178. But though he does not scruple to substitute for colour situations and quantities of coloured points, these do not with him constitute space, which he takes according to Locke’s account of it to be ‘distance between bodies or parts of the same body.’ This, according to his ‘Theory of Vision,’ is tangible extension, and this again is alone the object of geometry. As in that treatise a difference is still supposed between tangible extension and the feeling of touch, the question does not there necessarily arise whether the tactual experience, that constitutes this extension, is complete in a single feeling or only in a succession of feelings; but when in the subsequent treatise the difference is effaced, it is decided by implication that the experience is successive: [1] and all received modifications of the theory, which assign to a locomotive or muscular sense the office which Berkeley roughly assigned to touch, make the same implication still more clearly. Now in the absence of any recognition of a synthetic principle, in relation to which the successive experience becomes what it is not in itself, this means nothing else than that space is a succession of feelings, which again means that space is not space, not a qualification of bodies or parts of body by mutual externality, since to such qualification it is necessary that bodies or their parts coexist. Thus, in his hurry to get rid of externality as independence of the mind, he has really got rid of it as a relation between bodies, and in so doing (however the result may be disguised) has logically made a clean sweep of geometry and physics.
[1] ‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 44. It will be observed that in that passage Berkeley uses the term ‘distance’ not ‘space,’ and though with him the terms are strictly interchangeable, this may have helped to disguise from him the full monstrosity of the doctrine, ‘space is a succession of feelings,’ which, stated in that form, must surely have scandalised him.
If so, it is not space at all; but Berkeley thinks it is only not ‘pure’ space. Space and pure space stand or fall together.
179. Of this result he himself shows no suspicion. He professes to be able, without violence to his doctrine, to accept the sciences as they stand, except so far as they rest upon the needless and unmeaning assumptions (as he reckoned them) of pure space and its infinite divisibility. The truth seems to be that—at any rate in the state of mind represented his earlier treatises—he was only able to work on the lines which Locke had laid. It did not occur to him to treat the primary qualities as relations constituted by thought, because Locke had not done so. Locke having treated them as external to the mind, Berkeley does so likewise, and for that reason feels that they must be got rid of. The mode of riddance, again, was virtually determined for him by Locke. Locke having admitted that they copied themselves in feelings, the untenable element in this supposition had only to be dropped and they became feelings simply. It is thus only so far as space is supposed to exist after a mode of which, according to Locke himself, sense could take no copy—i.e. as exclusive not merely of all colour but of all body, and as infinitely divisible—that Berkeley becomes aware of its incompatibility with his doctrine. Pure space, or ‘vacuum,’ to him means space that can not be touched—a tangible extension that is not tangible—and is therefore a contradiction in terms. The notion that, though not touched, it might be seen, he excludes, [1] apparently for the same reason which prevents him from allowing visible extension to be space at all; the reason, namely, that there is no ‘outness’ or relation of externality between the parts of such extension. The fact that there can be no such relation between the successive feelings which alone, according to him, constitute ‘tangible extension,’ he did not see to be equally fatal to the latter being in any true sense space. In other words, he did not see that the test of reduction to feeling, by which he disposed of the vacuum, disposed of space altogether. If he had, he would have understood that space and body were intelligible relations, which can be thought of apart from the feelings which through them become the world that we know, since it is they that are the conditions of these feelings becoming a knowledge, not the feelings that are the condition of the relations being known. Whether they can be thought of apart from each other—whether the simple relation of externality between parts of a whole can be thought of without the parts being considered as solid—is of course a further question, and one which Berkeley cannot be said properly to discuss at all, since the abstraction of space from body to him meant its abstraction from feelings of touch. The answer to it ceases to be difficult as soon as the question is properly stated.
[1] ‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 116.
Berkeley disposes of space for fear of limiting God.
180. As with vacuum, so with infinite divisibility. Once let it be understood that extension is constituted by the relation of externality between homogeneous parts, and it follows that there can be no least part of extension, none that does not itself consist of parts; in other words, that it is infinitely divisible: just as conversely it follows that there can be no last part of it, not having another outside it; in other words, that (to use Locke’s phrase) it is infinitely addible. Doubtless, as Berkeley held, there is a ‘minimum visibile’; but this means that there are conditions under which any seen colour disappears, and disappearing, ceases to be known under the relation of extension; but it is only through a confusion of the relation with the colour that the disappearance of the latter is thought to be a disappearance of so much extension. [1] It was, in short, the same failure to recognise the true ideality of space, as a relation constituted by thought, that on the one hand made its ‘purity’ and infinity unmeaning to Berkeley, and on the other made him think that, if pure (sc. irreducible to feelings) and infinite, it must limit the Divine perfection, either as being itself God or as ‘something beside God which is eternal, uncreated, and infinite’ (‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 117). Fear of this result set him upon that method of resolving space, and with it the world of nature, into sequent feelings, which, if it had been really susceptible of logical expression, would at best have given him nothing but a μέγα ζῶον [2] for God. If he had been in less of a hurry with his philosophy, he might have found that the current tendency to ‘bind God in nature or diffuse in space’ required to be met by a sounder than his boyish idealism—by an idealism which gives space its due, but reflects that to make space God, or a limitation on God, is to subject thought itself to the most superficial of the relations by which it forms the world that it knows.
[1] The same remark of course applies, mutatis mutandis, to the ‘minimum tangibile.’ See below, paragraphs 265 and 260.
[2] [Greek μέγα ζῶον (mega zoon) = great being. Tr.]
How he deals with possibility of general knowledge.