Editor's Preface To The Treatise Concerning The Principles Of Human Knowledge
This book of Principles contains the most systematic and reasoned exposition of Berkeley's philosophy, in its early stage, which we possess. Like the Essay on Vision, its tentative pioneer, it was prepared at Trinity College, Dublin. Its author had hardly completed his twenty-fifth year when it was published. The first edition of this “First Part” of the projected Treatise, “printed by Aaron Rhames, for Jeremy Pepyat, bookseller in Skinner Row, Dublin,” appeared early in 1710. A second edition, with minor changes, and in which “Part I” was withdrawn from the title-page, was published in London in 1734, “printed for Jacob Tonson”—on the eve of Berkeley's settlement at Cloyne. It was the last in the author's lifetime. The projected “Second Part” of the Principles was never given to the world, and we can hardly conjecture its design. In a letter in 1729 to his American friend, Samuel Johnson, Berkeley mentions that he had “made considerable progress on the Second Part,” but “the manuscript,” he adds, “was lost about fourteen years ago, during my travels in Italy; and I never had leisure since to do so [pg 214] disagreeable a thing as writing twice on the same subject[466].”
An edition of the Principles appeared in London in 1776, twenty-three years after Berkeley's death, with a running commentary of Remarks by the anonymous editor, on the pages opposite the text, in which, according to the editor, Berkeley's doctrines are “carefully examined, and shewn to be repugnant to fact, and his principles to be incompatible with the constitution of human nature and the reason and fitness of things.” In this volume the Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous are appended to the Principles, and a “Philosophical Discourse concerning the nature of Human Being” is prefixed to the whole, “being a defence of Mr. Locke's principles, and some remarks on Dr. Beattie's Essay on Truth,” by the author of the Remarks on Berkeley's Principles. The acuteness of the Remarks is not in proportion to their bulk and diffuseness: many popular misconceptions of Berkeley are served up, without appreciation of the impotence of matter, and of natural causation as only passive sense-symbolism, which is at the root of the theory of the material world against which the Remarks are directed.
The Kantian and post-Kantian Idealism that is characteristic of the nineteenth century has recalled attention to Berkeley, who had produced his spiritual philosophy under the prevailing conditions of English thought in the preceding age, when Idealism in any form was uncongenial. In 1869 the book of Principles was translated into German, with annotations, by Ueberweg, professor of philosophy at Königsberg, the university of Kant. The Clarendon Press edition of the Collected Works of Berkeley followed in 1871. In 1874 an edition of the Principles, by Dr. Kranth, Professor of Philosophy in the university of Pennsylvania, appeared in America, with annotations drawn largely from [pg 215] the Clarendon Press edition and Ueberweg. In 1878 Dr. Collyns Simon republished the Principles, with discussions based upon the text, followed by an appendix of remarks on Kant and Hume in their relation to Berkeley.
The book of Principles, as we have it, must be taken as a systematic fragment of an incompletely developed philosophy. Many years after its appearance, the author thus describes the conditions:—“It was published when I was very young, and without doubt hath many defects. For though the notions should be true (as I verily think they are), yet it is difficult to express them clearly and consistently, language being framed for common use and received prejudices. I do not therefore pretend that my books can teach truth. All I hope for is that they may be an occasion to inquisitive men of discovering truth[467].” Again:—“I had no inclination to trouble the world with large volumes. What I have done was rather with the view of giving hints to thinking men, who have leisure and curiosity to go to the bottom of things, and pursue them in their own minds. Two or three times reading these small tracts (Essay on Vision, Principles, Dialogues, De Motu), and making what is read the occasion of thinking, would, I believe, render the whole familiar and easy to the mind, and take off that shocking appearance which hath often been observed to attend speculative truths[468].” The incitements to further and deeper thought thus proposed have met with a more sympathetic response in this generation than in the lifetime of Berkeley.
There is internal evidence in the book of Principles that its author had been a diligent and critical student of Locke's Essay. Like the Essay, it is dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke. The word idea is not less characteristic [pg 216] of the Principles than of the Essay, although Berkeley generally uses it with a narrower application than Locke, confining it to phenomena presented objectively to our senses, and their subjective reproductions in imagination. With both Berkeley and Locke objective phenomena (under the name of ideas) are the materials supplied to man for conversion into natural science. Locke's reduction of ideas into simple and complex, as well as some of his subdivisions, reappear with modifications in the Principles. Berkeley's account of Substance and Power, Space and Time, while different from Locke's, still bears marks of the Essay. Concrete Substance, which in its ultimate meaning much perplexes Locke, is identified with the personal pronouns “I” and “you” by Berkeley, and is thus spiritualised. Cause proper, or Power, he finds only in the voluntary activity of persons. Space is presented to us in our sensuous experience of resistance to organic movements; while it is symbolised in terms of phenomena presented to sight, as already explained in the Essay on Vision. Time is revealed in our actual experience of change in the ideas or phenomena of which we are percipient in sense; length of time being calculated by the changes in the adopted measure of duration. Infinite space and infinite time, being necessarily incapable of finite ideation, are dismissed as abstractions that for man must always be empty of realisable meaning. Indeed, the Commonplace Book shews that Locke influenced Berkeley as much by antagonism as otherwise. “Such was the candour of that great man that I persuade myself, were he alive, he would not be offended that I differed from him, seeing that in so doing I follow his advice to use my own judgment, see with my own eyes and not with another's.” So he argues against Locke's opinions about the infinity and eternity of space, and the possibility of matter endowed with power to think, and urges his inconsistency in treating some qualities [pg 217] of matter as wholly material, while he insists that others, under the name of “secondary,” are necessarily dependent on sentient intelligence. Above all he assails Locke's “abstract ideas” as germs of scepticism—interpreting Locke's meaning paradoxically.
Next to Locke, Descartes and Malebranche are prominent in the Principles. Recognition of the ultimate supremacy of Spirit, or the spiritual character of active power and the constant agency of God in nature, suggested by Descartes, was congenial to Berkeley, but he was opposed to the mechanical conception of the universe found in the Cartesian physical treatises. That thought is synonymous with existence is a formula with which the French philosopher might make him familiar, as well as with the assumption that ideas only are immediate objects of human perception; an assumption in which Descartes was followed by Locke, and philosophical thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but under differing interpretations of the term idea.