192. Upon this the remark must occur that, if the fact of being unextended constituted immortality, all sounds and smells must be immortal, and that the inseparability of time from the succession of feelings may prove that succession endless, but proves no immortality of a soul unless there be one self-conscious subject of that succession, identical with itself throughout it. To the supposition of there being such a subject, which Berkeley virtually makes, his own mode of disposing of matter suggested ready objections. In Locke, as we have seen, the two opposite ‘things,’ thinking and material, always appear in strict correlativity, each representing (though he was not aware of this) the same logical necessity of substantiation. ‘Sensation convinces us that there are solid extended substances, and reflection that there are thinking ones.’ These are not two convictions, however, but one conviction, representing one and the same essential condition of knowledge. Such logical necessity indeed is misinterpreted when made a ground for believing the real existence either of a multitude of independent things, for everything is a ‘retainer’ to everything else; [1] or of a separation of the thinking from the material substance, since, according to Locke’s own showing, they at least everywhere overlap; [2] or of an absolutely last substance, which because last would be unknowable: but it is evidence of the action of a synthetic principle of self-consciousness without which all reference of feelings to mutually-qualified subjects and objects, and therefore all knowledge, would be impossible. It is idle, however, with Berkeley so to ignore the action of this principle on the one side as to pronounce the material world a mere succession of feelings, and so to take it for granted on the other as to assert that every feeling implies relation to a conscious substance. Upon such a method the latter assertion has nothing to rest on but an appeal to the individual’s consciousness—an appeal which avails as much or as little for material as for thinking substance, and, in face of the apparent fact that with a knock on the head the conscious independent substance may disappear altogether, cannot hold its own against the suggestion that the one substance no less than the other is reducible to a series of feelings, so closely and constantly sequent on each other as to seem to coalesce. We cannot substitute for this illusory appeal the valid method of an analysis of knowledge, without finding that substantiation in matter is just as necessary to knowledge as substantiation in mind. If this method had been Berkeley’s he would have found a better plan for dealing with the ‘materialism’ in vogue. Instead of trying to show that material substance was a fiction, he would have shown that it was really a basis of intelligible relations, and that thus all that was fictitious about it was its supposed sensibility and consequent opposition to the work of thought. Then his doctrine of matter would itself have established the necessity of spirit, not indeed as substance but as the source of all substantiation. As it was, misunderstanding the true nature of the antithesis between matter and mind, in his zeal against matter he took away the ground from under the spiritualism which he sought to maintain. He simply invited a successor in speculation, of colder blood than himself, to try the solution of spirit in the same crucible with matter.
[1] Above, paragraph 125.
[2] Above, paragraph 127.
… as well as to a true Theism. His inference to God from necessity of a power to produce ideas;
193. His doctrine of God is not only open to the same objection as his doctrine of spiritual substance, but to others which arise from the illogical restrictions that have to be put upon his notion of such substance, if it is to represent at once the God of received theology and the God whose agency the Berkeleian system requires as the basis of distinction between the real and unreal. Admitting the supposition involved in his certainty of the ‘natural immortality’ of the soul—the supposition that the succession of feelings which constitutes the world, and which at no time was not, implies one feeling substance—that substance we should naturally conclude was God. Such a God, it is true (as has been already pointed out [1]), would merely be the μέγα ζῶον [2] of the crudest Pantheism, but it is the only God logically admissible—if any be admissible—in an ‘ideal’ system of which the text is not ‘the world really exists only as thought of,’ but ‘the world only exists as a succession of feelings.’ It was other than a feeling substance, however, that Berkeley required not merely to satisfy his religious instincts, but to take the place held by ‘outward body’ with Locke as the efficient of real ideas. The reference to this feeling substance, if necessary for any idea, is necessary for all—for the ‘fantastic’ as well as for those of sense—and can therefore afford no ground for distinction between the real and unreal. Instead, however, of being thus led to a truer view of this distinction, as in truth a distinction between the complete and incomplete conception of an intelligible world, he simply puts the feeling substance, when he regards it as God, under an arbitrary limitation, making it relative only to those ideas of which with Locke ‘matter’ was the substance, as opposed to those which Locke had referred to the thinking thing. The direct consequence of this limitation, indeed, might seem to be merely to make God an animal of partial, instead of universal, susceptibility; but this consequence Berkeley avoids by dropping the ordinary notion of substance altogether, so as to represent the ideas of sense not as subsisting in God but as effects of His power—as related to Him, in short, just as with Locke ideas of sense are related to the primary qualities of matter. ‘There must be an active power to produce our ideas, which is not to be found in ideas themselves, for we are conscious that they are inert, nor in matter, since that is but a name for a bundle of ideas; which must therefore be in spirit, since of that we are conscious as active; yet not in the spirit of which we are conscious, since then there would be no difference between real and imaginary ideas; therefore in a Divine Spirit, to whom, however, may forthwith be ascribed the attributes of the spirit of which we are conscious.’ Such is the sum of Berkeley’s natural theology.
[1] Above, paragraph 180.
[2] [Greek μέγα ζῶον (mega zoon) = great being. Tr.]
… a necessity which Hume does not see. A different turn should have been given to his idealism, if it was to serve his purpose.
194. From a follower of Hume it of course invites the reply that he does not see the necessity of an active power at all, to which, since, according to Berkeley’s own showing, it is no possible ‘idea’ or object of an idea, all his own polemic against the ‘absolute idea’ of matter is equally applicable; that the efficient power, of which we profess to be conscious in ourselves, is itself only a name for a particular feeling or impression which precedes certain other of our impressions; that, even if it were more than this, the transition from the spiritual efficiency of which we are conscious to another, of which it is the special differentia that we are not conscious of it, would be quite illegitimate, and that thus in saying that certain feelings are real because, being lively and involuntary, they must be the work of this unknown spirit, we in effect say nothing more than that they are real because lively and involuntary. Against a retort of this kind Berkeley’s theistic armour is even less proof than Locke’s. His ‘proof of the being of God’ is in fact Locke’s with the sole nervus probandi left out. The value of Locke’s proof, as an argument from their being something now to their having been something from eternity, lay, we saw, in its convertibility into an argument from the world as a system of relations to a present and eternal subject of those relations. For its being so convertible there was this to be said, that Locke, with whatever inconsistency, at least recognised the constitution of reality by permanent relations, though he treated the mere relation of external efficiency—that in virtue of which we say of nature that it consists of bodies outward to and acting on each other—as if it alone constituted the reality of the world. Berkeley’s reduction of the ‘primary qualities of matter’ to a succession of feelings logically effaces this relation, and puts nothing intelligible, nothing but a name, in its place. The effacement of the distinction between the real and unreal, which would properly ensue, is only prevented by bringing back relation to something under the name of God, either wholly unknown and indeterminate, or else, under a thin disguise, determined by that very relation of external efficiency which, when ascribed to something only nominally different, had been pronounced a gratuitous fiction. If Berkeley had dealt with the opposition of reality to thought by showing the primary qualities to be conceived relations, and the distinction between the real and unreal to be one between the fully and the defectively conceived, the case would have been different. The real and God would alike have been logically saved. The peculiar embarrassment of Locke’s doctrine we have found to be that it involves the unreality of every object, into the constitution of which there enters any idea of reflection, or any idea retained in the mind, as distinct from the present effect of a body acting upon us—i.e. of every object of which anything can be said. With the definite substitution of full intelligibility of relations for present sensibility, as the true account of the real, this embarrassment would have been got rid of. At the same time there would have been implied an intelligent subject of these relations; the ascription to whom, indeed, of moral attributes would have remained a further problem, but who, far from being a ‘Great Unknown,’ would be at least determined by relation to that order of nature which is as necessary to Him as He to it. But in fact, as we have seen, the notion of the reality of relations, not felt but understood, only appears in Berkeley’s developed philosophy as an after-thought, and the notion of an order of nature, other than our feelings, which enables us to infer what feelings that have never been felt would be, is an unexplained intrusion in it. The same is true of the doctrine, which struggles to the surface in the Third Dialogue, that the ‘sensible world’ is to God not felt at all, but known; that to Him it is precisely not that which according to Berkeley’s refutation of materialism it really is—a series or collection of sensations. These ‘after-thoughts,’ when thoroughly thought out, imply a complete departure from Berkeley’s original interpretation of ‘phenomena’ as simple feelings; but with him, so far from being thought out, they merely suggested themselves incidentally as the conceptions of God and reality were found to require them. In other words, that interpretation of phenomena, which is necessary to any valid ‘collection’ from them of the existence of God, only appears in him as a consequence of that ‘collection’ having been made. To pursue the original interpretation, so that all might know what it left of reality, was the best way of deciding the question of its compatibility with a rational belief in God—a question of too momentous an interest to be fairly considered in itself. Thus to pursue it was the mission of Hume.
Hume’s mission. His account of impressions and ideas. Ideas are fainter impressions.