[1] See above, paragraph 117, sub. fin.
Transition to doctrine of God and the soul.
126. It remains to inquire how, with Locke, the ideas of self and God escape subjection to those solvents of reality which, with more or less of consistency and consciousness, he applied to the conceptions on which the science of nature rests. Such an enquiry forms the natural transition to the next stage in the history of his philosophy. It was Berkeley’s practical interest in these ideas that held him back from a development of his master’s principles, in which he would have anticipated Hume, and finally brought him to attach that other meaning to the ‘new way of ideas’ faintly adumbrated in the later sections of his ‘Siris,’ which gives to Reason the functions that Locke had assigned to Sense.
Thinking substance—source of the same ideas as outer substance.
127. The dominant notion of the self in Locke is that of the inward substance, or ‘substratum of ideas,’ co-ordinate with the outward, ‘wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result.’ ‘Sensation convinces that there are solid extended substances, and reflection that there are thinking ones’ (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 29). We have already seen how, without disturbance from his doctrine of the fictitiousness of universals, he treats the simple idea as carrying with it the distinction of outward and inward, or relations severally to a ‘thing’ and to a ‘mind.’ It reports itself ambiguously as a quality of each of these separate substances. It is now, or was to begin with, the result of an outward thing ‘actually operating upon us;’ for ‘of simple ideas the mind cannot make one to itself:’ on the other hand, it is a ‘perception,’ and perception is an ‘operation of the mind.’ In other words it is at once a modification of the mind by something of which it is consciously not conscious, and a modification of the mind by itself—the two sources of one and the same modification being each determined only as the contradictory of the other. Thus, when we come to probe the familiar metaphors under which Locke describes Reflection, as a ‘fountain of ideas’ other than sensation, we find that the confusions which we have already explored in dealing with the ideas of sensation recur under added circumstances of embarrassment. Not only does the simple idea of reflection, like that of sensation, turn out to be already complicated in its simplicity with the superinduced ideas of cause and relation, but the causal substance in question turns out to be one which, from being actually nothing, becomes something by acting upon itself; while all the time the result of this action is indistinguishable from that ascribed to the opposite, the external, cause.
Of which substance is perception the effect?
128. To a reader to whom Locke’s language has always seemed to be—as indeed it is—simply that of common sense and life, in writing the above we shall seem to be creating a difficulty where none is to be found. Let us turn, then, to one of the less prolix passages, in which the distinction between the two sources of ideas is expressed: ‘External objects furnish the mind with the ideas of sensible qualities, which are all those different perceptions they produce in us; and the mind furnishes the understanding with ideas of its own operations’ (Book II. chap. i. sec. 5). We have seen already that with Locke perception and idea are equivalent terms. It only needs further to be pointed out that no distinction can be maintained between his usage of ‘mind’ and of ‘understanding,’ [1] and that the simple ideas of the mind’s own operations are those of perception and power, which must be given in and with every idea of a sensible quality.’ [2] Avoiding synonyms, then, and recalling the results of our examination of the terms involved in the first clause of the passage before us, we may re-write the whole thus: ‘Creations of the mind, which yet are external to it, produce in it those perceptions of their qualities which they do produce; and the mind produces in itself the perception of these, its own, perceptions.’
[1] As becomes apparent on examination of such passages, as Book II. chap. i. sec. 1, sub. fin.; and Book II. chap. i. sec. 23.
[2] See above, paragraphs 11, 12, 16.
That which is the source of substantiation cannot be itself a substance.