Berkeley, George

In the philosophies of Descartes and Locke a large share of attention had been directed to the idea of matter, which was held to be the abstract, unperceived background of real experience, and was supposed to give rise to our ideas of external things through its action on the sentient mind. Knowledge being limited to the ideas produced could never extend to the unperceived matter, or substance, or cause which produced them, and it became a problem for speculative science to determine the grounds for the very belief in its existence. Philosophy seemed about to end in scepticism or in materialism. Now Berkeley put this whole problem in a new light by pointing out a preliminary question. Before we deduce results from such abstract ideas as cause, substance, matter, we must ask what in reality do these mean—what is the actual content of consciousness which corresponds to these words? Do not all these ideas, when held to represent something which exists absolutely apart from all knowledge of it, involve a contradiction? In putting this question, not less than in answering it, consists Berkeley’s originality as a philosopher. The essence of the answer is that the universe is inconceivable apart from mind—that existence, as such, denotes conscious spirits and the objects of consciousness. Matter and external things, in so far as they are thought to have an existence beyond the circle of consciousness, are impossible, inconceivable. External things are things known to us in immediate perception. To this conclusion Berkeley seems, in the first place, to have been led by the train of reflection that naturally conducts to subjective or egoistic idealism. It is impossible to overstep the limits of self-consciousness; whatever words I use, whatever notions I have, must refer to and find their meaning in facts of consciousness. But this is by no means the whole or even the principal part of Berkeley’s philosophy; it is essentially a theory of causality, and this is brought out gradually under the pressure of difficulties in the first solution of the early problem. To merely subjective idealism, sense percepts differ from ideas of imagination in degree, not in kind; both belong to the individual mind. To Berkeley, however, the difference is fundamental; sense ideas are not due to our own activity; they must therefore be produced by some other will-by the divine intelligence. Sense experience is thus the constant action upon our minds of supreme active intellect, and is not the consequence of dead inert matter. It might appear, therefore, that sensible things had an objective existence in the mind of God; that an idea so soon as it passes out of our consciousness passes into that of God. This is an interpretation, frequently and not without some justice, put upon Berkeley’s own expression. But it is not a satisfactory account of his theory. Berkeley is compelled to see that an immediate perception is not a thing, and that what we consider permanent or substantial is not a sensation but a group of qualities, which in ultimate analysis means sensations either immediately felt or such as our experience has taught us would be felt in conjunction with these. Our belief in the reality of a thing may therefore be said to mean assurance that this association in our minds between actual and possible sensations is somehow guaranteed. Further, Berkeley’s own theory would never permit him to speak of possible sensations, meaning by that the ideas of sensations called up to our minds by present experience. He could never have held that these afforded any explanation of the permanent existence of real objects. His theory is quite distinct from this, which really amounts to nothing more than subjective idealism. External things are produced by the will of the divine intelligence; they are caused, and caused in a regular order; there exists in the divine mind archetypes, of which sense experience may be said to be the realization in our finite minds. Our belief in the permanence of something which corresponds to the association in our minds of actual and possible sensations means belief in the orderliness of nature; and that is merely assurance that the universe is pervaded and regulated by mind. Physical science is occupied in endeavouring to decipher the divine ideas which find realization in our limited experience, in trying to interpret the divine language of which natural things are the words and letters, and in striving to bring human conceptions into harmony with the divine thoughts. Instead, therefore, of fate or necessity, or matter, or the unknown, a living, active mind is looked upon as the centre and spring of the universe, and this is the essence of the Berkeleian metaphysics.

The deeper aspects of Berkeley’s new thought have been almost universally neglected or misunderstood. Of his spiritual empiricism one side only has been accepted by later thinkers, and looked upon as the whole. The subjective mechanism of association which with Berkeley is but part of the true explanation, and is dependent on the objective realization in the divine mind, has been received as in itself a satisfactory theory. Suni Cogitationes has been regarded by thinkers who profess themselves Berkeleians as the one proposition warranted by consciousness; the empiricism of his philosophy has been eagerly welcomed, while the spiritual intuition, without which the whole is to Berkeley meaningless, has been cast aside. For this he is himself in no small measure to blame. The deeper spiritual intuition, present from the first, was only brought into clear relief in order to meet difficulties in the earlier statements, and the extension of the intuition itself beyond the limits of our own consciousness, which completely removes his position from mere subjectivism, rests on foundations uncritically assumed, and at first sight irreconcilable with certain positions of his system. The necessity and universality of the judgments of causality and substantiality are taken for granted; and there is no investigation of the place held by these notions in the mental constitution. The relation between the divine mind and finite intelligence, at first thought as that of agent and recipient, is complicated and obscure when the necessity for explaining the permanence of real things comes forward. The divine archetypes, according to which sensible experience is regulated and in which it finds its real objectivity, are different in kind from mere sense ideas, and the question then arises whether in these we have not again the “things as they are,” which Berkeley at first so contemptuously dismissed. He leaves it undetermined whether or not our knowledge of sense things, which is never entirely presentative, involves some reference to this objective course of nature or thought of the divine mind. And if so, what is the nature of the notions necessarily implied in the simplest knowledge of a thing, as distinct from mere sense feeling? That in knowing objects certain thoughts are implied which are not presentations or their copies is at times dimly seen by Berkeley himself; but he was content to propound a question with regard to those notions, and to look upon them as merely Locke’s ideas of relation. Such ideas of relation are in truth the stumbling-block in Locke’s philosophy, and Berkeley’s empiricism is equally far from accounting for them.

With all these defects, however, Berkeley’s new conception marks a distinct stage of progress in human thought. His true place in the history of speculation may be seen from the simple observation that the difficulties or obscurities in his scheme are really the points on which later philosophy has turned. He once for all lifted the problem of metaphysics to a higher level, and, in conjunction with his successor, Hume, determined the form into which later metaphysical questions have been thrown.

Bibliography.—The standard edition of Berkeley’s works is that of A. Campbell Eraser in 4 vols. (i.-iii. Works; iv. Life, Letters and Dissertation) published by the Clarendon Press (1871); this edition, revised throughout and largely re-written, was re-published by the same author (1901). Another complete edition edited by G. Sampson, with a biographical sketch by A.J. Balfour, and a useful bibliographical summary, appeared in 1897-1898. Prof. Fraser also published an excellent volume of selections (5th ed., 1899), and a short general account in a volume on Berkeley in the Blackwood Philos. Class. For Berkeley’s theory of vision see manuals of psychology (e.g. G.F. Stout, Wm. James); for his ethical views H. Sidgwick, Hist, of Ethics (5th ed., 1902); A. Bain, Mental and Moral Science (1872). See also Sir L. Stephen, English Thought in the 18th Century (3rd ed., 1902); J.S. Mill’s Dissertations, vols. ii. and iv.; T. Huxley, Critiques and Addresses, pp. 320 seq.; G.S. Fullerton, System of Metaphysics (New York, 1904); John Watson, Outline of Philos. (New York, 1898); J. McCosh, Locke’s Theory of Knowledge (1884); T. Lorenz, Ein Beitrag zur Lebensgeschichte G. Berkeleys (1900) and Weitere Beiträge z. Leb. G.B.’s (1901); histories of modern philosophy generally.