Sorglose Nacht

Overview

The Enquiry is Hume’s concise rendering of his philosophical position (”moderate skepticism”). It consists primarily of statements of his methodological and epistemological views, along with his accounts of free will and religious knowledge.

In Stephen Buckle’s introduction to the first Enquiry, he describes its unified argument as such: “After Section 1 makes its case for serious philosophizing, Sections 2-6 put in place the basic account of human psychological functioning, and this account is then put to work in Sections 7-11.” I’ve taken a cue here and split the outline into two sections (1-6 and 7-11).

On a bureaucratic note, I’ve changed my outline numbering system. The reason I’ve done this is because anymore these texts are getting long, and marking numbered paragraphs alphabetically seems counter-intuitive at best. Here, I’ll try using the capitalized roman numerals (I) to represent chapters, and standard numerals (1) to represent numbered paragraphs.

Outline

1. On the different species of philosophy
   1. Moral philosophy (the study of human nature and action, contra natural philosophy - the study of the world) has two common manners of treatment.
      1. The first manner is designed to influence people to be virtuous by “excit[ing] and regulat[ing] our sentiments…[to] bend our hearts to the love of probity.”
   2. The second is more concerned with cultivating our understanding rather than our manners. Cartesian rationalism is a good example of this type of philosophy, which is “unintelligible to the common man.”
   3. It is certain that the “easy and obvious philosophy” will always receive the common person’s preference over the “accurate and abtruse.” The former may also be more useful in daily life.
   4. In this graph he makes a series of consistently wrong assumptions about which philosophers posterity will remember, choosing Cicero over Aristotle, La Bruyere over Malebranche, and Addison over Locke.
   5. Society types in particular like the easy philosophy, by whose writings “virtue becomes amiable, science agreeable, company instructive, and retirement entertaining.”
   6. Contra certain obsessive rationalists, Hume admonishes “be a philosopher, but…be still a man.” (Here, as many places, Hume is more enjoyable when read to oneself in a Scottish accent.)
   7. However, too much of a good thing (here, Epicurianism) is not the answer either. Perhaps there is something worth considering in the metaphysical endeavor.
   8. For one, accuracy-obsessed philosophy does so in the service of the humane pursuits. By analogy, Hume considers the painter’s debt to the anatomist: “Accuracy is,” he notes, “in every case, advantageous to beauty, and just reasoning to delicate sentiment.”
   9. Secondly, most human progress in understanding comes from the kind of enquiry of the metaphysicians, or “a spirit of accuracy…carries [all human pursuits] nearer their perfection.”
   10. While the important task of making this slow and arduous progress will seem dry to most, some minds “require severe exercise.”
   11. However, the justest exception to be taken with metaphysical philosophy is that these deep folk claim to “penentrate into subjects utterly inaccessible to the understanding.”
   12. This fact should not condemn the deep philosophical enterprise, though. On the contrary, the “only method of freeing learning…from these abstruse questions, is to enquire seriously into the nature of human understanding, and show…that it is by no means fitted for such remote and abstruse subjects.”
   13. There would be considerable other advantages to such an enquiry, the least of which might be a delineation of the distinct parts and powers of the mind.
   14. Skepticism against such an effort ostensibly entails skepticism about the ability of all speculation whatsoever, and of action. One cannot doubt that the mind is endowed with several distinct powers.
   15. There’s thus no reason to despair of such an effort of categorization.
   16. Hume modestly writes that even a small accomplishment in this endeavour would be ample reward for his effort.
   17. “Happy, if we can unite the boundaries of the different species of philosophy, by reconciling profound enquiry with clearness, and truth with novelty!”
2. Of the origin of ideas
   1. Objects of imagination and memory pale in force and vivacity to those of sensation.
   2. Similarly with emotions: A man in a fit of anger “is actuated in a very different manner” than one who merely thinks about anger.
   3. This indicates that we can divide all perceptions into two classes, distinguished by force: ideas (those “less lively”) and impressions (those more).
   4. At first blush, thinking seems unbounded (it is unconstrained by time and space, e.g.).
   5. Upon reflection, however, we realize that thought cannot really invent anything, rather it can merely compound, transpose, augment or diminish the objects we receive from our impressions.
   6. Two arguments to prove this. First, any of our ideas, when subjected to appropriate scrutiny, resolve themselves into simple ideas (received from impressions - very Lockean).
   7. Second, when a person has a defect of some sense (say, he is blind), he is likewise defective in his ability to comprehend its correspondent ideas (here, e.g. color).
   8. There is one phenomenon that contradicts this, for which Lock proposes the following thought experiment:
      1. Suppose a person is acquainted by experience with all but one particular shade of blue.
      2. When shown a gradient of color, he will be aware that there is a jump between the shade preceding the shade he has not experienced, and the one following it.
      3. This means, despite having never experienced that shade, he can infer that it should be there.
      4. However, Hume chalks up this example to complete anomaly.
   9. On the main, this is very useful as a heuristic device for analyzing philosophical argumentation. If you suspect that some philosopher’s terminology has no referent (apparently a big problem in Hume’s time), you can ask yourself, “from what impression is that supposed to be derived?”
3. Of the association of ideas
   1. It is evident that the different thoughts of our mind are always somehow connected to one another.
   2. Hume proposes that this principle of connection takes only three forms: resemblance, contiguity in time or place, and cause and effect.
   3. That these principles serve to connect ideas will not be doubted. That the three of them are exhaustive may justly be doubted. Hume will try to evidence his taxonomy’s exhaustiveness by showing that it applies to a wide variety of examples (following Hutcheson, he will immediately discuss aesthetics, qua the relationship between history and poetry).
   4. People’s actions are directed at ends. We seldom speak or think without purpose or intention.
   5. All compositions of genius therefore must arise at least in the first place from some aim or intention.
   6. Since this is always the case, there always must be some thread which relates the events of a narrative.
   7. The connecting principle may be different, depending on the designs of the poet or historian. Ovid’s Metamorphoses operates connectively by resemblance.
   8. A historian, however, may be influenced by contiguity in time and place.
   9. However, the most usual form of connection in poetic and historical narratives is cause and effect. For a historian, this seems obvious, as the more perfect the chain of causal links, the more perfect is the historical account.
   10. The same is true of a narrative about an individual, but from a narrative standpoint, this degree of detail can be boring. History and poetry thus differ in their “unity of action” not in kind, but merely in degree.
   11. He here gives us the example that it may not be necessary, as in the Iliad to let the reader know “each time the hero buckles his shoes.” If an epic poet does this, the reader’s imagination will doubtless flag.
   12. Secondly, he notes that the epic poet must not trace the causes to any great distance - again, the reader will lose interest.
   13. The same rule in dramatic poetry - introducing an actor only tangentially related to the main characters is just confusing. The author must, again, select which elements she will admit onto the stage, at the clear expense of providing a full accounting of the causal nexus which determines the plot.
   14. Paragraph 14 recaps 7-13: the relation of cause and effect is the same in history and poetry, where the latter’s concern is the imagination and passions of its readers.
   15. Since the difference is only measured by degrees, it will be difficult to separate history from epic poetry cleanly.
   16. Here a brief discussion of the role of narrative contrast in unifying Achilles’ anger in the death of Hector and his anger which “produced so many ills to the Greeks.”
   17. Here an analysis of Paradise Lost that suggests that the connective structure of this poem is not necessary causal, but rather resemblance (of miraculous events) and contiguity (of events in Christian metaphysical time).
   18. The full empirical review of the exhaustiveness of this taxonomy would lead us into reasonings too copious for this enquiry.
4. Sceptical doubts concerning the operations of the understanding
   1. (Part I) All objects of human reason may be divided into (1) relations of ideas and (2) matters of fact. The former are propositions which are independent of the actually existing stuff of the universe.
   2. The latter (matters of fact) are, on the contrary, just states of affairs in the really existing universe. Their contrary states don’t imply contradictions, and we cannot prove their contraries demonstratively false.
   3. It might be worth our time, then, to figure out something about what exactly assures us of any matter of fact, beyond the “present testimony of our senses.”
   4. Outside of that present testimony, everything we have to say about matters of fact seems to be founded on the relation of cause and effect. (It is supposed that there is some causal relation between the present fact and whatever we infer from it.)
   5. Therefore, we’d better look at how we arrive at the knowledge of cause and effect.
   6. Hume affirms that the knowledge of this relation arises entirely from experience. No object, considered in itself, ever reveals by its sensory qualities, the causes that produced it or the effects that will arise from it.
   7. It thus will be admitted that causes and effects are discoverable only by experience (not by reason) with regards to objects.
   8. However, it may not be so self-evident that this is the case when we consider events.
   9. Imagine two billiard balls, a first moving towards a second, making contact. Motion in the second is quite a distinct event from motion in the first.
   10. We of course think that when the first hits the second, the second will move. But we can conceive many other outcomes rationally. The first could stop, or be deflected in some other direction. There is never an a priori reason, then, that grounds our preference that the second will move on contact.
   11. Since every effect is distinct from its cause, and therefore cannot be discovered in the cause. Therfore, it is in vain that we should try to rationally infer an effect from a cause.
   12. While elasticity, gravity, etc. are probably the ultimate causes we shall ever discover in nature, “the most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer,” and “the observation of human blindless and weakness is the result of all philosophy.”
   13. Neither can geometry account for the law of motion, since the latter relies on the real existential world, for which we can only experimentally suppose the efficacy of the former.
   14. (Part II) Since the foundation of all our reasoning is experience, we need to ask, what is the foundation of all conclusions from experience?
   15. Even after we have experience of cause and effect, our conclusions from that experience are not founded on any process of the understanding. Explaining this is what follows.
   16. The main question to answer is why our experience of the behavior of one object should be extended to predictions about the behavior of other objects, however similar, at different times. Even when we allow that this inference is just, we need to know what the “medium” between the single experience and the expectation of similar experiences in the future.
   17. Just because we haven’t figured out this intermediate step yet doesn’t mean we never will. This means the negative proof isn’t good enough, and we need to endeavor to enumerate all the branches of human knowledge, and that none of them can afford such an intermediate step.
   18. There are two kinds of reasonings: demonstrative (that reasoning which concerns ideas) and moral reasoning (that reasoning that concerns fact and existence. That there are no demonstrative arguments to provide the intermediary step seems evident, since it doesn’t imply a contradiction that the course of nature may change sometime in the future.
   19. If we are going to be persuaded by any arguments to continue to expect future behaviors based on past experience, these arguments are going to be probable only.
   20. From causes which appear similar we expect similar effects, but even though there is “nothing so like as eggs,” no one “expects the same taste and relish in all of them.”
   21. If someone is to infer that some bundle of qualities (x) implies some causal power (y), based on his past experience that all x’s have the power y, of what nature is this inference? It’s neither demonstrative nor intuitive, and to say that it’s experimental is begging the question.
       1. Hume also makes the point here that regardless of the fact that as an agent he is satisfied to act based on inferences from experience, as a philosopher, he remains curious as to the nature of these inferences.
   22. Now Hume is going to give us some arguments that will prove that he hasn’t merely /missed/ some argument for the foundation of this inference.
   23. Imagine a child who puts her hand by a candle. The flame burns her, and in the future, she will be careful not to put her hand near the candle again. If you assert that the child develops this conclusion by rational means, and that the means are so evident that an infant can deploy them, this means that any valid explanation of the rational process can’t be more complex than those deployed by an infant. Since this is true, Hume thinks it likely that some philosopher would already have been able to explain it. Indeed, if he’s missing it, he would be “a very backward scholar; since I cannot now discover an argument which, it seems, was perfectly familiar to me long before I was out of my cradle.”
5. Sceptical solution of these doubts
   1. (Part I) One school of philosophy doesn’t lead us to the kind of hyper-rational selfishness in which philosophers are known to indulge. Academic (that is, post-Platonic, contra Pyrrhonian) Scepticism: suspending judgment, and renouncing speculation about things outside the limits of common life and practice.
   2. Though we must conclude (viz. the previous chapter) that there is a step taken by the mind which is not supported by a rational argument, there is no danger that this lack of argument will threaten all the knowledge (which is almost all of it) which it grounds.
   3. To an alien, there is no reason to conclude that simply because one event precedes another that the first is the cause and the second the effect.
   4. Now imagine that our alien has a little more experience. Though he now finds himself determined to draw the inference that one thing causes another, he still has no rational justificatin for doing so. But there must be some principle which makes him form this conclusion.
   5. That principle is custom or habit. It is by habit that we associate, e.g. heat and flame. There is a long footnote here that suggests that this experiential justification for reason underlies not only our knowledge of objects, but our views on civil government, moral conduct, the law, etc.
   6. “Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.” Without custom, we wouldn’t know anything about anything but what our sense experience and memory deliver us. This means that we wouldn’t know how to adjust means to make ends we want, and this would be the end “at once of all action, as well as the chief part of speculation.”
   7. Also, it is prudent to note that though our conclusions can carry us beyond memory and sense, some fact must always be present to sense or memory to provide a starting point to draw a conclusion.
   8. In conclusion, all beliefs about matters of fact are derived from some present object and a customary conjuction between that object and some other object.
   9. From here, then, we need to examine the nature of that belief and of the customary conjunctions from which it is derived.
   10. (Part II) What’s the difference, cognitively speaking, between a belief and something we just imagine?
   11. The difference lies in some sentiment or feeling that gets conjoined to beliefs (by force of custom) that doesn’t get joined up with fictions. Since there’s no logical contradiction in the idea of a red ocean, it is just some sentiment that forces us to understand an image of one as fiction, whereas to one of a blue ocean we attribute facticity.
   12. Defining this sentiment is hard, but describing it might not be so bad. We can call a belief “something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the ideas of judgment from the fictions of the imagination. It gives them more weight and influence…and renders them a governing principle of our actions.”
   13. On summary, “…belief is nothing but a conception more intense and steady than what attends the mere fictions of the imagination, and…this manner of conception arises from a customary conjunction of the object with something present to the memory or senses.”
   14. We will also remember that the principles of that conjunction are resemblance, contiguity and causation. Does it happen, Hume now asks, that “when one of the objects is presented to the sense or memory, the mind is not only carried to the conception of the correlative, but reaches a steadier and stronger conception of it than what otherwise it would have been able to attain?” He finds that in the case of cause and effect, this is indeed the case. The question is now whether it is generally the case.
   15. He argues that it is the case for the resemblance connection as well, using the example of viewing a picture of an absent friend.
   16. Further evidence for the power of resemblance comes in the form of Roman Catholic rituals that use idols (of the crucifixion of Jesus, e.g.).
   17. He argues then that it is also the case for the contiguity relation, using this example: when walking hear his home, the things that he passes remind him of his (absent) home more acutely than do similar things hundreds of miles away.
   18. Finally, “no one can doubt” that causation works similarly. His (strange) example here is the desire for religious types to have relics of saints, which he suggests are effects close to the cause (the holy person).
   19. Another, still weird example, is that in seeing the son of our dead friend, we remember him more acutely. The implication here is that the son is the effect, and the father the cause.
   20. Finally, all three connective types require that the correlative object is presupposed. It would have no effect if, e.g. we didn’t believe the father, or Jesus, or the saint, or our home, or our absent friend actually existed.
   21. This paragraph seems a little strange at first blush, because he suggests that custom is the principle by which “a kind of pre-established harmony between the course of nature and the succession of our ideas” (an obvious reference to Liebniz) and he ends up talking about final causes (in reference to Aristotle). It’s actually kind of nice, though, when you understand these problems in terms of paragraph 6 above: if custom didn’t unite our thoughts with our past experience of nature, we wouldn’t know how to act to bring about ends, and hence both moral action and knowledge would be impossible.
   22. Finally, there’s a practical analogy: we use our instinct for inferring future behavior from past experience in the same way we use our legs. We don’t have to understand the way the muscles and nerves work together to walk.
6. Of probability
   1. Although our world is causally determined, our ignorance of the real cause of any event means that our future-directed knowledge for real events and objects always takes the form of a belief or opinion.
   2. This opinion is based on probability.
   3. Now recall that a belief is just a stronger conception of some object than that which we have of some correspondent object of fiction in our imaginations.
   4. We can now understand that probability begets belief (and degree of belief). Since fire has always burned throughout our experience, it is incredibly probable that it will again. Therefore, we believe with high assurance that we’ll be burned if we touch a fire. In short, Hume thinks that when we project our experience of past events onto our beliefs about the future, those beliefs acquire a degree of assurance proportional to the consistency of our past experience in similar situations.

Overview

Book Three of Locke’s Famous Essay deals with Language. I’ll only outline much of this book very generally, because most of the book is about how words stand for ideas. This means that he goes through simple, complex, relational, etc. ideas again. To me, it just isn’t worth the effort to go through this all again point by point.

Nevertheless, since I didn’t outline every argument in detail, and because this is as far as I am going to take it with him, I’ve included a brief “overview” with a few key points from my notes on the secondary literature about his theory of ideas and his theory of language.

Outline

Chapter I: Words or Language in General

1. God designed humans as sociable - needing other people, and equipped with language, which “was to be the great instrument and common tie of society.”
2. Besides the ability to articulate sounds, humans needed to be able to use these sounds as signs of ideas in order to convey these ideas between minds.
3. Since language would be cumbersome otherwise, it needs to include terms that are general - aka. apply to multiple particular things. Names (nouns) are general if they apply to general ideas, and particular when they stand for particulars.
4. Additionally, we have privative words (nothing, ignorance, barrenness) that relate to positive ideas by signifying their absence.
5. We also have words referring to items far removed from anything of which we have sense-experience. The meanings of many of these words (e.g. imagine, apprehend, adhere, conceive) are borrowed from ideas of sense-perception.
6. Knowledge, which has to do with propositions, has a greater connection with words than perhaps is suspected. In order to investigate this, we have to determine what exactly names are applied to (exactly, what /kinds/ of things - since most nouns are general).

Chapter II: The Signification of Words

1. Since we had to have a way to get ideas out of our heads, we arbitrarily (note: not random or unmotivated) picked sounds to mark the ideas.
2. Words are used to signify ideas in the mind of the speaker (say, his or her representations of stuff in the world), as opposed to directly to stuff out in the world. He thinks our ideas are the medium of access to that worldly stuff and that since this is the case, words can only stand in for them (as opposed to the worldly stuff itself, to which they might still refer, but only indirectly).
3. Each of us uses a word to express the idea that we have associated with it; but obviously we cannot use it to signify a complex idea that we don’t have.
4. Despite the fact that words can only signify ideas in the mind of the speaker, “men in their thoughts” suppose that their words also mark two other things:
   1. Ideas in the mind of the hearer - that is, they presuppose that other literate speakers of the language in question use it in the same “ordinary meaning” way.
   2. Things as they really are - that is, they conflate their mindly ideas of worldly stuff with the worldly stuff itself.
5. Because words because “immediately signify one’s own ideas” the sound of the signifying word can come to evoke the idea it signifies just as strongly as if the relevant kind of object were presented to the senses.
6. Because we often learn words before we have a developed idea of the things they signify, it is easy to direct our thought to the words themselves, rather than the things. And so it happens, Locke cautions, that some people “utter various words just as parrots do.”
7. Each word has its meaning by a purely “arbitrary imposition” - it is ultimately for each individual to decide what idea she will associate with a given word. There are of course good practical reasons for wanting one’s own word-idea pairings to be the same as those of others’ in one’s own society, but this practical concern leaves standing the fact of personal responsibility for the meanings of one’s speech.

Several Remaining Chapter Summaries

1. Chapter iii: Most words are general for practical reasons. If we had names for each particular thing, communication and learning would be slow and difficult. So we generate words for abstract ideas to talk about things in “bundles.”
2. Chapter iv: Names of simple ideas refer (to the ideas). Names of substances refer (to complexes of simple ideas, not to things), but names of mixed modes need not refer (see below). Names of simple ideas are “undefinable,” where names of complex ideas are “definable.”
   1. Note on modes: By contrast with substances, modes are dependent existences - they can be thought of as the ordering of substances. Since these modal ideas are not only made by us but serve as standards that things in the world either fit or do not fit and thus belong or do not belong to that sort, ideas of modes are clear and distinct, adequate and complete. Thus in modes, we get the real and nominal essences combined. (Cf. Uzgalis, John Locke in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
3. Chapter v: Names for abstract ideas (mixed modes) and for relations (those ideas generated without direct reference to the outer world) and are answerable only to internal human interests and needs (which are often normative, evidence for why some words cannot be directly translated from language to language).
4. Chapter vi: Common names for substances stand for “sorts of things” - they are names for complex ideas, and the different common substances are marked out by nominal essences (since we cannot know the real essences of worldly stuff).
   1. Even though the “essences” which we talk about are “made by the mind” and not “by nature”, we are somewhat bound by nature in the case of substances more than in the case of mixed modes. If people fail to conform their ideas to the things they speak of, we’re back at Babel.
5. Chapter vii: In addition to words that signify simple and complex ideas, which function as general or particular terms, Locke knows he needs to account for what he calls “particles,” which are words that signify the logical operations of the mind (syncategorematic terms: the copula, conjunctions, etc.).
6. The remaining chapters discuss the distinction between abstract and concrete terms [viii]; how words may be misused, and how individuals may misuse words [ix and x]; and how such misuse may be overcome [xi].

Overview of Locke

1. Viz. Locke’s empiricism: “There is a big difference between maintaining that sense experience is the source of all our knowledge and maintaining that sense experience is the ultimate basis for the justification of our knowledge: Locke is not an empiricist in the latter sense.” (Hauptli, here)
2. Locke is a pretty serious representationalist, to the point where he thinks that the object of all cognitive activity of the understanding (thinking, perceiving, but not willing, etc.) has as its object an idea/representation.
   1. This has been roundly criticized for both being pointlessly inelegant and for introducing an apparent “veil” whereby it becomes unclear that we can have accurate knowledge of worldly things. Even many Locke apologists tend to grant this charge, and spend time arguing that Locke didn’t actually believe this.
   2. The validity of this criticism relies on the tacit ontological status of Lockean ideas, which seem to cash out to something intentional objects (or cognitive contents). The contrast between an intentional (say) apple, and some real apple is that “an intentional apple need not have any intentional [e.g.] shape whatsoever, even though its associated material apple - its material counterpart, as we might call it - must have some shape or other.” (Chappell, Vere; Locke’s theory of ideas in the Cambridge Companion to Locke)
3. There are two kinds of general ideas in Locke’s theory of ideas - determinate quality-ideas shared between particulars (whiteness) and indeterminate species-ideas that particulars instantiate (women).
   1. Contrast this to the fact that particular ideas are tokens and abstract ideas are types. This means the former cannot be shared, where the latter can.
   2. This addresses some confusion with regard to the fact that you can have particular general ideas. (Aka. you can have a particular “whiteness” idea token of the general “whiteness” type.)
4. This dovetails with Locke’s first controversial claim about language: that the immediate signification of a speaker’s words is always only his own ideas. This claim is basically that when I say “apple,” that stands in for an intentional apple, regardless of whether that intentional apple represents a real apple or not.
   1. To review, Locke’s strategy about language is in the first place to undercut confusion arising from a falsely essentialist view of language, especially classificatory language (see below). Where it gets complex is that he also believes that a true view reveals inherent liabilities in the ideal of perfect communication through language. Although, of course, he is pragmatic enough to know that we have no other medium for communication.
5. In his second (but related) controversial claim about language, Locke attacks the Aristotelian assumption that the classification of natural objects into kinds or species reflects the natural or objective existence of a determinate number of fixed or unchanging “substantial Forms.”
   1. Locke’s doctrine is thus that while our systems of classification must always be based on what we actually know about objects, no matter how much we know we will never find anything that removes the burden of choice from us in constituting these classifications. (Paul Guyer, Locke’s philosophy of language, in the Cambridge Companion to Locke)
6. These two claims clearly suggest a cautionary view of language.

Overview

After the critique of innate notions in Book I of the Essay, Book II sets forth Locke’s theory of ideas.

Because Book II is quite long, these notes focus primarily on what I understand to be the Book’s most salient chapters (with regard to Hume and subsequently to Kant, which is where I’m going). Generally speaking, the focus is on the Locke’s doctrines of simple and complex ideas, of primary and secondary qualities, and finally his still interesting theories of general and personal identity.

Again, these notes are made on a copy of the Essay usefully excerpted by Jonathan Bennett.

Outline

Chapter I: Ideas in General, and their Origin

1. Since it is beyond doubt that we have ideas, the first question is “how do we acquire them?” Locke’s critique of innate ideas will be received more favorably, he thinks, once he shows how ideas can be acquired.
2. Suppose the mind starts out blank, “like white paper.” If this is so, experience can fill it with ideas. Experience has two forms: (1) experience of things outside the mind and (2) experience of the mind reflecting on its internal operations.
   1. Sensation is the vehicle which conveys to the mind things in the world that produce perceptions (ideas).
   2. Reflection is a type of “inner sense.” By reflecting or becoming conscious of the operations of our mind - believing, reasoning, willing, knowing, etc. - we get a distinct set of ideas that are not triggered by sensations of things in the world.
3. Now Locke then challenges the reader to “search into his understanding” and see whether he has any ideas other than those of sensation and reflection.
4. Locke believes that empirical research into child development supports this theory. Children, he believes, develop ideas of qualities by experiencing them in the world, and eventually cataloging them in memory.
5. How many simple ideas a person has depends for ideas of sensation on what variety there is among the external objects that he perceives, and for ideas of reflection on how much he reflects on the workings of his own mind.
6. This reflection requirement is why it is quite late before most children get ideas of the operations of their own minds, and why some people never acquire any very clear or perfect ideas of most of their mental operations. Unlike the objects of external experience, we are not forced to turn inward and reflect on the mechanism of our thoughts (Locke likens them to the parts of a clock - we can experience the clock without ever having a clear idea of how it works).
7. Since perceptions are the same thing as ideas, people have ideas as soon as they can perceive things.
8. For some rationalists, as long as the soul exists, it actually thinks (much like actual extension is coextensive with the existence of the body).
   1. Contrarily, Locke believes that the perception of ideas is to the soul like motion (as opposed to extension) is to the body. That is, it is not something essential to it, but rather something it sometimes does.
   2. It is at least not self-evident, Locke thinks we can all agree, that the soul always thinks.
9. On the contrary, Locke thinks that when we are asleep, the soul isn’t thinking. If the soul is in some state of thought while the body is sleeping, and when that body wakes, it has no consciousness of those states, then the sleeping and unsleeping version of Socrates seem to be two different people (insofar as they have different sets of mental experience, presumably).
   1. Since we know some people sleep without dreaming, and since it is implausible that someone would think of something for several hours and be able to give no account of it, it is likely that during that time, the person is not thinking at all.
   2. He carries on about this at some length, the basic drift being several versions of the argument that, “Nature never makes excellent things for trivial uses or for no use; and it is hardly to be conceived that…the power of thinking…is so idly and uselessly employed, at least a quarter of the time.”
   3. He writes of thoughts that we do sometimes have in our sleep and remember after waking, pointing out that they are mostly “extravagant and incoherent.” He says that his present opponents, faced with this evidence, will have to say that the soul thinks better when employing the body (in waking, i.e.) that when thinking “apart” from the body. He evidently thinks that this is an intolerable conclusion.
   4. The discussion gradually moves to the thesis that the soul thinks only when it has ideas to think with, and allowing him to return to the discussion of how ideas are acquired. So, finally, the chapter circles back.
10. Since there don’t appear to be any ideas in the mind before the senses have conveyed some in, Locke concludes that the understanding arises at the same time as sensation.
    1. In time the mind “comes to reflect on its own dealing with the ideas acquired from sensation, and thereby stores up a new set of ideas” (ideas of reflection).
    2. Note that this means that in getting ideas, the understanding is passive. It cannot refuse the sense data it receives.

Chapter II: Simple Ideas

1. Some ideas are simple. Some are complex. Simple ideas cannot be broken down into smaller component ideas. His examples are sensory: softness, warmth, whiteness, sugariness, etc.
   1. “Nothing can be plainer,” he marks, than the “clear and distinct perception” of simple ideas.
2. Simple ideas are supplied to the mind by sensation and reflection.
   1. Stocked with simple ideas, the understanding can “repeat, compare, and unite them” in an almost infinite variety of ways, thus making new complex ideas.
   2. No one, though, can invent a simple idea - these only come through sensation and reflection - nor force the understanding to destroy those that it has acquired.
3. While it seems sure that there are other possible senses than our five (or six, Locke teases), we, constrained as we are, cannot imagine qualities outside of those delivered by these particular, contingent senses that we actually do have.

Chapter VIII: Some further ideas concerning our simple ideas

1. When an object causes the mind to have a perception, the perception is a positive idea, regardless of whether the quality which is being perceived is positive or negative.
   1. E.g. heat and cold, light and darkness, motion and rest, are all equally clear positive ideas in the mind, despite the fact that one of each pair is (qua the object itself) a mere privation.
   2. To explain this he appeals to the experience of perceiving a shadow: “the shadow of a man consists of nothing but the absence of light, but doesn’t it cause in an observer as clear and positive an idea as does the man whose shadow it is, even though he is bathed in sunshine? And the picture of a shadow is a positive thing.”
   3. Now, if a person can be said to truly see darkness, it is hard to know for sure whether darkness is any more a privation than light is, and thus whether there really are any ideas from a privative cause.
2. For reasons of intelligibility and convenience, it will be useful to distinguish the idea of a thing as it exists in our minds, and the thing itself as it exists in the world.
   1. Call the immediate object of perception an “idea”, and call the power to produce an idea inherent in an object a quality. (E.g. a snowball has whiteness, coldness qualities insofar as it produces white and cold ideas in our minds).
3. There are two kinds of qualities: those that are utterly inseparable from the body, whatever state it is in - primary qualities - and those that that “are really nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities” - secondary qualities.
   1. E.g. An ice cube has the primary qualities solidity, extension, shape, rest, and number, and these produce corresponding simple ideas in us.
   2. Our ice cube also has the secondary qualities of coldness, slipperiness, taste, etc.
   3. A third kind of quality may be called a “power”. Powers are those things by which the primary qualities of a body (e.g. fire) give it a power to affect another body (e.g. wax) in a way as to change the sensible properties of the latter.
4. How do bodies produce ideas in us? Obviously they do it by impact.
   1. But, since external objects are not directly touching our minds, there must be some bodies too small to be seen individually that go from the object to our sense-organ.
   2. We can conceive of these very small particles as conveyances of secondary qualities also (smell, taste, etc.)
   3. But, where the ideas of the primary qualities of bodies resemble them (they exist in the bodies themselves), the ideas of secondary qualities don’t resemble them at all.
   4. “What is sweet, blue, or warm in idea is nothing but the particular size, shape, and motion of the imperceptible parts in the bodies that we call ’sweet’, ‘blue’, or ‘warm’.”
5. Arguments against secondary quality inherence
   1. This only makes sense, too, because while it might be sensible to imagine that an icicle inherently contains the quality “cold”, it seems less sensible to imagine that it contains the quality “pain”, even though I could stab you with one.
   2. Consider a stone that is red and white in the light. Prevent light from reaching the stone, and its colours vanish. Can anyone think that any real alterations are made in the stone by the presence or absence of light?
   3. Imagine that one of your hands is very cold. Now imagine you put both hands in water. The water feels hot to one of your hands (the cold one) and cold to the other.
6. So the qualities that are in bodies are of three sorts.
   1. Primary - the size, shape, number, position, and motion or rest of their solid parts. These are in bodies whether or not we perceive them.
   2. Secondary - the ideas of colors, sounds, smells, tastes, etc.. These are the power that a body has, by reason of its imperceptible primary qualities, to operate in a special way on one of our senses.
   3. Powers - the power that a body has, by virtue of the particular set-up of its primary qualities, to change the size, shape, texture or motion of another body so as to make the latter operate on our senses differently from how it did before.
   4. Though the two latter sorts of qualities are merely powers, secondary qualities are often otherwise thought of as akin to primary qualities. However, by understanding one’s self as merely another body on which an object acts, one can easily see that secondary qualities work one’s senses precisely as the powers of one body (fire) work another (wax).
   5. The second sort of qualities “may be called secondary qualities, immediately perceivable,” and the third sort “secondary qualities, mediately perceivable.”

Chapter XXIII: Our complex ideas of substances

1. Our complex ideas of substances
   1. The mind is supplied with many simple ideas, and sometimes, when it perceives several simple ideas together regularly, it presumes that they are one thing (with one name).
   2. Then we “carelessly talk as though we had here one simple idea, though really it is a complication of many ideas together.”
   3. We become acclimated to the idea then that these simple ideas are reliant on some substratum, which we call substance.
   4. Pure substance is thus merely the supposition of an unknown support of the qualities that cause simple ideas.
   5. From this we form a “relative” idea of substance in general - that is, our idea of it consists only in how it relates to other things, it has no non-relational content.
   6. From there, we move to the idea of several substances, which are defined by regularly repeating combinations of simple idea producing substances: man, horse, gold, water.
   7. Hence, Our complex ideas of substances are made up of those simple ideas plus the confused idea of some thing to which they belong and in which they exist.
2. When we think of any particular sort of corporeal substance - a stone, e.g. - although our idea of it is nothing but the collection of simple ideas of qualities that we usually find united in the thing called a stone, we think of these qualities as existing in and supported by some common subject.
   1. We give this support the name “substance,” though we have no clear or distinct idea of what it is.
   2. We are led to think in this way because we can’t conceive how qualities could exist unsupported or with only one another for support.
   3. The same goes for the functions of mind, whose substratum we call spirit. We have an equally foggy idea of spiritual substance as we have of bodily substance.
3. The most perfect idea of any particular sort of substance results from putting together most of the simple ideas that do exist in it.
   1. §7-8 is an apology for the remainder of this section referring to all powers as simple ideas for brevity’s sake. They are not actually simple, Locke cautions, but they are “simpler than the complex ideas of kinds of substance, of which they are merely parts.”
4. Again, recall that our complex ideas of bodily substances are made up of primary, secondary, and (passive and active) powers. (E.g. your complex idea of gold involves the power of being melted without being burned away, etc.)
   1. And again, secondary qualities are also powers, this time powers of affecting us, e.g. gold’s “color” is its power to induce the sensation of that color in us.
   2. As further evidence that these secondary qualities are relational, e.g. the color of something appears quite different to the naked eye as it does under a microscope.
   3. Locke is inclined to believe that God has “suited our organs to the bodies that are to affect them, and vice versa.” E.g. if our senses were much more or less acute, Locke observes, we would be less adapted for survival, despite the additional depth of knowledge we may acquire from such senses.
   4. §13 is a great tangent, in which Locke imagines angels that can “flex” their senses (vary their acuteness of perception). He is somewhat obviously jealous of these conjectural angels, but admits that God must have his reasons.
5. Besides the complex ideas we have of material, sensible substances, we can also form the complex idea of immaterial mental (”spiritual”) subject from the simple ideas we have through our minds’ operations (e.g. thinking, willing, understanding, knowing).
   1. Empirical knowledge is always knowledge of both some stuff in the world and of some mindly processes which cohere into the idea of a thinking subject (Locke: a “spiritual” or “immaterial thinking” being).
   2. Again, we /really/ know about as much about bodies as we do about immaterial spirit.
      1. Bodies uniquely have the basic ideas of (1) holding together parts that are solid and therefore separable, and (2) of causing things to move by colliding with them.
      2. Spirit uniquely has the basic ideas of (1) thinking, (2) will - putting body into motion by thought, and (3) liberty.
      3. Bodies and spirit share the basic ideas of (1) existence, (2) duration, and (3) mobility (note that the mind has to go when the body does, and, Locke notes, also has to leave the body at death).
   3. Neither the idea of body (extended thing) nor that of spirit (thinking thing) is very clear.
      1. Body is “an extended solid substance, capable of transferring motion by impact.”
      2. Spirit is “a substance that thinks, and has a power of making a body move, by willing or thought.”
      3. If anyone says “I don’t know how I think,” I respond that he also doesn’t know how he is extended, that is, how his parts cohere.
6. The next three sections deal with the problem of parts cohering. Namely, we don’t have a compelling hard stop for the regress of progressively smaller particles that we use to explain the coherence of each set of immediately bigger particles. (E.g. we explain water wrt molecules and molecules wrt atoms and atoms wrt … etc.)
   1. §27 addresses the appeal to surrounding pressures: if things get held together by pressure, what’s holding the entire finite universe together?
7. From here, Locke addresses bodies’ other quality, the power of transferring motion by impact (alongside the soul’s power of inducing bodily motion by thought). Locke here suggests that we have no more empirically-derivable knowledge about how bodies transfer motion from one to another than we do about how minds transfer motion to bodies.
   1. In fact, minds moving bodies is actually more comprehensible than other bodies doing it, because we intuit that minds have exclusive claim on the active power of moving, and objects on the passive power.
   2. Since minds (created spirits) are not separate from matter, they are both active and passive. God is totally active.
   3. In conclusion: Sensation convinces us that there are solid extended substances, and reflection that there are thinking ones. Experience assures us that one has a power to move body by impact, the other by thought. “That much is sure, and we have clear ideas of it; but beyond those we cannot go.”
   4. So, in sum, “we have as much reason to be satisfied with our notion of immaterial spirit as with our notion of body, and of the existence of the one as well as of the other.”
8. Finally, it may be hard to conceive how thinking could occur without matter, but it’s at least as hard to conceive how matter could think.
   1. We can build up an idea of God as infinitely powerful, wise, etc. through a general procedure that involves taking simple ideas from the operations of our own minds and from exterior things and enlarging them to infinity. (E.g. I know something. From that, I conjecture that I can know twice as many things. And then twice as many again. Etc. And the same way for magnitude/perfection of knowledge.)
   2. “It is infinity - joined to existence, power, knowledge, etc. - that makes our complex idea of God … God may be simple and uncompounded, still our only idea of him is a complex one whose parts are the ideas of existence, knowledge, power, happiness, etc. - all this infinite and eternal.”
   3. §36 brings the angels back, suggesting that we can imagine them as posessing qualities to a degree and extent between those of ours and God. Angels also provide, he thinks, further evidence that we are limited to knowledge by reflection and sensation - we cannot imagine how to communicate or know in a way that is not embodied.
9. The existence, configuration, and genesis of our ideas of substances make three things evident:
   1. All our ideas of substances are collections of simple ideas, along with the supposition of some unclarified substratum (substance).
   2. All of these simple ideas are received either by sensation or by reflection.
   3. Most of the simple ideas that make up our complex ideas of substances are really only ideas of powers, however apt we are to interpret them as ideas of positive qualities.

Chapter XXVII: Identity and Diversity

1. Leading up to xxvii, Locke had been talking about our understanding of various relational properties (duration, place, etc.) Now he introduces identity, in which we compare something at time t1 with itself at t2.
   1. Two things can’t exist in the same place at the same time, nor can one thing exist in two places at once.
2. We have ideas of three types of substances: God, finite intelligences, and bodies.
   1. God is without beginning, eternal, unalterable, and everywhere; and so there can be no doubt concerning his identity.
   2. Finite spirits and bodies have determinate times and places of beginning to exist. Each one’s relation to it’s beginning time and place will determine its identity for as long as it exists.
   3. While we can conceive of overlap of all three kinds (e.g. God, a person, and some matter can occupy the same space), we can’t conceive that two of any single kind can occupy the same place at the same time.
   4. Modes and relations ultimately depend upon substances and therefore the identity and diversity of each of them will be determined in the same way as the identity of particular substances.
   5. Finally questions of identity and diversity don’t arise for things whose existence consists in a succession of events, such as actions (thought, movement) - these are ephemeral, and don’t have the requisite parts for identity, namely substantiality.
3. Hence, the principle of individuation is “existence itself,” by which a being is tied to an unsharable particular place and time.
   1. While this seems straightforward qua simple substances, it seems equally clear that you can’t just linearly apply it to complex ones. E.g. a living creature is self-identical throughout periods of fatness and thinness.
   2. This imples that such an identity doesn’t depend on merely accounting for the same particles at different times.
4. So, for one mass of matter (an oak tree): where the mass of matter is merely a cohesion of particles, the oak tree is the disposition of particles such that they consist in an individual life.
5. If we imagine a watch whose parts are “repaired, added to, or subtracted from, by a constant addition or separation of imperceptible parts, with one common life, it would be very much like the body of an animal.” The unique bit of animality being that motion comes from within, not without.
6. If you don’t conceive identity as the participation of some matter in a unified life, your only recourse to an intuitive concept of identity is by the soul.
   1. But if you do this, then you run the risk of leaving open the possibility that a single soul has inhabited many men over time (e.g. that Socrates, Pilate, and St. Augustine are the same man).
7. So there are at least three different types of identities: “it is one thing to be the same substance, another the same man [e.g. animal], and a third the same person.” (Assuming these three are different ideas.)
   1. To be clear, although man is an animal, the idea of a “rational animal” is wrong. There’s a long story about a rational parrot here. The point is that even if you believe there was a rational parrot, it’s still a parrot, not a man, and hence, rationality is not necessarily exclusively criterial for man-ness.
8. So much for the identity of a unified life (animal/man identity). Now, what about “same person”?
   1. Well, what’s a person? Locke thinks it is a “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing at different times and places.”
   2. The enabling faculty for this is consciousness: “Consciousness always accompanies thinking, and makes everyone to be what he calls ’self’ and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things; in this alone consists personal identity…”
9. While it may be reasonable to question whether (e.g. you or I) are self-identitical thinking substances (res cogitans) - e.g.when we are asleep, or focused on the present moment, or forgetful - this is not the same question as whether we are self-identical as persons.
   1. What makes a person self-identically him- or herself is his or her selfsame consciousness, regardless of whether the consciousness is tied to one substance (res cogitans, again) throughout.
   2. The classic appeal to amputation: if I cut off your hand, you’re still the same person, hence, personal identity isn’t constituted substantially.
   3. If you hold that thought is instantiated immaterially, you can appeal to a sameness of immaterial substance as criterial for personal identity, but these immaterialists have to explain why personal identity /couldn’t/ be preserved through a change of immaterial substance (since, by analogy, animal identity - unity of an individual life - can be preserved through a change of material substance).
   4. Either way, until we have a clearer idea of the nature of thinking substances, “we had better assume that such changes of substance within a single person never do in fact happen, basing this on the goodness of God. Having a concern for the happiness or misery of his creatures, he won’t transfer from one (substance) to another that consciousness that draws reward or punishment with it.”
   5. Locke finally dismisses reincarnation theories: his thought experiment involves showing that while it is logically possible that you and Nestor share a soul, you can’t really conceive of yourself and Nestor as one identical person.
10. Let’s now agree that the some sort of non-stringent body identity settles the “man” question. Hence, the same immaterial substance or soul does not by itself necessarily make the same man. Although this is the case, it is clear that consciousness unites actions into the same person, and thus is the basis of selfhood.
11. Personal identity is the basis for the justice of reward and punishment.
    1. “…to punish Socrates awake for something done by sleeping Socrates without Socrates awake ever being conscious of it would be as unjust as to punish someone for an action of his twin brother’s merely because their outsides were so alike that they couldn’t be distinguished.”
    2. If one man could have distinct disconnected consciousnesses at different times, that same man would be different persons at different times.
    3. This is intuitively understood by the fact that someone’s insanity can legally disprove their guilt: we don’t punish the sane man for what the madman did; they are treated as two persons.
    4. Meanwhile, we sometimes justly punish sober men for their bad actions while drunk, Locke thinks, because while their bad actions are proved against them, their lack of consciousness of those actions can’t be proved for them. It’s a sort of rough and ready juridical heuristic.
12. Whatever substance there is, and whatever it is like, there is no person without consciousness.
    1. On the question of contingent fact, “the more probable opinion is that this consciousness is tied to, and is a state of, a single immaterial substance.”
13. “Person” is a legalistic name for a self which applies only to active, thinking beings capable of law, happiness and misery.
    1. Through consciousness, this personality is concerned and accountable for its past and present actions.
    2. That concern and ownership derives from a fundamental concern for happiness which necessarily accompanies consciousness.
14. Thus, it appears that the obscurity that people have found in matters of identity has arisen from the sloppy thinking rather than from any obscurity in things themselves. To wit:
    1. Any substance that begins to exist must necessarily be the same substance so long as it continues to exist.
    2. Any complex of substances that begins to exist must during the existence of its component parts be the same.
    3. Any mode that begins to exist is throughout its existence the same.
15. The general point is that the complex idea we use when classifying a thing as being of a certain kind also determines what it is for a thing of that kind to continue in existence.
    1. Suppose a man is a “rational spirit”: then it is easy to know what is the same man, namely the same spirit - whether or not it is embodied.
    2. Suppose a man is a “rational spirit vitally united to a body with a certain structure”: then such a rational spirit will be the same man as long as it is united to such a body, though it needn’t always be the same body.
    3. Suppose a man is a “vital union of parts in a certain shape”: as long as that vital union and shape remain in a compound body, remaining the same except for a turnover in its constituent particles, it will be the same man.

Overview

Book I of Locke’s Famous Essay is a sustained argument against the rationalist notion of innate ideas. These notes are made on a copy of the Essay usefully excerpted by Jonathan Bennett. Welcome to British Empiricism.

Outline

Chapter I: Introduction

1. Since the understanding is (a) the distinctive feature of humans, and (b) not self-critiquing, it is useful - if difficult - to inquire into it.
2. This book, then, will inquire into the origin, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, as well as the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent.
3. It is useful to know where the line gets drawn between opinion and knowledge. This entails knowing just how confident we should be that our opinions are right. The method:
   1. Find the origin of ideas and how the understanding “comes to be equipped with them”.
   2. Show what knowledge the understanding has by means of these ideas.
   3. Finally, briefly take a look at faith and opinion.
4. The therapeutic aim of this project is to “to be peacefully reconciled to ignorance of things that turn out to be beyond the reach of our capacities.”
5. This should not distress us: God has given humans everything they need to discover how to thrive in this life and how to find their way to a better one (by forming of virtuous characters).
6. Scoping our mental powers is useful in setting our expectations neither too low nor too high.
7. It’s a bit of hubris to attempt to plumb deep concepts like being in the way we have until now (presumably this is a reference to Descartes). By creating our knowledge boundaries we can have a more satisfying and realistic kind of philosophical discourse.
8. Heretofore, “idea” means “whatever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks” - first up: how do ideas come to mind?

Chapter II: No innate principles in the mind, and particularly no innate speculative principles

1. Locke does not believe that there are innate ideas, and this chapter will present his reasons for that belief.
2. People often evidence the idea of innate ideas by reference to putatively universal speculative/theoretical and practical principles.
3. This universal consent does not necessarily imply innate ideas, especially if there are other candidate explanations.
4. Worse still, there is no universal consent in the first place.
5. “Children and idiots” do not subscribe to putatively universal speculative (e.g. logical) principles. Since this is the case, it seems clear that human brains tout court don’t merely arrive with some “imprinted” principles.
   1. Even those who think that all knowledge is acquired believe the capacity for knowledge is innate.
6. To avoid this problem, philosophers often suggest that humans come to these truths when they arrive at the use of reason.
7. That claim must in turn mean either that (a) as soon as people come to the use of reason they also automatically arrive at these so-called innate truths, or that (b) reason helps humans arrive at them.
8. If the claim is (b), then what they seem to mean is that “whatever truths reason can enable us to know for certain are all innate.”
   1. This eradicates the distinction between maxims (innate or - I think - what Kant will call analytic truths) and theorems (non-innate or - again, I think - synthetic truths).
9. The idea that “Reason shows us those truths that have been imprinted” amounts to saying that “the use of reason enables a man to learn what he already knew.”
10. In short, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to suppose that all of reason’s flailing and floundering should be needed to discover something that was imprinted on us by nature.
11. It is therefore false that reason could assist us in knowing innate truths, if it did, that would prove that they are not innate.
12. On the other hand, if the claim [from 7, above] is (a), then it is both false and frivolous.
    1. It’s false because we can empirically observe the emergence of reason before the approval of so-called innate maxims.
    2. It’s frivolous because there’s no justification for believing it unless you’re deeply invested in its utility as an argument for innate truths.
13. All this adds up to entail that maxims may be assented to after the emergence of reason, but this is true of all knowable truths, and thus has no power to cordon off innate from non-innate truths.
14. (§§14-16) How can x’s innateness be derived from the premise that a person first knows x when he comes to be able to reason? Why not derive something’s innateness from its being first known only when a person comes to be able to speak? (Or to walk? to sing?)
    1. There is some truth to the thesis that basic general maxims are not known to someone who doesn’t yet have the use of reason.
    2. He has alternative to innateness for how this works. His theory rests on the assumption - which he doesn’t declare until later - that to think a general maxim one must have general ideas, and that to express a general maxim one must be able to use general words.
15. Some people have tried to secure universal assent to so-called innate ideas by saying that they are generally assented to as soon as they are proposed, and the terms they are proposed in are understood.
16. But can prompt assent given to a proposition upon first hearing it and understanding the terms really is a certain mark of an innate principle? If so, there are apparently a lot of innate principles (about number, physics, metaphysics). Locke’s point is that self-evidence does not imply innateness.
17. There is good evidence that we can’t specific principles can’t be accepted on the strength of general ones, as the former often empirically precede the latter.
18. There doesn’t seem to be a reason for connecting usefulness to innateness, and in any case Locke plans to question whether the more general maxims are of any great use.
19. Put another way - if these putatively innate principles were really innate, why would they need to be proposed in order to be assented to?
20. Locke is unsympathetic to the suggestion that the knowledge of innate principles is implicit knowledge (which would be made explicit upon their being proposed).
21. The idea that a proposition counts as innate if it is assented to when first proposed and understood looks plausible only because it assumes that when the proposition is proposed and made to be understood, nothing new is learned.
    1. The idea that these truths are taught might seem objectionable.
    2. But in truth, they are taught: They have learned the terms and their meanings, neither of which was born with them; and they have acquired the relevant ideas, which were not born with them any more than their names were.
    3. Locke then presents his account of what happens when someone assents to a self-evident proposition. We’ll come back to this in detail in Book 2.
22. Since the putatively innate principles are not universal, they are not, in fact, innate.
23. (§§25-26) It may be objected that Locke doesn’t really know what the thoughts of infants are like. But he thinks that we do.
24. The innatist must allow that the truths innately implanted in our minds don’t always present themselves to our consciousness, and he is forced to explain that this happens because our innately given intellectual possessions may be “corrupted by custom or borrowed opinions, by learning and education.”
    1. However, if this was the case, those innate truths “should appear fairest and clearest” in the minds of “children, idiots, savages, and illiterate people,” yet we find no trace of them in such people.

Chapter III: No innate practical principles

1. It is even more obvious that no practical principles are universally assented to than that no speculative principles are, as none of them are even self-evident.
2. Further, it is empirically clear that no moral principles enjoy universal assent. The closest examples are justice and the keeping of contracts, which criminals flaunt.
3. You may want to say that criminals accept those principles even though they don’t act on them. Locke argues that it is “very strange and unreasonable” to suppose that there are innate practical principles that show up in what men think but don’t affect their behavior, because what makes a principle practical (rather than speculative) is its bearing upon action.
4. Another reason for doubting that there are any innate practical principles is that the truth of all these moral rules depends on some underlying rules from which they must be deduced; and this could not be so if they were innate, or even if they were merely self-evident.
5. Exempli gratia, a Christian, a Hobbsean, and a Greek philosopher would all give different reasons to justify the widely accepted moral principle that one ought not to lie.
6. This doesn’t detract from the moral and eternal obligation that these rules evidently have. It does show, though, that the outward acknowledgment men pay to them (in their words) does not prove that they are innate principles.
7. Further, this verbal justification may simply be lip service. If we take people’s actions to show what they think, “we shall find that they have no such inner respect for these rules, and are not so sure they are bound by them.”
8. You might urge that people’s consciences help to prevent them from breaking the rules. But “if conscience is a proof of innateness, contraries can be innate principles; because sometimes men will conscientiously promote what others conscientiously avoid.”
9. Locke inclines to believe that if moral rules were innate, people wouldn’t break them. To the contrary, he gives quite a few examples of people doing unpleasant things.
10. History teaches us that practical principles are not universal. Those that seem to be are pragmatic - they hold society together, and subsequently are not taken to hold between societies (e.g. murder is forbidden intra-society but war is sanctioned).
11. It may be objected that a rule’s being broken doesn’t prove that it is not known. This is true, but it seems inconceivable that entire societies could defy a universal rule in speech and action. Locke insists that for any practical rule, there is an example of this.
12. Practical rules, though, may not be propositions at all (and therefore incapable of being true or false), but rather commands.
    1. To make it capable of being assented to as true, we must turn it into a proposition (e.g. “It is the duty of parents to preserve their children).
    2. But duty cannot be understood without reference to law; and a law cannot be known or supposed without even more supporting infrastructure.
13. Locke now sees it safe to conclude that “no principle is innate if it is in any place generally allowed to be broken.”
    1. If a practical principle were innate, men would have to know that it was set by God who would certainly punish breaches of it very severely, and someone who knows that about a law will certainly be deterred from breaking it.
    2. The last (unrelated) point is that denying innate laws (”something imprinted on our minds”) does not preclude the existence of laws of nature (”something we can come to know of through the proper use of our natural faculties”), in which Locke believes.
14. For all the talk about innate moral laws, no one seems to be able to provide a clear catalog of them, which is in itself counter-intuitive.
15. (§§15-19) Here Locke discusses a writing by Lord Herbert of Cherbury.
    1. After completing the previous sections, he reports, someone told him that Lord Herbert had given a list of innate principles and an account of the criteria by which they can be classified as innate.
    2. Locke says that not all the items on the list satisfy all the criteria, and that they are satisfied by plenty of things not on the list. Some are criticized as vague or ambiguous, some as trivial, etc.
16. There’s often an appeal made to universal moral laws as those laws which are universally agreed upon by “men of right reason” (who are always the men speaking at the time). Locke disdains this line, calling it a “short cut to infallibility” and an “absurd approach.”
17. §§21-6 discuss the absolute confidence that people have in the truth of certain doctrines - different doctrines in different societies. Locke offers to explain this phenomenon, largely in terms of early education.
    1. §23: Since the normative principles of an individual in formation are the oldest thing in his or her mind, and since the individual in question can’t remember the source of them, it is natural to attribute them to God or nature.
    2. §24: Everyone has some revered principles, “on which he bases his reasonings, and by which he judges of truth and falsehood, right and wrong.”
    3. §25: Social pressure stops people from examining the revered propositions critically.
    4. §26: The effects of habituation allow us to fancy that the products ouf our education and the fashions of his country (however absurd) are innate practical principles.
18. This explanation is the only one that can explain why so many conflicting propositions are thought to be innate.

Chapter IV: Other considerations about innate principles

1. If the ideas that make up putatively innate truths are not themselves innate, then the propositions made up of them can neither be so.
2. If we “attentively consider new-born children,” we can supposedly empirically tell that they don’t have preformed ideas, but rather acquire them through experience.
3. If there are any innate principles, then surely this is one: It is impossible for the same thing to be, and not to be.
   1. But can anyone think, or will anyone say, that impossibility and identity are two innate ideas?
4. Identity is itself a philosophically problematic concept, and this evidences that the idea isn’t “clear and obvious” to us.
5. These questions aren’t trivial, since the actions they motivate are those by which we will be judged by God.
6. “The whole is bigger than the part” can neither be innate, as the ideas of whole and part themselves cannot be innate.
7. That God is to be worshiped is a great practical truth, but it can’t be innate unless our ideas of God and worship are as well.
8. It seems that the closest candidate for an innate idea is “God,” but we know that both the ancients and those of other cultures (Locke appeals in some detail to Brazil and China) don’t seem to have this idea.
   1. Even in Europe, if the fear of legal or social consequences didn’t tie up people’s tongues, many more people would proclaim their atheism openly.
9. Even if all mankind, at all times and places, had a notion of God, this would not be good evidence that the idea was innate.
   1. Since “the visible marks of extraordinary wisdom and power appear so plainly in all the works of the creation that any rational person who thinks seriously about them must conclude that they are the work of a God,” this belief could then spread through the world through communication amongst humans, so that the (supposed) universality of the idea of God could be explained in epidemiological terms (so to speak) rather than through innateness.
10. Locke thinks it a very good argument to say: “The infinitely wise God has made it so; and therefore it is best.” But, he says, we put too much confidence of our own wisdom if we argue: “I think it best, and therefore God has made it so.”
    1. Thus it is futile to argue that God has innately imprinted our minds with an idea of him·
11. Here again Locke insists that if there were an innate notion, it would be God, but that our empirical evidence of children’s faith development does not support this conclusion.
    1. “The truest and best notions men have of God were not (innately) imprinted, but acquired by thought and meditation and a right use of their faculties.”
    2. In §18, Locke engages in a less than pertinent discussion of substance. He will develop this at length in II.xxiii.
    3. He then recapitulates some of his earlier anti-innateness arguments, before introducing a new one:
12. The memory argument
    1. Any ideas we have must be stored in memory.
    2. To access them thus means to remember them.
    3. Remembering means perceiving an idea with a consciousness that has perceived it before.
    4. If innate ideas are then in memory, they can be revived without any impression from outside.
    5. Locke thinks that the possibility of this is dubious.
13. Since God is infinitely wise, it is hard to see what reason would God have to inscribe on the mind of man messages that are no clearer than (or can’t be distinguished from) messages that came there later?
14. §22 is an admonition that we have to work for knowledge, and not expect it to be handed to us on a plate,
15. §23 suggests that Locke’s aim in disrupting the foundations of knowledge has been his quest for truth, and continues with a long attack on the practice of basing one’s beliefs on what authorities say rather than on one’s own investigations.
16. The idea of innate ideas, Locke thinks, is lazy and inculcates laziness in its adherents.
17. The rest of the book intends to show how the understanding comes to knowledge of universal truths, if not by innate ideas.

Overview

Primary Truths was written shortly after Leibniz’s famous Discourse on Metaphysics, which places it about ten years after Freedom and Possibility, five before A New System, and almost twenty five before the mature position in the Monadology and the Principles of Nature and Grace.

This essay importantly develops at least two of Leibniz’s fundamental principles, the so-called “Predicate-in-Notion Principle” (PIN: that the notion of the predicate is in some way included in that of the subject - cf. §2.a below) and the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernables (PII), which he indicates here is derivable from combination of the Principles of Sufficient Reason (PSR) and Contradiction (PC) (cf. §4 below).

Brandon Look explains the implicit argument nicely:

1. Suppose there were two indiscernible individuals, a and b, in our world, W.
2. If this were the case, then there must also be a possible world, W^*, in which a and b are "switched".
3. But if this were the case, then God could have had no reason for choosing W over W^*.
4. But God must have a reason for acting as he does. (PSR)
5. Therefore, our original supposition must be false. There are not two indiscernible individuals in our world. (PII)

Outline

1. The primary truths are identities (A is A, everything is similar or equal to itself).
2. All other truths are reducible to these identities by resolving their definitions into their (progressively simpler) component propositions. This is called an a priori proof.
   1. Predicate in Notion Principle (PIN): Since all truths follow from primary truths, it follows that in any true proposition the predicate is always in the subject.
   2. This is the case for every (necessary or contingent) affirmative truth, and this tells us something about the nature of contingency and the challenges in thinking necessity (the fate of the free, e.g.).
3. The principle of sufficient reason
   1. Take this axiom: “There is no effect without a cause/Nothing is without reason.” (PSR, see Overview) If this were false, then there would be a truth that couldn’t be proved a priori (couldn’t resolve into identities). So, if this is false, Leibniz’s theory of truth is false. So, this follows from Leibniz’s theory of truth.
   2. This also applies to symmetries: Symmetry will follow from symmetry.
   3. Finally, there is even a reason about eternal truths. Imagine that we live in a world constituted by tiny spheres. There still needs to be a reason why they aren’t cubes.
4. The principle of the identity of indiscernibles
   1. From these considerations, it follows that in nature there can’t be two things that differ in number alone. (PII, see Overview)
   2. The basic idea in this argument seems to be that if x is identical to y in every way but in the fact that it one a second instance of the other, then there is no reason for them both to exist.
5. It also follows that there are no purely relational properties - that is, all properties are properties of things, and relational properties are grounded in non-relational ones. This, I think, is meant to follow from (2.a): Since all P’s of a given S are contained within S, it would seem to follow that if relational predicate R is attributable to S, then it would have to be contained in S, or at least in some P of S.
6. Any complete notion of a substance contains all its predicates: past, present and future. (If an S will have P, then it is now has T where T = “it is true now that it will have P”).
   1. This is a complete (perfect) notion of a substance, and from this we are meant to understand that God, who has knowledge of the possibilities for each of infinitely many potentially actual complete notions, would choose the ones that it, in its supreme wisdom, thought best.
7. Every individual substance contains in its complete notion the entire universe.
   1. For any given things x and y, there is a true proposition about how x relates to y only if they are related to each other.
   2. Since there are no purely relational predicates, both x and y must contain a predicate that explains their relationship.
   3. This must be the case for x viz. every other thing in the universe.
8. This means that all created substances are mirrors of the entire universe, which is to say, God, the universal cause. These expressions vary in perfection.
   1. This implies that every time any created substance changes, it changes all the others.
   2. However, strictly speaking, this does not mean that any created substances exercises metaphysical action or influence on anything else. This is to say that there is no inter-substance causal relationship, because each substance already contains within itself the entire universe, past, present, and future, which means that substances just harmoniously change without any sort of meaningful interaction.
   3. This theory also cleanly accounts for the correspondence of soul and body, without having to provide a medium of transport. By the nature of their complete concepts, they are simply in harmony already.
   4. Further, this implies that there is no atom (no body that could not be split). If there were atoms, there would be no cause to explain the effects of (e.g.) their size and shape. Every material thing requires smaller material things to explain its various properties.
   5. This means that every particle in the universe contains a world of infinitely many creatures.
   6. It also means that there is no determinate shape in actual things, because there is infinite complexity in any materially instantiated thing. Therefore, perfect circles, etc. exist only in our thoughts.
9. Bodies, Monads
   1. Since things have no determinate shape, this means that bodies are just extension and motion (which are “not substances, but true phenomena”)
   2. That means that something unextended is required for bodies, because material, extended stuff (as infinitely complex) can’t deliver unity. Since this can’t be atoms, all that remains is something analagous to souls.
   3. Corporeal substance comes into existence through creation (as opposed to construction) and leaves through annihilation (as opposed to dispersal), because there is no reason for them not to last forever. (Luckily, we know this argument gets better.)
   4. Therefore, animate things don’t come into or go out of existence entirely, but are merely transformed.

Bureaucratic Note

Finally, I should note that this ends my dalliance with pre-Kantian rationalism. Although I plan to come back to Spinoza at some point, for now, in order to push through to modernity, I’m going to take a step back to the roots of Kant’s other wellspring, British empiricism, and take a look at some bits of at least Locke and Hume, before finally arriving at Kant himself, who will represent the start of the period of philosophy in which I am most interested, German idealism. So, up next: John Locke.

Overview

Leibniz’s famous 1695 essay (in long form: A new system of the nature and communication of substances, and also of the union that exists between the soul and the body) was the introduction to a broad European readership of his original metaphysical ideas (many of which he had come to a decade earlier).

Outline

1. This paper is published in a scholarly journal - it is not written in the popular style.
2. Physics needs more than the concept of matter (”extended mass”), it also needs an operative concept of force.
3. At first, Leibniz favored an idea of matter and empty space (because it gives us a physics we can always “picture”).
   1. The matter itself, he realized, doesn’t yield any real unities. Because matter, by its nature is always divisible into smaller matter, and thus never a unity per se.
   2. Likewise, he thinks, geometrical points can’t yield existential unities, because points aren’t real extant stuff.
   3. In order to get a unity (a thing that’s deep down really just one thing), he needed a “real and living” point.
      1. These points, he realized, must be something like our idea of a soul - must be a force - that is, like appetition (desire and its low-grade analogs) and sentiment (belief, feeling).
      2. We can use these substantial forms to solve general (not particular) problems in natural science. Indeed, they are what Aristotle calls ‘first entelechies’.
      3. Leibniz calls them ‘basic forces’ for intelligibility, and because they involve actuality and activeness.
4. These forms and souls had to be indivisible.
   1. However, since this is the case, it also had to be the case that they were created and annihillated (rather than assembled/dismantled).
   2. This means that all substances were created with the universe, survive its duration, and will die with it.
5. There are at least two types of simple substances, though: rational souls (minds) and other souls. Compared with the latter, our minds are “like little Gods.”
   1. So, where God has imposed an order on matter, minds have special laws that raise them above that, or that matter works for minds (the punishment of the wicked, and the happiness of the good).
6. Since we are saying that souls (rather than atoms) last forever, one might be disposed to imagine that they pass from body to body. Because of microscopic observation, Leibniz is rather inclined to conclude that the animal simply begins and then just adds on other bits to itself in growth and development.
7. But what about the end of the animal, then? Since it is unreasonable to assume that souls just occupy a chaotic material station after death, the only tenable position is that not merely the soul but the animal is conserved (albeit in much smaller form) after death.
   1. This entails that rather than a transporting of souls, there is merely a continuous transforming, and that there is no death in a metaphysical sense.
8. God, however, has provided for rational souls so well that nothing can ever make them lose the “moral qualities of their personhood”.
   1. Thus it can be said that everything tends to not merely the perfection of the universe in general, but of these creatures in particular (who are destined to reach such a high degree of happiness that it affects the universe as a whole!)
9. Leibniz now attributes something like this view (that things don’t die, just appear and disappear) to Hippocrates, Parmenides, and Melissus.
10. The moderns take there to only be a quantitative difference - i.e. large and small - between the machines of nature and of humans, rather than a qualitative one. This is too far.
    1. For Leibniz the machines of nature and of humans differ not only by degree, but in kind. He isolates three differences:
       1. Nature’s machines are so well equipped as to never succumb to accidental destruction.
       2. Nature’s machines have a truly infinite number of parts.
       3. Nature’s machines remain the same, although they are (beautiful here:) “folded together differently.”
11. Furthermore, the soul is a true unity (which is what we call the ‘I’). Where human machines are more like armies of parts, and thus require unified parts somewhere.
    1. Since these unified parts clearly can’t be material (which for Leibniz is infinite in its compositional complexity). Rather we need something like “atoms of substance” (contra atoms of matter).
    2. These atoms of substance are:
       1. the sources of activity
       2. the basic reason for the composition of things (the explanation for material unities)
       3. the ultimate elements in the analysis of substantial things
    3. They might be called metaphysical points. They are not merely mathematical points because they have something alive in them (a kind of perception).
    4. So where material points seem indivisible but are not, and mathematical points are indivisible but are not things, only forms or souls/metaphysical points are both exact and real.
12. This generates a problem viz the soul’s communion with the body. The Cartesian/Malebranchean position is that senses and the motor behind actions is that God manually coordinates our activity/sensation with our volition, as well as causality in general.
13. Leibniz thinks that this is motivated right (its negative argument is good), but that its positive argument is wrong.
    1. In other words, it’s right that one created thing has no real influence on another and that all things are continually produced by the power of God, but relying on a deus ex machina is ostensibly the same as relying on miracles.
    2. Leibniz wants to explain how God coordinates causality.
14. Leibniz thinks that this happens because God initially created each soul to be spontaneous (aka. not causally affected by other monads), but meanwhile to just be in perfect conformity to things outside it.
    1. This entails that the internal perceptions of our souls are purely mental phenomena. The constitution of the soul “gives the substance a representative nature”: or, each substance reflects the entire universe in itself according to its particular point of view.
    2. Thus, the interaction of the body and the soul works by means of a universal spontaneous coordination that is the property of every substance.
    3. This theory has the charm of explaining how the soul resides in the body: e.g. in the same way that a unity is in a multitude.
15. Why couldn’t souls be like formal, free automatons? (This question will turn out not to answer itself.)
    1. Since the soul represents the entire universe (although with differing degrees of clarity), conversely, the body is adpated to the soul, and this gives us the sense of causal mind-body interaction.
16. It also has the advantage of showing that we are not susceptible to any kind of material causal determinism.
    1. Every mind is like a world apart: self-sufficient, independent of every other created thing, involving the infinite, and expressing the universe.
    2. It is also meant to be another proof of God that so many interacting substances do so harmoniously, a fact which implies that they share a common cause.
17. This system finally also allows us to understand “x acted on y and z” as “A change occurred in x which intelligibly explains changes in y and z, in such a way that we can conclude that when God was decreeing what substances were to exist he chose y and z so as to fit with the already chosen x.”
    1. That is, if matter is not substance, then something like this story is the only coherent way to explain the appearance of material causality.
18. This will prove useful in physics, despite its metaphysical character.

Overview

The Principles is among the last philosophical texts of Leibniz. It provides a short summary written in lay style of his philosophy. Taken together with the Monadology, Theodicy and the New System, Leibniz found it to be a coherent and comprehensive statement of his philosophy. (cf. Pauline Phemister, Leibniz and the Natural World pp. 7-8)

Outline

1. Substances
   1. A substance is a being that is capable of action.
   2. Substances can be simple (having no parts) or composite (collection of simple substances, monads).
   3. Simple substances = unities; Composite substances = multiplicities
   4. Lives, souls, and minds are simple substances, and therefore where there is simple substance there is life.
   5. Since the whole world is built out of simple substances, life is everywhere in nature.
2. Monads
   1. Because monads have no parts, they can’t be made/unmade.
   2. They also cannot come into or go out of existence. They last as long as the universe does.
   3. They can’t have shapes or sizes (since for this they would need parts).
   4. Therefore, they must be distinguished by their qualities (perceptions) or actions (appetitions).
   5. A simple substance can be in many states at once since these states match up with its various relations to things outside it. (E.g. a geometrical point is simple, but is at the center of infinitely many angles.
3. Causes
   1. Nature is totally full of simple substances, which are separated by their actions, and in a constant state of change relative to one another.
   2. A body is an infinite number of monads clustered around a central monad.
      1. If we can think this, then we can think that the central monad corresponds with the states of the body.
      2. This means that a body is a collection of progressively complex machines, a natural automaton.
      3. In turn, this means that every monad is a living mirror which represents the universe in accordance with its own point of view.
      4. “Living” refers to a monad’s being its own source of activity.
      5. Deleuze loves this bit.
   3. A monad’s perceptions arise out of its other perceptions by the laws of appetites (the final causes) just as changes in bodies arise from the laws of movement (the laws of efficient causes). [Note: formal and efficient causes in the Aristotelian sense.]
4. Animals, Subconscious Perceptions
   1. Since every organism is made up of smaller forms of life (less complex monads, say, organs), and so are these, and so on, then not only is life everywhere, but there are “infinite levels of life.”
   2. A sufficiently complex (?) lifeform is called an animal, and its (central?) monad is called its soul.
   3. Non-reasonable animals (”bare life”) have unelevated monads for souls. They don’t have distinct enough perceptions to be remembered.
      1. Here’s a distinction between perception (say, mere perception or sentience) and awareness (say, reflective knowledge or sapience).
      2. Awareness is not given to all souls and no soul has it all the time.
      3. Here’s where Cartesians went wrong - they didn’t grok le petit perceptions (we now say: subconscious perception).
5. Minds
   1. Animals have interconnected perceptions in a way that is not quite by reason. (A dog remembers a stick with which it has been beaten.)
      1. This is to say that it is grounded only in the memory of effects, without knowledge of causes.
   2. The kinds of animals that can understand causes (and therefore other analytic principles) are rational animals. Their soul-monads are called minds. Minds are capable of reflective acts (self-knowledge, science).
6. Death
   1. The ancients believed that life emerged from chaos, but we now know that it comes from organized systems (seeds), and therefore from other forms of life.
   2. Since this is the case, since animals do not emerge out of nowhere when they are born, it is unlikely that they disappear completely when they die. There is no metempsychosis, rather merely metamorphosis.
7. Since nothing comes about without sufficient reason, and since things do exist, we should be able to give a reason why there being something is preferable to there being nothing.
8. God
   1. The sufficient reason for the existence of the universe can’t be found in the order of contingent things (bodies and their representations in souls).
      1. It can’t be in bodies because there’s never a reason in matter for its own motion. The material reasons for the motion of matter are causal, and as we know, if we follow this chain, we regress infinitely.
   2. Therefore the sufficient reason for the universe must lie outside of the causal chain. It must be something that exists necessarily and without cause.
   3. This is called God.
9. God’s Perfection
   1. This simple, primal substance must have in a higher form the perfections of those things derivative from it.
   2. Directly this means that God has perfect power (omnipotence), knowledge (omniscience), and will (is supremely good). From this follows perfect justice (goodness + omniscience).
   3. Whatever imperfections earthly stuff has, they don’t derive from God, but rather from their own limits as created things.
10. The Most Perfect Universe
    1. Since God is perfect, it follows that he chose the best design for the universe. One with:
       1. The greatest variety and orderliness.
       2. The best arranged time and place (and terrain).
       3. The maximum effect produced by the simplest means.
       4. The highest levels of power, knowledge, happiness and goodness in created things that the universe allowed.
    2. This all follows since things must lay claim to existence where their claim is in direct proportion to their perfections.
11. The Most Perfect Physics
    1. God’s perfection is also exemplified in the laws of motion, which hang together the best and are the most comprehensible to metaphysical reasoning.
    2. Leibniz, who himself discovered some laws of nature, notes that these cannot be justified merely by means of (efficient) causality, and rather require appeal to final causes, a fact which provides yet another evident proof of God.
12. The Harmony of the Monads
    1. From the perfection of the universe (by way of the perfection of its author) it follows that every living mirror (monad/substantial center) must have its perceptions and appetitions ordered in the most perfect way qua compatibility with the rest of the monads.
13. The Fold
    1. So monads are ordered in perfect harmony with one another. This implies a serious kind of determinism (Leibniz nicely says “The present is big with the future, the future could have been read in the past, and distant things are expressed in what is nearby.”)
    2. If we could unfold any individual soul, we could see the beauty of the entire universe.
    3. But, since most of a soul’s perceptions are confused, and since the soul can only know its clear and distinct perceptions, which are /much/ fewer, individual souls know very little of the universe at a given time. Only God can have distinct perceptions of everything.
    4. Leibniz is obviously getting romantic here. He waxes poetical that in the roar of the ocean, he has many confused perceptions of distinct waves.
14. Imperfect Works and the Mirror of the Creator
    1. A rational soul is not merely a mirror of the universe, but also a likeness of its creator.
    2. It not only perceives God’s works, it can reproduce something like them on a smaller scale.
15. The City of God
    1. This means that all minds, entering into a kind of harmony with God, are members of the City of God - the most perfect and judicious state, with many fine characteristics:
       1. no crime without punishment
       2. no good deed goes unrewarded
       3. “as much virtue and goodness as possible”
    2. God achieves this City by means of a pre-established harmony between the kingdoms of nature and of grace, between God as the architect and God as the monarch.
    3. Nature leads on to grace, while grace perfects nature while at the same time making use of it.
16. Love of God
    1. Reason can’t tell us about the next life, but it can assure us that things have been done in a perfect way.
    2. In loving God, we can take pleasure in his perfections, which are … perfect … and so love for God must give us the most pleasure of which we are capable.
17. Pleasure without Sensory Input
    1. It is easy to love this God. There is nothing mysterious about taking pleasure from something imperceivable. Supporting arguments:
       1. People get pleasure from honors.
       2. Martyrs show the power of the pleasures of the mind in going happily to their deaths.
       3. The pleasures of the senses, in the end, are intellectual pleasures. Their sensory character is just our confusion (the real pleasure of music is in the numbers, e.g.).
       4. Again, very poetic Leibniz: “We are not aware of the numbers of these beats, but our soul counts them all the same!”)
18. The Pursuit of Happiness
    1. Loving God is its own reward, and gives us a foretaste of our future happiness.
    2. Finally, since God is infinite, and thus never knowable in its entirety, our happiness in loving it won’t ever consist in a mind-numbing complete enjoyment with nothing left to desire, but rather in “a perpetual progression towards new pleasures and new perfections.”

Overview

This early (1680) paper by Leibniz details a two-pronged theory of truth. Certain truths are necessary because their contraries are self-contradictory, and certain (existential) truths are necessary because of a free choice of God for the more perfect existence.

This theory seems to be meant to address a problem of freedom and determinism (or, as Leibniz calls it “future contingents”) - namely, because of the latter kind of truth, God can have future directed omniscience without future events being analytically necessary.

Outline

1. Premises
   1. In God everything is spontaneous.
   2. It can “hardly be doubted” that people have free will.
   3. A volition is a conscious attempt to act, and an act necessarily follows from the will and ability to do it.
   4. If the conditions pro and con for an action exist, a volitional equilibrium is reached, and thus, a person won’t act.
2. Analytic Propositions
   1. In every true proposition there is a connection between the subject and the predicate (”S is P”) and so every true proposition can be proved a priori.
   2. There are two primary propositions/truths:
      1. Necessary ones: whatever implies a contradiction is false. All truths of metaphysics (and logic, geometry, etc.) are necessary.
      2. Contingent ones: Whatever is more perfect or has more reason to be true.
   3. This cashes out to the idea that the principle of necessary truths is the principle that applies to essences, and the principle of contingent truths applies to existences.
3. Modality into Freedom
   1. God is the only being whose existence is not contingent. Which is to say that his existence is analytically entailed by his essence.
   2. For most contingent things (x), x’s definition shouldn’t explain its existence, because if it did, its nonexistence would be a contradiction.
   3. Contingent things that exist do so because they are more perfect than the possible rivals for existence. Now, if x’s nonexistence is a contradiction, then it could not be the case that there are other competing possibilities qua existence.
   4. This means that we need a notion of possibility according to which some things are not necessary and do not actually exist.
   5. If this kind of possibility exists, it implies a certain freedom on the part of a free mind to choose one thing rather than another (for its perfection, as God does, or from our imperfection).
4. Modality, God’s Actions and Existence
   1. God’s Free and Necessary Actions (God must have two types of actions)
      1. Example of a necessary action: God loves himself. This can be demonstrated from the definition of God.
      2. Example of a free action: God makes whatever is most perfect. There’s nothing contradictory in the contrary proposition (if it were, non-existent possibles would in fact be impossible).
   2. A similar conclusion (about modality) derives from the nature of existence:
      1. Take A and B. Only one of these can exist. Assume A is more perfect than B.
      2. Now, A exists because of this, and this fact can be demonstrated, or rendered certain by the nature of the case.
      3. If being certain were the same as being necessary, we’re in trouble.
      4. But, A’s existence has merely a hypothetical necessity. This means that it is necessary that if God always chooses what is most perfect, then A exists.
      5. This is to be distinguished from the (absolutely necessary-type) proposition that it is necessary that A exists.
      6. Again, if A were absolutely necessary, B would be impossible.
   3. So we must hold that:
      1. What has some degree of perfection is possible.
      2. What is more perfect than its opposite actually exists. (Perfection is an “urge for existence.”)
   4. This means that extant things are products of God’s will rather than of necessity.
   5. But: Does god will by necessity (because of his nature) or freely (because of his will)?
      1. It must be by necessity, since if he has to will to will something, this entails an infinite regress.
      2. Does this demean God? With Augustine: Such necessity is blessed.
5. Possible Things
   1. So, things are possible even if God does not will them into existence, because they are not in themselves contradictions.
   2. Or, a possible thing is “something with some essence or reality, that is, something that can be clearly understood.”
   3. This means that if there is never an instantiation of a perfect circle, a circle is still possible, but just possesses less perfection (i.e. less reality) than the things that do exist.
   4. So that “No perfect circle ever did or will exist” is a necessary proposition is true, but “No perfect circle exists” (the timeless proposition) is a necessary proposition is false.
      1. This is so because Leibniz denies that the timeless proposition can be demonstrated.
      2. Basically, Leibniz wants to distinguish between propositions that cannot be solved because they are self-contradictory (e.g. find x where x^2=9 and x+5=9) and where they are merely possible/imaginary (e.g. find x where x^2 + 9 = 3x).
6. Future Contingents
   1. This is meant to remove the problem about the foreknowledge of future contingents.
   2. God can formulate propositions about future contingents that are:
      1. necessary, given the state of the world that has “been settled once and for all”
      2. necessary, given the harmony of things.
   3. But future contingents are not necessary in the analytical sense. This lets God have foreknowledge of them even though they are not necessary.
   4. This entails that it is possible for the imperfect rather that the more perfect to exist. This is fine since we can accept “what God doesn’t will to exist doesn’t exist” without asserting the necessity of this proposition.
   5. [Near the end of this paper Leibniz has an incomplete sentence which he probably meant to turn into something saying:] The only existential proposition that is absolutely necessary is God exists.