On Sameness and Identity: A Psychological Study / Being a Contribution to the Foundations of a Theory of Knowledge

by George Stuart Fullerton

Now, it does not concern me to consider whether this change of view is to be regarded as a real progress in reflective knowledge or as a progressive decline and fall of the unreflective man. The point which concerns me is this: The unreflective man talks as if but one tree were under discussion. The man who reflects uses the same forms of speech: and even when he believes that he must distinguish between the tree immediately known and the obscure something which he has come to look upon as its cause, or between the tree immediately known, the bundle of "real" qualities inferred, and the obscure something that he connects with these, he still goes on talking as if he had only one thing to talk about. The danger of such a proceeding is obvious. If I talk about two or three things as though they were one, it is but natural that I should sometimes confuse them with each other. Should proof be forthcoming for one of these, it would be but natural for me to fall occasionally into the error of supposing that it somehow applies to the others. If I go on saying "the tree" when I mean one tree and something else, two trees, or two trees and something else, it is only to be expected that I sooner or later come to grief in my reasonings.

And it should be noted that this peculiar ambiguity in the names of things entails a parallel ambiguity in the use of the words by which we indicate the mind's recognition of the presence of things. We commonly speak of a drunken man's seeing two trees, where a sober man sees one. We speak of an insane man as hearing voices, when no one has spoken. We say that we see the maples are turning red, even when we believe that color may not properly be attributed to the mediate object of knowledge. On the other hand, those who hold to the existence of "real" objects of the kind before mentioned, generally maintain that in referring to things in space, their positions and mutual relations, we are giving attention, not to the immediately known, but to its "external" double. "I see, feel, perceive," it is "said, not the image, and not the constituents of the image (the ideas), but the external object by means of the image."[5] If one holds that this "external" object presupposes a substance, a something distinct from a group of qualities, there is nothing to prevent his maintaining, should he wish to do so, that in saying "I see a tree," primary reference is had to this substance or "reality." Of course, if, in the sentence "I see a tree," the word "tree" can have three meanings, it follows that there is also a possibility of taking in three senses the word "see." It is hardly necessary to point out that, unless one is very careful, "seeing" in one sense may result in "believing" in another, as "kicking" did in the famous case of Dr. Johnson and the stone. The caution is pertinent with respect to any other word used in the same general way as we use the word "see."

I have said that when a man abandons his original unreflective position and learns to distinguish between things immediately known and other things they are supposed to represent, he goes on using the common language, and talking as though there were but one thing under consideration. Now, men do not do this merely in common conversation and in writing about matters of everyday life, but they do it in the very books that have been written to prove that each thing is thus double or triple. John Locke, for example, begins the very chapter in which he is about to draw the distinction between the secondary and primary qualities of bodies (i. e., between the constituents of things immediately known and the constituents of their "external" correlates), as well as to enlighten us on our ideas of substances, with the following words:[6]

"The mind being, as I have declared, furnished with a great number of the simple ideas, conveyed in by the senses, as they are found in exterior things, or by reflexion on its own operations, takes notice also, that a certain number of these simple ideas go constantly together; which, being presumed to belong to one thing, and words being suited to common apprehensions, and made use of for quick despatch, are called, so united in one subject, by one name; which, by inadvertency, we are apt afterward to talk of, and consider as one simple idea, which indeed is a complication of many ideas together: because, as I have said, not imagining how these simple ideas can subsist by themselves, we accustom ourselves to suppose some substratum wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result, and which therefore we call substance."

It is clear enough from this, as it is clear enough from other passages in the same book, that Locke talked as though the complex of simple ideas in consciousness were the very same thing (in Sense I) as the group of "real" qualities outside of consciousness. And no careful reader of his book can avoid seeing that the confusion of his language is a fair index to the confusion of his thoughts with regard to the two.[7] It is little better in the case of "bodies" and substance. In the passage just given, he would seem to make substance an obscure something underlying groups of ideas, and not groups of real qualities, but in the next sentence he makes it a substratum of the qualities which produce in us ideas. In many passages[8] he distinguishes between substance and substances, by which latter he means groups of "real" qualities with the added substratum or substance; as such substances he instances oak, elephant, iron. He emphasizes the fact that substance is not to be confounded with substances, which are things of different sorts.[9] In so far as the substances are bundles of qualities, they are known to us through sensation.[10] In so far as they are also substance, they cannot be known to us through sensation, for the idea of substance is not known through sensation.[11] We are not then to look upon substance as such a constituent part of "a substance" as a quality is. The two belong to different classes. And if we offer proof for the existence of "real" substances, which is evidently applicable to them only as bundles of qualities—proof from sensation—then substance is overlooked altogether. It is significant that Locke, having thus put together under one head as "a substance" an oak viewed as a bundle of "real" qualities and an oak viewed as substratum, proceeded to argue as if he had but one thing to prove when he felt called upon to defend the real existence of substances. In his chapters on "The Extent of Human Knowledge," the "Reality of Knowledge," and "Our Knowledge of the Existence of Other Things,"[12] he devotes himself wholly to proving things as bundles of qualities, and pays no more attention to substance than if it had never entered his thought. If we take these chapters as authoritative, we must banish substance from the sphere of knowledge altogether.

As another instance of a use of language calculated to produce confusion, I may offer the following from Sir William Hamilton: "Whatever we know is not known as it is, but only as it seems to us to be,"[13]—a use of words which would certainly indicate that the immediate and mediate objects of knowledge are one. And what would we infer from such a sentence as this: "Thus the consciousness of an Inscrutable Power manifested to us through all phenomena, has been growing ever clearer; and must eventually be freed from its imperfections. The certainty that on the one hand such a Power exists, while on the other hand its nature transcends intuition and is beyond imagination, is the certainty towards which intelligence has from the first been progressing."[14] Or this: "We are obliged to regard every phenomenon as a manifestation of some Power by which we are acted upon; though Omnipresence is unthinkable, yet, as experience discloses no bounds to the diffusion of phenomena, we are unable to think of limits to the presence of this Power; while the criticisms of Science teach us that this Power is Incomprehensible. And this consciousness of an Incomprehensible Power, called Omnipresent from inability to assign its limits, is just that consciousness on which Religion dwells."[15]

"After concluding that we cannot know the ultimate nature of that which is manifested to us, there arise the questions—What is it that we know? In what sense do we know it?"[16] Or what shall one say to this: "Our consciousness of the unconditioned being literally the unconditioned consciousness, or raw material of thought, to which in thinking we give definite forms, it follows that an ever-present sense of real existence is the very basis of our intelligence."[17]

Now, if the consciousness of an "inscrutable power" is not the "inscrutable power" itself; if the existence of such a "power" does not mean simply its existence in consciousness; if the phenomena in which, it is assumed, a "power" is manifested, are to be kept separate in thought from the "power," so that we shall be in no danger of confounding a consciousness of certain phenomena with consciousness of an "incomprehensible power;" if our "consciousness of the unconditioned" is to be kept in mind as signifying merely our "unconditioned consciousness," and an "ever-present sense of real existence" as signifying only an ever-present sense of "raw material" in consciousness; then it is high time that these sentences and all such as these be re-written with some regard for lucidity, accuracy and consistency. How can a reader help confounding things when he is thus taught by the very man whose business it is to distinguish between them? The blind led by the blind is a cheerful spectacle compared with this.

Nothing can be more evident than that the man who has abandoned his original unreflective belief in the singleness of the perceived object, and has come to believe in it as having one or more "external" correlates, should keep distinctly in mind that an immediate and a mediate object are, by hypothesis, two distinct things: that he has never had any direct experience whatever save of the one; and that all distinctions that he makes with regard to the other, the very notions of its existence, reality, and externality, have been drawn from the sphere of the immediate and carried over to it in thought. And he should never allow himself to forget, that, when he says he has passed in thought from the immediate to the mediate object, he cannot mean literally that his thought is now occupied directly upon this "external" thing—that it is itself present to mind. He should remember that he can only mean that he has such an experience as the following:

He has in mind the immediate object, and a mental picture of a duplicate of this standing in a causal relation to it and represented by it; or, he has (if a Lockian), in addition to these two, a third highly vague and indefinite mental image (the idea of "substance"), which he connects with the image just described, as he has connected that with the immediate object; or (if a Kantian), he has in mind the immediate object, and, connected directly with that, such a vague image as has just been described. This is what he actually has in mind so far as objects are concerned. He does not, however, merely recognize the existence in his mind of these different images in their relations to each other, but he looks upon this mental arrangement as somehow justified by experience and embodying truth.