235. Hume does not attempt to reject the conclusion directly. He had too much eye to the appearance of consistency for that. But, in professing to admit it, he wholly alters its significance. The passage in question must be quoted at length. ‘The table, which just now appears to me, is only a perception, and all its qualities are qualities of a perception. Now, the most obvious of all its qualities is extension. The perception consists of parts. These parts are so situated as to afford us the notion of distance and contiguity, of length, breadth, and thickness. The termination of these three dimensions is what we call figure. The figure is moveable, separable, and divisible. Mobility and separability are the distinguishing properties of extended objects. And, to cut short all disputes, the very idea of extension is copied from nothing but an impression, and consequently must perfectly agree to it. To say the idea of extension agrees to anything is to say it is extended.’ Thus ‘there are impressions and ideas that are really extended.’ [1]
[1] P. 523 [Book I, part IV., sec. V.]
Yet the parts of space are co-existent not successive.
236. In order to a proper appreciation of this passage it is essential to bear in mind that Hume, so far as the usages of language would allow him, ignores all such differences in modes of consciousness as the Germans indicate by the distinction between ‘Empfindung’ and ‘Vorstellung,’ and by that between ‘Anschauung’ and ‘Begriff;’ or, more properly, that he expressly merges them in a mode of consciousness for which, according to the most consistent account that can be gathered from him, the most natural term would be ‘feeling.’ [1] It is true that Hume himself, admitting a distinction in the degree of vivacity with which this consciousness is at different times presented, inclines to restrict the term ‘feeling’ to its more vivacious stage, and to use ‘perception’ as the more general term, applicable whatever the degree of vivacity may be. [2] We must not allow him, however, in using this term to gain the advantage of a meaning which popular theory does, but his does not, attach to it. ‘Perception’ with him covers ‘idea’ as well as ‘impression;’ but nothing can be said of idea that cannot be said of impression, save that it is less lively, nor of impression that cannot be said of idea, save that it is more so. It is this explicit reduction of all consciousness virtually, if not in name, to feeling that brings to the surface the difficulties latent in Locke’s ‘idealism.’ These we have already traced at large; but they may be summed up in the question, How can feelings, as ‘particular in time’ or (which is the same) in ‘perpetual flux,’ constitute or represent a world of permanent relations? [3] The difficulty becomes more obvious, though not more real, when the relations in question are not merely themselves permanent, like those between natural phenomena, but are ‘relations between permanent parts,’ like those of space. It is for this reason that its doctrine about geometry has always been found the most easily assailable point of the ‘sensational’ philosophy. Locke distinguishes the ideas of space and of duration as got, the one ‘from the permanent parts of space,’ the other ‘from the fleeting and perpetually perishing parts of succession.’ [4] He afterwards prefers the term ‘expansion’ to space, as the opposite of duration, because it brings out more clearly the distinction of a relation between permanent parts from that between ‘fleeting successive parts which never exist together.’ How, then, can a consciousness consisting simply of ‘fleeting successive parts’ either be or represent that of which the differentia is that its parts are permanent and co-exist?
[1] As implying no distinction from, or reference to, a thing causing and a subject experiencing it. See above, paragraphs 195 and 208, and the passages there referred to.
[2] ‘To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive.’ p. 371 [Book I, part II., sec. IV.]. ‘When I shut my eyes and think of my chamber, the ideas I form are exact representations of the impressions I felt.’ p. 312 [Book I, part I., sec. I.].
[3] See above, paragraphs 172 & 176.
[4] Essay Book II. chap. xiv. sec. 1.
Hume cannot make space a ‘perception’ without being false to his own account of perception;
237. If this crux had been fairly faced by Hume, he must have seen that the only way in which he could consistently deal with it was by radically altering, with whatever consequence to the sciences, Locke’s account of space. As it was, he did not face it, but—whether intentionally or only in effect—disguised it by availing himself of the received usages of language, which roughly represent a theory the exact opposite of his own, to cover the incompatibility between the established view of the nature of space, and his own reduction of it to feeling. A very little examination of the passage, quoted at large above, will show that while in it a profession is made of identifying extension and a certain sort of perception with each other, its effect is not really to reduce extension to such a perception as Hume elsewhere explains all perceptions to be, but to transfer the recognised properties of extension which with such reduction would disappear, to something which for the time he chooses to reckon a perception, but which he can only so reckon at the cost of contradicting his whole method of dealing with the ideas of God, the soul, and the world. The passage, in fact, is merely one sample of the continued shuffle by which Hume on the one hand ascribes to feeling that intelligible content which it only derives from relation to objects of thought, and on the other disposes of these objects because they are not feelings.