Thought and language : an essay, having in view the revival, correction, and exclusive establishment of Locke's philosophy

Chapter I

The common persuasion of the way in which language denotes thought — Home Tooke's failure to correct Locke — Causes which have discredited Locke's Philosophy—Present effects of this discredit.

That Language and Thought stand to each other in the relation of sign and thing signified, is a fact beyond question ; but it may be made a question whether the way in which the representation takes place is not universally misconceived. The universal notion is, that language represents thought with a perfect correspondence of part to part, and a correspondence of operations in joining the parts ;

B

2 THE COMMON NOTION OF THE RELATION

SO that if we wish, when thought is expressed, .to .ascertain the nature and process of what kds" takeA' phjC^ '^^unthin, we have only to e;8.am:axe'/tTaG pjarls 'and composition of the language without J On the presumption of this kind of correspondence have been built all the metaphysical doctrines of ancient and of modern days, all treatises on grammar or structure of speech, all systems of logic, and consequently all systems of rhetoric also. The same kind of correspondence is taken for granted by Locke, who considers that all nouns in a proposition are put forward as signs of ideas that are the mental elements of the proposition, while the other parts of speech

» Addison speaks the common opinion when, in Spectator 166, he says, " The world is a copy or transcript of those ideas which are in the mind of the First Being, and those ideas which are in the mind of man are a transcript of the world. To this we may add, that words are the transcript of those ideas which are in the mind of man, and that writing or printing is the transcript of words,"

BETWEEN THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. 3

" signify the connection the mind gives to ideas, or to propositions, one with another."^

But universal, or all but universal as is this notion of the way in which language stands related to thought, it may, as I have said, be( questioned ; and I mean to show that if Locke / had questioned it, he might have reached a | foundation for his doctrine that would have \ placed it out of the reach of contradiction or \ dispute. A hundred years later, Home Tooke, one of Locke's most ardent admirers, did question it ; but it was by attributing to the instrumentality of language all that Locke ascribes originally to thought. Overpowered by the blaze of light which a view so near the truth cast upon him, he lost all distinctness of vision, and shot, in consequence, as far beyond the truth, as he had left Locke behind it. On the subject of abstraction, for instance, instead of saying that it is carried on, after our early learning, chiefly by the instrumentality of 2 Locke's Essay, b. iii., ch. vii., § 1.

4 HORNE TOOKE'S FAILURE

words, he says, " there is no such thing as abstraction except in words."^ Again, instead of being content with saying what most people suspect to be true that "all" (foregone) " systems of metaphysics, and controversies concerning it, are founded on the grossest ignorance of words and the nature of speech," he declares that " the very term metaphysic, is nonsense."^ Instead of pointing out in what way artificial language is instrumental in the conveyance of thought, he asserts that " all which we are accustomed to consider the operations of the mind, are nothing but the operations of language.* And further, after having traced all the parts of speech up to two, namely noun and verb, and shown that the remaining parts are only one or the other of these in disguise, he draws unwarrantable conclusions from the

' Diversions of Purley, cli. ii. The passage is often repeated. * Ibid., vol. i. (second edition), eh. ix., p. 399. 'Ibid., ch. iii., p. 51.

TO CORRECT LOCKE. 5

fact, and leaves his inquiries unfinished, because he could not establish, what indeed is contrary to truth, that verbs grew out of nouns, and not nouns out of verbs. Thus failing to place Locke's philosophy, as he meant to do, correctly before the world, he left an impression that the philosophy itself was unsound, instead of being deficient simply in mode of development ; an impression the more injurious, inasmuch as the continental followers of Locke had already brought, among his countrymen, discredit upon his doctrine, by having made it the ground of a system of materialism. Thus it happened that Locke, who, up to nearly the close of the last century, had been our leaning staff in metaphysics, as much respected by us as Bacon, the reformer of physics, lost almost all the authority he had won ; and the effect has been that those doctrines and methods of speculation have come again into activity, which Locke had set himself to ; oppose. _i)

6 CAUSES WHICH HAVE DISCREDITED

Now the doctrines which it had been Locke's especial object to subvert, were all those which assigned any other beginning, or any other ground of human knowledge than experience, and which pretended to arm human reason with any other means of prosecuting knowledge than Grod had given it.® The Aveight of his authority being removed, up sprung, in Germany, system after system of philosophy, constructed, in the old way, upon hypothesis, in contempt of all demand for experimental evidence; and here in England, where it had been thought dead, though alive among the metaphysicians of Germany, uprose, however failing in pristine vigour, the doctrine of the syllogism as taught by Aristotle and his followers, the schoolmen of the middle ages. Of this last-mentioned revival, Dr. Whately, the present archbishop of Dublin, was the indirect cause, probably without intending the full effect produced. He wrote for the Encyclo- " Locke's Essay, b. iv., ch. xvii., § 4.

LOCKE S PHILOSOPHY. 7

pedia Metropolitana an article on Logic, which he afterwards published separately; a work which, to use concerning it the words of Sir William Hamilton, himself a decided Aristotelian, " conciliated to the declining study a broader interest than its own." This it accomplished by the clearness of its style, by the strong common sense underlying the superstructure, and by its forced connection with Aristotelian logic, while all that is practically good and useful in it, is independent of the foundation on which it pretends to rest, but does not rest. But the public ear was won, and the subject followed up by an article in the Edinburgh Eeview (No. 115, 1833, Art. IX.), from the learned and powerful pen of the writer just named (Sir William Hamilton) ; and it is to this essay we may immediately ascribe the revulsion in favour of Aristotelian logic, and against Locke, which, for nearly five-and-twenty years, has been dominant in the academic world, and the portion of our periodic

8 PRESENT EFFECTS OF DISCREDITING LOCKE.

press which distributes, or which apes its learning.'

^ That I did not, at the time, under-estimate the likely effect of the article, — that, however conscious of my better cause, I saw it would eclipse for a season both me and my cause, — will be evident from the following passage, which was written six years after the publication of my "Outline of Sematology," and soon after the article appeared, while I was yet ignorant of the name of the author : —

"Though Oxford is said to be 'the only British seminary where the study of logic-proper survives,' yet if the learning expended in the article referred to operates according to its quantity, we may soon expect to see what the reviewer calls logic-proper flourishing in other places than Oxford. ' A new life ' is said to be * suddenly communicated to the expiring study,' in earnest of which we are presented with an array of new publications on the subject, formidable by their number at least, while the reviewer's essay, which places them at its head, is still more formidable for its learning, — learning which, being derived not only from Greece and Eome, but from the armouries of scholastic times, threatens, by its bare weight of rusty metal, to crush all opponents who come not in similar panoply. It would not he a new or singular event if, hy such sort of array, truth were overlornefor a season." — Beginnings of a new School of Metaphysics, Second Essay, p. 19.

PRESENT EFFECTS OF DISCREDITING LOCKE. 9

Nevertheless, in spite of the efforts which have thus far succeeded in re-establishing Aristotle, and in procuring respect for German metaphysics, our old love for the plain commonsense English philosophy of Locke, seems by many pregnant symptoms to be coming round again.® Nor must it be supposed that the

" Beside articles relative to Locke in several of the reviews, the following works, among others, have appeared, since these pages were first written, all of them tending in the direction of my own efforts :

" On the Study of Language, an Exposition of the Diversions of Purley : by Charles Richardson, LL.D."

" Letters on the Philosophy of the Human Mind : by Samuel Bailey."

" Locke's Writings and Philosophy historically considered : by Edward Tagart, F.S.A., F.L.S."

" The Senses and the Intellect : by Alexander Bain, A.M."

Ignored as I have been by the leaders among those who profess to review the literature of the day, and acquaint the world with what is new and true in doctrine, I cannot wonder that the three gentlemen last mentioned should know nothing of me or of my pretensions.

10 PRESENT EFFECTS OF DISCREDITING LOCKE.

efforts alluded to have been successful in any great degree beyond the limits of the academic world. Ask any Englishman of sound sense and wide information, clear from the trammels of college learning, what he thinks of metaphysics, Greek or German, and the subtilties of mood and figure in logic, — he will say that the one is moonshine, and the other, child's play with words. That this opinion is just, I do not despair of making evident. As a step to it, I shall, in the following chapter, endeavour to show that Locke's purpose is the only legitimate purpose that metaphysics can have ; that so far as he failed in it, the failure arose from his inability, notwithstanding all his pains, to keep his teaching clear from the false points of view which all previous teaching had contributed to establish ; but that, with regard to Kant's method of pursuing the same purpose,— while Locke's is a failure through 1^ wrong views occurring at times and capable of correction, Kant's is a failure throughout by

PRESENT EFFECTS OF DISCREDITING LOCKE. 1 1

being built on a purely hypothetical foundation incapable of proof, and permitting no substitution which would not destroy the entire edifice.

CHAPTER 11.

Speculation by hypothesis— Inquiry by induction.

The philosopliers of antiquity had but one way of prosecuting science, though the principle which each carried with him was as various as fancy could make it. Being admitted, the principle assumed was the key to all knowledge ; but this principle differed with every sect, and to the number of sects there was no end. The idealists of modern Germany build up systems in the same way, each system different from the last, because each is founded on mere hypothesis incapable of either proof or disproof. Surely it is time that this mode of philosophizing had an end ; and it would long since have been at an end, so as to have saved the world from nearly two centuries of fruitless speculation, if Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding had been as faultless in execution as it was sound in purpose. That purpose was, " to inquire into the original, certainty, said extent of human knowledge." It is self-evident that such inquiry should precede all other philosophical speculation, in order to stop it when it cannot be of use, and to indicate the ground, when ground there is, for speculating with likely profit. But while Locke's purpose was sound, he very soon takes a fundamentally wrong step in pursuirof "it. In endeavouring to get at th^ beginning of human knowledge, he goes back \ to the beginning of human existence, and finds | it sensitive ; that is to say, the babe has sen- | sations as the first condition of his existence. | With these sensations, either at first or after- V wards, he has knowledge also. Locke's proper | inquiry (the proper inquiry of every metaphysician) then was, how does knowledge become connected with sensation? For sensation is not knowledge : a sensation by itself is nothing more than an effect on the animal frame ; that is to say, some nerve or nerves of that frame are acted upon by a foreign substance, the action is diffused to the nerve centres, and sensations follow as the effect of having life that transcends, it may be just transcends, vegetable life. What an unwarrantable assumption, then, lies under Locke's first application of the term idea, when he considers the beginning of our knowledge to be those early sensations which reach the brain from the world without ; which sensations he calls simple ideas ! This first error leads to all his other errors in his doctrine of ideas. For speaking of sensations as simple ideas, he makes them the materials of complex ideas, by which he means all our subsequent knowledge, — all of which is derived from, or rather consists of, so he teaches, those first materials, with the addition to their number of ideas

INQUIRY BY INDUCTION. """^-W

obtained by reflecting on the inward processes while we accumulate our ideas obtained from without. Locke was not himself a materialist, but it is easy to see that such doctrine tends to materialism ; and this accordingly has, in other hands, been its issue, and its cause of failure. This is the reductio ad absurdum by which Locke has, for a time, been driven from the ground he was believed to have won ; nor can he be reinstated on it but by tracing our knowledge to a higher function of our nature than sensation, however true it is that the higher function would never have been called into activity if sensation had not first been active.

Turning now to Kant, the xmintentional father of modern idealism, as Locke is of modern sensationalism, we shall find that, with the same general purpose, namely, to ascertain the origin and the nature of human knowledge, and the source of its certainty when it is certain, he proceeds on a plan entirely difierent. He begins indeed as Locke begins, with sensations, and he allows that sensations arise from something that comes from without ; but what this something is, he denies that we know, or, in our present state of being, ever can know. Sensations, he teaches, are the crude materiel ^ of the world in which we live, which materiel is so moulded by the understanding immediately on its reception through the senses, as to exhibit the pheno- 'mena which we deem external nature, though these phenomena are nothing but the forms which the mind gives to that spiritual something, that noumenon, which occasions its activity. The mind, so he teaches, consists of TWENTY elements, of which the first TWO are Space and Time, for these receive the crude materiel conveyed by the senses ; the eye and the hand conveying it into space, inasmuch as they convey it in coexisting parts; the ear, the tongue, and the nose conveying it into

» Kant does not use this word, but it oifers itself in the attempt to explain his meaning.

time, inasmuch as they convey it in successive parts. Thus existing in space and time, it has next to take its varieties of form, and these it obtains from the understanding by virtue of the twelve constructive powers or faculties that constitute the Understanding. External nature, then, is nothing but the product of our own activity of thought : what things are in their own nature, we cannot now know; we can but know them as 'phenomena.^ Yet Reason is given to us to speculate on things transcending our present experience, and, while it regulates the understanding, it enables us, by virtue of its six ideas, completing the twenty elements of mind, to soar above this world where all is contingent and conditioned, and catch a secure,

^ Stated in our own way, we, Lockeists, must admit the fact which seems couched under this Kantist dogma. While we are convinced that the things of sense are, for us, related to each other as we perceive them to be, we must admit that by beings otherwise constituted, they may bo otherwise perceived.

C though not an experimental or demonstrable sight of that world, where all is absolute and unconditioned.

Such is the outline of Kant's doctrine ; and we, Lockeists, presume to say of it, that if our teacher began and continued his doctrine so as never to get clear of Matter, the German philosopher begins and continues his, so as scarcely to allow of our seeing anything but Mind. We need not wonder therefore that the speculators in Germany who have followed him, — Ficht^, Schelling, Hegel, and others, — have sought to establish systems of pure idealism, each agreeably to his own fancy, and have thus accomplished in Kant's case, the reductio ad ahsurdum which the French materialists accomplished in Locke's.

Seeing, then, that these philosophers have equally failed in their one common purpose, — a purpose that must be achieved or human learning will remain imperfect, — namely, that of establishing undeniable criteria by which to test the oriffln, the nature, and the limits of human knowledge, we have next to ask whether, in both of them, the faulty procedure is irremediable ? Now with regard to Kant, his system is a pure hypothesis, of which, if you change one part, you destroy the whole ; moreover, as it contradicts our earliest, our strongest convictions, it is required to contain in itself such inherent force, as to make its way and establish its authenticity without danger of change or question, the moment it becomes intelligible. We have seen that it has not so established itself, but that other hypotheses, like it in character, are continually arising, and seeking to displace it. Locke's ,^ theory^ on the other hand, is never hypothetical but in the search of facts to confirm the supposition ; as a whole, it ^pppala to eype^^'- ence, and rises, or seeks to rise to general propositions by the induction of particulars. It does not contradict our early convictions respecting space and time, nor that of the existence of an outward world unindebted for its forms to the understanding, nor that of the identity of human understanding and human reason ; contradictions which stand at the very threshold of Kant's doctrine. Always where it is faulty, it is so by being at variance with itself, and admitting as experimented facts, hypothetical distinctions which are essential only in such philosophy as Kant's. In avoiding the language of such philosophy, his own course would have been clear. He needs not have floundered as he does, in speaking of that unknown, unknowable support or substratum of qualities called matter, — he needs not have exposed himself to the objurgation of modern Platonists^ by supposing that matter, for aught we know, could be made to think, and that 'mind, for aught we know, may not be immaterial, if, with this persuasion of our necessary ignorance on these points, and

^ E. g. of Mr. James Douglas of Cavers, in his volume on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, p. 117.

avoiding the philosophical distinction implied by the terms, he had accepted them simply in their colloquial uses, and considered his subject to be, not the rrdrid^^iT^^ nor the body distinct from the mind, but MAN, as a living, feeling, thinking, reasoning creature. It was also essential to his purpose to avoid the personification as well of the faculties and the furniture of the mind, as of the mind itself; yet no metaphysician more frequently offends by giving, in mode of speech, distinct independent existence to sensation, memory, volition, perception, judgement, reasoning, and to ideas of every kind and variety.

It seems, then, that while Kant's philosophy must stand or fall as it is, that of Locke may be taken up where he has left it, and be corrected in parts till it becomes perfect as a whole. And the truth is, if Locke's continental followers had not seized upon, and carried out to their own conclusions, his primary assumption, that sensations are the materials out of which all our ideas are formed, both that assumption, and every other faulty statement in his Essay, would in time have been amended by his British followers. Indeed, the corrections are already made, though they have to be collected from different quarters, and sometimes to be carried out and specially applied. Take, for example, Berkeley's Theory of Vision ; a theory admitted (with only one exception, to be noticed hereafter) by every philosopher since his time, and we shall have reason to deny the fact which Locke at his first step takes for granted, that sensations enter the mind as simple ideas, and remain there to be formed into complex. Berkeley's theory makes evident this fact, that, with regard to vision at least, the sensations which enter by the appropriate organ, do not make us perceive the things that produce them from without, but only awaken higher functions of our nature, to the activity of which higher functions the perception is properly ascribable. The fact has only to be generalized by including the other senses, and we reach the truth that a sensation is one thing, and the knowledge we have of it, and have, through it, of a something external, is quite another thing Berkeley may be made further serviceable to Locke.

For subsequently to his " Theory of Vision," he published '' A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge," in which he follows out, to its legitimate consequences, the doctrine of all philosophers who start upon the hypothesis of two substances, Mind and Matter, which divide the universe, — the doctrine, namely, that mind cannot become acquainted withroatter except by means of its own ideas ; the legitimate conclusion from which fact, if it were a fact, is, that the mind never becomes acquainted with anything but its own ideas, and Berkeley, presuming that the fact must be admitted, shows accordingly that we have no proof of the existence of an external world.'' Locke needs not have exposed himself, this second time, to a reductio ad ahsurdum ; for, as we have seen, he lays no stress on the Platonic division of the universe, and yet, by his manner of using the term idea, "to express whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatr ever it is that the mind can be employed about when thinking,"^ he renders himself liable, while placed among the materialists by one party, to be set down as an idealist by another. To have done justice to himself, he should have made it clearly understood, that in using the expression mind ofTYian, he meant nothing more nor less than man himself as a thinking being ; nor should he have ever used the term idea but in some one well-defined sense. ^

■* Kant's doctrine adds the external noumenon to this doctrine of Berkeley's ; but the general similarity of the two doctrines is evident.

^ Locke's Essay, Introduction.

^ I^eaVVmong the old Platonists, means a form of thought, a pure abstraction ; in modern definite use,

However, Locke is not left in the iJtrait to which Berkeley reduces him : his followers of the Scottish school, so far as they are his followers from using, like him, the inductive method of inquiry, here come in to his rescue by being the first philosophers to assert, what indeed no one of unfettered common sense ever doubted, that we are cognizant of an external world immediately by our senses, though whether we are originally thus cognizant of it, as brutes certainly are, or become cognizant by virtue of some higher function of our nature, is an inquiry yet to be made.

As to the defect in Locke's mode of procedure which springs out of his ignorance of the true relation that language bears to thought.

it signifies that unreal presentation of some individual thing which remains, when the real presentation to the appropriate sense is absent ; following which use of the substantive, the adjective ideal stands opposed to real. By Locke the terms are confusedly applied in all possible ways of using them.

this, wlwch lias already been alluded to, also remains to be considered hereafter. Home Tooke, as already said, saw this cause of* failure, but misapplied the remedy, because he, as well as Locke, misunderstood the relation. Locke became aware, as he proceeded with his essay, that from having neglected to trace the moulding influence of language on thought, he had been working in the dark. " for," says he, " when I began this discourse on the understanding, and a good while after. I had not the least thought that any consideration of words was at all necessary to it." '^ All metaphysics, indeed, have been elaborated more or less under the same darkness ; nor can this department of learning receive its proper light till language and thought shall be understood in theory to be what they are in common proper practice.

7 Essay, iii., ix., § 21.

Chapter III

Intellection, brute and human — ^Initial steps in the inquiry, how Language denotes Thought.

Man is a sentient, an intellectual, and an emotive creature ; that is to say, he is placed in contact with tilings that pain or do not pain, that pleasure^ or do not pleasure him : he becomes cognizant of* these things, and speculates on things beydnd them: and on becoming thus cognizant, he fears and hopes, grieves and rejoices, hates and loves, as occasions arise from the previously mentioned sources.

1 This verb is not in elegant use, but it is needed in this place, because there is no other verb which would signify mere sensational pleasure.

But are not brutes of the higher orders capable of all this? Excepting speculation which rises above the things of sense, — by which characteristic even human beings do not all distinguish themselves, and none till early years are passed, — we have full ground f©r asserting that they are capable. In what, then, does the human being essentially differ from the intelligent brute ? He has one, and only one external characteristic by which he is clearly divided from all other creatures inhabiting the earth, — the use of rational language. As to his early language, at first instinctive, and then emotional, it identifies in kind and character with that which other creatures use; but, placed in society with his fellows, he inevitably invents or adopts means of communication which no other creature can invent or use. Have we not ground to infer, from this fact, that a human creature's first intellection occurs in some way different from a brute's? Not however his

IXTELLECTION, BRUTE AND HUMAN. 29

very first intellection, — that which makes him imbibe his earliest food, — but almost every subsequent intellection. We cannot go back and examine the first acts of human intellection, but we can those of later date ; and if we find that they occur with circumstances of a specific character, clearly distinguishing them from brute intellection, we shall be justified in deciding that the early acts likewise differed in the same specific manner, and that human language becomes different fi*om brute language, because early knowledge, in the respective cases, is differently derived.

Now as soon as we are old enough to examine how an act of intellect occurs, that is, an act by which we understand or know somethinor which we did not understand or know before, we shall find that it takes place, and can take place, only by virtue of knowing something else at the same time : that is to say, we come to know B only because we previously knew, or now for the first time know A.

In other words, every act of human intellection consists in becoming aware of a relation not hitherto perceived: but a relation implies things related, of which there must be two, and the relation between these being apprehended, is the new step in knowledge. We may further say that every such act includes a virtual syllogism, of which the two things whose relation is perceived, are the premises, and the knowledge of their relation, the conclusion. Thus, for instance, when I know for the first time that the loadstone attracts iron, it is by virtue of knowledge already existing, that neither of them stands in that relation to other things in which I now perceive that they stand to each other. Thus, again, when from some temporary disorder that affects my vision I believe my friend to stand before me within my reach, and I learn, by putting out my hand, that he is not there, not only do I learn this fact which I did not know before, but I also learn the fact, of which I was equally ignorant.

that my sight is disordered. Let this inquiry concerning our acts of intellection be prosecuted to the utmost amount of instances of every kind, and the result will always be the same, namely, that we cannot know one thing but by knowing another. We may restate the fact thus: not only is it true that I cannot know what it is to be a father, except by knowing what it is to be a son, — that I cannot know what it is to be a cause except by knowing what it is to be an effect, and in both and all cases, vice versa ; but it is equally true that I cannot know what is a man except by knowing what is not a man ; that I cannot know which of many persons is my friend John^ except by knowing which of them severally is not John ; that I cannot know the colour before me to be blue, unless I know some other colour or colours; that I cannot know I am now in pain, feel the pain though I may and do, unless I know what it is to be free from pain.