Two lines

in Locke,

between which a follower

to chose

its copies or effects, then, as on the one side our complex ideas of substances only fail of reality through want of fulness, or through mistakes in the process by which they are 'taken from things,' so, on the other side, the mental truth of mathematical propositions need only fail to be real because the ideas, whose relations they state, are considered in abstraction from conditions which qualify them in real existence. If it is true of the idea of a triangle that its three angles equal two right ones, it is true also of a triangle, wherever it really exists" (BOOK IV. chap. iv. sec. 6). There is, then, no incompatibility between the idea and real existMathematical ideas might fairly be reckoned, like those of substances, to be taken from real existence; but though, like these, inadequate to its complexity, to be saved from the necessary infirmities which attach to ideas of substances because not considered as so taken, but merely as in the mind. There is language about mathematics in Locke that may be interpreted in this direction, though his most explicit statements are on the other side. It is not our business to adjust them, but merely to point out the opposite tendencies between which a clear-sighted operator on the material given by Locke would find that he had to choose.

ence.

6

125. On the one hand there is the identification of real of thought existence with the momentary sensible event. This view, of which the proper result is the exclusion of predication concerning real existence altogether, appears in Locke's restricwould have tion of such predication to the singular proposition, and in his converse assertion that propositions of mathematical certainty concern not existence' (BOOK IV. chap.iv.sec. 8). The embarrassment resulting from such a doctrine is that it leads round to the admission of the originativeness of thought and of the reality of its originations, with the denial of which it starts. It leads Locke himself along a track, which his later followers scarcely seem to have noticed, when he treats the 'never enough to be admired discoveries of Mr. Newton' as having to do merely with the relations of ideas in distinction from things, and looks for a true extension of knowledgeneither in syllogism which can yield no instructive, nor in experiment which can yield no general, certainty—but only in a further process of singling out and laying in order inSee above, paragraph 117, sub. fin.

termediate ideas,' which are 'real as well as nominal essences of their species,' because they have no reference to archetypes elsewhere than in the mind (BOOK IV. chap. vii. sec. 11, and BOOK IV. chap. xii. sec. 7). On the other hand there is the notion that ideas, without distinction between' actual sensation' and 'idea in the mind,' are taken from permanent things, and are real if correctly so taken. From this it results that propositions, universally true as representing a necessary relation between ideas of primary qualities, are true also of real existence; and that an extension of such real certainty through the discovery of a necessary connexion between ideas of primary and those of secondary qualities, though scarcely to be hoped for, has no inherent impossibility. It is this notion, again, that unwittingly gives even that limited significance to the particular experiment which Locke assigns to it, as indicating a co-existence between ideas present as sensations and those which can only be regarded as in the mind. Nor is it the intrinsic import so much as the expression of this notion that is altered when Locke substitutes an order of nature for substance as that in which the ideas coexist. In his Fourth Book he so far departs from the doctrine implied in his chapters on the reality and adequacy of ideas and on the names of substances, as to treat the notion of several single subjects in which ideas co-exist (which he still holds to be the proper notion of substances), as a fiction of thought. There are no such single subjects. What we deem so are really retainers to other parts of nature.' 'Their observable qualities, actions, and powers are owing to something without them; and there is not so complete and perfect a part that we know of nature, which does not owe the being it has, and the excellencies of it, to its neighbours' (Book IV. chap. vi. sec. 11). As thus conceived of, the 'objective order' which our experience represents is doubtless other than that collection of fixed separate things,' implied in the language about substances which Locke found in vogue, but it remains an objective order still-an order of 'qualities, actions, and powers' which no multitude of sensible events could constitute, but apart from which no sensible event could have such significance as to render even a singular proposition of real truth possible.

Transition to doctrine

126. It remains to inquire how, with Locke, the ideas of self and God escape subjection to those solvents of reality of God and

the soul.

Thinking substance

the same

ideas as

stance.

which, with more or less of consistency and consciousness, he applied to the conceptions on which the science of nature rests. Such an enquiry forms the natural transition to the next stage in the history of his philosophy. It was Berkeley's practical interest in these ideas that held him back from a development of his master's principles, in which he would have anticipated Hume, and finally brought him to attach that other meaning to the new way of ideas' faintly adumbrated in the later sections of his Siris,' which gives to Reason the functions that Locke had assigned to Sense.

127. The dominant notion of the self in Locke is that of -source of the inward substance, or 'substratum of ideas,' co-ordinate with the outward, wherein they do subsist, and from which outer sub- they do result.' 'Sensation convinces that there are solid extended substances, and reflection that there are thinking ones' (BOOK II. chap. xxiii. sec. 29). We have already seen how, without disturbance from his doctrine of the fictitiousness of universals, he treats the simple idea as carrying with it the distinction of outward and inward, or relations severally to a 'thing' and to a 'mind.' It reports itself ambiguously as a quality of each of these separate substances. It is now, or was to begin with, the result of an outward thing ‘actually operating upon us;' for 'of simple ideas the mind cannot make one to itself:' on the other hand, it is a 'perception,' and perception is an operation of the mind.' In other words. it is at once a modification of the mind by something of which it is consciously not conscious, and a modification of the mind by itself the two sources of one and the same modification being each determined only as the contradictory of the other. Thus, when we come to probe the familiar metaphors under which Locke describes Reflection, as a 'fountain of ideas' other than sensation, we find that the confusions which we have already explored in dealing with the ideas of sensation recur under added circumstances of embarrassment. Not only does the simple idea of reflection, like that of sensation, turn out to be already complicated in its simplicity with the superinduced ideas of cause and relation, but the causal substance in question turns out to be one which, from being actually nothing, becomes something by acting upon itself; while all the time the result of this action is indistinguishable from that ascribed to the opposite, the external,

cause.

6

substance

128. To a reader to whom Locke's language has always of which seemed to be-as indeed it is-simply that of common sense is percep and life, in writing the above we shall seem to be creating a tion the difficulty where none is to be found. Let us turn, then, to effect? one of the less prolix passages, in which the distinction between the two sources of ideas is expressed: External objects furnish the mind with the ideas of sensible qualities, which are all those different perceptions they produce in us; and the mind furnishes the understanding with ideas of its own operations' (BOOK II. chap. i. sec. 5). We have scen already that with Locke perception and idea are equivalent terms. It only needs further to be pointed out that no distinction can be maintained between his usage of 'mind' and of 'understanding," and that the simple ideas of the mind's own operations are those of perception and power, which must be given in and with every idea of a sensible quality. Avoiding synonyms, then, and recalling the results of our examination of the terms involved in the first clause of the passage before us, we may re-write the whole thus: "Creations of the mind, which yet are external to it, produce in it those perceptions of their qualities which they do produce; and the mind produces in itself the perception of these, its own, perceptions.'

source of

tion cannot be itself a

129. This attempt to present Locke's doctrine of the rela- That which tion between the mind and the world, as it would be withont is the phraseological disguises, must not be ascribed to any polemi- substantiacal interest in making a great writer seem to talk nonsense. The greatest writer must fall into confusions when he brings substance. under the conceptions of cause and substance the self-conscious thought which is their source; and nothing else than this is involved in Locke's avowed enterprise of knowing that which renders knowledge possible as he might know any other object. The enterprise naturally falls into two parts, corresponding to that distinction of subject and object which self-consciousness involves. Hitherto we have been dealing with it on the objective side-with the attempt to know knowledge as a result of experience received through the senses and have found the supposed source of thought already charged with its creations; with the relations of inner

As becomes apparent on examination of such passages, as Book II. chap. i.

sec. 1, sub. fin.; and Book II. chap. i.

sec. 23.

2 See above, paragraphs 11, 12, 16

To get rid

source of ideas in favour of the outer would be false to Locke.

6

and outer, of substance and attribute, of cause and effect, of appearance and reality. The supposed outward' turns ont to have its outwardness constituted by thought, and thus to be inward. The outer sense' is only an outer sense at all so far as feelings, by themselves neither outward nor inward, are by the mind referred to a thing or cause which the mind supposes;' and only thus have its reports a prerogative of reality over the 'fantasies,' supposed merely of the mind. Meanwhile, unable to ignore the subjective side of selfconsciousness; Locke has to put an inward experience as a separate, but co-ordinate, source of knowledge alongside of the outer. But this inward experience, simply as a succession of feelings, does not differ from the outer: it only so differs as referred to that very thinking thing,' called the mind, which by its supposition of causal substance has converted feeling into an experience of an outer thing. Mind' thus, by the relations which it 'invents,' constitutes both the inner and outer, and yet is treated as itself the inner substratum which it accustoms itself to suppose.' It thus becomes the creature of its own suppositions. Nor is this all. This, indeed, is no more than the fate which it must suffer at the hands of every philosopher who, in Kantian language, brings the source of the Categories under the Categories. But with Locke the constitution of the outer world by mental supposition, however uniformnly implied, is always ignored; and thus mind, as the inward substance, is not only the creature of its own suppositions, but stands over against a real existence, of which the reality is held to consist just in its being the opposite of all such suppositions: while, after all, the effect of these mutually exclusive causes is one and the same experience, one and the same system of sequent and coexistent ideas.

130. Is it then a case of joint-effect? Do the outer and of the inner inner substances combine, like mechanical forces, to produce the psychical result? Against such a supposition a follower of Locke would find not only the language of his master, with whom perception appears indifferently as the result of the outer or inner cause, but the inherent impossibility of analysing the effect into separate elements. The Law of Parcimony,' then, will dictate to him that one or other of the causes must be dispensed with; nor, so long as he takes Locke's identification of the outward with the real for