Yet the universe of reality is not exclusively One Spirit. Experience contradicts the supposition. I find [pg 225] on trial that my personal power to produce changes in the ideas or phenomena which my senses present to me is a limited power (sect. 28-33). I can make and unmake my own fancies, but I cannot with like freedom make and unmake presentations of sense. When in daylight I open my eyes, it is not in my power to determine whether I shall see or not; nor is it in my power to determine what objects I shall see. The cosmical order of sense-phenomena is independent of my will. When I employ my senses, I find myself always confronted by sensible signs of perfect Reason and omnipresent Will. But I also awake in the faith that I am an individual person. And the sense-symbolism of which the material world consists, while it keeps me in constant and immediate relation to the Universal Spirit, whose language it is, keeps me likewise in intercourse with other persons, akin to myself, who are signified to me by their overt actions and articulate words, which enter into my sensuous experience. Sense-given phenomena thus, among their other instrumental offices, are the medium of communication between human beings, who by this means can find companions, and make signs to them. So while, at our highest point of view, Nature is Spirit, experience shews that there is room in the universe for a plurality of persons, individual, and in a measure free or morally responsible. If Berkeley does not say all this, his New Principles tend thus.
At any rate, in his reasoned exposition of his Principles he is anxious to distinguish those phenomena that are presented to the senses of all mankind from the private ideas or fancies of individual men (sect. 28-33). The former constitute the world which sentient beings realise in common. He calls them ideas because they are unrealisable without percipient mind; but still on the understanding that they are not to be confounded with the chimeras of imagination. They are more deeply and truly real than chimeras. The groups in which they are found [pg 226] to coexist are the individual things of sense, whose fixed order of succession exemplifies what we call natural law, or natural causation: the correlation of their changes to our pleasures and pains, desires and aversions, makes scientific knowledge of their laws practically important to the life of man, in his embodied state.
Moreover, the real ideas presented to our senses, unlike those of imagination, Berkeley would imply, cannot be either representative or misrepresentative. Our imagination may mislead us: the original data of sense cannot: although we may, and often do, misinterpret their relations to one another, and to our pleasures and pains and higher faculties. The divine meaning with which they are charged, of which science is a partial expression, they may perhaps be said to represent. Otherwise representative sense-perception is absurdity: the ideas of sense cannot be representative in the way those of imagination are; for fancies are faint representations of data of sense. The appearances that sentient intelligence realises are the things of sense, and we cannot go deeper. If we prefer accordingly to call the material world a dream or a chimera, we must understand that it is the reasonable dream in which all sentient intelligence participates, and by which the embodied life of man must be regulated.
Has Berkeley, in his juvenile ardour, and with the impetuosity natural to him, while seeking to demonstrate the impotence of matter, and the omnipresent supremacy of Spirit, so spiritualised the material world as to make it unfit for the symbolical office in the universe of reality which he supposes it to discharge? Is its potential existence in God, and its percipient realisation by me, and presumably by innumerable other sentient beings, an adequate account of the real material world existing in place and time? Can this universal orderly dream experienced in sense involve the objectivity implied in its being the reliable medium of [pg 227] social intercourse? Does such a material world provide me with a means of escape from absolute solitude? Nay, if Matter cannot rise into reality without percipient spirit as realising factor, can my individual percipient spirit realise myself without independent Matter? Without intelligent life Matter is pronounced unreal. But is it not also true that without Matter, and the special material organism we call our body, percipient spirit is unreal? Does not Nature seem as indispensable to Spirit as Spirit is to Nature? Must we not assume at least their unbeginning and unending coexistence, even if we recognise in Spirit the deeper and truer reality? Do the New Principles explain the final ground of trust and certainty about the universe of change into which I entered as a stranger when I was born? If they make all that I have believed in as outward to be in its reality inward, do they not disturb the balance that is necessary to all human certainties, and leave me without any realities at all?
That Berkeley at the age of twenty-five, and educated chiefly by Locke, had fathomed or even entertained all these questions was hardly to be looked for. How far he had gone may be gathered by a study of the sequel of his book of Principles.
ii. Objections to the New Principles answered (sect. 34-84).
The supposed Objections, with Berkeley's answers, may be thus interpreted:—
First objection. (Sect. 34-40.) The preceding Principles banish all substantial realities, and substitute a universe of chimeras.
Answer. This objection is a play upon the popular meaning of the word “idea.” That name is appropriate to the phenomena presented in sense, because they become concrete realities only in the experience of living [pg 228] Spirit; and so it is not confined to the chimeras of individual fancy, which may misrepresent the real ideas of sense that are presented in the natural system independently of our will.