Possibility of such fictitious ideas implies refutation of Hume’s doctrine.
345. Thus the more strongly Hume insists that ‘the identity which we ascribe to the mind of man is only a fictitious one’, [1] the more completely does his doctrine refute itself. If he had really succeeded in reducing those ‘invented’ relations, which Locke had implicitly recognised as the framework of the universe, to what he calls ‘natural’ ones—to mere sequences of feeling—the case would have been different. With the disappearance of the conception of the world as a system of related elements, the necessity of a thinking subject, without whose presence to feelings they could not become such elements, would have disappeared likewise. But he cannot so reduce them. In all his attempts to do so we find that the relation, which has to be explained away, is pre-supposed under some other expression, and that it is ‘fictitious’ not in the sense which Hume’s theory requires—the sense, namely, that there is no such thing either really or in imagination, either as impression or idea—but in the sense that it would not exist if we did not think about our feelings. Thus, whereas identity ought for Hume’s purpose to be either a ‘natural relation,’ or a propensity arising from such relation, or nothing, we find that according to his account, though neither natural relation nor propensity, it yet exists both as idea and as reality. He saves appearances indeed by saying [2] that natural relations of ideas ‘produce it,’ but they do so, according to his detailed account of the matter, in the sense that, the idea of an identical object being given, we mistake our successive and resembling feelings for such an object. In other words, the existence of numerically identical things is a ‘fiction,’ not as if there were no such things, but because it implies a certain operation of thought upon our feelings, a certain interpretation of impressions under direction of an idea not derived from impressions. By a like equivocal use of ‘fiction’ Hume covers the admission of real identity in its more complex forms—the identity of a mass, whose parts undergo perpetual change of distribution; of a body whose form survives not merely the redistribution of its materials, but the substitution of others; of animals and vegetables, in which nothing but the ‘common end’ of the changing members remains the same. The reality of such identity of mass, of form, of organism, he quietly takes for granted. [3] He calls it ‘fictitious’ indeed, but only either in the sense above given or in the sense that it is mistaken for mere numerical identity.
[1] P. 540. [Book I, part IV., sec. VI.]
[2] P. 543 [Book I, part IV., sec. VI.]. ‘Identity depends on the relations of ideas; and these relations produce identity by means of that easy transition they occasion.’ Strictly it should be ‘that easy transition in which they consist;’ since, according to Hume, the ‘easiness of transition’ is not an effect of natural relation, but constitutes it. Cf. pp. 322 & 497 [Book I, part I., sec. V. and part IV., sec. II.], and above, § 318.
[3] Pp. 536-538. [Book I, part IV., sec. VI.]
346. After he has thus admitted, as constituents of the ‘universe of objects,’ a whole hierarchy of ideas of which the simplest must vanish before the demand to ‘point out the impression from which it is derived,’ we are the less surprised to find him pronouncing in conclusion ‘that the true idea of the human mind is to consider it as a system of different perceptions or different existences, which are linked together by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually produce, destroy, influence and modify each other’. [1] A better definition than this, as a definition of nature, or one more charged with ‘fictions of thought,’ could scarcely be desired. If the idea of such a system is a true idea at all, which we are only wrong in confusing with mere numerical identity, we need be the less concerned that it should be adduced as the true idea not of nature but of the ‘human mind.’ Having learnt, through the discipline which Hume himself furnishes, that the recognition of a system of nature logically carries with it that of a self-conscious subject, in relation to which alone ‘different perceptions’ become a system of nature, we know that we cannot naturalise the ‘human mind’ without presupposing that which is neither nature nor natural, though apart from it nature would not be—that of which the designation as ‘mind,’ as ‘human,’ as ‘personal,’ is of secondary importance, but which is eternal, self-determined, and thinks.
[1] P. 541. [Book I, part IV., sec. VI.]
T.H. Green
GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. II.
Hume’s doctrine of morals parallel to his doctrine of nature.