This is the real thing from which abstraction is supposed to start.
48. ‘The complex idea of a species,’ spoken of in the passage last quoted, corresponds to what, in Locke’s theory of substance, is called the ‘idea of a particular sort of substance.’ In considering that theory we saw that, according to his account, the beginning of the process by which the ‘abstract idea of substance’ was formed, was either that abstract idea itself, the mere ‘something,’ or by a double contradiction the ‘complex idea of a particular sort of substance’ which yet we only come to have after the abstract idea has been formed. In the passage now before us there is no direct mention of the abstraction of the ‘substratum,’ as such, but only of the quality, and hence there is no ambiguity about the paralogism. It is not a mere ‘something’ that the man ‘lights upon,’ and thus it is not this that holds the place at once of the given and the derived but a something having manifold qualities to be abstracted. In other words, it is the ‘idea of a particular sort of substance’ that he starts from, and it is just this again to which as a ‘complex idea of a species,’ his understanding is supposed gradually to lead him. The understanding, indeed, according to Locke, is never adequate to nature, and accordingly the qualities abstracted and recombined in the complex idea always fall vastly short of the fulness of those given in the real thing; or as he states it in terms of the multiplication table (Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 10), ‘some who have examined this species more accurately could, I believe, enumerate ten times as many properties in gold, all of them as inseparable from its internal constitution, as its colour or weight; and it is probable if any one knew all the properties that are by divers men known of this metal, there would an hundred times as many ideas go to the complex idea of gold, as any one man has yet in his; and yet perhaps that would not be the thousandth part of what is to be discovered in it.’ These two million properties, and upwards, which await abstraction in gold, are all, it must be noted, according to Locke’s statement elsewhere (Book II. chap xxiii. sec. 37), ‘nothing but so many relations to other substances.’ It is just on account of these multitudinous relations of the real thing that the understanding is inadequate to its comprehension. Yet according to Locke’s doctrine of relation these must all be themselves ‘superinductions of the mind,’ and the greater the fulness which they constitute, the further is the distance from the mere individuality which elsewhere, in contrast with the fictitiousness of ‘generals,’ appears as the equivalent of real existence.
Yet, according to the doctrine of relation, a creation of thought.
49. The real thing and the creation of the understanding thus change places. That which is given to the understanding as the real, which it finds and does not make, is not now the bare atom upon which relations have to be artificially superinduced. Nor is it the mere present feeling, which has ‘by the mind of man’ to be made ‘significant,’ or representative of past experience. It is itself an inexhaustible complex of relations, whether they are considered as subsisting between it and other things, or between the sensations which it is ‘fitted to produce in us.’ These are the real, which is thus a system, a community; and if the ‘general,’ as Locke says, is that which ‘has the capacity of representing many particulars,’ the real thing itself is general, for it represents—nay, is constituted by—the manifold particular feelings which, mediately or immediately, it excites in us. On the other hand, the invention of the understanding, instead of giving ‘significance’ or content to the mere individuality of the real, as it does according to Locke’s theory of ‘generals,’ now appears as detaching fragments from the fulness of the real to recombine them in an ‘abstract essence’ of its own. Instead of adding complexity to the simple, it subtracts from the complex.
Summary of the above contradictions.
50. To gather up, then, the lines of contradiction which traverse Locke’s doctrine of real existence as it appears in his account of general and complex ideas:—The idea of substance is an abstract general idea, not given directly in sensation or reflection, but ‘invented by the understanding,’ as by consequence must be ideas of particular sorts of substances which presuppose the abstract idea. On the other hand, the ideas of sensation and reflection, from which the idea of substance is abstracted, and to which as real it as an invention is opposed, are ideas of ‘something,’ and are only real as representative of something. But this idea of something = the idea of substance. Therefore the idea of substance is the presupposition, and the condition of the reality, of the very ideas from which it is said to be derived. Again, if the general idea of substance is got by abstraction, it must be originally given in conjunction with the ideas of sensation or reflection from which it is afterwards abstracted, i.e. separated. But in such conjunction it constitutes the ideas of particular sorts of substances. Therefore these latter ideas, which yet we ‘come to have’ after the general idea of substance, form the prior experience from which this general idea is abstracted. Further, this original experience, from which abstraction starts, being of ‘sorts of substances,’ and these sorts being constituted by relations, it follows that relation is given in the original experience. But that which is so given is ‘real existence’ in opposition to the invention of the understanding. Therefore these relations, and the community which they constitute, really exist. On the other hand, mere individuals alone really exist, while relations between them are superinduced by the mind. Once more, the simple idea given in sensation or reflection, as it is made for not by us, has or results from real existence, whereas general and complex ideas are the workmanship of the mind. But this workmanship consists in the abstraction of ideas from each other, and from that to which they are related as qualities. It thus presupposes at once the general idea of ‘something’ or substance, and the complex idea of qualities of the something. Therefore it must be general and complex ideas that are real, as made for and not by us, and that afford the inventive understanding its material. Yet if so—if they are given—why make them over again by abstraction and recomplication?
They cannot be overcome without violence to Locke’s fundamental principles.
51. We may get over the last difficulty, indeed, by distinguishing between the complex and confused, between abstraction and analysis. We may say that what is originally given in experience is the confused, which to us is simple, or in other words has no definite content, because, till it has been analysed, nothing can be said of it, though in itself it is infinitely complex; that thus the process, which Locke roughly calls abstraction, and which, as he describes it, consists merely in taking grains from the big heap that is given in order to make a little heap of one’s own, is yet, rightly understood, the true process of knowledge—a process which may be said at once to begin with the complex and to end with it, to take from the concrete and to constitute it, because it begins with that which is in itself the fulness of reality, but which only becomes so for us as it is gradually spelt out by our analysis. To put the case thus, however, is not to correct Locke’s statement, but wholly to change his doctrine. It renders futile his easy method of ‘sending a man to his senses’ for the discovery of reality, and destroys the supposition that the elements of knowledge can be ascertained by the interrogation of the individual consciousness. Such consciousness can tell nothing of its own beginning, if of this beginning, as of the purely indefinite, nothing can be said; if it only becomes defined through relations, which in its state of primitive potentiality are not actually in it. The senses again, so far from being, in that mere passivity which Locke ascribes to them, organs of ready-made reality, can have nothing to tell, if it is only through the active processes of ‘discerning, comparing, and compounding,’ that they acquire a definite content. But to admit this is nothing else than, in order to avoid a contradiction of which Locke was not aware, to efface just that characteristic of his doctrine which commends it to ‘common sense’—the supposition, namely, that the simple datum of sense, as it is for sense or in its mere individuality, is the real, in opposition to the ‘invention of the mind.’ That this supposition is to make the real the unmeaning, the empty, of which nothing can be said, he did not see because, under an unconscious delusion of words, even while asserting that the names of simple ideas are undefinable (Book III. chap. iv. sec. 4), which means that nothing can be said of such ideas, and while admitting that the processes of discerning, comparing, and compounding ideas, which mean nothing else than the bringing them into relation [1] or the superinduction upon them of fictions of the mind, are necessary to constitute even the beginnings of knowledge, he yet allows himself to invest the simple idea, as the real, with those definite qualities which can only accrue to it, according to his showing, from the ‘inventive’ action of the understanding.
[1] Locke only states this explicitly of comparison, ‘an operation of the mind about its ideas, upon which depends all that large tribe of ideas, comprehended under relation.’ (Book II. chap. xi. sec. 4.) It is clear, however, that the same remark must apply to the ‘discernment of ideas,’ which is strictly correlative to comparison, and to their composition, which means that they are brought into relation as constituents of a whole.
That these three processes are necessary to constitute the beginnings of knowledge, according to Locke, appears from Book II. chap. xi. sec. 15, taken in connection with what precedes in that chapter.