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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
3
254199
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.
5'
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
7
'-
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.
10
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
11
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.
12
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.
13
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.
14
" 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.
15
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.
1(5
17
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.
18
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.
19
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.
20
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.
21
22
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.
23
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.
24
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.
25
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.
28
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.
29
30
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.
31
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.
32
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.
33
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.
34
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.
35
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.
36
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.
38
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.
39
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.
40
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.
41
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.
42
43
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.
46
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.
47
48
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.
49
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.
50
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-
51
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.
52
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.
53
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.
54
... 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.
55
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.
56
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.
57
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.
58
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.
59
60
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.
61
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.
62
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.
63
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.
65
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.
66
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.
67
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.
68
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.
69
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.
70
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.
71
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.
72
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.
73
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
74
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
75
76
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.
78
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.
79
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.
80
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.
81
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.
82
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.
83
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.
85
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.
86
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
87
88
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
89
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;
90
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.
91
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-
92
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.
93
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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