British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIII / January and April, 1871

by Various

Light and colour are the immediate objects of sight, and they constitute a species entirely distinct from the ideas of touch. No one would think of adding a visible foot to a tangible foot; and the experience of persons born blind and recovering their sight points to a certain confusedness in apprehending the connection between the two sets of ideas which would not occur if they belonged to one and the same abstract idea of extension. If we would explain the fact that ideas may so be universalized that they stand for ideas of touch, we must rather bring them under the living power of mind which, grasping the two together, makes the one the sign of the other. When we have the sensation of the colour greenness, we see a green leaf of a small oval shape, not because the colour is necessarily connected with the size and shape, nor because all three inhere as qualities in an abstract idea of extension, but because:—

'Light and colours, with their several shades and degrees, all which being infinitely diversified and combined, deform a language wonderfully adapted to suggest and exhibit to us the distances, figures, situations, dimensions, and various qualities of tangible objects—not by similitude, nor yet by inference of necessary connection, but by the arbitrary imposition of Providence, just as words suggest the things signified by them.'

There is no abstract idea which corresponds now to the sensations of sight, now to the sensations of touch; the connecting link is supplied by the unifying action of the human mind, which seizes upon the one idea and makes it the sign of the others, and this one idea is fitted to be the sign of the others not by any similarity or peculiar fitness on its side, but because of its position in the flow of phenomena given to it and preserved for it by the living spiritual causality which creates and arranges everything. The ideas of sense are universalized, scientific and objective knowledge is possible, we can go from ideas of sight to those of touch, and back again from those of touch to those of sight, because of a double spiritual influence—the active living influence of mind outside, permeating, creating, and associating all things, and the partly passive, partly active ingathering influence of the individual human mind within, interpreting, arranging, according to the associations imposed upon them and lying undeveloped in them, the vague blurs of sensation. Berkeley's thought is almost the same as Schleiermacher's, that all scientific knowledge is the joint product of an internal and an external factor—organic function and the external world,—which factors are universally related to each other; only, according to Berkeley's spiritual intuition, everywhere present; the living centre of organic function is the partly passive, partly active influence of the human self, while the living centre of the external factor is the supreme mind without us continuously creating and arranging.

The Principles of Human Knowledge follow up the attack on abstract ideas made in the New Theory of Vision. The introduction, with its attack on Conceptualism,[226] prepares the way for a more sweeping assault on abstractions. Now Berkeley almost invariably attacks a general question by making an assault on one special form which it takes. His method is borrowed from Locke, who shows that all our ideas may be reduced to ideas of sensation and reflection by selecting one or two most unlikely to conform to such a reduction, and proving by analysis that they do. Berkeley begins to attack the Lockian doctrine of abstract ideas by showing that there is no abstract extension common to sight and touch; he proves the providence of God by explaining the beauty and value of the language of vision; and he exhibits the organism of the universe by tracing the connection between the virtues of tar-water and the hidden mysteries of things. He always seeks a concrete instance of the abstract fact, and assails a particular case of the general principle he wishes to attack. This method is carried out in the 'Principles.' He does not assail the doctrine of abstract ideas in general, nor endeavour to strip Lockianism of all its notionalism. He fastens on one particular abstract idea, which because of its importance and prevailing influence may be considered as the champion of the rest, and puts to flight the armies of the Philistines by slaying their Goliath.

The sum and head of all abstract ideas is the idea of matter, as this was used in the new philosophy of the seventeenth century. For what is an abstract idea? It is a connecting link between sensations—something to which they may be referred, in which they are supposed to inhere, and which is thought to account for their permanence of objective reality. For example, 'white' is a single quality or a single sensation felt by me now and here when I look at a sheet of paper. But 'whiteness' is the abstract idea to which all these single sensations may be referred, and in which they may inhere and so have a permanence and objective reality, so that this sheet of paper, because it has 'whiteness,' is always and by every one seen to be 'white.' The abstract ideas of extension, of situation, and of number, are examples which are supposed to be of more importance, and to include a vastly larger number of individuals. Now the one idea to which every sense-particular, without exception, may be referred is the idea of matter or material substance. It gives them permanence, reality, and objectivity. It is the germ, the centre, the vital spot of the whole system of abstractions. Destroy it, and the system perishes. Show that it is an illusion, a mere word,—that it can give no reality, no permanence,—that it cannot afford a basis for scientific knowledge nor community of belief, and the whole doctrine which seeks to build science and reality on such a foundation disappears, and on the ground thus cleared a more substantial, real, and living structure of belief and opinion may be erected. This seems to be the guiding thought in the 'Principles of Human Knowledge' and in the 'Dialogues.' It is mainly negative,—a denial of matter, and therefore of all abstractions. But amidst the negative or destructive reasonings there are traces, as there must be, of positive construction. The one positive principle which is always present is that spiritual intuition which we have already spoken of,—the all-pervading belief inherited from the mystics, and particularly from Malebranche and Norris, that mind or spirit is the one reality and the one fount of active agency. But this intuition, always present, is never adequately expressed nor applied. Berkeley either meant to reserve its discussion for another 'Part,' or his natural impatience made him overlook the necessity of explaining the steps in his analysis of all reality into personal spirit, and all causality into the conscious activity of such personal spirits. He is always confused, hesitating, and sometimes conflicting in his statements about the way in which 'mind' becomes the only real existence, and the 'activity of mind' the only real agency; and it is in the skill with which he has pierced together the scattered hints into one really complete and so far adequate explanation of the universe of things that Professor Fraser's unwearied patient study and just appreciation of his author is seen to most advantage.

Our experience as given us in the senses is made up 'of sensations, ideas, or phenomena,—facts of which there is a perception or consciousness.' These sensations, and nothing else, make the material of the sensible universe which we see and know and live in,—they are the material out of which the shifting scenes in this wonderful panorama of sense-life are formed,—they are the exciting causes of all the various forms of our mental life, of our joy and sorrow, laughter and tears, hopes and despairings. When we are conscious of the outward world, it is of a world of sensations which is immediately present to our minds and in our minds; for the essence of an idea or sensation is that it is perceived,—its esse is percipi. But this is not the whole of Berkeley's theory of matter, as many critics would have us believe. There is along with this 'immediate perception of extended sensible reality' a 'mediate perception or a presumptive inference of the existence of sensible things and their relations.' The knowledge we have of the external world of the senses cannot be reduced to the sensations of which we are actually conscious for the time being. There are, besides the sensations immediately present, clustering groups of others which we do not immediately perceive. Tangible things are signified by visual sensations, and sounds recall colours and shapes. Every isolated sensation is significant of more than itself, and mere sensation is impossible. And this significance of sensations, the reality of their relations to each other, recognised and insisted upon by Berkeley, makes his scheme different from any system of merely subjective idealism, and supplies a basis for objective or scientific knowledge. 'For,' as Professor Fraser says, 'faith in an established or external association between our sense-phenomena is the basis of the constructive activity of intellect in all inductive interpretation of sensible things.' It is this 'external,' or imposed association, which universalizes and gives objective existence to sensations and the sense-world, and so far Berkeley's explanation does not differ very much from that of Mr. Mill or Professor Bain.

But then, what is Berkeley's 'association'? It is, as Professor Fraser well puts it, 'his religious faith in the constancy of the Divine constitution of the Cosmos.' The associative relations of things which give permanence and objective reality and intelligibility to the world of sense-phenomena are not to be explained by any hap-hazard one-coming-after-another, as modern psychologists do. They are due to the active agency of the Supreme Mind which links sensations together in ways of His own, so that there exists, not a chaos of varying, changing phenomena, but an orderly intelligible system of sense things, co-existing and successive, significant of each other, and all together making the interpretable language of Him whose designs they embody, and by whose constant activity they are all maintained. 'And thus,' as Professor Fraser has beautifully expressed it:—

'The only conceivable and practical, and for us the only possible, substantiality in the material world is—permanence of co-existence or aggregation among sensations; and the only conceivable and practical, and for us the only possible, causality among phenomena is—permanence or invariableness among their successions.

These two are almost (but not quite) one. The actual or conscious co-existence of all the sensations which constitute a particular tree, or a particular mountain, cannot be simultaneously realized. A few co-existing visible signs, for instance, lead us to expect that the many other sensations of which the tree is the virtual co-constituent would gradually be perceived by us, if the conditions for our having actual sensations of all the other qualities were fulfilled. The substantiality and causality of matter thus resolve into a Universal Sense-symbolism, the interpretation of which is the office of physical science. The material world is a system of interpretable signs, dependent for its actual existence in sense upon the sentient mind of the interpreter; but significant of guaranteed pains and pleasures, and the guaranteed means of avoiding and attaining pains and pleasures: significant too of other minds, and their thoughts, feelings, and volitions; and significant above all of Supreme Mind, through whose Activity the signs are sustained, and whose Archetypal Ideas are the source of those universal or invariable relations of theirs which make them both practically and scientifically significant or objective. The permanence and efficiency attributed to Matter is in God—in the constitutive Universals of Supreme Mind: sensations or sense-given phenomena themselves, and sensible things, so far as they consist of sensations, can be neither permanent nor efficient; they are in constant flux. This indeed is from the beginning the tone of Berkeley himself—much deepened in "Siris."'

In Berkeley's earlier philosophy, and even in his later, this grand conception of an orderly universe permeated and ever upheld by mind, is by no means fully or consistently worked out, as Professor Fraser himself acknowledges. The starting-point itself is somewhat confused. Berkeley starts with sensations. But the universe is not a universe of sensations, but of sensible things, and although the formula esse est percipi will at once explain the meaning of a sensation, it will not, without some argument and explanation, account for the meaning of a sensible thing. Berkeley did not sufficiently recognise the difference, and he leaped to a conclusion which, however right, should have been reasoned out. A whole is not the aggregate number of its parts, it is the sum of the parts plus their being placed together. There is a difference between a house and a heap of stones. Now Berkeley did not seem to see this, at least in his earlier philosophy. Tangible distance was to him a series of minima tangibilia, a series of tactual points; visible distance a series of visible points, and that only. Whereas, distance is really the sensible points plus their arrangement. The sensible thing is really the complex of sensations plus their unification. We are not disposed to believe with Professor Ueberweg[227] that this oversight amounted to a begging of the whole question, we hold with Professor Fraser that there is only a little confusion in apprehending the problem aright, and a rashness in leaping to a conclusion which should rather have been elaborated and proved. Berkeley thought, as Professor Fraser says, that 'the consciousness of my own permanence, amid the changes in my senses, is the only archetype, in my experience, of proper substance or permanence; and apart from this experience, permanence or substance is an unintelligible word.' His thought was not substantially distinct from Dr. Ueberweg's own,—who says[228] 'that individual intuitions gradually arise out of the original blur of perception, when man first begins to recognise himself an individual essence in opposition to the external world,' and who elsewhere[229] makes the notion of self the type of the essence of things. That unique thing called 'self' or 'I' is the only real permanent unity known, and is therefore the type of all permanence and unity elsewhere. The esse or the essence which gives shape and endurance to fleeting formless sensations is mind—my mind or the Supreme Mind. It is the percipi, being perceived, or coming under the formative influence of mind, which gives to a series of sensations that unity which we can call 'distance,' that shape and unity to the cluster of sensations which we call 'leaf' that orderly series arrangement and permanence which we call the system of things. The action of mind upon sensations, forming and arranging them, is not discussed by Berkeley. He contents himself with his vague spiritual intuition, and leaves his readers to work out his meaning. It does seem clear to us, however, both from his references to the archetypes of ideas in the 'Principles of Human Knowledge,' and more especially from his interesting discussions on the native archetypes of ideas in his letters to Johnson, that he did not altogether overlook the distinction between mere complexes of sensations and sensible things; but that he was sensible of this distinction, and wished to explain that the complex of sensations was transformed into an orderly stable sensible thing by the unifying formative mind putting as it were its stamp upon it.[230]