iii. Consequences and Applications of the Principles (sect. 85-156).
i. Rationale of the Principles.
The reader may remember that one of the entries in the Commonplace Book runs as follows:—“To begin the First Book, not with mention of sensation and reflexion, but, instead of sensation, to use perception, or thought in general.” Berkeley seems there to be oscillating between Locke and Descartes. He now adopts Locke's account of the materials of which our concrete experience consists (sect. 1). The data of human knowledge of existence are accordingly found in the ideas, phenomena, or appearances (a) of which we are percipient in the senses, and (b) of which we are conscious when we attend to our inward passions and operations—all which make up the original contents of human experience, to be reproduced in new forms and arrangements, (c) in memory and (d) imagination and (e) expectation. Those materials are called ideas because living mind or spirit is the indispensable realising factor: they all presuppose living mind, spirit, self, or ego to realise and elaborate them (sect. 2). This is implied in our use of personal pronouns, which signify, not ideas of any of the preceding kinds, but that which is “entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, by which they are perceived.” In this fundamental presupposition Descartes is more apparent than Locke, and there is even an unconscious forecast of Kant and Hegel.
Berkeley next faces a New Question which his New Principles are intended to answer. How is the concrete world that is presented to our senses related to Mind or Spirit? Is all or any of its reality independent of percipient experience? Is it true that the phenomena of which we are percipient in sense are ultimately independent of all percipient and conscious life, and are even the ultimate basis of all that is real? Must we recognise in the phenomena of Matter the substance of what we call Mind? [pg 221] For do we not find, when we examine Body and Spirit mutually related in our personality, that the latter is more dependent on the former, and on the physical cosmos of which the former is a part, than our body and its bodily surroundings are dependent on Spirit? In short, is not the universe of existence, in its final form, only lifeless Matter?
The claim of Matter to be supreme is what Berkeley produces his Principles in order to reduce. Concrete reality is self-evidently unreal, he argues, in the total absence of percipient Spirit, for Spirit is the one realising factor. Try to imagine the material world unperceived and you are trying to picture empty abstraction. Wholly material matter is self-evidently an inconceivable absurdity; a universe emptied of all percipient life is an impossible universe. The material world becomes real in being perceived: it depends for its reality upon the spiritual realisation. As colours in a dark room become real with the introduction of light, so the material world becomes real in the life and agency of Spirit. It must exist in terms of sentient life and percipient intelligence, in order to rise into any degree of reality that human beings at least can be at all concerned with, either speculatively or practically. Matter totally abstracted from percipient spirit must go the way of all abstract ideas. It is an illusion, concealed by confused thought and abuse of words; yet from obvious causes strong enough to stifle faith in this latent but self-evident Principle—that the universe of sense-presented phenomena can have concrete existence only in and by sentient intelligence. It is the reverse of this Principle that Berkeley takes to have been “the chief source of all that scepticism and folly, all those contradictions and inexplicable puzzling absurdities, that have in all ages been a reproach to human reason[469].” And indeed, [pg 222] when it is fully understood, it is seen in its own light to be the chief of “those truths which are so near and obvious to the mind, that a man need only open his eyes to see them. For such I take this important one to be—that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the Earth, in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a Mind” (sect. 6). Living Mind or Spirit is the indispensable factor of all realities that are presented to our senses, including, of course, our own bodies.
Yet this Principle, notwithstanding its intuitive certainty, needs to be evoked by reflection from the latency in which it lies concealed, in the confused thought of the unreflecting. It is only gradually, and with the help of reasoning, that the world presented to the senses is distinctly recognised in this its deepest and truest reality. And even when we see that the phenomena immediately presented to our senses need to be realised in percipient experience, in order to be concretely real, we are ready to ask whether there may not be substances like the things so presented, which can exist “without mind,” or in a wholly material way (sect. 8). Nay, are there not some of the phenomena immediately presented to our senses which do not need living mind to make them real? It is allowed by Locke and others that all those qualities of matter which are called secondary cannot be wholly material, and that living mind is indispensable for their realisation in nature; but Locke and the rest argue, that this is not so with the qualities which they call primary, and which they regard as of the essence of matter. Colours, sounds, tastes, smells are all allowed to be not wholly material; but are not the size, shape, situation, solidity, and motion of bodies qualities that are real without need for the realising agency of any Mind or Spirit in the universe, and which would continue to be what they are now if all Spirit, divine or human, ceased to exist?
The supposition that some of the phenomena of what is called Matter can be real, and yet wholly material, is discussed in sections 9-15, in which it is argued that the things of sense cannot exist really, in any of their manifestations, unless they are brought into reality in some percipient life and experience. It is held impossible that any quality of matter can have the reality which we all attribute to it, unless it is spiritually realised (sect. 15).
But may Matter not be real apart from all its so-called qualities, these being allowed to be not wholly material, because real only within percipient spirit? May not this wholly material Matter be Something that, as it were, exists behind the ideas, phenomena, or qualities that make their appearance to human beings? This question, Berkeley would say, is a meaningless and wholly unpractical one. Material substance that makes and can make no real appearance—unphenomenal or unideal—stripped of all its qualities—is only “another name for abstract Being,” and “the abstract idea of Being appeareth to me the most incomprehensible of all other. When I consider the two parts or branches which make up the words material substance, I am convinced there is no distinct meaning annexed to them” (sect. 17). Neither Sense nor Reason inform us of the existence of real material substances that exist abstractly, or out of all relation to the secondary and primary qualities of which we are percipient when we exercise our senses. By our senses we cannot perceive more than ideas or phenomena, aggregated as individual things that are presented to us: we cannot perceive substances that make no appearance in sense. Then as for reason, unrealised substances, abstracted from living Spirit, human or divine, being altogether meaningless, can in no way explain the concrete realisations of human experience. In short, if there are wholly unphenomenal material substances, it is impossible that we should ever discover [pg 224] them, or have any concern with them, speculative or practical; and if there are not, we should have the same reason to assert that there are which we have now (sect. 20). It is impossible to put any meaning into wholly abstract reality. “To me the words mean either a direct contradiction, or nothing at all” (sect. 24).
The Principle that the esse of matter necessarily involves percipi, and its correlative Principle that there is not any other substance than Spirit, which is thus the indispensable factor of all reality, both lead on to the more obviously practical Principle—that the material world, per se, is wholly powerless, and that all changes in Nature are the immediate issue of the agency of Spirit (sect. 25-27). Concrete power, like concrete substance, is essentially spiritual. To be satisfied that the whole natural world is only the passive instrument and expression of Spiritual Power we are asked to analyse the sensuous data of experience. We can find no reason for attributing inherent power to any of the phenomena and phenomenal things that are presented to our senses, or for supposing that they can be active causes, either of the changes that are continuously in progress among themselves, or of the feelings, perceptions, and volitions of which spiritual beings are conscious. We find the ideas or phenomena that pass in procession before our senses related to one another as signs to their meanings, in a cosmical order that virtually makes the material world a language and a prophecy: but this cosmical procession is not found to originate in the ideas or phenomena themselves, and there is reason for supposing it to be maintained by ever-living Spirit, which thus not only substantiates the things of sense, but explains their laws of motion and their movements.