Reformed Logic / A System Based on Berkeley's Philosophy with an Entirely New Method of Dialectic

by D. B. McLachlan

Since external experience implies that another mind is operating upon ours, what mind is operating when we perceive an object that is apparently mindless? Berkeley replies that it is the supreme mind that is then acting upon us.

Many objections can be urged against this view. I will mention only one, which seems to me conclusive. By every canon of judgment we possess, the living or organised is better—more important and significant—than the lifeless and elemental; so if Berkeley's reasoning be valid the phenomena excited by finite and created beings are superior to those excited by their Creator. The movements of a living man are referred to a human mind—a putrescent carcase is a vision immediately induced by the Deity.

The beauty of the starry sky is irrelevant to the question. Apart from the finite life and thought that may be associated with the stars, they have no more philosophical importance than a spadeful of sand.

A more reasonable account of the inorganic is found in several ancient philosophies. Gnostics and Neo-Platonists referred the elemental to a cosmic mind (Demiurgos) intermediate between human beings and the Supreme. The demiurgic mind is inconceivably greater and more powerful than the human, but is not necessarily better in quality. It is the origin of all natural forces, and its organic processes are what we term 'physical laws.' This is the explanation of inorganic consciousness which I feel disposed to adopt, but to discuss it fully would carry us too far from the subject of this work.

The next point relates to the body. What is its function in substantialism? The brain, says Berkeley, is an idea in the mind, and he ridicules the notion that one idea should generate all other ideas. This is an argument against materialism. No doubt he would have admitted, though he does not say so, that the body-idea facilitates, or at least must precede, the experience of other ideas. He would not have denied that it is an instrumental idea.

Since his time an important discovery has been made with reference to the constitution of the body. I allude to the Cell theory. It is no longer possible to regard the body either as a self-moving machine (if this is not a contradiction in terms), or as a lump of 'dead matter' animated by the mind. It is a society of minute animals[²], each having a certain degree of independent energy and liberty of movement. They are organised and governed by the human or animal mind with which they are associated. In short, the relation of the cell to the man is analogous to, if not quite the same as, the relation of the man to the cosmic being.

This discovery complicates the problem of 'external' consciousness, without however affecting the principles on which a substantialist would endeavour to solve it. Instead of conceiving human minds as coming into immediate contact in perception, we have to conceive the cellular systems of each as forming a medium between the two. We do not perceive the other mind immediately or intuitively; what we perceive intuitively is certain affections in our own organism, which we must first refer to the other body, and then to the mind behind that body. Our knowledge of other human beings is thus altogether inferential.

The cellular medium explains why we are not generally aware of the substantial constitution of other minds; it is veiled by the intervening organisms.