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LOCKE A CONSTRUCTIVE RELATIVIST
HENRY GL HARTMANN
&)iitf1imt' lecturer in Philosophy at ColumMa Un-ive.rxity
A Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the require- ments for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University.
NEW YORK
1912
LOCKE A CONSTRUCTIVE RELATIVIST
BY
HENRY G. HARTMANN
Sometime Lecturer in Philosophy at Columbia University
A Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the require- ments for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University.
NEW YORK
1912
8123*7
INTRODUCTION
IN presenting Locke as a Constructive Relativist I claim to present him in his central and most inclusive doctrine. It is not the view I held of Locke a short time ago. Nor is it likely that my older conception of him would have undergone its radical change, if it had not been for the fact that conditions led me to give Book III of his Essay more serious reading than our traditional opinion of it seemed to invite.
Locke tells his friend Molyneux that Book III gave him more labor in the writing than the rest of the Essay. This fact does not of necessity insure merit. Yet I mention it as a fact not without its significance, and, in addition, venture the further statement, that, until Book III was written, Locke never came into full pos- session of his " new way of ideas " — a way that not only yields what is most distinctive in modern pragmatism, but its much-lacking, or relevant, metaphysics as well. I admit Book III does not at first appear to have its specific doctrines writ in italics. Locke himself confesses in respect to this Book : " I should not much wonder if there be in some places of it obscurity and doubtfulness . . . though the thoughts were easy and clear enough, yet (it) cost me more pains to express them than all the rest of my Essay." The fact is that Locke's " new way of ideas " here took its last " new " turn, and its consummate character once clearly grasped,, one ceases over night to view Locke traditionally.
In affirming Locke to be essentially the constructive relativist and not essentially the reputed sensationalist, I expose myself to misunderstanding. He is the sensationalist, as reputed, for those who will not consider Locke beyond the evident sensationalistic implications of his doctrine, and who, in support of their claim, may turn to the British movement in philosophy that rose out of it. But let it be remembered that Kant's philosophy also had an origin in Locke, and do I trespass in stating that perhaps Prag- matism owes more to Locke than may be consciously recognized or
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accepted. So historical outcome pitted against historical outcome avails little in deciding an issue.
In denying Locke to be primarily the sensationalist, I am not unaware that T. H. Green (not to mention others) has written a critique of him that dare not be ignored. His aim, however, is to show up Locke negatively, not positively; to show him up in the light of a sensationalistic exponent, and, further, to show him up in all the absurdities to which all departure in Locke from this principle and Green's self-imposed dialectics, would, in addition, naturally commit him. This sort of criticism is not helpful, how- ever else remarkable the critique may be in its superior merits and mental acrobatics.
To begin with, instead of finding Locke abandoning " the his- torical plain method," to which he pledges himself in his Intro- duction, in order to pursue the psychological trend, of which he stands accused, I find him in the main so consistent with his orig- inal design that I am almost inclined to ignore the first half dozen or more of his chapters in Book II for the havoc they have done in distorting, or rather eclipsing, the far more -central, consistent, and evolved doctrine existing in his pages. And when, in addition, I find Locke expressly acknowledging his departure from the avowed method whenever, in his psychological digressions, the departure occurs, I ask myself what blame for all this distortion of our perspective rests with Berkeley and Hume? There is no need, however, for all that to lessen the value of the chapters indi- cated. Chapter VIII of that Book, in particular, is not the only instance where we find Locke forcing an extreme view : and, hence, discounting the exaggeration of his views in this chapter is not any more, nor any less, valid, than to do so with the many other extreme views with which his Essay abound. Read him where we will, we find, as I shall endeavor to outline, the most one-sided and extreme position brought face to face in his pages with others equally extreme and one-sided; and when we ask where in this jumble of views we are to find Locke, it behooves us to arrest any tendency to frame a too hasty judgment concerning the matter, and, most of all, at the outset, to venture the assumption that Locke did not know his own mind. It requires no great discernment to perceive that Green got his guiding thread, not from Locke himself, but from the traditional view of him. But Locke remains Locke, work the veritable gold mine of his Essay for some of its gold only, or for most of it, or merely for its dross.
The whole matter hinges upon the role of the simple ideas.
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Are they at bottom to be taken as working assumptions or as actual facts? Here Locke himself vacillates although tradition does not. " The historical plain method," in its application, has one specific problem set: the problem of the One and the Many, in the solu- tion of which, his simple ideas (namely, his sensationalism) are not a problem but assumed facts, even though at times he is strongly disposed to make and consider them as more. When he inclines to consider them as more than assumptions, he, with con- fession, ceases to be the metaphysician and turns psychologist, and then the simple ideas themselves becomes a problem, and no longer the merely descriptive assumptions. Yet he writes : " Every mixed mode, consisting of many distinct simple ideas, it seems reasonable to inquire, ' whence it has its unity, and how such a precise multi- tude comes to make but one idea, since that combination does not always exist together in nature ? ' To which I answer, it is plain it has its unity from an act of the mind." x Whether his simple ideas are in fact simple or whether complex, the problem upper- most with him, notwithstanding, would persist: "how such a precise multitude comes to make but one idea." For we do regard charity as one idea, however multitudinous its parts, and so with our notions of man or gold. They have no unity actually existing " in nature " ; then " whence do they have their unity ? " The sensationalistic interpretation of Locke would imply that the simple ideas rather than the complex ideas engrossed his interest. I venture the opposite contention. Sensationalism in Locke is but a subordinate phase or part of his constructive relativity. Nor is any student of Locke in a position to decide the issue unless he too has gotten beyond the traditional habit of neglecting Book III.
1. Bk. II, ch. 22, sec. 4.
CONTENTS
PAGE Introduction 3
I GENEEAL SURVEY
CHATTER
I. The Two Fundamental Steps in Locke's Philosophy 9
II. Relativity Defined and Locke's Position Indicated in Respect
to its Various Formulations 16
II RELATIVISTIC MOTIVES IN LOCKE
III. The Simple Ideas : What Are They? 21
I V. The Part-Whole Motive 26
V. The Term-Relation Motive 30
V I . Locke 's Conception of Relation 37
III ANTI-RELATIVISTIC MOTIVES IN LOCKE
VII. Ideas Versus Knowledge and Meaning 43
VIII. Absolute Knowledge : The Primacy of the ' ' Invisible Relation ' '
and of Conduct 48
IV CONSTRUCTIVE RELATIVITY IN LOCKE
IX. Doctrine of Sorts: Mixed Modes and Substances 60
X. Doctrine of Meaning (' ' Ideas of Relation ") 76
XL Conclusion 88
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GENERAL SURVEY CHAPTER I
THE TWO FFXDAMEXTAL STEPS IN" LOCKERS PHILOSOPHY
ee IT is past doubt," says Locke, " that men have in their minds several ideas, — such as are those expressed by the words whiteness, hardness, sweetness, thinking, motion, man, elephant, army, drunk- enness, and others : it is in the first place then to be inquired, — How he comes by them ? "* Locke's position here is clear. He takes existing distinctions in consciousness as the starting-point in his ill 1 ompted " account of the ways whereby our understandings come to attain these notions of things we have."2 This position cannot be overemphasized. He accepts the reality of thinking and the reality of distinctions within thought, and his sole problem is, not whether such distinctions exist apart from thought, nor what they may chance to be apart from thought, but how such distinctions, as commonly recognized in our experience, come about; what is their ground or basis? And it is my contention that this problem in Locke gets its most specific and most evolved solution in his doctrine of Sorts in Book III.
His first general attempt to account for such distinctions con- sists in his contention, that all we know of reality resolves itself ^ into ideas, of which he recognizes two sorts, — simple ideas and com- plex ideas. Of these, simple ideas are ultimate and underived; the complex ideas a mere aggregation of the simple ideas. Knowl- edge, in Locke's sense of the word, is in no way involved in the conscious existence of simple ideas, although the organism is involved in the production of some of them (the secondary quali-
1. Bk. II, eh. 1, sec. 1.
2. Introduction, sec. 2.
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ties). Knowledge begins its career only when the simple ideas are brought into union or connection by the mind, and terminates in such products as (1) Complex Ideas, (2) Meaning, (3) Knowl- edge proper, and (4) Knowledge as opinion or judgments of prob- ability. All these evolved distinctions within our experience, so Locke contends, are, notwithstanding, but complications or modes of simple ideas, and that they approximate reality so far only as they admit of a reduction to their source of origin in the simple ideas. Hence that contention in Locke, that complex ideas and meaning, considered apart from their reduction to simple ideas, are unreal, and that knowledge in general is unreal and irrelevant, except where grounded in the necessity of a " visible and neces- sary" relation between them; that is, that knowledge remains unreal until, as a perceptive meaning, as it were, it resolves itself to the status of a simple irreducible idea. Here the principle that comes to the surface is, that what is rational is real, in conformity with which, Locke makes the a priori modes the highest and most perfect forms of reality. But the simple ideas, on the other hand, are also made the supreme forms of reality. From this it would follow that there are two principles of truth and reality recognized by Locke, and not one, although now it is the one that gains the ascendancy in him, and then the other. But even when ignoring this dual standard and confining ourselves to the empirical standard only, we find the same see-saw manifested in his pages. In different parts of his Essay, he evaluates complex ideas and meaning very differently in respect to simple ideas, by hypothesis, considered the sole ultimates. We find that complex ideas and meaning get them- selves viewed, now as unreal, then as real, — as real and as ultimate as his hypothetical simple ideas. And when we ask by Avhieh decision Locke in truth stands, we can answer in the affirmative, one way or the other, only by emphasizing his statements at one place and in one context, and by ignoring what he as explicitly states to the contrary in other parts of his Essay. He who does not take these various contradictions in Locke in full consideration, and hold them together, may attain to a consistent theory or view in him, but he can do so only by a process of elimination and by a sub- stitution of a dialect, so to speak, for Locke's own rich, although varied, utterance. It is as difficult at times to answer whether Locke is a rationalist as it is to answer whether Locke i.- an empiricist; just as upon the empirical basis, as just indicated, it is difficult at times to answer whether Locke regards meaning and complex ideas as ultimate as simple ideas, or not. What are
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we to make of this tangle? At what point dogmatise concerning him?
Locke's first step, as iust stated, " to account for the ways whereby our understandings come to attain those notions oi thinffiL we havej! led him to the helief that simple ideas contained the sole ground of explanation. He rests his claim upon the fact that the simple ideas are essentially non-relative. To admit anything else were to court an infinite regress — such seems his conviction. Yet, on the other hand, he admits as emphatically, (1) that they are conditioned in their shape and character by the structure of our sense organs; (2) that, within such existing structure, variation in range and acuteness of perception is the law; (3) that their perception by a direct vision, involving a transcendence of the ordinary mode of perception, is ideal ; (4) that they involve a latent judgment; (5) that they reduce to mere products of externally con- ditioning factors (relativity) ; (6) that simple modes, although complex, are irreducible; (7) that complex modes arc ultimate and have their real essence in thought ( a priori rationalism) ; (8) that complex ideas of substances are ultimate and have their reality in distinctions as final in character as our distinction between a horse and a stone. And thus he wrestles with his problem to and fro ! Simple ideas are ultimate — this conclusion he will not let go, and yet he feels himself forced to admit ; u that whatever doth or can exist, or be considered as one thing, is positive ; and so not only simple ideas and substances, but modes also, arc positive beings ; though the parts of which they consist are very often rel- ative one to another; but the whole together, considered as one thing, and producing in us the complex idea of one thing, which idea is in our minds, as one picture though an aggregate of divers parts, is a positive or absolute thing or idea." 3 But if simple ideas, by the admissions catalogued, are conceded to be complex or rel- ative, as the case may be, and complex ideas, as just quoted, " pos- itive or absolute," what becomes of our original and fundamental distinction between simple ideas and our complex ideas? The next quotation will aid to a solution of the matter in Locke's own words. " It is not, therefore, unity of substance," writes Locke in his chapter on Identity and Diversity, " that Comprehends all sort of identity, or will determine it in every case. . . . Thus in the case of living creatures, their identity depends, not on a mass of particles, but on something else."4 But what is this something
3. Bk. II, ch. 25, sec. 6.
4. Bk. II, sec. 7.
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else, capable of conferring a unity where there is a diversity? Our answer to this question conducts us into the second funda- mental step in Locke's philosophy, and it consists in locating the principle of unit}7 in the subject and no longer in any external object. In Book IV this principle is located in " Reason " ; in Book III it is located in what he terms an abstract idea or defini- tion : in Book II in what he terms " ideas of relations " ; and, lastly, throughout his Essay, in what he frequently terms " our happiness or misery, beyond which we have no concernment, either of knowing or being." 5 Even our simple ideas do not escape this general transfer in their unity, and, in their case, found in the particular character and structure of our sense organs, or in a single picture or conception in the mind. The outcome of the doctrine, taken in its full setting, is what I term constructive relativity.
His treatment of this general subject is critical and destructive, as well as positive and constructive. A general outline of his inquiry, with a suggestion of the final conclusion to be reached, will amply suffice for a passing orientation in this second and more fundamental step in Locke's philosophy.
Our simple ideas given, why not rest content with them? Why seek to combine them ? And when we thus set about to unite them, what constitutes our motive or motives, and what our " patterns " ? Grant, if you will, that a certain aim is compassed in reducing complex ideas to simple ideas, whether that aim be pragmatic (a test of their truth or reality) or epistemological (a determination of the varied elements involved in a possible bit of knowledge, or in knowledge as a whole), and }ret it is evident that no adequate " account of the ways whereby our understandings come to attain those notions of things we have " could halt with the fact that our particular notions involve a purely general reality, a purely general truth, and a purely general meaning; it is well-nigh tantamount to saying that they have no reality, truth, or meaning at all. The emphasis with Locke throughout finds itself placed, not upon the universal, but upon the particulars. Hence his real problem : sim- ple ideas given, why do we combine them at all, and such and such qualities with this object, and others with other objects? We may seek the solution in the answer, that different objects are inherently of a different constitution or essence. But this answer merely begs the question at issue. We answer our question by off-hand asserting a principle of differentiation not discoverable 5. Bk. IV, eh. 11, sec. 8.
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within our experience. Now Locke vigorously denies the validity thus to explain our why. Thus he writes : " Our faculties carry us no further toward the knowledge and distinction of substances, than a collection of those sensible ideas which we observe in them. . . . A blind man may as soon sort things by their color, and he that has lost* his smell as well distinguish a lily and a rose by their odor, as by those internal constitutions which he knows not." 6 Locke returns to this contention with a wearisome prolixity, but is rarely at variance with the conclusion, that we never know an object's real essence, but its nominal essence only; and constantly questions the legitimacy even to assume the existence of a real essence, — " that inherent constitution which everything has within itself, without any relation to anything without it."7
From the standpoint of his radical relativity,8 the same negative conclusion is reached, with this differenece only, that, in accord with the former viewpoint, their unknowable character is what gets emphasized, whereas, in the latter case, it is their non-existence that is emphasized.
Thus reduced to our simple ideas, we may ask whether they have any natural and visible "connections and dependencies," whereby guidance is yielded in the proper formation of our par- ticular complex ideas? And here Locke's answer, in general theory, is again consistently negative.9 Hence Locke's conclusion, that our complex ideas, of which there are, according to him, three distinct sorts, — modes, substances, and relations, — " are of man's, and not of nature's making." In regard to mixed modes, his gen- eral contention is, "that they are not only made by the mind, but made very arbitrarily, made without patterns or reference to any real existence. Wherein they differ from those of substances, which carry with them the suggestion of some real being, from which they are taken, and to which they are conformable."10
I have now sufficiently outlined, in general theory, the second step in Locke's philosophy. But this second step, so easily over- looked as a second step, and so commonly regarded as a subordinate phase only of the first step in his argument, instead of the reverse, calls for a few additional considerations at this point.
The problem which particularly concerns Locke after he has once settled the claim that it is the nominal and not the real essence
6. Bk. Ill, ch. 6, sec. 9.
7. Ibid., sec. 6.
8. This term will receive explanation in the next chapter.
9. See Bk. IV, ch. 3, sees. 28-29.
10. Bk. Ill, ch. 5, sec. 3.
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" which determines the sorts of things," may be made to take the following form : what constitutes the " measure and boundary " of each particular thing, whereby it is made that particular thing, and distinguished from others? And his answer is : an object's measure and boundary is the " workmanship of the mind," operative within the nominal essence, and a matter of definition or abstract idea; that is, a construct. This answer, as elaborated in Locke, suffers in cogency, only where he persists in his exaggerated theoretical claim, that " there is no individual parcel of matter to which any of its qualities are so annexed as to be essential to it or inseparable from it,"11 and rendered with the meaning, that every particular parcel of matter reduces to pure flux, as it were ; reduces to a degree of variability or instability never experienced save in a theory which ignores varying degrees of instability and varying degrees of stability, as commonly experienced. It is only when thus rendered that it is necessary for him to find the sole principle of stability of permanence in a realm other than that of matter-of- fact. But it is in this version only that his notion of the definition or abstract idea as constituting the " essence " of a thing, namely, its measure and boundary, chimes in with his generally assumed dualism, or absolute divorce, between " fact " and " meaning ", in the varied forms this divorce assumes in his Essay. Thus formu- lated, Locke's doctrine were indeed a doctrine of (a rationalistic type of) relativity of a most extreme and exaggerated sort; but it would be a type of relativity where everything was attributed to the function of thought, only to be dashed to naught by one fell stroke : " nothing exists but particulars " ; — which, doctrine, when pushed to extremes, and as Locke's writings only too frequently favor, practi- cally means, that all knowledge is irrelevant. " Nothing exists but particulars !" But if " particulars " as indicated, are so elastic in content as to imply any content from a mere blank to the universe, how again avoid an interminable see-saw? Above the level of a mere zero, the " particular " would thus again openly negate knowledge only itself tacitly to usurp it.
In holding, then, as Locke does, that " each distinct idea is a distinct essence," nothing more is implied than that sucn deteF" mination or boundary of a thing, as of this or that kmr), is given in an abstract idea or definition, which, although in one sense less complete than reality, in another sense, exceeds it. It is incom- plete or inadequate in respect to the sum total of its potential quali-
11. Ibid., ch. 6, sec. 6.
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ties; but in respect to its momentary existences, all alike partial and' variable, it is in excess oi: any sill'li single iiiHJun'ce of its actual existence. For, at any moment, any given object may possess almost any quality and los'e almost any ot its qualities the next. 'There is a need ot unity in the midst of diversity; nence"Tns" conception of an object as a construct, — involving a description ot an object in -Locke truly marvelous, not 'only because it emerges out ot a sea oi: comracttctions and prepossessions, but, because in the form it finally assumes, it stands unsurpassed^ The question is not whether we have gotten beyond .Locke; rather is it the question whether we have caught up to him. Back to Book III is the plea urged upon us for a proper understanding of the other Books.
CHAPTER II
RELATIVITY DEFINED AND LOCKERS POSITION INDICATED IN RKSPKC'T TO ITS VARIOUS FORMULATIONS
STATED in its most general form, the principle of relativity properly denotes the theory that every object determines and is determined by every other object;1 and, as commonly considered, supports the claims that no object, at any point of its history, is incapable of a further reduction or decomposition; nor, at any point in its further growth or complexity, incapable of a still higher synthesis or composition. Conceived in this form, I designate the principle radical relativity. This formulation of it is the one that is most commonly encountered, and it has its usual and explicit statement in Locke. His more peculiar and frequent expression of it, however, is the following: "Substances when truly considered are powers, and hence nothing else than so many relations to other substances."2
Radical relativity is no doubt sound enough in abstract theory. Its emphasis is upon mutual dependence among objects, — the postulate of all scientific inquiry. But to talk of an object's depen- dence in general and to talk of a particular object's dependence upon other particular objects in a given situation, is a very dilVercnt thing. When discoursing upon this matter of mutual depend (Mice in the abstract, the dependence of objects admits of no partiality: they are all thought equally dependent and they are all thought completely dependent; their independence, if thought to have any, vanishing like mist in the morning air, the more its central tenet of mutual dependence gets its emphasis. Such is the criticism commonly directed against relativity of the so-called radical type. To what extent is it valid?
To insist upon a complete dependence among objects is valid. It is the postulate of all scientific inquiry and expresses our faith
1. See Baldwin's Dictionary; Article on Belativity.
2. Bk. II, ch. 24, sec. 37.
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in an object's inherent rationality. But objects are not equally dependent upon each other in any given situation; they do not in general, in specific situations, entail a perfect equivalence of give- and-take; and as knowledge begins with the given, it is equally reflective of the scientific spirit to hold strictly to the facts as thus revealed. The dependence of a given object in a given situation may be large, yet the dependence of the other objects upon it or upon each other in that particular situation may be a zero. The unaffected objects are accordingly more properly designated as independent. But an independence properly maintained for an object in certain situations may in other situations convert itself into a dependence, as our scientific postulate of mutual dependence would naturally dispose us to expect. In so far then, as we remain strictly empirical, and, further, strictly adhere to our confessed postulate, the following form of relativity seems the more permis- sible one : objects reveal themselves differently in different situa- tions, and in different situations capable of revealing qualities often absolutely incompatible with each other. Eelativity thus conceived, I term empirical. Locke's common expression of it takes on the following form : " The changes which one ' body ' is apt to receive from or produce in other ' bodies/ upon a due application, exceeds far, not only what we know, but what we are apt to imagine." 3
These considerations conduct us to the third form which I am inclined to affirm the principle in question assumes. I term it constructive relativity. Let me explain. If objects reveal them- selves differently in different situations and in different situations capable of revealing qualities often absolutely incompatible with each other, then the conclusion follows, as in opposition to the con- clusion reached by radical relativity, that no single situation of actual existence can reveal or exhaust an object's total actuality, all its possible phases or qualities. It is in its very nature a multi- plicity, viewed spatially or temporally. Such unity as may be ascribed to it, Locke assigns to the function of the so-called abstract idea, and the object that results accordingly viewed in the light of
3. Ibid., ch. 31, sec. 10. By insisting upon the distinction between the abstract and the empirical basis of the relativistic principle, I feel I fully meet the objection commonly directed against it; namely, that objects, according to it, resolve themselves into a sheer network of empty relations. In addition to what has already been stated, it need only be said that rela- tions, or, to be more specific, pariculars, are as effective in reinforcing each other and preserving each other intact, as they are in building each other up or in destroying each other. Relative independence is no less truly descrip- tive of the varied situations suggesting it than dependence.
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a construct and not a copy, " of man's and not of nature's making/' as we, in due place, shall find him propounding with great vigor. He writes in general to the following effect : " It is not unity of substances that comprehends all sorts of identity, or will determine it in every case ; but to conceive and judge of it aright . . . what- ever does or can exist, or be considered as one thing is positive, and so not only simple ideas and substances, but modes also are positive beings: though the parts of which they consist are often relative one to another ... it sufficing to the unity of every idea that it be considered as one representation or picture, though made up of ever so many particulars." 4 The statement involves the contention already enunciated that things, however, partial or variable in their matter-of-fact existence of this or that moment, are determined in their character of this or that sort or whole by the idea ; namely, that " men determine sorts,"5 specific things, which, in accord with his declared relativit}T, he denies as existing " in nature with .any prefixed bounds."6
For the sake of completeness, I mention two additional forms of the relativistic principle to which historic thought has given specific formulation and currency, and with which certain phases of his doctrine may be further identified.
Protagoras is made the exponent of one of these specific formu- lations ; the doctrine that " all knowledge is merely phenomenal," expresses another specific formulation. The former is based, in the main, upon a recognized and broadly affirmed diversity in our per- ceptions of a given object; the latter, upon the claim that an object (to quote Mill) "is known to us only in one special relation; namely, as that which produces, or is capable of producing, certain impressions on our senses; and all that we really know is these impressions. This is the doctrine of the Relativity of Knowledge to the knowing mind, in the simplest, purest, and, as I think, the- most proper acceptation of the word." (See Thomson's Diction- ary; Art., Relativity.) The Protagorean type of relativity, as we shall perceive further along in our stud}% is fundamental to Locke's elaboration of so-called constructive relativity.
To complete this survey,7 another specific formulation of Rela- tivity requires mentioning. Spencer gives the following graphic description of it: "Every thought/' he says, "involves a whole
4. Ibid., ch. 25, sec. 6; ch. 24, sec. 1.
5. Bk. Ill, ch. 6, sec. 35.
6. Ibid., sec. 29.
7. I do not mention Relativity as recognized and formulated in Physics and Psychology.
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system of thoughts; and ceases to exist if severed from its various correlatives. As we cannot isolate a single organ of a living body, and deal with it as if it had a life independent of the rest ; so, from the organized structure of our cognitions, we cannot cut one out and proceed as though it had survived the separation. ... A developed intelligence can arise only by a process which, in making thoughts defined, also makes them mutually dependent — establishes among them certain vital connections, the destruction of which causes instant death of the thoughts." (First Prin. sec. 39.) 8
In this quotation from Spencer, we have the voice of the rationalist; in Mill's quotation there appears the more dominant note of the empiricist; both of which, taken in conjunction with the Protagorean type of Eelativity, agree in one result; namely, that, knowing things as we know them, is not knowing them as they actually are ; that the Ding an sich eternally eludes, even while it eternally attracts, us. Hence the reaction to these formulations of knowledge as expressed by M'Cosh, in his " Intuitions of the Mind."9 "It should be admitted," he says, " (1) that man knows only so far as he has the faculties of knowledge; (2) that he knows objects only under aspects presented to his faculties ; and (3) that his faculties are limited, and consequently his knowledge limited, so that, not only does he not know all objects, but he does not know all about any one object. It may further be allowed (4) that in perception by the senses we know external objects in relation to the perceiving mind. But while these views can be established in opposition to the philosophy of the Absolute, it should ever be resolutely maintained, on the other hand, (1) that we know the very thing; and (2) that our knowledge is correct as far as it goes " (p. 344). Here we have the iteration of the realist, who refuses to be " cribbed, cabined, and confined " by the dogmas of the categories and of sense-perception into which modern thought has crystallized. Not very unlike Dr. Johnson's declaration in respect to Berkeley, a passage to " the very thing itself " is affirmed, let logic or dogma proclaim their loudest.
This apart, however, the sole question that concerns us is : How does Locke resolve the difficulty — Locke, the credited source of all our modern epistemological ills ?
Xo proper answer to this question is possible here. I venture the suggestion, however, that Locke remains consistently relativistic
8. The types of relativity formulated by Mill and Spencer in the above passages have no further bearing upon the present inquiry.
9. See Thomson's Dictionary; Art., Relativity.
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in his solution. He finds that reality,, in the last analysis, is deter- mined in ideas, formed under the control of ends or purposes, within a world of relatively determined needs ("beyond which we have no concernment either to know or be,") and of relatively " unalterable organs/' and where certain fixed, regular, and con- stant co-existences among ideas are accepted by him as a fact. This is at once relativistic, possivistic, pragmatic and constructive.
II
RELATIVISTIC MOTIVES IN LOCKE
CHAPTER III
THE SIMPLE IDEAS: WHAT AKK THEY?
SIMPLE ideas play a somewhat variable role in Locke's philos- ophy and the purpose of this chapter is to trace it, and to define them as nearly as possible.
" One thing/' says Locke, " is carefully to be observed concern- ing the ideas we have; and that is, that some of them are simple and some complex."1 They distinguish themselves in the fact that complex ideas consist in the unity or supposed unity of distin- guishable parts, whereas simple ideas, " being each in itself uncom- pounded, contains in it nothing but one uniform appearance or conception in the mind, and is not distinguishable into different ideas." 2 By this criterion, simple ideas are (a) uncompounded, (b) contain but one uniform appearance, and (c) are but one concep- tion in the mind. We shall presently get to see that Locke regards them as products; hence compounded. I turn to the remaining differentia indicated.
They constitute but one uniform appearance. Let us consider this mark.
Their uniform appearance is one that is relative : " blood that is red to the naked eye is not so under the microscope." 3 Further, the simple modes are admitted to have a uniformity or likeness in their parts, although declared to be complex : space and time " are justly reckoned among our simple ideas, yet none of the distinct ideas we have of either is without composition ; it is the very nature
1. Bk. II, ch. 2, sec. 1.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., ch. 23, sees. 11-12.
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of both of them to consist of parts ; but their parts being all of the same kind . . . hinder them not from having a place amongst simple ideas." 4 In the one case we find " the one uniform appear- ance " a conditioned affair ; in the latter case, they are seen to share this " uniform appearance " in common with simple modes. Hence, no differentia.
The third mark, that of " one conception " in the mind, also fails to be a differentia, as simple ideas are herein found undis- tinguished from complex ideas as a whole. There is no need to quote him at length. The discrepancy from this standpoint is writ too large in any part of the treatise to which we may turn. One citation therefore will be made to suffice. " Besides these complex ideas of several single substances, as of man, horse, gold, violet, apple, etc., the mind hath also complex collective ideas of sub- stances; which I so call, because such ideas are made up of many particular substances considered together, as united into one idea, and which, so joined, are looked on as one; v.g., the idea of such a collection of men as made an army ... is as much one idea as the idea of a man : and the great collective idea of bodies whatever, signified by the name world, is as much one idea as the idea of any the least particle of matter in it; it sufficing to the unity of any idea, that it be considered as one representation or picture, though made up of ever so many particulars." 5 That is, between an imaginary point and the universe, unity may be appropriated by anything ; either by the complex simple idea or by the simple com- plex one.
He next distinguishes between them in the fact, that in the origin of simple ideas the mind is passive, and that " it cannot invent or frame one new simple idea " nor refuse to have, alter or blot out one of them when offered to the mind ; whereas in the case of complex ideas the mind has the power to repeat, compare, and unite them to an infinite variety.6 From this follows his conclu- sion " that simple ideas are the material of all our knowledge," 7 and that we have " no complex idea not made out of those simple ones." A total dependence upon reality for our simple ideas, and a complete independence of reality in regard to complex ideas, is the distinction which discloses itself here. The mind, in its com- plex ideas, would appear totally dependent upon the simple ideas,
4. Ibid., ch. 15, sec. 9.
5. Ibid., ch. 24, sec. 1.
6. Ibid., ch. 2, sec. 2.
7. Ibid., ch. 7, sec. 4.
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but, other than that, the impression conveyed is that complex ideas neither require nor disclose any further dependence upon a reality and general constitution of things. And yet Locke's distinction between complex ideas of modes and substances is grounded just in this particular fact, that modes, within simple ideas, are more or less purely of the mind's invention, whereas substances are declared to be dependent, not only upon the simple ideas, but upon "the supposition of some real being, from which they are taken, and to which they are conformable." 8 The affirmed distinction then be- tween complex ideas and simple ideas cannot be based upon the fact that, in the origin of simple ideas, the mind is wholly depend- ent and passive, and the opposite in respect to complex ideas; for, as indicated, substances are dependent beyond simple ideas in a wray that modes are not. As to Locke's motive in thus ascribing a dependence of the mind upon reality, the copy-view theory asserts itself, wherein he affirms, that, in the case of simple ideas, as is evident, the mind, not unlike " a mirror, cannot refuse, alter, or obliterate the images or ideas which the objects before it do therein produce."9 This copy- view of his, however, even when thus falsely restricted within his theory to simple ideas, gets to encounter several set-backs in his pages. The first is that our senses may not be proportionate to or commensurate with the demands, variety, and richness of reality. To this effect, I quote the following : " I think it is not possible for any one to imagine any other qualities in bodies, however constituted, whereby they can be taken notice of, besides sounds, taste, smells, visible and tangible qualities. . . . But how much these few and narrow inlets are disproportionate to the vast whole extent of all beings will not be hard to persuade those who are not so foolish as to think their span the measure of all things. What other simple ideas it is possible the creatures in other parts of the universe may have, by the assistance of senses and faculties more (in number) or more perfect than we have, or different from ours, it is not for us to determine . . . and a great presumption to deny." 10
The second set-back is experienced where he gets to distinguish between primary qualities as alone copies and secondary qualities as effects. " There is nothing like our ideas existing in the bodies themselves . . . and what is sweet, blue or warm in idea, is but the certain bulk, figure and motion of the insensible parts in the
8. Bk. Ill, ch. 5, sec. 3.
9. Bk. II, ch. 1, sec. 25.
10. Ibid., ch. 2, sec. 3, and Bk. IV, ch. 3, sec. 22.
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bodies themselves." X1 Hence he regards it as possible to have " positive ideas even from privative causes." 12 Thus the ideas of "heat and cold, light and darkness, white and black, motion and rest are equally clear and positive ideas in the mind ; though, per- haps, some of the causes which produce them are barely privations in the subjects (objects) from whence our senses derive these ideas." 13
The original position gets itself still further complicated when the simple ideas, viewed as effects, are found to be conditioned by the particular character and structure of the sense-organs, no less so and to no less extent, than as conditioned by the structure of the " insensible parts " of an object. " Had we senses acute enough to discern the minute particles of bodies, and the real constitution in which their sensible qualities depend, I doubt not but they would produce quite different ideas in us : and that which is now the yel- low color of gold would then disappear, and instead of it we should see an admirable texture of parts. . . . This microscopes plainly discover to us; for what to our naked eyes produce a cer- tain color, is, by augmenting the acuteness of our senses, discov- ered to be quite a different thing." 14 Thus simple ideas, instead of being simple, underived, unconditioned, are found complex, derived and conditioned; and, instead of being copies of objects, are effects ; and, instead of effects produced solely by the " insensi- ble part" of bodies, they are effects equally conditioned in their character by the particular character and structure of the sensible organism ; and, in the case of positive ideas resulting from privative causes, almost exclusively conditioned, according to Locke's state- ments, by the sensible organism. Here, then, we have the prin- ciple of relativity wholly installed within the sacred precincts of even the simple ideas. In these changes registered in Locke's view of them, they become increasingly regarded as working assump- tions, and less and less as established facts; and, as is equally apparent, the need of psychology grows less relevant to his argu- ments. Simple ideas thus get more and more to fill the place of the necessary ' term } in the term-relation motive, to be indicated in subsequent chapters, as well as the ( part ' in the part- whole rela- tion. They preserve a uniqueness, but it is a uniqueness in kind,
11. Ibid., ch. 8, sec. 15.
12. Ibid., sec. 1-6.
13. Ibid., sec. 2.
14. Ibid., ch. 23, seci. 11-12.
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and not one of simplicity or unity. The simple modes, as we per- ceived, are no less simple ideas of a kind; just as pleasure and pain, succession, change, co-existence, etc., are others as ultimate and as unique in their kind. Future chapters will show how con- sistently this motive works out in his pages.
CHAPTER IV
THE PART-WHOLE MOTIVE
THE part-whole motive, as it unrolls itself in connection with mixed modes and substances, concerns itself with the question, <( how such a precise multitude of parts " as manifested in such complex ideas, " come to make but one idea." His solution of the matter I have reserved for a later chapter. Here I intend to con- sider the simple modes as a phase of this same motive. How do Space, Time, Number, Infinity, Power come to be? They are not simple, and yet he holds " that they are justly reckoned amongst our simple ideas/' * Wherein then lie their complexity ; wherein their simplicity? It is sufficient for our purpose here to con- sider the modes of Space and Time only. They are complex be- cause "they consist of parts, even though their parts are not sep- arable one from another." 2 Their parts are such as in each case naturally to involve and presuppose each other.
But just whereof do the parts consist? His answer is this: " Could the mind, as in Number, come to so small a part of exten- sion or duration as excluded divisibility, that would be, as it were, the indivisible unit or idea, by repetition of which it would make its more enlarged ideas of extension and duration. But since the mind is not able to frame an idea of any space without parts, instead thereof it makes use of the common measures which, by familiar use, in each country, have imprinted themselves in the in the memory (as inches and feet; seconds, minutes, hours, days, years.) . . . Every part of duration is duration too, and every part of extension is extension, both of them capable of addition or divi- sion in infinitum. But the least portions of either of them whereof we have clear and distinct ideas may perhaps be fittest to be con- sidered by us as the simple ideas of that kind out of which our complex modes of space, extension and duration are made up, and into which they can again be distinctly resolved." : "We have no absolute unit of space and no absolute unit of time; hence "no
1. Bk. II, ch. 15, sec. 9; eh. 21, sec. 3.
2. Ibid., ch. 15, sec. 10.
3. Ibid., sec. 9. Italics mine.
26
27
two parts of duration can be certainly known to be equal." 4 We try to control the situation, lacking such absolute units, by prac- tical devices of one kind or another, involving regular, periodic motions, "of which seeming equality, however, we have no other measure, but such as the train of our ideas lodged in our memories, with the concurrence of other probable reasons, to persuade us of their equality." 5 In a word, our notions of time and space are sheer constructs, and in their abstract character, capable in one direction of an infinite expansion, and in the other direction, of an infinite divisibility.
But in this absence of an absolute unit of space or time, what gives occasion for their formation? The facts of change, motion, and succession, and that of distance and place, as well as existing needs for unity or order. Of change, Locke writes: "Wherever change is observed, the mind must collect a power somewhere able to make that change, as well as a possibility in the thing itself to receive it " ; 6 and he might have said the same of succession, which he holds conditions our notion of time: wherever succession is observed, the mind must collect a notion somewhere able to make the fact of succession a possibility.
But such facts as change, etc., it may be held, are both complex and relative. True, and Locke not only admits as much but puts himself at pains to prove this very contention. But he was shown to prove as much concerning the simple ideas in general. What then becomes of our so-termed parts, whether a color or sound, or the facts of succession and change? We accept the ideas of color and sound as ultimate; then succession, change, motion, place, dis- tance, involving aspects equally as unique and irreducible, are equally as ultimate. And what is more, in respect to succession, he institutes a difference between a perceived and a conceived suc- cession ; " it seems to me that the constant and regular succession of ideas in a waking man, is, as it were, the measure and' standard of all other succession : whereof, if any one either exceeds the pace of our ideas, as where two sounds or pains, etc., take up in their suc- cession the duration of but one idea, or else where any motion or succession is so slow, as that it keeps not pace with the idea in our minds, or the quickness in which they take their turns . . . there also the sense of a constant continued succession is lost, and
4. Ibid., sec. 21.
'). Tbid.
G. ILirl., ch. 21, sec. 4.
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we perceive it not/' 7 In either event, he goes on to say, " we must have recourse to other means for determining the fact of a suc- cession " as existing in this or that object, " which we then per- ceive by the change of distance that it hath moved, yet the motion itself we perceive not." 8
The formation of the simple modes then are conditioned by cer- tain ultimate distinguishable phases of reality, " and are made use of to denote the position of finite real beings, in respect one to another, in those uniform infinite oceans of duration and space. . . . From such points fixed in sensible beings we reckon, and from them we measure our portions of those infinite quantities ; which, so considered, are that which we call time and place. For duration and space being in themselves uniform and boundless, the order and position of things, without such known settled points, would be lost in them; and all tilings would lie jumbled in an incurable confusion." 9
How then do our simple modes come to be? This question I think I have answered. The}r are constructs inevitably involved in the comprehension of certain organizable aspects, parts, or phases of experience; their peculiar kind or quality, in each case, being in a sense dependent upon the peculiar aspect of the parts or phases involved, " and therefore we are not to wonder that we compre- hend them not . . . when we would consider them either abstractly in themselves" or in their ontological character (if they really pos- sess such) ; they work successfully in preventing an " incurable confusion"; and hence are real pragmatically; whether they are real ontologically, Locke gives us no ground for concluding one way or the other.10
7. Ibid., ch. 14, sec. 12. Sees. 9-17. Italics are mine.
8. Ibid., sec. 11. •
9. Ibid., ch. 15, sec. 5; also sees. 6-10.
10. His conclusion is beautifully summed up in the following quotation: ' ' Where and when are questions belonging to all finite existences, and are by us always reckoned from some certain epochs marked out to us by the motions observable in it. Without some such fixed parts or periods, the order of things would be lost to our finite understandings in the boundless variable oceans of (abstract or conceptual) duration and expansion; which compre- hend in them all finite beings, and in their full extent belong only to the Deity. And therefore we are not to wonder that we comprehend them not, and do so often find our thoughts at a loss, when we would consider them either abstractly in themselves, or as any way attributed to the first incom- prehensible Being. But when applied to any particular finite being, the extension of any body is so much of that infinite space as the bulk of the body takes up ; ... all which distances we measure by preconceived ideas of certain lengths of space and duration, as inches, feet, miles; and, in the other, minutes, days, years, etc." Ibid., sec. 8.
CHAPTER V
THE TERM-RELATIOX MOTIVE
THE term-relation motive in Locke swings between the extreme views of ontological particulars and of a radical relativity. In accord to the latter motive, he writes : " This is certain : things however absolute and entire they may seem in themselves are but retainers to other parts of nature, for that which they are most taken notice of by us; . . . and there is not so complete and perfect a part that we know of nature which does not owe the being it has, and the excellencies of it, to its neighbors ; and we must not confine our thoughts within the surface of any body, but look a great deal further, to comprehend perfectly those qualities that are in it." * In respect to the former view, he writes : " The immediate object of all our reasoning and knowledge is nothing but particulars. . . . Universality is but accidental to it." 2 Uni- versality, we read elsewhere, " belongs not to things themselves, which are all of them particular in their existence, even those words and ideas which in their signification are general. When therefore we quit particulars, the universals that rest are only creatures of our own making; their general nature being nothing but the capacity they are put into by the understanding of signifying or representing particulars." 3 By particulars, Locke seems to imply " anything as existing in any determined time and place ",4 and by universals he denotes meaning or any other thought product. The universal, however, is merely accidental to particulars. Thought may create universals and these in turn may become par- ticulars; but they are particulars which permit the original par- ticulars, from which thought took its rise, to remain wholly unal- tered. Thought may have a function, but it is a merely specious,
1. Bk. IV., ch. 6, sec. 11.
2. Ibid., ch. 17, sec. 8.
3. Bk. Ill, ch. 3, sec. 11.
4. Bk. II, ch. 27, sec. 1.
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vapid function, ending, as with the radical realist in general, just where it began, the original particulars suffering little disturb- ance in their ontological peace, whether thought appeared on the scene or not. But suppose we identify particulars with Locke's other specified particulars; namely, simple and complex ideas; and if particulars refuse to be thus assimilated, our only alternative is to identify them with real essences; and then, of course, what is said of either, will hold equally true of particulars. It seems to me nothing more remains to be said on the subject. Unless thus capable of being assimilated, they remain wholly foreign to and outside of his philosophy as the " new way of ideas/'
The ontological particular, however, does not represent Locke's only anti-relativistic motive. Chapter VII shall concern itself with a very significant phase of it, and might be described as the primacy of the clear and distinct ideas, as opposed to and inde- pendent of meaning and knowledge as grounded solely in and confined solely to the relations of such ideas.
When we come to Locke's distinction of the primary-secondary qualities, the particular appears resurrected. The following is a typical passage : " Our senses failing us in the discovery of the bulk, texture and figure of the minute parts of bodies, on which their real constitutions and differences depend, we are fain to make use of their secondary qualities as the characteristical marks and notes whereby to frame ideas of them in our minds, and distinguish them one from another : all which secondary qualities are nothing but . . . mere powers depending on its primary qualities." 5 Here we have two distinct positions enunciated in respect to our insensible objects and the secondary qualities as depending upon them. First, that primary qualities constitute the insensible object, and, secondly, that " the secondary qualities as the characteristical marks and notes " serve " to distinguish " such objects one from another. The "first assertion involves the contradiction that the primary qualities, as but a division within simple ideas, and, therefore, sensible, are also to be identified with the insensible real constitution of bodies. But to identify them with such real constitution is to identify them with the unknown and non-existent. The second assertion involves the claim that the secondary qualities constitute the sole data of knowledge and are effects rather than products; they are further the "characteristical marks and notes" whereby we determine ;:n<l distinguish things one from another. The latter position
5. Ibid., ch. 23, sec. 8.
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sents the phenomenal type of relativity. Let us consider these various statements in detail.
In the first place, I seek to protest that the data of knowledge are confined to the secondary qualities. In addition to the data specified and recognized in the previous chapter as on a par with the secondary qualities as ultimate and irreducible data, co-existence is recognized and specified as in like manner such ultimate data. His whole contention concerning substances is, " that the mind of man,, in making its complex ideas of substances, never puts any together that do not really and are not supposed to co-exist; and so it truly borrows that union from nature." 6 They directly imply, not only simple ideas, but their " constant and regular union," or order, as well. Without the admitted perception of such " order," no com- plex ideas of substances are possible, whereby the " chimerical and fantastical " can distinguish itself from " the real." But the sec- ondary qualities make no provision for such data as herein specified, not any more so than they do for the perception of difference or agreement, the ultimate principle, with Locke, of all knowledge. It implies comparison, and for a comparison " there must always be in relation two ideas or things, either in themselves really separate, or considered as distinct, and then a ground or occasion for their comparison." 7
Now all such admitted data, like Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities, in the aspect of the former as simple ideas, involve a transcendence of the secondary qualities as the sole data of knowledge. When Locke therefore admits that " it is evident that the mind knows not things immediately, but only by intervention of the ideas it has of them," 8 it is one thing to make such a statement from the standpoint of the secondary qualities as constituting our sole range of ideas, and quite another to make it from the standpoint of such data widened in its scope, as he commonly recognizes. If this issue, then, of an unknown Ding an sicli is pertinent from the former standpoint, no problem may seem more silly from the latter. Let us turn to the problem from the standpoint of the Ding an sich.
Here we have Locke's issue between the real and the nominal essence. The real essence of an object with Locke betokens three dis- tinct conceptions as bound up with three distinct motives, con- veniently describable as the rationalistic, the sensationalistic, and
6. Bk. Ill, ch. 6, sec. 29.
7. Bk. II, ch. 25, sec. 6. See the whole of this chapter.
8. Bk. IV, ch. 4.
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the term-relation motives. Under the influence of the rationalistic motive, Locke's conception of the real essence of an object grows out of the demand for an inherent principle in objects, in virtue of which objects attain to a necessary and precise determination of the number and the kind of simple ideas composing them ; " the reason whereof is plain: for how can we be sure that this or that quality is in gold when we know not what is or is not gold?" Without knowledge of such principle, we can have no object in the strict sense of the word. Each substance would present sheer diversit}r, or, if held as determined and of this or that sort, variety of determination in each sort would be the inevitable outcome, and, logically considered, each sort equally valid in its different deter- mination. Have we such ideas of substances as the necessity of the case would seem to demand ? — ideas from which their qualities and properties " would be deducible and their necessary connection known, as all the properties of a triangle depend on, and v as far as they are discoverable, are deducible from the complex idea of three lines, including a space ? " 9 Locke's answer to this question in its endless repetition, never contradicts itself : " the complex ideas we have of substances are certain collections of simple ideas that have been observed or supposed constantly to exist together. But such a complex idea cannot be the real essence of any substance. . . . This essence, from which all these properties flow (as in the case of gold), when I inquire into it and search after it, I plainly perceive I cannot discover; the furthest I can go is, only to pre- sume that, it being nothing but body, its real essence or internal constitution, on which these qualities depend, c^n be nothing but the figure, size and connection of its solid parts ; of neither of which having any distinct perception at all, can I have any idea of its essence, which is the cause that it has that particular shining yel- lowness, a greater weight than anything I know of the same bulk, and a fitness to have its color changed by the touch of quicksilver. If any one will say that the real essence and internal constitution on which these properties depend, is not the figure, size, and arrangement or connection of its solid parts, but something else, ... I am even further from having any idea of its real essence than I was before." 10 In either event, we deal with a ' supposi- tion' only, and one that Locke regards ' useless,' X1 from the stand- point under consideration. Substances consist of the nominal
9. Bk. II, ch. 31, sec. 6.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., sec. 8.
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essence only. I shall return to this matter in a later chapter, when considering Locke's counter contention that modes do have and reveal such real essences; in which contrast, to use Kant's termi- nology, substances distinguish themselves from modes as respect- ively aposteriori and apriori determinable.
From the standpoint of the sensationalistic motive, wherein the nominal essence is identified in scope with the secondary qualities, Locke sets up his contrast between simple ideas as consisting of sensible qualities and an unknown cause consisting of insensible parts. It is at this juncture that the primary qualities are com- pelled to assume their dual role; they are thought that in which " our senses fail us," and yet he is inclined to view them as mere distinctions within simple ideas. They are made to pass for simple ideas until forced to function as insensible parts, whereupon "the secondary qualities are nothing but powers depending on its primary qualities." But whether narrowly or widely defined, with Locke the nominal essence, as the knowable, is always opposed to the real essence as the unknowable; and in this motive, the real essence is our ontological particular. Hence, if the primary qual- ities persist in such identification, the same fate would naturally be theirs that Locke, without exception, visits upon the real essences in general.
But if real essences remain unknown from either of the above viewpoints in Locke, from the standpoint of the term-relation motive, Locke goes a step further and holds them as non-existent. According to this motive the meaning of the real essence is identi- fied with " that particular constitution which everything has within itself, without any relation to anything without it." Here again he denies the existence of any such essence. He does so in three distinct ways. I quote from the text in order to get the first way stated. " It is evident the internal constitution, whereon their (an object's) properties depend, is unknown to us; for to go no further than the grossest and most obvious of objects we can imagine amongst them, what is that texture of parts, that real essence, that makes lead and antimony fusible, wood and stones not? What makes lead and iron malleable, antimony and stones not ? " 12 That is to say, objects manifest genuine differences, differences hardly to be explained where we abandoned the ultimate character of terms entirely and expect mere relations to originate such differ- ences ; yet he concludes, that the supposed essence " whereon this difference in their properties depend, is unknown to us."
12. Bk. Ill, ch. 6, sec. 9.
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Objects resolve themselves into nothing but " powers " — is the second and more familiar way in which this term-relation motive gets itself formulated by him. I select a passage at random : " The simple ideas that make up our complex ideas of substances, when truly considered, are nothing but powers, however we are apt to take them for positive qualities ... all which ideas are nothing else but so many relations to other substances, and are not really in the gold (to take an instance), considered barely in itself, though they depend on those real and primary qualities of its internal constitution." 13 His disposition, which is general, (a) to resolve substances into pure relation, (b) and yet not to do so out of a need adequately to provide for inherent differences in objects ; and then (c) to save himself, to affirm an unknown inner constitution, (d) which in turn gets itself denied as a reality and a more or less "useless supposition," is the circle of thought in which he keeps eternalty revolving. Where doubt, however, still persists in his mind concerning the reality of an inner constitution or real essence, the next line of reasoning he falls back upon, according to his own statement, puts the matter conclusively and beyond all doubt: real essences do not even justify the mere supposition of their reality. It involves a statement of the relativistic principle in its so-called radical form. " Put a piece of gold anywhere by itself, separate from the reach and influence of all other bodies, it will immediately lose all its color, weight, etc. . . .Water, in which to us fluidity is an essential quality, left to itself, would cease to be fluid. . . . We are then quite out of the way when we think that things contain within themselves the qualities that appear to us in them; and we in vain search for that (inherent) constitution . . . upon which depend those qualities and powers we observe in them." 14 Viewed in one light then, substances out of all relations, reduce to zero; viewed in the other light, " no one can doubt," he holds, " that this called gold has infinite other properties not contained in any specific complex idea " 15 we may have of it. The following quo- tation, however, I take as more truly representative of Locke in this term-relation motive : " The simple qualities which make up the complex ideas being most of them powers in relation to changes which they are apt to make in or receive from other ' bodies,' are almost infinite." 16 From which his conclusion follows, that if
13. Bk. II, ch. 23, sec. 37.
14. Bk. IV, ch. 6, sec. 11.
15. Bk. II, ch. 31, sec. 10. Italics are mine.
16. Bk. Ill, ch. 9, sec. 13.
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essences exist, such essences, and such meaning as they denote, must be found within the nominal essence; the nominal essence, in the course of the process, ever widening its data beyond the secondary qualities as the sole ultimates.
We speak in general as if ideas (whether simple or complex) were determined into this or that specific determination by this or that specific thing actually existing as one, considering the specific things, as thus indicated, as of a fixed and inherent ' measure and boundary ' ; whereas, according to Locke, it is just the reverse that is true. It is specific ideas in specific union in varying situations that give a specific determination to our abstract ideas, and, accord- ing to the variety and differences actually existing among our ideas, do we find and prescribe variety and differences in the determina- tion and in the number of our objects : " every distinct abstract idea is a distinct essence." Water, when frozen, we designate as a distinct thing from water in its proper form, naming it ice. Why do we fail to do the same thing in the case of gold when a liquid and when a solid, or with jelly when a liquid and when congealed? Here, then, in Locke's claim that the idea determines the thing and not the reverse, we have (in Kant's familiar phrase in its familiar setting) a complete Copernican shift in our view of things. Locke's dogma: "nothing exists but particulars," thus finds its other ex- treme contention in him : " nothing essential to particulars." I have already suggested his resolution of the matter. It is based upon an empirical relativity and a synthetic process of thought, culminating in what may be termed his " new way of ideas " ; in the course of which process the real essence, as defined within his rationalistic motive, gets itself transferred to the nominal essence. Hence the reason for terming the nominal essence, an essence.
CHAPTER VI
LOCKE'S CONCEPTION" OF RELATION
A TERM used so freely in Locke as relation, demands definition. What does Locke understand by this term ? The question is not to be answered off-hand, nor, after due inquiry, to be answered dog- matically. If we take Hume's version of it, Locke therein denotes what in itself were a delusion. Knowledge begins with impressions. What, then, is the impression to which I can point as the impres- sion of a relation? And his conclusion is, as we know, that there are no such existing impressions, and that relations, accordingly, are fictitious, or, at best, an arbitrary or subjective importation into knowledge. This proclamation in Hume has its equally 'full proclamation in Locke. We read in Locke with endless repetition, that whether we consider objects in relation to objects or ideas in relation to ideas, at no point can we perceive a visible or necessary connection between them, except among one class of ideas only, — modes as a priori determinate. " How any thought should pro- duce a motion in body is as remote from the nature of our ideas, as how any body should produce any thought [simple ideas] in the mind. That it is so, if experience did not convince us, the con- sideration of the things themselves would never be able in the least to discover to us. These, and the like, though they have a constant and regular connection [co-existence or sequence] in the ordinary course of things, yet the connection being not discoverable in the ideas themselves . . . we can attribute their connection to nothing else but the arbitrary determination of that All-wise Agent." 1 Yet Locke, notwithstanding, devotes chapters to " ideas " of rela- tions ; speaks of a " visible connection " in respect to modes ; and, in respect to our complex ideas of substances, writes that, " when truly considered [such ideas] are only powers . . . nothing else but so many relations to other substances." 2 And, then, in his
1. Bk. IV, eh. 3, sec. 28.
2. Bk. II, ch. 24, sees. 6-12 and 37.
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37
chapter on " powers " we read this very remarkable summary of his whole position. It is so significant, yet brief, that I quote it in full. "I confess powers includes in it some kind of relation, as indeed, which of our ideas, of what kind soever, when attentively considered, does not? For our ideas of extension, duration, and number, do they not all contain in them a secret relation of the parts? Figure and motion have something relative in them much more visibly; and sensible qualities, what are they but the powers of different bodies, in relation to our perception? And, if con- sidered in the things themselves, do they not depend on the bulk, figure, texture, and motion of the parts? All which include some kind of relation in them. Our idea therefore of power, I think., may well have a place amongst .other simple ideas, and be con- sidered as one of them." 3 That is, all ideas reduce to relations ; yet that seems not to hinder them from being ideas; yes, even simple ideas, according to Locke.
There is only one place in the treatise, that I can recall, where Locke himself deliberately sets about to define the term. " Kela- tion, what ? " — is the title of the Section.4 This sounds propitious ; let us turn to it. There we read : —
" Besides the ideas, whether simple or complex, that the mind has of things, as they are in themselves, there are others it gets from their comparison one with another. . . . When the mind so considers one thing, that it does, as it were, bring it to and set it by another, and carries its view from one to the other: that is, as the words import, relation and respect. . . . And since any idea, whether simple or complex, may be the occasion why the mind thus brings two things together, and, as it were, takes a view of them at once, though still considered as distinct; therefore any of our ideas may be the foundation of relation. . . . For as I said," he adds in a following section, "relation is a way of com- paring or considering two things together, and giving one or both some appellation ( 'denomination ') from that comparison; and sometimes giving even the relation itself a name " ;5 as a result of which, Locke mentions, as some among the " innumerable kinds" of relations, causal, spatial, temporal, quantitative, qualitative, blood, legal, civic, moral 6 etc. ; and that objects, in view of their consideration under this or that relation, take on this or that dis-
3. Ibid., ch. 21, sec. 3. Italics are mine.
4. Ibid., ch. 25, sec. 1.
5. Ibid., sec. 1 and 6.
6. Ibid., ch. 26-28.
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tinction or denomination, " although it be not contained in the real (' positive or absolute') existence of things, but is something extraneous or superinduced." T Thus Locke, upon the basis of some real or fancied uniformities or continuities, concedes to thought the capacity to organize our objects into a world where mutual implication and abstract dependence may come to reveal a whole set of new distinctions (denominations) in our objects; but they are distinctions which exist through thought and for thought only, and this conclusion Locke insists upon over and over again: they are merely superinductions ; they in no way alter, modify, or transform the things themselves; thought and facts have no com- merce ; " nothing really exists but particulars."
Our first conclusion, then, in answer to the question : "relations what ? " stands out sharply : relations are the pure products of thought, and result from comparing one object with another; but since nothing but particulars, by dogma, are real; and, further, since particulars, by dogma, in their determination, are wholly independent of thought and its processes, relations in that sense are not only non-real and non-existent, but are a deliberate and specious falsification of reality, — Locke's reality as ontological particulars.
But are they the pure products of thought? If so, why speak of a necessity enjoined upon the mind in the presence of change " to collect a power somewhere " to account for it, if no such thing as necessity exists? Or where does that necessity arise if wholly irrelevant to particulars? Do causality, space, time, and morality exist, or not? Are they something, or mere nothing? They are some of his typical relations; but what is their status and part in the scheme of things ? Then again, if relations are pure products of thought, why designate the " relations " pertaining to modes as " visible," and those pertaining to substances <c undiscoverable " ? If relations are non-existent and invisible as fact-reality within the sphere of substances, just what is that " visible " relation affirmed by Locke as existent within the sphere of modes? Is the relation element in this latter sphere " visible " solely because in this sphere, as Locke inclines to preserve it, its facts are equally as visible or invisible : so that " visible " in this sphere is equivalent to the " invisible " in the sphere of substances ? Then if so, what right has Locke to identify the higher type of knowledge and reality with modes, as he does in Book IV, where he specifically deals with the matter, and to identify a disrupted and makeshift sort of reality with substances, the whole issue there determined by this affirmed
7. Ibid., ch. 25, sec. 8.
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difference in the kind of their relations? These questions are exceedingly pertinent. Let us see whether an answer to them is accessible in Locke, keeping in mind, however, that our present problem is merely to get at Locke's full conception of the term rela- tion. Other issues will abide their proper place and time.
THE VISIBLE RELATIONS OF MODES: WHAT IS THEIR KIND; WHAT
THEIR REALITY
We may roam at large in Book IV, and almost on every page we will find ourselves confronted by the statement that modes are essentially different from substances ; the former pertaining wholly to reason, and are its offsprings; the latter pertaining wholly to experience, as divorced from reason, and in turn wholly its off- springs. Then we will also habitually encounter there, the uncrit- icized and unanalyzed assertion that the " relations " of the one are " visible," and the copiously criticized and analyzed fact that the relations of the other are totally invisible. Such is the situation. A passage or two from the text will suffice our purpose.
" Is it true of the ideas of a triangle that its three angles are equal to two right ones? Then it is true also of a triangle, wherever it really exists. Whatever other figure exists, that is not exactly answerable to the idea of a triangle in his mind, is not at all concerned in that proposition; and therefore he is certain all his knowledge concerning such ideas is real knowledge; because, intending things no further than they agree with those his ideas, he is sure what he knows concerning those figures, when they have barely an ideal existence in his mind, will hold true of them also when they have real existences in matter." 8
The passage is a very compact statement of his doctrine of a priori modes, and the doctrine is a fixture in Locke. Its outcome : reality identified with ideality, and because alone fulfilling his conceived requirements of knowledge proper (that which is not mere opinion) identified by him with reality in its most perfect form. These generalities aside, let us get down to particulars.
The doctrine, in the first place, asserts a certain independence in our thought activity, capable of forming ideas, not directly depend- ing upon sense, nor directly responsible to it, and, within its own province, having as it were, its own codes, patterns, and standards of reality. Hence if moral knowledge is the knowledge of modes,
8. Bk. IV, ch. 4, sec. 6.
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and the}:, " as other modes, be of our own making, what strange notions will there be of justice and temperance ! No con- fusion at all/7 for in the case of morality as in the case of the triangle, as he goes on to say, " we intend things no further than as they are conformable to our ideas,'5 9 and if things are not con- formable, so much the worse for them.
"\Ve may grant all this originating power of thought and the reality of its objects as thus determined; but because their parts (because more highly simplified in their reality) seem more coer- cive in their mutual dependence and implication, are we entitled for that reason to judge these relations of a type generically distinct? Does the uniqueness of relation, as compared with fact-reality, lose any of that uniqueness in this new setting of them? And if not, then the supposed distinction between visible and invisible rela- tions, as one of kind, vanishes, and only one question more remains to be answered. Whence that necessity that leads Reason to produce "its modes, such as they are ? And I can think of no other answer than the one to be asserted in connection with the other type of rela- tions; namely, the necessity resides in certain uniformities, and in certain " constant and regular union " of parts ; and, if in response to the demand of the one type of uniformities and union of parts, the mind, or " we intend things no further," does it follow that we or the mind ought not to " intend things further " ? Sup- pose we determine that the mind should " intend things further," be}^ond a mere contemplation of certain abstract ideas with their habitudes and relations; or suppose a mutual sequence observed among substances, forces the mind " to collect a power somewhere " to account for it; are we to suppose the uniformities of the one sphere, that of modes, share in a prerogative which makes them more real or binding, than the uniformities of the other ? And are we further to suppose, that, in the one case, our objects are, there- fore, purely a product of the mind; and objects, in the case of sub- stances, purely products unaffected by thought, — Locke's ontological particulars? And if Locke himself does not allow us to persist in such a divorce, shall we conclude with him, that, " apart from our abstract ideas, no determination in our substances is possible ? " 10 In other words, shall we credit Locke with the justice of knowing his own mind in terming his philosophy " the new way of ideas " ? Further, shall we credit that " new way " with the same Coperni- can inversion of object and idea, that Kant credits himself with
9. Ibid., sec. 5 and 9.
10. Bk. Ill, eh. 6, sees. 1-8.
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originating? Then the claim: "identity suited to the idea "n contains bound up in itself the deepest utterance from Locke : rela- tions are generated in a thought situation and relate to every object in so far as they are grasped and comprehended by thought; and what an object may be apart from such a thought construct of it, — for that answer we must turn to the destructive and profitless analysis of a Hume, or in Locke himself, where his uncriticized dogmatism throws a confusing shadow upon his brighter vision, fully elaborated by him as we shall come to see. Hence, in his efforts to discover where the unity of objects in general lie, physical, vegetative, and animal, including that of personal identity, he does not seek to find a " real " essence, nor an empirical unity (an impression in Hume's sense), but a thought-constructed and a thought-determined unity. Relations stand for determinations, abstract or concrete, which the mind feels itself privileged, as well as constrained, to take note, in any effort to know its objects and to organize them ; beyond which end, we may grant, " the mind need not intend things further," — beyond the articulated needs of an articulated self for an articulated world. Thus does his ration- alistic motive, by stages, get itself thoroughly fused with his pos- sivistic motive. It reflects itself in the scope accorded by Locke to conduct, to the nominal essence, and to synthesis.
11. Bk. II, ch. 27.
Ill
ANTI-RELATIVISTIC MOTIVES IN LOCKE
CHAPTER Til
IDEAS versus KNOWLEDGE AXD MEAXIXG
THE tendency in Locke to resolve even simple ideas into rela- tions finds a counter motive in him making df -ideas the self- sufficient and all other reality a mere consequence. Thus Knowl- edge, in his restricted sense of the word, " is founded in the habi- tudes and relations of abstract ideas " ; * Meaning is " the compar- ing or considering of two things together," whereby a new and irrelevant type of reality results, commonly designated by him as equivalent to the term signification. I described it as irrelevant. By that I simply mean that " it is not contained in the real exist- ence of things (the original ideas), but something extraneous and superinduced." 2 It is to this self-sufficient and originating char- acter of our ideas, in their affirmed independence of relations to which I wish now to draw attention. Upon what ground does he rest this contention?
" To improve our knowledge," says Locke, " is, I think, to get and fix in our minds clear, distinct and complete ideas . . . and thus, perhaps, without any other principle, but barely considering those perfect ideas, and by comparing them one with another, find- ing their agreement or disagreement, and their several relations and habitudes, we shall get more true and clear knowledge by the conduct of this one rule than by taking in principles, and thereby putting our minds into the disposal of others.'' 3 If our ideas are to be " clear and complete " before they enter into relations, the
1. Bk. IV, ch. 12, sec. 7.
2. Bk. II, ch. 25, sec. 8.
3. Bk. IV, ch. 12, sec. 6.
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relations could scarcely be calculated to make them more so. The implication is evident: ideas or terms elaborate themselves, seek to make themselves "clear and complete" outside of the knowl- edge or relation situation.
This whole motive crystallizes itself very clearly when we bring Locke's triple 4 division of perception into mind ; the perception of an idea; the perception of " a visible connection " (Knowledge) ; and the perception of signification (Meaning). In neither case do we appear to get beyond a "perception5'; and the difference between them is one, not of the Understanding, but of three dis- tinct types of reality thus perceived. Let us, if possible, get at the matter from its very roots.
I think to find his apotheosis of the idea to issue from its union of his two sharply antithetical convictions, — his possivistic reac- tionary one: nothing exists but particulars; and his rationalistic one, that certain and absolute knowledge involves an a priori deter- mination of parts and their mutual and inevitable implication/ Subsequently the former conviction, dogmatic in form, gets itself transformed into or substituted by his critical view, that simple ideas constitute our ultimates. The simple ideas in turn unite themselves with the rationalistic criterion of truth which centers itself in " clear and distinct " ideas. Nor is there any effort on Locke's part to consider simple ideas as otherwise than synonymous with " clear and distinct " ideas ; and if either motive gains the ascendancy, it is the rationalistic one. Consider his general account of what constitutes the unity of our simple ideas ; namely, " that it be considered as one representation or picture in the mind/' which account gets itself stated in the very opening chapters of Book II and repeats itself without modification throughout the Essay. Particulars, simple ideas, clear and distinct ideas, and a priori ideas —these four prescribe the locus of a distinct phase of his thought. Each in turn, or the four in fusion, as the case may be, pretend to what is final and ultimate in reality. They need nothing to make them more " perfect and complete " ; they are perfect and complete in themselves ; and knowledge and meaning, either irrele- vant incidents to them, or necessary consequences of them ; knowl- edge and meaning thus issuing forth as two new and distinct types of reality, which, if any sort of reality at all, must, like ideas in general, be modes of perception. Thus, in his reaction to " abuse of words," he sends us for remed}7^ to " clear and distinct " ideas,
4. See Bk. II, ch. 21, sec. 5.
4A
and likewise in his re-action to authority or general principles and maxims of all land. That he should also have been driven to the same source for knowledge (such as his notion of knowledge is) seems inevitable. Thus we read that ideas are not dependent upon, or the consequence of, the knowledge situation, but " knowledge is the consequence of the ideas (be they what they will) that are in our minds . . . that wherever we can suppose such a creature as man is, endowed with such faculties, and thereby furnished with such ideas as we have, we conclude, he must needs when he applies his thoughts to the consideration of his ideas, know the truth of certain propositions that will arise from the agreement or disagreement which he will perceive in his own ideas." 5 The " neAv way of ideas " does not characterize his doctrine amiss whether we consider this motive in his thinking or whether we consider the far more approved and developed ones. But we must not fail to note, that as a matter of general theory with him, it is primarily the " way of ideas " to knowledge, and not primarily the " way of ideas " to objects; and yet objects, in their characterization of modes and substances, are the central interest with him. Fail- ing, as he does, to make the idea dependent upon its relations, even while making the relations dependent upon, although wholly external to, ideas, the knowledge said to result really gets itself set up as an entirely new thing. Hence to keep knowledge and objects apart, or to make of knowledge an end independent of objects, is an antithesis in Locke that yields nothing but contra- diction and confusion till we come to his doctrine of " Sorts " in Book III. Influenced by his mistaken notion of knowledge, his aim in Book II is not to consider his simple ideas, as essentially determinations of things, but as the elements "out of which is made all its other knowledge.''' c Or, with clear and distinct ideas the touchstone of reality, simple ideas become the means of apprais- ing knowledge, such as it is : he demands any one to produce a com- plex idea, which, in so far as it is valid, is " not made out of those simple ideas."
Let us consider this matter in a slightly different light; and this were best done by considering the matter from the standpoint of a proposition or predication. It will guard against the con- viction that Locke's definition of knowledge, as the agreement of disagreement of ideas, is mere jingle, and provide against the
5. Bk. IV, ch. 11, sec. 14. Italics are mine.
6. Bk. II, ch. 7, sec. 10.
opposite conviction that true predication is therein* involved or understood.
There are two sorts of general propositions, .says Locke, the truth of which, it is affirmed, we get to know with perfect certainty. " The one is, of those trifling propositions [otherwise called, analytical or explicative propositions] which have a certainty in them, but it is only a verbal certainty, but not instructive. And, secondly, we can know the truth and so may be certain in proposi- tions, which affirm something of another, which is a necessary con- sequence of its precise complex idea, but not contained in it: as that the external angles of all triangles is bigger than either of the opposite internal angles." 7 Modes are said to yield this type of instructive propositions, which Locke then sets up in radical contrast to all general propositions based on substances, as, for example, that " gold is yellow ; " which, if they are certain, are trifling; and if instructive, are uncertain.8 We have trifling prop- ositions, in respect to substances, " when a part of the complex idea is predicated of the name of the whole," as " when the genus is predicated of the species, or more comprehensive of less compre- hensive terms. For what information, what knowledge, carries this proposition in it : viz., Lead is a metal, to a man who knows the complex idea the name lead stands for? . . . Indeed to a man that knows the signification of the word metal, and not of the word lead, it is a shorter way to explain the signification of the word lead. . . . But, before a man makes any proposition, he is sup- posed to understand the terms he uses in it [that is, he is sup- posed to make his ideas te clear, distinct, complete, and perfect " before they enter a proposition or enter the knowledge situation] or else he talks like a parrot, and making a noise by imitation and framing certain sounds, which he has learnt of others; but not as a rational creature, using them for signs of ideas which he has in his mind " 9 [If only he would evolve them, I suppose.]
This passage is illuminating and throws Locke's whole position in full relief. All reality begins and ends with ideas; that pred- ication is explication, and that explication (and, hence, predica- tion) does not realize itself as a fact, save where ideas are already " complete and perfect " before they enter or attempt to enter the knowledge situation, — explication and knowledge situation being one in meaning; that entering the knowledge situation is not for
7. Bk. IV, ch. 8, see. 8.
8. Ibid., sec. 9.
9. Ibid., sees. 4-7.
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the purpose of studying objects in their changing value or character due to new relations to other objects thus noted, discovered, or forced upon them (the proper role of predication, fully recognized in his account of Sorts), but that predication is merely an explica- tion of what already exists in a completed form or gets thus to exist, but in and through some inner developing or dynamic motive of their own, and wholly outside of the knowledge situation.
Here then in Locke we have his one, seriously to be considered anti-relativistic motive. The importance, or rather, prominence of the contention with him demands, in the first place, that we inquire more narrowly into this a priori claim. For, as this claim implies, ideas (objects) are not products involving relations and knowledge. Inquiry into this - contention constitutes the subject- matter of the next chapter. It suffices to observe here, that even though knowledge and meaning are taken by him in the light of " extraneous superinductions," this claim acquires force only to the extent in which the thought-process appears transferred within the periphery of the ideas themselves. This motive in Locke is not sensationalistic, but rationalistic and a priori. How this matter ultimately gets to resolve itself in his pages, our future chapters are required to help make clear. At this point, however, be it said, that in this conceived self-sufficient character of our ideas, we find in him the one extreme anti-relativistic motive, and, such as it is, the direct opposite of his general contention, that ideas or objects are nothing but " powers," that is, relations.
CHAPTER VIII
A UNO 1. 1 T I- K XOWLEDGE I
LOCKE'S claim of an absolute knowledge bulks forth with large proportions, giving occasion in Book IV for the central problem there set up between knowledge proper and knowledge as mere Opinion or Judgments of Probability.
The distinction made rests upon the assertion, as expressed in Kantian terminology, that certain ideas (modes) are a priori deter- minable, and others (substances) are a posteriori determinable. Thus he writes : " In some of our ideas there are certain relations, habitudes, and connections, so visibly included in the nature of the ideas themselves, that we cannot conceive them separable from them by any power whatsoever. And in these only, we are capable of certain and universal knowledge. Thus the idea of a right- lined triangle necessarily carries with it an equality of its angles to two right ones. Nor can we conceive this relation, this connec- tion of these two ideas to be possibly mutable, or to depend on any arbitrary power which of choice made it thus or could make it otherwise " ; * whereas in respect to " the coherence and continuity of the parts of matter; the production of sensation in us of colors and sounds, etc., by impulse and motion; nay, the original rules and communication of motion being such wherein we can discover no natural connection with any ideas we have, we cannot but ascribe them to the arbitrary will and good pleasure of the Wise Architect." : Ideas of the latter type, when joined together in a proposition, because their " connection and dependencies, being not discoverable in our ideas, we can have but an experimental knowledge of them/' All such propositions are held as limited in scope, conditional in character, and full of uncertainty and pos-«
1. Bk. IV, eh. 8, sec. 8. Italics are mine.
2. Ibid., ch. 3, sec. 29.
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sible error. " Certainty and universality " in knowledge only exists where, " by the mere contemplation of any of our ideas," I am able to affirm something of another idea " which is a necessary conse- quence of its precise complex idea, but not contained in it," : although " certainty " without " universality " is attained in the other types of ideas in our judgments of " particulars " : " as when our senses are actually employed about any object, we do know that it exists; so by our memory, we may be assured that hereto- fore things that effected our senses have existed." 4 But judgments of " particulars " aside, which do not here concern us, " certainty and universality " in knowledge, if anything more than verbal or trifling, is possible only with that type of ideas where, as stated, by the mere contemplation of an idea, we are able to affirm some- thing of another idea " which is a necessary consequence of its precise complex idea but not contained in it." Where such a priori determination of an idea is not possible, we do not have knowl- edge in his use of the word, as identified with " certainty and universality," but mere " opinion " or judgments of probability. Thus considered and thus distinguished, he regards knowledge possible only in respect to modes, in truth whereof mathematics is cited as an accomplished fact, and " demonstrated morality " a pet faith and conviction of his; whereas "propositions that are made about substances, if they are certain, are for the most part trifling ; and, if they are instructive, are uncertain, and such as we can have no knowledge of their real truth, however much constant obser- vation and analogy may assist our judgment in guessing." 5 The fact of this distinction in Locke, in its asserted reality and in its nature, is beautifully summarized in. the following brief citation. Further citations would contain little more than a monotonous variant thereof. He writes : " The want of ideas of their real essences sends us from our thoughts to the things themselves as they exist. Experience here must teach me what reason cannot." 6 Relativity will be found the outcome of both aspects of this doc- trine; latent in respect to modes; explicit in respect to substances. It is necessary to add, however, that substances do not get their full and proper elaboration from him in Book IV. For that we must turn to the Chapter on Sorts. And the same may be said
3. Ibid., ch. 8, sec, 8.
4. Ibid., ch. 11, see. 11.
5. Ibid., ch. 8, sec. 9. Italics are mine.
6. Ibid., ch. 12, sec. 9. Italics are mine.
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in regard to modes ; here, the former gets its reality despoiled ; the latter, assigned a reality which simulates the rejected innate ideas. Locke distinguishes between them in two respects.
1. Concerning their origin.
2. Concerning their foundation.
1. In regard to origin, modes originate with or in the mind, and, in their quality, present the status of " real " essences ; whereas substances have their origin in the simple ideas, and, hence, of the so-called " nominal " ^essence only.
2. In regard to their respective foundation, modes are held as grounded in abstract reason, and involve for their certainty, (a) "the mere evidence of the thing itself" or (b) the principle of Inconceivability. As for substances, their foundation is said to be experience as divorced from Reason.
FOUNDATION OF MODES
Locke gives the matter incidental rather than deliberate atten- tion. He merely speaks of a " visible " connection between certain of our ideas and the lack of such " visible " connection among other ideas ; but he nowhere attempts to articulate what this asser- tion appears to involve. Thus he writes in his Third Letter to Still ingneet : " To perceive the agreement or disagreement of two ideas and not to perceive the agreement or disagreement of two ideas is, I think, a criterion to distinguish what a man is certain of from what he is not certain of. Has your Lordship any other or better criterion to distinguish certainty from uncertainty?" That mere awareness is the principle here involved, seems obvious. In other cases, where the idea of a rational foundation comes to expression, as I stated, it appears to be the principle of Incon- ceivability.6 One additional quotation in this connection must also suffice. " We cannot conceive the relation, the connection of these two ideas (speaking of certain parts of a triangle), to be possibly mutable, or to depend on any arbitrary power which of choice made it thus or could make it otherwise." They stand for reason, as it were, objectified and inherent in the very nature of this class of things. But as Locke was seen to take his simple ideas more or less for granted (logical data, rather than psychological), so with
6. The connection between ideas of the a priori type yield a ' ' certainty every one finds to be so great that he cannot imagine, and therefore not require a greater." Bk. IV, ch. 2, sec. 1.
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the fact of consciousness as awareness or perception, he merely accepts its deliverance as a fact that is ultimate, and does not, save incidentally, make either of them a subject of special inquiry. Cer- tain connections are affirmed by him as " visible/' and others not, and solely because " visible " claimed by him to be underived, unconditioned, and final. They are then forthwith accepted and described by him as constituting knowledge that is absolute. But when we inquire into this alleged distinction within connections, we find that the whole matter resolves itself into the claim that in certain objects, as in the case of a triangle, parts are found mutually and inevitably to involve and implicate each other; whereas, in the case of substance, he puts himself to great pains to prove that the direct opposite is found to characterize its parts ; they are discrete and disparate, without rhyme or rhythm, and at no time permit the mind, by the mere contemplation of the one, to pass to the other. He fails, however, in this affirmed dis- tinction, to take note of three significant facts: first, that the tri- angle, like any other object, is a construct ; secondly, that it is rela- tive to the mind, whose principle of self -evidence, although in itself ultimate, involves, in any given situation, the principle of exclusion or inconceivability, and hence is inherently relative and conditioned, whether such conditions remain fixed or changeable ; and thirdly, that it is dependent in this specific instance, upon a derived and fixed conception of space, which conception, if altered, would subject the triangle to the same vicissitudes of change that any other object finds itself exposed to share. Allowing for a differ- ence in degree, I can see no reason why the substance gold, as a construct, deliberately held fixed to the exclusion of change, should any less successfully implicate its parts than is claimed of the parts of a triangle. It may be affirmed of the triangle that its sides implicate the angles in a way that weight and the color of my fixed concept of gold would not implicate each other. But in these two situations, is the difference at bottom any other than the fact that the principle of inconceivability is differently involved? I admit a difference of degree, but not a difference of kind. Nor is Locke himself blind to the contention I here raise. Such passages as the following, wherein it is declared that the principle of uni- formity is involved in mathematics no less than in knowledge of substances, help to destroy, by Locke's own confession, the very essence of the issue propounded. " // the perception that the same ideas will eternally have the same habitudes and relations be not a sufficient ground of knowledge, there could be no knowledge of gen-
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era! propositions in mathematics; for no mathematical demonstra- tion could be other than particular: and when a man has demon- strated any proposition concerning one triangle and circle his knowledge would not reach beyond that particular diagram/' 7
Concerning his other claim, that of Inconceivability, nothing more needs to be said. An object may be absolute for me because I cannot conceive it to be other than it is. But then at what point, pray, is that object in my conception of it, or in my inability to conceive it otherwise, unconditioned ? And to concede this point, is to concede the sole point at issue between a relativistic and an absolute view of an object. The absolute point of view does not only require the possibility of an unconditioned and an undeter- mined object, but an unconditioned mode of perception or concep- tion as well. But, after all, Locke's interest centers itself primarily in the determination of objects such as they are. Let us then, without more ado, turn to his account of modes as having their origin in Eeason and not in Experience. As this antithesis is a false one, and one that is fruitless, I shall not burden the reader with additional quotations. Modes, in their proper character, as has been stated, shall be taken up for inquiry in future chapters; and so with substances.
ORIGIN OF a priori MODES
Relevant points, scattered throughout the Essay with endless repetition, may be embraced under the following items: (a) that these ideas are of a real essence; (b) that they are ideas of Reason and not of Experience; (c) "that wherever we can suppose such a creature as man is, endowed with such faculties, and thereby furnished with such ideas as we have," the same knowledge must follow; (d) "for the same ideas have immutably the same rela- tions and habitudes," and (e) knowledge is a consequence of ideas, and not the reverse; hence (/) these ideas are primary, and not the result of knowledge. And lastly, (g) modes are of the Mind's own making, (h) made very arbitrarily. Consider these items, and the conclusions to be drawn are, either (1) that the mind out of nothing, under necessity or at pleasure, creates some- thing; or (2) that it has native or original ideas of its own, and hence creates nothing but merely unfolds what is latent; or (3) that
7. Bk. IV, ch. 1, sec. 9.
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it, within a given experience, lias the faculty to create something new, as conditioned within and conditioned without. Which con- clusion shall we accept ? The first conclusion is absurd ; the second, in contradiction with his denial of innate ideas; and the third, impossible in the light of the antithesis he here sets up between Reason and Experience. To conclude, then, as we did in a previous chapter, that the Mind, according to Locke, has an originating activity, seems to invite least violence to all the facts of the case. This is our positive conclusion. It is only when we ask with Locke, as we must in Book IY, what an originating capacity may achieve where it has no data, that this positive conclusion is apt to get itself overlooked in Locke. Modes and abstract ideas are its products, it is there affirmed. But if so, then what constitutes its data? In Book IV, nothing else remains to draw upon for such data than Reason as opposed to Experience. But where is Reason, as opposed to Experience, to get that data? From innate ideas? Hardly would Locke admit this. But yet, what other alternative lies open to us for choice? As a result of this dilemma, modes and abstract ideas expose themselves to the necessity of getting themselves looked upon here as at once data and product, as, at once, One and the Many.
SUBSTANCES AS DEPENDANT UPON EXPERIENCE DIVORCED FROM
REASON
I turn from a priori modes to consider a posteriori substances. With substances, Locke ceases to be merely dogmatic.
Knowledge, as we were told, depends upon the fulfilment of two conditions. First, that we, " by the mere contemplation of any idea," can affirm another " which is a necessary consequence of its precise complex idea, but not contained in it." 8 Or secondly, that " connections and dependencies " must be " visible," and that where " connections and dependencies are not thus discoverable in our ideas, we can have but an experimental knowledge of them." It presupposes that our account of knowledge, in respect to modes, was positive in its outcome, whereas the account proved negative, save for the one positive conclusion we drew above in respect to his view of the mind as originating and form-giving. These convic- tions, however, furnish the setting of his inquiries concerning sub-
8. Bk. IV, ch. 6, sec. 11.
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stances in Book IV. I begin my account with a passage from the text: "Had we such ideas of substances as to know what real constitutions produce these sensible qualities we find in them., and how these qualities flowed from thence, we could, by the specific ideas of their real essence in our minds, more certainly find out their properties and discover what qualities they had or had not, than we can now by our senses : and to know the properties of gold, it would be no more necessary that gold should exist and that we should make experiments upon it, than it is nevessary for the knowing of the properties of a triangle, that a triangle should exist in any matter, the idea in our minds would serve for one as well as the other. But we are so far from being admitted into the secrets of nature, that we scarce so much as ever approach the entrance towards them." How monotonous this strain is in Locke, the projection of the a priori ideal in respect to substances and its rejection, must be perfectly familiar. Yet substances as of this or that collection of simple ideas do exist : How then do we come by them ?
(a) THE DISPARATE AND DISCRETE CHARACTER OF SUBSTANCES
" The simple ideas whereof our complex ideas of substances are made up are such as carry with them, in their own nature, no visible necessary connection or inconsistency with any other simple ideas, whose co-existence with them we would inform ourselves about. . . . Besides our ignorance of the primary qualities on which depend all their secondary qualities, there is yet another and more incurable part of ignorance, . . . and that is, that there is no discoverable connection between any secondary quality and those primary qualities which it depends on. ... We are so far from knowing what figure, size, or motion of parts produce a yellow color, a sweet taste, or a sharp sound, that we cannot by any means conceive how any size, figure, or motion of any par- ticles, can possibly produce in us the ideas of any color, taste or sound whatsoever; there is no conceivable connection between the one and the other. . . . How any thought should produce a motion in body is as remote from the nature of our ideas, as how any body should produce any thought in the mind. ... In vain, therefore, shall we endeavor to discover by our ideas (the only true way of certain and universal knowledge) what other ideas are to be found constantly joined with that of our complex idea of any substance.
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... So, that, let our complex idea of any species of substance be what it will, we can hardly, from the simple ideas contained in it, evidently determine the necessary co-existence of any other quality whatsoever. Our knowledge in all these inquiries reaches very little further than our experience. . . . That it is so, if experience did not convince us, the consideration of the things themselves would never be able in the least to discover to us." 9 But with ideas of substances lacking an inherent constitution, and also lacking " discoverable connections " between them or their parts, our con- clusion is :
(6) IDE AS OF SUBSTAXCES ARBITRARY PRODUCTS AXD INADEQUATE
e< Distinct ideas of the several sorts of bodies that fall under the examination of our senses perhaps we may have: but adequate ideas, I suspect, we have not of any one amongst them. . . . Hence no science of bodies." 10 They are inadequate, no matter what specific determination we fix upon, because we do not know, in virtue of an object's possible relations, what qualities properly be- long to it and which do not. " N"o one who hath considered the properties of bodies in general, or of gold in particular, can doubt that this called gold has infinite other properties not contained in that complex idea " that we, in any specific case, may decide upon. " So that if we make our complex idea of gold a body yel- low, fusible, ductile, weighty and fixed, we shall be at the same uncertainty concerning solubility in aqua regia, and for this reason : since we can never, from the consideration of the ideas themselves, with certainty affirm or deny of a body whose complex idea is made up of yellow, very weighty, etc., that it is soluble in aqua regia; and so on of the rest of its qualities." 12
The disparate and discrete character, then, of our ideas, the indefinite and inexhaustible number of them that may, upon equal ground, come to form a part of any specific determination of sub- stances, and the flux thus of necessity projected into our sub- stances, and his assumption that such is not the case with modes, constitute the ground upon which Locke forces the sharp antithesis between modes and substances, or " abstract ideas and their rela-
9. Bk. IV, ch. 3.
10. Ibid., sec. 26.
11. Bk. II, ch. 31, sec. 10.
12. Bk. IV, ch. 6, sec. 9.
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tions " and " matters-of-fact." Hence, instead of instructive a priori judgments being possible in respect to substances, he forces the contrast or antithesis to a point that make substances seem in Book IV as little else than a highly and equally capricious fluctua- tion of parts. If only " we had such ideas of substances as to know what real constitution produce those sensible qualities we find in them/' 1S then all would be well, so Locke keeps repeating, and certainty, adequacy and universality in respect to substance attain- able. But substances have no such central core of reality, and, then, he concludes, that they have no adequacy, no fixity, no truth, or reality at all. NOT can the substitution of judgments of proba- bility for this affirmed lack of proper knowledge alter or improve the situation any. If substances are of a pure, unregulated flux in the one case, they continue pure, unregulated flux in the other. And the question now is, not how would we, but how does Locke himself handle this situation? This is the subject proper of Book III and of a later chapter.
Suppose we grant Locke that no abstract consideration of an object can yield an adequate one, — for such is the mode of his approach and such the conclusion here drawn. Does it neces- sarily follow that an abstract consideration and determination of an object is the only proper one, or that adequacy of an object implies a theoretical exhaustiveness of its infinite possible rela- tions? We get two distinct resolutions of this matter from Locke in Book IV, one that is sceptical in its outcome and the other that is positive and relativistic. I shall consider the sceptical issue first.
THE PRIMACY OF CONDUCT
He writes : " The way of getting and improving our knowl- edge in substances only by experience and history, which is all that the weakness of our faculties . . . can attain to, makes me suspect that natural philosophy is not capable of being made a science . . . from whence it is obvious to conclude . . . that morality is the proper science and business of mankind in gen- eral." 14 Namely, in the defeat of theory or science turn to con- duct for truth and reality. This demands a word.
13. Ibid., sec. 10.
14. Ibid., ch. 12, sees. 10-11.
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In this deference, or better, abdication of knowledge to con- duct, we have a lurking fallacy. When we say knowledge must subordinate itself to conduct, the assertion has a certain perti- nency when a needful corrective of a one-sided, opposite tendency; but beyond that it has no whit more pertinency than to say that conduct must subordinate itself to knowledge. If the principle of relativity, erroneously construed or applied, compasses the bank- ruptcy of knowledge in theory, we cannot thereafter logically ignore this defeat of knowledge and make it do service in a sphere, sup- posedly different, as if conduct itself were not disrupted as well as the other objects. If its supposed validity (that of the principle) was the means whereby we proved knowledge a failure, then knowl- edge does not cease being a failure, and as a failure, totally useless, when made to minister to conduct, even when granted that con- duct itself remained undisrupted (as if the principle of relativity did not apply to conduct as to all objects in general). Besides, to speak of conduct in general is to speak of an abstraction as mytho- logical as the abstraction involved in the notion " matter." For con- duct, if it exists, exists in " sorts/' as Locke would say, and how get the " sorts " of conduct denned, apart from knowledge, or apart from the abstract idea, as he would state it, which constitutes the essence of each sort, if knowledge has previously been declared a failure ? It is not logical to blow hot and cold with the same prin- ciple. Knowledge, if not the pretended failure, may truly subserve conduct; but conduct no less truly does subserve knowledge, when it is conduct, rather than some other object, that demands a deter- mination, and without a specific determination (again to speak in Locke's own language) " particular beings, considered barely in themselves, may at once be everything or nothing.'' 15 Besides, the principle of relativity disclaims the possibility of any absolute not limited and restricted. Otherwise accepted, it is a matter of bare faith and a matter of blind volition, but not a matter of knowl- edge. For how could it be a " matter of knowledge " when our very principle of knowledge declares that there can be no absolute with- out limitation and restriction, and yet conduct would seem to set itself up as an Absolute without limitations and restrictions? Then we might further ask : Does it belong to the class substances or mixed modes ? To one of them or to simple ideas it must belong,- if reality had thus been exhaustively outlined by him. And so, instead of having conduct in reserve as a place of safe retreat,
15. Bk. Ill, ch. 6; sec. 5.
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when the world, otherwise reared by knowledge, collapses, he really has nothing in reserve but a bare, empty abstraction, just as bare and empty as the notion " matter," for example. Such, to my mind, is the fallacy; the truth contained in the conduct-reference this: that the ends, aims and values of life, ^is revealed in conduct, cannot be prevented from reflecting themselves in the form, char- acter, and structure of things as of this or that sort; that the reality that thus reflects itself in the various sorts is no less cognitive in quality than sense-perceptions; and, according to the principle of relativity, may be either more or less real than sense-perceptions, as being a thing, in large measure, as dependent upon other things as other things in turn are dependent upon it. I shall return to this particular issue in subsequent chapters.
This general conclusion is confirmed in Locke's positive solu- tion of the above-mentioned theoretical defeat. The note is a recur- rent one and a brief citation will suffice for a statement of the position. " Our faculties being suited, not to the full extent of being, nor to a perfect, clear, comprehensive knowledge of things free from all doubt and scruple; but to the preservation of us, in whom they are, and accommodated to the use of life, they serve to our purpose well enough, if they will but give us certain notice of those things which are convenient or inconvenient to us. . . . So that this evidence is as great as we can desire, being as certain to us as our pleasure or pain, i.e., happiness or misery; beyond which we have no concernment either of knowing or being." 16 In other words, instead of defining an object's truth, reality, and adequacy or inadequacy in abstraction and in its isolation, he seeks here to define them in terms of a purpose, in terms of a limit or condition which our ' needs ' impose. But even in this shift in his position, it may be held, he has not gained anything, except to extend his principle of relativity to include a new source of change or determination: a further determination of objects in reference to our needs, constitution, or ends. Instead of less flux, then, we ought really to expect more. And, if not, may we ask why? It does not introduce more flux, because he assumes a certain fixity in such needs, constitution, or ends. But by what right has he to assume a fixity in these objects and fail to assume a higher degree of fixity than he does in objects in general? And suppose we answer, by reference to experience, that a fixity is here recognized, not recognized in respect to objects in general ; that my own needs,
16. Bk. IV, ch. 11, sec. 8; ch. 12, sec. 11; Bk. II, eh. 23, sees. 12-13.
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constitution,, and ends fluctuate less than such an object as a stone, let us say; and then we may ask further: is this true? And if not true, we have gained one* vast admission in respect to sub- stances : the collections of ideas, constituting this or that substance, do not share equally in* their degree of stability or flux, and this Locke himself tacitly admits in his account of primary and sec- ondary ideas and explicitly admits or presents in his empirical and constructive relativity. Moreover, Locke does not deny that things " proceed regularly " 17 and that " we may conclude do act by a law set them." 18 He merely insists upon the fact, that, even if they act by a law set them, it is " a law that we know not." 19 It is thus the sensuous unknowability and not the non-existence of a law or order or union of parts that Locke insists upon.
The reality, truth, adequacy, and certainty of simple ideas in general, he defines in the same way. They are real, etc., for the reason, as he repeats over and over again, " that they represent to us things under those appearances which they are fitted to pro- duce in us, whereby we are enabled to distinguish the sorts of par- ticular substances, to discern the state they are in, and so to take them for our necessities, and apply them to our uses." : Objects are thus regarded as partaking of certainty and adequacy when we hold them fixed in a certain definite and restricted context, of whicli context it forms an integral part. Instead of defining an object's adequacy or inadequacy in abstraction, wherein however we are really at pains to seek its definition in an unlimited and unbounded context, Locke here again seeks to establish the validity of defining it, according to needs, in a limited and specific context, and the context itself of a contracted or expanded boundary, as the case may be or demand. The a priori element which he felt must exist, and exist at the heart of things in order to set their limits and bounds and fixity, we now find, by this other view of his, to center in certain uniformities in the connection of facts, although such facts are disparate in character and their interde- pendence an appearance only, and to depend upon needs, interests, or aims. We are now ready to turn to Locke's doctrines in their most perfect form as deliberately elaborated by him.
17. Bk. IV, ch. 3, sec. 29.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., ch. 4, sec. 4.
IV
CONSTRUCTIVE RELATIVITY IN LOCKE CHAPTER IX
DOCTRINE OF SORTS I MIXED MODES AND SUBSTAXCKs
BY sorts, Locke understands things as of this or that specific determination or kind, as horse, stone, charity, murder. How do we come by them ?
In the first place, Locke makes both substances and modes de- pendent upon simple ideas or the so-called nominal essence. " The supposition of a real essence that cannot be known, " such is his position, " is so wholly useless and unserviceable to any part of our knowledge, that that alone were sufficient to make us lay it by, and content ourselves with such essences of the sorts or species of things [namely, the nominal] as come within the reach of our knowledge." l
Kext, they are held to agree in the fact " that sorts, as distin- guished and denominated by us, neither are nor can be anything but those precise abstract ideas we have in our minds." : Hence his conclusion in respect to both : " Each distinct abstract idea is a distinct Essence. . . . Thus a circle is as essentially different from an oval as a sheep from a goat; and rain is as essentially different from snow as water from earth. . . . Thus any two abstract ideas, that in any part vary one from another, with two distinct names annexed to them, constitute two distinct sorts, as essentially different as any two of the most remote or opposite in the world." 3'
1. Bk. Ill, ch. 3, sec. 17.
2. Ibid., sec. 13.
3. Ibid., sec. 14.
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Beyond these points of agreement, however, modes and sub- stances begin to get themselves more or less sharply distinguished. Let me enumerate these differences before turning to modes and substances for separate and enlarged discussion.
Modes, in theory, are made dependent (a) solely upon simple ideas and ( & ) upon " the free choice of the mind," giving a union or connection to a certain number of these ideas. Substances, on the other hand, are not solely dependent upon simple ideas, but upon their constant and inseparable union in Nature as well. Sub- stances " carry with them the supposition of some real being, from which its complex ideas are taken and to which they are conform- able. But, in its complex ideas of mixed modes, the mind takes a liberty not to follow the existence of things exactly." 4
The two are said to be very different in another essential : modes dealing with intangible as well as tangible elements; whereas sub- stances are thought to deal with the tangible only. " And hence I think it is that these mixed modes are called notions, as if they had their original and constant existence more in the thought of men, than in the reality of things ; and to form such ideas, it sufficed that the mind puts the parts of them together, and that they were consistent in the understanding, without considering whether they had any real being ; though I do not deny but several of them might be taken from observation, and the existence of several simple ideas so combined." 5 From this follows the more peculiar dependence of modes upon words, as " the sensible signs of his ideas who uses them." 6
I. MIXED MODES
By mixed modes, then, Locke understands such " complex ideas as we mark by the names obligation, drunkenness, a lie, etc. . . . being fleeting and transient combinations of simple ideas, which have but a short existence anywhere but in the minds of men." 7 How do we come by them? Inherently many, how do they come by their unity ? " Every mixed mode, consisting of many distinct simple ideas, it seems reasonable to inquire, ' whence it has its unity, and how such a precise multitude comes to make but one
4. Ibid., ch. 5, sec. 3.
5. Bk. II, ch. 22, sec. 2.
6. Bk. Ill, ch. 2, sec. 2.
7. Bk. II, ch. 22, sees. 1 and 8.
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idea/ since that combination does not always exist together in nature." 8
Our subject breaks up into three parts:
1. Their independence of Mature and dependence upon the mind and its simple ideas.
2. Their dependence upon Xature.
3. Every distinct abstract idea is a distinct essence or sort. Division three constitutes a far more vital issue in connection
with substances. Special consideration of this matter, then, were best reserved for such place.
1. TIIELJJ J.\l)El'i:Nl)KNCK OF XATUKi: AXI) DKL'MXDKNCE UPOX THE MIXD AXD ITS SIMPLE IDKAs
•• Nobody can doubt," he writes "that these ideas of mixed modes are made by a voluntary collection of ideas, put together in the mind, independent from any original patterns in nature. . . . For what greater connection in nature has the idea of a man than the idea of a sheep with killing, that this is made a particular species of action, signified by the word murder, and the other not. . . . It is evident then, that the mind by its free choice gives a connection to a certain number of ideas, which in nature have no more union with one another than others that it leaves out; . . . whereof the intranslatable words of divers languages are a proof, which could not have happened, if these species were the steady workmanship of nature, and not collections made by the mind." Furthermore, mixed modes " do often unite into one abstract idea things that, in their nature, have no coherence; and so under one term bundle together a great variety of compounded and decom- pounded ideas . . . often involving actions that required time to their performance, and so could never all exist together. . . . Thus the name of procession, what a great mixture of independent ideas of persons, habits, tapers, orders, motions, sound, does it contain in that complex one, which the mind of man has arbitrarily put together." Or again, " when we speak of justice or ingratitude, we frame to ourselves no imagination of anything existing, which we would conceive; but our thoughts terminate in the abstract ideas of those virtues, and look not further, as they do when we speak of a horse or iron, whose specific ideas we consider, not as
8. Bk. II, ch. 22, sec. 4.
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barely in the mind, but as in things themselves, which afford the original patterns of those ideas. For the originals of mixed modes then,, we look no further than the mind, which also shows them to be the workmanship of the Understanding.9 Turn where we will in his account of mixed modes, this line of argument will be found continually repeating itself.
That this description of them contains a tremendous element of truth cannot be denied. The mind certainly has the capacity of holding parts together and keeping them fixed and distinct so that " any two abstract ideas, that in any part vary one from another . . . constitute two distinct sorts, as essentially different as any two of the most remote and opposite in the world." 10 Furthermore, we cannot deny the radical character of the Many in such ideas as those cited; namely, the notion of a procession. Nor can we deny the arbitrary character in their determination, so much insisted upon by him ; not any more than we can deny the presence of an intangible element: "what the word murder or sacrilege, etc., signifies can never be known from things themselves : there be many of the parts of those complex ideas which are not visible in the action itself ; the intention of the mind or the relation of holy things, which make a part of murder or sacrilege, have no necessary connection with the outward and visible action of him that commits either." 1X What we may deny, is the range he ascribes to " the mind in its liberty not to follow the existence of things exactly," as if it were in no sense dependent at all. The corrective of this view exists in his pages? This shall constitute the subject-matter of our next division :
2. DEPENDENCE UPON NATURE
I stated above that, in theory, Locke distinguishes modes from substances in the quality that substances are dependent upon Nature for their pattern, whereas modes are not thus dependent; but dependent solely upon its simple ideas and " the free choice of the mind, pursuing its own ends." 12 But instead of the affirmed dependence upon simple ideas only, we find them dependent at least in part, "upon experience and observation of things tlicni-
9. See Bk. II, ch. 22 ; Bk. Ill, ch. 5.
10. Bk. Ill, ch. 3, sec. 14.
11. Ibid., ch. 9, sec. 7.
12. Ibid., ch. 5, sec. 6.
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selves; . . . for their immediate ingredients are also complex ideas,, although all our complex ideas are ultimately resolvable into simple ideas." 13 Or again, " action being the great business of mankind, and the whole matter about which laws are conversant, it is no wonder [that mixed modes should be made so largely out of them] . . . . Nor could any communication be well had amongst men with- out such complex ideas, with names to them: and therefore men have settled names, and supposed ideas in their minds, of modes of action distinguishable by their causes, means, objects, instru- ments, time, place, and other circumstances, and also of their powers fitted for those actions," 14 which amounts to an admission that modes are shaped and generated in concrete and complex sit- uations ; just as his notion of " the mind, pursuing its own ends," gets its ends defined as " the end of language," or as ends generated " in the ordinary occurrence of affairs. So that, if they join to the idea of killing the idea of father or mother, and so make a dis- tinct species from killing a man's son or neighbor, it is because of the different heinousness of the crime, and the distinct punishment due to the murdering of a man's father or mother, different from what ought to be inflicted on the murder of a son or neighbor ; . . . which plainly shows, whereof the intranslatable words of divers languages are a proof, that those of one country, by their customs- and manners of life, have found occasion to make several complex ideas, and given names to them which others never collected into specific ideas." 15 It is when we consider modes as thus dependent,, that they get to distinguish themselves from substances in aspects only — in the incorporation of a value-elenient : and, in like manner, get themselves closely identified with his " ideas of Eelation." It is significant that in Book III relations and modes are dealt with as if they presented no differences.
Without needlessly dragging out this account, we may formu- late the following conclusions as emerging from his description of modes: (1) They are inherently many and get their unity in an abstract idea; (2) that Ends, as manifesting themselves in com- plex situations, co-operate in determining their origin and specific character; (3) that value and meaning enter them as inseparable elements or ingredients; (4) they are constructs and not copies, and, such as they are, inherently relative.
13. Bk. II, ch. 22, sec. 9. Italics are mine.
14. Ibid., sec. 10.
15. Ibid., sees. 7-8.
II. SUBSTANCES
If it be true, as I think we have every reason to maintain, that Locke, like men in general, is interested primarily in things, and in their ground, foundation, origin, or explanation only so far as they will serve to account for " those notions of things we have/' then his account of substances at its best (not to speak of modes and relations), ought to be the real test of his theories, as far as Locke's own successful application of them is concerned, in the service of the more proper understanding of which such theories were called into existence. Now in regard to modes, whether simple or mixed, he never gets lost as to his real issue ; whether or not we agree with his account "whereby the understanding comes by them," is quite another matter. In regard to substances, the issue is not fully and frankly met until we come to Book III. Here the issue, at length, gets itself clearly stated : " Why do we say this is a horse, and that a mule; this is an animal, that an herb? How comes any particular thing to be of this or that sort ? " 16 His answer is that they are constructs and not copies ; achievements attained through trials, experimentation, and comparisons, in a world where resemblances among things, as well as " regular and constant union " among ideas, is accepted by him as a fact, and our sole knowable reality that designated by him as nominal. How can our objects be copies, when objects reveal different qualities and properties in different situations, and where " there is not so com- plete and perfect a part that we know of Nature, which does not owe the being it has, and the excellencies of it, to its neighbors: and that we must not confine our thoughts within the surface of any body, but look a great deal further, to comprehend perfectly those qualities that are in it." 17 Hence his conclusion that our ideas or conceptions, not " only' depend upon the mind of man variously collecting " or elaborating them, but, even at their best, are " seldom adequate to the internal nature of the things they are taken from." 18
The mind, " in making its complex ideas of substances, never puts any together that do not really or are not supposed to co-exist; and so it truly borrows that union from nature. . . . Nobody joins the voice of a sheep with the shape of a horse, nor the color of lead with the weight and fixedness of gold, to be the complex ideas of
16. Bk. Ill, ch. 6, sec. 7.
17. Bk. IV, ch. 6, sees. 11-12; Bk. Ill, ch. 6, sec. 32.
18. Bk. Ill, ch. 6, sec. 37.
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any real substances; unless he has a mind to fill his head with chimeras." 19 But if this be true, as already intimated, substances are not only dependent upon simple ideas but upon " their constant and inseparable union in nature as well." But we may ask again, as we did above: what extension in the meaning of the nominal essence, or the simple idea doctrine, is herein presumed? The simple ideas of taste, color, etc., cannot be our sole type of a real perception, if sequence or co-existence is also a type of reality, and yet no mere taste, color, etc. For to deny this fact a reality of some kind, is to deny the reality of every complex idea in so far as it is complex. In the meantime, the reality of a distinction between a horse and a mule, an animal and an herb persists, as well as his question : how does any particular thing come to be of this or that sort? Xow in Book III, the complex idea never has its reality questioned, save in the one point : " Does it truly borrow its union from nature ? " If it does, it may grow ever more and more com- plex, and, in so doing, makes itself ever more perfect and adequate. Substances, as sorts, according to Locke, are gotten in no other way. The sole issue that he here considers pertains to the fact whether our sort- view of an object does or does not limit and define its whole " measure and boundary." That the sort- view exhausts our total view of objects, is his firm contention — a contention directly at variance with his cruder dogmatism that fact and meaning stand in absolute divorce. But more of this a little further on ! For the present, let us continue to direct our attention more particularly to their genesis or formation. On this point he writes to the following effect : " In the substance of gold, one man satisfies himself with color and weight, yet another thinks solubility in aqua regia as necessary to be joined with that color in his idea of gold, as any one does its fusibility; solubility in aqua regia being a quality as constantly joined with its color and weight as fusibility or any other [of its infinite possible number]. Who of all these has established the right signification of the word, gold ? or who shall be judge to determine? Each has his standard in nature, which he appeals to, and with reason thinks he has the same right to put into his complex idea signified by the word gold, , those qualities, which, upon trial, he has found united; as another who has not so well examined has to leave them out; or a third who has made other trials, has to put in others. . . . From hence it will unavoidably follow that the complex ideas of substances [and the same fact holds with modes] will be very various, and so the signification of those
19. Bk. Ill, ch. 6, sees. 28-29.
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names very uncertain.." 20 Or again : " If we will examine it, we shall not find the nominal essence of any one species of substances in all men the same : no, not of that which of all others we are the most intimately acquainted with. Xor could it possibly be, that the abstract idea, to which the name man is given, should be different in several men, if it were of nature's making " 21 ; that is, if it were a copy, and not a construct^ " Men generally content themselves with some few sensible obvious qualities; and often, if not always, leave out others as material and as firmly united as those that they take." 22 It only remained necessary for him to have correlated with substances, at this point, his modes, relations, and his " practical " motive or the Self, to have given his philosophy all the unity we could have desired of it; for by the incorporation of the Self, as he does in his scattered and unsystematic manner, our notion of " nature " also would have been widened, with its addi- tional standard of reference. His emphasis upon diversity in our conceptions of substances, constitutes a line of argument whereby he seeks to establish that substances are not copies, but constructs ; " not of nature's making, but of man's."
But by the side of this view in Locke, wherein our notion of objects is presented in the light of constructs, the complex ideas thereby formed growing fuller and richer in content, Locke pre- sents another view of abstract or complex ideas, wherein he affirms that " the more general our ideas are, the more incomplete and partial they are." As the student of Locke commonly goes astray here, the matter needs to be cleared up before proceeding with the above line of thought. The following passage from Locke, though quoted at length, demands no apology : " If the simple ideas that make the nominal essence of the lowest species or first sorting of individuals, depends upon the mind of man variously collecting them, it is much more evident that they do so in the more com- prehensive classes, which, by the masters of logic, are called genera. . . . This is done by leaving out those qualities which are peculiar to each sort and retaining a complex idea made up of those that are common to them all; . . . whereby it is plain that men follow not exactly the patterns set them by nature when they make their general ideas of substances, since there is no body to be found which has barely malleableness and fusibility in it [as in the case of the abstract ' general idea ' metal] without other qualities as inseparable
20. Ibid., ch. 9, sec. 13.
21. Ibid., ch. 6, sec. 26.
22. Ibid., sec. 29.
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as those. But men, in making their general ideas, seek- ing more the convenience of language and quick dispatch by short comprehensive signs, than the true and precise nature of things as they exist, have, in the framing their abstract (general) ideas, chiefly pursued that end, which was to be furnished with a store of general and variously comprehensive names. So that in this whole business of genera and species, the genus, or more com- prehensive, is but a partial conception of what is in the species, and the species but a partial idea of what is to be found in each individ- ual. . . . If we would rightly consider what is done in all these genera and species, or sorts, we should find that there is no new thing made, but only more or less comprehensive signs. ... In all which we may observe that the more general term is always the name of a less complex idea, and that each genus is but a partial conception of the species comprehended under it. So that if these abstract general ideas be thought to be complete," it can only be in respect to the ends of language which called them forth, " and not in respect of anything existing, as made by nature." 23 It is hard to find a more suggestive passage in Locke. First, we here have his distinction between particular abstract ideas and general abstract ideas, or so-termed constructs and the commonly termed abstract ideas ; the former involving the mind in its " compounding " char- acter, the latter involving it in its more narrowly " abstracting " character. Secondly, within this difference, it is further to be noted that they are alike in being but partial and incomplete determina- tions of things ; the general abstract idea is a " partial conception of what is in the species, and the species but a partial idea of what is to be found in each individual." Thirdly, that the general abstract idea, " if thought to be complete " can on] j be so in respect to a certain end, just as was found to be the case with modes, and as is found to be the case with the particular abstract idea : " men generally con- tent themselves with some few sensible obvious qualities . . . which serve well enough for gross and confused conceptions, and inac- curate ways of talking and thinking; . . . most men wanting either time, inclination, or industry enough" to determine their ideas more fully, or " even to some tolerable degree, contenting them- selves with some few obvious and outward appearances of things, thereby readily to distinguish and sort them for the common affairs of life.241 So that, if maintained, that Locke's notion of sorts is an abstraction, the rather contrary statement may be offered as a
23. Ibid., sec. 32.
24. Ibid., sees. 28-29.
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rejoinder : his general abstract ideas as " partial conceptions," which, proceed in their formation " by leaving out qualities," are rather of the nature of constructs even though more obviously " inadequate to the internal nature of the things they are taken from."
As the conclusion here drawn will be confirmed by what follows, I proceed with my account, presenting the matter in his own language whenever possible. " This, then, in short, is the case," he writes. " Nature makes many particular things which do agree one with another in many sensible qualities, and probably too in their internal frame and constitution; but it is not this real essence that distinguishes them into species; it is men, who, taking occasion from the qualities they find united in them, and wherein they observe often several individuals to agree, range them into sorts; under which individuals, according to their conformity to this or that abstract idea, come to be ranked as under ensigns ; so that this is a man, that a drill." 25 In other words, we may here, as in the case of gold, follow the ' compounding ' process or the ' eliminating ' process; the process making for a fuller and richer complex idea, or the process making for a more partial one; — no single object, for example, a tree, in any single instance of its actual existence, embodying all the varied qualities embraced in any notion of a tree, not any more so than " that particular parcel of matter which makes the ring on my finger" exhausts all the ideas of gold by complex idea of gold stands for. Or gold may be viewed under the more ' partial idea ' the word metal stands for ; and the same with the object tree. Thus he writes : " It is necessary for me to be as I am ; God and nature has made me so; but there is nothing I have is essential to me. An accident or disease may take away my reason or memory, or both, and an apoplexy leave neither sense nor under- standing, no, nor life. Other creatures of my shape may be made with more and better, or fewer and worse faculties than I have ; and others may have reason and sense in a shape and body very different from mine. None of these are essential to the one, or the other, or to any individual whatever, till the mind refers it to some sort or species of things ; and then presently, according to the abstract idea of that sort, something is found essential. ... So that if it be asked, whether it be essential to me or any other particular corporeal being to have reason ? I say, no ; no more than it is essential to this white thing I write on to have words in it. But if that particular
l\j. Ibid., sees. 35-36.
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is to be counted of the sort man, and to have the name man given it, then reason is essential to it, supposing reason to be a part of the complex idea the name man stands for; as it is essential to this thing I write on to contain words if I will give it the name treatise, and rank it under that species." 26 That is to say, the mind in making its complex ideas depends upon particular instances of a common thing, in order to ascertain the different qualities which it ought to unite in it; which operation may be pursued under this or that end, and hence leading up to different results in the way of a complex idea ; whereupon these ideas, as thus variously determined, and, as thus determined, held fixed, get to determine the essence of that object's species brought under conformity with it. Accordingly, my aim in one case may be the knowledge of some- thing in its fullest possible particular character, as in the case of gold or man, in the course of which process I would evolve a very different complex idea of man, as in Ethics, for example, than would be the case if I only consider him in the light of some other end, that view of him as embraced by the idea actor or soldier. " If there- fore, any one will think that a man, and a horse, and an animal, and a plant, etc., are distinguished by real essences made by nature, he must think nature to be very liberal of these real essences, making one for body, another for an animal, and another for a horse, and all these essences liberally bestowed upon Bucephalus. But if we would rightly consider what is done in all these genera and species, or sorts, we should find that there is no new thing made, but only more or less comprehensive signs, whereby we may be enabled to express in a few syllables great numbers of particular things, as they agree in more or less general conceptions, which we have framed to that purpose." 27 Hence Locke's conclusion, that " the essence of each sort is the abstract idea," 2S understanding by essence, that "measure and boundary of each sort or species whereby it is con- stituted that particular sort and distinguished from others. ... So that the essential and not essential relates only to our abstract ideas ; which amounts to no more than this, that whatever particular thing has not in it those qualities which are contained in the abstract idea which any general term stands for, cannot be ranked under that species nor be called by that name,"'29 not any more so than " that particular parcel of matter which makes the ring on my finger"
2<>. Ibid., sec. 4.
27. Ibid., sec. 32.
28. Ibid., sec. 2.
29. Ibid., sees. 2-4.
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may be called gold and held to possess the essence of gold, unless that particular parcel of matter is either actually or potentially all that my complex idea of gold stands for. " Should there be found a parcel of matter that had all the other qualities that are in iron, but wanted obedience to the loadstone, would any one question whether it wanted anything essential ? It would be absurd to ask whether a thing really existing wanted anything essential to it; nor could it be demanded whether this made an essential or specific difference or not, since we have no other measure of essential or specific but our abstract idea ? And to talk of specific differences in nature, without reference to general ideas in names, is to talk unintelligibly; . . . all such patterns and standards being quite laid aside, particular beings, considered barely in themselves, will be found to have all their qualities equally essential; and everything in each individual will be essential to it, or, which is more, nothing at all. For though it may be reasonable to ask, whether obeying the magnet be essential to iron? yet I think it is very improper and insignifi- cant to ask, whether it be essential to the particular parcel of matter I cut my pen with, without considering it under the name iron, or as being of a certain species? . . . Hence we find many of the individuals that are ranked into one sort, called by one common name, and so received as being of one species, have yet qualities, depending on their real constitutions, as far different one from another as from others from which they are accounted to differ specifically." 30
If then the essence or specific denomination or meaning of each particular thing refers to its determination within some complex idea, what in the constitution of things is sufficient to justify the formation of a new sort or species ? We distinguish between watches and clocks as distinct sorts, yet the variation among watches is large just as it is among clocks ; 31 or we distinguish between water when liquid and frozen, designating the former water and the latter, ice, and yet fail to do so in the case of congealed jelly, when it is cold and the same jelly fluid and warm ; or in the case of liquid gold in the furnace and hard gold in the hands of a workman.32 This situation Locke suggests, but he does not elaborate it. This is much to be regretted, for Locke in that case would have been led to transfer his present contention into the very citadel of his dogma : nothing exists but particulars ; for ice and water denote two particu-
30. Ibid., sees. 5-8.
31. See Ibid., sec. 39.
32. Ibid., sec. 13.
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lars ; why not so in the case of gold or jelly? All I can find in Book III, as in any way pertinent to the issue, is, that shape, in the case of vegetables and animals, and color, in respect to bodies not propagated by seed, are the aspects of things we most fix on and ;i re most led by.33 In his account of mixed modes, as may be recalled, he enters upon this particular inquiry more fully. But in respect to substances, his interest rarely strays beyond the locus of the follow- ing inquiry : things are determined and held fixed to their specific sorts by their abstract ideas, whereby particular things, " because they have that nominal essence, which is all one, agree to that abstract idea a name is annexed to," 3* come to be of this or that sort, and so, as we read here and there, " has in truth a refer- ence not so much to the being of particular things, as to their gen- eral denominations." 35 But this is but one conclusion ; another : " take but away the abstract ideas by which we sort individuals, and rank them under common names, and then the thought of anything essential to any of them instantly vanishes; we have no notion of the one without the other, which plainly shows their relation.36 . . . For to talk of a man, and to lay by, at the same time, the ordinary signification of the name man, which is our complex idea usually annexed to it, and bid the reader consider man as he is in himself, and as he is really distinguished from others . . . looks like trifling." 37 " Nothing essential to individuals," 38 is the claim he here sets up, as it were, to confront his familiar dogma : " noth- ing exists but particulars " : and his solution, as noted, appears to be twofold: sorts relate "not so much to the being of particular things, as to their denomination " ; and the opposite one, that to " bid the reader consider man as he is in himself, as he is really distinguished from others," apart from our sort-view of him, " looks like trifling." It is true, he goes on to say, " that I have often mentioned a real essence, distinct in substance from those abstract ideas of them, which I call their nominal essence. By this real essence I mean the real constitution of anything, which is the foundation of all those properties that are combined in it, and are constantly found to co-exist with the nominal essence; that par- ticular constitution which everything has within itself, without any relation to anything without it. But essence (' measure and bound-
33. Ibid. sec. 29.
34. Ibid. sec. 7.
35. Ibid. sec. 8. Italics mine.
36. Ibid. sec. 4.
37. Ibid. sec. 43.
38. Ibid. sec. 4.
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ary?), even in this sense relates to a sort, and supposes a species; for being that real constitution on which the properties depend, it (the ' real essence') necessarily supposes a sort of things, prop- erties belonging only to species and not to individuals." 39 That is to say, even if we grant " essential differences in nature between particulars/' the particular would be as much an intellectualized thing, if we get beyond mere empty words, as the " sort," For to talk of particulars, in so far as they are particular, implies that they have something which belongs to them in their own right, and accordingly involve a principle of inclusion and exclusion of certain specific determinations. That is, certain properties are affirmed as essentially true of it, others denied as constituting a part of it. But Locke's conclusion is : " There is no individual parcel of matter to which any of its qualities are so annexed as to be essential to it or inseparable from it, That which is essential, belongs to it as a condi- tion, whereby it is of this or that sort ; but take away the considera- tion of its being ranked under the name of some abstract idea, and then there is nothing necessary to it, nothing separable from it." 40 Namely, the principle of inclusion and exclusion of parts presup- poses and involves comparison, unless some inherent real essence, as existing and as discoverable, furnishes us with the needed prin- ciple. And Locke's arguments on this point assumes two forms : (a) the ungrounded character for even assuming that such real essences exist, by seeking to exhibit a diversity even among our particular parcels of matter, as well as among a supposed natural animal and vegetable species; and (b), by the further claim, that even if real essences did exist, we do not know them and never can know them. The conclusion is reinforced by the relativistic prin- ciple either in its empirical or radical form: isolate a piece of gold from all other bodies and it reduces to zero, for not only substances (in the nominal sense) but objects or bodies in general " are but powers, either active or passive, in reference to other bodies." 41 Locke's confusion arises in confounding the ontological particular, which seems to resist death at all cost, with " a particular parcel of matter," and then again seeking to distinguish the former from the latter. In either case, however, we have his contention that particu- lars are variable and indeterminate until made determinate by, and held fixed in our abstract idea of them. Summarized, the following,
39. Ibid., sec. 6. Italics are mine.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., ch. 9, sec, 17. This principle has such frequent restatement in Locke, that any special references are needless. In particular, read ch. 9, Bk. Ill; ch. 31, Bk. II; and ch. 6, sees. 11-12, Bk. IV.
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then, presents Locke's position: he assumes an interplay of rela- tions or parts, that reflects itself in breaking -down or altering par- ticulars or in building them up and preserving them thus, at least relatively so; for relations are as capable of neutralizing each other's effects as they are capable of reinforcing them. Hence the justification and rational basis of Locke's empirical relativity: " bodies " are capable of producing change in or receiving it from other "bodies" to an indefinite degree. But bodies as of this or that sort, or of this or that determination, involve the abstract idea, which, in turn, involves and presupposes analysis, comparison, and synthesis, with the outcome in the form of the more "general abstract idea " or the more " particular abstract idea." " Nature," to which we must turn in the formation of our complex idea of substances, offers " similitudes " and also parts in " constant and inseparable union " ; hence, offers " parts in union," complexes, as real, as ultimate, and as final as parts in union, as any of its parts viewed in the light of simple ideas. And these parts " in union," however partial or variable the parts " in union," constitute the data upon which the abstract ideas, in their formation, are shown dependent. " Apart from our abstract ideas, no determina- tion in our objects," thus gets its complement stated as well: " apart from determinations, however variable or partial, in our particular parcels of matter in this or that specific situation, no determination of our abstract ideas."
This doctrine in Locke I designate as a phase of his constructive relativity, and I request any one to show me a doctrine in his pages, which in its comprehensive survey can match itself with this one. In his elaboration of it, he accepts his simple ideas as such " parts," but he goes further, in the claim that the union of parts, although no taste, smell, color, etc., is as much of the nominal essence as the simple ideas of sensuous perception. Such union represents noth- ing that is " visible," but it notwithstanding implies that sequence, co-existence, change, succession are perceived facts; so real, that to talk of complex ideas as otherwise complex, is wilful perversion. Hence his admission, as quoted in a previous chapter, " that our ideas of extension, duration, and number, do they not all contain in them a secret relation of the parts? Figure and motion have some- thing relative in them much more visibly; and sensible qualities, as color and smell, etc., what are they but the powers of different bodies in relation to our perception, etc? . . . Our idea therefore of power (which includes in it also some kind of relation, a relation
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to action or change), I think may well have a place amongst other simple ideas, and be considered as one of them/' *2 His notion of substances as facts, and not mere illusions and deceptions, involves the same conclusion : the union of its parts is as real and ultimate as the parts themselves. In fact, in the above passage, in order to establish the reality of modes, his deliberate effort and lack of hesitancy to resolve " sensible qualities " themselves into sheer relations (no mere passing procedure with him) must look as a very interesting procedure, indeed, to one saturated with the notion that Locke is fundamentally a sensationalist and not a relativist.
42. Bk. 11, ch. 21, sec. 3. Italics are mine.
CHAPTER X
DOCTRIXE OF ME AXING
("Ideas of Relation")
T. H. GUI-: EX laments that Locke " in his account of our complex ideas, explains them under modes, substances, and relations as if each of these three sorts were independent of the rest." That Locke never thoroughly correlates them is certainly to be regretted, and yet I feel that Locke in actual practice is far from keeping them as independent of each other as he, in theory, often struggles to do. Thus it is found, for example, that modes, substances and relations are alike constructs. Moreover, in our account of mixed modes, we might have asked wherein their declared dependence upon so-called Nature kept them distinguished from substances, while substances, in turn, reflected a dependence upon a very complex process of mind operating variously under very complex conditions, alike sensuous and non-sensuous in composition. When we come to our " ideas of relations " the overlapping and interfusion is made even more apparent. Not only does all distinction between mixed modes and relations practically vanish, but that between simple modes and relations vanishes as well ; while substances, in general, get themselves identified, as we have seen, with " powers " ; namely, relations, or, again, with what is " positive " and non-relative. And when we deal with what is " positive," let us not fail to recall, that the real of reals with Locke is " pleasure and pain, beyond which we have no concernment." We ought not to feel surprised, there- fore, if in his account of "ideas of relation" a unified rather than a split-up world should get itself more or less clearly foreshadowed. ISTo man is more dangerously read in snatches than Locke.
In a sense, therefore, our present chapter may be regarded as a reinstatement of the problem canvassed at large in our previous chapter; namely, the interdependence of fact and idea; the sole difference being, that there we were supposed to be more narrowly
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concerned with the sensuous structure of an object, and that here, following Locke, we are to be more narrowly concerned with its abstract structure in terms of space, time, casuality, etc., and with its value structure in terms of the " various ends, objects, manners, and circumstances of human action," x whereby such distinctions are acquired by them as "good, bad or indifferent." The term Meaning, in our common use of it, appears the one best employed as covering the situation. By adhering to this term, I in no way violate Locke's account and avoid considerable confusion.
Meaning, with Locke, stands primarily for an interdependence of objects as reflected in thought : " Beside the ideas, whether simple or complex, that the mind has of things as they are in them- selves, there are others it gets from their comparison one with another," 2 whereby certain distinctions or " denominations " are acquired by them, but not as something " contained in the real existence of things, but something extraneous and superinduced ;" 3 that is, meaning is purely mental in existential status. He holds further, " that there is no one thing . . . which is not capable of almost an infinite number of considerations in reference to other things," and that meaning therefore " makes no small part of men's thoughts and words ; v. g., one single man may at once be concerned in and sustain all these following relations [denominations, mean- ings], and many more; viz., father, brother, son, grandfather, . . . friend, enemy, judge, patron, . . . servant, master, . . . older, younger, like, unlike, etc., etc., to an almost infinite number; he being capable of as many denominations as there can be occasions of comparing him to other things." 4
The view presented contains nothing novel. When an object is said to have meaning it is not uncommon to hear it spoken of as something imported into the object from without, and never, except by the idealist, or pragmatist perchance, viewed as an integral part of said object. But we often, as Locke will be found doing, notwith- standing, begin with the consideration of meaning as actually existing in an object, even if in the light of an appearance only, and then, in virtue of its more natural and obtrusive variability and diversity, hold it up as something more or less gratuitously con- tributed from without. Relativity is rarely a disputed fact in this realm. What is disputed, is whether meaning does become or ever
1. Bk. II, ch. 28, sec. 4.
2. Ibid., ch. 25, sees. 1-7.
3. Ibid., sec. 8.
4. Ibid., sec. 7.
can become an integral part of an object. It exists in thought and for thought only, proclaims the realist; it is a distortion or falsi- fication of reality, says the naturalist. But to establish either of their contentions,, a criterion of an object is presupposed. What that is in their case, I leave for them to decipher. I accept for my object Locke's object as presented in the previous chapter. Locke, too, must be expected to abide by it, and the doctrine, just outlined, scanned in the light of it.
In accord with his notion of an object as a construct, we were not only said to be allowed, but constrained, to fix upon the specific character of our object with a variation of content, and, as once defined and articulated, invited to deny, if we choose, that any further qualification of it is relevant. But, then, in denying such relevancy, as we were further shown, another ground for deciding the matter had to be found than is offered in the variable and potential qualities of the object itself. If an object, in accord with relativity, gets to be what it is solely in and through its relations to other objects, and such relations affirmed to be indefinite, if not wholly infinite, then the modifications manifested in an object cannot be designated as real and valid in respect to its so-called " powers," but mere appearances and superinductions when acquired in the character of meaning. It is not logic to blow hot and cold with the same principle. Locke cannot revert to the dogmas of the realist or naturalist as he is apparently seen to do in the above, nor shall we be found under any special obligation to halt, with thai view of the matter.
But the objection may be raised that, in respect to sorts, the mutual determination of objects was of a mechanical type ; whereas here we are dealing with mutual determinations as essentially mental. To this objection I need only subjoin that causality, the so-termed mechanical type of determination, is but one of Locke's general types of relation included and elaborated in this particular division of his work. In fact, to grasp the full sweep and con- structive character of the present doctrine in Locke, we must not fail to keep in mind that it is here at length that we get his modes, whether simple or complex, correlated with substances. And thus considered, is it necessary to ask who got closer to Locke, Kant or Hume? Locke's signal contribution however consists in the fact that he correlated his mixed modes with substances as well as the simple modes, of time, place, etc. In following Locke here, prag- matism or Humanism have in Locke their antecedent in modern thought.
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Leaving mere theory, then, for the moment, let us instead direct attention to the facts adduced in support of it. Interdepen- dence of fact and meaning, is the contention I seek to establish; namely, that meaning is grounded in fact, just as in the previous chapter its converse constituted our thesis.
OBJECTS AND MEANING FOREIGN TO EACH OTHER
1. " Relations (denominations) different from the Things related." 5 Denominations may be the same in men " who have very different ideas of the things that are related, or that are thus compared; v. g., those who have far different ideas of a man may yet agree in the notion of a father ; which is a notion superinduced to the substance, or man, and refers only to an act of that tiling, called man, whereby he contributed to the generation of one of his own kind ; let man be what he will." 6 But if it " refers to an act of that thing," how does meaning fail to constitute an integral part of it ? But this observation by the way !
2. Hence, " change of relation (denomination) may be without any change in the object, — Caius, whom I consider to-day as a father, ceases to be so to-morrow only by the death of his son, with- out any alteration made in himself. Xay, barely by the mind's changing the object to which it compares anything, the same thing is capable of having contrary denominations at the same time; v. g., Caius, compared to several persons, may truly be said to be older and younger, stronger and weaker, etc." 7
3. Meanings seemingly inherent in objects, " conceal a tacit though less observable relation " ; that is, show a dependence upon something else; hence reduce to the order of products; reveal themselves detachable; and, therefore, can in no way properly belong to an object. I proceed to quote from the text without criti- cism or registered protest. That is to follow.
" Time and place are also the foundation of very large relations, and all finite beings at least are concerned in them, . . . but it may suffice here to intimate, that most of the denominations of things received from time are only relations. Thus, when any one says that Queen Elizabeth lived sixty-nine and reigned forty-five years, these words impart only the relation of that duration to some
5. Ibid., ch. 25, sec. 4.
6. Ibid., sec. 4. Italics mine.
7. Ibid., sec. 5.
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other, and mean no more than this, that the duration of her exist- ence was equal to sixty-nine, and the duration of her government to forty-five annual revolutions of the sun ; and so are all words answer- ing, How long ? " 8 Such words as young and old are, ordinarily, also thought to stand for positive ideas, which, when considered, will be found to be relative; that is, intimate preconceived ideas, formed under specialized and limited conditions. " Thus, having settled in our thoughts the idea of the ordinary duration of a man to be seventy years, when we say a man is young, we mean that his age is yet but a small part of that which men usually attain to; and when we denominate him old, we mean that his duration is run out almost to the end of that which men do not usually exceed. And so it is comparing the particular age or duration of this or that man, to the idea of that duration which we have in our minds, as ordi- narily belonging to that sort of animal ; which is plain, in the appli- cation of these names to other things; for a man is called young at twenty years and very young at seven years old ; but a horse we call old at twenty and a dog at seven years, because in each of these we compare their age to different ideas of duration which are settled in our minds." 9
That meaning is an aspect in objects distinguishable from its sensuous quality, no one would deny. But beyond this very general distinction, the view of an object as a construct presupposes the presence of intellectual principles at every point. And its saturation from this source penetrates to its core and is no mere thing sticking loosely at the surface, ready to be peeled off by any such process as was instituted above. Meaning comes into being, his illustrations would denote, by the consideration of some positive object under some specific idea or other " settled in our minds." That is, apart from some abstract idea, no meaning in objects is possible. This we will grant, but only after being instructed where those "ideas settled in the mind " originate. They would seem to arise, judging from these very same illustrations, from more or less definite and con- crete situations. In fact, these illustrations definitely emphasize the point that age, youth, size, etc., are pure abstractions where it is not the age, youth or size or a particular thing in a particular situa- tion with its particular conditions and limitations all held together in one elaborated notion or construct. Let us term the point of his departure, in this general analysis, pure objectivity, and then let any man tell, if he can, where the contribution made by any of its
8. Ibid., ch. 26, sec. 3.
9. Ibid., sec. 4.
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abstracted elements begins or lets off and where that of its other abstracted elements begins or lets off. In his chapters on relation, Locke moves in this purely objective status of existence, and seeks to disrupt it by the introduction of his abstract realistic object on the one hand, and by the introduction of an equally depleted abstract idea on the other. But even from the passages quoted in this chapter, the peculiar novelty of them all lies in the fact that abstract ideas are here revealed as growing out of concrete situations, " and that we are not to wonder that we comprehend them not, and do so often find our thought at a loss, when we would consider them abstractly by themselves/7 as he wrote in connection with his account of space and time in a passage adduced above.10 Had Locke only followed out this notion and continued his inquiry from it and from these admirable beginnings, instead from the standpoint of his abstractions of particulars and thought in divorce ; or from his abstractions of simple ideas versus complex; or from the still further abstractions within complex ideas ; namely, those of simple and complex modes versus substances, — what a length of needless, fruitless wanderings Locke might have spared himself, and, further, have spared the identification of pure objectivity, among some of his successors, with that range of experience which we in a protoplasmic state of existence might be thought to have.
Now there is no doubt that " the ideas settled in our minds " may vary with each other in two fundamental respects : (a) in their degree of possible generality, and ( b ) in their degree of response to " the constant and regular order of things " or, on the other hand, in their degree of response to a more or less arbitrary fancy or imagination. In the latter distinction, only, is the ground to be found for the supposed distinction between purely mental deter- minations versus the more conspicuously mechanical. But let these distinctions be forced as hard as they will, the distinctions, notwithstanding, are things of degree and not of kind. To establish the fact that such is Locke's contention when unfettered by false theory, I shall, in addition to what has been stated, consider two fundamental types of relation, that of cause and effect, and that of morality.
10. Chapter 4.
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ORIGIN" OF OUR PRECONCEIVED IDEAS AND THEIR PROPER CORRELATION WITH FACT-REALITY
1. CAUSE AND EFFECT
" As it would take a volume to go over all sorts of relations [preconceived ideas] ," writes Locke, " it is not to be expected that I should here mention them all." " He proposes, however, to consider " the most comprehensive relation, wherein all things that do or can exist, are concerned, and that is the relation of cause and effect." I shall in my account of this relation freely turn to every part of his text where this subject of causality conies up for discussion. Space, time, identity and diversity, quanti- tative, qualitative, blood, instituted, moral, civil, and divine rela- tions, are the few others Jie touches upon, briefly or at length, among the " innumerable sorts " which " would take a volume " to exhaust. And the general contention that concerns us is, that relations have no status or reality in objects, and, secondly, leave tli em accordingly unaffected, and it is this contention I seek to refute in Locke's own words.
" There must always in relation be two ideas or things," writes Locke, " either in themselves really separate, or considered as dis- tinct, and then a ground or occasion for their comparison " ; 12 namely, all relation involves three distinct factors. Hence in the matter of cause and effect, "taking notice how one (thing) comes to an end and ceases to be, and another begins to exist which was not before," 13 . . . whatever change is thus observed, the mind must collect a power somewhere able to make that change, as well as a possibility in the thing itself to receive it." 14 Here then we have ' a/ our original idea, ' b/ a distinct perception of something new in that original idea, and ( c/ the need of the mind to collect a power somewhere. My aim is to search for the ground of that need, as scattered passages in Locke favor its articulation. With-
11. Bk. II, ch. 28, sec. 17. .12. Bk. II, ch. 25, sec. 6. /13. Ibid., ch. 21, sec. 1. 14. Ibid., sec. 4.
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out the ideas ' a ' and ' b ' discoverable as distinct, as " either in themselves separate or considered as distinct/' the possibility of a comparison would not even exist. But, then, the present com- parison is of a kind involving something unique. That element of uniqueness is change. Change would seem to be a product of thought induced by the fact that ' a ? and ' b/ although distinct or separate, hence Many, are yet constrained by thought to be held in the original Oneness ; for we begin with ' a/ which is One, and yet forced to perceive ' b ' as another, when it comes " to exist which was not before." Yet " we never finding nor conceiving it possible, that two things of the same kind should exist in the same place at the same time, we rightly conclude that whatever exists anywhere at any time excludes all of the same kind and is there itself alone. . . . (But further) since one thing cannot have two beginnings of existence, nor two things one beginning : it is impos- sible for two things . . . to be or exist in the same instant, in the very same place, or one and the same thing in different places. That, therefore, that had one beginning, is the same thing; and that which had a different beginning in time and place from that, is not the same, but diverse." 15 In other words, ' b 3 having broke out as separate and distinct from ' a/ they cannot as two distinct things, have the same single beginning able to account for both of them ; hence the need of the mind to collect a beginning for ( b ' somewhere. But where turn for the originating principle where " powers are relations and not agents," 16 and the " communication of motion by impulse, or by thought [the only possible agents] are equally . . . obscure and inconceivable. . . . We have by daily experience clear evidence of motion produced both by impulse and thought; but the manner how, hardly comes within our compre- hension; we are equally at a loss in both. . . . For. when the mind would look beyond those original ideas we have from sensation or reflection, and penetrate' into their causes, and manner of produc- tion, we find it discovers nothing but its own shortsightedness; . . . there is no more difficulty to conceive how a substance, we know not, should, by thought, set body in motion, than how a substance, we know not, by impulse, set body into motion." 17 Yet the mind is constrained " to collect a power somewhere/' even though it has no visible fulcrum to rest upon; for change implies a new existence in space and time, or in time only, and the new
15. Ibid., ch. 27, sec. 1.
16. Ibid., ch. 21, sec. 19.
17. Ibid., ch. 23, sees. 28-29.
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thing ( b ' must get itself correlated or a " beginning " somehow or other. The need is as real ( 1 ) as the perception of ' a ' and ' b ' as distinct existences is real; (2) as real as the idea of change, as the result of the compa.rison; (that is, as real as the original unity and subsequent diversity is real) ; (3) as real as the principle of eonservation : and (4) as real as the inherent intellectual need for unity in our experience. In a word, cause and effect is a thought construct, involving comparison on the basis of a real il-irrrxili/ in unify, and the postulate that every new existence involves the idea of a new beginning; something cannot come out of nothing. Such then would seem the origin of our "precon- ceived idea " of cause and effect. It certainly does not appear as if generated in a vacuum, but in an exceedingly complex situation, wherein the interpretation of fact and idea or meaning appears so complete as well nigh to baffle analysis.
' I'nity ' is another such idea. Shall we call it fact or meaning? And if meaning, shall we hold it as ungrounded in reality and as leaving it unaffected, " it sufficing to the unity of an idea [object]/' as Locke writes, " that it be considered as one representation or picture, though made up of ever so many particulars"?18 Under conditions then, " an army, a swarm, a city, a fleet," are " things as perfectly one as one ship or one atom." 19 That reality is not left unaffected by it, is here evident. But is such unity real? Yes, if it serves our ends, or works; for after all, as Locke's recurrent note would have it: " God has fitted us for the neighborhood of the bodies that surround us"20 . . . and "it will become us, as rational creatures, to employ those faculties we have about what they are most adopted to."21 Ideas, then, that work successfully in our efforts to comprehend the world, and in our general lack of others or better, are real; it being as real in the interest of some ends, to regard a fleet or a city as One and not as Many, as in the interest of other ends to do the reverse. Fact and meaning are on<\ and, at best, distinguishable Aspects only.
18. Ibid., ch. 24, sec. 1.
19. Ibid., ch. 24, sec. 2.
20. Ibid., ch. 16, sec. 13.
21. Bk. IV, ch. 12, sees. 10-11.
2. MORAL RELATIONS
" Virtue and vice/7 writes Locke, "are names supposed every- where to stand for actions in their own nature right and wrong."2 This position, in harmony with his general contention, Locke denies, and, in turn, sets up the contention, " that moral good and evil consist in nothing but the conformity of our voluntary actions to some law ; which, I think, may he called moral relation, as being that which denominates our moral actions ... which relation as a touchstone, serves to set the mark of value upon their voluntary actions." 23 The following illustration sums up his whole position : " Our actions are considered as good, bad, or indifferent ; and in this respect they are relative, it being their conformity to, or disa- greement with some rule that makes them to be regular or irreg- ular, good or bad. . . . Thus the challenging and fighting with a man, as it is a certain positive mode, or particular sort of action ... is called duelling, which, when considered in relation to the law of God, will deserve the name sin; to the law of fashion, in some countries, valor and virtue; and to the municipal laws of some governments, a capital crime." 2* That is, apart from our preconceived ideas, no moral determinations in our objects. But suppose we again raise the counter claim: apart from determina- tions of some kind or other in our objects, can we attain to any preconceived ideas at all ? And what we find is, that the disruption of pure objectivity, brought about by abstract distinctions, is again the state of affairs. Modes as abstract, as the pure products of Eeason, a priori determinable therein apart from all experience or any direct check or control from experience, is his conception of morality as that rule or law whereby, as to a touchstone, our volun- tary actions get the marks of value set upon them. Hence there is no hope for freeing his doctrine here of an abstract conceptualism, unless Locke abandons his purely theoretical dogmatic view con- cerning modes. And on this point, Locke, in theory at least, con- cedes nothing. Until such a priori pretensions concerning modes, however, are abandoned, the original objectivity of our experience cannot be restored. This situation represents Locke's general posi- tion: but fortunately it is not an expression of his sole utterance. For, if " good and evil," as Locke contends, " are nothing but
22. Bk. II, ch. 28, sec. 10. Italics are mine.
23. Ibid., sees. 4, 5, 14.
24. Ibid., sec. 15.
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pleasure or pain, or that which occasions or procures pleasure or pain to us " 25 and our state, " as fitted for the neighborhood of the bodies that surround us," giving us no concernment beyond either to know or to be, our " preconceived idea " will depend upon a consideration of the various factors able to produce and suffer pleasure or pain, and, as thus considered, organized into a whole. And with this degree of a suggested reconstruction of such elements as appear in his Essay, I think I may let the matter rest. To have denoted morality the relation of actions to a law, as he does, and yet not find that law in those actions themselves, as their expression in certain fundamental relations, but, instead, to find that law the expression of an abstract Eeason divorced from Experience, reveals anew how deep Locke, in certain aspects of his doctrine, remained sticking in rationalism, and by con- trast, reveals the vast strides made by him in those other phases of his doctrine. If, as Ethics tends to enforce, a man is not truly moralized, whatever its values be, until such values are worked into the very texture of his being, I fail to see how value as a class can remain distinctions " extraneous and superinduced/' For grant that the " preconceived idea " is involved at every point in an object's determination, as Locke insists upon, and the " preconceived idea " little else than the synthetic articulation of a very complex situation, as Locke seenis further to maintain, then how prove the validity of that idea and its applicability as well, without admitting at the same time that the object itself is involved in that situation in its total compass, is more than I can Linisp. The object is. then, in fact and deed just what it is in that situation, whose total rays or light the preconceived idea only attempts to draw to a point in order to focus them upon this or that part in the total situation, a situation which, although realizing itself in the idea, actualizes itself in time only and more or less piecemeal, as set forth in the previous chapter. But it is in virtue of that total only, widely or narrowly circumscribed as the case may be, that any part within it becomes of this specific value or deter- mination rather than of that — a construct, no matter at what point we view it. Thus, if an artist finds an object's particular soul and pulse in its colors, who will prove that he has failed to get its soul and pulse, save by dogmatically sticking to the claim that we to the contrary, in some other equally specialized view or determina- tion, have gotten such soul or pulse of the objects about us, —
25. Ibid., ch. 28, sec. 5.
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objects, by theory,, variable and indefinite in their determination and signification. And if this be true of their more distinctively sensuous aspect, how much more so of their meaning-aspect; that is, if the determination of substances (in Locke's terminology) depends upon our ideas of them variously formed; how much more so in the case of the modes and the relations, as he insists. But the latter are merely ' extraneous and superinduced/ the realist may persist in proclaiming. Well, then, let him be equally ready to maintain that civilization, with all its distinctions and achieve- ments, wrought out with the brain and hands of man, and grounded in the heart and stomach and skin, as well as in other assumed facts, are extraneous superinductions upon a more real abstract world. The nihilist, strange to say, champions the same creed, and to him art, morality, government, refinement, culture, science, but specious falsification of reality. If this is not the logic of realism, I have yet to learn it; and if such is not its logic, then its logic is that of Locke : " All such patterns and standards laid aside, particular beings, considered barely in themselves, will be found to have all their qualities equally essential; and everything in each individual will be essential to it, or, which is more, nothing at all " ; 26 namely, the truth of reality is ideality — " the new way of
26. Bk. Ill, ch. 6, sec. 5.
CHAPTER XI
CONCLUSION
THE primacy of the idea in the determination of our objects culminates in the claim that, apart from the idea, an object is " at once everything or nothing." Further, Locke insisted upon the ultimate character of the Self and its unavoidable implication in all such determination ; and, further, insisted upon a radical differ- ence in its constitution with different men. Not only was the Self held as involved in the production of the secondary qualities, which, under a conceived difference in its constitution or structure, accord- ing to Locke, are bound to reveal things very differently, but our complex ideas, whether substances or modes or relations, were held as further dependent in their formation, not only " upon the minds of men/7 but " upon the minds of men variously collecting them." Every man, then, the measure of his own truth ! " Our business is living " ; our needs are ultimates ; " our faculties are suited to our state " ; " men determine sorts " and determine them variously; — here we have fundamental tenets in Locke, and, taken together, spell relativity of the Protagorean type.
On the other hand, Locke strongly emphasizes the fact that in Nature we find a common standard of reference ; speaks of " unal- terable organs"; and speaks of certain common ends, — language, duty, common affairs, and whatnot, and that such principles make for identity in our perceptions and not for diversity. But even within the range of a common knowledge, Locke's emphasis is upon individual diversity, and, secondly, upon the fact that human knowledge as human knowledge, is relative to its own peculiar constitution and bias, be that what it will. To speak, then, of an absolute knowledge in the sense of a knowledge that is inherently non-relative, is a wild and wholly groundless assumption from the Lockean standpoint; and, further, to speak within the limits of our possible knowledge, of a knowledge that is absolutely common to all, is equally wild and groundless. Individual differences
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exist; they are ultimate; and they are no more to be crowded out than our identity with others, in so far as we are identical, is to be eliminated. We see as we are conditioned to see, be the conditions for likeness or difference of perception wliat it will; and if, in the former case, no man can get away from his Self or outside of his skin to see things face to face, as it were, even where a relative independence in the structure of objects be granted; so in the other case, no man can crawl wholly within the skin of another man and see things just as he is absolutely conditioned, within his ultimate difference, in seeing them.
Does this spell scepticism? Xo; not any more so than it can be made to spell phenomenalism. Failure to perceive this truth lies in our failure properly to conceive and apply the principle of relativity. Let me enlarge upon this point, but, first of all, I beg to premise, what will be granted without dispute, that a truth's validity lies in its finality or necessity, be our ground or criterion what it will.
Every man inhabits a world of his own and the tongue he speaks is not always the tongue others speak. Untrained in music, how can I begin to picture that world, in all its serious interest, beauty, and significance in which Beethoven, Wagner, or a Handel really lived, moved, and had their being ? Unless I have intimately felt the heart-throb of Nature as a Wordsworth felt it, can I really understand and appreciate half that Wordsworth writes and talks about? Is not a Dante's world, or a Bismarck's world, or even a humble peasant's world, worlds baffling any proper sort of under- standing save in each case through some honest effort at identity of consciousness with them? Keeping this truth in mind, we are in a position to appraise that very general conviction among artists that men have eyes, yet see not ; among musicians, that men have ears, yet hear not; among poets, that men have hearts, yet feel not ; and among thinkers, that men have brains, yet think not. They forget that each of us and each of them has his special and conditioned range of vision, and, in consequence, his particular world, and that we, in each case, may be using all our faculties to their fullest, even though we use them differently. Thus for an artist, as indicated above, there is no object in nature but has its constantly shifting and varying moods, tints, forms, expression, light and shade, and herein alone, he holds, do you get an object's particular soul and pulse. He sees a thousand shades and tints where we see none. Hence we go reputed as blind. But even if the botanist fails to note this rich play of light and shade, has the
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artist necessarily on the other hand the botanist's keen and sharp perception for plant structure, or the physician's keen and sharp perception for the most evanescent symptom of disease? And when you complicate the situation by the addition in each case of interests, aims, standards, and conditions more or less unique with the general world of each, and with each individual in par- ticular, where in this state of affairs is one man likely to find the other?
But it may be argued that the difference in each case is nothing compared to what is held in common. If the world of the artist, in its difference, did not constitute the main world with him, why does his world so completely fill his space, that, not to exercise our eyes and faculties as he does, however much we exercise them dif- ferently, is nevertheless by him viewed as not using them at all. " The little more to him, and how much that is ; the little less, and what worlds between ! " One man stands by an accepted fact or truth, and ready to bleed for it, which another mocks, but mocks for the reason that he, in turn, consciously or unconsciously, stands by some other accepted fact or truth which the former man may scorn. Professor James, within our own times, has rendered this order of experience an emphasis which demands a recognition even larger than has yet been accorded to it. Yet I turn to Robert Browning, the arch-relativist, for its most persistent and trenchant formulation :
" What doos it all menu, poet ? Well, Your brains beat into rhythm — you tell What we felt only; you expressed Your bold things beautiful the best, And face them in rhyme so, side by side. 'Tis something, nay, 'tis much — but then, Have you yourself what's best for men? Are you — poor, sick, old ere your time — Xearer one whit your own sublime Than we who never have turned a rhyme? Sing, riding's a joy ! For me, I ride.
" And you, great sculptor — so, you gave A score of years to Art, her slave, And that's your Venus — whence we turn To yonder girl that fords the burn ! You acquiesce and shall I repine ? What, man of music, you grown gray With notes and nothing else to say;
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Is this your sole praise from a friend, " Greatly his opera's strains intend, But in music we know how fashions end ! " I gave my youth — but we ride, in fine.
" Who knows what's fit for us ?
What if Heaven be, that, fair and strong At life's best, with our eyes upturned Whither life's flower was first discerned, We, fixed so, ever should so abide ? "
Here, then, we have what is " final or necessary " divergently affirmed in the experience of different men, and, yet, in each instance, affirmed with a finality that appears most ultimate. But with " our business living " ; " our needs ultimate " ; " our faculties suited to our state " ; — how can divergency in our views, in so far as they are fundamentally divergent, come to spell scepticism, and concord in our views, in so far as they are conditioned to be in concord, the opposite? I fail to see the logic of such a contention, as I also fail to see the logic of a view of reality that would claim to know it as if the pscho-physical self, with all its varied needs, hopes, aspirations, defeats, sense of life, were not directly involved in its constitution, and, from a relativistic standpoint, varying in their significance, like things in general, from much to little or from little to much. " God has made the intellectual world har- monious and beautiful without us," writes Locke', " but it will never come into our heads all at once ; we must bring it home piecemeal, and there set it up by our own industry, or else we shall have noth- ing but darkness and chaos within, whatever order and light be in things without us." 1 How it is " brought home piecemeal " in Locke's account of it, I have now, I think, sufficiently stated in our extended study of him. I turn therefore to the remaining point.
It was further stated that relativity does not culminate in phe- nomenalism, not any more so than it was found to culminate in scepticism. This claim demands a word.
Relativity, we affirmed, implies the principle that an object reveals itself differently in different situations. Now, by placing the psycho-physical organism, as Locke does, within the system of objects taken as a whole, with its principles of determination no
1. Conduct of the Understanding, sec. 38. Italics mine.
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less final and ultimate in character than such principles as revealed in objects at large, then the principle of relative independence and dependence, as already formulated, comes to hold no less true of given situations wherein the Self figures as a part, than we are led to believe would hold of objects in general. A Ding an sich, and hence, phenomenalism, really has no meaning at all from a rela- tivistic standpoint; a thing is what it reveals itself to be in any given situation, or, by a process of construction, is what it was found to be in a series of situations, which " exceed far not only what we know but what we are apt to imagine " ; and it logically remains entirely beside the issue whether a Self constitutes a part of each such situation or whether other objects do. Objects do not exist in nature with " prefixed bounds," nor is one boundary of them more true in the abstract than another, whether we proceed by way of analysis to a pale and vapid ' quale/ or, by way of a synthesis, advance to the Absolute of our objective idealists. Whatever works from a given standpoint, or within a given situation or series of situations, analyzed and synthesized or unanalyzed and unsyn- thesized, as the case may be, is real. Hence, if valid from one point of view to turn to a sensationalism or to some " quale " for truth or the real, no viewpoint could be more astray if such pale and ghostly types are offered as samples of " immediacy " in general. Analysis carried to the nth degree is still analysis carried out to a degree, and except from some restricted aim or other, no more capable of uncovering the reals than synthesis carried to the Absolute is a thing necessary in order to conceive them. Our reality, at whatever point we may grapple with it or break off with it, is, in principle, still complex — it is the postulate of all scientific inquiry thus to conceive the matter. On the other hand, reality never reveals itself except in a more or less circumscribed situation, or in a series of them held together in an idea. Hence the violinist, in seeking what he calls a " tone," does not turn to abstract analysis nor to an Abso- lute, but to his instrument, held intact, and of a complex situation of which he too forms a part. And when that tone, to which he dedicates years and his developed technique in achieving, is eventr ually evolved, then he claims to have the one supremely real and beautiful one which the particular soul (circumscribed context) of his instrument seems to him capable of producing. He seeks the real by forging ahead, and when once attained, weaves his whole subsequent network of tones with that one as its ultimate ground or basis. And his experience is the common experience whether we turn to srioiu-o or to life in general. The stripping-process, so com-
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mon in our current search and definitions of Immediacy of Experi- ence, is either a search for a non-relative real, or for a relative real at its protoplasmic stage (which even at this stage, Heaven knows how complex it may be) . It would be like the violinist abandoning instruments entirely for getting a tone, or, in the other case, aban- doning the violin, let us saj, for a Jew's-harp. In either event, what bearing has such search in the world of art, or in any present metaphysical effort to determine an object? There is the tree before me. What is its total reality or meaning for me ? Is yours likely to be mine, or mine yours ? That, says Locke, depends upon our complex ideas of it variously formed under varying and very complex conditions. Science would yield the fullest account of it no doubt, and yet the artist's view of it need not be primarily the view of the scientist, not any more so than the psychologist's view of it need be that of a botanist. Such I consider to be Locke's philosophy, and the reductio ad absurdum of his own sensational- istic premises !
Adhering, then, to the current terminology, we may conclude in saying : whatever works is real ; merely adding thereto : whatever works in an articulated world of recognized and established values; a world where Mill's methods, so to speak, are found efficient in producing results, and where art, morality and refinement, in the direction given to them, are the accepted directions of still larger growths and results. Let any one reverse such general order and direction if he chose. But if he does so with the hope of getting something intrinsically more absolute, he pursues, he knows not what — a shadow. Whatever works, is real; whatever works in the fully articulated world of generally accepted science and values,, in its highly diversified and elaborated directions of interest and activ- ities, and not merely what works, as this term what tvorks gets itself so narrowly or so loosely and vaguely defined in our modern use of it.
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VITA
The author of the dissertation, Henry Gottlieb Hartmann, was born at Woodhaven, New York. After the usual elementary and the usual high school course, the latter pursued at Polytechnic Preparatory School, Brooklyn, X. Y., he entered Polytechnic Insti- tute of Brooklyn, and four years later, in 1900, graduated from the institution with, a B.A. degree. During the years 1900-02 he taught English and mathematics at the Polytechnic Preparatory School, and from 100-3 to 1907 taught mathematics at Cooper Union, New York City. He did graduate work at Columbia University, 1902- 06 and 1910-11, pursuing Philosophy under Professors Woodbridge, Dewey, Fullerton, Adler, Montague and Jones; Psychology, under Professors Cattell and Strong; Economics, under Professors Clark and Seligman ; and Education, under Professor MacVannel. From 1905 to 1907, he lectured in Philosophy at Polytechnic Institute, Brooklyn. During 1907, he pursued studies under Professors Eucken, Liebmann, Rein and Dinger at Jena University, Ger- many. During 1908-10 he was professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Education at Acaclia I' Diversity, Canada. Ee-entered Columbia University ns a student in 1(.)1(), and in the autumn of 1911, he became lecturer in Philosophy at Columbia Universit}*.
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