Malebranche appears less in the Principles than Locke and Descartes. In early life, at any rate, Berkeley would be less at home in the “divine vision” of Malebranche than among the “ideas” of Locke. The mysticism of the Recherche de la Vérité is unlike the transparent lucidity of Berkeley's juvenile thought. But the subordinate place and office of the material world in Malebranche's system, and his conception of power as wholly spiritual, approached the New Principles of Berkeley.
Plato and Aristotle hardly appear, either by name or as characteristic influence, in the book of Principles, which in this respect contrasts with the abundant references to ancient and mediaeval thinkers in Siris, and to a less extent in the De Motu and Alciphron.
The Introduction to the Principles is a proclamation of war against “abstract ideas,” which is renewed in the body [pg 218] of the work, and again more than once in the writings of Berkeley's early and middle life, but is significantly withdrawn in his old age. In the ardour of youth, his prime remedy for anarchy in philosophy, and for the sceptical disposition which philosophy had been apt to generate, was suppression of abstract ideas as impossible ideas—empty names heedlessly accepted as ideas—an evil to be counteracted by steady adherence to the concrete experience found in our senses and inner consciousness. Never to lose our hold of positive facts, and always to individualise general conceptions, are regulative maxims by which Berkeley would make us govern our investigation of ultimate problems. He takes up his position in the actual universe of applied reason; not in the empty void of abstract reason, remote from particulars and succession of change, in which no real existence is found. All realisable ideas must be either concrete data of sense, or concrete data of inward consciousness. It is relations embodied in particular facts, not pretended abstract ideas, that give fruitful meaning to common terms. Abstract matter, abstract substance, abstract power, abstract space, abstract time—unindividualisable in sense or in imagination—must all be void of meaning; the issue of unlawful analysis, which pretends to find what is real without the concrete ideas that make the real, because percipient spirit is the indispensable factor of all reality. The only lawful abstraction is nominal—the application, that is to say, of a name in common to an indefinite number of things which resemble one another. This is Berkeley's “Nominalism.”
Berkeley takes Locke as the representative advocate of the “abstract ideas” against which he wages war in the Introduction to the Principles. Under cover of an ambiguity in the term idea, he is unconsciously fighting against a man of straw. He supposes that Locke means by idea only a concrete datum of sense, or of imagination; [pg 219] and he argues that we cannot without contradiction abstract from all such data, and yet retain idea. But Locke includes among his ideas intellectual relations—what Berkeley himself afterwards distinguished as notions, in contrast with ideas. This polemic against Locke is therefore one of verbal confusion. In later life he probably saw this, as he saw deeper into the whole question involved. This is suggested by the omission of the argument against abstract ideas, given in earlier editions of Alciphron, from the edition published a year before he died. In his juvenile attack on abstractions, his characteristic impetuosity seems to carry him to the extreme of rejecting rational relations that are involved in the objectivity of sensible things and natural order, thus resting experience at last only on phenomena—particular and contingent.
A preparatory draft of the Introduction to the Principles, which I found in the manuscript department of the library of Trinity College, Dublin, is printed in the appendix to this edition of Berkeley's Philosophical Works. The variations are of some interest, biographical and philosophical. It seems to have been written in the autumn of 1708, and it may with advantage be compared with the text of the finished Introduction, as well as with numerous relative entries in the Commonplace Book.
After this Introduction, the New Principles themselves are evolved, in a corresponding spirit of hostility to empty abstractions. The sections may be thus divided:—
i. Rationale of the Principles (sect. 1-33).
ii. Supposed Objections to the Principles answered (sect. 34-84).