Can it be applied to him ‘figuratively’ in virtue of the indefinite number of His acts?
139. In regard to any other attributes of God than those of his duration and expansion, [1] Locke admits that the term ‘infinite’ is applied ‘figuratively’ (Book II. chap. xvii. sec. 1). ‘When we call them (e.g. His power, wisdom, and goodness) infinite, we have no other idea of this infinity but what carries with it some reflection on, or intimation of, that number or extent of the acts or objects of God’s wisdom, &c., which can never be supposed so great or so many which these attributes will not always surmount, let us multiply them in our thoughts as far as we can with all the infinity of endless number.’ What determination, then, according to this passage, of our conception of God’s goodness is represented by calling it infinite? Simply its relation to a number of acts and objects of which the sum can always be increased, and which, just for that reason, cannot represent the perfect God. Is it then, it may be asked, of mere perversity that when thinking of God under attributes that are not quantitative, and therefore do not carry with them the necessity of incompleteness, we yet go out of our way by this epithet ‘infinite’ to subject them to the conditions of quantity and its ‘progressus ad infinitum?’
[1] In the passages referred to, Locke speaks of ‘duration and ubiquity.’ The proper counterpart, however, of ‘duration’ according to him is ‘expansion’—this being to space what duration is to time. Under the embarrassment, however, which necessarily attends the ascription of expansion to God, he tacitly substitutes for it ‘ubiquity,’ a term which does not match ‘duration,’ and can only mean presence throughout the whole of expansion, presence throughout the whole of that which does not admit of a whole.
An act, finite in its nature, remains so, however often repeated.
140. Retaining Locke’s point of view, our answer of course must be that our ideas of the Divine attributes, being primarily our own ideas of reflection, are either ideas of the single successive acts that constitute our inward experience or formed from these by abstraction and combination. In parts our experience is given, in parts only can we recall it. Our complex or abstract ideas are symbols which only take a meaning so far as we resolve them into the detached impressions which in the sum they represent, or recall the objects, each with its own before and after, from which they were originally taken. So it is with the ideas of wisdom, power, and goodness, which from ourselves we transfer to God. They represent an experience given in succession and piece-meal—a numerable series of acts and events, which like every other number is already infinite in the only sense of the word of which Locke can give a clear account, as susceptible of indefinite repetition (Book II. chap. vi. sec. 8.) When we ‘join infinity’ to these ideas, then, unless some other meaning is given to infinity, we merely state explicitly what was originally predicable of the experience they embody. Nor will it avail us much to shift the meaning of infinite, as Locke does when he applies it to the divine attributes, from that of indefinite ‘addibility’ to that of exceeding any sum which indefinite multiplication can yield us. Let us suppose an act of consciousness, from which we have taken an abstract idea of an attribute—say of wisdom—to be a million times repeated; our idea of the attribute will not vary with the repetition. Nor if, having supposed a limit to the repetition, we then suppose the act indefinitely repeated beyond this limit and accordingly speak of the attribute as infinite, will our idea of the attribute vary at all from what it was to begin with. Its content will be the same. There will be nothing to be said of it which could not have been said of the experience from which it was originally abstracted, and of which the essential characteristic—that it is one of a series of events of which no two can be present together—is incompatible with divine perfection.
God only infinite in a sense in which time is not infinite, and which Locke could not recognize …
141. It appears then that it is the subjection of our experience to the form of time which unfits the ideas derived from it for any combination into an idea of God; nor by being ‘joined with an infinity,’ which itself merely means the absence of limit to succession in time, is their unfitness in any way modified. On the contrary, by such conjunction from being latent it becomes patent. In one important passage Locke becomes so far aware of this that, though continuing to ascribe infinite duration to God, he does it under qualifications inconsistent with the very notion of duration. ‘Though we cannot conceive any duration without succession, nor put it together in our thoughts that any being does now exist to-morrow or possess at once more than the present moment of duration; yet we can conceive the eternal duration of the Almighty far different from that of man, or any other finite being: because man comprehends not in his knowledge or power all past and future things … what is once past he can never recall, and what is yet to come he cannot make present. … God’s infinite duration being accompanied with infinite knowledge and power, he sees all things past and to come’ (Book II. chap. xv. sec 12). It is clear that in this passage ‘infinite’ changes its meaning; that it is used in one sense—the proper sense according to Locke—when applied to duration, and in some wholly different sense, not a figurative one derived from the former, when applied to knowledge and power; and that the infinite duration of God, as ‘accompanied by infinite power and knowledge,’ is no longer in any intelligible sense duration at all. It is no longer ‘the idea we have of perishing distance,’ derived from our fleeting consciousness in which ‘what is once past can never be recalled,’ but the attribute of a consciousness of which, if it is to be described in terms of time at all, in virtue of its ‘seeing all things past and to come’ at once, it can only be said that it ‘does now exist to-morrow.’ If it be asked, What meaning can we have in speaking of such a consciousness? into what simple ideas can it be resolved when all our ideas are determined by a before and after?—the answer must be, Just as much or as little meaning as we have when, in like contradiction to the successive presentation of ideas, we speak of a self, constituted by consciousness, as identical with itself throughout the years of our life.
… the same sense in which the self is infinite.
142. A more positive answer it is not our present business to give. Our concern is to show that ‘eternity and immensity,’ according to any meaning that Locke recognises, or that the observation of our ideas could justify, do not express any conception that can carry us beyond the perpetual incompleteness of our experience; but that in his doctrine of personal identity he does admit a conception which no observation of our ideas of reflection—since these are in succession and could not be observed if they were not—can account for; and that it is just this conception, the conception of a constant presence of consciousness to itself incompatible with conditions of space and time, that can alone give such meaning to ‘eternal and infinite’ as can render them significant epithets of God. Such a conception (we say it with respect) Locke admits when it is wanted without knowing it. It must indeed always underlie the idea of God, however alien to it may be attempted adaptations of the other ‘infinite’—the progressus ad indefinitum in space and time—by which, as with Locke, the idea is explained. But it is one for which the psychological method of observing what happens in oneself cannot account, and which therefore this method, just so far as it is thoroughly carried out, must tend to discard. That which happens, whether we reckon it an inward or an outward, a physical or a psychical event—and nothing but an event can, properly speaking, be observed—is as such in time. But the presence of consciousness to itself, though, as the true ‘punctum stans,’ [1] it is the condition of the observation of events in time, is not such an event itself. In the ordinary and proper sense of ‘fact,’ it is not a fact at all, nor yet a possible abstraction from facts. To the method, then, which deals with phrases about the mind by ascertaining the observable ‘mental phenomena’ which they represent, it must remain a mere phrase, to be explained as the offspring of other phrases whose real import has been misunderstood. It can only recover a significance when this method, as with Hume, has done its worst, and is found to leave the possibility of knowledge, without such ‘punctum stans,’ still unaccounted for.
[1] Locke, Essay II. chap. xvii. sec. 16.