History of Modern Philosophy

by Alfred William Benn

All these systems involve the negation of two fundamental scientific principles. The first is that every change must be explained by reference to an antecedent change to which it bears a strict quantitative relation. The second is that no particular change can be referred to another change as its necessary antecedent unless it can be shown by experience that a precisely similar

couple of changes are, in fact, always so connected. Let me illustrate these principles by an example. I leave a kettle full of cold water on the fire, and on returning after a sufficient interval of time I find the water boiling. Had I stayed by the fire and watched the process, my kettle would—a popular proverb to the contrary notwithstanding—have certainly boiled as soon, but also no sooner for being helped by my consciousness. The essential thing is that energy of combustion in the fire should be turned into energy of boiling in the water. Now, what is Berkeley's interpretation of the facts? Fire, kettle, water, and ebullition are what in his writings are called "ideas"—i.e., phenomena occasionally in my mind, but always in God's mind. And according to this view the necessary antecedent to the boiling of the water is not the fire's burning, but God's consciousness of its burning, his perception being the essence of the operation. But it is proved by experience that neither my perception nor anyone else's ever made a single drop of water boil. In other words, perception is not in this instance a vera causa. Why, then, should the perception of any other mind, however exalted, have that effect?

Nor is this all. How does Berkeley know that God exists? Because, he says, to exist is to be perceived, and therefore for the universe to exist implies a universal Percipient. But he got the idea of God from other men, who certainly did not come by it as a generalisation from their perceptions; they got it by generalising from their voluntary actions, which do produce the changes that perception cannot produce. It will be said that volitions and the feelings that prompt them exist only in consciousness. In whose consciousness? In that of a spirit. And what is spirit apart from

sensation, thought, feeling, and volition? Simply one of those abstract ideas whose existence Berkeley himself denied.

Hume.

The next step in the evolution of English thought was to consist in a return to Locke's method, involving a complete breach with seventeenth-century Platonism, and with the Continental metaphysics that it had inspired. This decisive movement was effected by one in whom German criticism has recognised the greatest of all British philosophers. David Hume (1711-1776) was born and bred at Edinburgh, which also seems to have been through life his favourite residence. But his great work, the Treatise on Human Nature, was written during a stay in France, between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-six. Thus his precocity was even greater than Berkeley's. Indeed, such maturity of thought so early reached is without a parallel in history. But Hume's style had not then acquired the perfection—the inimitable charm, Kant calls it—of his later writings; and, whether for this or for other reasons, the book, in his own words, "fell dead-born from the press." In middle life the office of librarian of the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh gave him access to the materials for his History of England, which proved a source of fame and profit. A profound historical scholar, J. S. Brewer, tells us that Hume "possessed in a pre-eminent degree some of the highest excellences of a historian." Other historians have treated their subjects philosophically; he furnishes the sole instance of a great speculative genius who has also produced a historical masterpiece of the first order. But morally it is a blot on his fame. It is sad that a philosopher should have deliberately perverted the truth, that one who has

Hume's philosophy is best understood when we consider it as, in the first place, a criticism of Berkeley, just as Berkeley's had been a criticism of Locke. It will be remembered that the founder of subjective idealism discarded the notion of material substance as an "abstract idea," an unintelligible figment devoid of any sensuous or imaginative content. The only true substances are the subjects of what we call experience communicating through sensation with God, the infinite spirit whose eternal consciousness is reality itself. Hume applied the same tests to spiritual substance, and found that it equally disappeared under his introspective analysis. He begins by dividing the contents of consciousness into two classes, impressions and ideas—the second being copies of the first, and distinguished from them by their relative faintness. Now, from these perceptions (which he called thoughts) Descartes had passed by an immediate inference to the ego or self, which he affirms as the primary fact of consciousness, using it as a basis for sundry other conclusions. But Hume stops him at once, and will not grant the existence of the metaphysical self—that is, a simple and continued substance, as distinguished from particular states of consciousness. We are, he declares, "nothing but a bundle of different perceptions, which

succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement." "There is properly no simplicity in it [the self] at one time, nor identity in different [times]; whatever natural propensity we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity." So much being assumed, Berkeley's whole argument for a new theology founded on subjective idealism is bound to collapse, as also is the argument for natural immortality derived from the supposed simplicity and identity of the thinking substance.