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Jerusalem Studies in Philosophy and History of Science
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Ruth Weintraub
Humean Bodies and their Consequences
Ruth Weintraub Department of Philosophy
Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv, Israel
ISSN 2524-4248ISSN 2524-4256 (electronic)
Jerusalem Studies in Philosophy and History of Science
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Acknowledgements
For comments and suggestions on parts of this book, many thanks to Avital Hazony Levi, Don Garrett, Thomas Holden, Peter Kail, David Landy, Kevin Meeker, Ariel Meirav, Noa Naaman-Zauderer, Hsueh Ku and two anonymous reviewers for Springer. Research for this book was partly funded by Israel Science Foundation, grant no. 751/20.
Some of the material in the book is based on the following papers: ‘The Time of a Killing’ , Analysis 63 (2003), pp. 178–182; ‘On Sharp Boundaries for Vague Predicates’ , Synthese 138 (2004), pp. 233–245; ‘Separability and ConceptEmpiricism: Hume vs. Locke’ , British Journal for the History of Philosophy 15 (2007), pp. 729–743; ‘Humean Bodies’ , History of Philosophy Quarterly 28 (2011), pp. 373–388; ‘Induction and Inference to the Best explanation’ , Philosophical Studies 166 (2013), pp. 203–206; ‘The problem of induction dissolved; but are we better off?’ , American Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2016), pp. 69–84; ‘Is Hume a methodological empiricist?’ , Hume Studies 48 (2021), pp. 1–25; ‘The dis-unity of humean space’ , Dialectica 75(1) (2021), pp. 59–83, https://doi.org/10. 48106/dial.v75.i1.04; ‘Hume’s view of geometry’. in: Posy, C., Ben-Menahem, Y. (ed.) Mathematical Knowledge, Objects and Applications. Jerusalem Studies in Philosophy and History of Science. Springer, Cham, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-3-031-21655-8_14
Permission to incorporate this material into the present volume is gratefully acknowledged. My thanks also go to the editors and anonymous referees of these journals.
Geometry from the Idealist Perspective
The Difficulty
First Suggestion for Contending with the Dif
Second Suggestion for Contending with the Difficulty
10.2.4 Most of Our Geometric Beliefs Are True and Justified from the Idealist Point of View
Part IV Consequences of the Idealist Interpretation for
15.3 Where the Replacement Makes a Difference Vis-à-vis Scepticism
15.3.1
15.4 How the Replacement Discriminates Between
15.5 Conclusion of the Fifth
Abbreviations
AbbreviationsofWorksbyDavidHume
A An abstract of a book lately published; entitled , A Treatise of Human Nature, etc. wherein the chief argument of that book is farther illustrated and explained, included in A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by David Fate and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Citations are given by paragraph number, followed by page numbers to A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge, revised by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). Referred to as SBN.
DNR Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, edited by J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1993). Citations are given by part and paragraph number.
EHU An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Citations are given by section and paragraph, followed by page numbers to Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Referred to as SBN.
T A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by David Fate and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Citations are given by book, part, Section, and paragraph, followed by page numbers to A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). Referred to as SBN.
T App The Appendix added to Book 3 of A treatise of Humean Nature, as found in the two editions above.
xivAbbreviations
AbbreviationsofOtherPrimaryWorks
CSM Descartes, Renè. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch, 3 volumes (Cambridge University Press, 1985–1991). Citations are by volume and page number.
DHP George Berkeley. Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonus.in The Works of George Berkeley , vol. II. Edited by Luce, A.A. and Jessop, T.E. (London: Nelson, 1948–1957). Citations are by page number.
ECHU Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Citations are by book, chapter, and section number.
N George Berkeley. Notebooks (also known as Philosophical Commentaries). in The Works of George Berkeley , vol. I. Edited by Luce, A.A. and Jessop, T.E. (London: Nelson, 1948–1957). Citations are by note number. and section number.
PHK George Berkeley Principles of Human Knowledge. in The Works of George Berkeley , vol II, Edited by Luce, A.A. and Jessop, T.E. (London: Nelson, 1948–1957).
Chapter 1 Introduction
My book has three related aims. The first is to defend the Idealist interpretation of the belief in external objects (“bodies”). Hume ascribes to us in the Treatise against the Materialist interpretation often ascribed to him. The second is to discern some of the far-reaching consequences of this interpretive controversy for Hume’s system: metaphysical implications pertaining to the spatiality of objects, causation and the divisibility of space, psychological implications pertaining to our ability to think certain thoughts and to Hume’s ability to account for some of our beliefs, methodological implications pertaining to Hume’s empiricism and epistemic implications relating to our ampliative (non-deductive) inferential practice. The existence of so many interesting implications attests to the signi ficance of the interpretative controversy.
The “implications” I discuss are differences between Hume’s system when it is interpreted Materialistically and when it is read Idealistically. I use the asymmetrical wording (“the implications of the Idealist reading”) although both readings are involved in the comparison, because I uphold the Idealist reading, and find the comparison of interest because of what it tells us about the way the Idealist reading affects Hume’s system. But the Idealist view is more clearly appreciated when the alternative, the Materialist reading, is taken note of.
The implications I will be exploring are of two kinds. Those of the first kind arise when Idealism is conjoined with the rest of Hume’s system and the two jointly engender consequences that Hume does not acknowledge (and of which he is, perhaps, unaware). Those of the second kind arise when Idealism impinges on claims Hume does make, rendering them more or less plausible than they would be on the Materialist reading (given Hume’s other commitments).
The point of the interpretative exercise is not to uphold Hume’s Idealism, but rather, to improve our understanding of the Treatise by seeing its sometimes-hidden commitments. Proponents of the Materialist reading will be able to see some of the Treatise’s commitments when it is read in this way. But they will not take them to be real commitments.
The third aim, less comprehensively pursued here than the other two, is to consider, for some of the implications, whether they are idiosyncratic to Hume’s system, in which Idealism is conjoined with additional assumptions, or part and parcel of Idealism at its best (call it sensible Idealism), in which Idealism is conjoined with the most plausible assumptions that are consistent with it. (Not all of Hume’s additional assumptions satisfy this condition.) The point of the comparison between Hume’s Idealism and Idealism at its best is to improve our understanding of Idealism as such. The conjunction of Idealism and Hume’s additional assumptions may imply implausible claims, for which the blame is to be laid on Hume’s additional assumptions. And when Idealism is embedded in an alternative, more sensible set of assumptions, it may entail interesting claims that Hume’s (less reasonable) system does not, or avoid implausible commitments of Hume’s (entire) system. (It is important to note that the term ‘sensible Idealism ’ does not denote the most plausible version of Idealism: here, I am keeping fixed Hume’s semantic Idealism. Rather, the term denotes the best view that is got by conjoining Hume’s Idealism with other assumptions.)
Although some commentators discuss the content Hume supposes the belief in the external world to have, most simply take for granted some interpretation of the belief without even acknowledging that it has alternatives.1 This is surprising, because the parallel question, pertaining to Hume’s construal of the belief about necessity, is hotly debated. As against the “Old Humeans”, who think that causation is, for Hume, regular concomitance, proponents of the “New Hume” take him to construe causal statements as referring to “thick” connexions between events, about whose nature we cannot know anything.
In the interpretative stage, I identify several ways in which the belief in external bodies can be construed (Chap. 2), and defend (Chaps. 3 and 4) one of them – the Idealist – according to which we can only think (and talk) about perceptions. My defence draws on familiar considerations from the “New Hume” debate, and adduces new ones, which are particularly relevant to the belief in “bodies” .
Having defended the Idealist interpretation, I go on to consider its implications, metaphysical, psychological, methodological and epistemological. In Chap. 5, which begins the metaphysical investigation, I argue that Idealist space is significantly synchronically fragmented, and entirely fragmented diachronically, there being no diachronic spatial relations at all. In Chap. 6, I consider how Idealism impinges on causation. Cause and effect, Hume claims in his analysis of causation, must be spatially contiguous, or at least linked by an intermediate chain of “causes, which are contiguous among themselves, and to the distant objects” (T 1.3.2.6; SBN 75). Since causes precede their effects, the requisite contiguity for an Idealist is between objects in successive perceptions, a condition that never obtains (Chap. 5). So Hume the Idealist is seemingly committed to the claim that there are no causes and effects. This is worrying, because the claim applies, inter alia, to Hume’s own causal claims, so cannot be taken to be an interesting Idealist discovery. I argue in
1 The exceptions are Strawson (1989, 2007), Rocknak (2007) and Landy (2017).
response that Hume’s considered view on causation does not require contiguity, so the Idealist reading does not render his science of man self-undermining. In Chap. 7, I consider the way the two readings impact the divisibility of space. I argue that only the Idealist Hume can uphold the claim, which Hume endorses, that space is finitely divisible.
In Chap. 8, I begin to explore the impact of the two readings on Hume’s science of man. I consider spatial and causal thoughts from a Humean Idealist point of view. I argue that although it entails that we think with perceptions (ideas) about perceptions (impressions), the very far-reaching conclusions I discerned with respect to Idealist space (Chap. 5) do not apply to thoughts about it, at least when they pertain to synchronic spatial relations, because of an important difference between Idealist objects (impressions) and thoughts about them (ideas). (The diagnosis in the case of diachronic spatial thoughts is less clearcut.) Even more straightforwardly, there is no difficulty with causal thoughts. In Chap. 9, I consider the signi ficance of the two readings for Hume’s nominalism (also part of Hume’s science of man). I argue that his account of the way general terms function fares much better on the Idealist reading; indeed, that it is egregious on the Materialist one. In Chap. 10, concluding the psychological investigation, I consider how the two readings impinge on our geometric beliefs. I argue that the Idealist Hume can definitely account for them, whereas the Materialist Hume may be able to if he thinks geometry is empirical. But the geometrical beliefs are (by and large) justified and true only from the Idealist point of view.
In Chap. 11, I consider the implications of the Idealist reading for Hume’s methodology. I argue for three claims. First, the Idealist reading renders Hume more of an empiricist than the Materialist alternative. Second, on no interpretation of Hume’s methodological view does the Idealist reading take him further away from the methodology he endorses (the one he arrives at in the final section of the first book of the Treatise) than the Materialist reading. Third, on some interpretations of Hume’s methodological view, the Materialist reading takes him further away from his considered methodological view than the Idealist one, and renders him methodologically less harmonious
In Chaps. 12, 13, and 14, I discern epistemological implications of the Idealist reading. Unlike previous chapters, in which I focus on Idealism within Hume’s system, in these three chapters, it is a more sensible Idealist, rather than Hume ’s, that occupies centre stage. I argue that a sensible view of (human) inquiry would replace causal inference and Hume’s account of our belief in the continued existence of bodies (Chaps. 12 and 13) with inference to the best explanation. This makes available to the sceptic new sceptical arguments against our ampliative (non-deductive) inferential practice, thus worsening our epistemic situations (Chap. 14). Two of the sceptical arguments impact differentially: one can be directed at the Idealist; the other – only at the Materialist (Chap. 15).
I close my introductory remarks with an important methodological point. I presented the two stages of the exposition – interpreting Hume on bodies and drawing consequences from the interpretation – as if they are quite distinct. And this seems initially plausible. Doesn’t one first defend an interpretation and then
consider its implications? But in fact, it is not always possible to keep the two apart. Ideally, the text should “speak for itself”, so that one can interpret it without relying on a comparison between the implications of alternative readings. But very few philosophical texts are “ideal” in this sense. When the text is less than fully transparent, a consequence of the interpretation may count as evidence for or against it. It may support it if it makes better sense of the philosopher. And it may count against it if it renders what the philosopher says sufficiently implausible. Of course, the less clear-cut the text, the more room there is for the invocation of charity. And the more the interpretation strays from the literal text, the less plausible, everything else being equal, it becomes. The principle of charity must be invoked with care, lest anything implausible a philosopher says is made to count as evidence for the claim that he actually means something else. But judiciously employed, the principle is an important interpretative tool, on which I rely (with care).
Suppose we reject as injudicious the invocation of charity in a particular case, refusing to count the fact that an interpretation renders the philosopher more reasonable than does a rival as supporting it. We can still, once we establish the interpretation on other grounds, note that it has this interesting consequence. Thus, I eschew (1.5) viewing the fact that something Hume says in discussing space and time is seemingly unintelligible only on the Materialist reading as evidence for the Idealist reading, because Hume is clearly committed to it, its implausibility notwithstanding. And, similarly, in discussing the implications of the Idealist reading for the divisibility of space (Chap. 7), I point out that the Idealist reading, unlike its Materialist rival, renders Hume’s argument for the finite divisibility of space cogent. This is an important difference between the way the two readings impact Hume’s system, but, because the implications are far from obvious, I do not take it as evidence for the Idealist reading.
Part I Interpretation
Chapter 2
Interpreting Hume on Bodies
2.1 Introduction
In this chapter, I present the different ways of interpreting the belief in external objects (“bodies”) that Hume ascribes to us. As in the case of causation, the content Hume ascribes to the belief in “bodies” is susceptible to more than one reading. Indeed, there is here a plethora of interpretations, engendered by the fact that Hume distinguishes between the belief of the ordinary (vulgar) person (including philosophers outside the study) and the “philosophical” belief, and each can be construed in more than one way. As often happens with Hume, supporting texts exist for each interpretation, and the interpreter has to rule out in a principled way some of them as non-representative, peripheral. The task may seem daunting, since, as Grene (1994) notes, the word ‘object ’ is used several hundred times in the Treatise, with different senses all well represented. Of course, the word ‘object’ is not always used synonymously with ‘body’: it also has an “intentional” sense, on which an “object ” is a target of attention. Still, many of its occurrences are pertinent to our concern, and the term ‘body’, too, is used on numerous occasions.
But although all of these occurrences should be taken into account, the crucial texts are those in which Hume discusses “bodies” in a systematic way, those in which “his express purpose is to address [the question of bodies]” (Waxman, 2005, p. 422, n. 14), rather than merely talks about them . It is in section 1.4.2 of the Treatise (“Of scepticism with regard to the senses”) and in the first part of section 12 in the Enquiry (“Of the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy”) that Hume’s view about the status of perceptions and their relation to the public world is most thoroughly worked out, so I will focus on them (although one has to take care when assuming that what he says in one of the texts tallies with his view in the other). But because there are so many additional passages in the Treatise that are relevant to the (interpretative) dispute, I will occasionally consider them.
The term ‘Idealism’ is usually used to denote an ontological thesis, denying the existence of anything but perceptions (and sometimes, as in Berkeley ’s Idealism,
minds). Thus, Berkeley (famously) says that “all the choir or heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind” (PHK, §6). By contrast, the fundamental thrust of Hume’s Idealism is cognitive: it pertains primarily to the objects we can think about. Whereas the Idealist claims we can only think about perceptions, the Materialist allows us to have thoughts about material bodies.1
The two Idealist theses, the ontological and the cognitive, are logically independent. Clearly, that there are only perceptions (and possibly minds) doesn’t entail that we cannot think about material objects (or believe that they exist). It may be that when we suppose they exist, we are mistaken. This is an “error theory” about bodyterms.2 Conversely, even if material objects exist, we may be unable to think about them, as small children are incapable of thinking about atoms, which we believe to exist.
The logical independence of the two Idealist theses will be important to the arguments in this book in two instances. First, only the cognitive version impacts the kinds of thoughts we can have (which I discuss in Chap. 8). Second, I rely on their logical independence to rebut an argument against the Idealist interpretation (Sect. 4.4). Now, to be sure, Hume the Idealist cannot agree that the existence of material objects is logically independent of our ability to think about them: he thinks both statements are meaningless (because they include a meaningless term ‘material object ’). But the independence claim is still important for those of us who are not Idealists. If we are right, we can comprehend the two theses and see their independence.3
By and large, I shall use the term ‘Idealism’ idiosyncratically, to denote the cognitive thesis, thereby refraining from coining a new term (‘cognitive Idealism’ , e.g.). But I will use it in its ontological sense when I discuss the same issues as they pertain to ontological Idealism (for instance, in Sects. 5.2.3 and 5.2.4). Unless I say otherwise, I will have the cognitive sense in mind.
Because Hume holds we think with ideas, and words stand for ideas, the cognitive claim, in the case of humans, stands or falls together with the semantic one, pertaining to the meanings of words. Not only do we believe about an appleimpression (rather than a material apple), the word ‘apple’ means an appleimpression. (I will contend with the seeming implausibility of this claim in Sect. 4.1.) Of course, this equivalence does not hold in the case of the more
1 Kant (1787, B274) labels Descartes’ view “problematic idealism”, because “it declares the existence of objects in space outside us to be merely doubtful and indemonstrable”. Kant’s usage of the term “Idealism” is idiosyncratic: it is an epistemological version of ontological Idealism. I discuss below (Sect. 2.5) what Hume says about it.
2 I borrow the term from Mackie (1977), who claims that our moral terms (‘good’ , ‘bad’, etc.) purport to denote moral properties that are too “queer” to exist, although we think they do.
3 The same is true in the case of any restrictive semantic theory. For instance, the logical positivist, who claims we cannot think about atoms (since they are unobservable), rejects as meaningless the suggestion that his semantic thesis doesn’t entail the ontological one (that no atoms exist). But if his rival is correct, he can understand the two theses, and appreciate their logical independence.
cognitively developed animals. They have beliefs about the external world without possessing language. “[T]here is evidently the same relation of ideas, and deriv’d from the same causes, in the minds of animals as in those of men. A dog, that has hid a bone, often forgets the place; but when brought to it, his thought passes easily to what he formerly conceal ’d, by means of the contiguity, which produces a relation among his ideas” (T 2.1.12.7; SBN 327). So in the case of animals, only the cognitive version of Idealism is relevant. But because Hume is interested in humans and not in animals (he invokes the latter only in order to establish claims about the former), I will use the terms ‘semantic’ and ‘cognitive’, as they pertain to Idealism, interchangeably.4
Here are two clari ficatory points about the term ‘Materialism’. The first pertains to my choice of the term. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to contrast Idealism with Realism, a label used by some commentators (Wright, 1983; Kail, 2007; Landy, 2017)?5 I have two reasons for my choice. First, the term ‘Realism’ has several meanings, and is, therefore, more likely to cause confusion than the term ‘Idealism’ Second, the term ‘Materialism’ is much more informative, since one can be a realist about many things: causal powers, bodies, theoretical entities, etc.
The second clarificatory point pertains to the distinction between perceptions and material bodies. Descartes takes material substances to be non-thinking and extended. But this cannot be the way to understand the distinction in our Humean context. Hume thinks some perceptions (visual and tactual) are extended and that perceptions may exist outside the mind (so do not need to be thoughts, even in a wide sense of the term, also to apply to feelings, desires, emotions, etc.). Unlike Descartes, Hume does not attempt to define the two kinds of entities. Instead, he relies on an intuitive understanding of the term ‘perception’, which he invokes to distinguish between their two kinds: impressions (which are lively) and ideas. And since he takes the term “material bodies” to be meaningless, he contrasts perceptions with things that are “speci fically different ” (different in kind) from perceptions. This may seem unsatisfactory: the distinction between perceptions and material objects may be inexhaustive. But the inaccuracy is harmless in our context. Our interpretative dispute pertains to the possibility of thinking about things that are “specifically different from ideas and impressions” (T 1.2.6.8; SBN 68). And this question can be discussed without even mentioning “material bodies”
So much for Idealism in general . There are (important) differences between its claims about the “vulgar” on the one hand, and the philosophers on the other. I will discuss them in the following two sections.
4 Berkeley endorses both the semantic and the ontological theses: “[t]he table I write on I say exists –that is, I see and feel it...This is all I can understand by these and the like expressions” (PHK, §3). But he attaches much greater significance to the ontological version of Idealism. He invokes the semantic version in order to argue for the ontological one.
5 This was suggested by an anonymous reader.
2.2 Interpretations of the Vulgar Belief
The “unthinking and unphilosophical part of mankind, (that is, all of us, at one time or other)” (T 1.4.2.36; SBN 205) identify objects with impressions. “The very image, which is present to the senses, is with us the real body” (T 1.4.2.36; SBN 205).6 The vulgar identification of “bodies” with impressions may be understood in two ways.
According to the first, Idealistic, reading, the vulgar belief about a “body” is a belief about an impression. For instance, to have a belief about an apple is to have a belief about a complex impression that has impressions of colour, taste and smell as (simple) constituents. Some Idealist commentators (call them radical Idealists) go even further, and claim that Hume ascribes to the vulgar a (de dicto) belief that, for instance, an apple is an apple-impression (Laird, 1932, p. 150; Cook, 1968; Bennett, 1971, p. 349; Penelhum, 1975, p. 64; Ayers, 1984, p. 320; Noonan, 1999, p. 165; Wilson, 2008; Landy, 2017). Thus, Laird (1932, p. 150) says that “[i]n [the vulgar] view a hat or a shoe was an impression, which, although it was immediately perceived, was also believed to persist”. And Bennett (1971, p. 349) suggests that “Hume credits the vulgar with holding the Berkeleian view that objects are perceptions”. Others (call them moderate Idealists) think that the vulgar do not know their beliefs about bodies are about impressions; indeed, they may not even understand this (sophisticated) claim (Wright, 1983; Pears, 1990, pp. 152–3; Richman, 1995, p. 430; Garrett, 1997, p. 210; Loeb, 2002, pp. 138–9; Stanistreet, 2002, p. 180, n. 9; Waxman, 2005, pp. 451–5; Allison, 2008, p. 235; Ainslie, 2010). Thus, Pears (1990, p. 153, original italics) says “Hume inadvertently represents [the vulgar] as confusing two kinds of thing, when what he really means is that it never occurs to them to distinguish them or to name them in a way that would indicate their different categories”. The vulgar, Pears’ Hume thinks, ascribe a continuing existence to the immediate objects of sensation (which only Hume and other philosophers know are impressions), without committing themselves to any assumption about their nature. I needn’t here adjudicate between the two versions of Idealist interpretations. Indeed, I think Hume may waver between them. But the implications of Idealism I will discern follow from both its radical and moderate versions: they depend on the fact that in the vulgar state of mind, we think (talk) about impressions, an assumption that both versions share. But there is one place where this distinction will be important. One of the arguments I will adduce in support of Idealism (Sect. 3.3) militates against both Materialism and moderate Idealism, vindicating the radical version of Idealism as against its moderate counterpart.
6 Reid (1785, II, iv [257a]) professes not to understand “what is meant by an image of [objects of sense, except figure and colour]”. But Hume uses the term ‘image’ broadly, as applying to anything which can be copied from experience, not just the visual. The term ‘impression’ applies to “all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul” (T 1.1.1.1; SBN 1, my italics), and ideas are “the faint images of these”. So Reid’s mockery is misguided.
The second interpretation of the vulgar belief in “bodies” (Kemp Smith, 1941, ch. xxii; Passmore, 1952, p. 90; Anderson, 1966, p. 40;Bricke, 1980, ch. 1; Strawson, 1989, p. 18; Beebee, 2006, pp. 177–8; Kail, 2007, pp. 14, 18, 59; Rocknak, 2007) is Materialist. Its vulgar believe in (and about) physical objects. Of course, they don’t believe (de dicto) that impressions are physical objects. Rather, they believe (de re) of impressions that they are material objects. But Hume, the scientist, knows that they are (mistakenly) ascribing a material nature to impressions.7,8
2.3 Interpretations of the Philosophical Belief
Hume says the philosophers believe, at least in their reflective moments, in “a double existence internal and external, representing and represented” (T 1.4.2.36; SBN 205). They “distinguish betwixt perceptions and objects, of which the former are suppos’d to be interrupted, and perishing, and different at every different return; the latter to be uninterrupted, and to preserve a continu’d existence and identity” (T 1.4.2.46; SBN 211).
The philosophical belief can be read in two ways, depending on whether the “second existent”, the one behind, and causally responsible for, a perception, is yet another perception (Ayers, 1984, p. 320; Fogelin, 1985, p. 68; Grene, 1994; Garrett, 1997, p. 211; Noonan, 1999, p. 165; Owen, 2000, p. 325; Waxman, 2005, pp. 451–5; Wilson, 2008; Baxter, 2009; Ainslie, 2010; Winkler, 2015; Landy, 2017),9 or a material object (Laird, 1932, p. 152; Passmore, 1952, p. 90; Anderson, 1966, p. 40; Bennett,1971, p.349;Bricke,1980,ch. 1;Wright,1983, pp.42, 81;Livingston,1984, p. 21; Strawson, 1989, p. 51; Loptson, 1990; O’Shea, 1996, p. 290; Garrett, 1997, p. 211; Owen, 2000, pp. 325–6; Loeb, 2002, p. 164; Beebee, 2006, pp. 177–8; Kail,
7 Grene (1994) contrasts the “phenomenalist” sense of the word ‘object’ (perceptions in the mind) with the “realist” (objects being non-mental). I distinguish, by contrast, between the Idealist reading, according to which objects are continuously existing perceptions, and the Materialist one, in which they are material. In my classification, but not in hers, both kinds of objects are believed to exist continuously. So her classification of Hume’s uses of the word doesn’t straightforwardly impinge on the dispute as I have set it up.
8 O’Shea (1996, p. 288) characterises Hume’s view so vaguely that it fits all three interpretations: “Hume describes the vulgar as ‘confounding’ perceptions and objects, in that we take our interrupted perceptions of things to constitute the persisting external object itself”
9 Baxter (2009) and Ainslie (2010) impute to Hume an epistemological reason for a philosopher to use “body-terms” in the Idealist way (although they don’t use my term). They argue that because Hume thinks we cannot discover the true nature of bodies, he recommends the philosopher should rest content with finding out how they appear to us, i.e., what “impressions they occasion” (Baxter, 2009, p. 130). There is support in the text for the epistemological motivation: “As long as we confine our speculations to the appearances of objects to our senses, without entering into disquisitions concerning their real nature and operations, we are safe from all difficulties, and can never be embarrass’d by any question” (T 1.2.5.26n12; SBN 638-9). But the semantic consideration, which figures much more prominently in the text, preempts the epistemic argument. It forces on us the Idealist interpretation of “body-terms” .
2007, p. 59). There is, in the case of the philosophers’ belief, no point in distinguishing, as I did in the case of the vulgar belief, between the radical and moderate versions. The philosophers are reflective, so they comprehend the difference between the two suppositions pertaining to the meaning of “body” terms. Like the beliefs of the vulgar on the radical Idealist interpretation, the philosophers’ beliefs, according to the Idealist interpretation, are de dicto: they believe that the table is an impression “behind” their impression.10
On all readings (of the two kinds of belief), the vulgar and the philosophers differ with respect to the manner in which they think “bodies” are perceived: directly (according to the vulgar) or mediately (according to the philosophers). But given different combinations of readings (an Idealist one for the vulgar and a Materialist one for the philosophers, e.g.), they may also differ vis-à-vis the nature they ascribe to “bodies”
2.4 Phenomenalism
Both vulgar and philosophical (Humean) beliefs can be construed in two importantly different Idealist ways. According to the first, which I label “single-impression” Idealism, a “body” is identified with a single (possibly complex) impression. According to the second version, which may be labeled “phenomenalism” (Russell, 1926, ch. 3) or (more informatively, to my mind) “multi-impression” Idealism, a “body” is identified with a set of impressions (“sensibilia”), which Mill (1884, ch. 11) aptly called “permanent possibilities of sensation”. The set includes “the multitudinous variety of perspectival and other distortions” (Price, 1940a, pp. 93–4). Thus, an impression of an elliptical coin will be included in the set constituting a round coin. Similarly, an impression of a bent stick will be included in the set constituting the straight stick, as will a luminous impression, corresponding to the way the stick appears in the moonlight.
Price (1940a, p. 100) imputes this conception of objects to Hume’s vulgar. But there is no textual evidence for this attribution, and several passages positively militate against it. First, Hume identifies an apple with “a particular colour, taste and smell” (T 1.1.1.2; SBN 2), and not, as does the phenomenalist, with sets of these, corresponding to the different ways it could appear: greyish (rather than red) at dusk, for instance. Second, he says “our senses...convey to us nothing but a single
10 I think Wright subscribes to the Materialist reading, because he suggests that Hume himself countenances “a firm belief in the independent existence of the material world” (1983, p. 42, my italics), and says that “he allowed a specific difference between perceptions and objects” (1983, p. 81). I hesitate, because Wright mainly speaks of the philosophers’ belief that bodies exist continuously and independently, which is consistent with the Idealist reading. And Hume’s advocacy of a representative theory of perception (1983, p. 13), too, is consistent with the Idealist reading, since the represented “object” can be a perception.
perception” (T 1.4.2.4; SBN 189, italics mine). Third, he says “[t]he very image, which is present to the senses, is with us the real body” (T 1.4.2.36; SBN 205).
The final objection to the phenomenalist interpretation of Hume qua Idealist is that it cannot account for the relevance of the “experiments” Hume adduces to prove the dependence of our sensible perceptions. Hume says that from “the seeming encrease and diminution of objects, according to their distance...we learn, that our sensible perceptions are not possest of any distinct or independent existence” (T 1.4.2.45; SBN 211). But the phenomenalist view identifies the object with its appearances from different perspectives (distances, for instance). If this were Hume’s view, how could he think that the “encrease and diminution” of an object “according to [its] distance” show that the object depends on us? Even when different impressions appear to us as we change our distance, they are still impressions that belong to the set constitutive of the object. What depends on us is only the particular impression (from amongst those constituting the object) that will appear to us. The “experiments” only make sense (even if they are ultimately unsuccessful) if the object is identified with a single perception. It will then make (at least some) sense to infer from the fact that we have a different impression when our situation changes that the object depends on us.
The reader may wonder why I mention phenomenalism, given that it is not Hume’s version of Idealism. The reply is threefold. First, the interpretative claim is controversial, so it is important to rebut it. Second, distinguishing between it and Hume’s version makes the two more perspicuous. Third, it is instructive to consider the implications of both versions of Idealism, since they constitute two important ways of reflecting the cognitive/semantic supposition that we think and talk about impressions (and not material objects). I will compare the two when considering the implications of other sensible versions of Idealism (for instance, in Sect. 5.3).11
2.5 Neutral Texts
Hume’s characterisation of the vulgar belief is often ambiguous as between the Materialist and Idealist interpretations. For example, he says he will understand the terms ‘object ’ and ‘perception’ “what any common man means by a hat, or shoe, or stone, or any other impression, convey’d to him by his senses” (T 1.4.2.31; SBN 202). Here, Hume may either mean that the vulgar believe that impressions are “bodies”,or of impressions – that they are material objects. Hume’s claim that vulgar bodies exist continuously and independently (T 1.4.2.16; SBN 194) is also
11 An obvious difference between phenomenalism and single-impression Idealism is that only the former makes it possible for “bodies” to have properties we do not observe (although we could). For instance, the house I am seeing has a rear window that I do not observe. This suggests that phenomenalism is a more sensible version of Idealism.
142InterpretingHumeonBodies
consistent with the two interpretations. The dispute is as to whether the “bodies” are (possibly unperceived) impressions or physical objects.
As in the case of the vulgar belief, there are ambiguous texts pertaining to Hume’s characterisation of the philosophers’ belief. He says, for instance, that “no man who reflects [i.e., no philosopher], ever doubted, that the existences, which we consider, when we say this house and that tree, are nothing but perceptions in the mind, and fleeting copies or representations of other existences, which remain uniform and independent” (EHU 12.9; SBN 152, italics removed). The “uniform and independent” existences (behind our impressions) could equally well be continuously existing impressions or material objects. Strawson rejects the first possibility, claiming that a “perception is by definition a mental occurrence” (1989, p. 36). But this is clearly not Hume’s view. Perceptions, he thinks, may (logically) exist outside the mind.
In support of the Materialist reading of the philosophical belief, Strawson (1989, p. 49) cites Hume ’s disparaging remarks about “a few extravagant sceptics” who deny “that there is such a thing in nature as a continu’d existence” (T 1.4.2.50; SBN 214). But Hume is here merely claiming that bodies exist continuously, and this fits both interpretations equally well, since Hume thinks perceptions may exist outside the mind.
Here is another passage that Strawson (2007, p. 41) takes to support the Materialist interpretation, but which is, in fact, neutral. “The essence and composition of external bodies are...obscure...the perceptions of the mind are perfectly known” (T 2.2.6.2; SBN 366). Strawson takes Hume to be contrasting perceptions and material objects. But the contrast may, instead, be between two kinds of perceptions: those that are in the mind, and, therefore, perfectly accessible to us, and those that are unperceived, and, therefore, beyond our ken, or at least, less accessible. The distinction is epistemological, rather than ontological. This reading is made plausible by noting that Hume says that “the perceptions of the mind are perfectly known” (my italics) and “since all actions and sensations of the mind are known to us by consciousness, they must necessarily appear in every particular what they are, and be what they appear” (T 1.4.2.7; SBN 190, italics mine). What looks like a pleonasm on Strawson’s reading (since he thinks perceptions for Hume can only be in the mind) makes perfectly good sense if we read ‘objects’ to mean ‘perceptions outside the mind’. These are, in contrast with their mental counterparts, “obscure”
Finally, there is seemingly supporting evidence for the Idealist interpretation in Hume’s discussion of space in part II of the first book of the Treatise. In discussing our ideas of space, Hume first argues that a finite idea cannot be infinitely divided. “In rejecting the infinite capacity of the mind, we suppose it may arrive at an end in the division of its ideas” (T 1.2.1.2; SBN 27). He then says of these minimal ideas that “[n]othing can be more minute, than some ideas, which we form in the fancy” (T 1.2.1.5; SBN 28). (Call this claim the comparison.)
Hume invokes the comparison three times. The first is in his refutation of the prevalent opinion that the mind cannot “adequately” represent the size of minute objects. Hume’s rebuttal is that it can adequately represent minute sizes, because no
object is smaller than a minimal idea. (This is the comparison.) What the finitude of the mind precludes is our ability to represent all the objects “justly”,reflecting all their details, because this might require ideas that are too detailed for us to have. The second invocation of the comparison occurs in Hume’s inference of the merely finite divisibility of space from that of ideas (which I will discuss at length in Chap. 7). Hume invokes the comparison when he says that “thro’ whatever divisions and subdivisions we may suppose these parts to be arriv’d at, they can never become inferior to some ideas, which we form” (T 1.2.2.1; SBN 29). Hume’s third invocation of the comparison occurs in his (scornful) dismissal of a natural objection to his claim that space is only finitely divisible, made to him by his contemporaries (and, more recently, by Laird (1932), Flew (1976) and Fogelin (1988)). The objection is that a finite extension could be infinitely divisible if it were divisible into unequal parts whose sizes converged to zero, e.g., ½, ¼, 1=8, Laird (1932, p. 67) and Flew (1976, p. 264) accuse Hume of being “cavalier” in dismissing (T 1.2.2.2; SBN 30, n. 1) this (“proportionate”) possibility, and Fogelin (1988, p. 52) says that Hume misunderstands mathematical limits. But the comparison underwrites Hume’s dismissal of this possibility as “frivolous ”.An infinite division cannot be “proportionate”, because (as the comparison guarantees) any part of an extension is no smaller than a minimal idea, whereas in a proportionate division, there is no positive lower bound to the sizes of parts.
Why is the comparison seeming evidence for the Idealist interpretation? Flew wonders “how [it] is...supposed to make sense to compare the relative sizes of ideas and impressions, on the one hand, with those of physical objects, on the other” (1976, p. 261), and suggests that “[t]o this objection Hume provides no answer”.It seems the Idealist could seize on this criticism in order to argue that Hume is not (unintelligibly) comparing sizes of ideas with sizes of material bodies. Instead, as the Idealist interpretation has it, he is comparing sizes of impressions with those of ideas, and this is perfectly intelligible.
But this argument, which tries to present the comparison as evidence for the Idealist interpretation, fails. Pace Flew, Hume does not think the comparison between sizes of material bodies and those of ideas is unintelligible. In the section of the Treatise titled “Of the immateriality of the soul”, he argues that some perceptions – namely, visual and tactile ones – are spatially extended:
The perception [of the table] consists of parts. These parts are so situated, as to afford us the notion of distance and contiguity; of length, breadth, and thickness the very idea of extension is copy’d from an impression, and consequently must perfectly agree to it. To say the idea of extension agrees to any thing, is to say it is extended. (T 1.4.5.15; SBN 239-40)
The Idealist might demur. In this passage, he will point out, Hume is concerned to account for our idea of space. And we can see from his discussion that a perception being “extended” only means that there are spatial relations between its constituents. It does not follow that perceptions occupy the same space as do material bodies; that there is one connected space that all extended perceptions and all the bodies occupy. My perception of Paris may not be spatially related to (100 km. to the north of, say)
162InterpretingHumeonBodies
Paris itself, its being “extended” notwithstanding. A fortiori, it doesn’t make sense to compare their sizes.
The Materialist will make two points in reply. First, the same logical gap exists in the case of perceptions. That a perception is “extended” does not entail that it occupies the same space as other perceptions (that are not its constituents) or that its size may be compared with theirs. Second, Hume thinks that according to the Materialist, extended perceptions occupy the same space as material objects. This can be seen from his attempt to reduce to absurdity the notion of a substantive soul, where he poses a dilemma the notion engenders. The first horn, which is the only one relevant in the present context, involves the possibility that the soul is a material substance. Its proponents, he says, will not be able to account for its (spatial) “conjunction” with unextended perceptions. “[T]hose perceptions, which are simple, and exist no where, are incapable of any conjunction in place with matter or body, which is extended and divisible” (T 1.4.5.11; SBN 236). The implication is that there is no problem for extended perceptions. These only pose a problem for the immaterialists, a problem that Hume points to by a series of rhetorical questions:
The free-thinker [the materialist] having found there are impressions and ideas really extended, may ask his antagonists, how they can incorporate a simple and indivisible subject with and extended perception?...Is the indivisible subject, or immaterial substance on the left or on the right hand of the perception? Is it in this particular part, or in that other? Is it in every part without being extended? Or is it entire in any one part without deserting the other? ‘Tis impossible to give any answer to these questions, but what will both be absurd in itself, and will account for the union off our indivisible perceptions with an extended substance.
(T 1.4.5.16; SBN 240)
If an idea is extended, the Materialist (as Hume understands him) will now argue, it is located in a space alongside whatever else is extended. So the comparison of its size with that of material bodies is perfectly intelligible, and the vexing comparison turns out to be compatible with both the Materialist and Idealist interpretations.
The Idealist might try to change his tack, and argue that the (admittedly intelligible) comparison is blatantly unjustified from a Materialist point of view, and quite reasonable from the Idealist one. Since, everything else being equal, an interpretation that doesn’t saddle a philosopher with an egregious error is to be preferred, there is here, the Idealist argues, support for the Idealist interpretation.
This Idealist argument is also specious. The argument Hume adduces for the claim that there is nothing smaller than indivisible ideas is not restricted to a comparison with other perceptions, and holds with respect to material objects (if any). He says “[n]othing can be more minute, than some ideas...since there are ideas...perfectly simple and indivisible” (T 1.2.1.5; SBN 28, my italics). Since Hume uncontentiously takes the comparison to be intelligible, we cannot invoke the principle of charity to fault the Materialist interpretation (on which it seems unintelligible), and must classify the passages pertaining to space as neutral between the Idealist and Materialist interpretations.
2.6 Conclusion
Having presented the two contending interpretations of Hume’s understanding of our (both vulgar and philosophers) belief in external objects (“bodies”), Materialist and Idealist, I will present, in the next chapter, arguments in support of the Idealist reading, and contend – in the following chapter – with objections to it.
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Century,” November, 1891). It was suggested by “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” The question was raised in conversation whether a limp and molluscous baby, unable so much as to hold up its head on its helpless little neck, could do anything so positive as to “rastle with” Kentuck’s finger; and the more knowing persons present insisted that a young baby does, as a matter of fact, have a good firm hand-clasp. It occurred to Dr. Robinson that if this was true it was a beautiful Darwinian point, for clinging and swinging by the arms would naturally have been a specialty with our ancestors if they ever lived a monkey-like life in the trees. The baby that could cling best to its mother as she used hands, feet, and tail to flee in the best time over the trees, or to get at the more inaccessible fruits and eggs in time of scarcity, would be the baby that lived to bequeath his traits to his descendants; so that to this day our housed and cradled human babies would keep in their clinging powers a reminiscence of our wild treetop days.
Dr. Robinson was fortunate enough to be able to test his theory on some sixty babies in the first hours of their life, and was triumphantly successful. He clasped their hands about a slender rod, and they swung from it like athletes, without apparent discomfort, by the half minute; many of us grown people could not do as well. Such a remarkable power of hands and arms has for ages been of no especial use to the human race, and it fades out in a few weeks, but for many months the arms keep ahead of the legs in development. Here was not only strength of arms, but the ability to perform quite skillfully an action, that required the working together of a number of muscles to a definite end,—the action namely, of clasping an object with the hand. This is one of several actions that come ready-made to the baby at birth, before he can possibly have had any chance to learn them, or any idea of what they are for. Babies sneeze, swallow, and cry on the first day; they shut their eyes at a bright light, or at a touch. On the first day, moreover, they have been seen to start at a sound or a jar; Preyer observed hiccoughing, choking, coughing, and spreading the toes when the soles were tickled; and Darwin saw yawning and stretching within the first week, though I do not know that any one has seen it on the first day.
These movements are all of the class called reflex,—movements, that is, in which the bodily mechanism is set off by some outside action on the senses, as a gun is set off by a touch on the trigger. Thus, when a tickling affects the mucous membrane, a sneeze executes itself without any will of ours; when our sense of sight perceives a swift missile coming, the neck muscles mechanically jerk the head to one side.
We grown people have, however, a good deal of power of holding in our reflexes,—“inhibiting” them, as the technical expression is,—but the baby has none at all. If they had a highly developed reflex activity, babies would be in real danger from the unrestrained acts of their own muscles, as we see in the case of convulsions, which show reflex action at its extreme. But the actions I have mentioned are about all the reflex movements that have been noted in new-born babies, except what are called the periodic reflexes, such as breathing, the heartbeat, the contractions of the arteries, and all the regular muscular actions of organic life.
That so complex a system of movement as these periodic reflexes should be so readily touched into motion upon contact with air and food, to maintain itself afterward by the interplay of the bodily mechanism and external forces, shows a ready-made hereditary activity far more than the sudden reflexes do. It does not work quite smoothly at first, however: the establishment of breathing, for instance, is irregular, and often difficult. Even the sudden reflexes are slower and less perfect than with older people.
There is another class of movements, often confused with the reflex —that is, instinctive movements. Real grasping (as distinguished from reflex grasping), biting, standing, walking, are examples of this class. They are race movements, the habits of the species to which the animal belongs, and every normal member of the species is bound to come to them; yet they are not so fixed in the bodily mechanism as the reflex movements. The stimulus to them seems to come more from within than from without—yet not from reason and will, but from some blind impulse. This impulse is usually imperfect, and the child has to work his own way to the mastery of the movements. Yet though certain reflex activities are inherited in a
more highly developed condition than any human instincts, the instincts are at bottom always hereditary, which is not the case with the reflexes—any one may teach his muscles new reflex movements, unknown to his ancestors. A musician does it every time that he practices new music till his hands will run it off of their own accord, while he is thinking of something else. But instinct cannot be thus acquired.
The amazing instincts of the lower animals; the imperfect and broken condition of the instincts in man, yet the deep hold that they have on him; the mingling of inherited necessity and individual freedom in the way in which they are worked out; the mystery of the physiological method by which they act (while that of reflex movement is fairly well understood, up to a certain point); the light they seem always about to shed for the biologist on the profoundest problems of heredity, and for the philosopher on those of free will and personality,—these things make instinct one of the great fields of present research, and I must not venture into it, though it is of importance in trying to understand a baby.
I shall say only that while instinct does not appear in the lowest animals (whose action is all of the reflex type), and is for a time a sign of rising rank in the scale of life, it reaches its culmination with the insects, and as we approach man it is the breaking up of the instincts that is in its turn a sign of advancement to higher life. The little chicken runs about as soon as it is out of its shell, and even the monkey baby is able to take care of itself in a few months. Nothing is so helpless as the human baby, and in that helplessness is our glory, for it means that the activities of the race (as John Fiske has so clearly shown) have become too many, too complex, too infrequently repeated, to become fixed in the nervous structure before birth; hence the long period after birth before the child comes to full human powers. It is a maxim of biology (as well as the frequent lesson of common observation) that while an organism is thus immature and plastic, it may learn, it may change, it may rise to higher development; and thus to infancy we owe the rank of the human race.
The one instinct the human baby always brings into the world already developed is half a mere reflex act—that of sucking. It is started as a reflex would be, by the touch of some object, pencil, finger, or nipple, it may be, between the lips; but it does not act like a reflex after that. It continues and ceases without reference to this external stimulus, and a little later often begins without it, or fails to begin when the stimulus is given. If it has originally a reflex character, that character fades out, and leaves it a pure instinct.
These two types of automatic movement (for instinct, however complicated later with volition, gives rise in these earliest days to none but automatic movement) are both “purposive,” though not purposed—that is, they are actions that are plainly adapted to some end by ancestral intelligence or by natural selection. But there was another type of movements more conspicuous in our baby than either, and apparently quite nonpurposive. From the first day she moved slightly, but almost constantly, the legs drawing up, the arms stirring, the eyes and head rolling a little. Sometimes the features were distorted with vague and meaningless grimaces. Most other observers report these movements, and inexperienced ones say that the baby “felt with his hands about his face,” or “tried to get his hands to his head.” Any mother may convince herself that the baby has no will in the matter by watching till he really does begin to try, weeks later, to turn his head, put his hands to his mouth, kick up his legs: the difference in the whole manner of the action is evident.
An odd explanation has been offered for these movements by Dr. Mumford, an English physiologist. He holds that they have a singular resemblance to those of swimming amphibians; that their prototype may be seen in any aquarium; they are, in short, survivals of the period long before the ape-like stage, long before any mammalian stage, when our ancestors had not yet abandoned life in the waters.
Now, although it is quite true that biologists believe that if our ancestry is traced far enough, it does lead back to the water, still it seems hardly possible that in a human baby, whose structure passed the amphibian stage long before birth, the most frequent movements should hark back to that tremendous antiquity. It is more likely that Preyer’s explanation is the correct one: viz., that the
movements are simply due to the rapid growth of nerve centres, which causes an overflow of nervous force to the muscles and makes them contract at haphazard. A certain regularity is given to these chance movements by the tendency of nerve impulse to flow in the same paths where it has flowed before, rather than in new ones, so that the muscles are drawn toward the position they occupied before birth. This brings the hands constantly up about the head—a fact that later has important results in development.
These aimless movements are called “impulsive” by Preyer. I have followed Bain and Mrs. Moore in calling them “spontaneous.”
There were no movements beyond these three types, and therefore none that showed the least volition. Mothers often think the crying shows wish, will, or understanding of some sort. But Preyer tells us that babies born without a brain cry in just the same manner.
Mothers do not like to think that the baby is at first an automaton; and they would be quite right in objecting if that meant that he was a mere machine. He is an automaton in the sense that he has practically neither thought, wish, nor will; but he is a living, conscious automaton, and that makes all the difference in the world. And it would be a bold psychologist who should try to say what germ of thought and will lies enfolded in his helplessness. Certainly, the capacity of developing will is there, and an automaton with such a capacity is a more wonderful creature than the wise, thinking, willing baby of nursery tradition would be.
If mothers would only reflect how little developed a baby’s mind is at a year old, after all the progress of twelve months, they would see that they rate the mental starting point altogether too high. And they miss thus the whole drama of the swift and lovely unfolding of the soul from its invisible germ—a drama that sometimes fairly catches one’s breath in the throat with excitement and wonder.
III
THE NEW-BORN BABY: SENSATIONS AND CONSCIOUSNESS.
I said that the baby began the world as an automaton, but a conscious, feeling automaton. And what, then, were these feelings and this consciousness? What was the outfit for beginning the world that the little mind brought with it? When I asked such questions I was skirting the edge of one of the great battle-grounds of philosophy. Whether all human ideas are made up solely from one’s own experience of the outer world as given him by his senses, or whether there are, on the contrary, inborn ideas, implanted directly by nature or God,—this is a question on which volumes have been written.
Did the baby start out ready equipped with ideas of space, personal identity, time, causation, such as we find so ineradicable in our own minds? That is, did she see objects about her, located in space, nearer and farther, right and left, and all outside and separate from herself, as we do? hear sounds coming from without, as we do? Did she feel herself a separate thing from the outer world? Did she perceive events as happening in time succession, one after another? And did she think of one thing as happening because of another, so that, for instance, she was capable of crying in order to cause her dinner to be brought?
The hope of answering such questions was the first stimulus to the study of infants, and the earlier records are much occupied with them. Philosophers nowadays are less disposed to think that we can prove anything about the doctrine of innate ideas by finding whether babies have such ideas to begin with; for we might indeed have ideas that came direct from God, or from the nature of the mind, and yet might not enter into our inheritance of these at once.
To me, however, not seeking to solve philosophical problems, but only to watch and comprehend what was going on in the baby’s mind, it was none the less interesting to try to make out the condition of her senses and consciousness—though without the careful special investigations certain physiologists had made before, I should have found it blind guessing as to how much she really did see, hear, and feel; for these processes, of course, went on inside her little mind, and could only be inferred from her behavior.
She evidently felt a difference between light and darkness from the first hour, for she stopped crying when her face was exposed to gentle light; and other observers confirm this. Two or three report also a turning of the head toward the light within the first week. The nurse, who was intelligent and exact, thought she saw this in the case of my niece. I did not, but I saw instead a constant turning of the eyes toward a person coming near her—that is, toward a large dark mass that interrupted the light. Either movement must be regarded as entirely instinctive or reflex. Even plants will turn toward the light, and among animal movements this is one of the most primitive; while the habit of looking toward any dark moving mass runs far back in animal history, and may well have become fixed in the bodily mechanism. With the beginning of voluntary looking these instinctive movements fade.
No other sign of vision appeared in the little one during the first fortnight. The eyes were directed to nothing, fixed on nothing. They did not wink if one made a pass at them. There was no change of focus for near or distant seeing; the two eyes did not even move always in unison,—and as the lids also had by no means learned yet to move symmetrically with the balls and with each other, some extraordinary and alarming contortions resulted.
True seeing, such as we ourselves have, is not just a matter of opening the eyes and letting the vision pour in; it requires a great deal of minute muscular adjustment, both of the eyeballs and of the lenses, and it is impossible that a baby should see anything but blurs of light and dark (without even any distinction of distance) till he has learned the adjustments. Not colored blurs, but light and dark only,
for no trace of color sense has ever been detected within the first fortnight of life, no certain evidence of it even within the first year.
The baby showed no sign of hearing anything until the third day, when she started violently at the sound of tearing paper, some eight feet from her. After that, occasional harsh or sudden sounds— oftener the rustling of paper than anything else—could make her start or cry.
It is well established by the careful tests of several physiologists that babies are deaf for a period lasting from several hours to several days after birth The outer tube of the ear is often closed by its own walls, and the middle ear is always stopped up with fluid. Even after the ear itself is clear and ready for hearing, few sounds are noticed; perhaps because the outer passage is still so narrow, perhaps because of imperfect nerve connections with the brain, perhaps because sounds are not distinguished, but go all together into a sort of blur, just as the sights do. As the usual effect of sounds on wee babies is to startle them, and to set off convulsive reflex movements, it is well for them that hearing is so tardy in development.
There is noticeable variation in sensitiveness to hearing, not only among different babies, but in the same baby at different times. A sound that startles on one day seems to pass absolutely unheard on the next.
In observing the sensibility to sound, one may easily be misled. If a baby starts when a door slams or a heavy object falls, it is more likely to be the jar than the sound that affects him; if he becomes restless when one claps the hands or speaks, it may be because he felt a puff of air on his head. The tap of an ordinary call bell is a good sound to test with, causing neither jar nor air current.
Taste and smell were senses that the baby gave no sign of owning till much later. The satisfaction of hunger was quite enough to account for the contentment she showed in nursing; and when she was not hungry she would suck the most tasteless object as cheerfully as any other. Physiologists, however, have had the daring to make careful test of smell and taste in the new-born, putting a wee drop of quinine, sugar, salt, or acid solution on the babies’ tongues,
and strong odors to their noses, and have been made certain by the resulting behavior that these senses do exist from the first. But it requires rather strong tests to call them into action. Many babies, for instance, suck at a two per cent. solution of quinine as if it were sugar; so it seems unlikely that the mild and monotonous taste of milk, and the neutral smells by which any well-kept baby is surrounded, are really perceived at all. There are instances related of very positive discrimination between one milk and another, either by taste or smell, shown by very young babies; yet the weight of evidence points to an almost dormant condition of these two senses.
We were told in school that the fifth sense was “feeling,” but psychologists now regard this not as a single sense, but as a group, called the “dermal” or skin senses. The sense of touch and pressure, the senses of heat and cold, and the sense of pain are the principal ones of the group.
Our baby showed from the first that she was aware when she was touched. She stopped crying when she was cuddled or patted. She showed comfort in the bath, which may have been in part due to freedom from the contact of clothes, and to liking for the soft touches of the water. She responded with sucking motions to the first touch of the nipple on her lips. Preyer found the lips of new-born babies quite delicately sensitive, responding even to the lightest touch; and there are other sensitive spots, such as the nostrils and the soles of the feet.
On the whole, however, the rose-leaf baby skin proves to be much less sensitive than ours, not only to contact, but also to pain, and perhaps to heat and cold, though this has not been so thoroughly tested. This is not saying, of course, that the physiological effects of heat and cold upon the baby are unimportant.
Our baby had no experience of skin pain in her early days, and being kept at an equable temperature, probably received no definite sensations either of heat or of cold.
The foregoing are the “special senses,” that is, those that give impressions of external things, and have end organs to receive and make definite these impressions,—the eye at the end of the optic
nerve, the different kinds of nerve tips in the skin, and so forth. Another sense now claims almost to rank with them,—the recently studied sense of equilibrium and motion, by which we feel loss of balance in our bodies and changes in their motion (changes only, for no one can feel perfectly smooth motion). This sense has been traced to the semicircular canals of the ear; and as this part of the ear is the oldest in evolution, and the rudimentary ears of the lower orders of animals are quite analogous to it in structure, biologists now suspect that hearing may be a more recent sense than we have thought, and that much which has been taken for sense of sound in the lower animals—even as high as fishes—may perhaps be only a delicate sense of motion.
I failed to watch for this motion sense in the baby. It would have been shown by signs that she felt change of motion when she was lifted and moved. Equilibrium sense she must have used as soon as she began to balance her little head, but in the first limp and passive days there was no sign of it. Still, there are tales of very young babies who showed disturbance, as if from a feeling of lost equilibrium, when they were lowered swiftly in the arms.
There is besides a sort of sensibility to vibration that affects the whole body. We know how much of the rhythm of music may be caught quite soundlessly through, the vibrations of the floor; and it is said (perhaps not altogether credibly) that it was thus that Jessie Brown recognized even the instruments and the tune at the relief of Lucknow by the tremor along the ground before a sound was audible. A jar, affecting the whole body, seems to be felt by creatures of very low organization. Babies are undoubtedly quite susceptible to jarring from the earliest days. Champney’s baby started when the scale of the balance in which he was lying immediately after birth sprang up.
Then there is the “muscle sense”—the feeling of the action of our own muscles; and a most delicate and important sense this is. It is safe to say that the baby had it from the first, and felt the involuntary movements her own little body was making, for it is hardly conceivable how else she could have learned to make voluntary ones. But that is another story, and comes later.
Even this does not exhaust the list of sensations the baby could feel. There was the whole group of “organic sensations,” coming from the inner organs,—hunger, thirst, organic pain. With older people, nausea, suffocation, choking, and perhaps some others might be added; but little babies certainly do not feel nausea,—their food regurgitates without a qualm. Nor do they seem to feel disagreeable sensations when they choke in nursing.
Organic pain our baby had her touch of in the usual form of colic; and hunger was obviously present very early, though perhaps not in the first two or three days. Thirst appeared from the first, and was always imperative. Of course, the milk diet largely satisfied it, but not entirely. Luckily our baby did not suffer from thirst, for grandma, nurse, and the good doctor had all entered early warning that “babies needed water,” and that many a baby was treated for colic, insomnia, nervousness, and natural depravity, when all the poor little fellow wanted was a spoonful of cool water. The baby’s body, as I said in my last chapter, is largely composed of water, and the evaporation from the loose texture of the skin is very great. After children can talk, they wear out the most robust patience with incessant appeals, night and day, for a “d’ink,” and consume water in quantities quite beyond what seems rational. But their craving is doubtless a true indication of what they need.
There are composites of sensation which the baby experiences very early. There is the feeling of clothes, for instance, made up of warmth, of touch and pressure sensations all over his skin, and of changes in the muscular feelings from constraint, and in the internal feelings from the effect on circulation. There are feelings of fatigue in one position, made up of sensations of touch, of the pressure of the body’s weight on the under surfaces of skin, of some muscular tensions, and perhaps of several other elements. Our baby’s nurse saved her much fretting by simply changing the position of the little body from time to time. We ourselves are constantly moving and shifting our positions, to relieve a pressure on the skin here, or a muscular tension there, but the wee baby cannot so much as turn his head or move a limb at will.
Vaguest and most composite of all is what is called “common sensation,” or “general sensation”—that feeling of comfort or discomfort, vigor or languor, diffused through the whole body, with which we are all familiar. It seems to be very primitive in origin— indeed, the speculation is that this dim, pervasive feeling is the original one, the primitive way in which animal tissue responded to light and heat and everything, before the special senses developed, gathering the light sensations to one focus, the sound sensations to another, and so on. But in its present development it is also largely made up of the sum of all the organic sensations, and even of dim overflows of feeling from the special senses.
It is with older people notably connected with emotional states. It varies, of course, with health and external conditions; yet each person seems from birth to be held to a certain fixed habit in this complex underlying condition of feeling—pleasant with one, unpleasant with another. This fixed habit of general sensation is perhaps the secret of what we call temperament; while its surface variations seem to be mainly responsible for moods.
Our baby showed temperament—luckily of the easy-going and cheerful kind—from her first day (though we could hardly see this except by looking back afterward); and there is no reason to doubt that she experienced some general sensation from the first. It was evidently of a pretty neutral sort, however: the definite appearance of high comfort and well-being did not come till later; nor were moods apparent at first.
Now in all this one significant thing appears. Sensations had from the first the quality of being agreeable or disagreeable. The baby could not wish, prefer, and choose, for she had not learned to remember and compare; but she could like and dislike. And this was shown plainly from the first hour by expressions of face—reflex facial movements, so firmly associated in the human race with liking and disliking that the most inexperienced observer recognizes their meaning at once. It is said that facial expression comes by imitation, and that the blind are therefore deficient in it; but this is not true of these simplest expressions: they come by inheritance, and are present in the first hour of life. A look of content or discontent, the
monotonous cry, and vague movements of limbs, head, and features,—these are the limits of expression of feeling in the earliest days.
It would seem that in this sense condition there was nothing that could give the baby any feeling of inner or outer, of space or locality. We have some glimpse of the like condition ourselves,—when people say after an explosion, for instance, that it “seemed to be inside their own heads,” or when we try to locate a cicada’s note, or when we feel diffused warmth.
Here is the conception I gathered of the dim life on which the little creature entered at birth. She took in with a dull comfort the gentle light that fell on her eyes, seeing without any sort of attention or comprehension the moving blurs of darkness that varied it. She felt motions and changes; she felt the action of her own muscles; and, after the first three or four days, disagreeable shocks of sound now and then broke through the silence, or perhaps through an unnoticed jumble of faint noises. She felt touches on her body from time to time, but without the least sense of the place of the touch (this became evident enough later, as I shall relate in its order); and steady slight sensations of touch from her clothes, from arms that held her, from cushions on which she lay, poured in on her.
From time to time sensations of hunger, thirst, and once or twice of pain, made themselves felt through all the others, and mounted till they became distressing; from time to time a feeling of heightened comfort flowed over her, as hunger and thirst were satisfied, or release from clothes, and the effect of the bath and rubbing on her circulation, increased the net sense of well-being. She felt slight and unlocated discomforts from fatigue in one position, quickly relieved by the watchful nurse. For the rest, she lay empty-minded, neither consciously comfortable nor uncomfortable, yet on the whole pervaded with a dull sense of well-being. Of the people about her, of her mother’s face, of her own existence, of desire or fear, she knew nothing.
Yet this dim dream was flecked all through with the beginnings of later comparison and choice. The light was varied with dark; the
feelings of passive motion, of muscular action, of touch, of sound, were all unlike each other; the discomforts of hunger, of pain, of fatigue, were different discomforts. The baby began from the first moment to accumulate varied experience, which before long would waken attention, interest, discrimination, and vivid life.
IV
THE EARLIEST DEVELOPMENTS
O of the new-born baby’s dim life of passivity the first path was that of vision. I noticed about the end of the second week that her eyes no longer wandered altogether helplessly, but rested with a long and contented gaze on bright surfaces they chanced to encounter, such as the shining of the lamp on the white ceiling, or our faces turned toward the light as she lay on our knees. It was not active looking, with any power to direct the eyes, but mere staring; when the gaze fell by chance on the pleasant light, it clung there. But something must have come to pass, that it could stop and cling to what gave it pleasure.
I think no one has yet analyzed this earliest stage in progress toward real seeing, though Professor Sully touches on an explanation when he says that the eyes “maintain their attitude under stimulus of the pleasure.”
We know that muscular action is normally caused by stimulus received from the nerve centres, and that in the earliest days there seems to be a good deal of random discharge of stimulus, developed by the growth of the centres, and causing aimless movements. Now there are two fundamental and profoundly important things about this nervous discharge. One is that pleasure, attention, or intensity of sensation seems to have the power of increasing it, and thus influencing the action of the muscles. The other is that the discharge always tends to seek the same paths it has used before, and more and more easily each time; so that physiologists speak of it as a current deepening its channels. It is really nothing like a flowing liquid, nor the nerve threads along which it passes like channeled watercourses. Still, just as a current of water will deepen a gully till it drains into itself all the water that had spread about in shallower ditches, so the wave of molecular change running
along a nerve somehow so prepares that nerve that by and by, instead of spreading about through any fibres that come handy, the whole energy will drain into the accustomed ones. Then, of course, the muscles to which these run will perform more and more easily the accustomed acts. Some of these channels—even whole connected systems of them—are already well prepared by inheritance, and hence come instinctive and reflex actions; many are still to be deepened by the baby’s own experience.
Now suppose the aimless impulse straying to the baby’s eye muscles, making the eyes roam hither and yon; but as they reach a certain position, they fall upon a lighted surface, and a pleasant brightness flows back into the consciousness; and something stirs within that has power to send an intenser current through those same fibres. For the time, at least, that channel is deepened, the wandering impulses are drained into it, and the eye muscles are held steady in that position. And, in fact, with the beginning of staring the irregular movements of head and eyes did decline, and gradually disappear.
It is an important moment that marks the beginning of even a passive power to control the movements; and when my grandmother handed down the rule that you should never needlessly interrupt a baby’s staring, lest you hinder the development of power of attention, she seems to have been psychologically sound.
A fuller and pleasanter life now seemed to pervade the whole little body. The grimaces of vague discomfort were disappearing, and the baby began to wear a look of satisfaction as she lay, warm and fed and dry, gazing at some light surface. In the bath, where the release from clothes and the stimulus to circulation from the warm water heightened the pleasant condition of general sensation, her expression approached real delight; the movements of her limbs were freer, and all her muscles tenser.
The neck muscles, especially, were so far “innervated”—that is, supplied with nervous energy—as fairly to lift her head from the supporting hand. This was probably not as yet a real effort to hold up the head, only a drafting of surplus energy into the neck muscles,
partly because of inherited aptitude, partly because the pleasure received from the lifted head and better seeing tended to draw the energy thither, just as it was drawn to the eye muscles in the case of the staring. At least one careful observer, Mrs. Edith Elmer Wood, records this action of the neck muscles on the first day.
It was at this period that the baby first smiled; but being forewarned of the “colic smile,” which counterfeits so exactly the earliest true smiles,—fleeting as these are, just touching the mouth and vanishing,—I never felt sure whether the baby was smiling for general contentment with life, or whether a passing twinge had crossed her comfort and drawn her lips into the semblance of a smile; and so never dared to record the expression till it first occurred for unmistakable pleasure.
There must have been rapid progress going on in the clearness of muscular and touch sensations, and in the forming of associations in the baby’s mind; but no plain evidence of these inner processes came till the fourth week. Then I noticed that the baby, when crying with hunger, would hush as soon as she was taken in the arms in the position usual in nursing, as if she recognized the preliminaries, and knew she was about to be satisfied. She could not, in fact, have remembered or expected anything as yet; it was not memory, but a clear instance of the working of that great law of association by which the raw material of the senses was to be wrought up into an orderly mental life.
The substance of the law is that when experiences have repeatedly been had together, the occurrence of one of them (still more, of several out of a group, as in this case) tends to bring up into consciousness the others. It is a law that underlies psychic life as profoundly as the law that nerve energy seeks its old channels underlies physical life. Indeed, it is in a sense the psychic side of the same law; for it implies that when a group of nerve centres have formerly acted together, the action of one tends to bring on that of the rest. So, since the baby had often experienced the feeling of that particular position (a combination of tactile and muscular and organic sensations) in connection with the feeling of satisfied hunger, that comfortable feeling, the missing member of the group, came into her
consciousness along with the rest, some moments in advance of the actual satisfaction.
I have said that this is not memory, yet there is in it a germ of memory. A past experience is brought back to consciousness; and if it were brought back as a definite idea, instead of a vague feeling, it would be memory.
Close on this came another great advance in vision. This was on the twenty-fifth day, toward evening, when the baby was lying on her grandmother’s knee by the fire, in a condition of high well-being and content, gazing at her grandmother’s face with an expression of attention. I came and sat down close by, leaning over the baby, so that my face must have come within the indirect range of her vision. At that she turned her eyes to my face and gazed at it with the same appearance of attention, and even of some effort, shown by a slight tension of brows and lips, then turned her eyes back to her grandmother’s face, and again to mine, and so several times. The last time she seemed to catch sight of my shoulder, on which a high light struck from the lamp, and not only moved her eyes, but threw her head far back to see it better, and gazed for some time, with a new expression on her face—“a sort of dim and rudimentary eagerness,” says my note. She no longer stared, but really looked.
Clear seeing, let us here recall, is not done with the whole retina, but only with a tiny spot in the centre, the so-called “yellow spot,” or “macula lutea.” If the image of an object falls to one side of this, especially if it is far to one side, we get only a shapeless impression that something is there; we “catch a glimpse of it,” as we say. In order really to look at it we turn our eyeballs toward the object till the image falls on the spot of clear vision. We estimate the distance through which to turn the balls, down to minute fractions of an inch, by the feeling in the eye muscles.
This was what the baby had done, and I do not dare to say how many philosophical and psychological discussions are involved in her doing it. Professor Le Conte thinks that it shows an inborn sense of direction, since the eyes are turned, not toward the side on which the ray strikes the retina, but toward the side from which the ray
enters the eye; that is, the baby thinks out along the line of the ray to the object it comes from, thus putting the object outside himself, in space, as we do. Professor Wundt, the great German psychologist, is positive that the baby has no sense of space or direction, but gains it by just such measurements with the eye muscles; that there is no right nor left, up nor down, for him, but only associations between the look of things off at one side, and the feel of the eye action that brings them to central vision.
This means that before a baby can carry the eye always through just the right arc to look at an object, he must have made this association between the look of things and the feel of the action separately for each point of the retina. It is a great deal for a baby to have learned in three weeks; still, babies have to learn fast if they are ever to catch up with the race; and in the early roamings of the eye they experience over and over all manner of transits of images to and fro across the retina. Probably, too, it was still only partially learned. I watched now for what Preyer’s record had led me to expect as the next development in vision—the ability to follow a moving object with the eyes; that is, to hold the yellow spot fixed on the object as it moved, moving the eyeball in time with it in order to do so. I used my hand to move to and fro before the baby, and could not satisfy myself that she followed it, though she sometimes seemed to; but the day after she was a month old I tried a candle, and her eyes followed it unmistakably; she even threw her head back to follow it farther. In trying this experiment, one should always use a bright object, should make sure the baby’s eyes are fixed on it, and then should move it very slowly indeed, right and left.
So far, there is no necessary proof of will. Longet found that the eyes and head of a pigeon whose cerebrum had been removed would follow a moving light. We ourselves can sit absorbed in thought or talk, yet follow unconsciously with our eyes the movement of a lantern along a dark road; and if something appears on the outer edge of our vision we often turn quite involuntarily to look. But the baby’s new expression of intelligence and interest showed that whether she willed the movements or not, she attended to the new impressions she was getting.
Professor Preyer noticed the same dawn of intelligence in his baby’s face at about the same stage. And it is worth while to observe that when I came to study my record I was surprised to find how often such an awakening look, an access of attention, wonder, or intelligence, in the baby’s face, had coincided with some marked step in development and signalized its great mental importance. I should advise any one who is observing a baby to be on the lookout for this outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual unfolding.
In both these visual developments the baby had proved able to use her neck in coöperation with her eyes, throwing back her head to see farther. It began at the same time to seem that she was really and deliberately trying to hold up her head for the same purpose of seeing better. She not only straightened it up more and more in the bath, but when she was laid against one’s breast she would lift her head from the shoulder, sometimes for twenty seconds at a time, and look about. Preyer sets this down as the first real act of will.
The baby’s increased interest in seeing centred especially on the faces about her, at which she gazed with rapt interest. Even during the period of mere staring, faces had oftenest held her eyes, probably because they were oftener brought within the range of her clearest seeing than other light surfaces. The large, light, moving patch of the human face (as Preyer has pointed out) coming and going in the field of vision, and oftener chancing to hover at the point of clearest seeing than any other object, embellished with a play of high lights on cheeks, teeth, and eyes, is calculated to excite the highest degree of attention a baby is capable of at a month old. So from the very first—before the baby has yet really seen his mother— her face and that of his other nearest friends become the most active agents in his development, and the most interesting things in his experience.
Our baby was at this time in a way aware of the difference between companionship and solitude. In the latter days of the first month she would lie contentedly in the room with people near by, but would fret if left alone. But by the end of the month she was apt to fret when she was laid down on a chair or lounge, and to become content only when taken into the lap. This was not yet distinct memory and
