Hume’s scepticism fatal to his own premises. This derived from
Berkeley.
154. Such a doctrine—a doctrine founded on the testimony of the senses, which ends by showing that the senses testify to nothing—cannot be criticised step by step according to the order in which its author puts it, for its characteristic is that, in order to state itself, it has to take for granted popular notions which it afterwards shows to be unmeaning. Its power over ordinary thinkers lies just in this, that it arrives at its destructive result by means of propositions which every one believes, but to the validity of which its result is really fatal. An account of our primitive consciousness, which derives its plausibility from availing itself of the conceptions of cause and substance, is the basis of the argument which reduces these conceptions to words misunderstood. It cannot, therefore, be treated by itself, as it stands in the first part of the Treatise on the Understanding, but must be taken in connection with Part IV., especially with the section on ‘Scepticism with regard to the Senses;’ not upon the plan of discrediting a principle by reference to the ‘dangerous’ nature of its consequences, but because the final doctrine brings out the inconsistencies lurking in that assumed to begin with. On this side of his scepticism Hume mainly followed the orthodox Berkeley, of whose criticism of Locke, made with a very different purpose, some account must first be given. The connection between the two authors is instructive in many ways; not least as showing that when the most pious theological purpose expresses itself in a doctrine resting on an inadequate philosophical principle, it is the principle and not the purpose that will regulate the permanent effect of the doctrine.
Berkeley’s religious interest in making Locke consistent.
155. Berkeley’s treatises, we must remember, though professedly philosophical, really form a theological polemic. He wrote as the champion of orthodox Christianity against ‘mathematical atheism,’ and, like others of his order, content with the demolition of the rival stronghold, did not stay to enquire whether his own untempered mortar could really hold together the fabric of knowledge and rational religion which he sought to maintain. He found practical ungodliness and immorality excusing themselves by a theory of ‘materialism’—a theory which made the whole conscious experience of man dependent upon ‘unperceiving matter.’ This, whatever it might be, was not an object which man could love or reverence, or to which he could think of himself as accountable. Berkeley, full of devout zeal for God and man, and not without a tincture of clerical party-spirit (as appears in his heat against Shaftesbury, whom he ought to have regarded as a philosophical yoke-fellow), felt that it must be got rid of. He saw, or thought he saw, that the ‘new way of ideas’ had only to be made consistent with itself, and the oppressive shadow must vanish. Ideas, according to that new way (or, to speak less ambiguously, feelings) make up our experience, and they are not matter. Let us get rid, then, of the self-contradictory assumption that they are either copies of matter—copies of that, of which it is the sole and simple differentia that it is not an idea, or its effects—effects of that which can only be described as the unknown opposite of the only efficient power with which we are acquainted—and what becomes of the philosopher’s blind and dead substitute for the living and knowing God? It was one thing, however, to show the contradictions involved in Locke’s doctrine of matter, another effectively to replace it. To the latter end Berkeley cannot be said to have made any permanent contribution. That explicit reduction of ideas to feelings ‘particular in time,’ which was his great weapon of destruction, was incompatible with his doing so. He adds nothing to the philosophy, which he makes consistent with itself, while by making it consistent he empties it of three parts of its suggestiveness. His doctrine, in short, is merely Locke purged, and Locke purged is no Locke.
What is meant by relation of mind and matter?
156. The question which he mainly dealt with may be stated in general terms as that of the relation between the mind and the external world. Under this general statement, however, are covered several distinct questions, the confusion between which has been a great snare for philosophers—questions as to the relations (a) between a sensitive and non-sensitive body, (b) between thought and its object, (c) between thought and something only qualified as the negation of thought. The last question, it will be observed, is what the second becomes upon a certain notion being formed of what the object of thought must be. Upon this notion being discarded a further question (d), also covered by the above general statement, must still remain as to the relation between thought, as in each man, and the world which he does not make, but which, in some sort, makes him what he is. In what follows, these questions, for the sake of brevity, will be referred to symbolically.
Confusions involved in Locke’s materialism.
157. Locke’s doctrine of matter, as we have seen, involves a confusion between (a) and (b). The feeling of touch in virtue of an intellectual interpretation—intellectual because implying the action of the mind as (according to Locke) the source of ideas of relation—becomes the idea of solidity, i.e. the idea of a relation between bodies in the way of impulse and resistance. But the function of the intellect in constituting the relation is ignored. Under cover of the ambiguous ‘idea,’ which stands alike for a nervous irritation and the intellectual interpretation thereof, the feeling of touch and conception of solidity are treated as one and the same. Thus the true conceived outwardness of body to body—an outwardness which thought, as the source of relations, can alone constitute—becomes first an imaginary felt outwardness of body to the organs of touch, and then, by a further fallacy—these organs being confused with the mind—an outwardness of body to mind, which we need only kick a stone to be sure of. Meanwhile the consideration of question (d) necessitates the belief that the real world does not come and go with each man’s fleeting consciousness, and no distinction being recognised between consciousness as fleeting and consciousness as permanent, or between feeling and thought, the real world comes to be regarded as the absolute opposite of thought and its work. This opposition combines with the supposed externality of body to mind to give the notion that body is the real. The qualities which ‘the mind finds inseparable from body’ thus become qualities which would exist all the same ‘whether there were a perceiving mind or no,’ and are primarily real; while such as consist in our feelings, though real in so far as, ‘not being of our own making, they imply the action of things without us,’ are yet only secondarily so because this action is relative to something which is not body. Then, finally, by a renewed confusion of the relation between thought and its object with that between body and body, qualities, which are credited with a primary reality as independent of and antithetical to the mind, are brought within it again as ideas. They are supposed to copy themselves upon it by impact and impression; and that not in touch merely, but (visual feelings being interpreted by help of the same conception) in sight also.
Two ways of dealing with it. Berkeley chooses the most obvious.
158. Such ‘materialism’ invites two different methods of attack. On the one hand its recognised principle, that all intellectual ‘superinduction’ upon simple feeling is a departure from the real, may be insisted on, and it may be shown that it is only by such superinduction that simple feeling becomes a feeling of body. Matter, then, with all its qualities, is a fiction except so far as these can be reduced to simple feelings. Such in substance was Berkeley’s short method with the materialists. In his early life it seemed to him sufficient for the purposes of orthodox ‘spiritualism,’ because, having posed the materialist, he took the moral and spiritual attributes of God as ‘revealed,’ without enquiring into the possibility of such revelation to a merely sensitive consciousness. As he advanced, other questions, fatal to the constructive value of his original method, began to force themselves upon him. Granting that intellectual superinduction = fiction, how is the fiction possible to a mind which cannot originate? Exclude from reality all that such fiction constitutes, and what remains to be real? These questions, however, though their effect on his mind appears in the later sections of his ‘Siris,’ he never systematically pursued. He thus missed the true method of attack on materialism—the only one that does not build again that which it destroys—the method which allows that matter is real but only so in virtue of that intellectual superinduction upon feeling without which there could be for us no reality at all: that thus it is indeed opposed to thought, but only by a position which is thought’s own act. For the development of such views Berkeley had not patience in his youth nor leisure in his middle life. Whatever he may have suggested, all that he logically achieved was an exposure of the equivocation between feeling and felt body; and of this the next result, as appears in Hume, was a doctrine which indeed delivers mind from dependence on matter, but only by reducing it in effect to a succession of feelings which cannot know themselves.