A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method Into Moral Subjects; and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion — David Hume — John Shaqi
A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method Into Moral Subjects; and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
David Hume · en
was then touched was red.’ [1]
[1] Thus the conviction that an object seen is not ‘bare fancy,’
which is gained by ‘putting the hand to it’ (Book IV. chap. xi. sec.
l7), as it conveys the idea of solidity, is properly, according to
Locke’s doctrine, not one among other ‘confirmations of the testimony
of the senses,’ but the source of all such testimony, as a testimony
to the real, _i.e._ to body. See above, paragraph 62.
Only the knowledge that something is, not what it is.
105. All that is gained, then, by the conversion of the feeling of
touch, pure and simple, into the idea of a body touched, is the
supposition that _there is_ a real existence which does not come and
go with the sensations. As to _what_ this existence is, as to its
real essence, we can have no knowledge but such as is given in a
present sensation. [1] Any essence of it, otherwise known, could only
be a nominal essence, a relation of ideas in our minds: it would lack
the condition in virtue of which alone a datum of consciousness can
claim to be representative of reality, that of being an impression
made by a body now operating upon us. (Book III. chap. v. sec. 2, and
Book IV. chap. xi. sec. 1.) The memory of such impression, however
faithful, will still only report a _past_ reality. It will itself
be merely ‘an idea in the mind.’ Neither it nor its relation to any
present sensation result from the immediate impact of body, and in
consequence neither ‘really exists.’ All that can be known, then, of
the real, in other words, the whole real essence of body, as it is
for us, reduces itself to that which can at any moment be ‘revealed’
in a single sensation apart from all relation to past sensations; and
this, as we have seen, is nothing at all.
[1] Cf. Book III. chap. vi. sec. 6: ‘As to the real essences of
substances, we only suppose their being, without precisely knowing
what they are.’ The appearance of the qualification ‘precisely,’ as
we shall see below, marks an oscillation from the view, according
to which ‘real essence’ is the negation of the knowable to the view
according to which our knowledge of it is merely inadequate.
How it is that the real essence of things, according to Locke,
perishes with them, yet is immutable.