answer must be, Just as much or as little meaning as we have when, in like contradiction to the successive presentation of ideas, we speak of a self, constituted by consciousness, as identical with itself throughout the years of our life.. 142. A more positive answer it is not our present business to give. Our concern is to show that 'eternity and immensity,' according to any meaning that Locke recognises, or that the observation of our ideas could justify, do not express any conception that can carry us beyond the perpetual incompleteness of our experience; but that in his doctrine of personal identity he does admit a conception which no observation of our ideas of reflection—since these are in succession and could not be observed if they were not -can account for; and that it is just this conception, the conception of a constant presence of consciousness to itself incompatible with conditions of space and time, that can alone give such meaning to 'eternal and infinite' as can render them significant epithets of God. Such a conception (we say it with respect) Locke admits when it is wanted without knowing it. It must indeed always underlie the idea of God, however alien to it may be attempted adaptations of the other infinite'-the progressus ad indefinitum in space and time-by which, as with Locke, the idea is explained. But it is one for which the psychological method of observing what happens in oneself cannot account, and which therefore this method, just so far as it is thoroughly carried out, must tend to discard. That which happens, whether we reckon it an inward or an outward, a physical or a psychical event-and nothing but an event can, properly speaking, be observed-is as such in time. But the presence of consciousness to itself, though, as the true punctum stans,' it is the condition of the observation of events in time, is not such an event itself. In the ordinary and proper sense of fact,' it is not a fact at all, nor yet a possible abstraction from facts. To the method, then, which deals with phrases about the mind by ascertaining the observable mental phenomena' which they represent, it must remain a mere phrase, to be explained as the offspring of other phrases whose real import has been misunderstood. Locke, Essay 11. chap. xvii. sec. 16. the same which the sense in self is infinite. How do I know my own real It can only recover a significance when this method, as with Hume, has done its worst, and is found to leave the possibility of knowledge, without such punctum stans,' still unaccounted for. 143. We have finally to notice the way in which Locke maintains our knowledge of the 'real existence' of thinking existence? substance, both as that which we call our mind,' and as -Locke's God. Of the former first. Experience convinces us that we have an intuitive knowledge of our own existence.. answer. If I know I feel pain, it is evident I have as certain perception of my own existence as of the pain I feel. If I know I doubt, I have as certain perception of the existence of the thing doubting as of that thought which I call doubt' (Book IV. chap. ix. sec. 3). Upon this the remark must occur that the existence of a painful feeling is one thing; the existence of a permanent subject, remaining the same with itself, when the feeling is over, and through the succession of other feelings, quite another. The latter is what is meant by my own existence, of which undoubtedly there is a certain perception,' if the feeling of pain has become the 'knowledge that I feel pain,' and if by the 'I' is understood such a permanent subject. That the feeling, as simple idea,' is taken to begin with by Locke for the knowledge that I feel something, we have sufficiently seen.' Just as, in virtue of this conversion, it gives us assurance' of the real existence of the outer thing or material substance on the one side, so of the thinking substance on the other. It carries with it the certainty at once that I have a feeling, and that something makes me feel. But whereas, after the conversion of feeling into a felt thing has been throughout assumed-as indeed otherwise feeling could not be spoken of-a further question is raised, which causes much embarrassment, as to the real existence of such thing; on the contrary, the reference of the feeling to the thinking thing is taken as carrying with it the real existence of such thing. The question whether it really exists or no is only once raised, and then summarily settled by the sentence we have quoted, while the reality whether of existence or of essence on the part of the outward thing, as we have found to our cost, is the main burden of the Third and Fourth Books. See above, paragraphs 26 and following, and 59 and following. 6 be known tently with doctrine of real exis Locke's tence. 144. In principle, indeed, the answer to both questions, as It cannot given by Locke, is the same: for the reasons which he alleges consisfor being assured of the existence of a thing without us corresponding to the idea of sensation' reduce themselves, as we have seen, to the reiteration of that reference of the idea to a thing, which according to him is originally involved in it, and which is but the correlative of its reference to a subject. This, however, is what he was not himself aware of. To him the outer and the inner substance were separate and independent things, for each of which the question of real existence had to be separately settled. To us, according to the view already indicated, it is the presence of self-consciousness, or thought as an object-to-itself, to feeling that converts it into a relation between feeling thing and felt thing, between 'cogitative and incogitative substance.' The source of substantiation upon each side being the same, the question as to the real existence of either substance must be the same, and equally so the answer to it. It is an answer that must be preceded by a counter question.-Does real existence mean existence independent of thought? To suppose such existence is to suppose an impossibility-one which is not the less so though the existence be supposed material, if 'material' means in 'space' and space itself is a relation constituted by the mind, bringing things to and setting them by one another.' Yet is the supposition itself but a mode of the logical substantiation we have explained, followed by an imaginary abstraction of the work of the mind from this, its own creation. Does real existence mean a possible feeling? If so, it is as clear that what converts feeling into a relation between felt thing and feeling subject cannot in this sense be real, as it is that without such conversion no distinction between real and fantastic would be possible. Does it, finally, mean individuality, in such a sense that unless I can say this cr that is substance, thinking or material, substance does not really exist? If it does, the answer is that substance, being constituted by a relation by which self-conscious thought is for ever determining feelings, and which every predication represents, cannot be identified with any 'this or that,' though without it there could be no this or that' at all. 145. We have already found that Locke accepts each of the above as determinations of real existence, and that, though in spite of them he labours to maintain the real existence of But he ignores this in treating of the self. Sense in which the self is outward things, he is so far faithful to them as to declare real essence unknowable. In answering the question as to 'his own existence' he wholly ignores them. He does not ask how the real existence of the thinking Ego sorts with his ordinary doctrine that the real is what would be in the world whether there were a mind or no; or its real identity, present throughout the particulars of experience, with his ordinary doctrine of the fictitiousness of generals.' A real existence of the mind, however, founded on the logical necessity of substantiation, rests on a shifting basis, so long as by the mind is understood a thinking thing, different in each man, to which his inner experience is referred as accidents to a substance. The same law of thought which compels such reference requires that the thinking thing in its turn, as that which is born grows and dies, be referred as an accident to some ulterior substance. 'A fever or fall may take away my reason or memory, or both; and an apoplexy leave neither sense nor understanding, no, nor life.' Just as each outer thing turns out to be a retainer to something else,' so is it with the inner thing. Such a dependent being cannot be an ultimate substance; nor can any natural agents to which we may trace its dependence really be so either. The logical necessity of further substantiation would affect them equally, appearing in the supposition of an unknown something beyond, which makes them what they are. It is under such logical necessity that Locke, in regard to all the substances which he commonly speaks of as ultimate - God, spirit, body-from time to time gives warning of something still ulterior and unknowable, whether under the designation of substance or real essence (Book II. chap. xxiii. secs. 30 and 36). If, then, it will be said, substance is but the constantlyshifting result of a necessity of thought-so shifting that there is nothing of which we can finally say, This is substance, not accident'-there can be no evidence of the 'real existence' of a permanent Ego in the necessary substantiation therein of my inner experience. 146. The first result of such a consideration in a reader of Locke will naturally be an attempt to treat the inner syntruly real. thesis as a fiction of thought or figure of speech, and to confine real existence to single feelings in the moments of This, it will seem, is to be faithful to Locke, Book III. chap. vi. sec. 4. their occurrence. Locke's own clearer mind, as it frequently emerges from the the real 147. Our knowledge of God's existence, according to him, Locke's is 'demonstrative,' based on the intuitive' knowledge of proof of our own. Strictly taken, according to his definitions, this existence must mean that the agreement of the idea of God with ex- of God. istence is perceived mediately through the agreement of the idea of self with existence, which is perceived immediately; that thus the idea of God and the idea of self' agree.' We need not, however, further dwell either on the contradiction implied in the knowledge of real existence, if knowledge is a perception of agreement between ideas and if real existence. is the antithesis of ideas; or on the embarrassments which follow when a definition of reasoning, only really applicable to the comparison of quantities, is extended to other regions of knowledge. Locke virtually ignores his definitions in the passage before us. 'If we know there is some real being' (as we do know in the knowledge of our own existence) and that non-entity cannot produce any real being, it is an evident demonstration that from eternity there has been something; since what was not from eternity had a beginning, and what had a beginning must be produced by something else' (Book IV. chap. x. sec. 3). Next as to the qualities of this something else. beginning from another must 1 See below, paragraph 152. "What had its being and also have all that which See above, paragraphs 25 and 24. |