Berkeley is, in fact, inconsistently combining two conflicting lines of thought. He argues, on the one hand, that since there must be some reason for the order in which presentations succeed one another in my mental life, that reason is to be found in a source independent of myself. This source he identifies with God, but, as far as the argument goes, it might equally well have been found, as by Locke, in the original constitution of matter; all that the argument requires is that it shall be placed in something outside the succession of presentations themselves. On the other hand, he also argues that since the existence of the physical world means simply the fact of its being presented to consciousness, when its contents cease to be present to my consciousness they must be present to that of God. And here again the objection might be suggested, that if presence to my own experience, while it lasts, is an adequate account of the esse of a thing, it does not appear why I should recognise the reality of any other experience. If I am to hold that disappearance from my experience does not destroy the reality of anything, I must logically also hold that its being, while I perceive it, is not exhausted by my awareness of it. Its esse cannot be merely percipi.
The complete solution of Berkeley’s difficulty would be premature at this point of our discussion. But we may at once point out its principal source. It arises from his failure to take adequate account of the purposive aspect of experience. Experience, as we have seen, is not mere awareness of a succession of presented objects, it is awareness of a succession determined by a controlling interest or purpose. The order of my experiences is not something simply given me from without, it is controlled and determined by subjective interest from within. Berkeley, in fact, omits selective attention from his psychological estimate of the contents of the human mind. He forgets that it is the interests for which I take note of facts that in the main determine which facts I shall take note of, an oversight which is the more remarkable, since he expressly lays stress on “activity” as the distinguishing property of “spirits.”[[41]] When we make good the omission by emphasising the teleological aspect of experience, we see at once that the radical disparity between the relation of the supreme and the subordinate mind to the world of facts disappears. I do not simply receive my presented facts passively in an order determined for me from without by the supreme mind; in virtue of my power of selective attention, on a limited scale, and very imperfectly, I recreate the order of their succession for myself.
Again, recognition of the teleological aspect of all experience goes far to remove the dissatisfaction which we may reasonably feel with the other half of Berkeley’s argument. When I conceive of the “facts” of experience as merely objects presented to my apprehension, there seems no sufficient reason for holding that they exist except as so presented. But the moment I think of the succession of presented facts as itself determined by the subjective interests expressed in selective attention, the case becomes different. The very expression “selective attention” itself carries with it a reminder that the facts which respond to my interests are but a selection out of a larger whole. And my practical experience of the way in which my own most clearly defined and conscious purposes depend for their fulfilment upon connection with the interests and purposes of a wider social whole possessed of an organic unity, should help me to understand how the totality of interests and purposes determining the selective attention of different percipients can form, as we have held that it must, the harmonious and systematic unity of the absolute experience. The fuller working out of this line of thought must be left for later chapters, but it is hardly too much to say that the teleological character which experience possesses in virtue of its unity with feeling is the key to the idealistic interpretation of the universe.[[42]]
Idealism, i.e. the doctrine that all reality is mental, as we shall have repeated opportunities of learning, becomes unintelligible when mental life is conceived of as a mere awareness of “given” presentations.
§ 7. We may now, before attempting to carry out in detail our general view of what is involved in being real, enumerate one or two philosophical doctrines about the nature of real existence which our conclusion as to the connection of reality with experience justifies us in setting aside. And, first of all, we can at once see that our previous result, if sound, proves fatal to all forms of what is commonly known as Realism. By Realism is meant the doctrine that the fundamental character of that which really is, as distinguished from that which is only imagined to be, is to be found in its independence of all relation to the experience of a subject.[subject.] What exists at all, the realist holds, exists equally whether it is experienced or not. Neither the fact of its existence nor the kind of existence it possesses depends in any way upon its presence to an experience. Before it was experienced at all it had just the same kind of being that it has now you are experiencing it, and it will still be the same when it has passed out of experience. In a word, the circumstance that a mind—whether yours or mine or God’s is indifferent to the argument—is aware of it as one of the constituents of its experience, makes no difference to the reality of the real thing; experience is what is technically called a relation of one-sided dependence. That there may be experience at all, and that it may have this or that character, there must be real things of determinate character, but that there may be real things, it is not necessary that there should be experience. This is, in brief, the essence of the realist contention, and any philosophy which accepts it as valid is in its spirit a realist philosophy.
As to the number and nature of the supposed independent real things, very different views may be held and have been held by different representatives of Realism. Thus some realists have maintained the existence of a single ultimate reality, others of an indefinite plurality of independent “reals.” Parmenides, with his doctrine that the real world is a single uniform unchanging material sphere, is an instance in the ancient, and Mr. Herbert Spencer, with his Unknowable, an instance in the modern world of a realist of the former or “monistic” type. The ancient atomists, and in more recent times Leibnitz with his infinite plurality of independent and disconnected monads, and Herbart with his world of simple “reals,” afford the best known instances of a doctrine of pluralistic Realism. So again, the most diverse theories have been propounded as to the nature of the “reals.” Ancient and modern atomists have thought of them as material, and this is perhaps the form of realistic doctrine which appeals most readily to the ordinary imagination. But though a materialistic metaphysician is necessarily a realist, a realist need not be a materialist. Herbart thought of the independent “reals” as qualitatively simple beings of a nature not capable of further definition, Leibnitz as minds, while Agnostic philosophers of the type of Spencer conceive their ultimate reality as a sort of neutral tertium quid, neither mental nor material. The only point on which all the theories agree is that the reality of that which they recognise as true Being consists in its not depending for its existence or its character on relation to an experience. The differences of detail as to the number and nature of independent “reals,” though of great importance for our complete estimate of an individual realist’s philosophical position, do not affect our general verdict on the tenability of the first principle of Realism.
The one point of divergence among realists which may be considered as of more than secondary importance for our present purpose, is the difference between what we may call Agnostic and Dogmatic Realism. Agnostic Realism, while asserting the ultimate dependence of our experience upon a reality which exists independently of experience, denies that we can have any knowledge of the nature of this independent reality. The independent reality by which all experience is conditioned is, on this view, an Unknowable or Thing-in-itself,[[43]] of which we are only logically entitled to say that it certainly is, but that we do not in the least know what it is. The doctrine of Agnostic Realism has probably never been carried out by any thinker with rigid consistency, but it forms a leading feature of the philosophy of Kant as expounded in his First Critique, and through Kant has passed into English thought as the foundation of the systems of Sir William Hamilton and Mr. Herbert Spencer.[[44]]
Dogmatic Realism, of which Leibnitz and, at a later date, Herbart are the most important representatives in modern philosophy, on the contrary, while maintaining that real being is independent of experience, at the same time holds that it is possible to have positive knowledge not only of its existence but of its nature. In principle, both these forms of Realism have been already excluded by the argument of Book I. chap. 2, [§ 4]. The supreme importance of the principle on which the argument rests may perhaps warrant us in once more briefly recurring to it. Our reasoning, it will be remembered, took the form of a challenge. Produce any instance you please, we said to the realist, whom we had not then learned to know by that name, of what you personally regard as reality, and we will undertake to show that it derives its reality for you from the very fact that it is not ultimately separable from the experience of a subject. A thing is real for you, and not merely imaginary, precisely because in some aspect of its character it enters into and affects your own experience. Or, what is the same thing in other words, it is real for you because it affects favourably or otherwise some subjective interest of your own. To be sure, the thing as it enters into your experience, as it affects your own subjective interests, is not the thing as it is in its fulness; it only touches your life through some one of its many sides. And this may lead you to argue that the real thing is the unexperienced “condition” of a modification of your experience[experience]. But then we had again to ask what you[you] mean by saying that facts which you do not experience are real as “conditions” of what you do experience. And we saw that the only meaning we could attach to the reality of the “condition” was presence to an experience which transcends your own.
To this general argument we may add two corollaries or supplementary considerations, which, without introducing anything fresh, may help to make its full force more apparent.
(1) The argument, as originally presented, was concerned directly with the that of reality, the mere fact of its existence. But we may also state it, if we please, from the side of the what, the nature possessed by the real. You cannot affirm any doctrine about the real existence of anything without at the same time implying a doctrine about its nature. Even if you say “Reality is unknowable,” you are attributing something beyond mere independence of experience to your reality; you are asserting that what is thus independent possesses the further positive quality of transcending cognition. Now what, in logic, must be your ground for attributing this rather than any other quality to your independent reality? It can only be the fact or supposed fact—which is indeed regularly appealed to by the Agnostic as the foundation of his belief—that our experiences themselves are all found to be self-contradictory. There is no ground for taking the unknowability of Reality to be true unless you mean by it a character which belongs not to something which stands outside all experience, but to experience itself. The same contention applies to any other predicate which the realist affirms as true of his ultimate reality.