tactual experience, taken in this _Essay_ provisionally as the real
external objects. See _Principles_, sect. 44.
355 Cf. sect. 144. Note, in this and the three preceding sections, the
stress laid on the _arbitrariness_ of the connexion between the
signs which suggest magnitudes, or other modes of extension, and
their significates. This is the foundation of the _New Theory_;
which thus resolves _physical_ causality into a relation of signs to
what they signify and predict—analogous to the relation between
words and their accepted meanings.
356 In sect. 67-78, Berkeley attempts to verify the foregoing account of
the natural signs of Size, by applying it to solve a phenomenon, the
cause of which had been long debated among men of science—the
visible magnitude of heavenly bodies when seen in the horizon.
357 Cf. sect. 10.
358 Omitted in the author’s last edition. Cf sect. 76, 77.—The
explanation in question is attributed to Alhazen, and by Bacon to
Ptolemy, while it is sanctioned by eminent scientific names before
and since Berkeley.
359 “Fourthly” in the second edition. Cf. what follows with sect. 74.
Why “lesser”?
360 When Berkeley, some years afterwards, visited Italy, he remarked
that distant objects appeared to him much nearer than they really
were—a phenomenon which he attributed to the comparative purity of
the southern air.
361 i.e. the original perception, apart from any synthetic operation of
suggestion and inferential thought, founded on visual signs.
362 In Riccioli’s _Almagest_, II. lib. X. sect. 6. quest. 14, we have an
account of many hypotheses then current, in explanation of the
apparent magnitude of the horizontal moon.
363 Gassendi’s “Epistolæ quatuor de apparente magnitudine solis humilis
et sublimis.”—_Opera_, tom. III pp. 420-477. Cf. Appendix to this
_Essay_, p. 110.
364 See _Dioptrique_, VI.
_ 365 Opera Latina_, vol. I, p. 376, vol. II, pp. 26-62; _English Works_,
vol. I. p. 462. (Molesworth’s Edition.)
366 The paper in the Transactions is by Molyneux.
367 See Smith’s _Optics_, pp. 64-67, and _Remarks_, pp. 48, &c. At p. 55
Berkeley’s _New Theory_ is referred to, and pronounced to be at
variance with experience. Smith concludes by saying, that in “the
second edition of Berkeley’s _Essay_, and also in a Vindication and
Explanation of it (called the _Visual Language_), very lately
published, the author has made some additions to his solution of the
said phenomenon; but seeing it still involves and depends on the
principle of faintness, I may leave the rest of it to the reader’s
consideration.” This, which appeared in 1738, is one of the very few
early references to Berkeley’s _New Theory of Vision Vindicated_.
368 Sect. 2-51.
369 This sentence is omitted in the author’s last edition.
370 What follows to the end of this section is not contained in the
first edition.
371 i.e. tangible.
372 Cf. sect. 38; and _Theory of Vision Vindicated_, sect. 31.
373 “Never”—“hardly,” in first edition.
374 Cf. Appendix, p. 208.—See Smith’s _Optics_, B. I. ch. v, and
_Remarks_, p. 56, in which he “leaves it to be considered, whether
the said phenomenon is not as clear an instance of the insufficiency
of faintness” as of mathematical computation.
375 A favourite doctrine with Berkeley, according to whose theory of
visibles there can be no absolute visible magnitude, the _minimum_
being the least that is _perceivable_ by each seeing subject, and
thus relative to his visual capacity. This section is thus
criticised, in January, 1752, in a letter signed “Anti-Berkeley,” in
the _Gent. Mag._ (vol. XXII, p. 12): “Upon what his lordship asserts
with respect to the _minimum visibile_, I would observe that it is
certain that there are infinite numbers of animals which are
imperceptible to the naked eye, and cannot be perceived but by the
help of a microscope; consequently there are animals whose whole
bodies are far less than the _minimum visibile_ of a man. Doubtless
these animals have eyes, and, if their _minimum visibile_ were equal
to that of a man, it would follow that they cannot perceive anything
but what is much larger than their whole body; and therefore their
own bodies must be invisible to them, because we know they are so to
men, whose _minimum visibile_ is asserted by his lordship to be
equal to theirs.” There is some misconception in this. Cf. Appendix
to _Essay_, p. 209.
376 Those two defects belong to human consciousness. See Locke’s
_Essay_, II. 10, on the defects of human memory. It is this
imperfection which makes reasoning needful—to assist finite
intuition. Reasoning is the sign at once of our dignity and our
weakness.
377 Sect. 59.
378 Sect. 80-82.
379 Sect. 88-119 relate to the nature, invisibility, and arbitrary
visual signs of Situation, or of the localities of tangible things.
Cf. _Theory of Vision Vindicated_, sect. 44-53.
380 Cf. sect. 2, 114, 116, 118.
381 This illustration is taken from Descartes. See Appendix.
382 Sect. 10 and 19.
383 Sect. 2-51.
384 Omitted in author’s last edition.
385 This is Berkeley’s universal solvent of the psychological
difficulties involved in visual-perception.
386 Cf. sect. 103, 106, 110, 128, &c. Berkeley treats this case
hypothetically in the _Essay_, in defect of actual experiments upon
the born-blind, since accumulated from Cheselden downwards. See
however the Appendix, and _Theory of Vision Vindicated_, sect. 71.
387 i.e. tangible things. Cf. _Principles_, sect. 44.
388 The “prejudice,” to wit, which Berkeley would dissolve by his
introspective analysis of vision. Cf. _Theory of Vision Vindicated_,
sect. 35.
389 Thus forming individual concrete things out of what is perceived
separately through different senses.
390 This briefly is Berkeley’s solution of “the knot about inverted
images,” which long puzzled men of science.
391 i.e. perceive _mediately_—visible objects, _per se_, having no
tactual situation. Pure vision, he would say, has nothing to do with
“high” and “low,” “great” and “inverted,” in the real or tactual
meaning of those terms.
392 i.e. tangible.
393 e.g. “extension,” which, according to Berkeley, is an equivocal
term, common (in its different meanings) to _visibilia_ and
_tangibilia_. Cf. sect. 139, 140.
394 Cf. sect. 93, 106, 110, 128.
395 i.e. real or tangible head.
396 Cf. sect. 140, 143. In the _Gent. Mag._ (vol. XXII. p. 12),
“Anti-Berkeley” thus argues the case of one born blind. “This man,”
he adds, “would, by being accustomed to feel one hand with the
other, have perceived that the extremity of the hand was divided
into fingers—that the extremities of these fingers were
distinguished by certain hard, smooth surfaces, of a different
texture from the rest of the fingers—and that each finger had
certain joints or flexures. Now, if this man was restored to sight,
and immediately viewed his hand before he touched it again, it is
manifest that the divisions of the extremity of the hand into
fingers would be visibly perceived. He would note too the small
spaces at the extremity of each finger, which affected his sight
differently from the rest of the fingers; upon moving his fingers he
would see the joints. Though therefore, by means of this lately
acquired sense of seeing, the object affected his mind in a new and
different manner from what it did before, yet, as by _touch_ he had
acquired the knowledge of these several divisions, marks, and
distinctions of the hand, and, as the new object of _sight_ appeared
to be divided, marked, and distinguished in a similar manner, I
think he would certainly conclude, _before he touched his hand_,
that the thing which he now saw was _the same_ which he had felt
before and called his hand.”
397 Locke, _Essay_, II. 8, 16. Aristotle regards number as a Common
Sensible.—_De Anima_, II. 6, III. 1.
398 “If the visible appearance of two shillings had been found connected
from the beginning with the tangible idea of one shilling, that
appearance would as naturally and readily have signified the unity
of the (tangible) object as it now signifies its duplicity.” Reid,
_Inquiry_, VI. 11.
399 Here again note Berkeley’s inconvenient reticence of his full theory
of matter, as dependent on percipient life for its reality. Tangible
things are meantime granted to be real “without mind.” Cf.
_Principles_, sect. 43, 44. “Without the mind”—in contrast to
sensuous phenomenon only.
400 Cf. sect. 131.
401 Sect. 2, 88, 116, 118.
402 In short, we _see_ only _quantities of colour_—the real or tactual
distance, size, shape, locality, up and down, right and left, &c.,
being gradually associated with the various visible modifications of
colour.
403 i.e. tangible.
404 Sect. 41-44.
405 i.e. tangible things.
406 i.e. visible.
407 Cf. sect. 41-44. The “eyes”—visible and tangible—are themselves
objects of sense.
408 Cf. _Principles_, Introduction, sect. 21-25.
409 “Visible ideas”—including sensations muscular and locomotive, _felt_
in the organ of vision. Sect. 16, 27, 57.
410 i.e. objects which, in this tentative _Essay_, are granted, for
argument’s sake, to be external, or independent of percipient mind.
411 i.e. to inquire whether there are, in this instance, Common
Sensibles; and, in particular, whether an _extension_ of the same
kind at least, if not numerically the same, is presented in each.
The Kantian theory of an _a priori_ intuition of space, the common
condition of tactual and visual experience, because implied in
sense-experience as such, is not conceived by Berkeley. Cf. _Theory
of Vision Vindicated_, sect. 15.
412 In the following reasoning against abstract, as distinguished from
concrete or sense presented (visible or tangible) extension,
Berkeley urges some of his favourite objections to “abstract ideas,”
fully unfolded in his _Principles_, Introduction, sect. 6-20.—See
also _Alciphron_, VII. 5-8.—_Defence of Free Thinking in
Mathematics_, sect. 45-48.
413 Berkeley’s _ideas_ are concrete or particular—immediate data of
sense or imagination.
414 i.e. it cannot be individualized, either as a perceived or an
imagined object.
415 Sect. 105.
416 “Endeavours” in first edition.
417 i.e. a mental image of an abstraction, an impossible image, in which
the extension and comprehension of the notion must be adequately
pictured.
418 “deservedly admired author,” in the first edition.
419 “this celebrated author,”—“that great man” in second edition. In
assailing Locke’s “abstract idea,” he discharges the meaning which
Locke intended by the term, and then demolishes his own figment.
420 Omitted in the author’s last edition.
421 Omitted in last edition.
422 Omitted in last edition.
423 Omitted in last edition.
424 See _Principles_, passim.
425 Omitted in author’s last edition.
426 He probably has Locke in his eye.
427 On Berkeley’s theory, space without relation to bodies (i.e.
insensible or abstract space) would not be extended, as not having
parts; inasmuch as parts can be assigned to it only with relation to
bodies. Berkeley does not distinguish space from sensible extension.
Cf. Reid’s _Works_, p. 126, note—in which Sir W. Hamilton suggests
that one may have an _a priori_ conception of pure space, and _also_
an _a posteriori_ perception of finite, concrete space.
428 Sect. 121. Cf. _New Theory of Vision Vindicated_, sect. 15.
429 i.e. there are no Common Sensibles: from which it follows that we
can reason from the one sense to the other only by founding on the
constant connexion of their respective phenomena, under a natural
yet (for us) contingent law. Cf. _New Theory of Vision Vindicated_,
sect. 27, 28.
430 Omitted in last edition.
431 Cf. sect. 93, 103, 106, 110.
432 Omitted in last edition.
433 Cf. sect. 43, 103, &c. A plurality of co-existent _minima_ of
coloured points constitutes Berkeley’s visible extension; while a
plurality of successively experienced _minima_ of resistant points
constitutes his tactual extension. Whether we can perceive visible
extension without experience of muscular movement at least in the
eye, he does not here say.
434 Omitted in last edition.
435 Real distance belongs originally, according to the _Essay_, to our
tactual experience only—in the wide meaning of touch, which includes
muscular and locomotive perceptions, as well as the simple
perception of contact.
436 Added in second edition.
437 Omitted in last edition.
438 See also Locke’s “Correspondence” with Molyneux, in Locke’s _Works_,
vol. IX. p. 34.—Leibniz, _Nouveaux Essais_, Liv. II. ch. 9, who, so
far granting the fact, disputes the heterogeneity.—Smith’s
_Optics._—_Remarks_, §§ 161-170.—Hamilton’s Reid, p. 137, note, and
_Lect. Metaph._ II. p. 176.
439 Omitted in last edition.
440 Cf. _Theory of Vision Vindicated_, sect. 70.
441 Cf. sect. 49, 146, &c. Here “same” includes “similar.”
442 i.e. visible and tangible motions being absolutely heterogeneous,
and the former, _at man’s point of view_, only contingent signs of
the latter, we should not, at first sight, be able to interpret the
visual signs of tactual phenomena.
443 Cf. sect. 122-125.
444 Cf. _Principles_, sect. 111-116; also _Analyst_, query 12. On
Berkeley’s system space in its three dimensions is unrealisable
without experience of motion.
445 Here the term “language of nature” makes its appearance, as
applicable to the ideas or visual signs of tactual realities.
446 Cf. sect. 16, 27, 97.
447 Is “tangible” here used in its narrow meaning—excluding muscular and
locomotive experience?
448 i.e. as natural signs, divinely associated with their thus implied
meanings.
449 Cf. _New Theory of Vision Vindicated_, sect. 35.
450 Berkeley, in this section, enunciates the principal conclusion in
the _Essay_, which conclusion indeed forms his new theory of Vision.
451 A suggestion thus due to natural laws of association. The
explanation of the fact that we apprehend, by those ideas or
phenomena which are objects of sight, certain other ideas, which
neither resemble them, nor efficiently cause them, nor are so caused
by them, nor have any necessary connexion with them, comprehends,
according to Berkeley, the whole Theory of Vision. “The imagination
of every thinking person,” remarks Adam Smith, “will supply him with
instances to prove that the ideas received by any one of the senses
do readily excite such other ideas, either of the same sense or of
any other, as have habitually been associated with them. So that if,
on this account, we are to suppose, with a late ingenious writer,
that the ideas of sight constitute a Visual Language, because they
readily suggest the corresponding ideas of touch—as the terms of a
language excite the ideas answering to them—I see not but we may,
for the same reason, allow of a tangible, audible, gustatory, and
olefactory language; though doubtless the Visual Language will be
abundantly more copious than the rest.” Smith’s _Optics_.—_Remarks_,
p. 29.—And into this conception of a universal sense symbolism,
Berkeley’s theory of Vision ultimately rises.
452 Cf. _Alciphron_, Dialogue IV. sect. 11-15.
453 Sect. 122-125.
454 Sect. 127-138.
455 Some modern metaphysicians would say, that neither tangible nor
visible extension is the object geometry, but abstract extension;
and others that space is a necessary implicate of sense-experience,
rather than, _per se_, an object of any single sense. Cf. Kant’s
explanation of the origin of our mathematical knowledge, _Kritik der
reinen Vernunft_. Elementarlehre, I.
456 Cf. sect. 51-66, 144.
457 This is a conjecture, not as to the probable ideas of one born
blind, but as to the ideas of an “unbodied” intelligence, whose
_only_ sense was that of seeing. See Reid’s speculation (_Inquiry_,
VI. 9) on the “Geometry of Visibles,” and the mental experience of
Idomenians, or imaginary beings supposed to have no ideas of the
material world except those got by seeing.
458 Cf. sect. 130, and _New Theory of Vision Vindicated_, sect. 57. Does
Berkeley, in this and the two preceding sections, mean to hint that
the only proper object of sight is _unextended_ colour; and that,
apart from muscular movement in the eye or other locomotion,
_visibilia_ resolve into unextended mathematical points? This
question has not escaped more recent British psychologists,
including Stewart, Brown, Mill, and Bain, who seem to hold that
unextended colour is perceivable and imaginable.
459 The bracketed sentence is not retained in the author’s last edition,
in which the first sentence of sect. 160 is the concluding one of
sect. 159, and of the _Essay_.
460 This passage is contained in the _Dioptrices_ of Descartes, VI. 13;
see also VI. 11.
461 The arbitrariness or contingency—as far as our knowledge carries
us—of the connexion between the visual phenomena, as signs, on the
one hand, and actual distance, as perceived through this means, on
the other.
462 Cf. sect. 80-83.
463 The reference here seems to be to the case described in the _Tatler_
(No. 55) of August 16, 1709, in which William Jones, born blind, had
received sight after a surgical operation, at the age of twenty, on
the 29th of June preceding. A medical narrative of this case
appeared, entitled _A full and true account of a miraculous cure of
a Young Man in Newington, who was born blind, and was in five
minutes brought to perfect sight, by Mr. Roger Grant, oculist_.
London, 1709.
464 Cf. _New Theory of Vision Vindicated_, sect. 71, with the relative
note.
465 Omitted on the title-page in the second edition, but retained in the
body of the work.
466 Beardsley’s _Life and Correspondence of Samuel Johnson, D.D., First
President of King’s College, New York_, p. 72 (1874).
467 Beardsley’s _Life of Johnson_, pp. 71, 72.
468 Chandler’s _Life of Johnson_, Appendix, p. 161.
_ 469 Commonplace Book._
470 Moreover, even if the outness or distance of things _were_ visible,
it would not follow that either they or their distances could be
real if unperceived. On the contrary, Berkeley implies that they
_are_ perceived _visually_.
471 It is also to be remembered that sensible things exist “in mind,”
without being exclusively _mine_, as creatures of _my will_. In one
sense, that only is mine in which my will exerts itself. But, in
another view, my involuntary states of feeling and imagination are
_mine_, because their existence depends on my consciousness of them;
and even sensible things are so far _mine_, because, though present
in many minds in common, they are, for me, dependent on _my_
percipient mind.
472 Thomas Herbert, eighth Earl of Pembroke and fifth Earl of
Montgomery, was the correspondent and friend of Locke—who dedicated
his famous _Essay_ to him, as a work “having some little
correspondence with some parts of that nobler and vast system of the
sciences your lordship has made so new, exact, and instructive a
draft of.” He represents a family renowned in English political and
literary history. He was born in 1656; was a nobleman of Christ
Church, Oxford, in 1672; succeeded to his titles in 1683; was sworn
of the Privy Council in 1689; and made a Knight of the Garter in
1700. He filled some of the highest offices in the state, in the
reigns of William and Mary, and of Anne. He was Lord Lieutenant of
Ireland in 1707, having previously been one of the Commissioners by
whom the union between England and Scotland was negotiated. He died
in January 1733.
473 Trinity College, Dublin.
474 In his _Commonplace Book_ Berkeley seems to refer his speculations
to his boyhood. The conception of the material world propounded in
the following Treatise was in his view before the publication of the
_New Theory of Vision_, which was intended to prepare the way for
it.
475 Cf. Locke, in the “Epistle Dedicatory” of his _Essay_.
Notwithstanding the “novelty” of the New Principles, viz. _negation_
of abstract or unperceived Matter, Space, Time, Substance, and
Power; and _affirmation_ of Mind, as the Synthesis, Substance, and
Cause of all—much in best preceding philosophy, ancient and modern,
was a dim anticipation of it.
476 Cf. sect. 6, 22, 24, &c., in illustration of the demonstrative claim
of Berkeley’s initial doctrine.
477 Berkeley entreats his reader, here and throughout, to take pains to
understand his meaning, and especially to avoid confounding the
ordered ideas or phenomena, objectively presented to our senses,
with capricious chimeras of imagination.
478 “Philosophy is nothing but the true knowledge of things.” Locke.
479 The purpose of those early essays of Berkeley was to reconcile
philosophy with common sense, by employing reflection to make
_latent_ common sense, or common reason, reveal itself in its
genuine integrity. Cf. the closing sentences in the _Third Dialogue
between Hylas and Philonous_.
480 Cf. Locke’s _Essay_, Introduction, sect. 4-7; Bk. II. ch. 23, § 12,
&c. Locke (who is probably here in Berkeley’s eye) attributes the
perplexities of philosophy to our narrow faculties, which are meant
to regulate our lives, not to remove all mysteries. See also
Descartes, _Principia_, I. 26, 27, &c.; Malebranche, _Recherche_,
III. 2.
481 His most significant forerunners were Descartes in his _Principia_,
and Locke in his _Essay_.
482 Here “idea” and “notion” seem to be used convertibly. See sect. 142.
Cf. with the argument against _abstract ideas_, unfolded in the
remainder of the Introduction, _Principles_, sect. 97-100, 118-132,
143; _New Theory of Vision_, sect. 122-125; _Alciphron_, Dial. vii.
5-7; _Defence of Free Thinking in Mathematics_, sect. 45-48. Also
_Siris_, sect. 323, 335, &c., where he distinguishes Idea in a
higher meaning from his sensuous ideas. As mentioned in my Preface,
the third edition of _Alciphron_, published in 1752, the year before
Berkeley died, omits the three sections of the Seventh Dialogue
which repeat the following argument against abstract ideas.
483 As in Derodon’s _Logica_, Pt. II. c. 6, 7; _Philosophia Contracta_,
I. i. §§ 7-11; and Gassendi, _Leg. Instit._, I. 8; also Cudworth,
_Eternal and Immutable Morality_, Bk. IV.
484 Omitted in second edition.
485 We must remember that what Berkeley intends by an _idea_ is either a
percept of sense, or a sensuous imagination; and his argument is
that none of _these_ can be an abstraction. We can neither perceive
nor imagine what is not concrete and part of a succession.
486 “abstract notions”—here used convertibly with “abstract ideas.” Cf.
_Principles_, sect. 89 and 142, on the special meaning of _notion_.
487 Supposed by Berkeley to mean, that we can imagine, in abstraction
from all phenomena presented in concrete experience, e.g. imagine
_existence_, in abstraction from all phenomena in which it manifests
itself to us; or _matter_, stripped of all the phenomena in which it
is realised in sense.
488 Omitted in second edition.
489 Locke.
490 Descartes, who regarded brutes as (sentient?) machines.
491 “To this I cannot assent, being of opinion that a word,” &c.—in
first edition.
492 “an idea,” i.e. a concrete mental picture.
493 So that “generality” in an idea is our “consideration” of a
particular idea (e.g. a “particular motion” or a “particular
extension”) not _per se_, but under general relations, which that
particular idea exemplifies, and which, as he shews, may be
signified by a corresponding word. All ideas (in Berkeley’s confined
meaning of “idea”) are particular. We rise above particular ideas by
an intellectual apprehension of their relations; not by forming
_abstract pictures_, which are contradictory absurdities.
494 Locke is surely misconceived. He does not say, as Berkeley seems to
suppose, that in forming “abstract ideas,” we are forming abstract
mental images—pictures in the mind that are not individual pictures.
495 Does Locke intend more than this, although he expresses his meaning
in ambiguous words?
496 It is a particular idea, but considered relatively—a _significant_
particular idea, in other words. We realise our notions in examples,
and these must be concrete.