of the horizontal moon (which may also be applied to the sun) is the same
that Gassendus had given before. I answer, there is indeed mention made of
the grossness of the atmosphere in both; but then the methods wherein it
is applied to solve the phenomenon are widely different, as will be
evident to whoever shall compare what I have said on this subject with the
following words of Gassendus:—
“Heinc dici posse videtur: solem humilem oculo spectatum ideo apparere
majorem, quam dum altius egreditur, quia dum vicinus est horizonti prolixa
est series vaporum, atque adeo corpusculorum quæ solis radios ita
retundunt, ut oculus minus conniveat, et pupilla quasi umbrefacta longe
magis amplificetur, quam dum sole multum elato rari vapores
intercipiuntur, solque ipse ita splendescit, ut pupilla in ipsum spectans
contractissima efficiatur. Nempe ex hoc esse videtur, cur visibilis
species ex sole procedens, et per pupillam amplificatam intromissa in
retinam, ampliorem in illa sedem occupet, majoremque proinde creet solis
apparentiam, quam dum per contractam pupillam eodem intromissa contendit.”
Vid. _Epist. 1. De Apparente Magnitudine Solis Humilis et Sublimis_, p. 6.
This solution of Gassendus proceeds on a false principle, to wit, that the
pupil’s being enlarged augments the species or image on the fund of the
eye.
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_Thirdly_, against what is said in Sect. 80, it is objected, that the same
thing which is so small as scarce to be discerned by a man, may appear
like a mountain to some small insect; from which it follows that the
_minimum visibile_ is not equal in respect of all creatures(462). I
answer, if this objection be sounded to the bottom, it will be found to
mean no more than that the same particle of matter which is marked to a
man by one _minimum visibile_, exhibits to an insect a great number of
_minima visibilia_. But this does not prove that one _minimum visibile_ of
the insect is not equal to one _minimum visibile_ of the man. The not
distinguishing between the mediate and immediate objects of sight is, I
suspect, a cause of misapprehension in this matter.
Some other misinterpretations and difficulties have been made, but, in the
points they refer to, I have endeavoured to be so very plain that I know
not how to express myself more clearly. All I shall add is, that if they
who are pleased to criticise on my _Essay_ would but read the whole over
with some attention, they might be the better able to comprehend my
meaning, and consequently to judge of my mistakes.
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I am informed that, soon after the first edition of this treatise, a man
somewhere near London was made to see, who had been born blind, and
continued so for about twenty years(463). Such a one may be supposed a
proper judge to decide how far some tenets laid down in several places of
the foregoing Essay are agreeable to truth; and if any curious person hath
the opportunity of making proper interrogatories to him thereon, I should
gladly see my notions either amended or confirmed by experience(464).
A TREATISE CONCERNING THE PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
[(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.
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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.
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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, Space 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 pronouns “I” and “you” by
Berkeley, and is thus spiritualised. Cause proper, or Power, he finds only
in the voluntary activity of persons. Space 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 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_.
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 Vérité_ 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_.
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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_.
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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 passions 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 pronouns, 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 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).
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