Hartmann, Henry G. A Hew Conception of Relativity and Locke DUKE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 https://archive.org/details/newconceptionofr01hart fy, m University of Cincinnati Studies wm, mi ®S *T -&•- V "h Series 11 VOLUME VIII (Concluded) Part 4 A NEW CONCEPTION OF RELATIVITY AND LOCKE BY tt/V ••• HENRY G. HARTMANN V- ■ 'i 'V *'• v - i¥^3 UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI STUDIES SERIES 2 VOLUME I, 1905 1. The Dramatic Element in the Popular Ballad. Pp. 1-59. 50 cents. G. M. Miller. 2. A Comparative Study of the Aesopic Fable in Nicole Bozon. Pp. 1-84. $1.00. P. W. Harry. (Single copies exhausted. Can be obtained in bound volume only.) 3. On the Omission of the Copula with E T O I M O 2- Pp. 1-9- 10 cents. J. E. Harry. 4. Glossemata de Prudentio. Pp. 1-102. $1.00. J. M. Burnam. Price of bound volume, $1.75. VOLUME II, 1906 a» 1. The Early Exploration of Louisiana. Pp. 1-160. $1.00. I. J. Cox. 2. Prolegomena to a Study of the Ethical Ideal of Plutarch and the Greeks of the First Century, A. D. Pp. 1-66. 75 cents. G. D. Hadzsits. 3. Summary Catalogue of a Part of the Library of J. M. Burnam. Edited by the owner. Pp. 1-84. $1.00. 4. The Growth of Ohio. A Manuai of State and Local History for the Schools of Southwestern Ohio. Pp. 1-120. $1.00. F. P. Goodwin. Price of bound volume, $2.75. VOLUME III, 1907. 1. Problems inj^e Prometheus. Pp. 1-48. 50 cents. J. E. Harry. 2. The Roman Cohort Castella. Pp. 1-48. Thirteen plans. 50 cents. ’ G. H. Allen. 3. The Scioto Speculation and the French Settlement at Gallipolis. Pp. 1-83. Two maps. 75 cents. T. T. Belote. 4. A Question of Divination ( Medea 240). Pp. 1-17. 50 cents. J. E. Harry. Price of bound volume, $1.75. (Concluded on Third Cover Page) UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI STUDIES A NEW CONCEPTION OF RELATIVITY AND LOCKE BY HENRY G. HARTMANN University of Cincinnati PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI CINCINNATI, OHIO 1914 \o-| V\i*337U UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI STUDIES EDITORS Louis T. More John M. Burnam Henry G. Hartmann PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI CINCINNATI, OHIO T 2453 7 CONTENTS PAGE Introduction 5 I GENERAL SURVEY CHAPTER I. The Two Fundamental Steps in Locke’s Philosophy 9 II. Relativity Defined and Locke’s Position Indicated in Respect to its Various Formulations 15 II RELATIVISTIC MOTIVES IN LOCKE III. The Simple Ideas: What Are They? 19 IV. The Term-Relation Motive 23 V. The Part-Whole Motive 32 VI. Locke’s Conception of Relation 35 III ANTI-RELATIVISTIC MOTIVES IN LOCKE VII. Ideas versus Knowledge and Meaning 41 VIII. Absolute Knowledge: The Primacy of the “Visible Relation” and of Conduct 45 IV CONSTRUCTIVE RELATIVITY IN LOCKE. IX. Doctrine of Sorts: Mixed Modes and Substances 58 X. Doctrine of Meaning (“Ideas of Relation”) 74 XI. Conclusion 85 ^/// A^/ RELATIVITY AND LOCKE ClT: 0.-,rp’.T.-:., The aim of this study is twofold. In the first place, I seek to offer a new and developed formulation of relativity; and secondly, to present this doctrine in connection with Locke, for whom I thereby hope to gain a renewed and revised consideration. Relativity has for so long a time been consigned to the role of scapegoat in the history of thought that, not unlike the appella- tion “heresy” in the realm of religion, a stigma has come to adhere to relativity not any more easily counteracted or dispelled. That this should be the case is not wholly without cause ; for when we look more closely into this concept, the fact that it has never been subjected to a critical examination is but one of the many singular and surprising features to be enumerated concerning it. My own conviction is, that, if the principle of relativity be given a full and proper formulation, not only would a new and very fruitful starting point in metaphysical inquiry offer itself, but one that in a way effects that closer connection between meta- physics and science so generally expressed in the aspirations no less than in the despair of current thought. The meaning attached to the term relativity must abide its place. I could not attempt its definition at this point without going far afield. I, therefore, leave this matter for the present to speak further of Locke. While I attach an equal importance to both aspects of the study, the accurate presentation of relativity as it exists in Locke is my more immediate interest. Nor do I aim at urging some mere side doctrine in him, but one that in the slow growth and development of his ideas becomes increasingly central, in- clusive, and self-conscious. I frankly confess that this is not the view I held of him a few years ago. Nor is it likely that my older traditional conception of him would have undergone its ladical change if conditions had not led me to give Book III of his Essay more serious reading than our traditional opinion of it seemed to invite. This Book, supposedly the last of the Books written, in turn became the key for reading the others. I submit the outcome in these pages as a real discovery of Locke. Locke tells his friend Molyneux that Book III gave him more labor in the writing than the rest of the Essay. This fact does INTRODUCTION 24537 6 University of Cincinnati Studies not of necessity insure merit. Yet I mention it as a fact not without its significance, and further, advance the contention that, until Book III was written, Locke never came into full possession of his “new way of ideas” — a philosophical view that not only embraces what is most distinctive in modern pragmatism, but one that presents the relevant metaphysics and system so lacking in pragmatism. I admit Book III does not at first appear to have its specific doctrines writ in italics. Locke himself confesses in re- spect to this Book : “I should not much wonder if there be in some places of it obscurity and doubtfulness .... though the thoughts were easy and clear enough, yet [it] cost me more pains to express them than all the rest of my Essay.” The fact is that Locke’s “new way of ideas” here took its last “new” turn, and its consummate character once clearly grasped, one ceases overnight to view Locke traditionally. In affirming Locke to be essentially the relativist 1 , and not essentially the reputed sensationalist, I expose myself to mis- understanding. He is the sensationalist, as reputed, for those who will not consider Locke beyond the evident sensationalistic impli- cations of his doctrine, and who, in support of their claim, may turn to the British movement in philosophy that arose out of Locke. But let it be remembered that Kant’s philosophy also had an origin in Locke, and do I trespass in stating that perhaps Pragma- tism owes more to Locke than may be consciously recognized or accepted? So historical outcome pitted against historical outcome avails little in deciding an issue. Nor in denying Locke to be primarily the sensationalist, am 1 unaware that T. H. Green (not to mention others) has written a critique of him that dare not be ignored. His aim, however, is to show up Locke negatively, not constructively ; to show him up in the light of the exclusive sensationalistic precursor of Berkeley and Hume, and in so doing, to expose in him as absurd any departure from this prin- ciple and Green’s self-imposed dialectics. This sort of criticism is not helpful, however else remarkable the critique may be in its superior merits and mental acrobatics. To begin with, Locke, instead of abandoning “the historical plain method” to which he pledges himself in his Introduction, in order to pursue the psychological trend of which he stands accused, 1. For a serious attempt at a proper definition of this term I refer the reader to Chapter II. Relativity and Locke 7 is in the main so consistent with his original design that I am almost inclined to ignore the first half dozen or more of his chap- ters in Book II for the havoc they have done in distorting and eclipsing the far more central, consistent, and evolved doctrine existing in his pages. And when, in addition, I find Locke in his psychological digressions expressly acknowledging a departure from his avowed method, I ask myself what blame for all this distortion of our perspective rests with Berkeley and Hume? There is no need, however, for all that to lessen the value of the chapters indicated. Chapter VIII of that Book, in particular, is not the only instance where we find Locke forcing an extreme view ; and, hence to discount the exaggeration of his views in this chapter is not any more, nor any less, valid, than to do so with the many other extreme views with which his Essay abounds. Read him where we will, we find, as I shall endeavor to outline, the most one-sided and extreme position brought face to face in his pages with others equally extreme and one-sided ; and when we ask where in this jumble of views we are to find Locke, it behooves us to arrest any tendency to frame a too hasty judg- ment concerning the matter, and, most of all, at the outset, to venture the assumption that Locke did not know his own mind. It requires no great discernment to perceive that Green got his guid- ing thread, not from Locke himself, but from the traditional view of him. But Locke remains Locke, work the veritable gold mine of his Essay for some of its gold only, or for most of it, or merely for its dross. The whole matter hinges upon the role of the simple ideas. Are they at bottom to be taken as working assumptions or as actual facts ? Here Locke in the growth of his thoughts decidedly vacillates, although tradition has obviously failed to follow him. “The historical plain method,” at its inception as well as in its constant application, reflects one specific problem : the problem of the One and the Many, in the solution of which, his simple ideas (namely, his sensationalism) are not a problem but assumed facts. When he inclines to consider them as more than assump- tions, he, with confession, ceases to be the metaphysician and turns psychologist, and then the simple ideas themselves become the problem. Yet he writes : “Every mixed mode, consisting of many distinct simple ideas, it seems reasonable to inquire, ‘whence it has its unity* and how such a precise multitude comes to make but one 8 University of Cincinnati Studies idea, since that combination does not always exist together in na- ture?’ To which I answer, it is plain it has its unity from an act of the mind .” 2 Whether his simple ideas are in fact simple or whether complex, the problem uppermost with him, notwithstand- ing, will persist : “how such a precise multitude comes to make but one idea.” For, as he would say, we do regard charity as one idea, however multitudinous its parts, and so with our notions of man or gold. They have no unity actually existing “in nature then “whence do they have their unity?” The sensationalistic interpretation of Locke would imply that the simple ideas rather than the complex ideas engrossed his interest. I venture the op- posite contention. It remains to add that the present study had its initial appear- ance under the title of “Locke a Constructive Relativist .” 3 The original study, however, has been subjected to a revision so general as to compel a change from the original to the present title. Chapters II, IV, and XI may be read for the more exclusive treatment of relativity. The study as a whole, however, consti- tutes a unit. 2. Bk. II, ch. 22, sec. 4. 3. Scientific Press, New York, 1912. It appeared as “A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia Uni- versity.” Relativity and Locke 9 I GENERAL SURVEY CHAPTER I THE TWO FUNDAMENTAL STEPS IN LOCKE’S PHILOSOPHY “It is past doubt,” says Locke, “that men have in their minds several ideas, — such as are those expressed by the words white- ness, hardness, sweetness, thinking, motion, man, elephant, army, drunkenness, and others : it is in the first place then to be inquired, — How he comes by them P” 1 Locke’s position here is clear. He takes existing distinctions in consciousness as the starting-point in his attempted “account of the ways whereby our understand- ings come to attain these notions of things we have.” 2 This position cannot be overemphasized. He accepts the reality of thinking and the reality of distinctions within thought, and his main problem is, not whether such distinctions exist apart from thought, nor what they may chance to be apart from thought, but how such distinctions, as commonly recognized in our exper- ience, come about; what is their ground or basis? And it is my contention that this problem, although given its most specific and most evolved solution in his doctrine of sorts in Book III, receives no less profuse elaboration in every other part of his Essay. His first general attempt to account for such distinctions con- sists in his well-knowrt contention, that all we know of reality resolves itself into ideas, of which he recognizes two sorts, — simple ideas and complex ideas. Of these, simple ideas are ulti- mate and underived ; the complex ideas a mere aggregation of the simple ideas. Knowledge, in Locke’s sense of the word, is in no way involved in the conscious existence of simple ideas, al- though the organism is involved in the production of some of them (the secondary qualities) . Knowledge begins its career only when the simple ideas are brought into union or connection by the mind, and terminates in such products as (1) Complex Ideas, 1. Bk. II, ch. 1, sec. 1. 2. Introduction, sec 2. 10 University of Cincinnati Studies (2) Meaning, (3) Knowledge proper, and (4) Knowledge as opinion or judgments of probability. All these evolved distinc- tions within our experience, so Locke contends, are, notwith- standing, but complications or modes of simple ideas, and that they approximate reality so far only as they admit of a reduction to their source of origin in the simple ideas. Hence that con- tention in Locke, that complex ideas and meaning, considered apart from their reduction to simple ideas, are unreal, and that knowledge in general is unreal and irrelevant except where grounded in the necessity of a “visible and necessary” relation between them ; that is, that knowledge remains unreal until, as a perceptive meaning, as it were, it resolves itself to the status of a simple irreducible idea. Here the principle that comes to the surface is, that what is rational is real, in conformity with which, Locke makes the a priori modes the highest and most perfect forms of reality. But the simple ideas, as just indicated, were also made the supreme forms of reality. From this it would follow that there are two principles of truth and reality recognized by Locke, and not one, although now it is the one that gains the ascendancy in him, and then the other. But even when we ignore this dual standard and confine ourselves to the empir- ical standard only, we find the same see-saw manifested in his pages. In different parts of his Essay, he evaluates complex ideas and meaning very differently in respect to simple ideas, by hypothesis, considered the sole ultimates. We find that complex ideas and meaning get themselves viewed, now as unreal, then as real, — as real and as ultimate as his hypothetical simple ideas. And when we ask by which decision Locke in truth stands, we can answer in the affirmative, one way or the other, only by em- phasizing his statements at one place and in one context, and by ignoring what he as explicitly states to the contrary in other parts of his Essay. He who does not take these various contradictions of Locke into full consideration and hold them together, may attain to a consistent theory or view of him, but he can do so only by a process of elimination and by a substitution of a dialect, so to speak, for Locke’s own rich, although varied, utterance. It is as difficult at times to answer whether Locke is a rationalist as it is to answer whether Locke is an empiricist; just as upon the empirical basis, as just indicated, it is difficult at times to answer whether Locke regards meaning and complex ideas as Relativity and Locke 11 ultimate as simple ideas, or not. What are we to make of this tangle ? At what point dogmatize concerning him ? Locke’s first step, as just stated, “to account for the ways whereby our understandings come to attain those notions of things we have” led him to the belief that simple ideas contained the sole ground of explanation. He rests his claim upon the fact that the simple ideas are essentially non-relative. To admit anything else were to court an infinite regress — such seems his conviction. Yet, on the other hand, he admits as emphatically (1) that they are conditioned in their shape and character by the structure of our sense organs; (2) that, within such existing structure, variation in range and acuteness of perception is the law; (3) that their perception by a direct vision, involving a transcendence of the ordinary mode of perception, is ideal; (4) that they involve a latent judgment; (5) that they reduce to mere products of ex- ternally conditioning factors (relativity) ; (6) that simple modes, although complex, are irreducible; (7) that mixed modes are ultimate and have their real essence in thought (a priori rational- ism) ; (8) that complex ideas of substances are ultimate and have their reality in distinctions as final in character as our distinction between a horse and a stone. And thus he wrestles with his problem to and fro! Simple ideas are ultimate — this conclusion he will not let go, and yet he feels himself forced to admit : “that whatever doth or can exist, or be considered as one thing, is positive ; and so not only simple ideas and substances, but modes also, are positive beings: though the parts of which they consist are very often relative one to another ; but the whole together, considered as one thing, and producing in us the complex idea of one thing, which idea is in our minds, as one picture though an aggregate of divers parts, is a positive or absolute thing or idea.” 3 But if simple ideas, by the admissions catalogued, are conceded to be complex or relative, as the case may be, and com- plex ideas, as just quoted, “positive or absolute,” what becomes of our original and fundamental distinction between simple ideas and our complex ideas? The next quotation will aid to a solution of the matter in Locke’s own words. “It is not, therefore, unity of substance,” writes Locke in his chapter on Identity and Diver- sity, “that comprehends all sort of identity, or will determine it in every case. . . . Thus in the case of living creatures, their 3. Bk. II, ch. 25, sec. 6. 12 University of Cincinnati Studies identity depends, not on a mass of particles, but on something else .” 4 But what is this “something else,” capable of conferring a unity where there is a diversity? Our answer to this question conducts us into the second fundamental step in Locke’s phil- osophy, and it consists in locating the principle of unity in the subject and no longer in any external object. In Book IV this principle is located in “Reason” ; in Book III it is located in what he terms an abstract idea or definition ; in Book II in what he terms “ideas of relation” ; and, lastly, throughout his Essay, in what he frequently terms “our happiness or misery, beyond which we have no concernment, either of knowing or being .” 5 Even our simple ideas do not escape this general transfer in their unity, and, in their case, the unity is found dependent upon Jhe particular character and structure of our sense organs, or upon a single pic- ture or conception in the mind. The outcome of the doctrine, taken in its full setting, is what I term constructive relativity. His treatment of this general subject is critical and destructive, as well as positive and constructive. A general outline of his inquiry, with a suggestion of the final conclusion to be reached, will amply suffice for a passing orientation in this second and more fundamental step in Locke’s philosophy. Our simple ideas given, why not rest content with them ? Why seek to combine them? And when we thus set about to unite them, what constitutes our motive or motives, and what our “patterns” ? Grant, if you will, that a certain aim is compassed in reducing complex ideas to simple ideas, whether that aim be pragmatic (a test of their truth or reality) or epistemological (a determination of the varied elements involved in a possible bit of knowledge, or in knowledge as a whole), and yet it is evident that no adequate “account of the ways whereby our understand- ings come to attain those notions of things we have” could end with the fact that our particular notions involve a purely general truth or reality ; it is well-nigh tantamount to saying that they have no truth or reality at all. The emphasis with Locke through- out is placed, not upon the universal, but upon the particulars. Hence his real problem : simple ideas given, why do we combine them at all, and such and such qualities with this object and others with other objects? We may seek the solution in the answer that different objects are inherently of a different constitution or 4. Ibid., sec. 7. 5. Bk. IV, ch. 11, sec. 8. Relativity and Locke 13 essence. But this answer merely begs the question at issue. We answer our question by off-hand asserting a principle of differen- tiation not discoverable within our experience. Now Locke vigorously denies the validity thus to explain our why. Thus he writes : “Our faculties carry us no further toward the knowledge and distinction of substances, than a collection of those sensible ideas which we observe in them. ... A blind man may as soon sort things by their colof, and he that has lost his smell as well distinguish a lily and a rose by their odor, as by those internal constitutions which he knows not .’’ 6 Locke returns to this contention with a wearisome prolixity, now domin- ated by the rationalistic, then by the sensationalistic, the nominal- istic, the dualistic, or the relativistic point of view, but he is rarely at variance with the conclusion that we never know an object’s real essence but its nominal 7 essence only; and he con- stantly questions the legitimacy even to assume the existence of a real essence, — “that inherent constitution which everything has within itself, without any relation to anything without it .’’ 8 Thus reduced to our simple ideas, we may ask whether they have any natural and visible “connections and dependencies,” whereby guidance is yielded in the proper formation of our par- ticular complex ideas? And here Locke’s answer, in general theory, is again consistently negative . 9 Hence Locke’s conclusion, that our complex ideas, of which there are, according to him, three distinct sorts, — modes, substances, and relations, — “are of man’s, and not of nature’s making.” In regard to mixed modes, his gen- eral contention is, “that they are not only made by the mind, but made very arbitrarily, made without patterns or reference to any real existence. Wherein they differ from those of substances, which carry with them the suggestion of some real being, from which they are taken, and to which they are conformable .” 10 I have now sufficiently outlined, in general theory, the second step in Locke’s philosophy. But this second step, so easily over- 6. Bk. Ill, ch. 6, sec. 9. 7. Although the terms real and nominal undergo some change in their meaning, all of which shall be touched upon in detail later, the dis- tinction in Locke is vital to modern thought and is no mere echo or vestige of mediaeval thought so frequently fancied. There is a sense in which Locke no less than Kant produced a critique of historical thought, and the most profitable entrance to this complete study of Locke is this, very distinction of his between the real and the nominal essences. 8. Bk : III, ch. 6, sec. 6. 9. See Bk. IV, ch. 3, secs. 28-29. 10. Bk. Ill, ch. 5, sec. 3. 14 University of Cincinnati Studies looked as a second step, and so commonly regarded as a subordi- nate phase only of the first step in his argument, instead of the reverse, calls for a few additional considerations at this point. The problem which particularly concerns Locke after he has once settled the claim that it is the nominal and not the real essence “which determines the sorts of things,” may be made to take the following form : what constitutes the “measure and boundary” of each particular thing, whereby it is made that particular thing, and distinguished from others? And his answer is: an object’s measure and boundary is the “workmanship of the mind,” opera- tive within the nominal essence, and a matter of definition or ab- stract idea ; that is, a construct. This answer, as elaborated in Locke, suffers in cogency, only where he persists in his exagger- ated theoretical claim, that “there is no individual parcel of matter to which any of its qualities are so annexed as to be essential to it or inseparable from it ,” 11 and rendered with the meaning, that every particular parcel of matter reduces to pure flux as it were ; that is, reduces to a degree of variability or instability never ex- perienced save in a theory which ignores varying degrees of instability and varying degrees of stability, as commonly experi- enced. It is only when thus rendered that it is necessary for him to find the sole principle of stability or permanence in a realm other than that of matter-of-fact. But it is in this version only that his notion of the definition or abstract idea as constituting the “essence” of a thing, namely, its measure and boundary, chimes in with his generally assumed dualism, or absolute divorce, between “fact” and “meaning,” in the varied forms this divorce assumes in his Essay. Thus formulated, Locke’s doctrine would be indeed a doctrine of (a rationalistic type of) relativity of a most extreme and exaggerated sort ; but it would be a type of relativity where everything was attributed to the function of thought, only to be dashed to naught by one fell stroke : “nothing exists but particu- lars — which doctrine, when pushed to extremes, as Locke’s writings only too frequently favor, practically means, that all knowledge is irrelevant. “Nothing exists but particulars !” But if “particulars,” as indicated, are so elastic in content as to imply any content from a mere blank to the universe, how again avoid an interminable see-saw? Above the level of a mere zero, the “par- ticular” would thus again openly negate knowledge, only itself tacitly to usurp it. 11. Ibid., ch 6, sec. 6. Relativity and Locke 15 In holding then, as Locke does, that “each distinct idea is a distinct essence,” nothing more is implied by him than that such determination or boundary of a thing, as of this or that kind, is given in an abstract idea or definition, which, although in one sense less complete than reality, in another sense, exceeds it. It is incomplete or inadequate in respect to the sum total of its potential qualities ; but in respect to its momentary existences, all alike partial and variable, it is in excess of any such single instance of its actual existence. For, at any moment, any given object may possess almost any quality and lose almost any of its qualities the next. There is a need of unity in the midst of diversity. Hence his conception of an object is that of a con- struct, which involves a description of an object in Locke truly marvelous, not only because it emerges out of a sea of contradic- tions and prepossessions, but, because in the form it finally as- sumes, it stands unsurpassed. The question is not whether we have gotten beyond Locke ; rather is it the question whether we have caught up to him. Back to Book III, is the plea I would urge for a proper understanding of the other Books. CHAPTER II RELATIVITY DEFINED AND LOCKERS POSITION INDICATED IN RESPECT TO ITS VARIOUS FORMULATIONS Historic thought has given specific formulation and currency to several forms of relativity. In its most general form, the principle properly denotes the theory that every object determines, and is determined by, every other object , 1 and, thus considered, commonly supports the claim that any object, at any point of its history, is capable of a still larger growth or of a reduction by a mere mathematical increase or decrease of its relations with other objects. Conceived in this form, I designate the principle radical relativity. This formulation of it is the one that is most commonly encountered, and it has its usual and explicit statement in Locke. His more peculiar and frequent expression of it, however, is the following: “Substances when truly considered are powers, and hence nothing else than so many relations to other substa nces .” 2 ' Radical relativity is no doubt sound enough in abstract theory. 1. See Baldwin’s Dictionary; Article on Relativity. 2. Bk. II, ch. 24, sec. 37. 16 University of Cincinnati Studies Its emphasis is upon mutual dependence among objects, — the postulate of all scientific inquiry. But to talk of an object’s depen- dence in general and to talk of a particular object’s dependence upon other particular objects in a given situation, are very dif- ferent things. When discoursing upon this matter of mutual de- pendence in the abstract, the dependence of one object upon an- other admits of no partiality ; they are all thought to be equally interdependent and they are all thought to be completely inter- dependent ; whereby their independence, if thought to have any, vanishes like mist in the morning air, the more this central tenet of an impartial mutual dependence is emphasized . 3 But objects as we learn from experience on all sides are not equally dependent upon each other in any given situation ; they do not as a general rule in specific situations entail a perfect equivalence of give-and-take; and as knowledge begins with the given, it is incumbent upon a scientific spirit to hold strictly to the facts as thus revealed. The dependence of a given object in a given situation may be large, yet the dependence of the other ob- jects upon it or upon each other in that particular situation may be zero. The unaffected objects are accordingly more properly designated as independent. But an independence properly main- tained for an object in certain situations may in other situations convert itself into a dependence, as our scientific postulate of general dependence would naturally dispose us to expect. In so far, then, as we remain strictly empirical, and, further, strictly adhere to our confessed postulate, the following form of relativity seems the more permissible one: objects reveal themselves differently in different situations and, in different situations, are capable of revealing qualities often absolutely incompatible with each other. Relativity thus conceived, I term empirical. Locke’s common ex- pression of it takes on the following form : “The changes which one ‘body’ is apt to receive from or produce in other ‘bodies,’ upon a due application, exceeds far, not only what we know, but what we are apt to imagine .” 4 3. And the burden of proof does not rest upon him who denies a fundamental unity to the Universe, but upon him who affirms this fact. 4. I hasten to say that by insisting upon the distinction between the abstract and the empirical basis of the relativistic principle, I feel I fully meet the objection commonly directed against it; namely, that objects, according to it, resolve themselves into a sheer netvvork of empty re- lations. In addition to what has already been stated, it need only be said that relations, or, to be more specific, particulars, are as effective in re- inforcing each other and in preserving each other intact, as they are in building each other up or in destroying each other; and in still other cases Relativity and Locke 17 These considerations conduct us to the third form which I am inclined to affirm the principle in question assumes. I term it constructive rel ativity. Let me explain. If a given object reveals itself differently - m~d liferent situations and in different situations is capable of revealing qualities often absolutely incompatible with each other, then the conclusion follows, as in opposition to the con- clusion reached by radical relativity, that no single situation of actual existence can reveal or exhaust an object’s total actuality, that is, all its possible phases or qualities. It is in its very nature a multiplicity, viewed spatially or temporally. Such unity as may be ascribed to it, Locke assigns to the function of the so- called abstract idea. The object that results is a synthesis and is accordingly viewed in the light of a construct and not a copy, “of man’s and not of nature’s making,” as we, in due place, shall find him propounding with great vigor. He writes in general to the following effect : “It is not unity of substances that comprehends all soi'ts of identity, or will determine it in every case ; but to con- ceive and judge of it aright .... whatever does or can exist, or be considered as one thing is positive, and so not only simple ideas and substances, but modes also are positive beings : though the parts of which they consist are often relative one to another . . . . it sufficing to the unity of every idea that it be consider- ed as one representation or picture, though made up of ever so many particulars.” 5 The statement involves the contention already enunciated that things, however partial or variable in their matter- of-fact existenc? of this or that moment, are determined in their character of this or that sort or whole by the idea ; namely, that “men determine sorts,” 6 specific things, which, in accord with his declared relativity, he denies as existing “in nature with any prefixed bounds.” 7 disdain, as it were, to enter into any effective relations with each other at all. For illustration, turn to Chemistry with its combining laws of substances, or to the principle of elimination as involved in the methods governing inductive inferences. Hence a relative independence among objects is no less involved and presupposed in the operation of the principle than a relative dependence. In fact, properly grasped, the principle of relativity is no other than the fundamental principle of all science ; namely, that given conditions produce a given result. Hence, let the results or the conditions be defined as you will, the dependence and correlation, namely, the connection between the factors involved could never be affirmed, if disconnection were not a fact equally obvious and ultimate in any given situation. For further discussion of this matter, see pp. 29-32. 5. Bk. II, ch. 25, sec. 6; ch. 24, sec. 1. 6. - Bk. III. ch. 6, sec. 35. 7. Ibid., sec. 29. 18 University of Cincinnati Studies For the sake of completeness, I mention several additional forms of the relativistic principle. 8 Thus Protagoras is made the exponent of one such specific formulation. The doctrine that all knowledge is merely phenomenal, yields another specific formulation. The former is based, in the main, upon a declared diversity in our perceptions of a given object; the latter, upon the claim that an object (to quote Mill) “is known to us only in one special relation ; namely, as that which produces, or is capable of producing, certain impressions on our senses ; and all that we really know is these impressions. This is the doctrine of the Relativity of Knowledge to the knowing mind, in the simplest, purest, and, as I think, the most proper acceptation of the word.” (See Thomson’s Dictionary; Art., Relativity.) To complete this survey, 9 another specific formulation of relativity, the Kantian, requires mentioning. Spencer gives the fol- lowing graphic description of it : “Every thought,” he says, “in- volves a whole system of thoughts; and ceases to exist if severed from its various correlatives. As we cannot isolate a single organ of a living body, and deal with it as if it had a life independent of the rest; so, from the organized structure of our cognitions, we cannot cut one out and proceed as though it had survived the separation A developed intelligence can arise only by a process which, in making thoughts defined, also makes them mutually dependent — establishes among them certain vital con- nections, the destruction of which causes instant death of the thoughts.” (First Prin. sec. 39.) With these formulations of relativity as covering the ground, T resume the study of Locke. He finds, as I claim, that reality in the last analysis is determined in ideas, formed under the control of ends or purposes within a world of relatively deter- mined needs (“beyond which we have no concernment either to know or be”) and of relatively “unalterable organs,” and where certain fixed, regular, and constant co-existences among ideas (objects or events) are accepted by him as a fact. This is at once relativistic, positivistic, pragmatic, and constructive. 8. Properly interpreted, however, the formulations offered above should make provision for every other form of it that seems valid. This is not the place, however, for entering upon any such discussion. 9. I do not mention the flux-doctrine as another form of the rela- tivistic principle. It represents its crudest formulation. How vividly this form of it, however, was present in Locke’s mind could be demon- strated by adducing many a passage from the Essay. Relativity and Locke 19 II RELATIVISTIC MOTIVES IN LOCKE CHAPTER III THE SIMPLE IDEAS: WHAT ARE THEY? The simple ideas play a somewhat variable role in Locke’s philosophy and the purpose of this chapter is to trace it, and to define them as nearly as possible. “One thing,” says Locke, “is carefully to be observed concern- ing the ideas we have ; and that is, that some of them are simple and some complex .” 1 They distinguish themselves in the fact that complex ideas consist in the unity or supposed unity of distin- guishable parts, whereas simple ideas, “being each in itself un- compounded, contain nothing but one uniform appearance or con- ception in the mind, and are not distinguishable into different ideas .” 2 By this criterion, simple ideas are (a) uncompounded, (b) contain but one uniform appearance, and ( c ) are but one conception in the mind. We shall presently learn that Locke regards them as products ; hence compounded. I turn to the remaining differentiae indicated. They constitute but one uniform appearance. Let us consider this mark. Their uniform appearance, we find, is one that is relative: “blood that is red to the naked eye is not so under the micro- scope .” 3 Furthermore, we find that the simple modes, although in themselves complex ideas, are also declared to have a uni- formity or likeness in their parts: space and time “are justly reckoned among our simple ideas, yet none of the distinct ideas we have of either is without composition ; it is the very nature of both of them to consist of parts ; but their parts being all of the same kind . . hinder them not from having a place amongst simple ideas .” 4 Thus in the one case we find “the one 1. Bk. II, ch. 2, sec. 1. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., ch. 23, secs. 11-12. 4. Ibid., ch. 15, sec. 9. 20 University of Cincinnati Studies uniform appearance” a conditioned affair; in the latter case, they are seen to share this “uniform appearance” in common with simple modes. Hence, no differentia. The third mark, that of “one conception” in the mind, also fails to be a differentia, as simple ideas are herein found undis- tinguished from complex ideas as a whole. There is no need to quote him at length. The discrepancy from this standpoint is writ too large in any part of the treatise to which we may turn. One citation therefore will be made to suffice. “Besides these complex ideas of several single substances, as of man, horse, gold, violet, apple, etc., the mind hath also complex collective ideas of substances ; which I so call, because such ideas are made up of many particular substances considered together, as united into one idea, and which, so joined, are looked on as one; v. g., the idea of such a collection of men as made an army .... is as much one idea as the idea of a man : and the great collective idea of bodies whatever, signified by the name world, is as much one idea as the idea of any the least particle of matter in it ; it sufficing to the unity of any idea, that it be considered as one representation or picture, though made up of ever so many par- ticulars .” 5 That is, between an imaginary point and the universe, unity may be appropriated by anything; either by the complex simple idea or by the simple complex one. He next distinguishes between them in the fact, that in the origin of simple ideas the mind is passive, and that “it cannot invent or frame one new simple idea” nor refuse to have, alter or blot out one of them when offered to the mind ; whereas in the case of complex ideas the mind has the power to repeat, com- pare, and unite them to an infinite variety . 6 From this follows his conclusion “that simple ideas are the material of all our knowledge ,” 7 and that we have “no complex idea not made out of those simple ones.” A total dependence upon reality for our simple ideas, and a complete independence of reality in regard to complex ideas, is the distinction which discloses itself here. The mind, in its complex ideas, would appear totally dependent upon the simple ideas, but, other than that, the impression conveyed is that complex ideas neither require nor disclose any further de- pendence upon a reality and general constitution of things. And 5. Ibid., ch. 24, sec. 1. 6. Ibid., ch. 2, sec. 2. 7. Ibid., ch. 7. sec. 4. Relativity and Locke 21 yet Locke’s distinction between complex ideas of modes and sub- stances is grounded just in this particular fact, that modes, within simple ideas, are more or less purely of the mind’s invention, whereas substances are declared to be dependent, not only upon the simple ideas, but upon “the supposition of -some real being, from which they are taken, and to which they are con- formable .” 8 The affirmed distinction then between complex ideas and simple ideas cannot be based upon the fact that, in the origin of simple ideas, the mind is wholly dependent and passive, and the opposite in respect to complex ideas ; for, as indicated, sub- stances are dependent beyond simple ideas in a way that modes are not. As to Locke’s motive in thus ascribing a dependence of the mind upon reality, the copy-view theory asserts itself, wherein he affirms, that, in the case of simple ideas, as is evident, the mind, not unlike “a mirror, cannot refuse, alter, or obliterate the images or ideas which the objects before it do therein pro- duce .” 9 This copy-view of his, however, even when thus falsely restricted within his theory to simple ideas, encounters several set-backs in his pages. The first is that our senses may not~^ be proportionate to or commensurate with the demands, variety, and richness of reality. To this effect, I quote the following: “I think it is not possible for any one to imagine any other qualities in bodies, however constituted, whereby they can be taken notice of, besides sounds, taste, smells, visible and tangible qualities . . . . But how much these few and narrow inlets are dis- proportionate to the vast whole extent of all beings will not be hard to persuade those who are not so foolish as to think their span the measure of all things. What other simple ideas it is possible the creatures in other parts of the universe may have, ' by the assistance of senses and faculties more (in number) or more perfect than we have, or different from ours, it is not for us to determine .... and a great presumption to deny .” 10 The second set-back is experienced when he comes to dis- tinguish between primary qualities as alone copies and secondary qualities as effects : “There is nothing like our ideas existing in the bodies themselves .... and what is sweet, blue or warm in idea, is but the certain bulk, figure and motion of the insensible 8. Bk. Ill, ch. 5, sec. 3. 9. Bk. II, ch. 1, sec. 25. 10. Ibid., ch. 2, sec. 3, and Bk. IV, ch. 3, sec. 22. 22 University of Cincinnati Studies parts in the bodies themselves.” 11 Hence he regards it as possible to have “positive ideas even from privative causes.” 12 Thus the ideas of “heat and cold, light and darkness, white and black, mo- tion and rest are equally clear and positive ideas in the mind ; though, perhaps, some of the causes which produce them are barely privations in the subjects (objects) from whence our senses derive these ideas.” 13 The original position becomes still further confused when, as just set forth (p. 21), the simple ideas, viewed as effects, are found to be conditioned by the particular character and struc- ture of the sense-organs, no less so and to no less extent, than as conditioned by the structure of the “insensible parts” of an object. "Had we senses acute enough to discern the minute particles of bodies, and the real constitution in which their sensible qualities depend, I doubt not but they would produce quite different ideas in us : and that which is now the yellow color of gold would then disappear, and instead of it we should see an admirable texture of parts This microscopes plainly discover to us ; for what to our naked eyes produce a certain color, is, by augmenting the acuteness of our senses, discovered to be quite a different thing.” 14 Thus simple ideas, instead of being simple, underived, unconditioned, are found to be complex, derived and conditioned ; and, instead of being copies of objects, are effects ; and, instead of effects produced solely by the “insensible part” of bodies, they are effects equally conditioned in their character by the particular character and structure of the sensible organism ; and, in the case of positive ideas resulting from privative causes, almost ex- clusively conditioned, according to Locke’s statements, by the sensible organism. Here, then, we have the principle of relativity wholly installed within the sacred precincts of even the simple ideas. In these changes registered in Locke’s view of them, they become increasingly regarded as working assumptions and less and less as established facts ; and, as is equally apparent, the need of psychology grows less relevant to his arguments. Simple ideas thus come more and more to fill the place of the necessary ‘term’ in the term-relation motive, to be indicated in subsequent chapters, as well as the ‘part’ in the part-whole relation. They preserve a 11. Bk. II, ch. 8, sec. 15. 12. Ibid., sec. 1-6. 13. Ibid., sec. 2. 14. Ibid., ch. 23, secs. 11-12. Relativity and Locke 23 uniqueness, but it is a uniqueness in kind, and not one of simplicity or unity. The simple modes, as we perceived, are no less simple ideas of a kind; just as pleasure and pain, succession, change, co-existence, etc., are others as ultimate and as unique in their kind. Future chapters will show how consistently this motive works out in his pages. CHAPTER IV THE TERM-RELATION MOTIVE “This is certain,” writes Locke, “things however absolute and entire they may seem in themselves are but retainers to other parts of nature, for that which they are most taken notice of by us; ... . and there is not so complete and perfect a part that we know of nature which does not owe the being it has, and the excellencies of it, to its neighbors ; and we must not confine our thoughts within the surface of any body, but look a great deal further, to comprehend perfectly those qualities that are in it .” 1 Here, as in like passages with which the Essay abounds, the dependence of terms upon relations is absolute and complete. But then in Locke it is only necessary to turn a page if we wish to read some fiat contradiction of what may chance to be said on a preceding page. Turning to such pages we read something very dififerent concerning terms and relations: “The immediate object of all our reasoning and knowledge is nothing but particulars. Universality is but accidental to it . 2 .... When therefore we quit particulars, the universals that rest are only creatures of our own making; their general nature being nothing but the capacity they are put into by the understanding of signifying or representing particulars .” 3 By particulars, Locke seems to imply “anything as existing in any determined time and place ,” 4 and by universals he denotes meaning or any other thought product. That is, particulars now are the primary things ; and relations and what results therefrom, accidental and extrane- ous . 5 In the one case, relations are without reservation affirmed 1. Bk. IV, ch. 6, sec 11. 2. Ihid., ch. 17, sec. 8. 3. Bk. Ill, ch. 3, sec. 11. 4. Bk. II, ch. 27, sec. 1. 5. Bk. II, Chapters on ideas of relations. 24 University of Cincinnati Studies to be internal ; here, with an equal lack of reserve they are af- firmed to be wholly external. Let us follow him step by step to note which line of thought in this contradiction becomes tri- umphant. I know no viewpoint from which a study of Locke is more worth while or fascinating. Locke’s original conception of particulars is the plain onto- logical one of ready-made, independent objects, each with its own “prefixed bounds.” But particulars, thus conceived, run counter to his doctrine of “the new way of ideas.” Suppose, then, that we identify these ontological particulars with Locke’s other speci- fied particulars ; namely, simple and complex ideas ; and if par- ticulars refuse to be thus assimilated, our only alternative is to identify them with real essences ; and then, of course, what is said of either, will hold equally true of particulars. It seems to me nothing more remains to be said on the subject. Unless thus capable of being assimilated, they remain wholly foreign to and outside of his philosophy as the “new way of ideas.” Locke’s distinction of the primary-secondary qualities marks a step in the direction required. Chapter VII will concern itself with another very significant step in the same direction. I refer to his affirmed primacy of the clear and distinct ideas as indepen- dent of and external to meaning and knowledge, and wherein Locke comes to hold that meaning and knowledge are confined to the mere relations of such ideas. In each case, however, whether dealing with our ontological particular in one of its trans- formed guises or in its original form, we encounter in Locke what for present convenience may be termed an anti-relativistic motive. The following passage, typical in its disposition of the primary- secondary qualities, will start us on our way: “Our senses failing us in the discovery of the bulk, texture, and figure of the minute parts of bodies, on which their real constitutions and differences depend, we are fain to make use of their secondary qualities as the characteristical marks and notes whereby to frame ideas of them in our minds, and distinguish them one from another: all which secondary qualities are nothing but — mere powers depend- ing on its primary qualities .” 6 Here we have distinct statements enunciated in respect to our insensible objects and the secondary qualities as depending upon them. First, that primary qualities constitute the insensible object, and secondly, that “the secondary 6. Bk. II, ch. 23, sec. 8. Relativity and Locke 9^ qualities as the characteristical marks and notes” serve “to dis- tinguish” such objects one from another. The first assertion involves the contradiction that the primary qualities, as but a division within simple ideas and therefore sensible, are also to be identified witjj the insensible real constitution of bodies. The second assertion involves the claim that the secondary qualities constitute the sole data of knowledge and are effects rather than products. With Locke, therefore, the conception of particulars natur- ally becomes one thing when made from the standpoint of the secondary qualities as constituting our sole range of ideas, and quite another when made from the standpoint of such data widened in scope as Locke commonly recognizes. Reserving the more specific solution of this particular question for the next chapter, let us turn exclusive attention to Locke’s insensible objects as furnishing our so-called terms. Here we enter upon Locke’s issue between the real and the nominal essence. The real essence of an object is conceived by Locke in three distinct ways, the result of three fundamental motives in his general thinking; namely, the rationalistic, the sensation- alistic, and the term-relation motive. Under the influence of the rationalistic motive, Locke’s conception of the real essence of an object grows out of the demand for an inherent principle in objects, in virtue of which objects attain to a necessary and precise determination of the number and the kind of simple ideas composing them; “the reason whereof is plain: for how can we be sure that this or that quality is in gold when we know not what is or is not gold?” Without knowledge of such a principle, ac- cording to him, we can have no object in the strict sense of the word. Each substance would present sheer diversity, or, if held as determined and of this or that sort, variety of determination in each sort would be the inevitable outcome, and, logically con- sidered, each sort would be equally valid in its different determina- tion. Have we such ideas of substances as the necessity of the case would seem to demand? — ideas from which their qualities and properties “would be deducible and their necessary connection known, as all the properties of a triangle depend on, and, as far as they are discoverable, are deducible from the complex idea of three lines, including a space?” 7 Locke’s negative answer to this ques- 7. Bk. II, ch. 31, sec. 6. 26 University of Cincinnati Studies tion is endless in repetition : “the complex ideas we have of sub- stances are certain collections of simple ideas that have been ob- served or supposed constantly to exist together. But such a com- plex idea cannot be the real essence of any substance This essence, from which all these properties flow in the case of gold), when I inquire into it and search after it, I plainly perceive I cannot discover; the furthest I can go is, only to presume that, it being nothing but body, its real essence or internal constitution, on which these qualities depend, can be nothing but the figure, size and connection of its solid parts ; of neither of which having any distinct perception at all, can I have any idea of its essence, which is the cause that it has that particular shining yellowness, a greater weight than anything I know of the same bulk, and a fitness to have its color changed by the touch of quicksilver. If any one will say that the real essence and internal constitution on which these properties depend, is not the figure, size, and ar- rangement or connection of its solid parts, but something else, I am even further from having any idea of its real essence than I was before.” 8 In either event, we deal with a ‘supposition’ only, and one that Locke regards ‘useless,’ 9 from the standpoint under consideration. Substances consist of the nominal essence only. I shall return to this matter in a later chapter, when considering Locke’s contention that modes, contrary to sub- stances, embody or represent such real essences ; whereby sub- stances (to use Kant’s terminology) distinguish themselves from modes as respectively a posteriori and a priori determinable. From the standpoint of the sensationlistic motive, wherein the nominal essence is identified in scope with the secondary qualities, Locke sets up his contrast between simple ideas as con- sisting of sensible qualities and an unknown cause consisting of insensible parts. It is at this juncture that the primary qualities are compelled to assume their dual role. Primary qualities are made equivalent to that essence or reality in which “our senses fail us,” and yet he is inclined to view them as mere distinctions within simple ideas. They are accordingly made to pass for simple ideas until forced to function as insensible parts, whereupon “the second- ary qualities are nothing but powers depending on primary quali- ties.” But whether narrowly or widely defined, with Locke the 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., sec. 8. Relativity and Locke 27 nominal essence, as the knowable, is always opposed to the real essence as the unknowable ; and in this motive, the real essence is our ontological particular. Hence, if the primary qualities persist in such identification, the same fate would naturally be theirs that Locke, without exception, visits upon the real essences in general. But if real essences remain unknown from either of the above viewpoints, from the viewpoint of the term-relation motive in the form of radical relativity, Locke goes a step further and holds them as non-existent. According to this motive the meaning of the real essence is identified with “that particular constitution which everything has within itself, without any relation to any- thing without it.” Here again he denies the existence of any such essence. He does so in three distinct ways. I quote from the text in order to get the first way stated. “It is evident the internal constitution, wherein their (an object’s) properties de- pend, is unknown to us ; for to go no further than the grossest and most obvious of objects we can imagine amongst them, what is that texture of parts, that real essence, that makes lead and antimony fusible, wood and stones not? What makes lead and iron malleable, antimony and stones not ?” 10 That is to say, ob- jects manifest genuine differences, differences hardly to be ex- plained where we abandon the ultimate character of terms en- tirely and expect mere relations to originate such differences ; yet he concludes, that the supposed essence “whereon this differ- ence in their properties depend, is unknozvn to us.” Objects resolve themselves into nothing but “powers” — is the second and more familiar way in which this term-relation motive acquires formulation by him. I select a passage at random : “The simple ideas that make up our complex ideas of substances, when truly considered, are nothing but powers, however we are apt to take them for positive qualities .... all which ideas are nothing else but so many relations to other substances, and are not really in the gold (to take an instance), considered barely in itself, though they depend on those real and primary qualities of its internal constitution .” 11 His disposition, which is general, (a) to resolve substances into pure relations, ( b ) and yet not to do so out of a need adequately to provide for inherent differences in objects, and then ( c ) to save himself, to affirm an unknown 10. Bk. Ill, ch. 6, sec. 9. 11. Bk. II, ch. 23, sec. 37. 28 University of Cincinnati Studies inner constitution, (of) which in its turn is again denied reality and, further, held to be a more or less “useless supposition,” — is a circle of thought in which he keeps revolving. Where doubt, however, still persists in his mind concerning the reality of an inner constitution or real essence, the next line of reason- ing he falls back upon, according to his own statement, puts the matter conclusively and beyond all doubt : real essences do not even justify the mere supposition of their reality. It involves a statement of the relativistic principle in its so-called radical form. “Put a piece of gold anywhere by itself, separate from the reach and influence of all other bodies, it will immediately lose all its color, weight, etc Water, in which to us fluidity is an essential quality, left to itself, would cease to be fluid We are then quite out of the way when we think that things contain within themselves the qualities that appear to us in them ; and we in vain search for that (inherent) constitution upon which depend those qualities and powers we observe in them.” 12 . Viewed in one light then, substances out of all rela- tions, reduce to zero ; viewed in the other light, “no one can doubt,” he holds, “that this called gold has infinite other properties not contained in any specific complex idea ” 13 we may have of it. The following quotation, however, I take as more truly representative of Locke in this term-relation motive : “The simple qualities which make up the complex ideas being most of them powers in relation to changes which they are apt to make in or receive from other ‘bodies,’ are almost infinite .” 14 From whence the conclusion fol- lows, that if essences exist, such essences, and such meaning as they denote, must be found within the nominal essence ; the nomi- nal essence, in the course of the process, ever widening its scope beyond the secondary qualities as the sole ultimates. And this conclusion is a transcription of Locke’s view, not of mine, in support of which the following chapters will abundantly testify. We speak in general as if ideas (whether simple or complex) acquired this or that specific determination in virtue of this or that specific thing actually existing as one; whereas, according to Locke, it is just the reverse that is true. Specific ideas of different union in varying situations, but of a fixed union in the same situations, furnish the data for the specific determination of 12. Bk. IV, ch. 6, sec. 11. 13. Bk. II, ch. 31, sec. 10. Italics are mine. 14. Bk. Ill, ch. 9, sec. 13. Relativity and Locke 29 our abstract ideas : whence it comes to pass that “every distinct abstract idea is a distinct essence.” Thus water when frozen is held and designated a distinct thing from water in its fluid form, namely ice. Why do we fail to do the same thing in the case of gold when a liquid and when a solid, or with jelly when a liquid and when congealed? Locke’s answer is found in his claim that the idea determines the thing, in which view we have (in Kant’s familiar phrase in its familiar setting) a com- plete Copernican shift in our view of things. Locke’s dogma: “nothing exists but particulars,” thus finds its other extreme con- tention in him : “nothing essential to particulars.” I have already suggested his solution of the matter. It is based upon an empirical relativity and a synthetic process of thought, culminating in what may be termed his “new way of ideas in the course of which process the real essence, as defined within his rationalistic motive, is found transferred to the nominal essence. Hence the reason for terming the nominal essence, an essence. I pause for a moment to consider the term-relation problem on its own merits. If terms threaten to vanish from the standpoint of radical relativity, what hinders a like outcome for them from the standpoint of so-called empirical relativity ? A prompt answer to this question would be: the conserva- tion of matter and energy. In accord with this principle, terms may displace and modify each other, but never can totally ex- tinguish each other. That is, radical relativity in contradiction with this principle would reduce a certain term to zero by a total abstraction of it from the rest of the universe, but it fails to note that this reduction of one of its terms argues some change or other in some of the remaining terms ; and, if we adhere to the principle of conservation in its abstract form, such change may be maintained as affecting all of the remaining terms. We may con- clude, therefore, that empirical relativity stands for the principle of interdependence of terms where terms in some form or other are already assumed to exist. It is, accordingly, a logical and not necessarily a genetic principle. In opposition to any such solution, however, it may, not- withstanding, be argued that the principle of relativity is clearly genetic, since it implies the conclusion that every term is a product of other terms. And the answer to this argument is, that the product-view of terms is not the outcome of an interdependence- 30 University of Cincinnati Studies view, but the outcome of the One and the Many problem as con- joined with that of interdependence. The notion of interdepend- ence denotes, not merely that this, that, or some other change in a term has and finds its cause and explanation in some other specific terms, but, in harmony with the postulate of all science, that all change in all terms is thus caused and is not otherwise to be explained. The recognition of change, however, is relatively in- dependent of the notion of interdependence in so far as interde- pendence involves the cause of a change as well as the idea of change. Change is also prior in logical order. It is a complex mental process indicating a comparison with something more or less permanent. It is at this juncture that the product- view of terms, as involving the One and the Many problem, is evoked. The product-view of terms, then, is precipitated only when the One and the Many problem, which any change in any object compels, becomes superinduced upon that of interdependence. It is in recognition of this distinction in problems that I have been led to distinguish between relativity as empirical and as constructive. But the One and the Many problem is not one confined to re- lativity ; it may and does exist as a real problem in quarters where no tincture of relativity is evinced. The question therefore arises, how the One and the Many problem is to find a solution from the standpoint of relativity as interdependence. To postulate terms with an inherent essence will not help us, for in that case we postulate, as Locke has so abundantly taught, we know not what. And where an object changes, and all objects do and can be made to change to an indefinite degree, the question arises to which group of its changing qualities shall I hold as representing the group of a particular object? It is in description of this situation that Locke has come to employ the phrase that “objects exist in nature with no prefixed bounds.” Now chemistry has its own term-solution in its elementary substances, just as modern physics has its present solution of it in its electrons. As for philosophy (to quote from a recent book), “I do not say that it is impossible to solve the problem of the One and the Many .... but up to the present time no such solution has been given .” 15 Modern realism, with its elusive and protean conception of an object, would surely not offer its solution as the solution of the 15. Russell. First Course in Philosophy, 1913, p. 90. Relativity and Locke 31 problem in hand. I wonder how long a chemist and physicist would pause to receive the instruction thus offered ? Suppose, then, that we accept the verdict of chemistry as pro- visionally valid. Our terms in that case are its elementary sub- stances. Secondly, let us also accept its combining laws of sub- stances. Generalized, the second assumption would mean that we accept the principle of uniformity as involving fundamental limits and peculiarities, differences in its operation as well as a constancy within such limits and peculiarities. Where then shall we place the source of these limits and peculiarities incident to the behavior or interaction of substances ? Suppose we locate them in the substances. In that event we should have the phrase “relation” implying nothing but the presence of some specific change in one or more of the instances brought into an effective union, and be- yond some such abstract meaning, the phrase, to my mind, sig- nifies nothing. So much granted, we may now return and ask : do the ele- mentary substances of chemistry rightly determine our “terms?” The chemist regards them as irreducible and he regards them in the light of constructs, — as specific groups of itemized properties, demanding time and most varied situations or conditions for their complete realization. But to speak of them as at once irreducible and as constructs involves confusion. Such a claim evokes the One and the Many problem as obviously as could be affirmed in any other quarter. I have no intention of laying bare the tech- nique whereby chemistry seeks to establish its claims. All that is necessary to add here is, that without its affirmed principle of conservation (constancy of weight in change) chemistry would not get very far. But constancy of weight is not uniformly its standard for determining the number and variety of its substances ; at times it is not this standard but some declared differences in properties upon which it relies and in dependence upon which it asserts ultimate differences in substances. Such dualism however involves confusion. The confusion is further accentuated when we read chemistry in the light of the electron as ultimate, whereby, as affirmed by many of the leading physicists of today, the electron and not the elementary substances of the chemist is the desired “term.” And thus the issue of the One and the Many problem continues, and for all we know, always will continue. But the ideal isolation of the “term,” the special aim of both these sciences, 32 University of Cincinnati Studies is not of necessity the only ideal. Often we aim to know the effect of a complex term upon other complex terms. Hence all we seem entitled to affirm in any case is, that the principle of uniformity, in so far as it signifies so-called conditions and so- called results, presupposes the existence of terms at every step of its operation. Terms thus come and go ; but with terms in some form or other we begin and with terms in some form or other we end. Whence it follows that relativity is the generally recognized logical principle of interaction and not of necessity a cosmic or genetic principle of outright creation. But any term necessarily presupposed and decided upon is without doubt inherently com- plex . 16 Hence, no term, as the result of conditions, may be affirmed to exist independently of other terms ; for to do so is to go counter to the fundamental principle of all science; namely, that all terms find their sole explanation in their conditioning terms. Nor does empirical relativity stand for any thing else than for this principle of science properly grasped by and incor- porated within metaphysics. Constructive relativity marks the next step in its metaphysical development, — the incorporation of the One. and the Many problem. CHAPTER V THE PART-WHOLE MOTIVE The part-whole motive, in connection with mixed modes and substances, concerns itself with the question, “how such a pre- cise multitude of parts” as manifested in such complex ideas, “comes to make but one idea.” Locke’s solution of the matter I have reserved for a later chapter. Here I intend to consider the simple modes as a phase of this same motive. How do Space, Time, Number, Infinity, Power come to be? They are not simple, and yet he holds “that they are justly reckoned amongst our simple ideas .” 1 Wherein then lie their complexity ; wherein their sim- plicity? To get his position, it is sufficient to consider the modes of Space and Time only. Modes are complex because “they consist of parts, even though their parts are not separable one from 16. Professor Rowland speaks of the atom as being as complex as a piano. 1. Bk. II, ch. 15, sec. 9; ch. 21, sec. 3. Relativity and Locke 33 another.” 2 Their parts are such as will in each case naturally involve and presuppose each other. But of what do the parts consist? His answer is this: “Could the mind, as in Number, come to so small a part of extension or duration as excluded divisibility, that would be, as it were, the indivisible unit or idea, by repetition of which it would make its more enlarged ideas of extension and duration. But since the mind is not able to frame an idea of any space without parts, instead thereof it makes use of the common measures which, by familiar use, in each country, have imprinted themselves in the memory (as inches and feet; seconds, minutes, hours, days, years.) .... Every part of duration is duration too, and every part of extension is extension, both of them capable of addition or division in infinitum. But the least portions of either of them whereof we have clear and distinct ideas may perhaps be fittest to be considered by us as the simple ideas of that kind out of which our complex modes of space, extension and duration are made up, and into which they can again be distinctly re- solved.” 3 We have no absolute unit of space and no absolute unit of time; hence “no two parts of duration can be certainly known to be equal ;” 4 that is, space and time are inherently vari- ables. We try to control the situation, lacking such absolute units, by practical devices of one kind or another, involving regu- lar, periodic motions, “of which seeming equality, however, we have no other measure, but such as the train of our ideas lodged in our memories, with the concurrence of other probable reasons, to persuade us of their equality.” 5 In a word, our notions of time and space are in their own nature variables, and, hence, a con- ditioned product no matter after what model they may be con- ceived or computed. Like ideas in general, they are constructs from which an arbitrary element can never be wholly excluded. But in this absence of an absolute unit of space or time, what gives occasion for their formation? We find it to be the facts of change, motion, and succession, and that of distance and place, as well as existing needs for unity or order. Of change, Locke writes : “Wherever change is observed, the mind must collect a poiver somewhere able to make that change, as well as a possi- 2. Ibid., ch. 15, sec. 10. 3. Ibid., sec. 9. Italics mine. 4. Ibid., sec. 21. 5. Ibid. 34 University of Cincinnati Studies bility in the thing itself to receive it;” 6 and he might have said the same of succession which he holds conditions our notion of time : wherever succession is observed the mind must collect a notion somewhere able to make the fact of succession a pos- sibility. But such facts as change, etc., it may be held, are not only complex and relative, but obviously mediate in character. Hence to base the other concepts upon them would look like a twofold removal from reality conceived in terms of our simple ideas. But such a view of Locke fails in force where simple ideas are con- verted into complex ideas and complex ideas converted into simple ideas, as was shown at large in Chapter III. What then becomes of our so-termed parts, whether a color or sound, or the facts of succession and change? We accept the ideas of color and sound as ultimate under conditions; then succession, change, motion, place, distance, involving aspects equally as unique and irreducible are equally as ultimate. Hence the confusion between perception and conception or the immediate and the mediate, which infects the whole treatment of the simple and complex ideas, is no less evident in respect to his treatment of the simple modes. Take the following passage in illustration : “it seems to me that the con- stant and regular succession of ideas in a waking man, is, as it were, the measure and standard of all other succession ; whereof, if any one either exceeds the pace of our ideas, as where two sounds or pains, etc., take up in their succession the duration of but one idea, or else where any motion or succession is so slow, as that it keeps not pace with the idea in our minds, or the quick- ness in which they take their turns .... there also the sense of a constant continued succession is lost, and we perceive it not.” 7 In that event, he goes on to say, “we must have recourse to other means for determining the fact of a succession” as ex- isting in this or that event, “which we then perceive by the change of distance that it hath moved, yet the motion itself we perceive not.” 8 How then do our simple modes come to be? This question I think I have answered. They are constructs inevitably involved in the comprehension of certain organizable aspects, parts, or 6. Ibid., ch. 21, sec. 4. 7. Ibid., ch. 14, sec. 12. Secs. 9-17. Italics are mine. 8. Ibid., sec. 11. Relativity and Locke 35 phases of experience ; their peculiar kind or quality, in each case, being in a sense dependent upon the more or less unique aspect of the parts or phases involved, “and therefore we are not to wonder that we comprehend them not .... when we would consider them either abstractly in themselves ” 10 or in their supposed ontological character; they work successfully in pre- venting an “incurable confusion ,” 9 and hence are real pragmat- ically. Whether they are real ontologically, Locke gives us no ground for concluding one way or the other . 10 CHAPTER VI locke’s conception of relation A term used so freely in Locke as the term relation, demands definition. What does Locke understand by this term? The question is not to be answered off-hand, nor, after due inquiry, to be answered dogmatically. If we take Hume’s version of it, Locke therein denotes what in itself is a delusion. Knowledge begins with impressions. What, then, is the impression to which I can point as the impression of a relation ? And Hume’s conclu- sion is, as we know, that there are no such existing impressions, and that relations, accordingly, are fictitious, or, at least, an arbi- trary or subjective importation into knowledge. This proclama- tion in Hume has its equally full proclamation in Locke. We read in Locke with endless repetition, that whether we consider objects in relation to objects, or ideas in relation to ideas, at no point can we perceive a visible or necessary connection between 9. Ibid., ch. 15, sec. 5; also secs. 6-10. 10. The following is a typical passage: “Where and when are ques- tions belonging to all finite existences, and are by us always reckoned from some certain epochs marked out to us by the motions observable in it. Without some such fixed parts or periods, the order of things would be lost to our finite understandings in the boundless variable oceans of (abstract or conceptual) duration and expansion; which comprehend in them all finite beings, and in their full extent belong only to the Deity. And therefore we are not to wonder that we comprehend them not, and do so often find our thoughts at a loss, when we would consider them either abstractly in themselves, or as any way attributed to the first in- comprehensible Being. But when applied to any particular finite being, the extension of any body is so much of that infinite space as the bulk of the body takes up; . . . all which distances we measure by precon- ceived ideas of certain lengths of space and duration, as inches, feet, miles; and, in the other, minutes, days, years, etc.” Ibid., sec. 8. 36 University of Cincinnati Studies them, except among one class of ideas only, — modes as d priori determinable . 1 Yet Locke, notwithstanding, devotes chapters to “ideas” of relations ; speaks of a “visible connection” in respect to modes ; and, in respect to our complex ideas of substances, writes that, “when truly considered [such ideas] are only powers . . . . nothing else but so many relations to other sub- stances .” 2 And, then, in his chapter on “powers” we read this very remarkable summary of his whole position. It is so signifi- cant, yet brief, that I quote it in full. “I confess power includes in it some kind of relation, as indeed, which of our ideas, of what kind soever, when attentively considered, does not? For our ideas of extension, duration, and number, do they not all contain in them a secret relation of the parts? Figure and motion have something relative in them much more visibly ; and sensible qualities, what are they but the powers of different bodies, in relation to our perception? And, if considered in the things themselves, do they not depend on the bulk, figure, texture, and motion of the parts? All which include some kind of relation in them. Our idea therefore of power, I think, may well have a place amongst other simple ideas, and be considered as one of them .” 3 That is, all ideas reduce to relations; yet that seems not to hinder them from being ideas; yes, even simple ideas, according to Locke. There is only one place in the treatise, that I can recall, where Locke himself deliberately sets about to define the term. “Re- lation, what?” — is the title of the section . 4 This sounds propi- tious ; let us turn to it. There we read : — “Besides the ideas, whether simple or complex, that the mind has of things, as they are in themselves, there are others it gets from their comparison one with another When the mind so considers one thing, that it does, as it were, bring it to 1. Bk. IV, ch. 3, sec. 28. “How any thought should produce a motion in body is as remote from the nature of our ideas, as how any body should produce any thought [simple ideas] in the mind. That it is so, if experience did not convince us, the consideration of the things themselves would never be able in the least to discover to us. These, and the like, though they have a constant and regular connection [co- existence or sequence] in the ordinary course of things, yet the con- nection being not discoverable in the ideas themselves . . . we can attribute their connection to nothing else but the arbitrary determina- tion of that All-wise Agent.” 2. Bk. II, ch. 24, secs. 6-12 and 37. 3. Ibid., ch. 21, sec. 3. Italics are mine. 4. Ibid., ch. 25, sec. 1. Relativity and Locke 37 and set it by another, and carries its view from one to the other : that is, as the words import, relation and respect And since any idea, whether simple or complex, may be the occasion why the mind thus brings two things together, and, as it were, takes a view of them at once, though still considered as distinct ; therefore any of our ideas may be the foundation of relation . . . . For as I said,” he adds in a following section, “rela- tion is a way of comparing or considering two things together, and giving one or both some appellation (‘denomination’) from that comparison ; and sometimes giving even the relation itself a name ;” 5 as a result of which, Locke mentions, as some among the “innumerable kinds” of relations, causal, spatial, temporal, quantitative, qualitative, blood, legal, civic, moral 0 etc. ; and that objects, in view of their consideration under this or that relation, take on this or that distinction or denomination, “although it be not contained in the real (‘positive or absolute’) existence of things, but is something extraneous or superinduced .” 7 Thus Locke, upon the basis of something real or fancied, concedes to thought the capacity to organize our objects into a world where mutual implication and abstract dependence may come to reveal a whole set of new distinctions (denominations) in our objects; but they are distinctions which exist through thought and for thought only, and this conclusion Locke insists upon over and over again : they are merely -superinductions ; they in no way alter, modify, or transform the things themselves ; thought and facts have no commerce ; “nothing really exists but particulars.” Our first conclusion, then, stands out sharply in answer to the question: “Relations, what?” Relations are the pure products of thought, and result from comparing one object wJth another. But since nothing but particulars, by dogma, are real ; and, further, since particulars, by dogma, in their determination, are wholly independent of thought and its processes, relations in that sense are not only non-real and non-existent, but are a deliberate and specious falsification of reality, — Locke’s reality as ontological particulars. But are they the pure products of thought? If so, why speak of a necessity enjoined upon the mind in the presence of change “to collect a power somewhere” to account for it, if no such 5. Ibid., sec. 1 and 6. 6. Ibid., ch. 26-28. 7. Ibid., ch. 25, sec. 8. 38 University of Cincinnati Studies thing as control of thought exists ? Or where does that necessity arise if wholly irrelevant to particulars? Are causality, space, time, power, and morality something or nothing? These are some of his typical relations ; but what is their status and part in the scheme of things? Then again, if relations are pure products of thought, why designate the “relations” pertaining to modes “visible,” and those pertaining to substances “undiscoverable?” If relations are non-existent and invisible as fact-reality within the sphere of substances, just what is that “visible” relation af- firmed by Locke as existent within the sphere of modes? These questions are exceedingly pertinent to the matter in hand. Let us see whether an answer to them is accessible in Locke. THE VISIBLE RELATIONS OF MODES: WHAT IS THEIR KIND; WHAT THEIR REALITY We may search at large in Book IV, and on almost every page we shall find ourselves confronted by the statement that modes are essentially different from substances: the former, the pure off- spring of reason ; the latter, the product of experience as divorced from reason. Then we shall also habitually encounter there, the uncriticized and unanalyzed assertion that the “relations” of the one are “visible,” and the copiously criticized and analyzed fact that the relations of the other are totally “invisible.” Such is the situation. A passage or two from the text will suffice for our purpose. “Is it true of the ideas of a triangle that its three angles are equal to two right ones? Then it is true also of a triangle, wherever it really exists. Whatever other figure exists, that is not exactly answerable to the idea of a triangle in his mind, is not at all concerned in that proposition ; and therefore he is cer- tain all his knowledge concerning such ideas is real knowledge ; because, intending things no further than they agree with those his ideas, he is sure what he knows concerning those figures, when they have barely an ideal existence in his mind, will hold true of them also when they have real existences in matter .” 8 The passage is a very compact statement of his doctrine of a priori modes, and the doctrine is a fixture in Locke. Its out- come is : reality, in the case of modes, identified with ideality, and 8. Bk. IV, eh. 4, sec. 6. Italics are mine. Relativity and Locke 39 because modes alone fulfil his conceived requirements of knowl- edge proper (that which is not mere opinion), modes become identified by him with reality in its most perfect form. These generalities aside, let us get down to particulars. The doctrine, in the first place, asserts a certain independence in thought to form ideas not directly depending upon nor directly responsible to sense, and, within its own province, having as it were, its own codes, patterns, and standards of reality. Hence (he writes) if moral knowledge is of the type modes, and they, “as other modes, be of our own making, what strange notions will there be of justice and temperance. No confusion at all,” for in the case of morality as in the case of the triangle, as he goes on to say, “we intend things no further than as they are con- formable to our ideas ,” 9 and if things are not conformable, so much the worse for them. It is well to keep in mind this great emphasis which Locke places upon an originating power in thought. But the question con- tested is, Locke’s apparent restriction of it here to modes, and to the extent in which relations with him follow thought, also to note his tendency to restrict them to the status of a pure thought- product. He calls relations in their case visible. Why? Because in their case, he holds that “by the mere contemplation of any of our ideas,” I am able to affirm something of another idea “which is a necessary consequence of its precise complex idea, but not contained in it ,” 10 that is, relations have no reality save with an a priori rationalism, and these relations are referred to by him as “visible”. Along this exploded line of inquiry, how- ever, we are not likely to gather much illumination from Locke on the subject. Let us turn, then, to the other question. Wherein lies that necessity which leads reason to produce its modes, such as they are? And I can think of no other answer than the one to be asserted in connection with the other type of relations ; namely, the necessity resides in certain uniformities, in certain induced needs, and in a certain interdependence or “constant and regular union of parts.” And, if this be true, how is he to defend the claim that in the case of modes objects are purely a product of the mind; and in the case of substances, that objects are products purely unaffected by thought, — Lockers world of ontological par- 9. Ibid., sec. 5 and 9. 10. Bk. IV, ch. 8, sec. 8. 40 University of Cincinnati Studies ticulars? And if Locke himself is far from persisting in such a divorce shall we conclude with him, that, “apart from our abstract ideas, no determination in our substances is possible ?” 11 In other words shall we credit Locke with the justice of knowing his own mind in approving the designation of his philosophy as “the •lew way of ideas?” Further, shall we credit that “new way” with the same Copernican inversion of object and idea that Kant credits himself with originating? Then we must also be ready to admit as Locke’s conclusion Kant’s own specific one : relations are gen- erated in a thought situation and pertain to objects in so far as they are grasped and comprehended by thought. And what an object may be apart from such a thought construct of it, — for that answer we must turn to the destructive and profitless analysis of a Hume, or to Locke himself, where his uncriticized dogmatism throws a confusing shadow upon this brighter vision, fully elaborated by him as we shall come to see . 12 Hence, in his efforts to discover where the unity of objects in general lies, — physical, vegetative, and animal, including that of personal identity, — he does not seek to find a “real” essence, nor an empirical unity (an impression in Hume’s sense), but a thought-constructed and a thought-deter- mined unity, “an identity suited to the idea .” 13 Relations stand for determinations, abstract or concrete, of which the mind feels itself privileged, as well as constrained, to take note in any effort to know its objects and to organize them; beyond which end, we may grant, “the mind need not intend things further,” — beyond the articulated needs of an articulated self for an articulated world. Thus does his rationalistic motive, by stages, become thoroughly fused with his positivistic motive. It reflects itself in the scope accorded by Locke to conduct, to the nominal essence, and to synthesis. 11. Bk. Ill, ch. 6, secs. 1-8. 12. In particular, see chapters 10, 5 and 8 in the order given. 13. Bk. II, ch. 27. Relativity and Locke 41 III ANTI-RELATIVISTIC MOTIVES IN LOCKE CHAPTER VII IDEAS versus KNOWLEDGE and meaning The tendency in Locke to resolve even simple ideas into rela- tions finds a counter motive in him, in which ideas are the self- sufficient, and all relational reality is a mere consequence. Thus Knowledge, in his restricted sense of the word, “is founded in the habitudes and relations of abstract ideas,” 1 and Meaning founded in “the comparing or considering of two things together,” whereby a new and irrelevant type of reality results, commonly designated by him as equivalent to the term signification. I have described it as irrelevant. By that I mean merely that “it is not contained in the real existence of things (the original ideas), but something extraneous and superinduced.” 2 It is to this self- sufficient and originating character of our ideas in their affirmed independence of relations to which I wish now to draw attention. Upon what ground does Locke rest this contention ? “To improve our knowledge,” says Locke, “is, I think, to get and fix in our minds clear, distinct and complete ideas . . . and thus, perhaps, without any other principle, but barely considering those perfect ideas, and by comparing them one with another, find- ing their agreement or disagreement, and their several relations and habitudes, we shall get more true and clear knowledge by the conduct of this one rule than by taking in principles, and thereby putting our minds into the disposal of others.” 3 If our ideas are to be “clear and complete” before they enter into relations, the relations could scarcely be calculated to make them more so. The implication is evident: ideas or terms elaborate themselves, seek to make themselves “clear and complete” outside of the knowl- edge or relation situation. Ideas are one thing, knowledge another, 1. Bk. IV, ch. 12, sec. 7. 2. Bk. II, ch. 25, sec. 8. 3. Bk. IV, ch. 12, sec. 6. Italics are mine. 42 University of Cincinnati Studies and meaning still another. This is very clearly stated in his triple 4 division of perception : the perception of an idea ; the per- ception of “a visible connection” (Knowledge) ; and the percep- tion of signification (Meaning). In no case do we appear to get beyond a “perception” ; and the difference between them is one, not of the Understanding, but of three distinct types of reality thus perceived. Let us get at the very roots of this motive if possible. I think Locke’s apotheosis of the idea issues from the union of his two sharply antithetical convictions, — his positivistic reac- tionary one : nothing exists but particulars ; and his rationalistic one: certain and absolute knowledge involves an d priori deter- mination of parts and their mutual and inevitable implication. In the course of time the former conviction, dogmatic in form, be- comes transformed and substituted by his critical view that simple ideas constitute our ultimates. The simple ideas in turn come to form an alliance with his rationalistic criterion of truth with a center of interest in “clear and distinct” ideas. Nor is there any effort on Locke’s part to consider simple ideas as otherwise than synonymous with “clear and distinct” ideas ; and if either motive gains the ascendancy, it is the rationalistic one. In proof of this statement, consider his general account of what constitutes the unity of our simple ideas ; namely, that simple ideas are to be “considered as one representation or picture in the mind,” a description of them stated in the very opening chapters of Book II and one repeated without modification throughout the Essay. Particulars, simple ideas, clear and distinct ideas, and a priori ideas — these four prescribe the locus of a distinct phase of his thought. Each in turn, or the four in fusion, as the case may be, aspires to what is final and ultimate in reality. None of them can be made more “perfect and complete” ; they are perfect and complete in themselves. Knowledge and meaning in turn become either ir- relevant incidents to ideas, or necessary consequences of them ; whereby knowledge and meaning issue forth as two new and dis- tinct types of reality, which, if any sort of reality at all, must, like ideas in general, be modes of perception. Thus, in his reac- tion against the “abuse of words,” and likewise, in his re-action against authority or general principles and maxims of all kind he sends us for remedy to “clear and distinct” ideas. That he should 4. See Bk. II, ch. 21, sec. 5. Relativity and Locke 43 also have been driven to the same source for knowledge (such as his notion of knowledge is) seems inevitable. Thus we read that ideas are not dependent upon, or the consequence of, the knowl- edge situation, but “knowledge is the consequence of the ideas (be they what they will) that are in our minds . . . that wherever we can suppose such a creature as man is, endowed with such facul- ties, and thereby furnished with such ideas as we have, we con- clude, he must needs when he applies his thoughts to the considera- tion of his ideas, know the truth of certain propositions that will arise from the agreement or disagreement which he will perceive in his own ideas .” 5 The “new way of ideas” does not characterize his doctrine amiss whether we consider this motive in his think- ing or whether we consider his far more approved and developed ones. But we must not fail to note, that as a matter of general theory with him, it is primarily the “way of ideas'’ to knowledge, and not primarily the “way of ideas” to objects ; and yet objects, in their characterization of modes and substances, constitute the central interest with him. Failing, as he does, to make the idea dependent upon its relations, even while making the relations dependent upon, although wholly external to, ideas, the knowl- edge said to result really converts itself into an entirely new thing. Hence to keep knowledge and objects apart, or to make of knowledge an end independent of objects, is an antithesis in Locke that yields nothing but contradiction and confusion till we come to his doctrine of “Sorts” in Book III. Influenced by his mistaken no- tion of knowledge, his aim in Book II is not to consider his simple ideas as essentially determinations of things, but as the elements “out of which is made all our other knowledge .” 6 Or, with clear and distinct ideas the touchstone of reality, simple ideas become the means of appraising knowledge, such as it is : he demands any one to produce a complex idea, which, in so far as it is valid, is “not made out of those simple ideas.” Let us consider the subject of discussion in a slightly different light; and this were best done by its presentation from the stand- point of a proposition or predication. The procedure will guard against the conviction that Locke’s definition of knowledge, as the agreement or disagreement of ideas, is mere words, and likewise, against the opposite conviction that true predication is thereby involved or understood. 5. Bk. IV, ch. 11, sec. 14. Italics are mine. 6. Bk. II, ch. 7, sec. 10. 44 University of Cincinnati Studies There are two sorts of general propositions, says Locke, the truth of which, it is affirmed, we come to know with perfect cer- tainty. “The one is, of those trifling propositions [otherwise called, analytical or explicative propositions] which have a certainty in them, but it is only a verbal certainty, but not instructive. And, secondly, we can know the truth and so may be certain in proposi- tions, which affirm something of another, which is a necessary con- sequence of its precise complex idea, but not contained in it: as that the external angles of all triangles are bigger than either of the opposite internal angles .” 7 Modes are said to yield this type of instructive propositions, which Locke then sets up in radical contrast to all general propositions based on substances, as, for example, that “gold is yellow;” which, if they are certain, are trifling; and if instructive, are uncertain . 8 We have trifling prop- ositions, in respect to substances, “when a part of the complex idea is predicated of the name of the whole,” as “when the genus is predicated of the species, or more comprehensive of less compre- hensive terms. For what information, what knowledge, carries this proposition in it : viz., Lead is a metal, to a man who knows the complex idea the name lead stands for? . . . Indeed to a man that knows the signification of the word metal, and not of the word lead, it is a shorter way to explain the signification of the word lead. . . . But, before a man makes any proposition, he is sup- posed to understand the terms he uses in it [that is, he is sup- posed to make his ideas “clear, distinct, complete, and perfect” before they enter a proposition or enter the knowledge situation] or else he talks like a parrot, and making a noise by imitation and framing certain sounds, which he has learnt of others ; but not as a rational creature, using them for signs of ideas which he has in his mind .” 9 This passage is illuminating and throws Locke’s whole position in full relief. All reality, as thus specified, begins and ends with ideas, and all predication is explication ; and that explication (and, hence, predication) does not realize itself as a fact, save where ideas are already “complete and perfect” before they enter or attempt to enter the knowledge situation. Hence explication and a knowledge situation are one in meaning. Entering the knowl- edge situation then, is not for the purpose of studying objects in 7. Bk. IV, ch. 8, sec. 8. 8. Ibid., sec. 9. 9. Ibid., secs. 4-7. Relativity and Locke 45 their changing value or relations to other objects thus noted, dis- covered, or forced upon them (the proper role of predication, fully recognized in his account of sorts), but that entrance into the knowledge situation, namely, predication is merely for an explan- ation of what already exists in a completed form, or comes thus to exist through some assumed inner development or dynamic motive that ideas have of their own and wholly outside of a knowl- edge situation. Here then in Locke we have an anti-relativistic motive of im- portance, because it is so prominent. The contention enjoins the need to inquire more narrowly into this d priori claim. For, as this claim implies, ideas (objects) are products involving neither relations nor knowledge. Inquiry into this contention constitutes the subject-matter of the next chapter. Here it will suffice to observe that even though knowledge and meaning are taken by him in the light of “extraneous superinductions,” this claim ac- quires force only to the extent in which the thought-process appears transferred within the periphery of the ideas themselves. How this matter is ultimately resolved in his pages, our future chapters are required to help make clear. At this point, how- ever, be it said, that in this self-sufficient character of our ideas, we find in Locke the one extreme anti-relativistic motive, and, such as it is, the direct opposite of his general contention, that ideas or objects are nothing but “powers,” that is, relations. CHAPTER VIII ABSOLUTE KNOWLEDGE : THE PRIMACY OF THE “VISIBLE RELATION” AND OF CONDUCT Locke’s claim that an absolute knowledge exists, bulks forth with large proportions, giving occasion in Book IV for the central problem there set up between knowledge proper and knowledge as mere opinion or judgments of probability. The distinction made rests upon the assertion, as expressed in Kantian terminology, that certain ideas (modes) are a priori deter- minable, and that others (substances) are d posteriori determin- able. Thus Locke writes : “In some of our ideas there are certain relations, habitudes, and connections, so visibly included in the nature of the ideas themselves, that we cannot conceive them 46 University of Cincinnati Studies separable from them by any power whatsoever. And in these only, we are capable of certain and universal knowledge. Thus the idea of a right-lined triangle necessarily carries with it an equality of its angles to two right ones. Nor can we conceive this relation, this connection of these two ideas to be possibly mutable, or to depend on any arbitrary power which of choice made it thus or could make it otherwise j" 1 whereas in respect to “the coherence and continuity of the parts of matter ; the pro- duction of sensation in us of colors and sounds, etc., by impulse and motion ; nay, the original rules and communication of motion being such wherein we can discover no natural connection with any ideas we have, we cannot but ascribe them to the arbitrary will and good pleasure of the Wise Architect.’’ 2 When ideas of the latter type are joined together in a proposition, because their “connection and dependencies, being not discoverable in our ideas, we can have but an experimental knowledge of them.” All such propositions are held as limited in scope, conditional in character, and full of uncertainty and possible error. “Cer- tainty and universality’’ in knowledge only exists where, “ by the mere contemplation of our ideas,” I am able to affirm something of another idea “which is a necessary conse- quence of its precise complex idea, but not contained in it,” 3 although “certainty” without “universality” is attained in the other type of ideas in our judgments of “particulars”: “as when our senses are actually employed about any object, we do know that it exists ; so by our memory, we may be assured that hereto- fore things that affected our senses have existed.” 4 But judgments of “particulars” aside, which do not here concern us, “certainty and universality” in knowledge, if anything more than verbal or trifling, is possible only with that type of ideas where, as stated, by the mere contemplation of an idea, we are able to affirm some- thing of another idea “which is a necessary consequence of its precise complex idea but not contained in it.” Where such a priori determination of an idea is not possible, we do not have knowl- edge in his use of the word, as identified with “certainty and universality,” but mere “opinion” or judgments of probability. Thus considered and thus distinguished, he regards knowledge 1. Bk. IV, ch. 8, sec. 8. Italics are mine. 2. Ibid., ch. 3, sec. 29. 3. Ibid., ch. 8, sec. 8. 4. Ibid., ch. 11, sec. 11. Relativity and Locke 47 possible only in respect to modes, in truth whereof mathematics is cited as an accomplished fact, and “demonstrated morality” a pet faith and conviction of his ; whereas “propositions that are made about substances, if they are certain, are for the most part trifling; and, if they are instructive, are uncertain, and such as we can have no knowledge of their real truth, however much constant ob- servation and analogy may assist our judgment in guessing.” 5 The fact of this distinction in Locke, in its asserted reality and in its nature, is beautifully summarized in the following brief citation. He writes : “The want of ideas of their real essences sends us from our thoughts to the things themselves as they exist. Ex- perience here must teach me what reason cannot.” 6 Rela- tivity will be found to be the outcome of both aspects of this doc- trine ; latent in respect to modes ; explicit in respect to substances. It is necessary to add, however, that substances do not attain their full and proper elaboration from him in Book IV. For that we must turn to the Chapter on Sorts. And the same may be said in regard to modes. Here, substances have their reality despoiled and modes assigned a reality which simulates the rejected innate ideas. Locke distinguishes between them in two respects. 1. Concerning their origin. 2. Concerning their foundation. 1. In regard to origin, modes originate with or in the mind, and present the status of “real” essences; whereas substances have their origin in the simple ideas, and, hence, are of the so- called “nominal” essence only. 2. In regard to their respective foundation, modes are held as grounded in abstract reason, and involve for their certainty, (a) “the mere evidence of the thing itself” or (b) the principle of Inconceivability. As for substances, their foundation is said to be experience as divorced from Reason. FOUNDATION OF MODES Locke gives the matter incidental rather than deliberate atten- tion. He merely speaks of a “visible” connection between certain of our ideas and the lack of such “visible” connection among other ideas ; but he nowhere attempts to articulate what his asser- 5. Ibid., ch. 8, sec. 9. Italics are mine. 6. Ibid., ch. 12, sec. 9. Italics are mine. 48 University of Cincinnati Studies tion appears to involve. Thus he writes in his Third Letter to Stillingfieet : “To perceive the agreement or disagreement of two ideas and not to perceive the agreement or disagreement of two ideas is, I think, a criterion to distinguish what a man is certain of from what he is not certain of. Has your Lordship any other or better criterion to distinguish certainty from uncertainty?’' That mere awareness is the principle here involved, seems obvious. In other cases, where Locke intimates the existence of a rational foundation between ideas, the principle actually involved is the principle of inconceivability . 6 One additional quotation in this connection must also suffice. “We cannot conceive the relation, the connection of these two ideas [speaking of certain parts of a triangle], to be possibly mutable, or to depend on any arbitrary power which of choice made it thus or could make it otherwise.” They stand for reason, as it were, made objective and inherent in the very nature of this class of things. But as Locke was seen to take his simple ideas more or less for granted (logical data, rather than psychological), so with the fact of consciousness as awareness or perception, he merely accepts its deliverance as a fact that is ultimate, and does not, save incidentally, make it a subject of special inquiry. Certain connections, he af- firms, are “visible,” and others are not, and, because “visible,” they are claimed to be underived, unconditioned, and final. They are then forthwith accepted as constituting knowledge that is absolute. But when we inquire into this alleged distinc- tion within connections, we find that the whole matter resolves itself into the claim that in certain objects, as in the case of a triangle, parts are found that mutually and inevitably involve and implicate each other; whereas, in the case of substance, he takes great pains to prove that the direct opposite is found to character- ize its parts ; they are discrete and disparate, without rhyme or rhythm in order and arrangement, and at no time permit the mind, by the mere contemplation of the one, to pass to the other. He fails, however, in this affirmed distinction, to take note of three significant facts: first, that the triangle, like any other object of thought, is a construct ; secondly, that it is relative to the mind, whose principle of self-evidence, although in itself ultimate, involves, in any given situation, the principle of 6. The connection between ideas of the a priori type yields a “cer- tainty every one finds to be so great that he cannot imagine, and therefore not require a greater.” Bk. IV, ch. 2, sec. 1. 1 Relativity and Locke 49 exclusion or inconceivability, and hence is inherently relative and conditioned, whether such conditions remain fixed or changeable ; and thirdly, that it is dependent in this specific instance, upon a derived and fixed conception of space, which conception, if altered, would subject the triangle to the same vicissitudes of change that any other object finds itself exposed to share. Allowing for a dif- ference in degree, I can see no reason why the substance gold, as a construct, deliberately held fixed to the exclusion of change, should any less successfully implicate its parts than a triangle. It may be affirmed of the triangle that its sides implicate the angles in a way that weight and the color of my fixed concept of gold would not implicate each other. But in these two situations, is the difference at bottom any other than the fact that the principle of inconceivability is differently involved? I admit a difference of degree, but not a difference of kind. Nor is Locke himself blind to the contention I here raise. Such a passage as the following, wherein it is declared that the principle of uni- formity is involved in mathematics no less than in knowledge of substances, helps to destroy, by Locke’s own confession, the very essence of the issue propounded. “If the perception that the same ideas will eternally have the same habitudes and relations be not a sufficient ground of knozvledge, there could be no knowledge of general propositions in mathematics ; for no mathematical demon- stration could be other than particular : and when a man has de- monstrated any proposition concerning one triangle and circle his knowledge would not reach beyond that particular diagram.” 7 Concerning his other claim, that of inconceivability, nothing more needs to be said. An object may be absolute for me because I cannot conceive it to be other than it is. But then at what point, pray, is that object in my conception of it, or in my inability to conceive it otherwise, unconditioned? And to concede this point, is to concede the sole point at issue between a relativistic and an absolute view of an object. The absolute point of view does not only require the possibility of an unconditioned and an undeter- mined object, but an unconditioned mode of perception or concep- tion as well. But, after all, Locke’s interest centers itself primarily in the determination of objects such as they are. Let us then, without more ado, turn to his account of modes as having their origin in Reason and not in Experience. Modes, in their proper 7. Bk. IV, cli. l, sec. 9. 50 University of Cincinnati Studies character, as has been stated, shall be taken up for inquiry in future chapters ; and so with substances. Here we are merely to concern ourselves with the a priori element that modes are made to involve. origin of d priori modes Relevant statements on modes, scattered throughout the Essay in endless repetition, assume the following forms: (a) that modes are of a real essence; ( b ) that they are ideas of Reason and not of Experience ; (c) “that wherever we can suppose such a creature as man is, endowed with such faculties, and thereby furnished with such ideas as we have,” the same knowledge must follow; ( d ) “for the same ideas have immutably the same rela- tions and habitudes,” and (e) knowledge is a consequence of ideas, and not the reverse; hence (/) these ideas are primary, and not the result of knowledge. And lastly, ( g ) modes are of the Mind’s own making, ( h ) made very arbitrarily. Consider these statements, and the conclusions to be drawn are, either (1 ) that the mind out of nothing, under necessity or at pleasure, creates some- thing; or (2) that it has native or original ideas of its own, and hence creates nothing but merely unfolds what is latent; or (3) that it, within a given experience, has the faculty to create some- thing new, as conditioned within and conditioned without. Which conclusion shall we accept? The first conclusion is absurd; the second is in contradiction with his denial of innate ideas ; and the third is impossible in the light of the antithesis he here sets up be- tween Reason and Experience. To conclude, then, as we did in a previous chapter, that the Mind, according to Locke, has an origin- ating activity seems to invite least violence to all the facts of the case. This is our positive conclusion. It is only when we ask of Locke, as we must in Book IV, what an originating capacity may achieve where it has no data, that this positive conclusion in Locke is apt to be overlooked. Modes and abstract ideas are the mind’s products, it is there affirmed. But if so, where does the mind get its data? In Book IV, nothing else remains to draw upon for such data than Reason as opposed to Experience. But where is Reason, as opposed to Experience, to get that data? From innate ideas? Locke would hardly admit this. But what other alterna- tive lies open to us for choice? In the face of this obvious pre- Relativity and Locke 51 dicament, however, let us not lose sight of Locke’s conception of the mind as active and as law giving. SUBSTANCES AS DEPENDENT UPON EXPERIENCE DIVORCED FROM REASON I turn from a priori modes to consider a posieriori substances. With substances, Locke ceases to be merely dogmatic. Knowledge, as we are told, depends upon the fulfilment of two conditions. First, that we, “by the mere consequence of any idea,” can affirm another “which is a necessary consequence of its precise complex idea, but not contained in it .” 8 Or secondly, that “connections and dependencies” must be “visible,” and that where “connections and dependencies are not thus discoverable in our ideas, we can have but an experimental knowledge of them.” It presupposes that our account of knowledge, in respect to modes, was positive in its outcome, whereas the account proved negative, save for the one positive conclusion we drew above in respect to his view of the mind as originating and form-giving. These convic- tions, however, furnish the setting of his inquiries concerning sub- stances in Book IV. I begin my account with a passage from the text: “Had we such ideas of substance as to know what real constitutions produce these sensible qualities we find in them, and how these qualities flowed from thence, we could, by the specific ideas of their real essence in our minds, more certainly find out their properties and discover what qualities they had or had not, than we can now by our senses : and to know the properties of gold, it would be no more necessary that gold should exist and that we should make experiments upon it, than it is necessary for the knowing of the properties of a triangle, that a triangle should exist in any matter, the idea in our minds would serve for one as well as the other. But we are so far from being admitted into the secrets of nature, that we scarce so much as ever approach the entrance towards them.” How monotonous this strain is in Locke, the projection of the a priori ideal in respect to substances and its rejection, must be perfectly familiar. Yet substances as of this or that collection of simple ideas do exist. How then do we come by them? 8. Bk. IV, ch. 6, sec. 11. 52 University of Cincinnati Studies (a) THE DISPARATE AND DISCRETE CHARACTER OF SUBSTANCES “The simple ideas whereof our complex ideas of substances are made up are such as carry with them, in their own nature, no visible necessary connection or inconsistency with any other simple ideas, whose co-existence with them we would inform ourselves about. . . . Besides our ignorance of the primary qualities on which depend all their secondary qualities, there is yet another and more incurable part of ignorance, . . . and that is, that there is no discoverable connection between any secondary quality and those primary qualities which it depends on. . . . We are so far from knowing what figure, size, or motion of parts produces a yellow color, a sweet taste, or a sharp sound, that we cannot by any means conceive how any size, figure, or motion of any par- ticles, can possibly produce in us the ideas of any color, taste or sound whatsoever ; there is no conceivable connection between the one and the other. . . . How any thought should produce a motion in body is as remote from the nature of our ideas, as how any body should produce any thought in the mind. ... In vain, therefore, shall we endeavor to discover by our ideas (the only true way of certain and universal knowledge) what other ideas are to be found constantly joined with that of our complex idea of any substance. . . . So, that, let our complex idea of any species of substance be what it will, we can hardly, from the simple ideas contained in it, evidently determine the necessary co-existence of any other quality whatsoever. Our knowledge in all these inquiries reaches very little further than our experience. . . . That it is so, if experience did not convince us, the consideration of the things themselves would never be able in the least to discover to us .” 9 But with ideas of substances lacking an inherent constitution, and also lacking “discoverable connections” between them or their parts, his con- clusion is that substances are all alike arbitrary and inadequate forms of reality. (&) IDEAS OF SUBSTANCES ARBITRARY PRODUCTS AND INADEQUATE “Distinct ideas of the several sorts of bodies that fall under the examination of our senses perhaps we may have : but adequate ideas, I suspect, we have not of any one amongst them. . . . Hence no science of bodies .” 10 They are inadequate, no matter what 9. Bk. IV, ch. 3. 10. Ibid., sec 26. Relativity and Locke 53 specific determination we fix upon, because we do not know what possible relations an object may assume, and hence what quali- ties properly belong to it and what do not. “No one who hath considered the properties of bodies in general, or of gold in partic- ular, can doubt that this called gold has infinite other properties not contained in that complex idea ” 11 that we, in any specific case, may decide upon. “So that if we make our complex idea of gold a body yellow, fusible, ductile, weighty and fixed, we shall be at the same uncertainty concerning solubility in aqua regia, and for this reason : since we can never, from the consideration of the ideas themselves, with certainty affirm or deny of a body whose complex idea is made up of yellow, very weighty, etc., that it is soluble in aqua regia ; and so on of the rest of its qualities .” 12 The disparate and discrete character, then, of our ideas, the indefinite and inexhaustible number of them that may, upon equal ground, come to form a part of any specific determination of sub- stances, and the flux thus of necessity projected into our sub- stances, and his assumption that such is not the case with modes, constitute the ground upon which Locke forces the sharp antithesis between modes and substances, or “abstract ideas and their rela- tions” and “matter-of-fact.” Hence, instead of instructive a priori judgments being possible in respect to substances, he forces their antithesis to modes to a point that makes substances seem in Book IV as little else than a highly capricious fluctuation of parts. If only “we had such ideas of substances as to know what real con- stitution [in each] produces those sensible qualities we find in them, ” 13 then all would be well — so Locke keeps repeating. But substances have no such central core of reality, and, then, he concludes, that they have no adequacy, no fixity, no truth, and no reality at all. Nor can the substitution of judgments of probability for this affirmed lack of proper knowledge alter or improve the situation any. If substances are of a pure, unregu- lated flux in the one case, they continue pure, unregulated flux in the other. And the question is, not how would we, but how does Locke himself handle this situation? This is the subject proper of Book III and of a later chapter. Suppose we grant Locke that no abstract consideration of an 11. Bk. II, ch. 31, sec. 10. 12. Bk. IV, ch. 6, sec. 9. 13. Ibid., sec. 10. 54 University of Cincinnati Studies object can yield an adequate one, — for such is here the mode of his approach and such the conclusion here drawn. Does it neces- sarily follow that an abstract consideration and determination of an object is the only proper one, or that adequacy of an object implies a theoretical exhaustiveness of its infinite possible rela- tions? We get two distinct resolutions of this matter from Locke in Book IV, one that is sceptical in its outcome and the other that is constructive and relativistic. I shall consider the sceptical issue first. THE PRIMACY OF CONDUCT He writes : “The way of getting and improving our knowl- edge in substances only by experience and history, which is all that the weakness of our faculties . . . can attain to, makes me suspect that natural philosophy is not capable of being made a science . . . from whence it is obvious to conclude . . . that morality is the proper science and business of mankind in gen- eral .” 14 Namely, in the defeat of theory or science turn to con- duct for truth and reality. This demands a word. In this deference, or better, abdication of knowledge in the interest of conduct, we have a lurking fallacy. When we say knowledge must subordinate itself to conduct, the assertion has a certain pertinency when it appears as a needful corrective of a one-sided, opposite theoretical tendency ; but beyond that it has no more force than to say that conduct must subordinate itself to knowledge. If the’ principle of relativity, erroneously construed or applied, compasses the bankruptcy of knowledge in theory, we cannot thereafter logically ignore this defeat of knowledge and make it do service in a sphere, supposedly different, as if knowl- edge had not met defeat and as if conduct itself were not dis- rupted in the general disruption of other objects. Knowledge does not cease to be a failure, and as a failure it is totally useless when made to minister to conduct, even when granted that con- duct itself remains undisrupted (as if the principle of relativity did not apply to conduct as to all objects in general). Besides, to speak of conduct in general is to speak of an abstraction as mythological as the abstraction involved in the notion “matter.” For conduct, as it exists, exists in “sorts,” as Locke would say, and how to get the “sorts” of conduct defined, apart from 14. Ibid., ch. 12, secs. 10-11. Relativity and Locke 55 knowledge, or apart from the abstract idea, as he would state it, which constitutes the essence of each sort, if knowledge has previously been declared a failure? It is not logical to blow hot and cold with the same principle. Knowledge, if not the pretended failure, may truly subserve conduct ; but con- duct no less truly subserves knowledge, when it is conduct, rather than some other object, that demands a determination, and without a specific determination (again to speak in Locke’s own language) “particular beings, considered barely in themselves, may at once be everything or nothing .” 15 Yet conduct would seem to set itself up as an Absolute. Then we might further ask : does conduct belong to the class substances or mixed modes? To one of them or to simple ideas it must belong, if reality has thus been exhaustively outlined by him. And so, instead of having conduct in reserve as a place of safe retreat, when the world, otherwise reared by knowledge, collapses, he really has nothing in reserve but a bare, empty abstraction, just as bare and empty as the notion “matter,” for example. Such, to my mind, is the fallacy contained in the conduct-reference. The truth contained in it is this : that the ends, aims and values of life, as revealed in conduct, cannot be prevented from reflecting themselves in the form, char- acter, and structure of things as of this or that sort ; that the reality that thus reflects itself in the various sorts is no less cog- nitive in quality than sense-perceptions ; and, according to the prin- ciple of relativity, may be either more or less real than sense- perceptions, as being a thing, in large measure, as dependent upon other things as other things in turn are dependent upon it. I shall return to this particular issue in subsequent chapters. This general conclusion is confirmed in Locke’s constructive solution of the above-mentioned theoretical defeat. The note is a recurrent one and a brief citation will suffice for a statement of the position. “Our faculties being suited, not to the full extent of being, nor to a perfect, clear, comprehensive knowledge of things free from all doubt and scruple ; but to the preservation of us, in whom they are, and accommodated to the use of life, they serve to our purpose well enough, if they will but give us certain notice of those things which are convenient or inconvenient to us. . . . So that this evidence is as great as we can desire, being as certain to us as our pleasure or pain, i. e., happiness or misery; beyond 15. Bk. Ill, ch. 6, sec. 5. 56 University of Cincinnati Studies which we have no concernment either of knowing or being .” 10 In other words, instead ,of defining an object’s truth, reality, and adequacy or inadequacy in abstraction and in its isolation, he seeks here to define them in terms of a purpose, a limit, or a condition which our ‘needs’ impose. But even in this shift in his position, it may be held, he has not gained anything, except to extend his principle of relativity to include a new source of change or determination: a further determination of objects in reference to our needs, constitution, or ends. Instead of less flux, then, we ought really to expect more. And, if not, may we ask why? It does not introduce more flux, because he assumes a certain fixity in such needs, constitution, or ends. But what right has he to assume a fixity in these objects and fail to assume a higher degree of fixity than he does in objects in general? And suppose we answer by reference to experience, that a fixity is here recognized which is not recognized in respect to objects in general; that my own needs, constitution, and ends fluctuate less than such an object as a stone, let us say; and then we may ask further, is this true? And if not true, we have gained one vast admission in respect to substances : the collections of ideas, constituting this or that sub- stance, do not share equally in their degree of stability or flux ; and this Locke himself tacitly admits in his account of primary and secondary ideas and explicitly admits or presents in his empirical and constructive relativity. Moreover, Locke does not deny that things “proceed regularly ” 17 and “act by a law set them .” 18 He merely insists upon the fact, that, even if they act by a law set them, it is “a law that we know not .” 19 It is thus the sensu- ous unknowability and not the non-existence of a law or order or union of parts that Locke insists upon. The reality, truth, adequacy, and certainty of simple ideas in general, he defines in the same way. They are real, etc., for the reason, as he repeats over and over again, “that they represent to us things under those appearances which they are fitted to pro- duce in us, whereby we are enabled to distinguish the sorts of par- ticular substances, to discern the state they are in, and so to take them for our necessities, and apply them to our uses .” 20 Objects 16. Bk. IV, ch. 11, sec. 8; ch. 12, sec. 11; Bk. II, ch. 23, secs. 12-13. 17. Bk. IV, ch. 3, sec. 29. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., ch. 4, sec. 4. Relativity and Locke 57 are thus regarded as partaking of certainty and adequacy when we hold them fixed in a certain definite and restricted context ; namely, hold them fixed to their specific conditions. The a priori element, which he felt must exist in order to secure limits and bounds and fixity to things, is now found, by this other view of his, to depend upon certain uniformities in the connection of facts, al- though such facts are disparate in character and their interde- pendence an appearance only, and to depend upon needs, interests, or aims. We are now ready to turn to Locke’s doctrines in their most perfect form as deliberately elaborated by him. 58 University of Cincinnati Studies IV CONSTRUCTIVE RELATIVITY IN LOCKE CHAPTER IX DOCTRINE OF SORTS: MIXED MODES AND SUBSTANCES By the term “sorts,” Locke understands things as of this or that specific determination or kind, as horse, stone, charity, mur- der. It is a generic term of which substances, modes, and rela- tions are species. Hence to ask how we come by “sorts” is to ask how we come by substances, modes, and relations. Substances and modes are to be considered in this chapter and relations in the chapter following. In the first place, Locke makes both substances and modes, de- pendent upon simple ideas or the so-called nominal essence. “The supposition of a real essence that cannot be known,” such is his position, “is so wholly useless and unserviceable to any part of our knowledge, that that alone were sufficient to make us lay it by, and content ourselves with such essences of the sorts or species of things [namely, the nominal] as come within the reach of our knowledge .” 1 Next, substances and modes are held to agree in the fact “that sorts, as distinguished and denominated by us, neither are nor can be anything but those precise abstract ideas we have in our minds .” 2 Hence his conclusion in respect to both : “Each distinct abstract idea is a distinct essence Thus a circle is as es- sentially different from an oval as a sheep from a goat; and rain is as essentially different from snow as water from earth Thus any two abstract ideas, that in any part vary from another with two distinct names annexed to them, constitute two distinct sorts, as essentially different as any two of the most remote or opposite in the world .” 3 But modes and substances are found to differ from each 1. Bk. Ill, ch. 3, sec. 17. 2. Ibid., sec. 13. 3. Ibid., sec. 14. Relativity and Locke 59 other as well as to agree. Let me enumerate these differences be- fore turning to modes and substances for separate and enlarged discussion. Modes, in theory, are made dependent (a) solely upon simple ideas and ( b ) upon “the free choice of the mind,” giving a union or connection to a certain number of these ideas. Substances, on the other hand, are not solely dependent upon simple ideas, but upon their constant and inseparable union in Nature as well. Sub- stances “carry with them the supposition of some real being, from which its complex ideas are taken and to which they are conform- able. But, in its complex ideas of mixed modes, the mind takes a liberty not to follow the existence of things exactly .” 4 The two are said to be very different in another essential : modes deal with intangible as well as with tangible elements; whereas substances are thought to deal with the tangible only. “And hence I think it is that these mixed modes are called notions, as if they had their original and constant existence more in the thought of men, than in the reality of things ; and to form such ideas, it sufficed that the mind puts the parts of them together, and that they were consistent in the understanding, without considering whether they had any real being ; though I do not deny but several of them might be taken from observation, and the existence of several simple ideas so combined .” 5 From this follows the more peculiar dependence of modes upon words, as “the sensible signs of his ideas who uses them .” 6 I. MIXED MODES By mixed modes, then, Locke understands such “complex ideas as we mark by the names obligation, drunkenness, a lie, etc. . . . being fleeting and transient combinations of simple ideas, which have but a short existence anywhere but in the minds of men .” 7 Inherently many, how do they come by their unity? “Every mixed mode, consisting of many distinct simple ideas, it seems reasonable to inquire, ‘whence it has its unity, and how such a precise multitude comes to make but one idea,’ since that combina- tion does not always exist together in nature .” 8 4. Ibid., ch. 5, sec. 3. 5. Bk. II, ch. 22, sec. 2. 6. Bk. Ill, ch. 2, sec. 2. 7. Bk. II, ch. 22, secs. 1 and 8. 8. Bk. II, ch. 22, sec. 4. 60 University of Cincinnati Studies I shall consider mixed modes under three heads : 1. Their independence of Nature and dependence upon the mind and its simple ideas. 2. Their dependence upon Nature. 3. Every distinct abstract idea is a distinct essence or sort. Division three constitutes a far more vital issue in connection with substances. Special consideration of this matter, then, were best reserved for such place. 1. THEIR INDEPENDENCE OF NATURE AND DEPENDENCE UPON TPIE MIND AND ITS SIMPLE IDEAS “Nobody can doubt,” he writes “that these ideas of mixed modes are made by a voluntary collection of ideas, put together in the mind, independent from any original patterns in nature. . . . For what greater connection in nature has the idea of a man than the idea of a sheep with killing, that this is made a particular species of action, signified by the word murder, and the other not. . . . It is evident then, that the mind by its free choice gives a connection to a certain number of ideas, which in nature have no more union with one another than others that it leaves out ; . . whereof the intranslatable words of divers languages are a proof, which could not have happened, if these species were the steady workmanship of nature, and not collections made by the mind.” Furthermore, mixed modes “do often unite into one abstract idea things that, in their nature, have no coherence ; and so under one term bundle together a great variety of compounded and decom- pounded ideas . . . often involving actions that required time to their performance, and so could never all exist together. . . . Thus the name of procession, what a great mixture of independent ideas of persons, habits, tapers, orders, motions, sound, does it contain in that complex one, which the mind of man has arbitrarily put together.” Or again, “when we speak of justice or ingratitude, we frame to ourselves.no imagination of anything existing, which we would conceive ; but our thoughts terminate in the abstract ideas of those virtues, and look not further, as they do when we speak of a horse or iron, whose specific ideas we consider, not as barely in the mind, but as in things themselves, which afford the original patterns of those ideas. For the originals of mixed modes then, we look no further than the mind, which also shows Relativity and Locke 61 them to be the workmanship of the Understanding .” 9 Turn where we will in his account of mixed modes, this line of argument will be found continually repeated. That this description of modes contains a very large element of truth cannot be denied. The mind certainly has the capacity of holding parts together and keeping them fixed and distinct so that “any two abstract ideas, that in any part vary one from another . . . constitute two distinct sorts, as essentially different as any two of the most remote and opposite in the world .” 10 Furthermore, we cannot deny the radical character of the Many in such ideas as those cited; namely, the notion of a procession. Nor can we deny the arbitrary character in their determination, so much insisted upon by him ; not any more than we can deny the presence of an intangible element : “what the word murder or sacrilege, etc., signifies can never be known from things them- selves : there be many of the parts of those complex ideas which are not visible in the action itself ; the intention of the mind or the relation of holy things, which make a part of murder or sacrilege, have no necessary connection with the outward and visible action of him that commits either .” 11 What we may deny, is the range he ascribes to “the mind in its liberty not to follow the existence of things exactly,” as if it were in no sense dependent at all. The corrective of this view exists in his pages. This will constitute the subject-matter of our next division. 2. DEPENDENCE UPON NATURE I stated above that, in theory, Locke distinguishes modes from substances by the quality that substances are dependent upon Nature for their pattern, whereas modes are not thus dependent ; but dependent solely upon simple ideas and upon “the free choice of the mind, pursuing its own ends .” 12 But instead of the affirmed dependence upon simple ideas only, we find modes dependent at least in part, “upon experience and observation of things them- selves; . . . for their immediate ingredients are also complex ideas, although all our complex ideas are ultimately resolvable into simple ideas .” 13 Or again, “action being the great business 9. See Bk. II, ch. 22; Bk. Ill, ch. 5. 10. Bk. Ill, ch. 3, sec. 14. 11. Ibid., ch. 9, sec. 7. 12. Ibid., ch. 5, sec. 6. 13. Bk. II, ch. 22, sec. 9. Italics are mine. G2 University of Cincinnati Studies of mankind, and the whole matter about which laws are con- versant, it is no wonder [that mixed modes should be made so largely out of them]. . . . Nor could any communication be well had amongst men without such complex ideas, with names to them : and therefore men have settled names, and supposed ideas in their minds, of modes of action distinguishable by their causes, means, objects, instruments, time, place, and other cir- cumstances, and also of their powers fitted for those actions” 14 — which amounts to an admission that modes are shaped and gener- ated in concrete and complex situations. Locke’s notion of “the mind, pursuing its own ends,” becomes particularized in a similar manner. The abstract end of an abstract mind makes way in his essay to ends generated “in the ordinary occurrence of af- fairs. So that, if we join to the idea of killing the idea of father or mother, and so make a distinct species from killing a man’s son or neighbor, it is because of the different heinousness of the crime, and distinct punishment due to the murdering of a man’s father or mother, different from what ought to be in- flicted on the murder of a son or neighbor ; . . . . which plainly shows, whereof the intranslatable words of divers lan- guages are a proof, that those of one country, by their customs and manners of life, have found occasion to make several com- plex ideas, and given names to them which others never col- lected into ’specific ideas.” 15 When we consider modes in this so-called dependence upon nature, it becomes increasingly diffi- cult to differentiate them from substances and relations. It is significant that in Book III relations and modes are dealt with as if they presented no differences. Without needlessly dragging out this account, we may formu- late the following conclusions as emerging from his description of modes: (1) They are inherently many and get their unity in an abstract idea; (2) that ends, as manifesting themselves in com- plex situations, co-operate in determining their origin and specific character; (3) that value and meaning enter them as inseparable elements and ingredients; (4) they are constructs and not copies; and (5) they are inherently relative. 14. Ibid., sec. 10. 15. Ibid., secs. 7-8. Relativity and Locke 63 II. SUBSTANCES If it be true, as I think we have every reason to maintain, that Locke is interested primarily in things, and interested in their ground, foundation, origin, or explanation only so far as they will serve to account for “those notions of things we have,” then his account of substances (not to speak of modes and rela- tions) ought to be the real test of his theories. In regard to the origin and foundation of modes, whether simple or mixed, Locke’s issue is fairly clear and definite throughout the essay, whether or not we agree with his account “whereby the understanding comes by them.” In regard to substances, the issue is not fully and frankly met until we come to Book III ; but there the issue, at length, is clearly stated : “Why do we say this is a horse, and that a mule ; this an animal, that an herb ? How comes any particular thing to be of this or that sort ?” 16 His answer is, that substances are constructs and not copies ; achievements attained through trials, experimentation, and comparisons, in a world where resemblances among things, as well as “regular and constant union” among ideas, is accepted by him as a fact, and our sole knowable reality that designated by him as nominal. How can our objects be copies, when objects reveal different qualities and properties in different situations, and where “there is not so complete and perfect a part that we know of Nature, which does not owe the being it has, and the excellencies of it, to its neighbors : and that we must not confine our thoughts within the surface of any body, but look a great deal further, to comprehend perfectly those qualities that are in it .” 17 Hence his conclusion that our ideas or conceptions not “only depend upon the mind of man variously collecting” or elaborating them, but, even at their best, are “seldom adequate to the internal nature of the things they are taken from .” 18 The mind, “in making its complex ideas of substances, never puts any together that do not really or are not supposed to co-exist ; and so it truly borrows that union from nature. . . . Nobody joins the voice of a sheep with the shape of a horse, nor the color of lead with the weight and fixedness of gold, to be the complex ideas of any real substances ; unless he has a mind to fill his head 16. Bk. Ill, ch. 6, sec. 7. 17. Bk. IV, ch. 6, secs. 11-12; Bk. Ill, ch. 6, sec. 32- 18. Bk. Ill, ch. 6, sec. 37. (5-i University of Cincinnati Studies with chimeras .” 19 But if this be true, as already intimated, sub- stances are not only dependent upon simple ideas but upon “their constant and inseparable union in nature as well.” But we may ask again, as we did above: what extension in the meaning of the nominal essence, or the simple idea doctrine, is herein presumed? The simple ideas of taste, color, etc., cannot be our sole type of a real perception, if sequence or co-existence is also a type of reality, and yet no mere taste, color, etc. For to deny this fact a reality of some kind, is to deny the reality of every complex idea in so far as it is complex. In the meantime, the reality of a distinction between a horse and a mule, an animal and an herb persists, as well as his question : how do particular things come to be of this or that sort? Now in Book III, the complex idea never has its reality questioned, save in the one point : “Does it truly borrow its union from nature?” If it does, it may grow ever more and more complex, and, in so doing, make itself ever more perfect and adequate. The sole issue then, that he here con- siders is the question whether our sort-view of an object does or does not limit and define its whole “measure and boundary.” That the sort-view exhausts our total view of objects, is his firm contention — a contention directly at variance with his cruder dogmatism that fact and meaning stand in absolute divorce. What, then, is this special doctrine of substances to which I have -so frequently reverted and so frequently extolled in Locke? I shall present it as fully in Locke’s own language as is possible. The doctrine involves the primacy of the idea in the determination of objects, but it does so in a way that is new in the sphere of metaphysics. He writes to the following effect: “In the substance of gold, one man satisfies himself with color and weight, yet another thinks solubility in aqua regia as necessary to be joined with that color in his idea of gold, as any one does its fusibility, solubility in aqua regia being a quality as constantly joined with its color and weight as fusibility or any other [of its infinite possible number.] Who of all these has established the right signification of the word, gold? or who shall be judge to deter- mine ? Each has his standard in nature, which he appeals to, and with reason thinks he has the same right to put into his complex idea signified by the word gold, those qualities, which, upon trial, he has found united ; as another who has not so well examined has 19. Bk. Ill, cli. 6, secs. 28-29. Relativity and Locke 65 to leave them out ; or a third who has made other trials, has to put in others. . . . From hence it will unavoidably follow that the complex ideas of substances [and the same fact holds with modes] will be very various, and so the signification of thosa names very uncertain .” 20 Or again : “If we will examine it, we shall not find the nominal essence of any one species of sub- stances in all men the same : no, not of that which of all others we are the most intimately acquainted with. Nor could it possibly be, that the abstract idea, to which the name man is given, should be different in several men, if it were of nature’s making” 21 ; that is, if it were a copy, and not a construct. “Men generally con- tent themselves with some few sensible obvious qualities ; and often, if not always, leave out others as material and as firmly united as those that they take .” 22 It only remained necessary for him to have correlated with substances, at this point, his modes, relations, and his “practical” motive or the Self, to have given his philosophy all the unity we could have desired of it; for by the incorporation of the Self, as is done in his scattered and un- systematic manner, our notion of “nature” also would have been widened, with this additional standard of reference. His empha- sis upon diversity in our conceptions of substances, constitutes a line of argument whereby he seeks to establish that substances are not copies, but constructs ; “not of nature’s making, but of man’s.” But by the side of this view in Locke, wherein our notion of objects is presented in the light of constructs, the complex ideas thereby formed growing fuller and richer in content, Locke pre- sents another view of abstract or complex ideas, wherein he affirms that “the more general our ideas are, the more incomplete and partial they are.” As the student of Locke commonly goes astray here, the matter needs to be cleared up before proceeding with the above line of thought. The following passage from Locke, though quoted at length, demands no apology: “If the simple ideas that make the nominal essence of the lowest species or first sorting of individuals, depends upon the mind of man variously collecting them, it is much more evident that they do so in the more comprehensive classes, which, by the masters of logic, are called genera. . . . This is done by leaving out those 20. Ibid. ch. 9, sec. 13. 21. Ibid., ch. 6, sec. 26. 22. Ibid.. sec. 29. 66 University of Cincinnati Studies qualities -which are peculiar to each sort and retaining a complex idea made up of those that are common to them all ; . . . whereby it is plain that men follow not exactly the patterns set them by nature when they make their general ideas of substances, since there is no body to be found which has barely malleableness and fusibility in it [as in the case of the abstract ‘general idea’ metal] without other qualities as inseparable as those. But men, in making their general ideas, seeking more the convenience of language and quick dispatch by short comprehensive signs, than the true and precise nature of things as they exist, have, in the framing their abstract (general) ideas, chiefly pursued that end, which was to be furnished with a store of general and variously comprehensive names. So that in this whole business of genera and species, the genus, or more comprehensive, is but a partial conception of what is in the species, and the species but a partial idea of what is to be found in each individual. ... If we would rightly consider what is done in all these genera and species, or sorts, we should find that there is no new thing made, but only more or less comprehensive signs. ... In all which we may observe that the more general term is always the name of a less complex idea, and that each genus is but a partial conception of the species comprehended under it. So that if these abstract general ideas be thought to be complete,” it can only be in respect to the ends of language which called them forth, “and not in respect of any- thing existing, as made by nature .” 23 It is hard to find a more suggestive passage in Locke. First, we have here his distinction between particular abstract ideas and general abstract ideas, or so- termed constructs and the commonly termed abstract ideas ; the former involving the mind in its “compounding” character, the latter involving it in its more narrowly “abstracting” character. Secondly, within this difference, it is further to be noted that they are alike in being but partial and incomplete determinations of things ; the general abstract idea is a “partial conception of what is in the species, and the 'species but a partial idea of what is to be found in each individual.” Thirdly, that the general abstract idea, “if thought to be complete” can only be so in respect to a certain end, just as was found to be the case with modes, and as is found to be the case with the particular abstract idea : “men generally content themselves with some few sensible obvious 23. Ibid., sec. 32. Relativity and Locke 67 qualities . . . which serve well enough for gross and confused conceptions, and inaccurate ways of talking and thinking; . . . most men wanting either time, inclination, or industry enough” to determine their ideas more fully, or “even to some tolerable de- gree, contenting themselves with some few obvious and outward appearances of things, thereby readily to distinguish and sort them for the common affairs of life .” 24 So that, if maintained, that Locke’s notion of sorts is an abstraction, rather may the contrary statement be offered as a rejoinder: his general abstract ideas as “partial conceptions,” which proceed in their formation “by leaving out qualities,” are rather of the nature of constructs even though more obviously “inadequate to the internal nature of the things they are taken from.” As the conclusion here drawn will be confirmed by what fol- lows, I proceed with my account, presenting the matter in Locke’s own language whenever possible. “This, then, in -short, is the case,” he writes. “Nature makes many particular things which do agree one with another in many sensible qualities, and probably too in their internal frame and constitution ; but it is not this real essence that distinguishes them into species ; it is men, who, taking occasion from the qualities they find united in them, and wherein they observe often several individuals to agree, range them into sorts ; under which individuals, according to their conformity to this or that abstract idea, come to be ranked as under ensigns ; so that this is a man, that a drill .” 25 In other words, we may here, as in the case of gold, follow the ‘compounding’ or the ‘eliminating’ process ; the process which makes for a fuller and richer complex idea, or the one which makes for a more partial idea ; for no single object, for example, a tree, in any single instance of its actual ex- istence, embodies all the varied qualities embraced in any notion of a tree, not any more so than “that particular parcel of matter which makes the ring on my finger” exhausts all the ideas of gold my complex idea of gold stands for. Or gold may be viewed under the more ‘partial idea’ the word metal stands for ; and the same with the object tree. Thus he writes : “It is necessary for me to be as I am ; God and nature have made me so ; but there is nothing I have is essential to me. An accident or disease may take away my reason or memory, or both, and an apoplexy leave neither sense nor under- 24. Ibid., secs. 28-29. 25. Ibid., secs. 35-36. 6S University of Cincinnati Studies standing, no, nor life. Other creatures of my shape may be made with more and better, or fewer and worse faculties than I have ; and others may have reason and sense in a shape and body very different from mine. None of these are essential to the one, or the other, or to any individual whatever, till the mind refers it to some sort or species of things ; and then presently, according to the ab- stract idea of that sort, something is found essential. ... So that if it be asked, whether it be essential to me or any other particular corporeal being to have reason? I say, no; no more than it is essential to this white thing I write on to have words in it. But if that particular being is to be counted of the sort man, and to have the name man given it, then reason is essential to it, supposing reason to be a part of the complex idea the name man stands for; as it is essential to this thing I write on to contain words if I will give it the name treatise, and rank it under that species.” 26 That is to say, that we depend upon particular instances of a common thing in order to ascertain the different qualities which we ought to unite in our complex idea of an object; an operation which may be pursued under this or that end, and hence leads to differ- ent results in the way of a complex idea. These ideas, thus variously determined, and, as thus determined, held fixed, define the essence or species of such objects as may be brought or ranked under them. Accordingly, my aim in one case may be the knowl- edge of something in its fullest possible particular character, as in the case of gold or man, in the course of which aim I would evolve a very different complex idea of man, as in Ethics, for example, than would be the case if I only consider him in the light of some other end, that view of him as embraced by the idea actor or soldier. “If therefore, any one will think that a man, and a horse, and an animal, and a plant, etc., are distinguished by real essences made by nature, he must think nature to be very liberal of these real essences, making one for body, another for an animal, and another for a horse, and all these essences liberally bestowed upon Bucephalus. But if we would rightly consider what is done in all these genera and species, or sorts, we should find that there is no new thing made, but only more or less comprehensive signs, whereby we may be enabled to express in a few syllables great numbers of particular things, as they agree in more or less general 26. Ibid., sec. 4. Relativity and Locke 69 conceptions, which we have framed to that purpose .” 27 Hence Locke’s conclusion, that “the essence of each sort is the abstract idea ,” 28 understanding by essence, that “measure and boundary of each sort or species whereby it is constituted that particular sort and distinguished from others. ... So that the essential and not essential relates only to our abstract ideas ; which amounts to no more than this, that whatever particular thing has not in it those qualities which are contained in the abstract idea which any general term stands for, cannot be ranked under that species nor be called by that name ,” 29 not any more so than “that particu- lar parcel of matter which makes the ring on my finger” may be called gold and held to possess the essence of gold, unless that particular parcel of matter is either actually or potentially all that my complex idea of gold stands for. “Should there be found a parcel of matter that had all the other qualities that are in iron, but wanted obedience to the loadstone, would any one question whether it wanted anything essential ? It would be absurd to ask whether a thing really existing wanted anything essential to it ; nor could it be demanded whether this made an essential or specific difference or not, since we have no other measure of essential or specific but our abstract idea? And to talk of specific differences in nature, without reference to general ideas in names, is to talk unintelligi- bly ; . . . all such patterns and standards being quite laid aside, particular beings, considered barely in themselves, will be found to have all their qualities equally essential ; and everything in each individual will be essential to it, or, which is more, nothing at all. For though it may be reasonable to ask, whether obeying the magnet be essential to iron ? yet I think it is very improper and in- significant to ask, whether it be essential to the particular parcel of matter I cut my pen with, without considering it under the name iron, or as being of a certain species? . . . Hence we find many of the individuals that are ranked into one sort, called by one common name, and so received as being of one species, have yet qualities, depending on their real constitutions, as far different one from another as from others from which they are accounted to differ specifically .” 30 If then the essence or specific denomination or meaning of each 27. Ibid., sec. 32. 28. Ibid., sec. 2. 29. Ibid., secs. 2-4. 30. Ibid., secs. 5-8. 70 University of Cincinnati Studies particular thing refers to its determination within some complex idea, what in the constitution of things is sufficient to justify the formation of a new sort or species? We distinguish between watches and clocks as distinct sorts, yet the variation among watches is large just as it is among clocks ; 31 or we distinguish be- tween water when liquid and frozen, designating the former water and the latter, ice, and yet fail to do so in the case of congealed jelly when it is cold and the same jelly fluid and warm; or in the case of liquid gold in the furnace and hard gold in the hands of a workman . 32 This situation Locke suggests, but he does not ela- borate it. This is much to be regretted, for Locke in that case would have been led to transfer his present contention into the very citadel of his dogma : nothing exists but particulars ; for ice and water denote two particulars ; why not so in the case of gold or jelly? All I can find in Book III in any way pertinent to the issue is, that shape, in the case of vegetables and animals, and color, in respect to bodies not propagated by seed, are the aspects of things we most fix on and are most led by . 33 In his account of mixed modes, as may be recalled, he enters upon this particular inquiry more fully. But in respect to substances, his interest rarely strays beyond the locus of the following inquiry : things are de- termined and held fixed to their specific sorts by their abstract ideas, whereby particular things, “because they have that nominal essence, which is all one, agree to that abstract idea a name is annexed to ,” 34 come to be of this or that sort, and so, as we read here and there, “has in truth a reference not so much to the being of particular things, as to their general denominations .” 35 But this is but one conclusion; another: “take but away the abstract ideas by which we sort individuals, and rank them under common names, and then the thought of anything essential to any of them instantly vanishes ; we have no notion of the one without the other, which plainly shows their relation . 36 . . . For to talk of a man, and to lay by, at the same time, the ordinary signification of the name man, which is our complex idea usually annexed to it, and bid the reader consider man as he is in himself, and as he 31. See Ibid., sec. 39. 32. Ibid., sec. 13.' 33. Ibid., sec. 29. 34. Ibid., sec. 7. 35. Ibid., sec. 8. Italics are mine. 36. Ibid. sec. 4. Relativity and Locke 71 is really distinguished from others . . . looks like trifling .” 37 “Nothing essential to individuals ,” 38 is the claim he here sets up, as it were, to confront his familiar dogma: “nothing exists but particulars” : and his solution, as noted, appears to be twofold : sorts relate “not so much to the being of particular things, as to their denomination” ; and the opposite one, that to “bid the reader consider man as he is in himself, as he is really distinguished from others,” apart from our sort-view of him, “looks like trif- ling.” It is true, he goes on to say, “that I have often mentioned a real essence, distinct in substance from those abstract ideas of them, which I call their nominal essence. By this real essence I mean the real constitution of anything, which is the foundation of all those properties that are combined in it, and are constantly found to co-exist with the nominal essence ; that particular con- stitution which everything has within itself, without any relation to anything without it. But essence (‘measure and boundary’) even in this sense relates to a sort, and supposes a species ; for being that real constitution on which the properties depend, it (the ‘real essence’) necessarily supposes a sort of things, proper- ties belonging only to species and not to individuals .” 39 That is to say, that even if we grant “essential differences in nature be- tween particulars,” the particular would be as much an intellectu- alized thing, if we get beyond mere empty words, as the “sort”. For to talk of particulars, in so far as they are particular, implies that they have something which belongs to them in their own right. They involve the inclusion and exclusion of certain specific de- terminations. That is, certain properties are affirmed as essentially true of a given thing, others denied as constituting a part of it. And Locke’s conclusion is : “There is no individual parcel of matter to which any of its qualities are so annexed as to be essential to it or inseparable from it. That which is essential, belongs to it as a condition, whereby it is of this or that sort ; but take away the con- sideration of its being ranked under the name of some abstract idea, and then there is nothing necessary to it, nothing separable from it .” 40 Namely, the principle of inclusion and exclusion in respect to particulars presupposes and involves comparison, unless 37. Ibid., sec. 43. 38. Ibid., sec. 4. 39. Ibid., sec. 6. Italics are mine. 40. Ibid. 72 University of Cincinnati Studies some inherent and discoverable real essence furnishes us with the needed principle. And Locke’s arguments on this point assume two forms: (o) a proof to establish the ungrounded character for even assuming that such real essences exist, by seeking to exhibit a diversity among our particular parcels of matter, as well as among a supposed natural animal and vegetable species ; and ( b ), by the further claim, that even if real essences did exist, we do not know them and never can know them. This claim is reinforced by the relativistic principle either in its empirical or radical form ; namely, isolate a piece of gold from all other bodies and it reduces to zero, for not only substances (in the nominal sense) but objects or bodies in general “are but powers, either active or passive, in reference to other bodies .” 41 Locke’s frequent reversion from this new to his old view grows out of his tendency to confound the ontological particular (which seems to resist death at all cost) with “a particular parcel of matter.” In either case, however, we have his contention that particulars are variable and indeterminate until made determinate by and held fixed in our abstract ideas of them. Summarized, the following, then, presents Locke’s position : he assumes an interplay of distinguishable ideas in uniform and in variable, in fixed and in unstable relations. Owing to these dif- ferences in their relations, ideas become as effective in breaking down or altering particulars as in building them up and preserving them intact, at least relatively so ; for relations are as capable of neutralizing each other’s effects as they are capable of rein- forcing them. Hence the justification and rational basis of Locke’s empirical relativity : “bodies” are capable of producing change in or receiving it from other “bodies” to an indefinite degree. But bodies of this or that sort, or of this or that determination, in- volve the abstract idea, which, in turn, involves and presupposes analysis, comparison, and synthesis. The outcome in Locke’s language is the more “general abstract idea” or the more “par- ticular abstract idea.” “Nature,” to which we must turn in the formation of our complex idea of substances, offers “similitudes” and also parts in “constant and inseparable union hence nature offers “parts in union,” complexes, as real, as ultimate, and as final 41. Ibid., ch. 9, sec. 17. This principle has such frequent restate- ment in Locke, that any special references are needless. In particular, read ch. 9, Bk. Ill; ch. 31, Bk. II; and ch. 6, secs. 11-12, Bk. IV. Relativity and Locke 73 as parts in union, as any of its parts viewed in the light of simple ideas. And these parts “in union,” however partial or variable the parts “in union,” constitute the data upon which the abstract ideas, in their formation, are shown dependent. Hence the dictum that apart from our abstract ideas, no determination in our ob- jects, has its complement stated as well : apart from determinations, however variable or partial in our particular parcels of matter in this or that specific situation, there is no determination of our abstract ideas. This doctrine in Locke I designate as a phase of his con- structive relativity, and I request any one to show me a doctrine in his pages, which in merit and comprehensive survey can match itself with this one. In his elaboration of this doctrine, he ac- cepts his simple ideas as such “parts,” but he goes further when he insists as he does that the union of parts, although no taste, smell, color, etc., is as much of the nominal essence as the simple ideas of sensuous perception. Such union represents nothing that is “visible,” but it notwithstanding implies that sequence, co- existence, change, succession are perceived facts ; so real, that to talk of complex ideas as otherwise complex, is wilful perversion. Hence his admission, as quoted in a previous chapter, “that our ideas of extension, duration, and number, do they not all con- tain in them a secret relation of the parts? Figure and motion have something relative in them much more visibly ; and sensible qualities, as color and smell, etc., what are they but the powers of different bodies in relation to our perception, etc? . . . Our idea therefore of power (which includes in it also some kind of relation, a relation to action or change), I think may well have a place amongst other simple ideas, and be considered as one of them ,” 42 His notion of substances as facts, and not mere illusions and deceptions, involves the same conclusion: the union of its parts is as real and ultimate as the parts themselves. In fact, in the above passage, in order to establish the reality of modes, his deliberate effort and lack of hesitancy to resolve “sensible quali- ties” themselves into sheer relations (no mere passing procedure with him) must appear a very interesting procedure, indeed, to one saturated with the notion that Locke is fundamentally a sen- sationalist and not a relativist. 42. Bk. 11, ch. 21, sec. 3. Italics are mine. 74 University of Cincinnati Studies CHAPTER X DOCTRINE OF MEANING (“Ideas of Relation”) T. H. Green laments that Locke “in his account of our complex ideas, explains them under modes, substances, and relations as if each of these three sorts were independent of the rest.” That Locke never thoroughly correlates them is certainly to be re- gretted, and yet I feel that Locke in actual practice is far from keeping them as independent of each other as he, in theory, often struggles to do. For example, I have tried to show that, with Locke, modes, substances and relations are alike constructs. Moreover, in our account of mixed modes, we might have asked wherein their declared dependence upon so-called Nature kept them distinguished from substances; while substances, in turn, re- flected in common with modes and relations a dependence upon a very complex process of mind operating variously under very complex conditions. When we come to our “ideas of relations” the overlapping and interfusion is made even more apparent. Not only does all distinction between mixed modes and relations practically vanish, but that between simple modes and relations vanishes as well ; while substances, in general, become identified, as we have seen, with “powers;” namely, relations. We ought not to feel surprised, therefore, if in his account of “ideas of rela- tion” a unified rather than a split-up world should become more or less clearly foreshadowed. No man is more dangerously read in snatches than Locke. In a sense, therefore, our present chapter may be regarded as a restatement of the problem canvassed at large in our previous chapter ; namely, the interdependence of fact and idea ; the sole difference being, that there we were supposed to be more narrowly concerned with the sensuous structure of an object, and that here, following Locke, we are to be more narrowly concerned with its abstract structure in terms of space, time, causality, etc., and with its value structure in terms of the “various ends, objects, manners, and circumstances of human action,” 1 whereby such distinctions are acquired by them as “good, bad or indifferent.” The term, ‘meaning,’ in our common use of it, appears the one best employed 1. Bk. II., ch. 28, sec. 4. Relativity and Locke 75 in the present discussion. By adhering to this term, I in no way violate Locke’s account and avoid considerable confusion. Meaning, with Locke, stands primarily for an interdependence of objects as reflected in thought: “Beside the ideas, whether simple or complex, that the mind has of things as they are in them- selves, there are others it gets from their comparison one with another,” 2 whereby certain distinctions or “denominations” are acquired by them, but not as something “contained in the real existence of things, but something extraneous and superinduced ;” 3 that is, meaning is purely mental in existential status. He holds further, “that there is no one thing . . . which is not capable of almost an infinite number of considerations in reference to other things,” and that meaning therefore “makes no small part of men’s thoughts and words ; v. g., one single man may at once be con- cerned in and sustain all these following relations [denominations, meanings], and many more; viz., father, brother, son, grand- father, . . . friend, enemy, judge, patron, . . . servant, master, . . . older, younger, like, unlike, etc., etc., to an almost infinite number; he being capable of as many denominations as there can be occasions of comparing him to other things.” 4 The view presented contains nothing novel. When an object is said to have meaning it is not uncommon to hear it spoken of as something imported into the object from without, and never, except by the idealist or pragmatist perchance, viewed as an inte- gral part of said object. But we often, as Locke will be found do- ing, notwithstanding, begin with the consideration of meaning as actually existing in an object, and then, in virtue of its more obtrusive variability and diversity, hold it up as something more or less gratuitously contributed from without. Relativity is rarely a disputed fact in this realm. What is disputed, is whether mean- ing does become or ever can become an integral part of an object. It exists in thought and for thought only, proclaims the realist ; it is a distortion or falsification of reality, says the naturalist. But to establish either of their contentions, a criterion of an object is presupposed. What that is in their case, I leave for them to decipher. I accept for my object Locke’s object as presented in the previous chapter. Locke, too, must be expected consistently 2. Ibid., ch. 25, secs. 1-7. 3. Ibid., sec. 8. 4. Ibid., sec. 7. 76 University of Cincinnati Studies to abide by the conception, and the doctrine, just outlined, scanned in the light of it. The deviations will be exposed. In accord with his notion of an object as a construct, we were not only said to be allowed, but constrained, to fix upon the •specific character of our object with a variation of content, and, when once defined and articulated, invited to deny, if we choose, that any further qualification of it is relevant. But, then, in denying such relevancy, as we were further shown, another ground for deciding the matter had to be found than is offered in the variable and potential qualities of the object itself. If an object, in accord with relativity, becomes what it is solely in and through its relations to other objects, and such relations are affirmed to be indefinite, if not wholly infinite, then the modifications manifested in an object cannot be designated as real and valid in respect to its so-called “powers,” but mere appearances and superinductions when ac- quired in the character of meaning. It is not logic to blow hot and cold with the same principle. Locke cannot revert to the dogmas of the realist or naturalist as he is apparently seen to do in the above, nor shall we be found under any special obligation to halt with that view of the matter. But the objection may be raised that, in respect to sorts, the mutual determination of objects was of a mechanical type; where- as here we are dealing with mutual determinations essentially mental. To this objection I need only subjoin that causality, the so-called mechanical type of determination, is but one of Locke’s general types of relation included and elaborated in this particular division of his work. In fact, to grasp the full sweep and con- structive character of the present doctrine in Locke, we must not fail to keep in mind that it is here at length that we get his modes, whether simple or complex, correlated with substances. And thus considered, is it necessary to ask who got closer to Locke, Kant or Hume? Locke’s signal contribution however consists in the fact that he correlated his mixed modes with substances as well as the simple modes, of time, place, etc. In following Locke here, prag- matism or humanism has in Locke its antecedent in modern thought. Leaving mere theory, then, for the moment, let us instead direct attention to the facts he adduced in support of theory. Inter- dependence of fact and meaning, is the contention I seek to es- Relativity and Locke 77 tablish; namely, that meaning is grounded in fact, just as in the previous chapter its converse constituted our thesis. OBJECTS AND MEANING FOREIGN TO EACH OTHER 1. “Relations (denominations) different from the Things related.” 5 Denominations may be the same in men “who have very different ideas of the things that are related, or that are thus compared ; v. g., those who have far different ideas of a man may yet agree in the notion of a father ; which is a notion superinduced to the substance, or man, and refers only to an act of that thing, called man, whereby he contributed to the generation of one of his own kind ; let man be what he will.” 6 But if it “refers to an act of that thing,” how does meaning fail to constitute an integral part of it? But this observation by the way! 2. Hence, “change of relation (denomination) may be without any change in the object, — Caius, whom I consider to-day as a father, ceases to be so to-morrow only by the death of his son, without any alteration made in himself. Nay, barely by the mind’s changing the object to which it compares anything, the same thing is capable of having contrary denominations at the same time; v. g., Caius, compared to several persons, may truly be said to be older and younger, stronger and weaker, etc.” 7 3. Meanings seemingly inherent in objects, “conceal a tacit though less observable relation that is, show a dependence upon something else ; hence reduce to the order of products ; reveal themselves detachable ; and, therefore, can in no way properly belong to an object. I proceed to quote from the text without criticism or registered protest. That is to follow. “Time and place are also the foundation of very large relations, and all finite beings at least are concerned in them, . . . but it may suffice here to intimate, that most of the denominations of things received from time are only relations. Thus, when any one says that Queen Elizabeth lived sixty-nine and reigned forty-five years, these words impart only the relation of that duration to some other, and mean no more than this, that the duration of her existence was equal to sixty-nine, and the duration of her govern- ment to forty-five annual revolutions of the sun ; and so are all 5. Ibid., ch. 25, sec. 4. 6. Ibid., sec. 4. Italics mine. 7. Ibid., sec. 5. 78 University of Cincinnati Studies words answering, How long?” 8 Such words as young and old are, ordinarily, also thought to stand for positive ideas, which, when considered, will be found to be relative; that is, they intimate preconceived ideas, formed under specialized and limited con- ditions. “Thus, having settled in our thoughts the idea of the ordinary duration of a man to be seventy years, when we say a man is young, we mean that his age is yet but a small part of that which men usually attain to ; and when we denominate him old, we mean that his duration is run out almost to the end of that which men do not usually exceed. And so it is comparing the particular age or duration of this or that man, to the idea of that duration which we have in our minds, as ordinarily belonging to that sort of animal ; which is plain, in the application of these names to other things ; for a man is called young at twenty years and very young at seven years old ; but a horse we call old at twenty and a dog at seven years, because in each of these we compare their age to different ideas of duration which are settled in our minds.” 9 That meaning is an aspect in objects distinguishable from its sensuous quality, no one would deny. But beyond this very gen- eral distinction, the view of an object as a construct presupposes the presence of intellectual principles at every point. And its saturation from this source penetrates to its core and is no mere thing sticking loosely at the surface, ready to be peeled off by any such process as was instituted above. Meaning comes into being, his illustrations would denote, by the consideration of some posi- tive object under seme specific idea or other “settled in our minds.” That is, apart from some abstract idea, no meaning in objects is possible. This we will grant, but only after being in- structed where those “ideas settled in the mind” originate. They would seem to arise, judging from these very same illustrations, from more or less definite and concrete situations. In fact, these illustrations definitely emphasize the point that age, youth, size, etc., are pure abstractions where it is not the age, youth or size of a particular thing in a particular situation with its particular conditions and limitations all held together in one elaborated notion or construct. Let us term the point of his departure, m this general analysis, that of pure objectivity, and then let any man 8. Ibid., ch. 26, sec. 3. 9. Ibid., sec. 4. Relativity and Locke 79 tell, if he can, where the contribution made by any of its abstracted elements begins or ends and where that of its other abstracted elements begins or ends. In his chapters on relation, Locke moves on this purely objective plane of existence, and seeks to disrupt it by the introduction of his abstract realistic object on the one hand, and by the introduction of an equally depleted abstract idea on the other. But even from the passages quoted 'in this chapter, the peculiar novelty of them all lies in the fact that abstract ideas are here revealed as growing out of concrete sit- uations, “and that we are not to wonder that we comprehend them not, and do so often find our thought at a loss, when we would consider them abstractly by themselves,” as he wrote in connection with his account of space and time in a passage ad- duced above . 10 Had Locke only followed out this notion and continued his inquiry from it and from these admirable beginnings, instead of pursuing such inquiry from the abstract standpoint of particulars and thought in divorce ; or from his abstractions of simple ideas versus complex; or from the still further abstractions within complex ideas ; namely, those of simple and complex modes versus substances, — what a length of needless, fruitless wander- ings Locke might have spared himself. Furthermore, he might have spared the identification of pure objectivity, among some of his successors, with that range of experience of which we might be thought susceptible in a protoplasmic stage of existence. Now there is no doubt that “the ideas settled in our minds” may vary with each other in two fundamental respects: (a) in their degree of possible generality, and (b) in their degree of response to “the constant and regular order of things” or, on the other hand, in their degree of response to a more or less arbitrary fancy or imagination. But however much ideas may differ from each other in these respects, in one respect they are alike ; namely, that the possibility of ideas or objects presupposes in all cases a thought- process and its control. To establish the fact that such is Locke’s contention when unfettered by false theory, I shall, in addition to what has been stated, consider two fundamental types of relation ; that of cause and effect and that of morality. 10. Chapter 4. 80 University of Cincinnati Studies ORIGIN OF OUR PRECONCEIVED IDEAS AND THEIR PROPER CORRELATION WITH FACT-REALITY 1. CAUSE AND EFFECT “As it would take a volume to go over all sorts of relations [preconceived ideas],” writes Locke, “it is not to be expected that I should here mention them all .” 11 He proposes, however, to consider “the most comprehensive relation, wherein all things that do or can exist are concerned, and that is the relation of cause and effect.” I -shall in my account of this relation freely turn to every part of his text where this subject of causality comes up for discussion. Space, time, identity and diversity, quanti- tative, qualitative, blood, instituted, moral, civil, and divine rela- tions, are the other relations he touches upon, briefly or at length, among the “innumerable sorts” which “would take a volume” to exhaust. And the general contention that concerns us i-s, that relations have no status or reality in objects, and, secondly, leave them accordingly unaffected, and it is this contention I seek to refute in Locke’s own words. “There must always in relation be two ideas or things,” writes Locke, “either in themselves really separate, or considered as dis- tinct, and then a ground or occasion for their comparison ;” 12 namely, all relation involves three distinct factors. Hence in the matter of cause and effect, “taking notice how one (thing) comes to an end and ceases to be, and another begins to exist which was not before ,” 13 . . . whatever change is thus observed, the mind must collect a power somewhere able to make that change, as well as a possibility in the thing itself to receive it .” 14 Here then we have ‘a,’ our original idea, ‘b,’ a distinct perception of something new in that original idea, and ‘c,’ the need of the mind to collect a power somewhere. My aim is to search for the ground of that need, as scattered passages in Locke favor its articulation. With- out the ideas ‘a’ and ‘b’ discoverable as distinct, as “either in themselves separate or considered as distinct,” the possibility of a comparison would not even exist. But, then, the present com- parison is of a kind involving something unique. That element 11. Bk. II, ch. 28, sec. 17. 12. Bk. II, ch. 25, sec. 6. 13. Ibid., ch. 21, sec. 1. 14. Ibid., sec. 4. Relativity and Locke 81 of uniqueness is change. Change would seem to be a product of thought induced by the fact that ‘a’ and ‘b,’ although distinct or separate, hence Many, are yet constrained by thought to be held in the original Oneness ; for we begin with ‘a,’ which is One, and yet are forced to perceive ‘b’ as another when it comes “to exist which was not before.” Yet “we never finding nor conceiving it possible, that two things of the same kind should exist in the same place at the same time, we rightly conclude that whatever exists anywhere at any time excludes all of the same kind and is there itself alone. . . . (But further) since one thing cannot have tzvo beginnings of existence, nor two things one beginning; it is impossible for two things . . . to be or exist in the same in- stant, in the very same place, or one and the same thing in dif- ferent places. That, therefore, that had one beginning, is the same thing; and that which had a different beginning in time and place from that, is not the same, but diverse .” 15 In other words, ‘b’ having broke out as separate and distinct from ‘a,’ they cannot as two distinct things, have the same single beginning able to ac- count for both of them ; hence the need of the mind to collect a beginning for ‘b’ somewhere. But where turn for the originating principle when “powers are relations and not agents ,” 16 and when the “communication of motion by impulse, or by thought [the only possible agents] is equally . . . obscure and inconceivable. . . We have by daily experience clear evidence of motion produced both by impulse and thought ; but the manner how, hardly comes within our comprehension ; we are equally at a loss in both. . . . For when the mind would look beyond those original ideas we have from sensation or reflection, and penetrate into their causes, and manner of production, we find it discovers nothing but its own shortsightedness ; . . . there is no more difficulty to conceive how a substance, we know not, should, by thought, set body in motion, than how a substance, we know not, by impulse, set body into motion .” 17 Yet the mind is constrained “to collect a power somewhere,” even though it has no visible principle to rest upon ; for change implies a new existence in space and time, or in time only, and the new thing ‘b’ must somehow or other find an explanation for its “beginning.” The need is as 15. Ibid., ch. 27, sec. 1. 16. Ibid., ch. 21, sec. 19. 17. Ibid., ch. 23, secs. 28-29. 82 University of Cincinnati Studies real (1) as the perception of ‘a’ and ‘b’ as distinct existences is real; (2) as real as the idea of change, as the result of the com- parison; (that is, as real as the original unity and subsequent diversity are real) ; (3) as real as the principle of conservation; and (4) as real as the inherent intellectual need for unity in our experience. In a word, the notion of cause and effect is a thought construct, involving comparison on the basis of a real diversity in unity, and the postulate that every new existence involves the idea of a new beginning ; something cannot come out of nothing. Such then would seem to be the origin of our “preconceived idea” of cause and effect. It certainly does not appear as if generated in a vacuum. Rather does the idea appear as if generated in an exceedingly complex situation, wherein the interpenetration of fact and idea or meaning appears so complete as well nigh to baffle analysis. ‘Unity’ is another such idea. Shall we call it fact or meaning? And if meaning, shall we hold meaning as ungrounded in reality and as leaving reality unaffected, “it sufficing to the unity of an idea [object],” as Locke writes, “that it be considered as one representation or picture, though made up of ever so many par- ticulars?” 18 Under conditions then, “an army, a swarm, a city, a fleet,” are “things as perfectly one as one ship or one atom.” 19 That reality is not left unaffected by the idea of unity is here evident. But is such unity real? Yes, if it serves our ends, or works ; for after all, as Locke’s recurrent note would have it : “God has fitted us for the neighborhood of the bodies that sur- round us” 20 . . . and “it will become us, as rational creatures, to employ those faculties we have about what they are most adapted to.” 21 Ideas, then, that work successfully in our efforts to comprehend the world, and in our general lack of others or better, are real ; it being as real in the interest of some ends, to regard a fleet or a city as One and not as Many, as in the interest of other ends to do the reverse. Fact and meaning are one, and, at best, distinguishable aspects only. 18. Ibid., ch. 24, sec. 1. 19. Ibid., ch. 24, sec. 2. 20. Ibid., ch. 16, sec. 13. 21. Bk. IV, ch. 12, secs. 10-11. Relativity and Locke 83 2. MORAL RELATIONS “Virtue and vice,” writes Locke, “are names supposed every- where to stand for actions in their own nature right and wrong .” 22 This position, in harmony with his general contention, Locke denies, and, in turn, sets up the contention, “that moral good and evil consist in nothing but the conformity of our voluntary actions to some law ; which, I think, may be called moral relation, as being that which denominates our moral actions . . . which relation as a touchstone, serves to set the mark of value upon their voluntary actions .” 23 The following illustration sums up his whole position : “Our actions are considered as good, bad, or indifferent ; and in this respect they are relative, it being their conformity to, or disagreement with some rule that makes them to be regular or irregular, good or bad. . . . Thus the challeng- ing and fighting with a man, as it is a certain positive mode, or particular sort of action ... is called duelling, which, when considered in relation to the law of God, will deserve the name sin ; to the law of fashion, in some countries, valor and virtue ; and to the municipal laws of some governments, a capital crime .” 24 That is, apart from our preconceived ideas, no moral determina- tions exist in our objects. But suppose we again raise the counter claim : apart from determinations of some kind or other in our objects, can we attain to any preconceived ideas at all? And what we find is, that pure objectivity is again distorted by the introduc- tion of false abstract distinctions. The matter is easily presented. Modes embrace the moral concepts by reference to which actions acquire the moral distinctions of good or bad. But how do these modes originate? His answer is: modes are the pure products of reason ; that is, a priori determinable and independent of ex- perience. Hence there is no hope of freeing his doctrine here of an abstract conceptualism, unless Locke abandons his purely theoretical dogmatic view concerning modes. And on this point, Locke, in theory at least, concedes nothing. Until such a priori 22. Bk. II, ch. 28, sec. 10. Italics are mine. 23. Ibid., secs. 4, 5, 14. 24. Ibid., sec. 15. S4 University of Cincinnati Studies pretensions concerning modes, however, are abandoned, the original objectivity of our experience cannot be restored. 25 To view morality as a relation of actions to a law, as he does, and yet not find that law in those actions themselves as their expression in certain fundamental relations, but, instead, to find that law the expression of an abstract Reason divorced from Experience, reveals anew how deep Locke, in certain aspects of his doctrine,, remained sticking in rationalism, and by con- trast, reveals the vast strides made by him in those other phases of his doctrine. If, as Ethics tends to enforce, a man is not truly moralized until the moral values are worked into the very texture of his being, I fail to see how values as a class can remain distinc- tions “extraneous and superinduced.” For grant that the “pre- conceived idea” is involved at every point in an object’s determina- tion, as Locke insists upon, and the “preconceived idea” little else than a synthesis of a very complex situation, as Locke seems fur- ther to maintain, then how prove the validity of that idea or its applicability without admitting at the same time that objects, in some form or other of their constitution, control the formation of the idea. And as one and the same object may be variously conceived (the outcome of a varied analysis and synthesis), the primacy of the idea and the object is of necessity found to inter- change. Thus, if an artist finds an object’s particular soul and pulse in its color, who will prove that he has failed to get its soul and pulse, save by dogmatically sticking to the claim that we to the contrary, in some other equally specialized view or determina- tion, have gotten such soul or pulse of the objects about us, — objects, by theory, variable and indefinite in their determination and signification. And if this be true of their more distinctively sensuous aspect, how much more so of their meaning-aspect ; that is, if the determination of substances (in Locke’s terminology) depends upon our ideas of them variously formed ; how much more so in the case of the modes and the relations, as he insists. 25. This situation represents Locke’s general position ; but fortunately it is not an expression of his sole utterance. For, if “good and evil,” as Locke contends, “are nothing but pleasure or pain, or that which oc- casions or procures pleasure or pain to us” and our state, “as fitted for the neighborhood of the bodies that surround us,” giving us no concernment beyond either to know or to be, our “preconceived idea” will depend upon a consideration of the various factors able to produce and suffer pleasure or pain, and, as thus considered, organized into a whole. And with this degree of a suggested reconstruction of such elements as appear in his Essay, I think I may let the matter rest. Relativity and Locke 85 But the latter are merely ‘extraneous and superinduced,’ the realist may persist in proclaiming. Well, then, let him be equally ready to maintain that civilization, with all its distinctions and achieve- ments, wrought out with the brain and hands of man, and grounded in the heart and stomach and skin, as well as in other assumed facts, is an extraneous superinduction upon a more real world. The nihilist, strange to say, champions the same creed, and to him art, morality, government, refinement, culture, science are but specious falsification of reality. If this is not the logic of realism, I have yet to learn it ; and if such is not its logic, then its logic is that of Locke : “All such patterns and standards laid aside, particular beings, considered barely in themselves, will be found to have all their qualities equally essential ; and everything in each individ- ual will be essential to it, or, which is more, nothing at all ;” 26 namely, the truth of reality is ideality — “the new way of ideas.” CHAPTER XI CONCLUSION The primacy of the idea in the determination of our objects culminates in the claim that, apart from the idea, an object is “at once everything or nothing .” 1 An object is “everything,” in so far as it “exists in nature with no prefixed bounds,” and, hence, may with equal logical validity assume this, that, or the other determination, since our only reference in its formation is “the constant and regular order,” in “the changes which one body is apt to receive from or produce in other bodies upon due appli- cation, which exceed far, not only what we know, but what we are apt to imagine .” 2 It is “nothing,” for the reason that without some more or less specific inclusion and exclusion of parts, we deal with nothing specific. Secondly, Locke insisted upon the ultimate character of the Self and its unavoidable implication in all such determinations ; and, further, insisted upon a radical difference in the constitution of the self with different men. Not only was the Self held as involved in the production of the secondary qualities, which, under a conceived difference in its constitution or structure, according to Locke, are bound to reveal things very differently, but our complex ideas, whether substances or modes or relations, were 26. Bk. Ill, ch. 6, sec. 5. 1. Bk. Ill, ch. 6, sec. 35. 2. Bk. II, ch. 31, sec. 10. 86 University of Cincinnati Studies held as further dependent in their formation, not only “upon the minds of men,” but “upon the minds of men variously collecting them.” Every man, then, the measure of his own truth! “Our business is living” ; our needs are ultimates ; “our faculties are suited to our state” ; “men determine sorts” and determine them variously — here we have fundamental tenets in Locke, and, taken together, they spell relativity of the Protagorean type. On the other hand, Locke strongly emphasizes the fact of a common standard of reference in the “constant and regular order” of things ; he also, speaks of “unalterable organs” ; and, further, speaks of certain common ends, — language, duty, common affairs, and whatnot, and such principles, as he enforces, make for identity in our perceptions and not for diversity. But even within the range of a common knowledge, Locke’s emphasis is upon in- dividual diversity; that such differences are ultimate and are no more to be crowded out than our identity with others, in so far as we are identical, is to be eliminated. We perceive as we are con- ditioned to perceive, be the conditions for likeness or differences in perception what they may. , His philosophy, therefore, involves the relativistic principle in three forms: (a) that objects are determined within change which, although constant and regular in its order, remains in- definite and unprefixed in respect to its quantity; ( b ) that the individual, as one object among other objects, is involved in that determination; and, (c) that different individuals are unavoidably differently involved. Does this spell scepticism? No, not any more so than it can be made to spell phenomenalism. Failure to perceive this truth lies in our failure properly to conceive and apply the principle of relativity. I shall, therefore, in conclusion, enlarge upon each of the three forms of the principle. A Consistently hold to the fact (1) that objects in nature exist with no “prefixed bounds,” and (2) to the principle that given conditions give a given result — then whatever the conditions, the result is reality. Break up that result into parts, if you choose, or synthesize the given results with other results, and, together, or- ganize them into a larger result ; either procedure is valid and in common practice found to be a fact. But if it be once admitted Relativity and Locke 87 that objects exist in nature with no prefixed, natural, or inevi- table boundaries of their own (shall we exclude the elementary substances of Chemistry or the electrons of Physics from this conclusion?), 3 then one boundary of them is no more true in the abstract than another, whether we proceed by the way of analysis to a pale and vapid “quale,” or, by way of a synthesis, advance to the Absolute of our objective idealists. Whatever works from a given standpoint, or within a given situation or series of situa- tions, analyzed and synthesized or unanalyzed and unsynthesized, as the case may be, is real. Hence, if valid from one point of view to turn to a sensationalism or to some “quale” for truth or the real, no viewpoint could be more astray if such pale and ghostly types are offered as samples of “immediacy” in general. Analysis carried to the nth degree is still analysis carried out to a degree, and except from some restricted aim or other, no more capable of uncovering the reals than synthesis carried to the Absojute is a thing necessary in order to conceive them. Our reality, at what- ever point we may grapple with it or break off with it, is, in prin- ciple, still complex — it is the postulate of all scientific inquiry thus to conceive the matter. For the fact remains (1) that reality never reveals itself except in a more or less circumscribed situa- tion or in a series of them held together in an idea; and, (2) whether as something to be analyzed or synthesized, reality is never considered wholly independent of all viewpoints nor of the available technique elaborated within any such viewpoint, either practical or scientific. Hence the violinist, in seeking what he calls a “tone,” does not turn to abstract analysis nor to an Absolute, but he turns to his instrument held intact in a complex situation of which he too forms a part. And when that tone, to which he dedicates years and his developed technique in achieving, is even- tually evolved, then he claims to have the supremely real and beau- tiful one which the particular soul (circumscribed context) of his instrument seems to him capable of producing. He seeks the real by forging ahead, and when once attained, weaves his whole subsequent network of tones with that one as its ultimate ground or basis. And his experience is a very common experience whether we turn to science or to life in general. The stripping-process, so common in our current search and definitions of Immediacy of Experience, is either a search for a non-relative real, or for a relative real at its protoplasmic stage (which even at this stage, 3. See pp. 31-32. S8 University of Cincinnati Studies Heaven knows how complex it may be!). It would be like the absurdity of a violinist abandoning instruments entirely for get- ting a tone, or, in the other case, abandoning the violin, let us say, for a Jews-harp or some possible protoplasmic instrument. In either event, what bearing has such search in the world of art, or in any present metaphysical effort to determine an object? There is the tree before me. What is its total reality or meaning for me? Is yours likely to be mine., or mine yours? That, says Locke, depends upon our complex ideas of it variously formed under varying and very complex conditions. Science would yield the fullest account of it no doubt, and yet the artist’s view of it need not be primarily the view of the scientist, not any more so than the psychologist’s view of it need be that of a botanist. Such I consider to be Locke’s philosophy, and the reductio ad absurdum of his own sensationalistic premises ! Lienee neither a Ding an Sich nor a phenomenalism really has any meaning from a relativistic standpoint. A thing is what it reveals itself to be in any given situation, or, by a process of con- struction, is what it was found to be in a series of situations, which “exceed far not only what we know but what we are apt to imagine” ; and it logically remains entirely beside the issue whether a Self constitutes a part of each one of such situations or whether other objects do. For no set of conditions with their specific result, in the abstract, has a prerogative or monopoly upon so-called reality. Adhering, then, to the current terminology, we may conclude this division by saying: whatever works is real; merely adding thereto: whatever works in an articulated world of recognized and established values ; a world where Mill’s methods, so to speak, are found efficient in producing results, and where art, morality and refinement in the directions given to them, are the accepted directions to still larger growths and results. Let any one re- verse such general order and directions if he choose. But if he does so with the hope of getting something intrinsically more absolute, he pursues, he knows not what — a shadow. Whatever works, is real, whatever works in the fully articulated world of generally accepted science and values, in its highly diversified and elaborated directions of interest and activities, and not merely what works, as this term what works is so narrowly, loosely, and vaguely defined in our modern use of it. Relativity and Locke 89 B If empirical relativity stands for one significant fact, it is that our universe is not only a place where novelty may occur, but a place where novelty is continually occuring. Things are and may be brought into conjunction and interaction today which never before have been, and because reality manifests itself only in circumscribed situations, all of which never have and never will realize themselves in one single moment of actual existence, therefore, one such manifestation of it is as real as another, and reality itself is thus continually in the making. I presented this view in an earlier chapter and gave reasons in support of it (chapter II). I now wish to show its bearing upon the fact that the individual, as one object among other objects, is involved in a varying degree, from nothing to much, in the determination or making of reality. If philosophy, in opposition to the physical sciences, has one central tenet, it is that the individual is involved in and contributes toward the determination or making of reality. Its interpretation of this fact for the present is of little interest; but the insistence it puts upon this fact is paramount. The physical sciences, on the contrary, have as insistently affirmed that the individual stands outside of reality, and is, in his invasion of reality, a disturbing and vitiating factor. The scientist’s point of view, I take for granted, is generally understood ; it is the every-day view. I shall accordingly confine myself to the outline of the philosophical view. Resting its case upon the established truths within the spheres of physiological psychology and physics, philosophy con- cludes that, in respect to the sense-qualities — sound, color, taste and what not — if no individual exists, then there are no sense- qualities. To this extent, then, the individual is inevitably involved in the determination or making of reality. But this is far from the whole story. That all our ideas are motor in character and con- stitution, and not merely sensational, one of the most significant contributions to the field of thought by modern psychology, carries with it metaphysical implications that are simply tremendous. Broadly stated, it means that the whole man contributes in the structure and constitution of his ideas (as constructs and other- wise) and not merely his sense organs. Yet man’s ideas, orgin- ating as they may, are his only reality. So much granted the next step follows: If man is involved in the determination or 90 University of Cincinnati Studies making of reality, in what way does he differ from any other object of the universe in the give-and-take process existing among all other objects? And I affirm, that he does not differ in this respect from any other object in the universe. Hence what is true of other objects is also true of man. As has been stated; certain objects in a given situation affect each other, just as others in the same situation do not. Any object, therefore, in any given situation may be very much affected by other objects, but the same object in other situations may neither affect other objects within those situations nor be affected by them . 4 In the light of such facts, then, science is correct in its claim that the individual is not involved in the determination of reality ; but its claim re- mains correct only to that extent in which it can find, and thus comes to deal with, objects whose interactions with the psycho- physical organism are at a minimum or more or less constant and uniform in their effects. But, then, just as there are facts and situations which make possible this affirmed objective type of truth of the physical sciences, so there are other facts and situations in which the at- tainment of truth has for its prescribed ideal the inclusion of just that individual element or factor which the other ideal seeks to eliminate. Psychology, Ethics, Aesthetics, Economics and So- ciology may be cited as some of the sciences falling within the sphere of this latter ideal. But when all has been said in proper appraisement of either of these scientific ideals, the ultimate fact remains, that they are differences of degree rather than of kind ; for with the world of a structure so complex as to involve analysis and synthesis, com- parison and organization at every turn, the role of the individual in the making of reality cannot be too conspicuously emphasized. For, whichever of the ideals we embrace, the fact remains, that, in the last analysis, the worlds we come to know and inhabit de- pend more upon a man’s brain, character, and training, so to speak, than upon his eyes. Thus Michael Angelo has been led to say that a great artist paints, not with his hands, but with his brain ; and the same may be said with equal truth of even the most objective of the sciences; the research student sees with his brain rather than with his eyes. If this were not so, what need of our Newtons to discern the big meaning in the little fact. 4. See pp. 15-17 for a fuller account of this principle. Relativity and Locke 91 If reality were, indeed, the prefixed thing so commonly pre- sented in our abstract theories (and those of common-sense and science are only too frequently the most abstract), perhaps the Self, as they ordain, would be rightly excluded from this or that synthesis of the world and from the role it, notwithstanding, stubbornly enacts therein. Let me present the subject of this division in a slightly different light. It is admitted that all our thinking proceeds by the joint pro- cess of analysis and synthesis. These processes may go on con- sciously or unconsciously. Where they proceed consciously, as in any specific scientific sphere, the disclosure of a growing world follows, — a world that becomes ever more engrossing, ramified, and heterogeneous. When unconsciously employed, these pro- cesses, notwithstanding, impel in the same direction. Worlds open up to us on all sides whose existence involves such an interchange of elements, that, if it were not for man, these worlds would never have been produced nor capable of a repro- duction. Literally described, they are human constructs, and to enter any one of them in any real sense demands a step by step reproduction or reconstruction. Are these varied worlds (those of the varied sciences, of the varied arts, of business, industry, social relationships, and what not) fundamental phases of reality or mere disfigurements and distortions of it? Let us assume the latter view, the disfigurement view. In the adoption of any such assumption, however, we postulate, whether we know it or not, the existence of a ready-made, prefixed world capable of direct and easy apprehension. But the notion of a ready-made world precludes the idea of all real change and novelty in it, and, at best, is an assumption loudly demanding a proof. In the second place, if the world were capable of a direct and easy apprehension on our part, why speak of analysis and synthesis as the inevitable mental processes employed in its apprehension, and of the different sciences as the most approved and inevitable means? We cannot evade the issue. Either the world as ready-made involves the most delusive kind of abstraction, or the relative and diverse views we acquire of it, and, as thus more or less variously determined, held to as fixed, is all there is of a world for us. But then, uncon- sciously to substitute any one or more of such constructions of it for the world is about as legitimate as the unknown substitution of a self-built house for the infinity and variety of the universe. Hence 92 University of Cincinnati Studies two facts come out clearly: (1) that the individual is involved in the world he achieves; (2) that, in the abstract, one such world is as real as another. The next division of this chapter, division C, is intended to enlarge upon this second point. The practice to overlook both these facts, however, is so ingrained in our usual view of things and the practice itself is so strikingly presented in a fragment of a poem by Robert Browning, that I shall proceed to quote it with subsequent comment. “The common problem, yours, mine, every one’s Is not to fancy what were fair in life, Provided it could be ; but, finding first What may be, then find how to make it fair Up to our means, a very different thing! No abstract, intellectual plan of life Quite irrespective of life’s plainest laws, But one, a man, who is a man and nothing more, May lead within a world which, by your leave, Is Rome or London, not Fool’s paradise. Embellish Rome, idealize away, Make paradise of London, if you can ; You’re welcome, nay, you’re wise.” These lines taken at their face value certainly sound plausi- ble ; but things are not always what they seem. He advocates a plan for a man who is a man and nothing more. But when is a man a man and nothing more? Is he a man when we conceive him as a natural animal, a noble savage, a Shakespeare, a mass of atoms, a group of cells, or an image of God? The fact is that he assumes a ready-made, prefixed existence of man, to apprehend whom, it would only appear necessary to open our eyes and look, whereas the truth remains that almost any conception of man is possible; that the whole matter remains an indeterminable prob- lem, and that no two men living are likely to agree in their full conception of what a man is or should be. So much for that! Now let us turn to the other phase of the poem. He demands a plan of the world for a man destined to live in a Rome or a Lon- don, and not in a fool’s paradise. Here the same sort of error confronts us. Rome or London is represented in what man’s view of them? In their vast, bewildering, multiplicity of detail of vast and most diverse relationship, man-made and otherwise, what man’s segment of them is the proper one, since nothing Relativity and Locke 93 less than an omniscience could possibly exhaust and embrace them all? The fact is that every man inhabits, and in his own complex nature offers additional elements for, a segment of them quite his own, and to substitute this segment for the whole is to convert his more or less concrete segment into an abstract symbol, — a very facile procedure, but one easily misleading and fraught with con- fusion. Rome and London, then, as well as the term man, as used in the poem, are sheer abstractions, conceived quite irrespective of the plainest laws, — ironically to re-phrase Browning. The principle of uniformity, as it reflects itself with specific terms in specific and circumscribed relations, is the only thing ap- proximating a fixity that is absolute. C I shall now set forth the claim that different individuals are, unavoidably, differently involved in the determination of reality, with its outcome for philosophy. I make no apology for again presenting the matter in the concrete. Every man inhabits a world of his own and the tongue he speaks is not always the tongue others speak. Untrained in music, how can I begin to picture that world, in all its serious interest, beauty, and significance, in which a Beethoven, a Wagner, or a Handel really had his being? Unless I have felt the heart-throb of nature as a Wordsworth felt it, can I really understand and appreciate half that Wordsworth writes and talks about? Keep- ing such facts in mind, we are in a position to appraise some very general convictions : among artists, that men have eyes yet see not ; among musicians, that men have ears yet hear not ; among poets, that men have hearts yet feel not ; and among thinkers, that men have brains yet think not. They forget that each of us and each of them has his special and conditioned range of vision, and, in consequence, his particular world, and that we, in each case, may be using all our faculties to their fullest extent even though we use them differently. Thus for an artist, there is no object in nature but has its constantly shifting and varying moods, tints, forms, expression, light and shade, and herein alone, he holds, do you get an object’s particular -soul and pulse. He sees a thousand shades and tints where we see none. Hence we go reputed as blind. But even if the botanist fails to note this rich play of light and shade, has the artist necessarily on the other hand the botanist’s keen perception for plant structure, 94 University of Cincinnati Studies or the physician’s keen perception for the most evanescent symptom of disease? And when you complicate the situation by the addition in each case of interests, aims, standards, and con- ditions more or less unique with the general world of each, and with each individual in particular, where in this state of affairs is one man likely to find the other ? But it may be argued that the difference in each case is nothing compared to what is held in common. If the world of the artist, in its difference, did not constitute the main world with him, why does his world so completely fill his space, that, not to exercise our eyes and faculties as he does, however much we exercise them dif- ferently, is nevertheless by him viewed as not using them at all. “The little more to him, and how much that is ; the little less, and what worlds between !” One man stands by an accepted fact or truth and is ready to die for it, which another mocks, but mocks for the reason that he, in turn, consciously or unconsciously, stands by some other accepted fact or truth which the former man may scorn. Professor James, within our own times, has rendered this order of experience an emphasis which demands a recognition even larger than has yet been accorded to it. Yet for convenience, I again turn to Robert Browning, the arch-relativist, for a trenchant formulation : “What does it all mean, poet? Well, Your brain’s beat into rhythm — you tell What we felt only ; you expressed You hold things beautiful the best, And pace them in rhyme so, side by side. ’Tis something, nay ’tis much — but then, Have you yourself what’s best for men? Are you — poor, sick, old ere your time — Nearer one whit your own sublime Than we who never have turned a rhyme? “And you, great sculptor — so you gave A score of years to art, her slave, And that’s your Venus — whence we turn To yonder girl that fords the burn! You acquiesce and shall I repine? What, man of music, you grown gray With notes and nothing else to say; Relativity and Locke 95 And thus Browning may have continued through the whole range and sweep of human interests and activities, with the re- sult that we unfailingly find what is ultimate in reality, within limits divergently affirmed in the experience of different men, and, yet, in each case, affirmed with a finality that appears to him conclusive. But with “our business living” ; “our needs ultimate” ; “our faculties suited to our state”; “our objects without prefixed bounds” ; how justify the claim that divergency in our views, in so far as they are fundamentally divergent, spells scepticism and that concord in our views, unless they are conditioned to be in con- cord, spells truth? I fail to see the logic of such a contention, just as I failed to see the logic of a view of reality that would claim to know reality as if the psycho-physical self, with all its varied needs, hopes, aspirations, defeats, sense of life, were not directly involved in its constitution, and, from a relativistic stand- point, varying in its significance, like things in general, from much to little or from little to much. “God has made the in- tellectual world harmonious and beautiful without us,” writes Locke, “but it will never come into our heads all at once; we must bring it home piecemeal, and there set it up by our own in- dustry, or else we shall have nothing but darkness and chaos within, whatever order and light be in things without us .” 5 The solution to this question of ultimate differences is found in pluralism ; namely, that from a cosmic point of view the psy- chical is as real and as ultimate as the physical ; 6 that music and art are as compelling in their reality as a stone or a house ; that af- fections, friendship, enmity are as ultimate as the atoms, electrons, or ions of science and far more concrete and definite to boot; that civilization may be and for us is more full of reality than crude nature, and that an Aristotle who thus finds the fulfill- ment of life in its developed and complex forms is far ahead of a Rousseau who would find it in his noble savage and in the return to simple life ; that, in the last analysis, to talk of a thing as real or ultimate or rational presupposes some standard in reference to which reality and rationality acquire whatever meaning we may be led to ascribe to them, and that, apart from such standard or standards, reality and rationality remain without one 5. Conduct of the Understanding, sec. 38. Italics mine. 6. Reality in its totality, in accord with the principles set forth, re- veals itself in circumscribed situations, each manifestion of which, in the abstract, is as real or unreal as the other. 06 University of Cincinnati Studies shred of sensible meaning attaching to them. And since every single fact of life must alike conform to this general truth of things, let the materialist, the sensationalist, the champions of conduct (as types of monists) stand by their ultimates if they will, but if they think they have condensed into their respective ultimates a truth and reality higher or better than the accepted ultimates of some other possible monist, it only remains necessary to turn them all over to some sound philosophical student, such as our Locke, to teach them individually the full extent of their unconscious dogmatism. For, as I stated in a previous chapter, the question is not so much whether we have gotten beyond Locke, but whether we have caught up to him. And in conclusion, I content myself in saying that the present accepted understand- ing of him is a travesty. | UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI STUDIES — Concluded VOLUME IV, 1908 1. The Effect of a Constant Stimulus upon Touch Localization. Pp. 1-49. Illustrated. 50 cents. L. A. Lurie. 2. Odd Prices and Bargains in Retail Trade. Pp. 1-28. 50 cents. R. C. Brooks. 3. The Authority of Law in Language. Pp. 1-26. 50 cents. G. P. Krapp. 4. Studies in Euripides — Hippolytus. Pp. 1-71. 75 cents. J. E. Harry. Price of bound volume, $1.75. VOLUME V, 1909 1 and 2. J. S. Mill’s Theory of Inductive Logic. In two parts : Part I, An Expository Outline, pp. 1-40, 50 cents ; Part II, A Discussion, pp. 1-55, 50 cents. G. A. Tawney. 3. Deficiencies of the Chromosome Theory of Heredity. Pp. 1-19. 35 cents. M. F. Guyer. 4. Forum Conche. The Latin text of the Municipal Charter and Laws of the City of Cuenca, Spain, with an introduction and critical notes by G. H. Allen. In two parts. Part I, pp. 1-92. $1.00. Price of bound volume, $1.75. VOLUME VI, 1910 1. Forum Conche. Part II. Pp. 1-134. $1.00. G. H. Allen. Price of Parts I and II taken together, $1.50. 2. Studies on Phagocata Gracilis (Leidy). Pp. 1-4L Three plates. 50 cents. L. D. Peaslee. 3. Authenticity and Sources of the “Origo Gentis Romanae.” Pp. 1-47. 50 cents. W. T. Semple. 4. The Study of Comparative Literature. Pp. 1-26: 25 cents. F. W. Chandler. Price of bound volume, $1.75. VOLUME VII, 1911 1. Organization of Work, by Louis Blanc. Translated from the First Edition. Pp. 1-59. 50 cents. Marie Paula Dickore. 2. Competitive and Monopoly Price. Pp. 1-39. 40 cents. F. C. Hicks. 3. Studies in Sophocles. Pp. 1-46. 50 cents. J. E. Harry. 4. An Old Portuguese Version of the Rule of Benedict. Pp. 1-78. 75 cents. J. M. Burnam. Price of bound volume, $1.75. Lfay/orc/ 1 _PAMPHIET BINDER ] Syracuse. N. Y. 9 Stockton, Colif.