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Hume and Descartes On Self-Acquaintance

David L. Mouton

Dialogue / Volume 13 / Issue 02 / June 1974, pp 255 - 269

DOI: 10.1017/S0012217300025610, Published online: 09 June 2010

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0012217300025610

How to cite this article:David L. Mouton (1974). Hume and Descartes On Self-Acquaintance.Dialogue, 13, pp 255-269 doi:10.1017/S0012217300025610

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HUME AND DESCARTES ONSELF-ACQUAINTANCE

THE idea of self-knowledge divides naturally into two parts inaccordance with the distinction between knowledge by acquaint-

ance and knowledge by description. I know myself and I know thingsabout myself. The latter I know partly from self-acquaintance, partlyfrom the behavior, especially linguistic, of others, and partly fromeach of these. All aspects of self-knowledge are controversial, so I

shall concentrate in this paper on the question of self-acquaintance.My purpose is both philosophical and historical. It is commonlybelieved that Hume and Descartes held diametrically opposed, orat least strongly contrasting, views regarding self-acquaintance sinceHume is regularly ridiculed for his denial of ability to discover hisown Self whereas it would occur to no one to ascribe that same viewto the author of the Meditations. In this paper I shall argue thatcontrary to appearances these two philosophers either held the same

position or Descartes occupied the more agnostic extreme; and alsothat the position usually ascribed to Hume is, when properly under-stood, both correct and of fundamental philosophical significance.Part of my reason for selecting Hume and Descartes for analysisand comparison is to show thereby that the thesis of this paper istrue independently of the rationalist/empiricist schism in philosophy.

The knowability of the self is a special case of the knowability ofanything or anyone, and to know or be acquainted with any objectis to know or be acquainted with at least some of its properties.Consider, then, a thing X with its properties a,b,c,d,. . . n. Supposefurthermore that X is a mirror. The properties of a mirror fall intoat least two different classes. First, there are those relatively stableproperties such as the weight, size, material, etc. which the mirrorhas by virtue of being a physical object. Let us call these "structuralproperties." There is another class of properties which includes allthose colors and shapes which the mirror "has" by virtue of itsfunction in reflecting the visual properties of other objects. Thusthe mirror appears red when its surface is reflecting a red object

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DAVID L. MOUTON

and green when it is reflecting a green object. I shall refer to these

as "functional properties."

Consider now Hu m e's fam ous confession of inability to discover

his own self:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself I alwaysstumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade,love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time withouta perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. (T, 252)

1

This falls far short of being a model philosophic statement, being

neither clear nor precise. Of course I cannot scrutinize myself with-out a perception since Hume held scrutinizing itself to be a percep-

t ion. There is however an important claim here which needs to be

sorted out. When I turn my attention on myself, what is the nature

of the object of my attention ? Hume's answer constitutes in part a

denial that he could discover anything which has "perfect identity

and simplicity" and thus continues "invariably the same, thro ' the

whole course of our lives." (T, 251) But this is not the whole or

even the central issue since two philoso phe rs cou ld easily agreeabout the description of a certain experience without being able to

agree at all with regard to the application of the concept of identity

to it or its objects. Thu s Hu m e also attacks, secondly, the claim of

"some philosophers who imagine we are every moment intimately

conscious of wha t we call our Self, (T 251) and par t of what

Hume means is exactly rebutted by his observation that "when I

enter most intimately into what I call myself I always stumble on

some part icular perception or o t h e r . . . And this is clearly a claimabout the nature of one of our exp erien ces, specifically about the

experience which constitutes the basis of self-acquaintance. Here

is the rock bot tom of Hume's posi t ion with regard to self-knowledge.

The cutting edge of Hume's claim is the distinction between two

types of possible objects of awareness, one of which he encountered

each time he searched for the other. Hume implies that each is

possible since (a ) he in fact tried to discover both types and (b) hein fact failed to find one of them. Instead of concluding that Hume is

egregiously mistaken and confused, I suggest an alternative inter-

pretation. Hume's implied distinction between two types of objects

1 Numbers given in parentheses preceded by T* refer to pages in Hume's

Treatise, the Oxford edition, (ed.) L. A. Selby-Bigge.

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HUM E AND DESCARTES ON SELF-ACQUAINTANCE

of awareness is really the distinction between, on the one hand, anentity, and, on the other hand, some "objects" of awareness not

constituting either partly or wholly an entity. For he did not denythe obvious fact that when one indulges in self-scrutiny, one mustthereby be aware of something. But, curiously enough, it is obscurehow such a distinction is to be drawn in the light of Hume's insistencethat we are never aware of anything but perceptions and that everyperception is a substance capable of independent existence. At thispoint I suggest the application of the mirror analogy.

A person is not a mirror and a mirror is not conscious. Nor if amirror were conscious would it be easy to specify the roles played byits structural and functional properties. Nevertheless, the analogy canbe helpful. Corresponding to the mirror's functional and structuralproperties, there is a current distinction between concepts of consciousstates which can be analysed adverbially and those which cannot beso analysed. In the former case one is simply aware of something bymeans of some property or properties of the conscious state itself, an

experience which necessarily occurs each time a conscious state ofthat description is instantiated; in the latter case one is aware of someobject independent of the conscious state, an experience whosenecessary conditions include the presence of the object, the instantia-tion of the conscious state, and the appropriate relation betweenthem. This is illustrated by the difference between being in pain andseeing a mountain. There are enormously complex issues involvedin this distinction and its application to human consciousness, but itwill not be necessary to discuss, much less to settle, any of them inorder to employ this rough distinction for the purpose of illuminatingHume's obscure remarks on this topic. Hume claims inability todiscover an entity or being called his self and hence also not to beable to be acquainted with such a being. If Hume or Hume's selfwere an entity, then it would make sense prima facie to expect thatentity to have some structural properties and thus that anyone ableto apprehend that self (at least the subject himself) would neces-sarily apprehend at least some of those structural properties. Andthis, I shall argue, is precisely what Hume failed to discover.

The properties which Hume does profess to apprehend are thoseof [feeling] "hot or cold, [seeing] light or dark, [feeling] love orhatred, pain or pleasure." But these evidently did not seem to himto be appropriate building blocks of an entity which was himself —

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DAVID L. MOUTON

and with good reason. Feeling hot or cold, experiencing the emotionsof love or hatred, and feeling sensations of pain or pleasure are most

plausibly regarded as instances of adverbial conscious states. Inexperiencing these states the properties given to one's awareness areanalogous to the functional properties of a mirror.

There are conscious states which appear to constitute the directapprehension of the structural properties of objects. This is especiallytrue of vision. Unfortunately Hume's example of seeing light or darkhardly qualifies as the apprehension of an object. If one saw only an

unbroken homogeneous expanse of light or dark, this might well beexperienced as nothing more than an adverbial state as e.g. in adream and not the apprehension of a structured object in the environ-ment. Nevertheless, Hume's tendentious choice of an example is ofno real import, since even if we acknowledge the direct visualapprehension of actual objects, none of them will satisfy his needsince no external object can be identical with one's self. Whatever Iperceive through the senses is unavoidably other than myself.

The body, it might be countered, is an exception to this — mybody is clearly at least part of me and hence of my structure — anexception which Hume overlooked due to his commitment to pheno-menalism. But to attribute Hume's attitude toward the body solelyto his penchant for perceptual phenomenalism is to ignore moreinteresting aspects of his thinking. There is no reason to think thatHume, any more than anyone else, lacked a sense of objecthood orthat he was not equally subject to the influence of what Quine has

called "the immemorial doctrine of ordinary enduring medium-sizedphysical objects."

2 The basic perception of medium-sized objects is

either visual or tactual. These are the objects which fill our worldand with which we have contact from infancy. And of course ourbodies are members of this conceptually primitive class. Hume choseto explicate the concept of physical object in terms of his impression-idea schema and as a result he produced a theory with two basicprinciples, Coherence and Constancy. (T, 194-5) Given any series

of impressions, if they are ordered in accordance with these twoprinciples, then the mind, i.e. observer, is led ineluctably to regardthem as constituting a physical object. (T , 210) What Hume failsto point out is that for each human being, the series of impressions

2\V. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 11.

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with the highest degrees of Coherence and Constancy are those whichconstitute one's own body. All other impressions are less coherent

and constant and are experienced against the backdrop, as it were,of one's own body. There is therefore absolutely no reason for Humeto ignore the human body in his philosophical system.

It is far better to conclude that Hume was too much rather thantoo little influenced by the paradigm of a medium-sized object. Hisrejection of visual properties as constituting or revealing units of hisown self can be explained by reference to his "looking within." In

this Hume is surely correct since my visual acquaintance with myselfqua medium-sized object is in many respects inferior to the visualacquaintance others have with my body. Yet my acquaintance withmyself is in a basic sense superior to that of any other person, fromwhich it follows that I should look within, not without, to specifyfurther this knowledge. Nevertheless, when Hume looked within, heeither was dominated by the paradigm of a medium-sized object orby some other standard of his goal. Commentators are correct in

holding that the latter is really empty, but we can still make sense ofHume if we hold to the paradigm of a medium-sized object andproduce an account of what from this perspective Hume was seeking.Is there any conceivable discovery which a rational being couldmake which could constitute the successful end of Hume's quest ?

The answer is Yes and the explanation is as follows. If conscious-ness is always a state of some substantial entity, be it mind, soul ornervous system, then the essential structural properties of the conscious

self are those of the substantial base of the conscious states. Thesituation reflected in Hume's claim of non-acquaintance is simply thatone is not aware of that substantial base or its structural propertiesmerely by virtue of being conscious. There are three reasons for thisstate of affairs corresponding to three classes of conscious states.First, some forms of perception are restricted to their own peculiar"objects," e.g. odors in smelling, sounds in hearing, etc. and theseare not structural properties of objects as is evidenced by the fact that,

if one were limited to such perceptions, there would be no way toknow whether the perceived sounds, odors, etc. emanate from oneor more than one object. Second, we do not normally perceive withthe eyes the eyes themselves. This is however only part of the storysince we do not consider visual experiences as being states of theeyes. But we are intimately familiar with the role of the eye in seeing

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due to such ordinary facts as that closing the eyes eliminates the

visual field, rotating one's head swings the visual field with it, and

so forth. Finally, there are conscious states whose intentionalityranges over everything. Thus we can think about the substantial baseof consciousness, but consciousness of the variety of which thinkingis one type does not constitute the direct apprehension of any naturalobject, as is attested by the fact that our thinking of Paris would not

be disturbed in any way by the sudden annihilation of that city at thatsame moment. Thus the fact that we can think of anything whatsoeverdoes not enable us to be thereby acquainted with everything. For

these various reasons no mode of consciousness ranges over its ownsubstantial base in a manner constituting acquaintance with its

structural properties.

Those conscious states involved in ^looking within" such as reflect-ing, meditating, mental imagery and introspection are such that, unlikeseeing, there is no particular organ with which we can readily asso-ciate them. The first three share the non-acquaintance characteristic

with thinking while introspection consists of specialized attention tothat which transpires within, namely, mental imagery, sensations,feelings, and so forth. Thus if one recedes into a state of philosophicalreflection or follows Descartes and Hum e into a representationalist or

phenomenalist reduction, one discovers a realm of functional proper-ties experientially disconnected from all structural properties. Fromthis perspective Hume was entirely correct in denying that he coulddiscover any substantial self, i.e. any structural properties of the

conscious self. The upshot of this discussion is that all the propertiesof which we are immediately aware suffer either from the defect of

(1) being functional properties and hence not capable of constituting,wholly or in part, any entity whatsoever or that of (2) being structuralproperties of entities which are not identifiable as the self. Hume'sclaim is therefore correct.

This enables us to see what is wrong with the recent charge that

Hume's search for the

self is a

pseudo-search; "there is

nothing thatwould count as having an experience of one's self, . . . the expression'having an experience of one's self' is one for which there is no use,

as A.J. Ayer has expressed the point.3 Similarly Sidney Shoemaker

holds that Hume was merely pretending to look for his self since he

3 A. J. Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge (New York, 1965), p. 49.

26 0



DAVID L. MOUTON

but since he made the same statement about knowing God (I, 183),his concern in each case was knowledge by description or the clear-

ness and distinctness of our ideas rather than any form of directacquaintance with the objects in question. For a philosopher withsuch implicit faith in the rational connections in the world, it isunderstandable that he placed no special emphasis on the distinctionbetween knowledge achieved through direct acquaintance and thatbased upon inferences. It is also the case that Descartes shared withHume the philosophical presupposition that nothing ever came direct-ly before the mind but ideas, thoughts, perceptions and other mental

phenomena. Such a thesis may appear to preclude any discussionof those objects we can, and those we cannot, immediately perceiveor cognize. Nevertheless both philosophers proceeded to mark andemploy precisely this distinction. It should also be noted that theCogito does not serve to distinguish Hume and Descartes in thisregard. Descartes accepted the traditional distinction between essenceand existence and after using the Cogito in Meditation II to establishhis own existence, he freely admits that he does not yet know what

he is — in fact in the most graphic way he observes that "I must becareful to see that I do not imprudently take some other object inplace of myself ( ) — indicating a degree of detachment andignorance of himself to which Hume never approached. (I , 150)

The sense in which I can be acquainted with my own self depends

upon the nature of the self or mind, although unfortunately Descartes'many diverse statements about the mind do not form one consistent

theory. The official formula states: "That substance in which thoughtimmediately resides, I call Mind." (II, 53) In some sense the mindis analysable into two components or aspects, substance and thought,

and the nature of the mind is a function of the natures of thoughtand substance and the relation obtaining between them. By 'thought'Descartes means 'thinking' taken in a very broad sense which

includes doubting, understanding, conceiving, affirming, denying,willing, refusing, imagining and feeling. (I, 153) The range of

'thinking' is thus at least coextensive with that of 'consciousness.'"By the word thought I understand all that of which we are consciousas operating in us." (I, 222) And he makes clear that these various

modes of thinking are modes of the thinking substance where 'mode'signifies a property which constitutes a real affectation or modifica-

tion of the substance. (I, 241) So a thinking action or event is both

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HUME AND DESCARTES ON SELF-ACQUAINTANCE

a mode — today we would tend to say state — of some appropriatesubstance as well as an activity, action or event. "Further, there

are other [in contrast to physical] activities, which we call thinkingactivities, e.g. understanding, willing, imagining, feeling, etc., whichagree in falling under the description of thought, perception or

consciousness." (II, 64)

Descartes' many statements that mind is constituted by a substanceand its thinking modes lead one to expect him to specify the natureof each of these components or aspects of mind. But it is notorious-

ly the case that he never tells us what the substance is in whichthinking inheres. Indeed, the nature or essence of this substance is,

according to Descartes, thinking. The only clear point which standsout in this thesis is that thinking, as Descartes understands it, is the

only essential property — the whole essence or nature" (I, 190) —

of mental substance.

How does all this relate to the question of self-acquaintance ?

There are three possibilities for each of which Descartes provides

textual support. First, we can take literally his claim that thinkingis the whole essence or nature of mind and, since thinking is itselfnecessarily a conscious phenomenon, conclude that we have directawareness of ourselves. To do so is to accept the controversial, if

not flatly mistaken, interpretation of Descartes which identifiesthinking and mental substance.

6 Textual support includes the fol-

lowing: All the attributes taken together are in truth the samething as a substance: but not the attributes taken singly apart from

the others." 7 (See also rinciples of Philosophy, Part I, No. LX III;II, 245-6). A more striking parallel to Hume's thesis that we have"no idea of substance, distinct from that of a collection of particularqualities" (T, 16) could scarcely be found. And while this doesprovide the necessary ontological basis for direct acquaintance withone's self, it reduces Descartes' view on the matter precisely to thatof Hume, namely, to a bundle theory of substance.

* Precisely this view — the act of thinking is a substance — is ascribedto Descartes by the phenomenologist Pierre Thevenaz in his essay "Reflexionand Consciousness of Self on the grounds that I become conscious that myact of thinking needs only itself to 'exist' and to be assured of its existence.That is the very definition of substance according to Descartes," in What isPhenomenology ? edited by James M. Edie (Chicago, 196 2), p. 125.

7 Oeuvres de Descartes, Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, (ed s.), ( Par is:

Cerf, 1897 and 1913), v. V, p. 155 and quoted in A. Kenny, Descartes: AStudy of His Philosophy (New York, 1968), p. 67.

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DAVID L. MOUTON

In spite of the passages in which Descartes seemed to advocatesuch a bundle theory, he explicitly rejected it in other passages. He

warned, for example, that "if we wish to consider them [thought andextension] apart from the substances in which they are, that willhave the effect of our taking them as self-subsisting things and thusconfounding the ideas of mode and substance." (I, 246) WhatDescartes considered a confusion Hume incorporated as an explicitthesis of his system according to which each perception is a self-

sufficient substance, there being no essential distinction betweensubstance and property (T, 233). By contrast one of the fundamental

tenets of Cartesian metaphysics is that, although "nothing can everbe deprived of its own essence,"

8 substance and property are never-

theless of two different categories of being which differ ontologicallyin that they are of two different degrees of reality. (II, 56) Thinkingis a property, an activity, which inheres in a substance. "Where Ihave said, this is the mind the spirit, the intellect, or the reason, Iunderstood by these names not merely faculties, but rather what isendowed with the faculty of thinking;.. ." (II, 62)

Assuming this to be Descartes' preferred view, what follows con-cerning the accessibility to consciousness of both these aspects ofthe mind ? On this Descartes expressed himself clearly: "we do nothave immediate cognition of substances . . . we perceive certain formsor attributes which must inhere in something in order to have exist-ence, we name the thing in which they exist a substance. (II, 98)Again, taken from a context in which the self or mind is itself under

discussion, he writes: "we do not apprehend the substance itselfimmediately through itself, but by means only of the fact that it isthe subject of certain activities." (II, 64) On this view, we mustdistinguish between the experience of self-scrutiny and the analysisof the ontology of the self. Hume and Descartes are again in completeagreement on the former since each denied that in self-awarenessone is aware of any substance in which our thoughts or perceptionsare grounded, but they disagreed as to the necessity of, and thusthe possibility of a sound inference to, such an underlying substratum.

There is a major objection to the above interpretation of Des-cartes which turns on the question whether there is sufficient dis-tinction between substance and its essence to permit us to make

8 In a letter to Hyperaspistes (August, 1641) reprinted in Descartes, Philo-

sophical Letters, (ed.) A . Kenny (Oxford, 1970), p. 111.

26 4




sense of the no t ions o f be ing acqua in ted wi th each o f t he m . Th i s

ob j ec t i on may be pu t i n t he fo rm o f an a rgumen t :

(1) "We may likewise consider thought [and "the diverse modes of though t

such as understanding, imagining, recollecting, willing, etc."] and extension

[and "the diverse modes of extension"] as the modes which are found in

substance; . . ." ( I , 246)

(2) There are "two sorts of modal distinctions one of which is "between the

mode properly speaking, and the substance of which it is the mode."

(I, 244)

(3) It is a "fact that we can clearly conceive substance without the mode

which we say differs from it, while we cannot reciprocally have a percep-tion of this mode without perceiving the substance." (I, 244)

(4) The refore, there are experiences which constitute perceiving both substanceand its properties.

This argument suggests that Descartes regarded a substance togetherwith its essential properties as constituting a substantial unitywhich qua object of acquaintance or knowledge is indivisible.

Although Descartes does deny a real distinction between thinkingand mind, the foregoing argument is not extended by him to mentalsubstance. Instead he recognizes, thirdly, the distinction of reason

(ratione) which is "between substance and some of its attributeswithout which it is not possible that we should have a distinct knowl-edge of it, or between two such attributes of the same substance."(I, 245) This is precisely the status of thinking and mind. Not onlyis it true in the trivial sense that without thinking I could not be

aware of and hence know anything, but also in the sense that think-ing constitutes "the whole essence or nature" of the mind, that isto say, its only essential property. Descartes makes this explicitwhen he writes that "all the modes of thinking which we consider asthough they existed in the objects, differ only in thought (ratione)both from the objects of which they are the thought and from eachother in a common object." (I, 245) Perceiving the essence of Xdoes not constitute in all senses perceiving X. In fact when Descartes,

following the passage just quoted, does raise the question of ourknowing a "substance alone, without regarding whether it thinks oris extended," he holds that it is "more easy to know a substance thatthinks or an extended substance" and he offers as his reason that"we experience some difficulty in abstracting the notions that wehave of substance from those of thought or extension, for they in

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DAVID L. MOUTON

truth do not differ but in thought." (I, 246) It did not occur tohim to consider whether we could directly cognize the substance or

whether there is some experience which constitutes the direct cog-nizing of mental substance; he regarded the question as pertainingonly to the alternative of thinking of substance in abstraction fromits essential properties and even here he saw only a very limitedpossibility. Descartes was fully aware that employing 'substance'in the sense of 'substratum' would lead to difficulties regarding theresidue when the properties were removed, but he embraced this asan acceptable consequence. He did not think it impugned the con-

cept of a substratum. He wrote that we first "perceive certain formsor attributes" and secondly recognize that they "must inhere in some-thing in order to have existence . . ." (II , 98) Then he added: "Butif, afterwards, we desired to strip that substance of those attributesby which we apprehend it, we should utterly destroy our knowledgeof it; and thus, while we might indeed apply words to it, they wouldnot be words of the meaning of which we had a clear and distinctperception." (II, 98-99; italics mine) And of course Descartes must

have realized that the first word to suffer this loss of meaning is'substance' when understood in this substratum sense. It is clearfrom this passage that Descartes, having distinguished mind andthinking, did not regard the relation between them to be such asto preclude the possibility that God may perceive a human mindindependently of His perceiving the thinking of that same mind,whereas such a separation on the part of a human percipient woulddestroy the very possibility of his either perceiving or even conceiv-

ing the substance clearly and distinctly apart from its thinking.

The third and final position is the one John Locke ascribed to

Descartes and which formed the basis of the attack in his Castor/

Pollux example. (An Essay Concerning Human Understating, Bk.

II, Ch. I, Sec. 12) Like the others it depends upon the explication

of 'thinking thing' in such passages as: "But then what am I ? A

thing which thinks." (1,153) Locke thought the operative word

here was 'thing' rather than 'thinking'. Apparently he had in mindeither such a familiar phrase as "this I (that is to say, my soul by

which I am what I am)" (I, 190) or the more specific statements

such as "the substance in which they [the "thinking activities"] reside

we call a thinking thing or the mind. . ." (II, 64) From these state-

ments it does follow that I am identical with a certain substratum

266




and hence am imperceptible even to myself and therefore that Icannot be immediately acquainted with myself. This is a far more

radical thesis than that maintained by Hume. In fact it is absurd,and so may be fairly dismissed as a product of careless writing.

In summing up, there appear to be three possible interpretationsof Descartes' position on self-acquaintance, two of which accordwith what Hume wrote and the third of which renders self-acquain-tance absolutely impossible. According to the first I am identical witha certain stream of thoughts, and self-scrutiny is both possible and a

fact. The second holds that I am identical with a stream of thoughtsplus a substance in which they inhere, and self-scrutiny is possiblefor the stream but impossible for the substance. The third holds thatI am identical with the substance in which my thinking inheres andself-acquaintance is impossible.

The thesis I am proposing in order to explain the position of Humeand Descartes on self-acquaintance is this: Although (1) all con-

sciousness is a state of some entity or substance and (2) all conscious-ness is an awareness of some object, the range of possible substitutioninstances of the object for human beings either does not include theunderlying substantial base at all or it includes it in a manner notcapable of grounding acquaintance with that base. In part this is thegeneralization of the rather trivial point that just as in seeing onedoes not see one's eyes, so in the conscious state called thinkingone is not thereby acquainted with the substantial base. But thecommonplace and possibly factual nature of this thesis is completelyincommensurate with its importance in philosophical reflection. Indiscussing Hume's non-acquaintance claim, A. H. Basson commentsthat, "This amounts to saying the perceptual relation is asymmetrical,"a thesis, he then adds, "which itself demands proof.

9 His first point

is correct but the second, although complicated by Hume's identifica-tion of being conscious and perceiving, is nevertheless mistaken; no

proof could be required for the asymmetry of all those consciousrelations relevant to being acquainted with the base of consciousnesssince the entire mind/body problem stems from this property. Theremust be some reason why the instrumentality of walking is accepted

9 A. H . Basson, David Hume (Penguin Books, 195 8), p . 127.

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DAVID L. MOUTON

without dispute as the legs, whereas the instrumentality of thinkingis a moot philosophical issue. If every, or even some, moment of

consciousness constituted an acquainting awareness, inter alia, of itsown substantial base, then there would be no mystery as to theidentity of that to which 'mind' refers. And if this situation hadobtained, Hume and Descartes would never have denied directacquaintance with the thing which thinks and thus the entire historyof the mind/body problem would have been aborted since it wouldbe obvious to each conscious being what the structural properties werewhich underlie his consciousness and, therefore, his self (in the sense

relevant to Cartesian and Humean reflections).

In Stuart Hampshire's well-known review of The Concept of Mind

he criticises Ryle for suggesting that "the origin of the conception ofthe mind as a ghost within a machine is of purely historical and ofno philosophical interest."

10 The ghost in the machine hypothesis

has the double-barreled purpose of explaining both the seat of con-sciousness and the source of actions. These problems have verydifferent characteristics and the concern of this paper is only withthe former. In response to Ryle's claim, Hampshire points out that"so far from being imposed on the plain man by philosophicaltheorists, and even less by seventeenth century theorists, the mythof the mind as a ghost within the body is one of the most primitiveand natural of all the innumerable myths which are deeply inbeddedin the vocabulary and structure of our language."

n Hampshire does

not then proceed to provide an explanation for this "universal featureof ordinary language."

M Perhaps one should not assume that there

is any one sufficient condition. I have already mentioned the distinc-tion between actions and conscious states. Yet, I think, for the latterthe asymmetry thesis is at least a necessary condition. There wouldhave been no myth of the mind to explain consciousness without thisasymmetry. One may further wonder how in view of this thesis aphilosopher can ever rest any real theoretical weight on such aninference as that to the indivisibility of the mind. For if we can onlybe acquainted with the conscious states and never with their substan-

tial base, then any additional property ascribed to the latter must beinferred from the former. But from what property of my states of

Stuart Hampshire, Review of The Concept of Mind Gilbert Ryle, in Mindvol. LIX , 1950, p. 239.

" Ibid. 2 Ibid. p. 240.

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awareness can I infer that they are modes of a substantial base whichmust be indivisible ?

A final point: Wittgenstein once asked: "Could one imagine astone's having consciousness ?" (PI # 390) Part of the thrust of thisquestion and of the remainder of his hilosophical Investigations isto bring out the philosophical significance of the criteria governingwords in ordinary language. Whatever the manifold criteria of con-sciousness may be, a stone cannot meet them. The thesis of thispaper points up a second aspect of Wittgenstein's bizarre example.If a stone were conscious in the manner of a philosopher indulgingin Cartesian meditations, i.e. if it could think but lacked all sensoryperception, then there would be no feature of its conscious states inso reflecting which could reveal that it was a stone. And if to thiswere then added the powers of sensory perception, it would recognizeitself as a "thinking stone" but there would still remain ample logicalspace within which to wonder what the nature of the base of itsconsciousness is. And in this its situation would parallel our own.

Roosevelt University DAVID L. MOUTON

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