[1] See above, paragraphs 25 and 24.
How ‘eternity’ must be understood if this argument is to be valid:
148. The value of the first step in Locke’s argument—the inference, namely, from there being something now to there having been something from eternity—must be differently estimated according to the meaning attached to ‘something’ and ‘from eternity.’ If the existence of something means the occurrence of an event, of this undoubtedly it can always be said that it follows another event, nor to this sequence can any limit be supposed, for a first event would not be an event at all. It would be a contingency contingent upon nothing. Thus understood, the argument from a something now to a something from eternity is merely a statement of the infinity of time according to that notion of infinity, as a ‘progressus ad indefinitum,’ which we have already seen to be Locke’s. [1] It is the exact reverse of an argument to a creation or a first cause. If we try to change its character by a supplementary consideration that infinity in the series of events is inconceivable, the rejoinder will be that a first event is not for that reason any less of a contradiction, and that the infinity which Locke speaks of only professes to be a negative idea, representing the impossibility of conceiving a first event (Book II. chap. xvii. sec. 13, &c.). In truth, however, when Locke speaks of ‘something from eternity’ he does not mean—what would clearly be no God at all—a series of events to which, becauseof events, and therefore in time, no limit can be supposed; but a being which is neither event nor series of events, to which there is no before or after. The inference to such a being is not of a kind with the transition from one event to another habitually associated with it; and if this be the true account of reasoning from effect to cause, no such reasoning can yield the result which Locke requires. As we have seen, however, this is not his account of it, [2] however legitimately it may follow from his general doctrine.
[1] See above, paragraph 138.
[2] See above, paragraph 68.
… and how ‘cause’.
149. The inference of cause with him is the inference from a change to something having power to produce it. [1] The value of this definition lies not in the notion of efficient power, but in that of an order of nature, which it involves. If instead of ‘something having power to produce it’ we read ‘something that accounts for the change,’ it expresses the inference on which all science rests, but which is as far as possible from being merely a transition from one event to another that usually precedes it. An event, interpreted as a change of something that remains constant, is no longer a mere event. It is no longer merely in time, a present which next moment becomes a past. It takes its character from relation to the thing or system of things of which it is an altered appearance, but which in itself is always the same. Only in virtue of such a relation does it require to be accounted for, to be referred to a ‘cause’ which is in truth the conception that holds together or reconciles the endless flux of events with eternal unity. The cause of a ‘phenomenon,’ even according to the authoritative exponent of the Logic which believes itself to follow Hume, is the ‘sum total of its conditions.’ In its fulness, that is, it is simply that system of things, conceived explicitly, of which there must already have been an implicit conception in order that the event might be regarded as a change and thus start the search for a cause. An event in time, apart from reference to something not in time, could suggest no enquiry into the sum of its conditions. Upon occurrence of a certain feeling there might indeed be spontaneous recollection of a feeling usually precedent, spontaneous expectation of another usually sequent. But such association of feelings can never explain that conception of cause in virtue of which, when accounting for a phenomenon, we set aside the event which in our actual experience has usually preceded it, for one which we only find to precede it in the single case of a crucial experiment. That we do so shows that it is not because of antecedence in time, however apparently uniform, that an educated man reckons a certain event to be the cause of another, but that, because of its sole sufficiency under the sum of known conditions to account for the given event, he decides it to be its uniform antecedent, however much ordinary appearances may tell to the contrary. Thus, though he may still strangely define cause as a uniformly antecedent event (in spite of its being a definition that would prevent him from speaking of gravity as the cause of the fall of a stone), it is clear that by such event he means one determined by a complex of conditions in an unchanging universe. These conditions, again, he may speak of as contingencies,i.e.as events contingent upon other events in endless series, but he must add ‘contingent in accordance with the uniformity of nature’—in other words, he must determine the contingencies by relation to what is not contingent; he must suppose nature unchanging, though our experience of it through sensation be a ‘progressus ad indefinitum’—if he is to allow a possibility of knowledge at all. In short, if events were merely events, feelings that happen to me now and next moment are over, no ‘law of causation’ and therefore no knowledge would be possible. If the knowledge founded on this law actually exists, then the ‘argumentum a contingentiâ mundi’ rightly understood—the ‘inference’ from nature to a being neither in time nor contingent but self-dependent and eternal, that constant reality of which events are the changing appearances—is valid because the conception of nature, of a world to be known, already implies such a being. To the rejoinder that implication in the conception of nature does not prove real existence, the answer must be the question. What meaning has real existence, the antithesis of illusion, except such as is equivalent to this conception?
[1] cf. Book II. chap. xxvi. sec. 1, and chap. xxi. sec. 1.
The world which is to prove an eternal God must be itself eternal.
150. The value, then, of Locke’s demonstration of the existence of God, as an argument from there being something now to an eternal being from which the real existence that we know ‘has all which is in and belongs to it,’ depends on our converting it into the ‘argumentum a contingentiâ mundi,’ stated as above. In other words, it depends on our interpreting it in a manner which may be warranted by his rough account of causation, and by one of the incompatible views of the real that we have found in him, [1] but which is inconsistent with his opposition of reality to the work of the mind, and his reduction of it to ‘particular existence,’ as well as with his ordinary view that ‘infinite’ and ‘eternal’ can represent only a ‘progressus ad indefinitum.’ If by ‘real existence corresponding to an idea’ is meant its presentation in a particular ‘here and now,’ an attempt to find a real existence of God can bring us to nothing but such a contradiction in terms as a first event. To prove it from the real existence of the self is to prove one impossibility from another. If, on the other hand, real existence implies the determination of our ideas by an order of nature—if it means ideas ‘in ordine ad universum’ (to use a Baconian phrase), in distinction from ‘in ordine ad nos’—then the argument from a present to an eternal real existence is valid, but simply in the sense that the present is already real, and ‘has all that is in and belongs to it,’ only in virtue of the relation to the eternal.
[1] See above, paragraphs 49 and 91.
But will the God, whose existence is so proven, be a thinking being?
151. This, it may be said, is to vindicate Locke’s ‘proof’ only by making it Pantheistic. It gives us an eternity of nature, but not God. Our present concern, however, is not with the distinction between Pantheism and true Theism, but with the exposition of Locke’s doctrine according to the only development by which it can be made to show the real existence of an eternal being at all. It is only by making the most of certain Cartesian elements that appear in his doctrine, irreconcileable with its general purport, that we can find fair room in it for such a being, even as the system of nature. Any attempt to exhibit (in Hegelian phrase) ‘Spirit as the truth of nature,’ would be to go wholly beyond our record; yet without this the ‘ens realissimum’ cannot be the God whose existence Locke believes himself to prove—athinkingbeing from whom matter and motion are derived, but in whom they are not. It is true that, according to the context, it is the real existence of the self from which that of the eternal being is proved. This is because, in the Fourth Book, where the ‘proof’ occurs, following the new train of enquiry started by the definition of knowledge, Locke has for the time left in abeyance his fundamental doctrine that all simple ideas are types of reality, and is writing as if ‘my own real existence’ were the only one known with intuitive certainty. This, however, makes no essential difference in the effect of his argument. The given existence, from which the divine is proved, is treated expressly asboth‘material and cogitative:’ nor, since according to Locke the world is both and man is both, and even the ‘thinking thing’ takes its content from impressions made by matter, could it be otherwise. To have taken thought by itself as the basis of the proof would have been to leave the other part of the world, as he conceived it, to be referred to another God. The difficulty then arises, either that there is no inference possible from the nature of the effect to the nature of the eternal being, its cause; in which case no attribute whatever can be asserted of the latter: or that to it too, like the effect, matter as well as thought must belong.
Yes, according to the true notion of the relation between thought and matter.
152. As we have seen, neither of these alternative views is really met by Locke. To the former we may reply that the relation between two events, of which neither has anything in common with the other, but which we improperly speak of as effect and cause (e.g.death and a sunstroke), has no likeness to that which we have explained between the world in its contingency and the world as an eternal system—a relation according to which the cause is the effect in unity. Whatever is part of the reality of the world must belong, it would seem, to the ‘ens realissimum,’ its cause. We are thus thrown back on the other horn of the dilemma. Is not matter part of the reality of the world? This is a question to which the method of observing the individual consciousness can give none but a delusive answer. A true answer cannot be given till for this method has been substituted the enquiry, How knowledge is possible, and it has been found that it is only possible as the progressive actualisation in us of a self-consciousness in itself complete, and which in its completeness includes the world as its object. From the point of view thus attained the question as to matter will be, How is it related to this self-consciousness?—a question to which the answer must vary according to what is understood by ‘matter.’ If it means the abstract opposite of thought—that which is supposed void of all determination that comes of thinking—we must pronounce it simply a delusion, the creation of self-consciousness in one stage of its communication to us. If it means the world as in space and time, this we may allow to be real enough as a stage in the process by which self-consciousness constitutes reality. Thus understood, we may speak of it roughly as part of the ‘ens realissimum’ which the complete self-consciousness, or God, includes as its object, without any limitation of the divine perfectness. The limitation only seems to arise so far as we, being ourselves (as our knowledge and morality testify), though formally self-conscious, yet parts of this partial world, interpret it amiss and ascribe to it a reality, in abstraction from the self-conscious subject, which it only derives from relation to it. Thus while on the one hand it is the presence in us of God, as the self-conscious source of reality, that at once gives us the idea of God and of an eternal self, and renders superfluous the further question as to their real existence; on the other hand it is because, for all this presence, we are but emerging from nature, of which as animals we are parts, that to us there must seem an incompatibility of existence between God and matter, between the self and the flux of events which makes our life. This necessary illusion is our bondage, but when the source of illusion is known, the bondage is already being broken.
Locke’s antinomies—Hume takes one side of them as true.
153. We have now sufficiently explored the system which it was Hume’s mission to try to make consistent with itself. We have found that it is governed throughout by the antithesis between what is given to consciousness—that in regard to which the mind is passive—as the supposed real on the one side, and what is ‘invented,’ ‘created,’ ‘superinduced’ by the mind on the other: while yet this ‘real’ in all its forms, as described by Locke, has turned out to be constituted by such ideas as, according to him, are not given but invented. Stripped of these superinductions, nothing has been found to remain of it but that of which nothing can be said—a chaos of unrelated, and therefore unmeaning,individua. Turning to the theory of the mind itself, the source of the superinduction, we have found this to be a reduplication of the prolonged inconsistency which forms the theory of the ‘real.’ It impresses itself with that which, according to the other theory, is the impress of matter, and it really exists as that which it itself invents. The value of Hume’s philosophy lies in its being an attempt to carry out the antithesis more rigorously—to clear the real, whether under the designation of mind or of its object, of all that could not be reckoned as given in feelings which occur to us ‘whether we will or no.’ The consequence is a splendid failure, a failure which it might have been hoped would have been taken as a sufficient proof that a theory, which starts from that antithesis, cannot even be stated without implicitly contradicting itself.
Hume’s scepticism fatal to his own premises. This derived fromBerkeley.
154. Such a doctrine—a doctrine founded on the testimony of the senses, which ends by showing that the senses testify to nothing—cannot be criticised step by step according to the order in which its author puts it, for its characteristic is that, in order to state itself, it has to take for granted popular notions which it afterwards shows to be unmeaning. Its power over ordinary thinkers lies just in this, that it arrives at its destructive result by means of propositions which every one believes, but to the validity of which its result is really fatal. An account of our primitive consciousness, which derives its plausibility from availing itself of the conceptions of cause and substance, is the basis of the argument which reduces these conceptions to words misunderstood. It cannot, therefore, be treated by itself, as it stands in the first part of the Treatise on the Understanding, but must be taken in connection with Part IV., especially with the section on ‘Scepticism with regard to the Senses;’ not upon the plan of discrediting a principle by reference to the ‘dangerous’ nature of its consequences, but because the final doctrine brings out the inconsistencies lurking in that assumed to begin with. On this side of his scepticism Hume mainly followed the orthodox Berkeley, of whose criticism of Locke, made with a very different purpose, some account must first be given. The connection between the two authors is instructive in many ways; not least as showing that when the most pious theological purpose expresses itself in a doctrine resting on an inadequate philosophical principle, it is the principle and not the purpose that will regulate the permanent effect of the doctrine.
Berkeley’s religious interest in making Locke consistent.
155. Berkeley’s treatises, we must remember, though professedly philosophical, really form a theological polemic. He wrote as the champion of orthodox Christianity against ‘mathematical atheism,’ and, like others of his order, content with the demolition of the rival stronghold, did not stay to enquire whether his own untempered mortar could really hold together the fabric of knowledge and rational religion which he sought to maintain. He found practical ungodliness and immorality excusing themselves by a theory of ‘materialism’—a theory which made the whole conscious experience of man dependent upon ‘unperceiving matter.’ This, whatever it might be, was not an object which man could love or reverence, or to which he could think of himself as accountable. Berkeley, full of devout zeal for God and man, and not without a tincture of clerical party-spirit (as appears in his heat against Shaftesbury, whom he ought to have regarded as a philosophical yoke-fellow), felt that it must be got rid of. He saw, or thought he saw, that the ‘new way of ideas’ had only to be made consistent with itself, and the oppressive shadow must vanish. Ideas, according to that new way (or, to speak less ambiguously, feelings) make up our experience, and they are not matter. Let us get rid, then, of the self-contradictory assumption that they are either copies of matter—copies of that, of which it is the sole and simple differentia that it is not an idea, or its effects—effects of that which can only be described as the unknown opposite of the only efficient power with which we are acquainted—and what becomes of the philosopher’s blind and dead substitute for the living and knowing God? It was one thing, however, to show the contradictions involved in Locke’s doctrine of matter, another effectively to replace it. To the latter end Berkeley cannot be said to have made any permanent contribution. That explicit reduction of ideas to feelings ‘particular in time,’ which was his great weapon of destruction, was incompatible with his doing so. He adds nothing to the philosophy, which he makes consistent with itself, while by making it consistent he empties it of three parts of its suggestiveness. His doctrine, in short, is merely Locke purged, and Locke purged is no Locke.
What is meant by relation of mind and matter?
156. The question which he mainly dealt with may be stated in general terms as that of the relation between the mind and the external world. Under this general statement, however, are covered several distinct questions, the confusion between which has been a great snare for philosophers—questions as to the relations(a)between a sensitive and non-sensitive body,(b)between thought and its object,(c)between thought and something only qualified as the negation of thought. The last question, it will be observed, is what the second becomes upon a certain notion being formed of what the object of thought must be. Upon this notion being discarded a further question(d), also covered by the above general statement, must still remain as to the relation between thought, as in each man, and the world which he does not make, but which, in some sort, makes him what he is. In what follows, these questions, for the sake of brevity, will be referred to symbolically.
Confusions involved in Locke’s materialism.
157. Locke’s doctrine of matter, as we have seen, involves a confusion between(a)and(b). The feeling of touch in virtue of an intellectual interpretation—intellectualbecause implying the action of the mind as (according to Locke) the source of ideas of relation—becomes the idea of solidity,i.e.the idea of a relation between bodies in the way of impulse and resistance. But the function of the intellect in constituting the relation is ignored. Under cover of the ambiguous ‘idea,’ which stands alike for a nervous irritation and the intellectual interpretation thereof, the feeling of touch and conception of solidity are treated as one and the same. Thus the trueconceivedoutwardness of body to body—an outwardness which thought, as the source of relations, can alone constitute—becomes first an imaginaryfeltoutwardness of body to the organs of touch, and then, by a further fallacy—these organs being confused with the mind—an outwardness of body to mind, which we need only kick a stone to be sure of. Meanwhile the consideration of question(d)necessitates the belief that the real world does not come and go with each man’s fleeting consciousness, and no distinction being recognised between consciousness as fleeting and consciousness as permanent, or between feeling and thought, the real world comes to be regarded as the absolute opposite of thought and its work. This opposition combines with the supposed externality of body to mind to give the notion that body is the real. The qualities which ‘the mind finds inseparable from body’ thus become qualities which would exist all the same ‘whether there were a perceiving mind or no,’ and are primarily real; while such as consist in our feelings, though real in so far as, ‘not being of our own making, they imply the action of things without us,’ are yet only secondarily so because this action is relative to something which is not body. Then, finally, by a renewed confusion of the relation between thought and its object with that between body and body, qualities, which are credited with a primary reality as independent of and antithetical to the mind, are brought within it again as ideas. They are supposed to copy themselves upon it by impact and impression; and that not in touch merely, but (visual feelings being interpreted by help of the same conception) in sight also.
Two ways of dealing with it. Berkeley chooses the most obvious.
158. Such ‘materialism’ invites two different methods of attack. On the one hand its recognised principle, that all intellectual ‘superinduction’ upon simple feeling is a departure from the real, may be insisted on, and it may be shown that it is only by such superinduction that simple feeling becomes a feeling of body. Matter, then, with all its qualities, is a fiction except so far as these can be reduced to simple feelings. Such in substance was Berkeley’s short method with the materialists. In his early life it seemed to him sufficient for the purposes of orthodox ‘spiritualism,’ because, having posed the materialist, he took the moral and spiritual attributes of God as ‘revealed,’ without enquiring into the possibility of such revelation to a merely sensitive consciousness. As he advanced, other questions, fatal to the constructive value of his original method, began to force themselves upon him. Granting that intellectual superinduction = fiction, how is the fiction possible to a mind which cannot originate? Exclude from reality all that such fiction constitutes, and what remains to be real? These questions, however, though their effect on his mind appears in the later sections of his ‘Siris,’ he never systematically pursued. He thus missed the true method of attack on materialism—the only one that does not build again that which it destroys—the method which allows that matter is real but only so in virtue of that intellectual superinduction upon feeling without which there could be for us no reality at all: that thus it is indeed opposed to thought, but only by a position which is thought’s own act. For the development of such views Berkeley had not patience in his youth nor leisure in his middle life. Whatever he may have suggested, all that he logically achieved was an exposure of the equivocation between feeling and felt body; and of this the next result, as appears in Hume, was a doctrine which indeed delivers mind from dependence on matter, but only by reducing it in effect to a succession of feelings which cannot know themselves.
His account of the relation between visible and tangible extension.We do not see bodies without the mind …
159. It was upon the extension of the metaphor of impression to sight as well as touch, and the consequent notion that body, with its inseparable qualities, revealed itself through both senses, that Berkeley first fastened. Is it evident, as Locke supposed it to be, that men ‘perceive by their sight’ not colours merely, but ‘a distance between bodies of different colours and between parts of the same body’; [1] in other words, situation and magnitude? To show that they do not is the purpose of Berkeley’s ‘Essay towards a new Theory of Vision.’ He starts from two principles which he takes as recognised: one, that the ‘proper and immediate object of sight is colour’; the other, that distance from the eye, or distance in the line of vision, is not immediately seen. If, then, situation and magnitude are ‘properly and immediately’ seen, they must be qualities of colour. Now in one sense, according to Berkeley, they are so: in other words, there is such a thing asvisibleextension. We see lights and colours in ‘sundry situations’ as well as ‘in degrees of faintness and clearness, confusion and distinctness.’ (Theory of Vision, sec. 77.) We also see objects as made up of certain ‘quantities of coloured points,’i.e.as having visible magnitude. (Ibid. sec. 54.) But situation and magnitudeas visibleare not external, not ‘qualities of body,’ nor do they represent by anynecessaryconnection the situation and magnitude that are truly qualities of body, the mind, ‘without the mind and at a distance.’ These are tangible. Distance in all its forms—as distance from the eye; as distance between parts of the same body, or magnitude; and as distance of body from body, or situation—is tangible. What a man means when he says that ‘he sees this or that thing at a distance’ is that ‘what he sees suggests to his understanding that after having passed a certain distance, to be measured by the motion of his body which is perceivable by touch, he shall come to perceive such and such tangible ideas which have been usually connected with such and such visible ideas’ (Ibid. sec. 45). On the same principle we are said to see the magnitude and situation of bodies. Owing to long experience of the connection of these tangible ideas with visible ones, the magnitude of the latter and their degrees of faintness and clearness, of confusion and distinctness, enable us to form a ‘sudden and true’ estimate of the magnitude of the former (i.e.of bodies); even as visible situation enables us to form a like estimate of the ‘situation of things outward and tangible’ (Ibid. secs. 56 and 99). The connection, however, between the two sets of ideas, Berkeley insists, is habitual only, not necessary. As Hume afterwards said of the relation of cause and effect, it is not constituted by the nature of the ideas related. [2] The visible ideas, that as a matter of fact ‘suggest to us the various magnitudes of external objects before we touch them, might have suggested no such thing.’ That would really have been the case had our eyes been so framed as that themaximum visibileshould be less than theminimum tangibile; and, as a matter of constant experience, the greater visible extension suggests sometimes a greater, sometimes a less, tangible extension according to the degree of its strength or faintness, ‘being in its own nature equally fitted to bring into our minds the idea of small or great or no size at all, just as the words of a language are in their own nature indifferent to signify this or that thing, or nothing at all.’ (Ibid. secs. 62-64.)
[1] Locke, Essay Book II. chap. xiii. sec. 2.
[2] See below, paragraph 283
… nor yet feel them. The ‘esse’ of body is the ‘percipi’.
160. So far, then, the conclusion merely is that body as external, and space as a relation between bodies or parts of a body, are not both seen and felt, but felt only; in other words, that it is only through the organs of touch that we receive, strictly speaking, impressions from without. This is all that the Essay on Vision goes to show; but according to the ‘Principles of Human Knowledge’ this conclusion was merely provisional. The object of touch does not, any more than the object of sight, ‘exist without the mind,’ nor is it ‘the image of an external thing.’ ‘In strict truth the ideas of sight, when by them we apprehend distance and things placed at a distance, do not suggest or mark out to us things actually existing at a distance, but only admonish us what ideas of touch will be imprinted in our minds at such and such distances of time, and in consequence of such and such actions’ (‘Principles of H. K.’ sec. 44). Whether, then, we speak of visible or tangible objects, the objectisthe idea, its ‘esse is the percipi.’ Body is not a thing separate from the idea of touch, yet revealed by it; so far as it exists at all, it must either be that idea or be a succession of ideas of which that idea is suggestive. It follows that the notion of the real which identifies it with matter, as something external to and independent of consciousness, and which derives the reality of ideas from their relation to body as thus outward, must disappear. Must not, then, the distinction between the real and fantastic, between dreams and facts, disappear with it? What meaning is there in asking whether any given idea is real or not, unless a reference is implied to something other than the idea itself?
[There are no paragraphs 161-169 in any edition or reprint. Tr]
What then becomes of distinction between reality and fancy?
170. Berkeley’s theory, no less than Locke’s, requires such reference. He insists, as much as Locke does, on the difference between ideas of imagination which do, and those of sense which do not, depend on our own will. ‘It is no more than willing, and straightway this or that idea arises in my fancy; and by the same power it is obliterated and makes way for another.’ But ‘when in broad daylight I open my eyes, it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or no, or to determine what particular objects shall present themselves to my view.’ Moreover ‘the ideas of sense are more strong, lively and distinct than those of the imagination; they have likewise a steadiness, order, and coherence, and are not excited at random as those which are the effects of human wills often are, but in a regular train and series’ (Ibid. secs. 28-30). These characteristics of ideas of sense, however, do not with Berkeley, any more than with Locke, properly speaking,constitutetheir reality. This lies in their relation to something else, of which these characteristics are the tests. The difference between the two writers lies in their several views as to what this ‘something else’ is. With Locke it was body or matter, as proximately, though in subordination to the Divine Will, the ‘imprinter’ of those most lively ideas which we cannot make for ourselves. His followers insisted on the proximate, while they ignored the ultimate, reference. Hence, as Berkeley conceived, their Atheism, which he could cut from under their feet by the simple plan of eliminating the proximate reference altogether, and thus showing that God, not matter, is the immediate ‘imprinter’ of ideas on the senses and the suggester of such ideas of imagination as the ideas of sense, in virtue of habitual association, constantly introduce (Ibid. sec. 33).
The real = ideas that God causes.
171. To eliminate the reference to matter might seem to be more easy than to substitute for it a reference to God. If the object of the idea is only the idea itself, does not all determination by relation logically disappear from the idea, except (perhaps) such as consists in the fact of its sequence or antecedence to other ideas? This issue was afterwards to be tried by Hume—with what consequences to science and religion we shall see. Berkeley avoids it by insisting that the ‘percipi,’ to which ‘esse’ is equivalent, implies reference to a mind. At first sight this reference, as common to all ideas alike, would not seem to avail much as a basis either for a distinction between the real and fantastic or for any Theism except such as would ‘entitle God to all our fancies.’ If it is to serve Berkeley’s purpose, we must suppose the idea to carry with it not merely a relation to mind but a relation to it as its effect, and the conscious subject to carry with him such a distinction between his own mind and God’s as leads him to refer his ideas to God’s mind as their cause when they are lively, distinct and coherent, but when they are otherwise, to his own. And this, in substance, is Berkeley’s supposition. To show the efficient power of mind he appeals to our consciousness of ability to produce at will ideas of imagination; to show that there is a divine mind, distinct from our own, he appeals to our consciousness of inability to produce ideas of sense.
Is it then a succession of feelings?
172. Even those least disposed to ‘vanquish Berkeley with a grin’ have found his doctrine of the real, which is also his doctrine of God, ‘unsatisfactory.’ By the real world they are accustomed to understand something which—at least in respect of its ‘elements’ or ‘conditions’ or ‘laws’—permanently is; though the combinations of the elements, the events which flow from the conditions, the manifestations of the laws, may never be at one time what they will be at the next. But according to the Berkeleian doctrine the permanent seems to disappear: the ‘is’ gives place to a ‘has been’ and ‘will be.’ If I say (δεικτικῶς) [1] ‘there is a body,’ I must mean according to it that a feeling has just occurred to me, which has been so constantly followed by certain other feelings that it suggests a lively expectation of these. The suggestive feeling aloneis, and it is ceasing to be. If this is the true account of propositions suggested by everyone’s constantly-recurrent experience, what are we to make of scientific truths,e.g.‘a body will change its place sooner than let another enter it,’ ‘planets move in ellipses,’ ‘the square on the hypotheneuse is equal to the squares on the sides.’ In these cases, too, does the present reality lie merely in a feeling experienced by this or that scientific man, and to him suggestive of other feelings? Does the proposition that ‘planets move in ellipses’ mean that to some watcher of the skies, who understands Kepler’s laws, a certain perception of ‘visible extension’ (i.e.of colour or light and shade) not only suggests, as to others, a particular expectation of other feelings, which expectation is called a planet, but a further expectation, not shared by the multitude, of feelings suggesting successive situations of the visible extension, which further expectation is called elliptical motion? Such an explanation of general propositions would be a form of the doctrine conveniently named after Protagoras—‘ἀληθὲς ὃ ἑκάστῳ ἑκάστοτε δοκεῖ’ [2]—a doctrine which the vindicators of Berkeley are careful to tell us we must not confound with his. The question, however, is not whether Berkeley himself admits the doctrine, but whether or no it is the logical consequence of the method which he uses for the overthrow of materialists and ‘mathematical Atheists’?
[1] [Greek δεικτικῶς (deiktikos) = “affirmatively” or “capable of being proven”i.e.not merely hypothetically. Tr.]
[2] [Greek ἀληθὲς ὃ ἑκάστῳ ἑκάστοτε δοκεῖ (alethes ho hekasto hekastote dokei) = the truth for each man is as it appears to him. Tr.]
Berkeley goes wrong from confusion between thought and feeling. ForLocke’s ‘idea of a thing’ he substitutes ‘idea’ simply.
173. His purpose was the maintenance of Theism, and a true instinct told him that pure Theism, as distinct from nature-worship and daemonism, has no philosophical foundation, unless it can be shown that there is nothing real apart from thought. But in the hurry of theological advocacy, and under the influence of a misleading terminology, he failed to distinguish this true proposition—there is nothing real apart from thought—from this false one, its virtual contradictory—there is nothing other than feeling. The confusion was covered, if not caused, by the ambiguity, often noticed, in the use of the term ‘idea.’ This to Berkeley’s generation stood alike for feeling proper, which to the subject that merely feels is neither outer nor inner, because not referring itself to either mind or thing, and for conception, or an object thought of under relations. According to Locke, pain, colour, solidity, are all ideas equally with each other and equally with theidea ofpain,idea ofcolour,idea ofsolidity. If all alike, however, were feelings proper, there would be no world either to exist or be spoken of. Locke virtually saves it by two suppositions, each incompatible with the equivalence of idea to feeling, and implying the conversion of it into conception as above defined. One is that there are abstract ideas; the other that there are primary qualities of which ideas are copies, but which do not come and go with our feelings. The latter supposition gives a world that ‘really exists,’ the former a world that may be known and spoken of; but neither can maintain itself without a theory of conception which is not forthcoming in Locke himself. We need not traverse again the contradictions which according to his statement they involve—contradictions which, under whatever disguise, must attach to every philosophy that admits a reality either in things as apart from thought or in thought as apart from things, and only disappear when the thing as thought of, and through thought individualised by the relations which constitute its community with the universe, is recognised as alone the real. Misled by the phrase ‘idea of a thing,’ we fancy that idea and thing have each a separate reality of their own, and then puzzle ourselves with questions as to how the idea can represent the thing—how the ideas of primary qualities can be copies of them, and how, if the real thing of experience be merely individual, a general idea can be abstracted from it. These questions Berkeley asked and found unanswerable. There were then two ways of dealing with them before him. One was to supersede them by a truer view of thought and its object, as together in essential correlation constituting the real; but this way he did not take. The other was to avoid them by merging both thing and idea in the indifference of simple feeling. For a merely sentient being, it is true—for one who did not think upon his feelings—the oppositions of inner and outer, of subjective and objective, of fantastic and real, would not exist; but neither would knowledge or a world to be known. That such oppositions, misunderstood, may be a heavy burden on the human spirit, the experience of current controversy and its spiritual effects might alone suffice to convince us; but the philosophical deliverance can only lie in the recognition of thought as their author, not in the attempt to obliterate them by the reduction of thought and its world to feeling—an attempt which contradicts itself, since it virtually admits their existence while it renders them unaccountable.
Which, if idea = feeling, does away with space and body.
174. That Berkeley’s was such an attempt, looking merely to his treatment of primary qualities and abstract ideas, we certainly could not doubt: though, since language does not allow of its consistent statement, and Berkeley was quite ready to turn the exigencies of language to account, passages logically incompatible with it may easily be found in him. The hasty reader, when he is told that body or distance are suggested by feelings of sight and touch rather than immediately seen, accepts the doctrine without scruple, because he supposes that which is suggested to be a present reality, though not at present felt. But if not at present felt it is not according to Berkeley an idea, therefore ‘without the mind,’ therefore an impossibility. [1] That which is suggested, then, must itself be a feeling which consists in the expectation of other feelings. Distance, and body,as suggested, can be no more than such an expectation; and asactually existing, no more than the actual succession of the expected feelings—a succession of which, as of every succession, ‘no two parts exist together.’ [2] There is no time, then, at which it can be said that distance and body exist.
[1] Reference is here merely made to the doctrine by which Berkeley disposes of ‘matter,’ the consideration of its reconcilability with his doctrine of ‘spirits’ and ‘relations’ as objects of knowledge being postponed.
[2] Locke, Book II. chap. xv. sec. 1.
He does not even retain them as ‘abstract ideas’.
175. This, it may seem, however inconsistent with the doctrine of primary qualities, is little more than the result which Locke himself comes to in his Fourth Book; since, if ‘actual present succession’ forms our only knowledge of real existence, there could be no time at which distance and body might beknownas really existing. But Locke, as we have seen, is able to save mathematical, though not physical, knowledge from the consequences of this admission by his doctrine of abstract ideas—‘ideas removed in our thoughts from particular existence’—whose agreement or disagreement is stated in propositions which ‘concern not existence,’ and for that reason may be general without becoming either uncertain or uninstructive. This doctrine Berkeley expressly rejects on the ground that he could not perceive separately that which could not exist separately (‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ Introduction, sec. 10); a ground which to the ordinary reader seems satisfactory because he has no doubt, and Berkeley’s instances do not suggest a doubt, as to the present existence of ‘individual objects’—this man, this horse, this body. But with Berkeley to exist means to be felt (‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 3), and the feelings, which I name a body, being successive, its existence must be in succession likewise. The limitation, then, of possibility of ‘conception’ by possibility of existence, means that ‘conception,’ too, is reduced to a succession of feelings.
On the same principle all permanent relations should disappear.
176. Berkeley, then, as a consequence of the methods by which he disposes at once of the ‘real existence’ and ‘abstract idea of matter,’ has to meet the following questions:—How are either reality or knowledge possible without permanent relations? and, How can feelings, of which one is over before the next begins, constitute or represent a world of permanent relations? The difficulty becomes more obvious, though not more serious, when the relations in question are not merely themselves permanent, as are those between natural phenomena, but are relations between permanent parts like those of space. It is for this reason that its doctrine of geometry is the most easily assailable point of the ‘sensational’ philosophy. Locke distinguishes the ideas of space and of duration as got, the one from the permanent parts of space, the other ‘from the fleeting and perpetually perishing parts of succession.’ [1] He afterwards prefers to oppose the term ‘expansion’ to ‘duration,’ as bringing out more clearly than ‘space’ the opposition of relation between permanent facts to that between ‘fleeting successive facts which never exist together.’ How, then, can a consciousness, consisting simply of ‘fleeting successive facts,’ either be or represent that of which the differentia is that its facts are permanent and co-exist?
[1] Book II. chap. xiv. sec. 1.
By making colour = relations of coloured points, Berkeley represents relation as seen.
177. This crucial question in regard to extension does not seem even to have suggested itself to Berkeley. The reason why is not far to seek. Professor Fraser, in his valuable edition, represents him as meaning by visible extension ‘coloured experience in sense,’ and by tangible extension ‘resistent experience in sense.’ [1] No fault can be found with this interpretation, but the essential question, which Berkeley does not fairly meet, is whether the experience in each case is complete in a single feeling or consists in a succession of feelings. If in a single feeling, it clearly is not extension, as a relation between parts, at all; if in a succession of feelings, it is only extension because a synthetic principle, which is not itself one of the feelings, but equally present to them all, transforms them into permanent parts of which each qualifies the other by outwardness to it. Berkeley does not see the necessity of such a principle, because he allows himself to suppose extension—at any rate visible extension—to be constituted by a single feeling. Having first pronounced that the proper object of sight is colour, he quietly substitutes for thissituationsof colour, degrees of strength and faintness in colour, and quantities of coloured points, as if these, interchangeably with mere colour, were properly objects of sight and perceived in single acts of vision. Now if by object of sight were meant something other than the sensation itself—something which to a thinking being it suggests as its cause—there would be no harm in this language, but neither would there be any ground for saying that the proper object of sight is colour, for distinguishing visible from tangible extension, or for denying that the outwardness of body to body is seen. Such restrictions and distinctions have no meaning, unless by sight is meant the nervous irritation, the affection of the visual organ, as it is to a merely feeling subject; yet in the very passages where he makes them, by saying that we see situations and degrees of colour, and quantities of coloured points, Berkeley converts sight into a judgment of extensive and intensive quantity. He thus fails to discern that the transition from colour to coloured extension cannot be made without on the one hand either the presentation of successive pictures or (which comes to the same) successive acts of attention to a single picture, and on the other hand a synthesis of the successive presentations as mutually qualified parts of a whole. In other words, he ignores the work of thought involved in the constitution alike of coloured and tangible extension, and in virtue of which alone either is extension at all.
[1] See Fraser’s Berkeley, ‘Theory of Vision,’ note 42. I may here say that I have gone into less detail in my account of Berkeley’s system than I should otherwise have thought necessary, because Professor Fraser has supplied, in the way of explanation of it, all that a student can require.
Still he admits that space is constituted by a succession of feelings.
178. But though he does not scruple to substitute for colour situations and quantities of coloured points, these do not with him constitute space, which he takes according to Locke’s account of it to be ‘distance between bodies or parts of the same body.’ This, according to his ‘Theory of Vision,’ is tangible extension, and this again is alone the object of geometry. As in that treatise a difference is still supposed betweentangibleextension and the feeling of touch, the question does not there necessarily arise whether the tactual experience, that constitutes this extension, is complete in a single feeling or only in a succession of feelings; but when in the subsequent treatise the difference is effaced, it is decided by implication that the experience is successive: [1] and all received modifications of the theory, which assign to a locomotive or muscular sense the office which Berkeley roughly assigned to touch, make the same implication still more clearly. Now in the absence of any recognition of a synthetic principle, in relation to which the successive experience becomes what it is not in itself, this means nothing else than that space is a succession of feelings, which again means that space is not space, not a qualification of bodies or parts of body by mutual externality, since to such qualification it is necessary that bodies or their parts coexist. Thus, in his hurry to get rid of externality as independence of the mind, he has really got rid of it as a relation between bodies, and in so doing (however the result may be disguised) has logically made a clean sweep of geometry and physics.
[1] ‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 44. It will be observed that in that passage Berkeley uses the term ‘distance’ not ‘space,’ and though with him the terms are strictly interchangeable, this may have helped to disguise from him the full monstrosity of the doctrine, ‘space is a succession of feelings,’ which, stated in that form, must surely have scandalised him.
If so, it is not space at all; but Berkeley thinks it is only not ‘pure’ space.Spaceandpurespace stand or fall together.
179. Of this result he himself shows no suspicion. He professes to be able, without violence to his doctrine, to accept the sciences as they stand, except so far as they rest upon the needless and unmeaning assumptions (as he reckoned them) ofpurespace and its infinite divisibility. The truth seems to be that—at any rate in the state of mind represented his earlier treatises—he was only able to work on the lines which Locke had laid. It did not occur to him to treat the primary qualities as relations constituted by thought, because Locke had not done so. Locke having treated them as external to the mind, Berkeley does so likewise, and for that reason feels that they must be got rid of. The mode of riddance, again, was virtually determined for him by Locke. Locke having admitted that they copied themselves in feelings, the untenable element in this supposition had only to be dropped and they became feelings simply. It is thus only so far as space is supposed to exist after a mode of which, according to Locke himself, sense could take no copy—i.e.as exclusive not merely of all colour but of all body, and as infinitely divisible—that Berkeley becomes aware of its incompatibility with his doctrine. Pure space, or ‘vacuum,’ to him means space that can not be touched—a tangible extension that is not tangible—and is therefore a contradiction in terms. The notion that, though not touched, it might be seen, he excludes, [1] apparently for the same reason which prevents him from allowingvisibleextension to be space at all; the reason, namely, that there is no ‘outness’ or relation of externality between the parts of such extension. The fact that there can be no such relation between the successive feelings which alone, according to him, constitute ‘tangible extension,’ he did not see to be equally fatal to the latter being in any true sense space. In other words, he did not see that the test of reduction to feeling, by which he disposed of thevacuum, disposed of space altogether. If he had, he would have understood that space and body were intelligible relations, which can be thought of apart from the feelings which through them become the world that we know, since it is they that are the conditions of these feelings becoming a knowledge, not the feelings that are the condition of the relations being known. Whether they can be thought of apart from each other—whether the simple relation of externality between parts of a whole can be thought of without the parts being considered as solid—is of course a further question, and one which Berkeley cannot be said properly to discuss at all, since the abstraction of space from body to him meant its abstraction from feelings of touch. The answer to it ceases to be difficult as soon as the question is properly stated.
[1] ‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 116.
Berkeley disposes of space for fear of limiting God.
180. As with vacuum, so with infinite divisibility. Once let it be understood that extension is constituted by the relation of externality between homogeneous parts, and it follows that there can be noleastpart of extension, none that does not itself consist of parts; in other words, that it is infinitely divisible: just as conversely it follows that there can be nolastpart of it, not having another outside it; in other words, that (to use Locke’s phrase) it is infinitely addible. Doubtless, as Berkeley held, there is a ‘minimum visibile’; but this means that there are conditions under which any seen colour disappears, and disappearing, ceases to be known under the relation of extension; but it is only through a confusion of the relation with the colour that the disappearance of the latter is thought to be a disappearance of so much extension. [1] It was, in short, the same failure to recognise the true ideality of space, as a relation constituted by thought, that on the one hand made its ‘purity’ and infinity unmeaning to Berkeley, and on the other made him think that, if pure (sc. irreducible to feelings) and infinite, it must limit the Divine perfection, either as being itself God or as ‘something beside God which is eternal, uncreated, and infinite’ (‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 117). Fear of this result set him upon that method of resolving space, and with it the world of nature, into sequent feelings, which, if it had been really susceptible of logical expression, would at best have given him nothing but a μέγα ζῶον [2] for God. If he had been in less of a hurry with his philosophy, he might have found that the current tendency to ‘bind God in nature or diffuse in space’ required to be met by a sounder than his boyish idealism—by an idealism which gives space its due, but reflects that to make space God, or a limitation on God, is to subject thought itself to the most superficial of the relations by which it forms the world that it knows.
[1] The same remark of course applies,mutatis mutandis, to the ‘minimum tangibile.’ See below, paragraphs 265 and 260.
[2] [Greek μέγα ζῶον (mega zoon) = great being. Tr.]
How he deals with possibility of general knowledge.
181. So far we have only considered Berkeley’s reduction of primary qualities, supposed to be sensible, to sensations as it affects the qualities themselves, rather than as it affects the possibility of universal judgments about them. If, indeed, as we have found, such reduction really amounts to the absolute obliteration of the qualities, no further question can remain as to the possibility of general knowledge concerning them. As Berkeley, however, did not admit the obliteration, the further question did remain for him: and the condition of his plausibly answering it was that he should recognise in the ‘idea,’ as subject of predication, that intelligible qualification by relation which he did not recognise in it simply as ‘idea,’ and which essentially differences it from feeling proper. If any particular ‘tangible extension,’e.g.a right-angled triangle, is only a feeling, or in Berkeley’s own language, ‘a fleeting perishable passion’ [1] not existing at all, even as an ‘abstract idea,’ except when some one’s tactual organs are being affected in a certain way—what are we to make of such a general truth as that the square on its base is always equal to the squares on its sides? Omitting all difficulties about the convertibility of a figure with a feeling, we find two questions still remain—How such separation can be made of the figure from the other conditions of the tactual experience as that propositions should be possible which concern the figure simply; and how a single case of tactual experience—that in which the mathematician finds a feeling called a right-angled triangle followed by another which he calls equality between the squares, &c.—leads in the absence of any ‘necessary connexion’ to the expectation that the sequence will always be the same. [2] The difficulty becomes the more striking when it is remembered that though the geometrical proposition in question, according to Berkeley, concerns the tangible, the experience which suggests it is merely visual.
[1] ‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 89.
[2] See above, paragraph 122.
His theory of universals …
182. Berkeley’s answer to these questions must be gathered from his theory of general names. ‘It is, I know,’ he says, ‘a point much insisted on, that all knowledge and demonstration are about universal notions, to which I fully agree: but then it does not appear to me that those notions are formed by abstraction—universality, so far as I can comprehend, not consisting in the absolute positive nature or conception of anything, but in the relation it bears to the particulars signified or represented by it; by virtue whereof it is that things, names, or notions, being in their own natureparticular, are rendered universal. Thus, when I demonstrate any proposition concerning triangles, it is to be supposed that I have in view the universal idea of a triangle; which is not to be understood as if I could frame an idea of a triangle which was neither equilateral nor scalene nor equicrural; but only that the particular triangle I considered, whether of this or that sort it matters not, doth equally stand for and represent all rectilinear triangles whatsoever, and is in that sense universal.’ Thus it is that ‘a man may consider a figure merely as triangular.’ (‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ Introd. secs. 15 and 16.)
… of value, as implying that universality of ideas lies in relation.
183. In this passage appear the beginnings of a process of thought which, if it had been systematically pursued by Berkeley, might have brought him to understand by the ‘percipi,’ to which he pronounced ‘esse’ equivalent, definitely the ‘intelligi.’ As it stands, the result of the passage merely is that the triangle (for instance) ‘in its own nature,’ because ‘particular,’ is not a possible subject of general predication or reasoning: that it is so only as ‘considered’ under a relation of resemblance to other triangles and by such consideration universalized. ‘In its own nature,’ or as a ‘particular idea,’ the triangle, we must suppose, is so much tangible (or visible, as symbolical of tangible) extension, and therefore according to Berkeley a feeling. But a relation, as he virtually admits, [1] is neither a feeling nor felt. The triangle, then, as considered under relation and thus a possible subject of general propositions, is quite other than the triangle in its own nature. This, of course, is so far merely a virtual repetition of Locke’s embarrassing doctrine that real things are not the things which we speak of, and which are the subject of our sciences; but it is a repetition with two fruitful differences—one, that the thing in its ‘absolute positive nature’ is more explicitly identified with feeling; the other, that the process, by which the thing thought and spoken of is supposed to be derived from the real thing, is no longer one of ‘abstraction,’ but consists in consideration of relation. It is true that with Berkeley the mere feeling has a ‘positive nature’ apart from considered relations, [2] and that the considered relation, by which the feeling is universalised, is only that of resemblance between properties supposed to exist independently of it. The ‘particular triangle,’ reducible to feelings of touch, has its triangularity (we must suppose) simply as a feeling. It is only the resemblance between the triangularity in this and other figures—not the triangularity itself—that is a relation, and, as a relation, not felt but considered; or in Berkeley’s language, something of which we have not properly an ‘idea’ but a ‘notion.’ [3]
[1] See ‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 89. (2nd edit.)
[2] See below, paragraph 298.
[3] ‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ Ibid. This perhaps is the best place for saying that it is not from any want of respect for Dr. Stirling that I habitually use ‘notion’ in the loose popular way which he counts ‘barbarous,’ but because the barbarism is so prevalent that it seems best to submit to it, and to use ‘conception’ as the equivalent of the German ‘Begriff.’
But he fancies that each idea has a positive nature apart from relation.
184. But though Berkeley only renders explicit the difficulties implicit in Locke’s doctrine of ideas, that is itself a great step taken towards disposing of them. Once let the equivocation between sensible qualities and sensations be got rid of—once let it be admitted that the triangle in its absolute nature, as opposed to the triangle considered, is merely a feeling, and that relations are not feelings or felt—and the question must soon arise, What in the absence of all relation remains to be the absolute nature of the triangle? It is a question which ultimately admits of but one answer. The triangularity of the given single figure must be allowed to be just as much a relation as the resemblance, consisting in triangularity, between it and other figures; and if a relation, then not properly felt, but understood. The ‘particular’ triangle, if by that is meant the triangle as subject of a singular proposition, is no more ‘particular in time,’ no more constituted by the occurrence of a feeling, than is the triangle as subject of a general proposition. It really exists as constituted by relation, and therefore only as ‘considered’ or understood. In its existence, as in the consideration of it, the relations indicated by the terms ‘equilateral, equicrural and scalene,’ presuppose the relation of triangularity, not it them; and for that reason it can be considered apart from them, though not they apart from it, without any breach between that which is considered and that which really exists. Thus, too, it becomes explicable that a single experiment should warrant a universal affirmation; that the mathematician, having once found as the result of a certain comparison of magnitudes that the square on the hypothenuse is equal to the square on the sides, without waiting for repeated experience at once substitutes for the singular proposition, which states his discovery, a general one. If the singular proposition stated a sensible event or the occurrence of a feeling, such substitution would be inexplicable: for if that were the true account of the singular proposition, a general one could but express such expectation of the recurrence of the event as repeated experience of it can alone give. But a relation is not contingent with the contingency of feeling. It is permanent with the permanence of the combining and comparing thought which alone constitutes it; and for that reason, whether it be recognised as the result of a mathematical construction or of a crucial experiment in physics, the proposition which states it must already be virtually universal.
Traces of progress in his idealism.
185. Of such a doctrine Berkeley is rather the unconscious forerunner than the intelligent prophet. It is precisely upon the question whether, or how far, he recognised the constitution of things by intelligible relations, that the interpretation of his early (which is his only developed) idealism rests. Is it such idealism as Hume’s, or such idealism as that adumbrated in some passages of his own ‘Siris’? Is the idea, which is real, according to him a feeling or a conception? Has it a nature of its own, consisting simply in its being felt, and which we afterwards for purposes of our own consider in various relations; or does the nature consist only in relations, which again imply the action of a mind that is eternal—present to that which is in succession, but not in succession itself? The truth seems to be that this question in its full significance never presented itself to Berkeley, at least during the period represented by his philosophical treatises. His early idealism, as we learn from the commonplace-book brought to light by Professor Fraser, was merely a cruder form of Hume’s. By the time of the publication of the ‘Principles of Human Knowledge’ he had learnt that, unless this doctrine was to efface ‘spirit’ as well as ‘matter,’ he must modify it by the admission of a ‘thing’ that was not an ‘idea,’ and of which the ‘esse’ was ‘percipere’ not ‘percipi.’ This admission carried with it the distinction between the object felt and the object known, between ‘idea’ and ‘notion’—a distinction which was more clearly marked in the ‘Dialogues.’ Of ‘spirit’ we could have a ‘notion,’ though not an ‘idea.’ But it was only in the second edition of the ‘Principles’ that ‘relation’ was put along with ‘spirit,’ as that which could be known but which was no ‘idea:’ and then without any recognition of the fact that the whole reduction of primary qualities to mere ideas was thereby invalidated. The objects, with which the mathematician deals, are throughout treated as in their own nature ‘particular ideas,’ into the constitution of which relation does not enter at all; in other words, as successive feelings.
His way of dealing with physical truths.
186. If the truths of mathematics seemed to Berkeley explicable on this supposition, those of the physical sciences were not likely to seem less so. As long as the relations with which these sciences deal are relations between ‘sensible objects,’ he does not notice that theyarerelations, and therefore not feelings or felt, at all. He treats felt things as if the same as feelings, and ignores the relations altogether. Thus a so-called ‘sensible’ motion causes him no difficulty. He would be content to say that it was a succession of ideas, not perceiving that motion implies a relation between spaces or moments as successively occupied by something that remains one with itself—a relation which a mere sequence of feelings could neither constitute nor of itself suggest. It is only about a motion which does not profess to be ‘seen,’ such as the motion of the earth, that any question is raised—a question easily disposed of by the consideration that in a different position we should see it. ‘The question whether the earth moves or not amounts in reality to no more than this, to wit, whether we have reason to conclude from what hath been observed by astronomers, that if we were placed in such and such circumstances, and such or such a position and distance both from the earth and sun, we should perceive the former to move among the choir of the planets, and appearing in all respects like one of them: and this by the established rules of nature, which we have no reason to mistrust, is reasonably collected from the phenomena’ (‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 58). [1]
[1] Cf. ‘Dialogues,’ page 147, in Prof. Fraser’s edition.
If they imply permanent relations, his theory properly excludes them.He supposes a divine decree that one feeling shall follow another.
187. Now this passage clearly does not mean—as it ought to mean if the ‘esse’ of the motion were the ‘percipi’ by us—that the motion of the earth would begin as soon as we were there to see it. It means that it is now going on as an ‘established law of nature,’ which may be ‘collected from the phenomena.’ In other words, it means that our successive feelings are so related to each other as determined by one present and permanent system, on which not they only but all possible feelings depend, that by a certain set of them we are led—not to expect a recurrence of them in like order according to the laws of association, but, what is the exact reverse of this—to infer that certain other feelings, of which we have no experience, would now occur to us if certain conditions of situation on our part were fulfilled, because the ‘ordo ad universum,’ of which these feelings would be the ‘ordo ad nos,’ does now obtain. But though Berkeley’s words mean this for us, they did not mean it for him. That such relation—merely intelligible, or according to his phraseology not an idea or object of an idea at all, as he must have admitted it to be—gives to our successive feelings the only ‘nature’ that they possess, he never recognised. By the relation of idea to idea, as he repeatedly tells us, he meant not a ‘necessary connexion,’i.e.not a relation without which, neither idea would be what it is, but suchde factosequence of one upon the other as renders the occurrence of one the unfailing but arbitrary sign that the other is coming. It is thus according to him (and here Hume merely followed suit) that feelings are symbolical—symbolical not of an order other than the feelings and which accounts for them, but simply of feelings to follow. To Berkeley, indeed, unlike Hume, the sequence of feelings symbolical of each other is also symbolical of something farther, viz. the mind of God: but when we examine what this ‘mind’ means, we find that it is not an intelligible order by which our feelings may be interpreted, or the spiritual subject of such an order, but simply the arbitrary will of a creator that this feeling shall follow that.
Locke had explained reality by relation of ideas to outward body.Liveliness in the idea evidence of this relation.
188. Such a doctrine could not help being at once confused in its account of reality, and insecure in its doctrine alike of the human spirit and of God. On the recognition of relations as constituting thenatureof ideas rests the possibility of any tenable theory of their reality. An isolated idea could be neither real nor unreal. Apart from a definite order of relation we may suppose (if we like) that it wouldbe, but it would certainly not be real; and as little could it be unreal, since unreality can only result from the confusion in our consciousness of one order of relation with another. It is diversity of relations that distinguishes, for instance, these letters as they now appear on paper from the same as I imagine them with my eyes shut, giving each sort its own reality: just as upon confusion with the other each alike becomes unreal. Thus, though with Locke simple ideas are necessarily real, we soon find that even according to him they are not truly so in their simplicity, but only as related to an external thing producing them. He is right enough, however inconsistent with himself, in making relation constitute reality; wrong in limiting this prerogative to the one relation of externality. When he afterwards, in virtual contradiction to this limitation, finds the reality of moral and mathematical ideas just in that sole relation to the mind, as its products, which he had previously made the source of all unreality, he forces upon us the explanation which he does not himself give, that unreality does not lie in either relation as opposed to the other, but in the confusion of any relation with another. It is for lack of this explanation that Locke himself, as we have seen, finds in the liveliness and involuntariness of ideas the sole and sufficient tests (notconstituents) of their reality; though they are obviously tests which put the dreams of a man in a fever upon the same footing with the ‘impressions’ of a man awake, and would often prove that unreal after dinner which had been proved real before. There is a well-known story of a man who in a certain state of health commonly saw a particular gory apparition, but who, knowing its origin, used to have himself bled till it disappeared. The reality of the apparition lay, he knew, in some relation between the circulation of his blood and his organs of sight, in distinction from the reality existing in the normal relations of his visual organs to the light: and in his idea, accordingly, there was nothing unreal, because he did not confuse the one relation with the other. Locke’s doctrine, however, would allow of no distinction between the apparition as it was for such a man and as it would be for one who interpreted it as an actual ‘ghost.’ However interpreted, the liveliness and the involuntariness of the idea remain the same, as does its relation to an efficient cause. If in order to its reality the cause must be an ‘outward body,’ then it is no more real when rightly, than when wrongly, interpreted; while on the ground of liveliness and involuntariness it is as real when taken for a ghost as when referred to an excess of blood in the head.
Berkeley retains this notion, only substituting ‘God’ for ‘body’.
189. As has been pointed out above, it is in respect not of the ‘ratio cognoscendi’ but of the ‘ratio essendi’ that Berkeley’s doctrine of reality differs from Locke’s. With him it is not as an effect of an outward body, but as an immediate effect of God, that an ‘idea of sense’ is real. Just as with Locke real ideas and matter serve each to explain the other, so with Berkeley do real ideas and God. If he is asked, What is God? the answer is, He is the efficient cause of real ideas; if he is asked, What are real ideas? the answer is, Those which God produces, as opposed to those which we make for ourselves. To the inevitable objection, that this is a logical see-saw, no effective answer can be extracted from Berkeley but this—that we have subjective tests of the reality of ideas apart from a knowledge of their cause. In his account of these Berkeley only differs from Locke in adding to the qualifications of liveliness and involuntariness those of ‘steadiness, order, and coherence’ in the ideas. This addition may mean either a great deal or very little. To us it may mean that the distinction of real and unreal is one that applies not to feelings but to the conceived relations of feelings; not to events as such, but to the intellectual interpretation of them. The occurrence of a feeling taken by itself (it may be truly said) is neither coherent nor incoherent; nor can the sequence of feelings one upon another with any significance be called coherence, since in that case an incoherence would be as impossible as any failure in the sequence. As little can we mean by such coherence an usual, by incoherence an unusual, sequence of feelings. If we did, every sequence not before experienced—such, for instance, as is exhibited by a new scientific experiment—being unusual, would have to be pronounced incoherent, and therefore unreal. Coherence, in short, we may conclude, is only predicable of a system of relations, not felt but conceived; while incoherence arises from the attempt of an imperfect intelligence to think an object under relations which cannot ultimately be held together in thought. The qualification then of ‘ideas’ as coherent has in truth no meaning unless ‘idea’ be taken to mean notfeelingbutconception: and thus understood, the doctrine that coherent ideasare(Berkeley happily excludes the notion that they merelyrepresent) the real, amounts to a clear identification of the real with the world of conception.