MERE INDIVIDUAL AND QUALIFIED INDIVIDUAL.

389

given in the real thing; or as he states it in terms of the multiplication table (Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 10), some who have examined this species more accurately could, I believe, enumerate ten times as many properties in gold, all of them as inseparable from its internal constitution, as its colour or weight; and it is probable if any one knew all the properties that are by divers men known of this metal, there would an hundred times as many ideas go to the complex idea of gold, as any one man has yet in his; and yet perhaps that would not be the thousandth part of what is to be discovered in it.' These two million properties, and upwards, which await abstraction in gold, are all, it must be noted, according to Locke's statement elsewhere (Book II. chap xxiii. sec. 37), 'nothing but so many relations to other substances.' It is just on account of these multitudinous relations of the real thing that the understanding is inadequate to its comprehension. Yet according to Locke's doctrine of relation these must all be themselves 'superinductions of the mind,' and the greater the fulness which they constitute, the further is the distance from the mere individuality which elsewhere, in contrast with the fictitiousness of generals,' appears as the equivalent of real existence.

the doc

a crea

tion of

49. The real thing and the creation of the understanding Yet, acthus change places. That which is given to the understand- cording to ing as the real, which it finds and does not make, is not now the bare atom upon which relations have to be artificially relation, superinduced. Nor is it the mere present feeling, which has 'by the mind of man' to be made significant,' or represen- thought. tative of past experience. It is itself an inexhaustible complex of relations, whether they are considered as subsisting between it and other things, or between the sensations which it is fitted to produce in us.' These are the real, which is thus a system, a community; and if the 'general,' as Locke says, is that which has the capacity of representing many particulars,' the real thing itself is general, for it represents -nay, is constituted by-the manifold particular feelings which, mediately or immediately, it excites in us. On the other hand, the invention of the understanding, instead of giving significance' or content to the mere individuality of the real, as it does according to Locke's theory of 'generals,' now appears as detaching fragments from the fulness of the

6

Summary of the

above

tions.

real to recombine them in an abstract essence' of its own. Instead of adding complexity to the simple, it subtracts from the complex.

50. To gather up, then, the lines of contradiction which traverse Locke's doctrine of real existence as it appears contradic in his account of general and complex ideas :-The idea of substance is an abstract general idea, not given directly in sensation or reflection, but 'invented by the understanding,' as by consequence must be ideas of particular sorts of substances which presuppose the abstract idea. On the other hand, the ideas of sensation and reflection, from which the idea of substance is abstracted, and to which as real it as an invention is opposed, are ideas of something,' and are only real as representative of something. But this idea of something the idea of substance. Therefore the idea of substance is the presupposition, and the condition of the reality, of the very ideas from which it is said to be derived. Again, if the general idea of substance is got by abstraction, it must be originally given in conjunction with the ideas of sensation or reflection from which it is afterwards abstracted, i.e. separated. But in such conjunction it constitutes the ideas of particular sorts of substances. Therefore these latter ideas, which yet we come to have' after the general idea of substance, form the prior experience from which this general idea is abstracted. Further, this original experience, from which abstraction starts, being of' sorts of substances,' and these sorts being constituted by relations, it follows that relation is given in the original experience. But that which is so given is 'real existence' in opposition to the invention of the understanding. Therefore these relations, and the community which they constitute, really exist. On the other hand, mere individuals alone really exist, while relations between them are superinduced by the mind. Once more, the simple idea given in sensation or reflection, as it is made for not by us, has or results from real existence, whereas general and complex ideas are the workmanship of the mind. But this workmanship consists in the abstraction of ideas from each other, and from that to which they are related as qualities. It thus presupposes at once the general idea of something' or substance, and the complex idea of qualities of the something. Therefore it must be general and complex ideas that are real, as made for and

not by us, and that afford the inventive understanding its material. Yet if so-if they are given-why make them over again by abstraction and recomplication?

overcome

violence

51. We may get over the last difficulty, indeed, by dis- They cantinguishing between the complex and confused, between not be abstraction and analysis. We may say that what is originally without given in experience is the confused, which to us is simple, or to Locke s in other words has no definite content, because, till it has fundabeen analysed, nothing can be said of it, though in itself it mental is infinetely complex; that thus the process, which Locke principles. roughly calls abstraction, and which, as he describes it, consists merely in taking grains from the big heap that is given in order to make a little heap of one's own, is yet, rightly understood, the true process of knowledge-a process which may be said at once to begin with the complex and to end with it, to take from the concrete and to constitute it, because it begins with that which is in itself the fulness of reality, but which only becomes so for us as it is gradually spelt out by our analysis. To put the case thus, however, is not to correct Locke's statement, but wholly to change his doctrine. It renders futile his easy method of sending a man to his senses' for the discovery of reality, and destroys the supposition that the elements of knowledge can be ascertained by the interrogation of the individual consciousness. Such consciousness can tell nothing of its own beginning, if of this beginning, as of the purely indefinite, nothing can be said; if it only becomes defined through relations, which in its state of primitive potentiality are not actually in it. The senses again, so far from being, in that mere passivity which Locke ascribes to them, organs of ready-made reality, can have nothing to tell, if it is only through the active processes of 'discerning, comparing, and compounding,' that they acquire a definite content. But to admit this is nothing else than, in order to avoid a contradiction of which Locke was not aware, to efface just that characteristic of his doctrine which commends it to 'common sense' the supposition, namely, that the simple datum of sense, as it is for sense or in its mere individuality, is the real, in opposition to the invention of the mind.' That this supposition is to make the real the unmeaning, the empty, of which nothing can be said, he did not see because, under an unconscious delusion of words, even while asserting

As real

existence, the simple idea car

ries with it relation of

'invented'

cause.

that the names of simple ideas are undefinable (Book III. chap. iv. sec. 4), which means that nothing can be said of such ideas, and while admitting that the processes of discerning, comparing, and compounding ideas, which mean nothing else than the bringing them into relation' or the superinduction upon them of fictions of the mind, are necessary to constitute even the beginnings of knowledge, he yet allows himself to invest the simple idea, as the real, with those definite qualities which can only accrue to it, according to his showing, from the inventive' action of the understanding.

52. Thus invested, it is already substance or symbolical of substance, not a mere feeling but a felt thing, recognised either under that minimum of qualification which enables us merely to say that it is something,' or (in Locke's language) abstract substance, or under the greater complication of qualities which constitutes a 'particular sort of substance'gold, horse, water, &c. Real existence thus means substance. It is not the simple idea or sensation by itself that is real, but this idea as caused by a thing. It is the thing that is primarily the real; the idea only secondarily so, because it results from a power in the thing. As we have seen, Locke's doctrine of the necessary adequacy, reality, and truth of the simple idea turns upon the supposition that it is, and announces itself as an 'ectype' of an archetype.' But there is not a different archetype to each sensation; if there were, in reporting' it the sensation would do no more than report itself. It is the supposed single cause of manifold different sensations or simple ideas, to which a single name is applied. 'If sugar produce in us the ideas which we call whiteness and sweetness, we are sure there is a power in sugar to produce those ideas in our minds. . . . . And so each sensation answering the power that operates on any of our senses, the idea so produced is a real idea (and not a fiction of the mind, which has no power to produce any single idea), and

1 Locke only states this explicitly of comparison, an operation of the mind about its ideas, upon which depends all that large tribe of ideas, comprehended under relation.' (Book 11. chap. xi. sec. 4.) It is clear, however, that the same remark must apply to the discernment of ideas,' which is strictly correlative to comparison, and to their composition,

·

which means that they are brought into relation as constituents of a whole.

That these three processes are necessary to constitute the beginnings of knowledge, according to Locke, appears from Book 11. chap. xi. sec. 15, taken in connection with what precedes in that chapter.

cannot but be adequate . . and so all simple ideas are adequate.' (Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 2.) The sugar, which is here the archetype' and the source of reality in the idea, is just what Locke elsewhere calls a particular sort of substance,' as the 'something' from which a certain set of sensations result, and in which, as sensible qualities, they inhere. Strictly speaking, however, according to Locke, that which inheres in the thing is not the quality, as it is to us, but a power to produce it. (Book II. chap. viii. sec. 23, and

c. xxiii. 37.)

53. In calling a sensation or idea the product of a power, Correla substance is presupposed just as much as in calling it a tivity of cause and sensible quality; only that with Locke 'quality' conveyed substance. the notion of inherence in the substance, power that of relation to an effect not in the substance itself. Secondary qualities are nothing but the powers which substances have to produce several ideas in us by our senses, which ideas are not in the things themselves, otherwise than as anything is in its cause.' (Book II. chap. xxiii. sec. 9.) Most of the simple ideas, that make up our complex ideas of substances, are only powers . . . . or relations to other substances (or, as he explains elsewhere, 'relations to our perceptions,' 1), and are not really in the substance considered barely in itself.' (Book II. chap. xxiii. sec. 37, and xxxi. 8.) That this implies the inclusion of the idea of cause in that of substance, appears from Locke's statement that whatever is considered by us to operate to the producing any particular simple idea which did not before exist, hath thereby in our minds the relation of a cause.' (Book 11. chap. xxvi. sec. 1.) Thus to be conscious of the reality of a simple idea, as that which is not made by the subject of the idea, but results from a power in a thing, is to have the idea of substance as cause. This latter idea must be the condition of the consciousness of reality. If the consciousness of reality is implied in the beginning of knowledge, so must the correlative ideas be of cause and substance.

ideas cor

54. On examining Locke's second rehearsal of his theory How do wo in the fourth book of the Essay-that 'On Knowledge' we are led to this result quite as inevitably as in the book 'On Ideas.' He has a special chapter on the reality of human knowledge,' where he puts the problem thus :—' It is

know that respond to reality of things?

1 Book 1. chap. xxi. sec. 3.