Now these passages[1] are noteworthy, in that they contain what, from Hume's point of view, ought to have been regarded, not as a psychological account of the genesis of a false belief, but as a valid logical deduction of the category of objective existence. In short, Hume was inconsistent in regarding the belief in the independent existence of sensible objects as a fiction, such as the belief in causality, for the very reason that it is an obvious and necessary implication of his own most fundamental doctrine of the composite nature of the mind. For, if the mind is nothing but a cluster of percepts or objects, no one of these objects could possibly owe its existence to its presence as an element of the cluster. Every new aggregate presupposes the prior and independent existence of its parts. From Hume's point of view, it is as irrational to regard any sensible object as having its esse in its percipi, as to regard a pebble as coming into existence, or going out of existence, when joined to, or separated from, other pebbles. The idealistic identification of esse and percipi derives its force from the Cartesian conception of objects of consciousness as 'states' of consciousness, as modifications of a mental substance or subject. A mode of a substance cannot exist apart from the substance ; and if a sensible object is a mere mode or state of a percipient, then, and only then, is its period of existence coincident with the period during which it is perceived. If, however, we deny permanence and substantiality to the mind, there is no longer any propriety in regarding perceived objects as transitory states. This was precisely what Hume failed to see. He had rejected the Berkleyan conception of the subject as a spiritual substance, but he still clung to the strictly correlative conception of the object as a transitory state, though there was nothing left of which it could be a state. The world, as it should have been for Hume, is as free from states of consciousness as from conscious subjects. There is left——what? Simply objects, facts, things and their relations. Instead of the supposedly Humean chaos or flux of mental states, in which everything is subjective and nothing
- ↑ I am indebted to Mr. H. M. Gage, formerly Fellow in Philosophy at Columbia, for calling my attention to these passages and suggesting their possible bearing upon the problem of realism.
