“Credibilius est, quia præsens est eis, quantum id capere possunt, Lumen Rationis æternæ, ubi hæc immutabilia vera conspiciunt.”—S. Augustin, Ret. i. 4.
“It may lead us a little,” says Locke, “towards the original of all our notions and knowledge, if we remark how great a dependence our words have on common sensible ideas; and how those which are made use of to stand for actions and notions quite removed from sense, have their rise from thence, and from obvious sensible ideas are transferred to more abstruse significations, and made to stand for ideas that come not under the cognizance of our senses.”[185]
So far we may seem to have been adducing a crowd of illustrations in support of this statement: for we have traced the germinal development of language from the seed and root of onomatopœia to the various ramifications of metaphor, and have seen convincing reason to infer the primary origin of all words from sensible ideas.
Are we then obliged to give in our adherence to the sensational philosophy, and to believe that “Nature, even in the naming of things, unawares suggested to men the originals and principles of all their knowledge?” Are we forced to accept the dogma that “there is nothing in the intellect, which has not previously existed in the sense?”
Such are the questions which must now be considered, because these are the conclusions usually drawn from the premisses, which have been hitherto receiving our support. The discussion of them cannot be considered a digression, because it will lead us at least to recognise the existence of problems which are of the profoundest importance, the examination of which must always bear reference to the facts of language, and especially to its origin and history. The space devoted by Locke to the development of his views on the use and abuse of words is a sufficient proof that we are not wilfully turning aside from the direct discussion of the subject before us. Indeed, it is the assertion of one of Locke’s acutest[186] and most admiring disciples, that the whole of the Essay on the Human Understanding is “little more than a philosophical account of the first sort of abbreviations in language.”
Before we reject the conclusion which may seem to have been involved in the facts which we have endeavoured to establish, it may be well to mark the full consequences which the sensationalists were gradually led to adopt. Locke, in defining the source of our ideas, had distinctly acknowledged an internal sense, which he calls reflection, as being necessary to complement the work of sensation; in the very passage which we quoted at the commencement of this chapter, he goes on to say that we have “no ideas at all, but what originally came either from sensible objects without, or what we feel within ourselves from the inward workings of our own spirits of which we are conscious to ourselves within.” Similarly, Bishop Berkeley, in his Theory of Vision, very clearly lays down “that there are properly no ideas or passive objects in the mind but what are derived from sense, but there are, besides these, her own acts and operations;—such are notions.”
But of that element of our thoughts which he called reflexion, Locke, although he barely asserted its existence, made so little use that it hardly counteracted the general tendency of his philosophy. “When[187] a term so wide and vague, or so complex and multifarious, so thin and shadowy, or so ponderous and unmanageable, as this ‘reflexion’ is introduced side by side with the clear, bodily, definite realities of the senses (sensation), it can hardly hold its place securely as a philosophical term.” Accordingly we are not surprised to find that Locke was claimed as the founder[188] of a sensationalist school, whose ultimate conclusions his calm and pious mind would have indignantly repudiated.
But it was in France that the Essay on Human Understanding was received with the most enthusiastic applause; and when the metaphysics of Locke had once “crossed the channel on the light and brilliant wings of Voltaire’s imagination,” sensationalism reigned for a long period without a rival near the throne. Etienne de Condillac was the philosopher who was mainly instrumental in introducing to his countrymen the speculations of the great English thinker; and it is an interesting fact that in Condillac’s first work, “L’Essai sur l’Origine des Connaissances Humaines,” (1746), he had not yet thought of “simplifying” Locke’s system, by discarding reflexion as an element of knowledge. But eight years after, in his “Traité des Sensations,” he states, in the broadest possible manner, that the senses are the source not only of our knowledge, but even (monstrous as it may appear) of our intellectual faculties themselves! And as he makes the faculty of speech the principle of superiority of men over animals, he is involved in the vicious[189] circle of considering language to be, at the same time and in the same sense, a cause and an effect of thought. This system found its most wonderful illustration in the too-famous description of the statue-man; a being, who, so far from being capable of acquiring memory, and judgment and thought, would even be incapable of anything, except mere organic impressions,[190] because it could have had no will whereby to contrast its personality with the action of external causes.
So far is it from being true, that there is nothing in the intellect which has not previously been in the sense, that even our conception of matter[191] itself is derived from a superior source, and would without the intellect be one at which we could not arrive. The senses themselves can tell us nothing except in so far as they are “the scribes[192] of the soul.”
It might have been thought that sensationalism itself could go no farther than Condillac, but it found exponents still more audacious in Helvetius and St. Lambert. According to the former, man is merely an animal superior to other animals because of the greater perfection of the organs with which he has been endowed; according to the latter, man, when born, is only an organised sensible mass; and the first objects which strike our senses give us our first ideas, until thus, gradually, Nature has created the soul within us. We are hardly surprised after this to find that Helvetius considers love to be only the feeling of a need, courage to be the fear of death (!), and “Do what is useful” to be the moral rule; and that St. Lambert avows openly, that pleasure and pain are the masters of man, so that the object of life will be to seek the one, and avoid the other.