Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/550

 538 J. HUTCHISON STIRLING : nant ; and I have no doubt he would have been equally surprised and amused had he witnessed the supersubtle pro- fundity of the Germans, who object it to him as " a manifest self-contradiction" to make substance the "work of our understanding," and yet give it " objective validity," or " expect the mind to subject itself to a world already in subjection to laws which are its own product ". Locke never dreamed for himself such deeps of speculation as these no, nor the glory of having perpetrated a conjuring trick even on the very "world"! In an object of experience there was for Locke a sense-original present for the idea of substance quite as much as there was a sense-original present in it for the idea of any quality, as whiteness, warnmess, sweetness, &c. Only, the relation between original and copy did not seem so direct and definite in the one case as in the other. That was what Locke held in reality of substance, let him express himself as he might about the obscurity of the original to which the idea was to be referred, or the influence of custom in respect of it. For Locke there was really a sense-object, a sense-thing, a sense-substance, in the constitution of which lay the causes which were qualities for us. And, in point of fact, Locke had reason : it is quite as certain that there is an archetype in sense for the idea substance, as that there is similarly one for the idea quality. It is no more reasonable to object that you cannot find the it of an object than that you cannot find the me of a subject my me, your me, say. Both are present in their qualities, and both are present through their qualities. That that should be their way is not a bit harder than that that of any quality should be its. How else can anything be than what it manifests itself to be ? If this that I hold is not to be hard, smooth, sharp-edged, transparent, brittle, then neither is it to be a piece of glass, but simply nothing. And how am I to make nothing something unless just by this that I make it something, that is, that I qualify it ? The juice and the pith constitute the substance of that apple, and they are not in any respect less real than the fragrance it exhales or the greenness it shows. Ah ! it is profundity, it is subtlety, it is philosophy to entertain the doubt ! As it is here not to know substance because of quality whereby alone it can be known ; so it is elsewhere not to know the universal because of the particular on which it sits ; and, again, not to know free-will because of the very motive that is just it. Why, it is only because I knmv that externality, that I do not know it ! We are deep nowadays. There are more spaces than space, more directions than all directions ; parallel lines