A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Deel 1. The Necessary Presuppositions of Philosophy

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Chapter III
The ideal of personality and the ideal of science in the critical transition to the primacy of the ideal of personality

§ 1 - The psychological turn in the science-ideal and its transcendental idea of origin

Rationalist mathematical dualism, rationalist mechanical naturalism and rationalist mathematical idealism prove to be the chief types in which the transcendental ground-Idea of Humanist thought was specified during the first phase of its development since the rise of the new science-ideal. The latter had built a new metaphysics and it was in the cadre of this metaphysics that the dialectical tension between the nature - and the freedom-motives displayed itself.

As long as the primacy of the mathematical science-ideal was maintained, it made no sense to oppose rationalism to empiricism. Hobbes was doubtless an empiricist in the epistemological sense. Nevertheless, his empiricism was of an extremely rationalist stamp, since it conceived of the process of knowledge itself in terms of the mechanical laws of movement.

The psychological turn in the ideal of science in empiricism since Locke.

Since Locke, however, empiricism brought a psychological turn into the science-ideal. The latter retained its primacy, nevertheless, the turn toward psychologism was highly significant. The science-ideal began to liberate itself, in an epistemological sense from metaphysics. It no longer sought its common denominator(s) for the different aspects of reality in one or two metaphysical concepts of substance. It now sought it within the functional apparatus of human knowledge itself, and at least its

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inner tendency was to seek it in the psychical function of feeling and sensation alone.

The ‘substance’, the ‘Ding an sich’, became the epistemological X, the unknown and unknowable background of the ‘empirical world’ which is given only in psychical impressions and perceptions.

According to the subject-object-relation in the psychical aspect of human experience, there is to be distinguished an outer world, given only in objective sensations, and an inner world of the subjective operations of the mind which are to be psychically perceived in the so-called ‘reflection’ or ‘internal sense’ only¹. According to Locke experience is exhausted by these two ‘sources’.

The understanding or the logical function borrows all ‘Ideas’ from them. Just as the ‘external material things’ are the objects of psychical sensation, the operations of the mind (including passions and feelings) are the object of inner perception or reflection². For the rest, Locke's division of the whole of human experience into ‘sensation’ and ‘reflection’, or as it was later to be called, the distinction between outward and inner experience (‘aüszeren’ and ‘inneren Sinn’ in Kant), is the perfect counterpart of Descartes' dualistic separation of ‘extensio’ and ‘cogitatio’. Although Locke denies the possibility of theoretical metaphysics, his psychological dualism between ‘sensation’ and ‘reflection’ remains grounded in the conviction that behind these two realms of experience, a material substance and a spiritual one must be present. And the latter are the causes of the external sensible and the internal spiritual impressions of experience. In Descartes these substances are supposed to possess the sharpest possible independence in respect to each other, although he was not able to maintain this dualism in an integral way. Locke agrees, except that he no longer considers the substances to be knowable. And if the material sub-

1 In his Essay concerning human understanding, vol. I, Bk 2 ch. I § 4 Locke observes as to the latter: ‘This source of Ideas every man has wholly in himself; and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense. But as I call the other sensation, so I call this reflection, the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself.’

2 Ibid. in fine.

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stance can be only an unknown X to human knowledge, then, in the nature of the case, the monistic materialist metaphysics of Hobbes must also lose its foundation.

Nevertheless, Locke, too, did not maintain his dualistic position in an integral sense. Although he attempted to oppose sensation and reflection as two entirely independent sources of experience, he did not ascribe to both of them an equal originality. According to him, the inner perception of the operations of the mind is not possible unless the mind by sensations of the outer world has first been stimulated to a series of operations which are the first content of its reflection.

This is the very reason why in the new empiricist school of Locke the same polar tensions were present as in the metaphysical rationalism of the Cartesian one.

Both Hobbes and Leibniz had sought to free themselves of the Cartesian dualism. In like manner empiricist-nominalist trends arose which sought to remove the psychological dualism. The new psychologism turned in the mechanistic association-psychology (already stimulated by Hobbes) of a Hartley, Brown, Priestly, Darwin et al., to the naturalist and materialist pole. It turned to the idealist pole in the spiritualism of Berkeley. The latter, however, does not belong to the closer community of Humanistic thought, because of his scholastic accommodation of the new psychologism to authentic Christian motives. Malebranche had done the same with Cartesianism.

The inner antinomy in Locke's psychological dualism.

Locke's psychological dualism involved itself in yet sharper antinomies than did the metaphysical dualism of Descartes.

Indeed, although he acknowledges innate faculties of the soul, Locke contests from the empiricist standpoint the ‘innate Ideas’. The point at which he differed in principle from Descartes in this matter consisted in his view that the understanding owes all its content to the simple or elementary psychical representations (‘Ideas’) given in sensation and reflection. Thought can obtain no knowledge beyond the reach of these representations. Locke even refuses to conceive of mathematical thought as purely logical, as Descartes and Leibniz had done.

The simple sensible and ‘spiritual’ impressions of psychical experience which the mind must receive purely passively, are sharply distinguished by Locke from the complex representations (‘Ideas’). In the latter, thought is actively and freely opera-

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tive, but still remains constantly bound to the material of the ‘simple Ideas’.

The ‘simple Ideas’ owe their origin to sensation and reflection and they not only include pleasure, pain, joy, and grief, but also the representations of force, causality, unity and reality.

The ‘complex ideas’, in which Locke includes also the ‘universalia’, i.e. the universal generic concepts acquired by abstraction, are freely formed by the understanding out of the combination of ‘simple’ ones. Among these complex Ideas, the number of which is infinite, Locke investigates in particular the concepts of number, space, infinity, the concept of identity (chiefly that of personal identity), that of power (especially in connection with the problem of the freedom of the will) and that of substance.

Thus psychological analysis dissolves the entire content of knowledge into simple psychical impressions. Consequently, even the mathematical science-ideal with its Idea of free creative mathematical thought must be given up, if the analysis is to be carried through consistently. But this consequence was entirely contrary to Locke's intention. He continued with Descartes to view mathematical thought, with its strict deductive coherence, as the mainstay of the ideal of science. The total psychologizing of scientific thought was first carried through by Berkeley and Hume. And so Locke's psychological dualism necessarily involved itself in the following antinomy: on the one hand it must reduce the concepts of mathematical thought, with respect to their proper mathematical meaning, to passive psychical impressions of experience; and at the same time, it continues to ascribe a free creative power to reflection in its active character of scientific thought. This antinomy originated from the attempt to furnish a psychological foundation for the mathematical science-ideal.

From Locke's travel-diary it appears that he originally gave up the mathematical ideal of science in the interest of absolutized psychological analysis¹. In his Essay, however, this radical psychological standpoint is abandoned and he tried on the one hand to bind mathematical thought to the psychical representations, and on the other hand to maintain the concepts of mathematical thought as the very foundation of the reality of experience. The psychological point of view predominates in the first

1 See Cassirer op. cit. II, p. 243 ff.

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two books; in the fourth book, however, the mathematical science-ideal predominates. Almost imperceptibly Locke's psychological dualism is transformed into a radical dualism between psychical experience and creative thought. This dualism, however, was threatened at the root by Locke's absolutized psychological startingpoint.

And this also explains why in the further development of the psychologizing trend of thought the attack was launched in the first place against the dualistic separation between ‘sensation’ and ‘reflection’.

In his psychological analysis the world of experience is dissolved by Locke into atomistic psychical elements, which as such exhibit no orderly inner coherence, but nevertheless are irresistably related by the consciousness to a common, though unknown, bearer (substance).

Reflexion may possess the capacity to join these given elements in an arbitrary manner, as the 24 letters of the alphabet¹; but such freedom to unite remains arbitrary. And an orderly coherence between the simple Ideas of experience cannot be based on arbitrariness. Unlike Hume, Locke had not yet attempted to reinterpret this orderly coherence in a psychological manner. His concept of order was still that of the mathematical science-ideal.

Thus psychological analysis necessarily led to the conclusion that no scientific knowledge of empirical reality is possible.

And at the same time it led to the conclusion that the necessary orderly coherence in the joining of concepts, without which science is not possible, cannot find its origin in the psychical impressions of experience.

Locke asserted that exact science would be impossible, if there were no necessary relations between the Ideas. According to him, these relations are elevated above the temporal process of the psychical impressions of experience and possess an eternal constancy. Otherwise one could never pass universally valid propositions. A man would ever remain bound to the psychical perception of the individual impressions of experience².

1 Essay concerning human understanding II, 7 § 10. The Idea of an alphabet of logical thought has here acquired a psychological rather than a mathematical sense.

2 Essay IV, 1 § 9: ‘If the perception that the same Ideas will eternally have the same habitudes and the same relations be not a sufficient ground of knowledge, there could be no knowledge of general propositions in mathematics; for no mathematical demonstration would be any other than particular: and when a man had demonstrated any proposition concerning one triangle or circle, his knowledge would not reach beyond that particular diagram. If he would extend it farther, he must renew his demonstration in another instance, before he could know it to be true in another like triangle and so on: by which means one could never come to the knowledge of any general propositions.’

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We saw, however, that Locke did not in the least intend to approve of the drawing of this sceptical conclusion from his psychological resolution of all the content of knowledge into isolated psychical ‘elements’. On the contrary, he remains true to the mathematical science-ideal, and affirms his belief in the super-temporal necessary coherence of the concepts of thought. True science, according to him, is possible wherever we deal only with the necessary connection of concepts, rather than with the ‘empirical reality of things’. Such is the case in mathematics and in ethics.

Locke maintains the mathematical science-ideal with its creation-motive, though in a limited sphere.

Here it is the understanding itself that creates its objects, i.e. the necessary relations between the Ideas. The mind forms the archetypes, the original patterns to which the things in the experience of reality must conform. A triangle possesses in an empirical form the same sum of its angles as does the universal triangle in the mathematical concept. Moreover, according to Locke, what is valid for the mathematical complex Idea is just as valid for ‘moral Ideas’. These Ideas too are absolutely independent of empirical reality, independent of the question whether or not human actions are really directed by them. ‘The truth of Cicero's doctrine of duties does not suffer any injury by the fact that no one in the world exactly follows its precepts or lives according to it in its portrayed example of a virtuous man.’

Therefore, according to Locke, exact proofs are as possible in ethics as in mathematics.

The thesis: ‘where there is no property, there is no injustice either,’ is no less accurate than any thesis in Euclid. Mathematical science and ethics furnish us with apriori knowledge, infallible, true and certain.

Thus it is clear that in spite of the epistemological-psychologi-

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cal turn of his investigation, Locke retains completely the fundamentals of the mathematical science-ideal. In his transcendental ground-Idea the latter still possesses the primacy over the ideal of personality.

With a tenacious faith, equal to that of Descartes and Leibniz, Locke clung to the Idea that human personality can only maintain its freedom of action by being obedient to sovereign mathematical thought.

However, because of the psychological turn which the Cartesian cogito had acquired in Locke's epistemological research, there arose an insoluble inner antinomy in the foundation of the mathematical ideal of science.

This antinomy is produced by the fact that the ‘sovereign reason’, in which the Humanistic ideal of personality had concentrated itself, refused to accept the dogmatic theory concerning the ‘Ideae innatae’ in their Cartesian sense¹.

1 Riehl, Der Phil. Kritizismus, supposes that no antinomy may here be indicated in Locke's system. This statement contains several errors. In the first place, in the Prolegomena we have pointed out the untenability of an opposition between the genetic and critical view-point. Nevertheless, in Riehl's argument this distinction plays its confusing rôle. He does not see that the question about the origin of our logical concepts is a transcendental-critical one, because it cannot be solved without a transcendental Idea of the origin and the mutual relation of the different modal aspects of reality. In the second place, Riehl forgets that Locke in the first two books of his essay had considered unity, force and causality as simply Ideas, and that he proceeds upon the assumption that all complex Ideas possess the simple Ideas as their elements. Locke did not yet know Kant's doctrine of the apriori forms of intuition ond understanding.

The tendency toward the origin in Locke's opposition to the innate Ideas, and the transcendental Idea of origin in Locke's epistemology.

For Locke's opposition to innate Ideas can only be explained in terms of the internal tendencies of the psychological ideal of science. The latter will not permit any restriction upon its sovereign freedom. Locke, like Hobbes, could only view the innate Ideas as an arbitrary restriction placed upon the sovereignty of thought. Descartes, as we have seen, viewed these Ideas only as potentially innate. In fact, for him they served to check the postulate of the continuity of the science-ideal so that, in due time, the autonomy of creative mathematical thought might be saved. So little did Descartes account for the possibility of

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mathematical thought, that he permitted it to become a static ‘res cogitans’. Locke was the first Humanist thinker to grant to psychology the central task of explaining the origin and limits of human knowledge and of critically examining the validity of its foundations. Therefore, he could only view the dogmatic acceptance of innate ideas as an attack upon the very sovereignty of thought.

If the psychological origin¹, the psychological ἀϱχή, of mathematical thought with its creative concepts is not shown, then, according to Locke, the ideal of science does not proceed from the sovereign self-consciousness, but from a dogmatical faith in authority. And it is just this latter that the ‘Aufklärung’ intended to combat with all the means at its disposal: ‘The way to improve our knowledge is not, I am sure, blindly and with an implicit faith, to receive and swallow principles; but is, I think, to get and fix in our minds clear, distinct and complete Ideas, as far they are to be had, and annex them to their proper and constant names.’ So Locke writes in the fourth book of his Essay concerning human understanding (Ch. 12, sect. 6).

The antinomy in Locke's thought which we must establish between the psychologized Idea of origin and the mathematical ideal of science, was disguised by his limiting scientific knowledge to the sphere of the non-real.

1 Locke himself qualified his Essay concerning human understanding, as an enquiry ‘into the original, certainty and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent.’ (I, 1 § 2). And in book II, 1 § 24, he writes, after having established sensation and reflection, sensory perception and internal introspection as the only sources of our knowledge: ‘All those sublime thoughts which tower above the clouds, and reach as high as heaven itself, take their rise and footing here: in all that good extent, wherein the mind wanders, in those remote speculations, it may seem to be elevated with, it stirs not one jot beyond those Ideas which sense or reflection have offered for its contemplation.’

The distinction between the knowledge of facts and the knowledge of the necessary relations between concepts.

For this purpose Locke introduced a fundamental distinction between the knowledge of empirical facts and the scientific knowledge of the necessary relations between concepts.

A distinction which had previously been made by Hobbes and

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would later be taken over by Hume. We shall see that it no longer could have any critical value for the latter.

In opposition to Descartes, however, Locke maintained the view that mathematical and moral judgments are synthetical and not merely logical. From the standpoint of his psychologism no possibility existed to ground synthetic judgments otherwise than on the single psychical impressions of experience.

This is exactly what Hume later did in a very consistent manner. Now Locke, in the fourth book of his Essay, introduced, in addition to ‘sensation’ and ‘reflection’, a new faculty of cognition, namely the intuition of the ‘cogito’. This faculty was proclaimed to be the indubitable foundation of all exact scientific knowledge and was thought of as the basis of mathematical proof (‘demonstratio’). But by introducting this faculty he really turned away from the paths of his psychologizing epistemology.

Descartes had also founded the certainty of mathematical knowledge on the intuitive certainty of the thinking self-consciousness. But he considered that mathematical knowledge originated in creative logical thought alone, apart from any assistance from sensory perception.

It was precisely against this purely analytical conception of scientific thought that Locke directed his thesis that, if thought is to lead us to knowledge, it must always remain joined to the material of psychical sensations.

Locke recognized that the continuity and infinity of space and time go beyond the perception of particular empirical sensations. Nevertheless, his analyses, in the second book of his Essay, of the complex Ideas of number, space, time, and infinity are invariably joined to the simple impressions of experience.

Thus the ultimate termination of Locke's psychological analysis of knowledge in the face of mathematical thought signifies a capitulation of his critique which is replaced here by the dogmatic proclamation of the primacy of the mathematical science-ideal.

The psychological epistemology had only caused a rupture in this latter, because Locke no longer deemed it possible to grant to mathematical thought domination over empirical reality. Physics and biology are, according to him, entirely dependent upon sense perception and cannot be subject to any mathe-

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matical method of demonstration: ‘Certainty and demonstration are things we must not in these matters pretend to’¹.

Nevertheless, we can observe in the epistemological turn of Locke's philosophy the germ of a critical self-reflection regarding the root of the science-ideal. This self-reflection was soon to cause a radical reaction against the rationalism of the ‘Enlightenment’. It was to lead to the granting of primacy to the ideal of personality. For Locke irrevocably rejected the Cartesian deduction of ‘Sum res cogitans’ from ‘Cogito ergo sum’. In other words to mathematical thought was denied the competency to identify itself with the ‘sovereign personality’, as the root of the science-ideal.

Similarly Locke refused to resolve the will into a mode of mathematical thought.

Thus the science-ideal was critically emancipated from the domination of a metaphysics, in which, in the last analysis, mathematical thought had been exalted as the origin and root of the cosmos. This emancipation was to have a radical significance for the further development of Humanistic philosophical thought.

The emancipation of the mathematical ideal of science from the rationalistic metaphysics of nature opened the way to the insight that the root of reality is not to be discovered by scientific thought. And it now became possible to see that the science-ideal must have its fundamentals in the ideal of personality.

The consciousness of the absolute autonomy and freedom of personality was not clearly expressed in Humanistic philosophy, as long as the root of reality was sought in a material substance. Nor was it clearly expressed as long as a material substance was opposed to a ‘res cogitans’.

1 Essay iv, 3 § 26, As is known, Locke retracted this statement with respect to physics after he learned from Newton the method of scientific physics. See Riehl, Der phil. Kritizismus (3e Aufl. I, p. 89).

§ 2 - The monistic psychological type of the humanistic transcendental ground-idea under the primacy of the science-ideal

However, before the transcendental Humanist ground-Idea could acquire this final turn and before Humanistic thought could really follow the transcendental direction which is pecu-

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liar to Kant's ‘Critiques’, it had to endure a serious crisis in which it would appear, that a radical psychologism in epistemelogy must undermine the foundations both of the ideal of science and of the ideal of personality.

The credit for having performed this preparatory critical work must unquestionably be given to Hume. This keen thinker had inwardly outgrown the spirit of the ‘Enlightenment’. Nevertheless he continued to accept the primacy of the science-ideal in its psychological turn. Locke had previously undermined the metaphysical conceptions of nature and human personality. By means of his psychological critique of knowledge, Hume reduced them to absurdity.

The fact that Hume in his psychologism proceeded from the standpoint of the Humanistic science-ideal is evident from the announcement of the aim of his research in the second book of his main work, Treatise upon Human Nature. Here he states, that he desired to achieve the same result in the field of the phenomena of human nature as had been attained in astronomy since Copernicus. He desired to reduce all phenomena to the smallest possible number of simple principles¹. The principle of the economy of thought took a central position in this ideal of science. This same principle had been praised by Leibniz, in his essay on the philosophical style of Nizolius, as one of the treasure troves of Nominalism².

1 A Treatise of Human Nature II, Part I, Sect. III, p. 81. I am quoting from the 4 vol. edition of Green and Grose.

2 This principle has in itself nothing to do with nominalism. Aristotle referred to it in his criticism of the Platonic ideas. And Aristotle, to be sure, was not a nominalist.

The psychologized conception of the science-ideal in Hume. Once again the nominalistic trait in the ideal of science.

The science-ideal, however, now received a radical objective-psychological turn. All abstract concepts, which are expressed in general symbols of language must in the last analysis be reduced to individual sensory ‘impressions’ as the simplest elements of consciousness. There may not remain a rest in our supposed ‘knowledge’ which is not resolved into these simple psychological elements. If it does, the psychological ideal of science is still subjected to a dogmatic limitation. And the latter must be overcome by sovereign analysis.

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In this is evident the strong nominalistic tenor of Hume's psychologism. I would here like to point out once more the misconception in the traditional opinion which presumes that modern nominalism manifests itself only in this so-called empiricist form. That this view is erroneous is apparent, if we remember that the so-called ‘rationalism’ desired as much as ‘empiricism’ to discover by analysis the simplest elements of knowledge. It was just by this method that rationalism thought it had found the guarantee for the creative continuity of mathematical thought.

The difference between Hume and Leibniz consists only in the basic philosophic denominator chosen by ‘sovereign reason’ to bridge over the diversity of the modal aspects of our cosmos. In Leibniz the ultimate origin of empirical reality is creative mathematical thought, in Hume it is to be found in psychological analysis.

As we have seen before, a moderate nominalism is quite compatible with the recognition of a necessary and foundational function of universal concepts (according to the ideal significance of symbols). The only condition is that universal concepts and their mutual relations must be recognized as having their origin in creative thought itself. They may not be thought of as having a foundation ‘in rē’, outside of mind¹. Hume, however, is not a moderate nominalist but rather a radical one.

In an individualist manner he resolved the ‘universal representations’ into ‘impressions’, as the simplest elements of consciousness. Nevertheless, this resolution was actually the exact psychological counterpart of the resolution of complex concepts into the simplest conceptual elements by mathematicism².

1 With respect to this, Berkeley's Alciphron furnishes a convincing proof. In it he overcame the extreme sensationalist nominalism of his earlier writings. He even recognizes the logical conformity to laws in the relations between the Ideas, although, in a nominalistic fashion, the function of universality is only ascribed to the signs. But the signs, which constitute the material and instrument of all scientific knowledge, are now for Berkeley no longer arbitrary names. On the contrary the representative character of symbols has now become the foundation of the possibility of our knowledge. They represent the validity of the relations in our thought.

2 Compare in particular Leibniz' exposition in his Meditationes de cognitione, veritate et ideis (1664) (Erdmann, p. 79) of the relation of the primitive (that is simple and basic) concepts to the complex.

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What Hume viewed as the ‘simplest elements’ of consciousness, and therefore as ‘data’, no more belongs to the real data of our experience than a single mathematical concept does.

In his penetrating critique of the ‘abstract Ideas’ which Locke still maintained, even Berkeley had overlooked the fact that the concept of a ‘simple psychical element of consciousness’ is itself no less abstract than that of a ‘triangle in general’.

Hume began by demolishing the barriers which Locke in his dualistic conception had raised between ‘sensation’ and ‘reflexion’. This dualism in Locke was in the last analysis founded on his belief in the existence of a material and a spiritual substance. For without the latter the entire distinction between external and internal experience in his epistemology would lack a foundation.

But even Berkeley, from his ‘idealist’ psychologistic standpoint, had completely resolved ‘nature’ into the sensory psychical impressions. His well-known thesis ‘esse est percipi’ became the psychological counterpart of Leibniz' mathematical idealism in respect to the world of phenomena. Therefore, he must also discard the distinction between primary and secondary qualities of matter that had been made by Locke in accordance with Galileo's and Newton's physics.

Hume subsumed all of cosmic reality, in all of its modal aspects of meaning, under the denominator of sensation. In a much more radical sense than in Locke, psychologism began to resolve the cosmos into the sensory contents of psychical consciousness, into perceptions¹. It must be granted, however, that in this respect Hume's Treatise proceeds in a much more radical line than his Enquiry.

1 Treatise I, Part II, Sect. VI p. 371): ‘To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive.
Now since nothing is ever present to the mind but perceptions, and since all Ideas are deriv'd from something antecedently present to the mind, it follows, that 'tis impossible for us so much as to conceive or form an Idea of anything specifically different from Ideas and impressions. Let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appear'd in that narrow compass. This is the universe of the imagination.’

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Hume and Pyrrhonic scepticism. Sextus Empiricus.

This radical psychologism had an outward point of contact in ancient philosophy, just as Humanist metaphysics had. The Pyrrhonic scepticism which had been transmitted to modern thought especially in the writings of Sextus Empiricus: Pyrrhonic Hypotyposes and Against the Mathematicians, had methodically turned down the same path. But it had a purely negative tendency and the ultimate intention of denying every criterion of truth¹. Recent investigations have made it very probable, that Hume was strongly influenced by the method of Sextus Empiricus, even though his defective knowledge of Greek presumably kept him from reading the Hypotyposes in the original². However, in 1718, Sextus Empiricus' work had been published in a Latin translation and in 1725 it was published anonymously in a French translation which is now ascribed to Huart.

During this period Hume studied in Edinburgh, where much of his time was occupied with the study of classic writers. In addition, a noteworthy harmony has been discovered between Hume and the connoisseur of Pyrrhonism, Crousaz, in the theory of perceptions, in the psychological treatment of logic, in the doctrine of imagination and of habit in the association of impressions. Crousaz was professor of philosophy and mathematics at the University of Lausanne, and had devoted an extensive work to Pyrrhonism³.

1 The Pyrrhonic thesis taken over by Hume and Berkeley: ‘Being is appearance’ can be found in Sextus Empiricus, Pyrr. Hyp. Ic. XIV, 8th trope.

2 B.M. Laing, David Hume (1933), p. 74 f. I refer to this book also for the following particulars. In his Dialogues concerning natural religion (W.W. II, 376 ff) Hume repeatedly mentions the sect of the Pyrrhonists.

3 Examen du Pyrrhonisme, ancien et moderne, 1733.

Sceptical doubt in Hume, as in Descartes, has only methodological significance.

Nevertheless, Hume did not have the slightest intention of following Montaigne and Bayle by ending in a destructive Pyrrhonistic scepticism.

On the contrary, in him scepticism had no other significance than it had in Descartes; it was only intended to be methodological, that is to say, methodological in the sense of the psycholo-

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gical ideal of science, which in order to carry through its principle of continuity must also repudiate the dualistic division between ‘sensation’ and ‘reflection’¹. Reflexion with its impressions and their corresponding ‘ideas’ (representations, which, in Hume, are identical with ‘concepts’) must be reduced to a dependent function, to a mere image of ‘sensation’ with its sensory ‘impressions’.

It is precisely this reduction which, according to Hume, makes it possible to conquer scepticism by discovering an unassailable criterion of truth.

1 See Treatise I, Part I Sect II (p. 317): ‘...the impressions of reflexion are only antecedent to their correspondent ideas; but posterior to those of sensation, and deriv'd from them.’ (I am italicizing).

The criterion of truth.

Hume seeks this criterion of truth in the demonstration of the ‘original impression’ from which the idea is derived². In him ‘impressions’ include all sensations, passions and emotions as they originally appear in the psychical function³. But they are not conceived of by him in their subjective actuality; rather, in the line of the ideal of science, they are comprehended according to their objective content, as the elements of phenomena.

The ‘impressions’ are the sole data in human experience. By ‘Ideas’ or ‘thoughts’, Hume understands only the apperceptions of thought and reasoning which are derived from sensory impressions; they are nothing but copies of impressions, which in their elementary forms only distinguish themselves from the latter by a decreased sensory intensity. Even ‘Ideas’ which at first sight do not appear to have any connection with ‘impressions’, upon closer examination give evidence that they have arisen from them. How, according to Hume, does a false Idea come into being? The answer is that either the original sensory impression is related to an Idea, which is the image of an other impression, or, vice versa, an idea is brought into relation with an impression of which it is not the copy.

With respect to the Ideas which he considered to be false,

2 Enquiry concerning human understanding, Sect. V, Part i.

3 Treatise I, Part 1, Sect. I (p. 311). Thereby, passions, desires and emotions are conceived of by Hume as impressions of the ‘reflections’. The latter themselves arise from ideas of pleasure and displeasure, and these Ideas, in turn, are copies of sensory impressions of hot, cold, hunger and thirst, etc.

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Hume set himself the task of discovering the sensory impressions, from which these Ideas are actually derived.

Now, according to him, there are two methods of uniting impressions and Ideas. In the one case they are united by a purely reproducing memory, and in the other by the free combining and variegating of fantasy or imagination.

The Ideas of memory are much stronger and livelier than those of fantasy, but the former are bound precisely to the same order and position as the impressions from which they were derived, whereas fantasy, in contrast, can freely combine and vary its Ideas, and is entirely independent of the original order of impressions¹.

However, the Humanist science-ideal does not allow this activity of fantasy to be conceived of as completely arbitrary. Even in its psychological form it possesses a concept of order which excludes any Idea of arbitrariness². And as we shall subsequently demonstrate, this concept of law serves in Hume, as well as in Leibniz or Descartes, as the ὑπόϑεσις, as the foundation of empirical reality. In Hume it is the concept of necessary connection or association (relating to impressions as well as to the Ideas).

To understand in Hume's nominalist course of thought this transition to the psychological concept of order, we must remember, that Hume, following in Locke's footsteps, divides Ideas into simple and complex. The latter are connections between simple Ideas. In part at least, they are grounded in sensorily perceived relations between impressions. For Hume also divides the impressions into simple and complex.

1 Treatise I, Part I, Sect. III. Of the Ideas of the Memory and Imagination.

2 Cf. Treatise I, Part I, Sect. IV (p. 319): ‘As all simple Ideas may be separated by the imagination, and may be united again in what form it pleases, nothing would be more unaccountable than the operations of that faculty, were it not guided by some universal principles, which render it, in some measure, uniform with itself in all times and places.’

The natural and philosophical relations. The laws of association.

Hume thought, that he could reduce all associations in the succession of Ideas to three basic laws, namely, the law of resemblance, the law of spatial and temporal coherence (contiguity), and the law of cause and effect.

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These laws of association are thought of as being purely mechanical, and concern only the so-called natural relations between the Ideas by which ‘two Ideas are connected in the imagination and the one naturally introduces the other,’ when a natural succession of ideas takes place. In his Treatise (I part 1 sect. vi) Hume writes: ‘This we may establish for a general rule, that wherever the mind constantly and uniformly makes a transition without any reason, it is influenced by these relations’ (i.e. by resemblance, contiguity and cause and effect).

These natural associations, according to Hume, cannot be perceived in a sensory manner. They do not connect impressions, but Ideas. The product of these associations are the complex Ideas of relations, substances and modi, which are the ordinary objects of our thought and judgments. It is true, that these complex Ideas are founded in sensory relations of resemblance and contiguity or coherence between the impressions. But the associations, which the faculty of imagination produces upon the basis of these sensory relations, exceed that which is given; they are an ‘order of thought.’ And they can lead thought astray, because they go beyond that which is directly given in the ‘impression’.

Hume distinguished the ‘natural’ from the ‘philosophical’ relations. The latter do not determine the associational transition of one ‘Idea’ to another, but simply compare ‘Ideas’ or impressions which are not connected by association².

It is very confusing, that Hume in summarizing the seven classes of philosophical relations, mentions causality once again. When we put aside this natural relation which, incorrectly, is mentioned in this connection, we can list the following six classes of philosophical relations:

¹

2 Treatise I, Part 1, Sect. V: ‘The word Relation is commonly used in two senses considerably different from each other. Either for that quality, by which two Ideas are connected together in the imagination, and the one naturally introduces the other, after the manner above explained; or for that particular circumstance, in which, even upon the arbitrary union of two Ideas in the fancy we may think proper to compare them. In common language the former is always the sense, in which we use the word relation; and 'tis only in philosophy that we extend it to mean any particular subject of comparison, without a connecting principle’ (p. 322).

1 Hume called them (Ibid. sect. iv) a sort of law of attraction ‘which in the mental world will be bound to have as extraordinary effect as in the natural.’

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1	- Resemblance, a relation, which is the foundation of all the other philosophical relations. No impressions or Ideas can be compared with each other which do not display a certain degree of resemblance. As a mere philosophical relation it does not produce any association of Ideas or any sequence in the Ideas, but is rather related to a simultaneous sensory relation of resemblance.
2	- Identity, the most universal relation. It is concerned with constant and unchangeable objects.
3	- The relations of space and time, which are the origin of an infinite number of comparisons, such as distance, contact, above, below, before, behind, etc....
4	- The relations in quantity or number.
5	- The degrees in common quality; thus two objects can both possess the common quality of weight, yet one can be lighter than the other. Thus in the same colour, e.g. red, two shades can be compared with each other etc.
6	- The relation of contrast, a relation, which only seemingly affords an exception to the rule that there cannot be any philosophical relation, unless a certain degree of resemblance exists between the impressions or Ideas; for in reality, this relation, as well, always pre-supposes a point of resemblance, if a comparison is to be possible. In his Enquiry Hume reduces this relation to a combination of the relations of resemblance and causality.

The reader observes, how in this table of relations not only are the basic mathematical principles reduced to psychological ones, but also the laws of logic (i.e. the principles of identity and contradiction).

Hume divided the philosophical relations into two classes: the variable and the invariable. The invariable include the relations of resemblance and contrast, and the degrees in quantity and quality. They are the ground of certain knowledge.

According to Hume, this certainty rests upon the fact that the relations in question are unchangeable and at the same time are directly sensorily perceivable together with their terms; and such without reasoning, which always consists in a succession of Ideas. They are ‘discoverable at first sight, and fall more properly under the province of intuition than demonstration.’

The same also holds good for the variable philosophical relations of identity and time and place. The latter do not go beyond that which is actually given in the sensory impressions. The

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reason why we say, that an object A is at a distance from object B, is that we perceive them both at that distance. Here the relation itself is given in the complex sensory impression.

It is entirely different, however, in the case of the natural relations. The latter rest upon a veritable association in the sequence of Ideas. According to Hume, it is only on the ground of the relation of causation that the relations of time, place, and identity can really exceed that which is directly given by the senses and can play their part in an associational process of thought¹. But we will explain this point later.

1 Treatise I, Part III, Sect. II (p. 376): ‘'Tis only causation, which produces such a connexion, as to give us assurance from the existence or action of one object, that 't was follow'd or preceded by any other existence or action; nor can the other two relations be ever made use of in reasoning, except so far as they either affect or are affected by it.’

§ 3 - The transition of the creation-motive in the science-ideal to psychological thought. Hume's criticism of mathematics

Proceeding from the four invariable philosophical relations as the only possible foundation of certain knowledge, Hume began first of all with his criticism of mathematics. In the latter the adherents of the Humanistic science-ideal (including Locke) had till now sought their fulcrum. In Hume, however, the science-ideal has changed its basic denominator for the different modal aspects of reality. This appears nowhere clearer than here.

Hume is even willing to abandon the creative character of mathematical thought in order to be able in his epistemological inquiry to subject all the modal aspects to the absolute sovereignty of psychological thought. However, this interpretation of his criticism of mathematics has been called in question.

Contradictory interpretations of Hume's criticism of mathematics.

In particular Riehl and Windelband believe, that Hume, together with all his predecessors since Descartes, shared an unwavering faith in mathematics as the prototype and foundation of all scientific thought.

Windelband, however, has overlooked the distinction between natural and philosophical relations, which is extremely fundamental in Hume. Consequently, Windelband completely mis-

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represents Hume's conception of the certainty of mathematical knowledge¹. Riehl, too, did not touch the real content of this conception.

Beyond any doubt Hume displays in his Treatise a sceptical attitude with respect to the claims of mathematics to exact knowledge. Riehl, however, tries to deprive this attitude of its sharpness by limiting it to ‘applied geometry’, which refers the standards of ‘pure geometry’ to ‘empirical reality’. According to him, Hume never meant to dispute the universal validity of ‘pure geometry’ itself. Moreover, he thinks, that even in this limited sense, Hume's criticism only affected a single point, namely the possibility, presumed by geometry, of dividing space to infinity.

Riehl believes, that the appearance which Hume gives in his Treatise of having denied the exactness of pure geometry is only due to his unfortunate manner of expression. According to him, the inexactitude which Hume thought he had discovered in ‘pure geometry’ is not concerned with the proofs of the latter, but only with their relation to the objects in ‘empirical reality’ and with the concepts upon which these proofs are based².

To support his view, Riehl appeals to the distinction that Hume also made between knowledge of facts (matters of fact) and knowledge of the relations between Ideas. For in Hume mathematics indubitably belongs to the latter. Besides, Riehl can, indeed, appeal to some statements even in the Treatise which seem to support his point of view. And, if his interpretation is adopted, the anomaly between the appreciation of mathematical knowledge in the Treatise and in the Enquiry would be overcome.

For, in Hume's Enquiry which he published after the Treatise, we encounter the statement: ‘That three times five is equal to the half of thirty, expresses a relation between these numbers. Proportions of this kind are discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe. Though there never were a circle or triangle in nature, the truths, demonstrated by Euclid, would forever retain their certainty and evidence’³. In other words, Hume here

1 Geschichte der neueren Phil. I, 340 ff. Windelband thereby entirely overlooks the problem of mathesis in Hume.

2 Riehl, Der phil. Kritizismus (3e Aufl.) I, 180.

3 Enquiry, Part I, Sect. IV.

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appears to have returned completely to the logicist conception of pure mathematics which lay at the foundation of the mathematical ideal of science. And, as we have seen, even Locke's psychologizing epistemology had capitulated in favour of the latter. Nevertheless, Riehl's interpretation is rejected by Green and Cassirer¹. In keeping with our view, they hold that at least in his Treatise, Hume's psychologism had undermined the foundations of mathematical knowledge as such.

1 See Green's Introduction to the first part of Hume's works; Cassirer II, 345.

The method of solving this controversy.

In order to take sides correctly in this controversy, we must not base our opinion upon incidental statements in Hume concerning mathematical knowledge. For it is firmly established that especially Hume's Treatise contains very contradictory statements on this point.

The problem can only be solved by answering the preliminary question as to whether or not the fundamentals of Hume's epistemology actually leave room for an exact mathematical science. Only on the basis of the answer given to this question are we able to examine critically the mutually contradictory statements concerning the value of mathematics.

In the first place we must notice that the contrast in Hume between ‘matters of fact’ and ‘relations of Ideas’ can no longer have the same fundamental significance as it possessed in Locke. From the very beginning Hume abandoned the Lockian dualism between ‘sensation’ and ‘reflection’, which gradually changed into a fundamental dualism between creative mathematical thought and sensory experience of reality.

In Hume reflection is no longer ‘original’. It is only a mere image of ‘sensation’. True ‘Ideas’ also have become images of ‘impressions’: the true complex ‘Ideas’ are mental images of complex ‘impressions’ (connected by sensory relations). And the true simple ‘Ideas’ are such of simple ‘impressions’.

Now, to be sure, Hume observes that not all our Ideas are derived from impressions. There are many complex Ideas for which no corresponding impressions can be indicated, while vice versa many of our complex impressions are never reflected exactly in ‘Ideas’².

2 Treatise I, Part I, Sect. I (p. 312/3).

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Nevertheless, when Riehl appeals to this statement, to demonstrate the fundamental distinction between ‘matters of fact’ and ‘relations of Ideas’, he distorts it, and ascribes to it a meaning which is quite different from what Hume had intended. For the latter illustrates his thesis with an instance taken from the activity of our fantasy, in which, according to him, the truth and universal validity of ‘Ideas’ are entirely excluded: ‘I can imagine a city like the ‘New Jerusalem’, he writes, ‘whose pavements are of gold and whose walls are of rubies, although I have never seen such a city. I have seen Paris; but can I maintain, that I can form such an Idea of this city which completely represents all its streets and houses in their real and exact proportions?’

In fact all judgments, in which the ‘Ideas’ are no longer pure copies of the original impressions, must in the light of Hume's criterion of truth, abandon their claim to certainty and exactness.

Hume drew the full consequences of his ‘psychologistic’ nominalism with respect to mathematics.

Thus even mathematical knowledge can never go beyond the limits of possible sense impressions without losing its claim to universally valid truth.

With respect to mathematics, Hume drew the full consequences of the extreme psychological nominalism to which he adhered, and which he also ascribed to Berkeley¹. He considered it to be one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries of his time that - as Berkeley had established - all universal ideas are nothing other than particular ones, which by universal names acquire an extended meaning, and thereby evoke other individual ideas in the imagination which exhibit a resemblance with the first.

Even abstract mathematical ‘Ideas’ are always individual in themselves. They can represent a great number of individual Ideas by means of a general name, but they remain mere ‘images in the mind’ of individual objects.

The word triangle, for instance, is in fact always connected with the Idea of a particular degree of quantity and quality (e.g. equal angles, equilateralness). We can never form a universal concept of a triangle that would really be separate from such individual characteristics. Our impressions are always entirely

1 As we saw above, Berkeley has later on abandoned this extreme nominalism.

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individual: ‘'tis a principle generally receiv'd in philosophy that everything in nature is individual, and that 'tis utterly absurd to suppose a triangle really existent, which has no precise proportion of sides and angles. If this therefore be absurd in fact and reality, it must also be absurd in Idea; since nothing of which we can form a clear and distinct Idea is absurd and impossible’¹.

This was the radical sensationalistic nominalism Leibniz combated from the very beginning. He knew that it must necessarily undermine the foundations of the mathematical ideal of science. We shall subsequently see, however, that Hume did not draw the sceptical consequences of this nominalism in respect to his psychological ideal of science.

The entire view in Hume's Treatise concerning the Ideas of space and time and their infinite divisibility must be understood in the light of this radical sensationalism.

In Hume the certainty of mathematical knowledge remains stringently connected with the sensory impressions and their mutual sensory relations. If mathematicians seek to find a rational standard of exactness, which transcends our possible sense impressions, they are in the field of pure fictions. These fictions are as useless as they are incomprehensible and, in any case, they cannot satisfy the criterion of truth.

1 Treatise I, Part I, Sect. VII (p. 327).

Hume's psychologistic concept of space. Space as a complex of coloured points (minima sensibilia).

Hume's conception of space and time is entirely in this line. The concept of space can only be the copy of sensory impressions of ‘coloured points’. The basic denominator, which Hume chose to compare the modal aspects of reality does not allow any meaning to be ascribed to the concept of space other than a visual and tactual one.

If this psychical space is a complex sensory impression, it must exist in the sensory relation between simple impressions. In that case the ‘coloured points’ - as the smallest perceptible impressions of extension or minima sensibilia - function as such simple impressions, and the concept of space is a mere copy of them. And these points must ever possess a sensory extension which itself is no longer divisible.

In this view the concept of the original mathematical point,

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that never can have any extension, is untenable. Even in the ‘order of thought’ it cannot have any truth or universal validity. For, according to Hume, anything which is absurd ‘in fact and reality’ - that is to say, anything which cannot be given in sensory impressions - is also absurd ‘in Idea’.

Psychologizing of the mathematical concept of equality.

The concept of mathematical equality is treated in the same way: ‘The only useful notion of equality or inequality is derived from the whole united appearance and the comparison of particular objects’ (read: particular sensory impressions). On the Other hand the so-called exact standard of equality between two magnitudes in ‘pure geometry’ is plainly imaginary. ‘For as the very Idea of equality is that of such a particular appearance corrected by juxta-position or a common measure, the notion of any correction beyond that we have instruments and art to make, is a mere fiction of the mind, and useless as well as incomprehensible’¹.

The same holds for mathematical definitions of straight lines, curves, planes, etc.

Hume admits, that the fictions concealed in such exact definitions are very natural and usual. Mathematicians may with ever more exact measuring instruments try to correct the inexactitude of the sensory perceptions which take place without the aid of such instruments. From this the thought naturally arises that one should finally be able to reach an ideal standard of accuracy beyond the reach of the senses. But this Idea lacks all validity. The measuring instruments remain sensory instruments whose use remains bound to the standard of sensory perceptions. ‘The first principles’ (viz. of mathesis) ‘are founded on the imagination and senses: The conclusion, therefore, can never go beyond, much less contradict these faculties’².

In contradiction to Riehl's interpretation, it is evident from the following statement, that this thesis is not restricted to the question as to whether or not space is infinitely divisible, but is actually concerned with the entire claims of ‘pure geometry’

1 Treatise I, Part II, Sect. IV (p. 353/4).

2 This entire course of thought is misunderstood by Riehl when he thinks that Hume recognizes an exact standard for ‘pure geometry’ independent of sense experience.

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to ideal exactness: ‘Now since these Ideas (i.e. of exact standards) are so loose and uncertain, I wou'd fain ask any mathematician, what infallible assurance he has, not only of the more intricate and obscure propositions of his science, but of the most vulgar and obvious principles? How can he prove to me, for instance, that two right lines cannot have one common segment? Or that 'tis impossible to draw more than one right line betwixt any two points?... The original standard of a right line is in reality nothing but a certain general appearance; and 'tis evident right lines may be made to concur with each other, and yet correspond to this standard, tho' corrected by all the means either practicable or imaginable’¹.

All that Hume taught here with respect to the concept of space applies even more strongly to the concept of time. For in similar fashion, he gave only a sensationalist sense to the latter. The Idea of time is formed out of the sequence of changing sensory ‘impressions’ as well as ‘Ideas’. As a relation of sensory succession it can never exist apart from such successive sensory Ideas, as Newton thought of his ‘absolute mathematical time’. Five notes played on a flute, give us the impression and the concept of time. Time is not a sixth impression which presents itself to our hearing or to one of our other sense organs. Nor is it a sixth impression which the mind discovers in itself by means of ‘reflection’. Therefore, a completely static and unchangeable object can never give us the impression of ‘duration’ or time².

All false concepts in mathematics, which pretend to give us an ideal exactness beyond the testimony of the sense organs, arise through the natural associations of resemblance, contiguity, and causality. And, according to Hume, the first of these three is ‘the most fertile source of error.’

1 Ibid., p. 356/7: The statement in question to which Riehl appeals is certainly not clear, when Hume writes further: ‘At the same time we may learn the reason why geometry fails of evidence in this simple point’ (i.e. the pretended infinite divisibility of space) ‘while all its other reasonings command our fullest assent and approbation.’ For it is just this very point which strikes in its entirety the claim of mathematics to exactness!

2 Treatise I, Part II, Sect. III, p. 342-344.

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The position of arithmetic in Hume's sensationalism.

Now it may appear that Hume still granted the standard of ideal mathematical exactness at least to algebra and arithmetic. He writes in part III, sect. 1 of his Treatise: ‘There remain, therefore, algebra and arithmetic as the only sciences, in which we can carry on a chain of reasoning to any degree of intricacy, and yet preserve a perfect exactness and certainty. We are possest of a precise standard, by which we can judge of the equality and proportion of numbers; and according as they correspond or not to that standard, we determine their relations, without any possibility of error. When two numbers are so combin'd, as that the one has always an unite answering to every unite of the other, we pronounce them equal; and 'tis for want of such a standard of equality in extension, that geometry can scarce be esteem'd a perfect and infallible science’¹. But has the meaning of number in Hume's system in fact escaped from being rendered psychological? Not in the least. The logicistic conception of arithmetic (held to by Descartes and Leibniz) is here only seemingly maintained.

In Hume's thought, arithmetical unity as an abstract concept can only be the copy of a single impression. Number as unity in the quantitative relations is a fiction. The real unity, which alone has real existence, and which necessarily lies at the foundation of the abstract concept of number, ‘must be perfectly indivisible and incapable of being resolved into any lesser unity’². Number can only be composed of such indivisible unities. Twenty men exist, but only because there exist one, two, three men.

What then is the true unit? In Hume's system it can only be an impression which is perceived separately and cannot be resolved into other impressions. As Laing has correctly observed, this was the conception of unity which is to be found in Sextus Empiricus³. Let us now return to the ‘minima sensibilia’, the coloured points of space.

A sum of units can in Hume's system only be grounded on a sensory relation between individual impressions⁴. Hume does

1 Ibid., p. 374.

2 Treatise I, Part II, Sect. II, p. 338.

3 Laing, Op. cit., p. 107.

4 In Part 1, Sect. vii (p. 330) Hume introduces a virtually adequate concept of number: ‘when we mention any great number, such as a thousand, the mind has generally no adeaquate Idea of it, but only a power of producing such an Idea by its adeaquate Idea of the decimals, under which the number is comprehended.’ But even the concept of the decimals in Hume's system only permit themselves to be maintained as the copy of a sensory multiplicity of simple impressions.

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not see the inner antinomy in which such a reduction of the original modal meaning of number to that of sensory impression must necessarily involve itself. He does not see that sensory multiplicity pre-supposes the original multiplicity in the modal sense of the numerical aspect, and that in a sensory multiplicity as such no arithmetical meaning can hide. In his system the arithmetical laws which rule the necessary quantitative relations among all possible numbers, must be reduced to psychical laws ruling the relations of the sensory impressions. Thus, even arithmetic must abandon all claim to being an exact science. Not only the irrational, the differential and the complex functions of number, but also the simple fractions have no valid ground. Even simple addition, subtraction, and multiplication of whole numbers lack a genuine mathematical foundation in his system. It appears from the exceptional position which he ascribes to arithmetic in contradistinction to geometry, that Hume did not expressly draw this conclusion. It seems he did not dare to draw it¹. Moreover, his entire exposition with respect to number must be judged extremely summary, vague, and intrinsically contradictory.

Nevertheless, the destructive conclusion here intended, lay hidden inexorably in his psychological starting-point.

1 Green, op. cit., p. 254, thinks that Hume saw the impossibility of reducing arithmetic to sensory relations.

Hume's retrogression into the Lockian conception of mathematics remains completely inexplicable on the sensationalistic basis of his system.

The position which Hume in his later work, Enquiry concerning human understanding, assumes with respect to mathematics, is actually a relapse into the Lockian standpoint; it is a capitulation in face of common opinion concerning the exactness of mathematical thought.

Locke, however, could base his view upon his dualism between sensation and reflection. But in Hume's sensationalistic nominalism, no single tenable point of contact is to be found

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for the traditional conception with regard to the creative character of mathematical thought.

At the utmost, the claims of mathematics to exactness and to independence of all sensory impressions can be judged valid in a pragmatic sense. For in the final analysis in both his Treatise and Enquiry, Hume did not wish to contest the practical utility of mathematics in natural science.

And, as it will subsequently appear, faith in the exactness of mathematics and in the objective universal validity of the causal judgments of physics can be explained by him from imagination and the psychical laws of association of human nature. By means of the latter he finally intended to arrest the radical Pyrrhonist scepticism. There is, however, in his system no room for the real mathematical science-ideal.

§ 4 - The dissolution of the ideals of science and of personality by the psychologistic critique

In Hume the creative function has actually been transferred from mathematical to psychological thought. In the latter he thought he had found his Archimedean point which needs ‘nulla re extra mentem ad existendum’.

Hume's criticism of the concept of substance and his interpretation of naïve experience.

In the rationalistic metaphysics both the ideal of science and that of personality had been founded on a concept of substance. It is against this metaphysical concept that Hume, on the basis of his new psychological view of the science-ideal, now directs his penetrating criticism.

As his starting point he took the belief of naïve experience in the existence of things in the external world - things which have a continuing reality independent of our consciousness. We shall later show in detail that his interpretation of naïve experience is a falsification of the latter by the realistic ‘Abbildtheorie’ (image-theory). Generally speaking, contemporary Humanistic epistemology has still not gone beyond this false conception of naïve experience. Hume at least does not intend to impute to the naïve experience of reality a theory concerning the relationship between consciousness and reality. He observes that the faith of naïve man in the existence of a reality which is independent of our consciousness cannot

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rest upon a theory. It must rather be explained in terms of a natural impulse of human feeling¹.

Hume thinks naïve man does not distinguish between his ‘impressions’ and the ‘things in the external world’, he identifies the latter with the former.

It was philosophy that originated the distinction between the reality of sensory impressions, which are real only in appearance, and the true reality of ‘things in themselves’, the reality of the ‘substances’. On theoretical grounds it rejected the misunderstood naïve conception of the external world.

Hume deemed this philosophical view to be false and dogmatic. In contradistinction to scepticism and the false mathematical metaphysics, he wished to give an account of naïve experience by explaining it in terms of the psychical laws of association inherent in human nature.

Although this interpretation is basically erroneous, and must undoubtedly falsify naïve experience in a functionalistic way, yet, in the face of the rationalistic metaphysics of the mathematical ideal of science, it affords us the important critical point of view, that naïve experience is no theory of reality².

Hume starts from his psychological basic denominator for all the modal aspects of meaning. In our impressions there is not a single one which gives us a ground to form any concept of a constant ‘thing in itself’, which would be independent of our consciousness³. Nothing is given in experience but the mul-

1 Treatise I, Part IV, Sect. 1 (pag. 474/5): ‘Nature, by an absolute and uncontrollable necessity has determin'd us to judge as well as to breathe and feel;’
‘...belief is more properly an act of the sensitive part than of the cogitative part of our nature.’ Treatise I, Part. IV, Sect. I (pag. 475). From this it is clearly evident, that Hume reduces the modal function of faith to that of feeling.

2 Cf. especially Treatise I, Part IV, Sect. II (p. 483): ‘And indeed, whatever convincing arguments philosophers may fancy they can produce to establish the belief of objects independent of the mind, 'tis obvious these arguments are known but to very few, and that 'tis not by them, that children, peasants, and the greatest part of mankind are induc'd to attribute objects to some impressions, and deny them to others. Accordingly we find, that all the conclusions, which the vulgar form on this head, are directly contrary to those, which are confirm'd by philosophy.’ These remarks are excellent!

3 Treatise I, Part IV, Sect. II (p. 479): ‘To begin with the senses, 'tis evident these faculties are incapable of giving rise to the notion of the continu'd existence of their objects, after they no longer appear to the senses. For that is a contradiction in terms...’
‘That our senses offer not their impressions, as the images of something distinct, or independent, and external is evident; because they convey to us nothing but a single perception, and never give us the least intimation of any thing beyond. A single perception can never produce the Idea of a double existence, but by some interference either of the reason or imagination.’

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tiplicity of the sensory impressions which continually arise and fade away.

Like Berkeley, Hume abandoned the distinction, still made by Locke, between the primary qualities (extension, motion, solidity) which belong to the things themselves, and the secondary qualities (colour, sound, odour, taste, heat, etc.) which have only a subjective character¹. But while Berkeley could seek an explanation for the belief in an external world in his metaphysical conception of God, this escape was not open to Hume. The positivistic psychologism of the latter had no room for a metaphysical theology.

There is nothing to be found in our impressions which gives us any right to assume that the ‘primary qualities’, independent of our consciousness, belong to things of the external world. The belief in the ‘Ding an sich’ can only be explained in terms of the natural laws of the imaginative faculty.

The ‘natural associations’ are here active and they rest upon the temporal succession of Ideas. They necessarily lead fantasy beyond that which is given. They lead metaphysics to its false concept of substance.

The task of true philosophy is to indicate the impressions which furnish naïve experience (‘common sense’) with a basis for its belief in the independent world of things. Hume supposes that in this way he has explained the origin of the false concept of substance. Metaphysical philosophy actually did nothing else but relate the natural associations to a false concept. So Hume wishes to show that his philosophy is in agreement with naïve experience (‘the vulgar view’), while, in contrast, metaphysics has from this very experience drawn a false concept of substance.

He supposes that there are two characteristic relations to

1 Ibid., p. 482: ‘Now 'tis evident, that, whatever may be our philosophical opinion, colours, sounds, heat and cold, as far as appears to the senses, exist after the same manner with motion and solidity!’

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be indicated in our impressions, namely the constancy and the coherence of impressions, which actually give the foundation for the naïve faith in the existence of an independent world of things. Constancy indicates a temporarily continuous uniformity or resemblance in specific impressions in spite of their fluctual character in temporal succession.

The trees, mountains, and houses, which I see before me at the moment, have always appeared to me in the same resemblance of impressions. Once I have turned my head or closed my eyes, no longer retaining them in my field of vision, I see them before me immediately afterward, without the least alteration, when I again hold them in view¹.

But this first relation of my sensory impressions is not yet enough to establish the belief in a constant empirical reality of things. If it were to be decisive, this faith would be bound to the unchangeability of impressions. There arises a problem, however, from the fact that naïve experience accepts the constant reality of things in spite of all changes in their properties and mutual relations.

Therefore, only in conjunction with the law of their coherence can the constancy of impressions supply a sufficient foundation for the belief in the constant reality of things. It is a law of association, namely that of the contiguity or coherence of impressions in time, through which we fill up by our imagination the impressions, actually given in a gradual discontinuity, so that they become a constant and continuous reality of things. The imagination (not logical thought) leaps, as it were, over the gaps in the temporal sequence of sensory impressions and fuses together the successive similar impressions, so that they become identical and continuously existing things.

1 Treatise, Part IV, Sect. II (p. 484).

The creative function of imagination and the way in which the creation-motive of the Humanistic ideal of science is transmitted to psychological thought.

This fusion of impressions is executed (by a natural necessity) through the influence of relations. It is executed through the relations of resemblance and coherence between impressions. The imaginative faculty follows the separate impressions, and on the basis of the resemblance between them passes from the one to the other. Thereby, it creates a continuous bond between

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the impressions, and this bond has been incorrectly interpreted by metaphysics as being a substantial connection within the things themselves.

We speak of an identical thing, whereas actually the only data that we have, are similar impressions, separated in time, but united by associational relations.

So the creative function is shifted in Hume's theory from mathematical to psychological thought. At every point he attempts to give a purely psychological explanation of our naïve experience of reality, by means of the laws of association ruling our sensory impressions. The sensory aspect of this experience is absolutized in a psychologistic way¹.

He rejected the attempt, undertaken by the metaphysics of the mathematical science-ideal, to construct a noumenal world of things out of ‘creative’ mathematical thought.

Mathematical rationalism had sought to defend the foundations of the science-ideal against the consequences of the postulate of continuity by means of the doctrine of innate Ideas. The latter is rejected by Hume in a much more radical way than by Locke. In his entire analysis of ‘human nature’ Hume was primarily concerned with the vindication of the absolute sovereignty of psychological thought. In favour of the latter he abandoned all the dogmas of the mathematical ideal of science. And I would especially call attention to the fact that he desired to explain the claims to logical exactness of the supposed creative mathematical thought in terms of the same psychological principle which he had employed in the construction of the world of things of naïve experience, namely, the creative function of fantasy: ‘I have already observ'd in examining the foundation of mathematics’, so he writes in this context, ‘that the imagination, when set into any train of thinking, is apt to continue, even when its object fails it, and like a galley put in motion by the oars, carries on its course without any new impulse. This I have assign'd for the reason why after considering several loose standards of equality, and correcting them by each other, we proceed to imagine so correct and exact a standard of that relation, as is not liable to the least error or variation.

1 Translator's Note: As we shall see in more detail in Vol. III naïve experience is characterized by total structures of individuality, which are never to be explained in terms of the association of separate sensory impressions.
D.H.F.

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The same principle makes us easily entertain this opinion of the continu'd existence of body. Objects have a certain coherence even as they appear to our senses; but this coherence is much greater and more uniform, if we suppose the objects to have a continu'd existence; and as the mind is once in the train of observing a uniformity among objects, it naturally continues, till it renders the uniformity as complete as possible’¹.

In other words, psychical imagination or fantasy is the creator of the world of things of naïve experience. It is also the origin of the claims of mathematical thought to exactness. However, this is true only in appearance.

For it is sovereign psychological thought by which Hume wishes to account for this situation of things, and which is placed as such above the ‘creative’ fantasy. It is the ‘creative’ power of this thought which is imputed to the faculty of imagination, since the latter is not able to isolate itself in a theoretical way.

So it is actually psychological thought that is elevated by Hume to the position of ἀϱχή, origin and lawgiver of the cosmos of experience.

The fact that he failed to account for this transcendental Idea of origin, the fact that he degraded logical thought itself to a dependent image of sensory fantasy only proves that Hume had not yet arrived at a transcendental critical self-reflexion.

The laws of association of his psychological ideal of science serve indeed the same purpose as the mathematical lex continui in Leibniz. In an analogous manner Hume employed them as an ὑπόϑεσις, as the foundation of the reality of experience. Only the basic denominator of the science-ideal was changed. In Hume, too, constant reality is resolved into a process which conforms to fixed laws. But in him this process is a psychological one.

1 Treatise, Part IV, Sect. II, p. 487/8.

Hume destroys the metaphysical foundation of the rationalist ideal of personality.

Unlike Berkeley, Hume did not restrict his radical criticism of the concept of substance to the concept of the material substance of nature. He extended it to the metaphysical concept of a spiritual substance in which the rationalist ideal of personality sought its sole foundation. In a really superb critical

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manner Hume demonstrated that (from the standpoint of immanence-philosophy) the whole conflict between materialism and idealism is only a conflict between ‘brothers of the same house’. The idealists called Spinoza an atheist, because he did not accept a soul-substance. Hume correctly observed that both of these standpoints are rooted in the same metaphysical principle. Consequently, if one calls Spinoza an atheist, then with equal reason one must label the idealistic metaphysics of the immortal soul as atheistic. The idealists arrive at their metaphysical theory of the immateriality, simplicity, and immortality of the soul by the same sort of rational speculations: ‘It appears, then, that to whatever side we turn, the same difficulties follow us, and that we cannot advance one step towards establishing the simplicity and immateriality of the soul, without preparing the way for a dangerous and irrecoverable atheism’¹.

Hume arrived at this conclusion on the basis of his psychologistic standpoint, according to which the universe of our experience is in the final analysis resolved into impressions, and into Ideas which are derived from them. From this standpoint the opposition between idealism and materialism must, in the nature of the case, be a relative one.

Hume had brought the different modal aspects of temporal reality under a psychological basic denominator. Therefore, in keeping with his honest critique, he must also reject the soul-substance. In Descartes and Leibniz the ego, the personality, was identified with mathematical thought and was hypostatized as a thinking substance. Seeking after the origin of this concept Hume states that the ego is not itself an impression, because it is always conceived of as something to which are related all impressions and ideas². The ‘ego is in truth nothing more than a collective concept of the different series of Ideas which are ordered constantly in accordance with the laws of association. Hume observes: ‘Nowhere in my experience do I encounter myself apart from an Idea and I can never perceive anything other than Ideas.’ There is in the soul no single faculty which in time remains unchangeably the same: ‘The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass,

1 Treatise I, Part IV, Sect. V (p. 527).

2 ‘self or person is not any one impression, but that to which our several impressions and ideas are supposed to have a reference.’ Treatise I, Part IV, Sect. VI (p. 533).

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re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations’¹.

But, even this comparison of the mind with the theatre of our ‘perceptions’ is misleading. For the mind itself consists of nothing other than ‘perceptions’.

Even the illusion, which, in spite of everything, ever causes ‘the ego’ to appear to us as a constant and self-sufficient entity, must be explained in terms of the associational law of the resemblance and coherence of impressions. Because the contents of the Ideas of a particular moment are only imperceptibly different from those of the following moment, our imagination easily passes over from the one phase of our ‘spiritual existence’ to the following.

This continuity in the associational process causes the illusion of an absolutely identical and singular personality or ‘selfhood’: ‘From thence it evidently follows, that identity is nothing really belonging to those different perceptions, and uniting them together; but is merely a quality, which we attribute to them because of the union of their ideas in the imagination, when we reflect upon them’². (I am italicizing).

1 Treatise I, Part. IV, Sect. VI (p. 534).

2 Ibid., p. 540.

The radical self-dissolution of the ideals of science and of personality in Hume's philosophy.

In a truly radical manner, the psychological science-ideal has here conquered the ideal of personality by destroying its supposed metaphysical foundation. In his psychological method Hume could no longer find a way back to the ‘free and sovereign’ personality.

The ideal of science had in fact no other foundation for the ‘sovereign personality’ than the metaphysical concept of substance. In Hume's philosophy, however, even the science-ideal in its claim to conceive ‘nature’ in the sense of ‘the outer world’, dissolves itself in a really radical manner. This is evident from the famous critique of the principle of causality, which received its clearest formulation in the Enquiry. We shall see that in this critique Hume not only undermined the foundations of mathematical physics, but at the same time those of his own associationism in which the science-ideal had acquired its psychological turn.

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§ 5 - Continuation: the criticism of the principle of causality as a critique of experience

At the outset the principle of causality had been elevated by the metaphysics of the mathematical science-ideal to the rank of an eternal logical truth. Leibniz broke with this purely logical conception, and conceived of causality as a ‘factual verity’. But he, too, held to its ideal logical foundation (viz. on the principium rationis sufficientis) in our judgment.

Hume's criticism of this principle became a critique of experience in the sense later on ascribed to it by Kant. It aimed at an investigation of the ground of validity of all theoretical synthetic judgments which claim to be universally valid and necessary, and this on the supposition that experience has no other data than sensory impressions.

Like Kant, Hume did not make any fundamental distinction between naïve experience and natural science!

According to Hume, all ‘experience’ goes beyond the sensory impressions which alone are given. We can only speak of experience when epistemological judgments of supposed universal validity and necessity are given with reference to the sensory impressions and when from a sensorily given fact we conclude to another fact that is not given.

This is only possible with the aid of the principle of the connection of cause and effect. Through this principle alone can the relations of identity and of time and place transcend that which is given in sense data. ‘Here then it appears, that of those three relations, which depend not upon the mere Ideas, the only one, that can be trac'd beyond our senses, and inform us of existences and objects, which we do not see or feel, is causation’¹.

If the principle of causality with its kernel, the necessity in the relation of cause and effect, is really to possess an established validity, then a basis in the sensory impressions must be indicated for the Idea of causality. The foundation in question can only be sought in the relations of impressions.

An analysis of the Idea of causality shows that two relations, viz. that of contiguity and that of the priority in time of one event before an other, are essential elements of the relation of causality. And these relations are in fact sensorily given².

1 Treatise I, Part III, Sect. II (p. 377).

2 Ibid., p. 397.

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But the Idea of causality very decidedly goes beyond this sensory relations. For the judgment of causality does not state a mere post hoc, but pretends to be able to indicate a propter hoc, a necessity.

The problem pertaining to the necessary connection of cause and effect is to Hume the problem of the origin of natural laws as such.

To Hume the problem with respect to the foundation of the relation of cause and effect becomes in the final analysis the problem of the origin of natural laws as such.

Mathematical physics had based the certainty of its results upon the law of causality as a functional law of physical relations. Descartes called this law an ‘innate idea’. Leibniz saw in it the foundational principle of all judgments of experience, an ideal rational ground by means of which we can give an account of empirical phenomena, but which remains bound to the ‘factual verities’. To Hume, however, this very principle of causality became problematical, insofar as it was conceived of as the principle of a necessary connection between a prior and subsequent event in the outer world.

Hume rejected as sophisms the attempts made by Hobbes, Clarke and Locke to demonstrate the logical necessity in the inference from cause to effect. There is no object that as a ‘cause’ would logically imply the existence of any other object. The denial of a necessary connection between cause and effect does not lead to a single logical contradiction.

Only by experience can we conclude from the existence of any object to the existence of another. With respect to this experience the situation is as follows: We remember that, after certain sorts of facts in space and time, we have constantly seen other facts follow. For instance we rember that, after the sensory perception of fire, we have regularly experienced the sensation of warmth. Thereby, a new relation is discovered which constitutes an essential element of the connection between cause and effect, namely, the constant connection of two sorts of impressions which follow each other in time¹.

In this relation there is nothing that in itself implies a necessity which would possess an objective validity: ‘From the mere repetition of any past impression, even to infinity, there never

1 Treatise I, Part III, Sect. VI (p. 389).

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will arise any new original Idea, such as that of a necessary connexion; and the number of impressions has in this case no more effect than if we confin'd ourselves to one only’¹.

1 Treatise I, Part III, Sect. VI (p. 389).

According to Hume, the law of causality is only to be maintained as a psychical law of association. Nevertheless, every legitimate foundation for the ideal of science in a mathematical physical sense is lacking.

Hume thought that he could only maintain the law of causality in the sense of a psychical law of association, which through habit compels the mind to proceed without any reasoning from that which is given to that which is not given.

In his Treatise he still took the trouble to indicate an impression as the psychological origin of the concept of causality. Here his argument is as follows: It is of course true, that from the mere repetition of similar events subsequent to previously perceived similar antecedents, nothing objectively new arises which is in fact sensorily perceived in each instance. But the constant resemblance in the different instances does raise a new subjective impression in the mind, namely, a tendency to pass over from an instantly given impression to the Idea of another impression which in the past repeatedly occurred after the former. This is then the impression which corresponds to the Idea of causality².

In his Enquiry Hume no longer took the trouble to bring his theory of the concept of causality in agreement with his doctrine concerning the relation between ‘impressions’ and ‘Ideas’. In fact this was impossible, because repetition can by no means give a new impression. Therefore Hume immediately introduces habit in connecting Ideas as a natural law.

2 Treatise, Part. III, Sect. XIV (p. 459: ‘Tho' the several resembling instances, which give rise to the Idea of power, have no influence on each other, and can never produce any new quality in the object, which can be the model of that Idea, yet the observation of this resemblance produces a new impression in the mind, which is its real model.’

The way in which Hume's Critique finally undermines the foundations of his own psychological science-ideal.

It is only habit which compels us to join the Idea of an event B, which repeatedly followed the same event A, with the Idea

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of the latter. Habit, in the constant perception of like consequences after like antecedents, is the only foundation for the judgment of causality. The subjective sequence of Ideas is incorrectly interpreted as an objective necessity in the relations between the contents of the Ideas.

The ‘propter hoc’ - and with that the entire necessary coherence of phenomena - can never be demonstrated or understood rationally. It can only be believed¹. This faith is only ‘some sentiment or feeling’ that accompanies our Idea. But implicitly, this acknowledgement destroys the foundation of the psychical laws of association, as psychical laws of ‘human nature’. For in these laws, too, there is implied a necessary connection between Ideas in temporal sequence: ‘nature by an absolute and uncontrollable necessity has determined us to judge as well as to breathe and feel’².

Hume even admits that he cannot account for these psychical laws of nature and he appeals to them in a purely dogmatic fashion as to ‘a principle of human nature, which is universally acknowledged, and which is well-known by its effects’³. Thus he not only undermined the Humanistic metaphysics of the rationalistic mathematical science-ideal and of the ideal of personality with its three themes: deity, freedom and immortality, but through his psychologistic epistemology he also shook the ground-pillars of the ideals of personality and of science, as such.

1 ‘All these operations are a species of natural instincts, which no reasoning or process of the thought and understanding is able either to produce or to prevent.’ Enquiry, Sect. V, Part. I.

2 Treatise I, Part. IV, Sect. 1 (pag. 474/5).

3 Enquiry, Sect. v, Part. 1. It is true, that again and again in the Enquiry the insight appears, that the law of causality must be postulated as the foundation for all events. (See Wentscher, Geschichte des Kausalproblems, 1921, p. 102). But Hume's psychologism compels him to seek the ground of the Idea of causality exclusively in subjective associations.

Hume disregards the synthesis of logical and psychical meaning in his psychological basic denominator.

In keeping with the postulate of continuity of the ideal of science in its psychologized sense, Hume levelled the modal boundaries of meaning between the law-spheres, and thereby involved himself in evident antinomies. He was not conscious of the fact that his reduction of the entire given reality

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to a psychological basic denominator rests upon a fundamental rational abstraction; he did not understand that only theoretical thought, by synthesizing analytical and psychical modal meaning, is in a position to isolate the psychical aspect of reality. That he failed to acquire this insight is evident from his attempt to obliterate, in the face of the psychical aspect of sensation, the original sense of the logical aspect and to reduce the concept to a mere copy of the psychical impression of feeling.

Hume had sharply recognized the antinomy (previously analyzed by Bayle and Berkeley) of the metaphysical concept of substance, an antinomy, which originates front the fact that a product of thought is proclaimed to be absolutely independent of thought, and to be a ‘thing in itself’¹.

But he did not see the inner antinomy which lay in his own absolutizing of the psychical (feeling-) aspect of reality. He was unconscious of the antinomy which arises from the attempt to reduce the meaning of the logical aspect to the psychical ‘in itself’. In truth his basic denominator for all given reality was a psycho-logical one, and not merely psychical.

In empirical reality the psychical aspect of meaning only exists in the full coherence of all the modal aspects. Only theoretical thought can abstract it, and within its modal cadre isolate the objective sensory impressions, the subjective emotions and the images of sensory phantasy. How then can the logical concept itself be comprehended as a mere image of a sensory impression? Whoever attempts to do so, is guilty of undermining the logical criterion of truth, and necessarily involves himself in logical contradiction. Where only psychical laws of association rule, there is no room for a veritable normative criterion of truth, there every concept of natural law becomes meaningless.

1 This antinomy is excellently characterized by Fichte in his Zweite Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre (Sämtl. Werke 1, S. 491), when he remarks in opposition to those who have accepted the ‘Ding an sich’: ‘Ihr Ding ist durch ihr Denken hervorgebracht; nun aber soll es gleich darauf wieder ein Ding an sich, d.i. nicht durch Denken hervorgebracht seyn. Ich verstehe sie wahrhaftig nicht; ich kann mich weder diesen Gedanken denken, noch einen Verstand denken, mit welchem man diesen Gedanken denkt...’ [‘Their “thing” has been produced by their thought; nevertheless it should immediately after that again be conceived of as a “thing in itself”, i.e. as not being produced by thought. Truly, I don't understand them; I can neither think this Idea, nor can I think of an understanding by means of which this Idea is thought...’].

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Thus, in his naturalistic psychologized system, Hume has also undermined his own theory's claim to truth.

§ 6 - The prelude to the shifting of primacy to the ideal of personality

The extension of the psychologized science-ideal over the modal boundaries of the aesthetic, juridical, moral and faith-aspects.

Even though Hume accepts psychological ‘feeling’, in its modal subject-object-relation (emotion-sensation), as the basic denominator for all modal aspects of reality, yet he recognizes a relative modal diversity of meaning in the cosmos. Within the absolutized psychical law-sphere, the aesthetic, juridical, moral and faith aspects of experience were distinguished by him from the logical one (which he had also psychologized). Nevertheless, the science-ideal, with its psychologically conceived law of causality, arbitrarily exceeds these modal boundaries.

In Leibniz all modal aspects of meaning are made to be modi of mathematical thought. In Hume they become modi of his psychological basic denominator. So the aesthetic aspect, too, becomes a modus of psychical feeling: ‘Pleasure and pain... are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence’¹. The same can be stated in respect to the remaining normative modal aspects of experience. Hume presented a mechanistic theory of human emotions, entirely in accord with the tradition handed down by Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza, and directly connected with Locke. On this point the latter had reproduced Hobbes' theory in the form in which it acquired its great influence in the English, French, and Scottish philosophy of the Enlightenment. For Hume - as it had been for Hobbes - this theory was the foundation of his ethical philosophy and of his theoretical view of faith: ‘in the production and conduct of the passions, there is a certain regular mechanism, which is susceptible of as accurate a disquisition, as the laws of motion, optics, hydrostatics, or any part of physical nature’².

The laws of association are the sole explanatory principles which Hume will here employ. They are grounded on the principle of the uniformity of human nature at all times.

1 Treatise II, Part. I, Sect. VIII (p. 96).

2 Diss. on the Passions, Sect. VI.

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The psychologically comprehended science-ideal that lies at the foundation of this entire explanatory method, is clearly formulated by Hume in the following statement: ‘We find in the course of nature that though the effects be many, the principles from which they arise are commonly but few and simple, and that it is the sign of an unskilful naturalist to have recourse to a different quality, in order to explain every different operation. How much more must this be true with regard to the human mind’¹.

We saw that the emotions form a second class of impressions next to those which belong to the sensory function of perception and to the corporeal feelings of pleasure and pain². Hume designated the first mentioned impressions as ‘reflective’ and deemed them to be derived from the original sensual impressions either directly or indirectly through the intermediary of an Idea of a sensory impression. He therefore called the emotions ‘secondary’ impressions, in contradistinction to the ‘original’ ones of ‘sensation’.

He divided the ‘secondary impressions’ into two classes, the calm and the vehement ones. He considered the emotions of beauty and ugliness as ‘calm’ impressions. Under the ‘vehement’ he subsumed all such passions as love and hate, sorrow and joy, pride and humility.

The ‘passions’ themselves were further divided into ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’. Under the former he understood all such which arise directly out of the elementary feelings of pleasure or pain, such as desire, aversion, sorrow, joy, hope, fear and despair; under the latter, all such which, although originating from the same source, nevertheless, do so only by combining other qualities. Pride and humility, ambition, vanity, love, hate, jealousy, compassion, generosity, malice, and so on, are considered to be ‘indirect’ passions.

All these emotions appear in human nature in connection with certain Ideas and objects; moreover, they do so in a regular conformity to natural laws. Hume sharply distinguishes the causes of emotions from their objects. The selfhood can never be the cause, but can only be the object of a passion³. For in Hume's criticism of the concept of substance the selfhood was

1 Treatise II, Part. I, Sect. I (p. 81).

2 Ibid. (p. 75).

3 Treatise II, Par. I, Sect. II (p. 77).

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resolved into a collective concept of the associational series of ideas. In the case of pride and humility, one's own selfhood is the object of the emotions, whereas in the case of hate and love, the emotion has other selves for its object.

The cooperation between the associations of Ideas and those of passions.

All the various causes of the ‘passions’ are now reduced to the simple natural principles of association.

The impressions are as much associated as the Ideas, but with the fundamental difference that the former in the temporal sequence combine only in accordance with the natural associational law of resemblance, whereas the Ideas are, in addition, connected according to the associational laws of contiguity and causality¹.

Because the emotions are always accompanied in a natural way by certain Ideas, also the associations of the Ideas and the associations of the passions combine in the same object: ‘Thus a man, who, by any injury from another, is very much discompos'd and ruffled in his temper, is apt to find a hundred subjects of discontent, impatience, fear, and other uneasy passions; especially, if he can discover these subjects in or near the person, who was the cause of his first passion. Those principles, which forward the transition of Ideas, here concur with those, which operate on the passions; and both uniting in one action, bestow on the mind a double impulse. The new passion, therefore, must arise with so much greater violence, and the transition to it must be rendered so much easy and natural’². A mere association of Ideas is consequently not sufficient to originate passions. In the sphere of the emotional or secondary impressions, the laws of association are only valid on the basis of a natural and original connection between an Idea and a passion³.

1 Treatise II, Part. I, Sect. IV, p. 82: ‘'Tis evident, then, there is an attraction or association among impressions, as well as among Ideas; tho' with this remarkable difference, that Ideas are associated by resemblance, contiguity, and causation; and impressions only by resemblance.’

2 Ibid., p. 83.

3 Ibid., Sect. IX (p. 101): ‘From this reasoning, as well as from undoubted experience, we may conclude, that an association of Ideas, however necessary, is not alone sufficient to give rise to any passion.
'Tis evident, then, that when the mind feels the passion either of pride or humility upon the appearance of a related object, there is, beside the relation or transition of thought, an emotion or original impression produc'd by some other principle.’

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The way in which Hume's psychologized ideal of science destroys the conception of the freedom of the will in the sense of the mathematical ideal of science.

In this entire psychological mechanism of ‘human nature’ there remains no room for the freedom of the will. Hume's standpoint in this respect is quite different from that of Locke and Leibniz.

Locke could leave some room to the freedom of the will in the indeterministic sense of a ‘liberum arbitrium indifferentiae’ or ‘liberum arbitrium equilibrii’, since he did not dissolve human self-hood and personality into a mechanism of psychical associations, and held to the dualism of reflection and sensation¹. In Hume's psychologized system, such an Idea of freedom must be discarded equally with the conception, according to the mathematical science-ideal, that the freedom of the will consists in the fact that it is determined by clear and distinct thought.

The metaphysical bulwark of the rationalistic Humanist ideal of personality, i.e. the selfhood, concentrated in its mathematical thought, as a substance, as ‘res cogitans’, had been destroyed by Hume's psychological criticism. And with equal force, the content of this ideal of personality (autonomous freedom) had to be sacrified to the psychologized science-ideal. The ‘will’ is therefore conceived of as a mere inner impression which we feel, when we consciously execute a new corporeal motion or produce a new Idea in our mind².

This psychical impression which we call ‘will’ is as necessarily determined as are the movements of psychical phenomena. There is a necessary causal connection between human actions

1 In his Essay concerning Human Understanding II, 2. Sect. 51, Locke found a place for the moral freedom and responsibility of personality in the ‘power a man has to suspend his desires and stop them from determining his will to any action, till he has examined, whether it be really of a nature in itself and consequences to make him happy or no.’ And he taught: ‘The care of ourselves that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty.’ In his Introduction (p. 16) to book II of Hume's Treatise, Green correctly observes, that this concession to the ideal of personality again evokes an intrinsic antinomy with Locke's ideal of science.

2 Treatise II, Part. III, Sect. I (p. 181).

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and their motives and the circumstances in which they arise. This necessity, however, is only comprehended in the sense of the natural laws of association, in the sense of constant sequences of similar motives and actions. It is not thought of in the sense of any hidden mechanical force or compulsion which proceeds from the impulses.

Hume was of the opinion that his psychological determinism could in no way be called materialistic, nor could be at all in conflict with religion. Rather he deemed his doctrine of the psychological necessity of human actions to be essential both for morality and religion¹. Every other conception altogether destroys the Idea of law, not only of human laws, but of the divine as well.

It must be granted that on the basis of Hume's psychologized cosmonomic Idea no other solution is possible!

1 Treatise II, Part III, Sect. II (p. 189 ff.).

The prelude to the shift of primacy to the ideal of personality.

We have seen that Hume's psychologized epistemology dissolved the very foundations of the ideal of science and that of personality. Nevertheless, the fact that Hume subordinated theoretical mathematical thought to the absolutized psychical function of feeling and sensation can be considered as the prelude to the shift of primacy from the nature-motive to the freedom-motive.

In the beginning of his exposition concerning the motives of the will, Hume states in the clearest possible manner the contradiction which exists between his own ethical standpoint and that of the mathematical science-ideal: ‘Nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in common life, than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and assert, that men are only so far virtuous as they conform themselves to its dictates. Every rational creature, 'tis said, is oblig'd to regulate his actions by reason; and if any other motive or principle challenge the direction of his conduct, he ought to oppose it, 'till it be entirely subdu'd, or at least brought to a conformity with that superior principle... In order to show the fallacy of all this philosophy, I shall endeavour to prove first, that reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the

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will; and secondly, that it can never oppose passion in the direction of the will’¹.

Reason, in the sense of the mathematical ideal of science of Descartes and Leibniz, is expelled completely from its sovereign position as the ultimate rule of human actions: ‘reason is and ought to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’².

Mathematics is of course useful in all mechanical technique, and arithmetic is utilized in nearly every art and in every occupation: ‘But 'tis not of themselves they have any influence...

A merchant is desirous of knowing the sum total of his accounts with any person: Why? but that he may learn what sum will have the same effects, in paying his debt, and going to market, as all the particular articles taken together. Abstract or demonstrative reasoning, therefore, never influences any of our actions but only as it directs our judgment concerning causes and effects’³.

Even the causal natural scientific thought in which the mathematical ideal of science found the method to extend its postulate of continuity over the entire reality of experience cannot in itself influence nor activate the will. Reason only discovers the causal relations between the phenomena, but ‘where the objects themselves do not affect us, their connexions can never give them any influence; and 'tis plain, that as reason is nothing but the discovery of this connection, it cannot be by its means that the objects are able to affect us’⁴. Reason cannot motivate an action, because experience demonstrates, that action only arises from an emotion: ‘nothing can oppose or retard the impulse of passion but a contrary impulse.’

Thus the rationalist prejudice is abandoned that the decisions of the will are determined by theoretical Ideas (whether clearly distinguished or confused).

1 Treatise II, Part III, Sect. III, p. 193.

2 Ibid., p. 195.

3 Ibid., p. 193/4.

4 Ibid., p. 194.

Hume withdraws morality from the science-ideal. Primacy of the moral feeling.

Now it is this which paves the way to Hume's own moral philosophy. It is not correct to say that Hume denied the normative

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sense of ethics. On the contrary, no other Humanist philosopher before Kant¹ had pointed out so sharply the necessity of the distinction between that which ‘is’ and that which ‘ought to be’. And, even in Hume, this distinction implies the contrast between scientific thought and ethical action².

From this very distinction Hume drew the consequence that ethics is not capable of being proven logically-mathematically, thereby dealing a new blow to the mathematical ideal of science. His argument in support of this view is extremely interesting, since in his own way Hume laid bare the antinomy existing between the mathematical ideal of science and that of personality.

If logical mathematical thought is to be in a position to establish the norms of good and evil, then, according to Hume, either the character of virtue and vice must lie in certain relations between the objects, or they would have to be ‘matters of fact’ which we would be able to discover by our scientific reasoning.

According to the dominant (Lockian) conception, the necessary

1 To be sure, Leibniz, too, makes a sharp distinction between what ‘is’ and what ‘ought to be’. Cf. his Méditation sur la notion commune de la justice [Meditation concerning the common notion of justice] in jur. vol. IIIa, Fol. 72-87; here he remarks against Hobbes: ‘Car autre chose est, ce qui se peut, autre chose ce qui se doit.’ [For what is possible is quite different from what ought to be].
However, in Leibniz this does not mean, that ethical action would be independent of clear and distinct thought. On the contrary, as we have seen, he agrees in principle with Descartes' rationalist view of ethics, although in him this rationalism is mitigated by a mystical motive due to his conception of a ‘supra-natural’ participation of human reason in the creative thought of God, which produces ‘love’ and ‘piety’. See Kurt Hildebrandt, Leibniz und das Reich der Gnade [Leibniz and the kingdom of grace] (The Hague, Nijhoff, 1953), especially p. 299 ff.
I fear, however, Hildebrandt has exaggerated this mystical motive at the cost of a just valuation of Leibniz' mathematical rationalism.

2 Treatise III, Part. I, Sect. I (p. 245): ‘In every system of morality which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet no proposition, that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it is necessary that it should be observed and explained;’ cf. Laing on this point, op. cit. pp. 189 ff.

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relations between the Ideas must be sharply distinguished from ‘matters of fact’.

Thus, if it were true that virtue is discoverable through thought, it would have to be an object either of mathematical science which examines the relations between Ideas, or of empirical natural science. There is, according to Hume, no third activity of thought.

According to the dominating rationalist conception, however, only the first possibility can receive consideration. For it pretends that the norms of ethics are capable of being proven apriori, ‘more geometrico’. And a mere ‘matter of fact’ is not susceptible of such proof. When it is conceded, however, that virtue and vice consist in relations concerning which certainty can be attained or for which mathematical proof can be given, then only the four invariable philosophical relations of resemblance and contrast, and the grades in quantity and quality can be taken into consideration. Now, in this case one is immediately involved in inescapable absurdities. For since there is not a single one among the four relations just mentioned which could not just as well be applied to animals and plants, or even to lifeless objects, the consequence would be inescapable that even such things would have to be capable of being judged as moral subjects: ‘Resemblance, contrariety, degrees in quality, and proportions in quantity and number; all these relations belong as properly to matter, as to our actions, passions and volitions. 'Tis unquestionable, therefore, that morality lies not in any of these relations, nor the sense of it in their discovery’¹.

Hume was too keen a thinker to be blind to the fact that with the same sort of reasoning one could also indicate the intrinsic antinomy in his own psychologized view of morality.

In his system virtue and vice are derived from feelings of pleasure and pain, which have nothing to do with normative properties. He attempts to rescue himself from this antinomy by pointing out that the feeling of pleasure is only a general term which signifies very different ‘feelings’. So the aesthetic feeling and the sensory feeling of taste are not mutually reducible the one to the other². Nevertheless, Hume forgets that his theory of the mechanism of human nature destroys the foundation for all normative imputation. If the normative ethical distinctions

1 Treatise III, Part. I, Sect. I (p. 241).

2 Ibid., p. 248.

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are not to be derived from mathematical reason, the question arises, in what must their basis be sought? Hume answers: in the moral sense, an explanation which clearly betrays the influence of Hutcheson. In Hume's system moral Ideas, just like other ideas, must be derived from ‘impressions’. Each feeling has its particular impressions. If a particular moral feeling exists, there must also exist moral impressions which cannot be reduced to other sorts of impressions. What is the character of these moral impressions? ‘To have the sense of virtue is nothing but to feel a satisfaction of a particular kind from the contemplation of a character. The very feeling constitutes our praise or admiration. We go no further; nor do we inquire into the cause of the satisfaction. We do not infer a character to be virtuous, because it pleases; but in feeling, that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in effect feel that it is virtuous’¹.

Good and evil, therefore, are nothing but feelings of pleasure and pain of a particular moral character. This special character lies in the feeling of approval or disapproval that an act provokes in ourselves or others. However, in the final analysis, the motives of acts, even of moral acts, in Hume still remain a-normative. Acts are not performed on the ground of their morally good or bad character; they are hedonistically determined. But the contemplation of the act creates a particular satisfaction or feeling of pleasure, which is approbation or the feeling of virtue, from which the Idea of virtue is the copy. In consequence, it may be that the psychologized ideal of science still absorbs the personal moral freedom; but the ratio, in the sense of mathematical thought, is in any case rejected as the foundation of ethics and as the basis for the ideal of personality. The tendency to withdraw the ideal of personality from the stiffening grasp of the Humanistic science-ideal is clearly perceptible. Yet Kant was to be the first to undertake the actio finium regundorum.

1 Treatise III, Part. I, Sect. II (p. 247).

Hume's attack upon the rationalistic theory of Humanist natural law and upon its construction of the social contract. Vico and Montesquieu.

Hume's break with the mathematical ideal of science of his rationalist predecessors is also evident from his noteworthy criticism of the entire rationalistic-Humanist doctrine of natural

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law, and in particular from his criticism of its conception that the state was to be construed by means of one or more contracts between pre-social individuals. From the very beginning the nominalistic trait of the Humanistic ideal of science in its mathematical form manifested itself very clearly in this construction. According to its adherents, the political community is not to be founded on the substantial form of human nature, as the Aristotelian-Thomistic doctrine of natural law had done. Nominalist natural law can no longer ascribe ontological reality to the state, not even in an accidental sense. Even in Hugo Grotius, who externally follows the Aristotelian-Thomistic doctrine of the appetitus socialis, authority and obedience have no natural foundation. Both must be construed ‘more geometrico’ out of the simplest elements, the free and autonomous individuals.

The construction of the social contract seemed to be the sole method to reconcile the postulate of the mathematical ideal of science and that of the Humanistic ideal of personality. For, whereas the former must lead to a construction of the state as an instrument of sovereign domination, the latter must require a justification of the modern concept of sovereignty, introduced by Jean Bodin, in the face of the autonomous freedom of human personality. And the construction of the social contract seemed to satisfy both postulates. While for the rest Hume took a radical nominalistic standpoint, he nevertheless exercised a sharp criticism of this construction, because he correctly thought that by so doing he was able to strike a blow at the mathematical ideal of science. Thereby, in contradistinction to Cartesianism, Hume, by virtue of his historical-psychological method, came to stand on the side of Vico and Montesquieu. And since the Whigs based their political views upon the mathematical doctrine of natural law, Hume's political affinity with the Tory party is also noteworthy in this connection. Over against the contract-theory Hume appealed to the psychical condition of primitive people. The latter certainly cannot comprehend obedience to political authority in terms of an abstract contract of individuals. Moreover, it bears witness to Hume's deeply penetrating insight into the weak side of the contract theories, when repeatedly he pointed out, that the obligation which arises out of an agreement is not of a natural but of a conventional character¹. The contract,

1 As I indicated in my series of treatises ‘In the Struggle for a Christian Politics’, the contract theory was the very seed of dissolution within the rationalist doctrine of natural law. The conflict between the absolutist concept of state-sovereignty and the principles of natural law concerning freedom and equality of all men as such, was a document to the inner antinomy between the ideal of science and the ideal of personality within the Humanist theory of natural law. See also my The Contest about the Concept of Sovereignty in Modern Jurisprudence and Political Science (publ. by H.J. Paris, Amsterdam 1950).

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therefore, cannot precede the establishment of an ordered community and the institutions of the state.

The historical side of Hume's criticism as he developed it in his The Original Contract and in his An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, naturally did not strike at the heart of the contract theory. The latter - at least in its general tendencies - always wished to construe the justification for the state along the mathematical logical path. Hume, however, had repudiated the mathematical ideal of science. In keeping with his psychological ideal of science, the mathematical conception of the natural state is replaced by a psychological one corresponding to his theory of ‘human nature’. In his treatise The Original Contract (in sharp contradistinction to his conception in the Enquiry¹) Hume assumed, to be sure, an original equality of men, from which he concluded that there was an original consent of individuals by which they subjected themselves to authority. But this agreement is not to be understood - in the sense of the mathematical science-ideal - as a universal continuous basis for the authority of the rulers. According to Hume's psychologized conception of mathematics, exact concepts which go beyond sensory impressions (e.g. the concept of an exact measure of equality, the concept of the infinitesimal, the mathematical point etc.) are ungrounded. The same conclusion must be drawn with respect to the search for mathematically exact foundations for the state and the legal order. In Hume's psychologized theory of state and law the original agreement can only be understood psychologically and intermittently in terms of the impressions of necessity and utility which arise in a given situation for the sake of subjecting oneself to someone of eminent qualities. Such situations occur again and again, and, in direct proportion to the frequency of their re-occurrence, a custom of obedience is born out of the impression. In the further development of the state, however, the psychologically comprehended agreement of the

1 Enquiry concerning the principles of Morals, Sect. III, Part. II.

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subjects is of no use as an explanatory principle. The factual basis of authority is only to be found in continually exercised force.

In answer to the question concerning the right of authority Hume points to the influence of time upon the human soul. From the feeling of utility arises the first psychical impulse to obey. When, however, a government has retained its power long enough to create constancy and stability in political life, there arises in the human soul an impression or custom which forms the foundation for the Idea of the right of the government, and personal interest and advantage are reduced to a subordinate value¹.

Thus Hume's psychologism conquered the strongest position in which the mathematical ideal of science had hitherto thought it could defend the freedom of the individual in the sense of the ideal of personality. Even the Humanistic doctrine of natural law caves in under his critique.

1 Treatise III, Part. II, Sect. X (p. 319): ‘Time alone gives solidity to their right’ (viz. of the usurpers) ‘and operating gradually on the minds of men, reconciles them to any authority, and makes it seem just and reasonable... When we have been long accustom'd to obey any set of men, that general instinct or tendency, which we have to suppose a moral obligation attending loyalty, takes easily this direction... 'T is interest which gives the general instinct; but 't is custom which gives the particular direction.’

§ 7 - The crisis in the conflict between the ideal of science and that of personality in Rousseau

In Rousseau's philosophical world of thought the tension between the ideal of science and that of personality reached a religious crisis. In 1750, in answer to the question posed by the Academy of Dijon, which offered a prize for the best response, the Genevan autodidact sent in his treatise entitled ‘Discours sur les sciences et les arts’. This writing at one blow established his European renown. It signified a passionate attack upon the entire Humanistic civilization which was dominated by the rationalist science-ideal, and had trampled the rights of human personality to a natural development. From the very beginning the Humanistic ideal of science had implied a fundamental problem with respect to the relationship between scientific thought, stimulated by the Faustian passion for power,

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and the autonomous freedom and value of human personality. In the soul of Rousseau this problem attained such a tension, that he openly proclaimed the antinomy between the two polar motives of Humanist thought. He did not eschew the consequence of disavowing the science-ideal, in order to make possible the recognition of human personality as a moral aim in itself.

‘If our sciences are vain in the object proposed to themselves, they are still more dangerous by the effects which they produce.’ So runs the judgment passed by Rousseau on the science-ideal in his Discours sur les sciences et les arts¹. And his writing ends with the pathetic exhortation to return into ourselves in all simplicity. Freed from the burden of science, we may learn true virtues from the principles which are inscribed in the heart of everybody. ‘O virtue! sublime knowledge of simple souls, should we need so much trouble and intellectual apparatus to know thee? Are not thy principles engraved in all hearts and does it not suffice for us in order to learn thy laws to return into ourselves and to hear the voice of conscience in the silence of the passions?’²

This was the passionate language of the re-awakened ideal of personality that called Humanistic thought to ultimate self-reflection, to reflection upon the religious motive of the freedom and autarchy of personality, through which the ideal of science was itself called into being.

In his Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalite parmi les hommes (Discourse on the origin of inequality among men) Rousseau rejected the conception which sought the difference between man and animals primarily in thought. Only the consciousness of freedom and the feeling of moral power proves the spiritual character of the human soul: ‘Every animal has ideas, because it has senses; it even combines ideas up to a certain point... Consequently it is not so much the understanding which among the animals makes the specific distinction of man, but rather man's

1 Oeuvres complêts de J.J. Rousseau, 1855 (ed. H. Bechold) II, p. 126: ‘Si nos sciences sont vaines dans l'objet qu'elles se proposent, elles sont encore plus dangereuses par les effets qu'elles produisent.’

2 Ibid., p. 138: ‘O vertu! science sublime des âmes simples, faut-il donc tant de peines et d'appareil pour te connaître? Tes principes ne sont-ils pas gravés dans tous les coeurs? et ne suffit-il pas pour apprendre tes lois de rentrer en soi-même et d'écouter la voix de la conscience dans le silence des passions?’

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quality of a free agent. Nature commands every animal, and the beast obeys. Man experiences the same impression, but he is aware of his freedom to yield or to resist; and it is especially in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul manifests itself; for physics explains in some fashion the mechanism of the senses and the formation of Ideas, but in the power of willing or rather choosing, and in the feeling of that power one finds only purely spiritual acts which in no single part are to be explained in terms of mechanical laws’¹.

Thus human thought was in a sensualistic sense degraded to a mere higher level of the animal associations of sensory Ideas, in order to permit all value of human personality to be concentrated in the feeling of freedom.

Nevertheless, in his democratic-revolutionary political philosophy, Rousseau did not abandon the mathematical pattern of thought. By means of the latter he sought to maintain the natural rights of human personality in the face of the despotism of Hobbes' Leviathan, although the latter was philosophically construed by the same means of mathematical-juridical thought, namely the social contract.

Rousseau sharply distinguishes the ‘volonté générale’ from the ‘volonté de tous’, because the former can only be directed towards the common good. But in this ‘general will’, in which ‘each of us brings into the community his person and all his power, in order that we may receive every member as an indivisible part of the whole’², personal freedom is again absorbed by the principle of majority³. The state-Leviathan

1 Oeuvres II, p. 30/1: ‘Tout animal a des idées, puisqu'il a des sens; il combine même des idées jusqu'à un certain point... Ce n'est donc pas tant l'entendement qui fait parmi les animaux la distinction specifique de l'homme que sa qualité d'agent libre. La nature commande à tout animal, et la bête obéit. L'homme éprouve la même impression, mais il se reconnait libre d'acquiescer ou de résister; et c'est surtout dans la conscience de cette liberté que se montre la spiritualité de son âme, car la physique explique en quelque manière le mécanisme des sens et la formation des idées; mais dans la puissance de vouloir ou plutôt de choisir, et dans le sentiment de cette puissance, on ne trouve que des actes purement spirituels, dont on n'explique rien par les lois de la mécanique.’

2 Du Contrat Social (Oeuvres II), p. 274: ‘chacun de nous met en commun sa personne et toute sa puissance, afin que nous recevons encore chaque membre comme partie indivisible du tout.’

3 Op. cit., p. 325: ‘Hors ce contrat primitif, la voix du plus grand nombre oblige toujours tous les autres; c'est une suite du contrat même.’ [Except for this original contract, the vote of the greatest number obliges always all the rest; this is a consequence of the very contract.]

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construed both in Hobbes and in Rousseau in accordance with the mathematical ideal of science which respects no limits, devours free personality in all its spheres of life. The introduction of the Idea of the ‘volonté générale’ was actually meant in a normative sense. And in it personality was to regain its natural autonomous freedom in a higher form construed by mathematical thought. In fact, its introduction implied the absorption of free personality into a despotic construction issued from the condemned ideal of science. It was the picture of Leviathan, with its head cut off that formed the frontispiece of the first edition of The Social Contract!

Meanwhile - and this is the point in which Rousseau had decidedly outgrown the spirit of the Enlightenment - the accent in his philosophy is definitely shifted to the ideal of personality. And the latter can no longer be identified with mathematical thought.

In Hume's philosophy the ideal of personality had already begun to revolt against the science-ideal by making moral feeling independent of the theoretical Idea. In Rousseau feeling became the true seat of the Humanistic ideal of personality which had been robbed of its vitality by the hypertrophy of the science-ideal.

Rousseau's religion of sentiment and his estrangement from Hume.

Rousseau's bitterest attacks were directed against the rationalistic view of religion of the ‘Enlightenment’. In it he correctly saw an attack upon the religious kernel of the Humanistic ideal of personality.

His proclamation of the natural religion of sentiment¹ was directed just as much against the materialism of the French Encyclopedists as against the deism of Newton's natural philosophy. Rousseau never grew weary of telling his contemporaries that religion is not seated in the head, but in the ‘heart’. He never grew tired contending that abstract science may not en-

1 See the famous fourth book of his Emile, where Rousseau expounded his dualistic conception of human nature (sensory nature versus the feeling of freedom). I suspect that this conception influenced Kant's dualism.

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croach upon the holy contents of human feeling. He combated the rationalistic associational psychology which had excluded the ‘soul’ from its field of investigation. And his opposition was marked by a passionateness which can only be understood in terms of an ultimate religious reaction of the Humanistic ideal of personality against the tyranny of the ideal of science. Thus not only did he necessarily become estranged from the circle of the Encyclopedists but also from his earlier friend and protector David Hume. For, no matter how Rousseau could feel in agreement with Hume in his emancipation of the function of feeling from theoretical thought, yet in the final analysis, in Hume's absolutizing of the deterministic viewpoint of associational psychology, the ideal of science still dominated that of the sovereign personality.

Disillusionized, the passionate defender of the freedom of sovereign personality turned away from Western culture. The freedom of the sovereign personality ought to be recognized equally in all individuals, but Western culture was dominated in all the spheres of life by sovereign science, which was not in the first place concerned with personal freedom. Rousseau sought consolation in the dream of a natural state of innocence and happiness which had been disturbed by modern culture.

Optimism and Pessimism in their new relation in Rousseau.

The state of nature is no longer painted, as in Hobbes, in the shrill colours of a ‘bellum omnium contra omnes’. On the contrary, in his representation of the original state of mankind, Rousseau revived the Stoic Idea of the ‘golden age’. Perhaps he was influenced by such idealistic pictures of primitive society as were current at his time. But his conviction of the value of the primitive had undoubtedly deeper grounds in his anti-rationalist conception of human nature. Rousseau's optimistic view of the original goodness of the latter differed radically from the optimistic life- and world-view in which the ideal of science held the supremacy.

Science has not made good its promise to human personality, it has not brought freedom to man, but slavery, inequality, and exploitation. Optimism and pessimism are the light and shadow in Rousseau's picture of the state of nature and of culture; however, their rôle is completely the reverse of what it had been in Hobbes. With respect to the culture of the science-ideal Rousseau

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was a pessimist. He was an optimist only in his belief in the free personality which will break the strait-jacket into which it was clapped by the rationalistic culture. It will build a new culture in which the sovereign freedom of man will shine forth in greater brilliance than in the uncorrupted state of nature. This new culture will find its foundation only in the divine value of personality.

Locke and Rousseau. The contrast between innate human rights and inalienable rights of the citizen.

In the natural state all individuals were free and equal but they remained individuals. Their inalienable human rights were formulated by Locke in opposition to the absolutistic doctrine of Hobbes. Nevertheless, Locke was a genuine figure of the ‘Enlightenment’. He held fast to the optimistic faith that the domination of mathematical thought was the best guarantee of the freedom of personality.

Just as he resolved all complex Ideas into simple ones, so to him the free individual remained the central point of the civil state. Just as the entire preceding Humanistic doctrine of natural law, Locke construed the transition from the natural state to the civil state by means of the social contract. The citizens had already possessed their inalienable rights of freedom and private property in the natural state, but they needed the social contract to guarantee them by an organized power. And this was the sole intention of this contract in the system of Locke. The civil state is no more than a company with limited liability, designed for the continuation of the natural state under the protection of an authority. It is the constitutional state of the old liberalism, the state which has as its only goal the maintenance of the innate human rights of the individual.

Rousseau broke with this liberalistic conception. Just like the Stoics he did not consider the natural state of freedom and equality to be in itself the highest ideal. This situation is forever gone. A higher destiny calls humanity to the civil state. Only within the latter can the sovereign freedom of personality completely unfold in its divine value. Natural freedom ought to be elevated to the level of a higher, a normative Idea of freedom. The innate natural rights of men must be transformed into inalienable rights of the citizens. By means of the social contract the individual must surrender all of his natural freedom in order to get it back again in the higher form of the freedom of the

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citizen. To that end the social contract can no longer be conceived of in a formal sense, as Hobbes, Pufendorf and even Grotius had done. For with these teachers of natural law, the original contract could in the final analysis even justify the abandonment of all freedom of personality. For them the construction of the social contract was not first and foremost orientated to the ideal of personality but to the mathematical science-ideal with its domination-motive. Rousseau raises his flaming protest against this subjection of the value of personality to mathematical thought: ‘To give up one's liberty that is to give up one's quality of man, the rights of humanity, even one's duties. These words slavery and right are contradictory, they exclude one another mutually’¹.

Freedom, just as equality, is an inalienable human right that only can be abandoned in its natural form, in order to be regained in the higher form of citizenship. There is only a single specific form of association which secures this freedom. Therefore, this form is the only lawful one.

Thus in Rousseau the transition from the natural state to the civil state became the fundamental problem of guaranteeing the sovereign freedom of personality in the only legitimate form of association.

1 Du Contrat Social I, chap. IV (Oeuvres II), p. 269: ‘Renoncer à sa liberté, c'est renoncer à sa qualité d'homme, aux droits de l'humanité, même à ses devoirs.’ Ces mots esclavage et droit sont contradictoires, ils s'excluent mutuellement.’

The ideal of personality acquires primacy in Rousseau's construction of the social contract.

This is the new motive in Rousseau, and therefore he could rightly oppose his doctrine concerning the social contract to the earlier Humanistic theories of natural law: the ideal of personality has acquired primacy over the ideal of science. In his famous work Du Contrat Social ou Principes du Droit Politique he formulated the problem in question as follows: ‘To find a form of association which with all the common power defends and protects the person and goods of every member and by means of which each one uniting himself with all, nevertheless is only obedient to himself and remains as free as before’¹.

1 Ibid., chap. VI (Oeuvres II), p. 273: ‘Trouver une forme d'association qui défende et protège de toute la force commune la personne et les biens de chaque associé, et par laquelle chacun, s'unissant à tous, n'obéisse pourtant qu'à lui même, et reste aussi libre qu'auparavant.’

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Rousseau intended to solve this problem through his ‘social contract’ which, in order to be valid, must include precisely the clause that each individual delivers himself with all his natural rights to all, collectively and thus through becoming subject to the whole by his participation in the ‘general will’ gets back all his natural rights in a higher juridical form: ‘For in the first place, if every one gives himself entirely, the condition is equal for all; and if the condition is equal for all, nobody is interested in rendering it onerous for the others’².

According to Rousseau, the inalienable right of freedom maintains itself in the inalienable sovereignty of the people, which can never be transferred to a magistrate. The sovereign will of the people is the general will, which expresses itself in legislation. As such it is to be distinguished sharply from the ‘volonté de tous’.

For the ‘volonté générale’ should be directed exclusively toward the general interest; it is therefore incompatible with the existence of private associations between the state and the individual, because they foster particularism. At this point Rousseau appeals expressly to Plato's ‘ideal state’.

Public law, formed by the general will, does not recognize any counter-poise in private spheres of association. The ‘social contract’ is the only juridical basis for all the rights of the citizens. Thus the construction of the general will becomes the lever of an unbridled absolutism of the legislator. ‘Just as nature gives every man an absolute power over all his limbs, so the social contract gives the body politic an absolute power over all its members; and it is this same power which, directed by the general will, bears the name of sovereignty’³.

Rousseau did observe indeed, that there was an inner tension between his doctrine of the ‘volonté générale’ and the individual freedom of human personality.

Wolff's basic law for the state: ‘Salus publica suprema lex

2 ‘Car, premièrement, chacun se donnant tout entier, la condition est égale pour tous; et la condition étant égale pour tous, nul n'a intéret de la rendre onéreuse aux atres.’

3 ‘Comme la nature donne à chaque homme un pouvoir absolu sur tous ses membres, le pacte social donne au corps politique un pouvoir absolu sur tous les siens; et c'est ce même pouvoir qui, dirigé par la volonté générale, porte le nom de souverainité.’

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esto’, was to be reconciled with Locke's doctrine of the inalienable human rights. Wolff had openly acknowledged that there was an insoluble antinomy between these two poles of Humanistic political theory.

In Rousseau's theory, therefore, the question as to the mutual relationship between the natural rights of man and the rights of the citizen became a problem of essential importance. ‘Besides the public person,’ so he observes, ‘we have to consider the private persons which compose it, and whose life and liberty are by nature independent of it. Consequently the question is that we should well distinguish the rights of the citizens and those of the sovereign, and the duties which the former have to discharge in their quality of subjects from the natural right which they ought to enjoy in their quality of men’¹. According to him it is beyond dispute, that in the social contract every individual transfers to the state only as much of his natural power, his possessions, and freedom, as is required for ‘the common good’ of the community.

The ‘common good’, and so also the ‘general will’, do not recognize any particular individuals, but only the whole.

1 Du Contrat Social II, IV ‘Des bornes du pouvoir souverain’ (Oeuvres II, p. 286): ‘Outre la personne publique, nous avons à considerer les personnes privées qui la composent, et dont la vie et la liberté sont naturellement indépendantes d'elle. Il s'agit donc de bien distinguer les droits respectifs des citoyens et du souverain, et les devoirs qu'ont à remplir les premiers en qualité de sujets, du droit naturel dont ils doivent jouir en qualité d'hommes.’

The antinomy between the natural rights of man and the rights of the citizen. Rousseau's attempt to solve it.

Proceeding from this principle Rousseau thought he had discovered the way by which ‘natural human rights’, as private rights, could also be maintained uncurtailed in the civil state.

The first principle of the ‘general will’ that follows from the fact that the latter only can aim at the general interest, is namely the absolute equality of all citizens with respect to the demands of the community.

As soon as the sovereign lawgiver (the people) would favour certain citizens above others, so that special privileges would be accorded (recall the privileges of forum, freedom from taxation etc. of nobility and clergy under the ancient regime), the

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‘general will’ would be transmuted into a private or particular will and the sovereign would exceed the limits of its competency¹.

For the clause of the ‘social contract’, upon which all sovereignty in the state is based, contains unchangeably the principle of equality of all citizens with respect to the public interest. In other words, the ‘general will’, because of its unchangeable inner nature, can never have a particular object. This is the significance of Rousseau's concept of statute law which is quite different from the formal one. And it is also different from the so-called ‘material concept of statute law’ in the sense of a positive juridical rule touching the rights and duties of the citizens, as understood by the positivistic German school of Laband in the XIXth century.

According to Rousseau, a real public statute (loi) can never regulate a particular interest. And it cannot issue from an individual by virtue of a seignorial right: ‘Besides, because the public statute unites in itself the universality of the will and that of the object, it is evident that an order issued by any individual whatsoever in virtue of his own right, is not at all a statute; even an order of the sovereign concerning a private object is no more a statute but a decree, nor an act of sovereignty but of magistracy’². In other words, not everything which possesses the form of a statute is a statute in a material sense.

There are formal statutes which are not real ones, and conse-

1 Op. cit. III, Chap. IV (p. 286: ‘On voit par là que le pouvoir souverain, tout absolu, tout sacré, tout inviolable qu'il est, ne passe ni peut passer les bornes des conventions générales, et que tout homme peut disposer pleinement de ce qui lui a été laissé de ses biens et de sa liberté par des conventions; de sorte que le souverain n'est jamais en droit de charger un sujet plus qu'un autre, parce qu'alors l'affaire devenant particulière, son pouvoir n'est plus compétent.’ [‘From this it is seen that the sovereign power, however absolute, however sacred, however inviolable it may be, does not and cannot surpass the limits of the general conventions, and that every man can completely dispose of what these latter have left him of his goods and of his liberty; so that the sovereign has never the right to charge a subject more than another, because in this case the matter becomes a particular one and his power is no longer competent’].

2 ‘On voit encore que la loi réunissant l'universalité de la volonté et celle de l'objet, ce qu'un homme, quelqu'il puisse être, ordonne de son chef n'est point une loi: ce qu'ordonne même le souverain sur un objet particulier n'est pas non plus une loi, mais un décret; ni un acte de souverainité, mais de magistrature.’

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quently which are not the expression of the sovereign general will, but are only decrees, private acts of the magistrate which as such are not binding, unless they give effect to the ‘loi’. Thus it seems that in Rousseau the inalienable human rights as private subjective rights are in no way absorbed in the general will, since within the sphere of private law they cannot be assailed by arbitrary decrees or acts of a magistrate. But as we have seen, human rights in the civil state have changed their ground of validity. Now this ground lies exclusively in the social contract. In other words, the juridical source of private and public rights is, in the civil state, one and the same, and on the condition that the formal principle of equality and generality is respected, the general will is omnipotent. Consequently, in the civil state private human rights can only exist by the grace of the general will.

All limits of competency must yield to the general will of the sovereign. Rousseau himself wrote that the judgment concerning what the public interest demands belongs exclusively to the sovereign people. Moreover, he accepted the well-known construction, adhered to by the nominalistic doctrine of natural law since Marsilius of Padua up until and inclusive of Kant, according to which the general will, in which every citizen encounters his own will, cannot do any injustice to any one: volenti non fit injuria!

The limits of the competency of the legislator which Rousseau constructed are not real ones, since they are neither grounded on the inner nature and structure of the different social relationships, nor on the modal structure of the juridical aspect, but have been deduced from the abstract principle of equality and generality which neglects all structural differences in social reality.

The origin of this antinomy is again to be found in the tension between the ideal of science and that of personality.

In his undoubtedly ingenious construction of the relation between public and private interest, it is once again the mathematical ideal of science that pretends to guarantee the value of personality. And in the final analysis the ‘sovereign personality’ is again sacrificed to this science-ideal. Rousseau's famous expression: ‘On les forcera d'être libre’ (they must be forced to be free) soon would become the watchword under which the

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legions of the French revolution were to bring to the nations revolutionary freedom and equality, although Rousseau himself was impatient of every revolution. But it was the expression of the unsoluble antinomy between the ideal of science and that of personality which in Rousseau's doctrine of the social contract had reached its highest tension.

The reawakened ideal of personality had in Rousseau's religion of sentiment reacted spontaneously against the science-ideal. Yet, finally it submitted again to the mathematical construction of the latter. The fulminant protest, however, that out of the religious depth of Rousseau's contradictory personality sounded against the supremacy of scientific thought, was to summon mightier spirits than he to fight for the supremacy of the ideal of personality.