Abstract
Spatial metaphors and spatial discourse about the mind and ideas abound in Locke’s Essay. This raises two related kinds of questions: first, whether and in what sense the mind is “in space”, has a location, and perhaps an extension? And second: how this ‘spatial mind’ is also ‘spacious’, offering room for ideas? What sense of spatiality is involved when Locke says that ideas are “in the mind”, “lodged in the mind”, and how does this inner spatiality of ideas within, relates to the spatiality of things without? In this chap. I argue that Locke’s early relationist view of space, expounded in the manuscript notes of his 1676-8 journals, offers a better framework for understanding how space could be applied in a literal sense to ideas, than the more mitigated view set forth in the Essay itself.
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Notes
- 1.
In Locke’s usage, spirits (without qualification) usually refers to finite thinking substances – like human souls, or angels (whether these are considered as united to bodies, or as “pure spirits”). God is sometimes refered to as ‘the Infinite Spirit’. See for example An Essay concerning Human Understanding, P. Nidditch (ed.), Oxford, Oxford University Press 1975, book 2. Chap. 23. §19 (henceforth Essay, followed by the triplet book, chapter, paragraph) The issue of God’s relation to space raises specific problems, which are not the main focus of this paper but about which I shall say a few words in the last part of this paper.
- 2.
See Essay 2.15.8: ‘Where and when are questions belonging to all finite existences’.
- 3.
Essay, 1.1.8: “I must here in the entrance beg pardon of my reader for the frequent use of the word idea, which he will find in the following treatise. It being that term which, I think, serves best to stand for whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks, I have used it to express whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking; and I could not avoid frequently using it. I presume it will be easily granted me, that there are such ideas in men’s minds: every one is conscious of them in himself; and men’s words and actions will satisfy him that they are in others.”
- 4.
The spatial relations are especially compelling in this passage: ‘Nor let anyone think these too narrow bounds for the capacious mind of man to expatiate in, which takes its flight further than the stars, and cannot be confined by the limits of the world; that extends its thoughts often even beyond the utmost expansion of Matter, and makes excursions into that incomprehensible Inane.’ (Essay 2.7.10). cf. also 3.3.2: ‘every bird and beast men saw; every tree and plant that affected the senses, could not find a place in the most capacious understanding’.
- 5.
See Essay, 2.8.22: ‘I have in what just goes before been engaged in Physical Enquiries a little further than perhaps I intended. But, it being necessary to make the Nature of Sensation a little understood; and to make the difference between the qualities in bodies, and the ideas produced by them in the Mind, to be distinctly conceived, without which it were impossible to discourse intelligibly of them.’
- 6.
Cf. Essay 2.27.27: ‘that thinking thing, that is in us, and which we look on as our selves,’ or 4.4.19: ‘that thinking thing within you’.
- 7.
See Essay 2.21.75: ‘Extension, Solidity, Mobility, or the power of being moved; which by our senses we receive from body. Perceptivity, or the power of perception, or thinking; Motivity, or the power of moving: which by reflection we receive from our minds. (…) To which if we add Existence, Duration, Number, which belong both to the one and the other, we have, perhaps, all the original ideas on which the rest depend.’
- 8.
Cf. T. Lennon, The Battle of the Gods and Giants, 1993, p. 251-273.
- 9.
At least until death, when the soul is, supposedly, ‘leaving’ the body. See the slightly sarcastic ending of the preceding quote in 2.23.20.
- 10.
See supra note 6.
- 11.
See 2.27.2-3.
- 12.
More on this way of construing the identity of a person through the same ‘continued consciousness’ in my ‘Mémoire et Conscience continuée, une lecture de Locke sur l’identité personnelle’ (2014).
- 13.
This is made quite clear in Essay 2.27.10: ‘Thus the Limbs of his Body is to every one a part of himself. (…) Thus we see the Substance, whereof personal self consisted at one time, may be varied at another, without the change of personal Identity.’
- 14.
Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais sur l’entendement humain, 2.27, English transl. p. 221.
- 15.
Cf. Summa Theologica, Part. 1, Questio 52, art1: ‘I answer that, It is befitting an angel to be in a place; yet an angel and a body are said to be in a place in quite a different sense. A body is said to be in a place in such a way that it is applied to such place according to the contact of dimensive quantity; but there is no such quantity in the angels, for theirs is a virtual one. Consequently an angel is said to be in a corporeal place by application of the angelic power in any manner whatever to any place. Accordingly there is no need for saying that an angel can be deemed commensurate with a place, or that he occupies a space in the continuous; for this is proper to a located body which is endowed with dimensive quantity. In similar fashion it is not necessary on this account for the angel to be contained by a place; because an incorporeal substance virtually contains the thing with which it comes into contact, an d is not contained by it: for the soul is in the body as containing it, not as contained by it. In the same way an angel is said to be in a place which is corporeal, not as the thing contained, but as somehow containing it.’
- 16.
“… the mind cannot be extended at one time or shrunk at another time according to place in the way of a substance, but only in regard to power, which it can apply to greater or smaller bodies.” April 151,649 (AT, 5, 347/ CSM III 375).
- 17.
See for example, Malebranche La Recherche de la Vérité, III, 2, 1, English translation, p. 217: ‘I think everyone agrees that we do not perceive objects external to us by themselves. We see the sun, the stars, and an infinity of objects external to us; and it is not likely that the soul should leave the body to stroll about the heavens, as it were, in order to behold all these objects. Thus, it does not see them by themselves, and our mind’s immediate object when it sees the sun, for example, is not the sun, but something that is intimately joined to our soul, and this is what I call an idea. Thus, by the word idea, I mean here nothing other than the immediate object, or the object closest to the mind, when it perceives something, i. e., that which affects and modifies the mind with the perception it has of an object.’
- 18.
Examination of Malebranche (1706), §25.
- 19.
It’s obvious that Locke had serious thoughts on the questions, as can be seen in several manuscript notes, where he tries to weight the probability of the human soul being immaterial or material. See Locke’s writing on religion, p. 31 sq. (MS Adv theol. 94). ‘We can conceive noe movable substance without extension, for what is not extended is no where. i e is not JL From this & the opposite we must conclude there is something in the nature of Spirits or thinking beings which we cannot conceive JL.’ Again, in MS c. 28 fol. 115r: ‘Anima. A thing that hath noe extension we cannot conceive to exist or have any being. And an extended solid being we cannot conceive to have life i.e. motivitie and perception. And yet we know and must grant there are thinking beings.’
- 20.
See on these issues my recent book, Dans la chambre obscure de l’esprit (2018).
- 21.
John Yolton (in various publications including his Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid, 1984) insisted that Locke was, against appearance of the contrary, a defender of direct realism. In his view Lockean ideas are not mental items, existing somewhere in the mind, but either the very act of perception, or, on the objective side, the external things themselves as they appear, or look to us. For criticisms of Yolton’s construal of Lockean ideas, see M. Ayers, Locke, Ontology and Epistemology, Routledge, 1990; P. Dlugos “Yolton and Rorty on the Veil of Ideas in Locke”, 1996; G. Yaffe, “Locke on ideas of substance and the veil of perception” (2004).
- 22.
See Newton (c. 1665), Certain Philosophical Questions, p. 450-2. Newton is quite explicit there: what we see is what is ‘delineated in the brain.’ He goes so far as explaining why these objects then are not judged to be in the brain: ‘Resp: Because the image of the braine is not painted there, nor is the Braine perceived by the soule it not being in motion, & probably the soule perceives noe bodys but by the helpe of their motion. But were the Braine perceived together with those images in it wee should thinke wee saw a body like the braine encompasing & comprehending our selves the starrs & all other visible objects. &c.’ On Newton’s seemingly ‘naïve’ representationalism, see my ‘Vision, color and method in Newton’s Opticks’, 2014.
- 23.
“‘… But supposing he could by recollecting remember 100 millions, and consequently must have as many distinct ideas, I see no reason why all these may not actually be contained within the sphere of the activity of the soul acting in the center. For if we consider in how small a bulk of body there may be as many distinct living Creatures as here are supposed ideas, and every of these Creatures perfectly formed …, we shall no need to fear any impossibility to find out room in the brain where this sphere may be placed… But to return to the Description of this Organ. I do suppose that what we call attention is nothing else but the action of the Soul in forming certain ideas, which for the present I will call little images, which bear the stamp, seal or mould according to which the soul formed it in the Center of the Repository. So that the greater the number of ideas are that have succeeded anyone formation, the greater is the space of time of which we have sense: and the ideas become further and further removed from the center and more and more new form’d ideas interpose themselves between the center and the said ideas placed in orbs at a greater distance, by the intrusion of fresh ideas between the center and them”’ (Lectures of Light, in Posthumous Works, p. 143-4).
- 24.
An examination of Malebranche § 9.
- 25.
See Mariotte, Nouvelle découverte touchant la vue, 1668.
- 26.
Journal Ms. 1676, in Aaron and Gibb ed., An Early draft of Locke’s Essay, together with extracts from his Journals, p. 77.
- 27.
Ibid. p. 96
- 28.
Ibid. p. 105
- 29.
See Principia Philosophiae II, 10 sq. [CSM, I, 227].
- 30.
The view that space is something that falls under the description of mathematics, and consequently has properties, is instrumental in the Cartesian demonstration that space or extension is a real being. As Descartes says, ‘it is important to consider that nonbeing can have no true attribute’, Descartes, Letter (for Arnauld) July 291,648 [CSM, III, 348]. See also Principia Philosophiae, II, 16.
- 31.
Cf. Journal Ms. Relation 1678, Early Draft, p. 99-103.
- 32.
See 2.15.2: ‘And he, I think, very much magnifies to himself the capacity of his own understanding, who persuades himself that he can extend his thoughts further than God exists, or imagine any expansion where He is not.’ The view that space is an affection (or ‘consequence’) of existence, and infinite space the affection of the first infinite existing being, was basically Newton’s view of the matter. See his De Gravitatione and the manuscripts quoted in J. E. McGuire “Newton on Place, Time, and God: An Unpublished Source”, 1978. See also J. E. McGuire “Existence, Actuality, and Necessity: Newton on Space and Time”, 1978.
- 33.
See 2.23.17: ‘the primary ideas we have peculiar to body, as contradistinguished to spirit, are the cohesion of solid, and consequently separable, parts, and a power of communicating motion by impulse. These, I think, are the original ideas proper and peculiar to body; for figure is but the consequence of finite extension.’
- 34.
Locke recognizes however that solidity ‘cannot exist without extension and figure’ (3.10.15), but I take this to mean that occupation of place and time are existential conditions of material beings, rather than to mean, in a Cartesian way, that solidity is derived from extension.
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Hamou, P. (2020). Spacious Minds and Spatial Spirits: John Locke on Space and Thought. In: Berchielli, L. (eds) Empiricist Theories of Space. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 54. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57620-2_4
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