The Works of George Berkeley Part 34

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 A second edition, with minor changes, and in which "Part I" was withdrawn from the t.i.tle-page, was published in London in 1734, "printed for Jacob Tonson"-on the eve of Berkeley's settlement at Cloyne.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 ma.n.u.script," 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 const.i.tution 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 pa.s.sive 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 Konigsberg, 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.

The book of _Principles_, as we have it, must be taken as a systematic fragment of an incompletely developed philosophy. Many years after its appearance, the author thus describes the conditions:-"It was published when I was very young, and without doubt hath many defects. For though the notions should be true (as I verily think they are), yet it is difficult to express them clearly and consistently, language being framed for common use and received prejudices. I do not therefore pretend that my books can teach truth. All I hope for is that they may be an occasion to inquisitive men of discovering truth(467)." Again:-"I had no inclination to trouble the world with large volumes. What I have done was rather with the view of giving hints to thinking men, who have leisure and curiosity to go to the bottom of things, and pursue them in their own minds. Two or three times reading these small tracts (_Essay on Vision_, _Principles_, _Dialogues_, _De Motu_), and making what is read the occasion of thinking, would, I believe, render the whole familiar and easy to the mind, and take off that shocking appearance which hath often been observed to attend speculative truths(468)." The incitements to further and deeper thought thus proposed have met with a more sympathetic response in this generation than in the lifetime of Berkeley.

There is internal evidence in the book of _Principles_ that its author had been a diligent and critical student of Locke's _Essay_. Like the _Essay_, it is dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke. The word _idea_ is not less characteristic of the _Principles_ than of the _Essay_, although Berkeley generally uses it with a narrower application than Locke, confining it to phenomena presented objectively to our senses, and their subjective reproductions in imagination. With both Berkeley and Locke objective phenomena (under the name of ideas) are the materials supplied to man for conversion into natural science. Locke's reduction of ideas into simple and complex, as well as some of his subdivisions, reappear with modifications in the _Principles_. Berkeley's account of Substance and Power, s.p.a.ce and Time, while different from Locke's, still bears marks of the _Essay_. Concrete Substance, which in its ultimate meaning much perplexes Locke, is identified with the personal p.r.o.nouns "I" and "you" by Berkeley, and is thus spiritualised. Cause proper, or Power, he finds only in the voluntary activity of persons. s.p.a.ce is presented to us in our sensuous experience of resistance to organic movements; while it is symbolised in terms of phenomena presented to sight, as already explained in the _Essay on Vision_. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 a.s.sails 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sumption that _ideas only_ are immediate objects of human perception; an a.s.sumption in which Descartes was followed by Locke, and philosophical thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but under differing interpretations of the term _idea_.

Malebranche appears less in the _Principles_ than Locke and Descartes. In early life, at any rate, Berkeley would be less at home in the "divine vision" of Malebranche than among the "ideas" of Locke. The mysticism of the _Recherche de la Verite_ is unlike the transparent lucidity of Berkeley's juvenile thought. But the subordinate place and office of the material world in Malebranche's system, and his conception of power as wholly spiritual, approached the New Principles of Berkeley.

Plato and Aristotle hardly appear, either by name or as characteristic influence, in the book of _Principles_, which in this respect contrasts with the abundant references to ancient and mediaeval thinkers in _Siris_, and to a less extent in the _De Motu_ and _Alciphron_.

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 s.p.a.ce, abstract time-unindividualisable in sense or in imagination-must all be void of meaning; the issue of unlawful a.n.a.lysis, 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 ma.n.u.script 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_.

After this Introduction, the New Principles themselves are evolved, in a corresponding spirit of hostility to empty abstractions. The sections may be thus divided:-

i. Rationale of the Principles (sect. 1-33).

ii. Supposed Objections to the Principles answered (sect. 34-84).

iii. Consequences and Applications of the Principles (sect. 85-156).

i. Rationale of the Principles.

The reader may remember that one of the entries in the _Commonplace Book_ runs as follows:-"To begin the First Book, not with mention of sensation and reflexion, but, instead of sensation, to use perception, or thought in general." Berkeley seems there to be oscillating between Locke and Descartes. He now adopts Locke's account of the materials of which our concrete experience consists (sect. 1). The data of human knowledge of existence are accordingly found in the ideas, phenomena, or appearances (_a_) of which we are percipient in the senses, and (_b_) of which we are conscious when we attend to our inward pa.s.sions and operations-all which make up the original contents of human experience, to be reproduced in new forms and arrangements, (_c_) in memory and (_d_) imagination and (_e_) expectation. Those materials are called _ideas_ because living mind or spirit is the indispensable realising factor: they all presuppose living mind, spirit, self, or ego to realise and elaborate them (sect. 2). This is implied in our use of personal p.r.o.nouns, which signify, not ideas of any of the preceding kinds, but that which is "entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, by which they are perceived." In this fundamental presupposition Descartes is more apparent than Locke, and there is even an unconscious forecast of Kant and Hegel.

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 a.s.sert 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).

The Principle that the _esse_ of matter necessarily involves _percipi_, and its correlative Principle that there is not any other substance than Spirit, which is thus the indispensable factor of all reality, both lead on to the more obviously practical Principle-that the material world, _per se_, is wholly powerless, and that all changes in Nature are the immediate issue of the agency of Spirit (sect. 25-27). Concrete power, like concrete substance, is essentially spiritual. To be satisfied that the whole natural world is only the pa.s.sive instrument and expression of Spiritual Power we are asked to a.n.a.lyse the sensuous data of experience. We can find no reason for attributing inherent power to any of the phenomena and phenomenal things that are presented to our senses, or for supposing that _they_ can be active causes, either of the changes that are continuously in progress among themselves, or of the feelings, perceptions, and volitions of which spiritual beings are conscious. We find the ideas or phenomena that pa.s.s in procession before our senses related to one another as signs to their meanings, in a cosmical order that virtually makes the material world a language and a prophecy: but this cosmical procession is not found to originate in the ideas or phenomena themselves, and there is reason for supposing it to be maintained by ever-living Spirit, which thus not only substantiates the things of sense, but explains their laws of motion and their movements.

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 const.i.tute 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 partic.i.p.ates, and by which the embodied life of man must be regulated.

Has Berkeley, in his juvenile ardour, and with the impetuosity natural to him, while seeking to demonstrate the impotence of matter, and the omnipresent supremacy of Spirit, so spiritualised the material world as to make it unfit for the symbolical office in the universe of reality which he supposes it to discharge? Is its potential existence in G.o.d, and its percipient realisation by me, and presumably by innumerable other sentient beings, an adequate account of the real material world existing in place and time? Can this universal orderly dream experienced in sense involve the objectivity implied in its being the reliable medium of social intercourse? Does _such_ a material world provide me with a means of escape from absolute solitude? Nay, if Matter cannot rise into reality without percipient spirit as realising factor, can my individual percipient spirit realise _myself_ without independent Matter? Without intelligent life Matter is p.r.o.nounced unreal. But is it not also true that without Matter, and the special material organism we call our body, percipient spirit is unreal? Does not Nature seem as indispensable to Spirit as Spirit is to Nature? Must we not a.s.sume at least their unbeginning and unending coexistence, even if we recognise in Spirit the deeper and truer reality? Do the New Principles explain the _final_ ground of trust and certainty about the universe of change into which I entered as a stranger when I was born? If they make all that I have believed in as _outward_ to be in its reality _inward_, do they not disturb the balance that is necessary to _all_ human certainties, and leave me without any realities at all?

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 subst.i.tute a universe of chimeras.