A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method Into Moral Subjects; and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
David Hume · en
In his Fourth Book he so far
departs from the doctrine implied in his chapters on the reality and
adequacy of ideas and on the names of substances, as to treat the
notion of several single subjects in which ideas co-exist (which he
still holds to be the proper notion of substances), as a fiction
of thought. There are no such single subjects. What we deem so are
really ‘retainers to other parts of nature.’ ‘Their observable
qualities, actions, and powers are owing to something without them;
and there is not so complete and perfect a part that we know of
nature, which does not owe the being it has, and the excellencies
of it, to its neighbours’ (Book IV. chap. vi. sec. 11). As thus
conceived of, the ‘objective order’ which our experience represents
is doubtless other than that collection of fixed separate ‘things,’
implied in the language about substances which Locke found in vogue,
but it remains an objective order still--an order of ‘qualities,
actions, and powers’ which no multitude of sensible events could
constitute, but apart from which no sensible event could have such
significance as to render even a singular proposition of real truth
possible.
[1] See above, paragraph 117, sub. fin.
Transition to doctrine of God and the soul.
126. It remains to inquire how, with Locke, the ideas of self and
God escape subjection to those solvents of reality which, with
more or less of consistency and consciousness, he applied to the
conceptions on which the science of nature rests. Such an enquiry
forms the natural transition to the next stage in the history of his
philosophy. It was Berkeley’s practical interest in these ideas that
held him back from a development of his master’s principles, in which
he would have anticipated Hume, and finally brought him to attach
that other meaning to the ‘new way of ideas’ faintly adumbrated
in the later sections of his ‘Siris,’ which gives to Reason the
functions that Locke had assigned to Sense.
Thinking substance--source of the same ideas as outer substance.