A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 2: Modern Philosophy

by Herbert Ernest Cushman

The Purpose of Berkeley. The life and teaching of Berkeley were dedicated to the true interests of religion. He may be called the religious Enlightener. He would not, like the deists, strip religion bare of dogma, but he would unlimber dogma and rational philosophy so that they would be of service to religion. His purpose was to free scholasticism on the one hand, and rationalism on the other, from abstractions and obscure terms, and thereby bring about a union of faith and knowledge. Berkeley looked upon himself as a crusader who would retake the Holy Land for the spiritual individual.

We have remarked that one of the presuppositions of this period of the Enlightenment is the independence of the individual. The individual around which Berkeley’s philosophy centres is the spiritual individual, and is therefore unique even for this period. Such an individual is superior to his environment because he belongs not to a material world, but to a community of religious beings who can talk and walk with God. The English Enlightenment passed from Locke to Berkeley. The inner life came into complete ascendency and the spiritual individual emerged. From the Lockian philosophy, with its many contradictory motives, there appeared the audacious one-sided philosophy of Berkeley, with its proclamation of the reign of spirituality. It stood in marked contrast with the development of the Enlightenment in France—a development of materialism and material atoms. The spectral although stubborn boundaries of the unknowable material world, which Locke supposed to shut around the powers of the human intellect, crumbled before the hand of Berkeley.

The casual reader of the history of thought is, however, often disconcerted at the appearance of such a philosophy as Berkeley’s in this period of empiricism, and especially as the immediate follower of Locke. The English school is called the empirical school, and yet Berkeley is also called an idealist. But we must remember that empiricism and idealism are not antithetical. Empiricism refers to the source of our knowledge; it means that all our knowledge is primarily derived from sense-perceptions. These sense-perceptions may be of two kinds: they may be (1) psychological facts, or (2) material facts. Berkeley was, like Locke and Hume, an empiricist of the first class; and yet because he denied the independent existence of material facts, he was also an idealist. He was an empirical idealist, just as the French philosophers of the Enlightenment were empirical materialists. The critic may find that Berkeley is not a consistent empiricist, to be sure, but neither was Locke. Berkeley started out by affirming the testimony of experience against scholastic speculation and abstraction; yet all along he assumed the scholastic conception of mind. Nevertheless, this assumption of the individual makes Berkeley a true child of the Enlightenment.[41]

Berkeley’s General Relation to Locke and Hume. The growth of this English school from Locke to Hume is not difficult to understand or to remember. It is not so much a page in the history of metaphysics (the nature of reality) as in epistemology (the theory ofknowledge). Locke asks, What can we know? And he replies to his own question, that we can know our “ideas.” At the same time he assumes the existence of a spiritual substance on the one side, and a material substance on the other. Neither of these is an idea, in the sense that it is an object of knowledge. The advance of Berkeley from Locke and of Hume from Berkeley was one of cancellation. Berkeley cancelled the material substance, because the material substance is not an idea. Hume then consistently enough asked, Why not for the same reason cancel the spiritual substance? The spiritual substance is not an idea or object of knowledge. We have no more right to assume it than the material substance. The only things we know to exist are our ideas. The development of the English school may be briefly put as follows:—

Locke,Spiritual substance—ideas—material substance.

Berkeley,Spiritual substance—ideas.

Hume,ideas.

Hume is Locke made logically consistent. Berkeley went only halfway. Hume among these three was the only self-consistent empiricist. On the assumption that all knowledge is derived from sense-perception the history of the English empirical school was a history of the restriction of knowledge.

Berkeley’s Points of Agreement with Locke. Berkeley starts from Locke’s psychological analysis as the basis of his own theory. The purely scientific aspect of the contents of mind as classified by Locke does not call for particular criticism from him. Logical classification does not seem to concern him very much, and while he accepts Locke’s analysis, he often calls Locke’s classesby other names. He commits himself to Locke’s psychological empiricism in the first sentence in his Principles: “It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses; or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind; or, lastly, ideas formed by the help of memory and imagination—either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways.” Our knowledge, therefore, deals only with ideas. There are the simple ideas of sensation and reflection, and ideas compounded from these.

Besides accepting the psychological analysis of Locke, Berkeley also adopts without question the assumption common to Locke and all the philosophers of the Enlightenment,—the assumption of the independence of the individual soul. “But besides all the endless variety of ideas or objects of knowledge, there is likewise something that knows or perceives them—what I call mind, spirit, soul, or self. By which I do not denote any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived.”