188. Such a doctrine could not help being at once confused in its account of reality, and insecure in its doctrine alike of the human spirit and of God. On the recognition of relations as constituting the nature of ideas rests the possibility of any tenable theory of their reality. An isolated idea could be neither real nor unreal. Apart from a definite order of relation we may suppose (if we like) that it would be, but it would certainly not be real; and as little could it be unreal, since unreality can only result from the confusion in our consciousness of one order of relation with another. It is diversity of relations that distinguishes, for instance, these letters as they now appear on paper from the same as I imagine them with my eyes shut, giving each sort its own reality: just as upon confusion with the other each alike becomes unreal. Thus, though with Locke simple ideas are necessarily real, we soon find that even according to him they are not truly so in their simplicity, but only as related to an external thing producing them. He is right enough, however inconsistent with himself, in making relation constitute reality; wrong in limiting this prerogative to the one relation of externality. When he afterwards, in virtual contradiction to this limitation, finds the reality of moral and mathematical ideas just in that sole relation to the mind, as its products, which he had previously made the source of all unreality, he forces upon us the explanation which he does not himself give, that unreality does not lie in either relation as opposed to the other, but in the confusion of any relation with another. It is for lack of this explanation that Locke himself, as we have seen, finds in the liveliness and involuntariness of ideas the sole and sufficient tests (not constituents) of their reality; though they are obviously tests which put the dreams of a man in a fever upon the same footing with the ‘impressions’ of a man awake, and would often prove that unreal after dinner which had been proved real before. There is a well-known story of a man who in a certain state of health commonly saw a particular gory apparition, but who, knowing its origin, used to have himself bled till it disappeared. The reality of the apparition lay, he knew, in some relation between the circulation of his blood and his organs of sight, in distinction from the reality existing in the normal relations of his visual organs to the light: and in his idea, accordingly, there was nothing unreal, because he did not confuse the one relation with the other. Locke’s doctrine, however, would allow of no distinction between the apparition as it was for such a man and as it would be for one who interpreted it as an actual ‘ghost.’ However interpreted, the liveliness and the involuntariness of the idea remain the same, as does its relation to an efficient cause. If in order to its reality the cause must be an ‘outward body,’ then it is no more real when rightly, than when wrongly, interpreted; while on the ground of liveliness and involuntariness it is as real when taken for a ghost as when referred to an excess of blood in the head.
Berkeley retains this notion, only substituting ‘God’ for ‘body’.
189. As has been pointed out above, it is in respect not of the ‘ratio cognoscendi’ but of the ‘ratio essendi’ that Berkeley’s doctrine of reality differs from Locke’s. With him it is not as an effect of an outward body, but as an immediate effect of God, that an ‘idea of sense’ is real. Just as with Locke real ideas and matter serve each to explain the other, so with Berkeley do real ideas and God. If he is asked, What is God? the answer is, He is the efficient cause of real ideas; if he is asked, What are real ideas? the answer is, Those which God produces, as opposed to those which we make for ourselves. To the inevitable objection, that this is a logical see-saw, no effective answer can be extracted from Berkeley but this—that we have subjective tests of the reality of ideas apart from a knowledge of their cause. In his account of these Berkeley only differs from Locke in adding to the qualifications of liveliness and involuntariness those of ‘steadiness, order, and coherence’ in the ideas. This addition may mean either a great deal or very little. To us it may mean that the distinction of real and unreal is one that applies not to feelings but to the conceived relations of feelings; not to events as such, but to the intellectual interpretation of them. The occurrence of a feeling taken by itself (it may be truly said) is neither coherent nor incoherent; nor can the sequence of feelings one upon another with any significance be called coherence, since in that case an incoherence would be as impossible as any failure in the sequence. As little can we mean by such coherence an usual, by incoherence an unusual, sequence of feelings. If we did, every sequence not before experienced—such, for instance, as is exhibited by a new scientific experiment—being unusual, would have to be pronounced incoherent, and therefore unreal. Coherence, in short, we may conclude, is only predicable of a system of relations, not felt but conceived; while incoherence arises from the attempt of an imperfect intelligence to think an object under relations which cannot ultimately be held together in thought. The qualification then of ‘ideas’ as coherent has in truth no meaning unless ‘idea’ be taken to mean not feeling but conception: and thus understood, the doctrine that coherent ideas are (Berkeley happily excludes the notion that they merely represent) the real, amounts to a clear identification of the real with the world of conception.
Not regarding the world as a system of intelligible relations, he could not regard God as the subject of it.
190. If such idealism were Berkeley’s, his inference from the ‘ideality’ of the real to spirit and God would be more valid than it is. To have got rid of the notion that the world first exists and then is thought of—to have seen that it only really exists as thought of—is to have taken the first step in the only possible ‘proof of the being of God,’ as the self-conscious subject in relation to which alone an intelligible world can exist, and the presence of which in us is the condition of our knowing it. [1] But there is nothing to show that in adopting coherence as one test, among others, of the reality of ideas, he attached to it any of the significance exhibited above. He adopted it from ordinary language without considering how it affected his view of the world as a succession of feelings. That still remained to him a sufficient account of the world, even when he treated it as affording intuitive certainty of a soul ‘naturally immortal,’ and demonstrative certainty of God. He is not aware, while he takes his doctrine of such certainty from Locke, that he has left out, and not replaced, the only solid ground for it which Locke’s system suggested.
[1] See above, paragraphs 146 and 149-152.
His view of the soul as ‘naturally immortal’.
191. The soul or self, as he describes it, does not differ from Locke’s ‘thinking substance,’ except that, having got rid of ‘extended matter’ altogether, he cannot admit with Locke any possibility of the soul’s being extended, and, having satisfied himself that ‘time was nothing abstracted from the succession of ideas in the mind,’ [1] he was clear that ‘the soul always thinks’—since the time at which it did not think, being abstracted from a succession of ideas, would be no time at all. A soul which is necessarily unextended and therefore ‘indiscerptible,’ and without which there would be no time, he reckons ‘naturally immortal.’
[1] ‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 98.
Endless succession of feelings is not immortality in true sense.
Berkeley’s doctrine of matter fatal to a true spiritualism;