Abstract idea of substance and complex ideas of particular sorts of substance.
35. As we follow Locke’s treatment of these ideas more in detail, we shall find the logical see-saw, here accounted for, appearing with scarcely a disguise. His account of the origin of the ‘complex ideas of substances’ is as follows. ‘The mind being furnished with a great number of the simple ideas, conveyed in by the senses, as they are found in exterior things, or by reflection on its own operations, takes notice also that a certain number of these simple ideas go constantly together; which being presumed to belong to one thing, and words being suited to common apprehensions and made use of for quick despatch, are called, so united in one subject, by one name; which by inadvertency we are apt afterwards to talk of and consider as one simple idea, which indeed is a complication of many ideas together; because, as I have said, not imagining how these simple ideas can subsist by themselves, we accustom ourselves to suppose some substratum, wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result; which therefore we call substance.’ (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 1.) In the controversy with Stillingfleet, which arose out of this chapter, Locke was constrained further to distinguish (as he certainly did not do in the original text) between the ‘ideas of distinct substances, such as man, horse,’ and the ‘general idea of substance.’ It is to ideas of the former sort that he must be taken to refer in the above passage, when he speaks of them as formed by ‘complication of many ideas together,’ and these alone are complex in the strict sense. The general idea of substance on the other hand, which like all general ideas (according to Locke) is made by abstraction, means the idea of a ‘substratum which we accustom ourselves to suppose’ as that wherein the complicated ideas ‘do subsist, and from which they do result.’ This, however, he regards as itself one, ‘the first and chief,’ among the ideas which make up any of the ‘distinct substances.’ (Book II. chap. xii. sec. 6.) Nor is he faithful to the distinction between the general and the complex. In one passage of the first letter to Stillingfleet, he distinctly speaks of the general idea of substance as a ‘complex idea made up of the idea of something plus that of relation to qualities.’ [1] Notwithstanding this confusion of terms, however, he no doubt had before him what seemed a clear distinction between the ‘abstract general idea’ of substance, as such, i.e. of ‘something related as a support to accidents,’ but which does not include ideas of any particular accidents, and the composite idea of a substance, made up of a multitude of simple ideas plus that of the something related to them as a support. We shall find each of these ideas, according to Locke’s statement, presupposing the other.
[1] Upon a reference to the chapter on ‘complex ideas’ (Book II. chap, xii.), it will appear that the term is used in a stricter and a looser sense. In the looser sense it is not confined to compound ideas, but in opposition to simple ones includes those of relation and even ‘abstract general ideas.’ When Locke thinks of the general idea of substance apart from the complication of accidents referred to it, he opposes it to the complex idea, according to the stricter sense of that term. On the other hand, when he thinks of it as ‘made up’ of the idea of something plus that of relation to qualities (as if there could be an idea of something apart from such relation), it seems to him to have two elements, and therefore to be complex.
The abstract idea according to Locke at once precedes and follows the complex.
36. In the passage above quoted, our aptness to consider a complication of simple ideas, which we notice to go constantly together, as one simple idea, is accounted for as the result of a presumption that they belong to one thing. This presumption is again described in the words that ‘we accustom ourselves to suppose some substratum, wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result; which therefore we call substance.’ Here it is implied that the idea of substance, i.e. ‘the general idea of something related as a support to accidents,’ is one gradually formed upon observation of the regular coincidence of certain simple ideas. In the sequel (sec. 3 of the same chapter I. xxiii.) we are told that such an idea—‘an obscure and relative idea of substance in general—being thus made, we come to have the ideas of particular sorts of substances by collecting such combinations of simple ideas as are, by experience and observation of men’s senses, taken notice of to exist together.’ Thus a general idea of substance having been formed by one gradual process, ideas of particular sorts of substances are formed by another and later one. But then the very same ‘collection of such combinations of simple ideas as are taken notice of to exist together,’ which (according to sec. 3) constitutes the later process and follows upon the formation of the general idea of substance, has been previously described as preceding and conditioning that formation. It is the complication of simple ideas, noticed to go constantly together, that (according to sec. 1) leads to the ‘idea of substance in general.’ To this see-saw between the process preceding and that following the formation of the idea in question must be added the difficulty, that Locke’s account makes the general idea precede the particular, which is against the whole tenor of his doctrine of abstraction as an operation whereby ‘the mind makes the particular ideas, received from particular objects, to become general.’ (Book II. chap. xi. sec. 9.)
Reference of ideas to nature or God, the same as reference to substance.
37. It may be said perhaps that Locke’s self-contradiction in this regard is more apparent than real; that the two processes of combining simple ideas are essentially different, just because in the later process they are combined by a conscious act of the mind as accidents of a ‘something,’ of which the general idea has been previously formed, whereas in the earlier one they are merely presented together ‘by nature,’ and, ex hypothesi, though they gradually suggest, do not carry with them any reference to a ‘substratum.’ But upon this we must remark that the presentation of ideas ‘by nature’ or ‘by God,’ though a mode of speech of which Locke in his account of the origin of knowledge freely avails himself, means nothing else than their relation to a ‘substratum,’ if not ‘wherein they do subsist,’ yet ‘from which they do result.’ If then it is for consciousness that ideas are presented together by nature, they already carry with them that reference to a substratum which is supposed gradually to result from their concurrence. If it is not for consciousness that they are so presented, if they do not severally carry with them a reference to ‘something,’ how is it they come to do so in the gross? If a single sensation of heat is not referred to a hot thing, why should it be so referred on the thousandth recurrence? Because perhaps, recurring constantly in the same relations, it compels the inference of permanent antecedents? But the ‘same relations’ mean relations to the same things, and the observation of these relations presupposes just that conception of the thing which it is sought to account for,
But it is explicitly to substance that Locke makes them refer themselves.
38. We are estopped, however, from any such explanation of Locke as would suggest these ulterior questions by his explicit statement that ‘all simple ideas, all sensible qualities, carry with them a supposition of a substratum to exist in, and of a substance wherein they inhere.’ The vindication of himself against the pathetic complaint of Stillingfleet, that he had ‘almost discarded substance out of the reasonable part of the world,’ in which this statement occurs, was certainly not needed. Already in the original text the simple ideas, of which the association suggests the idea of substance, are such as ‘the mind finds in exterior things or by reflection on its own operations.’ But to find them in an exterior thing is to find them in a substance, a ‘something it knows not what,’ regarded as outward, just as to find them by reflection on its own operations, as its own, is to find them in such a substance regarded as inward. The process then by which, according to Locke, the general idea of substance is arrived at, presupposes this idea just as much as the process, by which ideas of particular sorts of substances are got, presupposes it, and the distinction between the two processes, as he puts it, disappears.
In the process by which we are supposed to arrive at complex ideas of substances the beginning is the same as the end.