A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method Into Moral Subjects; and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
David Hume · en
76. This, it may be said, is just the conclusion that was wanted in
order to make Locke’s doctrine of the particular relation of identity
correspond with his general doctrine of the fictitiousness of
relations. To complete the consistency, however, his whole account of
the origin of the relation (or of the idea in which it consists) must
be changed, since it supposes it to be derived from an observation
of things or existence, which again is to suppose sameness to be
in the things or to be real. This change made, philosophy would
have to start anew with the problem of accounting for the origin of
the fictitious idea. It would have to explain how it comes to pass
that the mind, if its function consists solely in reproducing and
combining given ideas, or again in ‘abstracting’ combined ideas from
each other, should be able to invent a relation which is neither a
given idea, nor a reproduction, combination, or abstract residuum
of given ideas. This is the great problem which we shall find Hume
attempting. Locke really never saw its necessity, because the
dominion of language--a dominion which, as he did not recognise it,
he had no need to account for--always, in spite of his assertion that
simple ideas are the sole _data_ of consciousness, held him to the
belief in another _datum_ of which ideas are the appearances, viz., a
thing having identity, because the same with itself in the manifold
times of its appearance. This _datum_, under various guises, but
in each demonstrably, according to Locke’s showing, a ‘creation of
thought,’ has met us in all the modes of his theory, as the condition
of knowledge. As the ‘abstract idea’ of substance it renders
‘perishing’ ideas into qualities by which objects may be discerned.
(Book II. chap. xi. sec. 1.) As the relative idea of cause, it makes
them ‘affections’ to be accounted for. As the fiction of a universal,
it is the condition of their mutual qualification as constituents of
a whole. Finally, as the ‘superinduced’ relation of sameness, the
direct negative of the perpetual beginning and ending of ‘ideas,’ it
constitutes the ‘very being of things.’
Transition to Locke’s doctrine of essence.