Kant and the Empiricists: Understanding Understanding

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Kant and the Empiricists: Understanding Understanding

WAYNE WAXMAN

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

KANT AND THE EMPIRICISTS

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KANT AND THE EMPIRICISTS Understanding Understanding

WAYNE WAXMAN

1 2005

3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2005 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Waxman, Wayne. Kant and the empiricists : understanding understanding / Wayne Waxman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13 987-0-19-517739-8 ISBN 0-19-517739-8 1. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804. 2. Knowledge, Theory of—History. 3 Empiricism—History. 4. Philosophy, British. I. Title. B2799.K7W39 2005 146'.44—dc22 2004049234 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

for Alison, without whose support in every way nothing would have been possible


Preface

This book is a systematic attempt to read Kant through the British Empiricists, and the British Empiricists through Kant. It is, so far as I know, the first work of its kind, and was written in the belief that there is an affinity between their theories of understanding and self so fundamental and important that, in the cases of Hume and Kant particularly, their differences pale by comparison with what unites them. Because this interpretation runs contrary to the prevailing contemporary outlook, I have undertaken to examine the philosophies of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant in sufficient depth and detail to expose the gaps, preconceptions, and misunderstandings that, in my view, have contributed to obscuring the underlying continuity and unity of their thought. Due to the scope and complexity of this work, I have tailored it to the needs of different readerships. It does not need to be read consecutively, and the parts can stand quite well on their own. This is true above all of the book’s division into two volumes, Understanding Understanding, focusing mainly on the British Empiricists, and Time out of Mind, centered principally on Kant. The exception is the four-chapter general introduction to this volume. Readers concerned primarily with Kant or Hume should read all of this material (and reread it after completing part III), while those interested only in Locke and/or Berkeley may skip from chapter 1 directly to part I or part II by way of section A of chapter 3 and sections C and D of chapter 4. In this volume, the discussion of each British Empiricist can likewise be read independently, with one proviso: since my choice of topics and emphasis derives from the orientation of the work as a whole—self and understanding in Kant and British Empiricism—the treatment of individual thinkers is only as comprehensive as this requires.


Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to the Alexander-von-Humboldt Stiftung for the opportunity to pursue my research in Berlin and Oxford (through its Europaforschungsstipendium). My sponsor in Berlin, Professor-Dr. Rolf-Peter Horstmann, was as welcoming and supportive as he could possibly have been. I am especially grateful to him for the sessions of his Kolloquium in which a draft of my general introduction was discussed. I received wonderful feedback from a group of exceptionally talented, like-minded scholars, which I hope I have put to good use. I would particularly like to thank Dina Emundts and Stefanie Grüne for many stimulating and enjoyable discussions. I am also deeply grateful to Dr. Peter Hacker for sponsoring my visits to Oxford and being so generous with his time. My many hours of discussion with him were as valuable to my work as they were delightful. I have benefited enormously from conversations and correspondence with a number of Empiricist and Kant scholars. I am especially grateful for the unstinting support and encouragement I have received from Don Garrett, Béatrice Longuenesse, and David Owen. I would also like to express my particular appreciation to Richard Aquila, Jason Potter, Klaus Steigleider, and Allen Wood. Of the many others who have helped along the way, mention should be made of Michael Ayers, Laura Berchielli, Jean-Marie Beyssade, John Biro, Geneviève Brykman, Quassim Cassam, Francis Dauer, Rick Dempster, Eckard Förster, Aaron Garrett, James Harris, Kevin Hill, Laurent Jaffro, Arthur Melnick, Pawel Ozdowski, Jean-Claude Parriente, Martine Pecherman, John Perry, Alain Petit, Hubert Schwyzer, and Margaret Wilson. Portions of chapter 2 were revised and adapted from “Kant’s Psychologism, Pt. I,” Kantian Review,1999, and “Kant’s Psychologism., Pt. II,” Kantian Review,2000. Much of chapter 18 will be appearing in the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Hume, edited by Elizabeth Radcliffe. And portions of chapter 20 were modified from my article, “The point of Hume’s skepticism with regard to reason: the primacy of facility in Hume’s theory of the understanding,” Hume Studies, 1999. I am very grateful to the publishers and editors for their kind permission to include these materials here. My time at Boulder was a nightmare of petty dogmatism, deceit, and callous injustice. But the nightmare was turned into its opposite by a single incredible person, Alison McCulloch, to whom this book is dedicated.


Contents

Reference Scheme and Abbreviations

xv

General Introduction: The Emergence of Kant’s Transcendental Psychologism

1

Chapter 1: Kant and British Empiricism A. Sensibilism 3 B. Striking the Right Historiographical Balance 6 C. Psychologism 9 D. Overview 11

3

Chapter 2: Kant’s Extension of Humean Skepticism to Mathematics A. Kant’s Humeanism 18 B. Hume and Kant: Birds of the Same Psychologistic Feather 21 C. Kant’s Principal Debt to Hume: Psychologism as the Foundation for a New Theory of the Understanding 29 D. Mathematical Cognition: Imagination or Intellect? 33 E. Two Objections 39

18

Chapter 3: A Kantian Way Out of Hume’s Quandary 49 A. Hume’s Account of Personal Identity 49 B. Hume’s Quandary Concerning Personal Identity 53 C. Why Hume Could Not Psychologize Apprehension 55 D. The Elements of Kant’s Psychologization of Time 59 E. Prediscursive Synthetic Unity of Apperception 73 F. A Kantian Exit From Hume’s Quandary Concerning Personal Identity 83 Chapter 4: Hostage to Stereotypes A. Geometry 87 B. Mathematical Logic 91 C. Language 97 D. Cognitive Science 110

86

Part I: Locke’s New Model Philosophy: From the Metaphysics of Substance to the Psychology of Human Understanding 117 Chapter 5: Locke’s Theory of Ideas 119 A. The Thematic Unity of Locke’s Essay 119 B. Ideas, the Immediate Objects of Consciousness: Locke’s Sensibilism 122 C. Complex Ideas: Locke’s Empiricism 132 D. Further Considerations Regarding Locke’s Theory of Ideas 139

XII

CONTENTS

Chapter 6: Perception and the Synthesis of Experience A. The Human Perceptual Mechanism 150 B. The Molyneux Problem 155 C. Locke’s Solution to the Molyneux Problem 157 D. A New Conception of “Immediate” Experience 167

150

Chapter 7: Objective Understanding 174 A. The Elements of Locke’s Conception of Objective Understanding 174 B. The Object and the I: The Presupposition of an Empirical Subject 177 C. Substances: Our Understanding of Their Existence and Nature 178 D. Locke’s Materialism 184 Chapter 8: Understanding in Language 195 A. The Signification of Words 196 B. Generality Without Abstraction: The Philosophical Uses of Language 203 C. Locke’s Critique of Essentialism 209 D. Propositions, Mental and Verbal 216 Chapter 9: Knowledge and Skepticism A. Eternal Truths 224 B. Locke’s Proof of an External World 231 C. Setting Normative Epistemology to One Side: The Vitality of Early Modern Skepticism 236

224

Part II: Berkeley’s Modest Proposal: A World of Ideas

243

Chapter 10: Berkeley’s Separability Principle: Semantics, Psychology, and Ontology A. Berkeley’s False Start 248 B. The Separability Principle: The Cardinal Tenet of Berkeley’s Theory of Ideas 257 C. Beyond Language: Ideas Divested of Words 260 D. Towards a New Philosophical Ontology 266 E. The Heterogeneity of Language and Thought 269 Chapter 11: Berkeleyan Idealism: The Inseparability of Existence, Sensation, and Perception A. The Esse of Sensible Things is Percipi 274 B. Existing Unperceived 278 C. Berkeley’s Psychologistic Explication of Existence 284 D. Interpreting Berkeleyan Idealism 288 Chapter 12: Objective Understanding Dismantled A. The Likeness Principle 293 B. All Sensible Qualities Are Ideas of Secondary Qualities 297 C. Material Substance and Causation 303

247

272

293

Chapter 13: Notions of Mind 310 A. Berkeley’s Psychologistic Explications of Causality and Substance 310

Contents

xiii

B. The Nonmanifold I 315 C. The Mind as Substrate of Successive Perceptions 318 D. The Substantiality of Spirit 322 Chapter 14: Objective Understanding Transformed 325 A. The Synthesis of Visual Spatiality 326 B. Touched But Not Seen: Berkeley’s Theory of Spatial Representation 331 C. The Tactual Basis of Spatial Imagination 339 D. The Distinctive Phenomenology of Vision 344 E. The Distinctive Formal Multiplicity of Vision 348 F. Sense-Divide Transcending Objects 358 G. Objects as Chapters in the Volume of Nature 363 Part III: Hume’s Affective Affinities: Associative Attraction by Reflexive Projection Chapter 15: The Pre-Humean Problem of Origins A. The Rationalist Problem of Origins 379 B. Locke’s Critique of Rationalist Intellectualism 387 C. The Limits of Lockean Sensibilism 395 D. Berkeley’s Fortified Sensibilism 397 E. Towards Hume’s Psychologism 398 Chapter 16: From Origins of Ideas to Ideas of Origins: Causality Psychologized A. Preassociative Objects: Their Order and Arrangement 404 B. The Copy Principle: Hume’s Solution to the Problem of Origins 412 C. Making Sense of the Copy Principle: Is Circularity Avoidable? 417 D. Making Sense of the Copy Principle: Is Its Circularity Vicious? 423 E. Hume’s Theory of Ideas and the General Causal Maxim 428 F. The Copy Principle as a Product of Association 438 G. The Theory of Origins in Light of the Associative Nature of the Copy Principle 444

367 377

401

Chapter 17: The Nature of Relation A. Fictions of Relation 456 B. facility, the Essence of Relation 464 C. Vivacity Follows Facility 478 D. Projective Illusion 487 E. Associative Affects in the Science of Human Nature 496

456

Chapter 18: The Role of Custom in Associative Understanding A. At the Threshold of Synthetic A Priori Necessary Truth 500 B. Customary Association by Resemblance: General Ideas 504 C. Customary Association by Contiguity: Ideas of Space and Time 515 D. Customary Association by Cause and Effect: A World in Mind 523

499

Chapter 19: Reasoning Reasonably A. Empirical Reason 538

536

CONTENTS

XIV

B. The Structure of Empirical Rationality 546 C. The Role of Customary Association in Regulating Empirical Rationality 552 D. First Species Probable Reasoning: The Natural Basis of Belief in the Uniformity Principle and the General Causal Maxim 556 E. Reckoning With Contrariety 565 Chapter 20: The Supreme Principle of Hume’s Theory of Understanding 572 A. Skepticism With Regard to Reason: How Knowledge Degenerates Into Probability 573 B. Skepticism With Regard to Reason: How Probability Reduces to Nothing 576 C. Why Skepticism With Regard to Reason Convinces No One 579 D. The Primacy of Facility Affect in Hume’s Theory of Understanding 583 E. Other Proofs of the Primacy of Facility in Hume’s Science of Human Nature 586 Bibliography

593

Index

597

Reference Scheme and Abbreviations

When several citations from the same work occur successively in the same paragraph, I have opted not to repeat the title of the work. When the same text is cited in subsequent sentences of the same paragraph, I usually do not repeat the reference. Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. References to secondary literature, with the exception of my own previous books, are given in footnotes. Citations from primary sources are from the following editions: Descartes. All references to Descartes are from the three-volume translation by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny, published in 1984, by Cambridge University Press. References will cite abbreviated names or parts of individual works, such as “Discourse IV” for Discourse on Method part IV, or “First Meditation” for Meditations on First Philosophy, together with the relevant volume and page number of the standard Latin and French edition by Adam and Tannery, e.g. “AT VII 27”. Locke. The edition of the Essay concerning Human Understanding I employ is the 1975 Oxford-Clarendon, edited by Peter H. Nidditch, abbreviated “ECHU”. I also draw extensively on Locke’s correspondence with Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, abbreviated “CWS” with the pagination of the 1823 Works of John Locke (London). Spinoza. “E II P40S2”, for example, stands for the second scholium (“C” is used for corollaries) of proposition 40 of part II of the Ethics, in the translation of Samuel Shirley, edited by Seymour Feldman, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1982. Malebranche. “ST”, followed by book, part, and chapter, abbreviates The Search after Truth, translated by Thomas Lennon, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980. “EST” is Elucidations of the Search after Truth (same translation), and “First Dialogue”, say, for the first of the Dialogues of Metaphysics, translated by Willis Doney, cited from Malebranche. Philosophical Selections, edited by Steven Nadler, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992. Leibniz. “NE” abbreviates the New Essays on Human Understanding, translated and edited by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. “DoM” abbreviates the Discourse on Metaphysics, from G.W. Leibniz. Philosophical Essays, edited and translated by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989. Berkeley. Nearly all references are to Philosophical works, including the works on vision, edited by Michael R. Ayers (London: J.M. Dent, 1975). References will conform to the following practices: “PHK Intr. §3” for the third section of the xv

XVI

REFERENCE SCHEME

AND

ABBREVIATIONS

Introduction to A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, “1D179” for the first of the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous together with the pagination of the T. E. Jessop and A. A. Luce edition of the complete Works of George Berkeley (1946–57); “V” for the New Theory of Vision; “DM” for De Motu; and “C” for Philosophical Commentaries (also known as the Commonplace Books). “MP”, followed by the dialogue and section numbers, is used for Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher in focus, edited by David Berman (London: Routledge, 1993). “A” abbreviates The Analyst and “F” A Defense of Free-thinking in Mathematics in the Jessop-Luce Works. Hume. Citations of A Treatise of Human Nature are from the Oxford Clarendon 1978 edition by Peter H. Nidditch, revising the 1888 edition by L. A. Selby-Bigge, abbreviated “THN”. After a slash “/” the corresponding page in the new edition by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton is provided (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Citations from An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding are from the 1999 Oxford University Press edition by Tom L. Beauchamp, abbreviated “EHU IV/i ¶3”, for the third paragraph (editor’s numbering) of the first part of the fourth section. Citations from An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals are from the 1998 Oxford University Press edition also by Beauchamp, abbreviated “EPM”. “D” abbreviates Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, edited by Richard H. Popkin, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980. And “LGFE” abbreviates Hume’s Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh of 1745, Eric Steinberg’s edition of Hume’s Enquiry, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993. Kant. All translations from the German are my own. All references are to, or derived from critical editions based on, the Prussian Academy edition of the Gesammelte Schriften, begun in 1901 but still ongoing, and generally cited as the Akademie Ausgabe, abbreviated “AA”. I mostly use the standard abbreviation scheme: “A—/B—” (Critique of Pure Reason), “CPrR” (Critique of Practical Reason), “CJ” (Critique of Judgment), “ID” (Inaugural Dissertation), “PFM” (Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics), and “MFPNS” (Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science). Some works I refer to by name: Discovery (On a Discovery whereby any new Critique of Pure Reason is to be made superfluous by an older one), Progress (What progress has there been in Metaphysics since the time of Leibniz and Wolff?), Anthropology (Anthropology from a Pragmatic Viewpoint), and Logic (as published by Jäsche). Letters are cited by recipient and date. Other. Since I have frequent occasion to refer to my previous books in footnotes, I shall use the abbreviations “KMM” for Kant’s Model of the Mind. A New Interpretation of Transcendental Idealism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), and “HTC” for Hume’s Theory of Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, paperback 2002). References for all other works cited in this volume are given in footnotes.

General Introduction The Emergence of Kant’s Transcendental Psychologism It will be said that the solution to the difficulty here proposed still has considerable difficulty in it and does not lend itself to lucid exposition. But is every other solution men have attempted, or may attempt, easier and more intelligible? One might better say that the dogmatic teachers of metaphysics have shown more craftiness than candor by having put this difficult point as far out of view as possible in the hope that if nothing were said about it, no one would easily come to think of it. If we are to assist a science, then we must uncover difficulties, and even seek out those lying concealed along the way to it. For every such difficulty calls forth a remedy that cannot be found without fostering the growth of the science either in scope or specificity, so that even the obstacles become means of furthering the thoroughness of the science. Whereas if the difficulties are intentionally concealed, or removed by merely palliative means, they will sooner or later flare up into irremediable maladies and bring the science to ruin in a complete skepticism. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 103


1 Kant and British Empiricism

A. Sensibilism My purpose in this book is to expound the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant as a continuation of British Empiricism by nonempiricist means. The inconsistency of this formulation is only apparent. What principally unites the philosophies of John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume is not their empiricism but their commitment to what I shall term sensibilism: the thesis that all our ideas—perceptions, in Hume’s terminology, representations in Kant’s—originate in (are coeval with) being perceived, and have no existence prior to or independently of their immediate presence to consciousness in perception. To understand this, however, we need from the outset to dispel one of the most widespread misconceptions about sensibilism: its limitation to a thesis about the senses as sources merely of sensations (visual, tactual, etc.). Nothing is more responsible for obscuring the fundamental affinity of these philosophers than the construal of the central notion of ‘sense’ so narrowly as to diminish, even to overlook, the central importance and equal status accorded to internal sense in the philosophies of all four of these thinkers. So, before spelling out more precisely what sensibilism is, a few preliminary considerations concerning internal sense are in order.1 Both the British Empiricists and Kant distinguished the appearances present to internal sense from the appearances of the external senses given through sensation. The term most commonly used to designate the objects (contents) that appear to internal sense was reflexions (I shall henceforth employ this spelling for the objects of this sense, reserving ‘reflection’ for such discursive activities as conceptualizing, 1. There are three reasons why I have opted for ‘sensibilism’ in preference to the more common ‘imagism.’ First, since the philosophers concerned in this work are united above all by a thesis concerning the origins of ideas, a term that emphasizes the originals is to be preferred to one suggestive of copies (reproductions, representations). Second, because the term ‘image’ is so closely associated with vision, it works less well when applied to other sensations and becomes a hindrance when applied to the data of internal sense (passions, mental activity). Third, ‘image’ was not a term favored by these philosophers; they used ‘idea’ or something comparable far more often, and always with the implication that what is present to consciousness, and so an idea, is present to it, in the first instance, in sense (sensation or reflexion).

3

4

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

judging, and reasoning). The objects of internal sense consist, in the first place, of fleetingly existent perceptions (sensations, passions, thoughts) continuously coursing through our consciousness. Among the objects in this succession are, second, some that are specific to internal sense in much the same way light and color are specific to vision or sound to hearing: passions, emotions, and desires. Third, and most important, the British Empiricists and Kant counted the mind’s perceptions of the operations it performs on the data of sense (reflexions as well as sensations) among the objects of inner sense: perceiving, reproducing previous perceptions, remembering; discerning, comparing, separating, combining; considering as one, considering as related without uniting; forming propositions (judgment), forming sequences of propositions (reasoning); willing, assenting, doubting; and so forth. And, fourth, the objects present to us in and through the operations of thought count as reflexions as well (for all the sensibilists, this includes trees, stones, and all other physical objects, since reflexive activity is needed to consider as one sense-divide transcending object what is otherwise a disparate, unconnected manifold of data of the various senses). Though one gets precisely the opposite impression from recent commentary, conscious mental activity, rather than sensuous imagery, is the main focus of sensibilist theory of origins. For, insofar as inner sense came to the fore, and the scene present to the mind was deemed to be in reality precisely what it appears to this sense as being—a kaleidoscopic flux of distinct, unrelated perceptions—it was inevitable that sensibilists would accord preeminent importance to identifying, cataloguing, and adequately characterizing the various operations whereby the mind transforms its perception of this flux into consciousness of the natural world of dynamically interacting bodies and minds familiar to us in ordinary experience. For if (1) the concepts central to our understanding of the world as a world— substance, cause and effect, space, time, magnitude, real existence, and so on— cannot be traced to an origin in sensation; if (2) no ideas exist prior to or independently of their being perceived; and if (3) the scene presented to internal sense, prior to and independently of mental activity, is nothing but a random flux; then the only source remaining that can account for the presence of these concepts in our understanding is mental activity itself: awareness of the ways in which the materials perceived by the senses are consciously separated, combined, compared, and otherwise considered. Thus, the age of sensibilism was naturally also the period in which psychology moved to the forefront of philosophy, and the theory of human understanding most particularly. This was a momentous change. Until Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding appeared toward the end of the seventeenth century, psychology played no more than a supporting role in philosophy. This was not because many of Locke’s most important early modern predecessors and contemporaries took a different view of the inputs of the senses than he. For, by then, most had rejected the Scholastic “sensible species” picture of sense perception, in which the senses serve as conduits through which images of the real, objective nature of things existing outside us pass directly into our intellects, in favor of (1) and (3) of the the preceding paragraph. But none of the psychologies of human understanding expounded before Locke convinced these thinkers of (2). Instead, the most notable

Kant’s Psychologism

5

among them—the Rationalists Descartes, Arnauld, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz—embraced what I shall term intellectualism: the thesis that the ideas constitutive of intellection generally (conception, judgment, and reasoning), and of objective understanding most particularly (thought and cognition of substances, causes, quantities, etc.), exist prior to and independently of their being perceived in sensation or reflexion, and so are composed of contents distinct from sensations and reflexions. Whether intellectualists traced these ideas to a source in the essence of our own intellects (innatism) or in that of God (illuminationism) is a matter of only secondary concern vis à vis their differences with sensibilists. The key difference is that intellectualism implies that neither the senses nor any of the psychological operations directed upon their data have anything to contribute to the content of these ideas. Consequently, we have nothing whatsoever to learn about these ideas themselves from considerations pertaining to their origins as perceptions in the mind (their presence to consciousness in sensation and/or reflexion). Far from being their source, psychological operations serve instead only to make them consciously accessible (“clear”) and more easily differentiated from one another (“distinct”).2 Rationalist philosophers thus approached philosophical questions in much the same way geometers approach theirs: beginning with definitions and axioms (“clear and distinct” ideas and “intuitive knowledge” of the relations of such ideas), and proceeding to deduce various propositions therefrom, they took the putative immunity to skepticism of the demonstrations obtained by this method to be already, in and of itself, proof positive that human understanding is in possession of all the requisite ideas. The challenge confronting sensibilists was to show that the senses, together with mental activity directed upon them, are both necessary and sufficient to account for all the notions that, according to Rationalists, can have no origin save in intellect itself. The fact that the British Empiricists supposed that the senses supply only empirical data, and so equated sensibilism with empiricism—an assumption shared by every philosopher previous to Kant who addressed the origins question—is manifestly no more relevant to what sets them apart from Rationalist intellectualism than their British provenance. Nor can the rejection of this assumption suffice to exclude even a self-described transcendental philosopher from this group provided he agrees that the understanding is limited to the same sources of representations the Empiricists recognized, and makes it his principal endeavor to prove these sources both necessary and sufficient to account for all the notions the Rationalists deemed impossible to explicate purely psychologically. Since Kant’s transcendental philosophy fits this description perfectly, it is not only not paradoxical, it is essential, I shall argue, to interpret it as a sensibilist continuation of British Empiricist sensibilism by non-empiricist means.3

2. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy I §45. See chapter 15 for a more detailed consideration of intellectualist views. 3. Although Kant’s doctrine of a priori sensibility was substantially in place at the time of the 1770 Inaugural Dissertation, he had not yet broken free of intellectualism. This happened sometime after that, probably when the recollection of Hume (in the early 1770s) roused him from his “dogmatic slumber” (PFM 260); see also letters to Herz, 21 February 1772, and Bernoulli, 16 November 1781.

6


B. Striking the Right Historiographical Balance Many interpreters will recoil at this claim. In their view, Kant’s thesis that there are pure (a priori)4 intuitions that have their origin in the senses (A42–4/B59–61, A94–5), and pure concepts that presuppose the manifold of pure sensibility and its pure synthesis in imagination (A15–16/B29–30, A55–6/B79–80, A76–7/B102, A78– 9/B104), is ultimately dispensable to his philosophy. Indeed, it has become almost an article of faith, especially among Anglophone interpreters working under the influence of analytic philosophy, that the enduring “hard core” of Kantian transcendental philosophy remains intact, and moreover gains in clarity and power, once it is separated from claims about the senses, and more generally any approach to human understanding that gives primacy to questions concerning the psychological origins of concepts as representations in the mind. These interpreters take Kant to have been in essential agreement with their own notions of a strict division of labor between philosophers, whose charge is to analyze and explicate existing knowledge of mind and world, and scientists, including psychologists, whose business it is to extend and recast our knowledge through new discoveries. When confronted with Kant’s iterated insistence that his transcendental philosophy does not merely “analytically” explicate but also “synthetically” amplifies our knowledge in the same sense natural science does, the tendency is to discount this as the product of the more primitive and limited conception of analysis current in the eighteenth century. For these interpreters seem convinced that if only Kant could have acquainted himself with the kinds of logico-linguistic analysis familiar to philosophers today, he would have been persuaded that the transcendental propositions he saw no alternative to categorizing as “synthetic a priori” are in fact part of the logical fabric of objective representation itself (the algorithms of cognitive activity, conceptual schemes, language-games, or what not). The recognition of the logico-linguistic character of these propositions would also have enabled Kant to appreciate that the transcendental philosophy concerned with such propositions has no need for any special doctrine regarding the senses, and consequently has no business raising the question of the ultimate reality of material things and the empirical self at all, much less embracing a version of idealism so radically immaterialist as the transcendental variety he espoused. Moreover, Kant might have spared himself the trouble of tracing back the fundamental concepts of objective representation to their origins as representations in the mind and his consequent reliance on a “theory of ideas” replete with specially constituted mental faculties of sense perception and conceptual thought. Instead, the relation of the system of nature based on the pure concepts of the understanding to the nature and workings of the human mind could have been treated as analogous to that between a computer program and the hardware on which it runs, since, in the final analysis, it is 4. The term ‘pure’ was used by Kant to designate representations possible completely a priori, that is, with no admixture of the empirical whatsoever. Much of what Kant termed ‘metaphysics,’ as distinct from ‘transcendental philosophy,’ consists in a priori representations that are not, strictlyspeaking, pure because they involve empirical concepts and depend on certain fundamental experiences (Grundvorstellungen). My usage normally conforms to Kant’s.


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a matter of indifference whether the “program” of objective cognition runs on the “wetware” of a human brain, the electronic hardware of a computer, or any other medium suited to support its operation. For these interpreters, therefore, any notion that Kant’s transcendental philosophy is fundamentally continuous with the psychological sensibilism of the British Empiricists could not be more mistaken or misguided.5 The appeal of an interpretive approach that places a premium on the relevance of the philosophical here and now to the philosophical past and vice versa is obvious. By bringing the past into conformity with the mindsets and methods prevailing in philosophy today, a receptive readership is guaranteed, given the keen interest among contemporary thinkers to span the chasm that all too often prevents them from fully engaging with the greatest thinkers of the past. Yet, these advantages should not be purchased at the expense of textual, contextual, and overall historical accuracy. Philosophy is not like physics or biology, where the continuous improvement of knowledge from one advance to the next retrospectively marks out a path from the past to the present. The history of philosophy itself attests to this, for we find that with each founding or refounding of a school of thought, and with each great shift in focus and methodology, the image of the past is radically recast, and earlier notions of philosophy’s progress are apt to seem risibly parochial. The present does not seem any less susceptible in this regard, and the day will surely come when today’s image of the philosophical past will come to seem whimsical in ways we cannot foresee. Consequently, in purely interpretive efforts like this, one is probably wisest to focus on mastering past philosophies on their own terms before attempting to recast them in contemporary ones. For example, the mindset created by the focus of twentieth-century philosophers on sentential representation has led many to disregard the radically different orientation implicit in a theory of judgment such as Kant’s, even to the point where, in practice, it is effectively assimilated to contemporary outlooks. Yet, if there is anything common to the most enduring philosophical accounts of objective representation since Frege, it is a tendency to discount the contents present to the psyche of the individual isolated thinker. By contrast, the query at the heart of Kant’s transcendental philosophical enterprise—the possibility of synthetic a priori judgment—centers entirely on the contents present to the consciousness of the individual judging mind (“the question is not what we are supposed to attach to a given concept in thought, but what we actually think in it, even if only obscurely,” B17; also PFM 269). Indeed, Kant traced logic itself, in the guise of the universality distinctive of discursivity (= representation by means of concepts, both in judgments and inferences),6 to an origin in the most absolutely subjective of all 5. Paul Guyer employs the software analogy in “Psychology and the Transcendental Deduction,” in Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, ed. E. Förster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). The consequence of treating the psychological aspects of Kant’s transcendental philosophy as inessential is to deprive his relation to Hume and the Empiricists of fundamental importance. 6. Kant always employed the term ‘discursivity’ for representation by means of concepts (universals, general marks). This limits discursive understanding to judgments and the inferential operations that depend on them. One would therefore be mistaken to attribute to discursive understanding the synthesizing operations ascribed by Kant to imagination: “a blind but indispensable function of the

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representations, the pure Cartesian I think (the analytic unity of apperception), and this in turn to a ground in the prediscursive (B132) unity of consciousness brought about by the mental activity of synthesis directed on the manifold offered a priori by sense (the synthetic unity of apperception: B131 and B133–4 + n). Even without entering into the details, these considerations alone should suffice to make clear that so thoroughly subjectivist a conception of judgment as Kant’s does not lend itself to being slotted into the context of a contemporary theory of sententialrepresentation. The differences, as I shall show over the course of this work, are simply too numerous, too large, and too fundamental.7 More historically oriented scholars are still apt to bridle at the attempt made in this work to affirm and reinforce the traditional picture of philosophical advancement from Locke through Berkeley and Hume to Kant. Michael Ayers captures this sentiment well when he remarks that “there is no longer a felt need to record the progress of the torches of ‘Rationalism’ and ‘Empiricism’ as they pass from hand to hand; or to present the growth and development of the New Philosophy as an act of preparation for Kant and Hegel.”8 Quite apart from Kant and Hegel, a substantial number of scholars have judged the price too high, or the gains too meager, even to justify grouping Locke, Berkeley, and Hume together. They find it arbitrary to the extent that it both masks fundamental differences between them and neglects the equal or greater affinities each has with other philosophers of the period. Why tie Locke to Berkeley rather than to those who shared his realism about external objects, or his conception that God must concur before matter can acquire the perfections that allow it to act, obey universal laws of nature, form biological systems, develop animal sentience, and possibly even attain human-type intelligence? Why couple Berkeley with Locke instead of with those who rejected materialism and analyzed the mind as a solipsistically isolated monadic universe existing in a spaceless, timeless void? Or with those who likewise denied second causes and regarded nature as nothing more than sequences of events unfolding according to preestablished rules? And why lump Hume together with Locke and Berkeley when neither of the latter doubted that intuitive insight extends beyond soul”—blind precisely because its synthesizing operations are not in themselves conceptual but rather require the addition of a separate faculty of understanding to “bring them to concepts” (A78/B104). 7. Since philosophy of cognitive science has largely displaced logico-linguistic analysis at the center of anglophone philosophical endeavor (even while incorporating many of the central doctrines of the latter), many scholars have been struck by Kant’s apparent affinities with contemporary scientific psychology, including philosophers such as Patricia Kitcher and Andrew Brook and psychologists such as John O’Keefe. However, since scientific psychology seems at one with Fregean and Chomskyan logic-linguistic analysis in its disdain for philosophical psychologies centered on the I of the Cartesian cogito, these affinities may well be only superficial, and in the end may serve only to obscure more profound differences (see, for example, chapter 4, note 25). The upshot of these differences, I believe, is that Kant has even less in common with contemporary cognitive scientists than his Empiricist forebears, and, like them, cannot be understood apart from the framework of sensibilist theory of ideas and the antimaterialist idealism that (beginning with Berkeley) went with it (as Kant himself reminds us at PFM 374). See chapter 4-D for further discussion. 8. “Berkeley and Hume: A Question of Influence,” 304, in Philosophy in History. Essays on the historiography of philosophy,” ed. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).


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the ideal realm of numbers to the real realm of things by means of such (supposedly) intuitively certain propositions as “Whatever begins to exist must have a cause”? Why not rather group Hume with those who shared his conviction that everything about human nature that cannot be comprehended in terms of human social norms needs to be understood in terms of mammalian psychology? Those who would pose such questions do not mean to say that it is altogether arbitrary or pointless to relate Locke, Berkeley, and Hume to one another. They seek only to suggest that relating them is neither so useful nor necessary to understanding the thought of any of them individually as we are accustomed to supposing, and that, in general, viewing them as making up a single, continuous lineage tends to obscure more than it reveals. Even if one accepts that Locke, Berkeley, and Hume do constitute an important philosophical lineage, it is difficult to think of any scholar of British Empiricism who would not balk at treating Kant as its culmination. Undoubtedly the greatest barrier to viewing British Empiricist thought as continuous with Kant’s transcendental philosophy is the inclination to group philosophers according to their solutions to common problems. When this is done, British Empiricist positions across the board are consistently out of alignment with, when not starkly opposed to, Kantian positions: on mathematics, ethics, aesthetics, and the role of psychology in philosophy, and, above all, on nearly all matters metaphysical. In this light, one may reasonably conclude that the only continuum to be found here is one of opposition, with agreements highly exceptional and hemmed in by qualifying provisos. It will therefore require considerable effort to prove the existence of a more fundamental standpoint from which Kant’s differences with the Empiricists are reduced to the point where, at least in the case of Hume, they pale into insignificance in comparison with what unites them: sensibilism, and, in particular, the method to which sensibilism owes its philosophical significance, which, for want of an established designation, may best be termed psychologism. C. Psychologism “Psychologism” is an awkward notion, not only because it has been used in a variety of different senses but because nowadays it tends to be identified with an approach to philosophical questions that is widely condemned as fallacious: the attempt to naturalize such intrinsically normative aspects of thought as logic, mathematics, language, or ethics. In this work, I shall understand it more neutrally as the sensibilist endeavor to trace concepts at the heart of age-old philosophical disputes to their origins as ideas in sensation or reflexion, with an eye to determining whether the operations of the mind given in internal sense perception make any essential contributions to their content. When the answer is yes, the psychologistic philosopher is in a position to set bounds to the employment of a concept that limit its scope to the purview of the experiencing mind in the very same subjectivist sense that pleasures and pains can only be supposed to exist when they are perceived to exist. As affirmative answers were supposed to include some or all of the concepts central to understanding in general and objective understanding in

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particular—conceptual universality, judgment, reason, individuality and identity, space and time, existence (and its modalities of possibility, actuality, and necessity), quantity (number and extensive magnitude), quality (reality and negation), substance, and cause and effect—psychologism was rightly regarded as the source of an entirely new variety of conceptual skepticism, and met with immense hostility as a result. Psychologism was also regarded as a source of idealism, indeed the first genuinely new variety since Plato. For example, although Leibniz was an idealist, this was not because he had the least temptation, or even thought, to restrict the scope of application of ideas to the purview of sensing, reflexively acting mind. Quite the contrary, he was a committed intellectualist, who rejected any notion that ideas exist only in being perceived in sensation and reflexion, much less that they derive any essential contents through being thus perceived. Far from having any use for psychology (or, a fortiori, psychologism), Leibniz’s denial of the ultimate reality of material things derived instead from his conception of substance and the inability of anything existing in space and time to satisfy it.9 (The paradoxical character Leibniz attributed to notions such as infinite divisibility meant that the conceptual completeness he deemed indispensable to the conception of something as a substance became unattainable in the case of material things.) Even sensibilism as such does not commit one to psychologistic idealism, as the case of Locke demonstrates. Thanks to his affirmation of abstract ideas, he did not hesitate to attribute to sensibly acquired ideas a scope of application independent of the purview of experiencing minds. For example, although the ideas of space and its modes originate in visual and tactual sensation, Locke held that we can abstract from everything distinctive to these senses and employ our ideas of space to represent material objects, having no qualities in the least similar to those specific to vision or touch, with an existence distinct from (outside and independent of) their perception by a mind. Thus, while Locke’s sensibilism was a necessary condition for psychologism, it was not until Berkeley rejected abstraction in all its forms that the sensible origin of the contents of an idea could be supposed to delimit the idea’s scope of application so that, like ideas of pleasure or pain, nothing conformable to it can be conceived to exist unperceived. Yet, Berkeley stopped short of a fully formed psychologism, truly capable of restricting the scope of sensibly acquired contents (sensations and reflexions) to the purview of the mind that senses them. Only with Hume’s associationism did psychologism acquire the wherewithal to limit the scope of concepts to which even Berkeley had accorded unrestricted validity, as, for example, the concept of causation employed in the general principle that everything that begins to exist must have a cause of its existence. The transformations wrought by Humean psychologism are too profound and far-reaching to enter into here. Suffice it to say that we have Kant’s own testimony that it was the challenge posed by Hume’s skepticism 9. While Leibniz did credit at least obscure consciousness to even the simplest monads, only certain spiritual beings have sensation and reflexion. All monads, however, have the same ideas, and this shows the inessential, even incidental, character of psychological considerations for Leibniz and those influenced by him.


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of traditional approaches to metaphysical questions, together with psychologism he devised to supersede them (PFM 258–9), that first roused Kant from his “dogmatic slumber” (260) to the recognition of the need for a complete transformation of metaphysics, down to its bottommost foundations. Over the course of this work, it will emerge that the philosophies of Hume and Kant are not only both systematically psychologistic but so predominantly, and in such similar ways, that it makes sense to regard the innumerable differences between them as secondary and treat them instead as embarked upon one and the same philosophical enterprise. If this categorization is granted, at least provisionally, then it should also be evident why it is necessary to treat the philosophies of Hume and Kant against the background, first, of Locke’s sensibilism and, second, of Berkeley’s transformation of that sensibilism into incipient psychologism. In Locke’s case, this is not merely because he was the first to systematically and effectively address intellectualist challenges to the sensibilist program but, above all, because he showed how a psychological study of the origins of ideas can yield a complete account of the nature, workings, and vocation—cognitive and conative—of human understanding; he thus pioneered the kind of theory of understanding that would find its supreme expression in the Transcendental Analytic of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In Berkeley’s case, a close consideration of his theory of understanding reveals that, in the course of showing how the psychology of ideational origins could be applied to the resolution of perennial philosophical problems in ways thitherto unthought of (psychologism), he completely reconceived the relation of space and time to the senses, and thereby opened the way to both Hume’s associationism and Kant’s transcendental idealism. This study must therefore begin with interpretations that show how the theories of understanding developed by Locke and Berkeley made possible the psychologisms of Hume and Kant. D. Overview Sensibilism, then, is the principle of unity, and psychologism the principle of continuity, connecting Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Sensibilism is the presupposition of psychologism, contrasts with intellectualism, and is related to empiricism as species to subspecies. To reject sensibilism is to hold that the contents objectively present in the idea we perceive and the contents subjectively perceived in sensation or reflexion in the presence of the idea are incommensurate. The psychology of its perception can then have no fundamental or essential importance to the idea itself. For regardless of whether it is conceived as an innate exemplar of the nature of an archetype existing externally to our minds or as that nature itself (present to us immediately by some special mode of insight, be it Malebranchian illumination or a Fregean-type apprehension of senses and references), intellectualism implies that it can owe none of its content to the psychological processes whereby it, or its mental exemplar, becomes present to the individual, isolated conscious subject in sensation or reflexion. Only the sensibilists’ denial of the objective independence accorded to concepts by intellectualism can open the way

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for psychological considerations to become indispensable to determining their meaning and delimiting their scope of application. This potential is realized if, and only if, a psychological inquiry into their origin as objects present immediately to consciousness should reveal that the understanding, in and through the processes whereby it brings them to consciousness, makes some indispensable contribution to their content. For, in that case, a reference to conscious mind becomes intrinsic to their content, and their application must in consequence be restricted to the purview of conscious minds. The implication is then idealist, but of a kind peculiar to psychologism, where claims regarding reality as it exists outside our representations are based not on any pretended insight into the nature of things inaccessible to our senses but instead on the limitations of scope intrinsic to ideas actually in our possession. That is, rather than claiming such or such entity is impossible, it says only that such or such idea is nonsensical if employed in mind-independent contexts. Thus, sensibilist psychologism traverses a course from the psychology of a concept’s acquisition to its logic—the content (object) it enables us to conceive—and from there to its ontology—the subjective ideality of any object capable of being conceived through it. Once we become aware of the fundamental principles uniting Kant with his British Empiricist predecessors, especially Hume, we can see that the yawning chasm separating his positions from theirs stems from a single miniscule divergence at the roots: the addition of a source of representations unconsidered by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume—pure sensible intuition. Claims to complete originality are exceedingly rare in Kant, but he seems to have been saying nothing less than the truth when he declared “it never occurred to anyone that the senses themselves might intuit a priori” (PFM 375n). Just as the proverbial flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas when the circumstances requisite to exponentially amplify its force are in place, so too Kant’s addition of a thitherto unconsidered source of sensible representations at the inception transforms everything down the line, opening the way to a new conception of fundamental metaphysical concepts, their application to objects a priori, and—for Kant most important of all—a radically new conception of metaphysical freedom. Nevertheless, there is no denying that Kant’s contention that the Empiricists erred in regarding the senses as a source only of empirical, never of a priori, representations also poses the greatest obstacle to comprehending the evolution of sensibilism from Locke’s prepsychologistic variety through Berkeley’s quasi-psychologism and Hume’s mature systematic psychologism to Kant’s apriorization of psychologism. To begin with, if indeed the senses furnish us not merely with sensations and reflexions but also pure intuitions, how could this possibly have escaped all pre-Kantian philosophical psychologists—particularly if such intuitions condition, and are implicit in, all other intuitions, mathematical no less than empirical? In the Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant offered arguments against both empiricist and intellectualist accounts of the origin of space and time with the design of foreclosing every alternative save that of an a priori yet sensible origin. But even if his case is granted, the need persists for a positive account of the a priori sensible origin of space and time capable of making sense of how it is possible for the senses to furnish us with representations of these objects without depending on


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or in any way making use of what is perceived empirically in sensation or reflexion. How can their representation be “sensible” if neither sensations nor reflexions enter into their content in any way? With innatism and illuminationism specifically excluded by Kant’s rejection of intellectualism,10 the answers to this and related questions are, to say the least, anything but obvious. That is not to say Kant neglected them. Quite the contrary, his attempt to provide answers eventually takes us into the deepest recesses of his system, to the point where his doctrines of pure sensibility and pure understanding converge: the original synthetic unity of apperception. For the Transcendental Aesthetic proves to be only the first stage of Kant’s account of the origin of pure intuitions. In the part of the Transcendental Logic devoted to the fundamental subjective question “how is the capacity to think itself possible?”— “the pure understanding itself, according to its possibility and the cognitive faculties on which it rests” (Axvi– xvii)—it emerges that space and time are a priori unities of their manifolds that are at once original and synthetic (B136n). The consequence is that they are products not only of the senses but also of a pure psychology featuring both the action of a pure synthesis of imagination and the unity of a pure apperception (A99–100, A107, B140, and B160n). My previous book on Kant, Kant’s Model of the Mind, focused principally on the role of imagination in their origin. But that could only get one so far. In this work, I propose to complete the task by focusing on the role played by unity of apperception in the origin of space and time. The payoff in this case promises to be far greater. For if Kant did indeed regard pure apperception as no less essential to pure intuitions of sensibility than to pure concepts of the understanding, then it provides the key to understanding the relation between the a priori representations of sensibility and understanding, which otherwise seem entirely incommensurate with one other (indeed, their fundamental, ineliminable distinctness is a foundation stone of Kantian philosophy: A270– 1/B326–7). Absent this, Kant’s solution to the problem on which, in his view, the very possibility of metaphysics depends—how are synthetic a priori judgments possible?—must ultimately remain insoluble. For he purports to explain our ability to form transcendental judgments with appearances (considered a priori, and so with strict universality) as the subject and pure concepts of the understanding (the categories) as the predicates. However, since appearances consist entirely of sensible contents that can only be given a posteriori, while pure concepts of the understanding are intellectual and can only be given a priori, the relation of two such heterogeneous terms in judgment clearly requires the mediation of something homogeneous to each. To this end, Kant invoked the pure time intuition to which all appearances as such conform, as being at once sensible and a priori (A138–9/ B177–8). Yet, the sensible-intuitive character of pure time itself seems to preclude the possibility of any homogeneity with strictly intellectual-discursive nature of pure concepts of the understanding (AA 18 6359). How did Kant propose to bridge this divide? That is, how can the a priori representations of sensibility and understanding be brought into the requisite sort of agreement while at the same time preserving their radical incommensurateness inviolate? The answer, I shall 10. For Kant, all a priori representations are acquired, not innate: see KMM, pt. I and chap. 7.

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endeavor to show, lies ultimately in the way Kant integrated sensibility with understanding via unity of apperception (its synthetic and analytic unity, respectively). Nor is that the limit of the importance of this insight. Besides illuminating the relation between pure intuitions of sensibility and pure concepts of the understanding, pure apperception also reveals the nature of the relation between pure, transcendentally ideal space and time and the empirically real space and time coincident with the natural world, a relation that otherwise would remain obscured. According to Kant, however improbable it may strike us (A114, A127, B164, PFM 320 and 322, Progress 269), nature in general (formaliter spectata; B164–5) is the subjective product of the aforementioned category-based synthetic a priori judgments of pure understanding. As such, it is nothing other than the same original synthetic unity of apperception exemplified precategorially by pure intuition translated into the field of appearances (A177–8/B220 andA216/B263). In other words, the application of the categories to appearances has the twofold consequence of conferring empirical reality on a space and time that, as pure, are imperceptible and so without reality in the field of appearances,11 and conferring on appearances apprehended in intuition a posteriori, but antecedently to all discursive representation (judgments and concepts, including the categories and the principles of pure understanding they make possible), the status of spatio-temporally determinate existents—beings contained in and occupying objective (empirically real) space and time—thereby elevating these appearances to the status of full-fledged objects of nature (“phenomena” in the A248–9 sense). Thus, the psychologistic explication of pure space and time as originating in pure apperception presents the prospect of a way of unifying all the divergent doctrinal strands spun out by Kant over the course of the Transcendental Aesthetic and Analytic. We will see whether this promise can be redeemed in volume II, Time out of Mind. There is, however, another, less internalized approach to Kant’s transcendental philosophy that will figure prominently in this work, the principal advantage of which is to help simplify, clarify, and concretize my interpretation of it. This consists in relating elements of British Empiricist sensibilist psychology and psychologism to the Kantian transcendental variety as transitional forms, prototypes, near misses, and even, in some cases, close kin. The treatments of British Empiricist theories of understanding in this volume were all undertaken with that end in view, and scores of references to Kant are scattered throughout its course. For example, the theories of space and time developed by Berkeley and Hume (chapters 14 and 18) lend themselves remarkably well to making sense of both the purity and sensible character of Kantian space and time. The explication of the concept of real existence in terms of sensation, pioneered by Locke (chapter 9) and psychologistically transformed by Berkeley (chapter 11), offers a more accessible

11. Kant’s reasoning in each of the four classes of objective principles of pure understanding— Axioms, Anticipations, and Analogies—turns on the imperceptibility of space and, above all, time: AA 23 E LXX (A163), B207, B219, B225, A183/B226, B233, A200, B257, A215/B262, and Progress 275– 6. Earlier treatments of the topics considered in these paragraphs can be found in “What Are Kant’s Analogies About?” 63–114, Review of Metaphysics, September 1993, and “Kant on the Possibility of Thought,” 809–59, Review of Metaphysics, June, 1995.


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avenue into Kant’s transcendental idealism, helping in particular to make clear the precise nature of the empirical realism he deemed the obverse side of this idealism, as well as the critical philosophical basis on which he affirmed the existence of mind-independent things in themselves. And Locke’s subjectivist conception of propositional thought in general, his conception of mathematical knowledge as instructive (chapter 8-D), and Hume’s development of these ideas (chapter 18) into the thesis that “the necessity, which makes two times two equal to four, or three angles of a triangle equal to two right ones, lies only in the act of the understanding, by which we consider and compare these ideas” (THN 166/112), take us to the very threshold of Kant’s conceptions of judgment and synthetic a priori judgment in particular. So, even though the studies of British Empiricist theories of understanding in this volume are intended to stand on their own (relatively both to Kant and to one another), I shall all the while be tacitly reading them through Kant in order that I may then read Kant through them in the succeeding volume. Before embarking upon my examination of Empiricist theories of understanding, however, a preliminary trial of my principal interpretive thesis seems in order, both to further clarify it and to lay the groundwork for the approach just described. In particular, I shall put to the test Kant’s claim that Hume’s premises, if adhered to strictly and pursued to their farthest implications, would have led him to abandon empirical psychologism in favor of Kant’s own transcendental variety. In chapter 2, I will examine Kant’s own argument to this effect, intended to show that the very same reasoning Hume used to show that causal necessity is grounded not on the constitution of the objects we perceive—sensations, reflexions, and their images in thought—but on the psychological constitution of our minds in considering them applies with equal force to the necessity of mathematical relations, and so has the same skeptical implication. Since the upshot is a generalization of Hume’s skeptical challenge from traditional metaphysics to the whole of a priori cognition and its cognitive applications, including the mathematical physics Hume so cherished, Kant maintained that Hume would gladly have sacrificed his empiricism in favor of a doctrine of a priori sensibility on which to ground mathematical necessity. If so, the mere fact that Hume could abandon empiricism without forsaking either the fundamental tenets of his skepticism or the psychologistic project that goes with them would go far to vindicate my thesis that the differences between the two philosophers pales by comparison with the sensibilist psychologism that unites them. The chapter then concludes with responses to two objections likely to arise in connection with the claim that Kant’s vast differences from Hume all come down to a single psychological thesis about the nature of sensibility. Chapter 3 is the most challenging of this volume. In it, I consider a second way, unthought-of by Kant, in which the case can be made that Hume’s own premises, if followed through consistently, inexorably point beyond empirical psychologism to transcendental. Unlike the vulnerability of mathematics to Hume’s skepticism—a problem he overlooked — it concerns a difficulty Hume did eventually detect but could never resolve: the quandary concerning personal identity described in an appendix to the second volume (1740) of A Treatise of Human Nature. Hume’s difficulty consisted in being unable “to explain the principles, that

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unite our successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness” (THN 636/400). Since the very same Humean principles that make mathematics vulnerable to the skeptical argument regarding the necessity of a cause for every beginning of existence prevented Hume from finding a way out of the quandary, it is natural to wonder if Kant’s doctrine of pure sensibility, particularly as concerns time, might have been just the explanatory principle Hume was seeking. To determine whether this is indeed so, I shall first analyze the quandary itself, identify which conditions a resolution consistent with Hume’s principles has to meet, and consider why Hume’s empiricism failed to equip him with the necessary means. I will then show how Kant’s psychologism in respect to time, when understood as founded on an account of its origin involving imagination and apperception as well as sense, provides a way out of the quandary not open to Hume’s empirical psychologism. And, in the process, the essential elements of the interpretation of Kant to be presented in volume II will be set forth. Before describing the final chapter of this general introduction, I need to take note of the fact that there is yet another interpretive approach to Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant that will not be pursued in this work, one based on the conviction that to make a philosophy of the past intelligible, it should, wherever possible, be tailored to fit contemporary philosophical frameworks. Since past philosophers’ theories of ideas, faculties psychology, idealism, and related doctrines are generally considered nonstarters, or even nonsensical, by (mostly Anglophone) philosophers today, many interpreters maintain that we need to discard the literal meanings of their words and translate their texts, so far as possible, into currently respectable philosophical problems and solutions, and, by thereby showing how the rest may be adjudged inessential, retain only the enduring hard philosophical core of the systems they bequeathed to us.12 For such an approach to bear scrutiny, however, its exponents must validate their working assumption that philosophy today is, in its essentials, the same subject it was in the early modern period, so that it is not mere historical myopia that tempts them to believe that contemporary substitutes can be found for the context and terms in which early moderns philosophized without unduly falsifying, distorting, or obscuring what they thought and why. Many interpreters, myself among them, find the affinities they point to too superficial and the differences they neglect too profound to sustain this assumption, except perhaps in isolated instances of lesser importance. But even if this were not so, interpreters who tailor early modern philosophies to fit a contemporary framework run a risk of putting the cart before the horse. For if we excuse ourselves from confronting the often formidable obstacles in the way of comprehending them in their own terms first, are we not likely merely to compound our problem by introducing alien, potentially incompatible philosophical projects into the equation? Understanding the texts of early modern philosophers primarily in terms of 12. A notable recent example is Robert Hanna: “those of us writing about Kant’s first Critique at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and therefore 100 years after the beginning of the analytic tradition, cannot possibly ignore the dialectical interplay between Kant’s views and those of his leading analytic critics without risking misunderstanding Kant’s theories”; Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).


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their own projects (and vice versa) seems to me an essential prerequisite for forming a sound judgment as to whether and how best to appropriate their philosophies for present purposes. Thus, my procedure throughout this work shall be to strive to do justice to each philosopher from the standpoint of his own system, and to depart from that role only when I advance to the next philosopher and concern myself to show how he appropriated the thought of his predecessors for his own philosophical purposes. And to put my money where my mouth is, I shall present arguments intended to show that the gulf separating Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant from contemporary Anglophone philosophy is too wide and deep to sustain any but the most modest claims of affinity. The lines of my argument are laid out in chapter 4, but that is only the beginning. They are developed over the body of the work via interpretations of the doctrines featured in it, doctrines that, properly understood, pose huge, often insuperable obstacles to attempts to apply notions drawn from contemporary logico-linguistic theory or cognitive science to the interpretation of early modern philosophy. Discussions of cognitive science approaches can be found in chapters 6, 14, and 17–20; discussions of philosophy of language approaches can be found of chapters 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, and 16; and they will be resumed in volume II, culminating in the interpretation of the connection Kant proposed between self and understanding. The organization and objectives of the remainder of this book (parts I—III) are described in the introductions to the individual parts, and the introductory paragraphs of individual chapters. I shall therefore conclude this chapter by noting that discussion of secondary literature will be kept to a minimum. It is difficult enough to prevent the wealth of detail in the primary sources from obscuring the case that the unity and continuity in the theory of understanding from Locke through Berkeley and Hume to Kant are more fundamental and philosophically significant than their diversity and divergence. To attempt to deal as well with the secondary literature in the detail it deserves would be almost certain to bury all traces of the coherence of theme and objectives responsible for this work’s design. Instead, I shall confine myself to a sampling of (mostly recent, mostly Anglophone) secondary works selected for their quality and/or as emblematic of established or growing scholarly trends.

2 Kant’s Extension of Humean Skepticism to Mathematics

A. Kant’s Humeanism No reader of Kant can fail to be struck by the extent to which he saw himself as heir to Hume’s philosophical legacy. In work after work, he tells us how Hume was the first to identify the problem that puts the whole of metaphysics, even its very possibility, into doubt. He expresses regret at Hume’s failure to recognize that the same analysis that puts metaphysics into doubt applies equally to mathematics, as he would then have seen that this extension of his skepticism suffices to bring about the “terrible downfall of the chief branches of cognition” (CPrR 52). Moreover, owing to “the good company into which metaphysics would thus have been brought . . . that ingenious man would have been drawn into considerations that must needs have been similar to those which now occupy us, while benefitting immeasurably from the beauty of his inimitable eloquence” (PFM 273; also B20). Yet Kant’s belief that Hume might have entered upon the path of transcendental philosophy assumes that he could have abandoned his empiricism without fundamentally compromising his fundamental philosophical principles, and so implies the existence of a central core of Humeanism relative to which even empiricism is inessential and dispensable. Many balk at this suggestion. Isn’t empiricism the ultimate redoubt of Humeanism—the one thing the author of A Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding could never renounce? Is it not at least presumptuous for Kant, or indeed anyone, to claim in Hume’s name that the place of empiricism in his philosophy is a subordinate one? Yet Kant was on stronger ground than one might think. He gives no evidence either of finding fault with Hume’s analysis of metaphysics or of being unready to concede that, insofar as metaphysics alone is in question, empiricism is the right, perhaps the only choice a philosopher could make in view of the implications of that analysis. And Hume did indeed make clear that he was quite content to live with the skeptical consequence of his empiricism that “divinity or school metaphysics . . . contain nothing but sophistry and illusion,” so long as it leaves intact 18

Kant’s Extension of Humean Skepticism to Mathematics

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all “abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number” and “experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence” (EHU XII/iii ¶34). So, if indeed Kant was correct in claiming that Hume’s skeptical reasoning extends beyond metaphysics to mathematics, it seems quite certain that, as soon as Hume recognized this, he would no longer have been content to live with its result: Mathematics . . . must also succumb to empiricism in principles on the same ground on which Hume put custom in the place of objective necessity in the concept of cause; despite all its pride, it must consent to lower its bold claims commanding a priori assent and expect approval of the universal validity of its propositions from the kindness of observers who, as witnesses, would not refuse to admit that what the geometer propounds as principles they have always perceived as well, and who would therefore allow it to be expected in the future, even though it is not necessary. In this way Hume’s empiricism in principles also leads unavoidably to skepticism even with respect to mathematics and consequently in every scientific theoretical use of reason (for this belongs either to philosophy or to mathematics). I leave each to appraise for himself whether (in view of such a terrible downfall of the chief branches of cognition) the common use of reason will come through any better and will not instead become irretrievably entangled in the same destruction of all science, so that from the same principles a universal skepticism will have to follow (though it would, admittedly, concern only the learned). (CPrR 52)

In Kant’s eyes, it thus took only a single lapse to prevent Hume from being driven by the prospect of a universal skepticism to embark upon the apriorist path that “must needs” lead to the philosophy propounded in the Critique of Pure Reason: a failure to recognize that the very same commitments implicit in his skeptical analysis of metaphysics cast mathematics into the same sinking boat. Kant was correct in thinking that Hume espoused a version of the traditional view that mathematical cognition is always and invariably analytic, such that, at each step in a demonstration, we apprehend, by immediate intuition,1 that the contrary is precluded by the principle of contradiction, without need (or possibility) of any other principle to supplement it (“When a demonstration convinces me of any proposition, it not only makes me conceive the proposition, but also makes 1. As employed by the British Empiricists, ‘intuition’ carries a meaning different from and to some extent contrary to Kant’s notion. For the former, it denotes something made possible by the comparison of ideas without the need to have recourse to experience in order to relate them: we intuit the abstract relations of ideas, such as that a hand is larger than a finger, yellow lighter than purple, the height of a man greater than the height of a mouse. If we cannot intuit the square root of 14,067, then we need to calculate it; if we cannot intuit whether two shades of blue are the same or different, we have recourse to a standard; and if we cannot intuit a difference in size between one man and another, we need to take measurements. For Kant, by contrast, ‘intuition’ (Anschauung) refers to the immediate nondiscursive presentations of sense, whether pure or empirical, prior to acts of comparison and relation (“cognitions are called sensible on account of their genesis and not on account of their comparison in respect of identity or opposition,” ID 393). Like the Rationalists before them, what the Empiricists deemed matters of intuition Kant treated as a certain sort of recognition in a concept, where the concept furnishes the rule (standard) of comparison (see esp. A103–4, but also A78/B104, B114–15, A126, B137–8, and A140–2/B179–81).

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me sensible, that ’tis impossible to conceive any thing contrary,” THN 652–3/411; also 70/50, 95/66, 180/121, and EHU IV/i ¶1).2 The question is whether Kant was also correct in his belief that the way to the opposing synthetic conception of mathematics defended in the Critique of Pure Reason requires the proposal of no principle, and presupposes no commitment, beyond those Hume himself embraced and deemed incontrovertible. This is a very strong claim indeed, asserting not merely that Hume’s views imply the essential syntheticity of mathematical cognition but that, conversely, Kant’s critique of the traditional conception premises Hume’s views and none but these. If so, then anyone inclined to suppose that Hume’s divergence from Kant on the status of mathematical cognition marks a parting of the ways between them should think again. For it would mean that, in calling the problem of the Critique of Pure Reason “Hume’s problem” (PFM 261), Kant was doing more than merely acknowledging the role of Hume’s “censure” of metaphysical reason in rousing him from his dogmatic slumber (A760–1/B788–9 and A767–8/B795–6). Rather, we would have to recognize that every step he took in the process of expanding the scope of Hume’s censure to include mathematics is a distinctly Humean step that Hume himself might, and indeed ought, to have taken. The evidence confirms Kant’s claim to have remained within a strictly Humean framework when he generalized Hume’s problem to include mathematics. Before reviewing it, however, there is a further possibility that needs to be considered: if Kant’s generalization of the problem of the possibility of a priori metaphysical cognition to the possibility of a priori cognition in general is, in the strictest sense, a Humean problem, then might it not also be the case that the solution to it embodied in Kant’s transcendental philosophy is, in essence, a Humean solution? From Kant’s perspective, Hume’s false assurance regarding mathematics meant that there was nothing to impel him toward the only way of solving the problem of the possibility of a priori cognition consonant with his Lockean-sensibilist program of explicating human understanding entirely in terms of ideas originating in sense and in the mind’s own actions upon these data: the existence in us of a faculty of a priori intuitions that, despite being void of all material of sensation and reflexion, are nevertheless sensible, rather than intellectual, in nature. To be sure, Hume was commendably cautious when, prior to proposing an empirical psychological source of the idea of necessary connection essential to causal relations, he allowed that “there may still remain a suspicion, that the enumeration [of sources] is not compleat” (EHU IV/ii ¶22). Yet there is no indication whatsoever that he canvassed the possibility that the senses might be a source of a priori intuitions of sensible objects, or, a fortiori, that he ever considered the possibility that both metaphysical and mathematical cognition might admit be being explicated on this basis (“the pure forms of all sensible intuition . . . are what make a priori synthetic propositions possible,” A39/B56; also B73). Had he done so, and had he recognized that the problem he posed applies to mathematics and metaphysics 2. Although Hume attributed an imperfection to geometrical reasoning from which arithmetic and algebra are free, he considered it so minor that the resulting “mistakes can never be of any great consequence” (THN 72/51).


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alike, he might very well have steered clear of the path that leads to “empiricism in principles” (CPrR 52), and instead sought the solution to his problem along the path opened up by a doctrine of pure sensible intuition. To be sure, one cannot know. Nevertheless, since the mere possibility suffices to show that Hume’s sensibilism has the potential to diverge from his empiricism, Kant was surely right to suppose that Hume would have embraced the former at the expense of the latter if that were the only way to prevent knowledge of mathematical relations from deserving a place alongside divinity and school metaphysics in “the flames . . . [of] sophistry and illusion” (EHU XII/iii ¶34). B. Hume and Kant: Birds of the Same Psychologistic Feather While some commentators have noted that all the important lapses Kant identified in Hume’s censure of metaphysics consist in a lack of fidelity to Hume’s own principles and procedures, one looks in vain for any who have followed this through to the recognition that Kant was no less rigorously Humean in his solution to the problem of transcendental philosophy than he was in framing the problem itself. This is all the more perplexing because Kant could hardly have been more explicit about it than he was in the following well-known but, in its most important regard, seldom heeded text: One cannot, without feeling a certain pain, behold how entirely every one of [Hume’s] opponents—Reid, Oswald, Beattie, and lastly Priestly—missed the point of his problem (Aufgabe). . . . It was not the question whether the concept of cause is correct, serviceable, and in respect of the whole of our cognition of nature indispensable, for this Hume never doubted. Rather, it was the question whether the concept is thought through reason a priori and in this way has an inner truth independent of all experience and therefore also a far more extended employment, not limited to objects of experience: here is where Hume expected a breakthrough (Eröffnung). It was indeed only the issue (Rede) of the origin of this concept, not of its indispensability in use: if only the former were ascertained, then everything concerning the conditions of its use and the sphere in which it can be valid would already of itself have been given. (PFM 258–9)

Neither Hume nor Kant doubted the normative correctness or indispensability of concepts like cause and effect to objective representation. Yet, for them, this was quite beside the point philosophically. Their paramount concern was the origin of the concept as a representation in our mind: whether it is “thought through reason a priori” (PFM 257), whether it is a mere “bastard of the imagination” (PFM 258), or whether it arises from some other source. By a process of elimination, Hume found himself left with no source but the actions and affects of associative imagination to which to trace the concepts at the heart of traditional metaphysical disputes (necessary connection, identity, substance, space, time, etc.). For Kant, by contrast, the story of perception begins not with the data of the senses (sensations and reflexions) but with the pure sensible intuition that first makes their perception possible. With this hitherto unrecognized source of representations at his disposal,

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the way was opened to a transcendental psychology of origins focusing on the manifold of pure sensible intuition, its pure synthesis in imagination, and the pure consciousness of that synthesis in apperception. It was in terms of this psychology that Kant (1) explicated the contents of such concepts as cause and effect, substance, quantity, number, space, time, and existence, and then, on the basis of these explications, and (2) established both the possibility and the limits of the validity of the synthetic a priori judgments incorporating these concepts. Although this may be obvious to some, the trend in Kant scholarship has been so antipsychological for so long that the preeminent importance Kant attached to tracing concepts to their origins as representations in the mind has been all but forgotten. And this is why texts like that at PFM 258–9 are so important: they make unequivocally clear not only that Kant deemed Hume’s psycho-genetic method of explicating the concepts at the heart of perennial metaphysical problems—what I am terming psychologism—his principal positive legacy to philosophy but also that Kant himself wholeheartedly endorsed Humean psychologism as the key to solving these problems.3 Hume scholars too stand to benefit from a clearer, deeper appreciation of the extent to which Hume and Kant were upholders of one and the same psychologistic approach to metaphysical questions. For even those most resistant to endorsing the role of destroyer of metaphysics that Kant assigned to Hume’s empiricist version of the psychologistic program cannot deny that Hume attached the highest importance to inquiries into the origins of ideas: ’Tis impossible to reason justly, without understanding perfectly the idea concerning which we reason; and ’tis impossible perfectly to understand any idea, without tracing it up to its origin, and examining that primary impression, from which it arises. (THN 74/53)

To overcome “the obscurity of ideas, and ambiguity of terms,” that represent “the chief obstacle to our improvement in the moral or metaphysical sciences,” the discovery of an idea’s origins furnish philosophers with a new microscope or species of optics, by which, in the moral sciences, the most minute, and most simple ideas may be so enlarged as to fall readily under our

3. Since it is unknown whether Kant read the Treatise before he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason, I shall assume that its contents, by contrast with the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, were unknown to him unless there is clear evidence to the contrary. For example, there are two sources that were almost certainly known to Kant from which he could have formed some idea of the contents of book I of the Treatise (“Of the understanding”), including positions and arguments that did not find their way into the Enquiry: (1) the extensive paraphrases and citations from the Treatise (including passages relating to personal identity found on THN 207/137–8 and 252–3/165) in Beattie’s 1771 On the nature and immutability of truth (translated into German in 1772), and (2) a translation of the final section of Book I of the Treatise (with the brief mention of Hume’s view on the self found on THN 265/172–3) that circulated in Königsberg in 1772. For a recent discussion of Kant’s knowledge of Hume, see Günter Gawlick and Lothar Kreimendahl, Hume in der deutschen Aufklärung. Umrisse einer Rezeptionsgeschichte, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1987, and Wolfgang Ertl, David Hume und die Dissertation von 1770. Eine Entwicklungsgeschichte der Philosophie Immanuel Kants, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999.


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apprehension, and be equally known with the grossest and most sensible ideas, that can be the object of our enquiry. (EHU VII/i ¶4)

The technique is simply to trace ideas in thought to the sensations and reflexions (termed “impressions” by Hume) from which they originate: Produce the impressions or original sentiments, from which the ideas are copied. These impressions are all strong and sensible. They admit not of ambiguity. They are not only placed in a full light themselves, but may throw light on their correspondent ideas, which lie in obscurity.

To recognize Hume’s new “species of optics” as an instance of the psychologism described in chapter 1, we need only to remark that his term “impression” includes impressions of reflexion. These constitute more than just (1) the emotional, conative, voluntary, and other characteristically human modes of passionate response to the ideas constitutive of the everyday empirical world conjured up by associative imagination. For Hume also ranks among them (2) the actions4 we perform on sensory data in associative imagination, together with any of (3) the feelings immanent to associative imagination in the performance of these actions, inasmuch as these affects too—no less than sensations, passions, or volitions—are immediately given data of consciousness (where “consciousness” signifies “a reflected thought or perception,” THN 635/400). The actions of imagination of primary concern to Hume are the transitions we make from present impressions to ideas in thought, and there are two affects coincident with these actions that play a central role in his theory of understanding and of human nature generally: (3a) the “easy,” “smooth,” “natural,” “facile” feeling that distinguishes associative transitions of thought (to which I shall mainly refer by Hume’s term facility),5 and (3b) the feeling of “force,” “vivacity,” “solidity,” “firmness,” or “steadiness” (THN 629/68, EHU V/ii/¶12) characteristic of the manner in which impressions and (believed) ideas are considered (to which I shall refer by Hume’s term vivacity). In their essentials, Hume’s accounts of our most important cognitions and conations consist in tracing them back to associative relations whose contents are explicated in terms of impressions of reflexion of types 2 and 3. For example, when Hume claims that customary association is the true source of the idea of necessary connection which “makes an essential part of causation” (THN 407/261; also 77/55, 87/61–2, 409/263), what is he identifying as the originating impression? The impression is an impression of reflexion, but not in a sense that would classify it as an emotion, desire, or volition (type 1). Rather, it is found in customary transitions of thought (type 2): 4. The notion of “action” in Hume has to be understood contextually. Sometimes it may carry a causal connotation, sometimes it signifies an affective disposition of the imagination (THN 106/74 and EHU V/ii ¶12), and on occasion it even includes with in its scope seeing, hearing, loving, and hating, i.e., all perceptions as such (THN 456/293). The issue of circularity in Hume’s explication of cause and effect will be explored in chapter 16. Here it suffices to note that (unless otherwise indicated) I am using “action” in a causally neutral, or at least causally innocent, sense. 5. While some Hume scholars question whether he conceived of facility (smooth, easy transitions of the imagination) as a species of affect, the evidence that he did seems compelling: see chapter 17-B.

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION The connexion, therefore which we feel in the mind, this customary transition of the imagination from one object to its usual attendant, is the sentiment or impression, from which we form the idea of power or necessary connexion. Nothing farther is in the case. (EHU VII/ii ¶28) Necessity, then, is . . . nothing but an internal impression of the mind, or determination to carry our thoughts from one object to another . . . The necessary connexion betwixt causes and effects is the foundation of our inference from one to the other. The foundation of our inference is the transition arising from the accustom’d union. These are, therefore, the same. (THN 165/111)

As Hume makes clear time and again, custom is a chief source of facility affect (see, for example, 115–6/80 and 422/271); and when the customary union includes an impression, the idea to which the transition is made will then “approach the impressions in force and vivacity” and “imitate them in . . . influence on the mind” (119/82). Consequently, the action of the imagination in calling up an idea on the occasion of an associated impression (type 2), together with the affections immanent to the action (types 3a and 3b) constitute the essential constituents of the impressions from which all ideas of causal connections derive (“efficacy, agency, power, force, energy, necessity, connexion, and productive quality, [which] are all nearly synonimous,” 157/106; also 77/55 and 90–1/63). Given the action alone, without these affects, the human mind, according to Hume, could no more form ideas of causal connections than it could imagine colors or sounds in the absence of visual or auditory sense perceptions. And from his psychological account of these ideas in terms of their originating impressions, Hume drew the quintessentially psychologistic conclusion that “we either contradict ourselves, or talk without a meaning” if, instead of signifying “that determination of the mind, which is acquir’d by custom,” we attempt to apply the concept of causal connection to “the ultimate and operating principle . . . which resides in the external object” (THN 266–7/173).6 Hume’s strategy should now be evident. “There is no question, which on account of its importance, as well as difficulty, has caus’d more disputes both among antient and modern philosophers, than this concerning the efficacy of causes, or that quality which makes them be follow’d by their effects.” Yet they need never have embarked upon these disputes if, in order to determine “what idea we have of that efficacy, which is the subject of the controversy,” instead of stopping at definitions they had embarked upon a psychological inquiry into “the impressions, from which it is originally deriv’d” (THN 156–7/105). Indeed, doing so proves to be the only way of discovering something real, prior to and independent of our discourse, that is capable of underwriting causal language, thereby saving us from having to conclude “that we have no idea of connexion or power at all, and that these words are absolutely without any meaning, when employed either inphilosophical reasonings, or in common life” (EHU VII/ii ¶26). The price, however, is the admission that this idea incorporates into its content something that has its source in an ineluctably subjective impression of reflexion of type 3, whereupon 6. Some interpreters question that Hume intended to go so far. For a discussion, see chapter 16-C.


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we have no choice but to concede that the meaning and scope of application of all our concepts of causality are restricted to conscious experience in the same way ideas of impressions of type 1 are, or sensations of pleasures and pains (indeed, according to Hume, the facility and vivacity affects that constitute the originating impressions of ideas’ necessary connection are themselves sources of pleasure, and their opposites sources of pain).7 In effect, then, Humean psychologistic analysis converts the absurdity concealed in the supposition that “causes may exist independently of thought” into the patent nonsense that “customs of thought may exist independently of thought.” And since this “not only cuts off all hope of ever attaining satisfaction, but even prevents our very wishes” (THN 266–7/173), Hume’s psychologism, however unsatisfying to the metaphysician, at least promises the benefit of relief from much futile philosophical endeavor: “nothing is more certain, than that despair has almost the same effect upon us with enjoyment, and that we are no sooner acquainted with the impossibility of satisfying any desire, than the desire itself vanishes” (THN xviii/5). Although Kant did not treat empirical psychology as fundamental to the explication of the concepts at the heart of traditional metaphysical disputes, there can be no question that he was fully as concerned as Hume to offer psychological accounts of their origins as representations in the mind, and that he did so with the same ends in view: determining whether the mind makes essential contributions to the content of these concepts, and, if so, delimiting their scope of application accordingly. From the outset of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the origins theme is both pervasive and central to the formulation of his project. If metaphysics is the science of a priori cognition, the apriority of a representation is a question that turns first and foremost on the representation’s origin: “into our experiences there enter cognitions that have their origin (Ursprung) a priori” (A2); “though all our cognition begins (anhebt) with experience, it does not follow that it all originates (entspringt) from experience” (B1; also A2). At B5–6, Kant identifies the a priori origin of certain concepts and judgments as the Critique’s special focus of concern. At A3–4/B7–8, he emphasizes the importance of the thitherto neglected question of origins, while at B23 he insists that the primary task for the philosopher is not the analysis of concepts but the discovery of “how we attain (gelangen) them.”8 Then, as if to mirror the emphasis on origins in the Introduction, Kant concludes the Analytic of Concepts of the Critique by characterizing the a

7. “Belief must please the imagination by means of the force and vivacity which attends it; since every idea, which has force and vivacity, is found to be agreeable to that faculty” (THN 122/84; also 453/289); and “facility . . . is another very powerful principle of the human mind, and an infallible source of pleasure . . . The pleasure of facility does not so much consist in any ferment of the spirits, as in their orderly motion” (THN 423/271). See chapter 17-E. 8. See also A44/B61–2 (“subjective constitution” plus the parallel remark at PFM 290 stressing that the counterpart to a logical difference of the sort in Leibniz and Wolff is “the genetic one of the origin of cognition itself”), A78/B103 (the goal is to “determine the first origins of our cognitions”), A128 (“origin and truth”) A195–6/B240–1 (how we are “first led to make for ourselves the concept of cause”), A204/B249 (critique is concerned “with the sources of synthetic a priori cognition”), A270–1/B326–7 (“understanding and sensibility [are] two sources of representations”), A725/B753 (the demand is “to investigate the origin of the pure concepts of understanding and in so doing determine the extent of their validity”), and A758/B786 (Kant’s critical investigation of “the primary sources of our cognition”).

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priori representations described in the preceding chapters—space and time (pure sensible intuitions) together with the categories (pure concepts of the understanding)—as products of an “epigenesis of pure reason” (B166–7). This is a genetic notion if ever there was one; and Kant’s use of it as a way of contrasting his account of a priori representations (as acquired through mental activity directed upon the a priori manifold of sense) with both innatism and empiricism dates back to his first steps toward the Critique in the early 1770s: Whether concepts are mere educta or producta. Preformation or epigenesis. producta either through physical (empirical) influence or through consciousness of the formal constitution of our sensibility and understanding on the occasion of experience, hence still producta a priori, not a posteriori. The doctrine of innate ideas (ideis connatus) leads to fantasy (Schwärmerei). aqvisitae are a priori or a posteriori acqvisitae. The former are not always intellectual. Thus, the division of cognition into sensitive and intellectual is not the first, but rather that into a priori and a posteriori. (AA 18 §4851, 1771; see also §4859).9

Precisely because it is so seldom done, it is all the more important never to lose sight of the fact that the “grounding” role played by the Analytic of Concepts in respect of the Analytic of Principles consists in a “proof from the subjective sources (Quellen) of the possibility of cognition of an object in general” (A149/ B188). For when this is done, the essentially psychological character of Kant’s conception of the natural world—and so too its affinity with Hume’s associationist conception and remoteness from the conceptions of analytic philosophers today— becomes unmistakable, and supplies the key to resolving many of the seeming contradictions and obscurities it is commonly thought to involve.10 Of course, if psychological origin were an end in and of itself, then Kant ought to have reserved the greatest praise for Locke rather than Hume (“Locke’s excellence was that since he did not cognize intellectualia as connata, he sought their 9. The preformationist “middle course” with which both the epigenesis of pure reason and empiricism are contrasted at B167–8 is a version of the innatism of educta attributed to Crusius at AA 17 §§4275. For an extended discussion, see KMM chapter 7. 10. In lesser writings too, Kant remained true to the origins theme. A striking instance was when his critic Eberhard confronted him with the charge of innatism. Here was a perfect opportunity for Kant to declare that his notion of the “a priori” has nothing whatsoever to do with the origins of representations in the mind but ought instead to be construed in, say, the manner philosophers today might denominate “an epistemological analysis of their normative force.” Yet, far from denying that his concern was with origins, Kant insisted merely on having fashioned a novel method of accounting for origins, distinct from both innatism and empiricism, according to which pure intuitions of sensibility and pure concepts of the understanding, while original to our minds (by contrast with representations derived from experience), nonetheless have to be acquired through (consciousness of) the mental activity of synthesis directed upon data of the senses, which they in no sense preexist. Thus, in responding to his critic, Kant embraces faculties innatism, while explicitly rejecting representational innatism: “This first formal ground alone, e.g., of the possibility of a space intuition is innate, not the space representation itself” (Discovery 222). In KMM (chapters 1-D and 3), I related this text to a passage in the Critique in which one finds the form of intuition characterized as a “subjektive Beschaffenheit der Sinnlichkeit” and formal intuition equated with “time and space” themselves (A267–8/B323–4). This seems to me to coincide exactly with what Kant is saying in the On A Discovery text with respect to space and time as well as the categories.


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origin,” AA 18 4894; also A86–7/B118–9 and letter to Garve 7.Aug.1783). However, as PFM 258–9 makes clear, Kant felt a far greater debt to Hume as the discoverer of the psychologistic method of explicating concepts by tracing them to their origin as representations in the mind with an eye to determining their contents and delimiting their scope of application. His commitment to an apriorist psychologistic program is evident throughout the Critique. For example, he stressed the need “to inquire into the origin of pure concepts of the understanding, and thereby into the scope of their validity as well,” rather than “merely put them to use” (A725/B753; also A763/B791). He assigned to transcendental logic the brief of investigating “the origin of our cognitions of objects insofar as that origin cannot be attributed to the objects,” so that “what can alone be entitled transcendental is the cognition that these representations are not of empirical origin, and the possibility that they can yet relate a priori to objects of experience” (A56–7/ B80–2). Psychologism is present in the second Critique as well: If it is a matter of the determination of a particular capacity of the human psyche (Seele) as regards its sources, content, and boundaries, then, in accordance with the nature of human cognition, we cannot begin otherwise than with a precise and . . . complete exhibition of the parts of that capacity. (CPrR 10)

And the essentially psychologistic objective of the psychological dimension of transcendental philosophy is evident in numerous other passages: A204/B249, A481/ B509, A842/B870, CJ AA 20 205, PFM 329–30, Discovery 244, Logic 94, AA 16 1697, AA 17 4817, AA 18 4849, 4873, 4892, 4917, 4919, 4940–1, 4947, and 5665. What distinguishes Kant’s notion of causality and the other pure concepts of the understanding from the innate ideas attributed to the human thinking faculty by Descartes, Leibniz, and other intellectualists (chapter 15-A and 15-B) is a firm commitment to sensibilism. For although the concepts to which Kant ascribed an a priori origin in the understanding are not concepts specifically of pure space and time, or of any other mode of sensible intuition creatures comparable to ourselves may have,11 they are nonetheless inextricably bound up by origin, and so too by content, with the synthesizing operations performed by the imagination upon the data of the senses apprehended in conformity with pure sensible intuitions: “pure synthesis, represented universally, gives us the pure concept of the understanding” (A78/B104). Each such concept is simply a form of judgment “converted into a concept of the synthesis of intuitions” (A321/B378), which represents “nothing but the synthesis of the manifold of intuition insofar as the manifold has unity in apperception” (A401). As such, “the pure categories have in themselves no objective meaning at all whey they are not supported by an intuition to the manifold of which they can be applied as functions of synthetic unity. Apart from this they are simply logical functions of a judgment without content” (A348–9). The small, but

11. Kant would neither affirm nor deny the possibility that creatures might have different pure intuitions than ours that perform the same role in their empirical intuition (perception) that ours do: see A42–3/B59–60, B72, B139, B155, A230, A613–1/B641–2,PFM 350–1, Progress 267, Anthropology 399, letter to Beck, 20.Jan.1791, and AA 18 5056 and 6312.

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crucial, difference between the categories of transcendental logic and the logical functions of logic as such (general logic) is that the former “are those functions of thought (judging) already applied to our sensible intuition” (B429, my emphasis). To be sure, logical functions are what have to be added to the manifold of sense and the synthesis of imagination to introduce into our representations the “transcendental content” requisite to yield “pure concepts of the understanding which relate a priori to objects” (A79/B105). But Kant made equally clear that the reverse is true as well, and the manifold and its synthesis have to be added to the logical functions before these concepts can arise. Thus, by tracing the categories to their origin in the mind as pure concepts of the understanding, he was able to show that all three—the manifold of sense, the synthesis of imagination, and the logical functions—enter indelibly into the content of the categories (A78–9/B104), which must thenceforth be understood as “original pure concepts of synthesis” (A80/ B106; also A138/B177, A401–2, and A722/B750). The upshot, then, is that, far from being an intellectualist exception to Kant’s sensibilism, our possession of purely intellectual concepts is an integral part of it. For while, unlike their schemata, nothing spatial, temporal, or sensate figures in the content of the categories, they cannot be deprived of their relation to the manifold and its synthesis without thereby losing all objective meaning and signification, and reverting to their purely logical, nonobjective character as forms of judgments. Kant’s sensibilist-psychological account of the origin of the categories therefore leads straight to the psychologistic conclusion that we contradict ourselves, and talk without a meaning, whenever we attempt to apply them to objects in contexts where there is, and can be, no consciousness of the act of the synthesis in imagination of a manifold offered by sensibility in accordance with its (ineluctably) subjective constitution.12 12. To this one might object that if Kant had explicated the categories as bound up by content with the a priori sensible manifold and its pure synthesis in imagination, this would render unintelligible any use of the category of cause and effect to conceive a nonsensible (nontemporal, nonspatial) causal efficacy, as is requisite for pure reason to be able to form the idea of freedom (even in the negative sense specified at A553/B581). We clearly need a concept of cause and effect that remains thinkable even after abstraction is made from everything sensible. A detailed response to this objection will have to await volume II. Here it will suffice to remark that Kant offered a second characterization of the categories at B128-9 as rules for fixing the logical place of concepts in judgment, so that, e.g., by subordinating the concept of body to the category of substance, we preclude it from ever being used as a predicate (see also PFM 324 and AA 28-1 472). Taken in isolation, of course, their role in any such proceeding provides no reason for regarding the categories as anything more than logical devices for organizing concepts, subject to the whim of the judger. So to secure their status as pure concepts of objects, the B128-9 characterization must be supplemented by the explication of their “transcendental content” (A79/B105) in the metaphysical deduction in terms of the pure manifold of sense, its pure synthesis in the imagination, and the logical functions of judgment. This, however, is already of itself sufficient to open the way to asking: if the categories as explicated at B128-9 can acquire transcendental content only by being supplemented in the fashion of the metaphysical deduction, might they not acquire other, equally transcendental content by being supplemented in a different, but no less pure (a priori) manner? The supplementation model implicit in the B128-9 explication of the categories provides all that is requisite to form a concept of nonsensible causality: we simply conceive the supplementation of cause and effect (in its B128-9 guise) by means of something other than the pure manifold of sensibility. Indeed, in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant seems to identify just such an analogue, capable of conferring a positive transcendental, albeit strictly practical, meaning on the categories: “the determi-


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Paralleling his account of the origins of causality and the other categories, Kant determined space and time to be pure intuitions of sensibility that “are first given as intuitions” only insofar as “the understanding determines sensibility,” and so presuppose not just an a priori manifold of sensibility but a certain “unity of representation” and “a synthesis which does not belong to the senses” as well (B160n). This origin in acts of synthesis, consciousness of such acts, and the unity necessary to such consciousness (B136n) enabled Kant to draw the psychologistic conclusion that it is “a manifest contradiction” (PFM 341) to suppose that space and time, or any object determined conformably with them, can exist outside or independently of mental activity and its (original synthetic) unity. Hence, in the same way Hume could argue that our notions of necessary connection can have no application apart from impressions of reflexion of types 2 and 3 (acts and affects of imagination), Kant could use his a priori psychological account of the origin of space and time as pure intuitions of sensibility to assert that it is altogether impossible to conceive space or time to exist independently of possible experience, that is, apart from a consciousness of the acts whereby the manifold of sense is synthesized in imagination and brought to unity of consciousness entirely a priori. C. Kant’s Principal Debt to Hume: Psychologism as the Foundation for a New Theory of the Understanding There was, however, an additional psychologistic implication of Hume’s treatment of causation that Kant deemed so fundamental and far-reaching as to point to a whole new way of doing philosophy. For Hume, “the customary transition from causes to effects, and from effects to causes” (THN 225/148) owes its place at the center of his concern to its being the key to comprehending human understanding itself. It is chief among the “permanent, irresistible, and universal” principles that constitute “the foundation of all our thoughts and actions, so that upon their removal human nature must immediately perish and go to ruin” (THN 225/148). Such is the importance of causal association that, without it, “inference and reasoning concerning the operations of nature would, from that moment, be at an end; and the memory and senses remain the only canals, by which the knowledge of any real existence could possibly have access to the mind” (EHU VIII/i ¶5). The reason is that, of all relations, causation is “the only one, that can be trac’d beyond our senses, and informs us of existences and objects, which we do not see or feel” (THN 74/53). In particular, the same vivacity affect that makes us regard everything nations of a practical reason can have place only in ... conformity to the categories of understanding, but not in view of their theoretical employment, in order to bring the manifold of (sensible) intuition under one a priori consciousness, but only in order to subordinate the manifold of desires (Begehrungen) a priori to the unity of the consciousness of a practical reason commanding in the moral law, or to a pure will.” It should thus be clear how Kant could hold on the one hand that the supplemented (but still unschematized) categories of the metaphysical deduction of the first Critique are bound up by content with the pure manifold of sense and its pure synthesis in the imagination, and still insist on the other hand that the relation of practical reason to the capacity of desire suffices to yield a second set of categories adequate to its own purely practical purposes.

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“we see or feel” as real “existences and objects” (that is, the impressions of the senses) also makes us esteem as real and objective anything associated by the imagination with what we see and feel. For example, whenever we sense (rather than merely imagine) smoke, we not only think a fire as its cause, we believe one really to exist, even if it is not present to our senses; and because this vivacity renders the fire we imagine just as real to us as the smoke we see or smell, we are overcome with a terror not only of asphyxiation but of being incinerated as well. Thus, causal relations owe their centrality in Hume’s account of human understanding to his conviction that they alone are responsible for freeing our minds from the prison of a world limited to the senses and memory, and extending our purview to the remotest reaches of space and time (THN 108/75). Even the two other associative relations Hume deems fundamental to the mind, resemblance and contiguity, have to take a back seat in importance to causal relations. Thus, in the case of relations of identity (founded on resemblance: THN 202–4 and n/135–6 and n, 253–5/165–6), our belief in the real existence of external objects depends on the belief that an object absent from the purview of our senses would have causally affected them if its appearance had suffered no interruption and “we had kept our eye or hand constantly upon it” during that time (74/ 53; also 196–8/130–2). So too relations of space and time (founded on contiguity relations): we could never be induced to regard an invariable spatial relation between two objects as a fact about the objects themselves (rather than about merely their appearance to our senses) unless we first believed “there is some secret cause, which separates or unites them” (74/53). In general, the influence of resemblance and contiguity would never be more than “feeble and uncertain” (109/76) without the support of “fixt and unalterable” causal relations, whereby alone “a precise idea . . . takes its place in the imagination, as something solid and real, certain and invariable” (110/76). Even self-consciousness—the idea of personal identity— would be impossible even to conceive, much less believe really to exist, if the mind were not conceived and believed to consist of “a system of different perceptions or different existences, which are link’d together by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually produce, destroy, influence, and modify each other” (261/ 170). Consequently, with the clarification of the idea of a causal relation by means of a psychological account of its originating impression, Hume expected at the same time to achieve insight into the nature of human understanding itself, including, most particularly, what makes certain of its employments count as “rational” (chapter 19). According to Hume, the principal business of human understanding is the relating of ideas. But what are relations? Although the question has been much debated in Hume scholarship, the answer most clearly and insistently stated in the text is also the one most commonly overlooked. A relation is a transition between perceptions that is accompanied by facility affect: “The very nature and essence of relation is to connect our ideas with each other, and upon the appearance of one, to facilitate the transition to its correlative” (THN 204/135); “This easy transition is the effect, or rather essence of relation” (220/145); “facility of transition . . . is essential to it” (99/69); “the very essence of these relations [contiguity, resemblance, and causality] consists in their producing an easy transition of ideas” (260/


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169; also 309/201 and 355–6/230).13 For Hume, then, the psychological origin of all our ideas of relation is facility affect (an impression of reflexion of type 3), just as the psychological origin of all our ideas of real existence is vivacity affect (the other impression of reflexion of type 3 that figures prominently in his theory of understanding). Moreover, this origin carries with it the psychologistic implication that facility affect is so integral to the content of all our concepts of relations that, in its absence, it is no longer possible to conceive of anything as a relation of ideas at all (chapter 17-B). This is not to deny that Hume acknowledged the existence of relations of ideas in which facility is absent. These “philosophical” relations he contrasted with “natural” precisely because they lack that whereby “the one [constituent] naturally introduces the other” (THN 13–15/14–15). Nevertheless, philosophical relations can play no role in our reasoning unless buttressed by the support of facility affect that only natural relations can provide, above all natural causation: “tho’ causation be a philosophical relation, as implying contiguity, succession, and constant conjunction, yet ’tis only so far as it is a natural relation, and produces an union among our ideas, that we are able to reason upon it, or draw any inference from it” (94/65). The reason philosophical relations are parasitic on natural relations brings us to the cardinal tenet of Hume’s account of human understanding: the vivacity affect essential to the conception of an object as actually existent (rather than merely possibly existent) invariably follows the facility affect essential to all our notions of relation. The easier and more natural the transition to an idea becomes for the imagination, the more readily and completely will it transfer the vivacity of a related impression to that idea (98–9/69 and 115–6/80). Since the enlivening of the idea has the consequence that whatever is conceived in it will ipso facto be believed to be no less really existent, or factual, than something present in an impression,14 this means that an idea can only enter into and influence our reasoning if its relation to an impression either itself involves facility affect (natural relations) or is parasitic on other relations which do (philosophical relations). And, apart from a single exception to be considered shortly, it was thus that Hume represented the general nature of all the operations whereby the human understanding arrives at beliefs, be they rational or not (chapter 17-C). Hume’s psychologistic explication of understanding in terms of transitionfacilitating, idea-enlivening associative imagination involves precisely the kind of “overthrow” and “destruction” of metaphysics Kant attributed to him. Prior to Hume, imagination had been thought of primarily as a faculty for separating and combining, comparing and relating, the inputs of the senses. And though generally credited with a role in the discovery of causes, identities, and substances, no one 13. These characterizations of relation are not an afterthought. In Treatise I/i/§§4–5, where Hume first discusses relations, “naturally introduce” and “runs easily” are used as variants of the same thing: facile transitions of thought. The other sense of relation introduced there, philosophical relations, will be discussed shortly. 14. For “we must not be contented with saying, that the vividness of the idea produces the belief: We must maintain that they are individually the same” (THN 116/80); “Belief, therefore, since it causes an idea to imitate the effects of the impressions, must make it resemble them in these qualities, and is nothing but a more vivid and intense conception of any idea” (119–20/82).

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supposed that the imagination might itself be the source of our ideas of these things. With Hume’s critique of earlier accounts of their origin, however, this situation was transformed. For it left in its wake a stark choice between accepting that these ideas have their source in type 3 impressions of reflexion felt by the imagination in the course of operating on the data of the senses or conceding that the words for these ideas “are absolutely without any meaning, when employed either in philosophical reasonings, or common life” (EHU VII/ii ¶26). Neither alternative was compatible with metaphysics as it had traditionally been conceived and practiced. For if the most fundamental ideas employed in all reasoning regarding matters of fact and real existence depend on feelings immanent to the imagination, then any attempt to employ them to conceive objects lying beyond the scope of this faculty must be in vain. Even the assumption of sensibilists such as Locke and Berkeley that ideas of sensation, reflexion, and thought exist in an unqualifiedly real causal nexus, linking them not only to one another but to an underlying mind substrate that exists in dynamical interconnection with other substances (finite and infinite, material and/or spiritual), is swept away at a stroke. Since imagination, by its very nature, depends on inputs furnished by sense perceptions, it is impossible for its purview to extend beyond sensations and reflexions. Insofar as causes, identities, or substances enter into its experience, the imagination does not so much take us beyond the senses as move us further inward into consciousness itself—to the way transitions to ideas feel (facile or not) and the manner in which those ideas are conceived (vividly or not)—and so leaves us even further removed from the objects metaphysicians had hoped to understand by means of these concepts.15 As regards the alternative—abandoning ideas in favor of words (as metaphysicians of the twentieth century could be said to have done)— Hume might have been content to live with this. For since such an approach does not require us to credit the human mind with powers of knowledge that transcend “abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number” and “experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence” (EHU XII/iii ¶34), he would probably have had no objection either to it or to its appropriation of the hoary name “metaphysics”—on the principle that if philosophers are pleased to call it so, “’twill be of little consequence to the world.” Thus, Hume’s “censure of reason and the principles of understanding,” as Kant termed it, is at the same time an immense clarification of the challenge facing metaphysicians of his era. Before it is even possible to undertake the effort to defend metaphysics against Hume’s skepticism, philosophers needed to establish the raison d’être for a faculty of understanding as something more than simply a name for “the general and more establish’d properties of the imagination” (THN 267/174; also 149/101 and 265/173). It is a challenge comparable to that posed to creationism by the theory of evolution through natural selection: by showing that 15. “This efficacy or energy of causes is neither plac’d in the causes themselves, nor in the deity, nor in the concurrence of these two principles; but belongs entirely to the soul, which considers the union of two or more objects in all past instances . . . [I]t is not possible for us to form the most distant idea of that quality, when it is not taken for the determination of the mind, to pass from the idea of an object to that of its usual attendant” (THN 166–7/112–13; also 171/115, 266–7/173, and 409–10/263).


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and how the imagination can achieve everything a separate faculty of understanding had previously been thought necessary to do, Humean associationism threatens to render understanding redundant in much the same way natural selection renders the creationists’ God redundant in the origin of species. The only effective response to such a challenge is to demonstrate the existence of an explanandum overlooked, or misunderstood, by both pre-Humeans and Hume himself that intellect alone, not imagination, is capable of explaining. Clearly, then, Kant was not exaggerating when he signaled to his contemporaries that the necessity to confront the Humean challenge (as extended by Kant to include pure mathematics) trumps all other metaphysical occupations (PFM 276–8 and Progress 266): by exposing the inadequacy of all previous attempts at establishing the existence of pure intellect, Hume’s psychologism obliged metaphysicians to undertake anew, according to a completely reformed method no less psychologistic than Hume’s own, the propadeutic investigation of human understanding itself. D. Mathematical Cognition: Imagination or Intellect? To comprehend the full scope of the challenge Hume’s skepticism poses for traditional metaphysics, however, we need to supplement his critique of relational understanding with the results of his examination of the two other facets of understanding pre-Humeans had used to distinguish intellect from imagination: general representation and abstract reasoning of the kind epitomized by pure mathematics. To account for general representation, one or the other of two explanations, either singly or in combination, were favored prior to Hume: general ideas are (1) a special kind of idea distinct from those proper to imagination (imagery)—abstract ideas properly so called—or (2) a distinct way of regarding the (concrete, individual) ideas already present in the mind in sense perception that I shall henceforth term aspect discrimination, a special capacity immediately to perceive differences in ideas between things that cannot exist (be perceived) in the absence in one another (e.g., a line abstracted from its length, a visible shape from light and color, a timbre from its pitch). Platonic ideas are perhaps the purest example of an explanation of the first sort, and the general ideas of Locke best exemplify the second, while the clear and distinct ideas of the Rationalists combine features of both. Either way, a special faculty of abstracting ideas, over and above an imagination exclusively concerned with combining and comparing particular ideas, was deemed indispensable to general representation. Even Berkeley did not fully succeed in breaking free of this way of conceiving generality.16 Hume, however, devised an explanation of generality for which the associative imagination is fully

16. Many interpreters read PHK Intro. §16 as an affirmation of abstractive aspect discrimination, myself included in HTC. However, I no longer think this passage conclusive in that regard; and, in any event, it is unique, so far as I can determine, in Berkeley’s works, nor is there any evidence that aspect discrimination plays any role in his philosophy: see chapter 10. Nevertheless, there were gaps in Berkeley’s account that were not filled until Hume refined it (chapter 18-B), and there is a sense in which it sits ill with certain of Berkeley’s theistic commitments (chapter 15-E).

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adequate. According to this, particular ideas become general when a habit of association by resemblance is developed: If ideas be particular in their nature, and at the same time finite in their number, ’tis only by custom they can become general in their representation, and contain an infinite number of other ideas under them. . . . [’T]is certain that we seldom or never can exhaust these individuals; and that those, which remain, are only represented by means of that habit, by which we recall them, whenever any present occasion requires it. (THN 24/21 and 22/20)

Since Hume required that resemblance relations be understood the way all relations need to be—in terms of facile, idea-enlivening transitions of thought (99/69, 202–4 and n/135–6 and n, and 260/169–70)—he explained generality as a function of associative and customary facility affect rather than immediate abstractive aspect discrimination. By treating it as an affective,psychological operation of the mind (imagination) rather than a discursive logical one (intellect), Hume was thus uniquely positioned to extend the psychology of general representation to animals, and, implicitly at least, did so. For, since general ideas are a prerequisite for causal inference (87/61, 93/65, EHU VII/ii ¶27, and XI ¶30), Hume ipso facto credited them to animals when he ascribed to animal imaginations the capacity to make causal inferences (analyzed as customary associations: THN 178/119, 327/212–13, and EHU IX ¶5). Thus, even logic itself, as a distinct discipline from psychology, was brought in doubt, and future philosophers were put on notice that a new rationale for introducing intellect, over and above imagination, into the explanation of generality would have to be proffered. Although neither facility nor vivacity figure in Hume’s account of intuitive and demonstrative knowledge (THN 14/15#1 and 95/66), this did not stop him from attributing such knowledge to the imagination. In conformity with the (by then) traditional conception of imagination as the faculty for comparing ideas (13–4/14, 73/52–3), Hume treated all reasoning and judgment as the provenance of this faculty (139–40/95, 149/101, 185–6/124, 217–8/143–4, 224–5/148, 265/173, and 267–8/174). He then distinguished cases where the imagination is able to determine relations between ideas merely by comparing them from cases where it must take into account matters of fact and real existence (where it must subject itself to the guidance of facility and vivacity in order to fashion an idea of relation). The former he termed knowledge, the latter probability (69–70/50, 73/52, 124/86, and EHU IV/i ¶1); and he investigated the former, just as he did the latter, by applying his “new microscope or species of optics” of producing “the impressions or original sentiments, from which the ideas are copied” (VII/i ¶4) to the qualitative and quantitative relations that remain once causality, identity, and substance are excluded from the sphere of knowledge. Since Hume was equipped with a theory of general representation that did not commit him from the outset to the existence of a separate faculty of understanding, he was perhaps the first nonnominalist17 to be able to raise the question whether 17. By “nonnominalist” I mean one who does not confine generality to language (as Hobbes seems to have done) but instead affirms that there is something by virtue of which conception itself (conscious ideation) is general as well.


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there is anything, either in the first principles of mathematics or in its remotest consequences, that must, or even can, commit one to the existence of such a faculty.18 After placing the ideas of space, time, and equality under his psychologistic microscope, Hume determined that mathematics does not commit one to the existence of anything more than senses and imagination: ’Tis usual with mathematicians, to pretend, that those ideas, which are their objects, are of so refin’d and spiritual a nature, that they fall not under the conception of the fancy, but must be comprehended by a pure and intellectual view, of which the superior faculties of the soul are alone capable. . . . But to destroy this artifice, we need but reflect on that principle so oft insisted on, that all our ideas are copy’d from our impressions. For from thence we may immediately conclude, that since all impressions are clear and precise, the ideas, which are copy’d from them, must be of the same nature, and can never, but from our fault, contain any thingso dark and intricate. . . . The first principles [of mathematicians] are founded on the imagination and senses: The conclusion, therefore, can never go beyond, much less contradict these faculties. (THN 72– 3/52 and 638/39; also 50–1/38)

The obscurity Hume sought to ward off is that which arises when logical necessity and impossibility are detached from the realm of the senses and imagination and supposed, in the style of Plato (or indeed of Frege), to reside in some “superior faculty of the soul” that has to deal with “objects of so refin’d and spiritual a nature, that they fall not under the conception of the fancy.” Against any notion that a special “pure and intellectual view” is required to determine whether a relation such as equality is or is not to be accounted a conceptual necessity, Hume maintained that the status of a relation can always be determined by performing a simple test, well within the scope of “the conception of the fancy”: if in comparing different ideas, it is impossible for the imagination to conceive the relation to be changed without at the same time imagining a change in the ideas involved in it, then we may conclude that the relation depends “entirely on the ideas” and “is invariable, as long as the ideas remain the same” (THN 69/50). If the imagination is capable of performing this job all by itself, it would follow that mathematics can no more be a source of comfort to the intellectualist than general representation or reasoning in matters of fact and real existence. So, whatever one may think about other aspects of Hume’s treatment of mathematics, it must be allowed that his test represents a considerable obstacle in the way of attempts to characterize the 18. Some commentators have portrayed Locke and others who preceded Hume as equally concerned to supplant intellect with imagination; see, for example, Michael Ayers, Locke. Epistemology and Ontology (Routledge: London, 1993), Vol. I, chapter 5. While this may be true with respect to intellect considered as an autonomous source of ideas, no one prior to Hume (except perhaps Berkeley) was able to account for relations (including resemblance) and general ideas solely in terms of association and custom, without needing to resort even to so much as the asbtractive aspect discrimination on which Locke’s account depended (chapters 5-B, 8-A, and 10)—a capacity that goes beyond the ability simply to separate and recombine perceptions that are already in themselves separable (for which reason, at least partly, Locke denied that animals have the power to form general ideas). For Berkeley, pure intellect is the faculty by which spirits and their objective properites are known: DM §53.

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dependence of mathematical judgments “entirely on the ideas” in terms of a higher faculty than imagination.19 Now, it would be highly unlikely to escape anyone persuaded by the results of Hume’s methods with respect to metaphysics, and concerned to determine whether and how they might be extended, that the notion of analyticity championed by Hume in the case of mathematics collapses if it can be shown that a faculty of understanding higher than imagination is implicated in its judgments. For this opens the way to a distinction between two kinds of necessary relation: analytic necessities that depend “entirely on the ideas,” irrespective of what happens in the mind as it conceives and compares them, and nonanalytic necessities that have their locus not in the ideas but in the determination of the conceiving, comparing mind (where the necessity of causal relations is also located: a comparison Hume himself made at THN 166/112). If mathematical necessities and impossibilities are of the second type, they would depend on features specific to “the conception of the fancy” rather than to the ideas concerned in them; and the negation of such a necessity—“2+2=77,” “the sum of the angles of a triangle equals 7.4 right angles,” “ð = 0.29,” and so on—though unimaginable, would nevertheless still be thinkable in that the ideas themselves are combinable without contradiction. To be sure, the mere fact that no imaginable situation corresponds, or could correspond, to these negations might of itself have sufficed for Hume to reject them as “too refin’d and spiritual” for mere animal minds like ours. With regard to the notions of pure intellect then current (innate ideas and aspect discrimination), there is certainly no reason not to think he would have regarded the proposal that our minds can conceive things they cannot imagine as a transparent contrivance whereby to “refuse to submit to the decision of clear ideas, by appealing to such as are obscure and uncertain,” in order to “cover . . . absurdities” (72/52). In light of this, had Kant done nothing else, he assured himself a place in the philosophical pantheon by being the first to recognize that proof of the existence of a higher faculty of understanding, measuring up to Hume’s most exacting standards, could be obtained simply by showing that the very same reasoning that led Hume to deny the existence of intuitive or demonstrative knowledge of the general causal maxim20 applies equally to mathematics, including even the most elementary equations of arithmetic and theorems of geometry. Although Kant’s reasoning in this regard has seldom met with favor, we must at least concede that it is quite devastating in its intended purpose of destroying Hume’s justification for not committing “abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number . . . to the flames” along with divinity and school metaphysics: Mathematics came off well so long as Hume held that its propositions are all analytic, i.e. advance from one determination to the other by virtue of their 19. Since Hume held that the application of pure mathematics to matters of fact and real existence depends upon causal relations (see THN 413–14/265–6), applied mathematics also furnishes no evidence in favor of separate faculty of understanding beyond idea-enlivening imagination. On several occasions, understanding (reason, judgment) is expressly treated as a species of imagination: 104/73, 117/81, 140/95, 265/172–3, 267–8/174, and 440/281. 20. I will examine this aspect of Hume’s treatment of the general causal maxim in chapter 16-E.


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identity, and so in accordance with the principle of contradiction—which however is false since all are rather synthetic; and although geometry, for example, has nothing to do with the existence of things but only with their a priori determination in a possible intuition, it nonetheless involves a transition, just as causal concepts do, from a determination (A) to an altogether different one (B) that nevertheless is necessarily connected with it. (CPrR 52)

Smoke is conceivable as the effect of fire only because smoke is a distinct idea from fire, that is, neither concept is constituent of the other. By contrast, mountains cannot be judged to be causes of valleys because it is impossible to conceive a valley in the first place without incorporating into its conception the feature of being surrounded by mountains. Conceptual (logical) distinctness is thus a precondition for, while conceptual inclusion (logical identity) precludes the possibility of, one item entering into a necessary connection with another as cause and effect. So how then do things stand with mathematical relations? Clearly, logical distinctness is a precondition for any determination to enter into a necessary quantitative relation such as equality.21 For example, none of the infinitely many distinct determinations that stand in a necessary relation of equality (or inequality) to 4 is constituent of its concept (such that one could not even think the concept without it): the sum of 2 and 2, the square root of 16, the cube root of 64, the difference between 702 and 698, and so on. Since this is just to say that these determinations are no less separate and distinct in imagination than Hume deemed causes and effects to be, Kant’s contention that Hume did not reason consistently in the two cases seems warranted (all the more so because Hume recognized that the determinations are distinct—THN 49–50/37—but seems never to have thought the matter through:chapter 18-A; so too Locke, chapter 8-D). Had he done so, Kant was probably right in thinking that Hume could not but have arrived at the same conclusion about the necessity of (singular arithmetical and general geometrical or algebraic) quantitative relations as he did regarding the necessity of the general causal maxim (“the separation . . . of the idea of a cause from that of a beginning of existence, is plainly possible for the imagination”): the necessity of the proposition, far from depending “entirely on the ideas” (69/50), is of a quite different (nonanalytic) nature; its negation is accordingly “incapable of being refuted by any reasoning from mere ideas,” and so, in Hume’s sense of ‘intuitive,’ “is neither intuitively nor demonstratively certain” (79–80/56).22 Since to concede this is nothing short of admitting that the unimaginable remains conceivable, and that the inconceivable must be definable in terms completely independent of imaginability criteria, Hume would thus have had no option but to concede (1) the existence of a 21. See Kant’s distinction between the objective and subjective identity of representations in his letter to J. Schultz, 25 Nov., 1788. This is not to say that Kant denied that there can be relations of equality between subjectively (analytically) identical determinations such as “a = a” or “a+b > a”. But judgments that state merely that “a number is equal to itself,” or that “a number combined with another number is greater than itself,” are, for Kant, no more properly instances of mathematical knowledge than the judgment “if A is the cause of B, then B is the effect of A” is causal knowledge: see B16–17 and A164/B204. 22. Since Beattie discussed and quoted liberally from the argument of Treatise I/iii/§3, we may presume that Kant was aware of its gist: see note 3 above.

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faculty of intellect distinct from imagination and (2) the necessity to search for a further, nonlogical principle (over and above logical noncontradiction) to account for the necessities of the imagination. Once it is realized that the necessary quantitative relations discerned by the imagination cannot, consistently with Hume’s own principles, be deemed analytic, the route to a doctrine of pure sensibility becomes so short and direct that one cannot but agree with Kant that Hume, had he gotten that far, would very probably have gone the rest of the way. In the first place, Hume’s rejection of empiricism in regard to mathematics is explicit: “Propositions of this kind are discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is any where existent in the universe” (EHU IV/i ¶1). This, combined with an acceptance that the unity of determinations in imagination in accordance with necessary quantitative relations is a nonlogical synthetic unity, already of itself commits one to a classificatory category of synthetic a priori propositions. Since mathematics did indeed hold an incomparably higher place in Hume’s esteem than divinity or school metaphysics (EHU XII/iii ¶34), we can thus be reasonably confident that he would never, as he did in the case of metaphysics, have excused himself from inquiring into the principles that make mathematical synthetic a priori propositions possible. Indeed, since he could be certain from the outset that any such principle, by definition, cannot be purely logical (“depend entirely on the ideas”) yet nevertheless has to be a priori, he would have had no alternative but to postulate that the imagination must be endowed with a special constitution that equips it to bring its ideas of distinct quantitative determinations into necessary, yet synthetic, relations of equality. Moreover, in considering what this constitution might be, Hume would have found himself constrained by two further principles of his philosophy: (1) the only sources from which the imagination can attain the constituents it requires in order to fashion ideas of numerical or spatial quantity are impressions of the senses; and (2) the only things the imagination may be supposed to do with these materials is combine or separate them, or compare and relate them. He would thence have been led inexorably to the thought of an a priori yet sensible intuition of the manifold in imagination, and from this to the thought that human sensibility must be innately constituted to make such a representation possible. In view of how improbable it is that human nature is so endowed merely in order that we may engage in abstract mathematical reasoning, Hume would undoubtedly have appreciated that the implications of the synthetic a priori character of mathematical judgments extend far beyond mathematics. In particular, he would probably have grasped the significance of the lacuna exposed in his psychology of origins by the discovery that the senses must be able to furnish representations a priori as well as a posteriori, and reevaluated his entire theory of human understanding from the ground up. We can then plausibly suppose that he would eventually have arrived at essentially the same proposition from which Kant’s transcendental psychologism takes its start: that the mere apprehension of the data of the senses as a manifold of perceptions, antecedently to all copying (reproduction), combining, comparing, and conceptualizing, presupposes a capacity to imagine (synthesize a priori) a pure sensible intuition in which, and in the consciousness of which (B136n), they are contained as the manifold (A99–100, A120 and n). In


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that case, probably the first thing that would have struck Hume, just as it did Kant, is that space and time admit, even cry out for, psychologistic explication in terms of this pure intuition of sensibility: that far from being general ideas issuing from comparisons, resemblance associations, and habit as he had supposed (chapter 18C), they precede and make possible the apprehension of perceptions as successive and juxtaposed in the first place, before empirical imagination goes—can go—to work on them, and constitute genuine sensible individuals that contain their manifold within them (unlike universals that contain sensible appearances under them: B136n). And having gotten so far as to recognize that the empiricist cast of his psychologism might be nothing more than the mistaken result of overlooking a source of representations in the mind fully in keeping with his sensibilist commitments, is there any reason to think Hume would not have pressed his inquiries further and explored the possibility of explicating causality and other fundamental concepts of objective understanding by its means—just as Kant did after the 1770 Dissertation? Quite the contrary, he would have almost surely been quick to seize upon the possibility that the special faculty of understanding that, with the recognition of synthetic a priori judgments, has to be postulated in order to distinguish conceivability from imaginability (section C above), might stand in an a priori relation to the pure manifold of sensibility in such a way that genuinely a priori concepts of cause, substance, identity, etc., can be acquired (“pure synthesis [in imagination of the pure manifold of sense], represented universally, gives us the pure concept of the understanding,” A78/B104).23 From this point, of course, the potential to transform metaphysics instead of destroying it becomes evident, and, assuming Hume could have overcome such formidable obstacles as those that require a transcendental deduction of pure concepts to remove, he might very well have systematically anticipated Kant. It should thus be clear that Kant knew quite well what he was talking about when he conjectured that if Hume had only seen that mathematics is susceptible to the same skeptical reasoning he had applied to cause and effect, we might today have the benefit of a more elegant, less prolix exposition of the critical philosophy than Kant was able to bequeath. E. Two Objections Some readers are sure to object to the claim that Kant’s transcendental philosophy needs to be understood, first and foremost, as a psychologism modeled upon Hume. Although I shall attempt to address most of the foreseeable objections in the next volume, there are two that are best dealt with forthwith. 1. Can Kant be interpreted as having grounded the logical on the psychological without saddling him with a psychologistic fallacy? Once it is recognized that 23. As remarked earlier, this does not make the pure concepts of the understanding concepts of space and time, that is, nothing whatsoever of a sensible nature enters into their content that would compromise their status as purely intellectual concepts. This topic will explored in volume II, along with the analogous cases of the equally intellectual concepts of arithmetic and algebra.

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psychologism is not so much an attempt to naturalize logic as a rival to the subdomain of philosophical semantics that in recent times, especially among Anglophone philosophers, has appropriated the hoary name “metaphysics,” we can appreciate the true basis of the concern that, in attempting to explicate logic by means of psychology, nothing more may be achieved than to confound them. Many, now mostly forgotten nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophers and psychologists may well have been guilty of so doing, as Frege, Husserl, and others charged. But this does not suffice to show that psychologism itself—the endeavor pioneered by Hume and Kant to employ psychology (of whatever kind) for the “semantic” ends of determining the content and delimiting the scope of application of certain concepts—always and inevitably leads to error. We only have to consent to view Kant’s transcendental philosophy as a species of psychologism to understand how logic can be grounded on the psyche without its being vitiated by psychological interpolations. Kant left his reader in no doubt as to the importance he attached to not confusing the properly logical with the psychological, whether it be in pure general logic (that is, formal logic, as he understood it), transcendental logic, or conceptual analysis. Yet, as should by now be clear, this concern was principally motivated by the need to guard the a priori character of the logical against empirical psychological encroachments of the kind common in his day (Bviii, A54/B78, PFM 265–6). Whether his proscription of psychological explanation of the logical extended to all psychology as such, pure no less than empirical, is another question entirely. So, before one can claim to be warranted in holding that Kantian transcendental philosophy is something more than Humean psychologism refounded on a doctrine of pure sensibility, more textual evidence would be needed to show that his interdiction of psychology was as extreme, in nature and extent, as such a conclusion requires. And, to my knowledge, no such evidence exists. For example, in the case of pure general logic—a discipline Kant classified with the sciences (alongside mathematics and physics: see Bviii–ix)—the proscription of psychology takes the form of an insistence that it can form no part of this “body of demonstrated doctrine . . . certain entirely a priori” (A54/B78; also AA 16 1612). Does this insistence amount to anything more than an exclusion of empirical psychology? That is, can it plausibly be construed to include a pure psychology consisting not of empirical but pure synthesis in imagination, and pure, rather than empirical, apperception (unity of the manifold in one consciousness apriori)? Since Kant had little else to say about the relation of psychology to general logic, let us look for clues in his proscription of psychology from another a priori science, pure mathematics. Nothing transcendental philosophy has to say about the subjective conditions of the possibility of mathematics, whether on the basis of principles of transcendental aesthetic or transcendental logic, ever enters into mathematics proper, as an integral part of this body of a priori certain, demonstrated doctrine. When explicating definitions, axioms, theorems, and such fundamental mathematical concepts as number, it was never Kant’s intention to suggest that mathematical demonstrations are in any way defective, or less than apodeictically certain, unless supplemented by transcendental principles. Similarly, one may suppose that Kant’s explications of such notions of general logic as ‘concept’


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and ‘judgment’ in terms of (pure) psychology do not in any way imply that logicians ought to modify their textbooks to incorporate such principles as transcendental apperception into their science, so as to repair some hitherto unremarked defect in their definitions or demonstrations. Indeed, even if one concedes that Kant did in fact ground logical universality on the formal identity of the I think (most explicitly at B133–4n; also B131 and A341/B399–400),24 it does not follow that the two notions are, in all respects, interchangeable. For example, in respect to the demarcation of sciences, the ‘I think,’ if it belongs to any science, falls within the province of transcendental philosophy, not pure general logic. To understand its relation to logical universality in such a way as to avoid confounding the properly logical with the psychological, one should begin by recalling that, for Kant, a prerequisite for any science is to begin with clear, sharp concepts, in which everything inessential to the purposes of the investigation is stripped out (“we do not extend but disfigure sciences when we allow their boundaries to trespass upon one another,” Bviii; also Bxi–xii and Bxvii). General logic is no exception: the concept of “logical universality” needed for the purpose of investigating the pure, formal determinations and relations of distinct universals in judgments should include nothing not essential to this purpose. Since much that is essential to the representation ‘I think’ in the context of transcendental logic is clearly inessential to such investigations, general logicians can and must strip away everything from pure self-consciousness that transcendental logicians cannot, so as to arrive at the fully abstracted, strictly formal notion required in their science. The price of this abstraction, however, is that general logicians forfeit the right to adopt a position on the content of the concept of logical universality their science presupposes. For Kant would surely have rejected any inference from the fact that general logic is in no way beholden to the theory of self-consciousness that self-consciousness itself is not an essential presupposition of this science. In particular, he would have insisted that pure apperception affords us the only notion of logical universality our minds are capable of forming. In the same way, while neither the geometer nor the algebraist need take any note of the transcendental doctrines of space and time or the categories, this does not license them to infer that their sciences do not presuppose a representation of the synthetic unity of the manifold as the ultimate source of the only notions of number our minds are capable of forming (A142–3/B182).25 Thus, Kant’s exclusion of psychology from general logic and mathematics is predicated on an implicit quid pro quo: logicians and mathematicians must defer to the practitioner of transcendental psychologism to explicate the fundamental representations their sciences presuppose. More telling where the nature of transcendental logic is concerned is the fact that, in distinguishing it from psychology, Kant consistently treated them as distinct 24. The universality and identity aspects of the I will be discussed in volume II. An earlier treatment of the former can be found in “Kant on the Possibility of Thought.” 25. Although number (the schema of the categories of quantity—see A142–3/B182), as well as the transcendental principle of Axioms of Intuition, do enter into mathematics in much the same way the pure cogito enters into logic, Kant held that it is impossible to abstract absolutely from their sensible conditions (time and space) so as to rely merely on the (unschematized) categories for purposes of mathematics. For further discussion, see chapter 4-A.

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species—differentiated as a priori and a posteriori—of one and the same genus of investigation, the inquiry into the origin of representations: Logic begins from concepts and deals with their employment. The origin of concepts from sensible representations or the understanding belongs to psychology and transcendental philosophy. (AA 16 1697) Logic deals with thought without an object. Physics with cognition of things from experience. Metaphysics from their cognition prior to all experience. The origin is twofold (zweifach): 1. how we have come by them . . . psychology; 2. how cognitions are possible a priori. transcendental philosophy. (AA 18 5665)

Empirical psychology deals with the occasioning causes of representations. As such, Kant deemed it perfectly competent to explicate the origins of empirical representations. The need for another but still analogous discipline arises when the task is to trace a priori representations to their sources in the mind (A65–6/B90– 1, A87/B119, and AA 18 4866). And this pure psychology of origins founded on Kant’s doctrine of pure sensibility, necessitated by the Humean challenge and adapted from Hume’s own psychologism to the end of determining the contents and delimiting the scope of application of the a priori representations essential to objective representation, is none other than transcendental logic (A56–7/B80–2). 2. Kant’s quest for origins—a quid facti or a quid juris? From the time of Hermann Cohen and his Neo-Kantian successors, the opening paragraphs of §13, “The Principles of any Transcendental Deduction,” have been cited more often than any single text as proof of Kant’s antipsychologistic credentials. There, Kant employs the juridical distinction between an issue of right (quid juris) and an issue of fact (quid facti) as an analogy for the differencebetween his own transcendental deductions of the categories and empirical deductions of the kind proffered by Locke and Hume (also Progress AA 20 275 and AA 18 5636). As glossed by these interpreters, Kant’s use of a juridical analogy is clear proof that his concern is normative in nature, and that nothing having to do with the factual origin of space and time (as pure intuitions of sensibility) or the categories (as pure concepts of the understanding) is essential, or ultimately even relevant, to solving the problem of the Transcendental Deduction. While at first sight a plausible reading of the quid juris analogy, it does not, in my view, bear scrutiny. To begin with, such a reading saddles Kant with the mistaken view that the British Empiricists supposed that an empirical-factual account of the origin of the very same concepts of objective necessary relations Kant listed in his Table of Categories can be given. While this may to some degree be true of Locke and Berkeley, Kant was well aware that Hume looked to experience only for subjective psychological surrogates for these concepts, which he believed fully capable of discharging all the cognitive and conative functions that had formerly been imputed to such concepts (chapter 17-A). Hume argued, in particular, that the facts, whether gleaned from immediate perception (external and “inward sentiment or consciousness,” EHU VII/i ¶14) or from repeated experience (“there is nothing in a number of instances, different from every single instance, which is supposed to be exactly similar,” EHU VII/ii ¶27), can never acquaint us


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with any idea capable of expressing a necessary connection between distinct existents. He then reverted to the only empirical avenue of explanation still open to him, and found in customary association an empirical-psychological source of ersatz counterparts to concepts of necessary connection, which he believed able to fulfill all the purposes of reasoning, both ordinary and scientific, for which such categories as “substance” and “causation” had been supposed indispensable. Thus, far from offering empirical deductions of the traditional categories of metaphysics, Hume’s “bastards of the imagination,” as Kant called them (PFM 258), were specifically intended to render them superfluous. Faced with Hume’s charge that metaphysicians confound the humble deliverances of sense and imagination with concepts “of so refin’d and spiritual a nature, that they fall not under the conception of the fancy, but must be comprehended by a pure and intellectual view” (THN 72/52), Kant was quite correct to discern in Humean empirical deductions a challenge to the very possibility of metaphysics itself (PFM 257–61 and 275–9). For the skepticism with which Kant had to reckon starts by putting into question the very existence of such concepts as those listed in his Table of Categories, even before the question of their valid employment (objective application) can even arise. As a result, Hume would hardly be likely to have been impressed by proofs, however rigorous seeming, of our right to employ pure concepts of the understanding, when he refused to concede there even are such concepts in our possession in the first place! “If we have really no idea of a power or efficacy in any object, or of any real connexion betwixtcauses and effects, ’twill be to little purpose to prove that an efficacy is necessary in all operations” (THN 168/113). What Hume challenged future metaphysicians to provide, in the first instance, is proof of the existence of representations in the mind (not mere façons de parler) that correspond in content (meaning) to the traditional categories of metaphysics (chapter 17-A). Accordingly, if we adopt an antipsychologistic gloss on the quid juris analogy, our only option is to conclude that Kant never comprehended the true nature and extent of the challenge Hume leveled at traditional metaphysics, and failed not only to surmount it but even to address it. Kant’s enthusiastic endorsement of Hume’s psychologistic program on PFM 258–9 (cited in section B) is as clear an indication as one may ask or require that Kant understood ‘origin,’ ‘source,’ and their cognates in the same psychological sense Hume did, and not, usually or fundamentally, as a matter of normative sources of justification, title, and so on. This and similar texts show conclusively (1) that Kant recognized more clearly than any of his contemporaries that Hume focused his skeptical interrogation of metaphysical understanding on the issue of the origin of its supposed concepts, and (2) that he accepted the Humean challenge to future would-be metaphysicians to prove that mere “bastards of the imagination” are incapable of discharging their essential functions in thought and cognition. Consequently, any reading of the quid juris analogy that portrays the origins of the categories as inconsequential to their transcendental deduction falls foul of Kant’s express insistence that a knowledge of origins is precisely what we require to resolve all our doubts concerning their use and valid application. A more sustainable construal of the quid juris analogy emerges when we recognize that, by the time a Transcendental Deduction becomes necessary (§13),

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the first stage of Kant’s psychologistic explication of the categories—the explanation of their origin as pure concepts of the understanding, preliminary to the account of their use and application—had already concluded: “In the metaphysical deduction [§10: A76–81/B102–7] the a priori origin of the categories has been proved through their complete agreement with the universal logical functions of thought” (B159). According to this deduction, the categories are not merely pure but strictly intellectual notions, without the least tincture of (pure or empirical) sensible content. The question as to the nature and conditions of the applicability of notions so originating to objects, be they objects of the senses or things in themselves, thus becomes an “unavoidable necessity” in a sense that is not true of any other concept, including that of pure intuitions such as space and time (A88– 9/B120–1). Here it becomes important to remark that the division of problems in Kant’s transcendental logic between origin and application cannot arise in the context of a theory like Hume’s, where the fundamental categories of human understanding are assigned an empirical origin in the guise of functionally adequate associativepsychological surrogates of pure categories. For, since empirical concepts are, by definition, dependent on the causal relation of their objects to our senses, the very fact of their existence in our minds (their acquisition, our possession of them) is already of itself sufficient to guarantee their relation (applicability) to objects (their impression originals) (chapter 16). By contrast, since no relation, causal or any other, of pure concepts of the understanding to objects outside the understanding is implicated in the origin of these concepts described in the Metaphysical Deduction, the “quaestio iuris” of our right to apply them to objects, sensible or any other, “cannot be derived from experience alone as its ultimate cognitive ground” (AA 20 275) but must instead be able to invoke independent, purely nonempirical grounds (A95–7 and B163–5). Thus, the only point Kant may have meant to make by the quid juris analogy is that before we can claim a legitimate right to employ concepts originating in the subject, independently of objects, in synthetic a priori judgments relating to objects distinct from our thought, additional proofs, having nothing whatsoever to do with objective matters of empirical fact, establishing their relation to objects entirely a priori are indispensable.26 If so, then one has no choice but to concede that the quid juris analogy, in and of itself, is noncommittal about the precise nature of the additional proofs required, and in particular tells us nothing either way as to whether Kant meant to establish our right to employ pure concepts of the understanding in synthetic a priori judgments by psychologistic or normative proofs. To settle these issues, one therefore needs to look beyond analogies to the evidence of what Kant actually says and does.27 26. It turns out that such a proof is possible only with respect to objects of the senses (appearances), for only in their case can pure intuitions of sensibility mediate their a priori relation to the categories (chapter 1-D). The implication that an analogous proof is therefore impossible in respect to things in themselves does nothing less than achieve Kant’s “main purpose” (Axvi) in the Critique. 27. A passage in Kant’s response to Eberhard (Discovery 221–3) has often been invoked, most notably by Dieter Henrich, as evidence in support of the antipsychologistic reading of quid juris, since there Kant borrows another notion from the theory of right: original acquisition. But once again use of the phrase itself, the analogy, does nothing to preclude a genetic, nonnormative construal. And that a


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When this is done, it is not difficult to see that the reason Kant had no choice but to devise an entirely new method of proof to demonstrate the application of the categories to appearances is that the acquisition of these concepts is in no way dependent on pure intuition in space and time. Even the purely numerical concepts of arithmetic and algebra, though likewise devoid of sensible content, pose no comparable obstacle to establishing their objective validity. For, as explicated by Kant, they are possible only on the presupposition of the determination of pure space and time conformably to the categories (the transcendental schema of the categories of quantity described at A142–3/B182), and, on that basis alone, admit of being given (constructed) in pure intuition, in accordance with the same conditions to which appearances are subject (A717/B745, A734/B762, CJ 351–2, letters to Schultz, 25 November 1788, Reinhold 19 May 1789, Rehberg, (before) 25 September 1790, and AA 18 6314). The categories, by contrast, are incapable of being exhibited in any intuition whatsoever (A719–22/B747–50 and A732–3/B761– 2). The problem their objective application poses is consequently different in kind, indeed unique, and absolutely fundamental. For before Kant could establish that the categories apply to appearances by means of their transcendental schemata— the determinations of pure space and time presupposed not only by mathematical but empirical concepts of objects as well—he had first to answer the “question how the application of the category to the form of intuition is possible, since categories and form of intuition are heterogeneous” (AA 18 6359). Previous philosophers had been content to deal with this radical heterogeneity byexplaining it away, whether by intellectualizing the sensible or sensibilizing the intellectual (the “transcendental amphiboly” described at A271/B327). But the problem the origin of the categories poses for their application forecloses these easy options. Instead, Kant had no choice but to find some way of showing how the pure concepts of the understanding can determine pure intuitions of sensibility without its compromising their heterogeneity in the least. The method of transcendental deduction was develeoped to deal with this manifestly psychological problem.28 Thus, it should come as no surprise that, far from leading him into the realm of normative epistemology, transcendental deduction drew him even more deeply into considerations of the pure manifold of sense, its pure synthesis, and its unity in a pure consciousness (original apperception):

genetic meaning was intended seems clear when one considers the use Kant makes of ‘original acquisition’ in that text. For when he sets “original acquisition” against the two other theories of the origins of representations he considers there—innatism and empiricism—it is clearly not with the intention of rejecting the focus on mental origin but of offering a new alternative to the traditional two: representations that are acquired rather than innate, but original rather than derived (from experience). As I remarked earlier in note §10 above, original acquisition is simply a variant of the distinctively genetic notion of epigenesis. I have already considered these issues in detail in KMM chapters 1, 3, 6, and 7. Here it suffices to remark that interpreters with a preference for normative approaches to thought and cognition need to be more cautious about reading too much into Kant’s predilection for legal analogies: by themselves, they tell us nothing, either way, about the context or content of transcendental philosophy. 28. This is not to suggest that everything Kant termed 'deduction' is as bound up with the psychological issue of representations' origins as the metaphysical and transcendental deductions of the categories in the first Critique are.

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION Quæstio facti is in what way we have come into possession of a concept; quæstio iuris, with what right we possess and employ this concept. The universality and necessity in the employment of a pure concept of the understanding betrays (verräth) its origin, and that it must either be wholly unreliable and false or not be empirical. Pure sensibility, pure imagination, and pure apperception underlie the possibility of all empirical cognition a priori and the synthesis according to concepts which has objective reality. (AA 18 5636)

Clearly, this is as much a psychological account of the origin of pure concepts of the understanding as an account of the empirical concept of a smiling face or doleful melody in terms of empirical sensibility, empirical imagination, and empirical self-consciousness would be. Regardless of how we choose to read the Transcendental Deduction, we should be careful not to confound the presence of normative claims in a theory with the status of the theory itself as normative. For example, when Hume traced the origin of the idea of necessary connection to customary association—a proceeding none would equate with normative epistemology—he drew a normative conclusion regarding the applicability of the idea quite similar to Kant’s restriction of the categories to objects of possible experience: Such a discovery . . . that this [causal] connexion, tie, or energy lies merely in ourselves, and . . . is acquir’d by custom . . . not only cuts off all hope of ever attaining satisfaction, but even prevents our very wishes; since it appears, that when we say we desire to know the ultimate and operating principle, as something, which resides in the external object, we either contradict ourselves, or talk without a meaning. (THN 266–7/173; also 173–5/116–7)

Insofar as an investigation of a concept’s origin as an idea in the mind reveals that its application to objects under certain circumstances is inconsistent with the conditions of its applicability to anything at all, we can learn from it something about the legitimacy (and the limits thereto) of our title to employ the concept. It makes no difference if the psychological account of its origin is empirical or a priori: it can be a completely nonnormative account and yet have normative consequences. And certainly an account would seem to qualify as nonnormative if it is couched in terms of the mind and its powers of a priori intuition and conception—just as Kant did when he contrasted his approach with that of empiricism as follows: “It is not enough to know (wissen) what representations contain within them, nor to which occasioning causes and conditions they owe their origin, but in which faculties (Vermögen) and capacities (Fähigkeiten) they have their seat” (AA 18 4917). Why, if the relevant limitations are already inherent in the nature of our minds, was it necessary for philosophers like Kant and Hume to prescribe them anyway? In Kant’s case, the primary motivation was concern about the inescapable influence exerted on reason by transcendental illusion (see A327/B384 and A338–9/ B396–7). Like so many sirens, the principles that serve us so well within the field of experience inspire in us the unfounded confidence of being able to transcend experience by their means. For these illusions the only sure remedy is psycholo-


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gism: we must recognize that the limits to their scope of application are set by the very contents of the concepts they contain, as revealed when we trace them to their origin as representations in the mind. Consequently, Kant’s concern to formulate norms for the valid employment of the understanding in accordance with the inherently dialectical character of reason, far from being incompatible with or distinct from his psychologism, is actually an indelible part of it (Hume’s motivations were not dissimilar—see EHU VII/i ¶24, EHU XII/iii, and D XII 86–9; for Locke and Berkeley, language was the main culprit: chapters 8 and 10). The most important lesson to draw from the foregoing for purposes of this book is the imperative need to keep the conceptual distinct from the epistemological. The primary concern of the theories of understanding considered in it was not with beliefs (about necessary connections, bodies, the self, etc.) and their justification, but with ideas (of necessary connections, etc.) and their origin. Accordingly, the principal shortcoming of many contemporary interpretative approaches to Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and especially Kant is a tendency to conflate them, or even to lose the former altogether in the latter, so that the search for the psychological origin of a concept as a clue to its content and scope of legitimate application is transmuted into a quest for the origin of our title to uphold propositions employing it in the face of skeptical doubts.29 There is no compelling textual or contextual reason for supposing that the sense of ‘origin’ connoting truth-justifying grounds was the primary, much less the only, sense these philosophers attached to it. Quite the contrary, the evidence seems clear that, for sensibilists, the first concern is not with what concepts enable us to know but rather with what they allow us to think. If X is an object we have no means even to think, it can never be of cognitive concern to us anyway and may safely be ignored. Should anyone claim, on the basis of the most elegant, finely wrought proofs, that skepticism regarding X is incoherent, then, if there is convincing evidence that no idea exists in the understanding to underwrite the expression ‘X,’ then sensibilists would tell us to dismiss both the proofs and the doubt that elicited them as meaningless (since what cannot be thought can also neither be believed nor doubted: THN 164/111 and 172/116). To establish whether an idea adequate to underwrite the expression exists, they would counsel against definition and urge us instead to consider whether there is any source in our minds from which such an idea might spring. In particular, they held that we should seek to understand understanding psychologically, so that we may know from our account of the origin of an idea whether any of its contents derive from the constitution of our psyches. For if an idea proves to be bound up with it in such a way that a relation to conscious mind is implicit in its content, its scope of application must be restricted accordingly. Within a sensibilist frame-

29. Epistemologizing of this sort is standard procedure in Reid, and Reid’s present-day reputation as a critic of the theory of ideas and idealism would probably be much diminished if this were better appreciated. For the same reason, Manfred Kuehn’s endeavor in Scottish common sense in Germany, 1768–1800 : a contribution to the history of critical philosophy (Kingston, Ont.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987) to show that Kant was more beholden to Reid and other exponents of Scottish common sense philosophy than texts like PFM 258–60 would incline us to believe seems to me unconvincing. An example of epistemologizing Hume is considered in the introduction to chapter 15.

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work, then, psychologistic explications of our concepts may also teach us the limits of what we can know by their means. So, even though psychologism is in no sense itself a normative-epistemological inquiry, we need go no further to understand its immense appeal for sensibilists like Hume and Kant than to recognize that and how it can serve to ground inviolable epistemic norms in matters of the first importance to philosophy.

3 A Kantian Way Out of Hume’s Quandary

A more consistent application of Hume’s own principles to the question of the nature of mathematical judgments was not the only path that could have led him from empirical to transcendental psychologism. The question of personal identity might also have induced Hume to preempt Kant. The specific impetus to do so was the quandary concerning personal identity that Hume described in an appendix to the second volume of A Treatise of Human Nature (1740). While it seems unlikely that Kant was acquainted with this text,1 Hume’s quandary raises questions that go to the very foundations of both their philosophies, and so furnishes an ideal opportunity to get to the bottom of what psychologism is and why it must inevitably, if pursued consistently to its outrance, become transcendental. A. Hume’s Account of Personal Identity Hume’s attitude regarding the Cartesian cogito ergo sum was a great deal more skeptical than Locke’s. For Locke, the perception of the I in Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, as well as in the more authoritative variant formulation of the Meditations—“this proposition, I am, I exist (ego sum, ego existo), is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind” (AT VII 25)— constitutes intuitively certain evidence of the existence of the thinking subject (ECHU IV/ix). Locke otherwise could have confined his conception of intuitive knowledge to abstract relations and not had to include existence as well, nor would he have had to affirm that the human mind has available to it another means besides sensation of becoming immediately acquainted with existents other than ideas (the thinking I cannot smell, hear, feel, see, or taste itself). Nevertheless, Locke dissented from Descartes on two important points: he denied that the identity of the existence thus revealed can be equated with the identity of the substance 1. See chapter 2, note 3. Beattie’s book, which Kant certainly knew, contains only a couple of snippets relevant to personal identity: from “what we call a mind is nothing but a heap” to “perfect simplicity and identity” (THN 207–8/137–8), from “If any one, upon serious” to “flux and movement,” and, after a cut, from “There is properly no simplicity . . . constitute the mind” (252–3/165). And the conclusion of the Book I of THN includes a brief but important reference to personal identity (265/173).

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responsible for the action of thinking; and though he believed that the manner in which the existence of the thinking I is revealed renders it overwhelmingly likely that the substance of the mind is immaterial, he rejected Descartes’s contention that its immateriality follows necessarily from it (IV/iii/§6). Hume’s principal disagreement with Locke’s account of personal identity concerns the importance of the role played by memory in the origin of the idea of the I. Although he agreed (THN 635/400) with Locke’s view that “Consciousness makes Personal Identity” (ECHU II/xxvii/§10), he rejected the notion that memory is essential to, even constitutive of this consciousness. Locke’s contrary view is only capable of explicating ‘person’ as “a Forensick Term appropriating Actions and their Merit” (§26): I cannot justly be rewarded or punished for deeds I have no recollection of ever having performed. Indeed, on Locke’s conception, even if the body with which my consciousness is associated, or the substance (material or immaterial) that ultimately supports its existence, performed a certain deed, the deed cannot be deemed my doing if no memory of it exists in my consciousness. Conversely, if there is/was another consciousness in which a memory of willing the deed exists/existed, then the merit or demerit of that deed belongs to the personal identity defined by that memory even if the body with which it is/was associated, or the substance that supports/supported its existence, did not perform the deed. Yet the inadequacy of memory to account for the idea I have of myself as an identical existent is obvious even by Locke’s own criterion for the duration of one’s thinking I: whilst we are thinking, or whilst we receive successively several Ideas in our Minds, we know that we do exist; and so we call the Existence, or the Continuation of the Existence of our selves, or any thing else, Commensurate to the succession of any Ideas in our Mind, the duration of our selves, or any such other thing co-existing with our Thinking. (ECHU II/xiv/§3)

By contrast with the strictly forensic conception of a person in ECHU II/xxvii/ §§9–27, memory plays no part in the conception of the thinking I described here. For if the succession of ideas in consciousness alone defines the duration of its existence, then the loss of any idea(s) in that succession from memory would not alter the fact that the same thinking consciousness existed continuously, without interruption, during the entire interval delineated by that succession. Moreover, the existence Locke affirms here is more than simply the temporal sum of the succeedive ideas: as a realist regarding substance and causation, he would have conceived it as the support of these ideas and the repository of the powers whereby new ideas are caused by earlier ones (the fear that results from a certain sensation, the repetition in thought of a flavor formerly present in sensation, etc.). The resulting causal nexus points to a conception of the identical I intermediate between Descartes’s substantial I and Locke’s own later (2nd ed. ECHU) memory-delimited forensic I, and without the drawbacks of either. For example, although I lack any memory of the time when I first learned to speak, since the effects of those experiences are as much with me now as they ever were, and will be with me so long as I am able to use language, they belong to me—my thinking subject—now as

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surely as anything still remaining in my memory does. Similarly, if a murderer ingests a memory-erasing drug that causes him to forget having resolved upon, plotted, executed, and afterward obliterated his memory of the deed, these will still be all his deeds if they can be be shown to be effects of the same causally integrated thinking subject whose existence preceded them and continues beyond the forgotten interval. Nor would it interrupt personal identity in such cases if the substantial substratum changed at any (or indeed every) time along the way, just so long as the causal nexus linking present ideas to past ones remained intact. Here then is a more adequate conception of the identity of the thinking I according to which (1) all my previous ideas remain mine even if they are forgotten, so long as their effects (memories, habits of mind, phobias, etc.) continue in me, and (2) all the idea-effects produced by the thinking subject I was in the past remain my ideas even if they are forgotten, so long as the person I am now is, in any measure, causally continuous with the person I was before those ideas were caused. Thus, an idea remains mine so long as any of its causes or effects do; and nothing short of a complete causal rupture with both past and future perceptions can suffice to exclude any (or all) perceptions in the interim from the identity of the I whose perceptions preceded and succeeded them. Although Hume accepted (and added to) Locke’s criticisms of the substantial identity conception of the self, he crafted his account of the idea of the I to accord fully with the causal conception: we may observe, that the true idea of the human mind, is to consider it as a system of different perceptions or different existences, which are link’d together by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually produce, destroy, influence, and modify each other. Our impressions give rise to their correspondent ideas; and these ideas in their turn produce other impressions. One thought chaces another, and draws after it a third, by which it is expell’d in turn . . . Had we no memory, we never shou’d have any notion of causation, nor consequently of that chain of causes and effects, which constitute our self or person. But having once acquir’d this notion of causation from the memory, we can extend the same chain of causes, and consequently the identity of our persons beyond our memory, and can comprehend times, and circumstances, and actions, which we have entirely forgot, but suppose in general to have existed. (THN 261–2/170–1)

Hume’s comparison of person identity with the identity of a commonwealth (261/ 170) implies that personal identity persists even if, gradually over time, each memory of past experience is lost and supplanted with others—once, twice, even a thousand times. For so long as the effects of these forgotten perceptions persist (or the effects of their effects, etc.), the identity of the causal system will be preserved—just as a commonwealth continues even through the most radical revolutions in its laws and constitutions, for history can never be entirely effaced. In addition, Hume’s causal association based account of the self has the advantage of excluding extraneous elements of the kind substantialist conceptions inevitably end up including: perceptions that leave no causal trace behind, and so exert absolutely no influence whatsoever on the subsequent course of the causal system, and have no causal antecedents in that system, are accorded no relation to me even

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if the same substance that supports the perceptions that do belong to me supports them as well. For Hume, then, the identity of the thinking I is defined solely by a functional continuity of consciousness,2 and neither by ideational contents nor factors external to consciousness. His conception therefore comes as close to explicating the identity of the cogito as anything previous to Kant, according to Kant’s own criterion: The I think must be capable of accompanying all my representations; for otherwise something is represented in me which would be utterly incapable of being thought, which is just as much as to say the representation would either be impossible or, at least for me, be nothing. (B131–2; also A116, A117n, and A119–20)

In fact, Hume’s conception of the identity of the thinking I is even closer to the Kantian than this makes it seem. For where it differs most fundamentally and crucially from anything previous (including the causal conception implicit at ECHU II/xiv/§3) is that the causal relations concerned in it are associative in nature. Rather than anything “that really binds our several perceptions together,” where we observe “some real bond among [our] perceptions,” we “only feel one among the ideas we form of them” (THN 259/169): identity is nothing really belonging to these different perceptions, and uniting them together; but is merely a quality, which we attribute to them, because of the union of their ideas in the imagination. Now the only qualities, which can give ideas an union in the imagination, are these three relations above-mention’d. These are the unifying principles in the ideal world, and without them every distinct object is separable by the mind, and may be separately consider’d, and appears not to have any more connexion with any other object, than if disjoin’d by the greatest difference and remoteness. ’Tis, therefore, on some of these three relations of resemblance, contiguity and causation, that identity depends; and as the very essence of these relations consists in their producing an easy transition of ideas; it follows, that our notions of personal identity, proceed entirely from the smooth and uninterrupted progress of the thought along a train of connected ideas, according to the principles above-explain’d. (THN 260/169–70)

Whereas Locke (Berkeley too: chapter 13) was a realist regarding substance and causality, Hume treated these notions merely as ideal affairs of associative action and affect, and accorded them no meaning or application apart from the purview of a suitably constituted imagination (chapter 2-B, 16-F, and 17-A). His account is consequently strikingly similar to Kant’s own transcendental-synthetic conception of the empirical I, so that the whole difference between them boils down to the 2. Since a person’s passions, emotions, desires, and volitions do seem to be delimited by specific memories of past experience—for example, memories of the actions responsible for the pride or humility we feel toward our own character and the love or hatred we feel toward others—Hume may have had the Lockean forensic sense of ‘person’ in mind when he distinguished our “identity with regard to the passions” from our memory-transcending identity “with regard to the imagination” (THN 261/170). The latter identity is purely relational, and therefore formal. For a detailed examination, see HTC, chap. 6C.


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issue of whether association (empirical psychology) alone is sufficient to conceive the identity of the self or whether a foundation in pure intuitions of sensibility and pure concepts of the understanding is requisite as well. Let us therefore turn now to the flaw in the former that might have led Hume to anticipate Kant in the latter. B. Hume’s Quandary Concerning Personal Identity When the first volume of the Treatise went to press, Hume seems to have deemed his associationalist account of the self unassailable: The intellectual world, tho’ involv’d in infinite obscurities, is not perplex’d with any such contradictions, as these we have discover’d in the natural. What is known concerning it, agrees with itself; and what is unknown, we must be contented to leave so. (THN 232/152; also 366–7/236–7)

The account detaches the self from the notion of thinking substance; but it also succeeds in giving it sufficiently wide scope to capture sensibilist intuitions regarding the identity specific to the I of Descartes’s cogito. Nevertheless, Hume’s confidence in his account of the intellectual world collapsed before the second volume of the Treatise appeared a year later: I had entertain’d some hopes, that however deficient our theory of the intellectual world might be, it wou’d be free from those contradictions and absurdities, which seem to attend every explication, that human reason can give of the material world. But upon a more strict review of the section concerning personal identity, I find myself involv’d in such a labyrinth, that, I must confess, I neither know how to correct my former opinions, nor how to render them consistent . . . Most philosophers seem inclin’d to think, that personal identity is nothing but a reflected thought or perception. The present philosophy, therefore, has so far a promising aspect. But all my hopes vanish, when I come to explain the principles, that unite our successive perception in our thought or consciousness. I cannot discover any theory, which gives me satisfaction on this head. (633/398– 9 and 636/400)

Where precisely did the problem lie? Hume does not seem to have found fault with anything in his psychologistic explication of the I as the identity of consciousness (“the reasoning seems satisfactory. . . . So far I seem to be attended with sufficient evidence,” THN 634–5/399–400). In particular, before attempting to show that “the true idea of the human mind” has its source in a fiction of identity founded on the affective dispositions of associative imagination (termed in the previous chapter ‘impressions of reflexion of type 3’), he recognized the need to exclude all other sources. This Hume did by a sequence of arguments in favor of the principle that “we have no notion of the mind distinct from the particular perceptions” (635/400). In the first, he asked what the impression origin of one’s idea of self is. Since the self is supposed to continue invariably the same through the whole course of our lives, an originating impression would have to be constant

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and invariable. Instead of this, however, we find only that “Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time” (THN 252/164). If not any one impression, might the self not then be a something “to which our several impressions and ideas are suppos’d to have a reference” (251/164)? Yet, our perceptions offer no evidence of any such reference: All these are different, and distinguishable, and separable form each other, and may be separately consider’d, and may exist separately, and have no need of any thing to support their existence. After what manner, therefore, do they belong to self; and how are they connected with it? For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. (252/164–5)

Finding no non-fictitious impression original either for an idea of the identical self or for a real connection of our perceptions to such a self, Hume concluded that whatever the source of the idea of the self may be, the only materials available from which to form it are the successive perceptions continuously coursing through our mind, all different, and distinguishable, and separable from each other, and may be separately consider’d, and may exist separately, and have no need of any thing to support their existence . . . The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is compos’d. (252–3/165; also 207/ 137–8, EHU V/i ¶3, D III 28 and IV 28–9)

Hume then proceeded to develop the associationist account of the self described earlier. In my view, however, his quandary concerning personal identity did not result from anything in that account as such, but rather from something it presupposes: the unity of consciousness whereby successive perceptions are united in our thought in the first place. At the core of Hume’s associationism are facile transitions from one perception to a perception that succeeds it (99/69, 204/135, 220/145, 260/169–70). Such transitions consequently presuppose the compresence in consciousness of nonsimultaneous perceptions. In the case of “the true idea of the human mind” (261/170), if “they are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind” (253/165), then, in order for associative imagination to become conscious, and a fortiori to feel the facility, of the transitions between these non-simultaneous perceptions, they must already be united in one and the same transition-feeling consciousness. Some further principle, antecedent to associa-


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tion, is therefore required in order to account for the unity of successive perceptions in one and the same consciousness implicit in our idea of the identity of consciousness with respect to those perceptions. But what could that be? If, as on Locke’s conception of the self’s duration of existence at ECHU II/xiv/§3, these perceptions had some real connection uniting them, then the quandary could be averted. For Hume, however, retreat to traditional metaphysical fixes was not an option: there are two principles, which I cannot render consistent; nor is it in my power to renounce either of them, viz. that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences. Did our perceptions either inhere in something simple and individual, or did the mind perceive some real connexion among them, there wou’d be no difficulty in the case. (635–6/400)

The problem was that, “having thus loosen’d all our particular perceptions, when I proceed to explain the principle of connexion, which binds them together, and makes us attribute to them a real simplicity and identity; I am sensible, that my account is very defective” (635/400). With retreat ruled out, yet seeing no way forward, Hume confessed himself stymied: For my part, I must plead the privilege of a sceptic, and confess, that this difficulty is too hard for my understanding. I pretend not, however, to pronounce it absolutely insuperable. Others, perhaps, or myself, upon more mature reflection, may discover some hypothesis, that will reconcile those contradictions.

If Hume ever hit upon a tenable hypothesis to explicate the unity of successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness, no trace of it has yet been discovered.3 C. Why Hume Could Not Psychologize Apprehension Is there an exit from the impasse into which Hume’s account of the identity of the I led him? The difficulty can be expressed psychologistically as that of identifying the source of our idea of a single, enduring consciousness in which successive 3. The sense in which perceptions are loosened that stymied Hume’s attempts to explain their connection is examined further in part III, esp. the discussions of perfect identity (chapter 17-A), personal identity (chapters 16-F and 17-B), and Hume’s “bipolar” model of consciousness (chapter 17C). It would be unfair, however, not to acknowledge that there is little agreement regarding Hume’s quandary in the literature, and that the account offered here is, so far as I know, new. For a review of the various interpretive strategies (not including the one pursued here), and a defense of his own, see Don Garrett’s outstanding book Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), chap. 8 (Garrett himself, when discussing the differentiation of causal roles and temporal locations, is concerned with problems that would not arise if psychologistic explication and facility affect had been given their proper due in causal association and identity). For an earlier, more extended discussion of Hume’s quandary, see my article “Hume’s Quandary Concerning Personal Identity,” Hume Studies 18, 2 (November, 1992).

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perceptions are united. The idea exists, but to what originating impression could Hume trace it? Given his denial of any perceptible real bond joining successive perceptions (THN 252–3/165, 259–60/169, and 636/400), and the impossibility of an associationalist account tracing its origin to an impression of type 3 (affects immanent to imagination in transitions of thought), Hume found himself with no means, psychologistic or otherwise, to explicate the idea. Nor could he have simply treated it as a brute datum incapable of explanation. Since once past it is “impossible to recal the past impressions, in order to compare them with our present ideas” (85/60), Hume attributed the idea of the succession of perceptions premised in the idea of personal identity to associative imagination: “even with relation to that succession . . . of perceptions, which constitutes our self or person . . . we cou’d only admit of those perceptions, which are immediately present to our consciousness, nor cou’d those lively images, with which the memory presents us, be ever receiv’d as true pictures of past perceptions . . . [without] the imagination, or the vivacity of our ideas” (265/173). If, apart from associative imagination,4 we would be oblivious to the succession of perceptions that constitutes the self, then Hume would hardly have been likely to treat that succession as a brute datum. But even if he had, that would still not suffice to explicate the idea in question, since, in addition to the perceptions themselves and their succession, it also involves an idea of the unity of the consciousness wherein alone the successive perceptions can stand together so as to be represented as a succession. For unless their succession is consciously considered as one—the act of taking the manifold perceptions together and representing them as a manifold—how could we represent them as forming a succession at all, rather than each being, for us, an absolute beginning and end in its own isolated instant? Thus, the idea of this unity must have its source in an act rather than a passive input (brute datum); and since this act is a necessary element in the representation of the successive perceptions as a succession, the perception of this succession also cannot be understood as a purely passive affair. What then is the nature of that act, and how does it point the way out of Hume’s quandary? The quandary is a direct result of taking the succession of perceptions in our thought or consciousness as a brute datum (“They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is compos’d,” THN 253/165). This commitment saddled Hume with the presupposition of (1) a temporally enduring consciousness that, by its very nature, is (2) antecedent to association, (3) yet, thanks to his two unrenouncable principles, is inexplicable for want of the ideas of a real substantial substrate or of real connections between distinct existents that seem necessary to do so. His dilemma was compounded by the impossibility of tracing the idea of this consciousness to any of the usual sources of ideas recognized by his empiricist sensibilism. But what if, instead of brute datum, the succession of perceptions in consciousness was, in part, the product of an act of the imagination antecedent to association? 4. The associative nature of memory is clear from its dependence on causal association at THN 110/ 76 and resemblance association at THN 260/B170. See part III below and HTC chapter 2-B.


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Furthermore, what if that act were antecedent to everything empirical, and served as an a priori representational condition of the possibility of perception itself—the presence of sensations or reflexions to consciousness? Its effect would be to render the data of perception suitable for empiricial imagination (i.e. imagination as thitherto conceived) to copy, separate, associate, compare and relate the data of perception. But it would also open the way to a psychologistic explication of succession itself: if the idea of succession is bound up by content with the action of imagination so that to abstract from the latter would be to nullify the idea, then any attempt to apply this idea in imagination-independent contexts would be as absurd as it would be in the case of ideas of cause and effect once we recognize that customary transitions of thought are an indispensable element of their content (chapter 2-B). Such an explication would provide an exit from Hume’s quandary since, in eliminating the succession of perceptions he supposed to exist prior to and independently of imagination, the problem of explaining how that succession comes to be united in our consciousness would be eliminated as well. For, by contrast with a preimaginatively real succession, we would be no more inclined to look to metaphysics for a substantial substrate or real connections to explain how an ideal, purely imaginary succession of perceptions come to be united in our thought or consciousness than to explain other such irreducibly psychological phenomena as “seeing” mental states in facial postures (happy, puzzled, curious, fearful, etc., expressions), “hearing” articulate speech in the continuous sound stream of utterance, or what a stallion knows by “smelling” the scent of a mare in estrus to which its rider, exposed to the very same scent, is oblivious. Succession would already, by its very nature as psychological, belong to consciousness, and could no more be conceived to exist in isolation from that consciousness than the Cheshire cat’s smile can be conceived to remain after the cat vanishes. To beings with a suitably different psychological constitution, perceptions would not appear to succeed at all nor consciousness appear to endure, and all temptation to hypothesize anything incompatible with Hume’s two unrenounceable principles would be removed. It might seem that resolving Hume’s quandary by substituting an ideal-psychological explication of succession in place of a real-metaphysical one merely postpones the problem without solving it. For even if extending the imagination to a level more rudimentary than associative consciousness staves off Hume’s quandary at that level—let us, in anticipation of Kant, call that level synthesis of apprehension in intuition—does it not simply reemerge at the next level down, when we arrive again at the preimaginative? The answer, I think, is no. We must keep in mind the topic at the center of Hume’s quandary: personal identity, the duration of one and the same thinking I in the face of a flux of successive perceptions. More particularly, Hume approached this question as he did causality (necessary connection) and others: to understand it, we need to explicate the idea of the self, and to do this, rather than canvassing ordinary usage of ‘self,’ ‘person,’ and ‘mind’ with an eye to formulating a precise definition, we undertake a psychological investigation to discover the impression from which it is copied. Now, at the time of writing Treatise book I, Hume was evidently aware that one of the constituents of this idea is the unity of successive perceptions in consciousness, that is, the synthesis of apprehension of intuition (the “theatre” analogy at THN 252–3/165 is Hume’s

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fullest description of it). He did not, however, recognize the fundamental problem the explication of the idea of this synthesis posed for his psychologism until after the first volume of the Treatise was published. Now that we have explored what that problem is and an outline of the kind of solution that would have permitted Hume to remain faithful to his two unrenounceable principles, we can see that the question whether this solution merely staves off but does not solve the problem really comes to this: whether there is any further constituent of the idea of the thinking I originating at a yet more primitive level than the unity of the (in-itself nonsuccessive) manifold as a successive manifold in immediate intuition via synthesis of apprehension. If the answer is no, then even if there is a problem about how things stand in the mind antecedently to synthesis of apprehension, it is a different one from Hume’s quandary concerning personal identity. And this is as much as to say that the quandary does not reemerge preimaginatively (i.e. preapprehensively). How the data of the senses that exist in us prior to and independently of imagination—termed by Kant “the synopsis of the manifold a priori through sense” (A94; also A97)—come to be united in our consciousness so as to be apprehended as successive may well have to remain a mystery, a question we may legitimately pose but can never answer (“it is not given to us to observe our own mind with any other intuition than that of inner sense; and . . . yet it is precisely in the mind that the secret of the origin of sensibility is located,” A278/B334). For, whereas stroke victims’ loss of the ability to perceive speech need not have any effect on their ability to hear sounds as such, or their loss of the ability to recognize faces impair their ability to see light and colors, can any consciousness of sensory data be supposed to remain after one has lost the ability to perceive them as a succession, or the consciousness uniting them as enduring? If yes, what is it? Unless something can be specified, and shown to be latent in the content of the idea of the I, it can pose no problem to a philosopher concerned to explicate that idea psychologistically. If the answer is no, then the process whereby sensations come to be united in apprehension would be mysterious by virtue of occurring in the absence of anything that can properly be deemed “consciousness” at all; and not only would consciousness of sensations extend no further back than apprehension, consciousness itself would be impossible without a contribution from the imagination (“imagination might be a necessary ingredient of perception itself,” A120n). Yet, in that case, it is of even less concern to the psychologistic philosopher. For no ideas can be acquired where consciousness of sensations (impressions) is lacking; and something that is unknown to us because it is not a source of any of the ideas in our possession cannot be of the least relevance when it comes to explicating any of those ideas. Thus, since Hume never doubted that we possess an idea of the I, the a priori synopsis antecedent to apprehension is incapable of playing any role in the psychologistic explication of this or any other idea; nor, a fortiori, could it confront him with a problem analogous to that which arises when the subjective succession and duration of apprehension are supposed to exist prior to and independently of the action of imagination. Although we shall probably never know whether Hume investigated the possibility of extending the purview of the imagination to include apprehension in order


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to escape his quandary concerning personal identity, it seems certain that he anyway lacked the means to do so within the framework of his empiricism. The reason, as noted earlier, is that there would have to be a preapprehensive yet empirical consciousness, such that, absent the ability to imagine perceptions as a succession in an enduring consciousness, we might still retain a more primitive level of awareness of sensory data comparable to the way the loss of the ability to “see” (imagine) facial expressions can leave the ability to perceive shapes, or at least light and color, unimpaired. Yet there is no reason to suppose that any such empirical consciousness exists, nor any indication that Hume thought it did. To be sure, he never undertook to trace the idea of succession to its source. He went only so far as to explain our beliefs (1) that present perceptions really are preceded by other perceptions, (2) which perceptions they are, and (3) in what order they present themselves in terms of “the imagination, or the vivacity of our ideas” (THN 265/173). Yet, for him, beliefs are not ideas but rather presuppose ideas as conditions of their possibility (94/65; also 101/71, 140/95, 164/111, and 172/116). Hume’s associationist explication of our beliefs regarding what precedes present perceptions therefore tells us nothing whatever about the idea of succession they presuppose. We have already seen why the idea of succession cannot have its source in associative imagination: since association consists in transitions of thought, it presupposes, and so cannot explain, how the successive perceptions to and from which such transitions are made come to be apprehended together in the same enduring consciousness. It must instead have its source in a consciousness of sensory data that precedes association. Taking it to be a brute datum, however, eventuated in the quandary from which Hume was unable to extricate himself. Yet one looks in vain for empirical grounds for attributing apprehension to imagination. The failure of Hume and other pre-Kantians to discover any certainly did not result from introspective slackness. Whether there are more indirect, though still empirical grounds from which its source in imagination might be extrapolated is a possibility, but it seems highly doubtful that a complete explanation is obtainable by this route; for, in the end, the question hinges on the nature of succession itself. The fact nevertheless remains that the kind of answer Hume’s quandary demands is neither metaphysical nor logico-linguistic but psychologistic; and if anything is clear from the foregoing it is that a psychologism that equates sensibilism with empiricism lacks the means to determine whether succession is something that exists, and can exist, only in and through the action of imagination. Of course, it is one thing to recognize that the only hope lies down an apriorist path and quite another actually to develop an a priori psychologism and sustain it within the framework of a defensible theory. So, let us proceed now to consider how well Kant’s transcendental psychologism fits the bill. D. The Elements of Kant’s Psychologization of Time In the previous section, we saw that if a way could be found to psychologize apprehension—our preassociative consciousness of sensations as successive—by

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showing that the action of imagination makes an essential contribution to its content, an exit from Hume’s quandary concerning personal identity can be opened. However, it also became clear that to do so on empirical grounds would presuppose a preapprehensive, preimaginative consciousness of sensations that no sensibilist empiricist, including Hume, gave any indication of postulating. There is however an alternative. If, instead of a preapprehensive empirical consciousness, there were (1) a pure (a priori) consciousness that precedes and makes possible the empirical apprehension of perceptions as a succession in an enduring consciousness, and (2) this pure consciousness could be shown to be the doing of a pure synthesis of imagination, then grounds would exist for affirming that apprehension too is the product of the imagination, thereby circumventing Hume’s quandary concerning personal identity. In this section I will review the evidence for concluding that Kant’s doctrine of pure sensibility meets both conditions, and so underwrites his attribution of apprehension—the most elementary of all levels of consciousness—to imagination. More particularly, I will consider evidence that Kant espoused the following five theses: • The perception (empirical consciousness) of succession and simultaneity presupposes a time that is nothing else than a pure intuition of sensibility; • The restriction of the scope of the pure time intuition to appearances (regarded as representations rather than things in themselves) needs to be understood psychologistically. • Pure time is a product of the imagination. • Empirical apprehension presupposes the pure intuition of time and for that reason is itself a product of the imagination. • Since, in addition to the synthesis of the imagination, the pure time intuition exemplifies the formal unity of consciousness distinctive of pure apperception, apprehension must conform to apperception as well. By the end of the chapter, it should become clear that all five propositions are indispensable if Hume’s quandary is not to become Kant’s as well. 1. The perception (empirical consciousness) of succession and simultaneity presupposes a time that is nothing else than a pure intuition of sensibility. Whenever the context required, Kant, like the British Empiricists before him, was careful to distinguish experience of phenomena from perception of appearances, the raw material of experience (phenomena are appearances thought conformably to the categories, while appearances are apprehended in sense perception prior to and independently of the categories and discursive thought generally).5 So, contrary to 5. See B9, A110, A124–5, B161, A156–8/B195–7, B218–9, A183/B226–7, A764/B792, PFM 275, 305, Progress 274–6, Anthropology 398, AA 17 4679, AA 18 5923, 5934, and AA 22 93; phenomena: A248–9, AA 18 4999; and appearances: A89–91/B122–3, A111, A124, B145, and Anthropology 142 (also A20/B34, B67, B132, A253/B309). Kant’s distinction between perception and experience should not be confused with his distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience: perception is prediscursive, a matter of sensible intuition prior to and independently of conceptual thought, while judgments of perception are a species of discursive representation.


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the practice common in philosophy today, ‘perception’ was almost always restricted to that which is given to consciousness immediately, whereas ‘experience’ denoted the end product of various psychological operations performed on perceptions (reproduction, separation, combination, comparison, relation, association, unification in complexes, generalization, etc.). According to this phraseology, what we normally term “perceiving objects” is rather to be described as “experiencing objects” (cognizing them, judging them) by relating, ordering, and unifying given perceptions. Perception (apprehension), by contrast, consists simply in taking up into consciousness the data of the senses in such a way that they constitute a suitable input for these higher-level psychological operations. This distinction is crucial to comprehending Kant’s claim that the perception of succession and simultaneity presupposes a pure time intuition. For it does not, as sometimes is supposed, specifically concern experiential cognition, or in any way presuppose discursivity (representation by means of universals). It belongs instead to transcendental aesthetic—the doctrine of pure sensibility—understood as presupposed by, rather than subordinate to, transcendental logic (chapter 1-B). We must therefore recognize that Kant’s concern in the following texts is the possibility of perception as such, and so only indirectly the possibility of experience: Neither simultaneity nor succession would ever enter into perception, did not the representation of time underlie them a priori. (A30/B46) pure intuition underlies all perception (in respect to the status of perceptions as representations, the form of inner intuition, time, is their basis). (A115–6) since sensible intuition is a quite specific subjective condition underlying all perception a priori, whose form is original, the form is therefore given by itself alone; and far from its being the matter (or the things themselves which appeared) that is fundamental, the very possibility of this matter presupposes a formal intuition (time and space) as given. (A268/B323–4) time . . . inheres in us as a pure form of our sensibility before all perception of experience and makes possible all intuition of sensibility, and therefore all appearances. (PFM app. 375) An intuition which is to be possible a priori can only concern the form under which the object is intuited, for this means representing something a priori, prior to perception, i.e. prior to empirical consciousness, and making a representation of it independently thereof. Now, the empirical in perception—the sensation or impression (Eindrück)—is the matter of intuition, hence that in respect to which the intuition would not be an a priori representation. So an intuition concerning merely the form is called pure intuition, which, if it is to be possible, must be independent of experience. . . . Now the Critique of Pure Reason proves that the representations of space and time are such pure intuitions. (Progress 266–7)

2. The restriction of the scope of the pure time intuition to appearances (representations rather than things in themselves) needs to be understood

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psychologistically. Succession, for Kant, is one of three modes of time, along with simultaneity and duration (A177/B219). Its presence in perception depends on a nonconceptual (A30/B46), and so purely sensible intuition of time that takes place completely a priori (#1 above). Consequently, whatever is true of the nature and origin of time must ipso facto be true of its three modes as well. In particular, if the former is bound up by content with something contributed by the action of the mind in producing its intuition, then the latter must be so as well, with the psychologistic implication that neither is capable of existing prior to and independently of sensible-intuitive consciousness: When I speak of objects in time and in space, it is not of things in themselves, of which I cognize nothing, but of things in appearance, i.e., of experience, as a particular way of cognizing objects which alone is granted to man. I must not say of that which I think in time or in space, that it is in space and time in itself, completely independently of these my thoughts; for I would contradict myself, because space and time, together with the appearances in them, are nothing in themselves and outside of my representations, but are rather themselves only modes of representation, and it is a manifest contradiction to say that a mere mode of representation also exists outside our representation. The objects of the senses therefore exist only in experience; by contrast, to accord them a selfsubsistent existence in the absence of experience, or prior to experience, means as much to represent experience as actually existing in the absence of experience, or prior to experience. (PFM 341–2, my emphasis)

Kant’s reasoning here is of precisely the same psychologistic character as Hume’s in the case of necessary connections between causes and effects (chapter 2-B). By explicating such connections by means of customary transitions of thought, Hume could equate the concealed absurdity of the proposition “causal relations can be conceived to hold between distinct existents apart from any relation to thought” with the patent absurdity that “customary transitions of thought can be conceived to hold between distinct existents apart from any relation to thought.” Similarly, by explicating pure space and time as mere modes of representation, Kant could equate the absurdity latent in the proposition “space and time can be conceived to exist, either in themselves or as properties of things in themselves, apart from any relation to representation” with the patent absurdity of the proposition “modes of representation can be conceived to exist, either in themselves or as properties of things in themselves, apart from any relation to representation,” or, equivalently, “perceptions can conceived to exist prior to and independently of perceptions.” Thus, just as Hume’s psychologistic explication of cause and effect permitted him to declare that we “we either contradict ourselves, or talk without a meaning” (THN 267/173) if we suppose it to be a determination in the objects we consider rather than in the mind that considers them (167/113), Kant’s psychologistic explication of time led him to the conclusion that it is “a manifest contradiction” to suppose it to be a determination of the things we intuit rather than of the mind that intuits them.


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Faced with what seems to be a claim (oft iterated)6 about the constitution of things in themselves—that they are in no respect spatial or temporal—many interpreters have questioned whether Kant could have intended so baldly to contradict his oft-iterated denial that it is possible to intuit or conceive things in themselves in any way whatever (“the question as to the constitution of that something which cannot be thought through any determinate predicate because it is posited entirely outside the sphere of objects which can be given to us is entirely null and empty,” A478–9/B506–7n; also A30/B45, A255/B310–1, A392, A613–4/B641–2). The most serious expression of these misgivings is the well-known “neglected alternative” objection: even if we grant Kant’s thesis that apprehended appearances owe their spatial and temporal form to the special constitution of our sensibility, and for that reason are ideal—mere representations rather than things existing mind-independently in themselves—is it not still possible for things in themselves to be spatial and/or temporal in nature, quite independently of how it is with minds like ours? There is no obvious reason why the situation with appearances should have any bearing on the situation with things in themselves. So, why did Kant think it does? Or did he simply neglect the alternative possibility that it does not? Kant did not have open to him the way of replying to this objection that Berkeley and Hume did. For the latter took the distinction between the spatial or temporal form of appearances and their sensation or reflexion matter to be merely abstract distinctions of reason; and since they explained these simply as different ways in which one and the same idea may be used to signify generally rather than as distinct ideas in their own right (chapters 12 and 18), they could contend that only mental representations can be spatial or temporal since the spatial and temporal are one and inseparable from sensation and reflexion. Kant, however, did distinguish the form from the matter of appearance, on the ground that the form in virtue of which alone sensations and reflexions admit of being ordered and related cannot itself be sensation or reflexion, but must instead lie ready for the data of the senses a priori in the mind (A20/B34, A93/B125, and A373). This distinction is what provides the opening for the neglected alternative objector to query why a form that is distinct from sensation and reflexion cannot also be a form whereby mind-independently existing things in themselves admit of being ordered and related, so that space and time belong as essentially to their constitution as they do to that of appearances? I see no way Kant could have mounted an adequate response expect by applying the method of psychologistic explication to the pure forms of appearances, space and time. Psychologism, as we have seen, kicks in just in case the psychology of the origin of the representation under consideration turns up a constituent essential to its content that is superadded by the mind through the psychological operations it performs on data of the senses that, in and of themselves, lack this content. If Kant understood the origin of the forms of appearances, pure space and 6. In the first Critique, variations of the assertion that things in themselves cannot be temporal or spatial occur at A23/B37–8, A38/B55, A42–3/B59–60, A44/B61, B148–9, A286–7/B342–3, A358–9, A374–5 and n, A376, A385, A492/B520, and A494/B522.

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time, in this way, their distinctness vis à vis the matter of appearances would then be that of the imaginary vis à vis the preimaginary (not, as almost invariably supposed, that of the preimaginative sensible that consists neither of sensation nor reflexion vis à vis preimaginative sensations and reflexions themselves). As such, the same consequence that followed when Hume explicated the necessary connection essential to the idea of cause and effect in terms of customary transitions of thought would follow here: if an indispensable element of the content of the pure time and space intuitions proves to be indelibly bound up with the action of imagination, then these intuitions cannot be supposed to have meaning or application beyond the purview of imagination. And since Kantian things in themselves are prior to, independent of, and altogether inaccessible to the representational purview of our minds, this means that we could no more even so much as conceive things in themselves to be spatial or temporal in nature than we can conceive them to have carnal appetites or to agonize over moral dilemmas. What gives psychologistic explication, and it alone, the power to turn back the neglected alternative objection is that it supplies a reason sufficient to warrant Kant’s claim that “it is a manifest contradiction to say that a mere mode of representation also exists outside our representation” without falling foul of his insistence that we can have no knowledge of things in themselves of the kind that would enable us to affirm or deny anything about them directly (other than that they exist).7 For far from requiring us to know the unknowable, his denial of spatiality and temporality to things in themselves is simply the inescapable consequence of our knowledge of something he never for a moment doubted we are capable of knowing: the contents of our own representations. Kant, like Berkeley and Hume before him (chapters 10-D and 16-C), drew ontological conclusions from psychologistic analyses of the representations of objects actually in our possession while remaining an ontological agnostic regarding matters whereof all representation is lacking. As Hume put it, when we use our terms to “signify something, of which we have a clear idea, and which is incompatible with those objects, to which we apply it, obscurity and error begin then to take place, and we are led astray by a false philosophy”; whereas if we use them to mean those “unknown qualities . . . in material and immaterial objects with which we are utterly unacquainted . . . ’twill be of little consequence to the world” (THN 168/ 7. It may be thought that the neglected alternative is rebutted in the Antinomies, where Kant shows that reason inevitably falls into contradiction if space and time are assumed to be applicable to things in themselves. But this overlooks the fact that the Antinomies presuppose both the determination of the sensible by the categories and the determination of the categories by transcendental ideas of pure reason; hence, the contradictions Kant describes have to do not with the sensible per se but the application of discursive representations to the sensible. By contrast, the neglected alternative objection to transcendental idealism relates directly to the pure sensible intuitions of the Transcendental Aesthetic, prior to and independently of any question of discursive representations or their application to objects. This perhaps is why Kant never did more than claim that the Antinomies confirm the transcendental idealism of the Aesthetic, while never pretending that they could take the place of the explications provided in the latter. I will examine Kant’s reasons for affirming the existence of things in themselves in volume II. An earlier version is given in “Kant’s Refutation of Berkeleyan Idealism,” in Idealismus als Theorie der Repräsentation? (Paderborn: mentis Verlag, 2000). An earlier discussion of the neglected alternative objection can be found in KMM, chap. 1-G.


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113). It is precisely this incompatibility with things in themselves that follows when the psychologistic explication of space and time reveals that they fall into the same genus as puzzled frowns, shrugs, and skeptically toned speech: representations that only make sense from the subjective, irreducibly psychological purview of representational (feeling, imagining, understanding) mind. There is one further objection to Kant’s psychologism with respect to time that I need to address before proceeding. The objection is motivated by a conviction that, so far as ideality is concerned, the cases of space and time cannot be equated, and it seems to occur to everyone: Kant’s contemporaries raised it; Hume would certainly have done so; and it is voiced whenever anyone strives to take Kant at his oft-iterated word that the ideality of space and time is to be construed identically. It runs thus: “To be sure, distrust of the phenomenology of sense experience—how things seem to ordinary consciousness—both as a guide to mind-independent reality and to what in sense experience is and is not mediated by thought (imagination, understanding) was already pronounced in the time of Descartes and Locke. But such caution was invariably confined to the phenomenology of the external senses;8 and the very same philosophers who doubted whether the things present to us in sensation are in fact as they seem to us would have been sure to reject out of hand a comparable claim9 with respect to the phenomenology of internal sense had anyone previous to Kant ever thought to advance it (not even Berkeley did: B70). It is therefore difficult to take seriously anyone, even a great philosopher such as Kant, who questions whether the succession of perceptions in inner sense, and the duration of the consciousness in which they are contained, are, in transcendental reality, just as they appear to us empirically, in internal perception, as being.” The objectionable claim first appeared in the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770, the earliest work Kant deemed worthy of inclusion in his collected oeuvre. After receiving the objection from thinkers as distinguished as Johann Lambert and Moses Mendelssohn, Kant realized that he had no choice but to address the issue head-on in his next major work, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781): Against this theory, which admits the empirical reality of time, but denies its absolute and transcendental reality, I have heard men of intelligence so unanimously voicing an objection, that I must suppose it to occur naturally to every reader to whom these considerations are unfamiliar. The objection runs as follows: alterations really exist (sind wirklich); this is proved simply by the change of our own representations, even if one still denies all outer appearances, together with their alterations. Now, alterations are possible only in time; consequently, time is something real (etwas Wirkliches). (A36–7/B53)

Though professing to grant the entire argument, Kant did so only by introducing a slight change in its wording that renders his concession nugatory: 8. Examples will be considered in some detail through the course of this work, beginning with Locke’s solution to the Molyneux problem in part I. 9. By this I mean claims founded on psychological considerations. This foundation of idealist reasoning should not be confounded with rationalist views of time such as those espoused by Leibniz or McTaggart: their positions were motivated not by psychological considerations but by abstract logical and metaphysical ones.

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION There is no difficulty in responding. I concede the entire argument. To be sure, time is something, namely the really existent (wirklich) form of inner intuition. It thus has subjective reality in respect of inner experience, i.e. I actually have the representation of time and actually have my determinations in it. Time is therefore to be regarded as actually existent not as an object, but as the mode of representation of myself as an object. (A37/B53–4)

In terming time a mere “mode of representation” Kant presumably would have us draw the same implication here that he drew explicitly in PFM 341–2: “it is a manifest contradiction to say that a mere mode of representation also exists outside our representation.” In other words, in conceding to his objectors that the empirical reality of time is undeniable in the face of the empirical reality of alterations, he persisted in rejecting the conclusion his objectors took this immediately to imply: the absolute (transcendental) reality of time (“the things of the world are objectively, or in themselves, neither in one and the same state at different times nor in different states, for, so understood, they are not in time at all,” letter to Herz 21 February 1772). For Kant, empirical evidence suffices only for drawing empirical conclusions, and is quite incapable of enlightening us in matters regarding the real existence of things that must be addressed a priori or not at all (A30/B45 and A393). Kant’s apriorism, far from anticipating contemporary logico-grammatical and/ or normative-epistemological notions of the a priori, takes its start in the theory of sensibility (aesthetic). No one before him seems to have considered the possibility that our concepts of time might have their origin in the manner in which our minds are constituted to perceive their own operations (mental actions and passions), such that, apart from our specially constituted mode of apprehending them in internal intuition, it would be a manifest contradiction to apply temporal predicates either to these operations themselves, or to data of external intuition, or indeed to anything else whatever: if I could intuit myself, or another being intuit me, without this condition of sensibility, the very same determinations we now represent as alterations would yield a cognition in which the representation of time, and so too that of alteration, would not occur at all. It thus retains its empirical reality as a condition of all our experiences. Our exposition requires only that absolute reality cannot be accorded to it. Time is nothing but the form of our inner intuition. If we take from it the particular condition of our sensibility, the concept of time disappears, and it inheres not in the objects themselves, but merely in the subject, which intuits it. . . . I can indeed say that my representations follow one another; but this is only to say that we are conscious of them as in a time-sequence, that is, in conformity with the form of inner sense. Time is not, therefore, something in itself, nor is it a determination objectively inhering in things. (A37/B54 and n; also AA 18 5319)

Kant’s position regarding succession and duration fits the paradigm of psychologistic explication perfectly: because our concepts of them derive from representations in the mind that are bound up by content with a mere mode of representation,


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grounded in a condition peculiar to our sensibility, these concepts “disappear” the moment we attempt to apply them to things existing and acting in themselves, distinct from our representations of them, including the empirically intuited appearances of the operations of our own minds. Some interpreters balk at the implication that the succession of thoughts and perceptions we immediately intuit within ourselves is a mere representation that has nothing to do with the transcendental reality of our minds. They place their trust in philosophical intuitions that tell them it would be patently nonsensical for anyone, Kant included, to claim that the mind—not as it appears but as it really is—acts and is affected wholly atemporally. For this reason, they take it upon themselves, from philosophical charity, to restrict the scope of Kant’s idealism with respect to time more narrowly than that relating to space, so that the precognitive succession present to us in sense, prior to and independently of the framework of conceptual cognition, can be accorded unqualified reality.10 The problem with this is that, in freeing this succession from its ideal pure time condition, it would introduce an ineliminable empirical element into temporal representation and so undermine the whole point of the Transcendental Aesthetic: establishing pure sensible intuition as the first element on which the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments rests (A39/B56, B73, PFM 377, Discovery 245, and letter to Tieftrunk, 11.Dec.1797). For this and other reasons, Kant left it in no doubt that the pure time intuition precedes and makes possible all empirical succession and simultaneity, beginning with the Inaugural Dissertation: The idea of time does not arise from (oritur) but is presupposed by the senses. For it is only through the idea of time that it is possible for the things which come before the senses to be represented as simultaneous or successive. Nor does succession generate the concept of time; it makes appeal to it. (ID 398)

This doctrine is explicitly restated in the Aesthetic (A30/B46, already cited), and the context of the proof of the Second Analogy leaves no doubt that the time whose imperceptibility is the raison d’être for a categorial exponent of time in the field of appearance (A216/B263) is the pure time intuition of the Aesthetic that precedes and makes possible all perception of succession and simultaneity:

10. Among contemporary anglophone interpreters, Peter Strawson is unusual only in giving voice to his conviction that, textual evidence to the contrary notwithstanding (e.g., A38/B55, CPrR 6; and Anthropology 398), it is impossible for Kant truly to have meant to accord “equal reality to bodies in space (“outer objects”) and states of consciousness (“inner determinations”). The doctrine that the material and the mental constituents of the natural world are alike only appearances turns out, in the end, to bear with unequal weight on bodies and states of consciousness” (Bounds of Sense, 21–2 (London: Methuen, 1966). Wilfrid Sellars took a similar position: see KMM, chap. 1-F. As one who prefers to be guided by the text when it is plain and consistent, I think it important to keep in mind that if we succeed in overcoming the innumerable obstacles facing any attempt to think our way back into the distant philosophical past, we may well discover that the supposed “absurdity” of the view ascribed to Kant here was precisely the view we should expect a philosopher of his gifts, and with his unique appreciation of the British Empiricists, to have held. To put this possibility to the test, however, we need, at least for the time being, to keep an open mind.

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION All appearances are in time, in which, as substrate (permanent form of internal intuition), simultaneity and succession (Folge) can alone be represented. Hence, the time in which all change of appearances is to be thought remains and does not change, because succession (Nacheinandersein) and simultaneity can only be represented as determinations of that time. (B224–5)

Texts such as these show that if Kant did indeed draw the psychologistic conclusion that pure time is a representation having nothing to do with the transcendental reality of our minds, then all succession and simultaneity in our representation without exception, no matter how subjective or attenuated, are included within its scope. There is therefore no reason not to take at face value Kant’s claim that the unity of successive perceptions in consciousness that spawned Hume’s quandary is, and can be, nothing other than an appearance, in no way reflective of how things are with the mind transcendentally, as thing in itself: It is not possible that I represent time-relation as merely intuitionally in me and nevertheless also represent myself in this time as an object of intuition if this consciousness pertains to me as a thing in itself. . . . That I am in time which yet is a mere relation in me, consequently the continens is a contentum and I am in myself, that already indicates that I think myself in a twofold meaning. (AA 18 5655; also B422 and Anthropology 134n)

3. Pure time is a product of the imagination. The imagination is never mentioned in Kant’s exposition of time as a pure intuition originating in sensibility in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Yet not only is nothing said in it that would prevent “sensibility” from being construed so as to include imagination, Kant elsewhere often did exactly that.11 The only kind of spontaneity (mental activity) specifically excluded from the account of the origin of space and time given in the Aesthetic is the sort that involves concepts (discursivity, representations by means of universals: A24–5/B39 #3 and A31–2/B47 #4). When the imagination is first introduced, a few pages into the Analytic of Concepts, it is characterized as a specifically prediscursive faculty of synthesis that depends on understanding to bring its representations to concepts: the spontaneity of our thinking requires that this manifold . . . of pure a priori intuition belonging to conditions of the receptivity of our minds . . . first be gone through, apprehended, and combined in a certain way in order produce a cognition. This act I call synthesis. . . . Synthesis is in general . . . the mere action of the imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul without which we would have no cognition at all, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious. Only the function of bringing this synthesis to concepts belongs to the understanding, and it is by means of the understanding that cognition in the genuine sense is first obtained. (A77–8/B102–3) 11. “Sensibility, as belonging to the cognitive faculty, is sense and imagination; (the understanding: concepts). Intuition.” (AA 15 §229). In addition to A77–8/B103, A124, and B150, see Anthropology §15, AA 15 223 and 225, as well as AA 27, p. 473: “To empirical intuition belongs sense; to pure intuition imagination. The latter is the capacity for intuition even in the absence of objects. Both together, sense and imagination, constitute the sensibility.”


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As a prediscursive expression of the spontaneity of the mind (A97 and AA 18 5636), Kant could supplement his account of the origin of space and time in the Aesthetic by including imagination without fear of inconsistency. And there is an abundance of textual evidence, in the Analytic of Concepts and elsewhere, to indicate that Kant did indeed refine the Aesthetic account to include the a priori synthesis of pure (productive) imagination: A99–100, A107, B136n, B160 and n, On A Discovery 203, Anthropology 167, AA 18 5876, AA 22 37 and 76 (since I have discussed these texts in considerable detail elsewhere, and will have occasion to revisit them in volume II, readers should consult these texts if they are unaware of the evidence for the conclusion drawn here). 4. Empirical apprehension presupposes the pure intuition of time and for that reason is itself a product of the imagination. I will subject what Kant termed the synthesis of apprehension in intuition to detailed examination in volume II. Here I shall continue to understand by it the operation whereby data of the senses are perceived (immediately intuited) as a succession, and thereby united in one consciousness (A99)—an operation responsible for the disjointed flux of perceptions presupposed as given by the operations to which pre-Kantian psychologists (including Hume) had limited the imagination (reproducing past perceptions alongside present, and comparing, relating, separating, or combining them) (A120–1). In the previous section, I showed how the attribution of this synthesis to the imagination holds out the promise of an exit from Hume’s quandary but also found that no empirical basis exists for attributing it to the imagination. At the outset of this section, I noted that there is an alternative route to the same destination: if empirical apprehension proceeds in conformity with a pure consciousness that itself involves a synthesis of imagination, then there will be an a priori basis on which to ascribe empirical apprehension to the imagination. I then showed, in #1 above, that the pure time intuition precedes and makes possible all perception (empirical consciousness) of the modes of time (simultaneity, succession, and duration). In #2, it emerged that Kant’s denial of absolute, transcendental reality to time and space fits the model of psychologistic explication precisely: by tracing them to their origin as representations in the mind, he determined that the operation of the mind that produces these representations contributes something essential to their content. I also showed that the only origin that could warrant Kant’s assertion that it is a “manifest contradiction” to suppose that mind-independent things in themselves might exist and act in time is one in which not only the receptivity of sense but also the spontaneity of preconceptual imagination makes an essential contribution to its content. And, in #3, I showed that considerable textual evidence exists to confirm that Kant did indeed ascribe an essential role in their origin to pure imagination. Accordingly, to show that apprehension is a product of the imagination, Kant needed to go no further than to prove that perceptions (appearances) are subject a priori (and so universally and necessarily) to pure, formal intuitions of time and space. Having of course already done so in the Aesthetic (#1 above), he had no need to give additional arguments to show that the synthesis of apprehension to which he traced perception must itself conform to pure time, but simply stated it (A98–9, A115, B160 and n, A155/B194, and A411/B438). As this provided Kant

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with the requisite a priori basis on which to ascribe empirical apprehension to the imagination, he could do what no previous psychologist, including even Hume, had been in a position to contemplate—extend the reach of imagination down to the most primitive level of consciousness of all: since each perception contains a manifold, so that distinct perceptions are encountered in the mind scattered and single in themselves, a combination of perceptions is needed that they cannot have in the senses themselves. There is thus in us an active capacity for the synthesis of this manifold, which we call the faculty of imagination, whose action, when exercised immediately on perceptions I entitle apprehension.* This is because the imagination is supposed to bring the manifold of intuition into an image; so before this it must take the impressions up into its activity, i.e. apprehend them. *No psychologist ever has even so much as thought that the imagination might be a necessary ingredient of perception itself. This is in part because this capacity had been limited only to reproductions, and in part because it was believed that the senses are not confined to supplying impressions but also put them together and bring images of objects into being. Yet there can be no doubt that this requires something more than the receptivity of impressions, namely, a function for their synthesis. (A120 and n)

Each and every succession we apprehend empirically in perception is therefore generated by a synthesis of imagination, and so exists only in and for it: Insofar as appearances, as representations, are at the same time objects of consciousness, they are in no way distinct from apprehension, i.e. being taken up into the synthesis of the imagination, and we must therefore say that the manifold of appearances is always generated in the mind successively. (A190/B235)

5. Since, in addition to the synthesis of the imagination, the pure time intuition exemplifies the formal unity of consciousness distinctive of pure apperception, apprehension must conform to apperception as well. In the Transcendental Aesthetic, pure space and time are represented as the unity of the manifold they contain in a very special sense. Unlike concepts (universals, discursive representations) which confer unity on distinct representations by containing these under them as instances, pure space and time are individuals that confer unity on distinct representations by containing these within them as parts or occupants (A25/B39– 40 [#4] and A32/B74–8 [#5]). Moreover, pure space and time, far from being mere sums of their parts, or abstractions from the relations of their occupants, precede and make possible everything present in them (A24/B38–9 #2 and A31/B46 [#2]). All determinate spaces and times are possible only through the limitation of the one space and the one time, making each of the latter essentially one, and so impossible to multiply instantiate: no space exists outside the one space because no space is possible except through it and in it; no time exists outside the one time because no time is possible except through it and in it (A24–5/B39 [#3] and A31– 2/B47 [#4]). Thus, as represented in the Transcendental Aesthetic, pure space and


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time are a priori unities of the manifolds they contain in the sense of ‘a priori’ that connotes universality and necessity (B3–4): all external appearances necessarily conform to the one, and all internal appearances necessarily conform to the other. And since all external appearances are, at the same time, internal appearances (insofar as they are apprehended in perceptual consciousness), whereas not all internal appearances are also external ones, pure time is the only unity within sensibility itself (i.e. prediscursive) that encompasses absolutely everything capable of becoming an appearance to a mind constituted such as ours (A34/B50–1, B67, B224–5, and B427). In the Analytic of Concepts, Kant determined the unity of space and time more precisely. As a unity of distinct representations in one and the same consciousness, each counts as a synthetic unity of the manifold it contains; and as an a priori (necessary, universal) unity that precedes and makes possible all of its manifold, their synthetic unity counts as original (all determinate and/or empirical unities of spaces and times derive from a consciousness of the unity of pure space and time, whereas their unity is underivable from anything else):12 Space and time and all their parts are intuitions, hence individual (einzelne) representations with the manifold they contain in them (see the Transcendental Aesthetic), not mere concepts through which one and the same consciousness is contained in many representations but many contained in one, and in the consciousness of that one, and thus as composite; consequently, unity of consciousness that is synthetic yet also original is met with in them. This individuality (Einzelnheit) of space and time is important in application (see §26).13 (B136n)

If the pure space and time of the Aesthetic are original synthetic unities of their manifold, there then can be no doubt that Kant conceived of them as embodying what he variously termed the pure/original/necessary/transcendental unity of apperception (B132–3) and ascribed to pure understanding rather than to pure imagination or sense (A107 and B140). Many interpreters will balk at accepting that Kant, in tracing the original unity of the space and time of the Aesthetic to its origin in the mind, counted the understanding among its sources, since this seems to amount to including this faculty under the ægis of “sensibility” (along with sense and imagination, as in #3 above). Yet doing so would only be incompatible with the account of the origin of space and time given in the Aesthetic if “understanding” as the faculty of unity of apperception were indistinguishable from “understanding” as the faculty of discursive representation. Though we shall see in due course that there are powerful 12. Kant coupled the distinction between original and derived with that between innate and acquired to characterize the origin of both space and time and the categories as “original acquisitions” at Discovery 221–3. 13. The text actually refers the reader to section §25, but the contextual evidence that §26 is the section Kant actually intended seems overwhelming (see citation of B160n below). The error may have been the result of a writing or copying error that Kant failed to notice or correct, but it seems equally probable that it is the consequence of a subsequent decision to split §24 into two sections (whereupon the original §25 became §26).

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textual and contextual reasons for concluding that Kant did indeed distinguish them, we are fortunate to have a text in which he says quite explicitly that the unity of the pure space and time of the Aesthetic, though grounded on understanding, involves no concepts in its representation at all, not even the categories, and so is properly ascribed to sensibility: In the Aesthetic, I attributed this unity merely to sensibility only in order to remark that it precedes all concepts, although it presupposes a synthesis not belonging to the senses whereby all concepts of space and time first become possible. For since, through it (in that the understanding determines sensibility), space and time are first given as intuitions, the unity of this intuition belongs a priori to space and time and not to the concept of the understanding. (§24) (B160n)

In conforming to pure time, the synthesis of apprehension ipso facto conforms to the original synthetic unity of apperception present in intuition ahead of all discursivity; and this in turn opens the way for the appearances generated by this synthesis to be subsumed under the categories in synthetic a priori judgments whose collective product, according to Kant, is (the formal unity of) nature itself (A113– 4, A124–5, B160–2, B164–5, A216/B263, A236–7/B296, and chapter 1-D).14 Though this thesis (#5) raises thorny interpretive issues that cannot be dealt with here, it seems beyond dispute—especially when viewed in conjunction with the assertion at B136n (cited earlier) that the individuality of space and time 14. Many interpret B160n as relating to conceptualized intuition because of Kant’s reference to geometry in the first sentence. However, the remainder of the text (as entailing the two propositions stated here) is incompatible with such a reading, and it seems far more likely that Kant is talking about the space and time presupposed by, not that represented in and through, the definitions and axioms of geometry (see chapter 4-A below). Certainly, no geometrically constructed space can be supposed to play the role assigned to the formal intuitions of space and time in the argument of the transcendental deduction of the categories in §26; and the final sentence of the note, in which Kant distinguishes the unity of formally intuited space and time from the unity of the categories, would seem to rule out any role for them in an account of how pure space and time are “first given as intuitions.” What is the difference between space and time as forms of intuition (which includes neither synthesis nor unity) and space and time as formal intuitions? If we take B160n at face value, the former cannot be supposed to designate anything actually given to us as intuition; and since the only reality Kant attributes to space and time is that of intuitive representations, the most likely signification of ‘form of intuition’ at B160n is the innate constitution of receptivity that makes their pure intuition possible (this reading finds confirmation in the only other text mentioning both form of intuition and formal intuition, wherein the former is equated to a faculty, the latter to an actual intuition: A267–8/B323–4). Kant’s purpose in B160–1 seems to have been to show that apprehension, in conforming to pure space and time, ipso facto conforms to the unity of the understanding, so that the same unity that is represented discursively by means of the categories is included “with (not in) these intuitions” (B161; also B162n). In this regard, my reading agrees with J. S. Beck’s characterization in a letter to Kant (20 June 1797): “Herr Reinhold has corrected you when you say that space is an a priori intuition; according to him, it should be said that the representation of space is intuition. I show him that space itself is a pure intuition, i.e. the original synthesis of the understanding on which objective combination (an object having this or that magnitude) rests.” Judging from Kant’s replies to Beck and other comments, his eventual rejection (so far as it went) of Beck’s exposition of his philosophy did not have to do with this but rather Beck’s inability to countenance the thing in itself. For an extended discussion of the issues raised by B160n, see KMM, chap. 2.


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consists in nothing other than the original synthetic unity of the manifold they contain—that Kant could not have advanced it if he did not subscribe to the propositions (i) that the pure space and time of the Aesthetic cannot be given in intuition at all unless and until the manifold offered a priori by sense in synopsis is supplemented by the pure synthesis of that manifold in the imagination AND the unity of that synthesis in the understanding, but (ii) that the role played by the understanding in producing these intuitions in no way compromises the prediscursive (nonconceptual) character of the unity ascribed to space and time in the Aesthetic. Together, these propositions imply that pure space and time confer an original synthetic unity on the manifold right in intuition itself, ahead of all conceptual thought (not excepting the synthetic a priori principles of pure understanding incorporating the categories). If indeed Kant recognized this implication, and if the development of the theory he presented in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason is informed by it throughout (for which the evidence is strong), then there can be no question that a complete and accurate understanding of it is essential to the interpretation of that theory. Moreover, its importance is all the greater since its role in the theory is nowadays almost universally overlooked or neglected. For this reason, much of the second volume of this book will need to be devoted to demonstrating and delineating that role. Here, however, it suffices to consider how it provides the final ingredient requisite for a Kantian way out of Hume’s quandary concerning personal identity in the manner described in section C. E. Prediscursive Synthetic Unity of Apperception Kant was the first sensibilist philosopher to distinguish pure self-consciousness (pure apperception) from empirical (empirical apperception), both systematically and in the strong sense of a distinction of existence (A107, B132, B139–40, B152– 3). To be sure, this twofold I, as Kant sometimes termed it (Anthropology 134n and AA 18 5655), has parallels in the twofold existence attributed to the thinking I by Locke (section A) and Hume,15 but there is this crucial difference: the Kantian I of pure apperception, not being an appearance, is not subject to pure time, and so has an atemporal existence. The grounds on which Kant’s distinction rests have already been described. (1) The attribution of the pure time intuition to the imagination put Kant in a position to treat the successive alteration of perceptions apprehended in an enduring empirical consciousness as a mere appearance (representation), incapable of existing outside or independently of the action of the imagination. (2) Since “the subject in which the representation of time has its ground of origin cannot determine its own existence through time” (B422; also AA 18 5655), there was an obvious need to distinguish the existence of the empirical consciousness that appears to internal sense from the existence of the pure consciousness whose action is responsible for producing the pure intuition of time presupposed in all apprehension of a succession. In particular, (3) since (for want of any intuition of ourselves as self-active) our cognition of the subject is limited 15. See note 2 earlier and chapter 17, note 1.

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to a consciousness of the spontaneity of our thinking (B157–8n), Kant held that we are conscious of our pure self only as “something real that is given, given indeed only to thought in general, and so neither as appearance nor as a thing [Sache] in itself (noumenon), but as something that in fact exists and in the proposition I think is designated as such an existent” (B423n; also PFM 334n). The indeterminateness of this perception did not, however, prevent Kant from elaborating a doctrine of the I think. For even if I have no intuition of my pure self, I can still characterize my I think through its formal relations as an act capable of accompanying all my representations (B131–2), first, in the representation of the identity of this consciousness in relation to all the manifold, and second, its (analytically) presupposed condition of the unity of this manifold in one consciousness (B133–4 and n and B138). For if nothing can appear to me in intuition that fails to conform to the pure time intuition, then all possible appearances must ipso facto be accompanied by the action responsible for generating this intuition. Hence, to represent this action, together with the time intuition I am conscious of in it, is to represent the unity of their manifold in one consciousness a priori (B136n, B140, B160 and n, and A362), whereas to represent the necessary relation that every possible appearance has to this consciousness is to represent the necessary identity of that consciousnesss in respect to all possible appearances (A107–8 and B133– 5). Now, most interpreters take it for granted that Kant deemed the concepts listed in his Table of Categories essential conditions for both the unity and the identity of pure consciousness. However, Kant’s insistence in the Analytic of Concepts that the unity of the understanding is essential to space and time insofar as they “are first given as intuitions” (B160n) would be incompatible with the prediscursive unity he ascribed to them in the Aesthetic if the former unity involved the categories in any way. For, as concepts, the categories are discursive representations, and any unity of consciousness into which they enter is ipso facto discursive as well. Did Kant then hold contradictory views? Confronted with this prospect, many interpreters discount the passages in which he seems to assert that pure space and time are prediscursive synthetic unities. They do so not because those texts are unclear in themselves (by Kantian standards at any rate) but because they are convinced that he could not possibly mean what he says in them. What makes them so sure? As before, it is their assumption that the unity of apperception is grounded on the categories. Yet, while Kant did indeed attribute the synthetic unity he equated with nature to the categories (chapter 1-D), he never asserted that unity of apperception, always and as such, is grounded on them. Quite the contrary, if the categories are able to bring about synthetic unity in the field of appearances, it is because they themselves are grounded on unity of apperception: Apperception is itself the ground of the categories, which on their side represent nothing else but the synthesis of the manifold of intuitions insofar as the manifold has unity in apperception. Self-consciousness in general is therefore the representation of that which is the condition of all unity and yet is itself unconditioned. One can therefore say of the thinking I (soul) that . . . it does not so much cognize itself through the categories as cognize the categories, and through


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them all objects, in the absolute unity of apperception, and so through itself. (A401–2; also A124, B130–1, A342–3B400–1, B421–2, and PFM 318)

Now, if apperception is indeed more fundamental than the categories (and even the logical functions on which they are based: B131), then one cannot charge Kant with inconsistency for supposing that apperception underlies both the prediscursive unity of the manifold in pure intuitions of the Aesthetic (A107, B136n, B140, and B160n) and the discursive unity of the manifold under pure concepts of the understanding. Moreover, instead of having to conclude that the Aesthetic and Analytic are in conflict regarding the nondiscursive character of pure time and space, we can instead construe Kant to have understood the synthetic unity of consciousness as a two-stage process, first prediscursive and noncategorial (pure time and space), then discursive and categorial (nature). When I examine the details of Kant’s system in volume II, there will turn out to be ample reason to attribute this two-stage conception to him. However, since my present concern is limited to comprehending how Kantian pure intuition affords a way out of Hume’s quandary consistent with Hume’s principles, I shall here confine myself to a brief review of the most compelling piece of textual evidence in favor of the thesis that Kant not only could distinguish prediscursive and discursive varieties of original synthetic unity of apperception but could not have done otherwise. It is the well-known passage in which Kant asserts that the identity of the pure consciousness I think (das ich denke) is made possible by the unity of all the manifold of intuition in one consciousness—a unity that can only be brought about through the synthesizing activity of the mind: the empirical consciousness that accompanies distinct representations is in itself fragmentary and without relation to the identity of the subject. This relation comes about not by my accompanying each representation with consciousness, but by my conjoining (hinsetze) one representation to another and being conscious of their synthesis. Thus, it is only because I can combine a manifold of given representations in one consciousness that it is possible for me to represent to myself the identity of the consciousness in these representations, that is, the analytic unity of apperception is possible only on the presupposition of some such synthetic unity. (B133; also A108 and A116)

To this Kant appended the following footnote: The analytic unity of consciousness attaches to all common concepts as such, e.g., if I think red in general, then I represent thereby a feature which, as a characteristic mark (Merkmal), can be met with in something or combined with other representations; hence, only by means of a prethought (vorausgedachten) possible synthetic unity can I represent the analytic unity. A representation which is to be thought as common to differing representations is regarded as belonging to such as have, besides it, something different in them; consequently, it must be thought previously in synthetic unity with other (albeit only possible representations), before I can think the analytic unity of consciousness in it which makes it into a conceptus communis. And thus the synthetic unity of apperception is the highest point to which all employment of the understanding, even the whole of

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION logic, and in accordance with it, transcendental philosophy, must be attached, indeed this capacity (Vermögen) is the understanding itself. (B133–4n; also A107, A124, and A341–2/B399–400)

Most striking here are the entirely original correlations Kant draws between the identity of pure consciousness, logical universality, and the unity of pure consciousness. The identity is that of the cogito: “the I think must be able to accompany all my representations, for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought, which is as much as to say the representation would either be impossible or, at least, be nothing for me” (B131–2). If indeed, as Kant holds, the scope of the I think and the scope of the representation of the identity of consciousness in relation to given representations are one and the same, then any and all representations that fall outside the scope of the latter ipso facto do not belong to me. Moreover, since the representation of a consciousness identical to all my possible representations is ipso facto a representation common to all these representations (no matter how radically and completely they may otherwise differ), this has the logical implication that the representation of the I think is universal in scope. In particular, it means that any representation I happen to think, simply by virtue of me thinking it, ipso facto partakes of the same universality of scope; and since, for Kant, universal scope is a feature any representation must have if it is to function discursively—as a concept, or mark (Merkmal) common to (potentially infinitely many) other things—the identity of the I thus shows itself to be a fundamental principle not merely of transcendental logic but of general logic (logic as such) as well. It was to signal this that Kant designated it the analytic unity of apperception. Finally, Kant recognized that the representation of this identity of consciousness in respect of all the manifold would be impossible unless that manifold had already been combined in one consciousness, and so traced the analytic unity of apperception to a ground in a presupposed synthetic unity of apperception (combination of the manifold in one consciousness a priori). What makes B133–4 (and n) unique is the question it forces us to ask: whether the categories, and discursive understanding generally, can play any role in the constitution of the synthetic unity of apperception presupposed by the analytic unity of apperception necessary for any representation to function logically as a concept (conceptus communis). As the following argument proves, the answer is no: 1. The analytic unity of apperception—the identity of the I think in respect to all my representations—is an essential element in all concepts; apart from it, there can be no discursivity, no representation by means of universals at all (where “the form of concepts is universality,” Logic §2). 2. Nothing in representation that is prior to and independent of the analytic unity of apperception can involve concepts or depend in any way on discursivity. 3. Since the synthetic unity of apperception makes the analytic unity possible, it is prior to and independent of it.


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4. Since sensible intuitions are that in representation which is prior to and independent of discursive concepts, the synthetic unity of apperception presupposed by the analytic unity must originally arise prediscursively, through the combination of intuitions, and intuitions alone, in a single consciousness (“That representation which can be given prior to all thought is called intuition. Thus, all the manifold of intuition has a necessary relation to the I think in the same subject wherein this manifold is found,” B132). 5. The categories are not intuitions but concepts (“Pure synthesis, represented universally, yields the pure concept of the understanding”; also AA 18 5927); indeed, because they incorporate the logical functions of judgment into their very content, they are the most purely discursive of all concepts, fully meriting their designation as pure concepts of the understanding (A78–9/B104– 5, B128–9, PFM 324). 6. As discursive-conceptual representations, the categories are possible only in and through the analytic unity of apperception (“the proposition I think, taken problematically, contains the form of every intellectual judgment in general, and accompanies all categories as their vehicle,” A348/B406; also A341–2/B399–400). 7. The categories cannot enter into the constitution, or condition in any way, the synthetic unity of apperception that first makes possible, and so must necessarily precede, the analytic unity of apperception. 8. Synthetic unity of apperception must therefore consist of two stages: the first, non-discursive phase precedes the analytic unity of apperception and so makes possible thought (judgment) itself (representation by means of a conceptus communis); the second, properly categorial phase comes after thought has occurred and is responsible for making cognitive thought (concepts of objects) possible. If we accept this conclusion,16 the next question we need to ask is what noncategorial representation can yield the first, prediscursive synthetic unity of apperception? There is only one candidate: the pure time intuition of the Aesthetic. (i) Unlike pure space, pure time is all-embracing in scope, so that no appearance is possible that fails to conform to it (A34/B50, A98–9, A155/B194, B427, ID 405– 6). (ii) Far from presupposing concepts of time, the pure time intuition first makes them possible (A32/B48, B160n, and Discovery 240) and excludes everything conceptual-discursive from its content (A31–2/B47), including the categories (B160n). As such, (iii) the consciousness of pure time unifies all the data of internal sense within it, as an individual, not under it, as a universal (analytic 16. One might try to avoid the conclusion by supposing that logical functions—being innate properties of the mind rather than representations in their own right—may determine the synthesis in imagination of the manifold offered by sense so as to yield synthetic unity of apperception ahead of all conceptual thought (texts such as A90/B105 and B143 seem to support such a reading). My reasons for rejecting this proposal will become apparent shortly, when I subject the “cart-before-the-horse” reading of Kant’s three syntheses to scrutiny.

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unity), so that “unity of consciousness that is synthetic yet also original is met with in [it]” (B136n). Thus, pure time is the only representation to which Kant could point capable of satisfying the demand for an a priori synthetic unity of the manifold in one consciousness ahead of all discursive thought.17 Did Kant ever in fact point to it? He never did so directly, though this does not mean he did not intend to, or think he had in fact done so. For if the foregoing reasoning is an accurate reflection of B133–4 (and n)—a text that, owing to its fundamental importance, was undoubtedly written with meticulous care—then it may simply never have occurred to Kant that its implication that time is the prediscursive synthetic unity presupposed by the analytic unity of apperception would not be obvious (a simple matter of putting B133–4 and n together with B136n, backed up by A107, B140, and B160 and n). He may even have thought it obvious, in light of earlier portions of the Analytic of Concepts, that the unity of all the manifold in pure time described in the Aesthetic has to be at once synthetic and original. But if Kant believed this, time has proven him mistaken. In any case, perhaps the best reason for thinking I have reconstructed his thought correctly is that the alternative not only is viciously circular, but patently so. Kant insisted repeatedly that the categories are not innate but acquired representations, and that they are not intuitions but concepts (whose origin, as I showed in chapter 2-B, conforms to the strictures of sensibilism). Thus, in order for the categories to precede the analytic unity of apperception, and so play a constitutive role in the synthetic unity of apperception that first makes analytic unity possible, they would have to preexist the analytic unity. But then the only way Kant could escape the implication that concepts preexist themselves would be to renounce the thesis that the analytic unity of apperception makes concepts possible. Yet not only did he give no indication of ever wavering in his adherence to this principle, but also the price of renouncing it would have been high indeed, since he could then no longer claim that the ground of the analytic unity of apperception (the identity of the I think) is at the same time the ground of the possibility of thought itself (Axvii), and so not just transcendental logic but logic as such (general logic) as well (B133–4n; also A117n, B131, and A341–2/B399–400). If only because he could hardly have failed to appreciate the pernicious consequences of an exclusively discursive, intrinsically categorial synthetic unity of apperception, we can therefore be reasonably sure that Kant recognized in pure time the only viable candidate for the prediscursive synthetic unity of apperception that makes possible what for him is the most fundamental and essential element of logic, the conceptus communis. A signal advantage of understanding Kant this way is that not to do so would plunge him into the same quandary that shattered Hume’s hopes for his account of personal identity. We can see why if we recall that the locus of the quandary, the apprehension of perceptions as a succession in an enduring consciousness, is the very most elementary level of consciousness. The operations that pre-Kantians 17. Although a detailed examination of the issues that arise in connection with B133–4 and n will be given in volume II, the reader should also consult my article,“Kant on the Possibility of Thought,” Review of Metaphysics (June 1995).


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could and did ascribe to the imagination all take their start from the flux of apprehension, as their given: reproducing previously apprehended perceptions alongside present, separating those apprehended together, combining those apprehended separately, and comparing, relating, and associating them. In Kant’s terminology, this traditional demarcation between the preimaginary and the imaginary is marked by contrasting apprehension as a synthesis “in intuition” (A99) (also “the faculty of sense (facultas apprehendendi)” and “apprehension as sensations”: AA 15 228 and 18 5636) with “the synthesis of reproduction as a synthesis in imagining” (A100), with the former supplying the perception inputs on which the latter sets to work (A120–1). Moreover, in Kant’s scheme, it is only after reproduction occurs that discursivity proper enters the picture, transforming the associations formed between apprehended perceptions in reproductive imagination into cognitive representations by means of the “synthesis of recognition in a concept” (A103). So the question is how an intrinsically categorial synthetic unity of apperception could provide a way out of Hume’s quandary if the locus of the quandary, apprehension, precedes it in the order of mentation. For if Hume could not utilize principles of association to resolve the quandary because association presupposes apprehension, how could Kant possibly have employed principles of discursive representation to do so (the categories) when recognition in concepts presupposes apprehension and association alike? Many interpreters read Kant in such a way that how things seem with his three syntheses empirically is not how they stand transcendentally. They first point to his iterated insistence that the categories determine the empirical synthesis of apprehension a priori, so that ahead of all experience perceptions have already been brought into conformity with the principles of discursive understanding (A113–4, A124–5, B159–65), and then reconstrue the threefold structure of synthesis so that reproduction is implicitly present in apprehension and recognition implicitly present in both (what might, with no disrespect, be termed the “cart-before-the-horse” interpretation). And they trace this relation back to the very nature of the categories as pure concepts of the understanding, in which logical functions of judgment stand in a determinative relation vis à vis the synthesis in imagination of the manifold of sense: The same function that gives unity to distinct representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of distinct representations in an intuition, that, universally expressed, is called the pure concept of the understanding. Thus, the same understanding, through the very same actions whereby in concepts it brings about (bringst zustande) the logical form of a judgment by means of analytic unity also brings a transcendental content into its representations by means of the synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition in general, for which reason they are called pure concepts of the understanding that relate to (gehen auf) objects a priori, which general logic cannot achieve. (A79/B104–5)

All this is true. But the point on which the present question turns is whether or not it is conceivable for the categories—and, more particularly, the logical functions of judgments—to relate to the synthesis of imagination immediately. Logical functions are intrinsically propositional in character: subject/predicate, universal/

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particular, affirmative/negative, ground/consequence, and so on. The synthesis of imagination, by contrast, operates at the prediscursive level of unconceptualized data of sense (“a blind though indispensable function of the soul” that cedes to understanding the properly discursive function of “bringing this synthesis to concepts,” A78/B103). How can logical functions be supposed to apply directly to such a synthesis? Is it not inconceivable that propositional forms could apply to anything except what has already been made universal, that is, concepts and judgments? We thus again come face to face with the heterogeneity problem and the imperative of avoiding transcendental amphiboly (chapter 2-E-2). Before attributing to Kant the absurdity of asserting (in texts such as A79/ B105) that logical functions are capable of directly determining the intrinsically nondiscursive syntheses issuing from imagination, we should consider what he says when he shifts gears from saying that appearances in apprehension must fall under the categories to showing how this in fact occurs: the categories, in their own right (vor sich selbst), are nothing but logical functions, and as such do not constitute the least concept of an object in itself, but require a foundation in sensible intuition, whereupon they serve only to determine empirical judgments with respect to the logical functions, which otherwise are undetermined and indifferent with respect to all these functions, thereby conferring universal validity on them and making possible judgments of experience in general by their means. (PFM 324; also AA 23 XLII)

Rather than relating immediately to the still-to-be-conceptualized products of imagination, the categories instead determine the judgments in which the deliverances of apprehension and reproduction first find discursive expression (this is clear also from examples Kant gave at B128–9 and AA 28–1 472). And this of course makes eminent good sense, interpretively and otherwise: since the only possible use for concepts is to employ them as predicates in judgments (A68/B93 and AA 18 5923), the only role the pure concepts are capable of performing must likewise be a predicative one; and since sensible appearances themselves cannot enter into judgments (as subjects of predication), the categories can only be supposed to determine appearances through the intermediary of ordinary judgments (whose constituent concepts are conceptualizations of appearances). How such a procedure can be supposed to achieve all that Kant attributed to it—including making possible experience and its objects as well as prescribing to nature its most fundamental laws—will be considered in volume II under the topic of objective thought determination. For my purpose here, however, there is no need to understand this, but only what follows once it is recognized that the categories relate to appearances in apprehension exclusively through the intermediary of empirical judgments (judgments of perception: PFM 298). Such judgments are nonobjective (because not yet categorially determined) combinations of concepts, in which the predicate functions merely logically, as a common mark (conceptus communis), and not cognitively, as determining an object. According to Kant, such concepts (some of which prove incapable of cognitive employment: PFM 299 and n, CJ 203) are extracted from sensible appearances and syntheses by


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means of a procedure consisting of comparison, reflection, and abstraction (for example, we compare a spruce, a willow, and a linden, reflect on what they have in common, abstract from the differences, and so fashion the concept of a tree: Logic §6, and AA 16 §§ 2834, 2859, and 2865). Clearly, the judgments in which these concepts are employed do not precede but rather presuppose synthesis of apprehension, and indeed, synthesis of reproduction as well (putting the horse back before the cart, where it belongs).18 But if the judgments to which the categories, as involving logical functions of judgments, are alone capable of applying immediately are posterior to apprehension, how could the merely discursive synthetic unity of apperception (combination of the manifold in one consciousness) constituted by the categories possibly open a way out of Hume’s quandary? Quite the contrary, attempting to resolve it thus is like closing the barn door after the horses have bolted. If the quandary is to be unraveled in a manner consistent with the Humean principles Kant endorsed (chapter 2), it has to be done prediscursively or not at all. Thus, as suggested in #5 of the previous section, a Kantian exit from Hume’s quandary concerning personal identity is not possible unless we consent to view the categories as necessary conditions for the unity and identity of pure consciousness only within the purview of discursive understanding, and so leave open a place for a prediscursive synthetic unity of apperception in the guise of pure time.19

18. Many cart-before-the-horse interpreters construe Kant’s assertion that “The synthesis of apprehension is thus inseparably combined with the synthesis of reproduction” (A102) as holding unconditionally. But this seems to me the result of reading it through their preconception, for, far from confirming it, the context make clear that Kant was merely claiming that apprehension must be supplemented by reproduction if cognition is to arise. This same qualification, together with the assertion that reproduction presupposes apprehension, is evident both at A97 and A120–1. In any event, it only stands to reason that horse before the cart is the correct reading, since Kant made quite clear that apprehension is the synthesis responsible for perceptions (appearances, empirical intuitions) themselves (A120 and n and B160), and that reproduction presupposes these perceptions as already given. See KMM, chap. 5-C for further discussion. 19. The purity of apperception implies only that this unity cannot be derived (reproduced, copied) from empirical representations, not that it does not presuppose certain representations (including empirical ones) as indispensable to its formation. For Kant, a representation is both pure and a condition for a certain species of empirical representation if (1) members of that species cannot be represented unless and until that representation is already in our possession and (2) this representation is underivable from any of the other species of representations that exist in us independently of it. For example, appearances can be given to us in intuition prior to and independently of the categories but presuppose pure space and time (B67, A89–9/B122–3, A111, A124, and B145), while there is synopsis of the manifold in sense prior to and independently of the synthesis of imagination and unity of apperception whereby space and time “are first given as intuitions” (B160n; see also A452/B480n). The only species of representation the categories must precede a priori (as making it possible) is the phenomenon (material and thinking objects of experience); for until they determine appearances, nothing objective is possible in representation at all.

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F. A Kantian Exit From Hume’s Quandary Concerning Personal Identity In section C, it was determined what a solution to Hume’s quandary consistent with his two unrenounceable principles would look like, and in section D we saw that all the requisite ingredients are present in Kant. Having now dealt with the obstacles in the way of the key ingredient—a prediscursive synthetic unity of apperception in the guise of pure time—it remains only to assemble the pieces and show that Kant’s tenets open an exit to Hume’s quandary without requiring anything but a more consistent and sustained application of Humean principles than Hume himself was able to manage. These principles are what made it possible for Hume to effect a decisive break with metaphysics of the past (PFM 257) and lay the foundation for a whole new approach to philosophical questions (258–9): psychologism, and, in particular, the psychologistic explication of concepts of necessary connection such as subsistence/inherence and cause/effect. For this revealed that the actions of the understanding contribute indispensable elements of their content, so that they have neither meaning nor application to anything beyond the purview of this faculty. To be sure, both Hume and Kant countered the charge that psychologism is skeptical of more than simply the pretensions of traditional metaphysics by showing that, within the purview of understanding (as each conceived it), these concepts could hardly be more important: by ordering and uniting in thought perceptions that, as apprehended in sense, are completely disjoint and without relation, they do nothing less than give rise to experience of a world of bodies and minds linked together a single, law-governed nexus (the realm of nature). This should not, however, be allowed to obscure the fact that the method of psychologistic explication inaugurated by Hume completely transformed the situation from what it was before, when even sensibilists like Locke and Berkeley took the unrestricted scope of concepts of necessary connection to be a matter of intuitive certainty. For them, even if necessary connections between perceptions are never immediately present to the senses, we nevertheless cannot doubt these connections exist since it quite literally is inconceivable that anything begins to exist without some cause, or that it exist otherwise than as substance or the modification of a substance.20 By restricting the scope of concepts of necessary connections to the purview of understanding, Humean psychologism thus marked a watershed in the history of philosophy by permitting both Hume and Kant to affirm that perceptions, as apprehended by the senses, are not subject to any relation of necessary connection we are capable of conceiving, be it a substrate that supports them or causes whereof they are the effect (chapter 16-E and chapter 17-A).

20. One might object that Locke refused to classify void space as substance or modification of substance. However, he did so not because he meant to affirm that space is some third thing but because of the obscurity of the idea of substance itself: “of substance, we have no Idea of what it is, but only a confused obscure one of what it does” (ECHU II/xiii/§19). Thus, that Locke should confess to not knowing what space is, substance or modification, does not mean that, like every other existence, it does not do what a substance does if it is one (i.e. support accidents), or has done for it what modifications have done for them if it is not (being supported by a substantial substrate). See also chapter 7, note 15.


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At the level of apprehension, then, the same principles that led Hume to talk of “having thus loosen’d all our particular perceptions” (THN 635/400) induced Kant to speak of “distinct perceptions . . . encountered in the mind scattered and singly in themselves” (A120). And just as for Hume these perceptions “succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement” (THN 252/165), so too for Kant, “Our apprehension of the manifold of appearance is always successive, and thus always changing” (A182/B225), with the consequence that “there can be no standing or abiding (bleibendes) self in this flux of internal appearances” (A107; also A364 and A381). Yet, at this point Kant parted company from Hume. Where Hume took the succession of apprehension to be a preimaginative given and thereby plunged himself into a quandary he had no means to resolve, Kant contended that this succession, though empirically real, is transcendentally ideal, that is, no less dependent on the subjective constitution of sensibility than the sweet taste of sugar, so that “if I could intuit myself, or another being intuit me, without this condition of sensibility, the very same determinations we now represent as alterations would yield a cognition in which the representation of time, and so too that of alteration, would not occur at all” (A37/B54). More particularly, since all succession in apprehension must conform to a representation of time whose psychologistic explication reveals that synthesis of imagination enters essentially into its content, any succession that appears to our internal sense empirically exists, and can exist, only in imagination (section D ## 3 and 4). Now, it was because Hume’s empiricism left him with no means to extend the imagination all the way down to the level of apprehension that he was obliged to treat the succession of perceptions in apprehension as transcendentally real; and since this is just to say that “Hume took the objects of experience as things in themselves” (CPrR 53), he found himself in the untenable position of having on the one hand to concede that none but real-metaphysical principles are capable of explaining what “unite[s] our successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness” (THN 636/400), while having on the other hand to forswear any such explanation because his two unrenounceable principles forbade it. Kant, by contrast, faced no such quandary. Since time, and the succession empirically apprehended in perception that conforms to it, are confined to the purview of the imagination, none but ideal-psychological principles can enter into their explanation. And since the same psychologistic explication that reveals imagination to be an essential ingredient of the representation of time also discloses that unity of apperception enters essentially into its content as well (section D #5), Kant had all he needed to “explain the principles, that unite our successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness”: pure time, as “the supreme principle of the possibility of all intuition in relation to sensibility” (B136), necessitates that each and every perception (empirical intuition) of succession we ever have will be “found to be contained in one representation, and in the consciousness of that representation” (B136n). What about the mind as it is preimaginatively and preapperceptively, that is, independently of pure time: does the quandary not simply reemerge at the next level down? Contrary appearances notwithstanding, this is not the right question. In the context of sensibilist psychologism, how things stand with the mind in

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transcendental reality is irrelevant. Since all that matters here are the perceived contents of representation, the only germane question is this: is there any further content in the representation of the I (self, person, mind) that needs to be taken into account beyond those furnished by the sources of the pure time intuition (sense, imagination, apperception)? Now, to this question the obvious Kantian answer is no. For Kant, there is no source of representational content other than intuition and no intuition other than sensible (“it is not given to us to observe our own mind with any other intuition than internal sense,” A278/B334). Though the consciousness of my existence in the representation I am is indeed purely intellectual, it is not an intellectual intuition that provides a manifold whereby to determine that representation (“that intellectual consciousness does indeed precede, but the internal intuition in which my existence can alone be determined is sensible and grounded in the time-condition,” Bxln). In lieu of an intuition of the synthesizing action that generates pure time (as well as space and the formal unity of nature), “I am conscious only of the spontaneity of it” (B157–8n), such that the representation I think expresses an indeterminate empirical intuition, i.e. perception (and so proves that sensation which consequently belongs to sensibility already underlies this existential proposition), but prior to any experience that is supposed to determine the object of perception in respect of time by means of the categories, and the existence here is not yet the category, as the category of existence does not have relation to an indeterminately given object but only to such an object as one has a concept of and wishes to know whether or not it is also posited outside this concept. An indeterminate perception here means only something real that is given, given indeed only to thought in general, and so neither as appearance nor as a thing [Sache] in itself (noumenon), but as something that in fact exists and in the proposition I think is designated as such an existent. (B422–3n)

The emphasis, for present purposes, is on indeterminate: as a consciousness merely of the spontaneity of the I, this empirical intuition is a “simple and, in its own right, completely empty representation” (A345–6/B404), through which “nothing manifold at all is given” (B138; also A354–5). Rather than determinable contents, the I think consists entirely of the purely formal representation of the identity of consciousness in respect of all the manifold a priori (analytic unity of apperception), together (analytically: B138) with its presupposed condition, the a priori unity of that manifold in one consciousness (synthetic unity of apperception): in that which we call the psyche (Seele), everything is in continuous flux and nothing abiding, except perhaps (if one insists) the simple I, since this representation contains no content, and so no manifold, for which reason it seems also to represent—or, expressed more accurately, to designate—a simple object. If it were possible to bring about pure rational cognition from the nature of a thinking being in general, this I would have to be an intuition that, since it is presupposed by thought in general (prior to all experience), would, as intuition, supply synthetic a priori propositions. Yet this I is as little intuition as concept of any object, but rather the mere form of consciousness accompanying both sorts of


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representations, and elevates them to cognitions insofar as something else is given in intuition that offers (darreichen) material (Stoff) for representation from the object. (A381–2)

Thus, beyond the formal identity and formal unity of consciousness implicit in it, the I think has nothing whatsoever to teach me about myself. To be sure, if I had an intellectual (nonsensible) intuition of myself, a completely different (nonsensibilist) explication of the I would be in order. Yet, as Kant repeatedly insisted, we are unable to say even that such an intuition is possible; and even if it were, we lack the representational resources to speculate about what it might reveal (B139, A252–3, A255/B311–2, A277–8/B333–4, PFM 316n, Progress 267). For psychologistic explications of the concepts actually in our possession of space, time, cause, substance, magnitude, reality, and existence allow us to be confident that nothing representable by their means can possibly enter into the content of an intellectual intuition: since the representational activity distinctive to sensibly-conditioned minds contributes essential elements of their content, their scope of application is confined to the sensible appearances and phenomena synthesized in such minds. For the same reason, nothing about how things are in our minds preimaginatively and preapperceptively can be of the least concern when it comes to the psychologistic explication of the concept of the I actually in our possession. We can therefore be quite certain that Kant’s explication of the I cannot succumb to the sort of quandary Hume faced when he realized that the psychologistic explication of the self in Treatise I/iv/§6 failed to take account of a preimaginative element that enters essentially into this concept, and that his empiricist brand of sensibilism left him no way to make good this want consistent with his two unrenounceable principles. Conclusion In the previous chapter, I followed Kant’s lead and argued that mathematics could be saved from the empiricism Hume’s principles would otherwise imply only if a pure sensible intuition is available as a basis on which to establish synthetic a priori relations between distinct quantitative determinations. In this chapter, I have argued that the only way the psychologistic explication of the I can escape the quandary Hume’s principles would otherwise imply is if a pure sensible intuition is available to us as a basis on which “to explain the principles, that unite our successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness.” As my goal in these chapters was to put to a preliminary trial the principal interpretive premise of this study—that Kant’s differences with Hume pale into insignificance in comparison with the sensibilist psychologism that unites them—we may take their outcomes as evidence that the thesis does indeed stand up under scrutiny. However, before proceeding to address the many questions regarding sensibilist theories of understanding that have arisen in the course of these chapters, a further set of interpretive issues concerning their relationship to theories of understanding in philosophy today must first be considered.

4 Hostages to Stereotypes

Among the best understood and most widely recognized features of early modern philosophy is its intimate relationship to early modern mathematics and science. During this period philosophy hived off new sciences with unprecedented rapidity, while being in its turn fertilized, influenced, and, on occasion, transformed by progress in the sciences. Moreover, many of the same people were responsible for the progress in both domains—Descartes and Berkeley in optics, or Descartes, Pascal, and Leibniz in mathematics and physics. But perhaps even more telling is the extent to which important exponents of science and philosophy inspired one another, including Galileo, Boyle, Locke, Spinoza, Newton, Lambert, d’Alembert, Euler, Priestly, and Kant. Of course, no one was under any illusion about which endeavor was the more cognitively significant. Locke said it best when he characterized scientists as master builders “whose mighty Designs . . . will leave lasting Monuments to the Admiration of Posterity,” while philosophers can aspire to serve only as underlaborers, charged with “clearing the Ground a little, and removing some of the Rubbish, that lies in the way to Knowledge” (ECHU Epistle to the Reader; see Axxix). Early modern philosophers were consequently keenly aware of the need to do everything possible to avoid adding new obstructions to knowledge in place of those they were endeavoring to cart away. Among other things, this meant that, in the face of rapidly accelerating and ever more consequential progress in mathematics and the sciences, philosophers from Bacon to Kant took great care not to give hostages to fortune. To minimize the ravages of time on their philosophies, they sought to free them as much as possible from dependence on contemporary science and to seek instead independent, more durable, and, in their eyes, more fundamental grounds. In these regards they were not always successful, and some of their views have clearly been superseded. For example, although Kant surely did not believe that future developments in biology were capable of rendering his account of teleological judgment in the Critique of Judgment obsolescent, there seems little question today that elements of it would have to be discarded, or greatly modified, in the light of Darwin. Yet evolution by natural selection is an idea of such breathtaking originality and monumental importance that we would be wise to view it as the exception that proves the following rule: the finest early 86

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modern philosophers were extraordinarily adept at budgeting for subsequent change and progress, so that readers would have the means—the principles and methods— to devise Cartesian, Humean, Kantian, etc., solutions to almost any philosophical problems that might arise in later epochs. The purpose of the present chapter is to put this rule to the test by examining a number of current stereotypes all of which are predicated on the belief that subsequent progress in the abstract or empirical sciences has either refuted the doctrines of early modern philosophers or rendered them obsolete. The aim is not to deny that scientific progress has had a huge impact on the development of philosophy since the early modern period. Quite the contrary, the changes it has wrought have transformed philosophy into something that might almost be unrecognizable as philosophy to an early modern. The question, then, is whether there is sufficient continuity of mindset, problems, procedures, standards, and aims to warrant talk of “progress” in philosophy from early modernity to the present, or whether a clear view, unfettered by prevailings stereotypes, reveals philosophy today to be so different as to be unrecognizable as progress in the same endeavor. In this chapter, I shall argue that the finest early modern philosophers, by and large, devised their doctrines with the subtlety, flexibility, and range requisite to prevent their endeavor from being subsumed within any other. And since what cannot subsume also cannot supersede, the correct relation of contemporary approaches to human understanding to early modern ones remains to be determined. A. Geometry Among the more established stereotypes of Kant is that he was a dogmatic Euclidean whose philosophy of geometry has been refuted by the achievements of nineteenth-century geometers such as Riemann. Yet Kant was in general extremely wary of giving hostages to fortune, and a lapse seems particularly unlikely regarding mathematics, since he deemed it a synthetic-ampliative science “ever progressing, without end” (Progress 259; also A726/B754, PFM 280, and CJ 362–3). Did he nevertheless do so in this instance? Among those who accept that Kant was a dogmatic Euclidean, it is sometimes urged in his defense that nothing in his transcendental philosophy obliged him to be. After all, he was quite insistent that a transcendental-philosophical proposition neither does nor can imply or entail one properly mathematical proposition in preference to any other (A719–22/B747–50, A726/B754, A733–4/B761–2, Progress 261, AA 18 5636, and AA 22 85). So, when Kant maintained that his philosophical principles imply the a priori—necessary and universal—objective validity of Euclidean geometry, he should be viewed in the context of his time, when it would be considered a plus for a philosophy to secure geometry from the skeptical challenges of Berkeleyan and Humean empiricism (A165–6/B206–7). But before endorsing the thesis that Kant yielded to the rhetorical temptation to advertise the virtues of his system by claiming more for it than it can actually deliver, we need to take a step back. His critics tend to assume that ascribing necessity to Euclidean definitions, axioms, and postulates entails treating

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any propositions inconsistent with them as impossible. But that would be strictly true only if the propositions in question were analytic; and since Kant treated all genuinely mathematical propositions as synthetic a priori matters of (nonempirical) fact rather than logic (CJ 468), he would surely have denied that logic (the principle of contradiction) suffices by itself to rule out the negations of Euclidean propositions. Thus, the point truly at issue here is whether anything in Kant’s transcendental philosophy committed him to denying the mathematical possibility of non-Euclidean propositions once mathematical necessity is accorded to Euclidean ones. This would have been the case had Kant conceived the pure space of the Transcendental Aesthetic as intrinsically Euclidean. Yet the evidence seems clear that he did not. To begin with, since the space of the Aesthetic is, in itself, prediscursive, and not only precedes all concepts of space but first makes them possible (B160n), it can have none of the distinctively conceptual determinations specific to a properly geometrical space, corresponding to the definitions, axioms, and postulates specified by this or that variety of geometry. This space is rather the one geometers of all stripes presuppose in order to exhibit their concepts in intuition a priori (a procedure he termed construction, and which must be employed before a concept can acquire a properly mathematical validity). The resulting constructed space differs fundamentally from the presupposed space of the Aesthetic in that concepts are essential to its representation; it thus is as much a product of discursive understanding as it is of prediscursive sensibility. The text in which this distinction is clearest comes from a commentary Kant wrote on a dissertation by the mathematician Kästner: Metaphysics must show how one can have the representation of space, but geometry teaches us how to describe a space, i.e. exhibit it (not by drawing) in representation a priori. In the former, space is considered as given, prior to receiving any determination conformable to a definite concept; in the latter, it is considered as constructed (gemacht). In the first, space is original and there is only one (singular) space; in the second, space is derived and there then exist spaces (many); but, with regard to those spaces, the geometer must, in agreement with the metaphysician and as a consequence of the fundamental representation of space, admit that they can only be thought as parts of the single, original space. Now . . . that space which is given metaphysically, i.e. originally but merely subjectively, is an infinite that (because there are not many of it) cannot be brought under any concept that would admit of a construction, but rather contains the ground of the construction of all possible geometric concepts. It may therefore only be said that it consists in the pure form of of the sensible mode of representation of the subject as intuition a priori; consequently in this, as an individual representation, is given the possibility of all spaces which go into the infinite. (AA 20 419–21)

All objective unity, and so all necessity, pertaining to the synthesis of the manifold of space lies not in the prediscursively given, utterly indeterminate subjective space of the metaphysical exposition of the Transcendental Aesthetic but in the geometrically determinate space constructed in conformity with the quantitative categories and their schematism in the Transcendental Analytic. The apodeicity of


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geometrical propositions, whether axioms about or theorems presupposing a particular geometrical space, thus has nothing to do with the properties intrinsic to metaphysical space. On the contrary, the necessity of these propositions depends first and foremost on discursive understanding operating conformably to the categories—the ground of all objective unity and necessity of the manifold, both a priori and in experience (A78–9/B104, A106–7, A119–9, and B139–40): Space is something so uniform (Gleichförmiges) and in respect of all particular properties so indeterminate that we certainly should not seek a treasure trove of natural laws in it. Whereas that which determines space to assume the form of a circle, or the figures of a cone and a sphere is the understanding, so far as it contains the ground of the unity of their constructions. The mere universal form of intuition, called space, must therefore be the substratum of all intuitions determinable to particular objects; and in it, of course, the condition of the possibility and of the manifoldness of these intuitions lies. But the unity of the objects is entirely determined by the understanding, and according to conditions that lie in its own nature, and thus the understanding is the origin of the universal order of nature, in that it comprehends (faßt) under its own laws, and thereby first brings experience into being a priori (according to its form), by means of which whatever is to be cognized only by experience is necessarily subject to its laws. (PFM 321–2)

Indeed, as the ground merely of the manifoldness of our intuition according to a certain mode (juxtaposition), but not of any determination of that manifoldness, Kantian pure space probably cannot even be restricted to three dimensions. For while it may be true that the human capacity of visualization is restricted to three dimensions, this is precisely the sort of contingent empirical-psychological detail Kant would have regarded as irrelevant to the nature and scope of representations that originate completely a priori. He certainly had no truck with empiricist claims to determine the properties of space merely by inspecting visual and tactual appearances (“I am instructed by the Critique to omit all that is empirical, or actualsensate (Wirklich-Empfindbare) (by sensation) in space” (Discovery 240; also A20/ B34). So, if metaphysical space is determinable but not in any way determinate, is there any reason to suppose Kant would have made an exception of dimensionality? We should also take note of the implication of Kant’s insistence that geometrically constructed a priori magnitudes are free from the human limitations that beset our empirical determinations of magnitude, where “all estimation of the magnitude of objects of nature is in the final analysis . . . determined subjectively, not objectively” (CJ 251). For if true of mathematical magnitudes, can the determinable metaphysical space that precedes and makes possible all geometrical determinations of magnitude be any less free of empirical sensory and psychological limitations? Clearly, if Kantian pure space truly is a geometrically determinable manifold but in no sense a geometrically determinate one, then it must be free of geometrical determinateness with respect to dimensions as well. And, in general, a space so utterly indeterminate as Kant’s pure space cannot be supposed to be incompatible with non-Euclidean geometry or anything else geometers might one day succeed in constructing.

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It is the widespread tendency to confound the prediscursive metaphysical space of the Transcendental Aesthetic with the space constructed in conformity with the definitions, axioms, and postulates of Euclidean geometry that bears primary responsibility for the stereotype of Kant as a dogmatic Euclidean. But even without this, the stereotype might still persist because of the way Kant’s transcendental principle of Axioms of Intuitions is generally understood. It is true that he took this principle to establish the a priori—and so necessary and universal—objective validity of such axioms as that between two points only one straight line is possible and that two straight lines cannot enclose a space (A163/B204; also A24). Nevertheless, Kant was careful to remark that this “principle (Grundsatz) is not itself an axiom, but rather serves only to indicate the principle (Prinzipium) of the possibility of axioms in general and is itself only only a principle (Grundsatz) from concepts” (A733/B761). Genuine axioms, by contrast, are not discursive but “intuitive principles” (A733/B761) and “express the conditions of a priori sensible intuition” (A163/B204). So the question arises how a merely discursive transcendental principle of the possibility of axioms in general could possibly single out any properly geometrical axiom in preference to equally geometrical alternatives. Surely, if pure metaphysical space fails to settle the issue in favor of Euclidean axioms, then a merely discursive principle cannot be supposed do so either. But if not dogmatic Euclideanism, then what does follow from Kant’s transcendental principle? It seems to me that we can read the Axioms principle in a textually accurate manner that avoids saddling Kant with dogmatic Euclideanism by understanding it to imply that whatever definitions, axioms, and postulates mathematicians succeed in constructing in pure space—be it circa 200 BC or 1781, 1854, 37550, or any date in mathematical history—are ipso facto applicable to empirical intuition, and therefore valid a priori (necessarily and universally) of all external appearances (by virtue of their spatial form).1 In particular, provided that the propositions of the non-Euclidean could be constructed, and so validated mathematically as intuitive principles, nothing stands in the way of including these, or any other propositions geometers might succeed in constructing, within the scope of what is after all a merely discursive principle “of the possibility of axioms in general.” Since nonEuclidean geometry subsumes Euclidean as a special case, Kant’s principle would then extend to the new integrated whole the same apodeictically certain objective validity it formerly conferred on the Euclidean system alone; and it would continue to do so unless and until geometers developed a new geometry capable of subsuming this one, and so ad infinitum. It should therefore be clear why the mere fact that Kant accorded apodeictic certainty to the only geometry that existed in his day does not by itself make him a dogmatic Euclidean.2

1. It of course remains an empirical question which specifications of geometrical axioms are true of the actual world, but this is true of any geometry. For just as non-Euclidean geometry leaves it open whether our universe is or is not Euclidean, Euclidean geometry leaves open whether it is infinite or finite, and, if finite, whether it is spherical, cubic, square, linear, or whatnot. 2. A related stereotype is the notion that the Critique of Pure Reason is a work primarily, or even essentially, devoted to establishing the philosophical credentials of the Newtonian system of the world. Though now most closely associated with the brilliant work of Michael Friedman, this view has become


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B. Mathematical Logic Kant’s view that logic, as developed by Aristotle, is an essentially completed science (see Axiv and Bviii–ix) was challenged from the time he first advanced it, but has come to seem particularly dogmatic and retrograde since the advent of Fregean mathematical logic. The most acute doubts relate to Kant’s table of judgments listing twelve fundamental logical forms (also termed ‘logical functions’) divided into four basic types (A70/B96). This table plays an absolutely central role in Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Its presumed completeness and exhaustiveness is the ultimate guarantor of the systematic unity that Kant deemed absolutely indispensable in a philosophy whose focus is pure reason: (1) every legitimate question that can be raised in the science must be answerable by it (Axiii, A12–3/ B26–7, A477–81/B505–9, A762–3/B790–1, Progress 321–2); (2) it must be completely certain that nothing essential is omitted and that nothing omitted is essential (Axiv, Bxxiii–iv); and, above all, (3) each part must be understood functionally in terms of its relation to the whole, so that the whole exists solely for the sake of its parts and each part for the sake of the whole (Bxxxvii–viii, PFM 261 and 263). Thus, there is probably no greater embarrassment felt by anyone viewing Kant through a post-Fregean lens than that occasioned by his claims that the table of judgments is both a complete and exhaustive list of propositional forms, capable of conferring the form of an organically integrated systematic whole on his theory of understanding.

sufficiently widespread and well publicized to have acquired the status of common wisdom in certain circles. It should not be so. Kant published a work on the metaphysics of nature specifically concerned with this task—a work that, by contrast with the Critique, makes use of empirical concepts and depends on certain “Grunderfahrungen” (fundamental experiences, A172/B213). There is no reason to presume that Kant was so wedded to Newtonism that he failed to foresee that, with changes in mathematics and new fundamental experiences, portions of his Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science (as well as elements of his never completed Transition to Physics), would be superseded. This seems to have been budgeted for in the design of the transcendental philosophy of the Critique, wherein Kant is careful never to assert anything that presupposes empirical concepts or data of actual experience, including such primary data as that substances in space are extended and impenetrable (see MFPNS 469–70 and A847– 51/B875–9). While the Critique was indeed intended also to provide a foundation on which metaphysical principles of natural science suited to the science of Kant’s time could be formulated and established, the standard view of it as a work conceived with traditional metaphysics uppermost in mind—its task being to take philosophy beyond dogmatism and skepticism into the age of criticism (A856/B884)— seems to me correct. Certainly, no one can doubt that Kant believed himself to be bequeathing to posterity a finished work that would stand in perpetuity. And whereas Hume’s science of nature is limited to human and human-type intelligence as defined by principles of empirical psychology, Kant’s account of pure reason is built on principles he took to apply to any understanding whatsoever, so long as it is sensibly conditioned—be it human or not, be its senses constituted like ours or not, be its logical forms the same as ours or not (B145–6 and A230/B283), and whether or not the (empirical) principles of its psychology bear any resemblance to ours. Thus, while it is perfectly legitimate to approach the Critique of Pure Reason with an eye to its implications for the philosophy of science and mathematics, it seems to me far too narrow a lens through which to comprehend its true nature and scope.

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Nevertheless, one does not need to minimize the importance of what has been wrought since Frege in order to resist the temptation to be dismissive of Kant’s table of judgments. Those so inclined are perhaps overlooking the point on which everything in Kant’s attitude with regard to logic hinges: where he drew the line between the logical (which he termed “pure general logic”) and the nonlogical, including transcendental logic. Contrary to what is often supposed, this difference has nothing to do with the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. The latter relates to the contents of thought (what is thought), and turns on the cognitive question of whether a judgment amplifies or merely explicates its contents (PFM 266), whereas the properly logical, as Kant understood it, relates exclusively to the forms of thought (how these contents are thought) and is entirely indifferent to its cognitive value (“general logic abstracts from all content of intellectual cognition and the distinctness of its objects, and has to do with nothing but the mere form of thought,” A54/B78). In particular, a judgment is analytic just in case the predicate is already thought in the content of the subject concept but not otherwise (B17, A721/B749, and PFM 269), so that no other principle is presupposed in its cognition than the logical principle of noncontradiction; but a judgment is logical just in case we ignore its content altogether, along with its presupposed cognitive principle, and attend only to the form of the concepts combined in it—their universality (Logic §2)—and the forms according to which distinct universals are combined in it (generally or particularly, affirmatively or negatively, etc.) but not otherwise (§§ 18–21).3 Take, for example, the case of mathematical judgments. Certainly, in arithmetical and algebraic judgments, we abstract from all sensible content and attend exclusively to the form. Does this suffice for Kant to have counted them as logical, notwithstanding their status as synthetic a priori? And if so, would the same not be truer still of the judgments of post-Fregean mathematical logic? The answer in both cases is no, because mathematics and mathematical logic alike concern themselves with more than the form of concepts as universals and the kinds of formal combinations that are possible with universals alone. To appreciate Kant’s reason for imposing this limitation on what can be counted as properly logical, we need to start with his refusal to include the forms of singular and infinite propositions among the elements of logic. 1. When two concepts are joined in a universal affirmative judgment, nothing is said logically except that every concept capable of being specified from the subject concept will also be a species of the predicate concept. For example, in “all dogs are mammals,” if ‘chihuahua’ denotes a species (kind) of dog, then the logical form of judgment employed here implies that chihuahuas are ipso facto a species of mammal. Now in order to distinguish singular judgments from universal ones logically, there would need to be a logical form of individuality with which to do so. However, with his denial that intuition is ever intellectual, Kant restricted individuality to the determination of sensibility by the understanding. Since logic, 3. For an excellent discussion of the relation between Kant’s conceptions of general logic and analytic judgment, see Béatrice Longuenesse, Kant et le pouvoir de juger, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993) 94–6 (the pages cited here were unfortunately omitted from the English translation).


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as he understood it, is the one science that concerns itself with discursive understanding simply as such, without regard to its relation to the sensible, no properly logical form of individuality is possible in it. Consequently, singular judgments are logically indistinguishable from universal ones. Instead, they have to be understood as universal judgments wherein no species of the subject concept fails to be a species of the predicate concept for the simple reason that the subject concept does not admit of being specified at all (A71/B96). And from this, there emerges the following Kantian criterion for distinguishing the logical from the nonlogical: any conceptual framework in which it is possible to distinguish singular from universal judgments is, for that reason alone, not purely logical. 2. In pure general logic, an infinite judgment such as “the soul is nonmortal” is logically indistinguishable from affirmative judgments like “the soul is mortal,” since both affirm a predicate of their subjects. To differentiate them, a further element must be introduced: the sum-total of predicative “worth or content” (Werte oder Inhalt), that is, “the infinite sphere of all that is possible” (A72/B97). Here, an affirmative judgment situates the subject concept within the determinate region of this infinite sphere demarcated by the predicate affirmed of it, whereas an infinite judgment limits its location in that sphere to somewhere outside that region and thereby is logically differentiated from both affirmative and negative judgments (which do not involve the presupposition of an infinite sphere of possible being). Since one of the results of Kant’s transcendental critique is that no such sum-total of possibility is possible through discursive understanding alone, apart from its relation to sensibility, the ground for distinguishing infinite from affirmative judgments is ipso facto extralogical.4 And from this there emerges the following Kantian criterion of the properly logical: any conceptual framework wherein the condition for distinguishing infinite from affirmative judgments is satisfied is, for that reason alone, not purely logical. Clearly, pure mathematics can meet neither of the foregoing Kantian criteria of the logical. Since “for the construction of a concept, an intuition that is not empirical is requisite, which, as an intuition, is consequently an individual object” (A713/B741), “the singular is related to the universal as unit to infinity, and thus is in itself essentially distinct from it” (A71/B96). Moreover, each number is the number it is only by virtue of being completely determined with respect to the presupposed infinite sphere comprising the sum-total of possible numbers. For example, 4 is the individual number it is and no other only because it is the number that is one unit greater than 3, and one less than 5, and the square root of 16, and the cube root of 64, and the square of 2, and the difference between 998 and 994, and so on. Were it indeterminate in even a single one of these respects, it would not be the individual 4, nor indeed a true individual at all, and so would not even be a number. The predicates that make up the presupposed infinite sphere 4. It emerges in the Postulates of Empirical Thought, and more clearly still in the Transcendental Ideal, that the infinite sphere of possible being Kant mentions in connection with infinite judgments is founded on, and demarcated by, the original synthetic unity of apperception. On this basis, we can define a sphere comprising the sum-total (Inbegriff) of possible objects of intuition, a sphere comprising the sum-total of possible objects of experience, and, via hypostatization, the illusory sphere comprising the sum-total of possible objects in general (A581–2/B609–10).

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of possibility thus include all the operations whereby numbers can be formed into judgments of quantity: counting, adding, subtracting, and so on. Only in relation to the sum-total of these predicates can numbers attain the determinateness requisite for them to count as unique individuals, distinct from every other. In mathematics, there is consequently a logical difference between predicating something of 5 individually and predicating something of odd numbers generally, and of predicating something—say, ‘nonprime’—of four and predicating something— ‘prime’—affirmatively of 5 (the latter tells us that 5 is divisible only by itself and 1, but the former, in and of itself, provides no positive information about what 4 is divisible by besides itself and one, and so does not suffice to distinguish 4 from 9, 25, and infinitely many other nonprimes). For the same reason, algebraic formulas are mathematical rather than logical: since numbers are incorporated into its equations and are the only values its variables can take, algebra (at least as it was in Kant’s time) presupposes the same infinite sphere of numerical operations arithmetic does. Consequently, mathematics, no matter how abstract and free its concepts may be of all pure and empirical sensible content, still fails certain of the criteria Kant deemed essential to any properly logical formalism because it presupposes that the conditions have already been met for distinguishing singular from universal judgments and infinite judgments from affirmative. What are these conditions? As previously indicated, they are transcendental in nature. It is the transcendental logician who determines that we have no intuition other than the sensible, and so no other source of the infinitely determinable manifold requisite to individuate objects in respect of a single infinite sphere of being. Since space and time are the only such logically infinite wholes ever given to us, nothing we can conceive is capable of attaining the thoroughgoing determinateness requisite for true individuality except by means of the limitation of these presupposed, all-embracing infinite wholes (A25/B39, A32/B47–8, A169–70/B211– 2, and A263–4/B319–20). Moreover, as the sum-total of the possibility of all objects of the senses in respect of their form, they contribute to making experience itself into an infinite sphere of possible being such that every empirically real object presupposes it and is possible only through its limitation: an object of the senses can only be completely (durchgängig) determined if it is compared with all predicates of appearance and represented affirmatively or negatively by their means. But because . . . that wherein the real of all appearance is given is our integrated all-encompassing (die einige allbefassende) experience, the matter for the possibility of all objects of the senses must be presupposed as given in one sum-total (Inbegriff), and all possibility of empirical objects—their distinction from one another and their complete determination— can rest on its limitation alone. Now, no other objects than those of the senses can in fact be given to us, and nowhere else than in the context (Kontext) of a possible experience. Consequently, nothing is for us an object if the sum-total of all empirical reality is not presupposed as condition of its possibility. (A581–2/ B609–10)

To be sure, mathematics abstracts from the ineluctably empirical possibilities encompassed in this sum-total, and its purely quantitative branches (arithmetic and


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algebra) further abstract from all sensible content as such, pure (spatial and temporal) no less than empirical (see letters to Schultz, 25 November 1788, and Rehberg, before 25 September 1790). Nevertheless, just as Kant’s psychologistic explication of the categories shows that, however free these concepts may be of all sensible content, a determinative relation of discursive understanding (via its logical functions) to the pure synthesis in imagination of the manifold of pure intuition enters essentially into their representation (chapters 2-B and 3-E), the dependence of mathematics on the conditions requisite to distinguish singular from universal and infinite from affirmative judgments betrays the fact that the determination of sensibility by understanding is presupposed by it too. Indeed, since the transcendental schema of the pure categories of quantity predicates the formal possibility of number on pure time and its determination in conformity with the categories of quantity (A142–3/B181–2), while other, equally transcendental considerations point to its being predicated on pure space as well (B156, B293, and esp. AA 18 6314), Kant’s transcendental logic reveals that not just geometry but arithmetic and algebra involve an even closer relation of the understanding to the sensible than is true of the (unschematized) categories. Since this relation to the specific constitution of our sensibility enters into the content of all arithmetical and algebraic concepts (even if no sensible contents themselves actually do), they cannot be reckoned as purely logical by the transcendental philosopher.5 Accordingly, the only concepts this leaves for pure general logic are those that owe their determinateness entirely to the discursive understanding, without regard to its relation to the pure manifold of sensibility and its pure synthesis in imagination. Thus, by transcendental logical criteria, pure general logic is restricted to the form of concepts in general—universality (analytic unity of apperception: chapter 3-E)—together with the various ways in which universals (concepts or judgments) can be combined with one another (the logical functions of judgments and the relations of universals in syllogisms). Needless to say, Kant’s table of judgments starts to seem far less arbitrary and deficient when we realize that pure general logic, by its very nature, is exclusively concerned with the formal relations of which universals admit and has no presupposed infinite sphere of possible being available for its determinations to limit. With this in mind, we are now in a position to answer our initial question of whether Kant’s conception of logic can be extended to include post-Fregean mathematical logic. In particular, we can be quite confident that he would have answered it in the negative if, like arithmetic, algebra, or transcendental logic, mathematical logic in any way depends on differentiating singular judgments from universal and infinite judgments from affirmative. And that it does seems clear. Consider the case of quantificational logic. It is not just that existential judgments are by their very nature singular. More important, 5. Because this relation to the special constitution of our sensibility enters essentially into the content of arithmetical and algebraic concepts, a being with the same logical functions we have (Kant did not preclude the possibility that some beings do not—B145–6 and A230/B283) but different forms of intuitions would have the same (unschematized) categories we do but would find arithmetic and algebra as unintelligible to it as geometry, even though no spatial or temporal contents enter into the particular concepts employed in the former.

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post-Fregeans tend to think of quantifiers as logical rather than mathematical operators because the objects to which they relate are not confined to mathematical determinations but are considered completely abstractly, as open to determination unrestrictedly (qualitatively no less than quantitatively). Yet the essential thing from a transcendental philosophical perspective is not this but quantificational logic’s presumption that each (n-place) predicate determinately either holds or fails to hold of every object in its domain. For this is possible only insofar as each and every object is determined exclusively and exhaustively through the limitation of one and the same infinite sphere of possible being. In other words, the objects belong to one and the same domain, and the predicates all range over that domain, only because these predicates, although considered in abstraction from their content, have been presupposed to constitute a single, integrated, all-encompassing infinite sphere of possible being. The fact that this sphere is conceived abstractly in quantificational logic but not in Kantian transcendental logic (as exemplified there by pure space, pure time, and possible experience) is quite beside the point. From the transcendental logician’s standpoint, the presence of singular and infinite judgments in quantification theory already of itself suffices to show that it presupposes a determinative relation of understanding to sensibility just as surely as arithmetic, algebra, and pure categories do. Consequently, for the same reasons the latter cannot be reckoned purely logical by Kantian criteria, quantification theory also cannot.6 To be sure, matters are less clear when it comes to truth-functional logic. It might seem to qualify as logical in Kant’s sense because it ignores the internal structure of propositions, and so is indifferent both to whether they contain singular terms and to how things stand with their predicates (whether or not they presuppose an infinite sphere of possible being). Yet, by ignoring the internal structure of propositions, the restriction of truth-functional logic to propositions and their bivalent truth possibilities seems more like an external imposition—a particular interpretation of its formalism, an application—than anything intrinsic to this species of calculus. Trivalent, indeed n-valent, possibilities can just as easily be thought to attach to the unanalyzable atomic units from which its compounds are formed without changing the calculus in any way beyond depriving it of one of its applications.7 Regarded thusly, the truth-functional calculus seems to reveal itself to be merely a special case of a more general algebra, which itself may be expressible within the formalism of quantification theory. If so, however, one can make the case that truth-functional logic is a type of calculus that, although not in an obvious way, still fails to meet transcendental philosophical criteria of the properly logical. Since Kant’s distinction between the logical and the nonlogical is grounded on a transcendental philosophical (psychologistic) analysis of the division of repre6. Of course, just as is true of pure mathematics itself, the failure of mathematical logic to count as “logic” by Kantian criteria would no more detract from its power and importance than regarding its propositions as “synthetic a priori” would. 7. Even so, the application to propositions is very coarse indeed. For if we are to exclude everything Kant would consider nonlogical, we must exclude quantification theory from this application and thus are obliged to ignore the internal structure of uncompounded propositions.


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sentational labor between sensibility and its pure intuitions on the one side, and discursive understanding and its logical functions on the other, it should now be clear that his conception of logic does not so much disagree with present-day ones as bypass them altogether. For today the difference between the logical and the nonlogical is typically conceived in terms of the workings of mathematical logic itself, and rarely if ever incorporates considerations pertaining to the psychological-constitutional conditions of conscious representation. It thus should be evident that the stereotype of Kant as a diehard Aristotelean whose claims for his table of judgments have been completely undermined by nineteenth-century mathematical logicians and their heirs depends almost entirely on emphasizing superficial affinities at the expense of comparatively profound differences. C. Language In the past half century or so, the philosophical importance of language has come to be identified more and more with the theory of meaning. In his book Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?8 Ian Hacking decries this trend, contending that whereas language is of the first importance to philosophy, the theory of meaning is not. Whatever one may think of his position, Hacking issued a sage warning along the way to anyone tempted to view early modern treatments of language as essays toward a theory of meaning: “Our contemporaries often equate ‘philosophy of language’ and ‘theory of meaning.’ At best, that is a poor anachronism to bring to historical studies; at worst, it is misguided even for current philosophical analysis. Language matters, but I suspect that meaning does not.”9 Hacking contends that the prevailing anachronistic approaches to historical studies are largely responsible for the now widely current stereotype of early modern philosophers as exemplars of the sort of private language theories of meaning that, starting with Frege, have been spurned in favor of views that hold meanings to be public or even, according to certain platonistic conceptions such as Frege’s own, objective in a sense that accords them a reality altogether independent of human mentation and social practices. Hacking illustrates the problem by considering an example that Jonathan Bennett and similarly minded commentators suppose clinches the case in favor of regarding Locke as a prototypical private language theorist. Against the thesis that 8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. 9. Hacking, Language, 43. Hacking considers the cases of Hobbes, Locke, and Berkeley from the perspective of William Alston’s tripartite division of theories of meaning into ideational (the view that the meaning of a word is the idea for which it stands), referential (the meaning is the actual thing to which the words refer), and behavioral (analyzes the meanings of the words people use in terms of their actions). By showing that early modern theories of ideas do not slot neatly into any of these purportedly mutually exclusive categories—aspects of all three can be found in their theories by anyone disposed to find theories of meaning there—Hacking contends that the most probable explanation is that these philosophers were not in the business of explicating meaning at all. E.J. Ashworth reinforces and supplements some of Hacking’s claims in “Locke on Language,” in Essays on Early Modern Philosophers from Descartes and Hobbes to Newton and Leibniz, vol. 8, John Locke Theory of Knowledge, ed. Vere Chappell (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992).

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Locke equated the question “In your community, does ‘violet’ have the same common acceptation as in mine?” with the question “When you notice them, do violets produce the same idea in you as they do in me, when I am examining them?” Hacking maintains that Locke makes no such confusion. Bennett’s mistake is easy enough to make—for us, ‘signify’ can mean ‘mean’; a theory of signification is therefore a theory of meaning, and a theory of meaning, for Bennett is a theory of common acceptation. But Locke has no theory of common acceptation at all. . . . I shall use the phrase ‘theory of meaning’ to mean something that at least includes a theory of what Frege called ‘sense’ (Sinn) and what Locke might have called common acceptation. That is, theories of meaning have to do with the essentially public features of language, with whatever it is that is common to you and me, in respect of the word ‘violet’, which makes it possible for us to talk about the flowers in Knapwell wood. Frege was sure there had to be Sinn because a common store of thoughts and propositions is transmitted from one generation to the other. . . . Frege, like all his contemporaries, saw that public communication cannot be well explained by what he called private associated ideas. Locke, and his contemporaries, did not see this at all clearly. Nor did Locke and his friends care. He undoubtedly thought that whenever we do communicate successfully, you get the same ideas in your breast as I have in mine. But in the works of Locke this notion is not a part of a philosophical theory of communication. It is almost a physical conjecture about how external stimuli produce ideas in the mind: doubtless they do this in some regular way, so that the same external stimuli will produce similar internal effects. So if you associate an idea with the word ‘gold’ that is different from the idea I associate with it, we are probably, as a matter of physics and psychology, miscommunicating.10

Hacking is, in my view, correct to insist that early modern philosophers, especially the empiricists (sensibilists), were “not in the same line of business” as twentiethcentury philosophers concerned to explain thought via theories of meaning, and so, too, correct in his belief that the distinctions applicable to theories of meaning “are not the right categories for analysing” early modern approaches to language. Although we may think the early moderns too quick in dismissing the interest or importance of philosophical questions relating to the common acceptations of terms, these were not their questions. And it remains to be proven whether a theory of meaning would have been of any use to them either in framing or resolving the problems they were concerned to solve. If Hacking is correct, then Locke could perfectly well have accommodated the point of such supposedly devastating counterexamples to his account of language as Hilary Putnam’s case of the difference between an elm and a beech: without having any notion of the difference oneself, one can know that these terms, as a matter of common acceptation refer to different kinds of trees, because common acceptation is sometimes fixed by the expert knowledge possessed by only some members of a given speech community. Examples such as these, from the philosophical perspective of an

10. Hacking, Language 49–52.


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early modern philosopher like Locke, are of little, if any, philosophical interest precisely because they are concerned with the common acceptation of terms and not with the ideas and associative habits they trigger in the minds of speakers and hearers when pronounced. Locke’s interest in common acceptation was limited to its utility in enhancing the fidelity of the physico-psychological transmission process to the point where, for most purposes, ideas can be successfully communicated from one mind to another (roughly: ideational inputs are converted by the human brain into auditory and visual stimuli—speech and mien—that other suitably prepared brains then convert back into ideational contents, which commonly accepted linguistic “rules of propriety” help ensure will have a sufficient degree of fidelity to the original ideational inputs to assure their successful communication). The fact that Locke and others of his time confined their philosophical interest in common language to this fidelity-enhancing capacity alone, while ignoring the many other more properly linguistic features that are necessary to communication by means of artificial signs (syntactic and semantical rules, conceptual frameworks, logical spaces, forms of life and language-games, etc.), is indicative of the fact that their peculiarly psychological focus on language required them to bracket out everything specific to public discourse in general and the theory of meaning (as common acceptation) in particular. As Hacking rightly noted, they were simply not in that business; and it is therefore no criticism of early modern treatments of language that they failed to offer what they never sought to provide: a successful theory of meaning as today’s philosophical linguists understand it. Yet Hacking undid much of his good work by buying into another, in my view equally suspect, stereotype of early modern sensibilist theory of ideas: It may seem that we should stop right here. This array of doctrines has nothing to do with language and cannot help us understand how language matters to philosophy. At most the task of the seventeenth-century philosopher should be to escape from the toils of language and get down to his ideas. That is mere prophylactic linguistic work, and of no general interest! Not at all: after stripping public discourse from philosophizing, one gets down to the chain of ideas, to mental discourse. That is the language that mattered to philosophy. A philosopher today may deny there is such a thing as mental discourse, and certainly he will deny that it is discourse, part of language. But it remains possible that mental discourse, utterly central to the seventeenth-century world view, played the same role then as public discourse now.11

Here Hacking expresses what he takes to be the core of truth in current philosopher lore: though agreeing with contemporary philosophers of language that intelligent thought (conception, judgment, reasoning) has to be understood as linguistic discourse, early moderns regarded public forms and practices as incidental dress overlaid upon a wordless, but still linguistic core, consisting of trains of logically articulated ideas parading across the private stage of consciousness.12 Unfortunately, Hacking does not tell us much to explain or justify the thesis that early moderns 11. Hacking, Language, 33. 12. This is also how Michael Ayers seems to understand Locke: “I would suggest that it was only when reflections on the contrast between substance and sensible accidents were linked, as by Locke,

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held that intelligent thought should be understood as wordless ideational soliloquies. He may have meant no more than (or have been ready to fall back on the view) that early moderns deemed linguistic discourse the best model on which to understand intelligent thought. But is even that true? That is: how close an analogy did early moderns draw, and believe could be drawn, between what goes on in the mind and linguistic discourse? Whether by accident or design, Hacking neglected to consider the theories of understanding developed by Hume and Kant, where the analogies with linguistic discourse break down most quickly and obviously. It is well known that Hume did not hesitate to extend the associationist theory of ideas in terms of which he explained human understanding to animal intelligence, and even saw fit to make the ability of a theory of human understanding to account for animal understanding “a kind of touchstone, by which we may try every system in this species of philosophy” (THN 176/118). Is this because he took animal intelligence, too, to exemplify linguistic discourse and deemed their lack of verbal discourse incidental? Or is the strength of the analogy Hume discerned between human and animal minds a consequence more of the lack of resemblance he found between human associative understanding and linguistic discourse? That Hume saw fit to compare his principles of association not to language or anything else specific to human forms of life but to the principle of Newtonian attraction operative in the world of inanimate matter is quite suggestive in this regard.13 Certainly, if we recall the steps through which Hume’s account of understanding proceeds (chapter 2), there is nothing to indicate that he intended it to explain any of the operations that can plausibly be described as specifically linguistic: 1. General representation and inference can be reduced to acts of relating of ideas.

with a systematic compositional theory of thought and meaning that the notorious notion of the ‘Given’ emerged as a ‘dogma,’ as it were, of Empiricism.” “Can There Be a New Empiricism?” in Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, vol. 7, Modern Philosophy, ed. Mark D. Gedney (Bowling Green, Ohio: Philosophy Documentation Center, 2000; and footnoted citations from Locke I, 70–2 may be found in chapters 5 and 8 below). Though Ayers deems it uncontroversial that Locke’s theory of ideas is, among other things, a theory of meaning (see Alston’s first type in note 9 earlier), he thinks that a little sympathetic tweaking can moderate its purported commitment to an untenable element-by-logical-element isomorphism between thought and language into the more plausible view that there are analogues in thought to the logical structures on which language is, to some extent, dependent: “Ultimately the question hinges on whether, and in what way, consciousness and pre-linguistic cognitive capacities involving consciousness have to be mentioned, as well as public practice and convention, in an adequate account of what it is to understand an expression or learn its meaning. For perhaps the truth or falsity which presupposes logical form is dependent on a more primitive or fundamental kind of truth and falsity of which conscious states are in themselves capable. It is not so difficult, after all, to find in the relationship between conscious experience and its objects analogues for reference and the satisfaction of a predicate (and so for truth) without imputing fully determinate logical form to the experience” (73). In chapter 8, I shall show that Locke’s account of language admits of being interpreted as much farther from thought/language isomorphism than Ayers or Hacking supposed. 13. I will consider the affinity Hume found between his associationism and Newton’s system of universal gravitation in greater detail in the introduction to part III.


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2. Relations of ideas consist in transitions of thought. 3. A transition of thought constitutes a relation of ideas if the transition to the idea (i) is characterized by a certain feeling of ease (facility affect) or (ii) is developed (“philosophically,” by analogy) from transitions of thought that (“naturally”) relate ideas by means of such feelings.14 4. This feeling can be seen to be the primary determinant of rational and irrational understanding alike as soon as we recognize that belief in all matters of fact and real existence is likewise simply a feeling: a certain “force and vivacity” relating to the manner in which an idea is conceived. 5. Together, these elements permit understanding, human and animal alike, rational or irrational, to be explained entirely generally, in terms of the extension of vivacity from one perception to any other whose conception takes place by means of a facile transition of thought (THN 98–9/69). This last stage of Hume’s account of understanding expresses its most general and fundamental principle (indeed, as I will show in chapter 20-D, he extended its scope to include what he termed “indirect” passions as well). He employed it to explain general ideas (customary association in resemblance relations), space and time (customary association in contiguity relations), and the universal order of objects in boundless space and time (customary association in causal relations) (chapter 18). Even the copy principle (all simple impressions are copied from simple ideas) turns out, upon scrutiny, to exemplify it (chapter 16). Yet there is nothing about Hume’s principle of ideational attraction—nothing that enters into it nor any of its principal applications—to suggest that he was regarding thought as private linguistic discourse or even that he relied on linguistic discourse as his principal model for understanding understanding. Thus, the reason Hume seems to have regarded verbal language as a superficial garb in which we wrap our thoughts in order to communicate them is not, pace Hacking, that the true locus of linguistic discourse is the association of ideas, but, quite the contrary, because associative understanding bears little if any resemblance to linguistic discourse at all. Hume’s views on language tend to confirm this conclusion. He treated it as an essentially interpersonal, species-specific human affair. For language depends on the ability to establish conventions from a sense of common interest: two men pull the oars of a boat by common convention for common interest, without any promise or contract: thus gold and silver are made the measures of exchange; thus speech and words and language are fixed by human convention and agreement. (EPM III Appx 3 ¶8; also THN 490/315) General language . . . being formed for general use, must be moulded on some more general views, and must affix the epithets of praise or blame, in conformity to sentiments, which arise from the general interests of the community. . . . [W]e every day meet with persons who are in a situation different from us, and who

14. Hume’s distinction between natural and philosophical relations, mentioned briefly in chapter 2, will be considered in more detail in part III, esp. chapter 17-B.

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION could never converse with us were we to remain constantly in that position and point of view, which is peculiar to ourselves. The intercourse of sentiments, therefore, in society and conversation, makes us form some general unalterable standard, by which we may approve or disapprove of characters and manners. (EPM V/ii ¶42; also THN 581–2/371–2)

For Hume, the fact that only human beings possess the capacity to stipulate conventions, and thereafter conform their actions and point of view (reasoning) to them, and the fact that only humans employ language are closely connected and, save perhaps in their most rudimentary forms, interdependent. Since neither capacity is observed in nonhuman animals, is there any reason to suppose that a good inductivist like Hume would have deemed the comparison with linguistic discourse warranted in the case of animal understanding, or even that of human understanding when considered (as he did) solely in the light of the associationist principles rooted in human nature? I think not. For while Hume may well have been prepared to grant that the capacities requisite to develop linguistic conventions are also rooted in human nature (even those confined within the narrow, highly specific parameters described by Chomskyan linguistics), I think there can be little question that he would have deemed these powers merely an incidental overlay grafted onto the associative principles he deemed truly fundamental to conscious intelligence, and common to human and animal nature alike. In Kant’s case, human intelligence was conceived very much in terms of the individual, isolated conscious intelligence. Its possibility depends on its possession of a faculty of apperception, capable of underpinning both the unity and identity of the I think (chapter 3-E).15 Much as Hume used the term ‘perception’, and Locke and Berkeley ‘idea’, Kant employed ‘representation’ (Vorstellung, repræsentatio) to designate all and only (1) that which presents itself to our consciousness and so (2) enters into its unity and identity (A116–7 and n and B131–2). Since the mental activity whose raison d’être is to synthesize distinct representations of every variety (sensations, memories, images, feelings, etc.) so as to yield a single, all-embracing consciousness obviously cannot be the same as the activity that serves to string together distinct linguistic components of the appropriate parts of speech so as to form meaningful compounds, there seems little scope even for similarity, much less isomorphism, between the constituents of Kant’s theory of mental representation16 and the constituents of a theory of linguistic discourse. This is not to deny that a theory of ideas might subsume, and even to some extent incorporate, elements of a theory of linguistic discourse. But it certainly cannot consist primarily of these elements, much less exclusively so—and, as the case of Hume suggests, it need not incorporate any distinctively syntactic or semantic elements at all. 15. Whereas Hume’s conception of personal identity can easily be extended to animals (see HTC, 223–4, 233, 322n13, 325n25, and 327n33), Kant held that animals lack the ability to apperceive (KMM, 200–1). 16. Kant opted for the term ‘representation’ instead of ‘idea’ (A319–20/B376–7). Although I will generally respect his preference, the expression “theory of ideas” is so well established in philosophical use that I shall sometimes employ it in preference to “theory of representations” (which, in current use, means something else entirely and would invite misunderstanding).


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Kant’s account of discursive understanding provides an excellent illustration of how limited and tenuous the relation is between a theory of ideas and a theory of linguistic discourse. The total area of overlap between the two is confined to the thesis that twelve of the forms logicians extract from their analysis of linguistic discourse are innate to understanding: the logical functions listed in Kant’s table of judgments. Otherwise, he never even so much as suggests, much less states, that the table of judgments, in specifying pure understanding exhaustively as well as completely, also completely and exhaustively specifies the forms of linguistic discourse. Certainly, it would not be much of a language if, like Kantian logic, it were confined to the combination of universals, and so was incapable of differentiating singular from general and infinite from affirmative judgments (section B). Every other operation Kant attributed to the understanding depends on elements that no one could be tempted to compare to linguistic discourse: a manifold of sensible intuition (not to be confused with a mathematical manifold, but rather something “that can be given prior to all thought,” B132); the synthesis of this manifold ahead of all concepts, in apprehension (in intuition as a manifold) and association (as an image); and the original a priori unity of this synthesis of the manifold made possible by pure sensible intuitions (A107 and B136n). Any residual temptation we may feel to compare thought as Kant portrayed it with linguistic discourse will surely be kept to a minimum when we note that his psychologistic explications resolve the elements of discursive thought into a nondiscursive psychological process from which everything linguistic in nature has been excluded in favor of the nature and workings of the individual, isolated psyche: judgment is “that action of the understanding whereby the manifold of given representations (they may be intuitions or concepts) are brought under one apperception in general” (B143; also Logic §17); thought is “the action of bringing the synthesis of the manifold given to it elsewhere in intuition to the unity of apperception” (B145); and a concept is a “unitary consciousness” in which “the manifold successively intuited and then also represented is united into one representation” (A103). Even the logical forms of judgment signify only “the unity of the act of ordering distinct representations under a common representation” (A68/ B93), where “common” must ultimately be understood in terms of the unity and identity of the cogito (B133–4n). What all these characterizations of discursive understanding have in common is the presupposition of a standpoint higher even than pure general logic is capable of providing (B131, B133–4n). From this perspective, the specific contents of the logical determinations that define the capacity to judge as it exists in us—subject-predicate, universal, particular, affirmative, negative, problematic, and the other logical forms listed in Kant’s table of judgments—are a matter of indifference. The only thing he insisted on is that beings capable of sensible cognition must be endowed with forms of judgment whereby to bring the manifold of their sensible intuition to the unity of apperception. He never precluded the possibility that logical forms other than our own might achieve the same result (B145–6 and A230/B283), and whether or not these forms overlap with anything remotely resembling human linguistic discourse seems not to have concerned him in the least. And why should it? There is nothing in Kant’s account of the possibility of understanding as a faculty in beings dependent on sensible

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intuition17 that implies that all such beings, howsoever different from humans, must also be users of language, or even have the capacity for linguistic discourse. So what justifies us in assuming that Kant shared the assumption current among philosophers today that thought is a species of linguistic discourse? On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that the difference between Kant’s approach to thought and that common today is far greater, and goes much deeper, than any supposed failure on his part to properly appreciate the ineliminably public character of language. In light of the foregoing, it should be clear that any attempt to view the unity and identity of the Kantian I as essentially linguistic simply because they are presupposed in the possibility of thought (discursivity, representation by means of universals) is just as misconceived as viewing light as essentially visual simply because it makes it possible for humans to see. For Kant, by far the most fundamental and characteristic roles of the unity and the identity of the I concern the possibility of the very objects themselves that we intuit immediately in perception (appearances in unitary space and time) and afterward cognize by means of concepts in experience (objects as phenomena in a unitary nature).18 The fact that they coincidentally also serve to elucidate certain fundamental features of linguistic discourse no more permits us to say, à la Hacking, that Kant’s theory of ideas was designed with the same task in mind for which philosophers today formulate theories of public discourse than it entitles us to say it performs the same jobs geometry and physics do because of its role in elucidating certain fundamental features of the phenomenal world. Instead of striving to outdo one another in minimizing the differences between the two sorts of theory, we might therefore do better to let ourselves be struck, first, by how remarkably little of what Kant deemed essential to conscious intelligence carries over to linguistic discourse, and, second, how much of the rest—pure sensible intuition, the manifold of sense, apprehension and association in imagination, the unity and identity of the I—does not. The cases of Locke and Berkeley are not so different from those of Hume and Kant as tends to be supposed. Berkeley was well aware of the asymmetry of language and ideation in respect of cognition and conation. On the one hand, he had as clear a recognition as anyone in his time that much of what is possible in language cannot be achieved by means of ideas alone, as the case of mathematics illustrates: “arithmetic and algebra are sciences of great clearness, certainty, and extent, which are immediately conversant about signs, upon the skillful use and management whereof they entirely depend” (MP 7 §12). He also realized that language signifies in ways that have nothing to do with ideas or the order and 17. The possibility of the understanding itself is the theme of the subjective transcendental deduction of the categories (Axvi–xvii), and is addressed expressly at A96–7, A128, B131, and B137. Kant’s distinction between objective and subjective transcendental deductions will be discussed in volume II. 18. We should remember that Kant insisted time and again, from his “Copernican hypothesis” (Bxvi/xvii) onward, that, however strange and absurd it may seem, discursive understanding is the author of nature itself—its fundamental laws and the forms constitutive of all the objects in it: B127, A114, A127, B164, PFM 320 and 322, and Progress 269. This theory of “objective thought determination” will be my principal focus in volume II.


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relation of ideas: “general names are often used in the propriety of language without the speaker’s designing them for marks of ideas in his own which he would have them raise in the understanding of the hearer” (PHK draft-intr. 375–6). On the other hand, Berkeley pioneered the analysis of the relation and ordering of ideas in terms of the psychology of customary association that Hume afterward made his own. This conception, as we saw earlier, is poorly adapted to the linguistic model of thought as consisting of differentiated parts of speech capable of being combined into articulated, meaningful wholes. It lends itself far better to the comparison to the operations of inanimate nature, as when Hume compared association to “a kind of ATTRACTION, which in the mental world will be found to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural, and to shew itself in as many and as various forms” (THN 12–3/14). To be sure, Berkeley saw fit to characterize ideas as signs of other ideas, but this was more in the sense in which an animal might move to higher ground because it takes the distant sound of thunder as a sign of an impending storm than the sense in which words signify (chapter 10). Even in the case of vision, the data of which Berkeley analyzed as forming a language expressive of tangible space (V §§ 140–52, VV §§ 38–48, MP 4 §§ 10–2), the analogy does not extend beyond the thesis that both signify by stipulation, without in any way resembling their significata. For it is not in thought, by means of the kind of logico-grammatical composition distinctive of linguistic discourse, that vision constitutes a language of touch. What suits vision for this role but not hearing, smell, or taste is aestheticpsychological, not logico-grammatical, in nature: our capacity to discern and discriminate visible objects with the same fineness and precision we are capable of by touch (an ability we would lack if, say, our eyes lacked lenses). This enables vision to express touch directly, in the immediacy of sensation, with every nuance of the continuum of light and color serving to convey information about the objects of touch, in their full concreteness and determinate individuality. Berkeley compared vision to a language in this respect only in order to emphasize that, in his view, vision is not a source of spatial ideas at all, and is mistaken for one only because we become habituated from infancy to the constant conjunctions between visible and tangible objects. Long before we are out of our cradles, we become so “fluent” in substituting the tangible-spatial correlate in thought for the corresponding visible objects present to our senses that we cannot help fancying visible objects to be spatial in their own right. But there the language analogy ends. No linguistic endowments are requisite to “read” tangible spatiality into visual sensation. Humans and animals experience their visual worlds spatially thanks to a variety of customary association that has everything to do with their perceptual psychology and nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not they are capable of giving linguistic expression to their thought. Pace Hacking, when Berkeley urged us to “draw the curtain of words, to behold the fairest tree of knowledge” (PHK intr. §24), it was never his intent to reveal a second, wordless species of linguistic discourse underlying the verbal variety. It was rather to disclose to us a richly varied, complexly organized realm of psychological phenomena in “terms” of which the natural world finds expression. Thus, far from bringing ideational thought and linguistic discourse closer together, the general tenor of Berkeley’s sensibilist

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psychology is to emphasize the extent to which they march to the beat of different drummers (chapter 14). Most of the features that speak against equating the theory of ideas with a theory of linguistic discourse in his sensibilist successors are present, or foreshadowed, in Locke’s account of human understanding as well. But the extent of their divergence is perhaps clearest in his account of the relation between words and ideas. With the exception of proper names, Locke held that all words relate to ideas via abstract ideas. Consequently, if, as Hacking and most others suppose, Locke regarded thought as wordless linguistic discourse taking place in the privacy of one’s mind in parallel to the verbal variety, we should expect him to have held that abstract ideas exist in our minds corresponding to every meaningful thing we say, logico-grammatical structure not excepted (categorematic and syncategorematic parts of speech, their rules of composition, etc.). Yet the fact is that Locke regarded the mind’s capacity to form ideas by abstraction as extremely limited. While we can, for example, abstract from the difference between scarlet and beet red because these sensations have something directly discernible in common, our powers of abstraction go no further: since there is nothing discernible in common between blue and red, we cannot form the idea of color by abstracting from their differences; were we to do so, nothing would remain; and so too for all higher levels of generality (sensation; idea; being). Hence, what in language seems like a steady ascent from species to genus to higher genus turns out to be something quite different in idea: we form the general idea of color not by abstracting something common to the simple ideas of yellow, red, blue, etc., but by means of an entirely different mark, expressed by the general rule: “such Ideas, as are produced in the Mind only by the Sight, and have entrance only through the Eyes” (ECHU III/iv/§16). Since this makes clear that Locke was well aware that the nature and structure of linguistic generality is completely indifferent to our capacities (and their limits) to form abstract ideas, can we persist in our blithe confidence that Locke was blind to the impossibility of a thoroughgoing isomorphism between speech and ideational thought? And given the fact that Locke saw no problem for his account of the relation between words and ideas despite the breakdown of their isomorphism in the case of words for simple ideas of sensation and reflexion, is there any reason to think he would have been any more disturbed by its breakdown in the cases of complex ideas or ideas of relation? Certainly, the burden of proof is on those who claim that Locke’s account of language would be weakened, or even confuted, in the face of any extensive, ineradicable asymmetry between words and ideas. To be sure, Locke affirmed the existence of a correspondence between verbal and mental propositions, and attributed to both the quintessentially propositional property of possessing a truth value. Yet as portrayed by Locke, a mental proposition is essentially an act of comparing different ideas in some respect or other, and then affirming their agreement or disagreement on the basis either of immediate perception, in which case it counts as knowledge, or past experience, in which case it counts as probability (chapters 8 and 9). By this standard, a mole may be taken to believe a mental proposition when, upon the occasion of a certain scent, it starts digging in a certain direction because, in the past, it had found tasty grubs


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after performing this action in similar circumstances; and further, we may say that, by actually finding them, it at the same time recognizes the truth of this mental proposition, and has its confidence in it strengthened as a result.19 Now, we can construe this in either of two ways. We may regard it as evidence that Locke regarded ideational thought in both humans and animals as a wordless variety of linguistic discourse. Or we may conclude that Locke’s conception of mental propositions is focused so much more on the psychological dimension—its ideational contents and how the mind compares them to one another and/or to past experiences—than the logico-grammatical features evident in a verbal proposition that these features effectively drop out of consideration entirely. In the first case, we suppose Locke to have placed a premium on the existence of a systematic isomorphism between public verbal discourse and private wordless mental discourse, and then, as typically happens, take him to task for it. In the second case, by contrast, we accept that Locke may have been so indifferent to the existence of such an isomorphism that, even if it did exist, the essentials of his account of the relation of words and ideas would be unaffected, including its central principle that words signify ideas. And we are then free to understand the results Locke expected to obtain by unfolding the mental propositions underlying verbal ones without getting hung up on the inadequacy of his supposed attempt to explain the nature and workings of public discourse in terms of ideational thought. What then was the point of the sensibilists’ attempt to strip away from thought everything related to public discourse if it makes no difference to them whether what remains bears a strong enough resemblance to linguistic discourse to constitute a private, wordless species of the same genus? The answer is that they prized ideas as arbiters of the ontological worth of what we say. This was the result, in part at least, of their rejection of the intellectualist view, nurtured on the precedent of mathematics, that definitions constructed according to the highest standards of rigor and precision cannot fail to express ideational contents present in our minds. For sensibilists, language can never be its own guarantor in this respect. Instead, they demanded that independent evidence be obtained of what underlies linguistic discourse in the mind by means of a preliminary investigation into the powers of the understanding to perceive, signify, and know ideas. And it should come as no surprise that, far from providing support for intellectualist method, their investigations undercut it by spotlighting the extent and importance of the asymmetry between linguistic discourse and ideation. This emerges even in the case of discourse limited to reports of what is evident to the senses. I can report the presence of various shades of red in one region of my visual field and the presence of various colors in another, without ever suspecting that, in idea, the shift to the more general term ‘color’ depends on entirely different psychological operations (Locke). I can report on the flute-like timbre of 19. That Locke viewed knowledge as an affair of the comparison of ideas is clear at ECHU IV/ii/ §2; and though he attributed only a limited capacity for comparison to animals (II/xi/§§4–5), they surely have enough of one to form mental propositions of the kind described in my example. The greatest obstacle in the way of extending Locke’s account of mental propositions to animals is that he confined his consideration of such propositions almost exclusively to comparisons that involve one or more abstract ideas: see chapter 8-D.

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the tones I am hearing without mentioning their pitches, even though, in the idea of the tone, they are one and inseparable, and I am obliged to perform quite different psychological operations to discern them within a tone from those necessary to differentiate different tones themselves (Locke). I can report that I am seeing a line without specifying its length, color, curvature, and a host of other features that are inseparable in the idea (Berkeley). I can report that the foliage prevents me from seeing a certain mountain even if, in idea, I may be unable to distinguish between the idea of existence I apply to the mountain and the idea of its being perceived by an observing mind (Berkeley). I can report that a child is catching a falling leaf without mentioning my own inner state, even though I might be quite incapable of conceiving this or any efficacious action without forming an idea of such a state (Hume). The list of examples could go on, but it should already be quite clear to anyone not wedded to the view that sensibilist philosophers were committed to affirming a thoroughgoing isomorphism between speech and ideational thought that it would have never occurred to them to incorporate elements of the psychology of the formation of the ideas concerned in these and similar reports into definitions (or descriptions of the use) of the terms employed in them, or, conversely, to insist that the syntactic and semantic characteristics of these terms must carry over into the ideas signified by them. Certainly, the balance of the evidence suggests that these philosophers neither desired nor needed to go further than to suppose that the correlation between human language and psychology is sufficiently close to render the latter useful as a reality check in relation to certain philosophical misconceptions liable to arise if too much confidence is placed in language as a guide to what is possible in matters of fact and real existence, starting with the ideational contents of our own minds. Intellectualists and sensibilists agreed that the only reality our language has to answer to is the one our ideas equip us to conceive: for what is both insensible and inconceivable by us is ipso facto nothing to us, and so can never exert the least influence on our thoughts and actions. Yet by restricting the sphere of ideas to (1) data of sensation, (2) data of reflexion (the repertoire of psychological operations our minds are equipped to perform), and (3) the products of reproducing, separating, combining, and unifying these data in thought, sensibilists ensured that the sense in which language “expresses” and “communicates” ideational thought would be far more tenuous and circuitous than intellectualists supposed, and certainly bears no resemblance whatever to a translation from one species of discourse into another. For sensibilists, the systematic correlation between linguistic discourse and ideational thought runs mostly, or even entirely, in one direction only: whereas discourse can be distilled into the ideas that alone are capable of conferring on it an objective, ontological worth, there is so much loss of syntactic and semantic information in the process—so little isomorphism—that it is effectively impossible to reconstitute even the simplest tract of linguistic discourse from the ideas concerned in it. Hume may well have had this unidirectionality in mind when he contended that Of all the vices of language, the least excusable is the want of perspicuity; for, as words were instituted by men, merely for conveying their ideas to each other, the employing of words without meaning is a palpable abuse, which departs


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from the very original purpose and intention of language. . . . Vaugelas, the first great grammarian of France, will not permit, that any one have recourse to the sense, in order to explain the meaning of the words; because, says he, it is the business of the words to explain the sense—not of the sense to give a determinate meaning to the words; and this practice is reversing the order of nature; like the custom of the Romans (he might have added, the Greeks), in their saturnalia, who make the slaves the masters. (letter to John Home, 20 September 1775)

We must not suppose that it is owing to their privacy that Hume deemed ideas unsuited to explaining the meaning of words. For just as I can produce in you an auditory sensation by uttering ‘sky,’ I can produce in you a visual sensation by getting you to look up at the sky. The problem is rather that, by so proceeding, you would be at a loss to know whether you were being given an explanation of ‘sky,’ ‘up,’ ‘point up,’ ‘extend a finger,’ ‘index finger,’ ‘body part,’ or any number of other possible terms. Nor could you know that I was gesturing and not making a movement with no linguistic import at all, much less divine the meaning of the gesture if that indeed is what it was. This, it seems to me, is precisely why Hume and other sensibilists deemed words, with definite “meanings,” necessary in the first place: a noise, mark, movement of the body, or other variety of sign becomes a linguistic instrument serviceable to express and communicate ideas when, by means of conventionally established rules of propriety, we confer a meaning on it. Ideas, by contrast, are the masters of word-slaves because only by their means can we make sense of already meaningful words in terms of the only reality that is ever immediately present to, and therefore conceivable by, our minds. There is thus a radical division of labor between words and ideas that should suffice to squelch any notion that sensibilists thought of ideational thought as a wordless variety of linguistic discourse. For such a division implies that the process of moving from ideas to words is completely asymmetric with the process of moving from words to ideas—so much so that, for them, to suppose otherwise is to commit a category mistake. There is, in my view, another, deeper sense in which Hume and other sensibilists regarded ideational thought as master and linguistic discourse as slave: ideas have, while words lack, objective actuality (real existence, facticity). For they considered nothing an idea (perception, representation) unless and until it presents itself to consciousness; and this very presence confers upon it one or the other of the only two modes of objective actuality—real being or existence— human minds are capable of conceiving: presence to consciousness in sensation and presence to consciousness in reflexion. It has to do not with what an object is (ideational contents) but with the mode of its presence to us, its actuality. Linguistic discourse was cast in an ontologically servile role by sensibilists precisely because it is not a third such mode. For while they did not pretend to know that finite minds differently constituted than our own might derive conceptions of actuality from sources other than sensation and reflexion, there is no question that they would have insisted that those minds derive them from something analogous, that is, from a third species of sense, rather than from language. Consequently, notwithstanding their acknowledgement of the indispensability of linguistic discourse to the cognitive and conative economy of the human mind, sensibilists

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elevated ideas to the status of final arbiter of the ontological worth of everything having to do with communication. Psychologism, as elucidated in the preceding chapters, represents the most potent and highly developed early modern conception of ideational ontological arbitration. Whether our talk concerns the real existence of sensible things independently of their being perceived, causal efficacy as something that resides in things outside and independently of the mind that considers them, or space and time as features of things existing and acting mind-independently in themselves, psychologism instructs us to look to the ideas (perceptions, representations) that confer what Hume termed ‘sense’ on our words to determine whether our minds contribute anything to the content of these ideas that would render such talk nonsensical from an ontological standpoint. To be sure, different psychologistic thinkers espoused divergent views in particular instances: Berkeley held that sensation affords us no conception of real existence that can be meaningfully applied to things in themselves, whereas Kant, as I shall argue in volume II, took the opposite position; Berkeley and Hume saw no reason to restrict the modes of time to one’s own conscious mind, while Kant did (chapter 3-D); Berkeley believed that we can directly perceive the causal efficacy of our own minds, whereas Hume and Kant held that it is no more an object of inner sense than of outer, but rather a feature of the way objects of either sense are considered in thought (chapter 2); and so on. Yet notwithstanding these divergencies, their shared commitment to ideas as the arbiters of the ontological worth of what we say is unmistakable. And no less unmistakable is the fact that, beyond this unidirectional correlation of words to ideas in all matters ontological, sensibilists were quite content to accord a more or less complete independence to linguistic discourse vis à vis ideational thought in all other respects. D. Cognitive Science As the computational theory of mind originated by Alan Turing is increasingly integrated with evolutionary psychology, many believe we are finally arriving at a genuinely scientific understanding of the mind. Whether or not this model ultimately pans out,20 we can avail ourselves of it to frame the question that inevitably arises in connection with interpretations that stress the psychological aspects of early modern philosophy: are early modern psychology and contemporary cognitive science competing explanations of the mind, complementary explanations, or different endeavors entirely? Since this is a question best addressed after rather than before a detailed examination of early modern theories of understanding, I shall confine myself here to identifying and negotiating ways around some of the principal misconceptions that stand in the way of answering it. Perhaps the most obvious difference between early modern theories of understanding and contemporary cognitive science is the importance attached by the 20. One of the more convincing scientific lines of criticism is developed in Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi, Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination London: Penguin Books, 2000): see 47–9, 81, 85, 87–8, 93–101, 212–4, and 238n. Their argument does not, of course, imply that brain functions, if not in themselves computational, cannot be usefully modeled computationally.


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former to consciousness. While some cognitive scientists write consciousness off as either a mere by-product of language and/or social construct, many accept that it exists in nature and, like any other natural phenomenon, cannot be ignored by science. There are three respects in which it lends itself to scientific investigation: consciousness as (1) self-knowledge, (2) access to information, and (3) sentience.21 Yet cognitive scientists also agree that consciousness, however construed, is incidental, not essential, to the science of intelligence; and to the extent that, as a contingent matter of fact, consciousness figures in intelligence, it should be regarded as merely a cog in the greater unconscious, subpersonal computational mechanism wherein human cognitive and conative intelligence essentially consists. There can thus be no question that contemporary cognitive science represents a fundamental departure from the standpoint of early modern philosophers, for whom consciousness is indispensable to intelligence, and whose cogito-centered theories of ideas are intended to demonstrate that certain formal properties of consciousness (unity, identity) are, quite literally, constitutive of human-type intelligence. The main difficulty we face in determining whether and how early modern portrayals of conscious intelligence jive with contemporary cognitive science is distinguishing history from lore—current stereotypes about the cognitive scientific tenets of early modern philosophers and what they supposedly imply: whether, and if so to what extent, the early modern approach to cognitive intelligence is sufficiently commensurate with cognitive science to make it possible to speak of agreements and disagreements between them at all. On the affirmative side of the ledger, one might cite Hume for having set sentience at the core of his accounts of understanding and the passions. Central to his psychologism is the view that affective experience of the conscious activity of one’s own mind furnishes contents essential to the ideas of cause and effect, identity, and other relations, as well as real existence: the facility affect he deemed the essence of relation, and the vivacity affect he treated as constitutive of the difference between real existence and fictive, or merely possible, existence (chapter 2).22 Yet one could just as well cite Hume’s view as evidence for the negative side, since it exemplifies nearly all the features that render it all but impossible to investigate scientifically: the elusive character of sentience itself; the inaccessibility of facility and vivacity affects to the spotlight of attention; and their pervasiveness, as the basis of all relation of ideas and belief in real existence. Indeed, precisely because Hume supposed them to underlie all consciousness of relations and real existence, an inquiry into the adaptive significance of facility and vivacity affect would be effectively indistinguishable from the question of the adaptive significance of mind itself. Yet probably the greatest obstacle in the way of setting contemporary cognitive science and early modern psychology on the same level with a view to comparing and contrasting them is the sensibilist notion of an idea (Hume’s perception, Kant’s representation). On the principle, as Locke put it, that one cannot “well treat of that faculty of the mind, which consists in thinking, without considering the immediate objects of the mind in thinking” (CWS 134), he and his sensibilist 21. This distinction derives from the psychologist Ray Jackendorff and the philosopher Ned Block. 22. Kant seems to have had a similar focus in such texts as CJ §21.

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successors recognized the need for a term to designate “Whatsoever the Mind perceives in it self, or is the immediate object of Perception, Thought, or Understanding” (ECHU II/viii/§8). As this inevitably includes much that exceeds the reach of the attentive gaze, the notion of an idea led them to conceive of consciousness as having a far greater scope—unity and identity—than cognitive scientists tend to accord to it. How much more? Anything in the appearance of the objects we perceive or think must itself be immediately present to our consciousness, and so counts as an idea, even if our powers of discernment are insufficient to isolate it from its surroundings.23 Moreover, notwithstanding the stereotypical overliteral construal of the sensibilist conception of the mind as a blank slate, Locke and his successors were anything but grudging in allowing that human consciousness is underpinned by a rich variety of powerful capacities, faculties, and natural tendencies. Quite the contrary, they happily invoked them in extending the sphere of consciousness far beyond the limits ordinarily attributed to it, all the way down to the lowest levels of sensation and reflexion.24 At the same time, sensibilists reconceived the unity and identity of the I in accordance with these new bounds. The consequence was that much of what cognitive scientists presume to fall within the unconscious, subpersonal substratum of the conscious mind was deemed both conscious and personal. The most frequently repeated criticism of the sensibilist notion of an idea is that it is an indeterminate catchall that fails to distinguish anything from anything else. Yet this was quite deliberate. Sensibilists were interested in drawing a line dividing everything that in any way enters into our conscious life, whether by way of sensation or reflexion, from that which does not and is consequently nothing to us. And the accent falls on “in any way”: they were not interested in singling out some class of conscious objects from others, such as external objects, objects as we experience them, intentional objects, linguistic referents, logico-grammatical instruments, psychological attention grabbers, motives for action, volitions, dreams and other mental imagery, even things we are unaware of being conscious of for want of the powers to discern them individually. That they are all ideas, in addition to whatever else they may be, has nothing to do with their nature as objects—their content, their essence, their existence, their role in our thought, their capacity to represent other things, etc. For, in and of itself, ‘idea’ (‘perception,’ ‘representation’) is an ontologically agnostic notion (even for Berkeley), referring to anything and everything that is or can present itself immediately to consciousness by way of sensation or reflexion. Admittedly, sensibilists typically found reasons to assign an ontological import to ‘idea,’ so that instead of just “present to consciousness” it took on such additional significations as “modification inhering in a mental substantial substratum,” “something that exists only in being perceived by a 23. Among the examples adduced by sensibilist philosophers are the inputs and processes whereby vision in depth is achieved (Locke, ECHU II/ix/§§ 8–10), speech perception (Berkeley, V §159), the recognition of shame, gladness, etc., on a face (Berkeley, C 231), the perception of causal relations (Hume, THN 112/77–8, 167/112–13, and EHU IV/i ¶8), and the perception of highly complex phenomena such as a chord played on a cathedral organ (Kant, B414–5n). I will consider the theories in which these examples figure in due course. 24. By drawing the line there, they still distinguished themselves from intellectualists whose conception of ideas did not require that they actually be present to consciousness in sensation or reflexion. See chapters 1 and 15.


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mind,” “something that, in certain respects, resembles the real constitution of things that exist outside and independently of minds but are never themselves perceived,” etc. But, as we shall see in due course, this had less to do with how they understood ‘idea’ than with the meaning and scope of application they attached to the notions central to objective understanding: ‘subsistence and inherence,’ ‘cause and effect,’ ‘identity,’ ‘existence,’ ‘space,’ ‘time,’ ‘magnitude,’ etc. In particular, when Hume and Kant developed psychologistic explications of these notions as incorporating into their content elements originating in the action of thought (the synthesis of imagination and the unity of understanding), their scope was limited in such a way that they could no longer be applied to anything that exists prior to and independently of thought, including its ideational inputs. Yet the effect of stripping all its accumulated ontological baggage was to restore the term ‘idea’ (‘perception,’ ‘representation’) to its original, purely subjective core meaning of “something present to consciousness in sensation or reflexion.” It thus proved in the end to be neither more nor less specific than it needed to be for the purpose of investigating “that faculty of the mind, which consists in thinking” (CWS 134). Here we come to the root of the divergence between early modern theories of ideas and contemporary cognitive science. In its core meaning, ‘idea’ is anterior to all objective determinations, including the sort taken for granted by scientists (causality, identity, existence, space, time, quantifiable realities, etc.). If the origin of our ideas of these determinations does not show that conscious activity makes any essential contributions to their content, then we are free afterward to apply our ideas of these determinations to ideas and to the mind itself, as Locke, Berkeley, and other pre-Humeans did with some or all of them. However, if it turns out that the content of these ideas is ineluctably bound up with the action of thought (imagination, apperception), then any attempt to apply ideas of these determinations either to ideas themselves as they are anterior to this action, or to the consciousness to which they are present, can result only in absurdities of the kind considered in chapter 2-B (“we either contradict ourselves, or talk without a meaning”). So, if I am correct in ascribing this sort of psychologism to Hume and Kant, it means not only that their theories of ideas are so ineluctably subjective that neither science, metaphysics, theology, nor any other cognitive pursuit reliant on the categories of objective understanding can subsume them but that, to the contrary, they subsume all the others. Indeed, while there is every reason to believe that Hume and Kant would have applauded the aspiration of cognitive science to explain psychological phenomena in terms of the physical, they would still have insisted that physical objects and natural processes, considered ontologically (which is never the business of scientists to do), are subject to all the strictures of their psychologistic idealism.25 25. Psychologistic idealism is seldom correctly situated in relation to science and other cognitive pursuits. For example, if the psychologist John Tooby had done so, he could not have extracted from the fact that “our cherished mental life was a naturally selected product of organized matter, just one downstream consequence of the uncaring immensities of time and chance” the implication that “the mind with its moral sense was taken out of the authoritative domain of clerics and philosophers. For Darwin, the responsibility for its investigation would be in the hands of evolutionary psychologists, of which he was the first.” Review of Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, vol. 2 by Janet Browne, New York Times Book Review, Sunday, 6 October 2002). On the contrary, Hume and Kant could perfectly

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Accordingly, the need felt by critics of a later era for a more determinate notion of idea than the sensibilists devised is misconceived. Rather than deriving from any failure on the part of Locke and his successors to meet the demands of the kind of investigation in which they were engaged (quite the contrary), this qualm most probably stems from a desire to interpret sensibilist theories of ideas in terms more congenial to contemporary philosophy. I have already noted that this has led many, specialists and generalists alike, to treat ideationally the thought processes posited by early moderns as wordless soliloquies. Here we need to concern ourselves with an even older, but not unrelated, stereotype, which proves particularly deleterious when it comes to comprehending the relation of sensibilist theories of ideas to contemporary cognitive science: the notion that such theories, particularly in the case of the Empiricists, were extensively, even excessively, beholden to introspective evidence and proof. In fact, just the opposite is true. Hume, for example, made it quite clear that we can never rely on introspection as a reliable source of data from which to discover the principles of the human psyche: Moral philosophy [the science of the understanding, passions, and morals of human beings] has, indeed, this peculiar disadvantage, which is not found in natural [the physical sciences], that in collecting its experiments, it cannot make them purposely, with premeditation, and after such a manner as to satisfy itself concerning every particular difficulty which may arise. When I am at a loss to know the effects of one body upon another in any situation, I need only put them in that situation, and observe what results from it. But should I endeavour to clear up after the same manner any doubt in moral philosophy, by placing myself in the same case with that which I consider, ’tis evident this reflection and premeditation would so disturb the operation of my natural principles, as must render it impossible to form any just conclusion from the phænomenon. We must therefore glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men’s behaviour in company, and in their pleasures. (THN xviii–xix/6)

Kant too warned that, in psychology, “the observation itself alters and distorts the state of the object observed” (MFPNS 471). Even Locke, who is commonly regarded as the paradigmatic early modern introspectionist, held that direct observation of the mind is incapable of serving as an accurate guide to cognition because of “how very quick the actions of the Mind are performed: For as it self is thought to take up no space, to have no extension; so its actions seem to require no time, but many of them seem to be crouded into an Instant.” In addition, “Habits,especially well accept that human psychology arose in this way while still claiming the philosophical authority to assert that the very conceptions essential to this or any conception of material nature have a scope that limits their application to ideas (perceptions, representations), to the exclusion of mind-independent things in themselves. The difference between philosophical and scientific psychology is that the latter takes the world ontologically for granted as something existing in itself relative to our psychology; it therefore situates the psyche within that world and relies upon physical facts and laws in its experiments and observations as well as in the conclusions it draws from them. Philosophical psychology, by contrast, has (or, at any rate, appropriates for itself) the means to establish that the world itself is a product of our psychology (including the psyche as conceived ordinarily and by scientific psychology as something existing in nature).


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such as are begun very early, come, at last, to produce actions in us, which often escape our observation. . . . And therefore ’tis not so strange, that our Mind should often change the Idea of its Sensation, into that of its Judgment, and make one serve only to excite the other, without our taking notice of it” (ECHU II/ix/§10). That the evidence of introspection was discounted by early modern theorists of ideas should come as no surprise. Most of the lapses that today tend to be laid at their door belong rather to philosopher-psychologists of a later period, such as William James, when the experimental methods suited to scientific psychology were being pioneered (c. 1850–1950). In the preceding era, philosophers could not fail to be aware of the vast gulf between the rigorous experimental methods developed by Galileo and his successors in physics and what then passed for psychology. Advances in optics and biology also served to make clearer than before the extent to which perception, memory, conation, imagination, and recognition depend on complex, highly sophisticated unconscious, subpersonal neural mechanisms that early moderns knew they had barely begun to understand. That they said as little as they did about the physical bases of conscious intelligence was most likely due not to a failure to realize their importance but to a new appreciation of just how little they were in a position to say. Even Descartes, whose metaphysics led him to emphasize the immaterial basis of the conscious mind, nevertheless recognized the extent to which the mind is, in all respects besides the intellect (with its trove of innate ideas), an expression of the human body, and above all its central nervous system. To philosophers such as Hume and Kant, for whom there was no metaphysical mystery to the causal interaction between conscious intelligence and the unconscious brain (both alike being mere phenomena existing only in and through conscious imagination and apperception), experience has to be the ultimate arbiter of the extent and nature of their correspondence (THN I/iv/§5 and A384–8). For Locke, even if the causations and substantial underpinnings lay beyond our ken, there was nothing more problematic about matter being cognitive than about its being sentient (animals), organic (plants), or exhibiting any property over and above bare motion or rest (chapter 7-C). Even Spinoza built into his dualist account of the human mind a systematic isomorphism with the human body, such that an understanding of the former is impossible independently of an understanding of the latter. Hence, the consensus among leading early modern philosophers was not all that different from what it is today: consciousness—viewed empirically as a natural phenomenon occurring in humans and other animals—is a cog in a greater unconscious, subpersonal neural mechanism. Indeed, since nearly all of them shared Kant’s view “that in every specific doctrine of nature only so much science proper can be found as there is mathematics in it” (MFPNS 470), they would probably have rejoiced at the prospect of putting psychology on a genuinely scientific footing opened up by the computational theory of mind (tempered perhaps by skepticism about whether this particular prospect will ultimately pan out).26 26. Kant, lest we forget, held that every psychological state of the empirical subject is determined by material processes whose workings are capable of being represented mathematically. Empirical-psychological freedom, for him, is just a confusion (CPrR 95–7 and 101), so that the only genuine freedom is that conceivable by means of practical reason on the basis of the transcendental idea of freedom.

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What scope does this leave for philosophical psychology? While there may have been great divergence as to detail, early modern philosophers from Descartes to Kant all held that consciousness has to be understood as a unity, and that the properties of this unity, and the conditions of our awareness of it, hold the key to comprehending the nature, and fundamental workings, of human intelligence. It was above all Kant’s achievement to develop the work of his predecessors to the point where a formidable case could be made to show that human-type intelligence would be impossible in the absence of conscious representations of the individuality and universality of scope made possible by the a priori synthesis of all possible representations in one consciousness (chapter 3-E). What makes the unity and identity of this I opaque alike to natural science and introspection are the same factors that ensure that the sensibilist notion of an idea will be of use only in a certain kind of philosophical psychology and nothing else: it is present equally at the lowest and highest as at the intermediary levels of conscious life; far from being one individual among others like the I of empirical self-cognition, it is a global, all-encompassing I in which everything that can ever become an object for us is contained; its scope and functions are as formal and generalized as those of cognitive science’s “executive I”27 are specialized and local; it is neither accessible by nor identifiable with the spotlight of attention; its identity has nothing to do with the personalized memory definitive of the forensic I; and it is completely detached from the conative I at the empirical focus of our passions and desires. Nevertheless, Kant and his sensibilist predecessors were one in their conviction that the I in which all ideas are united is so fundamental to finite conscious intelligence that neither cognition nor all but the most primitive forms of conation are possible without it.

27. The “executive I” is the conscious mechanism responsible for ensuring that only one cognitive agency has control of the only body we have at any one time. As the psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, “‘You can’t dance at two weddings with only one tuches.’ No matter how many agents we have in our minds, we each have exactly one body. Custody of each major part must be granted to a controller that selects a plan from the hubbub of competing agents”; How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), 143–4.

PART I

Locke’s New Model Philosophy From the Metaphysics of Substance to the Psychology of Human Understanding My . . . way by ideas, which often occurs in your lordship’s letter, is, I confess, a very large and doubtful expression; and may, in the full latitude, comprehend my whole Essay: because treating in it of the understanding, which is nothing but the faculty of thinking, I could not well treat of that faculty of the mind, which consists in thinking, without considering the immediate objects of the mind in thinking, which I call ideas: and therefore in treating of the understanding, I guess it will not be thought strange, that the greatest part of my book has been taken up, in considering what these objects of the mind, in thinking, are; whence they come; what use the mind makes of them, in its several ways of thinking; and what are the outward marks whereby it signifies them to others, or records them for its own use. And this, in short, is my way by ideas. Locke, Letter to Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, 1697.

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LOCKE’S NEW MODEL PHILOSOPHY

Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding is the first magnum opus of a great philosopher with human understanding as its subject. As such, it represents a sea change in the history of philosophy. Most other seventeenth-century thinkers of Locke’s stature regarded the metaphysics of substance as the primary occupation of the philosopher, relegating the understanding to the status of a subordinate topic. Nor did their critics enter the lists so that the preeminent business of philosophy might become the humble endeavor “to take a Survey of our own Understandings, examine our own Powers, and see to what Things they were adapted” (ECHU I/i/§6). Locke was thus the first of those who “suspected we began at the wrong end” by letting “loose our Thoughts into the vast Ocean of Being, as if all that boundless Extent, were the natural, and undoubted Possession of our Understandings” (§7), to advocate that the right end at which to begin is the theory of human understanding.1 Nor can there be any question that the revolutionary change in philosophical focus he called for in the Essay was successfully wrought: the psychological approach to human understanding pioneered in it was to dominate the next century to such an extent that philosophical progress up to and including Kant effectively became synonymous with an “inquir[y] into the original of those ideas, notions, or whatever else you please to call them, which a man observes, and is conscious to himself he has in his mind; and the ways whereby the understanding comes to be furnished with them” (§3). My endeavor in part I will be to consider Locke’s new model philosophy on its own terms, so that we may better understand how the philosophical revolution it inaugurated found its completion in the psychologisms of Hume and Kant. I will therefore treat in turn each of the three powers of perception Locke attributed to the faculty of understanding: 1. The Perception of Ideas in our Minds. 2. The Perception of the the signification of Signs. 3. The Perception of the Connexion or Repugnancy, Agreement or Disagreement, that there is between any of our Ideas. All these are attributed to the Understanding,or perceptive Power, though it be the two latter only that use allows us to say we understand. (ECHU II/xxi/§5)

Chapters 5 through 7 focus on different facets of Locke’s account of the power of the understanding to perceive ideas in the mind: ideas themselves; their perception; and the cognitive use of ideas to conceive the world and the place of the understanding in it. In chapter 8, I will examine the second power of perception that Locke attributed to the understanding—the perception of the signification of signs—with an eye to comprehending why he made ideas the primary significations of signs. Finally, chapter 9 deals with Locke’s efforts to exorcise the demon of Cartesian skepticism so as to establish the reality and truth of human knowledge.

1. Like all blanket generalizations, others might have proposed the same, and gone some way toward making good on their proposals. This much, however, seems certain: nothing before Locke remotely approaches his theory of human understanding in scope, originality, quality, or influence.

5 Locke’s Theory of Ideas

As the epigraph to this part makes clear, Locke was unapologetic for devoting the greatest part of his Essay concerning Human Understanding (ECHU) to ideas. A work concerned with the faculty of thinking is ipso facto a work about its objects as well. But what do ideas tell us about our thinking? Do we first have to explain ideas—what causes them and how, their relation to the mind and its powers, etc.— before we can put them to use in the explanation of understanding? Or are they in some sense prior to everything that enters into their explanation, prior perhaps even to explanation itself? Before we can know what is and is not the case, we must first be able to think it. To explain anything, including ideas, our understanding is limited by the ideational materials available to comprehend (1) the explanandum, (2) the explanans, and (3) what it is to explain the one by the other. In the investigation of the understanding as a faculty of thinking, thought therefore takes precedence over knowledge; and the first task of a sensibilist theorist of ideas like Locke is to employ the senses as a compass to demarcate the sphere of the thinkable. A. The Thematic Unity of Locke’s Essay Whatever one takes to be the principal themes unifying Locke’s theory of human understanding, there seems little question that the theme unifying the text of his Essay concerning Human Understanding is the replacement of innate ideas with a strictly sensibilist account of understanding. Although many paths lead to innatism, the primary motivation countered in ECHU is the need to account for knowledge of eternal truths (“true and immutable natures”), whether logical, mathematical, or metaphysical (such as the principle that every beginning of existence must have a cause), once the nonsensibilist Aristotelian-Scholastic doctrine of intentional species formerly at the heart of empiricism has been rejected. Since Locke joined in this rejection of premodern empiricism (chapter 6-A), he shared with such mathematician-philosophers as Descartes the view that the senses do not acquaint us with the objective constitution of the objects that affect them: complex structure, substantial attributes, powers, identity, etc. Their inputs are instead a kaleidoscopic 119

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flux of sensations, passions, volitions, and thoughts (“if we look immediately into our selves, and reflect on what is observable there, we shall find our Ideas always, whilst we are awake, or have any thought, passing in train, one going, and another coming, without intermission,” II/vii/§9; also xiv/§3). The task of the understanding, accordingly, is to transform this welter, by drawing entirely on its own internal ideational resources, into the familiar, everyday scenes of a stable world of bodies (externally) and our own psyche (internally), operating in regular, predictable ways. To effect this transformation from subjective consciousness to objective understanding, however, some philosophers believed that more is requisite than an intellect equipped with powers merely to repeat the data of the internal and external senses in thought, separate them, combine them, compare them, and consider them abstractly but no faculty to bring forth any new, nonsensible contents of thought. In their view, nothing remotely resembling objective consciousness, either in its everyday or its scientific and philosophical forms, could arise unless our understandings were equipped with a power to perceive contents not sensibly accessible to us. This power was usually termed pure intellect. Since the contents perceived in this way can neither be given by nor otherwise derived from data of the senses, proponents of this position almost invariably traced them to the constitution of the intellect itself, so that when the mind is created, it comes equipped with a stock of innate ideas accessible to conscious representation (in clear and distinct pure intellectual perceptions).1 Locke’s task in developing a post-medieval, sensibilist alternative to intellectualist innatism was to show that forming images and abstractly considering them are all our understandings need to do in order to transform subjective consciousness into objective understanding. Everything that cannot be accounted for by these means he endeavored to expose as spurious, mere by-products of language devoid of ideational import (chapter 4-C). Finally, he set out to develop an account of propositional thought that, notwithstanding the a posteriori origin of all the ideas implicated in it, bargains away none of the necessity and universality of mathematical and metaphysical knowledge. The upshot is an account that shows the understanding to be fully adequate to all the purposes of human life but to fall well short of the attainments of which intellectualist metaphysicians supposed it capable. The plan of ECHU conforms perfectly to the strategic design just described. 1. In its first book, Locke considers innatism in isolation from the various doctrines that have, through the ages, led philosophers to embrace it, in order to determine whether there is evidence sufficient to establish the existence of innate 1. Innatism in this sense is not a biological view about information and knowledge present in the mind antecedently to birth, but a metaphysical view concerned with the essence of the intellect: when God chooses to create a particular intellect—yours, mine, or anyone else’s—is it created with certain ideational contents present in it already, or is it a blank slate? This is also how Locke understood innatism: ECHU II/ix/§6. The odd man out in this debate was Malebranche: though an intellectualist, he favored intellectual illumination to innatism. His view and those of other intellectualist philosophers will be considered in more detail in chapter 15, where I will review and assess the anti-innatist critiques of Locke and Berkeley before turning to the examination of Hume’s transformation of the question of origins.

Locke’s Theory of Ideas

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ideas and/or principles (maxims), even if only as a matter of probability. Although “no Proposition can be innate, unless the Ideas, about which it is, be innate” (I/ii/ §18), Locke focuses on innate principles in book I because the evidence for them is seemingly the strongest. He finds that, when subjected to scrutiny, the evidence is at best inconclusive. Moreover, because the embrace of innatist explanations puts an end to further inquiry into the origin of an idea or principle in the mind, Locke argues that we should never have recourse to them except as a last resort— after every conceivable sensibilist avenue of inquiry has been explored and found inadequate (see I/iv/§§23–4). 2. However, innatism cannot be definitively discredited without showing that all the ideas legitimately deemed indispensable either to objective understanding or to knowledge of necessary truths originate empirically, by the application of the understanding to sensations or to internal perceptions (termed ideas of reflexion) of the varied operations it performs on these data (repeating, discerning, comparing, etc.). This is the project undertaken in book II of ECHU; and the theory of ideas expounded in it is rightly regarded as Locke’s supreme philosophical achievement. 3. If the thoroughgoing empiricism regarding the origin of ideas of book II is accepted, then innatism with regard to principles becomes untenable. Yet Locke realized that he could not close the books on innatism until he had explained what gives it its veneer of truth. This, according to Locke, derives from confounding with ideation another of the powers of the understanding: signification. Book III of ECHU is consecrated to the examination of this power and its relation to the power of forming ideas. According to Locke, notwithstanding the semblance of independent, objective meaning that words acquire by means of conventional rules of propriety, the only genuinely objective meaning words can possess is that conferred on them by the sensible ideas present immediately to the consciousness of their users. Shorn of any supersensible meaning, words thus become useless for signifying the ideas posited by intellectualists, which, unlike ideas of the senses and sensibly conditioned understanding, are supposed to exist prior to and independently of their presence in (clear, distinct) perception. Instead, the carefully crafted definitions that intellectualist metaphysicians modeled on the definitions of mathematicians can have only so much objective meaning as sensation and reflexion are capable of conferring on them. 4. Finally, in book IV, Locke undertook to account for our knowledge of necessary truths. So far as the human psyche is concerned, propositional thought consists, first and foremost, in the comparing of (abstractly considered) ideas in respect of some relation—equality, cause and effect, etc.—with an eye to their agreement or disagreement. If their agreement or disagreement is immediately perceptible by a simple consideration of the ideas alone, without recourse to the senses for further evidence, then propositional thought (intuition) and reasoning (demonstration) count as knowledge of necessary truth (otherwise not). Given the anti-innatist brief of ECHU, this result is all Locke required to discharge it. For it then becomes a matter of indifference (i) that the ideas involved have their source empirically in sense perception or in the discretionary compositions of imagination, and (ii) whether they are, in various particulars, confused or obscure: provided

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they are clear and distinct enough to enable us to immediately perceive their agreement in some respect—for example, the greater lightness of the color canary yellow in relation to the color indigo—we have all we need in order to perceive a necessary truth. More particularly, the necessity we perceive in this way is merely relative: it is not intrinsic to the ideas themselves, independently of the respects in which they are compared. For example, if a person lacks the ability to sense or imagine indigo, and the relation of being “lighter than” that canary yellow has with respect to indigo is consequently completely beyond his ken, there is still nothing to prevent the person from having the same idea of canary yellow he would even if he could see indigo without impediment. Similarly, if one is ignorant of cube roots, and the necessary relation of equality of the sum of 2 and 1 to the cube root of 81 is completely beyond one’s ken, this will in no way prevent one from acquiring the same idea of the sum of 2 and 1 that persons versed in cube roots are able to form. In cases like these, where the ideas concerned in a necessary relation are separately conceivable, the necessity is never inherent in the ideas themselves but depends instead on the mind’s act of comparison and what it perceives thereby. Since this precludes the possibility of discovering necessary truths of this kind by analyzing the contents of the ideas concerned in them,2 it also eliminates the raison d’être for a pure intellect capable of descrying a priori the intrinsic necessities that had been imputed to ideas (for example, the clear and distinct intellectual perception of the idea of “the true and immutable nature” of a triangle that, according to Descartes, discloses the equality between the sum of its angles and two right angles). And with this Locke’s refutation of innatism is complete: if knowledge of necessary truth is simply a matter of comparing distinct ideas that have been acquired a posteriori by means of the senses, and owe whatever complexity they have to the discretionary action of the understanding (in discerning, combining, and abstracting sensory data), then there is no longer any reason to have recourse to innate ideas in order to account for it. B. Ideas, the Immediate Objects of Consciousness: Locke’s Sensibilism That Locke’s treatment of human understanding should assign philosophical priority to the psychological over the epistemological and ontological is part and parcel of the anti-innatist program prosecuted in ECHU. For its focus is ipso facto the origin of the ideas concerned in all judgment and reasoning. Since Locke’s rejection of innate ideas committed him to the view that the mind starts out an “empty cabinet” until “the Senses at first let in particular Ideas” (I/ii/§15), the explanation 2. The only exceptions admitted by Locke are the sort of trivial, uninstructive necessary relations that add nothing to the case put forward by intellectualist innatists. These include not only conceptual identities (“Water is water”) but conceptual containments as well (ECHU IV/viii/§§4–5): “No mountain can exist without a valley” is a necessary truth because no idea of the former can be formed without also forming an idea of the latter (this contrasts with instructive cases like that of canary yellow being necessarily lighter than indigo and the sum of 2 and 1 being necessarily equal to the cube root of 81). This difference points to Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic a priori cognition, but, for reasons considered in chapter 8-D, we cannot infer from this that Locke got there before Kant.


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to be given of their origin must, in the first instance, be strictly psychological, that is, confined to the discovery of the powers of the human understanding to acquire ideas, the limits implicit in these powers, and the various operations through which its powers discover themselves to the psychological investigator.3 By determining which ideas fall within the power of human understanding to acquire, Locke hoped to establish which things the human understanding is capable of thinking (sensing, conceiving) prior to and independently of any inquiry into which really existent things it has within its power to know by means of these ideas, or under which cognitive conditions and limitations it is able to realize its cognitive power. I will endeavor to show, both in the subsequent chapters of part I and throughout this work, how the tendency of commentators to underestimate or ignore this distinction has led to the imposition of unsuitable, often anachronistic, interpretive models of theories of understanding developed on the Lockean model. To help ensure against this, both this chapter and its successor will be devoted strictly to the properly psychological dimension of Locke’s theory: the powers that constitute the human ability to form ideas, and how the limits of these powers restrict the scope of application of these ideas. The epistemological and metaphysical consequences of Locke’s psychology of human understanding will be considered later (chapters 7 and 9). Locke employed the term “idea” in much the same all-encompassing sense in which traditional metaphysicians used “being,” except that it is restricted to the narrower sphere of conscious understanding: I must here in the Entrance beg pardon of my Reader, for the frequent use of the Word Idea, which he will find in the following Treatise. It being that Term, which, I think, serves best to stand for whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding when a Man thinks . . . or whatsoever it is, which the Mind can be employ’d about in thinking. (ECHU I/i/§8) Whatsoever the Mind perceives in it self, or is the immediate object of Perception, Thought, or Understanding, that I call Idea. (II/viii/§8)

The notion of idea is that of being in general considered in relation to understanding, understood as the faculty of thinking (perceiving, imagining, judging, reasoning). Since Locke deemed even sensation a species of thinking (“to me sensation [is] comprehended under thinking in general,” CWS 466), he had need of 3. Locke’s association with the tabula rasa (blank tablet) is frequently exaggerated to the point of caricature, so that he is supposed to have denied not only innate ideas but innate sensory capacities and intellectual faculties as well, in the conviction that nothing can enter into the constitution of our ideas or form them except experience. In reality, Locke inferred a power innate to the understanding for every idea it has: “God . . . hath furnished Man with those Faculties, which will serve for the sufficient discovery of all things requisite to the end of such a Being; and I doubt not but to shew, that a Man by the right use of his natural Abilities, may, without any innate Principles, attain the Knowledge of a God, and other things that concern him” (ECHU I/iv/§12); “For we cannot act any thing, but by our Faculties; nor talk of Knowledge itself, but by the help of those Faculties, which are fitted to apprehend even what Knowledge is” (IV/xi/§3). Nor was he any less shy about introducing “natural tendencies imprinted on the Minds of Men” (I/iii/§3) into his psychology of human understanding.

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an all-inclusive term for what we think—the objects of thought—corresponding to the all-inclusiveness of thinking itself: because treating in [ECHU] of the understanding, which is nothing but the faculty of thinking, I could not well treat of that faculty of the mind, which consists in thinking, without considering the immediate objects of the mind in thinking, which I call ideas: and therefore in treating of the understanding, I guess it will not be thought strange, that the greatest part of my book has been taken up, in considering what these objects of the mind, in thinking, are; whence they come; what use the mind makes of them, in its several ways of thinking; and what are the outward marks whereby it signifies them to others, or records them for its own use. And this, in short, is my way by ideas. (CWS 134)

Since thinking cannot cannot exist where a psyche is not in operation, Locke’s definition precludes the possibility of any idea preexisting consciousness: “To ask, at what time a Man has first any Ideas, is to ask, when he begins to perceive; having Ideas, and Perception being the same thing” (ECHU II/i/§9); and, a fortiori, no “Truths can be imprinted on the Understanding without being perceived” (I/ ii/§5).4 That indeed is the chief virtue of this, nowadays, much-maligned notion: by defining “presence to consciousness in perception” into “idea,” Locke circumvented the need faced by intellectualist innatists to distinguish (1) sensuous imagery from ideas properly so called (objects strictly of intellectual consciousness), to distinguish (2) the idea itself (as native to intellect) from its presence to consciousness in perception, and (3) to distinguish perceptions of these ideas according to both quantity (complete or incomplete) and quality (clear or obscure, distinct or confused, adequate or inadequate, intuitive or symbolic, etc.).5 The third distinction is not needed because Lockean ideas, by definition, are the objects we think: nothing more, nothing less.6 This means that no distinction between the appearance of our ideas and their reality is possible (ECHU II/xxix/§5, cited in D-3 below): ideas just are everything we think—sense, understand, judge, reason— them to be, and everything we think them to be they necessarily are (I shall 4. As Michael Ayers put it: “Locke’s ‘ideas’, when not occurring in actual sensation (or ‘reflection’), are sensory images or quasi-sensations. They are mental images in that to have an (occurrent) idea is evidently for Locke to be in a state of consciousness: an idea must be ‘taken notice of’ in order to exist” (Locke I, 51). 5. An example of the first distinction can be found in the passage cited from Leibniz’s New Essays concerning Human Understanding (henceforth NE) in chapter 6-C. An example of the second can be found in Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics: “the expressions in our soul, whether we conceive them or not, can be called ideas, but those we conceive or form can be called notions, concepts (conceptus)” (§27). The locus classicus of the third distinction is Descartes’s Fourth Meditation (supplemented by Principles of Philosophy I, §§45–7); according to Descartes, our understandings may be deficient quantitatively insofar as there are ideas we lack, or qualitatively by either not being able to distinguish an idea we have from other ideas (confusion) or by not being able to distinguish it at all (obscurity). All three distinctions tend to emerge, with slight variations, in all of the major early modern intellectualisms. See also chapter 15-A. 6. For Locke, it is not, strictly speaking, ideas themselves that are clear or distinct but ideas considered in relation to the words to which they give objective signification: ECHU Epistle (12–14) and II/xxix/§§6–12.


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henceforth refer to this as the “appearance = reality principle”).7 Accordingly, no idea can be brought to consciousness that is not, ipso facto, perceived perfectly (qualitatively) down to its (quantitatively) least element (though this does not mean everything perceived is attentively discernible). The need for the second distinction central to intellectualism disappears because ideas that cannot preexist actual consciousness cannot be innate, or otherwise exist independently of sensation and reflexion. All ideas have instead to be acquired; and insofar as many require no action on the part of understanding but are passively admitted into perception, their acquisition is an affair entirely of the senses. As true even of those of our ideas devoid of sensation contents—the ideas of reflexion that the understanding has of its own operations (constituting both its actions and passions)—the first intellectualist distinction (between sensuous imagery and ideas properly so called) also vanishes. In its place, Locke propounded a thoroughgoing sensibilism, including not only what traditionally had been accounted among the senses—capacities to be affected by things external to the mind such as sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste—but an internal sense as well: The other Fountain, from which Experience furnisheth the Understanding with Ideas, is the Perception of the Operations of our own Minds within us, as it is employ’d about the Ideas it has got; which Operations, when the Soul comes to reflect on, and consider, do furnish the Understanding with another set of Ideas, which could not be had from things without: and such are, Perception, Thinking, Doubting, Believing, Reasoning, Knowing, Willing, and all the different actings of our own Minds; which we being conscious of, and observing in our selves, do from these receive into our Understandings, as distinct Ideas, as we do from Bodies affecting our Senses. This Source of Ideas, every Man has wholly in himself: And though it be not Senses, as having nothing to do with external Objects; yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be call’d internal Sense. But as I call the other Sensation, so I call this REFLECTION, the Ideas it affords being such only, as the Mind gets by reflecting on its own Operations within it self. By REFLECTION then, in the following part of this Discourse, I would be understood to mean, that notice which the Mind takes of its own Operations, and the manner of them, by reason whereof, there come to be Ideas of these Operations in the Understanding. These two, I say, viz. External, Material things, as the Objects of SENSATION; and the Operations of our own Minds within, as the Objects of REFLECTION, are, to me, the only Originals, from whence all our Ideas take their beginnings. The term Operations here, I use in a large sence, as comprehending not barely the Actions of the Mind about its Ideas, but some sort of Passions arising sometimes from them, such as is the satisfaction or uneasiness arising from any thought. (II/i/§4)8 7. “’Tis the first Act of the Mind, when it has any Sentiments or Ideas at all, to perceive its Ideas, and so far as it perceives them, to know each what it is, and thereby also to perceive their difference, and that one is not another. This is so absolutely necessary, that without it there could be no Knowledge, no Reasoning, no Imagination, no distinct Thoughts at all. By this the Mind clearly and infallibly perceives each Idea to agree with it self, and to be what it is; and all distinct Ideas to disagree, i.e. the one not to be the other: And this it does without any pains, labour, or deduction; but at first view, by its natural power of Perception and Distinction” (ECHU IV/i/§4) See also IV/i/§4 and IV/vii/§4. 8. Also: “I pretend not to teach, but to enquire; and therefore cannot but confess here again, That external and internal Sensation, are the only passages that I can find, of Knowledge, to the Understand-

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The ideas of reflexion furnished by the internal sense require no “reflection” in the conventional sense: as immediate objects of sense, they arise just as involuntarily as, and no more involve pondering or reckoning than, ideas of the external senses such as colors, odors, and sounds (as noted in chapter 1, I use the spelling reflexion for objects immediately perceived by means of the internal sense, and reserve reflection exclusively for deliberative activity having nothing to do with the sensory acquisition of ideas). Because Lockean ideas are, by definition, relative to the operations9 of thought, each idea of sensation is individuated according to the corresponding idea of reflexion furnished by the internal sense, so that each new reflexive consideration (perceiving, discerning, compounding, etc.) constitutes a new idea. This, indeed, is implicit in Locke’s view that we can acquire an idea of temporal change only from the internal perception of change within our own understandings, that is, not from sensation but only from reflexion (II/xiv/ §§3–6): I would have any one try, whether he can keep one unvaried single Idea in his Mind, without any other, for any considerable time together. . . . he will, I suppose, find it difficult to keep all other Ideas out of his Mind: But that some, either of another kind, or various Consideration of that Idea (each of which Considerations is a new Idea) will constantly succeed one another in his thoughts, let him be as wary as he can. (II/xiv/§§13–4)

No matter how much our sensations might be changing during an interval between ideas of reflexion, no change of ideas of sensations can be perceived externally unless and until a change of reflexions is perceived internally; and no matter how little our sensations might be changing, we have only to perceive a change in our ideas of reflexion for the corresponding sensations, even if qualitatively indistinguishable, to count as distinct ideas (chapter 13-C). In this way, then, each new reflexive consideration of sensation is a new idea of sensation, and each new idea of sensation entails a new reflexive consideration of sensation. However, too much should not be read into the principium individuationis of ideas. In an abstractionist framework of the kind in which Locke operated, it is not equivalent to Berkeley’s principle that the esse of sensible things is percipi (they exist only in being perceived). For though, qua idea, the content present to coning. These alone, as far as I can discover, are the Windows by which light is let into this dark Room.” (ECHU II/xi/§17) 9. Locke makes clear in the passage cited in the previous paragraph (ECHU II/i/§4) that he uses the term ‘operation’ to comprise the passions (perceptions as well as emotions and desires) no less than the actions of the mind. Leibniz’s criticism that Locke’s position commits him to a reflective regress (NE 118) depends, it seems to me, on discounting Locke’s insistence that the one is just as deserving of being thought of as a sense as the other: a mere passive admission of sensations or reflexions into consciousness, with no need for any further mental activity in order for them to be given. There is thus no more need for the giving of reflexions itself to be given (and so on ad infinitum) than there is for the giving of sensations to be given simply in order for them to be perceived. Leibniz’s criticism seems to depend on the mistaken supposition that, for Locke, reflexive perceptual consciousness always involves an explicit act of focusing attention; however, as texts such as ECHU II/ix/§10 attest, Locke supposed that a great deal goes in our minds that is not attentively accessible to us: see chapter 6-C below.


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sciousness in sensation is indeed strictly correlated to its being taken notice of, the possibility remains open that, qua existent given to (not made by) the mind, a sensible object might continue to exist unperceived. In particular, by contrast with Berkeley, Locke did not face the problem of explaining how the “vulgar” can get it so wrong when they suppose their sensations to be individually the same with objects existing outside and independently of the mind when ideas appear in every respect what they really are and really are in every respect as they appear. For Locke, the vulgar view does not concern ideas qua ideas but qua the existence given in them; and there is no longer any reason to suppose that the appearance = reality principle holds once abstraction is made from the status of these existents as ideas present to us in sensation. Though Locke eventually did resolve the question of the ontological status of the existence given in ideas of sensation in favor of mind-dependence, he did so not, like Berkeley, for reasons having to do with the conceptual content of the idea of existence with which sensation acquaints us (chapter 11), but on the basis of nonconceptual, empirico-probabilistic considerations that show it to be more likely that our senses operate according to a mechanistic model than the Aristotelean one, with all that implies. The recognition that it is not a purely conceptual matter of features intrinsic to ideas themselves is particularly important for correctly interpreting Locke’s conception of the relation of ideas of sensation to their extramental causes (substances in the external world). Many commentators suppose that Locke treated this relation as an intrinsic feature of ideas of sensation, so that to perceive them is ipso facto to (1) conceive a substance external to the mind as their cause and, a fortiori, (2) to recognize that they are internal to the mind and so in need such a cause. Yet for (2) to be correct, we would have to suppose that Locke anticipated Berkeley’s quintessentially antiabstractionist doctrine of ideas, according to which the possibility of distinguishing the existence of the sensory contents present in the idea from the fact of their presence to the mind in perception (and so their status as idea), is precluded. For only then could Locke have supposed that we know immediately from their presence in idea that these contents themselves are incapable of existing without the mind, and can then infer that, far from existing as substances in their own right, they are mere modifications of the mind which must have an extramental cause (i.e., something other than another idea). Yet Locke gave every indication of being a convinced abstractionist, and there is no reason to think he would not have happily countenanced the sort of abstraction specifically ruled out by esse is percipi. So was there any other ground on which Locke could have held that sensations, qua ideas, are intrinsically mental and intrinsically relate to a cause outside the mind? Given that he regarded ideas as subject to the appearance = reality principle, I can think of none that would not commit him to the patent absurdity that a creature that never has any other sensation than a uniform field of orange color would, in having that idea, also have ideas of the impossibility of this orange existing independently of its being perceived AND of this orange having as its cause a substance existing outside the mind. For how could these not be part of its mental life if they are intrinsic to every idea qua idea? Even Locke’s “Oyster, or Cockle” with the “small dull Perception, whereby they are distinguished from perfect Insensibility” (ECHU II/ix/

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§§13–4), would ipso facto have a rich mental life consisting of ideas of substances, mind and world, and their causal interaction. Indeed, if all this is supposed to be intrinsic to even the humblest idea of sensation, Locke’s oyster would be more sophisticated than vulgar humans, since it would regard sensible objects not as things existing outside and independently of it but merely as the effects of imperceptible mind-independent causes. To avoid these and related implications, it suffices to construe Locke’s notion of an idea agnostically when it comes to the ontological status of sensible things. That is, we should read him as having already abstracted from their status as ideas when he took up the issue of whether or not the things present to us immediately in sensation have an existence independent of their being perceived, and so are capable of continuing to exist when no longer perceived. The fact that he resolved the issue in the negative thus tells us nothing whatsoever about what Locke conceived an idea to be (what ideas enable us to think) and a great deal about what he conceived the cause of ideas to be (what ideas enable us to cognize).10 One final remark about the Lockean principium individuationis of ideas: if each new reflexive consideration of sensation is a new idea of sensation, and each new idea of sensation entails a new reflexive consideration of sensation, it does not follow that every act of reflexive consideration must be an attentive consideration. That Locke regarded attentive consideration—or indeed even the potential for an 10. Martha Bolton is the interpreter most closely associated with the view just criticized, e.g. “it is a mistake to think [Locke] takes simple ideas as such to be totally lacking in what we might call conceptual connections. . . . That simple ideas are indicators of the distinctive qualities of things is something we naturally understand, not something we discover entirely from repeated idea-patterns. . . . The visual idea of a cube is a light-colour pattern plus the understanding that it is caused by a cube.” “The Real Molyneux Question and the Basis of Locke’s Answer,” in Locke’s Philosophy, ed. G.. A. J. Rogers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 78 and 98; for a similar view, see Paul Guyer, “Locke’s Philosophy of Language,” in The Cambridge Companion to Locke, ed. Vere Chappell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). On Bolton’s reading of Locke, the status of an idea of sensation as a cognitive ground of the existence of something outside me is integral, even intrinsic, to its status as an idea. Yet there is nothing in Locke’s text to suggest that he deemed the former part and parcel of the latter (including the oft-cited IV/iv/§4). Those who suppose he deemed them inextricably connected may be yielding to the temptation to read his claim in ECHU IV/xi that we have sensitive knowledge of the causes of our ideas into his conception of a simple idea of sensation as such. But knowledge through simple ideas and simple ideas as such are two quite different things for Locke. A simple idea would not be simple if it included in it all the ideational contents that enter into sensitive knowledge as being requisite to conceive its relation to an external cause: ideas of substances, causal powers, things outside the mind, the qualities whereby they produce sensations in us, etc. Moreover, sensitive knowledge would not be knowledge if having it did not, like all propositions, consist in a comparison between all these different ideational contents with an eye to their agreement or disagreement (chapter 8-D). The case is similar to that of intuitive knowledge of one’s own existence (IV/ix): just because I cannot fail to know that I exist whenever I think does not make existence an integral part of my idea of myself as a thinking being. To suppose otherwise would be to treat actual existence as necessary to the I in the same way the ontological argument for the existence of God treats actual existence as a constituent element of the idea of God (so that to think God is ipso facto to regard God as existing). In the same way, although sensitive knowledge makes it impossible not to regard what is present to one in sensation as existing outside the imagination, and so as requiring a cause external to the mind (chapter 9-B), this does not make the property of having a cause external to the mind an intrinsic feature of simple ideas of sensation as such.


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idea to be the focus of attention—as sufficient but not necessary to the generation of an idea is clear from his description of the (highly complex) mental operations he deemed requisite for visual depth perception: Nor need we wonder, that this is done with so little notice, if we consider, how very quick the actions of the Mind are performed: For as it self is thought to take up no space, to have no extension; so its actions seem to require no time, but many of them seem to be crouded into an Instant. . . . Secondly, we shall not be so much surprized, that this is done in us with so little notice, if we consider, how the facility which we get of doing things, by a custom of doing, makes them often pass in us without our notice. Habits, especially such as are begun very early, come, at last, to produce actions in us, which often escape our observation. (ECHU II/ix/§10)

Locke relies on various analogies to support his thesis that when we “see”in depth we are not perceiving at all but judging, and confound them only because the complex mental operations involved escape attentive consideration: how in speech we fail to notice the sounds we perceive auditorily because our attention is focused on their meaning (§9); how in reading we fail to notice the letters we perceive visually on the page because our attention is focused on the narrative (§9); how in looking we take no notice of dark intervals of blinking that continuously interrupt our perception because our attention is focused on things and events outside us; (§10); how when our attention is absorbed in the external situation our internally perceived reckoning regarding it escapes our notice but would not if the situation obliged us to share our thoughts with a companion (§10); and so on. In cases such as these, the force of habit may be too strong, our retentive capacities too feeble, or our powers of discernment too coarse for us to attend directly to all the ideas present to our consciousness in sensation or reflexion. Thus, for Locke, the spotlight of attention is both too narrow and too weak too illuminate all the ideas present to our perception, and there is no alternative but to have recourse to indirect, extrapolative (though still empirical!) methods, in order to penetrate the nature and workings of human understanding. Even where attentive discernment is possible, its testimony may not only need supplementation by inquiries of a more theoretical kind but may even be rendered redundant by them. The source of the idea of temporal succession is a case in point: But to any one that shall . . . say, Many have had the idea of time, who never reflected on the constant train of ideas, succeeding one another in their minds, whilst waking, I grant it; but add, that want of reflection makes not any thing cease to be: if it did, many men’s actions would have no cause, nor rise, nor manner, because many men never reflect so far on their own actions, as to consider what they are bottomed on, or how they are performed. A man may measure duration by motion, of which he has no other idea, but of a constant succession of ideas in train; and yet never reflect on that succession of ideas in his mind. A man may guess at the length of his stay by himself in the dark; here is no succession to measure by, but that of his own thoughts: and without some succession, I think there is no measure of duration. But though in this case he

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LOCKE’S NEW MODEL PHILOSOPHY measures the length of the duration by the train of his ideas, yet he may never reflect on that, but conclude he does it he knows not how. (CWS 414–5)

No one has to attend to the constant train of ideas perceived internally in order to acquire ideas of succession and duration. But even were one to do so, unless one’s observations were informed by an understanding of the theoretical apparatus and objectives of Locke’s psychology of human understanding, he would no more be able to ascertain the significance of what he observes than one who gazes at the lights in the night sky in complete innocence of astronomical conceptions of planets, stars, and other celestial phenomena. For it was not the evidence of introspection but the implications of a series of thought experiments that Locke replied upon to show that internal sense, not external, is the source of temporal ideas and the locus of the temporal phenomenology11 of experience (chapter 13-C). That Locke, as psychologist, was in the business of proffering descriptions of introspective experience, as philosophical psychologists were to do in more recent times (James, the sense-datumists, etc.), is thus a complete misconception. Though he did not despise the evidence of attentive introspection, he never let its limitations and eccentricities prevent him from engaging in a variety of empirical considerations and experiments to discover what human psychological operations “are bottomed on, or how they are performed.” It was perception, and perception alone (internal and external)—not higher reflexive operations such as retention, discernment, etc.—that demarcated the sphere of Locke’s concern; but his conception of it, and its distinctiveness from higher forms of reflexive activity, depended entirely on considerations of the most indirect, extrapolative kind. This is true even in the case of Locke’s refutation of the Cartesian metaphysical doctrine that the mind whose essence is thinking must ipso facto always be thinking (ECHU II/i). To be sure, he cited the absence of any memory of thinking during dreamless sleep as evidence in favor of his view. But this cannot be taken to imply that Locke meant to exclude all other forms of evidence. Quite the contrary, the foregoing considerations, and much else besides, show that between the testimony of retention and introspection on the one hand and essentialist metaphysical speculation of the kind on which Descartes based his thesis on the other hand there is a wide range of evidence that Locke was prepared to countenance. Thus, if a series of experiments were to show that even during dreamless sleep the parts of the brain associated with conscious activity (imagining, judgment, reasoning) were active, while those associated with forming memories and/or rendering them consciously accessible were inactive, I see no reason to doubt that Locke, if convinced of the soundness of the experiments, would have accepted them as 11. By ‘phenomenology,’ I shall henceforth mean the way things seem and/or are naturally described, regardless of whether things are objectively as they seem. For example, we may seem to see a face smile ironically in the same sense we see the light and colors, but the correct psychological explanation might treat the latter as immediate sense perception and the former as a product of experience and association. In the case of time, things may seem to occur at a faster or at a slower rate, time may seem to stand still or to fly by: this phenomenology need not imply anything about the objects present in sensation if the true locus of our sense of the passage of time is reflexion (trains of thought, shifts of attention, etc.).


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evidence that the mind always thinks notwithstanding the absence of any memory of it. For what he seems to have found most objectionable was not the Cartesian thesis itself but was the way it had been arrived at: Descartes’s preference for apriorist speculative reasoning and comparative indifference to empirical methods generally, however carefully prepared and executed. Locke was an exponent of the method of proportioning belief in all matters of fact and real existence to the evidence of experience (II/i§10); and while, consistent with that, he had no a priori bias against the testimony of introspection, there is ample textual evidence (a sampling of which I have just considered) to indicate that his preference lay with nonintrospective, extrapolative methods, including the experiments and theory of scientists (as, for example, the “little Excursion into Natural Philosophy”—II/viii/ §22—on which he based his distinction between ideas of primary and secondary qualities). With minor modifications, the Lockean principium individuationis carries over from the numerical to the qualitative distinctness of ideas. This is evident from Locke’s distinction between simple and complex ideas: Though the Qualities that affect our Senses, are, in the things themselves, so united and blended, that there is no separation, no distance between them; yet ’tis plain, the Ideas they produce in the Mind, enter by the Senses simple and unmixed. For though the Sight and Touch often take in from the same Object, at the same time, different Ideas; as a Man sees at once Motion and Colour; the Hand feels Softness and Warmth in the same piece of Wax: Yet the simple Ideas thus united in the same Subject, are as perfectly distinct, as those that come in by different senses. The coldness and hardness, which a Man feels in a piece of Ice, being as distinct Ideas in the Mind, as the Smell and Whiteness of a Lily; or as the taste of Sugar, and smell of Rose: And there is nothing can be plainer to a Man, than the clear and distinct Perception he has of those simple Ideas; which being each in it self uncompounded, contains in it nothing but one uniform Appearance, or conception in the mind, and is not distinguishable into different Ideas. (ECHU II/ii/§1)

Because Locke deemed it possible to separately consider the motion and color of a visible object, or the coldness and hardness of a tangible object, by abstractive aspect discrimination (the capacity to distinguish what cannot be separately perceived in sense), he counted them as distinct ideas. It did not matter to him, as it would to Berkeley and Hume, that motion cannot present itself to the eyes in the absence of light and color, that cold cannot be felt without also feeling hardness or softness, that the pitch of a tone cannot be heard without also hearing its timbre, and so on. Being impossible to perceive separately did not, in Locke’s view, entail an absence of complexity. True simplicity takes us beyond the limits of what it is possible to perceive separately to what is impossible to distinguish even by abstractive consideration. There is, however, another feature of Locke’s conception of the simplicity of an idea that also needs to be taken into account. An idea is simple if it is underivable through any reflexive operation performed on ideas already in one’s possession, but instead must be passively perceived (sensed) in order to be acquired:

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LOCKE’S NEW MODEL PHILOSOPHY it is not in the Power of the most exalted Wit, or enlarged Understanding, by any quickness or variety of Thought, to invent or frame one new simple Idea in the mind . . . nor can any force of the Understanding, destroy those that are there. The Dominion of Man, in this little World of his own Understanding . . . reaches no farther, than to compound and divide the Materials, that are made to his Hand. (ECHU II/ii/§2)

Indeed, the origin of an idea, whether in sense perception or as the product of reflexive activity directed upon the data of sense perception, is, for Locke, at least as important to its status as simple or complex as whether it admits of perceptual or abstractive differentiation. For example, notwithstanding the fact that it is divisible into parts, Locke counted the idea of space, or extension, as simple, “since it is the least Idea of Space that the Mind can form to it self, and that cannot be divided by the Mind into any less whereof it has in it self any determined Perception” (note added in fifth edition to II/xv/§9). The primary, irreducible constituent of the idea of extension is juxtaposition (Partes extra Partes), just as the primary, irreducible constituent of the idea of duration is succession, neither of which can be resolved into or compounded from anything unjuxtaposed (a point) or unsuccessive (a moment) without thereby nullifying the very quality that makes them the ideas they are. The same imperviousness to divisibility presumably extends to numerous other sensible qualities, including light and colors, matte/gloss, and other features specific to visible extension, as well as hard/ soft, smooth/rough, wet/dry, and other features of tangible extension. More generally, any complex phenomenon the sensible quality of which is so indelibly bound up with its complexity that it is impossible to become acquainted with it otherwise than by sensing the complex, Locke would probably count as simple (xxi/§3). For example, one cannot imagine what an orchestra sounds like by endeavoring to combine in imagination the sound of each instrument playing solo. Nor can one anticipate the taste of magret de canard à l’orange by sampling each of the ingredients individually and trying to imagine what they taste like combined. Precisely because origin is as important as complexity in Locke’s notion of a simple idea, the fact that we depend on passive sense perception to acquaint ourselves with sensible qualities such as these strongly suggests that Locke would have deemed these ideas fully as simple as the “Smell and Whiteness of a Lily; or as the taste of Sugar, and the Smell of a Rose” (ii/ §1).12 C. Complex Ideas: Locke’s Empiricism The principal challenge confronting Locke in book II, indeed in the ECHU as a whole, was to explain the acquisition of the ideas Descartes and other intellectualists deemed impossible to account for except as givens of a pure intellectual 12. When origin is factored into Locke’s notion of a simple idea of sensation, its relation to his “blank slate” (tabula rasa) anti-innatism becomes clear: at the first moment of conscious life, any idea of sensation, however composite, must be accounted a “simple” idea because it would be impossible for the mind, at that point in its existence, to assemble the idea from the ideational ingredients available to it (for there are none). However, if, instead of this composite idea, its constituent elements had been


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intuition, with respect to which all data of the senses are ultimately superfluous. These include substance and accident, cause and effect, action, power, identity, magnitude, number, infinity, and God.13 To do so, Locke needed to explicate all such ideas entirely in terms of the power of the understanding “to repeat, compare, and unite” the simple ideas already in its possession so as thereby to “make at Pleasure new complex Ideas” (II/ii/§2). Two constraints made this task particularly difficult. First, like other mechanistically minded thinkers of the time (chapter 6-A), Locke rejected the notion that the senses are windows, or conduits, through which the objects affecting them insinuate images of their nature (properties, constitution) into our minds. The multiplicity of ideas of sensation need reflect no corresponding multiplicity in their causes; some or even all sensible qualities may have nothing whatsoever in common with the qualities of their external causes; and the fixity and coherence we discover among ideas may coincide with the fixity and coherence of their causes wholly, partially, or not at all, and do so (or not) in any of countless possible ways. Above all, there is no guarantee that the ideational contents furnished by perception will be the ones best suited for the cognition of the causes of ideas—or even suitable at all. For these reasons, the task of human understanding, as conceived by Locke, is nothing like assembling the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that fit naturally together to form pictures of the reality beyond our ideas. On the contrary, the ideational inputs of perception are best thought of as a continuous flux of jumbles (ECHU II/vii/§9 and xiv/§3), upon which the understanding continuously struggles to impose order and coherence, to the end not of gaining cognition of their causes but of instituting and maintaining the economy of thought best suited to the purposes of human existence. Any cognition of the world as it is in itself, apart from our ideas, should thus be regarded as an extra dividend, to which the understanding must demonstrate its title before claiming more than conative worth for its productions. The second constraint governing Locke’s account of complex ideas is that the understanding cannot be the source of any new, original (simple) ideas other than the purely subjective reflexive ideas of its own operations afforded by the internal sense (“it is not in the Power of the most exalted Wit, or enlarged Understanding, by any quickness or variety of Thought, to invent or frame one new simple Idea in the mind,” ECHU II/ii/§2). The power of the understanding to form complex ideas is strictly a function of the modes of combination of which the simple ideas available to it already in themselves admit. The simple ideas of color afforded by the visual sense can be combined into various arrays; the simple ideas of extension afforded by both the visual and tactual sense admit of being divided and compounded perceived first, the idea would then count as “complex” because it might have been anticipated in thought by combining the memories of its elements in the requisite way. The divide between simple and complex ideas thus does not stabilize until a certain point in life is reached, after which simple ideas are limited to such comparatively exotic things as the flavor of an uncultivated berry in a faraway land that is unknown except to locals. 13. The intellectualist innatism backdrop of Locke’s theory of ideas will be considered in detail in chapter 15-A. See also G. A. J. Rogers, Locke’s Enlightenment. Aspects of the Origin, Nature and Impact of his Philosophy (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1998), esp. chap. 4.

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into extensive magnitudes, shapes, patterns, and so forth; simple ideas of all the various external senses can be combined in relations of cooccurrence; the simple ideas of actions afforded by the internal sense can be considered separately from the discerning, comparing, and other acts specific to the understanding (much as visual extension can be abstractively considered apart from light and color) and then conjoined with ideas of the external senses; so, too, the ideas of unity and existence furnished by all senses, internal as well as external, can be conjoined with, or separated from, any idea or collection of ideas; and so on. Because the ways in which complex ideas are possible is a purely contingent matter of whichever senses the understanding happens to have available to it, the only ideas we are capable of forming of the modes in accordance with which simple ideas can be combined into complex ones must be acquired empirically, through the senses, or not at all. If we had more, or fewer, or different senses (II/ii§3, ix/§15, xxiii/§13, III/vi/§4, IV/iii/§23), then, along with additional simple ideas, we would have ideas of ways to form complex ideas that, with the present constitution of our senses, are utterly unimaginable. The upshot of the two constraints governing Locke’s account of complex ideas is that the understanding must be conceived as nothing more than a faculty of imagination, in that every combination or relation of simple ideas it is capable of forming is one that might, in principle, have existed right in sense itself, without the understanding needing to perform any action at all. In truth, the only thing Lockean understanding is capable of that the senses are not is forming a single, unitary consideration from what otherwise would remain a manifold of separate, wholly independent cooccurrent views, so that we become conscious of the manifold ideas in sense or imagination as the manifold of a single idea: As simple Ideas, are observed to exist in several Combinations united together; so the Mind has a power to consider several of them united together, as one Idea; and that not only as they are united in external Objects, but as it self has join’d them. Ideas thus made up of several simple ones put together, I call Complex . . . which though complicated of various simple Ideas, or complex Ideas made up of simple ones, yet are, when the Mind pleases, considered each by it self, as one entire thing, and signified by one name. (ECHU II/xii/§1)

Locke distinguished two ways in which manifolds of simple ideas may be considered as a single complex idea: as substances and as modes. In the case of the former, we consider an assemblage of qualities conjoined in the imagination as a single individual substance, or an assemblage of individual substances as a single collective substance: the Ideas we have of Substances, and the ways we come by them; I say our specifick Ideas of Substances are nothing else but a Collection of a certain number of simple Ideas, considered as united in one thing. (xxiii/§14) the Mind hath also complex collective Ideas, of Substances; 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.


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the Idea of such a collection of Men as make an Army, though consisting of a great number of distinct Substances, is as much one Idea, as the Idea of a Man: And the great collective Idea of all Bodies whatsoever 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 never so many Particulars . . . every one finds, that he represents to his own Mind, by one Idea, in one view. . . . Nor is it harder to conceive how an Army of ten Thousand Men, should make one Idea, than how a Man should make one Idea; it being as easie to the Mind, to unite into one, the Idea of a great number of Men, and consider it as one; as it is to unite into one particular, all the distinct Ideas, that make up the composition of a Man, and consider them altogether as one. (xxiv/§§1–2)

Ideas of modes are formed in the same way ideas of substances are formed: an assemblage of simple or complex ideas collected by the imagination are considered as one. They differ only in this: we consider ideas as one mode without regard to “any connexion they have in Nature” (IV/iv/§5); they “contain not in them the supposition of subsisting by themselves” (II/xii/§4), and “are not looked upon to be the characteristical Marks of any real Beings that have a steady existence, but scattered and independent Ideas, put together by the Mind” (xxii/§1). Finally, ideas of substances and modes alike differ from “The last sort of complex Ideas . . . that we call Relation” (§7), which are formed by “bringing two Ideas, whether simple or complex, together; and setting them by one another, so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one” (§1). Since Locke evidently believed he could account for all the materials of objective thought and reasoning in purely sensibilist terms, without having recourse to pure intellect, simply by means of acts of considering otherwise disjoint manifolds of sense or imagination as the complex constituents of one idea or relation of ideas, it may seem astonishing that he had so little to say about them. Kant, after all, devoted more time and effort to analyzing the acts whereby the manifold of sense and its synthesis in imagination are regarded as united than to anything else, because he too traced all objectivity in representation to them. In Locke’s case, however, we have little choice but to speculate. We may wonder, for example, whether, and if so to what extent, ideas have logical, linguistic, and/or mathematical structure. Even though there is no explicit evidence that Locke took ideas to be so structured, many commentators take for granted that he did because of the way they interpret his theory of the relation of signs to ideas.14 But it is equally possible that Locke did not deem it germane to his investigation of human understanding to open this particular can of worms. In that case, our question would becomes this: how much leeway is there in Locke’s theory of ideas to accommodate powers of unifying ideas in logical, linguistic, and other ways not expressly distinguished or discussed by him? For example, recent experimental evidence suggests that infants acquire the ability to hear discrete linguistic elements instead of the “seamless acoustic ribbon” 14. Among recent commentators, Ayers is probably the leading exponent of this view. I will be considering his view in more detail shortly (see also chapter 4, note 12).

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that animals and mechanical devices register speech as being, even before they learn the meanings of words.15 If so, then, in Lockean terms, would this mean (1) that the discrete semantic elements that compose speech have to be reckoned as simple ideas, and (2) that among the powers of understanding to consider manifolds of simple ideas in a single complex idea is the ability to fashion phonetically articulated complexes from them? The products of the reflexive operations of the understanding that Locke attributed to humans and animals alike in ECHU II/ix– xi seem pitifully inadequate to the task;16 and even abstraction, which alone he limited to human beings, falls far short of the needs of linguistic discourse (chapters 4-C and 8-B). However, since Locke’s conception allows for multiply complex ideas (“I call Complex [Ideas] complicated of various simple Ideas, or complex Ideas made up of simple ones,” xii/§1), this does not settle the issue. For even if the complex ideas formed from simple ideas fall short of the requirements of logico-linguistic structure, might not several layers of complexity suffice for properly linguistic properties to emerge? As I shall show in the next chapter, Locke seems to have understood our visual experience of depth as an emergent property that results from a process of learning, and finally mastering, a number of highly complex mental operations he may very well have conceived of as multiply complex (ix/§§8–10). There thus seems to be nothing in his theory of ideas to prevent him from admitting the possibility of explaining other phenomena similarly, including speech perception. Would this extend so far as to include among complex ideas those formed by speakers (including signers) and readers proficient in the actual meanings of the semantic elements they perceive? The answer might well be yes, in view of Locke’s thesis that the primary significations of the terms composing speech are the ideas in the speaker’s mind. To be sure, this thesis does not imply that all complex ideas, even those of minimal complexity (combinations of simple ideas and the first levels of multiple complexity ), have logico-linguistic structure as well. For it is 15. The quoted phrase comes from Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, 139. In The Language Instinct (New York: Morrow, 1994), he writes: “Babies continue to learn the sounds of their language throughout the first year. By six months, they are beginning to lump together the distinct sounds that their language collapses into a single phoneme, while continuing to discriminate equivalently distinct ones that their language keeps separate. By ten months they are no longer universal phoneticians but have turned into the parents; they do not distinguish Czech or Inselekampx phonemes unless they are Czech or Inselekampx babies. Babies make this transition before they produce or understand words, so their learning cannot depend on correlating sound with meaning. . . . They must be sorting the sounds directly, somehow tuning their speech analysis module to deliver the phonemes used in their language. The module can then serve as the front end of the system that learns words and grammar” (264–5). 16. Unless, like Ayers, one supposes that even Lockean simple ideas are linguistic units: “For Descartes simplicity was logical or conceptual. Locke in effect offered to explain conceptual simplicity as phenomenal simplicity, at the same time as he ran conceptions together with sensory appearances. . . . [I]t is necessary, . . . he assumed, to attribute to each thought a structure related, element by element, to the logical structure of any sentence which accurately expresses that thought” (Locke I, 48 and 70). Ayers does not say whether he thinks Locke thought the same about ideas in nonhuman animal understandings. I think he goes wrong in attributing to Locke the view that even at the simplest levels of consciousness (simple ideas, their unification in complex ideas, the first few layers of complexity) there is logico-linguistic structure. This vitiates, in my view, his otherwise outstanding defense of the view that Locke was a thoroughgoing imagist.


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one thing to say the former are capable of expressing the latter, and quite another to say the latter are already in themselves logico-linguistically structured (just as it does not follow from there being mathematically structured ideas at higher levels of complexity capable of expressing lower level ideas in quantitative terms that the latter are mathematically structured in themselves). Indeed, far from serving to confirm the supposition that Locke conceived of ideational thought as wordless linguistic discourse (chapter 4-C), its implication that all complex ideas other than those composed of semantic elements are nonlinguistic would confute it. The thesis merely suggests that at some level of complexity, linguistic meaning might become part of auditory phenomenology (or, in the cases of signers, visual phenomenology) in much the same way we “see” joy, disgust, anger, and other emotions in the posture of human faces or “hear” the minor mode of a melody or the finality of a cadence. That Locke left few if any clues as to his views on such matters should therefore not be allowed to obscure the basic point: his explanation of complex ideas as the result of the power of the understanding to consider a manifold of simple or complex ideas as a single idea did not limit him to the sort of crude, unworkable imagism often attributed to him. At its most primitive levels, human understanding and nonhuman animal consciousness are not fundamentally different. Only at much higher levels of complexity (if at all) might the scene present to human understanding significantly diverge from that present to the understandings of nonverbal, nonmathematical creatures. Indeed, if one takes at face value texts such as that in which Locke compared “this little World of [man’s] own Understanding” to “the great World of visible things “ (ECHU II/ii/§2), it seems to coincide very well with the thrust of his thinking. For, just as in the great world, each higher level of complexity is characterized by newly emergent properties specific to it, which in turn make possible new combinations resulting in new, still higher level emergent properties, so too in the little world of the understanding, new properties may emerge with new levels of complexity, each making possible in turn new such properties at still higher levels of complexity.17 Locke was undoubtedly wise not to enter into such topics, especially since his brand of psychological investigation of the understanding did not require him to. What clearly did fall within his brief is the empiricism18 his sensibilist theory of ideas makes possible:

17. Locke’s comparison also recalls Spinoza’s contemporaneous account of material complexity and the new properties emergent at each new level of complexity (see Ethics II, lemma 7, scholium), extending up to and beyond the level of complexity characteristic of the human body. For Spinoza conceived of the human mind as an idea whose own ideational complexity exactly mirrors that of its ideatum, the human body. Although Locke undoubtedly would have been skeptical of Spinoza’s assertion of a perfect isomorphism (not to mention the grounds of that assertion), he might very well have agreed that the ideas of the mind—its powers being to a great extent effects of the constitution of the human body—form a structure that is highly correlated with, and every bit as complex, as that of the body, and, most particularly, the brain. 18. ‘Empiricism’ is a term that Locke seldom if ever employed to describe his philosophy. But it seems apt in light of the answer to the question posed at the outset of ECHU II: “Let us then suppose the Mind, to be, as we say, white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas; How comes it to be

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LOCKE’S NEW MODEL PHILOSOPHY If we trace the progress of our Minds, and with attention observe how it repeats, adds together, and unites its simple Ideas received from Sensation or Reflection, it will lead us farther than at first, perhaps, we should have imagined. And, I believe, we shall find, if we warily observe the Originals of our Notions, that even the most abstruse Ideas, how remote soever they may seem from Sense, or from any operation of our own Minds, are yet only such, as the Understanding frames to itself, by repeating and joining together Ideas,that it had either from Objects of Sense, or from its own operations about them: So that those even large and abstract Ideas are derived from Sensation, or Reflection, being no other than what the Mind, by the ordinary use of its own Faculties, employed about Ideas, received from Objects of Sense, or from the Operations it observes in itself about them, may, and does attain unto. (ECHU II/xii/§8)

That all our ideas are either simple ideas of sensation and reflexion or products of reflexive operations applied to simple ideas is the anti-intellectualist, anti-innatist thesis that Locke’s Essay is chiefly devoted to proving. It also serves to make clear in retrospect why Locke needed to distinguish the simple from the complex as much in terms of the origin of ideas as their divisibility and distinguishability. For his fundamental aim did not require him to prove that all complexes are reducible to combinations of simple ideas, but rather this: to prove, against the reigning intellectualism of the day, the sensible origin of all our ideas, however “abstruse”. That certain ideas are divisible yet, like extension, not derivable from anything else posed no problem for him provided it could be shown that they are sensory in origin; for, in that case, they could be accounted “simple” in the only sense that truly mattered to him (section B). Indeed, when viewed in this light, the operative standard of simplicity is relative: if we can resolve an idea about whose sensory origin we are skeptical into a reflexively formable complex of simpler elements whose sensory origin seems clear, then this is simple enough for Locke’s purposes, even if we find ourselves at a loss to say which elements are simplest of all—the “true,” “absolute” simples.19 By contrast, even a single idea whose sensory origin could not be established in this way is all that would be needed to fatally compromise his empiricism (though, as Kant showed, this need not take sensibilism down with it: chapter 1). It is thus in every sense a psychological empiricism: an attempt to answer the question “What can I think?” by tracing even such ideas as infinity, substance, space, and God to sensory origins, while showing that sensible origins are fully capable of sustaining their part in the cognitive and conative economy of the human mind: furnished? . . . When has it all the materials of Reason and Knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, From Experience” (i/§2). Although many different senses of ‘empiricism’ have been distinguished in reference to early modern philosophy (see, for example, Garrett, Cognition and Commitment in Hume's Philosophy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], 29–38), the one that early modern philosophers would surely have regarded as primary is that concerning ideational origins. More particularly, what distinguishes the empiricism of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume from earlier forms of empiricism (deriving mainly from Aristotelians or Epicureans) is their commitment to sensibilism (chapter 1) and the special notion of “idea” that goes with it (chapter 4-D and, esp., section B of the present chapter). 19. This may help to explain why Locke, after introducing both figure in space and power as simple ideas (ECHU II/v and vii/§8), later explained them as complex: the former a complex idea of a simple mode (xii/§5), the latter a complex idea of a relation (xxi/§3 and xxiii/§7; see chapter 7 note 18 below).


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Thus the first Capacity of Humane Intellect, is, That the mind is fitted to receive the Impressions made on it; either, through the Senses, by outward Objects; or by its own Operations, when it reflects on them. This is the first step a Man makes towards the Discovery of any thing, and the Groundwork, whereon to build all those Notions, which ever he shall have naturally in this World. All those sublime Thoughts, which towre above the Clouds, and reach as high as Heaven it self, take their Rise and Footing here: In all that great Extent wherein the mind wanders, in those remote Speculations, it may seem to be elevated with, it stirs not one jot beyond those Ideas, which Sense or Reflection, have offered for its Contemplation. (II/i/§24)

D. Further Considerations Regarding Locke’s Theory of Ideas Earlier, I noted Locke’s criticism of philosophers who “let loose [their] Thoughts into the vast Ocean of Being, as if all that boundless Extent, were the natural, and undoubted Possession of our Understandings,” and his claim that they “began at the wrong end” (I/i/§7). Locke left no doubt as to what, in his view, the right end is: I shall pursue this following Method: First, I shall enquire into the Original of those Ideas, Notions, or whatever else you please to call them, which a Man observes, and is conscious to himself he has in his Mind; and the ways whereby the Understanding comes to be furnished with them. Secondly, I shall endeavour to shew, what Knowledge the Understanding hath by those Ideas; and the Certainty, Evidence, and Extent of it. Thirdly, I shall make some Enquiry into the Nature and Grounds of Faith, or Opinion: whereby I mean that Assent, which we give to any Proposition as true, of whose Truth yet we have no certain Knowledge: And here we shall have Occasion to examine the Reasons and Degrees of Assent. (ECHU I/i/§3)

Because the question “What can I think?” clearly takes precedence in Locke’s plan, I have attempted to treat it as separately as possible from the question “What, given the powers of the human understanding to think, can I know with certainty, or at least find reason to assent to?” However, we must not infer from this that the two questions are generally as clearly demarcated in the text. On the contrary, although Locke did not take up the theme of cognitive understanding in its own right until ECHU IV, chapters of ECHU II treat of both the contents (explicated in terms of origin) and the cognitive employment of the idea or ideas discussed in each. Yet for precisely this reason, it becomes all the more imperative for his interpreter to avoid confounding them, and to scrupulously respect the priority he assigned the one over the other in working out his plan. To this end, let us conclude our consideration of Locke’s theory of ideas with some examples of what happens when this is not done. 1. Simple ideas of sensation, according to Locke, are caused by the affection of the sense organs of the human body by environing material objects (or, in the case of some sensible qualities, by material causes internal to the body). Because

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of this, every idea of sensation has a “reference” to things outside the mind and, in particular, to the internal constitution whereby they affect our sense organs, and affect them so and not otherwise. Now, to portray sensory affection in these terms, Locke presupposes an understanding equipped with all the ideas requisite to do so: ideas of complex material objects composed of material parts; ideas of the powers conferred on material objects by the properties and disposition of their parts; ideas of the exercise of these powers in acts of motion; ideas of the effects of inciting new or changed motions in other material objects, including the human body and its sense organs; and finally ideas of the sensible qualities themselves insofar as they are conceived both as the effects and, potentially, in part at least, resemblances of their causes. As effects, and to some extent also insofar as they resemble their causes, Locke sometimes described simple ideas as distinguishing marks (ECHU II/xxxii/§14), or as signs signifying their causes (II/xxxi/§2, xxxii/§15, and IV/xxi/ §4). In this sense, then, sense perception is also a signifying relation of ideas to their (resembling or nonresembling) nonideational causes. The question thus arises how we should understand their status as signs. In section A, I argued that it cannot be accounted an integral, or intrinsic, feature of ideas of sensations themselves. For if, as Locke held, the entire content of an idea is exhausted by its appearance to consciousness immediately in sensation, then its status as a sign of its extramental causes would have to be clear on its face, and this means that, far from being a simple idea, it would have to manifest the entire panoply of (complex!) ideas enumerated in the preceding paragraph. Rather than our perception of the ideas themselves (what we think in them), the basis on which Locke accorded the status of signs to perceptions is cognitive (what we know through them). In the first instance, it is founded on what Locked termed “sensitive knowledge” (ECHU IV/xi), which teaches, beyond any possibility of doubt, that something other than ourselves—be it material, immaterial, or of some third sort of finite substance, or even an infinite one (God)—is the cause of the ideas of sensations we find within us (chapter 9-C). When buttressed by Physical Enquiries” and “Natural Philosophy” (ECHU II/viii/§22), together with Locke’s principled commitment to a mechanistic explanation of sense perception, we arrive at the full cognitive basis on which he ascribed to ideas of sensation the status of signs of the qualities of material substances responsible for producing them in us. Yet the question still remains whether ideas of sensation are to be understood as signs only in a cognitive sense, or whether there is a stronger sense in which Locke accorded it to them. Michael Ayers believes there is: Lockean simple ideas . . . must be taken to correspond to their objects in regular and orderly ways, even if we are ignorant of the nature of those objects and of how they act on us. A simple idea is therefore, as Epicurus and Gassendi had held, a natural sign of its cause. As such it is a ‘sign’ in another sense too, since it is naturally fitted to represent or ‘signify’ in thought that feature of real things, whatever it may be, which is in general responsible for our receiving ideas or sensations of that type. So the simple idea of white received in sensation and capable of being recalled in imagination stands in the natural language of thought for whatever in the object underlies or constitutes its general power regularly to cause just that sensation in us, the power Locke called the ‘quality’ of the object.


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The epistemic sign is also the semantic sign of this quality. . . . The signs that naturally indicate qualities or powers naturally stand for them in thought. This neat conjunction of epistemology and theory of representation, encapsulated in the ambivalence of the terms ‘sign’ and ‘signify’ in Locke’s usage, lies at the heart of his general philosophy.20

Ayers’s claim seems to be that, in addition to signifying its external cause in the same general way a rapidly approaching thunderhead naturally signifies the imminence of rain, a simple idea of sensation is also semantically “about” its cause, so that its cause is also its “intentional” object. This is, to be sure, part and parcel of his interpretation of Locke as committed to a systematic isomorphism between language and thought all the way to simple ideas and their immediate combinations—a reading I have already found occasion to question (chapter 4-C and section C of the present chapter) and will subject to detailed criticism later (chapter 8). But the case of simple ideas of sensations also serves to highlight the risks of playing fast and loose with Locke’s notion of a sign. In particular, Ayers treats the sensation and its repetition in imagination as though they signify external things in precisely the same way. But what reason is there to believe that Locke thought so? After all, the only cause an image in thought ought properly to signify is the mind responsible for producing it. To signify the external objects that cause sensations in us, images in thought must first of all signify the sensations, that is, they must count as memories. But does the fact that a memory of a sensation is the effect of the sensation just as the sensation is the effect of its unperceived extramental cause imply that the memory is the sign of the sensation in the same way the sensation is the sign of its cause? Since no evidence exists to suggest that Locke regarded sensations as memories of their causes, the answer would seem to be no. Are memories of simple ideas of sensation semantic signs of the sensations? If the answer is yes, does this mean that a vole’s memory of gobbling up some grubs is a semantic representation of the recollected sensations, and the latter its intentional objects? Or are semantics unique to human memories of sensations? If the latter, then how certain is it that the semantic properties that undoubtedly attach to the expression of memories in language carry over into such forms of memory as the mere repetition in thought of a past sensation? And even if they do, is that any reason to suppose that the sensation the memory represents signifies its cause semantically? Again, take the case of nonremembered images of sensations (fantasized flavors, colors, sounds, etc.): do they signify actual simple ideas of sensation in the same way memories do? Or do we first have to recognize that the the image has to have originated from an earlier simple idea of sensation in order to do so? That is, do we first have to reinterpret the image in thought as a memory (hence, the effect) of a past sensation before we can use it as a sign to designate a possible sensation now? Or might there be some psychological process that enables a hungry fox to draw on past experience to form images of the best places to look for food, which food is to be found at each, and which threats at each require which 20. Locke I, 38 and 53.

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precautions to best evade? Either way, is there anything in Locke’s accounts of such process that would require the signs to be semantic as well? Perhaps, but what about when an image is used to signify sensation generally by means of abstraction (some sensation, every sensation)? Yet even if there were no nonsemantic way for Locke to explain how abstract ideas signify (which is doubtful), do sensations considered abstractly and generally still signify an external cause? Not only because the cause of abstract ideas lies only in ourselves but also because there is no longer any concrete, particular effect to refer to an external cause, the answer would seem to be no. And, in any event, if semantics enters only with abstract ideas, is that not as much as to admit that nothing prior to them in the chain of signifiers is a semantic sign, ideas of sensation included? The point is that while it may seem unexceptionable to extend the semantic features of language down to simple ideas when we proceed from words as signs of abstract ideas to abstract ideas as signs of particular images in thought to images as signs of memories of past sensations to past sensations as signs of their external causes, it seems quite otherwise when we proceed in the opposite direction. For if we take simple ideas of sensation in isolation and consider only how they designate their external causes, there is no temptation to read Locke as attaching a semantic worth to their signification, since he invariably characterized this signifying relation in strictly causal terms. If we now include memories of sensations but nothing further up the chain of signifiers, we find no evidence that he supposed the peculiar way in which memories signify past sensations carries over to the way sensations signify their external causes. Rather, he gives every indication of allowing each to signify in its own particular way, so that the way memories signify sensations does not seep down to the way sensations signify their causes just as the way sensations signify their causes does not percolate up to memories. Regarded thus, do we have the least reason to think that Locke took the trickle-down view that semantic signification passes from language to the external causes of sensations as though all the intervening stages of signification were uniform and transparent? It seems to me that unless we are already convinced that Locke affirmed a systematic isomorphism between ideational understanding and linguistic understanding, we can have no temptation to suppose that Locke conceived simple ideas of sensation to signify their causes otherwise than the natural way in which any effect can be viewed as the sign of its cause or any cause the sign of its effect, by humans and animals alike. And, in chapter 8, I shall consider a number of texts that show that, for Locke, the path from language to external reality via sensation is neither uniform nor transparent. 2. There is an important implication of the preceding with respect to the issue of Locke’s indirect realism. Ayers, a committed direct realist himself, left no doubt as to his attraction to a direct realist reading of Locke of the kind most closely associated with John Yolton, but regretfully had to cast his lot with the consensus view (in which I share) that Locke was an indirect realist because of the insuperable obstacles posed by texts such as ECHU IV/xxi/§4: “since the Things, the Mind contemplates, are none of them, besides it self, present to the Understanding, ’tis necessary that something else, as a Sign or Representation of the thing it


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considers, should be present to it: And these are Ideas.”21 I agree as well with Ayers’s contention that Locke’s commitment to indirect realism is part and parcel of his commitment to an anti-Scholastic, mechanistic model of sense perception. I must however dissent from his suggestion that this is a fault on Locke’s part, for his criticisms all depend on the questionable assumption that Locke affirmed a systematic isomorphism between language and thought. Once it is discarded, the issue of whether Locke was a direct or indirect realist can no longer be posed in terms that make the former seem even a remotely plausible interpretive option. With ideas of sensations confined to being nonsemantic signs of their causes in the same kind of way foaming at the mouth is a sign of distemper or steam pouring out from under the hood a sign of an overheating radiator, there is nothing left for “direct realism” to signify than the thesis that the immediate object of sense perception (the idea) is identical with its cause. To be sure, it need not be limited to the proximate cause, which, in this context, is a state of the central nervous system. But then we would need to suppose that (images of) the qualities of the external object can somehow migrate into our minds by way of the sense organs it affects, the nerves connecting these organs to the central nervous system, and the central nervous system itself: a view that seems indistinguishable from the Aristotelian-Scholastic supposition of intentional species. No one, I think, questions that Locke rejected this model, insisting instead that our bodies are capable only of transmitting quantitative impulses (but nothing qualitative) from external objects. Nor can it be doubted that he (1) distinguished the brain state responsible for an idea of sensation from the idea itself, (2) regarded the former as never present to consciousness, and (3) concluded that the causal dependence of the idea on the brain state is mysterious and may well remain so even for our remotest posterity. Accordingly, there can be no question that Locke rejected the only kind of direct realism available to him in favor of an indirect realism founded conjointly on sensitive knowledge and empirical scientific inquiry. 3. The only thing about complex ideas of substances that distinguishes them from other complex ideas is the way they are considered to be united in one thing: the general idea of a supporting substratum. We conceive an individual substance when we consider simple ideas as incapable of subsisting by themselves, and so “suppose some Substratum, wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result” (ECHU II/xxiii/§1). This same general idea of a substratum enters into our ideas of species of substances as well (“An obscure and relative Idea of Substance in general being thus made, we come to have the Ideas of particular sorts of Substances,” §3). The implication is that nothing more is required in order to form an idea of an individual substance or of a species of substance than an act of considering any arbitrary collection of coexistent ideas—simple or complex, internal or external, adjacent or distant, constant or changing, regularly or irregularly changing, etc.—as unified by a common substratum: a notion sufficiently obscure to permit one to form the idea of the universe as a substance (xxiv/§3).

21. See Ayers, Locke I, chapter 7; also “Locke on Language,” in Chappell, Knowledge.

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Although this may seem a mere cavil, it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance for Locke of excluding all cognitive inputs from the contents of our ideas of substance. Cartesian Rationalism and its descendents were founded on the notion that the ideas of substances in human understanding are genuine (materially true) ideas of substances—and designate the particular species of substance they do—because they incorporate the same principle of unity (forma, species) that confers unity on the substantial essences corresponding to them (ideas give us “an image of a true and immutable nature,” and so are “the forms of . . . certain thoughts within me which neither came to me from external objects nor were determined by my will, but which came solely from the power of thinking within me”).22 Locke’s critique of this conception begins with what the understanding thinks when it conceives of substances, prior to and independently of any cognitive consideration, since it is there—in understanding itself—that the link to real essence is severed. Our idea of a substance, taken simply as an operation of thought, contains no reference to anything outside it. It has no intrinsic intentionality, no “aboutness” relating it to a principle of unity situated outside the mind. The only thing that distinguishes Lockean ideas of substances, qua operations of thought, from other ways of regarding ideas as one (modes) is the element of existential dependence: the substratum is thought to support the existence of ideas we consider united in it (without this support, they would not exist), and to be the cause why these ideas but not others are present in the unity. And the expression “support the existence of ideas” is here used advisedly: for merely in thinking a manifold as a substance we do not thereby draw on any of the cognitive considerations underpinning the ontological thesis that the objects present to us in sensation (ideas of sensation in the ontologically neutral sense) are mere modifications of the mind. It is not the idea of substance per se but these cognitive considerations that give the idea of substance its specifically Lockean-philosophical application to that extramental thing (or things) whose constitution (constitutions) is responsible for the coexistence of ideas of sensation in us. In and of itself, the idea of the substrate is completely empty and indeterminate (“we have no Idea of what it is, but only a confused obscure one of what it does,” ECHU II/xiii/§19), and, unless philosophical considerations oblige us to pretend to be otherwise, we are never very punctilious about its locus for the simple reason that we cannot be, lacking anything specific in mind to determinately situate. Stripped of any explicit relation to the ontologically extramental, Locke’s notion of a substance thus boils down to the idea of a principle necessitating the combination of certain ideas in our mind, and so points forward to Kant’s explication of an object of our representations as the consciousness of a necessity (a rule) governing the synthesis of the manifold within our representations (A104, A126, A191/B236, and A197/B242–3). None of this is to deny that, for Locke, really existent extramental substances underlie all our experience of the coexistence of ideas, and thereby—with assistance from our in-built psychological propensity23 to apply the unifying idea of a 22. Fifth Meditation AT VII 68 and Comments on a Certain Broadsheet AT VIIIB 346. 23. Locke had little to say about the triggers of this psychological propensity. Presumably, the factors discussed in his consideration of the ideas of identity relations (ECHU II/xxvii) are the most relevant: spatial contiguity, palpability, cohesion, organic coherence, etc.


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substratum to those ideas of sensation we have found constantly conjoined—play a part in determining when the understanding will apply the uniting principle of substance to its ideas (ECHU II/ix/§§8–10, III/v/§3, and CWS 17). Nevertheless, their role has more to do with the utility and communicability of ideas of substance than the contents actually thought in these ideas. We “who have Understandings and Comprehensions, suited to our own Preservation, and the ends of our own Being, but not to the reality and extent of all other Beings” (ECHU II/xv/§11), “distinguish things for our uses” (CWS 77). Consequently, no matter how far our sortings of ideas into ideas of substances may fall short of external reality as a mind far superior to ours might represent it, all that matters in the end is that they be real enough to serve our needs to distinguish, say, a human from a baboon or a manatee (CWS 88). Nor is the absence of coexistence enough to stop humans from forming ideas of (and believing in the existence of) such substances as sprites, titans, ethereal spirits, or the omnipotent deity (III/vi/§§27–33). But however important factors like experienced coexistence, utility, communicability, and in-built psychological propensities may be in causing us to form the ideas of the individual, particular, and collective substances we do, they are ultimately dispensable in a Lockean psychological account of the origin of their contents. 4. To the extent one is given to viewing Locke’s theory of ideas as the means whereby he sought to secure infallibly certain foundations for human knowledge, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend the true nature of the theory, or the legacy it represented to his sensibilist successors. There is no question that anyone so disposed can find texts that lend support to such an interpretation.24 Yet when one considers the evidence in context, it becomes apparent that this interpretation depends far more on the early twentieth-century epistemological lens through which Locke’s and other early modern theories of ideas tend to be viewed than on their actual contents or the uses to which their originators put them. Russell, Ogden and Richards, early Carnap, Ayer, Broad, Pritchard, and a number of other philosophers of the time were indeed concerned to establish a foundation for human knowledge in the data of the senses that might help clarify what rests upon it, and better direct our future cognitive aspirations. Typically, they claimed to be the heirs of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and their opponents did not challenge them. Ever since, it has been well-nigh impossible to avoid viewing the doctrines of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume from this perspective, sometimes even to the point of assimilating early modern empiricism’s methods and goals with the very disparate ones of twentieth-century empiricism. In order to see them for what they were, we therefore should try to keep the following points in mind. (i) Certainty and doubt have no direct application to ideas. All the operations of thought depend on the immediate presence of ideas: you object, ‘that some people reckoned succession of time right by knots and notches, and figures, without ever thinking of ideas.’ Answ. It is certain that men,

24. For example: “All our Knowledge consist[s], as I have said, in the view the Mind has of its own Ideas, which is the utmost Light and greatest Certainty, we with our Faculties, and our way of Knowledge are capable of . . . ” (ii/§1). See also note 7 earlier.

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LOCKE’S NEW MODEL PHILOSOPHY who wanted better ways, might, by knots or notches, keep accounts of the numbers of certain stated lengths of times, as well as of the numbers of men in their country, or of any other numbers; and that too without ever considering the immediate objects of their thoughts under the name of ideas: but that they should count time, without ever thinking of something, is very hard to me to conceive; and the things thought on, or were present in their minds, when they thought, are what I call ideas. (CWS 414–5)

Conversely, no idea may be supposed to exist unless it is “taken notice of in the Understanding,” even if only passively in perception (without retention, attention, or any properly active consideration occurring); “So that where-ever there is Sense, or Perception, there some Idea is actually produced, and present in the Understanding” (ECHU II/ix/§4). Since this is just to say that what an idea is, and what differentiates it from others, is defined by nothing other than the operation of thought in which it is considered, from Locke’s perspective it is not so much false as nonsensical to suppose that an idea’s consideration might be in any way mistaken. For error to be possible here, the object of our consideration would have to be distinguishable in some respect from the consideration itself, so that it could then be subject to comparison with an eye to their agreement or disagreement.25 Since Locke introduced the term ‘idea’ precisely to capture that respect in which no such distinction is possible, the “infallibly certainty” of our considerations of ideas amounts to nothing more than the tautology “what we are conscious of is nothing different from what we are conscious of”: let any Idea be as it will, it can be no other but such as the mind perceives it to be; and that very perception, sufficiently distinguishes it from all other Ideas, which cannot be other, i.e. different, without being perceived to be so. No Idea therefore can be undistinguishable from another, from which it ought to be different, unless you would have it different from it self: for from all other, it is evidently different. (xxix/§5)

(ii) Truth and error are impossible in respect of ideas because of the absence of any distinction between subject and object of experience. Point (1) is simply Locke’s formulation of what I earlier denominated the appearance = reality principle. Where there is as yet no possibility of distinguishing the being of an object from its appearance, there can be neither agreement nor disagreement between them, and so, in this sense, neither truth nor falsity as well. Only when the understanding introduces the consideration (idea) of itself, as thinking subject, distinct from the objects it considers does it become possible for it to conceive a difference 25. The same applies when Locke affirms the privacy of ideas: “Since the Mind, in all its Thoughts and Reasonings, hath no other immediate Object but its own Ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident, that our Knowledge is only conversant about them” (ECHU IV/i/§1). If ideas are, by definition, relative to distinct operations of thought, then an idea is ipso facto as private as the correlated operation of thought itself. That is, since no two minds can perform the identical operation of thought (unless, as is the case in Spinoza, the human mind is related to God’s attribute of thought as a mere mode), no two understandings, distinguished by their different acts of consideration, can have the identical idea.


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between its objects’ reality and their appearance. For example, when the understanding forms ideas of convex bodies situated in three-dimensional space, our minds learn to distinguish simple ideas of sensation (such as “a flat Circle variously shadow’d”) as the object’s appearance to the senses of the subject from the complex idea of the body itself as it really is independently of its relation to the subject (“a round Globe, of any uniform colour, v.g. Gold, Alabaster, or Jet”), whereupon our “Judgment presently, by an habitual custom, alters the Appearances into their Causes” (ECHU II/ix/§8). Only within the framework of a distinction between the reality and the appearance of the object the subject considers does the possibility exist to form a complex idea of the body itself as flat, circular, and/or variously hued, and thereby to fall into error (a mistake an apprentice Lockean depth perceiver might very well commit: chapter 6-C). Thus, Locke’s assertion that “the view the Mind has of its own Ideas” affords “the utmost Light and greatest Certainty, we with our Faculties, and our way of Knowledge are capable of” (IV/ii/§1), could almost have been intended ironically, in view of how trivial and barren this knowledge is—and how useless as a foundation for other knowledge—in view of its restriction to the context where ideas of sensation are considered in and of themselves, without relation to anything beyond them, rather than as cognitive grounds. (iii) Our certainty about ideas consists entirely of propositions of logical identity and difference. Locke distinguished four species of knowledge (certainty beyond any possibility of error): knowledge of identity and diversity; relation, coexistence or necessary connection; and real existence. Now, ideas, each taken in its own right and in isolation (without regard to their relations, coexistence, or the existence of the objects they signify), can be known only in the first way. Since Locked tended to dismiss all knowledge of identity and diversity as trivial, the notion that he expected it to provide a foundation solid and broad enough to support all our nontrivial knowledge (as well as our merely probable cognition) makes little sense: the immediate perception of the agreement or disagreement of Identity, being founded in the Mind’s having distinct Ideas, this affords us as many self-evident Propositions, as we have distinct Ideas. Every one that has any Knowledge at all, has, as the Foundation of it, various and distinct Ideas: And it is the first act of the Mind, (without which, it can never be capable of any Knowledge,) to know every one of its Ideas by it self, and distinguish it from others. Every one finds in himself, that he knows the Ideas he has; That he knows also, when any one is in his Understanding, and what it is; And that when more than one are there, he knows them distinctly and unconfusedly one from another. Which always being so, (it being impossible but that he should perceive what he perceives,) he can never be in doubt when any Ideas is in his Mind, that it is there, and is that Idea it is; and that two distinct Ideas, when they are in his Mind, that it is there, and is that Idea it is; and that two distinct Ideas, when they are in his Mind, are there, and are not one and the same Idea. Such that all such Affirmations, and Negations, are made without any possibility of doubt, uncertainty, or hesitation, and must necessarily be assented to, as soon as understood; that is, as soon as we

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LOCKE’S NEW MODEL PHILOSOPHY have, in our Minds, determined Ideas, which the Terms in the Proposition stand for. (ECHU IV/vii/§4)26

Is it any wonder that Locke concluded that “the offering and inculcating such Propositions, in order to give the Understanding any new light, or inlet into the Knowledge of things, [is] no better than trifling” (ECHU IV/viii/§3)? Nor are they any less barren for informing us that ideas exist, since, in Locke’s lexicon, this simply means that something (rather than nothing) is being thought, and tells us nothing whatever about whether the existent affecting our senses minds precedes or outlasts the interval during which we consider the idea it produces in us, and whether, if it does not, it exists independently of being considered (its relation to our senses) at all. Taken together, (1)—(3) make clear that, for Locke, our infallible “knowledge” of ideas is nothing different from our thinking of them, and has nothing whatsoever to do with their employment as grounds of cognition (what I can know through what I can think), much less their serving as a foundation for further cognition (by contrast with, say, Mach, Russell, or the Carnap of the Aufbau). The case of sensitive knowledge (ECHU IV/xi) is no exception, precisely because it is not an instance of the knowledge we have of our ideas (in identity propositions) but a special case of the kind of cognition we can have through them (our awareness of the existence of something distinct from our minds through ideas of sensation has, according to Locke, a certainty beyond mere probability). For here we apply, and do not simply conceive, ideas such as body, the externality of one body with respect to another (together with the space containing them), the cognitive recognition of one body as mine, and the powers that body equips me with to sense and to imagine (section B earlier and chapter 9-B). If there is an exception—a case where the mere thinking of an idea yields a real increase of knowledge (instructive, not trivial)—it is the intuitive knowledge thinking gives us of our own existence: I have as certain a Perception of the Existence of the thing doubting, as of that Thought, which I call doubt. Experience then convinces us, that we have an intuitive Knowledge of our own Existence, and an internal infallible Perception that we are. In every Act of Sensation, Reasoning, or Thinking, we are conscious to our selves of our own Being; and, in this Matter, come not short of the highest degree of Certainty. (IV/ix/§3)

Yet far from proving how close Locke and other early modern empiricists were to certain strands of early twentieth-century epistemological thought, the inference 26. Some commentators interpret Locke as holding that infallibility is confined to simple ideas, so that the possibility of error arises with complex ideas (see, for example, Ayers, “The Foundations of Knowledge and the Logic of Substance: The Structure of Locke’s General Philosophy,” in Rogers, Locke’s Philosophy), 53. But some of the examples Locke offers in the text just cited, as well as in its companion (ECHU IV/viii/§3), concern complex ideas (soul, spirit, fetish, oyster, law, obligation, right). It thus seems clear that Locke attributed to our consideration of complex ideas the same infallible certainty he ascribed to our consideration of simple ideas.


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from cogito (I think) to sum (I am) serves only to highlight the vastness of the gulf that separates them.27

27. I am indebted to discussions with Peter Hacker for point 4 of this section. My hope is to have provided reasons sufficient to question the place assigned to Locke in current philosophical lore as the progenitor of empiricist foundationalism. Another chapter of this lore that should be discarded is the notion that consciousness and attention were, or else should have been, coextensive for Locke and his successors. The notion that they were is based on the mistaken presumption that they esteemed introspection above all other forms of empirical evidence, and supposed the portions of their theory that were supported by direct introspection were the solidest and least vulnerable to skeptical objection. I have already shown that this was untrue, and I will consider a good deal more evidence to this effect in subsequent chapters. As for the notion that introspection at least should have been their guide in the same way it tended to be for James, Russell, and others, this seems to be more the effect than the cause of the assumption that Locke and his successors were in the same line of business that James and his successors were in, and so begs the question. And I shall offer ample reason in what follows for supposing this assumption to be almost entirely a consequence of emphasizing superficial similarities at the expense of comparatively profound differences.

6 Perception and the Synthesis of Experience

There is no more important or influential chapter of Locke’s Essay than the one on perception. Since commentators typically pay it little attention, and seldom if ever attach great significance to it, this claim may strike some as idiosyncratic. Yet the doctrine Locke illustrated with his friend Molyneux’s thought experiment—whether someone born blind and suddenly made to see could distinguish a cube from a sphere without touching them—instituted the framework in which Berkeley, Hume, and Kant addressed the issues of realism and idealism. Indeed, Berkeley’s theory of nature is simply the Molyneux problem writ large, while Kant’s theory of nature is essentially a transformation of Berkeley’s, inspired by Hume instead of God.

A. The Human Perceptual Mechanism Locke’s agreement with Descartes and others who sought to develop a mechanistic explanation of the external sensory systems of the human body could not be clearer: “The next thing to be consider’d, is how Bodies produce Ideas in us, and that is manifestly by impulse, the only way which we can conceive Bodies operate in” (ECHU II/viii/§11). Locke’s allegiance to mechanistic explanation (subsequently adapted to incorporate Newtonian attraction)1 is equally evident in the distinction 1. Locke had to revise his notion of kinematics (expressed in the first edition of ECHU) after Newton: “It is true, I say, ‘that bodies operate by impulse, and nothing else.’ And so I thought when I writ it, and can yet conceive no other way of their operation. But I am since convinced by the judicious Mr. Newton’s incomparable book, that it is too bold a presumption to limit God’s power, in this point, by my narrow conceptions. The gravitation of matter towards matter, by ways inconceivable to me, is not only a demonstration that God can, if he pleases, put into bodies powers and ways of operation, above what can be derived from our idea of body, or can be explained by what we know of matter, but also an unquestionable and every where visible instance, that he has done so. And therefore in the next edition of my book, I shall take care to have that passage rectified” (CWS 467–8). The important point for Locke is that the only action bodies are capable of is motion, even if the efficacies underlying certain movements (specifically, attractions) were not conceivable to him (which, in the case of gravitation,

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he drew with respect to the ideas produced in us when bodies affect our sense organs between those ideas that do and those that do not resemble their causes: “Why is Whiteness and Coldness in Snow, and Pain not, when it produces the one and the other Idea in us: and can do neither, but by the Bulk, Figure, Number, and Motion of its solid Parts?” (II/viii/§16). Whiteness and coldness no more resemble the qualities of the snow whereby it affects us with these sensations than the pain we feel when our flesh is exposed to it resembles the qualities responsible for causing that sensation in us. For if mechanical impulse is the only way bodies can impinge upon our senses, the only ideas of snow that can be supposed to resemble their causes in the snow itself (the qualities whereby it affects the sense organs of the human body in the ways it does) are those that enter into the conception of the impulsion of one body on another: bulk, figure, number, and the motion of solid parts. Inasmuch as neither the whiteness and coldness of snow, nor the heat and light of a flame, nor the sweetness and whiteness of manna are any more capable of entering into the conception of impulsion than pleasure and pain are, Locke, like other mechanists, considered it impossible for them to be communicated from environing bodies to the sense organs of the human body, and so impossible for these ideas of sensation to resemble the qualities of their initiating causes in any way. Medieval and early modern Aristotelians did not limit their conception of the affection of the senses by external things to initiating impulses. On the contrary, they took the qualitative character of the sensations present to our minds to depend principally on the qualitative constitution of the affecting body itself (its nature, essence), and only secondarily (if at all) on the features involved in impulsion. Accordingly, nothing prevents a body from transmitting ideas of its nature to our minds by imprinting images of itself on the body’s sense organs, or from doing so in full living color, temperature, sound, scent, and flavor. As for the mind, other than passively receiving the impression in the manner of a glob of sealing wax, all it has to do in order to arrive at explicit knowledge of the nature of the object is to abstract out the various features already present implicitly in its imprint: bulk, figure, motion, composition, etc. Thus, the cause of sense perception is at the same time its fully transparent intentional object. This model of perception was abandoned once a consensus formed that an object cannot transmit images of itself through the sense organs, only impulses. If objects cannot impress images of themselves on our senses, and thereby imprint their specific and individual natures on our minds, the implication is that their natures are utterly opaque to our senses. The only inputs we receive from affecting bodies are their impulsive effects on the sensory receptors at or near the surfaces of the body (or, in the case of proprioceptive receptors, internal to the body). These impulses are then mechanically transmitted through a variety of different minute corpuscles forming pathways to the central nervous system, where they are operated on in a host of different ways that early moderns, aware of their ignorance of neurobiology, were content to leave a mystery for posterity to unravel. The most remains true for us, even if we think we now at least know the kind of concepts that one day will makes its operation perspicuous).

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mysterious part of the process, however, was usually not reckoned to be entirely biological: the conversion of impulses in the brain into ideas of color, texture, sound, and other sensations present to us in immediate consciousness.2 And from this deluge of continuously refreshed sense perceptual inputs, the mind has somehow to bring about images of their initiating causes that exhibit all the fixity and coherence of ordinary sense experience (images of ambient bodies and their behaviors). Mechanistically oriented early modern philosophers tended to focus on the final, intramental phase of the sense perceptual process: how we arrive at a consciousness of a world of enduring, interacting objects in which the data of the various senses are united (I shall usually refer to these as sense-divide transcending objects) using only inputs that, as immediately given in perception, are little better than a continuous flux of jumbles. This focus was no doubt due primarily to the fact that it did not seem necessary to know much about the biological processes that eventuate in ideas of sensation in order to investigate how these ideas, once present to our minds in perception, are then formed by the understanding into complex ideas capable of representing their initiating causes (i.e. ambient bodies). Instead, the investigation starts with the problem of determining precisely which contents are given in sense perception and which only seem to be given but are in fact produced through psychological operations performed on the given data, and, more particularly, how much the order and relation distinctive of the sensible objects of ordinary experience is given and how much has to be conferred on data by the understanding. To answer this is to know how far the understanding itself enters into our experience, and so too to know the nature and extent of its powers. As the principal focus of human sense experience, vision naturally became the chief object of such inquiry, and visible depth and distance were to prove the prime exhibits in the case for the thesis that many of the central features of the world as we experience it depend so extensively on intellectual processing of the sensory data given immediately in perception that the outputs bear almost no resemblance to the inputs. To better understand the questions confronting early modern visual psychologists, a comparison with contemporary visual psychology will prove helpful. The psychologist Steven Pinker offers a cogent summary of the present state of knowledge in this area: [Some] call it a visible surface representation: Depth is whimsically downgraded . . . half a dimension because it does not define the medium in which visual information is held (unlike the left-right and high-low dimensions); it is just a piece of information held in that medium . . . When [organisms] apprehend the world by sight, they have to use the splash of light reflected off its objects, projected as a two-dimensional kaleidoscope of throbbing, heaving streaks on 2. For example, “Fire may burn our Bodies, with no other effect, than it does a Billet, unless the motion be continued to the Brain, and there the sence of Heat, or Idea of Pain, be produced in the Mind, wherein consists actual Perception” (ECHU II/ix/§3). Locke was among those prepared to accept that the connection between brain and conscious mind may prove to be an insoluble mystery: see IV/iii/§6 (discussed in chapter 7-C).


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each retina. The brain somehow analyzes the moving collages and arrives at an impressively accurate sense of the objects out there that gave rise to them. . . . Unlike the other two dimensions, which announce themselves in the rods and cones that are currently active, depth must be painstakingly wrung out of the data. The stereo, contour, shading, and motion experts that work on computing depth are equipped to send along information about distance, slant, tilt, and occlusion relative to the viewer, not 3-D coordinates in the world. The best they can do is to pool their efforts to give us a two-and-a-half dimensional acquaintance with the surfaces in front of our eyes. It’s up to the rest of the brain to figure out how to use it.3

As we shall see, Locke had a fairly secure grasp of most of these features of the “kind of appearance convex Bodies are wont to make in us” (ECHU II/ix/§8), as well as the three others Pinker distinguishes: we see in perspective . . . even though your sense of depth provides plenty of information that your brain could use to cancel the effect. We also are aware that moving objects loom, shrink, and foreshorten. In a genuine scale model, none of this can happen. . . . [Further] we don’t immediately see ‘objects’: the movable hunks of matter that we count, classify, and label with nouns. As far as vision is concerned it’s not even clear what an object is. . . . A drop of Krazy Glue can turn two objects into one, but the visual system has no way of knowing that. We have, however, an almost palpable sense of surfaces and the boundaries between them.4

Finally, constructing depth and distance from two-dimensional sensory inputs poses the visual system with a special kind of problem: inverse optics, the deduction of an object’s shape and substance from its projection, is an ‘ill-posed problem,’ a problem that, as stated, has no unique solution. An elliptical shape on the retina could have come from an oval viewed head-on or a circle viewed at a slant. A patch of gray could have come from a snowball in the shade or a lump of coal in the sun. Vision has evolved to convert these illposed problems into solvable ones by adding premises: assumptions about how the world we evolved in is, on average, put together. For example . . . how the human visual system ‘assumes’ that matter is cohesive, surfaces are uniformly colored, and objects don’t go out of their way to line up in confusing arrangements. When the current world resembles the average ancestral environment, we see the world as it is. When we land in an exotic world where the assumptions are violated—because of a chain of unlucky coincidences or because a sneaky

3. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 212 and 261. Of course, touch too is restricted to the outer surfaces of objects, and even then, unlike vision, usually only to the parts presently in contact with the skin. Thus, seeing in 2.5 dimensions does not suffice to distinguish visual from tactual depth perception so completely as Pinker’s account suggests. 4. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 258–9. So too, for Locke: since solidity is essential to the idea of a material object but is obtainable only through touch, he would surely agree with Pinker that material objects are not, properly speaking, given in visual depth perception.

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LOCKE’S NEW MODEL PHILOSOPHY psychologist concocted the world to violate the assumptions—we fall prey to an illusion. That is why psychologists are obsessed with illusions. They unmask the assumptions that natural selection installed to allow us to solve unsolvable problems and know, much of the time, what is out there.5

As Pinker sees it, the visual system of the human brain is actuated by innate computational programs, replete with (naturally selected) built-in premises about the way the world is, on average, put together. The program may not be fully operational at birth, yet, like the program responsible for sexual maturation, this does not make it any the less innate. Moreover, just as the innate program composed of the rules constitutive of language still needs to be supplemented a posteriori with exposure to the local vernacular, the program composed of the rules constitutive of visual depth perception may also require empirical supplementation without this compromising its innateness in any way. We should not, however, assume that role consciousness plays in this process is essential; our brains might very well have evolved unconscious, subpersonal ways of implementing and supplementing its visual programming as or more beneficial for survival as consciousness. But where consciousness does play a role, it is sufficiently ignorable that an investigator could in principle know whether and how a creature sees the world in depth simply by knowing the rules, or “grammar,” of its brain’s visible depth and distance programs. The conception of visual depth perception outlined by Pinker may be regarded as a direct descendent of Descartes’s geometrical conception of the visual system. According to Descartes, distance vision is the consequence of “a sort of innate geometry (ex geometria quadam omnibus innata)” (Optics, Discourse Six, AT VI 137). Since Descartes held that the whole of mathematics is innate to our faculty of thought (Fifth Meditation AT VII 63–4 and 67–8; also Fifth Replies 381–2), those parts of vision that depend on trigonometry and other rules of geometry must be supposed to be innate in much the same sense the rules making up the computational programs postulated by cognitive psychologists are deemed innate. A complete knowledge of the rules constitutive of visual depth/distance perception is thus, in principle, attainable for Descartes, just as for Pinker, without regard to the contents of sense perception or the accumulated experience of living in the world as a sighted being. To be sure, Descartes too postulated a role for empiricalsensory inputs to fine-tune the innate mechanism to a given environment and to continually adapt it in the face of changes of environment (Sixth Replies AT VII 437–9). The key point, however, is that neither the senses nor the imagination, in separating and combining the data of visual perception, either with one another or with the inputs of other senses (particularly touch), contributes anything to the 5. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 212–13. For a discussion of the early modern background to Locke’s views on visual perception, see Ayers, Locke I, chapter 3; Bolton, “The Real Molyneux”; and Margaret Atherton, pt. I of Berkeley’s Revolution in Vision (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). For a review of the early literature from a psychologist’s perspective, see Michael J. Morgan, Molyneux’s Question: Vision, Touch and the Philosophy of Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1977. For a superb discussion of the psychological and philosophical issues involved, see Gareth Evans, “Molyneux’s Question,” in Collected Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).


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content of our ideas of convex volumes distributed through space. Such contents instead have their origin entirely in the body of the purely intelligible (nonsensory) ideas that make up the innate geometry of space, regardless of whether we gain access to it through the imagery of vision, touch, or any other sense (chapter 15). And it was to refute the intellectualism exemplified by Descartes and Pinker that Locke set out to persuade his reader “how much he may be beholding to experience, improvement, and acquired notions, where he thinks, he has not the least use of, or help from them” (ECHU II/ix/§8). B. The Molyneux Problem To convince his readers of the extent to which visual depth perception is beholden to experience, Locke offered the following thought experiment proposed to him by his correspondent, the lawyer-scientist William Molyneux: Suppose a Man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a Cube, and a Sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and t’other, which is the Cube, which the Sphere. Suppose then the Cube and Sphere placed on a Table, and the Blind Man to be made to see. Quære, Whether by his sight, before he touch’d them, he could now distinguish, and tell, which is the Globe, which the Cube. To which the acute and judicious Proposer answers: Not. For though he has obtain’d the experience of, how a Globe, how a Cube affects his touch; yet he has not yet attained the Experience, that what affects his touch so or so, must affect his sight so or so; Or that a protuberant angle in the Cube, that pressed his hand unequally, shall appear to his eye, as it does in the Cube. . . . [T]his Gent. farther adds, that having upon the occasion of my Book, proposed this to divers very ingenious Men, he hardly ever met with one, that at first gave the answer to it, which he thinks true, till by hearing his reasons they were convinced. (ECHU II/ix/§8)

Leibniz, Berkeley, and other philosophers since have used the same thought experiment in support of their own views against Locke’s. But what exactly is Locke’s view, and how does his solution to the problem supply confirmation of his empiricism? These are the issues we need to address first. For Locke, cubes and spheres are simple modes. A simple mode is the object of a complex idea formed “when the Mind pleases” to consider a number of simple or complex yet homogeneous elements “as one entire thing, and signified by one name” (ECHU II/xii/§1). It is a matter of complete indifference whether or not these elements are ever found so united in experience, since there is here no implication of a supporting substratum on which the existence or the coexistence of these elements depend (IV/iv/§§5–6). The elements of which the complex ideas of cubes and spheres consist are homogeneous in that all are modifications of a single simple idea of sensation, space. Space admits of being considered either as indeterminate distance or indeterminate extension (also termed ‘capacity’—II/xiii/§3). Determinate distances and extensions are the most elementary simple modes of this idea, since all of the other simple modes of space, including figures, are composed from them:

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LOCKE’S NEW MODEL PHILOSOPHY For the Mind, having a Power to repeat the Idea of any length directly stretched out, and join it to another in the same Direction, which is to double the length of that streight Line; or else join it to another with that Inclination it thinks fit, and so make what sort of Angle it pleases: And being able also to shorten any Line it imagines, by taking from it ½ or ¼ or, what part it pleases, without being able to come to an end of any such Divisions, it can make an Angle of any bigness: So also the Lines that are its sides, of what length it pleases, which joining again to other Lines of different lengths, and at different Angles, till it has wholly inclosed any Space, it is evident that it can multiply figures both in their Shape and Capacity, in infinitum . . . The same that it can do with streight Lines, it can do also with crooked, or crooked and streight together; and the same it can do in Lines, it can also in Superficies, by which we may be led into farther Thoughts of the endless Variety of Figures, that the Mind has a Power to make, and thereby to multiply the simple Modes of Space. (II/xiii/§6)

Determinate ideas of figure result when the mind “chuses a certain Number” of determinate simple modes (which either are, or consist of, determinate distances and/or determinate extensions), “gives them connexion, and makes them into one Idea” (ECHU III/v/§4). One figure is distinguished from another by the elements that go into it together with how they are considered as one (the rule of their connection). Although the very same elements may be considered as one complex idea in a variety of different ways—the rule for a figure, a polygon, a triangle, a scalene triangle, a right triangle, a scalene right triangle, etc.—this does not mean that one and the same idea admits of being considered in different ways. For if Locke’s conception of an idea is taken strictly, ideas are individuated and distinguished by the individual operations of thought in which they are considered, so that different considerations, distinguished by their different rules, imply a difference of ideas (chapter 5-B). When the same elements are considered according to different rules for combining them, the resulting complex ideas of simple modes thus constitute numerically distinct figures (distinct ideas), irrespective of the causes and the sensible qualities of their elements. This is why, according to Locke, when I draw a diagram in order to execute a proof regarding triangles, the proof relates to the idea distinguished exclusively by the rule determinative of which elements I consider and in which connection I consider them. Not considered are the appearances to the senses caused by my inking the paper (IV/i/§9), insofar as the properties of these inkings per se do not (in accordance with the rule) play any part in the formation of my idea-constituting consideration (this leaving out of consideration is central to Locke’s account of abstract ideas: chapter 8-A).6 In addition to being ideas of simple modes, cubes and spheres are classed by Locke as ideas of diverse senses. This classification stems from Locke’s belief (later challenged by Berkeley) that vision and touch alike make possible the consideration whereby the simple idea of space (indeterminate distance and extension) may be acquired by the mind. In particular, by abstracting from the color, light, and all the other distinctively visual properties related to them in the one case, and 6. Locke’s view on the kind of conception requisite for mathematics (shared, as we shall see, by Berkeley) seems fully in keeping with Kant’s description of the advent of geometry at Bxi–xii.


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from the softness or hardness, sharpness or dullness, and other distinctively tactual qualities in the other, the mind can arrive at the perception of one and the same simple idea of space. Consequently complex ideas of figures are likewise obtainable from tactual and visual ideas of sensation indifferently: This the Touch discovers in sensible Bodies, whose Extremities come within our reach; and the Eye takes both from Bodies and Colours, whose Boundaries are within its view: Where observing how the Extremities terminate, either in streight Lines, which meet at discernible Angles; or in crooked Lines, wherein no Angles can be perceived, by considering these as they relate to one another, in all Parts of the Extremities of any Body or Space, it has that Idea we call Figure, which affords to the Mind infinite Variety. (ECHU II/xiii/§5)

That figures, in all their infinite variety, may be conceived without including anything specifically visible or tangible in them is crucial to Locke’s (indirect) realism, since the mind can then employ the very same ideas of space and its simple modes it derives indifferently from vision and touch to represent objects existing mind-independently in themselves that have none of the qualities specific to vision and touch (chapter 7-D).7 Yet the fact that the kind of observation he describes premises the ability to see in depth creates special complications that lead straight to the doctrine at the heart of his solution to the Molyneux problem: the newly sighted subject cannot perform the considerations requisite to visualize a cube and a sphere without first effecting the transition from two-dimensional inputs to ideas of convex volumes arrayed in three-dimensional visual space. Whence the question becomes: can a subject make this transition without being beholden “to experience, improvement, and acquired notions”? C. Locke’s Solution to the Molyneux Problem Locke endorsed Molyneux’s justification for a negative answer to the question whether a newly sighted adult person is capable of distinguishing a cube from a sphere on the basis solely of what he perceives by sight alone: though he has obtain’d the experience of, how a Globe, how a Cube affects his touch; yet he has not yet attained the Experience, that what affects his touch so or so, must affect his sight so or so; Or that a protuberant angle in the Cube, that pressed his hand unequally, shall appear to his eye, as it does in the Cube.

7. Even so, one might object to Locke’s conception of a material object on the grounds that it essentially includes in it an idea that can be acquired only through one sense: solidity (ECHU II/iv). Locke evidently believed that the idea of solidity could be abstracted from other tactual qualities, as though it were merely an accident of human physiology that we are equipped with only one sense able to afford us the idea of solidity. In any case, abstractability from all that is bound up with the constitution of our senses is not the only criterion for determining whether an idea can enter into the concept of a material thing as a constituent mark: it must also be able to enter into the conception of kinetic impulsion (chapter 7-D).

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The point is that although his new sense presents him with the same variety and detail of light and color familiar to those who have enjoyed sight all their lives, his total ignorance of how what he sees feels to his hand, and how visible objects change their properties and relations with each tangible movement of eyes, head, and/or body, leaves him utterly unprepared to make three-dimensional spatial sense of what he sees or to put what spatial information is present in it to use, especially in order to make the kind of fine discriminations requisite to distinguish one threedimensional figure from another. The vastness of the differences between vision and touch cannot strike anyone for whom correlations between their data have been second nature since infancy. Yet for a newly sighted adult, the only precedents available would be the correlations that exist between his other senses and touch. The data of these senses are as richly various as those of touch and vision. However, only a limited amount of spatial information can be extracted from them, and even this can be obtained only, or largely, on the basis of a considerable amount of experience of their correlations to objects of touch. How then would a newly sighted person be able to determine simply from what he sees, prior to all experience of correlating visual perception with touch, that or how the situation is any different with vision? For all he knows, much of the richness and complexity of detail he sees is irrelevant or unusable with regard to discerning details of shape, size, distance, and direction of tactually perceptible objects, in much the way a great deal of auditory and olfactory detail is irrelevant or unusable to this end. And of what is relevant, how could he adduce anything about the way visible objects would feel simply from the patterns of light and color he perceives? For all he knows, the visual image we know to belong to a globe of white marble might feel to his hand like a cubical wire mesh. The newly sighted man is thus totally dependent on tactual experience to teach him (1) which visual data to ignore and which not to ignore in his three-dimensional spatial discriminations; (2) how to carve up the relevant visual data into units optimally suited for three-dimensional spatial representation; and (3) how, last but not least, to reassemble these units to effect the strongest possible correlations with haptic space. Leibniz objected to Locke’s anti-innatist solution to the Molyneux experiment on the ground that the obstacles likely to frustrate a newly sighted subject would be due to ancillary factors. By controlling for these, the same experiment turns out to provide evidence in favor of an intellectualist analysis of spatial ideas: I include a condition which can be taken to be implicit in the question: namely that it is merely a problem of telling which is which, and that the blind man knows that the two shaped bodies which he has to discern are before him and thus that each of the appearances which he sees is either that of a cube or that of a sphere. Given this condition, it seems to me past question that the blind man whose sight is restored could discern them by applying rational principles to the sensory knowledge which he has already acquired by touch. I am not talking about what he might actually do on the spot, when he is dazzled and confused by the strangeness—or, one should add, unaccustomed to making inferences. My view rests on the fact that in the case of the sphere there are no distinguished points on the surface of the sphere taken in itself, since everything there is uniform and without angles, whereas in the case of the cube there are eight


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points which are distinguished from all the others. If there were not that way of discerning shapes, a blind man could not learn the rudiments of geometry by touch, nor could someone else learn them by sight without touch. . . . These two geometries, the blind man’s and the paralytic’s, must come together, and agree, and indeed ultimately rest on the same ideas, even though they have no images in common. Which shows yet again how essential it is to distinguish images from exact ideas which are composed of definitions. (NE 137)

In Leibniz’s view, if there were some way to eliminate the effects of the initial dazzlement, a newly sighted geometer, skilled in reasoning, would have no difficulty distinguishing a cube from a sphere by their visual appearances alone, without needing to touch them. For since the eight points at which the angles of the visible cube terminate are present to his perception, all he has to do is count them to arrive at the knowledge that the object before him is the same object he has formerly perceived by touch; and the absence of these eight points is all he needs in order to determine that the other object before him is the same as a tangible sphere. To be sure, for all he knows, tangible cubes might affect his sight in such a way as to make a uniform appearance, while tangible spheres might affect his sight in such a way as to appear as having eight points. But this is a point about the causes of sensible appearances rather than these appearances themselves; and Leibniz would have been the first to admit that causes cannot be known by the immediate sensible appearances of things. As far as the appearances themselves are concerned, however, he had no doubt that the eight visible points present in the one but absent in the other are all the newly sighted man needs to distinguish the one three-dimensional figure from the other. Touch is in this respect quite irrelevant—a point Leibniz underscored by positing a sighted geometer paralytic from birth suddenly made able to feel: if blindfolded, he could still, judging from the eight points present to his touch alone, immediately distinguish the tangible appearance of a cube from that of a sphere; and this would remain true even if, upon removing the blindfold, he found that the cause of the eight-point tangible appearance affects his eyes so as to produce the visible appearance of a sphere. For implicit in Leibniz’s analysis of the Molyneux experiment is the notion that the semblance of plausibility attaching to the anti-innatist solution proffered by Molyneux and Locke derives from a confusion between sensible appearances and their causes. Since Leibniz never had the opportunity to present his objection to Locke, we can only surmise how Locke might have responded. One line of defense he might have pursued consists in modifying the Molyneux case to that of a man blind and deaf since birth suddenly made to hear. Suppose he has been misled to believe that people are not only able to distinguish distance and direction by sound but also such finer details as shape and size; and suppose he has further been informed that the characteristic auditory signature of a sphere is a single sustained tone versus eight short tones sounded at equal rhythmic intervals (rectangular solids would have some of their tones at unequal intervals, etc.). Is there any doubt that, when first made to hear, the person would distinguish the auditory appearance of the sphere from that of the cube by sound alone, without relying on touch? Surely none. But is this genuinely a case of the representation of the different figures or

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is the newly hearing person simply relying on cues he would never dream of interpreting spatially if he had been paralytic since birth as well? The point is that Leibniz’s equally well-prepped geometer is not really distinguishing cube from sphere by sight alone but is instead relying on cues he could not have interpreted spatially without his previous acquaintance through touch. It is one thing to rely on cues, visual or auditory, quite another actually to experience the figures in the way nonparalytics sighted from infancy see them. Our incapacity to experience figure auditorily shows that one does not need to move from sensible appearances to their causes to recognize that the process Leibniz described in the case of vision falls well short of explaining the kinds of spatial recognition we perform throughout our sighted lives. Seeing the world in depth and at distance is something quite different from a ratiocinative exercise performed on the data given immediately in visual perception. The question is what that something is, and, in particular, how three visible dimensions depends on altering “the Ideas we receive by sensation . . . by the Judgment” (ECHU II/ix/§8).8 A clue to the answer comes from considering whether Locke would have agreed with Leibniz that the challenge of distinguishing three-dimensional shapes is the same for someone paralytic from birth suddenly made to feel as for a blind man suddenly made to see. A negative response is suggested by Locke’s contention that the alteration of ideas of sensation by the judgment is not 8. Locke’s remark, earlier in ECHU II/ix/§8, that “the Judgment . . . by an habitual custom, alters the Appearances into their Causes,” can be interpreted differently according to whether one understands ‘cause’ to refer to the unperceived extramental cause of visual ideas of visual and tactual sensations alike or to the three-dimensional object (= idea) immediately perceived in tactual sensation. Bolton, for example, opted for the former reading, presumably because it fits with her view that reference to an external cause acting on the sense organs is an intrinsic part of any idea of sensation as such (see chapter 5, note 10 earlier). Yet it seems to me that such a reading is not supported by, and certainly not required by, the text. The role Locke accorded to judgment in vision is essentially one of reconciling the twodimensional objects presented in visual perception with the three-dimensional objects we perceive tactually. In his example in §8, the judgment treats the object given to visual perception, “a flat Circle variously shadow’d, with several degrees of Light and Brightness,” as an appearance of something else—a uniformly colored sphere—which is far more consonant with the smooth, round object (idea) we perceive by touch. This means that the object given in visual perception is not intrinsically, in and of itself, such an appearance; instead, it becomes so only as an extrinsic effect of the mind’s endeavor to coordinate the visual and tactual as comprehensively and efficiently as possible. This effect is achieved, according to Locke, through the formation of habits of mind founded on “experience, improvement, and acquired notions” (§8). In particular, judgement implicitly substitutes the three-dimensional object our touch assures us is in fact appearing to us for the two-dimensional object we actually perceive visually. That Locke on one occasion chose to describe this customary substitution in terms of “cause” being set in place of “effect” is misleading only if one chooses to read into this context the ontological thesis Locke articulated elsewhere (e.g. II/viii) that even the three-dimensional objects immediately present to touch are no more than ideas, and so not identical with but themselves the effects of the action of external corporeal things on the sense organs of the body. So absent textual evidence to prove that Locke had in mind extramental corporeal causes quite specifically in ix/§8, and with no explanatory role for them to perform in this context, it seems to me preferable to construe the cause substituted by the judgment as one and the same three-dimensional object (idea) we perceive by touch. For Locke’s aim in ix/§§8–10 is essentially psychological, not metaphysical: to show that visual experience of a threedimensional world is not, as with touch, a merely passive affair of perception, but rather the outcome of a two-stage process involving first perception and then something else of a quite different nature (“judgment”). The question I shall now address is what this something else is.


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usual in any of our Ideas, but those received by Sight: Because Sight, the most comprehensive of all our Senses, conveying to our Minds the Ideas of Light and Colours, which are peculiar only to that Sense; and also the far different Ideas of Space, Figure, and Motion, the several varieties whereof change the appearances of its proper Object, viz. Light and Colours, we bring our selves by use, to judge of the one by the other. This in many cases, by a settled habit, in things whereof we have frequent experience, is performed so constantly, and so quick, that we take that for the Perception of our Sensation, which is an Idea formed by our Judgment; so that one, viz. that of Sensation, serves only to excite the other, and is scarce taken notice of it self. (ECHU II/ix/§9)

It is difficult to believe that Locke could have supposed something similar to occur in the case of three-dimensional tactual experience without mentioning it either in this paragraph or the neighboring ones, or at least qualifying the claim that vision is distinguished from the other senses by its being, in the case of space and its modes, the rule rather than the exception for the inputs of perception to be habitually transformed by the judgment. The natural conclusion, then, is that, in his view, tactual experience of a three-dimensional world does not depend on judgment in the way, or at least to anything like the extent, that visual experience does. If so, vision and touch must be conceived as related asymmetrically: whereas we directly perceive the world in three dimensions by touch without any assistance from vision-based judgment, we never immediately “see” (perceive) the world in three dimensions, but instead are completely dependent on past experience (judgment), operating with the guidance of tactual perception, in order to visually experience the world in depth and at a distance.9 Why else would Locke have insisted so strongly on the distinction between perception—passive, prior to all operations of the understanding, and so too immune to the camouflaging effects of custom (ix/§§9–10)—and judgment, and made such a point of singling out threedimensional visual experience as the sensory phenomenon that most perfectly illustrates the difference? The operation of what Locke terms “judgment” in visual depth and distance experience does not seem comparable to the process of forming a tactual image of a whole object (in thought) by assembling successive tactual perceptions (in sense) of its parts, as is necessary when a tangible object is too large or otherwise impossible to sense all at once (by enveloping it in one’s hand or arms). There is nothing in his analysis of the three-dimensional visible world to indicate that the data of visual perception, at any scale, are three dimensional in themselves or 9. Since the idea of space, as explicated by Locke, consists equally in indeterminate distance and indeterminate extension, it seems reasonable to suppose that the questions of depth and distance (in three-dimensional space) were one and the same for him. Molyneux too seems to have understood it in this way, since distance is integrated into his formulation of the problem in his initial letter to Locke: “Whether he could, by his sight, and before he touch them, know which is the Globe and which the Cube? Or Whether he could know by his sight, before he stretched out his Hand, whether he could not Reach them, tho they were Removed 20 or 1000 feet from Him?” (7 July 1688; cited in Atherton, Berkeley’s Revolution). I see no reason to believe that Locke omitted the second question because he saw any particular difficulty in it for his view, or in any way dissented from Molyneux’s negative answer.

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ready-made, like those of tactual, for assembly into three-dimensional images; and this seems just as true of objects we visualize in imagination as of those present to us in visual sensation (since we can visualize nothing we cannot also perceive in sensation, visualized objects must be, in themselves, as two-dimensional as objects of visual sensation). On the contrary, Locke’s analysis suggests that the threedimensional visible world is something the mind synthesizes from scratch: through experience of the correlations between visual perception and tactual, we accumulate “rules” of a three-dimensional visible “grammar” that enable our judgment to confer on the data of visual perception the characteristic physiognomy of visual depth and distance familiar to those accustomed to applying these rules from infancy. The result is a three-dimensional visible world (i.e., Pinker’s 2.5 dimensions) that exists only in and through the action of thought in much the way a shamed expression is “seen” on a face only in consequence of learning to coordinate visible facial posture with emotions and their tangible expression in one’s own face. Thus did Locke see fit to compare the way the data of visual perception become transparent to us, so that we “see” only the product of our judgment, to the way “a Man who reads or hears with attention and understanding, takes little notice of the Characters, or Sounds, but of the Ideas, that are excited in him by them” (§9).10 Perhaps the most serious objection to this interpretation of Locke’s solution to the Molyneux problem is that it seems to conflict with Locke’s view that space is an idea of diverse senses, obtainable equally from vision and touch. For if threedimensional spaces can never be visually perceived or visualized in thought, then it seems to follow that ideas involving a third dimension are obtainable uniquely from touch. Since there is no indication of any such restriction in Locke’s accounts of either perception or ideas of space (ECHU II/v and xiii/§5), one may doubt that his attribution of the third visual dimension to judgment should be construed so as to preclude the possibility of three-dimensional visual imagery. In response, we first should note that Locke left it unspecified whether an idea of diverse senses must be obtained by means of perception alone or whether such 10. An excellent but very different interpretation of Locke’s solution to the Molyneux problem has been given by Laura Berchielli, “Color, Space and Figure in Locke: An Interpretation of the Molyneux Problem,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 40, no 1 (2002), pp. 47–65. Another reading is offered by Bolton, who rejects the assumption of most interpreters “that the once-blind man can see the shapes of things, or at least two-dimensional outlines or retinal images.” Instead, she attributes to Locke the view that even two-dimensional representations of bodies are achieved not by perception but judgment. To the objection that Locke himself speaks of the inputs of visual perception as, e.g., “a flat Circle” and “a Plain variously colour’d” (ECHU II/ix/§8), she proposes a “wholly non-spatial reading. . . . It seems he was struggling to describe a pattern of light and colour that has no reference to figures in two- or three-dimensional space… the phrase ‘flat Circle’ cannot be taken literally” (“The Real Molyneux Question,” 81–2). Although it is not quite clear what the “pattern” being perceived is if it is not a two-dimensional spatial configuration of just the kind one sees when viewing, say, a red circle against a blue background, Bolton’s claim is perhaps most suspect because of its implication that a Lockean perceiver already has the ideas of red and blue in a state of separation from the idea of the shape. For this seems to run foul of Locke’s abstractionism: ideas of red and blue in isolation from the circular shape seem no more possible by means of passive perception alone, without also performing an act of abstraction to prescind them, than an idea of the circular shape is possible in isolation from the


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an idea can, in certain instances, be acquired via an amalgam of perception and judgment. I know of no instance of him expressly denying that a new, original idea can originate in the latter way, nor is it evident that any of his positions, such as his rejection of innate ideas, committed him to denying it even in the case of simple ideas. Indeed, Locke’s anti-innatism may have left him no alternative but to affirm it. For the absence of innate ideas of space à la Descartes’s innate geometry or Pinker’s computational algorithms (section A), taken together with Locke’s insistence on the two-dimensionality of the ideas given in visual perception, would have left him no option but to equate whatever ideas result from the correlation of the visual with the tactual in judgment to the three-dimensional objects immediately present to us in tactual sensation. That is, notwithstanding the two-dimensionality of the perceived image, the visual idea of, say, a sphere just is—analyzes into—an amalgam composed of the perception of a flat circle, variously shadowed and colored, and the (tactually derived) judgments that what appears flat to our sight is really round and what appears variously colored is really uniformly colored. Due to the obscuring effects of lifelong custom, together with the fact that the actions of the mind “seem to require no time, but many of them seem to be crouded into an Instant” (ECHU II/ix/§10), accomplished seers entirely overlook the two-dimensional objects they actually perceive in much the same way accomplished speakers overlook the sounds of speech in their native tongue, and instead attend only to the three-dimensional objects their judgment habituates them to believing are really present to their eyes. In this way, through sheer practiced familiarity, a variously colored flat circle becomes, for all intents and purposes, something we can never, strictly speaking, see or visualize: (the facing side of) a uniformly colored sphere. We then employ this amalgam of perception and judgment, both in geometry and in common life, just as we do the genuine article immediately present to us in tactual sensation, and the visible object becomes as much a part of the objective and phenomenological connotations of ‘sphere’ in language as the tangible idea from which it takes its start. To be sure, on this account, ideas of three-dimensional space would be inaccessible to a sighted person entirely lacking in tactual sensation. But I see no reason red and the blue by means of perception alone. As merely abstractly distinct, the proper way of describing the preabstractive given of perception is one that avoids making the distinction on which Bolton insists. Instead, the best and most natural way to describe it is just as Locke did: in terms of twodimensional arrays of light and color that lend themselves to a three-dimensional spatial “reading”. To be sure, Bolton could defend her interpretation by arguing that the ideas of two-dimensional figures are not, like ideas of color, simple ideas, but complex ideas of simple modes, and so, like all complex ideas, require more than mere passive perception in order to be produced in our minds. Yet there is no reason to think that this distinction is at the focus of the Molyneux question. Although Locke held that all simple ideas must enter the mind through perception, he never insisted that we perceive nothing other than simple ideas (they might, for example, be complex from the standpoint of abstraction, or we might naturally consider many as one right in perception itself, as when we consider as one surface the parts we touch with our fingers and the untouched portions in between); there is consequently no reason to suppose that he did not think it possible to perceive two-dimensional colored figures (by contrast with three-dimensional ones), notwithstanding their status as complex ideas. Finally, if the distinction between perception and judgment at issue in the Molyneux question did turn on the difference between simple and complex ideas, then the distinction would be important in respect of all the senses (reflexion included), rather than just vision as Locke maintained (ix/§9).

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to believe that Locke was so punctilious in the employment of his category ‘ideas of diverse senses’ that he would have refused to extend it to space and its modes simply because more and different kinds of reflexive activity are needed to arrive at fully serviceable ideas of visible depth and distance than is requisite for their tangible correlates. Perhaps it will be easier to appreciate why Locke might have found a functional equivalence between the objects of vision and touch sufficient to consider space and its modes ideas of diverse senses if we think of it as analogous to the case of substance, where, according to Locke, even if we cannot understand a substance for what it is, we can nevertheless comprehend it through what it does (ECHU II/xiii/§19). For if indeed we are incapable of forming visual images of spheres, cubes, or anything else involving a third dimension, our judgment, relying on the evidence of touch, can put the inputs of visual perception to such good use that we can guide ourselves through a three-dimensional world by vision just as effectively as by touch. Indeed, as the most comprehensive of our senses (ix/§9), our sight opens up to us a world of things too large (a landscape), too small (a flea), too inaccessible (a mountain crag), too rarefied (fire), too distant (a star), too hot (molten metal), or otherwise beyond the purview of our other senses (a rainbow, a beam of light, a shadow, a reflection, a mirage). So in functional terms, ideas of three-dimensional space and its modes are at least as much the province of seeing as of feeling, even if, unlike the other two dimensions, they cannot originate by means of perception alone.11 This way of understanding Locke is also of a piece with his treatment of the idea of solidity. Though he made quite clear that this is not an idea of diverse senses but one specific to touch (II/iv), and that without this idea it would be impossible even so much as to conceive the difference between body (filled space) and empty space (§3 and §5),12 he gives no indication of having believed that this prevents us from using our judgment to form visual ideas of solidity, and then employing these ideas to discover the presence or absence of body in a given location. In the same way, we can form visual ideas of the hard and soft, hot and cold, and wet and dry, as well as the various materials of which bodies are composed, so that we can recognize these intrinsically tangible features by sight, unaided by touch. Thus do bodies come to have a “metalic” look, a “leathery” 11. Regarded in this light, Ayers may be said to have held too simplistic a conception of Locke’s imagism when he branded his solution to the Molyneux problem “disastrous” on the ground that “the argument he approves seems to depend on the assumption that all that the visual idea of a shape has in common with a tactual idea of the same shape is its cause: whereas if we suppose that they are intrinsically intentional, what they have in common is their object (i.e. . . . they are the same idea). Molyneux’s argument then, of course, collapses, as it should” (Locke I, 65). It is probably enough to refute Ayers simply to observe he overlooks the fact that Locke never questioned that visible and tangible figures have two spatial dimensions in common. But we should also note his neglect of the possibility that Locke’s conception of ideas of diverse senses permitted him to attribute an idea to a sense even if it exists there only as an amalgam of perception and judgment, but not as an image prereflexively in sensation. Though he is probably without peer in Locke scholarship, Ayers’s tendency to give short shrift to ideas of reflexion is particularly marked in the case of the role Locke ascribed to judgment in the constitution of ideas of visual depth and distance. 12. Hume was critical of Locke for treating solidity as a simple idea: THN 230–1/152. See also chapter 7, note 18.


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look, a “crumbly” look, a “squishy” look, a “wet” look, a “burning hot” look, and so on. Although Locke does not specifically designate these visible features “ideas of diverse senses,” he might very well have done so on the same principle of classification he seems to have used for visual ideas of three-dimensional space and its modes. It should not go unremarked that Locke’s notion of an “idea of diverse senses” is of an order of abstraction so great that he almost certainly would not have insisted on its being founded on any resemblance in the perceived appearance of the data of different senses (in the strict II/ix sense of ‘perception’). Certainly, there can be no question that he denied that the abstract notion of an idea of diverse senses itself has any such foundation, just as he did with respect to the abstract notions of color, sound, quality, simple idea, and idea of one sense (ECHU III/iv/§16). So if no common perceptible quality remains after all differences have been bracketed out between yellow and red, and, a fortiori, between blue and the sound of a clarinet, then how certain can we be that Locke would have insisted that some immediately perceptible common quality must remain after everything differentiating visible space and tangible has been bracketed out? Since the same restriction on nonlinguistic abstraction seems to apply to ideas of simple modes (§17), it likewise has to be wondered how many abstractions of differences a visible cube and tangible cube could survive without all perceptible common qualities between them being eliminated in the process. In view of the fact that Locke drew freely on resemblances other than immediately perceptible ones in order to underwrite notions of a certain level of abstraction, I see no reason not to suppose that he may have done so with respect to the visible and tangible spatial third dimension as well, or even visual and tactual ideas of space and its modes generally. I noted earlier that Locke compared seeing three-dimensionally to hearing speech and reading a narrative to facilitate our acceptance of the notion that what we perceive we do not see and what we see we do not perceive (ECHU II/ix/§9). When we hear speech or read, our attention is fixed not on the words or letters but on what is being said, on the content. The sounds and images effectively disappear from our attentive gaze, as do the acts of applying the rules requisite, first, to discern the words and letters, and, then, to make sense of their meaning. Yet even if our attention is directed elsewhere, we must still, at some (sensory) level of awareness, consciously perceive the sounds or images if we are to know which rules to apply when, and so too (internally) perceive the action of their application if the outcome of this reflexive activity is to become the object of our attentive gaze. To be attentively conscious of the written or spoken narrative is also to be conscious, subattentively, of the letters or phonemes and the judgments whereby they are combined to yield the narrative. For, as portrayed by Locke, attention here is just the discernible tip of a larger, multilayered structure of consciousness, composed equally and at the same time of subattentive perception and other reflexive operations. Whether or not we agree, there seems to me no question that this is the model Locke would have us apply to the third dimension of sight: through “rules” trained into us by experience of the constant conjunctions between the twodimensional objects of visual perception and the three-dimensional objects of touch,

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we develop the skills requisite to “read” the three-dimensional “narrative” visible objects convey. That our attention should be focused exclusively on the “Idea formed by our Judgment,” while the perceptions and actions that enter into it are “scarce taken notice of” (ECHU II/ix/§9), should occasion no surprise, since the three-dimensional world in which our tactual, and very tangible, bodies exist, act, obtain nourishment, and are at risk of injury or death is obviously where our attention is most profitably directed. Yet just as with speech perception and reading, the third visual dimension is merely the attentively accessible tip of a multilayered structure of objects of subattentive sensory and reflexive perception. For, according to Locke, human beings are creatures for whom consciousness is no more dispensable in the process of producing ideas of visible depth and distance than it is to the resulting judgments in and for which alone these ideas exist (consciousness above all of the visually perceived two-dimensional inputs of the process, but also, reflexively, of the process itself). Each of the analogies Locke offered in ECHU II/ix/§9 serves to highlight different features of three-dimensional visual experience. Reading is a skill acquired sufficiently late for us to retain a clear memory, long after it has become second nature, of the extent to which it depends on “experience, improvement, and acquired notions.” It also has the advantage that we are free to shift our attention from the narrative back to the page, and so see (perceive) all that we are not “seeing” when our attention is fully absorbed in the narrative (the product of our judgment). But the advantages of the reading analogy are at the same time disadvantages, since we neither remember having ever had to learn to see three-dimensionally nor, having mastered this skill, is it any longer in our power to “see” the world any other way. Here the analogy with the hearing of speech stands us in better stead. Most of us retain no memory of learning to understand and speak our native tongue. Moreover, once we have mastered this skill, we are subject to the same attentive incapacity characteristic of seeing three-dimensionally: we lose the freedom to direct our attention away from what is being said to the continuous ribbon of sound emanating from a person’s mouth so as to perceive the utterance as animals, or humans without language, may be presumed to (chapter 5-C). Crucial to Locke’s comparison, however, is the fact that this limitation on our attentive capacity is unquestionably an acquired constraint, since before and during the process of learning language the sounds will not only have been perceived but attended to. If we have no memory of our own training in language, we have only to witness the process of language-acquisition in the young and in immigrants. The status of language as an acquired skill is in no sense belied by the fact that it ceases to be at our discretion whether to understand what is said, or even to discern utterances as (discrete, articulate) speech rather than part of the general fabric of nonlinguistic ambient sound. Indeed, far from being a handicap, it is positively to our benefit for the objects of perception to become attentively inaccessible so as to be always and exclusively attuned to the objects of judgment. In this respect, then, the hearing of speech is a precise analogue for how Locke would have us regard our three-dimensional “parsing” of two-dimensional manifolds of light and color. It exhibits the same multilayered structure of consciousness, with attention focused solely on the outcome of complex mental operations directed upon the inputs of (sensory) perception that, though (reflexively) perceived, are performed so habit-


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ually and with such rapidity as to take place “without our taking notice of it” (ECHU II/ix/§10).13 D. A New Conception of “Immediate” Experience Is there any reason to believe Locke’s account of three-dimensional sight is true? As it happens, there is a considerable body of clinical evidence that seems to favor Locke’s empiricism over intellectualist-innatist views from Descartes to Pinker. In a review article entitled “A New Vision of Vision,” the psychologist Israel Rosenfield summed up matters as follows: Recently, one patient reported following an operation that restored her sight, that she had great difficulty making sense of whatever she was looking at. She was in a constant state of depression. Among the distressing problems she described was her inability to see individual colors as a part of objects; she saw the colors floating in separate planes before her eyes. . . . [In 1913, a researcher considering a similar case wrote:] “It would be an error to suppose that a patient whose sight has been restored to him by surgical intervention can thereafter see the external world. The eyes have certainly obtained the power to see, but the employment of this power . . . still has to be acquired from the very beginning. The operation itself has no more value than that of preparing the eye to see; education is the most important factor. The [visual cortex] can only register and preserve the visual impressions after a process of learning . . . To give back his sight to a congenitally blind patient is more the work of an educationalist than that of a surgeon.” Unfortunately, however, just as children who have never learned any language before the age of puberty cannot acquire the grammatical rules essential for language, people born blind who later have their vision restored cannot acquire the rules essential for seeing and recognizing objects and people.14

13. Perhaps one of the reasons the significance of ECHU II/ix is so often mistaken or overlooked is that, in the early sections, Locke equates perceptual consciousness with taking notice, and so, apparently, with attention, e.g.: “How often may a Man observe in himself, that whilst his Mind is intently employ’d in the contemplation of some Objects; and curiously surveying some Ideas that are there, it takes no notice of impressions of sounding Bodies, made upon the Organ of Hearing, with the same alteration, that uses to be for the producing the Idea of a Sound?.. Want of Sensation in this case, is not through any defect in the Organ, or that the Man’s Ears are less affected, than at other times, when he does hear: but that which uses to produce the Idea, though conveyed in by the usual Organ, not being taken notice of in the Understanding, and so imprinting no Idea on the Mind, there follows no Sensation. So that where-ever there is Sense, or Perception, there some Idea is actually produced, and present in the Understanding” (§4). That it is a mistake to infer from remarks such as this that attention and perceptual consciousness are coextensive, or the former a necessary condition for the latter, Locke made unequivocally clear later in the chapter, e.g.: “Habits, especially as are begun very early, come, at last, to produce actions in us, which often escape our observation. . . . And therefore ’tis not so strange, that our Mind should often change the Idea of its Sensation, into that of its Judgment, and make one serve only to excite the other, without our taking notice of it” (§10). This leaves no doubt that Locke acknowledged a difference between things we take no notice of for want of any idea perceived and things we take no notice of because custom and the rapidity of thought conceal an idea we perceive from the light of our attentive gaze. 14. New York Review of Books, 21 September 2000.

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Most important from a Lockean perspective is the suggestion that the problem facing these patients is not a sensory but a psychological one. If three-dimensional seeing were simply a matter of passive perception, the expectation would be that patients who gained their sight only in adulthood would no more need to acquire new notions and skills in order to see three-dimensionally than they would in order to see the other two. “Ill-posed problem” or not (section A), the processes of converting retinal stimuli into the three-dimensional world familiar to those sighted since birth would take place not just subattentively but subperceptually (nonconsciously). That is, so far as their reflexive consciousness (internal sense) was concerned, seeing three-dimensionally would be as purely passive an affair as haptic three-dimensional perception. And if they required any assistance from an educationalist at all, it would be strictly linguistic: a matter of learning to coordinate with visually perceived three-dimensional objects the language that formerly had been correlated exclusively or primarily to tactually perceived ones.15 The clinical evidence that shows such expectations to be defeated suggests that, in addition to the requisite genetic endowments, three-dimensional seeing may well be something like the multi-layered structure of attentive judgment and subattentive perception and reflexive activity Locke portrayed it as being. For if indeed seeing three-dimensionally is a matter of judgment—if, strictly speaking, only two-dimensional manifolds of light and color are ever perceived and there is never anything else present to us visually to be discerned—then we should expect those who have their sight restored in adulthood to be just as “blind” to the third dimension after as they were before. Lacking all experience of the correlations between the immediately perceived two-dimensional manifolds present to our sight and the three-dimensional manifolds of touch, they have yet to acquire the “grammar” necessary to “parse” the former as convex volumes distributed through space. Their apparent inability to acquire a mastery of this “language” even with the assistance of an educationalist may be due to its sheer wealth of detail, and the resulting complexity. For the language of three-dimensional seeing has to be far richer in detail, nuance, and complexity than any spoken or signed language, since it must be able to express every feature, however fine, of tactual experience, down to the least detail—like a language with a vocabulary hundreds or thousands of times larger than that of any vernacular, and with a proportionately greater, more diverse, and more flexible syntax. It thus stands to reason that if the two-dimensional objects perceived visually are to be correlated with the three-dimensional objects we perceive tactually, and these correlations are to be ingrained in us by custom, then it must occur in the earliest stages of conscious life, when we are first accumulating our tactual experiences of solid, convex objects distributed through three-dimensional haptic space. If that process is completed when a subject is still blind, the task of coordinating these objects may simply be too great when his sight is restored, so that he can never fully master the grammar of three-dimensional seeing to the point where visible objects acquire the “three-dimensional” physiognomy—the phenomenology, the look—familiar to those fluent in its use since infancy. Thus, if far from conclusive, the available clinical evidence tends to 15. This is how Morgan understands it in Molyneux’s Question.


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support, and certainly seems consistent with, Locke’s contention that seeing threedimensionally is for everyone a learning process—a matter of judgment grounded in “experience, improvement, and acquired notions”—even if it also one that is fully achievable only if undertaken concurrently with our haptic acquaintance with the world. To fully appreciate why Locke regarded his solution to the Molyneux problem as a powerful argument in favor of acquired notions (sensibilism) where we suppose ourselves to be most beholden to innate ones (intellectualism), we need to view it in relation to Locke’s account of complex ideas as products of acts of considering a manifold of ideas as one substance, mode, or relation (chapter 5-C). Even if we suppose that data of sense are received and ordered unconsciously and subpersonally, the result that presents itself to consciousness can be nothing but a bare manifold (aggregate) of juxtaposed or successive ideas, without unity or relation. For ideas of sensation, in themselves, are and appear to be as distinct and unrelated in imagination as they are and appear when first perceived by sense. All the re-arraying in the world—separating or combining these ideas in imagination as they are not separated or combined in actual perception—will not result in a unitary representation unless and until the manifold is considered as one (substance, mode, or relation) by an act of the subject AND the subject is conscious of its act. If a consciousness of the act of consideration is requisite, however, does this not entail that the act of synthesis (separation, combination) considered in it must likewise take place at a conscious level, and, if so, that the data themselves— the raw material upon which the imagination sets to work—must also be present to consciousness, in their presynthesized state as a bare manifold of ideas? Consequently, Locke’s assertion that the thinking subject is never attentively aware of all these internally perceived goings-on because the operations of the mind occur too rapidly to be perceived, and are further disguised by the effects of mental habit, is not the dodge it is usually dismissed as being. Quite the contrary, the posit of a thinking subject conscious of the unity its synthesizing actions impose on the manifold of sense, together with what that implies as to the conscious character of these actions and the objects they are directed upon, is neither arbitrary nor otiose. Since the question whether seeing three-dimensionally depends on acquired or innate notions is ideally suited to bring out precisely this, it is therefore no surprise that it occupied so central a position in the debate between sensibilist and intellectualist theories of human understanding. To be sure, Locke offered no more than an abstract of a theory of visual threedimensionality, nothing approaching a fully elaborated account. Because of this, it is often thought that there is nothing particularly original about the point that “Ideas of Sensation [are] often changed by the judgment” (title to ECHU II/ix/ §§8–10). For example, it might be supposed that Descartes got there first, not so much because of the view developed in his optical writings (spatial apprehension by means of an innate geometry of pure intellect) as the analysis of ideas of bodies encountered by the senses in the Meditations. The locus classicus is his Second Meditation reflection on the understanding he has of the piece of fresh beeswax he holds in his hand. Descartes’s (anti-Aristotelean) aim was to show that ideas of bodies are not first present to us in sensation and only afterwards in intellect, so

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that the role of the latter is confined to (1) improving our knowledge of the objects with which the senses acquaint us—in order, say, to distinguish fool’s gold from the real thing—and (2) assigning an easily remembered name to facilitate future differentiations. He claimed, on the contrary, that the intellect must be involved in the original perception, antecedently to (1) and (2), since it alone, not the senses, is capable of generating an idea of the wax as something that remains the same material stuff after melting as before, even though each of its sensible (visual, tactual, olfactory, gustatory, and auditory) qualities has changed. If so, then it follows that even in the crudest, least reflective instances of sense perception, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, we depend on a conception of the object of experience the elements of which are not uniquely, or even essentially, derived from data of the senses. In response to the objection that imagination rather than understanding may be responsible for this conception, Descartes argued, in essence, that since everything the imagination is capable of producing is nothing more than a rearrangement of materials previously given in sense perception, its images are really nothing more than possible sense perceptions; and if actual sense perception can be ruled out as a source of our conception of the wax as continuing to exist after melting, then possible perception (imagination) can be ruled out as well. Finally, to reinforce the point that it is judgment rather than sense perception that is responsible, Descartes famously compared the properties of material objects we perceive by means of our senses with the mobile hats and coats he saw as he gazed out his window at the bustling square below: “do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men. And so something I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgment which is in my mind” (Second Meditation AT VII 32). Yet though this may seem very like the distinction made by Locke between perception and judgment in his discussion of the visual third dimension, Descartes’s notion of the role of understanding in sense experience is in fact very different. At one level, it is simply the difference between a blanket assertion, extending to all the modalities of sense perception, versus a narrowly circumscribed claim, confined to vision, and more particularly to visual depth perception. But the difference goes deeper. Descartes was concerned with how we conceptualize (form ideas of) the corporeal things we suppose to exist outside and independently of our minds, and to be responsible for causing us to have the particular sensations we do. Implicit in their conceptualization are such notions as substance, identity, causation, and a constitution (nature) peculiar to each body that confers on it the powers to act as it in fact does—including the powers to affect our senses in the manner typical of, say, a piece of wax (when fresh, melted, etc.). By contrast, none of these notions are present, implicitly or otherwise, in Locke’s treatment of the third dimension of vision. His focus was restricted to the nature and workings of the psychological process that results in visual representations of three-dimensional shapes distributed through three-dimensional space, without regard to their objective reality (as corporeal substances endowed with material constitutions that confer on them powers to act in certain ways rather than others, etc.). The claim that “the Judgment presently, by an habitual custom, alters the


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Appearances into their Causes” (ECHU II/ix/§8) refers not to the extramental corporeal causes of visual sensations but to the ideas of tactual sensation customarily associated with them.16 Once this is appreciated, we can see that Locke’s distinction between perception and judgment leaves off at precisely the point where Descartes’s takes its start. For the outcome of the judgmental process described by the former is precisely the input presupposed by the process described by the latter, through which three-dimensional, perspectival visual forms are transformed into ideas of material objects like the piece of wax, the perambulating human beings in their coats, and so forth (Locke’s account is thus in complete accordance with Pinker’s observation that “we don’t immediately see ‘objects’: the movable hunks of matter that we count, classify, and label with nouns”). Hence, whereas Descartes was occupied with the topic of objective cognition through given sensory appearances, Locke focused on the origin of these appearances themselves, in particular visual appearances, with an eye to showing that the third visual dimension, far from being given to consciousness passively in perception, is in truth something that exists only and through our own reflexive activity. In this way, Locke transformed the concept of sense experience in ways that would prove of the highest importance for his successors. To begin with, the implication that three-dimensional objects never, strictly speaking, appear to the visual sense opened up a place in the sensibilist account of the origin of the idea of space for mental activity: a reflexive contribution to the content of the idea over and above mere sensation. Just as a three-dimensional image of the front side of a human head can be “seen” as a smiling face (and this in turn as a happy or ironical, beautiful or nondescript, etc., smile) by an operation of judgment rooted in past experience and customary association, so too, according to Locke, the three-dimensional image at the basis of this judgment is itself “seen” as three-dimensional only by means of a similarly grounded judgment performed on the two-dimensional visual image we actually perceive. Moreover, by thus in effect fusing the visual sense with the tactual into a single, unified external “sense,” judgment allows us to conceive the perceived objects (ideas) of different senses as objects (ideas) common to diverse senses, that is, as sense-divide transcending objects (ideas),17 which, like the sense-divide–transcending three-dimensional space they occupy, exist only in and through the operation of thought. Our seemingly immediate sensory experience is, accordingly, anything but “immediate”: the activity of the mind in carving up two-dimensional visual data so as to attain the most complete, systematic correlation with the three-dimensional data of touch possible, and forging therefrom a unified external “sense” of a world of three-dimensional sense-divide– transcending appearances is as much a part of that experience as the ideas of sensation we perceive immediately.

16. See note 8 above. 17. As noted earlier, none of the “objects” concerned in Locke’s distinction between perception and judgment are extramental; all are what he classed as ideas. Our focus here is on which objects/ideas, according to Locke, consist entirely of sensation (perception) and which involve an additional reflexive ideational component (judgment). Only in the next chapter will this focus shift to Locke’s view of the relation of ideas to extramental reality.

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Locke’s conception of sense experience thus represents the first step along the path to the distinction between sensations and appearances from which Kant’s transcendental philosophy takes its start (A20/B34). Kant acknowledged his debt to Locke as the first to recognize that sense experience consists of “two very dissimilar elements, namely a material for cognition from the senses and a certain form for ordering this material from the inner source of pure intuition and thought” (A86/B118–9). Since Kant invariably denominated sensation the “material” of cognition and space “pure intuition,” Locke’s distinction between visual perception and judgment (founded on experience and custom) in his chapter on perception in ECHU does indeed point the way toward Kant’s distinction between sensation and appearance (not to be confused with his distinction between appearances and phenomena: chapter 3-D #1). For, as I read it (chapter 3-D ##3-5), Kant’s conception of space as a pure intuition of sensibility involves a synthesis and unity of apperception for which spontaneity (mental activity) as well as receptivity (affection in sensation) is requisite; and since, unlike sensations, outer appearances presuppose pure space, the same dependence on spontaneity carries over to appearances. Needless to say, Locke never went so far as to posit, much less affirm, pure intuitions of sensibility or the pure concepts of the understanding they make possible (regarding which Kant rightly claimed to be breaking new ground: chapter 2A). Moreover, Berkeley and Hume trekked over much the same ground Kant was to do and arrived at positions far closer to his than Locke did with his solution to the Molyneux question. Nevertheless, it would be difficult to exaggerate the debt owed to Locke by all three for discovering, and advancing some considerable distance along, the path to a whole new way of conceiving external sense and space. Equally important, Locke’s insistence on the indispensability of reflexive activity to the content of our ideas of the visual third dimension, and so too our ideas of the sense-dividing transcending objects of the external sense into which these ideas essentially enter, pointed the way toward a new method for explicating ideas that Berkeley, Hume, and Kant would elaborate, extend, and systematize: psychologism (chapters 1—3). If an object of (external or internal) sense experience can be shown to be bound up by content with the mental processes whereby our experience of it first becomes possible, then ideas that seem to us “objective”—in the sense of being prior to and independent of the psychology of representing them—turn out not to be, and can thereby be known to be incapable of being realized in any object that exists prior to and independently of the purview of mind with the requisite psychological constitution. Of course, Locke did not infer any such restriction in the cases of three-dimensional space, if for no other reason than that he believed that tactual perception provides us with an impeccably objective image of it that, in conjunction with abstraction (from all ineluctably haptic qualities), can serve for the representation of mind-independent corporeal reality. But even if void of idealist implications for Locke himself, his account of the visual third dimension became a model to his successors because it traces the contents of this idea, and all its modes, to the mental operations requisite to “read” twodimensional appearances three-dimensionally as much as to the passive perceptions of these appearances. Thus, while Locke himself may never have been tempted,


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or even thought, to investigate whether the Cartesian model of objective understanding might be supplanted by psychologistic explications of such concepts as existence, cause and effect, substance, and space and time, there seems little question that the concept of sense experience he pioneered was the first step along a path that eventuated in a radically new, psychologistic brand of idealism.

7 Objective Understanding

My focus in the two preceding chapters has been confined to Locke’s theory of ideas: their nature as determined by their origins; the processes whereby they are formed; and how they are related and combined to yield the multitiered structure of consciousness that is ordinary sense experience. Yet although this conceptual inquiry was to be the chief occupation of later sensibilist thinkers, for Locke himself it was never more than a propadeutic. He sought only to proportion the cognitive ambitions of philosophers to the ideational capacities of human understanding, scaling them back wherever necessary, preliminary to letting “loose our Thoughts into the vast Ocean of Being” (ECHU I/i/§7). Once this was done, he set out to address age-old epistemological and ontological issues in much the same manner Descartes did before him: What can we cognize through our ideas? Do our ideas suffice for an understanding of the nature of what we cognize through them? Do our ideas afford us knowledge of reality in general, applicable even to things that, individually, we can neither conceive nor cognize through them? It seems never to have occurred to Locke that his theory of ideas might hold the key to furnishing solutions of an entirely new kind to these and similar questions, thereby superseding the approach he actually took. Consequently, by contrast with the psychological starting point of his theory of understanding, the epistemological and ontological inferences he drew from them became ever more a target and less a model for his successors. Yet precisely because this dissatisfaction stimulated them to rethink the psychological basis of cognition in ever more profound and farreaching ways, the doctrines they found objectionable merit a place in this study as well. A. The Elements of Locke’s Conception of Objective Understanding If the only objects ever present to our thoughts are our own ideas and the mental actions directed upon them, how is it possible to understand or cognize anything else? For Locke, the answer lies first and foremost in our intuitive knowledge, certain beyond any possibility of doubt, that every beginning of existence must have a cause of its existence, be it thing, state, or action: 174

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‘every thing that has a beginning must have a cause,’ is a true principle of reason, or a proposition certainly true, which we come to know by the same way, i.e. by contemplating our ideas, and perceiving that the idea of beginning to be, is necessarily connected with the idea of some operation; and the idea of operation, with the idea of something operating, which we call a cause; and so the beginning to be is perceived to agree with the idea of a cause, as is expressed in the proposition; and thus it comes to be certain proposition; and so may be called a principle of reason, as every true proposition is to him that perceives the certainty of it. (CWS 61–2)

The existence of ideas is a case in point. Since ideas, by their very nature, exist only in relation to the (active or passive) operations of thought (chapter 5–B), their beginning coincides with their being thought—perceived or otherwise considered— by the understanding. Since each act of thinking has a beginning, ideas must, by Locke’s principle, have a cause of their existence. And since anything less than a fully adequate cause of their existence would imply that an idea’s existence was to that extent uncaused, Locke had no doubt that each idea has a complete causal explanation and, to that extent, can serve the understanding as a cognitive ground whereby insight into its cause can be gained. Nor is that all that intuitive knowledge teaches us. Since causation implies active agency, this in turn powers to act, these the specific constitution in virtue of which an agent is so empowered, and a substance to support this constitution (ECHU II/xxiii/§11), Locke could infer a great deal about the cause of ideas in a general way. Understanding he ascribed to a mental substance, but, unlike Descartes, he did not pretend to certainty as to whether the essence of such substance is immaterial or material (or indeed some third nature). Locke also rejected Descartes’s intellectualist conviction that our mental substance lacks a constitution sufficient to produce all of its ideas other than sensation by the operation of the understanding alone, and so needs to be supplemented with an endowment of innate ideas from its Creator. Finally, while he agreed with Descartes both that our mental substance cannot fully and adequately account for the existence of ideas of sensation, and that this can be known with complete certainty, he did so on the ground of sensation alone, without presupposing the existence of God or the nature of God as incapable of deception: The Knowledge of the Existence of any other thing we can have only by Sensation. For there being no necessary connexion of real Existence, with any Idea a Man hath in his Memory,1 . . . no particular Man can know the Existence of any Being, but only when by actual operating upon him, it makes it self perceived by him. For the having the Idea of any thing in our Mind, no more proves the Existence of that Thing, than the picture of a Man evidences his being in the World, or the Visions of a Dream make thereby a true History. (ECHU IV/xi/§1)

I will examine Locke’s reasoning here in detail in chapter 9–B. For the present, it suffices to recognize that the causation of our ideas of sensation is divided between 1. Locke also applied this criterion to distinguish sensation from remembrance at ECHU II/xix/§1 and CWS 360.

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ourselves, as mental substances, and something else outside of us, be it mind, matter, or some third nature. For while our minds must be equipped with a sensory constitution requisite to empower us to, say, taste pineapple, smell garlic, see a brightly illuminated red circle, hear a Stradivarius, or feel an ice cube, we depend on the external substances with constitutions that empower them to affect our senses organs in such a way that we actually do taste, see, smell, hear, or feel these things. The constitutions of external substances determine everything our understandings do or do not sense throughout our lives, be it directly or through their power to alter the sense-affecting constitution of other substances (“the power in Fire to produce a new Colour, or consistency in Wax or Clay . . . is as much a quality in Fire, as the power it has to produce in me a new Idea or Sensation of warmth or burning, which I felt not before,” ECHU II/viii/§10). Yet just as we cannot know with certainty the constitution of our own mental substance, we also cannot know the constitution whereby substances external to our minds cause us to perceive the simple ideas of sensation we actually do. In order to cognize their nature at all, we are obliged to rely on the connections we can establish empirically, to whichever degree of probability, on the basis of the (paltry supply of) ideas available to us. And, on that basis, Locke deemed it as probable as anything can be that the objects which affect our senses, as well as our own ability to be affected by them (sense organs), are powers rooted in the material constitution of corporeal substances. As we have seen, Locke subscribed to the then developing consensus that our bodies are affected by other bodies in a purely mechanistic fashion (impulsion). Consequently, the only ideas of sensation we can use to conceive the constitutions of the external objects that cause us to perceive ideas of sensation are those necessary to conceive the communication of motion from one body to another: (1) the simple idea of space together with complex ideas of its simple modes; (2) the specifically tangible simple idea of solidity; and (3) the ideas of succession and duration that enable us to represent both the identity and change of location (motion) of material things. All other simple ideas, insofar as they cannot be conceived to play a role in mechanical action, are ipso facto excluded from playing a role in understanding these objects through the ideas they produce in us. The sensible qualities that fall into this category include colors, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactual qualities such as warm/cold and soft/hard: none of these enter, or can enter, into the conception of the constitution of bodies in virtue of which they affect our senses, and, in general, impel and are impelled, attract and are attracted, or repel and are repelled. Consequently, Locke distinguished simple ideas of sensation into ideas of primary and secondary qualities according to whether they can or cannot be used for conceiving the real constitutions of bodies by virtue of which they affect our senses. We also rely on experienced constant conjunctions of simple ideas of sensation to sort bodies into kinds. However, since we cannot be certain that some of the sense perceptual and psychological powers our feeble human minds lack might be necessary to conceive the true essences of the external causes of the ideas we perceive, we cannot be certain that any of the sorts into which we group bodies (metallic, liquid, organic, explosive, nutritious, etc.) correspond to human-mind-


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independent real kinds. Indeed, it may very well be that the essence of things goes deeper than material structure, so that none of the ideas available to the human mind suffice to give us the least insight whatsoever into the real essential natures of the substances that cause us to perceive the ideas of sensation we perceive. Philosophers who pretend to cognition of the real essences of substances, whether indubitably certain or merely probable, and then erect a body of philosophical doctrine upon it, are consequently deluding themselves. The remedy lies in taking the measure of the understanding at the start, before attempting to employ it in matters where experience can no longer guide it, so that, thus forearmed, we can steel ourselves against any and all temptations to misunderstand and exaggerate its true capacities. The foregoing is Locke’s theory of objective understanding in outline. In the remainder of this chapter, I will focus on each of its elements in turn. B. The Object and the I: The Presupposition of an Empirical Subject Since Lockean ideas are, by definition, relative to operations of thought, their relation to a Cartesian I think is built into them from the start. This means that ideas of sensation belong together, even if only as a bare manifold, only insofar as the successive considerations that distinguish and individuate them are united in one and the same consciousness. The unity of sensations as the manifold of a single consciousness is the essential condition for an understanding whose sole task it is “to repeat, compare, and unite them in an almost infinite Variety, and so make at Pleasure new complex Ideas” (ECHU II/ii/§2). The same condition holds of the ideas of reflexion that originate in the perception of the passive and active operations of thought directed upon ideas on sensation: if they are to belong together with simple and complex ideas of sensation to the same I think, they must all be united one and the same consciousness. The idea of this unity of all the ideas that successively present themselves in one’s mind, reflexions no less than sensations, is, accordingly, the idea of oneself as an enduring existent, continuing through all change (succession) in one’s ideas, and thus as something whose existence is distinct from them (xiv/§3) (chapter 3–A). This idea is the very first we have of ourselves, and the presupposed foundation on which every subsequent idea we form of ourselves is overlaid. This includes not only the extra dimension it acquires through our passionate concern with the fate of our unitary I, but also everything that accrues to it through the discovery that its fate is bound up with the career of a certain physical object, a human body, whose states are continually reflected in the I’s own, together with the forensic identity the I acquires by virtue of its ability to act through this body so as have effects in the physical world, and so too on the bodies associated with other thinking subjects. None of these ideas of ourselves would be possible were we not, in the first instance, able to conceive ourselves as a unitary I; and this we can only do because of the compresence of all our ideas in one and the same consciousness (chapter 4–D). Moreover, by contrast with the ideas of self superadded to it (which presuppose such things as that memory is an accurate picture of

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the past, or union with a body, or concourse with other embodied minds), only the idea of this unitary I carries with it absolutely certain knowledge that it exists at any moment it thinks that it does (“we have an intuitive Knowledge of our own Existence, and an internal infallible Perception that we are,” IV/ix/§3).2 Though largely invisible in Locke’s theory of objective understanding, there is one respect in which the I is absolutely fundamental. To represent an object is to represent an existent corresponding to our ideas yet distinct from them. But how is this possible when, for Locke, our only objects are own ideas, and the consideration of the idea and the idea itself are nothing distinct from one another? The answer begins with the representation of the unitary I. For although the idea of its duration presupposes the idea of the successive perceptions united in it, the idea of that succession presupposes the actual duration of the consciousness in which the successive perceptions are united. Where do we get the idea of that consciousness? Although the difficulties this question raises for an anti-abstractionist like Hume lead straight to the quandary discussed in chapter 3, for Locke there was no problem: we simply abstract the idea we derive of the I’s duration from our idea of the successive perceptions and apply it to conceive the unitary consciousness implicit in the idea of that succession. This idea thus affords us the idea of an existence prior to and independent of the ideas coursing through it, and so distinct from theirs. Thus equipped, there then is nothing lacking to prevent us from representing anything coexistent with our unitary self as distinct not only from our ideas but from ourselves as well (“we call the Existence, or the Continuation of the Existence of our selves, or any thing else, Commensurate to the succession of any Ideas in our Mind, the Duration of our selves, or any such other thing co-existing with our Thinking,” ECHU II/xiv/§3). This idea of an other vis à vis the thinking I arrived at in this way is the closest we can come to Locke’s account of the origin of the idea of an object in general, that is, an existent that both corresponds to some or all of our coexistent or successive ideas and is distinct from them. C. Substances: Our Understanding of Their Existence and Nature The idea of an object in general becomes the idea of an external object in general when applied specifically to the cause of sensations. The context in which this application takes place is fashioned from the interrelated concepts power, action and passion, causation, efficacy, and substance: Power being the Source from whence all Action proceeds, the Substances wherein these Powers are, when they exert this Power into Act, are called Causes; and the Substances which thereupon are produced, or the simple Ideas which are introduced into any subject by the exerting of that Power, are called Effects. The 2. It is true that Locke does not use the expression ‘I’ in this connection. Nevertheless, like most of his contemporaries and successors through Kant, Locke philosophized in the context of the notion here described. Since in our time it is anything but natural for philosophers to implicitly orient their thinking in accordance with the Cartesian notion of the I, it helps to make Locke’s orientation explicit.


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efficacy whereby the new Substance or Idea is produced, is called, in the subject exerting that Power, Action; but in the subject, wherein any simple Idea is changed or produced, it is called Passion. (ECHU II/xxiii/§11)

Corresponding to actions and passions, Locke distinguished two types of powers, active faculties and passive capacities. To account for the origin of the ideas of both sorts of power, Locke’s commitments to sensibilism and empiricism obliged him to identify a particular, concrete case that might serve as their source. The external senses, however, prove inadequate in this respect. For by their means, strictly speaking, only change can be perceived, so that the powers responsible for the change have to be extrapolated from regularities observed in past experience: The Mind, . . . concluding from what it has so constantly observed to have been, that the like Changes will for the future be made, in the same things, by like Agents, and by the like ways, considers in one thing the possibility of having any of its simple Ideas changed, and in another the possibility of making that change; and so comes by that Idea which we call Power. (xxi/§1)

Since extrapolation from past experience can only account for the application of an idea of power already in our possession rather than its first acquisition, Locke had to look elsewhere to account for its origin. And here it cannot be emphasized too strongly that Locke, unlike his psychologistic successors, was an abstractionist and so, like his intellectualist competitors, did not, and could not, take psychological accounts of the origin of ideas to reveal anything essential about the contents of ideas, or imply any limitation on their scope of application. In the case of the origin of the idea of active power in reflexion, this meant that he saw no bar to applying this idea to corporeal objects: active Powers . . . (which is the more proper signification of the word Power) . . . make so great a part of our complex Ideas of natural Substances, (as we shall see hereafter,) and I mention them as such, according to common apprehension; yet they [are] not, perhaps so truly active Powers, as our hasty Thoughts are apt to represent them. . . . [I]f we will consider it attentively, Bodies, by our Senses, do not afford us so clear and distinct an Idea of active Power, as we have from reflection on the Operations of our Minds. . . . This at least I think evident, That we find in our selves a Power . . . which we call Volition or Willing. The forbearance or performance of that action, consequent to such order or command of the mind is called Voluntary. . . . The power of Perception is that which we call the Understanding. . . . And the ordinary way of Speaking is, That the Understanding and Will are two Faculties of the mind. (xxi/§2 & §§4–6)

The experience of the I’s faculties of understanding and will by means of reflexive perception is the concrete, particular case from which, according to Locke, we originally derive the idea of active power. Only afterward, once we have abstracted it from its origin in internal sense, can we apply it for the purpose of forming ideas of active faculties in external objects on the basis of observed regularities.

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Before this can be done, however, we must first form ideas of our mind’s passive capacities. For if the active faculties of understanding and will were sufficient to explain the origin of all our ideas, there would be no cognitive ground for positing external objects corresponding to our ideas. This cognitive ground arises with the discovery that the active powers of the I are limited: neither is adequate to summon up new ideas of sensation or to prevent them from being perceived once they exist. This shows that sensations are not the actions of thought but its passions. Since “whatever Change is observed, the Mind must collect a Power somewhere, able to make that Change” (ECHU II/xxi/§4), the existence of sensations in us furnishes the cognitive ground that justifies us in positing an external cause of sensations. And, for the same reason, the mind’s various capacities for sensation—sight, touch, et al—can legitimately be designated external senses (i/ §4).3 Powers may be attributed only where the causal efficacy exists to exercise them. This is the case when, given some causal input (which may originate externally or internally), the constitution of a thing confers on it the causal efficacy to bring about a certain effect. In a loose sense, the existent thing so constituted may be thought of as a substance. However, since powers, and so too their supporting constitutions, may be organized hierarchically (some supporting others), Locke, following other early modern philosophers, accepted that, in the strict sense, ‘substance’ signifies only the most fundamental, elementary constitution of a thing, on which all its other, derivative constitutions supervene. This may be illustrated, without being exemplified (for reasons that will be made clear in the next section), by considering what the ultimate substance of a individual human walker is. To walk, a human must have a certain bodily constitution, part of which includes the power to contract the muscles of the legs. The distinct tissues that make up these muscles must have the appropriate constitution to confer on them the powers necessary to play their part in the contractions required for walking. The elements that make up the tissues must have the appropriate constitution to confer on them the powers necessary to play their part in forming tissues of the kind required. Eventually the level of cellular constitution is reached, then that of the chemical constitution of the cells, then that of the molecular constitution of the chemicals, then that of the atomic constitution of the molecules, and so on, until the ultimate, and therefore substantial, constitution is reached: the constitution responsible for the powers that make everything above it in the hierarchy possible. Locke did not pretend to know whether this substantial constitution corresponds to the ultimate constitution of matter as he and most other mechanists conceived of it: solid, extended being. But, on the assumption that it does, the actualization of each subsequent level in the hierarchy made possible by the basic level depends on the superaddition of organizing principles. Crediting these in all cases to divine intervention (ECHU IV/iii/§6, x/§§10–11, and CWS 460–78), Locke supposed that God, having created solid, extended substances, also had to organize them so that 3. Skeptical objections to the theses in this paragraph will be consider in chapter 9–B, where I shall deal with what Locke termed “sensitive knowledge.”


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each has the power to move and be moved by the others (only the passive power to receive the order impressed upon them is presupposed in the substances themselves).4 Once in motion, further organizing principles then need to be superadded to yield more complex constitutions of bodies with new, more varied powers of movement. After sufficient superadditions have occurred, biological mechanisms eventually emerge, some of which, like the human body, possess a constitution that confers on them a power to walk.5 The human ability to cognize the constitution of substances is, however, subject to two crucially important limitations. First, the serviceability of ideas of sensation as cognitive grounds of external substances is limited by such powers as these substances have to affect our senses, be it directly or indirectly (by altering the constitution of other things in ways that do affect our senses, as fire alters the appearance of wax or clay). Whatever may pertain to the constitution of substances, be it of external things or our own minds, that fails to confer any power on them to affect our senses is not only unknown but inconceivable (for want of the simple ideas with which to do so). Second, there may be “Creatures with a thousand other Faculties, and ways of perceiving things without them, than what we have. Yet our Thoughts can go no farther than our own” (xxiii/§13; also ii/§3, ix/ §15, III/vi/§4 and IV/iii/§23). This constraint relates to the kind, number, and/or quality of the sensory capacities humans possess. The first of these is potentially the most crippling. Since the only two kinds of sensory faculty known to us are external and internal senses, we are limited to the conception of only two general kinds of action: motion and thought. This means that our conception of the powers of substances, and consequently also of the constitution on which they depend, is limited to two kinds of efficacy: the exercise of the power to think and the exercise of the power to move. If substances are efficacious in other ways, we cannot even so much as think how this might be; nevertheless, we are at risk of being mistaken in inferring that a substance that lacks the power either to move or to think is ipso facto nonexistent, or indeed that it is incapable (through the power(s) it does possess) of affecting our senses.6 And since this is as true of the substance of our 4. Locke granted that God might create matter, “leave it in a state of inactivity, and it will nevertheless be a substance . . . which will not lose its being of a substance, though God should bestow on it nothing more but this bare being, without giving it any activity at all” (CWS 464). Does this mean there might have been matter that lacked the power of movement? That does not seem likely, for it would have made matter indistinguishable from extension, a Cartesian position from which Locke dissented (ECHU II/iv). Rather, his attribution to matter of solidity implies at least a passive capacity for resistance to external impulsion. Thus, the most plausible way to read CWS 464 is that, beyond the constitution in virtue of which material substances have solidity, God must superadd a constitution sufficient for an active faculty of movement. See also note 18. 5. See the outstanding discussion of superaddition in Ayers, Locke II, chap. 12 and 14. Although Locke uses the notion in reference to kinds (species, essences) of material beings—solid, moving, complex-inorganic, organic, sentient, and thinking—my extension of it here to an individual material thing (a human walker) seems warranted, for it is certainly at the level of the real constitution of individual substances that divine superaddition must work if it is to produce actual beings possessed of the (nominal) essence in question. 6. Similarly, Spinoza was careful to allow for attributes other than extension and thought, and Berkeley was careful to allow that there might be some third nature, distinct from both spirits and their ideas (sensible things).

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minds as it is of external substances, our knowledge of mental substances is limited in the same way: we only know its actions insofar as ideas of reflexion enable us to conceive them, but these are useless for conceiving any other kinds of action whereof they may be capable (of which creatures with senses of the appropriate kind to be affected by it might be able to form ideas). Yet even if external and internal senses should be the only two kinds there are, there may still be any number of other external senses than those with which humans are endowed (ECHU II/ii/§3). Human senses only permit us to conceive external substances as material—solid, extended—things. But there is no saying what ideas senses other than those we have might have afforded us: something different from, but analogous to, space; something different from, but analogous to, solidity; etc. “Other Spirits, who see and know the Nature and inward Constitution of things, how much must they exceed us in Knowledge?” (IV/iii/§6) Even the few senses we possess might still have opened up to us whole new scenes of thought had they been “quicker and acuter” (II/xxiii/§12), including perhaps in ways the makers of telescopes, microscopes, and other sense-enhancing devices have yet to imagine. Moreover, with the same, or even with fewer and duller senses, an understanding endowed with far more powerful and varied reflexive faculties than human minds possess might approach far nearer than us toward the ultimate constitution of external substances. Nevertheless, a creature with every kind of sense, in limitless number, with unbounded quickness and acuity, possessing reflexive faculties able to comprehend these data in ways vastly surpassing human understanding, might still find itself unable to penetrate into the ultimate constitution of substances. This is because the first restriction still applies: there may be much that belongs to the internal constitution of substances that no sensory capacity is capable of detecting, and/or no intellectual faculty (of the sensibilist Lockean sort, confined to processing the data of sense into complex ideas) is capable of comprehending. Thus, the ultimate constitution of substances could forever remain a mystery, not only to humans but to any understanding dependent on data of sense and limited to the production of complex ideas from these data: that is, all except an omniscient divine intellect. The upshot is that Locke’s commitment to sensibilism inevitably brought with it a skepticism regarding the ability of creatures that depend on senses to attain an understanding of the constitution of substances, whether of external things or their own minds, insofar as ‘substance’ is taken in the strict sense to refer to the ultimate constitution on which all the powers of a thing to affect our senses, directly or indirectly, depend. Since, in Locke’s view, there are no universal ideas of substances that do not derive from abstractive considerations of particular ideas, this skepticism carries over to all general notions of the essences of substances, insofar as “essence” is understood to refer to their ultimate constitution (chapter 8– C). This of course does not mean, as some have supposed, that Locke conceived of substances as ultimately having no essence at all. Whereas the only idea Locke credited to us of the ultimate essence of substances may be bare (“An obscure and relative Idea, ECHU II/xxiii/§3), this does not mean that the substances themselves


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are bare (bare particulars, devoid of essence).7 Substantial essence is the one on which all other real essences supervene, and may lie completely beyond the ken of what our ideas allow us to conceive. The real essence Locke attributed to material things in general as solid, extended substances must consequently not be construed absolutely, but only in relation to the last, best, lowest-common-denominator idea (“nominal essence”) humans are equipped to form of them. And, indeed, Ayers has found textual evidence to show that Locke, shy though he was of appearing too skeptical, acknowledged this implication of his view: [In CWS 460–78 Locke had] argued that the superaddition of thought to matter no more evidently ‘destroys the essence of matter’, i.e. extension and solidity, than does the superaddition of any other perfection. Yet that was less than clearly to recognize that, by his own lights, ‘extended, solid substance’ is only a nominal, rather than the real definition of matter. He seems rather to have been assuming the corpuscularian view of the latter for the sake of argument. Yet in a later letter to Collins the same general point was put in a way which is more scrupulously compatible with agnosticism about the ontological essence. Cogitation, extension and solidity, it is there said, may all be, for all we know, similarly related to an unknown substance or essence: ‘Of this substance we have no idea, that excludes cogitation, any more than solidity.’8

Locke’s theory of substances may thus be summed up as follows. The idea of an individual substance is, in respect of its contents, admirably clear and (in the sense specified in Locke’s Epistle to the Reader) determinate. Why then are matters anything but simple or straightforward when it comes to the cognitive employment of this idea? Locke seems never to have thought, as Hume and Kant were to do, that the conception of sense experience as an amalgam of rule-governed thought and sense perception that emerged from his consideration of the third visual dimension might be extended so that the scope of the idea of substance might be limited in the same way to ideal-psychological phenomena. Instead, he did precisely the opposite, holding that no object we meet with in sensation or reflexion can instantiate it, and that our only access to substances is by inference from such objects to causes that can never be present to our minds in sensation or reflexion. Lacking pure intellect, the only insight into the constitution of these substances we are capable of, according to Locke, depends on the extent of their resemblance to the qualities with which sensation and reflexion acquaint us. Although he found ample reason to suppose that such resemblances do indeed exist (ECHU II/viii), 7. See Edwin McCann’s criticism of the view championed most notably by Jonathan Bennett: “Locke’s Philosophy of Body,” in Chappell, Cambridge Companion to Locke, 83. Berkeley is sometimes mentioned too in this connection, but see chapter 12, note 9. 8. Locke II, 181–2. In correspondence with me, Ayers indicated passages in the Essay with a similar import: (1) under the topic “want of ideas,” Locke refers to “that All-wise Agent who has made [things] to be, and to operate as they do, in a way wholly above our weak Understandings to conceive” (IV/iii/ §28); (2) Locke qualifies the assertion that ideas of secondary qualities depend on primary qualities of the minute parts by adding “or if not upon them, upon something yet more remote from our Comprehension: (iii/§11); and (3) the same suggestion is present in the comment on “the Weakness of humane Understanding” in iii/§16. I am grateful to Ayers for these and other points of information, though he bears no responsibility for the use, or misuse, to which I have put them.

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this is not the case when it comes to the ultimate constitution of substances, on which their higher level constitutions and powers all supervene. To illustrate this, Locke invoked the tale of the Indian philosopher who, supposing “that the World was supported by a great Elephant, was asked, what the Elephant rested on; to which his answer was, a great Tortoise: But being gain pressed to know what gave support to the broad-back’d Tortoise, replied, something, he knew not what” (xxiii/ §2). The point of the story is that while our simple ideas may equip us to comprehend the constitution of the substances responsible for producing them in us at one level, and perhaps the next down, or even several more, we have, and can have, no reason to believe we can ever reach their ultimate constitutions, the foundation of all their other qualities, by means of these ideas (even if these did fall within the scope of our ideas, we could never know it; and assuming they did, we could never in practice be certain that any of the qualities we succeed in conceiving in fact pertain to the ultimate level). Thus, the fallacy committed by philosophers who pretend to insight into the ultimate essences (attributes) of substances, as Locke diagnosed it, consists in confounding the qualities most fundamental to the constitution of the objects present to us in experience—objects that in themselves are nothing but congeries of simples ideas of sensation and/or reflexion that the understanding happens to consider in a single, complex idea—with the qualities most fundamental to the constitution of the substantial objects responsible for causing those simple ideas in us. For the ultimate constitution of our complex ideas of substances may simply be the accidental by-product of the limited power of our senses to be affected by their substantial causes and/or the limited power to affect our senses conferred on these causes by their constitution; whereas the ultimate constitution of the substances themselves is subject to no limitations other than the limitations of their Creator, who, as divine, has no limitations at all.9 In the end, therefore, we can know nothing whatever for certain about what the ultimate constitution of any substance is; we can be certain only of what it does: support the existence of it qualities (ECHU II/xiii/§19).10 D. Locke’s Materialism Locke’s version of mechanistic materialism, with his conception of material substances as extramental causes of ideas whose ultimate constitutions are quite pos9. The essence of the objects we experience Locke termed nominal, because it is defined by an abstract idea formed at the pleasure of the understanding. Corresponding to this in the substance responsible for causing the simple ideas contained in the nominal essence is the real essence. The important thing to recognize is that the real essence need not coincide with the ultimate constitution of that substance. For, strictly speaking, a Lockean real essence is defined in terms of the qualities (powers) in the substances directly responsible for causing us to have the simple ideas of sensation contained in the nominal essence. There is, however, no saying that the constitution responsible for these qualities does not supervene on more elementary constitutions that, at least at the ultimate level, may bear no resemblance whatsoever to any of the qualities present to us in sensation or reflexion, ideas of primary qualities included. See chapter 8–C. 10. Though clear enough in ECHU, Locke put the issue beyond all doubt in CWS: “as long as there is any simple idea or sensible quality left, according to my way of arguing, substance cannot be


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sibly unknowable, was an inviting target for many of his sensibilist successors. What role can such substances play in our cognition if they are never present to us in sensation or reflexion, and may ultimately have no resemblance to anything that is? Still, before we consider the objections of Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, or what they proposed to set in place of Locke’s materialism, we first need to understand its tenets and the reasoning underpinning them. And the place to begin is with the view any philosophical materialism seeks to supersede: the materialism of the vulgar. The vulgar—which includes everyone when unreflectively engaged in the affairs of ordinary life, as well as infants and higher animals—never question the independent reality of the objects present to their senses. What they see and touch, as well as the body that sees and touches, are never for a moment considered to exist only as ideas in the mind as pleasure and anger do. Nor do they consider, much less take seriously, the possibility that, like ideas, these objects do not continue to exist when no longer present to the senses. Accordingly, vulgar materialism may be resolved into two constituent beliefs so natural to us that we believe without ever needing to be taught them: B1. We identify the qualities of bodies that appear to our senses with the real qualities of the bodies themselves that appear. B2. We attribute to these real qualities the same existence we attribute to the bodies themselves: an existence distinct from (external to and independent of) the existence of our perceptions of them, an existence that continues even when no perceptions of them exist. From these two beliefs, we arrive at the picture of the physical world as something that was much as it appears to humans and other percipient creatures before such creatures existed, that would continue so were all such creatures to go extinct, and that would be this way even if none had ever existed: leaves would still be green, roses red, and the sun shine; rotting vegetation would still stink, rock falls make a racket, stones be hard, snow cold, boulders heavy, and so on. The vulgar view faces a problem, however, when, in the case of sensible pleasure and pain, the two natural beliefs come into conflict (ECHU II/viii/§16). discarded; because all simple ideas, all sensible qualities, carry with them a supposition of a substratum to exist in, and of a substance wherein the inhere” (7). Also: “I think he deserves no blame, who owns the having imperfect, inadequate, obscure ideas, where he has no better: however, if it be inferred form thence, that either he almost excludes those things out of being, or out of rational discourse, . . . the first of these will not hold, because the being of things in the world depends not on our ideas: the latter indeed is true, in some degree, but is no fault; for it is certain, that where we have imperfect, inadequate, confused, obscure ideas, we cannot discourse and reason about those things so well, fully, and clearly, as if we had perfect, adequate, clear and distinct ideas” (9); and “He that is satisfied that Pendenniscastle, if it were not supported, would fall into the sea, must think of a support that sustains it: but whether the thing that it rests on be timber, or brick, or stone, he has, by his bare idea of the necessity of some support that props it up, no clear and distinct idea at all” (453). Clearly, Locke thought the truth of the general principle of substance as much a matter of intuitive knowledge as he did the general causal maxim.

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For example, the pain and the heat one feels upon touching a hot skillet are indistinguishable in tactual appearance, but only the heat is supposed to have a distinct, continued existence. Similarly, if one stares at the sun, the pain and glare are one and indistinguishable in appearance, yet only the light is supposed to have a distinct, continued existence. Or, again: the ache in, and the hardness of, a molar appear in the tooth; yet, though the sufferer believes the tooth to continue hard even when he is no longer perceiving it, he cannot suppose that it continues to ache when he no longer perceives the pain. Such conflicts between B1 and B2 are invariably resolved at the expense of the former: we do not identify sensible qualities of the bodies that appear to us with the real qualities of the bodies themselves if they cannot be conceived to continue in existence unperceived. This proceeding raises the question of what criterion the vulgar employ when they distinguish sensible qualities that exist only relatively to the senses from those that exist in the appearing body itself: is this too a matter of appearance—an immediately perceptible sensible quality—or does it depend on the application of some rule or standard to appearances? If the criterion were of the former kind, then, as a matter of immediate appearance, the vulgar could make this distinction even if all memories of past experience and the habits of judgment formed on their basis were erased from their minds. This means that in a world where other sensible qualities perfectly mimicked the behavior of pains and pleasures in this world—for example, not only the painful glare but the light too unfailingly vanished the moment one’s gaze was averted from the sun, the pan stopped cooking the moment one no longer felt its heat, etc.—the vulgar would still exclude only pains and pleasures from the scope of B1 to the former, while continuing to identify all other sensible qualities besides pain and pleasure with the actual qualities of the bodies. But is that at all plausible? Or, alternatively, suppose that pleasures and pains mimic the behavior of such sensible qualities as colors, as in a scenario sketched by Wittgenstein: Let us imagine the following: The surfaces of the things around us (stones, plants, etc.) have patches and regions which produce pain in our skin when we touch them. (Perhaps through the chemical composition of these surfaces. But we need not know that.) In this case we should speak of pain-patches on the leaf of a particular plant just as at present we speak of red patches. I am supposing that it is useful to us to notice these patches and their shapes; that we can infer important properties of the objects from them.11

In such an environment, could the vulgar continue to exclude pains from the scope of B1? And, if not, would the vulgar not extend B2 to pains as well, and suppose them to continue in existence just the colors of surfaces do? Clearly, if the scope of B1 and B2 can vary without the sensible qualities themselves changing in any way, it cannot simply be the immediate appearance of pains and pleasures that makes us exempt them from B1 and B2. Matters external to the appearance,

11. Philosophical Investigations, tr. by G.E.M. Anscombe, 2nd edition (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1958), §312.


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involving experience of the behavior of sensible qualities over time and becoming habituated to their behavior, seem to be essential as well, so that the operative criterion here is conceptual rather than perceptual.12 Let us designate the external, conceptual criterion in virtue of which the vulgar override their natural inclination to identify the appearance of corporeal things with their reality (B1) in the case of pleasures and pains “C1.” Satisfying C1 is clearly necessary to upholding the truth of B1 in a given case. However, Locke and other early modern philosophers wondered whether it is also sufficient. This is a reasonable question to raise if indeed the vulgar segregate pleasures and pains from other sensible qualities on the basis of a conceptual criterion, rather than one internal to the immediately perceived sensible appearances themselves. For might there not be other such criteria, less immediately obvious than C1, failure to satisfy which would oblige us to treat additional sensible qualities the way the vulgar treat pleasures and pains? Or, alternatively, need the failure to satisfy C1 itself always be so obvious as it is in the case of pleasure and pains? We do not have to know what C1 actually is in order to raise these questions. It suffices to acknowledge that the vulgar, in the normal course of events, are not so assiduous in their pursuit of conceptual criteria, or such sticklers in the application of those they already have, for us to treat their verdict as sufficient to decide the question whether the notion of an unfelt heat, or an unseen light, may be just as repugnant and unintelligible as that of an unfelt pain. Like most early modern thinkers, Locke believed that there indeed are less obvious, but no less sound, conceptual criteria in addition to C1 (or, alternatively, 12. The alternative also does not seem compatible with Locke’s views. In the first place, vulgar ideas of bodies involve complex ideas of substances; and since a condition for applying the latter is past experience of the coexistence of the sensible qualities concerned, were all memory of the past erased (and so too the effects of that memory on judgment), there would be nothing to guide vulgar understanding in the application of complex ideas of substance to sensible qualities; that is, they could have no notion of the kind of existence proper to bodies at all. Moreover, Locke recognized that exercises of powers (causal efficacy) are not sensible qualities in the same sense that pain or color are, since they could not be detected without the guidance of judgment conditioned by past experience (as is made clear in ECHU II/xxi/§1, the vulgar attribute powers on the basis of “constantly observed” changes); consequently, one could form no notion of pains and pleasures as the effects of other bodies on one’s own body, rather than appearances of the affecting bodies themselves, on the basis of immediately perceived sensible qualities alone. Locke would probably also have concurred with points that Berkeley and Hume were to make more explicitly than he. For example, he would almost certainly have accepted Hume’s contention that the idea at the heart of B2—the notion of continued, distinct existence—is impossible on the basis of immediate sense perception alone, without the aid of past experience: existential independence, no less than existential dependence, is a matter of causal efficacy, and so not of immediate perception; and the senses attest rather to the uncontinued, than to the continued, existence of bodies (THN 188–9/126). Locke might also have accepted Hume’s claim that the mind itself would have to be appear, as well as the dependence of the appearance on it, before the distinction between appearance and reality requisite for B2 could be made—all of which are complex ideas dependent on more than mere sense perception (THN 189–91/127, 207–8/137–8, and HTC, chap. 7–A; evidence of a similar view in Locke was offered in section B above, on the basis of ECHU II/xiv/§3). These considerations simply serve to highlight the fact that Locke reasoned within the framework of ideas; and since the appearance = reality principle holds of ideas (chapter 5–B), it seems certain that he would have denied that the vulgar segregate pains and pleasure from other sensible qualities in respect of B1 exclusively on the basis of immediate sense perception.

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additional satisfaction conditions of C1), and that these suffice to show that other sensible qualities exist in the same mind-dependent way pleasures and pains do. Hume captured the contrast between vulgar and learned views nicely: There are three different kinds of impressions convey’d by the senses. The first are those of the figure, bulk, motion and solidity of bodies. The second those of colours, tastes, smells, sounds, heat and cold. The third are the pains and pleasures, that arise from the application of objects to our bodies, as by the cutting of our flesh with steel, and such like. Both philosophers and the vulgar suppose the first of these to have a distinct continu’d existence. The vulgar only regard the second as on the same footing. Both philosophers and the vulgar, again, esteem the third to be merely perceptions; and consequently interrupted and dependent beings. (THN 192/128)

What mainly distinguishes the learned view from the vulgar in this, as in any other domain (be it watch repair or digging a mineshaft), is the methodical approach adopted to the question, beginning with the conceptual clarification of the matter at issue: the existence of corporeal substance.13 For insofar as the vulgar conception of it may be incomplete or confused, the move from B1 to B2 becomes questionable. In particular, a new criterion (or new satisfaction condition of C1) could emerge from the analysis of the conception of the existence of body common to vulgar and learned alike that is sufficient to prove that sensible qualities the vulgar deem to satisfy C1 (thereby coming within the scope of B1) cannot even so much as be conceived to have a continued, distinct existence (and so do not, in fact, come within the scope of B2). Clearly, then, the first order of business for the learned was to delineate a clear and distinct concept (a precise definition) of the existence of corporeal substance that would permit them to determine which sensible qualities can and which cannot be conceived to partake of that existence. Notwithstanding a great deal of variation in detail, the notion of existence the learned applied to body is simply an instance of the general notion of existence proper to substances. To conceive a substance as existent is to conceive of it as causally efficacious with respect to some species of action (thought, motion, etc.): it exists if it can act or be acted upon, react or be reacted to. Conversely, whatever is thought to possess neither active nor passive powers to act is ipso facto conceived not to exist.14 Since the only action relevant to the concept of the existence 13. In what follows, one should keep in mind the distinction Locke drew between body and matter: “Matter and Body stand for two different Conceptions, whereof the one is incomplete and but a part of the other. For Body stands for a solid extended figured Substance, whereof Matter is but a partial and more confused Conception, it seeming to me to be used for the Substance and Solidity of Body, without taking in its Extension and Figure. And therefore it is that speaking of Matter, we speak of it always as one, because in truth, it expresly contains nothing but the Idea of a solid Substance, which is every where the same, every where uniform” (III/x/§15). Presumably, matter is not a vulgar idea: animals are unlikely to have it, young children, and adults unexposed to learned ways of thinking. 14. In chapter 5–C and D-3, when I considered Locke’s account of the idea of substance, there was no need to take into account the quite distinct concepts of power, action, capacity, causation, and efficacy. Where these ideas prove indispensable is for the conception of the kind of existence distinctive of a substance corresponding to our idea. To early moderns such as Locke, the only idea human beings


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of corporeal substances shared by the vulgar and the learned is motion (“Of Thinking, Body affords us no Idea at all,” ECHU II/xxi/§4), it follows that the only ideas humans are capable of forming of their efficacy—and so of their existence—are those that relate exclusively to their motion, and so to “impulse, the only way which we can conceive Bodies operate in” (viii/§11).15 The following conceptual criterion, C2, restricting the scope of B2, thence emerges: an idea counts as an idea of the existence proper to corporeal substances in themselves—that is, that in virtue of which they can be conceived to have an existence completely independent of the powers of our minds—only if, and only so far as, it enables us to conceive their efficacy with respect to motion. Every other sensible quality that we may vulgarly suppose to relate to them must therefore, by default, be such that, in truth, our minds lack the ability to conceive it as existing in corporeal substances independently of their relation to our senses (that is, to the innate constitution of the passive capacities of the human mind). It was the adoption of C2 that led Locke and other early moderns to relegate color, light, heat, smell, flavor, and other sensible qualities to the same minddependent status as pleasure and pain. If, for example, you were to splatter a ripe tomato against a wall, the application of C2 will permit you to attribute a continued, distinct existence (B2) solely to those sensible qualities that can be used to conceive the efficacies concerned in this event. Insofar as the bright red color of the tomato cannot be conceived to contribute in any way to the tomato’s passive and active powers to be hurled and to splatter, or for its splatter to adhere to the wall, fall to the ground, vaporize, or otherwise move or be moved from one place to another, its bright red cannot even so much as be conceived to pertain to the existence of the tomato itself, considered as a body with a distinct, continued existence with respect to the senses and their constitution. Similar considerations apply to (1) the sound you hear when the tomato splatters, (2) the smell emitted from it, (3) its tepidness, wetness, and softness to the touch, as well as (4) its flavor. By contrast, C2 is satisfied by such sensible qualities as place, size, figure, motion and rest (which are modes of space and duration considered together), can form of the existence of a substance is identical with the idea of their causal efficacy: the ability (power, capacity) to act and react, to be acted upon and be reacted to. See also Ayers, Locke I:31: “Students of seventeenth-century philosophy need to be sharply aware that the question of what makes a perspicuous philosophy of substance and attribute was inextricably entwined with the question of how the world must be in which causality is fully perspicuous. Commentators on Locke (who held, roughly speaking, that we lack an answer to the former because we lack an answer to the latter) have in particular often failed to make that essential connection.” 15. But see chaper 6, note 1. If Locke shied away from designating bare or absolute space a substance (ECHU II/xiii/§§17–19), it was surely in part because space, as something that cannot move, be moved, or act or change in any other way, does not meet the condition requisite for ascribing substantial existence to it. For, on Locke’s conception of substance, the only idea we have of substance concerns what it does, not what it is (xiii/§19). Since space is unchangeable, and cannot be conceived to do anything or have anything done to it (action, power, efficacy), we lack the requisite ideational ingredient to conceive its existence as being that of a substance, or indeed as bound up with that of substances (modifications, accidents, of substances). Having no other notion of objective existence whereby to conceive it, yet recognizing that the existence of space is a condition of the bodies that occupy and contain it, Locke opted to leave the ontological nature of space unspecified.

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impenetrability (solidity), unity, number, and existence.16 Since this is just to say that these are the only sensible qualities that tomatoes, chunks of beeswax, and every other corporeal substance can be conceived to possess independently of their relation to the senses, C2 implies that, like pleasure and pain, color and light, odors, flavors, and certain tangible qualities exist, and can exist, only in relation to the mind (even if our vulgar psychology leaves us incapable of relinquishing our natural belief to the contrary). Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities should be seen as an epistemological corollary to C2. To see why, note first that “quality,” in this usage, is just another name for the power of a body to affect the human mind with a specific idea of sensation.17 Ideas of secondary qualities are merely “imputed Qualities” that “are not Resemblances of something really existing in the Bodies, we denominate from them” (ECHU II/viii/§22). Instead, they exist, and can exist, only incorporeally, in relation to the sensing mind, never otherwise: Take away the Sensation of them; let not the Eyes see Light, or Colours, nor the Ears hear Sounds; let the Palate not Taste, nor the Nose Smell, and all Colours, Tastes, Odors, and Sounds, as they are such particular Ideas, vanish and cease, and are reduced to their Causes, i.e. Bulk, Figure, and motion of Parts. (viii/§17)

Although these features are all vulgarly imputed to bodies, they play, and can play, no role in the affection of our bodily sense organs. Of course, this does not by itself suffice to warrant Locke’s claim that they are merely ideas of secondary qualities, existing only in relation to a mind, since the possibility remains that they might still pertain to corporeal substances independently of their powers to affect our sense organs. So does it not imply a degree of familiarity with the real constitution of bodies inconsistent with Locke’s insistence on our ignorance in these matters (a variant of the neglected alternative objection to Kant’s idealism discussed in chapter 3–D-2)? How then did Locke justify his claim that the properties represented in our ideas of secondary qualities “vanish and cease, and are reduced to their Causes,” whenever our sensation of them is interrupted? I see no way to answer these questions expect on the assumption that Locke devised the distinction between ideas of primary and secondary qualities as an epistemological corollary to the conceptual criterion C2, according to which the mind-independent existence of a corporeal substance is conceivable only in terms of its efficacy with respect to motion. According to this criterion, it is not simply the powers that fit corporeal substances to directly or indirectly affect our senses that must be conceived in terms of motive action, but all their powers without exception. Only powers to move, be moved, and exert efficacy on the motion of 16. Unity, number, and existence were classified by Locke as ideas that “are suggested to the mind by all the ways of Sensation and Reflection” (ECHU II/iii/§1; also vii). As such they are ideas of the senses, and so too sensible qualities (in the sense of II/i/§3). 17. This one-to-one correspondence between the perceptible qualities present to our minds in sensation and the powers of the imperceptible substances that cause them may have been what led Locke to extend the term ‘sensible quality’ from simple ideas of sensation, as at ECHU II/i/§3, to the corresponding causative powers at xxi/§3.


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something else, together with the constitution to confer them on a substance, can enter into our conception of something as a corporeal existent. Solidity and extension are of course also essential to our conception of a substance as corporeal, but they alone do not suffice for us to conceive of it as corporeally existent. This requires, in addition, an idea of the efficacious action distinctive to substances qua corporeal; and there can be little doubt that, for Locke, a thing that lacks the power to move, be moved, or exert influence on the motion of anything else cannot be conceived as corporeally existent, no matter how extended and solid we may suppose it to be (of course, a solidity that conferred no power on a substance to resist the encroachments of other things into its space would be unworthy of the name).18 Since there is good reason to believe that Locke, together with most seventeenth-century mechanistic materialists, was committed to C2, it is reasonable to assume that he would have tacitly relied on it when, of all the ideas of sensation corporeal substances may cause in the minds of creatures (regardless of however few or many external senses they possess), he insisted that only those capable of entering into the conception of the causation of motion can be accounted ideas of primary qualities, that is, ideas that resemble features to which corporeal existence may be attributed in the B2 sense (whether, in any given case, the attribution is true or false is here irrelevant; all that matters is that such an attribution, true or false, be conceivable). It then makes no difference whether a feature imputed to the real constitution of bodies happens to be incapable of impinging on the senses of the human body. So far as its corporeality is concerned, all that matters is whether its idea is capable of entering into the conception of corporeal efficacy. If not, then the feature is incorporeal, not even capable of existing otherwise than as an idea in a mind so constituted as to posses the requisite sensory capacity (such incorporeal existents must not be confused with corporeal inexistents like Hercules, griffins, and the possible progeny of animals belonging to species that happen to have gone extinct). And, for this reason, colors, warmth and cold, sounds, smells, and flavors, notwithstanding their undoubted importance to our understanding of the material world (each “Answering that Power which is in any Body to produce it,” ECHU IV/iv/§4), are incapable of being attributed to corporeal substances objectively, that is, independently of their relation to a mind with a certain sensory constitution.

18. See note 4 above. Locke considered impenetrability to be “more a consequence of Solidity, than Solidity it self” (ECHU II/iv/§1), and so may have supposed that even without this consequence solidity might still exist. Moreover, since he classified solidity as a simple idea of tactual sensation, there would have been nothing in the idea itself to prevent him from conceding that it might coincide in sensation with a failure to resist penetration, for the idea of impenetrability is clearly implicitly a complex idea of relation (cf. Hume’s criticism of Locke’s position: THN 230–1/152). Of course, Locke might have thought of the power of solid things to resist penetration as he did of powers generally, which he classified initially as simple ideas (vii/§8), but later acknowledged to include a complex idea of relation (xxi/§3 and xxiii/§7), and so qualified their status as simple ideas in much the same way he did divisible space/extension (chapter 5–B). If so, then solidity for Locke is a simple idea of tactual sensation in one respect, but a complex idea of a relation in another (the power to resist encroachment), with the former coming to the fore when the origin of the idea is uppermost in mind, and the latter when its content is subject to stricter criteria of analysis.

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Locke included among the secondary qualities of bodies the changes in color, smell, and so forth that that one body has the power to bring about in another (the effect of fire on the sensible qualities of wax and clay: ECHU II/viii/§10). This indirect affection extends to the “insensible particles” (corpuscles) that Locke, in agreement with the best science of his day, postulated to operate on, and within, the sensory systems of the human body (viii/§13). For although each is individually imperceptible, masses of them operating together on the masses of similar particles that compose our organs of sense are sufficient to bring about sensations in the mind. Can this supposition be extended to include the bosons and other subatomic particles that cloud-chamber experiments have revealed in our own day, and so on for experimentally unconfirmed particles and particles as yet undreamtof by scientists, indefinitely into the future? No doubt this was precisely Locke’s intention. He was not wedded to any particular hypothesis regarding the constitution of imperceptible material substances (IV/iii/§16).19 For his purposes, it suffices to assemble an experiment that, in the context of a theory, could not issue in the sensible outcome it does (registered on a visible monitor, a measuring device, or something of that kind) were it not for the existence of something imperceptible that, although too minute or otherwise incapable of affecting our senses directly, can be adequately conceived by means of the ideas of primary qualities derived from things that are capable of affecting our senses directly. Locke did not pretend to be able to preclude the possibility that knowledge of bodies in the strict sense (exceeding probability) might not some day fall to the lot of humans.20 Since such knowledge would consist in being able to “see, what Qualities and Powers of Bodies have a necessary Connexion or Repugnancy one with another” (ECHU IV/iii/§16), the question arises whether Locke would agree with Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke, and other recent philosophical “essentialists” that twentieth-century atomic theory has achieved knowledge in this sense. For is it not a necessary truth that something is gold if and only if its atomic number is 79, water only if it is H20, heat only if it is composed of particles in motion? I believe that Locke’s answer would almost certainly be no. Within the context of present-day theory, it may indeed make sense to count such propositions as necessary, yet a posteriori, truths. But the theory itself is subject to all the limitations that, in Locke’s view, beset human knowledge of substances generally and bodies in particular. Just as the alchemy of Paracelsus appears today to be a compound of a few facts heavily larded with mystical nonsense, so too the atomic theory reigning today may appear the same to future scientists, centuries or millennia hence. Or, if atomic theory should enter the repository of permanent human objective 19. See Ayers, Locke II: “Locke’s mechanism was ‘pure’, but overlaid with doubt . . . Observable mechanisms provide a kind of glimmering of what the ideal mechanical science would look like, but no more. . . . If we can be sure that Locke is a ‘pure’ mechanist, we must add that his mechanism was a formal commitment, not a material commitment to any existing geometrical mechanics. He might be described, then, as a ‘pure ideal’ mechanist” (152–3). 20. Though other remarks might seem to gainsay this, for example, CWS 466: “If God cannot join things together by connexions inconceivable to us, we must deny even the consistency and being of matter itself; since every particle of it having some bulk, has its parts connected by ways inconceivable to us.”


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understanding, this still does not mean that creatures with hundreds of external senses, each vastly quicker and more acute than our own feeble five, and with powers of intellection proportionately just as superior to human faculties, would not find atomic theory effectively indistinguishable from a badger’s understanding of material substances: He that will not set himself proudly at the top of all things; but will consider the Immensity of this Fabrick, and the great variety, that is to be found in this little and inconsiderable part of it, which he has to do with, may be apt to think, that in other Mansions of it, there may be other, and different intelligent Beings, of whose Faculties, he has as little Knowledge or Apprehension, as a Worm shut up in one drawer of a Cabinet, hath of the Senses or Understanding of a Man. (ECHU II/ii/§3)

It thus seems highly unlikely that Locke would have rated our understanding that gold is atomic number 79 and suchlike anything more than cognition of a real property, not of an essential one, and probability rather than knowledge. Furthermore, even if human insight should one day penetrate to the ultimate constitution of material substances, this would not imply that we had reached the ultimate constitution of the external substances themselves that cause ideas of sensation in us. While divine “omnipotency cannot make a substance to be solid and not solid at the same time” (CWS 465), no other restriction on God’s power is conceivable, including the power to take away solidity from material substance: he may, if he pleases, . . . take away from a substance the solidity which it had before, and which made it matter, and then give it a faculty of thinking, which it had not before, and which makes it a spirit, the same substance remaining. . . . [T]he same numerical substance may be sometimes wholly incogitative, or without a power of thinking, and at other times perfectly cogitative, or endued with a power of thinking. . . . God can give it solidity, and make it material again. For I conclude it will not be denied, that God can make it again what it was before. . . . God . . . can do what is in itself possible. (CWS 470–1)21

What Locke supposes God able to do with respect to the solidity of a substance, he no doubt would also grant God could do with extension: remove it without ipso facto annihilating the substance. If so, it follows that material substances may have constitutions more fundamental than we can conceive by means of the ideas of extension and solidity. In particular, one must be careful not to confuse Locke’s view that by means of ideas of primary qualities we can comprehend the real, mind-independent constitution of material substances with something else he evidently denied: that these ideas enable us to comprehend the constitutions of substances at the most elementary level. Quite the contrary, he held that the constitutions in virtue of which external substances supply us with the ideas of space, solidity, motion, organic being, sentient being, and possibly even thinking being, do not 21. Recall also Locke’s letter to Collins cited earlier: “Of this substance we have no idea, that excludes cogitation, any more than solidity.”

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give us the materials requisite to conceive the more fundamental constitutions of the substances on which these may supervene (section C). Since the same is true of the constitution of the substance that supports the active and passive powers of the I, it is clear that, in Locke’s view, ideas of primary qualities permit human understandings to conceive, and a fortiori know, the constitutions of substances only up to a certain point, beyond which they lack the conceptual means to penetrate. Perhaps my mind and my body are one substance? Perhaps they are different substances but with the same underlying constitutions? Perhaps all bodies or all minds are one and the same substance? Perhaps all bodies and all minds are one substance? Or perhaps, as Spinoza thought, there is much more to being than bodies and minds (modes of attributes besides Extension and Thought), yet all these beings are but the accidents of one and the same substance? Locke would not rule out any of these questions: they arise naturally and legitimately from what experience teaches us about the powers and limits of human understanding. Yet because of these same powers and limits, he would undoubtedly have considered them all unanswerable.22

22. Locke’s position is sometimes confounded with Kant’s view that the same transcendental object that underlies external appearances might also underlie internal ones, so that phenomena of mind and body might, in supersensible terms, be one and the same thing (A358–9, A383, and B427–8). The difference in their positions is that substance, as psychologistically explicated by Kant, is a notion restricted in scope to ideal, psychologically constituted phenomena, to the exclusion of everything supersensible, and so, ontologically speaking, is in the same boat as Lockean ideas of sensible qualities.

8 Understanding in Language

Locke “had not the least Thought, that any Consideration of Words was at all necessary to . . . this discourse of the Understanding.” What changed his mind was not anything having to do with “the Original and Composition of our Ideas”—the subject matter of ECHU II—but rather “the Extent and Certainty of our Knowledge” in ECHU IV: Knowledge . . . being conversant about Truth, had constantly to do with Propositions. And though it terminated in Things, yet it was for the most part so much by the intervention of Words, that they seem’d scarce separable from our general Knowledge. At least they interpose themselves so much between our Understandings, and the Truth, which it would contemplate and apprehend, that like the Medium through which visible Objects pass, their Obscurity and Disorder does not seldom cast a mist before our Eyes, and impose upon our Understanding. (ECHU III/ix/§21; also II/xxxiii/§19)

The key notion here is generality. Human understanding has no need of words to cope with the influx of ideas so long as its focus remains on the particular objects before it. As soon as we expand our purview beyond the here and now, however, a system is necessary whereby to simplify and order the deluge of information that would otherwise overwhelm us. This problem is dealt with by means of general ideas: “it being natural for the mind (forward still to enlarge its Knowledge) most attentively to lay up those general Notions, and make the proper use of them, which is to disburden the Memory of the cumbersome load of Particulars” (IV/xii/ §3). At first, by considering “particular ideas . . . as they are in the Mind such Appearances, separate from all other Existences, and the circumstances of real Existence, as Time, Place, or any other concomitant Ideas” (II/xi/§9), the understanding deals with the inflow entirely by means of abstract ideas (IV/xii/§3). However, the extension of understanding effected by abstract ideas is quite limited. For the true cognitive potential of abstraction to be realized, another power of the human understanding, distinct from ideation, must be brought into play, “The Perception of the the signification of Signs” (II/xxi/§5): Knowledge . . . though founded in particular Things, enlarges it self by general Views; to which Things reduced into sorts under general Names, are properly 195

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LOCKE’S NEW MODEL PHILOSOPHY subservient. These, with the Names belonging to them, come within some compass, and do not multiply every Moment, beyond what, either the Mind can contain, or Use requires. (III/iii/§4)

Names supply the understanding with easily remembered, easily conjoined tags with which it can operate in place of ideas that, owing to the complexity, variety, or indistinctness, are beyond the understanding’s capacity to contain or manage. In so doing, they give the understanding access to ever more general views of the particular objects (ideas) it perceives or thinks, and raise our knowledge to heights of generality it could never have attained by means of abstract ideas alone. Since so much of our knowledge depends on views not otherwise attainable than “through the intervention of words,” Locke came to recognize that his inquiry into “what Knowledge the Understanding hath by those Ideas” it “comes to be furnished with” (I/i/§3) must be prefaced with an investigation of the indispensable medium in which so much of human knowledge is framed: language. A. The Signification of Words Locke’s principal thesis regarding language relates to the signification of words: Words in their primary or immediate Signification, stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them, how imperfectly soever, or carelessly those Ideas are collected from the Things, which they are supposed to represent. . . . [I]t is a perverting the use of Words, and brings unavoidable Obscurity and Confusion into their Signification, whenever we make them stand for any thing, but those Ideas we have in our own Minds. (ECHU III/ii/§2 and §5)

The nature of the significative relation of words to ideas is habitual association (“’tis by the Custom of using them for Signs, that they excite, and revive in our Minds latent Ideas,” IV/xviii/§3). This extends even to the point of mimicking the effects external objects have on our minds: Words . . . being immediately the Signs of Mens Ideas . . . there comes by constant use, to be such a Connexion between certain Sounds, and the Ideas they stand for, that the Names heard, almost as readily excite certain Ideas, as if the Objects themselves, which are apt to produce them, did actually affect the Senses. . . . [S]o far as Words are of Use and Signification, so far is there a constant connexion between the Sound and the Idea; and a Designation, that the one stand for the other: without which Application of them, they are nothing but so much insignificant Noise. (ii/§§6–7)

To become a sign, a sensible idea (sound, gesture, tactile pattern as in braille, etc.) must be systematically correlated with another, usually complex, abstract idea, until the habit of associating them has become so ingrained that the one can, should the occasion demand, be instantly (unreflectively, automatically) replaced by the other (IV/v/§4). To the extent this connection is inconstant or otherwise

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unreliable, signifying ideas lose their usefulness and become more a hindrance than a help to the functioning of human understanding. Indeed, “the loose application of Names, to undetermined, variable, and almost no Ideas” (II/xxix/§12) is, in Locke’s view, responsible for “The greatest part of the Questions and Controversies that perplex Mankind” (Epistle to the Reader). Since “all (except proper) Names are general, and so stand not particularly for this or that single Thing; but for sorts and ranks of Things” (ECHU III/i/§6), Locke’s conception of the signification of words needs to be understood, more specifically, in connection with his account of the signification of abstract ideas. Unfortunately, Locke’s view on this subject is frequently oversimplified to the point of caricature. According to this version (first advanced by Berkeley in the Introduction to PHK), Locke trafficked in indeterminate, self-contradictory (hence impossible) images: for example, triangles that are neither scalene, isosceles, nor equilateral yet somehow all three at once (and so on for other properties). The principal textual source for this reading is IV/vii/§9. The problem with it is that this is not a text in which Locke was concerned with the topic of what abstract ideas are and how they serve for general representation (see analysis in chapter 10-A). His views are stated elsewhere, in texts specifically devoted to this topic: Words are general . . . when used for Signs of general Ideas; and so are applicable indifferently to many particular Things. And Ideas are general, when they are set up, as the representatives of many particular Things: but universality 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 Generals 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 many particulars. For the signification they have, is nothing but a relation, that by the mind of Man is added to them. (iii/§11) Every Man’s Reasoning and Knowledge, is only about the Ideas existing in his own Mind, which are truly, every one of them, particular Existences: and our Knowledge and Reasoning about other Things, is only as they correspond with those our particular Ideas. . . . Universality is but accidental to it, and consists only in this, That the particular Ideas, about which it is, are such, as more than one particular Thing can correspond with, and be represented by. (IV/xvii/§8)

Generality, for Locke, is not a feature of ideas themselves, all of which are in themselves distinct, individual existents. Far from being a matter of ideas of a special, “abstract” kind, with all the contradictory features Berkeley supposed Locke to attribute to them, generality consists rather in the abstractive way ordinary—concrete, individual—ideas are considered. If, for example, in the consideration of a particular scalene triangle scribbled on a piece of paper, I leave out of consideration this figure’s scalenity, the wobbliness of the lines, the color of the ink, and various other properties irrelevant to the light in which I choose to consider it, then, in respect of what I do consider in this idea, I can compare it to other

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ideas (in sensation or thought) and find them resembling (or not) in these respects, even if they differ (or not) in those that I omit from consideration (scalenity, wobbliness, etc.). For Locke, abstractive ideation has nothing whatsoever to do with the object (idea) itself I consider, and everything to do with the manner in which I consider it and, more particularly, with the use this (abstractive) consideration permits me to put it when I compare it with other ideas (III/iii/§§7–9). Generality is based on the abstraction that makes concrete, individual ideas “applicable indifferently to many particular Things” (§11), whereupon they can be used both as “Standards to rank real Existences into sorts” and to stand for an indeterminate (potentially infinite) number of things differing from it in “the circumstances of real Existence, as Time, Place, or any other concomitant Ideas” (II/xi/ §9). An individual idea in sensation or thought thus becomes universal by virtue of its limitless potential to be compared with other, equally individual ideas in accordance with the many possible abstractive manners (procedures, or rules, for leaving out) in which it may be considered: an abstractive consideration of the aforementioned triangle limited to the red color of the ink in which it is drawn enabling it be used for comparisons by which to rank a limitless number of red things (irrespective of whether the red is ink, etc.); an abstractive consideration limited to the ink character of the drawing enabling the same image to be used for comparisons by which to a limitless number of inkings (whether red or not, etc.); an abstractive consideration limited to its being drawn on paper enabling it to be used for comparisons by which to rank a limitless number of markings on paper (whether or not in red or in ink, etc.); and so on. Still, even if we recognize that Locke distinguished between abstract ideas, which are never anything else in themselves than particular ideas considered a certain way (by leaving out circumstances of existence and experienced concomitants), and general ideas, which are abstract ideas put to a certain significative use (to rank and sort existences), we cannot hope to comprehend Locke’s theory of language unless we take note of another feature of abstract ideas that has attracted little attention but is perhaps the most important of all: This farther may be observed, concerning simple Ideas, and their Names, that they have but few Ascents in linea prædicamentali . . . from the lowest Species, to the summum Genus . . . There is nothing can be left out of the Idea of White and Red, to make them agree in one common appearance. . . . And therefore when to avoid unpleasant enumerations, Men would comprehend both White and Red, and several other such simple Ideas, under one general name; they have been fain to do it by a Word, which denotes only the way they get into the Mind. For when White, Red, and Yellow, are all comprehended under the Genus or name Colour, it signifies no more, but such Ideas, as are produced in the Mind only by the Sight, and have entrance only through the Eyes. And when they would frame yet a more general term, to comprehend both Colours and Sounds, and the like simple Ideas, they do it by a Word, that signifies all such as come into the Mind only by one Sense: And so the general term Quality, in its ordinary acceptation, comprehends Colours, Sounds, Tastes, Smells, and tangible Qualities, with distinction from Extension, Number, Motion, Pleasure, and Pain, which make impressions on the Mind, and introduce their Ideas by more Senses than one. (ECHU III/iv/§16)


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Locke’s point is that, in the case of simple ideas, the ideational abstractive procedure of leaving things out of consideration does not get us very far at all beyond particular views. Since simple ideas are the ultimate constituents of all other ideas, this means that, without the assistance of words, our understandings would be able to attain almost none of the general views on which the greatest part of human knowledge depends. How does language do this? Clearly, not by enhancing the mind’s powers of abstractive consideration. Rather, words raise the understanding to more general views by enabling it to circumvent the extremely limited sphere of general signification that would be open to us by means of the ideational process of leaving out of consideration alone. Thus, the greater generality that language alone makes possible is purchased at the price of severing all further connection between words and the reflexive operation of abstraction on the contents of particular ideas. In Locke’s example, abstraction is useless to meet the expressive need to mark for oneself or communicate to others one’s ideas of white, red, yellow, et al, all at once, and so generally. Instead of leaving out everything except what is common to all these, to wit, nothing, our only option is to have recourse to a completely different notion—the complex idea of the organ whereby visual impressions are received—in order to fashion a sufficiently general concept adequate to our expressive ends. If one overlooks this, it is easy to be misled into supposing ‘color’ to be a name of the same kind as ‘red’ or ‘yellow’ and so to correspond as a natural sign (chapter 5-D-1) to a more general power in affecting bodies analogous to the powers to produce sensations of red or yellow or white in us. But once we take into account the extremely limited nature of our powers to consider simple ideas abstractly, we recognize that the only sort of abstraction that can take us to a higher level of generality is ineluctably linguistic and not ideational at all. The term ‘color,’ though anchored in the complex idea of the organ through which visual impressions are received, is still a very different concept than either ‘eye’ or ‘retinal stimulation’ (i.e., the term linked to the abstractive consideration of the complex idea of the organ in question).1 In other words, if, like most interpreters, we take Locke to have affirmed a systematic isomorphism between language and thought, our expectations here will be sorely disappointed, since there is nothing in thought that correlates to ‘color’ in the way ‘scarlet’ correlates to an abstractive consideration of a certain simple idea of visual sensation. For ‘color’ incorporates an irreducibly linguistic variety of generality, with no ideational counterpart. Nor is this a localized, insignificant exception to the isomorphism. The term ‘eye,’ insofar as it applies to brown, hazel, and blue eyes, incorporates the same irreducibly linguistic general term ‘color.’ The same is true of any sortal term that ranges over simple ideas (or complex ideas consisting of simple ideas) that have nothing in common after everything different has been left out: human, metal, fish, dance, leap, polka, striped, cajun style, and on and on and on. 1. For example, by contrast with ‘eye,’ our word ‘color’ would have no use for a creature that happened to have different organs for sensing red and yellow, or had an organ that gave entrance to all and only sensations of green and of tones falling in the octave above middle-C, or had two entirely different organs each of which yielded sensations of the same color.

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To be sure, Locke offered no further instances or details beyond his brief remark regarding ‘color.’ Still, he left no doubt that what is true of color is true of simple ideas generally, and we are on fairly safe ground in extending it into other sensory domains. Surely there is no common gustatory quality left after everything differentiating a bitter from a sweet flavor has been left out; but what about the sweetness of fudge and the sweetness of a plum? Surely there is no common olfactory quality remaining after everything differentiating the aroma of fudge cooking on the stove from the smell of canine excrement has been excluded; but what about the smell of a rose and the smell of a lily? Then there are simple ideas of reflexion: if anger and joy have nothing sensible in common for ideational abstraction to discern, what about sorrow and pity? If abstraction and passive sense perception have nothing in common, what about different kinds of comparison? Then there is Locke’s assertion that the term ‘idea of diverse senses’ is a view several times more general than ‘color. Presumably this carries with it the implication that there is even less in common between instances of this category than between yellow, red, and white as instances of ‘color,’ and so too that they are all that much more dependent on the irreducibly linguistic sort of abstractive generality to unite them. But would Locke accept the further implication that, once all the differences are left out, nothing more in common remains between ideas of visible space and tangible space than between ideas of red and yellow? Is there any sensible feature left for ideational abstraction to find in common in the cases of other ideas of diverse senses—pleasure, pain, power, existence, and unity (ECHU II/vii/§1)—after all differences between the different senses have been excluded? Or are these all examples of generality that depends implicitly on the supplementation of ideational by linguistic abstraction? Finally, does the fact that names of simple modes “differ little from those of simple Ideas” (ECHU III/iv/§17) mean that the same limitation—“few Ascents in linea prædicamentali”— holds for them too? Since every visible line must have a length, it does not seem possible to form the general idea of a line by leaving length out of consideration altogether. Is this then a case a irreducibly linguistic abstractive generality? Or again: after everything that sensibly differentiates a visible circle from a visible square as shapes has been left out, does any visible feature common to their shapes remain for ideational abstraction to discern? Or do these and other visible shapes leave as little behind for ideational abstraction as red and white color do (i.e., nothing)? Depending on the answer, ‘visible shape’ is or is not an irreducibly linguistic general view in the same sense ‘color’ is. Similar questions may be posed of their tangible counterparts, and so too with respect to ‘sensible polygonal shape,’ ‘sensible triangular shape,’ and ‘sensible equilateral triangular shape,’ as well as ‘sensible size,’ ‘sensible motion,’ etc., for each simple mode, both within and between each (sensate or reflexive) sense in which a simple mode is representable. Though we can only guess at the answers Locke might have given, there seems little reason to doubt that he considered at least some, and potentially all, of these cases to exemplify the same irreducibly linguistic abstractive generality he ascribed to our notions of color, ideas of one sense, and ideas of diverse senses in ECHU III/iv/§16. Nor should we be too critical of Locke for not explaining himself further, since he


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certainly could not have anticipated that readers living centuries after him would see in his treatment of significative understanding the perfect exemplar of a theory of private language according to which ideas possess all the essential logicolinguistic features of verbal language, and public language is no more than an outward manifestation of what already takes place wordlessly in our minds (chapter 4-C). And if there is anything that III/iv/§16 should once and for all put beyond dispute, it is that such a construal is not simply anachronistic but also distorts beyond recognition much of what Locke thought about language and why. The significance of this divergence between language and ideation with respect to Locke’s endeavor to explicate human knowledge becomes clearer when we consider what happens in the descending direction of abstraction (from greater to lesser generality). Although the abstract idea of scarlet never changes, its name acquires new and different signification (beyond its primary signification of this idea) from the irreducibly linguistic notions into whose extensions it falls (‘color,’ ‘sensible quality,’ ‘idea of sensation received through the eye,’ ‘idea of a single sense,’ ‘idea,’ ‘the same color as cardinal plumage,’ ‘a color with no resemblance to yellow,’ etc.). For example, all the general knowledge that first becomes possible for us when we operate with the term ‘color’—the anatomy and workings of the eye, the physics of its stimulation, the nature of light, the chemistry of dyes, etc.—trickles down into all the terms subordinate to it in respect of generality, including ‘scarlet,’ sometimes becoming part of their signification as well (when a communicative need for it exists). Yet, since there is no way of incorporating any of this into the abstract idea of scarlet that constitutes the name’s “primary or immediate” signification, the idea of scarlet sensation risks coming to seem incidental, or even irrelevant, to the meaning of its name, and a fortiori to some, or perhaps most, of the knowledge in which the signification of its name figures. Other, equally significant asymmetries between language and thought emerge once it is recognized that, with Locke’s decoupling of words from ideas, the latter can no longer serve to fix the bounds of the correlated term’s signification. First and foremost, standards independent of the ideas are requisite if language is to fulfill its role of affording us general views that can then trickle down to terms like ‘scarlet,’ originating in the less general views still within the purview of ideational understanding. Locke identified two sources from which such standards are typically derived: But though Words, as they are used by Men, can properly and immediately signify nothing but the Ideas, that are in the Mind of the Speaker; yet they in their Thoughts give them a secret reference to two other things. First, they suppose their Words to be Marks of the Ideas in the Mind also of other Men, with whom they communicate: For else they should talk in vain, and could not be understood, if the Sounds they applied to one Idea, were such, as by the Hearer, were applied to another, which is to speak two Languages. But in this, Men stand not usually to examine, whether the Idea they, and those they discourse with have in their Minds, be the same: But think it enough, that they use the Word, as they imagine, in the common Acceptation of that Language; in which case they suppose, that the Ideas, they make it a Sign of, is precisely the same, to which the Understanding Men of that Country apply that Name.

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LOCKE’S NEW MODEL PHILOSOPHY Secondly, Because Men would not be thought to talk barely of their own Imaginations, but of Things as really they are; therefore they often suppose their Words to stand also for the reality of Things. But this [relates] more particularly to Substances, and their Names, as perhaps the former does to simple Ideas and Modes. (ECHU III/ii/§§ 4–5)

Since the focus at present is on the names of simple ideas, we need here only take account of the first “secret reference” (since what holds true of the signification of names of simple ideas and simple modes carries over to the signification of the names of substances that incorporate them, common acceptation is integral to the latter as well). And here one cannot help but be impressed by Locke’s keen awareness of the ineluctably social character of human language: Speech [is] the great Bond that holds society together, and the common Conduit, whereby the Improvements of Knowledge are conveyed from one Man, and one Generation to another . . . Words, especially of Languages already framed, being no Man’s private possession, but the common measure of Commerce and Communication, ’tis not for any one, at pleasure, to change the Stamp they are current in; nor alter the Ideas they are affixed to; or at least when there is a necessity to do so, he is bound to give notice of it. (xi/§1 and §11)

Where the bounds of the signification of words in the public domain are concerned, common Use, that is the Rule of Propriety, may be supposed here to afford some aid, to settle the signification of Language; and it cannot be denied, but that in some measure it does. Common use regulates the meaning of Words, pretty well for common Conversation; but . . . common Use is not sufficient to adjust them to philosophical Discourses; there being scarce any Name, of any very complex Idea, (to say nothing of others,) which, in common Use, has not a great latitude, and which keeping within the bounds of Propriety, may not be made the sign of far different Ideas. Besides, the rule and measure of Propriety it self being no where established, it is often matter of dispute, whether this or that way of using a Word, be propriety of Speech, or no. (ix/§8)

Rules of propriety do not correlate the significance of terms to any one person’s ideas, nor is it possible to stipulate some standard idea for the purpose (analogous to the standard meter), since ideas, by contrast with words, are each mind’s private possession and in no measure public. Consequently, rules of propriety may be presumed to fix bounds to the significance to words in the public domain only by establishing nonideational standards of “common Use” in the same kinds of way societies regulate dress, dining, and other practices suited to conventionally established usages. It thus falls upon each of us individually to regulate the ideas we attach to our words according to the public standard, since this is the surest, perhaps the only, means at our disposal to bring our verbal behavior into conformity with common usage (“’Tis not enough that Men have Ideas, determined Ideas, for which they make these signs stand; but they must also take care to apply their Words, as near as may be, to such Ideas as common use has annexed them to,”


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III/xi/§11). Yet, the standards themselves remain wholly independent of the ideas that may or may not be present in the mind of any user of the language; nor do the ideas of any individual speaker need to be considered when accounting for the role of the vernacular as social bond and vehicle for the dissemination of information. Indeed, by allowing that, by “learning the Words first, and perfectly, but [making] the Notions, to which they apply those Words afterwards . . . Men [may speak] the proper Language of their Country, i.e. according to Grammar-Rules of that Language” (III/xi/§24), Locke effectively conceded that a cleverly programmed automaton might pass for human in its verbal behavior no less than in its other behaviors. Whether or not we think Locke was justified in identifying the wide latitude rules of propriety leave for speakers to form ideas (or even not to form them at all) as a principal cause of divergence of opinion, especially among the learned, the very fact he did so is a further demonstration of his cognizance of the extent of the asymmetry between public language and private ideation. Indeed, he may very well have assented to the judgment of philosophers working within the twentieth-century “linguistic turn” tradition that ideation, no less than brain physiology, is, for all intents and purposes, transparent with respect to the operation of public language, and so may be left out of its consideration (in much the same way the findings of Kantian transcendental psychologism can, and should, be ignored by those engaged in mathematics and logic: chapter 2-E-1). B. Generality Without Abstraction: The Philosophical Uses of Language Because Locke has come to be associated with the currently disreputable notion of private mental linguistic discourse, philosophers steeped in the post-Fregean tradition of philosophy of language invariably treat his claim that words signify (mean, refer to) the ideas in the minds of individual users of language with the utmost suspicion. Typically, it is exhibit number one in the indictment of the “alchemical period” of the philosophical understanding of language.2 For, in their view, one of the cardinal truths about language neglected by early modern philosophers such as Locke is the “transparency” of the signified with respect to the (natural or conventionally stipulated) sign: all physical, biological, and psychical mediation involved in the process of signifying drops out as irrelevant to the nature and workings of the processes of signification, and so must be excluded from any theory of signification. For example, when I scratch what I refer to as my ‘ankle,’ the immediate significatum is not an idea or something in the brain but that very body part I intend by what I say. Nor will the truth conditions for my becoming a millionaire have been satisfied if certain ideas come to exist in my mind (together with their supporting brain states) but nothing has been added to my bank account. And the mathematical laws of nature in Newton’s Principia describe not the comings and 2. The comparison of the difference between pre-Fregean and post-Fregean philosophical conceptions of language with the difference between alchemy and chemistry has been made repeatedly. The earliest instance known to me is Wittgenstein, but I doubt that he originated it.

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goings of ideas in a person’s mind (and/or the correlated events in the brain) but, directly, without ideational mediation, the movements of the sun, earth, and other celestial bodies. Meaning, like money, can belong to an individual only insofar as he is part of a community in which the requisite practices have been instituted. Apart from these institutions, private linguistic meaning is as self-contradictory as private monetary wealth. Critics of private language grant that there are mental faculties that account for the human ability to learn language, as well as for some of the universal characteristics of the languages they learn. No doubt the central nervous system is the locus of these faculties, and a complete understanding of its biology and evolutionary history would shed light on their nature, workings, and interrelation. Nevertheless, language remains the paradigmatic public-domain phenomenon, its use entirely open to everyone’s unprivileged view. Anything hidden away in the meat inside our heads—and a fortiori the introspectible stream of consciousness for which this meat’s peculiar biology is responsible—must thus, in the final analysis, be excluded from the philosophical study of signification in the same way we exclude it from the philosophical study of property rights or mathematical logic. It should therefore occasion no surprise that Locke’s notion that “The meaning of Words, [is] only the Ideas they are made to stand for by him that uses them” (ECHU III/ iv/§6), is today regarded as paradigmatic of how philosophers should not theorize about language and its role in human knowledge. Yet, as emerged in the previous section, Locke had a marked appreciation of the nature and extent of the asymmetries between human discourse and what goes on in the mind concomitantly with it. Indeed, it seems to have been sufficiently well developed to have convinced him not only of the futility of any attempt to account for public discourse in terms of private ideas but also that the train of ideas passing before human understanding falls well short of constituting a (private) language in its own right. Nevertheless, except as a source of error, Locke seems to have regarded such signification as words acquire beyond that which their correlated ideas are capable of conferring on them as a matter of philosophical irrelevance. Why did he believe this? Why did he not abandon his conviction that ideas are the primary, immediate signification of words when he realized—or at least had positioned himself to recognize—that ideas cannot account for a great deal of the signification words carry, and so cannot serve to explicate the extensive and indispensable role played by language in human knowledge? I believe the answer lies in the importance Locke attached to the origins of the contents of knowledge in assessing its nature and scope (ECHU I/i). At one level, this is just to say that words cannot originally acquire new signification from public sources because, in the end, the public sphere is nothing more than an aggregate of individuals, and since the individual never has anything present to his mind “but the Ideas, that he himself hath” (III/ii/§2), all signification must terminate in ideas. Insofar as words are used to signify objects existing outside the mind, they never do so directly but only via the mediation of ideas: “since the Things, the Mind contemplates, are none of them, besides it self, present to the Understanding, ’tis necessary that something else, as a Sign or Representation of the thing it considers, should be present to it: And these are Ideas” (IV/xxi/§4).


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And here we reach the nub of the issue: the implication Locke drew from ECHU II that “The whole extent of our Knowledge, or Imagination, reaches not beyond our own Ideas, limited to our ways of Perception” (III/xi/§23). Alongside this, the avowed fact that language expands our knowledge far beyond what would be possible without it, and confers on names significations that the ideas correlated to them can never yield, paled into insignificance for him. For all the cognitive services rendered by language ultimately boil down to the conjoining of ideas that could not otherwise have become related. To be sure, without this, we would be confined to the very limited general views abstract ideas make possible, and so would be deprived of the extensive network of linguistic interconnections between names that unites otherwise alien ideas and embeds them within a single, integrated framework bound together by publicly scrutinizable meanings. Yet, however immeasurably language augments the cognitive utility of ideas, it does so without adding even so much as a single new objective content to the repertoire of a human understanding whose only objects are its own ideas. For example, though the strictly linguistic concepts ‘color’ and ‘sensation’ have no objective significance in their own right, they perform the invaluable service of bringing together two such otherwise alien ideas as scarlet and the eye, with the result that ‘eye’ takes on the connotation of the source of ideas of scarlet sensation, and ‘scarlet’ the connotation of something related to the mechanisms in the world responsible for affecting the eyes as well as the mechanisms in the body responsible for transforming that affection into an idea of scarlet. At the same time, each new, cognitively parturient connotation an idea acquires through language serves to link it to still other otherwise alien ideas, eventuating in the inexhaustibly rich network of signifying relations that constitute vernacular language. Yet, so far as Locke was concerned, when all is said and done, all the wondrous cognitive achievements made possible for us by the general views only language can afford fail to expand the compass of our acquaintance with reality one iota. The only realities ever present to our minds remain what they were before we ever learned to speak, and they continue to both be and appear in every particular for speakers as they do to creatures incapable of language: mere simple ideas of sensation and reflexion. No matter how better suited to our ends ideas ordered in accordance with linguistic general views may be than they would be otherwise, language does absolutely nothing to extend or improve our view of the world beyond our ideas. So if, like Locke, our purpose is to understand being—first, such being as is possible for us to conceive, and second, what it is possible for us to know of it by means of our conceptions—we shall concern ourselves with language only so far as is necessary to see around it to the ideas actually present to our minds. In order fully to appreciate the implications of Locke’s stance, however, we need to widen our purview to include simple ideas of reflexion and, more particularly, the significata of the names he termed ‘particles.’ Particles are signs the mind requires in addition to those it has for “the Ideas it has then before it . . . to shew or intimate some particular action of its own, at that time, relating to those Ideas” (ECHU III/vii/§1). In particular, they enable a speaker to “shew what Connexion, Restriction, Distinction, Opposition, Emphasis, etc. he gives to each re-

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spective part of his Discourse” (§2). Syncategorematics such as ‘is,’ ‘is not,’ ‘of,’ and ‘through’ signify the various reflexive actions of the mind whereby mental propositions are formed from subpropositional parts (ideas), or, as in the case of conjunctions such as ‘but’ (§5) the actions whereby new mental propositions are formed from proposition constituents. Whatever their different characters and roles in articulating speech and rectifying communication, They are all marks of some Action, or Intimation of the Mind; and therefore to understand them rightly, the several views, postures, stands, turns, limitations, and exceptions, and several other Thoughts of the mind, for which we have either none or very deficient Names, are diligently to be studied. (§4)3

The inference most Locke scholars draw from this is that the role of particles in language is isomorphic with the actions of the mind whereby ideas are combined to yield (mental) propositions. Ayers, for example, takes him to “attribute to each thought a structure related, element by element, to the logical structure of any sentence which accurately expresses that thought,” so that “the inner process of thought itself has logical form . . . and is a kind of inner speech.”4 Yet, apart from the anachronistic character of the notion that Locke was engaged in the same sort of enterprise pursued by many twentieth-century philosophers of language (chapter 4-C), this assumes that he regarded the highly general standpoint from which logicians and grammarians distinguish the structural elements of verbal propositional thought as “abstract” in the same ideational sense in which ‘red’ and ‘white’ signify abstractly considered color sensations. But what if Locke treated the simple ideas of reflexion signified by particles the way he did the simple ideas of sensation signified by ‘color,’ ‘quality,’ and ‘sensation,’ where abstraction by dint of leaving sensible qualities out of consideration fails us after only a few ascents in linea prædicamentali (ECHU III/iv/§16)? Since he made quite clear that this limitation applies to simple ideas generally, surely we have no warrant for making an exception of the ideas of reflexion signified by particles. Indeed, quite the contrary: since early modern grammarians deemed the logico-grammatical elements of propositional discourse they identified so general as to amount to universal forms valid of all such discourse irrespective of its contents, there is every 3. Dissenters from the consensus reflected here include E. J. Ashworth (“Locke on Language,” in Chappell, Locke, ed. V. Chappell) and Norman Kretzmann (“The Main Thesis of Locke’s Semantic Theory,” in Chappell, Locke). Though Kretzmann seems to ignore ideas of reflexion, Ashworth denies that these ideas are the meanings of particles: “Particles indicate that a mental act is being exercised, they do not signify these acts as objects” (181). Yet how are performances of these actions present to consciousness (perceived) if not in ideas of reflexion?, and is it not the case that, by Locke’s definition of an idea (chapter 5-B), every idea is ipso facto an object? It seems part and parcel of Locke’s conception of ideas of reflexion as data passively given to internal perception in a sense fundamentally analogous to the manner in which sensations are given to perception in external sense that performances of reflexive actions are “objects” in essentially the same sense sensations are. I thus agree with Ayers that names for particles “must be supposed to stand for ‘ideas of reflection’, i.e. for ideas of the operations expressed by the particles” (Locke I, 205). But for reasons that will be made clear imminently, I cannot follow him in inferring from this that Locke was the exponent a systematic isomorphism between thought and language. 4. Locke I 70 & 72; see also chapter 4, note 12.


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reason to regard particles as lying well up the scale of linea prædicamentali, and so as dependent on the same kind of irreducibly linguistic abstractive generality involved in ‘color,’ ‘quality,’ and ‘sensation’ (section B). Their generality certainly presents a stark contrast with Locke’s description of the simple ideas of reflexion signified by particles as “views, postures, stands, turns, limitations, and exceptions, and several other Thoughts of the mind”: individual instances of these actions seem far too fleeting and variable, myriad and elusive, for any common (internal-reflexive) sensible features to remain once everything distinguishing them has been left out of consideration—if not at the first few levels in the linea prædicamentali, then without doubt well before the level of generality is attained at which syncategorematics such as ‘is,’ ‘is not,’ and ‘but’ first emerge. For we only have to admit that they involve a level of generality at least equal to that of ‘color’ to be obliged to admit that particles depend on an irreducibly linguistic species of abstraction that has, and can have, nothing corresponding to it in reflexion. This is not to deny that we could in principle coin terms for subspecies of particles that, like ‘red’ and ‘yellow,’ relate to these reflexive operations with sufficient specificity to depend on ideational abstraction alone. Yet, because we would here be concerned with ideas that, by their very nature, are far less accessible to attentive consideration and manipulation than ideas of red and yellow, the effort would most likely prove futile, even self-defeating (“the provision of Words is so scanty in respect of that infinite variety of Thoughts, tha[t] Men, wanting Terms to suit their precise Notions, will, notwithstanding their utmost caution, be forced often to use the same Word, in somewhat different Senses,” III/xi/§27). The human understanding’s power of signification is quite simply too limited to enable us to distinguish a variety of terms of intermediate generality between logicogrammatical particles and the simple ideas of reflexion they ultimately signify, so that the gulf separating syncategorematics from simple ideas of reflexion is, if anything, even more unbridgeable than that separating a term as general as ‘sensation’ from a simple idea of scarlet. On Locke’s conception of names for simple ideas, then, (1) the different ways the mind affirms and negates, conjoins and disjoins, and otherwise orders its ideas into mental propositions may well be as numerous and diverse as hues of color, timbres of sound, and the delights of pleasure (sexual, culinary, vinous, athletic, intellectual, etc.), and (2) general terms such as ‘is’ and ‘is not’ may only be attainable through generalizing considerations as wholly extrinsic to the various propositional “postures, stands, and turns” grouped under them as the generalizing considerations underlying our notions of ‘color’ or ‘sound.’ In that case, just as yellow, red, and green would never be able to form species of the same genus on ideational grounds alone, independently of language, there would be no sensible quality in common unifying the various ideas of reflexion grouped together as instances of the same logico-grammatical particle. Their unity would instead depend entirely on an irreducibly linguistic abstractive generalization, corresponding to nothing whatsoever in ideational understanding. In short, as soon as we consider particles in the light of ECHU III/iv/§16, it becomes clear that there is nothing to support, and much to gainsay, the prevailing view that Locke affirmed a syntactic and/or semantic isomorphism between thought and language.

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No doubt many will resist the conclusion that Locke’s account of language, far from exemplifying the natural, all but unavoidable illusion that the properties and structure of thought mirror those of the language in which it finds expression, actually opposes and undermines it. Perhaps they will find it more palatable if reduced to a proposal that interpreters of Locke do more to resist the temptation to extend the standards of an account of how words signify to which philosophers in the tradition of Davidson and Kripke subscribe to a philosopher concerned with signification merely as a subsidiary power of an understanding whose primary function is ideation. Precisely because ideas are incapable of underwriting so much of what enters into language, Locke feared that the “close connexion between Ideas and Words,” their “constant . . . relation one to another” (ECHU II/ xxxiii/§19), might deceive us into believing that our understandings are in possession of ideas even where the senses are plainly incapable of supplying the materials requisite to form them. The principal victims of this deception in his era were intellectualist philosophers. Rather than conducting a preliminary survey of the powers of the human understanding to form ideas, employ signs, and obtain knowledge (the three perceptual powers distinctive of human understanding: II/xxi/§5), they approached philosophical questions in much the same way geometers approach theirs: beginning with definitions and axioms (precise terms and the fundamental relations between them), and proceeding to deduce various propositions therefrom, they took the purported intuitive certainty of the former and demonstrative certainty of the latter to be a sufficient guarantee that human understanding is in possession of all the requisite ideas. What Locke’s examination of language revealed, however, is that the extremely general views enshrined in intellectualist definitions are so inextricably bound up with language as to sever all connection with concurrent ideational activity. Geometry and the rest of mathematics emerged unscathed from this critique because the truth of mathematical propositions does not depend on whether the relations of their terms mirror the real (prelinguistic, notation-independent) relations in which ideas stand to one another in the mind, or, a fortiori, the real relations of the realities outside the mind signified by those ideas. However, the truth of the propositions of intellectualist metaphysics depends directly on whether the relations between the realities signified by our ideas mirror the relations of their terms. The effect of shattering this mirror at the point where signs connect up with ideas is therefore devastating. For it means that the pretensions of intellectualist metaphysicians to ontological insight either terminate in clouds of empty verbiage or must be radically reinterpreted as principles that, though devoid of any cognitive worth in their own right, may still be accorded worth insofar as they may aid in better managing the cognitive and conative economy of our minds (rules of thumb, regulative ideas). Thus, the point of Locke’s consideration of language in the Essay should now be clear. It played a key role both in his critique of intellectualism and in his endeavor to displace it with a fully adequate sensibilist theory of understanding. It did so by showing that mentation and language, though intertwined and interdependent, are far too divergent for the former to support the ontological chimeras to which the latter makes us susceptible. Since these illusions are inseparable from the conviction that our ideas have a greater meaning and truth than actually ap-


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pears to us in perception, Locke’s rejection of the isomorphism between ideas and their signs, and between mental and verbal propositions, also served to underpin and give new force to his sensibilist credo that “The whole extent of our Knowledge, or Imagination, reaches not beyond our own Ideas, limited to our ways of Perception” (ECHU III/xi/§23). Conversely, the revolutionary impact of this limitation on the theory of human understanding will be dulled, or even lost, to the extent we remain wedded to the prevailing view of Locke’s consideration of language as upholding an isomorphism of precisely this kind. For we will then misunderstand the limitation “to our ways of Perception” to admit everything language is capable of expressing; and since this promises to restore to human understanding everything the limitation to our ways of perception seems to take away, Locke’s sensibilism will then not only cease to present an effective bulwark against intellectualist and Aristotelean doctrines but will itself take on the appearance of an idiosyncratic mélange of the two, with all the loose ends and inconsistencies one would expect from such a hybrid. By contrast, when we interpret “our ways of Perception” as divergent from, even at odds with, what is expressible in language, the purport of Locke’s consideration of language emerges as fundamentally incompatible with both intellectualism and Aristotelianism. For the emphasis now falls on how much semantic and syntactic information inevitably gets lost when we move from words to the ideas they signify, and from verbal propositions to the mental propositions they express. In particular, with psychology displacing language in the driver’s seat, the limits Locke placed on knowledge no longer appear in the guise of epistemic constraints—lack of enough ideas or ideas of the right kind, obscurity or confusion in their perception, inadequate warranting procedures when it comes to relating them, etc.—but instead derive directly from the origin of its contents. For psychology shows that all complex ideas resolve into considerations of simple ideas, and that simple ideas, stripped of the accretions of imagination and judgment, are nothing more than disjoint, fleetingly existent sensory qualities, devoid of all objective content. Once we recognize that the prerogatives of language do not stand in the away of construing the limitation of knowledge to “our ways of Perception” as a limitation of it to contents such as these, there no longer can be any doubt as to the revolutionary ontological import of the sensibilist principle at the heart of Locke’s philosophy: Since the Mind, in all its Thoughts and Reasonings, hath no other immediate Object but its own Ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident, that our Knowledge is only conversant about them . . . For our simple Ideas . . . are the Foundation, and sole Matter of all our Notions, and Knowledge. (IV/i/§1 and xviii/§3)

C. Locke’s Critique of Essentialism We have so far focused on the first of the two “secret references” Locke attributed to words over and above the ideas they signify: common acceptation. Precisely because common acceptation has come to occupy a far more central position in

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post-“linguistic turn” considerations of language, Locke’s unconcern with it tends to puzzle readers today, and has become a fertile source of misunderstanding. What should now be clear is that Locke’s thesis that ideas are the primary and immediate significations of words was not intended to explicate public discourse in terms of some private ideational language of thought, but merely to curb the linguistic flights of understanding by bringing it back down to the reality of the only objects with which it ever has to deal: ideas. Here, semantic transparency drops out as irrelevant, in favor of the ontological relation of words to extralinguistic reality. In the context of Locke’s theory of understanding, this relation is in the first instance psychological: the habitual association whereby words are able to “excite” certain ideas in our minds. Unlike words, ideas belong to the natural realm, their existence explicable entirely in terms of the efficacy of substances (the mind’s own capacities as well as the faculties of objects external to it). Through them, the understanding is not only integrated into the natural order, but, as an I encompassing all ideas in a single unity of consciousness, constitutes a natural phenomenon in its own right (chapters 4-D and 7-B). By contrast, the signification of words, insofar as it derives from common acceptation, is not nature but artifice: it depends entirely on conventional stipulations not essentially different from the institutions constitutive of other cooperative human practices (choice and preparation of foodstuffs, death rites, the conduct of hunts and warfare, etc.). However effective the artifice of language shows itself to be as a tool to improve the utilization of the materials naturally available to human understanding, it is nevertheless, in and of itself, void of objective conceptual or cognitive significance. Thus, in arriving at a final accounting of the nature and extent of our knowledge, Locke deemed it necessary to disregard both common acceptation and semantic transparency, and restricted his consideration to understanding in a state of nature. Because the other secret reference of words is directly concerned with the signification of substances existing in the natural world (chapter 5-D-1), it does not fall at this hurdle. Moreover, it shares with common acceptation the promise of restoring transparency to language by rendering the mediation of ideas redundant: “Because Men would not be thought to talk barely of their own Imaginations, but of Things as really they are; therefore they often suppose their Words to stand also for the reality of Things” (ECHU III/ii/§5). The problem with this is that because each person’s experiences of substances differ, the abstract ideas signified by the general terms for substances also vary from individual to individual: the features I leave out of consideration in forming the ideas named by ‘man,’ ‘gold,’ or ‘antimony’ may not be the same ones you omit. Embarrassed by the arbitrariness of this procedure, we cast about for an invariant reference, an objective standard whereby to fix the signification for everyone always. Rules of propriety, however, fail us here. As matters of conventional stipulation, they are not determined uniquely, or even mostly, by the requirements of cognition but instead are adapted to and fluctuate with societal norms shaped by factors that may have little to do with the accurate representation of material nature. Indeed, being subject to social forces in ways an individual’s private abstract ideas are not, rules of propriety are in a sense even more arbitrary and impermanent (“the Mind of Man, in making its complex Ideas of Substances, never puts any together that do not really, or are not supposed


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to co-exist,” vi/§29). Hoping to remedy the arbitrariness inherent in both intersubjective societal norms and subjective psychology, we look to the substances themselves to provide us with an invariant, universal standard by which to fix the reference of general terms for substances: if every distinct Quality, that were discovered in any matter by any one, were supposed to make a necessary part of the complex Idea, signified by the common Name given it, it must follow, that Men must suppose the same Word to signify different Things in different Men: since they cannot doubt, but different Men may have discovered several Qualities in Substances of the same Denomination, which others know nothing of. To avoid this therefore, they have supposed a real Essence belonging to every Species, from which these Properties all flow, and would have their name of the Species stand for that. (III/vi/§§48–9)

If we do not each experience the same qualities constantly conjoined, and so do not always arrive at the same abstract idea, the putative secret reference to the real essence of the substance from which these qualities all flow ensures that everyone is talking about the same thing. This, then, is taken to be the fully transparent signification of the general term, so that the mediation of abstract ideas (nominal essences) is rendered redundant. The notion that there is an invariant, universal, extraideational standard corresponding to general terms for substances is a characteristic feature of essentialisms from before Aristotle to beyond Descartes, even perhaps including some presentday varieties as well. In Locke’s view, however, they do nothing more than “put the name or sound, in the place and stead of the thing having that real Essence, without knowing what the real Essence is; and this is that which Men do, when they speak of Species of Things, as supposing them made by Nature, and distinguished by real Essences” (ECHU III/vi/§49). The problem is not our irremediable ignorance of the real essences of substances. It is rather that when abstract ideas are eliminated from the chain of signification linking general terms for substances to the substances themselves, and rules of propriety are set aside, we are left quite literally with nothing in mind, and might as well be uttering a string of nonsense syllables (“the Word . . . comes to have no signification at all, being put for somewhat, whereof we have no Idea at all,” III/x/§19). The secret reference to an unknown real essence tacitly presupposes a region of experience marked out, more or less sharply, by these abstract ideas. For even where abstract ideas differ as to which qualities of a substance are essential and which merely accidental properties, experience ensures that abstract ideas of substances will encompass the same qualities, or at least overlap extensively. Hence, the unintended consequence of sidelining abstract ideas by treating real essences as the transparent references of our general terms for substances is to render it impossible to distinguish any region of experience at all; and since a wholly indeterminate reference is indistinguishable from no reference at all, the loss of abstract idea intermediaries must forthwith deprive our general terms for substances of any signification. But as soon as these intermediaries are readmitted, we face

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the same problem as before: the same term will designate a different real essence according to which abstract idea is employed. Real essences thus turn out to be wholly parasitic on the nominal essence, determined according to which properties of a substance a given abstract idea treats as essential and which accidental. This is not to say that Locke denied that each individual substance has a real essence, or that it may share this essence with other substances. Yet, this fact has nothing to do with the names we actually employ for substances and cannot be put to any linguistic use even if we would: ’Tis true, I have often mentioned a real Essence, distinct in Substances, from those abstract Ideas of them which I call the nominal Essence. By this real Essence, I mean, that real constitution of any Thing, which is the foundation of all those Properties, that are combined in, and are constantly found to co-exist with the nominal Essence; that particular constitution, which every Thing has within it self, without any relation to any thing without it. But Essence, even in this sense, relates to a sort, and supposes a Species . . . v.g. Supposing the nominal essence of Gold, to be a body of such a peculiar color and weight, with Malleability and Fusibility, the real Essence is that Constitution of the parts of Matter, on which these Qualities, and their Union, depend; and is also the foundation of its Solubility in Aqua Regia, and other Properties accompanying that complex Idea. Here are Essences and Properties, but all on the supposition of a Sort, or general abstract Idea . . . [T]here is no individual parcel of Matter, to which any of these Qualities are so annexed, as to be essential to it, or inseparable from it. That which is essential belongs to it as a Condition, whereby it is of this or that Sort: But take away the consideration of its being ranked under the name of some abstract Idea, and then there is nothing necessary to it, nothing inseparable from it. Indeed, as to the real Essences of Substances, we only suppose their Being, without precisely knowing what they are: But that which annexes them still to the Species, is the nominal Essence, of which they are the supposed foundation and cause. (ECHU III/vi/§6; also IV/iii/§10)

Because the real essence designated by the name of a substance is entirely parasitic on the abstractive consideration that yields the nominal essence to which it corresponds, it can do nothing to fix the reference of a name in such a way as to overcome or ameliorate the fact that abstract ideas of substances are as many, various, and alterable as the diverse experiences and convenience of different human beings prescribe (or of the same human being at different times and/or in different circumstances): Wherein then, would I gladly know, consists the precise and unmovable Boundaries of that Species [viz. man]? ’Tis plain, if we examine, there is no such thing made by Nature, and established by Her amongst Men. The real Essence of that or any other sort of Substances, it is evident, we know not. . . . This then, in short, is the case: 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 ’tis 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, in order to their naming, for the convenience of comprehensive signs. (III/vi/§27 and §36)


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Indeed, real species may be even more diverse than nominal: “knowing not what real Constitution it is of Substances, whereon our simple Ideas depend, and which really is the cause of the strict union of some of them one with another, and the exclusion of others” (IV/iv/§12; also iii/§§11–13 and II/viii/§22), we have no way to preclude the possibility that substances that, in themselves, belong to different real species may nevertheless be indistinguishable in relation to our senses and their power to affect them (the principle of the identity of indiscernibles here fails to hold). But if real species of substances can be even more diverse and variable than the nominal species in accordance with which we distinguish them, then clearly the essentialist supposition that real essences are capable of providing a fixed, universal standard for the names of substances is completely illusory. Indeed, in this respect, we have no reason to attribute more worth to natural than to artificial species of thing: I must be excused here, if I think, artificial Things are of distinct Species, as well as natural: Since I find they are as plainly and orderly ranked into sorts, by different abstract Ideas, with general names annexed to them, as distinct one from another as those of natural Substances. For why should we not think a Watch, and Pistol, as distinct Species one from another, as a Horse, and a Dog, they being expressed in our minds by distinct Ideas, and to others, by distinct Appellations? (III/vi/§41)

Absent the mediation of abstract ideas, there are no species of any kind, real or nominal, to which to refer general names of substances. And however great the temptation to do so none the less, we can achieve nothing thereby beyond the abuse of language: Another Abuse of Words, is the setting them in the place of Things, which they do or can by no means signify. We may observe, that in the general names of Substances, whereof the nominal Essences are only known to us, when we put them into Propositions, and affirm or deny any thing about them, we do most commonly tacitly suppose, or intend, they should stand for the real Essence of a certain sort of Substances. For when a Man says Gold is Malleable, he means and would insinuate something more than this, that what I call Gold is malleable, (though truly it amounts to no more) but would have this understood, viz. that Gold; i.e. what has the real Essence of Gold is malleable, which amounts to thus much that Malleableness depends on, and is inseparable from the real Essence of Gold. But a Man, not knowing wherein that real Essence consists, the connexion in his Mind of Malleableness, is not truly with an Essence he knows not, but only with the Sound Gold he puts for it . . . This supposition . . . that the same precise internal Constitution goes always with the same specifick name, makes Men forward to take those names for the Representatives of those real Essences, though indeed they signify nothing but the complex Ideas they have in their minds when they use them. So that, if I may so say, signifying one thing, and being supposed for, or put in the place of another, they cannot but, in such a kind of use, cause a great deal of Uncertainty in Men’s Discourses. (III/x/§17 and §20)

Yet the risk of anachronistic misunderstanding is perhaps never greater than in the case of Locke’s critique of essentialism. To someone steeped in twentieth-

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century philosophy of language, the issue Locke was concerned with can seem an almost uncannily precise prefiguration of the divergence between direct (“Russellian”) and indirect (“Fregean”) conceptions of reference. So regarded, Lockean abstract ideas of substances may seem to be private analogues of Fregean senses: modes in which references (the substances themselves) are exhibited (Arten der Darstellung), and thence semantic mediators between signs and the reality they signify. By contrast, the second secret reference to which Locke’s conception of the signification of names of substances is opposed appears to parallel attempts to relate words such as ‘gold’ or ‘water’ directly to the natures “essentially” constitutive of their instances in the manner of proper names or demonstratives: the real constitution of the substance bearing the tag, or in direct contact with the business end of the pointer, confers a rigid designation on the general name. Nor is textual evidence lacking that seems to confirm this was indeed the issue toward which Locke was confusedly groping. For example, one might descry a basic affinity with criticisms of direct reference theories in the following: by this tacit reference to the real Essence of that Species of Bodies, the Word Gold (which by standing for a more or less perfect Collection of simple Ideas, serves to design that sort of Body well enough in civil Discourse) comes to have no signification at all, being put for somewhat, whereof we have no Idea at all, and so can signify nothing at all, when the Body it self is away. For however it may be thought all one; yet, if well considered, it will be found a quite different thing, to argue about Gold in name, and about a parcel of the Body itself, v.g. a piece of Leaf-Gold laid before us; though in Discourse we are fain to substitute the name for the thing. (ECHU III/x/§19)

For one so minded, no violence is inflicted on Locke’s argument by construing it as an attempt to show that the reference of natural kind terms cannot be assimilated to a “baptismal model,” according to which the literal presence of the referent to the referrer is already of itself sufficient to fix the reference of a term ever after, without any accompanying reference-fixing description (complex idea, mental proposition). In my view, the resemblances to Locke’s treatment of language that interpreters point to here is a classic example of superficial affinities being permitted to obscure far more fundamental differences, with the consequence that, instead of clarifying Locke’s position and making it more accessible, we succeed only in occluding our view of it. Simple ideas were not, for Locke, a second set of semantic signifiers alongside words; their combinations into complex ideas do not constitute descriptions, and they are in no sense private analogues of Fregean senses. Locke’s account of real essences is an ontological doctrine founded not on semantic but on psychological considerations. In the same way semanticists (nowadays) generally leave psychology to take care of itself by devising accounts of reference that are completely indifferent to the psychology of the language-user, Locke had no horse in the semantic race and crafted his views in ways that stand up (or not) irrespectively of whether a Fregean, Russellian, or some other account of semantic reference is correct. In particular, when Locke maintained that such terms as ‘grif-


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fin,’ ‘elf,’ ‘Olympian deity,’ and ‘incubus’ fail to signify because no substances exist for them to signify, he was not tacitly endorsing the semantic thesis that the referents of names for substances are identical with the things that bear the names. To suppose this so is anachronistic, and completely ignores the fact that, for Locke, ideas are never more than natural signs of their substantial causes (chapter 5-D-1). The claim that these terms fail to signify therefore rests on a psychological consideration of the origin of the abstract ideas they immediately signify: since they were not abstracted from actual complex ideas of substances, formed in the normal course of experience as a result of the experienced constant conjunction of the simple ideas contained in them, they lack what is requisite to confer on them the cognitive status of natural signs of the substantial causes of the coexistence of simple ideas. To be sure, the same failure is then carried over to the names correlated to these abstract ideas, but there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that Locke inferred from this that these terms are in any way semantically defective. Quite the contrary, he could allow that, referentially, ‘griffin,’ et al, are as semantically impeccable as ‘horse,’ ‘tobacco,’ ‘flintlock,’ and ‘church,’ while still denying them the cognitive worth he accorded to the latter set of terms on the basis of the psychological origin of the abstract ideas they immediately signify. A case in point is Locke’s criticism of the supposed “tacit reference” of ‘gold’ to “the real Essence of that Species of Bodies.” The target of his criticism is a mistaken inference drawn from the following premise: even if we prescind from the contents of the sensations a piece of goldleaf produces when we hold it and see it—the coexistent sensible qualities (and a fortiori whether they are ideas of primary or of secondary qualities in the objects)—the mere fact of these sensations’ presence in us is sufficient for us to affirm the concurrent existence of their external cause or causes. Locke accepted this premise, even to the point of regarding it as more certain than the highest probability—a truth evident to us by what he termed “sensitive knowledge” (chapter 9-B). He also accepted that (1) from the existence of the external causes of these sensations we can infer the existence in external substances of the powers requisite to cause them in us, (2) from these powers the existence of the real constitution on which they depend, and (3) from the existence of its real constitution the existence of any and all real essences this constitution may partake of. But Locke stopped there. In particular, he rejected any notion that, by virtue of prescinding from the (abstract ideas) of the sensory qualia that go together to make up the subjectively variable nominal essence of gold, we can use this real essence to fix the reference of ‘gold’ in such a way as to render the mediation of abstract ideas redundant. For while he chose not to dispute that, in the presence of the sensation a substance of some such real species causes, the word ‘gold’ can be used to signify that essence immediately, without regard to any nominal essence, it “can signify nothing at all, when the Body it self is away.” What here is critical is the psychological consequence of the presence or absence of sensation, and clearly not the word and its common acceptation. For in the absence of sensation, we have only the memory of its presence; and when, as is the case here, the contents of the recollected sensation are excluded, the memory of its presence can be the natural sign of nothing but the power that produced it, namely, our mind’s own memory faculty. Accordingly, the only way we can connect the

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memory to the real essence of the substantial cause of that sensation is by forming an abstract idea of the contents of that sensation (the coexistent simple ideas). And, in general, in the absence of the sensation, and without any nominal essence whereby to recall, imagine, or otherwise mark that sensation, the word ‘gold’ loses that whereby alone it can retain its relation to the power, the real constitution of the goldleaf, and thereby to whatever real essence that constitution may partake of (it “comes to have no signification at all, being put for somewhat, whereof we have no Idea at all”). If the foregoing interpretation is correct, then there can be no question that Locke’s reasoning has at best only a superficial affinity with indirect referentialist criticisms of the “baptismal model” of the reference of natural kind terms. For it relates exclusively to sensations—their natural causes, the idea of existence we get from their presence in us, the contents they leave behind in memory, and the complex and abstract ideas we produce from these contents. Insofar as words play a role in the story, only their psychology, not their semantics, need be taken into account: their habitual connection with abstract ideas endows them with the capacity to “excite certain Ideas, as if the Objects themselves . . . did actually affect the Senses.” And its denouement is no less purely psychological: the word ‘gold,’ detached from the nominal essence, would be unable to excite any ideas at all in the understanding, and so would find itself in a position of ontological inferiority even relative to the ravings of madmen or words in the imaginary mouths of Cartesian dreamers (which at least are able to excite “fantastical” ideas). That Locke’s reasoning should be construed in straightforwardly psychological terms, with no admixture of semantics, receives further confirmation from his complete indifference to the fact that the failure of ‘gold’ in such circumstances takes away nothing from the meaning conferred on it by commonly accepted rules of propriety. Since this is precisely the kind of significance of concern to twentieth-century philosophical reference theorists, it should therefore be clear that Locke’s accounts of the names of substances and other classes of general term, far from being gropings, confused or otherwise, in the same direction, are of an entirely different nature.

D. Propositions, Mental and Verbal Locke has sometimes been lauded for appreciating the fundamental logical difference between truth-value-bearing propositions and their truth-valueless constituents: Truth or Falshood, lying always in some Affirmation, or Negation, Mental or Verbal, our Ideas are not capable any of them of being false, till the Mind passes some Judgment on them; that is, affirms or denies something of them . . . Truth belongs only to Propositions: whereof there are two sorts, viz. Mental and Verbal; as there are two sorts of Signs commonly made use of, viz. Ideas and Words. (ECHU II/xxxii/§3 and IV/v/§2).

Though the plaudits are not undeserved, one has only to consider what Locke had in mind by “propositions” and their “truth” or “falsehood” to recognize that too


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much should not be made of this putative affinity with twentieth-century philosophers of language. For Locke, mental propositions, in and of themselves, are simply “a bare consideration of the Ideas” (IV/v/§3). Since he characterized complex ideas and ideas of relations in terms precisely of such acts of consideration (chapter 5-C), one has to wonder what distinguishes mental propositions from complex ideas: is there a special kind of consideration of ideas involved, is the difference due merely to the kind of ideas considered in them, or both? There seems no question that the mental propositions posited by Locke are distinguished from complex ideas of individual substances, modes, and relations between individual ideas by the kind of ideas considered in them. For while in forming nonpropositional complex ideas and ideas of relation we consider ideas in their full concrete determinateness, mental propositions invariably involve one or more abstract general ideas. Is that the whole difference, and, in particular, does it suffice to explain what makes the former incapable and the latter capable of being true or false? The mere fact that Locke distinguished mental propositions from complex ideas in this regard does not necessarily mean that he attributed irreducibly logical properties to the former that are lacking in the latter. On the contrary, the reason seems instead to lie in the fact that simple ideas, complex ideas of individual substances, modes, and relations between individual ideas are themselves the objects with which mental propositions have to be compared with a view to determining their truth or falsity: the immediate Object of all our Reasoning and Knowledge, is nothing but Particulars. Every Man’s Reasoning and Knowledge, is only about the Ideas existing in his own Mind, which are truly, every one of them, particular Existences: and our Knowledge and Reasoning about other Things, is only as they correspond with those our particular Ideas. (xvii/§8; also i/§1)

Indeed, there is no reason to think that, prior to all abstraction, simple ideas and complex ideas of individual substances, modes, and relations may not involve many, or even all, of “the several views, postures, stands, turns, limitations, and exceptions, and several other Thoughts of the mind” (III/vii/§4) that constitute acts of affirmation, negation, and being suspended between them, even while not admitting of being true or false (for the simple reason that they are the reality that makes mental propositions true or false). If so, are we perhaps not merely falling into anachronism if we take it for granted that the advantage Locke accorded to mental propositions in point of truth and falsity derives from their possession of some logical property lacking in ideas of individual substances, modes, and relation, rather than a merely psychological difference in the contents of the ideas concerned in them? The inclusion of abstract general ideas in an idea in and of itself introduces a distinction between these ideas and their instantiations, and so too the possibility of a way of considering (comparing) ideas that does not exist at the level of individual simple ideas or ideas of individual substances, modes, and relations of individual ideas: according to whether the combinations and relations of abstract ideas in mental propositions correspond to the combinations and relations of their instances. On this way of reading Locke, therefore, the shift in

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ECHU IV from ideas to propositions does not signify a shift from psychology to logic but only one from the psychology of the kind of complex ideas of substances, modes, and relation that do not include abstract ideas to the psychology of the kind that does. Does the evidence favor this reading of Lockean mental propositions? It certainly seems most consonant with the general psychological tenor of the Essay, especially once it is appreciated that the consideration of language in Book III tends more to undermine than support the supposition of a systematic logicosemantic isomorphism between language and ideation. More specifically, it helps us understand, among other things, why Locke placed verbal propositions in the same dependent relation of signifier to signified with respect to mental proposition in which he set names to ideas (IV/v/§§5–6). An abstract idea is “something in the Mind between the things that exists, and the Name that is given to it” (II/xxxii/§8). The implication is that, in the case of verbal propositions, there are two correspondences— two loci of truth or falsity—to be taken into account: first, whether the words of which they are composed correspond both to abstract ideas (and do so clearly and unconfusedly) and to the way they are related in mental propositions, and, second, whether the way those abstract ideas are related in mental propositions corresponds to the way their instantiating ideas of individual simple sensations or reflexions, individual substances, individual modes, and individual relations of ideas are found in experience (it was because of the added risk of error that comes with language that Locke recommended “the examining and judging of Ideas by themselves, their Names being quite laid aside,” as “the best and surest way to clear and distinct Knowledge,” IV/v/§1; also v/§4, II/xxix, and Epistle). Yet, if the presence of abstract ideas already of itself suffices to motivate Locke’s account of both verbal and mental truth and falsity, why should we doubt that psychology, not logic, is all there is to Locke’s distinction between mental propositions and (other) complex ideas in point of truth and falsity? None of this, of course, implies that we should construe mental propositions as translations of verbal ones, capable of replicating in the mind the essential logicogrammatical structure and semantic interconnections characteristic of public language. For the same reason the correspondence of names to ideas (in the sense posited by Locke) tends to undermine rather than support the supposition of their thoroughgoing isomorphism, that of verbal propositions to mental does the same: by far the greatest portion of propositional thought would be impossible apart from the nonideational, ineluctably linguistic variety of abstraction discussed above in sections A and B. These general views make it possible to stitch together things that, in idea, are entirely alien and isolated, so that nothing fails ultimately to connect up with everything else in a single, integrated framework bound together by publicly scrutinizable rules of propriety. Each verbal proposition, whether uttered aloud or thought silently, partakes of this holistic context, and acquires from it connotations, entailments, and implications of every kind. Consequently, in descending from verbal propositions to mental we are not only losing access to a multitude of general views but also detaching our thoughts from this holistic context and all the grammar that goes with it. Why then did Locke nevertheless insist on the primacy of mental propositions, and do so with such emphasis that verbal propositions appear parasitic on them?


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The answer seems to be that mental propositions alone are capable of conferring on verbal ones (1) objective sense and signification and (2) objective truth or falsity. Since the relation of any linguistic abstraction to actual particulars—that is, individual simple ideas, and complex ideas of individual substances, modes, and relations of individual ideas—requires the mediation of abstracted ideas (II/xxxii/ §8), then there can be no question that the verbal propositions we form from these linguistic abstractions owe whatever objective sense and signification they possess entirely to the relation to particulars conferred on them by intermediate mental propositions formed from abstract ideas. At the same time, only insofar as mental propositions confer relation to particulars on verbal propositions is it possible for the latter to be objectively verified or falsified. So, notwithstanding the great amount of linguistically significant information that inevitably is lost when we shift from verbal propositions to mental, because mental propositions are the repository of all objectively significant information, Locke seems to have deemed it a price well worth paying. The more we free ourselves from the notion that Locke affirmed a systematic isomorphism between thought and language, the less difficult it becomes to accept that mental propositions were for him simply a species of complex idea. To complete the picture, however, we need to take account of what I shall term the subjectivist conception of propositions. The reflexive operation of abstraction suffices to separate an idea “from all other Existences, and the circumstances of real Existence, as Time, Place, or any other Ideas taken from particular Beings” (ECHU II/xi/§9). When, in addition, one abstract idea is united with another in a mental proposition and this mental proposition is considered only with respect to what it itself contains, in isolation from any expression of it in language, it is ipso facto severed from the holistic context that would otherwise reconnect it with the wider network of entities from which abstraction had originally detached it. Indeed, this may well be part of what Locke was warning against when he noted that “a mental Proposition being nothing but a bare consideration of the Ideas, as they are in our Minds stripp’d of Names, they lose the Nature of purely mental Propositions, as soon as they are put into Words” (IV/v/§3). For mental propositions, as he conceived them, are, for all intents and purposes, individual, isolated atoms: unlike verbal propositions embedded in the holistic context, they have no connections to any other propositions—no implications, no entailments, no connotations, nothing whatsoever beyond the abstractly considered simple and/or complex ideas actually considered in them by the thinking subject. This subjectivist conception of mental propositions is as inseparable from sensibilism as intellectualism is from the opposing objectivist conception. Sensibilists from Locke to Kant held that no idea exists in the mind prior to or independently of its perception in sensation or reflexion, so that the reality of an idea and its appearance in perception are one and indistinguishable, and it can contain nothing except what is perceived or thought in it. Since sensibilism precludes the possibility that an idea can have connections to any distinct idea not already contained in it (any content not already perceived or thought in it), it thus leads directly to a subjectivist conception of mental propositions. For insofar as such propositions are composed of abstractly considered ideas, and since it is obvious that the operation

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of abstractive understanding cannot of itself introduce any new connections to other ideas, sensibilists must conceive the contents thought in mental propositions as devoid of connection to anything not already thought in the proposition (even if only obscurely). They thus arrive at the conception of mental propositions as including all and only such contents as the subject thinks in them, so that each constitutes a completely independent, isolated atom of thought. Because intellectualists hold ideas to exist prior to and independently of their perception in sensation or reflexion, they are free to suppose that ideas may contain more (possibly infinitely more) content than appears to us in perception. So, while agreeing with sensibilists that abstraction cannot include in the idea anything more than what was preabstractively perceived in it, they nevertheless conceive the abstract ideas in mental propositions very differently. For even if the judger is subjectively oblivious to the connections the abstract ideas in its judgment have to ideas outside the judgment—and oblivious too to any connections the ideas in the judgment might have to one another by means of these connections— the abstractly considered ideas themselves, objectively, have them nonetheless. As Descartes put it, each such idea is “an image of a true and immutable nature” (Fifth Meditation AT VII 68). For example, if it is the idea of a triangle, then the relation of quantitative equality between the sum of its angles and two right angles is objectively contained in the idea even if the thinking subject is completely oblivious of this connection. Being the limited creatures we are, we have to discover this necessary relation in the only manner open to us: by forming a chain of judgments, guided by intuitive certainty at each step, terminating in the judgment that the sum of the angles of a triangle is necessarily 180 degrees. At the same time, however, if we had a clearer perception of the image of the true and immutable nature of a triangle, we might have read this relation off directly from this idea with the same intuitive immediacy we recognize its trilaterality, since, according to Descartes, this property was already present in that idea when we first perceived it. Similarly, a maximally clear perception of the idea would enable us to recognize, with intuitive immediacy, the infinity of such properties contained in this true and immutable nature (including properties not accessible to present-day geometry or to any geometry within the capacity of the human mind). For, in the view of the intellectualist, since all the properties of this true and immutable nature are contained in its idea-image in us, they were already there in the mind of the first person ever to think a triangle, and already there in our own minds before we ever formed its conception. While Locke’s commitment to a subjectivist conception of mental propositions is everywhere in evidence in ECHU IV, perhaps the most striking and parturient instance is his claim that mathematical propositions are instructive: we can know the Truth, and so may be certain in Propositions, which affirm something of another, which is a necessary consequence of its precise complex Idea, but not contained in it. As that the external Angle of all Triangles, is bigger than either of the opposite internal Angles; which relation of the outward Angle, to either of the opposite internal Angles, making no part of the complex Idea, signified by the name Triangle, this is a real Truth, and coneys with it instructive real Knowledge. (ECHU IV/viii/§8)


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Since the idea of a triangle contains nothing—has no reality, meaning, content— other than that which appears immediately to our perception in accordance with our consideration of this simple mode, geometry does not merely clarify and make distinct connections already implicit in the idea of a triangle, but actually forges these connections itself. Moreover, if it does not thereby add new content to the idea of the triangle, it is because each idea is a new consideration (chapter 5-B), so that a number of sequential considerations (ideas) are necessary before judging subjects can recognize this necessary feature of all triangles. Sequential considerations of this sort consist in, or at least are mediated by, a number of mental propositions, so that the judging subject is here the reasoning subject. What makes this conception of reasoning distinctively sensibilist is the fact that the terms of the judgment that emerge from the reasoning as necessarily related originally have no relation. Reasoning, for Locke, is thus a vehicle for expanding and extending our cognition (instruction), rather than simply explicating what it is already implicit in our ideas (on the intellectualists’ model of Platonic recollection: chapter 15-A). The propositions whereof it consists, in their determinate sequence, are intrinsic to the connection. Reasoning does not merely reveal connections between ideas, it forges them, and the connections, even when necessary, have no meaning or validity prior to or independently of our passing through the requisite propositions in the requisite order. And this is true even if our mastery of a certain course of reasoning is so great that we become attentively oblivious of having to think each of its propositions individually, and in sequence, each time we apply it: if we consider, how very quick the actions of the Mind are performed . . . its actions seems to require no time, but many of them seem to be crouded into an Instant . . . Any one may easily observe this in his own Thoughts, who will take the pains to reflect on them. How, as it were in an instant, do our Minds, with one glance, see all the parts of a demonstration, which may very well be called a long one, if we consider the time it will require to put it into words, and step by step shew it another? (ECHU II/ix/§10)

It should not go unremarked that Locke’s subjectivist conception of mental propositions was a necessary first step along the path leading to Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic a priori judgments. Kant termed synthetic a priori those judgments in which one determination is supposed to be joined in thought to another but the judging subject does not actually think the one in the other, and analytic those in which the one actually is thought in the other. Indeed, his insistence that “the question is not what we are supposed to join in thought to the given concept but what we actually think in it, if only obscurely” (B17 and PFM 269) could almost be a gloss on Locke’s distinction of (intuitive and demonstrative) instructive knowledge from knowledge of the trifling sort (“Universal propositions; that though they be certainly true, yet they add no Light to our Understandings, bring no increase to our Knowledge,” ECHU IV/viii/§1). This is not, however, to say that Locke’s distinction actually anticipated Kant’s. By conceiving instructive no less than trifling knowledge as cases of intuitively evident necessary truth, Locke left himself no alternative but to treat their negations as impossible even to

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conceive. Yet, to hold that the negation of an intuitively evident proposition is inconceivable is equivalent to saying that the principle of noncontradiction is a sufficient guarantee of its truth. But if both instructive and trifling intuitive knowledge require no principle beyond that of noncontradiction to establish their truth, then, in Kantian terms, this means that both kinds of necessary truth are analytic. For this reason, Locke failed to distinguish them as Kant was to do. In particular, Kant’s distinction between synthetic a priori and analytic necessary truth was intended to make explicit the inadequacy of the principle of noncontradiction, and the need for some further principle, in the case of the former. So, while Kant set off in search of a principle capable of explaining the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments, Locke did not because he failed realize how fundamental the difference between instructive and trifling knowledge really is (so too Hume: chapters 2-D and 18-A). One final matter I need to address before concluding my consideration of mental propositions concerns the basis on which Locke distinguished affirmation, denial, suspension of judgment, and all the degrees in between. The principal impediment is the dearth of textual evidence. One possibility is that Locke distinguished them according to the different ways abstract ideas are considered as combined or related. In that case, negation would require us to combine or relate the abstract ideas just as we do in affirmation, and so differs from it only as a negative attitude toward the result differs from a positive, or a negative mode of consideration does from a positive mode (intermediate degrees of affirmation or negation can then be explained either as additional attitudes of the same kind or as mixtures in varying degrees of the two primary attitudes). Another possibility is that Locke distinguished affirmation from denial according to whether the understanding does or does not consider the ideas as combined or related. Here, affirmation consists in electing to consider the abstract ideas as combined or related a certain way, negation in electing to consider them as not combined or related that way (but rather in some other way or none at all), suspension of judgment in electing to do neither, and intermediate degrees in more or less tentatively electing to affirm or deny. In both cases, affirming, denying, and everything in between is effected by adopting one or another of the “several views, postures, stands, turns, limitations, and exceptions, and several other Thoughts of the mind” (ECHU III/ vii/§4) signified by particles (section B). Such evidence as there is suggests that the second alternative comes closest to Locke’s view. In particular, since a proposition consist in “the putting Ideas together, or separating them from one another in the Mind” (IV/xiv/§4), affirmation would seem to correspond to putting ideas together—that is, our determining or being determined to combine or relate them in one complex idea—and denial to separating them from one another—that is, determining or being determined not to combine or relate them in that complex idea. If so, then Locke construed the differences between affirmation, denial, and everything in between in terms solely of considerative acts of thought, no different in kind from the acts whereby complex ideas generally are formed.5 And confirma5. This suggests that Hume may have been thinking of Locke when he attacked the view that belief consists in such an act: chapter 20-C.


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tion can be found in the fact that this reading meshes perfectly with all three legs of the Lockean mental propositional tripod: subjectivism; anti-isomorphism; and the status of mental propositions as a species of complex idea distinguished by the inclusion of abstract ideas.

9 Knowledge and Skepticism

Locke distinguished the cognitive value of propositions according to whether or not the agreement or disagreement of the ideas considered in them can be immediately perceived. If it can, the proposition counts as knowledge and admits of no doubt; otherwise it is a judgment that, even if free of doubt, is still only a presumption: the Mind has two Faculties, conversant about Truth and Falshood.

First, Knowledge, whereby it certainly perceives, and is undoubtedly satisfied of the Agreement or Disagreement of any Ideas. Secondly, Judgment, which is the putting Ideas together, or separating them from one another in the Mind, when their certain Agreement or Disagreement is not perceived, but presumed to be so; which is, as the Word imports, taken to be so before it certainly appears. And if it so unites, or separates them, as in Reality Things are, it is right Judgment. (ECHU IV/xiv/§4; also i/§2) Without denying the many merits of Locke’s theory of judgment (IV/§§xiv-xx), few would compare it to his theory of knowledge (§§i-xiii) in interest, originality, or influence, and so it is on the latter that I shall focus in this chapter.

A. Eternal Truths The principal achievement of Locke’s theory of knowledge was to show how it is possible to cognize necessary truth by means of ideas all of which originate empirically in sensation or reflexion. Merely by comparing the abstract ideas concerned, we immediately perceive that white is not black, that scarlet is brighter than indigo, that a body is extended, that the figure ‘W’ has no curves, that no square is round, that a dog is a mammal, and so forth. Moreover, by perceiving this, we at the same time recognize that all these agreements and disagreements cannot be perceived to be otherwise, that all are therefore necessary. Conversely, where immediate perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas is lacking, we perceive that things can be otherwise, that a failure to agree or disagree is 224

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possible. The most we may hope for them is to find reasons to judge that they do or do not, as a contingent matter of fact, agree or disagree. When Locke’s sensibilism is factored in, and so too the appearance = reality principle (chapter 5–B) and the subjectivist conception of mental propositions (chapter 8–D), this is just to say that when no necessary agreement or disagreement is subjectively apparent to our perception, none exists objectively, nor can ever exist, between the ideas themselves (and though the same is true of the instances of the abstract ideas concerned—individual simple ideas and complex ideas of individual substances, modes, and relations of individual ideas—it need not carry over to the qualities of the substances responsible for causing these ideas). The only seeming exception is demonstrative knowledge, wherein an ordered sequence of intuitively evident propositions serves to forge a necessary relation between two ideas that cannot be immediately perceived to be so related (ECHU IV/ii/§1 and §7). But since such necessary relations have neither meaning nor validity apart from the requisite intermediate propositions considered in the requisite order (chapter 8–D), the necessity pertains properly to the sequence of comparisons of ideas taken in its entirety, not to the ideas whose necessary relation they mediate. Thus, for Locke, all necessary relations between ideas consist in the immediate perception of their agreement or disagreement. Knowledge develops in us, just as ideas do, by ascending from particular cases, haphazardly and unwittingly obtained, to views of ever greater generality, where it can be pursued increasingly methodically and integrated ever more systematically: Knowledge began in the Mind, and was founded on particulars; though afterwards, perhaps, no notice be taken thereof: it being natural for the mind (forward still to enlarge its Knowledge) most attentively to lay up those general Notions, and make the proper use of them, which is to disburden the Memory of the cumbersome load of Particulars. (ECHU IV/xii/§3)

The pursuit of general knowledge, whether unconscious and aleatory or deliberate and methodical, has as its end the discovery of (instructive, nontrifling) principles capable of guiding and securing our cognition, not only in the absence but even in the face of all other evidence. For example, the proposition that everything that begins to exist must have a cause of its existence is “a true principle of reason” arising “from the perceivable agreement” of the ideas contained in the proposition (CWS 61). Once in our possession, this knowledge functions as the principle of all our causal inferences (judgments) regarding particular existents, even to the point of taking precedence over the senses, testimony, or any other source of evidence with which it may seem to conflict: The first and firmest ground of Probability, is the conformity any thing has to our own Knowledge; especially that part of our Knowledge which we have embraced, and continue to look on as Principles. These have so great an influence upon our Opinions, that ’tis usually by them we judge of Truth, and measure Probability, to that degree, that what is inconsistent with our Principles, is so far from passing for probable with us, that it will not be allowed possible. The reverence is born to these Principles is so great, and their Authority so para-

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LOCKE’S NEW MODEL PHILOSOPHY mount to all other, that the Testimony not only of other Men, but the Evidence of our own Senses are often rejected, when they offer to vouch any thing contrary to these established Rules. (ECHU IV/xx/§8)1

Principles so fundamental and unchallengable had come to be called “eternal truths.” But their origin in comparisons of abstractly considered particular ideas given empirically in sense perception left them open to skeptical challenge. A natural line of response to skeptical doubt was available to intellectualists, for if ideas are objectively prior to and independent of our perception of them in sensation and reflexion, then their origin can be traced to an undeceiving divine Creator. Locke, by contrast, faced the more difficult challenge of securing eternal truths from skepticism without compromising either his sensibilism or his subjectivism. No one can accuse Locke of dodging the problem: I Doubt not but my Reader, by this time, may be apt to think, that I have been all this while only building a Castle in the Air; and be ready to say to me, To what purpose all this stir? Knowledge, say you, is only the perception of the agreement or disagreement of our own Ideas: but who knows what those Ideas may be? Is there any thing so extravagant, as the Imaginations of Men’s Brains? Where is the Head that has no Chimeras in it? Or if there be a sober and a wise Man, what difference will there be, by your Rules, between his Knowledge, and that of the most extravagant Fancy in the World? They both have their Ideas, and perceive their agreement and disagreement one with another. . . . ’Tis no matter how Things are: so a Man observe but the agreement of his own Imaginations, and talk conformably, it is all Truth, all Certainty. Such Castles in the Air, will be as strong Holds of Truth, as the Demonstrations of Euclid. That an Harpy is not a Centaur, is by this way as certain knowledge, and as much a Truth, as that a Square is not a Circle. (ECHU IV/iv/§1)

Locke took the point: if our Knowledge of our Ideas terminate in them, and reach no farther, where there is something farther intended, our most serious Thoughts will be of little more use, than the Reveries of a crazy Brain; and the Truths built thereon of no more weight, than the Discourses of a Man, who sees Things clearly in a Dream, and with great assurances utters them. (iv/§2).

Clearly, an independent, extraideational reality, in respect to which the relation of ideas in propositions is true or false, was a matter of the utmost importance for Locke, even more perhaps than for Descartes. For although Descartes attached supreme importance to overcoming skepticism in all its forms, the prison of ideas in which his account seems to leave knowledge is less confined than Locke’s because of his intellectualist conception of ideas. For if our general ideas of substances, their properties, and relations partake of a “true and 1. However, as Locke makes clear in ECHU IV/xii/§§1–3, the grounding role of principles is not to be understood on the model of a deductive axiom system. Philosophical and moral maxims have to be generalized from particular cases. Only when this is done can they assume the role of principles of probable judgment, and even then their role bears little resemblance to the role of axioms in geometry.


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immutable nature,” and are more than merely the workmanship of human understanding, then my immediate perception of an agreement between such ideas cannot be supposed to “impose any necessity on things,” but, “on the contrary, it is the necessity of the thing itself . . . which determines my thinking” (Fifth Meditation AT VII 67). Because Locke rejected intellectualist essentialism, Descartes’s way of obviating the foregoing objection was not open to him. Indeed, it is by no means obvious that Locke was in a position to respond to it at all, in view of his general skepticism regarding essences: if these are never perceived and so, pace Descartes, can never determine our thinking, how can we warrant any extension of the agreements and disagreements we immediately perceive between our ideas and things existing outside and independently of the operations of our thought? Thus, Locke had to confront not only the seemingly intractable problem of distinguishing the truth of knowledge from the errant “Reveries of a crazy Brain” and “the Discourses of a Man, who sees Things clearly in a Dream,” but also the question, how is it possible for human knowledge ever to be true of anything other than ideas at all? Locke offered several characterizations of truth and falsehood. Of these, the most helpful for making sense of his response to the foregoing objection is the one in which he relates the truth of our knowledge to its reality: Truth is the marking down in Words, the agreement or disagreement of Ideas as it is. Falshood is the marking down in Words, the agreement or disagreement of Ideas otherwise than it is. And so far as these Ideas, thus marked by Sounds, agree to their Archetypes, so far only is the Truth real. The knowledge of this Truth, consists in knowing what Ideas the Words stand for, and the perception of the agreement or disagreement of those Ideas, according as it is marked by those Words. (ECHU IV/v/§9)

Because Locke took the view that ideas are the only realities with which the human understanding ever has to deal, he had no option but to conceive of truth and falsity as a matter of the agreement of verbal or mental propositions (ideas in thought) with the particular ideas of sensation or reflexion that instantiate abstract general terms and ideas (chapter 8–D). In consequence, he could not avoid the question whether the truths we establish with regard to the latter have any significance whatsoever in respect to the reality beyond our ideas. The answer lay in determining whether, and to what extent, our various kinds of ideas—simple ideas of sensations, and complex ideas of individual substances, modes, and relations of individual simple or complex ideas—agree with external archetypes. For insofar as the abstract ideas we compare in propositions are instantiated by ideas that have external archetypes in the reality of things, we can, to that extent, be certain that any agreement (or disagreement) the mind affirms or denies between them may be reflected in the reality of things; and insofar as that agreement (or disagreement) is immediately perceived (known), we can, to that extent, be certain that it must be reflected in the reality of things. Either way, we can rest assured that the truths and falsehoods we discover in our ideas relate to reality rather than to chimerical reveries. Thus, for Locke, the question as to the objective reality of truth and

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falsity, particularly as concerns knowledge properly so called (intuitive and demonstrative), became the question, how far can we be certain that any of our ideas have external archetypes? To understand Locke’s response correctly, we need to remember that intuitive knowledge “is irresistible, . . . forces it self immediately to be perceived . . . and leaves no room for Hesitation, Doubt, or Examination” (ECHU IV/ii/§1), since their negations are impossible even to conceive (self-contradictory). Accordingly, if it is intuitively evident that an action is taking place, as is the case where our own thinking is concerned (ix/§3), we can, without fear of skeptical contradiction, apply the intuitively certain general principle according to which every action implies a power and efficacy sufficient to produce it, and this in turn a substantial constitution sufficient to support the power in question, to infer from the mind’s own action of thinking the existence of a substantial agent of the action, thereby establishing the existence of an archetype for our idea of this substance (chapter 7– B). Similarly, if we are intuitively certain that something has begun to exist, as is the case where the objects (ideas) of our thinking in sensation and reflexion are concerned, we can, again without fear of skeptical contradiction, apply the intuitively certain general principle that whatever begins to exist must have a cause, in order to affirm the existence of something distinct from our ideas as the cause of their existence. Since we are also intuitively certain that ideas, as Locke defined them, appear in every respect what they are and are everything they appear to be (chapter 5–B), the absence of any immediately perceptible causal connections or substantial dependence connecting them gives us intuitive knowledge that the cause and substantial support of the existence of any idea cannot be another idea. Taken together, therefore, these intuitive certainties imply that all our ideas have a nonideational substantial archetype.2 Consequently, Locke’s question as to the extraideational reality of the truths and falsehoods knowable by human understanding begins with the question whether any of our ideas have an archetype that is “external” not only to every idea in the mind but to the mind itself. One of the principal reasons the greatest part of Locke’s Essay was devoted to meticulously describing and delimiting the powers of human understanding is that he recognized that doing so is an essential prerequisite for being able to precisely formulate, and then solve, the problem of the extramental reality of the truths and falsehoods perceived by our understandings. For insofar as this examination can certify that the existence of an idea in us results from the exercise not of active faculties but passive capacities, we can be quite confident that idea relates to an archetype external to the mind, and so is able to confer a measure of reality on any propositional knowledge that involves (an abstract idea derived from) it. By this criterion, Locke straightaway excludes all ideas of modes, simple as well as mixed, as well all ideas of relation, for, in these, “the Ideas themselves are considered as the Archetypes, and Things no otherwise regarded, but as they are conformable to them” (ECHU IV/iv/§5). If something in reality matches any of the ideas “the Mind, by its free choice, puts together, without 2. Locke’s occasional use of “archetype” was perhaps inadvisable, since many of the ideas to which he accorded reality bear no resemblance to their external causes, e.g. ideas of secondary qualities such as whiteness or bitterness are in no sense ectypal: ECHU IV/iv§4.


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considering any connexion they have in nature,” then any knowledge we have regarding these ideas will ipso facto be true of it: we cannot but be infallibly certain, that all the Knowledge we attain concerning these Ideas is real, and reaches Things themselves. Because in all our Thoughts, Reasonings, and Discourses of this kind, we intend Things no farther, than as they are conformable to our Ideas. So that in these, we cannot miss of a certain undoubted reality. (iv/§5)

Mathematical knowledge of quantitative relations is a case in point: The Mathematician considers the Truth and Properties belonging to a Rectangle, or Circle, only as they are in Ideas in his own Mind. . . . But yet the knowledge he has of any Truths or Properties belonging to a Circle, or any other mathematical Figure, are nevertheless true and certain, even of real Things existing: because real Things are no farther concerned, nor intended to be meant by any such Propositions, than as they agree to those Archetypes in his Mind. Is it true of the Idea of a Triangle, that its three Angles are equal to two right ones? It is true also of a Triangle, where-ever it really exists. Whatever other figure exists, that it is not exactly answerable to that 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 farther 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 a real existence in Matter; his consideration being barely of those Figures, which are the same, where-ever, or however they exist. (iv/§6)

If ideas are immediately perceived to agree (or disagree) in respect of quantity, quality, or any other relation (aside from coexistence), then anything in reality, insofar as it conforms to these ideas themselves as its archetypes, is ipso facto subject to the same agreement (or disagreement) perceived in the ideas.3 Of course, because ideas of modes and relations are one and all our own contrivances, the truth and reality of our knowledge of them in no way depends on whether anything exists outside the mind in conformity with it, or even whether it is possible, in the natural course of things, for such things to exist. Consequently, there was never really any skeptical challenge here for Locke to defeat. Matters are different when it comes to the reality and truth of our knowledge regarding substances. Abstract general ideas of substances differ from those of modes and relations by virtue of “being referred to Archetypes without us,” which “may differ from them, and so our Knowledge about them, may come short of being real . . . by having more or different [simple] Ideas united in them, than are to be found united in the things themselves” (ECHU IV/iv/§11). Yet, this does not mean that these ideas find their archetype in anything akin to a Cartesian true and 3. For the same reasons reality and truth pertain to mathematical demonstrations, Locke holds out the prospect of a demonstrative science of morals: see ECHU IV/iv/§§7–10. For an excellent discussion, see Ayers, Locke II 58, 92, 187–8, and 294–5.

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immutable nature. Quite the contrary, it suffices merely that the collection of simple ideas united in an idea of substance be “taken from something that does or has existed,” instead of “put together at the pleasure of our Thoughts, without any real pattern they were taken from” (iv/§12). Accordingly, although our intuitive knowledge of substances is very limited (iii/§§9–17), such knowledge as there is counts as real if the ideas involved in it are copied from actually coexistent simple ideas: “Herein therefore is founded the reality of our Knowledge concerning Substances, that all our complex Ideas of them must be such, and such only, as are made up of such simple ones, as have been discovered to co-exist in Nature” (iv/§11). Because Locke deemed the existence of the I intuitively certain, he considered the reality of our knowledge concerning it to be beyond question. By contrast, he took the skeptical challenge to the reality of simple ideas of sensation quite seriously. Locke conceded that there is room for doubt whether these ideas resemble their causes, or that, even if they do (as he deemed probable in the case of ideas of primary qualities), whether the resemblance is only generic rather than a precise copy of the quality of the cause responsible for an idea. But since we can at least be certain that they result not from an active faculty but a passive capacity of the mind, Locke considered it beyond doubt that simple Ideas are not fictions of our Fancies, but the natural and regular productions of Things without us, really operating upon us; and so carry with them all the conformity which is intended; or which our state requires: For they represent to us Things under those appearances which they are fitted to produce in us. . . . Thus the Idea of Whiteness, or Bitterness, as it is in the Mind, exactly answering that Power which is in any Body to produce it there, has all the real conformity it can, or ought to have, with Things without us. And this conformity between our simple Ideas, and the existence of Things, is sufficient for Knowledge. (ECHU IV/iv§4; also II/xxx)

Needless to say, Locke’s account of the reality and truth of knowledge regarding simple ideas of sensation is perfectly consistent with his insistence that abstract ideas of substances are as many, various, and variable as the diverse experiences and convenience of different human beings prescribe. Indeed, in his eyes, this, more than anything else, vindicates his claim that “examining and judging of Ideas by themselves, their Names being quite laid aside, [is] the best and surest way to clear and distinct Knowledge” (ECHU IV/vi/§1). For the moment we fail to heed his warning to always “consider Ideas, and not confine our Thoughts to Names or Species supposed set out by Names,” we tend straightaway to fall into the trap of assuming “there were a certain number of these Essences, wherein all Things, as in Molds, were cast and formed” (iv/§13). As serviceable as names may be to the efficient sorting of things, they introduce an artificial fixity that we are all too apt to reify and “secretly refer” to the real constitutions and species of substances of which we are “incurably ignorant” (vi/§5). In the face of our incurable ignorance regarding the real essences of substances, no reply could be mounted to the objection Locke posed himself at the outset of IV/iv and the game is ceded to the skeptic. A response only becomes possible when we “accustom our selves to separate our Contemplations and Reasonings from Words” (iv/§17), and so confine our consideration of the reality of propositional thought to the references unique to


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ideas: their status as natural signs of the external substances whose action upon our senses is causally responsible for their presence to our consciousness (chapter 5– D-1). Only in these strictly confined terms did Locke feel warranted in according objective reality to the knowledge we attain through the comparison of (abstract ideas of) simples ideas of sensation: in respect of universality . . . our Knowledge follows the Nature of our Ideas. If the Ideas are abstract, whose agreement or disagreement we perceive, our Knowledge is universal. For what is known of such general Ideas, will be true of every particular thing, in whom that Essence, i.e. that abstract Idea is to be found: and what is once known of such Ideas, will be perpetually, and for ever true. So that as to all general Knowledge, we must search and find it only in our own Minds, and ’tis only the examining of our own Ideas, that furnisheth us with that. Truths belonging to Essences of Things, (that is, to abstract Ideas) are eternal, and are to be found out by the contemplation only of those Essences: as the Existence of Things is to be known only from Experience. (ECHU IV/iii/§31)

B. Locke’s Proof of an External World What if the external archetypes of our simple ideas of sensation and our ideas of substances—powers and their coexistence—exist only in our dreams: would this not undermine Locke’s proofs of the reality and truth of all knowledge involving these ideas? Did he have an effective response to the dream argument of Descartes’s First Meditation? The argument goes deeper than the absence of internal criteria by which to distinguish a waking state from the verisimilitude characteristic of the most vivid, internally and externally coherent dreams. Am I really pinching myself to establish whether I am only dreaming that I have lost my job or am I merely dreaming that I am proving that I am awake thereby? Am I really running cold water over my head to wake myself from this nightmare or am I merely dreaming that I am doing this? Nor have we exhausted the skeptical force of the dream argument when we generalize it to all former states of mind, with the implication that everything (or, at least, every complex idea) I now seem, or in the past seemed, to be “experiencing” has been fabricated by my imagination. Rather, its most powerful sting stems from the fact that, while dreaming, I may be completely unaware that my own imagination—an active faculty in me—is scripting the entire dream, and concocting the objects that play roles in it. And even if, as Descartes concedes in the First Meditation, the scope of the dream argument is limited by the dependence on the senses for simple ideas of sensation, there is still the possibility that there is some other faculty besides the imagination, “not yet fully known to me, which produces these ideas without any assistance from external things. . . . [T]his is, after all, just how I have always thought ideas are produced in me when I am dreaming” (Third Meditation AT VII 39).4 That is, even 4. Descartes limits the scope of the dream argument on the analogy of painters, who even “if they manage to think up something so new that nothing remotely similar has ever been seen before— something which is therefore completely fictitious and unreal—at least the colours used in the composition

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if the imagination can somehow be ruled out as source of my simple ideas of sensation, how can I secure the reality of my knowledge of the material world in the face of the possibility that I myself, unbeknownst to me, am the cause both of my simple ideas of sensation and of the constant conjunctions of such ideas by virtue of which I attribute their coexistence to their joint dependence on a single substantial substratum? Locke’s defense of his account of the reality and truth of our knowledge regarding simple ideas of sensation and ideas of external substances against Cartesian dream skepticism, as well as its Third Meditation radicalization, rests on the immunity to skeptical doubt conferred by what he termed “sensitive knowledge”: here, I think, we are provided with an Evidence, that puts us past doubting: For I ask any one, Whether he be not invincibly conscious to himself of a different Perception, when he looks on the Sun by day, and thinks on it by night; when he actually tastes Wormwood, or smells a rose, or only thinks on that Savour, or Odour? We plainly find the difference there is between any Idea revived in our Minds by our own Memory, and actually coming into our Minds by our Senses, as we do between any two distinct Ideas. (ECHU IV/ii/§14)

The idea of existence predicated in sensitively known propositions is a special abstract general idea of sensation, arrived at by leaving out of consideration everything that distinguishes one sensation from another qualitatively, and considering only that quality which distinguishes all sensations as such from memories and imaginings (including “the Visions of a Dream,” xi/§1). For Locke, sensation considered in this way is the source of an idea of a modality of existence that starkly contrasts with the modalities characteristic of memory and imagination. It is the immediately perceptible difference between an object that is present to us in sensation and that same object as present to us in thought when recollected or imagined; and it constitutes a modality of existence because it is the original source, and central core, of all the distinctions we make between the actual and the fictive, as well as the true and the merely hypothetical in respect to the external world. Accordingly, in predicating of the cause of sensation the idea of existence I derive from sensation and immediately perceiving their agreement, I thereby preclude the possibility that this cause is the creature of my imagination: the two ideas, that in this case are perceived to agree, and do thereby produce knowledge, are the idea of actual sensation (which is an action whereof I have a clear and distinct idea) and the idea of actual existence of something without me that causes that sensation. (CWS 360)

must be real” (First Meditation AT VII 20). Although he focused principally on simples of a highly general, intellectual character, he also seems to have believed that the imagination can only separate and recombine the simples of sensation given to it by the senses (equivalent to Locke’s simple ideas of sensation) and cannot preempt the function of the senses to provide these simples in the first place. This is confirmed by the text from the Third Meditation cited here, in which he finds in necessary to posit some additional unknown faculty that might provide us with simple ideas of sensation in a manner analogous to the undetectable, involuntary way in which our imaginations fabricate dreams.


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To be sure, this idea relates only to the simple ideas of sensations in me at the present instant (ECHU IV/xi/§9), and restricts sensitive knowledge accordingly. Nevertheless, in conjunction with the intuitive certainties that together imply that all our ideas have a nonideational substantial archetype (section A), sensitive knowledge is quite sufficient to secure the reality of our knowledge that our ideas of sensation have a substantial cause external to the mind against any possibility that I might merely be dreaming: If any one say, a Dream may do the same thing, and all these Ideas may be produced in us, without any external Objects, he may please to dream that I make his this Answer. . . . That I believe he will allow a very manifest difference between dreaming of being in the Fire, and being actually in it. (ii/§14)

The reality of the difference between the modality of existence specific to actual sensation of the fire and that characteristic of a remembered or imagined fire is as immediately evident and impossible to doubt as that between the modality of existence specific to the agony of being consumed in a fire and that same agony merely remembered or imagined. Did Locke also have a reply to Descartes’s Third Meditation radicalization of dream skepticism—the supposition that, if not imagination, then some faculty of the mind unknown to us may be the true cause of sensible qualities and/or the coexistence of sensible qualities with which our senses acquaint us? Although he never addressed the question in precisely these terms, he did argue as follows: ’Tis plain, those Perceptions are produced in us by exteriour Causes affecting our Senses: Because those that want the Organs of any Sense, never have the Ideas belonging to that Sense produced in their Minds. This is too evident to be doubted: and therefore we cannot but be assured, that they come in by the Organs of that Sense, and no other way. The Organs themselves, ’tis plain, do not produce them: for then the Eyes of a Man in the dark, would produce Colours, and his Nose smell Roses in the Winter: but we see no body gets the relish of a Pine-apple, till he goes to the Indies, where it is, and tastes it. (ECHU IV/xi/§4)

The problem with this argument, if viewed from the standpoint of a reply to Descartes, is that it offers only probable grounds for the thesis that external causes are responsible for ideas of sensations, when an adequate reply would have to carry intuitive weight. There is, however, a way to remedy this deficiency fully in keeping with Locke’s positions. It begins with the recognition that if some unknown faculty is all the mind depends on in order to see light and colors, hear sounds, feel tactual qualities, etc., the raison d’être of sense capacities is lost; for the only basis for attributing sense capacities to the mind in the first place is the presumed inability of any of the mind’s reflexive faculties to produce simple ideas of sensation. The unavoidable implication of the supposition that an unknown reflexive faculty is responsible for sensations is that all the powers of the mind are reflexive faculties, and all its ideas—including those hitherto known as “sensations”—are ideas of reflexion. But then the question arises how these acts of

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reflexion can have been occurring in us unawares all our conscious lives. If sight were a faculty creative of sensations of light and color, touch of solidity, hearing of sounds, et al, there could be no other action in which these powers could express themselves (be exercised) than thinking. But in that case, how could we fail to perceive these creative cogitative acts in ideas of reflexion? The intuitive certainty both Descartes and Locke ascribed to self-consciousness precludes the possibility of being ignorant that we are thinking whenever we in fact are. Thinking can never exist without our perceiving it, nor can we ever be deceived into believing that no thinking is taking place when in fact it is. Accordingly, if sensations really did issue from some faculty of the mind, its very first exercise would inevitably make its existence known. This is not to say that we could not be deceived into believing ideas the expression of a passive capacity when they in fact issue from active faculty: a species of error Locke was not only ready to admit but affirmed in the case of visual depth perception (chapter 6). But the challenge of the Third Meditation is not whether we can be mistaken about the true nature of a known power of the mind but whether there might be some unknown power being continuously exercised to produce sensations. Since Locke would surely have denied the possibility of something so manifestly in conflict with the intuitive certainty of the cogito, it should thus be clear why he saw no way to parse the doubt raised in the Third Meditation except in terms of some known faculty of the mind. With the shift from the unknown to the known powers of the mind, Locke was no longer obliged to reply in kind to the supposedly intuitively evident metaphysical theological considerations Descartes employed in his refutation of the radicalized dream doubt in Meditations Three through Six. Instead, sensitive knowledge suffices to do the job. For while such knowledge may be lacking in the case of such complex ideas as three-dimensional simple modes of space, it leaves no room for any doubt concerning the sensory (non-reflexive) provenance of simple ideas of sensation like yellow, the sound of an oboe, the taste of fudge, or the smell of sulphur. In addition, there are “other concurrent Reasons” to ensure that “we are farther confirmed in this assurance” (ECHU IV/xi/§3). In this and succeeding paragraphs (§§4–5), matters are put to a straightforward empirical test: is there any evidence that the understanding has the power to produce sensations or is it merely passive in their regard? Or is there evidence that the senses themselves are active faculties rather than passive capacities? Since everything we know about our faculties and capacities informs us that the answer to both questions is no, Locke was confident that he had grounds sufficient to secure the reality of sensitive knowledge against the challenge posed by dream skepticism. Yet, even if we concede Locke’s claim to have shown that we have sensitive “Knowledge of the Existence of other Things” (title of ECHU IV/xi), we may still ask whether the reality of such knowledge is sufficient to prove that these other things are material beings. For it is one thing to know that we are not the cause of sensations, quite another to know the essence of that which is. Is it knowable, or merely probable, that the cause of our sensations and their coexistence is material and not immaterial or of some third nature entirely unknown to us? The evidence suggests that the materiality of this cause is only probable. For if all we can know of these substances with intuitive evidence is their powers to cause ideas of sensa-


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tion in us, while “knowing not what real Constitution it is of Substances, whereon our simple Ideas depend, and which really is the cause of the strict union of some of them one with another, and the exclusion of others” (iv/§12), knowledge whether that constitution is material or something else would seem clearly to be beyond us. Admittedly, Locke sometimes speaks as if sensitive knowledge informs us “concerning the Existence of material Beings” (xi/§3). But this has to be weighed against the fact that he elsewhere made it clear that we cannot know with intuitive evidence whether all, some, or none of our ideas of sensation resemble their causes outside the mind. Proving that those relevant to the conception of corporeal nature are ideas of primary qualities required Locke to set aside his initial resolve not to “meddle with the Physical Consideration of the Mind” (I/i/§2) and embark upon a “little Excursion into Natural Philosophy” (II/viii/§22). Since he assigned natural philosophy (the physical sciences) to the domain of probable judgment (IV/xii/§10), we therefore seem safe in concluding that the reality and truth of sensitive knowledge extends only so far as “the existence of other Things,” but not to their materiality.5 Nevertheless, countering the challenge of Descartes’s dream skepticism was all Locke required of sensitive knowledge in order to secure the reality of eternal truths on sensibilist-subjectivist grounds alone: Many of these [general, intuitively certain Propositions] are called æternæ veritates, and all of them indeed are so; not from being written all or any of them in the Minds of all Men, or that they were any of them Propositions in any ones Mind, till he, having got the abstract Ideas, joyn’d or separated them by affirmation or negation. But wheresoever we can suppose such a creature as Man is, endowed with such faculties, and thereby furnished with such Ideas, as we have, we must 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. Such Propositions are therefore called Eternal Truths, not because they are Eternal Propositions actually formed, and antecedent to the Understanding, that at any time makes them; nor because they are imprinted on the Mind from any patterns, that are any where of them out of the Mind, and existed before: But because being once made, about abstract Ideas, so as to be true, they will, whenever they can be supposed to be made again at any time past or to come, by a Mind having those Ideas, always actually be true. For Names being supposed to stand perpetually for the same Ideas; and the same Ideas having immutably the same Habitudes one to another, Propositions, concerning any abstract Ideas, that are once true, must needs be eternal Verities. (ECHU IV/xi/§14)

By insisting always on resolving words into ideas, Locke sacrificed not only the literally eternal propositions posited by intellectualists but also the relative perma5. See also Ayers, Locke I, 62: “It is just because all our simple ideas are acquired in senseexperience that they point beyond themselves. On this official causal theory, or so it seems, what is given in sensation is the existence and coexistence of powers of things to affect our senses, but nothing else about those things, not even that they are disposed in space.” Locke credits us with “a general inclination to believe of all sensory effects that their external causes resemble them,” but, “as Locke presented it,” it “is an overwhelmingly convincing hypothesis posterior to sensitive knowledge, rather than something given or known at the moment of sense-perception.”

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nence of the verities that form the bedrock of vernacular language. In their place, he set mental propositions that, at first sight, seem the very antithesis of eternal truths, since they are, quite literally, contingent on which ideas an individual isolated understanding possesses, which of these it happens to form into abstract ideas, and, of these, which it happens to combine into a proposition so that it becomes possible to perceive the “eternal” truth of their agreement or disagreement (“the Perception that the same Ideas will eternally have the same Habitudes and Relations,” IV/i/§9). The sacrifice was justified, in Locke’s view, by the gain: a conception of knowledge in terms solely of ideas and their perceived agreement (or disagreement), notwithstanding their empirical origin in sensation or reflexion. In this way, we attain a species of certainty that owes nothing to our social or metaphysical natures but belongs instead to human understanding in a state of nature (chapter 4–D). Moreover, the price at which these advantages seems to be purchased—the emphemeralness of mental propositional knowledge—turns out, in his view, to be only nominal: “Since the Mind, in all its Thoughts and Reasonings, hath no other immediate Object but its own Ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident, that our Knowledge is only conversant about them” (IV/ i/§1). C. Setting Normative Epistemology to One Side: The Vitality of Early Modern Skepticism To the extent one identifies early modern theories of ideas with theories of linguistic discourse, one cannot but wonder why philosophers of the period were so resistant to direct realism and why Cartesian-type skepticism struck them as so formidable a challenge. For if ideas and mental propositions are bearers of semantic properties, the same semantic transparency exhibited by language—the “invisibility” of ideas, the mental acts performed on them, brain states underlying conscious life, and everything else in the physical realm that interposes itself between symbolic thought and its intended objects (chapter 8)—must extend to the reference of abstract ideas as well, with the consequence that the mental propositions composed of them derive their representational content in the same way verbal propositions do: directly, and exclusively, from their intended, publicly accessible objects. Of course, quite apart from the vagueness of the notion and its questionable utility for linguistics, psychology, and other ways of investigating human capacities for symbolic representation, semantic transparency exhibits an ontological promiscuity abhorrent to philosophers: expressions like ‘the Philosopher’s Stone,’ ‘Beelzebub,’ and ‘karma,’ as well as sentences that formulate falsehoods, impossibilities, or absurdities like “Explorers set out yesterday in search of the fabled valley surrounded by lakes instead of mountains” are no less semantically transparent than ‘earth,’ ‘Old Hickory,’ ‘Malaga,’ “The only U.S. President from New Hampshire was a one-termer,” and “The atomic number of gold is 79.” For this reason, many philosophers, convinced that ontology is a proper part of semantics, theorize that language incorporates devices—implicit criteria and rules— that serve to impose ontological discipline directly on meaning and reference


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(verificationism, truth-conditional semantics, etc.). Since most of these philosophers are at heart empiricists, they tend not only to cite empirical factors in their own semantic theorizing but also to interpret empiricists of the past as sharing, or at least groping toward, similar devices to meet similar needs. And because Locke is so commonly viewed through a semanticist lens as the exponent of a systematic isomorphism between thought and language, no great empiricist of the past is more frequently invoked in this connection than he. The finest example, in both senses of the term, is probably Michael Ayers, and it will be worth our while to conclude our examination of Locke by scrutinizing what Ayers believes are the principal lessons philosophers today have to learn from early modern philosophy generally and from Locke in particular. According to Ayers, direct realism is the view that in sense perception we are presented, pretheoretically and preconceptually, with the real, physical, independent structure of the world, and our own (of course, physical) place in it. A given feature of this perceived structure is our own status, and that of many other perceived objects, as materially discrete and unitary bodies. These are the primitive individuals of natural language. Our core ‘scheme of concepts’ comes into being as it were shaped around, or incorporating, this preconceptually experienced physical structure, which includes the distinction between ourselves and other things. . . . In contrast, ‘direct realism’ in its currently popular form is a cosmetic exercise, the unnecessary deployment of a paradoxically relational conception of mentality. Realism tout court, I would suggest, should be the view that reality structures experience and so thought. We are that closely in touch with it. The supposed problem of comparing ‘conceptual scheme’ with reality does not arise, but for nothing like the usually given, fundamentally idealist reasons.6

From this heady combination of semantic transparency with direct realism and empiricism, Ayers derives an important normative-epistemological consequence: If we are to offer argument against scepticism of the senses, it had better be not, as Descartes’ is, a first-order argument for the existence of sensible objects, but a second-order argument for the conclusion that what we ordinarily take to be knowledge of sensible objects is indeed knowledge, independently of any argument of ours. Perceptual belief is immediate and uninferred, and perceptual knowledge, if we have it, must be the same. . . . The subject simply accepts what the senses deliver, and the senses deliver an environment, surrounding objects in

6. “What Is Realism?” In Supplement to the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, V. 75 (July 2001). Elsewhere, Ayers maintains that “perceptual knowledge . . . derives from a perspicuous cognitive relation to reality itself, the relation itself being a part of the reality presented.” Such claims seem to me to verge on a category mistake, by affirming that material objects and their causal relations count as belief-justifying reasons right in perception itself, apart from any anticipatory reference to the logicolinguistic framework in which alone these contents are able to function as justifying grounds. Indeed, so little does this framework seem to matter that Ayers extends the normative epistemological value he attributes to human sense perception to animals: see his review-essay, “Comments on Perception and Reason by Bill Brewer,” in Philosophical Books, vol. 75, no. 1 (July 2011).

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LOCKE’S NEW MODEL PHILOSOPHY space, from the subject’s spatio-causal point of view. That that is how the world is presented in sense experience is why we not only know what surrounds us, but, in knowing that, we know how we know it. . . . Like the deliverances of rational insight or ‘intuition,’ the deliverances of the senses have an intrinsic authority. . . . What sensibly appears to us to be so, we so far have a right to believe to be so. Accordingly, what we perceive as being so, we normally know to be so. Good reason to suppose that appearances may be deceptive can arise in particular situations, but normally the best way to respond decisively to such grounded doubt is to re-employ our senses in relation to that situation and its circumstances: for example, by looking more carefully. Less direct ways of meeting the doubt may be necessary, but equally presuppose the authority of the senses. Such a specific, sweeping sceptical hypothesis as the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis, precisely in being tailor-made to pre-empt all such checks, also excludes all possibility of reason to take it seriously. Of its very nature, it is far-fetched and groundless. . . . For Descartes, on the other hand, the pretensions of the senses to deliver knowledge are quickly disposed of by the dreaming hypothesis.7

Ayers views Cartesian skepticism as a challenge aimed directly at the beliefjustifying, knowledge-conferring status of sense perception, and thus as a frontal assault upon its normative-epistemological authority. Locke, too, insofar as he attempted to answer Descartes with his doctrine of sensitive knowledge, failed to grasp that “Perceptual knowledge needs no such general confirmation. In the context of epistemology, it simply needs to be understood as knowledge.”8 But was the normative-epistemological authority of such knowledge the true target of Cartesian skepticism? Was the point of early modern responses to it, including those of Locke and Descartes, to confirm, establish, or fortify that authority? Or is the case comparable to Kant’s defense of Hume against his common-sense-philosophy critics: far from taking it into his head to question that the object of his inquiry is normatively correct, serviceable, and in respect of the whole of our cognition indispensable, he concerned himself solely with the nature and source of that authority?9 Neither Descartes nor Locke doubted for a moment that we are subject to the authority of the senses, and that even if it were in our power to free ourselves from it (which it is not), we could not, in our present human state, find any other to take its place. What they did doubt, however, is that this authority in any way depends on, or derives from, the world, and our place in it, at least as direct realists like Ayers portray it. Let us recall our discussion of Locke’s solution to the Molyneux problem in chapter 6 and the “synthetic” conception of experience that emerges from it. How can any argument we might make by saying—while holding up a hand in the spirit of G.E. Moore—“here is a hand, and there is no well-grounded reason you can offer that could make me doubt of it” preclude the very real possibility, bound up with the way thought enters into the constitution of human sense experience, that 7. Cited from “How Should We Respond to the Cartesian sceptic?” paper read at a philosophy department conference on perception held at the Humboldt University in Berlin, October 4, 2001. 8. Ayers, “Cartesian Sceptic.” 9. See citation from PFM 258–9 in chapter 2–B.


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the objects of our experience are species-specific constructions, perhaps unique to ourselves and to some other creatures who share our terrestrial evolutionary lineage? It is by no means far-fetched to suppose that, in the vast expanses of our own or other galaxies, a wide variety of sensory-cognitive systems can be found, some perhaps so radically different in the ways they carve up sensory continua into units and combine these units that the resulting phenomenology of objective experience is utterly incommensurate with our own. Under local conditions, some of these systems may even confer a Darwinian selective advantage on a given population of creatures as great, or greater still, than our own sensory-cognitive systems do in our environment. Who indeed is to say that a close coincidence with mindindependent reality ipso facto confers a selective advantage? or that, under terrestrial conditions, a selective advantage might not have been achieved despite their failing to coincide? Certainly, it need not be the case, nor is it even possible, given the myriad sensory-cognitive systems possible in the physical universe, that all the disparate phenomenologies of experience that have, or could have, arisen are equally reliable guides to the constitution of objects as they really, mind-independently, are. Consequently, to the extent that some or all of the objects our human experience delivers up are contingent on the rules (“grammar”) according to which human brains carve up and then combine the data of sense perception, we have to budget for the possibility that the features of the world as humans experience it may not coincide, closely or at all, with the world as it is independently of our sensory-cognitive systems. More to the point: is there any epistemological reason not to budget for this? Evocations of creatures with different faculties of sense and intellection than terrestrial versions are often derided as science fiction. Yet, the danger of being too ready to discount the significance of the knowledge we lack in favor of that we have seems to me far greater, if only because doing so comes so naturally to us, and there is seldom if ever a price to pay if we are wrong. The risk becomes especially great when direct realists insist on taking at face value the phenomenology of experience, notwithstanding creditable scenarios which suggest that the phenomenon in question may, like hearing speech or seeing a familiar face, be an amalgam of thought and preattentive sense perception, and consequently admit of no existence outside the human imagination. This is what gives the presence of the modifier ‘human’ in the title of Locke’s magnum opus an importance equal with that of ‘understanding’: insofar as thought, operating in accordance with a set of rules that might very well be specific to creatures in our evolutionary lineage, may plausibly be supposed to be as integral to the constitution of the world of our experience as the senses themselves, the possibility has to be taken seriously that the objects met with in the world are not strangers, introduced to human understanding by the senses, but, in some measure at least, its own productions being reflected back at it. Such speculations might perhaps be dismissed less readily were we to regard them in the way Hume asked us to consider his analysis of the general causal maxim (THN I/iii/§3): not as skeptical theses intended to impugn the reliability of something we have no choice anyway but to trust in all our thought and action, but instead as pointers toward a better, more rounded understanding of the nature of

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the phenomenon in question, inclusive of the implicit trust we place in it, with skepticism confined to certain specifically philosophical abuses of this trust. For then we may see that neither the implicit cognitive and conative confidence humans cannot help but place in the phenomenology of sense experience, nor the abundant rewards that trust regularly and dependably returns, are in any way challenged or compromised by early modern theorists of ideas and their endeavors to reckon with Cartesian skepticism. The normative-epistemological authority of the senses—“What sensibly appears to us to be so, we so far have a right to believe to be so”—was, for them, something to be understood and explained in the light of a theory of human understanding: a comprehensive survey of its natural powers, with the temptation to exaggerate them tempered by a sober refusal to mistake such features as the transparency of language for conceptual and/or cognitive amplifications of these natural powers (chapter 4–C and 8–D). If the theory indicates that this authority is not absolute but conditioned by the special constitution of human and human-type minds, this outcome is perfectly consistent with, and potentially even supportive of, the view that any attempt at a generalized doubt of the deliverances of the senses—when they are functioning normally, in accordance with their in-built specifications—is not merely farfetched but incoherent, and no more merits serious consideration inside than outside the philosophical arena. For what could be more pointless than contending against a norm one cannot help presupposing in every thought and action? All varieties of ratiocination presuppose the norms of inferential justification, skeptical no less than any other kind. They cannot be challenged from within, any more than skepticism can give me reason to suppose that sanity might really be insanity, or health be really a diseased state. For in this context the “abnormal” presupposes a standard of normality, and must always be assessed in relation to it.10 This no doubt is why Descartes dismissed the madness doubt (First Meditation AT VII 19) as blithely as he did the possibility that sensory illusion might be universal (18): where “illusion” and “insanity” are defined in relation to standards of optimal sensing conditions and mental health, there can be no generalized doubt. Even dream skepticism, insofar as it does not completely annul the distinction between sensation and fantasy,11 did not, in Descartes’s view, fully and finally succeed in bringing the external world into question. This result could only be achieved by the evil deceiver doubt, according to which the normal, healthy deliverances of the mind are postulated to conform to a human nature (including our thinking no less than our sensory constitution) that, owing to some cause (“fate or chance or a continuous chain of events, or by some other means,” First Meditation AT VII 21), is out of sync, perhaps radically and incorrigibly, with the way things 10. This is not to say that norms are not open to challenge from outside. For an excellent discussion of the checkered history of the concept of “normality” and how it has always been and is likely to continue to be open to challenge, see Ian Hacking The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Locke might have sympathized: since, for him, health and sanity, as mixed modes, have no external archetype, the only standards which may be supposed to govern our ideas of them are rules of propriety. 11. This seems to be (part of) the import of the painter analogy at AT VII 23 of the First Meditation: see note 4 above.


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(existences, eternal truths) mind-independently are. The early modern tradition of a generalized skepticism with regard to the senses inaugurated by Descartes should therefore always be viewed in the light of doubts arising from the human-natural constitution of sense experience—particularly the role therein of rule-governed thought, first emphasized by Locke (chapter 6–D)—and never in relation to the normative criteria—be they in-built, rooted in our forms of life, or socially grounded—that prescribe which particular beliefs and doubts are to count as “wellgrounded,” “ill-grounded,” “far-fetched,” or “incoherent.”12 Ayers is therefore arguing without a major early modern era antagonist when he avers that “sceptical hypotheses are not to be (cannot sanely be) taken seriously outside the philosopher’s study.”13 The issue is rather whether the varieties of philosophical skepticism early moderns from Descartes to Kant took seriously brought them into conflict with the norms of sense-perceptual belief justification. For while it remains true, just as on the standard anglophone reading of Locke, that his account of language and its relation to thought was endorsed by Berkeley, Hume, and Kant essentially unchanged, it has precisely the opposite implication, as interpreted in chapter 8, from that normally ascribed to it. For if we recognize that the shift from the verbal to the mental has the effect of stripping our thought of all identifiably semantic properties, including transparency, then it becomes not only possible but easy to keep sensibilist theory of human understanding from coming into conflict with human cognitive norms and practices. Neither then has any stake in or authority over the other. The one can perfectly well leave the other to take care of itself. And there can be no temptation to impose on the semantics of natural language the epistemological and ontological discipline that limits the objects of human understanding to a flux of sensations and reflexions—the skeptical strawman that continues even today to elicit defenses of common sense.

12. Ayers again, in my view, mistakes the target of early modern skeptical arguments, when he writes: “G E Moore’s appeal to the fact that he knows that the hand he sees in front of his face exists is often taken to be . . . question-begging, bare assertion in the face of argument. Yet, the positions of both Locke and Moore are more complex than that, and in any case, an empiricist might ask, what else is there to appeal to than the senses themselves, and the absurdity of a general doubt about their deliverances? The empiricist view in question is that perceptual knowledge is in some sense foundational, and the bare existence of the sceptical argument is hardly enough to refute that” (see reference in note 4). 13. See reference in note 4.


PART II

Berkeley’s Modest Proposal A World of Ideas I must be very particular in explaining what is meant by things existing in Houses, chambers, fields, caves etc when not perceiv’d as well as when perceiv’d. & shew how the Vulgar notion agrees with mine when we narrowly inspect into the meaning & definition of the word Existence which is no simple idea distinct from perceiving & being perceiv’d . . . ’tis on the Discovering of the nature & meaning & import of Existence that I chiefly insist . . . Let it not be said that I take away Existence. I onely declare the meaning of the Word so far as I can comprehend it. Berkeley, Philosophical Commentaries 408, 491, 593

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BERKELEY’S MODEST PROPOSAL

George Berkeley was the first philosopher of greatness to concur in Locke’s diagnosis that “we began at the wrong end” by “letting loose our Thoughts into the vast Ocean of Being, as if all that boundless Extent, were the natural, and undoubted Possession of our Understandings” (ECHU I/i/§7). For Berkeley, as for Locke, misunderstandings rooted in language are primarily at fault, and the most pressing task of the philosopher is “to clear the first principles of knowledge, from the embarras and delusion of words” (PHK intr. §25) so as to obtain a clear view of the ideas he would consider, separating from them all that dress and encumbrance of words which so much contribute to blind the judgment and divide the attention. In vain do we extend our view into the heavens, and pry into the entrails of the earth, in vain do we consult the writings of learned men, and trace the dark footsteps of antiquity; we need only draw the curtain of words, to behold the fairest tree of knowledge, whose fruit is excellent, and within the reach of our hand. (§24)

The complete and accurate survey of all that goes on in the minds of users of language was Berkeley’s philosophical starting point. If only this could be achieved, deception in any matter that turns on a correct understanding of the first principles of human knowledge, whether in metaphysics, physics, mathematics, ethics, or natural theology, would forthwith cease to be possible: so long as I confine my thoughts to my own ideas divested of words, I do not see how I can easily be mistaken. The objects I consider, I clearly and adequately know. I cannot be deceived in thinking I have an idea which I have not. It is not possible for me to imagine, that any of my own ideas are alike or unlike, that are not truly so. To discern the agreements or disagreements there are between my ideas, to see what ideas are included in any compound idea, and what not, there is nothing more requisite, than an attentive perception of what passes in my own understanding. (PHK intr. §22)

We can know everything there is to know about the three fundamental powers of the understanding (the same three, not incidentally, distinguished by Locke at ECHU II/xxi/§5): (i) the perception of whichever ideas are present to the mind, (ii) the perception of whichever ideas our words may (or may not) signify, and (iii) the perception of whichever agreements and disagreements between ideas are immediately present to the mind. With this knowledge, it becomes easy to cast aside the “false principles” that place “the fault originally in our faculties, and not rather in the wrong use we make of them,” in favor of true principles for their correct employment—principles that offer us complete assurance that nothing we can conceive of knowing by them lies “out of their reach . . . if rightly made use of” (PHK intr. §23). Yet Berkeley was keenly aware, more so even than Locke, of the extreme difficulty involved in dispelling the “mist and darkness” that language “has cast over the understandings of men, otherwise the most rational clear-sighted” (PHK draft-intr. 380). The same words employed in different contexts may say very different things: “a word pronounced with certain circumstances, or in a certain

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context with other words, hath not always the same import and signification that it hath when pronounced in some other circumstances or different context of words” (V §73). Frequently, instead of exciting ideas in our minds, words have precisely the opposite effect: a little attention will discover, that it is not necessary (even in the strictest reasonings) significant names which stand for ideas should, every time they are used, excite in the understanding the ideas they are made to stand for: in reading and discoursing, names being for the most part used as letters are in algebra, in which though a particular quantity be marked by each letter, yet to proceed right it is not requisite that in every step each letter suggest to your thoughts, that particular quantity it was appointed to stand for. (PHK intr. §19)

And, in general, so many and various are the uses of language that the relation of signs to ideas is often indirect or inconsequential: Thus much, upon the whole, may be said of all signs: that they do not always suggest ideas signified to the mind: that when they suggest ideas, they are not general abstract ideas: that they have other uses besides barely standing for and exhibiting ideas, such as raising proper emotions, producing certain dispositions or habits of mind, and directing our actions in pursuit of that happiness, which is the ultimate end and design, the primary spring and motive, that sets rational agents at work: that signs may imply or suggest the relations of things; which relations, habitudes or proportions, as they cannot be by us understood but by the help of signs, so being thereby expressed and confuted, they direct and enable us to act with regard to things: that the true end of speech, reason, science, faith, assent, in all its different degrees, is not merely, or principally, or always, the imparting or acquiring of ideas, but rather something of an active operative nature, tending to a conceived good; which may sometimes be obtained, not only although the ideas marked are not offered to the mind, but even although there should be no possibility of offering or exhibiting any such idea to the mind: for instance, the algebraic mark, which denotes the root of a negative square, hath its use in logistic operations, although it be impossible to form an idea of any such quantity. . . . And it must be confessed that even the mathematical sciences themselves, which above all others are reckoned the most clear and certain, if they are considered, not as instruments to direct our practice, but as speculations to employ our curiosity, will be found to fall short in many instances of those clear and distinct ideas. (MP 7 §14)1

Clearly, the endeavor to take ideas “bare and naked into my view” (PHK intr. §21) must overcome resistance from the habits of a lifetime of intermingling 1. This conception was in place from the start. In the 1708 draft of the Introduction to the Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley wrote: “a man may understand what is said to him without having a clear and determinate idea annexed to and marked by every particular word in the discourse he hears. Nay, he may perfectly understand it. For what is it, I pray, to understand perfectly, but only to understand all that is meant by the person that speaks? which very oft is nothing more than barely to excite in his mind certain emotions without any thought of those ideas so much talk’d of and so little understood. For the truth whereof I appeal to every one’s experience” (378; see also PHK intr. §§ 19–20).

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words with ideas, shifting continually back and forth between them, to such an extent that we hardly know how to do otherwise: the attainment of all these advantages doth presuppose an entire deliverance from the deception of words, which I dare hardly promise my self; so difficult a thing it is to dissolve an union so early begun, and confirmed by so long a habit as that betwixt words and ideas. (intr. §23; also V §159)

Nevertheless, in Berkeley’s view, successfully circumventing the obstacles set in our path by language is not only possible but necessary if philosophers are to discover the true principles of human knowledge. Consequently, the proper place to begin the consideration of Berkeley’s theory of the understanding is his endeavor to extricate ideas from the embrace of language so as to neutralize its deleterious influence. Since the separability principle is key to this endeavor, it will be the focus of chapter 10. Chapter 11 is consecrated to the first and most important application of the separability principle, as well as the foremost instance of psychologistic explication in Berkeley: “what is meant by the term exist when applied to sensible things” (PHK I §3). In chapter 12, I will turn to Berkeley’s systematic application of his protopsychologistic method to the end of dismantling the entire edifice of objective understanding erected by mechanists such as Descartes, Locke, and Newton. Finally, after examining his account of the mind and its substantial relation to its ideas in chapter 13, I will focus on Berkeley’s transformation of Locke’s synthetic conception of the third visual dimension into a thoroughgoing psychologistic explication of sense-divide transcending objects of experience and their place in the universal order of nature.

10 Berkeley’s Separability Principle: Semantics, Psychology, and Ontology

Berkeley devoted the Introduction to the Principles of Human Knowledge (PHK) to a critique of the doctrine of abstract general ideas. He singled Locke out for special attention not because he viewed him as more culpable than other abstractionist philosophers, but, quite the contrary, because he saw the role of abstract ideas in Locke’s philosophy as a last vestige of traditional metaphysics without which Locke might himself have transformed sensibilist theory of understanding in the manner Berkeley was left to do (C 567, 678, and 811). By discarding this remnant, Berkeley believed he could achieve what Locke professed to do (ECHU IV/vi/§1) but never quite did (PHK intr.-draft 381–2): free ideas from their verbal accouterments and behold them entirely “bare and naked.” When these are cast off, the first thing to go are material substances, which prove to be incompatible with the nature of everything present to us in sensation. The same fate befalls Locke’s notion of ideas of diverse senses and his distinction between ideas of primary and secondary qualities. Although causality, by contrast, retains objective validity, its scope is restricted to the actions and passions of minds, so that it cannot be known or understood independently of “a certain internal consciousness” (DM §21). Likewise, temporal ideas, which Locke traced to an origin in the reflexive perception of the successive actions of our minds (chapter 5-B), now find their sphere of application demarcated by their origin (“A succession of ideas I take to constitute Time, and not to be only the sensible measure thereof, as Mr. Locke and others think,” letter to Johnson, 24 March 1730). All these changes can be summed up by the term “idealism”; and all depend on the rejection of abstract general ideas in the Introduction to the Principles. Appreciating this, however, confronts Berkeley’s interpreter with a dilemma. Berkeley’s critique of Locke, as I shall show in the first section of this chapter, depends on a reading so selective and unrepresentative as to amount to little more than caricature. Admittedly, Locke could be so prolix and obscure that it is possible to find indications of almost any position and its contrary in the Essay. But one who would demonstrate the existence of a fundamental cleavage between his own thought and Locke’s is under an obligation to focus particularly on those texts in 247

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which the divergence is least pronounced, or even undetectable. After all, there is a distinct possibility that Locke may have included them not merely to articulate important facets of his view but also in order to stave off precisely the kind of misreading to which he may have recognized other passages to be liable. For whatever reasons, Berkeley chose to ignore, or overlooked, the texts in which Locke’s views verge most closely on his own. His interpreter does not, however, have this luxury. He or she must reckon with the fact that, when everything Locke says on the topic of abstract general ideas is taken into account, it emerges that, instead of the huge, obvious divergence Berkeley described, we find essentially the same view, with only nuances and details to distinguish them. We are therefore obliged to address a question Berkeley himself never quite succeeded in doing: what precisely is the basis on which he effected the transformation of Locke’s doctrines into his own? Is anything in the Introduction to the Principles capable of effecting so profound a transformation? It turns out that there is: the separability principle of PHK intr. §10. There is no more fundamental principle in the Principles of Human Knowledge, or in the rest of Berkeley’s œuvre, and it is unquestionably his principal philosophical bequest to Hume and, subtly adapted, to Kant. Yet, because Berkeley deemed the difference between his position and Locke’s so much more vast and obvious than it really is, he neglected to undertake the sustained, carefully detailed analysis of the separability principle necessary to clarify and secure his point of departure. As a result, the relation of the rest of his œuvre to the Introduction of the Principles is skewed to such an extent that even the most skilled and careful interpreters are often thrown off the scent. The dilemma facing one who would attempt to rectify matters is therefore this: to do so greatly increases the risks of perverting Berkeley’s thought into something it was not; yet failing to do so runs an even greater risk of allowing its most distinctive and influential feature to recede into obscurity. Since the brief of this work obliges me to place extra weight on that in Berkeley’s thought which most powerfully impacted the subsequent development of sensibilist theories of understanding, the choice is easily made. In this and succeeding chapters, Berkeley’s skewed presentation will be realigned so that pride of place is given to the separability principle. Moreover, as will emerge in due course, the risk of perverting his thought by this procedure turns out to be minimal. For whenever Berkeley exposes a doctrine in Locke, in other philosophers, in Newtonian science, or in any other domain as an instance of the insidious doctrine of abstract ideas, it is almost always clear, sometimes explicitly so, that his reasoning turns on applications of the separability principle. A. Berkeley’s False Start Berkeley’s misrepresentation of Locke’s doctrine of abstract ideas stems from deficiencies in his initial characterizations of it. Abstract ideas enable the mind to “consider . . . singly” features that, in existence, are inseparably united. For example, though it is impossible “for colour or motion to exist without extension” in a visible image, Berkeley’s Locke holds “that the mind can frame to it self by

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abstraction the idea of colour exclusive of extension, and of motion exclusive of both colour and extension” (PHK intr. §7). Or, alternatively, by “leaving out” the differences in what it finds resembling, the mind “considers apart or singles out by it self that which is common.” In this way, Berkeley’s Locke supposes that we are able to form a most abstract idea of extension, which is neither line, surface, nor solid, nor has any figure or magnitude but is an idea entirely prescinded from all these. So likewise the mind by leaving out of the particular colours perceived by sense, that which distinguishes them one from another, and retaining that only which is common to all, makes an idea of colour in abstract which is neither red, nor blue, nor white, nor any other determinate colour. (§8)

Berkeley’s last example is particularly revealing in view of the real Locke’s assertion that “there is nothing can be left out of the Idea of White and Red, to make them agree in one common appearance,” so that ‘color,’ far from signifying an abstract idea of the kind Berkeley describes, is nothing but “a Word, which denotes only the way they get into the Mind” (ECHU III/iv/§16). Berkeley evidently overlooked this illustration of Locke’s view that because “simple Ideas, and their Names, . . . have but few Ascents in linea prædicamentali . . . from the lowest Species, to the summum Genus,” we are completely dependent on words to attain the more general views on which our most cognitively parturient propositional thought depends. Thus, Berkeley’s failure to recognize that Locke limited abstract ideas to elements that agree in sensible appearance, and traced the rest to irreducibly linguistic abstractive considerations (chapter 8-A), undercuts his claim that Locke supposed that we cannot form general concepts of color, extension, or humanity (PHK intr. §9) except by means of abstract ideas in which “numberless inconsistencies” are “tacked together” (§14). Berkeley’s characterizations of Lockean abstract ideas in PHK intr. §§ 7–9 point to a still more fundamental misapprehension. While Locke does indeed employ such locutions as “consider singly,” “single out by it self,” and “leave out,” Berkeley supposed this to mean that “a general abstract idea . . . prescinds from the species or individuals comprehended under it” (F §45): ideas of extension without color, color without extension, or motion without extension and color; of a human who has neither male nor female characteristics; of an animal that is neither naked nor covered with hair, feathers, or scales; of a body without any particular shape or figure; and so on. In other words, Berkeley seems to have thought that there is only one way Lockean “leaving out” can be construed: the literal excision of contents from ideas of sensation or their images in thought so that what results is not possible as a concrete, sensible image at all (that is, not a possible object of imagination, in the sense that everything imaginable is ipso facto capable of being given in sensation as well). However, there is, as I have shown, another way of construing Locke: instead of leaving contents out of the idea itself, we leave out certain of its contents from our consideration of the idea, so that forming an abstract idea simply means limiting our consideration of a concrete individual thing (in sensation or thought) to certain features of it, to the exclusion of others—

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abstraction as selective attention. For example, if I form in my mind a concrete, particular image of my father, I can use it to form the abstract idea of a man by leaving out of my consideration of it—without in any way altering the image itself—all the features in it which distinguish him from James, David, Thomas, and other men. Using the same image I started with, I can produce the idea of a human being by leaving out of my consideration of the image everything that differentiates my father from Wanda, Hortense, Abigail, and other women, again without compromising the concrete particularity of my image in the least. And this process can be continued in relation to Rex the Wonder Horse (animal), the fern on the sill (complex living being), the pendulum clock (complex being), and so on, without my ever being obliged to extract so much as a hair on the head from my image of my father in order to make it abstract.1 Or, alternatively, I can attend solely to the color of my father’s skin and ignore everything else about his physiognomy, and then use it to denote all things of the same pinkish pallor indifferently, regardless of whether they bear the least resemblance to my father, or to men, humans, animals, living things, or corporeal things in general. To determine whether the latter conception of abstract general ideas differs in any significant regard from Berkeley’s own, let us turn back from Locke to Berkeley and examine how he explained universals. According to Berkeley, universality, so far as I can comprehend, not consisting in the absolute, positive nature or conception of any thing, but in the relation it bears to the particulars signified or represented by it: by virtue whereof it is that things, names or notions, being in their own nature particular, are rendered universal. (PHK intr. §15; also §§ 126–8)

For example, “Considering length without breadth is considering any length be the Breadth what it will” (C 722). The line in idea, whether in sensation or imagination, is completely determinate and individual. In considering it universally, we do not alter the idea itself in any way, we merely put it to use as a sign. Henceforth I shall use the term indifferent denotation to designate the account of general representation propounded by Berkeley: an idea, which considered in itself is particular, becomes general, by being made to represent or stand for all other particular ideas of the same sort. To make this 1. For a discussion of this way of construing Locke and additional references, see Ken Winkler, Berkeley: An Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 40. The debate continues to the present, although, surprisingly, the passages in ECHU that I shall discuss here, and that figured prominently in chapter 8, are almost never considered. Jonathan Dancy, introduction to George Berkeley: A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 36, rejects the thesis that Locke embraced selective attention, but this is probably due to Locke’s ambiguous terminology: as we saw in chapter 8, when Locke speaks of “leaving out” certain features of an idea he means that we should leave them out not of the idea but of our consideration of the idea; however, he also saw fit to designate each new consideration of an idea an idea in its own right. The textual evidence (including ECHU III/iii/§11, which I will examine shortly) is quite clear: for Locke, the contents present to us in thought are never in themselves abstract or general; only the mind’s consideration of them allows of being described as abstractive.


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plain by an example, suppose a geometrician is demonstrating the method, of cutting a line in two equal parts. He draws, for instance, a black line of an inch in length, this which in it self is a particular line is nevertheless with regard to its signification general, since as it is there used, it represents all particular lines whatsoever; for what is demonstrated of it, is demonstrated of all lines or, in other words, of a line in general. And as that particular line becomes general, by being made a sign, so the name line which taken absolutely is particular, by being a sign is made general. And as the former owes its generality, not to its being the sign of an abstract or general line, but of all particular right lines that may possibly exist, so the latter must be thought to derive its generality from the same cause, namely, the various particular lines which it indifferently denotes. (PHK intr. §12)

The same line, present to us as an idea in sensation or imagination, may have innumerable denotations, corresponding to what we call ‘line,’ ‘inch,’ ‘black,’ ‘length,’ and so on. In each of these significative uses, it indifferently represents all possible ideas that agree with the denotation, without regard to the differences between them qua sensations or images. Thus, an idea, “in itself particular,” becomes general because of the significative use to which it is put, without itself changing (losing any of its concrete individuality) in any way. How then did Berkeley explain what the mind does when it singles out one of the many possible significative uses (indifferent denotations) of which any given idea admits? Here is where the interpretive predicament described at the beginning of this chapter starts to become acute. For the answer Berkeley offers seems indistinguishable from the second way of construing Lockean “leaving out” described earlier: though the idea I have in view whilst I make the demonstration be, for instance, that of an isosceles rectangular triangle whose sides are of a determine length, I may nevertheless be certain it extends to all other rectilinear triangles, of what sort or bigness soever. And that because neither the right angle, nor the equality, nor determinate length of the sides are at all concerned in the demonstration. It is true the diagram I have in view includes all these particulars; but then there is not the least mention of them in the proof of the proposition. It is not said the three angles are equal to two right ones, because one of them is a right angle, or because the sides comprehending it are of the same length. Which sufficiently shews that the right angle might have been oblique, and the sides unequal, and for all that the demonstration have held good. And for this reason it is that I conclude that to be true of any obliquangular or scalenon which I had demonstrated of a particular right-angled equicrural triangle, and not because I demonstrated of a particular right-angled equicrural triangle, and not because I demonstrated the proposition of the abstract idea of a triangle. And here it must be acknowledged that a man may consider a figure merely as triangular; without attending to the particular qualities of the angles, or relations of the sides. So far he may abstract. But this will never prove that he can frame an abstract general inconsistent idea of a triangle. In like manner we may consider Peter so far forth as man, or so far forth as animal, without framing the forementioned abstract idea, either of man or of animal; inasmuch as all that is perceived is not considered. (PHK intr. §16)

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The figure I employ in a demonstration relating to all triangles is inevitably equilateral, isosceles, or scalene, of a definite size, with angles of definite inclination, etc. How do I single out this indifferent denotation (triangles in general) from among all the others I could have used this same figure to signify? I do it by considering only those features of the figure pertinent to this denotation, without attending to all the other features— features that, if I considered the figure with a different denotation in mind, I might need to take into consideration. Thus, for Berkeley, the difference between one denotation and another seems to be entirely an affair of selective attention. Yet is this not precisely the view Locke expounded twenty years earlier? So it seems: Words are general . . . when used for Signs of general Ideas; and so are applicable indifferently to many particular Things. And Ideas are general, when they are set up, as the representatives of many particular Things: but universality 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 Generals 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 many particulars. For the signification they have, is nothing but a relation, that by the mind of Man is added to them. (ECHU III/iii/§11)

Just as Berkeley held that “a word becomes general by being made the sign, not of an abstract general idea but, of several particular ideas, any one of which it indifferently suggests to the mind” (PHK intr. §11), so did Locke assert that words become “applicable indifferently to many particular Things” when used as signs for ideas “which are all of them particular in their Existence.” Just as for Berkeley, ideas, which are “in themselves particular,” become general by virtue of “the relation [each] bears to the particulars signified or represented by it,” so too, for Locke, ideas are not general in themselves but only by virtue of the significative use “they are put into by the Understanding,” so that generality is “nothing but a relation, that by the mind of Man is added to them.”2 Surely, if Berkeley were correct in thinking his view diametrically opposed to Locke’s in the way he claimed, we should not expect to encounter a passage like this in Locke. Prolix Locke may be; difficult sometimes to pin down; but, up to this point, there is no daylight between Berkeley’s conception of universality and his: Every Man’s Reasoning and Knowledge, is only about the Ideas existing in his own Mind, which are truly, every one of them, particular Existences. . . . Univer2. For Locke, as Dancy notes, “each abstract idea is of course in itself particular; its generality lies not so much in its nature as in the use to which we put it, which is to stand indifferently for any or all objects of the same sort” (Introduction, 26). However, he is mistaken, in my view, to ascribe to Locke the view that “General ideas must be formed by abstraction to serve this purpose;” for, as the case of ‘color’ demonstrates, a good many general ideas are inseparably bound up with general terms, since our powers of abstraction are too feeble to produce abstract ideas to underwrite them. This leads Dancy to overestimate the importance of qualitative resemblance for Locke in order to contrast him with Berkeley: see note 13 below.


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sality is but accidental to [knowledge], and consists only in this, That the particular Ideas, about which it is, are such, as more than one particular Thing can correspond with, and be represented by. (ECHU IV/xvii/§8).

There is, however, one text that has convinced many of the essential correctness of Berkeley’s reading of Locke (not surprisingly, it is the only text Berkeley cited and discussed at any length). In it, Locke tells us that general Ideas are Fictions and Contrivances of the Mind, that carry difficulty with them, and do not so easily offer themselves, as we are apt to imagine. For example, Does it not require some pains and skill to form the general Idea of a Triangle, (which is yet none of the most abstract, comprehensive, and difficult,) for it must be neither Oblique, nor Rectangle, neither Equilateral, Equicrural, nor Scalenon; but all and none of these at once. In effect, it is something imperfect, that cannot exist; an Idea where in several different and inconsistent Ideas are put together. (ECHU IV/vii/§9)

However, by this point, we should know better than to take Berkeley’s word for it. Instead, let us examine this text in relation to its context and see for ourselves if Locke was indeed affirming the mind’s capacity to form “the general idea of a triangle, which is, neither oblique, nor rectangle, equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once” (PHK intr. §13). The text comes from the chapter on general knowledge of maxims and axioms in the Fourth Book of the Essay. In the passage in question, Locke’s concern was not with the nature of abstract ideas and how the mind forms them, but to show that general maxims and axioms (the most general truths of all) “are not the truths the first known” (title of ECHU IV/vii/§9). His line of argument is expressly characterized as a recapitulation of the anti-innatist reasoning in I/ii; and the particular passage cited by Berkeley is an elaboration of the claim that “particular Ideas are first received and distinguished, and so Knowledge got about them: and next to them, the less general, or specifick, which are next to particular.” Since Locke saw no need, when making his point in I/ii, to anticipate the details of his account of the nature (III/iii/§11) and formation (II/xi/§9) of abstract general ideas, here too he seems to have seen no need to rehearse them. However, that does not excuse us, Locke’s readers, from the obligation to recall those details: not only his explicit insistence that “universality 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,” but also the extremely limited range of abstract ideation signaled by Locked claim that “simple Ideas, and their Names, . . . have but few Ascents in linea prædicamentali . . . from the lowest Species, to the summum Genus.” For this means that the mind has nothing left to consider after it has abstracted from everything common to red and white, or yellow and orange, or blue and green, and has no option but to signal what all have in common by a word (‘color’), whose sense is secured not by an abstract idea but by an extraneous consideration having nothing to do with the sensible quality (appearance) of the simple ideas it signifies (namely, that all are intromitted by the eye). Since, according to Locke, every complex idea incorporates simple ideas, and most do at a level

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of generality where we depend on familiarity with irreducibly linguistic general notions such as color, sound, quality, etc., it stands to reason that the more general the notion is the more language-bound and dependent on considerations extraneous to the qualities of ideas it is, with the consequence that it is very unlikely to be among the earliest generalizations we arrive at as children. To be sure, just as in ECHU I/ii, IV/vii/§9 does not expressly mention the fact that simple ideas and their names have few ascents in linea prædicamentali in connection with this consequence. But would any interpreter insist on restricting their scope to all and only what is explicitly stated in this or any passage? If so, I cannot agree: Locke’s philosophy is a system, the universal principles of which tacitly govern any argument or thesis to which they are relevant even if they are not expressly invoked. Even a philosopher as prolix as Locke cannot be expected to lay out every detail of every argument; and, since I/ii shows that he did not believe mention of the doctrines elaborated in subsequent books of ECHU necessary to make his point, why should we be surprised by their absence in IV/vii/§9? The only reason they need to be mentioned now is that Locke evidently did not foresee that certain readers might use this text to hang an absurd thesis about abstract ideas around his neck notwithstanding his express rejection of it in III/iii/ §11 and IV/xvii/§8. If we apply these considerations to the example of the triangle given in ECHU IV/vii/§9, what do we find? The general views that come most easily, naturally, and so too earliest to our minds are those that involve the least divergence from the particular views of ordinary, everyday sense experience. A child has no difficulty imagining her father with his hair parted on the other side, her house painted a different shade of yellow, or her aunt buying her a present she loves. Even if none of these things is the case in reality, they are sufficiently similar to the ways the child is accustomed to considering her world as not to unduly tax her imagination. Things become more difficult, however, when one is asked to consider things in ways that go against the grain of habit: recognizing upside-down faces, reading sentences backward, singing a familiar tune in inverted form, etc. Yet even such considerations as these are at least of a kind that correspond to objects that might actually be experienced in the ways one is charged to consider them. But what if one is asked to consider things in such a way that if any object did correspond to them, it would be “something imperfect, that cannot exist”: would doing so not present a far greater challenge? This question, it seems to me, captures the thrust of Locke’s point in IV/vii/§9: the appropriate way of considering the figures we draw with straight edge and compass in geometry class demands diligent application, long practice, and extensive reliance on the kind of general views language alone makes possible. Since ideational abstraction cannot even get us to the notion of ‘color,’ it certainly also cannot suffice for us to abstract from the color of the ink in any drawing of a triangle, and so cannot furnish us with the idea either of a colorless triangle or of a triangle that is all colors at once (similarly, if performed on a tactual image, it cannot yield the idea of a triangle that is neither soft nor hard, or one that is both at once). It may succeed in leaving out any visible wobbles in the lines of the drawing so that we consider them to be perfectly straight; but can we leave out the width of the lines altogether, beyond the mini-


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mum width necessary to see or feel lines at all? Clearly, if indeed a Lockean general idea of a triangle is, as Berkeley would have it, “neither oblique, nor rectangle, equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once,” then this would have to be in spite of, not by means of, any of the ideational powers Locke saw fit to ascribe to the understanding, and has rather to do with its power to signify a variety of particulars indifferently.3 For, in ECHU IV/vii/§9, Locke seems merely to be describing, in his own inimitable fashion (“an Idea where in several different and inconsistent Ideas are put together”), the same power of indifferent denotation Berkeley characterized with his wonted clarity and brevity. As a sensibilist, Locke’s explication of any idea inevitably began from concrete imagery, which is then considered in various ways, where each new consideration “is a new Idea” (ECHU II/xiv/§14). So, in explaining how we come to form an abstract idea of a triangle, he naturally delineated the long and torturous route we have to traverse in order to apprehend it, and in particular what we have to abstract from (whether semantically or ideationally being left unspecified in IV/vii/§9) before we can attain a view of sufficient generality to grasp the idea of a triangle employed in geometry. It is a difficult road because, either implicitly or explicitly, terms of greater generality require us to collect together under a common name simple ideas and simple modes that have no sensible quality in common after every quality in which they differ has been left out. Although we cannot be sure how Locke would handle individual cases, I think it highly probable that the criterion he employed is precisely the one Berkeley used but mistakenly took Locke to reject: imaginability. Just as we cannot form an image of the common quality of color that remains after everything qualitative that distinguishes red from yellow has been excluded, so too we cannot form any image of what remains after everything differentiating the inclinations of sides and angles of scalene, isosceles, and equilateral triangles has been excluded. Instead, we content ourselves with extraneous features that nevertheless serve the purpose because they are common to all and only the things we are concerned to group together: in the first case, the common feature of being intromitted by the eye, in the second, that of enclosing a space by means of three straight lines. Both alike are rules fully independent of the appearances of the objects concerned in them. The first com3. According to Ken Winker, in his discussion of ECHU IV/vii/§9 Berkeley “knows that Locke does not mean that the general idea of a triangle is both equilateral and not, just as he knows that no one who describes the general idea of colour means to say that it is both red and blue. But the opportunity to take advantage of Locke is irresistible” (Berkeley, 50). He bases this on his own interpretation of Berkeley’s theory of ideas in terms of the act/object semantics of intentionality theory, and cites F §§ 45–8 to show that Berkeley recognized that Lockean abstract general ideas conform to a “none of the above” rather than an “all at once” (inconsistent qualities) pattern. While acknowledging that Berkeley says of Locke’s abstract triangle that it “must be all and none of these at once” (oblique, rectangular, equilateral, scalene, etc.), Winkler asserts that “Berkeley does not take Locke’s ‘but all and none of these at once’ literally” (51–2) on the ground that in his discussion of color a couple of paragraphs later he does not make the same statement. I do not find this convincing. It seems to me that a properly nuanced reading of Locke that takes into account all the relevant passages shows that neither the ‘all’ nor the ‘none’ apply to Lockean abstract ideas, but a view very similar to Berkeley’s in its insistence that all ideas are concrete and individual.

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bines everything that is red, yellow, white, green, blue, purple, orange, brown, and black indifferently, so that the rule may be said to signify all and none of them at once; the second combines everything that is scalene, isosceles, and equilateral indifferently, so that this rule may be said to signify all and none of them at once. This, I believe, is all that is going on IV/vii/§9, even if Locke’s language lends itself to bizarre constructions. Once we understand this, and so realize that he did not have in mind a uniform, exclusively ideational process of abstractive consideration, we can see that the point of IV/vii/§9 is quite simple and, from an empiricist standpoint such as Berkeley’s, utterly uncontroversial. If, as empiricists maintain (indeed sensibilists generally), we are born with ideational capacities and faculties, but without any actual ideas (tabula rasa), then we have no choice but to submit ourselves to the painstaking process of mastering the many generalizing techniques wherein the role of language is indispensable, before we can hope to attain the viewpoints requisite to form highly general, abstract notions of the kind employed in geometry. But if, as innatists maintain, not just the powers to form these notions but these notions themselves are part of the natural endowment of our minds, we should expect to find little children employing them earliest and most easily of all. Since experience shows that the least general, most immediately imagistic views are mastered far earlier and more easily than the most general, abstract ones, Locke took this to vindicate the expectations of empiricists. Not, as Berkeley maintained, because it shows that children have more difficulty forming impossible chimeras in their minds than their elders but simply because the most general views involve a significant semantic component founded on a variety of considerations extraneous to the appearances of things, and so can be mastered only after extensive training and effort.4 The remainder of Berkeley’s critique of Locke’s position does not bear scrutiny any better. Locke was just as keenly aware as Berkeley (PHK intr. §19) that “not every one, nor perhaps any one. . . . is so careful of his Language, as to use no Word, till he views in his Mind the precise determined Idea, which he resolves to make it the sign of” (ECHU Epistle), and that it is common practice to reason in words instead of ideas whenever it is easier or more efficient to do so (III/xi/§25, IV/v/§4, vii/§15, and viii/§7). Nor did he neglect the fact that, in addition to standing for ideas, words derive significance from common acceptation, so that discourse and reasoning are possible on the basis of rules of propriety alone, without determinate ideas, or even any ideas at all (chapter 8-A). Although Locke may be thought to differ from Berkeley in his belief that precision requires that we shift from verbal to mental propositions, it is highly improbable that Locke meant to extend this censure from philosophical disputes to proceedings in the exact sciences, where signs and their employment are subject to the most rigorous standards of clarity and consistency. Moreover, while Berkeley, for his part, was ready to concede that mathematical sciences can proceed quite satisfactorily by means of 4. Locke’s conception of higher generality as involving diverse, sophisticated forms of abstraction in which language is indispensable thus comes very close to the view Berkeley articulated so much more clearly and effectively in such passages as PHK intr. §19 and MP 6 §14 (both cited in the introduction to this part).


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signs alone, he also believed that issues of fundamental principle in the sciences turn on facts about the nature and proper employment of the human understanding, and so require us to ferret out the ideas that underwrite our notation schemes (DM §§ 7, 23, 38–41, and 54; A §§ 32–3 and 36–7; F §§ 20 and 48; MP 7 §13; and C 337, 354a, 421–2, 537 and 540). To this extent, then, the seeming divergence of Locke from Berkeley may boil down to nothing more than Locke’s lack of concision and differences of emphasis. And the same may well be true of the final point Berkeley made against Locke, that “the communicating of ideas marked by words is not the chief and only end of language” (PHK intr. §20; also draft-intr. 375–8), since Locke, at the very least, had no great philosophical stake in things being otherwise (chapter 9-C).

B. The Separability Principle: The Cardinal Tenet of Berkeley’s Theory of Ideas In chapters 2 and 3 I considered a case of two philosophers who shared the same question and the same method of answering it but, through a slight shift at the foundations by the later one, ended up with philosophies that oppose one another across virtually the entire spectrum. The “slight shift” in question was Kant’s extension of sensibility to include pure intuition: this, as I shall argue in volume two sufficed to effect a complete transformation of the philosophical scene left in the wake of Hume’s strictly empiricist psychologism. Now, we find ourselves confronted with a similar case. For having recognized, as Berkeley himself did not, that he and Locke shared the same notion of universality—that words are general when made to stand for general ideas, and that ideas, though all without exception particular, become general insofar as they are used to denote other particular ideas indifferently—there can be no question that we are again dealing with a slight shift at the foundations with implications sufficiently profound quite literally to transform Locke’s theory of human understanding into Berkeley’s. The question is: what was the change Berkeley wrought? The answer is the separability principle described here: Whether others have this wonderful faculty of abstracting their ideas, they best can tell: for my self I find indeed I have a faculty of imagining, or representing to my self the ideas of those particular things I have perceived and of variously compounding and dividing them. I can imagine a man with two heads or the upper parts of a man joined to the body of a horse. I can consider the hand, the eye, the nose, each by itself abstracted or separated from the rest of the body. But then whatever hand or eye I imagine, it must have some particular shape and colour. Likewise the idea of man that I frame to my self, must be either of a white, or a black, or a tawny, a straight, or a crooked, a tall, or a low, or a middle-sized man. . . . To be plain, I own my self able to abstract in one sense, as when I consider some particular parts or qualities separated from others, with which though they are united in some object, yet, it is possible they may really exist without them. But I deny that I can abstract one from another, or conceive separately, those qualities which it is impossible should exist so separated. (PHK intr. §10)

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Berkeley frames the separability principle in terms of “the discerning faculty,” imagination. Imagination can separate ideas to the extent that real differences can be discerned between them. By what criterion can we fix the bounds of its powers of discernment? Obviously, not the physical impossibility that things should exist so separated: the faculty that can join the upper part of a man to the body of a horse is certainly not constrained by mammalian biology; aerodynamics do not prevent it from conjuring up flying horses; and physics does not prevent it from transporting itself to distant stars in the blink of an eye. The limits of imagination coincide instead with the scope of possible sense perception: “nothing enters the imagination which from the nature of the thing cannot be perceived by sense, since indeed the imagination is nothing else than the faculty which represents sensible things either actually existing or at least possible” (DM §5). Berkeley’s criterion for determining the scope of possible sense perception is whatever could still appear to us even if every trace of past experience, education, and reasoning were obliterated: “those things alone are actually and strictly perceived by any sense, which would have been perceived, in case that same sense had then been first conferred on us” (1D204). Thus, Berkeley’s separability principle is the thesis that the human imagination is only able to conceive “separately such objects, as it is possible may . . . be actually perceived asunder,” but “does not extend beyond the possibility of . . . perception” (PHK I §5). We have seen that the difference between using an idea in one indifferent denotation as distinct from others consists in selective attention: if my idea is a triangle, I can attend to the inclination of its sides and the size of its angles and so use it to signify all and only scalene triangles; or I can leave these features out of consideration and use it to signify all and only triangles, but indifferently to whether they are scalene, isosceles, or equilateral; or I can leave out the fact that it encloses a space by means of three straight lines and use it to signify all and only polygons; or I can leave out the straightness of the lines and use it signify all and only figures that enclose a two-dimensional area; or leave out its two-dimensionality and use it to signify all and only figures that enclose an area of any dimensionality; or leave out its serving to enclose an area and use it to signify all and only figures of every kind; and so on. For Berkeley, selective attention is unobjectionable so long as the items differentiated in it are distinct by the criterion of the separability principle. But Locke went well beyond this, supposing that such things as the visible shape of the triangle and its particular light and color (chromatic illumination) are distinct ideas, each the object of its own separate act of abstractive consideration (chapter 5-B). This distinction of course fails the separability principle test since it is impossible (ideationally, not merely physically) to see this shape in the absence of the light and color, or to see this light and color in the absence of the shape. The distinction between the timbre and pitch of a tone likewise fails the test because it is impossible to hear timbreless pitches or pitchless timbres; as does the distinction of a line from its length, a motion from its swiftness or its swiftness from its acceleration, a color from its particular hue, the heat of a skillet one touches from the pain, etc. Features we ascribe to ideas that fail the separability principle test may be termed aspects of these ideas, and the corresponding mental faculty, affirmed by Locke but denied by Berkeley, aspect discrimination: the


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capacity to selectively attend to an image in such a way as to immediately discriminate features in it (aspects) that cannot be perceived in the absence of one another (“distinctions of reason,” as early moderns often termed them). For Berkeley, distinctions of aspects are not distinctions of ideas at all because nothing can pertain to our ideas that fails to meet the criterion of the separability principle. Aspects are completely illusory, a misapprehension of what in fact are merely distinct denotations (significative uses) of one and the same idea: Qu. is it not impossible there should be General ideas? All ideas come from without, they are all particular. The mind, tis true, can consider one thing without another, but then consider’d asunder they make not 2 ideas. both together can make but one as for instance Colour & Visible extension. (C 318)

In denying that there is any common quality that can be immediately discriminated in red and yellow for the word ‘color’ to signify, Locke at the same time affirmed that there is such a quality in the case of, say, scarlet and burgundy for ‘red’ to signify (ECHU III/iv/§16). For Berkeley, however, this too is just an illusion. Just as there is no special capacity of aspect discrimination, there is none that allows us to attend to the common aspects of ideas either. There are only the individually distinct hues themselves, with nothing objectively in them to account for our grouping them under the same term. Of course, the utility of so doing is obvious; and since we tend to think of them as forming a spectrum from light to dark, we are also apt to choose hues falling roughly in the middle as the “best” paradigms of this concept. But if we have any inclination to consider this paradigm, or anything else pertaining to the appearance of these hues, as “common” to them all, Berkeley’s separability principle immediately intervenes to prevent us. We find these hues to resemble one another but not the hues we group under ‘yellow,’ ‘orange,’ ‘blue,’ etc., not because we are endowed with a faculty that enables us to immediately discriminate some common quality in the former that is lacking in the latter, but simply because, upon comparison, we find them to resemble one another but not any of the others. And here we arrive at the crux of the divergence between a philosopher who, like Locke, affirms and a philosopher who, like Berkeley, denies aspect discrimination. For the former, resemblances are sometimes a function of the aspects we immediately discriminate in an idea, prior to and independently of comparisons to other ideas, and which might in principle have been evident to us from the moment we first became acquainted with the idea. For the latter, aspects are merely a shadow cast on ideas by signification, and resemblance is a strictly relational affair—a function entirely of the comparison of ideas distinct from one another according to the criterion of the separability principle. So, even though Berkeley’s account of generality per se is for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from Locke’s, they diverged radically in their conception of the capacity whereby the mind abstracts its ideas from circumstances of real existence such as time, place, and concomitant ideas, preliminary to employing them as universals to denote other (equally particular) ideas indifferently. It thus becomes clear that Berkeley, thanks to his separability principle, was in the end correct to distinguish his view

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of universality from those of Locke and every other previous philosopher5 in terms of an absolute, unqualified rejection of abstract ideas (“words become general by being made to stand indiscriminately for all particular ideas which from a mutual resemblance belong to the same kind, without the intervention of any abstract general idea,” MP 7 §7).6 C. Beyond Language: Ideas Divested of Words For Berkeley, the distinction between an idea “considered in itself” (PHK intr. §12)—the “absolute, positive . . . conception of a thing” (intr. §15)—and its significative uses is absolutely fundamental: the same idea can have many such uses, each of which requires us to consider it in a different (resemblance) relation. Whereas for Locke, a new significative use is ipso facto a new idea, involving its own distinctive considerative procedure of selective attention, for Berkeley it is not a new idea, merely a new signifying relation in which an existing idea is placed, and aspect discrimination does not come into it at all. What Locke thought of as different types of ideas, some specific to one sense, others common to diverse senses—for example, “Sight, . . . conveying to our Minds the Ideas of Light and Colours, which are peculiar only to that Sense, and also the far different Ideas of 5. In the draft version of the Introduction to the Principles that has come down to us, Berkeley seems to limit the term ‘abstract idea’ to Locke, reserving ‘universal nature’ for the even more defective views that preceded Locke’s critique of essentialism (“if a man may be allow’d to know his own meaning, I do declare that in my thoughts the word animal is neither suppos’d to stand for an universal nature nor yet for an abstract idea, which to me is at least as absurd and incomprehensible as the other,” 374). This, however, does not mean that abstraction in Locke’s sense (aspect discrimination) was not also accorded a place in Rationalists’ accounts of how we become aware of universal natures. Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole are a case in point: “Because of the limited scope of our minds, we are unable to understand perfectly even things which are only slightly composite unless we can consider these things part by part or with respect to their different aspects. Knowing things in such a fashion is often called knowing by abstraction. . . . It is easy to see how we can consider one integral part of a thing without considering any other of its integral parts. But knowing a thing by a consideration of its integral parts is not what is commonly meant by abstraction. ¶ We now see how unfounded is the argument of those skeptics who wish to cast doubt on the certitude of geometry by claiming that geometry assumes the existence of lines and surfaces, neither of which is found in nature. For geometers do not suppose that there are lines without width or surfaces without depth; geometers suppose only that we can consider length without paying attention to breadth. We certainly do this when we measure the distance form one city to another; we report only the length of the road, not its breadth. ¶ The more aspects under which we consider a thing, the better we know that thing” (I-ch 5, pp. 48–50, The Art of Thinking. PortRoyal Logic, tr. by James Dickoff, Patricia James, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), vol. 7, chap. 5, pp. 48–50. Winkler appears to overlook this when he says that only empiricist doctrine “includes a belief in abstraction from experience, the proponents of [rationalist doctrine] preferring instead to make abstract ideas innate (Descartes) or to place them in the mind of God (Malebranche, Norris)” (Berkeley, 69). The abstractive consideration of sensible imagery described here is the same view Locke espoused; he would have disputed only the move from psychology to the intellectualist claim that mathematical and other forms of instructive knowledge depend in any way on the clear and distinct perception in pure intellect of ideas that exist prior to and independently of their presence to perception in sensation or reflexion: see chapter 15-A. 6. We should not, however, equate “separable” with attentively discernible differences: see chapter 14, note 2.


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Space, Figure, and Motion” (ECHU II/ix/§9)— Berkeley treated merely as an instance of “the embarrass and delusion of words”: we can no more argue a visible and tangible square to be of the same species from their being called by the same name, than we can that a tangible square and the monosyllable consisting of six letters whereby it is marked are of the same species because they are both called by the same name . . . The extension, figures, and motions perceived by sight are specifically distinct from the ideas of touch called by the same names, nor is there any such thing as one idea or kind of idea common to both senses. (V §§ 140 and 127)

The greatest threat posed by language to the philosophy of human understanding is that it reflects differences between denotations exceedingly well, while being almost entirely insensitive to differences between ideas: Strictly speaking . . . we do not see the same object that we feel. . . . But in case every variation was thought sufficient to constitute a new kind or individual, the endless number or confusion of names would render language impracticable. Therefore to avoid this as well as other inconveniences which are obvious upon a little thought, men combine together several ideas, apprehended by divers senses . . . but observed however to have some connection in nature, either with respect to co-existence or succession; all which they refer to one name, and consider as one thing. (3D245)

The reasons we assign the same words to certain visual and tactual denotations have nothing to do with the qualitative identity and distinctness of the ideas on which these denotations depend, and everything to do with the most ordinary, down-to-earth human purposes (“language being accommodated to the prænotions of men and use of life, it is difficult to express therein the precise truth of things, which is so distant from their use, and so contrary to our prænotions,” VV §35; also PHK I §52). Though there is a great deal more to Berkeley’s explanation of the common terminology of vision and touch (chapter 14-E), the basic point is clear: identity or diversity of terms is never, in and of itself, evidence of the identity or diversity of the ideas they signify. Though Locke went some way towards this realization (chapter 8-B), his conception of generality as founded on (if not entirely explicable by) abstractive considerations, with the implication that each new such consideration is a new idea, prevented him from attaining the escape velocity requisite to break free of the powerful force of the habitual “union . . . betwixt words and ideas,” and so effect “an entire deliverance from the deception of words” (PHK intr. §23). By contrast, it should now be clear not only that Berkeley meant it when he declared “I confine my thoughts to my own ideas divested of words” (PHK Intro. §22) but also how he proposed to do so: by assiduously employing the separability principle so as to avoid confounding significative with ideational distinctions. Mathematics is a case in point: I acknowledge . . . that it is not difficult to form general propositions and reasonings about those qualities [extension and motion], without mentioning any

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BERKELEY’S MODEST PROPOSAL other; and in this sense to consider or treat of them abstractedly. But how does it follow that because I can pronounce the word motion by itself, I can form the idea of it in my mind exclusive of body? Or because theorems may be made of extension and figures, without any mention of great or small, or any other sensible mode or quality; that therefore it is possible such an abstract idea of extension, without any particular size or figure, or sensible quality, should be distinctly formed, and apprehended by the mind? Mathematicians treat of quantity, without regarding what other sensible qualities it is attended with, as being altogether indifferent to their demonstrations. But when laying aside the words, they contemplate the bare ideas, I believe you will find, they are not the pure abstracted ideas of extension. (1D193)

Among other things, this means that great caution is in order if we are not to underestimate the vastness and depth of the chasm that separates Berkeleyan treatment of ideas and their significations from debates originating in the twentieth century about the need to take into account, and (if so) how best to paraphrase, ordinary perceptual judgments in the analysis of empirical knowledge. While no bounds can be set to the appropriation of philosophers of the past in the context of present debates, the same is not true of their interpretation, and we must be careful not to lose sight of the difference if our concern is to understand Berkeley, the historical personage. For him, more so even than Locke, language and ideation march to the beat of very different drummers, and the chances of learning about the one from the other (unlike those of being misled) are, for all philosophical intents and purposes, nil. This is not to say that recent philosophical debates would be illegitimate in Berkeley’s eyes but only that they concern very different issues, arising in a context fundamentally alien to his sensibilist theory of understanding. So, regardless of the deeply ingrained aversion to philosophical psychology that prevails in philosophy today, Berkeley’s interpreter needs to resist the urge to refuse, or to forget, to follow him in drawing “the curtain of words” by applying the separability principle to systematically distinguish ideas from their significative uses, and never losing sight of the fact that, in his view, language marches to the beat of the latter, not the former. Not all commentators have seen fit to take Berkeley at his word. Anthony Grayling, for example, insists that “one cannot in practice dispense with words; his recommendation to himself and others to do so is not, except as an ideal, a recommendation to wordless thought so much as a warning against being misled.”7 In evidence, he offers Berkeley’s concession that “I dare hardly promise myself . . . an entire deliverance from the deception of words” (PHK intr. §23). Yet the sequel makes clear that Berkeley regarded philosophy as an exception to the general rule—the one discipline in which it is both possible and necessary to divest ourselves of words. This emerges with especial clarity in the only draft of the Introduction to the Principles that has come down to us. Shortly after the remark just cited from the published version of §23, he wrote: it is no wonder that men should fatigue themselves in vain, and find it a very difficult undertaking, when they endeavour’d to obtain a clear and naked view of 7. Berkeley: The Central Arguments (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1986, 43).


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ideas marked by those words, which in truth mark none at all. . . . This seems to me the principal cause why those men that have so emphatically recommended to others the laying aside the use of words in their meditations, and contemplating their bare ideas, have yet been so little able to perform it themselves. . . . Which having been shewn to be mistakes, a man may now, with much greater ease, deliver himself from the imposture of words. He that knows he hath no other than particular ideas, will not puzzle himself in vain to find out and conceive the abstract idea annexed to any name. And he that knows names do not always stand for ideas, will spare himself the labour of looking for ideas where there are none to be had. Those obstacles being now remov’d, I earnestly desire that every one would use his utmost endeavour to attain a clear and naked view of the ideas he would consider by separating from them all that varnish and mist of words, which so fatally blinds the judgment and dissipates the attention of men. (PHK draft-intr. 381–2; also C 736)

Clearly, Berkeley was not simply repeating an age-old injunction to be wary of the spell cast by philosophical language when he tells us “we need only draw the curtain of words, to behold the fairest tree of knowledge, whose fruit is excellent, and within the reach of our hand” (PHK intro. §24). Nor was he any less in earnest when, at the end of the PHK introduction, he invites his reader to adopt this method in assessing Berkeley’s own discourse: Whoever therefore designs to read the following sheets, I entreat him to make my words the occasion of his own thinking, and endeavour to attain the same train of thoughts in reading, that I had in writing them. By this means it will be easy for him to discover the truth or falsity of what I say. He will be out of all danger of being deceived by my words, and I do not see how he can be led into an error by considering his own naked, undisguised ideas. (§25)

The Berkeleyan method, in essence, is: don’t describe, behold; and learn to do so by guiding yourself always by the separability principle. If we attempt to express ideas in words, we will succeed only in expressing their significative uses, not in characterizing the ideas themselves. Consequently, a theory of ideas may not include sentences that purport to describe ideas directly (observation sentences reporting their contents), and in general we must never presume that a univocal set of principles apply to ideas and to their expression in words. Far from being a theory of linguistic discourse (much less of linguistic meaning), the sensibilist theory of ideas Berkeley adapted from Locke is limited to general psychological principles concerned with their reception in perception, their repetition in memory, their distinction so far as “our discerning faculty” (V §66) permits, their combination and comparison, etc.—all with an eye to freeing ideas from the impositions of significative uses that, in Berkeley’s eyes, have misled philosophers from time immemorial, Locke not excepted. This is not to say that there are no problems with Berkeley’s account, even on its own terms. For example, although the recognition of resemblances and the exclusion of differences is at its heart, one looks in vain for a sustained examination of this relation in Berkeley’s writings. One finds instead only bits and pieces

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that, in the final balance, do not quite add up. In the first place, being a relation, resemblance is “distinct from the ideas or things related, inasmuch as the latter may be perceived by us without our perceiving the former” (PHK I §89); consequently, just as for Locke, consciousness of any relation presupposes “an act of the mind” (I §142). The act through which resemblances are discovered is comparison (“Two things cannot be said to be alike or unlike till they have been compar’d,” C 378). Relations formed through comparison are, however, apt to be nontransitive: one thing can be found to resemble a second, and the second a third, without the first being found to resemble the third. For example, a black globe may be found to resemble a white globe, and a white globe a white cube, without the white globe being found similar to the black cube. The black globe thus enters into resemblance relations that extend in different directions, as it were, each of which can be extended indefinitely along the same axis: from white globes to blue, green, and yellow globes, to globes made of marble, concrete, and plastic, globes that are at rest, roll, rotate, and so on; or, alternatively, from black cubes to other black polyhedrons, to black cats and ravens, to the darkness of a moonless night, and so on. And these are just a few of the myriad comparisons that are possible even before ascending to views so general than similarities in appearances become secondary or even cease to matter at all. These more general views depend on resemblances in different, usually more complex, regards than similarity of appearance: “When upon perception of an idea I range it under this or that sort, it is because it is perceived after the same manner, or because it has a likeness or conformity with, or affects me in the same way as, the ideas of the sort I rank it under” (V §128). A term such as ‘color,’ for example, has to do with the resemblance in the manner in which ideas of visual sensation are received rather than any sensible quality of the ideas themselves. So, even if the black globe has no resemblance to pink flamingos or yellow roses, all are appearances intromitted by the eyes and can be compared and denominated accordingly. More generally, Berkeley distinguished four ways in which a sign, natural or artificial, idea or word, may suggest an object: Ideas which are observed to be connected with other ideas come to be considered as signs, by means whereof things not actually perceived by sense are signified or suggested to the imagination, whose objects they are, and which alone perceives them. And as sounds suggest other things, so characters suggest those sounds; and, in general, all signs suggest the things signified, there being no idea which may not offer to the mind another idea which hath been frequently joined with it. In certain cases a sign may suggest its correlate as an image, in others as an effect, in others as a cause. But where there is no such relation of similarity of causality, nor any necessary connexion whatsoever, two things, by their mere coexistence, or two ideas, merely by being perceived together, may suggest or signify one the other, their connexion being all the while arbitrary; for it is the connection only, as such, that causeth this effect. (VV §39)

Suggestive signification is not confined to indifferent denotations, since ideas may serve as signs in this sense fully independently of general representation (chapter 14). Nevertheless, any instance of suggestive signification may in turn be exploited


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for indifferent denotation as well. Thus, the term ‘work of art’ groups together different things that may resemble each other only in being images; ‘laxative’ groups together various things that resemble one another only in the effect they have in mitigating or eliminating a species of discomfort; and ‘manmade’ groups together things that resemble one another in no regard except what caused them. In addition, even though there is no resemblance at all in their appearances, a blood-curdling scream can become a sign to indifferently denote a threatening situation because of their constant concomitance in the past (that is, resembling conjunctions and/or sequences of events, states, situations, and/or things). The list could go on indefinitely, but it should already be clear how resemblances of appearance or relation can serve to underwrite the indifferent denotations of ideas and terms. Nevertheless, there is still a significant gap remaining in Berkeley’s account of signification in terms of resemblance relations: if resemblances are never founded on immediately discernible common aspects, how are they recognized, and in what does that which we recognize consist? I can find no indications of a satisfactory answer in Berkeley, nor even any that he was cognizant of the problem. A comprehensive explanation that supplants aspect discrimination with association would have to wait until Hume (chapter 18-B). Still, the mere fact that Hume, in proposing a way to bring resemblance relations into conformity with the separability principle, did so with the express intent not of superseding but merely of confirming Berkeley (THN 17/17), suggests that Berkeley succeeded in compensating for his deficiency in this respect by his strict and systematic adherence to the separability principle.8 8. Winkler treats PHK intro. §16 as though it were clear proof that Berkeley affirmed aspect discrimination, and that he therefore considered qualitative aspects to belong to “the internal and inescapable structure of the perceived world” (Berkeley,74 ). What alone he supposes Berkeley to have denied is that aspects can exist apart, on their own, and so have the status of full-fledged ideas. Winkler draws this conclusion as part of an analysis aimed at showing that Locke’s distinction between simple and complex ideas “is decisively rejected in the Principles” and that there are “dramatic consequences of that rejection” (54). However, the evidence for this, which Winkler thinks “overwhelming” (71, 73), depends on a comparison of PHK intr. §7 with ECHU II/ii/§1 (66–7) in which the latter is read in a way that is almost certainly mistaken (see Ayers, Locke II, 34–6, for what seems to me a thoroughly convincing reading of “united and blended . . . in the things themselves” as referring to how things are not in sensible objects but in their imperceptible substantial causes). Yet, without this, there is little reason to accept Winkler’s contention that Berkeley (mis)construed Lockean simple ideas as such to be abstract ideas. For example, Winkler’s argument is predicated on Locke’s referring names of simple ideas to abstract general ideas (70–1) and overlooks the fact that Locke referred all signs (other than proper names) directly or indirectly (via language) to abstract ideas as the means whereby names relate to individual ideas (chapter 8). Winkler also cites the Commonplace Books in defense of his reading, arguing that Berkeley manifests an “uneasiness” there with the category of simple ideas, and that passages in which Berkeley uses, and implicitly endorses, the simple/complex distinction are “outnumbered . . . by expressions of doubt” (54). But this claim also does not stand up very well under scrutiny: Berkeley’s supposed “doubts” nearly all concern cases of simple ideas of diverse senses, which no one contests that he rejected. The only exceptions concern color, regarding which Berkeley, like Locke before him in the cases of space (chapter 5-B) and power (7-D), hemmed and hawed a great deal in the Commonplace Books, sometimes suggesting that colors are compound ideas, sometimes regarding them as simple in one regard and complex in another (“Colours are not devoid of all sort of Composition. tho it must be granted they are not made up of distinguishable Ideas, yet there is another sort of composition,”

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D. Toward A New Philosophical Ontology One of the most common criticisms of Berkeley’s theory of understanding, traceable back at least to Reid, is that it threatens a radical impoverishment of our conceptual apparatus. Gareth Evans stated the problem with particular cogency: Berkeley, . . . constrained by a theory of concept formation that would not allow for the formation of ideas of any other than sensory properties, . . . concluded that these spatial concepts [shape, motion, and hardness (solidity)] were sensory concepts, but related to the sense of touch as heat is. This is possible only by supposing that the concept of solidity is a sensory concept, as we have seen that it is not, and further, by supposing that the concept of the motion of the subject, and of the parts of his body, are concepts of kinesthetic experience, which they are not.9

The response to this objection should now be obvious. For what Evans means by ‘concepts’—principally, general terms and whatever they are correlated with in the mind—correspond to indifferent denotations, a significative use to which ideas are put, rather than to ideas as such (conceived “absolutely,” “positively,” “in themselves”). Since the separability principle in no way restricts our ability to form new indifferent denotations, it is potentially limitless (especially after all the varieties of suggestive signification are factored in). In particular, the concepts that Berkeley, according to Evans, would have to abjure are, quite the contrary, easily explicated. Just as we can distinguish the denotation of figure from that of color or timbre from pitch without postulating aspects or otherwise violating the separability principle (distinctions of reason), we can just as easily distinguish these pairs of denotations from the denotations is perceived by sight and is perceived by hearing. Similarly, the denotation solidity is distinguishable from the denotation is C 664). There is nothing in this to suggest that Berkeley was ever inclined to reject the category of simple ideas itself, and nearly all of his remarks indicate that he took it for granted (for example, 134, 378 #12, 570, 662, 671, and 885). It is true that Berkeley seldom mentions simple ideas in his published work, but this is no reason to think he rejected them or that this rejection was somehow of fundamental importance for him. (If it were, Berkeley was hardly the sort to keep quiet about it!) The term may occur infrequently, but the distinction is clearly in evidence in Berkeley, just as in Locke before him (chapter 5-B), between those ideas of sensation that can and those that cannot be generated in the imagination by the sheer compounding, blending, or otherwise combining of other ideas already in our possession. In this regard, Berkeley’s only divergence from Locke is a restriction, derived from the separability principle, on the scope of the class of simple ideas to ideas of one sense. Winkler then proceeds to argue on the basis of Berkeley’s supposed rejection of these sensory atoms for the affirmation, in their stead, of aspect-laden bearers of qualities. Yet, as should now be clear, the separability principle is incompatible with our possessing a capacity to immediately discern aspects (without needing to engage in comparisons with an eye for resemblances). It seems to me, therefore, that, in PHK intr. §16, when Berkeley says we should “consider” this “without attending to” that, he is not affirming aspect discrimination but instead reckoning in terms of resemblance-based indifferent denotations, as is clearer still in this text: “Mathematicians treat of quantity, without regarding what other sensible qualities it is attended with, as being altogether indifferent to their demonstrations. But when laying aside the words, they contemplate the bare ideas, I believe you will find, they are not pure abstracted ideas of extension” (1D193). 9. “Things Without the Mind—A Commentary of Chapter 2 of Strawson’s Individuals,” in Papers, 270. The bracketed insertion is from earlier in the same passage.


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perceived by touch, shape and motion from is perceived by sight or is perceived by touch, and so on for all the other “concepts” Evans mentions. Nor would Berkeley need to stop there: he could perfectly well allow that these separated denotations may in turn be combined to yield new, compound denotations to any complexity required in order to accommodate “the prænotions of men and use of life”— including one coinciding with the concept of a “material object existing unperceived,” which Evans mistakenly believed Berkeley incapable of explicating, owing to the putative “poverty of the mechanisms of concept formation which the empiricists recognized.”10 This, again, is because limitations restrictive of the power of human understanding to form ideas no more circumscribe its powers to distinguish and combine the denotations of ideas (chapter 14-F) than the senses prevent our imagination from employing their data to fashion images of fantastical substances with magic properties and powers unlike any encountered in actual sensory experience. Yet the converse is true as well: the significative uses to which ideas can be put no more enhance, extend, or otherwise alter the ideational powers of human understanding than the imagination enhances, extends, or otherwise alters the powers of the senses to furnish ideas of sensation. And, most important of all, the limitless potential to vary and combine the significative uses of ideas does nothing to free the ideas themselves from the far stricter criterion of distinguishability enshrined in the separability principle: Nothing is easier than to define in terms or words that which is incomprehensible in idea; forasmuch as any words can be either separated or joined as you please, but ideas always cannot . . . take a little care to distinguish between the definition and the idea, between words or expressions and the conceptions of the mind. (F §48)

What made the separability principle so important to Berkeley was his use of it as an ontological touchstone: a means of deciding which of the things we can conceive by means of denotations correspond to things actually existing, or capable of existing, in the real world disclosed to us in and through our ideas. In the context of his sensibilist theory of ideas, this “real world” is one and the same with “the sensible world”: the reality to which our only immediate access is by means of the senses with which our minds happen to be endowed.11 Using this standard, 10. Evans, “Things,” 274n. The denotational, as opposed to the ideational, conception of unperceived objects will be given detailed consideration in chapter 11. Berkeley’s psychologistic explication of objects conceived to transcend the divide between diverse senses and to possess causal powers will be examined in chapter 14. 11. There is an entry in Berkeley’s early Commonplace Books to suggest that he may have had a brief flirtation with innatism: “There are innate Ideas i.e. Ideas created with us” (C 649). However, since this sentence is the entire entry, there is no saying why it was written: Berkeley may have been affirming innate ideas, or toying with doing so; or he may have jotted down a claim he strongly opposed in order to think critically about it; or it may have been a note on something he was reading; or . . . : the possibilities are endless. Suffice it to say that since there is no sign of innatism in any of his subsequent, published work, we can do no more than note the existence of C 649 and then forget about it. For an excellent discussion, see Ayers, “Was Berkeley an Empiricist or a Rationalist?” in The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley, ed. Kenneth P. Winkler, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

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we can, for example, (1) conclude from the fact that we cannot hear pitchless timbres or timbreless pitches that the pitch and timbre of tones do not exist in reality, only tones do; (2) conclude from the fact that space is impossible to perceive visually independently of color and light, and impossible to perceive tactually independently of distinctively tactual qualities such as soft/hard, wet/dry, and warm/cool, that neither space nor any of its simple modes are ideas common to vision and touch; and (3) conclude from the fact that apples, houses, mountains, and other objects in the natural world are not distinguished in idea (only in denotation) from is perceived by sight, touch, hearing, smell, and/or taste that their esse is percipi (their being is being perceived: chapter 11). In all these cases, perfectly legitimate semantic distinctions fail to translate into ideational distinctions; and since for Berkeley, just as for Locke, ideas are the only real existents ever present to our thought (V §45, 2D214, 3D235–6; also PHK I §§ 38–9 and 3D250–1), no exclusively semantic distinction can be accorded the least ontological meaning or objective validity. Lacking ontological worth does not of course detract from the usefulness of a semantic distinction: To trace things from their original, it seems that the human mind, naturally furnished with the ideas of things particular and concrete, and being designed, not for the bare intuition of ideas, but for action and operations about them, and pursuing her own happiness therein, stands in need of certain general rules or theorems to direct her operations in this pursuit, the supplying which want is the true, original, reasonable end of studying the arts and sciences. Now, these rules being general, it follows that they are not to be obtained by the mere consideration of the original ideas, or particular things, but by the means of marks and signs, which, being so far forth universal, become the immediate instruments and materials of science. It is not, therefore, by mere contemplation of particular things, and much less of their abstract general ideas, that the mind makes her progress, but by an apposite choice and skilful management of signs: for instance, force and number. (MP 7 §11)

Because the concepts employed in the sciences seldom if ever pass the separability principle test, they reflect not the nature of things but of signs. For this reason, even our most objective-seeming scientific notions are, in the end, mere fictions, with no relation whatsoever to “the truth of things”: just as geometers for the sake of their art make use of many devices which they themselves cannot describe nor find in the nature of things, even so the mechanician makes use of certain abstract and general terms, imagining in bodies force, action, attraction, solicitation, etc. which are of the first utility for theories and formulations, as also for computations about motion, even if in the truth of things, and in bodies actually existing, they would be looked for in vain, just like the geometers’ fictions made by mathematical abstraction. (DM §39)

Significative uses, however indispensable they may be to human thought and action, play a completely different kind of role in the economy of human understanding than ideas. To accord objective, ontological worth to them even in the face of


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the separability principle, no matter how tempting we may find it, can result in nothing but illusion: About general and abstract terms men may make mistakes; they see their value in argument, but they do not appreciate their purpose. In part the terms have been invented by common habit to abbreviate speech, and in part they have been thought out by philosophers for instructional purposes, not that they are adapted to the natures of things which are in fact singulars and concrete, but they come in useful for handing on received opinions by making the notions or at least the propositions universal. (DM §7)

Significative uses are an incredibly effective means of exploiting frequently encountered resemblances among ideas to integrate and order them in ways that otherwise are impossible, with indisputable benefit to our species. Yet if the only objects with which we are, or can ever be, acquainted are the ideas immediately present to us in sensation, then semantic distinctions that have neither meaning nor validity with respect to ideas cannot even be conceived to have objective worth, much less actually have it. We should never confuse our success in operating with such distinctions with evidence of their correspondence to reality (C 727). For this success does not make them any less mere signs, or any more a new mode of perception comparable to the senses: We actually perceive by the aid of the senses nothing except the effects or sensible qualities and corporeal things entirely passive, whether in motion or at rest; and reason and experience advise us that there is nothing active except mind or soul. Whatever else is imagined must be considered to be of a kind with other hypotheses and mathematical abstractions. This ought to be laid to heart; otherwise we are in danger of sliding back into the obscure subtlety of the Schoolmen, which for so many ages like some dread plague, has corrupted philosophy. (DM §40)

E. The Heterogeneity of Language and Thought One of Berkeley’s most original insights was the recognition that the role of signs as indifferent denotators is by no means limited to simple and complex ideas of sensation. Quite the contrary, language would be greatly impoverished, indeed might vanish altogether, did general terms not connect up with passions, mental operations, and much else in the mind. Berkeley illustrated this by the example of the apostle who speaks of ‘good things’ “such as eye hath not seen nor ear heard, nor hath it enter’d into the heart of man to conceive.” Clearly, this manner of expression cannot have been intended to “mark out to our understandings the ideas of those particular things our faculties never attain’d to.” The apostle’s aim was instead to excite thoughts of reward, so that there may ensue an alacrity and steddiness in fulfilling those conditions on which it is to be obtain’d, together with a zealous desire of serving and pleasing the person in

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BERKELEY’S MODEST PROPOSAL whose power it is to bestow that good thing. . . . What is it that hinders why a man may not be stirr’d up to diligence and zeal in his duty, by being told he shall have a good thing for his reward, tho’ at the same time there be excited in his mind no other idea than barely those of sounds or characters? When he was a child he had frequently heard those words used to him to create in him an obedience to the commands of those that spoke them, and as he grew up he has found by experience that upon the mentioning of those words by an honest man it has been his interest to have doubted his zeal and activity for the service of that person. Thus there [has] grown up in his mind a customary connexion betwixt hearing that proposition and being disposed to obey with cheerfulness the injunctions that accompany it. . . . If any one will joyn ever so little reflexion of his own to what has been said, I doubt not it will evidently appear to him that general names are often used in the propriety of language without the speaker’s designing them for marks of ideas [o]f his own when he would have them raise in the understanding of the hearer. (PHK draft-intr. 375–6; also MP 7 §§ 5 and 14)

This serves to illuminate Berkeley’s larger point that, in learning language, very many more kinds of habitual connection are trained into us than those that connect words to ideas. In addition to ideas of sensation and imagination, deeds, attitudes, frames of mind, or any of the other mental particulars Berkeley often classed under the general rubric of “notions” (PHK I §89 and §142) may likewise be used to indifferently denote resembling reflexions by means of their resemblances. When habitually associated with general terms, the latter may then do duty in their stead, and it then becomes as simple and straightforward a matter to employ words to excite desires, emotions, or deeds of a certain kind as it is to use them to conjure up ideas: For what is it, I pray, to understand perfectly, but only to understand all that is meant by the person that speaks? which very oft is nothing more than barely to excite in his mind certain emotions without any thought of those ideas so much talk’d of and so little understood. (PHK draft-intr. 378)

To be sure, the words the apostle employs do not stand for emotions in the way dedicated terms like ‘fear,’ ‘hope,’ and ‘love’ do. But if anything should now be evident, it is that suggestive signification is an affair of resemblance relations that are myriad in variety and often multiply complex. To appreciate the significance of this better, consider the case of particles (‘is,’ ‘is not,’ ‘but,’ and other syncategorematic terms). Berkeley’s account of the generality of a term as dependent on a habitual connection to an idea—and, more particularly, on one among the many relations of resemblance whereby the idea indifferently denote all other ideas that partake of that relation—extends naturally to particles: “Tis allow’d that Particles stand not for Ideas & yet they are not said to be empty useless sounds. The truth on’t is they stand for the operations of the mind i.e. volitions” (C 667; also 661– 1a). As with terms generally, syncategorematics do not signify their individual instances (notions) directly but do so only via their indifferent denotations. This means not only that they are a function of the resemblance relations among the


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individual reflexive actions the mind performs on ideas and/or notions to combine and relate them but also, because of their extreme generality as universal forms of discourse, that the resemblances concerned in syncategorematics are sure to have long since left behind qualitative resemblances of appearances and become far more a matter of relational resemblances: resemblance as to cause, effect, constancy of concomitance, and a host of other relations that Berkeley never concerned himself to enumerate (section C). Accordingly, when we descend from the extremely general views of linguistics and logic down to their instances in the actual reflexive operations the mind performs on its ideas and notions, we find as little justification for attributing a language-thought isomorphism to Berkeley as we did in the case of Locke (chapter 8-C).12 If there is one lesson regarding the relation of language to thought in Berkeley we should take care never to forget, it is that, pace critics such as Evans, words go proxy not for ideas or notions but their resemblance-based indifferent denotations. For Berkeley, the truly fundamental distinction is not that between arbitrarily instituted signs like words on the one hand and ideas or notions on the other but between ideas and notions functioning in the role of indifferent denotators and these same ideas and notions considered absolutely and in themselves. The separability principle holds sway only in the latter domain. Of course, it cannot be stressed too strongly that, for Berkeley, none of the extra freedom we gain by thinking in signs rather than ideas or notions translates into a greater or deeper insight into reality than the latter are capable of furnishing. The distinctive ontological implication of his separability principle is that the signifying uses to which an idea or notion is put are in no way prefigured in the idea or notion itself, in the guise of “distinctions of reason” such as those previous philosophers purported to hold between qualities and what they qualify, quantities and what they quantify, modes and what they modify, reality and how it appears, appearances and the manner of their appearance (e.g. succession), and so on. Aspects, together with the power to discriminate them, are swept into the dustbin by the separability principle, leaving in their stead a greatly simplified, elegant sensibilist theory of human understanding consisting exclusively of ideas, notions, and their significative uses. And, as I shall argue in the next chapter, Berkeley’s idealism is simply one among the many philosophically important results of subjecting the latter to scrutiny under this principle. 12. Just as in note 2 we saw that Dancy tends to overestimate the extent to which Locke traced generality to abstract ideas that resemble their instances in appearance, he seems to me to greatly underestimate the importance and complexity of the role of resemblance relations in Berkeley’s account of indifferent denotation: “His view . . . is that no idea is needed to stand as intermediary between word and objects for the word to be able to denote more than one object indifferently. Part of what is being rejected here is the Lockean insistence that representation is a matter of resemblance between idea and object; for the general word is held able to represent many objects directly, without for that reason needing to resemble them in any respect at all.” (6) Indifferent denotations are the intermediary between signs and ideas, and they are entirely a function of the resemblances ideas bear to one another. The same seems to be true of terms for reflexions: indifferent denotation, founded on resemblance relations, is the indispensable intermediary by which to relate general terms to their instances. What Dancy apparently overlooked is that, for both Locke and Berkeley, resemblances are not confined to appearances but can instead be based on a resemblance, e.g., in the organ of sensation responsible for ideas (‘color’).

11 Berkeleyan Idealism: The Inseparability of Existence, Sensation, and Perception

Vulgar materialism, as emerged in chapter 7-D, is distinguished by two natural beliefs and a conceptual criterion. The vulgar, a category that includes everyone when unreflectively engaged in the affairs of ordinary life, as well as infants and higher animals, identify the qualities of bodies that appear to the senses with the qualities of the bodies themselves, and ascribe to these qualities the same distinct existence—independent and external to our minds—they attribute to the bodies themselves. The need for a criterion to distinguish that in their appearances which is mind-independent from that which is not first arises in connection with pleasures and pains: although just as integral to the appearances of bodies as such sensible features as light, softness, coldness, or solidity, the supposition that pains and pleasures have a distinct existence is repugnant to vulgar understanding. Thus, on the basis of a conceptual criterion (= C1)—that it is inconceivable that pleasure and pains continue to exist unperceived by a mind—the vulgar are idealists about pleasures and pains but realists about all the other sensible qualities of bodies. Do the limits of this natural idealism coincide with the true limits of idealism? Or are there other, less obvious but equally compelling, conceptual considerations that make it impossible to ascribe a distinct existence to other sensible qualities? Although affirmative answers had been offered in premodern times, the advent of the mechanistic conception of body in the seventeenth century brought with it the prospect of markedly superior criteria for distinguishing the real from the ideal in sensible appearances. The first step in realizing this promise consisted in a clarification of the concept of a body in general. Like their predecessors, mechanistically minded early moderns viewed body as a species of substance. Metaphysicians had long since clarified what it means to conceive a substance as existent: it is identical with conceiving of it as possessing active and passive powers that enable it to act and react, to be acted upon and be reacted to, with respect to a particular mode of action. Since the mode of action proper to bodies is motion, this means that to conceive a body as existent is to conceive it as causally efficacious with 272

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respect to motion. Bodies must thus be conceived of as substances whose constitution confers on them powers to move and be moved, to change their state of motion in reaction to the motion of other bodies and for other bodies to change their state of motion in reaction to them. From this, there follows a new criterion whereby to determine whether the distinct existence of any sensible quality is conceivable (= C2): we can conceive a sensible quality to have the same real (mind-independent) existence we attribute to bodies themselves if and only if it can enter into the conception of the motive efficacy of bodies; otherwise, like pleasure and pain, it cannot be conceived to exist except in relation to our minds, and consequently is not real but ideal. Learned materialism is what remains after sensible qualities are distinguished into ideas of primary and ideas of secondary qualities, according to whether or not they can be conceived to have a distinct existence under C2. In this way, early modern philosophers extended idealism to include not only pleasures and pains, but heat/cold, softness/hardness, colors, sounds, odors, flavors, and a host of other qualities specific to one or another of our senses that lack or resist easy verbal designation. Material realism was restricted accordingly. Despite some difference of opinion regarding solidity (impenetrability), proponents agreed that, along with temporality, all the sensible qualities familiar to geometers admit of mind-independent existence: indeterminate distance and extension in three dimensions, determinate distances and extensions, and the figures and other spatial arrays composed of determinate distances and extensions. Against both vulgar and learned forms of realism, Berkeley’s idealism, characterized most broadly, consists in the introduction of a new conceptual criterion, C3, whereby to determine whether the continued, distinct existence of any sensible quality at all is conceivable. C3 is the criterion of distinctness enshrined in the separability principle: ontological, rather than merely semantic, worth can be attributed to all and only those distinctions that go beyond differences among the indifferent denotations and other significative uses of an idea to genuine differences within the idea itself. More particularly, one thing is really and not merely ideally distinct from another if and only if it can be perceived (imagined) in the absence of the other. Since, according to Berkeley, none of our ideas of sensible qualities, primary any less than secondary, can meet this conceptual criterion, materialism is not simply false but unintelligible. Thus, from his perspective, philosophers and vulgar alike have been misled from time immemorial because they lacked the right criterion to prevent them from confounding what is, in truth, a merely semantic distinction of indifferent denotation with a genuinely ontological one: the difference between ‘to be’ and ‘to be perceived.’ This is not, however, to say that Berkeley’s idealism is merely the sum of its applications of the separability principle. One of these applications stands high above the others. It concerns not what appears to us in sensation—the contents of sensible appearances—but rather that there is any appearance at all: the fact of sensation, its presence in perception, irrespective of its qualitative content. This application of the separability principle is the focus of Berkeley’s most famous, original, and influential thesis: the esse of sensible things is percipi.

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A. The Esse of Sensible Things Is Percipi The argument for esse is percipi idealism is simple and straightforward: (1) ideas can exist only in being perceived; (2) sensible objects (stones, trees, mountains, etc.) are ideas; (3) therefore, sensible objects can exist only in being perceived. To the obvious objection occasioned by the second premise, that it confounds two existences which are in reality distinct—the ideas of sensible things and the sensible things themselves—Berkeley responded by demanding that the realist demonstrate that the distinctness in question is not merely semantic, a difference in the denotations of ideas, but a real difference of ideas, capable of satisfying the distinctness criterion laid down in the separability principle. The philosophical core of esse is percipi idealism therefore consists in proving that no such demonstration is possible. Before focusing on the second premise, however, we need to take note of a significant shift from Locke in respect of the first. For Locke, as we saw in chapter 5-B, an idea, by definition, corresponds to an operation of thought. This is as true of the objects given in perception—passively received ideas of sensation and reflexion—as it is of ideas that are products of the activity of thought (recollected ideas, discerned ideas, ideas related by comparison, complex ideas, and abstract ideas). Yet this definition must not be confounded with a substantive ontological claim that existences presented in ideas of sensation are themselves mind-dependent. Since Locke did not philosophize in accordance with the separability principle, the impossibility of conceiving the existences present to us in sensation in the absence of their perception in sensation did not, in his eyes, suffice to settle their ontological status as beings incapable of existing unperceived; and so the possibility remained open for him that these objects might continue to exist unperceived, and so be distinct from (independent of and external to) the mind and its perceptions. Locke departed from this ontological neutrality only when he shifted his focus from the conceptual dimension of ideas—what is presented in them (their content, their appearance = reality)—to what can be cognized through them. Here his commitment to mechanism generally, and its application to sense perception in particular, seems to have played the greatest role in persuading him that the objects immediately present to the mind are one and all incapable of existing unperceived. Nevertheless, this does not change the fact that Locke’s abstractionist theory of ideas, construed narrowly so as to exclude the status of ideas as cognitive grounds, (1) preserves a distinction between the existence of sensible objects and their status as perceived ideas, and (2) leaves open the possibility that both perceptions and sensations might be superadded properties of material substances in precisely the sense he deemed motion such a property (ECHU IV/iii/§6, x/§§10–11, and CWS 460–78). The future bishop of Cloyne was shocked by such innovations (C 695). No doubt it was with Locke’s ontological freethinking prominently, perhaps uppermost, in mind that Berkeley represented the Principles as a cure for the maladies of skepticism and atheism that, in his mind, were inseparably bound up with materialism.1 For he knew that, armed with his separability principle, he had 1. Skeptics and atheists need not despair, for, as we shall see in part III, Hume would soon ride to the rescue by turning the separability principle against spirit just as Berkeley had turned it against


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Locke dead to rights, starting with the putative distinctness between the existence of sensible objects and their status as perceived ideas of sensation: Twas the opinion that Ideas could exist unperceiv’d or before perception that made Men think perception was somewhat different from the Idea perceiv’d, that it was an Idea of Reflexion whereas the thing perceiv’d was an idea of Sensation. I say twas this made ’em think the understanding took it in receiv’d it from without which could never be did not they think it existed without. (C 656)

Berkeley was scathing about this putative distinction: “I Defy any man to Imagine or conceive perception without an Idea or an Idea without perception . . . Consciousness, perception, existence of Ideas, seem to be all one” (C 572 and 578). The distinction between perceiving reflexion and perceived sensation—between my consciousness of a sensation in perception and the existence of the sensation that I perceive—fails to satisfy the separability principle distinctness criterion, and consequently is (at most) a merely semantic difference of denotations, devoid of ontological worth. This same consideration, conversely, gives the first premise of Berkeley’s esse is percipi argument—that sensations can exist only in being perceived—the ontological punch he required of it, not only for this argument but a host of others as well. For to concede the ontological indistinguishability of perceiving reflexion and perceived sensation obliges one to grant that sensations are ideas that “cannot exist unperceived, or out of a mind” (3D251), so that “for an idea to exist in an unperceiving thing, is a manifest contradiction” (PHK I §7). Berkeley is certainly to be faulted for leaving his reasons for premise 1 obscure in his published works. For how can anyone not privy to the thoughts Berkeley penned in his Commonplace Books not find it dogmatic to claim that “an intuitive knowledge may be obtained” of the proposition that “the various sensations or ideas imprinted on the sense, however blended or combined together (that is, whatever objects they compose) cannot exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving them” (PHK I §3)? No doubt Berkeley was being sincere when he explained that he adopted the term ‘idea’ “because a necessary relation to the mind is understood to be implied by that term; and it is now commonly used by philosophers, to denote the immediate objects of the understanding” (3D235–6; also V §45). Yet if, as Locke’s case makes clear, the affirmation of such a relation is not, in itself, incompatible with an ontologically neutral stance regarding the existence of sensations, the question remains, what justified Berkeley in according intuitive certainty to the contrary claim? That he did not make his reasons as explicit as he might have in PHK was almost surely due to the fact that the first premise is based on the same reasoning as the second, and, being the exemplary master of concision he was, he opted to fold the former into the latter.2 Yet its basis in the separability matter, and would then, like some Enlightenment Samson, proceed to bring down the whole temple of traditional metaphysics by using the principle to discredit the claim to know propositions such as the general causal maxim with intuitive or demonstrative certainty. 2. The same elision is present in C 408: “the meaning & definition of the word Existence . . . is no simple idea distinct from perceiving & being perceiv’d.” When I turn to Kant’s refutation of Berkeley’s idealism in volume II, the elided differences (the distinction between premises 1 and 2 of the argument for esse is percipi idealism) become important.

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principle is obvious enough not to hold it against him: if aspects are an illusion and no two ideas are distinct unless one is capable of being perceived in the absence of the other, then we have no choice but to concede the impossibility of distinguishing the existence of a sensation from its presence in perception; and since this is just to say that the existence of an idea unperceived is (not a semantic but) an ideational contradiction, it follows with intuitive evidence that Lockean ontological neutrality is merely a figment of language. The reasoning underlying the second premise of the esse is percipi argument aims to defeat any attempt to distinguish the existence of sensible things like the ground under one’s feet, the sun above, and one’s own body, from the actuality of ideas of sensation in the same way the reasoning behind the first premise aims to confound any attempt to distinguish the existence of an idea perceived in sensation from its presence in perception. The passage in which this issue comes to a head, and quite possibly the most important Berkeley ever penned, is PHK I §5, where he applies the separability principle test to the “opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a world all sensible objects have an existence natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding” (§4): If we thoroughly examine this tenet, it will, perhaps, be found at bottom to depend on the doctrine of abstract ideas. For can there be a nicer strain of abstraction than to distinguish the existence of sensible objects from their being perceived, so as to conceive them existing unperceived? Light and colours, heat and cold, extension and figures, in a word the things we see and feel, what are they but so many sensations, notions, ideas or impressions on the sense; and is it possible to separate, even in thought, any of these from perception? For my part I might as easily divide a thing from it self. I may indeed divide in my thoughts or conceive apart from each other those things which, perhaps, I never perceived by sense so divided. Thus I imagine the trunk of a human body without the limbs, or conceive the smell of a rose without thinking on the rose it self. So far I will not deny I can abstract, if that may properly be called abstraction, which extends only to the conceiving separately such objects, as it is possible may really exist or be actually perceived asunder. But my conceiving or imagining power does not extend beyond the possibility of real existence or perception. Hence as it is impossible for me to see or feel any thing without an actual sensation of that thing, so is it impossible for me to conceive in my thoughts any sensible thing or object distinct from the sensation or perception of it.

It should be evident by this point that where Berkeley says ‘abstract ideas,’ his real concern is to keep ideas—all of which are sensible, particular, and concrete— distinct from the indifferent denotations to which they are put (signifying relations); and where the separability principle is invoked, we are meant to exclude all forms of abstraction, including aspect discrimination and the distinctions of reason that come with it. When this is done, the point in I §5 emerges clearly: to suppose that a house, a tree or any other object of the senses continues to exist unperceived is as much “a manifest contradiction” (§4) as the the proposition that a timbre may exist without a pitch or that a visible triangle may exist in the absence of light and


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color. To be sure, just as the idea of a tone can be used to denote timbre independently of any reference to pitch, or a visual idea can be used to denote triangles independently of any reference to light or color, so too the existence of sensible things can be denoted independently of any reference to the existence of sensations (and, a fortiori, of minds that perceive sensations). Failure to pass the separability principle test leaves semantic distinctness intact, and we remain free to consider houses, stars, and leptons in complete semantic independence from their being perceived. But full-blown philosophical materialism is not content with semantic independence. To go further, however it must show that sensible objects remain distinct from ideas of sensation even after everything redolent of significative uses has been bracketed out, and one’s ideas have been laid “bare and naked” before one. Since this leaves no conceiving power except the “faculty of imagining, or representing to my self the ideas of those particular things I have perceived and of variously compounding and dividing them” (PHK Intr. §10), it suffices to preclude the possibility of such a proof to show that “my conceiving or imagining power does not extend beyond the possibility of real existence or perception” (PHK I §5). And this Berkeley considered as easy to do as showing that a thing cannot be divided from itself. For even if we can imagine things that have never actually been sensed by variously compounding and dividing things that have previously been sensed, we can imagine nothing that is not ipso facto a possible sense perception (DM §5); and since this is just to say that the question on which the intelligibility of materialism hinges is whether a sense perception is possible in which sensible things exist unperceived, the contradiction at the heart of this doctrine, thitherto concealed under the cloak of semantics, finally is made manifest: “as it is impossible for me to see or feel any thing without an actual sensation of that thing, so it is impossible for me to conceive in my thoughts any sensible thing or object distinct from the sensation or perception of it” (PHK I §5). Thus, when materialism is subjected to scrutiny under the light of the separability principle, it fares no better than the proposition that pitches might exist independently of timbres or that visible triangles might exist independently of light and color. To comprehend Berkeley’s argument aright, we need to keep in mind what it was intended to show: “what is meant by the term exist when applied to sensible things” (PHK I §3). For this tells us that the distinction at issue in §5 has nothing whatever to do with whether sensible objects are conceivable independently of this or that sensible quality or complex of such qualities. It is not the quality (content) of sensation that is impossible to separate from our conception of the existence of houses, mountains, rivers, and the like, but the concept of actuality we acquire from the fact of its presence in us, irrespective of its quality. To be sure, the distinction between the quality and the actuality of sensation is itself merely semantic. But their being indissolubly one does not affect the point at issue. All that matters here is that sensation is the source of ideas not only of sensible qualities (contents) but of a certain modality of actuality as well (the same that plays a central role in Locke’s theory of sensitive knowledge: chapter 9-B). As the source from which the imagination copies the only concept of existence (actuality, real existence) applicable to sensible objects in its possession, Berkeley was able to portray materialists’ wish to separate the existence of sensible things from ideas of

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sensation as conceptually self-nullifying: to grant it would straightaway denude this concept of precisely that which gives it its meaning. Accordingly, the standard reaction to the second premise of the esse is percipi argument—that a distinction between the existence of sensible objects and ideas of sensation is perfectly intelligible—can be rebutted on the ground that it confounds a semantic distinction relating to genuinely distinct significative uses (indifferent denotations) of one and the same sensational idea of existence with an ontologically impossible distinction imputed to that idea considered absolutely and in itself (“the absolute existence of sensible objects in themselves, or without the mind,” PHK I §24). When united with the first premise, that sensations can exist only in being perceived, Berkeley’s desired conclusion that sensible objects exist only in being perceived—their esse is percipi—follows as a matter of course.3 B. Existing Unperceived Berkeley addressed possible objections to esse is percipi at great length, both in the Principles and in other writings. The most important, and certainly the most natural and compelling, is the following. But say you, surely there is nothing easier than to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and no body by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it: but what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of any one that may perceive them? But 3. Winkler concedes that Berkeley regarded his critique of materialism as an instance of his critique of abstract ideas, but denies that it is in fact the case: “In order to know that the idea of an unperceived object is abstract, we must already know that there can be no unperceived objects, but if we know that, materialism has already been disposed of.” Introduction to George Berkeley. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, ed. K. Winkler (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982). Robert Fogelin, in Berkeley and the Principles of Human Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2001), also supposes that Berkeley’s esse is percipi idealism committed him to the ontological solipsism (141–2) which precludes the possibility that “certain (perhaps indescribable) entities might exist that resemble neither spirits nor perceptions” (41). Both Winkler and Fogelin go wrong, in my view, in supposing that Berkeley’s idealism commits him to denying that anything whatsoever is capable of existing distinctly from (outside and independently of) minds, or, conversely, affirming that only minds and their ideas exist. Berkeley’s idealism committed him only to denying that the supposition that corporeal things might exist unperceived is intelligible, but implies nothing either way about the existence of things whereof we have no positive idea or notion at all: “I do not deny the existence of material substance, merely because I have no notion of it, but because the notion of it is inconsistent, or in other words because it is repugnant that there should be a notion of it. Many things, for ought I know, may exist, whereof neither I nor any other man hath or can have any idea or notion whatsoever. But then those things must be possible, that is, nothing inconsistent must be included in their definition” (3D232). Berkeley neither affirmed nor denied the possibility of some such “third nature” (3D239). He insisted only that if such beings are possible, then in order for an existence distinct from minds is to be ascribable to them, the supposition must not conflict with the separability principle or any other intuitively certain truth. The mistaken notion that Berkeley’s idealism committed him to proving that only spirits and their ideas exist, or can exist, stems directly, in my view, from a failure to accord a central place in its interpretation to the antiabstractionist separability principle. See also chapter 12, note 9.


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do not you your self perceive or think of them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the purpose: it only shows you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind; but it doth not shew that you can conceive it possible, the objects of your thought may exist without the mind: to make out this, it is necessary that you conceive them existing unconceived or unthought of, which is a manifest repugnancy. When we do our utmost to conceive the existence of external bodies, we are all the while only contemplating our own ideas. But the mind taking no notice of itself, is deluded to think it can and doth conceive bodies existing unthought of or without the mind; though at the same time they are apprehended by or exist in it self. (PHK I §23)

Even Berkeley’s most sympathetic readers have found this response perplexing, and not without a whiff of sophistry. The problem is that he seems to be playing fast and loose with the reference: it is not the image of trees I am forming in my imagination that I am supposing to exist independently of any mind but the actual trees themselves. This seems to be precisely the reaction Berkeley expected. Who, he might ask, is the one playing fast and loose: he, or the person who wishes to confer ontological worth on these distinct references? Berkeley, in other words, would have us ask ourselves whether this is the sort of distinction that can remain after we “draw the curtain of words,” set aside all use of ideas to denote indifferently, and consider our “own ideas divested of words.” Indifferent denotation just is independent reference, an inherently semantic notion, founded not on ideas but on the significative uses to which they are put. When we fancy ourselves to be imagining trees in the park existing unperceived, we are supposed to consider only what our imagining power proper is capable of doing, while avoiding the trap of inflating it with surreptitiously introduced semantics (“Nothing is easier than to define in terms or words that which is incomprehensible in idea; . . . take a little care to distinguish between the definition and the idea, between words or expressions and the conceptions of the mind,” F §48). When we do this, however, we find in our imagination nothing but the idea (visualization) of trees in a park, shorn of all denotation, devoid of aspects, and so without anything to refer us beyond the bare image itself, be it to sensation or beyond sensation to distinctly (independently, externally) existing bodies. For nothing can be attributed to the imagining act beyond the bare power to produce the idea. In particular, we cannot separate in idea, as we can in language, the existence of the visualized trees in the park from the visualization itself, nor this from consciousness (perception, conception) of the visualizing act: all are one and indistinguishable, and the esse of these imagined trees is imaginari. This does not, of course, prevent us from utilizing this indivisible idea to denote indifferently in a variety of ways (we might use it, for example, to denote tree ideas in general, independently of any reference to a mind sensing or imagining them, or to denote imagining acts independently of any reference to sense perception). But, with suggestive signification in all its varieties excluded, “When we do our utmost to conceive the existence of external bodies, we are all the while only contemplating our own ideas.” And then the only way open to us to defeat Berkeley is to “conceive them existing unconceived or unthought of, which is a manifest repugnancy.”

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Implicit in Berkeley’s response to the foregoing objection is what is explicit in esse is percipi idealism itself (section A) and the rejection of aspects generally (chapter 10): the conception of imagination (wordless thought) as a faculty dependent on the senses, incapable of representing anything that is not, in principle, possible for the senses themselves to perceive in sensation (“nothing enters the imagination which from the nature of the thing cannot be perceived by sense, since indeed the imagination is nothing else than the faculty which represents sensible things either actually existing or at least possible,” DM §53; also PHK I §5 and C 582, 818, and 822). Although not in itself surprising, it cannot be emphasized too strongly, because almost invariably overlooked, that the concept of existence at the heart of his esse is percipi idealism needs to be understood in this light as well. When Berkeley asks us to “attend to what is meant by the term exist when applied to sensible things” (PHK I §3), he offers examples from hearing and smell as well as from sight and touch. This indicates, for his purposes, that any sensations would do simply by virtue of being sensations, and, as I noted in the previous section, this strongly suggests that the meaning of ‘exists’ to which he wanted us to attend has everything to do with the fact that they are sensations and nothing at all to do with the qualitative contents of the sensations (their contents play no role in Berkeley’s reasoning in PHK I §§ 3–6, and are perfectly dispensable to it). Since this is evidently the crux of his idealism, it is time now to take a closer look. In PHK I §5, where the separability principle is clearly central to Berkeley’s reasoning, it might seem that he was thinking only, or principally, in terms of the power of the imagination to separate and recombine ideas of sensation in novel ways (“the trunk of a human body without the limbs . . . the smell of a rose without thinking on the rose itself”). But how does this bear on the issue of whether it is possible “to distinguish the existence of sensible objects from their being perceived, so as to conceive them existing unperceived”? Berkeley’s rejection of this distinction is expressed as a denial that “it is possible [sensible objects] may really exist or be actually perceived asunder” on the ground that “my conceiving or imagining power does not extend beyond the possibility of real existence or perception.” Now, the context leaves little room to doubt that in Berkeley’s two disjunctions—conceiving or imagining and real existence or perception—each disjunct is to be construed as synonymous with the other, not as terms whose difference is concealed by an elision of distinct propositions. For not only did Berkeley never, to my knowledge, distinguish two separate ideational4 powers, conceiving and imagining, in addition to sense and memory; but, more important, any admission that a distinction between real existence and perception is conceivable would be tantamount, in the context of §5, to denying that the esse of sensible things is percipi. By contrast, if we read Berkeley’s disjuncts as synonyms, his answer to the question “what is meant by the term exist when applied to sensible things” is exactly what we should expect: it means to be “actually perceived,” to have “an actual sensation of the thing,” since “the things we see and feel” are impossible to distinguish from “so many sensations, notions, ideas or impressions 4. By “ideational” I mean to exclude powers to produce notions. For, in this latter regard, Berkeley introduces pure intellect: see chapter 13.


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on the sense” (and these, in turn, are impossible “to separate even in thought . . . from perception”: premise one of section A). In other words, with the deceptive effects of universality (indifferent denotation) neutralized, the only idea our imaginations are capable of forming to underwrite the term ‘existence’ in application to sensible objects consists of nothing else than the repetition in thought of the idea of the actual presence of sensations in sense perception (the fact of their presence, without regard to their contents and how these are comparable or distinguishable). Thus, in addition to his concern to show that the separability principle precludes the possibility of distinctions between the existence of sensible things, their ideas in sensation, and the perception of these ideas by the mind (that is, premises 1 and 2 of the argument discussed in the previous section), Berkeley also took care to prevent us from confounding sensing—the origin of the concept of ‘existence’ applicable to sensible things—with memory and imagination, which never do more than reproduce what has already been sensed (whether by recalling it in thought— memory—or by arranging it in new ways—imagination). It is true that Berkeley generally applied the term ‘exists’ univocally to all ideas, regardless of whether they originate in sense, memory, or imagination (“the existence of our ideas consists in being perceiv’d, imagin’d thought on whenever they are imagin’d or thought on they do exist,” C 472; also PHK I §23, cited above). But Berkeley did sometimes distinguish the modality of existence proper to each, as when the vulgar distinguish reality from fiction: “But say you then a Chimæra does exist. I answer it doth in one sense. i.e. it is imagin’d. but it must be well noted that existence is vulgarly restrain’d to actuall perception. & that I use the word Existence in a larger sense than ordinary” (C 473). The coincidence of the vulgar conception of real existence with the concept of existence Berkeley traced to sensation is quite clear in the Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. Hylas objects that if the existence of sensible things really were the same as being perceived, “how comes it that all mankind distinguish between them?” In response, Philonous, Berkeley’s mouthpiece, appeals to the “common sense of the world” to sustain his position: Ask the gardener, why he thinks yonder cherry tree exists in the garden, and he shall tell you, because he sees and feels it; in a word, because he perceives it by his senses. Ask him why he thinks an orange tree not to be there, and he shall tell you, because he does not perceive it. What he perceives by sense, that he terms a real being, and saith it is, or exists; but that which is not perceivable, the same, he saith, has no being. (3D234)

The difference between the gardener’s conception of the nonexistent orange tree and his conception of the existent cherry tree consists simply and solely in the difference the presence of sensation makes to his conception. From the contents of conceptions of the orange and cherry trees alone, without sensation, he would find it altogether impossible to form the least idea of this difference. The presence of sensation in the gardener’s idea of the cherry tree and his idea of its real existence (actuality) are therefore, for Berkeley, one and the same. What occurs in the mind of the gardener when he thinks of the cherry tree in the garden after he goes home at night? Since “Ideas of Sense are the Real things

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or Archetypes,” and “Ideas of Imagination, Dreams etc. are copies, images of those” (C 822), the answer must conform to this distinction: the idea of existence the gardener conjoins with his idea of the cherry tree is a reproduction in thought of the recollected fact of sensation actually occurring (its earlier presence in perception). For if both the presence of sensation and the memory of its presence were entirely effaced from his mind, he would be utterly at a loss to imagine “what is meant by exist when applied to sensible things.” Of course, in order to relate his idea to the absent cherry tree that he supposes to continue in existence unperceived when he thinks of it at night, he is obliged to abstract the idea from the circumstances and conditions of its original acquisition. Reading (as always) “indifferent denotation” for “abstraction,” we can see what Berkeley would have us understand to be going on in the gardener’s understanding: first, the idea of existence derived from the presence of sensation is reproduced in imagination and used to denote sensible objects indifferently by means of resemblances that do not include the circumstances and conditions that held at the time of its acquisition; this idea is then conjoined with his nocturnal idea of the cherry tree in the garden; and in this purely significative sense (indifferent denotation), the gardener is able to conceive the cherry tree as existent, independently of any reference to its being concurrently sensed or imagined, whether by him or any other sentient being.5 Nor is the indifferent denotation method of representing the existence of things unperceived necessarily limited to human beings. For what, on Berkeley’s theory of indifferent denotation, is there to prevent the dog resting next to the gardener’s chair that night from thinking of the absent cherry tree that he too perceived earlier in the day, in precisely the same way? Insofar as canine thought is sufficiently circumscribed so as not to depend on the kinds of general views that arbitrarily instituted words governed by societal rules of propriety alone make possible, indifferent denotation may be presumed to lie within its mental capacity, provided that sensations, their combination and division in imagination, and relations of resemblance do.6 In this denotational sense of ‘imagine’ or ‘conceive’ (“inaccurate modes of speech, which use has made inevitable,” PHK I §52), then, Berkeley may very 5. To account for the regularities in the behavior of ideas of sensation that inculcate these habits of thought in the mind of the gardener, and his expectations of what he would find if he took his lantern and ventured into the garden, Berkeley invoked God. Against the need to posit a supersensible cause, Hume would set his psychologistic explication of the concept of cause and effect, with its implication that this concept has meaning only in respect to the sensible world: “Such a discovery not only cuts off all hope of ever attaining satisfaction, but even prevents our very wishes” (THN 266–7/173). 6. Although Berkeley had little to say about animal minds, he did once speculate “whether Composition of Ideas be not that faculty which chiefly serves to discriminate us from Brutes. I question whether a Brute does or can imagine a Blue Horse or Chimera” (C 753). The implication is that animal imaginations are capable of everything short of imagining combinations of ideas not previously met with in sensation, including applying them to significative uses. This includes the same capacity humans have to use their visual and other sensations as signs of tactual spatiality, that is, an ability to read what Berkeley termed the “language of nature” (V §59). The lack of verbal language merely circumscribes the general views animals are capable of taking, without preventing them from taking any, even minimal, general views at all (so too Berkeley’s solitary man: PHK draft-intr. 379). It thus does not seem too much of a reach to suppose that he would also have accorded to animals the means necessary to use their ideas to denote indifferently: the faculty to compare ideas and habitually distinguish those that do resemble from those that do not.


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well have allowed that the vulgar—some animals perhaps included—can “conceive” things to exist, now or in the past, that we are not presently perceiving (Phobos, the WTC twin towers), things we may never have perceived (Julius Caesar not crossing the Rubicon, my $1 million lottery win), and (because of physical law, rather than any limitation on the part of our senses) things that no one ever shall perceive (Pegasus taking flight, teacups chatting). The only thing he would disallow is the ability to form an abstracted idea of existence, which the gardener could apply to the cherry tree in distinction from the (equally abstract) idea of its being perceived in sensation. For while the separability principle in no way prevents us from using the idea of existence we copy from sensation to denote trees and other sensible objects independently of any reference to their being perceived, it does oblige us to acknowledge that the idea itself, considered apart from any signifying use, is not distinguishable in this way. It thus is impossible for anything capable of entering into our sensory experience (i.e., anything imaginable) to exhibit this same independence of being perceived in ideational fact that it has in significative use. Berkeley believed that the semantic distinction between the existence of sensible objects and their being perceived sufficient for all vulgar intents and purposes, whether of thought or action (the vulgar having no ax to grind on behalf of aspects, distinctions of reason, Platonic forms, and other variants of abstract ideas). His criticisms were aimed exclusively at philosophers who would attach an ontological import to that distinction. Once this is appreciated, it should put paid to the oft-iterated objection, associated especially with ordinary language philosophers like Austin, that Berkeley had no business professing “that in the tenets we have laid down, there is nothing inconsistent with the right use and significancy of language, and that discourse of what kind soever, so far as it is intelligible, remains undisturbed” (PHK I § 83). For Berkeley, our discourse concerning sensible reality reflects nothing about our ideas per se but only the denotative signifying uses to which we put them. Since his separability-principle-based idealism does not get in the way of indifferent denotation, it ipso facto cannot be supposed to impinge upon ordinary language and its use. This is what Berkeley’s recent critics overlook; far from confounding ideas with the significations of signs, his idealism depends on keeping them absolutely distinct. More particularly, detractors and defenders alike seem to me to make the mistake of discounting, or even entirely overlooking, Berkeley’s resolve to “confine my thoughts to my own ideas divested of words,” by finding matter for description in “bare and naked” ideas. It should by this point be clear that the separability principle renders it impossible for any describable matter to be found in ideas, for it requires us to consider them entirely apart from their use as signifiers. In consequence, there are no sentences for analysts keen to subject Berkeley’s idealism to the logico-linguistic techniques current today. In this respect, he 7. For this reason, I shall not deal with the mass of recent literature that applies contemporary logico-linguistic methods to the interpretation of Berkeley or to the solution of what are supposedly the same or similar problems to those dealt with by him. Interested readers should instead consult such Berkeley commentators as Pitcher, Bennett, Grayling, Dancy, Flage, Winkler, and Jessop.

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could not be more different from the true targets the barbs of Austin and later thinkers in this tradition are adapted to find: James, Russell, C. D. Broad, and other exponents of sensation language.7 Behind the veil of words—understood to include ideas (or reflexions) in the role of indifferent denotators—there is only a flux of ideas with barely any resemblance at all to language (chapter 4-C). C. Berkeley’s Psychologistic Explication of Existence Berkeley’s claim to “side in all things with the Mob” (C 405) has an undeniably disingenuous ring to it: In the immaterial hypothesis the wall is white, fire hot etc . . . We see the Horse it self, the Church it self it being an Idea & nothing more . . . the horse is in the stable, the Books are in the study as before. . . . I may say the pain is in my finger etc according to my Doctrine. (C 19, 429, and 444)

The problem is not simply that the vulgar have no philosophical position to champion or oppose. It is that Berkeley sides squarely with the philosophers of his time in denying that sensible objects have a distinct (independent, external) existence with respect to the perceiving mind. Indeed, if anything, Berkeley is farther from the vulgar than these others insofar as they accord reality to certain (primary) sensible qualities—if not in the immediately perceived objects, then at least in their imperceptible causes. By contrast, Berkeley’s separability principle (C3) permits none of the qualities of sensible appearances to be employed in the conception of their causes (that is, all ideas without exception count as ideas of secondary qualities), and implies nothing less than the impossibility of mind-independently existing material things. Berkeley’s principal justification for claiming to side with the vulgar is that he too holds a single existence view. According to the view of philosophers such as Locke (chapter 7-D), there are two sets of existents: the sensible things we actually perceive, which exist only as ideas in our minds, and the imperceptible causes of these ideas, which have certain qualities in common with them (resemblances). By arguing that the distinction between the “existence” of sensible things and their “being perceived” cannot carry the ontological significance philosophical materialists require, Berkeley directed his challenge to materialism not at the adequacy of its grounds but at the very intelligibility of the double existence thesis itself. If successful, it means that the sole remaining sense of ‘exists’ applicable to sensible things is the vulgar single existence view. To be sure, Berkeley’s own single existence view remains radically opposed to the “opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects have an existence natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding” (PHK I §4). To which the natural objection is: if such an existence were really inconceivable, how could this opinion be had by anyone at all, much less prevail among men? And Berkeley’s answer, as we have seen, is that such ways of talking find their foundation not in ideas but in the significative uses to which they


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are put, above all to indifferently denote things that resemble them in appearance or in the relational respects such as those specified at V §128 and VV §39 (cited in chapter 10-C). And just as science takes its start from vulgar conceptions of objective reality, it too supervenes not on ideas as such but on their significative uses, artfully developed thanks, above all, to innovative mathematical notation. How then did Berkeley respond to the objection that, on his view, when the gardener, his dog, or anyone else imagines sensible things to exist unperceived, what they imagine is false, sheer fantasy? Since this is essentially the same objection Locke raised in connection with his own theory of human understanding (see ECHU IV/iv/§1), it is instructive to compare their responses. In order to distinguish genuine (real and true) knowledge from the chimeras of madmen and the reveries of Cartesian dreamers, Locke argued that sensible objects, by contrast with all other ideas, have external archetypes (chapter 9-A). To sustain this claim against the skeptical objection that sensible objects might exist nowhere outside our dreams, Locke maintained that we have sensitive knowledge of the difference between sensation and thought (memory or imagination). If we consider just the fact of sensations’ presence in us, irrespective of their diverse contents, the difference between the actual presence of something in sense and its mere repetition in memory or imagination is immediate, unmistakable, and not open to skeptical challenge. Locke dealt with the possibility that some other, perhaps unknown faculty of the mind may be responsible for the presence of sensations in us (Descartes’s radicalization of dream skepticism in the Third Meditation) by contending that the sensory provenance of sensations is known with a certainty that brooks no skeptical contradiction. Since the same is true of our knowledge that the senses are not active faculties but passive capacities, Locke deemed it a case of knowledge, rather than probability, that the cause of our ideas of sensation is distinct from (external to and independent of) of our minds. Nevertheless, he stopped short of claiming that we have knowledge—intuitive, demonstrative, or sensitive—that these external causes are material substances (chapter 9-B). Berkeley gives every indication of agreeing with Locke’s strategy of using the manifest difference between the presence of something in actual sensation and its repetition in memory or imagination to respond to the challenge of Cartesian dream skepticism.8 He diverged from Locke only at the final stage, substituting for a material external cause a spiritual one, claiming in addition that it can be known with perfect certainty to be God (by means of traditional cosmological and teleological considerations adapted to the context of his idealism: PHK I §§ 146–50). Far more importantly, however, Berkeley also applied the answer Locke developed in response to Cartesian dream skepticism to another question entirely: “what is meant by the term exist when applied to sensible things”? This is a question Locke descried only vaguely, if at all, but its posing and answering are undoubtedly among Berkeley’s most significant contributions to sensibilist theory of understanding, as he himself was well aware: “tis on the Discovering of the nature & 8. That Berkeley was cognizant of Locke’s discussion of sensitive knowledge is suggested by the similar parallels he draws between real versus dreamed fire and real versus dreamed pain in PHK I §41: see ECHU IV/ii/§14 and xi/§7.

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meaning & import of Existence that I chiefly insist . . . Let it not be said that I take away Existence. I onely declare the meaning of the Word so far as I can comprehend it” (C 491 and 593). As we have seen, Berkeley’s explication of “exist” (as applied to sensible things) focuses on sensation in just the same way Locke did in his treatment of sensitive knowledge: only the fact of its presence, not its qualitative content, concerned him. At the heart of both their concerns was the distinction between sensing, on the one hand, and merely remembering or imagining, on the other. It was a point of crucial importance for both philosophers that the difference between the presence of a content in sensation and its presence in thought (memory or imagination) is as immediately evident and unmistakable as the difference between one content and another (the taste of fudge vs. the taste of guava). More particularly, in the same, purely passive way our senses are affected with sensible appearances—colors, odors, sounds, feels, flavors, etc.—the presence of these same sensations acquaints us with the modality of actual existence (real being, reality) as well, in distinction from the modalities of possible existence proper to memory and imagination, whether as past existence that may or may not continue into the present, presently existing but unsensed sensible objects, conceptions without belief such as hypothetical suppositions, or fictions (chapter 9-B). However, it was Berkeley alone, equipped with the antiabstractionist separability principle, who saw how this distinction could not only reveal the meaning of real existence or actuality as applied to sensible things but restrict it as well. Declaring that “I might as easily divide a thing from it self” as “distinguish the existence of sensible objects from their being perceived, so as to conceive them existing unperceived” (PHK I §5), Berkeley considered presence to consciousness in sensation not merely the origin of the idea of ‘existence’ we apply to sensible things but an essential element of its meaning, such that, upon its removal, the idea would be deprived of precisely that which it contributes to our thought: the difference in modality between actual, or real, existence, and merely possible (fancied) existence. If conceiving a sensible thing as existent means attributing to it a modality that sensation alone enables us to conceive, then the only way one could conceive things like houses, trees, or our own body to have an existence distinct from the sense perceptions of a mind would be by conceiving sensations themselves to be capable of existing unperceived. Since, for Berkeley, the impossibility of the latter is ensured by the separability principle (Kant had a different view),9 the former has to be deemed impossible as well. But what most particularly distinguishes Berkeley’s esse is percipi idealism from any previous variety of idealism is that the impossibility concerned is neither ontological nor epistemological, but psychological. We require no special analytical or cognitive insight into the imperceptible essence of sensible objects or anything else, merely an acquaintance with our own 9. Because Kant deemed imagination a necessary ingredient in perception itself (A120n) but not in sensation, sensation, in his system, affords a concept of existence distinct from that proper to perceiving—one that even proves adequate to conceive the existence of things in themselves (A143/B182). In volume II I will examine these and other facets of Kant’s empirical realism; the interested reader may wish to consult an earlier treatment of the topic, “Kant’s Refutation of Berkeleyan Idealism,” in Idealismus als Theorie der Repräsentation? (Paderborn: mentis Verlag GmbH, 2000).


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ideas together with a cognizance of the inseparability of the distinctive contribution of sensation (over and above memory and imagination) from our conception of their mode of existence (actuality, real existence). Without sensation, the only mode of existence things could be conceived to have would be that characteristic of dreaming. With it, we are acquainted with a mode of existing so evidently distinct from imagining that the difference cannot fail to be discerned (so long as our discerning faculty is in optimal working order—as Berkeley would be the first to admit, it is not when we are asleep, drugged, or in comparably impaired states). The fact of sensation in us—the presence of trees, houses, our own bodies, etc., to consciousness in sensation—is thus, for Berkeley, the sole and entire content of the idea of existence we incorporate, or presuppose, in every concept we relate to the external world. Idealism follows from this as a matter of course. For if we really have no concept of existence to apply to sensible things that is not ineluctably bound up with sensation and its perception, then, however vehemently we may deny it with our lips, our minds are through and through idealist. Nothing else is even intelligible to us; we could not renounce it even if we would; and so, faute de mieux, we have no choice but to adhere to its prescriptions continuously, throughout our mental lives. This certainly is what underlay Berkeley’s conviction that he was on the side of the mob, the first in history to give verbal expression to the previously voiceless human mind. The only reason it is not immediately obvious to us that idealism is the only possibility in play (materialism being “perfectly unintelligible” because “a manifest contradiction,” PHK I §6 and §4) is our failure to free our ideas from “all that dress and encumbrance of words which so much contribute to blind the judgment and divide the attention” (PHK Intro. §24) and “take them bare and naked into [our] view” (§21). And if despite this we persist in maintaining that being unable to form an idea of a thing is no argument against its existence, Berkeley had the following reply on offer: “I will not indeed thence conclude against the reality of any notion, or existence of anything: but my inference shall be, that you mean nothing at all: that you employ words to no manner of purpose, without any design or signification whatsoever. And I leave it to you to consider how mere jargon should be treated” (2D223). At this point it should be clear that Berkeley’s esse is percipi idealism slots perfectly into the mold of psychologistic explication described in chapters 1–3: (1) it traces the concepts of existence we apply to sensible things back to the origin of an idea in the mind; (2) it shows that this origin contributes something—presence to consciousness in sensation—indispensable to the meaning of the idea; and so (3) it restricts the ontological scope of every denotation incorporating or presupposing that meaning in accordance with the origin of the idea. The second step is of course dependent on the separability principle, since otherwise we could suppose that the semantic distinctness between esse and percipi carries over to the idea of existence considered absolutely and in itself, so that sensible things might in reality, as well as in language, be conceived to exist independently of their being perceived. Given this principle, however, one can have no difficulty recognizing in esse is percipi idealism nothing more than a particular application of a general method of explicating concepts in terms of their origins as ideas in the mind: if

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whenever the mind contributes something essential to the content of an idea the scope of application of any concept into which that idea enters is ipso facto confined to mind-dependent objects, then, given the separability principle, any concept into which the idea of existence we derive from sense perception enters can be intelligibly applied to nothing other than other sense perceptions (“Let it not be said that I take away Existence. I onely declare the meaning of the Word so far as I can comprehend it,” C 593). This psychologistic idealism is unquestionably something quite new in philosophy; and no attempt to refute it on its own terms can possibly succeed without providing a psychologistic explication of a concept of existence applicable to sensible things that can, in accordance with the criterion of distinctness laid down in the separability principle, be employed to conceive them to exist unperceived. It thus stands as an enduring challenge to the intelligibility of any materialism for which a merely semantic distinctness between esse and percipi is not enough, and nothing less than a mind-independent existence conceivable prior to and independently of any and all significative uses to which ideas are put will do. D. Interpreting Berkeleyan Idealism If my interpretation of Berkeleyan idealism up to this point is correct, then it should now be clear where other attempts go aground: 1. By not taking Berkeley at his word when he declares his intention, and ability, to draw the curtain of words and consider ideas “bare and naked.” This should not be trivialized by construing it as applying merely to vocalization and gesture. Taking Berkeley at his word means the elimination of everything that pertains to language as language, including the entire logicogrammatical framework of propositional representation: syntax, semantics, quantification, etc. For Berkeley, the latter all have to do with ideas not considered absolutely and in themselves, but rather in their role in suggestive signification, which, the more general the term, depends on ever more myriad, multiply complex relations of resemblance, as well as on notational schemes and other irreducibly linguistic devices. 2. By not appreciating that the separability principle and aspect discrimination are incompatible. This is important because, whereas the former pervades Berkeley’s idealism, the latter plays no role in it at all. 3. By not realizing how to amend Berkeley’s misrepresentation of Locke, that is, the need to substitute ‘indifferent denotation’ (significative uses of ideas) for ‘abstract idea’ (Cartesian objective realities, Lockean aspects) whenever the separability principle is in play in Berkeley’s reasoning. Moreover, we do Berkeley no favor by correcting for his misunderstanding of Locke without also correcting for the resulting skewing of his presentation; for only by so doing can we hope to comprehend the innumerable applications of his antiabstractionist separability principle correctly. 4. By not recognizing that Berkeley’s explication of ‘existence’ as applied to sensible things concerns the difference between sensation/perception and


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imagination/conception, not a sense of ‘existence’ applicable to sensations, memories, and fancies indifferently. 5. And, most important of all, by failing to comprehend Berkeley’s esse is percipi idealism as a perfect fit to the model of psychologistic explication. A review of the literature suggests that these errors form a sequence: whether by commission or omission, the first tends to lead to the second, the second to the third, the third to the fourth, and the fourth to the fifth. To illustrate this, I shall conclude this chapter by considering the approach adopted by one of Berkeley’s finest commentators, Anthony Grayling. I have already remarked that Grayling does not take Berkeley at his word when it comes to drawing the curtain of language (chapter 10-B). Error 2 generally takes the form of an omission in Grayling (though an exception will shortly be noted), but this was still enough to prevent him from apprehending the separability principle with sufficient clarity and precision to avoid committing error 3: Berkeley’s contention that the abstract concept of existence is a purely philosophical fiction which has no place in ordinary thought and talk, in which to say that something exists is no more than to say it can be met with, that is, that it can be perceived; it is not something additional to or besides perceivability, and could only ever have have come to be thought so as a result of illegitimate abstraction.10

When Berkeley rejected abstract ideas of the kind genuinely to be found in Locke (aspects), he did not thereby dispense with intermediaries between ideas and words; he simply replaced abstract ideas with indifferent denotations. Yet here Grayling seems to treat Berkeley’s esse is percipi idealism as an explication of the meaning of the concept of existence employed in ordinary discourse, with the implication that Berkeley saw high ontological stakes at play at the level of sentential representation. This seems to me mistaken. The ordinary concept of existence employed in sentential representation is supported not by the idea of existence derived from the modality of sensation (the presence of a thing to consciousness in sensation) but by its significative use to denote indifferently. As such, it is entirely innocent of any connotations of being actually perceived or even of perceivability (except in 10. Arguments, 90–1. Grayling, following Luce, thinks that perceivability is as much a part of esse is percipi idealism as actual perceiving. Although Berkeley does employ a counterfactual in PHK I §3, I do not think this is because he means to account for the use in hypothetical contexts, but rather to indicate that the idea of existence we have derives from sensation, so that even when we imagine something to exist we are simply reproducing in thought an idea of existence that is inseparable from actual sensation and perception. Be this as it may, Berkeley recognized that language is indifferent to the limits of ideation (which are not a high priority on the vulgar agenda), so that we are quite free to use the idea of existence we derive from actual sensations to denote all existing things independently of any reference to perceivers and their powers (perceptibility). Thus, an awareness of the fundamental importance for Berkeley of the distinction between ideas (ontology) and their significative uses (semantics) obviates the need for arcane dispositionalist construals of his idealism (though such notions do have relevance to Berkeley’s notion of sense-divide transcending objects of experience, since these consist not merely of ideas but of their signifying relations in the “language of nature” as well: see chapter 14).

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contexts specifically relating to mental life, as in the sentence, “Since your pain exists only in your mind, you can affect it, even make it go away, by an exercise of will”). By failing to distinguish the indifferent denotation of the idea from the idea, Grayling thus left himself no option but to interpret Berkeley as having supposed that the idea itself, directly and of itself, establishes the meaning of the concept of existence employed in vernacular sentential representation, with the implication that philosophical truth (an implicit reference to perceivability) as Berkeley saw it is, at some level, embedded in our ordinary discourse about the external world. By contrast, when ideas and their indifferent denotations are properly distinguished, ordinary sentential representation emerges as ontologically neutral: it conveys no information, and implies nothing whatsoever, about the existence or nature of the objects that greet our senses (chapter 10-D). What alone can be deemed ontologically significant are ideas considered absolutely and in themselves, without regard to the indifferent denotations on which ordinary language supervenes. Had Grayling fully appreciated why Berkeley found no fault with vernacular distinctions between things existing and being perceived, he might not have been led to overlook the importance of the origin of the idea of existence we apply to sensible objects to Berkeley’s account of its meaning. As a result, he passed over the modal distinction Berkeley drew between sensation on the one hand, and memory and imagination on the other, that lies at the heart of Berkeley’s esse is percipi idealism (error 4). Instead, Grayling frames Berkeley’s question of the meaning of ‘existence’ in terms of Fregean logico-linguistic apparatus, with roots in the Kantian thesis—which neither Kant nor, so far as I am aware, anyone else has supposed to bear on the question of idealism—that existence is not a (real) predicate. The concept of existence that emerges is instead purely formal, with no intrinsic limitation on its scope of application (error 5): That it is meaningless or contradictory to abstract the concept of existence from the concept of what can be perceived results from the fact that what is perceivable is what is extended, coloured, textured and so on—that is, something propertied, indeed which is the sum of its properties, and hence encounterable in perception, whereas a thing which is without properties is nothing, a ‘nonentity’ (P68). This is the respect in which EP [esse is percipi] is the obverse of the coin whose reverse is the denial of matter . . . In Berkeley’s terminology, one would say: one cannot conceive x without conceiving of it as existing, any more than one can conceive of an existence which is not the existence of something. The case is similar, in Berkeley’s view, when we say that something is coloured, or that something moving has a direction where what would be genuinely informative (assertions about particular colours or directions) is not at issue. One mark of the unabstractability of extension and colour, or motion and direction, is the special kind of pointlessness in saying that extensions are coloured or that movements are directional; the same applies to perceivability and existence. The same basic insight connects Berkeley’s claim with the claims of Kant and Hume on this head. . . . The formulations ‘“exists” is not a predicate’ and ‘existence is not a property’ are not of course employed by Berkeley and Hume, but the assertion that what exists is neither more nor less than what is encoun-


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terable in experience—that is, is nothing detachable from or additional to what makes an object encounterable in experience—amounts precisely to that.11

Surely, if ‘existence’ applies to all and only propertied things, and ‘nonexistence’ only to things devoid of properties, then not only is the term ‘exists’ applied univocally and so too indifferently to objects of sense and imagination (objects encounterable in experience), but there is nothing to prevent us from extending it also to spirits (for they too are met with in experience) and even to beings of some third kind, different from ideas and spirits alike.12 It could thus not be father from the sense of existence applicable uniquely to sensible objects explicated psychologistically in PHK I §§3–5. In fact, the one thing that Berkeley would have never considered propertybearer are ideas stripped of all suggestive signification. For, as we shall see in chapter 14, the sense-divide transcending objects of ordinary experience—apples, horses, mountains, et al—are not representable apart from the language of vision whereby the aspatial ideas perceived by that sense take on spatial meaning by virtue of their suggestive signification in respect to genuinely spatial tactual ideas, and the extension of that language to the ideas of all the senses and even to notions of substance and causality as well. Insofar as propertied individuals enter into our experience, it is an experience our understandings themselves constitute, and it has no meaning or application to ideas of sensation as they exist prior to and independently of its fictitious sense-divide transcending objects. To suppose otherwise is to saddle Berkeley with ideational abstractions (aspects, distinctions of reason), instead of the merely semantic abstractions he could reconcile with his separability principle (error 2). Indifferent denotation avoids this problem precisely because it does not require us to suppose that ideas are, or have, properties; it presupposes only their distinctness in the sense defined by the separability principle.13 In particular, the resemblances on which indifferent denotation depends are not relations the related ideas themselves have but what the perceiving mind finds in them by means of acts of comparison; for, as with all relations, resembling ideas “may be perceived by us without our perceiving [their relation]” ( PHK I §89) (error 3). Pace Grayling, in order to conceive an idea as existent, it is thus neither necessary nor sufficient to regard it as a property or property-bearer (error 4). The necessary and sufficient condition for this is simply its presence to consciousness in sensation, including the individual, isolated sensations (of flavor, look, feel, smell, and sound), prior to and independently of their being bundled together in 11. Grayling, Arguments, 91–2. 12. As remarked in not 3 earlier, Berkeley did not deny the possibility of beings other than ideas and spirits. 13. Grayling attributes to Berkeley the view that “a thing which is without properties is nothing, a ‘nonentity’” on the basis of PHK I §68. But this text says no such thing. What is characterized as a nonentity there is the conception of material substance “made up of negatives, excepting only the relative notion of its standing under or supporting: but then it must be observed, that it supports nothing at all.” This has nothing to do with ideas as they are in themselves and absolutely, that is, when considered as they are prior to and independently of all suggestive signification: things with no properties, no relations, no aspects.

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imagination to form such complex unities as that we term ‘apple.’ A creature thus does not need to conceive the objects of the senses as properties or propertybearers, much less to be able to quantify over them existentially. The only ability it needs in order to attribute the modality of real existence to any idea present to it in sensation rather than in memory or imagination is a faculty of discernment, operating conformably to the separability principle, to enable it to pick out ideas and distinguish them from others. Having done this, it can use the idea to form a general yet ideationally nonabstract concept of existence simply by employing it as a basis of comparison for segregating in thought (indifferently denoting) all and only those ideas that resemble it by virtue of their presence in sensation rather than memory or imagination. All this is possible solely by psychological means so primitive that they may be presumed to fall within the capacities of animal minds. Thus, any attempt such as Grayling’s to elevate Berkeley’s esse is percipi idealism from the psychological plane to the plane of complex sentential representation of the kind describable by post-Fregean logic or Chomskyan generative grammar seems wholly misconceived. As it happens, Grayling was right to relate Berkeley’s determination of the meaning of existence to Hume, but the relevant discussion, as will emerge in part III, is not the conception of existence analyzed in THN I/ii/§6 (applicable to idle imaginings and sense perceptions alike), but rather the psychologistic explication in THN I/iii§§6–10 of real existence (the modality of actuality) in terms not of anything copied from impressions of sensation but the forceful, vivacious manner in which an idea is conceived by the imagination (chapter 17-C). This was Hume’s refinement of Berkeley’s analysis of actuality in terms of sensation and its perception, and although it applies to sense impressions themselves (chapter 16-A), its principal virtue is to explain something Berkeley seems to have overlooked: how we come to conceive contents present to us only in thought as having the value of actual existents that happen not to be present to our senses (for example, the fire I believe to exist in the corridor because I see smoke pouring through the transom of the room I am in). Kant too is relevant, but not his discussion of existence as a predicate in connection with the ontological argument. We must instead look to Kant’s consideration of sensation in the Transcendental Aesthetic, the sensible realization of the category of reality in the Schematism (“that in the objects which corresponds to sensation is the transcendental matter of all objects as things in themselves,” A143/B182), and, above all, the Second Postulate of Empirical Thought (“whatever is connected with the material conditions of experience (sensation) is actual,” A218/B266): these, as we shall see in the next volume, are the texts in which Kant transformed Berkeley’s empirical idealism into empirical realism.14

14. Indirect realism can be viewed as a backhanded admission that Berkeley was correct to maintain that the fact (actual presence) of sensation is central to the meaning of the concept of existence in application to sensible things. For if something can never, either directly or indirectly, give rise to sensation, if the possibility of causing affection in sensation did not exist for it, this would be tantamount to an admission that it has no corporeal existence at all. Kant replicated this insight in his Second Postulate of Empirical Thought, and it is part and parcel of the concept of determinate spatio-temporally existence at the focus of the three Analogies of Experience.

12 Objective Understanding Dismantled

With esse is percipi idealism established, Berkeley devoted most of the remainder of the expository sections of Principles I (through §33) to the task of applying the separability principle to the central doctrines of the then reigning theories of objective understanding, and, in the process, demolishing them. Although Berkeley’s critique focused principally on Locke, he was clearly of the view that no previous theory of objective understanding had escaped the taint of attaching ontological worth to distinctions whose only value is semantic.1 In this chapter, we will first consider Berkeley’s use of the likeness principle to undermine the foundations of indirect realism (cf. chapters 5-D-2 and 7-D). Next, we will examine his use of the separability principle to prove that all ideas of sensation are ideas of secondary qualities (cf. chapter 7-D). Finally, we turn to Berkeley’s coup de grace: his threepronged critique of early modern conceptions of substance (cf. chapters 5-C and 7-C). A. The Likeness Principle The Likeness Principle is the thesis that “an idea can be like nothing but an idea” (PHK I §8). Berkeley placed great stock in this principle as a means of bringing out what he regarded as the contradiction inherent in the double existence views of the learned (indirect realism). If, on the one hand, we say that our ideas represent mind-independent things by resembling them in respect of such sense-perceptible features as shape, size, and motion, then, in order to conceive them as differing in their manner of existence (mind-independent vs. mind-dependent), we would need to be able to conceive shape, size, and motion to exist independently of their being perceived. But since our only idea of real (nonfictive, extraimaginational) existence is inseparable from their presence to consciousness in sensation (except in an ontologically neutral semantic sense), we lack the means to conceive shape, size, motion, or any other sensible quality to exist otherwise than as a sense perception (idea).2 If, on the other hand, we suppose that the mind-independent objects rep1. See chapter 10, note 5. 2. That Berkeley was thinking in terms of the limits he established for the concept of existence we apply to sensible things in the sections immediately preceding is confirmed by his use of the likeness

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resented by our ideas are by nature impossible to perceive (incapable of presenting themselves in sensation), then we are committed to saying, for example, that visible and tangible figures are like invisible, intangible figures. However, since the separability principle precludes the possibility of forming an idea of figure in isolation from all distinctively visible and tangible qualities (light, color, solidity, hardness/softness, etc.), we can no longer mean anything by our talk of “figure” here, and we are reduced to the patently nonsensical claim that visible and tangible figure are like something unfigured.3 Thus, “If we look but ever so little into our thoughts, we shall find it impossible for us to conceive a likeness except only between our ideas” (PHK I §8). Although pretty evident of itself, Berkeley left no doubt that the likeness principle is simply a variant of the appearance = reality principle, fortified by esse is percipi idealism: PHILONOUS: But how can that which is sensible be like that which is insensible? Can a real thing in itself invisible be like a colour; or a real thing which is not audible, be like a sound? In a word, can anything be like a sensation or idea, but another sensation or idea? HYLAS: I must own, I think not . . . I know them perfectly; since what I do not perceive or know, can be no part of my idea. PHILONOUS: Consider therefore, and examine them, and then tell me if there be anything in them which can exist without the mind: or if you can conceive anything like them existing without the mind. HYLAS: Upon inquiry, I find it is impossible for me to conceive or understand how anything but an idea can be like an idea. And it is most evident, that no idea can exist without the mind. (1D206)

Because every idea appears in every respect what it is and is what it is appears, and because their being is indistinguishable from their being perceived, ideas cannot be like anything except what exists only in being perceived, that is, another idea. If this is not obvious to everyone, it is only because they have let semantics occlude principle in PHK I §22: “I am content to put the whole upon this issue; if you can but conceive it possible for one extended moveable substance, or in general, for any one idea or any thing like an idea, to exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving it, I shall readily give up the cause.” Also §137: “That an idea which is inactive, and the existence whereof consists in being perceived, should be the image or likeness of an agent subsisting by it self, seems to need no other refutation, than barely attending to what is meant by those words.” 3. That this is what Berkeley had in mind seems clear from the fact that this argument led him directly into his antiabstractionist treatment of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities (§§ 9–14). This distinction was important to Locke and others since it supposedly enables us to conceive material (solid, extended) substances without having to ascribe to them light and color (i.e. features necessary for vision, implying they are invisible), distinctively tactual features such as soft-or-hard, wetor-dry, and smooth-or-rough (i.e., features necessary for touch, implying they are intangible), or any other sensible qualities that they adjudged to be essentially bound up with the constitution of a particular capacity of sense perception. It thus seems clear that the nonsense Berkeley had in mind in §8 when he asserted it cannot “be sense, to assert a colour is like something which is invisible; hard or soft, like something which is intangible; and so of the rest,” is the sort that premises our possession of abstract ideas of the kind exemplified by the distinction between primary and secondary sensible qualities. See also C 51 and 378 (16–8).

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their reason. For the moment we lift the veil of words, the separability principle confers on the likeness principle the same ontological significance it confers on the appearance = reality principle (chapter 11-A): the qualitative being of an idea and its existential being are indissolubly one; and since the latter is indissolubly one with its sensible appearance, and this in turn with its being perceived, the former can be like nothing except that the esse of which is percipi. The likeness principle thus draws its force from the esse is percipi, the first and most fundamental application of the separability principle; and once this is recognized, the objections Berkeley’s unprecedented use of the likeness principle has raised in the minds of so many readers must either be dropped or redirected to the argument from which it derives its warrant. It is important to recognize that Berkeley did not unqualifiedly deny the existence, and a fortiori the possibility, of resemblances between ideas and things that are not ideas. What he rejected was the conceivability of a resemblance, by means of the conceptions at our disposal (existence, resemblance, relation), between things that are and things that are not ideas. For had he not limited the scope of the likeness principle in this way, Berkeley would have left himself open to an objection along the following lines. To accommodate our intuitions that sensible things continue to exist even when no one is there to perceive them, yet to do so without compromising their status as ideas, Berkeley suggested that the omniscient mind of God continues to perceive them even when no finite mind does (PHK I §§ 6, 48, 3D230–1, 250–2). Yet when pressed, he conceded that no two minds have numerically the same ideas, including God’s mind and his own (3D247–8 and PHK I §90). This poses no problem insofar as the likeness principle allows ideas to be like other ideas. But a problem does arise insofar as the mind of God, being incommensurate with finite minds like ours, does not cognize any of its objects by means of ideas of sensation: We who are limited and dependent spirits, are liable to impressions of sense, the effects of an external agent, which being produced against our wills, are sometimes painful and uneasy. But God, whom no external being can affect, who perceives nothing by sense as we do, whose will is absolute and independent, causing all things, and liable to be thwarted or resisted by nothing; it is evident, such a being as this can suffer nothing, nor be affected with any painful sensation, or indeed any sensations at all . . . To know everything knowable is certainly a perfection; but to endure, or suffer, or feel anything by sense, is an imperfection. The former, I say, agrees to God, but not the latter. God knows, or hath ideas; but his ideas are not conveyed to him by sense, as ours are. (3D240–1)

If God has no sensations, how can divine ideas bear the least resemblance to ours, when, according to Berkeley, ours consist wholly of sensations, even including our idea of the real existence of sensible things? Indeed, when Berkeley asserts that “God May comprehend all Ideas even the Ideas which are painfull & unpleasant without being in any degree pained thereby” (C 675), he might seem to be indulging in precisely the kind of abstraction he remonstrated against so strongly when other philosophers indulged in it. As Locke emphasized in his discussion of sensitive knowledge, the sensation of pain is not the same as the idea of pain in

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imagination: “He that sees a Fire, may, if he doubt whether it be any thing more than a bare Fancy, feel it too; and be convinced, by putting his Hand in it. Which certainly could never be put into such exquisite pain, by a bare Idea or Phantom.” (ECHU IV/xi/§7) So how, save by means of some impossible abstraction, could God know the sensation a human gets when his body is being consumed by flames without ever undergoing the same “exquisite pain”? And how could such an abstraction be possible for God if, according to Berkeley, it “is a manifest repugnancy” (PHK I §23)? For Berkeley to aver that books locked away in the cabinet continue to exist insofar as God (nonsensibly) perceives them seems to require abstract ideas of existence and perception (separated from sensation) of precisely the kind that led him to excoriate materialism. It appears, then, that Berkeley must, in the end, choose between his theology and his idealism. Or perhaps not. For whereas materialists propose to employ the very same notions of existence and perception in the framing of their theory that the vulgar have from sensation, the understanding of an omniscient, omnipotent being must possess notions of a kind wholly incommensurate with those present to human minds, philosophical and vulgar alike. Berkeley’s likeness principle, like separability and all his other principles, are best regarded as principles strictly of human knowledge, not divine. Whether, as a human, one has the means to make sense of a claim like “the books continue to exist even after I have locked them away in the cabinet because God perceives them” is a genuine question (one I will take up in chapter 15-D), but is different from the question of what Berkeley’s likeness principle does or does not entitle him to say regarding human understanding. And Berkeley, more than is often recognized, was well within his separability principle rights to reject claims that we have it in our finite conceptual power to form the idea of something existing mind-independently that resembles objects of the senses (“A man cannot compare 2 things together without perceiving each of them, ergo he cannot say any thing which is not an idea is like or unlike an idea,” C 51; also 378 ## 16–8). Equally important to appreciate is what the likeness principle does not rule out. Our ideas change continuously, with every blink of the eyes, movement of the head, change of location, shift of glance, new focus of attention, sudden recollection, etc. But it is natural to imagine that nothing around us need change because of any change in our perceptions: the objects I see, for instance, have not changed and popped out of existence simply because I stood up and rubbed my eyes. So far as Berkeley was concerned, it is altogether normal and natural for our understandings to distinguish sensible objects from how they appear to us—so long as we do not suppose that the ideas of such unchanging objects furnish us with a model whereby to fashion a positive notion of mind-independently existent objects that also do not change as our perceptions change. For the unchanging objects of sense experience are nothing more or less than the result of integrating the objects of sight and the other senses with the properly spatial objects of touch, the unity of which exists only in and through the understanding (chapter 14). Prior to and independently of the fictitious unity conferred on them by the understanding, however, all ideas are separate, void of all relation, exist only in being perceived, and then only fleetingly in the present instant of perception. They therefore can be like nothing but other ideas.


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B. All Sensible Qualities Are Ideas of Secondary Qualities Vulgar understanding segregates pleasures and pains from the other appearances of bodies by according them real existence only insofar as they are actually perceived (present to consciousness in sensation); all other appearances are supposed to be qualities of the bodies themselves, and are accorded the same mind-independent existence they are. Learned materialists, by contrast, motivated by the constraints on our conceptions of corporeal being implicit in mechanical principles, attribute an existence distinct from (outside and independent of) minds only to the figure, bulk, motion, and solidity of bodies, but not to their colors, tastes, smells, sounds, and other “ideas of secondary qualities.” Berkeley offered a variety of arguments aimed at showing that none of these distinctions can meet the test of the separability principle, whereby alone they may be accorded ontological, rather than merely semantic, worth. When the question of the distinction between ideas of primary and ideas of secondary qualities is framed in terms of conformity to the separability principle, its failure is a foregone conclusion: I desire any one to reflect and try, whether he can by any abstraction of thought, conceive the extension and motion of a body, without all other sensible qualities. For my own part, I see evidently that it is not in my power to frame an idea of a body extended and moved, but I must withal give it some colour or other sensible quality which is acknowledged to exist only in the mind. In short, extension, figure, and motion abstracted from all qualities, are inconceivable. Where therefore the other sensible qualities are, there must these be also, to wit, in the mind and no where else. (PHK I §10)

If “those original qualities are inseparably united with the other sensible qualities, and not, even in thought, capable of being abstracted from them” (§10), then their ontological status cannot differ: primary and secondary qualities must both be capable of a distinct existence from minds, or neither: “this method of arguing doth not so much prove that there is no extension or [motion] in an outward object, as that we do not know by sense which is the true extension or [motion] of the object” (PHK I §15).4 This separability-principle-based parity means that all the grounds philosophers have adduced since ancient times to deny the distinct existence of colors, tastes, smells, etc., ipso facto become arguments for denying distinct existence to the spatial and numerical properties of corporeal objects as well: 4. I have substituted ‘motion’ for ‘colour’ because in PHK I §14 he asserts that what has just been shown of extension, motion, number, and unity “may be likewise proved of all other sensible qualities.” Alan and David Hausman read PHK I §15 as proving that Berkeley eschews the preceding relativity arguments for idealism. “A New Approach to Berkeley’s Ideal Reality,” in Berkeley’s Metaphysics. Structural, Interpretive, and Critical Essays, ed. Robert G. Muehlmann (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 54. However, as will become clear shortly, Berkeley’s comment on his method of arguing is more plausibly construed as an acknowledgment of the difference between what perceptual relativity arguments show in and of themselves and their role within a larger structure of reasoning intended to undermine the distinctions among sensible qualities that materialists purport to make.

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“after the same manner, as modern philosophers prove certain sensible qualities to have no existence in matter, or without the mind, the same thing may be likewise proved of all other sensible qualities whatsoever” (§14). Of course, the converse applies as well: whatever arguments can be given for attributing a distinct existence to the spatial and numerical features of bodies are ipso facto arguments for attributing a distinct existence to colors, tastes, and the other “secondary” qualities as well. Are there any arguments of this kind? Berkeley thought not. A problem to which he frequently returned is perceptual relativity: great and small, swift and slow, are allowed to exist no where without the mind, being entirely relative, and changing as the frame or position of the organs of sense varies. The extension therefore which exists without the mind, is neither great nor small, the motion neither swift nor slow, that is, they are nothing at all. But say you, they are extension in general, and motion in general: thus we see how much the tenet of extended, moveable substances existing without the mind, depends on that strange doctrine of abstract ideas. (PHK I §11)

Motion, as traditionally conceived, is the mode of action proper to corporeal substances, and everything attributable to the constitution of bodies must be in some way related to the capacity to move, be moved, or change of state with respect to motion (acceleration, etc.). Motion, however, is observer-relative: what is at rest from one standpoint is in movement from another; what is accelerating in one frame of reference may be decelerating in another; what is rapid in comparison to one thing is slow in comparison to another; and what has traversed a vast space by one measure will have hardly moved at all by another. To avoid attributing contradictory predicates to bodies, materialists treat these features of their motions as observer-relative, with no existence distinct from minds. But can a distinction between observer-relative and observer-independent motion be applied to ideas under the separability principle? To attribute to bodies a species of motion that, by definition, cannot be observed is ipso facto to leave ideas of motion behind and to supplant them with a generalized, abstract notion, with only semantic, not ontological, worth. The same reasoning applies to extension that is neither great nor small: if these features are observer-relative, then the extension in question is not an idea but the indifferent denotation of an idea; for, in idea, greatness or smallness are indissolubly one with extension. Consequently, if great and small, swift and slow, near and far, and other sensible qualities (such as the water in the bucket that is warm to one hand and cold to the other—1D189) cannot be conceived to exist separately from observing minds, then, by virtue of the separability principle, the same must be true of extension and motion. And if this is so, it must likewise be true of solidity, since “Without extension solidity cannot be conceived; since therefore it has been shewn that extension exists not in an unthinking substance, the same must also be true of solidity” (§11; also 1D191). Because Berkeley admitted that reasoning of the foregoing kind suffices only to establish parity between ideas of primary and secondary qualities, the option exists of accepting the parity claim by according to great and small, swift and slow, etc., the same distinct existence that pertains to extension and motion. For


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example, in order to avoid attributing incompatible predicates of extension and motion to the same observed object, one might utilize natural constants such as the period of rotation of the earth to fix standard units whereby to measure the “true”— standpoint-independent—extension and motion of objects. Of course, in order to “abstract” from the peculiarities of individual standpoints in this way, Berkeley would insist that we have shifted from ideas considered absolutely and positively in themselves to reckoning in terms of their indifferent denotations. So long as this is acknowledged, he would have no difficulty granting that objective standards and the measures that result from them may properly be spoken of as having an existence distinct from (independent of) each individual observing mind. But if construed ontologically, he would straightaway have recourse to “the arguments foregoing”—showing that the esse of sensible things is percipi and that such things can only resemble or represent things whose esse is also percipi—which “plainly shew it to be impossible that any colour or extension at all, or other sensible quality whatsoever, should exist in an unthinking subject without the mind, or in truth, that there should be any such thing as an outward object” (§15). Some commentators have suggested that Berkeley abandoned his modest pretension in the Principles to have demonstrated only ontological parity when he came to write the First Dialogue between Hylas and Philonous.5 Yet this claim seems suspect in the light of the following: Since therefore it is impossible even for the mind to disunite the ideas of extension and motion from all other sensible qualities, doth it not follow, that where the one exist, there necessarily the other exist likewise?.. [T]he very same arguments which you admitted, as conclusive against the secondary qualities, are without any further application of force against the primary too. (1D194)

Clearly, Berkeley was well aware that only parity follows from this type of reasoning. Where the Dialogues differ from the Principles in their treatments of the distinction between ideas of primary and secondary qualities is that, instead of plunging directly into the distinction into question, Berkeley approached it via a preliminary application of the same reasoning to the vulgar distinction between ideas of secondary qualities and ideas of pains and pleasures. He began by noting that intense degrees of sensations such as heat are indissolubly blended with pain, and so inseparable from it: Seeing therefore they are both immediately perceived at the same time, and the fire affects you only with one simple, or uncompounded idea, it follows that this same simple idea is both the intense heat immediately perceived, and the pain; and consequently, that the intense heat immediately perceived, is nothing distinct from a particular sort of pain. (1D176)

Besides being unable “to conceive a vehement sensation to be without pain, or pleasure,” it is equally impossible to conceive any “idea of pain or pleasure in 5. Dancy, for example, avers that the Berkeley of the Dialogues “takes these arguments much more seriously, tackling each of the sensible qualities one by one, and arguing that each is no more than a sensation in the mind” (introduction, 201n45).

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general, abstracted from every particular idea of heat, cold, tastes, smells, & c.” (1D177). Since neither can be separated from the other, the implication is that if we wish to attribute a distinct existence to the intense heat of the fire or the blinding light of the sun, parity of reasoning requires that we must also do so to the pains indelibly united with them in perception. Since Hylas grants that the latter is impossible (1D176), he is committed to denying the possibility of the former as well. It should thus be clear that the difference between the Principles and the Dialogues with respect to method of argument lies not in what Berkeley thought it capable of proving but rather his starting point in applying it: in the later work, we are asked to accept that intense heat has ontological parity with the pain experienced immediately along with it, that is, with something no one would dream of ascribing a distinct existence to; whereas in the former, we are asked to accept that extension, figure, and motion have ontological parity with colors and flavors, to which at least the vulgar ascribe a distinct existence. In both texts, parity is the point; but since, in the Dialogues, before applying this method of argument to the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, he applied it to that between secondary qualities and a species of sensible quality whose esse everyone can be presumed to grant is percipi, Berkeley positioned himself to argue that if the same idea of existence proper to secondary qualities must apply to the primary qualities insofar as they are impossible to distinguish from one another, then by transitivity the idea of existence applicable to pleasures and pains must likewise apply to primary qualities, insofar as secondary qualities are indistinguishable from pleasures and pains. To confirm this, let us briefly examine how Berkeley dealt with the objection leveled by his materialist mouthpiece, Hylas, that in the case of most of our sensations, there is neither pain nor pleasure, merely a certain “indolence. It seems to be nothing more than a privation of both pain and pleasure. And that such a quality or state as this may agree to an unthinking substance, I hope you will not deny” (1D178). Although Berkeley-Philonous disagrees, contending that all sensations, of whatever degree, are inseparable from feelings of pleasure and pain (1D178–81), he proceeds to offer a series of arguments in which no reference is made to pleasure and pain, aimed at showing that primary qualities are never, in idea, distinguishable from secondary ones. This turns out merely to be a detour, because, in the end, Philonous returns to the theme of pleasures and pains when he is asked why, notwithstanding these arguments, “philosophers who deny the secondary qualities any real existence, should yet attribute it to the primary”: It is not my business to account for every opinion of the philosophers. But among other reasons which may be assigned for this, it seems probable, that pleasure and pain being rather annexed to the former than the latter, may be one. Heat and cold, tastes and smells, have something more vividly pleasing or disagreeable than the ideas of extension, figure, and motion, affect us with. And it being too visibly absurd to hold, that pain or pleasure can be in an unperceiving substance, men are more easily weaned from believing the external existence of the secondary, than the primary qualities. You will be satisfied there is something in this, if you recollect the difference you made between an intense and more


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moderate degree of heat, allowing the one a real existence, while you denied it to the other. But after all, there is no rational ground for that distinction; for surely an indifferent sensation is as truly a sensation, as one more pleasing or painful; and consequently should not any more than they be supposed to exist in an unthinking subject. (1D191–2)

Having previously shown that secondary qualities are inseparable from primary in sensation, Berkeley here contends that the inseparability of pain or pleasure from the former carries over to the latter, thus making patent the otherwise disguised absurdity of supposing that primary qualities have application to mind-independent existents. For example, since the only distinction between the brightness of the sun and its shape we are capable of conceiving is semantic and has no validity in respect to its idea, and since the same is true of their difference from the pain, it follows that the shape can no more be conceived to exist in unperceiving things than the pain can. To be sure, once having separated a brightness denotation from a shape denotation, experience teaches us that pain varies with the intensity of the light but is indifferent to the shape (if the contrary had been the case, then we would now be talking of painfully shaped visible things instead of painfully bright ones). But so far as the ideas of sensation themselves are concerned, no such difference exists or can exist. And the same is true for sensations of every kind and intensity, provided we grant Berkeley’s claim that at least some degree of pleasure and pain is present in them all. Whether or not we agree with Berkeley, his objective in so arguing is plain: to establish ontological parity between primary and secondary qualities by exhibiting the parity of both alike with pleasures and pains. Or, what comes to the same: to show that the distinctions we make between different groups of sensations—the pleasure/pain group, the “secondary quality” group, and the “primary quality” group—are matters entirely of the indifferent denotations of ideas rather than the ideas themselves. Indifferent denotations reflect only the various resemblance relations of which ideas admit upon being compared. The particular indifferent denotations we actually use, among the limitless number of possible ones, are those that are most continually reinforced in experience and/or education and/or answer a need and/or fall in with a purpose. For example, among the plethora of possible ways of reckoning, we opt for those that best suit our present concerns: We call a window one, a chimney one, and yet a house in which there are many windows and many chimneys hath an equal right to be called one, and many houses go to the making of the city. In these and the like instances it is evident the unity constantly relates to the particular draughts the mind makes of its ideas, to which it affixes names, and wherein it includes more or less as best suits its own ends and purposes. . . . Every combination of ideas is considered as one thing by the mind, and in token thereof is marked by one name. Now, this naming and combining together of ideas is perfectly arbitrary, and done by the mind in such sort as experience shews it to be most convenient: without which our ideas had never been collected into such sundry distinct combinations as they now are. (V §109; also PHK I §§ 12–13 and 120–2)6 6. Not surprisingly, this passage drew Frege’s attention in his Foundations of Mathematics.

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The point Berkeley makes here applies to all indifferent denotations without exception, not just quantitative ones: experience of the patterns of both the natural and human worlds (training, education) determines which, among the plethora of possible denotative concepts, are selected for actual use. So if experience provided the occasion for establishing a denotative concept of pains and pleasures whose meaning does not include (entail or imply) being perceived, is there anything intrinsic to these ideas that would prevent it? Given the (separability principle based) ontological parity Berkeley attributed to all ideas of sensation without exception, including pleasures and pains, the answer has to be no. For example, if, as in the scenario devised by Wittgenstein considered in chapter 7-D, all our visual ideas without exception were marked by distinctive pleasures and pains (in something like the way we experience pain when we stare at the sun), and we consequently had need of a denotative concept of pleasures and pains that applied to the surfaces of objects in the same way our concepts of colors and visible shapes do, Berkeley’s commitment to parity would oblige him to be as semantically permissive here as he was in the cases of denotative concepts that attribute secondary and primary qualities to sensible things whose meaning does not entail or imply their being also perceived. Thus, in the end, arguments that suffice to show parity, even those in the Dialogues that introduce pleasure and pain into the equation, do not, in and of themselves, suffice to establish idealism. The evidence of both the Principles and Dialogues leaves little reason to doubt that Berkeley was fully cognizant of this limitation. His strategy in employing parity arguments was not to establish his idealism but to use the separability principle to turn learned materialists’ own assumptions regarding both ideas of secondary qualities and pains and pleasures against them. Such arguments were extremely effective in putting exponents of materialism on the defensive by obliging them to explain why the distinctions they draw between qualities that do and those that do not have an existence distinct from minds are not in fact distinctions without difference, thereby forcing them to admit either that their doctrine depends on indefensible abstract ideas or is the result of conflating perfectly legitimate, even indispensable, semantic distinctions with ontologically significant ones. By contrast, when concerned to establish his idealism, Berkeley always fell back on likeness arguments to show that things whose esse is percipi can only resemble things whose esse is also percipi (PHK I §15). But since these arguments can have the desired effect only if the sense in which they suppose ideas to “exist” is that established by esse is percipi reasoning (section A), it should now be clear that the latter reasoning is not only the preeminent and most original argument Berkeley offered in support of his distinctive brand of idealism but the presupposition of all the others as well.7 7. Winkler (Berkeley, 82–98) contends that Berkeley believed he was not able to demonstrate immaterialism. This is an astonishing claim to make in the face of promises in the Principles and elsewhere to do away with the false principles that lead us to believe that our philosophical difficulties have sprung “from any darkness and intricacy in the objects, or natural defect in the understanding” (PHK intr. §4). Although admitting there is no direct textual evidence to support his thesis, Winkler bases his view on what seems to me an unconvincing reading of certain passages in the early Commonplace Books, plus the fact that Berkeley omitted the Preface, with its explicit promise of demonstrations,


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C. Material Substance and Causation Berkeley offered three kinds of argument against material substance, the first intended to show its inconceivability, the second its epistemic nullity, and the third that no sensible object can satisfy the efficacy criterion of substantiality. We have already reviewed Berkeley’s arguments against the conceivability of material substance: the impossibility of conceiving the cause of sensations through the contents or existence of sensations themselves (section B), or of attributing a distinct existence to anything in any way resembling sensible qualities (section A). The notion of substance itself is first encountered in PHK I §7, where Berkeley argues that sensible qualities can have their existence only in a thinking substratum, not an unthinking one. In §16, he returns to the notion of an unthinking substratum that supports the existence of sensible qualities and asks “what is meant by matter’s supporting extension.” Because Locke had already ably performed the greater part of the task of showing that we have very little notion of this at all—memorably encapsulated in the comparison with the Indian legend of the earth supported on the back of an elephant and this in turn on the back of a tortoise (ECHU II/xiii/§19 and xxiii/§2)—Berkeley directed his critical aim at what, according to Locke, still remains: “we have no Idea of what it is, but only a confused obscure one of what it does” (xiii/§19); namely, it is “the supposed, but unknown support of those Qualities, we find existing, which we imagine cannot subsist, sine re subsante, without something to support them . . . substantia, is in plain English, standing under, or upholding” (xxiii/ §2). In what does this “obscure and relative Idea of Substance” (§3) as supporting qualities consist? For if substance cannot support a quality in the same sense in which pillars support a roof or legs an animal, “in what sense therefore must it be taken?” (PHK I §16) Since Berkeley himself conceived the action a substance performs in terms of causal efficacy, his question is targeted specifically at the supposed operation of “supporting,” “standing under,” “upholding” sensible qualities, which Locke and others attributed to a something-they-know-not-what, which consequently cannot be conceived otherwise than as a being abstracted from all content: The general idea of being appeareth to me the most abstract and incomprehensible of all other; and as for its supporting accidents, this, as we have just now observed, cannot be understood in the common sense of those words; it must therefore be taken in some other sense, but what that is they do not explain. (PHK I §17; also 1D197–9)

in the second edition of the Principles. Although Berkeley never said why he deleted the Preface, a far more plausible reason than doubts about the evidence in favor of his idealism (which the few, invariably minor second edition changes give no indication of) is the fact that his 1710 entreaties that his book should be read at least twice, with careful attention, before being judged must surely have seemed out of place in 1734, when Berkeley was no longer an unknown twenty-five-year-old but a famous author just shy of fifty, on the threshold of being elevated to a bishopric.

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In Berkeley’s view, an idea of what unthinking substances do that is so obscure no explication of it can be given is indistinguishable from an admission that we have no idea of this purported action at all.8 Can the impossibility of material substance in this “last most obscure abstract and indefinite sense” be demonstrated? Berkeley-Philonous concedes that where there are no ideas, there no repugnancy can be demonstrated between them. . . . You are not therefore to expect I should prove a repugnancy between ideas where there are not ideas; or the impossibility of Matter taken in an unknown sense, that is no sense at all. My business was only to show, you meant nothing; and this you were brought to own. So that in all your various senses, you have been showed either to mean nothing at all, or if anything, an absurdity. And if this be not sufficient to prove the impossibility of a thing, I desire you will let me know what is. (2D225–6)

This, it is important to note, is not a denial that unthinking beings exist. Berkeley makes no directly ontological claims about the existence or nonexistence of things of which he has no notion or idea (3D232). It is true that the idea of an existence distinct from spirits and their ideas turns out, upon scrutiny, to have no content; but Berkeley was content to let it remain as a purely negative idea of an unthinking thing in itself. Viewed in this light, all his other arguments against the conceivability of materialism take the form of proofs that none of the ideas we have in our possession can be combined with the idea of an unthinking thing in itself without issuing in contradiction (with no further claim respecting its combinability with notions not in our possession). By contrast, the argument regarding the impossibility of a supporting substratum is unique, since the impossibility it is supposed to prove relates to the idea of a something-I-know-not-what that supports the existence of accidents. While Berkeley recognized that he could not claim that it is inconsistent either within itself or in combination with the merely negative idea of an unthinking thing in itself, he still argued that it is impossible because of something it presupposes: the ability to form an idea of something corresponding to the words ‘something-I-know-not-what ’ in the first place. If ideas are the only things capable of objectively instantiating general terms, but no one has the least idea of the relation of support in which material substrata allegedly stand to their modifications—that is, what they are supposed to do—much less any idea what they are, then, on conceptual grounds alone (without bringing ontology into it), we have no choice but to conclude that the expression ‘material substance’ is altogether meaningless:

8. In PHK I §73, Berkeley gives a related argument, focused not on our lack of any idea of the action of supporting sensible qualities but on the lack of anything for an unthinking substance to support. For once the distinction between primary and secondary qualities has been undercut, with the implication that all such qualities are secondary (dependent on being perceived by a mind), it becomes clear that if “figure, motion, and such like” cannot “ possibly exist otherwise than in a spirit or mind which perceives them, it follows that we have no longer any reason to suppose the being of matter. Nay, that it is utterly impossible there should be any such thing, so long as that word is taken to denote an unthinking substratum of qualities or accidents, wherein they exist without the mind.”


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where we have not even a relative notion of it; where an abstraction is made from perceiving and being perceived, from spirit and idea: lastly, where this is not so much as the most inadequate or faint idea pretended to: I will not indeed thence conclude against the reality of any notion, or existence of anything: but my inference shall be, that you mean nothing at all: that you employ words to no manner of purpose, without any design or signification whatsoever. And I leave it to you to consider how mere jargon should be treated. (2D223)9

Besides the impossibility of making sense of any non-mental operation of supporting accidents, Berkeley asks how we could know such an operation was occurring if in fact it were. The two possibilities are the senses and reason. The senses can be ruled out since through them “we have the knowledge only of our sensations, ideas, or those things that are immediately perceived . . . call them what you will: but they do not inform us that things exist without the mind, or unperceived, like to those which are perceived” (PHK I §18). Since reason comes in two varieties, intuitive/ demonstrative and probable, Berkeley considers whether we can know that unthinking substrates are supporting sensible-quality accidents in either of these ways. Since, in the former case, we would cognize their relation to material substrates as necessary, Berkeley had no trouble ruling out this possibility: the very patrons of matter themselves do not pretend, there is any necessary connexion betwixt them and our ideas . . . and what happens in dreams, phrensies, and the like, puts it beyond dispute that it is possible we might be affected with all the ideas we have now, though no bodies existing without, resembling them. (§18; also §20)

If devoid of any intuitive or demonstrative rational justification, is the assumption of material substances at least helpful in increasing the probability of our explanations of natural phenomena? In view of the successes of natural science in making

9. Ayers and other commentators believe that Berkeley misunderstood Locke’s doctrine of substance, confusing, in effect, the idea of a bare particular with the bare idea of a particular (the same error often attributed to Bennett and others in their interpretation of Locke’s doctrine: see chapter 7-C). In support of this contention, remarks are cited such as Berkeley’s sarcastic comment on “the peculiar difficulty there must be, in conceiving a material substance, prior to and distinct from extension, to be the substratum of extension” (1D189–90). However, it should be remembered that Berkeley, in leaving the door open to things in themselves, allowed that they may have a nature, specifying only that it must be different from minds and their ideas (a “third nature”—see chapter 11, note 3). There is thus no warrant to infer from his denial that the substratum of extension and soidity can have these qualities that he took it to be bare of qualities. And is this not precisely the view Ayers and others (including myself) ascribe to Locke? For, as we saw in chapter 7-D, Locke left open the possibility that extension and solidity may be divinely superadded properties of a substance whose ultimate constitution must be understood in terms of more fundamental primary qualities of which we happen to have no idea. Indeed, Berkeley did eventually get around to giving an antiabstractionist argument that applies to all imputed actions other than thinking: at 3D239–40, Berkeley-Philonous denies that any third nature (distinct from minds and their ideas) can be conceived to be efficacious in any way since an impossible abstraction is required to conceive of actions separately from mental actions (I will examine this argument shortly). And from this, as we shall see in chapter 13, Berkeley drew the conclusion that nothing but a mind can be conceived to “support” other existents.

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sense of animate and inanimate nature in terms of material processes, it would seem natural to answer in the affirmative. Yet material processes are one thing, and the processes whereby ideas are produced in minds quite another. We are accustomed to conceiving and explaining the production of ideas by reference to thinking beings, since we are witness to this every time we remember or imagine (DM §30). But how are we to conceive the production of ideas by unthinking material things, whose only mode of action is motion? How motions in bodies can give rise to ideas in minds is as great a mystery as any in existence, and, notwithstanding the pretensions of science potentially to be able to explain all natural phenomena, this may well turn out to be the exception, at least in accordance with present conceptions of scientific explanation. Certainly, virtually all the major materialist philosophers of Berkeley’s time did not believe this mystery could be unraveled by the efforts of finite minds. But if the positing of material substances does absolutely nothing to clarify how sensations are produced in the first place, how can it possibly add to the probability of our explanations of their order and unity? According to Berkeley, it is at best a wash. For whatever explanatory advantages may accrue from positing material substances are completely canceled out by the mindbody interaction problem they bring with them: though we give the materialists their external bodies, they by their own confession are never the nearer knowing how our ideas are produced: since they own themselves unable to comprehend in what manner body can act upon spirit, or how it is possible it should imprint any idea in the mind. Hence it is evident the production of ideas or sensations in our minds, can be no reason why we should suppose matter or corporeal substances, since that is acknowledged to remain equally inexplicable with, or without this supposition. (PHK I §19)

Berkeley’s third argument against material substances seems to me his strongest and most important: (1) no object of the senses—actual, possible, or anything resembling such an object—can be conceived to be causally efficacious; and since (2) causal efficacy is indispensable to the conception of the existence of any substance, material or otherwise, (3) it is therefore not within the power of human understanding to ascribe substantiality to sensible things. Since we have already examined the second step in detail (chapter 7), we shall confine our attention here to the first. It boils down to the thesis that no idea (of sensation or imagination) of causation is possible: the senses are incapable of affording us any sensation-original of this idea, the imagination is incapable of assembling it from the materials provided by the senses,10 and we are therefore just as devoid of any idea of causal efficacy as we are of an idea of the purported operation of supporting qualities. This is true even of the idea of motion. For perceived changes in the relative 10. Although these theses are often attributed to Hume, prompting many to deny Hume’s originality on the basis of what can be found in Berkeley and other pre-Humeans, it should be noted that Hume rejected the contention that imagination is not a source of the idea of cause and effect, for he traced the idea to an origin in the operation of the imagination in customary association: see chapters 16 and 17. Kant of course criticized Hume for equating the merely subjective necessity of custom with cause and effect, but then offered an alternative account that treats the pure synthesis in imagination of the pure manifold of sense as one of its sources: see chapter 2.


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positions of ideas is merely a perception of succession, not of any action one idea performs on another. Thus, Berkeley in effect sought to hoist materialists with their own petard: their chief reason for denying that ideas of secondary qualities resemble anything in the constitution of the causes of sensations is the impossibility of utilizing them in the causal explanation of motions; and Berkeley’s claim is that, for precisely the same reason, the same is true of ideas of primary qualities: All our ideas, sensations, or the things which we perceive, by whatsoever names they may be distinguished, are visibly inactive, there is nothing of power or agency included in them. So that one idea or object of thought cannot produce, or make any alteration in another. To be satisfied of the truth of this, there is nothing else requisite but a bare observation of our ideas. For since they and every part of them exist only in the mind, it follows that there is nothing in them but what is perceived. But whoever shall attend to his ideas, whether of sense or reflexion, will not perceive in them any power or activity; there is therefore no such thing contained in them. A little attention will discover to us that the very being of an idea implies passiveness and inertness in it, insomuch that it is impossible for an idea to do any thing, or, strictly speaking, to be the cause of any thing: neither can it be the resemblance or pattern of any active being, as is evident from Sect. 8 [the likeness principle]. Whence it plainly follows that extension, figure and motion, cannot be the cause of our sensations. To say therefore, that these are the effects of powers resulting from the configuration, number, motion, and size of corpuscles, must certainly be false. (PHK I §25)

Let us examine each of Berkeley’s premises in turn. The strength of his argument depends crucially on that of the first: “since [our ideas] and every part of them exist only in the mind, it follows that there is nothing in them but what is perceived.” This premise is essential because if there were more to the reality of sensible things than what appears to us in sensation, then it would not follow that they are in reality inactive even if we accept that they are visibly so. We have already seen that this possibility is left open by Locke’s theory of ideas: although Lockean ideas are, by definition, relative to operations of mind, it does not follow from this that the existence of the object presented in the idea is limited to what appears in the idea it presents to us; on the contrary, it is possible, ceteris paribus, for it to preexist its presence to our minds, to continue in existence afterward, and so to have more to its being than what appears (chapters 5-B and 9-A). Berkeley, by contrast, was able to give ontological force to his version of the appearance = reality principle (chapter 11-A). For to conceive a sensible object to have more to its being than what is present to consciousness in sensation (idea) presupposes that we have a distinct idea of existence (not just a distinct significative use of an idea) that enables us to conceive a sensible object as existing outside and independently of a perceiving mind. This, however, falls foul of the separability principle, and its implication that the esse of sensible objects is percipi. Consequently, it is not simply that we cannot think anything as pertaining to the reality of an object that has not appeared to us, but, lacking the means even to conceive of it as possible that there may be more to its existence than what appears to the senses, we can straightaway brand as unintelligible any (nonsemantic, ontological) distinction that

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may be proposed between the reality of a sensible object and its appearance. Berkeley’s version of the principle that the reality of sensible things is one with their appearance, and their appearance identical with their reality, thus carries a powerful ontological sting absent from Locke’s. The second premise of Berkeley’s argument is that we never perceive power or activity in sensible things, nor can we derive an idea of them from the materials the senses furnish for reflection (memory, imagination).11 Through our senses, “We perceive a continual succession of ideas” (PHK I §26) and “learn by experience . . . that such and such ideas are attended with such and such other ideas, in the ordinary course of things” (§30). This “consistent uniform working . . . when we perceive certain ideas of sense constantly followed by other ideas” (§32) is all the order and connection our senses are capable of acquainting us with, as well as all we ever require in order to apply our reasoning to matters of fact: This gives us a sort of foresight, which enables us to regulate our actions for the benefit of life. And without this we should be eternally at a loss: we could not know how to act any thing that might procure us the least pleasure, or remove the least pain of sense. That food nourishes, sleep refreshes, and fire warms us; that to sow in the seed-time is the way to reap in the harvest, and, in general, that to obtain such or such ends, such or such means are conducive, all this we know, not by discovering any necessary connexion between our ideas, but only by the observation of the settled laws of Nature, without which we should be all in uncertainty and confusion, and a grown man no more know now to manage himself in the affairs of life, than an infant just born. (§31)

Berkeley’s thesis that the separability principle reigns supreme in the domain of the senses and imagination already of itself precludes the possibility that we could perceive or imagine a necessary connection between ideas that meet the distinctness test enshrined in the principle. Because it also confers on the appearance = reality principle the strong sense discussed earlier in connection with premise 1, this means that sensible things not only are passive and inert, loose and unconnected, in appearance (as philosophers previous to Berkeley had supposed), but are so in reality as well. For, given the implication that we have no means to conceive their reality in distinction from their appearance (except by resorting to indifferent denotation, and sacrificing all ontological pretensions in the process), we have to allow that all our ideas of sensation without exception are as inactive as they appear.12 11. When Berkeley speaks here of “ideas, whether of sensation or reflexion,” I take ‘reflexion’ to refer to the products of reflection in imagination, not to ‘reflexion’ in the sense of the inward reflexion whereby we perceive the doings of our own minds (notions). For it will soon emerge that Berkeley locates causation precisely there, in internally perceived acts of thinking, and even identifies activity with the very being of spiritual substance. As noted at the start of chapter 1-A, although the spellings ‘reflexion’ and ‘reflection’ were used interchangeably for both conceptions, in this work I am adopting the practice of utilizing the former only to denote the internal perception of the mental activity, and the latter for its more common use (mulling over, analyzing, deliberating about, etc.). 12. Many philosophers, upon reading PHK I §§ 25–32, are surprised to discover that theses they associate with Hume are so clearly anticipated by Berkeley. But this is just one of many common


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From the foregoing premises, Berkeley inferred that we are no more capable of conceiving the efficacious action of the causes responsible for our sensations in terms of so-called primary qualities—solidity, extension, motion, etc.—than mechanistic philosophers believed them conceivable by means of ideas of secondary qualities: “To say therefore, that these are the effects of powers resulting from the configuration, number, motion, and size of corpuscles, must certainly be false” (PHK I §25). Yet where no efficacious agency is conceivable, no substance can be conceived as well. Thus, Berkeley concluded that to conceive the substance responsible for the presence of sensations in us, we must look to something whose existence genuinely can be conceived in terms of efficacious action, and which, for that reason, cannot bear the slightest resemblance to any sensible object: to wit, the mind.

misapprehensions regarding Hume and his significance for Kant, and it should be noted that, in applying these theses, Hume never claimed to be their originator (nor indeed did Berkeley). Hume’s originality consists in the source to which he traced the idea of cause and effect (see note §10 above), and the implications he drew from it, above all concerning the principles of the uniformity of nature and that everything that begins to exist must have a cause: see chapters 16-E and 19-D below.

13 Notions of Mind

So far I have considered esse is percipi idealism unidirectionally: the concept of ‘existence’ applicable to sensible things is inseparable from sensations and these in turn from perceptions. Yet the separability principle seems also to imply the same in the reverse direction: the concept of ‘existence’ applicable to perceptions is inseparable from sensations and sensible things. For if semantic differences of indifferent denotation are set aside and we consider the ideational powers of the mind alone (sense and imagination), how could the existence of sensible things be one and indistinguishable from the existence of perceptions if the existence of perceptions were not likewise one and indistinguishable from the existence of sensible things? If so, however, it would seem to follow that the perceiving mind is as indistinguishable from sensible things as they are from it, and that the same idea of existence should apply to them both. Since the implication that the mind is nothing more than “a system of floating ideas, without any substance to support them” (3D233) was antithetical to Berkeley, the present chapter will be devoted to his theory of the mind with an eye to determining how he proposed to distinguish the perceiving mind from its perceptions without violating his own separability principle. A. Berkeley’s Psychologistic Explications of Causality and Substance Berkeley’s awareness of the inverse of esse is percipi is evident in his (pre-PHK) Commonplace Books: Qu: how is the soul distinguish’d from it’s ideas? certainly if there were no sensible ideas there could be no soul, no perception, remembrance, love, fear etc. no faculty could be exerted . . . . Consciousness, perception, existence of Ideas, seem to be all one . . . . Mind is a congeries of Perceptions. Take away Perceptions & you take away the Mind put the Perceptions & you put the mind. (C 478, 578, 580)

So long as we confine our consideration to the perceptions originating from the senses (sensations), and repetitions and rearrangements of these perceptions in 310

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thought (memories, imaginings), the only meaning that can be given to word ‘mind’ is that of a congeries of distinct perceptions: Consult, ransack [human] Understanding what find you there besides several perceptions or thoughts. What mean you by the word mind you must mean something that you perceive o[r] that you do not perceive. a thing not perceived is a contradiction. to mean (also) a thing you do not perceive is a contradiction. We are in all this matter strangely abused by words. (C 579)

By the time he came to write the Principles, Berkeley avoided the conclusion that the mind is nothing but “a system of floating ideas, without any substance to support them,” by pointing to a second source of materials of perception, in addition to sensations (= ideas), by means of which we are immediately conscious of “the passions and operations of the mind” (PHK I §1). Although its object is perceived “immediately, or intuitively” (3D231), and so in the same way objects of the senses are presented to us, Berkeley, following Locke (ECHU II/i/§4), steered clear of the potentially misleading denomination “internal sense” in favor of expressions such as “inward feeling or reflexion” (PHK I §89), “a certain internal consciousness” (DM §21), “reflex act” (3D232) and “reflection” (3D233). So that the objects of reflexive perception would not be confused with the sensate kind (ideas), Berkeley sometimes reserved the term ‘notion’ to designate the mind itself as immediately perceived in self-consciousness; its passions and operations; as well as the relations the mind forms between ideas and/or notions (PHK I §§ 27, 89, and 142). In addition, he distinguished pure intellect from the senses and imagination as the faculty of reflexive self-awareness, the faculty “concerned only with spiritual and inextended things, such as our minds, their states, passions, virtues, and such like” (DM §53; also 1D193–4). We have seen that, for early modern philosophers, the warrant for terming the mind, or anything else, a ‘substance’ is whether we are able to form a concept of its existence adequate to conceive it as self-subsistent and capable of supporting things (conceptually) distinguishable from it in their existence (inherence). To do this, changes in it must be conceivable as actions, which in turn are conceivable in terms of causal powers—to act and be acted upon, to react and be reacted to (chapter 7-D)—and these in turn in terms of a substantial constitution capable of supporting these powers. Berkeley was no exception. For him to justify treating the mind as a substance, and in particular a spiritual (immaterial) one, depended on whether reflexive perceptions, in immediately acquainting us with such mental operations as willing and thinking, ipso facto provide us with notions of causal efficacy. Berkeley’s answer was that they do: I find I can excite ideas in my mind at pleasure, and vary and shift the scene as oft as I think fit. It is no more than willing, and straightway this or that idea arises in my fancy: and by the same power it is obliterated, and makes way for another. This making and unmaking of ideas doth very properly denominate the mind active. Thus much is certain, and grounded on experience. (PHK I §28)

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What distinguishes Berkeley’s separability-principle-based conception from the views of previous philosophers is his insistence not only that our notions of active power originate in willing but that this origin restricts their scope of application: Now I desire to know in the first place, whether motion being allowed to be no action, you can conceive any action besides volition: and in the second place, whether to say something and conceive nothing be not to talk nonsense: and lastly, whether having considered the premises, you do not perceive that to suppose any efficient or active cause of our ideas, other than spirit, is highly absurd and unreasonable? (2D217)

Berkeley’s language may be somewhat confusing here, since he uses ‘volition’ for operations usually (traditionally and by him) accorded to imagination;1 moreover, as we shall see in chapter 14, he attributed to imagination operations that do not seem voluntary at all. Still, terminology aside, his point is clear enough. Through reflexive perception we do not, as Locke supposed (chapter 7-C), discover an idea of causality that we can afterward abstract from its source and apply to things in no way resembling volition. On the contrary, volition is constitutive of the only notion of causality the human understanding is capable of forming, so that, for Berkeley, it is as nonsensical to suppose that agency might exist (nonsemantically) independently of volition as it is to suppose that ideas might exist unperceived (“Tis folly to define volition an act of the mind ordering. for neither act nor ordering can them selves be understood without Volition,” C 635). This is as true in general as it is at the level of individual notions given immediately in perception. Since generality, for Berkeley, consists in indifferent denotation, and since indifferent denotation is nothing more than a significative use to which particular objects already present to the mind in perception are put, these objects are presupposed as given, whether in idea or notion. This, as we have seen, is because indifferent denotation limits the scope of general representation to all and only those objects that resemble the particular notion or idea employed for the purpose. And because no sensible resemblance is possible between objects so incommensurate in appearance as causally inert sensible things (ideas) and causally active reflexions (notions), the former are ipso facto excluded from the scope of any causal concept our understandings are capable of forming: That an idea which is inactive, and the existence whereof consists in being perceived, should be the image or likeness of an agent subsisting by itself, seems to need no other refutation than barely attending to what is meant by those words. . . . Do but leave out the power of willing, thinking, and perceiving ideas, and there remains nothing else wherein the idea can be like a spirit. For by the word spirit we mean only that which thinks, wills, and perceives; this, and this alone, constitutes the signification of that term. (PHK §§ 137–8) 1. Another text in which Berkeley used ‘will’ and ‘imagination’ interchangeably is 2D215: “I perceive numberless ideas; and by an act of my will can form a great variety of them, and raise them up in my imagination.” In his earliest writings, Berkeley sometimes dropped ‘understanding’ altogether in favor of ‘will’ because it was so important to him to emphasize the active powers that distinguishes mind from causally inactive sensible objects: see C 362a, 478–9, 587; also 499a and 791.

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The foregoing should suffice to make clear that Berkeley’s account of ‘causal efficacy’ is another instance of the psychologistic mode of explication discussed earlier in connection with ‘exist’ as applied to sensible things in chapter 11-C: when a consideration of the origin of a concept as an idea or notion in the mind reveals that the mind contributes something essential to its meaning, its scope of application is delimited accordingly. Volition, for Berkeley, is the indispensable basis for all the notions of causality and action the human understanding is capable of forming (“Trace an infant in the Womb. mark the train & Succession of its Ideas. observe how volition comes into the Mind. This may perhaps acquaint you with its nature,” C 629). To preclude the possibility of nonspiritual agency, Berkeley thus had no need to engage in metaphysics. He had need only of his separability principle, which requires acquaintance simply and solely with the powers of the understanding and their limits. On this basis, Berkeley determined, first, that whatever is inseparable in idea or notion ipso facto cannot be conceived to exist distinctly in reality, and, second, that no general term can be instantiated by anything really existent except the objects (ideas or notions) from which it might originally have been derived. No matter how independent of volition causal concepts may seem, this independence is accordingly limited to semantic contexts because of the inseparability of causal efficacy from volition in our notions. Thus, the only genuine actions capable of instantiating causal concepts are volitions, and the only substantial constitution capable of supporting the power of willing is spiritual: I have a mind to have some notion of meaning in what I say; but I have no notion of any action distinct from volition to be anywhere but in a spirit: therefore when I speak of an active being, I am obliged to mean a spirit. (3D239–40)

Substance of a Spirit is that it acts, causes, wills, operates, or if you please (to avoid the quibble that may be made on the word it) to act, cause, will, operate. (C 829) Still, it is one thing to adduce the efficacy of volition in order to explicate a notion of existence adequate to conceive of substances, but quite another to explicate the notion of substance itself as the substratum, or upholding support, of the existence of sensible things. To do so, Berkeley widened his focus to include perceiving sensations—objects the mind perceives but does not cause (PHK I §29)—and claimed that there is nothing more to our minds’ conception of a substrate than this operation: I know what I mean, when I affirm that there is a spiritual substance or support of ideas, that is, that a spirit knows and perceives ideas . . . . That there is no substance wherein ideas can exist beside spirit, is to me evident. And that the objects immediately perceived are ideas, is on all hands agreed. And that sensible qualities are objects immediately perceived, no one can deny. It is therefore evident there can be no substratum of those qualities but spirit, in which they exist, not by way of mode or property, but as a thing perceived in that which perceives it. I deny therefore that there is any unthinking substratum of the objects of sense, and in that acceptation that there is any material substance. (3D234 and 237; also PHK I §135)

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Yet if to support the existence of ideas, according to Berkeley, is nothing else than for a spirit to perceive them, one may well be tempted to turn against Berkeley the same argument he used against Locke (chapter 12-C) and ask what the mind does to support their existence in perceiving them? Berkeley himself admits that “whatever power I may have over my own thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceived by sense have not a like dependence on my will” (PHK I §29). If the only mode of activity conceivable by us is volition, and none of the sensations we perceive depend on our volition, how is it possible to conceive our own minds as acting to “support” or “uphold” their existence? Why not, as Malebranche did, use this as a reason for supposing that the existence of ideas of sensation must find its support in another mind than our own, a mind capable of producing them through the exercise of its will (chapter 15-A)? Since this opens up the possibility of many different minds viewing the same (ideational) sensible beings, our vulgar assumption that numerically the same (material) sensible entities are publicly accessible thus finds better philosophical support from Malebranche than Berkeley’s brand of idealism seems capable of providing. An equally serious objection to Berkeley’s conception of spiritual substance relates to his claim that the thinking, willing mind is “simple and individual” (MP 7 §18). Descartes viewed the unity of pure intellect/will with the senses as a consequence of the contingent joining of the mind to a human body, and so as an essentially dissoluble union. Although Berkeley rejected the latter together with Descartes’s materialism, it is by no means clear how he could justify treating the union of pure intellect/will with the senses as essentially indissoluble. Since reflexion and sensation are incommensurate with one another, the separability principle does not seem to prevent us from distinguishing their objects—respectively, notions and ideas—in thought and supposing one to exist without the other: without an intellect/will, the senses can still be supposed to yield ideas, and without senses the intellect/will might still occupy itself with reflexive actions and passions, notions of other spirits together with their actions and passions, as well as notions of the relations between spirits. Indeed, it is not immediately clear whether Berkeley was in a position to explain how it is possible for sensations and reflexions to belong to the same entity at all. On the one hand the perceived (ideas) are distinct from the perceiving (notions) as sensations are from reflexions, while on the other the bidirectional character of esse is percipi idealism implies that the existence of perceivings is no less indistinguishable from the existence of sensations than the existence of houses, mountains, rivers, and sensible objects generally are. From the latter standpoint, the existence of reflexively intuited perceivings seems to be indistinguishable from the existence of the sensory ideas perceived; but then how can the former possibly be distinguished from the latter as reflexions (notions) rather than sensations (ideas), or the latter from the former as sensations rather than reflexions? We seem to have a case similar to the timbre and pitch of tones, which the separability principle reveals to be a merely semantic difference based on the different resemblance relations proper to tones: sensations and reflexions seem to differ only semantically, via the different resemblance relations proper to something in itself undistinguishable that is neither idea nor notion. By contrast, from the former standpoint, where their distinctness is a given, it be-

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comes unclear how, in the face of that distinctness, esse is percipi can hold in either direction; for if perceivings and perceived can be distinguished from one another in thought as objects of reflexion from objects of sensation, then how can the distinct existence of these objects in reality fail to satisfy the separability principle? Berkeley’s carefully crafted edifice for distinguishing reflexively perceived notions from sensorially perceived ideas, and so too pure intellect/will from sense and imagination, thus seems to totter and risk crashing down. For it begins to look as though he may himself have fallen prey to the temptation to indulge in precisely the sort of abstractionist aspect-mongering his separability principle proscribes. Even if the preceding difficulties are set aside, there is something else that also seems to confute Berkeley’s attribution of indissoluble unity to spirit. What unites the reflexion of one moment with that of the next? Does the separability principle not imply that each object of reflexion is as distinct in its existence from every other for the same reason that it implies that there are as many distinct sensible objects as there are distinguishable sensations? Why then does it not follow from this that the mind is nothing more than the aggregate of distinct reflexive perceptions—in effect, instantaneously existent “minds”—rather than a single temporally enduring, even immortal (PHK I §141), spirit with an existence proper to itself, distinct from these successive reflexions? So here again Berkeley’s affirmation of a single, indivisible, substantial I, in which successive reflexions and sensations all inhere, seems to fall foul of his separability principle. B. The Nonmanifold I Berkeley’s responses to such objections as the foregoing all start from a single, ostensibly intuitively evident proposition: since reflexive knowledge discloses no manifold in the I—no distinguishable parts, stages, powers (faculties, capacities), or anything else—the doctrine of a unitary, indissoluble, substantial perceiving, willing I, far from falling foul of the separability principle, is actually its necessary consequence. Berkeley was, of course, not original in proclaiming the simplicity (nonmanifoldness) of the temporally enduring I. His view is indistinguishable from those of Descartes and Locke that we immediately and intuitively (3D231) grasp a principle of efficacious action insofar as we have immediate reflexive knowledge of the operations of the understanding whereby we recall, separate, and combine the contents (ideas and notions) present to us in perception. By contrast, Berkeley was unique in noting, or at least taking seriously, the significance of the fact that we are obliged to wait upon the outcome to discover which operations of thought bring about which effects, and to discover which are efficacious and which are not. Indeed, our blindness to the connection between the notion of “a thinking active principle that perceives, knows, wills, and operates about ideas” (3D233) and its effects is perhaps the key “datum” of Berkeley’s theory of spiritual substance. For, among other things, it obliges us to rely on past experience, rather than immediate perception, to discover which powers of volition we have and which we lack:

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BERKELEY’S MODEST PROPOSAL Such is the nature of spirit or that which acts, that it cannot be of it self perceived, but only by the effects which it produceth. If any man shall doubt of the truth of what is here delivered, let him but reflect and try if he can frame the idea of any power or active being; and whether he hath ideas of two principal powers, marked by the names will and understanding, distinct from each other as well as from a third idea of substance or being in general, with a relative notion of its supporting or being the subject of the aforesaid powers, which is signified by the name soul or spirit. (PHK I §27)

The difference between passively perceiving and actively repeating, separating, combining, or otherwise acting with respect to ideas and notions is something we discover not through a direct, reflexive perception of the connection these effects have to their cause. Instead, much as we can acquaint ourselves with the correlations between one sensation and another only through repeated experience of their sequence or conjunction (§§ 30–2 and 60–6), we can discover which faculties our minds have and lack only through repeated experience of the effects that follow upon their exercise. Here we reach the crux of Berkeley’s notion of mind. For it is all too easy to conflate the distinctions we attribute to our minds on the basis of experience— between understanding and will, sight and touch, memory and imagination, passive perception and acts of recollection, comparison, composition, et al.—with the nonmanifold spiritual existent immediately evident to us in reflexive perception: Again the soul is without composition of parts, one pure simple and individual being. Whatever distinction of faculties or parts we may conceive in it arises only from its various acts or operations about ideas. Hence it is repugnant that it should be known or represented in some parts and not in others, or that there should be an idea, which incompletely resembles it. (PHK I §138; also §141)2

It would be a violation of the separability principle to attribute the differences we can discover in the soul only by means of experience of its myriad ideational and notional effects to the soul itself. This does not mean we cannot legitimately utilize them as indifferent denotations whereby to conceptualize the soul, if doing so serves our cognitive and conative purposes. But we cross Berkeley’s antiabstractionist line if we accord the least ontological significance to these merely semantic distinctions: It will not be amiss to add, that the doctrine of abstract ideas hath had no small share in rendering those sciences intricate and obscure, which are particularly 2. It is unknown why this part of §138 did not make it from Berkeley’s manuscript to the published edition of PHK. For all we know, it might have been the error of a copyist or printer. If Berkeley himself was responsible, it may have been to make §138 more concise (that the omitted text begins with ‘Again’ might indicate that he rejected it as redundant), or because he thought it too liable to being misunderstood or not understood at all, or possibly even because he decided to reserve the topic of the nature of the soul for fuller development in the projected but never published second part of PHK. In any case, since there is sufficient corroboration in his published statements to consider this text a reasonably accurate representation of his mature position (PHK I §141 and MP 7 § 18), I do not believe its omission signals a change of view.

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conversant about spiritual things. Men have imagined they could frame abstract notions of the powers and acts of the mind, and consider them prescinded, as well from the mind or spirit itself, as from their respective objects and effects. Hence a great number of dark and ambiguous terms presumed to stand for abstract notions, have been introduced into metaphysics and morality, and from these have grown infinite distractions and disputes amongst the learned. (PHK I §143)

Philosophers err when they profess intuitive certainty that the soul is “simple and individual” but then immediately proceed to belie this by endeavoring to resolve it “into manifold parts” through “such terms as power, faculty, act, determination, indifference, freedom, necessity, and the like, as if they stood for distinct abstract ideas” (MP 7 §18).3 Berkeley’s commitment to the simplicity and individuality of the soul was, by contrast, total: We see no variety or difference betwixt the Volitions, only between their effects. Tis One Will one Act distinguish’d by the effects. This will, this Act is the Spirit, operative Principle, Soul etc. (C 788) Will, Understanding, desire, Hatred etc so far forth as they are acts or active differ not, all their difference consists in their objects, circumstances etc. (C 854) I must not say the Will & Understanding are all one but that they are both Abstract Ideas i.e. none at all. they are not being even ratione different from the Spirit, Qua faculties, or Active. (C 871)

There is, in truth, never activity in the soul that is not indissolubly united with passivity, and vice versa, that is, there is never volition that is not in some degree perception nor perception that is not in degree volition: Things are two-fold active or inactive, The Existence of Active things is to act, of inactive to be perceiv’d. Distinct from or without perception there is no volition; therefore neither is their existence without perception. (C 673–4) While I exist or have any Idea I am eternally, constantly willing, my acquiescing in the present State is willing. (C 791) Understanding is in some sort an Action. (C 821) It seems to me that Will & understanding Volitions & ideas cannot be severed, that either cannot be possibly without the other. (C 841) 3. Hume may well have had Berkeley uppermost in mind when he criticized doctrines of the simplicity and individuality of the soul as fictitious confutations of complex with simple ideas in THN I/iv/§§5–6. Berkeley’s Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher in focus (MP) appeared in 1732, not long before Hume began work on the Treatise, and there can be no doubt that he was familiar with the Principles as well. Although it is unknown what if anything of Berkeley’s Kant read when he came to write the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), one cannot fail to be struck by how neatly Berkeley’s doctrine of the simple, individual, substantial soul slots into the rationalist psychology criticized by Kant in the Paralogism chapter.

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BERKELEY’S MODEST PROPOSAL I must not Mention the Understanding as a faculty or part of the Mind, I must include Understanding & Will etc in the word Spirit by which I mean all that is active. I must not say that the Understanding differs not from the particular Ideas, or the Will from particular Volitions. (C 848) The Spirit, the Mind, is neither a Volition nor an Idea. (C 849)

If the spirit is, in itself, indistinguishably one, then Berkeley was in a position to respond to the objections considered in the previous section by pointing out that they too commit the error of attributing distinctions that pertain to the effects of spirit to spirit itself. However, before undertaking to spell this out, a better understanding is needed of how the mind can be in some measure active merely in the perceiving of sensations. Since Berkeley seems never to have addressed this question expressly and in detail, we are obliged to look for clues. And, in my view, the most important is provided by his appropriation of Locke’s account of temporal succession and duration.

C. The Mind as Substrate of Successive Perceptions Locke’s account of the origin of the ideas of succession and duration represents one of his most original and important contributions, as indispensable to Hume and Kant as it was to Berkeley. The question he posed is this: are we able to form a reflexive idea of the succession of thoughts within us because our outer senses disclose to us the motions of ambient bodies, or do we derive our ideas of movement in the things around us from our reflexive awareness of the succession of thoughts within us? In a striking break with tradition, Locke opted for the second alternative: by reflecting on the appearing of various Ideas, one after another in our Understandings, we get the Notion of Succession; which if any one should think, we did rather get from our Observation of Motion by our Senses, he will, perhaps, be of my Mind, when he considers, that even Motion produces in his Mind an Idea of Succession, no otherwise than as it produces there a continued train of distinguishable Ideas. (ECHU II/xiv/§6; also §3)

Locke built his case for the thesis that ideas of succession and duration have a reflexive origin on a sequence of thought experiments. To begin with, he conjectured that the rate at which ideas succeed one another in the mind is variable, and potentially greatly so: I leave it to others to judge, whether it be not probable that our Ideas do, whilst we are awake, succeed one another in our Minds at certain distances, not much unlike the Images in the inside of a Lanthorn, turned round by the Heat of a Candle. This Appearance of theirs in train, though, perhaps, it may be sometimes faster, and sometimes slower; yet, I guess, varies not much in a waking Man: There seem to be certain Bounds to the quickness and slowness of the Succes-

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sion of those Ideas one to another in our Minds, beyond which they can neither delay nor hasten. (§9)

What if these bounds were different, or even subject to our will? Locke reviewed a variety of cases. Whereas with our current rate of thinking the hour hand on the face of a clock seems immobile, if its rate were markedly slowed the motion of the hour hand would become visible (§11). If the rate were further slowed, the hour hand would seem to race around the dial faster and faster, until a point would be reached where, instead of a rotating bar, we would see only a solid, immobile disk (§8). Conversely, if the succession of our thoughts were to accelerate beyond its current rate, then what now appears simultaneous—say, the report of a rifle and the bullet penetrating its target (§10)—would be sensed as a succession. If continually accelerated, the bullet would itself become discernible, slowly drilling its way through the air toward its target, until, when the succession was rapid enough, it would seem as immobile as the hour hand on a clock. Alternatively, if it were possible for us, by the mere exercise of will, to prevent our thoughts from succeeding at all (“freeze-frame” consciousness), then no matter how much motion was occurring around us (in sensation), no elapse of time, and so too no change, would be perceptible during the interval (§4). Conversely, if nothing whatsoever were in motion, and our sensations were as unchanging as they would be in a perfectly effective sensory deprivation chamber, we would still be able to acquire an idea of temporal succession reflexively, simply by thinking a succession of different thoughts during the interval (§6). From this, Locke concluded that an inwardly perceived succession of thoughts is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for the acquisition of the idea of temporal succession, whereas sensible motion is neither; and duration too, understood as the linear distance from one point in the succession of thoughts to another (§3), must therefore also be supposed to originate in reflexion rather than sensation. Enter Berkeley with his separability principle. For Locke, the fact that the idea of succession could be acquired from no source other than reflexion did not of itself restrict its application to reflexions; and since the idea met his criteria for being the idea of a primary quality, he did not hesitate to include it in his conception of the substantial causes of our ideas of sensations and individual substances. Berkeley, by contrast, regarded the distinction between succession and the ideas and notions that succeed to be a mere distinction of reason, that is, a distinction with only semantic and not ontological validity. As a result, the origin of our representation of succession also delimits its scope of application (“A succession of ideas I take to constitute Time, and not to be only the sensible measure thereof, as Mr. Locke and others think,” letter to Johnson, 24 March, 1730). This of course does not prevent us from using temporal concepts to indifferently denote objects— our lifespans, the age of the earth, the age of stars, the age of the universe— independently of any reference to perceived sensations. But that does not change the fact that time is “onely in the mind” (C 13). Like the idea of existence we apply to sensible things, ideas of primary qualities, notions of causality and substance, duration and succession therefore have meaning only with respect to minds and their conceptions and are otherwise utterly unintelligible.

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One thing that sets succession and duration apart from other ideas and notions is that Berkeley allows them an application to ideas and notions alike. This does not mean he diverged from Locke’s account of their origin; quite the contrary, his insistence that the duration of the mind and its existence are indistinguishable (C 5), so that no mind can exist where there is no succession of ideas and notions (PHK I §98, C 83, 590, 651, and 704), shows that he was in full agreement with Locke on this point.4 But the application of succession and duration to notions and ideas alike does suggest that they may afford a clue to understanding how the mind can be active even in perception, notwithstanding the fact that, in having perceptions appear to it through an agency other than itself, it seems completely passive. To begin with, note that if Berkeley did regard reflexions and sensations as distinct under the separability principle, then, like Locke, he would have to admit the possibility that sensations might undergo kaleidoscopic change even while no change at all was occurring in reflexion (locked, as it were, in “freeze frame”). The problem with this is that we could not perceive the change in our sensations if we did not follow their changes in a train of reflexions (successive perceivings). Accordingly, the only way we could conceive our sensations to change without any change in our reflexions is to first abstract succession from reflexion so as to apply it to sensations alone. But not only is such an abstraction plainly incompatible with Berkeley’s separability principle, it would be tantamount to a supposition that sensations might come into existence unperceived (i.e., a denial that their esse is percipi). And since this is just to say that no succession can be perceived unless the mind actively produces a train of thoughts all the while it is passively having sensations produced in it, it should now be clear why, for Berkeley, the activity and passivity of the mind are always indelibly united, and no distinction between them can bear scrutiny under the separability principle. Berkeley’s thesis that the soul—our only notion of a substance—can be conceived to endure in existence only insofar as it exists (actively) thinking follows as a matter of course from the foregoing considerations: Time therefore being nothing, abstracted from the succession of ideas in our minds, it follows that the duration of any finite spirit must be estimated by the number of ideas or actions succeeding each other in that same spirit or mind. Hence it is a plain consequence that the soul always thinks: and in truth whoever shall go about to divide in his thoughts, or abstract the existence of a spirit from its cogitation, will, I believe, find it no easy task. (PHK I §98) 4. Grayling claims that “in Berkeley’s view there is no succession of ideas in God’s mind, and hence no time for God, who occupies what is in effect the eternal present, ‘the Now’ . . . of the Platonists” (Arguments, 176). Grayling cites a passage from Berkeley’s 24 March 1730 letter to Johnson as proof. Yet it is by no means clear in that passage whether Berkeley is expressing his own view or the Platonistic view he is attacking. Berkeley did not hesitate to entertain the possibility of a succession of ideas in the mind of God at C 92: “Qu: whether if succession of ideas in the Eternal mind, a day does not seem to God a 1000 years rather than a thousand years a day?” What Grayling does not consider, but Berkeley’s letter to Johnson leaves no doubt of, is Berkeley’s cognizance that such speculations were liable to bring charges of heterodoxy down upon his head (potentially fatal to his career as a cleric). It was thus in all probability caution that prevented Berkeley from being as free in letters and publications as he was in his private commonplace book.

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A substance can be conceived to exist only, and insofar as, it is conceived of as efficacious (chapter 7-C); and since the only action of which we have the least notion according to Berkeley is thinking (perceiving, recollecting, discerning, etc.), this is to say that “substance” and “thinking subject” are one and the same notion. It thus can come as no surprise that he regarded Locke’s contention (against Descartes and his followers) that “every drowsy Nod shakes their Doctrine, who teach, That the Soul is always thinking” (ECHU II/i/§13) as simply another instance of that philosopher’s propensity to confuse mere semantic differences grounded on indifferent denotations with real differences in the notions themselves (here, that between the duration of the mind and the reflexively perceived succession of cogitations in it): Certainly the mind always & constantly thinks & we know this too. In Sleep & trances the mind exists not, there is no time no succession of Ideas. To say the mind exists without thinking is a Contradiction, nonsense, nothing . . . . Men die or are in state of annihilation oft in a day . . . . No broken Intervals of Death or Annihilation. Those Intervals are nothing. Each Person’s time being measured to him by his own Ideas . . . . Locke’s out. The case is different. We can have an Idea of Body without motion, but not of Soul without Thought. (C 651, 83, 590, 704)5

This should not, however, be seen as a reversion to the Cartesian conception of the mind. Berkeley flatly rejected the abstraction of a pure intellect conjoined with the senses and imagination in a supposedly “substantial union” that is nonetheless dissoluble, and also had no truck with the supposition that Descartes and his successors shared with Locke that succession and duration are abstractable from the succession of ideas in a continuously perceiving mind. Rather, Berkeley’s claim that “the soul always thinks” is based on the same distinctively Berkeleyan antiabstractionist reasoning that leads to esse is percipi idealism: one’s inability to divide in his thoughts, or abstract, the existence of a spirit from its cogitation. To conceive of duration apart from succession, succession apart from the objects (ideas and notions) that succeed, or these objects apart from their being perceived by a mind are all alike impossible, because they fail to satisfy the distinctness criterion enshrined in the separability principle. Berkeley’s position may therefore be encapsulated thus: the notion of existence applicable to minds is no less indistinguishable from actions of “perceiving ideas and thinking” than the idea of existence applicable to sensible things is distinguishable from “being perceived” (PHK I §139); and “for any one to pretend to a notion of entity or existence 5. Berkeley sometimes makes it seem as if a succession of times might transpire even in the absence of a succession of ideas, which seems incompatible with the separability principle. Still, there was nothing to stop him from positing that God or some other spirit might perceive the succession of ideas in the minds of other spirits, and so have a basis for comparison—some more rapid than others, some more uniform than others, etc.: see C 45, 48, 92; also PHK I §14 and 1D190. It is less clear whether Berkeley was in a position to admit the possibility that succession and duration might apply to any nonspiritual “third nature” (see chapter 11, note 3) that might exist, for doing so seems to violate the separability principle.

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abstracted from spirit and idea, from perceiving and being perceived, is, I suspect, a downright repugnancy and trifling with words” (§81). D. The Substantiality of Spirit Does the distinction Berkeley drew between existence as perceiving and existence as being perceived (“Existere is percipi or percipere,” C 429) fall foul of his separability principle? If it did, it would seem to be impossible for him to avoid the consequence that the mind’s existence consists of as many temporal fragments as there are temporally distinct perceptions. One can only surmise that his response to this challenge would take the form of an elaboration of his thesis, founded on immediate intuition, that “spirit or that which acts . . . cannot be of it self perceived, but only the effects which it produceth” (PHK I §27). If true generally, then it would seem be so as well in the case of the succession of ideas and notions we perceive as a result of our minds’ thinking activity. The thinking subject must be distinguished from its successive notions and ideas as a cause from its effects; and since causes are, by their very nature, distinct from their effects under the separability principle (DM §50 and C 780), this means that the manifoldness exhibited by our successive notions and ideas in no way compromises the simplicity and individuality of the thinking subject. Perceiving (notions) may be no more distinguishable from being perceived (ideas) than vice versa, and neither may be any more distinguishable from their temporal difference as before or after, present, past or future, than vice versa, but all this, as effects of the action of a thinking subject, is ipso facto distinct from what that subject is in itself. Indeed, it would be viciously circular to suppose that any of these notions and ideas might immediately apply to their cause, since that cause—the thinking subject—must be presupposed in order to do the applying, whereupon the same chasm between cause and effect reopens to ensure that the thinking subject remains beyond their reach. Consequently, the thinking subject in itself is conceivable only as “purus actus or rather pure Spirit not imaginable, not sensible, not intelligible, in no wise the object of the Understanding, no wise perceivable . . . the substance of Spirit we do not know it not being knowable, it being purus actus” (C 828 and 701). The obvious comparison with Berkeley’s unknowability doctrine is Locke’s relative idea of substance: what substance is, its real constitution, is, in the final analysis, unknown to us; so we can only know what a substratum of ideas does— supports, upholds—not the constitution it has to have in order to do this. When we examined Berkeley’s criticism of this conception in PHK I §16 (chapter 12-C), we saw that it centers on Locke’s inability to offer anything more than uninformative, inadequate metaphors to conceptualize what unthinking substances do to support their accidents (as pillars support buildings, etc.). But what is no less clearly a target for Berkeley’s antiabstractionist critique is this very distinction itself, between what a substrate does and what it is itself. Such a distinction is possible only if we can conceive the being of a spiritual substance to be detachable from its thinking activity, and conceive it in terms of a relative notions such as property, attribute, or essence. Berkeley left no doubt that these are no more than abstractionist illusions arising from a failure to appreciate that no feature of grammar,

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however essential to it, can be presumed to tell us anything about reality if it cannot bear scrutiny under the separability principle: That there is no substance wherein ideas can exist beside spirit, is to me evident. And that the objects immediately perceived are ideas, is on all hands agreed. And that sensible qualities are objects immediately perceived, no one can deny. It is therefore evident there can be no substratum of those qualities but spirit, in which they exist, not by way of mode or property, but as a thing perceived in that which perceives it. (3D237–8) Of & thing causes a mistake . . . . Say you the Mind is not the Perceptions. but that thing which perceives. I answer you are abus’d by the words that & thing these are vague empty words without a meaning. (C 115 and 581)

We are misled by grammar into expecting that there is still more to be conceived and known—if not by humans, then at least by God—after everything has been said about what a thinking subject does to support/uphold the existence of its ideas and notions. Thus, Hylas asks Explain to me now, O Philonous! how it is possible there should be room for all those trees and houses to exist in your mind. Can extended things be contained in that which is unextended? Or are we to imagine impressions made on a thing void of all solidity? You cannot say objects are in your mind, as books in your study: or that things are imprinted on it, as the figure of a seal upon wax. In what sense therefore are we to understand those expressions? Explain me this if you can: and I shall then be able to answer all those queries you formerly put to me about my substratum.

Berkeley-Philonous answers that when things are spoken of in this way, “My meaning is only that the mind comprehends or perceives them” (3D249–50). Since it is impossible to conceive a difference between saying “there is a spiritual substance or support of ideas” and saying “that a spirit knows and perceives ideas” (3D234; also PHK I §135), we have no choice but to accept that supporting the existence of ideas and its active/passive perceiving of them are one and the same, and to attribute any appearance of a difference solely to the shadow cast by the semantic difference in the denotations with which these words are associated. In sum, the mistake common to Descartes, Locke, and other exponents of substancecentered philosophies was to be misled by language into supposing that there is something to know or conceive about a substance even after everything about what it does to support the existence of its accidents has been specified. Yet even if we do not know what the substance of the thinking subject is in itself, we can know certain things about it through its effects. As a substance, the existence of I and the exercise of its efficacy in thinking are indistinguishable (chapters 7-D and 12-C); and this not only means that the soul is always thinking but that “Some Ideas or other I must have so long as I exist or Will. But no Idea or sort of Ideas is essential.” (C 842) A further consequence, perhaps the most important of all to the future bishop of Cloyne, is that the thinking subject is “immortal, Incorruptible” (C 814):

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BERKELEY’S MODEST PROPOSAL We have shewn that the soul is indivisible, incorporeal, unextended, and it is consequently incorruptible. Nothing can be plainer, than that the motions, changes decays, and dissolutions which we hourly see befall natural bodies (and which is what we mean by the course of Nature) cannot possibly affect an active, simple, uncompounded substance: such a being therefore is indissoluble by the force of Nature, that is to say, the soul of man is naturally immortal. (PHK I §141)

Our ideas and notions can change in endless ways—the sensible world can experience the most violent upheavals, we can lose all memory of our past (once, twice, or any number of times), and undergo the most extreme metamorphoses—without any consequence for the continued existence of the thinking subject whose activity supports and (in whole or in part) causes these events. Nothing, in other words, can happen to us in the natural course of things that is capable of bringing our substantial existence to an end.

14 Objective Understanding Transformed

Taken together, Berkeley’s arguments against materialism suggest that objects of the senses hardly merit the appellation “object” at all. They are in no sense active or substantial. Their reality and their appearance are one and indistinguishable. All are, in some measure, pleasures or pains (chapter 12-B), and all are indelibly united with reflexive operations of the mind (chapter 13-C). Their existence is limited to the bare instant of their presence to consciousness in sensation since, in accordance with the separability principle, the existence of every past or future sensible object is numerically distinct from the sensible objects presently before us. They are, in short, mere ideas, subjective through and through. Since objective understanding is nevertheless a fact and needs to be understood, Berkeley set out to explain how fleeting, causally inert, insubstantial “floating ideas” (3D233) become the stable, active, coherent sense-divide transcending objects of everyday experience, how the actions of these objects come to be subject to laws of nature, and how these laws become necessary and universal, governing natural phenomena at every scale and dimension, everywhere, always. Berkeley’s solution is the theory of suggestive signification that we considered briefly in chapter 10-C. The unity of ideas within objects and the unity of objects with one another under universal laws is entirely a matter of the use of ideas or notions to signify other ideas or notions. Berkeley likened the order of nature to a language: ideas combine to form words, words sentences, sentences whole discourses, which collected together add up to “the volume of Nature” (PHK I §109; also §§ 65–6 and 108; V §§ 140–152; MP 4 §§ 11–12). This comparison, however, seems to raise as many questions as it answers. How literally should it be taken? Is nature a language of the same kind vernaculars are, with a syntax, semantics, and logic? Or did Berkeley view it as a distinct species of a higher genus? Does the analogy break down when pressed too far, and if so, where? Was it well chosen to begin with, or is it at least as likely to mislead us as help us comprehend Berkeley’s theory of objective understanding? To find the answer, I shall begin at the point where the comparison of nature with language takes it start: Berkeley theory of vision.

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A. The Synthesis of Visual Spatiality While Locke’s commitment to materialism rendered his theory of objective understanding largely useless to Berkeley (chapters 7 and 12), Berkeley’s own account was profoundly influenced by the conception of ordinary sense experience as, in a literal sense, synthetic that emerged from Locke’s analysis of visual depth and distance perception (chapter 6). Locke’s aim was to show his reader “how much he may be beholding to experience, improvement, and acquired notions, where he thinks, he has not the least use of, or help from them” (ECHU II/ix/§8). Visual experience at the most primitive level, where two-dimensional perceptual inputs of light and colors are converted into the appearances of a world-in-depth characteristic of ordinary visual experience, provided what he considered a perfect illustration. However, Locke does not seem to have considered, and certainly never programmatically pursued, the possibility that psychological operations of the same kind at work in visual depth and distance perception might provide a new and impeccably sensibilist way to account for objective understanding itself, encompassing everything from ideas of particular substances such as Descartes’s piece of wax to the unity of all such objects in a single, law-governed natural order. Had he done so, he might have seen more clearly that there was both the need and the means to explain the whole of experience as synthetic, thus obviating the need to resort to such abstractions as the relative idea of substance, materialism, ideas of diverse senses, and the distinction between ideas of primary and secondary qualities. For Berkeley, by contrast, Locke’s synthetic conception of experience was tailor-made to fill the gap created by his own wholesale rejection of the framework in which objective understanding traditionally had been approached. According to Locke, not unlike speech and reading, sight has a set of acquired “grammatical” rules for carving up the data furnished in sense perception into discrete combinatorial units, capable of being united to yield an “appearance” that is something more than, and fundamentally different from, the kind of appearance characteristic of tactual depth perception. In the case of the latter, the appearance of, say, a sphere is either directly perceived (if it can be encircled with a hand) or emerges when the parts that have been sequentially in contact with one’s hands have been reassembled in imagination so as to form a simultaneous manifold, replicating the shape formed by the outer surfaces of the object. In the case of vision, however, the use of the same sort of procedure would not result in the perception of convex volumes but simply more extensive two-dimensional manifolds than can occupy the visual field at a single instant. The move from two to three visible dimensions, like that from the continuous ribbon of sound to the discretely articulated units of speech perception, happens only when the given of perception is transformed by the operations of judgment into something that, strictly speaking, is not a visual datum at all but rather a species of customary association in which the “flat” two-dimensional data of visual perception are “read” threedimensionally by correlating them to the data of touch (chapter 6-C). Visual depth is thus as much a synthetic product of our psychology as the disapproval we “see” on a face, the grief we “hear” in a funeral march, and the embarrassment we

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“sense” in a person’s squirming: far from reconstituting in an image information already implicit in the sequentially apprehended data of sense, the product of the operations performed on the data of perception exists only in and through the rules discovered and applied by empirical imagination (chapter 6-D). Berkeley endorsed the essentials of Locke’s account of visual depth perception, while deepening and extending it beyond anything contemplated by Locke. The core idea common to them both is the need for “the Experience, that what affects his touch so or so, must affect his sight so or so” (ECHU II/ix/§8). It is for want of any knowledge of the correlations between visible and tangible objects (ideas) that Molyneux’s blind man suddenly made to see would find himself at a loss to distinguish a cube from a sphere by sight alone: Cube, sphere, table are words he has known applied to things perceivable by touch, but to things perfectly intangible he never knew them applied. Those words in their wonted application always marked out to his mind bodies or solid things which were perceived by the resistance they gave: but there is no solidity, no resistance or protrusion, perceived by sight. In short, the ideas of sight are all new perceptions, to which there be no names annexed in his mind: he cannot therefore understand what is said to him concerning them: and to ask of the two bodies he saw placed on the table, which was the sphere, which the cube? were to him a question downright bantering and unintelligible; nothing he sees being able to suggest to his thoughts the idea of body, distance, or in general of anything he had already known. (V §135)

From this point on, however, Locke and Berkeley part company. Locke held that vision, immediately, and so without needing to be integrated with touch, is a source of ideas of the other two dimensions, length and breadth. Berkeley, by contrast, applied the same criteria of resemblance to the ideas of touch and vision that Locke did to simple ideas of color: just as nothing resembling remains after everything that distinguishes yellow from red has been eliminated (ECHU III/iv/ §16), so too nothing resembling remains after everything that qualitatively distinguishes ideas of touch from those of vision has been excluded: The proper, immediate object of vision is light, in all its modes and variations, various colours in kind, in degree, in quantity; some lively, others faint; more of some and less of others; various in their bounds or limits; various in their order and situation. A blind man, when first made to see, might perceive these objects, in which there is an endless variety; but he would neither perceive nor imagine any resemblance or connexion between these visible objects and those perceived by feeling. Lights, shades, and colours would suggest nothing to him about bodies, hard or soft, rough or smooth: nor would their quantities, limits, or order suggest to him geometrical figures, or extension, or situation, which they must do upon the received supposition, that these objects are common to sight and touch. (VV §44; also V §§ 103, 133, and 158)

Berkeley, in short, would have none of Locke’s Cheshire cat abstractionism: if, in accordance with our actual endowment of abstractive powers (as prescribed in

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accordance with the separability principle of PHK Intr. §10 and I §5), we eliminate all light and color from visible extension and figure, nothing perceptible remains; and if we exclude from tangible extension and figure everything specific to that sense (hot and cold, hard and soft, rough and smooth, solid and penetrable, etc.), there is again no perceptible remainder. Forced to choose between sight and touch, Berkeley restricted spatiality proper to the latter (feeling, kinesthesia, balance). We “see” space only in a derivative, secondary sense (V §51, VV §42), akin to that in which we “see” a person’s emotions on their face (“I saw gladness in his looks, I saw shame in his face so I see figure or Distance,” C 231). And this is true not simply of depth but of the other dimensions as well, so that not even plane geometry would be possible by means of vision alone, prior to or independently of its integration with touch: planes are no more the immediate object of sight than solids. What we strictly see are not solids, nor yet planes variously coloured: they are only diversity of colours. And some of these suggest to the mind solids, and other plane figures, just as they have been experienced to be connected with the one or the other: so that we see planes in the same way that we see solids, both being equally suggested by the immediate objects of sight, which accordingly are themselves denominated planes and solids. But though they are called by the same names with the things marked by them, they are nevertheless of a nature entirely different. (V §158)

Berkeley explained the error Locke and the rest of us make as a consequence of the fact that early in life, without ever needing anyone else to teach us, we practice the art of using the aspatial objects of vision as signs for the genuinely spatial objects of touch and master it so completely that we confound what is in fact a relation between distinct, nonresembling items with qualitative and numerical identity: Visible figures are the marks of tangible figures, and . . . it is plain that in themselves they are little regarded, or upon any other score than for their connexion with tangible figures, which by nature they are ordained to signify. . . . If we have been all practising this language, ever since our first entrance into the world . . . whenever the eyes are open in the light, whether alone or in company: it doth not seem to me at all strange that men should not be aware they had ever learned a language begun so early, and practised so constantly, as this of vision. And, if we also consider that it is the same throughout the whole world, and not, like other languages, differing in different places, it will not seem unaccountable that men should mistake the connexion between the proper objects of sight and the things signified by them to be founded in necessary relation or likeness; or, that they should even take them for the same things. Hence it seems easy to conceive why men who do not think should confound in this language of vision the signs with the things signified, otherwise than they are wont to do in the various particular languages formed by the several nations of men. (V §140 and MP 4 §11)

From the beginning of our conscious lives, we experience the richly articulated, systematic network of relations whereby these two senses are intermeshed. Our


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minds move back and forth between their data so continuously that the transitions we make in thought between them become second nature. A network of habits of mind corresponding to this network of relations instills itself in us, so that we come to make the transitions with such facility—so rapidly and spontaneously— that, as Locke too pointed out (ECHU II/ix/§10), we do not even notice them happening (V §145). Thus, for Berkeley, as for Locke (ECHU II/ix/§9), the natural comparison was with spoken and written language: Those immediate objects whose mutual respect and order come to be expressed by terms relative to tangible place, being connected with the real objects of touch, what we say and judge of the one, we say and judge of the other, transferring our thought or apprehension from the signs to the things signified: as it is usual, in hearing or reading a discourse, to overlook the sounds or letters, and instantly pass on to the meaning. (VV §48) signs, being little considered in themselves, or for their own sake, but only in their relative capacity, and for the sake of those things whereof they are signs, it comes to pass that the mind overlooks them, so as to carry its attention immediately on to the things signified. Thus, in reading we run over the characters with the slightest regard, and pass on to the meaning. Hence it is frequent for men to say, they see words, and notions, and things in reading of a book; whereas in strictness they see only the characters which suggest words, notions, and things. And, by parity of reason, may we not suppose that men, not resting in, but overlooking the immediate and proper objects of sight, as in their own nature of small moment, carry their attention onward to the very things signified, and talk as if they saw the secondary objects? which, in truth and strictness, are not seen, but only suggested and apprehended by means of the proper objects of sight, which alone are seen. (MP 4 §12)

Indeed, so ingrained do the habits of transition from visual to tangible data and back again become that we can no more avoid making them than we can prevent ourselves from understanding sentiments expressed in our native tongue: we cannot without great pains cleverly separate and disentangle in our thoughts the proper objects of sight from those of touch which are connected with them. This, indeed, in a complete degree seems scarce possible to be performed: which will not seem strange to us if we consider how hard it is for anyone to hear the words of his native language pronounced in his ears without understanding them. Though he endeavour to disunite the meaning form the sound, it will nevertheless intrude into his thoughts, and he shall find it extreme difficult, if not impossible, to put himself exactly in the posture of a foreigner that never learned the language, so as to be affected barely with the sounds themselves, and not perceive the signification annexed to them. (V §159)

It is no more possible for our faculty of discernment to disentangle the visible from the tangible in such a way as to permit us to direct our attentive gaze upon it so as to exclude its tangible spatial signification as it is for us to hear our native tongue without understanding it, much less to hear the sound of speech as a

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continuous ribbon of sound rather than a series of articulated significant units (even when we cannot clearly make out what is being said).1 Yet the distinctness between the ideas themselves, as given immediately in perception (in the strict sense of Berkeley’s separability principle), is impossible to deny. The very notion of a transition of thought (V §145) requires it, since the idea to which the transition is made must be conceived separately from the idea which triggers the habit that determines us to make the transition. The loss of our original, infantile capacity to discern visual ideas independently of their tangible-spatial significations coincides with the habits of making the transitions from visual to tactual data becoming so deeply ingrained and automatic that we could not prevent their occurring even if they were attentively accessible. It is then that the visual world takes on the peculiar physiognomy familiar to all those who have mastered the visual “language” of spatiality. But, in truth, nothing has changed except the imagination’s ability to carry out the myriad transitions of thought upon perceiving any object that has acquired the status of a character in this language. For Berkeley, the objects present to us in visual perception itself—in the strict, preimaginative sense specified by Locke in ECHU II/ix—are no more spatial when considered absolutely and positively in themselves (i.e., apart from their tactual significations) than they are happy, angry, or puzzled (C 231). The attentive inaccessibility of these objects betokens nothing more than the loss of our ability to consider them as they are actually perceived once the language of visual spatiality has been mastered, and, in particular, in no way changes the fact that visible objects are entirely distinct (by the separability principle criterion) from the properly spatial objects of tactual perception.2 In other words, for Berkeley just as for Locke before him, visual experience is stratified: there is a more elementary, attentively inaccessible level of consciousness in which visible objects (ideas) are apprehended as a mere manifold without relation to anything else, signifying or any other kind. They enter into relations only insofar as the mind itself relates them (“all relations including an act of the mind, we cannot so properly be said to have an idea, but rather a notion of the relations or habitudes between things,” PHK I §142), and, in particular, when “we learn by experience . . . the set rules or established methods” (PHK I §30)3 in accordance with which alone visual spatiality may be synthesized from aspatial visual data—just as certain auditory data must be present in our 1. See chapter 5, note 15. 2. As formulated and employed by Berkeley, the separability principle is not a function of the discerning powers of the imagination. Rather, it concerns what can and cannot exist apart in perception, without regard for whether the items concerned are discriminable attentively or whether their distinction is attentively inaccessible. Attentive accessibility is a function of our ability to refrain (or not) from making a transition of thought that has long since become so habitual as to occur automatically, and consequently has nothing to do with the ideas themselves, whose distinctness is, in any case, implicit in the very fact that a transition between them occurs. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that Berkeley, like Locke before and Hume after him, was not an introspectionist; so long as there are other empirical grounds for supposing attentively indiscriminable ideas to be distinct in separability principle terms (the possibility of their existing one without the other in the mind), then Berkeley did not hesitate to affirm their distinctness. 3. Berkeley was speaking of laws of nature, but it should soon become evident that the correlations between visible and tangible objects are the most basic, and exemplary, instances of these laws.


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consciousness before the mind can synthesize them into meaningful speech, in accordance with the acquired rules of the vernacular. Locke flagged many of the same causes Berkeley used to explain why we are heedless of the absence of depth in the objects of visual perception (ECHU II/ix/ §§ 9–10). From Berkeley’s perspective, however, Locke himself was misled by the deceptive rapidity and spontaneity with which the mind makes transitions between the objects of vision and touch when he supposed that we can “see” any of the three dimensions directly, without surreptitiously substituting the objects of touch (ideas of tactual sensation) in place of those of vision. Precisely because it is “difficult, if not impossible” to “cleverly separate and disentangle in our thoughts the proper objects of sight from those of touch which are connected with them,” Berkeley searched for a nonintrospective, extrapolative technique whereby to consider “The two provinces of sight and touch . . . apart, and as if their objects had no intercourse, no manner of relation one to another” (V §115).4 And he found it by adapting Molyneux’s thought experiment to a variety of different scenarios.5 B. Touched But Not Seen: Berkeley’s Theory of Spatial Representation Since the experience of a lifetime that has made the connections between the visual and tactual second nature for the rest of us is totally absent in the blind, a 4. This of course is contrary to current philosophical lore, which supposes the all the British Empiricists to have been a committed introspectionists (see chapters 4-D, 5-B, 6-C, and 17-E-2). David Armstrong, for example, assimilates Berkeley’s theory of vision to the fundamentally distinct tradition of twentieth-century sense-datumist introspectionism, holding that when Berkeley “speaks strictly he is not prepared to say that the colour of a physical object is immediately seen; rather, all that is immediately seen is the colour that the object looks to me to have: only when we simply register our own senseimpressions, do we get immediate perception.” (Berkeley’s Theory of Vision: A Critical Examination of Bishop Berkeley’s “Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision.” (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1960), 7. But, as we have seen, for Berkeley, just as there is effectively no attentive access to speech that would enable me to hear the sounds of which speech in my native tongue is made without hearing that it is speech and hearing what is said, so too, once the “language of vision” has been mastered, there is effectively no attentive access to visual spatiality that would allow me to see its objects (ideas)—“how they look to me”—without seeing that they are extended, shaped, etc., or which spatial configurations they have. For a good discussion of other misunderstandings regarding Berkeley’s notion of “immediate perception,” see Atherton, Berkeley’s Revolution, 62–76. 5. Berkeley’s account of vision also includes a number of other arguments that I shall not examine because they are tangential to his theory of objective understanding. For example, his argument that distance is not immediately seen because it is a space composed of lines perpendicular to the plane of the eyes but also seen head on, can only appear as points (V §2 and 1D202) does not seem sufficiently fundamental to merit consideration here. For it not only assumes the spatiality of the objects of vision (visible lines extending in various directions from the eye), but also depends on the contingent empirical fact that humans do not have additional eyes that can be extended meters, or dozens of meters, by means of tentacles or other such appendages, to afford us side and rear views in addition to the view of surfaces perpendicular to our faces. Interesting discussions of the argument can be found in Maurice Merleau Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, (translated by Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 254–5 and Robert Schwartz, “Seeing Distance from a Berkeleian Perspective,” in Muehlmann, Metaphysics.

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blind person who first acquires sight in adulthood would at first have nothing to guide him beyond the actual inputs of visual perception. Yet the absence of all coordination between sight and touch does not of itself entail that what the newly sighted perceive is not spatial. Berkeley’s claim to this effect is an implication of his antiabstractionism; for, in the absence of aspect discrimination (chapter 10-B), it is evident that “the things I see are so very different and heterogeneous from the things I feel that the perception of the one would never have suggested the other to my thoughts, or enabled me to pass the least judgment thereon, until I had experienced their connexion” (V §108). The newly sighted should not be compared to language-users who suddenly find themselves in a strange land in which the people speak a completely unfamiliar tongue. Rather, their position is like that of invading barbarians, familiar with no other kinds of linguistic communication than speech and gesture, being exposed to writing for the first time: they could not form the least notion of what it is, nor even so much as suspect, on the basis only of what they see, that this too is language, and just as capable of recording and transmitting thoughts as speech. For Berkeley, it would be impossible for the newly sighted, on the basis of all they had known previously, even to suspect that what they saw had anything more to do with spatial representation that what they heard, smelled, or tasted did, much less conceptualize how this could possibly be the case. For, since indifferent denotation turns entirely on resemblance, they would be just as much at a loss to generalize the full panoply of tactually derived spatial concepts to visible objects (ideas) as they had been in the cases of audible, tastable, and smellable ones: When upon perception of an idea I range it under this or that sort, it is because it is perceived after the same manner, or because it has a likeness or conformity with, or affects me in the same way as, the ideas of the sort I rank it under. In short, it must not be entirely new, but have something in it old and already perceived by me. It must, I say, have so much at least in common with the ideas I have before known and named as to make me give it the same name with them. But it has been, if I mistake not, clearly made out that a man born blind would not at first reception of his sight think the things he saw were of the same nature with the objects of touch, or had anything in common with them; but that they were a new set of ideas, perceived in a new manner, and entirely different from all he had ever perceived before: so that he would not call them by the same name, nor repute them to be of the same sort with anything he had hitherto known. (V §128)

The newly sighted must painstakingly build up a vocabulary and grammar of visual-tactual correlations by marking the connections disclosed to them by experience until such time as the transitions from vision to touch and back again become habitual, and their attention gaze can be (permanently) directed where it is most useful to them: the tangible-spatial meanings of visual signs.6 In this respect, the only thing that distinguishes sight from the other senses besides touch is the 6. As noted in chapter 6-D, however, a full mastery is probably impossible to achieve for the newly sighted, even with the help of skilled educationalists.


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fineness of the discriminations it permits, and the more precise correlations with the data of touch this makes possible (section C below). Berkeley sometimes designated the objects we immediately perceive by means of sight—light and color—the primary objects of that sense, and contrasted them with its secondary objects: the properly tangible ideas of space and its modes correlated with the aspatial primary objects of vision. The secondary objects of vision exist only in and through transition-making imagination, and so, strictly speaking, are not objects of that sense at all (“those things alone are actually and strictly perceived by any sense, which would have been perceived, in case that same sense had then been first conferred on us,” 1D204; also VV §§ 9–10 and 42). Once these transitions become deeply ingrained habits of mind, primary objects have only to appear in order to suggest the corresponding secondary objects to the mind. And in the same way that speech is no sooner heard than it directs us to the objects (ideas in sensation or thought) they suggest to our minds, so too our attention is exclusively absorbed by the secondary objects the primary objects of vision suggest rather than by these objects themselves: No sooner do we hear the words of a familiar language pronounced in our ears, but the ideas corresponding thereto present themselves to our minds: in the very same instant the sound and the meaning enter the understanding: so closely are they united that it is not in our power to keep out the one, except we exclude the other also. We even act in all respects as if we heard the very thoughts themselves. So likewise the secondary objects or those which are only suggested by sight, do often more strongly affect us, and are more regarded than the proper objects of that sense; along with which they enter into the mind, and with which they have a far more strict connexion, than ideas have with words. Hence it is we find it so difficult to discriminate between the immediate and mediate objects of sight, and are so prone to attribute to the former what belongs only to the latter. They are, as it were, most closely twisted, blended, and incorporated together. . . . We cannot open our eyes but the ideas of distance, bodies, and tangible figures are suggested by them. So swift and sudden and unperceived is the transition from visible to tangible ideas that we can scarce forbear thinking them equally the immediate object of vision. (V §§ 51 and 145)

Among the less obvious ways in which the visual becomes so closely integrated with the tactual that primary objects are conflated with secondary involves proprioception. The motion we feel in our eyeballs, head, and body is a principal means whereby visual data are assimilated to the spatiotactual framework of face, hands, and the body as a whole (V §§ 16, 97–8, and 145). The spatial situation attributed to visible objects in whichever dimension—up, down, right, left, front, rear, near, far, etc.—is correlated to this framework: in a standing position (“upright”), the tangible head is upward relative to the tangible feet, the tangible left arm leftward relative of the body axis, the tangible derrière rearward, that in tangible arm’s reach nearer relative to what is not, that within a few tangible steps of tangible arm’s reach nearer relative to what takes more steps, etc. Accordingly, visible objects that come into view when the eyeballs rotate so that their front is higher than their rear are deemed to be situated upward, visible objects that come

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into view when the front of the eyeballs is directed leftwards of the rear are deemed to be situated on the left, visible objects that come into view when the body is rotated 180 degrees are deemed to have been situated rearward before the turn was made, and so on. The implication Berkeley would have us draw is that a blind person suddenly made to see, lacking all experience of these correlations, would be completely unable to visually distinguish which visible objects are appearances of his own body and of which other things, and so would have no notions of relative situation at all; and if prevented from learning these correlations (by, say, a proprioception numbing agent), he could never learn to situate visible objects spatially at all. Indeed, he would be quite incapable of suspecting that, much less conceiving that, visible objects are “appearances” of ambient bodies in a sense significantly different from the way auditory and olfactory appearances are. For, having no prior experience of bodies save by means of touch, it seems all but impossible that the newly sighted could figure out a different use for the primary objects of vision merely from their appearance—just as the barbarian unacquainted with writing could divine how the images he sees constitute a use of language. Thus, on the basis of their visual inputs alone, someone newly sighted could not form the least idea of situation or direction—that of hi own body or any ambient object—in any dimension: a man born blind, and remaining in the same state, could mean nothing else by the words higher and lower than a greater or lesser distance from the earth; which distance he would measure by the motion or application of his hand or some other part of his body. . . . Whence it plainly follows that such a one, if we suppose him made to see, would not at first sight think anything he saw was high or low, erect or inverted. . . . The objects to which he had hitherto been used to apply the terms up and down, high and low, were such only as affected or were some way perceived by his touch: but the proper objects of vision make a new set of ideas, perfectly distinct and different from the former, and which can in no sort make themselves be perceived by touch. There is, therefore, nothing at all that could induce him to think those terms applicable to them; nor would he ever think it till such time as he had observed their connexion with tangible objects, and the same prejudice began to insinuate itself into his understanding, which from their infancy had grown up in the understandings of other men. (V §§ 94– 5)

Implicit in Berkeley’s reasoning is the priority of tangible extension over visible. If experience showed that the left portion of the visual field coincided with tangible above, we would regard the things we see there as situated above us rather than beside us to the left. The tangible would also take precedence if visible right correlated with tangible left, visible down with tangible up, and visible up with tangible left. Similarly, if the correlations were insufficiently constant to ingrain habits of sufficient power to transform tangible situations into secondary objects of vision, then the objects of vision would no more be found to exhibit spatial situation than those of smell or taste do. Indeed, the transference of spatial notions from touch to vision would, in the absence of constant conjunctions between them, almost certainly render otiose all talk of a visual “field” with “upper” and “lower”


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or “left and “right” “areas,” or “locations” generally—except perhaps in the metaphorical sense in which we speak of auditory objects as “high” or “low,” “rising” or “falling,” and “near” or “distant” in pitch. Berkeley’s claims seem to gain plausibility when the conditions of the thought experiment are strengthened by administering a drug to prevent a newly sighted person from having proprioception, or by placing him in a position where he would be unable to correlate his new sensations with his tactual data (as Plato’s prisoners—if we imagine their eyeballs and not just their heads and bodies restrained—would be unable to coordinate what they feel with the light they see on the cave walls opposite). The result Berkeley’s account predicts is the following: if there were any resemblance at all between the primary objects of vision and touch, a blind person suddenly made to see would eventually, even under these conditions, discern the same spatial relations and situations by means of vision he had formerly been able to know only by touch. For if the ideas of vision and touch are in the relevant sense the same, what need would a newly sighted person have to store up a corpus of experiences in order to discover their identity? Past experience is necessary to disclose relations only when direct scrutiny of the appearances concerned is of no avail. This would be the case only if the ideas were not sensibly identical in respect of space, and experience alone was capable of relating (sensibly aspatial) visible ideas to (sensibly spatial) tangible correlates by serving to instill in us habitual transitions of thought between them (habitual transitions between an idea and itself—as would be the case if the same idea of space were derivable from vision and touch alike—are, of course, as impossible as they are unnecessary). Consequently, if, as Berkeley’s scrutiny of visual recognition of spatial situation purports to show, we have reason to believe that we are dependent on experience to correlate the primary objects of vision with those of touch, it follows that visual sensations no more resemble tactual in respect of situation than the sensations of hearing, smell, and taste do, and that no ideas of up, down, right, left, etc., are derivable from them. The case of distance is no different. As an object gets closer (in the tangible sense), the visual image blurs. But if it had been the ordinary course of Nature that the farther off an object were placed, the more confused it should appear, it is certain the very same perception that now makes us think an object approaches would then have made us to imagine it went farther off. That perception, abstracting from custom and experience, being equally fitted to produce the idea of great distance, or small distance, or no distance at all. (V §26)

Here again feeling takes precedence. For whatever the phenomenology of the visual appearance, if we find by experience that it is correlated to what is tangibly near, that appearance will take on the meaning and characteristic physiognomy (“look”) of proximity and, as such, become a secondary object of vision. By contrast, the very same appearance, if correlated to what is tangibly distant, will assume the value of a secondary object of vision with precisely the opposite signification and character. However, if the correlations are insufficiently regular

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to ingrain habits as powerful as those operative in speech perception, then we would not consider these features of vision to have anything to do with distance at all, and would treat them as we do irregularities we meet with in the objects of smell or taste. It is thus a manifest consequence that a man born blind, being made to see, would, at first, have no idea of distance by sight; the sun and stars, the remotest objects as well as the nearer, would all seem to be in his eye, or rather in his mind. The objects intromitted by sight would seem to him (as in truth they are) no other than a new set of thoughts or sensations, each whereof is as near to him as the perceptions of pain or pleasure, or the most inward passions of his soul. (V §41)

Berkeley extended the same reasoning to extension and measure. Even if we allow that, in some attenuated sense, the primary objects of vision—light and colors—constitute a field divisible into regions, lines, and points (the minima visibile of V §80), this “space” is still so subordinate to tangible space that it is not its primary but rather its secondary objects—tangible extension and figure—that monopolize our attention. This is shown by the fact that a blind person suddenly made to see would make a very different judgment of the magnitude of objects intromitted by [the eyes] from what others do. He would not consider the ideas of sight with reference to, or as having any connexion with the ideas of touch: his view of them being entirely terminated within themselves, he can no otherwise judge them great or small than as they contain a greater or lesser number of visible points. Now, it being certain that any visible point can cover or exclude from view only one other visible point, it follows that whatever object intercepts the view of another hath an equal number of visible points with it; and consequently they shall both be thought by him to have the same magnitude. Hence it is evident one in those circumstances would judge his thumb, with which he might hide a tower or hinder its being seen, equal to that tower, or his hand, the interposition whereof might conceal the firmament from his view, equal to the firmament: how great an inequality soever there may in our apprehensions seem to be betwixt those two things, because of the customary and close connexion that has grown up in our minds between the objects of sight and touch. (V §79)

However true the judgments the newly sighted may form of the magnitude of the primary objects of vision, the rest of us would consider them visually false and cognitively useless. Why? Our reckonings of visual magnitude are one and all founded on our lifelong experience of the interplay between the visual and the tactual, and governed by the habits and expectations this experience inculcates in us. For example, we learn by experience that a change in the magnitude of the portion of the visual field occupied by a primary object does not typically coincide with a tangible change. In such cases, the testimony of vision is invariably subordinated to that of touch: we posit a change in magnitude only if a tangible difference is sensed (or imagined), and otherwise regard size as constant, even to the point of denying the evidence of our eyes. The role of experience, then, is to so


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fully adapt vision to the service of touch that our imaginations take precedence over our sight, even to the extent that we no longer visually experience a change despite the fact that changes are visually perceived virtually all the time (since each movement of the eyes, head, or body repositions or annihilates primary objects in the visual field). In other words, the phenomenology of vision itself alters from its initial state, before we learned which tangible primary objects correlate with which visible ones, to the time when our imaginations have inculcated the habits requisite to pass unhesitatingly and unreflectively from the primary objects of vision to the secondary (defined in terms of the spatiotactual framework centered on the body). Finally, Berkeley applied to number the same considerations he did to situation, distance, and extension: I do not by any necessary consecution, independent of experience, judge of the number of things tangible from the number of things visible. I should not, therefore, at first opening my eyes conclude that because I see two I shall feel two. How, therefore, can I, before experience teaches me, know that the visible legs, because two, are connected with the tangible legs, or the visible head, because one, is connected with the tangible head? The truth is, the things I see are so very different and heterogeneous from the things I feel that the perception of the one would never have suggested the other to my thoughts, or enabled me to pass the least judgment thereon, until I had experienced their connexion. (V §108)

That experience might reveal my two tangible arms to be correlated with my five visible fingers, or with three visible things at a tangible distance of six meters from my body, shows that visible number no more has intrinsic spatial significance than auditory, olfactory, or gustatory number do. This lack of intrinsic spatial significance is precisely what Leibniz overlooked when we supposed that the Molyneux man might distinguish the cube from the sphere by counting the visible edges (chapter 6-C). It is therefore only through experienced conjunctions between the numbers of aspatial visible primary objects and the numbers of spatial tangible primary objects that the former are endowed spatial significance. We must however be careful, here and in what follows, not to confound tangible space with behavioral space: the sense-divide transcending space in which situation, size, number, shape, depth, and distance are determined not in accordance with the contents of sensation but functionally, in terms of how an embodied agent moves and acts. Evans, for example, characterized behavioral space as follows: I shall occasionally allow myself the shorthand way of speaking in terms of information ‘specifying a position in behavioural space,’ but in doing so I shall not be talking about information about a special kind of space, but about a special kind of information about space—information of the type one would possess if one had mastered an egocentric spatial vocabulary, and had received and understood information expressed in it. It is perfectly consistent with the sense that I have assigned to this vocabulary that its terms should refer to points in a public three-dimensional space. . . . Since coining the term ‘behavioural

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BERKELEY’S MODEST PROPOSAL space,’ I have found it used in roughly the same sense by C.B. Trevarthen . . . : ‘Animals act as though they were continuously cognizant of a space for behaviour around the body. . . . In this world acts are made from the body as centre and origin. Therefore the spatial frame for activity has a symmetry imposed upon it; it is bisymmetric with the midplane of the body and polarized in the antero-posterior direction of the body axis.’7

The problem with behavioral space is that it takes it for granted that we are operating in a mental world of sense-divide transcending objects, where one sees, feels, smells, tastes, hears, desires, enjoys, etc., the same object (“not . . . information about a special kind of space, but . . . a special kind of information about . . . a public three-dimensional space”); and it is by no means inevitable that every creature will preferentially orient itself spatially by feeling (touch, kinesthesia, balance, etc.) rather than by its other senses. For Berkeley, by contrast, explaining how it is possible to conceive sense-divide transcending objects in the first place is an essential part of sensibilist theory of objective understanding (or, at any rate, becomes so as soon as ideas of diverse senses are rejected). He did this, as we shall see in more detail below, by extending the visual language of spatiality to all perceptual modalities, even incorporating into it notions of causality and substance. In this way, suggestive signification provided him with a means to explain the unity of all our senses into what is, for all intents and purposes, a single external sense directed upon the same spatially determinate objects, situated and arrayed in the same space, and endowed with powers and potentialities of movement and resistance (solidity): that is, everything requisite for a creature to represent itself as an embodied agent in behavioral space. Yet for Berkeley, however else a creature might conceive behavior, its own and that of the objects it perceives, it could not do so spatially through suggestive signification alone. Before behavior can be supposed to impart spatial significance to anything, it must be imparted to it from some source of genuinely spatial ideas of sensation. For how could we imagine the potentialities of movement in the present (or any other) situation if our imaginations did not have actual sensations of movement on which to draw? In order to conceive actions in spatial terms as movements, and comprehend the consequences of behavior in spatial terms, our imaginations must first be provided by sense with the requisite spatial materials. With no such source, a creature could understand neither itself nor anything else as an embodied agent; with it, it can—and, in the case of creatures like ourselves, invariably will— 7. “Molyneux’s Question,” 385–6 and n, in Papers. The Trevarthen reference is “Two Mechanisms of Perception in Primates,” Psychologische Forschung 31 (1968), 302. Schwartz takes a similar view: “The very content or meaning of any spatial idea lies, ultimately, in its tangible consequences. To know the distance to X is to have ideas about locomotion, ideas about how many paces it will take to get to X or how much effort it will take to reach out and touch X. It is not a matter of how things look phenomenally. Seeing distance requires only that environmentally appropriate motor ideas are derived from the flux of visual sensations, whatever these sensations are like qualitatively. An organism perceives distance to the extent that its visual experience serves to direct effectively its movements in the world,” Vision, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 9. And Morgan ascribes to Berkeley the view that “we perceive a world that is always interpreted through our bodies and possible actions,” Molyneux’s Question,62.


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comprehend its own behavior and that of everything else spatially. Consequently, despite the preference of philosophers today for functionalist explications of the content of ideas, the notion of “behavioral space” risks begging the sensibilist philosopher’s first and most fundamental question: which contents of sensations are intrinsically spatial and which merely become spatial by virtue of being employed in imagination as signs to suggest those that are? C. The Tactual Basis of Spatial Imagination For Berkeley, “there is no more likeness to exhibit, or necessity to infer, things tangible from the modifications of light, than there is in language to collect the meaning from the sound” (VV §40; also V §§ 140–7 and MP 4 §10). In conferring on the primary objects of vision the significance of their secondary objects, the imagination may indeed radically transform the phenomenology of visual experience from what it would be if we were confined to the primary objects of immediate visual perception. Nevertheless, the imagination is incapable of transmuting visual appearances themselves into something they can never intrinsically be: spatial. Just as the visual phenomenology of fear—the distinctive posture and movements of the face and body—can exist without our having to suppose the visual appearances are transmuted into the emotion, so too visual appearances, no matter how spatial they may “look” to us, remain as aspatial as ever. Both alike are nothing more than secondary objects of vision, the one sort dependent on habitual associations of its primary objects (already in their secondary-object significations) with emotions, the other with tactual sensations, without thereby altering the fact of their qualitative incommensurateness one iota. Beyond shared names, the “extension,” “number,” “distance,” and “situation” of the primary objects of vision have nothing whatsoever in common with the situation, distance, magnitude, and number of the primary objects of touch. For it is impossible, simply by scrutinizing them and without the benefit of prior experience, to divine which visual inputs are spatially significant and which mere noise, to anticipate which of all the possible ways of carving up the whole visual input, at a given moment and over intervals of time, yields the units that “parse” best, when combined, with concurrent tactual inputs, or to descry the potential visual sensations have for expressing tangible spatiality that auditory, olfactory, and gustatory data lack. Clearly, therefore, Berkeley’s characterization of visual spatiality as a language needs to be taken very literally indeed: A great number of arbitrary signs, various and apposite, do constitute a language. If such arbitrary connexion be instituted by men, it is an artificial language; if by the Author of Nature, it is a natural language. Infinitely various are the modifications of light and sound, whence they are each capable of supplying an endless variety of signs, and, accordingly, have been each employed to form languages; the one by the arbitrary appointment of mankind, the other by that of God Himself. A connexion established by the Author of Nature, in the ordinary course of things, may surely be called natural; as that made by men will be named artificial. And yet this doth not hinder but the one may be as arbitrary as

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BERKELEY’S MODEST PROPOSAL the other. And . . . such as the connexion is of the various tones and articulations of voice with their several meanings, the same is in between the various modes of light and their respective correlates; or, in other words, between the ideas of sight and touch. (VV §40)

A newly sighted person, even if informed in advance that vision is a language optimally adapted by God to express tangible spatiality, would still be a loss to fathom what kind of language it is—so incommensurate would it be with everything he has known as “language” up to that time. Indeed, his situation would be indistinguishable from someone born blind and deaf who, prior to being given his hearing, had been misled to expect just such a language to be unfolded to his hearing. For example, if trained in advance with a host of rules on how to “read” auditory objects spatially—to correlate, for example, single tones with regular lines and curves and multiple tones with edges and bends—we could concoct situations that would, for quite a while, deceive him into believing he was hearing the difference between cube-tones and sphere-tones, hearing how many cube-tones are present, hearing which cube-tone is nearest to his own body’s tone, and so on. Without the habit-inculcating experiences requisite to integrate vision with touch, we would no more be capable of making sense of visual inputs as items distributed through space and enumerating them than we could make sense of a language at first exposure that was built on different principles of grammar, with completely unforeseeable expressive potential (e.g., a language used by intelligent nonhuman creatures): a man born blind and afterwards, when grown up, made to see, would not in the first act of vision parcel out the ideas of sight into the same distinct collections that others do, who have experienced which do regularly coexist and are proper to be bundled up together under one name. He would not, for example, make into one complex idea, and thereby esteem an unit, all those particular ideas which constitute the visible head or foot. For there can be no reason assigned why he should do so, barely upon his seeing a man stand upright before him. There crowd into his mind the ideas which compose the visible man, in company with all the other ideas of sight perceived at the same time: but all these ideas offered at once to his view, he would not distribute into sundry distinct combinations till such time as by observing the motion of the parts of the man and other experiences he comes to know which are to be separated and which to be collected together. (V §110; also MP 4 §11)8

If it is objected that vision alone gives us access to objects too small, too large, too distance, too inaccessible, too quick, etc., to perceive by touch, Berkeley’s response is that we would be helpless to make spatial sense of what we saw if we could not call upon the aid of tactual imagination, which in turn presupposes tactual sensations and their thoroughgoing integration with visual: “figures and motions, which cannot actually be felt by us, but only imagined, may nevertheless be esteemed tangible ideas, forasmuch as they are of the same kind with the 8. Atherton emphasizes similar themes in her treatments of the texts discussed earlier: Berkeley’s Revolution, 9.


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objects of touch, and as the imagination drew them from that sense” (VV §51). Once we have built up a visual vocabulary of secondary objects by correlating the primary objects of vision with the authentically spatial objects of tactual sensation, it becomes possible for our minds to effect transitions in the other direction. We do so, for example, by “reading” the primary objects of vision so as to form tactual images of the spatial properties we would feel if our bodies were in contact with something we are presently seeing but not touching. Since tactual imagination is not subject to the same physical limitations to which tactual sensation is, we are free to magnify, restructure, or otherwise compound and divide existing secondary objects to make new ones capable of conferring a spatial meaning even on visual data that are not, or cannot be, correlated to tangible sensations. Thus, for example, we can integrate microscope and telescope views with ordinary views by, in effect, imagining the tangible framework defined by the body to be increased greatly in sensitivity and reach. So long as our tactual imagination is anchored in tactual sensations and their correlation with visual, there is no limit to the number, magnitude, distance, and other features it can use to conjure up secondary objects for any and all primary visible objects given to us immediately in perception. Lacking this foundation, however, our imaginations would be no more capable of fashioning a visible spatial world than an audible or aromatic one. Berkeley extends this reasoning even so far as the drawings employed by the geometer. What the geometer sees is merely light and color. But since these have the power to suggest secondary objects, “they are of the same use in geometry that words are: and the one may as well be accounted the object of that science as the other, neither of them being otherwise concerned therein than as they represent or suggest to the mind the particular tangible figures connected with them” (V §152). To prove this, Berkeley considers the antithesis of a Molyneux man: “an intelligence, or unembodied spirit, which is supposed to see perfectly well, i.e. to have a clear perception of the proper and immediate objects of sight, but to have no sense of touch” (§153). Since such an intelligence could have no idea of distance, the objects he sees could neither have nor suggest volume, nor could their parts be represented as distributed through a volume. He would therefore not judge as we do, nor have any idea of distance, outness, or profundity, nor consequently of space or body, either immediately or by suggestion. Whence it is plain he can have no notion of those parts of geometry which relate to the mensuration of solids and their convex or concave surfaces, and contemplate the properties of lines generated by the section of a solid. The conceiving of any part whereof is beyond the reach of his faculties. (§154).

Plane geometry too would exceed the reach of such a mind “since some idea of distance is necessary to form the idea of a geometrical plain” (V §155). An idea of distance useful for geometrical purposes must exhibit a degree of constancy sufficient for magnitudes to be computed. But the objects of sight—“colours, with their variations and different proportions of light and shade”—suffer such “perpetual mutability and fleetingness” as to “render them incapable of being managed after the manner of geometrical figures;” and even if it could be done, “accurately

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to compute their magnitude and assign precise determinate proportions between things so variable and inconstant . . . must yet be a very trifling and insignificant labour” (§156). Even setting such considerations aside, Berkeley holds that plane figures are no more immediate objects of sight than solid figures are. To explain why, he proposes a new interpretation of Locke’s painting analogy (ECHU II/ix/§8): men are tempted to think that flat or plane figures are immediate objects of sight, though they acknowledge solids are not. And this opinion is grounded on what is observed in painting, wherein (it seems) the ideas immediately imprinted on the mind are only of planes variously coloured, which by a sudden act of the judgment are changed into solids. But with a little attention we shall find the planes here mentioned as the immediate objects of sight are not visible but tangible planes. For when we say that pictures are planes, we mean thereby that they appear to the touch smooth and uniform. But then this smoothness and uniformity, or, in other words, this planeness of the picture, is not perceived immediately by vision: for it appeareth to the eye various and multiform. (V §157)

If, as Locke’s painting analogy was intended to show, the immediate object of sight were a plane, then it should make no difference whether the plane is at one moment uniformly colored and lit and the next as variegated as a Kandinsky. But if experience showed that its color and light never varied without our also finding a corresponding tangible difference (roughness changed to smoothness, a change in inclination, etc.), the appearance a painting makes would convey no suggestion of (tangible) planarity whatsoever. And would we not craft our spatial judgments to conform to the verdict of touch in such circumstances? Indeed, if this had been our experience all our lives, would it ever have occurred to us to regard paintings as planar in the first place? Or would paintings not then have the “look” of the crumpled, or undulating, or whatever shape they manifest to touch? So far as Berkeley was concerned, vision, detached from touch, offers no verdicts regarding shape or any other spatial characteristic whatsoever. It is rather a blank slate waiting for the imagination to associate with its objects whatever significations it can find for them. And Berkeley would no doubt have drawn the implied conclusion concerning the newly sighted: being completely ignorant of the secondary objects of vision, they would be just as incapable of seeing the planarity of a painting as the solidity of a sphere or cube. For both alike are judgments, dependent on information obtainable only by means of experience of the correlations between visible and tangible ideas, and not possible otherwise: “planes are no more the immediate object of sight than solids . . . so that we see planes in the same way that we see solids, both being equally suggested by the immediate objects of sight, which accordingly are themselves denominated planes and solids” (§158).9 9. Arguing against Jonathan Mackie’s assertion that Locke would have responded differently to Diderot’s two-dimensional version of the Molyneux problem, Evans cites Locke’s distinction between ideas specific to vision (light and color) and ideas it has in common with touch (space, figure, and motion) “the several varieties whereof change the appearance of its proper Object, viz., Light and Colours,” so that “we bring ourselves by use to judge of the one by the other” (ECHU II/ix/§9): “This seems to express the straight Berkeleyan position on visual perception of space, and would obviously


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From a motive of what seems to me misguided charity, most interpreters refuse to take at face value Berkeley’s denial that we see “only diversity of colours,” not “planes variously coloured” (V §158), and search for alternative readings that will yield a position that seems to them more plausible. David Armstrong is a case in point: Berkeley denies that objects are immediately seen as three-dimensional, and so he must deny they are seen as flat. But this is by no means incompatible with saying that the immediate objects of sight are ordered in two dimensions, for a merely two-dimensional manifold is not flat, although it does have certain resemblances to a flat surface. Only if we confuse flatness with a two-dimensional manifold (a mistake often made) will any contradiction arise.10

Yet not only Berkeley’s theory of vision but his rejection of the claim that space is an idea of diverse senses depend on the thesis that, qualitatively, vision and touch are absolutely incommensurate. If space in any of its three dimensions truly were an idea common to touch and vision alike, then Berkeley would have taken this to imply that some spatial quality must remain to be perceived or imagined even after all qualities specific to each sense have been eliminated. That this is so he unquestionably denied, insisting instead that visible space vanishes completely the moment color and light are eliminated, and that tangible space does the same the moment soft/hard, smooth/rough, wet/dry, warm/cold, and all other qualities specific to touch are eliminated. Armstrong’s charity thus comes at a price Berkeley would clearly have deemed unacceptable: the abandonment of the separability principle and, with it, the antiabstractionism determinative of his entire theory of human understanding. With this in mind, I see no reason not to take at face value Berkeley’s assertion that there is nothing sensible whatsoever—content, quality, appearance—common to the primary objects of vision and touch, including the first and second dimensions: if a square surface perceived by touch be of the same sort with a square surface perceived by sight, it is certain the blind man here mentioned [by Molyneux and Locke] might know a square surface as soon as he saw it: it is no more but introducing into his mind by a new inlet an idea he has been already well acquainted with. Since, therefore, he is supposed to have known by his touch require a negative answer to Diderot’s version of Molyneux’s Question also” (“Molyneux’s,” 365n5). Such a reading, however, seems to me make ix/§9 inconsistent with Locke’s statement in §8 that a uniformly colored sphere appears to vision as “a flat Circle variously shadow’d, with several degrees of Light and Brightness coming to our Eyes.” What use (based on the guidance of touch) makes it possible for us to do is to form the idea of a uniformly colored sphere (in judgment) from this intrinsically twodimensional visual perception. Why? Because only experience can teach us the planar projection of a three-dimensional form. Surely, it cannot be inferred from this that Locke also held that we need to learn by use to judge two-dimensional figures from colors and light when no such complications exist in the two-dimensional case! Consequently, there seems to me no reason to suppose that Locke, by contrast with Berkeley, would not have answered Diderot’s question in the affirmative. See also chapter 6 note §37. 10. Vision, 6; see also 5–9, 37, 58–9, and 75–8.

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BERKELEY’S MODEST PROPOSAL that a cube is a body terminated by square surfaces, and that a sphere is not terminated by square surfaces: upon the supposition that a visible and tangible square differ only in numero it follows that he might know, by the unerring mark of the square surfaces, which was the cube, and which not, while he only saw them. We must therefore allow either that visible extension and figures are specifically distinct from tangible extension and figures, or else that the solution of this problem given by those two thoughtful and ingenious men are wrong. (V §133)

Since a visible square and circle could only be specifically identical with a tangible square and circle if the visible first and second dimensions were also specifically identical with the tangible first and second dimensions, Berkeley’s denial of the former entails the denial of the latter. And conversely: how could the first and second visual dimensions be specifically identical with the first and second tactual dimensions, and yet flat and curved planar figures described in the former never be (indeed, be incapable of being) specifically identical with flat and curved planar figures described in the latter? We might as well pretend that there could be three visible dimensions, all specifically identical with the three tangible dimensions, and yet it still be possible that no figure in visible space—sphere, cube, etc.—be specifically identical to any figure in tangible space. Pace Armstrong, when Berkeley says the primary objects of vision and touch are utterly incommensurate with one another, no wiggle room is left for supposing them to be resembling in twodimensionality. One or the other sort of idea is spatial but not both, in the sense proper to immediate perception and exclusive of everything having to do with the significative uses of ideas. Whatever the merits of the painting analogy of V §157, it seems clear that, in offering it, Berkeley was embracing the conclusion that visible two-dimensionality is just as much a matter of suggestive signification as visible three-dimensionality. There thus can be no question that Berkeley opted to equate extension, and all its modes (dimensions not excepted), with tangible space in the same psychologistic manner in which he equated causal efficacy with volition, substance with perceiving, and existence (as applied to sensible things) with presence to consciousness in sensation. D. The Distinctive Phenomenology of Vision Berkeley’s account of vision in terms of suggestive signification is often criticized for contradicting the manifest evidence of vision (visual phenomenology). According to Bertrand Russell, “Berkeley’s theory of vision, according to which everything looks flat, is disproved by the stereoscope.”11 William James too supposed that one need only open one’s eyes and look to recognize that Berkeley erred in dispossessing vision, and attributing to intellect, what are manifestly deliverances of the former: he concluded that distance could not possibly be a visual sensation, but must be an intellectual ‘suggestion’ from ‘custom’ of some non-visual experience. . . . 11. Human Knowledge, (London: Routledge, 1948), 65.


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Berkeleyans unanimously assume that no retinal sensation can primitively be of volume; if it be of extension at all (which they are barely disposed to admit), it can be only of two-, not of three-, dimensional extension. . . . It is impossible to lie on one’s back on a hill, to let the empty abyss of blue fill one’s whole visual field, and to sink deeper and deeper into the merely sensational mode of consciousness regarding it, without feeling that indeterminate, palpitating, circling depth is as indefeasibly one of its attributes as its breadth. . . . Berkeley of course erred in supposing that the thing suggested was not even originally an object of sight, as the sign now is which calls it up.12

More recently, Gertrude Anscombe objected that Berkeley deemed all besides the arrangement of colour patches in the visual field . . . inference and construction. This is not acceptable. There are impressions of distance and size, for example, independent of assumptions about what a thing is. . . . Departing, then, from Berkeley, we can note that descriptions of visual impressions can be very rich and various. There can be impressions of depth and distance and relative positions and size; of kinds of things and kinds of stuff and texture and even temperature; of facial expression and emotion and mood and thought and character; of action and movement (in the stationary impression) and life and death. Even within the compass of the description ‘colours with their variations of light and shade’ there are diverse kinds of impression.13

The foregoing objections seem to me representative. Berkeley is generally read as having relegated “visual” spatiality (his concern often supposed to be limited to depth) to the intellectual domain of interpretation, inference, and conjecture, and so is regarded as having blinkered himself to the evident facts of visual phenomenology.14 Yet if Berkeley did not expect to be held accountable to the phenomenology of vision, it is difficult to understand why he would have written something like the following: To perceive is one thing; to judge is another. So likewise, to be suggested is one thing, and to be inferred is another. Things are suggested and perceived by sense. We make judgments and inferences by the understanding. (VV §42) 12. The Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1890), 212–3 and 240. 13. “The Intentionality of Sensation,” in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1981), 16–7. Some of Anscombe’s criticisms are based on the mistaken belief that Berkeley followed Locke in regarding the inputs of vision as “a distribution of colour patches in a plane” (64–5)—something expressly denied at V §158. 14. Morgan differs in this respect from the others, but only because he believes the Molyneux problem is not concerned with visual phenomenology at all but rather with the ability of the newly sighted to name what they see: “Berkeley draws the consequence that there are no distinct names for visual sensations. The only names we have for them are those that we apply initially to tactile sensations. But the blind man does not know which names to use, for he has not yet learned which names for tactile sensations apply to visual sensations. Against Locke, therefore, who attempted to describe the sensations of the recovered-blind in such terms as ‘circle,’ Berkeley believes that there are no names for describing what he sees, because there are no words for this in our language. It would be fair to say that Berkeley is consistent on this, and that Locke is not. It would also be fair to say that, for both Locke and Berkeley, the only difference between ourselves and the recovered-blind is that the latter do not know what names to apply to their sensations—sensations that are exactly the same as our own,” Molyneux’s Question, 101; see also 7–10.

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At one level, this is just to say that the suggestion of tangible ideas by visible is not a matter of propositions but of ideas; something animal minds are no less capable of than human. But the attribution of suggestive signification to sense has a point. For while Berkeley actually had in mind transitions of thought performed in the imagination, they are not only of the most primitive, conditioned-response variety but are replete with phenomenological specificity of the kind that appears, literally, on the face of things. Berkeley’s use of the comparisons with speech perception and, even more tellingly, with the characteristic physiognomies of emotion—“I saw gladness in his looks, I saw shame in his face so I see figure or Distance” (C 231)—indicates that the secondary objects of vision, far from being matters of intellection, are precisely what gives visual spatiality its characteristic “look” (phenomenology) in the first place. The play of emotions across the face of human may be a closed book to nonhuman animals—just as the things suggested to a stallion by the scent and sight of an estrous mare are a closed book to nonequines. Yet this does not make them any the less directly experienced appearances—matters of phenomenological “immediacy” rather than conjecture or interpretation. So too the phenomenology of visual space: although the spatial secondary objects of vision exist only in and for imagination, and are entirely an affair of experience-bred customary transitions of thought, it does not follow that they cannot be experienced by us as integral elements of our visual experience. With repeated practice from infancy onward, the synthesis of visual spatiality, carving up the perceived aspatial visual inputs into units and combining these units in manners optimal for integrating the visual with tangible spatiality, confers on the primary objects of vision the familiar physiognomies—“looks,” “gestalts”—we “parse” in terms of extension and its modes, just as we “parse” the posture of faces in terms of emotions, desires, and inner states by means of comparable syntheses in the imagination, or parse uttered sounds as language (phonologically, syntactically, semantically). To be sure, these processes differ in numerous and important ways. But none of them matter when it comes to the distinction between what we experience by means of sense, be it in perception (the absolute, positive consideration of ideas) or through suggestive signification, and what we represent only intellectually, by means of judgment or inference. We may not, in the strict sense enunciated by Locke and Berkeley, “perceive” the gladness on a face, the sexiness of a body, the meaning of an utterance, or the narrative on a page, but both of these philosophers, and Berkeley especially, deemed operations of the imagination to be directly constitutive of the sensible reality our minds inhabit and experience. Thus, whether visual phenomenology starts out flat for the infant, as Locke supposed, or is just as aspatial as olfactory and gustatory phenomenology, as Berkeley did, the end result of assimilating the uniquely fine-grained and extensive network of correlations between vision and touch as habitual transitions of thought is the creation of the very phenomenology of visual experience with which sighted adults are long familiar. Yet however characteristic and familiar these appearances, they remain just as aspatial in themselves, as primary objects, as they were before we discovered our first correlation with the primary objects of touch. Here it may prove helpful to delve more deeply into the comparison Berkeley drew between seeing gladness or shame on a person’s face and visual spatiality (C


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231). One’s emotions (moods, attitudes, etc.) often have distinctive tactual profiles, especially the posture and movements of the muscles of the face. Once an infant learns to recognize the faces of others by touching them and attaching to the light and colors it sees the appropriate tangible spatial significations, it can then proceed to discern on the faces of others the visible counterparts of the distinctive tangiblespatial profiles coincident with its own emotions. After it has become habituated at doing this, it comes to “see” (visually experience) the gladness or shame on a face, while the details of the complex of light and color it is really seeing (visually perceiving) become attentively all but inaccessible (“the secondary objects or those which are only suggested by sight, do often more strongly affect us, and are more regarded than the proper objects of that sense,” V §51). At this point, the primary objects that make up a visible face develop a whole new “look” (“gestalt”) to the infant from what they had before it discovered and habituated itself to the appropriate tactual correlations, so that no interpretation, no conjecture, no intellection of any kind is required to see the suffering on the face of someone who has just been knifed in the gut. For Berkeley, what is important to recognize is that pain has not itself become a primary object of vision; though very much an object of that sense and in no sense an affair of intellection, it is merely a secondary object suggested by primary objects subsequent to our having become habituated to their tangible correlates. Once we recognize that Berkeleyan secondary objects are no less objects of sense than primary are, we can see that his story of visual spatiality is just the story of faces writ large: the depth we “see” when we lie on a hill and stare into the blue sky is simply the “look” this primary object of vision has acquired once we have discovered and habituated ourselves to the appropriate tangible secondary object. We call this visual primary object “depth,” just as we call another “suffering”; but in neither case do the primary and secondary objects bear the slightest qualitative resemblance to one another. Of course, since our imaginations must first spatialize the light and colors as a facial posture before it becomes possible to recognize in that posture the face of a suffering person, the synthesis of visual spatiality must be supposed to take place on a more fundamental level than that involved in spatial recognition. Thus, in comparing them, Berkeley was extending a model of explanation from a phenomenon to which he might reasonably expect us to agree it has application—the look of a suffering face regarded not as visual perception alone but as an habitual amalgam of sense and imagination—to another, far more general and fundamental phenomenon, to which no one previously had thought to apply it: the look of light and color habitually imagined as one, two, or three dimensional; as linear, flat, or convex; round, square, or oblong; etc. Since Berkeley made quite clear that there is no intrinsic relation between the signs of the language of visual spatiality and the objects they signify (VV §39–40), and since he deemed God the creator of this language (V §140), we can be sure that he would not have presumed it beyond the power and wisdom of a perfect being to have devised a variety of different visual languages of spatiality equally suited to human purposes. Supposing a different language had been instituted, our human imaginations would then have carved up the very same primary objects (visual inputs) into quite different units (“vocabulary”), combinable in accordance

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with quite different rules and procedures (“principles of grammar”), thus yielding a quite different set of secondary objects of vision. Would this not inevitably result in a completely different visual phenomenology—of spheres, cubes, things moving left and right, approaching and moving off, climbing, diving, growing, shrinking, etc.—from the “looks” of these things familiar to us now? If Berkeley’s analysis of vision is in its essentials correct, then the answer would have to be yes. For example, if God had ordained a different visual language of spatiality, what presently looks deep to us (an abyss, a well) might not have the same physiognomy we associate with depth but have a completely different, even opposite, spatial meaning. So far as Berkeley was concerned, none of the indefinitely many possible visual physiognomies of depth is, intrinsically, more or less “like” tangible depth than any other, and all are equally able, once embedded in a broader network of associations, to elicit the emotions James felt when looking up into the “depth” of the heavens. Thus, Berkeley could perfectly well allow that the features of visual objects we are accustomed to calling “depth,” “situation,” “extension, “magnitude,” and “number” might have precisely the same look (phenomenology) they actually do—which critics like James, Russell, and Anscombe have pointed to in the belief they were refuting Berkeley—and still have no more qualitatively in common with the genuine spatiality of tangible objects than the primary objects of vision have at the outset of our visual lives, before our imaginations have had a chance to confer secondary objects on them; nor any more in common with one another than either have with the primary objects of gustation, olfaction, and audition.

E. The Distinctive Formal Multiplicity of Vision With the phenomenological dimension of Berkeley’s comparison of visual spatiality with language clarified, let us turn now to the naming issue. How is it that the primary objects of vision, with their distinctive secondary object physiognomies, come to be called by the same names as the properly spatial objects of touch? Part of the answer lies in the tendency to treat as one things found by experience to be constantly conjoined: men . . . mistake the connexion between the proper objects of sight and the things signified by them to be founded in necessary relation or likeness; or . . . even take them for the same things. Hence it seems easy to conceive why men who do not think should confound in this language of vision the signs with the things signified, otherwise than they are wont to do in the various particular languages formed by the several nations of men. (MP 4 §11).

Another factor is that because the correlations between vision and touch are universal and learned so early in life, vernacular language finds no need to distinguish them: Because this language of nature doth not vary in different ages or nations, hence it is that in all times and places visible figures are called by the same names as


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the respective tangible figures suggested by them, and not because they are alike or of the same sort with them. (V §140; also §§ 77, 126, 147, and 152)

A third factor identified by Berkeley is that “of all our senses the sight is the most clear, distinct, various, agreeable, and comprehensive” (MP 7 §13; also VV §44). Since touch also excels the other senses in this regard (C 240), the data of sight are by far the best suited to serve in the capacity of a language of tangible spatiality: Again, the ideas of sight enter into the mind several at once, more distinct and unmingled than is usual in the other senses beside the touch. Sounds, for example, perceived at the same instant, are apt to coalesce, if I may so say, into one sound: but we can perceive at the same time great variety of visible objects, very separate and distinct from each other. Now tangible extension being made up of several distinct coexistent parts, we may hence gather another reason that may dispose us to imagine a likeness or an analogy between the immediate objects of sight and touch. (V §145)

Finally, since a proliferation of words risks undermining the benefits of symbolic representation, we economize in every way we can, even to the point of applying spatial language to auditory and olfactory phenomena as well as visual: Strictly speaking . . . we do not see the same object that we feel; neither is the same object perceived by the microscope, which was by the naked eye. But in case every variation was thought sufficient to constitute a new kind or individual, the endless number or confusion of names would render language impracticable. Therefore to avoid this as well as other inconveniences which are obvious upon a little thought, men combine together several ideas, apprehended . . . in different circumstances, but observed however to have some connection in nature, either with respect to co-existence or succession; all which they refer to one name, and consider as one thing. (3D245)

Of these, the third is by far the most important and fundamental of the reasons Berkeley offered to explain why spatial language is applied indifferently to the objects of vision and touch. For at its core is a concept that I shall henceforth term formal multiplicity: what suits vision uniquely to be the language of tangible spatiality is that its primary objects constitute as variegated a manifold of “distinct and unmingled . . . coexistent parts” as to the primary objects of touch. This commonality does not imply the least qualitative resemblance between the objects of the two senses, as Berkeley’s best illustration of the concept makes clear: visible figures contain in them distinct visible parts, answering to the distinct tangible parts of the figures signified or suggested by them. But it will not hence follow that any visible figure is like unto, or of the same species with, its corresponding tangible figure, unless it be also shewn that not only the number but also the kind of the parts be the same in both. To illustrate this, I observe that the visible figures represent tangible figures much after the same manner that written words do sounds. Now, in this respect words are not arbitrary, it not being indifferent what written word stands for any sound: but it

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BERKELEY’S MODEST PROPOSAL is requisite that each word contain in it so many distinct characters as there are variations in the sound it stands for. Thus the single letter a is proper to mark one simple uniform sound; and the word adultery is accommodated to represent the sound annexed to it, in the formation whereof there being eight different collisions or modifications of the air by the organs of speech, each of which produces a difference of sound, it was fit the word representing it should consist of as many distinct characters, thereby to mark each particular difference or part of the whole sound. (V §§142–3)

What adapts the written sign ‘adultery’ to suggest the spoken word is that our imaginations distinguish in it the right number of differences—neither too many nor too few—to enable us to pronounce the word even if we have had no previous acquaintance with it. To be sure, it did not have to be these sounds that go with those marks. But there the arbitrariness of the sign-signified relation ends: given these correlations, the multiplicity of the sign makes for an effortless transition from notation to speech. It is moreover a merely formal multiplicity because there is no sensible resemblance—no common content—between the sign and what it signifies. The only resemblance uniting sign and signified is the formal property of their common number of parts. But even here, as in all cases of number, the unit is not a given—something really existent, a matter of objective fact—but something “perfectly arbitrary, and done by the mind in such sort as experience shews it to be most convenient: without which our ideas had never been collected into such sundry distinct combinations as they now are” (V §109; also PHK I §§ 12– 13 and 120–2). Similarly, notwithstanding their qualitative incommensurateness, the formal multiplicity of the pattern of light and color we call a “square” makes it better suited to suggest a tangible square than the pattern we call a “circle”: it must be acknowledged the visible square is fitter than the visible circle to represent the tangible square, but then it is not because it is liker, or more of a species with it, but because the visible square contains in it several distinct parts, whereby to mark the several distinct corresponding parts of a tangible square, whereas the visible circle doth not. The square perceived by touch hath four distinct, equal sides, so also hath it four distinct equal angles. It is therefore necessary that the visible figure which shall be most proper to mark it contain four distinct equal parts corresponding to the four sides of the tangible square, as likewise four other distinct and equal parts whereby to denote the four equal angles of the tangible square. (V §142)15

In this way, “the most different and heterogeneous things in nature may, for all that, have analogy, and be proportional each to other” (VV §53). To be sure, there 15. As Atherton remarks, “the reason why the tangible square is best represented by the visible square and not the visible circle is because the visible square has parts that correspond to the parts of the tangible square. But this is by no means to say that any of the parts of the tangible square resembles the corresponding parts of the visible square” (Berkeley’s Revolution, 197). Unfortunately, Atherton does not pursue the implications, or examine the significance, of this facet of Berkeley’s doctrine of a language of visual spatiality. See note 20 as well.


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is nothing intrinsic to a certain pattern of light and color that obliges us to use it to signify a tangible square rather than a tangible circle. We could just as well have used the one we currently use to represent a tangible circle; for although its formal multiplicity makes it less fit to suggest a tangible square than the pattern we actually use (due to its lack of two pairs of four equal parts), we would use it to do so anyway if experience disclosed a correlation between it and (all and only) tangible squares. Indeed, since the “number of parts” is, in the end, “perfectly arbitrary,” a visual language of spatiality might have been designed in which experience teaches us to carve up the ideas of light and color we now read as a circle in such a way as to distinguish “four” “equal” “straight” parts. Different possibilities of formal multiplicity do not differ as true and false, but only as better or worse for the purpose of coordinating visual data with tangible spatiality. A formal multiplicity is optimal if (i) we have at least one sense whose ideas “enter into the mind several at once, more distinct and unmingled than is usual in the other senses beside the touch” (V §145), and (ii) these ideas can be fashioned into units that are related by constant conjunction with the real (nonarbitrary) elements of tangible spatiality. So whether we agree with Berkeley that vision satisfied these conditions because of the wisdom and beneficence of “the Author of Nature” (VV §43), or we attribute it to natural causes or even serendipity, the thoroughgoing agreement of vision with touch in respect to their formal multiplicity together with the relations of constant conjunction between their countable elements sufficed for Berkeley to accord to visual spatiality the status of a language in the strongest possible sense: Upon the whole, it seems the proper objects of sight are light and colours, with their several shades and degrees; all which, being infinitely diversified and combined, do form a language wonderfully adapted to suggest and exhibit to us the distances, figures, situations, dimensions, and various qualities of tangible objects: not by similitude, nor yet by inference of necessary connexion, but by the arbitrary imposition of Providence, just as words suggest the things signified by them. (MP 4 §10)

The reason the human senses of hearing, smell, and taste cannot furnish us with a full-fledged language of spatiality is that, by contrast with sight, the formal multiplicity of their data is inadequate: Euphranor: That . . . smells and tastes, for instance . . . are signs is certain, as also that language and all other signs agree in the general nature of sign, or so far forth as signs. But it is as certain that all signs are not language; not even all significant sounds: such as the natural cries of animals, or the inarticulate sounds and interjections of men. It is the articulation, combination, variety, copiousness, extensive and general use and easy application of signs (all which are commonly found in vision) that constitute the true nature of language. Other senses may indeed furnish signs; and yet those signs have no more right than inarticulate sounds to be thought a language. Alciphron: Hold! let me see. In language the signs are arbitrary, are they not? . . . And, consequently, they do not always suggest real matters of fact. Whereas this

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BERKELEY’S MODEST PROPOSAL natural language, as you call it, or these visible signs, do always suggest things in the same uniform way, and have the same constant regular connexion with matters of fact: whence it should seem the connexion was necessary; and, therefore, according to the definition premised, it can be no language. How do you solve this objection? Euphranor: You may solve it yourself by the help of a picture or looking-glass. (MP 4 §12)

Though the ideas of these senses are not in themselves any less variable and diverse than visual or tactual sensations (VV §40), our capacities of discernment are greatly inferior in respect to the former than the latter. The inputs of vision and touch can be carved up into units with exquisite fineness and precision, which thereafter can be easily remembered and recognized. By contrast, only the most highly trained musicians can distinguish the tones and overtones of a complex chord sounded on a cathedral organ; and no human senses besides vision and touch can approach the formal multiplicity that bats are able to discriminate by hearing, bloodhounds by smell, or snakes by taste. So even where correlations with the spatial objects of touch exist to be discovered, the data of these other senses can only serve us as signs, but not a language, of spatiality. This is not to deny that they may be incorporated into the visual language of spatiality by clinging to visual coattails, in much the way pictographs and icons have an honorary place in written language courtesy of the narratives or instructions they symbolize. Nevertheless, in humans, auditory, gustatory, and olfactory sensation lack the formal multiplicity requisite to yield a language of spatiality in their own right. The ‘adultery’ example considered earlier, focusing as it does on a formal isomorphism between written and spoken language akin to that between a musical score and its performance, is in a certain respect atypical. What seems to have been uppermost in Berkeley’s mind when he compared visual language to spatiality is the way words signify ideas, that is, the objective contents of thought (PHK I §43). It is precisely here, however, that the analogy begins to break down. The formal multiplicity of human languages is a logical multiplicity: the units of a verbal, signed, or written notation express the grammatical elements of language; these units admit of all and only such combinations as express the sentential elements (clauses, etc.) formable from these grammatical elements; these combinations in turn admit of all and only such combinations as express possible sentences; and, finally, these last admit of all and only such combinations as express complex sentences, discourses (including courses of reasoning), and dialogues.16 But, as we 16. I have borrowed the expression “logical multiplicity” (Mannigfaltigkeit, Multiplizität) from Wittgenstein, who employed it in various ways over the course of his career. Apposite to my use of it here is his observation that the truth table of a contradiction, because it has “nonsense, as the top line, ‘T | T || F,’ gives the proposition a greater logical multiplicity than that of the actual possibilities. It is, of course, a deficiency of our notation that it does not prevent the formation of such nonsensical constructions, and a perfect notation will have to exclude such structures by definite rules of syntax;” “Some Remarks on Logical Form,” in Philosophical Occasions: 1912–1951, ed. by James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 35. Also: “A proposition must have the right multiplicity: for example, a command must have the same multiplicity as the action which it commands or prescribes. . . . Language may be compared to the controls of a machine. These have the same multi-


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saw in chapter 10, the only realities to which language can ever relate—ideas (signified by most nouns) and notions (signified by verbs and particles)—do not replicate this structure. For not only did Berkeley reject the view that the significance of general terms should be understood to include distinct or common aspects (abstract ideas), the indifferent denotations with which he replaced them depend on resemblances of various kinds, which often have little or nothing to do with resemblances in the perceived appearance of the ideas or notions considered in themselves, and may be multiply complex and variegated (V §128 and VV §39). Of course, the consequence that ideas and notions are in no sense isomorphic with the logical formal multiplicity of language in no way detracts from the latter’s cognitive and conative utility, even indispensability, for whichever purposes this structure renders language serviceable, especially mathematical science (chapter 10-D and -E). It does, however, furnish a stark contrast with the highly isomorphic character of the language of visual spatiality. Whereas the signs constituting vernacular languages signify ideas only indirectly, insofar as they fall within their scope as general representations, there is no spatial idea that we can perceive or imagine tactually that cannot be expressed, in its full concreteness and determinate individuality, in the visual language of of spatiality. In the vernacular case, vast amounts of ideational information are lost because language functions entirely by means of semantic abstraction: the combination of different types of indifferent denotations (logico-grammatical particles included) to yield sentences, paragraphs, or whole discourses. In the visual case, by contrast, the formal multiplicity of the primary objects of vision obviates the need for this kind of approximation. For where we are not restricted to operating by means of universals (indifferent denotations), and consequently have no need to conceive of truth in terms of subsumption (of individuals) under or subordination (of other universals) to them, what need is there for parts of speech, quantifiers, or any of the other devices characteristic of discursive representation? What might be termed the aesthetic multiplicity of the primary objects of vision can, without the need for any logical differentiation, capture tangible spatial information to any order of specificity and complexity.17 For Berkeley, then, language is a genus distinguished into two incommensurable sorts, according to their different formal plicity as the movements which the machine is capable of making. You can’t get four speeds out of a three-speed gearbox. To try to do so would be the equivalent of talking nonsense in language. . . . I can say when my expectation is fulfilled (verified), and indeed in some cases how nearly it is fulfilled: e.g. how nearly alike are the colour expected and the colour actually seen. . . . The two facts, the expectation and the actual seeing, have the same logical multiplicity, and it is in this logical multiplicity that expectation and event are comparable, not in the sense that portrait and original are” (in Wittgenstein’s Lectures. Cambridge 1930–2, from the Notes of John King and Desmond Lee, ed. Desmond Lee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), §2 and §5. In these middle-period texts, as well as during the previous period of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein thought of reality as mirroring the logical multiplicity of language, and so can be seen to have fallen foul of the rejection of such an isomorphism by early modern British Empiricists. But Wittgenstein came more and more to reject the notion of an isomorphism with reality, conceiving logical multiplicity as an entirely internal affair of language: “It is in language that expectation and fulfilment make contact” (Philosophical Investigations §445; also §458). 17. The aesthetic/logical contrast is borrowed from Kant, and used in anticipation of my consideration in volume II of his contrast between the forms of the sensible manifold and the logical forms of judgment.

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multiplicities. The visual language of spatiality is the unique example known to us of the kind founded on a purely aesthetic formal multiplicity. The relation between its signs and what they signify is radically different from that characteristic of languages founded on logical multiplicity. For it results in nothing less than the complete and thoroughgoing fusion of vision with touch into what—for all phenomenological, cognitive, and conative intents and purposes—is a single external sense (though an amalgam of imagination and sense, describing it as a ‘sense’ is warranted by its purely aesthetic—nonintellectual, nondiscursive—character). Berkeley’s explanation for our applying the same spatial terminology to visible things that we apply to tangible ones should now be clear. The practice is founded not just on the common logical multiplicity that results when visible ideas, thanks to their correlations with tangible ideas, become indifferent denotators of spatial determinations but, above all, on the shared aesthetic formal multiplicity of the correlated ideas themselves. Once the imagination discovers the rules whereby to carve up the continuum of light and color (the primary objects of vision) into units suited to optimize correlations with touch (V §110), and transitions of thought in accordance with these regular correlations become second nature to us (i.e., habits of thought, relieving us of the need to attend to these operations), the common aesthetic multiplicity of vision and touch renders common denotations and common terminology all but inevitable. Here, the important thing is that although our use of a common terminology is rooted in something common to the ideas of vision and touch themselves, it is not anything common to their appearances per se (sensible resemblances) but simply the ways in which the imagination operates on these appearances. For Berkeley, the locus of aesthetic formal multiplicity is the idea-discerning, -combining, -relating imagination, constituted by human nature to seek out and exploit any and all means whereby to integrate and unify the qualitatively incommensurate ideas of diverse senses, with those of touch, because of their spatial character. This end is optimally served when the data of one or more of the other senses suggest the objects of touch not only by means of their experienced constant conjunction but also by being structured into discrete aesthetic units formally isomorphic with the primary objects of touch—what might be termed articulated suggestive signification. From Berkeley’s perspective, it is sheer happenstance that vision is the only human sense adequate to this end, inasmuch as “the ideas of sight enter into the mind several at once, more distinct and unmingled than is usual in the other senses beside the touch” (V §145; also C 240 and 243). This means, for example, that in one born without ocular lenses, light and color will have an aesthetic formal multiplicity no more adequate to express tangible spatiality than sound, odor, and flavor have. Such a person would consequently be handicapped both cognitively and conatively by having to depend entirely on crude habitual associations—that is, on signs lacking an adequately articulated formal multiplicity. Conversely, if we had a sense of smell, taste, hearing, or some other sense not found in humans at all, equipped with something that, like ocular lenses, might enable us to “perceive at the same time great variety of . . . objects, very separate and distinct from each other,” its primary objects would have an aesthetic multiplicity of the precision and subtlety requisite to express tangible spatiality. In that case, provided there were


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the same relations of constant conjunction presently obtaining between the objects of vision and touch, the objects of that sense would inevitably be included within the scope of tangible spatial denotations, and so be denominated “squares” and “spheres”; “width,” “breadth,” and “depth”; “above” and “below,” “far” and “near,” “right” and “left”; “large” and “small”; and so on. For the implication of all Berkeley’s determinations that light and color are not, and can never be, a source of ideas of space and its modes (all dimensions included) is that any species of sensation, as qualitatively incommensurate with visual as with tactual, is capable of serving as a language expressive of these properly tangible ideas provided only (i) that its data have the right aesthetic formal multiplicity and (ii) that the same relations of constant conjunction hold between each tangible-spatial object and the datum of that sense whose aesthetic multiplicity makes it best suited to suggest that object. And since nonsighted beings in which these two conditions were fulfilled would be as habituated to their aesthetic language of spatiality as sighted ones are to theirs, they would no doubt be as obstinate as ourselves in insisting that space and its modes are ideas of diverse senses, with all the temptations toward materialism implicit therein (it being an easy step from the thesis that space is an idea of diverse senses to the thesis that space may also be a quality common to mind-independent beings). The foregoing considerations shed additional light on Berkeley’s analysis of the capacities of persons blind from birth suddenly made to see in adulthood. Such persons will have had no previous experience of a sense with an aesthetic formal multiplicity comparable to touch, and so can have no inkling how the primary objects of one sense can be so extensively articulated as to suggest those of another qualitatively incommensurate with them, much less do this so consistently and systematically as to constitute a genuine aesthetic language of spatiality. Certainly, there is nothing in the appearance of light and color per se, apart from all experience of their correlations with touch, that would lead the newly sighted to suspect them capable of conveying more information than the kind of generalized exteriority and directionality already familiar to them from such experiences as smelling an aroma emanating from the kitchen or hearing the wail of the siren of an ambulance speeding unseen down the street far below. If told beforehand that visible objects relate to tangible in something like the way written phonemic transcriptions relate to phonemes, or words to (the indifferent denotations of) ideas, they would find, upon being made to see, that their previous acquaintance with language did little to prepare them for a species of language that functions by means of aesthetic rather than logical formal multiplicity. It would be like suddenly being confronted with speech that consisted not of scores or hundreds of distinguishable phonemes but an incomparably greater number, with every distinguishable nuance, however slight, correlated to its unique aesthetically articulated suggestive significatum. Deluged with expressions of an unfamiliar kind of language, made up of signs each of which needs to be comprehended in its full aesthetic individuality and determinateness, couched in a sensory medium qualitatively incommensurate with everything they have hitherto perceived—is it any wonder that Berkeley deemed it utterly implausible, even absurd, to suppose that the newly sighted could make sense of the visual suggestions of tangible spatiality suddenly inundating them,

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even in a simplified situation artificially restricted to two-dimensional figures? And indeed, so regarded, it seems self-evident that the visual language of spatiality would be as much a closed book to the newly sighted as the suggestions of meaning articulated in human speech are to a dog. Berkeley’s approach to the Molyneux problem itself becomes clearer when we consider it in the light of aesthetically articulated suggestive signification. His claim is that none of the objects the newly sighted man sees are “able to suggest to his thoughts the idea of body, distance, or in general of anything he has already known” (V §135). This is not because they lack the multiplicity to suggest them, but because, in the absence of all qualitative resemblance and experience of the correlations in which their suggestive powers consist, the newly sighted man has nothing else than the formal multiplicity to go on. Consequently, much as someone unfamiliar with writing would be baffled by peculiarities of script (gothic, italic, roman), or the principles of orthography that oblige us to write ‘through’ and ‘threw’ differently but to use ‘-ough’ to transcribe such dissimilar sounds as ‘though,’ ‘rough,’ ‘bought,’ and ‘bough,’ so too the newly sighted man would be clueless to determine what in the multiplicity of visible objects is and is not relevant to the suggestion of tangible objects, which discernible differences suggest tangible differences and which do not (and to what degree of detail), which visually indiscernible objects do and which do not suggest different tangible objects (whether alone or in combination with other visual data), and so on. For these things, he is entirely beholden to experience, improvement, and acquired notions. Another thing that now becomes clear is that, far from improving matters, attempts subsequent to Berkeley to simplify the Molyneux thought experiment, such as those by Diderot (differentiating a square from a circle)18 and Evans (arrays of points of light, or “phosphenes,” produced by the application of electrodes to the optical receptors of the blind),19 fatally compromise it by effectively reducing the aesthetic formal multiplicity specific to vision and touch to that of the other senses, with the consequence that fully articulate suggestive signification— which Berkeley equated with “seeing” figure, distance, etc.—becomes effectively indistinguishable from interpretation and conjecture. For example, with the initial visual input of the newly sighted restricted to brightly colored two-dimensional figures against a black background, the scene lit in such a way that potentially confusing variables (reflections, etc.) are eliminated, and the subjects informed of all this beforehand, it may well be that newly sighted persons could more often than not correctly distinguish a circle from a square. But would the same not be true of subjects who had been blind and deaf all their lives suddenly made to hear if they could be persuaded that lifelong hearers as readily distinguish squares from circles by sound as they do by touch? Told in advance that a circle consists of a single tone and a square of four tones separated by equal intervals, it seems likely (assuming that overtones and other potentially confusing factors are eliminated) that the simpler formal multiplicity of these auditory objects would suffice to enable blind persons hearing for the first time to make this phony distinction 18. See Morgan, Molyneux’s, 56. 19. See “Molyneux’s,” 391–3.


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“correctly” to the same frequency those seeing for the first time achieve with their supposedly legitimate discrimination by sight (similarly bogus accuracy might be contrivable in the cases of smell and taste). The problem here is that the drastically simplified conditions of this and similar Molyneux variants, ostensibly intended to factor out ambient “noise,” in fact serve only to reduce the multiplicity beneath the threshold where it is still possible to speak of “language” (articulated suggestion) in Berkeley’s sense at all. These conditions create a doubt as to whether the aesthetic multiplicity of the visible objects is actually suggesting anything spatial to the newly sighted, or whether, like the misled blind-deaf subject suddenly made to hear, they are merely exploiting the conditions of the experiment to draw an inference on the basis of differences of simplicity and complexity that have nothing intrinsically to do with spatiality (as Evans put it, “a capacity to make gross ‘same/ different’ judgements is far from establishing visual perception of the figure”).20 Since, for Berkeley, “seeing” dimensions, figures, and other spatial features consists precisely in apprehending the aesthetic formal multiplicities of visible objects as suggestive signs, any thought experiment that postulates conditions so restricted as to render suggestion indistinguishable from conjecture and interpretation is ipso facto useless 20. “Molyneux’s,” 380. Evans’s treatment of the Molyneux problem is one of the soundest and most penetrating to date. For example, he was clearly on the right track when he observed that “Berkeley himself was prepared to allow that ‘the visible square is fitter than the visible circle to represent the tangible square’ [V §142] on the ground that the visible square had, as the visible circle did not, several distinguishable parts, and it would not matter to the fundamental disagreement that he has with V [i.e. the philosopher, exemplified by Reid, who Evans portrays Berkeley as opposing (393–4)] that the visible square is uniquely fitted to represent the tangible square. It remains the case that the one represents the other, rather than being both instances of a common concept. It remains the case, that is, that there is an intelligible and separable conceptual capacity whose range is restricted to the set of tactually perceived squares” (380). Unfortunately, Evans’s treatment of the topic is marred in a general way by the tendency of his school to conflate early modern theory of ideas with semantic theories, and more particularly by a failure to distinguish denotations from ideas. This led Evans to frame the early modern Molyneux problem in terms of the application of concepts: “Berkeley was taking up a position upon the most fundamental issue posed by that question. . . . To bring it out, let us consider first the position of a philosopher, whom I shall call ‘V,’ who insists that, on the conditions given, the newly sighted man must be able to apply his concepts to the visually presented array—must, to use a convenient term, ‘generalize.’ . . . . His position is not that the tactual perceptual representation of a square resembles the visual perceptual representation of a square. His point is that if both are simultaneous representations, the only concept which he can understand applies (or seems to apply) in both cases. The opposing position is essentially that advanced by Berkeley . . . [who] denies that there is a single concept square, which may or may not be possessed by the blind man, and whose possession is tested by whether he generalized when he regains his sight. The sighted adult’s use of the word ‘square’ rests upon two separable and conceptually unconnected abilities. Both of the concepts apply to arrangements of simultaneously existing objects, but nevertheless they are distinct” (372 and 374). Here Evans seems to me to conflate Berkeley’s claim about ideas—that tangible objects are qualitatively incommensurable with visible, and that only the former are properly speaking spatial—with a claim about (general) concepts and their instantiation by the objects of vision and touch (just as he does in the case of esse is percipi idealism: chapter 10-D). As I read Berkeley, he could perfectly well allow that the resembling aesthetic formal multiplicity common to touch and vision can furnish the basis of common spatial denotations and common spatial terminology (general representations, approximating what Evans means by ‘concept’), such that ideas of one sense could be used to indifferently denote ideas of the other sense interchangeably. However, to understand what differentiates Berkeley from Locke or Leibniz it seems to me essential that the issue be framed in terms of the ideas themselves, rather than their indifferent

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for determining whether its subjects are actually seeing the figure they purport to identify. F. Sense-Divide Transcending Objects By the criterion of distinctness enunciated in the separability principle, apples, stones, and other objective individuals are nothing more than congeries of individual sensations, bundled together by our minds when found to be constantly conjoined, and possessed of no unity greater than a general term is capable of conferring: By sight I have the ideas of light and colours, with their several degrees and variations. By touch I perceive, for example, hard and soft, heat and cold, motion and resistance, and of all these more or less either as to quantity or degree. Smelling furnishes me with odours; the palate with tastes, and hearing conveys sounds to the mind in all their variety of tone and composition. And as several of these are observed to accompany each other, they come to be marked by one name, and so to be reputed as one thing. Thus, for example, a certain colour, taste, smell, figure and consistence having been observed to go together, are accounted one distinct thing, signified by the name apple. Other collections of ideas constitute a stone, a tree, a book, and the like sensible things. (PHK I §1)

To this one may object that a term such as ‘flock’ confers a kind of unity on a collection of geese, yet we do not on that account consider the collection an individual object in its own right. Why then do we do so in the case of ‘goose’? Presumably, it has to do with the peculiar ways the collections of concurrent sensations we call ‘goose,’ ‘apple,’ ‘stone,’ ‘moon,’ etc., are “combined, blended, or (if one may so speak) concreted together” (§99). But what does such “concretion” consist in? In view of their qualitative incommensurability, it may seen as though sensations from different senses cannot be concreted at all. For while it is easy to grasp how distinct sensations of light and color may be combined with one another, how can red be “concreted” with tactile hardness, or either of these with a certain tart flavor, a characteristic crunching sound, and the smell we collect together and subsume (by way of indifferent denotation) under the denomination ‘apple’? Spatiality is obviously key: the sensations of touch and vision are concreted by virtue of relating immediately to the place the apple happens to be filling at the moment it is present to these senses; and the concretion is completed by regarding denotations, and in particular, as an issue turning on qualitative resemblance: Locke denying there is any resemblance between objects immediately perceived by vision and touch with respect to depth but not the other dimensions, Leibniz allowing that all the images of vision and touch represent the same intellectual spatial ideas, and Berkeley both denying qualitative resemblance across the board (“visible extension and figures are specifically distinct from tangible extension and figures,” V §133) and substituting aesthetic formal multiplicity in place of the Platonic abstractions favored by Leibniz and other Rationalists (much as Kant was to do with his pure intuitions of sensibility). In short, Evans confuses an essentially aesthetic question, turning on whether there are ideas common to different senses, with a logical issue of concept-subsumption.


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the apple’s flavor as being in that place, its smell as emanating from it, and its sound as happening at it. In this way, the apple is a sense-divide transcending object, present to a single external sense wherein all five senses partake (in the case of parts of one’s own body, pleasure and pain count as a sixth: toothache, elbow itches, skin tingles, etc.). Berkeley’s antiabstractionism, however, made it impossible for him to take this conception literally: since the separability principle implies that the contents of the different senses are qualitatively incommensurable, to consider the ideas of any one sense spatial is ipso facto totally to exclude spatiality from all the others. By designating touch the unique sense of spatial ideas, he thereby precluded the possibility of a multisensory external sense and consigned sense-divide transcending objects to the domain of chimera. Nevertheless, Berkeley recognized that there is more to the illusion that apples, geese, stones, and one’s own body exist than can be explained by the convenience of grouping together constant concomitants under the same general term. This, indeed, is where his conception of a visual language of spatiality truly comes into its own: by uniting vision with touch in the uniquely intimate bond made possible by their common aesthetic formal multiplicity, Berkeley had the means to explain not only why it makes sense to talk as if sense-divide transcending objects of a single multi-sensory external sense existed but also why we experience the world as if they really do, and even why we think of them as the only kind of objects there are. Thus, in the end, the only thing that makes Berkeley’s conception of a external sense and its objects unique is their origin: they exist only in and through customary transitions of thought in imagination, and are in no sense a matter of immediately perceptible objects present to us prior to and independently of imagination. I have already considered Berkeley’s case that deeply ingrained habitual transitions of thought occur so automatically, with such rapidity, and are so little present to the attentive gaze that it is far more natural to compare them to the operations of sense than of reason (sections A—D). “So swift and sudden and unperceived is the transition from visible to tangible ideas that we can scarce forbear thinking them equally the immediate object of vision” (V §145). Indeed, “men, not resting in, but overlooking the immediate and proper objects of sight, as in their own nature of small moment, carry their attention onward to the very things signified, and talk as if they saw the secondary objects” (MP 4 §12). Once the habits of making transitions from (to) visible signs to (from) the tangible objects they suggest are so deeply ingrained in our imaginations as to become second nature in this way, vision and touch, for all cognitive and conative intents and purposes, become fused into a single system of spatial recognition. This finds expression not just functionally, in the ways we comport ourselves toward the objects we experience in judgment, action, and discourse, but phenomenologically, in our very experience of them. For in the same way we cannot just see a human face without also “seeing” that it is smiling, “seeing” that it is smiling embarrassedly, and “seeing” that it is embarrassed not at seeing us in that place but (shamefacedly) at being seen by us there, so too we cannot just see light and color without at the same “seeing” the characteristic geometry of a human face in a certain posture—that is, without instantly transitioning in thought to the tangible

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spatial signification of that light and color. In both cases, sign and signified are so closely united that it is not in our power to keep out the one, except we exclude the other also. So likewise the secondary objects or those which are only suggested by sight, do often more strongly affect us, and are more regarded than the proper objects of that sense; along with which they enter into the mind, and with which they have a far more strict connexion, than ideas have with words. (V §51)

Signs become so indelibly united to what they signify (“concreted together”) in the imagination that we cease to be cognizant of a difference. For the effect here is incomparably greater than in the case of verbal language, not only because the visual language of spatiality is mastered so early in life, by means solely of our own observation (without requiring training), and so as naturally as fledglings master flight, but, above all, because of the uniquely intimate union between sign and signified made possible by a common aesthetic—rather than merely logical— formal multiplicity (section E). Everything thus conspires to make us imagine that the two senses are occupied with one and the same sense-divide transcending spatial objects, and to consider vision and touch merely as different modalities of a single external sense. The comparison with facial recognition has an additional dimension that is important here. Since the recognition of the geometry of the face precedes and makes possible the (no less instantaneous) transition in imagination to the emotional significations suggested by its posture, it becomes clear how the uniquely intimate union of vision with touch made possible by their common aesthetic formal multiplicity creates a kind of phenomenological spindle around which secondary and tertiary phenomenological significations secure a grip in the otherwise exclusively tangible realm of space. We all know the relation between our facial postures and our emotional states from the inside (kinesthetically), and the blind especially have a finely honed sense of this relation from the outside (tactually). But touch and kinesthesia by themselves leave one largely blind to the rich variety of significations the sighted discern in the postures and movements of faces and bodies of both human and nonhuman animals: not only emotions but the state of health, wakefulness, and fatigue; where attention is directed and how preoccupied it is; which actions are purposeful, which involuntary or habitual; and so on. The case is similar with the primary objects of the other senses. For once the visual language of spatiality permits us to treat spatial objects as objects of vision and touch indifferently, the sense divide between them ceases, for all cognitive and conative intents and purposes, to count. The result is to open up the way to “concreting together” gustatory, olfactory, and auditory sensations with tactual far more intimately and systematically than their wide divergence in aesthetic formal multiplicity would otherwise permit. In the first place, without a visual language of spatiality, we would have nothing in our experience remotely approaching the finely articulated, systematically correlated signs that alone are capable of reducing the divide between the senses to cognitive and conative insignificance, and so would find ourselves quite unable even to conceive what a truly sense-divide


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transcending object might be, and how, nothwithstanding the qualitative incommensurability of their primary objects, all our senses might partake in the representation of such an object. Second, once vision is integrated with touch in imagination, a host of new associations between the sensations of the other senses with space become possible. This is not only because they may be more closely, widely, and/or systematically correlated with visual than with tactual phenomena but also because vision brings us into immediate relation to a host of spatial phenomena that are difficult or impossible to access by touch: the very large, the very small, the very rapid, the very complex, the too-hot-to-handle, the too-coldto-handle, the too-slippery-to-handle, the too-dangerous-to-handle, etc. The distinctive visual-spatial phenomenology such things acquire by virtue of their relation to tactual sensation and imagination (section C) is easily expanded to include gustatory, olfactory, and auditory sensory qualities, which thereafter are regarded as contained in, emanating from, and occurring at their visible “place.” To be sure, vision alone relates to tangible spatiality as a language because its superior formal multiplicity enables it to articulate tangible spatiality to any scale or level of complexity. Yet just as nods and winks, harrumphs and guffaws, when grafted onto the vernacular, take on meanings and implications they could never have independently of language, the primary objects of hearing, smell, taste, and pleasure/pain piggyback on articulated visual signs of tangible spatiality to become meaningful signs in that language (MP 4 §12). Thus does the bi-sensory external sense become a multisensory one, and its objects sense-divide transcending in the fullest sense: Sitting in my study I hear a coach drive along the street; I look through the casement and see it; I walk out and enter into it; thus, common speech would incline one to think I heard, saw, and touched the same thing, to wit, the coach. It is nevertheless certain, the ideas intromitted by each sense are widely different and distinct from each other; but having been observed constantly to go together, they are spoken of as one and the same thing. By the variation of the noise I perceive the different distances of the coach, and know that it approaches before I look out. Thus by the ear I perceive distance, just after the same manner as I do by the eye. (V §46; also 1D204)

Being the preeminently visual creatures that we are, our spatial imaginations tend to operate exclusively by means of intravisual transitions, bypassing tactual altogether, just as we typically think in language far more often than in imagery and often have no choice but to do so. Does this mean that Berkeley may have been too hasty in precluding the possibility of a genuinely (i.e., preimaginatively) multisensory external sense? Evidently not, as becomes clear when we pursue the analogy with language a little further. Though Berkeley did not hesitate to admit that the general views language alone makes possible serve to integrate and order ideas and notions in ways that are otherwise impossible, with indisputable and incalculable benefit to our species, he nevertheless insisted, on sensibilist and antiabstractionist grounds, that nothing we say can have the least objective meaning or application except in relation to the only objects that can ever present themselves to our minds: ideas of sensation and notions of reflexion (chapter 10-

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D). Similarly, he emphasized time and again that the visual language of spatiality enables us to integrate and order tangible ideas in ways that would not otherwise be possible, while at the same time providing a channel through which a host of invisible, intangible ideas and notions can also acquire spatial signification. Nevertheless, the philosophically salient point for Berkeley is that, however beneficial to our species the visual language of spatiality may be, all our ideas of space have their origin in touch, so that, without it, the features that confer on vision alone its potential to be an aesthetic language of tangible spatiality would count for nought. For however close imagination may approximate a sense in other respects, the one thing it cannot do is furnish new simple ideas of sensation, underivable from the contents already available to it. Without touch, therefore, the imagination would be incapable of yielding the slightest conception of sense-divide transcending spatial objects immediately present to a multisensory external sense (“From what we have shewn it is a manifest consequence that the ideas of space, outness, and things placed at a distance are not, strictly speaking, the object of sight; they are not otherwise perceived by the eye than by the ear,” V §46). It should now be clear how Berkeley’s theory of vision provided him the means to replace the abstractionist conception of a single perceptual field in which data of the various senses stand in immediate relation to one another—the traditional “common sense”—with a network of habitual transitions in thought between the data of the various senses. It is as thoroughly and exclusively synthetic an affair of imagination as Locke’s far less detailed and ambitious conception of visual depth and distance (chapter 6-D). For, in preimaginative reality, visible and tangible primary objects remain (1) distinct in number (by the separability principle), (2) devoid of qualitative resemblance, and (3) incapable of being brought into the kind of immediate relation in which different colors stand in the visual field or textures of varying hardness and softness stand in the tactual. The uniquely close relation between these senses has nothing whatsoever to do with their respective primary objects, and everything to do with the rich psychological endowment that enables the human imagination to establish a common aesthetic formal multiplicity in which an exquisitely refined network of habitual thought transitions can take root. It is only because the imagination navigates this network with such extreme ease and rapidity that we are deceived into thinking of it as a single multisensory external sense with the same sense-divide transcending spatial objects (“It is onely the constant & long association of ideas entirely different that makes me judge them the same,” C 224). Yet for Berkeley, such “objects” are no more present to the senses properly so called, prior to and independently of the imagination, than the anger we see on a face or the ribald tone we hear in an utterance are. They are not merely discovered and recognized by means of the connections established in our thought by experience and habit, but are constituted by them, and cannot even so much as be conceived to exist outside or independently of them (except by means of an ontologically insignificant distinction of indifferent denotations). In short, their locus is the “hither,” reflexive side of consciousness (mental activity) rather than the “thither,” sensory side (sensations and their images repeated in thought).


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G. Objects as Chapters in the Volume of Nature No less important than the vocabulary and grammar of the language of vision for Berkeley’s theory of objective understanding are the narratives couched in it. For, by itself, the language of nature implies only that all our sensations suggest or otherwise signify a properly tactual spatial realm, with an imagination-based, sensedivide transcending objectivity as the outcome. But how much of the expressive potential of this language actually gets realized is another matter entirely. In particular, there remains the question of the internal structural organization of the sense-divide transcending objects themselves, at different scales and levels of complexity, as well as the external organization that unites different such objects in a single natural order: ideas are not any how and at random produced, there being a certain order and connexion between them, like to that of cause and effect: there are also several combinations of them, made in a very regular and artificial manner, which seem like so many instruments in the hand of Nature, that being hid as it were behind the scenes, have a secret operation in producing those appearances which are seen on the theatre of the world, being themselves discernible only to the curious eye of the philosopher. (PHK I §64)

The grammar and vocabulary of the language of nature are rich enough to express spatial structures not only of the greatest complexity but of the greatest order within that complexity, such as that exemplified by “that curious organization of plants, and the admirable mechanism in the part of animals” whereby “vegetables grow, and shoot forth leaves and blossoms, and animals perform all their motions” (§60). Indeed, it is in this connexion that Berkeley’s comparison of visible spatiality with language attains its fullest realization: the reason why ideas are formed into machines, that is, artificial and regular combinations, is the same with that for combining letters into words. That a few original ideas may be made to signify a great number of effects and actions, it is necessary they be variously combined together: and to the end their use be permanent and universal, these combinations must be made by rule, and with wise contrivance. By this means abundance of information is conveyed unto us, concerning what we are to expect from such and such actions, and what methods are proper to be taken, for the exciting such and such ideas: which in effect is all that I conceive to be distinctly meant, when it is said that by discerning the figure, texture, and mechanism of the inward parts of bodies, whether natural or artificial, we may attain to know the several uses and properties depending thereon, or the nature of the thing. (§65)

Berkeley’s analogy can profitably be extended from the ways in which letters articulate words to the different, no less diverse sets of rules whereby words form articulated phrases, phrases sentences, sentences more complex sentences, paragraphs, and discourses, and these in turn whole narratives and dialogues. For the

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world of nature, according to him, is structured in a similarly hierarchical way. By articulating tangible spatiality, the primary objects of the other senses combine with touch to spell out the simplest, most elementary objects of external sense. These objects in turn articulate more complex objects in accordance with another, equally diverse set of rules. Additional sets of such rules yield objects of ever more complex composition and/or greater order, comprised of components of multifarious complexity and order, interrelated in myriad ways. The sum-total of all these object-narratives is the great “volume of Nature” (PHK I §109), composed by means of rules that apply to all objects, of whatever structural complexity, and deservedly deemed universal laws of nature (§§ 62 and 104–5). Of course, the sophistication of the organization of the objects and systems of objects spelled out in “the language of nature” (V §140) evinces rules so far beyond any humanly contrived grammar that even nontheists can appreciate why Berkeley saw fit to attribute them to a mind infinitely more capacious and subtle than the human, actuated by a single, all-encompassing worldview. Nevertheless, the inexhaustibly rich and variegated structure and order into which the simplest units of the natural world are organized, at every scale and level of complexity, are inseparable from their expression in terms of the aesthetic formal multiplicity of a language that exists only in and through the articulative, associative operations of imagination, in much the same way that Hamlet exists only in and through the logical formal multiplicity constitutive of English. Moreover, since its simplest units are nothing but ideas, incapable of existing apart from their perception, nature emerges as doubly dependent on the mind, on its passive capacities of sense no less than on its active faculties of imagination. Thus, Berkeley’s idealism extends to the forms and contents of nature alike. However, there is one element of a language of nature I have yet to consider, and possibly the most important of all since it alone is capable of conferring on sense-divide transcending objects the illusion of substantiality: the causal efficacy we impute to them. No bundle of ideas such as an apple can be truly “concreted together” unless and until cohesion, solidity (resistance), and other powers can be bundled together with them. Of course, since ideas are in themselves “visibly inactive” (PHK I §25), we have no ideas of causal efficacy and power, only notions of the actions of our own spiritual substance in thinking: perceiving, recollecting, combining and separating ideas, fantasizing them, willing, etc. (chapter 12-C). But since the nonspatial character of the primary objects of vision and the other senses besides touch does not prevent us from employing them as signs to suggest tangible spatiality, the question is whether notions may be put to similar use to suggest the presence of powers in spatial objects. Berkeley did of course allow that “In certain cases a sign may suggest its correlate as an image, in others as an effect, in others as a cause” (VV §40). Yet when he tells us that “Ideas which are observed to be connected together are vulgarly considered under the relation of cause and effect, whereas, in strict and philosophical truth, they are only related as the sign to the thing signified” (VV §13), he seems to have in mind one sensible thing as the mark or sign of another, as is clear in the following:


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the connexion of ideas does not imply the relation of cause and effect, but only of a mark or sign with the thing signified. The fire which I see is not the cause of the pain I suffer upon my approaching it, but the mark that forewarns me of it. In like manner, the noise that I hear is not the effect of this or that motion or collision of ambient bodies, but the sign thereof. . . . Hence it is evident, that those things which under the notion of a cause co-operating or concurring to the production of effects, are altogether inexplicable, and run us into great absurdities, may be very naturally explained, and have a proper and obvious use assigned them, when they are consider only as marks or signs for our information. (PHK I §§ 65–6)

When Berkeley shifted from the horizontal idea-to-idea axis, where causality is a relation of causally inefficacious idea-sign to equally causally inefficacious signified-idea, to the vertical axis in order to inquire into the true efficacy responsible for the presence of sensations in us (as also their coexistence and their constant relations), he looked exclusively to spirits. Like Locke (chapter 9-B), he sought the cause elsewhere than the perceiver’s own mind. For even if “From our ideas of sense the inference of reason is good to a Power, Cause, Agent” (VV §11), we know our ideas; and therefore know that one idea cannot be the cause of another. We know that our ideas of sense are not the cause of themselves. We know also that we do not cause them. Hence, we know they must have some other efficient cause distinct from them and us. (VV §13)

This led Berkeley directly to God as the one being of sufficient power and wisdom to impress the sensible forms and contents that compose the natural world on the senses of finite spirits (PHK I §§ 145–50). What I can find nowhere in Berkeley is a text in which he considered the use of the notions of efficacy obtained in the vertical dimension (spirit-to-idea causal relations) to suggest (signify) powers in the horizontal dimension (inefficacious idea-to-idea relations). This may because he overlooked the matter, or because he had some inhibition against casting notions in the role of signs. This, however, does not seem to be the case, since Berkeley did not hesitate to compare the way distance is seen with the way we see emotions like gladness and shame are seen on a person’s face (C 231), and there can be no doubt that he considered these to be passions or states of the mind (notion) rather than ideas (DM §53, V §41 and §94). So if emotions can suggest the spatial postures and movements of face and body, I can see no reason why Berkeley could not also have accorded the status of suggestive signs to our notions of the efficacy responsible for the existence, coexistence, and constant relations of ideas of sensation. Moreover, there is good reason to think he should have done so. Certainly, conceiving the transitions of thought that transform constantly coexisting sensations into sense-divide transcending objects to be united by a cause would solidify their union—“concrete” them together—in imagination more effectively than anything else could. Nor can habitual transitions from one such object to another be better fortified than by according the status of causal relations to them: fire will then not merely be followed by

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warmth, it will be thought to cause it; we will not merely feel refreshed after a good night’s sleep but think that sleep refreshed us; and we will not only observe being well nourished to follow upon the eating of food but suppose it to be caused by it. In this way, Berkeley could have strengthened the fiction of sense-divide transcending objects with a fiction of substantiality, and thereby more closely approximated the phenomenology of the sensible world as we actually experience it. For the one thing left inexplicit in his account of objective understanding is how we come to regard sense-divide transcending objects not as insubstantial ephemera but real things, endowed with distinctive powers of their own to act, react, and interact. All we can be sure of here is that Berkeley could have used the notions of efficacy originating in the actions as spirits as signs to suggest powers in sensedivide transcending objects without compromising either his denial of necessary connections among ideas (PHK I §31) or his restriction of efficacy to spirits (“this does not hinder the allowing occasional causes (which are in truth but signs),” #2, letter to Johnson, 25 November 1729).

PART III

Hume’s Affective Affinities Associative Attraction by Reflexive Projection What principally gives authority to this system is, beside the undoubted arguments, upon which each part is founded, the agreement of these parts, and the necessity of one to explain another. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature 154/104

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David Hume set out “to explain the principles of human nature . . . on a foundation almost entirely new” (THN xvi/4). He did not, however, propose to do so by a rupture with the past. Quite the contrary, Hume placed his work squarely in the empiricist tradition inaugurated by Locke and carried forward by subsequent “philosophers in England, who have begun to put the science of man on a new footing, and have engaged the attention, and excited the curiosity of the public” (xvii/5). Like them, Hume believed that “the only solid foundation” we can give to “the science of man . . . must be laid on experience and observation” (xvi/4): tho’ we must endeavour to render all our principles as universal as possible, by tracing up our experiments to the utmost, and explaining all effects from the simplest and fewest causes, we cannot go beyond experience; and any hypothesis, that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature, ought at first to be rejected as presumptuous and chimerical. (xvii/5)

Above all, Hume concurred fully with Locke’s new model philosophy, which subordinates all philosophical topics to the theory of human understanding: ’Tis evident, that all the sciences have a relation, greater or less, to human nature; and that however wide any of them may seem to run from it, they still return back by one passage or another. Even Mathematics, Natural Philosophy and Natural Religion, are in some measure dependent on the science of MAN; since they lie under the cognizance of men, and are judged of by their powers and faculties. ’Tis impossible to tell what changes and improvements we might make in these sciences were we thoroughly acquainted with the extent and force of human understanding, and cou’d explain the nature of the ideas we employ, and of the operations we perform in our reasonings. (xv/4)

Far from turning his back on the past, Hume sought to give the principles of human nature a new foundation by shoring up all that was weak in previous sensibilist theory of understanding. In particular, his predecessors had taken on trust principles that had been insufficiently scrutinized, applied them in ways that experience could not warrant, and approached their topic in too piecemeal a fashion: ’Tis easy for one of judgment and learning, to perceive the weak foundation even of those systems, which have obtained the greatest credit, and have carried their pretensions highest to accurate and profound reasoning. Principles taken upon trust, consequences lamely deduced from them, want of coherence in the parts, and of evidence in the whole, these are every where to be met with in the systems of the most eminent philosophers, and seem to have drawn disgrace upon philosophy itself. (THN xiv/3)

In a topic so “very deep and abstruse” (xiv/3), we cannot expect to reach the foundation “otherwise than from careful and exact experiments, and the observation of those particular effects, which result from [the mind’s] different circumstances and situations” (xvii/5). Only on this basis can we hope to arrive at principles

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of the human mind as simple, universal, and firmly grounded in experience as had been attained in the natural sciences in the period from Bacon to Newton (xvi– xvii/4–5): If, in examining several phænomena, we find that they resolve themselves into one common principle, and can trace this principle into another, we shall at last arrive at those few simple principles, on which all the rest depend. And tho’ we can never arrive at the ultimate principles, ’tis a satisfaction to go as far as our faculties will allow us. (646/407)

These, then, are the hallmarks of the philosophy Hume aspired to bring into being in his chef d’œuvre, A Treatise of Human Nature: a system composed of the simplest, most universal and fundamental principles of the human mind that experience is capable of disclosing.1 Much as Newton had shown that planetary orbits, lunar orbits, the paths of comets, tidal movement, and much else besides are simply different manifestations of the same universal gravitational attraction, Hume purported to resolve into diverse expressions of a single primary force of the human psyche such disparate mental phenomena as (1) rational and nonrational inference, (2) conception, judgment, and reason, (3) the senses, memory, and understanding, (4) the cognitive and conative facets of the mind, and, indeed, (5) the very theory of ideas in which this fundamental principle is framed—a virtuous circle wherein the theory in terms of which the principle is characterized is itself an illustration of the principle in operation.2 The force in question is the association of perceptions (impressions and/or ideas or both). And Hume did not shy from comparing its significance to Newtonian attraction: Here is a kind of ATTRACTION which in the mental world will be found to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural, and to shew itself in as many and as various forms. Its effects are every where conspicuous; but as to its causes, they 1. In addition to THN xiii/§3 (“coherence in the parts, and of evidence in the whole”), the clearest statement of the systematic character of Hume’s theory of human understanding is the text cited as the epigraph to this part (THN 154/104). Hume speaks of the simplicity of his system as “its principle force and beauty” (367/237), in that its principles are of “so simple a nature, that they may easily be suppos’d to operate on mere animals. There is no force of reflection or penetration requir’d. Every thing is conducted by springs and principles, which are not peculiar to man, or any one species of animals. The conclusion from this is obvious in favour of the foregoing system” (397/255; also 139/95, 177/119, 328/ 213, and 473/304). In addition to the texts already cited (xvii and 646), Hume’s universalizing aim is clearest here: “It is confessed, that the utmost effort of human reason is, to reduce the principles, productive of natural phænomena, to a greater simplicity, and to resolve the many particular effects into a few general causes, by means of reasonings from analogy, experience, and observation. But as to the causes of these general causes, we should in vain attempt their discovery; nor shall we ever be able to satisfy ourselves, by any particular explication of them. These ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry. . . . The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: As perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of our ignorance” (EHU IV/i ¶12; also IX ¶1 and THN 118/81, 327–8/212–3, and 473/304). 2. Although the case, both textual and contextual, for these claims will be presented later, the principal bases of each are: THN I/iv/§1 for (1); THN 96n/67n for (2); 265/172–3 for (3); II/ii/§2 for (4); and 259–60/169–70 for (5).

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HUME’S AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES are most unknown, and must be resolv’d into original qualities of human nature, which I pretend not to explain. (THN 12–13/14; also 283/186 and 289/189–90)

Hume’s audaciousness is even more striking in historical context. Penned when Newton’s fame was at its zenith, it seems incredible that an unknown philosopher, not yet twenty-eight years of age, would see fit to set his achievement in the science of human nature beside Newton’s in the science of material nature. What could possibly have emboldened Hume to draw such a comparison? An answer emerges, in my view, only if we consider his theory of association against its Berkeleyan background. Hume’s principal acknowledged debt to Berkeley was his solution to the problem of “abstract or general ideas, whether they be general or particular in the mind’s, conception of them” (THN 17/17), with the separability principle at its heart (18/17). This principle Hume wielded oftener, and more systematically, even than Berkeley (a partial list would include 2/7, 10/ 12, 18/17, 27/23, 36/29, 38/30, 54/40, 66/48, 79/56, 87/61, 207/137–8, 221/146, 222/146–7, 223/147, 233/153, 245/160, 259/169, 405/261, 634/399, and 636/400; also EHU I ¶¶ 13–14, VII i/¶1, and ii/¶26). Moreover, its use transforms the situation at the level of individual perceptions just as profoundly as it does at the level of general. For by denuding perceptions of everything smacking of aspects and distinctions of reason (chapter 10), the Berkeleyan separability principle has the consequence of precluding all that had traditionally been supposed to make it possible to unite perceptions in ideas of sense-divide transcending objects such as apples and chunks of beeswax, much less to form a concept of their systematic unity in a single, universal natural order: ideas of essences (forms, species) innate to intellect confusedly perceived through the welter of sensate imagery; ideas of diverse senses such as Locke thought space and its modes to be; propertiedness; inhesion; causal influence; distinct existence; resemblance to that which exists independently of the mind; and so on. (chapters 11, 12, and 14). Berkeley’s response to the challenge of accounting for objective understanding in a manner consonant with the separability principle was to posit a language of nature: through repeated perception of the peculiar conjunctions of perceptions (in themselves distinct) prescribed by this language, its grammar and vocabulary gradually become second nature to us, and we acquire facility in “reading” our perceptions as sense-divide transcending objects (chapter 14). At the heart of this account is a reconceptualization of relations between perceptions—their resemblance, their unity in one and the same object, and their causal relations—as transitions of thought (V §145). Berkeley, however, went no further. For example, he does not tell us what it is to recognize a resemblance between things if it does not consist in aspect discrimination. Nor does he explain how a transition in thought differs from a mere succession of perceptions so as to tie the successor idea to its predecessor in imagination. There must be something additional we perceive in such transitions if past experience is to have the effect he attributed it of relating (associating) ideas found frequently and constantly conjoined. Similarly, Berkeley did not tell us what difference habit makes to such transitions. For the mere fact that a certain idea triggers another in my thought does not, in and of itself, mean that I will notice any relation between them. What constitutes the recognizable tie


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between successor and predecessor? What is the associating quality? And is this associating quality unique to habitual transitions or is it found in other passages of thought, including instances where the objects concerned in the relation are present in sensation or reflexion? Berkeley offers few clues and no answers.3 Inasmuch as Hume’s “new foundation” of the principles of human nature was intended to furnish answers to these and similar questions, the comparison with Newton’s appears less startling. Newton set out principally to explain Kepler’s laws of planetary motion: how do planets come to have the trajectories they do? what keeps them in their orbits? why and how might they eventually depart from them? what is the “associating quality” that binds them together with the sun in one dynamical system? which natural phenomena besides planetary motion might this same associative quality also serve to explain? Newton’s new foundation, universal gravitation, made it possible to extend the laws that bind together these planets in this solar system to all systems of celestial bodies whatever—stars, planets, moons, comets—irrespective of their number, magnitudes, and distances. In similar fashion, Hume’s new foundation discloses how Berkeley’s laws of transitions of thought unite perceptions in the imagination: the facility (ease, smoothness) felt in their transition is the associating quality that relates them, the “nature” or “essence” of their relation (THN 99/69, 204/135, 220/145, 260/169–70; also 11/ 13, 115–6/80, 289/189–90, 305/199, 309/201, 355–6/230, 378/243–4, 510n/327n, and EHU III ¶124). Distinct yet contiguous and/or resembling perceptions are conjoined immediately upon their first appearance, since it is human nature for 3. Berkeley seldom employed the term association, but it does occur in the sense in which Hume was to employ it at least once: “It is onely the constant & long association of ideas entirely different that makes me judge them the same” (C 224). Locke’s analysis of the association of ideas anticipates much that would not be fully developed until Hume. According to Locke, “Ideas that in themselves are not at all of kin, come to be so united in some Mens minds, that ’tis very hard to separate them, they always keep in company, and the one no sooner at any time comes into the Understanding but its Associate appears with it” (ECHU II/xxxiii/§5). The preeminent example is custom, whose associating effect consists in facilitating the operation of thought: “Custom settles habits of Thinking in the Understanding . . . all which seems to be but Trains of Motion in the Animal Spirits, which once set a going continue on in the same steps they have been used to, which by often treading are worn into a smooth path, and the Motion in it becomes easy and as it were Natural” (§6). Unlike Hume, Locke probably used the terms ‘easy’ and ‘natural’ only to describe the functioning of the mind, or least did not specify it, as Hume was to do, as a special variety of affect (chapter 17-B). Locke also does not seem to have anticipated Hume’s doctrine of the association of impressions, so prominent in his analysis of certain passions (THN II/i/§§4–5, etc.). This is not to say that Locke was altogether oblivious of the potential of the association of ideas for the theory of understanding: “those [associations of ideas] which relate more peculiarly to the Mind, and terminate in the Understanding, or Passions, have been much less heeded than the thing deserves; nay, those relating purely to the Understanding have, as I suspect, been by most Men wholly over-look’d” (§8). Why then did Locke not delve further into this topic and devote more than a single, brief section to it (introduced only in the fourth edition of the Essay)? He evidently viewed association as important to the theory of understanding principally as a source of error and prejudice. Thus, unlike Berkeley, he does not seem to have appreciated its importance in the explanation of human understanding itself (chapter 14), much less descried in it, as Hume did, the very essence of human understanding (as well as certain facets of memory and the senses, THN 265/172–3, and the passions, THN 283/186). 4. For reasons he did not explain, Hume opted to excise ¶¶ 4–18 of sect. III in the last of the many editions of EHU he published during his lifetime. Since Kant and other near contemporaries were most

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such transitions be made smoothly and easily, while others are distinguished by their difficulty or by no feeling at all (the mind’s “native situation of indifference,” 125/86); and since constant conjunctions resolve into resembling contiguity relations,5 which likewise are associative (THN I/i/§3 and EHU III), they too can be understood in terms of a feeling of facility marking off such transitions of thought from indifferent and difficult ones. Habitual transitions owe their exceptional capacity to effect relations between distinct perceptions to the unsurpassed degree of facility that characterizes them (THN 115–6/80 and 422/271). The causal relations imputed to objects have their source in the facility felt in such transitions (125/86, 147/100, 156/105, 165–7/111–3, and EHU VII/ii ¶28), as do the indifferent denotations whereby we distinguish them into kinds and make generalizations (THN 22/20). Facility, then, is a universal attractor: any transition to and/or from any of our distinct perceptions characterized by facility feeling will ipso facto relate the perceptions concerned. Equally important for Hume, facility feeling is a universal conduit: insofar as the transition from one perception to another distinct from it is facile, the manner in which the first is apprehended, conceived, or felt is apt to be extended to the way the second is apprehended, conceived, or felt, to a degree proportionate to that facility. In particular, Hume’s contention that belief in the real existence of any object apprehended by the senses or conceived by the imagination consists in a “forceful,” “vivacious” sensation or feeling characteristic of the manner of its apprehension or conception (86/61, 94–6/65–7, 103/72, 119–20/82–3, 153–4/104, 183–4/123, 623–9/396–8, and EHU V/ii) becomes central to his theory of understanding, insofar as this sensation is extended from one perception to another more or less completely in direct proportion to the degree of facility felt in the transition between them, with the result that if the former is believed the latter will be as well (THN 98–9/69, 112/77–8, 141–2/96–7, 142–3/97, 151/102, 154/104, 318/207, and 431/276). Similarly, the “easy or difficult transition of the imagination operates upon the passions, and facilitates or retards their transition” (340/220–1): a “strong connexion of the events, as it facilitates the passage of the thought or imagination from one to another, facilitates also the transfusion of the passions, and preserves the affections still in the same channel and direction,” whereas a weak or difficult transition “breaks the course of the passions, and prevents that communication of the several emotions” (EHU III ¶¶ 12–13; also THN 320/208, 378/243–4, 380/245, likely to know EHU from earlier editions (which formed the basis of translations), it is unfortunate that this and Hume’s other excisions have been omitted from most twentieth-century editions (fortunately, the new Oxford edition has restored the missing material). For example, Kant’s comparison of the qualitative unity of apperception (B131) to the unity of theme in a play or speech (B114) was very likely prompted by Hume’s discussion of association in the edition of EHU III familiar to him. In what follows, I draw freely on the omitted material. 5. “There is, then, nothing new either discover’d or produc’d in any objects by their constant conjunction, and by the uninterrupted resemblance of their relations of succession and contiguity” (THN 164/111); also: “When I examine with the utmost accuracy those objects, which are commonly denominated causes and effects, I find, in considering a single instance, that the one object is precedent and contiguous to the other; and in inlarging my view to consider several instances, I find only, that like objects are constantly plac’d in like relations of succession and contiguity. Again, when I consider the influence of this constant conjunction . . . ” (THN 170/114–5).


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and 556/356). Through the channels carved out by successive facile transitions, our distinct perceptions “mutually produce, destroy, influence, and modify each other” (261/170): harmonious or contrary beliefs or passions or both that would not otherwise encounter do so more or less directly, and so unite or oppose their forces more or less completely (129–31/89–90, 135/92–3, 138–40/94, 366–8/236– 7, 380/245, 393/252–3, and 440–3/281–3), while resembling beliefs or passions that would not otherwise be confused are more or less easily confounded (“Nothing is more apt to make us mistake one idea for another, than any relation betwixt them, which associates them together in the imagination, and makes it pass with facility from one to the other,” 202/135; also 393/253). The conductive effects of facility feeling made it possible for Hume to explain the entire economy of the mind—the order and unity of understanding, the passions, and their interaction—by focusing on a single associative quality among distinct perceptions. In particular, he had only to discover which facilitating relations exhibit the greatest, and most far-reaching, conductive power in order to discover the “permanent, irresistible, and universal” principles of association at “the foundation of all our thoughts and actions, so that upon their removal human nature must immediately perish and go to ruin” (225/148). These principles resolve, according to Hume, into just three: resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect. Though “neither the infallible nor the sole causes of an union among ideas” (92/64–5), and not always able to prevail over other facilitating forces (e.g., 344– 5/223), Hume was therefore not without warrant when he compared the scope and ostensible explanatory power of these three principles to Newton’s celestial mechanics: ’Twill be easy to conceive of what vast consequence these principles must be in the science of human nature, if we consider, that so far as regards the mind, these are the only links that bind the parts of the universe together, or connect us with any person or object exterior to ourselves. For as it is by means of thought only that any thing operates upon our passions, and as these are the only ties of our thoughts, they are really to us the cement of the universe, and all the operations of the mind must, in a great measure, depend on them. (THN 662/416–7; also 108/75)6

Thus did Hume’s “Newtonian” science of human nature meet the need for a new theory of mental activity and affect that arose when Berkeley brought habitual transitions of thought to the forefront of the theory of objective understanding. Yet one may be forgiven for wondering whether, as such, it does not represent a contribution to psychology rather than to philosophy. Is there a genuinely philosophical project subserved by Hume’s associationism? The answer I will offer in 6. It is often maintained that Hume’s borrowings from the language of physics should only be construed metaphorically. Yet we should remember that, in his view, not only is there no difference between physical and moral necessity (THN 171/115), but the latter should be considered as the archetype for the former rather than vice versa (410/263). Consequently, it seems more likely that Hume would have regarded the language we apply to the physical world as a metaphorical extension of actions and efficacies familiar to us from the human world than the reverse.

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this part is yes: not only did Hume share the concern with the origin of the ideas at the heart of traditional philosophical disputes that was the hallmark of the sensibilist theories of understanding of Locke and Berkeley, associationism became in his hands the instrument of a systematic psychologism that superseded their approach to origins as completely as Newtonian universal gravitation did Cartesian cosmology. Chapter 15 will consider the state of the theory of origins before Hume arrived on the scene, beginning with the Rationalists’ intellectualist accounts and drawing together the elements of the sensibilist response to it, first, of Locke, and then Berkeley, with an eye to their shortcomings. In chapter 16, I shall examine how Hume’s revolutionary associationist theory of ideas overcame these deficiencies and, in the process, fundamentally transformed the question of origins itself. I will examine the nature of this associationism in chapter 17, focusing on the affective dimension of associative action at its center, and then, in chapter 18, consider the most important applications of the three fundamental principles of association identified by Hume: association by resemblance to general ideas and discourse; association by contiguity to space and time; and association by cause and effect to understanding generally and objective understanding in particular. Chapter 19 deals with Hume’s conception of empirical reason, and the distinction, implicit in his principle of customary association between reasonable belief on the one hand, and unreasonable and irrational belief on the other. My consideration of Hume concludes in chapter 20 with an examination of Hume’s skepticism with regard to reason and the supreme principle of human understanding that emerges from it. Although a substantial portion of my previous book on Hume, Hume’s Theory of Consciousness, was devoted to Hume’s theory of understanding, the focus and aims of the present work are sufficiently different, and wider, to warrant revisiting some of the same topics from this new perspective. Conversely, where more detailed consideration of a topic would go beyond the proper focus of this work, I have provided references in HTC for further discussion (similarly, the reader should look to the earlier book for discussions of the secondary literature). That said, aside from a slight divergence in terminology and organization, the interpretation offered here is the same as that presented in the earlier work, including my choice to focus on A Treatise of Human Nature in preference to Hume’s later works, including An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Although many interpreters claim that substantial differences of view exist between these works, the only divergences I can detect are in manner, not in substance, and are dictated by differences of scope, standards of rigor, and target audience in their conception. The Treatise is a classical philosophical treatise in the Lockean mold. It was directed above all (though not exclusively) at a specialist philosophical audience; Hume designed it to meet the highest methodological standards of argument, organization, and detail; and his ambition was to supplant the greatest systems of the past with his own. The Enquiry, by contrast, started life under the title Essays, and like other works of its period under that title was written to be accessible to readers who could not be expected to cope with the intricacies of a systematic treatise. No doubt there are some who believe that less is more: by leaving out much of the detail of the associationism of the Treatise, it


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brings out what they find truly essential in Hume’s thought. But others, myself included, find it impossible to overlook the fact that the Enquiry continually ignores questions that Hume, on the evidence of the Treatise, well knew needed answering, and almost certainly would not have left unanswered had he truly intended the Enquiry to replace the Treatise as a rigorous expression of his entire system of thought. Because of its restricted subject matter, the Dialogues is even less able to take the place of the Treatise; and its utility as an expression of Hume’s philosophy is further compromised by the fact that no character in it voices views that can be straightforwardly equated with his own (certainly, none is Hume’s mouthpiece in the sense true of the dialogues of Leibniz or Berkeley). To be sure, the very features that led posterity to focus on the Treatise as the definitive expression of Hume’s philosophy offered his contemporaries their best opportunities for criticism, sometimes verging on slander; and it should therefore come as no surprise that, as the attacks mounted and the misunderstandings multiplied, Hume publicly disowned the Treatise shortly before his death. Yet Hume’s willingness to accept the judgment of his public suggests that he would readily defer to the verdict of posterity and accept its judgment that A Treatise of Human Nature is his supreme contribution to philosophy, and quite probably the greatest philosophical work in the English language.


15 The Pre-Humean Problem of Origins

Hume entered into the question of the origins of ideas more single-mindedly and systematically than any previous theorist of human understanding, Locke and Berkeley not excepted. This is because, in his view, only by attending to the origins of the ideas at the heart of age-old philosophical disputes can we expect to arrive at explications of these ideas that are at once clear, unambiguous, and impartial (THN 74–5/53 and 156–7/105–6). This focus informs every aspect of Hume’s theory of understanding: the problems he posed himself, the way he subdivided and ordered them, the methods he devised to solve them, the data that mattered for him, and the standards by which he measured success. And it makes clear, above all, why the philosophy that emerges is so “very sceptical” that the only thing that prevents us from disbelieving everything our faculties lead us to assent to is that these same faculties compel our assent: “we cannot help it” (657/ 414). To lose one’s grip on Hume’s focus on origins is to lose sight of why his contemporaries, especially Kant, were so profoundly disturbed by Hume’s unique variety of skepticism. I see no other way to diagnose judgments like the following emanating from one of the finer Hume interpreters of our time, David Fate Norton: In the two and a half centuries since the publication of the Treatise Hume has often, even routinely, been interpreted as a destructive sceptic. He has been taken, that is, as the philosopher whose principal achievement was to show that the empiricism of Locke and Berkeley, when taken to its logical conclusion, results in the denial of the reality of causes, objects, enduring selves, human freedom, and objective values, and who, moreover, delighted in this radically sceptical result. We can probably see how this inaccurate interpretation arose. Hume described himself as a sceptic when sceptics were taken to be, as one reference work of his time put it, those who said that there is no real or certain knowledge of anything, and that we ‘ought to Doubt of, and Disbelieve every thing.’ Hume’s conception of his own scepticism is far more moderate; he insists, among other things, that our natures make it impossible for us to disbelieve many of the things some sceptics had claimed to doubt.1 1. Editor’s introduction to David Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), I 112. The remark quoted in the next sentence is on I 113.

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Norton reflects a now widespread belief among scholars that Hume’s reputation as an extreme skeptic is the result of mistaken “negative assessments [that] have since been repeated by those who have failed, as many still do, to read Hume with care.” Yet this and similar attempts to “correct” the record seem to me unduly dependent on paying too little attention to what, and far too much to the fact that, human beings, according to Hume, cannot help believing. Hume’s skepticism is not simply a new, more powerful expression of traditional skeptical occupations with the nature and limits of the evidence available to us, or our inability to limit our conclusions to what the evidence warrants. Such epistemological concerns give way, at the heart of Hume’s skepticism, to a conceptualist—or, more properly, psychologistic (chapters 1-B and 2-B)—focus on the content of the ideas at the heart of perennial philosophical disputes concerning the nature and reality of substance, cause and effect, mind, and body. What certain scholars seem all too often to forget or disregard is that, for Hume, “The idea of an object is an essential part of the belief of it” (THN 94/65; also 101/71, 140/95, 164/111, and 172/116). Hume’s reputation as the exponent of perhaps the most extreme and destructive philosophical skepticism ever developed derives far less from his characterization of our beliefs in the reality of body, mind, and causal connections as arising irresistibly from the nature of mammalian associative psychology, than from his explication of the ideas to which these beliefs relate as bound up by content with the internally perceived actions and affects distinctive of this psychology. It is by no means difficult either to understand or to sympathize with the oppugnant reaction of Hume’s contemporaries to his psychologistic explications of the ideas at the heart of objective understanding. After all, how much comfort can be found in Hume’s assurances that our strongest convictions about the world and our place in it are immune to any and all rational challenge when the ideas in which we repose our belief are, as Kant put it, mere “bastards of the imagination” (PFM 258)? To characterize Hume in the terms Norton does, as holding that “our natures make it impossible for us to disbelieve many of the things some sceptics had claimed to doubt,” would be correct only if skeptics had been wont to direct their doubts at ideas bound up by content with such ineluctably subjective operations as customary association and restricted in application accordingly. But this of course has never been the case. On the contrary, like many of the most extreme skeptics that preceded him, Hume targeted pretensions to objective knowledge by honing in on the putative ideas requisite to its possesion—contents (meanings) ostensibly prior to and independent of the operations of human psychology, and even perhaps of the senses themselves. By determining that human understanding has no source from which to obtain them, he concluded that we have no ideas to underwrite our verbal pretensions, and “either contradict ourselves, or talk without a meaning” (THN 267173) when we suppose the ideas in our possession to have a validity capable of extending beyond the purview of associative imagination. Consequently, the true choice with which Hume confronts us is between contenting ourselves with unassailable beliefs relating to ideas against which no skeptic would think it worth contending, or aspiring to an impossible “something more,” where belief is not merely lacking in evidentiary support but is altogether unintelligible for want of ideas in which to repose it (chapter 17-A).

The Pre-Humean Problem of Origins

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Still, it is one thing to recognize that the problem of origins was central to Hume’s skeptical philosophy, quite another to state clearly and precisely what that problem was, and to reckon with the growing suspicion in recent times as to whether it is a genuine philosophical problem at all. So before proceeding to examine Hume’s solution, we need to draw together the results of our considerations of the philosophies of Locke and Berkeley so as to comprehend what precisely the problem was they bequeathed to Hume. And to do this, we must begin by examining, in greater detail than hitherto, the intellectualist solution against which both Locke and Berkeley were contending. A. The Rationalist Problem of Origins What must be true before the origin of ideas can become a matter of more than psychological, or even biographical interest? Nearly all the early moderns, Rationalist and Empiricist alike, conceived of ideas in such a way that they can exist nowhere outside a mind, be it in finite minds like our own or in the infinite mind of God. The question dividing them into distinct camps was whether ideas have an existence in us distinct from their being perceived in sensation (external sense) or reflexion (internal sense), particularly those ideas bound up most intimately with objective understanding: substance and accident, cause and effect, space and time, finite and infinite quantity, unity and number, probability, reality and negation, existence and its modes (possibility, actuality, and necessity), individual identity and universal essence, body, matter, mind, and God. Rationalists were intellectualists, attributing to such ideas an existence prior to and independent of their presence to consciousness, while Empiricists were sensibilists because they denied this (chapter 1-A). Consequently, for Rationalists, the psychology of its perception is incidental to the idea itself: psychological considerations do not permit one to conclude anything at all about either the content of the idea or its scope of application, and are consequently matters of limited, even negligible, philosophical interest. For Empiricists, by contrast, nothing is an idea unless and until it is perceived by the senses; and since this is just to say that all ideas are either simple ideas of sensation or reflexion, underivable from other ideas (chapter 5-B), or complex ideas, ideas of relations, and abstract ideas fashioned by the mind from simple ideas (chapter 5-C), the psychology of their perception tells us everything there is to know about their (exclusively sensible) contents, and, moreover, may— given antiabstractionist psychologism à la Berkeley—tell us something about the limits of their scope of application as well. What made nearly all of those who denied this sensibilism go on to embrace innatism? The basic reasoning is quite straightforward. Ideas whose presence in human understanding involves no contribution from sensation or reflexion (perceptions of the mind’s own doings) must be contents of a completely different nature than experience provides; consequently, they must be the a priori objects of a more or less clear and distinct strictly intellectual intuition. However, unless such intuition is supposed to be effectuated by a kind of visionary revelation—a possibility rejected by all the major Rationalists except Malebranche—the only way to

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account for its possibility is to suppose that the ideas presented in it are native to our understanding. Thus, the same intellectualism that led Rationalists to relegate psychology to the margins of philosophy also led them to embrace innatism—not, to be sure, in relation to our beginning of existence (least of all qua biological organisms) but to our “true and immutable” essences as possible thinking beings, such that if God were to choose to create your mind, mine, or any other, a trove of innate ideas would ipso facto be brought into existence along with it. The incommensurability Rationalists supposed to obtain between the objects of intellectual intuition and the objects of external and internal sensory experience raised a specter of equivocation to the extent that the same term, ‘idea,’ was often applied to both. This concern, combined with the secondary status they accorded to psychology, led many of them to reserve ‘idea’ for the objects of pure intellectual intuition, and to extend it to the objects of the sensory experience only insofar as they may conform to such objects as their “rule” or “form”; apart from this, they deemed it advisable to term the latter “imagery” or something similar. Leibniz is a case in point; and though the latest of the leading early modern Rationalists, the clarity with which he expressed these views makes him the most fitting to focus on first. For Leibniz, innate ideas and their relations are a kind of implicit knowledge which enters into, and governs, all our thoughts, “serving as their inner core and as their mortar. Even if we give no thought to them, they are necessary for thought, as muscles and tendons are for walking. The mind relies on these principles constantly” (NE 84; also 76 and 78–9). Leibniz distinguished such innate contents of thought as being, substance, action, and identity from data of the senses and imagination as ideas from images (NE 137), while at other times, with the distinction between innate and actualized a priori knowledge uppermost in mind, he distinguished innate ideas from our awareness of them in notions or concepts by pure intellect (DoM §27). Either way, he left it in no doubt that the nature and origin of ideas is a quite distinct topic from the (merely psychological) matter of their perception: In order properly to conceive what an idea is, we must prevent an equivocation. For some take the idea to be the form or difference of our thoughts, and thus we have an idea in the mind only insofar as we think it; every time we think of it again, we have other ideas of the same thing, though similar to the preceding ideas. But it seems that others take the idea as an immediate object of thought or as some permanent form that remains when we are not contemplating it. And, in fact, our soul always has in it the quality of representing to itself any nature or form whatsoever, when the occasion to think of it presents itself. And I believe that this quality of our soul, insofar as it expresses some nature, form, or essence, is properly the idea of the thing, which is in us and which is always in us, whether we think of it or not. For our soul expresses God, the universe, and all essences, as well as all existences. . . . And nothing can be taught to us whose idea we do not already have in our mind, an idea which is like the matter of which that thought is formed. . . . [Plato’s Meno] demonstrates that our soul knows all these things virtually and requires only attention (animadversion) to recognize truths, and that, consequently, it has, at very least, the ideas upon


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which these truths depend. One can even say that it already possesses these truths, if they are taken as relations of ideas. (DoM §26)

The same views, with minor differences, can be found in Descartes. In the First Meditation, the intellectual provenance of the simplest, most universal ideas of things is indicated by the fact that they are presupposed by, and so cannot be derived from, the dreaming imagination (AT VII 20; chapter 9-B). In the Second Meditation, Descartes widened this thesis to include individual things, arguing that it would be impossible to conceive even something as concrete as a handful of beeswax were it not for ideas intellect alone is capable of contributing (30–1; chapter 6-D). To prove that the ideas of these things I find in my intellect “are not my invention” (64), not “something fictitious which is dependent on my thought” (68), Descartes set out in the Fifth Meditation to establish a general criterion: the idea of a thing must be deemed to exist in the intellect prior to and independently of its being conceived if “It is not that my thought makes it so, or imposes any necessity on any thing” but, “on the contrary, it is the necessity of the thing itself . . . which determines my thinking in this respect” (67). When the empiricist Gassendi objected that “if you had up till now been deprived of all your sensory functions, so that you had never either seen or touched the various surfaces or extremities of bodies,” you would not “have been able to acquire or form within yourself the idea of a triangle or other figure” (321), Descartes responded that, in the absence of an “image of a true and immutable nature” (68) present in us antecedently to all sensation and imagination, we would be unable to discern figure, or any determinate extension whatsoever, by means of sensation alone: when in our childhood we first happened to see a triangular figure drawn on paper, it cannot have been this figure that showed us how we should conceive of the true triangle studied by geometers, since the true triangle is contained in the figure only in the way in which a statue of Mercury is contained in a rough block of wood. But since the idea of the true triangle was already in us, and could be conceived by our mind more easily than the more composite figure of the triangle drawn on paper, when we saw the composite figure we did not apprehend the figure we saw, but rather the true triangle. It is just the same as when we look at a piece of paper on which some lines have been drawn in ink to represent a man’s face: the idea that this produces in us is not so much the idea of these lines as the idea of a man. Yet this would certainly not happen unless the human face were already known to us from some other source, and we were more accustomed to think of the face than the lines drawn in ink; indeed, we are often unable to distinguish the lines from one another when they are moved a short distance away from us. Thus we could not recognize the geometrical triangle from the diagram on the paper unless our mind already possessed the idea of it from some other source. (Fifth Replies 381–2)

In the absence of antecedent ideas of extension and figure to give “form” to our thoughts (AT VIIIB 346), we would be as much at a loss to discern them in what we see or touch as intelligent creatures familiar with portraiture would be to discern the face depicted in one of our portraits if they lacked any idea of human faces, or faces generally. For just as the carver requires a rule (pattern, exemplar)

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to direct his actions if he is to remove all and only such wood as is required, the thought (psychological activity) of subjects of sense experience must already be determined conformably to ideas of extension and its determinations if they are to exclude from their consideration of an undifferentiated manifold of sensation everything that is irrelevant to or incompatible with these ideas, and focus instead on all and only that which conforms to them: I could not conceive of an imperfect triangle unless there were in me the idea of a perfect one, since the former is the negation of the latter. Thus, when I see a triangle, I have a conception of a perfect triangle, and it is by comparison with this that I subsequently realize that what I am seeing is imperfect.2

This reasoning recalls the argument in the Third Meditation whereby Descartes sought to show that the idea of an infinite being cannot be obtained by negating the limitations in the finite beings we encounter in experience (AT VII 45–6), including our internal experience of the operations of our own minds (46–51). Even in the case of cogito, our thinking could not be determined to the recognition that “this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind” (Second Meditation 25) unless I already possessed the ideas of myself, thought, existence, and certainty (Third Meditation 51, Sixth Replies 422, and Principles I §10 AT VIIIA 8). Clearly, then, Descartes was an intellectualist in the same sense Leibniz was: ideas are prior to and independent of experience, internal no less than external, so that the psychology of their perception is a matter of complete indifference to the theorist of understanding. It is thus no surprise that Descartes anticipated Leibniz in embracing innatism as well: Among my ideas, some appear to be innate, some to be adventitious, and others to have been invented by me. My understanding of what a thing is, what truth is, and what thought is, seems to derive simply from my own nature. . . . For example, there are two different ideas of the sun which I find within me. One of them, which is acquired as it were from the senses and which is a prime example of an idea which I reckon to come from an external source, make the sun appear very small. The other idea is based on astronomical reasoning, that is, it is derived from certain notions which are innate in me (or else it is constructed by me in some other way), and this idea shows the sun to be several times larger than the earth. (Third Meditation AT VII 38–9)

As with Leibniz, the affirmation of innate ideas must not be thought of in relation to our biological existence as human beings. It concerns the essence of the mind that, if created, would be you, me, or some other individual finite mind. And, as beings innately endowed with a “treasure house” of ideas of ourselves, God, and corporeal being (Fifth Meditation 67; also Third Meditation 51–2), there is therefore 2. This is Descartes’s response to Burman’s request for elucidation of the passage from the Fifth Replies just quoted: see Descartes’ Conversations with Burman, tr. John Cottingham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 26 (at 39).


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nothing in our ideas which is not innate to the mind or the faculty of thinking, with the sole exception of those circumstances which relate to experience, such as the fact that we judge that this or that idea which we now have immediately before our mind refers to a certain thing situated outside us. We make such a judgement not because these things transmit the ideas to our mind through the sense organs, but because they transmit something which, at exactly that moment, gives the mind occasion to form these ideas by means of the faculty innate to it. (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet, AT VIIIB 358–9; also 60–1)

And these priorities are reflected in the most influential Cartesian treatise of the generation after Descartes, the Port Royal Logic of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole: “In metaphysics the most important questions concern the origin of our ideas, the distinction between ideas and images, the distinction between soul and body, and proofs of the soul’s immortality—proofs based on the distinction between soul and body” (Second Discourse). Spinoza’s belief that the method of the geometer is adaptable to philosophy is already of itself strong prima facie evidence of a commitment to Rationalist intellectualism. How the notions geometers employ in their definitions, axioms, postulates, and proofs come to be apprehended by minds—in sensation, through reflexive experience of the operations the mind performs on the data of the senses, or in any other way—is a matter of signal indifference so far as their content is concerned. Indeed, for all that psychological operations contribute to these notions, they might as well be Platonic forms situated beyond this world in the intelligible realm. Of course, as I argued in chapter 2-E-1, this does not by itself prove that essential elements of their content do not in fact derive from the sensing, thinking mind; it simply means that, for all geometrical intents and purposes, psychological contributions to their conception can and should be ignored. But when a philosopher models his method on geometry or any other abstract, formal science, this is tantamount to an unqualified denial of the relevance of psychological considerations to the notions of concern to philosophy, an affirmation that, in and of themselves, they are as fully independent of sensation and reflexion as the innate ideas of Descartes and Leibniz. Certainly, insofar as conception enters into Spinoza’s definitions of ‘substance’ and ‘attribute’ and intellect into that of ‘attribute,’ it had to have been with the conceptions of the infinite intellect of God uppermost in mind, not finite human intellects, and particularly not those human conceptions that have become confused by sensory affections, (recollected or fancied) imagery, passions, desires, and other contributions of human cognitive and conative psychology. No doubt, by adhering to the same canons as the geometer, Spinoza believed he could eradicate this kind of confusion from the notions of concern to philosophy, and thereby prevent their inherently deceptive character from vitiating his analyses and reasoning. But he could only have believed this if he were convinced that these notions could be purged of all psychological residue remaining from their initial acquisition without loss of essential content; and this in turn he could only have believed if he were convinced that their psychological origins contribute nothing to their content, nor in any way delimit their scope of application. Spinoza’s commitment to Cartesian intellectualism is evident throughout the Ethics but is perhaps clearest of all in V P21–23S. Spinoza equated minds (not just

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their modifications) with ideas the nature of which is to think a certain object (ideatum). The object of which a human mind is the idea is a certain human body (the one each of us calls “my own”), which the mind thinks by means of (more or less confused) ideas of everything that occurs in that body and happens to it during the entire span of its existence, beginning with its first formation in the womb till its death and dissolution.3 More particularly, since, according to Spinoza, the senses, memory, imagination, and passions express affections of the body, none can be exercised save while the body endures (E V P21 and P34). We can therefore expect to ascertain the nature and extent of Spinoza’s intellectualist commitments by determining whether he accorded any existence to the mind-idea antecedently to, and independently of, the existence of the body—an existence that would, by default, necessarily be confined to the mind qua pure intellect. Spinoza’s position on this issue is expressed clearly and unambiguously in E V P23 and its scholium: we assign to the human mind the kind of duration that can be defined by time only in so far as the mind expresses the actual existence of the body, an existence that is explicated through duration and can be defined by time. That is, we do not assign duration to the mind except while the body endures. However, since that which is conceived by a certain eternal necessity through God’s essence is nevertheless a something, this something, which pertains to the essence of mind, will necessarily be eternal. . . . Yet it is impossible that we should remember that we existed before the body, since neither can there be any traces of this in the body nor can eternity be defined by time, or be in any way related to time. Nevertheless, we feel and experience that we are eternal. For the mind senses those things that it conceives by its understanding just as much as those which it has in its memory. Logical proofs are the eyes of the mind, whereby it sees and observes things. So although we have no recollection of having existed before the body, we nevertheless sense that our mind, in so far as it involves the essence of the body under a form of eternity (sub specie æternitatis), is eternal, and that this aspect of its existence cannot be defined by time, that is, cannot be explicated through duration. Therefore our mind can be said to endure, and its existence to be defined by a definite period of time, only to the extent that it involves the actual existence of the body, and it is only to that extent that it has the power to determine existence of things by time and to conceive them from the point of view of duration.

What precisely Spinoza means by ‘eternity’ here is unclear, but this much seems certain: in its eternal guise, the mind is changeless, that is, there is no succession of states (affections) in it. But this did not stop Spinoza from according to the mind in its eternal condition the highest of the three kinds of knowledge he distinguished (II P40S2), intellectual intuition (V P31S-P33S). Thus, in this completely insensate state, according to Spinoza, the human mind has perfectly adequate ideas of the essence of its body (its ideatum), its own essence (by II P20–1), the essence of God (V P30), as well as all the notions implicit in them (including, 3. Regarding Spinoza’s conception of mind and body as parallel modes, see chapter 5, notes 17 and 25.


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by II P38, all common notions).4 And since the brand of innatism developed by Rationalists such as Descartes and Leibniz specifically concerns ideas contained in the essence of intellect, quite apart from any question of its actual existence, Spinoza may therefore be accounted among their number.5 Malebranche may at first seem a paradoxical case. On the one hand, he held that there is nothing in our minds unless and until it is perceived, by means of sensation or reflexion, which is precisely what empiricists like Gassendi and Locke maintained. On the other hand, he claimed that the ideas of God, self, corporeal things, universals, and common notions exist prior to and independently of our perception of them by means of outer or inner sensation, which is precisely what Rationalists like Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz maintained. But the paradox is only apparent. Malebranche was a Rationalist through and through, perhaps the most extreme intellectualist of all: Ideas have more reality than I thought; and their reality is immutable, necessary, eternal, common to all intellects, and does not consist in modifications of the intellect’s own being, which, being finite, cannot receive modifications that are actually infinite. The perception I have of intelligible extension belongs to me: it is a modification of my mind. It is I who perceives this extension. But the [intelligible] extension I perceive is not a modification of my mind, I am aware it is not myself I see when I think of infinite spaces, of a circle, of a square, or of a cube, when I look at this room, when I turn my eyes towards the heavens. The perception of extension is my own. But, as for the extension along with all the shapes I discover in it, I should like to know in what way all that is not my own. The perception I have of extension cannot exist without me. It is thus a 4. In this regard, Spinoza’s intellectualism recalls Descartes’s reply to Gassendi’s question, “what progress do you think you would have made if, since being implanted in the body, you had remained within it with your eyes closed and your ears stopped and, in short, with no external senses to enable you to perceive this universe of objects or anything outside you? . . . Answer in all honesty and tell me what idea of God and yourself you think you would have acquired under such circumstances” (Fifth Objections AT VII 310): “the mind . . . would have had exactly the same ideas of God and itself that it now has, with the sole difference that they would have been much purer and clearer” (Fifth Replies 375). This response should be understood to apply not only to the ideas Gassendi mentioned but to all innate ideas, including those employed in geometry. 5. Innatism is implicit in Spinoza’s assertions that (1) the mind in its preembodied condition “expresses the essence of this or that human body under the form of eternity” (E V P22); and (2) “a conception, or idea, which expresses the essence of the human body . . . is necessarily something that pertains to the essence of the human mind” (p23). Margaret Wilson also classified Spinoza among the innatists of his time: “The question of whether a philosopher accepts or denies the existence of ‘innate ideas’ has sometimes been considered important to whether or not he is appropriately labeled a ‘rationalist’. Spinoza’s position on this issue is a little hard to categorize, partly because he does not think of the mind as a substance in which ideas might be imprinted, independently of its connection with the body. But on the whole it seems to me that he is best thought of as aligned with the innatist camp. That is, he holds that the mind, by virtue of being what it is (the ‘idea of the body’) has certain ideas, independently of particular, fortuitous learning experiences (namely, the ideas of ‘what is common to all’). Additionally, he repeatedly indicates in the Treatise on the Intellect that the mind possesses certain true ideas as ‘inborn tools,’ or ‘arising from the very powers of the mind.’ (See, for example, TdIE 39, 86).” “Spinoza’s Theory of Knowledge,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. Don Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 137n36.

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HUME’S AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES modification of my mind. But the extension I see does subsist without me. You can contemplate it without my thinking of it, you and any other man. (First Dialogue 158)

My perception of extension depends on my senses, but not the extension itself I perceive: as an intelligible idea, this is prior to and independent of my human senses and, a fortiori, my human psychology. Malebranche differs from other Rationalist intellectualists only in his view that the seat of innate ideas is not the essence of our own, finite minds (innatism), but that of God: You need not be afraid to add, ‘And God himself.’ For all our clear ideas are in God in their intelligible reality. It is only in Him that we see them. . . . If our ideas are eternal, immutable, necessary, you plainly see they can only exist in a nature which is immutable. . . . God sees intelligible extension in Himself, i.e. the archetype of the matter of which the world is formed and in which our bodies live; and, I repeat, it is only in him that we see it. For our minds live entirely in universal Reason, in that intelligible substance which contains the ideas of all the truths we discover. (158; also ST III/ii/6 and EST 10)

Unlike Spinoza, for whom finite minds are merely a mode of the attribute of God, Malebranche deemed them to be substances in their own right, distinct from the being of God. Consequently, in order to account for our access to sensibly inaccessible (i.e., intelligible) ideas that exist in God and not in our own minds, he saw no option but to enlist a source of perception that had generally been supposed to be confined to prophets, apostles, saints, and others specially vouchsafed by God: divine illumination (lumière). All of us, including atheists and heretics, benefit from such illumination each and every time we perceive, imagine, or conceive an object. For without it we could have no access to the ideas that supply the rules conformity to which alone makes it possible for us to represent a body, a mind, or any of their attributes (ST III/ii/3; cf. Descartes, Fifth Replies, AT VII 381–2, cited earlier), and our consciousness would be confined entirely to the modes of thinking we experience in ourselves (sensation, memory, imagination, passion, desire, etc.: ST III/i/1). Thus, Malebranche’s solution to the problem of the origin of ideas agrees with the solutions of the other leading Rationalists of his day with respect to the that question—that ideas originate prior to and independently of their being represented in sensation, imagination, or conception, that they have an existence independently of their being perceived—and diverges only on the how question— how we have access to ideas is not by their being native to our faculty of thought but by divine revelation (ST III/ii/4 and EST 10). Since, so far as sensibilists like Locke, Berkeley, and Hume were concerned, the question of where ideas of pure intellect are lodged—in the essence of our own intellect (innatism) or that of God (illuminationism)—is nugatory, Malebranche’s solution to the problem of origins is effectively indistinguishable from the intellectualism of other Rationalists. Thus, the question is whether the sensibilists succeeded in their attempt to define an alternative to the intellectualist account of the origin of the ideas indispensable to objective understanding.


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B. Locke’s Critique of Rationalist Intellectualism Rationalists took great pains to distance their notion of innate ideas from cruder ones. Descartes, for example, stressed that “when we say that an idea is innate in us, we do not mean that it is always there before us, for this would mean that no idea was innate. We mean that we have within ourselves the faculty of summoning up the idea” (Third Replies, AT VII 189). Indeed, he even went so far as to claim that his anti-innatist opponent’s difference with him is merely verbal: When he says that the mind has no need of ideas, or notions, axioms which are innate, while admitting that the mind has the power of thinking (presumably natural or innate), he is plainly saying the same thing as I, though verbally denying it. I have never written or taken the view that the mind requires innate ideas which are something distinct from its own faculty of thinking. I did, however, observe that there were certain thoughts within me which neither came to me from external objects nor were determined by my will, but which came solely from the power of thinking within me; so I applied the term ‘innate’ to the ideas or notions which are the forms of these thoughts in order to distinguish them from others, which I called ‘adventitious’ or ‘made up.’ This is the same sense as that in which we say that generosity is ‘innate’ in certain families, or that certain diseases such as gout or stones are innate in others: it is not so much that the babies of such families suffer from these diseases in their mother’s womb, but simply that they are born with a certain ‘faculty’ or tendency to contract them. (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet AT VIIIB 357–8; also 360–1)

As Descartes understood innatism, although ideas and knowledge are present in our minds innately, some occasion must be supplied to actualize what otherwise is mere potential. That this may require considerable time and effort, even extending down many generations, is evident from the case of innate mathematical knowledge, which (barring another Dark Age) will continue to be extended and deepened into the remotest future.6 So when denying that the mind is a blank tablet, Rationalist intellectualists were not asserting we are created with ideas and

6. This seems to be one of the reasons why Descartes, Leibniz, and other Rationalists were so impressed with Plato’s illustration of his doctrine of anamnesis (recollection, reminiscence) in the Meno, in which Socrates’s questioning assists an uneducated slave boy to attain insights into “extremely difficult truths of geometry concerning incommensurables” (as Leibniz characterized the result in DoM §26). Plato’s main objective was to show how anyone, even the most untutored, can achieve sophisticated cognitive insights without needing to have any new information imparted to him, and so without depending on experience (his own or that of others transmitted to him). Part and parcel of his doctrine is that the boy almost certainly could never have made his potential knowledge actual without Socrates’ carefully ordered series of questions to show him the way. The point, then, is that innate knowledge cannot be brought to clear, and ultimately to distinct, perception without great effort being expended in discovering the right path (Meno 81d), considerable perplexity overcome along the way (84a–d), and, even after the destination is reached, reinforcing and securing this hard-won knowledge by means of repetition and the discovery of multiple paths leading to the same insight (85c–d).

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knowledge in a finished state. Leibniz, for example, put it this way in his response to Locke’s anti-innatist critique: I have also used the analogy of a veined block of marble, as opposed to an entirely homogeneous block of marble, or a blank tablet—what the philosophers call a tabula rasa. For if the soul were like such a blank tablet then truths would be in us as the shape of Hercules is in a piece of marble when the marble is entirely neutral as to whether it assumes this shape or some other. However, if there were veins in the block which marked out the shape of Hercules rather than other shapes, then that block would be more determined to that shape and Hercules would be innate in it, in a way, even though labour would be required to expose the veins and to polish them into clarity, removing everything that prevents their being seen. This is how ideas and truths are innate in us—as inclinations, dispositions, tendencies, or natural potentialities, and not as actions; although these potentialities are always accompanied by certain actions, often insensible ones, which correspond to them. (NE 52)

Indeed, after noting that Locke’s empiricism did not prevent him from attributing unactualized potential to the mind in the form of “natural faculties” (ECHU I/ii/ §1) and “natural tendencies imprinted on the Minds of Men” (iii/§3), Leibniz too, like Descartes in response to his anti-innatist critics, averred “that fundamentally [Locke’s] view on this question is not different from my own or rather from the common view” (NE 53). Is the claim that the difference between intellectualist innatists and sensibilist anti-innatists is merely verbal warranted? Many of Locke’s efforts to show that it is not seem instead only to underline the difficulty in precisely articulating the difference. For example, he argued that the conception of innate knowledge as yetto-be-realized potential is tantamount to an admission that such knowledge has to be learned, “Since it supposes, that several, who understand and know other things, are ignorant of these Principles, till they are propos’d to them; and that one may be unacquainted with these Truths, till he hears them from others” (ECHU I/ii/§21). Yet the very fact that learning new things seems indistinguishable from making explicit knowledge we heretofore had possessed implicitly but unawares suggests that the issue, if there is one, cannot be settled by considerations of this kind. Locke, of course, had a ready reply, in the form of a challenge to innatists to make sense of their notion of “implicit knowledge”: If it be said, The Understanding hath an implicit Knowledge of these Principles, but not an explicit, before this first hearing, (as they must, who will say, That they are in the Understanding before they are known) it will be hard to conceive what is meant by a Principle imprinted on the Understanding Implicitly; unless it be this, That the Mind is capable of understanding and assenting firmly to such Propositions. And thus all Mathematical Demonstrations, as well as first Principles, must be received as native Impressions on the Mind: which, I fear they will scarce allow them to be, who find it harder to demonstrate a Proposition, than assent to it, when demonstrated. And few Mathematicians will be forward to believe, That all the Diagrams they have drawn, were but Copies of those innate Characters, which Nature has ingraven upon their Minds. (ECHU I/ii/§22)


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Locke’s point seems to be that the notion of a mental capacity, even one determined by the innate constitution of our minds, is too weak a reed to support intellectualist innatism. For to say that our minds are endowed with a determinate constitution that enables us to acquire some ideas rather than others, or to discover certain truths but not others, is by no means tantamount to an admission that the knowledge of these truths, together with the ideas composing them, are implicit in us (our essence) from the beginning of our existence. For example, someone without sight lacks the capacity to acquire ideas of color and so, a fortiori, the capacity to discover truths into which these ideas enter. But does this suffice to show that ideas of colors are innate to those who possess sight, or that knowledge of truths into which these ideas enter is implicit in them? Locke’s answer is an unqualified no: It would be sufficient to convince unprejudiced Readers of the falseness of this Supposition, if I should only shew (as I hope I shall in the following Parts of this Discourse) how Men, barely in the Use of their natural Faculties, may attain to all the Knowledge they have, without the help of any innate Impressions; and may arrive at Certainty, without any such Original Notions or Principles. For I imagine any one will easily grant, That it would be impertinent to suppose, the Ideas of Colours innate in a Creature, to whom God hath given Sight, and a Power to receive them by the Eyes from external Objects: and no less unreasonable would it be to attribute several Truths, to the Impressions of Nature, and innate Characters, when we may observe in our selves Faculties, fit to attain as easie and certain Knowledge of them, as if they were Originally imprinted on the Mind. (I/ii/§1; also iii/§13 and iv/§12)

It may be thought that Descartes, for one, was quite ready to be “impertinent” in this matter, since he held that “the ideas of pain, colours, sounds and the like must be all the more innate if, on the occasion of certain corporeal motions, our mind is to be capable of representing them to itself, for there is no similarity between these ideas and the corporeal motions” (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet, AT VIIIB 359). But the context makes clear that “innate” is being used in a special sense, to contrast the mechanistic conception of perception with the sensible species theory, according to which ideas of things are transmitted to our minds from without, which, in Descartes’s nomenclature, is “empiricism”: we must admit that in no case are the ideas of things presented to us by the senses just as we form them in our thinking. So much so that there is nothing in our ideas which is not innate to the mind or the faculty of thinking, with the sole exception of those circumstances which relate to experience, such as the fact that we judge that this or that idea which we now have immediately before our mind refers to a certain thing situated outside us. We make such a judgement not because these things transmit the ideas to our mind through the sense organs, but because they transmit something which, at exactly that moment, gives the mind occasion to form these ideas by means of the faculty innate to it. Nothing reaches our mind from external objects through the sense organs except certain corporeal motions. . . . But neither the motions themselves nor the figures arising from them are conceived by us exactly as they occur in the senses organs. . . . Hence

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HUME’S AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES it follows that the very ideas of the motions themselves and of the figures are innate in us. (358–9)

It is at this point that Descartes affirmed the innateness of pains, colors, sounds, and other ideas of secondary qualities. Since Locke agreed with Descartes and others who sought to apply mechanistic conceptions to the sensory systems of the human body (chapter 6-A), the only thing he would have been likely to object to is the use here of the term ‘innate idea.’ For it is precisely when the realization of an innate capacity to form an idea depends on the “occasion,” in Descartes’s terminology, of an external stimulus that Locke saw fit to deem the idea acquired rather than innate: The Knowledge of some Truths, I confess, is very early in the Mind; but in a way that shews them not to be innate. For, if we will but observe, we shall find it still to be about Ideas, not innate, but acquired: It being about those first, which are imprinted by external Things, with which Infants have earliest to do, and which make the most frequent Impressions on their Senses. (ECHU I/ii/§15)

Locke’s anti-innatism is a direct consequence of his sensibilism: his denial that the intellect contributes objective content of any kind to thought (i.e., contents other than ideas of its own operations as disclosed in reflexion); his affirmation that all the objects of the understanding either are sensations or reflexions, or are formed entirely from these materials, with the implication that no idea, in however unrefined a form, exists in our minds prior to or independently of its being perceived (or retained, discerned, composed, compared, related, abstracted, and/or considered as one). Ideas of reflexion, notwithstanding their independence on external stimuli, are still nothing more than bare potential until they are perceived: to term them ‘ideas’ before this, even in the most attenuated sense, is like saying that a person who has never been outside an environment that consists entirely of shades of blue still has “ideas” of red and green, or that a person who has never sampled tropical fruit still has “ideas” of the taste of pineapple, guava, and mango. Moreover, even if not directly dependent on external stimuli, ideas of reflexion depend on them indirectly, insofar as the presence of sensations is presupposed before the exercise of any reflexive faculty is even possible; they are thus doubly deserving of being deemed acquired rather than innate. For similar reasons, Locke classified the ideas that exist only in and through reflexive operations—complex ideas of substances and modes, ideas of relations, and abstract ideas—as acquired, as well as those ideas that depend on any of these other acquisitions as the occasion for their occurrence in our minds, such as passions, desires, and volitions. And since, in Locke’s view, these three species of ideas exhaust the ideational inventory of human understanding (chapter 5), he believed he had thus defined a completely new anti-innatism to supplant the Scholastic sensible species variety, optimally adapted to the mechanistic spirit of the age (it was also sufficiently malleable to be taken up by the idealist Berkeley, the external stimulus in his case being God). Notwithstanding Locke’s belief that he had defined an anti-innatism distinct from the Scholastic variety, Leibniz persisted in his contention that only the Scho-


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lastic variety is genuinely distinguishable from innatism (NE 110–1). He did so for two reasons, the first of which relates to ideas of reflexion: why must we acquire everything through awareness of outer things and not be able to unearth anything from within ourselves? Is our soul in itself so empty that unless it borrows images from outside it is nothing? . . . Perhaps our gifted author [Locke] will not entirely disagree with my view. For after devoting the whole of his first book to rejecting innate illumination, understood in a certain sense, he nevertheless admits at the start of his second book, and from there on, that ideas which do not originate in sensation come from reflection. But reflection is nothing but attention to what is within us, and the senses do not give us what we carry with us already. In view of this, can it be denied that there is a great deal that is innate in our minds, since we are innate to ourselves, so to speak, and since we include Being, Unity, Substance, Duration, change, Action, Perception, Pleasure, and hosts of other objects of our intellectual ideas? And since these objects are immediately related to our understanding and always present to it (although our distractions and needs prevent our being always aware of them), is it any wonder that we say that these ideas, along with what depends on them, are innate in us? (NE 53 and 51–2)

Yet whatever force we may accord to Leibniz’s objection, most of it is lost as soon as we consider which ideas Locke ranked as simple ideas of reflexion. For, far from including the metaphysical ideas Leibniz enumerates, Locke’s list is restricted to psychological operations the mind performs upon the raw material of sensation: “Perception, Thinking, Doubting, Believing, Reasoning, Knowing, Willing, and all the different actings of our own Minds; which we being conscious of, and observing in our selves, do from these receive into our Understandings, as distinct Ideas, as we do from Bodies affecting our Senses” (ECHU II/i/3). The operations ranked under “thinking” include those properly active operations which are directed immediately upon the data of sensation, preliminary to their being formed into propositions suited to believing, doubting, etc. (ix/§1): the “Power to repeat, compare, and unite” these data (ii/§2), including retention (contemplation and memory, assisted by attention), discernment, comparison, composition, signification, and abstraction (II/x–xi). Like ideas of sensation, ideas of reflexion are individual and myriad in their variety. It is only through abstraction, and then the still more general points of view made possible by signs (chapter 8-A), that these internally sensed doings can be sorted into the distinct generic operations, hierarchically organized in Locke’s psychological theory of human understanding (including particles and other operations that, at this level of abstraction, tend no longer to be regarded as psychological but rather as logico-grammatical: chapter 8-B). So even if Locke had conceded Leibniz’s contention that ideas of reflexion are innate, the list would still not have included any of the ideas central to Leibniz’s intellectualism: notions such as substance, power, cause and effect, action, duration, change, identity, indispensable to objective understanding, or common notions such as being, unity, and number, indispensable to understanding in general. For although Locke did classify some of these as simple ideas or simple modes (of reflexion uniquely or along with sensation), they are anything but the maximally general

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common notions that Leibniz and other Rationalists had in mind. Quite the contrary, they are as empirically individual, concrete, and ineluctably subjective-psychological as the mental actions and passions in which they are perceived (or discerned by aspect discrimination). To attain the maximally general views requisite for common notions, Locke would undoubtedly have insisted that recourse to language, and so too reliance on resemblance relations that have nothing to do with the sensible appearance of the ideas concerned, is as unavoidable here as in the case of such general notions as ‘color,’ ‘sensation,’ and ‘idea of diverse senses.’ This last point is sufficiently important to merit further scrutiny. If, as Locke’s account of language as interpreted in chapter 8 clearly implies, common notions are irreducibly linguistic, then the intellectualists’ claim that in generalizing to common notions we are merely making explicit what is already present in our ideas cannot stand. For in that case there is nothing in the ideas themselves, considered prior to and independently of language, isomorphic with the contents attributed to common notions; and since for Locke all genuinely objective (ontological) worth is measured in ideational terms, this is just to say that his account of language denies to common notions precisely the universal objective validity the logical and metaphysical doctrines of intellectualists require. It is unclear how intellectualists could respond except merely by reaffirming their credo that there is more to the reality of simple ideas than their simple appearances might lead us to believe (which indeed is how Leibniz did respond to Locke’s claim that simple ideas have few ascents in linea prædicamentali: NE 299–300). Yet to do this is effectively to concede that the difference between intellectualism and sensibilism is, after all, substantive and not merely nominal. Thus, in response to Leibniz’s first objection, Locke could stick to his insistence that even if the term ‘innate’ is stretched to include simple ideas and modes of reflexion, it still gets us no further than to innate ideas of the mind’s own psychological actions and passions, without any of the genuinely objective contents and common notions Leibniz believed to be implicit in reflexive self-consciousness. Leibniz’s other objection to Locke’s belief that he had defined a new antiinnatism for the mechanistic age is the following: Our gifted author seems to claim that there is nothing potential in us, in fact nothing of which we are not actually aware. But he cannot hold strictly to this; otherwise his position would be too paradoxical, since, again, we are not always aware of our acquired habitudes or of the contents of our memory, and they do not even come to our aid whenever we need them, though often they come readily to mind when some idle circumstance reminds us of them, as when hearing the opening words of a song is enough to bring back the rest. So on other occasions he limits his thesis to the statement that there is nothing in us of which we have not at least previously been aware. But no one can establish by reason alone how far our past and now perhaps forgotten awareness may have extended, especially if we accept the Platonists’ doctrine of recollection which, though sheer myth, is entirely consistent with unadorned reason. (NE 52)

The problem with this objection is that Leibniz seems so inured to regarding sensation as a condition merely of the clear perception of ideas already present in


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potentia within us that he effectively imposes an epistemic construal on Locke’s solution to the origins problem. This assumption seems to underlie Leibniz’s belief that Locke’s view is in fact not fundamentally different from his own: Where could tablets be found which were completely uniform? will a perfectly homogeneous and even surface ever be seen? So why could we not also provide ourselves with objects of thought from our own depths, if we take the trouble to dig there? Which leads me to believe that his view on this question is not different from my own or rather from the common view, especially since he recognizes two sources of our knowledge, the senses and reflection. (53)

This, however, will not do. When Locke classified ideas of primary qualities as ideas of sensation, he was not merely saying that sensations enable us to discover such ideas in ourselves. Rather, he was claiming that sensation enters into the content of the ideas themselves, so that to abstract altogether from sensation is ipso facto to nullify the ideas. Nonsimple ideas consist in nothing more than manifolds of (simple or complex) ideas considered in a certain way, whether as a unity in the case of simple and complex modes or substances, as distinct but related in the case of identity and cause and effect, or in abstraction in the case of nominal essences (chapters 5, 8-C, and 10-B). To abstract from these ideas everything sensation and reflexion contribute to their perception in the hope of attaining a fully intellectualized, “clear and distinct” perception of a “perfect” triangle or body (be it the objectively real image of a true and immutable nature or, in Malebranche’s case, that very nature itself in its formal reality) is, for Locke, to leave the mind nothing at all to consider, and so, quite literally, to annihilate the idea. For if anything of the idea can still be said to remain for us to consider, it is nothing more than its significative use when we use it indifferently to denote other ideas resembling it in certain regards, including those having nothing to do with its appearance (but rather the way it is caused, its constant concomitants, and so forth: chapter 8). And Locke would surely have traced Leibniz’s illusion that there is more content contained in complex ideas than we explicitly include when we form them to a confusion between the significative uses of complex ideas and their actual contents. The foregoing should suffice to show that the issue of origins that divided early modern theorists of ideas into Rationalist and Empiricist camps was, to this extent, a genuine one. But to make still clearer what the origins problem is, let us distinguish in Locke’s solution to it a that-component and a how-component, just as we did with Rationalism at the conclusion of the previous section. Whereas the leading Rationalists agreed that some or all of our ideas are intellectual in content and are present to the mind prior to or independently of sensation and reflexion, Locke upheld the sensibilist view that all ideas, without exception, are bound up by content with sensations and/or psychological activity directed upon them, and that, in consequence, no ideas can exist in our understandings, implicitly or explicitly, prior to or independently of data of the (external and internal) senses. The question then becomes how ideas whose sole and entire content consists in manifolds of sensations being considered in certain ways can serve for all the purposes of human understanding: the cognition and recognition of objects, ranking objects

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under sorts, propositional thought (judging and knowing), drawing inferences, and signification. If such ideas do not suffice to explicate all the phenomena ascribable to human understanding—that is, if the solution to the how-question leaves any explanatory gap at all—that would be evidence, prima facie at least, of the falsehood of the sensibilist account of the origin of such ideas as action, power, cause and effect, substance, possible actual and necessary existence, extension and figure, unity and number, infinity, identity, body and matter, God, and the self. Thus, the principal task facing Locke and those who followed the sensibilist trail he blazed—above all, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant—was to find ways to dispel all legitimate suspicions that any such gap remains. As we saw in part I, Locke argued that the gap that thitherto had been thought to exist was more apparent than real. He attributed this, first and foremost, to the fact that philosophers “began at the wrong end.” Instead of conducting a preliminary survey of the powers of the human understanding to form ideas, employ signs, and obtain knowledge (i.e., the three perceptual powers constitutive of human understanding), they approached philosophical questions in much the same way geometers approach theirs: beginning with definitions and axioms (“clear and distinct” ideas and “intuitive knowledge” of their relations) and proceeding to deduce various propositions therefrom, they took the supposed immunity to skepticism of the demonstrations obtained by this method to already be, in and of itself, proof positive that human understanding is in possession of all the requisite ideas. Locke, by contrast, insisted on independent evidence of the ideas available to human understanding, on the principle that if is not in the power of human understanding to furnish ideas sufficient to underwrite the definitions and axioms from which Rationalism starts, then, to paraphrase Hume (THN 168/113), ’twill be to little purpose to insist on the unassailable certainty of these propositions. In particular, since many of the definitions Rationalists proposed for ideas are so general and abstract as to be incapable of being underwritten by even the most general and abstract Lockean ideas, their definitions, by Lockean reckoning, are more about signs than ideas. Moreover, by debunking the notions that words have nonideational “secret references” (chapter 8), Locke also precluded the possibility of these definitions describing any object at all if they do not first describe some idea of sensation or reflexion. This is not to say that language does not allow us to organize and integrate sensations and reflexions in ways that would otherwise not be possible, and so extract from them the maximum cognitive and conative benefit. Yet so far as Locke was concerned, this merely underscores the importance of beginning at the right end. For unless we begin with sensations and reflexions (ECHU II), and recognize just how inadequate they are to account for all that human knowledge is capable of, we cannot possibly appreciate the nature and extent of the contribution of language makes to it. When we then proceed to language (ECHU III), and recognize that it is capable of making this contribution without the need for any other objective inputs than sensation and reflexion are able to provide, we can appreciate that the supposed gap between the cognitive reach of objective understanding the materials available to it is merely apparent. The temptation to conflate the properly significative powers of human understanding with its genuinely ideational ones is now eliminated, and we can at last pro-


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ceed to form an accurate estimation of the nature and extent of human knowledge from a thoroughly sensibilist perspective (ECHU IV). Thus, Locke showed how a philosophy that begins with psychological considerations of the origins of ideas can end up by depriving Rationalist intellectualism of its very raison d’être—a lesson not lost on Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. C. The Limits of Lockean Sensibilism Where Locke’s endeavor to establish sensibilism as a viable alternative to Rationalist intellectualism seems in greatest danger of unraveling is with regard to the “considerations” at the heart of its how-component. One criticism comes from the side of Rationalist intellectualism. Although there is not enough evidence to be certain, Locke seems to have construed Rationalist ideas of pure intellect as objects beheld in a pure intellectual intuition in a manner analogous to the way sensations and reflexions are beheld in external and internal sense perception. There is, however, another possibility: the locus of ideas of pure intellect might be considerative consciousness itself. In particular, intellectual ideas might function as determinations of the mind’s considerative activity: rules that make it possible for us to consider manifolds of sensible ideas as one unified complex, or as distinct yet related, or abstractly, in such a way as to yield general ideas of substances, modes, causal powers, relations of identity, etc., sufficiently robust for objective understanding and metaphysical knowledge of the kind Locke himself held to lie with the capacities of the human mind (chapters 7 and 9).7 For might it not be the case that, in the absence of these rules, experience would dissolve into arbitrary bundlings of ideas with no value whatsoever for conceiving what, if anything, lies beyond the veil of perception, much less for objective demonstrative knowledge of quantity, morals, or the existence of God? Moreover, if the true locus of the Rationalists’ intellectual ideas lay in considerative consciousness itself, antecedently to any of the sensations and reflexions it considers, there would be nothing intrinsic to these ideas to limit their regulative function to considerations of sensible ideas. So even though mind-independently existing objects are never immediately present to our mind and may even be qualitatively incommensurable with those that are (sensations and reflexions), the same rules whereby we bring order out of chaos in respect of the latter might also serve to bring order out of chaos in respect to the former. To preclude this possibility, Locke would have had to prove that the considerations requisite for objective thought and cognition have no need for such purely intellectual determinations. Yet even though these acts are at the heart of his account of complex ideas, his cursory examination of their psychology does not go far enough to meet this demand. Nor is it by any means obvious that Locke could have dealt with this issue by the exclusively sensibilist means he favored. For although internal sense, as he conceived it, equips us to perceive that our minds are performing considerative acts and which acts they are performing (remembering rather than discerning, 7. Rules not unlike Kant’s categories. The differences will be examined in volume two.

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comparing rather than abstracting, etc.), it is by no means certain that he would have gone so far as to claim that any rules determinative of the manner in which we consider a sensible manifold as one, as related, or in abstraction would ipso facto be perceived. After all, rules for forming sensations and reflexions into new ideas cannot themselves be sensations or reflexions, and so presumably cannot be apprehended empirically at all. Accordingly, Locke would have had no choice but to concede that empirical considerations are powerless to prove the negative that the difference between success and failure in considering manifolds of ideas as substances, modes, and relations does not—at least in the robust sense requisite for objective understanding of the sort he attributed to the human mind—depend ineluctably on purely intellectual determinations, rooted in our faculty of thought, or otherwise inaccessible to empirical self-consciousness. That Locke did accord a robust sense to the ideas of substances, their properties, and relations he credited to considerative acts should be clear from the examination of his theory of objective understanding in chapter 7. For, while he may have been a skeptic regarding our ability to penetrate cognitively into the individual and generic essences of substances, he did not hesitate to attribute to human understanding conceptions of bodies, the mind, and God as causally efficacious substances that sacrifice little or nothing of the meanings ascribed to these notions in the definitions propounded by Scholastics and Rationalists. If indeed such notions fall within the competence of human understanding, one therefore cannot help suspecting that Locke’s rejection of ideas of pure intellect may have been due simply to a failure to appreciate that their true point of entry is the consciousness that considers sensible manifolds, and that their true role in our thought consists in serving as constitutive rules that make certain highly robust kinds of objective consideration possible in the first place. The obverse of this objection was leveled at Locke by his sensibilist successors, starting with Berkeley. Was Locke perhaps not too sanguine about the conceptual reach of human understanding? Might he himself have succumbed to the tendencies he criticized in others when he supposed that mere considerations of sensible manifolds are capable of yielding so rich a harvest of objective content? Doubts of this kind were almost certainly responsible for inducing Kant to dismiss Locke’s theory of understanding as an exercise in “enthusiasm” (Schwärmerei— B127–8). Yet adopting a soberer sensibilism threatens to reopen the gap between objective understanding and the capacity of sensibilism to explain it. Locke’s sensibilist successors prevented this by adopting the opposite tack: instead of inflating our conceptual and cognitive capacities by surreptitiously premising contributions of pure intellect as rules to guide our consideration of sensible manifolds, they deflated the pretensions of objective understanding to such a point that the need for ideas of pure intellect to explain acts of consideration vanishes. And Berkeley pointed the way by stripping spatial objects of all objective determination (substance, causal efficacy, action), and reducing the sense-divide transcending objects of a multisensory external sense to mere fictions of imagination (transitions of thought to or from tangible objects from or to visible, auditory, and other objects).


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D. Berkeley’s Fortified Sensibilism Berkeley’s esse is percipi idealism is built on the foundation of the antiabstractionist separability principle (chapter 11). One aspect of this idealism we have yet to explore is the one that implies the unintelligibility not only of materialism but also of intellectualism. For both materialism and intellectualism suppose that at least some of the contents present to us in perception exist prior to and independently of their being perceived. However, since the separability principle precludes the possibility of our conceiving the existence of any content present to us in perception separately from its being perceived (in sensation if it is an idea, in reflexion if it is a notion), it follows that materialism and intellectualism alike are unintelligible. This of course is not to say that materialism and intellectualism are the same thing. Quite the contrary, the latter concerns only the existence of ideas in minds antecedent to perception, be it in our own (innatism) or that of God (illuminationism). But the fact that the separability principle is incompatible with intellectualism no less than with materialism makes clear that Berkeley’s principle forged an indelible bond between a perennial question of metaphysics and the early modern problem of origins of a kind that seems never to have occurred to any of his predecessors, Locke included. And it is just as true of the link between Berkeley’s idealism and his sensibilism as it is between materialism and intellectualism. In particular, Berkeley’s idealism is neither epistemic (like Descartes’s, Locke’s, or Malebranche’s) nor ontological (Leibniz) but conceptual, and more particularly psychologistic.8 For it is neither an ontological claim regarding the reality of corporeal substances nor (except by implication) an epistemological claim about the nature and sources of evidence justifying belief in an external world, but a claim about the content and scope of application of the ideas human understandings are capable of forming founded on the psychology of their origin. It is the thesis that our conceptions admit of no application other than to all and only those sensible objects—sensations or reflexions—from which they might originally have been acquired (whether by being directly copied or assembled from constituents copied therefrom). On the one hand, this precludes the possibility of applying the idea of, say, extension acquired from visible or tangible objects (ideas) to invisible, intangible realities existing outside the mind (chapter 12-A), while, on the other hand, it erects an impenetrable wall against any supposition that the semantic properties of ideas (distinctions of reason, aspects, etc.) are capable of affording us the least insight into reality (chapter 10-D). Our thought can never extend conceptions originally acquired in sensation or reflexion beyond these objects except in the fictitious sense that customary transitions of imagination lead us to attribute the spatial properties of the objects of touch to the objects of vision, the other senses, and even to some notions (whereupon the primary objects of the former sense 8. Leibniz denied ultimate reality to corporeal being; the other philosophers listed here accepted its ultimate reality but considered our knowledge of the fact less immediate and certain than our knowledge of the existence and essence of thinking being.

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become secondary objects of the latter ones—chapter 14-B). Equally, we can never employ signs to any cognitive end except to suggest other ideas to the mind, be it as individuals on a one-to-one basis (by virtue of their common aesthetic formal multiplicity or through straightforward constant conjunction—chapter 14-E) or as universals denoting indifferently (on the basis of resemblance relations—chapter 10-C). For no matter how indispensable signs may be to our cognition (as Berkeley, like Locke before him, conceded without hesitation), neither use of signs can do more than reshuffle the existing ideational deck—organize it, put it to more effective cognitive and conative use. But what signs can never do is enhance or extend our ability to conceive, much less cognize, the reality lying beyond our ideas. Thus, the separability principle, not language, is, for Berkeley, the supreme arbiter of all matters ontological. It literally cuts down to psychological size all the notions at the core of objective understanding. The concept of existence that we apply to sensible things is cut down to the size, first, of sensation, and then of the presence of this sensation to consciousness (all three—sensible thing, sensation, and perception—being inseparable, and so distinct only semantically, not ontologically). Similarly, the concept of causality is cut down to the size of the thinking, willing action of the understanding; and its inseparability from this renders its application to anything other than the actions of a mind unintelligible (chapter 13A). Finally, the concept of substance: Berkeley’s psychologism not only restricts its application to spirits but even there strips away everything having to do with traditional, language-derived conceptions of spiritual substance as a “substratum” that “supports” ideas, and of ideas as “inhering” in it (as its “modes” or “properties”), leaving simply the bare action of thought (“being perceived by a perceiving thing,” 3D237; chapter 13-A). Thus, while preserving a central core of their meaning, Berkeley’s separability-principle-based sensibilism so deflates the notions central to objective understanding as to leave little for even the most skeptical critics of traditional substance metaphysics to quarrel with. E. Toward Hume’s Psychologism Nevertheless, Hume, the greatest of all skeptics, found much to quarrel with in Berkeley’s psychologism. His dissent related neither to the separability principle itself—not till Kant would it be significantly refined (volume II)—nor to the topics to which Berkeley applied it, but to Berkeley’s deficient grasp of its scope and power. By pursuing its consequences to their outrance, Hume would deflate the pretensions of objective understanding to an extent that Berkeley seems not to have dreamed possible and certainly would have resisted with all the force of his theological convictions.9 Since I will be examining this in great detail in subsequent chapters, it will suffice here to spotlight some of the principal shortcomings which made it all but inevitable that Berkeley’s brand of psychologism would be 9. Although Hume seems to have sent Berkeley a copy of the Treatise, and Berkeley lived long enough to have had time to react to the Enquiries, he may have thought that silence would be more effective than conferring the dignity of a refutation on a philosophy so skeptical.


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superseded by a more purely psychological variety, divested of the last vestiges of traditional substance metaphysics. In the course of my discussion of Berkeley’s likeness principle in chapter 12A, I examined the tensions with the separability principle implicit in his claim that “God knows, or hath ideas; but his ideas are not conveyed to him by sense, as ours are” (3D241), and so “May comprehend all Ideas even the Ideas which are painfull & unpleasant without being in any degree pained thereby” (C 675). The principle would seem to imply that it is impossible for God to have an idea of the pain I undergo when my body is hurled into a fire without experiencing the same suffering I do. After all, merely contemplating the pain can give no conception of what I am enduring; only the actual sensation seems capable of conveying any idea of what is present to my consciousness. But how, except through the kind of abstraction Berkeley deemed impossible, can the sensation be distinguished from the suffering? Berkeley himself insisted that all sensations are characterized by some degree of pleasure or pain, and so are inseparable from them (1D177–80 and 1D191–2). So the problem extends to all sensible objects: how, except by some impossible abstraction, can a God that neither enjoys the pleasures nor suffers the pains I do be conceived to have (qualitatively) the same ideas I do of sensible things? The same problem also arises in the case of ideas of secondary qualities— which for Berkeley includes all sensible ideas without exception (chapter 12-B): how, without abstraction, can a God who has no sensations have ideas (notions?) of the ineluctably sensible things you or I perceive? Since Berkeley asserted that God’s perception preserves trees, streams, mountains, and the whole cosmos in existence even when no finite mind is perceiving them, he clearly supposed that God has ideas of these things (albeit not numerically identical with those of any other mind—chapter 12-A). Yet how could that be possible unless what the separability principle proscribes—the intellectualist thesis that the contents of these ideas are not inherently but only accidentally sensible—were in fact the case? Thus, Berkeley’s commitment to the theistic doctrine of divine omniscience seems to entail precisely the kind of intellectualism his commitment to separability principle based sensibilism precludes. When considering this problem in connection with the likeness principle, I observed that, like all Berkeley’s principles including separability, it is intended only as a principle of human knowledge, not divine. So construed, this suffices to counter the objection that our ignorance of what exists in reality besides spirits and their ideas undermines Berkeley’s claim that an idea can resemble nothing but an idea, since his purpose was merely to rule out claims that we have it in our conceptual power to form ideas of things existing mind-independently that resemble objects of the senses. Yet I also noted that it leaves another question unanswered: whether Berkeley, or any finite mind, has the means to make sense of a claim like “the books continue to exist after I have locked them away in the cabinet because God perceives them.” Despite offering nothing by way of explanation of how a purely intellectual being, without sensations, can perceive books, cabinets, and other sensible things—or, still more tellingly, how finite minds like ours can form a conception capable of conferring so robust an ontological significance on the words “the books continue . . .”—Berkeley nonetheless held this to

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be so. It thus raises the question whether there is any way to reconcile the limits imposed on human understanding by the separability principle with Berkeley’s conception of the mind of God as so radically incommensurate with our own as to preclude the presence there of pleasures, pains, and ideas of sensation generally? If, as seems to be the case, the answer is no, Berkeley would have to make a choice. As a committed theist, he almost certainly would have opted to preserve divine omniscience at the expense of the separability principle. Yet any watering down of that principle would fatally compromise the psychologistic, idealist, and sensibilist foundations of his philosophical system. For in dealing with such ideas/ notions as existence, causation, substance, and sense-divide transcending objects, Berkeley could no longer profess to be explicating the meaning of the conceptions themselves and delimiting their scope of application. Instead, he could legitimately claim only to be explicating their meanings to the extent, and in the manner, finite minds like ours are equipped to apprehend them, and to be limiting the scope not of the conceptions themselves but only of our capacity to delimit it. This, of course, is just to say that where our comprehension is limited, God’s is not; and where ours is inextricably bound up with sensation, God’s not only is not but is completely free of its encumbrance. However, even to conceive this as a possibility, we would seem to require an idea of the existence of these conceptions as independent of their being perceived/conceived, and that, as we saw in the previous section, is as unintelligible under the separability principle as materialism is. The only alternative open to Berkeley would be to cease to regard the separability principle as the arbiter, or at least as the sole arbiter, of all matters ontological, since that would remove the principal obstacle in the way of according ontological worth to distinctions that are possible only semantically but not ideationally. He would then of course have to eat his words that “we need only draw the curtain of words, to behold the fairest tree of knowledge . . . within reach of our hand” (PHK intr. §24), for his “sensibilism” would become indistinguishable from a variant of Rationalist intellectualism, and all the arguments whereby he professed to demonstrate the self-contradictory character of abstractionist doctrines such as materialism would straightaway collapse in a heap. And, in a final irony, by turning his back on all that lies behind the curtain of words, Berkeley would have had no way to justify his new ontological principle without himself joining the chorus of philosophers he disparaged as seeking to disguise the “uncouth paradoxes, difficulties, and inconsistencies” (§1) implicit in their principles by appealing to “the natural weakness and imperfection of our understandings,” which are “designed by nature for the support and comfort of life, and not to penetrate into the inward essence and constitution of things” (§2).

16 From Origins of Ideas to Ideas of Origins: Causality Psychologized

The psychological notion of the origin of ideas bequeathed to Hume was a causal one. It implies the existence of an agent and a patient, at least one of which is a perceiving or conceiving mind, while the other(s) may be mental but may instead be corporeal or some other, possibly unknown, unknowable, or even inconceivable, nature(s). In addition, it implies a temporal sequence of states (accidents, properties) in both agent and patient (conceived as preserving their identities over time), as well as entities (substances, objects) whose constitution (individual essence, nature) make it possible for them to be in these states (powers, whether active faculties or passive capacities). Simply in order to frame the problem of origins, therefore, Hume’s predecessors took for granted the unrestricted scope of an entire panoply of objective notions, and this was the case whether the proposed solution was intellectualist or sensibilist in character. Because intellectualists regarded the actual perceiving or conceiving of these notions as merely incidental to their contents and irrelevant to their scope of application, they saw no problem of circularity in employing these same notions in their accounts of how they first come to be given in actual sensation or reflexion. The same was true of sensibilists of Locke’s abstractionist stripe. For though they believed these ideas to be bound up by content with sensations and/or reflexions (external or internal sense), their embrace of abstract ideas (aspects) saved them from having to restrict the application of these notions to objects (contents, data) given in sensation and/or reflexion. Ideas of primary qualities such as extension and its modes could therefore be employed, without fear of circularity, in the conception of the corporeal causes to which they referred the origin of sensations—including those ideas of visual and tactual sensations from which we originally derive our ideas of extension and its modes. Abstraction similarly clears the way for the employment of ideas of temporal succession and duration, substances and their constitutions, individual and specific essences, action, agency/patience, as well as causal efficacy and powers (faculties, capacities), in mind-independent contexts.

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However, this circularity threatened to become vicious with Berkeley’s embrace of the separability principle and the consequent expunging of abstraction in all its forms from the sensibilist tool kit. For if an inquiry into the origins of a concept in perception (sensation or reflexion) or thought (repetition, composition, separation, relation, etc.) should disclose that essential elements of its content are contributed by the operation(s) of perception or thought, then its scope of application ipso facto cannot exceed or in any way differ from the scope of our notions of the relevant operation(s). The locus classicus is the idea of existence we apply to sensible things: as inseparably bound up by content with sensation, it leaves the mind quite incapable of conceiving sensible things as existing independently of the operation of the senses. Since, according to this conception, the physical objects generally thought to be the causes of sensations—light acting on retinas, oscillating air particles acting on tympanic membranes, nerve pathways from sense receptors to the central nervous system, etc.—are themselves sensations, they cannot be cited to explain the origin of sensations. To determine what can, Berkeley relied on his account of the origin of concepts of cause and effect in acts of volition present to “internal consciousness” (DM §21). Because of the inseparability of cause and effect from volition, he found himself obliged to restrict the scope of the former to all and only “the passions and operations of the mind” (PHK I §1) known not in sensation but “inward feeling or reflexion” (§89). Yet by restricting its scope to the actions and passions of the mind, does the separability principle not thereby exclude sensations, so that the existence of sensible things falls entirely outside the causal nexus? To be sure, Berkeley could reject this implication on the ground that the idea of existence proper to sensible things is bound up by content with perception no less than with sensation, and since perception belongs among the actions and passions of the mind, he could use them to bring sensible things within the spiritual causal nexus. Still, the writing was on the wall: if for any reason the avenue to this solution had been closed, Berkeley would have found himself in the impossible position of having to choose between two principles each of which he deemed indubitably true: to violate either the separability principle by including sensible things within the scope of the notion of cause and effect or the principle of cause and effect by treating sensible things as exceptions to the rule that every beginning of existence must have a cause. It was left to Hume to cut the last threads by rejecting Berkeley’s psychologistic explications of existence, causation, substance, and the mind itself. In that case, only two possibilities conformable to the separability principle remain: either these notions derive from a source of new, original data overlooked by Berkeley, bringing with it quite different restrictions on their scope of application (possibly so different as to nullify cardinal tenets of Berkeley’s philosophy); or there is nothing whatsoever present to our minds capable of underwriting our discourse concerning causes, substances, and the mind, in which case it can carry at most semantic, but not ontological, weight. Hume opted for the first alternative in the guise of his associationism. He held that cause and effect, space and time, quantity, identity, substance, mind, and body—in short, all the ideas constitutive of objective understanding—are inseparably bound up by content with ideational elements contributed by association and allied psychological operations. This, however, imposes

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constraints on their application so stringent that Hume might just as well have plumped for the second alternative: “Ideas always represent the objects or impressions, from which they are deriv’d, and can never without a fiction represent or be apply’d to any other” (THN 37/30). For example, if our idea of cause and effect is inseparable from associative operations, it cannot be used to conceive the origins of any data that are perceived prior to and independently of association; indeed, the very query is unintelligible, as devoid of sense as “unfelt agony.” Since the transitions of thought that constitute associative relations presuppose such data as their inputs (as that from and to which transitions are made), this is as much as to say that we can never use causal concepts to peer behind the veil of our own associations to comprehend the “agency” that “effects” transitions of thought, the “energy” or “force” whereby they “necessarily connect” distinct ideas, or their “influence” on subsequent mentation (“Without considering it in this [associative] view, we can never arrive at the most distant notion of it, or be able to attribute it either to external or internal objects, to spirit or body, to causes or effects,” 165/ 111). Nor can we use the idea of real existence (actuality) that originates in the vivid manner in which we regard certain objects of sensation or thought to conceive the existence of these objects absolutely and in themselves. So too, our idea of substance cannot be applied to the existence of preassociative data of perception in order to conceive them as either “supported by” or “supportive of” the existence of anything else (222/146–7, 233–4/153–4, 244/160, and 252/164–5). Nor can we avail ourselves of our association-constituted idea of identity over time (202–4 and n/135–6 and n), or that of an individual thing at a time (221/146), in order to conceive an alternative to the instantaneous existence foisted on these data by the separability principle, which limits their duration to the temporally indivisible minimum of perception, and obliges us to treat them, at that instant, as an aggregate of distinct perceptions (36–7/29, 65/47–8, and 200–1/133–4). And it is likewise impossible to employ our ideas of mind and body to conceive preassociative data—or indeed associative transitions of thought themselves—as “mental” or “physical” in nature (“nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it compos’d,” 252/165). Thus, for Hume, association imagination and objective understanding are one and the same (265/173, 267/174); and as soon as we withdraw the lens of association in and through which alone the microcosmos of the mind and the macrocosmos of the universe exist (108/75), these worlds dissolve into (1) transitions of thought, (2) the fleetingly existent data to and from which these transitions are made, and (3) the affections felt either in the making of these transitions or in the way the data involved in them are regarded. Hume’s solution to the problem of origins is built up entirely from the three purely subjective-psychological elements just enumerated. They alone enter into the psychologistic explications by which he proposed to explain the entirety of objective understanding and much else besides (facets of memory and the senses— THN 265/173—as well as certain passions—THN 283/186, 289/189–90, etc.). The question is: how was so powerful a tool for resolving philosophical disputes (157/ 106) to be fashioned from such humble ingredients? In this chapter, we shall find that the answer does not emerge until one penetrates to the foundations of Hume’s

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solution to the problem of origins: the principle that all ideas are copies of impression originals. A. Preassociative Objects: Their Order and Arrangement Hume begins A Treatise of Human Nature with a notion he neglects to define: perception. A footnote makes clear that this term replaces Locke’s catchall term ‘idea’ (chapter 5-B) and, like it, is intended to capture all beings in its net insofar as they are immediately present to us by consciousness, whether in sensation, reflexion, or thought. This is made explicit elsewhere. For example, in the Abstract of the Treatise, we are told that its author calls “a perception whatever can be present to the mind, whether we employ our senses, or are actuated with passion, or exercise our thought and reflection” (THN 647/408). Perceptions are variously described as “objects . . . intimately present to the mind” (206/137), as “existences . . . immediately present to us by consciousness” (212/141), and as actions: nothing is ever present to the mind but its perceptions; and . . . all the actions of seeing, hearing, judging , loving, hating, and thinking, fall under this denomination. The mind can never exert itself in any action, which we may not comprehend under the term of perception; and consequently that term is no less applicable to those judgments, by which we distinguish moral good and evil, than to every other operation of the mind. (456/293)

Perceptions are “interrupted, and perishing, and different at every different return” (211/140), “and appear as such” (194/129). And “nothing is ever present to the mind but perceptions” (67/49; also 212/140–1). Just as was the case with ‘idea’ for Locke, the very indeterminacy of ‘perception’—the impossibility of contrasting it with anything that is not a perception because “The mind never has anything present to it but the perceptions” (EHU XII/i ¶12)—was, for Hume, its principal virtue. If things other than perceptions exist, then, as what never “can be present to the mind, whether we employ our senses, or are actuated with passion, or exercise our thought and reflection,” they are no different from perfect nonentities so far as our minds are concerned. By contrast, even objects as fanciful as a billiard ball that transforms itself into wedding cake upon being struck by another ball, though never present to the senses, are still objects of our thought, and so too perceptions (inasmuch as the idea “is not here consider’d, as the representation of any absent object, but as a real perception in the mind, of which we are intimately conscious,” 106/74; also 66/48).1 There is, however, one respect in which Hume’s use of ‘perception’ differs from Locke’s use of ‘idea.’ For Locke, nonideational existents have to be considered in the theory of human understanding because (1) they are causes of the sensory affections, and, as such, (2) they exist as substances, and (3) they are conceivable by means of ideas of primary qualities (extension, duration, number). By contrast, 1. For further discussion of Hume’s notion of a “perception” see HTC, chap. 6-B.


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Hume, on antiabstractionist and psychologistic grounds, limited the scope of application of the perceptions we employ to represent objects (ideas) strictly to other perceptions, whether present to us in sense or thought (“Ideas always represent the objects or impressions, from which they are deriv’d, and can never without a fiction represent or be apply’d to any other,” THN 37/29). Since this means that objects other than perceptions, if they exist (assuming we can even think that any might exist),2 can be entirely ignored in the theory of human understanding, as incapable by their very nature of playing any role whatsoever in anything we do think or believe. Indeed, Hume went farther even than Berkeley in this respect. For Berkeley, like Locke before him, affirmed the existence of a substantial cause of perceptions distinct from one’s own mind, and affirmed the substantial reality of the latter (one’s own mind) as well. Hume, however, not only restricted the scope of concepts of causation to objects that can be met with in experience (perceptions) but also determined that “the true idea of the human mind” (261/170) is a mere fiction of associative imagination (252–5/165–7, 259–61/169–71). So while many commentators balk at this implication, Hume’s theory of understanding never needs to range beyond (1) the successive perceptions (impressions and ideas) immediately present to consciousness in sensation, reflexion, or thought, (2) transitions of consciousness from one such perception to another, and (3) the affects (facility, vivacity) immanent to such transitions. Of course, this was not Hume’s starting point but rather the result of the doctrines gradually and systematically unfolded over the course of Treatise I. Instead of entering into the question of the nature of perceptions at the outset, he proceeded directly to distinguish them into two kinds according to the different “degrees of force and liveliness, with which they strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or consciousness” (THN 1/7). Hume termed those that “enter with most force and violence” impressions, but warned his reader that this is a special coinage meant to capture not “the manner, in which our lively perceptions are produced in the soul, but merely the perceptions themselves” (2n/7n), “when we hear or see, or feel, or love, or hate, or desire, or will” (EHU II ¶3). The other species, ideas, “are the less lively perceptions, of which we are conscious, when we reflect on any of those sensations or movements above-mentioned.” As Hume would have us understand it, the distinction between impressions and ideas “requires no nice discernment or metaphysical head to mark the distinction between them” (¶2), but rather “is evident; as evident as that betwixt feeling and thinking” (THN 647/408). It is what “Every one of himself will readily perceive” when confronted with “the difference betwixt feeling and thinking,” at least in the easily distinguishable “common degrees of these” (2/7). Yet despite these assurances, readers soon realize that the distinction between impressions and ideas is far more novel and elusive than it initially seems. Hume insists time and again that degree of “force and vivacity” is the sole feature on which the distinction between impressions and ideas depends (THN 2/8, 19/18, 96/ 2. Whether Hume supposed that we have access to an idea of existence with a scope sufficiently wide to enable us to conceive the existence of something other than a perception, or whether ‘nonperception’ is merely a semantic placeholder, will emerge in due course.

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67, 103/72, 119/82, 319/207, and 354/229). Whether this is because all other features that characterize the one kind of perception but not the other are merely coincidental and irrelevant or whether there are no other such features remains unclear. Either way, we are left in no doubt that the entire weight of the distinction is borne by force and vivacity, which therefore is its touchstone, and should probably be regarded as constitutive of it. But what exactly is “force and vivacity”? We learn subsequently that it is a feature that ideas can have as well, even to the point of approaching the force and vivacity distinctive of impressions and mimicking their effects on our thought and action (119–20/82–3). Indeed, in two cases, memories and the self, Hume saw fit to equate ideas with impressions (82/58 and 317/ 206); and on one occasion he even went so far as to claim that associative relations “can entirely convert an idea into an impression, and convey the vivacity of the latter into the former, so perfectly as to lose nothing of it in the transition” (320/ 208). In cases of madness too “our ideas may approach to our impressions” (2/7), even becoming “as vivid and intense . . . as the present impressions of the senses” (123/84). Conversely, an impression need make no great impression on us: “it sometimes happens, that our impressions are so faint and low, that we cannot distinguish them from our ideas” (2/7; also 19/18, 154/104, and 373/240–1); and some impressions are “so soft and gentle” (470/302; also 276/181) as to fail to produce “any sensible agitation” (419/269), and “are more known by their effects than by the immediate feeling or sensation” (417/267–8). Clearly, the question whether “force and vivacity” is by itself sufficient to distinguish impressions from ideas is both genuine and pressing. What sense must it carry if it is to do underwrite this distinction, as well as everything else Hume required of it? Since Hume did not embark upon a detailed analysis of force and vivacity until Treatise I/iii/§5, where he first takes up the question of what distinguishes belief in the real existence of an object present to the mind in sensation or thought from the mere conception of its existence, without belief in its actuality, I shall postpone further consideration of the matter to chapter 17-C. Here it will suffice to note that, in retrospect, the difference between actual existence and existence we contemplate without affirming is prominent in Hume’s initial presentation of the distinction between impressions and ideas. For example, in the Enquiry, to prove that “The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation,” Hume contrasts the landscape called up in our imagination by “All the colours of poetry” with the “real landscape” we behold with our eyes (II ¶1). The use of ‘lively’ should not mislead us, because it here clearly connotes not belief in real existence but its counterfeit, in the form of verbal imagery optimally conducive to the formation of mental imagery: however realistic the people and scenes painted by the poet or the orator may be, we typically have no difficulty keeping the fictional or hypothetical distinct from the real. What makes even the dullest sensation—seeing the faint gray outlines of, say, a bear lurking in the bushes on a dark night—impossible to confute with the most finely detailed, lifelike image in thought—imagining a bear clearly visible in the bright of day—is the impossibility of confusing the reality of the former with the fictiveness of the latter. The force and vivacity constitutive of the “real-ness” of the sensation is as immediately evident, unmistakable, and impossible to gainsay as any of the sensible qualities of its appearance: its redness,


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hardness, bitterness, acridness, etc. Actually feeling the cold is real cold, and so an impression, while the thought of the cold is not real cold, and so a mere idea; having the feeling of terror is real terror, and so an impression, while the thought of terror is not real terror, and so only an idea; yearning for her return is a real desire, and so an impression, while merely thinking of that desire, or wishing one had it, is not, and so only an idea; and resolving to diet is real willing, and so an impression, while pondering going on a diet is not, and so just an idea. Force and vivacity, then, is the quality that makes sensations, passions, desires, and volitions real for us, and its lack is what makes the corresponding thoughts mere fictions (possibilities, fantasies, hypotheticals). When, through factors such as memory, association, or sympathy, thoughts approach or even equal the degree of force and vivacity characteristic of sensations or passions, this is simply to say that they acquire the same quality of real existence (actuality) as the latter, so that, even while remaining thoughts, they can, with as much justice as sensations or passions, be termed ‘impressions.’ For example, the explosion I saw yesterday continues to be regarded as something real that happened, and is not converted into a fiction simply because things past can only be present to me in thought, not directly sensed. The fire burning unseen in the hall outside the room I am in, though only present to my mind in thought, is just as real for me as the smoke pouring in through the transom that is present to me in sensation (sight and smell); and it is the belief they are equally real that induces me to fear being incinerated as much as I do asphyxiation. And the inaccessibility to my internal sense of my close friend’s grief does not prevent my sympathy for her from conferring on my thought of it the reality of a pain little inferior to her own. Examples such as these seem fully in keeping with what Hume had in mind by “force and vivacity,” for he left no doubt that a thought can in certain cases equal or even surpass a sensation or passion in degree of force and vivacity, and moreover, as we have seen, went so far as to aver that this actually happens in the case of certain memories and associations, the idea of the self, and in the hallucinations of the mad. The upshot is that force and vivacity is a fully independent variable with respect to the qualities of their appearance that make sensations sensations, passions passions, and thoughts thoughts. The vivacity of a perception can, in principle, vary all the way from an impression of the highest degree to an idea of the lowest, and then back again, without the perception itself ceasing to be what it is: thought, desire, volition, passion, or sensation. To be sure, all are equally real as perceptions present to us by consciousness—objects of what Hume variously refers to as “internal perception” (THN 108/75), “internal sense” (466/300, EHU VII/i ¶3), and “inward sentiment” (EHU II ¶5, D III 27). But—and this is the crucial point—the sense of ‘existence’ that derives from mere presence to consciousness is not the same as “really existent” or “actual”: the former is true of all perceptions without exception (THN 66–7/48), while the latter applies only to those with a high quotient of force and vivacity (all others being accounted fictive, and treated as such in our thoughts and actions). Of course, it goes without saying that creatures such as zebras would not long survive if they regarded lions present to them in thought as really existent while deeming those present to them in sensation merely fictive. Yet the basic point remains: because vivacity is not an

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intrinsic feature of perceptions, and consequently is capable of varying independently of the particular qualities that make thoughts thoughts or sensations sensations (and passions passions, desires desires, volitions volitions), the fact that, in contexts prior to and independent of idea-enlivening associative imagination, we naturally accord more vivacity to sensations (etc.) than to thoughts is simply a contingent fact of human nature.3 Indeed, the principal business of association and allied operations is to right the balance by enlivening certain ideas to the point where we believe their objects are really existent as well (and so too coexistent with things present to our sense). And this is possible because vivacity is a quality that, strictly speaking, belongs not to the perceptions themselves but to our consciousness of them: how they are regarded, the manner in which they are apprehended or conceived.4 One final remark on Hume’s distinction between impressions and ideas: the sense-divide transcending objects of external sense are not impressions but ideas with impression and memory constituents resulting from associative activity (this is true of our perceptions of bodies, or anything else—events, processes, etc.—to which we attribute an existence that continues even when its appearance to the senses is interrupted, and is consequently regarded as distinct from the mind that perceives them). I cannot enter into the details of Hume’s account of the idea of an identity relation here.5 Suffice it to say that it is an idea of the same relation (between varying or interrupted objects) being successively repeated that the mind confounds with the idea of a true individual persisting through time (chapter 17B); that it is originally confined to visible and tangible materials, but then, through a projective illusion, incorporates other sensory (as well as reflexive) data as well (17-D); and that the result becomes a single sense-divide transcending object of the external sense when it is confounded with objects that are genuinely simple and individual by a process similar to the one that leads the mind to misapply the idea of identity to it (chapter 17-D). Because these ideas have a vivacity, and an influence on the mind, comparable to that of an impression, Hume sometimes characterized external objects as impressions. But we should not let this mislead us: the objects composing the physical world are not sensations (impressions) but thoughts (ideas) with sensation and memory constituents, and we should be as careful not to forget what Hume took their real nature to be as we ought to be in the cases of the other ideas that, owing to their exceptional vivacity and powerful influence on the mind, Hume also sometimes saw fit to denominate “impressions.”6

3. Regarding the associative character of memory, see chapter 16-E and HTC, chap. 2-B. 4. For further discussion see HTC, chap. 1-A and -B. 5. Hume deemed the imperfect identity he equated with external objects a fiction of the imagination. That is, it exists only in and through the imagination: the sustained affective disposition it feels when it continues the same relation of ideas (thought transition) through successive perceptions and then confounds this feeling with the sustained affective disposition it feels when successively presented with the same idea (perfect identity). I will consider this fiction in some detail in chapter 17 (and see HTC, pt. III for a more detailed discussion of Hume on identity). Here it suffices to note that, as fictions of imagination, there is nothing else external objects can be except ideas with impression and memory constituents. 6. As noted earlier, Hume warns the reader that memories will sometimes be termed ‘impressions’ on THN 82/58 and 107–8/75; so too when the vivacity an idea may acquire through association is


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Hume concluded the task he set himself in the opening pages of the Treatise of giving “an order an arrangement to our objects” with a distinction between simple and complex perceptions, “which extends itself both to our impressions and ideas” (2/7). It is also our first, albeit still informal,7 acquaintance with the separability principle: Simple perceptions or impressions and ideas are such as admit of no distinction nor separation. The complex are the contrary to these, and may be distinguished into parts. Tho’ a particular colour, taste, and smell are qualities all united together in this apple, ’tis easy to perceive they are not the same, but are at least distinguishable from each other. (2/7–8)

It is clear from Hume’s choice of example that ‘part’ must not be taken so literally that only those perceptions with spatial constitutions—visible and tangible objects—qualify as complexes of simple parts. The taste and smell of the apple are its “parts” even though, as Hume puts it elsewhere, they “admit of no such conjunction [in place], and really exist no where” (167/113). Moreover, some perceptions that have parts are nonetheless simple: “The impressions of touch are simple impressions, except when consider’d with regard to their extension; which makes nothing to the purpose” (230–1/152).8 Simplicity here seems to be relative (to some “purpose”), not an absolute quality of sensible appearances at all. But relative to what is an apple complex but its tangible extension simple? Or, to take a more perplexing example: are the passions of fear and hope complex perceptions because Hume resolved them into blends of joy and grief (443–4/283–4), or simple because, as mixtures (366/236), they are distinct, original qualities, neither resolvable into nor deducible from joy and grief in their unblended forms? Clearly, determining where Hume drew the line between simplicity and complexity, and why, is neither simple nor straightforward. To do so, we need to keep in mind three considerations. First, Hume was more interested in proving the existence of some distinction between simple and complex perceptions than in making it perfectly exact, or a fortiori, identifying a criterion of “perfect simplicity.”9 For example, if we grant that our perception of a centaur is a complex compounded of simpler ideas, then (1) we have admitted a simple/complex dichotomization with (2) a certain degree of precision, and the question then is whether it is sufficiently precise for the purpose to which we wish to put it. Similarly, we need ask what distinction between simple and complex particularly great (119/82, 354/229), especially, the idea of the self or person (317/206–7); and sympathy has an effect equivalent to association in this respect (354/229). 7. Hume’s definitive formulation of the separability principle is given on THN 18/17, where he endorsed Berkeley’s antiabstractionism. However, it is no surprise that he should here avail himself of Berkeley’s apple example from PHK I §1. 8. THN 231/152 seems to have been overlooked by Garrett when he maintained that “there is convincing textual evidence for a non-Lockean interpretation of Hume’s simple/complex distinction, one that treats the unextended minima sensibilia as the only simple (spatial, i.e., visual and tactile) perceptions” (Cognition, 62). 9. So far as Hume was concerned, there is no such thing as a perfect standard of anything that is also a useable standard: THN 45–53/34–40; see also chapter 17-D and HTC, chap. 3-D.

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perceptions, drawn to what degree of precision, did Hume’s philosophical purposes require? As it happens, he depended on it explicitly, and crucially, on only one occasion; and, as I shall show in the next section, there is good reason to suppose that the distinction as he drew it suffices to achieve his purpose. Second, it should never be forgotten that Hume’s distinction is specifically concerned with perceptions. Perceptions are individuals, immediately present to the mind prior to and independently not only of all general ideas and notions under which they are considered but also of all extra “synthetic” signification they accrue by means of past experience and habit (as in the case of visible spatiality for both Locke and Berkeley: chapters 6 and 14). Let us for the time being set aside the ontological question of whether the esse of these objects is percipi and consider them simply as inputs—appearances—immediately present to consciousness in sensation, reflexion, or thought (in this way, we need not prejudge whether Hume’s conception of the existence of a perception is closer to Locke’s or Berkeley’s: chapters 5-B and 12-A). When so regarded, Hume left no doubt that, in his view, the reality of a perception (what the input is) is one and indistinguishable from its appearance to the mind (what is present to our consciousness), and vice versa: every impression, external and internal, passions, affections, sensations, pains and pleasures, are originally on the same footing; and . . . whatever other differences we may observe among them, they appear, all of them, in their true colours, as impressions or perceptions. And indeed, if we consider the matter aright, ’tis scarce possible it shou’d be otherwise, nor is it conceivable that our senses shou’d be more capable of deceiving us in the situation and relations, than in the nature of our impressions. For since all the actions and sensations of the mind are known to us by consciousness, they must necessarily appear in every particular what they are, and be what they appear. Every thing that enters the mind, being in reality a perception, ’tis impossible any thing shou’d to feeling appear different. This were to suppose, that even where we are most intimately conscious, we might be mistaken. (THN 190/127; also 189/126, 206/137, 212/ 140, 236/155, 366/237, 546–7 and n/350 and n, and 548/351)

The question of whether a perception is simple or complex is consequently to be settled by its immediate appearance and nothing else. If a perception is such that some of it can be present in perception while the rest is absent, then it is complex. In cases where the data of perception (in the strict sense Hume adapted from Locke) are attentively accessible, the best test for this is discernment: an apple is a complex perception because each of its components can be imagined to exist in sensation in the absence of the others—its flavor apart from its color, its smell from its feel, its crunch from its wetness, and so on. The flavor itself, by contrast, may be deemed a simple perception because there is nothing in it we can separately consider (Hume expressly rejected aspect discrimination: 25/21–2; chapter 18B). For, unless we have reasons to suppose otherwise—if, say, we have evidence that the complexity of a flavor, though present in the perceived appearance, is attentively inaccessible, and so indiscernible—the inability to discern differences in a perception suffices for us to conclude that it is simple.


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Yet even in the case of vision, the human sense capable of the finest discriminations, the appearances we perceive do not always supply unequivocal determinations of simplicity or complexity: Put a spot of ink upon paper, and retire to such a distance, that the spot becomes altogether invisible; you will find, that upon your return and nearer approach the spot first becomes visible by short intervals; and afterwards becomes always visible; and afterwards acquires only a new force in its colouring without augmenting its bulk; and afterwards, when it has encreas’d to such a degree as to be really extended, ’tis still difficult for the imagination to break it into its component parts, because of the uneasiness it finds in the conception of such a minute object as a single point. This infirmity affects most of our reasonings on the present subject, and makes it almost impossible to answer in an intelligible manner, and in proper expressions, many questions which may arise concerning it. (THN 42/32)

Among these unanswerable questions is precisely where the simplicity of a visual appearance ends and complexity begins. It is unanswerable because we run into the limits of sensory resolution (our “infirmity”). But there are countless other questions that fall well within its bounds, including the inkspot when viewed from sufficiently close up (by the naked eye or with magnification) for its appearance to admit of a number of separate considerations: the complexity of that perception is then put completely beyond doubt. Third, the simplicity of a perception depends not only on whether it is divisible or otherwise separable into distinguishable components but also on whether or not it is capable of being derived from perceptions already in our possession. It was noted earlier that, for Hume, “The impressions of touch are simple impressions, except when consider’d with regard to their extension” (THN 231/152). No less important is the fact that this qualification did not stop him from treating the simplicity of a divisible tactual impression as sufficient to imply that we cannot remove anything from such a perception without removing the perception itself in its entirety (“to remove some part of of the impression . . . being impossible in a simple impression, obliges us to remove the whole”). This suggests that, for Hume as for Locke before him (chapter 5-B), the simplicity of a perception, including the objects of touch and vision, is relative to our existing stock of perceptions. In this respect, the operative criterion of simplicity is whether or not a perception is capable of being formed in imagination (derived) from existing ones: despite being divisible, a perception of a soft, flexible object counts as simple relative to a stock of tactual perceptions consisting exclusively of hard, rigid objects plus tangible extension. Similarly, a perception of red is simple insofar as it cannot be constructed from non-red visible extensions; the perception of a glossy object is simple insofar as it cannot be derived from exclusively matte constituents; visible extension is simple for a creature who has never seen or visualized anything but individual points of light separated by darkness (for Hume denied that darkness itself, even when limned by light, is a perception of extension)10; definite contours (shapes, 10. See chapter 18, note 13.

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patterns) are simple to a creature who has never known anything except blurs (as would be the case with us if human eyes lacked lenses); and so on. Thus, for Hume, the origination of a perception is, if anything, more crucial to its status as simple or complex than our ability to discriminate its parts. With the foregoing considerations in mind, we should have no difficulty comprehending Hume’s principle of compositionality: “the complex are formed from [the simple]” (THN 4/8; see also EHU II ¶6). The warrant of this principle should also now be clear: (1) all appearances are either formed from simple appearances or are themselves simple; (2) the reality of perceptions is indistinguishable from their appearance; (3) therefore, all perceptions are either themselves simple or consist of simple perceptions. The “simplicity” of an appearance is always to be understood relatively: could we have anticipated it in imagination from our available stock of ideas? Or, having acquainted ourselves with the appearance, can we separate it into simpler constituents from which it can afterward be reconstituted? If the answer to both questions is no, then the appearance is simple, and so the perception is simple in reality as well; otherwise, complex. For example, after touching a slick surface, I can divide it and then reconstitute it in imagination; but if the simplest components in my division are too small to imagine as slick, then I cannot reconstitute slickness by combining them, and slickness thus qualifies as a simple idea. Our question therefore becomes the following: is this merely relative simplicity, unsupported and unsupportable by any standard of perfect simplicity, adequate for Hume’s purposes? B. The Copy Principle: Hume’s Solution to the Problem of Origins “Having by these divisions given an order and arrangement to our objects, we may now apply ourselves to consider with the more accuracy their qualities and relations” (THN 2/8). The first relation on which Hume focused is the systematic resemblance between impressions and ideas: The one seem to be in a manner the reflexion of the other; so that all the perceptions of the mind are double, and appear both as impressions and ideas. When I shut my eyes and think of my chamber, the ideas I form are exact representations of the impressions I felt; nor is there any circumstance of the one, which is not to be found in the other. In running over my other perceptions, I find still the same resemblance and representation. Ideas and impressions appear always to correspond to each other. (2–3/8)

“[E]xcept their degree of force and vivacity,” there is no object (content, datum) present to consciousness in sensation (passion, desire, volition) that is not matched by an exactly resembling content present to our thought, and vice versa. As it stands, however, there are two problems with Hume’s idea/impression duplication principle: objects generally present themselves to the external and internal senses in greater detail than they do to thought; and thanks to our ability to separate and recombine ideas in imagination, there are often objects present to us in thought that have nothing corresponding to them in sensation or reflexion.


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To bring the senses and thought into sync, Hume invoked the compositionality principle: every simple idea has a simple impression, which resembles it; and every simple impression a correspondent idea. That idea of red, which we form in the dark, and that impression, which strikes our eyes in sun-shine, differ only in degree, not in nature. That the case is the same with all our simple impressions and ideas, ’tis impossible to prove by a particular enumeration of them. Every one may satisfy himself in this point by running over as many as he pleases. (3–4/8)

By restricting the duplication principle to simple perceptions, Hume sidesteps both of the aforementioned problems. For no matter how complex an impression or idea, the principles of separability and compositionality still apply, ensuring that our imaginations can resolve it into constituents simple enough to assure us of its conformity to the duplication principle: “we find, that all simple ideas and impressions resemble each other; and as the complex are formed from them, we may affirm in general, that these two species of perception are exactly correspondent” (4/8). With the principle established that all our impressions and ideas either exactly resemble one another or consist of simpler impressions and ideas that exactly resemble one another, Hume shifts his focus from the qualitative resemblance of impressions and ideas to “how they stand with regard to their existence, and which of the impressions and ideas are causes and which effects” (THN 4/9). This, for Hume, is the most important question of all: The full examination of this question is the subject of the present treatise; and therefore we shall here content ourselves with establishing one general proposition, That all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent.

This principle is usually termed the copy principle or copy thesis. Its formulation makes it quite plain that the copy principle is the answer to the question, what causal significance is there to the exact correspondence between simple impressions and ideas revealed by the duplication principle? Since thinking, not sensation or reflexion, is the immediate cause of the existence of any idea, the copy principle relates not to the existence of ideas per se but of the contents thought in them. It declares that we can form no idea in imagination that is not either itself copied directly from an antecedent impression original, or composed entirely of ideas that are themselves copied from antecedent impression originals, or, in the case of “secondary ideas, which are images of the primary” (6/10), copies of such copies. The copy principle is Hume’s solution to the problem of origins. It tells us that each and every content ever present to us in thought, no matter how complex, obscure, or remote it may seem from what is immediately present to our senses, is traceable to a source in sensation or reflexion (“outward or inward sentiment.” EHU II ¶5). Of course, Hume’s own counterexample of the missing shade of blue (THN 5–6/9–10 and EHU II ¶8)—which we shall consider in more detail in section D—suffices to make clear that we must not understand the copy principle

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as an a priori and/or necessary truth. But even if one considers this a deficiency in Hume’s principle, the important thing is that it is still cold comfort for the intellectualist. For even if the image of a shade of blue could exist in imagination prior to and independently of its being perceived by sight, the content concerned, like everything else we are capable of imagining, is nonetheless eminently sensible in nature—something we could perceive in sensation—and so has nothing whatsoever in common with the contents postulated by intellectualists, which “are of so refin’d and spiritual a nature, that they fall not under the conception of the fancy, but must be comprehended by a pure and intellectual view, of which the superior faculties of the soul are alone capable” (THN 72/52). Consequently, even in cases where an idea does not have its origin in sensation or reflexion, the copy principle still provides a guide to where we must look for clarification if this idea, or any other content in imagination, is in any measure confused or obscure—not to its analysis in a definition but to the corresponding impression: An idea is by its very nature weaker and fainter than an impression; but being in every other respect the same, cannot imply any very great mystery. If its weakness render it obscure ’tis our business to remedy that defect, as much as possible, by keeping the idea steady and precise; and till we have done so , ’tis in vain to pretend to reasoning and philosophy. (73/52)

The prospect of bringing ideas out into the clear light of day by tracing them to their originating impressions of sensation or reflexion led Hume to accord preeminent importance to the copy principle in the theory of human understanding: It seems a proposition, which will not admit of much dispute, that all our ideas are nothing but copies of our impressions, or, in other words, that it is impossible for us to think of any thing, which we have not antecedently felt, either by our external or internal senses. I have endeavoured to explain and prove this proposition, and have expressed my hopes, that, by a proper application of it, men may reach a greater clearness and precision in philosophical reasonings, than what they have hitherto been able to attain. Complex ideas may, perhaps, be well known by definition, which is nothing but an enumeration of those parts or simple ideas, that compose them. But when we have pushed up definitions to the most simple ideas, and find still some ambiguity and obscurity; what resource are we then possessed of? By what invention can we throw light upon these ideas, and render them altogether precise and determinate to our intellectual view? Produce the impressions or original sentiments, from which the ideas are copie’d. These impressions are all strong and sensible. They admit not of ambiguity. They are not only placed in a full light themselves, but may throw light on their correspondent ideas, which lie in obscurity. And by this means, we may perhaps, attain a new microscope or species of optics, by which, in the moral sciences, the most minute, and most simple ideas may be so enlarged as to fall readily under our apprehension, and be equally known with the grossest and most sensible ideas, that can be the object of our enquiry. (EHU VII/i ¶4; also THN 72–3/52)


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No one doubts that the copy principle was of the first importance to Hume. Yet what is seldom acknowledged, or at least given sufficient due, is that he would not have accorded it so much importance if he did not consider the origin of ideas to be the preeminent concern of the theorist of human understanding. Though well aware that he was not the first sensibilist to seek to exhibit the contents of ideas by tracing them to sense and reflexion originals, Hume was far and away the most single-minded, consistent, and systematic in this regard: ’Tis impossible to reason justly, without understanding perfectly the idea concerning which we reason; and ’tis impossible perfectly to understand any idea, without tracing it up to its origin, and examining that primary impression, from which it arises. The examination of the impression bestows a clearness on the idea; and the examination of the idea bestows a like clearness on all our reasoning. (THN 74–5/53)

This is Hume’s method in a nutshell. Behind the verbiage of philosophical disputes there is always some idea at the focus—causality, substance, space, time, identity, existence, etc. Since the disputes always turn on some confusion or obscurity in the idea, the only hope of resolving them lies in achieving agreement as to the precise contents of the idea. However, in Hume’s view, the endeavor to do so by means of definition is profoundly misguided. As ideas are by their very nature weak and faint (73/52), any attempt to formulate precise definitions while the ideas themselves remain, in any measure, confused or obscure is just so much labor wasted. If we proceed anyway, heedless of the futility, then we risk confounding whatever verbal clarity we may attain with ideational clarity; and since confusion of this sort is precisely what philosophical disputes have fed on since time immemorial, we are likely to achieve nothing with our definitions except to aggravate or compound the dispute with which we began. We thus need to look in any entirely different direction than language if we are to bring clarity to our ideas; and how better to do so than by tracing them to the impressions from which they originally derive? No perceptions can be clearer or more distinct than impressions. As the maximum of force and vivacity, it is impossible to overlook any of their contents or to attribute contents to them that are not there. They may not be an infallible guide to the contents of our idea, but they are far and away the best available, and so the gold standard against which all other analytic methods must be compared. Thus did Hume, like Berkeley before him, propose to draw the curtain of words and view the contents of thought directly in the light of their sensation or reflexion originals; and the result, in Hume’s case, would prove to be very skeptical indeed (chapter 17-A). The copy principle is, however, only one of two causal relations at the heart of Hume’s theory of ideas. He was equally interested in the ways one perception is capable of producing another without there being any resemblance between them: Impressions may be divided into two kinds, those of SENSATION and those of REFLEXION. The first kind arises in the soul originally, from unknown causes. The second is derived in a great measure form our ideas, and that in the follow-

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HUME’S AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES ing order. An impression first strikes upon the senses, and makes us perceive heat or cold, thirst or hunger, pleasure or pain of some kind or other. Of this impression there is a copy taken by the mind, which remains after the impression ceases; and this we call an idea. This idea of pleasure or pain, when it returns upon the soul, produces the new impressions of desire and aversion, hope and fear, which may properly be called impressions of reflexion, because derived from it. These again are copied by the memory and imagination, and become ideas; which perhaps in their turn give rise to other impressions and ideas. So that the impressions of reflexion are only antecedent to their correspondent ideas; but posterior to those of sensation, and deriv’d from them. (THN 7–8/11)

The original nonresembling causes of sensations cannot be known, and it remains to be seen whether it makes sense to speak of “causes” here at all (in the light of Treatise I/iii/§§6–14, Hume’s answer seems to be no). By contrast, the original nonresembling causes of reflexions are amenable to investigation since they are none other than ideas of sensation. Of course, this may not seem a very promising avenue of research. For while it may be true that if I am walking in the woods and come upon a sign that says “DANGER: BEARS,” the thought of a bear charging at me is enough to produce in me a reflexive impression of terror, why is that of any philosophical interest, at least for the theory of understanding? Nevertheless, Hume made quite clear that this was the avenue he intended to pursue: as the impressions of reflexion, viz. passions, desires, and emotions, which principally deserve our attention, arise mostly from ideas, ’twill be necessary to reverse that method, which at first sight seems most natural; and in order to explain the nature and principles of the human mind, give a particular account of ideas, before we proceed to impressions.

The reason impressions of reflexion were Hume’s principal focus even in the theory of understanding is that he viewed them as the source of the ideas at the heart of objective understanding, above all cause and effect. To be sure, he did not espouse the view that ideas such as cause and effect are copied from something of the same nature as a passion, desire, or emotion lightly. Quite the contrary, Hume considered it a last resort, an option to be exercised only after all other possible sources have been ruled out and the only alternative remaining is to concede that we have no idea to underwrite our words at all, so that “these words are absolutely without any meaning, when employed either in philosophical reasonings, or common life” (EHU VII/ii §26). Of course, one may wonder why, once he became convinced that an idea had its source in reflexion, instead of going straight to the source, he began with ideas of sensations and only then proceeded to their impression of reflexion effects. The reason would seem to be their strangely elusive character: why no one thitherto had even so much as suspected their existence. Though this may at first strike us as inconsistent with their being impressions, and consequently so strong and vivid as to be capable of conferring perfect clarity on any ideas copied from them, Hume never claimed that impressions of reflexion are all as attention-grabbing as the terror one feels when about to be charged by a bear. Quite the contrary, it is one


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thing to be perceived, quite another to become the focus of the attentive gaze; and just as Locke and Berkeley took the immediate objects of visual perception to be attentively inaccessible (chapters 6 and 14), Hume came to a similar view, for reasons I will examine in detail in the next chapter, with regard to the impression of reflexion originals of the ideas implicit in all objective understanding. Instead of introspection, the indirect method he devised for discovering the impression originals of these ideas consisted in considering the ideas of sensation found by experience to precede their formation with an eye to isolating the reflexive effect these ideas have on the mind—in essence, using their cause at one remove to learn enough about their impression source to shed light on them. Thus, even though the causal relation between ideas of sensation and impression of reflexions does not, in and of itself, tell us anything about the contents and scope of application of the ideas at the heart of objective understanding, it is nonetheless as integral a part of Hume’s solution to the problem of origins as the copy principle itself. C. Making Sense of the Copy Principle: Is Circularity Avoidable? Hume’s reliance on the copy principle to explain the origin of ideas raises a specter of circularity that needs to be dealt with right from the outset. For the principle posits a causal relation between impressions and ideas; so, in using it to trace the idea of cause to an origin in an impression of reflexion original, wasn’t he presupposing the very idea he was supposed to explain? The problem is compounded by the fact that Hume’s theory of ideas involves causal relations at every turn: sensations are copied in ideas of sensation, these in turn produce impressions of reflexion, and these in turn are copied in ideas of reflexion. How can cause and effect be explained by means of an explanatory scheme into which it is already built? We must therefore consider whether the circle is real or only apparent, and if real, whether it is vicious or virtuous. Many interpreters maintain that the circle is apparent on the ground that the concept of cause and effect employed in the explanans of Hume’s accounts of the origins of ideas is not the same as the concept of cause and effect in his explanandum. This tends to be the position of those who believe that Hume’s longstanding reputation as a radical skeptic is undeserved. They hold that, quite the contrary, he unequivocally rejected radical skepticism regarding the reality of causes, taking them for granted at every stage of his reasoning. In particular, their Hume held that the facts are simply not open to doubt that (1) impressions cause their resembling ideas, (2) repeated experience causes habits of mind, and (3) habits of mind cause ideas to be associated. However, being an empiricist, he also wished to determine what idea of causes we acquire in face of these facts. Insofar as interpreters of this stripe concede a measure of skepticism in Hume’s position regarding causation it is here, since neither the idea of cause and effect we derive from the frequent experience of the (more or less) constant conjunction of phenomena nor the idea we obtain from customary association are fully adequate to represent the reality of causation, the true nature of which ultimately eludes our comprehension. But such skepticism, far from being the radical sort traditionally ascribed to Hume, is

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effectively indistinguishable from the common-or-garden variety, which recognizes that our understanding of reality almost always falls short of reality itself, whether in the material sphere (the causes of gravity), the psychological (the causes of hate), the political (the causes of war), or the moral (the causes of virtue). This “mitigated skepticism”—adopting Hume’s own term (ECHU XII/iii)—thus leaves reality in peace, unvexed either by idealist scruples of Berkeley’s type or psychologistic pretensions to confine it within the bounds of our experience. Yet if Hume’s theory of understanding did involve two quite distinct concepts of cause and effect, would there not then be two ideas to be accounted for by reference to an originating impression rather than one? Hume made quite clear that, in order to believe in the reality of anything, we must have some idea of it (“The idea of an object is an essential part of the belief of it,” THN 94/65; also 101/71, 140/95, 164/111, and 172/116). In the case of causal necessity in particular, there can be no question that he thought it idle to insist on its reality without an idea to underpin it: “If we have really no idea of a power or efficacy in any object, or of any real connexion betwixt causes and effects, ’twill be to little purpose to prove, that an efficacy is necessary in all operations” (168/113). Nor is there the least indication that Hume exempted cause and effect, however construed, from the compositionality principle, the duplication principle, or the copy principle. Yet if not exempt, then it is impossible to escape the question: if Hume did avail himself of a robustly realist concept of cause and effect, unbeholden to past experience, habit, or association, then what is its originating impression? Such a concept would have to originate in immediate perception, either of external or internal sense. But if immediate perception could provide us with a preassociative idea of cause and effect without further ado—as Locke and Berkeley supposed when they traced it to an origin in the immediate, inward perception of voluntary action (chapters 7-B and 13-A)—then why did Hume too not simply stop there? Immediate perception is a source of ideas about which an empiricist can have no qualms. So why did Hume nevertheless press his search for an originating impression beyond immediate perception to past experience, remembered conjunctions of phenomena, and finally to customary association? The possession of an idea of cause and effect antecedently to all this would seem to render the entire exercise redundant. One can only avoid this consequence by contending that Hume exempted the concept of cause and effect he took for granted in his theory of ideas from the compositionality, duplication, and copy principles. Interpreters so minded concede that there is no perception, in Hume’s sense of an object present to us immediately by consciousness (section A), underpinning this concept. Yet they insist that the ideas whereby we understand causes—constant conjunction and customary association—are, in truth, no more than sensible tokens of inconceivable, incomprehensible “secret powers” and “ultimate principles.” In this sense, the copy principle itself—the “causal” relation between impressions and their idea copies—is no more than a manifestation of secret connections inaccessible to human understanding.11 The Hume of these interpreters thus holds a view similar to Berkeley’s thesis 11. This view is sometimes termed “sceptical realism” after John Wright, The Sceptical Realism of David Hume (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), the earliest book devoted to putting


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that the sensible objects commonly regarded as causes and effect are really not that at all but mere signs suggestive of the true, insensible causes and effects. However, whereas Berkeley held these true causes and effects to be conceivable by means of the data furnished by inward, reflexive perception, their Hume supposes that internal and external data alike are mere signs of causes we can only suppose to exist but neither conceive nor comprehend. And, in support of their view, they point to Hume’s seeming readiness to countenance such inconceivable suppositions as that of a relation without a relative (THN 68/49 and 241/158). Yet Hume admitted inconceivable suppositions only under the condition that the cause whose existence is postulated is an object specifically different from our perceptions. Since “’tis impossible for us so much as to conceive or form an idea of any thing specifically different from ideas and impressions” (THN 67/49), to pretend to be able to form an idea of an object specifically different from our perceptions is tantamount to claiming to be able to think something without thinking anything, and so is both “an absurdity” (188/126) and “a notion so imperfect, that no sceptic will think it worth while to contend against it” (EHU XII/i ¶16). For an object specifically different from our perceptions ipso facto can have none of the features we are capable of sensing or conceiving in the supposed signs of such secret connections: if the signs have color, hardness, flavor, or any of the other features philosophers classified as ideas of secondary qualities, then their specifically different secret causes must lack them; if the signs exhibit extension, motion, duration, or any of the other features philosophers classified as ideas of primary qualities, then their secret causes must lack them; if the signs have aesthetic or logical formal multiplicity, and so can be numbered, arrayed, and otherwise ordered, then their secret causes cannot; and, in general, every feature, relation, and ordering principle applicable to perceptions is ipso facto incapable of being used to conceive the specifically different secret causes they are presumed to signify. No wonder, then, that Hume branded the things we suppose in this way “inconceivable” and “incomprehensible.” The real question, then, is what warrant can there be in labeling them “causes” if everything we are able to conceive under that term is ipso facto incapable of being used to conceive them? Or, again: how can what we do conceive under the term ‘cause’ possibly be thought of as a sign indicative of something we cannot form the least conception of? I can conceive spots on the skin as a symptom of measles, or an approaching thunderhead as the sign of imminent rainfall, only because I am able to form an idea of what these indicators are supposed to indicate. But how can I regard anything present to me in perception as a sign of something that is never present to me—including the supposed causal efficacy underlying the relation between impressions and their exactly resembling ideas— if nothing I am capable of sensing or conceiving can enter into its conception? There then seem to be only two possibilities: either anything and everything may (or may not) be regarded as the sign of this I-know-not-what “secret connexion,” forth the case for such a reading; others terms it “The New Hume” (see Winkler, “The New Hume,” Philosophical Review, 100, 4 (October 1991). Variants on this view have been defended by many scholars, most notably Fred Wilson, David Fate Norton, and Galen Strawson.

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so that it is arbitrary, and therefore meaningless, to characterize it in terms of signs (symptoms, indicators) at all; or I am able to distinguish which phenomena are its signs and which not because I am already in possession of an idea of cause and effect—in which case, however, the cause straightaway ceases to count as specifically different from my ideas and, far from being secret, is as readily and easily perceptible as a smile (indeed, it is “the very same with a perception or impression,” THN 241/158). These considerations should suffice to make clear that the extent of Hume’s readiness to countenance the inconceivable supposition of a relation without a relative has been greatly exaggerated. In truth, it is probably no different from Berkeley’s readiness to countenance the possibility of beings of a “third nature” (3D239) with an existence distinct from spirits (chapter 12-C). For even if Berkeley’s separability principle makes it impossible to conceive anything whereof we do have an idea—any sensible thing—as possessing an existence distinct from a perceiving mind, it does not prevent us from supposing that things of a nature inconceivable by us have such an existence: “Many things, for ought I know, may exist, whereof neither I nor any other man hath or can have any idea or notion whatsoever” (3D232). The separability principle is concerned only with such ideas and notions as actually are in our possession, and is used to settle questions of whether their meaning and scope of application is sufficient for materialist (or intellectualist) theses to be intelligibly formulated. Hume, whose reliance on the separability principle was more systematic and explicit even than Berkeley’s, maintained that we do, indeed, possess a clear idea of necessary connection between cause and effect, and this idea suffices to underwrite all discourse and reasoning concerned with causes or presupposing them. Yet just as Berkeley stopped short of admitting that the clear idea of body on which our discourse and reasoning likewise depend can be applied to anything existing mind-independently in itself, Hume drew the line at applying to inconceivable things in themselves (nonperceptions) any idea the meaning of which is ineluctably bound up with contents contributed by associative imagination, that of cause and effect included. Accordingly, if ever we are seized by an impulse to talk of things in themselves in terms of some inconceivable sense of ‘power’ or ‘efficacy’ (or, indeed, of ‘identity’ or ‘spatial magnitude’), we can avoid falling foul of the foregoing restriction only by dropping any pretense of using these terms in their wonted signification. Of course, this will achieve precisely as much as talking of them as “angels,” “will-o’-the-wisps,” or “icxthrps”: precisely nothing. But if we pretend to be discoursing upon any such inconceivable “something” within the same framework of causes and effects in which we normally talk and reason, or anything continuous with that framework, we are no better than a blind man who shou’d pretend to find a great many absurdities in the supposition, that the colour of scarlet is not the same with the sound of a trumpet, nor light the same with solidity. If we have really no idea of a power or efficacy in any object, or of any real connexion betwixt causes and effects, ’twill be of little purpose to prove, that an efficacy is necessary in all operations. We do not understand our own meaning in talking so, but ignorantly confound ideas, which are entirely distinct from each other. I am, indeed, ready to allow, that there may be several qualities


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both in material and immaterial objects, with which we are utterly unacquainted; and if we please to call these power or efficacy, ’twill be of little consequence to the world. But when, instead of meaning these unknown qualities, we make the terms of power and efficacy signify something, of which we have a clear idea, and which is incompatible with those objects, to which we apply it, obscurity and error begin then to take place, and we are led astray by a false philosophy. This is the case, when we transfer the determination of the thought to external objects, and suppose any real intelligible connexion betwixt them; that being a quality, which can only belong to the mind that considers them. (THN 168/113)

Clearly, in countenancing inconceivable suppositions and relations without a relative, Hume was not giving carte blanche to those who, by the mere mention of “secret connexions,” suppose themselves to be talking about intelligible matters of some consequence to the world. Quite the contrary, even when we treat the objects we are capable of conceiving—the perceptions (impressions or ideas) themselves— to be loci of causal efficacy, we straightaway lapse into nonsense: Thus upon the whole we may infer, that when we talk of any being, whether of a superior or inferior nature, as endow’d with a power or force, proportion’d to any effect; when we speak of a necessary connexion betwixt objects, and suppose, that this connexion depends upon an efficacy or energy, with which any of these objects are endow’d; in all these expressions, so apply’d, we have really no distinct meaning, and make use only of common words, without any clear and determinate ideas. (THN 162/109–10)

These words—aside from the semantic independence Hume, in common with Berkeley, accorded to them12—have relation to reality only insofar as they apply to the only source there is for ideas of necessary connections between distinct existents: our internal awareness of the facile transitions of thought distinctive of customary association (chapter 2-B). So far from supposing that inconceivable yet 12. By embracing the separability principle, Hume was committed not only to the same account of general ideas and terms Berkeley espoused (THN 17/17) but also to the implication that no ontological worth can be assigned to distinctions that have only semantic validity (chapter 10-D). For while Hume evinced no misgivings about the semantic independence causal concepts enjoy with respect to psychological ones, he rejected any claim that supposes a real distinction of ideas between customary association, on the one hand, and cause and effect (including philosophical causation: see notes 15 and 21 hereafter), on the other, just as emphatically and unreservedly as Berkeley rejected materialists’ claims because they assert or imply a real distinction of ideas between perceived sensation and existence (as applied to sensible things). The point of this section can then be put this way: interpreters who saddle Hume with a doctrine of “secret connexions” are abusing a hospitality that is only intended to be semantic. They seem to me to do this when they seize on the freedom Hume allowed himself to mention “ultimate principles” and the like in contexts where he was not concerned to explicate the meaning of the idea of necessary connection or delimit its scope of application (not to mention that some of the passages commonly adduced seem not even to be about inconceivable causes but refer instead to empirically discoverable causes of which some or all of us, at a particular point in history, are ignorant, e.g. EHU V/ii ¶22). Thus, to exploit such language to paint Hume as a causal realist is tantamount to portraying Berkeley as a materialist because he permitted himself a similar latitude when discoursing of body and the material world in contexts where he was not concerned to explicate the ideas underlying such discourse or to delimit their scope of application. See also note 14.

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“true” causes exist but lie forever beyond our ken, Hume held precisely the opposite view: the only “objects” we truly are capable of conceiving as causes—in the only sense we are capable of conceiving any existent as a “cause”—are the easy transitions intimately present to us every time a present impression calls to mind the thought of a customary associate.13 Hume attributed the “contrary biass” and “prejudice” to a kind of “projective illusion”: ’Tis a common observation that the mind has a great propensity to spread itself on external objects, and to conjoin with them any internal impressions, which they occasion, and which always make their appearance at the same time that these objects discover themselves to the senses. . . . [T]he same propensity is the reason, why we suppose necessity and power to lie in the objects we consider, not in our mind, that considers them; notwithstanding it is not possible for us to form the most distant idea of that quality, when it is not taken for the determination of the mind, to pass from the idea of an object to that of its usual attendant. (THN 167/112–13; also EHU VII/ii ¶29n)

I will examine this projective illusion in detail in chapter 17-D. Here it suffices simply to note what is implicit in the need for such an account: any attempt to abstract causation from customary association is tantamount to seeking to conceive customary transitions of thought apart from thought (we lack “even any distinct notion what it is we desire to know, when we endeavour at a conception of it,” EHU VII/ii ¶29). Hume’s bottom-line position is this: the one and only idea of cause and effect relations in our possession has no use except in relation to conceivable objects (perceptions—impressions and ideas) and the internally perceived transitions we make in thought between them. Thus, “when we say we desire to know the ultimate and operating principle, as something, which resides in the external object, we either contradict ourselves, or talk without a meaning” (THN 267/173).14 13. This comes through clearly in a wonderful passage in which Hume responds to an objection to his account of causation from a religious angle: “Let no one, therefore, put an invidious construction on my words, by saying simply, that I assert the necessity of human actions, and place them on the same footing with the operations of senseless matter. I do not ascribe to the will that unintelligible necessity, which is suppos’d to lie in matter. But I ascribe to matter, that intelligible quality, call it necessity or not, which the most rigorous orthodoxy does or must allow to belong to the will. I change, therefore, nothing in the receiv’d systems, with regard to the will, but only with regard to material objects” (THN 410/ 263). This is the true import of his earlier claim “that there is but one kind of necessity, as there is but one kind of cause, and that the common distinction betwixt moral and physical necessity is without any foundation in nature” (171/115): to understand what customary association consists in is, for Hume, to understand what necessary connection consists in. 14. Although Wright charges me with a “perverse unwillingness” in HTC to acknowledge Hume’s talk of unknown causes (“Critical Study: Wayne Waxman’s Hume’s Theory of Consciousness,” Hume Studies, 21, 2, November 1995), 349, it was not the phraseology that caused me any difficulties (see note 12); my objection was to what Wright and other exponents of “The New Hume” seem intent on reading into it. In HTC, I argued that what should be taken to be decisive is what the philosopher says regarding the matter in dispute in contexts where his express purpose is to address it. When this is done, we find that none of the texts Wright and others insist upon do more than mention ultimate principles, secret connections, and such like in passing, and in them Hume never comes anywhere near close to


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D. Making Sense of the Copy Principle: Is Its Circularity Vicious? Having established in the previous section that Hume’s tenets leave no way to avoid using the very same idea of cause and effect whose origin is to be explained by means of the copy principle in this principle itself, the question now is whether or not this circularity is vicious. The circle would be vicious if and only if the causal relations between impressions and their resembling ideas affirmed in the copy principle were incompatible with the meaning and scope of application of the idea of cause and effect. Since, according to Hume, the idea of cause and effect is bound up by content with customary association15—easy, idea-enlivening transitions of thought—the causal relations enshrined in the copy principle would be incompatible with this idea only if the principle is premised as being prior to and independent of customary association. Thus, the question whether or not Hume’s copy principle is viciously circular can be answered by determining whether or not it is associative in nature. One should not be surprised that the status of the copy principle is left unclear when it is first introduced in Treatise I/i/§1. Association is not discussed until later in part i; the associative nature of cause and effect is not explored until part iii; while “the true idea of the human mind” as a system of causal relations in which “Our impressions give rise to their correspondent ideas; and these ideas in their turn produce other impressions” (261/170) is not dealt with until the penultimate section of the final part of Hume’s examination of human understanding (I/iv/§6). Nevertheless, there are three indicators in Treatise I/i/§1 that the copy principle is destined ultimately to be subsumed within the framework of Hume’s associationism: 1. Early in Treatise I/iii, Hume contends that necessary connections between distinct existents are an essential ingredient of all causal relations (THN 77/55, 87/

formulating the alternatives and plumping for the one these interpreters suppose him to have favored. The texts in which Hume does pose, or at least seem to pose, the choice are those cited and discussed in this section; and, on any natural reading, they make clear (1) that Hume deemed the application of any idea of causation in our possession to things in themselves out of bounds, and (2) that he did not care what words we use in reference to things in themselves so long as we do not mean by them anything of which we happen to possess clear ideas. To overcome the temptation to ascribe philosophical commitments to Hume solely on the basis of his language but without regard to its context, we have therefore only to acknowledge the primacy of the question of origins in his theory of understanding and, in particular, to recognize the imperative it imposes to first examine the content of the ideas in which beliefs are reposed before concerning ourselves with the nature and foundations of the beliefs themselves, as the only way we can hope to arrive at an accurate estimation of how skeptical he really was. See the discussion of Norton at the beginning of chapter 16, section G-6 of this chapter, chapter 17-A, and notes 26 and 34; also HTC, esp. chaps. 4-B, 5-F, 7-B, and 293–4n47. For a representative sample of other views on this topic, see Rupert Read and Kenneth A. Richman eds., The New Hume Debate (London: Routledge, 2000). 15. Strictly speaking, it is the idea of necessary connection that is bound up by content with customary association. However, since Hume deemed necessary connections essential to causal relations (they constitute the difference between relations of constant conjunction and relations of cause and effect, including “philosophical relations” cause and effect: see note 21), it comes to the same thing.

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61–2, 407/261, and 409/263; also EHU VIII/i ¶25 and ii ¶27), but that necessary connections can never be directly observed, either by sensation or reflexion, or discovered by the mere comparison of ideas (THN 76–7/54–5, 78–82/56–8, 88/62, 155–6/105, 162/110, 632/108, 636/400, 649–51/409–10, EHU IV/i ¶6, V/i ¶3, VII/ i, and VII/ii ¶26). Nevertheless, since the necessary connection of the effect to the cause implies that the effect can never exist unless the cause does, the effect must always exist in conjunction with its cause. There is thus a sensible indicator, an observable sign, from which we can infer that a causal connection exists: We remember to have had frequent instances of the existence of one species of objects; and also remember, that the individuals of another species of objects have always attended them, and have existed in a regular order of contiguity and succession with regard to them. Thus we remember to have seen that species of object we call flame, and to have felt that species of sensation we call heat. We likewise call to mind their constant conjunction in all past instances. Without any farther ceremony, we call the one cause and the other effect, and infer the existence of the one from that of the other. (THN 87/61)

Although the idea of a necessary connection between distinct existents essential to all causal relations cannot be traced to an origin in relations of constant conjunction, it is nonetheless true that, once we come into possession of this idea, “our remembrance of their constant conjunction” (THN 88/62) is all the evidence normally required to affirm that a necessary connection exists between them. This is why Hume’s definition of cause and effect as a “philosophical relation” in terms of constant conjunction (172/115) is parasitic on the “natural relation” (94/65) founded on (92–3/64–5), and defined in terms of (172/116), customary association: since it is from this latter source alone, according to Hume, that the idea of necessary connection can be acquired (THN I/iii/§14 and EHU VII/ii), and since “Ideas always represent the objects or impressions, from which they are deriv’d, and can never without a fiction represent or be apply’d to any other” (THN 37/29), the sense of ‘necessity’ in the two definitions of cause is “at bottom the same” (EHU VIII/ii ¶27). Thus, if Hume based his affirmation of the copy principle in Treatise I/i/§1 on the existence of relations of constant conjunction, this would be a strong indicator that he was preparing the ground for its eventual incorporation into his associationism. Another thing we need to note is that, even apart from their evidentiary role in the affirmation of necessary connections between distinct existents, relations of constant conjunctions are already in themselves bound up with association. For since one thing is said to stand in a relation of constant conjunction to another only because the one is “precedent and contiguous to” the other, and “all objects resembling the former are plac’d in a like relation of priority and contiguity to those objects, that resemble the latter” (THN 172/115), this relation amounts to nothing more than “the uninterrupted resemblance of their relations of succession and contiguity” (THN 164/111). Since contiguity and resemblance relations were classed by Hume as associative relations alongside cause and effect, the same must be true


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of relations of constant conjunction.16 Thus, even if the copy principle enunciated in Treatise I/i/§1 is construed simply as a relation of constant conjunction between simple impressions and ideas, this would still point toward its eventual incorporation into Hume’s associationism. Even a cursory review of Treatise I/i/§1 suffices to show that Hume’s evidentiary basis for affirming the copy principle is a relation of constant conjunction between the perceptions concerned in the duplication principle: I first make myself certain, by a new review, of what I have already asserted, that every simple impression is attended with a correspondent idea, and every simple idea with a correspondent impression. From this constant conjunction of resembling perceptions I immediately conclude, that there is a great connexion betwixt our correspondent impressions and ideas, and that the existence of the one has a considerable influence upon that of the other. Such a constant conjunction, in such an infinite number of instances, can never arise from chance; but clearly proves a dependence of the impressions on the ideas, or of the ideas on the impressions. (THN 4–5/9)

Since constant conjunction is here opposed to chance and said to prove a dependence of existence between impressions and ideas, there is no question that Hume is using it as evidence for a causal relation between them. Moreover, the fact that he leaves it open at this point which depend for their existence on which—impressions on their resembling ideas or ideas on their resembling impressions—is as powerful an indicator as one could wish that there is nothing intrinsic to the perceptions themselves (essential, a priori discoverable) that dictates which depends on which. Instead, just as his commitments to empiricism (xvi–xvii/4–5) lead us to expect, experience (“our remembrance of constant conjunction”) is the final arbiter of what, if any, causal relation exists between our simpler, exactly resembling perceptions: That I may know on which side this dependence lies, I consider the order of their first appearance; and find by constant experience, that the simple impressions always take the precedence of their correspondent ideas, but never appear in the contrary order. To give a child an idea of scarlet or orange, of sweet or bitter, I 16. Although the evidence is less explicit that philosophical contiguity and resemblance relations are parasitic on natural (associative) contiguity and resemblance than it is in the case of philosophical and natural causation (THN 94/65), I cannot see how Hume could have held any other view. For, just as Hume made clear in the case of philosophical causation, if the human mind were so constituted that contiguity and resemblance never facilitated transitions of thought and never led to any enlivening of ideas, how could they possibly ever influence us to relate perceptions or form beliefs? Or, if associative imagination were so constituted that contiguity and resemblance had the opposite effect they presently do, and so prevented the imagination from forming relations and beliefs regarding them, would we still form ideas of philosophical resemblances and contiguity as we do currently? Clearly not; without a foundation in a natural relation, a philosophical relation would have no influence on reasoning and belief, and so would not be accorded any place in Hume’s theory of human understanding. Indeed, as should be clear by the time we reach the end of chapter 17, this is why Hume insisted that facility is the essence of relation: 99/69, 204/135, 220/145, 260/169–70. See also HTC, 12–3, 49, 80–4, and 99–100.

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HUME’S AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES present the objects, or in other words, convey to him these impressions; but proceed not so absurdly, as to endeavour to produce the impressions by exciting the ideas. Our ideas upon their appearance produce not their correspondent impressions, nor do we perceive any colour, or feel any sensation, merely upon thinking of them. On the other hand we find, that any impressions either of the mind or body is constantly followed by an idea, which resembles it, and is only different in the degrees of force and vivacity. This constant conjunction of our resembling perceptions, is a convincing proof, that the one are the causes of the other; and this priority of the impressions is an equal proof, that our impressions are the causes of our ideas, not our ideas of our impressions. (5/9)

The thesis that all our simpler ideas are copies of our simpler impressions thus breaks down into elements all of which admit of being amalgamated into Hume’s associationism: (1) their temporal contiguity, (2) their close resemblance in appearance, and (3) their constant conjunction (the resemblance between their relations of succession and contiguity). 2. If the incorporation of Hume’s copy principle into his associationism depends on its being grounded on nothing else besides past experience and the remembrance of the constant precedence of simple impressions with respect to their resembling ideas, then, like any empirical generalization, the principle must be able to accommodate exceptions. So if, even in its initial presentation, Hume allowed that exceptions to the copy principle cannot be precluded, this would be a clear indication that our remembrance of constant conjunction is its sole and entire grounding. On the other hand, if he did not tip his reader off to the fact that it is the kind of principle that admits of exceptions, this would suggest that the principle has a further, possibly independent, grounding, most likely in the intrinsic nature of impressions and ideas, just as many causal realist interpreters have taken to be the case. What we find, in both the Treatise and the Enquiry, is that Hume made a point of showing (1) that exceptions to the copy principle can occur and (2) that, if in fact they do, they are “very rare” (THN 7/11) and not sufficiently important to “merit that for it alone we should alter our general maxim” (6/10, EHU II ¶8). He did so by suggesting that it might be possible to imagine the simple idea of a shade of blue despite never having seen it (no prior simple impression) if all the neighboring shades have been previously encountered by sight, and thence as impressions. Without ever claiming that this actually occurs, Hume thought we should all allow that it could occur, but also that, if it ever actually did, it would be a case “so particular and singular, that ’tis scarce worth our observing” (THN 6/10). What this means can best be understood by contrasting the copy principle with cases in which evidence contrary to an empirical generalization founded on “an infinite number of instances” would suffice to compromise it or even oblige us to abandon it. We would have to do this in case the possible exceptions became actual, and did so with sufficient frequency that they were no longer so particular and singular; or, alternatively, if the exceptions, though rare, were sufficiently noteworthy or remarkable to make it impossible to rest content with our general maxim. The kind of case exemplified by the missing shade of blue, however, constitutes no such


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threat to the copy principle: our confidence in the principle, even assuming it is founded solely on a relation of constant conjunction, is not in any way diminished by the mere possibility of exceptions, particularly ones that if they ever did occur, would be not only rare but utterly unremarkable—indeed, of so slight and fleeting a nature that even if we did experience them from time to time, they would draw no attention to themselves, and almost certainly pass by unremarked and ineffectual (an unnoticed counterexample cannot weaken a belief). Accordingly, the counterexample of the missing shade of blue not only suggests that constant conjunction is all the grounding the copy principle requires but, as a mere possibility, does nothing to prevent the conjunction from attaining the frequency and constancy distinctive of those certainties founded on experience and habit to which Hume accordance the status of a proof: “arguments, which are deriv’d from the relation of cause and effect, and which are entirely free from doubt and uncertainty” (124/ 86; also EHU X/i ¶¶ 4 and 12). So clearly, the exception here serves only to prove the rule, and does so in such a way as to greatly facilitate the integration of the copy principle into Hume’s associationism. 3. In the course of introducing his copy principle, Hume emphasized that it is no more than an attempt to express “in philosophical language” what sensibilists such as Locke and Berkeley had long maintained: that “all the materials of thinking are derived either from our outward or inward sentiment” (EHU II ¶5). And there can be no doubt that a great—probably the greatest—source of commentator’s resistance to the proposition that Hume’s copy principle needs, and was intended, to be construed in associative terms is the fact that the causal relations enshrined in the copy principles of Locke and Berkeley were clearly not intended to be understood that way. If Hume wanted us to construe his copy principle differently, presumably he would have said as much, if only to prevent us from assimilating it to those of his sensibilist predecessors. But he seems to maintain the contrary when he says “This proposition seems to be equivalent to that which Mr. Locke has taken such pains to establish, viz. that no ideas are innate” (THN 647– 8/408). So is it not excessively speculative to interpret Hume’s principle otherwise? The very least one can require is evidence that Hume erected an obstacle, from the very outset, to stop us from unqualifiedly identifying his copy principle with those of his predecessors. As it happens there is such an obstacle: instead of taking a position on the innatism question, or even expressing agnosticism, Hume rejects the issue out of hand, and even admonishes his reader not to associate with his copy principle the implication Locke drew from it that no ideas are innate. Although this was in part because he thought the innatism issue ill-defined (648/408 and EHU II ¶9n), his principal objection is made clear at the end of Treatise I/i/§1: ’tis remarkable, that the present question concerning the precedency of our impressions or ideas, is the same with what has made so much noise in other times, when it has been disputed whether there be any innate ideas, or whether all ideas be derived from sensation and reflexion. We may observe, that in order to prove the ideas of extension and colour not to be innate, philosophers do nothing but shew, that they are conveyed by our senses. To prove the ideas of passion and

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HUME’S AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES desire not to be innate, they observe that we have a preceding experience of these emotions in ourselves. Now if we carefully examine these arguments, we shall find that they prove nothing but that ideas are preceded by other more lively perceptions, from which they are derived, and which they represent. (THN 7/10)17

Hume’s focus here is on what is and is not implied by the truth of the copy principle. Clearly, if its implicative value is that of a customary associative founded on experienced conjunction, then a great deal less follows from it than is implicit in the copy principles of Locke and Berkeley. For the causal relations enshrined in their principles, far from being concerned with associative “uniting principles in the ideal world . . . the very essence” of which “consists in their producing an easy transition of ideas,” express preassociatively existent “real connexions” between distinct perceptions, whose “real bond” (THN 259–60/169) to one another lies in having their existence supported by one and the same mindsubstance. Built into their distinction between what Hume termed ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’ is thus another, more fundamental distinction between the mind’s passive capacities of sense and its active faculties of intellection: the former give rise to simple impressions only insofar as the mind exists in real causal interrelation with other substances (corporeal or spiritual finite or infinite) that affect its senses; the latter—specifically, the faculty of memory—generate simple ideas that “repeat” these impressions more faintly in thought. By contrast, if Hume’s copy principle is, as it gives every sign of being, grounded simply and solely on experienced constant conjunction, then it is completely incapable of supporting a framework of real (preassociative, extraimaginative) causally interacting substances of the kind entailed by the copy principles of Locke and Berkeley. And when one considers that Hume consigned all the elements of that framework—mind, substance, powers (faculties, capacities), and connections between distinct perceptions—to the ideal world that exists only in and through facile transitions of associative imagination, his rejection of the innatism issue may be seen as yet another indication that Hume, at the very least, left the door open in Treatise I/i/ §1 to the copy principle’s subsequent incorporation into his associationism.18 E. Hume’s Theory of Ideas and the General Causal Maxim If indeed Hume’s intention from the start was to subsume the copy principle within his associationist framework, then it would not be the only element of his theory 17. Hume’s objection here boils down to the thesis that the truly important issue is not whether any of the contents of our perceptions are innate but whether they are intellectual or sensible. This seems to me spot on, and it is why, in this book, the distinction between intellectualism and sensibilism is fundamental, not that between innatism and acquisitionism. Of course, when the difference is laid out in this way, Hume’s reconciliation of Locke and Malebranche (THN 648/408) no longer works (as emerged in chapter 15-A, Malebranche only seems closer to empiricism, but is in fact the most Platonistic of all intellectualists). 18. For further consideration of the copy principle and its treatment in the literature, see HTC, chap. 1-E and Garrett, Cognition, chap. 2.


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whose initial characterization turns out, in retrospect, to have been tentative, or even subject to correction, in the light of new experiments. We have already seen that the notion of force and vivacity by which Hume distinguished impressions from ideas contains blank spaces that are not filled until “belief in real existence” is analyzed in Treatise I/iii (in EHU it is likewise postponed—from II to V/ii). Another example is the I/i/§3 distinction between memory and imagination in terms of (1) the greater vivacity of the former and (2) the freedom of the latter from being “restrain’d to the same order and form with the original impressions” (THN 9/12). For, in I/iii, Hume first finds reason to reject the second point of difference (85/59–60), and then renders the first worthless when he shows that imagination, when operating in conformity with associative principles, is capable of conferring on ideas a force and vivacity equal to those of sense impressions and memories (119–20/82–3, 153/104, and 320/208). Indeed, memory gradually comes to be amalgamated with causal (110/76) and resemblance (260–1/170) association, until finally, in the conclusion to Treatise I, it is declared to be “founded on the imagination, or the vivacity of our ideas” (265/173).19 Thus, the fact that Hume does not expressly designate the copy principle an associative relation when first formulating it (three sections before the notion of association is first introduced!) does not mean that he did not do so sometime before concluding the exposition of his theory of understanding in Treatise I/iv/§7. This first indication, retrospectively, that the copy principle would end up being explained as an associative relation has already been considered: it is inferred from a relation of constant conjunction. The next sizeable step along this path was taken in Treatise I/iii/§3, “Why a cause is always necessary.” Hume’s focus in this section is the general causal maxim “that whatever begins to exist must have a cause of existence” (78/56).20 Philosophers prior to Hume, sensibilists and intellectualists alike, treated the maxim as an intuitive certainty, ranking it “one of those maxims, which tho’ they may be deny’d with the lips, ’tis impossible for men in their hearts really to doubt of” (79/56). Impossible in that its negation 19. Since the only sense in which Hume spotlighted imagination as a capacity to enliven ideas in Treatise I is its associative capacity, it was almost certainly with associative imagination in mind that he claimed that “The memory, senses, and understanding are, therefore, all of them founded on the imagination, or the vivacity of our ideas” (THN 265/173). Earlier in the paragraph, he speaks of experience and habit, which suggests, first and foremost, causal association, but also the other varieties—contiguity and resemblance—insofar as they depend on custom (chapter 18) and, more specifically, on customary association in relations of cause and effect (73–4/52–3 and 109–17/76–81), for their ability to influence belief. The conclusion of the paragraph accordingly serves to recapitulate, in reverse order, the ideaenlivening effects of experience and habit on the imagination: imagination-based understanding takes us beyond the senses; the imagination-based imperfect identity of body lets us represent the objects of the senses as independent of them; and imagination-based memory is requisite to the discovery of that succession of perceptions that constitutes our self or person. For an extended analysis of 265/173, see HTC, chap. 2. 20. One of the greatest losses in the Enquiry is the suppression of the topic of the general causal maxim, where it finds only one mention, and that merely in passing: “It is universally allowed that nothing exists without a cause of its existence, and that chance, when strictly examined, is a mere negative word and means not any real power which has anywhere a being in nature” (EHU VIII/i ¶25). Since Hume suffered persecution for what he wrote in Treatise I/iii/§3 on more than one occasion, its suppression is not surprising (details are given in HTC, chap. 4-B; see also note 34 below).

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is not just unlikely or implausible, but unintelligible: a self-contradictory combination of ideas that consequently is not a possible thought at all. And since this is just to say that intuitively certain knowledge of the general causal maxim is in no way beholden to experience—the senses, remembered past experience, and, a fortiori, associative imagination—it follows that there is nothing that limits the scope of the maxim to perceptions. In particular, if the impossibility of even thinking (much less believing) the maxim false is taken as proof that all objects without exception must be subject to it, then it holds for all causes and all things that begin to exist simply as such, irrespective of whether they are, or can be, objects of the senses (impressions of sensation and reflexion) or memory and imagination (ideas). Although restrictions may need to be placed on the scope of what can be thought of as a ‘something that begins to exist’ or ‘cause’—God, for example, was excluded from the scope of the former by both Locke and Hume (CWS 61–2 and D IX 56) while, in Berkeley’s case, everything other than spirits, including “third natures” (3D239–40), is excluded from the scope of the latter (chapter 13-A)—no such restrictions are built into the meaning of the maxim itself, insofar as it is known by intuition to be true. Thus, the intuitive certainty of the maxim brings with it a causal nexus that, in addition to perceptions (objects capable of presenting themselves to our consciousness in sensation, reflexion, or thought), may also include within its scope (1) things that escape our detection, (2) things inaccessible to observation, (3) things unobservable in principle, and (4) even things impossible for us to conceive because specifically different from all our impressions and ideas (section C). In the face of so inclusive a causal nexus, it is idle to pretend to restrict the copy principle, or any other causal relation between perceptions disclosed to us by experienced constant conjunction, to perceptions. For even if one conceded that no causal principle can be discovered except by means of constant conjunction, or even customary association, its discovery is one thing, its meaning and scope of application quite another. In particular, once we find that simple impressions and resembling simple ideas are united in a causal relation (the generic copy principle of all sensibilists), the intuitive, hence a priori certainty of the general causal maxim, not experience, will decide the context into which it fits, namely, a causal nexus open to including nonperceptions as well as perceptions. For example, by ascribing intuitive certainty to the general causal maxim, both Locke (CWS 61–2) and Berkeley (VV §30) had no doubt that they were warranted in situating their copy principles in the context of a causal nexus that includes faculty-endowed mind-substances, beings infinite and finite, including (in Locke’s case) corporeal beings, and (in both their cases) possibly also things of a third nature, different from both corporeal and spiritual being (section D). Thus, the ascription of intuitive certainty to the causal maxim already of itself suffices to erect an insuperable barrier to any claim that the copy principle is a mere associative relation, bound up by content with, and so limited in scope of application to, easy, idea-enlivening transitions of thought. Hume cleared away this obstacle when he answered his question “why a cause is always necessary” (title of Treatise I/iii/§3) by denying that it is because we have either intuitive or demonstrative certainty, arguing instead that “that opinion


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must necessarily arise from observation and experience,” and so be of the same purely associative character as our beliefs “that such particular causes must necessarily have such particular effects, and why we form an inference from one to another” (82/58); that is, a matter merely of force and vivacity feeling (chapter 2B). The true import of Hume’s (still frequently misunderstood) thesis comes through with signal clarity in the course of his defense (written in the third person) against the charge of atheism a decade after the Treatise: It is common for Philosophers to distinguish the Kinds of Evidence into intuitive, demonstrative, sensible, and moral; by which they intend only to mark a Difference between them, not to denote a Superiority of one above another. Moral Certainty may reach as high a Degree of Assurance as Mathematical; and our Senses are surely to be comprised amongst the clearest and most convincing of all Evidences. Now, it being the Author’s Purpose, in the Pages cited in the Specimen [Treatise I/iii/§3], to examine the Grounds of that Proposition; he used the Freedom of disputing the common Opinion, that it was founded on demonstrative or intuitive Certainty; but asserts, that it is supported by moral Evidence, and is followed by a Conviction of the same Kind with these Truths, That all Men must die, and that the Sun will rise Tomorrow. Is this any Thing like denying the Truth of that Proposition, which indeed A Man must have lost all common Sense to doubt of?.. Thus you may judge of the Candor of the whole Charge, when you see the assigning of one Kind of Evidence for a Proposition, instead of another, is called denying that Proposition; that the invalidating only one Kind of Argument for the Divine Existence is called positive Atheism; nay, that the weakening only of one individual Argument of that Kind is called rejecting that whole Species of Argument, and the Inferences of others are ascribed to the Author as his real Opinion. (LGFE II)

Whether or not one accepts Hume’s professions of innocence on the charge of atheism, there can be no question that it was ever his intention to deny that “A cause is always necessary.” The gist of Hume’s argument in Treatise I/iii/§3 that our certainty as to its truth is only moral (proof, the highest degree of probability), not intuitive or demonstrative, and so of the nature of an empirical principle, is as follows: 1. Cause and effect (necessary connection) is a relation that, by its very nature, concerns distinct existents, that is, things conceivable separately by the criterion of the separability principle. For example, since “We can form no idea of a mountain without a valley” (THN 32/26), valleys and mountains are incapable of being united in a causal relation, regardless of their experienced constant conjunction. By contrast, “The falling of a pebble may, for aught we know, extinguish the sun; or the wish of a man control the planets in their orbits” (EHU XII/iii ¶29), because these items admit of being separately conceived; and “’Tis only by experience we learn their influence and connexion; and this influence we ought never to extend beyond experience” (THN 466/300). 2. If we were intuitively certain that all beginnings of existence must have a cause of their existence, then it would be impossible for us to conceive even a single case there this general rule does not hold:

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HUME’S AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES We can never demonstrate the necessity of a cause to every new existence, or new modification of existence, without shewing at the same time the impossibility there is, that any thing can ever begin to exist without some productive principle; and where the latter proposition cannot be prov’d, we must despair of ever being able to prove the former. (THN 79/56)

However, no such proof of impossibility can ever be adduced. For “all distinct ideas are separable from each other;” and since, in all particular relations of cause and effect, “the ideas of cause and effect are evidently distinct” (premise 1), it is perfectly possible, in any particular case of conceiving the beginning of something’s existence—say, (a feeling of) heat—to form an idea of it without being necessitated (as in the valley-mountain case) to conceive its relation to some cause of its existence as well, say, (a visible) flame. And since ideas are, or at least consist of, nothing but copies of antecedent impressions, Hume inferred from the conceptual possibility the possibility that something may really begin to exist without a cause: ’twill be easy for us to conceive any object to be non-existent this moment, and existent the next, without conjoining to it the distinct idea of a cause or productive principle. The separation, therefore, of the idea of a cause from that of a beginning of existence, is plainly possible for the imagination; and consequently the actual separation of these objects is so far possible, that it implies no contradiction nor absurdity; and is therefore incapable of being refuted by any reasoning from mere ideas; without which ’tis impossible to demonstrate the necessity of a cause. (79–80/56)

3. The inference from separability in imagination to the possibility of being distinct in reality is an allusion to the formulation of the separability principle given in the course of Hume’s defense of Berkeley’s position on general ideas in Treatise I/i/§7: Whatever objects are different are distinguishable, and whatever objects are distinguishable are separable by the thought and imagination. And we may here add, that these propositions are equally true in the inverse, and that whatever objects are separable are also distinguishable, and that whatever objects are distinguishable are also different. For how is it possible we can separate what is not distinguishable, or distinguish what is not different? (18/17)

The nature of general ideas as implied by the separability principle, although left implicit, is crucial to Hume’s argument in Treatise I/iii/§3, since the proponent of the view that the general causal maxim is intuitively certain presumes that we are in possession of a general idea of causation—or of power, energy, necessary connection, or a productive principle (all of which Hume deemed synonymous with causation: 77/55 and 157/106)—which is inseparable in thought from the equally general idea of a beginning of existence. If general ideas are explained in Berkeley’s fashion—particular perceptions employed to denote other particular perceptions indifferently according to their resemblance in a certain regard (which


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may or may not concern their sensible appearance: chapter 10)—then the only way we could generalize to an intuitively certain general causal maxim would be if it was intuitively certain in each and every individual case that this individual Y could not have come into existence unless that individual X (distinct from it) had caused it to exist. This means that given any two ideas, we need do no more to determine whether or not they are causally connected than we need to do in the case of the intuitive relation between the generalized ideas: a simple comparison of ideas must suffice, without reliance on experience in any way—be it sense perception, remembered constant conjunction, or a fortiori customary association. For example, even if my memory of all the relations in which I have experienced flame and heat were erased, I would still be able to determine with intuitive certainty when I see a flame begin to exist a certain distance from me that I will soon be feeling its heat; that is, I will know this with a certainty equal, and of precisely the same kind, as that with which I know that 2 times 2 is 4, or the sum of the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. Similarly, if all memory of the relations in which I have experienced men’s wishes and the orbits of the planets were erased, I would nevertheless be able to know with intuitive certainty—simply by comparing the ideas and without resorting to experience—that a mere wish will have no effect whatsoever on the orbits of the planets. Since intuitive certainty of this kind is never, in any individual case, attainable, Hume reasoned that we are not in possession of a general idea of cause and effect of the kind we would need in order to be able to reconcile the supposition that the general causal maxim is intuitively certain with the conception of general ideas founded on the separability principle: It has been establish’d as a certain principle, that general or abstract ideas are nothing but individual ones taken in a certain light, and that, in reflecting on any object, ’tis as impossible to exclude from our thought all particular degrees of quantity and quality as from the real nature of things. If we be possest, therefore, of any idea of power in general, we must also be able to conceive some particular species of it; and as power cannot subsist alone, but is always regarded as an attribute of some being or existence, we must be able to place this power in some particular being, and conceive that being as endow’d with a real force and energy, by which such a particular effect necessarily results from its operation. We must distinctly and particularly conceive the connexion betwixt the cause and effect, and be able to pronounce, from a simple view of the one, that it must be follow’d or preceded by the other. This is the true manner of conceiving a particular power in a particular body: and a general idea being impossible without an individual; where the latter is impossible ’tis certain the former can never exist. Now nothing is more evident, than that the human mind cannot form such an idea of two objects, as to conceive any connexion betwixt them, or comprehend distinctly that power or efficacy, by which they are united. Such a connexion wou’d amount to a demonstration, and wou’d imply the absolute impossibility for the one object not to follow, or to be conceiv’d not to follow upon the other: Which kind of connexion has already been rejected in all cases. If any one is of a contrary opinion, and thinks he has attain’d a notion of power in any particular object, I desire he may point out to me that object. But till I meet with such-aone, which I despair of, I cannot forbear concluding, that since we can never

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HUME’S AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES distinctly conceive how any particular power can possibly reside in any particular object, we deceive ourselves in imagining we can form any such general idea. (THN 161–2/109; also 111–12/77 and EHU XI ¶30)

Lacking a general idea of power and causal efficacy of the requisite kind, we can have no doubt that our undoubted certainty regarding the proposition that a cause is always necessary is founded neither on intuition nor demonstration but on experience. In a nutshell, Hume argued (1) that we have already formed the idea of a beginning of existence when we conceive something as absent one moment and present the next—that there is nothing in this conception, in and of itself, that compels us to add “to it the distinct idea of a cause or productive principle” (79/ 56)—and, on this ground, (2) that our certainty that a cause is necessary to every beginning of existence must be grounded in something more than merely our conception of a beginning of existence; (3) but if not in intuition or demonstration, where else than in experience and custom could this certainty originate? This result, more than anything else, led Kant to cast Hume in the role of destroyer of metaphysics (PFM 257–8 and n), and it is easy to see why. With the maxim, together with the idea of causation at its heart, deprived of their a priori intuitive grounding and thrown wholly onto the mercies of experience, the objective causal nexus weaving our perceptions into a single fabric with nonperceptions—the causal nexus of substances (the mind and substances external to it) in real causal interaction taken for granted in the metaphysics of all early moderns, Locke and Berkeley included—is swept away at a stroke. What remains in its wake are only one’s particular perceptions themselves, existing fleetingly in consciousness (THN 252–3/165 and 635–6/400). Yet even here real (preassociative, extraimaginative) causality cannot get a grip. For sensations, as Berkeley put it, are “visibly inactive” (PHK I §25); and by contrast with Berkeley, Hume maintained that this is just as true of impressions of reflexion and ideas generally as it is of impressions of sensation: our own minds afford us no more notion of energy than matter does. When we consider our will or volition a priori, abstracting from experience, we are never able to infer any effect from it. And when we take the assistance of experience, it only shows us objects contiguous, successive, and constantly conjoined. (THN 656–7/413; also 78/56, 165/111, 249/163, 632/108, and EHU VII/i) The uniting principle among our perceptions is as unintelligible as that among external objects, and is not known to us in any other way than experience. Now the nature and effects of experience have been already sufficiently examin’d and explain’d. It never gives us any insight into the internal structure or operating principle of objects, but only accustoms the mind to pass from one to another . . . [T]here is but one kind of necessity, as there is but one kind of cause, and . . . the common distinction betwixt moral and physical necessity is without any foundation in nature. (THN 169–71/114–15; also 404/260, 409–10/263, and EHU VII/ii ¶30)

Apart from the idea of causation we derive from customary association, “we can never arrive at the most distant notion of it, or be able to attribute it either to


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external or internal objects, to spirit or body, to causes or effects” (THN 165/111). Customary association is the unique source of the idea of necessary connection that forms an essential element of the content of all ideas of cause and effect;21 and the latter can no more be abstracted from the former than the idea of a valley can be abstracted from that of a mountain: The necessary connexion betwixt causes and effects is the foundation of our inference from one to the other. The foundation of our inference is the transition arising form the accustom’d union. These are, therefore, the same. (165/111; also 82/58, 88/62, 92/64, 167/113, 169/114, and EHU VII/ii)

When we consider perceptions (impressions and ideas) as they are independently of customary association, and the facile transitions of thought that are their essence (THN 99/69, 204/135, 220/145, 260/169–70), we find “That all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences” (636/400; also 139/95, 223/147, 233–4/153–4, 242–6/ 159–61, 248/162, 252–3/164–5, 259–60/169, and EHU VII/ii ¶26). The causal maxim thus has neither objective meaning nor validity outside and independently of associative imagination; and consequently restricts the validity of all causal principles, including the copy principle, in the same way. Some interpreters have questioned whether Hume himself was aware of the full scope and significance of the break with the past signaled by his analysis of the general causal maxim. David Owen, for example, believes that such textual evidence as there is indicates that Hume took a different view of his achievement in this regard than Kant and others were to do: Whatever Hume’s readers might have thought, I do not think there is much textual evidence to support the view that Hume thought this was what was new and important. I think that what Hume thought was notable and significant was just what he went on to say in the Abstract: not only is past experience necessary for us to be able to judge that one event is causally related to another, but also it is not reason so much as custom that explains how it is we come to have such beliefs.22

The problem with this, in my view, is that it treats as basic something that, for Hume, is a mere corollary. More fundamental and significant in his eyes than the 21. What Hume terms “philosophical causation” (THN 94/65, 170/114) does not involve customary association, and consists in nothing more than a relation of constant conjunction with the addition of an idea of necessary connection. It is not, however, an exception to the claim made here. For Hume made quite clear that philosophical causation is not a source of the idea of necessity, and that it consequently presupposes natural causation both for the element (necessity) that alone distinguishes it from constant conjunction and (what is the same) our ability “to reason upon it, or draw any inference from it” (94/ 65). See chapter 19. 22. Hume’s Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 90n13. My positions are generally closer to Owen’s than to anyone else’s, but whether one agrees with him or not, there seems to me no question that his is among the finest and most important books on Hume to date. My basic difference with him, as with virtually every other interpreter of Hume, concerns the preeminence of the problem of origins in Hume’s thought, and the central place of the psychologistic method Hume developed to solve it (that Owen speaks not of the idea of cause and its contents, but of our judgments and beliefs, betrays an epistemological, rather than conceptual-psychological focus.

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solution to the epistemological problem of how we form beliefs about what is causally related to what is his answer to the conceptual (psychological) question, what is the source of the idea of necessary connection essential to all our ideas of causal relations? The latter question concerns the content thought in the idea and takes precedence over any question relating to the cognitive use to which the idea is put. It is thus the only question concerning cause and effect Hume saw fit to characterize as the key to resolving “one of the most sublime questions in philosophy, viz. that concerning the power and efficacy of causes,” and its answer, in his view, can only be discovered by tracing ideas of causation to “the impressions, from which it is originally deriv’d” (THN 156–7/105–6). Any doubt that this is what he deemed really “new and important” in his treatment of the topic of causation should be dispelled by the fact that it was precisely here that Hume expected resistance to his view to focus: I doubt not but my sentiments will be treated by many as extravagant and ridiculous. What! the efficacy of causes lie in the determination of the mind! As if causes did not operate entirely independent of the mind, and wou’d not continue their operation, even tho there was no mind existent to contemplate them, or reason concerning them. Thought may well depend on causes for its operations, but not causes on thought. This is to reverse the order of nature, and make that secondary, which is really primary. To every operation there is a power proportion’d; and this power must be plac’d on the body, that operates. If we remove the power from one cause, we must ascribe it to another: But to remove it from all causes, and bestow it on a being, that is no ways related to the cause or effect, but by perceiving them, is a gross absurdity, and contrary to the mst certain principles of human reason. I can only reply to all these arguments, that the case is here much the same, as if a blind man shou’d pretend to find a great many absurdities in the supposition, that the colour of scarlet is not the same with the sound of a trumpet, nor light the same with solidity. If we have really no idea of a power or efficacy in any object, ’twill be to little purpose to prove than an efficacy is necessary in all operations. (167–8/113)

What should by now be evident is that the indispensable basis justifying this anti-Humean consensus is the intuitive certainty of the general causal maxim. For without this underpinning, what ground is there for maintaining that the causal nexus is independent of our thought? Berkeley (chapters 12-C and 13-A) was by no means the first philosopher to recognize that all particular inferences regarding cause and effect—that bread nourishes, arsenic kills, chains restrain, etc.—are neither immune to revision in the light of subsequent experience nor capable of underwriting inferences to the world of causally interacting substances lying behind the veil of our perceptions. The only reason Berkeley and other pre-Humean metaphysicians did not lose any sleep over this was that they thought they could at least rest comfortably in the intuitive certainty of the general principle that every new existence, state, or action must have some cause of its existence, our perceptions included. It thus seems highly unlikely that Hume’s predecessors and hostile contemporaries would have found it particularly “notable and significant,”


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much less shocking, if, as Owen suggests, he had gone no further than to claim that the psychology of customary association is integral to the formation of our beliefs about particular causes (Berkeley already did essentially this in the case of sensible things: PHK I §§ 30–1, 62–6, and VV §13). That this changes the moment the nature and grounds of our certainty of the truth of the general causal maxim are placed in doubt could not be brought out more clearly than by Hume’s reply to the charge that his account of the origin of the idea of necessary connection puts at risk the independence of causes in terms of what is, unmistakably, a variant formulation of the general causal maxim23: “If we have really no idea of a power or efficacy in any object, or of any real connexion betwixt causes and effects, ’twill be to little purpose to prove, that an efficacy is necessary in all operations” (THN 168/113). The point (Lockean in inspiration) is that all previous endeavors to prove the general causal maxim get things the wrong way around: if we do not first establish what idea of necessary connection, if any, is involved therein, then we cannot possibly know what kind of certainty, and which source of certainty, is pertinent to our acceptance of this proposition. Hume’s account of the origin of the idea of necessary connection is thence, at the same time, a solution to the problem of the nature and source of our certainty of the truth of the causal maxim; and the context in which he made this clear (167–8) leaves no doubt that he was fully aware of the horrified reaction that would greet his contention that the maxim “is not founded on any arguments either demonstrative or intuitive” (172/115) but on experience (82/58). When this did indeed happen, and he was made to suffer for it (on more than one occasion), the suggestion that he could have been in the least surprised defies belief.24 For what was at stake was nothing less than the fate of metaphysics itself, together with the entire edifice of rational theology erected upon it: without the intuitive certainty of the causal maxim, the empirical limitations of particular causal judgments would inevitably vitiate the maxim itself and undermine all basis for causal inferences to the supersensible divine by means of pure reason.25 And I find it equally impossible to credit the notion that when, in 23. Hume made clear as early as THN 12/13 that causal association concerns actions and motions (qualities too: 94/65) as much as it does existence. The focus on the latter in Treatise I/iii should consequently always be understood as an elision of the former in the latter. The variant formulation of the maxim on 168/113, in terms of ‘operations,’ should likewise be construed as an elision, but one that goes the other way (“causes of existence” being folded into “causes of actions”). 24. See HTC, 141–2 and 307n9, for details. 25. The implications of Hume’s rejection of all sources of the idea of cause and effect other than customary association on the supersensible inference in accordance with the general causal maxim could not be more clearly stated than in this remark (prudently masked as a narrow criticism of Malebranchian occasionalism): “We are got into fairy land, long ere we have reached the last steps of our theory and there we have no reason to trust our common methods of argument, or to think that our usual analogies and probabilities have any authority. Our line is too short to fathom such immense abysses. And however we may flatter ourselves, that we are guided, in every step which we take, by a kind of verisimilitude and experience we may be assured, that this fancied experience has no authority, when we thus apply it to subjects, that lie entirely out of the sphere of experience” (EHU VII/i ¶24). This only makes sense if the idea of necessary connection employed in the causal maxim is derived from, and inapplicable independently of, customary association, and the maxim itself derives all its authority from the strength of the habit on which the association is based (see chapter 19-D). For otherwise the bounds of experience would fail to coincide with the bounds of our reason.

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Kant, a worthy successor finally did emerge, Hume would have been in the least surprised at Kant’s declaration that metaphysicians must stop everything until a way could be found to surmount Hume’s challenge to the general idea (category) and principle of causation (PFM 277–8 and Progress 266). In sum, Hume finished what Berkeley began (chapter 14-F): by construing all cause-and-effect relations—not just between sensations but those involving reflexions as well (volitions, desires, and so on)—as transitions of thought between perceptions that are in themselves separate and distinct, Hume was able to show that, insofar as we have any idea of causal connections at all, it can only be that copied from our experience of facile transitions of thought from impressions to enlivened ideas. He thereby fixed the locus of the only idea of a necessary connection the human mind is capable of forming in associative imagination, and restricted the scope of all propositions incorporating it accordingly. The consequence is nothing less than the exclusion of everything that exists prior to and independently of associative imagination, including preassociative impressions and ideas, from participation in the causal nexus defined by the general causal maxim.26 And if this scope restriction applies to the causal maxim, the most general and certain causal principle of all, must it not apply to the copy principle as well? F. The Copy Principle as a Product of Association We are finally in a position to ask whether there is any text in which the copy principle of Treatise I/i/§1, itself and/or in combination with the theory of ideas presented in I/i/§2, is explicitly and unambiguously amalgamated with Hume’s associationism. The answer is yes. The text in question can be found in the penultimate section of Treatise I, “Of personal identity.” There, as always, Hume’s focus is on the psychologistic explication of the idea of the mind (self, person)27 in terms of its originating impression. While it would take us too far afield to enter into the details of Hume’s theory of identity here,28 its gist is as follows. The idea of the mind is an instance of that “imperfect identity” (THN 256/167) which results when something that, in truth, is not an identity at all puts the imagination into an affective disposition so similar to that characteristic of relations of “perfect identity” (203/135) that it becomes all but impossible for it not to confound them (202–4/134–6 and 253–5/165–6). The disposition of imagination in both cases is 26. Even if one sets aside the problems already discussed in connection with “The New Hume” school of interpretation (see section C and note 14), Hume’s treatment of the causal maxim poses it an insuperable problem. For the notion of an inconceivable “secret connexion” (“ultimate operating principle,” “hidden energy,” etc.), implying as it does a causal nexus that extends to realities that not only never are but never could be present to our minds as perceptions, seems irreconcilable with the limits imposed on the necessity of a cause for every beginning of existence when Hume ascribed this necessity to experience and custom rather than a priori intuition. For further discussion of the causal maxim, see HTC, chap. 4-B, 5-C and -E. 27. Hume seems to have used ‘mind’ (THN 261/170), ‘self’ (251), and ‘person’ (title I/iv/§6) to designate the same idea. 28. Elements of Hume’s account of identity have been considered in chapter 3 and will be further examined in chapter 17, but for a full treatment of the topic, see HTC, pt. III.


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that of a succession of transitions between distinct perceptions that feels so smooth and easy that “The faculties repose themselves in a manner, and take no more exercise, than what is necessary to continue that idea of which we were formerly possest. . . . The passage from one moment to another is scarce felt, and distinguishes not itself by a different perception or idea, which may require a different direction of the spirits, in order to its conception” (203/135; also 98–9/69 and 255–6/166–7). An identity is said to be perfect when the idea successively reproduced is the idea of an object rather than of a relation of objects (chapter 17-A). As a result, any discernible interruption or variation in the succession suffices to destroy a perfect identity by introducing a new perception, necessitating a new direction of the spirits sufficiently pronounced to draw attention to itself, thereby ending their state of repose. However, according to Hume, human nature is so constituted that if the variation or interruption is counteracted by a sufficiently strong associative relation (or relations), the effects of variation or interruption on the affective disposition of the imagination can be overcome, even effaced. In that case, a succession of ideas not of objects (perceptions) but of the same relation of objects can put imagination into a disposition so similar to that characteristic of perfect identity as to be effectively indiscernible from it, and we arrive at the idea of imperfect identity. This idea can arise in either of two ways. When the relation is a resemblance relating sequences of perceptions prior to and subsequent to interruptions by other appearances, the imperfect identity we conceive is that of an external object: the associatively generated fiction, and belief, that what appears to our senses continues in existence even when no longer perceived, and is therefore distinct (external to and independent from) from the mind (199–209/133–9).29 The idea of an external object, however, is possible only in relation to a standard of continuity and distinctness sufficient for its conception: the imperfect identity of one’s own mind (self, person), conceived as enduring through all variation in our particular perceptions (THN 189–90/126–7 and 206–8/137–8; see ECHU II/xiv/§3).30 What is the 29. Since data of touch and vision are central to this fiction, the external objects we represent are invariably spatial objects, that is, bodies (corporeal things, physical objects). 30. In his explication of the identity of body—a perceived existence that continues through interruptions of its appearances to the senses—Hume argued that the only way the appearance of a perception can be distinguished from its existence is if the mind, with respect to whose senses it appears and disappears, is itself merely a product of associative imagination. For, in that case, the mind is, in itself, nothing more than “a connected heap of perceptions,” and “there is no absurdity in separating any particular perception from the mind; that is, in breaking off all its relations, with that connected mass of perceptions, which constitute a thinking being” (THN 207/138). One of the implications of this that surprisingly has seldom if ever been remarked is that the identity of body premises the identity of the mind (self, person), and that though in the order of textual exposition, body comes first, the mind precedes and makes it possible in the order of reasons. This is confirmed by the fact that when Hume first canvassed the possibility that the idea of the distinct existence of bodies—their external, independent existence—has its origin in “a kind of fallacy and illusion,” he insisted that, in order for this to be so, “both the objects and ourselves must be obvious to our senses, otherwise they cou’d not be compar’d by these faculties,” so that “The difficulty, then, is how far we are ourselves the objects of our senses” (189/126). The difficulty is not to be solved by comparing external objects to our own body, since “properly speaking, ’tis not our body we perceived, when we regard our limbs and members, but certain impressions, which enter by the senses; so that the ascribing a real and corporeal existence to these

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relation of ideas whose invariability lulls the imagination into an affective disposition so similar to perfect identity that it inevitably confounds them and so forms the idea of an identical self? This second species of imperfect identity does not, as Locke supposed (chapter 3-A), arise from the resemblance relations distinctive of memory (260–2/170–1). Rather, it has its basis in relations of cause and effect, including the causal dimension of memory implicit in the copy principle (“The relation of cause and effect . . . [whereby] each impression draws along with it a precise idea, which takes its place in the imagination,” 110/76): As to causation; we may observe, that the true idea of the human mind, is to consider it as a system of different perceptions or different existences, which are link’d together by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually produce, destroy, influence, and modify each other. Our impressions give rise to their correspondent ideas; and these in turn produce other impressions. One thought chaces another, and draws after it a third, by which it is expell’d in its turn. . . . In this view, therefore, memory does not so much produce as discover personal identity, by shewing us the relation of cause and effect among our different perceptions. (261–2/170–1)

The “system of causal relations” that gives rise to the smooth transitions between successive ideas of the same relation, establishing “the continuity of thought” (258/169) constitutive of the “true idea of the human mind,” is clearly none other than the theory of ideas Hume introduced in Treatise I/i, incorporating the copy principle of I/i/§1. We can point right to it: “Our impressions give rise to their correspondent ideas” is the copy principle. Its sequel—“these ideas produce other impressions”—is the other causal relation featured in Hume’s solution to the problem of origins in §2 (section B). And “One thought chaces another, and draws after it a third, by which it is expell’d in its turn” corresponds to a third causal relation, the association of ideas, introduced in Treatise I/ii/§4 and elaborated in connection with the origin of the idea of necessary connection in I/iii and the origin of the ideas of external objects and the mind in I/iv. It is the third of these causal relations that is most important, because, in the course of accounting for “the true idea of the human mind,” Hume made it expressly and unambiguously clear that all three of the causal relations concerned in the origins of ideas—including the copy principle—are associative in nature, “uniting principles in the ideal world . . . the very essence of [which] consists in their impressions, or to their objects, is an act of the mind as difficult to explain, as that which we examine at present” (191/127). It is the mind (self, person) and nothing but this that is requisite in order to perform the comparison requisite to establish the independent external existence of bodies, including one’s own. To be sure, Hume mentions the need for such a comparison only in the course of arguing that the senses cannot be the source of the idea of body, either veridically or by fallacy and illusion. But this does not make such a comparison any less necessary to forming the idea of body by means other than the senses, so that, when Hume does eventually trace its source to associative imagination, he leaves no doubt (207–8) that this is so only because that same faculty is also the source of “the true idea of the human mind.” For associative imagination then has what it needs to perform the comparison requisite to be able even so much as to distinguish, if only fictitiously and falsely (209/139), the appearance of a perception to the senses from its real existence. For a detailed discussion see HTC, chap. 7.


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producing an easy transition of ideas” (THN 260/169). This, to be sure, represents a seismic shift, comparable to the way Hume’s elaboration of the theory of associative imagination gradually erases the line between memory and imagination and eventuates in the incorporation of the former within the latter. For, on the preceding occasion where Hume contrasted the system of realities of the senses and memory with the system of realities founded on customary association, he gave no indication that, in the end, the former would likewise be incorporated into the latter: ’Tis evident, that whatever is present to the memory, striking upon the mind with a vivacity, which resembles an immediate impression, must become of considerable moment in all the operations of the mind, and must easily distinguish itself above the mere fictions of the imagination. Of these impressions or ideas of the memory we form a kind of system, comprehending whatever we remember to have been present, either to our internal perception or senses; and every particular of that system, joined to the present impressions, we are pleas’d to call a reality. But the mind stops not here. For finding, that with this system of perceptions, there is another connected by custom, or if you will, by the relation of cause or effect, it proceeds to the consideration of their ideas; and as it feels that ’tis in a manner necessarily determin’d to view these particular ideas, and that the custom or relation, by which it is determin’d, admits not of the least change, it forms them into a new system, which it likewise dignifies with the title of realities. . . . ’Tis this latter principle, which peoples the world, and brings us acquainted with such existences, as by their removal in time and place, lie beyond the reach of the senses and memory. By means of it I paint the entire universe in my imagination, and fix my attention on any part of it I please. (THN 107–8/75)

Hume’s decision not to group “The first of these systems . . . the object of the memory and senses” together with “the system of judgment” founded on custom seems to have been made for expository, rather than substantive reasons. For by this juncture (Treatise I/iii/§9), he had already established that the idea of causal relation originates in transitions from impressions to ideas facilitated by customary association in iii/§6; and since the copy principle consists in precisely such a transition—the only difference being that the impressions and ideas concerned are specified as being both simple and resembling—Hume would have had no warrant for making an exception of it. Nevertheless, he opted not to make this explicit until he was ready to deal with the associative basis of identity in Treatise I/iv and the identity of the mind (self, person) in particular in §6. The first indication that the system of realities that make up the object of the memory and senses are to be subsumed within Hume’s associationism comes in the course of his account of the imperfect identity of body in iv/§2: what we call a mind, is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations, and suppos’d, tho’ falsely, to be endow’d with a perfect simplicity and identity. Now as every perception is distinguishable from another, and may be consider’d as separately existent; it evidently follows, that there is no absurdity in separating any particular perception from the mind;

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HUME’S AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES that is, in breaking off all its relations, with that connected mass of perceptions, which constitute a thinking being. (207/137–8)

If the idea of the mind is no more than the idea of a “connected mass of perceptions,” separate and distinct in themselves, and united together by “certain relations,” can there be any doubt as to the associative nature of these relations? If they were preassociative (preimaginative), and so immediately evident to the senses, then they could no more be imagined different from how they are found than we could imagine the immediately evident relation of “brighter than” in which scarlet stands to burgundy red capable of varying so long as the ideas remain the same (69–70/50). Since causal relations are precisely the sort that can vary, and even be broken off, without entailing the least variation in the ideas concerned, and yet are also the only sort of connection between distinct perceptions powerful enough to form them into a “connected mass” (I/iii/§9), there is little doubt that Hume was asserting that there is no absurdity in breaking off the causal connection of any perception to the connected mass of perceptions in which the idea of the mind consists on 207/137–8. And since by that juncture he had already determined that causal connections are associative in nature (natural causation), or at least founded on association (philosophical causation), it seems clear that the connected mass he equated with the mind is a mere fiction of associative imagination, consisting simply and solely of facile transitions of thought. Still, Hume saw fit to postpone a formal statement to this effect until Treatise I/iv/§6. There he tells us, in so many words, that he is going to apply to the case of the mind “what has been already prov’d at large, that the understanding never observes any real connexion among objects, and that even the union of cause and effect, when strictly examin’d, resolves itself into a customary association of ideas” (THN 259–60/169). When Hume presented his account in I/iii/§14, he made a point of stressing its “extraordinary” (156/105) nature by imagining the shock he was sure would greet it (see citation of 167–8/113 in section E above). Yet not until I/iv/§6 (aside from a brief anticipation on 169/114) did he expressly apply this result to the system of realities of memory and sense that constitute the world of the mind. Hume did so in order to resolve the question whether the relation of personal identity concerns “something that really binds our several perceptions together, or only associates their ideas in the imagination” (259/169) in favor of the latter: identity is nothing really belonging to these different perceptions, and uniting them together; but is merely a quality, which we attribute to them, because of the union of their ideas in the imagination, when we reflect upon them. Now the only qualities, which can give ideas an union in the imagination, are these three relations above-mention’d. These are the uniting principles in the ideal world, and without them every distinct object is separable by the mind, and may be separately consider’d, and appears not to have any more connexion with any other object, than if disjoin’d by the greatest difference and remoteness. ’Tis, therefore, on some of these three relations of resemblance, contiguity and causation, that identity depends; and as the very essence of these relations consists in their producing an easy transition of ideas; it follows, that our notions of person-


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al identity, proceed entirely from the smooth and uninterrupted progress of the thought along a train of connected ideas, according to the principles aboveexplain’d.

After quickly ruling out contiguity as a significant factor in relating perceptions most of which are only indeterminately spatial (smells, flavors, sounds) or not spatial at all (volitions, desires, passions, and thoughts), Hume turned to resemblance, as instantiated by memory. Although the marks by which he initially distinguished memory from the imagination had by this point long since been discarded (section E), this was only the second time he made explicit that memory is founded on an associative relation (its dependence on causal association had been shown on THN 110/76). The necessary resemblance of memories to the past perceptions from which they were copied bestows a relation on “that succession of perceptions, which constitutes the mind,” conveys “the imagination more easily from one link to another, and make[s] the whole seem like the continuance of one object” (260–1/170). Without associative imagination—that is, if there were no idea-enlivening facile transitions from past perceptions to present memories—“we cou’d only admit of those perceptions, which are immediately present to our consciousness, nor cou’d those lively images, with which the memory presents us, be ever receiv’d as true pictures of past perceptions” (265/173). Consequently, “memory not only discovers the identity, but also contributes to its production, by producing the relation of resemblance among the perceptions”—a relation the “very essence” of which “consists in . . . producing an easy transition of ideas” (260–1/ 169–70). Yet as we have seen, it is the three causal relations involved in Hume’s accounts of the origin of ideas that provide the principal foundation for “the true idea of the human mind.” But with the result of I/iii at last factored in, we can no longer have any doubt that, for him, these causal relations are mere “uniting principles in the ideal world” whose “very essence . . . consists in their producing an easy transition of ideas,” and that, in each case, we observe no “real bond” among perceptions, but “only feel one among the ideas we form of them,” so that there is nothing “that really binds our several perceptions together,” only something that “associates their ideas in the imagination.” Here then is explicit, incontrovertible evidence that, in the light of the account of necessary connection in Treatise I/iii, Hume clarified the status of the causal relations at the heart of his solution to the problem of origins, leaving no doubt as to their associative nature. And since causal associations are founded on experience and habit, we should not be surprised that Hume saw fit to bring the business end of the first book of the Treatise to a conclusion by extending his claim that the system of realities discovered by the understanding are founded on customary association (108/75) to the system of the senses and memory: Experience is a principle, which instructs me in the several conjunctions of objects for the past. Habit is another principle, which determines me to expect the same for the future; and both of them conspiring to operate upon the imagination, make me form certain ideas in a more intense and lively manner, than others, which are not attended with the same advantages. Without this quality, by

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HUME’S AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES which the mind enlivens some ideas beyond others (which seemingly is so trivial, and so little founded on reason) we cou’d never assent to any argument, nor carry our view beyond those few objects, which are present to our senses. Nay, even to these objects we cou’d never attribute any existence, but what was dependent on the senses; and must comprehend them entirely in that succession of perceptions, which constitutes our self or person. Nay farther, even with relation to that succession, we cou’d only admit of those perceptions, which are immediately present to our consciousness, nor cou’d those lively images, with which the memory presents us, be ever receiv’d as true pictures of past perceptions. The memory, senses, and understanding are, therefore, all of them founded on the imagination, or the vivacity of our ideas. (THN 265/172–3)

G. The Theory of Origins in Light of the Associative Nature of the Copy Principle An advantage of so in-depth a consideration of the copy principle as that just concluded is that, in the process of establishing its status as an associative relation founded on experienced constant conjunction, we have at the same time traversed, at least in a preliminary way, the stages of Hume’s account of causal relations in general. This will prove useful in subsequent chapters when we delve more deeply into the associationalism at the heart of this account and Hume’s theory of understanding generally. However, before proceeding, a number of important consequences of the associative character of the copy principle need to be noted: 1. The way out of the circle. By exhibiting the copy principle as an instance of customary association founded on experienced constant conjunction, we have seen it to be an instance of itself, and thereby closed the circle described in section C. Is it a vicious circle? How we answer depends on whether Hume’s account of the origin of the idea of cause and effect presupposes what it sets out to explain. For there are at least four distinct causal relations posited therein: the copying in memory of our past experience of conjunctions of perception, whereby alone we can know whether they are constant, inconstant, or unique; this memory engendering customary associations when the perceptions are discovered to be constantly conjoined; these, in their turn, giving rise to facile transitions of thought relating the perceptions concerned in them; and when the transitions are made from impressions to their associated idea copy (Treatise I/iii/§4), reflexive impressions of necessary connections between them are produced (which are then projected onto the objects themselves: chapter 17-D). The only way this could fail to issue in a vicious circle is if none of these elements of the causal explanation of impressions of necessary connections enter into the content of the impression of necessary connection itself. Do they? It seems not. For if one is careful to distinguish the contents Hume actually ascribed to the impression from the details of his account of its origin, there are only the following: (i) a transition of thought, (ii) a feeling of ease in the transition, and, (iii) when the transition is from an impression to an idea, (iv) the idea is regarded in imagination with a feeling of force and vivacity


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(belief) that approaches the vivacity with which impressions are regarded preimaginatively: the mind is carried by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant, and to believe that it will exist. This connexion, therefore, which we feel in the mind, this customary transition of the imagination from one object to its usual attendant . . . [so as] to consider it in a stronger light upon account of its relation to the first object . . . is the sentiment or impression, from which we form the idea of power or necessary connexion. Nothing farther is in the case. (EHU VII/ii ¶28; THN 156/105, 166–7/112–13, and 169/114)

Besides the impression of necessary connection—the facile transition to an idea that is regarded with heightened vivacity when the transition is made from an impression of the senses (or from an already lively idea such as a memory or the self)—the only other contents that enter into ideas of causal relations are two of the other associative relations distinguished by Hume, contiguity and succession (77/54–5).31 Everything else in Hume’s account of cause and effect—the memory caused by the experience of constant conjunction, the customs of thought caused by the memory, and the transitions of thought caused by the customs—relates not to the content of the idea but to its causal explanation, that is, the application of this idea to its own origin. But since these causal relations fall outside the content of the idea, the circle they describe is not vicious: having an idea of necessary connection distinct in content from the ideas of past experience and habit, we are free to utilize this idea both in the conception of experience (as the cause of customs) and habit (construed as a cause of facile transitions) themselves and to relate them to reflexive impressions of necessary connection as cause and effect. This is true even of the copy relation that binds our ideas of necessary connections to these impressions itself: since its content consists merely in facile transitions from the impressions to the temporally contiguous ideas reinforced by the addition of a relation of almost perfect resemblance between them, we are free to invoke experience and habit as the cause both of the presence of this content in our mind (its origin) and of the unsurpassed strength of its influence on our reasoning (because the habit is founded on perhaps the most constant and continuously recurrent conjunction in human experience).32 Thus, as a matter simple and solely of relations whose essence consists in facile transitions of thought, or at least are founded on such transitions, the circularity implicit in Hume’s solution to the problem of origins reveals itself to be impeccably virtuous. 2. The copy principle is a natural relation. In Treatise I/i/§5, Hume distinguishes two kinds of relation, natural and philosophical. Whereas the expectation of heat when approaching a flame is natural because our ordinary experience 31. In cases involving perceptions that are only indeterminately spatial or fully aspatial, there is only temporal (immediate priority in time: 75–6/54), not spatial, contiguity. 32. Its very strength, however, ensures that it will be unnoticed: “Such is the influence of custom, that, where it is strongest, it not only covers our natural ignorance, but even conceals itself, and seems not to take place, merely because it is found in the highest degree” (EHU IV/i ¶8; also THN 93/65, 104/ 72, 133/92, and 373/240–1).

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suffices to instill an association between them, other relations are too general, complex, inaccessible, or otherwise unable to effect the facile transitions of thought constitutive of associative relations, as when we learn that microbes cause disease, that the gravitational force of the moon causes the changing of the tides, or that a certain enzyme catalyzes a particular stage of the digestion of a certain class of nutrient. When experience is supplemented by education, these philosophical relations can become habitual (THN 115–16/80), but never natural in the sense associative relations are. Which kind of relation, then, is the copy principle? While there may be a question as to the status of some of the causal relations prominent in Hume’s theorizing, the naturalness of the copy principle seems beyond doubt. The resemblance between our simpler sensations and reflexions, on the one hand, and our (nonlinguistic) thoughts, on the other, can hardly be supposed to escape the notice of anyone from earliest infancy. So too the temporal precedence of the former with respect to the latter. Since these relations of constant conjunction are all that is necessary to effect a customary association, the causal dependence of our thoughts on past impressions is as natural and elementary as the recognition that some of our ideas are memories and other mere imaginings. To be sure, a straightforward identification of the copy association with memory is not possible for the same reason Hume found it necessary to distinguish between complex and simple perceptions when framing the duplication principle (the copy principle applies to the simple constituents of imaginings no less than to memories generally). Yet just as no one needs to be instructed in how to distinguish memories from inventions of their imaginations, this adjustment too can be made in the natural fashion distinctive of customary association (“immediately, without any new operation of the reason or imagination,” 102/71–2; also 93/65, 104/72–3, 133/91, and 147/100). For would it ever occur to us to regard things we imagine as possible sense perceptions (sensations, reflexions) if we were not naturally certain that the simplest ingredients of thought-imagery are the effects of prior, exactly resembling, sense impression originals? The fact that we believe what we imagine to relate to what our senses are capable of presenting to us so naturally and implicitly—that is, without instruction or needing to engage in cogitation, from very early in life— indicates that it is the kind of relation Hume would not, and could not, have explained otherwise than by reference to customary association. Indeed, to be fully convinced of this, we need only consider how transformed our ordinary understanding of the world would be if we did not naturally believe that our simplest ideas are copies derived from our impressions, or, a fortiori, if we naturally believed the opposite: in the one case, we would not naturally believe that any of our ideas were memories of actual impressions or images of possible ones, while in the other we would naturally disbelieve that they are. Thus, the importance of the copy principle to all our thought and action should not be overlooked simply because it is one of those relations that, while perceived, seldom if ever attracts attention to itself.33 3. The preassociative life of the mind. By extending the scope of imagination to include the three causal relations involved in his theory of the origin of ideas 33. See previous note. It follows that the duplication and compositionality principles presupposed by the copy principle are also natural.


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(and so from the system of realities of the understanding to those of sense and memory as well: THN 265/172–3), Hume described what is present to our consciousness preassociatively in the following terms: The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is compos’d. (THN 252–3/165; also D IV 28–9)34

Although there are many references to a mental scene of “perpetual flux and movement” in earlier philosophers (including Locke and Berkeley), it appears in an entirely new aspect in the light of Hume’s explanation of causal relations as associations of ideas, particularly as applied to the copy principle and the general causal maxim, since it turns both into mere “uniting principle[s] in the ideal world . . . producing an easy transition of ideas” (260/169). In the eyes of pre-Humeans, this flux is just a false appearance, resulting from the inability of our senses to detect causal connections immediately, without a body of past experience on which to draw. Reassured by the putatively intuitive certainty of the causal maxim, however, they had no doubts about the existence of a mind in causal interaction with other substances that together are responsible for (i) causing perceptions to exist, (ii) causing these perceptions rather than others to appear at any given time, and (iii) causing them to appear in certain conjunctions and sequences rather than others. By contrast, when the phenomenological effects of Hume’s associative 34. I do not know of any interpreters of the inconceivable supposition/relative idea school (see section C above) who infer from this passage that Hume affirmed the existence of a secret place and secret materials on the basis of what he says here, although it would not surprise me to learn this was the case. For, as remarked earlier, most of the evidence they muster in favor of their version of Hume consists in inferring from claims that ultimate principles are inconceivable and unknowable that Hume, merely by mentioning them, ipso facto affirmed the existence of such principles, and the scope of cause and effect, identity, and other notions are thereby extended to include inconceivable as well as conceivable existents. The conclusion is not of course implied by the premise, and their case is further weakened by a tendency to place great weight on precisely those passages where Hume is not dealing with the content and scope of application of the idea of cause or the principles and propositions into which it enters (see also notes 12 and 14). But this is only one reason to be diffident in the conclusions we draw from Hume’s phraseology. Another is that, at the time he wrote, censorship laws that had been allowed to lapse in the 1690s were being replaced by new ones (beginning in 1737). Hume, as everyone acknowledged, wrote with the utmost care to avoid bringing the establishment down on his head, so as to be left in peace to pursue his literary career and preserve his access to the public. For example, he allowed himself to be persuaded to delete the argument concerning miracles from the Treatise (it later appeared in the first Enquiry), and came to regret not being as cautious in the case of the causal maxim (the footnote on God on 633/109 is almost surely an exercise in self-protection, as is the avoidance of any explicit mention of the causal maxim in the Enquiry). One may surmise that the same is true of his discussion of the mind, where perhaps even more care needed to be exercised. We thus have yet another reason to suspect the procedure of those who would exploit the devices whereby Hume attempted to deflect attention from the extremity of his psychologistic skepticism.

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fictions are bracketed out, the preassociative succession of perceptions really is in every respect the relationless flux of distinct perceptions it appears in immediate perception to be, and appears in every respect like the relationless flux it really is (“without [associating principles] every distinct object is separable by the mind, and may be separately consider’d, and appears not to have any more connexion with any other object, than if disjoin’d by the greatest difference and remoteness,” THN 260/169). If there is anything more to this reality, it is in any event inconceivable, and so “’twill be of little consequence to the world” what we choose to call it, or even whether we ponder its existence at all. And, as the first philosopher genuinely to have “loosen’d all our particular perceptions,” Hume was also the first to be confronted with the problem of explaining “the principles, that unite our successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness” (635–6/400), and so too the first to land himself in the quandary from which Kant’s transcendental psychologism provides the only exit compatible with the separability principle (chapter 3). 4. Origins. It should now also be clear that just as Hume’s conception of the preimaginative given only seems similar to the internally perceived flux of ideas antecedent to all relation and combination affirmed by his predecessors, so too his solution to the problem of origins only seems like those proposed by previous sensibilists. By incorporating the copy principle, along with other psychological principles relevant to the origins of ideas, into his associationism, Hume thereby effected a fundamental change in the character of the origins problem itself. Those who preceded him took for granted the unrestricted scope of both the idea of causal relation and purportedly intuitively certain principles incorporating it such as the general causal maxim, and then applied them to the case of the perceiving, thinking mind in order to investigate the origin of ideas. Hume, by contrast, operated with a new idea of ideational origins, restricted, like all ideas of causal relations, to the purview of associative imagination. Accordingly, like causal explanations generally, solutions to questions of ideational origins have to be couched in terms of the (more or less) constant conjunctions we remember having experienced, such as that between relations of constant conjunction themselves and causal inferences, between these and customary association, between customary associations and the enlivening of ideas associated to an impression, and between transitions of the latter kind and ideas of necessary connections between distinct existents. Since “Ideas always represent the objects or impressions, from which they are deriv’d, and can never without a fiction represent or be apply’d to any other” (THN 37/29), the implication is that inquiries into the origins of ideas run up against an untransgressable bound of the sense of this or any causal inquiry: Nothing is more curiously enquir’d after by the mind of man, than the causes of every phænomenon; nor are we content with knowing the immediate causes, but push on our enquiries, till we arrive at the original and ultimate principle. . . . And how must we be disappointed, when we learn, that this connexion, tie, or energy lies merely in ourselves, and is nothing but that determination of the mind, which is acquir’d by custom, and causes us to make a transition from an object, to its usual attendant, and from the impression of one to the lively idea


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of the other? Such a discovery not only cuts off all hope of ever attaining satisfaction, but even prevents our very wishes; since it appears, that when we say we desire to know the ultimate and operating principle, as something, which resides in the external object, we either contradict ourselves, or talk without a meaning. (THN 266–7/ 173; also xvii–xviii/5, 12–3/14, 267/174, and EHU VII/ii ¶29)35

5. Psychologism, the purpose of the copy principle. Because ideas resemble their impression causes, the copy principle is often supposed to form part of a causal theory of representation: ideas stand (go proxy) for impressions in thought, impressions are the referents of ideas, and the two are related as sign and signified. The copy principle, however, belongs to a theory of ideas; and except for the attenuated sense in which any effect can be taken for the sign of its cause (and vice versa), Hume’s theory has no more to do with a theory of meaning than the theories of Locke and Berkeley do (chapters 4-C, 8, 10, and 14). Its status as an associative relation already of itself suffices to rule out any reading of idea copies as intrinsically referential: if ideas were found to regularly precede their resembling impressions, then ideas would be the originals and impressions the copies (THN 5/9); and if experience revealed no regularity in precedence, then there would be no copy-original relations between them at all. But even their extrinsic relation, founded on experience and custom, serves only to confer on simple ideas the status of memories of their impression originals; and although memories may be said to “represent” the objects they reproduce in thought, this is hardly a warrant for treating ideas as if they were names, or attributing to them a logicolinguistic structure or function. The copy principle is strictly about origins: it leads us to infer, for every idea we find in ourselves, the existence either of an antecedent resembling impression from which it was derived, or of simpler resembling impressions from which its simpler constituents were derived. The true role of the copy principle in Hume’s theory of understanding is to provide an empirical warrant for the psychologistic explications to come. Once a constant experience and deeply ingrained customary association have instilled in us a conviction that our simple ideas all originate in antecedent simple impressions, we readily defer to impressions as the best means of eliminating the obscurity often met with in our ideas (THN 72–3/52). We do so whenever an idea exists but definitions fail to eliminate confusion and obscurity surrounding it (157/106). For as concrete particulars of sense (sensation or reflexion) that strike the mind with maximal force and vivacity, impressions enable us to circumvent the approx35. When these words were penned, Hume still believed that “The intellectual world, tho’ involv’d in infinite obscurities, is not perplex’d with any such contradictions, as those we have discover’d in the natural” (THN 232/152; also 366–7/237). This security was lost the moment he realized that his principles of the intellectual world fall into contradiction “when I come to explain the principles, that unite our successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness” (635–6). Here, then, was a case in which he could not take comfort in the absence of an explanation by claiming “that we are no sooner acquainted with the impossibility of satisfying any desire, than the desire itself vanishes” (xviii/5), for Hume did not pretend “to pronounce it absolutely insuperable” on some other hypothesis. But he surely would have found some consolation in the fact that it required a Kant to discover and elaborate the hypothesis capable of solving this problem (though even then, as we shall discover in volume II, many loose ends remain).

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imations of general representation and the obfuscations of language. More importantly, they present the objects of their resembling ideas in a form divested of everything specific to the experience and habit of thinking these objects. For, unlike sensing, thinking is all about relating otherwise distinct objects: there is no counterpart in immediate sense perception to a sequential course of reasoning, nor to the use of reason to discover the best ways to act in order to attain desired ends. Consequently, objects of reason (ideas) invariably become enmeshed in a confusing network of customary patterns of thought, the passions and actions bound up with them, and the conventions of language in terms of which they are expressed and communicated. But when we shift from the idea to its originating impression, we gain the opportunity to consider the object in isolation, unencumbered by any of these extra associations, in much the same way a microscope makes it possible for us to see what we are dealing with in ways that are otherwise impossible (EHU VII/i ¶4). In the theory of ideas, the originating impression is thus the final arbiter of the content of ideas, and the only sure means whereby to fix the limits of their use in reasoning: Here, therefore, is a proposition the copy principle], which not only seems, in itself, simple and intelligible; but, if a proper use were made of it, might render every dispute equally intelligible, and banish all that jargon, which has so long taken possession of metaphysical reasonings, and drawn disgrace upon them. All ideas, especially abstract ones, are naturally faint and obscure: The mind has but a slender hold of them: They are apt to be confounded with other resembling ideas; and when we have often employed any term, though without a distinct meaning, we are apt to imagine it has a determinate idea, annexed to it. On the contrary, all impressions, that is, all sensations, either outward or inward, are strong and vivid: The limits between them are more exactly determined: Nor is it easy to fall into any error or mistake with regard to them. When we entertain, therefore, any suspicion, that a philosophical term is employed without any meaning or idea (as is but too frequent), we need but enquire, from what impression is that supposed idea derived? And if it be impossible to assign any, this will serve to confirm our suspicion. By bringing ideas into so clear a light, we may reasonably hope to remove all dispute, which may arise, concerning their nature and reality. (EHU II ¶9; also THN 74–5)

Of course, to make the fit with psychologism perfect, the copy principle needs to be supplemented by the equally important principle that “Ideas always represent the objects or impressions, from which they are deriv’d, and can never without a fiction represent or be apply’d to any other” (THN 37/30). Like the copy, duplication, separability, and other fundamental principles of Hume’s philosophy, the principle restricting the application of ideas according to their origin governs only our perception of objects in sensation, reflexion, and thought, and does not imply any restriction on our talk of objects. Nevertheless, it represents an insuperable obstacle to according the least objective validity to any verbal proposition that would require ideas to be applicable to objects from which they were not, and could not, have originally been acquired. Since for Hume, just like Locke and Berkeley before him, perceptions—sensations, reflexions, and thoughts—are the


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only objects the human understanding is capable of conceiving, this is just to say that anything posited in language with nothing in perception to underwrite it, however useful or even indispensable to cognition and conation it may be, is completely devoid of ontological worth. To be sure, he was happy to acknowledge that this in no way prevents us from proceeding on the fiction that we have ideas where none exist, and himself examined many instances in which such fictions make essential contributions to the cognitive and conative economy of the human mind (chapter 17). Nevertheless, in all matters ontological, Hume invariably stuck to his psychologistic guns, and insisted that objective meaning answer to the copy principle and objective truth to the principle restricting application by origins. 6. Impressions are not copies of, and in no sense represent, supersensible objects and/or their relations. Interpreters who regard Hume as a metaphysical realist and construe his skepticism as essentially epistemological in nature—that is, confined to emphasizing the imperfections in our understanding of the secret essences and secret connections of supersensible objects—tend to make a great deal of those texts in which he characterized impressions as representations. The question is whether these texts provide any justification for ascribing to Hume the view that, in addition to the principle that ideas copy and represent impressions, impressions, however inadequately, copy and represent a supersensible reality beyond? Before attempting to answer this question, we should note that a second copy principle would seem to deprive the first of the very virtues that earned it a central place in Hume’s theory of understanding. For impressions either do or do not suffice to overcome the weakness and faintness of ideas so as to permit us to arrive at a full and detailed recognition of their contents. If they do, then the regress from ideas stops with them: we have only to consider the relevant sensation or reflexion to know whether our ideas of necessary connections, the self, continued distinct existents, and simple individual substances are applicable in supersensible contexts, or even to our own perceptions as these exist prior to and independently of associative imagination. Because this question is settled in the negative by their psychologistic explication, the only hope for interpreters who would construe Hume as a metaphysical realist lies in showing him to have regarded impressions as copies of the supersensible reality beyond, but copies so inadequate as to do no more than indicate that essences and connections exist there, without revealing to us anything at all about what they are.36 Yet this seems tantamount to saying that impressions leave our ideas of cause and effect, substance, and identity in the same obscurity they were in before they were traced to their originating impressions. What then is to be gained by abandoning the method of definition in the search for clarity? What kind of microscope of the moral sciences is it that leaves our ideas as muddled and confused as before? What justification would remain for saying that impressions bring “ideas into so clear a light [that] we may reasonably hope to remove all dispute, which may arise, concerning their nature and reality” (EHU 36. See, for example, Peter Kail “Conceivability and Modality in Hume: A Lemma in an Argument in Defense of Skeptical Realism,” Hume Studies 29, 1 (April 2003), and Projection and Realism in Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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II ¶9)? Hume’s claims for the original copy principle thus seem to reduce to mere hyperbole if a second copy principle, in which impressions are cast as inadequate representations of a largely inaccessible supersensible reality, is added to the first. The reason is simple: pride of place now goes to the notions of supersensibly real essences and connections instead of to impressions. These notions are accorded objective sense and signification despite the want of all sensible (sensation and reflexion) content. Indeed, in all matters bearing on the true objects of our representations—the supersensible originals of our impressions—impressions cease to be a source of content altogether, and instead serve only as epistemic markers to enable us to apply these notions in experience. This is not to say that inquiries regarding epistemic markers are not important. But why then did Hume make such a big deal of tracing ideas to origins in impressions if sensation and reflexion are not the source of any of the genuinely objective contents of our ideas? Or are we supposed to accept that Hume simply lost interest in the method of explicating the content of concepts by tracing them to their origins when it came to the only genuinely objective notions we have? Why did he not then follow the path the intellectualists did and seek their source somewhere other than the data of the senses or the actions and affects immanent to associative imagination? I see no evidence that Hume took the “microscope” of sensible origins to be a merely ancillary matter when it came to understanding the content of these concepts— what objects we can think by their means, antecedently to any question of what, if anything, they enable us to know. And that Hume sought their origins where he so evidently did—impressions of sensation and reflexion—should leave us in no doubt that he rejected the intellectualism implicit in a second copy thesis (in effect Descartes sans dieu) and adhered to a strictly psychologistic sensibilism. Let us turn now to the textual evidence adduced in favor of a second copy thesis. There can be no question that Hume did on occasion refer to impressions as representations. But the question is whether he did so with regard to the supersensible, and, if he did, whether he did so in an affirmative voice. For there is nothing intrinsic about Humean impressions that prevents them from having the status of representations (signs) of other perceptions, as a portrait we see represents an absent sitter or visible smoke is a sign of an unseen fire. Indeed, if it is true, as maintained here, that the copy principle is an ordinary causal inference founded on experienced constant conjunction, then Hume would have had no option but to reverse the present copy principle and treat impressions as copies and ideas as their originals if experience showed simple ideas to precede (not succeed) the exactly resembling simple impressions. So if we exclude cases where ‘represent’ is most plausibly construed as relating impressions to other perceptions,37 there remain 37. When Hume says that “The only defect of our senses is, that they give us disproportion’d images of things, and represent as minute and uncompounded what is really great and compos’d of a vast number of parts” (THN 28/24), he seems to be speaking from the standpoint of “reason,” which finds that “there are other objects vastly more minute.” In particular, a spot of ink we see as absolutely simple and indivisible would not appear that way to a mite, much less to a creature a thousand times smaller than a mite; and we have only to use our reason to put ourselves in the position of the mite so as to imagine the spot as large as a human head is to us, or that of a creature a thousand times smaller than a mite to imagine a human head as large as Mt. Everest. In light of this, it becomes clear that the


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only two texts in which Hume might be thought to be taking impressions as representations of supersensible reality. This first can be found in Treatise I/iii/§5, “Of the impressions of the senses and memory”: As to those impressions, which arise from the senses, their ultimate cause is, in my opinion, perfectly inexplicable by human reason, and ’twill always be impossible to decide with certainty, whether they arise immediately from the object, or are produc’d by the creative power of the mind, or are deriv’d form the author of our being. Nor is such a question any way material to our present purpose. We may draw inferences from the coherence of our perceptions, whether they be true or false; whether they represent nature justly, or be mere illusions of the senses. (84/59)

That Hume enumerated the possible causes of sensations only in order to tell us that the question itself is not in any way material to his purpose already of itself suggests that he was merely paying lip service to his readers’ partiality to causal realism, in which both Locke (chapter 9-B) and Berkeley (chapter 11-C) partook. In any event, more important than the alternatives listed in the text is the one Hume omitted: the possibility that the causal realists’ question makes no sense because the idea of cause and effect is inseparably bound up by content with customary association. The reason it is omitted here, presumably, is that, at that point, he had yet to embark on the analysis of the inference from the impression to the idea in I/iii/§6 that leads to the conclusion that causal relations are ideal (as they are termed on 260/169). Only in the course of that analysis could he formulate the alternative to causal realism and elaborate the case that culminates in I/iii/ §14 with the thesis that the only ideas we can ever form of necessary connections between distinct existents are copied from what we experience in customary transitions of thought. Since the implication of this psychologistic explication is that ideas of necessary connection have no application prior to or independently of the actions and affects immanent to association imagination, the causal realist question about the cause of sensations is at last revealed to be meaningless (“it is not possible for us to form the most distant idea of . . . necessity and power . . . when real difficulty lies not in shrinking our conceptions but in enlarging them “so as form a just notion of a mite, or even of an insect a thousand times less than a mite.” The “reason” Hume here has in mind, it seems clear in retrospect, is a function of general points of view and the use of general rules to expand or contract them to scales beyond the purview of the senses (chapter 18-D). However, the important thing for my purposes is that it is an idea, and that its content is homogeneous with its disproportioned “representation” by a sense impression—not something supersensible with a secret, unknowable essence incommensurable with the contents of our perceptions. Similarly, when Hume speaks of “That compound impression, which represents extension” (THN 38/30), he is clearly referring to our general idea of extension. He seems to intend no more than to say that the impressions of vision and touch “represent” the general idea of extension by instantiating it (the inverse of his account of the origin of the idea extension early in ii/§3 as generalized from these two sorts of impressions: chapter 18-C). Finally, when Hume says that the simple impressions of touch “neither represent solidity, nor any real object” (231/ 152), he is clearly referring to the idea of solidity, not some supersensible object with a secret essence. Here ‘represent’ seems equivalent to ‘the same content as’: Hume is merely arguing against Locke’s equation of the idea of solidity with a simple tactual impression (ECHU II/iv) on the ground that the former is a complex, relational idea.

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it is not taken for the determination of the mind, to pass from the idea of an object to that of its usual attendant,” 167/113; and “when we say we desire to know the ultimate end and operating principle, as something, which resides in the external object, we either contradict ourselves, or talk without a meaning,” 266–7/173). Hume’s idealism regarding causes was further secured when he proceeded to show in Treatise I/iv that the substances postulated by causal realists as possible causes of sensations—the mind and mind-independent corporeal objects38—are themselves nothing more than fictions of associative imagination. Nevertheless, interpreters such as Don Garrett, while granting this to be true of the vulgar singleexistence view that “the very perception or sensible image is the external object,” ascribe supersensible representationalism to Hume in connection with the philosophical “double-existence” view that “perceptions are only representations of something external” (EHU XII/i ¶14): Hume argues that the “philosophical” belief in bodies, as distinct from and represented by the perceptions of the mind, cannot be established by reason and involves several egregious confusions in its etiology; he also notes that the most readily conceived version of the belief is incompatible with modern philosophers’ conclusions about secondary qualities. However, he never says that the belief in such bodies is false. On the contrary, he claims that one of its two competitors (the vulgar view that our impressions of sensation are themselves “continu’d and distinct” existences) can be shown to be false by a few simple experiments and that the other competitor (the skeptical rejection of “continu’d and distinct” existences) is literally incredible. These claims suggest that he accepts the philosophical view—albeit with the degree of caution and non-dogmatism suitable to a mitigated skeptic—as true.39

Yet the notion that Hume never claimed the philosophical view to be false seems difficult to square with his assertion that “it contains all the difficulties of the vulgar system” (THN 211/140; also 217–18/144). If it really does contain all of them, and these are sufficient for him to consider the vulgar view false, why would they not suffice for him to regard the philosophical view too as false? And, in my opinion, Hume did precisely that when he claimed that the “objects” of the philosophers, if not specifically different from our perceptions, are themselves nothing but a second set of perceptions (218/144); for how could he assert this and not take it to imply the same consequence it does in the vulgar case, namely, that “our perceptions have no more a continu’d than an independent existence” (211/140)? 38. A well-founded wish to avoid bringing charges of religious heterodoxy down on his head probably prevented Hume from subjecting the third possible cause of sensations—God—to the same scrutiny. 39. Don Garrett, “Hume’s Theory of Mental Representation,” paper presented at the Las Vegas Hume Conference, 2004, cited with permission of the author. It is worth remarking that Hume deemed skepticism “incredible” in connection with the human-nature grounded vulgar view (which likewise motivates the philosophical position: “natural and obvious principles here prevail above our study’d reflections,” THN 214/142). But what matters to the skeptic is not the belief but the object (idea) believed; and as we saw at the outset of chapter 15, no skeptic would think it worth contending against the multiply fictitious imperfect identity that constitutes the vulgar idea of body.


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As for “the notion of external existence, when taken for something specifically different from our perceptions, we have already shewn its absurdity [in I/ii/§6]” (188/125; also EHU XII/i ¶16). Since I know of no text in which Hume came remotely close to an explicit, unequivocal affirmation of philosophical materialism, and since everything in his psychologistic explication of the idea of a continued, distinct existent as an amalgam of various fictions of associative imagination (THN 209–10/139) seems to rule it out as an option for him, I must confess myself at a loss to understand why so many fine commentators still insist on interpreting him as holding that impressions are representations of unperceived material objects. To do so, they must suppose that Hume accorded not merely semantic but ontological worth to the abstraction of ‘continued, distinct existent’ from the actions and affects of associative imagination indispensable to our acquisition of ideas of these things. But Hume declared himself to be a committed Berkeleyan in all matters bearing on abstract ideas, including a strict adherence to the separability principle (THN 17– 18/17). The implication is that while we are free to talk of continued, distinct existents (bodies) without so much as an implicit reference to the sustained affective disposition of associative imagination—as we are to talk of the existence of sensible things without reference to the vivacity felt in their conception, of necessary connections without reference to the facile transitions distinctive of customary association, etc.—this semantic independence is in no sense evidence of even the possibility of their real, ontological independence. What mattered for Hume, as it did for Berkeley before him, is whether these things are separable in the mind’s conception of them; and since Hume’s psychologistic explications of our concepts of body, self, cause, substance, space, and time show that the actions and affects of associative imagination make indispensable contributions to their content, the separability principle seems to me to represent an insuperable obstacle to metaphysical realist readings that depend on placing ontological weight on what can never be more than the semantic exclusion of these contributions from their content. For example, were it not for what customary association contributes to our idea of cause and effect, the “necessary conclusion” would “be, that we have no idea of connexion or power at all, and that these words are absolutely without any meaning, when employed either in philosophical reasonings, or common life” (EHU VII/ii ¶26; also THN 648–9/408–9 and 656–7/413). But in order to dispel the specter of realism as fully as possible, it is time now to examine the reasoning behind Hume’s rejection of it and the nature of the associationism that replaced it.

17 The Nature of Relation

All ideas, according to Hume, must either be copied from antecedent impressions or assembled from ideas copied from them. Where impression originals are lacking, there can be no ideas at all, and so too nothing in the realities present to our consciousness with which to underwrite our words. For example, if there were no impressions of necessary connection from which to derive ideas of causal relations, the necessary conclusion would be “that we have no idea of connexion or power at all, and that these words are absolutely without any meaning, when employed either in philosophical reasoning, or common life” (EHU VII/ii ¶26). Yet the truly striking thing that emerges from Hume’s account of the origin of our ideas of causal relations is that their need for originating impressions is met not by anything present to us antecedently to the operations of associative imagination, but rather by what we experience in the interstices, as it were, between perceptions, whenever we make a customary transition from an impression to an idea: “that inference of the understanding, which is the only connexion, that we have have any comprehension of” (VIII/i ¶25; also VII/ii ¶¶ 28– 30, THN 165/111, 166/112, 167/113, and 266–7/173). Nor is causation the only case of an idea with such an origin: personal identity, identity as such, complex individuals (sense-divide transcending objects), and space and time all find impression originals, wholly or in part, in the operations (actions and affects) of associative imagination (impressions of reflexion of types 2 and 3 of chapter 2-B). And this raises a very important question: what consequences does the want of an impression original of the kind present to consciousness antecedently to imagination and all its works have for these ideas? In particular, how far does it take them from the meaning accorded to them by pre-Humeans in their definitions? Was it far enough to expose these definitions as falsifying their contents, and serving only to mislead us as to their true employment and scope of application?

A. Fictions of Relation On Hume’s analysis, an essential element of any definition of causal relations is a necessary connection between distinct existents (THN 87/61–2, 407/261, and EHU VIII/i ¶25). Because valleys and mountains are not conceptually distinct existents, 456

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we do not consider them candidates for terms of a causal relation (chapter 16-E). Fire and smoke, by contrast, have the potential to enter into a causal relation because each can be conceived to exist without our having to conceive the other to exist as well. Yet, because this distinctness implies the possibility of conceiving the existence of the one in the absence of the other, while the necessity of their connection implies the impossibility of conceiving the one to exist in the absence of the other, something has to give. Faced with this dilemma, Hume concluded that the objectively necessary connection distinct existents called for by the definition is a chimera, and instead traced our conception of their connection to a strongly felt customary transition in the imagination that considers these existents (so that, as Kant put it, “Hume . . . asked nothing more than that a merely subjective meaning of necessity, namely custom, be assumed in place of any objective meaning of necessity in the concept of cause,” CPrR 13). This was not, however, because Hume found anything self-contradictory about the notion of an objective necessary connection. Rather, the definition owes its paradoxical character entirely to the want of an idea to give our words meaning—a deficiency for which the only Humean remedy is an impression of a necessary connection between the distinct existents themselves, prior to and independently of associative imagination. It is therefore the lack of such an impression, not anything internal to the definition, that renders it null and void. Many commentators find fault with Hume’s characterizations of objective necessary connections because they construe him as assimilating them to deductively necessary relations—as though our possession of an idea of an objective necessary connection between fire and smoke would enable us to understand the former to imply the latter, and the latter to entail the former, in the same way the conclusion of a modus ponens inference is implied by and entails the premises. But this goes too far. It is not that Hume conceived objective necessary connection to be deductive relations, but rather that such relations were the only analogy available to him with which to characterize what, after all, is something we cannot conceive for want of an idea to underwrite our definition. This is clear from the fact that the conceptual distinctness he deemed an absolute precondition for terms of a causal relation specifically precludes the possibility of their being deductively related. Rather than a deductive relation between the terms, what is missing, and nullifies any pretension to back up the definition with an idea, is the impression of a necessary relation that leaves the distinctness of the relata intact. Yet without an impression source for an idea adequate to underwrite this indispensable component of the definition of cause and effect as an objective relation, objectively distinguishable from mere conjunction (VII/ii ¶28), the conceptual materials requisite to render causal realism intelligible are lacking. And in its place Hume set the one idea of necessary connection for which an impression exists: a subjective principle in “the ideal world . . . which can give ideas an union in the imagination,” but nothing that “really binds our several perceptions together” (THN 259–60/ 169). The case is exactly the same with the definition of objective identity as an existence that continues through successive times. Since “all impressions are internal and perishing existences, and appear as such” (THN 194/129), the appearances of things,

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far from supporting this definition, contradict it (188–9/126). Nor can support for numerical identity over time be found in any of the other perceptions present to consciousness, since all our perceptions are “interrupted, and perishing, and different at every different return” (211/140; also 252–3/165). Consequently, it is not impressions themselves, but rather the “concurrence of some of their qualities with the qualities of the imagination” (194/129), that account for our “natural propensity . . . to imagine that . . . identity” (253/165). To be sure, it is “the common opinion of philosophers as well as the vulgar” to “pretend, that the idea of duration is applicable in a proper sense to objects, which are perfectly unchangeable” (37/29). Yet, for want of any “stedfast or unchangeable” impression, there is no preassociative source from which an objective idea of such an existence can be derived: “time cannot make its appearance to the mind, either alone, or attended with a steady unchangeable object, but is always discover’d by some perceivable succession of changeable objects” (35/ 28); and “since the idea of duration cannot be deriv’d from such an object, it can never in any propriety or exactness be apply’d to it, nor can any thing unchangeable be ever said to have duration” (37/30). We must be careful, however, not to construe Hume’s account of the fiction of identity as an attempt to derive the same idea of objective identity called for by the definition from some source other than a preassociative impression. Intended simply to “point out those appearances, which make us fancy we have that idea” (THN 65/47), the fiction does nothing to make good the want of an impression of unchangeable existence, but only shows how “we are apt to confound our ideas, and imagine we can form the idea of a time and duration, without any change or succession” (65/48). The fiction takes its start from the fact that “the idea of time [is] ever present with us” because of the “continual succession of perceptions in our mind” (65/47). Since anything coexistent with these perceptions will also partake of the idea of time (determinate duration), an object observed without interruption over an interval that exhibits no variation is straightaway fancied to partake in the duration marked out by our successive perceptions without at the same time partaking of their succession. Of course, if we consider any of the successive moments within that interval together, our ideas of the object are ipso facto multiplied, that is, we will be conceiving not identity but number (201/134). To avoid multiplying the object—that is, to be able to overlook the manifest multiplicity of (qualitatively identical) objects that are in fact present to our perception—we would need to abstain from considering the successive moments together. The have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too impossibility at the heart of this exercise—Hume’s proof that identity is a fiction and not a genuine idea at all—is the supposition that, in not considering the successive moments together, we can nevertheless conceive (abstract, separately consider) the time marked out by that succession, and so use it to conceive the object as enduring identically, without change or interruption. For if Hume’s explication of duration is correct, we can never, without considering a succession of different moments together, even so much as conceive a duration or, a fortiori, a duration of existence (35–7/28–30). Consequently, the true ideational outcome of the exercise called for in the fiction of identity would be to banish time altogether from our consideration of the object, yielding not identity but what Hume termed unity, where, in the proposition “an


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object is the same with itself,” nothing, including duration, intervenes to distinguish ‘object’ from ‘itself’ (200/133). We can perhaps better understand the significance of the identity fiction by comparing it with another fiction to which it seems closely analogous, or possibly even an instance: our “strong propensity to compleat every union by joining new relations to those which we have before observ’d betwixt any ideas” (THN 217/ 143). The principal example Hume provided of this phenomenon is the fictitious spatiality accorded to objects that, in and of themselves, are aspatial: finding a constant conjunction between the look, feel, smell, and flavor, say, of a fig, and finding that the two former qualities are, in addition, related by contiguity in space, we proceed to complete the union by extending the contiguity relation to the two latter qualities as well: and we do this notwithstanding the impossibility of spatially situating objects that, quite literally, exist nowhere, and can no more stand in a relation of contiguity with the objects of touch and vision than moral reflections and passions can (235–7/154–6). Extending this model to the case of identity over time, we may be said to complete the union by extending the properties specific to the idea of duration we are only capable of forming by perceiving or conceiving a succession of distinct objects (impressions and ideas) to something in which no succession is perceived at all, so “that the unchangeable or rather fictitious duration has the same effect upon every quality, by encreasing or diminishing it, as that succession, which is obvious to the senses” (65/47–8): and here too we do this despite the fact that anything in which no succession is perceived is ipso facto impossible to conceive as enduring. Consequently, when Hume recalls this fiction (in a footnote), and says it is “able to give us a notion of identity” (200–1/133/4), we must not suppose that he has changed his mind and ceased to deem it “impossible to shew the impression, from which the idea of time without a changeable existence is deriv’d” (65/47). For while we can perfectly well semantically distinguish the times in which a succession of qualitatively identical objects exist from the objects themselves (64– 5/47), and thereby suppose the time to multiply without ipso facto being obliged to suppose the object to do so as well, no such distinction is possible ideationally, that is, conformably to the separability principle (36–7/29). For a distinction of the latter kind to be conceivable, nothing short of an impression of duration in the absence of succession is requisite. Lacking this, Hume deemed it impossible to provide an objective (i.e., ideational, rather than merely semantic) conceptual basis on which to distinguish a numerically identical continued existent from a succession of fleetingly existent, qualitatively identical existents. Thus, for all ideational intents and purposes, this is a distinction without a difference. The only remaining question is the psychology of the fiction: what leads the imagination to accord ideational import to a distinction that, in truth, can never have more than semantic worth? The answer emerges from Hume’s description of “the disposition of the mind in viewing any object which preserves a perfect identity”: When we fix our thought on any object, and suppose it to continue the same for some time; ’tis evident we suppose the change to lie only in the time, and never

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HUME’S AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES exert ourselves to produce any new image or idea of the object. The faculties of the mind repose themselves in a manner, and take no more exercise, than what is necessary to continue that idea, of which we were formerly possest, and which subsists without variation or interruption. The passage from one moment to another is scarce felt, and distinguishes not itself by a different perception or idea, which may require a different direction of the spirits, in order to its conception. (THN 203/135)

To understand this description of what Hume termed a ‘perfect identity,’ recall his (Locke-derived) thesis that “Where we have no successive perceptions, we have no notion of time, even tho’ there be a real succession in the objects” (35/28). In the present context, where we are witness to a qualitatively invariant appearance, this means that we can only become aware of the passage of time by observing a change of perceptions inwardly, in our contemplation of the appearance. That is, unless we were aware, however vaguely, of the effort, however slight, needed to continue the same, qualitatively unchanging image or idea we had formerly into the present, we would perceive no succession at all, and so too no duration. So the phenomenon of a perfect identity depends crucially on our inwardly perceiving transitions between fleetingly existent successive perceptions, and so on the very contrary of identity. The reason it nevertheless gives rise to a fiction of identity lies in the fact that, though felt, the transitions are “scarce felt.” This is because the feeling incident to producing an idea remains invariant and uninterrupted so long as the same idea is successively repeated. The moment a new idea must be produced, requiring “a different direction of the spirits, in order to its conception,” the feeling is ended and, with it, the facile transition essential to relation. Thus, in addition to the qualitative identity of the objects from and to which the transitions are made, the transitions themselves must be qualitatively indiscernible in feeling. Here it is important to take account of the remark with which Hume prefaced his description of perfect identity. Resemblance “not only causes an association of ideas, but also of dispositions,” where by ‘disposition’ he means the “act or operation of the mind” in which “ideas place the mind” (THN 203/135). This is an unusual use of the term ‘disposition’ even for Hume, but it is not unique, as when he commented in a related context (leading up to his first enunciation of the thesis that facility is the essence of relation) that “All the operations of the mind depend in a great measure on its disposition, when it performs them; and according as the spirits are more or less elevated, and the attention more or less fix’d, the action will always have more or less vigour and vivacity” (98/69). In this use of the term, Hume seems to have had uppermost in mind the mind’s affective disposition, its feeling in performing its actions, and it is in this sense too, I believe, that he would have us understand his use of the term in connection with perfect identity: the facile transitions constitutive of the resemblance relations conjoining successive qualitatively invariant perceptions are themselves so alike to the feeling as together to constitute a sustained—invariant, uninterrupted—affective disposition that continues just so long as no new image or idea necessitates a different direction of the spirits. What this means becomes clearer if we consider how the same appearances might be considered in the imagination if human nature were different. For exam-


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ple, if the action of successively repeating the same idea, instead of being scarce felt, required as great an effort as presently is required to produce new ideas, then we would be just as clearly aware of the nature of the former as a succession of fleetingly existent objects as we are of the latter. In particular, there would be no sustained—invariable, unchanging—affective disposition to tempt us to confound what is, both in appearance and in truth, “interrupted, and perishing, and different at every different return” (211/140) with something in perception answering to our semantic notions of identity. Thus, for Hume, our propensity to fictions of identity is as much a function of the affective disposition of association imagination as of the appearances before it.1 Indeed, this claim is too weak. For once we turn from perfect to imperfect identities—identity even in the face of interrupted or variable appearances—it immediately becomes evident that, for Hume, the primary locus of all identity, perfect no less than imperfect, is the affective disposition of associative imagination. Thus, the principle invoked time and again in his explanations why things bearing little or no resemblance to perfect identity are nevertheless invariably confounded with it, and treated as identities in all our thought and action, is that they “place the mind in the same disposition, or in similar ones,” so that it “readily passes from one to the other, and perceives not the change without a strict attention, of which, generally speaking, ’tis wholly incapable” (THN 203/135). In particular, we conflate what it feels like to successively form the same relation between ideas with what it feels like to successively repeat the same idea: a succession of related objects places the mind in this disposition, and is consider’d with the same smooth and uninterrupted progress of the imagination, as attends the view of the same invariable object. The very nature and essence of relation is to connect our ideas with each other, and upon the appearance of one, to facilitate the transition to its correlative. The passage betwixt related ideas is, therefore, so smooth and easy, that it produces little alteration on the mind, and seems like the continuation of the same action; and as the continuation of the same action is an effect of the continu’d view of the same object, ’tis for this reason we attribute sameness to every succession of related objects. The thought slides along the succession with equal facility, as if it consider’d only one object; and therefore confounds the succession with the identity. (204/135)

The consequence of the want of a preassociative impression to underwrite the definition of continued existence as an objective relation of numerical identity, objectively distinguishable from a qualitative identity of distinct successive objects, is to expose identity realism as no less meaningless than causal realism. To 1. Hume’s denial that “the idea of duration is applicable in a proper sense to objects, which are perfectly unchangeable” (THN 37/29) did, however, come back to haunt him. For if my analysis of the appendix to the second volume of the Treatise in chapter 3 is correct, it left him no way “to explain the principles, that unite our successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness” (636/400). Only by idealizing succession—which, like simplicity, remained for Hume a real (preassociative) property of perceptions—could a way be found to avoid ascribing a real temporal duration to consciousness in which the successive perceptions are apprehended, and thus resolve the quandary in a manner consistent with the separability and copy principles.

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this it might be objected that Hume specifically affirmed that the distinct existence of body is conceivable since “there is no absurdity in separating any particular perception from the mind; that is, in breaking off all its relations, with that connected mass of perceptions which constitute a thinking being” (THN 207/138); and because the conceivability of distinct existence entails and implies that of continued existence (188/125–6), Hume cannot be supposed to have been committed, like Berkeley (chapters 11 and 12), to the unintelligibility of materialist identity realism. Yet, to recognize that this objection is unfounded, we need only to consider that the sense ‘distinct’ carries here derives from the separability principle: the perceptions included in our concepts of bodies can be conceived to exist separately from the mind because “the true idea of the human mind” (261/170) is nothing but a “heap of perceptions” and “every perception is distinguishable from another” (207/138). Such distinctness is, however, no comfort to the materialist. For the scope of the separability principle is universal: everything that counts as a perception is ipso facto distinct from every other. This means that in the same sense that shape, solidity, color, and sound count as “distinct from the mind,” so too do itches, headaches, thirsts, lusts, rages, loves, dreams, and everything else present to consciousness in sensation, reflexion, or thought; and there is consequently “no absurdity . . . in breaking off” all of the relations of any of these perceptions to “that connected mass of perceptions, which constitute a thinking being.”2 Moreover, since all our impressions, and perceptions generally, both exist and appear to exist as a flux of fleeting existents (194/129, 211/140, and 252–3/ 165), the one ostensible impression materialism would require in order for Hume to admit its intelligibility is specifically precluded by the separability principle: “duration . . . applicable in a proper sense to objects, which are perfectly unchangeable” (37/29). And if the only corporeal realism able to pass Hume’s intelligibility tests is one that limits the existence of matter to the present instant (specious or not) and concedes that pains, emotions, desires, and volitions have the same “mind-independence” visible and tangible objects do, then materialism, philosophical and vulgar alike, is something not even the most extreme skeptic would bother contending against.3 2. Hume did not, of course, suppose that we exercise our conceptual option to regard every perception as existing separately from the mind. We do so only with regard to those perceptions that exhibit the greatest constancy and coherence, namely, the objects of vision and touch (THN 194–5/130 and 209/138–9). The question when we actually exercise our conceptual option is, however, posterior to the issue of the supposed conceivability of a distinct, continued existence of the kind stipulated in the corporeal realist definition of body; and if the want of an impression original makes it impossible for us to conceive distinct, continued existence—rather than merely fancy we do, under the influence of certain fictions of associative imagination—then the constancy and coherence of any of our perceptions can do nothing to alter the fact of its inconceivability (all they do is explain what turns the fiction of continued, distinct existence into a firm conviction, i.e., the fourth part of the system outlined on 199–200/133). 3. We should not think this conclusion inconsistent with Hume’s assertion that the existence of body is something “we must take for granted in all our reasonings” (THN 187/125): the latter concerns belief in body and is perfectly neutral as to the content of the idea in which this belief is reposed. Commentators overlook this, in my view, when they construe Hume’s denial that we can live our lives as Pyrrhonian skeptics as a concession to realism. His “mitigated skepticism” merely acknowledges the fact that it is not within our capacity genuinely to disbelieve things that human nature necessitates us to believe (see HTC, conclusion). But there is nothing milquetoast about this skepticism when it comes to


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Another definition, closely related to numerical identity over time, nullified by the want of a preassociative impression is the simplicity of a composite being, as when “the colour, taste, figure, solidity, and other qualities, combin’d in a peach or melon, are conceiv’d to form one thing” (THN 221/146). For while Hume did of course affirm the existence of impressions that qualify as simple under the separability principle (chapter 16-A),4 this impression-grounded idea of simplicity specifically excludes beings in which the color can be distinguished from the taste, the taste from the figure, and the figure from all the other separately conceivable qualities. Simple impressions of this kind are at most analogies for, but can never take the place of, the impression requisite to make the objective simplicity accorded to composite beings by the definition conceivable (just as we saw earlier that deductively necessary relations are no substitute for the impressions of objective necessary connections needed to render the realist definition of cause and effect intelligible). Lacking such an impression, no matter how great our propensity to fancy that we can conceive of a peach, melon, or other qualitatively composite object as one thing, we cannot help recognizing that all these qualities are different, and distinguishable, and separable from each other; which view of things being destructive of its primary and more natural notions, obliges the imagination to feign an unknown something, or original substance and matter, as a principle of union or cohesion among these qualities, and as what may give the compound object a title to be call’d one thing, notwithstanding its diversity and composition. (221/146)

A substance is an “unknown something” we have to “feign” because there is no impression from which to obtain an idea of it (15–6/16). Only through the influence of fictions of imagination do we come to fancy that we can form an idea answering to the definition of substance as a “principle of union or cohesion” binding together impressions of color, taste, figure, et al, into a single composite thing (16/16, 221/146, and 263/171). And so it should come as no surprise that Hume branded substance an “unintelligible chimera” (222/147). As with the other notions I have examined, the consequence of the want of an impression original for an idea sufficient to underwrite the definitions that accord objective simplicity and/or substantiality to composite objects is to expose the unintelligibility of realism in either regard. To be sure, Hume allowed that the definition of substance as “something which may exist by itself” does not lack the the question whether the idea of body in which we naturally believe is sufficient to underwrite the realist definition of body. And since “all the difficulties of the vulgar system, with some others, that are peculiar to itself” (211/140) beset philosophical materialism—the lack of the preassociative impressions requisite to conceive numerical identity over time, identity despite interruption or variation—the true philosopher must accede to the skeptical-idealist implication that the notion of body called for by the realist definition is completely unintelligible, so that all our beliefs concerning it relate solely to the subjective associative-psychological surrogate we conceive instead. 4. Thus, “perfect simplicity” differs from “perfect identity” in that Hume reckoned it to be real (objective) and not merely an idea we fancy having because of some fiction of associative imagination. Only with Kant does simplicity of this kind count as subjective and ideal (because of the presupposition of pure intuition).

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support of impressions and ideas. The problem, however, is that “this definition agrees to every thing that can possibly be conceiv’d” (233/153), and makes “every perception . . . a substance, and every distinct part of a perception a distinct substance” (244/160). Since this is just to say that every fleeting pain, emotion, whimsy, desire, and volition is, according to the definition, as much a self-standing, independent substance as anything else, it “never will serve to distinguish substance from accident, or the soul from its perceptions” (233/153). And certainly no skepticism is so extreme as to consider so vapid a substance realism worth the trouble of a refutation. Later I will examine other instances of ostensibly objective relations that, for want of an impression, turn out to be inconceivable, and whose place in the economy of human understanding Hume deemed subjective psychological surrogates—fictions of associative imagination—fully capable of filling. Yet, in so doing, one must be careful not to lose sight of the forest for the trees. By nullifying relational realism in all its forms—relations of cause and effect, perfect identity, the imperfect identities of the enduring mind (chapter 16-F) and corporeal beings, composite individuals, substantial substrates, and space and time (chapter 18-C and -D)—Hume, quite literally, “loosen’d all our particular perceptions” (635/ 400). By thus rejecting the reality of all objective relations, he accordingly shifted the burden of explicating “objective” understanding entirely to subjective principles of association (“as these are the only ties of our thoughts, they are really to us the cement of the universe, and all the operations of the mind must, in a great measure, depend on them,” 662/417). Yet, before we can hope to understand this “universe of the imagination” (68/49), it first is necessary to comprehend the nature of the relational ties binding it together. B. Facility, the Essence of Relation Hume’s doctrine of relation is not the mystery most commentators maintain it to be. It is stated clearly and concisely, and subjected to extensive elaboration and development not only over the course of Treatise I (“Of the understanding”) but through Treatise II (“Of the passions”) and III (“Of morals”) as well. Rather than any dearth of information, obscurity, or ambiguity, the problem these commentators have with Hume’s doctrine stems from its being so different from, even contrary to, received notions of what an account of relations should do. For while it is recognized that Hume conceived of relations as founded on easy transitions of thought, this is commonly thought to explain not ideas of relation as such but merely the psychological mechanism whereby they are formed. Yet, from the perspective of Hume’s psychologism, this is a distinction without a difference. For those who make it are overlooking or discounting a possibility that must always be considered in connection with Hume’s theory of ideas: that psychological mechanisms are a source of ideational elements that enter into the contents of ideas of relations—constituents so indispensable that, apart (in abstraction) from them, the relation becomes inconceivable. This is how we need to understand facility (ease of transition): more than merely a mechanism for bringing about an idea of rela-


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tion, “facility of transition . . . is essential to it” (THN 99/69), its “very nature and essence” (204/135; also 220/145, 260/169–70).5 Thus, in a departure from the standard interpretive practice of ignoring or marginalizing facility in the consideration of Hume’s doctrine of relation and its place in his theory of understanding, I shall give it its full due by acknowledging, and then analyzing, its place at the heart of both. Facility—“easy,” “smooth,” or “natural” transitions of thought from one impression or idea to another—associates distinct perceptions, and makes their relation natural rather than merely philosophical. Associations are formed when “one idea naturally introduce[s] another,” so that, “in the course of our thinking, and in the constant revolution of our ideas, our imagination will run easily” from the one to its associate; and this facilitating quality, already of itself, “is to the fancy a sufficient bond and association” (THN 11/13; also EHU III ¶3). To produce what Hume terms a “perfect relation betwixt two objects,” the transition must be equally facile in either direction (THN 355–6/230). Conversely, there is a “want of relation” when “the fancy, in the comparison of objects, passes not easily from the one object to the other,” since “the action of the mind is, in a great measure, broke, and the fancy, in considering the second object, begins, as it were upon a new footing” (378/243). Finally, insofar as facile transitions associate impressions in reflexion just as they do ideas in imagination, and “these two attractions or associations of impressions and ideas concur on the same object, they mutually assist each other, and the transition of the affections and of the imagination is made with the greatest ease and facility” (289/189).6 What then is facility? Did Hume use this term and its synonyms (‘easy,’ ‘natural,’ ‘smooth’) to characterize the workings of an unconscious mechanism, to designate a perceptible datum of some kind, or both, in varying measure? In the case of Hume’s predecessors, the notion is usually left so indeterminate that one cannot be sure. Locke, for example, seems to have had the performance of a mechanism uppermost in mind when he characterized the association of ideas as “Trains of Motion in the Animal Spirits, which once set a going continue on in the same steps they have been used to, which by often treading are worn into a smooth 5. Other texts with a similar purport include THN 289/189, 305/199, 309/201, 355–6/230, 378/ 243–4, and 510n/327n. Although Hume iterated the claim that facility is the essence of relation too frequently for anyone to doubt that this was his view, he did on at least one occasion characterize the former as the effect of the latter: “The relation causes a smooth passage from the impression to the idea, and even gives a propensity to that passage” (THN 208/138; 318/207 is perhaps also an instance). This should not surprise us; the same thing occurs in the case of belief and vivacity, e.g.: “Here we must not be contented with saying, that the vividness of the idea produces the belief: We must maintain that they are individually the same” (116/80). Such multiple characterizations seem to be a consequence of Hume’s predilection to consider a number of particular “experiments” to confirm and clarify the general principle of the science of human nature he periodically enunciates: while some suffice only to show that belief or relation is the effect of vivacity or facility (or, conversely, that vivacity or facility is the effect of belief or relation), other experiments suffice to prove the psychologistic conclusion that vivacity and belief, and facility and relation, are “individually the same.” 6. This association of impressions is central to Hume’s analysis of the passions in Treatise II, but plays little if any role in Hume’s theory of the understanding in book I, and will only be touched on occasionally and tangentially here, e.g., chapter 20-E.

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path, and the Motion in it becomes easy and as it were Natural” (ECHU II/xxxiii/ §6). Similarly, Joseph Butler almost certainly had in mind the propensities and aversions of different mechanisms to certain courses of action—physical, biological, mental—when he maintained that “by accustoming ourselves to any course of action, we get an aptness to go on, a facility, readiness, and often pleasure in it”;7 still, since he may have meant that facility is not only a cause of pleasure but itself a pleasure, and so a datum consciously felt, we cannot be quite sure. Most probably, pre-Humean philosophers who introduced facile transitions into their theorizing were doing no more than availing themselves of the common practice of describing those operations that have become second nature to us through repetition as “easy,” “natural,” “smooth,” etc.: lacing up one’s shoes, speaking one’s native tongue, playing a piece one has mastered on the keyboard, behaving in the manner appropriate to a given social situation, and, in general, anything that practice tends to make perfect. What seems not to have occurred to any philosopher previous to Hume was to link facility to association as the source of the very idea of relation itself. Certainly, in no one else had the affective character of facility, as a datum felt in certain transitions of thought, been thematized more explicitly or consistently. This should not surprise us. If, as Hume supposed, a relation is a transition of thought, he still needed to specify what it is about transitions of thought that confers on them the status of relations. For if the scene played out in Hume’s “theatre of the mind” is indeed one of “perpetual flux and movement,” and “Our thought is still more variable than our sight” (THN 252–3/165), then transitions between perceptions are continuously occurring without their being in every case related as a result. The perception of transitions is necessary, but not sufficient, to form an idea of a relation between that from and to which the transition is made; there must be something else—some associating, or relating, quality—of which we are conscious in some transitions that is lacking in others, in which ideas of relations between the perceptions concerned in them consists. Facility feeling is, in my view, the “very nature or essence” of relation for Hume because it answers the question what datum, or content, immediately present to our consciousness constitutes the difference between a transition in thought from one perception to another that is distinct from yet also related to it, and a transition from one perception to another that is distinct from and alien to it. In the former case, there is something to link the perceptions in imagination, and their sequence acquires the potential to figure in our thought and action. In the latter case, their sequence is indiscernible from mere succession, and so a matter of indifference to our thought and action. An unconscious mechanism, triggered by the appearance of some object to produce an idea of the object that had in the past been found to be constantly conjoined with it, would not be sufficient to relate the perceptions involved in a transition of thought. For in the absence of any perceptible associating quality to link them in our thought, how would their sequential presence to our consciousness be marked out from any of the perceptual sequences simultaneous with theirs? 7. The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature 1.5.2 (1736).


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If we were conscious of nothing more in the transition from the one to the other than we are in the transitions involving any of the impressions and ideas simultaneous with them, then there would be nothing more to relate them to one another in our imaginations than to any of these other perceptions. Unconscious mechanisms such as those discussed in chapters 4-D and 6-C may well be necessary to produce relations of ideas, but, for Hume, they are by no means sufficient to introduce an association between perceptions that, both in appearance and in reality, “are different from each other, and from every thing else in the universe . . . and may exist separately, and have no need of any thing else to support their existence” (THN 233/153). To suppose otherwise is to put the Humean cart before the horse. For no matter how many times, and however consistently, an unconscious mechanism might generate a certain idea upon the prompting of a hardwired response to a perception stimulus, that would not suffice to effect any conscious tie between the perceptions concerned therein unless temporal contiguity (sequence) and resemblance (between the sequences) were already in themselves associative in nature. Yet, as Hume made quite clear, they have such a nature only insofar as the transition from the stimulus to its idea response feels easy, smooth, and natural to the imagination. If the transition were not distinguished by any perceptible datum from random successions of perceptions; or if it felt difficult, unnatural, somehow wrong, then no matter how constant and frequent the recurrence of the transition instigated by the unconscious mechanism might be, it would not register in imagination as any kind of relation at all. Indeed, since relations of constant conjunction are nothing more than resembling sequences of perceptions, if temporal sequence and resemblance were not associative relations, and had no transition-facilitating effect whatsoever (or the contrary effect), then relations of constant conjunction could never become more than background noise so far as human understanding was concerned. This is especially true at the most fundamental level of consciousness, where, in the absence of any immediately perceptible associating quality, it would be impossible to form any custom of thought of the kind requisite for causal association. And, in that case, there would be nothing to associate any of our present ideas to past impressions (the copy principle), with the consequence that memories could never be “receiv’d as true pictures of past perceptions,” and “we cou’d only admit of those perceptions, which are immediately present to our consciousness” (265/173).8 8. Interpreters who claim that Hume never questioned the truth of materialism and secret causal connections tend to make much of his departure on THN 60–1/44 from his usual practice of not concerning himself with the causes of sensations and embarking on a discussion of brain traces and animal spirits. But their enthusiasm might be tempered by recalling Hume’s expressed reluctance to enter into disquisitions of a natural-scientific character, as lying “without our present sphere” (55/41; also: “my philosophy . . . pretends only to explain the nature and causes of our perceptions, or impressions and ideas,” 64/46; see Locke’s similar determination regarding the distinction between primary and secondary qualities at ECHU II/viii/§22). In any event, Hume’s intermittent talk of brain traces did not prevent him from endeavoring to explicate our ideas of body in psychologistic fashion, establishing that they consist in an associative fiction of identity, and forthwith restricting their scope to “the imagination, or the vivacity of our ideas.” In one particularly telling passage, Hume reminds us “That, properly speaking, ’tis not our body we perceive, when we regard our limbs and members, but certain impressions, which enter by the senses” (191/127). If our limbs and members consist entirely of impres-

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Once it is recognized that Hume’s associationism requires that there be some immediately perceptible associating quality immanent to transitions of thought in imagination, the evidence points unambiguously to a feeling of facility as the datum in question. Let us begin with cause and effect as customary association, the affective nature of which he affirmed explicitly: “when many uniform instances appear, and the same object is always followed by the same event. . . . We then feel a new sentiment or impression, to wit, a customary connexion in the thought or imagination between one object and its usual attendant; and this sentiment is the original of that idea which we seek for” (EHU VII/ii ¶30); “their necessary connexion is that new determination we feel to pass from the idea of the one to that of the other” (THN 169/114); “and as we feel a customary connexion between the ideas, we transfer that feeling to the objects; as nothing is more usual than to apply to external bodies every internal sensation, which they occasion” (EHU VII/ii ¶29n). In the absence of this feeling, our ideas would be “entirely loose and unconnected” and “chance alone wou’d join them” (THN 10/12). Indeed, “chance,” as Hume understood it, corresponds to the situation in which we initially find ourselves, antecedently to all facilitating association and custom: chance is nothing real in itself, and, properly speaking, is merely the negation of a cause, its influence on the mind is contrary to that of causation; and ’tis essential to it, to leave the imagination perfectly indifferent. . . . A cause traces the way to our thought, and in a manner forces us to survey such certain objects, in such certain relations. Chance can only destroy this determination of the thought, and leave the mind in its native situation of indifference. (THN 125/86)

A transition to an idea in which any idea will do as well as any other so far as the imagination is concerned is the indifference that contrasts with relation. This indifference must be replaced by something that makes it feel so natural to think one idea, in preference to all others, upon the occasion of the presence of another, that we cannot, without experiencing “a sensible violence survey them in any other” relation. For example, when the imagination “considers a dye no longer supported by the box, it cannot without violence regard it as suspended in the air; but naturally places it on the table, and views it as turning up one of its sides” (128/ 88). It is the way the action of the mind in forming the idea feels that constitutes the difference between an indifferent transition and consciousness of a relation between the perceptions concerned in a transition. That the feeling Hume had in mind is facility seems clear since any idea has the potential “to acquire a facility and force; and both by its firm hold and easy introduction distinguish itself from any new and unusual idea” (116; my emphasis here and in the citations followsions incorporated into ideas (fictions) of identity in association imagination, can this be any less true of brains, brain traces, and the animal spirits flowing through them? To eliminate any sense of residual puzzlement, we need only reflect on what I showed in chapter 16: since Hume’s science of human nature, beginning with the copy principle, is itself restricted by content to associative imagination, none of the causal explanations offered in it—including the few exceptional cases that involve excursions into “natural philosophy” (55/41)—can have anything to do with the preassociative reality of our minds, much less the inconceivable “secret” realm of the reality beyond perception.


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ing).9 By contrast, “Where the mind reaches not its objects with easiness and facility, the same principles have not the same effect as in a more natural conception of the ideas; nor does the imagination feel a sensation, which holds any proportion with that which arises from its common judgments and opinions” (185/ 124). Thus, once we accept that what “associates ideas in the imagination” consists simply and solely in our coming to “feel [a bond] among the ideas,” there can be no doubting that “the very essence of these relations consists in their producing an easy transition of ideas” (259–60/169). One might object that the identification of the feeling characteristic of causal association with facility is less straightforward than the foregoing makes it seem, since ‘determines,’ rather than ‘ease,’ etc., is Hume’s preferred term to characterize the feeling of an impression of necessary connection. But quite apart from the difficulties involved in identifying it with something so causally loaded as “feeling irresistibly compelled,”10 a careful consideration of the text reveals that Hume was simply emphasizing one feature of the exceptionally high degree of facility feeling that characterizes associations grounded in the strongest customary associations (where the “strength” of the habit is proportionate to the frequency and constancy of the experience responsible for instilling it: THN 130–1/90). A strong custom not only “naturally conveys the thought to its usual attendant” but does so in such a way that “’twill scarce be possible for the mind, by its utmost efforts, to prevent that transition” (93/65; also 128/88). It “forces us to survey such certain objects, in such certain relations” (125/86), “by a natural transition, which precedes reflection, and which cannot be prevented by it” (147/100). This bypassing of reflection seems to have been uppermost in Hume’s mind when he distinguished habit-based natural relations that “determine” our thought in this way—where “imagination of itself supplies the place of this reflection” and “interposes not a moment’s delay” in the conception of the customary associate (93/65)—from “philosophical” causal relations that, lacking such habitual determination, depend on a process of deliberative ratiocination. For reasons I will consider in the next section, Hume insisted that “’tis only only so far as it is a natural relation, and produces an union among our ideas, that we are able to reason upon it, or draw any inference from it” (94/ 65). Here it suffices to recognize that it is specifically as habit-based natural relations that Hume described causal relations as “determining” our thought to the conception of an (associated) idea. And, indeed, what transition could be more natural than a shift from talk of customary association as (1) eliminating the need 9. Although Hume usually used “force” and “firmness” (THN 629/68) in connection with vivacity, and so as part of his explication of our belief in the real existence (actuality) of any impression or idea present to us in perception, he frequently uses the same term, and its cognates, in reference to customary association in relations of cause and effect: THN 109–10/76 (“fixt and unalterable . . . solid and real, certain and invariable”), 125/86 (“A cause . . . forces us . . . ”), 128/88 (“’tis almost impossible . . . not to form an idea of the other”), and 147/100 (“precedes reflection, and . . . cannot be prevented by it”). The reason for this ambiguity will be examined shortly, in connection with the sense in which the imagination is “determined” by customary association. In the case of 116/80, we cannot be completely certain whether vivacity, facility, or both at once is meant, but the sense of the passage seems to me to require the inclusion of facility feeling. 10. See HTC, chap. 5-A, for a discussion.

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to “reflect on past experience” (93/65), (2) proceeding “from a past repetition, without any new reasoning or conclusion” (103/72), and (3) making “the transition without the assistance of memory . . . before we have time for reflexion” (104/72), to talk of customs connecting ideas in the imagination so that “it feels that ’tis in a manner necessary determin’d to view these particular ideas” (108/75), “without any choice or hesitation,” its objects “fixt and unalterable . . . solid and real, certain and invariable” (110/76)? That both sets of characterizations—“facility” and “being determined”—come to the same is further evidence that both alike suffice for there to be a “sensible violence” (125/86) when we try to direct our thought from an impression to any idea(s) other than its customary associate(s). Indeed, their difference is one merely of emphasis, depending on which of the “original effects” of customary association Hume had uppermost in mind on any given occasion: “in bestowing a facility in the performance of any action or the conception of any object; and afterwards a tendency or inclination towards it; and from these we may account for all its other effects, however extraordinary” (422/ 271). The affective character of facility emerges equally clearly in the case of the multiple transitions of thought distinctive of identity relations. In the case of in the imperfect identity of the mind (person, self), “We only feel a connexion or a determination of the thought, to pass from one object to another. It follows, therefore, that the thought alone finds personal identity, when reflecting on the train of past perceptions, that compose a mind, the ideas of them are felt to be connected together, and naturally introduce each other” (THN 635/400). So too in the case of the imperfect identity of external objects: Hume’s account supposes that we feel the action of the mind in conceiving successively the same relation of ideas, and treats this feeling as the locus of the resemblance relation (202–4 and n/135–6 and n) that leads us to confound the survey of a succession of the same relation of objects with the feeling we have when surveying a succession of the same objects (perfect identity): “That action of the imagination, by which we consider the uninterrupted and invariable object, and that by which we reflect on the succession of related objects, are almost the same to the feeling” (253–4/166). In both perfect and imperfect identities (self and external object), a succession of facile transitions of thought together constitute a sustained affective disposition of thought founded on the resemblance between the appearances, respectively, of successive ideas and successive relations of ideas: a succession of related objects places the mind in this disposition, and is consider’d with the same smooth and uninterrupted progress of the imagination, as attends the view of the same invariable object. The very nature and essence of relation is to connect our ideas with each other, and upon the appearance of one, to facilitate the transition to its correlative. The passage betwixt related ideas is, therefore, so smooth and easy, that it produces little alteration on the mind, and seems like the continuation of the same action; and as the continuation of the same action is an effect of the continu’d view of the same object, ’tis for this reason we attribute sameness to every succession of related objects. The thought slides along the succession with equal facility, as if it consider’d only one object; and therefore confounds the succession with the identity. (204/135)


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Facility is constitutive of resemblance as a relation of ideas in imagination, regardless of whether the resemblance concerns the appearance of the ideas or the way in which they are related. Perfect identity is constituted by a succession of such transitions of thought when these are founded on a resemblance in the appearance of the objects considered, resulting in a passage so easy and smooth to the feeling as to form a single sustained affective disposition (chapter 17-A). Imperfect identity, as instanced by the idea of distinct, continued objects and the idea of the mind (self, person), is likewise constituted by a succession of such transitions of thought. But instead of being founded solely (in the case of interrupted resembling appearances) or at all (in the case of varying, and so nonresembling appearances) on a resemblance relating to the appearance of the objects considered, it is founded instead on a resemblance in the relation of the objects considered. The successive facile transitions constitutive of the relation outweigh the changed appearances and result in an affirmation of identity because they have the same effect as a perfect identity, a single sustained affective disposition that feels so much like that incident to perfect identity that the imagination confounds them: But tho’ these two ideas of identity, and a succession of related objects, be in themselves perfectly distinct, and even contrary, yet ’tis certain, that in our common way of thinking they are generally confounded with each other. That action of the imagination, by which we consider the uninterrupted and invariable object, and that by which we reflect on the succession of related objects, are almost the same to the feeling, nor is there much more effort of thought requir’d in the latter case than in the former. The relation facilitates the transition of the mind from one object to another, and renders its passage as smooth as if it contemplated one continu’d object. This resemblance is the cause of the confusion and mistake, and makes us substitute the notion of identity, instead of that of related objects. However at one instant we may consider the related succession as variable or interrupted, we are sure the next to ascribe to it a perfect identity, and regard it as invariable and uninterrupted. Our propensity to this mistake is so great from the resemblance above-mention’d, that we fall into it before we are aware; and tho’ we incessantly correct ourselves by reflexion, and return to a more accurate method of thinking, yet we cannot long sustain our philosophy, or take off this biass from the imagination. Our last resource is to yield to it, and boldly assert that these different related objects are in effect the same, however interrupted and variable. (THN 253–4)

Hume’s point is that if we consider “the nature of relation, and that facility which is essential to it, we can satisfy ourselves” that the disposition of the mind in a single easy transition of thought will continue without changing (at least in so sensible a fashion as to draw attention to itself) through succeeding transitions unless and until an object requiring a new action of thought to be conceived makes us aware of a variation or interruption: ’tis evident the continuance of the disposition depends entirely on the objects, about which the mind is employ’d; and that any new object naturally gives a new direction to the spirits, and changes the disposition; as on the contrary, when the mind fixes constantly on the same object, or passes easily and insensibly along

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HUME’S AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES related objects, the disposition has a much longer duration. Hence it happens, that when the mind is once inliven’d by a present impression, it proceeds to form a more lively idea of the related objects, by a natural transition of the disposition from the one to the other. The change of the objects is so easy, that the mind is scarce sensible of it, but applies itself to the conception of the related idea with all the force and vivacity it acquir’d from the present impressions. (98–9/69)11

It cannot be emphasized too strongly, in interpreting this and similar texts, that, in the mind’s “native situation of indifference,” there can be no such thing as an easy, smooth, or natural transition of thought, and so too no “sensible violence” (125/ 86) were the imagination, at that moment, to replace its natural correlate with any other idea. Where no datum “traces the way to our thought,” any idea we form will do as well as any other, and none will exert that “firm hold and easy introduction” that alone distinguishes a related idea “from any new and unusual idea” (116/80). The essence of associative relation is facility because the action of forming a related idea feels different—the affective disposition of the imagination is sensibly different—from forming an unrelated idea (“any loose floating image of the fancy”). Recognizing this is especially crucial to comprehending the role of successive transitions of thought in Hume’s account of identity. If the affective disposition of the mind in the first transition were one of perfect indifference, devoid of any distinguishing affect, then there would be nothing—no positive content or datum—to continue over into the next, and again into the next, and so on, and so, a fortiori, there would be no sustained affective disposition. It is the facility feeling we are conscious of in the first transition that makes possible “the continuity of the thought” (THN 258/169) Hume deemed essential to identity relations; and this is just as true of perfect identity as it is of imperfect, if for no other reason than that, in the absence of a feeling distinctive of the former, there would be nothing to cause the mind to confound the feeling of the latter with it (section A). He was far too explicit and unequivocal for anyone to doubt that he placed the locus of the continuity constitutive of identity over time not in the objects (appearances) we successively consider but in the affective disposition immanent to our successive considerations (201–4 and n/135–6 and n, 253–4/166 and 255–6/166–7). For Hume, the continuation of the same action of thought is thus ipso facto a continuation of the same feeling, the same affective disposition, which continues so long as “The 11. Hume usually employed ‘disposition’ in the sense philosophers today invariably understand it: an imperceptible feature (nature, property, propensity, etc.) causally responsible for a certain effect. It is therefore all the more important to be cognizant of those few instances when he departed from standard usage and employed the term to signify a frame of mind, with particular emphasis on its affective dimension. Though Hume sometimes used ‘disposition’ in this sense and ‘facility’ interchangeably, their meanings seem to differ in two respects. First, the former is more general, embracing all affective dispositions, not just facility feeling (e.g.: “These sentiments spring up naturally in my present disposition; and shou’d I endeavour to banish them, by attaching myself to any other business or diversion, I feel I shou’d be a loser in point of pleasure; and this is the origin of my philosophy,” THN 271/176). Second, as noted earlier, Hume tended to employ ‘disposition’ in cases where his focus was not on a single facile transition of thought but a succession of closely resembling facile transitions, which together constitute a single sustained affective disposition.


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passage from one moment to another . . . distinguishes not itself by a different perception or idea, which may require a different direction of the spirits” (203/ 135; also 99/69). Now, the crux of Hume’s psychologistic explication of ideas of imperfect identities is that the natural tendency of the imagination to conserve its affective disposition will prevail over interruptions and variations in the appearances, and the consequent breaks in the smooth transitions they occasion due to the lack of apparent (i.e., sensible) resemblance (THN 201–4/134–6). If we were to compare any individual facile transition of a perfect identity relation, where there is neither variation nor interruption, with the individual facile transitions of an imperfect identity relation characterized by interruption and/or variation, it is impossible to mistake the difference, and so too the fact that the latter is not, in truth, an identity relation at all. But what in isolation could not be easier for the imagination to distinguish becomes otherwise in the face of the resemblance in the sustained affective disposition that results when successive objects exhibit the same relations to one another. The imagination will then seek some fiction whereby to preserve its disposition in the face of the uneasiness caused it by recalcitrant appearances (206/137). Take for example the case of an interruption in the perception of otherwise perfectly resembling appearances: Our memory presents us with a vast number of instances of perceptions perfectly resembling each other, that return at different distances of time, and after considerable interruptions. This resemblance gives us a propension to consider these interrupted perceptions as the same; and also a propension to connect them by a continu’d existence, in order to justify this identity, and avoid the contradiction, in which the interrupted appearance of these perceptions seems necessarily to involve us. Here then we have a propensity to feign the continu’d existence of all sensible objects; and as this propensity arises from some lively impressions of the memory, it bestows a vivacity on that fiction; or in other words, makes us believe the continu’d existence of body. (208–9/138–9)

By means of this fiction/conviction, the imagination relieves “the uneasiness [arising] from the opposition of two contrary principles . . . by sacrificing the one to the other” (206/137). In particular, the pain occasioned by the interruption because it destroys the sustained affective disposition (composed of successive facile transitions incident to resemblances in the appearance of the perceptions considered) is eliminated by distinguishing the existence of an object of the senses from its appearance by postulating its absence from that “connected heap of perceptions” (207/138) that constitutes the mind. The result is that the imagination ceases to be disturbed by the interruption and so is able to sustain its pleasant (easy, smooth) affective disposition in perfect tranquility (“The thought slides along the succession [of related objects] with equal facility, as if it consider’d only one object; and therefore confounds the succession with the identity,” 204/135). If nothing else, it should at least be clear that, for Hume, the true associative locus of identity relations is not the objects we relate but the disposition of the imagination. If the observation of resemblances in successive appearances did not occasion a succession of pleasurably easy, smooth, natural (right-seeming) transitions

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in the imagination, then we would never be tempted to confound the sustained affective disposition in imagination with an identity relating the resembling, but nevertheless distinct, objects we are considering (perfect identity). And if the locus of perfect identity were solely the resembling appearances, then the interruption of the resemblance would not be the occasion of any uneasiness, and the imagination would have no inclination to indulge in “the fiction of a continu’d existence; since that fiction, as well as the identity, is really false, as is acknowledg’d by all philosophers, and has no other effect than to remedy the interruption of our perceptions, which is the only circumstance that is contrary to their identity” (THN 209/139). This is true no less in the case of the imperfect identity of the self than in the case of perfect identity and the imperfect identity continued, distinct existents. The only difference is that causal associations play the role in the case of the former that relations of resemblance in appearance play in the latter cases. They alone are suited to this role because causal relations have nothing to do with the appearance of the objects concerned in them and the I is precisely that identity whose existence is supposed to continue regardless of any and all variation in appearances (the “perpetual flux and movement” of our sensations, reflexions, and thoughts). Identity here depends crucially on being able to continue the facility felt in each individual causal association when proceeding to the next, as “Our impressions give rise to their correspondent ideas; and these ideas in their turn produce other impressions,” and “One thought chaces another, and draws after it a third, by which it is expell’d in its turn” (261/170). If anything prevented us from continuing this facility feeling from one causal relation to the next, then it would be impossible to sustain our affective disposition at all, much less sustain it indefinitely; and there would be nothing for us to confound with the sustained affective disposition distinctive of perfect identity. For it is not a sequence of causal associations per se that constitutes the idea of personal identity, but rather a sequence in which the affective disposition distinctive of each causal association is continued into its successor. Since the three causal relations concerned in “the true idea of the human mind” are never absent through the entire course of our conscious lives (chapter 16-G-1–2), this means that they are able to sustain this affective disposition quite literally so long as we are compos mentis. By confounding this disposition with perfect identity just as we do in the case of continued, distinct existents (253–6/165–7), we obtain an idea of our own identity that “is always intimately present” (317/206).12 Thus, it should come as no surprise that Hume 12. Hume may well have had Locke’s narrowly circumscribed, forensic sense of ‘person’ in mind when he distinguished our “identity with regard to the passions” from our memory-transcending identity “with regard to the imagination” (THN 261/170). For a person’s passions, emotions, desires, and volitions do seem to be delimited by specific memories of past experience—for example, memories of the actions responsible for the pride or humility we feel toward our own character and the love or hatred we feel toward others. But this raises the question of the relation of these two selves: did Hume affirm more than one sense of ‘person,’ and if so, how are they correlated? Many interpreters regard Hume’s imagination-centered account of the self in Treatise book I, according to which there is no constant and invariable impression we can equate with the self nor any impression of a connection of particular perceptions as inhering in a self, as not only different from but inconsistent with the self of the passions described in Treatise book II, as when he maintains “that the idea, or rather impression of ourselves is


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was even more emphatic in his insistence that the essence of relation is facility feeling when discussing identity than he was in the case of any other relation (thrice affirming it: 204/135, 220/145, and 260/169–70).13 always intimately present with us, and that our consciousness gives us so lively a conception of our own person, that ’tis not possible to imagine, that any thing can in this particular go beyond it” (317/206). This appearance of inconsistency vanishes, however, as soon as we realize that Hume’s denial of an impression of the self in Treatise I concerns only the kind of impression that originates in the senses prior to and independently of associative imagination, not the kind that arises from its action (the affects immanent to it), which prove to be the source not only of ideas of identity but also of our ideas of necessary connection (the impressions of reflexion incident to customary association founded on constant conjunction). To be sure, the self of imagination is an idea, not an impression. But just as Hume sometimes accounted memories impressions rather than ideas because their vivacity is so great that their effects on thought and action are comparable to impressions (82/58), the idea of the self deserves this appellation for the same reason: first, because, unlike other ideas, it is never absent from our purview (insofar as causal associations are always present to us), so that, being always front and center, “the present situation of the person is always that of the imagination” (430/276), and, second, because the continuous presence of these associative relations serves to continuously reinforce the vivacity of this self—so that, more nearly than any other idea (even memories) it approaches the vivacity of an impression. Thus, far from conflicting with the imagination-centered account of the self in Treatise I, the perpetually and intimately present self of the passions in Treatise II is its natural consequence. 13. The requirement of affective continuity is often neglected or regarded as inessential to Hume’s explication of “the true idea of the human mind.” One might defend this position by pointing to the fact that a causal system preserves its identity even if, at some point in time, it branches off into multiple discrete, non-interacting causal lines. By contrast, if personal identity is supposed to consist principally in affective continuity, a single person can ramify into as many distinct persons as there are discrete causal lines (some of which might later converge, forming again one person). The question is whether such purely conceptual possibilities would have mattered enough to Hume to induce him to treat affective continuity as ancillary to personal identity. With no experienced instance of branching causal systems of perceptions to warrant according it the least probability, I doubt that he would have reacted to it any differently than he did to the possibility illustrated by the missing shade of blue: “the instance is so particular and singular, that ’tis scarce worth our observing, and does not merit that for it alone we should alter our general maxim” (THN 6/10). One rarely remarked difficulty that arises if affective continuity is discounted and personal identity equated with a system of causally associated perceptions is that, in the context of Hume’s associationism, it would make my identity and that of the universe as a whole one and the same (“as these are the only ties of our thoughts, they are really to us the cement of the universe,” THN 662/416–7). It is causal association in particular that “peoples the world, and brings us acquainted with such existences, as by their removal in time and place, lie beyond the reach of the senses and memory. By means of it I paint the universe in my imagination, and fix my attention on any part of it I please” (108/75 ). To confine the scope of the causal system of perceptions so that it can plausibly be equated with the self, everything we suppose to exist distinct from (independently of and external to) the mind must be excluded from the system. To be sure, there is no reason to think that Hume did not mean to include causes and effects of all kinds in his system, not excepting the continued, distinct existents that result from the fiction of imperfect identity examined in THN I/iv/§2. Still, exponents of the view that he equated the self with a system of causally linked perception can plausibly maintain that he regarded the objects painted in associative imagination in either of two ways: as complex ideas with sensation and memory constituents belonging to the identity of the mind, or as objects fictitiously supposed to have an existence distinct from the mind. When the causal system of perceptions is viewed in the former regard, the result is an idea of the self rather than of the universe as a whole, and affective continuity contributes nothing essential to its content at all. Of course, a great deal of philosophy is involved in learning to view the physical world as consisting in nothing but complex ideas with sensation and memory constituents fictitiously regarded as preserving their identity through interruptions in their appearance to the senses. Does this mean that

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The final piece of textual evidence that shows that associative imagination, for Hume, is as much an organ of feeling—“the imagination feels a sensation” (THN 185/124), “the imagination has a set of passions belonging to it” (585/373–4)—as it is of mental activity (the repeating, “compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience,” EHU II ¶ 5) is the pleasure and pain the imagination undergoes when its action is in any way affected. Facility, in particular, is often (though not invariably) a source of pleasure, which could not be the case if its nature was not already that of a feeling: By degrees the repetition produces a facility, which is another very powerful principle of the human mind, and an infallible source of pleasure, where the facility goes not beyond a certain degree. . . . The pleasure of facility does not so much consist in any ferment of the spirits, as in their orderly motion; which will sometimes be so powerful as even to convert pain into pleasure, and give us a relish in time for what at first was most harsh and disagreeable. But again, as facility converts pain into pleasure, so it often converts pleasure into pain, when it is too great, and renders the actions of the mind so faint and languid, that they are no longer able to interest and support it. And indeed, scarce any other objects become disagreeable thro’ custom; but such as are naturally attended with some emotion or affection, which is destroy’d by the too frequent repetition. (THN 423/271; also 434/278)

only philosophers who succeed in convincing themselves of this are capable of forming an idea of the self? Anyone inclined to answer yes probably regards Hume’s explication of the idea as a debunking exercise designed to deny the idea of the self and set that of a causal system of perception in its place. It then bears a strong resemblance to positivist readings of Hume’s account of cause and effect in favor in throughout much of the twentieth century, portraying his intent as being to deny the existence of any such idea and to set constant conjunction in its place (the “regularity view”). Yet, just as most scholars today appreciate that Hume’s preeminent concern with the origin, content, and scope of application of the idea of necessary connection stemmed from his conviction that we possess an idea of cause and effect distinct from constant conjunction and that this idea is essential to the cognitive and conative economy of our minds, we should also recognize that Hume’s concern with the origin, content, and scope of application of the idea of personal identity was likewise motivated by a conviction that we possess an idea of the self distinct from that of a causal system and that this idea too plays a vital role in human cognition and conation. A causal system of perceptions is just what it is: the source not of any idea of a single complex individual but of a system of individuals, simple and complex, that “mutually produce, destroy, influence, and modify each other” (THN 261/170). Only with the addition of affective continuity is there anything present to imagination resembling perfect identity and capable of being confounded with it. Moreover, as soon as we recognize that, for Hume, the locus of identity is the affective disposition of imagination, we can see that it makes no difference which things are included in the causal system that underpins it. For if the self is equated not with the system itself but the affective disposition whereof it is the occasion, there can be no absurdity in the fact that this system includes my body, your body, mountains, cities, moons, stars, and all the other objects that populate the boundless universe we paint inside our imaginations. Finally, by restoring affective continuity to its central place in Hume’s explication of “the true idea of the human mind,” we thereby retrieve it from the rarefied realm of idealist philosophy and restore it to everyone, animals included (the object of a peacock’s pride: 326/212), possessed of an imagination equipped to associate perceptions relations of resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect. Thus, if being a Humean about personal identity means equating the idea of the self with a system of causal relations, then Hume was not a Humean.


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When the objects that engage us are “sensible, and of a narrow compass,” they “are enter’d into with facility, and are agreeable to the imagination” (452/289). By contrast, Where the mind reaches not its objects with easiness and facility, the same principles have not the same effect as in a more natural conception of the ideas; nor does the imagination feel a sensation, which holds any proportion with that which arises from its common judgments and opinions. The attention is on the stretch: The posture of the mind uneasy. (185/124)

This should suffice to dispel any remaining doubt as to the affective nature of facility. For if Hume did not deem it a feeling, how could he suppose that its presence or absence pleases or displeases? The workings of unconscious mechanisms, however smooth and easy, cannot in themselves give pleasure. This does not mean that Hume always used ‘facility’ and its cognates with a certain sensible affection uppermost in mind. But the textual evidence seems overwhelming that when Hume repeatedly described facility as the essence of relation he had in mind a datum that distinguishes indifferent transitions in which no datum of relation is perceived from transitions “which can give ideas an union in the imagination” (260/169). While the foregoing textual considerations should suffice to make clear the affective nature of facility and its centrality to Hume’s doctrine of associative imagination, we must be careful not to confound it with other things to which he applied the term ‘feeling’: impressions of reflexion such as passions, desires, and volitions. The species of affect characteristic of the association of ideas is not simply an accompaniment, cause, or consequence of the relation (transition of thought), but instead is immanent to it: “This easy transition is the effect, or rather essence of relation” (THN 220/145)—a constitutive element therein. Facility affect is distinguishable from the action of the imagining mind only in the sense that such action may take place even while, affectively, it remains “in its native situation of indifference” (chance). But since its actions are seldom if ever random,14 some degree of facility feeling is always present to us, albeit unremarked (as typified by the influence of custom: “where it is strongest, it not only covers our natural ignorance, but even conceals itself, and seems not to take place, merely because it is found in the highest degree,” EHU IV/i ¶8; also THN 93/65, 104/72, 133/92, and 373/240–1). What sets facility apart from the impressions of reflexion that occasion or are occasioned by goings on in the imagination is that it is neither distinct in existence nor separable in thought from associative activity. By contrast, the impressions of reflexion that stand in causal relation with the actions of 14. Facility affect cannot be any less omnipresent than the association of ideas to which it is essential: “even in our wildest and most wandering reveries, nay in our very dreams, we shall find, if we reflect, that the imagination ran not altogether at adventures, but that there was still a connexion upheld among the different ideas, which succeeded each other. Were the loosest and freest conversation to be transcribed, there would immediately be observed something, which connected it in all its transitions. Or where this is wanting, the person, who broke the thread of discourse, might still inform you, that there had secretly revolved in his mind a succession of thought, which had gradually led him from the subject of conversation” (EHU III ¶1).

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imagination are, like all causes and effects, separable in thought and distinct in existence from one another.15 So, although Hume sometimes grouped facility with impressions of reflexion insofar as it enters into the impression original of our ideas of relation (the psychologistic explications of cause and effect as well as of identity), the fact that its existence is confined to the interstices between successive perceptions (transitions from one to another) prevents it from partaking of the selfsubsistence he attributed to other affects and to perceptions generally (207/137–8, 233–4/153–4, 244/160, and 252/164–5). C. Vivacity Follows Facility One vexing interpretive question we can lay to rest as soon as we acknowledge the central importance of feelings immanent to imagination to Hume’s associationism concerns whether, and if so how, consciousness is distinct from perceptions (impressions and ideas). The alternatives are a “bipolar” model, where ideas go to together with impressions of sensation and reflexion at “the object pole,” immediately present to a “consciousness pole,” at which they are considered in various ways; and a “unipolar” model, where consciousness is nothing distinct from the ideas and impressions formed in our minds (the difference counts as a merely abstract “distinction of reason,” nothing more). There is considerable textual and contextual evidence in favor of the bipolar reading, while most of that typically adduced in favor of the unipolar model seems to evaporate under scrutiny. For example, right from the outset, Hume classes impressions and ideas as “objects” (THN 2/8; also 206/137) and characterizes their difference in terms of “the degrees of force and liveliness, with which they strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or consciousness” (1/7). Perceptions are “immediately present to our consciousness” (265/173; also 212/140); an idea is “a real perception in the mind, of which we are intimately conscious” (106/74); and consciousness is specifically distinguished from the object pole when Hume reexpresses the proposition that “all actions and sensations of the mind are known to us by consciousness” as “Everything that enters the mind, being in reality a perception, ’tis impossible any thing shou’d to feeling appear different” (190/127). Above all, who is the spectator in Hume’s theatre in mind—the internal awareness presupposed in the observational claim that all our perceptions (ideas and impressions, internal and external) “successively make their appearance, pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations” (253/165)—if consciousness is nothing distinct from our particular perceptions? Indeed, it was an inability to account for this distinct, spectator consciousness (apprehension) presupposed by association that got Hume into the quandary examined in chapter 3. Yet even if we consent to ignore the textual evidence that indicates Hume worked within the framework of a bipolar model of consciousness, the value he attached to transitions of thought in his doctrine of associative relation seems 15. Examples of these causal relations can be found at THN 120/82–3, 321/208–9, 339–40/220–1, 373/240–1, 393/253, and 422–38/271–80; see also 115/79, 148/100–1, 380/245, and EHU X/ii ¶16.


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incompatible with any other. Facile, idea-enlivening transitions of thought seem inconceivable on a unipolar model, according to which consciousness is nothing distinct from the particular perceptions themselves. If imagination is supposed to have no degree of independence from the particular perceptions that constitute Hume’s “perpetual flux and movement,” how could it possibly perceive their transitions, and be affected with feelings of easiness or uneasiness in the process? Certainly, perceptions themselves cannot be the locus of such feelings—impressions do not feel their transitions to ideas, nor do ideas feel the transitions from impressions. Associative imagination must enjoy the degree of independence from its objects requisite for it to be in a position to reflect upon the impressions and ideas before it, if it is to “feel a connexion or a determination of the thought, to pass from one object to another” (635/400; also 260/169). Consciousness, for Hume, is not itself a thought or perception, but rather “a reflected thought or perception” (635/400)—the action, and affective disposition, on the hither (subjective) side of consciousness, not the thither (objective) side where sensations, reflexions, and thought are found. Though the thesis that Hume embraced a bipolar model of consciousness, with a real distinction between contents considered and their consideration, may seem arcane, it is nonetheless essential to making sense of his associationism. This is evident from what happens when a unipolar model is applied to one of Hume’s most important principles, the “general maxim in the science of human nature, that when any impression becomes present to us, it not only transports the mind to such ideas as are related to it, but likewise communicates to them a share of its force and vivacity” (THN 98/69). Those who read this vivacity-transference principle through the lens of a unipolar model tend to view it as exemplifying what Hacking and others have characterized as “Hume’s much maligned mechanical model of vivacity.”16 It is deplored for the same reason all philosophical psychology of Hume’s type is. As Norman Kemp Smith put it in his seminal work on Hume, “psychology, as exposing the mechanisms through which belief is causally produced, usurps upon logic, as defining the conditions under which it can be intelligently regulated.”17 Yet, as I have contended time and again in these pages, one only adopts such an attitude if one fails to reckon with, or even descry, the importance of psychological accounts of the origins of ideas in the sensibilist theory of understanding that culminates in Hume’s psychologism. These mechanisms enter into Hume’s theory of understanding not merely as causal explanations of the formation of the ideas constitutive of objective understanding but because they contribute contents indispensable to those ideas. But this can only be properly comprehended if we abjure unipolar models of consciousness. For until they are discarded, the vivacity-transference principle cannot fail to conjure up hydrostatic imagery of impressions pumping their force and vivacity into the ideas to which they transport the mind like boilers piping hot water into a room’s radiators at the opening of a valve. Such imagery prompts one to ask whether the impression expends its vivacity in conveying it to the idea and so itself becomes an idea while 16. “Hume’s Species of Probability,” Philosophical Studies 33 (1978), 34. 17. The Philosophy of David Hume (London: MacMillan 1941), 387.

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the idea becomes an impression? Or, if vivacity is not zero-sum, does extra vivacity simply pop into existence ex nihilo or is there some underground well the imagination taps into? And what has all this shuttling around of “force and vivacity” to do with what goes on in conscious imagination when it conceives the idea to which an associative transition is made in the manner Hume equated with belief? While a bipolar model of consciousness may have drawbacks of its own, it at least banishes otiose mechanistic imagery of this sort. Vivacity transference is then regarded from inside the standpoint of conscious imagination itself—the spectator of Hume’s theatre of the mind (THN 252–3/165)—and, particularly, what it feels both in its (facile) transition from a perception to its associated idea and in the (forceful, lively) manner in which it conceives that idea. Indeed, even before association operates, consciousness feels a force and vivacity in the manner in which it apprehends certain of its objects. For, just as believed ideas are distinguished from unbelieved by the (forceful, lively) manner in which they are conceived by associative imagination, so too impressions are preassociatively distinguished from ideas generally by the (forceful, lively) manner in which they “strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or consciousness” (1/ 7). In both cases, force and vivacity is a feature not of perceptions themselves, but of our consciousness of them and, more particularly, like facility, signifies a feeling immanent to consciousness itself (chapter 16-A). It then becomes easy on a bipolar model to explain what seems inexplicable, in a convincingly Humean manner, on a unipolar model: how one and the same ideational content can, at one time, not be believed, at another be weakly believed, at yet another be firmly believed, and at still another be strongly disbelieved. On a unipolar model, the separability principle prevents us from distinguishing force and vivacity from the content of the idea for the same reason it prevents us from distinguishing a particular hue of blue from blue itself: they are one and indistinguishable (the only distinctions possible here are differences of significative use founded on an ideational content’s “many different resemblances and relations,” 25/21; chapter 18B). Differences in force and vivacity would then be differences of ideational contents, so that we could never believe the same object (ideational content) we formerly did not believe, or later come to disbelieve it: they would all be different objects related only by resemblance as pale blue is to indigo. Yet Hume made quite clear that two ideas of the same object can differ in no other way than “by their different feeling,” including “their different degrees of force and vivacity” (636/400–1). Words like these seem to cry out for bipolar construal. For if force and vivacity pertain to my consciousness of the ideational content and not to that content itself, then it can range all the way from the faintest idea to the liveliest without ipso facto implying that I have ideas of different contents. On a bipolar model, in other words, the degree of force and vivacity varies independently of the object thought, so that, without violence to the separability principle, I can come to believe one and the same ideational content I formerly did not.18 This model therefore permits 18. When Hume sought to correct his assertion in Treatise I that “two ideas of the same object can only be different by their different degrees of force and vivacity,” remarking that “there are other


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the object (perceptions: sensations, reflexions, thoughts) to be conceived independently of consciousness, and so too to be conceived to exist independently of it: “An interrupted appearance to the senses implies not necessarily an interruption in the existence. The supposition of the continu’d existence of sensible objects or perceptions involves no contradiction” (207–8/138). This result has two consequences of the first importance; yet, before considering them, we must first be assured of the affective nature of the “force and vivacity” to which Hume equated belief (THN 94–6/65–7, 119–20/82–3, 623–32/396–8, and EHU V/ii). The notion first appears as the quality whereby impressions are distinguished from ideas (THN 1/7), and then as the quality whereby ideas of memory are distinguished from those of imagination (9/11–2). It is first equated with belief in the case of impressions and memories at the conclusion Treatise I/ iii/§5, just before Hume embarks on the discussion of the nature and causes of belief that culminates in the vivacity transference maxim: Thus it appears, that the belief or assent, which always attends the memory and senses, is nothing but the vivacity of those perceptions they present; and that this alone distinguishes them from the imagination. To believe is in this case to feel an immediate impression of the senses, or a repetition of that impression in the memory. ’Tis merely the force and liveliness of the perception, which constitutes the first act of the judgment, and lays the foundation of that reasoning, which we build upon it, when we trace the relation of cause and effect. (86/61)19 differences among ideas, which cannot properly be comprehended under these terms,” he is sometimes interpreted as retracting his claim that belief consists simply and solely in a feeling of vivacity. Francis Dauer, for example, holds that “if force and vivacity is not the only way the manner of conception can be varied, Hume’s argument in I/iii/§7 for identifying belief with force and vivacity collapses and there is no longer reason to think that force and vivacity attaching to beliefs must be the same as the force and vivacity attaching to impressions, though it will no doubt be related” (personal correspondence). Yet Hume makes no mention of “manner of conception” on 6363/400–1. Even more important, he neither says nor suggests that the other ways in which two ideas of the same object can differ have anything to do with belief. The only thing he makes clear is that the other ways in which two ideas of the same object can differ also have to do with feeling. This might simply mean that two ideas of the same object can differ by virtue of the emotion that accompanies them (“no object is present to the senses, nor image form’d in the fancy, but what is accompany’d with some emotion or movement of spirits proportion’d to it,” though “custom may make us insensible of this sensation, and cause us to confound it with the object or idea,” 373/240). Or he may have in mind the invigorating or enervating effect the passions we undergo may have on the imagination (120–1/83, 148–9/100–1), since this can effect the facility of a thought transition, and so too the transference of vivacity from the impression to the idea to which the transition is made (chapter 20-D). See also chapter 18, note 17. 19. Wright avers that “the notion of natural beliefs of immediate consciousness is an invention of Waxman, not Hume” (“Critical,” 345). Yet the passage just cited proves otherwise (“To believe is in this case to feel an immediate impression of the senses”). Although not explicitly labeled immediate, there seems no doubt that the principles in which Hume professed unrenounceable belief on THN 636/400 are likewise beliefs rooted in immediate consciousness: “That all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences.” Another evident example of a belief founded on immediate consciousness is Hume’s claim the senses attest that none of their objects have a continued existence after they cease to be perceived (189/126). These are the beliefs that constitute one side of the dialectic of natural beliefs discussed in the conclusion of HTC (the other side consists of the no less irresistible beliefs, founded on associative imagination, that causes, selves, and bodies exist and populate a realm that extends far beyond the immediate purview of consciousness,

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This is the first occasion where the affective nature of belief (vivacity as feeling) is made explicit, after which it is reaffirmed repeatedly: “belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures . . . some sensation or peculiar manner of conception, which ’tis impossible for mere ideas and reflections to destroy” (184/123); “a peculiar feeling or sentiment,” such that “When we are convinc’d of any matter of fact, we do nothing but conceive it, along with a certain feeling, different from that which attends the reveries of the imagination” (623–4); nothing distinguishes “belief from the simple conception beside the feeling or sentiment,” and this feeling is nothing “but a firmer conception, or a faster hold, that we take of the object” (627/398); and the same story is repeated in Enquiry V/ii. The first consequence of the thesis that the objects of consciousness (perceptions) exist independently of our consciousness of them—and so too of the feelings immanent to it (facility, vivacity)—is to open the way to construing Hume’s equation of belief with vivacity as a psychologistic explication of the idea of real existence. Of course, to do this, we must be careful not to confound the sense of “belief” that occupied Hume with belief as epistemologists today regard it. The latter notion of belief is modeled on propositional expressions of belief and, more generally, implies a context in which it makes sense to speak of being correct or incorrect about something, not only by judging and/or acting in conformity with the facts but also in conformity to law, custom, divine ordinance, procedure, methodology, or any normatively prescribed cognitive or conative practice. One consequence of this is that almost no epistemologist today would restrict his or her account of what constitutes belief to the purely mental, much less to a feeling, or affective disposition; and, indeed, many maintain that an ability to represent propositionally is an essential constituent of this notion of belief. Hume, by contrast, seems to have thought of the feeling of vivacity constitutive of belief as a kind of reality sense, whereby not only humans but animals as well, despite their incapacity to represent propositionally, regard certain of the objects present to their minds in sensation, reflexion, and thought as really existent, rather than as fictitious or merely possible. It is true that he sometimes pointed out affinities between this sense of ‘belief’ and others, such as the credibility of portrayals of characters and events in works of fiction. Yet what ultimately mattered to him, as for both Locke and Berkeley before him (chapters 9-B and 11-A), is what constitutes the difference, in and for consciousness, between the dullest, most inchoate object of sensation and the most sharply delineated, finely detailed object of fancy (EHU II ¶1) and between a historical narration and a fiction (THN 631/84, 625/397). This difference, and it alone, Hume traced to an origin in the affective disposition (“feeling,” “sensation”) he characterized as a forceful, lively manner of regarding an object present to consciousness. i.e., the world of judgment on THN 108/75). And Wright compounds the error when he claims that “on Waxman’s view, Hume should have given precedence to natural beliefs engendered by immediate consciousness” (345), when the whole point (clearly stated in HTC, 18 and 268) of borrowing Kant’s term ‘dialectic’ was to stress that both sides of these Humean antinomies consist of beliefs that are equally impossible to resist or renounce.


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Thus did Hume trace the meaning of “believes really to exist,” as applied to any content present to our thought—sensation, reflexion or thought—to an origin in vivacity feeling: “Belief is the true and proper name of this feeling,” because “a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm steady conception of an object” is “that act of the mind, which renders realities, or what is taken for such, more present to us than fictions, causes them to weigh more in the thought, and gives them a superior influence on the passions and imagination” (EHU V/ii ¶12; also 628–9/68). The difference between merely conceiving something to exist and really believing that it does—thinking of it as really existent, actual—“consists not in the peculiar nature or order of our ideas, but in the manner of their conception, and in their feeling to the mind,” for “An idea assented to feels different from a fictitious idea, that the fancy alone presents to us” (THN 629/68). Construed on a bipolar model of consciousness, this is just to say that belief (regarding something as real) is conferred on an object neither by conjoining to it a distinct idea (94–5/65–6, 184/ 123, 623–4/396), nor a distinct impression (625–7/397–8), nor the “peculiar nature or order” of impressions and ideas, but by an affective modification (disposition) immanent to our consciousness of them. To this it might be objected that Hume could not have intended to explicate the idea of existence in terms of vivacity since he had already done so in Treatise I/ii/ §6 without mentioning it at all: “To reflect on any thing simply, and to reflect on it as existent, are nothing different from each other. . . . Any idea we please to form is the idea of a being; and the idea of a being is any idea we please to form” (66– 7/48). Yet precisely because the sense of ‘exists’ here described applies to all perceptions indifferently, it cannot explain what it is to represent a perceptual content (in sensation, reflexion, or thought) as really existent rather than inexistent, as actual rather than fictive, as a fact rather than a possibility, as an actualizable rather than an inactualizable possibility, or as present to consciousness rather than absent from it. Hume invoked vivacity to explain every one of these differences. We regard an idea of an object as “a real perception of the mind,” and contrast it with the idea of something we might have thought but did not, if it possesses that “quality, call it firmness, or solidity, or force, or vivacity, with which the mind reflects upon it and is assur’d of its present existence” (106/74). A thing or event is a real possibility if there has been at least one experience of its actuality in the past, and fantastical if it has never before been experienced and is contrary to what we have come to believe (vividly conceive) the principles of nature to be (133, 135, and EHU VIII/i ¶20); and “experience” here connotes nothing else than the vivacity of an impression and the transfer of this vivacity either to our memory of it or to an idea associated with the impression. And I have already presented ample textual evidence to show that Hume traced the differences between the really existent and inexistent, etc., entirely to differences in degrees of force and vivacity. In retrospect, then, the explication of existence in Treatise I/ii concerns only presence to consciousness—the sense of ‘exists’ that pertains to every perception as such, from the most vivid impression to the faintest idea. The task of psychologistically explicating the modalities of existence that distinguish the objects of sense from those of memory, inference, and fantasy was not undertaken until Hume took up the topic of belief as the force and vivacity of impressions (86/61) and ideas

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(94–8/65–9) in I/iii. This enabled him to explain in what sense even the dullest historical account is more “forceful and lively” than the most gripping fictional narrative (THN 631/84, 625/397), or the dimmest, most inchoate object of sensation is more “forceful and lively” than the most sharply delineated, finely detailed object of fancy (EHU II ¶1): a feeling immanent to our consciousness of the first of each of these pairs makes us take it to be real, causes it to weigh more in our reasoning, and gives it a superior influence on the conative passions (EHU V/ii ¶12). This brings us to the second of the aforementioned consequences of Hume’s thesis that perceptions exist independently of consciousness and the affects immanent to it: his rejection of esse is percipi idealism. That he did so seems clear from his assertion that “An interrupted appearance to the senses implies not necessarily an interruption in the existence” and “The supposition of the continu’d existence of sensible objects or perceptions involves no contradiction” (207–8/138). Thus, for Hume, contrary to Berkeley, it is intelligible to suppose that the esse of sensible things is not their percipi (though it cannot be emphasized too strongly that the converse does not follow, nor is there any evidence that Hume supposed that consciousness, and a fortiori the feelings of vivacity and facility immanent to it, are possible in the absence of any object—impression or idea—to perceive).20 What is less obvious is the ground of their divergence. In light of the preceding considerations, however, there can be little doubt that it stems from the different way the two philosophers conceived the modality of existence that distinguishes the really existent (actual, factual) from the conceivable but inexistent (fictive, unrealized possible, inactualizable conceivable). According to Berkeley, ‘real existence,’ as applied to sensible things, just means “present to consciousness in sensation” (chapter 11). However, for Hume, mere presence in sensation is not enough: in addition, our consciousness of the sensation must be characterized by a sufficient degree of force and vivacity affect for us to regard the content present in sensation as really existent. Otherwise, notwithstanding its presence in sensation, we would not regard it as real. In other words, if human nature were so constituted that our consciousness of sensations (and reflexions) was faint and languid, then we would not regard them as really existent; conversely, if it were constituted so that anything present to us in thought were regarded with maximal force and vivacity, then we would ipso facto regard the contents we think as real existents. Of course, as remarked in chapter 16-A, a creature with such a nature would be unlikely to survive long, for it would take flight at the mere thought of 20. See discussion in HTC, 187–91. Despite my iterated insistence, in those pages and throughout HTC, on the inseparability of consciousness (including the feelings immanent to it) from the objects (impressions and ideas) it considers, Wright claimed that I “attempt to detach consciousness from perceptions,” notwithstanding “Hume’s own claim that ‘consciousness is nothing but a reflected thought or perception’ (T 6[3]5)” (“Critical,” 345). Perhaps this misreading was the result of my thesis in HTC, chap. 6-B, that Hume rejected esse is percipi idealism. And Wright again compounded the error by setting up a false dilemma between a bipolar model in which both the object and consciousness pole are separable from one another and an abstractionist unipolar model in which neither pole is separable (except by a distinction of reason). Quite properly excluding the former, Wright relied on this false dilemma to assert that Hume situated belief “on the noemic rather than the noetic side of consciousness” (350n2—where he cites 625/397 against my reading, failing to note my acknowledgment of the undetachability of consciousness from its object in the course of discussing the same text on HTC, 152–3).


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a predator and relapse into quiescence the moment the predator appeared to its senses. But the point remains: sensations and reflexions are not intrinsically our most forceful, lively perceptions; they are so only relatively to the feeling immanent to the consciousness with which they regarded; and what makes them impressions rather than ideas has nothing to do with their contents and everything to do with the degree of force and vivacity characterizing our consciousness of them. Since, for Hume, the difference between real existence and inexistence does not consist in being perceived per se but rather in the intensity of the vivacity feeling accompanying it, there was therefore nothing to stop him from rejecting Berkeley’s claim that the supposition that an object (perception) can exist unperceived is unintelligible. Hume could do this by construing ‘exists’ in the Treatise I/ii sense, where “To reflect on any thing simply, and to reflect on it as existent, are nothing different from each other” (66–7/48): since “presence to consciousness in sensation” forms no part of this conception of the existence of the object, we can suppose it to exist without ipso facto presupposing that it appears, formerly appeared, or ever will appear to the senses. Of course, there is no comfort here for the materialist since the relevant sense of ‘exists’ includes reflection upon pains, pleasures, and reflexions as well as sensations within its scope, and so implies that presence to consciousness in sensation is likewise not inseparable from the “existence” of pleasures and pains, nor presence to consciousness in reflexion from the “existence” of desires, emotions, volitions, and passions. It is likewise of no use to the intellectualist because the perceptions of the human mind remain the same, intrinsically sensible contents regardless of whether they are supposed to continue in “existence” after their appearance to the senses is interrupted: sensations, reflexions, and their duplicates in thought. Thus did Hume elegantly turn the tables on Berkeley by accepting his point that existence and being conceived to exist are one and indistinguishable, while at the same time divorcing the idea21 of real existence (actuality) from sensation (and indeed from perceptions generally) by explicating it in terms of a feeling immanent to consciousness of perceptions that in no way enters into the content of the perceptions themselves (they belong to different axes of bipolar consciousness, with the former capable of varying independently of the latter).22 Thus, for Hume, every perception without exception, whether sensation, 21. Hume shied away from speaking of an “idea” of real existence in order to avoid giving the impression that it is a distinct content in its own right (under the separability principle) which the imagination might then freely combine or separate from any perception, and thus be free to disbelieve anything it believes or believe anything it disbelieves at a whim (THN 623–4/396 and EHU V/ii ¶10). But once it is made clear that the origin of this idea is an “impression” consisting in a feeling of force and vivacity immanent to the consciousness of any impression or idea, and that this feeling is inseparable from consciousness and consciousness from the perceptions present to it (see note 20), there is then no danger of confounding the true idea of real existence, or actuality, with the kind of idea the imagination is free to capriciously conjoin and separate. 22. Berkeley’s conception of the meaning of ‘exists’ that is applied to sensible things in terms of presence to consciousness in sensation left him with no satisfactory way to explain how we come to regard some of the ideas present to us in thought as no less real than the ideas appearing to the senses. For example, when I hear talking, I not only think there are people behind the partition I see but believe them to be no less really existent than the sounds themselves. On Hume’s account of the idea of real existence, there is a single univocal feature in our consciousness of both perceptions that is responsible

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reflexion, or thought, is conceivable as a mind-independent (207–8/137–8), selfsubsistent existent (222/147, 233–4/153–4, 244/160, 252/164). In this section we have found that vivacity feeling psychologistically explicates the idea of real existence in the same way that facility feeling explicates the idea of relation in the previous section. We are therefore at last in a position to appreciate why the vivacity transference maxim occupies a central place in Hume’s associationist theory of human understanding: to say that vivacity feeling is transferred from an impression to an idea in proportion to the facility felt in the transition is equivalent to saying that the perceptions are (consciously) regarded as related and the content of the idea as really existent. For example, if the transition from the sight of smoke to the idea of fire is facile, then I will regard the two perceptions as related and I will regard the fire present to me only in thought as no less really existent than the smoke present to my sight and smell. That vivacity follows facility is, for Hume, the basis of all belief in the real existence of objects beyond the senses, present, past, or future, and the essential nature of all reasoning regarding matters of fact and real existence (there is also a parallel passionsfollow-facility principle that reigns in the sphere of reflexion: “This easy or difficult transition of the imagination operates upon the passions, and facilitates or retards their transition; which is a clear proof, that these two faculties of the passions and imagination are connected together, and that the relations of ideas have an influence upon the affections,” THN 339–40/220–1; “a relation of ideas . . . produces its usual effect of facilitating the passions,” 345/223). I will consider the vivacity transference principle in greater detail in the course of my examination of Hume’s conceptions of reason and rationality in chapters 19 and 20. Here, it will suffice to remark that this principle makes clear why, for Hume, philosophical relations, which seem independent of natural relations rooted in psychological mechanisms, are in fact parasitic on them. For, as devoid of facility, a philosophical relation has no intrinsic (natural) capacity to transfer vivacity from impressions or lively ideas to any of the ideas it relates to them; and so, in the absence of a sufficiently strong analogy with some vivacity-transferring natural relation on which it can piggyback, it will be found impossible “to reason upon it, or draw any inference from it” (94/65). Philosophical relations thus occupy a place in Hume’s theory of understanding only on sufferance: they owe their influence on our thought and action entirely to the foundation provided by customary association, and even then, only insofar as they are continuous with (outgrowths of) preexisting natural relations of contiguity, resemblance, and/or cause and effect.23 And far from representing a counterexample to the primacy of the for our belief in the real existence of these objects: the great degree of force and vivacity immanent to our consciousness of them. For Berkeley, the belief that people exist nearby despite the fact that they are not present in sensation would probably have to be explained dispositionally, by imagining what we would see if we were in a different location. 23. This is evident in texts like the following: “in inlarging my view to consider several instances, I find only, that like objects are constantly plac’d in like relations of succession and contiguity. Again, when I consider the influence of this constant conjunction, I perceive, that such a relation can never be an object of reasoning, and can never operate upon the mind, but by means of custom, which determines the imagination to make a transition from the idea of one object to that of its usual attendant, and from


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vivacity-transference principle, philosophical relations serve instead to confirm it.24 D. Projective Illusion The foregoing considerations should make clear that, when Hume affirmed that customary association is the source of the impression of reflexion original of our idea of necessary connection, the datum in question can be nothing else than an amalgam of facility and vivacity feelings. That this is indeed the case is evident in Hume’s characterizations of the impression: after a repetition of similar instances, the mind is carried by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant, and to believe that it will exist. This connexion, therefore, which we feel in the mind, this customary transition of the imagination from one object to its usual attendant, is the sentiment or impression, from which we form the idea of power or necessary connexion. Nothing farther is in the case. (EHU VII/ii ¶28)

The impression of necessary connection is what we perceive in ourselves when we are “determin’d by custom”: a feeling of facility so strong that the association “conceals itself, and seems not to take place, merely because it is found in the highest degree” (EHU IV/i ¶8), resulting in a near complete transference of the vivacity that makes us regard an object present to us in sensation or reflexion as really existent to the conception of the idea associated with it. It is in this sense that the “necessary connexion betwixt causes and effects,” and “the transition arising from the accustom’d union . . . are, therefore, the same” (THN 165/111; also 166–9/112–4). Of course, if the same feelings of facility and vivacity that characterize association in relations of cause and effect also characterize association in relations of resemblance and contiguity in time or place, why then do the latter not afford an idea of necessary connection as well? Part of the reason is that contiguity and resemblance relations are directly observable, and concern as much the qualities of the objects (impressions and ideas) we consider as the association formed between them in our imaginations (THN 73/52 and 168–9/113–4), while causal relations the impression of one to a more lively idea of the other” (THN 170/115). The “philosophical” enlargement of belief beyond the influence of facilitating customary association is something Hume seems to have understood in terms of general rules that owe their influence on our thought and action to their roots in customary association (and so in facility affect): vivacity is extended beyond the mind’s ability to grasp things easily in the same way the emotional advantage of getting three guineas instead of two is enlarged by a general rule into an emotional advantage of getting a thousand instead of 999 (141–2/ 96–7). See also chapter 18, note 17. 24. For further discussion, see HTC, 12–13, 49, 80–4, 99–100, 261, 281n23, and 300n12. In his review, Wright either overlooked or neglected my iterated insistence on these pages that philosophical relations are parasitic on natural when he charged me with disregarding Treatise I/i/§5, “where Hume explicitly says that we may compare ideas to form philosophical relations even when there is no natural or associational relation between them” (“Critical,” 347).

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have nothing to do with the sensible qualities of the objects connected in them (75/ 53). Custom bears the entire burden of unifying perceptions in relations of cause and effect. Moreover, when the custom is founded on frequent experience of a constant conjunction of objects, it creates a far more powerful associating bond, in the form of a much more intense facility feeling, than resemblance or contiguity are capable of conferring on transitions of thought, with the consequence that causal relations founded on such a custom transfer far more vivacity from impressions to ideas than the other associative relations: tho’ I cannot altogether exclude the relations of resemblance and contiguity from operating on the fancy in this manner, ’tis observable that, when single, their influence is very feeble and uncertain. As the relation of cause and effect is requisite to persuade us of any real existence, so is this persuasion requisite to give force to these other relations. . . . There is no manner of necessity for the mind to feign any resembling and contiguous objects; and if it feigns such, there is as little necessity for it always to confine itself to the same, without any difference or variation. And indeed such a fiction is founded on so little reason, that nothing but pure caprice can determine the mind to form it; and that principle being fluctuating and uncertain, ’tis impossible it can ever operate with any considerable degree of force and constancy. The mind foresees and anticipates the change; and even from the very first instant feels the looseness of its actions, and the weak hold it has of its objects. . . . The relation of cause and effect has all the opposite advantages. The objects it presents are fixt and unalterable . . . solid and real, certain and invariable. (109–10/76; also 73–4/52–3, 110–7/76–81, 180–1/121, 317–8/206–7, 413–4/265–6, and EHU V/ii)

But even if the intensity of the facility feeling incident to the strongest customary associations explains why so much more vivacity is transferred to ideas than by associations unsupported by custom, it still remains to be explained why we attribute causal efficacy to the objects of sense and thought we consider rather than situate them at their true locus in customary transitions of thought. I have already noted that Hume attributed it to a projective illusion of the same sort that leads us to situate the smell, flavor, and sound we associate with the properly spatial objects of vision and touch in these objects themselves, “tho’ the qualities be of such a nature as to admit of no such conjunction, and really exist no where” (THN 167/ 113). Yet this is as far as he took things. Consequently, if we are to better understand how Hume’s conception of the projective illusion that operates in the case of causation and allied notions (“efficacy, agency, power, force, energy, necessity, connexion, and productive quality, are all nearly synonimous,” 157/106; also 77/55 and 90–1/63), then we have no option but to extrapolate from his accounts of other such illusions. In Treatise I/ii/§3, Hume traced the idea of space to its origin and found that we have “no idea of space or extension, but when we regard it as an object either of our sight or feeling” (THN 39/30–1). Yet, however convincing (or not) the details of his psychologistic explication may be (chapter 18-C–D), Hume recognized, like Berkeley before him (chapter 14-F), that the human imagination does not stop there. Indeed, not only does it locate intrinsically aspatial sensations of


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flavor, sound, and smell in the bodies we experience by sight and touch, it also situates minds (personalities, character, thoughts, feelings, etc.) in those bodies (Treatise I/iv/§5, 504n/323–4n, and EPM app.3¶10n), and sometimes yields to another, “very remarkable inclination in human nature, to bestow on external objects the same emotions, which it observes in itself; and to find every where those ideas, which are most present to it.” Hume illustrated the latter with the “sympathies, antipathies, and horrors of a vacuum” (224/148) posited by the ancient Greek Peripatetics, and with our tendency to project what we mistakenly (in his view) term force, energy, power, etc., onto any inert object we exert ourselves to set in motion by transferring to it the “internal sensation . . . of a nisus or endeavour” (EHU VII/ii ¶29n; also VII/i ¶15). Yet, whenever the imagination would accord a place to things that, considered (preassociatively) in themselves, literally exist nowhere, it is endeavoring to conceive the inconceivable: An object may be said to be no where, when its parts are not so situated with respect to each other, as to form any figure or quantity; nor the whole with respect to other bodies so as to answer to our notions of contiguity or distance. Now this is evidently the case with all our perceptions and objects, except those of the sight and feeling. A moral reflection cannot be plac’d on the right or on the left hand of a passion, nor can a smell or sound be either of a circular or a square figure. These objects and perceptions, so far from requiring any particular place, are absolutely incompatible with it, and even the imagination cannot attribute it to them. (THN 235–6/154–5)

Why does the imagination persist in the attempt anyway? And, more puzzlingly still, how does it convince itself of the success of its efforts despite the impossibility of succeeding? Hume attributed the persistence of the imagination in this endeavor to our “strong propensity to compleat every union by joining new relations to those which we have before observ’d betwixt any ideas” (THN 217/143). Nothing is more natural than for the imagination to continue any action “even after the reason has ceas’d, which first determin’d it to begin” (48/36–7). As “a galley put in motion by the oars, carries on its course without any new impulse . . . the imagination, when set into any train of thinking, is apt to continue, even when its object fails it” (198/132). Hume attributed elements of the fiction that sensible objects continue to exist when no longer perceived to this cause, as he did the illusion that space and time are infinitely divisible. The occasioning cause, as we saw in section A, is facility feeling: when a single transition of thought is succeeded by others so closely resembling it that the actions of conceiving the successors feel the same as conceiving their predecessors, then the continuity of feeling in the disposition of the imagination eventually becomes a force in its own right, as if building up momentum, so that it is apt to prevail even in the face of interruptions and/or variations in the objects considered. The result is that the imagination will persist in affirming a relation even in the face of recalcitrant appearances, usually by devising some fiction to palliate the unease such conflicts cause it to feel. And completing the relation is one of the most important of these palliatives.

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In the case of the continued, distinct existence of bodies, for example, the propensity to complete the union of successive perceptions is expressed when the imagination ascribes greater coherence and regularity to the objects than past experience and constant conjunction can support: ’twill readily be allow’d, that since nothing is ever really present to the mind, besides its own perceptions ’tis not only impossible, that any habit shou’d ever be acquir’d otherwise than by the regular succession of these perceptions, but also that any habit shou’d ever exceed that degree of regularity. Any degree, therefore, of regularity in our perceptions, can never be a foundation for us to infer a greater degree of regularity in some objects, which are not perceiv’d; since this supposes a contradiction, viz. a habit acquir’d by what was never present to the mind. But ’tis evident, that whenever we infer the continu’d existence of the objects of sense from their coherence, and the frequency of their union, ’tis in order to bestow on the objects a greater regularity than what is observ’d in our mere perceptions. . . . Objects have a certain coherence even as they appear to our senses; but this coherence is much greater and more uniform, if we suppose the objects to have a continu’d existence; and as the mind is once in the train of observing an uniformity among objects, it naturally continues, till it renders the uniformity as compleat as possible. The simple supposition of their continu’d existence suffices for this purpose, and gives us a notion of a much greater regularity among objects, than what they have when we look no farther than our senses. (THN 197–8/131–2)

Because we can never form the slightest notion of objects other than our own perceptions (chapter 16-A), it is impossible for them really to have greater regularity and coherence than they appear to have. Yet even though on the objective side of consciousness (the appearances) it is impossible for any illusion of greater regularity and coherence to get a grip, matters are different on the subjective side of the affective disposition of imagination. For, like a string set vibrating,25 it is characteristic of affects (feelings) to outlast the occasioning stimulus; and just as our desire or pain may continue a while even after the stimulus—the occasioning appearance—has been removed, so too the sustained affective disposition composed of a succession of facile transitions tends to continue after its stimulus has ceased. Now, since the facility we feel on the subjective side of consciousness is, according to Hume, the true locus of all relations (section B), it follows that, so far as the imagination is concerned, the continuance of its idea-relating affective dis25. “Now if we consider the human mind, we shall find, that with regard to the passions, ’tis not of the nature of a wind-instrument of music, which in running over all the notes immediately loses the sound after the breath ceases; but rather resembles a string-instrument, where after each stroke the vibrations still retain some sound, which gradually and insensibly decays. The imagination is extreme quick and agile; but the passions are slow and restive: For which reason, when any object is presented, that affords a variety of views to the one, and emotions to the other; tho’ the fancy may change its views with great celerity; each stroke will not produce a clear and distinct note of passion, but the one passion will always be mixt and confounded with the other. According as the probability inclines to good or evil, the passion of joy or sorrow predominates in the composition” (THN 440–1/282). Hume’s seems to have ascribed the same divergence to the actions of the imagination and the affects immanent to its action (facility and vivacity).


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position after the appearances that occasioned it have ceased will feel, and so, for it, be, a continuance of the relation itself. The imagination accordingly projects onto the objects the relation constituted by its continuing feeling of regularity and coherence, well beyond the point where the objects themselves serve to sustain it; and, from the projection of the continuance of these relations, the imagination immediately (unreflectively) infers the continued existence of the objects in them after they have ceased to be perceived. In the case of infinite divisibility, the projective illusion consists in the completion of a process that begins with our devising ever more precise standards to obtain better measurements. We suppose that after the removal of an amount too small to be assessed from one of two objects found to be equal in accordance with our most precise unit of measurement, there must exist a finer standard which would enable us to precisely gauge this difference. Then, “after considering several loose standards of equality, and correcting them by each other, we proceed to imagine so correct and exact a standard of that relation, as is not liable to the least error or variation” (198/132). This “false reason” (48/37) is the effect of the continuance of the affective disposition of imagination occasioned by the transitions from coarser to finer measures beyond anything these measures themselves can support: “’tis from these corrections, by carrying on the same action of the mind, even when its reason fails us, that we form the loose idea of a perfect standard . . . without being able to explain or comprehend it” (49/37). For, since the locus of relation, and so too of vivacity transference, lies on the subjective side (consciousness, rather than its objects), the continuance of this disposition is sufficient to confer belief on the perfectly exact standard that is supposed to complete the relation. Notwithstanding the lack of anything in the objects present to our senses to support it, there is nothing to prevent us from projecting the subjectively completed relation onto the objects we can perceive and fancy that we have thereby succeeded in conceiving the impossible: sensible objects composed of insensible “bodies infinitely more minute . . . than those, which appear to the senses” (48/36). Nor is this illusory projection onto objects of a completed relation that, in truth, is not the idea of any possible object but merely an affair of affects immanent to imagination confined to the application of mathematics to space and time: A musician finding his ear become every day more delicate, and correcting himself by reflection and attention, proceeds with the same act of the mind, even when the subject fails him, and entertains a notion of a compleat tierce or octave, without being able to tell whence he derives his standard. A painter forms the same fiction with regard to colours. A mechanic with regard to motion. To the one light and shade; to the other swift and slow are imagin’d to be capable of an exact comparison and equality beyond the judgments of the senses. (48–9/37; also 49–52/37–9, 71–2/51–2, 198/132, and 638/39)

The essential feature of Hume’s accounts of this projective illusion is that our endeavors to attain perfect exactitude are illusory not because it lies beyond human powers of penetration into objects to attain (a weakness or coarseness of our faculties), but because the objects themselves are incompatible with its pursuit.

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Since whatever object we may adopt as our standard of geometrical equality, or of any other quality or relation of sensible things, must ultimately be “deriv’d from nothing but the senses and imagination, ’tis absurd to talk of any perfection beyond what these faculties can judge of; since the true perfection of any thing consists in its conformity to its standard” (THN 51/38). Since the objects of these faculties are such that we reach a minimum beyond which further division is impossible (26–8/23–4, 40/31–2, 41–2/32, and EHU XII/ii ¶18n), the projective illusion that leads to the notion of infinitely divisible space or time is thus incapable of conforming to the standard appropriate to the only objects that can ever be present to our minds, in sensation or in thought. It is only because this true standard is also “entirely useless” to us, since sensible minima “are so minute and so confounded with each other, that ’tis impossible for the mind to compute their number” (THN 45/35; also 41–2/31–2, 46–7/35, 637/35–6 and 658–9/414–5), that we are obliged to have recourse to inexact, but useful, standards, of the kind that admit of continual improvement. But this standard will issue in something both useless and false if we give free reign to the relation-continuing propensity of our imaginations: “the notion of any correction beyond what we have instruments and art to make is a mere fiction of the mind, and useless as well as incomprehensible” (48/36; also 72–3/52, 638/39, and EHU XII/ii ¶20n).26 The assignment of spatial location to inward sensations, reflexions, and thoughts that, in reality, exist nowhere is a projective illusion of the same kind as continued existence and perfect exactness. All are variations on a single theme: when the same associative action is continued through successive transitions of thought, the imagination builds up a kind of affective momentum whereby it preserves its idearelating feeling even after objects suited to the performance of the action that produced it cease to be perceived, and so projects relations onto objects that it is, in truth, incapable even of conceiving. The action of imagination from which ideas of continued existence originate is halted the moment an object (impression or idea) is perceived that “distinguishes . . . itself by a different direction of the spirits, in order to its conception” (THN 203/135). Its objects again fail it the moment it presses its pursuit of ever more precise measures of equality beyond the reach of “the loose and indeterminate” (50/37) standards obtainable from sensory appearances. And when the imagination comes up against an object “that exists without any place or extension” (237/155), its action of uniting a manifold of constantly conjoined perceptions in associative relations of causation and contiguity in time is halted at contiguity in space. Yet, although its action stops the instant its objects fail it, its affective disposition—facility feeling, the locus for Hume of all relations between distinct perceptions—does not, but continues on to complete the relation. That contiguity in space is inconceivable does not stop the imagination from projecting what is, in truth, wholly an affair of its affective disposition onto the objects it considers. And whereas the illusion of perfect exactitude is somewhat recondite (though nevertheless natural—48/36), the illusion that takes place whenever we conceive of sense-divide transcending spatial objects is such that “even in common life we have every moment occasion to examine it” (236–7/155). 26. For further discussion of Hume on standards of equality, see HTC, chapter 3-D.


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Needless to say, Hume’s explanation of projective illusion relies implicitly on a bipolar model of consciousness: if the affective disposition sustained by a sequence of facile transitions were not independent (under the separability principle) of the objects from and to which these transitions are made, it would be impossible for that disposition to continue after the objects requisite to continue the feeling ceased to be perceived. This is particularly true in the case of the projective illusion involved in causal relations. Causal relations operate at the level of the individual transition of thought rather than that of an affective disposition sustained through a sequence of such transitions. By contrast with the projective illusions considered so far, where relations homogeneous with those discovered in the objects are projected onto them even after they have ceased to be conceivable in that relation, “the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences” (THN 636/400), and so must project something quite heterogeneous with its objects: in accounting for that idea of agency . . . we search for in vain in all the objects, which are presented to the senses, or which we are internally conscious of in our own minds. . . . [We] have no adequate idea of power or efficacy in any object; since neither in body nor spirit, neither in superior nor inferior natures, are they able to discover one single instance of it. (160/108)

We do not perceive impression originals causing their idea copies to appear, ideas of sensation causing impressions of reflexion, and contiguity, resemblance, or constant conjunctions causing facile transitions of thought. The same is true of the causal connections we observe in billiards, wrestling, flirtation, rocket flight, a cloud chamber experiment, or anywhere else. The connection we project onto the objects (contents) present to us in sensation, reflexion, and thought, whereby they are stitched together into a single nexus encompassing the worlds both without and within the mind, is entirely heterogeneous with these objects. It exists exclusively at the subjective pole of consciousness, an amalgam of feelings of facility and vivacity, and “Without considering it in this view, we can never arrive at the most distant notion of it, or be able to attribute it either to external or internal objects, to spirit or body, to causes or effects” (165/111). How then does the projective illusion involved in cause and effect relations operate? While Hume said too little for us to be quite certain, three factors may be supposed to contribute significantly to the illusion. 1. Facility must be perceived in order for any relation between distinct existents to be perceived; otherwise, the mind would lapse back into “its native situation of indifference” (THN 125/86) and there would be nothing to distinguish its present thought “from any new and unusual idea” (116/80). But this does not mean that facility draws attention to itself. When customary association brings objects into relation as cause and effect, its influence is such “that, where it is strongest, it not only covers our natural ignorance, but even conceals itself, and seems not to take place, merely because it is found in the highest degree” (EHU IV/i ¶8). Since the stronger the custom the more facile the transition of thought (THN 422/271), this is just to say that the highest degree of facility feeling is no more likely to fall

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under our attentive gaze than the lowest. Attention is directed instead at the objects to and from which the transition is made; and since it is natural for the imagination to project the facility it subattentively feels within it onto whatever objects (impressions and ideas) are occupying its attention, it readily succumbs to the illusion that these objects are related to one another independently of it. Thus arises the mistaken belief that the idea of cause and effect is the idea of an objective relation, when in fact its content is principally derived from a feeling immanent to imagination, apart from which the idea has neither meaning nor application. 2. Vivacity is by its very nature projective: we regard as real any object (impression or idea) present to the consciousness when our consciousness is modified by this feeling. Human nature is such that a sensation or reflexion has only to appear to us for us to regard it with this feeling in the maximal degree. But, in addition, when anything present to us in thought is related to a sensation or reflexion by any of the three basic associative relations (resemblance, contiguity in time or place, and cause and effect), we immediately confer on it a higher degree of vivacity, and regard it as really existent in proportion to the facility of the associating bond. In the case of customary association in relations of cause and effect, when the objects concerned have been found frequently and constantly to be conjoined, the bond of facility feeling uniting them becomes so strong that when one of them is present in sensation or reflexion, we conceive the other object with the same intensity of vivacity feeling, that is, we regard it too as really existent, even though it is present to us only in thought (as when we believe the fire we merely think of to be as real as the smoke we actually see and smell). 3. For one object to be causally influenced by another, they must be contiguous in time and place, the effect must succeed the cause, and the existence of the effect must have a necessary connection with the existence of the cause (Treatise I/iii/ §2). Even though the essence of all these relations is facility (section A), the first two are felt in response to qualities directly observed in the objects present to consciousness, while the third has nothing whatsoever to do with what we observe in any object but is instead a matter entirely of what we feel in consciousness itself when we pass from an impression to an associated idea (168–9/113–4). Here then is a situation ripe for the projective illusion. For by projecting the relation of necessary connection onto the objects, we thereby complete the relation they already have by virtue of contiguity and succession, in the same way we complete the relations of coexistence and co-temporaneous appearance that unite the sight, touch, smell, and taste of a fruit by projecting the relation of conjunction in place that unites the two former onto the two latter (237/155). And just as the projection of conjunction in place onto the smell and taste of a fruit is entirely illusory since these qualities, in truth, exist nowhere, projecting necessary connections onto objects is illusory since these connections exist only in the interstices of transitions of consciousness from objects to their customary associates: the same propensity is the reason, why we suppose necessity and power to lie in the objects we consider, not in our mind, that considers them; notwithstanding it is not possible for us to form the most distant idea of that quality, when it is not taken for the determination of the mind, to pass from the idea of an object to that of its usual attendant. (167/113)


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These three factors together seem sufficient to explain why Hume supposed a projective illusion to be at work in the case of the originating impressions of our ideas of causal connections. Facility and vivacity affects serve rather to conceal than to highlight the subjective consciousness pole at which they are actually felt, and so do nothing to incline the imagination to situate necessity impressions there. Since customary transitions of thought never occasion necessity impressions except when at least one of the connected objects actually appears as an impression, the actuality (maximal vivacity) preassociatvely accorded to impressions would tend to direct the imagination toward the object pole rather than to itself. As a result, when the transition and enlivening of the associated idea occur, there is nothing to hinder the imagination from yielding to its natural relation-completion propensity by projecting onto the objects it considers the impression of necessary connection it inwardly feels in the transition. Thus, notwithstanding the impossibility of perceiving this impression in any of the objects before it, the imagination situates necessity impressions in objects—impressions or ideas, reflexions sensations or thoughts—with the same alacrity as that with which its affective disposition deceives it into attributing spatial location to sensations, reflexions, and ideas that exist without any place or extension. One final remark on projective illusions in general before leaving this subject: they are a genuine psychological illusion, concerned with the way things appear— their phenomenological “look”—in precisely the sense Locke’s account of visual depth perception (chapter 6) and Berkeley’s account of sense-divide transcending objects (chapter 14) were. Human faces appear ashamed, glad, or in any of myriad other affective guises, and elicit sympathetic responses accordingly (cf. THN 151/ 102), because of the projective illusions to which Hume deemed us prey. We find beauty in the appearance of a painting or a musical theme rather than in the imagination that actually feels the pleasures he equated with beauty because of a similar illusion (cf. 364/235, 581–2/371–2, 585/373–4). Visible and tangible objects, as distinct from the objects of the other senses (internal included), appear to exist outside and independently of us because the continuance of the imagination’s affective disposition after “its object fails it” (198/132) leads us enhance their coherence and regularity beyond what experience alone is capable of supporting. Minds, our own and others, appear to be situated in human bodies as a result of the same illusion that makes the flavor of a fig seen at one end of a table appear to be located there and not either in the olive seen at the other end or in the mind that considers them (its true yet nonspatial locus). And so too: the physical and mental objects that populate the natural and intellectual worlds appear to exist in thoroughgoing causal connection, influencing and being influenced by one another, as a result of this same projective illusion, taking place continuously throughout our conscious lives. So far as Hume was concerned, as long as we recognize that the semblances of energy and power that seem both to surround us without and to actuate our thoughts within are nothing more than the illusory by-product of a natural psychological propensity to complete relations, no harm can result. But when we confound this projective illusion with genuine perception, or insight of any kind, into the objects immediately present to us in sensation, reflexion, or thought, “obscurity and error begin then to take place, and we are led astray by a false philosophy”—power and efficacy “being a quality, which can only belong to the mind that considers them” (168/113).

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E. Associative Affects in the Science of Human Nature 1. Understanding is subject to the pleasure principle. Part of the evidence considered in section A for regarding facility as, first and foremost, a feeling, is its status as a species of pleasure (“facility . . . is another very powerful principle of the human mind, and an infallible source of pleasure,” “objects . . . enter’d into with facility . . . are agreeable to the imagination”). Hume considered vivacity feeling too a source of pleasure: Belief must please the imagination by means of the force and vivacity which attends it; since every idea, which has force and vivacity, is found to be agreeable to that faculty. (THN 122/84) By the vivacity of the idea we interest the fancy, and produce, tho’ in a lesser degree, the same pleasure, which arises from a moderate passion. As the vivacity of the idea gives pleasure, so its certainty prevents uneasiness, by fixing one particular idea in the mind, and keeping it from wavering in the choice of its objects. (453/289; also 353/228)27

Projective illusion provides further evidence that the associative imagination is a locus of pleasure (and pain—205–6/136–7, 423/271): our imaginations strive to complete partial relations among objects “because we feel a satisfaction in joining the relation of contiguity to that of resemblance, or the resemblance of situation to that of qualities” (237/155 and 504n/323–4n). Now, since, on Hume’s view, facility, vivacity, and/or projective illusions enter into all cognitive functions of the human mind in one way or another (since general ideas and philosophical relations are possible only on a foundation of natural relations in associative imagination: section 1), the question arises whether he took the view that the actions of human understanding are actuated by the same pleasure principle that, in his view, reigns supreme in the conative domain of the passions and morals. That he believed “Each of the passions and operations of the mind has a particular feeling, which must be either agreeable or disagreeable” (590/377), and “There is implanted in the human mind a perception of pain and pleasure, as the chief spring and moving principle of all its actions” (118/81) suggest that he did. If so, this means that the mind described in Hume’s system of human nature forms a more harmonious, closely integrated whole than has generally been appreciated, and that the gulf between the cognitive and conative mind may be more superficial than any previous philosopher had given us reason to suspect. 2. The limits of rigor. There may or may not be good reason for philosophers to discount or ignore the affective dimension of human understanding, but one 27. Sometimes Hume seems to identify vivacity and facility with pleasures, while other times he seems to treat them as sources of pleasure. If one denies that one or both of these should be construed as feelings immanent to consciousness, then one will be obliged to explain away the former and interpret the latter in terms of pleasures occasioned by unconscious mechanisms. But if one takes the view advocated here, equating facility and vivacity with pleasures will seem quite straightforward, and they will be understood as sources of pleasure in the same sense a delicious fruit or the fragrance of fine perfume is.


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cannot help being surprised at the extent to which commentators have overlooked or discounted its importance for Hume. Hume himself was keenly conscious of the difficulty of finding any term adequate to express his meaning, and how “unphilosophical” it would seem to employ a variety of terms and “to have recourse to every one’s feeling” (THN 628–9/68 and EHU V/ii ¶12). The problem is that, in matters relating to the operations of the mind, “common language has seldom made any very nice distinctions among them, but has generally call’d by the same term all such as nearly resemble each other” (THN 105/73). This deficiency cannot be made good by introspection, not only because of the concealing effects of custom (93/65, 104/72, 133/92, 373/240–1, and EHU IV/i ¶8) and the extreme quickness and agility with which the imagination performs its actions (THN 104/ 72 and 441–2/282) but also because the “reflection and premeditation” introspection involves “would so disturb the operation of my natural principles, as must render it impossible to form any just conclusion from the phænomenon” (xix/6). Even in their natural, undisturbed state, there is so much vagueness and complexity built into the phenomena themselves that the methods which confer such precision and clarity on the natural sciences have little or no application in this domain: There is no phænomenon in nature, but what is compounded and modify’d by so many different circumstances, that in order to arrive at the decisive point, we must carefully separate whatever is superfluous, and enquire by new experiments, if every particular circumstance of the first experiment was essential to it. These new experiments are liable to a discussion of the same kind; so that the utmost constancy is requir’d to make us persevere in our enquiry, and the utmost sagacity to choose the right way among so many that present themselves. If this be the case even in natural philosophy, how much more in moral, where there is a much greater complication of circumstances, and where those views and sentiments, which are essential to any action of the mind, are so implicit and obscure, that they often escape our strictest attention, and are not only unaccountable in their causes, but even unknown in their existence? I am much afraid, lest the small success I meet with in my enquiries will make this observation bear the air of an apology rather than of boasting. (175/117–8)

Though the operations of the imagination are “most intimately present to us, yet, whenever they become the object of reflection, they seem involved in obscurity; nor can the eye readily find those lines and boundaries, which discriminate and distinguish them” (EHU I ¶13); “the qualities, which operate upon that faculty, run so insensibly and gradually into each other, that ’tis impossible to give them any precise bounds or termination” (THN 506n/325n). Ambitions therefore have to be scaled back, and the ideal of precision that reigns in the natural sciences has to be renounced altogether in the science of human nature: When we trace the principles of the human mind through a few steps, we may be very well satisfied with our progress; considering how soon nature throws a bar to all our enquiries concerning causes, and reduces us to an acknowledgement of our ignorance. The chief obstacle, therefore, to our improvement in the

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HUME’S AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES moral or metaphysical sciences is the obscurity of the ideas, and ambiguity of the terms. (EHU VII/i ¶2)

Nevertheless, Hume was nothing if not sanguine about the promise of his science of human nature (THN xv/4) and deemed its foundations beyond “any suspicion” of being “uncertain and chimerical”: It cannot be doubted, that the mind is endowed with several powers and faculties, that these powers are distinct from each other, that what is really distinct to the immediate perception may be distinguished by reflection; and consequently, that there is a truth and falsehood in all propositions on this subject, and truth and falsehood, which lie not beyond the compass of human understanding. There are many obvious distinctions of this kind, such as those between the will and understanding, the imagination and passions, which fall within the comprehension of every human creature; and the finer and more philosophical distinctions are no less real and certain, though more difficult to be comprehended. Some instances, especially late ones, of success in these enquiries, may give us a juster notion of the certainty and solidity of this branch of learning. And shall we esteem it worthy the labour of a philosopher to give us a true system of the planets, and adjust the position and order of those remote bodies; while we affect to overlook those, who, with so much success, delineate the parts of the mind, in which we are so intimately concerned?.. [M]ay we not hope, that philosophy, if cultivated with care, and encouraged by the attention of the public, may carry its researches still farther, and discover, at least in some degree, the secret springs and principles, by which the human mind is actuated in its operations? (EHU I ¶¶ 14–15)

We must consent to take Hume as we find him. However out of sync with the ideals of scientific rigor and credibility that have actuated so much Anglophone philosophy over the past century, we do Hume no service by pretending that his philosophy is something it is not and was never intended to be. Stripping out all that seems imprecise, ambiguous, or “unscientific” in his philosophizing amounts to a denial of the very enterprise upon which he embarked, since these features are intrinsic to it, and were factored into the development of its “experimental” methodology (THN xix/6, 175/117–8). Above all, just because these features are found in the highest degree in Hume’s considerations of the affective dimension of associative action is no excuse for failing to acknowledge, and undertaking to explicate, its indispensable role at the very heart of his theory of understanding.

18 The Role of Custom in Associative Understanding

Hume’s approach to propositional thought is distinctly Lockean (chapter 8-D). Insofar as it consists of mental rather than verbal propositions (or to the extent, if any, that a given verbal proposition has a mental counterpart), it resolves into something that today would not be regarded as propositional at all—the comparison of general ideas with an eye to their agreement or disagreement in a particular respect: “All kinds of reasoning consist in nothing but a comparison, and a discovery of those relations, either constant or inconstant, which two or more objects bear to each other” (THN 73/52; also 124/86). Again like Locke, Hume distinguished knowledge in the strict sense from all other propositional thought according to whether or not our conviction as to the agreement or disagreement depends “entirely on the ideas, which we compare together” (70/50), and so on whether or not the agreement or disagreement is discoverable directly, “by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is any where existent in the universe” (EHU IV/i ¶1; also THN 84/59, 413–4/265–6, and 458/295). Hence, something is not merely probable but known, intuitively or demonstratively, just in case “the person, who assents, not only conceives the ideas according to the proposition, but is necessarily determin’d to conceive them in that particular manner, either immediately or by the interposition of other ideas” (95/66). More particularly, as soon as we arrive at knowledge of a proposition, we ipso facto are cognizant of the necessary determination of our thought—“sensible, that ’tis impossible to conceive any thing contrary” (653/411)—and will thereafter recognize any other relation of the ideas not merely as false but as “absurd” and “unintelligible” (95/66). When a relation is evident from the “general appearance” (47/36) of the objects concerned (evident differences of quality or quantity), intuition suffices to acquaint us with the relation (70/50). For example, we know directly from a comparison of the objects that the color of a tomato resembles the color of blood, and that it is impossible to conceive the color of the former to resemble the color of a lemon more closely than the color of the latter. Similarly, once demonstration has acquainted us with the relation of equality between the three angles of a triangle and two right angles, we thereafter no longer treat assertions to the contrary as false 499

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but as failures to assert anything at all. For the whole purpose of demonstrations is to make us sensible that the contrary can neither be nor be conceived; and since “The idea of an object is an essential part of the belief of it” (94/65), they therefore show us that there is nothing—no thought—in which we can even so much as mistakenly repose belief (only verbal mistakes remain possible).1 A. At the Threshold of Synthetic A Priori Necessary Truth The most original and intriguing element in Hume’s account of knowledge is the parallel he drew between mathematical and causal relations: the necessity, which makes two times two equal to four, or three angles of a triangle equal to two right ones, lies only in the act of the understanding, by which we consider and compare these ideas; in like manner the necessity or power, which unites causes and effects, lies in the determination of the mind to pass from the one to the other. The efficacy or energy of causes is neither plac’d in the causes themselves, nor in the deity, nor in the concurrence which considers the union of two or more objects in all past instances. ’Tis here that the real power of causes is plac’d, along with their connexion and necessity. (THN 166/ 112)2 1. In his outstanding discussion of Hume’s theory of knowledge, Owen warns against yielding to the temptation of reading contemporary formalistic notions of deduction into Hume’s account of demonstration: “any account of Hume’s notion that includes the notion of ‘deductively valid,’ where that notion is construed formally either in the modern or the syllogistic sense, is equally anachronistic. . . . I submit that we cannot understand Hume here [Treatise I/iii/§1] if we treat demonstration as a matter of deductively arguing from necessarily true premises. On that view, there can be no constraint on the content of conclusions of demonstrations. . . . If I am right, Humean demonstration is a matter of content, not form” (Reason, 90, 93, and 99). Owen makes an even more original and important point when he emphasizes that, for Hume, mental propositions, as well as reasoning formed from chains of them, are themselves ideas: “the mental correlates of propositions are not themselves propositional. We grasp verbal propositions, not by forming mental propositions, but by conceiving ideas. The same point applies to inferences. If relations of ideas are complex ideas, and demonstrations are a chain of related ideas, then a demonstration is really just a process that leads to the formation of a complex idea” (104; also 155–6). The implication is that the logico-linguistic features distinctive of vernacular language are absent from human (and animal) conception. 2. In discussions of intuitively certain knowledge, Hume twice made a point of specifying that they are known by the mind rather than the eye: “’Tis evident, that the eye, or rather the mind is often able at one view to determine the proportions of bodies, and pronounce them equal to, or greater or less than each other, without examining or comparing the number of their minute parts” (THN 47/36) and “When any objects resemble each other, the resemblance will at first strike the eye, or rather the mind; and seldom requires a second examination” (70/50). In these cases, where the ideas are unquestionably distinct (by the separability principle), Hume seems to have been subtly making the same point he stated most explicitly on 166/112: “the necessity . . . lies only in the act of the understanding, by which we consider and compare these ideas.” Owen seems to have overlooked this special action of the understanding when he wrote that “Locke’s account of intuition was pretty thin, but Hume has even fewer resources on which to draw. While Locke appeals to the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas, Hume speaks of the comparison of ideas. But, as we have seen, he is committed to the comparison of ideas as something that reduces to the conception of ideas. There is no special act of the understanding that Hume can appeal to. . . . If the ideas could be conceived to be not related in that way,

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The striking thing here is Hume’s denial that the necessity of geometrical and arithmetical relations lies in the ideas related in them, that instead, like the necessity of causal relations, it depends on a determination of the mind that considers, compares, and relates the ideas. It is uncertain how far he supposed the parallel with causal relations to go, but this much seems clear: Hume regarded both mathematical and causal relations as relations between items—quantities in the one case, existents in the other—presupposed as distinct according to the criterion of the separability principle. This means that mathematical cognition, far from being merely a matter of making explicit what is already implicit in the ideas themselves, is genuinely informative in the same sense empirical cognition is: ’Tis true, mathematicians pretend they give an exact definition of a right line, when they say, it is the shortest way betwixt two points. But in the first place I observe, that this is more properly the discovery of one of the properties of a right line, than a just definition of it. For I ask any one, if upon mention of a right line he thinks not immediately on such a particular appearance, and if ’tis not by accident only that he considers this property? A right line can be comprehended alone; but this definition is unintelligible without a comparison with other lines, which we conceive to be more extended. In common life ’tis establish’d as a maxim, that the streightest way is always the shortest; which wou’d be as absurd as to say, the shortest way is always the shortest, if our idea of a right line was not different from that of the shortest way betwixt two points. (49–50/37)

Although propositions such as “2 + 2 = 4,” “the sum of the angles of a triangle = two right angles,” and “the shortest distance between two points = the straight line that passes through them” are necessary truths, they count as discoveries, rather than definitions, because the ideas corresponding to the terms on either side of ‘=’ satisfy the distinctness criterion enunciated in the separability principle: each is conceivable in the absence of the other. By contrast, if the ideas in these equations had been related as definiendum to definiens, then we would find it impossible to frame an idea of the former without ipso facto forming the idea of the latter, as a precondition to performing any comparison (mental proposition) involving the idea. Unlike the necessity of other mathematical propositions, that of definitions is trivial (“as absurd as to say the shortest way is always the shortest”); consequently, comparison can do no more here than make explicit what we anyway have already had to think merely in oder to frame the idea for the purpose of comparison. It may be recalled from chapter 8-D that Locke characterized intuitive and demonstrative mathematical propositions as “instructive” knowledge (ECHU IV/ viii/§8); and it was surely the same recognition that obliged Hume to find a more finely grained way to distinguish propositional knowledge from other kinds of they would not be the same ideas. It is ‘not possible for the imagination to conceive’ them in any other way. The content of the ideas determines what they are, and relations of ideas that rely solely on that content cannot be altered by the imagination. Any such alternation would change the ideas themselves” (96–7). Here, and elsewhere (e.g. 103), Owen seems to confuse the impossibility of conceiving one idea without the other with the impossibility of conceiving a difference in the relation of two ideas without changing the ideas. Only the first, not the second, is a function solely of the content of the ideas, without reference to a special action of the mind.

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propositional thought. For if only those propositions that merely explicated what we have already thought in an idea preliminary to comparison (definitions) were to count as knowledge, the vast majority of mathematical propositions would be excluded, notwithstanding their necessity (the only exceptions being those of the form “a = a,” “a + b > a,” and such like). So to capture all and only the propositions he wished to classify as intuitive and demonstrative knowledge, Hume formulated the following criterion: relations may be divided into two classes; into such as depend entirely on the ideas, which we compare together, and such as may be chang’d without any change in the ideas. ’Tis from the idea of a triangle, that we discover the relation of equality which its three angles bear to two right ones; and this relation is invariable, as long as our idea remains the same. On the contrary, the relations of contiguity and distance betwixt two objects may be chang’d merely by an alternation of their place, without any change on the objects themselves or on their ideas; and the place depends on a hundred different accidents, which cannot be foreseen by the mind. ’Tis the same case with identity and causation. Two objects, tho’ perfectly resembling each other, and even appearing in the same place at different times, may be numerically different: And as the power, by which one object produces another, is never discoverable merely from the idea, ’tis evident cause and effect are relations, of which we receive information from experience, and not from any abstract reasoning or reflexion. (THN 69/50)

This criterion makes possible a distinction not only between knowledge and other kinds of propositional thought but also, within the sphere of knowledge, according to whether the necessary truth of a proposition is or is not recognizable from the ideas alone, prior to and independently of the act of comparison. For example, the proposition that no mountain exists without a valley is a necessary truth that determines our thought in such a way as to make us “sensible, that ’tis impossible to conceive any thing contrary” (653/411). However, the necessity is not the sort that “lies in the act of the understanding, by which we consider and compare these ideas” (166/112), but in the idea itself, since “We can form no idea of a mountain without a valley, and therefore regard it as impossible” (32/26). By contrast, the necessity of the proposition that 2 plus 2 equals 4 does not lie in the ideas themselves, since it is perfectly possible to conceive of adding 2 to 2 without forming the idea of 4 and vice versa. No amount of analysis of the contents of these ideas can make us sensible of this necessity; only in and through the act of comparison itself can we intuit the impossibility of varying the relation of the ideas without varying the ideas themselves. And since the necessary relation of equality between 2 + 2 depends as much on the determination of the imagination that results from comparing the ideas as it does on the ideas themselves, it therefore is more akin to the necessary relation between fire and smoke than that between valleys and mountains.3 3. There has been considerable debate in the literature regarding Hume’s claim that a proposition is demonstrable just in case its negation is inconceivable, and his connecting ‘conceivably false’ with ‘possibly false’. As is often the case with such debates, they arise only because the context of Hume’s


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With this criterion, Hume was clearly, more so even than Locke (chapter 8-D), on the threshold of anticipating Kant’s all-important distinction between analytic and synthetic a priori propositions. However, to cross it, as we saw in chapter 2D, Hume would have needed to take the additional step of asking how it is possible, by a simple act of comparison, to produce a necessary relation between objects (ideas) that are in themselves distinct. To understand the nature of the difficulty, we need to remember that, like Kant after him, Hume adopted Locke’s subjectivist-sensibilist conception of propositions (chapter 8-D). That is, Hume rejected the intellectualists’ imputation to ideas of a reality (being, content, meaning) over and above that which appears in sensation, reflexion, or thought, and accessible only by means of a special faculty of pure intellect (THN 72/52). Quite the contrary, their reality and their appearance to consciousness were, for him, one and indistinguishable (190/127; also 189/126, 206/137, 212/140, 236/155, 366/237, 546–7 and n/350 and n, and 548/351). Consequently, where ideas are in appearance distinct, there can be nothing intrinsic to the ideas themselves to ground their relation, be their relation necessary (“2+2 = 4”) or not (“the earth has one moon”). So the question that arises is this: how are necessary relations between distinct ideas possible that cannot be discovered simply by considering (analyzing) the ideas themselves, prior to and independently of the determination of the imagination that results from the act of comparing them? The answer Hume provided in the case of necessary connections between distinct existents—facile transitions of thought founded on conjunctions of perceptions experienced with sufficient frequency and constancy to confer on the idea to which the transition is made a vivacity that approaches an impression—cannot here suffice. For he recognized that this account of necessary relations applies only where intuitive or demonstrative discussion is neglected and replaced with the framework in which analytic philosophers consider such issues: can Hume justify his thesis that a proposition is nondemonstrable if it is possibly false? and justify his thesis that a proposition is possibly false if it is conceivably false? Such debates can be entirely circumvented if we consent to view Hume’s reasoning in terms of the theory of ideas and, more particularly, psychologistic explication: issues are resolved by considering the ideas at their core, that is, determining their content and delimiting their scope of application by tracing them to their originating impression. Since, according to Hume (THN 66–7/48), ‘exists,’ conformably with the separability principle (significative uses that semantically abstract from ideation being here irrelevant), can have have no other (ideational) meaning than ‘being conceived,’ to conceive something as existing, or as being the case, is simply to form the idea, and its impossibility simply the impossibility of forming the idea. However, with the statement of the criterion on 69/50 that permitted Hume to classify nonanalytically true propositions as knowledge, it becomes necessary to distinguish two sorts of inconceivability, one independent of and the other dependent on the act of comparison the mind performs on the ideas concerned. Intuitive and demonstrative knowledge of the sort exemplified by mathematics concern the latter sort: the determination of the mind that makes the negation inconceivable is grounded on the act of comparison, not on the ideas which are compared in it (166/112). Thus, one could refine Owen’s insistence (see note 1) that knowledge, in Hume’s sense, be understood in terms of content rather than form to include, in addition to contents pertaining to the ideas themselves of which we are conscious, contents derived from our consciousness of them, namely, that determination of the mind which makes the conception of the negation impossible (a sense of ‘determination’ that is consequently distinct from that characteristic of customary connections of cause and effect, where the negation remains thinkable but not without a feeling of unease strong enough to do “sensible violence”—125/86, 128/88—to the affective disposition of the imagination).

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insight is wanting (69/50, 111–12/77, 650/410, EHU IV/i ¶¶10–11). In cases where such insight exists, however, facility and vivacity are irrelevant (THN 95/66). Yet we search Hume’s writings in vain for even so much as a recognition of the problem, much less an appreciation of how deep it goes or how intractable it is (requiring nothing less than a critique of pure reason for its solution).4 In any event, the criterion that a relation cannot vary without the ideas themselves varying sufficed for Hume’s purpose of distinguishing knowledge in general, whether grounded in the ideas alone or in the act of comparison as well, from all other kinds of propositions (comparisons of ideas). For the question that concerned him above all others was what constitutes agreement and disagreement where knowledge is lacking, and how conviction comes to be reposed in such propositions. The answer he provided was the association of ideas in imagination through facility, vivacity transference, and projective illusion, all operating conformably with the pleasure principle (chapter 17). More particularly, he focused on the three principles of association he considered most fundamental and important to human understanding (THN 10–13/12–14 and 662/416–17): resemblance, contiguity in place or time, and cause and effect. For while these may be “neither the infallible nor the sole causes of an union of ideas” (10, 92), they are nonetheless principles so “permanent, irresistible, and universal . . . that upon their removal human nature must immediately perish and go to ruin” (225/148). However, it soon becomes evident that this is true only insofar as association is supported by custom (habits of mind). B. Customary Association by Resemblance: General Ideas Resemblance relations are directly observable, and form an association between similar objects or relations of objects (e.g., perfect identity: THN 203/135), without depending on past experience or habit (70/50, 73–4/ 52–3, and 168–9/113–14). Nevertheless, Hume deemed the support of customary relations of cause and effect 4. Nothing of a logico-grammatical character can serve to solve a problem that arises only within the framework of a Lockean sensibilist subjectivism (chapter 8–D). This subjectivism precludes a logical space (a holistic conceptual framework, web of belief, etc.) in which both the objects (ideas) we compare and the comparisons we make between them are contained (chapter 8–B). Not only is the notion of a logical space (as opposed to that of a bare, indeterminate manifold of pure sensible intuition) incompatible with the supposition that the ideas are genuinely distinct (unqualifiedly separable, capable of being conceived even in total ignorance of all others), but it also restricts the scope of comparison far more than any theorist of ideas not in the subjectivist-sensibilist tradition could find acceptable. For even a fairly primitive creature, quite incapable of conferring logico-grammatical form on its perceptions, is presumably able to attain an intuitive acquaintance with the nearer resemblance the color of a tomato has to the color of blood than to the color of the sun, or even perhaps the difference in quantity between a herd of wildebeest and one in isolation (see, for example, the account of number recognition in birds in Donald R. Griffin, Animal Minds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 136–7). The kind of comparison primarily at issue here is of precisely this purely ideational sort: agreements and disagreements between ideas that even infants, humans who never acquired language, other hominids, and a large swathe of the animal kingdom may be supposed capable of recognizing. The factor that accounts for the kind of necessary truth that is grounded in acts of comparison, and has no sense or signification independently thereof, must consequently be other than logico-grammatical in nature.


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crucial to the cognitive efficacy of resemblance relations: their “feeble and uncertain” (109/76) capacity to generate belief (vivacity feeling) when operating alone; and the impossibility of carrying the resemblances constitutive of identity relations “beyond what is immediately present to the senses, either to discover the real existence or the relations of objects” excepted when “founded . . . on the connexion of cause and effect” (73–4/52–3; also 198/132). The importance of custom to the cognitive efficacy of resemblances is not, however, confined to the sort which gives rise to causal inferences. The generality of ideas, terms, and rules and maxims originates in the combination of association by resemblance with custom; and since causal relations cannot become customary until the ideas united in them have been generalized (87/61, 93/65, EHU VII/ii ¶27. and XI ¶30), this species of customary association must be considered most fundamental of all. In interpreting Hume’s account of generality, it is vital to recognize what kind of explanation we are being offered: neither logical nor linguistic (certainly not in the sense these are now understood), much less computational, mechanistic, or neurological, but psychologistic. Hume’s concern was with what we are conscious of that constitutes the difference between thinking an individual and thinking a universal, and thus with the origin of the idea of generality, particularly the extent to which it may depend on contributions from associative imagination. This is evident right from the outset of his discussion in Treatise I/i/§7, when he formulates the problem of universals and lauds Berkeley as the discoverer of its solution: A very material question has been started concerning abstract or general ideas, whether they be general or particular in the mind’s conception of them. A great philosopher has disputed the receiv’d opinion in this particular, and has asserted, that all general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annexed to a certain term, which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals, which are similar to them. As I look upon this to be one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries that has been made of late years in the republic of letters, I shall here endeavour to confirm it by some arguments, which I hope will put it beyond all doubt and controversy. (17; also 19–20, 34, and LGFE III)

If, as Berkeley supposed, we are not conscious of abstract ideas (aspects) in addition to sensations, images, and other particular ideas, then the difference between individuals and universals must lie not in the perceptions themselves—all of which, ideas no less than impressions, are particular and conform to the separability principle—but in the different ways in which they are considered (chapter 10). From a Humean standpoint, this is best understood on the general model of relation examined in previous chapters: an idea, in and of itself, relates to nothing beyond itself, not even its originating impression, unless and until association and custom alter the imagination’s native situation of indifference so that, upon considering the idea, it is determined by it to form an idea of something else. Generality, like necessary connection and identity, is simply one of the ways in which this indifference is displaced by a consciousness of relation constituted by, or (in the case of philosophical resemblance) parasitic upon, facile transitions of thought. By

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contrast, an object is considered as a fully concrete individual whenever this species of thought determination is absent. The question, then, is this: in what does the generality determination consist? Differences in terminology and detail aside, Hume’s answer, just as he maintains, is essentially the same as Berkeley’s. Its first element is association by resemblance. From the moment the senses first convey perceptions into the mind, the imagination takes cognizance of resemblances among the objects present to it, and naturally responds to resemblances between new perceptions and past ones. Objects may be found resembling either directly from their appearance (resembling sensible qualities) or by virtue of some circumstance they have in common (cf. V §§128, 136, and 145). For example, they may have something similar in “the general appearance and comparison, without having any common circumstance the same” (THN 637/18–9n), such as entering by the same organ of sensation, being constantly conjoined with objects that resemble one another, resembling dispositions of the mind in contemplating them (202–4/135–6), similar accompanying emotions (373/240–1, 393/252–3), or being ranked under the same “fictitious denomination”5 (30/25)—for example, “found always in pairs,” “book,” or “piece of furniture,” etc. In addition, existing resemblances may, by means of a general rule, give rise to new resemblances, thereby forming a stronger bond in imagination between the objects concerned (141–2/96–7). There is therefore no bound to the extent to which resemblances may proliferate, and, indeed, “no relation of any kind can subsist without some degree of resemblance,”6 even contrariety, since existence and nonexistence imply “both of them an idea of the object” (15/15; also 236/155 and EHU III ¶16n). The variety of resemblance relations, as well as the potential to combine them to whatever degree of complexity our representative purposes require, should guard against simplistic interpretations of their role in general representation. When we are not sufficiently careful in this regard, we are apt to suppose that resemblances in sensible appearance are the most important, or even the only ones, that mattered for Berkeley and Hume, when in truth they are the least important. For resemblances of this kind depend on the nature and extent of the resemblances apparent in the different simple ideas into which all complex ideas must inevitably resolve. Even in Locke’s case, notwithstanding his admission of abstract ideas (aspects), this is extremely limited because “simple Ideas . . . have but few Ascents in linea prædicamentali . . . from the lowest Species, to the summum Genus” (ECHU III/ iv/§16; chapter 8-A and -B). Hume, by contrast, adopted Berkeley’s separability principle (THN 18/17) and followed him in denying the existence of common aspects between simple perceptions (25/22). The result is that simple perceptions can have no circumstance the same, and this applies not just to perceptions of different senses, or to perceptions as different as yellow and red, but to perceptions 5. For further discussion of Hume’s notion of a ‘fictitious denomination,’ see my “The Psychologistic Foundations of Hume’s Critique of Mathematics,” 123–69, Hume Studies (April 1996), 123–69. 6. Since Hume’s formulation of the claim on THN 14/15(#1) might make it seem that it holds only of philosophical relations, I have opted for that on 15/15(#6), which (as on 236/155), makes clear that resemblance is requisite to all relating of perceptions, natural no less than philosophical, and between impressions (283/186) no less than between ideas.


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with any noticeable difference of content at all. Nevertheless, there being no distinct, separable circumstance the same in simple perceptions themselves does not prevent us from comparing them with others and associating them in resemblance relations: Blue and green are different simple ideas, but are more resembling than blue and scarlet; tho’ their perfect simplicity excludes all possibility of separation or distinction. ’Tis the same case with particular sounds, and tastes and smells. These admit of infinite resemblances upon the general appearance and comparison, without having any common circumstance the same. And of this we may be certain, even from the very abstract terms simple idea. They comprehend all simple ideas under them. These resemble each other in their simplicity. And yet from their very nature, which excludes all composition, this circumstance, in which they resemble, is not distinguishable nor separable from the rest. ’Tis the same case with all the degrees in any quality. They are resembling, and yet the quality, in any individual, is not distinct from the degree. (637/18–9n)

Simple ideas generally have nothing in common as appearances yet nevertheless resemble one another in the impossibility of resolving them into component elements. Simple ideas of touch have nothing sensible in common with the simple ideas of vision yet resemble them in their capacity to be divided into parts. Blue and red likewise have no common sensible content but are alike in being intromitted by the eyes. Blue and green have no more sensibly in common than either does with red but still resemble one another more than either does red because they seem to shade more gradually into one another, or because of our affective response to them, or any number of other equally extraneous circumstances. And the insignificance of resemblances in sensible appearance is, if anything, more marked still in the case of complex ideas. Thus, the more universal—the less “natural” and more “philosophical”—the idea, the more myriad the resemblances concerned in it, and the more likely it is to involve many levels of complexity, where each higher level of resemblance is made possible by resemblances that emerge only at the preceding level. The second element of the Berkeley-Hume account of generality is custom. Customs are instilled when resembling objects are associated with sufficient frequency, or make a forceful enough impression, to induce us to take cognizance of similar things in the future. When triggered by an appropriate stimulus, the custom prompts the imagination to associate the stimulating object with the resembling objects whose frequent survey originally instilled the habit, bypassing the need to recall these objects individually and perform a new act of comparison: They are not really and in fact present to the mind, but only in power; nor do we draw them all out distinctly in the imagination, but keep ourselves in a readiness to survey any of them, as we may be prompted by a present design or necessity (THN 20/19)

The stimulating object, thus “classified,” will thenceforth be viewed in accordance with all the cognitive and conative expectations we have accumulated from our experience of prior “instances” of its “kind”.

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We can better comprehend why Berkeley and Hume thought custom sufficient to explicate generality by recalling some of the characteristics we associate with generality and how they might apply in the context of the theory of ideas (for no mention has yet been made of language, nor of any distinction between human general representation and the nonhuman animal variety). To think of objects in general terms is not to pick them out individually or in aggregate but rather to represent them with complete indifference to which individuals are denoted, or even whether they actually exist. For general representation is by its very nature open-ended, and capable of encompassing infinitely many objects, if not in actual instances, then possible ones. To early modern theorists of ideas, this posed the problem of explaining what is present to the mind when we are conscious of such a representation. Because our experience is limited and our minds are not infinitely capacious, the alternatives seemed to be these: (1) either we perceive a special kind of object (abstract, not particular); or (2) we are capable of a special kind of view of objects (aspect discrimination); or (3) general representation is simply and solely an artifact of language, rooted in conventional rules of propriety, but easily mistaken for a natural operation of our minds. A new explanatory approach emerged, however, when Berkeley and Hume pointed to customary association as a solution to the problem how, “tho’ the capacity of the mind be not infinite, yet we can at once form a notion of all possible degrees of quantity and quality, in such a manner at least, as, however imperfect, may serve all the purposes of reflexion and conversation” (THN 18/17). The number of objects capable of being compared and associated by resemblance may be potentially infinite, but once the association becomes habitual, all at once are ipso facto present to the mind, albeit only in power, not in fact (22–3/20). A custom is open-ended, so that the moment any of the objects capable of triggering it presents itself to consciousness, it actuates the custom which determines us to regard the object as a new instance of a familiar kind. In this sense, then, a customary determination of thought affords us an idea of generality: “If ideas be particular in their nature, and at the same time finite in their number, ’tis only by custom they can become general in their representation, and contain an infinite number of other ideas under them” (24/21). By its means, “we can at once form a notion of all possible degrees of quantity and quality, in such a manner at least, as, however imperfect, may serve all the purposes of reflexion and conversation” (18/17), just as the idea of necessary connection we derive from the experience in ourselves of the workings of a different species of habitual association suffices for all the purposes of empirical reasoning, both ordinary and scientific. Customary association thus proves to be the foundation of the two actions so fundamental to human understanding that it would be impossible without them: general representation and inference regarding matters of fact and real existence. We now come to the third element of the Berkeley-Hume account of generality: general terms (words, notations, and other conventionally stipulated sensible signs). As each and every perception enters into multiple resemblance associations, and so is capable of triggering any of a number different customs, we need to create terms for each custom in order to stave off confusion:


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so entire is the custom, that the very same idea may be annext to several different words, and may be employ’d in different reasonings, without any danger of mistake. Thus the idea of an equilateral triangle of an inch perpendicular may serve us in talking of a figure, of a rectilineal figure, of a regular figure, of a triangle, and of an equilateral triangle. All these terms, therefore, are in this case attended with the same idea; but as they are wont to be apply’d in a greater or lesser compass, they excite their particular habits, and thereby keep the mind in a readiness to observe, that no conclusion be form’d contrary to any ideas, which are usually compris’d under them. . . . A particular idea becomes general by being annex’d to a general term; that is, to a term, which from a customary conjunction has a relation to many other particular ideas, and readily recalls them in the imagination. (THN 21–2/19–20; also 34/28)

Ideas are indispensable to “fix the meaning” (22/20) of a word. Once this is done, however, they tend to drop out of play, and general representation proceeds instead by means of terms and their associated customs (“It is usual, after the frequent use of terms . . . to omit the idea, which we wou’d express by them, and to preserve only the custom, by which we recal the idea at pleasure,” 224/148; also EHU II ¶9). To illustrate this, Hume reminds us of occasions when someone misspeaks: “if instead of saying, that in war the weaker have always recourse to negotiation, we shou’d say, that they have always recourse to conquest, the custom, which we have acquir’d of attributing certain relations to ideas, still follows the words, and makes us immediately perceive the absurdity of that proposition” (23/20–1). The customs to which our words are linked are also triggered when falsehoods are uttered: shou’d we mention the word, triangle, and form the idea of a particular equilateral one to correspond to it, and shou’d we afterwards assert, that the three angles of a triangle are equal to each other, the other individuals of a scalenum and isosceles, which we overlook’d at first, immediately crowd in upon us, and make us perceive the falshood of this proposition, tho’ it be true with relation to that idea, which we form’d. If the mind suggests not always these ideas upon occasion, it proceeds from some imperfection in its faculties; and such a one as is often the source of false reasoning and sophistry. But this is principally the case with those ideas which are abstruse and compounded. On other occasions the custom is more entire, and ’tis seldom we run into such errors. (21/19)

And on those occasions where our design is to summon up ideas of a particular kind, a custom-based general term serves to facilitate their entrance into the imagination, and make them be suggested more readily upon occasion. And indeed if we consider the common progress of the thought, either in reflexion or conversation, we shall find great reason to be satisfy’d in this particular. Nothing is more admirable, than the readiness, with which the imagination suggests its ideas, and presents them at the very instant, in which they become necessary or useful. The fancy runs from one end of the universe to the other in collecting the ideas, which belong to any subject. One would think the whole intellectual world of ideas was at once subjected to our view, and that we did nothing but pick out such as were most proper for our

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HUME’S AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES purpose. There may not, however, be any present, beside those very ideas, that are thus collected by a kind of magical faculty of the soul. (23–4/21)

Since Hume considered it one of the great virtues of his system that it extends from human to animal understanding (THN 175–7/118–9, EHU IX ¶1), the question arises whether he regarded language as a necessary condition for all general representation. Although he never addressed the issue directly, there is sufficient indirect evidence to conclude that he would have answered no. In the first place, however impaired reflection would be in the absence of a vernacular stock of words, replete with their own logic and grammar, there is nothing in Hume’s account of generality to imply that a creature that lacked language would be altogether incapable of general reflection, however primitive and constrained it might seem by comparison with our own. For, as it is neither the term nor the idea but the customary association that defines (psychologistically explicates) generality as such, and since general representations are differentiated not by terms but by the different customs different terms revive, the place of terms might be taken, albeit deficiently, by fixing on a single, archetypal idea for each custom (“in the same manner [as terms], one particular idea may serve us in reasoning concerning other ideas, however different from it in several circumstances,” THN 23/21).7 Second, “the three relations of resemblance, contiguity and causation operate in the same manner upon beasts as upon human creatures” (327/212–3). One component of their operation is a relation of constant conjunction between “one species of objects” and “the individuals of another species” (87/61), such that “When ev’ry individual of any species of objects is found by experience to be constantly united with an individual of another species, the appearance of any new individual of either species naturally conveys the thought to its usual attendant” (93/65; also EHU VII/ii ¶27 and xl ¶30). Hume’s talk here of ‘species’ of objects makes clear that general representation (customary resemblance association) is an integral part of any causal inference. If so, and if “in causation . . . all animals shew so evident a judgment” (327/212), then surely Hume was committed to attributing general representation to animals as well as to humans. In that case, however, he cannot have viewed their lack of language as anything more than an impediment to general representation, not an insuperable obstacle. Indeed, from Hume’s standpoint, it would probably be more accurate to look at vernacular language as a tool that greatly magnifies preexisting mammalian powers of general representation, rather than something whose want impairs (much less precludes) their exercise.8 7. The principal drawback of using ideas in place of terms is that “no particular idea, by which we represent a general one, is ever fix’d or determinate, but may easily be chang’d for other particular ones, which will serve equally in the representation” (THN 425/272). 8. In correspondence, a leading Hume scholar has expressed the following reservation: “I’m not sure that animal inductive reasoning, as described, requires general representation. It certainly requires the capacity to be affected by the resemblances involved in constant conjunction (i.e., the capacity to be conditioned by constant conjunction). But such conditioning need not require general representation of the aspects in which the causes all resemble one another.” Yet, in the first place, if associative relations operate in animals the same way they do in humans (THN 327/212–3), and if causal relations in humans involve the recognition of species of things (87/61, 93/65, and EHU VII/ii ¶27), I fail to see how Hume could deny that animal causal inference also involves the recognition of species of things, i.e., general


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The fourth and final element of Hume’s account of general representation goes beyond merely elaborating, developing, and securing Berkeley’s account of generality. Although the separability principle disposes of aspect discrimination, Berkeley offered no alternative explanation of how the resemblances that play so large a part in his account of general representation are recognized (chapter 10-C). How do we perceive the resemblance in shape between two visible objects that differ in size, color, shininess, and a host of other features, when the shape cannot be perceived or conceived to exist independently of these features? Or two bars of music that resemble one another in pitch and rhythm but with no timbres in common: since the resembling elements cannot be perceived or conceived to exist independently of the nonresembling ones, how is the resemblance discerned? Aspect discrimination was the answer proposed by Locke and others (Hume mentions the authors of the Port Royal logic in connection with this conception at THN 43/ 33).9 For example, although, in my visual sensation, the shape and color of the rose blossom are one and indistinguishable, a faculty of aspect discrimination supposedly equips me to perceive the one in distinction from the other, and to form distinct ideas of both, despite the fact that neither meets the separability principle criterion of distinctness. Similarly, notwithstanding the absence of any distinction in fact, I can form separate ideas by making a distinction in reason between the length and breadth of the same line, the triangularity and the equilateralness of the same figure, the happy expression and the posture of the same face, the human features and the female features of the same person, etc. The reason each of these was deemed an idea despite its failure to satisfy the separability principle is that aspect discrimination was conceived as being a species of immediate perception, and anything that is immediately present to us by consciousness deserves to be accounted an idea. Aspect discrimination was thus supposed to reveal features that belong as much to the constitution of the object immediately present to us as those we perceive without its assistance. Accordingly, from the first moment of our visual lives we could, by its means (in principle at least), distinguish the shape of an object from its color, the length of one of its sides from its breadth, its straightness from its linearity, even perhaps (if it is a human face) its happiness, healthiness, and youthfulness. Hume would have no truck with this explanation of the perception of resemblances. He attributed the error into which so many of his predecessors fell to the concealing effect of custom: as it is the nature of custom to obviate the need for representations. Second, would Hume have any reason, any wish, to deny this, given how intent he was to advertise the fact that his theory of human understanding maximizes its affinities with animal understanding? Third, if Hume is interpreted as denying the existence of aspects, so that the recognition of resemblances never involves anything more than comparison and association of distinct perceptions, then I do not see how Hume could have denied to animals the same power to recognize resemblances he attributed to humans. So if one agrees that language is necessary only to (the more sophisticated sorts of) human general representation but is not in principle essential to general representation, then it seems to me that (1) the burden of proof is not on the interpreter who claims that Hume’s account of general representation extends to animals (minus the part played in it by terms) but rather on one who denies it; and (2) this burden cannot be met. 9. See chapter 10, note 5.

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reflection and deliberation (THN 93/65, 102/71–2, 104/72, and 133/92), it also “renders us, in a great measure, insensible” (25/22) to the comparisons and transitions of thought we initially had to perform in order to acquaint ourselves with the “the different resemblances which the same simple idea may have to several different ideas” (67/49). Being inaccessible to our attentive gaze, we inevitably overlook the ineluctably relational nature of resemblances and fancy in ourselves an ability immediately to discern differences within a perception that, by Hume’s Berkeleyan criterion (chapter 16-A), is perfectly simple. This is the error to which we succumb when we posit the existence of aspects intrinsic to things, founded on distinctions of reason, prior to and independently of all comparison and relation: ’Tis certain that the mind wou’d never have dream’d of distinguishing a figure from the body figur’d, as being in reality neither distinguishable, nor different, nor separable; did it not observe, that even in this simplicity there might be contain’d many different resemblances and relations. Thus when a globe of white marble is presented, we receive only the impression of a white colour dispos’d in a certain form, nor are we able to separate and distinguish the colour from the form. But observing afterwards a globe of black marble and a cube of white, and comparing them with our former object, we find two separate resemblances, in what formerly seem’d, and really is, perfectly inseparable. After a little more practice of this kind, we begin to distinguish the figure from the colour by a distinction of reason; that is, we consider the figure and colour together, since they are in effect the same and undistinguishable; but still view them in different aspects, according to the resemblances, of which they are susceptible. When we wou’d consider only the figure of the globe of white marble, we form in reality an idea both of the figure and colour, but tacitly carry our eye to its resemblance with the globe of black marble: And in the same manner, when we wou’d consider its colour only, we turn our view to its resemblance with the cube of white marble. By this means we accompany our ideas with a kind of reflection, of which custom renders us, in great measure, insensible. (THN 25/21–2)

There are no abstract “distinctions of reason” within a simple perception “of so refin’d and spiritual a nature, that they fall not under the conception of the fancy, but must be comprehended by a pure and intellectual view, of which the superior faculties of the soul are alone capable” (72/52). What seem to be aspects are instead always resolvable into relations between distinct perceptions, conformably to the separability principle.10 We are now in a position to see how Hume solved the problem of how resemblances are recognized. The resemblance relations on which our most elementary general ideas are founded are customary associations that, like all such relations, consist essentially in facile transitions of thought (chapter 17-B). To recognize a resemblance relation between distinct perceptions is accordingly to feel facility in transitions of thought from one perception to another similar to it. If human nature were such that similar perceptions were never the occasion of facility feeling, then 10. In addition to HTC, chap. 3-B, a similar reading of THN 24/21 can be found in Garrett, “Simplicity and Separability in Hume’s Treatise,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie (1985), and Cognition, 62–4.


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no relation of resemblance would be recognized and the perceptions would not be associated in our imagination (at least, not on account of any similarity they have), and similarities among the objects present to it would pass by completely unremarked, undifferentiated from the welter of perceptual “background noise”.11 But how in that case are philosophical resemblances recognized despite the absence of facility feeling? Once perceptions become associated in natural relations of resemblance and these resemblances are reinforced by custom, we become conscious of the significance similarities as such have for our thought and action. We can then use natural relations of resemblance as patterns for general rules whereby to extend them to analogous (resembling) cases where we would not naturally feel a facile transition of thought, as when the mind perceives “from its immediate feeling, that three guineas produce a greater passion than two; and this it transfers to larger numbers, because of the resemblance; and by a general rule assigns to a thousand guineas, a stronger passion than to nine hundred and ninety nine” (141– 2/96–7). Thus, philosophical resemblance, like philosophical relations generally, is entirely parasitic on its natural counterpart, both when it comes to recognizing them and to their ability to influence our thought and action. A final question, perhaps the most important of all, needs to be addressed before leaving the topic of generality: what prompted Hume to declare Berkeley’s thesis that “all general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annexed to a certain term . . . to be one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries that has been made of late years in the republic of letters” (THN 17/17). One has only to consider the use Berkeley made of it, and the separability principle implicit in it, to appreciate the skeptical consequence that almost surely elicited these superlatives from Hume: it denudes universals of all ontological value. In Berkeley’s case, as soon as we recognize that generality is nothing but the significative use to which particular ideas or notions are put according to their various resemblances to other such ideas or notions, we lose any temptation we may have had to ascribe an ontological import to general concepts. For no one can mistake an acquaintance with significative uses for an expansion of his acquaintance with reality; reality can be conceived only to the extent it reveals itself to consciousness in the guise of the objects—particular ideas or notions—present to it immediately in sensation, reflexion, or thought (chapter 10-D). To extend this insight to Hume, we need do no more than substitute ‘customary resemblance association’ for ‘significative use’ to formulate Berkeley’s psychologistic explication of universality in terms satisfactory to Hume: since no one can mistake an acquaintance with a habitual determination (facile transition) of thought with insight into reality, any temptation to attach an ontological import to a general conception, or to any distinction between such conceptions, once its impression original is found to be indelibly bound up by content with customary association, will vanish straightaway (on the general principle 11. Of course, if resemblance were not a natural associative relation, that would render not only generality but also relations of constant conjunction unrecognizable (including the duplication and copy principles), and so would imply a radical transformation of understanding as we know it. And if the deficiency were not made good by the emergence of other nature relations of comparable cognitive and conative potential that, with our current natures, are mere perceptual background noise, then it would amount to the complete incapacitation of understanding.

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that “we are no sooner acquainted with the impossibility of satisfying any desire, than the desire itself vanishes,” xviii/5). Thus, while we can perfectly well distinguish the habits whereby we refer to shape independently of color or causes independently of customary association, no ontological worth whatsoever can be attached to these distinctions because of their failure to satisfy the separability principle. What holds true of customary associations holds for language as well. Even more perhaps than Locke (chapter 8), Hume recognized the extent to which language is a social institution, dependent on publicly accessible general rules and standards of the same sort that govern promise making and enforcement, the expectation of chastity and punishment for failing to maintain it, the coinage and circulation of money, and so on (chapter 4-C). Nor did Hume give any indication of believing that associationism, with its focus on the individual psyche taken in isolation—its impressions, ideas, and the affective dispositions incident to its associative activity—has much if anything to tell us about the public realm in general and language in particular (HTC chapter 3-C). For example, his claim that “if no impression can be produced . . . the term is altogether insignificant” (THN 649/409) is concerned not with linguistic meaning or reference but the objective validity of what we say, where this is to be construed in terms of the only realities ever present to our minds: sensations, reflexions, and their copies in thought. Aside from its role as a touchstone of linguistic ontological worth, Hume probably would not just have conceded but insisted that this or any other principle of mentation is no more fitted to help us to understand language than it is tort law, arbitrage, sovereignty, or any other social institution. The two march to the beat of different drummers, and for Hume, as for Locke and Berkeley before him, there is no greater danger facing the philosopher than to forget how different mentation and language are from one another. One such risk arises from the holistic nature of language, and especially its role as the repository, in the form of internal conceptual connections, of relations between items that, in mentation, are distinct and have nothing but the external relation of experienced constant conjunction to connect them. Intentionality is a case in point. In discourse, desire, volition, esteem, contempt, and many other things must always have an intentional object: a state of affairs desired, an action chosen, a person esteemed or contemned, etc. But so far as Hume was concerned, each of these intentions is separable in thought from its object, distinguishable in reality, and therefore really distinct from it, so that it is perfectly possible for it to exist even in the absence of its object—not, to be sure, in language, but in the mind (“will and desire are annex’d to particular conceptions of good and pleasure,” and so are “distinguishable from the conception,” THN 625/397). It is experience that teaches us that these things have an invariant constant relation; but just as in the case of causal connections, experience does not and cannot teach us that these intentional actions (impressions) have any kind of necessary connection to their intentional objects (ideas). And, far from showing Hume to be heedless of the rules and deliverances language, his strict adherence to the separability principle in all matters relating to mentation (the contents of the individual psyche taken in isolation) merely shows that he took language and mentation to be so different from one another that, in concerning himself with the latter, his only concern with language was to escape its influence so far as humanly possible.


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C. Customary Association by Contiguity: Ideas of Space and Time Relations of contiguity in time or place, like resemblance relations, are associative bonds that operate on the imagination even without assistance from custom. Yet their psychological efficacy, again like that of resemblances, depends, in several regards, on the underpinning of custom. We have already seen that contiguity presupposes custom in the form of cause and effect relations in order to extend its influence beyond the scope of objects immediately present to the senses (THN 74/53), since its capacity to generate belief (vivacity feeling) is otherwise extremely limited (109–10/76). But, most importantly, contiguity association is actuated by customs of thought rooted in our lifelong experience as creatures existing in space and time: ’Tis likewise evident, that as the senses, in changing their objects, are necessitated to change them regularly, and take them as they lie contiguous to each other, the imagination must by long custom acquire the same method of thinking, and run along the parts of space and time in conceiving its objects. (11/13; also 429/ 275 and 435/278)

Our bodily movements always proceed from one place to the adjacent place. The objects that come into our tangible reach with each new step are those contiguous to those that were in our reach before, and something analogous occurs with motion through visible space. And not only our bodily actions but our mental ones as well unfold from one time to the next. So used do we become to these constant patterns of change that we form a custom of associating objects according to this sensible framework. But how do we arrive at the idea of this framework in the first place? Or, in other words, how do our minds form ideas of space and time? The customary associations of primary importance for contiguity association are those responsible for the abstract general ideas of space (extension) and time (succession and duration). Hume’s endeavor to explicate the nature of these ideas by tracing them to their originating impressions (THN 33–4/27) was no doubt inspired by, and too some extent modeled upon, Berkeley’s precedent, in which he adapted elements of his accounts of suggestive signification by means of isomorphic aesthetic formal multiplicity to elucidate the nature of space and time (chapter 14). Hume’s principal departure from Berkeley is that, instead of restricting the source of ideas of space to touch, he accorded to vision an equal status in this regard: “The idea of space is convey’d to the mind by two senses, the sight and touch; nor does anything ever appear extended, that is not either visible or tangible” (38/30). There is no evidence to suggest that this was because he was any less convinced than Berkeley that the sensations we get from the touch of our hand are incommensurate in appearance with those intromitted by the eye, or that he balked at the consequence that a visual extension, composed exclusively of light and color, can have no sensible quality in common with a tangible extension composed exclusively of qualities of feeling.12 Nor is there reason to believe that Hume made 12. Hume made no effort to give a more precise characterization of tactual sensation: see THN 55– 6/41 and 230–1/152.

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space an exception to his rejection of immediately discernible abstract ideas (aspects, distinctions of reason), since any “partial consideration” or “distinction of reason” we care to make with respect to space (or time) must be understood “after the manner above explain’d” (43/33), that is, explained away in the same manner all seemingly abstract ideas are to be (section A): by reference to a history of performing comparisons between distinct perceptions, and associating them by resemblance sufficiently often to render the resemblance customary, but “of which custom renders us, in a great measure, insensible” (25/22). Instead, “the impressions of touch are found to be similar to those of sight in the disposition of their parts” (34/28). What Hume meant by this is unfortunately none too clear. Nevertheless, with the Berkeleyan precedent in mind, I think the best way to make sense of what Hume meant by a “similar disposition of parts” is in terms of the notion of aesthetic formal multiplicity implicit in Berkeley’s conception of vision as a language of touch (chapter 14-E). The formal multiplicity unique to vision is one of the two elements that, according to Berkeley, make it possible for its aspatial objects to express the properly spatial objects of touch, in much the same way language gives expression to thought or writing to speech (the other element is the systematic constant conjunction between the objects of the two senses that Berkeley credited to God). To say that vision and touch are comparable in aesthetic formal multiplicity does not imply the slightest qualitative resemblance between their data in appearance. Its locus is rather in what the imagination can do with their data that it cannot do with the data of the other senses, and so must be conceived in terms not of the objects (perceptions) upon which our mental activity is directed but of that activity itself. In particular, it is in relation to the mind’s powers of discernment that the resemblance in formal multiplicity between vision and touch first emerges. For while the data of our other senses are no less variable and diverse than those of vision and touch, our ability to resolve detail and make fine discriminations with ease and assurance is greatly superior in respect of the latter. For example, only the most gifted musicians can distinguish the individual tones and overtones of a complex chord sounded on a cathedral organ; and no human senses besides vision and touch can approach the aesthetic formal multiplicity bats are able to discriminate by hearing, bloodhounds by smell, or snakes by taste. Since spatial perception of the kind possible by touch requires not only a richly diverse and variable palette of data but an exceptionally detailed formal multiplicity as well, Berkeley held that vision alone, of all human senses, is capable of systematically expressing tangible spatiality. Thus, in much the way a written word, despite having no qualitative resemblance to the spoken word, has precisely the right multiplicity to enable someone cognizant of its correlations to phonetics to enunciate an unfamiliar word by seeing it written, so too the formal multiplicity of sensations of light and color, once correlated to tactual elements, suffices to articulate tangible spatiality to any scale or level of complexity, notwithstanding the absence of any qualitative resemblance between the data themselves. Of course, without the correlations that only experience of the constant conjunction of visible and tangible objects is capable of disclosing, none of the potential for the former to express the latter, and so become a language of spatiality,


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would be realized. Nor, until these correlations have had a chance to establish themselves in our mind in the form of ingrained habits of thought, would we have the slightest temptation to attribute the spatial properties and relations we know from touch to the qualitatively incommensurate data of vision. But as soon as all this is in place, according to Berkeley, the objects of the two senses become so intertwined in our minds that we cannot help but regard them as though they were a single external sense. We then become susceptible to the illusion that space is somehow independent of everything distinctly visual or tactual (an idea of diverse senses), and the way is opened to the chimerical distinction between primary and secondary qualities premised in philosophical materialism. This resemblance in aesthetic formal multiplicity between the visual and tactual seems best to capture what Hume was getting at when he characterized their objects as “similar . . . in the disposition of their parts” (THN 34/28), and proceeded to describe space/extension as though it were an object common to these senses: “visible or tangible points distributed in a certain order” (53/40), “a composition of visible or tangible points dispos’d in a certain order” (62/45), “what is colour’d or tangible . . . has parts dispos’d after such a manner, as to convey that idea” (235/ 154), and “a number of co-existent parts dispos’d in a certain order, and capable of being at once present to the sight or feeling” (429/275). More particularly, the aesthetic formal multiplicity proper to each sense is what, in the first instance, gets picked out insofar as they both alike qualify as sources of an abstract idea of space/extension (so that those born blind or paralytic can, by this route, arrive at the very same general idea); and, in the second place, it is the focus of the resemblance relation that induces our imaginations, despite the qualitative incommensurateness of visual and tactual data, to unite the extension proper to each sense in the still more abstract idea of a space/extension (an idea of diverse senses). To put these suppositions to the test, let is examine Hume’s account of the origin of the idea of space/extension in accordance with the principle established in Treatise I/i/§7 that “All abstract ideas are really nothing but particular ones, consider’d in a certain light” (34/28). The first task, as always for Hume, is to isolate the originating impression: This table before me is alone sufficient by its view to give me the idea of extension. This idea, then, is borrow’d from, and represents some impression, which this moment appears to the senses. But my senses convey to me only the impressions of colour’d points, dispos’d in a certain manner. If the eye is sensible of any thing farther, I desire it may be pointed out to me. But if it be impossible to shew any thing father, we may conclude with certainty, that the idea of extension is nothing but a copy of these colour’d points, and of the manner of their appearance. (34/27)

The nature of the distinction between the colored points and the manner of their appearance cannot, of course, be left to stand in its current form, since, if construed as ultimate, it would imply a capacity for aspect discrimination incompatible with the separability principle. Consequently, Hume proceeds to resolve this distinction into resemblance relations, comparisons, and the different customary associations to which their continual recurrence gives rise:

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HUME’S AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES Suppose that in the extended object, or composition of colour’d points, from which we first receiv’d the idea of extension, the points were of a purple colour; it follows, that in every repetition of that idea we wou’d not only place the points in the same order with respect to each other, but also bestow on them that precise colour, with which alone we are acquainted. But afterwards having experience of the other colours of violet, green, red, white, black, and of all the different compositions of these, and finding a resemblance in the disposition of colour’d points, of which they are compos’d, we omit the peculiarities of colour, as far as possible, and found an abstract idea merely on that disposition of points, or manner of appearance, in which they agree. (34/28)

How far Hume deemed it possible to “omit the peculiarities of colour” emerged in the previous section in connection with his analysis of aspects arising from distinctions of reason: “the mind wou’d never have dream’d of distinguishing a figure from the body figur’d, as being in reality neither distinguishable, nor different, nor separable; did it not observe, that even in this simplicity there might be contain’d many different resemblances and relations” (25/22). Similarly, while the disposition of visible points is one and indistinguishable from their color, we can form distinct abstract general ideas of them thanks to the different customary resemblance relations of which they admit. This distinction thus arises not from any capacity on our part to discern differences in the appearances present to our senses, but rather from the different customary resemblance associations formed in us by repeated comparisons, each susceptible to being triggered by stimuli that fail to trigger the other. To be sure, there is more to Hume’s conception of “colour’d points, dispos’d in a certain manner.” The points whose multiplicity is constitutive of visual impressions (and the ideas copied from them) are not the kind of unit that “is merely a fictitious denomination, which the mind may apply to any quantity of objects it collects together,” such that, by the stipulation of a rule of numeration, twenty men, the “whole globe of the earth, nay the whole universe may be consider’d as an unite” (THN 30/25). The units of aesthetic formal multiplicity that are of concern here are prior to and independent of any denomination (general term) we may care to apply, and are in effect built into each and every visual perception (impression or idea) itself. To discern a minimum visibile, simply “Put a spot of ink upon paper, fix your eye upon that spot, and retire to such a distance, that at last you lose sight of it; ’tis plain, that the moment before it vanish’d the image or impression was perfectly indivisible” (27/24). The multiplicity of a visual impression, then, corresponds to the number of colored points that appear in it.13 This of 13. I am here leaving darkness out of account. Since “the idea of darkness is no positive idea, but merely the negation of light, or more properly speaking, of colour’d and visible objects” (THN 55/41), darkness cannot be the source of any idea of extension, and a fortiori, of any division of extension, points included. Still, because certain visual phenomena involving darkness (58–9/43) bear so close a resemblance to positive ideas of extension, not only in the appearances but in the mental actions directed upon them (60–1/44–5), the former are confused with the latter and treated as if they were instances of visible extension (62/45). By simply yielding to this natural fiction, the dark holes we encounter in many, indeed most, of our visual impressions can be incorporated into the following account. Apropos of this fiction, Wright contends that “if he had taken more care with his analysis of what Hume calls


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course does not mean that Hume thought we see the world pointilistically, least of all when no variation of light or color is present at all. But there is another sense, grounded on past experience rather than immediate perception, in which he quite properly supposed that we do. From the beginning of our visual lives, we are all experienced in comparing our present visual impression to that of an instant previous and finding that they differ in the appearance or disappearance of a single colored point (as when a distant bird comes into or passes out of view in the sky); in the replacement of a point of one color with a point of another color (as when the bird’s wings catch the light of the sun and suddenly flash brightly); the changing location of a single colored point (a fly zigzagging against a white background just near enough to see); a point that before was indivisible expands to a divisible size, or vice versa; a multitude of separated points (sand grains, stars in the night sky); and so on. After we have had enough experience of paying heed to visible points and marking their situations and relations with respect to other points, they become as deeply ingrained in our habits of visual reckoning as distinguishable visible figures or regions. Why then does Hume’s account of the origin of the idea of space/extension focus on points rather than regions or the wholes they compose? Surely, part of the answer is that a sense able to resolve detail all the way down to, and permits us to maintain a focus on, indivisible points is one that permits the very finest discriminations to be made (albeit subject to the infirmity described on THN 40–1/32). If, instead, our sight consisted only of blurred patches (as is the case with eyes without lenses), so that no points (“what has neither length, breadth nor depth”), linear contours (“length without breadth or depth”), or surfaces (“length and breadth without depth,” 42/33) could become visible to us, then its aesthetic formal multiplicity would be no greater than that of smell or taste—senses that, in Hume’s view, are incapable of furnishing the idea of space/extension (“nor is there any thing, but what is colour’d or tangible, that has parts dispos’d after such a manner, fictions of the imagination, Waxman would have understood how Hume thought that beliefs—such as absolute space or external existence—can be generated in cases where we have no distinct ideas” (“Critical,” 349)—as though this and other Humean fictions were exceptions to the rule that there can be no belief except where there is an idea in which to repose it: THN 94/65, 101/71, 140/95, 164/111, and 172/116. It seems that Wright supposes Humean fictions to be exempt from this requirement only because he mischaracterizes them. The mistake Hume ascribed to the imagination in the present case is essentially one of misclassifying an idea actually in our possession rather than one of having no idea at all: what is in fact not an instance of a space, or extension, at all because it is not a possible source of the idea (37/28)—the blackness in our visual field, the tactually empty time interval when our hand passes through the air and meets no resistance—is mistaken for one because of a resemblance between the ideas that, while genuine, is misleading in precisely the respect necessary for the classification to be correct. In the same way, an idea in our possession that is not an instance of identity because it involves interrupted and/or variable appearances is mistaken for one because of a resemblance that, while genuine, leaves out of account a difference that defeats the classification (202–4/134–6 and n and 253–5/165–6). In these and other projective illusions (chapter 17-D), belief is reposed in an impression of reflexion consisting in an affective disposition sustained after its objects fail it (the fiction arising from its resemblance to the disposition of imagination before its objects fail it). Pace Wright, there is no instance of Hume affirming belief in the absence of an idea. And how could there be so long as he adhered to his account of belief as a manner of conceiving? For Hume, to believe in the absence of an idea is tantamount to the absurdity that a manner of conceiving might exist even when there is nothing to conceive.

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as to convey that idea,” 235/154; also 38/30). Hume’s emphasis on visible points thus has the effect of stressing the central importance of the aesthetic formal multiplicity of sight to the status of this sense as a source of the idea of space/ extension. In addition, Hume’s preoccupation with points enabled him to call attention to another element, lacking from an account of origin of space such as that offered by Locke, which considers space only as as indeterminate extension and distance (chapter 6-B): determinability. For while a visual impression consisting of a wash of blurs or invariable in lighting and color is certainly indeterminate enough to satisfy Locke’s description of the idea, it falls well short of visible space/extension properly so called, as the idea of something in which visible objects appear and disappear, change their color and contour, grow, shrink, and alter their relative positions and situations inside, outside, alongside, adjacent, separated, above, below, right, left, in front, or behind one another. The idea of such limitless determinability is impossible except when visual perceptions are conceived of as “a composition of visible . . . points dispos’d in a certain order” (62/45): that is, an ordered manifold, or nexus, formed of coexistent loci (points) that preserve their relative positions to one another (their situation and relations) through any and all changes in respect of light and color (“co-existent parts dispos’d in a certain order, and capable of being at once present to the sight,” 429/275). For Hume, notions like “discriminability” and “determinability” imply powers, which in turn resolve into customs of thought (Hume used “power” to denote customary resemblance association on THN 20/19 and 22–3/20). In the present context, this is just to say that the idea of visible space/extension is the outcome of comparing visual perceptions, associating them according to their various resemblances, and forming habits when these associations are strongly reinforced, whether by frequent recurrence or some other cause. The key, as with aspects and distinctions of reason generally, is that visible space is never anything present to our eyes, prior to and independently of experience and habit, but rather something that exists only in and through the actions and affects of associative imagination.14 Even while seeming not to take place at all (EHU IV/i ¶8), the customary association in which the idea of the determinable ordered manifold of space has its origin confers on immediately perceived sensations of light and color determinate spatial form, so that the two seem to be as inseparably one as the motion that custom determines us to regard as communicated from one object converging upon another at rest seems to us a single continuous motion (“the relation . . . binds the objects in the closest and most intimate manner to each other, so as to make us imagine them to be absolutely inseparable,” THN 112/77–8). Yet no matter how immediate and primitive a datum visible space may seem to us to be, for Hume the fact remains that, without comparison, association and experience-bred custom, we could no more form an idea of the aesthetic formal multiplicity and determinability distinctive of visible space than we could form an idea of necessary connec14. It is no accident that when Hume first formulated the principle examined in chapter 17-B that “Resembling ideas are not only related together, but the actions of the mind, which we employ in considering them”—60–2/44–5—it was specifically in relation to space and time.


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tions between distinct existents. The distinctive phenomenology of visual space— the characteristic “look” of flat, concave, and convex surfaces, interposed forms, foreshortening, etc.—is thus as much an amalgam of sensory inputs and associative imagination as the distinctive facial physiognomy of embarrassment or agonizing pain (chapter 17-D; also chapters 6-C and 14-D).15 The next step in Hume’s account of the origin of the abstract idea of space concerns the integration of visible with tangible space/extension. The existence of an aesthetic formal multiplicity in tactual sensation comparable to that of visual accounts for the ability to form an abstract idea of an ordered manifold of tangible points, with the same determinability found in visible space. The challenge facing Hume was to explain how the complete qualitative incommensurateness between visual and tactual sensation is overcome by an associative relation of resemblance of sufficient strength to fuse them into a single, still more general idea of space/ extension, whereof each is thereafter regarded as an instantiation. (Even so, how the two ideas become integrated into a single external sense of objects that transcend the divide between vision and touch cannot be understood until we shift from custom-based contiguity to causation in the next section.) The key to meeting this challenge is the recognition that the principle of resemblance is not dependent upon the sensible appearances of things (chapter 17-A and -B). Thus, notwithstanding their qualitative incommensurateness, their comparable aesthetic formal multiplicity already of itself suffices to mark off vision and touch from the other senses (tangible points can be discriminated and kept in focus over intervals— pinpoints, tiny dust grains, etc.). At the same time, it makes possible the performance of strikingly similar operations in associative imagination, each of which issues in abstract ideas of determinable ordered manifolds of coexistent points (visible and tangible minima), which in turn enable us to associate objects occupying adjacent positions in these fields in relations of contiguity. In addition, so thoroughgoing a similarity in the action the imagination performs in the two sensory fields must presumably give rise to closely resembling affective dispositions of the sort Hume would afterward identify as a focus of resemblance relations powerful enough to overcome dissimilarities in the appearance of the objects (impressions and ideas) on which those actions are directed (60–2/44–5; also 202– 4/135–6 and 253–5/165–6). In this way, then, the associative imagination itself becomes the locus of a resemblance association capable of subsuming visible and tangible space under a single, more general, yet still natural (associative) idea of space, notwithstanding their qualitative incommensurateness.

15. One cannot help being surprised at how often commentators have supposed space and time to be exceptions, rather than instances, of the account of general ideas, aspects, and distinctions of reason given in Treatise I/i/§7. Hume alludes to this section in the process of accounting for the origin of space and time when he notes that “All abstract ideas are really nothing but particular ones, consider’d in a certain light” (THN 34/28), and, later in I/ii, refers to it explicitly on 43/33 and again on 67/48–9. If one understands that the kind of distinction exemplified by that between visible or tangible points and their manner of appearance “is founded on the different resemblances, which the same simple idea may have to several different ideas” (67/48), then one is obliged to interpret I/ii/§3 in something like the manner undertaken here.

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Hume’s account of the source of the idea of time differs from that of space in two principal regards: (1) whereas ideas of spatial features originate only in vision and touch, temporal ideas can be “deriv’d from the succession of our perceptions of every kind, ideas as well as impressions, and impressions of reflection as well as of sensation” (THN 34–5/28), and (2) whereas the manner of appearance of the spatial is defined by “that quality of the co-existence of parts,” the temporal “is compos’d of parts that are not co-existent . . . and consequently that idea must be deriv’d from a succession of changeable objects” (36/29). Otherwise, the psychological processes whereby ideas of the temporal are acquired are identical to those that give rise to ideas of the spatial. From an unchanging object no idea of time can be derived “since it produces none but co-existent impressions;” only “a succession of changeable objects” can yield the idea of something composed of noncoexistent parts. But since the successiveness of, say, five notes played on the flute cannot be perceived or conceived independently of the sounds—“The ideas of some objects [the mind] certainly must have, nor is it possible for it without these ideas ever to arrive at any conception of time” (T 37/29)—any supposition that the former, as the manner of appearance of these auditory objects, is something really distinct from these auditory objects themselves falls afoul of Hume’s antiabstractionism. So in order to distinguish the former and “conjoin it with any other objects” (37/29), we must undertake comparisons between distinct perceptions, associate them in resemblance relations, and, among the habits of mind that result, acquire one that remains in readiness to be triggered by all and only those stimuli to which temporal predicates are applied. Thus, time, understood as an ordered manifold of determinable positions composed of indivisible, noncoexistent instants, is, on Hume’s account, as much an amalgam of the senses and associative imagination as space. The significance of this dual origin, in the case of space/extension no less than that of time/duration, is that while on the one hand these abstract general ideas suffice for us to talk of things succeeding or enduring without reference (even implicitly) to the perceptions continually coursing through our minds, or to talk of the extension, figure, etc., of objects without reference to their color and/or feel, on the other hand we can neither perceive nor conceive individual things that instantiate the general ideas of space and time other than these perceptions. For, since abstract ideas are “in themselves individual” (THN 20/19) and “’tis only by custom they can become general in their representation” (24/21), we cannot detach temporal or spatial predicates from the individual objects from which they can be acquired and employ them to represent unchangeable objects or invisible, intangible extended objects: I know there are some who pretend, that the idea of duration is applicable in a proper sense to objects, which are perfectly unchangeable; and this I take to be the common opinion of philosophers as well as the vulgar. But to be convinc’d of its falshood we need but reflect on the foregoing conclusion, that the idea of duration is always deriv’d from a succession of changeable objects, and can never be convey’d to the mind by any thing stedfast and unchangeable. For it inevitably follows from thence, that since the idea of duration cannot be deriv’d


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from such an object, it can never in any propriety or exactness be apply’d to it, nor can any thing unchangeable be ever said to have duration. Ideas always represent the objects or impressions, from which they are deriv’d, and can never without a fiction represent or be apply’d to any other. (37/29–30)

Hume’s antiabstractionist, associationist account of the origin of our ideas of space and time so restricts their scope of application that, talk though we may of the contrary, they afford human understanding the means to perceive or conceive (become conscious of) nothing enduring save noncoexistent complexes of instantaneously existing sensations, reflexions, and thoughts, and nothing extended save for coexistent complexes of colored or felt points. In other words, Hume’s account of the origin of space and time, and the consequences he drew from it, are as thoroughly Berkeleyan as the analysis of abstract ideas it exemplifies (T 17/17 and n), and so carries with it a similarly extreme idealist implication: unchangeable things, and extended things that are neither visible (colored) nor tangible (soft, dry, smooth, etc.) are, in a strict ideational sense (as distinct from the looser, ontologically insignificant semantic sense), utterly unintelligible to us, and only by means of certain fictions of the imagination can we ever, per impossibile, be induced to suppose the contrary. Thus, in classic psychologistic fashion, a claim about the contents of an idea, grounded on an account of its origin, serves to limit its scope to the experience of a suitably constituted associative imagination. D. Customary Association by Cause and Effect: A World in Mind Abstract ideas of space and time are all that is requisite to begin associating perceptions by contiguity in conformity with the myriadly determinable, superrich formal multiplicity of these ordered manifolds. Thereafter, despite the fact that the human “body is confined to one planet, along which it creeps with pain and difficulty; the thought can in an instant transport us into the most distant regions of the universe; or even beyond the universe, into the unbounded chaos, where nature is supposed to lie in total confusion” (EHU II ¶4). Our adherence in thought to the same order of space and time to which the human body is subject results from the fact that contiguity is an associative relation, reinforced by custom, with just enough force to prod the imagination out of its native situation of indifference into one in which transitions in thought to contiguous places are easier and more natural for it than others: in the conception of those objects, which we regard as real and existent, we take them in their proper order and situation, and never leap from one object to another, which is distant from it, without running over, at least in a cursory manner, all those objects, which are interpos’d betwixt them. (THN 428/274)

We “trace the succession of time by a similar succession of ideas,” except for one difference arising from the fact that instants, unlike points, are never coexistent: facility feeling is increased by transitions of thought that proceed in the same direction as time (from past to future), and correspondingly decreased when pro-

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ceeding the opposite way, with the consequence that “A small degree of distance in the past has . . . a greater effect, in interrupting and weakening the conception, than a much greater in the future” (431/276). Yet the easy transitions effected by customary contiguity association are still “very feeble and uncertain” (THN 109/76) in themselves, and such poor transferers of vivacity from impressions to associated spatially and/or temporally contiguous ideas that they would not figure prominently in Hume’s associationist account of human understanding, were it not for the foundation provided them by causal association: There is nothing in any objects to perswade us, that they are either always remote or always contiguous; and when from experience and observation we discover, that their relation in this particular is invariable, we always conclude there is some secret cause, which separates or unites them. . . . Here then it appears, that . . . the only [relation], that can be trac’d beyond our senses, and informs us of existence and objects, which we do not see or feel, is causation. (73–4/53) As the relation of cause and effect is requisite to persuade us of any real existence, so is this persuasion requisite to give force to these other relations. . . . There is no manner of necessity for the mind to feign any resembling and contiguous objects; and if it feigns such, there is as little necessity for it always to confine itself to the same, without any difference or variation. . . . The mind forsees and anticipates the change; and even from the very first instant feels the looseness of its actions, and the weak hold it has of its objects. And as this imperfection is very sensible in every single instance, it still encreases by experience and observation, when we compare the several instances we may remember, and form a general rule against the reposing any assurance in those momentary glimpses of light, which arise in the imagination from a feign’d resemblance and contiguity. (109–10/76)

While it may be easier for the imagination to relate two contiguous objects together after a first encounter, the relation is too weak to create an expectation that they will be similarly related at the next encounter. Only if some cause of their proximity (or distance) is discovered, or a cause that enables us to predict how their relative relations will change over time, will the relation acquire a fixity in imagination, and become, as it were, a new reference point on the mental maps we continually draw up of our world. In this way, I take for granted a cause that keeps my feet on the earth when I walk; a cause that makes my next step take me into the contiguous place rather than one a continent away, and the contiguous time rather than one a million years hence; causes that constitute and maintain the structure of my body; causes that explain the mountain range that exists between China and India, and why the continents are in their present positions; causes of the existence, situation, and actions of the moon, the solar system, the galaxy, and galaxy clusters; and everything else that enters into the conceptions that give contiguity its special role in constituting the fixity and order of the world and my place within it.


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This, however, only scratches the surface of the role Hume attributed to causal association in our consciousness of a world of objects integrated in a single natural order extending to the farthest reaches of space and time. When a custom of thought, triggered by the sight and smell of smoke coming in through the transom, induces me to imagine a fire in the hall outside, I do not simply make a facile transition in thought to the idea the fire, I conceive the fire in the forceful, lively manner Hume equated with belief in its real existence; and it is owing entirely to the vivacity with which I conceive what is after all merely an object of my thought (and, in that regard, no different from a fire in a daydream) that I take precautions not only against asphyxiation but against being incinerated as well. Similarly, if I hear familiar voices outside, I imagine the people with whom I associate these voices, and do so with the same belief (degree of vivacity feeling) in their presence as I confer on the sound (auditory impression) itself. In these, and countless other instances, causal association prompts us to attribute real existence to things present to our consciousness only in thought (idea), not in sensation or reflexion (impression) (“the only [relation], that can be trac’d beyond our senses, and informs us of existence and objects, which we do not see or feel, is causation” T 73–4/53; also EHU VIII/i ¶5). Nor is this all. At the same time we attribute real existence to objects by means of causal inference, we do so to the places and times they occupy as well, and thereby extend the bounds of existent (vividly conceived, nonfictive) space beyond the immediate confines of vision and touch, and time beyond the range of present perception and memory. This effect is multiplied by the fact that all causes are themselves regarded as the effects of other causes: the fire in the hall was caused, say, by an electrical short, this by a frayed wire, the fraying by the nibbling of mice, the presence of mice in the building an effect of their being driven out of the next building by construction, the construction resulting from the renovation plans of the new owner, who got the money for it from an inheritance that came about when his father was murdered by a junkie seeking money for his next fix, and so on and on and on. Since similar causal chains, with fewer or more of the blanks filled in, are taken for granted in respect of every event to which I am witness, or which I hear or read others attesting to, the space and time of real things demarcated by the purview of the senses and memory is easily dwarfed by the sphere composed of the realities we infer to exist by means of customary association in relations of cause and effect: ’Tis this latter principle, which peoples the world, and brings us acquainted with such existences, as by their removal in time and place, lie beyond the reach of the senses and memory. By means of it I paint the universe in my imagination, and fix my attention on any part of it I please. I form an idea of ROME, which I neither see nor remember; but which is connected with such impressions as I remember to have received from the conversation and books of travellers and historians. This idea of Rome I place in a certain situation on the idea of an object, which I call the globe. I join to it the conception of a particular government, and religion, and manners. I look backward and consider its first foundation; its several revolutions, successes, and misfortunes. All this, and every thing else, which I believe, are nothing but ideas; tho’ by their force and settled order,

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HUME’S AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES arising from custom and the relation of cause and effect, they distinguish themselves from the other ideas, which are merely the offspring of the imagination. (THN 108/75)

These dimensions are further expanded by the progress of science, proceeding on the foundation provided by natural causation: the very large, the very small, the very remote in time, additional dimensions, repeating Big Bang universes, universes within universes, and so on. Even if scientists were to conclude that they had discovered the farthest limit of the humanly knowable universe, we would still not treat these bounds as absolute, if only on account of our unshakeable conviction in the truth of the general causal maxim, which allows us to infer for each existence (things, their states, their actions) some cause prior to it in the order of time without which it would not have existed (how we come by this conviction will be considered in chapter 19-D).16 Causal association is also indispensable to our ability to construct general points of view independent of our particular point of view at any instant. With each movement of the eyes or hand, each shift of the head, each movement of the body, the appearances of visible objects change: in size, shape, and color; from horizontal to vertical, top to bottom, inside to outside, and front to back; their proximity or remoteness from other objects; their being at rest or in motion; fast or slow, accelerating or decelerating, constant or erratic motion; and so forth. How then is it possible to form a stable point of view, from which the objects are not only understood not to change with our continuously changing points of view, but even seem (phenomenologically) not to change? The answer lies in the capacity of the imagination to form habits of adapting the causal information it gradually accumulates to compensate for the peculiarities of each point of view, thereby circumventing the need for deliberative reflection to reconcile conflicting views: The judgment here corrects the inequalities . . . in the several variations of images, present to our external senses. The same object, at a double distance, really throws on the eye a picture of but half the bulk; yet we imagine that it appears of the same size in both situations; because we know, that, on our approach to it, its image would expand on the eye, and that the difference consists not in the object itself, but in our position with regard to it. And, indeed, without such a correction of appearances, both in internal and external senti16. I have formulated the maxim here so as to take into account phenomena that Hume could not have budgeted for, such as those described in quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is unquestionably inconsistent with a notion of causal determination that reigned in the period previous to its discovery (though not perhaps as early as Hume—see Hacking, Taming, chaps. 1 and 2). But it does not take its embrace of chance so far as to deny all relation of the state of things at one time with the state of things previous to it, and indeed stochastic principles seem no less premised on the belief that whatever exists at a certain time depends on what existed previously than those of classical mechanics and ordinary understanding are: “Knowledge of the wave functions of all of the fundamental ingredients of the universe at some moment in time allows a ‘vast enough’ intelligence to determine the wave functions at any prior or future time. Quantum determinism tells us that the probability that any particular event will occur at some chosen time in the future is fully determined by knowledge of the wave functions at any prior time”; Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe (New York: Norton, 1999), 341. See also chapter 19 note 17 below.


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ment, men could never think or talk steadily on any subject; while their fluctuating situations produce a continual variation on objects, and throw them into such different and contrary lights and positions. (EPM V ¶41; also THN 591/377 and 603/384–5)

The imagination, operating in accordance with general rules founded on experience-bred causal associations, quite literally alters the “look” of things: ’Tis universally allow’d by the writers on optics, that the eye at all times sees an equal number of physical points, and that a man on the top of a mountain has no larger an image presented to his senses, than when he is cooped up in the narrowest court or chamber. ’Tis only by experience that he infers the greatness of the object from some peculiar qualities of the image; and this inference of the judgment he confounds with sensation, as is common on other occasions. (112/ 77)

Why does a great mountain, formerly seen only in the distance, strike us as huge on nearer approach even though we can blot it out, and much else besides, by holding a hand in front of our eyes? Clearly, the point of view of the imagination is not that of the senses. From infancy, we assemble a body of general rules whereby to accommodate our viewpoint to the causal profile of each species of object, as well as to the order, circumstances, and other factors distinctive of their efficacy, whether in exercising their powers on other objects or on our sense organs. This “reflexion on general rules” becomes so ingrained and automatic that, as with all customary acts of mind, it preempts the need for comparison and reckoning, and is inevitably mistaken for “immediate” perception. Objects then come to seem as fixed and unalterable in their sensible qualities as we imagine them to be, notwithstanding the fact that these qualities are actually in a continual flux and movement: “Where an opinion admits of no doubt, or opposite probability, . . . the understanding corrects the appearances of the senses, and makes us imagine, that an object at twenty foot distance seems even to the eye as large as one of the same dimensions at ten” (632/85).17 Just as it is rule-governed imagination, rather than the senses, to which the posture of a human face seems happy, so 17. The portion of 632/85 omitted from this citation is sometimes thought to point to a different interpretation of Hume’s conception of belief than that advanced in HTC, chap. 1-B and in chapters 16A and 17-C of the present work: “A . . . reflexion on general rules keeps us from augmenting our belief upon every encrease of the force and vivacity of our ideas. Where an opinion admits of no doubt, or opposite probability, we attribute to it a full conviction; tho’ the want of resemblance, or contiguity, may render its force inferior to that of other opinions.” The objection, put to me by Dauer and Owen, is the following. Imagine two opinions derived from causal inference, each of which is supported by a frequently experienced and constant conjunction of the objects concerned. Now, if belief were simply and solely a function of the degree of vivacity feeling, would one of these beliefs not exceed the other in certainty if it were reinforced by vivacity added by resemblance and contiguity? Yet this is precisely what Hume denies. Is that not then a problem for anyone who interprets him as identifying belief with vivacity, to the exclusion of all other factors? I do not believe it is, as a consideration of Hume’s comparison of belief with distance vision in this connection shows. Thanks to general rules, we do not regard something we are walking toward as growing larger merely becomes its appearance becomes larger to our sight; indeed, so powerful is the influence of these rules on the imagination that we “see”

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too the world, both within and without, takes on its stable, orderly phenomenology only when the point of view of the imagination has become seamlessly amalgamated into that of the senses.18 Whether because Locke (chapter 6-D), and, still more so, Berkeley (chapter 14-D), had already so extensively worked this vein, or for other reasons, Hume did not enter into detail as to how imagination transforms the phenomenology of visual experience so profoundly that what we take ourselves to be directly sensing is in fact the product of its rule-governed governed synthesis. Nevertheless, the cases of magnitude and distance, as well as similar examples (THN 141–2/96–7, 151/102, 364/235, 435/278, and 581–2/371–2), make clear that he was no less cognizant than his predecessors that the world constituted (and inhabited) by imagination has a markedly different “look” than the one our senses actually present to us. If the contribution of the former could be stripped out, the scene we would find before us would be “a perpetual flux and movement”: Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change. . . . Nay farther, even with relation to that succession, we cou’d only admit of those perceptions, which are immediately present to our consciousness, nor cou’d those lively imagines, with which the memory presents us, be ever receiv’d as true pictures of past perceptions. (252–3/165 and 265/ 173). the object as maintaining the same size at ten paces that we ascribed to it at twenty. So in the same way the peculiarities of our particular points of view are corrected for in the case of our visual sense of distance, the imagination uses a general rule to correct for the peculiarities of its “reality sense” (vivacity feeling): having learned from experience that the certainty of a thing need not be increased every time its appearance to the reality sense is increased, our imagination, governed by a general rule, adjusts the reality “image” accordingly, and the certainty in the one case (where reinforcement by resemblance and contiguity association is lacking) now “looks” just as great to us as the certainty in the other. This operation of imagination does not make vivacity any less our “reality sense” than the operations it performs in distance vision make sight any less a “spatiality sense” (both “senses” being, of course, amalgams of immediate affection and associative imagination). Instead, it merely goes to show how much all our senses and passions are at the mercy of the facility feeling constitutive of relation, which in turn is subject to a variety of different influences, “reflexion and general rules” (THN 631/85) among them. See also chapter 17, note 18. 18. John Campbell may be overlooking the need for what Hume referred to as “general unalterable standards,” founded on experience of the causal powers and relations of things, in judgments of objective magnitude and distance, when he writes: “it is hard to see why the re-identification of places could not use distinctive features rather than physical objects. Certainly this seems to be the right way to describe the reasoning of many animals. Homing pigeons, for example, are certainly capable of reidentifying places. But supposing them to be capable of re-identifying places by using some features which are distinctive of them, does not depend upon supposing the pigeons having any conception of the landmarks as objects with the internal causal connectedness characteristic of objects. The pigeons may have no expectations at all as to what would happen in the case of a collision between two landmarks” (“The Role of Physical Objects in Spatial Thinking,” in Naomi Eilan, Rosaleen McCarthy, and Bill Brewer, eds., Spatial Representation: Problems in Philosophy and Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 68–9). In order to overcome the limitations of their particular point of view at any instant, would a pigeon have any less need than a human to take account of the causal properties of objects, such as not shrinking or growing or changing shape even though they appear to do so every time the pigeon changes position?


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Before we are even out of our cradles, however, we accumulate sufficient causal information to become firm believers in the uniformity of nature (EHU IV/ii ¶23 and V/ii ¶22) and to devise general rules to correct for our fluctuating points of view, so that, before long, the kaleidoscopically shifting scene our senses actually present to consciousness becomes as strange and attentively inaccessible as the blind spot at the center of the visual field or the continuous ribbon of sound conveying (discretely articulated) speech in our native tongue. For by then customary association has so indelibly affixed the lens of “common” (THN 591/377) “steady and general points of view” (581–2/372), formed in accordance with “some general inalterable standard” (603/385), that, very early in life, we lose the ability to view the world in any other way. Yet the general point of view fashioned in the imagination has an importance in Hume’s system that goes far beyond the phenomenology of experience. Even when we compensate for our fluctuating points of view from moment to moment, there is still a natural tendency to consider the world from the standpoint of the self (the fictitious imperfect identity explicated in Treatise I/iv/§6). For “our consciousness gives us so lively a conception of our own person, that ’tis not possible to imagine that any thing can in this particular go beyond it” (THN 317/206). “This lively idea changes by degrees into a real impression . . . and conveys a sensible degree of vivacity to the idea of any other object, to which we are related” (354/229), space and time not excepted: There is an easy reason, why every thing contiguous to us, either in space or time, shou’d be conceiv’d with a peculiar force and vivacity, and excel every other object, in its influence on the imagination. Ourself is intimately present to us, and whatever is related to self must partake of that quality. But where an object is so far remov’d as to have lost the advantage of this relation, [and], as it is farther remov’d, its idea becomes still fainter and more obscure. . . . ’Tis obvious, that the imagination can never totally forget the points of space and time, in which we are existent; but receives such frequent advertisements of them from the passions and senses, that however it may turn its attention to foreign and remote objects, it is necessitated every moment to reflect on the present. . . . When we reflect, therefore, on any object distant from ourselves, we are oblig’d not only to reach it at first by passing thro’ all the intermediate space betwixt ourselves and the object, but also to renew our progress every moment; being every moment recall’d to the consideration of ourselves and our present situation. The fewer steps we make to arrive at the object, and the smother the road is, this diminution of vivacity is less sensibly felt, but still may be observ’d more or less in proportion to the degrees of distance and difficulty. (427/274)

From its subjective point of view, the imagination situates and relates objects not according to their own objective situation and relations in space and time but according to their spatial and temporal orientation relative to oneself. Objects are near or far according to their distance from oneself; so too right and left, above and below, in front and behind, at rest and in motion, even earlier and later (so too present, future, and past). Moreover, the vivacity of the idea of the self is extended to objects—vivifying them, so they weigh more in our thought and action—in

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proportion to their temporal and spatial proximity to the self, so that objects the imagination can reach only by way of numerous intervening objects suffer a sensible loss of vivacity, that is, our belief in their real existence diminishes and may even disappear altogether. In principle, this effect should extend to other facets of their spatial and temporal situation and relations as well; for example, because it is more difficult to imagine the setting sun as vastly larger and more distant than the huge mountain behind which it is about to disappear than to consider it to be just as it appears to us (since “the present situation of the person is always that of the imagination,” 430/276), this lesser facility should translate into a lesser degree of belief. Why then does it not? Why, that is, does the objective state of affairs prevail over the subjective disposition of the imagination in shaping our belief in this as well as in countless other cases? Although Hume did not address this issue specifically, he provided us with the means to do so when he made clear that customary association in relations of cause and effect has the power to facilitate transitions of thought, thereby to transfer vivacity from impressions to ideas without sensible diminution. We have then only to connect this with the features essential to all causal relations as such to understand how the subjective point of view, together with the space and time defined conformably to it, can be integrated into, and subordinated to, an objective point of view, with its own distinctive objective space and time, constituted conformably with general rules of causal relation. The features in question are these: (1) causal connections are never immediately perceptible but always depend, either directly or indirectly (THN 104–5/73, 131/90, and 209/138–9), on experience to be discovered (173/116); (2) although distinct (distinguishable, separable) from one another, all causes are immediately contiguous to their effects in the order both of time (75–6/54, 649/409) and (when all the relata are spatial) of space (“nothing can operate in a time or place, which is ever so little remov’d from its existence,” 75/54); and (3) all objects joined in causal relations, whether internal or external, are beneficiaries of the projective illusion that places the efficacy in them rather than in the mind that considers them (chapter 17-D). Because we situate powers in objects, we cannot help believing that the cause is immediately antecedent to and contiguous to its effect, and consequently cannot help using these relations as “general unalterable standards” to correct for appearances to the contrary. For example, if I smell smoke before I feel the heat of the fire, the custom of regarding the latter as the cause of the former leads me, without pausing to reflect, to reverse their order in imagination and regard the fire as earlier in objective time despite the fact that subjectively, in relation to me, both my thought of the fire and my sensation of it occurred after my sensing the smoke. Similarly, although I can never see all the sides of a building simultaneously, the causal associations that enter into my belief that the parts of the building maintain a constant relation in space and time induce me to treat them as objectively coexistent, despite the subjective successiveness (73–4/53; also 16/16). Or, again, although objects such as a rock ten miles into the interior of the earth beneath my present position or the nonfacing hemisphere of the moon have only the most “philosophical” of relations to my subjective point of view, they nevertheless are regarded as no less really existent objectively than objects within arm’s reach. For,


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as each is an extension of a causal chain firmly rooted in natural relations and associated to a present impression, the imagination will apply a general rule to enhance the vivacity of any idea I should chance to form of them to a degree equal to that of the floor I feel beneath my feet or the casement through which I see the moon.19 It should thus be clear that it is well within the capacity of Hume’s system to explain how we integrate and subordinate the ego-centric order of space and time befitting our subjective point of view to the inferred objective space and time synthesized in imagination (“the universe of the imagination,” 68/49; also 662/ 416–17) in accordance with general rules founded on causal association (a striking anticipation of the objective space and time synthesized in conformity with Kant’s Analogies of Experience). A topic given still sketchier treatment by Hume is the role of causal association in uniting the spaces of vision and touch to yield what is, for all intents and purposes, a single, integrated external sense, with its own sense-divide transcending objects. That he was familiar with, and endorsed at least the part of Berkeley’s theory of vision that deals with the role of customary conjunction in integrating the aesthetic formal multiplicities of vision and touch, is suggested by his allusion to one of its most novel and important tenets: the role of eyeball motion in judging the distance between visible objects (THN 58/42). Since eyeball movements are sensed by feeling rather than by vision, this amounts to an implicit endorsement of the emphasis placed on them by Berkeley in integrating what we see with the haptic spatial axes centered on one’s body (chapter 14-B).20 Although Hume was not explicit about the role of causal association in this connection, it is difficult to see how else to cash out his claim that our visual judgments depend as much on (empirical) reason as on the eyes themselves except in terms of customary association in relations of cause and effect: I need not insist upon the more trite topics, employ’d by the sceptics in all ages, against the evidence of sense; such as those which are derived from the imperfection and fallaciousness of our organs, on numberless occasions; the crooked appearance of an oar in water; the various aspects of objects, according to their different distances; the double images that arise from the pressing of one eye; with many other appearances of a like nature. These sceptical topics, indeed, are only sufficient to prove, that the senses alone are not implicitly to be depended on; but that we must correct their evidence by reason, and by considerations, 19. In note 17 I considered how Hume compared the use of general rules to govern belief to their use in distance vision. The point here is merely another instance of correcting for appearances to the imagination’s reality sense, this time to enhance the vivacity on account of its diminution with distance. To do so, we simply need to acquire the skill for doing with objects incomparably farther away or inaccessible what we do with objects in the vicinity of our person and more accessible to us—much as we learn to have a greater passion for a thousand guineas than 999 by forming a general rule on the basis of our experience of preferring the greater of small amounts (THN 141–2/96–7). 20. Hume eventually repudiated one of the other “perceptions, from which we can judge of distance” he mentions on THN 58/43—“The angles, which the rays of light flowing from [objects at a distance from one another], form with each other”—because he overlooked the fact that this is not in fact perceived (“these angles are not known to the mind, and consequently can never discover the distance,” 636/400). The other way of visually perceiving distance mentioned by Hume concerns “the different parts of the organs, which are affected by [distant objects].”

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HUME’S AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES derived from the nature of the medium, the distance of the object, and the disposition of the organ, in order to render them, within their sphere, the proper criteria of truth and falsehood. (EHU XII/i ¶6; also THN 191/127 and 210–11/ 140)

The corrections of the evidence of the senses by reason Hume mentions are all causal in nature: the effect of different media on our organs, the effects of sensory affection at different distances, the effects of being directly impinged on, etc. Since none of the unusual examples offered here would be in the least puzzling in the absence habitual expectations about how things seen will feel and vice versa, Hume may reasonably be credited with a recognition that we depend on these and other causal considerations in order to integrate vision with touch in the first place. After all, what other explanatory option was there for a post-Berkeleyan antiabstractionist sensibilist? For Hume, no less than for Berkeley before him, the objects of vision and touch are not only qualitatively incommensurable but distinct in existence as well (by the criterion of the separability principle); and although their similar aesthetic formal multiplicities are enough to give rise to a resemblance founded on our affective disposition in operating with their data, this suffices only to make visible and tangible space instances of a single kind, but not to integrate them to the point where they become in effect the one space of a single external sense. Hence, without causal connections to calibrate vision to touch to overcome their mutual isolation, how else could they be unified, or indeed integrated in any way? Among other things, causal connections between visible and tangible objects must figure as an essential element in the ability of the imagination to construct the general points of view that, according to Hume, are the only means whereby we can transcend the limitations inherent in any particular sensory point of view. And how else could the mind effect such connections than associative imagination? For if the visible world is not to have the continually shifting, often jerky aspect it would have if vision were left entirely to the mercies of the movements of our eyes, head, and body, then we need some way to integrate the stability distinctive to tangible space directly into the phenomenology of visual experience. Since deliberative reasoning is obviously incapable of supplementing sight so spontaneously and immediately, Hume can have had no option but to credit the integration of vision with touch to causal association, which “operates immediately, without allowing any time for reflection” (133/91; also 93/65, 102/71–2, 104/ 72, and 147/100). This conclusion is confirmed by the role Hume assigned to causal association in the constitution of sense-divide transcending objects. Because there is no impression from which to copy the idea of a substrate that supports the existence of sensible qualities, “our idea of any body, a peach, for instance, is only that of a particular taste, colour, figure, size, consistence, & c.” (THN 658/414); that is, these qualities resolve into so many distinct simple ideas in the sense proper to the separability principle (221–2/146–7, 233–4/153–4, and 244/160). To unite any such “collection of simple ideas” into the idea of a single sense-divide transcending object, associative “relations of contiguity and causation” must supply the “principle of union” (16/16). For a cause must be inferred here, just as in all cases


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where distinct existents maintain a constant spatial and temporal relation (74/53), because the qualities are not only “always co-existent” but also “co-temporary in their appearance in the mind” (237/155). Since constant conjunctions yield the strongest causal associations, such collections of coapparent qualities become so “closely and inseparably connected” (16/16) in the imagination that they cease to be thought of as a collection at all, and are instead regarded as something simple and individual. This Hume explained as a fiction resulting from the same kind of confusion that takes place in cases of imperfect identity (chapter 17-B): The imagination conceives the simple object at once, with facility, by a single effort of thought, without change or variation. The connexion of parts in the compound object has almost the same effect, and so unites the object within itself, that the fancy feels not the transition in passing from one part to another. Hence the colour, taste, figure solidity, and other qualities, combin’d in a peach or melon, are conceiv’d to form one thing; and that on account of their close relation, which makes them affect the thought in the same manner, as if perfectly uncompounded. (221/146)

The case exactly parallels that of identity, where a close resemblance in the affective disposition of the imagination can induce us to overlook the manifest difference in appearance between an object that preserves a genuine identity over time and something variable or interrupted and attribute identity to the latter as well (chapter 17-B). Here the feeling of conceiving something genuinely simple by a single effort of thought and the effort of conceiving a coapparent manifold so closely interrelated that its conception feels indistinguishable from a single effort of thought leads the imagination to disregard the manifest complexity of the latter and consider it as simple and individual. Now, if this is the case with qualities that are merely “co-existent in general” and “co-temporary in their appearance in the mind,” how much more so must it be when the purview of the imagination is restricted to the qualities of “colour and tangibility” (THN 237/155)? Certainly, if the projective illusion is to operate on those qualities that exist “without any place or extension” as Hume prescribes (chapter 17-D), it presupposes that those constantly conjoined qualities that really do have extension and exist in a place have already been confounded with something simple and indivisible. But how could this occur so long as the extension of vision and the extension of touch continued to be considered only generically but not numerically the same? Clearly, the only way the constantly coexistent, coapparent spatial objects of vision and touch can be “conceiv’d to form one thing” is by uniting them in a relation of “conjunction in place.” So notwithstanding their qualitative incommensurability, the imagination indulges its internal affective disposition to consider their objects simple and individual by conjoining them in place. It presumably was thus that Hume explicated the inception of the fiction of sense-divide transcending objects. When supplemented by the projective illusion whereby the objects of the senses are regarded as conjoined in the same place the common objects of vision and touch are located, the fiction is expanded to incorporate all the senses into what is, for all intents and purposes, a single, integrated

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external sense with its own simple and individual sense-divide transcending objects. And the collective result of positing such objects must inevitably be the conflating of visible and tangible extension themselves in the fiction of a single, individual space, common to all our senses, with a single, sense-divide transcending ordered manifold of positions (points). Because of the dearth of textual evidence in this matter, the most that can be claimed for the proceeding is that such an account is implicit in Hume’s associationism. Even so, given that he unquestionably regarded visible objects as distinct from tangible objects in the sense of the separability principle, the only way he could have accounted for our seeming possession of a single, integrated external sense would have been by means of the fiction resulting from a confusion of the affective disposition in considering something genuinely simple and individual with the feeling incident to conceiving a coexistent complex united by the closest bonds of association and custom. For, as remarked earlier, customary association by resemblance and contiguity by itself can only explain how visible and tangible extension come to be regarded as instances of the same kind, but not why we take visible and tangible objects to be conjoined in numerically the same place. For this, only customary association in relations of cause and effect can suffice, since only they can create a strong enough affective disposition in imagination to induce it to regard as simple and individual visual and tactual appearances that are manifestly distinct, both qualitatively and numerically. Thus, my extrapolation from Hume’s account of the fiction of regarding compound objects as simple and individual to sense-divide transcending objects situated in a single, individual space common to all the senses at least has this much to be said for it: it meets a real Humean need by genuinely Humean means. Before concluding, mention should be made of another way in which customary association in relations of cause and effect plays an indispensable role in human understanding—the extension of mathematics and other “abstract relations of our ideas” from “the world of ideas . . . to that of realities”: Mathematics, indeed, are useful in all mechanical operations, and arithmetic in almost every art and profession: But ’tis not of themselves they have any influence. Mechanics are the art of regulating the motions of bodies to some design’d end or purpose; and the reason why we employ arithmetic in fixing the proportions of numbers, is only that we may discover the proportions of their influence and operation. A merchant is desirous of knowing the sum total of his accounts with any person: Why? but that he may learn what sum will have the same effects in paying his debt, and going to market, as all the particular articles taken together. Abstract or demonstrative reasoning, therefore, never influence any of our actions, but only as it directs our judgment concerning causes and effects. (THN 413–14/265–6; also EHU IV/i ¶13 and VII/i ¶29)

Implicit in this is that if the causal relations to which merchants and others are accustomed were sufficiently different, the uses to which mathematics are put would also be quite different. Indeed, if the differences were sufficiently drastic, it might never occur to anyone to consider the results of mathematics as “truths” at all, just as Wittgenstein pointed out:


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Put two apples on a bare table, see that no one comes near them and nothing shakes the table; now put another two apples on the table; now count the apples that are there. You have made an experiment; the result of the counting is probably 4. (We ought to put the result like this: when, in such-and-such circumstances, one puts first 2 apples and then another 2 on a table, mostly none disappear and none get added.) And analogous experiments can be carried out, with the same result, with all kinds of solid bodies.—This is how our children learn sums; for one makes them put down three beans and then another three beans and then count what is there. If the result at one time were 5, at another 7 (say because, as we should now say, one sometimes got added of itself, and one sometimes vanished of itself), then the first thing said would be that beans were no good for teaching sums. But if the same thing happened with sticks, fingers, lines and most other things, that would be the end of all sums. “But shouldn’t we then still have 2+2=4?”—This sentence would have become unusable.21

If physical objects behaved in such a way as to add and subtract themselves (“as we should now say“) in the manner here described, the rules of arithmetic would have no application to the real world. But if they were inapplicable, would any temptation remain to say that our “knowledge” that 2 and 2 make 4 is a case of immediate and infallible insight into the nature of things? Inapplicability does not, of course, falsify the formula. Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that anyone would continue to regard “2+2=4” as a “truth” of any kind at all, much less an exemplary instance of knowledge (“intuition”), if it turned out to be utterly useless. Thus, Wittgenstein’s conclusion that causal relations sufficiently different from those presently obtaining in the world are capable of shaking our confidence in the truth (agreement with reality) of even the most intuitively certain knowledge of simple quantitative relations serves to make explicit what is implicit in Hume’s account of applied mathematics in terms of causal association.

21. I-37 in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, rev. ed., by Ludwig Wittgenstein, ed. G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G.E.M. Anscombe (Cambridge MA: MIT Press), 1978. See also I-38, 91, -99, -102, -137, -157, and -169.

19 Reasoning Reasonably

What is the understanding for Hume? It would be a mistake to equate it with imagination. The role of the imagination in the Humean economy of the mind is both more extensive and fundamental than that of the understanding. Indeed, by the end of the first book of the Treatise, it emerges that “The memory, senses, and understanding are, therefore, all of them founded on the imagination, or the vivacity of our ideas” (THN 265/173). The reason the memory and senses are included here is that their distinction is a function of the copy principle, and the copy principle itself turns out to be a causal association founded on experience and habit (chapter 16). In addition, certain kinds of comparison performed by the imagination (73), including cases of association by contiguity and resemblance (168/113– 4), are distinguished from operations of the understanding, as are the fictions constitutive of ideas of (perfect and imperfect) identity (193/129, 231/152), the “trivial suggestions of the fancy” that play so vital a role in preventing the understanding from entirely subverting itself (267/174), and a wide swathe of conative and hedonic phenomena (indirect passions, sympathy, beauty, etc.) traceable to the interaction of imagination and reflexion (chapter 20-D). This leaves to imagination qua understanding the operations of forming abstract general ideas; taking cognizance of the abstract relations of ideas through intuition and demonstration; forming general ideas of ordered manifolds of points and instants; and, most important of all, extending one’s consciousness of real existence beyond present and past impressions of the senses. The second and fourth of these intellectual operations were of primary concern to Hume because they are the operations usually deemed to comprise cognitive understanding. As analyzed by him, each variety of cognitive understanding consists in a consideration and comparison of objects (ideas) that results in their being joined in a necessary relation, yet in such a way that the necessity lies not in the ideas themselves but “only in the act of the understanding, by which we consider and compare these ideas” (THN 166/112). In the case of abstract relations, the necessity consists in our incapacity to conceive a change in the relation of the ideas without being necessitated to change our conception of the ideas themselves (chapter 18-A). Whether because Hume believed he did not have much to add to 536

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what his predecessors had said about knowledge of abstract relations, or because he did not think it merited extensive treatment, he focused his attention primarily on reasoning regarding matters of fact and real existence. The kind of necessity here at issue is causal: in Hume’s view, only by means of causal association is it possible for us not merely to conceive but to believe that any object or relation of objects—including identity and constant relations of space or time (73–4)—is really existent even though absent from the purview of the senses. The senses are useless to us here because they can acquaint us only with objects and their immediately observable relation (contiguity and resemblance), whereas “the efficacy or energy of causes” is placed not “in the causes themselves” but in “the soul which considers the union of two or more objects in all past instances” (166/112). Consequently, the understanding, rather than the senses and memory, becomes the final arbiter of what counts as real and what only fictive, and it alone is competent to determine where the bounds of cognizable and conatively relevant reality lie. Indeed, as emerged in the previous chapter, this is true even within the sphere of reality accessible to the senses, since causal association alone can (1) free us from the limitations of our point of view at any instant and (2) integrate our subjective point of view as individual persons into the broader, impersonal framework of objective space and time. The necessity specific to causal relations thus serves to transform cognitive understanding into objective understanding, but, because of its purely ideal-associative character, without any of the metaphysical baggage with which previous philosophers, including Berkeley, had laden it (chapters 15 and 16). I will describe the new possibilities opened up by this new conception of objective understanding in the next volume. For the present, however, it is necessary to explore a final facet of Hume’s theory of understanding: the difference between its rational and its irrational exercise (reasoning reasonably or unreasonably). This is a distinction that is best regarded as having no relevance to the first variety of cognitive understanding. For reasonable belief can only be differentiated from unreasonable when there are alternative conceptions from which to choose; but in cases of intuition and demonstration, “’tis impossible to conceive anything contrary” (THN 653/411; also 95/66). It is true that mathematicians are sometimes mistaken, and their mistakes may be made more or less rationally (reasonably). Yet so far as Hume was concerned, mistakes in mathematics are possible only insofar as intuitive or demonstrative knowledge is lacking, since it is their very nature to make us “sensible that ’tis impossible to conceive the contrary” (THN 658/414, emphasis added). To know the truth of a proposition by intuition or demonstration consists in consciously closing off the logical space in which conjecture (thought) of any kind—rational or irrational, true or false—can take place; and if what purports to be intuition or demonstration does not serve to make us sensible of the impossibility of conceiving the alternative, then whatever certainty it may confer must necessarily be of an entirely different nature (for example, the evidence that spoke in favor of Fermat’s last Ttheorem before Wiles proved it, or that today speaks in favor of Goldbach’s Conjecture). Matters only seem otherwise because, in the science of mathematics, the logical space needing to be closed off is typically specified beforehand, and the

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concern is to determine whether any of the proofs on offer meet all the prescribed requirements (180–2/121–2). Those that fail to meet them may still serve to seal off lesser or different logical spaces, and so make us sensible of the impossibility of conceiving something other than what we set out to discover, yet liable to being conflated with it (through misdescription, carelessness, etc.). For Hume what matters is whether and how the action of the imagination is determined in the case of any comparison of ideas, not whether it gives us the result we set out to achieve or whether the one we have in fact gotten is of particular interest to present or future mathematicians. This is because his concern was less with mathematics per se than the underlying cognitive capacity mathematics arose to harness and exploit. It was almost certainly this capacity he had uppermost in mind when he conceded that “In all demonstrative sciences the rules are certain and infallible” and “Our reason must be consider’d as a kind of cause, of which truth is the natural effect,” while at the same insisting that our attempts to apply those rules invariably introduce contrary causes capable of deflecting reason from its natural course (chapter 20-A). In any case, the impossibility of conceiving otherwise in the case of intuition and demonstration obliged Hume to look to empirical cognition (probable reason) in order to investigate the difference between rationality and its contrary. A. Empirical Reason The unique inferential potency of causal relations, as “The only connexion or relation of objects, which can lead us beyond the immediate impressions of our memory and senses” (THN 89/63), derives from the idea of necessary connection at their core (87/61–2, 407/261, and EHU VIII/ii ¶27). The existence of a necessary connection between two distinct, temporally successive, spatially contiguous objects means that the existence of the successor depends on the existence of its predecessor (“where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed,” EHU VII/ii ¶29). For, as Hume would have us understand such connections, it is impossible for the successor (effect) to come into existence unless its predecessor (cause) already exists; nor can the predecessor exist without straightaway bringing its successor into existence as well: “The same cause always produces the same effect, and the same effect never arises but from the same cause,” while even so much as “their separation for a moment shews, that these causes are not compleat ones” (173/116–17 #4 and 175/117 #8). Accordingly, the indispensability of these connections for reasoning in matters of fact and real existence consists in this: if distinct existents X and Y are necessarily connected as cause and effect, we then require only that one be present to our minds in an impression in order to be able to affirm the existence of the other with perfect confidence, even if it is present to us only in idea, not as an impression. Necessary connections, and they alone, circumvent the need for both X and Y to be present in an impression. In their absence, the existence of Y could give us no more reason to suppose that X existed, and the existence of X no more reason to suppose that Y will exist, than either gives to infer the existence of any


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third object, or indeed nothing at all. We would in that case be entirely dependent on the senses and memory to acquaint us with the real existence of things and their relations; and since “we call this perception rather than reasoning” (THN 73/52), “Inference and reasoning concerning the operations of nature would, from that moment, be at an end” (EHU VIII/i ¶5). At the same time, causal inference can only count as reasoning to some matter of fact or real existence, rather than merely to a related possibility, if at least one of two or more necessarily connected possible existents is present in an impression, and so is regarded as really existent (“Were there no mixture of any impression in our probable reasonings, the conclusion wou’d be entirely chimerical,” THN 89/63; also 82–3/58). Thus, every reasoning regarding matters of fact and real existence must exhibit two features: (1) it must take the form of an inference from an impression to an idea, and (2) the existence of the object present to us in an impression must stand in a relation of necessary connection (either as cause or as effect) with the existence of the object present to us only in idea. From this it should be clear that one of Hume’s principal motivations for making the task of tracing ideas of necessary connection to their originating impression his top priority was to gain insight into the nature of empirical reason (also termed by him “probable reason,” “moral reason,” and “experimental reason”). For evidence in any reasoning relating to matters of fact and real existence must consist, first and foremost, of evidence for the existence of a necessary connection between the distinct existents invariably involved in such reasoning; and the only source from which such evidence can be derived are the impressions of reflexion from which our ideas of necessary connection all originate. Thus did Hume come to see the essential oneness of two issues that philosophers, then as now, tend to think of as distinct: the epistemological question of what evidence justifies us in drawing a conclusion regarding matters of fact and real existence, and the psychological question of the source from which ideas of necessary connections between distinct existents originate. This fusion of questions may deservedly be deemed the founding insight of psychologism, and so too Hume’s principal legacy to Kant. For it has two consequences of the first importance: (1) the correct determination of the psychological origin of ideas of necessary connection becomes the key to comprehending the nature and workings of empirical reasoning, and (2) there are only so many conceptions of its nature and workings possible as there are potential sources of these ideas. We saw in earlier chapters that Hume canvassed a number of candidate sources for ideas of necessary connection only to reject them: innate ideas, immediate perception of objects in sensation or reflexion, knowledge (intuitive or demonstrative), and reasoning (inference) itself. Frequent experience in the past of the constant conjunction of successive, contiguous existents also failed to pass muster since, “From the mere repetition of any past impression, even to infinity, there never will arise any new original idea, such as that of a necessary connexion; and the number of impressions has in this case no more effect than if we confin’d ourselves to one only” (THN 88/62). Nevertheless, since our inferences from the impression of a cause or an effect to the idea of its effect or cause are evidently “founded on past experience, and on our remembrance of their constant conjunction,”

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Hume recognized that these factors play a crucial role as evidence from which the existence of necessary connections may be inferred: We remember to have had frequent instance of the existence of one species of objects; and also remember, that the individuals of another species of objects, have always attended them, and have existed in a regular order of contiguity and succession with regard to them . . . Without any farther ceremony, we call the one cause and the other effect, and infer the existence of the one from that of the other. (87/61)

Clearly, “all reasonings concerning cause and effect, are founded on experience” (651/410). Yet since it is equally plain that, despite our reliance on experienced constant conjunction as evidence for the existence of a necessary connection, it is not a source for any idea of necessary connection, there also has to be something more—“a certain step taken; a process of thought, and an inference, which wants to be explained” (EHU IV/ii ¶16)—that confers evidentiary status on something that, in and of itself, is quite distinct from, and, a priori, has nothing whatsoever to do with, ideas of necessary connection. There are only two processes of thought whereby the mind can be supposed to take the step from experienced constant conjunction to the existence of a necessary connection between the conjuncts: either “we are determin’d by reason to make the transition, or by a certain association and relation of perceptions” (THN 88–9/62). If reason were responsible, then the inference would be founded on the “principle, that instances, of which we have had no experience, must resemble those, of which we have had experience, and that the course of nature continues always uniformly the same” (89/62). The question Hume posed is whether our belief in the truth of this uniformity principle is a product of rational argument, demonstrative or probable, or whether our certainty is of a different nature entirely, and arises from nonrational causes. However, before considering why he opted for the latter alternative, we need to determine how he supposed the uniformity principle to operate in our reasoning, regardless of the source of its certainty. In particular: (1) how does the uniformity principle suffice to assure the “step or progress of the mind” (EHU IV/ ii ¶21) whereby the existence of necessary connections is inferred from experienced constant conjunction?, and (2) is this inference a case of demonstrative or probable (empirical) reasoning? The uniformity principle was unquestionably formulated with great care. In particular, Hume’s decision to include “must” and “always” in it was almost certainly intended to add the elements of necessity and universality that alone seem able to bridge the gulf between the ground—past experience and the remembrance of a conjunction conjunction between distinct existents—and the consequence— the existence of a necessary connection between the conjuncts. Without “must” and “always,” the uniformity principle would look rather like an autobiographical prediction, relating to each individual’s lifetime, that future experiences will closely resemble past ones. In that case, however, a number of important contingencies would be neglected: what if my lifespan were to be extended, even to the point where I could continue accumulating experiences forever? What if during that


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span, I were to spend time in far more places than I have hitherto, including surroundings radically different from everything I have so far known? Would I still expect the course of nature to continue uniformly? The presence of “must” and “always” in Hume’s formulation of the uniformity principle would seem to commit anyone who accepts it to answer this last question affirmatively, for they connote the necessity and universality of the relation in question. And how else could the uniformity principle bridge the gap between experienced constant conjunctions and the existence of necessary connections if it did not incorporate into its meaning something of what lies on either side of the gap—universality (absolute constancy) as well as necessity? To be sure, Hume might have formulated the principle in such a way as to make it more explicit that necessary connections between causes and effects are part of its content. In this respect, it brings to mind another case involving uniformity, where two propositions that Hume clearly thought of as equivalent were formulated in such a way that it seems otherwise, because the inclusion of necessary connection in the content of one is insufficiently explicit: Similar objects are always conjoined with similar. Of this we have experience. Suitably to this experience, therefore, we may define a cause to be an object, followed by another, and where all the objects, similar to the first, are followed by objects similar to the second. Or in other words, where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed. (EHU VII/ii ¶29)

The second, counterfactual formulation of this definition of a cause—the first of two definitions offered by Hume (this one concerns the philosophical, the one not cited the natural relation of cause and effect)—clearly incorporates the idea of necessary connection (the existence of the second necessarily depends on the existence of the first). Not so the first formulation, where Hume seems to equate causal relations with relations of constant conjunction viewed under the uniformity principle (all objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second). Here, then, the ‘must’ and ‘always’ seem to become detached. Only subsequently, in the course of recalling his definitions of cause in EHU VIII/i, does Hume make explicit that “necessity makes an essential part . . . [of] the two definitions”—the necessities in each case being “at bottom the same.” He then issues the following challenge: “Let any one define a cause, without comprehending, as a part of the definition, a necessary connexion with its effect; and let him show distinctly the origin of the idea, expressed by the definition; and I shall readily give up the whole controversy” (¶25). Hume’s two formulations of the first definition of cause only emerge as equivalent when we recognize that, far from reducing causal relations to relations of constant conjunction (the “positivist” reading of Hume which is far truer to Berkeley, as at VV §13), philosophical causation includes the idea of necessary connection as an integral, ineliminable element of its content. And Hume was quite clear that there is only one source—one impression original—of the idea of necessary connection, and that is customary association: facile, idea-enlivening transitions of thought.

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A similar split between necessity and universality might seem to occur in the case of the uniformity principle. As soon as something is determined to cause something else, we immediately infer that this relation will hold uniformly in every future instance: “when by any clear experiment. we have discover’d the causes or effects of any phænomenon, we immediately extend our observation to every phænomenon of the same kind, without waiting for that constant repetition, from which the first idea of this relation is deriv’d” (THN 173–4/116–17 #4), that is, “What we have found once to follow from any object, we conclude will for ever follow from it” (131/90). But could the ‘always’ of a causal relation be affirmed if there were no ‘must’ implicit in their relation? Just as we have to recognize that Hume’s two formulations of the first definition of cause in EHU were intended to be understood as saying the same thing in different ways—affirming a universal constancy implied by a presupposed necessary connection and affirming a necessary connection that tacitly implies a universal constancy—we affirm that causal relations operate everywhere always because causal relations are necessary connections. For example, when Hume returns to the uniformity principle after its initial presentation in Treatise I/iii/§6, he formulates it this way: “instances of which we have no experience, must necessarily resemble those, of which we have” (104/73). It seems to me no accident that when the principle is restated in the next paragraph and ‘must necessarily’ drops out, ‘instances’ are replaced by the patently causal expression ‘like effects’: “like objects, plac’d in like circumstances, will always produce like effects.” I see no other way to construe these two formulations of the uniformity principle as equivalent than to read the ‘must’ and ‘always’ of the first in terms of the causation of the second and vice versa.1 And both together make clear that Hume’s principle of the uniformity of nature is an intrinsically causal principle that entails the existence of a necessary connection between the objects concerned in it. The foregoing considerations suggest that the formulation of the uniformity principle on THN 89/62 is the result of a conscious attempt to bring out precisely that in the nature of necessary connection whereby it confers on past experience and remembrance of constant conjunction the status of evidence that a necessary connection exists. If, despite the use of “must” and “always,” Hume’s narrowly directed focus also had the unintended effect of making him seem to be talking about the uniformity of nature as something not equivalent with necessary connection, this is unfortunate. But the ancillary evidence I have just reviewed, buttressed by reflecting on the context in which the principle is introduced,2 should be sufficient to make clear that Hume formulated the uniformity principle with the intent to span the gap that would otherwise prevent us from inferring the existence of 1. A similar divergence in formulation (with “power” replacing “effect” in the second) in which ‘always’ is clearly intended to be understood as equivalent to ‘must’ can be found in the Enquiry: “all inferences from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the future will resemble the past, and that similar powers will be conjoined with similar sensible qualities” (IV/ii ¶21). 2. The context of the section in which the uniformity principle is first stated (Treatise I/iii/§6) is this: after having earlier broken off the “direct survey of this question concerning the nature of that necessary connexion, which enters into our idea of cause and effect” (78), and devoting the subsequent three sections (iii/§§ 3–5) to other considerations, Hume tells us in the early portion of iii/§6 that “We may now see the advantage of quitting the direct survey of this relation [cause and effect], in order to


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necessary connections from experienced constant conjunctions by incorporating both past constancy and necessity into its content. The question accordingly becomes the following: given that the content of the uniformity principle allows it to span this gap, are the inferences it makes possible demonstrative or probable? Hume did not address this question in Treatise I/iii/§6, where his concern was the basis of our belief in the uniformity principle itself (which we shall turn to shortly) rather than the nature of the inference from experienced constant conjunctions to necessary connections that belief in the uniformity principle makes possible. Elsewhere, however, he made it quite clear that it is an inference of probable, not demonstrative, reasoning, where our certainty is a matter merely of vivacity feeling rather than being sensible of the impossibility of conceiving the negation. That this is so has nothing to do with the form of the inference,3 but is due rather to contingencies intrinsic to their experiential foundation: the constancy of the conjunction, its frequency (the number of times we have experienced it), and the strength of the resemblance (analogy) between different instances. The past experience of any one person, or even that of the entire human race, may fail to constitute an accurate sampling, so that a conjunction may only seem to be constant; and whereas sampling errors are always a risk, however small, “A demonstration, if just, admits of no opposite difficulty . . . ’Tis either irresistible, or has no manner of force” (THN 31/26). Even the merest possibility that some instance contrary to a conjunction may occur—one unwitnessed by anyone, even a merely possible instance that cannot be witnessed because it happens never actually to occur—is already of itself sufficient to show that the inference the uniformity principle makes possible from experienced constant conjunction to the existence of necessary connections is merely probable in nature. For “probable,” in this sense, does not imply that such inferences are in any way uncertain (124/86). Where the conjunction has been experienced constantly and frequently, and where the analogy between particular instances is the strongest we can possibly require, the uniformity principle allows us to transfer this experience to future instances with a probability of being correct so high that no one can possibly bring himself sincerely to doubt of it (as “Fire has always burned, and water suffocated every human creature,” EHU VI ¶4). It is “probable” only in the sense that its certainty, though equal to intuitive and demonstrative knowledge in its ability to resist doubt, has a different nature and origin (Treatise I/iii/§12). Thus, the only question still remaining—the one Hume rightly recognized as decisive for the issue of the nature of empirical reason—is how we arrive at belief in the uniformity principle itself: “whether we are determin’d by reason to make the transition, or by a certain association and relation of perceptions” (88/62). discover the nature of that necessary connexion, which makes so essential a part of it” (87/61–2). From this it should be clear that we are supposed to understand something about the nature of necessary connection by understanding some things about the nature of the inference from an impression to an idea. What ultimately emerges could, however, only be hinted at in this section: “Perhaps ’twill appear in the end, that the necessary connexion depends on the inference, instead of the inference’s depending on the necessary connexion,” 88/62; the payoff finally comes in iii/§14—see 165/111 and 169/114; also section D below. 3. See chapter 18, note 1.

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Hume was quick to dispose of the possibility that our belief in the uniformity of nature is grounded in demonstrative reason: We can at least conceive a change in the course of nature; which sufficiently proves, that such a change is not absolutely impossible. To form a clear idea of any thing, is an undeniable argument for its possibility, and is alone a refutation of any pretended demonstration against it. (THN 89/62; also EHU IV/ii ¶18; cf. PHK I §107)

Against this one might object by citing Hume’s own assertion on THN 73–4/53 that any constant relation in space and time implies a cause. Since a cause implies a power to produce this relation, and “The power necessarily implies the effect” (90/63), it seems that, in conceiving the course of nature to be determined by a necessary connection, we are no longer free to conceive a change in its course. In other words, if the conception of a change in the course of nature would contradict the conception of the determination of its course by necessary connections, would it not then follow that the uniformity principle is demonstrably certain? In response, Hume argued that the objection overlooks the fact that the uniformity principle, turning as it does on the resemblance of different conjunctions of objects, is confined to the sensible properties and relations of objects (insensible properties and relations ipso facto cannot be found to resemble anything, and so cannot enter into relations of constant conjunction—or observable conjunctions of any kind). By contrast, the power and efficacy whereby causes produce their effects is never evident to the (external or internal) senses. As insensible properties, they thus are incapable of precluding the possibility that sensible objects, both individually and as kinds of individuals, may lose the insensible powers they once possessed, or gain new powers they formerly lacked, without this entailing the slightest sensible change, or, a fortiori, any change in their resemblance relations: it having already been prov’d, that the power lies not in the sensible qualities of the cause; and there being nothing but the sensible qualities present to us; I ask, why in other instances you presume that the same power still exists, merely upon the appearance of these qualities? Your appeal to past experience decides nothing in the present case; and at the utmost can only prove, that that very object, which produc’d any other, was at that very instant endow’d with such a power; but can never prove, that the same power must continue in the same object or collection of sensible qualities; much less, that a like power is always conjoin’d with like sensible qualities. (THN 91/64)

The unprovability of this “must” and “always” does not show that there is no probability that the objects will retain the powers they have formerly been discovered to have, and that these powers will continue always to be exerted, at least whenever no outside cause exerts itself to oppose or cancel them out. But it does suffice to show that the uniformity of causes is not a principle that admits of demonstrative certainty.


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Hume’s proof that a vicious circle results if we suppose belief in the uniformity principle to be founded on probable reason is justly celebrated. In it, he simply pulls together the definitions and propositions considered earlier: 1. Probable reasoning is the inferring of a previously unbelieved matter of fact or real existence from a believed one.4 As such, it involves at least one impression, present or remembered, and at least one idea: “Were there no mixture of any impression in our probable reasonings, the conclusion wou’d be entirely chimerical: and were there no mixture of ideas, the action of the mind, in observing the relation, wou’d, properly speaking, be sensation, not reasoning” (THN 89/63). 2. The relation of cause and effect (THN 89/63)—and, more particularly, “that necessary connexion, which makes so essential a part of it” (87/62)—is the only means whereby the mind can effect a transition from an impression to an idea in such a way that the object present to us in idea is regarded as no less really existent than that present to it in the impression. 3. Since causes and effects are objects neither of the immediate perception of the (internal or external) senses nor of (intuitive or demonstrative) knowledge, only past experience and our remembrance of their constant conjunction can acquaint us with the existence of a necessary connection between them. 4. However, the mere repetition of the same can teach us nothing we could not have understood from the first presentation; and since the first encounter with the sensible appearances of the objects is incapable of acquainting us with any of the insensible causal powers they possess, experienced constant conjunction, in and of itself, must be insufficient to do so as well. 5. There thus must be “a certain step taken; a process of thought, and an inference, which wants to be explained” (EHU IV/ii ¶16). But what else can underwrite an inference from the remembrance of a constant conjunction to the existence of a necessary connection than the stipulation that such conjunctions must always persist into the future? 6. Since this is just to say that, in order for probable reason to be the basis of our belief in the uniformity principle, we would need already to believe in the truth of this principle, it follows that belief in this principle cannot be founded on probable reason: According to this account of things, which is, I think, in every point unquestionable, probability is founded on the presumption of a resemblance betwixt those objects, of which we have had experience, and those of which we have had none; and therefore ’tis impossible this presumption can arise from probability. The same principle cannot be both the cause and effect of another; and this is, perhaps, the only proposition concerning that relation, which is either intuitively or demonstratively certain. (THN 90/63; also 651–2/410 and EHU IV/ii ¶19)

4. Hume’s preferred formula, “matter of fact or real existence,” may simply be an alternation of synonyms: “all reasonings from causes or effects terminate in conclusions, concerning matter of fact; that is, concerning the existence of objects or their qualities” (THN 94/65).

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Having argued that belief in the uniformity principle is presupposed in all probable (empirical) reasoning, and that this belief cannot itself be founded on any reasoning, Hume turned next to the alternative hypothesis, asking whether belief in it can result from “a certain association and relation of perceptions” (THN 89/62). I have already traced the lineaments of his account: custom circumvents the need for reflection and reasoning, unites distinct existents in the imagination, and, when any one of the united perceptions is met with in an impression, not only induces us to conceive its associate(s), but to do so in so forceful and lively a manner that we believe in its (their) real existence with the same certainty we regard the object present to us in an impression as really existent. Moreover, once formed, a customary causal association will thereafter lie in readiness to be triggered by any appropriate stimulus. In other words, it exhibits the same kind of openendedness that led Hume to explicate the universality of ideas and terms in terms of customary relations of resemblance (chapter 18-B). Only here, where the custom is a function not of sensible qualitative affinities but of insensible necessary connections, its openendedness takes the form of a firm conviction that the course of nature will never alter: This removes all pretext, if there yet remains any, for asserting that the mind is convinc’d by reasoning of that principle, that instances of which we have no experience, must necessarily resemble those, of which we have. For we here find, that the understanding or imagination can draw inferences from past experience, without reflecting on it; much more without forming any principle concerning it, or reasoning upon that principle. (104/73)

After developing the implications of the thesis that our belief in the uniformity of nature is founded on customary association in iii/§§ 9–13, Hume then returned to the issue with which he started: the impression original of the idea of necessary connection. As noted earlier, one of the founding insights of his system was the recognition that this psychological question and the epistemological question of the foundation of empirical reasoning are, at bottom, one and the same. It should now be clear how customary association is Hume’s answer to both: habits of mind founded on constant, frequently encountered, closely resembling conjunctions between successive, contiguous perceptions account on the one hand for the uniformity of nature that underlies all our probable reasoning, and on the other hand for the contents of the impression original of the idea of necessary connection (facility and vivacity affects, together with the projective illusion to which they give rise: chapter 17).5 B. The Structure of Empirical Rationality Hume’s theory of empirical reason, as traced in the previous section, is a complex structure. An overview, both to make it clearer and to facilitate subsequent reference, may here prove useful. In order from least to most fundamental, we find in it the following five levels: 5. For further discussion of the topics considered in this section, see HTC, chaps. 4-C and 5.


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I. Reasoning from one matter of fact or real existence to another takes the form of an inference from an impression to an idea. The first anchors it in actuality (real existence) rather than possibility (fictive being), the second is what makes it reasoning rather than perception. Reasoning of this form is always founded on . . . II. Necessary connections between cause and effect, “The only connexion or relation of objects, which can lead us beyond the immediate impressions of our memory and senses” (THN 89/63). These relations are never objects of immediate sense perception (sensation or reflexion) or knowledge. Instead, our awareness of them is founded on . . . III. Past experience and our remembrance of the constant conjunction of distinct, successive, contiguous objects. Yet, a mere repetition, in and of itself, could not bring us any closer to an awareness of a causal relations than our initial experience of it did if experience did not furnish the occasion for a probable inference to the existence of a causal relation between the conjuncts, founded on . . . IV. Our belief in the uniformity of nature. By this means, our experience is able to yield us a rich bounty of causal information, which in turn permits us to connect up the reality with which our senses acquaint us (impressions) to the greater reality that lies beyond the purview of the senses, yet, in truth, exists only in our imaginations in the form of vivid ideas. However, although the uniformity principle is the foundation of all empirical reason, it is not itself founded on reason, demonstrative or probable, but on . . . V. Customary association. When a conjunction of successive, contiguous objects has been repeated with sufficient frequency and constancy to ingrain a habit, it “produces a new impression, and by that means . . . affords me the idea of necessity” (THN 155–6/105). Pronouncing the one object ‘cause’ and the other ‘effect,’ we straightaway affirm “that instances of which we have no experience, must necessarily resemblance those, of which we have” (104/73). If one looks only at level V, the foundation of this structure, there may seem to be no place in it for a distinction between rational and irrational understanding, and even reason itself might seem to have been not so much explained as explained away. Some of Hume’s own characterizations of empirical reason, wittingly or not, contribute to this impression: all probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation. ’Tis not solely in poetry and music, we must follow our taste and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy. When I am convinc’d of any principle, ’tis only an idea, which strikes more strongly upon me. When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence. Objects have no discoverable connexion together; nor is it from any other principle but custom operating upon the imagination, that we can draw any inference from the appearance of one to the existence of the other. (THN 103/72; also 178–9/120 and 183/123)

We reason because it is our nature to reason; and it is our nature not because we engage in reflection and ratiocination while still in our cradles (EHU IV/ii ¶23),

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but because we instinctively respond to the stimulus of a frequent, constant experience of successive, contiguous perceptions by forming a customary association between them (V/ii ¶22). Thus, all probable reasoning is, in truth, either itself nothing but customary association— in inlarging my view to consider several instances, I find only, that like objects are constantly plac’d in like relations of succession and contiguity. Again, when I consider the influence of this constant conjunction, I perceive, that such a relation can never be an object of reasoning, and can never operate upon the mind, but by means of custom, which determines the imagination to make a transition from the idea of one object to that of its usual attendant, and from the impression of one to a more lively idea of the other. (THN 170/115)

—or else is founded on such natural relations: tho’ causation be a philosophical relation, as implying contiguity, succession, and constant conjunction, yet ’tis only so far as it is a natural relation, and produces an union among our ideas, that we are able to reason upon it, or draw any inference from it. (94/65)

Yet when we shift our focus from level V to level III, where probable reasoning holds sway and may be considered without regard to its ultimate foundation, we meet with a perfectly natural criterion of empirical rationality. If we take rational belief in general to be belief that is proportioned to the evidence, then, in matters of fact and real existence, rationality consists in proportioning belief to the evidence of past experience. More precisely, a rational believer proportions belief to the constancy of the conjunction of distinct existents, its frequency (the number of times the conjunction was experienced), and the strength of the resemblance between different instances (particularly the analogy between the present instance and past ones; THN 153–4/104). A belief disproportionate with any of these three factors may be characterized as unreasonable (ill-founded, precipitate, over-cautious, etc.), or even irrational if maintained in conscious opposition to any of them. Of course, to say that a belief is unreasonable or irrational is not to say that it is false. For although past experience is “the true standard” (113) of all reasonings “founded on the transferring of past to future” (138), experience is, by its very nature, merely a sampling, so that even a conjunction that has maintained perfect constancy after frequent encounters may still turn out to have been unrepresentative. Thus, for an inference to qualify as rational, the uniformity principle (level IV) must intervene to relate a transition in thought (from a present or remembered impression to an idea) to the experienced constant conjunction of the perceptions concerned in it. To this, some interpreters will surely object that it is only on the option that Hume rejected—the inference from the impression to the idea takes place by reason rather than custom—that the uniformity principle is required to mediate the inference. On the view Hume espoused, by contrast, unmediated inference from the cause to the effect or from the effect to the cause “is not only a true species of reasoning, but the strongest of all others, and more convincing than when we


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interpose another idea to connect the two extremes” (THN 96–7/67n). Owen, for example, holds that What Hume is denying is that probable reasoning is an activity of the faculty of reason conceived of as functioning by the discovery of intermediate ideas that link the two ideas at the ends of the chain . . . The question is, how do we move from a current impression to a belief in an unobserved matter of fact? If reason determined us, we would move from the impression to the idea via some intermediate idea, such as the idea of necessary connection or the uniformity principle. Hume has shown this to be impossible and instead explained how the idea of the unobserved existent occurs, upon the appearance of the impression, given past experience and the principles of association.6

According to Owen, past experience conditions (causes) the inference from the impression to the idea but is not consciously taken into account in it; and the same is true of both the idea of a necessary connection between them and the uniformity principle. Now, this is indeed true if by “consciously” taking these factors into account we mean directing our attentive gaze at each mediating link sequentially and enunciating it individually. But, for both Hume and his sensibilist predecessors, to attend and to perceive are two different things. Locke for instance remarked how even a long chain of reasoning, once it becomes habitual, can easily be mistaken for immediate perception: “How, as it were in an instant, do our Minds, with one glance, see all the parts of a demonstration, which may very well be called a long one, if we consider the time it will require to put it into words, and step by step shew it another” (ECHU II/ix/§10). Hume too was keenly aware of both the concealing effects of custom (EHU IV/i ¶8) and that the imagination is so “extreme quick and agile” (THN 441/282), that its action may seem immediate and instantaneous even when “it proceeds from certain views and reflections, which will not escape the strict scrutiny of a philosopher, tho’ they may the person himself, who makes them” (317/206; also 373/240–1). Though he left no doubt that custom drastically cuts the time of the performance of an inference (93/65, 104/72–3, and 133/91), he gave no indication that it also reduces the number of terms involved in it. Consequently, the fact that, in customary transitions from impressions to an associated idea, Humean reasoners are not attentively aware of forming the idea of a necessary connection between them, recalling the experiential basis on which that necessary connection was inferred, and relating the connection to the present transition of thought by means of the uniformity principle, is not of itself evidence that these views and reflections do not nonetheless subattentively, though still consciously, mediate the inference. Is there reason to believe Hume held that they do, indeed must, enter into customary inferences? The one that most obviously must is the idea of necessary connection. For Hume distinguished many kinds of customary transitions of thought, but only one that is capable of underwriting inferences from impressions to ideas: customary associations in which the reflexive impression original of ideas of necessary connection are found. The sound of a word may induce me to form an idea 6. Reason, 147 and 154.

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of its referent, or the occurrence of an idea induce me to audibly pronounce the word for it (‘dog’ dogs, griffins ‘griffin’), without prompting me to suppose that the two are related in the way an unseen fire is to visible smoke or a voice heard to an unseen human frame. I may be so used to having potatoes with my steak that the sight of a steak on my plate without potatoes immediately strikes me as wrong and leads me to think of potatoes, but this habit of mind is not enough to make me connect steak with potatoes in a causal relation. I may have a customary expectation at concerts that I will hear the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony after the third, but this does not lead me to suppose that the third is the cause of the fourth. And I may teach my dog to sit when I say “Sit!” without her believing for a moment that the sound of my voice, rather than her own action, was the cause of her ending up in that posture. Examples such as these should suffice to make clear that if the idea of necessary connection is absent from a customary association, then even though the imagination will still respond to an impression by unfailingly bringing its associated idea to mind, it will not connect the existence of the one to that of the other in a causal relation. Ideas of necessary connection are therefore essential ingredients in all reasoning regarding causes and effects. Since the idea of a necessary connection between distinct existence is at the same the idea that the effect follows universally from the cause (section A), the uniformity principle is clearly built into it. That ratiocination plays no role in our forming our belief in this principle is here quite beside the point; all that matters is that we do believe it. For if our experience-based belief that two species of object are conjoined by a necessary connection were not at the same time a belief in the universality of that connection, then necessary connections discovered in the past would have no influence on present judgments. The custom instilled by past experience would still bring an idea of some object to mind as soon as its customary associate appeared in an impression, but without a belief in the uniformity of nature to induce us to transfer the necessity from the past to the present case, we would be no more inclined to regard the existence of the one to depend on that of the other than to regard the existence of either to depend on some random thought or on nothing at all. Moreover, there are numerous texts in which Hume made clear that the uniformity principle is an actual belief—conclusion drawn, proposition supposed to be true—of all causal reasoners, not just the learned: “we have many millions [of experiences] to convince us of this principle; that like objects, plac’d in like circumstances, will always produce like effects” (THN 105/73); “Beasts . . . form a general conclusion, that those objects of which they have had no experience, resemble those of which they have” (178/119); “the most ignorant and stupid peasants, nay infants, nay even brute beasts . . . suppose the past resembling the future, and . . . expect similar effects from causes, which are, to appearance similar. This is the proposition which . . . was perfectly familiar to me, long before I was out of my cradle” (EHU IV/ii ¶23); etc. If we recognize that ideas of necessary connection and the uniformity principle tacitly, but still consciously, enter into all Humean customary transitions from impressions to ideas, there should be no difficulty granting that, in employing the uniformity principle, we also tacitly take into consideration whether the necessary connection between these objects is founded on experience or something


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else,7 and, if on experience, the frequency and constancy of the conjunction from which the connection was inferred. If we were not in some measure cognizant of the evidentiary ground of the necessary connection we think in a customary transition of thought, how could we detect or eliminate those factors that render it disproportionate to past experience and, to that extent, less than optimally rational? Certainly, when the experience from which the necessary connection was inferred is inconstant, “we commonly take knowingly into consideration the contrariety of past events” (133/91), that is, “the mind . . . casts its eye backward upon past experience” (140/96). But could we knowingly take past experience into account in cases where the conjunction is inconstant if we did not also consciously take it into account, knowingly (with attention) or not, when “the transition from an impression present to the memory or senses to the idea of an object, which we call cause or effect, is founded on . . . our remembrance of their constant conjunction” (88/ 62)? So along with the idea of a necessary connection and belief in the uniformity of nature, the customary associations Hume equated with causal reasoning must also incorporate a sub-attentive awareness of the basis in experience, if any, of the necessary connection concerned in it. Interpreters who construe Hume as denying the presence of mediating links in customary transitions from cause to effect or from effect to cause are making an unwarranted inference from the instantaneity of customary inference to its inferential simplicity. When Hume tells us that custom takes the place of a reflection on past experience, he means only that “The custom operates before we have time for reflexion” and “that we interpose not a moment’s delay in passing from the one to the other” (THN 104/72; also 93/65 and 133/91). But to say that an inferential operation is performed in an instant is not to say that it is simple and unmediated, and would not turn out to be quite long and complex if put into words and set forth step by step. For Hume, just as for Locke and Berkeley before him (chapters 6 and 14), custom displaces ratiocination not by eliminating steps but by compressing them into an instant. This is why Hume treated custom as the great concealer (EHU IV/i ¶8): the constituent elements of its inferences, even their very complexity, escape our sluggish introspective attentive gaze, so that we commonly confound the experience-based “inference of the judgment with sensation” (THN 112/77). Nevertheless, the immediacy and simplicity are only apparent. All the views and reflections we would expect to figure in a deliberative inference from cause to effect or effect to cause figure also in the same inference when actuated by custom, even though it “operates immediately, without allowing any time for reflection” (133/91). If they did not, it would not be that inference, and indeed it would not a causal inference at all. For, as explicated by Hume, all such inferences, be they deliberative or customary, must incorporate (1) an idea of necessary connection (2) based on past experience and (2) related to the present instance by means of the uniformity principle.8 7. For example, “custom and education produce belief by such a repetition, as is not deriv’d from experience, yet this requires a long tract of time, along with a very frequent and undesign’d repetition” (THN 140/96). 8. The mediating role performed by these ideas is by no means incompatible with Hume’s assertion that “We infer a cause immediately from its effect; and this inference is not only a true species of

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C. The Role of Customary Association in Regulating Empirical Rationality If experience is the true standard of empirical rationality, it finds its natural regulator in customary association; for we have only to heed the indications of the latter to succeed in cleaving a rational course throughout our lives. That is the upshot of Hume’s account of how past experiences are marshalled for present judging. For setting them to memory is just the beginning. They also need to be sifted, sorted, and appropriately fused before they can be put to effective use in judging any situation in which we happen to find ourselves (“this consideration must change the first form of our ideas, and draw together the divided images presented by experience,” THN 134/92). Such a process, according to Hume, must have one of two possible forms: As to the concurrence, there is only the choice left betwixt these two hypotheses. First, That the view of the object, occasion’d by the transference of each past experiment, preserves itself entire, and only multiplies the number of views. Or, secondly, That it runs into the other similar and corespondent views, and gives them a superior degree of force and vivacity. (138/94)

The first hypothesis fails because we find that the judgments we form on the basis of our remembrance of past conjunctions of perceptions consist “in one conclusion, not in a multitude of similar ones, which wou’d only distract the mind, and in many cases wou’d be too numerous to be comprehended distinctly by any finite capacity.” But if “the only reasonable opinion” is “that these similar views run into each other, and unite their forces; so as to produce a stronger and clearer view, than what arises from any one alone,” the question then becomes: how does the imagination do this? The process takes its start from memory, which consists not merely in the recollection of the object or relation of objects but also of the action of the mind in considering it: In thinking of our past thoughts we not only delineate out the objects, of which we were thinking, but also conceive the action of the mind in the meditation, that certain je-ne-scai-quoi, of which ’tis impossible to give any definition or descripreasoning, but the strongest of all others, and more convincing than when we interpose another idea to connect the two extremes” (THN 96/67n). His point is that an inference from seen smoke to unseen fire is just as much a case of reasoning, and at least as convincing, as an inference from seen smoke to unseen fire to an unperceived short in the wiring in the wall. This in no way implies that immediate and nonimmediate causal inferences alike do not presuppose the mediation of ideas of necessary connection, belief in the uniformity of nature, and a rough awareness of the frequency and constancy of the experience from which the necessary connection was inferred. It will perhaps be helpful here to distinguish a horizontal and a vertical axis of mediation: on THN 98/69n, Hume makes clear that the more immediate an inference is (i.e. the fewer intermediary cause and effect relations intervene) in the horizontal direction, the more certain it is; but its immediacy does not make it any less dependent on mediation in the vertical direction by necessary connection, uniformity, and past experience, and this is true whether the inference proceeds by deliberation or custom.


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tion, but which every one sufficiently understands. When the memory offers an idea of this, and represents it as past, ’tis easily conceiv’d how that idea may have more vigour and firmness, than when we think of a past thought, of which we have no remembrance. (THN 106/74; cf. ECHU II/x/§2)

Memory consists in an associative relation whereby we believe an idea present to the mind is the effect of (THN 110/76), and resembles (260–1/170), something real that is past. As such, it requires that we form an idea not only of the past object, or relation of objects, but also of the action the mind performed in considering it, be it a sensory action (seeing, smelling, etc.; also desiring, willing, etc.) or a conceptual one (reflecting, meditating, reckoning, daydreaming, etc.).9 This second idea is what enables us now to distinguish a past experience from a past fantasizing. But it is not whether the action recalled is sensation/reflexion or thought that is essential here; for there are many things, present and so too past as well, that we believe to be no less real than the objects we sense: the fire we never saw but inferred to exist when we saw and smelled smoke; the people we testify to have been present at the crime scene even though we only heard their voices in a darkened house; the reports of eye-witnesses; and so on. Rather, our recollection of having regarded an object or relation as real—that is, of having been affected with a high degree of vivacity feeling—is what constitutes the difference—the “jene-scai-quoi ”—that enables us now to differentiate past experiences from past ruminations (objects we merely conjured up in thought but never regarded as real). Thus, it was Hume’s psychologistic account of the idea of actuality—real, as opposed to merely possible, existence—in terms of a vivacity feeling, the locus of which is not the perception itself but our consciousness of them (chapters 16-A and 17-C), that opened the way to a completely new way of conceiving how past experience informs present judgment. However, before this potential can be realized, a further element is required: The reflection on several instances only repeats the same objects; and therefore can never give rise to a new idea. But upon farther enquiry I find, that the repetition is not in every particular the same, but produces a new impression . . . which affords me the idea of necessity. (THN 155–6/105)

When two successive, contiguous perceptions are first experienced, there is absolutely no relation between them in our imagination. This is just to say that our experience of their conjunction triggers no existing habitual association, either because they have too little similarity to any of the perceptions we have found by experience to be constantly conjoined or because our minds are too immature to have formed any such habits at all (these are the third and first of the species of probability identified by Hume that I will consider hereafter). However, when closely resembling conjunctions are encountered subsequently, a habit will gradually take shape in the mind: 9. As THN 456/293 makes clear, Hume sometimes used the term ‘action’ for perceptions that are purely sensory, and so passive. It thus is similar to Locke’s use of the term ‘operation’ of the mind: see chapter 5-B. Regarding the relation of Hume’s analysis of memory to Locke’s, see HTC, chap. 2-B.

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HUME’S AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES As the habit, which produces the association, arises from the frequent conjunction of objects, it must arrive at its perfection by degrees, and must acquire new force from each instance, that falls under our observation. The first instance has little or no force: The second makes some addition to it: The third becomes still more sensible; and ’tis by these slow steps, that our judgment arrives at a full assurance. (130/90)

With each new instance of the conjunction, the mind gradually passes from “its native situation of indifference” (125/86), characteristic of chance successions of perceptions, to a determination to conceive and believe the real existence of one of the conjuncts whenever the other is encountered in an impression. If the account of this process given in chapter 17-B is correct, this is just to say that, with each new experience of the conjunction, the transition of thought becomes easier, smoother, more natural, and, at the same time, a transition to anything else becomes ever more difficult, until the point where a “sensible violence” is caused thereby. In other words, each new experience brings with it an additional dollop of facility affect, so that, if enough of them concur in the same conjunction of perceptions, an association will gradually be formed between them that is strong enough to produce that “impression, . . . or determination, which affords me the idea of necessity” whenever one of the associated perceptions is present in sensation or reflexion. Since, according to Hume’s vivacity transference principle (chapter 17-C), the proportion of the vivacity an impression possesses that will be transferred to the conception of an idea associated with it is directly proportional to the facility felt in the transition from the former to the latter, this means that with each new dollop of facility affect, an additional dollop of vivacity affect will also be added to the conception of the idea, so that “Each new experiment is as a new stroke of the pencil, which bestows an additional vivacity on the colours, without either multiplying or enlarging the figure” (135/92). Or, to state the same point in terms of the je-ne-scai-quoi of memory: with each new experience of the conjunction, and the consequent incremental addition to the pool of facility affect, the pool of vivacity also increases, so that the idea of the conjunction becomes ever more vivid as the relation itself grows ever more facile, until finally (with a little help from the projective illusion discussed in chapter 17-D), we arrive at a firm conviction that the conjuncts themselves are necessarily connected as cause and effect. And from that point forward (provided nothing happens to decrease the intensity of facility feeling), our custom will be sufficiently entrenched for us to take the causal relation for granted in all thoughts and actions to which it is relevant. It should now be evident that one of the principal advantages of Hume’s psychologistic explication of relation in terms of facility feeling, and real existence in terms of vivacity feeling, is to make it possible for the effect of past experience on present judging to be understood as a result of the gradual accumulation of these imagination-immanent affects. Given the training and inclinations of most philosophers, then as now, this way of explaining the process tends at first to seem repellant, much as Hume predicted it would (THN 118/8181). But this response may perhaps be overcome if, as he claimed, the only ideational alternative is to suppose that past experience merely “multiplies the number of views,” so that we are obliged, every time we pass judgment on a matter of fact or real existence, to


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reckon not with “one conclusion” but “a multitude of similar ones . . . often too numerous to be comprehended distinctly by any finite capacity” (138/94). For whereas distinct affects, whether sensations, reflexions, or feelings immanent to imagination (facility, vivacity), admit of being pooled together, thoughts, instead of blending, persist in their distinctness: Ideas may be compar’d to the extension and solidity of matter, and impressions, especially reflective ones, to colours, tastes, smells and other sensible qualities. Ideas never admit of a total union, but are endow’d with a kind of impenetrability, by which they exclude each other, and are capable of forming a compound by their conjunction, not by their mixture. On the other hand, impressions and passions are susceptible of an entire union; and like colours, may be blended so perfectly together, that each of them may lose itself and contribute only to vary that uniform impression, which arises from the whole. (366/236)

If there were no element in our past experiences that could genuinely mix together in such a way that each “may lose itself and contribute only to vary that uniform impression, which arises from the whole,” they could never coalesce into an impression of necessary connection. Quite apart from the encumbrance the resulting multiplication of views would create, this would have left Hume with no impression whereby to account for the origin of ideas of necessary connection. And this would mean not only “that we have no idea of connexion or power at all, and that these words are absolutely without any meaning, when employed either in philosophical reasonings, or common life” (EHU VII/ii ¶27) but also that “The relation of cause effect must be entirely unknown to mankind” and “Inference and reasoning concerning the operations of nature would, from that moment, be at an end” (EHU VIII/i ¶5).10 At the very least, anyone who would deny that our ideas of causal relation and real existence are indelibly bound up by content with facility and vivacity affect has no option but to reject Hume’s system lock, stock, and barrel and erect another in its place, radically different both from it and from those systems vulnerable to a Humean critique (we shall find in the next volume that Kant’s transcendental psychologism fits the bill well). 10. Only when he took up the issue of probability—causal inferences that fall short of the certainty of proofs (frequently experienced constant conjunctions: THN 124/86)—did Hume explicitly address the task of explaining how the similar views afforded by past experience concur in one object. Yet even if Hume never said so in so many words, it seems clear that the same explanation should be understood to extend to proofs as well, if only because the same choice exists in their case too: “First, That the view of the object, occasion’d by the transference of each past experiment, preserves itself entire, and only multiplies the number of views. Or, secondly, That it runs into the other similar and correspondent views, and gives them a superior degree of force and vivacity” (138/94). Surely, for Hume, the first alternative was as much a nonstarter in the case of proofs as it was in that of probabilities. More importantly, no other explanation seems consonant with Hume’s affective conception of relations generally and causal associations in particular: with each new experience of a conjunction, facility and vivacity concur not by multiplication but by accumulation—pooling together—prior to and independently of any question of contrariety. And confirmation of this can be found in Hume’s assertion that his analysis of how imagination operates in the cases of probability “may lead us to conceive the manner, in which that faculty enters into all our reasonings” (139–40/95). Contrariety will be discussed in section E.

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We should also now be able to comprehend the thesis stated at the outset of this section: if experience is “the true standard” (THN 113/78) of empirical rationality, customary association is its natural regulator: if the transference of the past to the future were founded merely on a conclusion of the understanding, it cou’d never occasion any belief or assurance. When we transfer contrary experiments to the future, we can only repeat these contrary experiments with their particular proportions; which cou’d not produce assurance in any single event, upon which we reason, unless the fancy melted together all those images that concur, and extracted from the one single idea or image, which is intense and lively in proportion to the number of experiments from which it is deriv’d, and their superiority above their antagonists. Our past experience presents no determinate object; and as our belief, however faint, fixes itself on a determinate object, ’tis evident that the belief arises not merely from the transference of past to future, but from some operation of the fancy conjoin’d with it. This may lead us to conceive the manner, in which that faculty enters into all our reasonings. (139–40/95)11

The “fancy” not only suggests the past experience relevant to a particular situation (in the same “magical” manner described on 23–4/21) but at the same time mixes the affects of the memories of that experience together. More precisely, of the two components of memory—the idea of the object or relation of objects, and the idea of the action of the mind in contemplating them—the imagination “melts together” (pools) the affective constituents of the latter while leaving the former single (unmultiplied). After encountering a sufficient number of closely resembling objects in the same relations of priority and contiguity, these feelings accumulate an intensity sufficient to trigger the projective illusion that leads us to regard the conjoined objects as endowed with causal efficacy (active and passive power), and to regard their conjunction as a necessary connection. In this way, the strength of the causal relation (intensity of facility feeling), and, correspondingly, the amount of real existence (intensity of vivacity feeling) that will be accorded to the idea of one in any transition from an impression of the other, is directly calibrated (proportioned) to past experience, and, in particular, the frequency, constancy, and strength of the resemblance between instances of the conjunction. Thus does customary association serve to regulate the amount of confidence we place in any reasoning from an impression to a causally associated idea, in accordance with the true standard of empirical rationality: past experience. D. First Species Probable Reasoning: The Natural Basis of Belief in the Uniformity Principle and the General Causal Maxim Hume adapted the procedure described in the previous section to cases where our experience of a conjunction of perceptions is deficient in respect of frequency, constancy, or the strength of the resemblance between distinct instances—the three 11. See note 10.


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species of philosophical probability discussed in Treatise I/iii/§12. They are “philosophical” not because they are confined to philosophical relations but because they concern custom-based varieties of rational belief, by contrast with the irrational “unphilosophical” probabilities discussed in §13. In this reference, “probability” carries a narrower sense than is usual with Hume, one closer to ordinary usage. For although he was well aware how odd it seems to term “probable” the belief that “the sun will rise to-morrow, or that all men must dye” (THN 124/86), where real doubt is impossible, he opted to follow Locke’s usage of the term. Hume did so because beliefs of this kind (1) relate to the same objects—matters of fact and real existence; (2) are subject to the same standard and regulator— experience and custom; and (3) are of the same nature—vivacity affect—as our feeblest, most uncertain beliefs. These commonalities easily outweighed the differences when he came to contrasting them with the knowledge we gain of the abstract relations of ideas by means of intuition and demonstration (chapter 18-A). It was only when Hume turned to the task of explaining how past experience informs present judgments that the differences between experiential beliefs we never think to doubt—nor could doubt even if we would—and beliefs which are not entirely free from doubt and uncertainty that he saw fit to introduce a specific terminology to distinguish them: “proofs” for the former, “probabilities” for the latter (124/86; also EHU VIn and X/i). The first species of probability distinguished by Hume relates to the condition of doubt and uncertainty we are in concerning cause-and-effect relations until the habit that produces the association of ideas to a present impression becomes strong enough for full assurance: “before it attains this pitch of perfection, it passes thro’ several inferior degrees, and in all of them is only to be esteem’d a presumption or probability. The gradation, therefore, from probabilities to proofs is in many cases insensible” (THN 130–1/90). However, the sequel makes clear that this species of probability is not what it first seems to be. For, according to Hume, “no one, who is arriv’d at the age of maturity, can any longer be acquainted with it.” If so, then, quite clearly, it can have nothing to do with the kind of case we encounter throughout our lives, where the number of conjunctions is too few for us to determine whether the objects concerned are successive and contiguous by accident or through some cause. What inferences then does the first species of probability really concern? An important clue is what Hume deemed responsible for eradicating it and thereby bringing empirical reason to maturity. It concerns an apparent counterexample to Hume’s claim that we infer the existence of necessary connections on the basis of experienced constant conjunction and custom: ’Tis true, nothing is more common than for people of the most advanc’d knowledge to have attain’d only an imperfect experience of many particular events; which naturally produces only an imperfect habit and transition: But then we must consider, that the mind, having form’d another observation concerning the connexion of causes and effects, gives new force to its reasoning from that observation; and by means of it can build an argument on one single experiment, when duly prepar’d and examin’d. What we have found once to follow from any object, we conclude will for ever follow from it. (THN 131/90)

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The first species of probability is eradicated when, still in our cradles (EHU IV/ii ¶23 and V/ii ¶22), we have become firm believers in the uniformity principle. Here it takes the same form—the uniformity of causes—Hume gave it when he first raised the single experiment problem (THN 104–5/73): “What we have found once to follow from any object, we conclude will for ever follow from it.” There, Hume argued that our ability to infer the existence of a necessary connection after only a single acquaintance with a conjunction, “not only in philosophy, but even in common life,” still depends on custom, only “in an oblique and artificial manner;” for “if we consider, that tho’ we are here suppos’d to have had only one experiment of a particular effect, yet we have many millions to convince us of this principle; that like objects, plac’d in like circumstances, will always produce like effects.” Since the belief reposed in the fully generalized uniformity principle by the infant mind already of itself suffices to dispel all doubt and uncertainty of the first species, a full understanding of the latter requires us to determine how, according to Hume, we come to believe in the uniformity principle in the first place. Although he left no doubt that the source of this belief, both in humans and animals (THN 178/119, EHU IV/ii ¶23 and IX ¶5), is customary association, he never directly addressed the issue of how experience gives rise to this custom (level V of the scheme laid out in section B). The problem that arises in this connection particularly is whether experience is ever sufficiently constant to inculcate a habit perfect enough to confer certainty, or even a lesser degree of belief, in the uniformity of nature. Hume tells us only that “we have many millions [of experiences] to convince us of this principle; that like objects, plac’d in like circumstances, will always produce like effects” (THN 105/73). But is that true? Hacking, for one, suggests that Hume is guilty of a gross misrepresentation of what experience is really like: Cause, says Hume, is among other things constant conjunction. Causes are learned about from experience, and the idea of causation, with its concomitant, necessary connection, derives from the association of ideas. If Hume were right, causes could play little role in our thought, because ‘for the most part,’ ‘usually’ and the like are the order of the day . . . It is an irony that a rationalist can give a constant conjunction analysis of causality, and Leibniz did exactly that with his theory of expression. Only the empiricist who claims to find the origin of every idea in experience is flummoxed, for in fact we scarcely ever experience constant conjunctions, and, in maturity, when we do experience them we do not always infer that the conjunction is altogether constant . . . The errant empiricist has told us that cause is constant conjunction, and yet is almost unable to give any constant conjunctions to show for it. So he needs a theory of less than constant conjunction, which is probability.12

Hacking may be wrong about why Hume needed a theory of probability, for, as will emerge shortly, both the second and third species presuppose a firm belief in the uniformity of nature (level III). But he is right to this extent: when, in infancy, the uniformity habit has yet to be instilled (pre-level V), a lack of constant con12. “Hume’s Species of Probability,” Philosophical Studies 33 (1978), 21 and 24.


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junctions such as Hume describes below would be fatal so far as empirical reasoning is concerned (levels II and I—necessary connections, the inference from impressions to ideas they make possible, and so too our ability to infer one matter of fact or real existence from another): It seems evident, that, if all the scenes of nature were continually shifted in such a manner, that no two events bore any resemblance to each other, but every object was entirely new, without any similitude to whatever had been seen before, we should never, in that case, have attained the least idea of necessity, or of a connexion among these objects. We might say, upon such a supposition, that one object or event has followed another; not that one was produced by the other. The relation of cause and effect must be utterly unknown to mankind. Inference and reasoning concerning the operations of nature would, from that moment, be at an end; and memory and senses remain the only canals, by which the knowledge of any real existence could possibly have access to the mind. Our idea, therefore, of necessity and causation arises entirely from the uniformity, observable in the operations of nature; where similar objects are constantly conjoined together, and the mind is determined by custom to infer the one from the appearance of the other. (EHU VIII/i ¶5)

The chaotic scene Hume describes bears an uncomfortably close resemblance to the one all of us have to reckon with before we arrive “at the age of maturity” and cease to be subject to first species probabilities. For newborns, lacking all experience, must be supposed to open their eyes to a world defined far more by inconstancy than its opposite: objects kaleidoscopically careening about the scene; coming and going and returning; changing continuously in size and shape, color and brightness; never tangibly present except by the fragments intermittently in contact with hands, lips, and other body parts; all this interlarded with random bursts of sound, smell, flavor, and other perceptions that, quite literally, exist nowhere; and so on. This is not to say that infants cannot impose order on this chaos, since each and every one of us is proof that they do. The question is whether customary association of the kind capable of conferring the status of proof, beyond all probability, on the uniformity principle is any better suited to explain this than Hume deemed reason to be. For if, as he supposed, such an association depends on the sort of “full and perfect” habit (THN 134/92) that only frequently experienced constant conjunctions between successive contiguous perceptions are capable of producing, then the lack of such conjunctions is all that is needed to render his associationist account of empirical reason a nonstarter. Instead, we may prefer an explanation of the kind proposed by Pinker, where infants, confronted with innumerable versions of what he terms “ill-posed” problems, rely on innately engineered assumptions to resolve them (chapter 6-A). Did Hume provide the means to respond to these doubts and objections? The answer, I believe, is yes; but we have to consider his theory of the understanding in its full systematic unity in order to appreciate it. More particularly, since constancy, for Hume, is fundamentally a matter of resemblance association, we can understand his likely response to the foregoing objection simply by retracing our steps in previous chapters, and taking note of the various constancies to which

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resemblance gives rise, beginning with the duplication and copy principles. For if any feature of experience is constant it is the resemblance between our simple impressions and the ideas that always succeed them, from the first beginnings of conscious life right through to the end (chapter 16-B). With at least this uniformity continuously before the infant mind, a customary association will be ingrained that is more than sufficient to generate impressions of necessary connection, together with a strong belief, amounting to proof (rather than probability), in the uniformity of this causal system—which, as we have seen (chapters 16-F and 18-D), is none other than the system of realities that constitutes “the object of the memory and senses” (THN 108/75). The next step is to factor in the ephemeral resemblances between successive ideas requisite to form ideas of perfect identities (chapter 17-A), whereupon the infant imagination has all its needs to fashion an idea of itself as a(n imperfectly) simple (263/171), identical (261/170) individual self (person, mind) persisting through time (chapter 17-B and -D). At the same time, its imagination introduces new order and regularity into its experience by means of the other resemblances met with in the causal system on which “the true idea of the human mind” is founded. For these give rise to customs of the sort constitutive of general ideas (chapter 18-B), and so provide a basis for the formation of new causal associations (since causal relations13 presuppose the customary associations responsible for general ideas: 87/61, 93/65, EHU VII/ii ¶27, and XI ¶30). There can be little doubt that the most important of these general ideas are the ideas of space and time derived from the resemblances between visual impressions or between tactual impressions, together with the resemblance between these two species of space and time founded on their formal multiplicity (chapter 18-C). The idea of space, in particular, makes possible the discovery of new resemblances, of which two are of special importance. First, the constant conjunctions between visual and tactual sensations, such as the myriad correlations between eyeball movements and changes in visual position (THN 58), serve to integrate vision with touch to yield what is, in effect, a single external sense (chapter 18-D). And, second, the perceptions of this external sense are found to recur in the same spatial and temporal relations with a constancy so striking that we cannot help but infer the existence of a cause of their coexistence (16/16, 74/53, and 237/155). At this point, we need to factor in the identity relations between distinct perceptions, also founded on resemblances (THN 202–4/135–6 and n), which the associative imagination of the infant will have been forming concurrently with the identities considered earlier. I have already noted that the infant mind has all it needs to form “the true idea of the human mind” (261/170). With this, its imagination possesses the standard it requires in order to conceive its sensible objects as maintaining an (imperfect) identity that continues even when they are no longer appearing to the mind, and so to have an existence distinct from (external to and independent of) it (189–91/126–7 and 207–8/138).14 Needless to say, the replace13. Including the copy principle: like the duplication principle (chapter 16-A), it presupposes the customary associations requisite to form general ideas of impressions and ideas. 14. See chapter 16, note 30.


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ment of similarly ordered external data encountered at intervals with a single object believed to enter into and pass out of relation to the bundle of perceptions that constitutes the identical mind (207/137–8) makes possible a massive reduction in the complexity of the infant’s experience, while at the same time opening the way to the discovery of entirely new species of constancy and uniformity therein (197–8/131–2). For example, thanks to the same sort of relation-completing projective illusion whereby causal powers and efficacies are attributed to the objects we consider (rather than to the imagination that considers them), impressions of the other (nonexternal) senses “co-temporary in appearance” (237/155) with the objects of the external sense (constantly conjoined visual and tactual impressions connected by an imperfect identity) are situated “in” these objects (chapter 17-D). But by far the most important consequence for probable reasoning of the advent of both kinds of imperfect identity—that of the mind and that of external objects existing distinctly from it—is the differentiation they make possible between objective and a subjective points of view. For this holds the key to eliminating by far the greatest part of the contrariety we meet with in our experience of bodies, such as changes of size and shape when viewed from different distances and angles: Even when these contrary experiments are entirely equal, we remove not the notion of causes and necessity; but supposing that the usual contrariety proceeds from the operation of contrary and conceal’d causes, we conclude, that the chance or indifference lies only in our judgment on account of our imperfect knowledge, not in the things themselves, which are in every case equally necessary, tho’ to appearance not equally constant or certain. (403–4/259–60)

By distinguishing its own perspective on things from the things themselves (their sensible properties), as they exist independently of their appearances to it (their insensible power and efficacy), the infant imagination achieves two things. First, by sweeping so much of the contrariety it experiences in bodies under the carpet, as it were, of its particular perspective at any moment, or the peculiarities of its subjective perspective over time (chapter 18-D), it is able to rechannel enough contrariety to prevent it from impeding the establishment of a sufficiently “full and perfect” habit to permit the extension of its belief in uniformity from the “intellectual world” (232/152) of the self, consisting of the comings and goings of particular perceptions, to the natural realm of objective space and time (the system of realities that constitute the object of judgment: 108/75). Or, to put the same point in a different yet no less Humean way: by preventing the contrariety it witnesses from weakening the habit, the infant imagination is able to produce impressions of necessary connection involving bodies external to its (identity-preserving) mind as readily as it produces them between distinct perceptions within its mind. Second, the customary associations essential to the latter (the idea of the mind) are in no way weakened when the “chance or indifference” contrariety implies are transferred from the things the mind considers to the mind that considers them. For the very essence of personal identity is to preserve itself through any and all variation, provided only that sufficient resemblances remain to establish such customary associations as the copy principle. So to maintain “a system of different perceptions

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or different existences, which are link’d together by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually produce, destroy, influence, and modify each other,” nothing more is required than that “Our impressions give rise to their correspondent ideas; and these ideas in their turn produce other impressions” (261/170). Contrariety in the appearance and behavior of bodies external to the mind obviously can make no difference where the constancy and uniformity of particular perceptions within the mind is concerned. Thus, by the simple device of supposing contrariety to lie “only in our judgment on account of our imperfect knowledge, not in the things themselves,” causal association, and so too belief in uniformity, are able to triumph over “chance and indifference” in the infant mind, in both the natural world without and the intellectual world within.15 Even if one does not deem the foregoing considerations a full and adequate response to the objection that there is insufficient constancy to establish a firm conviction in the truth of the uniformity principle before one “is arriv’d at the age of maturity” (THN 131/90), it should now be clear that Hume had available to him a viable kind of response to it that requires nothing more than one’s consent to take seriously the perspective of the theory of ideas in general, and that of Hume’s theory in particular. Hume’s is unique in being divested of even the metaphysical baggage that continued to weigh down the theories of Locke and Berkeley (chapters 15 and 16-E). Thanks to his systematic employment of the method of psychologistic explication, and especially the associationist character of his explications, Hume was able to show that the concepts constitutive of objective understanding— relation, cause and effect, space and time, identity, the mind (person, self), body, substance, real existence, et al—are indelibly bound up by content with affective contents contributed by the associative imagination (chapters 17–18). Because of this, however, the preassociative given of consciousness has to be taken as being precisely what it appears to be: a kaleidoscopically changing flux of disconnected, isolated perceptions (chapter 16-G-3). Confronted by such a flux, it may seem impossible that the associative imagination, acting alone and responding to no inputs other than resemblances between distinct perceptions, can arrive at the firm 15. It may be objected that this is to ascribe too “philosophical” an outlook to minds as vulgar as those of infants and animals. For “The vulgar, who take things according to their first appearance, attribute the uncertainty of events to such uncertainty in the causes, as makes them often fail of their usual influence, tho’ they meet with no obstacle nor impediment in their operation. But philosophers observing, that almost in every part of nature there is contain’d a vast variety of springs and principles, which are hid, by reason of their minuteness or remoteness, find that ’tis at least possible the contrariety of events may not proceed from any contingency in the cause, but from the secret operation of contrary causes” (THN 132/90–1; also 174/117 #6 and EHU VIII/i ¶13). Yet it is one thing to say that the vulgar sometimes fail to take concealed causes into account, but quite another to say they always do; and Hume never ventured the latter claim. Moreover, at the very vulgar, even infantine level of consciousness where the imagination first fashions general points of view and corrects for subjective appearances by their objective causes (as in placing the fire before the smoke in order of time even if the order of their appearance is the reverse—see chapter 18D), the vulgar imagination is just as occupied with “concealed” (insensible) causes as the watchmaker Hume mentions on 132/90–1, or scientists engaged in the most arcane inquiry. As I shall argue in section E below, all that Hume’s views on this matter imply is that we concern ourselves to ferret out concealed causes only to the extent it suits our purposes, and even the infant mind has an interest in transferring as much contrariety as possible from the things it judges to its own limitations as a judger, since in no other way can it attain the belief in the uniformity of nature essential to overcoming first species probability and establishing a foundation for empirical reasoning.


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conviction in the truth of the uniformity principle (level IV of section B) essential for probable reasoning (level III). But this is precisely why it is so important never to forget or discount Hume’s claim that “What principally gives authority to this system is, beside the undoubted arguments, upon which each part is founded, the agreement of these parts, and the necessity of one to explain another” (154/104). We need only consent to view his principle of association in the systematic fashion he intended to recognize in it a powerful enough principle for the mind to create its own uniformity of nature, raising itself up by its own bootstraps, as it were, from a bare flux to the mature exercise of probable reason (proofs and probabilities alike). For the essential thing to recognize is that belief in the uniformity of nature is not conjured up at a single stroke but built up layer by layer, through “many millions” (105/73) of observations, from the copy principle all the way up to the objective positions of objects in space and time implicit in their place in the causal nexus, where at last it becomes possible to situate most contrariety “in our judgment on account of our imperfect knowledge, not in the things themselves.” To the objection that none of this changes the fact that the inputs of experience are anything but uniform, the response is that none of this matters to the proper functioning of empirical reason (level III) so long as there is belief in the uniformity of nature (level IV). That this belief is the creation of associative imagination, and consists in nothing but a feeling of vivacity, does not make it any less firm or adequate a foundation for empirical reason than any alternative. For this purpose it suffices merely that association be able, by means of whatever fictions, projections, and other psychological devices, to enliven the idea of uniformity to the certainty of proof, beyond all probability. And this may very well be what Hume had in mind when, casting a backward glance on his theory of ideas as a whole, he concluded that “the memory, senses, and understanding are therefore, all of them, founded on the imagination, or the vivacity of our ideas” (265/173). A systematic standpoint is no less essential to grasping how the infant mind comes to accord the certainty of proof, beyond all probability, to the general causal maxim “that whatever begins to exist, must have a cause of existence” (THN 78/ 56).16 For if the foregoing account of how associative imagination creates the 16. Technically, Owen is correct when he observes that “Hume never bothers to explain why we believe the causal maxim on the basis of experience. At T 172, he explains only why we should no longer feel it odd to deny that it is intuitively or demonstratively certain” (Reason, 128n30). But Hume’s oversight goes no further, in my view, than a failure to spell it out in so many words. Far more important than this omission is the fact that it did not result from any inability on his part to explain our belief in the causal maxim, much less from a want of concern about the issue (see chapter 16-E). After all, Hume also never troubled himself to explain our belief in the uniformity principle beyond attributing it to customary association; and we find the same attribution in the case of the general causal maxim, both by implication in the Treatise (“that opinion must necessarily arise from observation and experience,” 82) and explicitly in LGFE II (“it is supported by moral Evidence, and is followed by a Conviction of the same Kind with these Truths, That all Men must die, and that the Sun will rise Tomorrow”). In addition, he made quite clear on 168/113 that our belief in the maxim has to be understood in terms of the content of the idea of necessary connection as explicated through its originating impression in customary association (168/113). There is therefore no reason to doubt that Hume did indeed have associationist explanations of these beliefs, even if their details have to be extrapolated from his system considered as a whole—“the agreement of [its] parts, and the necessity of one to explain another” (THN 154/104)—rather than any particular part of it taken in isolation.

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uniformity of nature from a kaleidoscopic flux is correct, no existent (perception) can present itself to consciousness without triggering one or more of the myriad habitual causal associations, founded on “many millions of experiments” (105/73), that make up the multi-layered uniformity of nature: (1) the copy principle; (2) the causal connections needed to underwrite all spatial, temporal, identity, and other relations insofar as they are believed really to exist beyond the memory and senses (intuitive and demonstrative relations included—413–14/265–6); (3) the connections that knit together the spaces of vision and touch to yield a single external sense; (4) the causal principle (“substance”) to which we attribute the co-temporary appearance of impressions of the various senses, and, by a projective illusion, treat as a single individual thing; (5) the general points of view we form on the basis of how objects causally affect the external senses; and (6) the objective positions we ascribe to objects in space and time on the basis of their causal relations to one another, which enable us to attribute much of the contrariety we meet with in their appearance and behavior to the limitations of a particular sensory point of view, or the quantitative and/or qualitative deficiencies in subjective experience (both our own and that obtained via the testimony of others). With causal necessity so pervasive in our experience of the world, permeating it at every scale and order of complexity, it becomes effectively as impossible to believe that anything might begin to exist without a cause as to doubt the existence of physical objects or one’s own mind (fictions of imperfect identity though they be). Thus, what Hume says elsewhere applies here as well: the opinion that something may come into existence with complete indifference to the state of the world in the time previous “has been peculiar to a few extravagant sceptics; who after all maintain’d that opinion in word only, and were never able to bring themselves sincerely to believe it” (214/142).17 The reasoning our habitual belief in the causal maxim underwrites may be crude (animism) and/or fallacious (astrology) or sophisticated and sound (relativity theory, quantum mechanics). But where we cannot take necessary connections for granted whenever anything begins to exist—where events may be supposed to begin with an absolute indifference to what came before—inferences from impressions to ideas, natural and philosophical alike,18 and so too everything dependent on them, including our belief in external world (73–4/53 and 195–8/130–2), be17. And it makes no difference if an aleatory element is involved as well, so long as the past is not completely indifferent to, and in no way determinative of, what comes into existence in the future. Even quantum mechanics may be said to conform to the general causal maxim. For though Hume was principally concerned with ordinary (“vulgar”) belief in the maxim and the uniformity principle, he gives every indication of holding that these beliefs are just as irresistible in the most arcane, esoteric scientific contexts as well (Treatise I/iii/§15). Quantum mechanics deals with objects very unlike the sort familiar to us from experience and classical mechanics. But then: Humean impressions, being in themselves (preassociatively) causally inert, existing only in the present instant, and amenable to blending seamlessly together, are even more unlike them, but still are universally and necessarily subject to the causal maxim. See also chapter 18, note 16. 18. Here we see what is perhaps the primary and most important reason Hume deemed philosophical causation to be parasitic on natural (THN 94/65): only customary association can secure the causal maxim and the uniformity principle that all probable reasoning, philosophical no less than natural, presuppose.


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come impossible. What is true of the uniformity of nature must therefore be true as well of why a cause is always necessary: this operation of the mind, by which we infer like effects from like causes, and vice versa, is so essential to the subsistence of all human creatures, it is not probable, that it could be trusted to the fallacious deductions of our reason, which is slow in its operations, appears not, in any degree, during the first years of infancy; and at best is, in every age and period of human life, extremely liable to error and mistake. It is more conformable to the ordinary wisdom of nature to secure so necessary an act of the mind, by some instinct or mechanical tendency, which may be infallible in its operations, may discover itself at the first appearance of life and thought, and may be independent of all the laboured deductions of the understanding. (EHU V/ii ¶22)

E. Reckoning With Contrariety The second species of probable reasoning relates to experienced inconstant conjunction, or contrariety: cases “where different effects have been found to follow from causes, which are to appearance exactly similar” (EHU VI ¶4), or where different causes are found to precede effects that appear exactly alike. Hume makes clear that such reasoning presupposes that customary association has already eradicated the first species of probability and supplanted it with an unshakeable conviction “that the future resembles the past,” founded on a “full and perfect . . . habit or determination to transfer the past to the future” (THN 134/92). Accordingly, the only difference contrariety makes, so far as the habit and belief in the uniformity principle are concerned, is that instead of transferring only one past outcome to the future, we transfer multiple outcomes, and repose in each a confidence proportionate to the quantity of pooled facility and vivacity affect accumulated on each occasion that outcome has occurred. Yet precisely because this “determination, tho’ full and perfect in itself, presents us with no steady object, but offers us a number of disagreeing images in a certain order and proportion,” customary association is here in need of supplementation by ratiocination—deliberative reflection—if we are to forge from these diverse transitional possibilities a unified view, from which a single judgment, excluding all the rest, may emerge: we commonly take knowingly into consideration the contrariety of past events; we compare the different sides of the contrariety, and carefully weigh the experiments, which we have on each side: Whence we conclude, that our reasonings of this kind arise not directly from the habit, but in an oblique manner. (133/1; also 104–5/73)

Probable reasoning in the face of inconstant conjunction is thus a two-stage affair: after the contrariety triggers our “full and perfect . . . habit or determination to transfer the past to the future” (134/92), we knowingly reflect on the different possibilities, accord them a relative weight proportionate to their frequency of

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occurrence, and then “deduct the smaller number from the greater, in order to know the exact force of the superior evidence” (EHU X ¶4; also THN 154/104 and 403/259–60). Although Hume is credited with making important contributions to the philosophy of the science of probability (including anticipating Bayes in some respects),19 his treatment of the topic is geared almost exclusively toward incorporating second species probable reasoning into his general account of empirical rationality. For even if deliberative ratiocination is requisite here to supplement customary association, the former operates in essentially the same way as the latter. In particular, the source and nature of the belief we repose in each of the various judgmental options we consider, and then deduct from the one best supported by experience, is the vivacity feeling we transfer from impressions to their associated ideas: Many of these images are suppos’d to concur, and a superior number to concur on one side. These agreeing images unite together, and render the idea more strong and lively, not only than a mere fiction of the imagination, but also than any idea which is supported by a lesser number of experiments. Each new experiment is as a new stroke of the pencil, which bestows an additional vivacity on the colours, without either multiplying or enlarging the figure. (THN 135/92)

An event has only to have occurred once in order to be included in this reckoning as a real possibility (Hume was careful to distinguish real possibilities, supported by at least one previous experience, from purely conceptual ones: 133/92, 135/93, 312–13/203–4, and EHU VIII/i ¶20). The strength of the transition in thought to each such event, and so too the belief that it will recur, will then be proportionate to the facility and vivacity affects that, with every new occurrence, mix together and unite their forces. At any point in time when we need to decide between different transitional options, our preference will hinge on the size of the “pool” of accumulated facility and vivacity affect proper to each: The determination of the thought is common to all; but no more of its force falls to the share of any one, than what is suitable to its proportion to the rest. ’Tis after this manner the original impulse [to transfer past to future], and consequently the vivacity of thought, arising from the causes, is divided and split in pieces by the intermingled chances. (129/89)20

Just as Hume declared empirical reason in general to be “the slave of the passions” (415/266), he might also have declared empirical ratiocination to be the slave of the affects incident to customary association. For our verdict, in any instance of probable reasoning, is wholly an affair of the strength of these feelings in respect of each of the competing alternatives, rather than a function of abstract reckoning (even when a calculus is employed—EHU IV/i ¶13): 19. See Hacking, “Hume’s Species,” 21. 20. My exposition does not distinguish the probability of chances (Treatise I/iii/§11) from the probability of causes (§12) because I am focusing on Hume’s account of the operation of the mind in probable reason, which, as he tells us on THN 135/92, is the same in both cases.


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When we transfer contrary experiments to the future, we can only repeat these contrary experiments with their particular proportions; which cou’d not produce assurance in any single event, upon which we reason, unless the fancy melted together all those images that concur, and extracted from them one single idea or image, which is intense and lively in proportion to the number of experiments from which it is deriv’d, and their superiority above their antagonists. (THN 139–40/95)

Against this, it may be objected that the status accorded both to experience as the touchstone of empirical rationality, and to custom as its regulator, is entirely arbitrary. For if all they do in order to relate ideas and generate beliefs in matters of fact and real existence is conjure up feelings of facility and vivacity, what justification is there for equating them with rationality and denigrating all other causes of these same affects as unreasonable or irrational? Indeed, since, as Hume certainly held, feelings are in themselves neither rational nor irrational, it seems quite unreasonable to equate any source of facility and vivacity with reasonable belief, be it experience and custom or gullibility, credulity, phobias, cupidity, or any other species of “unphilosophical probability” (Treatise I/iii/§13, Enquiry X). Perhaps the truth is that he had no reason but was instead simply seeking to reflect linguistic practice when he associated the former with rationality in probable reasoning, and the latter with its absence? However, the objection overlooks a compelling reason for drawing the distinction as he did, stemming from his account of the origin of the ideas of necessary connection on which all causal inference depends. Experience, for Hume, is both the natural and the original cause of the impressions from which these ideas are copied (in the sense of these terms specified on THN 280/184): it operates most constantly and steadily on the imagination, and is almost inseparable from the nature of that faculty. By comparison, all other causes of impressions of necessary connection are secondary and ephemeral. It thus was human nature itself, rather than any objective criterion or normative paradigm, that justified Hume in according to experience the status of a touchstone of rationality in all reasoning regarding matters of fact and real existence. Hume devoted only a single paragraph to the third species of probable reasoning, arising from weakness in the analogy between the future and past. This is because it operates the same way inconstancy does: “If you weaken either the union or resemblance, you weaken the principle of transition, and of consequence that belief, which arises from it” (THN 142/97; also 154/104). A lesser degree of facility felt in the transition of thought leads us to regard the idea with proportionately less vivacity than we regard the impression from which the transition began; and this translates into uncertainty as to the real existence of the object presented to us in this idea, that is, probability rather than proof. The upshot, then, of Hume’s account of proofs and probabilities is that the normative procedure of proportioning belief to the evidence furnished by past experience is in fact not normative at all but a natural associative mechanism (chapter 2-E-2).21 A belief is reasonable if and only if it is founded on experience 21. Owen makes an important point when he stresses that “it is important to bear in mind that Hume is concerned here with the nature of beliefs, especially beliefs in the unobserved, and how we

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and habit. More precisely, it is reasonable if and only if, in conceiving an idea with more or less vivacity according to the intensity of the facility feeling felt in the transition to the idea from an associated impression, the intensity of the facility is proportionate to the strength of the experience-bred associative habit that caused it. Insofar as other causes intervene to increase or decrease the facility feeling so that it is disproportionate with this experience-bred habit, the resulting belief (since vivacity always follows facility—chapter 17-C) will be unreasonable or even irrational (should the feeling become so disproportionate as to lead to a belief opposed to experience-based habit). To guard ourselves against these influences, we find it expedient to adopt a number of general “Rules by which to judge of causes and effects” (title, Treatise I/iii/§15): these rules are form’d on the nature of our understanding, and on our experience of its operations in the judgments we form concerning objects. By them we learn to distinguish the accidental circumstances from the efficacious causes; and when we find that an effect can be produc’d without the concurrence of any particular circumstance, we conclude that that circumstance makes not a part of the efficacious cause, however frequently conjoin’d with it. (THN 149/101)

Contrary to what is often supposed, these rules do not take us beyond the sphere of natural causal relations to philosophical ones. Rather, they “are very easy in their invention,” and “not very necessary” to invent since they “might have have been supply’d by the natural principles of our understanding” (175/117). Whenever we find ourselves in situations where care and precision in the judging of causes are requisite to achieve our ends, we have reason to be not only deliberative but methodical in our approach; and, whether we are scientists, artisans, astrologers, or witch doctors, our method will be crafted to best enable us to ferret out those sensible signs of insensible causes that are the most reliable predictors of outcomes. Hume’s rules state what are, in effect, the criteria to which any such method must conform. The most striking thing about Hume’s rules is that, collectively, they commit him to the strictest kind of causal necessitarianism, rule #4 especially: “The same

come to form them. It is tempting to read into Hume a more current problem: given that we have such beliefs, how, if at all, are they justified? Hume’s problem is more one of explanation than justification: given that we have such beliefs, what is their nature and how is it that we come to have them?” (Reason, 118) Owen does an excellent job of demolition on the anachronistic analyses of Hume’s reasoning that continue to proliferate, and exposes the misunderstanding, distortion, and obfuscation in contemporary understanding of Hume that has been their consequence. Yet in taking the explanation of the nature and origin of belief to be fundamental for Hume, Owen may not have gone far enough. In my view, this concern is subordinate to the more fundamental matter of explaining the nature and origin of the ideas on which belief is conferred. For if belief were merely a matter of conferring vivacity on ideas as the Rationalists, Locke, or Berkeley understood them (chapter 15), then Hume’s skepticism would in no way pose a threat to metaphysics, Kant would have had it all wrong, and it would be the milquetoast production it is nowadays so often supposed to be (chapter 15 introduction). Equally importantly, it is only when ideas of relation (causality, identity, space and time) are understood psychologistically, and so as bound up by content with facility affect, that Hume’s analysis of the belief that attends all empirical reasoning finds its indispensable foundation.


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cause always produces the same effect, and the same effect never arises but from the same cause” (THN 173/116). To be sure, this does nothing more than make explicit what is implicit in the idea of necessity essential to causation, whether philosophical or natural (the same is true of rules ## 1–3). For if a cause could exist without its effect following immediately upon it, then a necessary connection is lacking, and this is as much to say that it is not a cause of that event at all, or at least not its complete cause (rule #8). Where nonresembling sensible objects cause resembling objects to exist, the similarity in their efficacies must coincide with a resemblance among these otherwise nonresembling causes (rule #5); and where resembling objects do not cause resembling sensible objects to exist, the difference in their efficacies must coincide with some difference among these otherwise resembling cause (rule #6). Thus does Hume arrive at the strict necessitarian position, where each effect can have but one cause and each cause but one effect, necessarily, everywhere, always. One might object that Hume ascribed necessitarianism only to the more philosophical among humankind, since the vulgar are wont to “attribute the uncertainty of events to such an uncertainty in the causes, as makes them often fail of their usual influence, tho’ they meet with no obstacle nor impediment in their operation” (THN 132/90; also EHU VIII/i ¶13). But this would follow only if he intended us to understand this species of vulgar reasoning to proceed in conformity to rules ## 5–6. For the uncertainty the vulgar attribute to causes would then imply that the efficacies whereby nonresembling causes produce the same effect do not have any quality in common, and that the efficacies whereby resembling causes produce different effects have no quality in which they differ. That would indeed be uncertainty! Moreover, it is in direct conflict with the fact that “the most ignorant and stupid peasants, nay infants, nay even brute beasts . . . suppose the past resembling the future, and . . . expect similar effects from causes, which are, to appearance similar” (EHU IV/ii ¶23). By contrast, if we suppose that the uncertainty the vulgar attribute to causes fails to conform to rules ## 5–6, a more natural reading results, perfectly consonant with the text, and fully compatible with strict necessitarianism (rule #4): members of the same species of sensible object, or even the same individual sensible object at different times, sometimes have, and sometimes lack, a particular insensible power and efficacy. On this construal, the vulgar practice a strict necessitarianism, in that they proceed under the assumption that the same power invariably produces the same effect, and the same effect invariably arises from the same power, yet, in contravention to rules ## 5–6, regard powers as fickle things, inclined to take up residence in some members of a certain sensible species but not in others, or in the same member at different times (see discussion of THN 90–1/63–4 in section A above). Only when some interest or need makes it uncomfortable for our vulgar selves to rest content with being uncertain about which individuals of a species do and which do not possess a particular power, or when an individual of that species does and when it does not exercise any power it has, do we reckon on there being some sensible difference that, because of its “minuteness or remoteness” (132/90), escapes us. We then put Hume’s remaining rules to use in our search for new sensible signs that can enable us to predict the presence or absence of the power more reliably. For, in this way,

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regardless of the conceptual framework with which we approach experience— astrology, astronomy, the Pentateuch, Hume’s science of human nature, etc.—our causal inferences will be kept as close as possible to their true standard, experience, and its natural regulator, customary association (“philosophical decisions are nothing but the reflections of common life, methodized and corrected,” EHU XII/ iii ¶25; also VII/ii ¶29). Some may still prefer to interpret the uncertainty the vulgar sometimes ascribe to causes as evidence that they adhere less strictly than philosophers to rule #4 (the same causes always produce the same effects), and so as proof that the vulgar are not, as I claim Hume supposed, strict necessitarians. Against this, it should be noted that, in the Enquiry, Hume saw fit to introduce the topic of the uncertainty of causes in the context of his treatment of liberty and necessity. The thesis he defends is that, professions to the contrary notwithstanding, we are all strict necessitarians in practice (VIII/i ¶6). In the course of elaborating this view, Hume cited the uncertainty attributed to natural causes as a parallel with the apparent whimsicalness of certain human behavior (¶¶ 13–14): even when an action, as sometimes happens, cannot be particularly accounted for, either by the person himself or by others; we know, in general, that the characters of men are, to a certain degree, inconstant and irregular. This is, in a manner, the constant character of human nature . . . The internal principles and motives may operate in a uniform manner, notwithstanding these seeming irregularities; in the same manner as the winds, rain, clouds, and other variations of the weather are supposed to be governed by steady principles. (¶15)

That this insight is not vouchsafed to philosophers alone is clear from the fact that “the regular and uniform” operation of “cause and effect in any part of nature”— not just “the conjunction between motives and voluntary actions”—“has been universally acknowledged among mankind, and has never been the subject of dispute, either in philosophy or common life” (¶16, my emphasis). Hence, the uncertainty the vulgar attribute to causes in nature should be seen as precisely parallel to the uncertainty they attribute to human actions when they insist they are free: “so inconsistent are men with themselves, that tho’ they often assert, that necessity utterly destroys all merit and demerit . . . , yet they continue still to reason upon these very principles of necessity” (THN 411–12/264). Even while positing the uncertainty of causes when their expectations are upset in particular cases, the vulgar remain committed to the universal necessitarianism of principles they imbibed when, in infancy, they overcame Hume’s first species of probability and came to believe in both the uniformity of nature and the necessity of a cause for every beginning of existence (section D). Certainly, in any case where the vulgar did have to make a choice, there is no doubt they would adhere to their necessaritarianism, since to sacrifice the uniformity principle and the general causal maxim would be tantamount to denying that necessity without which “Inference and reasoning concerning the operations of nature would, from that moment, be at an end; and the memory and senses remain the only canals, by which the knowledge of any real existence could possibly have access to the mind” (EHU VIII/i ¶5). In-


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deed, the vulgar could not deny them even if they would since “It is more conformable to the ordinary wisdom of nature to secure so necessary an act of the mind, by some instinct or mechanical tendency, which may be infallible in its operations, may discover itself at the first appearance of life and thought, and may be independent of all the laboured deductions of the understanding” (V/ii ¶22). Vulgar and philosophical reasoners alike are committed necessitarians; and the purpose of Hume’s rules is simply to define the most reasonable method of implementing this commitment.

20 The Supreme Principle of Hume’s Theory of Understanding

Hume’s theory of the understanding concludes on a note of great irony. Imagine there was a perfectly rational being by the standards of his theory: someone whose belief was always perfectly proportioned to “the true standard” of experience and regulated entirely by customary association; who adhered scrupulously, in every instance, to the “Rules by which to judge of causes and effect” (Treatise I/ii/§15); and who never failed to balance opposed experiences where they are contrary, always subtracted the inferior from the superior, and then proceeded with only the degree of assurance that remains. What would be the fate of such a being? According to the argument advanced in Treatise I/iv/§1, “Of scepticism with regard to reason,” he would be inexorably driven to conclude “that all is uncertain, and that our judgment is not in any thing possest of any measures of truth and falshood” (THN 183/123). If we let ourselves be governed exclusively by reason, “we subvert entirely the human understanding” (268/174). It is only thanks to the intervention of a natural instinct for self-preservation that reason is prevented from destroying itself: ’Tis happy, therefore, that nature breaks the force of all sceptical arguments in time, and keeps them from having any considerable influence on the understanding. Were we to trust entirely to their self-destruction, that can never take place, ’till they have first subverted all conviction and have totally destroy’d human reason. . . . We save ourselves from this total scepticism only by means of that singular and seemingly trivial property of the fancy, by which we enter with difficulty into remote views of things, and are not able to accompany them with so sensible an impression, as we do those, which are more easy and natural. (187/125 and 268/174)

Hume’s skepticism with regard to reason has puzzled readers from the start. Is there more than meets the eye to the thesis that transitions of thought that come more easily and naturally will win belief more readily than those that require effort and a new way of seeing things (“the trivial property of the fancy”)? Interpreters inclined to overlook or discount the central importance of the affective dimension 572

The Supreme Principle of Hume’s Theory of Understanding

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of thought to Hume’s associationism seem almost invariably to regard his skeptical thesis as devoid of philosophical interest and confine their attention exclusively to the argument on which it is based, if only to diagnose its fallaciousness. The thesis appears in a very different light, however, to anyone who has appreciated the significance of Hume’s oft-iterated claim that facility is the essence of relation (chapter 17-B). The question for these interpreters, presuming that Hume’s skeptical argument is as exemplary as he believed, is whether anything new and important can be learned about human understanding from its failure to convince. A. Skepticism With Regard to Reason: How Knowledge Degenerates Into Probability The argument that leads to the skeptical conclusion “that all is uncertain, and that our judgment is not in any thing possest of any measures of truth and falshood” (THN 183/123), was crafted with a view to undermining reason in both its guises: knowledge of the abstract relations of ideas, and experience-based proofs and probabilities relating to matters of fact and real existence. Accordingly, it proceeds in two stages: a proof that “all knowledge degenerates into probability” (180) and a proof that any probability we start with, “however great we may suppose it to have been,” must be continually diminished until “reduc’d to nothing” (182/122). The first stage begins by, in effect, conceding the reality of knowledge: “In all the demonstrative sciences the rules are certain and infallible” (180/121). But what about our belief, in any particular case of applying these rules, that we know? Experience informs us that “when we apply them, our fallible and uncertain faculties are very apt to depart from them, and fall into error.”1 As this happens contrary to our intention, we “form a new judgment, as a check or controul on our first judgment,” in which we “enlarge our view to comprehend a kind of history of all the instances, wherein our understanding has deceiv’d us, compar’d with those, wherein its testimony was just and true.” If, in the past, in circumstances similar to the present, we have often been mistaken, then we will conclude that the probability our original judgment is mistaken is high; if mistakes have been rare, we will conclude that the probability it is correct is high; and if we have never in the 1. It is unclear whether the distinction between the rules of the demonstrative sciences and their application is equivalent to, or at least coincides with, the distinction between mathematical definitions and discoveries at THN 49–50/37 (see chapter 18-A). The geometrical definitions Hume had in mind in Treatise I/ii/§4 do seem to go beyond fixing the use of a word or the arbitrary concatenation of ideas (i.e. modes, as specified on 17/16), for they are formed according to standards derived directly from the senses and imagination, whether by way of minima (a true but useless standard of equality), general appearances (a true but only occasionally useful standard), or stipulated standards founded on general appearances (useful without being fully true). However, it is uncertain whether he included axioms and postulates among the definitions or the discoveries of geometry, and he provides no clue in Treatise I/ iv/§1 whether any of these count as “rules of the demonstrative sciences.” Nor is there any indication what the “rules” of arithmetic, algebra, and other formal calculi are, or what the relevant criteria are. Since this makes it all but impossible to bring Hume’s discussion of mathematics in I/ii to bear on I/iv/ §1, it seems fair to characterize the first stage of the skeptical argument as more the bare bones of an argument than an argument fully fleshed out.

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past been mistaken when we have formed a judgment in circumstances similar to the present, the probability will be so high as to amount to proof, and we will have a perfect confidence in the correctness of our judgment. Yet even where our confidence is perfect, the fact that we derive our certainty from past experience rather than a comparison of ideas shows that it has the nature of probability (proof), not knowledge (intuition or demonstration). For this reason, it makes no difference whether our original judgment really is knowledge if, by the standard of past experience, we form a judgment that it is not; and it makes no difference if it really is not knowledge if, by this same standard, we have convinced ourselves that it is. Either way, our decision will be founded not on the certain and infallible rules of the demonstrative sciences but on the rules of proof and probability by which we judge of causes and effects in accordance with past experience (chapter 19-E). Thus, “knowledge degenerates into probability” (180/121). In order better to understand the conclusion of the first stage of the skeptical argument, let us briefly review the considerations Hume employed to fortify his claim that we are all convinced probabilists in matters relating to knowledge, intuitive as well as demonstrative. Mathematicians repeatedly check their work, and then recruit competent colleagues to do so as well. What is the rationale for such practices if not as controls designed to increase the probability that their judgments will be instances of genuine knowledge? Indeed, by proceeding in this way, one not only learns how to correct one’s mistakes but discovers new and better techniques for avoiding them in the future. If technical aids and devices exist with an even better track record of controlling for error than the most skilled and experienced mathematicians are able to promise, then we will avail ourselves of them too in order to increase the probability that our original judgment is knowledge (Hume’s example is “the artificial structure of the accompts”—181/ 121—but today we are more apt to place our confidence in the artificial structure of computer programs, the time-tested engineering principles of the machines designed to run them, and the craftsmanship of their builders). And if, at the same time, we are always prepared to avail ourselves of calculi whereby to simplify complex problems, is this too not because past experience has convinced us that such techniques increase the probability still nearer to proof that we are knowing? In the course of surveying various probability-enhancing techniques taken for granted in pure no less than in applied mathematics, Hume develops another, closely related argument for the conclusion that knowledge degenerates into probability: as none will maintain, that our assurance in a long numeration exceeds probability, I may safely affirm, that there scarce is any proposition concerning numbers, of which we can have a fuller security. For ’tis easily possible, by gradually diminishing the numbers, to reduce the longest series of addition to the most simple question, which can be form’d, to an addition of two single numbers; and upon this supposition we shall find it impracticable to shew the precise limits of knowledge and of probability, or discover that particular number, at which the one ends and the other begins. But knowledge and probability are of such contrary and disagreeing natures, that they cannot well run insensibly into each other, and that because they will not divide, but must be either entirely present, or entirely absent. (THN 181/121)


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Because Hume seems to set knowledge together with probability on a single continuum, he has sometimes been accused of confusing different levels of probability in this argument.2 A mathematical judgment is either a genuine instance of knowledge or it is a mistake; and if it is knowledge, no judgment pertaining to the reliability of our faculties in forming it—even if it causes us to lower the probability of reliability to zero—can alter the nature of the original judgment from knowledge to something else. In Humean terms, the first judgment is about an abstract relation of ideas, the second about a matter of fact; and if the capacity of the first to influence our thought and action depends entirely on the second, this already of itself shows that they operate at different levels and do not form part of a single continuum, with no clear divide between them. Yet it seems unlikely that Hume was guilty of such a confusion. In the first place, his theory of reason is everywhere predicated on the existence of a distinction, at the most fundamental level, between knowledge and probability: two irreducible species of certainty, differing both in their causes and nature. If it were so easy for the one to become the other, is it at all likely that he would have spent the whole of Treatise I/iii erecting a theory of human understanding predicated on that difference? Second, if Hume had designed his argument to show that knowledge and probability dovetail into one another, he would have had to retract the claim he makes at the start of Treatise I/iv/§1 that “In all demonstrative sciences the rules are certain and infallible.” For there is no way to acquaint ourselves with these rules except in judgments; and since he expressly precluded the possibility of error, the certainty of these judgments must have the character of (intuitive) knowledge rather than proof. Third, Hume is equally explicit in the remainder of the opening paragraph of the section that it is only with the application of the rules of mathematics that knowledge degenerates into probability; there is nothing in the argument to suggest that he did not acknowledge a clear divide between knowledge and probability that prevents us from extending its conclusion to these rules themselves.3 Finally, and most important, the necessity of any genuine mathematical equation has its locus not in the ideas considered but “only in the act of the understanding, by which we consider and compare these ideas” (THN 166/112; chapter 18-A). From the ideas alone, without the rules whereby we consider and compare them, we cannot hope to advance beyond definitions to make a single new mathematical discovery (49–50/37). The rules of the demonstrative sciences thus play a role in mathematical reasoning analogous to that performed by impressions in empirical reasoning: they are the point from which cognitive transitions in thought (inferences) take their start. As such, they can no more become the targets 2. Hacking may not have been the first to make this oft-iterated charge, but he remains its most effective exponent; see “Species,” esp. section 9; also Robert Fogelin, Hume’s Skepticism in the Treatise of Human Nature, 19–20 and 174n6 (London: Routledge, 1985). Many other objections to Hume’s reasoning have been proposed, but the confusion of levels seems to me the most compelling that is also well grounded in the text. 3. See also Owen: “This does not cast doubt on the existence of demonstration; it casts doubt on our being sure that the faculty of reason has functioned properly in any particular instance of demonstration. . . . [Hume’s] claim that ‘knowledge degenerates into probability’ must mean . . . something like ‘knowledge claims become embedded in belief claims’” (Reason 179 and n4).

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of any skepticism aimed at reason than sense impressions can, since no reasoning, properly so called, takes place until a transition in thought from the rules—some application of them—is actually made. It therefore is not just unnecessary but impossible for Hume’s skeptical argument to go so far as to engulf even the basic rules from which mathematical reasoning takes its start. Hume’s view that the necessity of any mathematical relation lies not in the ideas considered but “in the act of the understanding, by which we consider and compare these ideas” (THN 166/112) seems to me the key to understanding why, at least at the first stage, there is no confusion of levels in his skeptical argument. For if the locus of mathematical discovery (as opposed to mathematical definitions—49–50/37) is the determination of the mind in comparing ideas rather than the ideas themselves, then, far from being an afterthought at a subsequent level of consideration, the fact that our faculties are “fallible and uncertain” (180/121)— and, with it, probability—enters immediately and essentially into all mathematical knowledge as such, even applications of the rules as simple as finding the product of 2 times 2 (Hume’s example on 166/112) or the “addition of two single numbers” (181/121). To be sure, when the applications are fewest and most straightforward, the probability amounts to proof, and no one can entertain the least doubt that the applications are error-free. Nevertheless, the introduction into the process of knowledge acquisition of anything of a probable character, no matter how high the probability, is sufficient to reduce the result of the application of the rules from knowledge (intuitive certainty) to probability. If one were to counter that in some cases the difference between a rule of the demonstrative sciences and its application is so vanishingly small that probability has no room in which to insinuate itself, this would only serve to confirm Hume’s point that we cannot be certain where knowledge ends and probability begins, since it amounts to conceding that something which, by its very nature, should always be “entirely present, or entirely absent” (181/121) is never without an area of gray. Otherwise, if even so much as a single addition in a series of additions were as free from considerations of probability as the rules themselves, then every one wou’d be so, and consequently the whole or total sum; unless the whole can be different from all its parts. I had almost said, that this was certain; but I reflect, that it must reduce itself, as well as every other reasoning, and from knowledge degenerate into probability.

B. Skepticism With Regard to Reason: How Probability Reduces to Nothing The second stage of Hume’s skeptical argument begins with the observation that our judgments of probability are just as much in need of a second judgment to act as a check or control as our mathematical judgments are. We all have had experience of being mistaken about the probability we ascribed to matters of fact and real existence. Experience and skill in the estimation of probabilities differs from person to person with respect to the same matters of fact or real existence, and in


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the same person with respect to different matters or the same matters at different points in life (EHU V/i ¶5n and IX ¶5n). Accordingly, the most rational reasoners will regulate the confidence they place in any probable judgment by a judgment of the judger’s competences and infirmities to judge that particular matter of fact or real existence. Yet this second judgment is only as reliable as one’s ability to estimate the reliability of a person’s cognitive faculties, one’s own or anyone else’s: Having thus found in every probability, beside the original uncertainty inherent in the subject, a new uncertainty deriv’d from the weakness of that faculty, which judges, and having adjusted these two together, we are oblig’d by our reason to add a new doubt deriv’d from the possibility of error in the estimation we make of the truth and fidelity of our faculties. (THN 182/122)

With each new judgment—on the original matter of fact or real existence, on the competence of the judger to estimate its probability, on our own competence to judge the competence of judgers—our confidence diminishes, however slightly. And the process does not end there, since the confidence we place in our third judgment must itself be weaken’d by a fourth doubt of the same kind, and so on in infinitum; till at last there remain nothing of the original probability, however great we may suppose it to have been, and however small the diminution by every new uncertainty. No finite object can subsist under a decrease repeated in infinitum; and even the vastest quantity, which can enter into human imagination, must in this manner be reduc’d to nothing. . . . When I reflect on the natural fallibility of my judgment, I have less confidence in my opinions, than when I only consider the objects concerning which I reason; and when I proceed still farther, to turn the scrutiny against every successive estimation I make of my faculties, all the rules of logic require a continual diminution, and at last a total extinction of belief and evidence. (182–3/122)

Hume’s skeptical argument seems even more vulnerable to the charge of confusing levels of probability in its second stage than its first. For, in fact, the original estimation of probability “deriv’d from the nature of the object” remains what it is regardless of the estimation we form of the reliability of the judgment “deriv’d from the nature of the understanding” (THN 182/122). This is because evidence relating to the reliability of the understanding of the judger is neither here nor there where the objects in the original judgment are concerned. The only evidence relevant to the latter is our experience of objects similar to these in the past. Hence, even if past experience confers a certainty amounting to proof of the unreliability of the judger, this is incapable of affecting the probability the judger assigns to the object on the basis of an experience confined to those objects and nothing else. And the same is true for each of the levels Hume distinguishes: the probability assigned to the judger’s probable judgment of the object draws on different evidence (different experiences) from the probability assigned to the judgment of the probable accuracy of the judger’s probable judgment of the object, and

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so on. Thus, the multiplication of uncertainty that Hume supposes to be implied by “all the rules of logic” is in fact a violation of those very rules. Yet it is not difficult to see that this objection has more to do with Hume’s phraseology than his meaning. For what really is at issue in the second stage of the skeptical argument of Treatise I/iv/§1, it seems to me, is the rationality of probable reasoning, not just probable reasoning per se. In chapter 19, I argued that, for Hume, probable reasoning consists in drawing inferences from impressions to ideas founded on the imputation of a necessary connection to the objects concerned (levels I—II of section B); and such reasoning counts as rational insofar as it is founded on transferences of past experience to the future, which itself depends on belief in the uniformity of nature (levels III—IV). Since experience is “the true standard” (THN 113/78) of all rational probable reasoning, any inference we draw from an impression to an idea that disregards, or deliberately flouts, all the checks and controls on which we rely in order to bring our reasoning into conformity with this standard must be regarded, respectively, as unreasonable or irrational. Checks and controls are indispensable to preventing the understanding from becoming the plaything of every whim, ebb and flow of the passions, trivial considerations of interest or pleasure, laziness, hastiness, miseducation, and every other kind of “unphilosophical” influence that experience shows to increase the likelihood of error (Treatise I/iii/§13 and Enquiry X/ii). Even if the judgment is true, it would be as arbitrary and devoid of cognitive worth as the calculations of someone who always persisted in his first result and refused all checks and controls. Accordingly, a second judgment about the reliability of our faculties, based on the application of the requisite checks and controls, is an essential part of all rational probable reasoning as such, not merely a discretionary adjunct. But what about this new judgment? If it were arrived at without the guidance of the checks and controls requisite to ensure its conformity to the true standard of empirical rationality, then the whole reasoning, composed of this judgment together with the original one, will fail to be rational. So in order to persist in a course of probable reasoning that is at no point unreasonable or irrational, a third judgment is necessary to apply checks and controls to the second, then a fourth to apply checks and controls to their third, and so on ad infinitum. While this struggle to keep probable reasoning on a rational course is going on, however, there is an additional risk of error to be taken into account at each step, since each time we apply a check and control there is a certain probability that we will misapply it: each time we enlist someone to back us up, there is a certain probability of miscommunication; each time we rely on a technique or device to eliminate the vagaries to which even the most skillful and experienced reasoners are liable (double-ledger bookkeeping, surveyor’s level, computer, etc.), there is a probability that we will employ it incorrectly; and so on for every check or control we apply. The uncertainty is further compounded by the fact that, with the application of each new check and control, the complexity of the task of ensuring our judgments are rational increases exponentially, and therewith the risk of error as well. As a result, we do not need to proceed very far at all, much less ad infinitum, before we find ourselves so overwhelmed with the complexity of the task of making our probable judgments rational that nothing remains of the original prob-


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ability. The costs of applying the checks and controls necessary to ensure the rationality of any piece of empirical reasoning turn out to be so great that, no matter how high the original probability, it must “in this manner be reduc’d to nothing” (182/122). It is therefore not probable reasoning per se that is selfundermining but its conjunction with the insistence that it conform to the highest standards of rationality: this, when pursued to its outrance, leads inexorably to the conclusion “that all is uncertain, and that our judgment is not in any thing possest of any measures of truth and falsehood” (183/123). C. Why Skepticism With Regard to Reason Convinces No One In the view of many commentators, the purpose of Hume’s argument in Treatise I/ iv/§1 is to show that reason, on any conception other than his own, must inevitably destroy itself.4 In support of this reading is Hume’s own testimony that “My intention then in displaying so carefully the arguments of [the skeptics], is only to make the reader sensible of the truth of my hypothesis, that all our reasonings concerning causes and effects are deriv’d from nothing but custom; and that belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures” (THN 183/123). Yet however tempting this way of viewing the argument may be, it overlooks the fact that, right after saying this, Hume runs the skeptical argument a second time with his own conception of empirical reason in the dock: “But here, perhaps, it may be demanded, how it happens, even upon my hypothesis, that these arguments above explain’d produce not a total suspense of judgment, and after what manner the mind ever retains a degree of assurance in any subject?” (184/ 123). Hume does not rehearse the first stage of the argument, no doubt because it makes no difference to the reduction of knowledge to probability how we conceive probable reason (as an affair of the enlivening of ideas in associative imagination or not). Instead, he proceeds directly to determine whether its second stage is equally effective in reducing our belief in the conclusion of any probable reasoning to nothing irrespective of whether belief is conceived as a “simple act of the thought” or as “some sensation or peculiar manner of conception”: as these new probabilities, which by their repetition perpetually diminish the original evidence, are founded on the very same principles, whether of thought or sensation, as the primary judgment, it may seem unavoidable, that in either case they must equally subvert it, and by the opposition, either of contrary thoughts or sensations, reduce the mind to a total uncertainty. 4. William E. Morris, for example, identifies the target of the argument as the same “prevalent rationalist or intellectualist model of the way the mind works” that Hume had earlier set out to demolish in “the famous argument of Part III about causal inference,” namely, “the view that our causal expectations are . . . based on reasoning”; (“Hume’s Scepticism about Reason,” Hume Studies 15, 1 (1989), 57). Dauer takes a similar line: “when Hume attacks reason, he is pretty clearly attacking the role claimed for it by internalists like Descartes” (“Hume’s Scepticism with Regard to Reason: A Reconsideration,” Hume Studies 22, 2 (Nov. 1996), 217.

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The answer is that it is indeed unavoidable. Yet to see why, we need, as before, to recognize that what is here at issue is not probable reasoning per se but ensuring that it proceeds on a rational foundation. Rational belief, whether on Hume’s view or that to which it was opposed, is a matter of proportioning belief to experience; they differ only in that the instinctive psychological operation of idea-enlivening customary association is cast by Hume as the principal means (the natural regulator) whereby this proportioning is achieved (chapter 19). But the means makes no difference where the skeptical argument is concerned. All that matters to it is that customary association is just as susceptible as the alternative to having its influence on belief formation vitiated or thwarted by whims, the ebb and flow of the passions, trivial considerations of interest or pleasure, laziness, and other causes able to throw our beliefs out of alignment with experience and thereby magnify the risk of error.5 For this means that the formation of rational belief, on Hume’s account, no less than on any other, is a perpetual battle against forces that would prevent probable reasoning from conforming to its true standard of experience— a struggle in which the only hope of success lies in the development of checks and controls powerful enough to counteract these forces: I suppose, there is some question propos’d to me, and that after revolving over the impressions of my memory and senses, and carrying my thoughts from them to such objects, as are commonly conjoin’d with them, I feel a stronger and more forcible conception on the one side, than on the other. This strong conception forms my first decision. I suppose, that afterwards I examine my judgment itself, and observing from experience, that ’tis sometimes just and sometimes erroneous, I consider it as regulated by contrary principles or causes, of which some lead to truth, and some to error; and in ballancing these contrary causes, I diminish by a new probability the assurance of my first decision. This new probability is liable to the same diminution as the foregoing, and so on, in infinitum.

It makes no difference whether we regard belief as an act of thought or a sensation and manner of conception: the skeptical argument shows that the endeavor to ensure it a rational foundation is self-undermining, and cannot fail to reduce all probabilities, including proofs, to nothing. By any conception, then, true reason— perfect rationality—destroys itself, and “We have, therefore, no choice left but betwixt a false reason and none at all” (268/174). Yet even if Hume’s conception of empirical reason is just as susceptible to the skeptical argument as its rival, there is another, more important regard in which he deemed its superiority indisputable: it alone is consistent with, and capable of explaining, the complete failure of the skeptical argument to convince anyone, including those who, like Hume, are persuaded of its conformity to the highest 5. This is why, on Hume’s conception of reason as much as on any other, “Our reason must be consider’d as a kind of cause, of which truth is the natural effect; but such-a-one as by the irruption of other causes, and by the inconstancy of our mental powers, may frequently be prevented” (THN 180/ 121). What Treatise I/iv/§1 shows is that the endeavor to reason conformably to the highest canons of empirical rationality is just such an eruption.


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canons of empirical rationality (“all the rules of logic,” THN 183/122). If being “convinced” by a piece of probable reasoning—“accepting” its conclusion—means thinking and acting accordingly, then acceptance of the skeptical argument implies that one would from that moment stop drawing inferences either from one’s impressions of sense and memory or from the rules of the demonstrative sciences, or, at least, that one would never again reason or act according to the conclusions of such inferences. For example, skeptical arguments notwithstanding, if you are deep inside a forest and you hear a loud growl nearby, you cannot help inferring (believing) from this impression that a beast is fast closing in on your position. Nor can you prevent this involuntary belief from striking you with an equally involuntary feeling of terror, and this in turn causing a desire to take to your heels and run as fast as you can the other way. By contrast, a true skeptic with regard to reason, finding himself in the same situation, would experience none of these perceptions. For, in his endeavor to ensure the rationality of his inference, he would promptly decide that his judgment that a beast is approaching has no probability at all. His fear and flight response would consequently not be triggered until the beast actually came into view, that is, when he no longer had to rely on probable reasoning. And even if the skeptic still somehow managed to escape that time, it seems clear that his attitude must sooner or later prove fatal. It is therefore no wonder that “Nature, by an absolute and uncontroulable necessity has determin’d us to judge as well as to breathe and feel” (183/123). The challenge posed to the philosopher of empirical reason by our natural immunity to the skeptical argument is this: empirical rationality itself, however we conceive of it, implies that the endeavor to keep empirical reasoning on a rational course must in the end reduce all belief to nothing, and so inevitably self-destruct; since this never actually happens, is there any conception of reason that can be reconciled with the facts, and even permit them to be explained? Hume’s contention is that the conception of empirical reason/rationality that makes it a matter purely of thought, with no place for any affective element (facility, vivacity), fails. Understanding why is no easy task, since Hume told us next to nothing about the specifics of the conception to which he was opposed. Since he clearly meant to capture every serious philosophical conception still in play before he himself entered the lists, he presumably took it for granted that his reader would not need it to be spelled out. This much, however, seems clear: empirical reasoning, on the pre-Humean view, also consists of transitions of thought from present or remembered matters of fact or real existence to inferred ones on the basis of the uniformity principle, commensurately with past experience. The difference is that the transition of thought becomes a relation between the objects concerned not through something we come to feel when considering them after repeated acquaintance with their conjunction (facility feeling), but rather through the addition of some new content in our conception of the objects (or through making clear and distinct a content that formerly was only obscurely perceived). Since each becomes part of the content of the other in something like the way their relation makes the ideas of mountain and valley part of one another’s content, the related ideas cease to be distinct in the sense of the separability principle. Similarly, if belief, instead of being affective in nature, “is some new idea, such as that of reality or existence,

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which we join to the simple conception of an object” (THN 623/396), it becomes conceptually impossible to add this idea to the content of one of the related ideas without adding it also to the content of the other, to the degree of certainty prescribed by the conceptual relation between them. Accordingly, the anti-Humean is committed to the following thesis about belief: any reality or existence inferable from another must also be believed, on pain of contradiction. For if belief were indeed of the same nature as thought, it would quite literally be self-contradictory to attach belief to premises P1 . . . Pn but not to the conclusion C if P1 . . . Pn are related to C in such a way that their conjunction conceptually determines the mind to form the idea of C. Accordingly, if we let C be the conclusion of the skeptical argument (“that all is uncertain, and that our judgment is not in any thing possest of any measures of truth and falshood,” THN 183/123), and if we accept all the premises (as Hume clearly thinks the commitment to rationality in probable reasoning obligates us to do), then to infer C from these premises renders it quite literally impossible not to believe C as well, if belief is nothing but “a simple act of thought.” Accordingly, the fact we we do not believe C even after accepting all of P1 . . . Pn suffices to nullify the entire conception of empirical reason that implies the impossibility of not believing it. For if the only way we could fail to accept the conclusion of the skeptical argument is by violating the principle of noncontradiction, then not even the force of nature, which “by an absolute and uncontroulable necessity has determin’d us to judge as well as to breathe and feel,” could induce us to disbelieve what we cannot even so much as conceive to be false. The fact that all of us retain a complete conviction as to its falsehood thus demonstrates that belief cannot be a simple act of thought and nullifies any conception of empirical reasoning implying that it is. Matters turn out very differently when we shift to Hume’s conception of empirical reason/rationality. If affect, far from being incidental to ideas of relation and beliefs in real existence, constitutes their very essence (chapter 17), then probable reasoning is no more subject to the principle of noncontradiction than itches, thirst, and fears are. In particular, since nothing can logically (conceptually) necessitate a feeling, there can be no contradiction in not believing C despite (1) accepting that all of P1 . . . Pn and (2) conceding that, by all the rules of rational reasoning, they have an evidential relation to C sufficient to make any perfectly rational being who believes P1 . . . Pn also believe C. All that is requisite for this to occur is some cause that prevents the transference of vivacity affect from the vividly conceived premises to the conclusion from occurring. To what did Hume attribute such an obstructive power? There are only two: either a lack of facility feeling (the indifference of chance) or a greater contrary facility favoring a different transition of thought (chapter 17-B). It thus should come as no surprise that he attributed the impotence of the skeptical argument to a want of facility feeling in the transition to the conception of C: after the first and second decision; as the action of the mind becomes forc’d and unnatural, and the ideas faint and obscure; tho’ the principles of judgment, and the ballancing of opposite causes be the same as at the very beginning; yet their influence on the imagination, and the vigour they add to, or diminish from the


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thought, is by no means equal. Where the mind reaches not its objects with easiness and facility, the same principles have not the same effect as in a more natural conception of the ideas; nor does the imagination feel a sensation, which holds any proportion with that which arises from its common judgments and opinions. The attention is on the stretch: The posture of the mind is uneasy; and the spirits being diverted from their natural course, are not govern’d in their movements by the same laws, at least not to the same degree, as when they flow in their usual channel. (THN 185/124)

D. The Primacy of Facility Affect in Hume’s Theory of Understanding Interpreters who disregard or overlook the central importance of the affective dimension of associative thought to Hume’s theory of understanding are inevitably puzzled by what seems to them not only a weak, ad hoc explanation of the skeptical argument’s incapacity to convince, but one that is so transparently false.6 After all, no one with the training requisite to master a complex scientific argument will, after scrutinizing and being convinced by the evidence marshalled in its favor, have any more difficulty accepting its conclusion, and conforming his thought and action to it thereafter, than is the case with ordinary inferences in common life. The sciences and other learned disciplines abound in examples of “subtile reasoning,” demanding immense efforts of comprehension, that nonetheless command strong and enduring assent. This seems beyond dispute: we bet our money on them and trust our lives to them (airplanes, particle accelerators, leukemia treatments, etc.). By contrast, Hume’s skeptical arguments require little expertise to comprehend, and are far less difficult to grasp than Newton’s reasoning in the Principia. Their subject matter may be off the beaten path, but that still does not seem to warrant his assertion that “The same argument, which wou’d have been esteem’d convincing in a reasoning concerning history or politics, has little or no influence in these abstruser subjects, even tho’ it be perfectly comprehended; and that because there is requir’d a study and an effort of thought, in order to its being comprehended” (THN 185/124). If perfectly comprehended, does it not follow that all the difficulties have been overcome? Why should we still have trouble believing its conclusion if the premises and their relation to the conclusion are exactly analogous to equally complex probable arguments in other abstruse learned disciplines that elicit the assent of everyone who succeeds in comprehending them? In any event, if indeed, as Hume maintains, it is “the same argument” in both domains, then it would appear that his explanation fails to identify any abstruseness specific to skeptical reasoning that, by contrast with other forms of complex rea6. According to John Passmore, “Hume tries to operate with a bold sweeping associationist psychology, but has constantly to supplement it with subsidiary ‘propensities.’ There is a suspiciously ad hoc air about the supplementation”; Hume’s Intentions, 3rd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1980), 75–6. Paul Guyer also seems to hold such a view: “Hume simply invokes certain natural tendencies of the mind to strengthen or weaken the vivacity of ideas under certain circumstances” (“Psychology,” in Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 53). It is principally to the neglect of the role of facility feeling as the essence of relation that such verdicts should be traced.

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soning, can explain why, even after it is “perfectly comprehended,” the conclusion continues to strike us as “forc’d and unnatural.” We therefore seem to be left with either a trivial, uninformative explanation—that we believe what we find easy to believe and do not believe what we find difficult to believe—or no explanation at all, simply the brute fact, wrapped up in “pretty phrases,”7 that human beings have a natural disinclination to believe complex arguments whose subject matter is the probability of error itself.8 Yet if we consent to take Hume at his word and recognize in facility affect the essence of all nonintuitively evident relations between distinct ideas (chapter 17B), his solution to the problem posed by the failure of skepticism regarding reason to convince assumes a very different aspect. The feature of the skeptical argument that makes it so centrally important to Hume’s purposes is its perfect conformity to the canons of empirical rationality: Reason first appears in possession of the throne, prescribing laws, and imposing maxims, with an absolute sway and authority. Her enemy, therefore, is oblig’d to take shelter under her protection, and by making use of rational arguments to prove the fallaciousness and imbecility of reason, produces, in a manner, a patent under her hand and seal. This patent has at first an authority, proportion’d to the present and immediate authority of reason, from which it is deriv’d. But as it is suppos’d to be contradictory to reason, it gradually diminishes the force of that governing power, and its own at the same time; till at last they both vanish away into nothing, by a regular and just diminution. The sceptical and dogmatical reasons are of the same kind, tho’ contrary in their operation and tendency; so that where the latter is strong, it has an enemy of equal force in the former to encounter; and as their forces were at first equal, they still continue so, as long as either of them subsists; nor does one of them lose any force in the contest, without taking as much from its antagonist. (186–7/125)

The rationality of the skeptical argument is clear from the fact that it invokes no premise lacking the full imprimatur of experience and habit: the original judgment of probability; the judgment that our faculties are uncertain and fallible; and the time-tested checks and controls used to counteract this uncertainty and fallibility. Its reduction of probability to nothing follows not for want of these checks and controls, much less in spite of them, but precisely because of them. In the very process of ensuring that the inference from the impression to the idea adheres to the canons of empirical rationality, they have the unintended effect of nullifying the very relation of necessary connection on which the inference depends, by depriving it of the facility constitutive of or presupposed by all such relations. Or rather: they would nullify it that were it not the case that, before this can happen, the relentless repetition the argument calls for—endlessly checking and controlling not only the original judgment but every correction of it as well— 7. Hacking, “Species,” 30. 8. Thus Guyer: “the natural tendency of the mind to increase its estimation of the probability of error in any long calculation through reflection upon its own fallibility is counterbalanced by its equally natural disinclination to carry out any long calculations about the probability of error itself” (“Psychology,” 52).


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deprives the argument itself of the “easiness and facility” (THN 185/124) requisite to produce conviction. For what we need to recognize is that the final arbiter of belief, in Hume’s theory of the understanding, is not experience and habit, the ebb and the flow of the passions, or any of the other causes that influence the formation of beliefs, considered in themselves, but rather the facility they produce, or fail to produce, in transitions from impressions to ideas. Indeed, of all the general maxims in his science of human nature, none is more basic or important to understanding understanding than the vivacity-transference maxim: the principle that the vivacity of an idea is directly proportionate to the intensity of the facility felt in the transition to it from an impression (chapter 17-C). What the skeptical argument makes clear, more effectively and emphatically than anything else in Hume’s system, is the primacy of facility affect in the economy of human understanding. For it shows that when experience and habit fail in their usual effect of facilitating transitions of thought, they ipso facto lose their power over our reason. The influence of experience and habit derives entirely from feelings rooted in human nature; and that same nature, by introducing limits to their power to engender these feelings, “breaks the force of all sceptical arguments in time, and keeps them from having any considerable influence on the understanding” (187/125). This is not to say that Hume needed the skeptical argument of Treatise I/iv/§1 to establish the primacy of facility affect, since this was built into the accounts both of the origin of necessary connection and of the nature and workings of probable reasoning developed in I/iii (from 98–9/69 onward). So if his introduction of skepticism with regard to reason is not to appear meretricious, we need to recognize that he needed it to establish something else, no less essential to his system, that could be demonstrated in no other way. What this is should now be clear: the more specific thesis that facility affect has primacy over every principle of human understanding, including experience and habit, in the determination of belief. This, in my view, is the method to Hume’s apparent madness in conceding that his own notion of rational belief (“a sensation or peculiar manner of conception”) is just as much at the mercy of skepticism with regard to reason as its contrary (“a simple act of thought”). The skeptical argument, uniquely, provided him with a means to prize facility affect loose from experience-bred customary association and set them in opposition to each other, thus making it possible, for the first time, to assess which of the two is the more powerful factor in probable reasoning. In this respect, the argument is best compared to a critical experiment in science, devised for the purpose of isolating factors that are seldom if ever found separately in nature, much less in opposition, in order to distinguish their individual actions and their respective effects. Indeed, it is difficult to think of another, much less a better, way in which Hume could have established that facility affect prevails in any contest with experience and habit for the favor of empirical reason in order to prepare the way for the even more prominent role he assigned to facility in connection with identity relations (chapter 17-B). Hume’s treatment of skepticism with regard to reason thus proves indispensable to the completeness and furtherance of his design in the first book of the Treatise, by showing the principle that vivacity follows, and is proportionate to, facility to be the supreme principle of human understanding because it triumphs irrespective of,

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and even contrary to, the effects of experience and habit. And this in turn is why the skeptical argument returns in the conclusion to that book. For it is precisely because facility trumps the rationality founded on experience and habit (265/172– 3)—the rationality impeccably displayed in the skeptical argument—that we find ourselves with “no choice left but betwixt a false reasoning and none at all” (268174) and why “Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium” (269/175).

E. Other Proofs of the Primacy of Facility in Hume’s Science of Human Nature Once we recognize that the point of “Scepticism with regard to reason” is to establish the primacy of facility (relation) over experience and habit in the determination of vivacity (belief in real existence), other illustrations of this primacy in the Treatise leap out at us as well. Education is a case in point. By dint of mere repetition, an idea may “acquire a facility and force” (116/80) even without being associated to an impression and, a fortiori, frequent experience of its conjunction with such an impression: All those opinions and notions of things, to which we have been accustom’d from our infancy, take such deep root, that ’tis impossible for us, by all the powers of reason and experience, to eradicate them; and this habit not only approaches in its influence, but even on many occasions prevails over that which arises from the constant and inseparable union of causes and effects. . . . I am persuaded, that upon examination we shall find more than one half of those opinions, that prevail among mankind, to be owing to education, and that the principles, which are thus embrac’d, over-ballance those, which are owing either to abstract reasoning or experience. (THN 116–17/80)

As with education, the testimony of others is apt to create a strong connection in the mind not only from the things witnessed to the words used to portray them but in the other direction as well. These words call up ideas in imagination, which, by an easy transition of resemblance, tend to be related to a cause in objects present to the senses. When this propensity is afterward given too free a rein, we become credulous, and readily receive as true all manner of reports “concerning apparitions, enchantments, and prodigies” that not only lack empirical support but are “contrary to daily experience and observation” (113/78). And a final example of this type is the liar. For just as education, by frequent repetition, confers a “facility and force” on a relation of ideas, so too the frequent telling of a lie, and the counterfeiting of belief, may eventually turn into the real thing: liars . . . by the frequent repetition of their lies, come at last to believe and remember them, as realities; custom and habit having in this case, as in many


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others, the same influence on the mind as nature, and infixing the idea with equal force and vigour. (86/60–1)

A different kind of case illustrating the primacy of facility over experiencebred custom concerns beliefs contrary to experience that we cannot stop from influencing our imagination even after we have applied the checks and controls that usually suffice to neutralize them. Fears and phobias are obvious examples, as Hume makes graphically clear in his description of a man, who being hung out from a high tower in a cage of iron cannot forbear trembling, when he surveys the precipice below him, tho’ he knows himself to be perfectly secure from falling, by his experience of the solidity of the iron which supports him; and tho’ the ideas of fall and descent, and harm and death, be deriv’d solely from custom and experience. The same custom goes beyond the instances, from which it is deriv’d, and to which it perfectly corresponds; and influences his ideas of such objects as are in some respects resembling, but fall not precisely under the same rule. (THN 148/101)

The situation Hume describes is more common in the age of skyscraper elevators and airplanes. Those who are overcome by a terror of plunging to their deaths when riding in them are usually no less aware than the rest of us that experience proves the risk to be negligible. Yet to such a person, the mere sight of an elevator to the sixtieth floor, or of a plane ready to be boarded, so invigorates his imagination that he “makes the transition with greater facility” to the idea of falling to his death, “and consequently conceives the object with greater force” (151/102). No checks and controls can then overcome his belief that he is at imminent risk of falling to his death, and prevent him from being overcome by terror at the prospect. In general, anything the effect of which is to invigorate the imagination to the point of facilitating its transition to an associated idea will have a comparable effect on the vivacity with which it regards the object, that is, on one’s belief in its real existence. Checks and controls will then be of only limited efficacy in combatting the effect of the passions of surprise and wonder, religious enthusiasm, vanity, self-interest, eloquence, the pleasure of being in the know, and, in general, “any extraordinary ferment of the blood and spirits” (123/84; also EHU X/ii ¶¶ 16–19), up to and including madness. And, conversely, anything that enervates the imagination in such a way as to obstruct its transition to an idea, is equally able to throw our beliefs out of alignment with what experience and habit prescribe, whether we will or not. Another class of examples has already been considered: instances of projective illusion (chapter 17-D). Here it suffices to recall the case of continued, distinct existence (the imperfect identity maintained by sensible things notwithstanding interruptions in their appearance to the mind). The causal coherence of sensible things plays a major part in the attribution of such an existence to them (THN 73– 4/53), as Hume illustrated by describing a recent occasion when the porter knocked at his door to deliver a letter from a distant friend (195–7/130–1): the gravity of a human body would have prevented him from reaching Hume’s upper floor door unless the staircase outside his chamber continued in existence since he last tread

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upon it; the letter he holds in his hand could not have reached him from where its writer posted it if the intervening lands and sea did not still exist, and if there had not been carriers who traversed them; the paper seller, the paper mill, the tree from whence the paper came, and so on and on. However, this inference to the continued, distinct existence of these things cannot be supported by experience and habit alone: ’tis evident, that whenever we infer the continu’d existence of the objects of sense from their coherence, and the frequency of their union, ’tis in order to bestow on the objects a greater regularity than what is observ’d in our mere perceptions. We remark a connexion betwixt two kinds of objects in their past appearance to the senses, but are not able to observe this connexion to be perfectly constant, since the turning about of our head, or the shutting of our eyes is able to break it. What then do we suppose in this case, but that these objects still continue their usual connexion, notwithstanding their apparent interruption, and that the irregular appearances are join’d by something, of which we are insensible? But as all reasoning concerning matters of fact arises only from custom, and custom can only be the effect of repeated perceptions, the extending of custom and reasoning beyond the perceptions can never be the direct and natural effect of the constant repetition and connexion, but must arise from the co-operation of other principles. (197–8/131–2)

These other principles, as we have seen (chapter 17), relate specifically to the affective disposition of the imagination, and have their locus in successive facile transitions between resembling ideas and resembling relations of ideas (202–4/ 135–6 and n). Vivacity—belief in continued, distinct existents—follows in the wake of this affective disposition: “Here then we have a propensity to feign the continu’d existence of all sensible objects; and as this propensity arises from some lively impressions of the memory, it bestows a vivacity on that fiction; or in other words, makes us believe the continu’d existence of body” (209/138). The vivacity of different memories is pooled together to form a single, very vivid idea when different memories are considered to be perceptions of a single continued, distinct existent. Thus, thanks to the facile transitions that lead to the confusion with perfect identity (206–8/137–8), together with the projective illusion that increases causal coherence beyond what is possible on the basis of experience and habit alone (198/132), we form an unshakeable belief in something that experience and habit (empirical reason) not only cannot support (193/129) but even contradict (231/152 and 266/173). Yet possibly the most striking illustration of the primacy of facility in Hume’s system of human nature relates to the production not of vivacity feeling (understanding) but of pride and humility, love and hatred (passions). According to Hume, these “indirect passions” are products of a double relation of impressions and ideas (Treatise II/i/§§ 1–2). In accordance with the nature of relation as facility of transition, this means that “these two attractions or associations of impressions and ideas . . . mutually assist each other, and the transition of the affections and of the imagination is made with the greatest ease and facility” (THN 289/189), that is, “The two impulses concur with each other, and render the whole transition more smooth and easy” (339/220). Conversely, where other factors intervene to


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enfeeble or eliminate the facility of transition with respect to either or both of these relations, then, notwithstanding experience and habit or the presence of everything requisite for relations viewed “philosophically” (in the sense detailed at 13–15/14–15, 94/65, and 170/114), neither pride nor humility, love nor hatred, will arise. We see these principles most clearly at work in the final three of Hume’s eight “Experiments to confirm this system” in Treatise II/ii/§2. To appreciate the force of Hume’s otherwise puzzling claim that “not only the variations resolve themselves into the general principle, but even the variations of these variations” (THN 347/225), we need only to keep in mind that a double relation of impressions and ideas is, in accordance with the “nature and essence of relation” (204/135),9 impossible without a double facile transition. That is, the power of one relation to cause the other depends entirely on the presence of an adequate degree of facility feeling; failing this, even if the relation obtains “philosophically,” it will fail to produce its usual effect. Accordingly, the method common to Hume’s final three experiments is to show that if any circumstance prevents, counterbalances, or outweighs the facility felt in one or both directions of relation, then the relation will fail of its usual effect on the passions, imagination, or both, thus putting it beyond all doubt that, for him, facility is the decisive factor in the capacity of any relation to influence our thought or action. The sixth experiment concerns the following asymmetry: love or hatred for another commonly produces the resembling passion of pride or humility in oneself, whereas pride or humility in oneself does not as a rule produce love or hatred for another. Since the same relations exist objectively in both directions, this asymmetry might appear to confound the prediction implicit in the system of double relation. To this objection, Hume responds by conceding the presence of the relevant relations, but locates the cause of the asymmetry in the differing degrees of facility affect characterizing the relation of ideas in one direction as opposed to the other. In particular, experience shows that a transition of thought from a less vivid to a more vivid idea of an object feels more facile to the imagination than one in the opposite direction;10 and since the idea of the self is the most vivid of all ideas,11 it follows that any transition toward it is bound to be that much easier, and any transition away from it that much more difficult than is true, ceteris paribus, of any other idea: I have observ’d, that those two faculties of the mind, the imagination and passions, assist each other in their operation, when their propensities are similar, and when they act upon the same object. . . . The two impulses concur with each other, and render the whole transition more smooth and easy. But if it shou’d 9. The thesis that facility is the essence of relation recurs or is echoed in Treatise II and III on 305/ 199, 309/201, 355–6/230, 378/243–4, 510n/327n. 10. “The imagination passes easily from obscure to lively ideas, but with difficulty from lively to obscure. In the one case the relation is aided by another principle: In the other case, ’tis oppos’d by it” (THN 339/220). 11. “’Tis evident, that as we are at all times intimately conscious of ourselves, our sentiments and passions, their ideas must strike upon us with greater vivacity than the ideas of the sentiments and passions of any other person.” (THN 339/220; also 317/206–7 and 353/228–9). See also chapter 17-D, esp. note 12.

590

HUME’S AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES happen, that while the relation of ideas, strictly speaking, continues the same, its influence, in causing a transition of the imagination, shou’d no longer take place, ’tis evident its influence on the passions must also cease, as being dependent entirely on that transition. This is the reason why pride or humility is not transfus’d into love or hatred with the same ease, that the latter passions are chang’d into the former. . . . The passage is smooth and open from the consideration of any person related to us to that of ourself, of whom we are every moment conscious. But when the affections are once directed to ourself, the fancy passes not with the same facility from that object to any other person, how closely so ever connected with us. This easy or difficult transition of the imagination operates upon the passions, and facilitates or retards their transition. (T 339–40/220)

The seventh experiment posits a contrariety between the facility feelings of imagination and the passions, such that the transition easiest and most natural to the former runs contrary to that easiest and most natural to the latter. For example, “Nothing is more natural than to bear a kindness to one brother on account of our friendship with another, without any farther examination of his character. A quarrel with one person gives us a hatred for the whole family, tho’ entirely innocent of that, which displeases us” (THN 341/221). The natural flow of the passions in such a case is from a greater object, such as the head of a family, to lesser, subordinate ones (“our passions, like other objects, descend with greater facility than they ascend,” 342/222). Yet the imagination, by contrast, finds the greatest ease in a transition from a lesser object to a greater one related to it, and only with difficulty can proceed reversewise. As “the affections are a more powerful principle than the imagination” (344/223), the easy transition of passions prevails against the opposition presented by the difficult transition of ideas. Nevertheless, since the transition of passions has much of its facility subtracted from it in overcoming the opposition of imagination, we seek to palliate the imagination, and thereby reduce its resistance, with a new relation that works with instead of against the passions (“’tis commonly by complying with it, and by seeking another quality, which may counter-ballance that principle, from whence the opposition arises,” 345/224). For example, if the servants or subordinate members of the family are in our presence but the head of the household is absent, the superior facility of the contiguity relation in the direction from the remote (absent) greater object to the proximate (present) subordinate object will cancel out some or all of the difficulty the imagination would otherwise feel in a downward transition, thereby leaving “the way open from the one passion to the other” (346/224). The operative principle is that if a relation “by any particular circumstance, ceases to produce its usual effect of facilitating the transition,” then it “ceases likewise to operate on the passions” (345/223). Thus, Hume’s seventh experiment highlights the predominance of facility affect in determining the associations of impressions just as the sixth exhibits it in the association of ideas. The eighth experiment deals with a related anomaly: though the imagination generally passes with difficulty from a contiguous object (oneself) to a remoter one (another person), pride turns easily to love and humility to hatred when the object of love or hatred (another person) is the cause (through praise) of our pride or (through blame) of our humiliation. Why this exception? The “transition in this


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case is not made merely on account of the relation betwixt ourselves and the person; but because that very person is the real cause of our first passion, and of consequence is intimately connected with it” (THN 346/224). Here the causal relation compensates for the want of a facile transition that would otherwise inhibit a transition in thought from something contiguous to something remote; and since the presence of a facile transition of adequate strength, no matter what its nature, supplies the essential condition Hume’s system requires to effect a transition from pride or humility to the resembling impressions of love or hatred, we should have no difficulty understanding why he maintained that this case “is not a contradiction, but an exception to the rule; and an exception that arises from the same reason as the rule itself,” and “is, therefore, rather a confirmation of the rule.” Thus, to appreciate that there is nothing gratuitous or ad hoc in Hume’s claim that “not only the variations resolve themselves into the general principle, but even the variations of these variations” (347/225), we have only to recognize that double relations always resolve into double facile transitions, and that facility takes precedence everything else in the affirmation or denial of any relation of perceptions, be they impressions or ideas. These considerations should suffice to make clear that the passions, just like vivacity affect constitutive of belief in real existence, follow relations only insofar as facility affect smooths the way, but not otherwise. Numerous other examples might be cited as well to illustrate how the recognition that facility is the essence of relation can transform our view of Hume’s treatment of the passions and morals12 from an accumulation of ever more convoluted epicycles, pasted on ad hoc to salvage theory in the face of recalcitrant phenomena, to a marvelously streamlined system of double facile transitions, fully consonant with the methods and doctrines of the first book of the Treatise.13 Suffice it to say that, for Hume, a relation is 12. Since moral sentiment exhibits the same double-relation structure as pride/humility and love/ hate (473/304), facility affect is no less important in the moral domain than in those of understanding and the indirect passions. 13. Treatise II/ii/§4, “Of the love of relations,” is replete with striking examples. In accounting for certain asymmetries in child-parent bonds then (and to some extent still) common in cases of second marriages, Hume relies on facility to distinguish perfect from imperfect relations: “to produce a perfect relation betwixt two objects, ’tis requisite, not only that the imagination be convey’d from one to the other by resemblance, contiguity or causation, but also that it return back from the second to the first with the same ease and facility. . . . For supposing the second object, beside its relation to the first, to have also a strong relation to a third object; in that case the thought, passing from the first object to the second, returns not back with the same facility, tho’ the relation continues the same; but is readily carry’d forward on to the third object, by means of the new relation, which presents itself, and gives a new impulse to the imagination. The fancy is by its very nature wavering and inconstant; and considers always two objects as more strongly related together, where it finds the passage equally easy both in going and returning, than where the transition is easy only in one of these motions” (THN 355–6/230). For example, had Hume’s mother remarried, “The ties of interest and duty bind her to another family, and prevent that return of the fancy from her to myself, which is necessary to support the union. The thought . . . goes with facility, but returns with difficulty.” By contrast, since the imagination moves with greater ease from lesser to greater than from greater to lesser, when the thought goes to the father, “His superiority prevents the easy transition of the thought from him to his spouse, but keeps the passage still open for a return to myself along the same relation of child and parent. He is not sunk in the new relation he acquires; so that the double motion or vibration of thought is still easy and natural”

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nothing but a facile transition; and although the same relation may, in the “philosophical” sense, exist in one direction as in the other, if any circumstance should result in the diminution or elimination of the facility in either or both directions of relation, then the relation ipso facto loses the efficacy it otherwise has vis à vis the indirect passions (just as philosophical causation can only play a role in reasoning insofar as it is founded on natural causal relations constituted by facility affect: THN 94/65). It is therefore not the relation per se but only the appertaining facility of transition that has the power to effect transitions from pleasureful impressions to love or pride and from unpleasant impressions to hatred or humility. The significance of skepticism with regard to reason for Hume’s system of human nature should now be clear as well. With respect to understanding, it shows that vivacity (the source of all our notions of real existence) always follows facility (the source of all our ideas of relations), even if the relations (natural or philosophical) founded on experience and habit are ignored in the process. With respect to the passions and morals, it discloses the unity underlying the apparently convoluted course of Hume’s theorizing, by revealing that (indirect) passions always follow facility, irrespective of (philosophical) relations, and even contrary to the natural propensities of the imagination (facile transitions from obscure to lively, lesser to greater, etc.). Skepticism with regard to reason is therefore intimately bound up with the preeminence Hume assigned to the affective dimension of mentation in the determination of our thoughts and actions; and the neglect of that dimension, more than anything else, seems responsible for much of the incomprehension and hostility that have greeted Hume’s skepticism, in all its forms, from his day to our own.

(357/231). Thus, once again: passions, just like vivacity, follow relations only insofar as facility is constitutive of them, but not otherwise.

Bibliography

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Index

Abstraction. See also Aspects; General representation; Ideas; Language semantic, 198–201, 204–9, 291, 353, 391–2 as special kind of idea given to pure intellect, 33 Actuality. See Existence Affective dispositions, 472n11. See also Association; Facility; Imagination Animals (and animal reason) acuity of certain senses surpasses humans, 352 Ayers situates in normative epistemological framework, 237n6 Berkeley ascribed language of visual spatiality to, 105, 282n6, 346 Hume extends theory of human to animal understanding, 34, 100–2, 510 Hume seems to attribute general representation to, 510 Kant denied animals apperceive, 102n16 Locke accorded perception to simplest, 127–8 may have intuitive knowledge of necessary relations, 5045n4 Anscombe, Gertrude, 345 Appearance = reality principle, 124–5, 127, 146–7, 187n12, 225, 274, 294–5, 307–8, 410, 448, 478, 503 Appearances (Kant) distinguished from phenomena, 60–1, 104 distinguished from sensation, 172 result from apprehension, 70 Apperception (Kant) analytic unity of, 8, 75–81 makes understanding possible, 13, 73– 81, 102, 116

prediscursive, precategorial, 8, 14, 71– 81, 172 pure, 13–4 as qualitative unity, 371–2n4 synthetic unity of, 8 convergence of sensibility and understanding at, 13 nature instantiates, 14 present prediscursively in apprehension, 71–3 space and time instantiate, 13 two stages of, 75–7 Application restriction principle (Hume) 405, 424, 448, 450–1, 458, 518– 9n13 Apprehension in intuition (Kant) conforms to prediscursive apperception, 70–3 contains only scattered isolated perceptions, 83 and Humean quandary, 55–9 ideality of succession in, 83–5 Kant first to attribute to imagination, 70 pre-Kantian conceptions of, 78–9 presupposes pure time intuition, 69– 70 Armstrong, David, 331n4, 343 Arnauld, Antoine, 5, 260n5, 383 Ashworth, E. J. 97n9, 206n3 Aspects, aspect discrimination, distinctions of reason, 33, 131, 258–9, 271, 276, 288, 291n13, 332, 353, 370, 409, 505, 511–2, 516–8 Association as conceived by Berkeley, 371n3 as conceived by Locke, 371n3, 465–6 by contiguity (see Contiguity)

597

598

INDEX

Association (continued) Hume’s account (see also Custom; Idealism; Imagination) addresses issues ignored by Berkeley, 370–74 affective dispositions produced by, 408n5, 438–9 affective locus (see Facility; Vivacity) chief principles of, 373 compared with Newton’s principles, 100, 369–74 constitutive of memory, 429, 443, 553 constituted by facility affect, 371, 465 fictions of (see Fictions of associative imagination; Projective Illusion) highest principle of philosophy, 368–74 implies ideality, 440–1 of impressions, 371n3, 465, 588–92 instrument of a systematic psychologism, 374 philosophical import of, 373–4 preassociative mental life (see Preassociative reality) principle of his psychologism, 402–3 by resemblance (see Resemblance) Atherton, Margaret, 331n4, 340n8, 350n15 Attention, attentive discernment facility eludes, 111, 477, 493–4 impressions of reflexion often elude, 416–7 perpetual flux inaccessible to, 529 preferentially focused on secondary objects of sense, 333, 354 separability principle not restricted by, 260n6, 330n2 too weak to discern some mental activity, 129, 165–7, 329–30, 549 Axioms of intuition, 41n25, 90 Austin, J. L. 283–4 Ayers, Michael on Berkeley misunderstood Locke’s idea of substance, 305n9 rejected innatism, 267n11 on Locke agnosticism regarding ultimate essence of matter, 183

convincing reading of ECHU II/ii/§1 265n8 criticism of Locke’s solution to Molyneux problem, 164n11 direct realism and Cartesian skepticism, 237–8 and G. E. Moore’s refutation of skepticism, 241n12 ideas as semantic signs of their causes, 140–2 indirect realism of, 142–3 a material cause of sensation only probable, 235n5 meaning of ‘idea’ 124n4 mechanistic commitment of, 192n19 particles signify ideas of reflexion, 206n3 superaddition, 181n5 thought/language isomorphism, 99– 100n12, 135n14, 141–2, 206 superficiality of standard groupings of philosophers, 8 Beauty, 495 Beck, J. S. 72n14 Belief. See Vivacity Bennett, Jonathan, 97–8 Berchielli, Laura, 162n10 Berkeley, George antiabstractionism defines philosophy of, 10 distinguished two senses of ‘exists’ 281, 288–9 grouping with Locke and Hume, 8–9 method, 263 misinterpreted Locke on abstract ideas, 247–57 origins of ideas crucial to, 286–8, 290 perceptual relativity argumentation, 297–302 psychologism of, 10–1 deflates concepts of traditional metaphysics, 398 origin determines content, delimits scope of application, 286–8, 311– 3, 397, 402 realism regarding causes and substances, 32, 82, 113, 430, 436– 8, 447–8, 453, 562 theology falls foul of separability principle, 398–400

Index Block, Ned, 111n21 Bolton, Martha, 128n10, 160n8, 162–3n10 British Empiricists. See Empiricists Broad, C. D. 284 Brook, Andrew, 8n7 Butler, Joseph, 466 Campbell, John, 528n18 Categories confer empirical reality on space and time, 14 confer objectivity on appearances, 14 constitutive of formal unity of nature, 14, 74–5 manifold of sense belongs to content, 27–8 not necessary conditions of apperception, 74–5 origin consonant with sensibilism, 27–8 as pure concepts of the understanding, 13–4 psychologistically explicated, 27–8 Causal maxim (Hume) argument against intuitive certainty of, 431–4 cognizant of revolutionary implications of analysis, 435–8 how conception and belief in it first arise, 563—5 intuitively certain truth to Hume’s predecessors, 429–30 intuitive certainty confers unrestricted scope on, 430 model for Kant’s extension of Humean skepticism, 36–7 moral certainty of proof only, 430–1 and quantum mechanics, 526n16 radical skeptical implications of Hume’s analysis, 434–8, 447–8 scope restricted to associative imagination of, 429–38 source of disbelief in any absolute limit to empirical regress, 526 unrestricted scope would tie perceptions into a preassociatively real causal nexus, 430, 436–7 Causal realist interpretations of Hume ascribe ontological import to semantic distinctions, 421n12, 455 causes of sensations inconceivable suppositions, 419

599

conflict with Hume’s analysis of the causal maxim, 438n26 conflict with Hume’s treatment of inconceivable suppositions, 419–22 deny circularity of copy principle, 417 deny Hume was a radical skeptic, 417–8 result of narrowly epistemological focus, 418, 422–3n14, 451–5 sensible ideas of causes just epistemic marks of the supersensible, 418–9, 452 textual case depends on irrelevant contexts, 421n12, 422–3n14, 447n34 treat copy principle as a priori (intrinsic) truth about perceptions, 426 treat impressions as representations of the supersensible, 451 inconsistent with Hume’s sensibilism, 452 would nullify role Hume accorded to copy principle, 451–2 truer of Berkeley than Hume, 418–9 Cause and effect, efficacy, power Berkeley’s account God cause of sensations and their order, 285, 295, 399 ideas as signs suggestive of, 365–6 mind’s efficacy known from past experience, 315–6 origin delimits application, 312–3 psychologistically explicated by mental activity, 311–3, 398 scope restricted to operations of mind, 247, 309 source not in sensible objects, 308–9 Hume’s account. See also Custom; Facility; Necessary connection; Projective illusion; Relation; Vivacity associative basis of all belief beyond senses and memory, 30, 486, 525, 538–9 associative basis of memory, 429, 443 causal maxim (see Causal maxim) contents of idea, 445 contiguity and resemblance parasitic on enlivening power of, 30, 488, 504–5, 515, 524–6

600

INDEX

Cause and effect, efficacy, power Hume’s account (continued) corrects for visual disagreements with touch, 531–2 definition of philosophical relation includes necessity, 541–2 as determination of thought, 469–70, 502–3n3 distinct existents alone relatable in, 37, 431 explicated by customary association, 23–4, 29, 403, 422–3, 434–5, 438, 453 fixes spatial and temporal contiguity relations, 524–5 helps create the constancy of experience, 559–65 ideality of, 52–3, 403 idea not derivable from objects, 41, 424, 487–9, 493 impression arises through gradual pooling of affects, 555 impression origin in facile transitions from impressions to ideas, 422, 438, 468–70, 474, 539 indispensable to human understanding, 29 locus not sensible objects but feelings immanent to imagination, 474 necessary connection essential ingredient of idea, 23, 423–4 never immediately perceptible, 487– 8, 494, 530, 544–5, 547, 562n15 no preassociative impression of objective, 457 not a positivistic regularity theory, 475–6n13, 541 objective space and time made possible by, 529–31 only semantically distinct from custom, 421n12, 422, 435 opposite of chance, 468 paradoxical nature of idea, 457 philosophical incorporates idea of necessary connection, 423n15, 435n21, 475–6n13, 541, 592 philosophical parasitic on natural, 31, 101, 424, 425n16, 435n21, 442, 548, 564n18

preeminent among belief-producing relations, 29–30, 488 projective illusion in, 422, 488, 493– 5 reconciles diverse points of view in a general view, 526–8 rejected sources of idea, 539 relates already generalized ideas, 34, 505, 510 rules for judging, 568 transfers vivacity in proportion to strength of custom, 488, 554, 567 uncertainty of, 569–71 Locke’s account active powers or faculties, 179 entails a substantial constitution to support, 175 general causal principle has universal scope, 32, 50–2, 82, 113, 174–7, 228 general causal principle known intuitively, 174–5, 225 idea of power originates in perceived mental activity, 179 passive powers or capacities, 179 substances are the only causes, 178– 9 Chance. See also Indifference constituted by absence of facility affect, 468, 582 opposite of caused, 468 Chomskyan, 8n7, 102, 292 Cognitive science, relation of to early modern philosophy, 8n7, 110–6 Cohen, Hermann, 42 Complex individuals (Hume) fiction of, 463, 532–3 no preassociative impression of, 463 realism regarding is unintelligible, 463– 4 Compositionality principle (Hume) 412–3 Consciousness. See also Perception difference between sensibilist and intellectualist conceptions, 112n24 Hume’s account bipolar, not unipolar, 478–86, 493 distinct axis of determination from perception axis, 485 locus of personal identity quandary, 55–9, 478

Index not attentive discernment, 549 not separable from perceptions, 484n20 perceptions separable from, 478–84 some beliefs founded on immediate, 481–2n19 obscure, clear, distinct, 10n9 scope not demarcated by attentive awareness, 112–6, 128–9, 165–7, 329–30, 333, 345–8, 354, 359–60, 416–7, 493–4, 529, 549 unity of in Locke, 177 Constant conjunction (Hume) amalgam of contiguity and resemblance relations, 372n5, 467, 513n11 associative nature of, 372, 424–5, 467 causes impression of necessary connection, 445, 539–40 difference from cause and effect, 423n15 do not enter into content of ideas of cause and effect, 445 most frequent, constant produce strongest custom, 488 sensible mark of insensible necessary connections, 424, 540, 544, 547 Contiguity (Hume) customary constitute ideas of space and time, 515–23 custom not essential to because sensible, 515 custom underlies role in spatial and temporal reasoning, 515, 523–4 immediately perceptible, 487–8, 494, 515 support of causal relation essential to cognitive efficacy, 30, 488, 515, 524–6 Contrariety (Hume) account of also applies to constant conjunctions, 555n10 arises from inconstant conjunction, 565 and general points of view, 526–8, 561 involves ratiocination as well as custom, 565–6 presupposes belief in uniformity principle, 565 second species of probability, 565 Copy principle (Hume) associative origin of, 404, 413–55

601

a causal principle, 413, 441 causal significance of duplication principle, 413, 446 certainty of proof, 427 circularity non-vicious, 444–5 circularity of, 417, 423 circularity real not apparent, 417–23 contrasts as ideal with corresponding principles of Locke and Berkeley, 428 distinguished from memory, 446 an empirical generalization, 426–7 exemplifies vivacity-transference principle, 101 facility constitutes, 467 first origin of impressions of necessary connection, 559–60 grounded on experienced constant conjunction, 425–6 ideality of, 440–4 limitation of causal maxim to associative imagination also limits, 435, 438 missing shade of blue counterexample, 426–7 a natural causal relation, 445–6 not an a priori principle, 414, 425–7 place in theory of ideas, 415–6, 440 preeminence in theory of understanding due to clarifying power, 414–5 psychological, not linguistic, 449–51 solution to origins problem, 413, 417 supplants definition in clarifying ideas, 414–5, 449–50 value depends on impressions being uncopied, 451–2 Credulity, 586 Customs of thought, customary association, habit Berkeley’s account conceal aspatiality of sight, 328–30 explain conative effects of language, 270 explain order and relation of ideas, 105 partly explain language of vision, 105, 337 effects associations of ideas, 371n3 Hume’s account attain perfection by degrees, 554

602

INDEX

Customs of thought, customary association, habit Hume’s account (continued) chief source of facility affect, 24 concealed more the stronger it is, 477, 493–4, 511–2 as determinations of thought, 469–70 entire bond conjoining cause with effect, 487–8 experience-based keep empirical reasoning rational, 552–6, 568, 570 explicate cause and effect, 23–4, 29, 422–3 explicate general representation, 34 facilitating and determinative effects of, 470 the foundation of empirical reasoning, 545–8 important for understanding only as cause of facility, 585–6 perfect, 554, 557, 580 reduces the time of reasoning, not number of steps, 548–52 source of illusion of aspect discrimination, 511–2 stronger the more frequent and constant the conjunction, 488 Dancy, Jonathan, 252n2, 271n12, 299n5 Dauer, Francis, 480–1n18, 527–8n17, 579n4 Davidson, Donald, 208 Definition Hume supplanted with copy principle, 414–5, 456–64 intellectualists use to exhibit content of ideas, 5, 107 in mathematics, 501, 573n1 sensibilists reject for exhibiting contents of ideas, 107, 208, 279, 394 Demonstration. See Knowledge Descartes, René advocated mechanistic model of perception, 119, 150 conception of the cogito, 49 conception of ideas, 144 dream skepticism of, 231–2 innatism of, 27, 154–5, 163, 175, 382– 3, 387–90 intellectualism of, 5, 169–70 220, 381– 2, 385n4

the mind always thinks, 130–1, 321 nature of skeptical challenge, 226–7, 238–41 substantial union of mind and body, 321 on vision, 154–5 Diderot’s variant of Molyneux problem, 342–3n9, 356 Discursivity as representation by means of universals, 7–8 Distinctions of reason. See Aspects Duplication principle (Hume) 412–3, 425, 560 Duration. See Succession; Time Early modern philosophers’ lack of affinity with current cognitive science, 8n7 Edelman, Gerald M., 110n20 Education, 586 Empiricists attached minimal importance to introspection, 114–6, 128–31, 149n27, 330n2, 331, 417, 497 did not limit consciousness to attentively discernible, 112–6, 128–9, 165–7, 329–30, 333, 345– 8, 354, 359–60, 416–7, 493–4, 529, 549 equated sensibilism with empiricism, 5 grouping of, 8–9 Locke as, 137–9 relation to Kant, 9 Epigenesis of pure reason, 26 Epistemological confounded with conceptual, 47, 123, 377–8, 452, 462–3n3 Essence (Locke) ideas of real parasitic on nominal, 182 inaccessibility and unknowability of ultimate, 176–7, 181–2 naming, 211–6 nominal, 184n9 real, 184n9 real distinguished from substantial (ultimate) 182–4, 193–4 real parasitic on nominal, 211–2 Evans, Gareth, 266–7, 271, 337–9, 342– 3n9, 356, 357–8n20 Existence

Index applied to ideas in two senses (Berkeley, Hume) 281, 288–9, 292 nonmodal sense common to all perceptions, 281, 483–4, 502–3n3 notion of proper to substance, 188–9 real (modality of actuality) distinguished from existence as such, 483–4 distinguished from fictive modality of imagination, 281, 286–7, 290, 292, 481–4 explicated by sensation (Locke, Berkeley) 14–5, 109, 232–3, 276– 88, 398, 484–6 explicated by vivacity (Hume) 111, 292, 403, 406–8, 482–6 external knowable only through sensation, 175 Experience Berkeley’s synthetic conception of objective, 326–66 distinguished from perception, 60–1, 104, 333, 337, 339, 346, 519 Hume’s account causes impressions of necessary connection (see Constant conjunction) important for understanding only as cause of facility, 585–6 role in empirical reasoning, 539 standard of rationality in empirical reasoning, 537–51, 567 synthetic conception of objective, 410 Locke’s synthetic conception of visual, 170–3, 326–7 External objects. See also Material object; Sense-divide transcending objects; Substance Hume’s account (see also Fictions; Imperfect identity; Impressions) affective locus of fiction of continued existence, 473–4 depend on distinguishing appearance from reality, 473 duration not properly applicable to, 458 as fictitious imperfect identities, 408n5, 467n8 no preassociative impressions of, 408, 475–6n13

603

only spatial perceptions believed to be, 439n29, 462n2 perceptions all conceivable as, 462, 485 philosophers’ version even more problematic than vulgar, 454–5 presuppose imperfect identity of self, 439–42, 473 products of associative imagination, 408n5 realist interpreters mistake target of skepticism, 377–8, 454n39, 462– 3n3 role of constancy/coherence in fiction, 462n2 role of separability principle in fiction, 462n2 Locke’s account affect the senses by impulsion, 119. 127, 143, 176 affirmable if senses understood as passive powers, 180, 230–1 ideas of sense-divide transcending, 171–2 material nature of only probable, 176, 234–5, 285 presuppose the I 178 sensitive knowledge of, 232–6 External sense, 125, 171–2, 180, 359–60, 531–4, 560 Facility, facile transitions of thought Hume’s account associating quality, 371, 465, 477 in association of impressions, 588–92 contrasts with sensible violence or indifference, 371–2, 468–9 custom a major cause of, 24, 470, 88 in customary spatial and temporal contiguity association, 523–4 difference from sustained dispositions, 472n11 distinguishes natural from philosophical relations, 425n16, 465–6 draws no attention to itself, 111, 477, 493–4 essence of relation, 30–1, 101, 111, 371–2, 425n16, 460, 464–78, 582, 584, 589n9

604

INDEX

Facility, facile transitions of thought Hume’s account (continued) essential to content of ideas of identity, 470–5, 478 essential to content of ideas of necessary connections, 468–70, 474, 478 essential to content of ideas of resemblances, 512–3 a feeling immanent to imagination, 468–78 foundation of philosophical relations, 425n16 intense degree of “determines” the mind, 469–70 intuitable and demonstrable relations do not have, 503–4 multiple reinforce, 465 not a perception by separability standard, 477–8 passions follow, 372, 486, 588–92 a perceptible affective content, 371n3, 466–73 perfect relations as bidirectional, 465, 591–2n13 pleasure giver, 25, 476 primacy over experience and custom in reasoning, 585–8 psychologistically explicates relation, 30–1, 111, 466–9 reigns in the moral sphere, 591 as repetitions intensify feeling, the relation strengthens, 554 successive produce sustained affective disposition, 470–2 supreme principle of human nature, 592 supreme principle of the passions and morals, 588–92 supreme principle of understanding, 585–8 transfers vivacity in proportion to its intensity, 488, 554, 567 universal attractor, 372 universal conduit, 372–3 vivacity-transference principle (vivacity always follows) 31, 101, 372–3, 479, 483, 486–8, 525, 530, 554, 567, 582–6 Locke characterized customary association by, 371n3, 465–6

Fears and phobias, 587 Feelings immanent to imagination. See Facility; Imagination; Vivacity Fictions of associative imagination by completing the union, 459, 518–19n13 of conceiving the inconceivable, 458– 9, 489–95 furnish content for objective beliefs, 518–9n13 give semantic differences illusory ideational validity, 459 identity as, 458–9 (see also Imperfect identity; Perfect identity) nature of, 458 simplicity as (see Complex individuals) Fictitious denominations, 504, 518 Fogelin, Robert, 278n3, 575n2 Freedom, Kant’s views relating to, 12, 28–9n12, 115n26 Frege, Gottlob, 7, 35, 40, 92, 97,301n6 Fregean, post-Fregean, 8n7, 11, 203–4, 214, 290 Friedman, Michael, 90n2 Garrett, Don, 55n3, 409n8, 454 General points of view (Hume) 526–8 General representation. See also Ideas; Language; Signification and analytic unity of apperception, 6, 41, 76 Berkeley’s account conception of abstraction, 257–60 Hume’s debt to, 505–10 indifferent denotation (significative uses) 250–71, 276, 278–9, 282–3, 289–92, 301–2, 312, 353 rejects abstractive aspect discrimination, 258–60 role of selective attention in, 258 same as Locke’s account, 259 a species of suggestive signification, 264–5, 353 visual language of spatiality has no need for, 353–4 Hume’s account explicated by customary resemblance association, 505–14 intended to confirm Berkeley, 265, 505

Index rejects abstractive aspect discrimination, 409 role of terms in, 508–10 supersedes Berkeley’s account, 265, 511–5 Locke’s account (see also Ideas) includes abstraction by aspect discrimination, 259–60 by indifferent denotation, 197, 249– 57 pre-Humean explanations of, 33, 508 General rules (Hume) 486–7n3, 513, 524, 527–8, 531 Geometry, 87–90, 156, 220–1, 341–2 God, 5, 282n5, 285 295–6, 320n4, 339– 40, 346–7, 364, 398–9 Grayling, Anthony, 262–3, 289–92, 320n4 Greene, Brian, 526n16 Griffin, Donald R. 504n4 Guyer, Paul, 7n5, 583n6, 584n8 Habits. See Customs of thought Hacker, Peter, 149n27 Hacking, Ian, 97–100, 240n10, 479, 558, 575n2 Hausman, Alan and David, 297n4 Hegel, G. W. F. 8 Henrich, Dieter, 44–5n27 Heterogeneity problem (Kant) 13–4, 45–6, 79–81 Hobbes, Thomas, 34n17 Hume, David analytic conception of mathematics, 19–20, 36 anticipated Kant’s synthesis of objective space and time, 531 applied analysis of causation to (causal) origins of ideas, 401–55 developing characterization of copy principle in THN 440–4 developing characterization of memory in THN 429 developing characterization of vivacity in THN 429 disdained definition in favor of origins, 24–5, 57 divergence from Berkeley, 292, 398 empiricism of, 368–9 epistemology eclipses origins in commentary, 47n29, 378–9, 418,

605 422–3n14, 435n22, 436, 451–2, 462–3n3, 567–8n21 ersatz psychological equivalents of metaphysical categories, 43 experimental method of THN 428–9, 465n5, 496–8 fear of censorship, 447n34 grouping with Locke and Berkeley, 8–9 Kant’s affinity with, 9, 18–85 Kant imputed transcendental realism to, 83 on Locke, 164n12, 427 metaphysical principles presuppose possession of ideas used in them, 43–4 Newtonian model, 369–73 no substantive change from THN to EHU 374–5 originality of, 21–33, 306n10, 308n12, 415, 464–5, 539, 546 preeminent importance to of the origins of ideas, 21–3, 377–9, 415 psychologism associationist nature of, 10, 21–2, 402–3 converts concealed into patent absurdity, 25, 62 destructive of traditional metaphysics, 18–9, 31–2, 43, 50–3, 82, 113, 378, 402–3, 428, 434–44, 447–8 explication of generality, 505–14 explication of identity (see Identity; Perfect Identity; Imperfect identity, External objects; Personal identity) explication of necessary connection (see Necessary connection) explication of real existence by vivacity (see Existence; Vivacity) explication of relation by facility (see Facility; Relation) explication of space and time (see Space; Time) idealism (see Idealism) origin determines content, delimits scope of application, 24–5, 32, 47– 8, 82, 113, 377–8, 402–3, 438, 449–51, 453–4 rejected innatism question, 427–8 sensibilism of detachable from his empiricism, 20–1, 39

606

INDEX

Hume, David (continued) a strict necessitarian, 538, 568–9 subject matter of THN the causal relations between perceptions, 413 systematic character of his philosophy, 369n1, 563 Hume’s Theory of Consciousness, 374 Husserl, Edmund, 40 Idealism. See also also Materialism; Realism Berkeley’s esse is percipi bidirectionality of, 310, 314, 321–2 common ground with his sensibilism, 397–8 conflicts with theology, 295–6 extends to both form and content of nature, 364 first premise of chief argument for, 274–6 founded on anti-abstractionist separability principle, 247, 268, 273, 396 a Humean refutation of, 484–6 likeness principle presupposes, 294, 302 not ontological solipsism, 278n3 not to be construed dispositionally, 289n10 parity arguments not intended to prove, 302 perceptual relativity arguments presuppose, 299 psychological basis of, 286–7 psychologistic character of, 287–8, 397–8 response to principal objection, 278– 84 second premise of chief argument for, 276–8 sensation psychologistically explicates real existence, 277–88 Hume’s psychologistic external objects mere associative fictions, 439–40, 454–5, 467–8n8 regarding all relations of existence, 456–75 regarding causal relations, 456–7, 468–70, 493–5 regarding objective understanding, 402–3, 456–64, 537, 562

regarding principles of his theory of ideas, 440–4 regarding principles of substance and causality, 402–3, 428, 453 regarding relations, 52–3, 403 regarding space and time, 523 self nothing but associative fiction, 52–3, 434–5, 438–44 Kant’s psychologistic, 29, 60–73, 77– 85, 88–9 natural (vulgar) 185–7, 272, 297 nonpsychologistic varieties, 10, 65n9, 397 psychologistic, 10, 12, 29, 113, 172–3 transcendental, 15 Ideas Berkeley’s account (see also Notions) all are of secondary qualities, 273, 284, 297–302, 399 appearance = reality principle of, 294–5, 307–8 considered in themselves, 260, 266, 279, 287, 291, 299, 346 general are only a use to which particular are put, 250–1 intrinsically mind-dependent, 127, 307 likeness principle, 284, 293–6, 302, 307 new considerations not always new ideas, 260 none of diverse senses, 261, 268 not property bearers, 291 privacy of, 314 separable from language, 262–3, 287 simple, 265–6n8 Hume’s account associationism revolutionizes theory of origins of, 374, 402–3 associative origin of precludes preassociative application, 402–3 cannot blend with one another, 555 conscious mechanisms for forming also contribute contents to, 23–5, 373–4, 377–8, 464–75, 479 distinguished from impressions by lesser vivacity, 405–8 of existence and real existence (actuality) 292 impressions clarify better than definitions, 414–5, 449–50, 456–64

Index impressions strip holistic linguistic overlay from, 450 of modes, 573n1 most vivid sometimes termed ‘impressions’ 408, 474–5n12, 529, 589 not private-linguistic signs of impressions, 449 preeminence of the origins question, 21–3, 377–8 of sensation as causes of impressions of reflexions, 416–7 simple and complex (see Perception) a species of perceptual object, 405 Locke’s account abstract distinguished from general, 198 abstract not abstract images, 197, 249–57 abstractive signification of, 195–6 abstract too limited for our cognitive needs, 195–6, 198–201 abstract via aspect discrimination, 131, 258–9 abstract via selective attention, 156, 195, 197–8, 249–50 appearance = reality principle of, 124–5, 127, 146–7, 187n12, 225, 274 application conditions of regarding substances, 144–5 association of, 371n3, 465–6 cognitive value as signs of their causes, 139–40, 174–6, 180 considered in themselves, 147 considering a manifold as a mode, 135 considering a manifold as a relation, 135 considering a manifold as a substance, 134 of diverse senses, 156–7, 162–6, 190n16, 200–1 each consideration a new, 126, 146 empiricism of complex, 132–9 individuating acts of consideration need not be attended to, 128–9 knowledge of foundationally trivial and useless, 145–9 levels of complexity of, 135–7 limitations on cognitive use of, 133

607 limited powers to form abstract, 106 meaning, scope of term, 122–32, 145–6, 274 need to keep role in conception separate from role in cognition, 119, 122–3, 128, 139–49, 183, 274 no need for obscure/clear, confused/ distinct distinctions, 124n6 not bearers of semantic or syntactic properties, 135–7, 140–3 not intrinsically mind-dependent existents, 127, 274, 307 ontological arbiters of words, 204–5 of power originate in perceived mental activity, 179 of primary and secondary qualities, 176, 190–2, 273 principle of individuation of, 126–9, 145–6 privacy of, 146n25 reality of simple (see Knowledge, sensitive) reflexive are objects of internal sense, 125–6, 391 relation to external causes not intrinsic to content, 127–8, 140 sensations’ external causes probably material, 176, 234–5 sensations have external causes, 174– 6, 231–4 sensibilist, anti-intellectualitst, 124–6, 133, 138, 390–2 sensitive knowledge through, not of, 148 simple, 128n10, 131–2, 132–3n12, 138, 139–42, 163n10, 191n18, 198–201 simple ideas perhaps made as well as given, 162–3 of substance, substances, 143–5, 183 unity of complex, 135–7, 169 materials of thought, 47–8 need to distinguish conceptual from epistemological aspects, 47–8, 119, 122–3, 377–8, 452 obscure and clear, 5 sensibilist conception of, 111–4 sensibilists’ ontological agnosticism regarding, 112 theory of (see Theory of ideas)

608

INDEX

Identity, Hume’s account of external objects (see External objects) as fictitious idea of relation, 458–9 imperfect identity (see Imperfect identity) locus in affections of imagination, 473– 4 no idea of objective, 457–9, 462n2 perfect identity (see Perfect identity) personal (see Personal identity) realism regarding is meaningless, 461–2 Illuminationism, 5, 379 Imagination Berkeley’s conception basis of common spatial terminology for vision and touch, 354 derives idea of existence from sensation, 280 limited to possible sense perceptions, 258 locus of modality of fictive existence, 281, 286, 290 locus of separability principle, 257–8, 292 locus of visual spatiality, 339–44 and the phenomenology of visible space, 346–8 spatial depends on and conforms to touch, 361–2 tactual, 340–1 distinctive phenomenology of its productions, 162–7, 238–40, 346– 8, 528–9 Hume’s conception affects of distinct from other impressions of reflexion, 477–8 associative is foundation of sense, memory, and understanding, 429n19 basis of senses, memory, and understanding, 403, 429, 443–4, 467, 536 belief beyond senses based on vivacity transference in, 486, 525– 6 conceivability of depends on natural copy principle, 446 confers distinctive phenomenology on experience, 528–9 explicates understanding, 29–36, 403

an organ of feeling, 23, 408n5, 438– 9, 468–78 and the passions, 589–92 self of same as self of passions, 474– 5n12 its situation is that of self, 474–5n12 as source of contents of ideas, 31–2, 402–3 sustained affective dispositions of See Identity; Imperfect identity, Perfect Identity; Projective Illusion Kant’s conception prediscursive, 7–8n6, 68–9 pure productive, 69 pure synthesis, 8, 68–9 Locke on the phenomenology of, 162– 7, 238–40 Imagism, 3n1 Imperfect identity (Hume) affective confusion with perfect identity, 439–4, 461, 470–1, 473– 4, 533 belief in fictitious continued existence, 588 fictitious continued existence resolves affective dissonance, 473 locus in imagination-immanent affect, 461, 470 role of coherence in fictitious continued existence, 490–1, 587–8 a succession of the same relation of ideas, 461 successive facile transitions constitute sustained affective disposition, 470–2 Impressions (Hume) association of, 371n3, 465, 588–92 causes of sensations unknown perhaps unintelligible, 416 clarify ideas, 414–5, 449–50 distinguished from ideas as blendable, 555 distinguished from ideas by greater vivacity, 405–8 not copies (representations) of supersensible objects, 451–5 not referents (significata) of ideas, 449 ontological touchstone of language, 450–1, 512–3, 523 preassociative not to be equated with external objects, 408, 475–6n13

Index reflexions follow from ideas of sensation, as Hume’s focus, 416–7 sensations and reflexions, 415–7 simple and complex (see Perception) a species of perceptual object, 405 Inconceivable conceiving the (see Fictions; Projective illusion) suppositions, 419–22 Indifference constitutive of chance, 468 transitions not including facility, 468, 472, 582 transitions not involving facility cannot relate perceptions, 468, 472, 477 Individuality, conditions of for Kant, 94–5 Induction, problem of, 545–6 Infinite divisibility, 491 Innatism, 5, 26n10, 27, 120n1, 379–96, 427–8 Intellectualism and abstract ideas, 260n5 begins at the wrong end, 118, 208, 245, 394 common basis with materialism, 396–8 Hume’s missing shade no comfort to, 414 implies objectivist conception of propositions, 219–20 irrelevance of psychology to, 5, 10n9, 11–2, 379 meaning of, 5, 379, 386 pure intellect (intellectual intuition) 379–86 relies on definition and analytical methods, 5, 105, 208, 394 separability of perceptions from mind no comfort to, 485 violates separability principle, 396–8 Internal sense, 3–4, 125, 311 Introspection lacks importance for sensibilists, 114–6, 128–31, 149n27, 330n2, 331, 417, 497 Intuition pure intellectual, 132–3 as species of propositional knowledge, 19n (see also Knowledge) Intuition, pure sensible (Kant). See also Space and time form of intuition distinguished from formal intuition, 72n14

609

individuality of as original synthetic unity, 39 key to solving the problem of synthetic a priori judgments, 20 notion of original to Kant, 12 psychologistically explicates pure space and time, 13–4, 29, 38–9, 62–8 starting point for Kant’s theory of origins, 21 Isomorphism between thought and language. See Language I think, the as analytic unity of apperception, 8 Berkeley’s non-manifold simple substantial, 315–8 conscious only of its spontaneity, 74, 84–5 conditioned by unity of pure consciousness, 74 distinctive of early modern theory of understanding, 116 formally characterized, 74, 84–5 identity of, 74–81 Locke’s conception and affirmation of, 49–51, 177–8, 228, 230 opaque to introspection, 116 reality of, 210 unity of, 74–81 unity, identity, universality converge at, 76 Jackendorff, Ray, 111n21 James, William, 115, 284, 344–5, 348 Judgment. See also Propositions analytic, 36, 92, 221–2 arithmetic and algebraic, 92, 95 defined by Kant, 103 logical functions of only element common to language and thought, 103 qualitative, 92–5 quantitative, 92–5 and system, 91–7 problem of possibility of synthetic a priori question hinges on heterogeneity problem, 13–4 relation of views of Locke and Hume to, 15, 221–2, 503–4 solution to problem of synthetic a priori judgments

610

INDEX

Judgment (continued) pure sensible intuition the key, 20 psychologistic method indispensable to, 15 subjectivist conception of, 8, 15, 219– 22 synthetic a priori distinguished from analytic, 221–2 as nature of mathematical judgments (see Mathematics) Kail, Peter, 451n36 Kant, Immanuel anti-innatism of, 26n10, 27 apriorism primarily psychological, 66 Berkeley as forerunner of refutation of Berkeleyan idealism, 275n2, 286n9 relation to on aesthetic formal multiplicity, 353n17, 357–8n20 relation to on existence, 292 revised separability principle, 398 Copernican experiment, 104n18 denial of his sensibilism or psychologism by commentators, 6–8 divergence from current cognitive science, 8n7 empirical realism, 15 existence not a real predicate for, 290 Hume as forerunner of came to threshold of problem of synthetic a priori, 503–4 closeness of affinity with, 9, 11, 85, 113 debt to for psychologism, 21–9 folded justification question into origins question, 539, 546 importance of for, 10–11, 18–19, 22 principles of lead to transcendental psychologism, 19–20, 37–8, 49, 83 probable source for apperception as qualitative unity, 371–2n4 skepticism challenges possibility of metaphysics, 18–9, 31–2, 43, 82, 378, 434–8, 457, 555 and Locke, 26, 172, 394–6 mathematics as synthetic a priori (see Mathematics) Newtonian physics not primary focus of in first Critique, 90–1n2

normative issues secondary for, 21, 42– 8, 66 not a dogmatic Euclidean, 87–90 originality of, 12, 70 origins of ideas crucial to, 25–6 phenomena, empirical objectivity (see Phenomenon) psychologism of a priori, transcendental character of, 11–3, 39–42 basis of theory of understanding, 29– 33 converts concealed into patent absurdity, 62 nullifies metaphysical realism, 82 origin determines content, delimits scope of application, 25, 27–9, 42, 47–8, 85, 113 provides response to Lambert/ Mendelssohn objection, 65–8 provides response to neglected alternative objection, 63–5 resolves Hume’s quandary concerning personal identity, 82–5, 448 as transcendental idealism, 29 and pure concepts of the understanding (see Categories) pure space and time (see Space and time) on relation of sensibility to understanding, 13–4, 45–6, 79–81 relation to British Empiricism, 3–5, 7, 11 separability principle accepted by, 36–7 sensibilism of, 5, 27 and skepticism, 10–1 subjectivism of, 8, 15, 219 summit of early modern theory of understanding, 116 synthetic a priori judgments (see Judgment, synthetic a priori) theory of judgment, 7–8, 15 things in themselves, 15 transcendental deduction, 42–8 transcendental idealism (see Idealism) transcendental psychology of, 21–2, 40–2 treated perfect simplicity as ideal, 463n4 Kant’s Model of the Mind, 13

Index Kitcher, Patricia, 8n7 Knowledge. See also Mathematics Hume’s account can go beyond what is contained in the ideas, 501 comes to threshold of problem of synthetic a priori, 503–4 criterion of adapted to capture informative varieties, 501–2 demonstrations teach inconceivability of contrary, 499–500 demonstration turns on content, not form, 500n1 distinguished from probability, 34, 499, 557 intuitive based on general appearances of objects, 499 makes us sensible of inconceivability of the contrary, 499, 537 a matter of secondary concern for Hume, 536–7 needs checks and controls, 573–4 often involves a special act of the understanding, 500–1 rules of demonstrative sciences infallible, 573, 575–6 rules play same role in demonstrative reasoning as impressions in empirical, 575–6 Locke’s account of bodies possible but not yet actual, 192–3 demonstrative, 219–20 distinguished from judgment, 224–5 distinguished from probability, 34 of existence of the I 148–9 four species of, 147 instructive vs. trivial, 122n2, 220–1 intuitive always abstract with one exception, 49 language essential to most general, 195–223 limited to ideas, 208–9, 217 of necessary relations, 224–5 as perception of necessary relations between ideas, 121 principles (eternal truths) 225–6, 230–1, 235–6 reality of, 227–36

611

regarding ideas as such, 145–9, 230– 1, 235–6 sensitive, 128n10, 140, 148, 175–6, 215, 231–6, 285–6, 295–6 skeptical challenge to, 226–7 some necessary relations not contained in ideas, 122, 219–22 Kretzmann, Norman, 206n3 Kripke, Saul, 192, 208, 214 Lambert, Johann, 65 Language and signs. See also Suggestive signification Berkeley’s account chief obstacle to philosophical clarity, 244–6, 287, 294–5, 322–3 cognitive utility of not the same as cognitive validity, 268–9 conative roles of words, 245, 269–71 differentiates significative uses well but ideas poorly, 261 distinguished from sign systems, 351–2, 361 importance of signs, 268–9 misinterprets Lockean abstractionism, 247–57 not isomorphic with thought, 104–6, 261–71, 283–4, 288, 352–3 particles (syncategorematic terms) 270–1 visual highly isomorphic with touch, 353–4 words/signs often do not designate ideas, 245, 269–71 early moderns not private language theorists, 97–8, 114, 201, 203 hearing speech from “seamless acoustic ribbon” 135–6, 166, 329–30, 529 Hume’s account conventions constitute, 101–2 general terms express customary resemblance relations, 508–10 impressions ontological touchstone of, 450–1, 512–3, 523 impressions strip holistic linguistic overlay from ideas, 450 not essential to all general representation, 510 not isomorphic with thought, 100–2, 449–50, 500n1, 514

612

INDEX

Language and signs Berkeley’s account (continued) peculiar to humans, 101–2 terms tend to replace ideas in general representation, 509 unidirectional correlation with ideas, 108–9 Locke’s account abstract ideas mediate relation to particular ideas, 196–7, 211–6 common acceptation, rules of propriety, 98–9, 201–3, 256 confuses us about ideas, 120 deceives as to which ideas we possess, 208–9 generality relational in nature, 197–8 gives intellectualism/innatism veneer of truth, 121, 208, 391–5 ideas do not always accompany speech, 256 ideas lack semantic transparency, 141–3, 203–4, 210–2, 236–7 ideas, not rules of propriety, confer objectivity on, 121, 204–5 ideas, not words, should always be our guide, 230–1, 235–6, 391–5 importance of signs, 195–6, 198–205, 207–9, 218, 394 information lost in transition to ideas, 201, 204–5, 207–9, 218–9 misleads when words signify no fixed idea, 196–7 not isomorphic with thought, 106–7, 198–223 not private language theorist, 201, 203–4 particles (syncategorematic terms) 205–7, 217, 222, 391 propositions (see Propositions) and real essences, 211–6 secret references, 202–3, 210–2 394 supplements abstract ideas in most general representation, 106, 195, 198–201, 205, 207–9, 249–50, 390–2 words signify (stand for) ideas, 196– 7 misleading as to scope of ideas, 47 plays no role in Kant’s theory of understanding, 102–4

and transparency of signification, 142, 151, 162, 203–4, 210–2, 236–7 Leibniz, Gottfried distinguished ideas from sensory imagery, 158–9, 380–1 distinguished ideas from their perception, 124n5 idealism of, 10, 65n9, 397n8 innatism of, 27, 380–1, 387n6, 388, 390–2 intellectualism of, 5, 10 solution to Molyneux problem, 158–9, 337, 357–8n20 Liars, 586–7 Locke, John abstractionism of, 10, 156, 195–201, 249–50, 258–9 anti-innatism of, 119–22, 138, 388–94 ECHU as refutation of innatism, 119– 22, 138 empiricism of, 132–9, 166–9, 392 on existence (see Existence) grouping with Berkeley and Hume, 8–9 indirect realism of, 142–3, 157 and Kant’s problem of the synthetic a priori, 221–2 materialism of, 10, 187–90 mechanism of, 150–2, 392 method in ECHU 139 originality of, 171–3 origins of ideas crucial to, 118–39, 204–5, 208 preference for extrapolative empirical methods, 128–31 and psychologism, 11, 171–3 realism regarding causes and substances, 32, 50–2, 82, 113, 174–7, 430, 436–8, 447–8, 453, 562 rejected sensible species, 4, 150–2 response to Cartesian dream skepticism, 231–6 said too little about the unity of complex ideas, 135, 395–6 subjectivist conception of propositional thought (see Propositions) substance concept of points forward to Kant’s, 144 why ECHU includes a book on language, 195

Index Logic logical functions of judgment (see Judgment) mathematical, 91–7 meaning of for Kant, 92–5 post-Fregean mathematical, 91–7 pure general, 40–1, 91–7 transcendental, 41–2, 94–5 Longuenesse, Béatrice, 92n3 Malebranche illuminationism of, 11, 120n1, 386 intellectualism of, 5, 385–6, 428n17 Manifold. See Apprehension; Intuition; Space and time; Time Materialism. See also External objects; Idealism; Realism learned (double existence view) 187– 94, 271–2, 284, 297, 355 abstract ideas of diverse senses crucial to, 157, 355, 401 anti-abstractionist critique of primary/ secondary distinction undermines 297–302, 304n8 Berkeley denied intelligibility of, 277, 284, 293–309 Berkeley’s parity arguments intended to put on defensive, 302 common basis with intellectualism, 396–8 Hume found more problematic than vulgar, 454–5 involves distinction of ideas of primary and secondary qualities, 188–92 requires ideational, not just semantic, distinctness from ideas, 277, 284, 288 separability of perceptions from mind no comfort for, 462, 485–6 vulgar (single existence view) 127, 185–7, 271, 284 Berkeley’s critique of realism regarding secondary qualities, 299– 302 idealist only regarding pleasure and pain, 185–7, 272, 297 parsed semantically (nonontologically) by Berkeley, 283–5, 289–90

613

Material object, matter Locke’s conception of, 157n7 difference from body, 188n13 involves solidity as well as extension, 181n4 Mathematics Hume’s account applications of rules leads to skepticism (see Skepticism) applied presupposes causal relations, 36n19, 534–5 comes to threshold of problem of synthetic a priori, 503–4 discoveries distinguished from definitions, 501, 573n1 error in, 537–8 involves only senses and imagination, 34–6 rules of, 573, 575–6 rules play same role impressions do in empirical reasoning, 575–6 Locke’s account comes to threshold of problem of the synthetic a priori, 221–2 instructive, 220–1 reality of requires no external archetypes, 229 Kant’s account demarcation from transcendental logic, 40–1 extension of Humean skepticism to, 37–8 Hume’s principles sufficient to prove synthetic, 19–20, 37–8 judgments of are synthetic a priori, 19–20 not part of logic, 93–4 McCann, Edwin, 183n7 McTaggart, John Ellis, 65n9 Measure fiction of infinite divisibility, 491 fictitious but useful standards, 492 true but useless standards, 409n9, 492 Mechanism. See Perception Memory, 49–52, 175n1, 429, 443, 446, 552–3 Mendelssohn, Moses, 65 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 331n5 Metaphysics, science of a priori cognition, 25

614

INDEX

Mind, mental. See also I think; Substance Berkeley’s conception problem of unity of, 314–5 not a system of floating ideas, 310 Hume’s conception (see Personal identity; Preassociative reality) introspection needs support from theory, 129–30 Locke’s conception of material substrate not impossible, 50, 175, 193 refutation of thesis that it always thinks, 130–1 need for extrapolative methods to investigate, 129 processes often concealed by custom, 129 processes often too rapid to discern, 129 relation to body, 115, 151–2, 306 Modalities of existence, 232–3, 277–8, 286–7, 290, 292 Molyneux problem, 155. See also Vision Morgan, Michael, 168n15, 345n14 Morris, William E. 579n4 Nature, laws of Berkeley’s account hierarchy of laws, 363–4 language of, 363–6, 370 laws correlating vision with touch, 330n3 Hume’s account: human takes priority over physical, 368, 373n6, 422n13 Kant’s account understanding the author of, 104 unity of introduced by the categories, 14, 72, 74–5, 104 third (see Third natures) Necessary connections, relations Hume’s account basis on which inferable after one experience, 557–8 as determination of thought, 469–70 difference between cause/effect and constant conjunction, 423n15 difference from deductively necessary relations, 457 essential element in all causal relations, 423–4

explicated by customary association, 423n15, 435, 453, 487 extend belief beyond senses and memory, 538–9 idea incorporated in uniformity principle, 540–2 idea not derivable from objects, 41, 424, 493 of ideas in knowledge are informative, 501 of ideas in knowledge lies in determination of mind, 500–1 impressions of arise through gradual pooling of affects, 555 impression of first originates with copy principle, 559–60 impression originals amalgam of facility and vivacity, 23–4, 444–5, 487 impression originals are feelings in imagination, 468–70 indispensable to all reasoning regarding matters of fact, 538–9 inferrable from constant conjunctions, 424, 540, 544, 547 no preassociative impression of, 457 often caused by constant conjunctions, 445 only one idea of, 418–21, 422n13 paradoxical character of idea of, 457 reflexive impressions of, 435, 445 subjective, not objective, only kind conceivable, 457, 493 Locke’s account in mathematics, 224–5 some not contained in ideas, 122, 219–22 scope restricted by Hume and Kant to understanding, 32, 50–2, 82 Neglected alternative objection, 63–5, 190 Neo-Kantians, Neo-Kantianism, 42 Newtonian, Newtonism, 86, 100, 369–74 Normative epistemology, 21, 42–8, 66, 237–41 Norton, David Fate, 377–8, 419n11 Notions (Berkeley) contrasted with ideas, 280n4, 311 indifferent denotation using, 312, 316 meaning of, 311 objects of internal sense, 311 of reflexion, 270, 311

Index relations are, 330 in suggestive signification, 365–6 Object. See External objects; Ideas; Perception; Sense-divide transcending objects Objective thought determination (Kant) 80 O’Keefe, John, 8n7 Origins of ideas (perceptions, representations) a causal notion, 401 Hume’s account applied associationism to idealize (causal) origins, 401–55, 448–9 copy principle solves, 413 dependence of reflexions on ideas of sensation in, 416–7 elements employed in Hume’s solution to problem of, 403 idealized, 440–4 revolutionary character of, 448–9 was bequeathed a causal realist conception of origins, 401, 428 intellectualist accounts of, 5, 379–95 primary focus of sensibilists, 3–7, 47–8 sensibilist accounts of, 3–7, 428n17 Owen, David, 435, 437, 500n1, 500–1n2, 527–8n17, 549, 563n16, 567–8n21, 575n3 Passions follow facility, 372, 486, 588–92 Hume on indirect, 101, 588–92 identity of the self of the passions, 52n2, 474–5n12 self of same as self of imagination, 474–5n12 Passmore, John, 583n6 Perception Berkeley’s account immediate distinguished from experience, imagination, 333, 337, 339, 346 is the existence of sensible things (see Idealism) not a purely passive operation of the mind, 320–1 psychologistically explicates substance, 344, 398 representative scope limited to other perceptions, 405

615 distinguished from experience, 60–1, 104 Hume’s account all objects immediately present to consciousness are, 404 appearance = reality principle of, 410, 448, 478, 503, 562 difference from Locke’s ‘idea’ 404–5 distinguished into impressions and ideas, 405–8 immediate distinguished from experience (see Cause and effect; Custom; Experience) flux is what it appears to be, 562 simple and complex (compositionality) 409–13, 446, 506–7 Kant’s account distinguished from judgments of perception, 60n5 product of imagination, 58, 69–70 of pure I given to thought alone, 73– 4 Locke’s account adapted to incorporate Newtonian principles, 150–1n1 distinguished from attentive awareness, 165–7 distinguished from judgment, 157–67 espouses mechanistic model, 119, 127, 143, 176 input of a kaleidoscopic flux, 120, 133, 152 judgment mistaken for, 157–8, 160n8, 160–2 a passive operation of understanding, 125 present in the simplest animal minds, 127–8 obscure, clear, distinct (see Consciousness) philosophers concerned with at instrumental level, 152 Scholastic-Aristotelean (sensible species) view, 4, 119, 143, 151–2, 169, 389 scope not demarcated by attentive awareness, 112–6, 128–9, 165–7, 329–30, 333, 345–8, 354, 359–60, 416–7, 493–4, 529, 549

616

INDEX

Perceptual relativity arguments, 297–302 Perfect identity (Hume) affective locus primary, 460–1, 472, 473–4 constituted by sustained affective disposition, 438 contrasts as fictitious with perfect simplicity, 463n4 disposition made up of successive facile transitions, 460, 470–1 psychological dimension of identity fiction, 459 Personal identity Berkeley’s account (see Mind; Spirit) Hume’s account causal association necessary but not sufficient for idea of, 474–6 causal associations have right locus for this fiction, 474 causal relations involved all ideal, 52, 440–1 causal relations involved in, 30, 51– 2, 440–1, 474–5 chief determinant of imagination’s point of view, 529–30 conforms to Kant’s criterion of I think, 52 distinguishing causal system of self from that of the universe, 475– 6n13 equating with causal system limits idea of to philosophers, 475–6n13 Hume not a “Humean” regarding, 475–6n13 idea of as vivid as an impression, 474–5n12, 529, 589 ‘mind’, ‘self’, ‘person’ designate same idea, 438n27 presupposed by fiction of body, 439– 40, 441–2, 473 results from confusion with perfect identity, 438 same in THN I and II 474–5n12 self of imagination and self of passions, 52n2, 474–5n12 subordinates role of memory in, 50, 440 sustained affective disposition indispensable to idea, 438–40, 474–6

a system of causal relations, 51–3, 440 Hume’s quandary concerning (see also Apprehension; Kant) antiabstractionism makes unavoidable, 178, 448 apprehension beyond Humean imagination, 58–9, 83 apprehension in imagination key to solution, 56–9 concerns preassociative reality of the mind, 54–9, 448 fault not with account of personal identity as such, 53–5 metaphysical realist fixes not an option, 55, 83 route from empirical to transcendental psychologism, 49– 85 unity of successive perceptions inexplicable, 54–9, 449n35, 461n1 Locke’s account causal nexus of perceptions crucial to, 50–1 commitment to metaphysical realism in, 50–2 divergence from Descartes, 49–50 existence of the I intuitively certain, 49, 178 forensic notion of self, 50, 116, 474n12 forensic presupposes nonforensic I 177–8 the I as condition for conceiving objects, 178 less skeptical than Hume’s, 49–50 memory essential in, 50 the nonforensic I (empirical subject) 50–1, 177–8 powers of the I 179–80 Phenomenology, 129, 130n11, 137, 162– 7, 171, 238–40, 330, 335, 337, 339, 342, 344–8. See also Imagination; Space; Vision Phenomenon, Kant’s conception of, 14, 60–1, 81n19, 104, 115 Philosophy approaches to its history, 7, 16–7, 67, 97–116, 262 transcendental (see Kant; Logic)

Index underlaborer of science, 86 Pinker, Steven, 116n27, 152–5, 162–3, 171, 559 Plato, 10, 35, 335, 387n6 Platonic ideas, 33 Platonic recollection, 221, 387n6, 392 Pleasure, pleasure principle, 25, 476, 489, 496, 504 Port Royal Logic, 260n5, 383 Possibility, 566 Postulates of Empirical Thought, 93n4 Power. See Cause and effect Preassociative reality (Hume) 54–9, 402– 12, 446–8, 457–8, 461n1, 467– 8n8, 562 Probability (Hume) checks and controls ensure we reason rationally, 576, 578–9 conceptual become real possibilities after one occurrence, 566 distinguished from knowledge, 34, 499, 557 distinguished from proofs, 557 first species, 553, 556–65 proofs, 427, 431, 543, 555n10, 557 second species (see Contrariety) in skepticism with regard to reason (see Skepticism) third species, 553, 567 unphilosophical, 557, 567, 578 Projective illusion (Hume) affective dispositions outrun occasioning objects, 489–95, 518– 19n13 and beauty, 495 can overcome the influence of reason, 587–8 convinces us we can conceive the inconceivable, 459, 489–95 in fictions of continued existence, 490 in fictions of perfect exactitude, 491–2 in fictions of objective causal connections, 422, 493–5, 530, 554 in fictions of sense-divide transcending objects, 408, 422, 459, 488–9 in fictions of spatially situated thoughts and passions, 489, 495 locus in sustained affective dispositions, 489 natural, phenomenological character of, 495

617

pleasure giver, 489, 496 Proofs. See Probability Propositions Hume’s account: follows Locke’s, 499, 503 Locke’s account affirmation, denial, suspension, 222–3 bearers of truth value, 216–7 defines psychologically not logically, 216–8 mental a species of complex abstract idea, 217–23 ontological primacy of mental over verbal, 218–9 subjectivist conception of mental, 8, 15, 219–22 truth of, 217–9, 227–8 verbal holistic, mental not, 218–9 Proprioception, 333 Psychologism (psychologistic) Berkeley’s explication of existence (see Idealism) bonds Hume with Kant, 9, 21–2, 113 explications (see Berkeley; Cause and effect; Existence; Hume; Identity; Kant; Relation; Space; Substance; Time) and idealism (see Idealism) interpreters neglect contents contributed by idea-forming mechanisms, 23– 5, 373–4, 377–8, 464–75, 479–80 Kant’s apriorist variety (see Kant) key to answering neglected alternative objection, 63–5 Locke opened the way to, 171–3 meaning of, 9–10, 12 ontological dimension of, 12, 64–5, 110 (see also Berkeley; Hume; Ideas; Impressions; Kant; Language; Locke) nullifies metaphysical realism, 18–9, 30–2, 43, 50–3, 82, 113, 378, 402– 3, 428, 434–44, 447–8 principle of continuity from Locke to Kant, 11 and skepticism, 10, 82 Psychology. See also Berkeley; Hume; Kant; Locke; Origins of ideas; Understanding contemporary scientific, 8n7, 113–4n25

618

INDEX

Psychology (continued) demarcation from the logical, 39–42 intellectualists disregard, 5 philosophical distinguished from scientific, 113–4n25 pure, 21–2, 40–1 role in theory of understanding, 4–5 role in theory of understanding presupposes sensibilism, 11–2 Putnam, Hilary, 192 Qualities Berkeley’s account how Dialogues differs from Principles in critique of primarysecondary distinction, 299–302 ontological parity of all sensible, 297–302 primary-secondary distinction has semantic worth only, 247, 294n3, 297–302 Locke’s account defined, 151, 190 ground of distinction into primary and secondary, 190–1 primary, 176 secondary, 176, 190–2 Quantifiers, 96 Quantum mechanics, 526n16, 564n17 Quid facti or quid juris question, 42–8 Rationalism. See Intellectualism Realism. See also Materialism empirical (Kant) 14–5, 65–6, 83, 94, 286n9, 292 indirect, 143, 157, 292n14, 293 metaphysical (mind-independent causality, substance) (see Berkeley; Locke) regarding causal relations (see Berkeley; Causal realist interpretations of Hume; Locke) regarding identity relations (see Identity) regarding things in themselves, 275n2, 286n9 Reason, reasoning. See Imagination; Knowledge; Probability; Understanding Reflexion, 3–5, 125–6, 172–3, 308n11, 311, 354, 362, 415–7

Reid, Thomas, 47n29, 266 Relation Berkeley’s account (see also Transitions of thought) always involve an act of the mind, 264, 291, 330 notions of, 330 Hume’s account (see also Facility; Transitions of thought) advantage of psychologistic approach to, 554–5 consciousness of consists in facility affect, 371, 466–73 facility distinguishes natural from philosophical, 465 facility explicates psychologistically, 466–8 facility the essence of, 30–1, 101, 111, 425n16, 464–78, 582, 584, 588 fictions of completing, 459, 488–95 idealism regarding (see Idealism) of ideas in knowledge, 35, 500–1 involve transitions of thought, 23, 101 knowable distinguished from probabilistic, 502 knowable do not involve facility, 503–4 originality of Hume’s approach to, 464–5 perfect have bidirectional facility, 465, 591–2n13 philosophical and general rules, 486– 7n3, 513 philosophical can be habitual without being natural, 446 philosophical involve ratiocination, 469 philosophical parasitic on natural, 31, 101, 424, 425n16, 435n21, 469, 486–7, 513, 588–92 philosophical resemblance relations, 505, 513 Locke’s account ideas of always involve a considerative act, 135, 228 necessary, 220–1, 224–5 propositions consist in, 106–7, 121– 2, 216–8

Index propositions sometimes constitutive of, 220–1 of sensations to their causes not intrinsic, 127, 142 Representations (Kant) meaning of ‘pure’ in reference to, 81n19 pure are original yet acquired, 26n10, 44–5n27, 71n12 Resemblance Berkeley’s account fails fully to explain, 263–5, 511–4 reflexive basis for identifying visible with tangible spatiality, 354 varieties of, 264–5, 354 Hume’s account associative basis of memory, 429, 443 customary explicates general representation, 34, 505–14 custom not essential to because sensible, 504 custom’s role in generality most fundamental, 505 facile transitions constitute, 512–3 immediately perceptible, 487–8, 494, 504 inferential role inferior to causation, 30 support of causal relation essential to cognitive efficacy, 488, 504–5 varieties of, 496 506 Rosenfield, Israel, 167 Rules. See Knowledge; Mathematics; Skepticism Russell, Bertrand, 145, 148, 149n27, 284, 344 Schwartz, Robert, 331n5 Scottish common sense philosophy, 47n29 Self. See Personal Identity Self-consciousness, pure, 73–4 Sellars, Wilfrid, 67n10 Sensation Berkeley’s account difference from Locke regarding ‘existence’ 284–5 existence inseparable from quality of sensation, 295 fact vs. quality of, 277, 280–1, 286, 295 modality contrasts with imagination’s fictive, 281, 286–7, 290, 292

619

psychologistically explicates ‘existence’ 274–88, 398 source of idea of real existence (see Idealism; Existence) Hume’s account original causes of unknown, 416 question of original causes unintelligible, 416 some exist nowhere, 409, 459, 489 Locke’s account (see Ideas) Sense Berkeley’s account of external different roles of vision and touch in, 361–2 diverse senses fused into one via suggestive signification, 338, 354, 517 unity of forged in imagination, 354, 359–60 Hume’s account of the unity of external, 531–4, 560 internal, 3–4, 125, 311 Locke’s account of unity of external, 171–2 Sense-divide transcending objects, 152 Berkeley’s account and behavioral space, 337–9 causal efficacy and substantiality of, 364–6 exist only in the understanding (imagination) 296, 359 as narratives in volume of nature, 363–6 organized complexity in, 363–4 phenomenology of, 359–60 products of suggestive signification, 291, 338, 359–66 Hume’s account causal reason reconciles vision with touch, 531–3 constituted by fiction of complex individuality, 408, 532– constituted by fiction of imperfect identity, 408 fiction starts with spatial objects of vision and touch, 533–4 involve projective illusion, 408, 422, 459, 488–9, 561 possible only in and through associative imagination, 408 Locke’s account, 171–2

620

INDEX

Sensibilism. See also Berkeley; Hume; Kant; Locke; Psychology begins not with definitions but psychological origin, 107, 118, 208, 245, 394–5, 414–5, 456–64 conception of ideas (perceptions, representations) in, 112–4 denies isomorphism between language and thought, 107–9 ideas arbiters of the ontological worth of words, 107–10, 204–5, 267–9, 394, 398, 513–4 implies subjectivist conception of propositions, 219–22 meaning of, 3–7, 379, 393–4 principle of unity of Empiricists with Kant, 11 senses demarcate the thinkable, 119 synthetic conception of objective experience, 170–3, 326–66, 410 Sensibility (Kant) 6, 13–4, 29, 38–40, 42,45–6, 53, 60–73, 77–85, 88–9, 353n17, 357–8n20, 463n4 Sensible species. See Perception Separability principle (principle of antiabstractionism) Berkeley’s, 248, 257–71, 273–8, 283 , 286– 8, 292–310, 312–6, 319–23, 325, 330, 343, 358–9, 396, 398–9, 420 Hume’s, 370, 398, 402, 409–10, 413, 420–1, 432, 448, 455, 461n1, 462– 3, 477–8, 480, 501, 506, 511–2, 514, 517, 532, 534, 581 Signs. See Generality; Ideas; Language; Suggestive signification; Vision Skepticism (Hume) affective basis of rarely given its due, 592 extremity of, 377–9, 402–3, 415, 434–8 limits of, 82 philosophy its target, 239–40 psychologistic, 10–1 (see also Idealism) should have led him to transcendental psychologism, 38–9 with regard to reason, 572–92 conception of Hume on relation decisive for outlook on, 572–3, 582–4 does not confuse different cognitive levels, 575–9

effort to be rational self-nullifying, 572, 578–9, 584 failure to convince explicable only on Humean principles, 580–3 Humean reason vulnerable to argument, 579–81, 585 lack of facility explains failure to convince, 582–6 probability governs applications of rules, 573 proves primacy of facility for understanding, 585–6 reduces knowledge to probability, 573–6 reduces probability to complete uncertainty, 576–9 targets both abstract and empirical reason, 573 with regard to the senses (see External objects; Imperfect Identity) Smith, Norman Kemp, 479 Solidity, 153n4, 164–5, 191, 298 Space. See also Geometry; Vision Berkeley’s account ideas of not common to sight and touch, 294 proprioceptive locus of tangible, 333–4 tangible vs. behavioral, 337–8 Hume’s account aesthetic formal multiplicity of visual and tactual data, 516–20, 523 application of account of general ideas in THN I/i/§7 515–6, 521n15 causal association makes possible objective situation in, 529 contributes to constancy of experience, 560 customary contiguity association constitutes general idea of, 515–23 darkness not a source of idea, 411, 518–9n13 does not ignore determinability component, 520–1 fiction of a single sense-divide transcending, 531–4 exists only as a general idea in associative imagination, 520–22 how visible and tangible come to be instances of same idea, 521

Index need for a general point of view, 526 need to transcend standpoint of self, 529–30 no application beyond associative imagination, 522–3 objective made possible by causal association, 529–30 an ordered manifold (nexus) of points, 520–1 origin of, 517–22 phenomenology of, 526–8, 532 reason for focus on points (minima) 518–20 visible distance, 527–8 vision and touch both alike sources of the idea, 515 Kant’s conception metaphysical distinguished from geometrical, 88 nondiscursive, 88 not intrinsically Euclidean, 88–9 Locke’s account figures as complex ideas of simple modes, 155–6, 162–3n10 figures as ideas of diverse senses, 156–7 ignores determinability component, 520 as indeterminate distance or extension, 155, 520 simple idea despite divisibility, 132 a simple idea of diverse senses, 155– 6, 200–1 Space and time as a priori representations (see also Intuition; Sensibility) categories confer empirical reality on, 14 ideal in the same sense, 65–8 imagination a source of, 68–9 psychologistically explicated by pure intuition, 13–4, 29, 38–9, 62–8 pure sensible character of, 14 as synthetic unities of apperception, 13, 29, 71–3, 172 transcendental ideality of (see Idealism) Berkeley and Hume not open to neglected alternative objection, 63 Spinoza, Baruch

621

all but two attributes inconceivable by us, 181n6, 194 and emergent properties, 137n17 geometrical method, 383 human mind a mode, 146n25 innatism, 385 intellectualism of, 5, 383–5 mind-body parallelism, 115, 384 Spontaneity, 69, 74, 84–5 Standards. See Measure Strawson, Galen, 419n11. See also Causal realist Strawson, Peter, 67n10 Subject, atemporal existence of (Kant) 67–9, 73 Subjectivism. See Propositions; Psychologism; Sensibilism Substance, substantial constitution Berkeley’s account active even in “passive” perception, 320–1 correctly construed Locke’s conception, 305n9, 322–3 critique of Locke’s conception, 303– 5, 322–3 duration of coincides with succession of perceptions, 320 exists in perceiving, 320–1 grammar obscures notion of, 322–3 immortality of spiritual, 323–4 non-mental support of sensible qualities explains nothing, 305–6 objections to, 314–5 perceiving psychologistically explicates, 344, 398 possibility of a third nature, 181n6, 278n3, 291, 304–5 rejects Cartesian notion of substantial union, 321–2 sensible things not because inconceivable as efficacious, 306–9 simplicity of spiritual, 315–8, 321–4 spirit knowable through its effects, not in itself, 322–4 spirits satisfy criteria of substantial existence, 311–2 “supports” sensible qualities by perceiving them, 305n9, 313–4 idea of (see Ideas)

622 Substance, substantial constitution (continued) Hume’s account associative origin restricts scope to imagination, 403 causes are always, 178–9 fiction of, 463 no preassociative impression, so no idea of as object, 463 perceptions all satisfy definition of, 463–4 realism regarding is unintelligible, 463–4 Kant’s conception of, 194n22 Locke’s account causal efficacy defines existence of, 188 conceived by what it does, not what it is, 144, 164 difference from Kant’s account, 194n22 has an essential constitution, 182–3 limitations of human ability to cognize, 181–4 the most fundamental constitution of a thing, 180–1 powers superadded to by God, 8, 1501n1, 180–4, 193 skepticism regarding, 183–4, 193–4 when ideas of should be applied, 144–5 Succession. See also Time Berkeley’s account Locke’s subjected to separability principle, 319–321 origin restricts to mental operations, 247, 319 Hume’s account derived from Locke, 460 duration inapplicable in a proper sense to objects, 458–9, 461n1, 522–3 no application of idea beyond associative imagination, 522–3 not ideal but real, 56–7, 83, 403, 447, 457–8, 562 Kant’s account ideal, 65–8, 83 made possible by pure time, 62, 67 psychologistically explicated, 62–8

INDEX Locke’s account idea of reflexion, 126, 318 reflexive origin proven by thought experiments, 130, 318–9 Suggestive signification (Berkeley) animals capable of, 105, 282n6, 346 articulated, 354–8, 361 basis of Berkeley’s theory of objective understanding, 235 both artificial and natural (divinely instituted) 264–5, 339–40, 346–7, 364 experience and custom requisite for, 333, 337 experienced sensibly, not intellectually, 345–8 explains behavioral space, 338 explains objective understanding, 359– 66 first and second visual dimensions are given by, 341–4 formal multiplicity makes some signs better suited than others, 350–1 generality just one species of, 264–5, 353 language of nature, 59–66 and notions, 365–6 primary objects suggest secondary, 333 varieties of, 264–5 visual ideas suggest tactual, 329 vs. considering ideas absolutely in themselves, 260, 266, 279, 287, 291, 299, 346 by written characters, 329 Synopsis of the manifold a priori through sense, 58, 73 Synthesis. See Apprehension, Imagination System, systematic unity essential to Hume’s philosophy, 369n1, 563 unity essential to Kant’s philosophy, 91 Tangible space. See Space; Vision Testimony, 586–7 Theory of ideas, 6 and Cartesian skepticism, 236–41 difference from cognitive science, 110– 6 Hume’s composed of ideal causal relations, 440–1

Index Hume’s composed of two causal relations, 415–6 not a theory of linguistic discourse, 99– 110 not a theory of meaning, 97–99 nothing like a private language, 8, 97– 110, 114, 201, 203, 241, 449 Theory of understanding, early modern. See also Intellectualism; Sensibilism; Understanding conception of idea in, 111–3 divergence from contemporary scientific, 110–6 empiricist, 137–9 importance of psychologism for, 30–3 justification and origins questions fused in Hume’s, 539, 546 must never confound conceptual with epistemological, 47–8, 122–3, 377–8, 452 preeminence of Hume’s copy principle in due to clarifying its power, 414–5 purpose of, 240–1 role of psychology in, 4–5 Thing in itself. See Kant; Realism; Third natures Third natures, 175, 181n6, 234, 278n3, 291, 304–5, 405n2, 420, 422– 3n14, 430 Thought. See Association; Imagination; Judgment; Relation; Understanding Time. See also Succession Hume’s account amalgam of the senses and associative imagination, 522 as an ordered manifold (nexus) of instants, 522 customary contiguity association constitutes general idea of, 515–23 objective made possible by causal association, 529–30 two differences from account of origin of space, 522 Kant’s account (see also Intuition; Space and time) duration psychologistically explicated, 66–7 modes of, 62, 69 as original synthetic unity of all the manifold, 71–3, 77–81

623

psychologistically explicated, 63–8 Tononi, Giulio, 110n20 Tooby, John, 113n25 Transcendental Ideal, 93n4 Transcendental philosophy. See Idealism; Logic; Psychology Transitions of thought. See also Custom; Facility; Relation relational significance for Berkeley, 328–30, 335, 346, 354, 359, 365, 370, 373, 396 relational significance for Hume, 23, 371–3, 405, 443–5, 460, 464–78, 512–3, 530, 554, 567, 575–6, 581– 2, 588–92 Understanding, intellect Berkeley’s account action psychologistically explicates cause and effect, 311–3, 398 critique of traditional conception of objective, 293–309 introspection plays minimal role in, 330n2, 331 objective explained by suggestive signification, 325, 359–66 outcome of critique of traditional conceptions, 325 principles of human not applicable to divine, 296 problem of unity of, 314–5 psychologistic, 397–8 psychology as ontological touchstone, 267–9, 394, 398 pure as faculty of reflexive selfawareness, 311 relevance to animal, 282n6, 292 role of God in, 282n5, 295–6, 364–5, 399 separability principle transforms sensibilist theory of, 257–71 shortcomings of, 370–1 synthetic conception of objective, 326–66 Hume’s account and abstract relations of ideas (see Knowledge) accepts limits to rigor in study of, 496–8 affect saves from self-destruction, 582–6

624

INDEX

Understanding, intellect Hume’s account (continued) affects immanent to consciousness central to, 111, 464–78, 498, 582– 6 arbiter of what is real, what fictive, 537 association is highest principle, 368– 74 Berkeleyan foundations of, 370–1 challenge to distinguish from imagination, 32–9 customary association explains, 508 difference between spatial and temporal reasoning, 523–4 empirical reasoning, 538–71 empirical reasoning based on uniformity principle, 543 excludes everything but perceptions, 405 explicated by imagination, 29–36, 403 extends to animal minds, 510–1 facility the supreme principle of, 585–8, 592 and imagination, 21–33, 536–7 introspection plays minimal role in, 114, 417, 497 irrational and unreasonable employments of, 548, 551, 568, 578, 580, 586–8 justification and origins questions fused in, 539, 546 objective point of view made possible by causal association, 529–30 objective understanding idealized, 402–3, 456–64, 537, 562 operations of, 536 pleasure principle actuates, 496, 504 preassociative reality of, 403, 405 preeminence of origins of ideas in, 21–3, 377–8 psychology as ontology’s touchstone, 450–1, 512–3, 523 rational/reasonable employment of, 537–8, 548, 551, 556, 567–8, 578– 9 reasoning consists in making comparisons, 499

resemblance association essential to, 513n11 scientific, 526 skeptical dimension of, 377, 572–92 takes account of constancy of conjunctions, 551 theory of philosophically preeminent, 368 world of judgment (see World beyond the senses) Kant’s account (see also Apperception) discursive, 7–8n6 as faulty of prediscursive unity of apperception, 71–3 focused on individual, isolated intelligence, 102–4 introspection plays minimal role in, 114 psychological origins as ontological touchstone, 25, 27–9, 42, 47–8, 85, 113, 244 possibility of, 13, 73–81, 102, 104n17 Locke’s account anti-innatist, 119–22, 138, 388–95 ascribed more to than experience can explain, 395–6 brings order from chaos of perception, 120, 133, 152, 395 brought to forefront of philosophy, 118, 177 cognitive limitations of, 133–4, 181– 4, 192–4 complexity of its ideas parallels complexity of visible world, 137 considerative power essential to all complexity and relation, 134–5, 393, 395–6 human-relative character of, 239 and imagination, 134 introspection plays minimal role in, 114–5, 129–30, 149n27 in its state of nature, 210, 236 objective, 120, 174–94 only separates and combines, never creates simple ideas, 131–4 origins of ideas crucial in, 118–39, 204–5, 208, 377–8, 388–95, 479 prioritizes conception over cognition, 119, 122–3, 128, 141–9

Index psychology as ontological touchstone, 118, 122–3, 139, 208–9, 394 rich innate endowment of faculties, 112, 123n3 signifying power of, 195–223 three powers define, 118, 394 vocation of more conative than cognitive, 133 theory of (see Theory of understanding) Uniformity of nature principle Hume’s account belief in begins with the copy principle, 559–60 belief in founded on custom, 546–8 belief in overcomes first species probability, 557–63 belief in presupposed by empirical reasoning, 545–51 belief in presupposed by second and third species probability, 558 incorporates idea of necessity connection, 540–3 infixed conviction of infants and animals, 529, 550 mediating role in empirical reasoning, 540–3, 548–52 operation in empirical reasoning, 540, 543 in Locke, 179 Universals, universality. See General representation Vision Berkeley’s account aesthetic formal multiplicity, 353–6, 516 affords access to tactually inaccessible space, 340–1, 361–2 aspatiality of visual data escapes attention, 329–30, 333, 345–8, 354, 359–60 built on Locke’s precedent, 327 comparisons with facial expressions, 339, 346–7, 359–60 comparisons with spoken language, 329, 333, 346 comparisons with written language, 329, 332–3, 340, 349–50 custom conceals aspatiality of, 328– 30

625 data carved up to optimize correlations with touch, 332–3, 339–40, 346–8, 350–2, 354 direction, 333–5 disanalogies with vernacular language, 105–6, 333, 352–4, 360 distance, 331n5, 335–6 empiricist but not introspective, 330n2, 331–3, 336–7 expands spatial signification of data of other senses, 360–1 experience and custom essential to spatial representation, 326–44, 346 extension and figure, 336 formal multiplicity of, 339, 349–58, 362 geometry by sight, 341–2 guided by touch in all matters spatial, 334–7, 342 imagination produces familiar spatial physiognomy, 330, 335, 346 Molyneux-type cases, 331–40, 342–4, 355–8 no more spatial than hearing, smell, and taste, 332, 334–5, 337, 346, 348, 355, 361 not a logical formal multiplicity, 352–3 number, 337 only sense comparable in formal multiplicity to touch, 105, 349–58, 361 other senses’ ideas spatial signs but not spatial language, 351–2, 354–5 perception vs. experience, 333, 337, 339, 346 phenomenology (spatial “look”) 330, 335, 337, 339, 342, 344–8, 359–60 primary objects of, 333 primary objects of vision and touch do not resemble, 335, 341–4, 346, 357–8n20 primary objects spatial only in attenuated, metaphorical sense, 334–6 and proprioceptive locus of tangible spatiality, 331–2 secondary objects of, 329, 333–4 secondary objects the focus of attention, 333

626

INDEX

Vision Berkeley’s account (continued) situation, 333–5 space of any dimension visually imperceptible, 328, 331–2, 334–5, 341–4, 354–5 a species of language, 105, 328–30, 339–40, 347, 351, 355–6 synthesized spatiality, 330–1 systematic network of relations with touch, 328–9, 362 touch the only source of ideas of space, 328, 338–9, 361–2 visual ideas suggest tactual (see Suggestive signification) why same spatial terminology for vision and touch, 348–9, 354 contemporary comparison, 152–4 Descartes’s innatist conception, 154–5 Hume’s account (see Space) innatist conceptions of depth perception, 153–5 Locke’s account of visible third dimension acts of considering as one essential in, 169 as confirmation of empiricism, 166–9 data carved up to optimize correlations with touch, 158, 239, 326 evidence for truth of, 167–9 experienced as appearance, not ratiocinative, 160–3, 170–3 explanandum pre-objective, 170–1 extent of dependence on tactile experience, 158 judgment confounded with perception, 129, 147, 160n8, 160– 3 judgment’s role in differs from its role in tactual, 161–2, 326–7 learning analogous to learning vernacular, 167–9 Molyneux problem, 155–7 originality and importance of analysis, 150, 169–73 painting analogy, 343–4 phenomenology of products of judgment, 162–7, 238–40

probable response to Leibniz on Molyneux, 159–62 reading analogy, 129, 162, 165–6, 326 sense relied on most for spatial cognition, 164 solution to the Molyneux problem, 150, 157–67 speech analogy, 129, 162, 165–7 synthetic conception of experience of, 170–3, 326–7 transparency of judgment, 162 visualization, 162 why a focus for early modern philosophers, 152 Vivacity (Hume) alone distinguishes actual from possible modalities of existence, 406–8, 482–6 alone distinguishes believed from unbelieved perceptions, 406–8, 478–6, 553 alone distinguishes impressions from ideas, 405, 481 belief always requires an object (idea, impression) 59, 378, 418, 500, 518–9n13 belief and general rules, 527–8n17 belief for Hume not what epistemologists today understand, 482 causal relations main source of, 488, 504–5 a feeling immanent to consciousness, 408, 480–6, 553 general rules correct for appearances to reality sense, 527–8n17, 531n19 independent variable in respect to perceptions (objects) 407–8, 484–6 influence of association on, 406 intensity of proportioned to intensity of facility, 554, 567 pleasure giver, 25, 496 projective character of, 494 psychologistically explicates real existence, 31, 292, 403, 482–6 reality sense, 406–7, 482, 527–8n17, 531n19 role in memory, 553

Index transference principle (always follows facility) 31, 101, 372–3, 479, 483, 486–8, 525, 530, 554, 567, 582–6 Vulgar views. See Materialism Will Berkeley’s conception denotes what is active in the mind, 312 sometimes interchangeable with imagination, 312 source of notion of causality, 311–3, 398 Locke source of ideas of active powers, 179 Wilson, Fred, 419n11. See also Causal realist

627

Wilson, Margaret, 385n5 Winkler, Ken, 250n1, 255n3, 260n5, 265– 6n8, 278n3, 302n7 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 186, 203n2, 302, 352–3n16, 534–5 World beyond the senses, 30, 373, 403, 428, 441, 464, 475–6n13, 481– 2n19, 493, 495, 523–35, 561 World of the senses (intellectual world) 53, 403, 440–4, 447 449n35, 493, 495, 509, 559, 561–2 Wright, John, 418–9n11, 422–3n14, 481– 2n19, 484n20, 518–9n13. See also Causal realist Yolton, John, 142

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