[6] Pp. 523-526. [Book I, part IV., sec. V.]
Causality of spirit treated in the same way.
341. The supposition of spiritual substance being thus at once absurd, and of a tendency the very opposite of the purpose it was meant to serve, can anything better be said for the supposition of a spiritual cause? It was to the representation of spirit as cause rather than as substance, it will be remembered, that both Locke and Berkeley trusted for the establishment of a Theism which should not be Pantheism. [1] Locke, in his demonstration of the being of God, trusted for proof of a first cause to the inference from that which begins to exist to something having power to produce it, and to the principle of necessary connexion—connexion in the way of agreement of ideas—between cause and effect for proof that this first cause must be immaterial, even as its effect, viz. our thought, is. Hume’s doctrine of causation, of course, renders both sides of the demonstration unmeaning. Inference being only the suggestion by a feeling of the image of its ‘usual attendant,’ there can be no inference to that which is not a possible image of an impression. Nor, since causation merely means the constant conjunction of impressions, and there is no such contrariety between the impression we call ‘motion of matter’ and that we call ‘thought,’ anymore than between any other impressions, [2] as is incompatible with their constant conjunction, is there any reason why we should set aside the hourly experience, which tells us that bodily motions are the cause of thoughts and sentiments. If, however, there were that necessary connexion between effect and cause, by which Locke sought to show the spirituality of the first cause, it would really go to show just the reverse of infinite power in such cause. It is from our impressions and ideas that we are supposed to infer this cause; but in these—as Berkeley had shown, and shown as his way of proving the existence of God—there is no efficacy whatever. They are ‘inert.’ If then the cause must agree with the effect, the Supreme Being, as the cause of our impressions and ideas, must be ‘inert’ likewise. If, on the other hand, with Berkeley we cling to the notion that there must be efficient power somewhere, and having excluded it from the relation of ideas to each other or of matter to ideas, find it in the direct relation of God to ideas, we fall ‘into the grossest impieties;’ for it will follow that God ‘is the author of all our volitions and impressions.’ [3]
[1] See above, §§ 147, 171, 193.
[2] There is no contrariety, according to Hume, except between existence and non-existence (p. 323) [Book I, part I., sec. V.] and as all impressions and ideas equally exist (p. 394) [Book I, part III., sec. VII.], there can be no contrariety between any of them. He does indeed in certain leading passages allow himself to speak of contrariety between ideas (e.g. pp. 494 and 535 [Book I, part IV., secs. II. and VI.]), which is incidental evidence that the ideas there treated of are not so, according to his account of ideas, at all.
[3] Pp. 529-531 [Book I, part IV., sec. V.], a commentary on the argument here given has been in effect supplied in paragraphs 148-152, and 194.
Disposes of ‘personal’ identity by showing contradictions in Locke’s account of it.
342. Against the doctrine of a real ‘identity of the self or person’ Hume had merely to exhibit the contradictions which Locke’s own statement of it involves. [1] To have transferred this identity definitely from ‘matter’ to consciousness was in itself a great merit, but, so transferred, in the absence of any other theory of consciousness than Locke’s, it only becomes more obviously a fiction. If there is nothing real but the succession of feelings, identity of body, it is true, disappears as inevitably as identity of mind; and so we have already found it to do in Hume. [2] But whereas the notion of a unity of body throughout the succession of perceptions only becomes contradictory through the medium of a reduction of body to a succession of perceptions, the identity of a mind, which has been already defined as a succession of perceptions, is a contradiction in terms. There can be ‘properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity at different; it is a kind of theatre where several perceptions successively make their appearance.’ But this comparison must not mislead us. ‘They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place where these scenes are represented, or of the materials of which it is composed.’ The problem for Hume then in regard to personal, as it had been in regard to bodily, identity is to account for that ‘natural propension to imagine’ it which language implies.
[1] See above, §§ 134 and foll.
[2] See above, §§ 306 and foll.