Transcript Reading: More Barclay and Hume Part 1

When we last met, we were going through some criticisms of Barclay, and I had just gotten some onto the board when our time ran out. Let's have a look then at what I had on that board. Barclay says that God is one, eternal, infinitely wise, good, and all-perfect. But his hypothesis doesn't show that God is all those things. It’s not all those attributes that are justified. It only shows that God is all-knowing, and maybe all-powerful, and only in a certain sense. God is all-knowing in the sense that He knows all the perceptions He gives to all minds—all human minds in the world. And His being all-powerful need mean no more than that He gives them all their perceptions. That’s the same thing as creating the world that consists of minds and the perceptions in minds. But He doesn’t have to be infinite in power or infinite in knowledge to know everything that's going on in the world and to give everyone their perceptions all the time.

Let’s look at another point: being all-knowing and all-powerful doesn’t need to imply perfection. So I just made that point—see, God has to have an all-knowing mind to keep everything in existence when no humans are perceiving it. But He doesn’t have to be the God as He was defined previously in Rational Theology as the being with all and only perfections. The other attributes of God, like goodness and justice, and the claim that He’s all-perfect and has infinite perfections—these are just things Barclay slips into the discussion without justification. There’s an old saying in philosophy: “What’s freely asserted is freely denied.” If you don’t give me any reasons to think something is true, I don’t have to give you any money to deny it. If he’s not going to justify the claim, he shouldn’t make it. And if he does make a claim, he should give us the justification, the reasons why, so we can examine them and discuss it. But if he doesn’t provide any reasons, philosophically, it’s a black hole.

Now, this isn’t a complete list of criticisms we could make of Barclay. In fact, Barclay himself thought of some, and he tried to give answers to them. The main one that he thought of, apparently after he published his first work, is that in his first work, he just blithely assumes there’s no problem talking about minds. He sometimes uses the word "spirits" to emphasize that he means the non-physical thing that knows, thinks, wills, and feels. But why can’t we turn around and use the same critique he’s been using to destroy the idea of physical things to destroy the idea of spirits or minds?

I’ll read to you from part of his dialogues. (I assume that doesn’t mean they’re coming for me or something.)

Let’s just ignore that for now. In the dialogues, the two people talking are invented characters. One’s name is Hylas, which means "matter" in Greek, and the other’s name is Philonous, two Greek words that mean "lover of mind." So you can tell right away which one is Barclay and which is his imaginary debater. Hylas asks, “Answer me, are all our ideas perfectly inert beings, or are they agents? Are they active?”

Barclay, to be consistent, answers, “They’re entirely passive.”

Then Hylas says, “But isn’t God an agent and purely active at that?”

Philonous has to admit, “That sounds right.” No idea can be like or represent God. No idea, meaning no perception, can represent God or the nature of God. Remember, "idea" is used in this peculiar way among people from Locke onward to mean anything in the mind. Barclay is going to propose the term "notion" as a substitute for that. But for now, there’s no idea—that is, no perception—that represents God or the nature of God. Philonous says, “No, it can’t.”

Hylas continues, “Since you have no idea of God’s mind, how can you conceive it possible that things exist in His mind? Shouldn’t it be as impossible for you to conceive of that as it is for you to conceive of purely physical things outside the mind? And if you can conceive of the mind of God without having an idea of it, why can’t I be allowed to conceive of matter, even if I have no idea of it?”

So you’re going to have to be even-handed here. You’ll either have to say that God is inconceivable—in the sense that we can form no idea, no perception, no concept—or you’ll have to allow matter back into your philosophy.

It goes on: “You admit that there is spiritual substance, although you have no idea of it, while you deny that there can be material substance, because you have no notion or idea of it. Is this fair? To act consistently, you must either admit matter or reject spirit according to your own way of thinking. And according to your own principles, it should follow that you are left with only a system of floating ideas with no substance to support them—no spiritual substance, no mind. Words should not be used without meaning. And since there is no more meaning to spiritual substance than there is to material substance, if one is expelled, the other should be as well.”

Barclay tried to come up with a reply to this. He admitted, “I have no proper idea of God or of any other spirit mind. I do, nevertheless, know that I, who am a spirit or thinking substance, exist as certainly as I know that my ideas exist. I know this immediately and intuitively, although I do not perceive it the way I perceive a triangle or a color or an animal.” So, Barclay’s reply starts with him saying that he is intuitively aware of his own mind—something he had not previously put forward. Remember, he was saying there’s nothing in the mind but concepts and perceptions, and that concepts are all derived from perceptions. If you don’t have a perception of something, you don’t know it—you’re just speaking hot air by naming it. Yet now he’s taken that back.

So, I was reading from him.

Okay, we're right now. Unfortunately, this difficulty isn't really solved by Barclay’s move. The idea of "I have an intuitive awareness of my own mind." Okay, then there's something more in the mind than just ideas and concepts—there are intuitions. And why can't his opponent claim that on behalf of his own belief? Well, there doesn't seem to be any good reason given by Barclay why he couldn’t. Not only that, but this inference—or, I think it’s not really an inference (that’s not the right word for it)—admitting the idea of God on the grounds that there is no explanation for the continued existence of things when no human perceives them, and since we know from simple facts, like the candle burning down when no one's in the room, that things do continue to exist.

So, this is what recommends the all-knowing mind. But then Barclay has to admit that some contents of our minds are caused by other minds. What does he have in mind? The actions of other human beings, the actions of what we call their bodies, which are controlled by their minds. So, if there were other minds besides God’s—and Barclay wants to say there are—then they cause bodily movements in their own bodies, which come to us as sensations, and we see them. So, it’s not the case that God causes all of the perceptions that come to our minds. He never quite sorts this out. He doesn't give any reasons or make this a consistent system of ideas, because first he says God gives all the perceptions and perpetuates their existence by knowing them all. Then he says, well, some are given by other people as well. He never really explains how those two ideas fit together.

But there's also something different with Barclay's philosophy, and it’s fair to point it out as we close our discussion of him. Barclay wasn’t a philosopher by trade; he was a bishop. He thought he had hit on a clever argument as to why there’s no material substance, but he didn’t attempt, like Locke did, to set up a system, make everything fit together, and think as precisely as possible. Locke tells us at the beginning of his work that he’s trying to be as precise as possible and to explain as much as possible, sorting out past theories that don’t work, and so on. Barclay, on the other hand, was just trying to get across a great idea he had: that material substance turns out to be nothing more than our perceptions again. So, we never really get outside of ourselves or what’s given in this narrow space of our brains and minds. Maybe it wasn’t as serious to Barclay that these other issues were never solved, but I think it’s important to point them out anyway and say this is where he left things—for another philosopher who was a philosopher by trade and by practice, and that’s David Hume.

David Hume came from a somewhat well-to-do family. They weren’t ridiculously rich, but they owned their home, were well-off, and didn’t have to work for a living. This meant his parents sought a position for him that would count as a "gentleman’s" position, meaning he wouldn’t work with his hands, in the fields, or producing food or digging in a mine. He was expected to be an attaché to an ambassador or something like that. Hume got a good education and noted how he found himself mentally superior to his classmates. He was born in 1711 and died in 1776. (You remember my bad joke about that—it’s easy to remember when he died because that’s the year Gibbon published The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and, of course, the year the American colonies declared independence. That’s how most people will remember that date.)

This was a time in which science was burgeoning, building on the work of Galileo and Newton. You can add to that Boyle, Volta, Lavoisier, and more and more astronomers. New sciences were opening up—Lavoisier began what became chemistry, and physics had already started with Newton. Astronomy had developed with Copernicus and then especially Kepler, who published three laws of planetary motion and gave us mathematical formulas for predicting where and when we would see various heavenly bodies. This caught the imagination of everyone—the educated public and scientists alike.

Hume wanted to put things on a scientific basis, but for him, that meant showing how all of our experience reduces to sensations and combinations of them. He wanted to be consistent with that idea. To be consistent, he accepted all the problems left to him by Barclay. What do I mean by "accepted"? Hume admitted that we have no idea of material substance, and that the idea of an immaterial substance, like a mind, is just as ridiculous as material substance. We don’t have an idea of God. Barclay tried to say, "Well, I have an intuition of my own mind, and therefore I can think there might be another mind that knows everything." Hume’s response? “Get out of here.” There’s nothing in the mind but sensations, which he called impressions, and copies of them, which he called ideas. Let’s sort our terms out and not use them ambiguously. What’s in the mind are sensations and copies of sensations. The only difference between them is that present sense impressions are more lively and vivid than memories of them, which are copies. That’s all we have.

Hume’s philosophy rules out mental substances as well as physical ones. We don’t know there are physical objects, an external world, or God, and, to be consistent, Hume has to say we don’t know there are other finite minds in the world either.

It’s a tough corner to be backed into, right? Rational reasoning and theory-making are highly esteemed in Western European culture. When applied to things like astronomy, it leads to great achievements like predicting the position and movement of heavenly bodies with precision. Physics, when taken seriously, can explain a great many things—Newton’s laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics, gravitation, and free fall—all explain things that were once inexplicable. We see the beginnings of chemistry and electronics—Volta’s pile of metal discs in acid generates a current, marking the start of electrical science.

But when you turn to philosophy, which is supposed to give us the big picture—the nature of reality (ontology) and how we know things (epistemology)—it ends up telling us we don’t know whether minds or matter exist, or whether there’s a world outside our minds. The furthest it gets, philosophically speaking, is solipsism—the view that all we know exists is ourselves and our own perceptions. We don’t know what’s causing those perceptions. We naturally think that when we see a chair in the room, there’s a chair in the room causing that perception. But on examination, we can’t justify that belief. We can’t justify the existence of other minds either. Descartes’ question—how do we know others aren’t cleverly disguised robots—has no real answer because we can never peel back the layers of reality to get to the mind, and even if we could, it wouldn’t register as a perception since it has no physical properties.

But is this really the best philosophy can do? Centuries of philosophical labor and reasoning by the brightest minds, and all we can say is that for all we know, each one of us is the only thing that exists, and everything else is just a perception or a copy of a perception?

Humans arrive at this.

Inclusion by doing the same thing Locke did. Locke said what we need to tackle here is to analyze the mind, its powers, and how it operates, and see what the mind can and can't do. Hume starts exactly the same way. For Hume, the only method of freeing learning from these abstruse questions that traditional philosophy has devoted itself to is to show, through an exact analysis of its powers and capacities, that the mind is not equipped for such remote and abstruse ideas. "We must submit to this fatigue," Hume says, "in order to rid ourselves of it forever. I must cultivate a true theory of reality with some care in order to destroy what’s false. Accurate and just reasoning is the only universal remedy fit for all persons and all dispositions, and it alone can subvert this abstruse philosophy." By this, he means the philosophy of the Middle Ages, mixed with metaphysical jargon and popular superstition, which renders it impenetrable to reasoners and gives the illusion of being real science and wisdom. Hume has no time for all the talk about essences, God, and perfections that dominated the Middle Ages, and he doesn’t think modern philosophy has entirely overcome it.

Locke started out trying to be critical, as did Descartes, but they both ended up with God, souls, perfections, and so on. Hume thinks that's just silly. He continues, “It’s remarkable that, concerning the operations of the mind, though these are most intimately present to us, whenever they become the object of reflection, they seem to be involved in obscurity.” We are aware of our own minds, and it seems very clear that we have one, and that it performs operations such as perceiving, thinking, willing, feeling, conceiving, and so on. But when we turn our attention inward to the mind itself, to see how it works and what powers it has, it becomes an obscure thing. The eye cannot readily find lines and boundaries to distinguish the mind from what is not the mind. The objects are too fine to remain long in one aspect or another and to be truly apprehended in an instant.

It becomes, therefore, no small part of science merely to know the different operations of the mind, to separate them from each other, to classify them under their proper headings, and to correct whatever seems in disorder. If we can go further with this mental geography, we want to delineate the distinct parts and powers of the mind. It’s at least a satisfaction to go as far as we can. The more obvious this science may appear—and it’s not very obvious, he adds—the more contemptible it would be to be ignorant of it. All pretenders to philosophy and learning should try for this mental geography.

This, of course, is what God is. This is precisely what Hume is going to do—lay out the architecture of the mind, how it all works. He thinks that’s the first thing he has to do in order to say what the mind can and can’t know. Shall we, Hume asks, esteem it worthy of a philosopher’s labor to give us a true system of the planets and adjust the position and order of those remote bodies, while we overlook those who, with so much success, delineate the parts of the mind with which we are intimately connected? It would be hypocritical, Hume says, to think that philosophy has made any progress comparable to astronomy. Astronomy shows us when and where to expect planets to appear, the phases of the moon, and so on. But philosophy hasn’t even clearly delineated the powers of the mind or come to sound conclusions as to what the mind can and can’t do.

Now, Locke tried to do that, but in Hume’s opinion, Locke failed. To be fair to Locke, as I pointed out, he never really tried. He caught himself in inconsistencies and things he couldn’t explain—big holes he couldn’t even attempt to plug. Hume is going to say he doesn’t want to be caught doing that.

Here, then—and I’m reading from Hume—we may divide all the perceptions of the mind into two classes or species, which are distinguished by their different degrees of force and vivacity. The less forceful and lively are commonly called thoughts or ideas. The other species lack a proper name in our language (and in most others, I suppose, because no one but philosophers needed to distinguish them). Let us, therefore, use a little freedom and call these impressions, employing that word in a somewhat different sense from usual. By impressions, I mean all our more lively perceptions when we hear, see, feel, love, hate, desire, or will. These are perceptions or feelings that are present to someone, and they are more lively and vivid than any memory of them, which is less lively and vivid, as it only copies them. These copies Hume will call ideas. So, the first two terms he introduces are impressions, which are present, lively, and vivid percepts or feelings (feelings count in this for Hume), and ideas, which are less lively and vivid copies of impressions. Memories of impressions, for example, or reimagining something—“Yes, that was a terrible fire, I can picture it in my mind’s eye”—is a copy of what was originally an impression.

This much Hume wants to make clear right up front. "What has never been seen or heard may yet be conceived," he says, "nor is anything beyond the power of thought except what implies an absolute contradiction." What we can do with our conceiving power is piece together impressions in combinations they never had, or parts of one impression and parts of another into new combinations we’ve never seen. We can do the same thing with ideas, with copies of them. We don’t need the fire in front of us to think of fire coming out of the nose of a great beast flying through the air. Thus, we conceive of a fire-breathing dragon. We can conceive of all sorts of things, except those that are contradictory.

To prove this, the following two arguments will, I hope, be sufficient. First, when we analyze our thoughts or ideas, no matter how compounded, we always find that they resolve into simple ideas that were copied from preceding feeling or sentiment, or perception. So, the first thing is that he appeals to Barclay’s argument. The compound impressions and ideas can be analyzed to show they are comprised of simple ideas.

So that was the shocking argument of Barclay: that if you take any of the properties that are supposed to be purely physical, and when you try to explain what you mean by them, all you can do is name sensations. They resolve or reduce to sensations. Barclay’s argument was that physical properties resolve themselves into feelings. Hume accepts this first argument from Barclay.

Those who assert that this position is not universally true, or who deny that it has no exceptions, have one easy method of refuting it. All you have to do, Hume says, is produce one idea that does not resolve into sensations or feelings—copies of those impressions. In the same way, it is incumbent on us, if we maintain our doctrine, to produce the impression or lively perception that corresponds to any idea we have. So, is the term meaningful or meaningless? If I can show which ideas or copies of impressions it refers to, it has meaning. If I can't, it's meaningless—throw it out. We bind ourselves to the same rules we’re asking our opponents to be bound by.

Second, here’s Hume’s second big point: if it happens that, due to a defect in an organ of sensation, a person is not susceptible to a particular species of sensation, this can show that we are wrong about our doctrine. Hume is thinking of someone born this way, like someone born blind, deaf, or without a sense of smell or taste. If someone lacks a certain perceptual ability, you can show that there is more in the mind than just impressions and their copies by having that person describe the impressions they’ve missed due to that lack.

To explain it more clearly, if someone lacks a certain perceptual ability, then have that person describe the impressions they cannot experience. For instance, if you want to deny that what's in our minds consists only of impressions and ideas that are copies of those impressions, then have a person born blind describe a color. Have someone born deaf describe a certain sound, maybe its pitch or its timbre. If someone born without a particular sensory organ cannot perceive a certain species of perception, then you can show there is more in the mind than just perceptions by having a blind person describe which side of an object is blue and which side is red, and where the difference occurs. Hume is confident they can't do that—the blind can't describe color, and the deaf can't know what it’s like to hear. These are his two main examples.

Hume continues: “Hence, a proposition that seems simple and intelligible in itself—if properly used—could render every dispute equally intelligible and banish all the jargon of philosophy that has taken possession of metaphysical reasoning and brought disgrace upon philosophers. If we could just get this much straight, it would be a huge step forward. We wouldn't be talking about essences and quiddities, and we wouldn't be talking about proofs of the existence of perfections and God's having them all. There were even arguments about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. We'd get rid of all that stuff. Let's start by showing that the mind has only impressions and ideas, and that’s what gives our language meaning. If you use terms that don't refer to any impression or idea, they’re meaningless."

Hume goes on: "All ideas, especially abstract ones, are naturally faint and obscure. The mind has but a slender hold of them. They are apt to be mixed up with other ideas they resemble. And when we have often employed a term without a distinct meaning, we are apt to imagine that it has a very determined and clearly distinct property attached to it. But on the contrary, impressions—that is, sensations—are strong and vivid. The limits between them are more exactly determined, and it is not easy to fall into error or mistake with regard to them. When we entertain, therefore, any suspicion that a philosophical term is employed without meaning, we need only inquire from what impression that supposed idea is derived.”

Now, Locke in the end was willing to admit—I'm sorry, I mean Descartes here. Descartes was willing to admit that we have sensations and we have concepts. But for him, ideas are not just copies of impressions. We know a lot of things that go well beyond impressions and sensations. His examples were the laws of logic, the laws of mathematics. We don't know these things by sensation. Even "one plus one is two"—we don't know that by sensation, not because there are exceptions, but because we can’t see the distant past and future. We don't know that one plus one has always equaled two, everywhere and always, but that’s what we mean by it—it’s a universal truth. So, Descartes believed the mind has an innate ability to see logical and mathematical truths, and a few other axioms, intuitively grasping them and their truth. Hume, however, is ruling all that out. There's no such thing. Whatever's in the mind is an impression or a copy of one. An impression is a sensation. So, if anybody uses a term, and we wonder what it means, or they insist it’s important, we ask: “From what sensations is it derived?”

Descartes wouldn't allow you to derive all knowledge from sensations. For him, sensations start our reasoning—they prime the pump. But once our rational minds begin to work, they can see rational truths as self-evident, which are not derived from any impression. They are occasioned by sensations—having this or that impression gets the mind working, and then it independently grasps these truths, which can't be derived from sensation, like "one plus one equals two," or "things equal to the same thing are equal to each other," or "nothing can be both true and false at the same time in the same sense."

We just read where Hume said we can form ideas—copies of memories or concepts of any impression we’ve had—and the only thing we can't conceive of is what contradicts itself. How is Hume going to show that the law of non-contradiction is derivable from sense perception? That’s the task he’s set for himself. Let me finish that section from Hume, and we'll close today's discussion with it.

To find out whether a term has meaning, we need only inquire from what impression that supposed idea is derived. If it’s impossible to assign any impression to it, this will confirm our suspicion that it’s meaningless. By bringing ideas into such clear light, we may reasonably hope to remove all disputes concerning their nature and reality. Hume wants precision: for any term anybody uses, tell me what sensations it’s derived from. If you can't, you don't know it has any meaning. But then, what about the logical and mathematical truths the rationalists like Descartes held? They claimed we know some things by sensation and a lot of other things because they are rational, and our minds have the capability of reflecting on the rational order of things. If you pressed them on how our minds got this capability, they would say, "We were created that way by God." For Descartes, God knows all rational truths and created them. In his view, the truths are eternal and uncreated. We’re not going into that now. How is Hume going to deal with this?

There are no external physical objects—we can’t know that. We can't describe the mind’s structure, though we can infer some of its powers. It can perceive, and it can remember or conceive of past impressions. But that's it—that’s the content of the mind. It will be interesting to see how Hume explains the rest of knowledge and what he does with science. Hume doesn’t want to abandon science. Remember, two big concerns behind all this, which rarely bubble to the surface, are: how can we keep science, and how can we keep free will? We'll see what Hume’s answer to that is in our next discussion