Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

single idea as that of a man or an unit.' He then adds, and the third sort of complex ideas is that which we call relative, which consists in the consideration and comparing one idea with another.' This last sort of ideas seems to me the only ones that are perfectly simple and indivisible: things themselves are always complex. Mr. Locke considers rightly that we know nothing of the nature of substance, and that we can only define it as an abstract idea of some thing, that supports accidents or connects different sensible qualities together. For this modest confession of his own ignorance he was however called to a very severe account by the learned of the time, Bishop Stillingfleet and others, who thought they knew more of the matter, and could penetrate the essence of things. The Essay on the Human Understanding' is swelled out with repeated and long extracts from this controversy, and they are not the least valuable part of the work, as they show to what shifts men can be driven, to defend systematically not truth but their own opinion, who become blind and obstinate by implicit faith, and who by adhering to every established prejudice drive others into all the absurdities of paradox.

[ocr errors]

Mr. Locke's own account of our ideas of substance is a good deal spun out, and is enriched with as many illustrations from the qualities of gold, as if he had been candidate for the place of assaymaster of the mint. The chapter On Identity' is perhaps the best reasoned and the most full of thought and observation of any in the Essay: though the author sets out with an observation which seems to augur differently. For after explaining identity as it relates to individuality, or implies that a thing is the same with itself, he says, 'From what has been said it is easy to discover what is so much inquired after, the principium individuationis: and that, it is plain, is existence itself, which determines a being of any sort to a particular time and place, incommunicable to two beings of the same kind.' He then, very wisely quitting this principle which would certainly be of no use to him, proceeds directly to account for the identity of different things from a continuance, not of the same substance, but of the same essence, or of the characteristic properties of any thing, carried on in succession; as a river is the same while it flows through the same channel, or an oak while it retains the same organization, and a man while he retains the same life and continued consciousness.

In the chapter entitled 'Of true and false Ideas,' the author supposes truth to depend on some mental or verbal proposition, and does not, like Hobbes and the modern metaphysical writers, make it consist entirely in a form of words. In the last chapter of the

first volume he treats of the association of ideas. This chapter was added after the first edition of the work, and he confesses, that the subject was something new to him. He has treated it in that mixed way of observation and reasoning, in which the peculiar force of his mind lay. The account he has given of it does not form a system, but the fragments of a system, something like the French memoirs that are to serve for the materials of a history. He does not appear to have laid down any general theorem on the subject, or to have been aware of the possibility of applying this principle to account in a plausible manner for the whole chain of our thoughts and feelings, as Hobbes and Hartley have done. Sound, practical, good sense, and a kind of discursive observation, neither grovelling in vulgar common place, nor soaring into the regions of paradox, are in fact the general characteristics of his mind, which has not been understood by his admirers and commentators. A short passage will suffice to show his manner of considering this doctrine of association.

'Many children,' he says, 'imputing the pain they endured at school to their books they were corrected for, so join those ideas together that a book becomes their aversion, and they are never reconciled to the study and use of them all their lives after and thus reading becomes a torment to them, which otherwise possibly they might have made the great pleasure of their lives. There are rooms convenient enough that some men cannot study in, and fashions of vessels, which though ever so clean and commodious they cannot drink out of, and that by reason of some accidental ideas which are annexed to them, and make them offensive: and who is there that has not observed some man to flag at the appearance, or in the company of some certain person, not otherwise superior to him, but because having once on some occasion got the ascendant, the idea of authority and distance goes along with that of the person? And he that has been thus subjected is not able to separate them. Instances of this kind are so plentiful every where, that if I add one more, it is only for the pleasant oddness of it: it is of a young gentleman, who having learned to dance, and that to great perfection, there happened to stand an old trunk in the room where he learned: the idea of this remarkable piece of household stuff had so mixed itself with all the turns and steps of his dances, that though in that chamber he could dance exceedingly well, yet it was only whilst that trunk was there; nor could he perform well in any other place, unless that, or some such other trunk had its due position in the room.'

The following passage approaches the nearest to the statement of a general principle:

This strong combination of ideas, not allied by nature, the mind makes in itself either voluntarily or by chance: and hence it comes in different men to be very different, according to their different inclinations, educations, interests, &c. Custom settles habits of thinking in the understanding, as well as of determining in the will, and of motions in the body: all which seems to be but trains of motion in the animal spirits, which once set agoing continue 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. As far as we can comprehend thinking, thus ideas seem to be produced in our minds; or if they are not, this may serve to explain their following one another in an habitual train when once they are put into that track, as well as it does to explain such motions of the body. A musician used to any tune will find, that let it but once begin in his head, the ideas of the several notes of it will follow one another orderly in his understanding, without any care or attention, as regularly as his finger moves orderly over the keys of the organ to play out the tune he has begun, though his inattentive thoughts be elsewhere a wandering. Whether the natural cause of these ideas, as well as of that regular dancing of the fingers, be the motion of his animal spirits, I will not determine, how probable soever by this instance it appears to be so; but this may help us a little to conceive of intellectual habits, and of the tying together of ideas. That there are such associations of them made by custom in the minds of most men, I think nobody will question, who has well considered himself or others; and to this perhaps might be justly attributed most of the sympathies and antipathies observable in men, which work as strongly and produce as regular effects as if they were natural, and are therefore called so, though they at first had no other original but the accidental connexion of two ideas, which either the strength of the first impression or future indulgence so united, that they always afterwards kept company together in that man's mind, as if they were but one idea. I say, most of the antipathies, I do not say all; for some of them are truly natural, depend upon our original constitution, and are born with us; but a great part of those which are counted natural, would have been known to be from unheeded though perhaps early impressions, or wanton fancies at first, which would have been acknowledged the original of them, if they had been warily observed.'

The former part of this passage, relating to the dancing of the animal spirits, the Abbé Condillac in his Logic' has paraphrased with a self-sufficiency, an assumption of originality, and a smoothness of flippancy, peculiar almost to himself.

On the subject of materialism, Mr. Locke seems to have had two opinions; the first, that as far as we can discern, the properties of mind and matter are utterly distinct and irreconcileable; the second, that God might for aught we know be able to superadd to matter a faculty of thinking: either the one or the other of these opinions must be without meaning. In speaking of the difficulties attending both sides of this question, he has, however, offered one of the best moral cautions against precipitancy of judgment and impatience of inquiry to be found in any author. He says, (vol. ii. p. 203) He that considers how hardly sensation is in our thoughts reconcilable to extended matter, or existence to any thing that hath no extension at all, will confess that he is very far from certainly knowing what his soul is. It is a point which seems to me to be put out of the reach of our knowledge: and he who will give himself leave to consider freely, and look into the dark and intricate part of each hypothesis, will scarce find his reason able to determine him fixedly for or against the soul's materiality. Since on which side soever he views it, either as an unextended substance, or a thinking extended matter, the difficulty to conceive either, will, whilst either alone is in his thoughts, still drive him to the contrary side. An unfair way which some men take with themselves; who because of the unconceivableness of some thing they find in one, throw themselves violently into the contrary hypothesis, though altogether as unintelligible to an unbiassed understanding. This serves not only to show the weakness and scantiness of our knowledge, but the insignificant triumph of such sort of arguments, which drawn from our own views may satisfy us that we can find no certainty on one side of the question; but do not at all thereby help us to truth, by running into the opposite opinion, which on examination will be found clogged with equal difficulties.'

Mr. Locke has not, I think, himself enough attended to this admirable caution in his adoption of the common argument to demonstrate the existence of God à priori, towards which I conceive not the slightest advances can be made in this method. For the axiom that every thing must have a cause can never be made to infer the existence of a first cause, that is, of something without a cause. It is equally impossible for the human mind to conceive of the beginning of existence, or to pass from nothing to something, either by the help of an infinite series of finite existences, or by the infinite duration of one simple, absolute existence. Those who wish to see how far human ingenuity can push a complete confusion of ideas into the verge of the strictest logical demonstration and self-evident truth, may find all that they want in Dr. Clarke's celebrated work on the

'Attributes,' which contains more logical acuteness and more power of scholastic disputation than any other work that I know of in modern times. Hartley has lost himself in the same endless labyrinth of finite and infinite series. And Locke's statement of this question is only better, because it is shorter, and goes straight forward, without stopping to answer difficulties.

ON TOOKE'S 'DIVERSIONS OF PURLEY'

I WOULD class the merits of Mr. Tooke's work under three heads: the etymological, the grammatical, and the philosophical. The etymological part is excellent, the grammatical part indifferent, and the philosophical part to the last degree despicable; it is downright, unqualified, unredeemed nonsense. As Mr. Tooke himself says that all metaphysical reasoning is nonsense, it is scarcely rude to say that his metaphysical reasoning is so. It appears to me to be mere midsummer madness.' He ought not indeed to have meddled with logic or metaphysics after such a declaration; he ought to have supposed that he laboured under some natural defect in this respect, as a man who finds no harmony in any tune that is played to him, may without much modesty conclude that he has no ear for music.

The opinion which I have here advanced of this writer's merits as a general reasoner may seem a bold one; but the proof of it is not difficult; it is as easy as transcribing. I have only to take a few passages in which he has applied etymology to the illustration of moral and metaphysical truth, to make his undistinguishing admirers blush, not for their idol, but for the weakness and bounded faculties of human nature.

Mr. Tooke lays it down as a maxim, that the mind has neither complex nor abstract ideas. He was in some things a zealot, and his zeal had led him to believe that his system of etymology would in some way or other establish this metaphysical principle, and overturn the established notions of law, morality, philosophy, and divinity. The full development and execution of this project is reserved for a future volume, but there are perpetual hints and intimations of it in the two first, something like the aerial music and flying noises in Prospero's island. The author seems constantly in his own mind on the point of detecting all imposture and delusion with the Ithuriel spear of etymology, but he as constantly draws back, and postpones his triumph. The second volume of the Diversions' consists chiefly of about two thousand instances of the etymology of words, to prove

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »