THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

KANT AND GERMAN IDEALISM 195
form of mind. It was a brilliant idea to refute materialism by the simple
expedient of showing that we know of no such thing as matter; in all Europe
only a Gaelic imagination could have conceived this metaphysical magic.
But see how obvious it is, said the Bishop : has not Locke told us that all
our knowledge is derived from sensation? Therefore all our knowledge
of anything is merely our sensations of it, and the ideas derived from these
sensations. A "thing" is merely a bundle of perceptions i. e., classified
and interpreted sensations. You protest that your breakfast is much more
substantial than a bundle of perceptions; and that a hammer that teaches
you carpentry through your thumb has a most magnificent materiality.
But your breakfast is at first nothing but a congeries of sensations of sight
and smell and touch; and then of taste; and then of internal comfort and
warmth. Likewise, the hammer is a bundle of sensations of color, size,
shape, weight, touch, etc. ; its reality for you is not in its materiality, but
in the sensations that come from your thumb. If you had no senses, the
hammer would not exist for you at all; it might strike your dead thumb
forever and yet win from you not the slightest attention. It is only a
bundle of sensations, or a bundle of memories;
it is a condition of the
mind. All matter, so far as we know it, is a mental condition; and the'
only reality that we know directly is mind. So much for materialism.
But the Irish Bishop had reckoned without the Scotch sceptic. David
Hume (1711-1776) at the age of twenty-six shocked all Christendom
with his highly heretical Treatise on Human Nature, one of the classics
and marvels of modern philosophy. We know the mind, said Hume, only
as we know matter: by perception, though it be in this case internal.
Never do we perceive any such entity as the "mind" ; we perceive merely
separate ideas, memories, feelings, etc. The mind is not a substance, an
organ that has ideas; it is only an abstract name for the series of ideas;
the perceptions, memories and feelings are the mind; there is no observable
"soul" behind the processes of thought. The result appeared to be
that Hume had as effectually destroyed mind as Berkeley had destroyed
matter. Nothing was left; and philosophy found itself in the midst of
ruins of its own making. No wonder that a wit advised the abandonment
of the controversy, saying: "No matter, never mind."
But Hume was not content to destroy orthodox religion by dissipating
the concept of soul; he proposed also to destroy science by dissolving
the concept of law. Science and philosophy alike, since Bruno and Galileo,
had been making much of natural law, of "necessity" in the sequence of
effect upon cause; Spinoza had reared his majestic metaphysics upon this
proud conception. But observe, said Hume, that we never perceive causes,
or laws; we perceive events and sequences, and infer causation and necessity;
a law is not an eternal and necessary decree to which events are sub-
jected, but merely a mental summary and shorthand of our kaleidoscopic
experience; we have no guarantee that the sequences hitherto observed