its proper prerogatives. It has admitted that experience is something given to it
from without, not that in which it comes to itself. It inevitably follows that in
what it does for itself, when not simply receptive of experience, it is merely
draining away in narrower and more remote channels the fulness of the real
world. We cannot know by abstraction, for properties must be known before
they can be abstracted. If thought, then, is a process of abstraction – as it is
according to the Aristotelian logic – we think by other methods than we know.
Thought, therefore, cannot give us knowledge, but only lead us away from it.
68
The main focus of Green’s attack on this picture is the ‘popular philosophy’
of ‘Locke and his followers’,
69
where abstraction was seen to play a role
both in Locke’s epistemology and his psychology. Beginning from a stock of
simple ideas delivered by sensory perception, Locke argued that the mind
can then form complex ideas by abstraction from more or less resembling
simple ideas, where the complex idea lacks features which distinguish the
latter from one another. This account thus makes sensory experience a prior
and independent source of knowledge, to which thought is subordinate. It
also allows Locke to adopt a nominalist or ‘particularist’ view of properties,
kinds and relations: for Locke hold s that at the level of the senses or simple
ideas, what we experience is not identity, but merely resemblances; but when
the mind comes to form complex ideas, the differences are abstracted away,
so we come to believe that properties, kinds and relations are the same, and
thus come to attribute universality to them to explain this , when in fact what
we are explaining is a shadow of our capacity for abstraction, rather than a
genuine feature of the world. On this basis, Locke can conclude that ‘All
things, that exist, [are] Particulars’,
70
and it is only the abstractionist
processes of thought that make us believe otherwise.
As is well known, Green believe d that everything in this Lockean picture
was mistaken, and that if accepted, it lead to disastrous philosophical results
(illustrated, Green held, in the scepticism of Hume, who carried the Locke an
programme through to its logical, but absurd, conclusions). Locke’s
essential error, Green argued, was that he took for granted a dualistic
conception of feeling and thought, treating the former as a source of
knowledge that was independent of and prior to the latter, on which we
must rely to provide us with direct and immediate access to reality. Green
held that this position had seemed intelligible to Locke because he thought
our senses could provide us with experience of particular properties in the
world and thus provide us with simple ideas corresponding to these
properties, prior to thought’s merely abstractive role in forming complex
68
T. H. Green, ‘The Philosophy of Aristotle’, in Works of Thomas Hill Green, edited by R. L.
Nettleship, 3 vols (London, 1885–1888), Vol. III, pp. 46–91, esp. pp. 61–2.
69
Green, ‘The Philosophy of Aristotle’, 48.
70
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Peter H. Nidditch
(Oxford, 1975), Book III, Chapter III, x1, p. 409.
144 ROBERT STERN
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