These subversive consequences of his theory Hume did not conceal, though
he did not push his mental 'atomism' to its logical extreme. When he
defined material objects as 'coloured points disposed in a certain
order,' he was in fact admitting space as a relating factor; when he
spoke of the succession of impressions and ideas in experience, he was
tacitly assuming that what was apprehended was not a bare succession of
sensations, but _also_ the fact that they were succeeding one another,
and so allowing a sense of temporal relation. But further than this he
refused to go. The idea of a continuous self was fantastic. There was
nothing beneath the ideas to connect them. The notion of causal
connection was equally chimerical. Each sensation was distinct and
existed in its own right. It could therefore occur alone. There was
nothing to link together the distinct impressions. Hence necessary
connection in events could not be more than a fiction of the mind based
on expectation of customary sequences; how the mind he had described as
non-existent could form an expectation or observe a sequence was calmly
left a mystery.
Hume, then, seemed to leave to his successors in philosophy a task of
synthesis. He had tumbled the soul off her high watch-tower, but how to
combine her shattered fragments again into a working unity he declined
to say. He saw the sceptical implications of his analysis, but professed
himself unable to suggest a remedy.
He had, however, made the embarrassments of the theory of knowledge
sufficiently clear for Kant, his most important successor, to hit upon
the most obvious palliative, and in the _Critique of Pure Reason_ Kant
set himself to patch up Hume's analysis. Experience as it came through
the channels of sense, he admitted Hume had analysed correctly; it was
'a manifold,' a whirl of separate sensations. But these _per se_ could
not yield knowledge. They must be made to cohere, and the way to do this
he had found. The mind on to which they fell was equipped with a
complicated apparatus of faculties which could organize the chaotic
manifold of sense and turn it into the connected world which common
sense and science recognize. First it views the data of sense in the
light of its own 'pure intuitions,' and, lo! they are seen to be in
Space and Time; then it solidifies them with its own 'categories,' which
turn them into 'substances' and 'causes' and endow them with all the
attributes required to sustain that status; finally it refers them all
to a Transcendental Ego, which is not, indeed, a soul, but sufficiently
like one to provide something that can admire the creative synthesis of
'mind as such.'
Had Hume lived to read Kant's _Critique_, he would probably have jeered
at the vain complications of Kant's transcendental machinery, and made
it clear that between the primary manifold of sensation and the first
constructions of the intellect there still yawns a gulf which Kant's
laboured explanations nowhere bridge.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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