No More Learning

H. More, Antidot. adv. Ath. and and Locke, 22. Cf. Geil, op.
cit. , p. 49.
Locke, " 23 " The term idea
lb. II.
had lost its Platonic sense already in later Scholasticism
and taken on the more general meaning of any mental modification whatever Vorstellung).
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Chap. 1, § 33. ] Innate Idea* : Locke. 451
ever, he announces two different sources : sensation and rejtection, outer and inner perception. Under sensation he understands the ideas of the corporeal world, brought about by the medium of the bodily senses ; under reflection, on the other hand, the knowledge of the activities of the soul itself called out by the above process. Psycho-genetically, therefore, these two kinds of perception are so related that sensation is the occasion and the presupposition for reflection, — as regards their matter or content the relation is, that all content of ideas arises from sensation, while reflection, on the contrary, contains the consciousness of the functions performed in connection with this content.
3. To these functions, however, belonged also all those by means of which the combination of the elements of consciousness into complex ideas takes place, i. e. all processes of thought. And here
Locke left the relation ^of the intellectual activities to their original sensuous contents in a popular indefiniteness which gave occasion to the most various re-shapings of his teaching soon after. For, on the one hand, those activities appear as the "faculties '' of the mind, which in reflection becomes conscious of these its own modes of
functioning (as for example, the capacity of having ideas itself,1 "perception," is treated as the most original fact of reflection, to understand which every one is sent to his own experience) ; on the other hand, the mind, even in these relating activities, such as recollecting, distinguishing, comparing, connecting, etc. , is regarded throughout as passive and bound to the content of the sensation. Hence it was possible for the most various views to develop out of Locke's doctrine, according to the varying degree of self-activity which was ascribed to the mind in its process of connecting its ideas.
Of particular interest in this connection, by reason of the problems of epistemology and metaphysics derived from the Middle Ages, was the development of the abstract ideas out of the data of sensation. Like the greater part of English philosophers, Locke was an ad herent of Nominalism, which professed to see in general concepts nothing but internal, intellectual structures. In explaining these general ideas, however, Locke made more account of the co-opera tion of "signs," and in particular of language. Signs or words, when attached more or less arbitrarily to particular parts of ideas, make it possible to lay special stress upon these parts and bring them out from their original complexes, and thereby render possible the farther functions by which such isolated and fixed contents of
1 Essay, II. 0, 1 t
462 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [Pa*t V
consciousness are put into logical relations to one another. 1 Hence for Locke, as formerly for the Epicureans, and then for the Ter- minists, logic was coincident with the science of signs, semiotics. 1 By this means room was gained for a demonstrative science of con ceptions and for all abstract operations of the knowing mind, quite in the spirit of Occam, in spite of the sensualistic basis upon which all content of ideas was held to rest. None of these determinations were philosophically new, nor has their exposition in Locke any originality or independent power of thought : it is, however, smooth and simple, of agreeable transparency and easy to understand; it despises all scholastic form and learned terminology, glides skilfully over and away from all deeper problems, and thus made its author one of the most extensively read and influential writers in the history of philosophy.
4. Strongly as Locke had emphasised the independent existence of inner experience by the side of the outer (as followed from his metaphysical attachment to Descartes, on which see below, § 34, 1), he yet made the dependence of reflection upon sensation, as regards origin and content, so strong that it proved the decisive factor in the development of his doctrine. This transformation to complete sensualism proceeded along different paths.
In the epistemological and metaphysical development of Nomi nalism this transformation led with Locke's English successors to extreme consequences. Berkeley * not only declared the doctrine of the Reality of abstract conceptions to be the most extraordinary of all errors in metaphysics, but also — like the extreme Nominalists of the Middle Ages — denied the existence of abstract ideas within the mind itself. The illusory appearance of such ideas arises from the use of words as general terms ; but in truth, even in connection with such a word, we always think merely the sensuous idea, or the group of sensuous ideas, which at the beginning gave rise to that term. Every attempt to think the abstract alone shatters upon the sensuous idea, which always remains as the sole content of intellectual activity. For even the remembered ideas and partial ideas which can be separated out, have no other content than the original sense
1 The development of these logical relations between the ideational content* which have been singled out and fixed by means of the verbal signs, appears with Locke, under the name of the lumen naturale. Descartes had understood by this as well intuitive as also demonstrative knowledge, and had set all this natural knowing activity over against revelation ; Locke, who treats the intuitive with terministic reserve (cf. § 34, 1), restricts the signification of the "light of nature" to the logical operations and to the consciousness of the principles which obtain in these, according to the nature of the thinking faculty.
■' Essay, IV. 21, 4.
* Prinr. nf Human Knowledge, 5 ff.
Chap. 1, $ 33. ] Innate Ideas : Berkeley, Hume. 453
impressions, because an idea can never copy anything else than auother idea. Abstract ideas, therefore, are a fiction of the schools ; in the actual activity of thought none but sensuous particular ideas exist, and some of these can stand for or represent others similar to the in, on account of being designated by the same term.
David Hume adopted this doctrine in its full extent, and on the ground of this substituted for Locke's distiuction of outer and inner perception another antithesis with altered terminology, viz. that of the original and the copied. A content of consciousness is either original or the copy of an original, — either an '•impression" or an " idea. " All ideas, therefore, are copies of impressions, and there is no idea that has come into existence otherwise than by being a copy of an impression, or that has any other content than that which it has received from its corresponding impression. It ap peared, therefore, to be the task of philosophy to seek out the orig inal for even the apparently most abstract conceptions in some impression, and thereby to estimate the value for knowledge which the abstract conception has. To be sure, Hume understood by im
pressions by no means merely the elements of outer experience; he meant also those of inner experience. It was, therefore, accord ing to Locke's mode of expression, the simple ideas of sensation and reflection which he declared to be impressions, and the wide vision of a great thinker prevented him from falling into a short sighted sensualism.
5. A development of another sort, which yet led to a related goal, took place in connection with the aid of physiological psychology. Ix>cke had only thought of sensation as dependent upon the activity of the bodily senses, but had regarded the elaboration of seusation in the functions underlying reflection as a work of the mind; and though he avoided the question as to immaterial substance, he had throughout treated the intellectual activities in the narrower sense as something incorporeal and independent of the body. That this should be otherwise regarded, that thinkers should begin to consider the physical organism as the bearer or agent not only of the simple ideas, but also of their combination, was easily possible in view of the indecisive ambiguity of the Lockian doctrines, but was still more called out by one-sided conclusions drawn from Cartesian and Spimotistic theories.
Descartes, namely, had treated the whole psychical life of the animal as a mechanical process of the nervous system, while he had ascribed the human psychical life to the immaterial substance, the res cogitans. The more evident the completely sensuous nature of human ideation now seemed in consequence of Locke's investigation,
454 The EnliylUenment : Theoretical Question*. [Pajit V.
the nearer lay the question whether it was possible to maintain the position, that the same processes which in the animal seemed capa ble of being understood as nervous processes, should be traced back in the case of man to the activity of an immaterial psychical sub stance. — From another side, Spinoza's parallelism of the attributes worked in the same direction (cf. above, § 31, 9). According to this view a process in the bodily life corresponds to every process of the psychical life, without either process being the cause of th«
other, or one process being the original and the other the derived. (Such, at least, was the thought of the philosopher himself. ) This had now been conceived of at first by its opponents as materialism, as if Spinoza meant that the fundamental process was the bodik. and the psychical process only its accompanying phenomenon. But
scientists,
It is interesting that the consequences of these combinations of thought appeared in literary form first in Germany. Here as earlv as 1697 a physician named Pancratius Wolff taught in his Cogita- tiones Medico-legales that thoughts are mechanical activities of the human body, especially of the brain, and in the year 1713 appeared the anonymous Correspondence concerning the Nature of the Soul
( Briefwechsel vom Wesen der Seele),1 in which, screened by pious refutations, the doctrines of Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes are car ried out to an anthropological materialism. A distinction of degree only is recognised between the psychical life of the animal and that of man ; ideas and activities of the will are without exception re garded as functions of excited nerve-fibres, and practice and educa tion are given as the means by which the higher position of man is reached and maintained.
In England the procedure was more cautious. In a way similar to that in which Locke had carried out the Baconian programme, men now studied primarily the internal mechanism of the psychical activ ities, and the development of the higher out of the elementary states according to purely psychological laws : such was the work of Peter Brown in the epistemological field, and that of others upon the domain of the activities of the will. In the same manner proceeded
1 Of which Lange gives an account, Qesrh. det Mat. , I. 319 ff. (3d ed. [Eng. tr. , History of Materialism, IL 37 £LJ ).
among its adherents also, both physicians and natural
such as the influential Boerhave of Leyden, a mode of thought in clining strongly toward materialism soon substituted itself for the master's doctrine. This took place in connection with the expe riences of experimental physiology which, following Descartes" stimulus, employed itself largely with a study of reflex movements.
Chap. 1, § 33. ] Innate Idea* : Hartley, Lamettrie. 455
David Hartley also, who brought into common use the expression association ' (which had already been used before this) for the com binations and relations which arise between the elements. He wished to conceive these relations, which he analysed with all the care of a natural scientist, solely as psychical processes, and held fast to their complete incoinparableness with material processes, even with the most delicate forms of corporeal motion. But he was also a physi cian, and the connection of the mental life with the states of the body was so clear to him that he made the constant correspondence of the two and the mutual relationship of the psychical functions and the nervous excitations, which, at that time, were termed " vibra tions,"* the main subject-matter of his psychology of association. In this work he held fast to the qualitative difference between the two parallel series of phenomena and left the metaphysical question, as to the substance lying at their basis, undecided : but with refer ence to causality he fell insensibly into materialism, in that he con ceived of the mechanism of the nervous states as ultimately the
primary event, and that of the psychical activities as only the phe nomenon accompanying this event To simple nervous excitations correspond simple sensations or desires ; to complex, complex. This scientific theory, to be sure, involved him in serious contradictions with his pious faith, and the " Observations " show how earnestly and fruitlessly he struggled between the two. Quite the same is true of Prientley, who even made the farther concession to material ism of letting fall the heterogeneity between the psychical and bodily processes, and desiring to replace psychology completely by nerve physiology. On this account he also abandoned entirely the standpoint of inner experience defended by the Scots, but at the same time desired to unite with his system the warmly supported conviction of a teleological deism.
Anthropological materialism was worked out in its baldest form by the Frenchman, Lamettrie. Convinced by medical observations upon himself and others of the complete dependence of the mind upon the body, he studied the mechanism of life in animals and men, following Boerhave's suggestions, and Descartes' conception of the former seemed to him completely applicable to the latter also. The distinction between the two, which is only one of degree, permits for human psychical activities also no other explanation than that they are mechanical functions of the brain. On this account it is
1 In the later, especially the Scottish literature, and in particular with Thomas lir'nen. the expression " association " U often replaced by tuggtttinn. "
* Instead of this term Erasmus Darwin Introduced the expression, motions of the seusorium. "
456 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [Part V
an encroachment of metaphysics to ascribe to the "mind" a sub stantiality of its own in addition to that of matter. The conception of matter as that of a body which is in itself dead and needs mind or spirit as its moving principle, is an arbitrary and false abstrac tion : experience shows that matter moves itself and lives. It is just Descartes' mechanics which has proved this, says Lamettrie, and therefore the inevitable consequence of this mechanics is mate rialism. And that all psychical life is only one of the functions of the body, is evident from the fact that not a single content is found in the mental life which is not due to the excitation of some one of the senses. If we think of a man as the Church Father Arnobius proposed, — so writes Lamettrie,1 to establish his sensualism which had developed from Locke, — who from his birth on had been excluded from all connection with his kind, and restricted to the experience of a few senses, we should find in him no other ideational contents than those brought to him through just these senses.
6. Less important in principle, but all the more widely extended in the literary world, were the other re-shapings which Locke's doctrine experienced in France. Voltaire, who domesticated it among his countrymen by his Lettres stir les Anglais, gave it a com pletely sensualistic stamp, and even showed himself — though with sceptical reserve — not disinclined to entrust to the Creator the power of providing the I, which is a corporeal body, with the capacity of thinking also. This sceptical sensualism became the fundamental note of the French Enlightenment. * Condillac, who at the beginning had only expounded Locke's doctrine and defended it against other systems, professed his adherence to this sceptical sensualism in his influential Traite" des Sensations. Whatever the mind may be, the content of its conscious activities is derived solely from sense-perception. Condillac develops the theory of associational psychology in connection with the fiction of a statue, which, equipped only with capacity of sensation, receives one after another the excitations of the different senses which are added to and by this means gradually unfolds an intellectual life like that of man. Here the fundamental idea that the mere co-existence of different sensations in the same consciousness brings with of itself the sensation of their relation to each other and to the
At the close of the Histoire Naturtlle de VAme. Cf. also above, p. 225,
note
The same mode of thought asserts itself also in the beginnings of aesthetic
criticism in the form of the principle that the essence of all art consists in the "imitation of beautiful Nature. " The type of this conception was E. Batttuz
(1713-1780) (1746).
with his treatise, Let Beaux Arts riduits a un meme Principe
a1 1.
it
it,
is
Chap. 1, § 33. ] Innate Ideas : Condillac, Diderot. 457
object or the self. In accordance with this principle the process is depicted by which all the manifold psychical activities become unfolded out of perception : in the theoretical series, by virtue of the differences in intensity and in repetition of sensations, there grow successively attention, recognising recollection, distinction, com parison, judgment, inference, imagination, and expectation of the future; and finally with the help of signs, especially those of language, arise abstraction and the grasping of general principles. But in addition to sensation, perception has also the feeling-element of pleasure and pain, and out of this, in connection with the move ment of ideas, develop desire, love and hate, hope, fear,1 and — as the result of all such changes of the practical consciousness —
finally, the moral will. So knowledge and morality grow upon the soil of the sensibility.
This systematic construction had great success. The systematic impulse, which was repressed in the metaphysical field (cf. § 34, 7), threw itself with all the greater energy upon this "analyst* of the hnman mind" as a substitute; and as Condillac himself had already woven many acute observations into his exposition of the develop ment process, so a whole throng of adherents found opportunity to take part in the completion of this stiucture by slight changes and sin[tings of the phases, by innovations in nomenclature and by more or less valuable deductions. The Government of the . Revolu tion recognised as philosophy only this study of the empirical development of intelligence, and Destutt de Tracy gave it later the name "Ideology. ''1 So it came about that at the beginning of our century philosophers were in France usually called ideologists.
7. With reference to the nature of the mind in which these trans formations of sensation (sentir) were held to take place, a great part of the ideologists remained by Condillac's positivistic reserve ; others went on from Voltaire's problematical to Lamettrie's assertive mate rialism, — at first, in Hartley's fashion emphasising the thorough going dependence of combinations of ideas upon nervous processes, then with express maintenance of the materiality of the psychical activities. This development is most clearly to be seen in the case of Diderot. He set out from the position of Shaftesbury and Locke, but the sensualistic literature became more potent from step to step
1 In toe development of the practical series of conscious acta, the Influence of Descartes' and Spinoza's theory of the emotions and passions asserted itself with Condillac and his disciples, as also in part among the English associa- Uunal psychologists.
* It U not impossible that this nomenclature in case of de Tracy was intended to be the counterpart to Fichie's " Wissenschaftslehre," — Science of Knowl edge (cf. below. Pan VI. ch. 8).
458 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [Part V.
in the Editor of the Encyclopaedia ; he followed up the hypotheses of hylozoism1 (cf. below, § 34, 9), and finally took part in the com
of the Sy8thne de la Nature. This work set forth the human psychical activities within the framework of its metaphysics as the fine invisible motions of the nerves, and treated their genetic process just as Lamettrie had done. Among the later ideologists
Cabanis is prominent in this respect bf the newness of his physio logical point of view ; he takes account of the progress of natural science in so far as to seek the conditions of the nerves, to which man's psychical states (le moral) must be referred, no longer merely in mechanical motions, but in chemical changes. Ideation is the secretion of the brain, just as other secretions are produced by other organs.
In opposition to this, another line of ideology held fast to Locke's principle that all content of ideas may indeed be due to the senses, but that in the functions directed toward combining such content the peculiar character of the mind's nature shows itself. The leader of this line of thought was Bonnet. He, too, in a manner similar to that of Condillac, adopts the mode of consideration commended by Lamettrie, adverting to Arnobius, but he is much too well-schooled as an investigator of Nature to fail to see that sensation can never be resolved into elements of motion, that its relation to physical states is synthetic, but not analytic. Hence he sees in the mechanism of the nervous system only the causa occasionalis for the spontaneous reaction of the mind, and the substantiality of the mind seems to him to be proved by the unity of conscioumess. He connects with this theory all sorts of fantastic hypotheses. ' Religious ideas speak in his assumption of the immaterial mind-substance, but sensualism admits an activity of this substance only in connection with the body ; for this reason, in order to explain immortality and the un interrupted activity of the mind, Bonnet helps himself by the hypothesis of an aethereal body which is joined essentially with the soul and takes on a coarser material external organism, according to its dwelling-place in each particular case.
This union of sensualism with the maintenance of self-subsistent substantiality and capacity of reaction on the part of the mind passed over to Bonnet's countryman, Rousseau, who combated with its aid the psychological theories of the Encyclopaedists. He found that this characteristic quality of the mind, the unity of its function, evinces itself in feeling (sentiment), and opposed this original natu-
- ■ > The decisive transition-writing is cPAlembert's Dream. 2 In the Paling&netie* Philosophiques.
position
Chap. 1, § 33. ] Innate Ideas : Bonnet, Rousseau, Reid. 459
ralness of its essence to the cold and indifferent mechanism of ideas, which would debase the mind to an unconditional dependence upon the outer world. The feeling of individuality rebelled with him against a doctrine according to which there is nothing in man's consciousness but the play, as if upon an indifferent stage, of a mass of foreign contents accidentally coming together, which unite and then separate again. He wished to bring out the thought that it is not the case that the mental life merely takes place within us, but that it is rather true that we are ourselves present as actively deter mining personalities. This conviction dictated Rousseau's opposi tion to the intellectualistic Enlightenment, which in the sensualism of Gondii lac and of the Encyclopaedists wished to regard man's inner life as only a mechanical product of sensational elements excited from without: to psychological atomism Rousseau opposes the principle of the Monadology.
In the same manner, and perhaps not without influence from Rousseau in his arguments, St. Martin raised his voice against the prevailing system of Condillac ; he even came out of his mystical retreat to protest in the sessions of the Ecoles Normales ' against the superficiality of sensualism. The ideologists, he says, talk a great deal about human nature; but instead of observing it they devote their energies to put it together (composer).
8. The Scottish philosophers are the psychological opponents of sensualism in all its forms. The common ground on which this contrast developed is that of psychology regarded as philosophy.
For Reid, also, and his disciples seek the task of philosophy in the investigation of man and his mental capacities ; indeed, they fixed still more energetically and one-sidedly than the various schools of their opponents the methodical point of view that all philosophy must be empirical psychology. But this view of the human physi cal activity and its development is diametrically opposed to that of the sensualists. The latter hold the simple, the former the com plex, the latter the individual ideas, the former the judgments, the latter the sensuous, the former the internal, the latter the particular, the former the general, to be the original content of the mind's activity. Reid acknowledges that Berkeley's idealism and Hume's scepticism are as correct consequences from Locke's principle as is Hartley's materialism ; but just the absurdity of these consequences refutes the principle.
In opposition to this, Reid will now apply the Baconian method of induction to the facts of inner perception in order to attain by an
i Seances dts /■>. . Vorm. , UI. 01 ft
460 The Enlightenment: Theoretical Questions. [Part V.
analysis of these to the original tiiiths, which are given from the beginning in connection with the nature of the human mind, and which assert themselves in the development of its activities as determining principles. Thus, putting aside all help of physiology, the fundamental science psychology shall be perfected as a kind of natural science of inner observation. In the solution of this task, Reid himself, and after him especially Dugald Stewart, develop a considerable breadth and comprehensiveness of vision in the appre hension of the inner processes and a great acuteness in the analysis of their essential content : a multitude of valuable observations on
the genetic processes of the mental life is contained in their exten sive investigations. And yet these investigations lack in fruitful- ness of ideas as well as in energetically comprehensive cogency. For they everywhere confuse the demonstration of that which can be discovered as universally valid content in the psychical func tions, with the assumption that this is also genetically the original and determining : and since this philosophy has no other principle than that of psychological fact, it regards without criticism all that can in this manner be demonstrated to be actual content of mental activity, as self-evident truth. The sum-total of these principles is designated as common sense, and as such is held to form the supreme rule for all philosophical knowledge.
9.
In the philosophy of the German Enlightenment all these tendencies mingle with the after-workings of the Cartesian and Leibnizian rationalism. The twofold tendency in the method of this latter system had taken on a fixed systematic form through the agency of Christian Wolff. According to him, all subjects should be regarded both from the point of view of the eternal truths and from that of the contingent truths : for every province of reality there is a knowledge through conceptions and another through facts, an a priori science proceeding from the intellect and an a posteriori science arising from perception. These two sciences were to combine in the result in such a way that, for example, em pirical psychology must show the actual existence in fact of all those activities which, in rational psychology, were deduced from the metaphysical conception of the soul, and from the " faculties " resulting from this conception. On the other hand, following Leib niz's precedent, the distinction in value of the two modes of knowl edge was so far retained as to regard only the intellectual knowledge as clear and distinct insight, while empirical (or, as they said at that time, historical) knowledge was regarded as a more or less obscure and confused idea of things.
Psychologically, the two kinds of knowledge were divided, in
Chap 1, § 33. ] Innate Ideas : Wolff, Lambert. 461
accordance with the Cartesian model, into the idea; innatat and the idem adventitim. Yet Wolff himself, agreeably to the metaphysical direction of his thought, laid less weight upon the genetic element. But the opposite was the case with his adherents and opponents, who were already standing under the influence of the French and
Knglish theories. The general course of the development was that the importance which Leibniz and Wolff had conceded to empiricism was increased more and more by the penetration of the Lockian
The psychological method gained the preponderance over the metaphysico-ontological step by step, and within the psy chological method increasing concessions were made to sensualism, of such a nature that ultimately not only earnest men of science like Rudiger and"Lossius, but especially a great part of the "popu lar philosophers supported completely the doctrine that all human ideas arise from sense-perception. The motley and irregular series of stages in which this process completed itself has only a literary- historical interest,1 because no new arguments came to light in con nection with it.
Only one of these men used the psychologico-epistemological dualism which prevailed in the German philosophy of the Enlight. enment, to make an original and fruitful turn. Heinrich Lambert,
who was fully abreast of the natural science of his time, had grown into intelligent sympathy with the mathematico-logical method as completely as he had into an insight into the worth of experience : and in the phenomenology of his New Qrganon, in attempting to fix the limits for the psychological significance of these two elements of knowledge, he disposed the mixture of the a priori and a posteriori constituents requisite for knowing reality, in a way that led to the distinction ofform and content in ideas. The content-elements of thought, he taught, can be given only by per
ception : but their mode of connection, the form of relation which is thought between them, is not given from without, but is a proper activity of the mind. This distinction could be read out of Locke's ambiguous exposition:1 but no one had conceived it so sharply and precisely from this point of view as Lambert. And this point of view was of great imj>ortanee for the genetic consideration of the ideas of the human mind. It followed from that was neither possible to derive the content from the mere form, nor the form of knowledge from the content. The first refuted the logical rational
Cf. W. Winilflband, Onrh. d. nrurrrn Phttntnphlr. $$ KUA.
Ct. thr dem'inmratlon in O. Harwnnwin, Lurke'i l. *hrt ron der mrn*r\ lieken Ertrnntniu in Vergleif. htmg mil Leibnis' KritUt dentil** (l^ipa 1801, Abhandl d. tHrht. On. d. WiMMtueh. ).
principles.
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462 the Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [Pam V.
ism with which Wolff would spin all ontology and metaphysics oat from the most general principles of logic, and ultimately from the one principle of contradiction ; the other took the basis away from sensualism, which thought that with the contents of perception the knowledge also of their relations was immediately given. Out of this grew for the " improvement of metaphysics " the task of dis solving out these relating forms from the total mass of experience, and of making clear their relation to content. But Lambert sought in vain for a single unifying principle for this purpose,1 and his " Archilektonik" finally contented itself with making a collection of them not based on any internal principle.
10. While all these theories as to the origin of human ideas were flying about in the literary market, the reconciling word upon the problem of innate ideas had been long spoken, but was waiting in a manuscript in the Hanoverian library for the powerful effect which its publication was to produce. Leibniz, in his Nouveaux Essais, had provided the Lockian ideology with a critical commentary in detail, and had embodied within it the deepest thoughts of his phi losophy and the finest conclusions of his Monadology.
Among the arguments with which Locke combated the doctrine that ideas were innate, had been that with which he maintained that there could be nothing in the mind of which the mind knew nothing. This principle had also been pronounced by him 2 in the form that the soul thinks not always. By this principle the Car tesian definition of the soul as a res cogitans was brought into ques tion : for the essential characteristic of a substance cannot be denied it at any moment. In this sense the question had been often dis cussed between the schools. Leibniz, however, was pointed by his Monadology to a peculiar intermediate position. Since, in his view, the soul, like every monad, is a " representing " power, it must have perceptions at every moment: but since all monads, even those which constitute matter, are souls, these perceptions cannot pos sibly all be clear and distinct. The solution of the problem lies, therefore, again in the conception of unconscious representations or
petites perceptions (cf. above, § 31). The soul (as every monad) always has ideas or representations, but not always conscious, not always clear and distinct ideas ; its life consists in the development of the unconscious to conscious, of the obscure and confused to clear and distinct ideas or representations.
In this aspect Leibniz now introduced an extremely significant
1 Thi* is best seen in his interesting correspondence with Kant, printed in the works of the latter.
« Essay II. 1, 10 f.
Chap. 1, § 33. ] Innate Idea* : Leibniz. 463
conception into psychology and epistemology. He distinguished between the states in which the soul merely has ideas, and those in which it is conscious of them. The former he designated as percep tion, the latter as apperception. 1 He understood, therefore, by apperception the process by which unconscious, obscure, and con fused representations are raised into clear and distinct consciousness, and thereby recognised by the soul as its own and ajypropriated by
The genetic process of the psychical life consists in the changing of unconscious into conscious representations or ideas, in taking up perceptions into the clearness and distinctness of self-
consciousness. In the light of the Monadology Leibniz's methodo logical view of the empirical or contingent truths (cf. § 30, 7) took on a peculiar colouring. The fact that the monads have no windows makes it impossible to conceive of perception metaphysically as a working of things upon the soul : * the ideas of sense, or sense-pres entations, must rather be thought as activities which the soul, by virtue of the pre-established harmony, develops in an obscure and confused manner (as petites perceptions), and the transformation which takes place in them can be regarded only as a process of making them distinct and of clearing them up, — as a taking up into self-consciousness, as apperception.
Sensibility and understanding, the distinction between which with Leibniz coincides with that of different degrees of clearness and distinctness, have, therefore, in his view, the same content, only
that the former has in obscure and confused representation what the latter possesses as clear and distinct. Nothing comes into the soul from without; that which it consciously represents has been already unconsciously contained within it: and on the other hand, the soul cannot bring forth anything in its conscious ideas which has not been within it from the beginning. Hence Leibniz must decide that in a certain sense, that is, unconsciously, all ideas are innate ; and that in another sense, that consciously, no idea innate in the human soul. He designates this relation, which had been previously sketched in the principles of the Monadology, by the name virtual innateness of ideas.
This thought, which at once treated as the controlling point of view at the opening of the New Essays, carried out especially with reference to the universal or eternal truths. This was indeed the burning question here the one party (the Neo-1'latonists, and in part the Cartesians) maintained that these were innate "axtu-
Print, it la Nat. el At la GrOrt, where the relationship with the Lockian redaction comes out strongly Xout. Em. II.
• . V. B. IV.
self-consciousness.
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is,
464 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [Part V.
ally," as fully formed (fertige) truths; the others (Hobbes, and in part Locke) would explain them from the co-operation of sensa tional elements. Leibniz, however, carries out the thought that such principles are contained already in perception, as petites percep tions, that is, as the involuntary forms of relating thought, but that after this unconscious employment of them they are apperceived, that raised to clear and distinct consciousness and so recognised in connection with experience. The form of the soul's activity which afterwards brought to clearness and distinctness of intel lectual apprehension as universal principle, an eternal truth, inheres already in the sensuous representation, though unclear and confused. Hence while Locke had appropriated for his own use the scholastic principle nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, Leibniz adds thereto nisi intellectus ipse. 1
11. When the Nouveaux Essais were printed in 1765, they excited great attention. Lessing was translating them. That the life of the soul transcends all that clear and distinctly conscious, and rooted in obscurely presaged depths, was an insight of the highest value for the literature which was just struggling out of the intel lectual dryness of the Enlightenment, and out of insipid correctness to an unfolding full of genius, — and an insight all the more valua ble as coming from the same thinker that Germany honoured as the father and hero of its Enlightenment. In this direction Leibniz worked especially upon Herder: we see not only in his aesthetic views,' but still more in his prize essay " On the Knowing and Feel ing of the Human Soul. "
Under the preponderance of the methodological point of view, the Leibnizo-Wolffian school had strained the opposition between rational and empirical knowledge as far as possible, and had treated under standing and sensibility as two separate faculties. The Berlin Academy had wished to see the mutual relation of these two sepa rated powers, and the share which each has in human knowledge, investigated Herder played the true Leibniz — as the latter had developed himself in the Nouveaux Essais — against the prevailing system of the schools when he emphasised in his treatise the living unity of man's psychical life, and showed that sensibility and under standing are not two different sources of knowledge, but only the different stages of one and the same living activity with which the monad comprehends the universe within itself. All the ideas with which the soul raises itself in its development, step by step; from the consciousness of its immediate environment to the knowledge of
Nouv. Ess. II. Cf. principally the fourth Kritische Waldcken.
1
1, 2.
2
a
:
it
is
is
is
is,
Chap. 1, § 33. ] Innate Ideas : Herder, Kant. 465
the harmony of the universe, are innate within the soul as internal
This deeper unity of sensibility and understanding, Herder called feeling; and in this also in his inquiry as to the "Origin of Language," he found the function which embraces all senses like a unity, and by means of which the psycho-physical mechanism of producing and hearing sounds (Tonens and H&rens) is raised to
become the expression of thought.
12. More important still was another effect of the work of Leib
niz. It was no less a thinker than Kant who undertook to build up the doctrine of the Nouveaux Essais into a system of epistemology
(cf. § 34, 12). The Konigsberg philosopher was stimulated by that work to one of the most important turns in his development, and completed it in his Inaugural Dissertation. 1 He had already grown out of the Wolffian school-metaphysics and had been long employed with the examination of the empirical theories, and yet could not satisfy himself with them. * On the contrary, he was proceeding in the direction of establishing metaphysics upon a new basis, and was following Lambert's attempts to make a beginning at the work in connection with the distinction of form and content in knowledge. Now Leibniz showed with reference to the " eternal truths " that they inhered already as involuntary relating forms within sense experience itself, to be raised and brought to clear and distinct con sciousness by the reflection of the understanding. This principle of virtual innateness is the nerve of Kant's Inaugural Dissertation: the
metaphysical truths lie in the soul as laws of its activity,' to enter into active function on occasion of experience, and then to become object and content of the knowledge of the understanding.
Kant now applies this point of view in a new and fruitful manner to sensuous knowledge. From methodical reiisons he opposed this to intellectual knowledge much more sharply even than the Wolffians : but on this account the question for him was, whether there are perhaps in the world of the senses just such original form-relations as had been pointed out in the intellectual world by Leibniz and recognised by Kant himself (cf. 5 8, and the whole Sectio IV. of the treatise De mundi sensibilis et intelligibilix forma et principiis) : and thus he discovered the " pure Forms of the sensibility " — qxire and time. They are not innate in the ordinary sense, but acquired, yet not abstracted from the data of sensibility, but ab ipsa mentis
powers.
1 The dependence of this essay upon the Xoureaux Etsais has been shown by W. ' Windelband. Yiertetjahrtehr. f. u-Utensch. Philot. . I. , 1876, pp. 234 ft*.
Tills la best proved by the essay which apparently stands farthest removed from metaphysics. The Ihreamn of a (ihost Seer. Cf. also Part VI. ch. 1.
1 De Jtundi Sens, et Int. , J 6: dantur per iptam naluram intellect in. Cf. | 8, aJao the corollary to f 8.
466 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [Part V.
actione secundum perpetuus leges sensa sua coordinante [from the very action of the mind co-ordinating its sensations according to perpetual laws], and like the intellectual Forms they are recognised by attending to the mind's activity on occasion of experience, — the business of mathematics.
Another formulation was given to the principle of virtual innate- ness by Tetens. He wrote his essays on human nature and its development under the impression received from Kant's Inaugural Dissertation. He, too, declares that the " acts of thought " are the first original relation-thoughts (Verhctttnissgedanken) : we learn them by applying them when we think; and thus they prove themselves to be the natural laws of thought. The universal prin ciples which lie at the basis of all philosophical knowledge are, accordingly, " subjective necessities " in which the essential nature of the thinking soul itself comes to consciousness.
§ 34. Knowledge of the Outer World.
The background of all these theories is their epistemological pur
This, however, assumes from the beginning a somewhat narrower place under the presupposition of the naive realism which became attached to the Cartesian metaphysics. The principle of the cogito ergo sum made the self-knowledge of the mind's nature appear as the original certainty, as that which was self-evident and immediately free from doubt ; but the greater the difference in kind which was conceived to exist between the world of consciousness and that of space and bodies, the greater the difficulties that pre sented themselves with reference to the possibility of knowing this latter world. This fact was taught at once by the metaphysical development immediately after Descartes (cf. § 31), and the same was now repeated in the most various forms in connection with the translation of these same thoughts into the language of empirical psychology and sensualism.
There is thus in the epistemology of modern philosophy from its beginning a superiority attributed to inner experience, by virtue of which knowledge of the outer world becomes problematical. In this an after- working of the Terminism, with which the Middle Ages had ended, asserts itself throughout the whole extent of modern thought as a determining mode of view : the heterogeneity of the outer and inner worlds gives the mind a proud feeling of a substantial quality peculiar to itself as contrasted with things, but at the same time a certain degree of uncertainty and doubtfulness in orienting itself in this world which is to it strange and foreign. In this way
pose.
Chap. 1, § 34. ] Knowledge of the Outer World : Locke. 467
the very statement of the fundamental problem in the philosophy of the Enlightenment shows itself to be an echo of that deepening of the mind within itself, that placing of consciousness upon an inde pendent basis over against the outer world, with which the ancient philosophy ended its course. In this was rooted the power of the Augustinian spirit over modern philosophy.
1. The preponderance of the inner experience asserts itself very strongly also with Locke, although in principle he placed sensation and reflection upon an equality psychologically, and in his genetic theory even made the latter dependent upon the former. But in assigning the epistemological values this relation is at once reversed in the spirit of the Cartesian principles. For the dualism of finite substances wjiich the great French metaphysician had propounded is quietly introduced by Locke in conjunction with the dualism of the sources of experience : sensation is designed to furnish knowledge of the corporeal outer world, reflection to give knowledge of the activities of the mind itself: and in this consideration it is naturally found that the latter is much more suited to its task than the former. Our knowledge of our own states is intuitive and the most certain of all ; and with a knowledge of our states we are at the same time perfectly and undoubtedly sure of our own existence also. Locke presents this doctrine of the certainty of knowledge of self with an almost verbal adherence to Descartes. ' With reference to our knowledge of the corporeal world, on the other hand, his attitude is much more reserved Such a knowledge is possible oi. 'y through sensation ; and although it still deserves the name knowledge, it yet lacks complete certainty and adequacy. Primarily, it is only the presence of the idea in the mind that is intuitively certain ; that a thing corresponds to the idea is not intuitively certain, and demon stration can at most teach that there is a thing there, but can predicate nothing concerning this thing.
To be sure, Locke is not at all in agreement with himself on this point. In connection with his theory of the ideas of sensation, he adopts the doctrine of the intellectual nature of the sense qualities quite in the form worked out by Descartes (cf. § 31, 2), designates them happily by the distinction of primary and secondary qualities, adds, as tertiary qualities, such powers as express the relation of one body to another, declares primary qualities to be those which really belong to bodies in themselves, and reckons, also, impenetrability in this class, in addition to those assigned to it by Descartes. As compared with the doctrine of Hobbes, this is in its essence a
> Kt$at IV. A, 3.
468 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Question*. [Part V.
decided relapse into the mode of thought of Democritus and Epicurus, as is shown, also, in the fact that Locke follows the theory of images in tracing stimulations • to the affection of the nerves by minute particles streaming out from objects. 1 On the whole, there fore, the fundamental Cartesian basis of mathematical knowledge of Nature is here reaffirmed, and even more widely extended.
But Locke's decision in connection with his analysis of the idea of substance has an entirely different purport. Like Occam, he distinguishes from intuitive knowledge and knowledge given by sensation, demonstrative knowledge: this has to do, not with the relation of ideas to the outer world, but with the relation of ideas to one another. In its value as knowledge it stands after the intui tive, but superior to the sensitive. 5 Demonstrative thinking is then conceived of entirely terministically, something as in the case of Hobbes, as a reckoning with concept signs. The necessity attach ing to the demonstration holds only within the world of ideas ; it concerns, as one class, general or abstract ideas to which no proper reality corresponds in natura rerum. If ideas are once present, judgments may be formed concerning the relations which exist between them, quite apart from any reference to the things them selves; and it is with such judgments alone that demonstrative knowledge has to do. Such "complex" ideas are thought-things, which, after they have been fixed by definition, can enter into the union with others determined in each case by the respective con tents, without thereby acquiring any relation to the outside world. Among these modes of union, that which is expressed by the idea of substance (the category of inherence) is conspicuous in an especial manner. For all other contents and relations can be thought only as belonging to some substance. This relation, therefore, has Reality, — the idea of substance according to Locke's expression, ectypal, — but only in the sense that we are forced to assume real substrate for the modes given in particular ideas, without being able to make any assertion as to what this substrate itself is. Substance is the supporter, itself unknown, of known qualities, which we have occa sion to assume belong together.
This view that substances are unknowable does not, indeed, hinder Locke from taking in hand at another passage,8 in an entirely Cartesian fashion, a division of all substances into " cogitative and incogitative. " On the other hand, he applies the view to his treat-
Essay, II. IT. Cf. also B. Rlittenauer, Zur VorgescMchte des Idealism*! und Kriticismus (Freiburg, 1882), and Geil, op. cit. , pp. 66 ft".
lb.