[222] Professor Hermann Ulrici, of Halle, in Fichte's Zeitschrift, vol. lvii. Pt. 1, 1870, pp. 171-4.
[223] As Freiherr v. Reichlin-Meldegg does, Enleit. für Philosophie, p. 122.
[224] The advance which Berkeley made from the stand-point of Locke may not have been made very clear by this abstract statement; but the difference of conception was just the difference between the Baconian and modern induction. Bacon endeavoured to explain everything by referring it to its form; and this form was a contemporaneous cause, corresponding very much to the abstract ideas of Locke, or rather to those abstract ideas which are supposed to be the more important, viz., the primary qualities (cf. Ellis and Spedding's Ed. of Bacon, I., p. 29). Modern induction explains by referring a consequent to its invariable antecedent. It introduces the idea of motion, succession, or flow, and explains a thing by showing its place in the flow of phenomena. It is interesting to note that while Berkeley was thus substituting a living causality for the abstract ideas of Locke, and explaining the construction and objective knowledge of things by their position in the successive moments of a personal agency, other philosophers were endeavouring to solve the same metaphysical and psychological problem in somewhat the same way. Leibnitz's 'Monadologie' was really an attempt to explain the existence of universals and objective principles of knowledge by the thought of growth or development or flow; but Leibnitz's explanation differs from Berkeley's in this, that he kept chiefly the thought of the development itself before his mind, and conceived a gradual progression through impersonal existences up to the conscious self, while Berkeley, keeping to his direct spiritual intuition, ever looks at this flow as manifesting the presence and action of a free personal spirit. The same general thought is also at the basis of Wolff's hint that the causal-nexus, not abstract ideas, enables us to explain how universal judgments are formed out of individual experiences (logica, § 706). It has developed since then into the conception of organic development, which plays such an important part in Kant's 'Kritik der Urtheilskraft,' is the fundamental thought in such post Kantian metaphysics as the 'Natur-Philosophie' of Schelling, and the 'Mikrokosmos' of Herman Lotze, and may be called the metaphysical foundation for the scientific method which has led to the theories of Darwin in natural history, of Aug. Schleicher in philology, and of the Leyden School in the history of religions.
[225] In proof of this, we need only refer to the admirable preface of Professor Fraser, especially pp. 3, 5, 7, 9.
[226] Berkeley is usually esteemed the foremost of modern Nominalists, but we question if his Nominalism was more than a denial of Conceptualism. It was not a positive doctrine. There are several assertions in his 'Common-place Book' which show that even in his earlier days he was not a Nominalist in the proper sense of the term. He denies once and again Locke's statement that we know particulars only; he believes in the real existence of classes or kinds; and he says that genera and species are not abstractions. In his later writings he probably found that in his eagerness to attack the conceptualist doctrine of abstract conceptions, he had probably been carried too far, for in his third edition of 'Alciphron' he curiously omits those chapters which treat of Nominalism, and in 'Siris' the reality of universals is assumed throughout.
[227]Berkeley's 'Abhandlung über die Principien der menschlichen Erkenntniss. In's Deutsch übersetzt,' &c., von Dr. Fr. Ueberweg, pp. 110-112.
[228] Ueberweg's 'Logik,' § 46.
[229] 'Logik,' § 57.
[230] There is undoubtedly one difficulty to this hypothesis, and that difficulty arises from Berkeley's mathematical opinions; for the whole question between Berkeley and Newton in the 'Analyst' may be resolved to this one particular,—in Berkeley's view a line is a series of points, in Newton's the line is not the series of separate points, but these points coalescing and arranging themselves in length. Newton says, 'Lineæ describuntur ac describendo generantur non per appositiones partium sed per motum continuum punctorum.' The difference between them was just the difference between Nominalism and Realism, and Berkeley takes the Nominalist side. This may have been due to his ignorance of mathematics.
[231] Ueberweg, 'Logik,' § 1.