760 LOCKE
Locke, with all his aversion to what is unrepresentable in forms of coexistence and succession, is too faithful to rational facts to overlook these mysterious elements of our rational experience. His integrity is also illustrated in his acknowledgment of the unimaginable, and in this sense incognizable, in our thought of Substance. He tries to phenomenalize it; but he finds that it cannot be phenomenalized, and yet that we cannot dispense with it. An unsubstantiated succession of phenomena, without a centre of unity to which they are referable, is unintelligible; we could not have a language consisting only of adjectives. Locke had an obscure apprehension of this intellectual obligation as a fact of rational consciousness. According to his report, "the operations of the mind" oblige us to suppose something beyond phenomena, to which as qualities phenomena must belong; but he was honestly perplexed by the "confused negative" thought of this something," which was all that he could reach, and of which he says we "neither have nor can have any positive idea either by sensation or reflexion." The word substance thus means "only an uncertain supposition of we know not what" (i. 4, § 18). All attempt to realize it is like the attempt to realize immensity or eternity, and we are involved in an endless – inevitable yet incomprehensible – regress. If one were to ask what the substance is in which this colour and that taste and smelling "inhere," and was told that they belong to the solid and extended parts, or primary qualities, of the thing, he must again ask what their substance is, and so on for ever. "He would be in a difficulty like the Indian, who, after saying that the world rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a broad-backed tortoise, could only suppose the tortoise to rest on 'something, I know not what.'" We must fail, in short, when we try either to phenomenalize our thought of substance or to dispense with it. He finds that our only positive complex ideas of substances are these in which we imagine an aggregate of attributes; it is only thus that we can rise to any positive thought even of God, in "the power we have of enlarging indefinitely some of the ideas we receive from sensation and reflexion" (ii. 23, § 33). Why we must be in this strange mental predicament with regard to our thought of substance, Locke characteristically did not inquire. He reported the fact in his own "plain historical way."
He struggled bravely to be faithful to facts in his report of the not unlike mental predicament in which we find ourselves when reflexion awakens in us the conviction of our own Individuality and continued personal sameness. The paradoxes of expression in which he gets involved in the chapter on "personal identity" are evidence of this. He mixes the thought of our actual individual personality, given in our consciousness of something external to self, and above all in our moral experience of responsible agency, with the negative thought of the transcendental relation of substance, which, when we try to phenomenalize it, becomes "an uncertain supposition of we know not what."
But we must pass on to his report about our thoughts of Causality and Power, especially as his theory of real knowledge in the fourth book is very much an application of the principle of causality. The intellectual demand for the cause of an event is what we find we cannot help having, and yet it is a demand for what in the end we cannot grasp in a phenomenal representation. The causal thought in the form of power very much perplexed Locke, in his famed chapter on that idea (21); the perplexity is not so obvious in the sections on "cause and effect," in another chapter (26), where he considers only the circumstances in which this relational thought arises.
Locke traces the thought of "cause and effect" back to our "constant observation" that "qualities and finite substances begin to exist, and receive their existence" from other beings which produce them. Seeing, for instance, that, "in the substance which we call wax, fluidity is constantly produced by the application of a certain degree of heat, we somehow come to think of heat as the cause and fluidity as the effect." This is to report what happens in our minds when we observe a particular example of that causal connexion which gives intelligibility to successive phenomena, converting them into the concatenated system which we call the universe. Through calculated observations we, in this way, learn that this is the cause of that, and that such as this is the cause of such as that. But Locke's words in the 26th chapter do not explain the rational need for this causal expectation. Anything, as far as "constant observation" tells us, might have been the cause of anything; no finite number of instances of an "observed" sequence – in the strict meaning of the term "observation" – can guarantee its universality. Elsewhere, indeed, he adds to this meagre account the important statement that "our clearest idea of power is got through our consciousness of our own voluntary agency, and therefore through reflexion" (chap. 21). Bodily phenomena he there reports to be incapable of presenting originative agency, this being an idea which cannot be phenomenalized in external sense. In changes among bodies we observe no origination, but only phenomenal order – significant and therefore interpretable phenomena. The thought of the "production" of motions is connected with what we are conscious of when we exert volition. Locke here approaches the view of power afterwards taken by Berkeley, which was the constructive principle of Berkeleyan philosophy. But neither Locke nor Berkeley explains the transformation of our moral consciousness of ourselves, as free or originative, and therefore, to this extent, responsible agents, into the universal rational principle, on which both proceed in explaining our knowledge of the real existence of God and of the sensible world. Locke's language sometimes suggests that the transformation is made through an induction that is either instinctive or produced by custom. Now, not to say that every inductive generalization presupposes causal connexion, the particular fact that this, that, or the other person, through his moral experience, finds himself a free cause, does not, consistently with inductive rules, warrant the universal conclusion that the phenomenal changes of the universe must all be referred to power like our own personal power. That we are somehow obliged to think a caused or phenomenal cause, and ultimately an uncaused or free agent, of every change – that we are obliged to view changes as events or issues from adequate productive causes into which they may be refunded – is vaguely accepted in the Essay as a fact of rational consciousness; but no explanation is given of its origin, only of the circumstances in which it arises in the individual mind. The inquisitive reader still asks why the individual mind is obliged to think back all changes into sufficient causes of which they are the issues, and why each set of antecedent phenomena, into which we thus refund new phenomena, themselves occasion a fresh intellectual, demand for a preceding cause, while, after all, the mind is still left dissatisfied until it rests in a truly originative or unconditioned cause. And yet if the intellectual need for a phenomenal cause were withdrawn there could be no rationality in, and therefore no reasoning possible about, Nature; for all the physical government of the universe depends upon it; and again, if uncaused or unconditioned power were withdrawn there could be no moral responsibility or moral government. This sort of reductio ad absurdum of every merely empirical analysis of the causal thought into what is strictly observable was foreign to Locke. His aversion from mysticism may have made him pass slightly over the mystery of an experience that like ours is conditioned by relations of place, which lead to the unimaginable thought of Immensity, of succession, which lead to the unimaginable thought of Eternity, and of change, which lead to the unimaginable thoughts of Substance and Power.
Locke's book about our individual ideas or thoughts leads naturally to his Third Book, which is especially about those of them that are general and abstract, and their connexion with language. It is here that he describes "abstract ideas"; here also he illustrates the confusion apt to be produced in our thoughts by the imperfections of language.
But we must pass on to the Fourth Book, about knowledge, which closes the Essay. Knowledge, he says, is perception or discernment of relations among our thoughts; real knowledge is discernment of their relations to what is objectively real. In his books about our "ideas" he had dealt with "simple apprehensions"; here he is concerned with "judgments" and "reasonings," and largely with judgments and reasonings about matters of fact. At the end of the long and patient research among our mere thoughts or simple apprehensions, he supposes his reader apt to complain that he has been "all this while only building a castle in the air," and to ask what the purpose is of all this stir about our thoughts, or our knowledge either, if we are not thereby carried beyond our own individual thoughts, and must accordingly regard our own fancies as the universe. "If it be true that knowledge lies only in the agreement or disagreement of our own ideas, the visions of an enthusiast and the reasonings of a sober man will be equally certain. It is no matter how things themselves are" (iv. 4, § 1). This is the keynote of the fourth book. It does not, however, carry him into an analysis of the rational constitution of knowledge as knowledge, as it would carry a transcendentalist of the 19th century, or even an associative philosopher. Transcendental analysis is too remote from human affairs to interest Locke. Hume, moreover, had not yet shown the difficulties which sceptical ingenuity could suggest against those facts of rational consciousness which Locke accepted without analysis. The sceptic who doubted the very constitution of reason and experience, because it could not be supported by external proof, was less in his view than minds blindly resting on authority or on irrational instincts. Universal scepticism like Hume's he would at any rate probably have regarded as a frivolous amusement, into which no human mind could permanently subside, and therefore unworthy of the serious attention of a wise man. What he wanted was to awaken a conscious conviction of principles apt to be dormant in the individual, but to which he believed a response must be given when reflexion was called forth. He was careless as to how far these principles might be developed into a reasoned system of speculative philosophy. "Where we perceive the agreement or disagreement of any of our ideas there is certain knowledge; and wherever we are sure these ideas agree with the reality of things, there is certain real knowledge" (chap. 4, § 18). He is anxious throughout to show that a great deal of commonly supposed real
