Critiques and Addresses

by Thomas Henry Huxley

Doubtless this passage sounds like the acme of metaphysical paradox, and we all know that "coxcombs vanquished Berkeley with a grin;" while common-sense folk refuted him by stamping on the ground, or some such other irrelevant proceeding. But the key to all philosophy lies in the clear apprehension of Berkeley's problem—which is neither more nor less than one of the shapes of the greatest of all questions, "What are the limits of our faculties?" And it is worth any amount of trouble to comprehend the exact nature of the argument by which Berkeley arrived at his results, and to know by one's own knowledge the great truth which he discovered—that the honest and rigorous following up of the argument which leads us to materialism, inevitably carries us beyond it.

Suppose that I accidentally prick my finger with a pin. I immediately become aware of a condition of my consciousness—a feeling which I term pain. I have no doubt whatever that the feeling is in myself alone; and if anyone were to say that the pain I feel is something which inheres in the needle, as one of the qualities of the substance of the needle, we should all laugh at the absurdity of the phraseology. In fact, it is utterly impossible to conceive pain except as a state of consciousness.

Hence, so far as pain is concerned, it is sufficiently obvious that Berkeley's phraseology is strictly applicable to our power of conceiving its existence—"its being is to be perceived or known," and "so long as it is not actually perceived by me, or does not exist in my mind, or that of any other created spirit, it must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit."

So much for pain. Now let us consider an ordinary sensation. Let the point of the pin be gently rested upon the skin, and I become aware of a feeling or condition of consciousness quite different from the former—the sensation of what I call "touch." Nevertheless this touch is plainly just as much in myself as the pain was. I cannot for a moment conceive this something which I call touch as existing apart from myself, or a being capable of the same feelings as myself. And the same reasoning applies to all the other simple sensations. A moment's reflection is sufficient to convince one that the smell, and the taste, and the yellowness, of which we become aware when an orange is smelt, tasted, and seen, are as completely states of our consciousness as is the pain which arises if the orange happens to be too sour. Nor is it less clear that every sound is a state of the consciousness of him who hears it. If the universe contained only blind and deaf beings, it is impossible for us to imagine but that darkness and silence should reign everywhere.

It is undoubtedly true, then, of all the simple sensations that, as Berkeley says, their "esse is percipi"—their being is to be "perceived or known." But that which perceives, or knows, is mind or spirit; and therefore that knowledge which the senses give us is, after all, a knowledge of spiritual phenomena.

All this was explicitly or implicitly admitted, and, indeed, insisted upon, by Berkeley's contemporaries, and by no one more strongly than by Locke, who terms smells, tastes, colours, sounds, and the like, "secondary qualities," and observes, with respect to these "secondary qualities," that "whatever reality we by mistake attribute to them [they] are in truth nothing in the objects themselves."

And again: "Flame is denominated hot and light; snow, white and cold; and manna, white and sweet, from the ideas they produce in us; which qualities are commonly thought to be the same in these bodies; that those ideas are in us, the one the perfect resemblance of the other as they are in a mirror; and it would by most men be judged very extravagant if one should say otherwise. And yet he that will consider that the same fire that at one distance produces in us the sensation of warmth, does at a nearer approach produce in us the far different sensation of pain, ought to bethink himself what reason he has to say that his idea of warmth, which was produced in him by the fire, is actually in the fire; and his idea of pain which the same fire produced in him in the same way, is not in the fire. Why are whiteness and coldness in snow, and pain not, when it produces the one and the other idea in us; and can do neither but by the bulk, figure, number, and motion of its solid parts?"[1]

[Footnote 1: Locke, "Human Understanding," Book II. chap. viii. §§ 14, 15.]

Thus far then materialists and idealists are agreed. Locke and Berkeley, and all logical thinkers who have succeeded them, are of one mind about secondary qualities—their being is to be perceived or known—their materiality is, in strictness, a spirituality.

But Locke draws a great distinction between the secondary qualities of matter, and certain others which he terms "primary qualities." These are extension, figure, solidity, motion and rest, and number; and he is as clear that these primary qualities exist independently of the mind, as he is that the secondary qualities have no such existence.