[2] Book III. chap. iii. sec. 10.
[3] For the germs of the distinction between outer and inner sense, see Locke’s Essay, Book II. chap. i. sec. 14: ‘This source of ideas (the perception of the operations of the mind) every man has wholly in himself; and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense.’ For the notion of outer sense cf. Book II. chap. ix. sec. 6, where he is distinguishing the ideas of hunger and warmth, which he supposes children to receive in the womb from the ‘innate principles which some contend for.’ ‘These (the ideas of hunger and warmth) being the effects of sensation, are only from some affections of the body which happen to them there, and so depend on something exterior to the mind, not otherwise differing in their manner of production from other ideas derived from sense, but only in the precedency of time.’
Body and its qualities supposed to be outside consciousness.
99. According to the doctrine of primary qualities, as originally stated, the antithesis lies between body as it is in itself and body as it is for us, not between body as it is for us in ‘actual sensation,’ and body as it is for us according to ‘ideas in the mind.’ The primary qualities ‘are in bodies whether we perceive them or no.’ (Book II. chap. viii. sec. 23.) As he puts it elsewhere (Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 2), it is just because ‘solidity and extension and the termination of it, figure, with motion and rest, whereof we have the ideas, would be really in the world as they are whether there were any sensible being to perceive them or no,’ that they are to be looked on as the real modifications of matter. A change in them, unlike one in the secondary qualities, or such as is relative to sense, is a real alteration in body. ‘Pound an almond, and the clear white colour will be altered into a dirty one, and the sweet taste into an oily one. What alteration can the beating of the pestle make in any body, but an alteration of the texture of it?’ (Book II. chap. viii. sec. 20.) It is implied then in the notion of the real as body that it should be outside consciousness. It is that which seems to remain when everything belonging to consciousness has been thought away. Yet it is brought within consciousness again by the supposition that it has qualities which copy themselves in our ideas and are ‘the exciting causes of all our various sensations from bodies.’ (Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 3.) Again, however, the antithesis between the real and consciousness prevails, and the qualities of matter or body having been brought within the latter, are opposed to a ‘substance of body’—otherwise spoken of as ‘the nature, cause, or manner of producing the ideas of primary qualities’—which remains outside it, unknown and unknowable. (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 30, &c.)
How can primary qualities be outside consciousness, and yet knowable?
100. The doctrine of primary qualities was naturally the one upon which the criticism of Berkeley and Hume first fastened, as the most obvious aberration from the ‘new way of ideas.’ That the very notion of the senses as ‘reporting’ anything, under secondary no less than under primary qualities, implies the presence of ‘fictions of thought’ in the primitive consciousness, may become clear upon analysis; but it lies on the surface and is avowed by Locke himself (Book II. chap. viii. secs. 2, 7), that the conception of primary qualities is only possible upon distinction being made between ideas as in our minds, and the ‘nature of things existing without us,’ which cannot be given in the simple feeling itself. This admitted, the distinction might either be traced to the presence within intelligent consciousness of another factor than simple ideas, or be accounted for as a gradual ‘invention of the mind.’ In neither way, however, could Locke regard it and yet retain his distinction between fact and fancy, as resting upon that between the nature of things and the mind of man. The way of escape lay in a figure of speech, the figure of the wax or the mirror. ‘The ideas of primary qualities are resemblances of them.’ (Book II. chap, viii. sec. 15.) These qualities then may be treated, according to occasion, either as primitive data of consciousness, or as the essence of that which is the unknown opposite of consciousness—in the latter way when the antithesis between nature and mind is in view, in the former when nature has yet to be represented as knowable.
Locke answers that they copy themselves in ideas—Berkeley’s rejoinder. Locke gets out of the difficulty by his doctrine of solidity.
101. How, asked Berkeley, can an idea be like anything that is not an idea? Put the question in its proper strength—How can an idea be like that of which the sole and simple determination is just that it is not an idea (and such with Locke is body ‘in itself’ or as the real)—and it is clearly unanswerable. The process by which Locke was prevented from putting it to himself is not difficult to trace. ‘Body’ and ‘the solid’ are with him virtually convertible terms. Each indifferently holds the place of the substance, of which the primary qualities are so many determinations. [1] It is true that where solidity has to be defined, it is defined as an attribute of body, but conversely body itself is treated as a ‘texture of solid parts,’ i.e. as a mode of the solid. Body, in short, so soon as thought of, resolves itself into a relation of bodies, and the solid into a relation of solids, but Locke, by a shuffle of the two terms—representing body as a relation between solids and the solid as a relation between bodies—gains the appearance of explaining each in turn by relation to a simpler idea. Body, as the unknown, is revealed to us by the idea of solidity, which sense conveys to us; while solidity is explained by reference to the idea of body. The idea of solidity, we are told, is a simple idea which comes into the mind solely by the sense of touch. (Book II. chap. iii. sec. 1.) But no sooner has he thus identified it with an immediate feeling than, in disregard of his own doctrine, that ‘an idea which has no composition’ is undefinable (see Book III. chap. iv. sec. 7.), he converts it into a theory of the cause of that feeling. ‘It arises from the resistance which we find in body to the entrance of any other body into the place it possesses till it has left it;’ and he at once proceeds to treat it as the consciousness of such resistance. ‘Whether we move or rest, in what posture soever we are, we always feel something under us that supports us, and hinders our farther sinking downwards: and the bodies which we daily handle make us perceive that whilst they remain between them, they do by an insurmountable force hinder the approach of the parts of our hands that press them. That which then hinders the approach of two bodies, when they are moving one towards another, I call solidity.’ [2]
[1] See Book II. chap. viii. sec. 23: The primary ‘qualities that are in bodies, are the bulk, figure, number, situation, and motion or rest, of their solid parts.’ Cf. Book II. chap. xiii. sec. 11: ‘Solidity is so inseparable an idea from body, that upon that depends its filling of space, its contact, impulse, and communication of motion upon impulse.’
[2] Book II. chap. iv. sec 7.