‘ratio cognoscendi’ but of the ‘ratio essendi’ that Berkeley’s
doctrine of reality differs from Locke’s. With him it is not as an
effect of an outward body, but as an immediate effect of God, that
an ‘idea of sense’ is real. Just as with Locke real ideas and matter
serve each to explain the other, so with Berkeley do real ideas and
God. If he is asked, What is God? the answer is, He is the efficient
cause of real ideas; if he is asked, What are real ideas? the answer
is, Those which God produces, as opposed to those which we make
for ourselves. To the inevitable objection, that this is a logical
see-saw, no effective answer can be extracted from Berkeley but
this--that we have subjective tests of the reality of ideas apart
from a knowledge of their cause. In his account of these Berkeley
only differs from Locke in adding to the qualifications of liveliness
and involuntariness those of ‘steadiness, order, and coherence’ in
the ideas. This addition may mean either a great deal or very little.
To us it may mean that the distinction of real and unreal is one that
applies not to feelings but to the conceived relations of feelings;
not to events as such, but to the intellectual interpretation of
them. The occurrence of a feeling taken by itself (it may be truly
said) is neither coherent nor incoherent; nor can the sequence of
feelings one upon another with any significance be called coherence,
since in that case an incoherence would be as impossible as any
failure in the sequence. As little can we mean by such coherence an
usual, by incoherence an unusual, sequence of feelings. If we did,
every sequence not before experienced--such, for instance, as is
exhibited by a new scientific experiment--being unusual, would have
to be pronounced incoherent, and therefore unreal. Coherence, in
short, we may conclude, is only predicable of a system of relations,
not felt but conceived; while incoherence arises from the attempt of
an imperfect intelligence to think an object under relations which
cannot ultimately be held together in thought. The qualification
then of ‘ideas’ as coherent has in truth no meaning unless ‘idea’ be
taken to mean not _feeling_ but _conception_: and thus understood,
the doctrine that coherent ideas _are_ (Berkeley happily excludes the
notion that they merely _represent_) the real, amounts to a clear
identification of the real with the world of conception.
Not regarding the world as a system of intelligible relations, he
could not regard God as the subject of it.
190. If such idealism were Berkeley’s, his inference from the
‘ideality’ of the real to spirit and God would be more valid than
it is. To have got rid of the notion that the world first exists
and then is thought of--to have seen that it only really exists as
thought of--is to have taken the first step in the only possible
‘proof of the being of God,’ as the self-conscious subject in
relation to which alone an intelligible world can exist, and the
presence of which in us is the condition of our knowing it. [1] But
there is nothing to show that in adopting coherence as one test,
among others, of the reality of ideas, he attached to it any of the
significance exhibited above. He adopted it from ordinary language
without considering how it affected his view of the world as a
succession of feelings. That still remained to him a sufficient
account of the world, even when he treated it as affording intuitive
certainty of a soul ‘naturally immortal,’ and demonstrative certainty
of God. He is not aware, while he takes his doctrine of such
certainty from Locke, that he has left out, and not replaced, the
only solid ground for it which Locke’s system suggested.
[1] See above, paragraphs 146 and 149-152.
His view of the soul as ‘naturally immortal’.
191. The soul or self, as he describes it, does not differ from
Locke’s ‘thinking substance,’ except that, having got rid of
‘extended matter’ altogether, he cannot admit with Locke any
possibility of the soul’s being extended, and, having satisfied
himself that ‘time was nothing abstracted from the succession
of ideas in the mind,’ [1] he was clear that ‘the soul always
thinks’--since the time at which it did not think, being abstracted
from a succession of ideas, would be no time at all. A soul which is
necessarily unextended and therefore ‘indiscerptible,’ and without
which there would be no time, he reckons ‘naturally immortal.’
[1] ‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 98.
Endless succession of feelings is not immortality in true sense.
Berkeley’s doctrine of matter fatal to a true spiritualism;
192. Upon this the remark must occur that, if the fact of being
unextended constituted immortality, all sounds and smells must be
immortal, and that the inseparability of time from the succession of
feelings may prove that succession endless, but proves no immortality
of a soul unless there be one self-conscious subject of that
succession, identical with itself throughout it. To the supposition
of there being such a subject, which Berkeley virtually makes, his
own mode of disposing of matter suggested ready objections. In Locke,
as we have seen, the two opposite ‘things,’ thinking and material,
always appear in strict correlativity, each representing (though he
was not aware of this) the same logical necessity of substantiation.
‘Sensation convinces us that there are solid extended substances,
and reflection that there are thinking ones.’ These are not two
convictions, however, but one conviction, representing one and the
same essential condition of knowledge. Such logical necessity indeed
is misinterpreted when made a ground for believing the real existence
either of a multitude of independent things, for everything is a
‘retainer’ to everything else; [1] or of a separation of the thinking
from the material substance, since, according to Locke’s own showing,
they at least everywhere overlap; [2] or of an absolutely last
substance, which because last would be unknowable: but it is evidence
of the action of a synthetic principle of self-consciousness without
which all reference of feelings to mutually-qualified subjects
and objects, and therefore all knowledge, would be impossible. It
is idle, however, with Berkeley so to ignore the action of this
principle on the one side as to pronounce the material world a mere
succession of feelings, and so to take it for granted on the other
as to assert that every feeling implies relation to a conscious
substance. Upon such a method the latter assertion has nothing to
rest on but an appeal to the individual’s consciousness--an appeal
which avails as much or as little for material as for thinking
substance, and, in face of the apparent fact that with a knock on the
head the conscious independent substance may disappear altogether,
cannot hold its own against the suggestion that the one substance no
less than the other is reducible to a series of feelings, so closely
and constantly sequent on each other as to seem to coalesce. We
cannot substitute for this illusory appeal the valid method of an
analysis of knowledge, without finding that substantiation in matter
is just as necessary to knowledge as substantiation in mind. If this
method had been Berkeley’s he would have found a better plan for
dealing with the ‘materialism’ in vogue. Instead of trying to show
that material substance was a fiction, he would have shown that it
was really a basis of intelligible relations, and that thus all that
was fictitious about it was its supposed sensibility and consequent
opposition to the work of thought. Then his doctrine of matter
would itself have established the necessity of spirit, not indeed
as substance but as the source of all substantiation. As it was,
misunderstanding the true nature of the antithesis between matter and
mind, in his zeal against matter he took away the ground from under
the spiritualism which he sought to maintain. He simply invited a
successor in speculation, of colder blood than himself, to try the
solution of spirit in the same crucible with matter.
[1] Above, paragraph 125.
[2] Above, paragraph 127.
... as well as to a true Theism. His inference to God from necessity
of a power to produce ideas;
193. His doctrine of God is not only open to the same objection as
his doctrine of spiritual substance, but to others which arise from
the illogical restrictions that have to be put upon his notion of
such substance, if it is to represent at once the God of received
theology and the God whose agency the Berkeleian system requires as
the basis of distinction between the real and unreal. Admitting the
supposition involved in his certainty of the ‘natural immortality’
of the soul--the supposition that the succession of feelings which
constitutes the world, and which at no time was not, implies one
feeling substance--that substance we should naturally conclude was
God. Such a God, it is true (as has been already pointed out [1]),
would merely be the μέγα ζῶον [2] of the crudest Pantheism, but it
is the only God logically admissible--if any be admissible--in an
‘ideal’ system of which the text is not ‘the world really exists
only as thought of,’ but ‘the world only exists as a succession of
feelings.’ It was other than a _feeling_ substance, however, that
Berkeley required not merely to satisfy his religious instincts,
but to take the place held by ‘outward body’ with Locke as the
efficient of real ideas. The reference to this feeling substance, if
necessary for any idea, is necessary for all--for the ‘fantastic’
as well as for those of sense--and can therefore afford no ground
for distinction between the real and unreal. Instead, however, of
being thus led to a truer view of this distinction, as in truth a
distinction between the complete and incomplete conception of an
intelligible world, he simply puts the feeling substance, when he
regards it as God, under an arbitrary limitation, making it relative
only to those ideas of which with Locke ‘matter’ was the substance,
as opposed to those which Locke had referred to the thinking thing.
The direct consequence of this limitation, indeed, might seem to
be merely to make God an animal of partial, instead of universal,
susceptibility; but this consequence Berkeley avoids by dropping
the ordinary notion of substance altogether, so as to represent
the ideas of sense not as subsisting in God but as effects of His
power--as related to Him, in short, just as with Locke ideas of sense
are related to the primary qualities of matter. ‘There must be an
active power to produce our ideas, which is not to be found in ideas
themselves, for we are conscious that they are inert, nor in matter,
since that is but a name for a bundle of ideas; which must therefore
be in spirit, since of that we are conscious as active; yet not in
the spirit of which we are conscious, since then there would be no
difference between real and imaginary ideas; therefore in a Divine
Spirit, to whom, however, may forthwith be ascribed the attributes of
the spirit of which we are conscious.’ Such is the sum of Berkeley’s
natural theology.
[1] Above, paragraph 180.
[2] [Greek μέγα ζῶον (mega zoon) = great being. Tr.]
... a necessity which Hume does not see. A different turn should have
been given to his idealism, if it was to serve his purpose.
194. From a follower of Hume it of course invites the reply that
he does not see the necessity of an active power at all, to which,
since, according to Berkeley’s own showing, it is no possible ‘idea’
or object of an idea, all his own polemic against the ‘absolute
idea’ of matter is equally applicable; that the efficient power,
of which we profess to be conscious in ourselves, is itself only a
name for a particular feeling or impression which precedes certain
other of our impressions; that, even if it were more than this, the
transition from the spiritual efficiency of which we are conscious
to another, of which it is the special differentia that we are not
conscious of it, would be quite illegitimate, and that thus in
saying that certain feelings are real because, being lively and
involuntary, they must be the work of this unknown spirit, we in
effect say nothing more than that they are real because lively and
involuntary. Against a retort of this kind Berkeley’s theistic armour
is even less proof than Locke’s. His ‘proof of the being of God’
is in fact Locke’s with the sole _nervus probandi_ left out. The
value of Locke’s proof, as an argument from their being something
now to their having been something from eternity, lay, we saw, in
its convertibility into an argument from the world as a system of
relations to a present and eternal subject of those relations. For
its being so convertible there was this to be said, that Locke, with
whatever inconsistency, at least recognised the constitution of
reality by permanent relations, though he treated the mere relation
of external efficiency--that in virtue of which we say of nature that
it consists of bodies outward to and acting on each other--as if it
alone constituted the reality of the world. Berkeley’s reduction
of the ‘primary qualities of matter’ to a succession of feelings
logically effaces this relation, and puts nothing intelligible,
nothing but a name, in its place. The effacement of the distinction
between the real and unreal, which would properly ensue, is only
prevented by bringing back relation to something under the name of
God, either wholly unknown and indeterminate, or else, under a thin
disguise, determined by that very relation of external efficiency
which, when ascribed to something only nominally different, had been
pronounced a gratuitous fiction. If Berkeley had dealt with the
opposition of reality to thought by showing the primary qualities
to be conceived relations, and the distinction between the real and
unreal to be one between the fully and the defectively conceived, the
case would have been different. The real and God would alike have
been logically saved. The peculiar embarrassment of Locke’s doctrine
we have found to be that it involves the unreality of every object,
into the constitution of which there enters any idea of reflection,
or any idea retained in the mind, as distinct from the present effect
of a body acting upon us--_i.e._ of every object of which anything
can be said. With the definite substitution of full intelligibility
of relations for present sensibility, as the true account of the
real, this embarrassment would have been got rid of. At the same
time there would have been implied an intelligent subject of these
relations; the ascription to whom, indeed, of moral attributes would
have remained a further problem, but who, far from being a ‘Great
Unknown,’ would be at least determined by relation to that order of
nature which is as necessary to Him as He to it. But in fact, as
we have seen, the notion of the reality of relations, not felt but
understood, only appears in Berkeley’s developed philosophy as an
after-thought, and the notion of an order of nature, other than our
feelings, which enables us to infer what feelings that have never
been felt would be, is an unexplained intrusion in it. The same is
true of the doctrine, which struggles to the surface in the Third
Dialogue, that the ‘sensible world’ is to God not felt at all,
but known; that to Him it is precisely not that which according
to Berkeley’s refutation of materialism it really is--a series or
collection of sensations. These ‘after-thoughts,’ when thoroughly
thought out, imply a complete departure from Berkeley’s original
interpretation of ‘phenomena’ as simple feelings; but with him,
so far from being thought out, they merely suggested themselves
incidentally as the conceptions of God and reality were found to
require them. In other words, that interpretation of phenomena, which
is necessary to any valid ‘collection’ from them of the existence
of God, only appears in him as a consequence of that ‘collection’
having been made. To pursue the original interpretation, so that all
might know what it left of reality, was the best way of deciding
the question of its compatibility with a rational belief in God--a
question of too momentous an interest to be fairly considered in
itself. Thus to pursue it was the mission of Hume.
Hume’s mission. His account of impressions and ideas. Ideas are
fainter impressions.
195. Hume begins with an account of the ‘perceptions of the human
mind,’ which corresponds to Locke’s account of ideas with two main
qualifications, both tending to complete that dependence of thought
on something other than itself which Locke had asserted, but not
consistently maintained. He distinguishes ‘perceptions’ (equivalent
to Locke’s ideas) into ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’ accordingly as
they are originally produced in feeling or reproduced by memory and
imagination, and he does not allow ‘ideas of reflection’ any place in
the _original_ ‘furniture of the mind.’ ‘An impression first strikes
upon the senses, and makes us perceive heat or cold, thirst or
hunger, pleasure or pain, of some kind or other. Of this impression
there is a copy taken by the mind, which remains after the impression
ceases; and this we call an idea. This idea of pleasure or pain, when
it returns upon the soul, produces the new impressions of desire and
aversion, hope and fear, which may properly be called impressions
of reflection, because derived from it. These, again, are copied by
the memory and imagination, and become ideas; which, perhaps, in
their turn give rise to other impressions and ideas; so that the
impressions are only antecedent to their correspondent ideas, but
posterior to those of sensation and derived from them’ (Part I. §2).
He is at the same time careful to explain that the causes from which
the impressions of sensation arise are unknown (ibid.), and that by
the term ‘impression’ he is not to be ‘understood to express the
manner in which our lively perceptions are produced in the soul,
but merely the perceptions themselves’. [1] The distinction between
impression and idea he treats as equivalent to that between feeling
and thinking, which, again, lies merely in the different degrees of
‘force and liveliness’ with which the perceptions, thus designated,
severally ‘strike upon the mind.’ [2] Thus the rule which he
emphasises [3] ‘that all our simple ideas in their first appearance
are derived from simple impressions which are correspondent to them
and which they exactly represent,’ strictly taken, means no more
than that a feeling must be more lively before it becomes less so.
As the reproduced perception, or ‘idea,’ differs in this respect
from the original one, so, according to the greater or less degree
of secondary liveliness which it possesses, is it called ‘idea of
memory,’ or ‘idea of imagination.’ The only other distinction noticed
is that, as might be expected, the comparative faintness of the
ideas of imagination is accompanied by a possibility of their being
reproduced in a different order from that in which the corresponding
ideas were originally presented. Memory, on the contrary, ‘is in a
manner tied down in this respect, without any power of variation’;
[4] which must be understood to mean that, when the ideas are faint
enough to allow of variation in the order of reproduction, they are
not called ‘ideas of memory.’
[1] p. 312, note [Introduction to the Treatise of Human Nature]
[2] See pp. 327 and 375 [Book I, part I., sec. II. and part III. sec.
II.]
[3] p. 310 [Introduction to the Treatise of Human Nature]
[4] p. 318 [Book I, part I., sec. III.]
‘Ideas’ that cannot be so represented must be explained as mere words.
196. All, then, that Hume could find in his mind, when after Locke’s
example he ‘looked into it,’ were, according to his own statement,
feelings with their copies, dividing themselves into two main
orders--those of sensation and those of reflection, of which the
latter, though results of the former, are not their copies. The
question, then, that he had to deal with was, to what impressions
he could reduce those conceptions of relation--of cause and effect,
substance and attribute, and identity--which all knowledge involves.
Failing the impressions of sensation he must try those of reflection,
and failing both he must pronounce such conceptions to be no ‘ideas’
at all, but words misunderstood, and leave knowledge to take its
chance. The vital nerve of his philosophy lies in his treatment
of the ‘association of ideas’ as a sort of process of spontaneous
generation, by which impressions of sensation issue in such
impressions of reflection, in the shape of habitual propensities,’
[1] as will account, not indeed for there being--since there really
are not--but for there seeming to be, those formal conceptions which
Locke, to the embarrassment of his philosophy, had treated as at once
real and creations of the mind.
[1] Pp. 460 and 496 [Book I, part III., sec. XIV. and part IV., sec.
II.]
Hume, taken strictly, leaves no distinction between impressions of
reflection and of sensation.
197. Such a method meets at the outset with the difficulty that
the impressions of sensation and those of reflection, if Locke’s
determination of the former by reference to an impressive matter
is excluded, are each determined only by reference to the other.
What is an impression of reflection? It is one that can only
come after an impression of sensation. What is an impression of
sensation? It is one that comes before any impression of reflection.
An apparent determination, indeed, is gained by speaking of the
original impressions as ‘conveyed to us by our senses;’ but this
really means determination by reference to the organs of our body
as affected by outward bodies--in short, by a physical theory. But
of the two essential terms of this theory, ‘our own body,’ and
‘outward body,’ neither, according to Hume, expresses anything
present to the original consciousness. ‘Properly speaking, it is
not our body we perceive when we regard our limbs and members,
but certain impressions which enter by the senses.’ Nor do any of
our impressions ‘inform us of distance and outness (so to speak)
immediately, and without a certain reasoning and experience’. [1] In
such admissions Hume is as much a Berkeleian as Berkeley himself, and
they effectually exclude any reference to body from those original
impressions, by reference to which all other modes of consciousness
are to be explained.
[1] p. 481 [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]
Locke’s theory of sensation disappears. Physiology won’t answer the
question that Locke asked.