213. The above admission, however, does not dispose of the question about ideas of resemblance. A feeling qualified by relation of resemblance to other feelings is a different thing from an idea of that relation—different with all the difference which Hume ignores between feeling and thought, between consciousness and self-consciousness. The qualification of successive feelings by mutual relation implies, indeed, the presence to them of a subject permanent and immaterial (i.e. not in time or space); but it does not imply that this subject presents them to itself as related objects, permanent with its own permanence, which abide and may be considered apart from ‘the circumstances in time’ of their occurrence. Yet such presentation is supposed by all language other than interjectional. It is it alone which can give us names of things, as distinct from noises prompted by the feelings as they occur. Of course it is open to any one to say that by an idea of resemblance he does not mean any thought involving the self-conscious presentation spoken of, but merely a feeling qualified by resemblance, and not at its liveliest stage. Thus Hume tells us that by ‘idea’ he merely means a feeling less lively than it has been, and that by idea of anything he implies no reference to anything other than the idea, [1] but means just a related idea, i.e. a feeling qualified by ‘natural relation’ to other feelings. It is by this thoughtful abnegation of thought, as we shall find, that he arrives at his sceptical result. But language (for the reason mentioned) would not allow him to be faithful to the abnegation. He could not make such a profession without being false to it. This appears already in his account of ‘complex’ and ‘abstract’ ideas.
[1] See above, paragraph 208.
Substances = collections of ideas.
214, His account of the idea of a substance [1] is simply Locke’s, as Locke’s would become upon elimination of the notion that there is a real ‘something’ in which the collection of ideas subsist, and from which they result. It thus avoids all difficulties about the relation between nominal and real essence. Just as Locke says that in the case of a ‘mixed mode’ the nominal essence is the real, so Hume would say of a substance. The only difference is that while the collection of ideas, called a mixed mode, does not admit of addition without a change of its name, that called a substance does. Upon discovery of the solubility of gold in aqua regia we add that idea to the collection, to which the name ‘gold’ has previously been assigned, without disturbance in the use of the name, because the name already covers not only the ideas of certain qualities, but also the idea of a ‘principle of union’ between them, which will extend to any ideas presented along with them. As this principle of union, however, is not itself any ‘real essence,’ but ‘part of the complex idea,’ the question, so troublesome to Locke, whether a proposition about gold asserts real co-existence or only the inclusion of an idea in a nominal essence, will be superfluous. How the ‘principle of union’ is to be explained, will appear below. [2]
[1] p. 324 [Book I, part I., sec. VI.]
[2] Paragraph 303, and the following.
How can ideas ‘in flux’ be collected?
215. There are names, then, which represent ‘collections of ideas.’ How can we explain such collection if ideas are merely related feelings grown’ fainter? Do we, when we use one of these names significantly, recall, though in a fainter form, a series of feelings that we have experienced in the process of collection? Does the chemist, when he says that gold is soluble in aqua regia, recall the visual and tactual feeling which he experienced when he found it soluble? If so, as that feeling took its character from relation to a multitude of other ‘complex ideas,’ he must on the same principle recall in endless series the sensible occurrences from which each constituent of each constituent of these was derived; and a like process must be gone through when gold is pronounced ductile, malleable, &c. But this would be, according to the figure which Hume himself adopts, to recall a ‘perpetual flux.’ The very term ‘collection of ideas,’ indeed, if this be the meaning of ideas, is an absurdity, for how can a perpetual flux be collected? If we turn for a solution of the difficulty to the chapter where Hume expressly discusses the significance of general names, we shall find that it is not the question we have here put, and which flows directly from his account of ideas, that he is there treating, but an entirely different one, and one that could not be raised till for related feeling had been substituted the thought of an object under relations.
Are there general ideas? Berkeley said, ‘yes and no’.
216. The chapter mentioned concerns the question which arises out of Locke’s pregnant statement that words and ideas are ‘particular in their existence’ even when ‘general in their signification.’ From this statement we saw [1] that Berkeley derived his explanation of the apparent generality of ideas—the explanation, namely, which reduces it to a relation, yet not such a one as would affect the nature of the idea itself, which is and remains ‘particular,’ but a symbolical relation between it and other particular ideas for which it is taken to stand. An idea, however, that carries with it a consciousness of symbolical relation to other ideas, cannot but be qualified by this relation. The generality must become part of its ‘nature,’ and, accordingly, the distinction between idea and thing being obliterated, of the nature of things. Thus Berkeley virtually arrives at a result which renders unmeaning his preliminary exclusion of universality from ‘the absolute, positive nature or conception of anything.’ Hume seeks to avoid it by putting ‘custom’ in the place of the consciousness of symbolical relation. True to his vocation of explaining away all functions of thought that will not sort with the treatment of it as ‘decaying sense,’ he would resolve that idea of a relation between certain ideas, in virtue of which one is taken to stand for the rest, into the de facto sequence upon one of them of the rest. Here, as everywhere else, he would make related feelings do instead of relations of ideas; but whether the related feelings, as he is obliged to describe them, do not already presuppose relations of ideas in distinction from feelings, remains to be seen.