The Divine Lamp

 Please note:  Not being the brightest bulb on the chandelier I inadvertently posted part two before part one.

Article 1

Objections raised by D’Alembert against the system of Locke.

The first ideas which offer themselves to our analysis are those of corporeal beings; and it was these that engrossed the attention of Locke and his followers.

No sooner did this philosophy see the impossibility of harmonizing the idea of substance with his system than, to save the system, he denied the idea.

He did not reflect that, without it, we should have no means of forming the ideas of external bodies, and that therefore the idea of substance-i.e., of an existence exclusively proper: of a subject, in short, of the sensible qualities-enters of necessity into them all.

Meanwhile, however, his declaration about the impossibility of deriving the idea of substance from the senses was a valuable admission; but, as it stood there isolated from everything else, it remained a long time without bearing fruit.

He had viewed this idea in an abstract way, and hence he could not see the connection it had with so many other ideas less extensive than itself. This explains why he spoke of it as of a mere creature of the imagination, which might be dispensed with in philosophy.

Nor did the philosophers who came after Locke feel at first the full import of his admission; nor did they give it that serious attention which it really deserved.

Instead of this, they occupied themselves with examining in particular the manner in which Locke had derived the ideas of bodies; and here it was that they discovered how his proceeding had been arbitrary, and how difficulties which should have been seriously grappled with had been simply passed over.

The thought that it was necessary to enter upon a carefully-reasoned explanation of how it is possible for us to form ideas of things external to us had not occurred to Locke, any more than it would occur to any illiterate man. He had started from the proposition that ‘the sensations give us immediately the ideas of external bodies.’ To his mind this proposition expressed a primitive fact equivalent to a principle-a fact so obvious that to delay over its explanation would be a mere waste of time.

D’Alembert observed that this could not be admitted as a primitive fact, and that there were in it certain difficulties which called for explanation. The difficulties seen by D’Alembert were these:-

(1) The sensations are only modifications of our own soul; they exist only in us. How is it possible, then, for us to go outside of ourselves, and to gain the conception of things external to us, if our sensations are the only sources whence we can draw ideas?

(2) Each sensation stands detached from and independent of the others. For instance, the sensation of smell has nothing to do with the sensation of color; nor has the sensation of color any resemblance with that of flavor or sound; nor, again, is there anything in common between these sensations and that of touch. Now, our idea of a body is the assemblage of all these sensible qualities so utterly different in their nature. It shows them to us joined together in one only subject, which is precisely what we call body. How, then, can this be, if the ideas of bodies are produced in us by the senses alone?

These objections made by D’Alembert against the theory of Locke came in reality to the same difficulty which Locke had seen in connection with the origin of the idea of substance; only that Locke had, as I have said, proposed the difficulty in relation to the idea of substance in general, whereas D’Alembert was presenting it under a partial form-that is, by considering that idea in reference to bodies.

In fact, to think of an external body as the sole subject to which all the qualities perceived by our senses are referred is nothing but to think of a support, a center necessary to those qualities-in a word, the corporeal substance.

But so far was the French philosopher from being conscious of the radical identity of his difficulties with that noticed by Locke, that he, with all apparent good faith, proposed the question, ‘Whence is the substantial idea we have of bodies derived?’ and this (still more strange to say) while he was fully concurring with Locke in a total denial of the idea of substance. So torpid is human thought! So true is it that even most perspicacious intellects are apt to grope their way slowly searching after truth in the dim twilight of uncertainty!