His notion
of the
'thinking
thing.'

This he

will passively ob

Berva.

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.

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.

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.

servation

possible?

9. As an observation of the 'thinking thing,' the 'philo- Is such obsophy 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. 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

The

Why it

seems so.

Locke's account of origin of ideas.

Its ambiguities.

(a) In regard to

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? 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.

11. Let us consider the passage where Locke sums up his theory of the original of our ideas.' (Book II. chap. i. sec. 23, 24.) Since there appear not to be any ideas in the mind, before the senses have conveyed any in, I conceive that ideas in the understanding are coeval with sensation; which is such an impression, made in some part of the body, as produces some perception in the understanding. It is about these impressions made on our senses by outward objects, that the mind seems first to employ itself in such operations as we call perception, remembering, consideration, reasoning, &c. In time the mind comes to reflect on its own operations about the ideas got by sensation, and thereby stores itself with a new set of ideas, which I call ideas of reflection. These impressions that are made on our senses by outward objects, that are extrinsical to the mind; and its own operations, proceeding from powers intrinsical and proper to itself, which, when reflected on by itself, become also objects of its contemplation, are, as I have said, the original of all knowledge.'

12. Can we from this passage elicit a distinct account of the beginning of intelligence? In the first place it consists in an 'idea,' and an idea is elsewhere (Introduction, sec. 8) stated to be whatsoever is the object of the understanding, sensation. when a man thinks.' But the primary idea is an idea of sensation.' Does this mean that the primary idea is a sen

sation, or is a distinction to be made between the sensation and the idea thereof? The passage before us would seem to imply such a distinction. Looking merely to it, we should probably say that by sensation Locke meant an impression or motion in some part of the body;' by the idea of sensation ' a perception in the understanding,' which this impression produces. The account of perception itself gives a different result. (Book II. chap. ix. sec. 3.) Whatever impressions are made on the outward parts, if they are not taken notice of within, there is no perception. Fire may burn our bodies with no other effect than it does a billet, unless the motion be continued to the brain, and there the sense of heat or idea of pain be produced in the mind, wherein consists actual perception.' Here sensation is identified at once with the idea and with perception, as opposed to the impression on the bodily organs. To confound the confusion still farther, in a passage immediately preceding the above, 'Perception,' here identified with the idea of sensation, has been distinguished from it, as exercised about it.' 'Perception, as it is the first faculty of the mind exercised about our ideas, so it is the first and simplest idea we have from reflection.' Taking Locke at his word, then, we find the beginning of intelligence to consist in having an idea of sensation. This idea, however, we perceive, and to perceive is to have an idea; i.e. to have an idea of an idea of sensation. But of perception again we have a simple or primitive idea. Therefore the beginning of intelligence consists in having an idea of an idea of an idea of sensation.

ideas of

13. By insisting on Locke's account of the relation between (b) In rethe ideas of sensation and those of reflection we might be gard to brought to a different but not more luminous conclusion. In reflection. the passages quoted above, where this relation is most fully spoken of, it appears that the latter are essentially sequent to those of sensation. 'In time the mind comes to reflect on its own operations, about the ideas got by sensation, and thereby stores itself with a new set of ideas, which I call ideas of reflection.' Of these only two are primary and ori

The

1 Cf. Book II. chap. xix. sec. 1. perception, which actually accompanies and is annexed to any impression on the body, made by an external object, being distinct from all other modifications of

thinking, furnishes the mind with a
distinct idea which we call sensation;
which is, as it were, the actual entrance
of any idea into the understanding by
the senses.'

What is

the 'tablet'

ginal (Book II. c. xxi. sec. 73), viz. motivity or power of moving,
with which we are not at present concerned, and perceptivity
or power of perception. But according to Locke, as we have
seen, there cannot be any, the simplest, idea of sensation
without perception. If, then, the idea of perception is
only given later and upon reflection, we must suppose per-
ception to take place without any idea of it. But with Locke
to have an idea and to perceive are equivalent terms.
must thus conclude that the beginning of knowledge is an
unperceived perception, which is against his express state-
ment elsewhere (Book II. c. xxvii. sec. 9), that it is impos-
sible for any one to perceive without perceiving that he does
perceive.'

6

14. Meanwhile a perpetual equivocation is kept up between impressed? a supposed impression on the 'outward parts,' and a supposed impression on the tablet of the mind.' It is not the impression upon, or a motion in, the outward parts, as Locke admits, that constitutes the idea of sensation. It is not an agitation in the tympanum of the ear, or a picture on the retina of the eye, that we are conscious of when we see a sight or hear a sound.' The motion or impression, however, has only, as he seems to suppose, to be continued to the brain,' and it becomes an idea of sensation. Notwithstanding the rough line of distinction between soul and body, which he draws elsewhere, his theory was practically governed by the supposition of a cerebral something, in which, as in a third equivocal tablet, the imaginary mental and bodily tablets are blended. If, however, the idea of sensation, as an object of the understanding when a man thinks, differs absolutely from a motion of the outward parts,' it does so no less absolutely, however language and metaphor may disguise the difference, from such motion as continued to the brain.' An instructed man, doubtless, may come to think about a motion in his brain, as about a motion of the earth round the sun, but to speak of such motion as an idea of sensation or an immediate object of intelligent sense, is to confuse between the object of consciousness and a possible physical theory of the conditions of that consciousness. It is

6

ideas; and two ideas so different and distant one from another, that no two can be more so.'