A Treatise of Human Nature / Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method Into Moral Subjects; and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Introductions to Books I and II of

David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature

Thomas Hill Green

A Treatise of Human Nature, being an attempt to introduce the
Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects and Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion

by David Hume,

Edited, with preliminary dissertation and Notes, by T.H. Green and T.H. Grose

London, Longmans Green & Co, 1874

Transcriber's Note:

The Introduction to Book I is taken from an 1898 reprint; that to
Book II from an 1882 reprint, both by Longmans.

The tables of contents have been changed to refer to paragraphs instead of pages, as was done by R.L. Nettleship in his edition of Green's Philosophical Works. The paragraph numbers are the same as in the originals, and as in Nettleship's edition.

The Notes which were printed in the margins of the originals have been placed as captions above the relevant paragraphs.

Green’s footnotes have been placed below the paragraphs to which they relate. Because this book does not contain Hume’s text, where Green cites Hume by page number, a reference to the relevant section has been added in square brackets. Greek phrases are translated in footnotes marked "Tr."

PREFACE.

In this edition we have sought to avoid the inconveniences which are apt to attend commentaries on philosophical writers, by the plan of putting together, in the form of continuous introductions, such explanation and criticism as we had to offer, and confining the footnotes almost entirely to references, which have been carefully distinguished from Hume’s own notes. For the introductions to the first and second volumes Mr. Green alone is responsible. The introduction to the third is the work of Mr. Grose, who also has undertaken the revision of Hume’s text.

Throughout the introductions to Volumes I. and II., except where the contrary is stated, ‘Hume’ must be understood to mean Hume as represented by the ‘Treatise on Human Nature.’ In taking this as intrinsically the best representation of his philosophy, we may be thought to have overlooked the well-known advertisement which (in an edition posthumously published) he prefixed to the volume containing his ‘Inquiries concerning the Human Understanding and the Principles of Morals.’ In it, after stating that the volume, is mainly a reproduction of what he had previously published in the ‘Treatise,’ he expresses a hope that ‘some negligences in his former reasoning, and more in the expression,’ have been corrected, and desires ‘that the following Pieces may alone be regarded as containing his philosophical sentiments and principles.’ Was not Hume himself then, it may be asked, the best judge of what was an adequate expression of his thoughts, and is there not an unbecoming assurance in disregarding such a voice from his tomb?

Our answer is that if we had been treating of Hume as a great literary character, or exhibiting the history of his individual mind, due account must have been taken of it. Such, however, has not been the object which, in the Introductions to Volumes I. and II., we have presented to ourselves, (See Introd. to Vol. I. § 4.) Our concern has been with him as the exponent of a philosophical system, and therefore specially with that statement of his system which alone purports to be complete, and which was written when philosophy was still his chief interest, without alloy from the disappointment of literary ambition. Anyone who will be at the pains to read the ‘Inquiries’ alongside of the original ‘Treatise’ will find that their only essential difference from it is in the way of omission. They consist in the main of excerpts from the ‘Treatise,’ re-written in a lighter style, and with the more difficult parts of it left out. It is not that the difficulties which logically arise out of Hume’s system are met, but that the passages which most obviously suggest them have disappeared without anything to take their place. Thus in the ‘Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding’ there is nothing whatever corresponding to Parts II. and IV. of the first Book of the ‘Treatise.’ The effect of this omission on a hasty reader is, no doubt, a feeling of great relief. Common-sense is no longer actively repelled by a doctrine which seems to undermine the real world, and can more easily put a construction on the account of the law of causation, which remains, compatible with the ‘objective validity’ of the law—such a construction as in fact forms the basis of Mr. Mill’s Logic. How inconsistent this construction is with the principles from which Hume started, and which he never gave up; how impossible it would be to anyone who had assimilated his system as a whole; how close is the organic connection between all the parts of this as he originally conceived it—we must trust to the following introductions to show. (See, in particular, Introd. to Vol. I. §§ 301 and 321.)

The only discussion in the ‘Inquiry concerning Human Understanding,’ to which nothing in his earlier publication corresponds, is that on Miracles. On the relation in which this stands to his general theory some remarks will be found in the Introduction to Vol. I. (§ 324, note). The chief variations, other than in the way of omission, between the later redaction of his ethical doctrine and the earlier, are noticed in the Introduction to Vol. II. (§§ 31, 43, and 46, and notes).

SUMMARY OF THE CONTENTS

of the

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. I

1. How the history of philosophy should be studied.

2. Hume the last great English philosopher.

3. Kant his true successor.

4. Distinction between literary history and the history of philosophical systems.

5. Object of the present enquiry.

6. Locke’s problem and method.

7. His notion of the ‘thinking thing’.

8. This he will passively observe.

9. Is such observation possible?

10. Why it seems so.

11. Locke’s account of origin of ideas.

12. Its ambiguities (a) In regard to sensation.

13. (b) In regard to ideas of reflection.

14. What is the ‘tablet’ impressed?

15. Does the mind make impressions on itself?

16. Source of these difficulties. The ‘simple’ idea, as Locke describes it, is a complex idea of substance and relation.

17. How this contradiction is disguised.

18. Locke’s way of interchanging ‘idea’ and ‘quality’ and its effects.

19. Primary and secondary qualities of bodies.

20. ‘Simple idea’ represented as involving a theory of its own cause.

21. Phrases in which this is implied.

22. Feeling and felt thing confused.

23. The simple idea as ‘ectype’ other than mere sensation.

24. It involves a judgment in which mind and thing are distinguished.

25. And is equivalent to what he afterwards calls ‘knowledge of identity’. Only as such can it be named.

26. The same implied in calling it an idea of an object.

27. made for, not by, us, and therefore according to Locke really existent.

28. What did he mean by this?

30. Existence as the mere presence of a feeling.

31. Existence as reality.

32. By confusion of these two meanings, reality and its conditions are represented as given in simple feeling.

33. Yet reality involves complex ideas which are made by the mind.

34. Such are substance and relation which must be found in every object of knowledge.

35. Abstract idea of substance and complex ideas of particular sorts of substance.

36. The abstract idea according to Locke at once precedes and follows the complex.

37. Reference of ideas to nature or God, the same as reference to substance.

38. But it is explicitly to substance that Locke makes them refer themselves.

39. In the process by which we are supposed to arrive at complex ideas of substances the beginning is the same as the end.

40. Doctrine of abstraction inconsistent with doctrine of complex ideas.

41. The confusion covered by use of ‘particulars’.

42. Locke’s account of abstract general ideas.

43. ‘Things not general.’

44. Generality an invention of the mind.

45. The result is, that the feeling of each moment is alone real.

46. How Locke avoids this result.

47. The ‘particular’ was to him the individual qualified by general relations.

48. This is the real thing from which abstraction is supposed to start.

49. Yet, according to the doctrine of relation, a creation of thought.

50. Summary of the above contradictions.

51. They cannot be overcome without violence to Locke’s fundamental principles.

52. As real existence, the simple idea carries with it ‘invented’ relation of cause.

53. Correlativity of cause and substance.

54. How do we know that ideas correspond to reality of things? Locke’s answer.

55. It assumes that simple ideas are consciously referred to things that cause them.

56. Lively ideas real, because they must be effects of things.

57. Present sensation gives knowledge of existence.

58. Reasons why its testimony must be trusted.

59. How does this account fit Locke’s definition of knowledge?

60. Locke’s account of the testimony of sense renders his question as to its veracity superfluous.

61. Confirmations of the testimony turn upon the distinction between ‘impression’ and ‘idea’.

62. They depend on language which pre-supposes the ascription of sensation to an outward cause.

63. This ascription means the clothing of sensation with invented relations.

64. What is meant by restricting the testimony of sense to present existence?

65. Such restriction, if maintained, would render the testimony unmeaning.

66. But it is not maintained: the testimony is to operation of permanent identical things.

67. Locke’s treatment of relations of cause and identity.

68. That from which he derives idea of cause pre-supposes it.

69. Rationale of this ‘petitio principii’.

70. Relation of cause has to be put into sensitive experience in order to be got from it.

71. Origin of the idea of identity according to Locke.

72. Relation of identity not to be distinguished from idea of it.

73. This ‘invented’ relation forms the ‘very being of things’.

74. Locke fails to distinguish between identity and mere unity.

75. Feelings are the real, and do not admit of identity. How then can identity be real?

76. Yet it is from reality that the idea of it is derived.

77. Transition to Locke’s doctrine of essence.

78. This repeats the inconsistency found in his doctrine of substance.

79. Plan to be followed.

80. What Locke understood by essence.

81. Only to nominal essences that general propositions relate, i.e. only to abstract ideas having no real existence.

82. An abstract idea may be a simple one.

83. How then is science of nature possible?

84. No ‘uniformities of phenomena’ can be known.

85. Locke not aware of the full effect of his own doctrine …

86. … which is to make the real an abstract residuum of consciousness.

87. Ground of distinction between actual sensation and ideas in the mind is itself a thing of the mind.

88. Two meanings of real essence.

89. According to one, it is a collection of ideas as qualities of a thing:

90. … about real essence in this sense there may be general knowledge.

91. But such real essence a creature of thought.

92. Hence another view of real essence as unknown qualities of unknown body.

93. How Locke mixes up these two meanings in ambiguity about body.

94. Body as ‘parcel of matter’ without essence.

95. In this sense body is the mere individuum.

96. Body as qualified by circumstances of time and place.

97. Such body Locke held to be subject of ‘primary qualities’: but are these compatible with particularity in time?

98. How Locke avoids this question.

99. Body and its qualities supposed to be outside consciousness.

100. How can primary qualities be outside consciousness, and yet knowable?

101. Locke answers that they copy themselves in ideas—Berkeley’s rejoinder. Locke gets out of the difficulty by his doctrine of solidity.

102. In which he equivocates between body as unknown opposite of mind and body as a ‘nominal essence’.

103. Rationale of these contradictions.

104. What knowledge can feeling, even as referred to a ‘solid’ body, convey?

105. Only the knowledge that something is, not what it is.

106. How it is that the real essence of things, according to Locke, perishes with them, yet is immutable.

107. Only about qualities of matter, as distinct from matter itself, that Locke feels any difficulty.

108. These, as knowable, must be our ideas, and therefore not a ‘real essence’.

109. Are the ‘primary qualities’ then, a ‘nominal essence’?

110. According to Locke’s account they are relations, and thus inventions of the mind.

111. Body is the complex in which they are found. Do we derive the idea of body from primary qualities, or the primary qualities from idea of body?

112. Mathematical ideas, though ideas of ‘primary qualities of body,’ have ‘barely an ideal existence’.

113. Summary view of Locke’s difficulties in regard to the real.

114. Why they do not trouble him more.

115. They re-appear in his doctrine of propositions.

116. The knowledge expressed by a proposition, though certain, may not be real …

117. … when the knowledge concerns substances. In this case general truth must be merely verbal. Mathematical truths, since they concern not substances, may be both general and real.

118. Significance of this doctrine.

119. Fatal to the notion that mathematical truths, though general, are got from experience:

120. … and to received views of natural science: but Locke not so clear about this.

121. Ambiguity as to real essence causes like ambiguity as to science of nature. Particular experiment cannot afford general knowledge.

122. What knowledge it can afford, according to Locke.

123. Not the knowledge which is now supposed to be got by induction. Yet more than Locke was entitled to suppose it could give.

124. With Locke mathematical truths, though ideal, true also of nature.

125. Two lines of thought in Locke, between which a follower would have to choose.

126. Transition to doctrine of God and the soul.

127. Thinking substance—source of the same ideas as outer substance.

128. Of which substance is perception the effect?

129. That which is the source of substantiation cannot be itself a substance.

130. To get rid of the inner source of ideas in favour of the outer would be false to Locke.

131. The mind, which Locke opposes to matter, perpetually shifting.

132. Two ways out of such difficulties. ‘Matter’ and ‘mind’ have the same source in self-consciousness.

133. Difficulties in the way of ascribing reality to substance as matter, re-appear in regard to substance as mind.

134. We think not always, yet thought constitutes the self.

135. Locke neither disguises these contradictions, nor attempts to overcome them.

136. Is the idea of God possible to a consciousness given in time?

137. Locke’s account of this idea.

138. ‘Infinity,’ according to Locke’s account of it, only applicable to God, if God has parts.

139. Can it be applied to him ‘figuratively’ in virtue of the indefinite number of His acts?

140. An act, finite in its nature, remains so, however often repeated.

141. God only infinite in a sense in which time is not infinite, and which Locke could not recognize

142. —the same sense in which the self is infinite.

143. How do I know my own real existence?—Locke’s answer.

144. It cannot be known consistently with Locke’s doctrine of real existence.

145. But he ignores this in treating of the self.

146. Sense in which the self is truly real.

147. Locke’s proof of the real existence of God. There must have been something from eternity to cause what now is.

148. How ‘eternity’ must be understood if this argument is to be valid:

149. … and how ‘cause’.

150. The world which is to prove an eternal God must be itself eternal.

151. But will the God, whose existence is so proven, be a thinking being?

152. Yes, according to the true notion of the relation between thought and matter.

153. Locke’s antinomies—Hume takes one side of them as true.

154. Hume’s scepticism fatal to his own premises. This derived from Berkeley.

155. Berkeley’s religious interest in making Locke consistent.

156. What is meant by relation of mind and matter?

157. Confusions involved in Locke’s materialism.

158. Two ways of dealing with it. Berkeley chooses the most obvious.

159. His account of the relation between visible and tangible extension. We do not see bodies without the mind …

160. … nor yet feel them. The ‘esse’ of body is the ‘percipi’.

170. What then becomes of distinction between reality and fancy?

171. The real = ideas that God causes.

172. Is it then a succession of feelings?

173. Berkeley goes wrong from confusion between thought and feeling.

174. Which, if idea = feeling, does away with space and body.

175. He does not even retain them as ‘abstract ideas’.

176. On the same principle all permanent relations should disappear.

177. By making colour = relations of coloured points, Berkeley represents relation as seen.

178. Still he admits that space is constituted by a succession of feelings.

179. If so, it is not space at all; but Berkeley thinks it is only not ‘pure’ space. Space and pure space stand or fall together.

180. Berkeley disposes of space for fear of limiting God.

181. How he deals with possibility of general knowledge.

182. His theory of universals …

183. … of value, as implying that universality of ideas lies in relation.

184. But he fancies that each idea has a positive nature apart from relation.

185. Traces of progress in his idealism.

186. His way of dealing with physical truths.

187. If they imply permanent relations, his theory properly excludes them. He supposes a divine decree that one feeling shall follow another.

188. Locke had explained reality by relation of ideas to outward body. Liveliness in the idea evidence of this relation.

189. Berkeley retains this notion, only substituting ‘God’ for ‘body’.

190. Not regarding the world as a system of intelligible relations, he could not regard God as the subject of it.

191. His view of the soul as ‘naturally immortal’.

192. Endless succession of feelings is not immortality in true sense. Berkeley’s doctrine of matter fatal to a true spiritualism:

193. … as well as to a true Theism. His inference to God from necessity of a power to produce ideas;

194. … a necessity which Hume does not see. A different turn should have been given to his idealism, if it was to serve his purpose.

195. Hume’s mission. His account of impressions and ideas. Ideas are fainter impressions.

196. ‘Ideas’ that cannot be so represented must be explained as mere words.

197. Hume, taken strictly, leaves no distinction between impressions of reflection and of sensation.

198. Locke’s theory of sensation disappears. Physiology won’t answer the question that Locke asked.

199. Those who think it will don’t understand the question.

200. Hume’s psychology will not answer it either.

201. It only seems to do so by assuming the ‘fiction’ it has to account for; by assuming that impression represents a real world.

202. So the ‘Positivist’ juggles with ‘phenomena’.

203. Essential difference, however, between Hume and the ‘Positivist’.

204. He adopts Berkeley’s doctrine of ideas, but without Berkeley’s saving suppositions,

205. … in regard to ‘spirit’,

206. … in regard to relations. His account of these.

207. It corresponds to Locke’s account of the sorts of agreement between ideas.

208. Could Hume consistently admit idea of relation at all?

210. Only in regard to identity and causation that he sees any difficulty. These he treats as fictions resulting from ‘natural relations’ of ideas: i.e. from resemblance and contiguity.

212. Is resemblance then an impression?

213. Distinction between resembling feelings and idea of resemblance.

214. Substances = collections of ideas.

215. How can ideas ‘in flux’ be collected?

216. Are there general ideas? Berkeley said, ‘yes and no’.

217. Hume ‘no’ simply. How he accounts for the appearance of there being such.

219. His account implies that ‘ideas’ are conceptions, not feelings.

220. He virtually yields the point in regard to the predicate of propositions.

221. As to the subject, he equivocates between singleness of feeling and individuality of conception.

222. Result is a theory which admits predication, but only as singular.

223. All propositions restricted in same way as Locke’s propositions about real existence.

224. The question, how the singular proposition is possible, the vital one.

225. Not relations of resemblance only, but those of quantity also, treated by Hume as feelings.

226. He draws the line between certainty and probability at the same point as Locke; but is more definite as to probability,

227. … and does not admit opposition of mathematical to physical certainty—here following Berkeley.

228. His criticisms of the doctrine of primary qualities.

229. It will not do to oppose bodies to our feeling when only feeling can give idea of body.

230. Locke’s shuffle of ‘body,’ ‘solidity,’ and ‘touch,’ fairly exposed.

231. True rationale of Locke’s doctrine.

232. With Hume ‘body’ logically disappears. What then?

233. Can space survive body? Hume derives idea of it from sight and feeling. Significance with him of such derivation.

234. It means, in effect, that colour and space are the same, and that feeling may be extended.

235. The parts of space are parts of a perception.

236. Yet the parts of space are co-existent not successive.

237. Hume cannot make space a ‘perception’ without being false to his own account of perception;

238. … as appears if we put ‘feeling’ for ‘perception’ in the passages in question.

239. To make sense of them, we must take perception to mean perceived thing,

240. … which it can only mean as the result of certain ‘fictions’.

241. If felt thing is no more than feeling, how can it have qualities?

242. The thing will have ceased before the quality begins to be.

243. Hume equivocates by putting ‘coloured points’ for colour.

245. Can a ‘disposition of coloured points’ be an impression?

246. The points must be themselves impressions, and therefore not co-existent.

247. A ‘compound impression’ excluded by Hume’s doctrine of time.

248. The fact that colours mix, not to the purpose.

249. How Hume avoids appearance of identifying space with colour, and accounts for the abstraction of space.

250. In so doing, he implies that space is a relation, and a relation which is not a possible impression.

251. No logical alternative between identifying space with colour, and admitting an idea not copied from an impression.

252. In his account of the idea as abstract, Hume really introduces distinction between feeling and conception;

253. … yet avoids appearance of doing so, by treating ‘consideration’ of the relations of a felt thing as if it were itself the feeling.

254. Summary of contradictions in his account of extension.

255. He gives no account of quantity as such.

256. His account of the relation between Time and Number.

257. What does it come to?

258. Unites alone really exist: number a ‘fictitious denomination’. Yet ‘unites’ and ‘number’ are correlative; and the supposed fiction unaccountable.

259. Idea of time even more unaccountable on Hume’s principles.

260. His ostensible explanation of it.

261. It turns upon equivocation between feeling and conception of relations between felt things.

262. He fails to assign any impression or compound of impressions from which idea of time is copied.

263. How can he adjust the exact sciences to his theory of space and time?

264. In order to seem to do so, he must get rid of ‘Infinite Divisibility’.

265. Quantity made up of impressions, and there must be a least possible impression.

266. Yet it is admitted that there is an idea of number not made up of impressions. A finite division into impressions no more possible than an infinite one.

267. In Hume’s instances it is not really a feeling, but a conceived thing, that appears as finitely divisible.

268. Upon true notion of quantity infinite divisibility follows of course.

269. What are the ultimate elements of extension? If not extended, what are they?

270. Colours or coloured points? What is the difference?

271. True way of dealing with the question.

272. ‘If the point were divisible, it would be no termination of a line.’ Answer to this.

273. What becomes of the exactness of mathematics according to Hume?

274. The universal propositions of geometry either untrue or unmeaning.

275. Distinction between Hume’s doctrine and that of the hypothetical nature of mathematics.

276. The admission that no relations of quantity are data of sense removes difficulty as to general propositions about them.

277. Hume does virtually admit this in regard to numbers.

278. With Hume idea of vacuum impossible, but logically not more so than that of space.

279. How it is that we talk as if we had idea of vacuum according to Hume.

280. His explanation implies that we have an idea virtually the same.

281. By a like device that he is able to explain the appearance of our having such ideas as Causation and Identity.

283. Knowledge of relation in way of Identity and Causation excluded by Locke’s definition of knowledge.

284. Inference a transition from an object perceived or remembered to one that is not so.

285. Relation of cause and effect the same as this transition.

286. Yet seems other than this. How this appearance is to be explained.

287. Inference, resting on supposition of necessary connection, to be explained before that connection.

288. Account of the inference given by Locke and Clarke rejected.

289. Three points to be explained in the inference according to Hume.

290. a. The original impression from which the transition is made b. The transition to inferred idea

291. c. The qualities of this idea.

292. It results that necessary connection is an impression of reflection, i.e., a propensity to the transition described.

293. The transition not to anything beyond sense.

294. Nor determined by any objective relation.

295. Definitions of cause: a. As a ‘philosophical’ relation.

296. Is Hume entitled to retain ‘philosophical’ relations as distinct from ‘natural’?

297. Examination of Hume’s language about them.

298. Philosophical relation consists in a comparison, but no comparison between cause and effect.

299. The comparison is between present and past experience of succession of objects.

300. Observation of succession already goes beyond sense.

301. As also does the ‘observation concerning identity,’ which the comparison involves.

302. Identity of objects an unavoidable crux for Hume. His account of it.

303. Properly with him it is a fiction, in the sense that we have no such idea. Yet he implies that we have such idea, in saying that we mistake something else for it.

304. Succession of like feelings mistaken for an identical object: but the feelings, as described, are already such objects.

305. Fiction of identity thus implied as source of the propensity which is to account for it.

306. With Hume continued existence of perceptions a fiction different from their identity. Can perceptions exist when not perceived?

307. Existence of objects, distinct from perceptions, a further fiction still.

308. Are these several ‘fictions’ really different from each other?

309. Are they not all involved in the simplest perception?

310. Yet they are not possible ideas, because copied from no impressions.

311. Comparison of present experience with past, which yields relation of cause and effect, pre-supposes judgment of identity;

312. … without which there could be no recognition of an object as one observed before.

313. Hume makes conceptions of identity and cause each come before the other. Their true correlativity.

314. Hume quite right in saying that we do not go more beyond sense in reasoning than in perception.

315. How his doctrine might have been developed. Its actual outcome.

316. No philosophical relation admissible with Hume that is not derived from a natural one.

317. Examination of his account of cause and effect as ‘natural relation’.

318. Double meaning of natural relation. How Hume turns it to account.

319. If an effect is merely a constantly observed sequence, how can an event be an effect the first time it is observed? Hume evades this question;

320. Still, he is a long way off the Inductive Logic, which supposes an objective sequence.

321. Can the principle of uniformity of nature be derived from sequence of feelings?

322. With Hume the only uniformity is in expectation, as determined by habit; but strength of such expectation must vary indefinitely.

323. It could not serve the same purpose as the conception of uniformity of nature.

324. Hume changes the meaning of this expectation by his account of the ‘remembrance’ which determines it. Bearing of his doctrine of necessary connexion upon his argument against miracles. This remembrance, as he describes it, supposes conception of a system of nature.

326. This explains his occasional inconsistent ascription of an objective character to causation.

327. Reality of remembered ‘system’ transferred to ‘system of judgment’.

328. Reality of the former ‘system’ other than vivacity of impressions.

329. It is constituted by relations, which are not impressions at all; and in this lies explanation of the inference from it to ‘system of judgment’.

330. Not seeing this, Hume has to explain inference to latter system as something forced upon us by habit.

331. But if so, ‘system of judgment’ must consist of feelings constantly experienced;

332. … which only differ from remembered feelings inasmuch as their liveliness has faded. But how can it have faded, if they have been constantly repeated?

333. Inference then can give no new knowledge.

334. Nor does this merely mean that it cannot constitute new phenomena, while it can prove relations, previously unknown, between phenomena. Such a distinction inadmissible with Hume.

335. His distinction of probability of causes from that of chances might seem to imply conception of nature, as determining inference.

336. But this distinction he only professes to adopt in order to explain it away.

337. Laws of nature are unqualified habits of expectation.

338. Experience, according to his account of it, cannot be a parent of knowledge.

339. His attitude towards doctrine of thinking substance.

340. As to Immateriality of the Soul, he plays off Locke and Berkeley against each other, and proves Berkeley a Spinozist.

341. Causality of spirit treated in the same way.

342. Disposes of ‘personal’ identity by showing contradictions in Locke’s account of it.

343. Yet can only account for it as a ‘fiction’ by supposing ideas which with him are impossible.

344. In origin this ‘fiction’ the same as that of ‘Body’.

345. Possibility of such fictitious ideas implies refutation of Hume’s doctrine.

SUMMARY OF THE CONTENTS

of the

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. II.

1. Hume’s doctrine of morals parallel to his doctrine of nature.

2. Its relation to Locke: Locke’s account of freedom, will, and desire.

3. Two questions: Does man always act from the strongest motive? and, What constitutes his motive? The latter the important question. Distinction between desires that are, and those that are not, determined by the conception of self.

4. Effect of this conception on the objects of human desire.

5. Objects so constituted Locke should consistently exclude: But he finds room for them by treating every desire for an object, of which the attainment gives pleasure, as a desire for pleasure.

6. Confusion covered by calling ‘happiness’ the general object of desire.

7. ‘Greatest sum of pleasure’ and ‘Pleasure in general’ unmeaning expressions.

8. In what sense of happiness is it true that it ‘is really just as it appears?’ In what sense that it is every one’s object?

9. No real object of human desire can ever be just as it appears.

10. Can Locke consistently allow the distinction between true happiness and false? Or responsibility?

11. Objections to the Utilitarian answer to these questions.

12. According to Locke present pleasures may be compared with future, and desire suspended till comparison has been made.

13. What is meant by ‘present’ and ‘future’ pleasure? By the supposed comparison Locke ought only to have meant the competition of pleasures equally present in imagination:

14…. and this could give no ground for responsibility. In order to do so, it must be understood as implying determination by conception of self.

15. Locke finds moral freedom in necessity of pursuing happiness.

16. If an action is moved by desire for an object, Locke asks no questions about origin of the object. But what is to be said of actions, which we only do because we ought?

17. Their object is pleasure, but pleasure given not by nature but by law.

18. Conformity to law not the moral good, but a means to it.

19. Hume has to derive from ‘impressions’ the objects which Locke took for granted.

20. Questions which he found at issue, a. Is virtue interested? b. What is conscience?

21. Hobbes’ answer to first question.

22. Counter-doctrine of Shaftesbury. Vice is selfishness; but no clear account of selfishness.

23. Confusion in his notions of self-good and public good; Is all living for pleasure, or only too much of it, selfish?

24. What have Butler and Hutcheson to say about it? Chiefly that affections terminate upon their objects; but this does not exclude the view that all desire is for pleasure.

25. Of moral goodness Butler’s account circular. Hutcheson’s inconsistent with his doctrine that reason gives no end.

26. Source of the moral judgment: received notion of reason incompatible with true view. Shaftesbury’s doctrine of rational affection; spoilt by doctrine of ‘moral sense’.

27. Consequences of the latter.

28. Is an act done for ‘virtue’s sake’ done for pleasure of moral sense?

29. Hume excludes every object of desire but pleasure.

30. His account of ‘direct passions’: all desire is for pleasure.

31. Yet he admits ‘passions’ which produce pleasure, but proceed not from it.

32. Desire for objects, as he understands it, excluded by his theory of impressions and ideas.

33. Pride determined by reference to self.

34. This means that it takes its character from that which is not a possible ‘impression’.

35. Hume’s attempt to represent idea of self as derived from impression.

36. Another device is to suggest a physiological account of pride.

37. Fallacy of this: it does not tell us what pride is to the subject of it.

38. Account of love involves the same difficulties; and a further one as to nature of sympathy.

39. Hume’s account of sympathy.

40. It implies a self-consciousness not reducible to impressions.

41. Ambiguity in his account of benevolence: it is a desire and therefore has pleasure for its object. What pleasure?

42. Pleasure of sympathy with the pleasure of another.

43. All ‘passions’ equally interested or disinterested. Confusion arises from use of ‘passion’ alike for desire and emotion. Of this Hume avails himself in his account of active pity.

44. Explanation of apparent conflict between reason and passion.

45. A ‘reasonable’ desire means one that excites little emotion. Enumeration of possible motives.

46. If pleasure sole motive, what is the distinction of self-love? Its opposition to disinterested desires, as commonly understood, disappears. It is desire for pleasure in general.

47. How Hume gives meaning to this otherwise unmeaning definition. ‘Interest,’ like other motives described, implies determination by reason.

48. Thus Hume, having degraded morality for the sake of consistency, after all is not consistent.

49. If all good is pleasure, what is moral good? Ambiguity in Locke’s view.

50. Development of it by Clarke, which breaks down for want of true view of reason.

51. With Hume, moral good is pleasure excited in a particular way, viz.; in the spectator of the ‘good’ act and by the view of its tendency to produce pleasure.

53. Moral sense is thus sympathy with pleasure qualified by consideration of general tendencies.

54. In order to account for the facts it has to become sympathy with unfelt feelings.

55. Can the distinction between the ‘moral’ and ‘natural’ be maintained by Hume? What is ‘artificial virtue’?

56. No ground for such distinction in relation between motive and act.

57. Motive to artificial virtues.

58. How artificial virtues become moral.

59. Interest and sympathy account for all obligations civil and moral.

60. What is meant by an action which ought to be done.

61. Sense of morality no motive: when it seems so the motive is really pride.

62. Distinction between virtuous and vicious motive does not exist for person moved.

63. ‘Consciousness of sin’ disappears.

64. Only respectability remains: and even this not consistently accounted for.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. I.

How the history of philosophy should be studied.

1. There is a view of the history of mankind, by this time familiarised to Englishmen, which detaches from the chaos of events a connected series of ruling actions and beliefs—the achievement of great men and great epochs, and assigns to these in a special sense the term ‘historical.’ According to this theory—which indeed, if there is to be a theory of History at all, alone gives the needful simplification—the mass of nations must be regarded as left in swamps and shallows outside the main stream of human development. They have either never come within the reach of the hopes and institutions which make history a progress instead of a cycle, or they have stiffened these into a dead body of ceremony and caste, or at some great epoch they have failed to discern the sign of the times and rejected the counsel of God against themselves. Thus permanently or for generations, with no principle of motion but unsatisfied want, without the assimilative ideas which from the strife of passions elicit moral results, they have trodden the old round of war, trade, and faction, adding nothing to the spiritual heritage of man. It would seem that the historian need not trouble himself with them, except so far as relation to them determines the activity of the progressive nations.

Hume the last great English philosopher.

2. A corresponding theory may with some confidence be applied to simplify the history of philosophical opinion. The common plan of seeking this history in compendia of the systems of philosophical writers, taken in the gross or with no discrimination except in regard to time and popularity, is mainly to blame for the common notion that metaphysical enquiry is an endless process of threshing old straw. Such enquiry is really progressive, and has a real history, but it is a history represented by a few great names. At rare epochs there appear men, or sets of men, with the true speculative impulse to begin at the beginning and go to the end, and with the faculty of discerning the true point of departure which previous speculation has fixed for them. The intervals are occupied by commentators and exponents of the last true philosopher, if it has been his mission to construct; if it has been sceptical, by writers who cannot understand the fatal question that he has asked, and thus still dig in the old vein which he had exhausted, and of which his final dilemma had shown the bottom. Such an interval was that which in the growth of continental philosophy followed on the epoch of Leibnitz; an interval of academic exposition or formulation, in which the system, that had been to the master an incomplete enquiry, became in the hands of his disciples a one-sided dogmatism. In the line of speculation more distinctively English, a like régime of ‘strenua inertia’ has prevailed since the time of Hume. In the manner of its unprofitableness, indeed, it has differed from the Wolfian period in Germany, just as the disinterested scepticism of Hume differed from the system-making for purposes of edification to which Leibnitz applied himself. It has been unprofitable, because its representatives have persisted in philosophising upon principles which Hume had pursued to their legitimate issue and had shown, not as their enemy but as their advocate, to render all philosophy futile. Adopting the premises and method of Locke, he cleared them of all illogical adaptations to popular belief, and experimented with them on the body of professed knowledge, as one only could do who had neither any twist of vice nor any bias for doing good, but was a philosopher because he could not help it.

Kant his true successor.

3. As the result of the experiment, the method, which began with professing to explain knowledge, showed knowledge to be impossible. Hume himself was perfectly cognisant of this result, but his successors in England and Scotland would seem so far to have been unable to look it in the face. They have either thrust their heads again into the bush of uncriticised belief, or they have gone on elaborating Hume’s doctrine of association, in apparent forgetfulness of Hume’s own proof of its insufficiency to account for an intelligent, as opposed to a merely instinctive or habitual, experience. An enquiry, however, so thorough and passionless as the ‘Treatise of Human Nature,’ could not be in vain; and if no English athlete had strength to carry on the torch, it was transferred to a more vigorous line in Germany. It awoke Kant, as he used to say, from his ‘dogmatic slumber,’ to put him into that state of mind by some called wonder, by others doubt, in which all true philosophy begins. This state, with less ambiguity of terms, may be described as that of freedom from presuppositions. It was because Kant, reading Hume with the eyes of Leibnitz and Leibnitz with the eyes of Hume, was able to a great extent to rid himself of the presuppositions of both, that he started that new method of philosophy which, as elaborated by Hegel, claims to set man free from the artificial impotence of his own false logic, and thus qualify him for a complete interpretation of his own achievement in knowledge and morality. Thus the ‘Treatise of Human Nature’ and the ‘Critic of Pure Reason,’ taken together, form the real bridge between the old world of philosophy and the new. They are the essential ‘Propaedeutik,’ without which no one is a qualified student of modern philosophy. The close correspondence between the two works becomes more apparent the more each is studied. It is such as to give a strong presumption that Kant had studied Hume’s doctrine in its original and complete expression, and not merely as it was made easy in the ‘Essays.’ The one with full and reasoned articulation asks the question, which the other with equal fulness seeks to answer. It is probably because the question in its complete statement has been so little studied among us, that the intellectual necessity of the Kantian answer has been so little appreciated. To trace the origin and bring out the points of the question, in order to the exhibition of that necessity, will be the object of the following treatise. To do this thoroughly, indeed, would carry us back through Hobbes to Bacon. But as present limits do not allow of so long a journey, we must be content with showing Hume’s direct filiation to Locke, who, indeed, sufficiently gathered up the results of the ‘empirical’ philosophy of his predecessors.

Distinction between literary history and the history of philosophical systems.

4. Such a task is very different from an ordinary undertaking in literary history, and requires different treatment. To the historian of literature a philosopher is interesting, if at all, on account of the personal qualities which make a great writer, and have a permanent effect on letters and general culture. Locke and Hume undoubtedly had these qualities and produced such an effect—an effect in Locke’s case more intense upon the immediately following generations, but in Hume’s more remarkable as having reappeared after near a century of apparent forgetfulness. Each, indeed, like every true philosopher, was the mouth-piece of a certain system of thought determined for him by the stage at which he found the dialectic movement that constitutes the progress of philosophy, but each gave to this system the stamp of that personal power which persuades men. Their mode of expression had none of that academic or ‘ex cathedra’ character, which has made German philosophy almost a foreign literature in the country of its birth. They wrote as citizens and men of the world, anxious (in no bad sense) for effect; and even when their conclusions were remote from popular belief, still presented them in the flesh and blood of current terms used in the current senses. It is not, however, in their human individuality and its effects upon literature, but as the vehicles of a system of thought, that it is proposed here to treat them; and this purpose will best be fulfilled if we follow the line of their speculation without divergence into literary criticism or history, without remarks either on the peculiarities of their genius or on any of the secondary influences which affected their writings or arose out of them. For a method of this sort, it would seem, there is some need among us. We have been learning of late to know much more about philosophers, but it is possible for knowledge about philosophers to flourish inversely as the knowledge of philosophy. The revived interest which is noticeable in the history of philosophy may be an indication either of philosophical vigour or of philosophical decay. In those whom intellectual indolence, or a misunderstood and disavowed metaphysic, has landed in scepticism there often survives a curiosity about the literary history of philosophy, and the writings which this curiosity produces tend further to spread the notion that philosophy is a matter about which there has been much guessing by great intellects, but no definite truth is to be attained. It is otherwise with those who see in philosophy a progressive effort towards a fully-articulated conception of the world as rational. To them its past history is of interest as representing steps in this progress which have already been taken for us, and which, if we will make them our own, carry us so far on our way towards the freedom of perfect understanding; while to ignore them is not to return to the simplicity of a pre-philosopic age, but to condemn ourselves to grope in the maze of ‘cultivated opinion,’ itself the confused result of those past systems of thought which we will not trouble ourselves to think out.

Object of the present enquiry.

5. The value of that system of thought, which found its clearest expression in Hume, lies in its being an effort to think to their logical issue certain notions which since then have become commonplaces with educated Englishmen, but which, for that reason, we must detach ourselves from popular controversy to appreciate rightly. We are familiar enough with these in the form to which adaptation to the needs of plausibility has gradually reduced them, but because we do not think them out with the consistency of their original exponents, we miss their true value. They do not carry us, as they will do if we restore their original significance, by an intellectual necessity to those truer notions which, in fact, have been their sequel in the development of philosophy, but have not yet found their way into the ‘culture’ of our time. An attempt to restore their value, however, if this be the right view of its nature, cannot but seem at first sight invidious. It will seem as if, while we talk of their value, we were impertinently trying to ‘pull them to pieces.’ But those who understand the difference between philosophical failures, which are so because they are anachronisms, and those which in their failure have brought out a new truth and compelled a step forward in the progress of thought, will understand that a process, which looks like pulling a great philosopher to pieces, may be the true way of showing reverence for his greatness. It is a Pharisaical way of building the sepulchres of philosophers to profess their doctrine or extol their genius without making their spirit our own. The genius of Locke and Hume was their readiness to follow the lead of Ideas: their spirit was the spirit of Rationalism—the spirit which, however baffled and forced into inconsistent admissions, is still governed by the faith that all things may ultimately be understood. We best do reverence to their genius, we most truly appropriate their spirit, in so exploring the difficulties to which their enquiry led, as to find in them the suggestion of a theory which may help us to walk firmly where they stumbled and fell.

Locke’s problem and method.

6. About Locke, as about every other philosopher, the essential questions are, What was his problem, and what was his method? Locke, as a man of business, gives us the answers at starting. His problem was the origin of ‘ideas’ in the individual man, and their connection as constituting knowledge: his method that of simply ‘looking into his own understanding and seeing how it wrought.’ These answers commend themselves to common sense, and still form the text of popular psychology. If its confidence in their value, as explained by Locke, is at all beginning to be shaken, this is not because, according to a strict logical development, they issued in Hume’s unanswered scepticism, which was too subtle for popular effect, but because they are now open to a rougher battery from the physiologists. Our concern at present is merely to show their precise meaning, and the difficulties which according to this meaning they involve.

His notion of the ‘thinking thing’.

7. There are two propositions on which Locke is constantly insisting: one, that the object of his investigation is his own mind; the other, that his attitude towards this object is that of mere observation. He speaks of his own mind, it is to be noticed, just as he might of his own body. It meant something born with, and dependent on, the particular animal organism that first saw the light at Wrington on a particular day in 1632. It was as exclusive of other minds as his body of other bodies, and he could only infer a resemblance between them and it. With all his animosity to the coarse spiritualism of the doctrine of innate ideas, he was the victim of the same notion which gave that doctrine its falsehood and grotesqueness. He, just as much as the untutored Cartesian, regarded the ‘minds’ of different men as so many different things; and his refutation of the objectionable hypothesis proceeds wholly from this view. Whether the mind is put complete into the body, or is born and grows with it; whether it has certain characters stamped upon it to begin with, or receives all its ideas through the senses; whether it is simple and therefore indiscerptible, or compound and therefore perishable—all these questions to Locke, as to his opponents, concern a multitude of ‘thinking things’ in him and them, merely individual, but happening to be pretty much alike.

This he will passively observe.

8. This ‘thinking thing,’ then, as he finds it in himself, the philosopher, according to Locke, has merely and passively to observe, in order to understand the nature of knowledge. ‘I could look into nobody’s understanding but my own to see how it wrought,’ he says, but ‘I think the intellectual faculties are made and operate alike in most men. But if it should happen not to be so, I can only make it my humble request, in my own name and in the name of those that are of my size, who find their minds work, reason, and know in the same low way that mine does, that the men of a more happy genius will show us the way of their nobler flights.’ (Second Letter to Bishop of Worcester.) As will appear in the sequel, it is from this imaginary method of ascertaining the origin and nature of knowledge by passive observation of what goes on in one’s own mind that the embarrassments of Locke’s system flow. It was the function of Hume to exhibit the radical flaw in his master’s method by following it with more than his master’s rigour.

Is such observation possible?

9. As an observation of the ‘thinking thing,’ the ‘philosophy of mind’ seems to assume the character of a natural science, and thus at once acquires definiteness, and if not certainty, at least plausibility. To deny the possibility of such observation, in any proper sense of the word, is for most men to tamper with the unquestioned heritage of all educated intelligence. Hence the unpalatability of a consistent Positivism; hence, too, on the other side, the general conviction that the Hegelian reduction of Psychology to Metaphysics is either an intellectual juggle, or a wilful return of the philosophy, which psychologists had washed, to the mire of scholasticism. It is the more important to ascertain what the observation in question precisely means. What observes, and what is observed? According to Locke (and empirical psychology has never substantially varied the answer) the matter to be observed consists for each man firstly in certain impressions of his own individual mind, by which this mind from being a mere blank has become furnished—by which, in other words, his mind has become actually a mind; and, secondly, in certain operations, which the mind, thus constituted, performs upon the materials which constitute it. The observer, all the while, is the constituted mind itself. The question at once arises, how the developed man can observe in himself (and it is only to himself, according to Locke, that he can look) that primitive state in which his mind was a ‘tabula rasa.’ In the first place, that only can be observed which is present; and the state in question to the supposed observer is past. If it be replied that it is recalled by memory, there is the farther objection that memory only recalls what has been previously known, and how is a man’s own primitive consciousness, as yet void of the content which is supposed to come to it through impressions, originally known to him? How can the ‘tabula rasa’ be cognisant of itself?

Why it seems so.

10. The cover under which this difficulty was hidden from Locke, as from popular psychologists ever since, consists in the implicit assumption of certain ideas, either as possessed by or acting upon the mind in the supposed primitive state, which are yet held to be arrived at by a gradual process of comparison, abstraction, and generalisation. This assumption, which renders the whole system resting upon the interrogation of consciousness a paralogism, is yet the condition of its apparent possibility. It is only as already charged with a content which is yet (and for the individual, truly) maintained to be the gradual acquisition of experience, that the primitive consciousness has any answer to give to its interrogator.