Part 50

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.

497 i.e. “ideas” in Locke’s meaning of idea, under which he comprehends, not only the particular ideas of sense and imagination—Berkeley’s “ideas”—but these considered relatively, and so seen intellectually, when Locke calls them abstract, general, or universal. Omniscience in its all-comprehensive intuition may not require, or even admit, such general ideas.

498 Here and in what follows, “abstract _notion_,” “universal _notion_,” instead of abstract _idea_. Notion seems to be here a synonym for idea, and not taken in the special meaning which he afterwards attached to the term, when he contrasted it with idea.

499 “notions,” again synonymous with ideas, which are all particular or concrete, in his meaning of _idea_, when he uses it strictly.

_ 500 idea_, i.e. individual mental picture.

501 In all this he takes no account of the intellectual relations necessarily embodied in concrete knowledge, and without which experience could not cohere.

502 “have in view,” i.e. actually realise in imagination.

503 What follows, to the end of this section, was added in the second or 1734 edition.

504 So Bacon in many passages of his _De Augmentis Scientiarium_ and _Novum Organum_.

505 “wide influence,”—“wide and extended sway”—in first edition.

506 “idea,” i.e. individual datum of sense or of imagination.

507 See Leibniz on Symbolical Knowledge (_Opera Philosophica_, pp. 79, 80, Erdmann), and Stewart in his _Elements_, vol. I. ch. 4, § 1, on our habit of using language without realising, in individual examples or ideas, the meanings of the common terms used.

508 “doth”—“does,” here and elsewhere in first edition.

509 “ideas,” i.e. representations in imagination of _any_ of the individual objects to which the names are applicable. The sound or sight of a verbal sign may do duty for the concrete idea in which the notion signified by the word might be exemplified.

510 This sentence is omitted in the second edition.

511 Elsewhere he mentions Aristotle as “certainly a great admirer and promoter of the doctrine of abstraction,” and quotes his statement that there is hardly anything so incomprehensible to men as notions of the utmost universality; for they are the most remote from sense. _Metaph._, Bk. I. ch. 2.

512 Added in second edition.

513 Omitted in second edition.

514 Omitted in second edition.

515 Omitted in second edition.

516 “my own ideas,” i.e. the concrete phenomena which I can realise as perceptions of sense, or in imagination.

517 He probably refers to Locke.

518 According to Locke, “that which has most contributed to hinder the due tracing of our ideas, and finding out their relations, and agreements or disagreements one with another, has been, I suppose, the ill use of words. It is impossible that men should ever truly seek, or certainly discover, the agreement or disagreement of ideas themselves, whilst their thoughts flutter about, or stick only in sounds of doubtful and uncertain significations. Mathematicians, abstracting their thoughts from names, and accustoming themselves to set before their minds the ideas themselves that they would consider, and not sounds instead of them, have avoided thereby a great part of that perplexity, puddering, and confusion which has so much hindered men’s progress in other parts of knowledge.” _Essay_, Bk. IV. ch. 3, § 30. See also Bk. III. ch. 10, 11.

519 General names involve in their signification intellectual relations among ideas or phenomena; but the relations, _per se_, are unimaginable.

520 The rough draft of the Introduction, prepared two years before the publication of the _Principles_ (see Appendix, vol. III), should be compared with the published version. He there tells that “there was a time when, being bantered and abused by words,” he “did not in the least doubt” that he was “able to abstract his ideas”; adding that “after a strict survey of my abilities, I not only discovered my own deficiency on this point, but also cannot conceive it possible that such a power should be even in the most perfect and exalted understanding.” What he thus pronounces “impossible,” is a _sensuous_ perception or imagination of an intellectual relation, as to which most thinkers would agree with him. But in so arguing, he seems apt to discard the intellectual relations themselves that are necessarily embodied in experience.

David Hume refers thus to Berkeley’s doctrine about “abstract ideas”:—“A great philosopher has asserted that all general ideas are nothing but particular ones annexed to a certain term, which gives them a more extensive signification. I look upon this to be one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries that has been made of late years in the republic of letters.” (_Treatise of H. N._ Pt. I, sect. 7.)

521 This resembles Locke’s account of the ideas with which human knowledge is concerned. They are all originally presented to the senses, or got by reflexion upon the passions and acts of the mind; and the materials contributed in this external and internal experience are, with the help of memory and imagination, elaborated by the human understanding in ways innumerable, true and false. See Locke’s _Essay_, Bk. II, ch. 1, §§ 1-5; ch. 10, 11, 12.

522 The ideas or phenomena of which we are percipient in our five senses make their appearance, not isolated, but in individual masses, constituting the things, that occupy their respective places in perceived ambient space. It is as _qualities_ of _things_ that the ideas or phenomena of sense arise in human experience.

523 This is an advance upon the language of the _Commonplace Book_, in which “mind” is spoken of as only a “congeries of perceptions.” Here it is something “entirely distinct” from ideas or perceptions, in which they exist and are perceived, and on which they ultimately depend. Spirit, intelligent and active, presupposed with its implicates in ideas, thus becomes the basis of Berkeley’s philosophy. Is this subjective idealism only? Locke appears in sect. 1, Descartes, if not Kant by anticipation, in sect. 2.

524 This sentence expresses Berkeley’s New Principle, which filled his thoughts in the _Commonplace Book_. Note “in _a_ mind,” not necessarily in _my_ mind.

525 That is to say, one has only to put concrete meaning into the terms _existence_ and _reality_, in order to have “an intuitive knowledge” that matter depends for its real existence on percipient spirit.

526 In other words, the things of sense become real, only in the concrete experience of living mind, which gives them the only reality we can conceive or have any sort of concern with. Extinguish Spirit and the material world necessarily ceases to be real.

527 That _esse_ is _percipi_ is Berkeley’s initial Principle, called “intuitive” or self-evident.

528 Mark that it is the “natural or real existence” of the material world, in the absence of all realising Spirit, that Berkeley insists is impossible—meaningless.

529 “our own”—yet not exclusively _mine_. They depend for their reality upon _a_ percipient, not on _my_ perception.

530 “this tenet,” i.e. that the concrete material world could still be a reality after the annihilation of all realising spiritual life in the universe—divine or other.

531 “existing unperceived,” i.e. existing without being realised in any living percipient experience—existing in a totally abstract existence, whatever that can mean.

532 “notions”—a term elsewhere (see sect. 27, 89, 142) restricted, is here applied to the immediate data of the senses—the ideas of sense.

533 This sentence is omitted in the second edition.

534 In the first edition, instead of this sentence, we have the following: “To make this appear with all the light and evidence of an Axiom, it seems sufficient if I can but awaken the reflexion of the reader, that he may take an impartial view of his own meaning, and turn his thoughts upon the subject itself; free and disengaged from all embarras of words and prepossession in favour of received mistakes.”

535 In other words, active percipient Spirit is at the root of all intelligible trustworthy experience.

536 ’proof’—“demonstration” in first edition; yet he calls it “intuitive.”

537 “the ideas themselves,” i.e. the phenomena immediately presented in sense, and that are thus realised in and through the percipient experience of living mind, as their factor.

538 As those say who assume that perception is ultimately only representative of the material reality, the very things themselves not making their appearance to us at all.

539 He refers especially to Locke, whose account of Matter is accordingly charged with being incoherent.

540 “inert.” See the _De Motu_.

541 “ideas existing in the mind,” i.e. phenomena of which _some_ mind is percipient; which are realised in the sentient experience of a living spirit, human or other.

542 What follows to the end of the section is omitted in the second edition.

543 “the existence of Matter,” i.e. the existence of the material world, regarded as a something that does not need to be perceived in order to be real.

544 Sometimes called _objective_ qualities, because they are supposed to be realised in an abstract objectivity, which Berkeley insists is meaningless.

545 See Locke’s _Essay_, Bk. II, ch. 8, §§ 13, 18; ch. 23, § 11; Bk. IV, ch. 3, § 24-26. Locke suggests this relation between the secondary and the primary qualities of matter only hypothetically.

546 “in the mind, and nowhere else,” i.e. perceived or conceived, but in no other manner can they be real or concrete.

547 “without the mind,” i.e. independently of all percipient experience.

548 Extension is thus the distinguishing characteristic of the material world. Geometrical and physical solidity, as well as motion, imply extension.

549 “number is the creature of the mind,” i.e. is dependent on being realised in percipient experience. This dependence is here illustrated by the relation of concrete number to the point of view of each mind; as the dependence of the other primary qualities was illustrated by their dependence on the organisation of the percipient. In this, the preceding, and the following sections, Berkeley argues the inconsistency of the abstract reality attributed to the primary qualities with their acknowledged dependence on the necessary conditions of sense perception.

550 Cf. _New Theory of Vision_, sect. 109.

551 e.g. Locke, _Essay_, Bk. II, ch. 7, § 7; ch. 16, § 1.

552 “without any alteration in any external object”—“without any external alteration”—in first edition.

553 These arguments, founded on the mind-dependent nature of _all_ the qualities of matter, are expanded in the _First Dialogue between Hylas and Philonous_.

554 “an outward object,” i.e. an object wholly abstract from living Mind.

555 This sentence is omitted in the second edition.

556 “reason,” i.e. reasoning. It is argued, in this and the next section, that a reality unrealised in percipient experience cannot be proved, either by our senses or by reasoning.

557 Omitted in the second edition, and the sentence converted into a question.

558 But the ideas of which we are cognizant in waking dreams, and dreams of sleep, differ in important characteristics from the external ideas of which we are percipient in sense. Cf. sect. 29-33.

559 “external bodies,” i.e. bodies supposed to be real independently of all percipients in the universe.

560 i.e. they cannot shew how their unintelligible hypothesis of Matter accounts for the experience we have, or expect to have; or which we believe other persons have, or to be about to have.

561 “the production,” &c., i.e. the fact that we and others have percipient experience.

562 Mind-dependent Matter he not only allows to exist, but maintains its reality to be intuitively evident.

563 i.e. bodies existing in abstraction from living percipient spirit.

564 “Matter,” i.e. abstract Matter, unrealised in sentient intelligence.

565 The appeal here and elsewhere is to consciousness—directly in each person’s experience, and indirectly in that of others.

566 i.e. otherwise than in the form of an idea or actual appearance presented to our senses.