132. In the history of subsequent philosophy two typical methods have appeared of dealing with this chaos of antinomies. One, which we shall have to treat at large in writing of Hume, affects to dispose of both the outward and the inward synthesis—both of the unity of feelings in a subject matter and of their unity in a subject mind—as ‘fictions of thought.’ This method at once suggests the vital question whether a mind which thus invents has been effectively suppressed—whether, indeed, the theory can be so much as stated without a covert assumption of that which it claims to have destroyed. The other method, of which Kant is the parent, does not attempt to efface the apparent contradictions which beset the ‘relation between mind and matter;’ but regarding them as in a certain sense inevitable, traces them to their source in the application to the thinking Ego itself of conceptions, which it does indeed constitute in virtue of its presence to phenomena given under conditions of time, but under which for that very reason it cannot itself be known. It is in virtue of the presence of the self-conscious unit to the manifold of feeling, according to this doctrine, that the latter becomes an order of definite things, each external to the other; and it is only by a false inclusion within this order of that which constitutes it that the Ego itself becomes a ‘thinking thing’ with other things outside it. The result of such inclusion is that the real world, which it in the proper sense makes, becomes a reality external to it, yet apart from which it would not be actually anything. Thus with Locke, though the mind has a potential existence of its own, it is experience of ‘things without it’ that ‘furnishes’ it or makes it what it actually is. But the relation of such outer things to the mind cannot be spoken of without contradiction. If supposed outward as bodies, they have to be brought within consciousness as objects of sensation; if supposed outward as sensation, they have to be brought within consciousness—to find a home in the understanding—as ideas of sensation. Meanwhile the consideration returns that after all the ‘thinking thing’ contributes something to that which it thinks about; and, this once admitted, it is as impossible to limit its work on one side as that of the outer thing on the other. Each usurps the place of its opposite. Thus with Locke the understanding produces effects on itself, but the product is one and the same ‘perception’ otherwise treated as an effect of the outer world. One and the same self-consciousness, in short, [1] involving the correlation of subject and object, becomes the result of two separate ‘things,’ each exclusive of the other, into which the opposite poles of this relation have been converted—the extended thing or ‘body’ on the one side, and the thinking thing or ‘mind’ on the other.
[1] For the equivalence of perception with self-consciousness in Locke, see above, paragraph 24, et infra.
Difficulties in the way of ascribing reality to substance as matter, re-appear in regard to substance as mind.
133. To each of these supposed ‘things’ thought transfers its own unity and self-containedness, and thereupon finds itself in new difficulties. These, so far as they concern the outward thing, have already been sufficiently noticed. We have seen how the single self-contained thing on the one hand attenuates itself to the bare atom, presented in a moment of time, which in its exclusiveness is actually nothing: [1] how, on the other, it spreads itself, as everything which for one moment we regard as independent turns out in the next to be a ‘retainer’ to something else, into a series that cannot be summed. [2] A like consequence follows when the individual man, conceiving of the thought, which is not mine but me, and which is no less the world without which I am not I, as a thinking thing within him, limited by the limitations of his animal nature, seeks in this thinking thing, exclusive of other things, that unity and self-containedness, which only belong to the universal ‘I.’ He finds that he ‘thinks not always;’ that during a fourth part of his time he neither thinks nor perceives at all; and that even in his waking hours his consciousness consists of a succession of separate feelings, whose recurrence he cannot command. [3] Thought being thus broken and dependent, substantiality is not to be found in it. It is next sought in the ‘thing’ of which thought is an occasional operation—a thing of which it may readily be admitted that its nature cannot be known (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 29, etc.), since it has no nature, being merely that which remains of the thinking thing upon abstraction of its sole determination. It is in principle nothing else than the supposed basis of sensible qualities remaining after these have been abstracted—the ‘parcel of matter’ which has no essence—with which accordingly Locke sometimes himself tends to identify it. [4] But meanwhile, behind this unknown substance, whether of spirit or of body, the self-consciousness, which has been treated as its occasional unessential operation, re-asserts itself as the self which claims both body and spirit, the immaterial no less than the material substance, as its own, and throughout whatever diversity in these maintains its own identity.
[1] See above, paragraph 94 and the following.
[2] See above, paragraph 125.
[3] Locke, Essay ii. chap. i. sec. 10, etc.
[4] See above, paragraph 106, near the end.
We think not always, yet thought constitutes the self.
134. Just, then, as Locke’s conception of outward reality grows under his hands into a conception of nature as a system of relations which breaks through the limitations of reality as constituted by mere individua, so it is with the self, as he conceived it. It is not a simple idea. It is not one of the train that is for ever passing, ‘one going and another coming,’ for it looks on this succession as that which it experiences, being itself the same throughout the successive differences (Book II. chap. vii. sec. 9, and chap. xxvii. sec. 9). As little can it be adjusted to any of the conditions of real ‘things,’ thinking or unthinking, which he ordinarily recognises. It has no ‘particularity in space and time.’ That which is past in ‘reality’ is to it present. It is ‘in its nature indifferent to any parcel of matter.’ It is the same with itself yesterday and to-day, here and there. That ‘with which its consciousness can join itself is one self with it,’ and it can so join itself with substances apart in space and remote in time (Book II. chap, xxvii. secs. 9, 13, 14, 17). For speaking of it as eternal, indeed, we could find no warrant in Locke. He does not so clearly distinguish it from the ‘thinking thing’ supposed to be within each man, that has ‘had its determinate time and place of beginning to exist, relation to which determines its identity so long as it exists’ (Book II. chap. xxvii. sec. 2). Hence he supposed an actual limit to the past which it could make present—a limit seemingly fixed for each man at the farthest by the date of his birth—though he talks vaguely of the possibility of its range being extended (Book II. chap. xxvii. sec. 16). In the discussion of personal identity, however, the distinction gradually forces itself upon him, and he at last expressly says (sec. 16), that if the same Socrates, sleeping and waking, do not partake of the same consciousness (as according to Book II. chap. i. sec. 11 he certainly does not), ‘Socrates sleeping and waking is not the same person;’ whereas the ‘thinking thing’—the substance of which consciousness is a power sometimes exercised, sometimes not—is the same in the sleeping as in the waking Socrates. This is a pregnant admission, but it brings nothing to the birth in Locke himself. The inference which it suggests to his reader, that a self which does not slumber or sleep is not one which is born or dies, does not seem to have occurred to him. Taking for his method the imaginary process of ‘looking into his own breast,’ instead of the analysis of knowledge and morality, he could not find the eternal self which knowledge and morality pre-suppose, but only the contradiction of a person whose consciousness is not the same for two moments together, and often ceases altogether, but who yet, in virtue of an identity of this very consciousness, is the same in childhood and in old age.