171. To eliminate the reference to matter might seem to be more easy than to substitute for it a reference to God. If the object of the idea is only the idea itself, does not all determination by relation logically disappear from the idea, except (perhaps) such as consists in the fact of its sequence or antecedence to other ideas? This issue was afterwards to be tried by Hume—with what consequences to science and religion we shall see. Berkeley avoids it by insisting that the ‘percipi,’ to which ‘esse’ is equivalent, implies reference to a mind. At first sight this reference, as common to all ideas alike, would not seem to avail much as a basis either for a distinction between the real and fantastic or for any Theism except such as would ‘entitle God to all our fancies.’ If it is to serve Berkeley’s purpose, we must suppose the idea to carry with it not merely a relation to mind but a relation to it as its effect, and the conscious subject to carry with him such a distinction between his own mind and God’s as leads him to refer his ideas to God’s mind as their cause when they are lively, distinct and coherent, but when they are otherwise, to his own. And this, in substance, is Berkeley’s supposition. To show the efficient power of mind he appeals to our consciousness of ability to produce at will ideas of imagination; to show that there is a divine mind, distinct from our own, he appeals to our consciousness of inability to produce ideas of sense.
Is it then a succession of feelings?
172. Even those least disposed to ‘vanquish Berkeley with a grin’ have found his doctrine of the real, which is also his doctrine of God, ‘unsatisfactory.’ By the real world they are accustomed to understand something which—at least in respect of its ‘elements’ or ‘conditions’ or ‘laws’—permanently is; though the combinations of the elements, the events which flow from the conditions, the manifestations of the laws, may never be at one time what they will be at the next. But according to the Berkeleian doctrine the permanent seems to disappear: the ‘is’ gives place to a ‘has been’ and ‘will be.’ If I say (δεικτικῶς) [1] ‘there is a body,’ I must mean according to it that a feeling has just occurred to me, which has been so constantly followed by certain other feelings that it suggests a lively expectation of these. The suggestive feeling alone is, and it is ceasing to be. If this is the true account of propositions suggested by everyone’s constantly-recurrent experience, what are we to make of scientific truths, e.g. ‘a body will change its place sooner than let another enter it,’ ‘planets move in ellipses,’ ‘the square on the hypotheneuse is equal to the squares on the sides.’ In these cases, too, does the present reality lie merely in a feeling experienced by this or that scientific man, and to him suggestive of other feelings? Does the proposition that ‘planets move in ellipses’ mean that to some watcher of the skies, who understands Kepler’s laws, a certain perception of ‘visible extension’ (i.e. of colour or light and shade) not only suggests, as to others, a particular expectation of other feelings, which expectation is called a planet, but a further expectation, not shared by the multitude, of feelings suggesting successive situations of the visible extension, which further expectation is called elliptical motion? Such an explanation of general propositions would be a form of the doctrine conveniently named after Protagoras—‘ἀληθὲς ὃ ἑκάστῳ ἑκάστοτε δοκεῖ’ [2]—a doctrine which the vindicators of Berkeley are careful to tell us we must not confound with his. The question, however, is not whether Berkeley himself admits the doctrine, but whether or no it is the logical consequence of the method which he uses for the overthrow of materialists and ‘mathematical Atheists’?
[1] [Greek δεικτικῶς (deiktikos) = “affirmatively” or “capable of being proven” i.e. not merely hypothetically. Tr.]
[2] [Greek ἀληθὲς ὃ ἑκάστῳ ἑκάστοτε δοκεῖ (alethes ho hekasto hekastote dokei) = the truth for each man is as it appears to him. Tr.]
Berkeley goes wrong from confusion between thought and feeling. For
Locke’s ‘idea of a thing’ he substitutes ‘idea’ simply.
173. His purpose was the maintenance of Theism, and a true instinct told him that pure Theism, as distinct from nature-worship and daemonism, has no philosophical foundation, unless it can be shown that there is nothing real apart from thought. But in the hurry of theological advocacy, and under the influence of a misleading terminology, he failed to distinguish this true proposition—there is nothing real apart from thought—from this false one, its virtual contradictory—there is nothing other than feeling. The confusion was covered, if not caused, by the ambiguity, often noticed, in the use of the term ‘idea.’ This to Berkeley’s generation stood alike for feeling proper, which to the subject that merely feels is neither outer nor inner, because not referring itself to either mind or thing, and for conception, or an object thought of under relations. According to Locke, pain, colour, solidity, are all ideas equally with each other and equally with the idea of pain, idea of colour, idea of solidity. If all alike, however, were feelings proper, there would be no world either to exist or be spoken of. Locke virtually saves it by two suppositions, each incompatible with the equivalence of idea to feeling, and implying the conversion of it into conception as above defined. One is that there are abstract ideas; the other that there are primary qualities of which ideas are copies, but which do not come and go with our feelings. The latter supposition gives a world that ‘really exists,’ the former a world that may be known and spoken of; but neither can maintain itself without a theory of conception which is not forthcoming in Locke himself. We need not traverse again the contradictions which according to his statement they involve—contradictions which, under whatever disguise, must attach to every philosophy that admits a reality either in things as apart from thought or in thought as apart from things, and only disappear when the thing as thought of, and through thought individualised by the relations which constitute its community with the universe, is recognised as alone the real. Misled by the phrase ‘idea of a thing,’ we fancy that idea and thing have each a separate reality of their own, and then puzzle ourselves with questions as to how the idea can represent the thing—how the ideas of primary qualities can be copies of them, and how, if the real thing of experience be merely individual, a general idea can be abstracted from it. These questions Berkeley asked and found unanswerable. There were then two ways of dealing with them before him. One was to supersede them by a truer view of thought and its object, as together in essential correlation constituting the real; but this way he did not take. The other was to avoid them by merging both thing and idea in the indifference of simple feeling. For a merely sentient being, it is true—for one who did not think upon his feelings—the oppositions of inner and outer, of subjective and objective, of fantastic and real, would not exist; but neither would knowledge or a world to be known. That such oppositions, misunderstood, may be a heavy burden on the human spirit, the experience of current controversy and its spiritual effects might alone suffice to convince us; but the philosophical deliverance can only lie in the recognition of thought as their author, not in the attempt to obliterate them by the reduction of thought and its world to feeling—an attempt which contradicts itself, since it virtually admits their existence while it renders them unaccountable.
Which, if idea = feeling, does away with space and body.
174. That Berkeley’s was such an attempt, looking merely to his treatment of primary qualities and abstract ideas, we certainly could not doubt: though, since language does not allow of its consistent statement, and Berkeley was quite ready to turn the exigencies of language to account, passages logically incompatible with it may easily be found in him. The hasty reader, when he is told that body or distance are suggested by feelings of sight and touch rather than immediately seen, accepts the doctrine without scruple, because he supposes that which is suggested to be a present reality, though not at present felt. But if not at present felt it is not according to Berkeley an idea, therefore ‘without the mind,’ therefore an impossibility. [1] That which is suggested, then, must itself be a feeling which consists in the expectation of other feelings. Distance, and body, as suggested, can be no more than such an expectation; and as actually existing, no more than the actual succession of the expected feelings—a succession of which, as of every succession, ‘no two parts exist together.’ [2] There is no time, then, at which it can be said that distance and body exist.
[1] Reference is here merely made to the doctrine by which Berkeley disposes of ‘matter,’ the consideration of its reconcilability with his doctrine of ‘spirits’ and ‘relations’ as objects of knowledge being postponed.