The Works of George Berkeley. Vol. 1 of 4 · George Berkeley
[(465)PART I]
WHEREIN THE CHIEF CAUSES OF ERROR AND DIFFICULTY IN THE SCIENCES, WITH THE GROUNDS OF SCEPTICISM, ATHEISM, AND IRRELIGION, ARE INQUIRED INTO _First Published in 1710_ Editor’s Preface To The Treatise Concerning The Principles Of Human Knowledge This book of _Principles_ contains the most systematic and reasoned exposition of Berkeley’s philosophy, in its early stage, which we possess. Like the _Essay on Vision_, its tentative pioneer, it was prepared at Trinity College, Dublin. Its author had hardly completed his twenty-fifth year when it was published. The first edition of this “First Part” of the projected Treatise, “printed by Aaron Rhames, for Jeremy Pepyat, bookseller in Skinner Row, Dublin,” appeared early in 1710. A second edition, with minor changes, and in which “Part I” was withdrawn from the title-page, was published in London in 1734, “printed for Jacob Tonson”—on the eve of Berkeley’s settlement at Cloyne. It was the last in the author’s lifetime. The projected “Second Part” of the _Principles_ was never given to the world, and we can hardly conjecture its design. In a letter in 1729 to his American friend, Samuel Johnson, Berkeley mentions that he had “made considerable progress on the Second Part,” but “the manuscript,” he adds, “was lost about fourteen years ago, during my travels in Italy; and I never had leisure since to do so disagreeable a thing as writing twice on the same subject(466).”
An edition of the _Principles_ appeared in London in 1776, twenty-three years after Berkeley’s death, with a running commentary of _Remarks_ by the anonymous editor, on the pages opposite the text, in which, according to the editor, Berkeley’s doctrines are “carefully examined, and shewn to be repugnant to fact, and his principles to be incompatible with the constitution of human nature and the reason and fitness of things.” In this volume the _Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous_ are appended to the _Principles_, and a “Philosophical Discourse concerning the nature of Human Being” is prefixed to the whole, “being a defence of Mr. Locke’s principles, and some remarks on Dr. Beattie’s _Essay on Truth_,” by the author of the _Remarks on Berkeley’s Principles_. The acuteness of the _Remarks_ is not in proportion to their bulk and diffuseness: many popular misconceptions of Berkeley are served up, without appreciation of the impotence of matter, and of natural causation as only passive sense-symbolism, which is at the root of the theory of the material world against which the _Remarks_ are directed. The Kantian and post-Kantian Idealism that is characteristic of the nineteenth century has recalled attention to Berkeley, who had produced his spiritual philosophy under the prevailing conditions of English thought in the preceding age, when Idealism in any form was uncongenial. In 1869 the book of _Principles_ was translated into German, with annotations, by Ueberweg, professor of philosophy at Königsberg, the university of Kant. The Clarendon Press edition of the Collected Works of Berkeley followed in 1871. In 1874 an edition of the _Principles_, by Dr. Kranth, Professor of Philosophy in the university of Pennsylvania, appeared in America, with annotations drawn largely from the Clarendon Press edition and Ueberweg. In 1878 Dr. Collyns Simon republished the _Principles_, with discussions based upon the text, followed by an appendix of remarks on Kant and Hume in their relation to Berkeley.
Time is revealed in our actual experience of change in the ideas or phenomena of which we are percipient in sense; length of time being calculated by the changes in the adopted measure of duration. Infinite space and infinite time, being necessarily incapable of finite ideation, are dismissed as abstractions that for man must always be empty of realisable meaning. Indeed, the _Commonplace Book_ shews that Locke influenced Berkeley as much by antagonism as otherwise. “Such was the candour of that great man that I persuade myself, were he alive, he would not be offended that I differed from him, seeing that in so doing I follow his advice to use my own judgment, see with my own eyes and not with another’s.” So he argues against Locke’s opinions about the infinity and eternity of space, and the possibility of matter endowed with power to think, and urges his inconsistency in treating some qualities of matter as wholly material, while he insists that others, under the name of “secondary,” are necessarily dependent on sentient intelligence. Above all he assails Locke’s “abstract ideas” as germs of scepticism—interpreting Locke’s meaning paradoxically. Next to Locke, Descartes and Malebranche are prominent in the _Principles_. Recognition of the ultimate supremacy of Spirit, or the spiritual character of active power and the constant agency of God in nature, suggested by Descartes, was congenial to Berkeley, but he was opposed to the mechanical conception of the universe found in the Cartesian physical treatises. That thought is synonymous with existence is a formula with which the French philosopher might make him familiar, as well as with the assumption that _ideas only_ are immediate objects of human perception; an assumption in which Descartes was followed by Locke, and philosophical thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but under differing interpretations of the term _idea_.
The Introduction to the _Principles_ is a proclamation of war against “abstract ideas,” which is renewed in the body of the work, and again more than once in the writings of Berkeley’s early and middle life, but is significantly withdrawn in his old age. In the ardour of youth, his prime remedy for anarchy in philosophy, and for the sceptical disposition which philosophy had been apt to generate, was suppression of abstract ideas as impossible ideas—empty names heedlessly accepted as ideas—an evil to be counteracted by steady adherence to the concrete experience found in our senses and inner consciousness. Never to lose our hold of positive facts, and always to individualise general conceptions, are regulative maxims by which Berkeley would make us govern our investigation of ultimate problems. He takes up his position in the actual universe of applied reason; not in the empty void of abstract reason, remote from particulars and succession of change, in which no real existence is found. All realisable ideas must be either concrete data of sense, or concrete data of inward consciousness. It is relations embodied in particular facts, not pretended abstract ideas, that give fruitful meaning to common terms. Abstract matter, abstract substance, abstract power, abstract space, abstract time—unindividualisable in sense or in imagination—must all be void of meaning; the issue of unlawful analysis, which pretends to find what is real without the concrete ideas that make the real, because percipient spirit is the indispensable factor of all reality. The only lawful abstraction is _nominal_—the application, that is to say, of a name in common to an indefinite number of things which resemble one another. This is Berkeley’s “Nominalism.”
Berkeley takes Locke as the representative advocate of the “abstract ideas” against which he wages war in the Introduction to the _Principles_. Under cover of an ambiguity in the term _idea_, he is unconsciously fighting against a man of straw. He supposes that Locke means by _idea_ only a concrete datum of sense, or of imagination; and he argues that we cannot without contradiction abstract from all such data, and yet retain idea. But Locke includes among _his_ ideas intellectual relations—what Berkeley himself afterwards distinguished as _notions_, in contrast with ideas. This polemic against Locke is therefore one of verbal confusion. In later life he probably saw this, as he saw deeper into the whole question involved. This is suggested by the omission of the argument against abstract ideas, given in earlier editions of _Alciphron_, from the edition published a year before he died. In his juvenile attack on abstractions, his characteristic impetuosity seems to carry him to the extreme of rejecting rational relations that are involved in the objectivity of sensible things and natural order, thus resting experience at last only on phenomena—particular and contingent. A preparatory draft of the Introduction to the _Principles_, which I found in the manuscript department of the library of Trinity College, Dublin, is printed in the appendix to this edition of Berkeley’s Philosophical Works. The variations are of some interest, biographical and philosophical. It seems to have been written in the autumn of 1708, and it may with advantage be compared with the text of the finished Introduction, as well as with numerous relative entries in the _Commonplace Book_.
Berkeley next faces a New Question which his New Principles are intended to answer. How is the concrete world that is presented to our senses related to Mind or Spirit? Is all or any of its reality independent of percipient experience? Is it true that the phenomena of which we are percipient in sense are ultimately independent of all percipient and conscious life, and are even the ultimate basis of all that is real? Must we recognise in the phenomena of Matter the _substance_ of what we call Mind? For do we not find, when we examine Body and Spirit mutually related in our personality, that the latter is more dependent on the former, and on the physical cosmos of which the former is a part, than our body and its bodily surroundings are dependent on Spirit? In short, is not the universe of existence, in its final form, only lifeless Matter?
The claim of Matter to be supreme is what Berkeley produces his Principles in order to reduce. Concrete reality is self-evidently unreal, he argues, in the total absence of percipient Spirit, for Spirit is the one realising factor. Try to imagine the material world unperceived and you are trying to picture empty abstraction. Wholly material matter is self-evidently an inconceivable absurdity; a universe emptied of all percipient life is an impossible universe. The material world becomes real in being perceived: it depends for its reality upon the spiritual realisation. As colours in a dark room become real with the introduction of light, so the material world becomes real in the life and agency of Spirit. It must exist in terms of sentient life and percipient intelligence, in order to rise into any degree of reality that human beings at least can be at all concerned with, either speculatively or practically. Matter totally abstracted from percipient spirit must go the way of all abstract ideas. It is an illusion, concealed by confused thought and abuse of words; yet from obvious causes strong enough to stifle faith in this latent but self-evident Principle—that the universe of sense-presented phenomena can have concrete existence only in and by sentient intelligence. It is the reverse of this Principle that Berkeley takes to have been “the chief source of all that scepticism and folly, all those contradictions and inexplicable puzzling absurdities, that have in all ages been a reproach to human reason(469).” And indeed, when it is fully understood, it is seen in its own light to be the chief of “those truths which are so near and obvious to the mind, that a man need only open his eyes to see them. For such I take this important one to be—that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the Earth, in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a Mind” (sect. 6). Living Mind or Spirit is the indispensable factor of all realities that are presented to our senses, including, of course, our own bodies.
Yet this Principle, notwithstanding its intuitive certainty, needs to be evoked by reflection from the latency in which it lies concealed, in the confused thought of the unreflecting. It is only gradually, and with the help of reasoning, that the world presented to the senses is distinctly recognised in this its deepest and truest reality. And even when we see that the phenomena _immediately_ presented to our senses need to be realised in percipient experience, in order to be concretely real, we are ready to ask whether there may not be substances _like_ the things so presented, which can exist “without mind,” or in a wholly material way (sect. 8). Nay, are there not _some_ of the phenomena immediately presented to our senses which do not need living mind to make them real? It is allowed by Locke and others that all those qualities of matter which are called _secondary_ cannot be wholly material, and that living mind is indispensable for _their_ realisation in nature; but Locke and the rest argue, that this is not so with the qualities which they call _primary_, and which they regard as of the essence of matter. Colours, sounds, tastes, smells are all allowed to be not wholly material; but are not the size, shape, situation, solidity, and motion of bodies qualities that are real without need for the realising agency of any Mind or Spirit in the universe, and which would continue to be what they are now if all Spirit, divine or human, ceased to exist?
The supposition that some of the phenomena of what is called Matter can be real, and yet wholly material, is discussed in sections 9-15, in which it is argued that the things of sense cannot exist really, in _any_ of their manifestations, unless they are brought into reality in some percipient life and experience. It is held impossible that any quality of matter can have the reality which we all attribute to it, unless it is spiritually realised (sect. 15). But may Matter not be real apart from all its so-called qualities, these being allowed to be not wholly material, because real only within percipient spirit? May not this wholly material Matter be Something that, as it were, exists _behind_ the ideas, phenomena, or qualities that make their appearance to human beings? This question, Berkeley would say, is a meaningless and wholly unpractical one. Material substance that makes and can make no real appearance—unphenomenal or unideal—stripped of all its qualities—is only “another name for abstract Being,” and “the abstract idea of Being appeareth to me the most incomprehensible of all other. When I consider the two parts or branches which make up the words _material substance_, I am convinced there is no distinct meaning annexed to them” (sect. 17). Neither Sense nor Reason inform us of the existence of real material substances that exist _abstractly_, or out of all relation to the secondary and primary qualities of which we are percipient when we exercise our senses. By our senses we cannot perceive more than ideas or phenomena, aggregated as individual things that are presented to us: we cannot perceive substances that make no appearance in sense. Then as for reason, unrealised substances, abstracted from living Spirit, human or divine, being altogether meaningless, can in no way explain the concrete realisations of human experience. In short, if there are wholly unphenomenal material substances, it is impossible that we should ever discover them, or have any concern with them, speculative or practical; and if there are not, we should have the same reason to assert that there are which we have now (sect. 20). It is impossible to put any meaning into wholly abstract reality. “To me the words mean either a direct contradiction, or nothing at all” (sect. 24).
Yet the universe of reality is not exclusively One Spirit. Experience contradicts the supposition. I find on trial that my personal power to produce changes in the ideas or phenomena which my senses present to me is a limited power (sect. 28-33). I can make and unmake my own fancies, but I cannot with like freedom make and unmake presentations of sense. When in daylight I open my eyes, it is not in my power to determine whether I shall see or not; nor is it in my power to determine what objects I shall see. The cosmical order of sense-phenomena is independent of my will. When I employ my senses, I find myself always confronted by sensible signs of perfect Reason and omnipresent Will. But I also awake in the faith that I am an individual person. And the sense-symbolism of which the material world consists, while it keeps me in constant and immediate relation to the Universal Spirit, whose language it is, keeps me likewise in intercourse with other persons, akin to myself, who are signified to me by their overt actions and articulate words, which enter into my sensuous experience. Sense-given phenomena thus, among their other instrumental offices, are the medium of communication between human beings, who by this means can find companions, and make signs to them. So while, at _our_ highest point of view, Nature is Spirit, experience shews that there is room in the universe for a plurality of persons, individual, and in a measure free or morally responsible. If Berkeley does not say all this, his New Principles tend thus.
At any rate, in his reasoned exposition of his Principles he is anxious to distinguish those phenomena that are presented to the senses of all mankind from the private ideas or fancies of individual men (sect. 28-33). The former constitute the world which sentient beings realise in common. He calls them _ideas_ because they are unrealisable without percipient mind; but still on the understanding that they are not to be confounded with the chimeras of imagination. They are more deeply and truly real than chimeras. The groups in which they are found to coexist are the individual things of sense, whose fixed order of succession exemplifies what we call natural law, or natural causation: the correlation of their changes to our pleasures and pains, desires and aversions, makes scientific knowledge of their laws practically important to the life of man, in his embodied state. Moreover, the real ideas presented to our senses, unlike those of imagination, Berkeley would imply, cannot be either representative or misrepresentative. Our imagination may mislead us: the original data of sense cannot: although we may, and often do, misinterpret their relations to one another, and to our pleasures and pains and higher faculties. The divine meaning with which they are charged, of which science is a partial expression, they may perhaps be said to represent. Otherwise representative sense-perception is absurdity: the ideas of sense cannot be representative in the way those of imagination are; for fancies are faint representations of data of sense. The appearances that sentient intelligence realises _are_ the things of sense, and we cannot go deeper. If we prefer accordingly to call the material world a dream or a chimera, we must understand that it is the _reasonable_ dream in which all sentient intelligence participates, and by which the embodied life of man must be regulated.
That Berkeley at the age of twenty-five, and educated chiefly by Locke, had fathomed or even entertained all these questions was hardly to be looked for. How far he had gone may be gathered by a study of the sequel of his book of _Principles_. ii. Objections to the New Principles answered (sect. 34-84). The supposed Objections, with Berkeley’s answers, may be thus interpreted:— _First objection._ (Sect. 34-40.) The preceding Principles banish all substantial realities, and substitute a universe of chimeras. _Answer._ This objection is a play upon the popular meaning of the word “idea.” That name is appropriate to the phenomena presented in sense, because they become concrete realities only in the experience of living Spirit; and so it is not confined to the chimeras of individual fancy, which may misrepresent the real ideas of sense that are presented in the natural system independently of our will. _Second objection._ (Sect. 41.) The preceding Principles abolish the distinction between Perception and Imagination—between imagining one’s self burnt and actually being burnt. _Answer._ Real fire differs from fancied fire: as real pain does from fancied pain; yet no one supposes that real pain any more than imaginary pain can exist unfelt by a sentient intelligence. _Third objection._ (Sect. 42-44.) We actually _see_ sensible things existing at a distance from our bodies. Now, whatever is seen existing at a distance must be seen as existing external to us in our bodies, which contradicts the foregoing Principles.
_Answer._ Distance, or outness, is not visible. It is a conception which is suggested gradually, by our experience of the connexion between visible colours and certain visual sensations that accompany seeing, on the one hand, and our tactual experience, on the other—as was proved in the _Essay on Vision_, in which the ideality of the _visible_ world is demonstrated(470). _Fourth objection._ (Sect. 45-48.) It follows from the New Principles, that the material world must be undergoing continuous annihilation and recreation in the innumerable sentient experiences in which it becomes real. _Answer_. According to the New Principles a thing may be realised in the sense-experience of _other_ minds, during intervals of its perception by _my_ mind; for the Principles do not affirm dependence only on this or that mind, but on a living Mind. If this implies a constant creation of the material world, the conception of the universe as in a state of constant creation is not new, and it signally displays Divine Providence. _Fifth objection._ (Sect. 49.) If extension and extended Matter can exist only _in mind_, it follows that extension is an attribute of mind—that mind is extended. _Answer._ Extension and other sensible qualities exist in mind, not as _modes_ of mind, which is unintelligible, but _as ideas_ of which Mind is percipient; and this is absolutely inconsistent with the supposition that Mind is itself extended(471).
_Sixth objection._ (Sect. 50.) Natural philosophy proceeds on the assumption that Matter is independent of percipient mind, and it thus contradicts the New Principles. _Answer._ On the contrary, Matter—if it means what exists abstractly, or in independence of all percipient Mind—is useless in natural philosophy, which is conversant exclusively with the ideas or phenomena that compose concrete things, not with empty abstractions. _Seventh objection._ (Sect. 51.) To refer all change to spiritual agents alone, and to regard the things of sense as wholly impotent, thus discharging natural causes as the New Principles do, is at variance with human language and with good sense. _Answer._ While we may speak as the multitude do, we should learn to think with the few who reflect. We may still speak of “natural causes,” even when, as philosophers, we recognise that all true efficiency must be spiritual, and that the material world is only a system of sensible symbols, regulated by Divine Will and revealing Omnipresent Mind. _Eighth objection._ (Sect. 54, 55.) The natural belief of men seems inconsistent with the world being mind-dependent. _Answer._ Not so when we consider that men seldom comprehend the deep meaning of their practical assumptions; and when we recollect the prejudices, once dignified as good sense, which have successively surrendered to philosophy. _Ninth objection._ (Sect. 56, 57.) Any Principle that is inconsistent with our common faith in the existence of the material world must be rejected.
_Answer._ The fact that we are conscious of not being ourselves the cause of changes perpetually going on in our _sense_-ideas, some of which we gradually learn by experience to foresee, sufficiently accounts for the common belief in the independence of those ideas, and is what men truly mean by this. _Tenth objection._ (Sect. 58, 59.) The foregoing Principles concerning Matter and Spirit are inconsistent with the laws of motion, and with other truths in mathematics and natural philosophy. _Answer._ The laws of motion, and those other truths, may be all conceived and expressed in consistency with the absence of independent substance and causation in Matter. _Eleventh objection._ (Sect. 60-66.) If, according to the foregoing Principles, the material world is merely phenomena presented by a Power not-ourselves to our senses, the elaborate contrivances which we find in Nature are useless; for we might have had all experiences that are needful without them, by the direct agency of God. _Answer._ Elaborate contrivances in Nature are relatively necessary as signs: they express to _us_ the occasional presence and some of the experience of other men, also the constant presence and power of the Universal Spirit, while the scientific interpretation of elaborately constituted Nature is a beneficial moral and intellectual exercise. _Twelfth objection._ (Sect. 67-79.) Although the impossibility of _active_ Matter may be demonstrable, this does not prove the impossibility of _inactive_ Matter, _neither solid nor extended_, which may be the occasion of our having sense-ideas.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.