The Bloomsbury Companion to Berkeley 9781441162281, 9781474217170, 9781441128270

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The Bloomsbury Companion to Berkeley

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Other volumes in the series of Bloomsbury Companions: Aesthetics, edited by Anna Christina Ribeiro Analytic Philosophy, edited by Barry Dainton and Howard Robinson Continental Philosophy, edited by John Ó Maoilearca and Beth Lord Epistemology, edited by Andrew Cullison Ethics, edited by Christian Miller Existentialism, edited by Felicity Joseph, Jack Reynolds and Ashley Woodward Hegel, edited by Allegra de Laurentiis and Jeffrey Edwards Hume, edited by Alan Bailey and Dan O’Brien Hobbes, edited by S.A. Lloyd Kant, edited by Gary Banham, Dennis Schulting and Nigel Hems Leibniz, edited by Brandan C. Look Locke, edited by S.-J. Savonius-Wroth, Paul Schuurman and Jonathan Walmsley Marx, edited by Jeff Diamanti, Andrew Pendakis and Imre Szeman Metaphysics, edited by Robert W. Barnard and Neil A. Manson Philosophical Logic, edited by Leon Horston and Richard Pettigrew Philosophy of Language, edited by Manuel Garcia-Carpintero and Max Kolbel Philosophy of Mind, edited by James Garvey Philosophy of Science, edited by Steven French and Juha Saatsi Plato, edited by Gerald A. Press Political Philosophy, edited by Andrew Fiala Pragmatism, edited by Sami Pihlström Socrates, edited by John Bussanich and Nicholas D. Smith Spinoza, edited by Wiep van Bunge, Henri Krop, Piet Steenbakkers and Jeroen van de Ven

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The Bloomsbury Companion to Berkeley Edited by

Bertil Belfrage and Richard Brook

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Bertil Belfrage, Richard Brook and contributors, 2017 Bertil Belfrage and Richard Brook have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN : HB : ePDF : ePub:

9781441162281 9781441128270 9781441114785

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: Bloomsbury Companions Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

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Contents Abbreviations List of Contributors Introduction by Bertil Belfrage and Richard Brook

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Part 1 Berkeley’s Life and Importance

1 2 3 4

George Berkeley’s Biography Tom Jones Berkeley’s Bermuda Project in Context Nancy Kendrick Berkeley’s Correspondence Marc A. Hight Berkeley and Twentieth-Century Realist-Anti-Realist Controversies Howard Robinson

5 21 49 63

Part 2 Berkeley’s Major Works

5 6

Atomism in Berkeley’s Theory of Vision Bertil Belfrage Berkeley’s Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge Samuel C. Rickless 7 Three Dialogues between Hylas, Philonous and the Sceptic Tom Stoneham 8 The Mystery of Goodness in Berkeley’s Passive Obedience Bertil Belfrage 9 De Motu: Berkeley’s Philosophy of Science Richard Brook 10 Alciphron; or the Minute Philosopher: Berkeley’s Redefinition of Free-Thinking Adam Grzeliński 11 Berkeley’s Querist: ‘Hints . . . What Is to be Done in this Critical State of Our Affairs’ or Proposals for a Hyperborean Eutopia? Patrick Kelly 12 Berkeley’s Siris, an Interpretation Timo Airaksinen

85 99 121 141 158 174

196 216

Part 3 Berkeley in Context

13 Berkeley and Descartes Charles J. McCracken 14 Berkeley and Leibniz Laurence Carlin

247 254

v

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15 16 17 18 19

Contents

Berkeley’s Critique of Locke’s Theory of Perception Georges Dicker Berkeley and Malebranche Charles J. McCracken Reid’s Opposition to Berkeley James Van Cleve Berkeley and Hume on the Imagination Keota Fields The Reception of Berkeley in Eighteenth-Century France Sébastien Charles

268 288 299 314 334

Part 4 Main Themes in Berkeley’s Philosophy

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Immaterialism and Common Sense S. Seth Bordner Immediate and Mediate Perception in Berkeley Richard Glauser Berkeley on Ordinary Objects Jeff McDonough Berkeley’s Philosophy of Mind Talia Mae Bettcher Berkeley on the Philosophy of Language John Russell Roberts Berkeley’s Philosophy of Mathematics Wolfgang Breidert Berkeley’s Philosophy of Religion Kenneth L. Pearce

Bibliography Index

343 355 385 397 421 435 458 484 514

Abbreviations Alc

Alciphron; or, the Minute Philosopher (1732)

Analyst

The Analyst; or, a Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician (1734)

DM

De Motu; sive, De Motus Principio & Natura, & de Causa Communicationis Motuum (1721)

NB

Two notebooks (A and B) published as Philosophical Commentaries.

P

A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Part I (1710)

PI

Published Introduction to the Principles.

MI

Manuscript Introduction to the Principles.

TV

An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709)

TVV

The Theory of Vision . . . Vindicated and Explained (1732)

3D

Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1712)

Siris

Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions . . . (1744)

Q

The Querist, Containing Several Queries, Proposed to the Consideration of the Public (1735–1737, 1750)

Works

The Works of George Berkeley, 9 Vols, A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (eds), London, Nelson (1948–1957).

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Contributors Timo Airaksinen is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Bertil Belfrage became Assistant Professor (universitetslektor) in Theoretical Philosophy at Lund University, Sweden in 1970, and Research Fellow in the History of Ideas and Sciences in 1993. He was Senior Editor of Berkeley Studies in 2005–2007, is editing a new scholarly edition of Berkeley's works and has published numerous papers on different aspects of Berkeley's philosophy. Talia Bettcher is Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy, College of Arts and Letters, California State University, USA . Seth Bordner is Assistant Professor Philosophy at the University of Alabama, USA . Wolfgang Breidert was formerly professor of philosophy at the University of Karlsruhe. He has translated most of Berkeley’s writings into German (1980–96). He is the author of George Berkeley: 1685–1753 (1989); Philosophen im Gedicht (2012); Philosophie in Gedichten (2013); and essays on history of mathematics, among others on Berkeley and mathematics. Richard Brook is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University, USA . Laurence Carlin is Associate Professor of Philosophy and a member of the University Honors Faculty at University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, USA . Sébastien Charles is a Professor and Dean of Research at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières, Canada. James Van Cleve is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, USA . Georges Dicker is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the College of Brockport, State University of New York, USA .

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Contributors

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Keota Fields is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, USA . Richard Glauser is a Professor at the Institute of Philosophy, University of Neuchatel, Switzerland. Adam Grzeliński is the Director of the Institute of Philosophy at Nicholas Copernicus University, Poland. Marc Hight is Eliot Professor of Philosophy at Hampden-Sydney College, Australia. Tom Jones is a Reader in English, University of St. Andrews, UK . Patrick Kelly is Professor and Fellow Emeritus of History at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. Nancy Kendrick is a Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College, USA . Charles McCracken is Professor Emeritus Philosophy at Michigan State University, USA . Jeff McDonough is Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, USA . Kenneth Pearce is Ussher Assistant Professor in Berkeley Studies in the Department of Philosophy, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland and Lilly Postdoctoral Fellow at Valparaiso University, USA . Samuel Rickless is a Professor in the Philosophy Department of the University of California, San Diego, USA . John Roberts is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Florida State University, USA . Howard Robinson is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. Tom Stoneham is a Graduate Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of York, UK .

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Introduction Bertil Belfrage and Richard Brook

George Berkeley’s most famous works today are the Principles (1710) and the Three Dialogues (1713), known for his idealism and his challenging denial of ‘matter’. Ironically enough, these important works were either neglected or disregarded in Berkeley’s lifetime. When rediscovered about a century after his death, they attracted a lot of interest from both realists and idealists. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the established view was that Berkeley exclusively contributed to the field of metaphysics. The editors of Berkeley’s Works (1948–57), A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, argued in their introductions that we could, or should, neglect some of those works in which he dealt with other than metaphysical issues. Thus we read in volume one of the Works that the Theory of Vision (1709) did not represent ‘Berkeley’s own views at any stage’ (1:147, 149–50, 156), in volume three that Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (1732) has been ‘left to students of philosophy – quite wrongly, because’ he did not express his own view in this work (3:7, 13), in volume four that De Motu (1721) is ‘a slight and disappointing work . . . apart from the Principles the De Motu would be nonsense’ (4:3–4), et cetera. The result was that works for which Berkeley was famous in his lifetime are seldom, if ever, studied in the Anglophone world today. Geneviève Brykman took a different approach as general editor of a French translation of Berkeley’s Œuvres (1985–1996). She excluded recommendations on how the texts should be interpreted, and stimulated French scholars to make ground-breaking discoveries in those works that the English editors, Luce and Jessop, asked us to neglect. In The Bloomsbury Companion to Berkeley, we do not take sides in arguments on editing or evaluating particular works; our sole concern is to inform about all of Berkeley’s works, which include a great variety of subjects: from philosophy to

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Introduction

mathematics, natural philosophy and empirical psychology; from theology to political economy and monetary policy; from moral philosophy to physiology and medicine. To cover this broad field, we invited leading experts to write informative, explanatory, but also critical chapters on all aspects of Berkeley’s philosophy.

Part One

Berkeley’s Life and Importance

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George Berkeley’s Biography Tom Jones

George Berkeley was born on 12 March 1685. He entered Kilkenny College on 17 July 1696, and progressed to Trinity College Dublin in March 1700. He was made a fellow in June, 1707, obtaining permission to be absent from the College from 1713. Berkeley’s important friendship with John Percival, later Earl of Egmont, began in 1708. He toured France and Italy from October 1713 to August 1714, and during 1717 to 1720. Once he returned to Ireland he was made Dean of Derry in 1724 but never lived in the town, concentrating his energies on campaigning for funds and a charter (which was granted in June 1725) for the foundation of a college on Bermuda. He married Anne Forster in 1728, and they had seven children: Henry (1729–?); Lucia (1731–1731); George (1733–1795); John (1735– 1735); William (1736–1751); Julia (October 1738–?); Sarah (1739/1740–1740). Between January 1729 and October 1731, Berkeley was in America, principally in Newport, Rhode Island. When eventually it became clear that the funds for the college would not arrive he returned to London. He was made Bishop of Cloyne in 1734 and remained there for 18 years, rarely travelling even to Dublin. Berkeley departed Cloyne for Oxford, where his second son, George, was studying at Christ Church, in August 1752. He died there on 14 January 1753. Berkeley’s character has been described both as pious and practical and as one that expressed, through strategy and dissimulation, ‘a greater than usual split between his appearance and reality.’1 Combining elements of these insights, the chief characteristic of Berkeley’s life I will emphasize is an interest in the best strategies by which to practise piety. Berkeley’s diverse activities, the beliefs and projects often regarded as eccentric, are related to one another by a strong, pragmatic desire to do good – with pragmatism understood as a focus on practice, rather than a willingness to give up creative or idiosyncratic solutions in favour of achievable compromises. Berkeley’s notion of the good is specific, founded in the spiritual, moral and social project of the Anglican Church. Doing

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good required demonstrating the falsehood of materialistic, atheistic and freethinking propositions, and arguing for a mode of life in which religious education was the basis for political loyalty, productive personal life, and social responsibility. Berkeley attempted to promote these virtues as an educationalist, man of religion, friend, father and husband, and believed he was fulfilling his responsibilities as a member of a philosophical elite in doing so. One pattern according to which his life and career might be understood is that of the gradual application of the strategies of argument Berkeley practised from an early stage in metaphysics to matters of faith and related social issues. Berkeley’s social views were expressed with stridency in his early work. But over the years he accumulated a wide experience of life in different parts of the world, and saw different forms of Christian faith support, or fail to support, the moral and physical well-being of a population of believers and also the people with whom they lived (slaves, colonized peoples, people of other sects). This experience induced Berkeley to alter his approach to argument in the moral, social and religious domains. His strong sense of Ireland as a colony, in which different faith and language groups cohabit, his visits to Italy, his sojourn in America, all contribute to a developing emphasis on inclusion, dialogue, common ground, and on persuasion achieved by example and by insinuation rather than by the declaration of universal laws and obligations. Berkeley’s family came to Ireland from England, probably from Staffordshire, having, according to Joseph Stock, Berkeley’s early biographer, suffered on account of loyalty to the Stuarts during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.2 Stock records that Berkeley was born at Kilcrene, near Thomastown.3 A. A. Luce’s supposition of a move to Dysart Castle, and the precise location of the Berkeley home in Dysart, are conjectural, though recent excavations provide evidence of a late seventeenth-century dwelling on the site, a dwelling referred to as the Berkeley house.4 Knowledge of Berkeley’s schooling rests on a firmer foundation. The revised statutes for Kilkenny College of March 1684/5 provided for a ‘Loyall and Orthodox’ Master, an Usher, and Visitors drawn from the local episcopacy and Trinity College.5 Students should have arrived at the school knowing their accidence and ‘fitt to Enter upon Grammar Learning’. The statutes refer to instruction in ‘Latine Greek and Hebrew Languages as also in oratory and Poetry’. Dr Edward Hinton, the School’s master, was Berkeley’s tutor. He is said to have been an outstanding teacher of Greek.6 Students worked for 9 to 10 hours four days of the week, with Thursday and Sunday afternoons given to recreation. Kilkenny College would have disciplined Berkeley intellectually and as a member of a protestant social institution.

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The statutes of Trinity College Dublin also emphasize the requirement that officers be loyal protestants, and further that deference for hierarchy be observed within the College in order to prevent anarchy. Instruction was by lecture followed by interrogation, and disputation between students. These forms of instruction were supplemented by Latin commentary on the lectures and compositions in or translations into Latin. There were also disputations in mathematics, metaphysics, physics or divinity for the different year groups. Prayers were scheduled three times a day, and sermons after prayers on Sundays.7 The syllabus and general reading of the students at Trinity College Dublin reflected the intellectual controversies of the period: traditional scholastic philosophy was reinforced by modern logic textbooks such as those of Franco Burgersdijck and Marcin Smiglecki, mixed with René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi, and of course John Locke, whose Essay was introduced in 1692 under the supervision of St George Ashe, later a patron of Berkeley. Students worked through a wide range of Greek and Latin dramatists, orators, poets, historians and writers of dialogues, and natural science (studied in the third year) included text books in physics and universal geography.8 A broader intellectual ambiance is also relevant to Berkeley’s development. The Dublin Philosophical Society, in which Ashe was a leading figure, helped popularize science as a genteel pursuit, and contributed to the intellectual culture of the town.9 The Society was largely in abeyance between the death of William Molyneux in 1698 and a refoundation by Samuel Molyneux in 1707, in November of which year Berkeley read his paper ‘Of Infinites’ to the Society. Berkeley’s notebooks record some rules for two different societies for the study of the new philosophy, which may have been attempts to revivify the Philosophical Society, either before 1707, or shortly afterwards when Samuel Molyneux turned his attention towards the theory of government.10 Berkeley joined the fellowship of Trinity College Dublin as a lecturer in mathematics on 9 June, 1707, following his first publications in that field, indeed in any field, receiving his MA on 15 July of the same year. Despite periods of absence from Trinity during which he visited London and toured Italy (twice), Berkeley held several College positions. He was librarian from 20 November 1709, and in this role he may have been involved in discussing Marsh’s Library in Dublin and Wren’s library at Trinity College, Cambridge, as models for the library that was built between 1712 and 1732, when he was largely absent.11 The library clearly required attention. Berkeley writes to Molyneux on 26 November 1709 of ‘the snow that was constantly driving at the windows & forcing its entrance into that wretched mansion’. Entries in the College records also associate

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him with the following positions and honours: Junior Dean (20 November 1710 and 1711); Junior Greek Lecturer (20 November 1712); Senior Greek Lecturer (resigned 21 November 1721); BD and DD degrees (14 November 1721); Divinity Lecturer and Preacher (20 November 1721); Senior Proctor (20 November 1722 and 1723); Hebrew lecturer (14 June 1723, 20 November 1723). Berkeley was ordained Deacon on 19 February 1709, and Priest in 1710 by St George Ashe, then bishop of Clogher, causing a dispute with William King, Archbishop of Dublin, and author of De origine mali.12 Berkeley writes to King expressing ‘concern and surprise’ that he has ‘fallen so far into the displeasure of your grace, as that you should order me to be prosecuted in your Grace’s court’. Ulterior reasons for the conflict have been suggested. Berkeley’s New Theory of Vision had been published in 1709 and its second edition included an appendix that Berkeley said was a response to King’s views.13 King and Berkeley may also have differed on the use of analogical terms for describing the attributes of God when Berkeley presented his paper ‘On Infinites’.14 It is also possible that a political difference, latent until the publication of Berkeley’s Passive Obedience, is vented here. King presented the Glorious Revolution as a providential exception to the law against rebellion, whereas Berkeley argued that obedience was a negative duty, and limited opposition to cases in which the sovereign power was ‘unhinged’ or ‘disputed’ (Passive Obedience 52).15 King speculated that Berkeley wished to avoid the discourse that preceded ordination, and it is possible that King’s acknowledged relish for discipline and their philosophical and political differences encouraged Berkeley to do so.16 In Notebooks Berkeley writes that ‘He that wou’d win another over to his opinion must seem to harmonize with him at first and humour him in his own way of talking. From my Childhood I had an unaccountable turn of thought that way’.17 Berkeley demonstrates aptitude for seeing things from his opponents’ point of view when answering objections in the Principles, as in sections 34–85, and in the very form of Three Dialogues. (I shall not offer a characterization of Berkeley’s theory of vision and metaphysics in the period 1709–13 as these topics demand the fuller treatment given them in other chapters of this Companion.) In metaphysics, then, it seems Berkeley cultivated dialogue, and knew the strategic benefits of conceding at least some of an opponent’s position. He is less inclined to such concessions in his moral, social and religious writings of this early period. Berkeley published Passive Obedience in 1712, stating that it drew on three discourses delivered in the college chapel. This treatise develops an argument for the moral obligation of absolute loyalty to temporal authority,

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an argument that has sometimes been associated with rule utilitarianism, but which primarily asserts the harmony of human laws of conduct with universal laws of creation, and only secondarily invokes human goods. The text is sufficiently ambiguous to provide opponents the opportunity of associating him with extreme Toryism, but any argument for loyalty may at that point in history have been taken to imply that Britons should have remained loyal to the Stuarts. Berkeley’s Advice to the Tories who have Taken the Oaths (1715) shares with Passive Obedience its insistence on the necessity of following laws (specifically those to which one has sworn an oath), but is explicit in defending the Hanoverian settlement. Berkeley also writes to Percival suggesting that ‘the most lamentable evil [of the Jacobite rebels] is the great dishonour they have done to the Church and religion by public perjury and rebellion’ (26 September 1715). In this early period, then, Berkeley’s rhetorical strategy for persuading others of their religious and therefore moral obligations is to emphasize obeying God’s immutable laws.18 Berkeley was granted leave to move to London in January 1713, and there met Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Richard Steele and Jonathan Swift. He undertook the anthology The Ladies Library for Steele, selecting and working together passages from Mary Astell, Locke, John Tillotson, Bertrand de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon, the Port-Royal moralists and other works on education and of piety, extending his educational activities by engaging (speculatively, at least) with the intellectual needs of women. Nancy Kendrick in this volume argues that Berkeley was influenced by Mary Astell, whose work suggests education ‘ought to aim at providing women the opportunity to transcend the sphere to which custom had assigned them’. Kendrick explores the implications of this view of education for the Bermuda project. During his time in London Berkeley also produced essays for The Guardian, several of which attack those qualities of ‘free-thinking’ that were to remain Berkeley’s targets for the rest of his life: a focus on minute particularities of texts or arguments; a denial of a future state of rewards and punishments; the materiality of the soul. Berkeley also expresses views on supporting local industries and on social bonds that hint at the themes of his writings of the 1720s onwards. Berkeley conducted two tours of France and, principally, Italy in the 1710s. On the first tour, October 1713 to August 1714, Berkeley served as Lord Peterborough’s chaplain during his diplomatic mission to Sicily. On this tour he probably met Malebranche in Paris, having written to Percival on 24 November 1713 that he was to be introduced to the philosopher that day. Luce suggests that Berkeley preached for Basil Kennet, the chaplain at the protestant colony at

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Leghorn (Livorno) around Easter 1714, but Kennet left Leghorn in February 1712, and was chaplain to the Bishop of Lincoln by October 1713.19 Writing to Samuel Johnson on 25 November 1729, Berkeley says, ‘As to the second part of my treatise concerning the principles of human knowledge, the fact is that I had made a considerable progress in it, but the manuscript was lost about fourteen years ago during my travels in Italy; and I never had leisure since to do so disagreeable a thing as writing twice on the same subject.’ The date Berkeley gives here corresponds more closely to his first than his second tour of Italy. The 1734 edition of the Principles still refers to the matter following the ‘Introduction’ as ‘Part I’. Berkeley undertook his second tour as tutor to St George Ashe Jr., 1717–1720. This was the longest visit to Italy by a British tourist of the period, and Berkeley made extensive studies of art, architecture and local natural phenomena, recorded in notebooks now in the British Library. He also recorded the political and legal organization of the regions through which he passed. Some of his remarks take the form of comparisons: ‘Italians living in townes makes ’em polite the contrary observable in ye English.’ Sometimes Berkeley uses the query form when asking whether a useful practice he has observed is also in use in England.20 He was generally unimpressed by contemporary Italian priesthood, and noted that ‘Nastiness, ill manners, stupidity, madness &c sanctified in the church of Rome’.21 This extensive period of (partly comparative) study of the cultural conditions of a people informs Berkeley’s later expression of views on social life. Berkeley returned from this tour having written De motu for an essay competition at the French Academy. Berkeley met John Smibert, the painter who was later to accompany him to America, on this tour.22 On his return to Ireland, Berkeley demonstrated a greater interest in economic and social matters, and argued that the role of money and credit (between which Berkeley wishes to reduce the distinction) should be the promotion of industry. He wrote on the consequences of the South Sea bubble in An Essay towards preventing the Ruine of Great Britain (1721), which might be regarded as a prospectus for his social and economic writings of the coming two decades. This essay places financial and moral corruption in the context of attacks on religion, suggesting that public designs to promote atheism ought to be punishable by death: ‘perhaps it may be no easy matter to assign a good reason why blasphemy against God should not be inquired into, and punished with the same rigour as treason against the king.’ The arguments in favour of sumptuary laws also include threatening modern ladies with the same pestilences of scab, stench and burning visited upon the ladies of Zion in Isaiah 3:16–24.23 In these points at least the

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essay represents a continuation of Berkeley’s earlier attitudes to obedience and punishment, and his argumentative strategies for expressing them. In June 1723, to his surprise, Berkeley inherited the estate of Esther Van Homrigh, Swift’s Vanessa. Complying with the terms of the legacy turned out to be a large administrative burden. He became Dean of Derry in 1724, never taking up residence, as his plan to establish the college of St Paul’s on Bermuda had already become his central focus. He had a Royal Charter for the college by June 1725, engaged in several years of vigorous lobbying for the project and, on the promise of a grant of £20,000, sailed for America on 6 September 1728. He also designed a plan for the college.24 Eliza Berkeley, George’s daughter in law, recollects the ‘American scheme’ as one ‘by which he meant to introduce Episcopacy there’.25 Berkeley mentions the future prospect of Episcopacy being established in America in his ‘Proposal’ for the scheme, and also makes clear the importance of competing with Catholic missionary activity on that continent: ‘we fall as far short of our Neighbours of the Romish Communion in Zeal for propagating Religion, as we surpass them in the Soundness and Purity of it’.26 Church politics and missionary and educational zeal are inextricably linked in the Bermuda scheme. Berkeley had married Anne Forster (21 March 1702–27 May 1786) in 1728, apparently concealing his intentions from some principal correspondents.27 Anne had spent some time in France, and was a devoted reader of religious texts.28 The marriage is remembered as an affectionate one by Anne in a letter to Mrs Grimshaw, 19 February 1765: ‘the Bishop of Cloyne was the most tender and amiable of Husbands – I remember a misanthropic friend of ours once, railing against matrimony in our presence – looked with an air of spite, & said you two are not included in this general hate, for you are lovers’.29 That Anne was happy in the marriage is corroborated by a letter from Elizabeth Montagu on the occasion of Berkeley’s death: ‘She had a perfect adoration of the Bishop.’ The same letter mentions Berkeley’s previous proposal of marriage to Anne Donnellan, a friend of Swift (later an intimate of Georg Friedrich Handel and Samuel Richardson), and a descendant (like Berkeley) of Archbishop James Ussher. Her mother had taken Philip Percival, brother to Berkeley’s friend John, Earl of Egmont, as her second husband. This proposal is perhaps the source of the rumours of Berkeley’s marriage to which Prior alludes in 1726, and also the reason for Berkeley’s later secrecy.30 Montagu is not sure why Donnellan rejected the offer, but conjectures that ‘perhaps aversion to the cares of a married life, and apprehensions from some particularities in his temper hinder’d the match; however their friendship always continued, and I have always heard her give him for virtues and talents the preference to all mankind’.31 It may be that moving to

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Bermuda was part and parcel of Berkeley’s proposal of marriage, and that it might not have appealed to Donnellan. Berkeley’s party was forced to stop at Williamsburg, Virginia ‘for want of Provisions’, where Berkeley was met by William Gooch, the Governor of the colony and president of the college of William and Mary. In a letter to Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, Gooch notes he gave Berkeley a ‘short view of our Country and Circumstances’.32 Very soon after his arrival in Newport, Rhode Island, in January, 1729, Berkeley began to consider the possibility of making it, rather than Bermuda, the location of the college.33 Both William Byrd (see below) and Gooch note the unsuitability of Bermuda as a location for the college in correspondence with Berkeley’s colleagues and friends. Berkeley’s letters during his stay in America record constant uncertainty about the best means of altering the terms of the charter, and growing despair of the grant ever being paid at all. In her annotated copy of Joseph Stock’s life of Berkeley, Anne notes Berkeley’s involvement in local religious life at Newport, preaching every Sunday and instructing local missionaries twice a year.34 Berkeley was a slave-owner whilst at Newport, which was the centre of the colony’s trade. The colony saw a disproportionately large increase in its enslaved population in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.35 But, even if Rhode Island was, in ‘both relative and absolute terms’, ‘the most important American carrier of African slaves’, there were fewer than ten slaving voyages per year during Berkeley’s residence in Newport, as opposed to around fifty at the peak of the trade at the turn of the nineteenth century.36 Berkeley received a letter from Benson, an old friend, that refers to a ‘project for the propagation of ye race of blacks in Europe’.37 He thought slavery and baptism compatible, apparently baptizing his three slaves Philip, Anthony and Agnes.38 It has recently been suggested, on the basis of Berkeley’s statement that ‘it seemed a proper Step, if the Opinion of his Majesty’s Attorney and Solicitor-General could be procured’ on the disputed legal question of whether baptism entailed freedom for slaves, that he or members of his circle were responsible for commissioning and publicizing the Yorke-Talbot opinion, a legal opinion that may have secured the status of slavery.39 Berkeley’s plan to Christianize indigenous Americans at the Bermudan college would also, according to the Virginia colonist William Byrd, have required kidnap, and Berkeley admits as much in his own proposal, saying ‘the Children of savage Americans’ to fill the college could be got either by peaceable means ‘or by taking captive the Children of our Enemies’.40 Berkeley, then, was prepared to take extreme measures to pursue his educational goals, and his concern for human goods was more for the future state than this world.

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This is not strategy, but having an immoveable conviction of the priority of spiritual goods over (nonetheless significant) temporal goods. Spiritual good is sometimes used to justify repugnant practices. Whilst in Rhode Island, Berkeley wrote Alciphron and made the contacts that on his return to London enabled him to employ unused funds from the Bermuda project to donate books and land to American universities. The sermon just cited that Berkeley preached to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel on his return emphasized the importance of promoting religion and religious education at home if there was to be any prospect of promoting the gospel overseas. He notes the variety of forms of Christianity practised (irregularly) amongst the colonists, and also the spiritual and physical condition of indigenous Americans and black slaves. He feels Roman Catholics have made better steps in promoting their religion than Anglicans: It must be owned, our reformed Planters, with respect to the Natives and the Slaves, might learn from those of the Church of Rome, how it is their Interest and Duty to behave. Both French and Spaniards have intermarried with Indians, to the great Strength, Security and Increase of their Colonies. They take care to instruct both them and their Negroes in the Popish Religion, to the Reproach of those who profess a better. They have also Bishops and Seminaries for Clergy; and it is not found that their Colonies are worse Subjects, or depend less on their Mother-Country, on that Account.41

Once he has returned from America, Berkeley begins to think that conversion should be achieved and education facilitated by integration, rather than kidnap. He also begins to show concern for the institutional autonomy of the American Anglican Church: politicians more concerned with enforcing the dependence of the colonies on Great Britain than with the establishment of Anglican institutions in America overstated the negative consequences of such autonomy. Similar concerns for the persuasive rather than enforced cultural integration of different communities persist in the next period of Berkeley’s life. He was made Bishop of Cloyne in January 1734. From 1741 Berkeley’s brother Robert served as rector of Midleton/Middletown in Berkeley’s diocese.42 Berkeley left Cloyne just once in the next eighteen years, to make a speech at the House of Lords in Dublin, a speech related to the Discourse Addressed to Magistrates, which once again shows Berkeley asserting the role of religious values in public, civil life. Berkeley’s work in the Cloyne period consisted of active church administration (correspondence with Thomas Secker, Martin Benson and Gibson revealing a strong sense of the threat to the church), poor relief and

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economic improvement, and the education of his children, not least in music. Berkeley’s interest in the Roman Catholic population of his see and the value of the Irish language for reaching that community is evident in his Primary Visitation Charge. Here Berkeley recommends that his clergy be all things to all men, and work their attempts at attracting and converting Roman Catholics to Anglicanism into the general course of conversation. His interest in preaching Anglican services in Irish is discussed with Gibson, and features in The Querist (Queries 260–65; Queries omitted, 294–5).43 (Interest in Irish for the purposes of conversion to Protestantism was part of the ethos at Trinity College in the period immediately prior to Berkeley’s attendance.44) Berkeley’s work was well received at least by some in the Catholic community. Charles O’Conor, a Catholic antiquarian who worked to integrate the two communities and who was invited to join the Dublin Society praised Berkeley: ‘A FEW Berkleys, in every Communion, would soon restore us to that Spirit, and that Identity, of true Christianity, which one hath labored, so apostolically, to revive.’45 Economics, and the relation between chemistry, medicine and divine order were the subjects of Berkeley’s Querist and Siris respectively, his major publications of this period. The Querist develops Berkeley’s arguments concerning the nature of money and credit, and places a great emphasis on the duty to promote domestic industry as a means of supporting an indigent local population. In this respect Berkeley is comparable to his friend Swift, defending Irish manufacture and trade from the depredations of the English, and from the corruption of imported fashions.46 Berkeley’s friendship with Tom Prior, with whom he had studied at Kilkenny College, and who acted as Berkeley’s agent in financial and legal matters, is also significant. Prior was greatly concerned with the flight of money from Ireland, publishing on the subject and drawing up a list of Church of Ireland absentee clergy.47 In the 1730s Prior organized the Dublin Society, which sought to address Ireland’s economic difficulties by means of patronizing advances in agricultural and industrial design and innovation. Berkeley was a full participant in the movement for Irish economic independence through encouraging local manufacture and keeping money in the local economy. Berkeley’s recommendations for drinking tar water, the starting point of Siris, received a great deal of attention in England and Europe in subsequent decades. Siris moves from describing methods for the regulation of the animal spirits, the physical organism, such as drinking tar water, to considerations of the relationship between nature as the subject of scientific observation and the observing and acting mind or spirit. Berkeley retains his absolute distinction between nature (consisting in instruments, occasions and signs) and the active agency that

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impels and perceives bodies in nature according to certain laws (section 258). Though a very different kind of text from the Principles, one might see in Siris a restatement in different terms of the distinction between the one substance – spirit – and the various active dispositions of that substance that constitute its perceiving or knowing anything of the world. Berkeley helped raise and arm a militia against the Jacobite rebels during 1745–6, and published a letter to the Roman Catholic clergy at the same time, alerting them to their responsibilities. His brother William was a commander of Hanoverian forces in Fife, leaving an account of the campaign.48 According to Eliza Berkeley, William was remembered in Fife when Berkeley’s grandson, George Monck Berkeley, enrolled at the University in St Andrews in 1781/2.49 Berkeley, then, remained a loyalist, though there are changes in the published expression of his social and political views. A wide inter-cultural experience, one that included failure, and being thought of as belonging to a religious minority, produces changes in the rhetorical mode of Berkeley’s social and moral philosophy, and its practical objectives. His understanding of the good shifts from the necessity of maintaining an oath in Advice to the Tories (1715) to the relief of inter-generational poverty and indigence in A Word to the Wise (1749), both texts that explicitly seek to demonstrate the usefulness of Christianity in preserving social order. Berkeley may never have returned to metaphysics with the intensity of the period 1709–13, but the argumentative skills he developed at that time were practised over his entire career. From seeming to harmonize with his opponents in order to demonstrate to them indubitable truths, he may have come actually to harmonize with them in the production of an episcopal Protestant government in Ireland that was, at least to some degree, tolerant of religious difference.

Notes 1 Luce, A. A. (1949/1992), The Life of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne (reprint, intro. by David Berman). London: Thomas Nelson / London: Routledge/Thoemmes, passim; Berman, D. (1994), George Berkeley: Idealism and the Man. Oxford: Clarendon Press, passim; and for the quotation Berman, D. (2005a), ‘Berkeley’s life and works’ in K. P. Winkler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 13–33, p. 24. 2 See Stock, J. (1776), An Account of the Life of George Berkeley, D.D. London: J. Murray, p. 1. The copy of this book interleaved with notes by Anne Berkeley is preserved as

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The Bloomsbury Companion to Berkeley TCD MS 5936. Opposite p. 1 Anne notes that Salt in Staffordshire was the residence of the Berkeleys. Salt was in the parish of St Mary, Stafford. Parish records for 1559–1671 survive in the Lichfield Record Office, but contain no record of baptism, marriage or funeral for a Berkeley. My thanks to Anita Caithness for this information. In 1747 Berkeley asked Prior to test the legitimacy of the will of a cousin (see Hight, M. A., ed. 2013, The Correspondence of George Berkeley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, letters 347, 349, 354). The bill dated 19 October 1747 entered in relation to this case, when giving the names and places of residence of Berkeley and his brothers, and the preceding two generations of the family, notes that William and Sarah Berkeley, Berkeley’s grandparents, were resident in Staffordshire, but leaves a blank space in the document where the name of the town of residence should be found (see National Archives C 11/1091/9; the same is true of a further bill dated 27 January 1748, C 11/1093/9). Stock, 1776, p. 2. Luce, 1949/1992, pp. 20–2. See http://www.excavations.ie/Pages/Details.php?Year=& County=Kilkenny&id=3472. Retrieved 23 October 2013. TCD MS MUN -P-1-518a. Stock, 1776, p. 2 and Luce, 1949/1992, p. 31 citing the TCD entrance book. See Welch, H. T. (2009), ‘Edward Hinton’, in James McGuire and James Quinn (eds), Dictionary of Irish Biography (vol. 4). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press/The Royal Irish Academy, pp. 716–17, p. 716. Bolton, R. (1749), A Translation of the Charter and Statutes of Trinity-College, Dublin. Dublin: Oli. Nelson for the Translator, pp. 25, 27, 31; pp. 69–78. See Stewart, M. A. (2004), ‘Berkeley, George (1685–1753)’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edn. May 2005). Oxford: Oxford University Press (http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2211, accessed 6 August 2012) for one account of the curriculum. A letter by John Shadwell of 1708 (MS Rawl[inson] D.842, f. 35, copied as TCD MS 7971/Misc. Aut. 271) describing some authors read at the College is mentioned by Luce, 1949/1992, p. 39, and parsed by McDowell, R. B. and Webb, D. A. (1982), Trinity College Dublin 1592–1952: An Academic History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 32: ‘philosophical teaching consists of a farrago of conflicting hypotheses from Aristotle, Descartes, Colbert, Epicurus, Gassendi, Malebranche and Locke’. The commonplace book of Josias Haydock, who entered the College in 1677, contains book lists that cite Descartes’ Meditations, and works by Burgersdijck, Heerebord, Smiglecki, Zabarolla and Didacus (TCD MS 2642/2.3.31, ff. 104–9). Burgersdijck and Smiglecki are still on the syllabus in an outline that survives from 1736, see TCD MS MUN V/27(1), f. 6r, ‘a List of Books appointed to be read at Morning Lecture’. Burgersdijck is for junior freshmen, Smiglecki for senior freshmen. McDowell and Webb, 1982, pp. 45–8, summarize the syllabus. William Molyneux writes to Locke, 20 December 1692 that ‘I was the First

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that recommended and lent to the Reverend Provost of Our University Dr Ashe, a most Learned and Ingenious Man, Your Essay, with which he was so wonderfully pleased and satisfyd, that he has Orderd it to be read by the Batchelors in the Colledge, and strictly examines them in the Progress therein.’ Locke, J. (1979), E. S. de Beer (ed.), The Correspondence of John Locke (vol. 4). Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 601–2. See TCD MS 888/1/Molyneux I.4.17, f. 32v for Ashe recommending the Society to Clarendon and emphasizing the useful nature of its pursuits. Hoppen, K. T. (1970), The Common Scientist in the Seventeenth Century: A Study of the Dublin Philosophical Society, 1683–1708. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 185–6, 195–7; British Library (BL ) MS Add. 39305, ff. 96–103. Ferguson, 2000, p. 26: Ferguson, L. (2000), ‘Custodes librorum: service, staff and salaries, 1601–1855’ in V. Kinane and A. Walsh (eds), Essays on the History of Trinity College Library. Dublin and Portland, OR : Four Courts Press, pp. 25–38; and Grimes, 2000, p. 73: Grimes, B. (2000), ‘The library buildings up to 1970’ in V. Kinane and A. Walsh (eds), Essays on the History of Trinity College Library. Dublin and Portland, OR : Four Courts Press, pp. 72–90. Hight, 2013, letter 3, Berkeley to William King, 18 April 1710. The college statutes suggest the Provost should be ordained, but do not make the same condition for fellows. Trinity College Dublin, 1735, p. 31: ‘Statuimus igitur, ut Præpositus sit moribus probus, vitâ integra, & fama inviolata, annos natus ad minimum triginta, & in sacris ordinibus constitutus.’ Hight, 2013, p. 35, letter 12, Trinity College Dublin (1735), Charta, sive literæ patentes, a serenissimo rege Carolo primo collegio sanctæ & individuæ Trinitatis juxta Dublin, concessa. Una cum statutis ejusdem Collegii. Dublin: S. Powell for A. Bradley. Berman, 1994, pp. 14–15. Breuninger, 2010, p. 29. TCD MS 750/11 cited in Berman, D. (1994), Breuninger, Scott (2010), Recovering Bishop Berkeley: Virtue and Society in the Anglo-Irish Context. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 18; Connolly, S. J. (2008), ‘William King (1650–1729)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edn.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Works, vol. 9, p. 153. BL MS Add. 39304, f. 4r. Berman, 2005a, pp. 21–7 cites this evidence, and develops a picture of Berkeley that, in my view, overstates the importance of the deployment of argumentative strategy and dissimulation in the judgement of Berkeley’s character. Ross, 2005, suggests Berkeley was not a Jacobite, and that the discourses were misfiring attempts to use the language of Jacobitism to persuade people out of that position – and therefore a further example of his strategy: Ross, I. C. (2005), ‘Was Berkeley a Jacobite? Passive Obedience revisited’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland 20, 17–30.

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19 Luce, 1949/1992, p. 72, Stock, 1776, pp. 6–7; Cheesman, C. E. A. (2004), ‘Kennett, Basil (1674–1715)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edn. May 2005). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 20 Works, vol. 7, pp. 294, 319. 21 BL MS Add 39310, f. 92v. 22 Saunders, 1995, p. 32. Saunders thinks Berkeley stayed in Rome until at least April 1721 and developed Jacobite connections, but on the basis of a confusion between George Berkeley and George Barclay, the Church of Scotland Chaplain to the Pretender: Saunders, R. H. (1995), John Smibert: Colonial America’s First Portrait Painter. New Haven and London: Yale University Press/Barra Foundation. See Ingamells, 1997, p. 865: Ingamells, J. (1997), A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800: Compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive. New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art. 23 Works, vol. 6, pp. 71, 76. 24 Stock, 1776, pp. 71–2. 25 Berkeley, George Monck (1797), Poems by the Late George Monck Berkeley. London: J. Nichols, pp. ccl–ccli. 26 Works, vol. 7, p. 355. 27 See record DU -CI -BA-90353 at http://churchrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/ churchrecords/details/3a71f80090352 for the record of the baptism. The parish was St John’s, Dublin, and Anne’s parents’ address Fishamble Street. 28 Hight, 2013, letter 282, Berkeley to James, 7 June 1741; [Berkeley], 1791, vol. 1, p. 84. For a discussion of this work, its attribution to Anne Berkeley, and the judgement that her views on free thinking and Christian militancy coincide with those of George Berkeley, see Storrie, S. G. (2011), ‘Anne Berkeley’s Contrast: A note’, Berkeley Studies 22, 9–14. 29 BL MS Add 39311 f. 168r. On the other hand, Eliza Frinsham/Berkeley adds a later note to this letter to the effect that Anne was Berkeley’s Xantippe – the wife of Socrates who is traditionally portrayed as harassing and bullying the philosopher. 30 See Hight, 2013, letter 156. In 1725 a mock petition and reply were published, ostensibly from a beautiful young lady to Berkeley, and from Berkeley in response, in which the young lady offers to marry Berkeley and go to Bermuda with him. See Anon. (1725), The Humble Petition of a Beautiful Young Lady. To the Reverend Doctor B-rkl-y. Dublin, [N.P.] and Owens, S. (?1726), Remarks on the Young Ladies PETITION , To the Revnd. Dr B-rk-y. [N.P.: N.P.]. 31 Climenson, E. J. (1906), Elizabeth Montagu, The Queen of the Bluestockings: Her Correspondence from 1720–1761 (2 vols). London: John Murray, vol. 2, p. 26. At vol. 1, pp.112–14 there is an interesting letter from Anne Donellan offering advice on behaviour during courtship to Montagu, which may reflect on her attachment to Berkeley.

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32 Harrison, F. and B., and McLaren, G. (1924), ‘The Virginia clergy: Governor Gooch’s letters to the Bishop of London 1727–1749’, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 32, 3, 209–36, p. 228–9, from a letter of 29 June 1729. The letters are transcribed from the Fulham Papers of Lambeth Palace Library. 33 Hight, 2013, letter 179, Berkeley to Benson, 11 April 1729. 34 TCD MS 5936, opposite p. 21. 35 Berlin, I. (1998), Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, p. 178. 36 Coughtry, J. (1981), The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700–1807. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 25, 28. 37 Hight, 2013, letter 186, Benson to Berkeley, 23 June 1729. 38 Gaustad, E. S. (1979), George Berkeley in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 90–3. There is a suggestion that Berkeley brought slaves back to Ireland with him, founded on the appearance of servants in two reading cards for children. See Kelly, Patrick (1995/6), ‘Berkeley’s Servants’, Berkeley Newsletter 14, 13–14. 39 Works vol. 7, p. 122; Glasson, T. (2010), ‘ “Baptism doth not bestow Freedom”: Missionary Anglicanism, slavery, and the Yorke–Talbot opinion, 1701–30’, William & Mary Quarterly 67, 279–318, pp. 297, 304. 40 Works vol. 7, p. 346. Rand, B. (1914), Berkeley and Percival: The Correspondence of George Berkeley and Sir John Percival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 244–5, William Byrd to John Percival, 10 June 1729. See also Uzgalis, W. (2005), ‘Berkeley and the westward course of empire: on racism and ethnocentrism’ in Andrew Valls (ed.), Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 108–26. 41 Works, vol. 7, p. 122. 42 Luce, 1949/1992, p. 171. 43 Works vol. 7, p. 165; Hight, 2013, letter 254 Gibson to Berkeley, 9 July 1735. 44 For the interests of Narcissus Marsh see O’Connor, T. (2004), ‘Marsh’s Library and the Catholic tradition’ in Muriel McCarthy and Ann Simmons (eds), The Making of Marsh’s Library: Learning, Politics and Religion in Ireland, 1650–1750. Dublin: Four Courts Press, pp. 235–55, p. 235; for those of William Petty and Robert Boyle see Hunter, M. (2004), ‘Robert Boyle, Narcissus Marsh and the Anglo–Irish intellectual scene in the late seventeenth century’ in Muriel McCarthy and Ann Simmons (eds), The Making of Marsh’s Library: Learning, Politics and Religion in Ireland, 1650–1750. Dublin: Four Courts Press, pp. 51–75, pp. 61, 66–8. 45 O’Conor, C. (1754). Seasonal Thoughts Relating to our Civil and Ecclesiastical Constitution. Dublin: [N.P.], p. 40; see also McBride, I. (2009), Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, p. 92. 46 McBride, 2009, pp. 149–50 describes the ‘buy Irish’ movement of the 1720s.

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47 See Prior, T. (1729a), Observations on Coin in General With Some Proposals for Regulating the Value of Coin in Ireland. Dublin: A. Rhames for R. Gunne; Hight, 2013, letter 202, Berkeley to Prior, 7 May 1730. 48 See Luce, 1949/1992, p. 177. The account is cited by Roberts, J. L. (2002), The Jacobite Wars: Scotland and the Military Campaigns of 1715 and 1745. Edinburgh: Polygon, p. 187, in relation to campaigns in Arbroath, in Angus, without bibliographic details. I have not been able to trace the account. 49 Berkeley, 1797, pp. cxxxvii–viii, n.

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Berkeley’s Bermuda Project in Context Nancy Kendrick

In September 1728 Berkeley left Greenwich, England and set sail for Newport, Rhode Island to make preparations for the college he intended to found in Bermuda. After four months ‘blundering about the ocean’ (Works viii: 190), he and his wife, Anne Forster Berkeley, landed in Virginia and made their way north to Newport. Berkeley had spent a good part of the period from 1713 to 1720 travelling in Europe, mostly in Italy, and soon after his return to Ireland wrote to his friend John Percival about a plan to found a college for educating British colonists together with Native Americans (Works viii: 127). He spent much of the next eight years working toward this plan. Though the Percival letter is the first mention of the scheme, it would be a mistake to think that Berkeley came up with the plan suddenly, or that his was the only educational mission in the colonies. On the contrary, the seeds for the Bermuda Project had been planted over several years, and the project itself was formed in relation to many other educational endeavors of the early eighteenth century.1 What made Berkeley’s project special? At the time he was proposing to found a college in Bermuda, several colleges already existed in the American colonies: Harvard, Yale and William and Mary. Providing an education for English settlers was, then, no innovation.2 With respect to the Native populations, Anglican missionary work had been going on for some time in the Maryland and Virginia colonies, while Protestant missionaries of other denominations had been at work for more than a century ‘civilizing’ and converting the Natives in the New England colonies. What, then, did Berkeley have to offer? His college was to provide Native Americans with an education of the mind, an initiation into the intellectual life. In the letter to Percival he explains: In the same seminary a number of young American savages may be also educated till they have taken their degree of Master of Arts. And being by that time well

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The Bloomsbury Companion to Berkeley instructed in Christian religion, practical mathematics, and other liberal arts and sciences, and early endued with public spirited principles and inclinations, they may become the fittest missionaries for spreading religion, morality, and civil life, among their countrymen. Works viii: 127

The formal plan, published in 1725 as A Proposal for the better Supplying of Churches in our Foreign Plantations, And For Converting the Savage Americans, to Christianity, met with criticism even by those who were also engaged in missionary work in the American colonies. Thomas Bray, an Anglican clergyman and well-respected educational reformer who founded the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK ) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG ), criticized Berkeley’s Bermuda plan on numerous points. He claimed that Berkeley knew nothing about the Native populations and that his understanding of Bermuda was out-of-date (Gaustad 1979: 435). But his most serious objection focused on Berkeley’s insistence that the ‘savages’ were to receive an academic education. Colleges may be useful, Bray wrote, ‘in Countries already cultivated and in some Measure Polished; yet among Savages, I cannot conceive, but even a Charity School . . . taught tho’ by old Women, would answer the Ends better than by Professors of Sciences. And the Mechanicks would be more usefull taught among such than the Liberal Arts’ (Gaustad 1979: 45–6). Despite Bray’s and others’ objections, Berkeley proposed not only to educate ‘savages’ into the life of the mind, but that the English government should pay for this education. He was prepared to contribute much of his own (small) fortune to the project, and he had raised private subscriptions totaling more than £5,000, but he realized he needed an endowment for the project to succeed. He received a charter for the college fairly quickly after publishing the proposal in 1725, and lobbied for another year for a Parliamentary grant in the amount of £20,000. When he succeeded in winning a promise for the grant, he wrote to his friend Tom Prior: ‘I have . . . carried my point . . . in the House of Commons. . . . [T]here is an end of all their narrow and mercantile views and endeavours, as well as of the jealousies and suspicions of others . . . who apprehended this College may produce an independency in America, or at least lessen its dependency upon England’ (Works viii: 155). Mercantile interests coupled with fears that education would bring about colonial independence haunted Berkeley’s project from its inception and contributed much to its ultimate failure. In proclaiming that one of his aims was to re-educate English settlers, Berkeley made clear his belief that the colonists

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were in need of moral and intellectual improvement. He saw them as driven by commercial concerns and self-interest rather than by concern for the public good.3 This view won him no friends from among ‘men in stocks [or] trade’ or from ‘traders to America’ (Works viii: 155). His plan to educate the Native Americans by training them in ‘Religion and Morality . . . Eloquence, History, and practical Mathematicks . . . [and providing them with] some Skill in Physic’ (Works vii: 347–8) also generated some resentment. By the time of Berkeley’s Proposal, England had long been competing with France and the Netherlands for resources and territory outside Europe (Salisbury 1996: 400). Therefore, much of the discourse around the status of the ‘savage’ Americans concerned whether and in what ways ‘civilizing’ them would contribute to the ends to which the colonies had been settled to begin with: trade and commercial growth.4 But, as Berkeley saw it, the point of educating the ‘savages’ was not to make them more useful in satisfying the commercial needs of the English or even to ground their own self-improvement in the development of skills that would enable them to participate in the growing mercantile economy. The education of the Native Americans was a matter of their moral, spiritual and intellectual growth. This, Berkeley believed, was the ‘civilizing’ enterprise that would make the young American culture flourish. By the mid-1720s, the charter was granted, the endowment promised and a number of teachers for the college identified, including the painter John Smibert, who travelled with Berkeley to Newport. Yet despite this evidence of the project’s feasibility, the Proposal was thought by many to be the work of a dreamy idealist. Jonathan Swift was perhaps the first to so regard it, as he makes clear in his letter of 3 September 1724, introducing Berkeley to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Swift writes: [Berkeley] is an absolute philosopher with regard to money, titles, and power; and for three years past hath been struck with a notion of founding an university at Bermuda. . . . He shewed me a little tract which he designs to publish, and there your excellency will see his whole scheme of a life academico-philosophical . . . of a college founded for Indian scholars and missionaries. . . . His heart will break, if his Deanery be not taken from him. . . . I discourage him by the coldness of courts and ministers, who will interpret all this as impossible and a vision; but nothing will do. And therefore I do humbly entreat your excellency . . . to assist him by your credit to compass his romantic design, which however is very noble and generous. Luce 1949: 100–101

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Many of Berkeley’s commentators and biographers have also fostered this image of the project as idealistic and romantic and of Berkeley as blind to the ways of the world. In his 1776 biography, Joseph Stock presents the Bermuda Project as a utopian scheme, and A. C. Fraser continued in this vein in the late nineteenth century, calling the Bermuda Project ‘the romantic episode of Rhode Island, which warms the heart and affects the imagination more perhaps than any other incident . . . in Berkeley’s life’ (Fraser [1881]1912: 139). Even recent discussions of the Bermuda Project see it, for better or worse, as advancing a utopian vision in which Berkeley planned a romantic retreat where ‘old world decadence [would be exchanged] for the purity of a world reborn’5 (Fabricant 2003: 267). One exception to this reading is offered by A. A. Luce, who notes that Berkeley’s disciplined, philosophical mind was not likely to be overcome by romance in such a crucial matter (Luce 1949: 98–9). Anne Forster Berkeley provides another exception to this view in her remarks on Stock’s representation of the Bermuda Project. She defends her husband against the biographer’s claim that the plan was romantic and naive.6 While I agree with this aspect of both Luce’s and Anne Berkeley’s assessment of the project, a fuller understanding of the Bermuda plan demands that it be situated in two important contexts generally overlooked by commentators. First, the Bermuda school, as Berkeley conceived of it, was no more of a religious college than any other college in the American colonies at the time. Harvard and Yale, both Congregationalist, combined an academic education with training for the clergy, as Berkeley’s college would have done. Providing students with an education in both ‘divine and human Learning’ (Works vii: 356), as Berkeley proposed, was not uncommon. To regard the plan, then, solely as a Christian missionary enterprise – as most commentators do7 – is to miss what Berkeley thought was its unique aspect: providing Native Americans with a college education in the liberal arts and sciences. Berkeley believed such an education would make for a greatly improved civil society. His plan was not merely to Christianize the Natives, as scores of missionaries had tried to do before him, but to give them an education equal to that of any English or Irish gentleman. Second, though no detailed curriculum for the Bermuda College exists, it is reasonable to suppose that in receiving a liberal arts education, students would have learned history, mathematics, philosophy, music, art and languages. Berkeley may even have modelled the curriculum on the course of study that led to his own Master of Arts degree from Trinity College. His plan was to educate the ‘savage’ Americans in the Anglo-European intellectual life. That the Native Americans may already have had an intellectual life and history did not occur to

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Berkeley. On the contrary, he believed that the Natives had been living in a great ‘Darkness’ (Works vii: 359), that ‘their reason, like their fields, [was] quite uncultivated’8 (Stevens 2004: 44) and that enlightenment would come through the intellectual and moral development that St. Paul’s College in Bermuda would provide. If Berkeley believed that Christianity was the means through which the Natives’ souls could be saved, he also believed that a liberal arts education was the means through which their minds could be rescued and their earthly existence made purposeful. In focusing on the educational aims of the project rather than its Christian conversion mission, I divide this chapter into two sections: ‘Education, Commerce and the Public Good’ and ‘The Rhode Island Experience’. In the first section I consider the plan in relation to several other English educational projects of the early eighteenth century. I look to three of Berkeley’s early works and explain the contribution each made to the plan for the Bermuda Project. In the second section I shift attention to the actual conditions of colonists, Natives and slaves in Rhode Island and consider the limits of Berkeley’s project with respect to the different populations from which his students would be drawn. In a brief final section, I discuss the collapse of the project and offer a few reflections on what it would have taken for it to succeed.

Education, commerce and the public good Berkeley’s Bermuda Project was one among many educational schemes advanced by British intellectuals both at home and in the colonies. It emerged from a setting in which diverse conceptions of the public good and competing ideas of the role of commerce were articulated and debated. Three of Berkeley’s early works – The Ladies Library, Passive Obedience and An Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain – offer some insight into the positions he developed over several years on these matters, and thus, they provide a background for understanding what he believed the Bermuda Project might achieve. Though schemes to educate the ‘savage’ Americans were in full force by the early eighteenth century, many plans also existed aimed at educating even ‘civilized’ Europeans. The discussions in England focused on the sort of education that would be most useful for different classes and genders, insofar as it contributed to the public good. Berkeley was aware of many of these discussions, as he was the compiler and editor of a set of essays on women’s education

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published in 1714 as The Ladies Library.9 The collection contained extracts from more than a dozen works, including François Fénelon’s Instructions for the Education of a Daughter, Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies and John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Though little attention has been paid to Berkeley’s compilation, it serves to illuminate his thinking with respect to the Bermuda Project. The Ladies Library provided Berkeley with an opportunity to consider a spectrum of views regarding the benefits education could provide to its recipients, and it contributed to the formulation of his own position about the ends to which ‘savage’ Americans might be educated. Furthermore, one of the works he included in the collection – Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies – likely influenced some aspects of the Bermuda Proposal. The question of women’s education, like the question of ‘savage’ education, was much discussed in Berkeley’s day; he had a wide array of texts to choose from in compiling The Ladies Library. Some of these texts concerned women’s conduct while others concerned women’s intellectual development. This points to disputes at the time about the benefits education could provide to women and to society. The texts that focused on improving women’s minds were divided between those that argued that intellectual achievements would enable women to excel within their own sphere and make them ‘better Daughters, Wives, Mothers and Friends’ (Bond 1965, vol. 1: 404) and those that insisted on the contributions educated women would make to the society by transcending that sphere, for example, by becoming ‘general Scholars’10 (Bond 1965, vol. 1: 390). Thrown into the mix as well were claims that women were incapable of intellectual improvement. For example, in a letter written to the Athenian Oracle, the author, having read Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies, expresses disbelief that women’s minds could be improved: A little tract that I have lately read, very much encourages women to be studious, and contrary to the general opinion of most men, maintains, that they are capable of making as great improvement in it as we are. Now I must confess, I am so far from the author’s opinion, judging by that acquaintance I have had with the sex, that I believe it impossible [that women’s] natural impertinencies shou’d ever be converted into a solid reasoning. Perry 1986: 99–100

Though this position expressed a minority view, it was, nonetheless, a position to be taken seriously since it raised the question whether women were ‘naturally’ ignorant. This was an issue also raised with respect to the ‘savage’ Americans, and Berkeley confronted it in the Proposal, as we shall see in a moment.

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Richard Steele, who was the publisher of The Ladies Library and asked Berkeley to make the compilation,11 provided an argument for the view, noted above, that educating women would improve them within their own sphere. In an essay written for the Tatler some four years before the publication of The Ladies Library, Steele deplored the state of women’s education, whereby, he explained, some parents imagine their daughters will be accomplished enough, if nothing interrupts their growth, or their shape. According to this method of education . . . all the girls hear of . . . is that it is time to rise and to come to dinner, as if they were so insignificant as to be wholly provided for when they are fed and clothed. Bond 1987, vol. 3: 267

The result, he continued, is that ‘the female world [is] . . . condemned to a laziness, which makes life pass away with less relish than in the hardest labor’ (Bond 1987, vol. 3: 267). Steele’s main concern was to show that a proper education would enable women to be sensible wives and companions for reasonable men. With this end in mind he proposed a ‘Female Library’, which would include a collection of books that would ‘tend to advance the value of [women’s] innocence as virgins, improve their understanding as wives, and regulate their tenderness as parents’ (Bond 1987, vol. 3: 267). Steele argued – as did many others – that cultivating women’s minds would allow them to better satisfy their duties in relation to men, and that men, therefore, need not fear women’s intellectual improvement.12 A year after the Tatler essay, Steele again picked up the topic of a ‘Female Library’ in the Spectator, printing letters by women hungry for opportunities for intellectual discourse. Several women wrote asking for ‘the Catalogue of Books which you have promised to recommend to our Sex’ (Bond 1965, vol. 1: 389), explaining that ‘if a fervent Desire after Knowledge, and a great Sense of our present Ignorance may be thought a good presage and earnest of Improvement, you may look upon your Time you shall bestow in answering this Request not thrown away to no purpose’ (Bond 1965, vol. 2: 55). Selections from several works suggested by Steele or Joseph Addison and by various male and female readers of the Spectator made their way to The Ladies Library, indicating that Berkeley read with some care the Spectator issues that addressed the subject of a ‘Female Library’.13 While Steele’s approach to women’s education was fairly conservative, Mary Astell – whose work Berkeley included in the compilation though it was not recommended in the Spectator14 – offered a more radical proposal. She argued in Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part I that education ought to aim at providing

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women the opportunity to transcend the sphere to which custom had assigned them. In Serious Proposal, Part II, she provided a how-to manual for women to educate themselves in logic, philosophy and religion.15 Berkeley included a long excerpt from Astell’s work in The Ladies Library and also wrote a short paragraph introducing the selection, which he entitled ‘Ignorance’. In this opening paragraph, Berkeley asserts that custom, not nature, keeps women from intellectual achievements. He writes: There wou’d be no End of it, if we shou’d go about to give Instances of the great Improvements Women have made of Education, there being hardly any Science in which they have not excell’d. ’Tis very plain therefore, that Nature has given them as good Talents as Men have, and if they are still called the weaker Sex, ’tis because the other, which assumes the Name of the wiser, hinders them [from] improving their Minds in useful Knowledge, by accustoming them to the Study and Practice of Vanity and Trifles.16 Berkeley 1714: 438

The view that ignorance is not a natural failing but an imposition made through neglect became an important part of the position Berkeley advanced in the Bermuda Proposal with respect to the ‘savage’ Americans. While the ignorance of the ‘savages’ did not ‘condemn [them] to laziness’ or ‘accustom [them] to vanity and trifles’, as Steele and Berkeley had claimed was the case with women, Berkeley insisted, nonetheless, that the ‘Darkness’ in which they had been languishing was very much the result of societal neglect and that St. Paul’s College would ‘rescue [them] from their savage Manners to a Life of Civility’ (Works vii: 348). It would turn ‘savage’ Americans into ‘Indian Scholars’ (Works vii: 360). Astell’s work appears to have influenced Berkeley’s Bermuda Proposal in two important ways. First, in diagnosing the problem of women’s ignorance in Serious Proposal, Astell argued that if (English) men were as neglected as (English) women had been with respect to their intellectual and moral development, and if ‘as little care [had been] taken to cultivate and improve them’, one could expect that ‘they themselves wou’d sink into the greatest stupidity and brutality’ (Astell [1694, 1697] 2002: 57). Her point – that intellectual and moral improvement required cultivation – made a strong impression on Berkeley. In the Bermuda Proposal, he rejected the view that the ‘savages’ suffered from ‘a natural Stupidity’ (Works vii: 356) by providing three responses to the objection that their ignorance could not be overcome by education. First, he argued that a general incapacity ought not be drawn from the fact that some Natives appear unable to make improvement. Second, he claimed that his plan

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was quite different from previous schemes in that ‘a thorough Education in Religion and Morality, in divine and human Learning, doth not appear to have been ever given to any savage American’ (Works vii: 356). Third, he conceded that if some Natives were ‘found less likely to improve by academical Studies, [they] may be taught Agriculture, or the most necessary Trades’ (Works vii: 357). A second influence from Astell emerges in Berkeley’s conception of his college as providing a retreat where students would receive appropriate training and return to the world as missionaries and educators. Astell had proposed her women’s college as a refuge from the negative influences of wealth and luxury, explaining that it would be ‘not only a Retreat from the World . . . but likewise, an institution . . . to fit [women] to do the greatest good in it’ (Astell [1694, 1697] 2002: 73). This college, she continued, ‘shall not so cut [women] off from the world as to hinder [them] from bettering and improving it, but rather qualify [them] to do it the greatest Good, and be a Seminary to stock the Kingdom with pious and prudent Ladies; whose good Example . . . will so influence the rest of their Sex’ (Astell [1694, 1697] 2002: 76). Berkeley expressed similar aims in the Bermuda Proposal: He chose Bermuda as the site for the college because he believed it to be relatively free from commercial and other worldly concerns. Young students ‘would be there less liable to be corrupted in their Morals’, while the faculty and administrators, he claimed ‘would be . . . better contented with a small Stipend, and a retired academical Life, in a Corner from whence Avarice and Luxury are excluded, than they can be supposed to be in the midst of a full Trade and great Riches, attended with all that high Living and Parade which our Planters affect’ (Works vii: 353). Furthermore, like Astell, Berkeley did not intend for his students to remain in retreat; they would return to the world to serve as models and teachers for others like themselves. Just as Astell’s women would ‘influence the rest of their Sex’, so too would Berkeley’s ‘young American savages’ become ‘the fittest missionaries for spreading religion, morality, and civil life, among their countrymen’ (Works viii: 127, my emphasis). To sum up, Berkeley’s work on The Ladies Library identifies an important motivation he developed for the Bermuda Project. Given his familiarity with Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies, with Steele’s proposal for a ‘Female Library’ and with the pleas of female letter writers to the Spectator seeking release from their ‘Ignorance’ and admission into the intellectual life, it would not have been a great leap for Berkeley to conclude that others who had been consigned to an even greater‘Darkness’ – like the‘savage’Americans – were eager for enlightenment as well.

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Though virtually all eighteenth-century educational reformers believed that the primary aim of their missions was the enhancement of the public good, there was no single, unified view of what the public good consisted in. Berkeley’s sermons on Passive Obedience (1712) help to shed light on his conception of the public good and the ways he believed individuals might best bring it about. Although one of the main themes of the work concerns justifying passive obedience to political authority, two arguments from Passive Obedience are particularly relevant to understanding the Bermuda Project. First, Berkeley claimed, one ought not be guided by one’s passions in advancing schemes for the public good. Although he recognized that ‘[t]enderness and benevolence of temper are often motives to the best and greatest actions’, he cautioned against making them ‘the sole rule of our actions’ (PO §13). Actions aimed at promoting the public good must be grounded in reason. Second, he argued that no person ought set himself up as an authority on what the public good consists in: ‘the great end of morality can never be carried on by leaving each particular person to promote the public good in such a manner as he shall think most convenient’ (PO §27). We must not, Berkeley claimed, ‘leave everyone to be guided by his own judgment’ (PO §27). Berkeley saw a connection between the moral good and the public good, between moral duties and social duties. In Passive Obedience, he argued against the idea that an action promotes a moral good merely because it advances the public good. On the contrary, he explained, actions express a moral good insofar as they instantiate a moral law, and these laws were designed by God to ensure the common good of society.17 Therefore, Berkeley reasoned, those who advance projects for the public good must be guided not by their passions or by their own judgment, but by ‘certain determinate universal rules’ (PO §27) since these ‘established laws . . . if universally practiced, have, from the nature of things, an essential fitness to procure the well-being of mankind’ (PO §8). Berkeley recognized, of course, that many activities might enhance the public good, but he insisted that if they were not grounded in moral law, they would be subject to the whims of successive innovators, all of whom would attempt to promote the good in a way that each thought ‘most convenient’. With respect to the Bermuda Project, two consequences follow from these positions. First, Berkeley did not see himself as an innovator, as someone ‘guided by his own judgment’ (PO §27). Though the project was unusual compared with other eighteenth-century educational missions in the colonies, Berkeley saw it as advancing the public good precisely because it was grounded in moral law. Educating the ‘savage’ Americans by cultivating their reason and virtue was dictated by moral imperatives connected to the fulfilment of human potential. If

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the ‘savages’ were human beings, and Berkeley believed they were, then, he argued, they must be liberated from the ‘Darkness’ in which they had been living, and their ‘cruel brutal Manners’ improved. Doing so was a matter not only of saving their souls but also of ‘procur[ing] a great and lasting Benefit to the World’18 (Works vii: 359). A second important point to keep in mind is that the Bermuda Project was not grounded in the values of political liberalism. It was not offered as a means of expanding the rights of citizens or of subjects who were not citizens.19 Indeed, Passive Obedience was directed, in part, against Locke’s conception of individuals, which served to ground his theory of limited obedience to government.20 This is not to say that Berkeley wished to withhold political rights from Native Americans. Rather, the point is that his project for educating them was not driven by ideals of political equality. Berkeley’s plan was to provide an education that would ‘instill’ (Works vii: 348) into the minds of colonists and Natives moral laws, thus enabling them to create together a civil society that instantiated these laws and that would, consequently, place the common good above private interest. The young Americans, both Native and transplanted, were to be educated to the end of developing ‘public spirited principles and inclinations’ (Works viii: 127), not to the end of asserting themselves as political agents. I shall return to Passive Obedience in the next section, where I consider Berkeley’s experience with slavery in Rhode Island. Here, I continue examining Berkeley’s view of the link between education and the public good by comparing the aims of the Bermuda Project with a different educational endeavor underway in the 1720s: Thomas Coram’s proposal to create a foundling hospital in London. By the early 1720s, Thomas Bray and the SPCK had helped to found approximately one hundred charity schools in and around London.21 The purpose of these schools was to remove poor, begging children from the streets by providing them with the education, skills and training that would prepare them to enter the labor force. Yet despite the relative success of the charity schools, vast numbers of abandoned children were still living – and dying – on the streets of London. These were not merely the poor, but also the children of unmarried women, who out of poverty, desperation and ignorance ‘had no alternative, save infanticide, [but to] abandon . . . the[ir] child[ren] in a public place with the desperate hope that some compassionate person would rescue [them]’ (McClure 1981: 14). Coram witnessed scores of dying children on his daily walk to London’s center and decided in the spring of 1722 – the same time as Berkeley’s letter to Percival announcing his Bermuda plan – that something needed to be done (McClure 1981: 19).

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Coram’s plan, which succeeded after seventeen years (though not with government funding), was to turn illegitimate and unwanted children into contributing members of society. The Foundling Institute would accept children no older than two months and would send them to the countryside to be nursed and raised until they were three or four years old. When the children were returned to the Institute, they would learn to read though not to write; at the appropriate time, the boys would be apprenticed to husbandry or to the sea service and the girls would be indentured as domestics (McClure 1981: 47). Thomas Bray – who, as noted above, censured Berkeley’s Bermuda Project, claiming that a ‘Charity School . . . taught . . . by old women’ would suffice for the education of ‘savages’ – wrote a pamphlet in support of Coram’s plan citing in its favor both Christian duty and more material considerations. Through Coram’s charitable school, Bray wrote, the children would be ‘rendered useful and fit for Services, and Apprenticeships to the meanest Trades, instead of being innured to Beggary, Pilfering, and Stealing’ (McClure 1981: 35). Viewed from one perspective, Coram’s proposal (and Bray’s support of it) was a noble undertaking. Educating abandoned children to become seamen or domestics was surely preferable to having them die on the streets from starvation. Further, this rescue mission would provide a public benefit: by entering the labor force the children would be able to support themselves. From another perspective, however, the project betrayed the assumption that poor or illegitimate children were not fit for higher ends. The purpose of Coram’s Institute was not to educate these children in trades that would put them in competition with the children of the burgeoning middle class,22 and it certainly was not to provide them with an education aimed at cultivating their minds. The goal was to make them serviceable within the growing commercial economy. The improvement of these children, and consequently, the improvement of society would come by having the children fulfil their duties within the social and economic spheres to which they had been assigned. In Coram’s and in many other plans for improving the lives of the impoverished, commerce was seen as the panacea to social ills. It was the means through which the poor could survive, the rich could remain rich, and the public good could best be served. Berkeley’s Bermuda Proposal presented an unambiguous alternative to this kind of educational mission. First, it insisted that the path to improved human life was not through commerce, but through intellectual, moral and spiritual development; second, it rejected the view that the aim of education was to enable those receiving it to serve the interests of others. Although Berkeley’s plan proposed instilling moral laws into the minds of Natives and colonists, it did

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express an important element of equality: the ‘savages’ were to be educated not to satisfy the needs of colonists, but to create with them – albeit, in what might be considered ‘separate but equal’ fashion – a social order in which all would flourish, at least in terms of their moral, intellectual and spiritual lives. Berkeley was not, of course, opposed to commerce, manufacture or trade. He was, however, suspicious of the idea that commerce alone could improve human life. Commerce could contribute to the public good, he argued in An Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721), but only insofar as it was nourished by – and in turn nourished – moral, spiritual, intellectual and even aesthetic aims. In the Essay, Berkeley’s focus was not on the relation between the public good and the moral good, but on what he perceived as the lack of concern for the public good by officials and wealthy citizens whose interests were limited to their own private ends. The collapse of the South Sea Company’s shares in 1720, in which many fortunes were both made and lost, made clear to Berkeley that an economic system in which the benefits of some are inextricably tied to the losses of others is problematic: it encourages and rewards self-interest and discourages and punishes public spiritedness. He feared that the nation’s wealth was becoming nothing but ‘an instrument to luxury’ (Works vi: 75). In repudiating the growing emphasis on private gain at the expense of the public good, Berkeley understood that his view was thought to be extremely naive: I am well aware that to talk of public spirit, and the means of retrieving it, must, to narrow sordid minds, be matter of jest and ridicule . . . though one would think the most selfish men might see it was their interest to encourage a spirit in others by which they, to be sure, must be gainers. Yet such is the corruption and folly of the present age that a public spirit is treated like ignorance of the world and want of sense; and all the respect is paid to cunning men, who bend and wrest the public interest to their own private ends. Works vi: 82

Despite the perception that his views were unsophisticated, Berkeley persisted. Three years after publishing An Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain, his views on education, commerce and the public good came together in the Bermuda Proposal. Berkeley’s motivations for the project were complex. As we have seen, they were humanistic, aimed at improving the moral, intellectual and spiritual lives of settlers and Native Americans; they were public spirited, aimed at enhancing the public good; they were also missionary, aimed at spreading Christianity in new lands; and they were Protestant, aimed at halting the progress in America of

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‘Popery’ made by the French and the Spanish (Works vii: 354–55). In choosing Bermuda as the location for the college, Berkeley did envision a refuge for both teachers and students from a world filled with excess. This suggests that he regarded a physical retreat from the (supposed) decadence of Anglo-European life as essential to the plan, lending support to the view advanced by many commentators that his project was romantic, even utopian. But, as noted in the discussion above of Astell’s Serious Proposal, although Berkeley’s students were to retreat from the ordinary world, the aim was to have them re-join it. The goal of the Bermuda Project was not to create a new and perfect community disconnected from all others. The goal was to transform the existing community of English settlers and Native Americans to ‘public Spirit and Virtue’ (Works vii: 348). A retreat from a world too much given to luxury and vice was the means through which students would receive the proper training. But a utopian community existing in isolation from the rest of the world was not the aim of the Bermuda Project. These comparisons of Berkeley’s Bermuda scheme with other English educational proposals regarding middle-class women, the poor and the abandoned show it to be neither romantic nor naive. The plan was driven by legitimate concerns over the powerful role of commerce; it was grounded in communitarian values; and it expressed a commitment to (non-political) equality between colonists and Native Americans. Whether these concerns and commitments would make sense to the proposed recipients of Berkeley’s plan is the question to which I now turn.

The Rhode Island experience Berkeley wrote to his friend Percival within a week of his arrival in Newport, informing him that ‘(were it in my power) I should not demur one moment about situating our College here’ (Works viii: 190). What did Berkeley find in Rhode Island that brought about this potential change of plan? By the early 1720s, Newport had experienced a housing boom, with residences, warehouses and shops multiplying on the main streets (Bridenbaugh 1955: 310, 390). Among some of the colonists, Berkeley found an emphasis on commercial growth that rewarded private gain and undervalued public spiritedness, prompting him to write to Percival, ‘there is a more probable prospect of doing good here than in any other part of the world’ (Works viii: 190). *

*

*

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When he gave the anniversary sermon in 1732 to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel shortly after returning to England, Berkeley made clear just how much of a ‘Want of spiritual Things’ (Works, vii, p. 359) there was in the Rhode Island colony. ‘Men of Fashion’ were more concerned with their dress than with ‘virtuous and religious’ matters (Works vii: 123). Many of the colonists, he reported, ‘seem[ed] to rival some well-bred People of other countries, in a thorough Indifference for all that is sacred’ (Works vii: 121). Newport was not, of course, completely without those who were as optimistic as Berkeley was about the peaceful assimilation of Native Americans into European intellectual culture. There were some enthusiastic supporters of the project, including the governor, Joseph Jenckes and the attorney general, Daniel Updike, who would gladly have seen it actualized in what was known as the Narragansett country.23 But among many of the town’s traders and merchants and the country’s farmers and plantation owners, there was some resistance to Berkeley’s plan. These ‘frontier’ colonists had long been at odds with ‘metropolitan’ Englishmen, who perceived them as ‘land-hungry’ opportunists, determined to win control of the land from the Native populations (Oberg 1999: 7). These colonists were resentful of attempts to have English standards of civility imposed upon them. Furthermore, long-standing religious factionalism in Newport was responsible for zealousness and bigotry on the one hand and indifference and hostility toward religion on the other (Skemp 1978: 59–61). ‘[T]oo many of [the colonists],’ Berkeley reported in his 1732 SPG sermon, ‘have worn off a serious Sense of all Religion’ (Works vii: 121). In a town where ‘Sunday was treated by many as an ordinary working day’ (Skemp 1978: 61), Berkeley feared that material interests had filled the void created by these sectarian disputes. Given their drive for material wealth, their resentment of the ‘metropolitan’ English, and their internal sectarian quarrels, it is likely that many colonists would have rejected Berkeley’s view that the public good was in jeopardy and that educating their sons in the liberal arts and sciences alongside the ‘savages’ would restore it. In short, Berkeley found among the colonists what he had found at home: both support and disdain for his project. With respect to the Native population Berkeley had much to learn. His belief that the ‘savage’ Americans had been languishing in the ‘Darkness’ of ignorance was false in several respects. First, during the eighty years before Berkeley’s arrival in Newport, Protestant educational reformers had been at work teaching the Natives to read and write in English (and, to some extent, in their own languages). Second, the Native Americans had a vibrant intellectual, creative and civic life, even if one hundred years with British colonizers had done much to undermine it.

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I consider first the influence of missionary work on the Natives during the fifty to eighty years prior to Berkeley’s arrival. In southern New England, basic education had been provided to many Native children between the 1640s and the 1680s (Szasz 1988: 112). Many colonists and Natives were bilingual speakers, and a translation of the Bible from English into the Massachusett language (a dialect of the Algonquian People) was published in 1663. This Indian Bible was the result of a joint effort between John Eliot, a New England missionary, and several Native translators. Prior to the publication of the Eliot Bible, no written form of the Massachusett language existed (Wyss 2000: 1). During this period, missionary Protestants made great strides introducing English language literacy to portions of the Native population. Though most of this education was directed toward Christian conversion – missionaries believed that since God’s truths were contained in the Bible, literacy was the means through which God could be understood – some of it focused on more secular learning (Wyss 2000: 9). Some forty Native students received a grammar school education in Boston or surrounding cities between 1656 and 1672, an education that prepared them for admission to Harvard College. And a handful of Algonquians even attended (Szasz 1988: 126). Such opportunities were short-lived though. By 1680, the Boston area grammar schools no longer admitted Natives (Szasz 1988: 127), and by the time of Berkeley’s arrival in Rhode Island, there existed very few conduits for preparing Native students to enter St. Paul’s College. When Berkeley arrived in Newport, the Native Americans had been living with English colonizers for more than one hundred years, and they were capable of assessing the advantages and disadvantages Christian conversion and literacy had brought them. Experience Mayhew, an educational reformer and missionary from Boston, reported in his diary as early as 1714 – the same year as the publication in England of The Ladies Library – the rebukes of the Native sachems or political leaders with respect to the religious conversion mission. Ninigret II , a Narragansett leader, noted, for example, the lack of moral integrity on the part of some colonists, demanding of Mayhew ‘that he make the English good in the first place, for . . . many of them were still bad’ (Szasz 1988: 182). He also pointed to the many sectarian disputes in Christianity, something Berkeley found troubling as well,24 claiming that this factionalism made it difficult for ‘ye Indians [to] tell what religion to be of, if they had a mind to be Christians’ (Szasz 1988: 182). Mayhew also reported that Mohegan leaders rejected the moral claims of Christianity, arguing that ‘men were [n]ever the better for being Christians, for the English that were Christians would cheat the Indians of their land and otherwise wrong them’25 (Szasz 1988: 182). Other Native leaders questioned the

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coherence of Christianity. If the Christian God was omni-benevolent and if Christ had died for the salvation of all, then it was difficult to understand how ‘all the world of Indians are gone to hell to be tormented for ever, until now a few may goe to Heaven and be saved’ (Stevens 2004: 122). As for literacy, which signalled for Berkeley the means to the Anglo-European intellectual life, this too, was viewed by the Natives with a sceptical eye. Some sachems claimed that literacy made the English more wicked, since ‘their knowledge of books made them the more Cunning to Cheat others & so did more hurt than good’ (Szasz 1988: 182). Much more important, though, was the fact that the literacy brought by British educational reformers, including Berkeley, entailed a profound shift in Native cultural practices.26 Because written forms of Native languages either did not exist or were just being created, literacy training was not simply a matter of learning to read and write in a second language, akin to an English child learning French. It was a matter of learning an entirely different way to record, transmit, and understand a culture’s historical achievements. Learning to read and write in English was intimidating enough given its connection to Christian conversion and the consequent abandonment of traditional spirituality (Wyss 2000: 58). But insisting on the importance of literacy, even in the Natives’ own languages, pointed to the belief held by most educational reformers that the ‘savage’ Americans simply lacked a culture worthy of recognition. Experience Mayhew made this point in Indian Converts: ‘The Indians of whom I am to speak . . . must be considered as a People in a great measure destitute of those advantages of Literature, which the English and many other Nations enjoy. They have at present no scholars among them . . . [N]othing may at present be expected of them27 (Wyss 2000: 63–4). Mayhew’s claim makes clear that the oral-based culture of Native Americans was dismissed both by missionaries who saw it as inadequate for a true understanding of Christianity (Wyss 2000: 8) and by educational reformers who failed to acknowledge in oral traditions a storehouse of genuine intellectual, creative, aesthetic, political and social life. In the absence of institutions in which Europeans expected to find cultural riches – universities, libraries, seminaries, monasteries and convents – most educational reformers concluded that the Native Americans simply lacked a sophisticated cultural life. For the Native Americans, however, knowledge relating to religion, agriculture, family ties, political relations, etc., was preserved in oral storytelling and oratory, not in treatises. The performative aspect of their oral/aural culture, one in which ideational contents – that is, ‘words’ – were enacted rather than written was the means through which their ‘texts’ were recorded, remembered and revised (Irwin

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2002: 104). It was through ‘communities of memory’ that Native societies ‘conserve[d] tradition while possessing the creative capacity to reinterpret tradition and practices’ (Moses 2002: 195). Even wampum beads, which the Narragansett Indians cut and shaped from shells along the coast of New England beaches, were understood by the British to be merely trinkets or baubles to be used as a means of trade. But for the Narragansetts, wampum beads woven into belts were also ‘words’ used to record agreements, express peace or condolence, and to record their history (Kidwell 2002: 89; Salisbury 1996: 404). Stories, performances and rituals were not much appreciated by colonizers as legitimate ways to transmit knowledge; furthermore, the Natives were viewed as unsophisticated in their understanding of the natural world. Because they viewed both themselves and natural forces as wilful agents, Natives looked to dreams, ceremonies and visions as providing the means to understand their interactions with the world (Kidwell 2002: 88–9). They conceived of humans as one among many spiritual or wilful agents in the universe, and this ‘broad understanding of the relatedness of animals, plants, and landscapes’ (Miller, 2002: 139) made their social, political and intellectual practices quite inscrutable to colonizers and educational reformers. Given their stated reasons for resisting conversion to Christianity as well as the richness of their own cultural life, it is reasonable to think that many Native Americans would have resisted Berkeley’s educational enterprise, not because they were so blinded by the ‘Darkness’ of ignorance that they foolishly wished to remain in it, but because they did not believe themselves to be in the darkness at all. In failing to recognize the cultural life of the ‘savage’ Americans, Berkeley’s Proposal never considered that their social practices and political structures may have already evinced ‘public spirited principles and inclinations’ (Works viii: 127). In fact, Berkeley saw very little of the Native Americans while he was in Rhode Island, and what he did see likely confirmed his commitment to building St. Paul’s College. He visited James MacSparran, a missionary of the SPG serving as rector of St. Paul’s church near Newport in the Narragansett country, with the aim of ‘examin[ing] the condition and character of the Indians’ (Lapan n.d.: 14; Fabricant 2003: 274) and in his report on America presented in the 1732 SPG sermon, he indicated that he found them much reduced in number, body, mind and spirit: The native Indians, who are said to have been formerly many Thousands . . . do not at present amount to one Thousand, including every Age and Sex. And these

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are either all Servants or Labourers for the English, who have contributed more to destroy their Bodies by the Use of strong Liquors, than by any means to improve their Minds or save their Souls. Works vii: 121

Wars, enslavement and diseases had taken their toll on the New England Native population.28 Seeing the extent to which the Natives’ lives, minds and morals had been not merely neglected but positively harmed indicated to Berkeley how much there was to be done. This, too, may explain his comment to Percival that ‘there is a more probable prospect of doing good here than in any other part of the world’ (Works viii: 190). That Berkeley still understood himself to be on a rescue mission seems clear. But it was the colonists from whom the Natives needed release. In Newport, Berkeley became familiar with slavery and perhaps even with the slave trade, as Rhode Island in the early 1730s was carving out a place for itself as a supplier of slaves to the rest of the colonies (Coughtry 1981). Though Berkeley included the ‘Negroes of our Plantations’29 (Works vii: 346) in the second and third editions of the Bermuda Proposal,30 his concern was limited to Christian conversion; slaves would not attend St. Paul’s College. His main worry was that Christian baptism had been withheld by colonists who believed (incorrectly) that baptism bestowed freedom. In the Proposal, Berkeley blamed incompetent clergy in the colonies for the ‘small Care that hath been taken to convert the Negroes of our Plantations, who, to the Infamy of England, and the Scandal of the World, continue Heathen under Christian Masters, and in Christian Countries’ (Works vii: 346). While he was in Newport, Berkeley worked to convince planters and other settlers that baptizing slaves did not liberate them. In the 1732 SPG sermon he delivered in England, Berkeley reported that the obstacles to the conversion of ‘these poor People’ were twofold: first, an ‘irrational’ belief on the part of early colonists that Blacks were ‘Creatures of another Species, who had no Right to be instructed or admitted to the Sacraments’; and second, an ‘erroneous’ belief that ‘being baptized is inconsistent with a State of Slavery’ (Works vii: 122). With respect to the latter, Berkeley explained to his SPG audience that ‘the Opinion of his Majesty’s Attorney and Solicitor-General’ was sought in order to ‘undeceive [colonists] in this Particular’ (Works vii: 122). This opinion, issued in 1729 by Attorney General Philip Yorke and Solicitor General Charles Talbot, asserted that ‘[b]aptism doth not bestow Freedom on [a slave] nor make any alteration in his temporal Condition in these Kingdoms’ (Glasson 2010: 279). Recent scholarship suggests that the Yorke-Talbot opinion

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had been solicited not by slave owners and traders taking a proslavery stance – as had long been assumed – but by Berkeley and other Anglican churchmen in America who were trying to facilitate the baptism of slaves (Glasson 2010: 297– 304; Gaustad 1979: 91). Berkeley’s mentioning the opinion in the SPG sermon supports this position. Although it is generally recognized that the Anglican aim was not grounded in a proslavery position; historians of the period note nonetheless that by the middle of the eighteenth century, the Yorke-Talbot opinion had become ‘the most assertively and clearly proslavery interpretation of English law’ (Glasson 2010: 292). While he was in Rhode Island, Berkeley owned three slaves – Philip, Anthony and Agnes – and he baptized them in June 1731 (Gaustad 1979: 94). Berkeley’s interest in slaves lay in converting them, not in welcoming them to St. Paul’s College and the intellectual life. In arguing in the Proposal that ‘Slaves would only become better Slaves by being Christians’ (Works vii: 346), Berkeley was trying to ease the fears of slaveholders who worried that admitting enslaved people into the Christian life would make them independent and thus keep them from satisfying their masters’ needs. His argument mirrors the position Steele had advanced in the Tatler essay, in which he assured his fearful readers that cultivating women’s minds would not keep them from satisfying men’s needs, that women would not ‘go out of character in their enquiries, but their knowledge appear only a cultivated innocence’ (Bond 1987, vol. 3: 268). Furthermore, Berkeley’s position with respect to converting slaves echoes the more conservative approaches to education taken by reformers like Bray and Coram, who saw education as providing a means for its beneficiaries to serve its benefactors. In the case of converting slaves, Berkeley reasoned that baptizing them and admitting them into the Christian community would enable them to better perform their duties in relation to masters (Works vii: 346). With respect to Native Americans the Bermuda plan was more radical. Natives were to be educated not to satisfy the needs and interests of the English, but to create with the English a better (European) civil society. Some commentators have confronted Berkeley’s acceptance of slavery by connecting it to his arguments in Passive Obedience. For example, Travis Glasson – who treats Berkeley’s conception of passive obedience as roughly equivalent to blind obedience – argues that Berkeley’s endorsement of passive obedience allowed him to think of the enslaved as ‘compliant sufferers’ who would be rewarded by God in the next life31 (Glasson 2010: 306–7). I suggest instead that the connection between Passive Obedience and Berkeley’s acceptance of slavery may be better explained by noting that he rejected a certain conception of selves

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or individuals, rather than that he regarded earthly bondage as a small price to pay for eternal salvation. To make this point clear, let’s return to the arguments in Passive Obedience that were directed against Locke’s claims for political rebellion in The Second Treatise of Government. It is not that Berkeley accepted Locke’s conception of political individuals but thought some individuals (for example, slaves) did not deserve rights. On the contrary, Berkeley rejected altogether Locke’s conception of individuals as the locus of political rights. In Passive Obedience, he repudiated completely the language of self-preservation so essential to Locke’s conception of political individuals, who are ‘obliged by nature . . . to resist the cruel attempts of tyrants’ (PO §33). Arguing against Locke’s view that ‘the law of self-preservation is prior to all other engagements, being the very first and fundamental law of nature’ (PO §33), Berkeley insisted that ‘there is no particular law which obliges any man to prefer his own temporal good, not even life itself, to that of another man, much less to the observation of any one moral duty’ (PO §34). Berkeley simply rejected the conception of a subject as a political individual that could serve to ground arguments for civil liberation.32 Therefore, if Passive Obedience helps shed light on Berkeley’s acceptance of slavery, it does so by showing that he understood a self or individual to be the locus of moral law, not the grounding of political agency. In baptizing slaves and admitting them into the Christian world, the sufficient means to act in accordance with moral law and to preserve themselves against evil would have been available.33 This consideration of Berkeley’s Bermuda Project from the perspective of its intended beneficiaries indicates that the plan failed to confront the needs and desires of each. This is not to say that Bray was correct in his view that ‘the Mechanicks’ would be more useful to ‘savages’ than the liberal arts and sciences. Rather, the point is that the issues and concerns that motivated the project did not correspond to the concrete conditions faced by colonists, Natives and slaves in America.

The collapse of the Bermuda Project During the nearly three years that he stayed in Rhode Island, Berkeley remained committed to carrying out his plan for a college for Natives and colonists. The English Treasury, however, did not. Even before he sailed for Newport in the autumn of 1728, Berkeley was beginning to fear that interest in his project was waning. By the summer of 1730, it was clear that the scheme was losing support

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in England and probably would not be funded. He wrote to Percival: ‘I wait here with all the anxiety that attends suspense till I know what I can depend upon or what course I am to take’ (Works viii: 205). Percival and other friends indicated that Berkeley’s choice of Bermuda was thought by political leaders to be the main stumbling block. William Byrd, a wealthy Virginia planter and politician, wrote to Percival that Berkeley’s plan was ‘no better than a religious frenzy’, claiming that it was a ‘wild undertaking to build a college in a country where there is no bread, nor anything fit for the sustenance of man, but onions and cabbage’ (Rand 1914: 244). Berkeley was willing to change locations and informed his SPCK associate Henry Newman that he had written ‘some friends in England to take the proper steps for procuring a translation of the College from Bermuda to Rhode Island’ (Rand 1914: 252). Becoming fearful, however, that this change might undermine support for the project, he soon asked Newman and Percival to inform those who mattered that he remained resolved to set sail for Bermuda as soon as the money was paid (Works viii: 206). But in the spring of 1731, Berkeley wrote to Percival: ‘I have received such accounts on all hands both from England and Ireland that I now give up all hopes of executing the design which brought me into these parts. I am fairly given to understand that the money will never be paid’ (Works viii: 212). Expressing regret over what he perceived to be the persistence of fear around Berkeley’s project, Percival wrote to his friend: I do not wonder the disappointment you so long have met with in the settlement of your College . . . should sensibly affect you; but the design seems too great and good to be accomplished in an age when men love darkness better than the light, and nothing is considered but with a political view. A very great Lord asked me whether I thought the Indians would not be saved as well as we . . . and if I considered that learning tended to make the Plantations independent of their Mother Country . . . adding that the ignorance of the Indians, and the variety of sects in our Plantations was England’s security. He was even sorry that we had an University in Dublin. And yet [this] Lord is the ornament of the nobility for learning and sobriety. Rand 1914: 269

Percival shared with Berkeley the view that the Bermuda Proposal was grounded in a beneficent concern for both the Native Americans and the colonists and that it was undone by politicking, fear and free thinking.34 There can be no doubt that Berkeley’s aims and intentions in the Bermuda Project were noble. He meant to provide Native Americans with something he believed to be

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of great value: entry into the Anglo-European intellectual life. Compared with the other educational proposals of his day – Bray’s ‘Charity School’ for ‘savages’, Coram’s Institute for abandoned children and even a ‘Female Library’ as Steele had conceived of it – Berkeley’s Proposal displayed important principles of equality. The aim of educating ‘savages’ was not to enable them to better satisfy the needs of others, but to stand on equal footing with the English colonists in creating an improved civil society. Furthermore, in rejecting the view that ‘riches alone are sufficient to make a nation flourishing and happy’ (Works iii: 80), Berkeley believed – contrary to many of his British contemporaries – that a society was improved not merely through commercial development but through intellectual and moral progress. Still, Berkeley’s notion of equality was surely marred by one-sidedness. He was and remained unaware of the rich and abundant cultural life of Native Americans and therefore insisted that the means to the Natives’ and colonists’ intellectual and moral improvement would come solely from European ideals. Furthermore, he rejected the worry that education might bring with it independence for colonists and ‘savages’ not by arguing that intellectual independence would, in fact, be a good thing, but by assuming that the moral laws ‘instilled’ into his students’ minds would necessarily create a well-functioning social order. Had the Bermuda Project been funded, Berkeley would have had to face two gravely serious matters: first, that the Natives were not blank slates awaiting European enlightenment; second, that slavery, though not inconsistent with Christian baptism, was inconsistent with human well-being. In Passive Obedience, Berkeley wrote: ‘It is not . . . the private good of this or that man, nation, or age, but the general well-being of all men, of all nations, of all ages of the world, which . . . should be procured by the concurring actions of each individual’ (PO §7). For the Bermuda Project to live up to this standard would have required not only deep reflection on Berkeley’s part and substantially more time in the colonies, but also a history of Native American, African, and English relations – prior to Berkeley’s arrival in Newport – vastly different from what, in fact, it actually was.35

Notes 1 Berkeley explained his reason for travelling first to Rhode Island rather than directly to Bermuda in a letter to Edmund Gibson just before setting sail for Newport:

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The Bloomsbury Companion to Berkeley ‘Rhode Island . . . is a place abounding in provisions where I design to purchase a piece of land . . . in order to supply our college with such necessaries as are not the product of Bermuda, which will in good measure remove one principal objection to the success of our design’ (Berman, D., 2005b, Berkeley and Irish Philosophy. London: Continuum: 211–12). I am grateful to Bertil Belfrage for informing me of David Berman’s discovery of this letter. Another reason Berkeley may have had for settling first in Newport is suggested by the postscript to the Bermuda Proposal. It notes that the terms of the patent required him to give up his Deanery in Derry one and a half years after his arrival in Bermuda. Thus, Berkeley could wait in Newport for the promised funding while making the necessary preparations for the College without risking the loss of his Deanery before the plan came to fruition (Works vii: 360). Harvard and Yale, however, had no affiliation with the Church of England. They were dissenting institutions founded by Congregationalists. Given the slight Anglican presence in the colonies, some commentators suggest that one of Berkeley’s aims was to gain a stronger foothold for Anglicanism. See Gaustad, E. S. (1979), George Berkeley in America. New Haven: Yale University Press: 6–9. Gaustad (1979: 172) notes that Berkeley was an early critic of mercantilism. There was also concern that Protestant Christianity keep up with (and surpass) the Catholic conversions by the Spanish and the French. See Works vii: 354, and Stevens, L. M. (2004), The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press: 5–6, 48. For additional recent work on the utopian theme, see Bradatan, C. (2006), The Other Bishop Berkeley: An Exercise in Reenchantment. New York: Fordham University Press: chapter 6; Berman, D. (1994), George Berkeley: Idealism and the Man. Oxford: Clarendon Press: chapter 5; and Breuninger, S. (2010b), ‘Planting an asylum for religion: Berkeley’s Bermuda scheme and the transmission of virtue in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world’, Journal of Religious History 34, 4, 414–29. See Berman, D. (1977), ‘Mrs. Berkeley’s annotations in her interleaved copy of An account of the life of George Berkeley (1776)’. Hermathena 22, 15–28. See, for example, Luce, A. A. (1949/1992), The Life of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne (reprint, intro. by David Berman). London: Thomas Nelson / London: Routledge/Thoemmes; Berman 1994; Breuninger 2010b; Bradaton 2006; and for a post-colonial perspective, Fabricant, C. (2003), ‘George Berkeley the islander: some reflections on utopia, race, and tar-water’, in F. Nussbaum (ed), The Global Eighteenth Century. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 263–78. Gaustad 1979: 66–7 gives some attention to the educational aspects of the project. From George Muir’s sermon to the Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK ). The Ladies Library was a popular text for nearly sixty years. The eighth (and final) edition was published in 1772. Berkeley’s connection to this work was discovered

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relatively recently, in 1980. A contract between Richard Steele, who published the work, and the printer makes clear that Berkeley was the compiler of the extracts (See Parks, S. (1980), ‘George Berkeley, Sir Richard Steele and The Ladies Library’, Scriblerian, 13, 1, 1–2: 2). For a detailed listing of the texts Berkeley included, see Furlong, E. J. and Berman, D. (1980), ‘George Berkeley and The Ladies Library’, Berkeley Newsletter 4, 4–13: 6–7; Hollingshead, G. (1989–90), ‘Sources for the Ladies’ Library’, Berkeley Newsletter 11, 1–9: 1–2, and Aitken, G. A. (1968), The Life of Richard Steele, Volume 2. New York: Haskell House (originally published 1889): 40–41. Richard Steele reported in the Spectator that Jacob Tonson Junior, the bookseller/ printer ‘is of Opinion, that Bayle’s Dictionary might be of very great Use to the Ladies, in order to make them general Scholars’. Tonson would print The Ladies Library in 1714. Steele also wrote a preface to the work. It is likely that he asked Berkeley to compile the extracts in 1713, when Berkeley had gone to England for the first time and met Steele and other literary Londoners. During this period Berkeley wrote, also at Steele’s invitation, several essays for the Guardian. Berkeley advanced a similar argument against those who feared baptizing slaves would liberate them. I discuss this below. Some of these include Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living, Lord Halifax’s Advice to a Daughter, and Richard Allestree’s The Ladies Calling. Steele notes in the Preface to The Ladies Library the ‘frequent mention’ in the Spectator of a ‘Female Library’. Among the books Berkeley donated to Yale upon his departure from Rhode Island was an eight-volume collection of the Spectator. See The Yale University Library Gazette 1933: 25. Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies was lampooned by Steele or Jonathan Swift in several issues of the Tatler. See Bond, D. F. (1987), The Tatler, 3 Volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, vol. 1: 238; Bond 1987, vol. 1: 438–40; and Bond 1987, vol. 3: 284–87. Mary Astell, Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest (1694); A Serious Proposal, Part II (1697). See the modern edition: Astell, M. (2002), A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. P. Springborg, ed. Peterborough: Broadview Press. The Ladies Library includes selections from both Parts I and II . Astell’s work was quite popular. It was also praised by several Anglican scholars, including George Hickes, who recommended her work in his 1707 translation of Fénelon’s Instructions for the Education of a Daughter, another text Berkeley included in The Ladies Library. Hickes also gave at least one sermon advocating the creation of women’s universities. See Perry, R. (1986), The Celebrated Mary Astell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 119. Hollingshead (1989–90: 6) attributes this passage to Berkeley.

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17 The question whether Berkeley subscribed to a utilitarian moral theory is beyond the scope of this chapter. If utilitarianism is the view that the morally good acts are good because they tend to promote the greatest good for the greatest number, it is clear that Berkeley is not a utilitarian. He thinks that the morally good acts are good because they instantiate a moral law. For more on this topic, see Leary, D. (1977), ‘Berkeley’s social theory: context and development’, Journal of the History of Ideas 38, 635–49; Breuninger, S. (2008), ‘Rationality and revolution: rereading Berkeley’s sermons on Passive Obedience’, New Hibernia Review 12, 2, 63–86; and Olscamp, P. J. (1970b), The Moral Philosophy of George Berkeley. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 18 Berkeley likely felt a special duty as a clergyman to bring ‘divine and human Learning’ to the Natives. In 1715, George Ashe, Bishop of Clogher, suggested in an SPG sermon that ‘every one [ought] to put his hand some way to this good work’ and that the clergy could do so ‘by preaching, writing, and personal labors’ (Stevens 2004: 105). Berkeley served as tutor to Ashe’s son on a four-year tour of Italy (1716–1720) (Luce 1949: 75–6). 19 Most Natives ‘declined to be referred to in treaties as “subjects” of the crown’ (Jacobs, W. R. (1969), ‘British-colonial attitudes and policies toward the Indian in the American colonies’, in H. Peckham and C. Gibson (eds), Attitudes of Colonial Powers Toward the American Indian. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, pp. 81–106: 94). 20 See PO §§29–34; Breuninger 2008: 81; and Leary 1977: 269. 21 For more on the SPCK ’s charity schools, see Perry 1986: 233–42. 22 As the governing board noted, these children ‘should not be educated in such a manner as may put them upon a level with the Children of Parents who have the Humanity and Virtue to preserve them, and the Industry to Support them’ (McClure, R. K. (1981), Coram’s Children: The London Foundling Hospital in the Eighteenth Century. New Haven and London: Yale University Press: 47–8). 23 Berkeley and Updike were among the founding members of The Society for the Promotion of Knowledge and Virtue by Free Conversation in 1730, which later became the Redwood Library and Athenaeum (Lapan, M. T., (n.d.), ‘George Berkeley: friends and experiences in the Narragansett country in Rhode Island’. Unpublished manuscript in Whitehall Study Center, Middletown, Rhode Island: 5). 24 Berkeley at first perceived the diversity of Christian sects in Newport as ‘a strange medley of different persuasions’ (Works viii: 192) but soon saw this sectarianism as generating a problematic factionalism. See Skemp, S. (1978), ‘George Berkeley’s Newport experience’, Rhode Island History 37, 2, 52–63: 59–61. 25 The colonists’ practice of cheating the Natives in land transactions and trade is well documented. See Jacobs 1969: 92, and Salisbury, N. (1996), ‘Native people and European settlers in Eastern North America, 1600–1783’, in B. G. Trigger and W. E. Washburn (eds), The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 399–460: 420.

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26 Wyss claims ‘the most significant single shift in cultural practice for the [Natives] was the adoption of a written language’ (Wyss, H. E. (2000), Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press: 8). 27 Mayhew’s Indian Converts was published by the SPG in 1727, two years before Berkeley left for Newport. 28 King Philip’s War (1675–6) alone resulted in the death of approximately 5,000 New England Algonquians; 2,500 English also lost their lives (Wyss 2000: 30). The war also resulted in the sale of Natives into slavery, including hundreds of women and children (Johansen, B. E. (2002), The Native Peoples of North America: A History. Westport and London: Praeger: 133). The enslavement of Natives continued well into the eighteenth century: ‘Throughout the colonial period [New England] held more Indians in slavery than any of the other colonies except South Carolina’ (Forbes, J. D. (1964), The Indian in America’s Past. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall: 89). 29 It is unclear whether Berkeley was aware that Natives had also been enslaved. He mentions only ‘Negroes’. 30 The second and third editions are nearly identical. The latter appeared in the Miscellany of 1752. See Works vii: 338. 31 Berman (1994: 130–33) also has this reading of Berkeley. 32 Despite the fact that Locke’s theory supported an anti-slavery position, he upheld its practice in the colonies. For a helpful discussion of this point, see Grant, R. W. (1987), John Locke’s Liberalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 67–9. 33 Mary Astell also defended passive obedience in The Christian Religion, As Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705, 1717) by arguing against Locke’s view of self-preservation. She writes: ‘What then is self-preservation, that fundamental law of nature, as some call it . . .? [I]t does not consist in the preservation of the person or composite [mind and body], but in preserving the mind from evil, the mind which is truly the self. . . . It is this self-preservation and no other, that is a fundamental sacred and unalterable law’ (Goldie, M. (2007), ‘Mary Astell and John Locke’, in W. Kolbrener and M. Michelson (eds), Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith. Surrey and Burlington: Ashgate, pp. 65–85: 80). 34 Berkeley wrote to Percival: ‘what they foolishly call free thinking seems to me the principal root or source not only of opposition to our College but of most other evils in this age’ (Works viii: 212). 35 I am grateful to the Hay Library of Brown University for access to the 1714 edition of The Ladies Library, to Trinity College Dublin for access to Anne Forster Berkeley’s interleaved commentary in Stock’s Account of the Life of George Berkeley, to the Redwood Library and Athenaeum, Newport for access to early Rhode Island historical texts, and to Whitehall Museum House, Berkeley’s home in Rhode Island for access to its study centre. I benefited from audience comments and questions at

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The Bloomsbury Companion to Berkeley the following conferences at which I presented this chapter or parts of it: the New England Colloquium in Early Modern Philosophy (Harvard University), the International Berkeley Conference (Université de Sherbrooke, Longueuil) and the Irish Philosophical Society (National University of Ireland – Maynooth). A discussion of the penultimate draft of this chapter with Bertil Belfrage helped me clarify several points. I owe a debt of gratitude to my colleagues Lisa Lebduska, Dana Polanichka and Tanya Rodrigue for their helpful comments on several drafts of this chapter, and to Jaime Jarvis for stylistic and editing advice. Susan Dearing and Hyun Kim assisted me, as usual, in all the best ways.

3

Berkeley’s Correspondence Marc A. Hight

In-depth knowledge of an early modern luminary – perhaps especially philosophers – requires familiarity with their correspondence as well as their published works. Letter writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was often considered almost a form of art, and many letters were written with the intention that they someday be published or made available to intellectual circles. This truism applies to Berkeley as well. Although much of his correspondence has not survived and we do not have as rich a philosophical and personal set of correspondences as we have, for instance, with Descartes, Locke or Leibniz, what remains is considerable and worthy of study nonetheless. In this chapter my intent is purely descriptive: to give the reader an overview of the nature, extent and rough content of Berkeley’s correspondence. I make no arguments or judgments of a philosophical nature about the letters or their content, leaving that for other venues. The correspondence of a philosopher is particularly important as it promises to provide a context for the philosophy that interests us and deepen our historical understanding as well. Who did Berkeley have in mind when writing a particular argument? What is going on in his life that might impact his work? How might his letters reveal or confirm some insight into his era? Sometimes these questions are not answerable, but occasionally the correspondence can provide clues to larger philosophical questions about his system. This chapter is an attempt to provide a guide for scholars and the otherwise interested reader to Berkeley’s correspondence. I divide my task in this descriptive overview as follows. I first list and provide an overview of the sources of Berkeley’s correspondence, including collections of his letters and the provenance (as best is known). I then turn to discuss his correspondents and the general content of those exchanges, including a discussion of what letters are now lost to us.

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Berkeley’s correspondence Until recently1 there has been no successful attempt to provide a complete collection of Berkeley’s extant and known correspondence. A. C. Fraser published many letters in his Life and Letters, but he excluded most of the correspondence written to Berkeley. Benjamin Rand presented most of the correspondence between Berkeley and John Percival in his now aging work Berkeley and Percival (published in 1914), but he missed a number of letters in the archives and was unaware of several others that have since come to light. A. A. Luce hoped to compile a complete edition of Berkeley’s letters (see Life, vi), but he too made the decision to not publish the vast majority of the letters addressed to Berkeley. Luce’s collection of correspondence in The Works of George Berkeley (volume VIII ) is also increasingly incomplete with the discovery of several additional letters since its publication in the mid-twentieth century. In 2012 I published The Correspondence of George Berkeley (Cambridge University Press). The volume includes letters both authored by and addressed to Berkeley, but it is necessarily defective on at least two accounts. First, there is reason to believe that some extant letters were not included (especially a few likely held by private collectors to which I could not get access) and second, we have evidence of many letters that have since presumably been lost or destroyed. As of this writing, it is the most complete collection of Berkeley’s known and extant correspondence. That said, a single known piece was inadvertently omitted from the collection, a letter from Berkeley to Thomas McDonnell dated 7 May 1752. The letter, fortunately, has already been published with some commentary by David Berman in Berkeley and Irish Philosophy (Continuum, 2005), p. 223. The letter is brief and I refer readers to Berman’s monograph for details. I reproduce the letter here in conformance to the organization of the volume for the sake of completeness. 388b Berkeley to McDonnell MS unknown. Thomas McDonnell, A Short Vindication of the passages in the Essay towards an answer . . . (Dublin 1754) 7 May 1752 **Sir, The Weakness and Presumption of the Book stiled an Essay on Spirit, render it undeserving of any serious Answer. I find there are some anonymous persons who have treated it in a ludicrous Manner. But if you are minded to confute it

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seriously, I make no Doubt of your being singly an Over-match for such an Adversary. I shall therefore leave him to yourself, and wishing you good success remain, Sir, Your Faithful, Humble Servant, G. Cloyne Cloyne, May 7, 1752 ** The Original lies in the bookseller’s hands for the satisfaction of those who may desire to see it.

Description of main manuscript repositories Bodleian Library, Rhodes House, Oxford University The archives of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG ), now the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, are held at the Rhodes House in Oxford. Catalogues of SPG correspondence, letterbook copies of official correspondence, and some original autographed letters are available, although one letter has unfortunately gone missing when the materials were rebound. SPG catalogue, C/AM 9, A24. Ser. B vol. 15 (letter 191 missing), 191a, 249.

British Library, London The Berkeley Manuscripts are bound volumes containing notes, reflections and other materials by Berkeley and others in his family. BL Add. Ms 39304, 39305, 39306, and 39311 include a number of letters and drafts of letters, many in Berkeley’s hand. Also present are the Egmont Papers. These records were formerly housed at the Public Records Office in London but have since been moved to the British Library. They include John Percival’s records and letterbooks that contain copies (typically in a secretary’s hand) of much of his correspondence with Berkeley along with some correspondence between Percival’s son (also named John) and Berkeley. The volumes in the Egmont Collection (BL Add. Ms 46964–47213) with letters to or from Berkeley include BL Add. Mss 46986, 46997, 46998, 47000, 47012B, 47013B, 47014A, 47025, 47026, 47027, 47028, 47029, 47030, 47031, 47032 and 47033. Berkeley’s letter to Sloane comes from the Sloane Manuscripts (BL Sloane Ms 4040) and two other volumes contain letters as well: BL Add. Ms 32710 and 46688.

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Beinecke Library, Yale University MS Vault File Berkeley and the Johnson Family Papers (Ms 305) both have loose autographed letters of Berkeley along with other miscellaneous Berkeleiana. Two additional letters are present in the Osborn Files ‘B’ folders 1118 and 1184.

Butler Library, Columbia University The Johnson Papers are held here, which contain a number of letters and copies of letters between the American Samuel Johnson and Berkeley. The collection includes three bound volumes and a box of loose materials. The library also has two autograph collections with one Berkeley letter each, the Edwin Seligman Special Collection and the David Eugene Smith Special Collection.

Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, UK The letterbooks of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK ) are now housed at Cambridge University Library. Copies of letters to and from Berkeley (Henry Newman is the principal correspondent) are present in bound volumes: Ms D4/23, Ms D4/24, Ms D4/28, MS D4/29, Ms D4/41, and Ms D4/42.

Chatsworth, Derbyshire The Devonshire Collection Ref. 364.0 contains a single autographed letter to Dorothy Boyle.

Christchurch College Library, Oxford The library holds most of the correspondence of Archbishop William Wake, including one autographed letter written by Berkeley.

Harvard University Library, Cambridge, MA In the Orrery Papers one bound volume has a copy of a letter to John Boyle.

Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Several autographed letter collections here contain Berkeley correspondence, specifically the Ferdinand Dreer Collection in the English and American Clergy Series, and the Simon Gratz Collection in the British Authors Series.

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Lambeth Palace Library, London The Fulham Papers at Lambeth hold a single letter from Berkeley to then Bishop of London Edmund Gibson (see Letter 210) and a second autographed letter in their manuscript collection to Henry Clarke.

National Library of Ireland, Dublin Only a few letters are held at the National Library. Ms 2979 contains a single letter to Isaac Gervais and Ms 987 is a bound volume with a letter from Dorothea Annesley and a reply from then Bishop Berkeley. Microfilm copies of letters held elsewhere are usefully present as well (Microfilm 2510 and 2761).

Redwood Library, Newport, RI The Roderick Terry Jr. Autograph Collection contains a single autographed letter by Berkeley to Isaac Gervais.

Representative Church Body of the Church of Ireland Library, Dublin D6/150/6: a single autographed letter by Berkeley to Archbishop Hoadly.

Rhode Island Historical Society Library, Providence, RI Ms 294 in the Gabriel Bernon papers is a ‘scrapbook’ with two letters in French from Berkeley to Bernon.

Southampton Civic Centre, Southampton, United Kingdom D/M1/2 contains a letterbook of Samuel Molyneux with copies of four letters from Berkeley. The letterbook also holds copies of other letters received by Molyneux.

Trinity College Library, Dublin In addition to other Berkeleiana, including multiple drafts of his letter about the cave of Dunmore, several original letters are preserved in bound volumes: TCD Ms 1186, 2167, and 4309.

University of Amsterdam Library, Amsterdam J3b: Two original letters, loose but well preserved, from Berkeley to Jean LeClerc.

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Description of non-manuscript sources As many of the original letters are lost, often our best sources for the letters are copies preserved in other ways, frequently as copies in previously published works. The following is a list of the known non-original manuscript sources (organized by title).

Authentic Narrative, by Thomas Prior (London: 1746) Berkeley Studies (formerly Berkeley Newsletter) One letter that was auctioned in 1979 and now in (unknown) private hands was transcribed and published by David Berman in the Berkeley Newsletter immediately before its sale. Although the addressee is not certain, the letter is most likely to Edmund Gibson.

Correspondence of Sir Thomas Hanmer, Bart. by Sir Henry Bunbury (London: Edward Moxon, 1838) One letter to Hanmer from Berkeley appears in the text. The location of the original is unknown.

L’Adamo, ovvero il Mondo Creato, by Tommaso Campailla (Rome: Rossi, 1728) In the preface Campailla reproduces two letters sent to him by Berkeley.

Life and Correspondence of Samuel Johnson by E. Edwards Beardsley (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1874) Beardsley reproduces a number of letters to and from Johnson for which we have originals and generally does so accurately. At least one of the originals, however, has been lost and this volume is now our only source.

Life and Letters of George Berkeley, D.D., by A.C. Fraser (Oxford: Clarendon, 1871) Some of the letters Fraser published in this volume are no longer extant, making his book the best source that remains to us (especially several exchanges with Johnson). Fraser’s transcriptions are the only records that remain for five letters (four to Samuel Johnson and one to Evans). The work is also valuable for checking the accuracy of letters lost but published elsewhere.

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The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley by L. Tyerman (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1880), 5th edition Tyerman reproduces extracts of letters from then Bishop Berkeley to Lloyd, one of his parish priests, concerning the preaching of John Wesley in Berkeley’s bishopric.

Literary Relics: Containing Original Letters . . . by George Monck Berkeley (London: T. Kay, 1789, reprinted in a corrected second edition 1792) Many of the letters to Thomas Prior are originally preserved only in this volume. In the preface the younger Berkeley (the grandson) says he received the Berkeley letters from Mr Archdale, but there is no hint as to where the originals might be located at the present, if they survive.

Memoirs of George Berkeley: Late Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland by Joseph Stock (London: J. Murray, 1784) and Stock’s preface to the Works of George Berkeley (London, 1784) Both works contain extracts of letters penned by Berkeley, most of which fortunately overlap with other published collections (such as George Monck Berkeley’s Literary Relics and Fraser’s Life and Letters of George Berkeley, D.D.).

Poems by the late George Monck Berkeley (London: J. Nichols, 1797) The preface to this work, a prodigious bit written by Eliza Berkeley, reproduces one letter to Martin Benson.

Siris: Gründliche Historische Nachricht vom Theer-Wasser by D. W. Linden (Amsterdam and Leipzig, Peter Mortier, 1745) In the preface to the work Linden reproduces his letter to Berkeley.

Siris. Recherches sur les Vertus de l’eau de Goudron, ou l’on a Joint des Réfléxions Philosophiques sur Divers Autres Sujets (Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier, 1745) A French translation of Berkeley’s Siris, it contains the earliest appearance I could find of Berkeley’s response to D. W. Linden’s letter in an appendix. Lastly, I refer readers to the following period journals in which letters penned by Berkeley have appeared: Daily Gazetteer, Dublin Journal, Gentleman’s Magazine, Guardian, Newcastle Journal and Philosophical Transactions.

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Berkeley’s correspondents Berkeley maintained correspondences with a variety of people and the content ranges from strictly professional to deeply personal. I here first provide an overview of the major exchanges and some of the themes present in those letters, arranged roughly in chronological order. Readers are advised to consult the complete correspondence.

John Percival (1683–1748), later Earl of Egmont (1733), and his son (also named John, 1711–70) Lifelong friend and confidant, Berkeley exchanged letters with John Percival for most of his adult life. Many of the earliest letters were written on Berkeley’s continental tours and discuss a wide range of topics from current affairs to advice on reading and selecting a suitable mate. Most of Berkeley’s significant life events are recorded in this correspondence, including references to his own marriage to Anne Forster and his efforts at establishing St. Paul’s College in Bermuda. Of philosophical and historical note, Berkeley used Percival as a means to disseminate his early metaphysical works, especially the Principles of Human Knowledge. Berkeley’s frustration with the dismissive attitudes of the intelligentsia and educated audience of the day are well recorded in these exchanges. Percival kindly sought to get Berkeley’s book read in influential circles, only to find failure and ridicule, often issuing from individuals who did not actually read or engage Berkeley’s work. While in Rhode Island awaiting funding for his Bermuda project, Berkeley also sought the aid of Percival with certain business affairs. A few of these letters survive, detailing directives and counter-directives for the sale or purchase of stocks. Berkeley inherited South Sea Company stocks (after the infamous bubble had already burst) and had Percival both sell and then re-purchase shares whilst he was in Rhode Island. Later, after having returned to Ireland as bishop, Berkeley lent Percival 3,000 Irish pounds. Percival repaid the debt with interest, and those details are available to us in the letters as well. The letters also have a personal side, as they reveal that Berkeley was quite close not only to Percival but many of his friends and extended family as well. Berkeley consistently asks after Catherine, Percival’s wife, their children, and a variety of mutual friends. In one letter Berkeley even scolds Percival for not being a quality parent. Despite the reproof, they were clearly fast friends. Both Percival and his wife intervened on Berkeley’s behalf at court and with several of

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the Lord Lieutenants of Ireland (most notably the Duke of Grafton), speeding his preferment in the Church. The evidence also suggests that Berkeley had a close relationship with Percival’s eldest son John, and some letters between Berkeley and the son from after the death of Percival survive.

Thomas Prior (1681–1751) Thomas Prior was Berkeley’s lifelong friend; they met at school in Kilkenny when Berkeley was only eleven or twelve years of age. He served as Berkeley’s agent in Ireland for a variety of matters and his letters to Prior are our primary source of information about Berkeley’s administration of Hester Van Homrigh’s estate. Unfortunately, no letters from Prior to Berkeley have survived. Although there are some personal touches in the letters to Prior, especially those letters sent from the continent when Berkeley was touring Italy, they mostly concern business affairs. They do provide, however, insight into the times and Berkeley’s thinking. Berkeley charges Prior, for instance, with the task of finding out the ratio of papists to protestants in Ireland. Prior had his own lively intellectual life. He was a passionate advocate for the Irish people and its economy. In 1729 he published his List of the Absentees of Ireland, which contained details of estates and incomes from rents. He claimed that upwards of £600,000 went overseas in remitted rents (the figure is now disputed), an implicit indictment against said absentees. Berkeley was listed in one edition (he was in Rhode Island while holding the deanery of Derry), a fact that did not diminish their friendship. In 1731 Prior and twelve others established the Dublin Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Manufactures, Arts and Sciences. In 1749 it received a grant of £500 per annum from parliament and subsequently became the Royal Dublin Society. Prior was also an ardent advocate of tar water, publishing the flattering Authentic Narrative of the Success of TarWater in Curing a Great Number and Variety of Distempers in 1746.

Samuel Johnson (1696–1772) When Berkeley travelled to Rhode Island as a part of his scheme to found a college on the island of Bermuda, he met Samuel Johnson, an American divine who converted to Anglicanism. Johnson was also interested in philosophy and education (and would later become the first president of King’s College, modern day Columbia University). Their common interests and distance from one another (Johnson resided in Connecticut) yielded a lively philosophical exchange.

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In a series of letters Johnson asks Berkeley a variety of questions about his immaterialist metaphysic and it upshots. Johnson would go on to be a ‘convert’ to Berkeley’s system, later publishing his own works explaining and espousing immaterialism. After Berkeley’s return to Europe they continued to correspond. Johnson helped arrange Berkeley’s donation of books and land to Yale as well as the founding of scholarships there. Johnson periodically sent reports to Berkeley about the status of learning in New England and specifically at the ‘College in New Haven’ (i.e. Yale). He even sought practical advice from Berkeley about how to organize and set up King’s College.

Henry Newman (1670–1743) Not well known as a correspondent of Berkeley’s, Henry Newman was an administrator for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. In that role he corresponded regularly with Berkeley during his time in Rhode Island and afterwards they maintained some connection based on their mutual interests in promoting Christianity in the colonies. Some fourteen letters are known to still exist and mostly concern the affairs of the society and arrangements for donations Berkeley made to various institutions in the colonies.

Martin Benson (1689–1752) A clerical colleague of Berkeley’s, Benson initially met Berkeley in Italy when both were on continental tours. This meeting started a lifelong friendship that is reflected in their letters. In addition to their personal affinity, both men held similar views on a variety of subjects, ranging from high Tory politics to their mutual disapproval of the licentiousness of the times. Benson supported the Bermuda project and even acted as Berkeley’s lieutenant in England after Robert Clayton relinquished the role upon being made a bishop. The letters reveal a comfortable friendship and discuss mostly political and clerical issues.

Isaac Gervais (1680–1756) Born in Montpelier, France, Gervais was brought to Ireland as a child after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. He entered the Anglican Church in Ireland, ultimately being named the dean of Tuam in 1744. Many letters survive between the two, and almost all of them are intimate, personal letters that reveal a close

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friendship between the two that started sometime after Berkeley was appointed bishop of Cloyne. The letters are typically short and concern matters that range from music to politics; most of them involve Berkeley urging Gervais to visit him repeatedly in Cloyne. Gervais was also an advocate of tar water. A testimony of his is included in Thomas Prior’s Authentic Narrative.

Minor correspondences and letters lost In addition to the above mentioned letters, several other correspondences are worthy of mention. I label these ‘minor’ only because there are relatively few letters extant (often only one or two, or excerpts from the same). We know that Berkeley wrote Hans Sloane (1660–1753) of the Royal Society a learned letter (in Latin) about topics in natural philosophy. While a young man still at Trinity College, Dublin, Berkeley exchanged letters with Samuel Molyneux (1689–1728), son of the famed William Molyneux, discussing mundane matters from the college, but also some philosophy related to his recently published Essay Toward a New Theory of Vision. In 1711 Berkeley penned two letters to Jean LeClerc, trying to correct errors reported in the Bibliothèque Choisie about his New Theory of Vision and then also to gain a wider audience for his Principles of Human Knowledge. Although his association with English literary luminaries such as Richard Steele (1672–1729), Joseph Addison (1672–1719), John Arbuthnot (1667–1735) and Alexander Pope (1688–1744) is well known, we have virtually nothing remaining to us in the form of letters between them. A few letters (mostly excerpts) between Pope and Berkeley remain. It is likely that Berkeley would have had occasion to exchange notes with them, and one letter to Arbuthnot survives, but no others do. Another notable absence in the correspondence is Jonathan Swift. Berkeley became acquainted in London with Swift, who then formed a favourable impression of the young philosopher. It is possible that much of the correspondence between them was purposefully destroyed after the Van Homrigh affair (she was Swift’s poetical Vanessa, and as her letters to Swift were ‘warm’ and amorous it is not unreasonable to suppose that Swift asked Berkeley to destroy any mention of them in their own exchanges), where Berkeley was surprisingly named as one of the executors of the young woman’s estate after her death in 1723. Luce reports the existence of letters to and from Swift as late as 1910, but by 1946 no trace could be found of any of them.2

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Two letters to Tommaso Campailla remain, published by Campailla in the preface to his L’Adamo, ovvero il Mondo Creato (1728). Berkeley met the scholar during his travels in Italy and promised to introduce the Italian’s work to the scientific circles in England. It is possible that other letters of a similar nature might have existed, but it is not likely given Berkeley’s generally negative opinion of the state of learning in Italy at the time. By the mid-1720s Berkeley’s attention turned fully towards his plan to establish a college in the Bermuda Islands. His letters to Prior and Percival are replete with references to the project and its progress. There were, no doubt, many letters penned by Berkeley to a variety of individuals concerning the projected St. Paul’s College, but few remain. One letter in 1725 to William Wake (1657–1737) remains, notifying the archbishop of the status of his plan to use funds from the sale of crown lands in the St. Christopher Islands for the Bermuda project. Another letter, to Brian Fairfax (1676–1749), discusses the details for shipping books to the American colonies via London. One additional letter, most likely to Edmund Gibson (the addressee is not certain), provides an update as Berkeley is leaving for Rhode Island. At this point his correspondences with Newman, Prior and Percival are filled with the business of the Bermuda project. In America Berkeley was perceived by some as a local authority, since at the time he was still technically Dean of Derry. Gabriel Bernon (1644–1736) wrote to Berkeley in Rhode Island, appealing for help with problems in the local church. Since there were no bishoprics in the colonies and travel to England was long and dangerous, any Anglican figure in the colonies was likely to attract the attention of the few Church of England members there. One of those was, of course, Samuel Johnson, whose correspondence is mentioned above. A copy of a letter from Berkeley to David Humphreys (1690–1740), secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, survives concerning matters of the society and the local Anglican clergymen. When it became clear that the Bermuda project was doomed to fail, Berkeley arranged to donate his considerable library (arguably one of the largest libraries in New England at the time), his land and additional resources to local causes in the colonies. Letters remain between Berkeley and Elisha Williams (1694–1755), the rector (later president) of Yale, Benjamin Wadsworth (1670–1737), the president of Harvard, and later Thomas Clap (1703–67), another president of Yale. Berkeley made many friends during his time in America, but few letters remain. One letter to John Smibert (1688–1751) remains that suggests many others were written. Of the friends he made en route to America, namely John James (?–1741) and Richard Dalton (c. 1695–1769), again little remains. One

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letter to Dalton has survived, congratulating him on his third marriage. Two letters to James are known to us, both because they were published. One is a short letter penned in 1736 and the other a long public letter to James. The latter was written on the occasion of James announcing his intention to convert to Catholicism. Berkeley published the letter in 1741. These letters and others suggest that Berkeley kept up a lively personal correspondence with a number of people. In thinking about his personal letters, however, there is one glaring lacuna: his family. Not a single letter to or from a relative remains. In the case of his wife and children this is not surprising since they were rarely apart. But Berkeley makes mention often of his brother Robert (‘Robin’) in other letters, his other siblings being mentioned less often. No word of a correspondence with his parents or other relations is made. He makes one disparaging comment about his brother Thomas, who was condemned for bigamy in 1726, but otherwise the corpus that remains to us is bereft of letters to or from family members. In 1734 Berkeley was made bishop of Cloyne, a relatively poor diocese in southern Ireland. Here again we find a very few letters that nonetheless suggest much more voluminous exchanges. Berkeley apparently regularly corresponded with fellow divines who were friends, as evidenced by letters to Thomas Secker (1693–1768), Martin Benson (1689–1752) and his wife’s uncle Nicholas Forster (1672–1743). These letters primarily discuss the political and ecclesiastical events of the day. He maintained official correspondences as well, including with his superior archbishop John Hoadly (1678–1746) and officials at Trinity College, Dublin, but few are extant. In his role as bishop he also corresponded with his own clergy, and copies of letters to one of his parish priests survive, reproving him for contributing to riots after allowing John Wesley to preach in his church. Yet he was also apparently a shepherd to his flock. In a letter to Berkeley near the end of his life, Dorothea (née Annesley) Dubois (1728–74) asks for personal advice concerning her marriage. In his reply (both originals have survived) Berkeley provides supportive but cautious advice. By the 1740s, however, one finds most of Berkeley’s letter writing consumed by his advocacy of tar water. Tar water is a mixture of pine tar and water that has a constipating effect. As such it was used to treat a variety of ailments associated with diarrhoea, although it quickly became endorsed as a general panacea. After publicly endorsing tar water as a medicine Berkeley became nothing short of a minor celebrity. The evidence suggests that many people wrote to him asking for medical and related advice. We know that he corresponded with nobility (letters to Pellham-Holles [1693–1768], the Duke of Newcastle and later prime minister,

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and Sir Thomas Hanmer [1677–1746] have survived) as well as with others from all walks of life across Great Britain. Letters to Berkeley were published by Thomas Prior in his Authentic Narrative and in newspapers (including, most notably, a series of letters from ‘Ward’ published in the Newcastle Journal). His fame extended to the continent as well. His unusual work Siris, which among other things discusses and advocates the use of tar water, was translated into French and German. He answered questions about the substance in letters to D. W. Linden (?–1768), a German doctor renowned for his study of medicinal (i.e. spa) waters. I have neglected to mention in this descriptive narrative a few scattered letters, but I wish to draw some attention to the letters published by Berkeley. He published a number of letters under pseudonyms, for instance in the Guardian, and did so on and off throughout his life. As these letters were published and are already generally known to scholars (not accounting for disputes about authorship for some of them), I have not discussed them here.

Notes 1 The Correspondence of George Berkeley, edited by Marc A. Hight. Cambridge University Press, 2012. 2 See A. A. Luce, ‘A New Berkeley Letter and the Endorsement,’ Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy vol. 51, sec. C (1945–46): 85.

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Berkeley and Twentieth-Century Realist–Anti-Realist Controversies Howard Robinson

Section I: Background and plan Idealism was probably the dominant school in British philosophy from the 1860s until the 1920s, but this was a Hegelian idealism and that makes its relation to Berkeley very ambiguous. Berkeley was an empiricist and hence an experiential atomist, whereas the Hegelians were rationalists and holists. Mander says of these idealists ‘we find a vital point of unity; a common affiliation – not to Berkeley but to Plato, Kant, Hegel’ (2011, 5). Nevertheless, in A. C. Ewing’s words, ‘repudiate him as the later idealists may, they still use his arguments that to conceive anything is to bring it into relation to mind, that physical things are inseparable from experience, that objects are relative to a subject; and on such arguments the whole character of their philosophy depends’ (1934, 384). It would be fair to say that they take for granted Berkeley’s major arguments against the possibility of a mind-independent world – especially the argument that one cannot conceive the unthought-of – then move on in an entirely different direction. Berkeley, of course, gets more explicit credit from twentieth-century empiricists, but not for his idealism, rather for paving the way, via Hume, for modern phenomenalism and verificationism. An example of this recognition is Karl Popper’s (1953) essay ‘A Note on Berkeley as precursor of Mach and Einstein’. Although Hume was, overall, more in tune with twentieth-century empiricism than was Berkeley, it is not irrelevant that Berkeley’s involvement with the worlds of mathematics and science was greater than Hume’s. There is nothing in Hume like the Theory of Vision, the De Motu or the Analyst. Despite the fact that it is Berkeley’s influence on modern empiricism that is most noted amongst analytical philosophers, the more rationalist strains that influenced the British Hegelians also have echoes in contemporary analytic

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controversies. I hope to bring out this intertwining of what might be called empiricist and rationalist themes derived from Berkeley in the sections that follow. In sections II to VII shall discuss Berkelian themes under the headings of five claims, starting with the ‘full strength’ claim made by Berkeley, followed by four more that have some serious affinity with his idealism, or the arguments for it, but fall in various ways short of it or differ significantly in strategy. In section VII I will discuss two contemporary philosophers who are very close to Berkeley’s position (one of them with some embarrassment, the other with enthusiasm), namely Michael Dummett and John Foster. Finally I shall try to assess the current state of the realism–anti-realism debate in the light of these Berkelian influences. The five claims are the following.

(1) We cannot conceive of the world except as being in, or dependent on, our minds or experience. (2) We cannot conceive of the world except under thought-forms or concepts which are particular to humans: there is no sense to conceiving of it ‘as it is in itself ’. (3) We cannot conceive of the world independently of qualitative concepts that are essentially experiential. These themes are fairly strongly idealist or phenomenalist. (1) is Berkeley’s own position and is not much, if at all, copied in twentieth-century philosophy after the Hegelians, but is a starting point for (2), which is found in contemporary analytical work. (2) is Kantian conceptualist and, as we shall see, is a common contemporary theme. (3) lies at the heart of phenomenalism in the empiricist tradition. There are two other contemporary lines of thought that explicitly acknowledge a debt to Berkeley but which deny that they are idealist.

(4) We can only perceive, and therefore, only imagine, the world as it is from a subjective, first personal perspective. This falls short of idealism because it denies the dependence of what we can conceive upon what we can perceive and imagine. (5) We cannot form a conception of the world except as we perceive it directly. This is the view of the relationists’ version of naive realism. It claims to share with Berkeley the idea that we can make no sense of a world beyond a ‘veil of perception’, as required by representational theories, so what we

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are in direct contact with must count as the real world. But they are naive realists, not idealists.

Section II: Berkeley’s ‘master argument’ This I take to be the argument for (1), above.

(1) We cannot conceive of the world except as being in, or dependent on, our minds or experience In a famous passage Berkeley argued as follows. But say you, surely there is nothing easier than to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it: but what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of anyone that may perceive them? But do you not yourself perceive or think of them all the while? This, therefore is nothing to the purpose: it only shows you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind; but it doth not shew that you can conceive it possible, the objects of your thought may exist without the mind: to make this out, it is necessary that you conceive them existing unconceived or unthought of, which is a manifest repugnancy. Principles, #23

Much ink has been spilled on interpreting this passage, but the interpretation in which I am interested at the moment is very straightforward – initially, at least. It can be interpreted as making a straightforward howler, arguing that because whenever you think of something it is being thought of and anything being thought of is, ipso facto, ‘in the mind’ then you cannot think of something that is not in the mind. According to Russell, this was a keystone for idealism and it involves a simple mistake. Berkeley’s view . . . seems to depend for its plausibility upon confusing the thing apprehended with the act of apprehension. Either of these might be called an ‘idea’; probably either would have been called an idea by Berkeley. The act is undoubtedly in the mind; hence, when we are thinking of the act, we readily assent to the view that ideas must be in the mind. Then, forgetting that this was only true when ideas were taken as acts of apprehension, we transfer the

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Russell’s criticism is in line with Moore’s famous ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ (1903), where he argues that if one recognizes the act–object distinction within conscious states, one can see that the object is independent of the act. This ‘discovery’, together with the development of a formal logic for relations, was the cornerstone of the rejection of ‘British idealism’. If objects can be conceived of as independent of conscious thought, and if it is consistent to think of them as in actually related to each other, the mentalistic holism that was contemporary idealism is demolished. Contemporary philosophers have not tried to revive the argument of Principles #23. Berkeley’s argument is more complex than either Moore or Russell allow, but no less disastrous. Berkeley’s imagistic theory of thought and attack on abstract ideas leaves him without a plausible account of how thoughts represent things beyond themselves – that is, without an adequate account of intentionality. (He tries to use resemblance as the basis for this, but it will not serve his purpose. See Robinson, 1996.) This approach to thought is disastrous because one cannot form an image instantiating many essential features of our conceptual scheme, for example, instantiating the property of being yesterday, or being someone other than oneself. The situation is a delicate one. On the one hand, Berkeley’s claim that we can conceive only what we can image is disastrously wrong. On the other hand, idealism is not refuted, as Moore thought, simply by pointing out the act–object distinction in experience: pains are objects of awareness, but they cannot exist unperceived. It was the attempt to explain this latter fact that led Ducasse (1942) to develop the adverbial account of experience in response to Moore. Most of what follows in this chapter can be seen as attempts to tease out from Berkeley’s bulldozer of an argument various possible insights and intuitions.

Section III: The Kantian-conceptualist route to idealism There is, however, a weaker claim, somewhat like (1), in that it shares with Berkeley’s imagism the idea that we cannot break out of our own subjectively constituted modes of thought. This is (2).

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(2) We cannot conceive of the world except under thought-forms or concepts which are particular to humans: there is no sense to conceiving of it ‘as it is in itself ’ This is not so straightforwardly disastrous as Berkeley’s imagism and is followed by philosophers in a Kantian-cum-nominalist (or conceptualist) tradition. Kant was not an imagist, making a firm distinction between percepts and concepts, but the nature of those concepts is radically anthropocentric. The fundamental idea is that we can only think using our concepts and that it is a kind of category mistake to think of the world as itself instantiating anything like a concept. This is a denial of property realism, or of the Aristotelian idea that essentially the same kind of thing – in his terms, form – could be the common feature of both concepts and features of the world. According to the conceptualist, anything that is intelligible must belong to the mind and cannot be thought of as existing in a non-mental reality, just as a pain cannot exist outside a mind. On the one hand, this is meant as a way of rejecting idealism, because it rests on the nominalist instinct that realism mentalizes the world by infusing it with intelligibility. On the other hand, this approach has idealist consequences, for it means that theworld-as-we-understand-it is a creation of essentially mind-dependent entities, namely the concepts that are the forms of our own thought, which cannot be understood as in any way directly mirroring reality. This situation parallels Berkeley’s argument in #23 by claiming that it makes no sense to try to break out of our own mental structures. It is obvious that modern Kantians are prone to this tendency, but so, it is often argued, are certain philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein: one cannot ‘break out of language’ and it is sometimes suspected that this leads, in the case of John McDowell or Richard Rorty, for example, to a kind of linguistic idealism. Whether these philosophers are committed to such a view is, of course, controversial, but it seems that anyone who refuses to give an account of the fundamenta in re that justify (by and large) our application of general concepts is going to find it difficult to deny that our practices are the sole source of the organization in nature, as we experience it. Thus a realist about universals, a trope theorist or a resemblance theorist all have an account of this fundamentum, but anyone who insists that we are not in a position to contrast, compare or check our linguistic or conceptual practices with the world itself, is liable to the charge of conceptual or linguistic idealism. In addition to this full-blown conceptualist route to what some judge to be idealism, there is another concept-based path, derived from Berkeley, but sharing features with the Kantian tradition, which may be undergoing a revival.

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Berkeley said, almost as an aside, that ‘all relations [are] including an act of the mind’ (P 142). In this he seems only to be following Locke (Essay, II , XXV ) who talks as if all relations involve acts of comparison. Indeed, most philosophers from Aristotle to Russell claimed that there was a subjective element in relations, because there is always comparative judgement, which presupposes mind, in the attribution of relations (see Weinberg 1965). This aspect of relations was drawn on from Leibniz to Bradley as a ground for idealism: if objects cannot be related except by an act of mind, they cannot be individuated and so exist as entities apart from such an act.1 The normal, modern verdict on subjective theories of relations is that they are rooted in the ontology of Aristotle’s metaphysics, as expressed in Categories. Aristotle divides the world into substances and their accidents, and accidents cannot be shared between substances. Relations, therefore, must have their truthmakers in the monadic properties of objects, which are compared in judgements. Because the limitations of Aristotelian logic are seen as the cause of the view that relations are dependent on judgement and therefore on the mind, the conclusion is drawn that the incorporation of relations in Russell’s predicate logic is enough to establish their objectivity. There is a slippage of argument here, however. It is true that Aristotle’s logic, being of subject-predicate form, reflects the ontology of Categories, but revision of logic does not necessarily remove all the philosophical reasons behind the ontology. In Timothy Sprigge’s words The point is that there is no distinguishable portion or piece of reality which is where the relation is exemplified as there is in the case of a property. . . . There is not, so to speak, some sub-division of the totality of particular reality which actualises the relation to the exclusion of its contraries as in the case of properties. 1983: 164

Sprigge’s remarks on relations spread, perhaps in surprising ways, to other concepts. David Armstrong (1997) follows in the tracks of Wittgenstein’s dictum that ‘the world is the totality of facts not things’, by regarding the world as the totality of states of affairs. He also believes that everything, including states of affairs, are spatio-temporal entities. But, in addition to all the obvious states of affairs, in order to signal that these are all there is, not just a part of some larger world, there is the ‘totality state of affairs’, the final state of affairs that says ‘that is all there is’ (1997, 196ff ). It is hard to see how this can be spatio-temporal, or, in Sprigge’s phrase, ‘a distinguishable portion or piece of reality’. But, more significantly, it looks as if this particular state of affairs is not so much a part of the world as a recognition that the list is complete; it, like relations, involves a

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judgement. This suggests that, in addition to what one might call baldly descriptive facts there are also factual assessments, which are also essential to an account of what there is (see Robinson 2009). These latter seem clearly to be minddependent. It may be that negative truths are in the same category: what there is ‘out there’ in my room includes only its positive contents, but these provide the grounds for a negative judgement that there are no elephants in the room. In order to justify his rationalist ethics, Derek Parfit (2011, 475ff ) needs a class of facts that constitute the reasons behind moral judgements, and he classifies these facts amongst the things that constitute non-metaphysical cognitivism. The epithet ‘non-metaphysical’ means that there is nothing external to the processes of reasoning that constitutes their truth conditions, – no Platonic entities are required – yet they are completely objective. One might wonder how this can be the case – how rational processes can be objectively required without something that stands independent of them as their ground – and how other forms of factual assessment can be possible, if they run beyond the ordinary truthmakers. It is hard to see what other explanation there could be other than that there is an objective Intellect that is an integral part and precondition of the existence of an objective world. This was the conclusion that Aristotle and, following him, the Neo-platonists, drew from his criticisms of Platonism: not that objective cognitivism was free of metaphysics, but that the metaphysics it involved made the world essentially dependent on an active intellect. So one may not need a Kantian conceptualism to see that the objective world essentially depends on the understanding intellect.

Section IV: The empiricist inheritance There is a rationalist tincture to the argument so far, because the foundation of the arguments is how thought must be. The empiricist foundation for idealism, however, rests more on what experience can and cannot tell us about the nature of the physical world. This gives us (3).

(3) We cannot conceive of the world independently of qualitative concepts that are essentially experiential This empiricist idea can be broken down into two or three components, as follows. (i) The only non-formal or non-mathematical components in our conception of the physical world depend upon the sensible qualities that are the

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core of our ‘manifest image’ or common-sense conception of the world. (ii) In Berkeley’s words, ‘nothing can be like an idea but an idea’: that is to say, the sensible qualities we experience are essentially experiential. (iii) Probably, this is true of qualities in general. That is, the whole idea of a non-formal component in our conception of the world is essentially experiential. (i) is the least controversial of these points, but it also has a strong and a weak interpretation. The strong interpretation is akin to the positivist claim that all statements about the physical world can be translated into statements about sense-data. The weaker version requires only that, in John Foster’s words (2008, 1ff ), our interpretation of the world as containing physical objects is constituted and logically necessitated by the qualitative states that we experience. This latter is a thesis that even a representative realist of a Lockean kind could accept, provided that he could attribute to the mind-independent world some or all of the qualities that manifest themselves in experience. That this could be so is what (ii) denies. That there is nothing in the external world to match the secondary qualities in the form we experience them, has been a common view since the seventeenth century: whether the same applies to primary qualities, considered as qualities and not just as formal (for example, geometrical) properties, abstracted from the manner of their manifestation, has been controversial ever since the same time. Molyneux’s Problem, which focuses on the question of whether shapes as seen and as felt can be seen as present themselves as truly similar, raises this issue. This Problem is still much discussed but some recent empirical work has been taken as showing that they cannot be simply recognized as similar (Bakalar, 2011). If this is so, then it is not possible to attribute to the external world the qualitative nature of the primary properties, as revealed in experience. If the external world is to have anything more than formal and abstract qualities, therefore, it must possess a qualitative nature different from any of the qualities revealed in experience. The plausibility of this is what (iii) rejects. Thinking of the qualitative as what provides the categorical, as opposed to relational or purely structural, features of the world, Blackburn remarks that ‘[c]ategoricity in fact comes with the subjective view’ (1990, 65). And, as we shall see, Dummett claims that we can have no conception of what anything is ‘like in itself ’ independently of how it figures in the experience of a creature of some sort. How one might actually prove (iii) is difficult to see, but the association of the qualitative with qualia – with the felt nature of experience – looks pretty convincing. In order to make a clear distinction between qualities and subjective experience, one must affirm that that there is a fundamental divide between quality and affect, where the latter is plainly

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subjective. That this is even apparently so holds only in the case of vision – all non-visual qualities present themselves as ways of our being affected, and thus it is not implausible to conclude that the appearances in vision of objectivity may itself be misleading, particularly given that there are other reasons than simple phenomenology for thinking that visual phenomena – colour and visual shape – are subjective. This link between the qualitative and the experiential was taken up by the logical positivists. I have already referred to Popper’s (1953) description of Berkeley as the precursor of Mach and Einstein. Popper claims that physics since Mach shares twenty-one theses with Berkeley. He sums up what they share as follows: Berkeley and Mach are both convinced that there is no physical world (of primary qualities, or of atoms; cf. Pr 50; S 232, 235) behind the world of physical appearances. Both believed in a form of the doctrine nowadays called phenomenalism – the view that physical things are bundles, or complexes, or constructs of phenomenal qualities, of particular experienced colours, noises, etc. Mach calls them ‘complexes of elements’. The difference is that for Berkeley, these are directly caused by God. For Mach, they are just there. While Berkeley says that there can be nothing physical behind the physical phenomena, Mach suggests that there is nothing at all behind them. 1953, 34

Popper includes, amongst the things they agree on, the denial of absolute space and time, and absolute motion (giving the connection also with Einstein), and the existence of real forces in nature: explanations are formal and mathematical. It is striking, too, how much discussion of Berkeley is to be found in Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. He opens his Preface by saying: ‘The views that are put forward in this treatise derive from the doctrines of Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein, which are themselves the logical outcome of the empiricism of Berkeley and Hume’ (1936, 11). Although Mach’s and the positivists’ systems have more in common with Hume than with Berkeley, because of the rejection of theism and mind that Popper points out, both Popper and Ayer credit Berkeley with being the originator of the radical empiricist tradition, which Hume merely developed. Ayer says: ‘What Berkeley discovered was that material objects must be definable in terms of sense-contents’ (54). He even assimilates Berkeley to his own positivism with regard to metaphysics, by saying ‘Nor is it fair to regard Berkeley as a metaphysician. For he did not deny the reality of material things, as we are

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still too commonly told. What he denied was the adequacy of Locke’s analysis of the notion of a material thing. . . . And in this he was right’ (53). Ayer was as much a British empiricist as a logical positivist and he probably devotes more time to Berkeley by name than do most of the continental positivists. Nevertheless, though they all reject his views on God, the self, and his explicit mentalism, he is referred to with a respect that other classes of metaphysical idealists do not receive, and this is because they regard him as the originator of the principles that they themselves have taken to what they believe to be their logical conclusion. The positivist attempt to analyse physical object statements in sense-datum terms did not, of course, fare well, but it was not the only source of the idea that the qualitative must be subjective. The idea that the qualitative is, in some way, subjective was also used by Russell to develop neutral monism (Russell, 1927). According to this theory the qualitative, which is the content of consciousness, is also the intrinsic nature of all matter. We are aware of its presence in matter only in the case of our own brain. Science reveals only the behavioural properties of matter, but its true qualitative nature is the foundation of both the mental and the physical – hence the theory is monistic because everything is made of qualities and these qualities are neutral between being physical and being mental. Russell described his theory as follows. On the question of the materials out of which the physical world is constructed, the views advocated in this volume have, perhaps, more affinity with idealism than with materialism . . . what is in our heads is the mind . . . rather than what the physiologist sees through his microscope. It is true that we have not suggested that all reality is mental. The positive arguments in favour of such a view, whether Berkeleyan or German, appear to me to be fallacious. The sceptical of the phenomenalists, that, whatever else there may be, we cannot know it, are argument much more worthy of respect. 1927, 387–8 While, on the question of the stuff of the world, the theory of the foregoing pages has certain affinities with idealism – namely, that mental events are part of that stuff, and that the rest of the stuff resembles them more than it resembles traditional billiard balls – the position advocated as regards scientific laws has more affinity with materialism than with idealism. 388

Until quite recently, it would have hardly been worth pointing out these views of Russell’s as an idealist influence on twentieth-century philosophy, for Russell’s

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theory was regarded as absurd. Thanks to the influence of Maxwell (1978), Lockwood (1989), Strawson (2006), and Chalmers (2010), however, it has returned to the forefront of the debate in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. Russell’s theory has more in common with Leibniz’s rather than with Berkeley’s style of idealism, but for those who are unconvinced by the panpsychist turn, a more Berkelian route has remained open. Berkeley, followed by Hume, denied that we could have any idea of physical force. This has serious consequences for our conception of matter, because impenetrability is a force-concept and it, together with spatial properties, is the defining feature of atomist matter. Hume (1978: I iv 4, 229) objected to the idea that material bodies were volumes of impenetrability on the grounds that this left us with the concept of a body as something that resists penetration by other bodies, and that this is circular because the concept one is trying to define appears in the definition. There is, to put it at its weakest, a primacy of the qualitative properties of matter over the dispositional, force or power properties – which might be generically classified as the causal properties. But if seventeenthcentury science relied on the dispositional property of impenetrability, from the era of Boscovitch on to modern science, the concepts of force, energy and power have come to have an even greater monopoly. As Russell pointed out, the ontology of science is a powers or dispositional ontology. Modern philosophers of an idealist persuasion (e.g. Foster 1982, 1993; Robinson 1982, 2009) have picked on this predicament, argued that this conception is incoherent and drawn the conclusion that there is no adequate scientific realist notion of matter. The incoherence consists in the vicious regress that is said to follow if one tries to give an account of matter or bodies as mere powers or energies. Something would simply be the power to affect a power to affect a power to affect . . .: nothing categorical – nothing not defined in terms of something further – would ever emerge. (See Robinson 2009 for a recent statement of this argument, with response to criticisms. Also Martin (1997), Mumford (1998), Molnar (2003) Bird (2007)). If this argument is correct, then matter is unintelligible without a qualitative component. At the least, this escapes the compass of science, and, if one accepts that the qualitative is essentially experiential, it leads one to phenomenalism.

Section V: The primacy of the first-person perspective Christopher Peacocke (1985) argues for our fourth proposition.

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(4) We can only perceive, and therefore, only imagine, the world as it is ‘from the inside’, that is, from a subjective, first personal perspective The Berkelian import of this is that, however it may be that we can conceive of unperceived physical objects, this is not because we can imagine – in the strict sense of form an image of – unperceived things. This is because all imaging is a recreation of how objects would appear to one under the given circumstances. One way of putting this claim, I think, would be to borrow Nagel’s language and say that one cannot image an object ‘as it is in itself ’, when this latter expression is associated with how it is in the scientific view – the ‘view from nowhere’. All imaging is perspectival. So if one thinks that the object unperceived is equivalent to the object as it is in itself, then imagery is no help in conceiving of this. One might reply to this that certain perspectives – for example, a direct, headon view of something – do reveal the object almost exactly as it is in itself. A corresponding image, therefore, does the same. Even if one is impressed by this response, I think Berkeley’s argument about the relativity of perception between a man and a mite might be invoked. Even if one can cancel out the spatial perspectives, there still remain the perspectives associated with being different kinds of observers. Robinson (2011) argues that the ‘mite’ argument shows that nothing experiential can possibly give content to a notion of objective size, which physical realism requires.

Section VI: The impossibility of indirect realism Some of that modern school of naive or direct realists who are known as relationists claim to be following Berkeley in accepting (5).

(5) We cannot form a conception of the world except as we perceive it directly. John Campbell, for example, starts from what he calls ‘Berkeley’s puzzle’, which is ‘How can experience of an object explain our grasp on the possibility of existence unperceived?’ (2002, 129). His response is that we can acquire a notion of a mind-independent world only if direct realism is true: ‘We cannot extract the conception of a mind-independent world from a mind-dependent image. . . . It seems as though it ought to be possible, though, to extract the conception of a

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mind-independent world from an experience which has a mind-independent object as a constituent’ (135). Bill Brewer (2011), too, sees the problem facing modern realists as the same as that which Berkeley faced in Locke. His argument is organized around an inconsistent triad, namely:

(I) Physical objects are mind-independent. (II) Physical objects are the direct objects of perception. (III) The direct objects of perception are mind-dependent. Brewer wishes, like most contemporaries, to deny (III ), but he thinks that the way most modern representationalists, or intentionalists, deny it does not put one in direct contact with the physical objects at all, and it falls foul of similar objections to those that Berkeley made against Locke. So Campbell and Brewer draw inspiration from Berkeley’s frustration at the way representationalism cuts us off from the world: Berkeley had spotted the fatal flaw in the ‘scientific’ causal account of perception; but whereas Berkeley agreed that realism could not avoid this conclusion and so adopted idealism, the relationists attempt to re-establish naive realism.

Section VII: Two modern Berkelians Michael Dummett Michael Dummett is one of the two major recent analytic philosophers who adopts a broadly Berkelian picture of the world. The other is John Foster, whom I shall discuss in the next section. Dummett’s affinity with Berkeley can be seen in the following quotations. The world, in so far as we apprehend it and are capable of coming to apprehend it, is the world we inhabit; of what we are incapable of apprehending we cannot meaningfully speak. In asking after the character of reality, we are asking after that of the world we inhabit; to speak of a world transcending ours and, as it were, encasing it, is merely to employ a form of words devoid of any clear sense. 2006, 23

This could be a defence of a simple naive realism, denying that the world transcends how we experience it, as either a Lockean or a Kantian might have that it does. But that the sense is not realist is made very plain later in the book.

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The Bloomsbury Companion to Berkeley The conception of ‘the world as it is in itself ’ collapsed because, of our own resources, we can give no substance to the expression ‘like’ as it occurs in the question ‘What is the world like in itself?’ . . . But to express our goal in this search by means of a word such as ‘like’ that calls for an account of experience, asking in effect how we should experience the world if we experienced it as it really is, and not in any particular way, is unintelligible: the question needs to be replaced by ‘How is the world to be described as it is in itself?’ . . . That is why our search for a conception of the world as it is in itself ended with barren mathematical models of which it is senseless to think ‘This is what there really is’, still less ‘That is all there really is’. We set out with a robust version of ‘scientific realism’ as our understanding of what science aims at: its task is, on this view, to uncover how things really are in themselves. We finished by lapsing into a purely instrumentalist interpretation. 98–9

This is a very Berkeleian line of argument. We cannot conceive of what the world is ‘like’ independently of experience; what is left is only abstract description or mathematics. That ‘likeness’ is confined to experience is pretty much the claim that nothing but an idea can be like an idea – there are no non-experienced qualities. The unsatisfactory nature of this abstract instrumentalist conception of the world ‘in itself ’ forces Dummett to a Berkelian theism. Since it makes no sense to speak of a world, or the world, independently of how it is apprehended, this one world must be the world as it is apprehended by some mind, yet not in any particular way, or from any one perspective rather than any other, but simply as it is: it constitutes the world as it is in itself. We saw that how God apprehends things as being must be how they are in themselves. But now we must say the converse: how things are in themselves consists in the way God apprehends them . . . This does not imply that God understands what it is for the material world to exist independently of there being within it any sentient creature to perceive it . . . God’s knowledge of the material universe consists in the grasp of an immensely complex structure determining what will be observed by the various kinds of sentient creatures . . . and what will be discovered by the various rational creatures when they attempt to find out what things are in themselves. 101–3

How does Dummett get from his rejection of the world that ‘transcends’ or ‘encases’ the world of experience to this idealism? How does he avoid naive realism? He approaches idealism via formal semantics and the theory of meaning. Immediately after the passage I quoted in which he rejects the Lockean

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or Kantian world he says: ‘Reality is constituted by what facts there are, and the notion of a fact is one that we have framed. The only facts of which we can conceive are those that render our beliefs, and other beliefs that we may come to form, true or false’ (23). So the world is the totality of facts, ‘fact’ is a human notion, and the only facts that are intelligible to us are those that have a function as the truth conditions of our beliefs: so facts are mind-dependent truth conditions. Dummett’s starting point is Frege’s truth conditional theory of meaning, but he thinks that a pure truth conditional theory is viciously circular. One might say that one knows the meaning of a sentence – say, ‘snow is white’ – by knowing its truth conditions. But what kind of knowledge is this? If it is purely propositional knowledge, and if (as Dummett believes) the only route to the content of propositions is through the sentences that express them, then the attempt to understand the sentence this way presupposes that one already understands it. One therefore needs a less theoretical notion of the knowledge in question – something more in line with the Wittgensteinian idea that knowing the meaning is knowing how to use the expression. Dummett puts it thus: ‘On a non-circular account of understanding, the grasp of the sense of a predicate could be taken to consist in an ability to arrive at a correct decision, for any given object, whether to accept or reject a statement applying that predicate to that object’ (57). Dummett calls this a justificationist theory of meaning and it clearly closely related to verificationism, for ‘arriving at a correct decision’ is obviously verifying, or more or less. Like verificationism, the justificationist approach immediately throws one into problems with, for example, statements about the past: it is clear how one might justify the use of the sentence ‘snow is white’, but it is far from clear how one could justify the use of ‘snow was white five million years ago’. The more nominalist one is, the greater this problem becomes. A realist about meanings, properties or universals (which, in the Aristotelian tradition, are, for good reason, all classified under the same concept, namely that concept form) can hope to draw some general conclusions from reflecting on the nature of these universals, but anyone who is a nominalist or a particularist has to construct generality from the use of or relations between particular tokens. Berkeley was certainly a nominalist and particularist of this sort in the introduction to the Principles and Wittgenstein (at least as interpreted by Kripke, 1982) was in his understanding of linguistic practice. It is annoying in Dummett that he never clearly places himself on this issue (see Green, 2001, 108–11). But he makes it clear that thoughts and propositions can be understood only via language, which

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suggests that language and experience do not enable us to come to grips with universals on which we can then also build. If one believed that experience and thought-through-language made universals available, then I think that Dummett’s particular version of anti-realism, by means of the denial of bivalence, would not become so pressing. Indeed, it is plain, I think, that Dummett’s attempt to put the whole weight on language cannot be right. His own justificationist theory appears to lead to the conclusions that, as evidence for past events’ decay, gaps open up in the past (74). He says of this view: ‘It cannot strictly speaking be convicted of incoherence; but no-one could possibly regard it as a credible conception of the world’ (74). But why could they not? There is much in the world that does change, why not the past? It cannot be because of the nature of our language about the past: this is not just a ‘grammatical’ truth. We must have some grip on the nature and phenomenology of time, which, though no doubt refined and articulated with the help of language, does not simply rest on language. Language is not, therefore, the sole route to metaphysical truth. Dummett himself seems to provide a counterexample to his view of the route to metaphysics, for his argument that we can have no conception of what anything is ‘like in itself ’ independently of how it figures in the experience of a creature of some sort does not seem to be dependent on the justificationist theory of meaning or the denial of bivalence. It comes from reflection on, both, the historical fact that science dispenses with secondary qualities and reflection on phenomenology that suggests that even primary qualities vary with the sense to which they are presented. None of this has language as its source. Indeed this line of thought is more common to a more traditional empiricist approach.

John Foster Foster’s route to idealism is more conventional than Dummett’s. He starts from the refutation of direct realism. In his later work he bases this on a version of the argument from illusion, treating the causal-hallucinatory argument he had originally favoured as question-begging. It does not matter strategically, however, which argument is preferred, as long as one believes that at least one of them is effective. Once it is agreed that we do not perceive the supposed physical world directly, the question arises of which of its properties we can actually know. The abandonment of direct realism, together with the scientific picture of the world, relieves the mind-independent world of secondary qualities. It is plausible to

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think that Molyneux’s Problem shows that visual shape and tactile shape have only a formal similarity. Russell carried this idea forward for time as well: the sense of time passing is experiential: time itself is just an aspect of structure. Beyond structure, the actual or qualitative nature of the physical world is wholly inscrutable. This idea – that the essential nature of matter, beyond the formal or mathematical, is inscrutable to us – is the next move in Foster’s argument. Nevertheless, he concedes that one might hold that anything that copied the formal spatial structure of empirical space could count as the physical world. He tries to show that we would have no reason to think that a mind-independent world that lay behind the empirical world would classify as the physical world. The argument for this is his ‘deviant space’ argument. Our ordinary or empirical conception of space is based on experience: we locate things where they seem, on the basis of experience as a whole, to be. But, argues Foster, if the ‘real’ space is something that lies beyond experience, as a representative realist must allow, then it could be that the topology of that real space could be quite different from the topology of empirical space. It could be the case, for example, that in that transcendental space, Oxford is really where Cambridge seems to be and Cambridge is really where Oxford seems to be: it is just that the laws of nature have a ‘kink’ in them that makes things to appear as they do. These laws determine that things in the transcendental world ‘jump’ from a ‘just outside Oxford’ location to a ‘just inside Cambridge’ location (and vice versa) as they pass the crucial boundary. Foster claims that such a deviant space would not be the real, physical space, which must have the topology that experience and the resultant physical science (which could never uncover such deviance) give it. One response to this argument is that it is merely a sceptical hypothesis: it is not reasonable to think that the transcendental world is deviant in this way. The response to this is that, even if it is not, it could become deviant and this possibility alone is enough to show that it is not the physical world, for any such identity would have to be necessary. The real problem with Foster’s argument is, I think, that it seems to treat the identity of spatial position in the mind-independent world as independent of the behaviour of objects in it; but if space is simply a dimension of the physical system that is a function of the interrelation of the matter in it, it is not so clear that deviance makes sense. Nevertheless, the intuition behind Foster’s argument is not as counterintuitive as it might seem. The core of the argument is that the nomological structure of

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experience is sufficient to guarantee the existence of the physical world: the nature of the cause that lies behind it is irrelevant, apart from its role in guaranteeing the nomological structure of the empirical world. There are interesting parallels to this line of thought in van Fraassen and Chalmers. Van Fraassen (1980) propounds the theory of ‘constructive empiricism’, according to which the aim of science is to explain the phenomena, not to match some external reality. Chalmers (2010) thinks that a world such as the supposedly virtual reality of the Matrix counts as physically real, essentially because the precise nature of what sustains that empirical reality is indifferent to the reality of what is sustained. He disagrees with Foster, I think, in that he thinks that the semantics of our concepts is ‘two dimensional’ in the sense that a term such as ‘space’ refers both to what is presented empirically as space and to whatever it is that underlies the empirical facts. But this two dimensionality differs essentially from that of natural kinds of terms such as ‘water’, because the second dimension of such terms refers to a scientifically discoverable real essence, not to some transcendent reality that is, in principle, inaccessible to science. It seems to me that there is no reason to bring the latter into the meaning of our physical concepts at all. One might adopt instead the principle advocated in Robinson (1985), namely that the physical world is that towards which an accurate physics approximates. Some wholly different foundation is noumenal, not physical. One might be tempted to draw tentatively from this position the conclusion that, once one has decided that there is no reason to think that the empirical world’s cause resembles the empirical world itself in a more than nomological way, then to take the external reality to be a divine mind seems no more strange than any other theory. If one thinks, for example that the fine tuning of the world requires a Designer, and that a mind-independent reality is something of which we can know nothing beyond the nomology that the Designer plans, Berkeley’s claim that postulating some unknowable ‘material’ world as a mere instrument looks redundant might seem to become plausible.

Section VIII: Conclusion Taking the modern period as a whole, Berkelian idealism has not been a popular world view amongst philosophers, although various of the hares that Berkeley started running have continued to be pursued and hunted. In the last few years, however, there have been developments that move the heart of Berkeley’s system closer to modern trends. The confidence in scientific realism and naturalism,

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which seemed so dominant in the 1970s and 1980s has begun to erode. On the one hand, the attempt to accommodate human consciousness and even thought into the scientific world view has come to seem more and more hopeless. On the other, our conception of the physical world has become more and more attenuated, with intuitive understandings of space and time having only a formal connection to any physical reality, and matter itself lacking non-abstract content independent of its manifestation in the qualitative nature of experience. Perhaps we are not so far away from a view of our world that constructs it from experience, grounded on nothing more than a nomic structure which itself manifests design and intelligence. Perhaps Berkeley’s thought that this is the picture which can accommodate both the theoretical achievements of natural science and the foundational reality of human experience and thought is not so far from the truth.

Note 1 This way of putting the connection between the subjectivity of relations and idealism fits with Bradley and Hegelianism better than it does with Leibniz. Leibniz’s monads are really different from each other, but there are no real relations between them, beyond what is expressed in the monadic properties of the individuals.

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Berkeley’s Major Works

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Atomism in Berkeley’s Theory of Vision Bertil Belfrage

Introduction George Berkeley published An Essay towards A New Theory of Vision in 1709, when he was twenty-four years old. A second edition followed in 1710, and three further editions were appended to editions of the Alciphron in 1732. During Berkeley’s lifetime – when the Principles (1710) and the Three Dialogues (1713) were neglected or disregarded – the Theory of Vision was studied in its own right, known for laying the foundations of atomistic psychology. It was widely regarded, for more than a century, as the book on ‘the Science of Man’ (David Hume’s term that John Stuart Mill used for the Theory of Vision).1 Samuel Bailey, a metaphysician of the realist school, criticized however the Theory of Vision in 1842. He thought the thesis, that perceptions are end products of mental processes, drew a veil over ‘reality’ thus leading to scepticism and, to him, unacceptable idealism. Thus, in opposition to Mill, who defended ‘the received [Berkeleian] modes of studying mental phenomena’, Bailey saw it as a covert defence of idealism. From Berkeley’s assertion that the Theory of Vision had a strong influence on his metaphysical works,2 Bailey concluded that the Theory of Vision itself was a contribution to metaphysics.3 He introduced a polemical approach to the Theory of Vision that was followed by Thomas Abbott in 1864 and David Armstrong in 1960. They saw nothing in it but unsound sophisms in support of idealism. The latest book on the Theory of Vision, published in 1990 by Margaret Atherton, is free from polemical overtones, and completed the tradition from Bailey by the thesis that the Theory of Vision expresses a complete ‘idealistic immaterialism’.4 Berkeley saw this as a serious misrepresentation of his work. He knew the underlying assumptions very well, because an anonymous critic published them in the London Daily Post-Boy of 9 September 1732. The answer to this

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critic (and indirectly even to his most recent critics) was published in The Theory of Vision Vindicated (1733). I open with an account of this reply. In the next section, I present what was referred to in Berkeley’s lifetime as his ‘atomistic psychology’, thus following his analysis of how bits of information from different senses are combined, step by step, to compose more complex units. In the final section, I observe how the complexity of visual perceptions required explanations beyond descriptive atomism but, confining this chapter to the Theory of Vision, I will not discuss how he approached these difficulties in later works.

Berkeley’s reply to his critics In the 170-year-old tradition of Bailey many things appeared self-evident: that the Theory of Vision was a metaphysical work in defence of immaterialism, that Berkeley was hostile to science in general and to geometry in particular, that he intended ‘to break down’ physiological research, et cetera. We can see that this tradition does misrepresent his work by considering the four questions discussed below.

(1) Is the Theory of Vision a contribution to ontological metaphysics? One of the main assumptions in the tradition after Bailey is, in Atherton’s terms, that ‘the beliefs Berkeley is particularly interested in [are] beliefs about external bodies’ (1990, 20; emphasis in original). Even in Berkeley’s days, commentators insisted on mixing problems on vision with ontological speculation. The anonymous critic, for instance, who made him write The Theory of Vision Vindicated, opened his ‘Letter’ defining ‘the object of sense’ as an object ‘without us’, which causes sensations or ‘ideas within’. But Berkeley declined his opponent’s invitation to discuss ‘external objects’. In the science of vision, he said: ‘The term ‘sensible Object is . . . not applied to signify the absolutely existing outward Cause or Power, but the Ideas themselves produced thereby’ (TVV 12). Thus he meant that we are talking about very different kinds of objects, when we are ‘about to treat of the Nature of Vision’ than when we are dealing with ontological issues (TVV 18, cp. 14).5 If we nonetheless insist that ‘what is of primary importance to Berkeley’s account is his theory of visual representation rather than . . . his theory of visual experience’ (Atherton 1990: 15), his answer is:

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The Beings, Substances, Powers which exist without, may indeed concern a Treatise on some other Science, and may there become a proper Subject of Inquiry. But, why they should be considered as Objects of the visive Faculty in a Treatise of Optics, I do not comprehend. TVV 19, my emphasis To the absolute Nature, therefore, of outward Causes or Powers, we have nothing to say. TVV 12, my emphasis

(2) Did Berkeley intend ‘to discredit the geometric theory’? Already in 1709, William King accused Berkeley of turning his back on geometry, the science of sciences in those days.6 Atherton agrees: ‘Berkeley contrasted his approach to vision with another, which he called the geometric.’ He ‘thought a geometrical approach to space perception is peculiarly conductive to the belief that what we see are bodies existing in external space’, and ‘presents his project as opposed to the theories we have been discussing to the extent these theories rely on geometric principles’ (1990: 3, 16, 54). His ‘motivation’ for writing the Theory of Vision (‘Berkeley’s Revolution in Vision’) was to eliminate geometric optics from enquiries about perception.7 Berkeley answered: The opinion ‘that Men might argue and compute geometrically by Lines and Angles in Optics . . . is so far from carrying in it any Opposition to my Theory, that I have expresly declared the same thing’ (TVV 31), for example when he defined ‘confused’ and ‘distinct’ vision by reference to the angle at which light rays fall on the retina (TV 34–35). It is true, he admits, that he criticized one point in contemporary optics but, he says, this is not to criticize the entire science.8 His point of criticism was that the psychology of perception is an empirical, not a deductive (’mathematical’) science (TV 24). When he mentions those ‘three Lights [in which] Vision should be considered’ to form a complete theory, moreover, one of these ‘Lights’ is ‘the Geometrical Application of Lines and Angles’ (TVV 37).

(3) Did Berkeley intend ‘to break down’ physiological research? Atherton mentions Descartes and Malebranche, who were convinced that ‘sensory operations such as seeing . . . depend on a sequence of organic changes in the sense organs’. Hence, ‘what we see is dependent on our sense organs’, according to these philosophers. But, Atherton argues, ‘These theories are committed to a distinction

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between a visual world that is the result of the operations of our sense organs and an external corporeal world. This is the distinction Berkeley is determined to break down.’ ‘Berkeley’s point is there is no way to account physiologically for visual perception of distance,’ according to Atherton (1990, 53–54; 2005, 108). This is a reasonable conclusion from the assumption that Berkeley accepted no other than efficient causes (which is true of Berkeleian metaphysics), but the term ‘cause’ is never used in this sense in the Theory of Vision. In this context, he did not deny that ‘what we see is dependent on our sense organs’. On the contrary, he referred to ‘the Physical Consideration of the Eye, Nerve, Coats, Humours, Refractions, bodily Nature, and Motion of Light’ as one of the ‘three Lights [in which] Vision should be considered, in order to [form] a compleat Theory of Optics’ (TVV 37). And he does mention what Atherton referred to as ‘organic changes in the sense organs’ several times in connection with ‘visual perception of distance’, not only when he defines ‘distinct’ and ‘confused’ vision, but also when he referred to how visual perceptions appear ‘vigorous’ or ‘faint’ in proportion to how many light rays the object sends to the eye (TV 68).

(4) Did Berkeley deny ‘supplementary processes’ in vision? The anonymous critic agreed with Berkeley that sensations of different senses were ‘intirely different’, but added that Berkeley mistakenly denied ‘we may justly argue from one to the other’ (Letter, 8). Similarly, Berkeley held, according to Atherton, that ‘Ideas of sight are entirely unrelated to ideas of touch’ (2005, 98– 100): ‘Berkeley’s solution to the problem how it is possible to perceive distance by sight doesn’t incorporate any supplementary processes into the visual system at all, over and above what we immediately perceive. Seeing is seeing’ (1990: 103). Berkeley answered: ‘Now my Theory no where supposeth, that we may not justly argue, from the Ideas of one Sense to those of another, by Analogy and by Experience: On the contrary, this very Point is affirmed, proved, or supposed throughout’ (TVV 27). In the final section, moreover, I will comment on Berkeley’s three examples of a conditioning process between sensation and perception.

The atomistic approach From this outline of Berkeley’s reply to those critics, who saw the Theory of Vision as a metaphysical defence of idealism, I proceed to read Berkeley’s text

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from scratch in an attempt at reconstructing his so-called ‘atomistic psychology’. By Berkeley’s ‘Atomistic Principle’ I mean the line of reasoning from the decision to ‘confine [his] thoughts and enquirys to the naked Scene of [his] own Particular Ideas’ (MI 50, 48, 61, PI 24), combined with the semantic test, directing one ‘to take the mask [off ] Words, and obtain a naked view of [his] own Particular Ideas’ (MI 50a). Terms that do not denote ‘particular ideas’ fail the test and should be rejected as nonsensical.

A regular-sequence approach to causal explanation The difference between the descriptive approach in the Theory of Vision and the metaphysical approach in the Principles (1710) and the Three Dialogues (1713), is reflected in significant, possibly confusing, differences in vocabulary between these works. In descriptive science it is an important task, according to Berkeley’s philosophy of science, to observe ‘regularities between sensible things’ to establish ‘what precedes as cause, and what follows as effect’ (DM 71). This is the approach he follows in the Theory of Vision, when enquiring into perceptual processes – contrary to his metaphysical doctrine in which he accepted no other than efficient causes. Thus, he asked in the Theory of Vision: What kind of response is likely to follow a given stimulus (TV 29, 36–37, 39)? What kind of data do we take in by our different senses (TV 46, 129, 130)? How to measure and describe the raw data, on which we build our conception of the surroundings (TV 54, 67, 77, 78)? What is given, when we look at ‘one thing’ from different perspectives (TV 60– 61)? The within/without relation, moreover, lacks the metaphysical sense it has in his immaterialist doctrine, for instance when we read about causal chains of events, sometimes ‘within’, sometimes ‘without’ the mind, or about external causes of external events (TV 36, 68), external stimuli causing internal responses (TV 38, 72), internal judgements caused by external stimuli (TV 68), or ideas causing ideas (TV 73).9

Raw data in microcosm At the most basic level of his analysis, Berkeley often speaks about ‘objects’ in a sense very different from what we refer to as ‘objects’ in everyday life. He mentions isolated sounds, tastes, and smells; ‘diversity of colours’ without any distinct size and form; he mentions visual sensations that appear distinct or confused, clear or faint; tactile sensations of gravitating downwards, of moving one’s limbs, etc.

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As isolated ‘objects’ they belong to a micro level, or a pre-perceptive stage, that we seldom mention or pay much attention to, and that are irrelevant to questions about the nature of, or our ‘beliefs about external objects’. How did Berkeley define the ‘objects’ he analysed in the Theory of Vision? Could he measure or describe them in a scientific manner?

The Law of Specific Sense Responses If I say, for example, while holding an apple, ‘I smell the same thing as I touch,’ then this is a mistake at the most basic level of analysis, although Berkeley admits that ‘common Speech wou’d incline one to think, I heard, saw, and touch’d the same Thing’. According to the physiological Law of Specific Sense Responses (a law Berkeley took to be ‘allow’d by all’), raw data, or ‘Ideas intromitted by each Sense are widely different and distinct from each other’. It is in this basic sense of ‘immediate’ or ‘proper’ objects of sight that ‘there is no other immediate Object of Sight besides Light and Colours’, so ‘All that is properly perceiv’d by the Visive Faculty, amounts to no more than Colours with their Variations, and different Proportions of Light and Shade’ (TV 46, 129, 156 et passim). Consequently, at this basic level, ‘That which I see is only variety of Light and Colours. That which I feel, is Hard or Soft, Hot or Cold, Rough or Smooth’ (TV 103, 77 3rd ed., 129, 130, my emphasis). Although isolated raw data do not give any useful information in themselves, they are the elements on which Berkeley started to build his construction of the perceived world. When he speaks about ‘homogeneous’ sensations, he refers to raw data in the microcosm of what we take in by one sense only (‘heterogeneity’ is the relation between data from different senses).

Instruments for describing visual appearances The raw data of Berkeley’s psychology are ‘atomic’ in the sense of being the most basic elements of human knowledge. He distinguishes between them by means of the Law of Specific Sense Responses. The defining property of these data is the peculiar kind of minima sensibilia by which they can be uniquely described. This provided him with methods of measuring and otherwise describing these raw data in an objective manner. With regard to visual data, Berkeley used the received method of establishing a person’s minimum visibile by observing what the smallest angle is at which rays of light cause a response in the receptors of the eye and will, via the visual nerve etc., eventually result in a visual sensation. So established, a person’s minimum visibile can be used to measure ‘apparent magnitudes’.10

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In microcosm, ‘distance’ is a relation between homogeneous ‘atoms’: ‘the Distance between’ two visible points ‘is mark’d out, by the Number of the interjacent Visible Points’, so in microcosm (before raw data have been connected into heterogeneous units) visual distance is strictly confined to the visual sphere, but if the points ‘are Tangible, the Distance between them is a Line consisting of Tangible Points’ (TV 112).11

Basic micro relations To proceed from isolated colours, sounds, etc. to more complex sensations, Berkeley needed to establish correlations between heterogeneous factors, or (in Berkeley’s terms) to show they are ‘proportionate to’ each other.12

Descriptive and operative elements Long before Gestalt psychology and related doctrines, and without workable insights into neurology, tactile sensations were given a leading role by Berkeley. We can describe an object by means of such tactile sensations as ‘Hard or Soft, Hot or Cold, Rough or Smooth’ (TV 103). But there are also three other kinds of sensations, which Berkeley classified as tactile. I refer to them as ‘operative elements’, because they play an important part in structuring sensations of light and colour. These data are sensations of pleasure and pain, of gravitating downwards, and of moving a part of one’s body.

Instruments for structuring visual data To make sense of isolated raw data we need, in the first place, to distinguish useful information from useless. Given our instinct to approach pleasure and avoid pain (P 146), sensations of pleasure and pain function as choice-making data. ‘We regard the Objects that environ us, in proportion as they are adapted to . . . produce in our Minds the Sensations of Pleasure, or Pain’ (TV 59, 109, 147), which in turn makes us focus on one part of the visual field and regard it as a unit. What we regard as ‘one’,‘two’, or ‘several things’ is therefore ‘intirely the Creature of the Mind’: Number (however some may reckon it amongst the Primary Qualities) is nothing fix’d, and settled, really existing in things themselves. It is intirely the Creature of the Mind . . . According as the Mind variously Combines it’s Ideas, the Unite varies . . . and [is] done by the Mind in such sort, as Experience shews it to be most convenient. Without which, our Ideas had never been collected into such sundry, distinct Combinations as they now are. TV 109

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Once we have learnt to focus on one thing in the visual field, neglecting others, we should be able to describe this ‘one thing’ which, in turn, requires ability to relate its constituent parts in an ordered manner above or below each other, to the right or to the left. We describe what appears in the visual field by means of the basic coordinating datum of gravitating downwards, according to Berkeley, which provides us with the coordinates up/down, left/right (TV 93, 95, 98). Kinaesthetic experiences of moving a part of one’s body, finally, are spacebuilding data by which we learn about three-dimensional space (TV 16, 45, 94): ‘Which Foresight, how necessary it is to the preservation of an Animal, every ones Experience can inform him’ (TV 59, 148). The sensation of threedimensional space is a function of a kinaesthetic sensation of moving one’s limbs and not feeling something hard resisting one’s movements. The sensation of ‘solidity’ or of ‘body’ is, on the other hand, the sensation of trying in vain to move, but feeling something hard preventing the motion. This resistance is a sensation of ‘solidity’ or of ‘body’ (P 116, with reference to TV ). The theory of how visual data are being structured by means of tactual information supported Berkeley’s opinion that ‘Visible Extensions in themselves . . . have no settled determinate Greatness’ (TV 151).

Basic relations in macrocosm The Association Thesis The tool we use, according to Berkeley, for connecting different sensations into intelligible perceptions is expressed in the Association Thesis. ‘The Cause why one Idea may suggest another’ is, according to this thesis, ‘that they have been observ’d to go together’ (TV 25). Thus, if a number of things are observed to follow each other regularly, we regard them as links of a causal chain. Thereby we take early links in a chain as causes which ‘suggest’ that a later link is about to appear. Later links of such a chain are then explained as effects of an earlier link, or of earlier links, in this causal chain.

Finding connections between sensations of different senses The major task of vision is ‘to regulate our Actions, in order to attain those things, that are necessary to the Preservation and Well-being of our Bodies’ (TV 147) which, primarily, depends ‘altogether on the Tangible, and not at all on the Visible, Qualities of any Object’ (TV 59). Convinced that ‘Men measure altogether, by the Application of Tangible Extension to Tangible Extension’ (TV

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151, 61), Berkeley argued that seeing an object at a distance means ‘that if I advance forward so many Paces, Miles, &c. I shall be affected with such, and such Ideas of Touch’ (TV 45). This implies that we can establish the ‘proportionality’ (to use his term) between sensations of different senses. One example of the activity of connecting visual and tactile data is Berkeley’s thesis about how we relate the location of an appearance in the visual field to the location of tactile data in three-dimensional space. To illustrate his thesis, he asked us to ‘suppose a diaphanous Plain erected near the Eye, . . . divided into small equal Squares’.8 The size of visual appearances can then be measured by how many hypothetical squares it covers. ‘Those that occupy most Squares have a greater visible Extension’ (TVV 55), he says. Not only its (visual) size, but also its location (in the visual field) is important: if an appearance covers a small number of points close to the horizontal line, then it suggests a bigger (tactile) size, than is suggested by an appearance that covers more squares but at a lower part of the plane (TVV 55–56). As Berkeley’s analysis proceeded, however, the complexity of visual perception led him beyond the atomistic approach.

Beyond atomism Berkeley’s physiological study of perceptual processes opened new perspectives. He observed how stimuli, described or controlled by opticians, cause (or are ‘proportionate to’) certain responses, and how these responses, in turn, become links in a causal chain that eventually ends in perception. To illustrate how his explanations led to assumptions of conditioning processes beyond the scope of his atomistic framework, I will give three examples: his analysis of the Barrovian Case, of the Moon Illusion, and the perception of ‘one thing’ from different perspectives.

Conditioning processes in perceptual acts Some opticians suggested that we base our judgments of distance on the angle at which the rays of light fall on the retina. They observed that, when objects are close, the light rays diverge towards the object, and speculated that, if the rays were made to converge, the object should appear to be at a remote distance, but the hypothesis failed. In an experiment named after Isaac Barrow the subject saw the object as very close (TV 29).

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To explain the failure, Berkeley first defined the terms ‘distinct’ and ‘confused’ vision. If light rays focus on the retina, the object will appear ‘distinct’; if not, it appears ‘confused’ (TV 34–35, 77). As the rays did not focus on the retina in the experiment, the object looked ‘confused’ (TV 38). Another observation was that if we bring an object very close to the eyes of a person with normal eyesight, it looks ‘confused’. So normal-sighted persons are used to taking ‘confusedness’ as a sign of near distance. That explains why the experiment failed. But Berkeley added that distant objects look ‘confused’ to near-sighted persons (TV 36, 37, 39). In Barrow’s laboratory, therefore, it could happen that a normal-sighted person said, ‘It is near,’ but a near-sighted person said, ‘It is not near’ (TV 29, 37). Due to the difference in background knowledge, the one actually saw a close-by object in this case, the other a faraway object. I will use the term ‘sensation’ for what both of them saw (a ‘confused’ object), and ‘perception’ for what they saw, when the one said ‘I see a nearby object’ and the other ‘I see a faraway object’. Instead of sensation Berkeley uses the term ‘Immediate Objects of Sight’ and instead of perception he speaks about ‘Mediate’ objects of sight. As two subjects saw different things from exactly the same position in the laboratory, it follows that two persons with the same sensations (a ‘confused’ object) can have different perceptions (the one perceiving a nearby, the other a faraway object). This is an observation of far-reaching consequences, because it entails a conditioning process between sensation and perception, but Berkeley leaves it as a loose end.

The failure of introspection My second example concerns the Moon Illusion. Berkeley observes that the moon is at a greater distance from the observer when seen on the horizon than at the zenith. The projection on the retina (the stimulus) is therefore slightly less in the illusion and, as the response is ‘proportional to’ the stimulus, the sensation (or ‘the proper and immediate Object of Vision’), measured in terms of how many minima visibilia it covers in the visual field, ‘is no greater’ in the illusion (TV 74). To explain the illusion Berkeley introduces the term ‘faint’. If ‘by reason of the Distance of the Object, or grossness of the interjacent Medium, few Rays arrive from the Object to the Eye,’ then the object will appear ‘faint’, in contrast to ‘vigorous’ (TV 35). He first observes that, in the Moon Illusion, ‘the Particles of the intermediate Air and Vapours, which are themselves unperceivable, do interrupt the Rays of Light, and thereby render the Appearance less Strong and Vivid’. Then he refers to our background knowledge that ‘Faintness of Appearance

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caused in this Sort, hath been experienced to coexist with great Magnitude’ (TV 72). His explanation of the illusion is, finally, that the ‘faintness’ acts as an operative element, like ‘confusedness’ in the Barrovian Case, whereby the small sensation (if measured by minima visibilia) is conditioned by its ‘faintness’ to make us perceive a big horizontal Moon.14 Here, introspection fails, because Berkeley cannot have an idea of the small sensation of the moon (the ‘immediate Object of Vision’), only of the ‘mediate object’, the perception of a big horizontal moon. Thus even this explanation entails a conditioning process between sensation and perception (the ‘faintness’ of a small sensation conditions the perceiver to see a big moon), but Berkeley leaves it, again, as a loose end.

To see ‘one thing’ from different perspectives ‘It is thought a great Absurdity to imagine that one, and the same thing, shou’d have any more than one Extension, and one Figure,’ Berkeley said. ‘But if we take a close and accurate View of the Matter,’ he continued, this is a correct description of what we see when observing a thing from different perspectives, because visual appearances continuously change, when we move (TV 48–50). As ‘No Reason can be assign’d, why we shou’d pitch on one, more than another’ of these endless series of continuously changing impressions (TV 60–61), we do not see ‘the same thing’, strictly speaking, from different perspectives (TV 55, 61, 156). The conception of ‘one thing’ (including all these appearances of different size and form) is of a higher logical category than things in the naked scene of his own particular ideas. In accordance with the Atomistic Principle he therefore rejected such a concept of ‘one thing’ in the Three Dialogues as an ‘abstracted Idea of Identity’ (3D, 247–249). The Association Thesis illustrates the difficulty. It teaches that we connect different observations, because ‘they have been observ’d to go together’. So, if we have not observed b to follow a, then a will not ‘suggest’ the appearance of b (TV 25). Yet we are able to predict fairly well how an object will look even from a perspective we never tried. How? Berkeley’s first answer – outside the field of psychology – was presented towards the end of the Theory of Vision. From the theological assumption that ‘the proper Objects of Vision constitute an Universal Language of the Author of Nature, whereby we are instructed how to regulate our Actions’ (TV 147, 3rd ed.), he developed a metaphysical doctrine of perception in the Principles and the Three Dialogues on the theme of seeing things in God’s mind (P 66). A

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question for further studies is, if Berkeley developed a second answer – within the field of psychology? The question – far beyond the limited scope of the present chapter – is, if Berkeley could explain the conditioning processes between sensations and perceptions in The Theory of Vision Vindicated (1733), once he, in De Motu (1721), completed his atomistic approach with an abstract or theoretical part of science, in which he accepted abstract notions of theoretical (‘mathematical’) laws (notiones abstractæ mathematicorum, DM 71)?15

Notes 1 Hume, D. (1978), A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed), 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press. Introduction, paragraph 4. Mill, J. S. (1842), ‘Bailey on Berkeley’s theory of vision’, reprinted in Dissertations and Discussions. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1867, vol. 2, pp. 84–91, 84–5. 2 In Principles 42, Berkeley considered the objection to his immaterialism ‘that we see things actually without or at a distance from us, and which consequently do not Exist in the Mind’, and answered that, ‘The Consideration of this Difficulty [how it is that we perceive Distance and Things placed at a Distance by Sight] it was that gave birth to my Essay towards a new Theory of Vision’. He added that the merit of this book was to show, ‘That the proper Objects of Sight neither Exist without the Mind, nor are the Images of External Things’ with the conclusion that ‘the Ideas of Sight . . . do not Suggest or mark out to us Things actually Existing at a Distance’ (P 42–44, cp. 116). Already before the Principles was published, Berkeley wrote, in a letter to Percival, dated 1 March 1710, that ‘the usefulness’ of the Theory of Vision would be proved ‘in a treatise I have now in the press’. And twenty years later, he said in a letter to Samuel Johnson (to which he enclosed copies of the Theory of Vision, the Principles, and the Three Dialogues): ‘I could wish that all the things I have published on these philosophical subjects were read in the order wherein I published them . . . to take in the design and connexion of them’ (Works 8:31 and 2:294). 3 Bailey, S. (1842), A Review of Berkeley’s Theory of Vision, Designed to Show the Unsoundness of that Celebrated Speculation. London: James Ridsway, Piccadilly, p. 5ff. 4 Atherton distinguishes between ‘idealism’ and ‘immaterialism’. ‘Idealism’ means that sensing or perceiving is identified with the object sensed or perceived (Atherton, M. (1990), Berkeley’s Revolution in Vision. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 232–4). Charles McCracken objected that this definition of ‘idealism’ leaves out the crucial question of ‘what is seen or what is felt’, as distinct from ‘the seeing it or feeling it’ (McCracken, C. J. (1995), ‘Godless immaterialism: On Atherton’s Berkeley’

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in R. G. Muehlmann (ed), Berkeley’s Metaphysics. Structural, Interpretive, and Critical Essays. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 249–60, 252). ‘Immaterialism’ is defined as ‘a theory about what ideas represent . . . it claims that ideas represent only other ideas’, visual ideas representing tactual ideas (Atherton 1990: 9, 233 et passim). McCracken objected that, if ‘immaterialism’ is so defined, it is not about ‘the nature of the sensory object’. ‘So the problem of the status of the object perceived is unresolved’ (McCracken 1995, 254). Atherton concluded that the Theory of Vision expresses a complete ‘idealistic immaterialism’ without any theological assumptions (Atherton, M. (1995), ‘Berkeley without God’ in R. G. Muehlmann (ed), Berkeley’s Metaphysics. Structural, Interpretive, and Critical Essays. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 231–48). McCracken asked rhetorically what difference would there be between Berkeley’s immaterialism ‘without God’ and ‘a purely phenomenalistic theory like Mill’s’? (McCracken 1995, 254–7). For the sense of ‘sensible object’ in this context, see the section on ‘The atomistic approach’. We do not know exactly how King formulated his criticism, but Berkeley says in a letter to Percival, dated in March 1710 that he ‘endeavoured to answer the objections of the Archbishop of Dublin’ (William King, in the appendix to the second edition of the Theory of Vision (Works 8:31)). Atherton, 1990: 3, 15–16, 20, 54–6, 86–8, 202. See the Appendix to the 2nd edition of the Theory of Vision. It is an interesting task to follow the development from the uncontroversial statements in the Theory of Vision that visual sensations are ‘not without the Mind’ (TV 43, 81, 95, 117–18), to the controversial immaterialist thesis in the Principles and the Three Dialogues, but that is a task far outside the scope of the present chapter. John Locke, for instance, defines ‘a sensible point’ as ‘the least Particle of Matter or Space we can discern, which is ordinarily about a Minute, and to the sharpest eyes seldom less than thirty Seconds of a Circle, whereof the Eye is the centre’ (Locke, J. ([1689]1975), An Essay concerning Human Understanding. P. H. Nidditch (ed). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd ed., 2.15.9). When Berkeley speaks about the ‘Situation of Objects’ (TV 1), he is talking about pure visuals situated or located in the visual sphere, or pure tactile sensations situated in the tactile sphere. For different aspects of the Proportionality Relation, see TV 35, 59, 68, 72, 73, 77, 78, 111, 131, 156. I have chosen the elegant explanation in TVV 55–56 instead of the more complicated account in the Theory of Vision. This is the one-factor explanation Berkeley offered in the first edition of the Theory of Vision. For the difference between the first and later editions on this point, see

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Berman D. (1985), ‘Berkeley and the moon illusions’, Revue internationale de philosophie, 154, 215–22. 15 I wish to express my gratitude to Georges Dicker and Richard Brook for helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. I am grateful to the Hultengrens Fond, Lund University, for a grant that made it possible to finish this chapter.

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Berkeley’s Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge Samuel C. Rickless

Berkeley’s Principles, published in 1710 when he was twenty-five years old and revised in 1734, is a wonderful, engaging and sometimes frustrating work that articulates and defends a thesis that has been widely reviled at least in part because it has been widely misunderstood; namely, the claim (call it ‘idealism’) that sensible objects (tables and chairs, apples and pears) are no more than collections of ideas that can exist only in the minds that perceive them, and, more generally, the claim that the only things that exist in the universe are minds and their ideas. Berkeley originally intended the work to have two parts, with Part I devoted to his theory of mind and body and Part II devoted to the application of the principles announced in Part I to theology and morality (among other matters). Unfortunately for us, Berkeley lost the manuscript of Part II during his travels in Italy in 1716, and much later (in 1729) pithily wrote to his friend, the American philosopher Samuel Johnson, that he ‘never had leisure since to do so disagreeable a thing as writing twice on the same subject’ (Works 2: 282). Those who are interested in what Berkeley might have included in Part II should consult Alciphron (1732) and Siris (1744). The Principles consists of an Introduction, followed by 156 numbered sections that Berkeley himself indicates should be divided into three parts, with P 1–33 devoted to metaphysics (the theory of what exists) and epistemology (the theory of what is and can be known about what exists), P 34–84 (aside from an extended digression at P 67–81) devoted to answering objections to his theory, and P 85–156 devoted to drawing out the consequences and advantages of his theory.

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Introduction: Against the ‘Doctrine of Abstraction’ Among Berkeley’s predecessors, sceptics such as Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) and Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), picking up on the work of Sextus Empiricus (ca. 160–210), had argued that there are good reasons for us not to trust our senses, and John Locke (1632–1704) had claimed in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) that we should ‘sit down in a quiet Ignorance of those Things, which, upon Examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our Capacities’ (I.i.4), including the nature or essence of physical things. In the ‘Published Introduction’ to the Principles (itself divided into 25 sections), Berkeley claims that we have a strong desire for knowledge, that surely God (assuming he exists) would not have given us such a strong desire if he had made it impossible or very difficult for us to know much of anything about the world, and that ‘the high-road of plain, common sense’ is right to suppose that we should believe the evidence of our senses (PI 1–3). Berkeley spends much of the rest of the Introduction attacking the one doctrine that he finds ‘to have occasioned innumerable errors and difficulties in almost all parts of knowledge’, namely, that ‘the mind hath a power of framing abstract ideas or notions of things’ (PI 6). If we rid ourselves of the Doctrine of Abstraction, says Berkeley, we will be better able to understand what the world is really like and what can be known about it. The Doctrine of Abstraction is the view that among ideas, i.e. those entities immediately perceived by means of the senses or the imagination, some are by their very nature general, applying, when they do, to many things at once. By contrast, Berkeley insists that all existing entities, including ideas, are intrinsically particular. As Berkeley sees it, his predecessors (notably Locke) take themselves to have discovered two ways of forming abstract ideas: what we might call ‘singling’ abstraction and ‘generalizing’ abstraction. By singling abstraction, we mentally separate one idea from others with which it is united in our experience. This is supposed to happen, for example, when we mentally separate colour from extension. By generalizing abstraction, we mentally separate one idea from its particular determinations, as when we think of a colour but no particular colour. Berkeley’s main argument against ideas formed by singling abstraction is that it is impossible to ‘conceive separately those qualities which it is impossible should exist so separated’: for example, if no sensible object can exist unperceived, then it is impossible to mentally separate the idea of a sensible object from the idea of its being perceived. His main argument against ideas formed by generalizing abstraction (but also against some ideas formed by singling abstraction, as when

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colour is supposedly mentally separated from extension) is that he ‘cannot by any effort of thought conceive’ them: for example, ‘whatever hand or eye I imagine, it must have some particular shape and colour’ (PI 10). Exactly how Berkeley supposes the Doctrine of Abstraction to be responsible for errors that have driven philosophers to scepticism is something that he discusses here and there in the main text of the Principles, and is something we will come back to.

Main text P 1–33 divides naturally into four parts. In P 1–7, Berkeley argues that all sensible objects (such as tables and chairs, as well as their sensible qualities, such as colour and shape) are ideas or collections of ideas, and that the only things in the worlds are minds and ideas. In P 8–21, Berkeley argues that materialism, the thesis that the world contains material substances, is necessarily false because the very concept of material substance is incoherent, that the Doctrine of Abstraction is at fault for making materialism seem philosophically palatable, and that materialism leads naturally to scepticism, as well as ‘numberless controversies and disputes’ in both philosophy (including natural philosophy, i.e. science) and religion. In P 22–23, Berkeley attempts what appears (erroneously, I believe) to be a self-standing argument (often called the ‘Master Argument’) for idealism. And, following a paragraph (P 24) summarizing the result of his anti-materialist arguments, Berkeley devotes P 25–33 to an argument for the existence of God.

Sections 1–7: The proof of idealism Berkeley tries three ways of establishing idealism in P 1–7. In P 1, he claims that sensible things (such as apples) are combinations or collections of sensible qualities (such as colour, taste, smell, shape and texture) and, presupposing that such qualities are just ideas, concludes that all the ‘objects of human knowledge are . . . ideas’. In P 3, he argues that idealism follows from the proper understanding of the meaning of the word ‘exists’. For, he argues, to say that a table exists when one is in its presence is to say that one perceives it (by sight or touch), and to say that a table exists when one is not in its presence is to say either that if one were in its presence one might perceive it or that some other mind perceives it (even while one is not oneself perceiving it). He concludes that the esse (or being) of sensible things (such as tables) is percipi (to be perceived), and hence that sensible things must be ideas. In P 4, he argues that sensible things (by definition)

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are ‘the things we perceive by sense’, that we do not perceive anything ‘besides our own ideas or sensations’, and hence that sensible things are no more than ideas or sensations. Each of these arguments is problematic, in ways that Berkeley almost certainly came to recognize. (It is worth remembering that Berkeley wrote the Principles when still a very young man.) Concerning the first argument, it is far from obvious that apples, say, are just collections of qualities. Berkeley’s opponents (including the followers of Aristotle (384–322 BCE ), René Descartes (1596– 1650) or Locke) would have said that apples are substances, things that have qualities, things in which qualities inhere. In addition, it is far from obvious that sensible qualities themselves (colour, shape and so on) are nothing but ideas, that they cannot exist unperceived. Interestingly, in the first of his Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (1713), published three years after the Principles and designed to ‘treat more clearly and fully of certain principles laid down in [the Principles], and to place them in a new light’ (3D: 167–68), Berkeley tries to solve this problem by providing explicit arguments for both of the premises of the argument in P 1, arguments that also underpin acceptance of the premises of the argument in P 4. As for the argument from P 3, Berkeley drops it and never once returns to it. Berkeley recognizes, of course, that hardly any of his predecessors accepts idealism. But he diagnoses this philosophical mistake as the product of unjustified adherence to the Doctrine of Abstraction (P 5). Acceptance of the possibility of singling abstraction suggests the possibility of mentally separating the idea of the existence of a sensible object from the idea of its being perceived. But Berkeley accepts that if the idea of X can be mentally separated from the idea of Y, then X and Y can exist apart in reality. So if the idea of a sensible object’s existing were mentally separable from the idea of its being perceived, then it would be possible in reality for a sensible object to exist unperceived, and hence idealism would be false. But if, as Berkeley has already argued in the Introduction, the Doctrine of Abstraction is false, then it can provide no reason for thinking that idealism is false. In P 2, Berkeley argues that the existence of ideas entails the existence of ‘something which knows or perceives them’, namely minds (spirits, souls, selves). He also takes himself to have shown the following by P 4: (i) that the entire sensible world is a world of ideas, (ii) that minds are substances (things that can exist independently of anything else, except perhaps for God), (iii) that ideas are not substances (because they depend for their existence on minds) and (iv) that the only possible substances must be either minds or among the things that

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minds perceive by sense. It then follows directly from (i)–(iv) that ‘there is not any other substance than spirit, or that which perceives’ (P 7). (This is a kind of substance-monism, the view that there is only one kind of substance. This view should be contrasted with Descartes’s substance-dualism, according to which there are two fundamentally different kinds of substances, immaterial minds and material bodies.) And if, for Berkeley, the only existing things are minds, ideas, and the things perceived by minds, it follows from idealism (the thesis that the things perceived by minds are ideas) that the only existing things are minds and ideas.

Sections 8–21: Against materialism In P 8–21, Berkeley criticizes the claim that the world contains material substances distinct from minds and their ideas. Berkeley’s targets are philosophers such as Locke, who hold that primary qualities, such as shape, size and motion, which resemble our ideas of them, exist in or are supported by an unthinking (material) substance, as well as philosophers such as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), who hold in addition that secondary qualities (such as colour, sound, taste, odor, cold and hot) are themselves ideas existing only in minds. Against the former, Berkeley insists on what has come to be known as the Likeness Principle, the claim that ‘an idea can be like nothing but an idea’ (P 8). It follows from this principle that if ideas of primary qualities resemble the qualities they represent, then those qualities must themselves be ideas, and hence cannot exist in an unthinking substance. Against the latter, Berkeley wields his denial of the Doctrine of Abstraction, holding that primary qualities are mentally inseparable from secondary qualities (so that, for example, it is impossible to conceive shape without colour). Given that the mental inseparability of qualities entails their inseparability in reality, Berkeley concludes that if secondary qualities exist only in minds, then primary qualities must exist only in minds too; thus, there is no reason to suppose that there is any unthinking substance external to the mind serving as a support to sensible qualities (P 10 and P 14–15). Besides, argues Berkeley, the very concept of material substance is selfcontradictory. For a material substance, by definition, is supposed to be an unthinking support of sensible qualities. But from the truth of idealism, which Berkeley takes himself to have already established in P 1–4, it follows that sensible qualities are ideas. And the only kind of thing capable of supporting an idea is a mind, or thinking thing. Hence, if material substances were unthinking supports of sensible qualities, it would follow that material substances are both

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unthinking and thinking (P 9). In addition, even leaving aside the truth of idealism, the claim that a material substance supports sensible qualities cannot be taken literally (’as when we say that pillars support a building’, P 16), and yet the non-literal way in which matter is supposed to serve as a support to sensible qualities is left unexplained. And if, as Locke suggests, the idea of material substance contains ‘the idea of being in general’ (in addition to the idea of supporting sensible qualities), then the idea of matter is abstract, and hence, as Berkeley has already argued in the Introduction, incomprehensible, indeed impossible (P 17). Furthermore, argues Berkeley, even if the idea of material substance were coherent and even if there actually were mind-independent material substances, it would be impossible for us to know of their existence. For knowledge must be grounded in either sense or reason. But the information sensation provides is limited to the entities immediately perceived by sense, namely ideas and their various combinations; hence, sensation on its own cannot provide us with any information about supposed material substances. And given that there is no necessary connection between ideas and material substances, that for all we know it would be possible for us (as in the case of a comprehensive hallucination) to have all the ideas we have now in the absence of any material substances, it follows that reason does not entitle us to infer the existence of material substance from the existence of the ideas we experience in sensation. Given that all knowledge is grounded in either sense or reason, it follows that we cannot know that material substances exist even if they do. Materialism, then, even if coherent, unavoidably leads to scepticism about the sensible world (P 18–20). By contrast, of course, if sensible objects are nothing but immediately perceived collections of ideas of sense, then, given that we can and do know (and indeed, know the very nature of) the objects of immediate perception, it follows from idealism that knowledge of the sensible world and of its nature is not only possible, but also actual. Idealism, then, unlike materialism, endorses the deliverances of common sense (for example, that there really is a hand in front of me as I type) and avoids the scourge of scepticism.

Sections 22–24: The master argument The master argument of P 22–23 is a response to a challenge to idealism that Berkeley imagines materialists might use in their own defence. The challenge is that it seems possible (indeed, easy) ‘to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and no body by to perceive them’ (P 23). But if this is

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possible, then given that what is conceivable is possible, it follows that it is possible for trees in a park and closeted books to exist unperceived. Yet, if idealism were true, then such trees and books would be ideas, and since the very esse of an idea is percipi (P 3), they could not exist unperceived. Berkeley attempts to meet the challenge by arguing that, despite appearances, it is actually impossible to imagine any physical object (such as a tree or a book) existing unperceived. Different scholars have offered different reconstructions of Berkeley’s argument here, the vast majority of the opinion that it is grossly fallacious. My own view is that it is a mistake to treat the argument as invalid, and that this mistake derives from the (understandable, but also mistaken) view (rashly suggested by Berkeley’s comment that he is ‘content to put the whole upon this issue’ (P 22)) that the argument is meant to be free-standing and independent of the argument for idealism in P 1 and P 4. Once it is recognized that the Master Argument assumes the truth of one of the premises used to establish idealism in these sections (namely, the assumption that everything conceived by the mind is an idea), it can be seen as valid, but also secondary in importance to the arguments of P 1–4, if only because it is not (as is widely assumed) an argument for idealism at all.

Sections 25–33: The proof of God’s existence Berkeley’s argument for God’s existence in the Principles starts from the assumption, based on mere introspection of our ideas as purely passive and inert, that ‘all our ideas . . . are visibly inactive, . . . so that one idea . . . cannot produce, or make any alteration in another’ (P 25). It follows that extension, shape and (most importantly) motion, having been shown in P 1–4 to be ideas themselves, cannot be the cause of anything, and hence cannot be the cause of our ideas. Yet where there is change, there must be a cause of change. Given that our ideas are constantly changing, it follows that something must be the cause of our ideas and of the changes they undergo (P 26). That cause cannot itself be an idea. But since there are in the world only substances and ideas, it follows that the cause of our ideas must be a substance. And since there can be no such thing as material substance, the cause of our ideas (and of the changes they undergo) must be ‘an incorporeal active substance or spirit’ (P 26). However, although I am able to imagine new ideas (such as the idea of a centaur) at will, ideas of sense, unlike ideas of imagination, are not subject to my will: if my eyes are open and in working order, I cannot help but see hands on the keyboard in front of me even if I will not to perceive them. Thus, although my mind may be the cause of my ideas of imagination, some other mind must be the cause of my

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ideas of sensation (P 28–29). But my ideas of sensation exhibit a remarkable ‘steadiness, order, and coherence’, as well as admirability. Given that only a mind of infinite power, wisdom and goodness could cause an immense set of interconnected beautiful ideas of such remarkable coherence and complexity, it follows that our ideas of sense are caused by such a mind, that is, it follows that our ideas of sense are caused by God (P 30–33; see also P 146). This argument for God’s existence is therefore a version of the standard teleological argument, with a serious idealist twist.

Sections 34–84: Objections and replies In P 34–84, Berkeley anticipates and responds to a significant number of objections to his idealist metaphysics and epistemology. Berkeley numbers these objections (with the same objection often taking up several consecutive sections), but sometimes includes two separate objections under the same number, and sometimes counts as an objection something that is not. The numbered list below reflects the logic of Berkeley’s argumentation, rather than his explicit numbering. The first objection Berkeley considers is that idealism entails the unpalatable consequence that physical objects, being nothing but collections of ideas, are not real but rather just ‘so many chimeras and illusions’ (P 34). By contrast, it might be alleged, materialism can make sense of the distinction between reality and illusion by treating reality as mind-independence while treating illusoriness as mind-dependence. Berkeley’s answer is that there is a very simple way of distinguishing between real and chimerical objects within his idealist metaphysics: an idea or collection of ideas counts as real inasmuch as it is ‘affecting, orderly, and distinct’, while an idea or collection of ideas counts as chimerical inasmuch as it is ‘faint, weak, and unsteady’ (P 36). This account of the distinction, as Berkeley emphasizes, preserves the commonsense belief that sensible objects (such as the sun, and in general ‘each part of the mundane system’) are real, while all imagined objects (such as centaurs and fictional characters) are chimerical. A second objection charges that ‘it sounds very harsh to say’, as Berkeley’s idealism avers, that ‘we eat and drink ideas, and are clothed with ideas’ (P 38). In response, Berkeley acknowledges the point, but attributes the harshness to the fact that the word ‘idea’ is not commonly used to refer to combinations of sensible qualities. Once it is recognized, as the arguments of P 1–4 presuppose, that sensible qualities are nothing but ideas and that sensible objects such as food, drink and clothing are nothing but combinations of sensible qualities, the truth, even if not the propriety, of the claim that ‘we eat and drink ideas, and are clothed with ideas’

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becomes manifest. Moreover, Berkeley maintains, the word ‘idea’ as he uses it means no more than ‘immediate object of (sense) perception’. So on this usage of the word ‘idea’, to say that we eat and drink ideas is to say no more than that we eat and drink things that are immediately perceived (by sense). And this is hardly a harsh statement that is grating to the common or philosophical ear (P 38). It should be noted that while the first point (relying on the distinction between the truth and the propriety of assertoric speech) is reasonable, the second is one that seems inconsistent with Berkeley’s approach to the establishment of idealism in the first of the Three Dialogues. For in the first Dialogue, Berkeley’s spokesman, Philonous, argues for idealism on the strength of four assumptions: (i) that sensible objects are perceived by sense, (ii) that everything that is perceived by sense is immediately perceived, (iii) that everything that is immediately perceived by sense is a sensible quality or collection of sensible qualities, and (iv) that all sensible qualities are ideas. But if the word ‘idea’, as Berkeley suggests at P 38, is just synonymous with the phrase ‘immediate object of (sense) perception’, then idealism would follow directly from (i) and (ii), and both (iii) and (iv) would be otiose. Given that the first Dialogue treats both (iii) and (iv) as critical premises in the argument for idealism, Berkeley must be assuming there that the claim that the immediate objects of sense perception are ideas is a substantive, rather than a tautological, proposition. A third objection to idealism is that whereas ideas, being in our minds, are ‘near to us’, many sensible things (such as houses and trees) are seen as being ‘at a distance from us’. In response, Berkeley makes two points. The first, very reasonable observation is that ‘in a dream we do oft perceive things as existing at a great distance off, and yet for all that, those things are acknowledged to have their existence only in the mind’ (P 42). Berkeley here notices that the proposition that sensible things are seen as being at a distance does not entail the proposition that sensible things are at a distance. The second point relies on arguments Berkeley had just published in An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), and to which he refers the reader. There he argues that seeing something as being at a distance is a matter of learning from experience which ‘ideas of touch will be imprinted in our minds’ after the perception of completely heterogeneous ideas of sight and the excitation of ‘this or that motion in our own bodies’ (P 44). For example, as Berkeley might say, to see a computer screen as being at some distance from me is to know that I will perceive ideas of tangible flatness and uniform resistance when I experience the kinaesthetic sensation of extending my hand in a particular direction. In support of this hypothesis, Berkeley notes that ‘a man born blind, and afterwards made to see, would not, at first sight, think

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the things he saw, to be without his mind, or at any distance from him’ (P 43). If Berkeley is right about what seeing something as being at a distance amounts to (namely, predicting which ideas of touch will follow upon which ideas of sight under such-and-such conditions), then seeing a tree, say, as being at some distance from me is perfectly compatible with the tree’s being no more than a collection of ideas in my mind. A fourth objection is that idealism entails the unacceptable consequence that sensible things ‘are every moment annihilated and created anew’. For if sensible things (such as the laptop screen I see) are nothing but collections of ideas, then they cease to exist when they are not perceived. And this means that ‘upon shutting my eyes [the screen] is reduced to nothing, and barely upon opening them it is again created’ (P 45). After some ad hominem attacks (in P 46–47) on some of his intellectual opponents for being forced to accept the same result as applied to some sensible things (such as light and colors), Berkeley answers the objection straightforwardly. The fact that I do not perceive the laptop screen when my eyes are closed does not entail that the screen has ceased to be, for it might well be that the screen is being perceived by another mind (P 48). Indeed, if, as Berkeley argues in the second of the Three Dialogues, all sensible things are perceived by God, then there is no doubt that the screen continues to exist even when it is unperceived by any finite mind. A fifth objection, which relies on Scholastic metaphysical assumptions, is that ‘if [as idealists aver] extension and figure [i.e. shape] exist only in the mind, it follows that the mind is extended and figured’. But, as Berkeley himself accepts, it is absurd to suppose that the mind is extended or figured. Hence, it is absurd to suppose that extension and figure are nothing but ideas in the mind. The Scholastics (and also Cartesians) argue for the first premise of this objection as follows: (i) extension is an attribute (roughly, a way for a substance to be that is essential to it) and shape is a mode (roughly, a way for a substance to be that is not essential to it), (ii) whenever an attribute or mode exists in a substance, it is predicated of that substance, (iii) to predicate F-ness of X is to say that X is F (e.g. to predicate strength of Socrates is to say that Socrates is strong); therefore (iv) if extension and figure exist in the mind, then the mind is extended and figured (P 49). In response, Berkeley attacks premises (i) and (ii), urging that ‘what philosophers say of subject and mode . . . seems very groundless and unintelligible’. Extension and shape are not ways for a body to be; rather, they are constituents of, or compose, bodies. For, as P 1–4 have already established, a body is no more than a collection of ideas such as extension and shape. Extension and shape, therefore, are parts or constituents of bodies, rather than modes or attributes of

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bodies. Moreover, extension and shape are not ways for a mind to be, and so predicable of it even when they exist in it. For extension and shape are ideas, ideas exist in minds only by being perceived by those minds, and the mere fact that X perceives Y does not entail that Y is predicable of X. A sixth objection is that ‘whatever advances have been made . . . in the study of Nature, do all proceed on the supposition, that . . . matter doth really exist’ (P 50). So if, as idealists claim, there is and can be no such thing as matter or material substance, then they must abjure the remarkably explanatorily successful corpuscularian mechanism at the heart of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Berkeley’s response to this objection is clear and straightforward: whatever phenomena can be explained on the supposition of corpuscularian mechanism can just as easily be explained on the basis of an idealist metaphysics. For scientific explanation, Berkeley claims, is no more than showing ‘why upon such and such occasions we are affected with such and such ideas’. For example, it might be argued that it is a law of nature that a heated gas expands. To Berkeley, this simply means that perception of the idea of heat and, say, the idea of a balloon filled with gas is invariably attended with perception of the balloon’s expansion. As long as every corpuscularian mechanistic explanation can be replaced by an equally successful explanation based on the generalization of an ideational sequence (i.e. on the instantiation of a law of nature), idealists do no worse than materialists in accounting for the results of scientific observation and experiment. A seventh objection is that idealism subverts our ordinary suppositions about causation. For example, we ordinarily say that ‘fire heats’ and ‘water cools’. But, strictly speaking, if idealism is true, then fire is one collection of ideas, and water another. Given that ideas, being inert and passive, are incapable of causing anything (P 25), it follows that fire cannot be the cause of heat and water cannot be the cause of cold. If spirits are the only active beings, then we must say instead that ‘a spirit heats, and so forth’. These results seem absurd on their face: surely it is the fire (not a mind) that does the heating and the water (not a mind) that does the cooling (P 51). Berkeley’s famous response is that ‘in such things [i.e. talk of what causes what] we ought to think with the learned, and speak with the vulgar [i.e. with the common folk]’ (P 51). Just as there is no harm in saying that the sun rises even though (on the Copernican hypothesis) it does not actually rise, so there is no harm in saying that fire heats or water cools even though it is acknowledged that, strictly speaking, only a spirit can heat or cool anything. The use of language is best suited to the ends of life, so if it advances our ends to speak as if sensible objects are causes, then such talk is appropriate even if it is false (P 52). Besides,

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argues Berkeley, idealism is superior to alternative occasionalist materialist systems, such as the theory of Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), which agree with idealism in robbing sensible objects of causal power; for occasionalist materialism must suppose that God has created a number of material substances to no purpose, given that it would have been just as easy for him to have produced directly what those material substances are held to occasion (P 53). An eighth objection is that the existence of matter is almost universally accepted, and it seems wrongheaded to suppose that so many people could be so wrong about this. In response, Berkeley makes two points. First, he argues that this would not be the only time that a vast number of people had accepted something that, properly considered, is meaningless or self-contradictory (P 54): witness the almost universal acceptance of the metaphysics of subject, mode and attribute for hundreds of years in the Schools. Second, he points out, quite reasonably, that universal acceptance of a proposition ‘is but a weak argument of its truth’, especially given the ‘vast number of prejudices and false opinions . . . every where embraced with the utmost tenaciousness’, both ‘by the unreflecting (which are the far greater) part of mankind’ and by ‘men of learning’. For example, the proposition that the Earth is at rest has been accepted by almost everyone who ever considered the matter, and yet the proposition is almost surely false (P 55). Berkeley goes on to explain how it might have come about that philosophers take the world to contain material substances. Philosophers, avoiding the ‘vulgar’ error of thinking that ideas can exist outside the mind, recognize, rightly, that their ideas of sense must be caused by something outside their minds. They then infer, wrongly, that the cause of their ideas must be material things that resemble their ideas, in part because their experience is so uniform that it does not lead them to think that their ideas are caused by someone’s will, and in part because the real cause of their ideas (namely, God) is not singled out in their experience ‘by any particular finite collection of sensible ideas’ (P 56–57). A ninth objection is that idealism is incompatible with the truths of science and mathematics. For idealism entails that whatever is not perceived does not exist; so, for example, if the motion of the Earth is not perceived, then the Earth does not move; and hence, given that we do not perceive the Earth to move, it follows that the Earth is at rest. But this result contradicts the best astronomical theory. Berkeley claims in reply that to say that the Earth moves is to assert a counterfactual conditional of the following sort: ‘if we were placed in such-andsuch circumstances, we would perceive the Earth to move’. And the truth of this counterfactual conditional is perfectly consistent with the result of conjoining idealism with the fact that we do not perceive the Earth’s motion.

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A tenth objection is that if, as Berkeley holds, God is the cause of all motion and other natural effects in the universe, what reason could he have had to create ‘an innumerable multitude of bodies and machines framed with the most exquisite art, which . . . serve to explain abundance of phenomena’, when he could have produced the same effects directly (P 60)? If no such reason can be found, then idealism entails that God acts without a purpose, a result that contradicts God’s providence. In reply, Berkeley insists (at P 62) that the vast and intricate assemblage of interconnected natural machinery is needed to produce effects in accordance with the laws of nature (rules that specify which ideas are regularly followed by which other ideas – P 30), laws that themselves make it possible for us ‘to regulate our actions for the benefit of life’ (P 31). There is therefore a relatively straightforward connection between God’s providence and his decision to create such a ‘wonderfully fine and subtle’ ‘clockwork of Nature’ (P 60). At this point in the Principles, Berkeley engages in an extended digression (P 67–81) on the question of whether there might not be a way to save materialism from the objections leveled at the doctrine at P 8–21. Berkeley imagines the materialist retreating, first to the claim that matter is an ‘inert senseless substance, that exists without the mind, or unperceived, which is the occasion of our ideas, or at the presence whereof God is pleased to excite ideas in us’ (P 67), and second to the claim that matter is ‘an unknown somewhat, neither substance nor accident, spirit nor idea, inert, thoughtless, indivisible, immoveable, unextended, existing in no place’ (P 80), but still something describable as a ‘quiddity, entity, or existence’ (P 81; original emphasis). In response, Berkeley provides further criticisms of the occasionalism presupposed by the first line of retreat, and ridicules the second line of retreat as involving the reduction of the idea of matter to the idea of nothingness, given that the positive ideas of quiddity, entity and existence (in general) are purportedly abstract ideas that are, in actual fact, inconceivable and impossible (see PI ). (In the first of the Three Dialogues, Berkeley collects the objections to materialism that exist separately at P 8–21 and P 67–81 into a single, sustained anti-materialist argument.) The eleventh and final objection Berkeley considers is that idealism is incompatible with Scriptural reports that real sensible objects exist and that miracles (such as the changing of water into wine) have taken place (P 82). Berkeley makes short work of this objection, pointing out that idealism is fully compatible with (indeed, entails) the claim that real sensible objects exist, and with the claim that Jesus transformed water into wine. After all, idealism entails that sensible objects are collections of ideas and, given that these ideas exist, it follows that sensible objects exist. And, according to idealism, to say that Jesus

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changed water into wine is to say that Jesus replaced one collection of ideas with another collection of ideas. Moreover, the water that Jesus changed, as well as the wine into which Jesus changed it, were both very real, inasmuch as the ideas of which they were composed were affecting, orderly and distinct (see P 34–36). The rest of the Principles is devoted to discussion of the advantages and consequences of idealism, considered relative to its major opponent, materialism. Berkeley divides his discussion into two main parts, each devoted to one of the two kinds of beings he takes to exist: ideas (P 85–134) and spirits (P 135–156). He begins the first part by pointing out two general advantages of idealism over materialism, one philosophical and the other theological: (i) that the former is inconsistent with, while the latter naturally leads to, scepticism about the existence and nature of sensible objects (P 85–91), and (ii) that the former avoids the atheism, idolatry and Christian heresies that are natural outgrowths of the latter (P 92–96). He then moves on to the advantages of idealism over materialism with respect to the theory of ideas and sensible objects in the realms of science (P 97–99, 101– 117), morals (P 100), arithmetic (P 118–122) and geometry (P 123–132), followed by a brief summary (P 133–134) of the main points argued for in P 85–132. In the second part (P 135–156) Berkeley also divides his discussion in two, first focusing on knowledge of the existence of finite spirits (P 135–145), and then addressing knowledge of the existence of the only infinite spirit, namely, God (P 146–156).

Sections 85–91: Philosophical advantages, and restatement, of idealism Materialism, as Berkeley reminds us, is beset with problems for which its adherents struggled to find solutions: ‘Whether corporeal substance can think? Whether matter be infinitely divisible? And how it operates on spirit?’ (P 85). Locke answers the first question positively, while Descartes answers it negatively. Descartes answers the second question positively, while Epicureans (such as Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655)) answer it negatively. And while materialist monists (such as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and staunch Epicureans) explain the operation of body on spirit (and vice versa) as involving the transfer of motion from one material substance to another, materialist dualists (including Descartes and Locke) throw up their hands when asked (as Descartes was asked by Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1630–1714)) to explain how an immaterial substance and a material substance are supposed to causally interact. As Berkeley emphasizes, idealism avoids all of these disturbing questions and debates inasmuch as it entails the non-existence, indeed, the impossibility, of matter (P 85 – see P 9).

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In the next few sections (P 86–88), Berkeley repeats the arguments of P 18–20 that materialism leads to scepticism. If material objects existing outside our minds can stay the same while our ideas of them vary, if it is possible for us to have ideas of material objects (as in dreams and hallucinations) that are not really there to be perceived, then it is possible for our senses to mislead us and, beyond that, it becomes impossible for us to know whether our ideas really conform to an external reality or even whether there is an external reality for our ideas to conform to (P 86–87). Besides, common sense teaches us to place total faith in our senses; and materialism, which leads us to distrust common sense, thereby ‘makes philosophy ridiculous in the eyes of the world’ (P 88). By contrast, of course, idealism, which teaches that sensible things are nothing more than ideas or collections thereof, entails that sensible things, like all ideas in our minds, are perfectly known, both as to their existence and as to their intrinsic properties. Berkeley then ends his discussion of the philosophical advantages of idealism over materialism by restating the main tenets of idealism (P 89–91): that there are two distinct kinds of things or beings, namely, spirits and ideas (see P 1–2); that the former are active, enduring, indivisible and independent beings (see P 27), while the latter are inert, fleeting, divisible and dependent beings (see P 25); that there are, in addition to things, relations and actions; that we know of our own existence ‘by inward feeling or reflexion’ and of the existence of other spirits ‘by reason’, i.e. by inferring their existence from the signs of their operations or from the ideas they produce in our minds (see P 145); that ‘an idea can be like nothing but an idea’ (see P 8), and hence that our ideas cannot resemble anything existing outside of all minds; that our ideas of sense are produced in us by another spirit in which they themselves exist (namely, God – see P 29–31), and in this way may be called ‘external’; and that even though sensible things are ideas or collections thereof, the fact that they depend on minds for their existence does not derogate from their reality (P 33–36).

Sections 92–96: Theological advantages of idealism In these sections, Berkeley argues that materialism, unlike idealism, conduces to atheism. For first, some materialists think that because nothing comes from nothing, God could not have created matter from nothing, and therefore matter must be ‘uncreated and coeternal with him’ (P 92). This contradicts the idea that God created the universe and that he is the only eternal, necessary being. Second, monistic materialists hold that because spirits are material and all material substances are divisible, spirits themselves must be divisible, and therefore

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‘subject to corruption as the body’, i.e. naturally mortal. Third, materialists (such as ‘Epicureans, Hobbists, and the like’) who take matter (a ‘self-existent, stupid, unthinking substance’) to be at the origin of life must deny the existence of any sort of providence or ‘inspection of a superior mind over the affairs of the world’ (P 93). By contrast, Berkeley holds, idealism does not conflict with the basic tenets of Christian theology. For idealists are not plagued by any worry about how matter could have been created, given that they deny the existence and possibility of matter; they hold that the mind is immaterial and indivisible, and thus incorruptible and naturally immortal (P 141); and the argument for God’s existence (at P 25–33) entails that God supervises the created universe with wisdom and benevolence. Berkeley also notes that materialism provides support for idolatry, i.e. the worship of sensible beings (such as ‘the sun, moon, and stars’), particularly if these things are thought to be the source or support of human life. By contrast, idealism tells us that sensible beings are nothing but collections of ideas in our minds created in us by God. Given that ideas are fleeting, dependent beings and that there is no pre-existing disposition to worship beings of this kind, idealism does not conduce to idolatry, but conduces rather to the worship of the cause of such a wondrous system of ideas, namely, God (P 94). Finally, Berkeley argues that materialism is difficult to reconcile with the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body after death, and also (in ways that Berkeley does not explain) conduces to Socinianism (a system of Christian heresies, including the denial of Christ’s full divinity, the denial of natural immortality, and the denial of the Trinity – three persons in one substance). For, in particular, if the human body is a material substance composed of matter that is scattered after death, possibly entering other human bodies, then it is difficult to understand how all of the matter composing a human body immediately before death could be collected to reshape it after death. By contrast, if, as idealism holds, the human body is nothing but a collection of ideas, then it becomes easy to understand how the very same body that existed in the mind of God before death could exist in the mind of God after death (P 95).

Sections 97–117: Advantages of idealism in science and morals Berkeley begins this part of the Principles by outlining the felicitous consequences of his denial of the Doctrine of Abstraction. He charges that this doctrine is responsible for numerous ‘difficulties’ (P 98) and ‘great extravagancies’ (P 99). In particular, Berkeley argues, the attempt to abstract the idea of time from the idea

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of a succession of ideas in our minds (something impossible, because what time is is the succession of ideas in our minds) leads to the natural but wrongheaded thought, famously articulated by Augustine of Hippo (354–430), that the nature of time is inexplicable (P 97). Other difficulties ensue if it is held, as many proponents of abstraction do, that time, extension, and motion are infinitely divisible (P 98–99). (We may presume here that Berkeley is thinking of Zeno’s paradoxes.) As for morality, Berkeley claims that the misguided attempt to form and analyse abstract ideas of happiness, goodness, justice and virtue (as in the work of Aristotle, Hobbes, and Locke) has made it more difficult to inculcate morality and has resulted in the befuddling of moralists, who, we may presume, would be better served studying concrete examples of moral behaviour, such as Christ’s actions as described in the New Testament (P 100). Berkeley now turns to more particular difficulties faced by materialists who want to make room for science. In his Essay, Locke writes that humans are incapable of scientific knowledge, in large part because the real internal constitution of any material substance (i.e. the primary qualities of the substance’s insensible parts that account for all of its observable properties) is beyond the ken of human beings. Berkeley picks up on this, noting that for the Lockean materialist ‘the internal qualities, and constitution of every the meanest object, is hid from our view’ (P 101). But whereas materialism cannot in fact make room for scientific knowledge, idealism can: for idealist science tells us that sensible things are all ideas, things that are in their very nature transparent to the human mind, and that the laws of nature are no more than the rules in accordance with which God excites ideas in our minds, rules that can be discovered by observation and experiment. Berkeley goes on to say that while mechanist materialists in particular struggle to explain how the motion of (insensible) matter causes the observable properties of sensible things, idealists who claim that motion is an idea (and hence, inactive) avoid the difficulty altogether (P 102). Berkeley recognizes that some materialists, such as Isaac Newton (1642– 1727), strive to explain the motion of some bodies (such as the tides and the fact that unsupported objects fall to Earth), as well as the cohesion of their parts, by postulating a universal law of attraction or gravitation. But this hypothesis faces two major problems. The first is that the law of attraction does not so much explain as simply redescribe the motion of bodies (P 103). The second is that attraction is not in fact a universal phenomenon: as counterexamples to the purported law, Berkeley cites three observations: the immobility of ‘the fixed stars’, ‘the perpendicular growth of plants’, and ‘the elasticity of the air’ (P 106).

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Setting himself against the popular research program of materialist corpuscularian mechanism, Berkeley insists that science should treat phenomena as signs, rather than as causes, of other phenomena, signs that God uses to inform us of what will be beneficial and what will be harmful to us. Properly conceived, then, science should investigate final causes, that is, the reasons or purposes lying behind God’s decision to cause the ideas he does, rather than the efficient causes hypothesized by materialists (P 107–109). Berkeley then completes his account of the relative advantages of idealism by outlining (in P 110–117) some of the problems faced by the theory that Newton had advanced in his Principia, the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, published in 1687. The theory of the Principia assumes the existence of absolute space, absolute place (position in absolute space) and absolute motion (motion of a body from one absolute place to another), as well as absolute time (already discussed under the rubric of the abstract idea of time at P 97–98). But, so Berkeley argues, the ideas of absolute motion and place, if abstracted from ideas of relative motion and place, are, like all abstract ideas, incomprehensible and impossible (P 114), as is the idea of absolute space ‘exclusive of all body’ (P 116). Here, then, is yet another place in which the Doctrine of Abstraction leads even the most gifted scientific investigators into a conceptual morass from which their theories cannot be extricated.

Sections 118–134: Advantages of idealism in arithmetic and geometry Turning now to mathematics, Berkeley explains some of the relative advantages of idealism over materialism, first in arithmetic, the study of number (P 118– 122), and then in geometry, the study of extension (P 123–132). The main problems arising in arithmetic derive from the Doctrine of Abstraction, which leads mathematicians (and philosophers, such as Locke) to believe that it is possible to abstract the idea of unity from any particular idea or collection of ideas, and thence form abstract ideas of numbers greater than one by repeating the idea of unity. But, of course, as Berkeley has already argued (see PI and P 13), the Doctrine of Abstraction is false and the purported abstract idea of unity necessarily non-existent (P 119–120). As Berkeley then goes on to argue, arithmetic is a language composed of names that are used to signify particular things or groups of things, a language whose usefulness derives from the rules of computation with numerals and other arithmetical notation that enable us to derive practical results that ‘direct us how to act with relation to things, and dispose rightly of them’ (P 121–122).

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In the case of geometry, the main problem arises from the Euclidean supposition that finite extension is infinitely divisible. This supposition, as Berkeley has already argued in P 98–99, leads to what he here refers to as ‘amusing geometrical paradoxes, which have such a direct repugnancy to the plain common sense of mankind’, possibly including the Zenonian argument that it is impossible for an arrow to cover a finite distance in a finite period of time (P 123). What, then, accounts for the problematic supposition? Berkeley gives a twofold explanation. First, he charges that those who think they can construct an abstract, rarified idea of extension ‘may be persuaded’ of a finite extension’s infinite divisibility. Second, he charges that corpuscularian materialists may ‘be brought to admit’ that any given finite length has infinitely many parts ‘too small to be discerned’ (P 125). This provides Berkeley with yet another reason to characterize the effects of abstractionism and materialism on the seemingly well-founded discipline of geometry as intellectually pernicious. Berkeley then offers an interesting account of how those who are tempted by the Doctrine of Abstraction arrive at the conviction that finite extension is infinitely divisible. He begins by noting that geometrical reasoning treats particular finite lengths (such as an inch) as signs or representatives of much longer finite lengths (such as a mile). He then hypothesizes that abstractionists fail to distinguish between signifier and signified, and thereby come to see relatively short finite lengths as containing many more parts than can be discerned by sense. It is then but a short step to the conclusion that even the shortest finite length is divisible into infinitely many parts (P 126–128), and indeed to the even more absurd conclusion that each of the infinitesimally small parts of a given finite length is itself ‘subdivisible into an infinity of other parts’ (P 130). But, as Berkeley notes, the fact that the purported axiom of infinite divisibility is logically independent of the other axioms of Euclidean geometry entails that it ‘may be pared off ’ from the rest of the system ‘without prejudice to truth’, and without losing ‘whatever is useful in geometry and promotes the benefit of human life’ (P 131). Moreover, as Berkeley avers (without evidence), there is no theorem of geometry that requires for its proof the supposition of extension’s infinite divisibility (P 132).

Sections 135–145: Idealism and the knowledge of finite spirits Berkeley argues that idealism is superior to materialism in respect of the possibility of knowledge of one’s own mind. A mind or spirit, so Berkeley has already argued, is, by its very nature, an ‘active thinking substance’, a substance

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that ‘knows or perceives [ideas], and exercises divers operations, as willing, imagining, remembering about them’ (P 136 and P 2). Indeed, Berkeley adds, what the word ‘spirit’ means is ‘that which thinks, wills, and perceives’ (P 138); hence a spirit is something whose very existence consists in ‘perceiving ideas and thinking’ (P 139 – see also P 98). Most materialists, Berkeley claims, think that knowledge in general is representational, that knowledge of X is possible only if one perceives an idea of X. (Locke, for example, claims in Book IV of the Essay that knowledge of X’s existence involves perception of an agreement between an idea of X and the idea of existence, while knowledge that X is F involves perception of an agreement between an idea of X and the idea of F-ness.) Most materialists, then, are committed to the view that knowledge of a mind (whether of its existence or of its properties) is possible only when one has an idea that represents it. But, as Berkeley emphasizes, materialists have struggled to identify ideas that represent spirits (P 137). This, as it turns out, is no surprise: for, by the Likeness Principle (P 8), it is impossible for an idea to resemble anything but an idea; hence, because representation presupposes resemblance, it is impossible for an idea to represent anything but an idea; and, therefore, since minds are not ideas, it is impossible for an idea to represent a mind (P 135 – see also P 27 and P 89). It follows that the materialist is committed to the impossibility of selfknowledge. By contrast, Berkeley holds that self-knowledge is possible, indeed actual, for ‘we comprehend our own existence by inward feeling or reflexion’ (P 89). Berkeley anticipates an objection based on a theory of meaning that had become standard among materialists, and had been championed by Locke in particular. This is the theory that the meaning of any categorematic term (i.e. a term belonging to one of the ten categories of Aristotelian philosophy of language: substance, quantity, quality, relatives, somewhere, sometime, being in a position, having, acting and being acted upon) is an idea that represents the term’s referent. If this ideational theory of meaning is true, then terms referring to minds are meaningless if, as Berkeley claims, ideas cannot represent minds (P 139). But, of course, as everyone allows, terms referring to minds are meaningful. Berkeley’s response, admittedly not stated in the clearest terms at P 139–140, but stated quite clearly and forcefully in the Introduction, is to reject the ideational theory of meaning, hook, line and sinker. For the ‘chief . . . end of language’, Berkeley writes, is not ‘the communicating of ideas marked by words’, but rather ‘the raising of some passion, the exciting to, or deterring from an action, [or] the putting the mind in some particular disposition’. Thus, ‘when a Schoolman tells me Aristotle hath said it, all I conceive he means by it, is to dispose me to embrace

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his opinion with the deference and submission which custom has annexed to that name’ (PI 20). But what, then, on Berkeley’s view, is the meaning of the word ‘I’? In the Principles, Berkeley offers us an answer to this question that might seem initially unsatisfactory. What he says is that the meaning of ‘I’ is not an idea, but rather a notion, of my mind (P 142). This seems like trifling with words, a mere matter of replacing one word (‘idea’) with another (‘notion’), without explanation. But, in fact, the claim needs to be understood against the background of Berkeley’s theory of meaning, according to which the meaning of a word such as ‘I’ consists in the use of the word to elicit passions (‘I’m disappointed in you!’), deter actions (‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you!’), and so on. Berkeley emphasizes that knowledge of the existence of other minds is not acquired in the way that knowledge of the existence of one’s own mind is acquired: whereas inward feeling or reflexion is sufficient for the latter sort of knowledge, only reason can provide us with the former sort of knowledge (P 89). The justification for belief in the existence of other minds (including God) consists in an inference to the best explanation of ‘several motions, changes, and combinations of ideas’ in one’s experience (P 145). As Berkeley argues, changes in our ideas that are produced according to regular, predictable patterns for our benefit (i.e. the laws of nature) are incontrovertible evidence of the existence of an infinite mind (P 29–31 – see also P 146). We may reasonably presume, then, that what Berkeley takes to be sufficient evidence for the existence of other finite minds consists in changes in our ideas that are irregular, unpredictable, and sometimes gratuitously harmful.

Sections 146–156: Idealism and knowledge of God Berkeley ends the Principles, fittingly from his perspective, with a discussion of the most important piece of knowledge in the idealist system, namely, knowledge of the existence of God. His aim is twofold: (i) to explain why ‘the existence of God is far more evidently perceived than the existence of men’ (P 147), and (ii) to produce the rudiments of a theodicy, an explanation of how it is possible for God to be the cause of a world that appears full of imperfection and pain. The first point is straightforward. Berkeley holds that both finite spirits and God are known through their ‘effects or concomitant signs’ (P 145). But whereas there are relatively few concomitant signs of finite spirits (namely, ‘the motion of the limbs’ of the bodies that ‘serve to mark [them] out unto us’ – P 147–148), the effects produced by God ‘are infinitely more numerous and considerable, than

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those ascribed to human agents’ (P 147). For, as Berkeley reminds us, ‘every thing we see, hear, feel, or any wise perceive by sense [is] a sign or effect of the Power of God’ (P 148). It follows, then, that ‘nothing can be more evident to any one that is capable of the least reflexion, than the existence of God’ (P 149). The second point is that the apparent imperfections and real pain that exist in the world are not inconsistent with the being and attributes of God. Berkeley recognizes that the production of natural things is often ‘slow and gradual’, and that nature is full of ‘monsters, untimely births, fruits blasted in the blossom, [and] rains falling in desert places’ (P 151). But, he argues, in order to bring about his perfect providential aims, God has ordained that nature be governed by simple and general laws with necessary byproducts that give the appearance of imperfection when narrowly considered (P 151). Moreover, the existence of some blemishes and defects in nature is required to ‘augment the beauty of the rest of the creation, as shades in a picture serve to set off the brighter and more enlightened parts’ (P 152). As for pain, Berkeley argues that ‘in the state we are in at present [it] is indispensably necessary to our well-being’, and, besides, pain that may strike us as evil when considered independently of its relation to other things (as when a leg is amputated – not Berkeley’s example) will come to be seen as good ‘when considered as linked with the whole system of beings’ (as when it becomes clear that amputation is necessary to save a human being from a potentially fatal case of gangrene) (P 153). Berkeley then concludes the Principles by emphasizing that recognition of God’s existence and the ‘holy fear’ of his power to punish us for transgressing his moral laws serves as ‘the strongest incentive to virtue’, hopefully thereby achieving his two main aims in writing the work, promotion of ‘the consideration of God, and our duty’ (P 155–6; original emphasis).

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Three Dialogues between Hylas, Philonous and the Sceptic Tom Stoneham

I am farthest from scepticism of any man. Berkeley, NB 563

Nay, I will proceed so far with him, if he still persists to charge me of the want of this, as to uphold against him that he himself is the man who is guilty of the scepticism of denying the existence of all visible objects; nay, that he cannot shew another in the world, besides Mr. Berkeley and myself, who hold the testimony of sense to be infallible as to this point. Collier, Letter to Low, 8 March 1713/4 1. It is clear from the most cursory reading of George Berkeley’s works that throughout his life he took atheism and scepticism to be moral and intellectual vices with the potential to wreak havoc in civil society. While happy acceptance of these labels was restricted to those who also identified themselves as ‘freethinkers’ – that is as willing to challenge custom and tradition in manners, morals and metaphysics – both atheism and scepticism are formally just philosophical theses that may be reached on the basis of better or worse arguments. Hence it became Berkeley’s philosophical project to provide compelling arguments for a system that entailed the falsity of both atheism and scepticism.1 The project officially launched with the publication of A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge in 1710, the subtitle of which is: ‘Wherein the Chief Causes of Error and Difficulty in the Sciences, with the grounds of Scepticism, Atheism, and Irreligion, are inquired into’. In that work, however, scepticism plays a minor role with just one short substantive discussion (P 86–9), the remainder of the references being largely pejorative and adding little to

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the argument. But in Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) the engagement with the sceptic becomes the over-riding dialectical device, to the extent that in the third edition of 1734, bound together with a reprinting of the Principles, the subtitle is reduced to ‘In Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists’.2 Clearly Berkeley thought the label ‘sceptic’ would have just as much significance for his readership as the label ‘atheist’, that is that they would know what he was talking about and agree with him that scepticism was a bad thing. But this bears further investigation, for there is at least one well-known sceptical author, Michel de Montaigne, whose work was very influential throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and would have been owned by many of the people that Berkeley was expecting to buy his books. Montaigne had seen his way through scepticism to an apparently orthodox religious position, which was for some time accepted by the church (at least, many French anti-Calvinists) (Popkin, 2003, p. 66ff ). Montaigne had realized that the Pyrrhonist aporia meant that one should just go along with whatever seemed right to one (Sextus, I.19– 21) and, as someone brought up in orthodox Christianity, his scepticism gave him no grounds for challenging those appearances: ‘we are Christians by the same title as we are either Perigordians or Germans’ (Montaigne II .12, p. 161). Similarly, Pierre Gassendi had developed a sceptical position that was intended to be intellectually respectable and religiously orthodox. Hence there were wellknown examples of sceptical positions that did not appear to threaten morals and society in the way Berkeley feared. We need to understand exactly what Berkeley had in mind. In this chapter I will examine presence of scepticism in the Three Dialogues in the light of the likely understanding that Berkeley would have had of sceptical positions and arguments. My project then is almost exactly that undertaken by Richard Popkin in his famous ‘Berkeley and Pyrrhonism’ (1951), though it will be both narrower in scope, concentrating on just the one text of Berkeley’s, and wider in scope, drawing upon more sceptical sources than Popkin’s almost exclusive focus on Pierre Bayle. We can immediately see the value of this approach by considering Popkin’s discussion of Berkeley’s ‘definition’ of scepticism: First of all, what did Berkeley mean by scepticism? This doctrine is defined either explicitly or implicitly in the Philosophical Commentaries [Notebooks], the Principles, and the Dialogues. Altogether Berkeley attributes three doctrines to the sceptics: (1) the sceptic doubts everything; (2) the sceptic doubts the validity [sic] of sensible things; (3) the sceptic doubts the existence of real objects like bodies or souls. These three different views constitute the core of the sceptical

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view for Berkeley. The second and third are corollaries of the first, and were for Berkeley the most interesting features of the position. 1951, pp. 226–7

Popkin gives sources for (1)–(3) from the Notebooks, the correspondence with Percival, the Principles and the Three Dialogues.3 But if we concentrate on the explicit definition in the Three Dialogues, we see that there is something rather odd about Popkin’s account: he is trying to force on Berkeley a definition of scepticism which is rather more in line with traditional accounts of scepticism than the text supports. Hylas actually says: Hylas . . . I said indeed, that a sceptic was one who doubted of every thing; but I should have added, or who denies the reality and truth of things. 3D 173

Notice that Hylas has started with Popkin’s (1) but here adds a further condition, namely a denial, whereas Popkin’s (2) and (3) are further doubts.4 It is quickly established that the things in question are ‘sensible things’ and that ‘denying the real existence of sensible things is sufficient to denominate a man a sceptic’ (3D 173). The context for this addition is Philonous pointing out that with just the doubt-condition for scepticism, neither materialist nor immaterialist would count as sceptics because ‘He then that denieth any point, can no more be said to doubt of it, than he who affirmeth it with the same degree of assurance’ (3D 173). Furthermore, denying the existence of anything is certainly not a corollary of doubting everything, so it is quite clear that Berkeley intends his definition of scepticism to be broader than merely the traditional characterization of Pyrrhonism. We might reasonably wonder why Berkeley thought his readers would accept this. After all, even a fairly superficial reading of Book I of Sextus’s Hypostases would reveal that denying the existence of something is dogmatism not scepticism, and that work was widely available by 1713 in Latin (Stephanus, 1562), Greek (Chouet, 1621) and English (Stanley, 1656/1687). Popkin thinks that Berkeley is drawing on Bayle, e.g.: The ‘new’ philosophers . . . have so well understood the bases of suspension of judgement with regard to sounds, smells, heat, cold, hardness, softness, heaviness and lightness, tastes, colours, and the like, that they teach that all these qualities are perceptions of our soul and that they do not exist at all in the objects of our senses. Zeno of Elea, Remark G, pp. 364–5

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However, Bayle was careful to say, precisely where I have put ellipses in the above quotation, ‘although they are not sceptics’; so while Bayle may be a source for some aspects of Berkeley’s thought about scepticism, he is not an authority for the extension of the definition to denials of existence. To find that authority and thus an explanation of why Berkeley might have expected his readers to accept the extended definition, we need to go to an often overlooked source for early modern understandings of scepticism, namely Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers. While there is no evidence that Berkeley had read this by 1713 (though he had by 1745 since he makes two references in Siris), the work had been widely available in Latin since the late fifteenth century, was often cited by Montaigne, Thomas Stanley and Bayle, and had been translated into English in 1688/96 (’by several hands’).5 We can then reasonably assume that Berkeley knew it himself6 and expected his readers to know it as well. And in the chapter on Pyrrho we find the following passage, which is striking in the present context, where Diogenes lists some others who have been called sceptics: ‘and Zeno [of Elea] because he would destroy motion, saying “A moving body moves neither where it is nor where it is not”; Democritus because he rejects qualities, saying, “Opinion says hot or cold, but the reality is atoms and empty space”’ (p. 485).7 Thus Berkeley is neither focusing exclusively on doubt, as Popkin claims, but nor is he being idiosyncratic in his extension of the definition to include denials of existence. Insofar as Berkeley’s readers would have been familiar with Diogenes Laertius, they would have been familiar with his brand of scepticism. 2. The extended definition of scepticism is crucial to the dialectic of, and provides most of the drama in, the Three Dialogues. The doctrine makes its first appearance in the Preface,8 where it is closely allied to ‘paradoxes’: Upon the common principles of philosophers, we are not assured of the existence of things from their being perceived. And we are taught to distinguish their real nature from that which falls under our senses. Hence arise scepticism and paradoxes. . . . We spend our lives in doubting of those things which other men evidently know, and believing those things which they laugh at, and despise. 3D 167

Here the sceptic is characterized as claiming we do not know things that we think we do (either because they are false or because we lack the means of knowing) whereas the paradox-monger is claiming to know something others take to be obviously false, hence ‘the affected doubts of some philosophers, and fantastical conceits of others’ (3D 172). We see the paradoxes come in to play

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when Hylas gives a mechanistic explanation of sound and Philonous responds: ‘But can you think it no more than a philosophical paradox, to say that real sounds are never heard, and that the idea of them is obtained by some other sense’ (3D 183). Now, at this point we have the ideal materials for a Pyrrhonist to bring about epoche: there are two ‘opposing accounts’ of sound, that of ordinary experience and that of the mechanistic science, and they seem ‘equipollent’ (Sextus I.8). The ‘account’ of sound based on ordinary experience is that the sound of a violin being played in the next room is part of the real, extra-mental9 world and has its auditory characteristics essentially. The mechanistic account, in contrast, is that the real, extra-mental world contains ‘merely a vibrative or undulatory motion in the air’ (3D 182) produced by the playing of the violin. These motions may cause auditory ideas within the minds of perceivers, but those ideas are not part of extra-mental reality. Hylas, however, doesn’t seem to find the two accounts equipollent and prefers the mechanistic account of what is real, even if that means accepting ‘that sounds have no real being without the mind’ (3D 182). In twentieth-century terms, when his attempted reductive account is shown to fail, he merely re-categorizes it as eliminativist. Which is to say, Hylas takes the common sense, experiential account of sounds to be what they would be like if they were to exist without the mind, and the mechanistic account to be correct as to what in fact exists (in extra-mental reality). The mechanistic account of the phenomena, by conflicting with the way the world is experienced to be, creates a complicated set of options for the philosopher, which Berkeley is exploring through the dialectical move of rejecting paradoxes. If both accounts are equipollent, then Pyrrhonian epoche follows. But if they are not equipollent, then, because each makes a claim both about what exists and what its nature is (‘after what manner you suppose it to exist, or what you mean by its existence’ (3D 222), there are several options:

(1) Experience is right about what exists and mechanism is right about its nature = the paradox that real sounds are not heard but felt, which is rejected by Hylas as too paradoxical. (2) Experience is right about the nature of the phenomena (e.g. sound) but mechanism is right about what really exists without the mind = Hylas’s eliminativism. (3) The mechanistic account is right on both counts, i.e. there are no sounds without the mind, only motions = veil of perception realism (e.g. 3D 192; cf. 3D Second Dialogue passim). (4) Experience is right on both counts = Berkeley’s immaterialism.

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Thus the unacceptability of the paradoxical position, that real sounds are not heard, becomes a tool to force the mechanist to choose between denying the reality of the phenomena (2 and 3) such as sounds and denying the reality of the material world (4). Despite both alternatives involving the denial of the existence of something, in the Three Dialogues this choice is not presented in such neutral terms but as that between scepticism and common sense. The point is not that common sense must be preserved at all costs, but that it is clearly better than scepticism or paradox. While Hylas insists that ‘the reality of things cannot be maintained without supposing the existence of matter’ (3D 224), Philonous is intent on showing that supposing the existence of matter, even though that avoids the Pyrrhonian epoche, leads to the unacceptable scepticism. I turn next to how this is achieved. 3. The book opens with Hylas expressing an opinion that we can imagine Berkeley heard several times in reaction to the Principles:10 ‘What! Can any thing be more fantastical, more repugnant to common sense, or a more manifest piece of scepticism, than to believe there is no such thing as matter?’ (3D 172). Philonous picks up particularly on the charge of scepticism and sets about clarifying the terms of the debate, concluding: ‘Shall we therefore examine which of us it is that denies the reality of sensible things, or professes the greatest ignorance of them; since, if I take you rightly, he is to be esteemed the greatest sceptic?’ (3D 173).11 The real interest, however, is not the definition but how it is employed. Here the strategy is to show that the combination of his materialism and a series of facts about perceptual experiences forces Hylas into a position he must regard as sceptical by the definition. The first move, as ever, is crucial: Hylas is asked what he means by the ‘reality of sensible things’ which the sceptic is said to deny, and insists: ‘I mean a real absolute being, distinct from, and without any relation to their being perceived’ (3D 175). We saw this distinction at work when we analysed the paradox of the real sound not being heard, with the contrast being between ideas in the mind and the material causes of those ideas. While the early modern materialists Berkeley is primarily arguing against in the Three Dialogues were certainly committed to that, all that is actually needed here is the much more general distinction between appearance and truth that we find in Sextus, who opens the Hypostases with a tripartite division of philosophies into the Dogmatic, the Academic and the Sceptical: ‘in the case of philosophical investigations, too, some have said that they have discovered the truth, some have asserted that it cannot be apprehended, and others are still investigating [i.e. they have no opinion about the truth]’ (I.2).12

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But Sextus is at great pains to point out that this truth, which the Dogmatists claim to have discovered, the Academics declared inaccessible and the Sceptics remain silent upon, is distinct from the appearances, with which the Sceptic is entirely comfortable: ‘in uttering these [sceptical slogans] they say what is apparent to themselves and report their own feelings without holding opinions, affirming nothing about external objects’ (I.15; cf. I.19–20, 192–3, 208).13 Thus the Sceptic has the same starting point as the Dogmatist, namely a desire to find the truth, and the same contrast between such truths about the reality and nature of external objects, and mere appearances. Where they differ is that the Sceptic finds the process of enquiry produces not belief or opinion but puzzlement (aporia) and suspension of judgement (epoche), but only with respect to truth. The appearances remain untouched or, to be more precise, each person’s appearances remain untouched for them, because they are neither true nor false in this sense. At the start of the second dialogue Hylas admits to being an ‘arrant sceptic’ (3D 210) by the criteria set out for the debate in the first dialogue, namely he has denied the reality of sensible things. He then proceeds to insist that for all that, there must be some material world, pushing himself towards the position of the ‘Academic’ who asserts that there are truths we do not apprehend. Philonous dispatches these attempts to defend a fairly extreme version of the ‘veil of perception’ realism, resulting in Hylas starting the third dialogue facing a sort of ‘crise pyrrhonienne’ (Popkin, 1951, p. 232):14 Hylas Truly my opinion is, that all our opinions are alike vain and uncertain. What we approve to-day, we condemn tomorrow. We keep a stir about knowledge, and spend our lives in the pursuit of it, when, alas! we know nothing all the while: nor do I think it possible for us ever to know any thing in this life. Our faculties are too narrow and too few. Nature certainly never intended us for speculation. 3D 227

Clearly Hylas has not found the tranquility of a Sextus or Montaigne, but what has gone wrong? One interpretation, championed by Myles Burnyeat (e.g. 1982, p.28), is that in a post-Cartesian context, appearances have been reified into ideas, and thereby become objects of knowledge in themselves.15 We can see this in Bayle’s description of how Cartesianism goes beyond Pyrrhonism: ‘Today the new philosophy speaks more positively. Heats, smells, colours, and the like, are not in the objects of our senses. They are modifications of my soul. I know that bodies are not at all as they appear to me’ (Pyrrho, Remark B, p. 197).

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Thus Hylas is left in the frustrating position of having knowledge of his mind, by knowing how things appear, but not of the world – knowledge is in principle something the human mind can achieve, just not about the external world: Hylas . . . All you know, is, that you have such a certain idea or appearance in your own mind. But what is this to the real tree or stone? I tell you, that colour, figure, and hardness, which you perceive, are not the real natures of those things, or in the least like them. The same may be said of all other real things or corporeal substances which compose the world. They have none of them any thing in themselves, like those sensible qualities by us perceived. We should not therefore pretend to affirm or know any thing of them as they are in their own nature. 3D 227

There is, of course, some truth in this and it is crucial for Berkeley’s avoidance of the problems he has dealt to Hylas that the sensible qualities are objects of knowledge. However, as a diagnosis of what is holding Hylas back from tranquility it is not quite right and nor is it the one that Berkeley himself offers.16 When Philonous comes to summarize Hylas’s predicament, he says: Philonous It seems then we are altogether put off with the appearances of things, and those false ones too. The very meat I eat, and the cloth I wear, have nothing in them like what I see and feel. 3D 228

The problem is not that the appearances are ideas and thus objects of knowledge, but that they are – all of them – misleading as to the truth Hylas was seeking. It is perfectly possible to hold the view that appearances are misleading without reifying them into ideas and treating them as a separate realm of knowledge. The key to Pyrrhonian tranquility is to stick with appearances and have no opinion whether they are misleading or not (for that would entail an opinion about external reality). This is what Hylas fails to achieve. Berkeley’s solution, as is well-known, is to change the terms of the enquiry and deny that real existence – and thus truth – is distinct from appearance: ‘To be plain, it is my opinion, that the real things are those very things I see and feel, and perceive by my senses. These I know, and finding they answer all the necessities and purposes of life, have no reason to be solicitous about any other unknown beings’ (3D 229). The esse is percipi principle, which this passage introduces is that the being, the real existence, of sensible things consists in their being perceived. The power of this principle, the reason Berkeley thought it so original, is that it not only

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undermines dogmatic materialism, but also Hylas’s crise pyrrhonienne and genuine Pyrrhonism. For if the nature and truth of things consists in appearances, then the very project of philosophical enquiry that is common to those three positions, namely the search for truth, both starts and ends with the appearances. Like the Pyrrhonian, Berkeley is satisfied with just stating the appearances, but unlike the Pyrrhonian, he thinks this is not a way of leaving the enquiry unfinished but an actual discovery. The appearances are the truth and reality of things. Stanley translates the opening sentence of the Hypostases as: ‘It is likely, that they who seek, must either find, or deny they have or can find, or persevere in the enquiry’ (1687, p.  776). Berkeley is pointing out a fourth option: one might declare the object sought illusory, unseekable, a dangerous fantasy. However, while this move does cut off both dogmatism and Pyrrhonism, dialectically it is only effective against someone suffering la crise pyrrhonienne like Hylas. The dogmatist will, of course, not accept that the discoveries he has made are in fact illusory. So his dogmatism must first be undermined with sceptical arguments. But care must be taken not to engender Pyrrhonism, for this sceptic has found tranquility without finding what is sought, and is thus going to be indifferent to whether the project of enquiry was a misguided search for the unseekable – it has had the right effect whether misguided or not and he has no opinions about such matters. Thus Berkeley’s argument in the Three Dialogues turns upon having just the right amount and not too much scepticism; he needs to exploit the power of the sceptical arguments while avoiding the end they were intended to produce. A medical analogy from Sextus seems appropriate: ‘The chief witness to this argument is what is observed in the case of medicinal powers: here the accurate mixing of simple drugs makes the compound beneficial, but sometimes when the smallest error is made in the weighing it is not only not beneficial but extremely harmful and often poisonous’ (I.133).17 One of the striking differences between the Principles and the Three Dialogues is the lengthy discussion of perceptual phenomena in the first dialogue. We can now see that this is not just a matter of making explicit what Berkeley thought his readers already accepted. Rather he needs to ensure that their understanding of these phenomena is precisely balanced to undermine dogmatism without engendering Pyrrhonism. We now turn to an examination of how Berkeley achieves this. 4. There is one passage in the first dialogue where it seems certain Berkeley is drawing directly on Sextus to the point of paraphrase:

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For instance, people with jaundice say that what appears white to us is yellow, and people with bloodsuffusion in the eye say that such things are blood-red. Since, then, the eyes of some animals are yellow, of others blood-shot or white or some other colour, it is likely, I think, that their grasp of colours is different. . . . It is surely far more reasonable, given that animals’ eyes contain mixtures of different humours, that they should also get different appearances from existing objects. I.44/4618

In the jaundice, every one knows that all things seem yellow. Is it not therefore highly probable, those animals in whose eyes we discern a very different texture from that of ours, and whose bodies abound with different humours, do not see the same colours in every object that we do? 3D 185

Sextus is clear that the modes (or ‘places’ in Stanley) are not arguments aiming to bring about acceptance of a proposition, but ways of bringing about suspension of judgement. These passages are from the first mode, which seemed to have an extraordinary impact on the early modern imagination,19 where Sextus lists many differences between animals – how they reproduce, how they perceive and their preferences and aversions – with the intention of undermining our confidence that our senses reveal the objects as they really are. He is not trying to persuade us that we mis-perceive colours and the cat or the rat get it right, but instead to settle with ‘this is how it seems to me’ and have no opinion about what the real colours are. In contrast, Philonous encourages Hylas to draw a conclusion and a strikingly different one: ‘From all20 which, should it not seem to follow, that all colours are equally apparent, and that none of those which we perceive are really inherent in any outward object?’ (3D 185). [N.B. Berkeley does note perceptual relativity examples cannot show objects have no one true colour in Principles 15.] As we saw in the last section, persuading Hylas that he is committed to all appearances being illusory is crucial to achieving the delicate balance of undermining dogmatism and avoiding Pyrrhonism. To see how Berkeley achieves this, we need to go back to the beginning of the discussion of colours. Here Philonous introduces the example of the clouds at dawn: Philonous What! are then the beautiful red and purple we see on yonder clouds, really in them? Or do you imagine they have in themselves any other form, than that of a dark mist or vapour? 3D 184

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Now, to a close reader of Sextus, this might look like an instance of the fifth mode ‘depending on positions and intervals and places’ (I.118) in which the oar in water and the pigeon’s neck both appear.21 But instead of treating it like that, Philonous lets Hylas develop a criterion22 for which perceived colour is the real colour (those ‘discovered by the most near and exact survey’ (3D 184)), thereby establishing that the opposing appearances here are sufficient to render one of the colours unreal and merely apparent. Rather than undermine the criterion, Philonous uses it to show that the allegedly real member of the apparent-real opposing pair turns out by the same criterion to be apparent when considered against a third perception, namely what is seen through a microscope. This is the clever logical move: he has shown that the criterion is not actually a criterion of real colour but of apparent colour. Applying the criterion shows that the red and purple in the clouds is apparent but not that the grey is real, for a further application might show that to be equally apparent. At this point we are confronted with two ways this sequence might extend indefinitely. It might be that microscopes become more and more powerful, so we have a sequence of opposing pairs of possible experiences between ever stronger microscopes. But also, when we do look through actual microscopes, we perceive ‘inconceivably small animals’ (3D 185) whose vision is presumably tuned to their microscopic environment. This generates a sequence of possible experiences of ever smaller animals. However, it is not necessary for the argument to work that the sequence is indefinite, merely that it extends beyond our own experiences, because then the application of the criterion within our experience will never establish that a given experience is of the real colour (or size or shape) of the object, merely that it ‘opposes’ an experience of apparent colour. 5. We can see a different strategy Berkeley has for re-purposing sceptical modes in his discussion of heat and cold. Having convinced Hylas that intense heat and cold are both pains and thus not real existences in the external objects, the discussion moves to moderate degrees of heat and cold. Here Philonous offers Hylas a criterion of the real for moderate heat, which he accepts:23 ‘Those bodies therefore, upon whose application to our own, we perceive a moderate degree of heat, must be concluded to have a moderate degree of heat or warmth in them: and those, upon whose application we feel a like degree of cold, must be thought to have cold in them’ (3D 178). Philonous then proceeds to trap Hylas with the example of the hot and cold hands in water, a version of two examples in Sextus’s fourth mode:

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The same water seems to be boiling when poured on to inflamed places, but to us to be lukewarm. I.101 The bathhouse vestibule warms people entering from outside but chills people leaving if they spend any time there. I.11024

In this case Berkeley avoids the Pyrrhonist suspension of judgement by showing that by his criterion the water is both really cold and really warm, which is taken to be an absurdity by Hylas and thus a reductio of his criterion of the real. Hylas retorts: But after all, can any thing be more absurd than to say, there is no heat in the fire? 3D 179

At this point he is teetering on the brink of Pyrrhonism: he has been persuaded that his way of determining what heat there is in the fire leads to an absurdity, but to deny that there is heat in the fire is equally absurd. Suspension of judgement beckons. Philonous blocks this by drawing Hylas’s attention to the analogy between the way a pin causes pain and a ‘coal burns your finger’ (3D 179). This looks like an allusion to Locke’s Essay: After the same manner that the ideas of these original qualities are produced in us, we may conceive that the ideas of secondary qualities are also produced, viz. by the operation of insensible particles on our senses. . . . v.g. that a violet, by the impulse of such insensible particles of matter of peculiar figures and bulks, and in different degrees and modifications of their motions, causes the ideas of the blue colour and sweet scent of that flower, to be produced in our minds; it being no more impossible to conceive that God should annex such ideas to such motions, with which they have no similitude, than that he should annex the idea of pain to the motion of a piece of steel dividing our flesh, with which that idea hath no resemblance. 2.8.13

However, in the example given, there is no need to appeal to the mechanist’s ‘insensible particles’ because Berkeley has carefully chosen an example that, unlike Locke’s blue violet, mirrors the clearly perceptible process by which the pain is caused in us by the pin: just as we see the pin causing damage to our finger, we see the coal causing heat in our finger, so we think that the process that results in a sensation in each case must be the same. Yet it is no absurdity to say there is no pain in the pin.25 In fact, it was precisely Hylas’s acceptance

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that pain is not in the fire that made the argument that a great heat is a pain effective. Again, Philonous has used the sceptical modes to undermine Hylas’s initial dogmatism, but blocked the move to Pyrrhonism by persuading Hylas that he is committed to all appearances being illusory. 6. At this point Hylas introduces the distinction between primary and secondary qualities as ‘an opinion current among philosophers’ (3D 188), with the intention of restricting his claim that he is not a sceptic and does not deny the reality of sensible things. So far the discussion has been restricted to secondary qualities, but Philonous responds: ‘But what if the same arguments which are brought against secondary qualities, will hold good against these [primary qualities] also?’ (3D 188). As Popkin pointed out, Berkeley here seems to be drawing upon Bayle, who quite explicitly credited the point to Simon Foucher’s Critique de la recherche de la vérité (Bayle, Pyrrho, Remark B, fn. 11, p. 197).26 But while Bayle is astute to spot the power of the point and is fully aware of the difference between genuine Pyrrhonism and this denial of the reality of sensible qualities, he does not have Berkeley’s concern to use the sceptical arguments to undermine dogmatic materialism without engendering Pyrrhonism. Consequently his presentation of the point lacks Berkeley’s care and sophistication, simply noting ‘if the objects of our senses appear coloured [etc.] and yet they are not so, why can they not appear extended [etc.] though they are not so?’ (Bayle, p. 197), before discussing whether this makes God a deceiver.27 Berkeley’s discussion of primary qualities (3D 188–94) has many original elements. He begins with consideration of extension, or more specifically size, and follows the Pyrrhonists’ first mode by again comparing human perception with that of other animals, emphasizing the way we can expect the difference in size of the animals to result in difference in their perception of size: ‘A mite therefore must be supposed to see his own foot, and things equal or even less than it, as bodies of some considerable dimension’ (3D 188). However, Berkeley’s argument is significantly different from the arguments found in Sextus in two respects. First, he appeals not just to physical variation but also to teleology. Second, the appeal to teleology is not applied to secondary qualities, for example, so he is committed to one difference between primary and secondary qualities: other animals may see colours differently but must see size differently. The appeal to teleology is implicitly creationist:

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Philonous Answer me, Hylas. Think you the senses were bestowed upon all animals for their preservation and well-being in life? Or were they given to men alone for this end? 3D 188

As such this is neither a move the Pyrrhonist could make nor one that is dialectically appropriate given that the existence of God is yet to be demonstrated. What Sextus does talk about are ‘parts of the body . . . which are naturally fitted for deciding and perceiving’ (I.44),28 which is an appeal to biological function appropriate for a physician to make. And in fact this weaker claim will suffice for Berkeley’s purposes if we add a further observation that these creatures are reasonably successful in avoiding harms. For example, contemporary biologists are inclined to argue that the ability of a housefly to avoid being swatted is evidence that the motion of our hand, which looks fast to us, looks slow to the fly.29 What is striking about Berkeley’s teleological move, even when naturalized, is that he only applies it to the primary qualities. One might expect Berkeley to say that, for example, the cold of an arctic sea is a pain for any human who swims in it, but it clearly isn’t for the fish that live there, or that the deer escapes the hunt by hearing sounds a human cannot, but he doesn’t. Rather, where he does cite inter-species variation in perception of secondary qualities, he appeals not to the avoidance of harm but to difference in preferences. For instance, in the discussion of odours he refers to ‘brute animals’ that eat ‘filth and ordure’ ‘out of choice’ (3D 181): this is not an appeal to teleology but an instance of the appeal to preferences, which we also find in the first mode (Sextus, I.55).30 So while Berkeley is attacking certain uses of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the way he marshalls the sceptical arguments reveals that he is committed to some form of the distinction: the perception of both sorts of quality enables the creature to seek pleasure and avoid pain (‘the never enough admired laws of pain and pleasure’ (P 146)), but in the case of secondary qualities the connection between a given quality and pain or pleasure is arbitrary, whereas in the case of primary qualities it is not. So whether a given taste or smell or degree of heat causes pleasure or pain may vary between creatures but is not something we can work out a priori. In contrast, we can work out a priori that an object that is large, solid and fast-moving relative to the size, hardness and motion of a given creature, will cause that creature harm. Furthermore, not only is Berkeley committed to some version of the primary– secondary quality distinction, he comes close to accepting the Cartesian view that

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extension is the principal or fundamental primary quality. While the Cartesian will say that the other primary qualities are modes of extension, which Berkeley doesn’t accept, he does say that ‘motion, solidity, and gravity . . . all evidently suppose extension’ (3D 191). Clearly his thought here is that having either motion or solidity or gravity entails having some extension, and that seems right. However, it is not so clear whether Berkeley should also accept the reverse entailment: if something is extended it also must have some degree of motion, solidity and gravity. That depends upon whether we regard, for example, not moving as having a degree of motion (namely zero) or as lacking motion. One might think that Berkeley is committed to all physical objects having some positive extension, specifically at least one minimum sensibilium, in order to exist at all, but that is not the case. For a start, there is no cross-modal property of extension, so at the very least Berkeley should say that everything must have either visible or tangible or . . . extension. Since the Berkeleian doctrine is that esse is percipere and not just videre vel tangere, he is committed to the real existence of merely heard, tasted or smelled objects, such as echoes and aromas. Now while echoes and aromas may have approximate locations and may even sometimes move, it is not obvious that all odours and sounds have extension. (Tastes are different because it may be that only tangible objects can be tasted.) In which case there would be real existence without extension, and the correct way of stating that motion etc. ‘supposes extension’ would be: if – but not only if – anything has a positive degree of motion etc., it has a positive degree of extension. Berkeley’s really distinctive contribution, however, is not over the dependency between these primary qualities, but the claim that the primary qualities depend upon the secondary. If it is not possible, Berkeley argues, for there to be primary qualities without secondary, and if the ‘new philosophers’ have persuaded themselves that the secondary qualities lack real existence, they must conclude that the primary qualities also lack real existence. Thus the sceptical, but not Pyrrhonian, denial of the reality of things is reached without having to apply the sceptical modes to primary qualities. Instead there is just an appeal to a fairly plausible general principle about conception and possibility: Philonous And can you think it possible, that should really exist in Nature, which implies a repugnancy in its conception? Hylas By no means. 3D 194

Note that this principle does not entail that what is conceivable is possible nor even that what is possible is conceivable. Rather it simply states that if, in

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attempting to conceive something you run into a contradiction, then that thing is not possible. Hylas doesn’t take much persuading that attempting to conceive of primary qualities without secondary leads to a contradiction, but considering an example makes it clear how the inference is meant to go. Try to conceive of some specific sensible extension, say a visible circle of 1m diameter, without conceiving of it as having some (chromatic or non-chromatic) colour. To conceive of the circle we must conceive of its edge, but to conceive of an edge is to conceive of a boundary marked by some change in qualities, and given that it is a visible circle we are trying to conceive, this must be a visible change. What could this be apart from a colour difference between the circle and its background or a line marking the edge in a colour different from the circle and background? Another primary quality such as motion will not suffice: a rotating circle against a static background would only be visible in virtue of its motion if the motion were visible, and the motion would only be visible if something visible moved. That cannot be the circle itself since we are using the motion to discriminate the circle, so we must be able to discriminate some part of the circle, and all the same issues recur. The only way to conceive of a visible circle involves conceiving of colours, and thus the attempt to conceive of the circle without colour is selfdefeating. Hylas immediately realizes that the only way to avoid the full-blown denial of the reality of sensible things now is to re-evaluate the arguments that led him to la crise pyrrhonienne about secondary qualities in the first place, and consequently he immediately moves into proposing an act-object model of perception. Berkeley makes no further use of sceptical arguments, instead engaging with the theology, metaphysics and philosophy of science of his contemporaries in order to defend immaterialism as a way out of ‘that phrensy of the ancient and modern sceptics’ (3D 258). 7. Our close look at the presence of scepticism in the Three Dialogues has revealed Berkeley’s sophisticated strategy of using the sceptical arguments to force the materialist into a crisis where immaterialism presents the only acceptable way out. He is fully aware that a genuine Pyrrhonist would no more want to accept immaterialism than materialism for he has found tranquility in suspension of judgement. This is why Berkeley quickly moves the discussion of scepticism away from doubt to denial of the reality of things. His readers would have been well aware that he was drawing upon sceptical sources for his arguments, though they might not have noticed the care and subtly with which he did so, and thus his eventual escape from scepticism through immaterialism was all the more

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powerful. The literary effect is very similar to René Descartes’ Meditations, though the escape from scepticism is much simpler. Where Descartes’ challenges concern the effectiveness of his arguments for his self, for God and for bodies in Meditation II – VI , Berkeley’s challenges come from the direct objections to the adequacy of his positive view. When Hylas insists in the second dialogue that ‘the reality of things cannot be maintained without supposing the existence of matter’ (3D 224), he is expressing the thought that whatever may be achieved by immaterialism by way of response to the sceptic, it leaves us with less of a real world than we wanted. Scepticism has receded and the focus in now on the adequacy of Berkeley’s system. The third dialogue is a sustained attempt to answer that criticism and show that everything we really cared about remains in place. Few have been convinced.31

Notes 1 ‘As it was my intention to convince sceptics and infidels by reason, so it has been my endeavour strictly to observe the most rigid laws of reasoning’ (3D 168). 2 In the 1713 and 1725 editions, the full subtitle was: ‘The design of which is plainly to demonstrate the reality and perfection of human knowledge, the incorporeal nature of the soul, and the immediate providence of a Deity: in opposition to Sceptics and Atheists. Also to open a method for rendering the Sciences more easy, useful, and compendious.’ 3 Interestingly, he doesn’t look at the later works, omitting the discussions of scepticism and freethinking in Alciphron (1732). 4 To be fair, Popkin might be using ‘doubt’ in the loose, vernacular sense, which includes denial, but Berkeley makes a clear distinction between doubt and denial in the Three Dialogues and the sceptical epoche clearly excludes denial. 5 The article on Pyrrho only appears in the extended 1696 edition. 6 A fact that suggests Berkeley knew the text well is that the names ‘Euphranor’ and ‘Lysicles’ (the two freethinkers in Alciphron) both make brief appearances in Diogenes Laertius though neither is the subject of an article. The 1688–96 translation in fact mis-transliterates ‘Lysicles’ as ‘Lysiclides’. 7 One might also suspect that Bayle’s decision to reintroduce discussion of the sceptical modes in Remark G of the article on Zeno of Elea was prompted by this passage. 8 The Preface was omitted from the 1734 edition, perhaps because literary fashions had changed, or perhaps because Berkeley no longer felt the same need to publically justify publishing a book.

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9 Berkeley’s phrase ‘without the mind’ is deliberately ambiguous between ‘outside the mind’ and ‘independent of the mind’. While Hylas takes ideas to be within, and thus dependent upon, the mind, Philonous will go on to separate the two and claim that ideas are outside the mind that perceives them even if they only exist when perceived: ‘I am not for changing things into ideas, but rather ideas into things’ (3D 244). 10 For a record of perhaps the first such reaction and Berkeley’s response, see the correspondence with Percival in August and September 1710 (Hight, M. A., ed. (2013), The Correspondence of George Berkeley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Letters 17 and 18). Here Berkeley notes that he was afraid of being charged with scepticism. 11 It is worth observing that Philonous is not endorsing Hylas’s extension of the definition of scepticism here – though, as I argued above, Berkeley might expect his readers to accept it. This is presumably because he knows that it is not consistent with Pyrrhonism. 12 While I am quoting from the best modern translation of Sextus (Sextus Empiricus (2000), Outlines of Scepticism. J. Annas and J. Barnes (ed) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), it is worth checking against the best English translation that would have been available to Berkeley and his readers, namely that in Thomas Stanley’s The History of Philosophy (1656, 2nd edition 1687: Stanley, T. (1687), The History of Philosophy. [Online]. [Accessed 17 October 2015]. Available from: http://eebo. chadwyck.com): ‘Hence (it may be) some of those who profess Philosophy, declare, they have found the Truth; others hold it impossible to be found; others still enquire’ (1687, p. 776). 13 Stanley: ‘Moreover, in these Expressions he speaketh that which appreareth so to him, and declareth how he is affected without engaging his Opinion, (or Judgment) but ascertaining nothing concerning external objects’ (1687, p. 777). 14 It is important to remember that la crise pyrrhonienne is not the state of mind of a sceptic but of one who reaches aporia in the face of sceptical arguments while lacking the appropriate disposition to respond with epoche and ultimately ataraxia (Sextus, I.25–30). 15 Burnyeat in fact traces this to Augustine, but its impact philosophically is mediated by Descartes. 16 A very different diagnosis of why la crise pyrrhonienne does not lead to tranquility is offered by Pascal: ‘We perceive an image of the truth and possess nothing but falsehood, being equally incapable of absolute ignorance and certain knowledge; so obvious is it that we once enjoyed a degree of perfection from which we have unhappily fallen’ (L.131). Berkeley quotes La Vie de M. Pascal (by his sister Gilberte) in Passive Obedience (1712) so had at least that much awareness of Pascal’s thought. Whether he had read Pascal’s analysis of scepticism we do not know.

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17 Stanley: ‘This is most evident in Medicine; a just measure in their Composition is beneficial; but sometimes, to put in ever so little more or less, is not only not beneficial, but destructive, and often deadly’ (1687, p. 784). 18 Stanley: ‘Those things which to us seem White, they who have the Yellow Jaundice affirm to be Yellow, and they who have a Hyphosphagme in their Eyes, Red. As therefore, of living Creatures, some have Eyes Bloud red, others Whitish, others of other Colours, it is likely they perceive Colours after different manners. . . . Much more likely is it, that the humours, mixed in the Eyes of living Creatures, being different, they have different Phantasies, from the same Object’ (1687, p. 779). 19 For instance, the claim about jaundice is false but consistently repeated as fact by authors across the period, including, we have seen, Berkeley. 20 The jaundice example is preceded by a discussion of ‘inconceivably small animals perceived by glasses’ who are presumed to see things differently and especially things too small for us to see. This is an updating of Sextus’s ‘dogs, fish, lions, humans and locusts do not see the same things as equal in size or similar in shape’ (I.49). 21 Berkeley mentions both those examples at 3D 258 as instances of arguments against ‘the reality of corporeal things’ based on the supposition that ‘reality consist[s] in an external absolute existence’. 22 Sextus anticipates this move but gives a very weak regress argument in response (I.121–3). Assuming Berkeley was familiar with Sextus helps us understand why he argues as he does at this point. 23 Hylas accepts the same criterion of the real for extension at 3D 188 and the argument follows the same pattern, ingeniously creating a version of the two hands in water example by imagining looking down a microscope with one eye while keeping the other open. 24 Stanley: ‘Again, the same water poured upon any Part that is Inflamed seems scalding, to us, lukewarm: . . . The Parastas of a Bath warms those that go in, cools those who go out, if they have stay’d any while in it’ (1687, pp. 782–3). 25 This needs some careful handling by Berkeley because when he rejects the materialist’s criterion of real existence for sensible qualities, he is going to have to say the intense heat I feel when my hand is in the fire exists in the fire, and it is identical to the pain I feel. Thus pain exists in the fire. Of course, for Berkeley that doesn’t mean it inheres in the fire, but it looks like it has to be a sensible quality in the collection that constitutes the fire. So, while fires don’t cause pain or feel pain, they do have pain, in the same sense that they have heat and colour. 26 It has been suggested that Bayle’s memory of Foucher’s views was not all that good (Lennon, T. M. and Hickson, M. (2014), ‘Pierre Bayle’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [Online]. [Accessed 17 October 2015]. E. N. Zalta (ed) Available from: http://plato.stanford.edu, §6). However, he may just be misremembering his source,

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which could be Foucher’s Nouvelle Dissertation (see Foucher, S. (1679), Nouvelle dissertation sur la ‘Recherche de la vérité’. [Online]. [Accessed 17 October 2015]. Available from: http://archive.org, pp. 78–9). It is worth noting that Hylas’s only appeal to a non-deceiving God is a form of the ‘consent of nations’ argument but applied to matter: ‘Do you imagine, he would have induced the whole world to believe the being of matter, if there was no such thing?’ (3D 243). Like Descartes, Berkeley is very careful to note the point at which God is introduced into his philosophy, but while Descartes introduces God before the substantive metaphysics, Berkeley does it on the back of his immaterialism. Hence, dialectically, neither he nor his opponents can appeal to a non-deceiving God. The badness of scepticism has to be independent of that. Stanley: ‘those which Nature made for Judgment and Sense’ (1687, p. 779). http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/small-animals-live-in-a-slow-motionworld/ The specific example of eating ordure is not found in Sextus but is in Diogenes Laertius and is mentioned several times by Montaigne. Many thanks to John Blechl for help with preparing the final text.

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The Mystery of Goodness in Berkeley’s Passive Obedience Bertil Belfrage

Introduction The first edition of George Berkeley’s Passive Obedience was published in Dublin in 1712. Two London editions followed the same year, the first as ‘The Second Edition’ (perhaps with the Dublin edition in mind), and the second as ‘The Third Edition, Corrected and Enlarged’. Its full title is Passive Obedience, or the Christian Doctrine of not Resisting the Supreme Power, Proved and Vindicated upon the Principles of the Law of Nature. Pamphlets about ‘Passive Obedience’ were frequent at this period of time, often criticizing the Glorious Revolution that forced James II to abdicate in 1689.1 If rebellion in any form is a sinful act, as Berkeley argues in Passive Obedience, then the present government held office as a result of an immoral action. This was the typical Jacobite and Tory position. In the first four sections of the work, the ‘Doctrine Of not Resisting the Supreme Power’ is presented as the main, if not as the, thesis of the work. It occupies three quarters of the entire text. However, in June 1730, Berkeley not only omitted the four introductory sections, he omitted the entire theme of our duty to passively obey the civil power. This revised version is entitled ‘The Sense of Dean Berkeley upon the Foundations of Moral Good, extracted from his Discourse of Passive Obedience’. It exists in one handwritten copy, included in Samuel Johnson’s copy of De Motu.2 The only surviving sections of the original work are 5–15, except the end of 15,3 and 27–28. Why did Berkeley revise his Passive Obedience, and why did he not include it in A Miscellany 1752? My conjecture is that he observed an inconsistency in the original work.

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If it is our duty to pay ‘a Blind implicit Submission’ to civil laws (provided they do not violate the moral law), and the prince changes his mind or is succeeded by a ruler of a different mind, what is right at one time could be wrong at another. And, as Berkeley extended this duty to obeying even masters at a lower level in his Proposal for building a college in Bermuda,4 one act could be good, according to one authority, but at the same time be regarded as bad, according to another authority. This would lead to a normative relativism that he rejected, when he criticized utility as the criterion for moral goodness. It would lead to ‘the most horrible confusion of Vice and Virtue, Sin and Duty, that can possibly be imagined’ (PO 9–10), he said, because different persons, and even one and the same person in different situations, could judge the same action sometimes as good, sometimes as bad. This would contradict his ethical objectivism based on his belief in a god-given eternal, unchangeable law of morality. If aware of this inconsistency, it is understandable that Berkeley omitted this theme in 1730, and decided not to republish it in 1752.5 In an attempt at presenting a coherent account of Passive Obedience, Berkeley’s first attempt at a moral philosophy, I will focus on the sense of ‘Moral Good’ rather than on the duty to obey the civil power. In the first part of this chapter, I will give an overview of the historical background, focusing on how Berkeley followed the tradition I refer to as ‘Theological Positivism’ – in opposition to non-theological positivists. In the second part, I will investigate Berkeley’s approach to moral issues in the light of Locke’s metaethical account of a deductive moral science. Finally, I will interpret Berkeley’s view ‘upon the Foundations of Moral Good’, as presented in Passive Obedience.

Historical background (1707–1708) In 1700, when George Berkeley entered Trinity College in Dublin (TCD ), John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding was well established at TCD. It appeared in 1690, but already in 1692 St. George Ashe, then Provost of Trinity College in Dublin, had ordered the Essay to be read by the students. He even examined them ‘strictly . . . in their progress therein’.6 There is, however, in Locke’s philosophy a tension between empiricist criteria of meaning and truth on the one hand, and religious faith in matters above human understanding on the other. This tension became obvious when followers of Locke, such as John Toland, Thomas Emlyn and Anthony Collins, applied empiricist

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criteria of meaning to religious mysteries and rejected them as mere nonsense. This tension is the main theme of this section on the historical background.

Theological positivism The current metaphysical doctrine in Dublin, when Berkeley entered TCD, was what I will refer to as ‘Theological Positivism’. Locke formulated its positivistic aspect as follows: ‘Men have Reason to be well satisfied with what God hath thought fit for them, since he has given them [. . .] Whatsoever is necessary for the Conveniences of Life, and Information of Vertue.’ But there is also a restrictive aspect of this doctrine. There are, as Locke expresses it, ‘some Things that are set out of the reach’ of human knowledge, but we should confine ourselves to knowable things, because those who extend ‘their Enquiries beyond their Capacities’ are doomed to end up ‘in perfect Scepticism’.7 Theological Positivism with its two aspects can be summarized as follows: (1) In statements about knowable things, the variable x in propositions about ‘all x’ does not range over everything there is, but is restricted to things God placed within the scope and limits of human knowledge.

The result was a distinction between a cognitive field of knowable things and a non-cognitive field of unknowable things which do exist but are above our understanding.

The positivistic aspect In Notebook A, we can follow Berkeley’s consecutive reading of Book IV of Locke’s Essay from the first chapter to the last. The first note in the series is ‘All knowle[d]ge onely about ideas. Locke B.4 c.1.’ (NB 522).8 The reference is to the opening of Book IV: Since the Mind, in all its Thoughts and Reasonings, hath no other immediate Object but its own Ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident, that our Knowledge is only conversant about them. 4.1.1

Berkeley reformulated it: ‘all our knowle[d]ge & contemplation is confin’d barely to our own Ideas’ (NB 606), and accepted the following semantic principles as ‘axioms’: ‘No word to be used without an idea’, ‘No reasoning about things whereof we have no ideas’ (NB 421, 422). In cognitive discourse, he found it

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‘absurd to talk or make propositions about’ unimaginable things that we have no ideas of (NB 417).9 He presents his view on meaning and truth in what he styled ‘my Doctrine of Certainty’.10 His example is, ‘The Horse is White’. The sentence is meaningful, if we can form a ‘mental proposition’ or an image picture of a white horse (if we cannot, it is meaningless). The sentence is not true or false in itself. If we take the attitude of ‘affirmation or negation’ to the proposition (that which is expressed by the sentence), thus forming a statement, then it can be either true or false. The simple way to check if the horse is white, is to go and have a look, because ‘real certainty is of sensible Ideas pro hic & nunc’. The attitude of assenting to a statement is often referred to as having an ‘explicit belief ’ in it. Berkeley’s other example is ‘a Blue Horse’. We can imagine such a thing, although there is no such animal. So statements about blue horses are meaningful but false. But if we cannot form a ‘mental proposition’, or have an ‘idea’ or an image-picture of something, then we are not justified in claiming to believe that it is either true or false. Here Berkeley accepts a Lockean doctrine of ‘meaning’ and ‘truth’. The predicates ‘is true’ and ‘is false’ are defined in terms of the agreement and disagreement of a proposition with ‘sensible ideas pro hic & nunc’.11 Statements that are neither true nor false are meaningless according to this doctrine. But, again, this concerns cognitive discourse. In this context, we are not justified believing, affirming or denying anything about x, unless we have an ‘idea’ of x, or can imagine a ‘mental proposition’ about x. To sum up. At this stage, Berkeley accepted no other than descriptive statements in cognitive discourse, and ‘ideas’ were ‘suppos’d to be the Copies & Images’ of things (MI 20). That is to say, (2) If a person truly believes – in cognitive discourse – that a proposition, say p, is true or that x exists, then it is required that this person has an idea of x or of what p is about, and gives assent to this explicit belief or mental proposition.12

Within the positivistic aspect of Theological Positivism, the emphasis is on knowable things, identified as things that are perceivable by sense. But, again, there is also a restrictive aspect of Theological Positivism regarding our attitude to those unknowable things we read about in revealed theology.

The restrictive aspect Locke said he wrote his Essay to discover how far our intellectual powers reach. His advice was ‘to sit down in a quiet Ignorance of those Things, which [. . . are]

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beyond the reach of our Capacities’.13 ‘Holy mysteries’ in revealed theology are among those things which are ‘beyond the reach of our Capacities’. Berkeley defines them as follows: (3) [Expressions for] ‘holy mysteries’ =def. ‘propositions about things [. . .] that are altogether above our knowle[d]ge out of our reach’.14

As these mysteries are ‘altogether above our knowledge’, we cannot form any ‘mental proposition’ about them. According to (1) and (2), therefore, we cannot form – in cognitive discourse – meaningful propositions about mysteries mentioned in (3). When we nonetheless assent to expressions for mysteries, this is, psychologically, a different attitude of assenting from when we affirm beliefs in knowable things. Thus, (4) Assenting to expressions for holy mysteries is a non-propositional attitude towards something beyond explicit belief, described as ‘an Humble Implicit faith’. NB 584, 720

The attention we can pay to expressions for mysteries, Berkeley says, is ‘such as a popish peasant gives to propositions he hears at Mass in Latin’ (NB 720). The Mass in Latin is to him expressed in a language without semantics. We cannot use such terms as ‘is true’ or ‘is false’ in non-cognitive discourse, therefore, in the sense Berkeley used them in cognitive discourse. This illustrates the significant difference between empiricist criteria of meaning and truth on the one hand and religious faith in unknowable mysteries on the other.

Non-theological positivism It follows from Berkeley’s belief in two incommensurable aspects of the world, that it is not possible to use the same criteria of meaning and truth, which are designed for the one aspect, when approaching the other aspect of the world. In Berkeley’s terms: ‘When I say I will reject all Propositions wherein I know not fully & adæquately & clearly the Thing meant thereby This is not to be extended to propositions in the Scripture’ (NB 720, my italics).

John Toland’s challenge John Toland challenged Theological Positivism, when he insisted, contrary to Berkeley, that the same criteria of meaning and truth should be used in all

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contexts. ‘Nor is there any different Rule to be follow’d in the Interpretation of Scripture from what is common to all other Books’, he said.15 The result was an unrestricted or absolute positivism saying: (1ʹ) In meaningful statements about ‘all x’, the variable x ranges over everything in the universe.

Although he rejected the restrictions of classical Theological Positivism, he accepted its positivistic aspect, which he expanded accordingly to everything there is. Thus, (2ʹ) A person is justified assenting to a proposition, p, about x – no matter in what context – only if this person knows what x is or what p is about, and gives assent to an explicit belief or a ‘mental proposition’ about it.

Toland took two further steps. Assenting to expressions for holy mysteries, he said, (using the nonsense word ‘Blictri’) is as absurd as claiming ‘infallible Assurance that something call’d Blictri had a Being in Nature’ (81–82). This is a step into ontological metaphysics: if we cannot have an idea of x, or if it cannot be part of a ‘mental proposition’, then x does not exist or have ‘a Being in Nature’. From his conviction that the world consists of nothing but pictorial ‘facts’ he concluded that, (3ʹ) Holy mysteries do not have ‘a Being in Nature’.

In a second step, he found it psychologically impossible to believe in imperceptible matters: ‘all Faith or Perswasion must necessarily consist of two Parts, Knowledg and Assent’ (italics original), he said, where ‘faith’ meant ‘explicit belief ’. As explicit belief entails awareness of a pictorial ‘mental proposition,’ we cannot have faith in unperceivable things. In short, (4ʹ) Those who claim to believe in mysteries above our knowledge do, in fact, believe in nothing at all.

In this form of non-theological positivism, ‘non-cognitive’ means ‘nonsensical’ or ‘non-existent’.

Berkeley’s counter-argument As Berkeley emphasized the difference between knowable and unknowable aspects of the world, he meant that expressions for unknowable things had to be strictly isolated from a discourse on knowable things. Empirical criteria of meaning and truth are ‘not to be extended to propositions in the Scripture’ about

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revealed mysteries, he argued, because, again, these mysteries are ‘altogether above our knowledge’ (NB 720, my emphasis). If we say, therefore – in cognitive discourse – ‘X is so-and-so’ or ‘X is not so-andso’, but X does not refer to a knowable thing, then we are talking nonsense. It does not make sense to include expressions about unknowable things, such as ‘Holy Trinity’, in cognitive discourse. So, when Toland rejected holy mysteries on empirical grounds, or maintained, ‘Holy Trinity does not have “a Being in Nature”’, he was himself talking nonsense according to Berkeley, who defended the principle that, (5) to pretend to demonstrate or reason any thing [in cognitive discourse] about [holy mysteries] is absurd here an implicit Faith becomes us. NB 584, 41716

The strength of this argument is that holy mysteries cannot be criticized in cognitive discourse. The weakness is that neither could an implicit belief in holy mysteries be defended in cognitive discourse. The pressing question is, how could he formulate a moral philosophy based on non-cognitive doctrines – without violating the principle he formulated in (5)?

Berkeley’s approach to moral issues 1707–1712 Berkeley expressed a view that was generally accepted in those days, when he said (in no. 16 of his early ‘Notes on Moral Philosophy’), there could be ‘no solid morality without religion’.17 If those actions are morally good, which are in conformity with the moral law as we know it from the Scripture, how did he analyse moral judgements such as ‘This action is morally good’? In particular, do moral judgements belong to the cognitive or the non-cognitive domain? Berkeley discussed semantic issues in a series of notebook entries marked ‘Mo’ for ‘Moral Philosophy’, often commenting on passages in Locke’s Essay. ‘We have no Ideas of Vertues & Vices, no Ideas of Moral Actions’ he said in NB 669, thus indicating that moral judgements are not about matters of fact (or about ‘real ideas’ to use Locke’s term).18 This can be formulated, (6) The logical form of moral judgments is not captured in the formula ‘X is good,’ where X is an action and ‘good’ is a monadic, one-place predicate observable in X.

If value statements are not about matters of fact, it follows from Berkeley’s ‘Doctrine of Certainty’, or Locke’s correspondence theory of truth, that value

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statements are not true or false – in the sense that descriptive statements, such as ‘This horse is white’, are true or false.19 Following Edward Synge Senior (who was chancellor of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin when Berkeley wrote his notebooks), Berkeley meant that, in everyday language, moral judgements, and even expressions for mysteries, can be used for persuasive purposes without communicating any descriptive information at all (MI 36, 36a, 41, 41b first stratum).20 He used this as a counter-example against ‘Those Philosophers [. . .] Who think it nonsense for a Man to assent to any Proposition each term whereof doth not bring into his Mind a clear and distinct Idea’ (MI 44).21 But what is the logical form of a value statement, if it is not simply ‘X is good’? And on what grounds are we justified in assenting to a moral judgement? Suppose we ask whether a murder is a good or a bad action (to take Locke’s example). We can describe perfectly well what we mean by ‘murder’, but the quality of being ‘Good, Bad, or Indifferent’ does not appear in this description, according to Locke, ‘it being their Conformity to, or Disagreement with some Rule that makes them to be regular or irregular, Good or Bad’ (2.28.13–16).22 In short, (7) ‘X is good’ is an abbreviation for ‘X is good – according to a law L’.

The quality ‘is good’ is therefore an empty term if not completed ‘is goodaccording-to-L’. This is part of Locke’s thesis that ‘Morality is capable of Demonstration, as well as mathematics’ (4.12.8), which is reflected in Berkeley’s statement about ‘Demonstrations used even in Divinity’: There may be Demonstrations used even in Divinity. I mean in reveal’d Theology, as contradistinguish’d from natural. for tho the Principles may be founded in Faith yet this hinders not but that legitimate Demonstrations might be built thereon. Provided still that we define the words we use & never go beyond our Ideas. . . . But to pretend to demonstrate or reason any thing about the Trinity is absurd here an implicit Faith becomes us. NB 584

A moral judgement on X, given the moral law L, would then be correct, if it follows logically – by the same kind of logic as when the court passes judgement – from the prescriptive definitions of L (such as ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’) that X is, or is not, good-according-to-L. That is to say, (8) A moral judgment is an analytical statement which is valid if, and only if, it follows logically from prescriptive definitions of the moral law on which it is based, invalid if not.

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Once Berkeley regarded moral judgements as analytical statements based on prescriptive definitions and first principles quoted from the Scripture, the important question is, What ‘Principles . . . founded in Faith’ form the basis for morality?

Theological fundamentalism (1712) Berkeley emphasizes the deductive approach in the opening argument of the Passive Obedience. ‘I intend not to build on the Authority of Holy Scripture, but altogether on the Principles of Reason’, he says (PO 2, my emphasis). But already in section six he draws the conclusion that ‘a Conformity to [God’s] Will . . . is the sole Rule whereby every Man who acts up to the Principles of Reason, must Govern and Square his Actions’ (PO 6) – which means that we do have ‘to build on the Authority of Holy Scripture’ (PO 2). The crucial premise of this argument is that, on the one hand, we have an inborn tendency to approach pleasure and avoid pain (our search for ‘natural goodness’) and, on the other hand, a belief in the mystery of the afterlife, according to which God prepared unimaginable pleasures in Paradise to those who followed his will, but awful, eternal pain to those who broke God’s law. Those, who strive for maximizing pleasure should, on these premises, follow ‘the Authority of Holy Scripture’ – if they act ‘up to the Principles of Reason’. So far, his reasoning concerns our motivation for performing moral actions. Convinced there could be ‘no solid morality without religion’, he went to the Bible in search of moral principles. The result is a theological doctrine of the relation between God and man rather than the relation between living people in this world. The problem is, how to reach Paradise by pleasing God rather than how to make other people happy or ease their pain. I start with Berkeley’s account of ‘natural goodness’ and of the mystery of ‘divine goodness’, and end with what follows concerning ‘moral goodness’.

Natural goodness In Principles 146, we read about the tendency to approach pleasure and avoid pain as ‘the never enough admir’d Laws of Pain and Pleasure, and the Instincts or natural Inclinations, Appetites, and Passions of Animals’. Berkeley refers to this instinctive striving for ‘natural goodness’ as the Principle of Selflove (PO 5):

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(9) With ‘natural goodness’ as the criterion, pleasure is intrinsically good and pain intrinsically bad (to animals, humans included).

Sensual pleasures, however, like all kinds of pleasures and passions ‘must be restrain’d and kept under’ (PO 13). Nonetheless – as Berkeley argued in the opening sections of Passive Obedience (PO 2–6) – natural goodness can motivate us to perform morally good actions, if we believe in an afterlife. Morality is, however, subordinate to God’s design for the world, according to Berkeley.

The mystery of divine goodness Starting with the mystery of the Creation, Berkeley was convinced that ‘the general design of Providence with regard to Mankind’ is to establish ‘the general well-being of all Men’ (PO 7). As part of God’s design for the world, the moral law was included as one of the laws of nature. The basic rule in this line of thought was that, (a) ‘if they [the god-given laws, ‘Rules or Precepts’] be all of them, at all times, in all places, and by all Men observed, [then] they will necessarily promote the well-being of Mankind’ (PO 15, my italics). As the world is, however, it does not reveal ‘general well-being of all Men’. The reason is that, (b) if we do not follow the god-given ‘Rules and Precepts’, then the laws of nature (= God’s will) will not ‘promote the well-being of Mankind’ (PO 13–14, 41). If we combine (a) and (b), we have this general principle: (10) The laws of nature (including the moral law) ‘will necessarily promote the well-being of Mankind’, if, and only if, all persons follow the god-given ‘Rules and Precepts’ at all time. PO 13–15, 41

As the moral law is one of the laws of nature, sinful acts create an imbalance between the moral law and other natural laws, so the latter begin to run amok thus causing ‘Plagues, Famines, Inundations, Earthquakes with an infinite variety of Pains and Sorrows’ (PO 14). Berkeley asked, How could we ‘believe that God hath, in several instances, laid the innocent part of mankind under an unavoidable necessity, of enduring the greatest Sufferings and Hardships without any Remedy’ (PO 41)? The answer is – in consequence of (10) – that ‘Sufferings and Hardships’ are ‘particular Evils which arise, necessarily and properly, from the Transgression of some one or more good Laws’ (ibid., italics original).

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So long as there are sinners in the world, therefore, even those who never sinned can fall victim to ‘an infinite variety of Pains and Sorrows’. What these unfortunate people can hope for, who suffer because other persons sinned, is that God ‘hath appointed a day of retribution in another life’ (PO 42). It follows that, (11) The ‘well-being of Mankind’ is unattainable in this world (so long as there are sinners) – but God ‘hath appointed a Day of Retribution in another Life’. PO 7, 13–15, 41–4223

The result is a conflict between what is good from a divine and from a human perspective of the world. With ‘absolute goodness’ as the criterion, all natural laws are intrinsically good (as part of God’s ‘general design’ for the world), even if they sometimes cause ‘Pains and Sorrows’, which are intrinsically bad from a human perspective (with ‘natural goodness’ as the criterion). Berkeley mentioned ‘foolish Men’ who criticized the god-given laws of nature on this ground. These ‘foolish Men’ meant ‘that the natural good not only of private Men, but of intire Cities and Nations, wou’d be better promoted by a particular Suspension, or Contradiction, than an exact Observation of those Laws’ (PO 14). Berkeley’s comment is: Yet for all that Nature still takes its course; nay, it is plain that Plagues, Famines, Inundations, Earthquakes with an infinite variety of Pains and Sorrows, in a word all kinds of Calamities publick and private do arise from a uniform steddy observation of those general Laws, which are once establish’d by the Author of Nature, and which he will not change or deviate from upon any of those Accounts, how wise or benevolent soever, it may be thought by foolish Men to do so. PO 14

Berkeley argued – again from the principle in (10) – that the lack of wellbeing in this world does not indicate any ‘defect of Wisdom or Goodness in God’s Law, but of Righteousness in Men’ (PO 41). It is a mistake, Berkeley argues, to compare God’s ‘absolute goodness’ with ‘natural goodness’. To understand this, we should not look at this world from our own narrow perspective as human beings, but try to widen our perspective by looking at the world as ‘distant spectators’: And if we have a mind to take fair Prospect of the Order and general well-being, which the inflexible Laws of Nature and Morality derive on the World, we must, if I may so say, go out of it, and imagine our selves to be distant Spectators of all

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that is Transacted and Contained in it; otherwise we are sure to be Deceived, by the too near View of the little present Interests of our Selves, our Friends, or our Country. PO 28

Once we have reached this elevated stage, beyond ‘the little present Interests of our Selves, our Friends, or our Country’, the seeming contradiction disappears between God’s ‘absolutely good’ laws and what appears evil consequences, if we judge from ‘natural goodness’. As Berkeley formulated it in the Principles: what appears to be ‘Defects of Nature’ – such as ‘an infinite variety of Pains and Sorrows’ (PO 14) – actually increases the beauty of the creation, if we look at the world from this elevated perspective: ‘But we shou’d further consider, that the very Blemishes and Defects of Nature are not without their Use, in that they make an agreeable sort of Variety, and augment the Beauty of the rest of the Creation, as Shades in a Picture serve to set off the brighter and more enlighten’d Parts’ (P 152). So, the suffering of some increases ‘the Beauty of the rest of the Creation, as Shades in a Picture’ – provided, again, that we look at the world from an elevated perspective.

Moral goodness If we leave the elevated platform from which all god-given laws appear good, even when they cause ‘Pains and Sorrows’, and ask from an everyday-life perspective: Is it not our moral obligation to help the unfortunate? Should we not follow our conscience and make life less painful for those who suffer?24 In answer to these questions, Berkeley again warns us against those ‘foolish Men’ who base their moral judgments on emotions and natural goodness rather than passively obeying the divine laws. He admits, ‘Tenderness and Benevolence of Temper are often motives to the best and greatest Actions’ but, he adds, they [Tenderness and Benevolence] are passions rooted in our nature, and like all other Passions must be restrain’d and kept under, otherwise they may possibly betray us into as great Enormities, as any other unbridled Lust. Nay, they are more dangerous than other Passions, inasmuch as they are more plausible, and apt to dazzle, and corrupt the Mind, with the appearance of Goodness and Generosity. PO 13

Why should a person ignore natural goodness, resist the temptation to follow such emotions and passions as tenderness and benevolence, and passively accept

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whatever the laws of nature may cause, ‘tho’ thereby he should bring himself [his Family, his Friends, his Country] to Poverty, Death, or Disgrace’ (PO 13)? One reason why we should leave out emotions when deciding about moral matters, is that knowledge about what is morally good requires that we ‘enquire what Methods are necessary for the obtaining’ general well-being’ (PO 7, my emphasis). Probabilities (to which we are confined in our empirical inquiries) are not sufficient, when dealing with ‘absolute goodness’ because: ‘In Morality the eternal Rules of Action have the same immutable, universal Truth with Propositions in Geometry. Neither of them depend on Circumstances or Accidents, being at all Times, and in all Places, without Limitation or Exception true’ (PO 53, 3rd ed.). Here, Berkeley uses the term ‘Truth’ in a different sense from how he did in the Notebooks. It indicates assenting to the mystery of divine goodness, on which Berkeley bases his ethical objectivism. As we cannot identify those actions that ‘have a necessary tendency to promote the Well-being . . . taking in all Nations, and Ages, from the beginning to the end of the World’ (PO 10–11), we have to follow the general principle in (10), according to which it is our moral obligation to follow the god-given ‘Rules and Precepts’ – ‘all of them, at all times, in all places’ (PO 7, 15, my italics). But as we cannot obey several positive commands at each moment in time, according to Berkeley, the rules of morality consist exclusively of negative commands: ‘Thou shalt not forswear thyself,’ ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery,’ etc. (PO 15, 16, 26). So formulated, the moral law does not allow any exceptions: positive laws could admit ‘Limitations and Exceptions’ that negative commands ‘are on no account liable to’ (PO 40). As our knowledge in moral matters is confined to negative commands, i.e. to what actions are not morally good, it follows that, (12) Our knowledge of ‘moral goodness’ does not include knowledge of intrinsically good, only of intrinsically bad, actions.

If we could decide if an action is morally good, we would not have to base morality on religion or on the mystery of divine goodness. But, again, there is ‘no solid morality without religion’ according to Berkeley, so (12) is a perfectly coherent remark against this background. As we lack tools to ‘enquire what Methods are necessary for the obtaining’ general well-being, and our knowledge about moral goodness is confined to what is intrinsically bad, according to (12), the conclusion should be that, (13) It is beyond human ability to set up positive laws of morality.

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One reason for this is ‘the perverse irregularity of humane Wills’ (PO 8). As mentioned in the Introduction, we cannot calculate the utility of a particular action, because one action may appear good on one occasion, and bad on another, which would lead to ‘the most horrible confusion of Vice and Virtue, Sin and Duty, that can possibly be imagined’ (PO 9–10). Berkeley mentions with great indignation a person who suggested that ‘the Publick Good’ should take priority over ‘Divine Laws’ (PO 48n).25

The early fundamentalism In Passive Obedience, Berkeley is looking into the heavens with his own salvation in mind, rather than care for what happens in everyday life, as when he warns us against being betrayed by ‘passions rooted in our nature’ such as tenderness and benevolence, which are ‘apt to dazzle, and corrupt the Mind, with the appearance of Goodness and Generosity’. Or when he asked us to look at the world as ‘distant Spectators’ to understand how human suffering could increase ‘the Beauty of the rest of the Creation, as Shades in a Picture’ – or to avoid being distracted or deceived ‘by the too near View of the little present Interests of our Selves, our Friends, or our Country’ (PO 13–14, 28, P 152). What becomes us is to passively obey the negative commands we find in the Scripture, possibly with one exception.As the freethinkers were guilty of undermining the ‘great points of the Christian Religion’, Berkeley argued in a pamphlet from 1721,26 ‘it is high time the Legislature put a stop to them’. He meant that ‘the public Safety requires that the avowed Contemners of all Religion be severely chastised’. As he could not find ‘a good reason, why Blasphemy against God should not be inquired into and punished with the same rigour as Treason against the King’, he moved in effect that free-thinking should be forbidden under penalty of death. However, Berkeley wrote Passive Obedience when he was 27 years old, and Alexander Pope’s (slightly exaggerated) ‘To Berkley, ev’ry Virtue under Heav’n’ was a comment on the later Berkeley. To investigate how he as a mature man defeated the fundamentalism he developed in his youth, is however a story far outside the scope of the present chapter.27

Notes 1 For an account of the historical context, see Warnock, G. J. (1986), ‘On Passive Obedience’. History of European Ideas 7, 555–62.

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2 This copy is available at the Johnson Memorial Library at Columbia University, New York, catalogued as BK 100 B4 55. See Belfrage, B. (1981), ‘The Newport extract of Berkeley’s Passive Obedience’, Berkeley Newsletter 5, 6–9. 3 In the extract he omitted the following passage at the end of PO 15: ‘it follows that Loyalty is a moral Virtue; and, Thou shalt not Resist the Supreme Power, a Rule or Law of Nature, the least breach whereof hath the inherent stain of moral Turpitude’. 4 Works 7:346. 5 The traditional view is, however, that Passive Obedience is ‘Berkeley’s main contribution to moral and political Philosophy’, his ‘most important ethical and political work’, etc. See, for instance, Olscamp, P. J. (1970b), The Moral Philosophy of George Berkeley. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff: 56 and Darwall, S. (2005), ‘Berkeley’s moral and political philosophy’ in K. P. Winkler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 311–38: 323. 6 See a letter from William Molyneux to Locke in De Beer, E. S., ed. (1976–1989), The Correspondence of John Locke, 8 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, iv, 602. 7 Locke (1689), ‘Epistle to the Reader’ (p. 7) in: Locke, J. ([1689]1975), An Essay concerning Human Understanding. P. H. Nidditch (ed). Oxford: Clarendon Press, and 1.1.5, 7. 8 In Luce’s numbering, the first entry in Notebook A is numbered 400. 9 NB 421 and 422 are referred to as ‘axioms’ in NB 380 and 382. In these notes, as well as in NB 417, he has infinitesimals in mind. 10 See NB 731, 753, 777, 809, 731a. In NB 731a he distinguishes between being certain (I will use the term ‘believe’) and being really certain (in this case I speak of ‘being certain’). 11 Compare Locke’s view in the Essay 4.5.2 that the term ‘truth’ signifies ‘nothing but the joining and separating of Signs, as the Things signified by them, do agree or disagree one with another’ (italics original). Berkeley frequently refers to Locke in this context. 12 By ‘truly believes’ I mean that the requirement of being aware of a pictorial ‘mental proposition’ is fulfilled. 13 Locke 1689, 1.1.4. 14 NB 720. I have replaced Berkeley’s ‘i.e’ by ‘=def.’ and, as Berkeley repeats ‘out of our reach’ twice, I have replaced the first occurrence by ‘[. . .]’. The addition in square brackets is mine. Thus ‘expressions’ is my term. I use it for any element used in a system of (attempted) communication. 15 Toland, J. (1696), Christianity not Mysterious: Or, a Treatise Shewing, That There is Nothing in the Gospel Contrary to Reason, Nor Above it: And that no Christian Doctrine Can be Properly Call’d a Mystery (2nd ed). London: Sam. Buckley, 44 (page numbers are to the 1997 edition). 16 I have added ‘in cognitive discourse’ within square brackets, and I have replaced ‘the Trinity’ with ‘holy mysteries’.

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17 Compare Locke’s Essay 1.3.6, 2.28.8, 3.4.10. On Berkeley’s ‘Notes on Moral Philosophy’, see Belfrage, B. (1978), ‘Notes by Berkeley on moral philosophy’, Berkeley Newsletter 2, 4–7. 18 Locke meant it is particularly important to define our technical terms in moral philosophy, because, ‘A Definition is the only way, whereby the precise Meaning of moral Words can be known’ (3.11.17, italics original). These definitions are (now using Locke’s own vocabulary) ‘Combinations of Ideas’ – ‘not of Nature’s but Man’s making’ (3.11.15). As they are ‘Collections of simple Ideas, that the Mind it self puts together’ (2.31.14), they have ‘no other reality, but what they have in the Minds of Men’ (2.30.4). Thus we have no ‘real Ideas’ of value predicates, in the sense that they have ‘a Conformity with the real Being, and Existence of Things’ (2.30.1). (Italics original.) 19 In Locke’s terms: as ‘the Mind it self puts together’ the ideas referred to in our definitions of moral terms, they are ‘Archetypes of the Mind’s own making’. Thus, what ‘moral Words stand for, may be perfectly known’ (3.11.16, 4.4.7), and as a ‘moral Idea’ represents nothing ‘but it self, [it] can never be capable of a wrong representation’ (2.31.14, 4.4.5). 20 See Synge, E. (1703), A Gentleman’s Religion. 2nd ed. London: A. and J. Churchill, p. 219. 21 Commentators, who presume that Berkeley agreed with ‘Those Philosophers’ he criticizes here (or with Toland’s non-theological positivism), are convinced that – if Berkeley meant that value statements could be used for persuasive purposes, and if he agreed with Locke that moral judgements are no descriptions of matters of fact – then a moral judgement would be ‘a sentence that, in reality, does not have a truth value’, and thereby Berkeley would, they say (with reference to twentieth-century philosophers), be ‘forced into emotivism’, thus being a ‘proto-emotivist’ denying an objective moral order (Williford, K. (2003), ‘Berkeley’s theory of operative language in the Manuscript Introduction’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 11, 271–301, pp. 295, 297, 299; Jakapi, R. (2002), Berkeley, Mysteries, and Meaning: A Critique of the Non-cognitivist Interpretation. Tartu: Dissertationes Philosophicae Universitatis Tartuensis 2, Tartu University Press, p. 50. Repeated in Williford, K. and Jakapi, R. (2009), ‘Berkeley’s theory of meaning in Alciphron VII ’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 17, 99–118). 22 Locke distinguished between ‘The law of God’, civil laws, and ‘The Law of Fashion, or private Censure’. The common mistake is, he said, that ‘there is often no distinction made between the positive Idea of the Action, and the reference it has to a rule’ (2.28.13, 16; italics original). 23 ‘Retribution’ in this context includes both punishment and recompense. 24 It is difficult to say what role conscience plays in Passive Obedience. On the one hand, we read that the moral rules ‘are said to be stamped on the Mind, to be engraven on

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the Tables of the Heart, because they are well known to Mankind, and suggested and inculcated by Conscience’ (PO 12, italics original), and that we should be prepared to accept penalties for following our conscience (PO 3), suffering ‘for Conscience sake’ (PO 40). On the other hand, we read that it will lead to ‘great Difficulties’ if we look for the rules of morality ‘in the natural Inscriptions on the Mind’ (PO 4). And in PO 13 we read that it would be wrong to follow our conscience to ease sufferings caused by natural laws. If to follow the voice of ‘conscience’ means to be led by ‘Tenderness and Benevolence’,’ then our conscience misleads us in these cases. 25 Passive Obedience is a theological enquiry. I have not found it fruitful to compare it to later, secular doctrines such as Utilitarianism. 26 In An Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721). Works 6:70–71. 27 I wish to express my gratitude to Timo Airaksinen, Nancy Kendrick and Marta Szymanska-Lewoszewska for helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. I am grateful to the Hultengrens Fond, Lund University, for a grant that made it possible to finish this chapter.

9

De Motu: Berkeley’s Philosophy of Science Richard Brook

Introduction Berkeley’s De Motu [hence DM ] was first published in 1721 and republished in 1752. Its full title was De Motu: Sive de motus principio & natura et de causa communicationis motuum (On Motion: Or The Principle and Nature of Motion and the Cause of the Communication of Motions). The essay was evidently unsuccessfully submitted for a prize offered by The Royal Academy of Paris in 1720. Although dismissed by some, DM offers important accounts of Berkeley’s distinction between religion (metaphysics) and science or natural philosophy (here mainly mechanics, optics and astronomy), particularly how Berkeley conceived his work in relation to that of Isaac Newton’s discussion in the Principia of scientific explanation, for example, the status of forces in astronomy and mechanics, and the nature of space, and motion (Newton, 1687). These issues are dealt with in other works, particularly the Philosophical Notebooks, The Principles of Human Knowledge (1710/1734) and The Siris (1744). However, DM being more focused on the physical sciences (or natural philosophy) gives a usefully clear and consistent commentary on these topics. Finally, I consider some modern views about the significance of DM , in particular Karl Popper’s claim that Berkeley’s criticism of Newton’s views of space, time and motion anticipate the late nineteenth-century physicist and philosopher, Ernst Mach (Popper, 1953, Mach, 1884).

Natural philosophy and metaphysics The following four passages from DM illustrate Berkeley’s conception of the contrast between natural philosophy and metaphysics.

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DM §38: In mechanics also [as with geometry] notions are premised, i.e. definitions and general statements about motion from which afterwards by mathematical method conclusions more remote and less general are deduced.

DM §41: Mechanical principles and universal laws of motions or of nature, happy discoveries of the last century, treated an applied by aid of geometry, have shown a remarkable light on philosophy. But metaphysical principles and real efficient causes of the motion and existence of bodies or of corporeal attributes in no way belong to mechanics or experiment, nor throw light on them except in so far as being known beforehand they may serve to define the limits of physics, and in that way to remove imported difficulties and problems.

DM §42: the natural philosopher should concern himself entirely with experiments, laws of motions, mechanical principles, laws of motions, and reasonings thus deduced.

And DM §71: In physics sense and experience which reach only to apparent effects hold sway; in mechanics the abstract notions of mathematics are admitted. In first philosophy or metaphysics we are concerned with incorporeal things, with causes, truth, and the existence of things.

Incorporeal things are minds, and Berkeley’s well-known view is that only minds are efficient causes. For Berkeley ‘physics’ deals with qualitative relationships revealed to sense experience, mechanics makes use of, for example, the idealizations (or ‘abstractions’) of Euclidean geometry and algebra to mathematize those relationships, and first philosophy or metaphysics considers real (efficient) causes identified with the actions of an agent (God, or finite agents). In P §105 Berkeley – after a discussion of ‘attraction’ as an alleged mechanism for gravitational effects – remarks: If therefore we consider the difference there is betwixt natural Philosophers and other men, with regard to their knowledge of the Phenomena, we shall find it consists, not in an exacter knowledge of the efficient cause that produces them, for that can be no other than the will of a spirit, but only in a greater largeness of comprehension, whereby analogies, harmonies, and agreements are discovered in the works of Nature, and the particular effects explained, that is reduced by mathematics to general rules (my emphasis).1

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Berkeley and Newton In P §104 Berkeley writes: That bodies should tend towards the center of the earth, is not thought strange, because it is what we perceive every moment of our lives. But that they should have a like gravitation towards the center of the moon, may seem odd and unaccountable to most men, because it is discerned only in the tides. But a philosopher, whose thought takes in a larger compass of Nature, having observed a certain similitude of appearances, as well in the heavens as the earth, that argue innumerable bodies to have a mutual tendency towards each other, which he denotes by the general name attraction, whatever can be reduced to that, he thinks justly accounted for (Berkeley’s emphasis).

The philosopher referred to is Newton. By ‘accounted for’ Berkeley means can be mathematically deduced from general laws such as the law of gravity. Certainly Newton’s work – with important differences –is the model for Berkeley’s conception of scientific explanation. Both take general laws to account for or explain more specific regularities, like planetary orbits or tidal variation. We have something like what has been called ‘the deductive-nomological model [DN , or ‘covering law’] model of explanation’.2 From general laws of motion, including the inverse square law of gravity, more specific regularities, for example, Kepler’s second law of planetary motion – planets in their orbits around the sun sweep out equal areas in equal times –are mathematically deduced (Buchdahl 1970).3 The DN model has well-known difficulties. I will focus on one issue, particularly relevant to Berkeley’s relation to Newton; the role, even if implicit, of causality in the model. Both explanations and justifications can instantiate the formal (logical) structure of the DN account. A familiar example of the latter is that using Euclidean geometry and knowing the length of a flagpole’s shadow, and the angle light rays make with the pole, I can deduce the pole’s length. I have not explained why the pole is that long, although I have justified my belief that it is that long. On the other hand, given the angle of the sun’s rays and the flagpole’s height, I deduce and thereby explain the shadow’s length, since the pole’s blocking the rays causes the shadow.4 Certainly there are non-causal explanations, for example, deducing a theorem in pure mathematics from a sufficiently complex set of premises. For example, explaining why in a Euclidean triangle the sum of the angles equals two right angles. The point is simply that meeting the formal requirements of the DN

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model is not sufficient for an explanation. Moreover, in what became known as ‘mixed mathematics’, as in mathematically deducing Kepler’s laws, empirical premises in the explanans suggest at least implicitly a cause of what is to be explained. In the Preface to the first edition of the Principia (distinguishing ‘manual arts’ from ‘natural philosophy’), Newton writes: But I consider philosophy rather than arts and write not concerning manual but natural powers, and consider chiefly those things which relate to gravity, levity, elastic force, the resistance of fluids, and the like forces whether attractive or impulsive; and therefore I offer this work as the mathematical principles of philosophy, for the whole burden of philosophy seems to consist in this – from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena. Principia 1729, 1962 xvii, my emphasis

Berkeley agrees with this in general but raises questions about the nature of forces. He writes in DM §37: A thing can be said to be explained mechanically then indeed when it is reduced to those most simple and universal principles, and shown by accurate reasoning to be in agreement and connection with them. For once the laws of nature have been found out, then it is the philosopher’s task to show that each phenomena is in constant conformity with those laws, that is, necessarily follows from those principles. In that consist the explanation and solution of phenomena and the assigning their cause, i.e. the reason why they take place (my emphasis).

The last sentence carefully doesn’t equate cause with efficient cause. And in that sense the DN structure might appear a useful model of explanation for Berkeley since no explicit reference is made to causes. Yet without at least an implicit reference to causality DM §37 doesn’t tell us why ‘a thing’ is explained rather than merely that the belief the ‘thing’ occurred or will occur is justified. In any case Newton and Berkeley certainly thought that Kepler’s laws could be explained from, among other premises, the inverse square law for gravitational attraction. For Newton – I return to this below – gravitational attraction does explain, in the sense of strictly causing, orbital motions and tidal variation. There are, then, important differences between Newton and Berkeley about whether gravitational attraction counts as a force or strict cause. Two issues at least are involved: whether forces in general, thought of as efficient causes, are real; and whether alleged forces, even if assumed to exist, can act unmediated and instantaneously across empty space. My main interest is the first question,

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though I note the question of action at a distance was important for many of Newton’s contemporaries.5 As for force itself, conceived as an active principle, Berkeley contends bodies are essentially passive, a position he thinks is supported by Newton’s laws themselves. In DM §22 he writes: All that we know to which we have given the name body contains nothing in itself which could be the principle of motion or its efficient cause; for impenetrability, extension, and figure neither include or connote any power of producing motion; nay, on the contrary, if we review singly those qualities of body, and whatever other qualities there may be, we see that they are all in fact passive and that there is nothing active in them which can in any way be understood as the source and principle of motion.

This is a general principle echoing Berkeley’s view that nature contains no efficient causes. In DM §33 he comments: But those who attribute a vital [vitale] principle to bodies are imagining an obscure notion and one ill suited to the facts. For what is meant by being endowed with the vital principle, except to live? And to live, what is meant but to move oneself, to stop, and to change one’s state? But the most learned philosophers of this age lay it down for an indubitable principle that every body persists in its own state, whether of rest or of uniform movement in a straight line, except in so far as it is compelled from without to alter that state.6

Berkeley rejects Newton’s view that bodies contain a vis insita, or innate force of matter . . . a power of resisting by which every body, as much as in it lies, endeavours to preserve its present state, whether it be of rest or of moving uniformly forward in a straight line.7 As for gravity, Berkeley evidently shared with continental critics like Leibniz the view that gravitational force was an occult quality. In P §23 he writes: ‘The great mechanical principle now in vogue is attraction. That a stone falls to the earth, or the sea swells toward the moon, may to some appear sufficiently explained thereby. But how are we enlightened by being told this is done by attraction?’ (Berkeley’s emphasis). In DM §4 he is more explicit: ‘But since the cause of the fall of heavy bodies is unseen and unknown, gravity in that usage, cannot properly be styled a sensible quality. It is, therefore, an occult quality. But what an occult quality is, or how any quality can act or do anything, we can scarcely conceive – indeed we cannot conceive’ (my emphasis). The last sentence connects two clams: (1) gravity, qua occult quality, doesn’t do anything, and (2) no sensible quality, or collection of sensible qualities, does anything, since sensible objects are causally inert.8 Newton, as noted (fn 2),

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rejected criticism that gravity was an occult quality. He writes In the General Scholium ending Book III of the Principia: Hitherto we have explain’d the phaenomena of the heavens and of our sea, by the power of Gravity, but have not yet assign’d the cause of this power. This is certain, that it must proceed from a cause that penetrates to the very centers of the Sun and Planets, without suffering the least diminution of its force; that operates, not according to the quantity of surfaces of the particles upon which it acts, (as mechanical causes used to do) but according to the quantity of the solid matter which they contain, and propagates its virtue on all sides, to immense distances, decreasing always in the duplicate proportion of the distances. Gravitation towards the Sun, is made up out of the gravitations towards the several particles of which the body of the Sun is compos’d; and in receding from the Sun, decreases accurately in the duplicate proportion of the distances, as far as the orb of Saturn, as evidently appears from the quiescence of the aphelions of the Planets;9 nay, and even to the remotest aphelions of the Comets, if those aphelions are also quiescent. But hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phaenomena, and I frame no hypotheses. For whatever is not deduc’d from the phaenomena, is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferr’d from the phaenomena, and afterwards render’d general by induction. Thus it was that the impenetrability, the mobility, and the impulsive force of bodies, and the laws of motion and of gravitation, were discovered. And to us it is enough, that gravity does really exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea (my emphasis) (Newton, 1713, 546–7).10

Yet Berkeley, interestingly, attributes his own instrumental view of forces to Newton, writing in DM §17: Force, gravity, attraction and terms of this sort are useful for reasonings and reckonings about bodies and bodies in motion, but not for understanding the simple nature of motion itself or for indicating so many distinct qualities. As for attraction, it was certainly introduced by Newton, not as a true physical quality, but only as a mathematical hypothesis (Berkeley’s emphasis).

The passage suggests there is no denotative distinction between the terms ‘force’, ‘gravity’ and ‘attraction’ (though ‘force’ obviously is a more general term) since none refer. Attributing forces for Berkeley is like positing epicycles in astronomy; not existing but mathematically useful for explanation.11 Berkeley’s

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broader point is that a realist view of forces takes them mistakenly to be efficient causes.12 Although in the passage Berkeley attributes this view of forces to Newton,13 the section quoted from the General Scholium shows that Newton was a realist about forces, certainly about gravitational attraction.14 The Principia does have a passage that apparently offers evidence for Berkeley’s claim that Newton thought attraction a mathematical hypothesis. Newton contrasts what he calls the ‘mathematical’ and the ‘physical’ treatment of force. After defining various sorts of motions and forces, Newton writes of the concept of force: ‘For I here design only to giver a mathematical notion of those forces, without considering their physical causes and seats’ (Principia, 5). It’s clear, however, that Newton means here by a mathematical treatment, taking the centres of attracting bodies as mathematical points (Ibid, 6). In fact Newton has a fourfold distinction: gravitational phenomena such as tidal changes and planetary orbits, gravitational attraction as the cause of those changes, the cause of attraction itself, and lastly the law of gravity;15 that the attractive force is directly proportional to the masses of attracting bodies and inversely proportional to the square of the intervening distance. I note in passing that action at a distance should not be a special problem for Berkeley since he thought natural bodies were causally inert even in contact. So corpuscularianism would not be attractive to him if it required real contact forces.16 In sum, although Berkeley was mistaken in thinking that for Newton gravitational attraction was shorthand for a mathematical hypothesis, he largely accepted the Principia’s systemization for what Berkeley took to be a non-causal paradigm for scientific explanation, at least in astronomy, optics and mechanics; using mathematics to deduce specific regularities from more general laws, where the deduction constitutes the core of the explanation.17

Absolute motion and absolute space Berkeley’s specific criticism of the Principia’s distinction between absolute and relative motion and space is notable for its modern appearance. This criticism, and his critique in The Analyst (Berkeley, 1734) of Newton and Leibniz’s formulation of the calculus, perhaps among all Berkeley’s works, had the most relevance for modern treatments of physics and analysis. Newton famously offers two thought experiments in the Principia for the existence of absolute motion and hence absolute space, both dealing with centrifugal effects of accelerated motion. (1) In a spinning vessel containing water, the water at first

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will be in relative motion with the vessel, then gradually whirl at the same speed, (relatively at rest with the vessel) while the water’s edges creep up the sides of the container, deforming the surface into a concave shape. For Newton this centrifugal effect, the rise of the water, demonstrates the vessel is accelerating absolutely (‘the true and absolute circular motion of the water’) (Newton, 10). (2) If two globes connected by a cord are ‘whirled around their common center of gravity’, the ‘tension’ of the cord, a centrifugal effect, implies, without comparison with other bodies, that the globes are truly in motion (Ibid, 10–12). Berkeley considered these thought experiments from early on. In his unpublished Note Books (Berkeley, 1707–1709, Ayers, 1975, NB 456) he writes: ‘I differ from Newton in that I think the recession ab axe motus is not the effect or index or measure of motion, but of the vis impressa. It showeth not what is truly moved but what has the force impressed on it. or rather that which hath an impressed force.’ The passage is too brief to be very helpful. It is not clear what Berkeley means here by the impressed force or why he doesn’t think the water’s recession indicates its absolute motion. The other possibility is that the bucket is whirling with respect to some other material object(s), a choice Berkeley ultimately endorses. While considering De Motu’s analysis of these thought experiments, I also look at some passages from The Principles. In P §112, after outlining Newton’s distinction between relative and absolute motion, and therefore relative and absolute space, Berkeley comments: But not withstanding what has been said [about Newton], it doth not appear to me, that there can be any other motion than relative: so that to conceive motion, there must be at least conceived two bodies, whereof the distance or position in regard to each other is varied. Hence if there was one only body in being, it could not possibly be moved. This seems evident, in the idea I have of motion doeth necessarily include relation.

This is a conceptual claim about the nature of motion, (shared by Leibniz) but, as noted below, it has important consequences. Though by definition Berkeley takes a perceived A to move only if it changes its position with respect to some perceived B taken to be at rest, he does suggest a distinction between relative motion per se, and a sub-class we can call ‘real motion’. Using the example of walking across the streets, he says in P §113: [Y]et as relative motion is that which is perceived by sense, and regarded in the ordinary affairs of life, it should seem that every man of common sense knows what it is, as well as the best philosopher: now I ask anyone, whether in his sense

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of motion as he walks along the streets, the stones he passes over may be said to move, because they change distance with his feet? To me it seems, that though motion includes a relation of one thing to another, yet it is not necessary that each term of the relation be denominated from it [see also P §115].

Real motion has an efficient cause, in this case the person choosing to walk by moving his legs. Although Berkeley takes this to be a matter of commonsense it raises the question of how he differs from Newton who in terms of impressed forces distinguished absolute from merely relative motion.18 The answer, one that perhaps leads to a difficulty (see below), is that real motion, as any motion for Berkeley, still requires an observable reference frame, whereas for Newton absolute motion can exist in absolute space. Discussing ‘place’ in P §114, Berkeley comments: In the common affairs of life men never go beyond the earth to define the place of any body: and what is quiescent in respect of that, is accounted absolutely to be so. But philosophers who have a greater extent of thought, and juster notions of the system of things, discover even the earth itself to be moved. In order therefore to fix their notions, they seem to conceive the corporeal world as finite, and the utmost unmoved walls or shell thereof, to be the place, whereby they estimate true motions. If we sound our own conceptions, I believe we may find all the absolute motion we can frame an idea of, to be at bottom no other than relative motion thus defined.

By the ‘utmost unmoved walls or shell’, Berkeley refers to the fixed stars. Supporting this gloss are comments in DM §64. After noting that, depending on the reference frame, a body can be said to be in motion or at rest, he writes: [T]o determine true motion and true rest, for the removal of ambiguity, and for the furtherance of the mechanics of these philosophers who take the wider view of the system of things, it would be enough to bring in, instead of absolute space, relative space as confined to the heavens of the fixed stars, considered as at rest (my emphasis).

We can now say the globes ‘truly’ rotate relative to the fixed stars. What of the tension in the cord? That particular centrifugal effect for Newton is caused by the absolute rotation of the globes; that is, the rotation with respect to absolute space. Presumably for Berkeley if the fixed stars suddenly disappeared, there would be no motion. Would he think, however, the tension in the cord remains?19 Since the passage above does not discuss that particular centrifugal effect, we can look elsewhere. Berkeley writes in P §114 about centrifugal effects in the bucket experiment:

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As to what is said of the centrifugal force,20 that it doth not at all belong to circular relative motion; [Newton’s view] I do not see how that this follows from the experiment which is brought to prove it. See Philosophie Naturalis Principia Mathematica, in Schol. Def. VIII. For the water in the vessel, at that time wherein it is said to have the greatest circular motion, hath, I think, no motion at all; as is plain from the foregoing section (Berkeley’s emphasis).

The water lacks motion, Berkeley believes, since, given his conception of motion, the water is at rest relative to the bucket. But, as with his discussion of the globe experiment, Berkeley says nothing in this passage about centrifugal effects; in this case the deformation of the water’s surface. DM §60, though, has a more complete discussion of the bucket experiment: As regards circular motion many think that, as motion truly circular increases, the body necessarily tends ever more and more away from its axis. The belief arises from the fact that circular motion can be seen taking its origin, as it were, at every moment from two directions, one along the radius and the other along the tangent, and if in this latter direction only the impetus be increased, then the body in motion will retire from the centre, and its orbit will cease to be circular. But if the forces be increased equally in both directions the motion will remain circular though accelerated – which will not argue an increase in the forces in retirement from the axis, any more than in the forces of approach to it. Therefore we must say that the water forced round in the bucket rises to the sides of the vessel, because when new forces are applied in the direction of the tangent to any particle of water, in the same instant new centripetal forces are not applied. From which experiment it in no way follows that absolute circular motion is necessarily recognized by the forces of retirement from the axis of motion. Again, how those terms corporeal forces and conation are to be understood is more than sufficiently shown in the foregoing discussion (Berkeley’s emphasis).21

The passage has some problems. First, the deformation of the water does not result from a new tangential impetus to the bucket. (Unless Berkeley means relative to when the bucket was still.) Rather, particles of water, less constrained than the bucket’s structural rim, move along a tangential line as their natural (inertial) motion, though trapped by the bucket’s sides. Moreover, from Newton’s viewpoint, the water surface’s deformation does not change the fact that the rim velocity of the water and bucket are the same. It is the centrifugal effect, the deformation of the water, that needs explaining. For Newton, again, the explanation is the bucket’s rotation – thus acceleration – with respect to absolute space.22 Berkeley perhaps could have simply admitted the presence of centrifugal effects when the water and the bucket are relatively at rest, but insists on his

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earlier point that the fixed stars are an adequate inertial frame with respect to which the bucket is rotating. This does raise the problem – see notes – of accounting for the water’s perceived deformation when no frame exists with respect to which we perceive the bucket’s rotation. The fact, however, that the earth and the fixed stars can equally serve as an inertial frame (roughly Newton’s laws come out true in both) raises a possible puzzle concerning Berkeley’s claim in P §113 where he distinguishes merely relative motion and what I have called real relative motion, and his claim in DM 64 that ‘true motion and rest’ are revealed relative to the fixed stars as a reference frame. In principle, if I walk in the opposite direction and with equal speed to the earth’s rotation, then in one inertial frame [the earth] I am moving, and in the other [fixed stars] I am stationary.23 Berkeley certainly recognizes this ‘Galilean relativity’. As mentioned above, in DM §64 he notes: ‘a thing can be said in one respect to be in motion and in another respect to be at rest’. The phrase ‘true motion’ in that passage then is perhaps misleading. Or at least real motion and true motion might need to be distinguished. Winkler (1986) notes the Galilean relativity point and suggests we can without contradiction say I am truly moving with respect to the earth and truly at rest relative to the fixed stars. Presumably, if I were to walk at the speed of the earth and in the same direction as its rotation I would truly be at rest with respect to the earth, and I would truly move with respect to the fixed stars. However it is not clear how the term ‘truly’ functions here. Perhaps we must ultimately rest with a pragmatic point that, at least for Berkeley, the fixed stars as a reference frame give a simpler physics, particularly one that does not introduce efficient causes. Again, Berkeley requires some observable reference frame, in this case an inertial frame like the earth or the fixed stars, for there to be motion at all. His point is that absolute motion and absolute space are illegitimate abstractions; since they cannot be perceived they are literally unconceivable.

Berkeley as anticipating Ernst Mach Some contemporary philosophers, notably Karl Popper (1953), find Berkeley’s critique of Newton’s thought experiments historically significant, for its strain of positivism they think anticipates some contemporary views about space and time. DM §64 is a fundamental passage for Popper as it claims that the fixed stars can replace absolute space as a reference frame for the centrifugal effects in Newton’s examples. Popper writes:

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What is perhaps most striking is that Berkeley and Mach, both great admirers of Newton, criticize the ideas of absolute time, absolute space, and absolute motion on similar lines. Mach’s criticism, exactly like Berkeley’s, culminates in the suggestion that Newton’s arguments in favor of his absolute space (Foucault’s Pendulum, the rotating bucket of water, the effect of centrifugal forces upon the shape of the earth) fail because these movements are relative to the fixed stars. 1953, 32–33

The significant point for Popper is that both Berkeley and Mach think absolute motion and absolute space are illegitimate notions. One body can be said to move only relative to some observable body (or bodies) considered at rest. Mach writes: ‘the system of the world is only given once to us, and the Ptolemaic or Copernican view is our interpretation, but both are equally actual. Try to fix Newton’s bucket and rotate the heaven of fixed stars and then prove the absence of centrifugal forces’ (Mach 1884, 232). Mach takes the thought experiment to beg the question in favor of absolute motion. He thinks only the relative motion of the bucket to the remainder of mass in the universe is functionally related to the water’s deformation. Newton’s experiment with the rotating vessel of water simply informs us that the relative rotation of the water with respect to the sides of the vessel produces no noticeable centrifugal forces, but that such forces are produced by its relative rotation with respect to the mass of the earth and the other celestial bodies (Mach 1884, 232).24 I note in passing that although Berkeley and Mach have a quite similar view of alleged entities like forces,25 absolute motion and absolute space – they are in principle unobservable and therefore non-existent – Mach would lack sympathy for Berkeley’s idealism or religious metaphysics. The historical tie between Berkeley and Mach, as both Karl Popper (1953) and John Earman (1989) contend, is that both belong to that positivist tradition in physics and philosophy of science that rejects appeal to entities that are in principle unobservable. W.A. Suchting (1967) thinks, however, that whereas Mach had a thoroughly conventionalist view of what counts as an inertial frame, Berkeley took it as at least meaningful that the fixed stars could be really at rest.26 However, in DM §65, Berkeley, using the following reductio, indicates that he has a conventionalist position about inertial frames. The laws of motion and the effects, and theorems containing the proportions and calculations of the same for the different configurations of the paths, likewise for accelerations and different directions, and for mediums resisting in greater or less degree: all of these hold without bringing absolute motion into account. As

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is plain from this that, since according to the principles of those who introduce absolute motion we cannot know by any indication whether the whole frame of things is at rest or is moved uniformly in a direction, clearly we cannot know the absolute motion of any body.27 And in DM §66 Berkeley notes we should be content with ‘relative measures’. I remarked above that in P §113 Berkeley endorses the existence of real motions, those caused by an impressed force as when I intentionally walk along the street. This motion is relative, however, to the earth as an inertial frame; presumably again I might be stationary relative to some other frame, say the fixed stars. There might be no practical problem here for Berkeley, though socalled ‘true’ motion, as Winkler (1986) suggests, would for Berkeley be relativized to a particular reference frame. The problem remains, however, of how to explain the centrifugal effects of alleged accelerated motion, for example the tides, or the water’s deformation in the bucket experiment. Here too Berkeley perhaps could be satisfied I think with a kinematics, dispensing with forces like attraction, and substituting functional relations between observables suitably idealized. He might accept with Mach, for example, that force in the Newtonian system simply means mass times acceleration, and that what is ultimately significant about socalled gravitational attraction is the mathematical law of gravity. Berkeley sums up his view of the relation between natural philosophy and metaphysics in De Motu’s last section (DM §72), and I end with that passage: Only by meditation and reasoning can truly active causes be rescued from the surrounding darkness and be to some extent known. To deal with them is the business of first philosophy or metaphysics. Alot to each science its own province; assign its bounds; accurately distinguish the principles and objects belonging to each. Thus it will be possible to treat them with greater ease and clarity.

Notes 1 Eric Schliesser notes how important it was for Berkeley to protect religion from what he believed to be the possibility that the growing success of science would challenge the existence of a realm – in this case religion – that is both distinct in its aims from science, but allowed the existence of science itself. The latter is effected not only by denying there is any efficient causality in non-minded nature, but also by insisting that the mere correlations that constitute natural laws in, for example, astronomy and mechanics, to exist, must be maintained in existence by God (Schliesser, E. (2005), ‘On the origin of modern naturalism: The significance of Berkeley’s response to a Newtonian indispensability argument’, Philosophica 76, 45–66).

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2 Hempel, C. and Oppenheim, P. (1948), ‘Studies in the logic of explanation’, Philosophy of Science 15, 2, 133–75. 3 Eric Schliesser claims, mistakenly I believe, that Berkeley ‘limits the aim of the sciences to predictions alone’ (Schliesser 2005, 46). He correctly notes that for Berkeley natural science has no authority with respect to metaphysics (religion in Berkeley’s case), which considers strict causes. 4 A good recent discussion of this case is in Lina Jansson: Jansson, L. (2016), ‘Explanatory asymmetries: Laws of nature rehabilitated’, The Journal of Philosophy 112, 11, 577–99. 5 Leibniz, among others, argued that gravity for Newton was essentially an occult quality (Leibniz–Clarke Correspondence, 1717, 1956, (ed) H. G. Alexander, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 66), meaning not only that it was unobservable, but also had no explanatory power. Berkeley, in the above remarks about attraction, apparently shares this view. Newton famously rejected action at a distance for gravitational attraction. In a well-known letter to Richard Bentley, six years after the Principia’s publication, he writes: ‘It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact’ (cited in Newton, I. ([1687]1729, 1962), Principia. Edited by Florian Cajori, Berkeley: University of California Press). Yet Newton did believe, however attraction was ultimately explained, that gravitational attraction was not an occult quality but a cause that subsumed the planetary orbits and the fall of an apple under the same law (Newton, I. ([1730]1979), Optics. Edited by E. T. Whittaker. New York: Dover Publications). 6 Uniform motion in a straight line (including rest V = 0) is force-free in the Newtonian system. Impressed forces are corrrelated with alterations in that motion. 7 Principia, 2. 8 See also DM §§5, 6. 9 The aphelion is that part of an orbit furthest from the sun. 10 You can find a stout defence of Newton along these lines in Roger Cotes, Preface to the Principia (2nd edition) trans. Motte/Cajori, xx–xxiii. By ‘phenomena’ in this context, Newton means laws such as Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. 11 Berkeley uses the example of epicycles in the Siris (S 228). See as well ‘Berkeley’s Philosophy of Motion’ (Whitrow, G. J. (1953), ‘Berkeley’s philosophy of motion,’ British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 4, 13, 37–45). 12 In P §108 Berkeley writes: ‘Those men who frame general rules from phenomena, and afterwards derive the phenomena from those rules, seem to consider signs rather than causes.’ 13 See DM §32. ‘And Newton everywhere frankly intimates that not only did motion originate from God, but that still the mundane system is moved by the same actus.’ Berkeley may be referring to passages in Newton’s Optics (1730, 1979, 369–70).

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14 Although Max Jammer accepts Berkeley’s comment about Newton and attraction without criticism, he takes Berkeley to be one of the founders of that tradition which seeks to eliminate forces – as efficient causes – from physics (Jammer, M. (1957, 1999), Concepts of Force. New York: Dover Publications, 204–208). 15 In his later Optics Newton writes: ‘What I call Attraction may be perform’d by impulse, or by some other means unknown to me. I use that Word here to signify only in general any Force by which Bodies tend towards one another, whatsoever be the cause’ (Optics, 376). 16 Berkeley writes in DM §8, discussing alleged forces of percussion: ‘We generally suppose that corporeal force is something easy to conceive. Those, however, who have studied the matter more carefully are of a different opinion, as appears from the strange obscurity of their language when they try to explain it.’ 17 See Machamer, P. McGuire, J. E. and Kochiraas, H. (2012), ‘Newton and the mechanical philosophy: Gravitation as the balance of the heavens’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 50, 3, 370–88, 373. They write: ‘Moreover, what became important during the seventeenth century was not that the traditional categories of causes were deemphasized for explanatory purposes (that certainly occurred) but, rather, that a new stress was placed on the category of law, and on laws of motion, in particular.’ For Newton’s speculation about corpuscular explanations of chemical phenomena, see his Optics (Quest. 31), 375. 18 Leibniz endorses this contrast between real (‘true and absolute’) and merely relative motion, but also thinks for there to be motion it must be possible to observe it. Like Berkeley, he denies motion exists with respect to something called ‘absolute space’ (Leibniz–Clarke Correspondence, 74). 19 Winkler (Winkler, K. (1986), ‘Berkeley, Newton and the stars’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 17, 1, 23–42, 40) suggests a strategy Berkeley might use to account for the continued presence of centrifugal effects when there is no observable motion – i.e. the reference frame has disappeared. God keeps the tension in the cord, or the deformation of the water’s surface even when no frame was available for the bucket or globes to be perceived as rotating. When the stars reappear the rotation would appear. The supposition did not as far as I know occur to Berkeley. 20 Though Berkeley uses the phrase ‘centrifugal force’, the tendency of water particles to move tangentially to their curved orbit reflects its natural or unforced motion. Centrifugal effects are, at least for modern discussions of the Newtonian system, the result of central (centripetal) forces. Newton does, however, use the phrase ‘centrifugal force’ a number of times referring to matter’s innate tendency (viz. inertia) when in curved motion to move each moment along the tangent to the curve (See Newton, I. ([1687]1729, 1999), Principia. Edited with commentary by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 82–84).

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21 Presumably Berkeley, since he permits volitional causes, could allow that someone twisted the bucket’s rope, thus efficiently causing its motion as it unwinds. 22 In DM §62 Berkeley notes that the bucket’s motion is not truly circular since it is compounded of other motions, e.g. the earth’s rotation around its axis. It is not clear that this has bearing on the discussion of the ‘cause’ of centrifugal effects. Lawrence Sklar (Sklar, L. (1974), Space, Time, and Spacetime. Berkeley: University of California Press, 193) finds, with some justification I think, Berkeley’s above discussion of the bucket experiment confused. Sklar does acknowledge Berkeley’s De Motu as an important precursor of the work of Ernst Mach. 23 Think of swimming upstream against a current. You move with respect to a leaf carried downstream, but are stationary with respect to the shore. 24 John Earman (Earman, J. (1989), World Enough and Space-time, Cambridge: MIT Press, 82) takes Mach to simply be recapitulating the critique of Berkeley and others of Newton’s thought experiments. 25 Mach, reformulating Newton’s laws, considers the second law, F = MA , to be a definition of force; force then by convention equals the product of mass and acceleration. 26 Suchting claims that what importantly ties Mach and Berkeley together is not so much a positivist rejection of what is unobservable, but rather that alleged entities like gravitational force, absolute space and absolute motion, play no role in physics (Suchting, W. A. (1967), ‘Berkeley’s criticism of Newton on space and motion’, Isis 58, 2, 186–97, 196–197). 27 Leibniz, also criticizing the notion of absolute space, takes the supposition of moving the ‘whole frame of things’ to raise not just an epistemological problem but to be in itself absurd since God would lack a sufficient reason to do that (Leibniz–Clarke Correspondence, 38–39).

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Alciphron; or the Minute Philosopher Berkeley’s Redefinition of Free-Thinking Adam Grzeliński

The circumstances of the work’s publication Berkeley worked on his Alciphron; or the Minute Philosopher between 1729 and 1731 during his stay in Rhode Island, where he was planning to lay the foundations of a college for the next generations of English colonists who would go on to promote Christianity among the local population.1 This work – being the most extensive book within the Irish philosopher’s whole output – was published in London in 1732 just after Berkeley returned from his unsuccessful trip to America (and by the middle of 1731, it was already clear that the promise made by the British Parliament to provide a subsidy of twenty thousand pounds for the foundation of the college was not going to be fulfilled), however, there are some comments on the surrounding scenery in the second and fifth dialogues that give us an idea of their location and can be recognized to feature parts of Rhode Island. The first edition of Berkeley’s work consisted of two volumes and the second volume included a new release of An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision. The Alciphron was published anonymously, but since the previous edition of the Theory of Vision, dated 1709, was signed under Berkeley’s name, those interested in the matter could easily reveal who the author of this treatise was. The work was nearly simultaneously released in Dublin in 1732 and the second London edition appeared in the same year. The fourth edition of the work, which included some amendments and supplements, is dated 1752 and was published in London without the Theory of Vision – as Berkeley’s very last published work – and, similarly to his previous publications, it was anonymous (however, the posthumous editions were signed in his name and were published in 1755, 1757, 1767 and 1777).

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The complete title of the work is Alciphron; or the Minute Philosopher. In Seven Dialogues. Containing an Apology for the Christian Religion, against those who are called Free-thinkers. The work does not only present certain arguments having apologetic purposes, but it also provides direct reasoning against the advocates of irreligiousness, by referring to previous philosophical arguments and developing them. The Theory of Vision Vindicated published in 1733 was meant to complete Berkeley’s critique of the ideas of free-thinking and deism in the Alciphron. In the Theory of Vision Vindicated Berkeley comes to his metaphysical and religious conclusions based on his theory of vision, the preview of which may be found in the second dialogue of the Alciphron. What’s more, the Theory of Vision Vindicated opens with a criticism of Shaftesbury’s philosophy that relates to the one we can find on numerous pages of the Minute Philosopher. The beginning of the 1730s was a period of powerful polemics on religious rationality, religious tolerance and freedom of political debates. After the release of Anthony Collins’ influential book, A Discourse of Free Thinking, in 1713, the advocates of this new movement were now named free-thinkers. At the time, in fact, the first seeds of change had already been sowed by the books that heralded the withdrawal from revealed religion in favour of rational religion of philosophers (if not of atheism), and their fruitful outcomes were finally coming to the forefront in the 1720s and 1730s. The movement itself was pretty varied. The most renowned works on ‘free-thinking’ and deism were written by the promoters of religion, who postulated its rationalization, such as John Locke in The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), or presented the project of its naturalization as the famous three-volume Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times (1711) by Anthony Ashley Cooper Shaftesbury did, or directly ridiculed miracles described in the Bible, which was the case in John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious (1696). Not long after them, the group was joined by, as already mentioned, Anthony Collins with A Discourse of Free-thinking and A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of Christian Religion (1724), and by others, to name a few, such as William Wollaston (The Religion of Nature Delineated, 1722) and Matthew Tindal (Christianity as Old as the Creation; or, the Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature, 1730). The above groundwork, in conjunction with the influential works that were recognized as revolutionizing the common social order, such as the notorious Fable of the Bees (1714) by Bernard Mandeville, as well as the books by Benedict Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes (widely acknowledged as atheistic works), has become the threat for the state with, in Berkeley’s opinion, irreligiousness as its

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biggest fear. Previously, in An Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721), Berkeley expressed his disappointment in the situation of the country – the moral decline that, in his view, brought about the famous speculation in the South See Bubble in the early 1720s. Therefore, he set his hopes and mind to build a better, decadent-free society in America. No wonder then that his return to Great Britain must have seemed to him as if he was going back to the land of decline. A few years passed, but Berkeley’s other work A Discourse Addressed to Magistrates and Men in Authority (1738) reveals the same fears: ‘our prospect is very terrible – says Berkeley there – and the symptoms grow stronger every day’, for ‘modern schemes of our free-thinkers, who pretend to separate morality from religion, how rational soever they may seem to their Admirers, are in truth and effect most irrational and pernicious to civil society’ since ‘nothing truly great, and good, can enter into the heart of one attached to no principles of religion, who believes no providence, who neither fears hell, nor hopes for heaven’ (Works VI , 206–207).

Minute philosophy – redefining the notion of free-thinking The first dialogue is an introduction and presentation of the location, the time of the dialogues and their protagonists. The hitherto contemporary scenery being a ‘distant retreat, far beyond the verge of that great whirlpool of business, faction, and pleasure, which is called the world’ (Alc I, 1) was chosen as the location of the dispute between Euphranor and Crito, who both appear to express Berkeley’s point of view2 and Crito’s guests: i.e. Alciphron ‘above forty, and no stranger either to men or books’ (ibid.) and Lysicles – a junior to Alciphron and relative of Crito – who ‘after having passed the forms of education and seen little of the world, fell into an intimacy with men of pleasure and free-thinkers’ (ibid.). The choice of characters strongly suggests an educational aspect of the dialogues: Euphranor and Crito are confronted with the pair of Alciphron and Lysicles. Lysicles is described as a young follower of modern, trendy opinions, whereas Crito, junior to Euphranor, is a well-educated man who presents far more detailed argumentations and systematically comes to conclusions that could – and should – be shared by the reader, since the whole dispute is aimed at winning the reader over to his viewpoint. Berkeley presents his dialogue in the traditional way: the statements are direct, however the dialogue itself is recounted to Teages by Dion. Apart from its

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philosophical and theological contents and literary quality, the Alciphron also has a persuasive bearing: Berkeley does not aim to simply present the standings of the criticized philosophers (it was not until the 1752 edition, when the detailed footnotes were published to show a reference to the works by Hobbes, Toland, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Collins, Browne and others), but rather to demonstrate the paradigmatic notions of the diverse intellectual formation of free-thinkers. Hence he writes in the Advertisement: ‘it must not therefore be imagined that every one of these characters agrees with every individual free-thinker’, and a free-thinker is considered an ‘atheist, libertine, fanatic, scorner, critic, metaphysician, fatalist, and sceptic’ (Alc Advertisement, Works III , 23). Therefore, the names of the characters that represent certain viewpoints, as was common at the time, have their origins in ancient times (i.e. Theages refers to Pseudo-Plato’s work and Alciphron is named after the Greek sophist) or are completely made up, but have particular meanings like Nicander (‘bringing war’) or Menecles (‘of perishable glory’). It is worth noting that the name of a free-thinker had no – or at least did not need to have – negative meaning, so Berkeley in his criticism prefers to refer to ‘those who are called free-thinkers’ using the ambiguous name of minute philosophers. The latter is borrowed from Cicero’s De senectute and De divinatione and means philosophers that are meticulous and at the same time ‘diminishing all the most valuable things’ (Alc I, 10); for Berkeley their minute scrutiny is no more than empty chattering.3 The first dialogue is also an outline of the viewpoints held in later discussions. On the one hand, the minute philosophers are antagonistic towards the clergy and accuse them of plunging society into superstition; they oppose the academic philosophy and propound the fashionable, however superficial integrity and ‘witty’ education, gained in ‘a drawing room, a coffee house, a chocolate house, at the tavern, or groom-porter’s’ (Alc I, 11). On the other hand, their opponents consider them as destroyers of all qualities, and what is proclaimed by some of them as deism, turns out to be a disguised atheism. The necessity of the gradual dismissal of traditional superstitions is their only restraint from an open manifesto of irreligiousness.

Against Mandeville’s naturalism The starting point of the second dialogue is Euphranor’s thesis claiming that ‘the general good of mankind [should] be regarded as a rule or measure of moral truths’ (Alc I, 16) and that there is a necessary relation between religion and the

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well-being of mankind (Alc I, 16). It is commonly regarded that the statement suggests a utilitarian nature to Berkeley’s theory of ethics, however, recently it has been argued in a pretty conclusive way, that it rather points to its relation with natural law concepts.4 Lysicles’ thread of arguments is primarily directed against the existence of the commonly recognized and objective order of values: if the common moral concepts are illegitimate, then the traditional truths proclaimed by religion are not legitimate either. Thus, there is nothing left for religion to argue as it actually becomes a mere superstition. An example of such inconsistency, within the commonly accepted practical principles, is the opposition between the public good and private interest; instead of praising public goals that can conceal the real interest of an individual, one should rather acknowledge the public good as the satisfaction of all particular interests of individuals. Hence, the common moral concepts, like virtue and vice, are nothing but meaningless names because we are able to expose people who benefit from generally disapproved human behaviour, such as gambling or drunkenness, so one should then accept that, as Euphranor concludes, ‘vice then is a fine thing with an ugly name’ (Alc II , 3). This point of view was already presented in the infamous work by Bernard Mandeville – The Fable of the Bees and, according to Berkeley, it turns out to be untrue for several reasons. First, from an economic point of view, it underestimates the costs of the actions since the loss caused by them is not matched by their potential profit. Second, considering the necessity to provide the durability of social order, ‘a new experiment’ would undermine the foundations of the whole existing legal and customary order. And finally, the third argument shows the contradiction within Mandeville’s theory itself: deists (who de facto are crypto-atheists, as they stand against all religious superstitions) seem to hold that the individual interests of people will be, in some unknown way, harmonized and thus they will contribute to the overall public good. The latter, however, would require actions of some kind of Providence that would happen beyond human knowledge and any religious belief. The critique of Mandeville’s conception is just an introduction to Berkeley’s criticism of the whole set of ideas of free-thinkers (or, as we call them nowadays, the proponents of the Enlightenment): the assumption that a new social order can be built by negating tradition, through emancipation of individuals, the postulate presented by Locke about rational behaviour of every human being,5 and Shaftesbury’s dreamy vision of nature as an organic whole, which should be imitated by men in their social institutions (however, the judgement on this is grounded only on his enthusiastic, aesthetic vision).6 The intentional behaviour

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of a human being, aiming at creating a rational society, requires a conscious guidance of these actions to the social objective, instead of ill-considered belief that caring for private interests will ultimately result in the well-being of the integral society, as Mandeville wanted. The manifestation of such a belief also demonstrates confidence in the possibility of ruling a natural instinct (relevant to human beings as well as to animals) that, according to Berkeley, is equal with waiving the rationality specific only to humanity, i.e. conscious, purposeful actions. Such a naturalistic vision of a man can be found in the works of Hobbes, Mandeville and Shaftesbury.7 Yet another mistaken belief of freethinkers is the assumption that every man is capable of determining public good and deciding what actions can bring it forward with a complete certainty. Berkeley, in opposition to Locke who opted for such a view on man, was convinced that this project incorporates only factors related to the rationality of human behaviour but ignores passion, social pressure or fashion.8 Therefore, according to the Irish philosopher, neither the naturalistic vision of man, nor supremacy of his rationality truly represents the real state of affairs: ‘I question – Euphranor says – whether everyone can frame a notion of the public good, much less judge of the means to promote it’ (Alc II , 9). We can now fully comprehend the ironic remark made by Crito: ‘instead of thoughts, books, and study, most free-thinkers are the proselytes of a drinking club. Their principles are often settled, and decisions on the deepest points made, when they are not fit to make a bargain’ (Alc II , 19). In other words, according to Berkeley, freethought does not turn out to be a well-considered rational concept, but an aesthetic mirage or trend, thoughtless revolt of the youth lured by ‘old sharpers in business’ (Alc II , 19). Such a conclusion has a twofold meaning for this discussion – first, if freethinkers’ theses are based on unjustifiable beliefs (hence they are at least as superstitious as proponents of religious claims are), then the argument ‘against superstitions’ is overruled – Berkeley revisits this question later in the sixth dialogue, when he defends the mystery of religious faith. Second, we shall come to the conclusion that the concept of free-thought is grounded on inaccurate understanding of human freedom, which, being naturalized and deprived of rationality, must be no more, as Berkeley argues, than irrational selfwill. And thus the free-thinkers, cited after Crito, ‘had pruned and weeded the notions of their fellow-subjects, and divested them of their prejudices, to strip them of their clothes, and fill the country with naked followers of nature, enjoying all the privileges of brutality’ (Alc II , 26). Here we have minute philosophy in all its glory.

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The fallacy of Shaftesbury’s moral sense theory The third dialogue is devoted first and foremost to the critique of Shaftesbury’s concept of moral sense, as later developed by Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and David Hume, amongst others. According to Shaftesbury, moral sense is responsible for approval of moral and aesthetic values, and the objective status of judgements concerning them requires the capability of the sense to acknowledge them and to appreciate them for what they are in themselves (in a disinterested way, regardless of future reward or punishment). Berkeley’s critique aims at proving that Shaftesbury’s conception is: (a) groundless and as such cannot provide accurate, i.e. unbiased functioning of moral sense, (b) completely abstract, and finally (c) that the introduction of it is effectively pointless. The main argument in the overall discussion can be found in the dialogue between Nicander and Menecles. Here, we have honour as the principle of a virtuous behaviour of a gentleman, so it is the respect of other people’s judgement that pushes a man towards moral deeds. However, this honour means ‘paying debts (. . .) such as are contracted by play’, ‘giving gentleman’s satisfactions’ and finally resembles ‘honesty among pirates, something confined to themselves’ (Alc III , 2). However surprising these statements might be for Shaftesbury’s readers, this is not just a critique of the trendy lifestyle of the aristocracy who exploit the concept of honour and lead an empty and excessive life. It goes beyond it and examines the possibility of moral behaviour grounded on Shaftesbury’s principles in general. And so, in accordance with the postulate of the author of the Characteristics, the essence of moral behaviour is the respect of moral value itself, as identified with the public good, and then the further stimulus of exercising the moral actions is the approval by others, and since it is an emotional reaction it becomes a source of pleasure. However, Berkeley argues, it would be very difficult to make people feel obliged to act morally without the acknowledgment of their actions from others. Therefore, Shaftesbury’s reference to the stoic ideal of independence from opinion is unsuccessful – his ‘heroic’ virtue can, at most, be the privilege of a few people, the rest look after their own honour and continue the pursuit of the ever changing opinions of others. Berkeley also makes an observation about natural affection, a bond with other people in that it only refers to a limited circle of people and the opinion given by the moral sense is always, more or less, partial. Hence, Crito does not only associate honour with ‘honesty among pirates’ but he states with great conviction, that a man of honour ‘abhors to take the lie, but not to tell it’ (Alc III , 2). These remarks lead us to the main critique of the inner sense as a power of understanding beauty and deformity of human actions, which for Berkeley

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would be an abstract name of various powers, shaping the moral actions of a man. The point is that each of them provides different, but always determinate, grounds of such behaviour, so the moral sense detached from the principles of reason, and further from the specific custom in a given country, from its religion and education, turns out to be a je ne sais quoi (as cited by Berkeley from Shaftesbury). In the end, the supporters of moral sense, the ‘heroic inamoratos of abstracted beauty’ (Alc III , 12), seem to be looking for philosophical novelties in the best case scenario and in the worst one – they are exponents of a stoic apathy and wreckers of the public order. This novelty is also illustrated by Alciphron, who refers after Shaftesbury, and who postulates that the existence of an objective order of beauty discovered through the ‘idea of order, harmony and proportion’ (Alc III , 8) that being devoid of religious connotation is pertinent to all people. This order is meant to be a manifestation of natural purposefulness, ‘a certain vital principle of beauty, order and harmony, diffused throughout the world’ (Alc III , 9) or the purpose of human artefacts, such as architectural works. Nevertheless, all the attempts to refer to the aesthetic purposefulness of natural beauty turn out to be incoherent with the negation of the existence of the objective purpose being grounded on the actions of Providence,9 and Alciphron’s statement that ‘Truth is the only divinity that I adore. Wherever truth leads, I shall follow’ must, according to Berkeley, prove to be false.10 Despite the fact that in his critique of Shaftesbury’s aesthetic concept, Berkeley does not recognize its significance (mainly in terms of the idea of aesthetic disinterestedness, which, formulated by British aesthetics in the eighteenth century led to the conclusions included in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790)), his comments related to the abstract character of the concept of moral sense, as proposed by Shaftesbury, are further supported by its development within the philosophical thoughts of Adam Smith and David Hume (i.e. determination of the role of reason in moral judgements and acknowledgment of the conditions of impartial judgement).11

Religious interpretation of experience The critique of the selected deistic viewpoints – which according to Berkeley were essentially atheistic – is being replaced by the arguments in favour of the existence of God in the fourth dialogue. The starting point of the whole discussion is its restriction to experience alone, the sphere of ‘matters of fact that can be proved not

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by notions, but by facts alone’ (Alc IV, 3). At the beginning, the traditional proofs are being abolished – i.e. the ontological argument presented by Anselm of Canterbury of the existence of God based on the notion of the perfect being, as well as the argument of Plato and Aristotle (which was later brought into general use by Thomas Aquinas), grounded on the necessity of the assumption of the finite chain of causes.12 By contrast, restraining the discussion to a given interpretation of experience and rejection of the other two ways of argumentation – i.e. referral to the authority of tradition and pragmatic argument according to which the existence of God is practical for a man – are the results of the development of the discussion, and are successfully applied in the next two dialogues as secondary arguments towards the particular interpretation of experience. It is meant to allow, as reported to Alciphron by Euphranor, the validation of the thesis of existence of ‘an invisible God, as certainly, and with the same evidence, at least, as any other signs perceived by sense do suggest to me the existence of your soul, spirit, or thinking principle’ (Alc IV, 5). To some degree, the argumentation refers to the resolutions presented earlier, as it is with the interpretation of the statement that ‘God is not far from every one of us; and that in Him we live, move, and have our being’ (P 66) or else, with the analysis of the process of the interpretation of visual phenomena in the Theory of Vision Vindicated. This reasoning is later expanded upon and the explanation of visual experience is then applied as theological argument. However, according to Euphranor, Alciphron’s thesis on common sense saying that we should relate to facts needs an explanation. Stating a fact requires an interpretation that goes beyond the data provided by senses. Such an interpretation is presented, for instance, by physiology where the fact of experiencing the sensible impressions is explained with bodily processes: early modern mechanistic physiology – see René Descartes for example – postulated the existence of animal spirits – being a certain very fine air or wind animating nervous system. The reason to accept their existence is the coherent mechanistic interpretation of body functions. And similarly, intelligibility of someone’s actions and especially their verbal articulation, is established by the existence of a rational intention of all actions. In both cases, the requirement of intelligibility of phenomena is possible under the assumption of the existence of their actual source: in the first instance, it is animal spirits that explain phenomena on the basis of mechanistic relations, and in the second – an active rational, endowed with will, soul or spirit capable of acting intentionally. Thus, the first step in the overall argumentation is to demonstrate the necessity of an interpretation of sensual phenomena. The next step is to indicate such an

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interpretation that may be applied as theological argument. Euphranor points to an analogy between human language and the entire phenomena of nature that is treated as the Creator’s language and that enables us to ‘demonstrate an invisible God, as certainly . . . as . . . the soul, spirit, or thinking principle’. This argumentation is acquired from the Theory of Vision. A precise analysis of experience allows us, not only to separate passive sensuality from imagination that combines various sense data, but also to differentiate data of particular senses. It means that in the case of touch and sight, the objects of both senses are different in terms of their quantity and because of that we are not able to claim that they inform us of – identical to both – the objective size of an object. Abandoning ‘prejudice . . . and the vulgar error of the ideas common for both senses’ (Alc IV, 15) allows interpreting the role of senses as not replicating the objects that are not dependent on reason but as providing data to be interpreted as follows: a) visual impressions are to announce the experience of touch, and b) sensible signs need to be treated as a certain way of statement towards the hearer that can be understood only if we assume the existence of a speaker – another man (in terms of human speech) and God (on the assumption of semiotic interpretation of natural phenomena). Thanks to the above, one can acknowledge visual experience as an orderly sign system and ultimately as a statement directed by the Creator towards man. This provides an elaboration of a previous concept on the role of imagination in constructing the objects of experience, as presented in the Theory of Vision and emotivism of the experience, as described in the Principles. This time, however, Berkeley talks about the entire visual experience as being about the Creator’s language, which is now a new interpretation of the conclusions from his Theory of Vision and arguably the reason why it was included in the second volume of the Alciphron. As mentioned before, Berkeley repeats this interpretation in his Theory of Vision Vindicated published in 1733.13

The refusal of Browne’s negative theology The validity of such an interpretation is based on the legitimacy of applying the analogy in the description of a Creator. Berkeley opposes the negative theology of Peter Browne who argued that the objects of faith go beyond the valid statements of reason because ‘we may rack our invention, and turn, and wind all those ideas we have into ten thousand different shapes, and yet never make up any likeness or similitude, of the real nature of those objects of another world’

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and the ‘endeavours to bring down these hidden things to the level of our present capacities of knowledge is the specious trifling of . . . abstracted metaphysical brains’.14 Despite the fact that Browne’s argumentation is directed against Toland, i.e. one of the minute philosophers, it contributes, according to Berkeley, to the same opinions of free-thinkers that Browne criticizes. The deity, deprived of its analogy with human finite spirits and their attributes, such as wisdom and goodness, turns out to be completely unknown and its notion used in the dispute between deists and atheists – meaningless ‘for this may be fate, or chaos, or plastic nature, or anything else as well, as God’ (Alc III , 18). On account of that, we need to recognize the fact that Browne’s negative theology develops into atheism. Berkeley argues as well that the works considered to give birth to such a viewpoint, like the Divine Names or the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy by NeoPlatonist theologian Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and the Disputationes metaphysicales, by the sixteenth-century Spanish theologian Francisco Suarez, lead to a conclusion that (contrary to Browne) these authors were inclined to accept such an analogy between a man and God that emphasizes a proportional greater perfection of God towards the imperfection of man. This ‘proper’ analogy, analogia proprie dicta, related to such divine attributes as wisdom and goodness being separate to the analogy based on metaphor (where it is for example said about digitus Dei interfering with the world’s history), facilitates the statement that ‘all sorts of perfection which we can conceive in a finite spirit are in God, but without any of that alloy which is found in the creatures’ (Alc IV, 21). Then, it voids Alciphron’s argument about the imperfection of Creation because, as Euphranor argues, the part that is appreciable by us despite being full of ‘blots being so large and so black’ (Alc IV, 24) it is only a little part of the whole nature and when compared to how it could have been seen without the limitations of a man it resembles ‘a loathsome dungeon or sepulchre’ (ibid.). This ‘proper analogy’, sustaining the difference between perfection of God and a finite nature of man, enables the understanding of the specific language of God. Provided that the adequate application of human language is dialogue and as far as God’s language is concerned – it is specifically oriented towards man. Even though in both cases the purpose of language is – in accordance with the Principles – ‘the raising of some passion, the exciting to, or deterring from an action’ (PI , 20), the communication within the language of the Creator is onesided: the data provided by the senses are to support the adequate management of one’s actions, whereas the prayers and requests addressed to Him are meant to bring on the right disposition in people themselves. Therefore, Euphranor’s deliberation is not evidence for the existence of God in its strict sense, but it

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presents a course of arguments that counterbalance the opposite arguments and compel one to accept the religious thesis.

Social significance of religion The fifth dialogue is devoted to the presentation of the social function of religion and deflecting the typical claims directed towards it. Therefore, it refers more to apologetics and rhetoric and it does not include many strictly philosophical speculations; however, it is directly dependent on them. The interpretation of natural phenomena as Creator’s language only opens up a possibility of religious interpretation of experience and requires further argumentation to demonstrate the actuality of the positive effects of religious belief. Euphranor and Crito defend religion in order to show how religious beliefs positively influence an individual and state; hence the argumentation is a posteriori and is mainly based upon the interpretation of historical process to prove the practical value of Christian religion, both natural and the revealed. The starting point of the dispute is a question about the status of natural religion that holds a few essential theses on the existence of God or the existence of future life. However the latter can be proven by the ‘light of reason’ (Alc V, 9) and, yet, the postulated ‘religion of philosophers’ does not bear a real solution – it proves too little and does not leave much room for belief, void of evidence; what’s more, as it is deprived of the notion of revelation, it only becomes a fragile construct that, at the end, leads to profanity. It is because of, first, the distinction between faith and reason (to which some men attribute ‘too much [and] other attribute too little’ (ibid.)), and second, the utopian character of the previously mentioned project of the authors of the Enlightenment, like Locke and later deists, when they postulated the rational behaviour of each individual. Therefore, Berkeley declares that, first of all, human motives cannot be put down just to reason and, second, as emphasized by Euphranor, ‘precepts and oracles from heaven are incomparably better suited to popular improvement and the good of society than the reasonings of philosophers’ (Alc VII , 19). Berkeley specifies two fundamental tasks of religion: to form customs and to be a social binder – a statement that he later accentuates in his summary in Euphranor’s words: ‘religion . . . is concerned no further than that man should be accountable’ (Alc VII , 19). Religion, if properly comprehended, as ruled by Aristotle’s golden mean principle, shall constitute a counterbalance for any kind of enthusiasm – of both libertines and bigots, whereas the constituted Church

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belongs just to the institutions indispensable for the functioning of a state. To support it, we may refer to the tradition argument – since the most distant past, the functioning of all societies was based on the functioning of religion, while Christianity was backed up by the whole tradition and the authority of the English Constitution as it guaranteed the state character of Anglicanism since the Supremacy Act in 1559, and, if misappropriated, it would mean a reversion to anarchy. We may find the reference to anarchy in Lysicles’ words: ‘old customs and laws and national constitutions [are] only words and notions’ (Alc V, 31) and also in Alciphron’s: ‘but times are changed, and the magistrate may now be afraid of us’ (Alc V, 35). If we were to consider the previously mentioned remarks on ethics and the pragmatic argument supporting the teaching of the Church’s validity, then it seems that Berkeley’s main concerns15 would be the results of social and political actions of free-thinkers. In his opinion, they do not offer anything but negative freedom that exposes people to the variety of passions and would be best put aside. Berkeley, thereby, revisits the theses incorporated in the Passive Obedience, where he announces that misappropriation of the highest authority is both a crime and sin as well as a moral evil.16 Here, however, Berkeley puts much more emphasis, than in his previous works, on the gradual progress and soothing of customs by means of religion. This improvement would encompass the complete society and not just individual people; hence there were always virtuous people even amongst the ancient stoics like Cicero, a fact that, after all, does not forejudge the general customs of a given era. These remarks manifest Berkeley’s withdrawal from rational and religious rigors typical of his Passive Obedience in favour of an affirmation of the necessity of a gradual progress of the whole society in The Querist (1737), the work produced to indicate the ways ‘to feed the hungry and cloathe the naked’ (Q, Advertisement; Works VI , 103), and in the Siris (1744) where he offers prescriptions to cure the ill.

The defence of the Scripture The sixth dialogue is related to the credibility of tradition based on biblical epiphanies and prophecies. It is ingrained in the discussion evoked in the vast majority of Locke’s comments included in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695),17 which referred to the relation between reason and faith. This was then used by later deists as arguments against the literal reading of prophecies from the Bible

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(which, according to Collins, is a result of late over-interpretation18) as well as the denial of a specific revelation experienced by some inspired authors (since, as Matthew Tindal put it, ‘God, at all times, has given mankind sufficient means of knowing what he requires of them’19). The sixth dialogue opens in the middle of this very dispute: if we accept that ‘there is a God, a devil, and a revelation from heaven to writing many years ago’ (Alc VI , 28) and, unlike the old revelations there are no revelations at present, or if there are, it would be hard to prove their divine origins, then the validity of epiphanies is based on the credibility of tradition. The conviction that the Bible is a work of real revelation, however, requires verification of the validity of the words of many generations and its many editions within the biblical hermeneutics. It is evident that Berkeley follows Locke’s steps in this matter20 but his aim is different, as he is looking to overthrow the distinction between certainty and the probability of knowledge, and especially the knowledge of historical facts including Christian ‘prejudices’.21 These discussions are carried out in great detail, on one hand, by Toland, Shaftesbury, Collins or Tindal and, on the other hand, by the tradition advocates such as Edward Chandler and William Whiston, who referred to many questions on the consistency of the message between the Old and New Testament, the literal or allegorical interpretation of miracles and prophecies, as well as the question of continuity of tradition, which reassures the accuracy of the message or precise dating of the biblical chapters, or dating the beginning of the world on the basis of biblical dating. The latter issue, which has no other than historic meaning nowadays, in Berkeley’s times engaged both philosophers and mathematicians of the highest order such as James Ussher, Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton. The biblical chronology is meant to stand as an example of applying reason in explaining miracles: despite the fact that Creation in itself transcends human reason and ‘is beyond any other miracle whatsoever’ (Alc VI , 23), it is still possible to determine certain facts about it. The general objective of Crito’s argumentation is to dissolve reservations mentioned by Alciphron: ‘I may be willing to follow, so far as common sense and the light of nature lead; yet the same reason that bids me yield to rational proof forbids me to admit opinions without proof. This holds in general against all revelations whatsoever’ (Alc VI , 2). It is presented in a twofold approach: first, it negates the dichotomous division between (definite) knowledge and (unjustifiable – and as such meaningless) ‘prejudices’ and, second, it validates the probability of historical record that then is to guarantee the contents of the Scripture. It is therefore about showing in an ‘agreeable [way] to the light of reason and the notions of mankind’ – as Euphranor says (Alc VI , 9) – that there are rational

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procedures (such as source examination, chronological findings, the critique of comments) that allow us to estimate the true content of the historical message with great plausibility. Human knowledge, ultimately, needs both critique and trust. This ultimately criticizes Alciphron who ‘would destroy human faith to get rid of divine’ (Alc VI , 4). The acceptance of probable knowledge as the only one opens the door widely to argumentation in favour of ‘divine faith’ especially because the impossibility of getting assurance does not eliminate the burning questions asked by religion. And the examples of the latter would be the question of immortality of soul: since the relation between soul and body is unclear – according to Cartesians – then, as Euphranor says: ‘I can see no reason to be positive that the one must necessarily be extinguished upon the dissolution of the other; especially since I find in myself a strong natural desire of immortality’ (Alc VI , 11). When it comes to the question of understanding miracles, Berkeley favours their literal interpretation, on the basis that their allegorical genuineness, or to be more exact – their practical effect on believers, is a premise of their literal authenticity. Thus, in the case of the Resurrection of Jesus the allegorical truth is ‘a resurrection of Christ’s disciples from weakness to resolution, from fear to courage, from despair to hope’ that is a premise to acknowledge resurrection as a literal truth as well (Alc VI , 31). This argument allows the presumption that, despite Berkeley’s doctrine accepting the existence of miracles – since the laws of nature are dependent on the Creator’s will after all – then what Berkeley would consider as a miracle could be mainly grace generating the modifications of man’s attitudes – from atheist and materialist to religious.22

God’s grace and human freedom The seventh dialogue begins with the considerations on grace understood as an ‘active, vital, ruling principle, influencing and operating on the mind of man, distinct from every natural power or motive’ (Alc VII , 4) and the thesis holding that ‘faith is not an indolent perception, but an operative persuasion of mind, which ever worketh some suitable action, disposition, or emotion in those who have it’ (Alc VII , 10), and thus ‘faith without ideas’ is not a weaker form of knowledge, only a superstition or an inner attitude, as minute philosophers wanted it to be, but a certain attitude accompanied by the conviction that man is free and responsible. This draws the attention to the philosophical questions: the functions of language, personal identity and arguments in favour of the existence

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of the soul, or practical premises of the postulate of the existence of human freedom. The comment on grace is a reaction to Alciphron’s reservations on Locke’s thesis on adequacy of linguistic signs and the ideas they denote.23 By referring to the earlier comments from the Principles (PI , 12; P 135), Berkeley points to the difference between an idea, understood as a specific sensible image and a linguistic sign, and underlines that when words relate to abstract notions or relations they do not aim at providing the idea, on the contrary ‘they direct us in disposition and management of our affairs, and are of such necessary use that we should not know how to do without them’ (Alc VII , 5). Hence, the referral to theoretical notions turns out to be a necessity in science (the notion of power), as well as in morality (the notion of freedom) or religion (the notion of grace),24 whereas the instrumental understanding of physical notions25 is accompanied by pragmatic understanding of moral and religious notions. Grace given to men may be discussed on the basis of their virtuous and religious actions and, similarly, the notion of freedom, even though it does not refer to any idea, is a necessary notion applied in judgements of people’s responsibility for their actions. Euphranor’s statement: ‘I am conscious of my own actions’ (Alc VII , 18) shifts the attention of debaters towards the question of personal identity. When he further states that the explanation of the principle of individuation or answering the objections raised against human identity faces the exact same problems as the ‘union between the divine and human nature’ (Alc VII , 8), he is referring to Joseph Butler’s conclusion made at practically the same time in opposition to Locke. Joseph Butler, in The Analogy of Religion (1736), presented the insufficiency of founding personal identity on mental data alone, like it was described by Locke in his Essay26 and later repeated by Alciphron in Berkeley’s dialogue. For both authors, Butler and Berkeley, it is a premise to assume the existence of soul, understood as substance that cannot be defined by use of Locke’s way of ideas, but it can be an object of religious faith. Therefore, despite the impossibility of proving the existence of human freedom by means of theoretical analysis of experience, it does not compromise its necessity on practical moral or religious levels. It does, however, allow us to set aside the naturalistic concept produced by Alciphron, according to which a man is ‘a sort of organ played on by outward objects, which, according to the different shape and texture of the nerves, produce different motions and effects therein’ or a puppet (Alc VII , 16). Quite naturally, the seventh dialogue offers a summary of all earlier discussions. As far as the work’s primary issue on the existence of God is

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concerned, on a positive note it comes down to: ‘The being of a God is capable of clear proof, and a proper object of human reason: whereas the mysteries of His nature, and indeed whatever there is of mystery in religion, to endeavour to explain and prove by reason is a vain attempt’ (Alc VII , 21). And on a critical note, Berkeley is trying to demonstrate the contradiction within the beliefs of minute philosophers who are ‘men so strong in assertion, and so weak in argument; advocates for freedom introducing a fatality; patriots trampling on the laws of their country; and pretenders to virtue destroying the motives of it’ (Alc VII , 21). Their ultimate message is ‘the grand arcanum and ultimate conclusion’ (Alc VII , 24) for their sect, which basically means bringing any understanding to the level of opinion and as such falling into sheer scepticism.

The Alciphron and the question of the development of Berkeley’s philosophy It was largely due to the polemical character of the Alciphron that it was received so widely, and it triggered numerous publications of more or less comprehensive works or pamphlets by the authors, whose concepts were mainly criticized in it: Mandeville, Browne, Hutcheson and others.27 With the benefit of hindsight, we should give credit to the Alciphron, not only for its literary merits, but for its meaning in the interpretation of Berkeley’s philosophical output. Berkeley applied the form of dialogue in his earlier work, but this time in the Alciphron he aspires to put it in a more artful shape – the debaters are located in specific scenery and he introduces several characters bestowed with individual features. The element of satire adds a distinctive novelty to the Alciphron in general. Berkeley parodied Shaftesbury’s hymnic style and Mandeville’s poignancy and introduced impatient Lycisles who on occasions tries to persuade others to leave behind the serious discussions and move on to the ‘trendiest’ conversations. The introduction of these techniques together with the broad part of the seventh dialogue, where Euphranor calls upon creation of a Dianoetic Academy, where all free-thinkers could be confined or when he mentions ‘honest Demea’ who bans his son from reading Euclid’s Elements, bring smiles to readers’ faces. Some of his characters may be accused of being one-dimensional – for instance Euphranor, who is usually aside during the whole discussion in order to return in the seventh dialogue to sum it up, and especially Lysicles, who passionately defends the minute philosophers’ point of view but fires only trivial arguments. The construction of the characters of Crito and Alciphron is much

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more interesting as the former articulates most of the substantive arguments and the latter is forced to change his views (at least up to a certain point) and accept them. The only way of explaining his firm defence of the free-thinkers’ position is, as Berkeley seems to hold, by his persevering attachment to peculiar superstitions. In the Alciphron, we find many of Berkeley’s earlier theses: he holds on to the division between the activity of spirits and passivity of ideas from his Principles and the distinction of natural philosophy and metaphysics, as we know it, from De Motu. The description of the functions of language and the emphasis on its emotive role, especially the semiotic interpretation of natural phenomena, were also already discussed in the Principles and the Theory of Vision. Nonetheless, as we can read in David Berman’s elaboration, in the Alciphron many of these problems are now discussed in a more systematic way, which proves Berkeley’s intensive research on some of the earlier analysed issues. It also allows us to understand the revisions he presented in his later editions of previous works.28 These issues are the concept of beauty (Alc III , 8–10), the more detailed description of linguistic signs (Alc IV, 17–20) and an exhaustive analysis of the mutual relation between determinism and human freedom (ibid.). As has already been mentioned, the Alciphron is Berkeley’s testimony of his gradual departure from religious radicalism, as presented in earlier social treatises between 1712 and 1721, to proclaim the need of moderate customary changes as well as the need to be governed by the goodness of all members of society. This inclination of his becomes stronger in time, as in the Querist (1735– 37, 1750) and the Siris (1744). When it comes to Alciphron’s placement in Berkeley’s later work, we must not forget about the speculations within chemistry in the sixth dialogue, where he identifies soul with ‘essential oil’ and animal spirit. In the Alciphron, this identification serves as a foundation of the rejected physiological and naturalistic understanding of soul whereas in the Siris the chemical processes are integral parts of the ladder of Creation reaching the lucent ether along with God.29 Thus, similarly, in both the fourth dialogue of the Alciphron and in the Theory of Vision Vindicated we find the theological interpretation of his earlier vision theory that originally in 1709 had none of these connotations, whereas the chemical debates included in the Alciphron, as part of natural philosophy, gained their broader meaning in the Siris, twelve years later, to become a part of Neoplatonist metaphysics. It documents Berkeley’s consistency in developing his conception who, as early as during the 1730s, i.e. since he started his work on the Alciphron, endeavoured not only to expand on certain problems that were already argued, but also to incorporate the variety of

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the elements of his concepts into one unitary form. If we were to assume that the Siris is the capstone of this whole process, then we should also state that in the Alciphron one may have a grasp of the beginning of this process, which in turn emphasizes the meaning of this work for the comprehension of the complete legacy of Berkeley.

Notes 1 The details concerning the historical background of the origin of the Alciphron and of its editions are presented by Goeffrey Keynes in: Keynes, G. (1976), A Bibliography of George Berkeley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 36–62 and David Berman in: Berman, D. (1993a), ‘Introduction’ in D. Berman (ed.), Alciphron in Focus. London– New York: Routledge, pp. 1–16. The newest essays on the Alciphron together with the new edition of the text are collected in L. Jaffro, G. Brykman, C. Schwartz (eds.) (2010), Berkeley’s Alciphron. English Text and Essays in Interpretation. Hildesheim– Zürich–New York: Georg Olms Verlag. 2 This is a widely accepted view (see e.g. Flage, D. (2014), Berkeley. Malden: Polity Press, p. 158). Timothy Dykstal, in turn, suggests that it is only Euphranor who is Berkeley’s spokesman in the Alciphron (Dykstal, T. (2001), The Luxury of Scepticism. Politics, Philosophy, and Dialogue in the English Public Sphere, 1660–1740. Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, p. 132) whereas G. Keynes remarks that according to the convention used in the dialogue, neither Crito nor Euphranor can be Berkeley’s alter ego, although both of them make use of Berkeley’s arguments (A Bibliography of George Berkeley, p. 36). 3 Dykstal points out the specific character of the rhetoric in the Alciphron: quite in contrast to Shaftesbury for whom dialogue was a way to reach the impartial truth thanks to the opposition of various points of view (in the Moralists) and unlike Mandeville, for whom the dialogue showed the clash of particular interests (in The Fable of Bees), Berkeley uses the form of a dialogue to stress the unavoidable presuppositions made by all interlocutors (also by free-thinkers); this feature of the dispute is discussed in the second and the sixth dialogue of Alciphron (see: Dykstal, T. (2001), The Luxury of Scepticism, pp. 133–4). Peter Walmsley, in turn, stresses the satiric aspect of the parodic travesty of the literary styles of both authors in the second and third dialogue (Walmsley, P. (1990), The Rhetoric of Berkeley’s Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 110). According to T. E. Jessop, Berkeley might have been influenced by satiric writings of Jonathan Swift in this aspect (Works III, 336–7). 4 Flage, D. Berkeley, p. 159 ff. Paul Olscamp underlines the coexistence of two motives – utilitarian and rule-utilitarian – in Berkeley’s practical philosophy

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(Olscamp, P. (1970b), The Moral Philosophy of George Berkeley. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 51–84). See e.g. Locke, J. (1690), The Second Treatise of Government, chap. 2, par. 6–11. There is not much scholarship concerning relations between Berkeley’s and Shaftesbury’s moral philosophy. Detailed analyses can be found in Olscamp, P., The Moral Philosophy of George Berkeley, pp. 154–72 and Jaffro, L. (2007), ‘Berkeley’s Criticism of Shaftesbury’s Moral Theory in Alciphron III ’ in S. Daniel (ed.), Reexamining Berkeley’s Philosophy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 199–213. For the relations between Shaftesbury and deism see: Alderidge A. O. (1951), ‘Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 41, 2, 297–382. Cf. e.g. Leviathan, VI , where Hobbes gives the mechanical and materialist interpretation of volitional activity; the claim that moral notions referring to general good are but a tool in the hands of skilful politicians can be found in Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees, and the naturalistic analogy between human and animal activity appears in Shaftesbury’s Moralists. According to Berkeley, the line of contention did not lie between Shaftesbury’s vision of nature with its ‘mutual sympathy of parts’ and Hobbes’ and Mandeville’s mechanical notion of nature, but rather between various naturalist conceptions of man on the one hand and religious doctrines that claim the uniqueness of man and his special position in the act of Creation (with their theological implications concerning the immortality of soul, the history of Incarnation and Redemption) on the other. See e.g. Passive Obedience 8 (Works VI , 21), An Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (Works VI, 71), and also A Discourse to Magistrates and Men in Authority (Works VI, 204). According to Peter Kivy, it is not Shaftesbury but rather Francis Hutcheson who might have been the target of Berkeley’s attacks here. In An Inquiry concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony and Design (1725) Hutcheson developed Shaftesbury’s theory of beauty and in the fourth edition of the work (1738) he added the critique of the utilitarian interpretation of beauty from the Alciphron (see: Kivy, P. (1976), The Seventh Sense. New York: B. Franklin, p. 30 ff.). It is also worth mentioning the similarity between Berkeley’s description of natural beauty in the Three Dialogues (3D, 2; Works II , 210) and its descriptions given by Shaftesbury. Though both seem to agree on the organic character of nature, the expression of which is its beauty, in the Alciphron the vision is supplemented by rational premises for the existence of natural teleology based on the rules established by God. See Smith, A., The Theory of Moral Sentiments, especially part III , Hume, D., A Treatise of Human Nature, bk. III , part. 1. See: Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, 2; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, I, 2, 3.

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13 It is noteworthy that in the edition of the Theory of Vision published together with the Alciphron Berkeley rephrased earlier statements concerning sensuous phenomena, and started calling them not the ‘language of nature’ (as he did in the first edition from 1709), but the ‘language of the Author of nature’ (see TV 147, 152), giving a new interpretation of optical phenomena that could be reconciled with the claims of the Principles (P 44, 65–6, 108). 14 Browne, P. (1703), A Letter in Answer to a Book entitled ‘Christianity not Mysterious’, Dublin: W. Sayes for Robert Clavel, pp. 43–4. A year after the publication of the Alciphron, Browne criticized Berkeley’s argumentation in his Things Divine and Supernatural Conceived by Analogy with Things Natural, London (1733). 15 Berkeley was not the only clergyman who deplored the moral and religious decline of the country in his time. Joseph Butler also wrote about religion: ‘In the present age . . . nothing remained, but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule’ (Butler, J. (1736), The Analogy of Religion. London: J. and P. Knapton, Advertisement), and Thomas Secker added that ‘Christianity is now ridiculed and railed at with very little reserve; and the teachers of it without any at all’ (Secker, Th. (1738), The Charge of Thomas Lord Bishop of Oxford to the Clergy of his Diocese in his Primary Visitation. London: J. and J. Pemberton, p. 4). Robert Ingram suggests that many of the complaints were caused by the spectre of the seventeenth century with its civil wars looming large over the eighteenth century, which were seen as the evidence of fragility of the established political-religious order that could be endangered by a heterodoxy (Ingram, R. (2007), Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Secker and the Church of England. Martlesham: Boydell & Brewer, pp. 71–2). 16 The defence of the thesis that ‘whatsoever resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God’ (PO 1; Works VI , 17) is the chief motive of the Passive Obedience. 17 Especially the chapters related to religious faith, reason and probability (Essay, bk. IV, chap. 15, 16 and 18). Locke conditioned the degree of probability on the unanimity of testimonies and their congruence with everyday experience; although such a claim made room for extra-rational truths (for example, referring to the facts that ‘angels rebelled against God . . . and that the dead shall rise and live again’ (Locke, J. (1960), An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. A. S. Pringle-Pattison (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 357), it also opened a possibility of the critique of traditional revelation. It should be noted however, that when Locke postulates that ‘Revelation cannot be admitted against the clear evidence of reason’ (ibid., p. 356), he directed his Reasonableness of Christianity, where the thesis was developed in detail, against those who ‘were not yet thoroughly or firmly Christians’, that is deists (the clear evidence of Locke’s position can be found in his two Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity. For the relations of Locke and British deism see: Higgins-Biddle, J. C. (1999), Introduction in J. Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. xxvii–xlii).

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18 Collins, A. (1724), A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion. London. 19 Tindall, M. (1730), Christianity as Old as the Creation. London, p. 1. 20 See: Rogers, G. A. J. (1999), Locke and the Latitude-Men. Ignorance as a Ground of Toleration in: R. W. F. Kroll, R. Ashcraft and P. Zagorin (eds.), Philosophy, Science and Religion in England 1640–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 199– 229. 21 From the historico-philosophical perspective this argumentation, as well as the earlier remark of Alciphron on the discussions restricted to the facts alone, may be seen as a harbinger of David Hume’s claim that all knowledge concerning ‘matters of facts and existence’ cannot be certain but only probable (see: Hume, D., An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. 4). 22 Such an interpretation of miracles would be in accordance with the remarks on the emotive function of language in the Principles and Berkeley’s claim that the main purpose of the descriptions of miraculous phenomena in the Scripture was establishing the faith of Christians. ‘As for miracles recorded in Scripture,’ he writes in the Passive Obedience, ‘they were always wrought for confirmation of some doctrine, or mission from God, and not for the sake of the particular natural goods’ (PO 14). 23 See: Locke, J. (1960), An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, pp. 223–6. 24 This analogy does not reach far; although all the notions relate to causality, the notion of force is applicable to natural philosophy, which – quite independently from metaphysics – allows finding the order among various natural phenomena; in the strict sense causality refers to the activity of spirits (see: Downing, L. (2005), ‘Berkeley’s Natural Philosophy and Philosophy of Science’ in: K. Winkler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 231 ff.). 25 Ibid., pp. 249–56. 26 Locke, J. (1960), An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, pp. 190–91. 27 See: Berman, D. (1993), Introduction, pp. 2–6. 28 Apart from the changes Berkeley made in the new edition of the Theory of Vision, it is also the new edition of the Principles (1734), in which natural phenomena are referred to not as a language, but as signs. 29 See: Airaksinen, T. (2011a), Light and Causality in ‘Siris’ in Berkeley’s Lasting Legacy: 300 Years Later. T. Airaksinen, B. Belfrage (eds.), Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, pp. 91–120.

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Berkeley’s Querist ‘Hints . . . What Is to Be Done in this Critical State of our Affairs’ or Proposals for a Hyperborean Eutopia?1 Patrick Kelly

The Querist, containing several Queries, Proposed to the Consideration of the Public was Berkeley’s major piece of economic writing.2 It first appeared anonymously in three annual parts, from 1735–37, and was subsequently issued in a single, much abbreviated volume, bearing Berkeley’s name in 1750.3 Its unusual format of a series of often randomly linked rhetorical questions makes it a work that is hard to view comprehensively, not least because of the wide variety of topics covered. Nonetheless, the book created a considerable stir on its first appearance, and ever since there have been those who have admired it for its theoretical insights, its concern for the plight of Ireland’s impoverished masses, and not least its literary skill.4 Far from being an isolated production, The Querist was one of the most distinguished contributions to a rich literature on economic topics published in Ireland between 1720 and 1750; other notable writers being Thomas Prior, Arthur Dobbs, David Bindon and (best known to posterity) Jonathan Swift.5 To apply the word ‘economic’ in the context of the first half of the eighteenth century is, of course, somewhat of an anachronism. The term ‘economics’ had not yet emerged nor had the ideas behind it established themselves as a distinct, selfdefining subject.6 For Berkeley and his contemporaries, the various writings on banking, taxation, currency reform, trade, poor relief, etc., which had appeared since the early seventeenth century belonged to a subordinate branch of politics; namely provision for the material needs of the state and its inhabitants. For the most part, these publications had been written in response to particular shortterm difficulties, and the profusion of such works in Ireland in the three decades following the South Sea Bubble of 1720 testifies to the serious problems confronting the country in those years. What follows focuses on the broader context of Berkeley’s economic ideas and their relation to his social and ethical

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views (as has been the trend in the recent literature), rather than his contribution to the history of economic analysis in the narrow sense – a topic that has been extensively covered in the mid to later twentieth century.7 Before turning to this, it is necessary to say something more about the Querist’s format and the relationship between its two editions. Berkeley’s decision to present his thoughts on Ireland’s economic problems as series of, generally, rhetorical questions (punctuated by occasional gnomic reflections such as Om. Q. III . 62, ‘Whether there be not an art to puzzle plain cases as well as to explain obscure ones?’), that periodically switch from topic to topic and back again, creates difficulties for the would-be expositor. While there is an identifiable core of propositions that add up to a comprehensive solution to Ireland’s economic difficulties, on many issues Berkeley remains elusive, ironic and unwilling to commit himself. Moreover, on a number of significant matters, particularly the role of foreign trade, Berkeley not so much directly contradicts himself, as varies his position so as to leave readers uncertain where he stands.8 Om Q. III . 88 indicated that The Querist’s frequent repetition and changing juxtaposition of ideas was intended to convince readers not only intellectually but also emotionally: ‘Whether in order to make men see and feel, it be not often necessary to inculcate the same thing, and place it in different lights?’ (my italics). Queries 41 and 458 further identified repetition as a strategy for overcoming prejudices, while Om. Q. II . 315 suggested that Berkeley’s objective was in part as much to persuade readers to think for themselves as to have them adopt the remedies he proposed. A further difficulty arises from the considerable differences between two main editions of The Querist.9 The first was an anonymous, three-part publication in 1735, 1736 and 1737, totalling 895 queries, and the second a single volume first issued in 1750. The latter reduced the number of queries to 595 by dropping 345 from the original and adding a further 45, the main difference being the omission of the major number of queries relating to banking.10 This consolidated volume, to which Berkeley set his name and added an Advertisement to the Reader, is the version by which the work has generally been known to economists.11 Further, mainly minor, variations are to be found in its subsequent issues up to 1752, the year that saw the Dublin printing of Berkeley’s Miscellany of 1752. For an economic pamphlet, The Querist enjoyed considerable popularity, going through ten printings in the course of the eighteenth century, eight of which were in Berkeley’s lifetime.12 Also important for spreading his ideas was the anonymous compendium, Queries Relating to a National Bank, Extracted from the Querist. Also the Letter Containing the Plan or Sketch of Such a Bank. Republished with Notes (1737). This reprinted 288 queries, taken in roughly equal

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shares from the three parts of The Querist, which serve as an introduction to a short proposal for the National Bank that had first appeared as a letter in Dublin newspapers in April 1737.13

Berkeley’s radical solution to Ireland’s problems The most pressing problems confronting Ireland in the second half of the 1720s and first half of the 1730s were agricultural depression, an ill-functioning currency system and chronic underemployment, which in times of famine or trade depression left a large part of the population vulnerable to pauperization and beggary.14 Given contemporary ideas of what made for national prosperity, Irish writers found it hard to account for their country’s destitution, other than in terms of British malevolence and native idleness. With its fertile soil, favourable climate, sufficient harbours and navigable rivers, and large, employable population, Ireland seemingly possessed all the resources believed necessary to make a nation rich and prosperous.15 Faced with the way Irish problems were intensified by the famine conditions of the late 1720s, Swift had altogether despaired of finding any solution to Ireland’s crisis through the application of received Mercantilist wisdom, while younger commentators like Dobbs and Prior could only look to co-operation with England in manufactures that complemented rather than threatened her economy.16 In The Querist, however, Berkeley came up with a new and audacious solution to Ireland’s problems, as radical in its context as his earlier rejection of matter. This solution rested on two insights, neither of which was individually novel, but which combined together had revolutionary potential for transforming Ireland’s position. The first was that real wealth consisted not of gold and silver, but of things that immediately satisfied human needs such as food, clothing and shelter.17 The second was that the demand creating function of money in circulation could be as effectively served by paper money as by gold and silver, a perception that almost certainly arose from Berkeley’s experience of paper money in America.18 Furthermore, Berkeley perceived that not only was conventional Mercantilist wisdom at odds with the realities of a relatively primitive, agricultural economy, but that the solutions it proposed would be positively harmful for the latter. In the case of a poor agricultural economy, such as Ireland’s, exporting the foodstuffs etc. required for the basic maintenance of the population was the way not to wealth (as Mercantilists had argued since the days of Thomas Mun) but to destitution (Queries 167–75, 325).19

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Together, these insights freed Berkeley from the straitjacket of current mercantilist thinking that the only way to achieve national prosperity was through increasing the supply of gold and silver by means of a favourable balance of trade, an assumption that blinkered the vision of even the most perceptive of his Irish contemporaries. The immediate key to solving Ireland’s problems was therefore to stop exporting raw agricultural commodities in exchange for luxuries satisfying an extravagant and heedless gentry (Query 106), and to introduce paper money that would transform the needs of the pauperized masses into economic demand. Initially it would seem that Berkeley envisaged that in order to safeguard the new paper money and advance the interests of the rural poor over those of the luxury-importing gentry, Ireland would need to become an economy cut off from trade with the rest of the world. His wellknown reference to the desirability of ‘a wall of brass a thousand cubits high round this kingdom’ (Query 134) was, however, probably by way of illustration of his argument rather than a call for absolute self-sufficiency. Berkeley’s solution was therefore, in effect, to stand Ireland’s economic problems on their head, making the needs of the pauperized and unemployed masses the motor to develop the Irish economy. In tactical terms, however, the success of the proposal would depend on the establishment of a National Bank to issue the necessary paper money, and much of The Querist is directed to persuading the Irish parliament to agree to this.

Berkeley’s economic principles To convince the public that his proposals would work, Berkeley was led to the exposition of the principles on which his solution rested, principles that are encapsulated, as I have suggested elsewhere, in his first forty queries.20 Here he defines what he terms the true nature of Wealth and the true nature of Money. Wealth, properly understood as what satisfies direct human needs, is the creation of labour and industry, even land being of no value without the application of labour. What is necessary to promote wealth is to awaken the will to labour, which in turn can only be stirred by creating the appetite to consume the product of labour. The business of the state is therefore to promote employment by all means possible, notably ensuring ‘that each member, according to his just pretensions and industry have power [to supply wants]’.21 Paper money would ensure a regular circulation of goods for money, and money for goods, thereby facilitating economic activity at present choked by the lack of specie (Queries 6,

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26 – see also 239, 424, 480, 567). As Berkeley’s definition of money is essentially functional, the material of which money consists is therefore merely a matter of convenience (Queries 34–5).22 As early as his 1713 Guardian essay ‘On Shortsightedness’, Berkeley had repudiated the notion that gold and silver possessed an intrinsic value of their own.23 In The Querist he rejected the Aristotelian concept that the precious metals serve as a pledge redeemable against other goods in the future – an idea that had recently been reformulated by Locke, the foremost authority on money for Irish writers of the eighteenth century.24 This important breakthrough was enshrined in Berkeley’s celebrated definition of money as a ticket or counter, the statement that has above all else ensured his place in the history of economic analysis.25 It is important to emphasize, however, that for Berkeley the function of money as a ticket is not the inert formulation of classical economy, but a ticket providing entitlement to power, whose circulation serves to activate industry (Queries 441, 475; Om. Q. III . 176). In this latter respect, Berkeley’s concept of money (for all its rejection of specie fetishism) remained firmly within the Mercantilist paradigm, where money is seen an independent variable in the economic process, serving, as Locke and Petty stated, to drive the wheels of trade.26 The other respect in which Berkeley remained primarily a mercantilist thinker was in looking to the state to direct economic activity, a necessity given the absence of any notion of the optimization of resources through the operations of the invisible hand, and his rejection, in Alciphron, part II , of effecting prosperity through the untrammelled pursuit of self-interest (as advocated by Mandeville).27 Locke and his contemporaries had accorded this directive role to what they termed the ‘statesman’, but in Irish conditions the notion of the ‘statesman’ was a more contested entity than it would have been in Britain. Irish opinion had long been that no British government would have Irish interests truly at heart – a view reinforced by the recent crisis over Wood’s Halfpence.28 Although Berkeley did not share this conviction, awareness of the general prejudice against the British government and its local administration in Ireland led him to identify the Irish parliament (for all its shortcomings) as the only body credible enough to assume the necessary direction of the national economy. What Berkeley sought to bring about in place of dependence on a foreign trade that involved the exchange of raw agricultural products and foodstuffs, essential for the support of the poorer population, in return for unprofitable luxuries consumed by the gentry was, first, the strengthening of agriculture through the creation of mass internal demand for ‘beef and shoes’, (Query 20). This in turn would expand agriculture and increase population, resulting in the

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encouragement of domestic industry (Query 403), and thereby lead to the expansion of towns and the improvement of their amenities in the form of churches, public buildings and paved streets (Queries 414–15). The expansion of agriculture meant, however, exclusively the expansion of tillage, since Berkeley saw cattle-ranching and sheep-raising as reducing employment in the countryside, and pandering to the Irish poor’s preference for idleness and sloth – inherited from their Tartar ancestors.29 As well as providing for the poor, a self-sufficient economy would also produce the amenities required by the ‘upper rank’ (Query 18), which would include improved houses, furniture, gardens and works of art (Queries 123–7; 399–401, 409). Such improvements in gentry living standards would in time attract back the absentees, who now expended their rents in England and abroad (Queries 408, 413). For Berkeley, foreign trade came bottom of the list of desirable activities, being identified as something in which the poorer economy should only seek to participate, once its agricultural base and domestic commerce were firmly established. Even then it should be regarded with circumspection, being only really desirable when what was imported was intended for working up into re-exports rather than luxury items that pandered to gentry extravagance (Queries 170, 554). As far as the relationship with Britain was concerned, both political and economic, Berkeley followed the call of Prior, and more especially Dobbs, for economic cooperation.30 To succeed, this would require Britain to recognize Ireland’s potential contribution to the British Empire in supplying cheap goods that she was currently required to import expensively from her European competitors, in return for an acceptance that Ireland would not seek to compete in sectors regarded as key to Britain, notably the woollen export trade (Queries 64, 73, 81, 89, 492).31 Obsession with the lost woollen manufacturing industry was a political grievance that the Irish needed to put behind them, not merely to disarm British hostility but also because pasturage was harmful to the economy in undermining employment.32 To Berkeley, Ireland appeared best suited to develop not so much within the colonial empire but as an integral part of Britain’s domestic economy. Although he spoke of it being ‘the true interest of both nations to become one people’ (Query 90), unlike Dobbs, Berkeley did not, however, make the case for political union.33

Persuading the recalcitrant The practical obstacles to bringing Berkeley’s proposal to fruition were primarily questions of motivation, viz. how to bring about the co-operation of the two

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groups in Irish society whose apathy and self-indulgence obstructed the implementation of the plan, namely the idle and impoverished poor and the heedless and extravagant gentry. How Berkeley sought to achieve this reveals significant links between the ideas of The Querist and the reflections on God’s plan for society that he had articulated in his sermons and his 1713 essays for The Guardian. In his 1714 sermon ‘On Charity’ Berkeley claimed that God’s plan for providing for man’s material needs was to be effected through harmonious co-operation in the mutual exchange of goods and services, both locally and between countries.34 In the Guardian essays he asserted that men were driven by an innate urge to pursue their own ‘happiness’, subsequently distinguishing the forms that this took into ‘profit’ and ‘pleasure’.35 To facilitate provision for our ‘well-being’, God had implanted in man the twin attributes of sociability and benevolence, which together ensured that individual behaviour ‘best suits with the common well-being’.36 The divine plan also required the co-operation of human industry to bring it to fruition, lest ‘a supine indolence and neglect’ deprived us of the benefits God had intended for us – phraseology strikingly similar to that applied to the native Irish in The Querist.37 Properly understood self-interest advances the common good, and it is through promoting the common benefit that individuals most effectively promote their own good – a notion constantly reiterated in The Querist.38 Berkeley’s position was thus diametrically opposed to that of Adam Smith, for whom individuals’ pursuit of self-interest achieved the optimum outcome for the community through the operations of the invisible hand.39 Although Berkeley was prepared to concede that selfish motives might lead people to fail to co-operate as God had intended, he was confident that co-operation would be restored through ‘learning wherein our true interest consists’. In the first edition of The Querist, he looked to the legislature to effect the necessary co-operation to promote economic well-being, confident that with proper training and education Irish legislators could successfully perform this role. However, by the time of A Word to the Wise (1749) and the 1750 edition of The Querist Berkeley had come to realize that bringing about the necessary co-operation in Ireland was not the simple matter that he had previously believed.40 Persuading the two main groups, whose failure to recognize their true interest impeded the implementation of Berkeley’s solution to Ireland’s problems, required contrasting approaches, the differences between which reveal much about his perception of the classes who made up the Irish population. For Berkeley the Irish poor were not fully rational, and thus needed to be incentivized to labour by awakening their appetite to consume (rather than appealing to

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their reason, as was the case with the gentry). Where the attractions of consumption failed, Berkeley was prepared to resort to increasingly severe forms of coercion.41 His ultimate sanction for the idle poor was forced labour for the public benefit, and even temporary slavery (an unhappy echo of the notorious English Poor Law Act of 1547).42 Indeed, Berkeley’s preoccupation with the disinclination of the Irish poor to abandon their misery, dirt and sloth in favour of industry (and cleanliness) could be said to verge on the obsessive.43 The Irish were depicted as uniquely averse to labour: in no country was industry said to be so ‘against the natural grain of the people’ (Queries 19, 132, 138, 357, 448). Though the innate idleness of the Irish was a colonialist trope reaching back to the sixteenth century, not all Berkeley’s contemporaries shared this view. David Bindon, for example, argued that national dispositions to industry or idleness depended on circumstances rather than innate characteristics, and that whatever had happened in the past the Irish were now so eager for employment that they would, if necessary, emigrate to find it.44 However, when Berkeley failed with his appeal to the self-interest of the gentry in persuading them they could not hope to thrive while their fellow countrymen starved (Queries 167, 255), his approach was very different from his proposed treatment of the poor. In the case of the gentry, Berkeley merely looked to the current legislature, together with the exploitation of religious and national prejudices, to change their behaviour, finally suggesting holding their self-indulgence up to public obloquy (Queries 10–14, 141, Om. Q. 162).45 Further resort to reason to induce co-operation from the gentry came with Berkeley’s call for them to assume a directive role in stimulating the economy at a local level by promoting employment through improvements on their estates (Queries 407–13). These differences in the treatment of the two classes raise the question of the extent to which Berkeley as a member of the Anglo-Irish elite regarded the ‘poor, native Irish’ as his fellow countrymen. Query 383 suggests that he saw the poor as a resource to whose labour the state had an undoubted right, whether yielded willingly or unwillingly. Their labour, over and above what was necessary to provide ‘a tight house, warm apparel, and wholesome food’,46 was regarded as available to serve the needs of the state and the prosperity of the upper classes (Queries 59, 383, 487). There is no suggestion that, however hard they labour, the poor might aspire to any higher standard than the modest prosperity of eating beef and wearing shoes (Query 20). Against this seemingly unsympathetic approach may be set Berkeley’s assertion that the happiness of the state cannot be distinguished from that of the individuals who comprise it,47 and the statement

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that ‘those who employ neither heads not hands for the common benefit deserve . . . to be expelled like drones out of a well-governed State’ (Queries 345, 3). What Berkeley proposes in overall terms, however, is prosperity in the form of ‘comfortable living’ for the poor, to be achieved, initially at least, by imposing frugality on the rich (Query 18).48

The National Bank and the Irish Parliament The immediate political objective of The Querist was to persuade Irish legislators of the desirability of establishing a National Bank to issue and manage the paper money that was the key to Berkeley’s project. As George Caffentzis has shown, The Querist was originally published as part of a sustained propaganda campaign by Berkeley and his associates, Thomas Prior, Samuel Madden and the Perceval brothers, to prepare the way for the introduction of legislation for setting up an Irish National Bank in the parliamentary session of 1737–8.49 Such a project was, however, a contentious matter; after the failure of the 1720–21 bank scheme, both Houses of Parliament had passed resolutions outlawing bank proposals for the future, the Lords declaring any member who attempted to bring them forward a public enemy.50 Even though some very limited suggestions for paper money had been published in 1734, the long shadow of the South Sea Bubble and the Mississippi debacle in France still compromised bank proposals in Ireland.51 Berkeley’s arguments in favour of a bank rested on the conviction that the question for Ireland was not so much dependence on specie or paper money, but since provision of credit by banks was unavoidable, whether the necessary credit should be public or private (Query 429; Om. Q. III . 58). To win over the legislators (particularly the members of the Lower House, who had the dominant voice in financial business), Berkeley argued that a National Bank would uniquely mobilize all the forces of the nation to promote industry and employment (Query 588). To show how the benefits that other nations had derived from banks could be reproduced in Ireland, while avoiding their errors and weaknesses, Berkeley analysed at length the recent history of banking in Europe and America, focusing particularly on the causes of the dramatic failure of Law’s bank in France. These dangers, Berkeley was convinced, could be overcome through careful supervision of the operations of the Irish National Bank; ensuring it operated exclusively in the national interest, and by skilful controlling of the volume of notes issued against the mortgaging of land. By separating management and note-issuing functions, and a series of security measures (most incidentally initiated by Law

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himself), a National Bank wholly owned by the public rather than private shareholders, and therefore operating exclusively in the public interest, would transform the Irish economy. Most important was to avoid links between the bank and any form of trading project, such as had bedevilled both Law’s Mississippi venture and the South Sea Company in giving them an interest in promoting their own shares to the detriment of the public (Om. Q. I, 220, 273; II . 106-10, 140). Finally, parliament would receive responsibility for overseeing the bank through a committee of MPs, Peers and Officers of State who would ensure that those managing the bank adhered to the regulations laid down for them.52 Establishing and supervising the bank was therefore a highly visible manifestation of what Berkeley saw as the legislature’s general responsibility for directing the economy. Though he still had doubts as to how well prepared Irish legislators were for this function, he realized there was no other body in the state capable of performing it (Om. Q. III . 49). In seeking MPs’ support for his bank, Berkeley appealed both to their corporate pride and to their prejudices. He reminded them of their initial support for a bank in 1720, and urged the protestant Irish parliament to show themselves as resourceful as the ‘Popish Senate’ of Venice or the phlegmatic Dutch (Query 368; Om. Q. II . 251–2, 37, 53). In the longer run, however, Berkeley saw education as the key to developing the necessary knowledge, experience and judgement for MPs to fulfil their role. In Query 346, one of the longer queries in the book, Berkeley asked: Whether, therefore, a legislator should be content with a vulgar share of knowledge? Whether he should not be a person of reflexion and thought, who hath made it his study to understand the true nature and interest of mankind, how to guide men’s humours and passions, how to incite their active powers, how to make their several talents co-operate to the mutual benefit of each other, and the general good of the whole?

Aftermath and The Querist revised Unfortunately for Berkeley, the campaign to launch the National Bank in the parliamentary session of 1737–38 came to nothing, a failure that suggests that even his practical ‘Hints’ were as utopian as his hopes of persuading the Irish public to rely on reason to solve their country’s problems (Query 269, Om Q I. 312). The frustration and anguish that he felt on account of this setback are manifest in a paper entitled ‘The Irish Patriot, Queries upon Queries’, which was

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written in 1738 but did not see the light of day for nearly 200 years.53 As well as excoriating Irish MPs, the paper illustrates what appear to be the behind-scenes arguments that prevented his proposal from even being introduced into the House.54 Although Berkeley’s practical involvement in promoting ‘the Manners, Health, and Prosperity’ of his countrymen was put to the test in responding to the terrible famine of 1740–41, it would take another dozen years before he ventured again into print on the subject of economic improvement with the pamphlet A Word to the Wise of 1749.55 This is not to say that he remained uninvolved with matters of public interest. These included his call to Irish Catholics to resist the blandishments of the Stuarts in the 1745 Rebellion56 and his earlier contribution to combating the diseases consequent to the 1740–41 famine through advocating the use of tar water, which eventually received literary formulation in Siris (1744). However, the experience of what was the worst famine of the century, with the loss of between one fifth and one quarter of the population, left little mark on Berkeley’s subsequent writings.57 Nothing is known of his decision to publish A Word to the Wise in 1749, which was unique in being a call to the Catholic clergy, especially priests in rural parishes, to promote industry among their poorer parishioners and wean them away from idleness through inculcating habits of industry and cleanliness from childhood.58 Though interpreted at the time as a more than gracious gesture of confidence in his Catholic confreres, this decision to appeal to the Catholic clergy, as the group who might exercise real influence over the Irish poor and arouse them to industry, may well have reflected Berkeley’s despair over the possibility of motivating the Irish poor to work as much a unwonted religious altruism.59 Indeed, the complaints of the sloth and idleness of the Irish poor in the first edition of The Querist were so heightened in A Word to the Wise that Berkeley felt it necessary to apologize to their pastors for ‘painting [their poorer parishioners] in no very good light’.60 It was perhaps in response to the surprisingly enthusiastic reception of A Word to the Wise, that Berkeley reissued The Querist in 1750, in a radically different form and no longer anonymously. The ‘Advertisement by the Author’, which prefaced this second version of the work, spoke in disappointingly elliptical terms of the motives that prompted him to bring it before the public. Berkeley acknowledged that ‘the face of things has somewhat changed’, and stated that much of what he had omitted from the earlier version ‘relat[ed] to the sketch or plan of a national bank, which it may be time enough to take in hand again when the public shall seem disposed to make use of such an expedient’ (my italics). In keeping with this, the major omissions from the first edition were

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blocks of queries relating to banking, notably the general discussion of banking (I. 209–67); the history of banking (II . 28–66); the critique of Law’s scheme (II . 67–125); consideration of the objections to the bank likely to be raised in parliament (III . 14–128), and finally the role that the bank might serve in facilitating a transition from the current Irish monetary standard back to sterling (III . 133–64).61 Since he concedes that the time is not appropriate to raise the bank question again, it is puzzling why Berkeley should have undergone the considerable labour of readapting the work for the single volume edition, especially as writing twice on the same subject was a task that he had privately described as highly disagreeable.62 Consideration of the economic and political backgrounds throws no light on why Berkeley might have felt it desirable to reissue The Querist at this specific point. Although the Advertisement recognizes economic circumstances had in some respects improved since 1737,63 Berkeley showed no awareness that short-term conditions had greatly improved since 1747 with a substantial rise in agricultural production and exports, especially in the Cork region.64 This confirms the impression already given in the first edition that Berkeley was concerned with long to medium-term developments in the economy rather than short-term trends. The Advertisement goes on to claim that though Berkeley ‘had determined with myself never to prefix my name to the Querist, but in the present edition [I] was overruled by a friend, who was remarkable for pursuing the public interest with as much diligence as others do their own.’65 Whether this is to be understood as meaning that Berkeley’s friend had persuaded him to bring out the revised Querist, or merely to end his anonymity, is not altogether clear, though the description of the public-spirited friend surely identifies Thomas Prior. For all his claim in 1750 that public disinclination to consider a proposal for a National Bank made it inappropriate to raise the matter, it is possible, however, that Berkeley had not entirely given up hope that parliament would respond in some form. Otherwise, what are we to make of the publication, presumably later in the year, of Maxims on Patriotism By a Lady (otherwise Berkeley), which rehearses much the same bitter criticisms of Irish MPs found in the unpublished ‘Irish Patriot’ of twelve years earlier? The significance of the changes in the 1750 Querist was first pointed out by Ellen Leyburn in a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, in 1937, which spoke of the work as toned down from the verbal brilliance and satire of the anonymous three-part original but adopting a more tolerant attitude to Catholics.66 Berkeley certainly dropped his assertion that uniformity in religion was essential for the well-being of the state, along with suggestions on how to

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distinguish Catholics loyal to the regime from those who were not (Om. Q. I. 289–300), although he also introduced new proposals for promoting conversion (Queries 260–4). What he now looked to, however, was enlisting middle-class and mercantile Catholic Ireland in the scheme for promoting national prosperity (Queries 265–8), whereas his previous focus had been on motivating the poorer Catholics. The appeal to the former was taken further in the most significant addition to the version of The Querist in the 1752 Miscellany, where Berkeley suggested that they might be allowed to acquire former Jacobite lands, despite the penal laws (Query 265). To an extent, this more liberal view of Catholics may be attributable to the notable lack of any overt Irish response to the 1745 rising in Britain (though ironically its two most prominent, behind-the-scenes Irish supporters, Lords Barrymore and Orrery, were substantial protestant landowners in Berkeley’s own east Cork neighbourhood).67 Other changes in the 1750 edition included more emphasis on the role of education in promoting economic prosperity (Queries 191, 194–8, 202–5); considerations of how to increase the population (Queries 206–16); miscellaneous recommendations in relation to particular manufactures and parts of the country, and developing trade with Sicily (which Berkeley had visited in 1717) (Queries 164–5).68 Despite his much harsher denunciations of Irish sloth, indolence and dirt in A Word to the Wise, no further comments were added on this score in 1750. Very noticeable, however, was Berkeley’s diminished confidence in the capacity of Irish parliamentarians to respond to their country’s needs, a change more evident in what was dropped from the book than in what was added, particularly in omitting III , 49: ‘where the legislative Body is not fit to be trusted, what security can there be for trusting anyone else?’69 Clearly, he had not forgotten their failure to respond to his call in 1737–8.70 What had not changed, however, was Berkeley’s commitment to state direction of the economy, without which mutual co-operation in advancing the public welfare through industry and trade could not be achieved. Belief in the need for state direction of the economy had, alongside the accumulation of gold and silver, and the primacy of foreign trade, been the three fundamental postulates of Mercantilist theory, and it would be the last of the three to command the assent of economic writers right up to the appearance of Smith’s Wealth of Nations.71 It is above all this conviction that mutual co-operation in building prosperity cannot be left to self-interest that measures Berkeley’s distance from Adam Smith’s ‘system of liberty’. Ultimately, therefore, Berkeley’s approach to economics remains essentially Aristotelian with the emphasis on providing for human needs at a level of modest prosperity rather than unlimited accumulation; a process identified in

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The Querist as leading to madness for individuals and corruption and ruin for whole societies (Queries 306–9). As he expressed the matter in Alciphron, the real question was that since ‘riches are not an ultimate end . . . in order to make a nation flourish it is not sufficient to make it wealthy, without knowing the true end and happiness of mankind, and how to apply wealth towards attaining that end.’72 Berkeley’s view of economic activity as a necessary, but definitely subordinate, part of the divine plan for mankind revealed him as fundamentally out of sympathy with the confidence in the beneficial effects of the growth of commercial society so widespread among the thinkers of the Enlightenment.73 And it is this attitude that probably accounts for the limited impact that The Querist (for all Berkeley’s theoretical brilliance) had on the subsequent development both of Ireland and of economics.74

Notes 1 See George Berkeley, Plan or Sketch of National Bank, reprinted in Johnston, J. (1970), Berkeley’s Querist in Historical Perspective. Dundalk: Dundalgan Press, p. 207, and The Querist, Query 269: ibid. p. 148. 2 His other significant economic works were the anonymous An Essay towards Preventing the Ruine of Great Britain (London, 1721), (Works, vi. 69–86), and A Word to the Wise: or An Exhortation to the Roman Catholic Clergy of Ireland (Dublin, 1749), (ibid. 233–55). 3 Citations from The Querist are taken from the version in Johnston, 1970, which prints the 1750 text (as revised in Berkeley’s Miscellany, 1752), followed by an appendix giving the omitted queries of the 1735–7 edition, divided into their three original parts. For details of the editions of The Querist, see below. Future references to the queries in the 1750 edition are in the form Query 000 in the text and notes, and to the omitted queries in the form Om. Q. I/II / or III (as appropriate) followed by their number in the relevant Part (e.g. ‘Om. Q. II . 25’). 4 See [Goldsmith, O.] (1989), ‘Memoirs of the late famous bishop of Cloyne’, The Weekly Magazine: or Gentleman & Ladies Polite Companion [1759–60], reprinted in George Berkeley: Eighteenth-Century Responses. 2 vols. New York and London: Garland Publishing, p. 178; Balfour, A. (1897), ‘Biographical Introduction’ in George Sampson (ed.), The Works of George Berkeley, D.D. Bishop of Cloyne. 3 vols. London: George Bell, vol. 1, pp. i–lx, p. xlix; Leyburn, E. (1937–8), ‘Bishop Berkeley, The Querist’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 44, sec. C, pp. 75–98, 77; Luce, A. A. (1949/1992), The Life of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne (reprint, intro. by David Berman). London: Thomas Nelson / London: Routledge/Thoemmes, pp. 195–6.

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5 For these writers, see Rashid, S. (1988), ‘The Irish school of economic development, 1720–50’, Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies 56, 345–69, and Kelly, P. (2000), ‘The politics of political economy in mid-eighteenth century Ireland’ in S. J. Connolly (ed), Political Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Ireland. Dublin: Four Courts Press, pp. 105–29. 6 Berkeley frequently uses the term ‘nation’ to designate what we would call the economy, see Kelly, P. (2014), ‘Berkeley and the idea of a national bank’, in Daniel Carey (ed), Money and Political Economy in the Enlightenment. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, pp. 163–84, p. 171. 7 Notably in Caffentzis, G. (2001), Exciting the Industry of Mankind: George Berkeley’s Philosophy of Money. Dordrecht: Kluwer; Breuninger, S. (2010a), Recovering Bishop Berkeley: Virtue and Society in the Anglo–Irish Context. New York: Palgrave Macmillan; and Kelly, P. (2005), ‘Berkeley’s economic writings’ in Kenneth P. Winkler (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 339–68. The significant mid-twentieth century papers are found in Clark, S. R. L. (ed) (1989), Money, Obedience and Affection: Essays on Berkeley’s Moral and Political Thought. New York and London: Garland Publishing, especially those of T. W. Hutchison, Douglas Vickers and Ian. D. S. Ward. 8 For Berkeley’s divergent comments on foreign trade, see below. 9 ‘Edition’ is employed in terms of common usage rather than the technical, bibliographical sense. Successive editors since A.C. Fraser in 1871 have adopted the alternative strategies for bringing both versions before the reader, of either presenting the material dropped from 1735–7 in footnotes to the text, or relegating this material to an appendix. The latter was the solution adopted by Luce and Jessop in Works, vi. 87–181, the basis of the version in Johnston, 1970. Neither solution can be said to be entirely satisfactory, making the imminent appearance of Bertil Belfrage’s critical edition, which presents all 940 queries as a sequential text, with a subjacent apparatus indicating significant changes in the eight impressions of Berkeley’s lifetime, particularly welcome. 10 For an extended discussion of the changes in 1750, see further below. 11 Both Hume and Smith, for example, owned the 1751 reprint from the Foulis Press in Glasgow. See Norton, D. F. and M. J. (1998), The David Hume Library. Edinburgh: Scottish Bibliographic Society, p. 75; Hiroshi, M. (2000), Adam Smith’s Library. Oxford: Oxford University Press, items 154, 1194. 12 These included the London printing of the original Querist, with an Advertisement probably by Berkeley’s friend Lord Egmont (previously Perceval), issued in three parts in 1736, 1736 and 1737; see further n. 31 below. Pace Keynes, G. (1976), A Bibliography of George Berkeley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 86–7, a further reference in HMC Egmont Diary, ii. 296 confirms that ‘Richardson the printer’ to

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14

15 16

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whom Egmont recorded sending the work (ibid. 275) was indeed Samuel Richardson the printer and future novelist. The Letter was based on Part III , Queries 118–28. Its text was not recovered in modern times until 1926: Keynes, 1976, p. 86. Cf. Berkeley to Prior, on the difficulty of obtaining the copy of The Querist requested by the viceroy, Lord Chesterfield, February 1746: Works, viii. 282. Berkeley’s influence is perhaps detectable in Chesterfield’s closing speech to the Irish parliament in April 1746: Lords Journals [Ireland], iii. 646. News of Ireland’s distress even crossed the Atlantic, cf. the harrowing account (credited to reports in English newspapers) in Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, 20 November, 1729: reprinted in Franklin, B. (1959), The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 1 (1706–34), ed. W. Labaree and B. Whitfield. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 162. As argued in Swift, J. (1727/8), A Short View of the State of Ireland. Dublin: S. Harding.; cf. Queries 271–3, 418. Cf. Swift, J. (1729), A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland, from being a Burden to their Parents or Country; and for making them beneficial to the Publick. Dublin: S. Harding; Prior, T. (1729b), A List of the Absentees of Ireland. And the Yearly Value of their Estates and Incomes Spent Abroad. With Observations on the Present State and Condition of that Kingdom. Dublin: R. Gunne, pp. 59–65; and Dobbs, A. (1729), An Essay on the Trade and Improvement of Ireland, Part I. Dublin: A. Rhames, pp. 1–4, 74–8. Berkeley’s understanding of wealth may derive from Fénelon’s immensely popular Télémaque. See Fénelon, Francois de Salignac de la Mothe (1994), The Adventures of Telemachus, ed. and trans. P. J. Riley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 109, and Luce, 1992, p. 111. Interestingly, it was not until he wrote A Word to the Wise in 1749 that Berkeley included shelter amongst mankind’s basic needs: Works, vi. 238, 241. For a useful introduction to American paper money of the early eighteenth century, focusing particularly on Rhode Island, see Caffentzis, 2001, pp. 93–5. Cf. Mun, T. (1664), England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade. Or, The Balance of our Forraign Trade is the Rule of our Treasure. London: Thomas Clark; North, D. (1691), Discourses upon Trade; Principally Directed to the Cases of the Interest Coynage Clipping [and] Increase of Money. London: Thomas Basset, p. 17. Adam Smith would comment that ‘The title of Mun’s book became a fundamental axiom in the political economy not only of England but of all other commercial countries’ (Smith, A. (1976), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Glasgow Edition, (eds) R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner and W. B. Todd. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, i. 434–5). It is therefore somewhat ironic that Smith chose to bind his copy of The Querist (cf. n. 11 above) with the Foulis Press reprint of Mun.

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20 Cf. Kelly, P. (1985), ‘Ireland and the critique of mercantilism in Berkeley’s Querist’, Hermathena, 139, 109–10. 21 The theme of promoting employment is reiterated throughout The Querist; for different means of doing so, see Queries 3, 54, 329, 361, 379. The citation is from Query 8. 22 Queries 468–70, 473, 482, 571–2 recognize, however, the need for different forms of money to service the needs of different classes, especially low denomination metal pieces for the poor (shortage of which was a particular problem in Ireland during the 1720s and 1730s). 23 Works, vii. 212. 24 Query 25. Cf. Locke, 1991, i. 233: ‘Money . . . carrying with it . . . Security, that he that receives it, shall have the same Value for it again, of other things that he wants, whenever he pleases.’ 25 Cf. Schumpeter, Joseph A. (1953), A History of Economic Analysis. London: Allen and Unwin, p. 296. 26 Cf. Bowley, M. (1973), Studies in the History of Economic Theory before 1870. London: Macmillan, chap. 1. 27 Works, iii. 79–83. 28 Dickson, D. (2000), New Foundations: Ireland 1600–1800. 2nd edn. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, pp. 72–5. 29 Queries 87, 489, 512–14; cf. Word to Wise: Works, vi. 235. Caffentzis, 2001, pp. 110–15, has suggested that Berkeley’s hostility to pasturage may have had an element of self-interest given the refusal of Irish landowners to pay tithes on cattle and sheep rearing (known as agistment tithe). The switch from tillage in the 1730s threatened the welfare of the Anglican clergy, and led to a lively pamphlet debate, involving Swift among others. 30 The Querist did not raise the view that Berkeley broached to Prior, 7 May 1730, that it would be in England’s interest to grant Ireland free trade: Works, viii. 208. 31 The Advertisement to the 1736 English reprint of The Querist, part I, recommended the book for its call for increased co-operation between Ireland and England, in phraseology reminiscent of the Dedication of William Molyneux’s Case of Ireland . . . Stated (1698). This echo of Molyneux would seem to dispose of the claim in Keynes, 1976, p. 87, that this Advertisement was the work of its London publisher John Roberts. 32 For the problems of the woollen trade, see Dickson, 2000, pp. 49–53, 135–8. 33 Dobbs, 1729, pp. 52, 56–72. 34 Sermon ‘On Charity’ (preached at Leghorn, spring 1714): Works, vii. 35. 35 Guardian essay viii – ‘Happiness’: ibid. 212; Guardian essay ix – ‘Short-sightedness’: ibid. 211.

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36 ‘The Author of our Being who aims at the common good of his creatures . . . implanted the seeds of mutual benevolence in our souls’: Guardian essay xii, ‘On the Bond of Society’ (1713): Works, vii. 227. 37 ‘On the Mystery of Godliness’ was preached in Boston on the eve of Berkeley’s departure from America in 1731, ibid. 91. It also asserted that co-operation in trade served to spread new ideas and technical processes. Cf. especially Query 357. 38 ‘Because the good of the whole is inseparable from that of the parts; in promoting the common good every one doth at the same time promote his own private interest.’ Cf. Queries 586–7. 39 ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their self interest’ (Smith, 1976, i. 26–7). 40 See further below. 41 Queries 53–4, 387–9 also proposed the forcible working of criminals in chain gangs both to provide labour for the state and to discourage crime through harsher punishments than the death penalty – a notion subsequently independently advanced by the Austrian Emperor Joseph II . Cf. Ernst Wangermann (1973), The Austrian Achievement, 1700–1800. London: Thames and Hudson, p. 144. 42 Berkeley’s views were by no means unique; other British philosophers such as Locke and Francis Hutchison advocated similarly harsh treatment of the recalcitrant poor. Cf. Woolhouse, R. (2007), Locke, a Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 396–7; T.W. Hutchison in Clarke, 1989, p. 49. 43 Query 61 does concede that misery and despair might be so extreme as to inhibit the poor from seeking to better their condition. 44 Cf. Pref. to his translation of Jean-Francois Melon (1738), A Political Essay on Commerce. Translated with some annotations and remarks by David Bindon. Dublin: Philip Crampton, p. xiv (though Bindon also cited The Querist with approval). Queries 447, 528–9 show Berkeley’s concern over the loss to Ireland arising from people emigrating to work elsewhere. 45 The suggestion in Query 326 of banishing incorrigibly extravagant ‘fine folk of both sexes’ from the country is merely a piece of Berkeleian irony. 46 A Word to the Wise; Works, vi. 241. 47 Phraseology that seemingly appealed to Adam Smith. Cf. Smith, 1976, i. 94: ‘No society can surely be happy and flourishing of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.’ 48 The frugality Berkeley called for was as much moral as economic (cf. Essay on the Ruine of Great Britain: Works, vii. 74–9), but had no connection with Adam Smith’s concept of the ‘parsimony’ of the industrious effecting the accumulation of capital (Smith, 1976, i. 15–19), pace Smith, A. (1993), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Laurence Dickey (ed), Indianapolis: Hackett, p. 252.

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49 Caffentzis, G. (2011), ‘The failure of Berkeley’s bank: money and libertinism in eighteenth-century Ireland’, in Daniel Carey (ed), The Empire of Credit: the Financial Revolution in the British Atlantic World. Dublin: Four Courts Press, pp. 229–48. 50 Lords Journals [Ireland], ii. 720; Commons Journals [Ireland], iii. 289. 51 For a detailed discussion of Berkeley’s bank proposals, see Kelly, 2014, pp. 165, 169–78. A useful summary of Law’s scheme and the South Sea Bubble is found in Murphy, A. E. (1997), John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy Maker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 45–66. 52 Queries Relating to a National Bank . . . Also the Letter containing a Plan or Sketch of the Bank, item 5, in Johnston, 1970, p. 205. 53 Ibid. 210–13. 54 Caffentzis, 2011, 230–2. 55 Citation from the ‘Advertisement by the Author’, which prefaces the 1750 edition of The Querist: Johnston, 1970, p. 124. 56 ‘A Letter to the Roman Catholics of the Diocese of Cloyne’, Dublin Journal, 19–22 October 1745: Works, vi. 229–30. 57 A Word to the Wise (1749) speaks of ‘how many of [those poor creatures] perished in a late memorable distress’: ibid. vi. 238. For the famine, Dickson, D. (1997), Arctic Ireland: the Extraordinary Story of the Great Frost and Forgotten Famine of 1740–41. Belfast: White Row Press. 58 Works, vi. 235–48. 59 For the Catholic response, see ‘A Letter from the Roman Catholic Clergy of the Diocese of Dublin’ [Dublin Journal, 18 Nov. 1749] reprinted in ibid. 248. Cf., however, Berkeley’s sly intimation that given their ambiguous status in law, it might be desirable for the Catholic clergy to show zeal for the public welfare: ibid. 244–5. 60 Ibid. 236. 61 None of the 45 queries added in 1750 related to banks. 62 Berkeley to Johnston [29 November 1729]: Works, ii. 282–3. 63 A note to Query 482 refers to the improvements produced by the currency reforms of 1735 [recte 1737]. These had brought the gold/silver ratio into line with the English revaluation of the guinea in 1717, and issued some £40,000 worth of copper money (equivalent to 9,600,000 pennies), thereby ensuring much-needed monetary stability. Other changes noted by Berkeley included improvements in ‘the art of design’ and a decline in extravagant fashions (Queries, 68, 140). 64 See Dickson, D. (2005), Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster, 1630–1830. Cork: Cork University Press, tables VIII . i; X. i; XI . i, and XIII . i and ii. 65 The 1750 version of the Advertisement read ‘present edition’ (as here), which has been altered to ‘last edition’ in the 1752 version that served as Johnston’s copy-text.

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66 Leyburn, 1737–8, 91. Berkeley even dropped I. 316 (’Whether he, who only asks, asserts? And whether any man can confute the querist?’), which was perhaps the nearest he came to indicating his reasons for adopting the Querist format. 67 Cf. Dickson, 2005, 252–3. 68 Query 191 proposes admitting Catholics to Dublin University without requiring the usual religious exercises, in the same way the Jesuits received Protestants at their college in Paris. 69 Cf. the omission of III . 14–28. 70 Since there was only one election in George II ’s reign, membership of the Commons would probably not have greatly changed between 1737 and 1750. 71 The need for enhanced state direction when the objective is to employ the whole population would be stressed by Steuart, Sir James (1767), An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy, 2 vols, London: Strahan, i. 2, 15, 162, 249–50. 72 Alciphron, II , 10: Works, iii. 80. Berkeley had posed very much the same question in his 1721 Essay towards preventing the Ruine of Great Britain: ibid. vi. 74–5. 73 A contrast notable by comparison with Hume, for example. Cf. ‘Of Commerce’; ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’; ‘Of Money’, and ‘Of Interest’: Hume, D. (1994), Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 93–125 passim. 74 For the subsequent influence of The Querist, see Rashid, S. (1990), ‘Berkeley’s Querist and its Influence’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 12, 38–60.

12

Berkeley’s Siris, an Interpretation Timo Airaksinen

Reading Siris Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries is a short book, only some 130 pages, but it challenges its reader, especially when one compares it with, for instance, the Principles of Human Knowledge. For Berkeley, Siris is a new kind of book, a ‘rude essay’ and a stream of consciousness draft (S 297). Some modern readers have adopted a negative attitude towards Siris, for understandable reasons.1 Siris looks like a scandalous treatise if you admire the young Berkeley of the Principles and the Three Dialogues. However, to understand George Berkeley as a philosopher and a scientist, we need to tackle Siris as well. Some critics think that a topic like tar water, which Berkeley promotes, is a sufficient reason for rejecting the project. Berkeley indeed recommends tar water as a medicine (S 12–3, 20, 22, also First Letter to Thomas Prior, Works 5). He tells us how to prepare it, how it works as a medicine, and why it is so successful that we can almost call it a panacea.2 The quest for a panacea, a catholicon, or a universal medicine, which cures most diseases, had been around for a long time. I do not see any problem here.3 Siris is, among other things, a medical work. Berkeley develops his key ideas in his two long letters to Thomas Prior and in his last publication, Farther Thoughts on Tar-Water (Works 5). He recommends tar water to ‘sea-faring persons, ladies, and men of studious and sedentary lives’ (S 116). Wood tar also happens to be a carcinogenic substance.4 Interpretative literature on Siris is available, although many errors prevail, ranging from trivial to significant: for instance, that Siris is a large volume or that Berkeley was an enemy of Newton but still accepted his idea of aether.5 Most of the older literature may not hold much value but one hopes that the emerging body of scholarship will be better.6 In its own time, Siris was a popular success; it went quickly through several editions, even a Swedish language translation

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appeared. One modern edition of Siris exists, which is T. E. Jessop’s edition in the Works 5. My position is that Siris is a contribution to philosophy and especially to sciences. It is an essential part of Berkeley’s corpus because he changed many, or even most, of his youthful theories at this last stage of his career. Even his theory of causality, which he may have considered as his key thesis, gets a new twist in 1744. Siris has an ethical core, it is deeply philosophical, scientifically informed and in many places beautifully written; at the same time it is a rambling, prima facie self-contradictory, and sometimes a nostalgic intellectual journey. Who would not like such a book? Jessop says that the word ‘siris’ means a small chain and it is also an ancient name of the river Nile in Egypt (Works 5, 5). As such, the name is well chosen. Berkeley was interested in the religious symbolism of water, such as fountains and vessels.7 The Nile is a symbol of fertility, religion, culture and travel. The idea of a chain is repeated in the title of the book, Siris, A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions. This chain is supposed to connect Earth to Heaven; the most base to the most elevated, or mundane to heavenly. This is important because the text of Siris consists of a series of numbered paragraphs, without chapters or headings. Every paragraph is a link in the chain, siris, which ascends towards what is true, good and beautiful or, as the author also says, towards what is pure: ‘And according to the Platonists, heaven is not defined so much by its local situation as by its purity’ (S 211). Berkeley’s religious concerns are strong all along the chain but, in the end, they reach their stylistic and speculative crescendo. Berkeley longs for the Christian religion to be part of science, and science to be part of it, so that ultimately science will serve religion.8 However, all this is in the past and Berkeley resents modern times, which breed freethinkers – whom he hates – and this does not bode well. Alciphron displays confidence, but in Siris the reader feels its author’s anger when he realizes that science and religion may no longer form a unified hierarchic whole. Siris is one of the last major attempts to provide a hierarchical definition of the relative positions of science and religion. Berkeley is afraid religion will lose its dominance: ‘And have not Fatalism and Sadducism gained ground during the general passion for the corpuscularian and mechanical philosophy, which hath prevailed for about a century?’ (S 331). Berkeley accepts new and old scientific doctrines. He may admire René Descartes but he rejects, for instance, his cosmology.9 He does it almost implicitly: Nature seems better known and explained by attractions and repulsions than by those other mechanical principles of size, figure, and the like; that is, by Sir Isaac

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Newton, than Descartes. And natural philosophers excel, as they are more or less acquainted with the laws and methods observed by the Author of nature. S 243

Nevertheless, Berkeley adopts the key elements of Descartes’ physiology. He criticizes Newton but he also follows him. He collects and collates existing knowledge. He may not be an experimentalist like Isaac Newton but he knows the value of experimentation.10 He understands the idea of double-blind controlled experiments: The experiment may be easily made if an equal number of poor patients in the small-pox were put into two hospitals at the same time of the year, and provided with the same necessaries of diet and lodging; and, for further care, let the one have a tub of tar-water and an old woman, the other hospital, what attendance and drugs you please. Farther Thoughts on Tar Water, 210

Also, ‘In one family there was a remarkable instance of seven children, who came all very well through the small-pox, except one young child which could not be brought to drink tar water as the rest had done’ (S 2). However, Berkeley himself does not rely on such experimental techniques. He trusts plain observations – as if he still lived in the world of sensory ideas. As we will see, this trust on sense data is inconsistent with the new epistemology of Siris. However, in the ascending chain, experience and experiments are at a lower level than theorizing and reasoning, which rest on first principles and speculations. The higher along the chain he advances, the bolder Berkeley’s new philosophical vision gets. The ultimate aim is to elevate one’s thoughts up the chain all the way to God as the Holy Trinity. This is how the book’s argument ends, in the understanding of the role and the nature of God. I will show below in detail how Berkeley argues. Some commentators have said that Siris contains no argumentation at all – this is a mistake. On the contrary, Siris exhibits some solid argumentation, which is one of the reasons for reading it. Another reason is that it reveals a new Berkeley.

Tar as medicine Tar water is easy to make (S 1). Put one quart of fresh pine tar into a glazed earthen vessel and add one gallon of cool water, then stir it for fifteen minutes, let sit for thirty-six hours, skim the surfaced oily substance, and bottle the clear

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liquid.11 Drink in normal conditions a half pint in the morning and another in the evening; if you are sick, drink more. You can drink as much as your stomach takes, as there is no overdose. The idea of tar water is not new with Berkeley. He reports that he got the idea in America (S 1, 17; First Letter to Thomas Prior, 132), but also ocean going ships used tar water as medicine against scurvy, as we learn from Captain Drape’s Affidavit (Works 5, 189).12 In Scandinavia, people used tar for medicinal purposes, mostly externally, but its fumes were inhaled, too. To treat toothache, take a small amount of fresh tar, press it into a ball, dip it in strong alcohol and press it firmly into the cavity. Thus, we can say that Berkeley perfected the method of preparing tar water, pioneered its wider use and explained its effects, but he did not invent it. When tar water is prepared, a lump of brown substance will remain on the bottom of the vessel. One can reuse it for making more tar water, otherwise it is useless. The medicine is now in the bottle. What is in the bottle? Berkeley realizes that tar does not dissolve in water; it dissolves in alcohol but that does not make a plausible medicine. The case of resin applies to tar as well: If anyone were minded to dissolve some of the resin, together with the salt or spirit, he need only mix some spirit of wine with the water. But such an entire solution of resins and gums as to qualify them for entering and pervading the animal system, like the fine acid spirit that first flies off from the subject, is perhaps impossible to obtain. S 49

A crucial element in tar evidently dissolves in water, as one can see and taste: ‘no acid more gentle than this obtained by the simple affusion of cold water’ (S 50). The result is tar water, that clear, brownish, soothing liquid that is so good for us. It contains an acid spirit, ‘that principle of life and verdure’ (S 24). Therefore, strictly speaking, it is misleading to talk about tar water at all. Only a small portion of tar works for medicinal purposes; the water-soluble part holds its effective element. The trick is to get the good element out of its container, tar, which in itself is useless. Next, Berkeley explains the science behind it. A stream of very small particles hits the atmosphere of the earth and reacts with its larger particles: Light impregnates air, air impregnates vapour; and this becomes a watery juice by distillation, having risen first in the cold still with a kindly gentle heat. This fragrant vegetable water is possessed of the specific odour and taste of the plant. It is remarked that distilled oils added to water for counterfeiting the vegetable water can never equal it, artificial chemistry falling short of the natural. S 45, also S 37

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Next, a variety of different particles enters plants, including trees, via the porous outer surfaces of their leaves.13 The particles move through vents and capillaries all the way to the roots of coniferous trees, such as pines and firs. There they slowly concentrate and mature: ‘The trees, like old men, being unable to perspire, and their secretory ducts obstructed, they are, as one may say, choked and stuffed with their own juice’ (S 16). Tar is extracted from pine logs by means of a dry distilling method called ‘tar burning’ in the Scandinavian languages and Finnish, or making tar by slowly burning small logs under a thick dirt and turf cover. Too much oxygen starts a flame and you will lose everything. The method is pyrolysis, which induces various chemical reactions. Hot liquid tar pours out through tubes inserted into the pile.14 Tar making used to be a major industry in northern Europe. Berkeley knows this process (S 13). He also refers to an alternative method, namely cutting the bark of the tree open and collecting the liquid: ‘This balsam, weeping or sweating through the bark hardens into resin’ (S 38; also S 16, 18). Alas, this is not tar but a chemically different substance called resin, which is hardened sap of coniferous trees. Resin and tar are chemically different and they look very different. According to Berkeley, resin is healthy too, but it is a factual mistake to think that this is tar, as he occasionally does: ‘[t]he brown old rosin, that is to say hardened tar’ (S 111). These sections of Siris contain conflicting information about the roles of such different substances as tar, resin and turpentine.15 Berkeley thinks that God has given tar to us to use it for our benefit. Tar water contains an element, pure acid from heaven, which God sent to us. It flows freely from the heavens in the form of light and fire accumulating in old trees. What Berkeley shows is that we are able first to extract it from trees and subsequently learn how to mix it with water so that tar’s ingredients become a powerful catholicon, or a universal cure. Tar water is good in every sense, because it is a gift from God. This also means that tar water works in the best possible way. It has no side effects, it cannot hurt the patient, it must be as powerful as any cure ever was, because God himself guarantees it, at least in the Bishop’s imagination while he sits and writes during his long-lasting isolation in Cloyne. Tar water is perfect because it is natural and pure, unlike alcohol. It is natural in three different senses. It comes from living nature, man minimally manipulates it, and God’s wish is for us to have it. Berkeley says that a medicine that is closest to nature is the best: ‘artificial chemistry falling short of the natural’ (S 45). Of course, no artificial manufacturing effort or chemistry is beneficial in the same perfect manner as are the works

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of God. Tar flows freely and unassisted out of an incision on the bark of a tree, as he believes; this is natural. Medicines we produce by chemical means are artificial. Distillation is a good example: Iatrochemists applied distillation methods. In the same way, people produced strong alcohol, Berkeley’s nightmarish foe (S 53, 107–8). What is closer to God’s creations is better than artificial products: The less violence is used to nature the better its produce. The juice of olives or grapes issuing by the lightest pressure is best. Resins that drop from the branches spontaneously, or ooze upon the slightest incision, are the finest and most fragrant. And infusions are observed to act more strongly than decoctions of plants; the more subtle and volatile salts and spirits, which might be lost or corrupted by the latter, being obtained in their natural state by the former. It is also observed that the finest, purest, and most volatile part is that which first ascends in distillation. And, indeed, it should seem the lightest and most active particles required least force to disengage them from the subject. S 46

Here Berkeley’s logic falters, because his ethical and theological concerns override the factual foundations of his medical theories. Tar and turpentine, unlike resin, come out of hell-like smoky and fiery conditions in tar-making mounds, which changes the chemical constitution of the wood and resin inside. If those conditions are not violent, unnatural and dangerous, nothing is. Compared with what happens when one distils alcohol, tar making is unlike anything that we call natural conditions. Distillation is not a chemical process. Wine ferments on its own requiring minimal intervention. Metals may work as medicines, as the case of antimony shows, and metals just sit in the bowels of the earth where they wait to be discovered and extracted. Berkeley wants to show the ideal nature of tar water and nothing is going to stop him, not even facts that he should know well. In this way, Berkeley relies on something like theological medicine where the cure comes from God and is therefore pure and perfect, benevolent and not violent – but tar comes from Hell.

The chemistry of life Next, chemical explanations follow. Berkeley is familiar with the work of Herman Boerhaave and Wilhelm Homberg, and perhaps the Paracelsian lore (S 126 etc.) – certainly, he does not rely on the Galenic medicine (S 171, Alc VI , 28). He

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mentions Jan Baptist van Helmont, a Dutch Paracelsian (S 49).16 Berkeley says that the sun’s light is an acid (S 202), and as an acid it combines with the salts in the atmosphere, which again combine with the particles of earth. Later he supplements this picture by saying that the salty acid particles, which are combined with earth, are ‘sheathed in fine oil’: [T]he gentle vibrations that are raised in the nerves by a fine subtle acid sheathed in a smooth volatile oil, softly stimulating and bracing the nervous vessels and fibres, promotes a due circulation and secretion of the animal juices, and creates a calm satisfied sense of health. And, accordingly, I have often known tar-water procure sleep and compose the spirits in cruel vigils occasioned either by sickness or by too intense application of mind. S 86

This fine oil mixes with water – this is why we call it tar water. Here Siris applies contemporary chemistry based on the three chemical principles, salt, sulphur and mercury, together with the four forms of matter: earth, air, fire and water. Berkeley refers to earth, acids and the principle of salt. Salt is the deposit you get when you boil various liquids, which then reduce to earth-like substances. Salts are an element of life and the growth of plants and animals: ‘The salts, the spirits, the heat of tar-water are of a temperature congenial to the constitution of a man, which receives from it a kindly warmth, but no inflaming heat’ (S 74). They are also soluble to water, which we have seen is important when you make tar water. Already in Alciphron Berkeley reviews the key facts: ‘This volatile salt is properly the essence of the soul of the plant, containing all its virtue; and the oil is the vehicle of this most subtile part of the soul, or that which fixes and individuates it. And as, upon separation of this oil from the plant, the plant died’ (Alc VI , 14). All this chemistry used to be a freethinker’s doctrine in Alciphron, but not for long. In Siris, tar water is healthy and its effects depend on acid salts, which Berkeley knows to be beneficial to men and animals. All salts combine with earth, which is present in the air or atmosphere, which itself is born out of the inhalations of the earth radiated by the sun (S 33, 88). This is common knowledge: the earth, animals and plants let out gases, including those that are evaporated liquids. We also find sulphur in tar, but its medical role is more controversial than that of salts. Sulphur is a fiery substance that, unlike salts, heats and disturbs living organisms. Tar water cools the patient down but sulphuric substances have the opposite effect; they produce inflaming heat:

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The salts, therefore, and more active spirits of the tar are got by infusion in cold water; but the resinous part is not to be dissolved thereby. Hence the prejudice which some perhaps may entertain against tar-water as a medicine, the use whereof might inflame the blood by its sulphur and resin. S 47

A problem follows: The acid spirit or salt, that mighty instrument in the hand of nature, residing in the air, and diffused throughout that whole element, is discernible also in many parts of the earth, particularly in fossils, such as sulphur, vitriol, and alum. It was already observed, from Homberg, that this acid is never found pure, but hath always sulphur joined with it, and is classed by the difference of its sulphurs, whether mineral, vegetable, or animal. S 135

How do you explain, first, that tar water contains no sulphur and, yet, it must contain some because of its salts? I mention this as a typical challenge to the reader of Siris. Berkeley seems to argue that two types of heat exist in the body: beneficial warmth and harmful inflammation, but tar water is not responsible for the second type. The reason is that tar water contains no sulphur. Obviously, the matter is more complicated than this.17 A well-known iatrochemists’ panacea used to be antimony, a metal that Paracelsus favoured, and metals imply the principle of mercury. Gold, mixed with a liquid, is another example of a traditional panacea, or potable gold. Berkeley’s own list does not mention antimony or gold: ‘In the modern practice, soap, opium and mercury bid fairest for Universal Medicines’ (S 69). He says tar water is a soap (S 59). Of course, metals as medicines were controversial because of their poisonous qualities. For instance, mercury is dangerous, as Berkeley knows: Mercury hath of late years become a medicine of very general use, the extreme minuteness, mobility, and momentum of its parts rendering it a most powerful cleanser of all obstructions, even in the most minute capillaries. But then we should be cautious in the use of it, if we consider that the very thing which gives it power of doing good above other deobstruents doth also dispose it to do mischief. I mean its great momentum. S 71

Metals are heavy and thus they break human tissues. Whole schools of medicine depended on this before Berkeley’s time.18 Berkeley always emphasizes that tar water is not poisonous or damaging. Doctors who recommended

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metallic medicines, as well as those who favoured strong purges, bloodletting, salivation and enemas, could say that these methods may be harmful but they also cure the patient. Berkeley counters this by saying that the damage done is so severe that a patient may recover from the illness but not from the cure: ‘But it is well remarked in Plato’s Timaeus that vomits and purges are the worst exercise in the world’ (S 67). Thus, he prefers a gentle cure: ‘[T]he saline extract is a gentle purge and diuretic, by the stimulus of its salts’ (S 84). Tar water contains an acid that comes from the sun. How can Berkeley know that the light and fire of the sun is an acid (S 128)? He believes that light is a hail of small, invisible particles, and so it is possible that they are chemically an acid. He knows this by verifying that the particles behave like acids when they combine with salts and earth. What kind of behavior are we talking about? He writes: ‘For whatsoever strongly attracts and is attracted, may be called an acid, as Sir Isaac Newton informs us in his tract De Acido. Hence it should seem that the sulphur of Homberg and the acid of Sir Isaac are at bottom one and the same thing, to wit, pure fire or æther’ (S 202). This quotation is a conceptual minefield. Sulphur is not a medical substance but now it is the same as acid, which is the good part of tar water. Sulphur as a fiery substance is a part of Berkeley’s pure fire, light and aether. Siris contains such tangles, as one must admit. Siris is a useful book because it promotes health, but what is health? What is life? These are the central questions.19 Berkeley believes that the entire universe is alive; this is one of his main metaphysical doctrines. However, he is aware of its problems. This is typical of Siris. Berkeley first accepts some grand speculations about the nature of things, but next he says that we should approach them with care and subtle consideration. This is what life is: And although an animal [the world] containing all bodies within itself could not be touched or sensibly affected from without, yet it is plain they [ancients] attributed to it an inward sense and feeling, as well as appetites and aversions; and that from all the various tones, actions, and passions of the universe, they supposed one symphony, one animal act and life to result. S 273

Life is a symphony of motions, cosmic music that the world plays under the direction of God as His mind animates the word. All living beings participate in this musica universalis. Logically, it follows that the whole world is alive. The living universe is not a mere metaphor – it also refers to natural motions, appetites and aversions (conatus), vital motion and life force (vis vitae) (S 85, 218). The universe as well as any living body is in motion and everything has its own

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rhythm; all this activity plays cosmic music. What reason would there be to distinguish sharply between the motions of the world and the bodies as they all are the same? Our thoughts move and ideas change, blood circulates, animal spirits fly through nerves, plants grow and change all the time. Life emerges from fire, ‘But this active element [fire] is supposed to be everywhere, and always present, imparting different degrees of life, heat, and motion to the various animals, vegetables, and other natural productions, as well as to the elements themselves wherein they are produced and nourished’ (S 190). A hail of small particles from the sun is also the principle of life, an ‘active element’. Fire is the bringer of life. A loss of life is a constant threat. Illnesses work by blocking and hindering the harmonious motion that is life. An obstruction of some vessels causeth the blood to move more swiftly in other vessels which are not obstructed. Hence, manifold disorders ensue. Liquor that dilutes and attenuates resolves the concretions which obstruct. Tar-water is such liquor. It may be said, indeed, of common water, that it attenuates; also of mercurial preparations, that they attenuate. S 56

This has its unintended Galenic overtones as Berkeley emphasizes the imbalance of humours in the body. All good chemical medicines work in the same way, namely, they remove blockages. Medicine revives the life force by allowing it to flow freely, naturally and in the right rhythms. Too much flow is dangerous, too little means death, so we want the correct amount of flow and motion. Only God can create the vital force but a good doctor and his medicine alleviate problems by unblocking the pathways. Poisons do the opposite. Nourishment reconstitutes life. Berkeley gives a relevant example. You extract metal from ore and then leave it in the open air. This reconstitutes the ore, or replaces some of the metal that you have already removed. The explanation is that the inhalations of the earth put some metal into the atmosphere from where it returns to the ore: Air may also be said to be the seminary of minerals and metals, as it is of vegetables. Mr. Boyle informs us that the exhausted ores of tin and iron being exposed to the air become again impregnated with metal, and that ore of alum having lost its salt recovers it after the same manner. And numberless instances there are of salts produced by the air, that vast collection or treasury of active principles, from which all sublunary bodies seem to derive their forms, and on which animals depend for their life and breath. S 142

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This wonderful example shows how nourishment works and how the whole universe is alive, even ores.

Science and its problem In Siris Berkeley confronts Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, René Descartes and other contemporary scientists for instance on the nature of light, explanation of gravity and some new physical problems like electricity (S 235). Nothing much is original here, except of course the way Berkeley approaches these rather standard problems and theories. We do not go into details, but clearly Berkeley admires science and the scientists. He is knowledgeable of their theories. He never denies their prima facie value, as many religious enthusiasts like, for instance, John Hutchinson did in his Moses’ Principia (1724–7). Berkeley says that he does not know Hutchinson’s work and he is not interested in it (Letter 260, to Johnson, Works 8, 305). Berkeley is no enthusiast; therefore, it is a mistake to call Berkeley an enemy of Newton and the new mechanistic epistemology. Berkeley only tries to put mechanism in its own place, subordinated to God’s causal efficacy. Berkeley has read Newton’s Opticks and its speculative Queries (4. ed, 1730), which obviously impressed him. He mentions Newton’s own examples without giving him credit, for instance, that flies walk on the surface of water ‘without wetting their feet’ (235).20 It is now becoming clear to him that the physical world is excessively complicated. For instance, electric and magnetic phenomena demand attention. The same applies to fermentation and putrefaction (S 229, cf. S 126), which are originally alchemical terms. Berkeley refers to three important experimental devices: prism (S 165 indirectly; 3D 186), microscope (S 29; TV 85, etc.) and especially burning glass (S 158, 169, 190, 193, 198, 221), which create new empirical knowledge. Microscopic observations show what the surface structure of plants is like and reveal aspects of the world by making them visible for the first time. All this he takes for granted in Siris. However, things change when the prism and the burning glass emerge. Light, when it hits a prism, forms a spectrum of colours, as Newton showed. Berkeley accepts his idea that light is of corpuscular nature, a fast moving set of very small particles (S 165, also S 206–7). Moreover, the spectrum of colours indicates that the particles of white light are of many different kinds, and because of this, their effects are variable, too. He writes,

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The pure æther or invisible fire contains parts of different kinds, that are impressed with different forces, or subjected to different laws of motion, attraction, repulsion, and expansion, and endued with divers distinct habitudes towards other bodies. These seem to constitute the many various qualities, virtues, flavours, odours, and colours which distinguish natural productions. S 162

The rule is, different causes produce different results, even if, as he also says, the same cause may have different effects: ‘[T]he same cause shall sometime produce opposite effects: heat for instance thins, and again heat coagulates the blood’ (S 74). Next, Berkeley rejects Newton’s idea of a separate ethereal substance because its uniform particles do not allow for the observed variety of the effects of light. Here Berkeley dismisses his own claim that the same cause may bring about variable effects. Be this as it may, his point is clear. Sunlight, unlike Newton’s aether, is a complex cause and hence its effects are equally rich and variable. Berkeley calls light and fire aether, but this not the substance that his contemporaries talk about (S 226). The Newtonian aether is not what Berkeley has in mind; his is that ‘active fiery ethereal substance of light’ (S 178). Aether is the same as light, or the aether postulated by some ancient authors. Here Berkeley follows them and rejects the modern thinkers. I find it puzzling that commentators of Siris miss this elementary point. Perhaps it is because Newton and Berkeley use the same word. However, Berkeley does not need the modern concept. He says the ancient thinkers are correct when they identify aether and pure light or fire (S 152, 264). If light, fire or aether consists of variable particles, is it material? Siris is clear on the subject of materialism and the nature of matter. Berkeley postulates invisible particles and their motions. However, he never says that the particles are material. They cannot be ideas, as they are first invisible and then principles – so what is their true nature? Whatever it is, we must not call corpuscles and particles material: ‘[A]ct is to be esteemed spurious whose object hath nothing positive, being only a mere privation, as silence or darkness. And such he accounteth matter’ (S 306). In other words, when you speak of matter you say nothing. A reference to matter is never an explanans. It seems that Berkeley’s physical world still consists of ideas, but this is problematic, too (see the final section, below). Particles and their principles are the invisible furniture of the world, which obviously cannot be ideas. Berkeley says that different flavours, textures, colours and other things all depend on the variable effects of light as their instrumental cause:

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The element of æthereal fire or light seems to comprehend, in a mixed state, the seeds, the natural causes and forms [. . .], of all sublunary things. The grosser bodies separate, attract, and repel the several constituent particles of that heterogeneous element; which, being parted from the common mass, make distinct essences, producing and combining together such qualities and properties as are peculiar to the several subjects, and thence often extracted in essential oils or odoriferous waters, from whence they exhale into the open air, and return into their original element. S 164, also 165

Light particles are so small that they are imperceptible, and hence they cannot be ideas in the sense defined in the Principles. Not even a microscope can reveal them – they are indeed imperceptible as such. Yet they obey the laws of nature, which may tempt us to call them proto-ideas: ‘The pure æther or invisible fire contains parts of different kinds, that are impressed with different forces, or subjected to different laws of motion, attraction, repulsion, and expansion’ (S 162). One way to understand this is by observing that we do not discuss light as such but the principle of light and fire; in the same way we do not discuss acids but their principle when we do chemistry. Light or fire is a living, active principle, says Berkeley in Siris: ‘There is no effect in nature great, marvellous, or terrible but proceeds from fire, that diffused and active principle’ (S 158). Of course, such problems as these one cannot solve only by reading Siris. The text is too rudimentary. However, Berkeley emphasizes light as an active principle; hence, the particles of light we perceive only through their effects (S 169).21 This is methodologically important because light as a flow of small pseudo-material particles exists at the lower levels of the chain. When we ascend, light becomes a richer metaphysical entity. Let us take seriously the idea that light is a hail of small particles. Berkeley considers the following anti-corpuscular argument and refutes it (S 207). How can I see your eye and you see mine, if the light particles reflected from your eyeball should reach mine and the other way round? The particles flying in opposite directions should collide and disperse so that neither of us can see the other’s eye. Berkeley says that there is enough empty space around the light particles so that they pass each other and form an image of the person on the other side. He writes logically and eloquently so that the argument is convincing. Light or aether does not form a plenum, as Descartes erroneously supposed. Another feature of light, and particularly the sun’s light, is its heat and fire. Take a burning glass, or a magnifying glass, and let sunlight stream through it. You see nothing but the glass itself. This is because light is invisible. Its existence

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becomes evident only through its effects, as Siris emphasizes. Now, move a piece of paper under the glass and change its position until a focus appears. The heat generated at the focus burns the paper. This shows that light is hot, it is heat, and it brings about a flame (S 159). The next step is to say that there are two forms of light and fire: the perceptible and the pure form. Pure light is invisible; what we call light is just its effects. Pure fire is different from culinary fire, or fire that consumes, and its flame that we see; those again are effects (S 37). Occasionally Berkeley utilizes a different notion of light. This is the pneumatic notion, which has its roots in a tradition that is much older than Newton and Descartes. Suppose light streams through a window into a dark place, then you block the window. The place is dark as there is no light in that space. However, according to the pneumatic theory, light stays there, as if waiting. Berkeley says that light or fire hides and waits in dark places, such as deep, dark caverns, wherefrom it can be released: ‘The eye by long use comes to see even in the darkest cavern,’ because of hidden light (S 368, also S 213). Dark caves contain light. Perhaps Berkeley thinks of the Cave of Dunmor, which he visited (Works 4, 257ff ). Next, Siris presents a high drama that culminates in the radical effects of the sun’s light and fire, which lie waiting in the deepest caves. When freed, the hiding fire acts, its power is strong, terrible, and often violently destructive (S 176).22 This expresses God’s wrath. Berkeley thinks of earthquakes and volcanoes. He witnessed the eruption of Mount Vesuvius when travelling in Italy and wrote a report on it for the Royal Society (Works 4, 247ff.).23 Here his personal experiences find their novel expressions. Then he says, again paradoxically, that pure fire mixes with water, as shown by whitecap waves at sea glimmering with light in the darkest night: ‘Fire or light mixeth with all bodies, even with water; witness the flashing lights in the sea, whose waves seem frequently all on fire’ (S 195). There is fire in the sea as well as in tar water. Berkeley sailed across the Atlantic in a storm in 1728, so he should know. It is interesting that he refers to such a theory of light. He does it because light as a hail of minimal bullets does not allow us to predict dramatic effects. A resident light and fire is more potent. For Berkeley, both types of light and fire are God’s instruments; because God is so powerful, His tools are strong and terrible, too. God is able to destroy all he created. He uses instruments, which are light and fire. The point of introducing light and fire is to answer the following question: How does God, the only active and efficient causal agent, control the world He created? In Siris, light and fire are instrumental causes because God, and human spirits in a limited way, bring about changes in the world by using them. Notice that in the Three Dialogues and in the Principles, He denies the

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use of instruments (3D 212; cf. S 61ff.). In the early system, God directly manipulates the ideas perceived by man, as this is His causal function. He allows man’s ideas to form regular patterns that express law like relations between ideas or sensory data. When A appears, then B follows, regularly and thus predictably. Obviously, this allows us to know what happens in our world, which is both useful and good: But where there is no such relation of similitude or causality, nor any necessary connexion whatsoever, two things, by their mere coexistence, or two ideas, merely by being perceived together, may suggest or signify one the other, their connexion being all the while arbitrary; for it is the connexion only, as such, that causeth this effect. TV 39

In Siris, God is still an agent and efficient cause, but now He does not manipulate our ideas directly but by means of His pure light and fire, which are instrumental causes, machines and active principles. These change the world, which we, limited causal agents, can mainly observe and understand (S 261). When the sun’s light hits a surface, this becomes, say, red, its odour and its texture change, and we can perceive all of this by using vision, smell and touch. Our perceptual ideas no longer depend directly on God’s will but, on the contrary, on the effects of light and fire, which obey God’s will. We do not possess sensory ideas of light as light is invisible. Moreover, how could we see it, if all our ideas depend on light? Light makes us see; what would make us see the light? Berkeley is correct when he denies its visibility, although he himself never mentions this argument. The second change in Berkeley’s theory of causality is as follows.24 Some physical causes now seem to him occult and specific: ‘For although the general known laws of motion are to be deemed mechanical, yet peculiar motions of the insensible parts, and peculiar properties depending thereon, are occult and specific’ (S 239).25 Hence, the simple versions of mechanistic natural philosophy miss their mark. As Newton’s speculations in his Opticks indicate, and new scientific experiments show, the proposition ‘A is followed by B, and that is why A is the apparent cause of B’ fails to make sense. It does not fail only because of its own internal weaknesses but because many new, unaccountable phenomena become available. Think of the traditional weapons salve and its wonderful effects. One spreads the salve over the blooded blade that made the wound, and the wound heals. Here Berkeley’s A–B scheme of apparent causality fails. Intuitively, the causal connection between the salve on the blade and the wound is unrealistic. However, if God wants to do His healing in this way, what can one

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say against it? This misses the point. The new science shows that the situation is worse from the point of view of the A–B scheme. Berkeley may still maintain that the A–B scheme is useful, because God wants us to know and flourish. This is dubious if no antecedent causes are visible. How does one plan one’s actions now? Think of gravity. I drop this brick. I know that it will fall; I can calculate how quickly and how hard it will hit the ground. However, no causal antecedents exist because dropping the brick is not a cause that explains its fall. It falls when I let it go, but it does not fall because I let it go. Thus, we cannot explain the fall, or the effect, if we work in an A–B causal context. If I let go of a helium balloon, it will not fall down. The only thing one can do is to calculate the force and the trajectory of the brick from the moment I release it. This is useful, as God wanted, but not because we know the relevant causes. They remain occult. Berkeley discourses on gravity and Newton’s efforts to explain it and not just to calculate its effects on bodies (S 225 etc.). Berkeley concludes that Newton is unsuccessful but he agrees that neither can his own views on light and fire explain it. Gravity is an occult cause and a sui generis mystery in physical science.26 Now, it becomes evident that in certain interesting cases the causal antecedent A vanishes. Only the effect B remains. Think of magnetism. Two pieces of metal attract or repel each other without a visible sign of which way they should go. Hence, A is now missing but B is still visible. Only the effects are evident, not their causes. This is what for Berkeley an occult cause is. Causes also tend to be specific, as he says. Newton’s example, repeated by Berkeley, is a fly that walks on water. What law would apply to this specific case? When a stump of a tree grows a green shoot, it is a new, specific case: ‘Or how can it account for the resurrection of a tree from its stump, or the vegetative power in its cutting? In which cases we must necessarily conceive something more than the mere evolution of a seed’ (S 233). According to Berkeley, no law like the relation between A and B exists here. It is an exception to the rule.

Physiology Echoing Descartes, Berkeley writes: ‘We are embodied, that is, we are clogged by weight and hindered by resistance’ (S 290). The human bodies emerge in a new context, which we can call pseudo-materialist. Hence, a fourth form of light, fire or aether also exists, namely spirits or corpuscular animal spirits (S 156). ‘Spirit’ means any volatile substance that may produce noticeable effects on its

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environment, like alcohol. It is a kind of inherent energy. Berkeley resorts to the Cartesian theory of the extraction of corpuscular animal spirits from heated blood, when its heat results from fermentation: ‘The animal spirits are elaborated from the blood. Such therefore as the blood is, such will be the animal spirit, more or less, weaker or stronger’ (S 87). Moreover ‘[g]ravity and fermentation are received for two most extensive principles. From fermentation are derived the motion and warmth of the heart and blood in animals, subterraneous heat, fires, and earthquakes, meteors, and changes in the atmosphere’ (S 241). Obviously, we need to think in terms of the mighty principle of fermentation, which also produces earthquakes. Notice that fermentation produces heat that indicates fire. In the animal body hot blood rushes out of the heart and this explains circulation. Perhaps Berkeley wants to use this explanation, dismissing William Harvey, because it explains the emergence of animal spirits.27 They are particles of thin heated blood, which circulate in nerve tubes inside the living animal body. It is difficult to understand that blood contains particles as light and fire, except that blood is warm. However, one can imagine that they relate to vital motion, but Berkeley never clarifies this point; he just says that animal spirits are of the same kind as light and fire. They are all corpuscles. However, in the Principles he wrote: ‘They indeed, who hold the soul of man to be only a thin vital flame, or system of animal spirits, make it perishing and corruptible as the body, since there is nothing more easily dissipated than such a being’ (P 141, see also Alc VII , 16). Now he confirms the existence of ‘a thin vital flame’ that permeates all: ‘It should seem that the forms, souls, or principles of vegetable life subsist in the light or solar emanation, which in respect of the macrocosm [the world] is what the animal spirit is to the microcosm [man] – the interior tegument, the subtle instrument and vehicle of power’ (S 43, also S 143). Nevertheless, the role of the soul and the human mind does not change in Siris. ‘Mind’ means the soul’s cognitive and conative aspects (S 272, 279). Soul is not corpuscular, of course; hence, Berkeley’s original dualism prevails in a new garb. Mind is an agent that directs light, fire and animal spirits, and that applies to the human mind too (S 261). The key word is, thus, ‘agent’, which has active causal powers. Now, the corpuscular animal spirits, as a sub-type of light and fire, circulate in the nervous system and in blood as well, allowing the human mind to govern its immediate environment and promote her good. The powers of the human mind may be limited, but as a causal agent she has powers: ‘In the human body the mind orders and moves the limbs: but the animal spirit is supposed the immediate physical cause of their motion’ (S 161). The mind is a free agent that

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works by means of the animal spirits she commands (S 291). The mind uses an instrument. Berkeley writes: [T]he constant regular tenor of the motions of the viscera and contained juices doth not hinder particular voluntary motions to be impressed by the mind on the animal spirit; even so, in the mundane system, the steady observance of certain laws of nature, in the grosser masses and more conspicuous motions, doth not hinder but a voluntary agent may sometimes communicate particular impressions to the fine æthereal medium, which in the world answers the animal spirit in man. Which two (if they are two), although invisible and inconceivably small, yet seem the real latent springs whereby all the parts of this visible world are moved. S 261

Mind is an agent who commands animal spirits as instruments that move the limbs. Light and fire reveal themselves only in their effects, says Berkeley, but what perceived effects can animal spirits bring about? They bring about bodily action. A hand raised by a person is such an effect. What does this mean? My hand moves when I so decide. Animal spirits bring about an effect under the guidance of my active mind. How is this possible? As I read it, the mind can move animal spirits because they are so fine and unsubstantial; hence, they are much less than material or even corpuscular, in fact they are akin to the mind. Animal spirits can be mind-like. As Berkeley says, ‘there is something divine in fire’ (S 180), and hence in animal spirits, too. They are mind-like mediating substances, or instruments that follow the orders of the free and active mind, or the mind that ‘permeates’ light, fire, aether or spirit (S 291). We only need to add the following point. No causes exist such that they work from corpuscles towards the mind; thus, the mind is independent and free. In this way, Berkeley successfully faces the problem of dualism, which in Descartes’ hands proved to be so intractable that he, infamously, suggested that the mind and the body meet in the pineal gland. Berkeley suggests a better solution. Animal spirits, like fire and light, are ambiguous as they are corporeal and soul-like, even divine. They are particles but they are not mere particles. In this way, the mind as an active agent moves the corpuscular/divine animal spirits, which it permeates. Berkeley maintains that the mind is an active substance, and ‘active’ in its proper sense means that the mind causally initiates action. This is his idea of agent causality, which is real causality: ‘[T]here is no other agent or efficient cause than spirit, it being evident that motion, as well as all other ideas, is perfectly inert’ (P 102).

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Now, animal spirits are corpuscular, so the mind alone is a cause, and a causal agent moves the animal spirits, which then work on the body making it move in a typical way. Life is motion and this motion travels through the body taking a new role or form when necessary. First, there are the motions of the mind and, then, the animal spirits move around moving body parts. Such a system is more complicated than in the Principles. There you imagine a raised hand, which you perceive. Bodily motion is a set of ideas in the mind, and imagination produces new ideas. Subsequently, there must be two different kinds of imagination: illusory and real. I may imagine that I raised my hand when this is an illusion. I can imagine, in the Principles, that I raised my hand and this is a fact. My hand is up. I see no problem here. Siris is different and more complicated. I can still imagine my raised hand but now I can also raise my hand by means of an embodied psychological and physiological engine actuated by my will. Action and imagination are now two different things. How does the human mind govern its animal spirits, if they follow the laws of nature? This may imply determinism because it does not seem plausible that man can break God’s laws of nature. Perhaps God allows one to act freely by suspending the laws of nature at a given point. This permits conditionally free will and partial causal agency. It is conditional, as the mind needs God’s permission for every action. Another restriction applies, too. Even if the will is free, what the animal spirits can do is limited. I am able to raise my hand but I cannot change it into a foot or throw it away. The external world is a recalcitrant place. This may be easier to explain in Siris than in the Principles. The main point is, however, that the mind as a free agent is able to direct animal spirits because they are ambiguously soul-like and divine. Thus, they mediate as instrumental causes between the recalcitrant world and active minds. Animal spirits are at the same time subject to the laws of nature and the vehicles of free will. This is an ingenuous solution. The freedom of the will may be a mere token capability. Free action is a rare occurrence and its effects are limited. Yet the mind’s essence is to be a free and active substance, that is, an agent.28 Berkeley mentions no other characterization. For him the mind is an active agent. However, as human agency is weak, rare and restricted, the soul’s substantiality is limited. The soul and mind as a free agent are like a spark in darkness, yet they should be the glory of the created world, its master, ready for eternal life. In Siris, the mind and its free will take their own place in nature, but the role of the mind is not what Berkeley’s readers might expect. In Sermon X he changes the rules of the game:

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We shall abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul, and confine our appetites within such limits, as their respective ends and uses require. And instead of being slaves to them, we shall become their masters and governors, ever bending them to a compliance with the divine will, which is the freedom and perfection of a rational creature. Works 7, 133–4

A novel sense of ‘freedom’ emerges. The true freedom, as ethical perfection, is to know and follow the commands of God, after we have made a decision to do so. Therefore, true freedom has little to do with agency. True freedom means that one is free of evil and of all the impurities of the mind that condemn one to the lower rungs of the Siris (S 290). Freedom, in this sense, perfects the soul.

Ancient lore and cosmological vision Siris contains much information about ancient philosophy, especially about Plato and his followers. Berkeley wants to retreat as far back to the past as possible, all the way to the creation. It is evident in Siris that he is longing for the past, the original source of wisdom. The ancients were closer to the creation and not burdened by too many false ideas and bad theories; thus, they were closer to the truth: Men in those early days were not overlaid with languages and literature. Their minds seem to have been more exercised, and less burdened, than in later ages; and, as so much nearer the beginning of the world, to have had the advantage of patriarchal lights handed down through a few hands. S 298

Berkeley may have believed that the world is almost 6,000 years old, or the creation took place in 4004 BC , as another Irishman, Bishop James Ussher, calculated (1650). The ancient scholars knew more, yet they did not have the science and scientific language Berkeley and his contemporaries have. First, they knew the deepest truths better that the moderns but, second, they could not express their findings in a fully comprehensible manner. Hence, Berkeley needs a translation from the ancient lore to his own language (S 350, cf. Alc VI , 19). He speaks, simultaneously, of the ‘hoary maxims’ and the ‘nice metaphysics’ of the ancients (S 350–1).29 Did Berkeley believe in these theories? What is their role in the development of his cosmological view? For instance, he says that light and fire are the key

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ontological elements and their origins lie in the ancient theories. He really looks back in time. Thus, when we read Siris, we must remember that Berkeley is committed to his translation project, especially when he discusses his metaphysical fundamentals. For instance, the idea of aether comes from the ancients, not from Newton or other scientists. They knew what aether is and Berkeley wants to rewrite it in Siris. He does so by relating aether to pure fire or light that streams from the sun and which at the same time is an all-encompassing instrumental cause and the active principle of fire. The Newtonian aether cannot permit that many interpretations. It is just an element of physical science. Berkeley wants a more fertile metaphysical notion whose meanings extend from being a particle to expressing something essential about the Holy Trinity. The ancient learning is essential for him. My position is that he accepts the old theories as ‘glimpses [of divine ideas] within our reach’ (S 336, 367), or of the truths that the ancients saw clearly (Alc VI , p.  234). What he accepts is not possible to say; what he quotes is important. An example of the ancient metaphysics and its translation into the modern language follows. The world is both an animal, or a plant, and a macrocosm. Man is a microcosm (S 153, 154).30 This language was popular among Paracelsians and others, although it was old fashioned in the 1740s. However, Berkeley likes such grand analogies as they stimulate his imagination and help his reasoning.31 Now, the Platonists are not atheists when they say the world is a living thing and an animal. They keep it all under the control of gods (S 279). One should then illustrate the analogy between the animal and the world. One should specify the characteristics of perception, motion, life, alimentation, and so on. Berkeley notices that external perception is a problem because the world-animal has nothing to see – there is no outside to perceive (S 153). Hence, the analogy may be weak. Nevertheless, Berkeley says that fire and light are the animal spirits of the world-animal. Moreover, fire and light nourish the world and keep it going. The sun’s light is the food of the world, which streams from the sun because God wants it that way: ‘This luminous æther or spirit is therefore said by Virgil to nourish or cherish the innermost earth, as well as the heavens and celestial bodies’ (S 213). The modern scientific world is, for Berkeley, identical with the Ancient’s macrocosm, or the Platonic world-animal. Man, his mind and animal body, is a microcosm. This completes the four-fold analogy. Many readers of Siris, if they admire the Principles, may find this disturbing. Why would Berkeley speculate on something as poetic and abstruse as that? Something even worse follows, his speculative theory of trinities: ‘Certain it is that the notion of a Trinity is to be found in the writings of many old heathen

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philosophers’ (S 361). A summary of these complicated paragraphs follows. Seven minor trinities exist, for instance, birth, illumination and movement. Berkeley organizes them analogously to the Holy Trinity, or Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. Hence, two directions of reading are needed, that is, horizontally, Plurality and vertically, Unity: Father birth, sun, principle, one, good, authority, fons deitatis Son illumination, light, mind, intellect, word, law, supreme reason Holy Spirit movement, heat, soul, life, love, justice, spirit.32

Here we ‘touch the first One’ (S 345). The initial trinity is then, vertically, birth, illumination and movement. The second trinity is sun, light and heat or fire, and so on. Where is Berkeley supposed to get this knowledge? Not even the ancient lore helps him here, and his speculations do not look fully Christian either. Such trinities are a major new interpretation of the ultimate questions of metaphysics from his personal point of view, directed to readers who might think as he does. Not many have found this plausible, perhaps not even during the time when Siris was popular. What is the ultimate aim of Siris? It has one aim at the bottom end of the chain, health and happiness, but now we approach the top end and the key thesis of perfectibility (Alc III , p.117). What is the view like from there? In other words, what is the ultimate secret of Siris? Perhaps I agree with David Berman that it exists. For Berman, it is the esoteric glimpses of truth, which should replace the exoteric and ultimately misleading vulgar scientific speculations (personal communication). Here is another secret of Siris. Berkeley discovered a medicine and found its scientific and theological foundations. He wanted to show science its place under God, and in this way fight the freethinking trend that threatened to make science independent of God. These are no secrets, however. They are exoteric facts. Yet there is a secret. Berkeley shows that the world, or the macrocosm or the world-animal, is one single living being under God and man a microcosm analogous to that big thing. Behind this basic order lies an allencompassing view of the universe as an organic living unity, a monad – if we use the language of the magi.33 This comes close to monism. In Siris, Berkeley may still be a dualist, but he also sees the coming of monism where ens is unum (S 346, 355). Here my vision is different from Berman’s. All the contents of the world form a set of seven trinities. The trinities together are analogous to the Holy Trinity as One. The Holy Trinity is one thing, a personal God. All the trinities are one, first individually and then collectively, as they reflect the Holy Trinity. Therefore, everything under God is one, which is a monad: ‘The several beings which compose the universe are parts of the same

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system; they combine to carry on one end, and perfect one whole’ (S 342). Because all the trinities vertically form their unities, just as the Holy Trinity is one person, we may call the world a living monad. In other words, the main trinity, Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, forms one God. Analogous to this, each of the seven trinities forms its own unity as one. Seven of them exist but there is only one monad (S 322). This is to say, that these seven trinities stay under the main trinity, which is One. We form horizontally seven different trinities and then vertically one monad. The monad emerges at the level of both the microcosm (soul) and the macrocosm (the world-animal). In the microcosm, According to the Platonic philosophy, ens and unum are the same. And consequently our minds participate so far of existence as they do of unity. But it should seem that personality is the indivisible centre of the soul or mind, which is a monad so far forth as she is a person. Therefore person is really that which exists, inasmuch as it participates of the divine unity. In man the monad or indivisible is [. . .] the self-same self or very self, a thing in the opinion of Socrates much and narrowly to be inquired into and discussed, to the end that, knowing ourselves, we may know what belongs to us and our happiness. S 346, also S 322; my emphasis

This explains the ethics of human liberation and perfectibility in Siris. However, the question remains: Do God and the world or macrocosm form one unity (monism) or not (dualism)? Is the world in God? Is dualism Berkeley’s strategic invention when he speaks with the vulgar? When Berkeley introduces his trinities, he is already at the uppermost end of the chain, or the siris. Everything in Siris is included in those trinities: they contain everything there is. Moreover, because all there is forms one thing and a living creature, it forms a monad – as ens is unum. This is Berkeley’s secret. He appears to be an empirical scientist and a medical doctor to many, including his editor, T. E. Jessop, but he is much more. This may turn the reader’s standard expectations around and conflict with the assumed view of Berkeley the philosopher. Siris itself creates these false expectations when it explores medical and scientific issues in its early chapters.

Berkeley, new and old Does a gap exist between the Principles, its immaterialism, and the new radical metaphysics of Siris? Jessop, in his commentaries on Siris, says that no such gap

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exists, so that the Principles and Siris are, when correctly understood, fully compatible (Works 5, 12). However, ideas and abstractions, among other things, have their new role in Siris. Berkeley mentions his old theories in Siris but does not utilize them. He writes, for instance, ‘Natural phenomena are only natural appearances. They are, therefore, such as we see and perceive them’ (S 292). He recalls his old theories of natural grammar and the language of ideas (S 252–4). We cannot take this seriously because too much of the natural world is invisible, occult and specific anyway to allow for a regular language. The theory that remains is the true efficient causality, or God’s causal role, although the concept of instrumental or apparent causality changes. I have already explained how Berkeley’s theory of apparent, false or instrumental causality changes. We have also discussed his theory of corporeal – but not material – spirits. Let us look at the immaterialist theory of ideas. Berkeley says that ideas cannot be trusted as the source of certain knowledge. He writes, Sense and experience acquaint us with the course and analogy of appearances or natural effects. Thought, reason, intellect introduces us into the knowledge of their causes. Sensible appearances, though of a flowing, unstable, and uncertain nature, yet having first occupied the mind, they do by an early prevention render the aftertask of thought more difficult. S 264, also S 340

No sensory ideas are certain, as Berkeley now emphasizes. Ideas are ‘such as we see them’, but this fact is now irrelevant to their truth. What we see is confused; and therefore any empiricist theory of reality is confused: ‘Those things that before seemed to constitute the whole being [. . .] prove to be but fleeting fantoms’ (S 294). However, reason allows us to find natural causal relations that are beyond the realm of ideas; hence, natural causality cannot be reduced to relations between sets of ideas. This is especially pertinent to keep in mind when Berkeley talks about light and fire as principles – active principles – that explain the world. The corpuscular doctrine of light says that its particles are invisible and therefore our empirical world cannot be fully ideational. In addition, natural laws work independently of ideas. Many causes are occult. Hence, natural laws cannot be useful expectations based on visible causes, or antecedent conditions in law like connections between ideas. Some philosophers have said that this does not matter as angels who see better (S 86) could see the particles of light.34 This solution is implausible. Berkeley says light is – unconditionally – invisible. Moreover, light is an active principle, even a living principle, and as such a

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messenger of the will (S 166). We do not perceive such principles, as they are just the dynamic essences that explain a wide range of variable phenomena. For instance, the principle of salt explains a large number of apparently unrelated chemical phenomena. Thus, the principle is what is real and its apparent instantiations, as ideas, are derivative. What explains the world, or its explanans, is more real than the explanandum, as Berkeley thinks in Siris. We explain ideas by referring to God. Thus, God is real when ideas are not. In this way, Berkeley leaves his early phenomenalist worldview behind and moves towards realism concerning universal forms. As he says, ‘The heaven is supposed pregnant with virtues and forms, which constitute and discriminate the various species of things’ (S 181). Berkeley is now a rationalist, not an empiricist philosopher. As George Hicks puts it, Esse is percipi is now Esse is concipi.35 Reason is universal, unlike perception; hence, Berkeley rejects his early, nearly solipsistic first-person viewpoint to the world. He no longer believes that the world is a collection of his ideas. What happens to abstract ideas? An abstract idea of a triangle cannot exist, according to the Principles and Theory of Vision. If a triangle is going to exist, it must have its size and other specifications (TV 102). We of course have the word ‘triangle’, which refers to all possible triangles. However, we cannot say that an abstract triangle exists, or that ‘triangle’ refers to triangle. Mental concepts are more difficult. The discussion of free will in Alciphron VII illustrates this. The discussants reach a dead end when they ponder the free will from a deterministic point of view.36 They notice that those, who defend the freethinkers, use certain psychological terms. These are declared abstractions and their use condemned (Alc VII , 18). Berkeley says that we should think with the vulgar, who do not use such terms. This is a radical change. Normally he recommends that we think with the learned and speak with the vulgar. Now he changes his mind in a populist direction. Psychological terms are abstractions, which the learned should not use. Nevertheless, in Siris he himself uses abstract terms all the time. How should we understand this? Berkeley’s position in the Principles was that no generalizations or abstractions could be real, or exist. Then in the Alciphron, he says that psychological terms like power, faculty, act and indifference, which the learned use when they discuss free will, are abstractions and, therefore, he bans them. Berkeley condemns psychological speculations and insists on remaining at the level of vulgar common sense.37 I know my will is free as I can kick a stone in front of me, or refuse to do so. This is all I need to know. Then, in Siris his position in Alciphron changes. In Siris, some terms, which look like abstractions, are acceptable as

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existing real entities. Will is not just my individual act of will, but also the principle of willing. All willing things share this real entity, which belongs to everyone. Such an abstract entity cannot be real according to the Principles. However, Siris allows the will, in its general meaning, to exist outside the human language in which we formulate and use the term ‘will’. In other words, the principle of will refers to the world of real things. Berkeley implicitly denounces his own earlier projects, his ‘first prejudices’ in his ‘vulgar speech and books’, The mind, her acts and faculties, furnish a new and distinct class of objects [. . .] from the contemplation whereof arise certain other notions, principles, and verities, so remote from, and even so repugnant to, the first prejudices which surprise the sense of mankind that they may well be excluded from vulgar speech and books, as abstract from sensible matters, and more fit for the speculation of truth, the labour and aim of a few, than for the practice of the world, or the subjects of experimental or mechanical inquiry. S 297, also S 264

Berkeley comes close to dismissing his old ideas concerning abstractions and ideas in Siris. His former position has been vulgar. Abstract things are now real, The most refined human intellect, exerted to its utmost reach, can only seize some imperfect glimpses of the divine Ideas [. . .], abstracted from all things corporeal, sensible, and imaginable. Therefore Pythagoras and Plato treated them in a mysterious manner, concealing rather than exposing them to vulgar eyes; so far were they from thinking that those abstract things, although the most real, were the fittest to influence common minds, or become principles of knowledge, not to say duty and virtue, to the generality of mankind. S 337, also S 348

Abstraction is necessary if we hope to see the truth and to understand what the existing reality might be like; hence, only abstract entities are real. The problem is that they are so difficult to handle that most people should not think of them; they should utilize sensory ideas, as the Bishop used to do.

Notes 1 See Airaksinen, T. (2008), ‘The path of fire: The meaning and interpretation of Berkeley’s Siris’ in S. H. Daniel, (ed.), New Interpretations of Berkeley’s Thought. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, pp. 261–81, Appendix A.

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2 About panacea, see Sloan, A. W. (1996), English Medicine in the Seventeenth Century. Durham: Durham Academic Press, p. 61 ff; and Debus, A. G. (1991), The French Paracelcians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; this is a valuable treatise. 3 See Holtzman, M. (2011), ‘Berkeley’s two panaceas’, Intellectual History Review 21, 473–95. This interesting paper starts by listing some old prejudices. 4 See http://ec.europa.eu/health/archive/ph_risk/committees/sccp/documents/ out_203.pdf 5 Airaksinen, T. (2011b), ‘Rhetoric and corpuscularism in Berkeley’s Siris’, History of European Ideas 37, 23–44, p. 34. 6 Hicks, G. D. (1932), Berkeley. Bristol: Thoemmes Press can be recommended; also Walmsley, P. (1990), The Rhetoric of Berkeley’s Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Part IV. 7 About water symbolism, see Houghton, R. W., Berman, D., and Lapan, M. T. (eds.), (1986), Images of Berkeley. Dublin: Wolfhound Press. 8 See Berman, D. (2005a), ‘Berkeley’s life and works’ in K. P. Winkler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 13–33, p. 26. 9 On Descartes, see Gaukroger, S. (2002), Descartes’ System of Natural Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 10 Berman, D. (1997), Berkeley, Experimental Philosophy. London: Phoenix. 11 See Urmson, J. O. (1986a), Berkeley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 82, for a wild mistake in a widely read book. 12 On the story of scurvy and its early medication, and cure, see Brown, S. R. (2003), Scurvy. Camberwell: Viking. 13 Notice the hidden reference to the alchemical symbolism of the Philosopher’s Tree; see Roob, A. (2005), The Hermetic Cabinet. Köln: Taschen, pp. 106 ff. 14 For a more modern method in Norway, see http://vimeo.com/40581474 15 See Airaksinen, T. (2006), ‘The chain and the animal: Idealism in Berkeley’s Siris’ in S. Gersch and D. Moran (eds), Eriugena, Berkeley, and the Idealist Tradition. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, pp. 224–43, pp. 232ff. 16 See Debus, 1991, about medical chemistry. 17 See Principe, L. M. (2001), ‘Wilhelm Homberg: Chymical corpuscularianism and chrysopoeia in the early eighteenth century’ in C. Lüthy, J. E. Murdoch, and W. R. Newman (eds), Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories. Leiden: Brill, pp. 535–56; and Peterschmitt, L. (2011), Berkeley et la chimie. Une philosophie pour la chimie au XVIII e siècle. Paris: Classiques Garnier. 18 See Debus, 1991. 19 Cf. Hall, T. S. (1975), History of General Physiology, Vol. I. Chicago: Chicago University Press, p. 363: the soul animates the body. In Siris, this takes place via light. 20 Newton, I. ([1730]1979), Optics. Edited by E. T. Whittaker. New York: Dover Publications, p. 396.

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21 Such principles explain in a non-causal and non-mechanistic manner. Hence, Berkeley has added a new conceptual tool to his philosophy of science. About principles, see Airaksinen, T. (2010a), ‘Active principles and trinities in Berkeley’s Siris’, Revue Philosophique, 1, 57–70. 22 Cf. Newton, 1730, p. 380: ‘a very potent principle’. 23 The Royal Society encouraged the writing of travel reports and gave advice on how to do it right. See Vickers, I. (2006), Defoe and the New Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 132 ff. 24 See Airaksinen, 2011a, pp. 91–118. 25 Cf. Newton, 1730, p. 401, on occult qualities. 26 See Airaksinen, T. (2010b), ‘Berkeley and Newton on gravity in Siris’ in S. Parigi (ed.), George Berkeley: Religion and Science in the Age of Enlightenment. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 87–106. 27 See Gaukroger, 2002, pp. 185 ff; Descartes, R. (1998), ‘Description of the human body’ in S. Gaukroger (ed.), Descartes: The World and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 170–205; and Descartes, R. (1985), ‘The Passions of the Soul’ in J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch (eds), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 328–404. 28 Brykman, G. (2008), ‘On human liberty in Alciphron VII ’ in S. Daniel (ed.), New Interpretations of Berkeley’s Thought, pp. 231–46. 29 See Fowden, G. (1986), The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press, e.g., p. 157, about the chain metaphor and p. 77 on microcosm. 30 See Abraham, 1998, pp. 129–30. See also Roob, 2005. 31 See Walmsley, 1990, ch. 12, ‘The method of inductive analogy’. 32 Airaksinen, 2010a. 33 For an overview of this tradition, see Szönyi, G. E. (2004), John Dee’s Occultism. Albany: SUNY Press. 34 Berkeley mentions angels but why would they see more than we do: Berkeley mentions the ‘imperfections in the knowledge of men or angels’ (Alc IV, 20). He also writes: ‘The mind which is pure and spiritual, which is made in the image of God, and which we have in common with angels’ (Sermon VI ). About sensible aether, see Downing, L. (2005), ‘Berkeley’s natural philosophy and philosophy of science’, in K. Winkler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 230–65, p. 256. However, aether is also an active principle, which is not a visible entity. Urmson, 1986b, says light and aether are incompatible with his earlier philosophy of science: Urmson, J. O. (1986b), ‘Berkeley’s philosophy of science in the Siris’, History of European Ideas 7, 563–6.

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35 Hicks, 1932, p. 285. I think Hicks is right. 36 See Brykman, 2008. 37 Dr Johnson wanted to disprove immaterialism by kicking a stone. In Alciphron, Euphranor himself wants to prove the existence of motion by ‘walking before them’ (Alc VII , 18). In the same way, he wants to prove the freedom of the will by willing freely.

Part Three

Berkeley in Context

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Berkeley and Descartes Charles J. McCracken

From his notebooks, we know that as Berkeley was working out his own philosophical views he was reading (among other things, to be sure) Descartes’ Meditations, probably in Molyneux’s 1680 translation. Berkeley did not form a high opinion of Descartes, declaring cogito ergo sum to be ‘no mental Proposition’ but a mere tautology1 and complaining, in a letter to Molyneux, of Descartes’ ‘inconsistencies’ and ‘blunders’.2 Nonetheless, Descartes’ philosophy formed an important background for many of the developments in philosophy from the mid-seventeenth through the eighteenth century, and this was true of the development of Berkeley’s philosophy, too. This chapter will focus on two features of Descartes’ philosophy that had importance for the formation of Berkeley’s views: Descartes’ purported proof that a material world exists and his doctrine that the mind is a thinking substance, and the reactions these provoked.

Descartes’ proof that there is a material world In the Meditations, Descartes raised a doubt about the existence of the material world – a doubt that, by the Meditations’ end, he believed he had removed. (Descartes and his followers took ‘matter’, ‘material substances’, ‘bodies’ and ‘extended substances’ all to name the same thing, in contrast to Berkeley, who sharply distinguished ‘bodies’, whose existence he affirmed, from ‘matter’, whose existence he denied.) The question Descartes asked – does the material world exist? – was a new one, for even the ancient sceptics were more inclined to doubt that we could know the nature of material objects than to call their very existence into question; nor was the existence of matter among the issues debated in the medieval schools.3 Descartes’ proof that there is a material world turned on his claim that we have a natural inclination to believe that our sensations are caused by bodies and we

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have no faculty whereby we could discover that belief to be false, if it were false. Since God is no deceiver, we can be confident that our belief in the existence of bodies is true.4 But several thinkers who were otherwise well disposed to Descartes’ philosophy found this reasoning faulty. Descartes himself, after all, had held that, to avoid error, we should suspend judgement about anything we do not clearly and distinctly perceive to be the case. Yet in his argument for the existence of bodies, he appealed to our natural inclination to believe that they exist, not to a clear and distinct idea of extended things (we have, he held, such an idea, but that only proves that the existence of extended things is possible, not that it is actual).5 Among thinkers who were in some ways close to Descartes but who raised objections to this proof were Henricus Regius, Géraud de Cordemoy and Nicolas Malebranche. They all granted that the evidence of our senses affords grounds for believing it is probable that bodies exist, but they denied that reason can prove beyond doubt that they exist. For that certainty, these thinkers declared, we must have recourse to the Scriptures, which teach that God created heaven and earth.6 François de Lanion and Michelangelo Fardella, both deeply influenced by Descartes and Malebranche, went further, holding that reason, unaided by faith in the Scriptures, can prove that the existence of bodies is possible (for we can form a clear idea of extended objects), but it cannot prove their existence even probable. Against the claim that the senses make it probable that bodies exist, Lanion and Fardella argued that we cannot even understand how bodies could cause sensations, whereas we can easily understand how God can do so. Hence, were it not for Scripture, we would have to conclude it unlikely that there are material objects corresponding to our sensations.7 Pierre Bayle, the foremost sceptic of the seventeenth century, recounted the arguments of some of the foregoing thinkers, then added an argument of his own, which, he claimed, showed that reason can actually prove that extended things do not exist, for if they did, they would have to be divisible to infinity or be composed of extensionless points or be composed of extended but indivisible atoms, and Bayle offered arguments to show why each of these alternatives had to be rejected. It is true, he concluded, that Scripture teaches that bodies exist, so we can in fact be sure that they do exist, but only because we must accept the teachings of the Bible, even when they contradict the evidence of reason.8 John Norris, Malebranche’s English disciple, argued that even faith in the Bible cannot give us certainty that a material world exists, for we know of the existence and teachings of the Bible only by means of our senses, and, while the evidence of the senses makes it probable that bodies – including the Bible – exist, nothing can make it certain that they do.9 Antoine Arnauld had argued that

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if bodies did not exist, God would have no reason to give us sensations, but Norris answered that claim, arguing that our sensations themselves have great beauty, whereas material things ‘have none of those Finenesses, Excellencies, or Beauties (Figure alone excepted) which we think we see in them; . . . those Beauties which [a man] thinks he perceives without, are really in himself, and he carries about him the World that he admires.’10 By arguing that we cannot be certain that matter exists, while urging that even if it did not exist, the beauty of the ‘sensible world’ would explain why God gives us sensations, Norris brought the discussion ever closer to immaterialism. Soon after this, Arthur Collier, deeply influenced by the writings of Norris, did draw the immaterialist conclusion from these considerations, offering in his work Clavis Universalis nine arguments to prove that the material world does not exist. Collier’s work was published in 1713, three years after Berkeley’s Principles, a work that Collier apparently did not know. In a later work, A Specimen of True Philosophy (1730), Collier claimed that the only book he knew of, other than his own, that denied the existence of matter was Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, which was not published until a few months after Collier’s Clavis. But even if Collier did know Berkeley’s Principles, as G. A. Johnston believed, Collier’s arguments are drawn chiefly from Norris and Malebranche (as Johnston granted).11 Collier thus belonged broadly to the Cartesian tradition and saw himself as drawing conclusions about the existence of matter that he thought that tradition led ineluctably to. So the Cartesian tradition contained within it seeds for the development of immaterialism.12 Berkeley would not have known some of these, but he was well aware of others. He had studied Malebranche’s Search after Truth and sometimes recorded in his notebooks his reflections on it. Certainly Malebranche’s claim that neither sense nor reason can prove beyond doubt that matter exists, and Malebranche’s conviction that only the Scriptures can give us certainty of the existence of material things, must have caught the young Berkeley’s attention as he worked out his own views.13 And from the articles ‘Pyrrho’ and ‘Zeno of Elea’ in Bayle’s Dictionary, which there is good reason to believe Berkeley had read, he would have been acquainted with Bayle’s arguments against the existence of a material world. From those articles he would even have got some idea of Lanion’s and Fardella’s views on the subject.14 So, while there can be no question that Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (hereafter Essay) exerted the greatest influence on Berkeley’s development, the criticisms others made of Descartes’ putative proof of the existence of bodies is likely also to have played a role in the development of his immaterialism.

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Descartes’ doctrine of the mind Berkeley’s views about the mind seem to have been influenced by Descartes in two ways, one direct and the other indirect. The indirect influence came from Berkeley’s reaction to Locke’s critique of Descartes’ claim that the mind always thinks. The direct influence came from Descartes’ treatment of the relation of the will and the understanding.

The indirect influence In the Meditations, Descartes claimed to prove that the mind is an unextended substance whose essential attribute – that which it cannot lose without ceasing to exist – is thought, and hence that the mind always thinks. Locke, on the other hand, denied that we can know whether the mind is a substance distinct from the body (Essay, IV.iii.6); further, according to Locke, Descartes was wrong that thought is the essence of the mind and that the mind always thinks. Thinking, said Locke, is an activity of the mind, as motion is an activity of the body, and – just as a body continues to exist when not moving – the mind can continue to exist when it stops thinking, as it does in deep sleep (Essay, II .xix.4). Berkeley, for whom the esse of the mind is percipere, rejected Locke’s view (Notebooks 612–15) and agreed with Descartes ‘that the soul always thinks’ (Principles §98).

The direct influence Throughout his notebooks, Berkeley struggled to be clear about the nature of the mind. Early on he had taken the notion of the mind to be ‘a complex idea made up of existence, willing, and perception in a large sense’ (Notebooks 154). This view had to be abandoned when Berkeley ceased to believe in abstract ideas, and for a while he entertained the view that ‘the understanding [is] not distinct from particular perceptions or ideas. The will [is] not distinct from particular volitions’ (Notebooks 612–15; cf. 681). This inclined Berkeley, at one point, to entertain a dualism of passive understanding (identified with our ideas taken collectively) and active will (identified with our volitions taken collectively) and to the surprising conclusion that ‘the will & the understanding may very well be thought two distinct beings’ (Notebooks 708). But it soon became clear that a sharp separation of the will from the understanding was untenable, for the will must have an idea of what it is willing. This led him for some time to ponder the relation of will and understanding (Notebooks 587, 611–15, 624, 645, 815, 820). It

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was during this period that he read (or perhaps re-read) Descartes’ Meditations. His notes on them begin around Notebooks 780 and continue intermittently to 822, and it seems clear that his reading of Descartes influenced his thinking about the relation of the will and the understanding. In the Fourth Meditation, Descartes had considered the relation of the will and the understanding in connection with an explanation of error. Will and understanding must work together, Descartes argued, for by itself the understanding passively perceives ideas but neither affirms nor denies anything, while the will can affirm or deny, but only if it has ideas present to it. Error, according to Descartes, occurs because our will is free to affirm or deny something, even if our idea of that thing is unclear or confused. Reading this account seems to have led Berkeley to reflect on error, which he at first tried to limit to the will (Notebooks 816). But Descartes had made a cogent point: If the will is to affirm or deny something, it must have an idea of what it is affirming or denying. And we soon find Berkeley reintegrating will and understanding. Eager to identify the mind (i.e. the spirit) as something wholly active, Berkeley then suggested that to understand and perceive something involves activity (Notebooks 821, 854). But he continued to the end of the Notebooks to identify the spirit with the will, as something that is active (Notebooks 848). This view was different from that of Descartes, who held that the mind consists of a passive faculty (the understanding) and an active faculty (the will). But in the end, Berkeley too came to acknowledge that the mind must have both active and passive components, telling Samuel Johnson of Connecticut ‘that the soul of man is passive as well as active, I make no doubt.’15 The view of the mind that Berkeley finally arrived at, as a simple, incorporeal substance, whose esse is thinking and perceiving as well as willing, was close to Descartes’ own view of the mind. But one important difference separated their views about the mind. Although both held that the mind is an unextended, thinking substance, Descartes maintained that the mind (in this life) is united to a material substance – a human body. And Berkeley of course denied that there are any material substances. (Willis Doney went so far as to call Berkeley ‘a castrated Cartesian without matter’.16) But even here there is an interesting connection in their views. For Berkeley, a body is a collection of sensible ideas and as such is radically different from the mind – so much so that while mind and body may each be called ‘a thing’, that term ‘comprehends under it two kinds entirely distinct and heterogeneous’ (Principles §89). So in Berkeley too we get a kind of dualism – not Descartes’ dualism of two kinds of substance, material and mental, but a dualism of mind, which ‘is an active being, whose existence consists

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. . . in perceiving ideas and thinking’, and of ideas, which are ‘entirely passive, and [whose] existence consists only in being perceived’ – two things with ‘natures perfectly disagreeing and unlike’ (Principles §139). In the end, Berkeley’s view of the mind as a unitary substance that thinks and perceives, and is radically different from the collection of sensible ideas that is the human body, is far closer to Descartes’ view of the mind than to Locke’s, or even to the view of Malebranche, who, while holding that the mind is an incorporeal substance, denied that we can know what its nature is. Thus in two of its most characteristic features – that matter does not exist and that the mind is an incorporeal substance – Berkeley’s philosophy shows some influences that came from Descartes or from the broad Cartesian tradition.

Notes 1 Notebooks, entry 738. Entry numbers are those in Berkeley, Works (1948–57), v. 1, where the Notebooks are called Philosophical Commentaries. 2 Works, v. 8, p. 26. 3 On whether any philosophers before Descartes raised this issue, cf. Burnyeat, M. (1982), ‘Idealism and Greek philosophy: What Descartes saw and Berkeley missed’, Philosophical Review 91, 1, 3–40, and Groarke, L. (1984), ‘Descartes’ First Meditation: Something old, something new, something borrowed’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 22, 281–301. 4 Descartes, R. (1984), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, v. 2, p. 55. 5 Ibid., p. 50. 6 Regius, Henricus (1654), Philosophia Naturalis (2nd edn). Amsterdam: Apud Ludovicum, pp. 347–51; Cordemoy, G. de (1666), Discernement du corps et de l’âme. Paris, pp. 151–5; and Malebranche, N. (1677–78), Recherche de la vérité (3rd edn). Paris: André Pralard, bk. 6, pt. 2, chap. 6, and Elucidation Six. 7 Lanion, François de (1678), Méditations sur la métaphysique. Paris, pp. 40–67; and Fardella, M. (1691), Universæ philosophiæ systema. Venice: G. Albrizzi, appendix II . 8 Bayle, P. (1697), Dictionnaire historique et critique. Rotterdam: Reinier Leers, articles ‘Pyrrhon’, remark B and ‘Zénon d’Elée’, remarks G and H. 9 Norris, J. (1701–4), The Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World. 2 vols. London: S. Manship, v. 1, pp. 189–90. 10 Ibid., v. 2, pp. 254–5. 11 Johnston, G. A. (1923), The Development of Berkeley’s Philosophy. London: Macmillan, appendix I.

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12 For a fuller account, see McCracken, C. J. (1986), ‘Stages on a Cartesian road to immaterialism’. Journal of the History of Philosophy 24, 19–40. 13 See Chapter 16 on Berkeley and Malebranche in this volume. 14 Berkeley mentions Bayle’s views in Notebooks 358 and 424 and Fardella’s in Notebooks 79. Fardella’s book was rare, and Berkeley probably knew of his views from Bayle. 15 Works, v. 2, p. 293; cf. the discussion of the mind’s passivity in Three Dialogues, in Works, v. 2, pp. 194–7. 16 Doney, W. (1982), ‘Is Berkeley’s a Cartesian mind?’, in C. M. Turbayne (ed.), Berkeley: Critical and Interpretive Essays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 274.

14

Berkeley and Leibniz Laurence Carlin

Historical background Although the lives of George Berkeley and Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) overlapped by more than thirty years, it was not until the final years of Leibniz’s life that Berkeley’s works became known to the learned world. Berkeley was not yet twenty-five years old when he composed his first major philosophical work, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), yet when Leibniz learned of Berkeley’s work, the German was less than five years from his death. There was thus less engagement between the two than one would want. Still, they were aware of each other’s work, and each left us fragmented commentary on the other’s philosophy. Berkeley refers to Leibniz in no less than six of his writings: Of Infinities (1707; Works 4, 236f.), Notebooks (1707–08; Works 1, 40), De Motu (1721; Works 4, 33, 35f.), Alciphron (1732; Works 3, 295), Theory of Vision Vindicated (1733; Works 1, 254) and Analyst (1734; Works 4, 75).1 These early references mention Leibniz’s work on mathematics (for which he was well known), while the later references are critical of Leibniz’s philosophy. It seems Leibniz’s first encounters with Berkeley’s philosophy were through critical reviews of the Principles and of the Three Dialogues in various scholarly journals from 1711–13.2 But by 1715, Leibniz had acquired his own copy of the Principles and wrote revealing commentary on the last page of it. While this mutual exchange of commentary is enough to draw the interest of scholars, it is also scant enough to make one wonder how well each knew the other’s philosophy. A number of questions present themselves when comparing the views of Leibniz and Berkeley. First, there is the historical question concerning whether they believed they had similar views. Consider Leibniz’s letter of 5 March 1715 to Des Bosses, where Leibniz referred to Berkeley in negative terms: ‘The one in

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Ireland,’ Leibniz wrote, ‘who attacks the reality of bodies does not seem to bring forward suitable reasons, nor does he explain himself sufficiently.’ He continued: ‘I suspect that he is one of that sort of men who wants to be known for his paradoxes’ (Leibniz, 1875, v. 2, p. 492/Leibniz, 1989, p. 306). Taken in isolation, remarks such as these suggest that Leibniz did not view himself as having views similar to those of Berkeley. And Berkeley too, it seems, did not wish to be connected to Leibniz. In De Motu, we find Berkeley labelling Leibniz’s views ‘too abstract and obscure’ and constituting no improvement over the medieval doctrine of substantial forms (DM §19/Works 4, 25). If we focus on these types of remarks, it is easy to get the impression that each thinker saw a vast philosophical distance between himself and the other. But then there is the interpretative question of whether in fact they held substantially different views, regardless of how they saw the matter. It is not merely the fact that there is historical interaction between the two that interests the contemporary scholar. Each thinker endorsed some version of phenomenalism, and it is largely this fact that has drawn the attention of scholars.3 A comparison of their respective phenomenalisms is illuminating for both historical and philosophical purposes and forms the basis of the discussion that follows. In what follows, I discuss the fundamental differences between Berkeley’s phenomenalism and that of Leibniz and I use as examples each thinker’s views on the nature of force and infinite divisibility. I then turn to a discussion of how these differences in phenomenalistic outlook led them to differences in their views about causation and scientific explanation. I also explain how these differences in phenomenalistic outlook led them to differences in their views about human happiness. I conclude briefly with the suggestion that a comparison of Leibniz and Berkeley is useful not only for highlighting differences in phenomenalisms, but also insofar as it involves a clear example of how philosophy, science, theology and value theory intersected in early modern intellectual thought.

Phenomenalisms Consider the notes Leibniz took on the last page of his copy of Berkeley’s Principles: There is much here that is correct and close to my own view. But it is expressed paradoxically. For it is not necessary to say that matter is nothing, but it is sufficient to say that it is a phenomenon, like the rainbow; and that it is not a substance, but the resultant of substances, and that space is no more real than

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time, that is, that space is nothing but the order of coexistents, just as time is the order of subexistences. True substances are monads, that is perceivers. But the author should have gone further, to the infinity of monads, constituting everything, and their pre-established harmony. Badly, or at least in vain, he rejects abstract ideas, restricts ideas to imaginations, and condemns the subtleties of arithmetic and geometry. The worst thing is that he rejects the division of extension to infinity, even if he might rightly reject infinitesimal quantities. Leibniz, 1989, p. 3074

Note first that at the start of this passage, Leibniz has an agreeable assessment. He claims that in Berkeley’s Principles there is a lot that is ‘correct and close to [his] own view’, a remark with a strikingly different tone from the negative comments he sent to Des Bosses (quoted in the previous section). This, of course, confounds the view that Leibniz saw his philosophy as fundamentally different and makes the interpretive question all the more interesting. Is there in fact a lot in Berkeley that is ‘close to’ Leibniz’s own view? The question is tricky since the remainder of the passage suggests rather serious disagreements. A useful way of approaching the phenomenalisms of Berkeley and Leibniz is by focusing on the latter’s remark that Berkeley ‘restricts ideas to imaginations’. Leibniz’s insight here is on target and may be usefully seen as the fundamental difference between the two philosophers, one that led to further disagreements. Berkeley’s phenomenalism is what we will call sensationalist. In this view, phenomena are identical only with what appears in sensory perception. Since what we perceive, according to Berkeley, is a collection of sensory ideas, he identifies bodies with collections of ideas or sensible impressions. Moreover, there is no deeper reality, no non-phenomenal world that the senses fail to uncover. This is evident in passages such as the following from Berkeley’s Three Dialogues: ‘I am of a vulgar cast, simple enough to believe my senses, and leave things as I find them. To be plain, it is my opinion, that the real things are those very things I see and feel, and perceive by my senses [viz., ideas]’ (3D/Works 2, 229; cf. 3D/Works 2, 249). It is precisely the phenomenalism presented in passages such as this one that elicits Leibniz’s most basic disagreement. Leibniz’s phenomenalism is what we will call intellectualist. This can be understood for our purposes as the view that phenomena are the objects of the perceptions of the intellect as well as sensation.5 It is in this sense that Berkeley is wrong, according to Leibniz, to ‘restrict ideas to imaginations’. What Leibniz means here is that Berkeley is wrong to restrict his conception of phenomena to what is presented in sensory images. The intellect, for Leibniz, reveals that there is far more to the phenomenal world than what the senses present via images.

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Leibniz made this point in a letter to Burcher De Volder in 1699: ‘We are constituted so full of preconceptions that although we properly distinguish in theory intelligible things from those given in sense perception . . . we do not observe the distinction in practice and regard almost as nothing everything which is not to be grasped in images’ (Leibniz, 1875, v. 2, p. 194). By restricting phenomena to sensible ‘images’, Leibniz believed that Berkeley underestimated nature’s complexity. There are, Leibniz held, at least two costly consequences of Berkeley’s restriction of ideas to images, and Leibniz’s position on these matters is suggested clearly enough in his remarks on Berkeley’s Principles quoted above. The first concerns force and its relationship to substance, and the second concerns infinite divisibility. Both serve as examples of the sort of phenomena (intellectualist) that Leibniz recognized, but Berkeley did not.

Force and substance According to Leibniz, Berkeley’s sensationalism led him to deny active force to bodies. In his De Ipsa Natura (1698), Leibniz made precisely the point that one cannot understand the inherent force of bodies by sense perception alone: [I]t must be granted that there is a certain efficacy residing in things, a form or force such as we usually designate by the name of nature, . . . [T]his inherent force can indeed be understood distinctly, though it cannot be explained by sense perception. It is no more to be thus explained than is the nature of the soul, for this force belongs among those things which are grasped, not by the imagination but by the understanding. Leibniz, 1875, v. 4, p. 507 [my emphasis]

The forces in matter are not presented in sensory images, but they are understood to exist. For example, consider Leibniz on inertia: ‘As matter itself is nothing but a phenomenon, . . . it is the same with inertia, which is a property of this phenomena’ (Leibniz, 1875, v. 3, p.  636).6 Leibniz thought inertia, the tendency of an object to resist change, is clearly not presented by sensory image. It is instead through the process of scientific reasoning that we ‘perceive’ that such forces exist in phenomena. Berkeley disagreed. He rejected Leibniz’s doctrine of force in a number of texts. Consider the following from De Motu (1721): ‘Leibniz contends that effort [i.e. force] exists everywhere and always in matter, and that it is understood by reason where it is not evident to the senses. But these points, we must admit, are

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too abstract and obscure, and of much the same sort as substantial forms and entelechies’ (DM §19/Works 4, 25). Earlier in De Motu, Berkeley characterized substantial form as ‘shadows of scholastic things’ and ‘terms which have no certain significance’, for they are beyond what is ‘evident to the senses’ (DM §8/Works 4, 33). For Berkeley, forces do not literally exist, though positing them might have instrumental value in explanatory contexts: ‘Force, gravity, attraction, and terms of this sort are useful for reasonings and computations about motion and bodies in motion, but not for . . . indicating so many distinct qualities’ (DM §17/Works 4, 35).7 This disagreement between Leibniz and Berkeley over the reality of force is closely connected to another. Recall that, in his comments on Berkeley’s Principles, Leibniz remarked that matter is ‘the resultant of substances’, and thus Berkeley ‘should have gone further, to the infinity of monads, constituting everything’ (Leibniz, 1989, p.  307). One of Leibniz’s chief motivations for believing matter contains monads (simple substances) is that monads could serve as the metaphysical elements from which force can arise; monads ‘present’ as forces. Berkeley’s charge that Leibniz’s view on force is ‘of the same sort as substantial forms’ is clearly intended to be derogatory, but it is one that Leibniz would have embraced. In the New System (1695) and elsewhere, Leibniz did not hesitate to assimilate his doctrine of substance with the revival of substantial forms. ‘I found that their [i.e. substantial forms’] nature consists in force,’ Leibniz wrote, and thus ‘we must conceive of them on the model of the notion we have of souls’ (Leibniz, 1875, v. 4, p. 479/Leibniz, 1989, p. 139). From this perspective, the disagreement between Berkeley and Leibniz over the reality of force in matter is closely linked to whether matter contains infinitely many monads (i.e. ‘simple substances’, ‘substantial forms’ or ‘seats of force’). It is a disagreement the origin of which lies in whether sensationalism or intellectualism is the correct phenomenalism.8

Infinite divisibility Leibniz believed in the infinite division of matter. Recall that in his comments on the Principles quoted above, Leibniz found Berkeley’s rejection of the infinite division of the extended to be the ‘worst’ error of all. Leibniz was clearly referring to Berkeley’s argument in Principles §124: Every particular finite extension, which may possibly be the object of our thought, is an idea existing only in the mind, and consequently each part thereof must be perceived. If therefore I cannot perceive innumerable parts in any finite

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extension that I consider, it is certain they are not contained in it: but it is evident, that I cannot distinguish innumerable parts in any particular line, surface, or solid, which I either perceive by sense, or figure to my self in my mind: wherefore I conclude they are not contained in it. P §124/Works 2, 98

Berkeley’s argument: finite extended things cannot be infinitely divided because that would imply that they have ‘innumerable’ parts of which the mind cannot form an image. But of course, if the mind cannot perceive them in this way, then according to Berkeley’s sensationalism they do not exist. Hence, there are only a finite number of parts in any given body, and thus matter is not divisible into infinitely many parts. Surely it is Leibniz’s understanding of geometry that leads him to object to Berkeley’s rejection of infinite divisibility.9 In Leibniz’s view, one can reason to the conclusion that matter is infinitely divided, and that suffices for those innumerable parts to be genuine phenomena. But there is, we shall see, more to it, for Leibniz’s value theory also motivates this objection since it demanded an infinitely divided world of matter subsumable under intelligible laws of nature. It is thus not surprising that Principles §124 drew Leibniz’s strongest reaction, for in his mind there was much at stake. But the point for now is that there are indeed significant differences between Berkeley’s phenomenalism and the phenomenalism of Leibniz.

Explanation and causation Given that the nature of Leibnizian phenomena is substantially different from that of Berkeley, it is not surprising that each held a different account of scientific explanation. Berkeley famously maintained that ‘all our ideas, sensations, or the things which we perceive . . . are visibly inactive [and] there is nothing of power or agency included in them’ (P §25/Works 2, 51). Since bodies, for Berkeley, just are collections of ideas, they are not causally productive: ‘when we perceive certain ideas of Sense constantly followed by other ideas . . . we forthwith attribute power and agency to the ideas themselves, and make one the cause of another, than which nothing can be more absurd and unintelligible’ (P §32/Works 2, 54). Explanations of phenomena, therefore, are to be understood in some way that does not commit one to the real existence of efficient causes. Berkeley appealed instead to an ontology of ‘sign’ and ‘thing signified’. Consider the following from the Three Dialogues:

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‘[T]he connection of ideas does not imply the relation of cause and effect, but only of a mark or sign with the thing signified. The fire which I see is not the cause of the pain I suffer upon my approaching it, but the mark that forewarns me of it. (3D/Works 2, 69)

Certain successions of ideas should be understood, as Berkeley notes, as a series of representative signs (fire) and the things those signs can represent (pain). Consistent with this, Berkeley wrote that the job of scientists ‘with regard to their knowledge of the phenomena, . . . consists, not in an exacter knowledge of the efficient cause that produces them,. . .but only in a greater largeness of comprehension, whereby analogies, harmonies, and agreements are discovered in the works of nature’ (P §105/Works 2, 87; cf. DM §35/Works 4, 40). Berkeley’s scientist is not in the business of discovering efficient causes but rather aims to establish regularities. Accordingly, Berkeley made a crucial distinction between mechanistic explanation and causal explanation. In De Motu, he described mechanistic explanation: A thing can be said to be explained mechanically then indeed when it is reduced to those most simple and universal principles, and shown by accurate reasoning to be in agreement and connection with them. For once the laws of nature have been found out, then it is the philosopher’s task to show that each phenomenon is in constant conformity with those laws, that is, necessarily follows from those principles. In that consist the explanation and solution of phenomena and the assigning their cause, i.e. the reason why they take place. DM §37/Works 4, 20

The point is that mechanical explanation consists in the deducing of phenomena from established laws of nature, a version of the covering law model of explanation. Note that such explanations carry no ontological commitment to real productive causes, for they are merely ways of capturing perceived regularities.10 But in the very same works in which he discussed mechanical explanation, Berkeley also insisted that causal explanation is something different. In Siris, we find him insisting that scientists (‘mechanical philosophers’) are not engaged in assigning causes: Certainly, if the explaining a phenomenon be to assign its proper efficient and final cause, it should seem the mechanical philosophers never explained anything; their province being only to discover the laws of nature, . . . and to account for particular phenomena by reducing them under, or shewing their conformity to, such general rules. S §231; Works 5, 111; cf. DM §41/Works 4, 42; P §105/Works 2, 87

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The distinction between causal explanation and mechanistic (covering law) explanation is clear enough in this text. But note that while he thought that the scientist was not in the business of assigning causes, there were conditions under which causal explanations of a sort were available to the philosopher. Consider the following from Principles §107: First, it is plain philosophers amuse themselves in vain, when they inquire for any natural efficient cause, distinct from a mind or spirit. Secondly, considering the whole creation is the workmanship of a wise and good agent, it should seem to become philosophers, to employ their thoughts . . . about the final causes of things: and I must confess, I see no reason, why pointing out the various ends, to which natural things are adapted, and for which they were originally with unspeakable wisdom contrived, should not be thought one good way of accounting for them, and altogether worthy a philosopher. P §107/Works 2, 88

In this passage, having again noted the lack of efficient causation in corporeal nature, Berkeley then argues that final causes are a way to explain phenomena intelligibly. Nature is not efficiently causal, but it is purposeful: fire feels warm upon approach for the purpose of warning creatures of the potential pain. As we will see in the next section, this ‘teleological requirement’11 for rendering phenomena intelligible plays a crucial role in his theory of value. But Leibniz saw things differently. It is central to Leibniz’s thinking that ‘everything . . . in nature . . . can be explained by efficient causes . . . and can be explained by final causes’ (Leibniz, 1875, v. 7, p. 451/Leibniz, 1969, p. 472). Leibniz and Berkeley, then, are on the same page when it comes to the pursuit of final causes for rendering phenomena intelligible. But Leibniz, unlike Berkeley, posited corporeal forces ‘in the phenomena’ (Leibniz, 1875, v. 2, p.  276/Leibniz, 1989, p. 182) and cited them as the natural efficient causes of motion in bodies (Leibniz, 1875, v. 4, p. 444/Leibniz, 1989, p. 51; Leibniz, 1875, v. 2, p. 98). Leibniz’s mechanist, unlike Berkeley’s, was in the business of providing efficient causal explanations and in so doing, referenced real features of the world (forces) that are explanatorily fruitful. This too, then, is a difference between the two philosophers that stems ultimately from their different conceptions of phenomena.

Knowledge of nature and human happiness As noted in the previous section, Berkeley interpreted relations of alleged cause and effect as sign and thing signified. The view here is connected with his

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teleology: in pointing out a succession of signs in nature, Berkeley was pointing to a design in nature. And the laws of nature that govern the regularity with which that series of signs occurs were instituted for purposes discoverable by creatures. Berkeley claimed that these signs are constituents of a divine language of nature. ‘Upon the whole,’ Berkeley wrote in the early New Theory of Vision (1709), ‘I think we may fairly conclude the proper objects of vision constitute an universal language of the Author of nature, whereby we are instructed how to regulate our actions in order to attain those things that are necessary to the preservation and well-being of our bodies’ (TV §147/Works 1, 231). And in the later Siris, we find that Berkeley still held the ‘language of nature’ doctrine and this time connected it with the doctrine of signs: ‘As the natural connexion of signs with the things signified is regular and constant, it forms a sort of rational discourse, and is therefore the immediate effect of an intelligent cause’ (S §254/Works 5, 120). Clearly, Berkeley’s teleological commitment was firm throughout his career: the whole of nature should be interpreted as proceeding from purposive intentionality in the form of God’s communication to creatures through signs. What we end up with, then, is a view of the laws of nature as a set of rules that govern a divine discourse for the purpose of helping creatures to make predictions and prepare for their well-being: [The laws of nature] give us a sort of foresight, which enables us to regulate our actions for the benefit of life. And without this we should be eternally at a loss: we could not know how to act any thing that might procure us the least pleasure, or remove the least pain of sense. That food nourishes, sleep refreshes, and fire warms us; that to sow in the seed-time is the way to reap in the harvest, and, in general, that to obtain such or such ends, such or such means are conducive, all this we know, not by discovering any necessary connexion between our ideas, but only by the observation of the settled laws of Nature, without which we should be all in uncertainty and confusion . . . [T]his consistent uniform working . . . so evidently displays the goodness and wisdom of that governing spirit whose will constitutes the Laws of Nature. P §§31–2/Works 2, 53–4

Nature is set up with law-like regularity and in such a way that the more we know about how it works, the better we manage our affairs. Armed with this conception of the laws of the nature, Berkeley built upon it a science of happiness. Consider his definition of human happiness given to us in Alciphron (1732): ‘[T]he good or happiness of a man consist in having both soul and body sound and in good condition, enjoying those things which their

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respective natures require, and free from those things which are odious or hurtful to them’ (Alc 2: 10/Works 3, 79). In other words, happiness consists in physical and mental health. The former ‘results from the right constitution and temperature of the organs and the fluids circulating through them’, and the latter results when ‘the notions are right, the judgments are true, the will regular, the passions and appetites directed to their proper objects, and confined within due bonds’ (Alc 2: 12/Works 3, 82). If we focus on this conception of happiness we see how knowledge of nature – knowledge of the law-like series of signs and things signified – is a necessary condition for attaining such happiness. Berkeley’s position was that in order to achieve a state of physical and mental health, we need to know how the world works: we need to know, for example, what things bring pain and illness and what things bring pleasure and health; what things lead to sadness and guilt and what things delight and incite contentment in ourselves and others. Thus, in designing the laws of nature in such a way that they ‘speak’ to us (via divine language) about how to procure such things, Berkeley’s God thereby intentionally provided the means for human happiness.12 But it is equally important to underscore the importance of religion for Berkeley in this context. Although knowledge of natural laws is a necessary condition for happiness (physical and mental health), it seems that such knowledge is not, according to Berkeley, generally sufficient for the highest form of happiness. In several passages Berkeley emphasized that for true happiness, one also needs to acknowledge the moral laws (sometimes deemed ‘natural’ laws, as in Works 6, 18) handed down by God – the ‘prescriptive’ laws, as well as the ‘descriptive’ ones. According to him, these are handed down for the sake of ‘promoting’ happiness to those who obey them (cf. Works 7, 130). Presumably, obeying such laws is necessary in particular for the ‘mental health’ required for happiness, which as we have seen, enables one to direct the ‘passions and appetites to their proper objects’ (Alc 2: 12/Works 3, 382). Moreover, Berkeley’s general position about the procurement of happiness is often religious in tone: ‘the pleasure which naturally affects a human mind with the most lively and transporting touches [is] . . . the sense that we act in the eye of infinite wisdom, power and goodness’ (Works 7, 196). Still, Berkeley held, as we have seen, that knowledge of nature promotes happiness, even if it is not sufficient for the highest form of happiness. And so it is that in Berkeley’s system, a sensationalist phenomenalism of ‘signs’ and ‘things signified’ intersects with and promotes his theory of human value. But Leibniz would find most of Berkeley’s account of this intersection inadequate, and again, it is the difference in phenomenalistic outlook that drives

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the disagreement. Leibniz’s phenomena contain infinitely divided matter and immaterial seats of force responsible for efficient causal change; they are infinitely complex. But for all of the universe’s complexity, God has established intelligible rules to govern it, as Leibniz told us in his only published book, Theodicy (1710): ‘[A]mong the general rules which are not absolutely necessary, God chooses those which are the most natural, which it is easiest to explain, and which also are of greatest service for the explanation of other things’ (Leibniz, 1952, §208/Leibniz, 1875, v. 6, p. 241; cf. Leibniz, 1875, v. 4, pp. 568–9). The infinite complexity of the world is balanced with laws of nature that guarantee the intelligibility of that infinite complexity to finite minds. This balance, for Leibniz, is an essential ingredient for making this the best possible world. It is no wonder, then, that Berkeley’s rejection of infinite divisibility elicited Leibniz’s protest. And just as Berkeley’s sensationalist phenomena provided the basis for his science of happiness, so too Leibniz’s intellectualism was the basis for his science of happiness. He agreed with Berkeley that knowledge of nature serves the purpose of allowing us to preserve and sustain our bodies. But he added that there is another more important purpose: ‘The knowledge of bodies is therefore most important on two grounds – first, to perfect our mind through an understanding of the purposes and causes of things; second, to conserve and nurture our body, which is the organ of the soul, by furthering what is wholesome for it and reducing what is harmful’ (Leibniz, 1923, s.  6, v. 4, p.  1994/Leibniz, 1969, p. 280). The second ‘ground’ about nurturing our body is one that Leibniz and Berkeley both acknowledge. It is the first that is uniquely Leibnizian, and Leibniz believed it to be the more important, the one that leads to the highest degree of happiness. ‘For though all science increases our power over external things provided a proper occasion arises for using it,’ Leibniz wrote, ‘there is nonetheless another use which depends on no such occasion, namely the perfection of the mind itself.’ He added that ‘by understanding the laws or mechanisms of divine invention, we shall perfect ourselves far more than by merely following the constructions invented by men’ (Leibniz, 1923, s. 6, v. 4, p. 1994/Leibniz, 1969, p. 280). Knowledge of nature in itself is more valuable than any practical value such knowledge might bring by being a means to a tangible end (e.g. how to grow food, etc.), according to Leibniz. Consistent with this, happiness does not consist in a static state of physical and mental health for Leibniz as it did for Berkeley. Rather, happiness is an active state in which the mind continually perfects itself, as Leibniz told us in the Principles

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of Nature and Grace (1714): ‘Thus our happiness will never consist, and ought not to consist in a complete enjoyment, in which there would be nothing left to desire, and which would stupefy our mind, but in a perpetual progress to new pleasures and new perfections’ (Leibniz, 1875, v. 6, p. 606/Leibniz, 1989, p. 213). Happiness, then, consists in a state of progression in which one is constantly acquiring new perfections. As we have seen, we perfect our mind through ‘knowledge of bodies’, or ‘through an understanding of the purposes and causes of things’. But since the world, for Leibniz, consists of infinitely complex phenomena subsumable under intelligible laws, God has thereby provided an inexhaustible source of knowledge for humans, an inexhaustible source of progress to ‘new pleasures and new perfections’. That is, God has provided the necessary condition for happiness: intellectualist phenomena.13 Finally, it is worth noting that, while he agreed with Berkeley that the pleasures attained through knowledge of nature ‘are the most valuable’ (Leibniz, 1875, v. 5, p.  180/Leibniz, [1765]1981, p.  194), Leibniz also maintained, unlike Berkeley, that knowledge of nature is sufficient for a state of happiness. ‘One must hold as certain,’ Leibniz wrote in On Felicity (1694?), ‘that the more a mind desires to know order, reason, the beauty of things which God has produced . . . the happier he will be’ (Leibniz, 1948, p. 583). If one believes, as Leibniz did, that pleasure and happiness involve perfection of mind and that mere accumulation of knowledge of nature (i.e. independently of any practical benefits such knowledge brings) gives such perfection, then one will hold that accumulation of knowledge of nature in itself is sufficient for happiness. It seems that Berkeley has no account of happiness that involves mere knowledge of nature, for it is only the practical use such knowledge brings that is relevant to Berkeley’s conception of happiness, one that relies on signs to help creatures procure physical and mental health. Leibniz saw things differently: ‘For though all science increases our power over external things provided a proper occasion arises for using it, there is nonetheless another use which depends on no such occasion, namely the perfection of the mind itself.’ An ongoing accumulation of knowledge of infinitely complex phenomena suffices in itself to continuously perfect the mind and thereby secure Leibnizian happiness.

Concluding remarks This chapter covers only some points of useful comparison between Berkeley and Leibniz, and there are other worthwhile areas to be considered. I hope to

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have shown that the differences in their phenomenalisms form the basis of significant differences in other areas of their thinking. I hope also to have shown that a comparison of the views of Berkeley and Leibniz reveals the ways in which many facets of their thinking – theological, ethical, scientific and philosophical – intersected and supported each other.14

Notes 1 References to the works of Berkeley are cited by abbreviation, and references to the works of Leibniz are to those listed in the Bibliography. 2 See Daniel, S. H. (2007), ‘The Harmony of the Leibniz–Berkeley Juxtaposition’ in P. Phemister and S. Brown (eds), Leibniz and the English-Speaking World. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 163–80, p. 165. 3 The following studies make comparisons of Leibniz and Berkeley: Carlin, L. (2006), ‘Leibniz and Berkeley on Teleological Intelligibility’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 23, 151–69; Carlin, L. (2007), ‘Selecting a phenomenalism: Leibniz, Berkeley, and the science of happiness’, Journal of the History of Ideas 68, 57–78; Daniel (2007); Adams, R. M. (1994), Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 224f.; Wilson, M. (1987), ‘The phenomenalisms of Leibniz and Berkeley,’ in E. Sosa (ed), Essays on the Philosophy of George Berkeley. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, pp. 3–22; MacIntosh, J. J. (1970), ‘Leibniz and Berkeley’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1970–71, 147–63; Furth, M. (1967), ‘Monadology’, The Philosophical Review 76, 169–200; Kabitz, W. (1932), ‘Leibniz und Berkeley’, Sitzungsberichte der Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse 24, 623–36. 4 This text was written in Leibniz’s hand on the last page of Leibniz’s copy of the Principles. The original Latin is in Kabitz (1932), p. 636. 5 The difference here is related to the traditional distinction between Leibniz as a rationalist and Berkeley as an empiricist. A rationalist phenomenalist, by placing emphasis on reason, might thus be comfortable with intellectualism; a phenomenalist from the empiricist tradition might restrict phenomena to what is presented to the senses. 6 Cf. Adams (1994), p. 226 emphasizes this passage. See also Leibniz, G. W. (1875–90), Die Philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 7 vols, C. I. Gerhardt (ed.). Berlin: Weidman, v. 2, p. 276; Leibniz, G. W. (1989), ‘Philosophical essays’, in R. Ariew and D. Garber (eds). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, p. 182, where he explicitly located corporeal forces in phenomena. 7 It is for this reason that many have labelled Berkeley an instrumentalist (as opposed to a realist) about forces. See, for example, Downing, L. (2005), ‘Berkeley’s natural philosophy and philosophy of science’, in K. Winkler (ed.), The Cambridge

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9 10 11 12

13

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Companion to Berkeley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 230–65, p. 247f. See also DM 18/Works 4, 35, where Berkeley remarks that when it comes to forces, ‘to be of service to computation and mathematical demonstrations is one thing, to set forth the nature of things is another’. Of course, Berkeley might allow unsensed realities in the form of souls, spirits and God. The point is that Berkeley, unlike Leibniz, would not allow that there is more to non-rational nature than what is presented to the senses. Cf. Adams (1994), p. 225. See also P §62/Works 2, 67–8; cf. DM §37/Works 4, 41. See Winkler, K. (1989), Berkeley: An Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 131. It is worth noting that the pleasures promoted by this knowledge of nature’s regularities are ‘natural’, as opposed to ‘fantastical’, pleasures. Natural pleasures are ‘suited to human nature in general, and . . . intended by Providence as rewards for the using our faculties agreeably to the ends for which they were given us’ (Works 7, 193). Fantastical pleasures are those often based on convention, such as ‘money’ and other ‘outward rewards’ (Works 7, 193). Berkeley believed that natural pleasures were far more valuable (see Alc 2: 14/Works 3, 86). Further details of the account of Leibniz’s theory of value that I outline here can be found in Brown, G. (1988), ‘Leibniz’s Theodicy and the Confluence of Worldly Goods’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 26, 571–91, and Brown, G. (1995), ‘Leibniz’s Moral Philosophy’ in N. Jolley (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 411–41. I am grateful to Richard Brook for very helpful comments on a previous draft of this paper.

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Berkeley’s Critique of Locke’s Theory of Perception Georges Dicker

Berkeley is sometimes credited with having refuted Locke’s ([1689]1975) theory of perception. There is a standard portrayal of Locke, in no small part due to the Good Bishop himself, that makes this assessment of Berkeley’s critique very seductive. According to this portrayal, Locke holds that we cannot perceive material things; rather, we can perceive only the ideas caused in us when those things affect our senses. Ordinary material objects like rocks and trees and wheels are unperceivable; they lie behind an impenetrable ‘veil of perception’. We can know that they exist only by means of a problematic causal inference from premises about ideas that is supposed to show that the ideas are produced in us by material things and that they resemble those things to a certain extent. In Part I of this chapter, I shall argue that Berkeley’s critique of Locke as standardly portrayed fails when attention is paid to a feature of Locke’s thought that the standard portrayal ignores. In Part II , I shall say what I think is right in Berkeley’s critique.

Part I Berkeley’s most famous argument against Locke’s philosophy is that once it is admitted that we perceive only our own ideas, the existence of material things becomes unknowable.1 As Berkeley says: So long as men thought that real things subsisted without the mind, and that their knowledge was only so far forth real as it was conformable to real things, it follows, that they could not be certain that they had any real knowledge at all. For how can it be known, that the things which are perceived, are conformable to those which are not perceived, or exist without the mind? P 862

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Furthermore, Berkeley argues that on this ‘veil-of-perception’ doctrine, the belief in matter becomes unintelligible: I ask whether those supposed originals or external things, of which our ideas are the pictures or representations, be themselves perceivable or not? . . . If you say they are not, I appeal to any one whether it be sense, to assert a colour is like something which is invisible; hard or soft, like something which is intangible; and so of the rest. P8

The upshot is that on Locke’s theory of perception as Berkeley construes it, the existence of material things is unknowable, and the belief in such things is unintelligible. There is no doubt that Locke sometimes lays himself open to Berkeley’s attack. For he writes: ’Tis evident, the Mind knows not things immediately, but only by the intervention of the Ideas it has of them. Our Knowledge therefore is real, only so far as there is a conformity between our Ideas and the reality of Things. But what shall be here the Criterion? How shall the Mind, when it perceives nothing but its own Ideas, know that they agree with Things themselves? Essay IV.iv.3: 563; my italics except for ‘Ideas’3 SINCE the Mind, in all its Thoughts and Reasonings, hath no other immediate Object but its own Ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident, that our Knowledge is only conversant about them. Essay IV.i.1: 525; my italics except for ‘Ideas’ ALL our Knowledge consisting, as I have said, in the view the Mind has of its own Ideas. Essay IV.ii.1: 530

However, Locke does not always say that we perceive only ideas, and in the chapter of the Essay officially addressed to ‘sensitive knowledge’ (= perceptual knowledge), he says the opposite. He writes: ‘no particular Man can know the Existence of any other Being, but only when by actual operating upon him, it makes it self perceived by him’ (Essay IV.xi.1: 630). Here ‘any other Being’ obviously refers to material things, not to ideas, and Locke means that when a material thing actually stimulates a person’s sense-receptors, the person perceives that thing itself. A bit later, he says: If we persuade ourselves, that our Faculties act and inform us right, concerning the existence of those Objects that affect them, it cannot pass for an ill-grounded

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confidence: For I think no body can, in earnest, be so sceptical, as to be uncertain of the Existence of those Things which he sees and feels. Essay IV.xi.3: 631

The words ‘those Things which he sees and feels’ unmistakably refer to material things, not to ideas. Thus, although there are passages where Locke says that we can perceive only our own ideas, in his most sustained discussion of perceptual knowledge he accepts the common-sense view that we perceive material objects. Further, even in the Essay’s chapter on primary and secondary qualities, which is often thought to show his espousal of the ‘veil-of-perception’ doctrine, he says that primary qualities are those that ‘Sense constantly finds in every particle of Matter, which has bulk enough to be perceived,’ and he contrasts such a particle with one whose bulk is ‘less than to make it self singly be perceived by our Senses’ (Essay II .viii.9: 134–5). These can hardly be the words of a man who thinks material things are unperceivable. So is Locke’s position flatly self-contradictory? No – at least not if we apply the principle of charity. Notice the words ‘immediately’ and ‘immediate’ in the first two passages from the Essay quoted above. If one heeds those words, then what Locke can be taken to mean, when he says that we perceive only ideas, is that we immediately perceive only ideas, and so never immediately perceive material things. There is every reason to attribute this view to Locke, and indeed also to Descartes, Malebranche and other early modern philosophers. In one place, Locke even defines an Idea partly as ‘the immediate Object of perception’ (Essay II .8.8: 134; my italics). But if what Locke really means when he says that we perceive only ideas is merely that we immediately perceive only ideas, then he avoids contradiction, for his claim then leaves open the possibility that we perceive material things non-immediately, or mediately. If we apply the principle of charity to Locke, then this is the best way to interpret him. Here, however, is where Berkeley re-enters the picture. For in Three Dialogues,4 he repeatedly puts forward a principle, which I call ‘the Principle of Perceptual Immediacy’ (for short, ‘the PPI ’), which says that

(1) Whatever is perceived by the senses is immediately perceived.5 But if we combine this principle with Locke’s admission that

(2) No material things are immediately perceived, then it obviously follows that

(3) No material things are perceived by the senses.

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I shall call this line of reasoning the ‘argument from the PPI ’. I believe that it, and certain variations of it that combine the PPI with other premises (notably with the premise that no causes of sensation are immediately perceived), is a key weapon that Berkeley uses to attack Locke’s theory of perception.6 What is interesting and important about the argument from the PPI is that it is not merely an ad hominem argument that takes Locke’s bald assertions that we perceive only ideas at face value and then points to the paradoxical consequences; rather, it tries to show that Locke is logically compelled by other, more refined and potentially more plausible views of his, to accept the ‘veil-of-perception’ view that the standard portrayal attributes to him. But is the argument from the PPI sound? That depends on a difficult and controversial issue; namely, what does the term ‘immediately perceived’ mean in its premises? For the argument to work, Berkeley needs a single sense of ‘immediately perceived’ on which premises (1) and (2) are both true; for if this term has a different meaning in each premise, then the argument is invalid, whereas if the term has the same meaning in both premises but either premise (1) or premise (2) is false, then the argument is valid but unsound. I shall now argue that there is no single sense of ‘immediately perceived’ on which premises (1) and (2) are both true. I shall also try to show that Berkeley thought there was because, contra what some current scholars hold, he used at least two senses of the term, but conflated them. According to the account of Berkeley’s views on mediate and immediate perception recently proposed by Samuel Rickless, Berkeley is best interpreted as operating throughout his works with a single, univocal sense of immediate perception: ‘for X to be immediately perceived by S is simply for X to be perceived without intermediary (and so without suggestion of any kind)’.7 I shall call this the ‘no-suggestion’ sense of ‘immediately perceived’. On this sense of the term, premise (2) of the argument from the PPI is plausible, because perceiving a material thing, if this means perceiving it as a material thing, seems to require ‘suggestion’ in Berkeley’s sense. Think of Berkeley’s example of hearing the sound of a coach, and treat it as hearing the coach as a (real) coach (whether material or ‘real’ only in Berkeley’s idealist sense). Then Berkeley’s view that such hearing requires that the sound suggest to the mind such things as the sight of wheels, horses, a coachman, passengers, and so forth, seems correct and important. Absent such suggestion, one does not perceive the coach as a coach, or hear it as a coach, or take it to be a coach; one only hears a noise. However, what Berkeley says about his ‘coach’ case also shows that if ‘immediately perceives’ is taken in the no-suggestion sense, then even he does not believe that premise (1) of the argument from the PPI is true:

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Though I grant we may in one acceptation be said to perceive sensible things mediately by sense: that is, when from a frequently perceived connexion, the immediate perception of ideas of one sense suggests to the mind others, perhaps belonging to another sense, which are wont to be connected with them. For instance, when I hear a coach drive along the streets, immediately I perceive only the sound; but from the experience I have had that such a sound is connected with a coach, I am said to hear a coach. It is nevertheless evident, that in truth and strictness, nothing can be heard but sound: and the coach is not then properly perceived by sense, but suggested from experience. 3D 204

This passage is as difficult as it is famous, and I once thought that it meant that for Berkeley the coach is not perceived by sense (not heard) at all.8 But I now think that he meant only to deny that the coach is a proper object of sense, in the classic Aristotelian sense on which a proper object of any sense is one that can be perceived only by that one sense.9 One point that supports this interpretation is that there are many other places in Berkeley’s work, notably in Theory of Vision and in Theory of Vision Vindicated, where he says that sense perception involves suggestion.10 It is a main thesis of Theory of Vision that while distance is not immediately perceived, it is nonetheless perceived by sight, by dint of suggestion. Sometimes, Berkeley goes so far as to say that we perceive another person’s emotions ‘by sight’, on the grounds that they are suggested to us by the colour of a person’s face (as in blushing). Also, he explicitly says: ‘Things are suggested and perceived by sense’ (TVV 9).11 Should we then see the coach passage, together with Berkeley’s statements in his works on vision, as showing that he does not really accept the PPI , and that he would have been prepared to simply retract the argument? I do not think so. There are too many places in Three Dialogues where Berkeley insists on the truth of the PPI , and the argument from the PPI plays too important a role, both in his attack on Lockean realism and in his case for idealism, for that to be a plausible interpretation.12 So I ask: is there a sense of ‘immediately perceived’, other than the no-suggestion sense, on which (1) is true (and Berkeley accepts it)? I think there is. Close to the beginning of Three Dialogues, Hylas says: I tell you once for all, that by sensible things I mean those only which are perceived by sense; and that in truth the senses perceive nothing which they do not perceive immediately: for they make no inferences. The deducing therefore of causes or occasions from effects and appearances, which alone are perceived by sense, entirely relates to reason. 3D: 174–5

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From this ‘the-senses-make-no-inferences passage’, which is meant to summarize the progress of the First Dialogue up to that point, and from which Philonous does not demur, one can extract a psychological sense of ‘immediately perceives’, which I shall call the ‘no-inference’ sense, on which for X to be immediately perceived by S is for X to be perceived without any (conscious) inference on S’s part.13 I believe that in this sense of ‘immediately perceived’, the PPI is true (and that Berkeley believes it to be true). For I agree with R. M. Chisholm’s view that It is sometimes said that to perceive something is to ‘make an inference’ or to ‘frame a hypothesis’. . . . But surely no perceiver, on opening his eyes in the morning, can be said to ‘infer’ that he is surrounded by familiar objects. . . . If we do use the words ‘inference’ and ‘hypothesis’ in this context, we cannot take them in the ordinary sense – in the sense in which a physician, studying symptoms, may be said to ‘make an inference’ or ‘frame a hypothesis’ about the disorders of his patients. Use of the psychological terms ‘unconscious inference’ and ‘interpretation,’ in this context, serves only to obscure the fact that perceiving is not an inference, in the ordinary sense of the word ‘inference.’14

Of course, however, the fact that premise (1) is true on the no-inference sense of immediate perception does not salvage the argument from the PPI ; for the only sense of ‘immediately perceived’ that we have so far identifed on which premise (2) is true (or at least plausible) is the no-suggestion sense, and the argument cannot be valid if ‘immediately perceived’ has one sense in premise (1) and another sense in premise (2). But it is worth noting that if we assume that Berkeley reads the no-inference sense of immediate perception into premise (1) and the no-suggestion sense into premise (2), then at least we have a possible explanation of why he thinks the argument is valid. This is that he thinks that if something is perceived without inference, then it is perceived without suggestion. In other words, the possible explanation is that he does not distinguish, or does not clearly distinguish, conscious inference from the kind of learned, unconscious and automatic association that he calls ‘suggestion’, i.e. that he conflates the noinference and the no-suggestion senses of ‘immediately perceived’. There are some passages that may seem to support this charge, as when Berkeley writes that estimating a remote object’s distance from us involves ‘form[ing] a conclusion’ that the object is far away, or performing ‘rather an act of judgment grounded on experience than of sense’ (TV 3).15 Nevertheless, I do not think that Berkeley conflates lack of inference with lack of suggestion.16 For one thing, he ascribes inference and suggestion to two different faculties of the mind: the former to reason or understanding, the latter

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to imagination, which for him (as for Hume and Kant after him) is involved in all but the most rudimentary cases of sense perception. There is also this passage, where he explicitly distinguishes inference from suggestion and ties suggestion to sense perception: ‘To perceive is one thing; to judge is another. So likewise to be suggested is one thing, and to be inferred another. Things are suggested and perceived by sense. We make judgments and inferences by the understanding’ (TVV 42). Furthermore, even in those passages that may seem to support the inference/ suggestion conflation charge, Berkeley talks about ‘instantly conclud[ing]’ or ‘fortwith conclud[ing]’ an object to be far off (TV 3, TV 45), about making ‘sudden judgments’ of distance (TV 20, TV 24) and about the ‘habitual or customary connection’ between visual cues and judgments of distance (TV 17, TV 21) – all expressions that show him to be aware of the difference between a conscious inference and the kind of unconscious association that he calls ‘suggestion’. It may now seem that I have overlooked the simplest way to save the argument from the PPI : we have already seen that premise (1) is true on the no-inference sense of ‘immediately perceives’, so why not just also use that sense in premise (2)? Berkeley himself might have thought this to be a good solution, for he frequently implies that if there were material things, then we could cognize them only by inferring them from our ideas. For example, in the last-quoted passage from Three Dialogues, he says: ‘The deducing . . . of causes or occasions from effects and appearances, which alone are perceived by sense, entirely relates to reason,’ and elsewhere he writes, ‘The objects of sense, being things immediately perceived, are otherwise called ideas. The cause of these ideas, or the power producing them, is not the object of sense, not being itself perceived but only inferred by reason form its effects, to wit, the objects or ideas which are perceived by sense’ (TVV 11). But using the no-inference sense of immediate perception in both premises of the argument from the PPI will not do. First, it would make premise (2) very questionable (indeed, I believe, false), for there is no good reason to think that a material thing cannot be perceived without a conscious inference on the perceiver’s part. Second, it would be question-begging, for given only premise (1), reading premise (2) with the no-inference sense of immediate perception is tantamount to assuming from the outset that material things, if they exist at all, are not perceived by sense – that ‘appearances . . . alone are perceived by sense’ – which is to take for granted the very ‘veil-of-perception’ stance that it was the purpose of the argument to force one into. So we need to ask: is there yet a

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further sense of ‘immediately perceived’, other than the no-suggestion and the no-inference senses, on which (2) is true, and if that sense were used in (2), then would (2) connect with (1), so as to yield a sound argument for (3)? I think that the answer to the first part of this question is yes, and that the answer to the second part is no. I have elsewhere maintained that Berkeley sometimes operates with an epistemological sense of ‘immediately perceives’, on which for X to be immediately perceived by S at time t is for X to be perceived in such a way that its existence and nature can be known solely on the basis of S’s perceptual experience at t.17 We can call this the ‘epistemological sense’ of ‘immediately perceives’. Now, in this sense of the term, it is clear that premise (2) is true, because any perceptual experience obtained by perceiving a material thing could be duplicated in a hallucination or in a dream. However, if (2) has the epistemological sense that makes it true but (1) has the ‘no inference’ sense that makes it true, then again the argument obviously commits the fallacy of equivocation. It perhaps goes without saying that the problem cannot be avoided by giving ‘immediately perceived’ the epistemological sense in premise (1); for the existence of hallucinations and illusions shows that it is not the case that whatever is perceived by the senses is perceived in such a way that its existence and nature can be known solely on the basis of one’s present perceptual experience – that if ‘immediately perceived’ is taken in the epistemological sense in premise (1) (= the PPI ), then that premise is false. I have also maintained elsewhere that the fundamental flaw in Berkeley’s various appeals to the PPI to attack realism and to support idealism is an equivocation between the non-inference sense and the epistemological sense of immediate perception, and that he fails to see this flaw because he conflates these two senses.18 Drawing only on what I have said so far in this chapter, I would support this claim by arguing that since premise (1) is true on the no-inference sense of immediate perception but premise (2) requires another sense, and since Berkeley does not conflate the non-inference sense with the no-suggestion sense, he must be conflating the no-inference sense with another sense that makes (2) true, and the only such sense that I can identify is the epistemological one. There is no space here to review all of my other reasons for making this criticism of Berkeley. But since Samuel Rickless has recently argued that Berkeley never even uses an epistemological sense of immediate perception, I shall now devote some space to replying to his points. As Rickless (2013) notes, I have offered textual support for holding that Berkeley operates with an epistemological sense of ‘immediate perceived’. The most direct support is a passage in Three Dialogues where Berkeley analyses the

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error made by a person who thinks that an oar that looks crooked when dipped in water is really bent: ‘His mistake lies not in what he perceives immediately and at present (it being a manifest contradiction to suppose he should err in respect of that)’ (3D: 238). Here Berkeley says that one cannot fail to know, solely on the basis of one’s present perceptual experience, the existence and nature of what one immediately perceives. Thus, he seems to invoke an epistemological notion of immediate perception even stronger than the one I have attributed to him, which requires only that one can know this solely on the basis of a given perceptual experience.Yet, he shows no awareness that this strong epistemological notion of immediate perception is different from the psychological, no-inference one that he used in the senses-make-no-inferences passage. There is also this passage: ‘The real objects of sight we see, and what we see we know’ (TVV 20). Admittedly, Berkeley does not use the term ‘immediately perceive’ here, but the reason why he says that ‘what we see we know’ can only be that ‘see’ carries the epistemological import that it can have only if whatever is seen is perceived in the epistemologically privileged way embodied in the strong epistemological sense of immediate perception. There is even an entry in Berkeley’s youthful notebooks that supports my view: ‘certainly I cannot err in matter of simple perception’ (Notebook A, entry 693).19 Rickless rejects such pieces of evidence. With respect to the ‘oar’ passage he writes: The fact that P is a necessary a priori truth (or that P’s negation is selfcontradictory) does not entail that P is definitionally true. In particular, it does not follow from the fact that one cannot (on pain of contradiction) be mistaken about anything that one immediately perceives that the very concept of immediate perception is or includes immediate perception [in Dicker’s epistemological sense]. For all that the ‘Crooked Oar’ passage tells us, it may be that Berkeley takes it to be necessary and a priori that perception of O without intermediary is sufficient for knowledge of O. Why would he think this? Presumably on the grounds that it is necessary and a priori that whatever is immediately perceived without intermediary is directly and wholly present to the mind, and that there is simply no room for the mind to be mistaken about what is directly and wholly present to it. As Berkeley puts the point . . . ‘Colour, figure, motion, extension and the like, considered only as so many sensations in the mind, are perfectly known, there being nothing in them which is not perceived’ [P 87]. For Berkeley it is simply a fundamental truth that when a sensation is directly and wholly present to the mind, there is nothing in the sensation that could possibly be hidden from the mind. And if every aspect of a sensation is

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necessarily manifest to the mind, then it is also a fundamental truth that the mind cannot make a mistake about what the sensation is like. This result is substantive, not definitional. So the ‘Crooked Oar’ passage does not suggest that Berkeley is operating with an epistemic concept of immediate perception.20

With respect to the ‘what-we-see-we-know’ passage, the relevant part of what Rickless says is From the fact that I know what I see . . . it does not follow that my very concept of (immediate) perception is epistemic. It could simply be necessary and a priori that the very nature of the relation I bear to my own ideas (namely, that they are directly and wholly present to me) makes it impossible for me to be mistaken about them.21

In response, I note first that in the ‘oar’ passage, Berkeley does not say, ‘it being a manifest contradiction to suppose he should err in respect of an idea’; instead he says, ‘it being a manifest contradiction to suppose he should err in respect of that’. Although the passage as a whole does indicate, unsurprisingly, that things immediately perceived are ideas, within the key sentence Berkeley leaves the reference of ‘that’ entirely general and open, which suggests that he means that one cannot be mistaken about what one immediately perceives, no matter what ‘that’ refers to – that immediate perception is by its very nature, i.e. by definition, infallible. Likewise in the ‘what-we-see-we-know’ and in the ‘simple-perceptioncannot-err’ passages, there is no reference to ideas, and the point seems to be that the type of seeing or perception invoked is by nature immune to error. Contra Rickless, therefore, I think that these passages do suggest that Berkeley is operating with a strong epistemological concept of (immediate) perception. But there is more to be said in favour of my view. The fact that X is ‘directly and wholly present to the mind’ does not of itself show that one cannot be wrong about X. Suppose that I am looking at a perfectly transparent object a couple of feet in front of me, say a glass paperweight. In any ordinary sense, it is ‘directly and wholly present’ to my mind: I see it, as it were, through and through. But it is not the case that I can know its existence or (any of its) properties solely on the basis of my present visual experience, for I could have exactly the same visual experience in a hallucination or in a dream. Here Rickless might reply that this lack of ‘immediate’ knowledge is due to the fact that a paperweight is not merely an idea or sensation. Indeed, in the first passage just quoted he moves, apparently without noticing the difference, from saying, ‘there is simply no room for the mind to be mistaken about what is directly and wholly present to it’, to saying ‘when a sensation is directly and wholly present to the mind, there is nothing in

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the sensation that could possibly be hidden from the mind’ [my italics]. He thinks, then, that what accounts for the infallibility of immediate perception is ‘the very nature of the relation I bear to my own sensations [or ideas]’ [my italics]. But what is that relation? Well, he says, it is just that ‘they are directly and wholly present to me’. But the glass paperweight example shows that this will not do, for the paperweight is ‘directly and wholly present to me’, but I could be mistaken about its existence and properties, since I could have the same experience if I were hallucinating. So Rickless might press into service the word ‘directly’ and say: ‘by saying that ideas are directly present to me I mean that I cannot be mistaken about what in them is wholly present to me, and since everything in them is wholly present to me, I cannot be mistaken about them at all’. But this obviously reintroduces a crucial epistemological element, since ‘X is directly present to me’ just means ‘X is present to me in such a way that I cannot be mistaken about X’. The fundamental weakness in Rickless’s view, I suggest, is that it seeks to separate completely the nature of ideas from the epistemologically privileged way in which they are perceived, and to use the former as an explanation of the latter. I doubt that this is possible; it seems to me that the epistemologically privileged way in which an idea is perceived is part of what makes it an idea. Reading almost any philosophical work in which ideas play the foundational role that they do in early modern philosophy reveals that ideas are understood to be just those items that, unlike material things, can be known solely on the basis of a momentary perceptual episode, apart from any other evidence or corroboration. Thus, Descartes writes in the Meditations: For example, I am now seeing light, hearing a noise, feeling heat. But [suppose that] I am asleep, so all this is false. Yet I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. This cannot be false; what is called ‘having a sensory perception’ is strictly just this, and in this restricted sense of the term it is simply thinking.22

Descartes does not use the word ‘idea’ here, but he might just as well have finished by saying, ‘and in this restricted sense of the term it is simply having ideas’. So ideas are here understood at least partly in terms of the epistemologically privileged way in which we perceive them, rather than that way of perceiving ideas being explained in terms of some independent analysis of the nature of ideas. And the special relation I bear to my own ideas is just that of perceiving them in this epistemologically privileged way. Perhaps this can be traced back to the fact that here, unlike in the perception of a material thing, the object of

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perception – the idea – is not a cause of the perception. But this is a merely negative point, and it seems that the only positive way to characterize the relation between the object and the perceiver, S, is again to say that S perceives the idea in such a way that S can (does) know its existence and nature solely on the basis of ‘having’ it. It seems to me that the failure to recognize this point lies at the root of Rickless’s (and some other recent scholars’) denial that Berkeley, like other early modern philosophers and their more recent devotees, operates with an epistemological concept of immediate perception.23 There remains one question. If the non-inference and the epistemological senses of immediate perception are as different as I have claimed, then why should Berkeley (or any other philosopher) conflate them or, as is needed for premise (1) of the argument from the PPI to connect with premise (2), assume that just because X is perceived without any inference, it is perceived in such a way that its existence and nature can be known solely on the basis of one’s present perceptual experience? Briefly, I suggest the following answer. We regard sense perception, especially vision, as our basic way of acquiring knowledge about the world we live in. With many qualifications that cannot be entered into here, that is indeed the role that vision plays in human lives. It is therefore not surprising that philosophers from Plato onwards have modelled their views of what knowing is on vision, that they have so often used visual metaphors and visual language to characterize knowing, that they have been ineluctably drawn towards what John Dewey called a ‘spectator theory of knowledge’.24 It is only by reflecting philosophically on such phenomena as hallucination and illusion and on the causal facts of perception, among other things, that we come to realize that it is not really the case that ‘what we see we know’ or that ‘I cannot err in matter of simple perception’. Thus the conflation of the psychological immediacy (lack of conscious inference) that characterizes mere seeing with the epistemological immediacy captured by the epistemological sense of immediate perception is natural, for it is based on a deeply rooted assimilation of seeing with knowing.

Part II I have argued that Berkeley’s most famous objection to Locke’s theory of perception is based on an oversimplified portrayal of Locke’s position, but I also think that Berkeley has another line of criticism that is much more powerful.25 Sceptical doubts about perception do not have to rest on the view (which I take

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to be the erroneous) that we can perceive only ideas. For even if we perceive material things, it is possible for any perceptual experience obtained by perceiving a material thing to be duplicated in a hallucination or a dream. So the question arises: even when I do perceive a material thing, how can I know that I am perceiving a material thing, rather than hallucinating or dreaming? Locke understood this problem, albeit without always seeing it as a serious one.26 The solution may seem obvious: I must have other perceptual experiences that corroborate the experience in question. But since those other experiences can also be duplicated in a hallucination or a dream, this solution seems to lead to an infinite regress of corroborations. And it may seem that the only way to stop this regress is to show, by means of an argument that starts with premises about experiences whose existence and character can be known without any corroboration (whether we construe these experiences in terms of ideas or in some more current way, such as in terms of being appeared to or sensing in certain ways), that the experiences are caused by material things affecting our senses. Locke offers just such an argument, when he argues in his ‘concurrent reasons’ passage that the best explanation of certain specific features of our ideas is that they are caused by material objects affecting our sense receptors (Essay IV.11.4–8: 632–5). Berkeley’s most powerful objection to Locke’s theory of perception is that such an inference to the best explanation cannot possibly work. He presents it in Principles 18 and elaborates it in Principles 19 and 20.27 Here is section 18, divided into four segments:28

1.

2.

3.

4.

But though it were possible that solid, figured, moveable substances may exist without the mind, corresponding to the ideas we have of bodies, yet how is it possible for us to know this? Either we must know it by sense, or by reason. As for our senses, by them we have the knowledge only of our sensations, ideas, or those things that are immediately perceived by sense, call them what you will: but they do not inform us that things exist without the mind, or unperceived, like to those which are perceived. This the materialists themselves acknowledge. It remains therefore that if we have any knowledge at all of external things, it must be by reason, inferring their existence from what is immediately perceived by sense. But what reason can induce us to believe the existence of bodies without the mind, from what we perceive, since the very patrons of matter

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themselves do not pretend, there is any necessary connexion betwixt them and our ideas? I say it is granted on all hands (and what happens in dreams, phrensies, and the like, puts it beyond dispute) that it is possible we might be affected with all the ideas we have now, though no bodies existed without, resembling them. Hence, it is evident the supposition of external bodies is not necessary for the producing our ideas: since it is granted they are produced sometimes, and might possibly be produced always in the same order we see them in at present, without their concurrence. The opening premise of Berkeley’s argument here is contained in segment 1. But as the argument continues, it becomes obvious that the issue it addresses is not merely how we can know that our ideas ‘correspond’ to bodies, but how we can even know that there exist any bodies for them to correspond to. So we may initially put the opening premise in a way that simplifies its language without distorting the argument: If we know that material things exist, then we know this either (a) by sense perception or (b) by reason.

The main point of segment 2 is to eliminate option (a), but in doing so Berkeley also does something else: he equates whatever we do know by sense perception with ‘those things that are immediately perceived by sense’. In segment 3, he turns to option (b), but in doing so he again equates whatever knowledge we may have by sense (and from which we would infer the existence of material things) with what is immediately perceived by sense. In order to capture the role that immediate perception plays in the argument, then, we should formulate the first premise like this:

(1) If we know that material things exist, then we know this either (a) by immediately perceiving them by sense, or (b) by inferring their existence from what is immediately perceived by sense. The second premise, stated in segment 2, may be put this way:

(2) We don’t know that material things exist by immediately perceiving them by sense. It now follows from (1) and (2) that

(3) If we know that material things exist, then we know this by inferring their existence from what is immediately perceived by sense.

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Segment 4 is meant to show that the consequent of (3) is false – that we cannot know that material things exist by inferring their existence from what is immediately perceived by sense. It contains two premises and a conclusion. The premises are

(4) Our only evidence that material things exist – our sensations or ideas – could be exactly the same even if no material things existed, and

(5) If (4) is true, then we don’t know that material things exist by inferring their existence from what is immediately perceived by sense. The conclusion that follows from (4) and (5) is

(6) We don’t know that material things exist by inferring their existence from what is immediately perceived by sense. Berkeley does not flatly state (6), but it is implicit in his rhetorical question, ‘But what reason can induce us to believe the existence of bodies without the mind, from what we perceive?’ The argument can now be completed, for it follows from (1), (2) and (6) that

(7) We cannot know that material things exist. Simply put, having eliminated the only two possible ways of knowing that material things exist, viz. by immediate perception and by an inference from what is immediately perceived, Berkeley concludes that even if it material things existed, we could not know that they do. Let us consider Berkeley’s argument step by step. In premise (1), how should we interpret the term ‘immediately perceived’? The natural answer is that it should be understood in the epistemological sense, for it is clear that Berkeley there regards immediate perception as tantamount to knowledge of any items so perceived. There is more to be said in favour of this interpretation. First, Berkeley clearly thinks that (a) and (b) are mutually exclusive (and jointly exhaustive) possible human ways of knowing that material things exist; so the ‘or’ in (1)’s consequent must be taken in the strong, exclusive sense. Second, for his argument to bear on Locke’s prototypical inference to the best explanation, (b) should not refer to the kind of conscious transition from premise to conclusion or from sign to signified captured by the no-inference, psychological sense of immediate perception, but rather to a back-up, justificatory argument to the best explanation, as shown by Locke’s introducing it as a set of ‘concurrent reasons’ (Essay IV.xi.3:

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632). Given these two points, ‘immediately perceived’ in (1) cannot have the psychological sense, for perceiving a thing without any conscious inference and justifying the claim that one perceives it by a certain type of argument are not mutually exclusive alternatives (even if we suppose, perhaps a bit unrealistically, that these are simultaneous) – in fact, this is presumably what Locke thinks that he does and that we (can) do. Could ‘immediately perceived’ in (1) then have the no-suggestion sense? I do not think so. For consider the only two possibilities that would then be truth-makers for (1)’s consequent: (i) the material thing’s existence is known without suggestion and without the help of a back-up argument [option (a)], (ii) the material thing’s existence is known with suggestion and with the help of a back-up argument [option (b)]. But case (i) seems impossible because absent any element of suggestion – even the suggestion of solidity based on what is seen – there seems to be no knowledge of material existence (this much Berkeley himself teaches us in Theory of Vision), and case (ii) is the one that Berkeley rules out in step (6) of the argument. So, (1)’s consequent will be false if ‘immediately perceived’ is taken in the no-suggestion sense, and we have already seen that (1)’s consequent is false (given the exclusive use of ‘or’) if ‘immediately perceived’ is taken in the no-inference, psychological sense. So, if we assume the truth of (1)’s antecedent and read either the noninference or the no-suggestion sense of ‘immediately perceived’ into the premise, then there will no case in which its consequent is not false. It follows (assuming there is not some fourth sense of the term that we need to consider) that the only sense of ‘immediately perceived’ remaining that allows (1) to be true is the epistemological one. But what is the justification for premise (1)? Well, it rests on the regress of corroborations that is generated by the possibility of hallucinations and dreams. To see this, let us use the following abbreviations: ● ●

●

K = We know that material things exist. (a) = We know that material things exist by immediately perceiving them by sense. (b) = We know that material things exist by inferring their existence from what is immediately perceived by sense.

Then the regress of corroborations shows that: ●

(c) If K, then if not (a) then (b). [K ⊃ (∼a ⊃ b)]

This is because if we do not know that a material thing exists by immediately perceiving it, then it seems that we can know this only by appealing to other

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perceptions for corroboration. But since each of those corroborating perceptions, taken individually, is subject to the same difficulty – i.e. since it too could be duplicated even though no material thing were being perceived – it seems that we could know of a material thing’s existence only if we could infer it from some sufficiently rich set of perceptual experiences. But (c) is logically equivalent to: ●

(d) If K, then either (a) or (b)

[K ⊃ (a v b)]

which is identical to premise (1). Premise (2) is of course accepted by Locke, and it can justified by appealing to the possibility of hallucinations and dreams and to the multiple alternative possible causes of any perceptual experience. The next premise – line (4) (‘Our only evidence that material things exist – our sensations or ideas – could be exactly the same even if no material things existed’) could also be stated this way:

(i) There is in principle no way of knowing that any material thing exists other than by immediately perceiving certain ideas or sensations and

(ii) There is only a contingent relation between any set of ideas or sensations, no matter how prolonged, systematic, and vivid, and the existence of any material thing. Any philosopher who tries to defend the senses by an inference to the best explanation is committed to (i) and (ii), and must therefore accept premise (4). For to deny (i) is to abandon the whole idea that knowledge of material things can only be based on some sort of inference from items that can be known without corroboration, and to deny (ii) is to deny that this inference is any sort of non-deductive inference. The next premise, line (5), claims that if (4) is true – i.e. that if (i) and (ii) are both true – then we cannot possibly be justified in inferring the existence of a material thing from the occurrence of any set of ideas or sensations (in which case, assuming that knowledge requires justification, we cannot know the existence of a material thing by such an inference). This is a key contention of the argument, and one that seems difficult to deny. Berkeley’s own reply to scepticism is to accept (i) but to deny (ii), by reducing bodies to collections of ideas. So his cure for the scepticism that he powerfully argues Locke’s epistemology leaves us with is idealism. I believe that the cure is worse than the disease, but that is another story.29

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Notes 1 Berkeley also attacks this theory by invoking his ‘Likeness Principle’. I have discussed this topic in Georges Dicker, ‘An Idea Can Be Like Nothing But An Idea,’ History of Philosophy Quarterly, 2, 1 (January 1985), 39–52. Reprinted in Walter E. Creery (ed.), George Berkeley: Critical Assessments, 3 vols. (London: Routledge, 1991), Vol. III , 162–76, and in Georges Dicker, Berkeley’s Idealism: A Critical Examination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 149–69. Finally, as we shall see in Part II , Berkeley also has a more purely epistemological argument against Locke. 2 ‘P’ is the abbreviation of the title, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, and references to that work are to section numbers in Part I. 3 ‘Essay’ is the shortened title for Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and references to that work are to the book number, chapter number, section number and page number in John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1689]1975). 4 ‘Three Dialogues’ is the shortened title for Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. ‘3D’ will be the abbreviation for the title, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. References to this work will be by page number in A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (eds.), The Works of George Berkeley, Volume II (London: Nelson, 1949). 5 I shall henceforth refer to this statement impartially as ‘the PPI ’, as ‘premise (1) of the argument from the PPI ’, as ‘premise (1)’ and simply as ‘(1)’. 6 Berkeley’s most explicit statement of the argument is this, said by Philonous: ‘But the causes of our sensations are not things immediately perceived, and therefore not sensible’ (3D: 191). This is obviously an enthymeme whose missing premise is ‘sensible things are immediately perceived’, which is equivalent to the PPI . I have argued elsewhere that Philonous reverts to this argument and variants of it several times. See Dicker, Berkeley’s Idealism: A Critical Examination, 119–22 and my articles on immediate perception listed in its bibliography. 7 Samuel C. Rickless, Berkeley’s Argument for Idealism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 56. Details aside, George Pappas defends a similar view in his Berkeley’s Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 147–82. 8 Georges Dicker, ‘The Concept of Immediate Perception in Berkeley’s Immaterialism,’ 51–2, 54–7. In Colin M. Turbayne, ed., Berkeley: Critical and Interpretive Essays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 48–66. 9 My view on this point changed as a result of reading Pappas, Berkeley’s Thought, 170–1. For details see Dicker, Berkeley’s Idealism: A Critical Examination, 134–5. 10 ‘Theory of Vision’ is the shortened title for Berkeley’s An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, and ‘Theory of Vision Vindicated’ is the shortened title for his Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained.

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11 ‘TVV ’ is the abbreviation of the title, Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained, and references to that work are to section numbers. In one place in the same work, Berkeley still wants to contrast suggestion with perception (TVV 52). 12 See 3D: 174–5, 183, 191, 194–5, 203, 204, 205. 13 Elsewhere I call this sense of immediate perception ‘immediately perceivedp’. See Dicker, Berkeley’s Idealism: A Critical Examination, 87, 122, 127–8, and the articles mentioned in note 6. 14 Roderick M. Chisholm, Perceiving: A Philosophical Study (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957), 158–9. 15 ‘TV ’ is the abbreviation of the title, An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, and references to that work are to section numbers. 16 Here I agree with Rickless, Berkeley’s Argument for Idealism, 24, and I must retract a suggestion to the contrary that I made in ‘The Concept of Immmediate Perception in Berkeley’s Immaterialism’, 55–6. 17 Elsewhere I call this sense of immediate perception ‘immediately perceivede’. See Dicker, Berkeley’s Idealism: A Critical Examination, 86, 127–30, and the articles mentioned in note 6. 18 See Dicker, Berkeley’s Idealism: A Critical Examination, 128–30 and the articles mentioned in note 6. 19 These notebooks are published under the title, Philosophical Commentaries, in A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (eds.), The Works of George Berkeley, Volume I, pp. 1–139. (London: Nelson, 1948). 20 Rickless, Berkeley’s Argument for Idealism, 41–2. 21 Ibid., 42n. 22 René Descartes, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Volume II , trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 19. 23 One book on Berkeley that shows very well that he operates with different senses of immediate perception (including notably an epistemological one), though it does not use technical definitions, as do Pappas, Rickess, and I, is G. J. Warnock, Berkeley (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1982 [1953]), especially pp. 126–40 and pp. 152–170. 24 See Georges Dicker, Dewey’s Theory of Knowing (Philadephia: Philosophical Monographs, 1976), 4–5. 25 The analysis of the problem of perception that follows, as well as of Locke’s attempt to solve it and of Berkeley’s critique of that attempt, is based on a more detailed exposition given in Dicker, Berkeley’s Idealism: A Critical Examination, 29–35, 37–42, 48–63, 194–200. 26 Thus in introducing the topic of ‘sensitive knowledge’ (= perceptual knowledge) in the Essay, Locke writes: ‘There is, indeed, another Perception of the Mind, employ’d

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about the particular existence of finite Beings without us; which . . . passes under the name of Knowledge. There can be nothing more certain than that the Idea we receive from an external Object is in our Minds; this is intuitive Knowledge. But whether there be anything more than barely that Idea in our Minds, whether we can thence certainly infer the existence of anything without us, which corresponds to that Idea, is that, whereof some Men think there may be a question made, because Men may have such Ideas in their Minds, when no such Thing exists, no such Object affects their Senses’ (Essay IV.ii.14: 537). Here Locke puts his finger on the fundamental point behind the classic problem of perception – that any perceptual experience obtained by perceiving a material thing can be duplicated when no such thing is being perceived – a point that is different from, and not to be confused with, the view that we can never perceive material things. 27 ‘Principles’ is the shortened title for A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. 28 For brevity’s sake I shall here discuss only section 18; I disuss sections 19 and 20 in Dicker, Berkeley’s Idealism A Critical Examination, 198–200. 29 Ibid., 245–51, 253–70, 281–95.

16

Berkeley and Malebranche Charles J. McCracken

Berkeley was always prepared for the possibility that his philosophy might be confused with that of the seventeenth-century French thinker Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), a philosopher whose major works had all been translated into English late in the seventeenth century. Malebranche was widely read in Britain and Ireland, and Berkeley himself would later seek to meet him – with what success we do not know – when, in 1713, he visited Paris for the first time.1 Thus, towards the end of the Principles, Berkeley was at pains to say he did not hold that ‘we see corporeal things, not by themselves, but by seeing that which represents them in the essence of God, which doctrine is I must confess to me incomprehensible’.2 Malebranche is not explicitly named here, but it would be clear to any reader with some knowledge of his philosophy that the reference is to him. Nonetheless, a 1713 review of the Principles in the Jesuit journal Mémoires de Trévoux pronounced Berkeley ‘un Malebranchiste de bonne foi’ – a bona fide Malebranchist.3 It was a view that was to be shared by a number of others in the eighteenth century, among them Samuel Clarke, Henry Bolingbroke, Thomas Reid and James Beattie.4 Berkeley repeatedly sought to dispel this identification, adding to the revised (1734) edition of the Three Dialogues a passage in which Philonous, Berkeley’s spokesman, listed important differences between Berkeley’s and Malebranche’s views, ending with the declaration that ‘upon the whole there are no principles more fundamentally opposite than his and mine’.5 Berkeley was not without justification for insisting that his philosophy differed radically from Malebranche’s – Malebranche, after all, made a distinction between ideas and sensations, believed in abstract ideas, affirmed the existence of matter and held that God is the cause of human volitions, all views that Berkeley emphatically rejected. Yet it was no accident that many readers thought they heard in him an echo of Malebranche. It was not until 1934, though, with the publication of

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Berkeley and Malebranche, by A. A. Luce (1934), the foremost Berkeley scholar of the twentieth century, that the debt the Irish thinker owed to the Frenchman was first shown in detail. Numerous entries in Berkeley’s Notebooks show that he was studying Malebranche’s Search after Truth (hereafter Search) during the period when he was working out his views.6 These entries often show Berkeley hostile to one view or another of Malebranche’s, but there are nonetheless noteworthy elements of Berkeley’s philosophy that seem to reflect Malebranche’s influence. The most important of these – important because it was a point central to both their philosophies – was the contrast each drew between the ‘Heathen’ and the ‘Christian’ views of nature. The ‘Heathen’ view, according to Malebranche, consists in the belief that the things in nature are themselves endowed with causal powers, whereas the ‘Christian’ view recognizes that everything occurring in nature depends directly on God as its sole cause. But, said Malebranche, Christian philosophers have failed to recognize that ‘the Nature of the Heathen philosophers is a chimera’, because the Christian philosophers, whether Scholastics or Cartesians, while recognizing that God is the ultimate cause of all that occurs, have supposed that nature is filled with ‘secondary causes’ – powers in things to produce effects in other things.7 Berkeley’s view, and even the language he expressed it in, was the same. If one means by ‘Nature’ a realm of things that have the power to produce effects, rather than ascribing those effects ‘to the immediate and sole operation of God’, then ‘Nature in this acceptation is a vain chimera introduced by those heathens, who had not just notions of the omnipresence and perfection of God’. That the heathen philosophers held such a view was unsurprising, according to Berkeley, but it was astonishing ‘that it should be received among Christians professing belief in the Holy Scriptures’ (Principles §150). Both Malebranche and Berkeley saw, as a central mission of their philosophies, the demonstration of the immediate dependence of the things in nature on God (though, as we shall see later, Berkeley rejected Malebranche’s view that all events, including voluntary human actions, are caused by God). Berkeley was, however, to press beyond Malebranche in this matter. Where Malebranche had held that the Christian view of nature entails that there are no corporeal powers in nature, Berkeley insisted that the Christian view also entails that there are no corporeal substances in nature. Malebranche himself had said that matter is ‘dead’, ‘inert’, ‘good for nothing’.8 It was, therefore, according to Berkeley, ‘very unaccountable and extravagant’ for Malebranche and those who thought like him to suppose that God had made ‘an innumerable multitude of

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created beings, which they acknowledge are not capable of producing any one effect in Nature, and which therefore are made to no manner of purpose, since God might have done everything as well without them’ (Principles §53; cf. §§61– 6). Malebranche had also insisted that God, not material things, is the cause of all our sensations, which sensations, he said, are a ‘natural revelation’ whereby God tells us what we must do to protect and preserve our bodies. Berkeley too held that our sensations ‘constitute an universal language of the Author of Nature’, whereby God informs us of what we must do for ‘the preservation and wellbeing of our bodies, as also to avoid whatever may be harmful and destructive to them’.9 But since Malebranche himself insisted that God is the immediate cause of our sensations, what reason would God have to create a world of inefficacious material substances as the correlate of those sensations? Berkeley’s answer, of course, was that God would have no reason to create such a world – a view he thought Malebranche, who said that ‘God always acts by the simplest ways’, should also have embraced. But notwithstanding this crucial difference between the two thinkers, it is likely that, as Berkeley had studied the Search at the very time when he was working out his own stance, Malebranche’s insistence that all events in nature depend directly and immediately on God, and the arguments he adduced in support of that view (some of which Berkeley was himself to use), had an important influence on Berkeley.

The existence of matter The influence of the Search on Berkeley was not limited, however, to this doctrine. In Malebranche he would also have encountered prototypes of several arguments he himself was to use against the existence of matter. For although Malebranche continued to believe in the existence of material substances, he disagreed with Descartes that reasoning can prove their existence with certainty. We can only be certain that matter exists, he held, because Scripture reveals that God created the heavens and the earth. Malebranche offered various arguments in defence of the claim that we cannot prove with certainty that matter exists, and some of them are quite similar to some arguments Berkeley was to give in defence of immaterialism. Thus, Malebranche argued that neither the senses nor reason can prove the existence of bodies (Malebranche supposed that ‘bodies’, ‘extended substances’, ‘material substances’ and ‘matter’ all name the same thing; Berkeley, of course, was sharply to distinguish ‘bodies’, in whose existence he believed, from ‘matter’, whose existence he denied). The senses cannot prove that bodies

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exist, said Malebranche, for we cannot directly perceive bodies by our senses nor are bodies the cause of our sensations. And reason cannot prove that bodies exist, for it can only establish what is necessarily the case, and bodies – if there are any – exist not from any necessity but only because God has freely chosen to create them.10 In Principles §18, Berkeley too argued that neither sense nor reason can prove that matter exists. Like Malebranche, he argued that the senses cannot, because ‘by them we have the knowledge only of our sensations, ideas, or those things that are immediately perceived by sense’. He did not give the same argument that Malebranche had given for the claim that reason cannot prove that matter exists, arguing instead that ‘what happens in dreams, phrensies, and the like puts it beyond dispute’ that we could have sensations ‘though no bodies existed without, resembling them’. But that was an argument Malebranche himself had used elsewhere, arguing that dreams and what happens to people in a high fever show that to have an idea ‘there need not be any external thing like that idea’.11 Berkeley had concluded that since it is possible for ‘an intelligence, without the help of external bodies, to be affected with the same train of sensations or ideas that you are’, such an intelligence would have ‘all the reasons to believe the existence of corporeal substances’ that we have (Principles §19). This should give us pause in our conviction that, because we have sensations, there must be ‘external bodies’ corresponding to them (Principles §20). Malebranche had made the same point, arguing that, since God can cause all our sensations himself, the senses do not prove that there are ‘external bodies’ (corps hors de nous – Malebranche’s curious expression that Taylor had translated as ‘external bodies’, the term Berkeley also used).12 But although Malebranche held that we, were it not for the teaching of Scripture, could not establish with certainty that matter exists, he did think that Descartes’ argument for the existence of bodies in the Sixth Meditation proved their existence highly probable. And he accepted Descartes’ view that extension is the essence of material substances (that is, that without which they cannot exist). Because of this, he sought to combat the Scholastic view that extension is just an ‘accident’ of bodies, not their essence. He did this by arguing that if you ask the Schoolmen what their concept of matter is, their reply makes it clear that they have no definite idea of what matter is, but only the idea of some ‘being or substance in general’. But such an idea, said Malebranche, is too vague to provide us with any definite idea of what matter can be. Now Malebranche did not at all deny that we have an idea of ‘being in general’ – to the contrary, he insisted that that idea is involved in any idea we have of particular things. But he also insisted

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that our idea of any particular thing must be not ‘the indefinite idea of being in general’, but the idea of something having a determinate essence. Descartes had provided, he held, just such a definite idea of matter’s essence, by showing that extension is that without which a body cannot exist. The Schoolmen’s idea of matter, by contrast, contains ‘nothing real and cannot even be used to explain natural effects’.13 Where Malebranche argued that the Schoolmen’s concept of matter was nothing more than the idea of being in general, Berkeley made the same claim, but against philosophers more generally. Ask the ‘most accurate philosophers’ what they mean by the expression material substance and they will ‘acknowledge they have no other meaning annexed to those sounds but the idea of being in general, together with the relative notion of supporting accidents’ (Principles §17). While Locke has long been recognized as a source of this view,14 it was Malebranche who expressly argued that if we adopt the Schoolmen’s view of matter, which (he claimed) amounts to nothing more than the idea of being in general, then we admit we really have no idea of matter at all. It seems plausible to see in Malebranche’s argument the prototype of Berkeley’s argument, even though the latter’s argument proceeded from a very different premise from Malebranche’s – Malebranche insisted that we do indeed have an idea of being in general, but claimed that it alone is never sufficient for us to conceive the nature of any particular thing, whereas Berkeley denied that we can even form an idea of being in general, which is ‘the most abstract and incomprehensible of all other’ (Principles §17). Another way in which the Search was almost certainly instructive to the young Berkeley was in its detailed argument that our ideas of the primary qualities (extension, figure, motion and distance) vary just as much with changes in the condition or position of the perceiver as do our ideas of the secondary qualities (colour, heat, sound, smell, taste). It was widely agreed that there is nothing in bodies that resembles our ideas of the secondary qualities (or ‘sense qualities’, as Malebranche called them), whereas the primary qualities were widely supposed to be like our ideas of them. But in the first book of the Search, Malebranche examined both kinds of quality in detail and concluded that the kinds of argument that were used to prove that secondary qualities are not in bodies in the way they appear to our senses to be – arguments from how these qualities vary depending on the perceiver’s condition – could be used to prove the same thing about the primary qualities. Berkeley, from very early in his notebooks, adopted a similar view: ‘Primary ideas prov’d not to exist in matter, after the same manner that secondary ones are prov’d not to exist therein’

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(Notebooks 20). Now Locke, in the Essay, had discussed both the primary and the secondary qualities at length (indeed it was Locke, following Boyle, who introduced these names for them, though the distinction was an old one). But the argument Malebranche had insisted on – an argument Berkeley was to adopt – to prove that the ideas we get from our senses are not present in the material object (the argument that our ideas of the primary qualities are just as relative to the condition and position of the perceiver as are our ideas of secondary qualities) was not one Berkeley would have met in Locke’s Essay. To the contrary, according to Locke the ‘idea of motion represents it as it really is in the manna moving: a circle or square are the same, whether in idea or existence, in the mind, or in the manna’ (Essay II .viii.18). Descartes had expressed much the same view in the Principles of Philosophy, Part I, §70. By contrast, Malebranche insisted that ‘through sight we cannot even ascertain whether a circle or a square, the simplest of figures, are not in fact an ellipse and a parallelogram, although these figures might be in our hands and very close to our eyes’.15 Malebranche’s purpose in arguing that our ideas of both primary and secondary qualities vary with our condition and position was not to impugn the existence of material substances, but rather to show that the senses regularly mislead us. This view of the senses was one Berkeley firmly repudiated. But Malebranche had noted that this variability could raise a question about the very existence of material substances: ‘What evidence do you have that an impression that is deceptive not only with regard to sense qualities, but also with regard to size, figure, and motion of bodies, is not so with regard to the actual existence of these same bodies?’16 Pierre Bayle used this as grounds for calling the existence of bodies into question, in his article on Zeno of Elea, in the Dictionnaire historique et critique – an article there is good reason to believe Berkeley had read – building explicitly on Malebranche’s treatment of the relativity of the primary qualities.17 Berkeley came in time to recognize the limitations of the argument from the relativity of perceived qualities and did not put great weight on it in the Principles (cf. Principles §§14–15), but he did give it prominence in the Three Dialogues, and it is noteworthy that he there took up the primary and secondary qualities in much the same order that Malebranche had taken them up in Book One of the Search, and often gave much the same arguments to prove their relativity to the perceiver as Malebranche had given.18 Several other Malebranchean doctrines were of some importance for Berkeley, and the rest of this chapter will look at three of them: the theory of ‘the vision of things in God’; the doctrine of ‘occasional causes’ (Occasionalism); and the claim that we know the human mind not by way of idea but by ‘inner feeling’.

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The vision of things in God Central to his theory of the ‘vision of all things in God’ was the radical distinction Malebranche drew between ideas and sensations. Our ideas of bodies, according to Malebranche, are not modifications (‘modes’) of the human mind at all, but rather a portion of God’s idea of infinite extension (‘infinite intelligible extension’) that God ‘unites’ our minds to when physically extended objects are present to one or another of our sense organs. Sensations, on the other hand, are modes of our minds, which we ‘paint’ or project onto the portion of intelligible extension that God unites our minds to. It is by this projection of our sensations onto intelligible extension that particular bodies are made visible, tangible, etc., to us. Thus, when I look at, touch and taste an orange, the colour I see, the texture I feel, the flavour I taste, are my sensations, which are projected onto a part of purely intelligible extension (one without colour, texture, etc.), which intelligible extension (taken in its infinite totality) is God’s archetypal idea of extension.19 Berkeley completely rejected this theory, calling it unintelligible and saying it rested on a belief in abstract ideas – a belief Berkeley took himself to have refuted in the Introduction to the Principles. For Berkeley, our sensations are ideas (we also have other ideas, those we imagine or remember, but those ideas themselves are ultimately based on sensations we have previously had) and no distinction of the sort Malebranche tried to draw between ideas and sensations is intelligible. And yet a Berkeleian idea seems, in some ways, to be a sort of synthesis of a Malebranchean idea and a Malebranchean sensation. For, like a Malebranchean idea, a Berkeleian idea is not a mode of the mind (Principles §49), but something radically different from minds or states of mind (Principles §89). Ideas, said Berkeley, can exist even when we do not perceive them, ‘since there may be some other spirit that perceives them, though we do not’ (Principles §48). In the Three Dialogues, Berkeley makes clear who that other spirit is: it is ‘an omnipresent eternal Mind, which knows and comprehends all things’.20 In the Three Dialogues, Hylas asks whether the tree we see exists independently of our minds. Philonous replies that it does, because it ‘is truly known and comprehended by (that is, exists in) the infinite mind of God’.21 It is such claims that led some of Berkeley’s early readers to suppose that he subscribed to Malebranche’s doctrine of the vision of things in God. But while Berkeley sometimes stresses that ideas are independent of our minds (especially when eager to show his doctrine is compatible with our ordinary belief that the things we perceive do not depend on us), at other times he stresses that they are ‘inert, fleeting, dependent beings, which subsist not by themselves but are supported by, or exist in minds or spiritual substances’

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(Principles §89, Berkeley’s italics). And here Berkeleian ideas sound quite a lot like Malebranchean sensations – transient things that are caused directly in us by God. There is, I think, a certain tension in Berkeley’s notion that ideas are in some sense independent of the human mind and yet are mere ‘fleeting, perishable passions’ (Principles §89, 1st edition) – a tension that perhaps arises from a notion of ideas that in some ways combines Malebranche’s concept of an idea with his concept of a sensation.

Occasionalism According to Malebranche’s theory of ‘occasional causes’, God alone is the true cause of all that occurs in the universe; what we usually take to be the causes of events are really just the occasions on which God produces effects. Thus, when ball A strikes ball B and B begins to move, A’s striking B is not the cause of B’s motion, but rather the occasion on which God causes B to move. Not, to be sure, that Malebranche thought that God produces all the events in the universe by a vast number of ‘particular volitions’; instead, he held, the laws of nature are God’s ‘general volitions’, and thus by a small number of basic laws of nature (i.e. a small number of general volitions), God produces all the effects that make up the course of nature. Malebranche’s chief argument for this claim is that, neither from what we perceive by our senses nor from our purely geometrical concept of an extended thing, do we get any concept of power. Our senses show us not powers in things, but only that one event is followed by another. Nor does our geometrical concept of extension include any notion of power, for it is just the idea of something having figure and mobility. Our inner awareness, however, provides us with a notion of volition or the will, and our concept of God includes the notion that God’s will is unlimited – that is, that God can bring about any (non-contradictory) state of affairs just by willing it. God requires no instruments, Malebranche never tired of saying, to work his will. So the only clear idea we have of a power to bring about effects is our concept of God’s unlimited ability to produce whatever he wills. Since nothing can happen unless God wills it, and whatever God wills does happen, his will is both the necessary and the sufficient cause of all events. Hence it is unnecessary, indeed redundant, to suppose any ‘secondary causes’ when accounting for what occurs in the universe.22 Berkeley accepted part of this doctrine. He too argued that we have no idea of a power in bodies (which, for Berkeley, are complexes of sensory ideas) to produce effects; he too held that our notion of causal agency comes from our

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notion of the will (Principles §§25–8). And he held, as we have seen, that events in nature are immediately caused by God. In these matters he followed Malebranche. But he departed from him in two important ways. First, Malebranche held that all events, including human volitions and the actions they give rise to, are caused by God. But that, Berkeley believed, would destroy our free will and our moral responsibility. He therefore qualified the claim: all events that do not depend on the will of human beings or other finite spirits (e.g. angels) are caused by God. But we are the true causes of our own volitions and the actions they produce. ‘We move our legs our selves. ’Tis we that will their movement. Herein I differ from Malbranche’ (Notebooks 548). The other way his account of causality departed from Malebranche’s was about what the ‘occasions’ are that lead God to cause certain events. According to Malebranche, events occurring in material objects are occasions on which God causes certain other events to occur. Some of these are events in inanimate material objects (the first ball striking the second is the occasion for God to cause the second to move); others are events in those material substances that are human bodies, which are occasions for God to cause events in human minds (thus on the occasion of events occurring in our sense organs and our brains, God causes sensations in our minds). By the same token, certain events in our minds (e.g. my willing my legs to move) are the occasions for God to cause correlated events (e.g. my legs moving) in those material objects that are our bodies. Now since Berkeley denied that there are any material substances, he of course rejected this whole doctrine (Principles §§67–76). Nonetheless, what Malebranche had said of bodies (they never cause anything), Berkeley said about ideas: ‘All our ideas, sensations, or the things which we perceive, by whatsoever names they may be distinguished, are visibly inactive, there is nothing of power or agency included in them’ (Principles §25). Thus when we see two bodies collide and hear a loud noise, it is not the collision of the bodies that causes the sound – it is God (Principles §§32–3). This is still a version of Occasionalism, with ideas as the occasion on which God produces other ideas in the mind. But as we have seen, it is only a partial Occasionalism, for the human will is the true cause of our voluntary actions.

Our knowledge of the mind In his views about the mind, Berkeley (who used the words ‘mind’, ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ interchangeably) was closer to Descartes than to Malebranche.23 Although

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Malebranche held that the mind is an incorporeal substance, he denied that we can know its nature. By contrast, like Descartes, Berkeley believed both that the mind is an incorporeal substance and that we can know what it is – it is a thing that perceives and acts: Existence of a spirit, he said, is percipere and agere (Notebooks 429–9a). But there is one notable point at which Berkeley’s view of the mind is closer to Malebranche’s than to Descartes’ (or Locke’s), for both Berkeley and Malebranche denied that we have an idea of the mind; instead, both said, our knowledge of the mind depends on what Berkeley called ‘inward feeling’ and what Malebranche called ‘sentiment intérieur’, where the two thinkers seem to have intended, by these terms, much the same thing.24 Even here there is, to be sure, an important difference in their views, a difference that arose from the ways in which they understood what an idea is. According to Berkeley, there could not be, even in principle, an idea of the mind, because ideas are passive things, whereas minds are active things, and hence the mind could never be represented by an idea (Principles §§137–8). Malebranche, on the other hand, held that God must have an idea of the human mind – otherwise he could not have created it; but, said Malebranche, although God has disclosed to us his idea of the body, he has not chosen to disclose to us his idea of the human mind – perhaps because if we had clear ideas of both our mind and our body, their union would be weakened. Despite this important difference, it is noteworthy that throughout his first notebook, Berkeley had agreed with Descartes and Locke that we have an idea of the mind – had held, indeed, that we must have an idea of the mind if we are to have any knowledge of it (Notebooks 378). In what is generally taken to be his second notebook, however, Berkeley completely changed his mind about this matter, now arguing that we have no idea of the mind. This had been one of Malebranche’s most celebrated doctrines – one of the ways in which he departed sharply from the Cartesians – and it seems plausible that it was his reading of the Search that first suggested this view to Berkeley as a serious possibility. We may say in conclusion that Berkeley’s relation to Malebranche was far more complex than would be supposed from his claim that ‘there are no principles more fundamentally opposite than his and mine’.

Notes 1 On his attempt to meet Malebranche, see Berkeley’s letters to John Percival and Thomas Prior in Works, 1948–59, v. 8, pp. 73–6.

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2 Berkeley, Principles §148. 3 McCracken, C. J. and Tipton, I. C., eds. (2000), Berkeley’s Principles and Dialogues: Background Source Materials. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 178. 4 See McCracken, C. J. (1983), Malebranche and British Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 205–7. 5 Works, v. 2, p. 214. 6 See Notebooks, entries 255, 257, 265, 269, 288, 358, 424, 548, 686, 686a, 800, 818; other entries have some relation to Occasionalism, Malebranche’s theory of causality, without naming Malebranche: 433, 499, 499a, 754, 794, 855, 856. 7 Malebranche, N. (1700), A Treatise concerning Nature and Grace, trans. Thomas Taylor. London: W. Bowyer, pp. 32–3. This translation by Thomas Taylor was published in a single volume along with Taylor’s translation of Malebranche’s Search after Truth, which Luce (1934) has shown is the version of the Search Berkeley probably read. Cf. also Search, Elucidation Fifteen, Reply to Seventh Proof. 8 Malebranche, N. (1980b), The Search after Truth, trans. T. M. Lennon and P. J. Olscamp. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, bk. 6, pt. 2, chaps. 3 and 6, and Elucidation Fifteen. 9 Berkeley, Theory of Vision §147. 10 Malebranche, 1980b, Elucidation Six. 11 Ibid., p. 217. 12 Cf. Malebranche, N. (1980a), Dialogues on Metaphysics, trans. W. Doney. New York: Abaris Books, I.6, for an extended argument for this claim. 13 Malebranche, 1980b, p. 245. 14 Locke, J. ([1689]1975), An Essay concerning Human Understanding. P. H. Nidditch (ed) Oxford: Clarendon Press, II .xxiii.2. 15 Malebranche, 1980b, p. 33. 16 Ibid., p. 573. 17 Bayle, P. (1697), Dictionnaire historique et critique. Rotterdam: Reinier Leers, ‘Zénon d’Elée’, remark G. That Berkeley had read this article and associated it with Malebranche seems clear from Notebooks, 358 and 424. 18 For a detailed examination of the similarities, see McCracken, 1983, pp. 218–24. 19 Malebranche, 1980b, bk. 3, pt. 2, chap. 6. 20 Works, v. 2, p. 248. 21 Works, v. 2, p. 235. Berkeley’s italics. 22 Malebranche, 1980b, Elucidation Fifteen. 23 See Chapter 13 in this volume on Berkeley and Descartes. 24 Cf. Berkeley, Principles §89 with Malebranche, 1980b, bk. 3, pt. 2, chap. 7, sect. 4 and Elucidation Eleven.

17

Reid’s Opposition to Berkeley James Van Cleve

Thomas Reid opposes the basic doctrines of Berkeley’s philosophy – that the only objects of human knowledge are ideas, that ideas and spirits are the only things that exist, that there is no such thing as matter, and that the objects of sight and touch are radically heterogeneous. At the same time, he appropriates key elements of Berkeley’s philosophy from the New Theory of Vision and makes them central in his own – especially Berkeley’s views about the manifold ways in which we gain information about features proper to one sense from cues belonging to another. In what follows, I discuss the agreements and disagreements between Berkeley and Reid under two headings: (I) ideas and idealism and (II ) space and sight.

Ideas and idealism Reid opposes the way of ideas – the theory that the immediate objects of perception are ideas existing only in the mind. He believes the way of ideas leads either to scepticism about the material world (as with Hume) or to idealism (as with Berkeley), and in the name of common sense he opposes them both. It is therefore surprising to find Reid telling us that he once embraced Berkeley’s philosophy in its entirety: ‘I once believed this doctrine of ideas so firmly, as to embrace the whole of Berkeley’s system in consequence of it’ (EIP 2.10:142).1 What led him to change his mind? More than anything else, it was the realization that the way of ideas leads to the loss of the mind itself, or its demotion to a bundle of ideas (see EIP 2.12:162–3, but also all of EIP 2.10–11). Reid is the progenitor of the view that Hume is Berkeley made consistent.

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The alleged unknowability of external things Reid holds there are two sceptical arguments we must accept if we embrace the theory of ideas. The first is an argument that we have no knowledge of the material world (if taken to be anything beyond our ideas); the second is an argument that we do not even have any conception of such a world. The first argument may be put thus (EIP 2.11:156–7):

1. 2. 3.

If we have any knowledge of a material world, it must be through our perceiving material things. But we do not perceive material things; we perceive nothing but our own ideas. Therefore, we have no knowledge of a material world.

Reid accepts the first premise because he thinks that if we do not perceive material things, we can know of their existence only through an inference that would be hopelessly problematic. He cites Descartes, Malebranche, Berkeley and Hume as having shown how questionable the required inference would be – either by trying to give a good argument for the material world but failing, as in the case of Descartes, or by arguing that no such argument is possible, as in the case of Hume. According to Hume, the inference would go from ideas as effects to objects as causes. We have reason to believe Ys are caused by Xs only if we have experienced Xs conjoined with Ys in the past, but if the theory of ideas is correct, we have never experienced any of the relevant Xs – that is, any objects other than our ideas (EHU 12). Reid holds that there is fortunately no need to make the problematic inference, since we perceive material things directly, contrary to the second premise. We need only open our eyes to see the sun and the moon (EIP 2.14:172). How, then, does he respond to the pantheon of philosophers who subscribe to the way of ideas?

Against the way of ideas Reid rebuts the following argument for the way of ideas, taken from Hume but also similar to some of Berkeley’s arguments in the Three Dialogues: ‘The table, which we see, seems to diminish as we remove further from it; but the real table, which exists independent of us, suffers no alteration. It was therefore nothing but its image which was present to the mind’ ([1748]1975:152). The argument may be put in the form of the following syllogism:

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1. 2. 3.

301

What I see diminishes in magnitude as I retreat from it. The table itself does not diminish in magnitude as I retreat from it. Therefore, what I see is not the table itself, but only its image or idea.

Ironically, Reid counters the argument by using a distinction he learned from Berkeley. He contends that Hume’s premises are true only if we restate them as follows (EIP 2.14:180–2):

1. 2. 3.

What I see diminishes in apparent magnitude as I retreat from it. The table itself does not diminish in real magnitude as I retreat from it. Therefore, what I see is not the table.

Here Reid is appropriating Berkeley’s distinction between visible and tangible magnitude, rebaptizing them as apparent and real magnitude. As Reid develops it, the real magnitude of an object is an intrinsic property of it, measured in inches or feet, whereas the apparent magnitude of an object is a relation between the object and a perceiver, measured by the angle the object subtends at the eye. It is easy to see that apparent magnitude diminishes with distance (objects subtending smaller angles when further away) whereas real magnitude does not. Once we record these facts correctly, Hume’s conclusion no longer follows. ‘The syllogism has what the logicians call two middle terms’ (EIP 2.14:182). Berkeley seems to take the way of ideas for granted without argument. ‘It is evident to anyone who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses . . . (PHK 1). Nonetheless, some of his arguments are adaptable to show that ideas, not external things, are what we perceive. Consider the following argument from the First Dialogue: The point will be past all doubt, if you consider, that in case colors were real properties or affections inherent in external bodies, they could admit of no alteration, without some change wrought in the very bodies themselves: but is it not evident from what has been said, that upon the use of microscopes, upon a change happening in the humors of the eye, or a variation of distance, without any manner of real alteration in the thing itself, the colors of any object are either changed, or totally disappear? Nay, all other circumstances remaining the same, change but the situation of some objects, and they shall present different colors to the eye. 3D, 185–6

The conclusion is that colours are not inherent in external bodies, but we could recruit the facts Berkeley cites to make an argument parallel to Hume’s:

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What I see changes in colour as I draw nearer to it. (When I look at the mountain from a distance through the haze, I see blue, but when I look at it from close up, I see green.) The mountain itself does not change in colour as I draw nearer to it. Therefore, what I see is not the mountain itself, but only an image or idea.

I conjecture that Reid would reply as follows: What changes as I approach the mountain is its apparent colour – first it appears blue, then green. Its appearing green or blue is not a matter of its presenting me with some item that really is green or blue, but is a dyadic relation between the mountain and me. What remains the same all along is the real colour of the mountain, which may be construed either as a disposition of the mountain to appear various colours in various circumstances or as the underlying molecular constitution that grounds the disposition. Like the table argument, the colour argument equivocates between apparent colour as a relational property and real colour as an inherent property. There is no one construal of colour that makes both premises true.

The alleged inconceivability of external things Reid attributes to Berkeley and Hume an argument more radical than the argument that we cannot know that matter exists – we cannot even conceive of matter. The argument runs as follows (IHM 5.8:75):

1. 2. 3.

‘We can have no conception of any thing but what resembles some sensation or idea in our minds.’ ‘The sensations and ideas in our minds can resemble nothing but the sensations and ideas in other minds.’ Therefore, ‘we can have no conception of an inanimate substance, such as matter is conceived to be, or of any of its qualities.’

The second premise states in Reid’s language Berkeley’s dictum that ‘an idea can be like nothing but an idea’ (P 8). Reid accepts this premise, and he credits Berkeley with having made it evident. The first premise states in Reid’s language Hume’s empiricist principle that all our simple ideas are copied from precedent impressions. This is the premise Reid challenges. He believes we have many conceptions – of external bodies, of substantial minds, and of active powers – that are exceptions to it. One of Reid’s points against the empiricist principle echoes Hylas in the Third Dialogue. Berkeley admits we can have no idea of spirits, since ideas do not resemble them, but he nonetheless insists that we have some conception of

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spirits – we have a notion of them. Then why, ask Hylas and Reid, cannot we have notions of matter? (EIP 2.11:154). But Reid’s most important point against the empiricist principle is his experimentum crucis.

Reid’s experimentum crucis Reid thinks it is as clear as anything can be that we have notions or conceptions of things and qualities that do not resemble any of our sensations. This is the moral of a thought experiment he calls his experimentum crucis (IHM 5.6:65–7 and 5.7:70). He points to a notion that Berkeley and Hume would certainly agree that we possess – the notion of extension – and contends that it could never be extracted from our sensations. He asks us to imagine a being furnished with a progressively richer array of sensations, beginning with the prick of a pin, advancing to more complex sensations such as the pressure of a blunt object, and culminating with the sensations accompanying the motion of his limbs. He asks at each step of the way whether those sensations would suffice to give anyone a conception of extension, and his answer is no. But if extension resembled anything in our sensations, a notion of it could be extracted from our sensations, so it follows that extension resembles nothing in our sensations. Our conception of extension is innate in Hume’s sense – not copied from anything in our sensations. The experimentum crucis concerns only tactile sensations. Friends of Berkeley may therefore ask, why can we not obtain our notion of extension from visual sensations? Reid’s answer is that we can indeed do this, but only in virtue of an innate human disposition, not in virtue of any resemblance between visual sensations and extended objects. Visual sensations are caused by retinal impressions, and retinal impressions cause us to see points of an object at various positions in external space. (This happens thanks to the ‘receive low, perceive high’ law discussed below.) To see points as occupying various positions in external space is to see an extended expanse, but the sensations that are the occasion of our so seeing are not themselves extended. Here is a case in which we conceive of something bearing no resemblance to any of our ideas or sensations.

Space and sight Berkeley’s Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision may be divided into four quadrants, devoted to the seeing of outward distance (2–51), the seeing of size

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(52–87), the seeing of up–down orientation (88–120) and the seeing of shape, along with the question of whether shape is an idea common to sight and touch (121–59). In each of the last three quadrants, Berkeley seeks to confirm his views by applying them to a famous test case: the moon illusion in quadrant 2, the problem of the inverted retinal image in quadrant 3 and Molyneux’s question in quadrant 4. Reid studied the Theory of Vision closely, and he has much to say about each of its four principal topics. He agrees with Berkeley’s contention in quadrant 1 that distance is not perceived immediately by sight, but only through visual signs that we have learned to associate with distance as apprehended by touch. Indeed, he uses Berkeley’s theory of distance perception as the model for what he calls acquired perception, an important extension of our cognitive capacities wherein we learn to perceive by one sense features given originally only to another (IHM 6.20–3 and EIP 2.21–2). Reid pays his respects to the New Theory in the following passage: The Theory of vision . . . contains very important discoveries, and marks of great genius. He distinguishes, more accurately than any that went before him, between the immediate objects of sight, and those of the other senses which are early associated with them. He shews, that distance, of itself, and immediately, is not seen; but that we learn to judge of it by certain sensations and perceptions which are connected with it. This is a very important observation; and I believe, was first made by this author. EIP 2.10:140

Nonetheless, Reid sharply disagrees with Berkeley’s views in quadrants 2, 3 and 4, disputing his theories and reaching opposite conclusions on each of the three famous test cases.

Distance Berkeley holds that sight alone gives us only a two-dimensional array of colours, arrayed along vertical and horizontal axes, but not along any near–far axis. It is only through touch and locomotion that we first apprehend the distances away from us of things; for example, we find that we must walk so many paces before we bump into the tree we see. We come to be able to perceive the distances of things by sight mediately, however; that is to say, we learn a battery of correlations between visual or ocular cues and distance as apprehended by touch and kinaesthesis, and these correlations enable us to make automatic

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judgements about the distances of objects on the basis of visual information alone. Reid agrees with everything in the preceding paragraph. In his language, outward distance is not an object of original perception by sight, but only of acquired perception, so called because it often seems so much like original perception that ordinary perceivers do not know the difference (cf. TV 51, IHM 6.20:173 and EIP 2.14:182). A person of common sense thinks that there are objects at various distances from us, that we see these objects, and that we see their distance immediately. Berkeley and Reid both depart from common sense in rejecting the last of these beliefs. Reid makes no further departures, but Berkeley makes two. First, he holds that the things whose distance we know by sight are not strictly seen by us; they are objects of touch only. The moon we see is a small yellow disc, but there is no small yellow disc where we take the moon to be, some 250,000 miles away (TV 44). Second, though Berkeley allows the reader of the Theory of Vision to believe there are objects at various distances from us, he intimates in the Principles that nothing is really any distance from us, spatial distance being reducible to the length of time required to reach certain tangible ideas (P 44). So we have four progressively more radical views, with Reid occupying row 2 and Berkeley row 4 of Table 17.1. I believe Berkeley and Reid are both wrong in the point on which they agree – that we do not see distance immediately. There is a way, not known in their day, in which we can perceive distance with our eyes alone without relying on touch, namely, stereopsis. Our two eyes receive slightly different views of any object towards which both are directed, and the amount of discrepancy between

Table 17.1 Four progressively more radical views regarding distance perception Are there objects at a distance from us?

Do we see these Do we see the objects? distance of these objects immediately?

Common sense

Yes

Yes

Yes

Reid and Berkeley up to TV 44

Yes

Yes

No

Berkeley in the rest of the Theory of Vision

Yes

No

No

Berkeley in P 42–4

No

No

No

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the views enables our visual systems to calculate the relative distances of objects and make us perceive differences in depth. For corroboration, see the discussion of ‘Stereo Sue’ in Van Cleve (2015).

Size Berkeley distinguishes visible magnitude from tangible magnitude. Tangible magnitude remains constant as objects move in relation to perceivers, while visible magnitude varies. As I bring a basketball from arm’s length to just in front of my face, its tangible magnitude remains constant, but its visible magnitude increases rapidly until it takes up nearly all my field of view. To speak more accurately, what increases is not its visible magnitude (that of the tangible basketball), but the magnitude of the associated visual object or, more accurately yet, the magnitudes in a series of distinct visible objects. As I bring the ball to my face, I see a series of round, orange visible objects, each larger than the last. As in the case of depth, we may come to judge tangible magnitude from visible cues, and thus perceive it by sight mediately. Reid follows Berkeley in distinguishing between visible and tangible magnitude but, unlike Berkeley, he holds that they may belong to the same objects. It is one and the same table that possesses a constant tangible or real magnitude and a varying visible or apparent magnitude. As explained on p. 301, this distinction is the key to Reid’s reply to Hume’s table argument for the way of ideas. Berkeley applies his account of size perception (that is, the perception of tangible magnitude based on visible cues) to an ancient puzzle: why does the moon look so much larger on the horizon than it does when higher in the sky? The horizon moon is the same in angular size as the zenith moon, as one may verify by comparing the moon at either location with the tip of one’s little finger. Yet the horizon moon appears to most observers to be at least half again as large as the zenith moon. What accounts for this difference? A venerable explanation, sometimes attributed to Ptolemy and still defended in our own day (Kaufman & Rock, 1962), invokes a relation between perceived size and perceived distance. Intervening objects and terrain make the horizon moon look farther away than the elevated moon. With constant angular size, greater perceived distance means greater perceived size. Hence the horizon moon is perceived as larger than the zenith moon. Berkeley rejects this explanation. He notes that if it were correct, the horizon moon should not appear larger when viewed through a tube or over a wall that

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cuts off one’s view of the intervening terrain; yet it does still appear larger in those circumstances, or so he claims (TV 70 and 77). Berkeley’s preferred explanation invokes the size cue of faintness. The horizon moon is seen through a larger tract of intervening atmosphere than is the zenith moon and consequently appears fainter. Other things being equal, fainter things look larger. Reid accepts the Ptolemaic explanation. He dismisses both Berkeley’s theory and Berkeley’s objection to Ptolemy: Bishop Berkeley therefore committed a mistake, when he attributed the large appearance of the horizontal moon to the faintness of her light, occasioned by its passing through a larger tract of atmosphere: for we are so much accustomed to see the moon in all degrees of faintness and brightness, from the greatest to the least, that we learn to make allowance for it; and do not imagine her magnitude increased by the faintness of her appearance. Besides, it is certain that the horizontal moon seen through a tube which cuts off the view of the interjacent ground, and of all terrestrial objects, loses all that unusual appearance of magnitude. IHM 6.22:184, my italics

Whoa! The horizon moon either continues to appear abnormally large when viewed through a tube or it does not. How could Reid and Berkeley disagree on such a seemingly easily resolvable matter of empirical fact? My own nighttime attempts to settle the matter proved equivocal, however, and it turns out that other investigators have disagreed on the same point, Molyneux and Euler siding with Berkeley and Malebranche and Reimann with Reid (Egan, 1998 and Ross & Plug, 2002: 120). Ross and Plug note that modern experiments using large numbers of subjects and quantitative methods show that ‘the presence of intervening objects, or terrain, can increase perceived size by about 34 per cent’ (2002: 133). In the moon illusion, perceived size is increased by about 50 per cent. Evidently, neither Reid nor Berkeley is entirely correct in his claims about the effects of seeing terrain on the moon illusion; pace Reid, it does not do everything, and pace Berkeley, it does not do nothing. Moreover, each of their explanations of the moon illusion faces independent difficulties. Reid’s Ptolemaic explanation encounters the problem that most observers report that the horizon moon appears closer than the elevated moon, not farther as postulated by that explanation. Berkeley’s faintness explanation runs up against the following difficulties: (1) the constellations are not less bright upon rising, but do then appear larger, and (2) the Apollo astronauts reported an

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earth illusion, even though the moon has no atmosphere to make the earth appear fainter upon rising (Egan, 1998). For further difficulties, see Ross and Plug (2002), chapter 6. To this day, none of the dozen or so explanations of the moon illusion has won consensus.

Situation By ‘situation’, Berkeley means the positions of objects as described by such terms as ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘high’, ‘low’, ‘erect’ and ‘inverted’. In Berkeley’s view, situation is not an immediate object of sight. Like distance, it is perceived by sight only after one has learned correlations between visual signs and tangible data. To have a visual perception of an apple as high on a branch is to know from visual cues that one must turn one’s eyes up to see the apple clearly or reach up to grasp its tangible counterpart. In the absence of visual–tangible associations, one could attach no meaning to terms like ‘high’ and ‘low’ as applied to objects of vision. Berkeley uses his theory to solve the conundrum of the inverted retinal image. The image of a tree on our retinas is inverted with respect to the tree, so why do we see the tree the right way up? The question may seem naive, resting on the dubious presupposition that retinal images are what we see. But even if the naive question is dismissed, a real question with several possible answers remains (Rock, 1975). Do we see the world the right way up because (1) the orientation of the retinal image does not matter? Or do we see the world the right way up because (2) the inverted image is the very means of upright vision, a lower point in the retinal image signifying a higher point in ambient space? In the latter case, does a lower point on the retina signify a higher point in space by virtue of (a) geometrical reasoning, (b) empirical learning or (c) an innate law of the human constitution? Berkeley and Reid agree in rejecting answer (2a), which was given by Descartes and Kepler (TV 89–90; IHM 6.11, 115–16). As for the remaining possibilities, Berkeley gives answer (1) in a passage or two, but gives pride of place to answer (2b); Reid gives answer (2c). The materials for answer (2b) are developed by Berkeley in TV 91–8, culminating with the following remark: ‘And this seems to me the true reason why he should call those objects uppermost that are painted on the lower part of his eye. For, by turning the eye up they shall be distinctly seen’ (TV 98). With this account, Berkeley answers the naive question and Rock’s question in one stroke. There is no reason to think the inverted image should make us see things upside down, since before learning sight–touch correlations we see things

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in no orientation whatsoever, and after learning such correlations we see things in their correct orientation. Moreover, the inverted image, rather than being irrelevant to the perception of orientation, is the means of our seeing objects erect once we have learned how to interpret it. Reid dismisses the naive problem by rejecting its presupposition that we perceive our own retinal images (IHM 6.12:121). He answers Rock’s question by saying the inverted image signifies an erect object not by virtue of learning, but innately. He cites the following as a law of nature: ‘Every point of the object is seen in the direction of a right line passing from the picture of that point on the retina through the centre of the eye’ (IMH 6.12:122–3). It is a consequence of this law that a point whose image is projected high on the retina will be seen as low in ambient space, and a point whose image is projected low will be seen as high; I therefore call it the ‘receive low, perceive high’ law. It implies that if a man’s feet are ‘painted’ high on our retinas and his head low (as they are when a man stands upright in front of us), we shall see his head as high and his feet as low. Reid points out that his answer to Rock’s question and Berkeley’s answer make conflicting predictions about certain hypothetical cases (IHM 6.12:116). Suppose someone had worn inverting lenses from birth, making his retinal images erect rather than inverted with respect to objects, as hypothesized by Berkeley in section 278 of his Notebooks. How would this person see the world? Berkeley’s view implies that the person would see nothing as erect or inverted initially – he would first have to learn associations with directions of reaching or looking. But after forming such associations, his erect image would signify for him an erect object in the same manner that in Berkeley’s theory an inverted image does for us now. It would cue him to reach up to touch a man’s face and down to touch his feet. On Reid’s theory, by contrast, the lens wearer would see objects as oriented right from the start – erect objects as inverted and inverted objects as erect – and he would continue to perceive them that way indefinitely, thanks to the ‘receive low, perceive high’ law.

Whose prediction is correct, Berkeley’s or Reid’s? A variant of the experiment Berkeley envisioned in his notebooks was actually carried out by the American psychologist G.M. Stratton (1896, 1897) in the 1890s. Stratton wore a blindfold over one eye and a set of lenses over the other that turned his retinal image by 180 degrees. The results over a period of three days, which I separate into three phases, are summed up in Stratton’s words as follows:

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Phase 1: When he first looked through the lenses, everything looked upside down. ‘All images at first appeared to be inverted; the room and all in it seemed upside down’. 1896: 6132 Phase 2: As time wore on, he learned to adjust his movements to the new scene, and things sometimes seemed normal again. ‘When . . . full attention was given to the outer objects, these frequently seemed to be in normal position’. 1896: 616 Phase 3: ‘On removing the glasses on the third day, there was no peculiar experience. Normal vision was restored instantaneously and without any disturbance in the natural appearance or position of objects’. 1896: 616

Phase 2 of the experiment is often taken to confirm Berkeley’s view. If seeing an object erect is just a matter of having the appropriate expectations about where to reach in order to feel various parts of it, then a person who systematically relearns where to reach will thereby see the world aright again, just as allegedly happened with Stratton in Phase 2. By the same token, Stratton apparently refutes Reid’s view, which implies that a man with inverting lenses would continue to see things as inverted no matter how well he learned to cope with his tangible environment. If those who wear inverting lenses achieve upright vision, Berkeley’s view is indeed upheld and Reid’s refuted. But is that really what happens? Doubts may be raised about this on two scores. First, as Rock points out, if Stratton had achieved genuine perceptual adaptation (not just motor adaptation) in Phase 2, there should have been a negative aftereffect in Phase 3. The world should have flipped again when he removed the lenses. But Stratton reports no such effect; on the contrary, he says ‘there was no peculiar experience’. Second, in an attempted replication of experiments like Stratton’s by Linden, Kallenbach, Heinecke, Singer, and Goebel (1999), the researchers reached the conclusion that the return of upright vision during adaptation to inverting spectacles is a myth. In their experiment, four subjects wore either inverting prisms or mirror spectacles. They rapidly achieved motor adaptation, becoming able to ride bicycles, negotiate department stores, and the like, but none of them reported a return of upright vision. Moreover, their introspective judgements that things continued to appear upside down were confirmed by independent tests, involving reading tasks and shape-from-shading tasks. In no previous experiments with inverting lenses were the subjects’ own impressions corroborated by such independent checks. In

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sum, the latest and most sophisticated experiment with inverting lenses confirms Reid’s position, not Berkeley’s.

Figure In the fourth quadrant of the Theory of Vision, Berkeley maintains that the items given to sight are not only numerically distinct from the items given to touch (as affirmed in TV 49), but also ‘specifically distinct’ from them, that is, different from them in species or kind (TV 121 and 127). This is Berkeley’s heterogeneity thesis; it implies that shape is not a common sensible. Visible things and tangible things do not both possess shape in any univocal sense of the term, and a tangible square bears no more likeness to a visible square than it does to the word ‘square’ (TV 140). Reid disagrees: Visible figures . . . have not only a resemblance to the plane tangible figures which have the same name, but are to all sense the same. . . . Berkeley therefore proceeds upon a capital mistake, in supposing that there is no resemblance betwixt the extension, figure, and position which we see, and that which we perceive by touch. IHM 6.11:118–19

Berkeley’s test case for the heterogeneity thesis is Molyneux’s question, first publicized by Locke: Would a man born blind and made to see recognize by sight alone cubes and globes that were previously known to him by touch? Berkeley says no. Diderot proposed an important amendment to the question: change it from globe vs. cube to circle vs. square. He reasoned that a subject gaining sight for the first time might not be able to perceive depth (as Berkeley maintained), in which case he would not be able to see anything as a three-dimensional globe or cube, but might still be able to distinguish and recognize two-dimensional visual figures like circles and squares. Berkeley says ‘no’ both to the original Molyneux question and to Diderot’s variant. In effect, he offers the following modus tollens:

1. 2. 3.

If visible squares resemble tangible squares, the answer to Molyneux’s question is yes. But in fact the answer is no. Therefore, visible squares do not resemble tangible squares.

He explains, as follows, why the first premise is true:

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Now, if a square surface perceived by touch be the same sort with a square surface perceived by sight, it is certain the blind man here mentioned might know a square surface as soon as he saw it. It is no more but introducing into his mind, by a new inlet, an idea he has been already well acquainted with. TV 133

Reid’s answer to Molyneux’s question is ‘yes’. He expresses confidence that Dr Saunderson, a blind mathematician of his acquaintance, could have figured out the visible appearances of cubes and spheres so as to know which is which upon seeing them for the first time (IHM 6.7:95–6). And if we confine the question to circles and squares, he thinks that even a mathematically unsophisticated person could know which is which, since a visible square and a tangible square resemble each other in figure as closely as a hot square and a cold square (IHM 6.11:118). So it appears that Reid would replace Berkeley’s modus tollens with his own modus ponens:

1. 2. 3.

If visible squares resemble tangible squares, the answer to Molyneux’s question is yes. Visible squares do resemble tangible squares. Therefore, the answer to Molyneux’s question is yes.

Who is right this time? For three centuries after Molyneux’s question was posed, the evidence drawn from cases of restored vision was equivocal. (See Van Cleve, 2015, for references and discussion.) Subjects who could recognize newly seen shapes may already have had relevant experience, and subjects who could not recognize them may have been unable to see shapes distinctly at all. But under the auspices of Project Prakash, a humanitarian and scientific project now underway in India, unequivocal answers may finally be forthcoming. In their first published results (Held et al., 2011), the Prakash researchers report that in five subjects operated on to cure congenital blindness, the mean success rate in matching seen to previously felt shapes was 58 per cent, not significantly above chance. Their results thus support a negative answer to Molyneux’s question. It should be noted, however, that the shapes used in their experiment were three-dimensional Lego blocks. On the two-dimensional Diderot variant of Molyneux’s question, the jury is still out. To summarize part II , Berkeley and Reid are both wrong in holding that depth cannot be seen immediately, and both are again wrong in their explanations of the moon illusion. Reid is right and Berkeley is wrong about inverted vision, and we do not yet know who is right on the two-dimensional version of Molyneux’s question.

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Notes 1 ‘EIP 2.10:142’ denotes Essay 2, Chapter 10, p. 142 of Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man ([1785] 2002) edited by Derek R. Brookes. University Park, PA : Pennsylvania State University Press. ‘IHM 5.8:75’ denotes Chapter 5, Section 8, p. 85 of Reid’s, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, edited by Derek R. Brookes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2 Now is the time to say something about Berkeley’s other solution to the inversion problem. In TV 111, Berkeley allows that there is, after all, a purely visual sense in which things may be said to high or low, erect or inverted. So long as a man’s feet are seen against the visible earth and his head against the visible sky, he is erect in a sense that owes nothing to touch or any other sense. There is no problem about the inverted retinal image because, however the image were turned, we would see things as we do – this is answer (1) to Rock’s question. As will readily be seen, this answer cannot accommodate Phase 1 of Stratton’s experiment. It implies that when the subject first donned the inverting lenses, there should have been no difference in his visual experience – but in fact there was.

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Berkeley and Hume on the Imagination Keota Fields

There is longstanding scholarly interest in David Hume’s intellectual debt to George Berkeley.1 Hume himself claims that in order to fully understand his metaphysics one should read Berkeley.2 Eighteenth-century readers of Hume, most notably Thomas Reid, took Hume’s radical scepticism to be the logical extension of Berkeley’s idealism. But by the mid-twentieth century, scholars were debating whether Hume had read Berkeley at all.3 While that debate is now settled (Hume indeed read Berkeley), questions linger about the extent of Berkeley’s intellectual influence on Hume. I argue that there is significant evidence that Berkeley strongly influenced Hume’s account of the faculty of imagination and its role in mental representation. Both Berkeley and Hume use what they call suggestion as a model for explaining how the imagination constructs mental representations. According to this model, representations are constructed from simple ideas in a manner analogous to how words are combined into sentences in order to signify states of affairs, and letters are combined into words in order to signify objects and properties. This semiotic model seems to be unique to Berkeley and Hume, and stands in contrast to resemblance models of mental representation adopted by other prominent early modern philosophers. Berkeley and Hume also draw similar conclusions about human psychology and metaphysics from their accounts of the imagination and its objects. Given the centrality of Hume’s account of mental representation to various aspects of his philosophical thought, what emerges is a picture of Berkeley as a major intellectual influence on Hume.4 Berkeley’s account of mental representation is best understood in the context of his extremely successful empirical theory of vision.5 There he seeks to explain visual perception of depth, size and orientation. Since Berkeley intends this to be an empirical theory, these explanations are based primarily on observational and experimental data, although he also makes extensive use of thought experiments.

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Those thought experiments are often variations on the Molyneux man – a natively blind subject who is asked to distinguish a cube from a sphere on the basis of visual sensations alone immediately after he begins to see (Molyneux 1688, quoted in Locke ([1689]1975). Berkeley rejects theories that explain visual representation of distance in terms of lines and angles because lines and angles do not exist in reality. They are theoretical constructs. Berkeley admits that lines, angles and other geometric models are instrumentally useful in a variety of scientific explanations. But the question of visual representation of distance seems to require an empirical explanation rather than an explanation in terms of theoretical constructs. He also rejects the claim that necessary connections among abstract mathematically quantifiable properties explain visual representations of distance. Instead, he argues that the correct explanation involves ‘suggestion’, ‘habit’ or ‘custom’, and that visual representation of distance is learned through experience (TV 16–17). I see a barn in a field. As I approach it, maintaining visual contact all the while, my visual sensations constantly change relative to my tactile and proprioceptive sensations until finally I reach the barn (perhaps I extend my hand to touch it). These successive sensations occur with a regularity that eventually allows me to estimate how far I would have to walk (e.g. the succession of tactile and proprioceptive sensations required) for me to reach the barn. Such estimates are made given only my initial visual sensations. But Berkeley does not think that these estimates are calculations. Instead, he thinks they are interpretations of visual sensations in terms of tactile sensations. I do not mentally attach, say, a certain number of paces to my visual sensations. Rather, I see the barn as being so-and-so succession of such-and-such tactile sensations away. Such interpretations happen, as it were, automatically and explain how we manage to see distances.6 Berkeley’s theory of vision uses language as a model for explaining how these interpretations work. Since tactile sensations are objects of experience they may be included in the explanation of visual distance perception along with visual sensations. Berkeley combines this data with suggestion to provide the following theory of visual representations of distance. Through experience of constant connections between visual and tangible sensations (including kinaesthetic and other tangible sensations) the imagination learns to use visual sensations as signs for tangible sensations. But just as there is only a contingent connection between signs and what they signify in a language, so too there is only a contingent connection between visual and tangible sensations. Visual sensations come to suggest or mean those tangible sensations that provide us with information about depth, size and situation just as words come to mean that

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which they signify through custom and habit. In vision we use tactile sensations to interpret our visual sensations so that visual perception is more informative than visual sensations alone.7 Berkeley proposes the following schematic account of how the imagination functions. Ideas of the imagination are less vivid copies of sensations. Berkeley calls sensations ‘real things’, by which I take him to mean that they are original, nonderivative objects of experience. Ideas of the imagination, in contrast, are derivative objects of experience, relying for their existence and content on antecedent sensations (P 33, 3D 235). The relation between sensations and ideas of the imagination is one of resemblance. Ideas of the imagination are copies or images that resemble sensations, and represent sensations in virtue of that resemblance. The imagination can also produce representations by ‘compounding, dividing or barely representing’ ideas originally perceived by sensation or reflection (P 1), so that the imagination is not limited to producing representations through resemblance. It can also produce representations through suggestion of nonresembling ideas. The imagination is free to do this because it has ‘an entire dependence on the will’. Suggestion includes conceiving, expecting and inferring. In all of these cases, an idea x suggests another idea y when x is a sign for y. According to Kenneth Winkler (2008, 134), Berkeley proposes several ways in which something becomes a sign including convention, annexation, appointment, co-presence in perception, and custom. The latter two, co-presence in perception (or contiguity) and custom, are what Berkeley uses to explain the imagination’s use of ideas as signs for other ideas, particularly when the ideas in question (sign and signified) do not resemble one another. Berkeley notices that sensations often occur in a contiguous manner. In my example of seeing a barn, I described a structured order of visual as well as tactile sensations. Berkeley recognizes that ‘ideas of sense’ have ‘a steadiness, order, and coherence, and are not excited at random . . . but in a regular train or series’.8 This coherence is governed by ‘the laws of nature’ and experience ‘teaches us that such and such ideas are attended with such and such other ideas’ (P 30). We not only observe sensations but we also observe certain regularities to hold between them. Those regularities may be either co-presence, as when one sees ice while simultaneously feeling its coldness and hardness; or they may be regularities of succession, as when each step towards a fire makes it appear larger and hotter. Berkeley goes on to argue that the imagination learns to unify ideas into representations of objects as a result of experienced contiguities of ideas. The interpretation of my visual sensations as discrete objects – a barn, a field, etc. – is the work of the imagination (P 1; 3D 245). Visual ideas of the far side of a

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magnolia tree are suggested by the imagination when only the near side is seen. Likewise, the imagination suggests tactile sensations of rough bark and smooth leaves although the tree is not touched. What the imagination does not suggest, for instance, are tactile ideas of liquidity when one has visual sensations of the tree’s bark. That is because such ideas are not regularly experienced together. The imagination also suggests ideas that might be experienced in succession to sensations presently experienced, as when visual sensations of a flame and tactile sensations of warmth suggest ideas of pain to come if I should get too close. The result of such suggestions is that for Berkeley the imagination rather than the intellect bears primary responsibility for representing external objects.9 Berkeley makes this point explicitly in his Theory of Vision Vindicated (TVV ): By a sensible object I understand that which is properly perceived by sense. Things properly perceived by sense are immediately perceived. Beside things properly and immediately perceived by any sense, there may be also other things suggested to the mind by means of those proper and immediate objects. Which things so suggested are not objects of that sense, being in truth only objects of the imagination, and originally belonging to some other sense or faculty. Thus, sounds are the proper object of hearing, being properly and immediately perceived by that, and by no other sense. But, by the mediation, of sounds or words all other things may be suggested to the mind, and yet things so suggested are not thought the object of hearing. TVV 9

There is scholarly debate over how Berkeley draws the distinction between immediate and mediate perception,10 but a consensus has emerged according to which Berkeley takes sensations to be immediately perceived (or, as he calls them, the immediate or proper objects of perception). Berkeley claims here that sensations are immediately perceived by some sensory faculty (say, vision) and that the imagination suggests or associates other ideas, formerly perceived either by the same sense faculty or by some other sense. In Berkeley’s example, a word is heard (i.e. immediately perceived by hearing) and the imagination associates with those sounds other ideas. For instance, when the word ‘apple’ is heard the imagination suggests visual ideas of certain colors, tactual ideas of smoothness and roundness, gustatory ideas of sweetness and crunchiness, etc. In the next paragraph, Berkeley extends this analysis to all mental representations: The peculiar objects of each sense, although they are truly or strictly perceived by that sense alone, may yet be suggested to the imagination by some other

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sense. The objects therefore of all the senses may become objects of imagination, which faculty represents all sensible things. A colour, therefore, which is truly perceived by sight alone, may, nevertheless, upon hearing the words blue or red, be apprehended by the imagination. It is in a primary and peculiar manner the object of sight: In a secondary manner it is the object of imagination: But cannot properly be supposed the object of hearing. TVV 10

Berkeley identifies a two-stage process by which the imagination acquires ideas and associates them with other ideas. First, ideas are immediately perceived by sense and all such immediately perceived ideas ‘may become objects of the imagination’, that is, any idea immediately perceived by sense is copied by the imagination and may thereafter be associated with another idea by the imagination. Such associations may include ideas from more than one sensory faculty although the ideas themselves are unique or exclusive to a particular sense faculty (e.g. colours are exclusive to vision, and cannot be sensed by touch, etc.). Berkeley concludes that the imagination represents objects by associating ideas from diverse senses. The resulting complex idea is ‘in a secondary manner’ the object of the imagination – by which Berkeley apparently means that representations are mediately perceived by the imagination although their constituent parts are ideas that are (or were previously) immediately perceived by one or another sense faculty. The means by which the imagination associates ideas of one sense faculty with ideas of another is called ‘suggestion’ in the passages above, but in a later passage Berkeley specifies that what he has in mind is a form of signification: Ideas which are observed to be connected with other ideas come to be considered as signs, by means whereof things not actually perceived by sense are signified or suggested to the imagination, whose objects they are, and which alone perceives them. And as sounds suggest other things, so characters suggest those sounds; and, in general, all signs suggest the things signified, there being no idea which may not offer to the mind another idea which hath been frequently joined with it. In certain cases a sign may suggest its correlate as an image, in others as an effect, in others as a cause. But where there is no such relation of similitude or causality, nor any necessary connexion whatsoever, two things, by their mere coexistence, or two ideas, merely by being perceived together, may suggest or signify one the other, their connexion being all the while arbitrary; for it is the connexion only, as such, that causeth this effect. TVV 39

The imagination associates two ideas by using one as a sign for the other. In some cases, the imagination uses an immediately perceived idea as a sign for

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an idea that is not immediately perceived – as when immediately perceived visual sensations of ice signify tactual sensations of coldness although no such tactile sensations are immediately perceived. In other cases, a mediately perceived idea of the imagination may signify other ideas of the imagination – as when I visually imagine an apple (i.e. I have certain ideas of color in my imagination) and that visual image signifies tactual sensations of smoothness, roundness, etc. Importantly, Berkeley claims that the imagination learns which ideas to associate as sign and signified through experience of ‘their mere coexistence’ or ‘being perceived together’. My imagination learns to associate visual ideas of ice with tactual ideas of cold because at some point I immediately perceived those ideas simultaneously. In 3D 254, Berkeley adds succession as a means by which the imagination learns to associate ideas as sign and signified, so that I learn to associate ideas x and y when y regularly succeeds x in my experience. Once an association is learned, the imagination can use an immediately perceived idea to signify an idea ‘not actually perceived by sense’. Such significations are ‘arbitrary’ (by which Berkeley means contingent – in contrast to a necessary connection – rather than random), and the regular experience of coexisting or successive ideas alone is sufficient to establish a semiotic connection between ideas.11 In TV, Berkeley supports this result with his analysis of the Molyneux man thought experiment. Berkeley thinks that the Molyneux man would be incapable of seeing objects at all. Rather, Berkeley says, ‘The objects intromitted by sight would seem to him . . . no other than a new set of thoughts or sensations’. The Molyneux man would not judge that he sees external objects, according to Berkeley, but rather, ‘the sun and stars, the remotest objects as well as the nearer, would all seem to be in his eye, or rather in his mind’ (TV 41). Elsewhere he says that the Molyneux man ‘would never think of men, trees, or any other objects that he had been accustomed to perceive by touch, upon having his mind filled with new sensations of light and colours’. This is because he ‘doth not yet understand, or know the meaning of ’ his visual sensations and has not learned to interpret them, ‘no more than a Chinese, upon first hearing the words man and tree, would think of the things signified by them’. The Molyneux man’s imagination has yet to learn which tactile ideas to associate with his visual ideas, leaving the latter as uninterpreted signs until through ‘time and experience, by repeated acts’ the imagination acquires ‘a habit of knowing the connection between the signs and the things signified’ (Alc 155, also see TV 110). For Berkeley, the imagination is responsible for perceptual representations of what is and what is not an object. Since the Molyneux man cannot form such

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representations with respect to vision, Berkeley claims he cannot yet see objects despite being restored to sight. Notably, Berkeley argues that the natural laws according to which the imagination learns which ideas to suggest are actually the rules of a divine language (TV 147, P 44, 3D 231, Alc IV.10). That language is universal but is no less arbitrary than human languages. Fundamentally, mental representations are semantic items – words in a divine language of vision. When Berkeley says that the Molyneux man cannot see objects because he has not learned the language of vision this is meant quite literally. Berkeley’s account of the imagination raises two points relevant to understanding Hume’s analysis of mental representation.12 The first point is methodological. Berkeley consistently rejects theoretical constructs in favour of objects of experience. Necessary connections are also rejected in favor of suggestion. The second point is philosophical. Berkeley generalizes his theory of vision to conclude that all mental representations are the products of suggestion rather than reason, and are produced by the imagination rather than the intellect. This philosophical point is quite unique and anticipates Hume’s thinking in these areas. In many ways, Hume’s accounts of the imagination and mental representation are meant to prepare the reader for his metaphysical accounts of external objects, space and time, and the self. The similarities between Hume and Berkeley on the former issues suggest that Berkeley may have had a significant impact on Hume’s thought on the latter issues. For Hume the objects of experience are of two kinds: impressions and ideas. Impressions include what I have been calling sensations. Hume claims that the difference between impressions and ideas is ‘in the degrees of force and liveliness, with which they strike upon the mind’. Impressions have a higher degree of ‘force and vivacity’ whereas ideas are ‘faint images’ of impressions ‘used in thinking and reasoning’ (T 1.1.1.1). Having distinguished impressions from ideas Hume’s Copy Principle explains the relation between them: all ideas are copies of impressions (T 1.1.1.8). In broad outline this is very much like Berkeley’s claim that ideas of the imagination are less vivid derivative copies of sensations.13 However, the details of their respective accounts differ. Don Garrett (1997) reads Hume’s Copy Principle as consisting of a resemblance thesis (ideas resemble their antecedent impressions) and a causal thesis (impressions cause ideas). While Berkeley agrees that ideas of the imagination resemble their antecedent sensations, he rejects any causal link between them if only because he thinks that ‘it is impossible for an idea . . . to be the cause of anything’ (P 25).

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Hume observes three ‘universal principles of association’ that explain how the imagination unites ideas into mental representations. According to Hume, the imagination is at ‘liberty . . . to transpose and change its ideas’ (T 1.1.3.4). This is because the imagination is at liberty to separate and unite distinct ideas ‘in what form it pleases’ (T 1.1.4.1). Hume scholars call this the Separability Principle. Hypothetically, the result would be utterly random combinations of ideas. But our experience reveals that ‘simple ideas . . . fall regularly into complex ones’, implying the presence of ‘some bond of union among them, some associating quality, by which one idea naturally introduces another’. This bond is a universal association that Hume argues occurs in three kinds: resemblance, contiguity and causation. Hume repeatedly claims that all three kinds of mental association are arbitrary and result from habit, custom or experience. Berkeley also recognizes psychological associations between ideas in terms of resemblance and contiguity, although signification takes the place of causation (and in any case Hume’s account of the origin or our ideas of causality is quite different from Berkeley’s). A key feature of Hume’s account of the principles of association is that they are not deterministic. That is, Hume rejects necessary (or inseparable) connections as grounding associations among ideas: This uniting principle among ideas is not to be consider’d as an inseparable connection; for that has been already excluded from the imagination. Nor are we to conclude that without it the mind cannot join two ideas, for nothing is more free than [the imagination]: But we are only to regard it as a gentle force, which commonly prevails . . . nature in a manner pointing out to every one those simple ideas, which are most proper to be united into a complex one. T 1.1.4.1.

Inseparable connections are rejected because the imagination is free to associate ideas as it pleases. If associations between ideas were grounded in necessary connections, the imagination would be compelled to associate ideas in certain ways, but we know from experience that this is not the case. This freedom also implies that the imagination is not limited to the principles of association when uniting ideas. The imagination is free to flout those principles in order to form ideas of dragons or winged stallions. This was also recognized by Berkeley, who suggests that he is free to ‘imagine a man with two heads, or the upper parts of a man joined to the body of a horse’ (PI 10) and other ‘chimeras or ideas of our own framing’ (P 34; cf. P 28). One might wonder how associations of ideas could be free given that they are automatic, but such a claim becomes considerably less perplexing once

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one considers what Hume and Berkeley have to say about free action, although detailing their respective views would take us too far afield. Hume is widely considered to be a compatibilist about freedom. He is committed to the claim that an action’s being free is compatible with its being causally determined. Briefly, for Hume what distinguishes a free action from a compelled action is not whether the action was caused (i.e. a free action is uncaused whereas a compelled action is caused); but rather the type of cause: ‘By liberty, then we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may’ (E 8.1.23; italics in original). For Hume, a free action is caused by the agent of that action whereas a compelled action is caused by a power external to that agent. That is, for Hume free actions are volitional whereas compelled actions do not result from the agent’s will (also see T 2.3.2.1). Berkeley’s views on free will are more complex and there is not as clear a scholarly consensus as there is with Hume. Berkeley was not a compatibilist but instead seems committed to an agent causation model of freedom. For Berkeley, as for Hume, the distinction between a free action and a compelled action rests on the causal source of the action rather than the presence or absence of a cause. That is, for Berkeley an action is free if it is caused by the agent and compelled if it is caused by some power external to the agent. Berkeley expresses this distinction in terms of activity (i.e. free or volitional action) and passivity (i.e. compelled action) in the following passage: Phil When is the mind said to be active? Hyl When it produces, puts an end to, or changes anything. Phil Can the mind produce, discontinue, or change anything, but by an act of the will? Hyl It cannot. Phil The mind therefore is to be accounted active in its perceptions so far forth as volition is included in them? Hyl It is. 3D 196

Berkeley argues here that insofar as the mind produces some change, it is acting on its own volitions. He goes on to say that the mind is passive in sensation – in perceiving light, colour, texture, etc. But he nevertheless claims that the mind is active in representation – in using sensations as signs. That activity is volitional, and so is free for Berkeley:

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Phil . . . I perceive numberless ideas; and by an act of my will, can form a great variety of them, and raise them up in my imagination. 3D 215; my emphasis

The imagination acts under its own power when using one idea as a sign for another. In that sense, the imagination’s association of ideas is volitional and so it is free rather than compelled for Berkeley. We can now see how psychological associations can be automatic yet free for Berkeley and Hume. The fact that associations are automatic does not imply that they are compulsory. Associations are actions of the imagination because they are directed by the imagination’s power to associate ideas. Associations do not merely happen to the imagination – the imagination is not passive with respect to associations. Rather, associations are something that the imagination does (perhaps the chief activity of the imagination). Associations are voluntary or free insofar as they flow from the imagination’s power to connect or relate ideas – the power to direct how such associations are composed. The imagination does not direct that visual ideas of ice be associated with tactile ideas of heat, for instance. It directs that the former be associated with tactile ideas of cold. Associations are compulsory when the imagination’s power to direct how ideas are associated is thwarted – that is, when the imagination is prevented from associating ideas by some external power. For Berkeley and Hume, freedom is a power – the power to exercise a volition. While this may imply that there is a necessary connection between volitions and actions it also implies that volitions themselves are not determined by external forces, which is all that is required for an action to be free for Berkeley and Hume. There is no conceptual barrier to claiming that this power can be exercised automatically. Insofar as a habit is the automatic exercise of a volition, habits can be free and automatic. Perhaps we can get a better idea of what Berkeley and Hume have in mind by describing psychological associations as routine rather than automatic. Fidgeting and nail biting are examples of routine behaviour (of which the subject may not even be aware). But we would nevertheless call such behaviours volitional in the relevant sense. They are caused by the agent rather than by some external power. My claim is that Berkeley and Hume agree that the imagination routinely associates ideas in a similarly relevant sense. It is also worth pointing out that ‘habitual’ and ‘automatic’ do not imply determinism. This is because the latter requires a necessary connection but the former do not. The reason we do not judge fidgeting and nail biting to be determined by some cause external to the agent is that there is no necessary

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connection between any external cause and the observed behaviour. Both Berkeley and Hume claim that associations are contingent, which implies that they are not determined by an external cause even if it is conceded that they are automatic. If freedom is incompatible with determinism, then the absence of determinism with respect to psychological associations implies at least the possibility of freedom whether or not such associations are automatic. In any case, both Berkeley and Hume say that the imagination is free. So, these texts must be included in an interpretation of their respective understandings of the imagination. Still, one might wonder what differences there are between perceptual representations and chimera since the imagination is responsible for both. If the imagination is free in both cases, it seems that the difference between perceptual representations and chimera dissolves. This seems especially problematic for Berkeley given his idealist metaphysics. Berkeley addresses this complaint in the following passage: Hyl But, according to your notions, what difference is there between real things, and chimeras formed by the imagination, or those visions of a dream – since they are all equally in the mind? Phil The ideas formed by the imagination are faint and indistinct; they have, besides, an entire dependence on the will. But the ideas perceived by sense . . . have not the like dependence on our will. 3D 235; my emphasis14

Berkeley has not completely answered Hylas’s question, which I take to be the question of what difference there is between actually seeing an apple and imagining an apple (or a griffin). In order to provide an answer on Berkeley’s behalf I draw on an insight from Samuel Rickless (2013, 80). The imagination is active both when actually seeing an apple and when imagining an apple (and so, the imagination is free in both cases). But when I actually see an apple, I have immediately perceived sensations of light and colour in addition to ideas suggested by the imagination. Those sensations ‘have not the like dependence on [my] will’, yet they are constituents of the resulting perceptual representation. The imagination’s activity consists in suggesting ideas that are not immediately perceived in order to convert immediately perceived sensations into a perceptual representation.15 But when I merely imagine an apple (or when I imagine a griffin) I have no immediately perceived sensations – only ideas suggested by the imagination. In that case, all of the constituents on my representation are provided by the imagination, instead of merely some of those constituents as in

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the case of perceptual representation. Yet suggestion is operative in both cases. Otherwise, like the Molyneux man, I could not have a mental representation of an apple even when I immediately perceive apple-like sensations. For Berkeley, perceptual representations and chimera are not different in kind as far as the imagination is concerned. They differ in their contents – i.e. in the kinds of ideas that are their constituents. Perceptual representations include immediately perceived sensations whereas chimera do not.16 Although the imagination is free, Hume observes that it habitually applies principles of association to ideas. As John Biro puts it on Hume’s behalf, ‘the imagination . . . produces a “habit” or “custom”, which consists in a tendency to move from an idea one has to another idea linked to the first idea by one of the principles of association’ (2009, 48). These habits are the result of experience. Ideas are constantly conjoined in experience and from those constant conjunctions emerge habits of associating ideas in virtue of resemblance, contiguity or causation. The imagination learns through experience which ideas to associate together. This is unmistakably similar to Berkeley’s view. Hume describes the habitual functioning of the imagination in some detail when giving an account of how we come to have certain fundamental beliefs. According to David Owen, for Hume a ‘central case of belief is not the assent we might attach to any proposition, whether known or merely believed, but rather the belief we have in unobserved existents’ (2009, 86). Such beliefs are ideas with a force and vivacity approaching that of impressions.17 In the present context, a useful example of the kind of unobserved object that Hume has in mind is visual depth. Depth is not seen because of considerations Berkeley brought to bear. Yet the mind moves from impressions of light and colour to visual ideas of depth, i.e. to the vivid belief that one sees depth. Hume intends to offer an account of this psychological relation. His view is that the mind moves from impressions of light and colour to the belief that one sees depth although depth is not among the impressions that one actually sees.18 The question Hume considers in Treatise 1.3 is how such beliefs emerge from impressions. His answer is that the imagination rather than reason is responsible for them: The nature of experience is this. We remember to have had frequent instances of the existence of one species of objects; and also remember, that the individuals of another species of objects have always attended them,19 and have existed in regular order of contiguity and succession with regard to them. Thus we remember to have seen that species of object we call flame, and to have felt that

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species of sensation we call heat. We likewise call to mind their constant conjunction in all past instances. . . . But in all cases, wherein we reason concerning them, there is only one perceiv’d or remember’d, and the other is supply’d [by the imagination] in conformity to our past experience. T 1.3.6.120

Memories of constant conjunctions prompt the imagination to produce an idea of heat at the sight of a flame; that is, to unite the impression of a flame with the idea of heat. If reason were the source of such beliefs, they would be ‘deriv’d merely from a survey [i.e. conceptual analysis] of these particular objects, and from such penetration into their essences as may discover the dependence of the one upon the other’ (T 1.3.6.1). In other words, we would observe a necessary connection between the impression of a flame and the idea of heat, implying that one could not be psychologically separated from the other. The impression or idea of one would include the idea of the other. But experience shows us that this is not the case (T 1.3.6.1). For this reason Hume rules out the intellect as an explanation of such beliefs in favour of association (T 1.3.6.12, 15). The similarities between Berkeley and Hume so far are readily apparent. The imagination rather than the intellect is responsible for perceptual belief in the existence of external objects. Necessary connections are rejected and replaced with learned associations. Those associations arise from regularities of experience and the imagination makes such associations freely, further indicating lack of any necessary connections.21 Hume’s version differs from Berkeley’s in that Hume is explicit about the distinction between impressions and ideas (a distinction only implicit in Berkeley’s distinction between immediately and mediately perceived ideas). For Hume, the imagination associates impressions with ideas, and associates ideas with other ideas. For Berkeley, the imagination associates immediately perceived sensations with mediately perceived ideas, and associates ideas with other ideas. Hume presents three experiments to support his conclusions. He first rules out external powers or qualities of the object perceived, and any necessary or causal relation those qualities might have to the object of belief, on the simple principle that because those qualities are external they cannot be observed. But since the phenomenon under examination is entirely internal to the mind, ‘these powers and qualities, being entirely unknown, can have no hand in producing it’. This is similar to Berkeley’s rejection of geometric approaches to seeing distances because they are premised on unobservable lines and angles. Hume concludes that ‘the present impression has not this effect by its own proper power and

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efficacy, and when consider’d alone, as a single perception, limited to the present moment’ (T 1.3.8.9). This is presumably because impressions lack information given in the beliefs prompted by those impressions, just as visual sensations themselves lack information given in visual representations of depth. Hume’s second observation is that ‘the belief, which attends the present impression . . . I say, arises immediately . . . because I am never conscious of any . . . operation [of the mind], and find nothing in the subject, on which it can be founded’. The last phrase is a restatement of the first observation: there is insufficient information in the impression to give rise to the information included in the idea. The first part of the sentence is a bit trickier. What would it mean to be conscious of any such operation? Presumably, it would mean having an impression of the operation such that the impression is related to both the original impression and the belief that ultimately results from association of the impression with other sensations and ideas. But Hume reports lacking any such impression. This is similar to Berkeley’s report of lacking any sensations of lines or angles when visually perceiving distance. Hume again appears to reject necessary connections as the relevant explanation in favour of mental habits that move the mind from a present impression to a belief in unobserved objects (T 1.3.8.10). Hume claims that the mind moves immediately from impressions to ideas of unobserved objects. Combined with the observation that an impression alone is insufficient to move the mind to a relevant belief, these data suggest that the mind is not moved by necessary connections in these cases. Impressions alone would be sufficient to move the mind to the relevant belief if the relevant connection were a necessary connection because the impression and the belief could not be separated. Instead, Hume proposes habit as the relation between present impressions and the ideas they prompt in a manner quite similar to Berkeley. Perhaps the best example of a necessary psychological connection in Hume’s writings is the Copy Principle itself. The occurrence of an impression causes a corresponding idea resembling the original impression. This is so in cases where the impression has never before been experienced. To take Hume’s example, even if I have never tasted a pineapple I know that my first impression of the taste of a pineapple will cause a corresponding idea. Because of this causal relation, I can anticipate that a resembling idea will follow my first impression. I need not associate the idea with the impression. Moreover, I am conscious of my mind’s operation of copying impressions to generate ideas. Were I not conscious of such an operation, the Copy Principle could not be an empirical principle of human psychology.

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But such a similar operation does not occur when the mind moves from impressions to ideas of unobserved objects. Hume makes this clear in the Abstract of the Treatise when he considers the biblical character Adam watching a billiard ball strike another for the very first time: ‘Were a man, such as Adam, created in the full vigour of understanding, without experience, he would never be able to infer motion in the second ball from the motion and impulse of the first’ (TA 11).22 Hume argues that Adam’s mind would not move from impressions of the first ball moving and striking the second to a belief that the second ball will move because he lacks the relevant experiences to ground psychological associations between impressions of the first type and ideas of the second type: It would have been necessary, therefore, for Adam (if he was not inspired)23 to have had experience of the effect which followed upon the impulse of these two balls. He must have seen, in several instances, that when the one ball struck upon the other, the second always acquired motion. If he had seen a sufficient number of instances of this kind, whenever he saw the one ball moving towards the other, he would always conclude without hesitation that the second would acquire motion. His understanding would anticipate his sight and form a conclusion suitable to his past experience. TA 12

The belief that the second ball will move arises immediately from impressions of the first ball in motion and striking the second ball. But this is a matter of habitual psychological association grounded in a sufficient number of past experiences: When I see a billiard-ball moving towards another, my mind is immediately carried by habit to the usual effect, and anticipates my sight by conceiving the second ball in motion. But is this all? Do I nothing but conceive the motion of the second ball? No surely. I also believe that it will move. TA 17; my emphasis

Moving from impressions of motion of the first ball to the belief that the second ball will move is not an indication of a necessary connection between impression and belief because the mind ‘can always conceive . . . any event to follow upon any other’. It is a function of habit or as Hume sometimes calls it, custom. Hume’s third set of experiments is meant to determine whether anything other than habit is needed to produce belief from an impression. In that set of experiments, the impression is changed into an idea. From this change Hume observes that although the correlative idea still follows (i.e. the idea that followed the impressions still follows when the impression is converted into an idea), ‘yet

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there is in reality no belief or perswasion’ (T 1.3.8.11). Consider the billiard balls again. My impression of the first ball’s motion is immediately followed by the belief that the second ball will move. But if I only have an idea (rather than an impression) of the first ball’s motion, while I may still have an idea of the second ball’s motion I will not thereby believe that the second ball will move. (Perhaps I see the balls stationary on the billiard table and conceive of the first ball moving towards the second, but do not see the first ball move. Such a conception does not produce in me a belief that the second ball will actually move.) Hume concludes from this observation that the present impression and ‘the customary transition’ are necessary and sufficient for producing the belief (T 1.3.8.12). It seems then, that Hume’s account of the imagination is quite similar to Berkeley’s work. One difference between Berkeley and Hume is that Berkeley takes his divine language thesis seriously as an explanation for how the imagination produces mental representations. For Berkeley, the imagination is engaged in explicitly linguistic signification. This is not a feature of Hume’s account. Given that Berkeley also thinks that linguistic signification is rulegoverned (cf. TV 147; P 30, 65; 3D 231), the regularities we experience and use to unify sensations into ideas are instances of natural linguistic rules (which Berkeley identifies with natural laws). No such rule-governed linguistic structure is apparent in Hume’s account. Instead, Hume takes regularities at face value and uses them alone to explain the imagination’s acquisition of habits of signification. This is presumably because Hume considers Berkeley’s natural rules to be supernatural,24 and in that sense Hume’s method for investigating the functions of the imagination is more strictly empirical that Berkeley’s. Both Berkeley and Hume reject necessary connections as explaining mental representations in favour of suggestion, and they both reject theoretical constructs as explanatory in favour of objects of experience. These methodological commitments result in strikingly similar treatments of mental representation. They both claim that ideas of the imagination are copies or resemblances of sensations and that complex ideas of the imagination are constructed through suggestion, which is a relation of arbitrary or contingent signification between ideas. They both argue that suggestion is learned and habitual, and that the imagination is free to suggest ideas. They both argue that the imagination rather than reason is responsible for mental representations and they both offer empirical evidence for these claims. They differ in that Hume distinguishes between impressions and ideas, and between simple and complex impressions and simple and complex ideas, whereas Berkeley leaves these distinctions vague. Hume also provides a detailed account of the psychology of belief that Berkeley

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does not offer. Perhaps most prominently, Berkeley’s treatment of suggestion is explicitly linguistic in TV and TVV, whereas Hume recognizes only regularities as explaining how the imagination learns which ideas to suggest. I have argued that Hume’s account of mental representation is importantly similar to Berkeley’s account. This includes Hume’s commitment to methodological and philosophical principles similar to those that motivate Berkeley’s theory of vision. Interestingly, Hume is more conservative than Berkeley about mental representation, limiting suggestion and association to those occasions when resemblance is available. Yet Berkeley is less resolutely empirical, relying on divine language rules to help explain mental representations. Perhaps the reason for Hume’s conservatism is that he does not take Berkeley’s divine language seriously. For Berkeley, the semiotic relations that the imagination uses to associate ideas are fundamentally linguistic relations. For Hume, they simply emerge from observed regularities. Moreover, Hume’s account of the imagination and its relation to belief is considerably more detailed than Berkeley’s. Still, the texts provide sufficient evidence that, as Hume himself suggests, reading Berkeley is a guide to understanding Hume’s account of mental representation.

Notes 1 References to Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature are indicated with ‘T’ followed by Book number, Part number, Section number, and paragraph number (e.g. T 1.1.1.1). References to the Abstract of the Treatise are indicated by a ‘TA’ followed by the paragraph number (e.g. TA 1). References to Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding are indicated with an ‘E’ followed by Section number, Part number (where applicable) and paragraph number (e.g. E 2.1.3). 2 In a letter from Hume to Michael Ramsay dated 31 August 1737, Hume recommends that Ramsay read Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge as well as works by Descartes, Malebranche and Bayle in order to understand Hume’s metaphysics. 3 See Popkin, R. (1959), ‘Did Hume ever read Berkeley?’ The Journal of Philosophy 56, 535–45. Popkin’s essay prompted replies by Anthony Flew and Philip Wiener, with responses from Popkin, over the course of several years. Popkin only conceded that Hume had read Berkeley after the discovery of Hume’s letter to Ramsay, cited above. Hume refers to Berkeley explicitly when discussing abstraction in T 1.1.7.1 note 4; and in E note 64. 4 I do not argue that Berkeley was Hume’s exclusive influence, or even Hume’s most prominent influence. Nor do I advocate a return to something like Reid’s view of

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Berkeley as Hume’s intellectual fulcrum. Those strike me as implausible given the breadth of Hume’s interests and source materials. Margaret Atherton notes that Berkeley’s theory of vision was ‘undeniably successful’ and had ‘remarkably long lasting consequences’ (1990, 3) after its 1709 publication: Atherton, M. (1990), Berkeley’s Revolution in Vision. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Atherton quotes John Stuart Mill’s 1842 assessment of the success of Berkeley’s theory of vision as having ‘remained, almost from its first promulgation, one of the least disputed doctrines in the most disputed and most disputable of all sciences, the Science of Man’ (’Baily on Berkeley’s Theory of Vision,’ in Dissertations and Discussions, vol. 2. New York, 1973, 84; quoted by Atherton 1990, 4). I have said ‘automatically’, which might imply involuntary behaviour. But Berkeley seems to think that these interpretations are willed by us, and so are voluntary. Still, he also thinks they are habitual, and the habitual performance of some action involves some element of automaticity. That is the sense of automaticity I have in mind here. This theory also explains the Molyneux man. He has not learned to use his visual sensations as signs for his tactile sensations and so cannot interpret his very first visual scene in terms of information about the depth, size and shape of the objects placed before him. The phrase ‘regular train or series’ suggests that the structure in question is temporal rather than spatial. Various ideas regularly occur before or after one another, or simultaneously. This leaves open an interesting question about the extent to which Berkeley’s account of time is consistent with or in conflict with Hume’s account. For Berkeley the faculty of imagination is responsible for both associating ideas and allowing us to have fantastical ideas (such as chimera) and images. It is unclear to me what connection there is between these roles for the imagination. See Atherton (1990); Dicker, G. (1982), ‘The Concept of Immediate Perception in Berkeley’s Immaterialism’ in C. M. Turbayne (ed.), Berkeley: Critical and Interpretive Essays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Dicker, G. (1992), ‘Berkeley on the immediate perception of objects’ in P. Cummins and G. Zoeller (eds.), Minds, Ideas, and Objects: Essays in the Theory of Representation in Modern Philosophy. North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy, Volume 2. Atascadero, CA : Ridgeview; Dicker, G. (2006), ‘Berkeley on immediate perception: Once more into the breach’, The Philosophical Quarterly 56, 517–35; Pappas, G. S. (2000), Berkeley’s Thought. Ithaca: Cornell University Press; Rickless, S. C. (2013), Berkeley’s Argument for Idealism. Oxford: Oxford University Press; and Winkler, K. (1989), Berkeley: An Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Berkeley suggests that experiences of coexistence or succession must be regular (or, as he sometimes puts it, natural) in order to establish a semiotic relation.

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12 In 2011 Hume’s copy of Berkeley’s TV (2nd edition, 1709) was discovered at the University of Otago, New Zealand. There are no annotations and so no direct evidence that Hume studied Berkeley’s theory of vision with care. Still, this is evidence that Hume was at least familiar with Berkeley’s theory as are the similarities between their respective published treatments of the imagination. 13 As mentioned above, Berkeley also thinks that chimera are ideas of the imagination. He seems to think that we cannot have, for instance, an idea of a lion’s body with an eagle’s head unless we have had sensations of some sort of lions’ bodies and eagles’ heads: ‘I may indeed divide in my thoughts or conceive apart from each other those things which, perhaps, I never perceived by sense so divided. Thus I imagine the trunk of a human body without the limbs. . . . So far I will not deny that I can abstract . . . which extends only to the conceiving separately such objects as it is possible may really exist or be actually perceived asunder. But my conceiving or imagining power does not extend beyond the possibility of real existence or perception’ (P 5). Berkeley seems to be saying here that I cannot compose an idea of a chimera from ideas of its parts if I have never perceived its parts (even derivatively, as in seeing a picture of a lion’s body). 14 See also P 33–4. 15 Rickless (2013) calls such representations Type 3 sensible objects. 16 They also differ in the principles that guide the imagination’s associations (e.g. natural laws for perceptual representations; convention for chimera). 17 See page 86 of Owen, D. (2009), ‘Hume and the mechanics of mind: Impressions, ideas, and association’ in D. F. Norton and J. Taylor (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Hume. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 70–104. 18 It is unclear to me whether, like Berkeley, Hume thinks that the mind associates tactile ideas with visual impressions in order to form visual representations of depth. 19 I am unclear what Hume means when he writes of ‘[individuals] of one species of objects’ and of ‘individuals of another species of objects that have always attended [the first species]’. His talk of individuals appears to be a reference to what we would call tokens – i.e. token impressions. My hunch is that, since the only objects in this passage are impressions and ideas, ‘species’ refers to sensory modalities. In that case, token visual sensations are ‘one species of objects’ and token tactile sensations are ‘another species of objects that have always attended the first’. This reading is supported by Hume’s subsequent examples of a flame (which is presumably seen) and heat. Distinguishing visual and tactile sensations as different ‘species’ of objects makes me wonder to what extent Hume accepted Berkeley’s heterogeneity thesis, construed as the principle that tactile sensations, and the information they provide, are unavailable to vision. If this passage is textual evidence that Hume accepts even a limited version of Berkeley’s heterogeneity thesis, that would cast some doubt on claims that Hume rejects the thesis on the basis that he thinks that we have abstract

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ideas of distance, shape etc. common to sight and touch. The latter claim also needs to be evaluated in terms of Hume’s own Berkeleyan account of abstract ideas. The reader should note the similarity between this passage and Berkeley’s P 30–2. The two writers offer quite similar accounts of psychological association. It is useful to point out that Hume is no less hesitant than Berkeley to use thought experiments to support his views. Whereas Berkeley used the Molyneux man thought experiment prominently in his explanation of the role of the imagination in producing perceptual judgements, Hume used a very similar thought experiment concerning Adam in his Abstract of the Treatise. In Hume’s thought experiment Adam is created whole as a fully functioning adult, not unlike the Molyneux man gaining sight as an otherwise fully functioning adult except that in the case of Adam all of his senses and cognitive faculties are newly operative rather than just vision. Similar to Berkeley’s query whether the Molyneux man would be able to see a sphere and a cube with his new vision, Hume asks whether Adam would be able to predict that a billiard ball will transfer its motion to a second billiard ball upon only seeing the first one move. Hume, like Berkeley, answers in the negative; and both support their negative answers by appealing to a lack of experience. Adam must learn to make such predictions, just as the Molyneux man must learn to see objects. The reader should note the close similarity between this thought experiment and the Molyneux man. Hume seems to mean here: if the information that the second ball would move had not been divinely revealed to Adam. Hume famously rejects what he calls the principle of the uniformity of nature (E 4.2) in the course of articulating his problem of induction, and Berkeley’s natural linguistic rules look suspiciously like an instance of that principle.

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The Reception of Berkeley in EighteenthCentury France Sébastien Charles

The early reception of Berkeley in France With its explicit aim of opposing scepticism and atheism, Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy would appear to have been a natural choice of reference point, indeed source of inspiration, for eighteenth-century French Christian thinkers who wished, in the name of an apologetic purpose identical to his, to demolish the materialism and atheism of their day. And yet, with a few very rare exceptions, a natural alliance of this kind failed to take shape. This was because the reception of immaterialism in France gave rise from the outset to a distortion of Berkeley’s thought that held sway with Enlightenment thinkers and their opponents alike right through the Enlightenment period. The earliest French reviews of Berkeley’s immaterialism, which appeared in 1713 following the publication of Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, presented it not as a philosophical stance that stripped matter of existence as the ontological foundation of the real, but rather as a somewhat strange system whose purpose was supposed to be to doubt, and in fact to deny, the effective existence of the external world. The source of this confusion was above all the work of Jesuit thinkers (in particular René-Joseph de Tournemine), who were then doing battle with Malebranche and wished to use immaterialism as a means to discredit his concept of intelligible extension by tarring it with the brush of absurdity. But opposition to Malebranchism does not explain everything; we must also recognize in the Jesuit critique of immaterialism a concerted attack on all forms of ontological monism, with Spinoza’s thought being viewed as the materialist counterpart to Berkeleyan immaterialism. It appeared important to mount serious opposition to such a doctrine, soon termed ‘egoism’. (The word ‘egoist’ had at the time a metaphysical meaning and did not represent a moral

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judgement; it designated one who is certain of nothing besides his or her own existence.) An attempt at such opposition was first undertaken by the Jesuit thinker Claude Buffier, based on his theory of common sense, which treats the existence of the external world as a first truth, since there is common consent about this proposition. From Tournemine to Buffier, the Jesuits forcefully denounced the slippery slope from Cartesianism to scepticism and then from scepticism to the purported egoism of Berkeley. Several factors besides opposition to Malebranchism underlay the Jesuits’ attack. On one hand, a system of this kind was deemed pernicious because it leads to atheism by destroying the cosmological proof, which seems the proof best suited to bringing the creature back to the Creator. On the other hand, by questioning the reality of the external world, such a system undermines the established political and religious orders, since it denies existence and seems conducive to encouraging libertinism. Last but not least, the system was a Protestant brainchild, which was ample reason to consider it suspect.

Berkeley and the philosophes French Enlightenment philosophers arrived at a kind of unanimity regarding Berkeley’s thought. Whether atheists, Christians or deists, they all mobilized against him. They had divergent reasons, of course, but their unanimity of purpose is notable for its rarity during the Enlightenment. The deists and the Christians shared one familiar argument: by suppressing the world, the egoist also suppresses the most tangible proof of God’s existence as Creator. But another far more subtle reason is to be found in explicit form in only one place, a philosophical novel by the Abbé Prévost: Le Philosophe anglais, ou Histoire de Monsieur Cleveland. There it is argued that, if it is claimed that of necessity sensations cannot refer to a matter that is not perceived, we can also conclude that the spiritual effects that belong to us (desire, will) do not point to an immaterial substance like the soul or the self. Egoism is dangerous not just because it destroys the cosmological proof of God’s existence, but also because it leads us, through a conceptual manoeuvre, to deny the existence of the soul and consequently its immortality. It then points us directly towards atheism, or at least to scepticism. What about the philosophes? As deists or materialists, they viewed solipsism as a logical error or a metaphysical mistake that we can and must counter. For Voltaire, the only way to do this was to reject Bayle’s and Berkeley’s epistemologies, which reduce primary qualities to secondary ones. Voltaire adds to this the

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argument from impenetrability, the essential characteristic of extension that the sense of touch discovers in external bodies and that, according to Voltaire, gives us the idea of matter. This is not very convincing, however, and Voltaire knows it, making numerous statements about his ignorance on the subject. In Chapter IV of the Traité de métaphysique, he concludes his argument with an absurd process of reasoning that leaves the problem unsolved: ‘[T]he Pyrrhonians will allow me to start by believing firmly that bodies exist, otherwise I will have to reject these gentlemen’s own existence’ (Voltaire [1734]1984, p. 448). Much more systematic is the position adopted by Turgot, expressed as early as 1750 in his Lettres à M. l’Abbé de . . . sur le système de Berkeley (Turgot 1913) and again six years later in his entry on ‘Existence’ in the Encyclopédie (Turgot 1913). The argument Turgot advances most often is that of causality, which can be summed up in the following syllogism: ‘There is no effect without a cause. Sensations are effects. Therefore they obviously have a cause’ (Wendel 1978, p. 182). But is this sufficient to prove that these sensations have external causes? The case of dreams seems to point to an answer in the negative. That is why Turgot adds to this first argument a second one, the argument from repetition. If we deny the existence of external objects, it is impossible to grasp the cause of a linked series of similar impressions. The existence of these objects does not tell us anything about their nature, however. Turgot knows this all too well; and yet, like Voltaire, he does not try to go further. He too acknowledges his ignorance, and he refuses to qualify the substance of either material extension or the spiritual monad. If Rousseau did not wish to produce a formal refutation of solipsism, he nevertheless often showed interest in it as a theory. In La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), simplicity serves as a major objection to solipsism. For Rousseau, it seems simpler to say that sensations effectively refer to external bodies as their real cause. Whether these bodies are pure appearances or substantial beings is of no importance. What is important is the fact that the world’s presence reveals itself to us as a whole, be it phenomenal or substantial. In Condillac’s Traité des sensations (1754), we find a supposed demonstrative proof of the external world’s existence. This proof is based on the sensation of double contact that guarantees the existence of bodies by means of the sense of touch, the only sense that provides a degree of objectivity because it allows us to perceive obstacles; a fact that enables the sense of touch to confer the awareness of the external. But if the sense of touch guarantees the existence of external objects, it does not allow us to reach their essence. A true child of his century, Condillac assigns limits to reason, limits that do not allow him to grant unconditional objectivity to things.

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The most original treatment of egoism is without any doubt that of Diderot. First, because he makes a clear distinction between egoism and scepticism, the latter being no more than a variant of Pyrrhonism. Second, because he understands the difficulty of challenging a metaphysical stance that presupposes a truly objective point of view from which it is to be challenged. Such a point of view would entail standing outside the phenomenological order, and this is impossible. Third, and last, because Diderot realizes that only the introduction of a new dimension will allow him to attack egoism effectively. This dimension is that of practical experience. Theoretical irrefutability, practical impossibility – these are Diderot’s last words on solipsism. As Diderot put it at the end of his life in his Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, ‘Berkeley still awaits an answer’ (Diderot 1985, p. 291). To close this discussion of the responses to egoism by Enlightenment thinkers, let me add a word about the materialists d’Holbach and Helvétius. What a disappointment to find that they did not take it seriously, even though it undermined the very basis of their materialism. Indeed, d’Holbach ([1770] 1999) recognizes in Chapter X of the first section of his Système de la nature that we must choose between Berkeley and Spinoza, but no demonstration justifies his choice. It is ultimately on the grounds of its likelihood that he chooses the materialist hypothesis. In La morale universelle (1776), he adds to it the concept of good will, and resorts to the moral argument used by Diderot. But he nevertheless concludes his discussion by remarking on the difficulty of resolving the immaterialist question, a sentiment shared by Helvétius. In fact, the only materialist who affirms that he can easily refute egoism is the anonymous author of the Jordanus Brunus Redivivus, a clandestine manuscript from the end of the eighteenth century. But it would be generous to call this so-called demonstration a real refutation. According to the manuscript’s author, we must admit either the existence of an infinite spiritual being or that of a material and immensely extended being. Since, according to him, matter exists, God does not; in this way, the egoist thesis self-destructs.

Allies and adversaries of Berkeley in the Counter-Enlightenment Among eighteenth-century Christian thinkers, the encounter with Berkeley tends to occur as a side-trip during an attack on an Enlightenment philosopher or school of thought, whether on Voltaire by Le François, Nonnotte and Bergier,

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on Helvétius by Liger and Barruel, on English deism by Caraccioli, or on the Scottish School of Common Sense by Isaac de Pinto. In this context, Bergier’s reading is undoubtedly the most original, with other authors persisting in the view of Berkeley as a solipsist. While analysing the entry ‘Corps’ (‘The Body’) in Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), Bergier comes to defend Berkeley, finding that his arguments for radical scepticism survive Voltaire’s critique. Bergier maintains that reducing extension to secondary qualities is legitimate if one accepts the modern theory that these qualities are a modality of the soul, refusing to grant specific ontological status to extension. In fact, the purported objectivity of extension conceived of as constitutive of the real world poses a problem; and it is preferable to think of sensation as being above all a relationship, perception of a colour (for example) needing to be contemplated simultaneously from the perspective of the subject, in which it reflects a certain constitution of the sensory organs, and that of the object, in which it designates a certain disposition of the parts, a certain way of being that is specific to the perceived object. In this way, immaterialism had the interesting consequence of leading some antiphilosophes to revisit dualism from within a modern conception of sensation. Of course, all eighteenth-century Christian thinkers did not, like Bergier, discover the merits of immaterialism through a philosopher whom they were critiquing. Some had direct access to Berkeley’s text and yet even this made no difference to their final judgement: the work of conceptual distortion done by the Jesuits was all too efficient. A few notable exceptions may be mentioned: David-Renaud Boullier, the translator of Siris, Charles Bonnet and the Abbé Pluquet all strove to take immaterialism seriously, but they did not draw inspiration from it, because the system’s implications struck them as problematic. Only a very few thinkers breached the barriers that prejudice and habit had erected against the adoption of the immaterialist doctrine. These included Thomas-Jean Pichon in France, Joseph Berington in England and Corneille de Nélis in Belgium. Their influence, however, was comparatively marginal. It must be acknowledged that the conception of immaterialism proper to the Enlightenment – with the philosophes in general sharing the view of the antiphilosophes on this score – remained that of a doctrine that was at once absurd and impossible to refute. This peculiarity of appearing to be impossible either to adopt or to refute undoubtedly contributed to the dissemination of immaterialism, but it also contributed to its critique: many thought they could get around the obstacle of the irrefutability that Diderot claimed for it. From this emerged some astonishing solutions to the problem of solipsism, consisting

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mainly of returns to the metaphysics of the previous century. Thus Descartes was reclaimed by Aubry, Malebranche by Boncerf and Joannet, and Arnauld by Lelarge de Lignac and Para du Phanjas. In short, faced with scepticism, and the farfetched version of it known as egoism, French Christian thinkers of the Enlightenment era generally agreed on the view that the existence of the sentiment intime must surely convince solipsists of their own existence and that, seen from the angle of solipsism, the doctrine of immaterialism is both untenable and pernicious. Untenable because sensations are effects and every effect has a cause (which proves the existence of matter as cause) – and Enlightenment philosophers said nothing further on the topic. We can only regret that this stance of rejection is largely explained by ignorance of Berkeley’s doctrine, an ignorance due in turn to the work of denigration carried out by the Jesuits whose success is observable in the writings not just of the Christian thinkers but also the philosophers of the eighteenth century.

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Immaterialism and Common Sense S. Seth Bordner

Berkeley is famous for his immaterialism and for his idealism. Let us define immaterialism as the denial that there is anything answering to the name ‘matter’, and idealism as the view that, fundamentally, everything that exists is either a mind or in a mind. These are somewhat unorthodox definitions, in part because they separate two ideas that are sometimes blended together. A recent book on Berkeley defines immaterialism as ‘the view that only minds and ideas exist; there is no such thing as matter’ (Dicker 2011, 3).1 But it is important, I think, to keep these views separate. What counts as an argument that there is no such thing as matter does not show anything with regard to whether everything is a mind (or in a mind), or even whether anything is a mind (or in a mind). This distinction is also useful for the present discussion, since Berkeley is also famous for claiming to be a philosopher of common sense, and he arguably regards the question of whether immaterialism is commonsensical differently from the question of whether idealism is.2 In Principles §4, Berkeley says that the belief ‘that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects have an existence natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding’ – a belief that conflicts with idealism but not necessarily with immaterialism – is ‘strangely prevailing’. Here, ‘strangely’ means just ‘very much’, not ‘oddly’ (see Winkler 1989, 5). So, Berkeley here notes that the anti-idealist view is also the more popular view. If being common is part of being commonsensical, then Berkeley seems self-aware that his idealism is not straightforwardly commonsensical. Yet Berkeley does seem to regard his philosophy as somehow open to the idea, perhaps even constituting a philosophical defence, of common sense. And if his idealism is not the part of his system that he thinks is commonsensical, it seems even stranger to say that it is immaterialism that he thinks is the touching point between his philosophy and the views of that ‘illiterate bulk of mankind that walk the high-road of plain, common sense’ (PI §1).

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How Berkeley thought his views were aligned with common sense has intrigued scholars for years. Why would Berkeley claim to side with common sense? What philosophical benefit is there in such a claim? Did he completely misunderstand the views of the ‘common run of mankind’ or not realize how unusual the denial of the existence of matter would sound to them? Or did he actually disregard common opinions and only cynically claim the title of ‘common sense’ for the views he thought he could defend? At the outset, it is worth noting that there is no consensus on how Berkeley’s philosophy and common sense are supposed to be related. Some think Berkeley’s philosophy just is common sense itself and so in offering arguments for his philosophy Berkeley offers arguments for common sense (Luce 1967, 82). Many scholars think Berkeley regarded his philosophy as a defence of common sense; that he was offering arguments that supported common sense views or showed in what way common sense is correct (see, e.g. Muehlmann 1992, and Stoneham 2002). On this interpretation, Berkeley is an apologist for common sense. Others think that Berkeley’s project was more modest. George Pappas, for instance, sees Berkeley as claiming only that his philosophy is consistent with common sense, though to a greater degree than the views of his materialist opponents (see Pappas 2000). There are other interpretations as well. In this chapter, we will survey the range of positions that scholars have defended on the relationship between Berkeley’s philosophy and common sense, beginning with the view that Berkeley’s apparent respect for common sense was at best disingenuous.

Dismissive accounts Berkeley promotes his Three Dialogues as an attempt to combat scepticism and atheism, and to ‘reduce men from paradoxes to common sense’ (3D 2:168).3 Yet, Berkeley’s philosophy is so odd that it is natural to wonder whether he could have been serious to think he was in any way defending, vindicating or corroborating common sense. There are some reasons to think that Berkeley was disingenuous. For one thing, he seems to distinguish his views from common sense more so in his private correspondence than in his published works. He tells his friend Percival that whatever doctrine contradicts vulgar and settled opinion had need been introduced with great caution into the world. For this reason it was I omitted all mention of the non-existence of matter in the title-page, dedication, preface, and

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introduction, that so the notion might steal unawares on the reader, who possibly would never have meddled with a book that he had known contained such paradoxes. Works 8:36, emphasis added4

Even in his published works there are hints that Berkeley recognized there was friction between his views and common sense. In the preface to his Principles, for example, he notes that his views are ‘contrary to the prejudices of mankind’ (Preface to Principles, 2:23). Admissions such as these provide ample ground for those, like Jonathan Bennett, who read Berkeley’s friendly claims about common sense as thinly veiled rhetorical window-dressing (see also Yandell 1995). Bennett thinks Berkeley’s idealist treatment of ordinary objects – his claim that such objects are collections of ideas – is ‘casually dismissive’ and ‘disrespectful’ of commonsensical beliefs. Bennett writes, ‘Berkeley does not endorse the plain person’s belief in sensible things – he condescends to it’ (Bennett 2001, 176–7). That is an easy verdict to reach. Too easy, perhaps. For one thing, there are more passages where Berkeley seems to place his philosophy on the side of common sense than those where he notes a conflict. These cannot be ignored, even if one thinks there is a strain of cynicism in Berkeley’s writing. More importantly, Berkeley’s metaphysics is intimately tied to – perhaps even derived directly from – his epistemology. That epistemology provides a theoretical framework through which ordinary ways of speaking and belief ascriptions are to be understood. For Berkeley, ordinary language claims and belief ascriptions have to be analysed into their constituent ideas to understand what they really mean. Berkeley simply would not allow the kinds of beliefs Bennett thinks are part of common sense to be accounted for as data without first recasting those beliefs in the terms of his epistemology. This recasting would show that what people say is different from what they mean or believe. One cannot simply note that the vulgar say they believe that sensible objects exist independently of minds and conclude that common sense includes the proposition ‘sensible objects exist independently of minds’. For Berkeley, we must first ask what is meant – that is, what ideas are signified – by someone who says they believe sensible objects exist independently of minds.5 Of course, it is Berkeley’s view that the mind-independence of sensible objects is inconceivable; this is the intended result of the so-called Master Argument of both the Principles and the Dialogues (see P §§22–4 and 3D 2:200). So, there is no coherent idea for anyone uttering such words to signify. No one can either

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mean or believe that sensible objects exist independently of minds, though of course one can say it.6 For Bennett then to claim that Berkeley is dismissive of common sense attitudes about sensible objects begs the question against Berkeley’s epistemology and the consequences it has for understanding ordinary language, and inter alia, common sense. In short, the beliefs Bennett claims are part of common sense, in Berkeley’s view, may not be beliefs one could hold in the first place. Dismissive interpretations such as Bennett’s are in the minority among Berkeley scholars. There is a fair consensus that Berkeley was at least some of the time interested in showing a fit between his philosophy and (some understanding of) common sense. The textual evidence counts strongly in favour of such readings. The most oft-quoted text is Berkeley’s remark in the Notebooks that ‘I side in all things with the Mob’, which is shortly followed by his self-reminder to be careful in explaining what, in his view, is meant by claims of sensible objects existing when unperceived, so as to ‘shew how the Vulgar notion agrees with mine’ (NB 405 & 407). And while the Preface to the Principles suggests a Berkeley self-conscious about the ‘novelty and singularity’ of his views, the Preface to the Three Dialogues – explicitly intended to be a popularized edition of the material from the Principles – is thoroughly populist. There, it is not Berkeley’s views but ‘the prejudices of philosophers which have so far prevailed against the common sense and natural notions of mankind’ (3D 2:167–8). Berkeley’s advertised project is to introduce new principles he thinks will undermine scepticism and atheism and see ‘men reduced from paradoxes to common sense’ (Ibid.). The bulk of the Three Dialogues is set at determining whether Hylas’s materialism or Philonous’s novel denial of the existence of matter is ‘most agreeable to common sense, and remote from skepticism’ (3D 2:172). And when all is said and done, Berkeley (through Philonous) claims to have united and placed in a clearer light ‘that truth, which was before shared between the vulgar and the philosophers: the former being of the opinion, that those things they immediately perceive are the real things; and the latter, that the things immediately perceived, are ideas which exist only in the mind. Which two notions put together, do in effect constitute the substance of what I advance’ (3D 2:262, original emphasis). If, in the Three Dialogues at least, Berkeley is not genuine in claiming that his views are closer to common sense than materialism, then he is an exceedingly artful deceiver. Yet accepting that Berkeley is serious about the close relationship between his philosophy and common sense does little to answer just what he thinks that relationship is, or how close he thinks it to be.

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What does Berkeley mean by ‘common sense’? Bennett’s (2001) conclusion that Berkeley is dismissive of common sense rests on an assumption about the nature of common sense: that common sense is readily understood independently of philosophy and that Berkeley shares this understanding. This is not (pardoning the pun) an uncommon kind of assumption to make. After all, if anything can be discussed ‘pre-philosophically’ surely it is common sense. And, since Berkeley nowhere says in great detail what exactly he means by common sense, it is tempting to think he did not say more because he thought it would have been obvious to his readers. As a result of his saying so little, scholars have had much to say about what Berkeley counts as common sense. On this point, there are a number of views that fall roughly into three types.

Propositional accounts The most common kind of interpretation takes common sense to be a set or family of propositions that are commonly held, philosophically basic or perhaps just plain obviously true. Typically, Berkeley’s philosophy is judged to be commonsensical according to how many of the common sense propositions it either entails or is consistent with. But just which propositions are counted as commonsensical, and of those, which ones Berkeley’s philosophy is supposed to support, are up for debate. According to David Berman, it is the common sense view that physical objects have causal power that makes Berkeley’s claim that only agents can be causes ‘embarrassingly uncommonsensical’ (Berman 1994, 41; see also Ibid., 42). Margaret Atherton says, ‘common sense clearly supposes that we don’t have to do anything to perceive physical objects’ and that, when we see, ‘we see what’s out there’ (Atherton 2008a, 109; see also Atherton 1990, 209). George Pitcher thinks it is common sense that we see and feel the very same objects (Pitcher 1977, 59–61). Bennett thinks that it is part of common sense that physical objects ‘can be perceived by you and by me, yesterday and tomorrow, by sight and by touch’ (Bennett 2001, 170). George Pappas presents a detailed list of propositions he thinks are most fundamental to common sense and is equally detailed in showing which of these Berkeley accepts and defends (Pappas 2000, 217). Propositional accounts are the most common type because Berkeley’s texts are riddled with suggestive remarks deriding the consequences of his opponents’

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views as being contrary to common sense. There are even occasional positive remarks that appear to endorse one view or another as being in accord with common sense. This can be taken to mean both that (a) Berkeley thinks of common sense as containing definite propositions, and (b) the contraries of the views being criticized are either Berkeley’s views or common sense views (or both). Pappas takes Berkeley’s critical comments about the uncommonsensical nature of materialism to be indicative of his views about common sense itself (see Pappas 2000, 218 ff.). As tempting as this approach may be, it is fraught with difficulty. For starters, as we have already seen, Berkeley’s remarks about common sense and his philosophy’s relationship to it are not univocally positive. It is hard to distil from his scattered remarks anything more than an uneven affinity for common sense. Also, it is not always clear what Berkeley’s positive views are. So, noting that he rejects materialist view P is not necessarily an indication that Berkeley holds rival view Q, let alone whether either P or Q are considered by Berkeley to be part of common sense. Partly, this is due to Berkeley’s insistence that many materialist claims are meaningless, not simply false. A meaningless claim has no contrary, so Berkeley’s rejection of such a claim should not be taken to imply that he accepts its contrary. The biggest difficulty with a propositional account of common sense is in giving an answer to the question of why Berkeley cares to defend such a conception of common sense. Even a careful accounting of all the passages where Berkeley mentions common sense does not generate anything more than a hodgepodge of propositions with little connection to each other. There is no principle that appears to unify the allegedly commonsensical propositions into a coherent body of common sense knowledge.7 Absent such a principle, it is a vexing question as to why Berkeley cares at all about showing his philosophy is consistent with – let alone a defence of – a cluster of unrelated propositions, why he defends some commonsensical propositions and not others, or why he thinks doing so is any mark in favour of his philosophy.8

The perspectival approach Where propositional accounts of Berkeley’s view of common sense fail is in explaining what the various commonsensical propositions have in common and why Berkeley cares to show his philosophy is, variably, either consistent with them or a defence of them. One way to provide both is to understand common sense more holistically, as a worldview or perspective that Berkeley might have

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better reasons for cleaving to. This is the approach John Russell Roberts (2007) has defended. Borrowing a Sellarsian notion of an image of humanity-in-theworld – a conceptual framework through which the world and humanity’s place in it are understood – Roberts argues that Berkeley’s conception of common sense can be understood as a religious image. The religious image conceives of the world first and foremost as a creation of a supreme God, and human beings are conceived as specially made in the image of that God and given a special place in the world because of it. The core of the religious image is monotheism. Roberts’ interpretation then takes Berkeley’s claims regarding common sense to be claims about the religious image. Berkeley’s philosophy is, if not common sense itself, at least open to it since common sense is, after all, nothing but monotheism. If Berkeley himself understood common sense as something like the holistic, conceptual scheme of the religious image, then it should be clear both how Berkeley thought he was offering a defence of common sense and why he thought it might be worth defending. Berkeley does say that one of the principal dangers of materialism is the possibility that it would lead people to scepticism and atheism, ‘to entertain suspicions concerning the most important truths which they had hitherto held sacred and unquestionable’ (3D 2:172). So presenting a metaphysics that places an active personal God at its centre is conducive to both projects. Explaining Berkeley’s motivation and his sense of having succeeded in defending (this view of) common sense is not a problem for a perspectival approach such as Roberts’. The real problem is much simpler: there is no textual evidence to support it. Of course, Berkeley is a monotheist and his motivation for advancing a monotheistic metaphysics is transparent. But there is no indication in Berkeley’s texts that he thought of his monotheism as central to common sense. Indeed, all of Berkeley’s major philosophical opponents, the same people whose views he considers dangerously opposed to common sense, are monotheists as well. When Berkeley talks about common sense, his major concern is with the dangers posed to it by materialism, not polytheism, pantheism or atheism. Remember, Berkeley’s worry is that materialism leads to atheism, not the other way around. So the strange truth, as I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, seems to be that Berkeley thought of his immaterialism – not his theism – as the main point of contact between his philosophy and the untutored common sense of the vulgar. Roberts’ religious image is very probably an image that Berkeley would have shared, but it is a stretch to think that Berkeley identified it with common sense itself.

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Alternative strategies Applicable to all the accounts discussed above is an assumption that Berkeley’s intention was to offer a philosophical apology for common sense, or at least to provide it with some additional philosophical support by showing that common sense is consistent with strict philosophy. The idea shared by nearly all commentators is that Berkeley meant to defend common sense in a positive, constructive manner by offering arguments for propositions or perspectives that he thought were philosophically sound and commonsensical at the same time. This assumption raises a number of difficult questions, as I have already mentioned. Why does Berkeley think common sense is worth defending in this way? Why does he single out only some apparently commonsensical views for defence and criticize others? If the views being defended really are just common sense, why would Berkeley feel compelled to offer additional philosophical support in the first place? And, most pressingly, how could Berkeley be so apparently clueless that his philosophy is so far from (what most would say is) common sense? If we reject the assumption that Berkeley was arguing for common sense, however, these questions lose their force. And we should reject this assumption. Indeed, Berkeley nowhere says that he aims to ‘defend’ common sense, he says that he aims to vindicate it (3D 2: 244). My own view is that Berkeley’s strategy was not to defend common sense by arguing for it, but to protect common sense by arguing against views he regarded as threats to it – to vindicate common sense. I read Berkeley as being fully aware that his own views were not commonsensical; that few among the vulgar would ever consider, let alone agree, that the sensible world depends for its existence on its being perceived, or that we do not touch the very same thing we see, and so on. But this does not mean that Berkeley could not reasonably regard his philosophy as being salutary to the ‘illiterate bulk of mankind who walk the high-road of plain, common sense’. The reason why is stated clearly in both the Introduction to the Principles and in the Preface to Three Dialogues: philosophy is supposed to lead to greater clarity and wisdom, yet in practice it leads its practitioners into ‘uncouth paradoxes, difficulties, and inconsistencies’. The result is that philosophers who are supposed to know as much as anyone can are drawn insensibly to scepticism. This scepticism among philosophers is dangerous to people of common sense because, when men of less leisure see them who are supposed to have spent their whole time in the pursuits of knowledge, professing an entire ignorance of all things, or

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advancing such notions as are repugnant to plain and commonly received principles, they will be tempted to entertain suspicions concerning the most important truths, which they had hitherto held sacred and unquestionable. 3D 2:172

These sacred and unquestionable truths are, no doubt, those of religion. There is then a connection between Berkeley’s views about common sense and his religious commitments, but it is not exactly the one Roberts has highlighted. What Berkeley seems to be saying is not that theism is a part of common sense, but that sceptical philosophy can have a disrupting effect on the common sense, religion-friendly credulity of the non-philosopher. The vulgar are ‘for the most part easy and undisturbed. To them nothing that’s familiar appears unaccountable or difficult to comprehend. They complain not of any want in their senses, and are out of all danger of becoming sceptics’ (PI §1). This credulity is useful for the ends of religion, and as clergy himself, Berkeley has a clear motivation to preserve this. So, the question as to why Berkeley would care about defending – or rather, vindicating – common sense is easily answered: common sense, considered as the default, credulous state of the vulgar, is useful for ecclesiastical purposes. It is also easy to identify the dangerous philosophical views most centrally in Berkeley’s sights, especially given how Berkeley defines ‘sceptic’. A sceptic is one who ‘denies the reality of sensible things, or professes the greatest ignorance of them’ (3D 2:173). We might put the point more pointedly: a sceptic denies that sensible things – the things perceived immediately by sense – are real. Of course, Berkeley is adamant that the only things perceived by sense, strictly speaking, are those immediate objects of sense: ideas of light and colour (by sight), or of heat and cold, motion and resistance (by touch) (see P §§38 & 54, 3D 2:188 and 2:236). These ideas are nothing but what they are perceived to be and have no being in themselves outside of the mind. On these points, Berkeley would have met with little resistance, even from Locke himself. The crucial and dangerous move that Locke and others make is in supposing that something beyond our ideas – something more real yet less evident – is perceived, indirectly, by the senses. This is matter, material substance, or substratum; or as Berkeley understands it, an ‘inert, senseless unknown substance’ that ‘neither acts, nor perceives, nor is perceived’ (P §68). But with the supposition of matter, the ‘real’ things are the material objects that one supposes to be the causes of our immediately perceived ideas; the ideas themselves, the things immediately perceived by sense, are reduced to a false imaginary glare.

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In Berkeley’s view, materialism directly implies scepticism about the reality of sensible things, and scepticism leads to atheism and irreligion. So it is Berkeley’s immaterialism – his case against the existence of matter and the attending belief that the sensed world is not the real world – that is the lynchpin of his vindication of common sense. As a negative metaphysical thesis, there is little Berkeley can offer by way of positive arguments for immaterialism, which explains why Berkeley’s case consists primarily in drawing out the absurd consequences – metaphysical, epistemological and semantic – of the materialist hypothesis. That is enough for Berkeley’s purposes. The reason why is again suggested by Berkeley himself: the vulgar are naturally disposed to accept that the things they perceive are the real things and not merely appearances caused in our minds by some unperceived somethings-we-know-not-what. This natural credulity is the default state of mind for anyone not in the grips of sceptical philosophy; this is what Berkeley means by common sense. And he means to vindicate it by warding off the major threat to it: by offering arguments against materialism and, in the process, scepticism and atheism. That Berkeley thought of common sense as this default naive realism is, I think, nicely shown by his closing remarks in the Three Dialogues. Philonous I do not pretend to be a setter-up of new notions. My endeavours tend only to unite and place in a clearer light that truth, which was before shared between the vulgar and the philosophers: the former being of the opinion, that those things they immediately perceive are the real things; and the latter, that the things immediately perceived, are ideas which exist only in the mind. Which two notions put together, do in effect constitute the substance of what I advance. 3D 2:262; original emphasis

By understanding Berkeley’s defence of common sense as this negative, vindicatory project, we can better understand why he was so ambivalent towards other commonly held beliefs and the vulgar more generally. The ‘illiterate bulk of mankind’ is unlearned, and, quite naturally, one would expect to find more superstition and old wives’ tales in commonly held beliefs than deep philosophical truth. Yet even the vulgar have sense enough to trust in their senses that fire is hot and sugar sweet. We can also see how Berkeley could have simultaneously thought of his own philosophy as contrary to common opinions and yet also useful in the service of common sense. Since the vulgar’s naive realism is the default position, it need not be argued for, it needs only to be left undisturbed. Nor are the vulgar his

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audience; sceptically minded philosophers are. So it would not much matter to Berkeley whether the vulgar would find his philosophy perfectly obvious or downright ridiculous if, as is unlikely, they were ever confronted with it. What matters from Berkeley’s perspective, rather, is whether or not those in a position of intellectual authority are setting the right example: whether they believe that we can know, directly and immediately, that the objects of sense are red, round, sweet or hot, or whether they profess that the world is fundamentally unknowable. Berkeley, along with the vulgar, holds with the former.

Notes 1 One might doubt whether the clause following the semicolon is intended to explicate the preceding clause. However, Dicker later explicitly conflates the two views: ‘Berkeley’s position is also called “idealism”, and I shall use that term more frequently than “immaterialism”.’ Dicker, G., Berkeley’s Idealism: A Critical Examination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 4. 2 For alternative definitions of idealism, see Muehlmann, Berkeley’s Ontology (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), p. 13. 3 Berkeley also claims here that the Dialogues are meant simply ‘to treat more clearly and fully of certain principles’, introduced in his Principles of Human Knowledge, ‘and to place them in a new light’. A natural reading of this is that Berkeley thought of the Principles as equally open to common sense despite how little he says about common sense in that work; although one might contend that the connection to common sense that Berkeley draws in the Dialogues is just the ‘new light’ he mentions. 4 Berkeley used the term ‘vulgar’ typically to refer to uneducated people and their opinions. Because the vast majority of the population in Berkeley’s day fit this description, it is a fair inference that where he speaks of ‘the vulgar’ and ‘vulgar opinions’ he is speaking of common folk and common sense opinions. 5 There is some debate on this point, but most scholars agree that Berkeley held some kind of ideational theory of meaning on which language gains its meaning from ideas perceived and signified by the speaker. To my knowledge, only John Russell Roberts denies that Berkeley holds any kind of ideational theory of meaning. See his A Metaphysics for the Mob: The Philosophy of George Berkeley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), especially chapter 2. For a more mainstream account of Berkeley’s theory of meaning, see Winkler’s Berkeley: An Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), chapter 1, and ‘Berkeley and the Doctrine of Signs’, in K. Winkler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 125–65, 2005).

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6 Berkeley himself vacillates between calling such utterances meaningless or contradictory, but the upshot is the same in either case. Someone who claims, ‘I believe that sensible objects exist independently of minds’ certainly does not take her claim to be either meaningless or contradictory. In Berkeley’s view, however, this is only because the speaker does not carefully attend to the ideas she signifies (or rather her failure to signify any ideas) when speaking. So recognizing what people might commonly say does not require Berkeley to grant that anything in particular is meant or believed as part of common sense. 7 This is not to say that a reconstructive propositional account of what Berkeley means by common sense could not provide a unifying principle or an answer to the question of why Berkeley cares about common sense in the first place. There might be such a connecting principle that scholars have overlooked. My point here is just that the propositional accounts on offer have as yet failed to show convincingly what it is about common sense – considered as a collection of commonsensical propositions – that Berkeley finds valuable. 8 Pappas at least is aware of this challenge and tries to meet it, I would argue unsuccessfully. See Bordner, ‘Berkeley’s “Defense” of “Commonsense”,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy, 49, 315–38 (2011), 331–3 for a critique of Pappas’s attempt at answering these questions.

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Immediate and Mediate Perception in Berkeley Richard Glauser

Berkeley was concerned with perception from the Notebooks to Siris. Daringly innovative in its day, his position in this field has remained a notoriously radical one ever since its initial appearance in An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, closely followed by A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. Other important works are Alciphron and The Theory of Vision, Vindicated and Explained. When discussing perception in Berkeley, one must distinguish between the perception of a sensible quality (e.g. a colour, a sound, a figure, distance, size, situation, etc.) and that of a physical object (e.g. a cherry, a coach). For the time being let us consider the perception of sensible qualities; we will discuss physical objects in the final two sections of this chapter.

Immediate and mediate perception in the theory of vision According to Berkeley’s understanding of immediate perception to be gathered from the Theory of Vision, one perceives x immediately just if x is a sensible thing and one perceives x directly, i.e. one’s perception of x does not depend on the perception of an intermediary idea (an idea that is neither identical with, nor a part of, x), which either suggests or represents x.1 Let us call this the TV definition. In contrast, one perceives y mediately just if y is a sensible thing, and one’s perception of y depends on the immediate perception of one or more intermediary ideas x, in such a way that: (i) the immediate perception of x suggests the idea of y; and (ii) given x, one expects one will, or would, immediately perceive y under such and such conditions.2 Due to her past experience, when Sally immediately perceives some visible ideas and these suggest to her imagination the ideas of sensible qualities she would perceive by touch if she were to move in the direction of a certain tangible body, she mediately perceives

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ideas of tangible figure, size, situation and distance. Mediate perception is made possible by the facts that: (a) visible ideas are produced by God in lawfully ordered sequences; (b) tangible ideas are also produced in this way; (c) these intra-modal lawfully ordered sequences co-vary in complex ways according to lawful intermodal relations; and (d) human beings and at least some animals more or less subconsciously register these intra-modal and intermodal relations merely by experience, custom and association.3 Berkeley’s ‘first conferred’ criterion describes the domain of immediately perceivable sensible things: ‘those things alone are actually and strictly perceived by any sense, which would have been perceived, in case that same sense had then been first conferred on us’ (3D 204). Thus, immediate perception is independent of the psychological, associative activity involved in mediate perception. The criterion also implies that immediate perception is not conceptual. For, if Sally immediately perceives x when her senses are ‘first conferred’ on her, and if x is an F, she will presumably not perceive x as an F until she forms the concept of F. For Berkeley, the kind of concept, or general idea, involved in conceptual perception is just a particular idea made functionally and extrinsically general by being made a sign of other particular ideas that are sufficiently similar for all of them to be given the same general name.4 Forming such a sign, however, goes beyond immediate perception, because when we make a particular idea a sign of similar particular ideas, we are disposed to use the sign to signify and suggest similar ideas (to which we give the same general name). Thus, because forming and using a concept go beyond immediate perception and depend on suggestion, immediate perception taken strictly by itself must be non-conceptual.5 In mediate perception the suggested ideas are not sensible ideas proper, but ‘in truth only objects of the imagination’.6 These suggested ideas nevertheless have sensory content; they are ideas of – they represent – possible ideas of touch,7 namely sensible ideas that one does not immediately perceive at present, but that one would immediately perceive under certain conditions. The expression ‘tangible ideas’ in the Theory of Vision is sometimes ambiguous: it can refer either to tangible ideas proper or to ideas of the imagination. Berkeley warns the reader of the ambiguity in TV §45, and he clears it up in a letter to Jean Le Clerc8 and in TVV §51. Contrary to what is sometimes held, Berkeley does have a representative theory of perception of sorts, because the ideas suggested to the imagination represent certain sensible ideas of touch in such a way that one expects to immediately perceive the latter under such and such conditions. Given that Berkeley grants, however, that mediate perception is sometimes non-veridical,9

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one should presumably say that the suggested ideas of the imagination represent sensible ideas of touch either correctly or incorrectly, and the expectation will thus be either correct or incorrect. That being so, what fundamentally distinguishes Berkeley’s representative theory of mediate perception from ‘materialist’ representative theories is that, for Berkeley, when mediate perception is veridical, the mediately perceived qualities are always perceivable immediately. More accurately: the suggested ideas are immediately perceived by the imagination ‘whose objects they are, and which alone perceives them’ (TVV §39); and when mediate perception is veridical the sensible qualities that the former (correctly) represent can all in principle be immediately perceived by sense, although it may not be possible to do so due to practical limitations. Berkeley’s claim that mediate perception depends entirely on experience and association, not on rational inference (thereby giving his theory application to animals), goes hand in hand with his denial of necessary connexions – and phenomenal resemblances – between visible and tangible ideas. This denial leads Berkeley to the ‘heterogeneity thesis’, a conjunction of three points: (i) there is no numerically identical sensible idea common to two or more senses; (ii) there are no specifically identical sensible ideas common to two or more senses; (iii) there are no intrinsic phenomenal resemblances between ideas of different senses.10 Contrary to the long-standing tradition stemming from Aristotle, there are no common sensible qualities for Berkeley, only proper sensible qualities. Given (iii) it follows that it is not even possible to form a general idea of extension – in the sense in which Berkeley accepts general ideas – capable of representing both visible and tangible extension.

Natural signs and the language of the Author of nature In the Theory of Vision Berkeley argues not only that groups of visible ideas are natural signs of tangible ideas, but also that visible ideas are analogous to linguistic signs of human institution in that they naturally signify tangible ideas by constituting ‘an universal language of the Author of Nature’ (TV §147). In the Three Dialogues, and arguably in the Principles, Berkeley expands the scope of his theory of mediate perception so as to include ideas of the other three senses as well. In Alciphron he spells out his expanded theory: Alciphron It seems to me that every other sense may as well be deemed a language as that of vision. Smells and tastes, for instance, are signs that inform us of other qualities to which they have neither likeness nor necessary connexion.

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Euphranor That they are signs is certain, as also that language and all other signs agree in the general nature of sign, or so far forth as signs. But it is as certain that all signs are not language: not even all significant sounds, such as the natural cries of animals, or the inarticulate sounds and interjections of men. It is the articulation, combination, variety, copiousness, extensive and general use and easy application of signs (all of which are commonly found in vision) that constitute the true nature of language. Other senses may indeed furnish signs; and yet those signs have no more right than inarticulate sounds to be thought a language. IV §12 157

Euphranor grants that not only visible ideas, but also smells, tastes – and, presumably, unintentionally produced sounds, such as the rattling of a coach, a thunderclap or an accidental yawn – are signs. Given that a finite agent does not intentionally produce these signs (contrary to the signs of human conventional languages, and contrary, too, it seems, to ‘significant sounds, such as the natural cries of animals, or the inarticulate sounds and interjections of men’), such signs can only be natural. Furthermore, the ideas they and visual signs signify are ‘qualities to which they have neither likeness nor necessary connexion’. Hence, the ideas signified by them are not necessarily tangible ideas only, for there is ‘neither likeness nor necessary connexion’ between the ideas of any of the five senses. In sum, whereas in TV Berkeley’s description of mediate perception was limited to the mediate perception of tangible ideas by the immediate perception of visible ideas, he later expands the scope of his theory to the extent that at least some ideas of each sense are natural signs of at least some ideas of any one or more of the other senses. However, Euphranor states that only visual signs constitute a natural language. Why? Because: ‘It is the articulation, combination, variety, copiousness, extensive and general use and easy application of signs (all of which are commonly found in vision) that constitute the true nature of language’. These features sum up Berkeley’s conception of the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for signs – whether natural or of human institution – to constitute a language. Such features are not found in the combinations of, respectively, smells, tastes and unintentionally produced sounds. Thus, although these are natural signs, they do not constitute as many natural languages.11 The natural language of vision has a biological and practical finality. By means of this language ‘we are instructed how to regulate our actions in order to attain those things that are necessary to the preservation and well-being of our bodies, as also to avoid whatever may be hurtful and destructive of them’.12 This suggests a distinction that Berkeley does not make, but that he arguably should make:

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between what a visual sign suggests and what it naturally signifies. Visual signs suggest ideas of the imagination in the sense that they prompt them, i.e. excite them so as to be perceived by the imagination. However, ideas of the imagination are obviously not the things we strive ‘to attain’ as ‘necessary to the preservation and well-being of our bodies’, nor are they ‘hurtful and destructive of them’. The things we seek to attain are food, clothing, shelter, etc.; the things that are hurtful and destructive are raging fires, wild storms, etc. All of which are collections of sensible ideas. So, Berkeley ought to say that visual signs are the relata of two distinct relations: (1) through psychological association they come to suggest ideas of the imagination (say, ideas that merely represent a forthcoming storm and lead one to expect one); (2) independently of our psychological associations, they are instituted by God to naturally signify the sensible ideas that the suggested ideas represent correctly when mediate perception is veridical (namely, the sensible ideas one immediately perceives in a real storm).13

The identity of sensible qualities and sensible ideas As Berkeley acknowledges in the Principles §44, he neither presupposed, nor argued for, immaterialism in the Theory of Vision. Let us now take for granted three of the claims he argues for in the Principles and the Three Dialogues: (1) material substances cannot exist; (2) sensible qualities and sensible ideas are identical; (3) a physical body is a ‘collection’, a ‘combination’ or a ‘congeries’ of sensible qualities, or ideas that belong to several senses, and that share no common space.14 Let us consider (2). It seems that the best way to understand the claim that sensible qualities and sensible ideas are identical is to see that Berkeley wants to construct an original ontological category of sensible items that share: (A) some of the features commonly attributed by seventeenth-century philosophers to ideas of sense (e.g. Descartes and Locke), or sensations (Malebranche); and also (B) some of the characteristics ascribed by ‘materialist’ philosophers to primary qualities, and ascribed, too, by ordinary persons to secondary qualities. For instance, among the features in (A) are the following:

(A1) the sensible items are immaterial; hence they are not modes or accidents of material substances; (A2) they necessarily exist in a mind; that is, they necessarily depend on a mind inasmuch as they exist if, and only if, they are perceived;

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they are passively received by the finite minds that perceive them; they have an external cause; they are perceived immediately; when the items are immediately perceived, they appear exactly as they are, and they are exactly as they appear, as to all of their intrinsic, phenomenal traits.

Among the characteristics in (B) we find:

(B1) the sensible items are all particulars; (B2) they are not acts, but objects of perception; (B3) these objects are not ideas of qualities; contrary to ideas of imagination, they are not intentional items that represent qualities; they are a particular figure, a redness, a hardness, a sound, etc.; (B4) they are constituents of physical objects, which are governed by physical laws, whereby the latter constitute a physical universe; (B5) they are not modes of minds;15 (B6) they have a kind of being which is ‘entirely distinct and heterogeneous’ from that of minds, or spiritual substances (P §89). We may add an altogether different characteristic, which Berkeley’s items share with Malebranchean physical objects and primary qualities:

(B7) they are causally inert. Berkeley calls the items that belong to this original ontological category either ‘sensible ideas’ or ‘sensible qualities’. He stresses, however, that his only reason for calling such qualities ‘ideas’ is due to feature (A2), the idealist tenet.16 He calls them ‘ideas’, not because they are modes of a mind, which indeed they cannot be (B5), but because they necessarily depend on minds in virtue of the fact that they cannot exist unperceived. Let us look at (A6), part of which is the basis for (B7). In the Principles §25 Berkeley says that ‘since they [sensible ideas] and every part of them exist only in the mind, it follows that there is nothing in them but what is perceived’. He uses the claim that ‘there is nothing in them but what is perceived’ as a major premise for the argument that, since we perceive no causal activity in any of our sensible ideas, they have no such activity (B7).17 This means that, if S immediately perceives a sensible quality, all of its intrinsic, phenomenal traits and all of its parts, if it has parts, are manifest to the perceiver.18 Let us call this, following Cummins (1995), the Manifest Quality Thesis (MQT ).

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Berkeley argues for MQT by saying that it follows from the fact that sensible qualities can only exist in a mind (A2). Thus, according to Berkeley, MQT is not part of the definition of immediate perception. MQT follows from the application of the esse is percipi principle to immediately perceived sensible qualities, that is, from the identification of sensible qualities with sensible ideas. Berkeley also holds a complementary thesis. In the ‘crooked oar’ passage of the Three Dialogues Philonous says that ‘his mistake lies not in what he perceives immediately and at present (it being a manifest contradiction to suppose he should err in respect of that) but in the wrong judgement he makes concerning the ideas he apprehends to be connected with those immediately perceived: or concerning the ideas that, from what he perceives at present, he imagines would be perceived in other circumstances’ (238). What is obviously intended here, in the first instance, is that the visible form of the oar really is crooked. But the more general claim embedded in Philonous’s reply is that the perceiver cannot be mistaken ‘in what he perceives immediately and at present’. Let us call this the Infallibility Thesis (IT ): if S immediately perceives a sensible quality as having certain intrinsic, phenomenal traits, then it has those traits. The conjunction of MQT and IT amounts to point (A6): when sensible qualities are immediately perceived, they appear exactly as they are, and they are exactly as they appear, as to all of their intrinsic, phenomenal traits. Notice that we have formulated MQT and IT in terms of perception, rather than knowledge. However, Berkeley closely links immediate perception with knowledge. It is presumably with both MQT and IT in mind that he says that immediately perceived sensible ideas are ‘perfectly known’ (P §87). In the Published Introduction to the Principles: ‘so long as I confine my thoughts to my own ideas divested of words, I do not see how I can easily be mistaken. The objects I consider, I clearly and adequately know’ (§22). And in TVV: ‘The real objects of sight we see, and what we see we know’ (§20). Formulated in epistemic terms MQT would exclude ignorance; IT would rule out error.

The immediate and mediate perception of sensible qualities Berkeley’s notion of immediate perception is the locus of three distinctions. (1) It is distinguished from mediate perception as Berkeley endorses it in the TV and the TVV, as discussed above. The objects of immediate and mediate perception in Berkeley’s accepted sense are all and only ideas and collections of ideas. (2) Both immediate and mediate perception as Berkeley accepts them

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are distinguished from inference and reasoning. (3) Immediate perception is distinguished from the sort of representative mediate perception that Berkeley does not accept and that, according to him, the ‘materialist’ endorses on the assumption that material bodies exist and that it is possible to perceive them and their qualities. On that assumption the objects of immediate perception would be sensible ideas, whereas the mediately perceived bodies and their qualities would be ontologically distinct both from the mind and from its ideas. Let us approach the second distinction – that between immediate and mediate perception on the one hand, and on the other hand inference and reasoning – by raising a question. Given the importance of ideas of the imagination in mediate perception, does Berkeley consider mediate perception to be a form of sense perception, or not? Pitcher (1977) denies that he does, for there are quite a few passages, especially in the Three Dialogues, to the effect that ‘sensible things are those only which are immediately perceived by sense’ (175); ‘there is nothing perceived by sense, which is not perceived immediately’ (215).19 I believe, however, that Berkeley’s more considered position enlarges the notion of sense perception so as to encompass mediate perception, as in the ‘coach passage’: ‘I grant we may in one acceptation be said to perceive sensible things mediately by sense: that is, when from a frequently perceived connexion, the immediate perception of ideas by one sense suggests to the mind others perhaps belonging to another sense, which are wont to be connected with them’ (3D 204; my italics). That Berkeley considers mediate perception a form of sense perception gains confirmation from TVV, where he distinguishes between (a) perception by the senses, which is either immediate or mediate, and (b) acts of the understanding, such as judgements and inferences: To perceive is one thing; to judge is another. So likewise, to be suggested is one thing, and to be inferred another. Things are suggested and perceived by sense. We make judgements and inferences by the understanding. What we immediately and properly perceive by sight is its primary object, light and colours. What is suggested or perceived by mediation therefore, are tangible ideas which may be considered as secondary and improper objects of sight. We infer causes from effects, effects from causes, and properties one from another, where the connection is necessary. TVV §42; my italics

When Berkeley says that ‘things are suggested and perceived by sense’, he endorses the view that mediate perception, in his accepted sense, is a case of sense perception. Furthermore, because judgements and inferences, as described here, are acts of the understanding rather than sense, and because inference

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deals with causal relations and necessary connections between properties, it follows that immediate and mediate perception, taken strictly in themselves, do not contain judgements and inferences. This, however, leaves Berkeley ample room to hold – if he so wishes – that mediate perception can depend on, be accompanied by, or prompt perceptual judgements, as the case may be. The Theory of Vision Vindicated, from which we have just quoted, is a late text, so some chronological perspective is in order regarding Berkeley’s use of his central epistemic notions. His distinction between suggestion and judgement is not made in TV, where he often uses both terms equivalently.20 His reason for doing so is presumably that mediate perception, although not an inference, is generally accompanied by expectations and beliefs regarding the sort of ideas one would immediately perceive by sense under such and such conditions. Indeed, the very finality of the natural language of vision, inasmuch as it concerns our survival and well-being, is precisely to ensure that such expectations and beliefs are formed rapidly and are, for the most part, correct. Next, Berkeley’s distinction between suggestion and inference is implicit, but clear in TV, where he seems never to use the terms equivalently when describing his own theory. The distinction between immediate perception and inference is explicit in the Three Dialogues, although worded by Hylas: ‘in truth the senses perceive nothing which they do not perceive immediately: for they make no inferences. The deducing therefore of causes or occasions from effects and appearances, which alone are perceived by sense, entirely relates to reason’ (174–5). Finally, the distinction between, on the one hand perception by the senses, both immediate and mediate, and on the other hand inference, or ‘ratiocination’, is made in the Three Dialogues: ‘Whatever therefore you could before apprehend, either immediately or mediately by your senses, or by ratiocination from your senses [. . .] remains still with you’ (255; my italics). Let us return to the two last distinctions mentioned at the beginning of this Section: (2) the distinction between sense perception (immediate and mediate in Berkeley’s accepted sense) and inference, or reasoning; and (3) the distinction between immediate perception and the sort of representative mediate perception that Berkeley rejects, but that, according to him, the ‘materialist’ endorses. There is an important connexion between the two distinctions: the connexion is that so-called ‘mediate perception’ in this latter sense, according to Berkeley, would have to contain an inference, and so would not be an instance of sense perception. Let us explain. In the first of the Three Dialogues, Philonous sets out to show Hylas that all sensible qualities are mind-dependent, i.e. they are sensible ideas. Before

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surrendering, however, Hylas resorts to the ‘materialist’ distinction between, on the one hand sensible ideas, and on the other hand qualities that inhere in material substances. Hylas agrees with Philonous’s analogy between: (i) the mediate perception of an external sensible quality by means of the immediate perception of an idea of that quality, presuming the external quality has ‘a conformity or resemblance to our ideas’ (203); and (ii) the perceptual situation of a person who is said to perceive Caesar when perceiving a picture of him. Philonous notes that two persons who can see the picture equally well may differ in that the one’s ‘thoughts are directed to the Roman Emperor’ (204), whereas the other person’s thoughts are not, and that the difference cannot be explained by a difference in what they perceive since they both see the picture equally well. Philonous infers that the difference between the two persons ‘should seem therefore to proceed from reason and memory’ (204). By way of the purported analogy, the implication is that when a ‘materialist’ speaks of mediately perceiving a quality of a material substance, the position he really holds is that: (a) a person immediately perceives a sensible idea; and that (b) the step further – the step from the sensible idea to the external quality itself, i.e. the step whereby her thoughts are mediately directed to the quality – depends on the use of ‘reason and memory’. (Berkeley knows that the ‘materialist’ has to exclude memory from his explanation of his so-called ‘mediate perception’, because memory depends on perception, and perception is precisely what the ‘materialist’ is trying to explain. This, then, leaves only reason open to the ‘materialist’, that is, inference.) In sum, according to Berkeley, although the ‘materialist’ speaks of mediately perceiving qualities of material substances, in his mouth the expression ‘mediate perception’ is bogus, because he uses the expression to describe, not a case of sense perception, but an inference from immediately perceived sensible ideas to external objects.21 Thus, material bodies and their qualities, if any existed, could not be mediately perceived in the sense in which mediate perception is a form of sense perception. Given that Berkeley takes it that the ‘materialists’ agree that material bodies and their qualities cannot be immediately perceived, he holds that they could be perceived neither immediately nor mediately, that is, not at all.

How many definitions of immediate perception does Berkeley have? A question raised by Dicker and Pappas is that of Berkeley’s definition of immediate perception. I agree with Pappas that Berkeley’s definition of immediate

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perception is the TV definition.22 In an excellent paper Dicker argues that in the First Dialogue Berkeley also operates with two other, quite different definitions, and that he conflates them. These are what Dicker describes as a psychological notion (to immediately perceive-p) and an epistemic notion (to immediately perceive-e). The psychological definition of ‘x is immediately perceived-p’ is: x is perceived without the perceiver’s performing any (conscious) inference.

The epistemic definition of ‘x is immediately perceived-e’ is: x is perceived in such a way that its existence and nature can be known solely on the basis of one’s present perceptual experience. 2006, 518

Dicker would surely agree that the psychological notion of immediate perception is not Berkeley’s proper definition. It gives only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition of immediate perception, because, as we have seen, the definiens applies just as well to mediate perception as Berkeley accepts it.23 More must be said, however, about Dicker’s epistemic notion of immediate perception. He sees it surreptitiously at work in at least three passages of the First Dialogue, where he holds that Berkeley conflates it with the psychological notion. His reason for attributing to Berkeley the epistemic definition, and for Berkeley’s conflation, can be summarized as follows. In the Three Dialogues 180–7 Hylas tries to distinguish between (a) sensible qualities ‘as immediately perceived by us’, which exist only in the mind, and (b) qualities as they are ‘in themselves’ and that exist without the mind. For instance: Hylas You must distinguish, Philonous, between sound as it is perceived by us, and as it is in itself; or (which is the same thing) between the sound we immediately perceive, and that which exists without us. The former indeed is a particular kind of sensation, but the latter is merely a vibrative or undulatory motion in the air.24

Hylas agrees that qualities ‘as immediately perceived by us’ are sensations, sensible ideas. He believes that qualities as they are ‘in themselves’ are material entities that cause the former, and that they are numerically distinct from them (cf. 3D 186–7). He thus holds that there are two sorts of qualities – two sorts of sounds, light, colours, etc. – the one in the mind, the other without the mind. Philonous denies that such qualities exist without the mind. So, he denies Hylas the right to call the hypothetical material causes of our sensible ideas ‘sounds’, ‘light’, ‘colours’, etc. How does Philonous do this? He reminds Hylas that they are

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supposed to be talking only about sensible qualities, and that the qualities as they are ‘in themselves’ that Hylas wishes to posit are not sensible qualities at all. Why are they not? Because, says Philonous, they cannot be immediately perceived:25 Philonous Colours then in the vulgar sense, or taken for the immediate objects of sight, cannot agree to any but a perceiving substance. Hylas That is what I say. Philonous Well then, since you give up the point as to those sensible qualities, which are alone thought colours by all mankind beside, you may hold what you please with regard to those invisible ones of the philosophers. It is not my business to dispute about them; only I would advise you to bethink yourself, whether considering the inquiry we are upon, it be prudent of you to affirm, the red and blue which we see are not real colours, but certain unknown motions and figures which no man ever did or can see, are truly so. Are not these shocking notions [. . .]?26

According to Philonous, Hylas’s external qualities are not sensible qualities because they cannot be immediately perceived. Dicker asks: ‘What notion of immediate perception is required in order to make it true that we do not immediately perceive the causes of our sensations?’ (2006, 528). Well, how about Berkeley’s TV definition of immediate perception? Dicker concedes that ‘if we think of sensations as thing-like intermediaries (‘sense-data’) involved in all perception’, then the TV definition will be ‘sufficient to rule out the claim that we immediately perceive the causes of those sensations. For then it will be the case that we do not perceive those causes unless we perceive an intermediary not identical with them, which means that our perception will be mediate rather than immediate’ (2006, 528). In short Berkeley’s TV definition will do the job if, and only if, it is agreed that sensations are immediate objects of perception. However, according to Dicker, this is not agreed, for Hylas may be considering sensations as ‘merely states of the self, or ways the self senses or is appeared to’ (ibid.). Therefore, in order to block the possibility that we immediately perceive the external causes of our sensations, Philonous must implicitly appeal to the epistemic definition of immediate perception. I agree with Dicker that, if sensations are immediately perceived objects of perception in the passages under discussion, then Philonous’s rebuttals do not require an epistemic definition of immediate perception. I believe, however, that the antecedent is true, and so, that the consequent is, too. Hylas distinguishes ‘between sound as it is perceived by us, and as it is in itself; or (which is the same thing) between the sound we immediately perceive, and that which exists without

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us. The former indeed is a particular kind of sensation, but the latter is merely a vibrative or undulatory motion in the air’ (my italics). Hylas equates a sensation with an immediately perceived quality, an object of immediate perception. And that is how Philonous understands him: ‘Colours then in the vulgar sense, or taken for the immediate objects of sight, cannot agree to any but a perceiving substance’.27 As Philonous says later on: ‘the materialists themselves acknowledge what we immediately perceive by our senses, to be our own ideas’ (3D 248). Thus, it is unnecessary to see Philonous as relying on Dicker’s epistemic definition; the TV definition is all that is required. Of course, Berkeley would accept the following epistemic conditional, where immediate perception is understood according to the TV definition: if one immediately perceives a sensible quality, one perceives it in such a way that its existence and nature can be known solely on the basis of one’s present perceptual experience.28 Indeed, the conditional can be derived from MQT. According to MQT, if one immediately perceives a sensible quality, all of its intrinsic, phenomenal traits and all of its parts, if it has parts, are manifest to the perceiver. Therefore, if one immediately perceives a sensible quality, one perceives it in such a way that its existence and nature can be known solely on the basis of one’s present perceptual experience. Remember, though, that according to Principles §25, MQT follows from the claim that immediately perceived qualities exist only in the mind, i.e. they are sensible ideas. Thus, if Philonous were implicitly presupposing the derived epistemic conditional in 3D 180–7, Berkeley would be committing a petitio principii. His being guilty of that, however, is far from obvious.

The immediate and mediate sense perception of physical objects When discussing physical objects, we must distinguish two different levels. At the upper, phenomenological level an apple is a hard, smooth, round object in three-dimensional space; its colour seems to cover its entire hard surface; its smell seems to be situated a few inches from the apple, in varying degrees of intensity; its taste seems to be uniformly spread in each morsel; and the sound the apple makes when dropped on a table seems to come from the exact place where it hits the table. This phenomenological picture, however, is partly – not entirely – mistaken. It is wrong insofar as it represents an apple’s different sensible qualities as located and coexisting in three-dimensional space.

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Berkeley’s explanation as to how this misleading picture is constructed by finite minds relies largely on his theory of mediate perception and on the associative connections in the imagination.29 However, philosophical reflection, in particular the heterogeneity thesis, helps us to understand what an apple really is, and this can only be found out at a level that is more basic than the upper, phenomenological level. At the more basic level an apple is a collection of sensible ideas that belong to several senses, and that share no common space. Within each sense modality the ideas that constitute a physical object belong to numerous, complex, lawfully regulated sequences. The sequences of ideas within each sense modality are correlated with those of other sense modalities by further lawfully ordered relations. The intra-modal and intermodal relations are what bind the sense-specific ideas into a bundle, a physical object.30 Up to here, when talking of Berkeley’s accepted sense of mediate perception, we have focused on the mediate perception of sensible qualities of one sense by means of the immediate perception of ideas of another sense. In the ‘coach passage’ of the Three Dialogues, Berkeley intends his notion of mediate perception to apply not only to sensible qualities, but also to physical objects: I grant we may in one acceptation be said to perceive sensible things mediately by sense: that is, when from a frequently perceived connexion, the immediate perception of ideas by one sense suggests to the mind others perhaps belonging to another sense, which are wont to be connected with them. For instance, when I hear a coach drive along the streets, immediately I perceive only the sound; but from the experience I have had that such a sound is connected with a coach, I am said to hear the coach.31

Presumably then, we mediately perceive a physical object when: (i) immediately perceived sensible ideas x suggest ideas of the imagination that represent sensible ideas y ‘perhaps belonging to another sense’; (ii) given x, one expects one will, or would, immediately perceive y under such and such conditions; and (iii) sensible ideas x and y are constituents of the same physical object. Question: Philonous says that ‘In reading a book, what I immediately perceive are the letters, but mediately, or by means of these, are suggested to my mind the notions of God, virtue, truth, etc.’ (3D 174). Of course, God, virtue and truth are not sensible things. But, the question goes, what if the immediately perceived words suggest ideas of flowers and trees, which are sensible things? Would this count as a case of mediate sense perception? Reply: clauses (ii) and especially (iii) rule out such a possibility.

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For the last thirty years there has been an on-growing debate concerning the question whether, according to Berkeley, physical objects such as described at the basic level can be immediately perceived. Let us call those who give a positive reply ‘the advocates’, and those who give a negative reply ‘the opponents’.32 The advocates hold that in some cases a physical object may be immediately perceived without being mediately perceived, and that in other cases a physical object may be simultaneously perceived both immediately and mediately. The opponents believe that a physical object cannot be immediately perceived. We might distinguish two sorts of opponents: extreme and moderate. Extreme opponents, such as Pitcher, believe that physical objects can be perceived neither immediately nor mediately. As I have already shown that Berkeley acknowledges mediate sense perception of physical objects, from now on I will be considering the moderate opponents. They hold that physical objects can be mediately, not immediately, perceived. How does the problem arise? On the one hand we find numerous passages to the apparent effect that only sensible ideas can be immediately perceived. For instance, there is the ‘coach’ passage, where Philonous says: It is nevertheless evident, that in truth and strictness, nothing can be heard but sound: and the coach is not then properly perceived by sense, but suggested from experience. So likewise when we are said to see a red-hot bar of iron; the solidity and heat of the iron are not the objects of sight, but suggested to the imagination by the colour and figure, which are properly perceived by that sense. In short, those things alone are actually and strictly perceived by any sense, which would have been perceived in case that same sense had then been first conferred on us. As for other things, it is plain they are only suggested to the mind by experience, grounded on former perceptions. 3D 204; my italics

Further on, Philonous reiterates the heterogeneity thesis: ‘we do not see the same object that we feel’ (3D 245); this, too, might seem to rule out the possibility of immediately perceiving a physical object. On the other hand there are several passages in the Principles and Three Dialogues to the apparent effect that finite minds do immediately perceive physical objects. Two such passages are the following: Take away this material substance, about the identity whereof all the dispute is, and mean by body what every plain ordinary person means by that word, to wit, that which is immediately seen and felt, which is only a combination of sensible qualities or ideas: and then their most unanswerable objections come to nothing.

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Wood, stones, fire, water, flesh, iron, and the like things, which I name and discourse of, are things that I know. And I should not have known them, but that I perceived them by my senses; and things perceived by the senses are immediately perceived.33

The advocates, who take the latter passages literally, have to acknowledge a gap in Berkeley’s theory of perception: he offers no explicit account of what the immediate perception of a physical object amounts to. They believe the gap should be bridged – though not filled up – so as to satisfy Berkeley’s declared intentions. The advocates cannot fill the gap because they are not supposed to invent a theory where Berkeley gives none; they can only bridge it, by showing that the quoted passages taken literally are consistent with Berkeley’s views on the nature of immediate perception. They believe this can be done. The opponents hold that the latter passages cannot be taken literally because they would be inconsistent with Berkeley’s views on immediate perception, and with the boundaries he draws between immediate and mediate perception. Several advocates reply by highlighting three points. First, the TV definition of immediate perception can be used to speak of the immediate perception of a physical object: one perceives x immediately just if x is a sensible thing and one’s perception of x does not depend on the perception of an intermediary idea (an idea that is neither identical with, nor a part of, x), which either suggests or represents x. According to the advocates, x can be a number of sensible qualities – of one or more senses – constitutive of the same physical object, so that to perceive x immediately is to perceive a physical object immediately. Second, MQT as put forth in Principles §25 applies to the immediate perception of sensible qualities, not to that of physical objects. It would be obviously mistaken to say that if one immediately perceives a physical object, say a tree, all of its intrinsic, phenomenal traits and its parts are manifest to the perceiver. Therefore, the epistemic conditional discussed at the end of the previous section applies only to the immediate perception of a sensible quality, not to that of a physical object. Third, several passages, including 3D 204 quoted above, show that Berkeley has in mind a distinction between what is merely immediately perceived and what is strictly, or properly and immediately perceived.34 According to several advocates, sensible qualities proper to a sense are properly and immediately perceived by that sense. However, when Berkeley speaks of the immediate perception of physical objects, he dispenses with the adverbs ‘strictly’ and ‘properly’, thereby implying that physical objects can be immediately perceived, albeit not properly because they are not the proper objects of any one sense modality.

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Some opponents seem to believe (a) that for Berkeley the perception of a physical object is necessarily conceptual. For example, to perceive a physical object one must perceive it as an apple, or as a tomato, etc. Opponents and advocates agree (b) that conceptual perception of a physical object involves mediate perception. For example, one would not perceive an apple as an apple unless the immediate perception of some sensible ideas that belong to an apple suggest ideas of the imagination that represent other sensible ideas that also belong to the apple. The conjunction of (a) and (b) leads the opponents to the conclusion that it is impossible to perceive a physical object immediately. Given that the advocates accept (b), they deny (a). So their reply is, or should be, that immediate perception is, and mediate perception can be, non-conceptual for Berkeley. We have seen at the beginning of this chapter that immediate perception is non-conceptual because of the ‘first conferred’ criterion. I now wish to show that mediate perception can be non-conceptual. Berkeley’s awareness of conceptual perception is evidenced in a group of four sections of the Theory of Vision Vindicated, where he explains that suggested ideas of tangible distance, size and situation vary considerably according to what he calls our ‘praenotions’ concerning, among other things, the kind of object we are mediately perceiving. Here is one such passage: Beside this magnitude, situation, and faintness of the pictures, our praenotions concerning the kind, size, shape and nature of things do concur in suggesting to us their tangible magnitudes. Thus, for instance, a picture equally great, equally faint, and in the very same situation, shall in the shape of a man suggest a lesser tangible magnitude than it would in the shape of a tower.35

If Jane has the ‘praenotion’ that she is perceiving a man, the visible ideas she immediately perceives will suggest to her imagination an idea of tangible size much smaller than what would be suggested by similar visible ideas (‘equally great, equally faint, and in the very same situation’) if she thought she were perceiving a tower. Suppose that, due to her immediately perceiving man-shaped visible ideas rather than tower-shaped visible ideas, Jane has the correct ‘praenotion’ that she is mediately perceiving a man rather than a tower. In Berkeley’s example Jane mediately perceives a physical object as a man, rather than as a tower. This is a case of conceptual mediate perception. I believe, though, that conceptual mediate perception, for Berkeley, must be preceded by non-conceptual mediate perception. Why? It seems that the only way Berkeley can explain how we mediately perceive a physical object as an F, say as an apple, is by supposing that we have already formed the concept of F, say the general idea of an apple.36 This is confirmed by Berkeley’s expression ‘praenotion’:

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a previously acquired conception.37 Now, we must perceive particular ideas before making them general; general ideas are dependent on, and subsequent to, particular ideas. Thus, taking ‘F’ to stand here for a sort of physical object (a coach, an apple, etc.), one must perceive at least one F non-conceptually before forming a concept of F, and therefore before perceiving it, or another physical object, as an F. Perceiving a certain physical object as an F is necessarily dependent and consequent on perceiving some F non-conceptually, whether it be the same one or another, numerically distinct one. In sum, although mediate perception of a physical object can be either conceptual or non-conceptual, non-conceptual mediate perceiving is prior to, and independent of, conceptual mediate perceiving.38 The advocates’ hypothesis is that Berkeley can consistently claim both: (1) that sensible qualities of one sense modality are properly and immediately perceived by that sense (in accordance with the ‘first conferred’ criterion); and (2) that a physical object can be immediately perceived (in accordance with the TV definition), albeit not properly, nor conceptually, just in virtue of the fact that one immediately perceives some of the sensible qualities that happen to belong to such a collection. In order to immediately perceive a physical object it is not necessary to perceive the object as of this or that sort.39 Let us now envisage what may be a difficulty for the opponents. The difficulty concerns point (a) mentioned above: that for Berkeley the perception of a physical object is necessarily conceptual. How is (a) to be interpreted? Surely the opponents do not mean to say that in order to perceive a tomato, one must perceive it as a tomato, because we have seen that Berkeley readily acknowledges cases of misperception. To clarify this, let us consider a common case of sortal misperception. Mary (an experienced perceiver equipped with all of our ordinary concepts) perceives a round red fruit as an apple and believes it is an apple, although, unknown to her, it is a tomato. If the opponents’ understanding of (a) were that, in order to perceive a physical object that is an F, it is necessary to perceive it as an F, they would have to deny that (unknown to her) Mary perceives a tomato. This would rule out the possibility of sortal misperception. Why? Because in order to (mis)perceive as an apple a round red fruit that is a tomato, it must be true that one perceives a tomato even though one does not perceive it as a tomato. Therefore, let us interpret (a) so as to accommodate the possibility of sortal misperception: in order to perceive a physical object that is an F, it is necessary to perceive it either as an F, or a G, or an H, etc. So the question now becomes: How do the opponents account for the fact that Mary perceives a tomato (although she perceives it as an apple, and believes it is one)? It seems they will offer the following account: (i) Mary immediately

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perceives some sensible ideas that, unknown to her, belong to a tomato; (ii) these suggest to her imagination ideas that correctly represent several sensible qualities of a red fruit, e.g. its figure, size, distance and situation; (iii) they also suggest to her imagination other ideas that represent apple-like, but not tomato-like, sensible qualities; and (iv) if (counterfactually) Mary were closer to the tangible tomato, another set of immediately perceived sensible ideas would suggest to her imagination ideas such as those mentioned in (ii), and also ideas that represent tomato-like sensible qualities, instead of the apple-like sensible ideas mentioned in (iii). Furthermore, the opponents’ account goes, because of (ii) Mary mediately, conceptually and correctly perceives a round red fruit. Because of (iii) she falsely believes that the fruit she mediately perceives is an apple. Because of (iv) it is counterfactually true that, given certain conditions, Mary would mediately, conceptually and correctly perceive the tomato as a tomato, and believe it is one. So far, so good. However, since the opponents deny that a physical object can be immediately perceived, (i) does not account for the fact that Mary at present really perceives a tomato. So what, according to the opponents, does account for this fact?40 As for the advocates, they will agree with (i)–(iv), but they will claim that (i) accounts for the fact that, unknown to her, Mary perceives a tomato: she perceives it immediately, and just insofar as she perceives it immediately, she perceives it non-conceptually.

Two objections, replies, and further considerations Let us now discuss two objections to the advocates’ reading so far proposed. In a fine paper Atherton rejects the distinction between what is immediately perceived (both sensible qualities and physical objects according to the advocates) and what is properly and immediately perceived (only sensible qualities). She believes that the ‘first conferred’ criterion implies that ‘the concept of what is immediately perceived collapses into the concept of what is properly perceived’ (2008a, 114). Why? Because: mental activity is required before the different sensible ideas are perceived as or constitute a collection. Indeed, this seems to be a job for suggestion. Ideas form a collection when immediate ideas suggest other sensible ideas of the imagination. Since physical objects are collections of a variety of sensible ideas, under this account, they are mediately perceived. 2008a, 111; my italics

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Apparently she holds that the collection of sensible ideas that constitutes a physical object is literally produced by a finite mind’s mental activity in mediate perception: Although the Man Born Blind immediately perceives the visual properties of a globe and a cube, he does not yet perceive a globe or a cube, because the visual cues do not yet suggest tangible meanings to him. The tangible properties of the globe and cube are not yet part of the collection along with the visual ideas that make up the globe and cube.41

If so, then it follows that physical objects, collections of sensible ideas, can be only mediately perceived. The argument contains two premises, however, that I find ambiguous, true in one sense, false in another: (1) a collection of ideas is formed when immediately perceived ideas suggest ideas of the imagination; (2) mental activity typical of mediate perception is required for different sensible ideas to constitute a collection. The reason why the two premises are ambiguous is that I believe Berkeley distinguishes between: (a) the collection of sensible ideas that constitute a physical object; and (b) the combination of ideas of the imagination that finite minds produce in mediate perception. As I have argued for the distinction elsewhere,42 let me briefly rehearse its main points. According to Berkeley, physical objects are produced by God, not by finite minds: ‘Moses mentions the sun, moon, and stars, earth and sea, plants and animals; that all these do really exist, and were in the beginning created by God, I make no question’ (3D 255). This must be understood of individual, particular physical objects as described at the basic level: combinations of inter-related sensible qualities. God produces both the constituent sensible ideas and the intra-modal and intermodal lawfully regulated relations that unite them into a combination.43 Now, the relations that obtain between past, present and possible sensible ideas must not be confused with the psychological, associative relations by which a finite mind combines together suggested ideas of the imagination so as to form a complex idea that represents a physical object. First, whereas the former relations are produced by God and, thus, can only be discovered by finite minds, the psychological, associative relations are produced by finite minds and depend on the discovery of the former. (As Cummins says, ‘it is the lawful connections that bind diverse qualities into individual things’.44 Associative relations in the imagination are not lawful connections, although many such relations depend on a finite mind’s registering lawful connections between sensible ideas.) Second,

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whereas the latter relations connect only sensible ideas proper, the associative relations connect immediately perceived sensible ideas with only ideas of the imagination. Whereas the sensible ideas that constitute a physical object are sensible qualities, the suggested ideas of the imagination are not sensible qualities (although they have sensory content). Third, whereas the amount of sensible ideas that constitute a physical object at the basic level is indefinitely great, the complex idea that a finite mind forms of a physical object by associatively combining ideas of the imagination is highly selective because the mind includes in its combinations only the ideas of the imagination that represent the qualities that it finds relevant to its needs, ‘in such sort as experience shows it to be most convenient’.45 To return to the opponent’s argument, (1) and (2) above are ambiguous because they do not distinguish between (a) the God-produced collection of sensible ideas that constitutes an individual physical object, and (b) the very selective combination of associatively connected ideas of the imagination that is produced by a finite mind, and that represents a physical object. If ‘collection’ in (1) and (2) refers to (a), I believe the two statements are false. If it refers to (b), then they are true, but irrelevant, because Berkeley can consistently hold that a finite mind can immediately perceive a physical object by immediately perceiving some of the sensible ideas that belong to the collection produced by God, whether or not it mediately perceives other qualities belonging to the same collection, and whether or not it has combined together ideas of the imagination that represent (some of) the sensible qualities that belong to the God-produced collection. This possibility is compatible with Berkeley’s TV definition of immediate perception. As long as the possibility remains open, it has not been established that whatever is immediately perceived is properly and immediately perceived. Let us clarify. The advocates’ argument, as I would state it, is not: God produces particular physical objects, therefore finite minds immediately perceive them. The point is rather the following: Berkeley says on several occasions that finite minds immediately perceive physical objects, and good sense can be made of this claim if: (i) we acknowledge that, although finite minds make sorts and kinds, God produces particular physical objects; (ii) immediate perception is understood according to the TV definition, which seems to be Berkeley’s only definition, as argued in Section V; (iii) we acknowledge that immediate perception for Berkeley is non-conceptual, as argued in Section I; and (iv) we accept the distinction between what we properly and immediately perceive and what we immediately perceive, albeit not properly.

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Let us turn to a second objection, made by Brook, according to whom it is not possible to immediately perceive a physical object, because a bundle theory such as Berkeley’s does not allow this. Why? Imagine Sarah, who does not yet have the concept of an apple, and who immediately perceives seriatim different sensible ideas that, unknown to her, happen to be constituents of one and the same apple. Brook compares Sarah’s situation with that of a visitor to a large house containing a collection of, say, a hundred vases spread out in many different rooms. The thought experiment consists of four steps. First, we have the intuition that the visitor cannot be said to perceive the collection of vases merely by perceiving two of them. Second, we are invited to envisage an analogy: constituent sensible ideas are to a Berkeleian physical object what the individual vases are to the collection of a hundred. Third, we are to transfer the common-sense intuition from the visitor’s perception of the collection of vases to Sarah’s immediate perception of a physical object. Finally, we are supposed to conclude that, just as the visitor cannot be said to perceive the collection of vases unless he perceives all of them, a finite mind cannot immediately perceive a physical object unless it immediately perceives all of its constituent ideas: ‘Unless Sarah has experienced all the sense elements of the apple bundle (and perhaps not even then) she has not, in my view, perceived the bundle’ (Brook 2005, 500). The argument, I believe, is inconclusive because the second step – the purported analogy – does not hold. The differences between a collection of vases and a physical object in Berkeley’s view are too great for one to legitimately transfer the common-sense intuition about perceiving the collection of vases to the question of one’s immediately perceiving a physical object. The reason is that the comparison is based on the everyday intuition we have of a collection of vases at the phenomenological level: a hundred coloured and tangible physical objects spread out discontinuously in three-dimensional space. But this picture fails to represent what a physical object is for Berkeley, because its constituents are not spread out discontinuously in three-dimensional space. On the contrary, (1) the tangible ideas of solidity that constitute a physical object are spread out continuously in three-dimensional space, and (2) the constituents of the same physical object that belong to touch and the other senses share no common space at all. Because of these differences the analogy does not hold, and so one cannot transfer the phenomenological intuition of the collection of vases down to Berkeley’s basic-level conception of a physical object. This leaves unwarranted the claim that to immediately perceive a physical object one should immediately perceive all of its constituent ideas.

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It remains an open question: How many, and what kinds of sensible qualities must one immediately perceive in order to immediately perceive a physical object? Advocates have given different answers,46 which is only to be expected. Given the heterogeneity thesis, our common-sense intuitions can afford no principled reply. Berkeley’s basic-level conception of a physical object is too remote from common sense for our phenomenological, upper-level intuitions to bear conclusively on the issue. In any case the advocates cannot be held to give a precise answer; their task is merely to establish the consistency of Berkeley’s views on immediate perception, not to invent a theory. Let us now consider an argument – independent of the dubious claim that physical object perception for Berkeley is necessarily conceptual – that might favour the opponents. A possible assumption concerning perception is that in order to perceive a physical object (even non-conceptually) one must be able to perceptually discriminate it from its surroundings. Berkeley, as far as I know, does not state the assumption explicitly; I am far from certain it is true, or that Berkeley believes it is. Nevertheless, because some opponents might take it for granted, or ascribe it to Berkeley, let us grant it for the sake of the argument. Now, consider Susan, who has just received the sense of sight. We, who have already coordinated our sight with our touch, can say that her visual field is that of a table, on which there is a computer and a pen, behind which there is a window frame. Yet, it seems plausible to say that her visual field is manifest to her, so to speak, as a variegated kaleidoscopic field of coloured patches, so that Susan, in her present state, is unable to parcel out by sight which visible ideas belong to the table, which to the computer, which to the pen, and which to the window frame, etc. Although she immediately perceives all of these visible ideas, Susan cannot visually discriminate one from another the physical objects to which the visible ideas respectively belong. If the assumption mentioned above is granted, Susan does not immediately perceive these physical objects because she cannot distinguish them by sight. The argument favours the opponents’ case, but does not clinch it. Why not? Consider June, who is blind and has just had the sense of touch first conferred on her. She might be able to discriminate these physical objects merely by touch, before having sufficient experience for her tangible ideas to suggest any ideas to her imagination. If so, even if Berkeley did endorse the discrimination assumption, he might nevertheless agree that it is satisfied in June’s case: she immediately perceives the physical objects because she distinguishes them by touch, unaided by mediate perception.47

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Notes 1 A more complex definition is given by Pappas in Pappas, G. (2000), Berkeley’s Thought. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, p. 159. 2 At the beginning of TV Berkeley uses a broader notion of mediate perception. He says that we perceive another person’s passions ‘by sight, though not immediately, yet by means of the colours they produce in the countenance’ (TV §9, cf. §10). This seems to be a loose way of speaking because, on Berkeley’s own grounds, passions are not sensible things, they cannot be immediately perceived, nor can they be represented by ideas of the imagination. We experience, but do not perceive, our own passions; we neither perceive nor experience other persons’ passions. For this reason, I submit, Berkeley would agree that the case at hand does not count as a case of mediate sense perception, which is what we are concerned with. 3 That Berkeley intends his theory of mediate sense perception to apply to animals, too, is clear in TV §59, and implicit in 3D 185 and 188. 4 Cf. PI §12 and §§15–16. 5 For a different argument concluding that immediate perception is non-conceptual, cf. Pappas (2000: 167–8). 6 TVV §9; cf. TVV §§10, 39, 51 and 3D 204. In the context of mediate perception Berkeley considers the imagination as a power of representing sensible things in their absence, rather than as a power of intentionally and fancifully compounding or dividing the representations of such things, as in Principles §1. 7 ‘Possible’ should be taken as ‘possible relative to a certain finite mind’. Such ideas may be real in God’s mind (cf. 3D 230–1). Thus, if an idea of a tangible quality is suggested to Sally’s imagination, the suggested idea is an idea of the imagination that is supposed to represent a tangible idea of sense that she would immediately perceive under such and such conditions. However, since she does not immediately perceive that sensible idea at present, it is only, for her, a possible idea of sense, although it may be real in God’s mind. 8 Cf. Bellemare, P. & Raynor, D. (1989), ‘Berkeley’s letters to Le Clerc [1711]’, Hermathena, 146: 7–23, p. 11. A draft of the letter is in Works VIII , 50. 9 Cf. TV §45; 3D 238; TVV §25; Alc IV §12 157–8. In a footnote at p. 158 editors Luce and Jessop correctly refer the reader to TV §45. 10 Cf. TV §§121, 127–8, 133 and 140–3. 11 Given that the ‘the natural cries of animals, or the inarticulate sounds and interjections of men’ are ‘significant sounds’ (presumably sounds intentionally produced to express a passion or to convey a meaning), they are probably not natural signs as used by those making such cries and sounds, but nor are they constitutive of a language, natural or not. 12 TV §147; cf. TV §59 and P §44.

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13 Although Berkeley never makes this distinction in so many words, I have argued elsewhere that it is implicit in his theory of perception; cf. Glauser, R. (2003), ‘La structure de la perception médiate dans la théorie berkeleyenne de la vision’, in D. Berlioz (ed.), Berkeley. Langage de la perception et art de voir, 103-133, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 14 Cf. respectively P §§1, 4, 95 and 3D 175 and 249. 15 Cf. P §49 and 3D 237. The following concerns (B2), (B3) and (B5). ‘Idea of a quality’ could have at least two meanings in seventeenth-century philosophy. It could mean an act or event of perceiving a quality, or it could mean a perceived intentional object that represents a quality. According to the standard metaphysics of Berkeley’s day, such entities would be modes of a finite mind. According to P §49, however, precisely because Berkeley’s sensible items are qualities – in fact we literally eat, drink and are clothed with combinations of sensible ideas (cf. P §38) – they cannot be modes of a finite mind, for otherwise the mind, a spiritual substance, would be occasionally red, hard or loud, which is absurd. Notice that if they are not modes of a mind, then they are not necessarily private, although they may be so as a matter of fact. 16 Cf. e.g. P §§2, 38, 39; also 3D 250. 17 The major premise is echoed at least twice in the Principles: ‘Colour, figure, motion, extension and the like, considered only as so many sensations in the mind, are perfectly known, there being nothing in them which is not perceived’ (§87); ‘Every particular finite extension, which may possibly be the object of our thought, is an idea existing only in the mind, and consequently each part thereof must be perceived’ (§124). The same premise appears in the Three Dialogues: ‘PHILONOUS : Do you not perfectly know your own ideas? HYLAS : I know them perfectly; since what I do not perceive or know, can be no part of my idea’ (206). 18 (1) The claim is limited to the intrinsic, phenomenal traits of a sensible quality, or idea, because such an entity can be the term of many relations: intermodal relations to ideas of other sense modalities, relations to God who causes it, and relations to the finite mind that perceives it. Relations, however, are not objects of perception. According to a passage added in the second edition of the Principles (1734), ‘we know and have a notion of relations between things or ideas, which relations are distinct from the ideas or things related, inasmuch as the latter may be perceived by us without our perceiving the former’ (§89). (2) Furthermore, to say that all of the parts of a sensible quality are manifest does not mean that they are necessarily perceived as parts. For, as pointed out to me by Dick Brook, a Berkeleian extensive magnitude, visible or tangible, is composed of minima sensibilia, and the minima are not perceived as parts if, to do so, one must perceive their boundaries. 19 Cf. Pitcher, G. (1977), Berkeley. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 145–6. 20 Cf. e.g. TV §§20, 22, 24, 38, 45 (‘conclude’), 57, 61, 73, 78–9 and 98.

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21 (1) Berkeley is arguing here against all of the ‘materialists’, who, according to him, either do not realise that their notion of mediate perception involves an inference, or are content to include an inference in their notion. (2) Philonous’s argument, of course, leaves open the possibility that – if per impossibile material substances and qualities existed – the inferred proposition may be true. But that would count as knowledge based on immediate perception, not as sense perception. Berkeley has other arguments to the effect that such knowledge would be impossible, too: cf. P §§18–20. (3) Philonous’s argument raises problems I have no space to discuss. For instance, how does Berkeley explain on his own terms what we ordinarily call perceiving Caesar in a picture? (4) Philonous’s intended conclusion is that, when a ‘materialist’ says that we mediately perceive a material object or quality by immediately perceiving some sensible ideas that are supposed to resemble the object or quality, the position he actually holds is as far from describing a case of sense perception as we would be if we were to say that we have sense perception of Caesar himself merely by seeing his portrait. 22 Cf. Pappas (2000: 147–82). 23 Dicker bases his attribution of immediate perception-p to Berkeley on 3D 174: ‘HYLAS : in truth the senses perceive nothing which they do not perceive immediately: for they make no inferences’. However, in the light of the ‘Caesar passage’ we can now see, retrospectively, that when Berkeley put the words just quoted in Hylas’s mouth, he was anticipating the distinction, not between immediate perception and mediate perception as Berkeley accepts it, but between immediate perception and what he takes to be the ‘materialist’s’ false notion of ‘mediate perception’, criticized in the ‘Caesar passage’. 24 3D 181–2. Dicker quotes Hylas’s three attempts and Philonous’s three rebuttals (cf. Dicker, G. (2006), ‘Berkeley on immediate perception. Once more unto the breach’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 56 (225): 517–35, pp. 525–7). Here is another such passage, to which I shall refer in this chapter: ‘HYLAS : I tell you, Philonous, external light is nothing but a thin fluid substance, whose minute particles being agitated with a brisk motion, and in various manners reflected from the different surfaces of outward objects to the eyes, communicate different motions to the optic nerves; and which being propagated to the brain, cause therein various impressions: and these are attended with the sensations of red, blue, yellow, etc. [. . .] Light and colours, as immediately perceived by us, I grant cannot exist without the mind. But in themselves they are only the motions and configurations of certain insensible particles of matter’ (3D 186–7; my italics). 25 At this stage of the First Dialogue, Hylas and Philonous are not yet talking about mediate perception, which will only be discussed explicitly as of 3D 203. They are debating whether sensible qualities exist only in the mind (as Philonous claims), or also without the mind (as Hylas claims). The issue at stake here is not whether

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hypothetical material causes (qualities as they are ‘in themselves’) of our sensations, or sensible ideas, can be mediately perceived, but whether they can be immediately perceived. 3D 187, my italics. Here is another of Philonous’s rebuttals: ‘PHILONOUS : I say it is nothing to the purpose. Our discourse proceeded altogether concerning sensible things, which you defined to be the things we immediately perceive by our senses. Whatever other qualities therefore you speak of, as distinct from these, I know nothing of them, neither do they at all belong to the point in dispute. You may, indeed, pretend to have discovered certain qualities which you do not perceive, and assert those insensible qualities exist in fire and sugar. But what use can be made of this to your present purpose, I am at a loss to conceive’ (3D 180). The only place where Hylas seems to envisage the distinction Dicker has in mind – between, on the one hand sensations as ‘merely states of the self, or ways the self senses or is appeared to’, and, on the other hand external objects of immediate perception – is in 3D 195: ‘HYLAS : [. . .] The sensation I take to be an act of the mind perceiving; beside which, there is something perceived; and this I call the object’. However, Philonous’s ensuing rejection of this distinction does not rely on Dicker’s epistemic notion of immediate perception. Philonous’s principal objection is that, because immediate perception is passive, it is not an act of the mind (cf. 3D 195–7). The expression ‘can be known’ in the conditional implies that it is not the case that immediate perception just is knowledge. ‘Throughout this whole affair the mind is wonderfully apt to be deluded by the sudden suggestions of fancy, which it confounds with the perceptions of sense, and is prone to mistake a close and habitual connexion between the most distinct and different things for an identity of nature’ (TVV §52). Cf. TV §144. As Brook aptly notes, it is ‘important to distinguish constitution as uniting a bundle of ideas or sense qualities from constitution in terms of structural parts that compose objects’: Brook, R. (2005), ‘Berkeley, bundles, and immediate perception’, Dialogue, 44 (3): 493–504, p. 498. For example, the relations between the functional parts of a clock are not the same as those between its constituent sensible qualities. The former obtain only between tangible, functional parts of a tangible clock. 3D 204, my italics. The italicized words lead Pitcher to write that Berkeley ‘says [. . .] this is a loose, and in fact false, way of speaking’ (1977: 145). Berkeley certainly does not say it is a false way of speaking. And unless one would have him trying to deceive both the vulgar and the learned, there is no reason to attribute to him the belief that it is false. It is more reasonable to take Berkeley as working here with a bona fide ‘acceptation’ of mediate sense perception, one that, moreover, encompasses the mediate perception of physical objects. An acceptation is the meaning, the sense,

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of an expression; it is not just a manner of speaking. Thus, when Philonous says ‘we may in one acceptation be said to perceive sensible things mediately by sense’ (my italics), he is not endorsing a mere rhetorical way of speaking, even less a false one, but an important distinction between his own notion of mediate sense perception and the ‘materialists’ false notion, criticised and rejected a few lines before in the ‘Caesar passage’. Among the advocates are: Luce, A. A. (1963), The Dialectic of Immaterialism. London: Hodder & Stoughton; Ayers, M. (1975), ‘Introduction’, in George Berkeley: Philosophical Works, ed. M. Ayers, London: Dent, vii–xxiii; Grayling, A. C. (1986), Berkeley: The Central Arguments. London: Duckworth, p. 62; Winkler, K. (1989), Berkeley. An Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp, 149–61); Muehlmann, R. (1992), Berkeley’s Ontology. Indianapolis: Hackett, p. 123; Graham, J. (1997), ‘Common sense and Berkeley’s perception by suggestion’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 5 (3): 397–423; Pappas (2000: 147–82) and Dicker (2006: 535). Among the opponents are: Tipton, I. C. (1974), Berkeley. The Philosophy of Immaterialism. London: Methuen, 195 ff.); Pitcher (1977: 140 ff.; also 1986), Brook (2005) and Atherton, M. (2008a), ‘The Objects of Immediate Perception’, in S. H. Daniel (ed), New Interpretations of Berkeley’s Thought. New York: Humanity Books, pp. 107–120 and Atherton, M. (2008b), ‘The books are in the study as before. Berkeley’s claims about real physical objects’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 16 (1): 85–100. Ayers’s position as an advocate is expressed more trenchantly in a review of Pitcher (1977), quoted by Pitcher, G. (1986) ‘Berkeley on the perception of objects’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 24 (1): 99-105, p. 99. There are important differences between the members of each family; taking account of the differences would expand this paper unduly. My presentation of both camps, therefore, is somewhat approximate. Respectively P §95 and 3D 230. Other passages are in P §38, §88; 3D 175, 195, 224, 261, 262, and Berkeley’s first letter to Johnson (Works II , 282). Cf. Winkler (1989: 156 ff.); Graham (1997: 398–99); Pappas (2000: 170 ff.); Dicker (2006: 532–3). Cf. TV §77; 3D 174, 204; Alc IV 154, 155, 156. TVV §59, my italics. ‘The faintness, therefore, and vividness, the upper and lower situation, together with the visible size of the pictures, and our praenotions concerning the shape and kind of tangible objects, are the true medium by which we apprehend the various degrees of tangible distance’ (§62, my italics). Cf. also §§60, 63 and TV §57. (1) This is not to be confused with knowing that the object is an F, since one might perceive a tomato as an apple, and mistakenly believe it is one. (2) Generally it is the context that explains why a person, who has the concepts (general ideas) of an apple and a tomato, perceives a certain round red fruit as an apple rather than as a tomato, or vice versa.

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37 (1) Even if the conception is a belief, rather than a concept, it nevertheless involves a concept, a general idea. (2) ‘Praenotion’, although latinized, is apparently of Epicurean and Stoic origin. On the use of the term in Gassendi, cf. Glidden, D. (1988), ‘Hellenistic backgrounds for Gassendi’s theory of ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 49 (3): 405–24, pp. 411, 413 and 417. 38 Additional support can be gathered from Berkeley’s application of his theory of mediate perception to animals. Animals mediately perceive physical objects as well as humans do. Yet, either they do not form general ideas, or, if they do, they do not give them general names so as to be able to store such ideas in memory, at disposal for spontaneous use in conceptual perception. 39 Brook notes that Winkler and Pappas ‘correctly require Berkeley to have an extensional or non-conceptual reading of immediate perception’ (2005: 495). However, he objects: ‘Nowhere, to my mind, does Berkeley make use – as a philosophic thesis – of people non-conceptually and immediately perceiving physical objects’ (495); ‘there is nothing I find in the texts that suggest he had any philosophic interest in an extensional or non-conceptual account of object perception’ (500). Reply: Berkeley repeatedly says that we immediately perceive physical objects, so, given that Winkler and Pappas ‘correctly require Berkeley to have an extensional or non-conceptual reading of immediate perception’ in order to account for the immediate perception of physical objects, they are certainly entitled to that reading. The expressions ‘conceptual perceiving’ and ‘non-conceptual perceiving’ were not in use in Berkeley’s day, which does not mean that he was unaware of the distinction, as we have seen above in TVV. 40 (1) If the opponents just deny that Mary does perceives a tomato (as an apple), they deny the possibility of sortal misperception of physical objects, and this seems to fly in the face of Berkeley’s granting that misperception does occur. In any case, would it not be paradoxical to say that: (a) Mary perceives (mediately) a round red fruit; (b) the fruit Mary perceives (mediately) is a tomato; and yet (c) Mary does not perceive a tomato (immediately or mediately)? (2) If the opponents say that, unknown to her, Mary at present mediately perceives a tomato (as an apple), how can they block the advocates’ claim that, unknown to her, she immediately perceives a tomato (while mediately perceiving it as an apple)? 41 (2008a: 114 my italics). Another opponent believes the same: ‘physical objects are congeries of sensory ideas linked together by perceivers for practical reasons and given one name. No congeries exist “out there” to be later experienced. Rather, Berkeley’s important thought is that congeries are constructed by us out of sensory elements’ (Brook 2005: 499, my italics). 42 Glauser, R. (2007), ‘The problem of the unity of a physical object in Berkeley’, in S. Daniel (ed.), Reexamining Berkeley’s Philosophy, 50–81, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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43 According to Berkeley finite minds determine the sorts and kinds under which we classify physical objects; what they do not make, I believe, are particular physical objects. In two passages in 3D (245 and 249) Philonous certainly seems to say that particular physical objects are made by finite minds. I have proposed what I believe is a plausible way of interpreting these passages otherwise (cf. Glauser 2007: 72–5). 44 Cummins, P. D. (1995), ‘Berkeley’s manifest qualities thesis’, in R. Muehlmann (ed.), Berkeley’s Metaphysics: Structural, Interpretive and Critical Essays, 107–125, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, p. 118, fn. 18. 45 TV §109. Presumably, for instance, we include ideas of taste in our complex idea of chocolate, but not in our complex idea of a coach; we include olfactory ideas in our complex idea of a rose, but not in our complex idea of the Eiffel Tower, even though such qualities are surely constituents of such physical objects. 46 Jody Graham says: ‘we immediately perceive ordinary physical objects only by immediately perceiving with several sense modalities, simultaneously’ (1997: 417). Winkler seems to hold that one might immediately perceive a physical object by immediately perceiving only one quality: ‘To perceive an object immediately, on this view, is to perceive immediately a quality that belongs to it’ (1989: 159). Pappas’s position is intermediate between the two: ‘By immediately perceiving enough of an object’s qualities, one thereby immediately perceives the object’ (2000: 199), leaving it an open question how much is enough and how many sense modalities should be involved. Stoneham makes an interesting suggestion without, however, attributing it to Berkeley: Stoneham, T. (2002), Berkeley’s World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 278–82. 47 I wish to thank Dick Brook for many helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.

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Berkeley on Ordinary Objects Jeff McDonough

Berkeley famously maintains that spirits and ideas exhaust the fundamental ontology of the world. How then do ordinary objects – tables and chairs, cats and dogs – fit into Berkeley’s metaphysics? I start below by presenting the core of Berkeley’s account of ordinary objects as well as a longstanding objection to that account, namely that he must deny the commonsense conviction that ordinary objects persist even when they are not perceived. Next I consider three lines of response to the problem of the persistence of ordinary objects that have been attributed to Berkeley by his commentators. Finally, I suggest that those three lines of response might perhaps best be seen as complementary – rather than rival – threads in Berkeley’s considered understanding of things such as birds and bees, mountains and lakes.

Ordinary objects and the persistence problem It is tempting to suppose that for Berkeley ordinary objects should be identified with particular ideas. A rose, for example, might be identified with a rose-idea. A bird with a bird-idea, etc. Particular Berkeleyian ideas, however, would offer a poor substitute for ordinary objects. For ordinary objects are generally assumed to be perceivable at different times, via different sensory modalities, and by different perceivers. I am able to see the same rose today that I saw yesterday. I am not only able to see it but to smell it as well. And the same holds for others – my wife and daughter can see and smell the same rose as I. If Berkeley were to identify ordinary objects with particular ideas, he would have to deny all these commonsense convictions about ordinary objects in light of the fact that he takes particular ideas to be transitory, restricted to particular sensory modalities, and resolutely private.

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Berkeley is able to recapture many of our commonsense intuitions concerning ordinary objects, however, by identifying them with collections or ‘combinations’ of ideas rather than with particular ideas (see, P 1, 3, 12, 148; 3D 1:195, 2:224, 2:249). In this vein, an apple, for example, might be identified with a collection of ideas enjoyed at different times, via different sensory modalities, and by different perceivers. I might be said to have perceived the same apple on two different days in virtue of my experiencing two members of an apple-collection; one member on Monday, another member on Tuesday. Likewise, I might be said to have both touched and tasted the same apple in virtue of my experiencing a tactile and a gustatory idea from one and the same collection of ideas. And similarly you and I might be said to perceive the same apple in virtue of our having direct perceptual acquaintance with different members of the same apple-collection of ideas. In identifying ordinary objects with collections of ideas, rather than with particular ideas, Berkeley is thus able to salvage many of our commonsense intuitions concerning ordinary objects without abandoning any of his deep metaphysical principles. One should not suppose that in identifying ordinary objects with collections of ideas Berkeley thereby commits himself to the view that any old collection of ideas must count as an ordinary object. My tactile sensation of sandpaper, visual glimpse of a silk tie, and olfactory perception of my neighbour’s fresh-cut grass might well constitute a collection of ideas. There is no reason, however, to suppose that they must constitute an ordinary object. In a passage from the first section of the Principles, Berkeley suggests some rough and ready considerations that might be used to distinguish mere collections of ideas from ordinary objects: [A]s several of these [ideas] are observed to accompany each other, they come to be marked by one name, and so to be reputed as one thing. Thus, for example, a certain colour, taste, smell, figure and consistence having been observed to go together, are accounted one distinct thing, signified by the name apple. Other collections of ideas constitute a stone, a tree, a book, and the like sensible things; which, as they are pleasing or disagreeable, excite the passions of love, hatred, joy, grief, and so forth. P 1; see also 3D 245, 249; TV 109

This passage implies that a collection of ideas is a better candidate for counting as an ordinary object if its members are instances of types of ideas that regularly co-occur in experience, if we have names for referring to such collections, and if it is the sort of collection that interests us. While these suggestions do not, of course, represent a fully developed theory of necessary and sufficient conditions

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according to which a collection of ideas may be designated an ordinary thing, they nonetheless provide some plausible heuristics for distinguishing between ‘mere’ collections of ideas and the collections of ideas that might appropriately be identified with ordinary objects (see Atherton 2008b; Flage 1994; Glauser 2007). A more serious difficulty for Berkeley’s account of ordinary objects, however, remains. It is nicely captured in an often-quoted limerick attributed to Monsignor Ronald Knox: There was a young man who said God, must find it exceedingly odd when he finds that the tree continues to be when noone’s about in the Quad.

The difficulty alluded to by Knox’s poem arises from a tension between Berkeley’s ‘esse is percipi’ doctrine and our commonsense intuitions concerning the persistence of ordinary objects. Berkeley’s doctrine – central to his defence of immaterialism – insists that perceived things exist only as long as they are perceived (P 2–4, 48, 139; 3D 3:230). If the tree in the quad is a perceived thing, this implies that it exists only as long as someone is perceiving it, and thus that it must cease to exist when no one is around and that it, or perhaps another tree altogether, must suddenly ‘pop’ into existence as soon as someone enters the quad. This apparent consequence of Berkeley’s immaterialism has long troubled his readers and has been much discussed by his commentators. The next three sections will take up three lines of response that have been developed by leading scholars in light of various suggestive passages in Berkeley’s writings.

A dismissive response Since Berkeley is not committed by his fundamental metaphysics to the continuous existence of ordinary objects, he could have simply dismissed the widespread conviction that the tree in the quad continues to exist when no one is there to see it. All interesting philosophical theories have some unintuitive consequences, and Berkeley could have counted the ‘gappy’ existence of ordinary objects as one of the more surprising results of his often-surprising immaterialism. Furthermore, he could have hoped to soften the initial shock of such a move by noting that the intermittent existence of ordinary objects need not have any practical significance whatsoever given Berkeley’s system. If the tree ceases to exist precisely when no one is there to see it, its absence clearly could not be

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noticed directly. But it might also be impossible to notice gaps in the tree’s existence even indirectly since Berkeley’s God might guarantee that our actual perceptions are indistinguishable from the perceptions we would have if the tree were to exist continuously. While it might still be counted as a shocking metaphysical conclusion that the tree in the quad pops in and out of existence depending on whether or not anyone is about, it appears that Berkeley, if he had wanted to, could have turned his back on the commonsense belief in the persistence of ordinary objects without inflicting any serious damage to his considered metaphysics. But did Berkeley adopt such a dismissive attitude? In a provocative series of writings spanning almost four decades, Jonathan Bennett has argued vigorously that Berkeley’s ‘fundamental attitude toward the plain person’s trees and stones’ was a ‘disrespectful one’ (Bennett 2001, p. 177; see also Bennett 1965; Bennett 1971, pp.  169–98). In support of his interpretation, Bennett offers three main lines of evidence. The first line of evidence involves a close examination of Berkeley’s texts for signs that he does not take the person on the street’s view of ordinary objects to be a serious metaphysical concern (see, TV 49, 108, 110; P 1; 3D 1:245). Especially relevant in this regard is a three-paragraph stretch of the Principles, which begins with Berkeley noting that ‘it will be objected that from the foregoing principles it follows, things are every moment annihilated and created anew . . . the trees therefore are in the garden, or the chairs in the parlour, no longer than while there is some body by to perceive them’ (P 45). Instead of immediately rejecting this apparent consequence of his immaterialism, however, Berkeley spends the remainder of the section, as well as most of the next two sections, implying that the commonsense belief in the persistence of ordinary objects is less secure than one might have imagined. He maintains that philosophers in general are widely committed to the non-persistence of ordinary objects given their views on sensible qualities, divine conservation, and the divisibility of matter (P 46–7). And he entreats ‘the reader to sound his own thoughts, and not suffer himself to be imposed on by words’, declaring that if the reader can conceive it possible either for his ideas or their archetypes to exist without being perceived, then I give up the cause: but if he cannot, he will acknowledge it is unreasonable for him to stand up in defense of he knows not what, and pretend to charge on me as an absurdity, the not assenting to those propositions which at bottom have no meaning in them. P 45

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Passages such as these provide some textual support for Bennett’s suggestion that Berkeley did not have a considered interest in reconciling his own immaterialism with the person on the street’s belief in the persistence of ordinary objects. Bennett finds a second line of support for the same conclusion in Berkeley’s failure to pursue various philosophical strategies that might have brought his fundamental ontology into better agreement with commonsense beliefs about ordinary objects. Particularly glaring, in Bennett’s opinion, is Berkeley’s failure to ‘reach for the glittering prize of an account of thing-collections which allows for one to exist when not perceived by anyone’ (Bennett 2001, p. 177). As we have noted, by identifying ordinary objects with collections of ideas, Berkeley is able to recapture some of our commonsense beliefs about ordinary objects – that, for example, they can be perceived at different times, by different perceivers, and via different sensory modalities. But once ordinary objects are identified with collections of ideas, it seems that they might also be said to persist through gaps in our perceiving them provided that they include ideas that exist both before and after those gaps. The tree in the quad might thus be said to exist on Wednesday even if it is unperceived provided that it is constituted by a collection of ideas, at least one member of which is perceived earlier in the week and another member of which is perceived later in the week. This is the ‘glittering prize’ that Bennett maintains Berkeley could have failed to adopt only through wilful neglect; Bennett therefore counts Berkeley’s indifference to this solution as evidence of his indifference to the problem that it would solve. A third line of support invoked by Bennett is similarly indirect. In an undeniably important passage from the Dialogues, Berkeley’s spokesperson Philonous implies that whether two perceivers may be said to perceive the same object or not might be simply a matter of convention. In making the point he introduces the following analogy: [S]uppose a house, whose walls or outward shell remaining unaltered, the chambers are all pulled down, and new ones built in their place; that you should call this the same, and I should say it was not the same house: would we not for all this perfectly agree in our thoughts of the house, considered in it self? and would not all the difference consist in a sound? 3D 3:248

The analogy implies, of course, that whether a house with a fully replaced interior should be counted as the same house or not is of no metaphysical importance – a matter of pure convention. One might therefore see in Berkeley’s analogy an indication that he intends to take the same stance toward the

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persistence of ordinary objects more generally; as saying, in effect, that the question of whether or not the tree in the quad continues to persist when no one is looking is metaphysically shallow and unworthy of serious reflection – a matter ripe for brute stipulation.

An idealist response While it might well be correct to see Berkeley’s treatment of ordinary objects as occurring at a level removed, as it were, from his most fundamental metaphysics, it must be counted against Bennett’s interpretation that Berkeley appears to offer not just one, but two positive strategies for reconciling his immaterialism with the commonsense view that the tree in the quad persists when no one is there to perceive it. The more famous of those two strategies is suggested by yet another limerick attributed to Knox: Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd I’m always about in the Quad And that’s why the tree continues to be Since observed by, yours faithfully, God

As Knox’s poem implies, Berkeley could hope to reconcile his commitment to the esse is percipi doctrine with the persistence of ordinary objects by insisting that ordinary objects are always perceived by God. That is to say, he could maintain that an ordinary object, taken to be a collection of ideas, exists as long as at least one of its members is perceived, and, in particular, that the tree in the quad may exist when no one is about because at least one of its memberideas is always perceived by God. This ‘idealist’ strategy suggests an especially straightforward way in which Berkeley might have reasonably hoped to accommodate commonsense views concerning the persistence of ordinary objects while nonetheless remaining true to his deepest metaphysical principles. There is clear textual evidence that Berkeley at least entertained an idealist account of the persistence of ordinary objects. At Principles 48, he writes: [T]hough we hold indeed the objects of sense to be nothing else but ideas which cannot exist unperceived: yet we may not hence conclude that they have no existence except only while they are perceived by us, since there may be some other spirit that perceives them, though we do not. Wherever bodies are said to have no existence without the mind, I would not be understood to mean this or that particular mind, but all minds whatsoever. It does not therefore

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follow from the foregoing principles, that bodies are annihilated and created every moment, or exist not at all during the intervals between our perception of them.

A clearer general statement of the idealist strategy could hardly be hoped for. Nor is this the only passage in which Berkeley suggests that ordinary objects might persist in virtue of being perceived by other minds and by God in particular. In Principles 6, for example, Berkeley, having affirmed that ‘all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or known’, immediately goes on to emphasize that if those bodies ‘do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit’ (italics added). Additional evidence that Berkeley took seriously an idealist response to the problem of the persistence of ordinary objects can be found in a novel argument he offers for the existence of God. Responding to Hylas’s charge that his immaterialist philosophy is, in fact, a version of external world scepticism, Berkeley’s spokesperson Philonous begins by reaffirming his commitment to the esse is percipi doctrine, stating ‘sensible things cannot exist otherwise than in a mind or spirit’ (3D 212). Philonous goes on to concede, however, that sensible things exist independently of his perceiving them, and implies that the same must hold for any finite perceiver. He infers that there must therefore ‘be some other mind’ wherein sensible objects exist, and concludes ‘As sure therefore as the sensible world really exists, so sure is there an infinite, omnipresent spirit who contains and supports it’ (3D 212). Summarizing his novel argument for God’s existence, he proudly declares that ‘Men commonly believe that all things are known or perceived by God, because they believe the being of a God, whereas I on the other side, immediately and necessarily conclude the being of a God, because all sensible things must be perceived by him’ (3D 212). Insofar as this argument takes for granted the idealist strategy in order to reach its conclusion, Berkeley’s endorsement of the argument lends support to seeing him as committed to the idealist strategy as well. Even if it is granted, however, that ordinary objects might persist through gaps in our perceptions in virtue of their being perceived or known by God, an important objection, forcefully raised by George Pitcher, remains. Since human perception is passive, and God himself is wholly active, the nature of our perceiving must be very different from the nature of God’s perceiving (Mabbott 1931, p. 24; McCracken 1979, pp. 282–7; Thomas 1976). Having concluded that

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God’s perception of an object must amount to his merely thinking it, or having an idea of it, Pitcher declares of the idealist response: I have to remark that I think the doctrine is by no means an attractive one. Anyone who wants to, or does, believe that objects continue to exist when no finite creature is observing them – and this includes at least all of mankind who are sane – should not be satisfied with the statement that they merely continue to exist in God’s mind . . . God must have ideas of all possible worlds in His mind, in addition to ideas of this actual world. The kind of existence that Berkeley accords to unperceived objects of this world, then, is precisely the kind that objects in merely possible, but non-actual worlds, have – e.g. the kind and amount that a purple man with three heads has. No one, I say, should be satisfied with so little. Pitcher 1977, pp. 171–2

Pitcher’s objection is that if an object were to count as existing merely in virtue of God’s having some idea of it, then given God’s omniscience, every possible object should count as existing. In short, an idealist account would appear to be overly permissive in supposing that God’s having an idea of an object is sufficient for that object’s having a real and full-blooded existence. As we will see below, this objection leaves open the possibility that being perceived by God might nonetheless be a necessary condition for an object’s continued existence.

A phenomenalist response In addition to the idealist strategy, Berkeley’s texts also suggest another approach to the difficulty presented by the persistence of ordinary objects. In his early notebooks, he writes, ‘The trees are in the park, that is, whether I will or no, whether I imagine anything about them or no, let me but go thither and open my eyes by day and I shall not avoid seeing them’ (NB 98). Similarly, in the Principles he tells us: ‘The table I write on, I say, exists, that is, I see and feel it; and if I were out of my study I should say it existed, meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it’ (P 3). These and other passages suggest that statements about the continued existence of objects might be understood at least partially in terms of conditional statements about what we would perceive in various circumstances (see also, NB 52, 185a, 282, 293, 293a, 408; P 58). That is to say, they suggest that Berkeley seems to have entertained a phenomenalist account of ordinary things like trees and parks, tables and chairs.

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Further evidence of a phenomenalist strain in Berkeley’s thinking about ordinary objects can be found in his response to a difficulty originally raised by Lady Percival shortly after the publication of the Principles. She points out that, according to the Bible, God created trees prior to the creation of sentient beings. But how, she wonders, if idealism is true, could trees exist before there were sentient beings to perceive them? In his reply, Berkeley invokes not only God’s eternal perception of ideas, but also an element that clearly smacks of phenomenalism: I do not deny the existence of any of those sensible things which Moses says were created by God. They existed from all eternity in the Divine intellect, and then became perceptible (i.e. were created) in the same manner and order as is described in Genesis. For I take creation to belong to things only as they respect finite spirits, there being nothing new to God. Hence it follows that the act of creation consists in God’s willing that those things should be perceptible to other spirits, which before were known only to Himself. Works 8:37; see also 3D 3:251–4, 3:253

In this passage, Berkeley implies, in keeping with the idealist thread discussed above, that sensible things have always existed in the divine intellect. But the passage also introduces an additional consideration, namely, that the creation of sensible things relative to finite spirits involves God’s decreeing that they should become perceptible to sentient perceivers. That further element may be seen as betraying a phenomenalist strain in Berkeley’s thinking insofar as it suggests that the existence of ordinary objects, perhaps relative to us, or in the fullest sense, depends on the truth of conditionals involving the circumstances under which they would be perceived by finite spirits. In spite of passages such as those just cited, however, any attempt to read Berkeley as a straightforward phenomenalist must face serious difficulties. Some of those difficulties are of a general philosophical nature. It has long been objected, for example, that the conditional truths involved in phenomenalist analyses of ordinary objects inevitably become unmanageably and implausibly complex in short order. Thus, for example, the statement that I will see my desk if I open my office door helps itself to ‘office door’. ‘Office door’ will therefore itself have to be analysed, in turn, in terms of further conditional statements, e.g. ‘if I were in Emerson Hall with the lights on I would see my office door’. But that statement, in turn, makes reference to a building – to another ordinary object that will therefore also stand in need of further analysis. Phenomenalist analyses of even the most banal statements involving ordinary objects, such as ‘I will see

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my desk if I open my office door’ thus threaten to quickly become wildly, even unimaginably, complex. Other difficulties in attributing a straightforward phenomenalist account of ordinary objects to Berkeley concern more directly matters of textual interpretation. It has been noted, for example, that several key phenomenalist-sounding passages may be read as being conjectural or pragmatic, rather than as expressing clear statements of considered doctrine (see, for example, 3D 3:253; P 52). Likewise, it has often been suggested that strict phenomenalism is, at any rate, inconsistent with the letter of Berkeley’s esse is percipi doctrine insofar as it implies that objects may exist when they are not, in fact, actually being perceived (see, for example, Dicker 2011, p. 271; Stoneham 2002, pp. 288–91). A rather different, and I think ultimately more revealing, objection might be called the ‘wrong answer objection’. When Berkeley is pressed to give an account of how sensible objects can persist when no finite being senses them, he frequently says, as we have seen, that they can persist in virtue of God’s perceiving them. Such a reply, however, does not merely lend support to an idealist interpretation, but also seems to be altogether the wrong sort of response for a phenomenalist to offer. For a proponent of phenomenalism there is a straightforward answer to the challenge presented by continuity: sensible objects continue to exist because they would be perceived if such and such conditions were to obtain; that answer, it would seem, has absolutely nothing to do with God’s having the relevant ideas in mind. The ‘wrong answer objection’ thus suggests that Berkeley’s sympathy for an idealist solution militates against attributing a phenomenalist response to him.

Complementary threads? One might not unreasonably suppose that the three accounts just sketched represent irreconcilable strains in Berkeley’s thinking about ordinary objects – that while he recognized the persistence of things like tables and chairs as a prima facie difficulty for his system, he never settled upon a consistent response to it. Alternatively, however, one might endeavour to see the responses just sketched as complementary threads in an inclusive, if perhaps not fully articulated, account of ordinary objects. Such an approach holds out the promise of seeing Berkeley’s treatment of things like bats, balls and baubles as being essentially coherent. As a first step towards such a conciliatory account, it should be conceded, in the spirit of the dismissive response, that ordinary objects like tables, books and

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lamps do not, for Berkeley, belong to the fundamental ontology of the world. He may therefore allow the identity conditions of ordinary objects to differ from the identity conditions of ideas and spirits and he may even grant that they might be determined at least in part by convention and commonsense. Such concessions, however, are perfectly consistent with Berkeley’s taking the project of reconciling his fundamental metaphysics with the existence of ordinary objects very seriously, and, indeed, with his having considered views concerning how his fundamental metaphysics and commonsense might best be reconciled. Second, in the spirit of the idealist response, it should be conceded that, for Berkeley, an object’s being continuously perceived is a necessary condition for its persistence. That is to say, having identified ordinary objects with collections of ideas, Berkeley may insist that things like tables and chairs can exist only as long as at least one of their members is perceived – an insistence most likely rooted in his ground-floor conviction that it is impossible to even conceive of a sensible thing existing unperceived. Such a concession to idealism, however, should not be taken to imply that an object must be continually perceived by the same finite agent, or, indeed, by any finite agent at all. Berkeley may thus allow that the requirement of being continuously perceived may be satisfied by a higher spirit, or even by God himself. In this regard, one should not, I think, be overly worried that God’s perception of ordinary objects must be quite different from our sensory perception of ordinary objects insofar as the former must be active and the latter must be passive. For such a concern represents a standard worry confronting essentially all Christian philosophers of the past, and Berkeley would have been in good company in allowing that God may perceive in some sense even if not in exactly the same sense in which creatures perceive (McCracken 1979, pp. 287–90; Pitcher 1977, pp. 175–9; Winkler 1989, pp. 235–6). Finally, in the spirit of the phenomenalist response, it should be granted that the truths of certain counterfactual statements play an important role for Berkeley as necessary conditions for the existence, or full existence, of ordinary objects. Indeed, his proposal that the ‘steadiness, order, and coherence’ of a collection of ideas contributes to its qualifying as an ordinary object, as well as his analysis of perceptual error in terms of mistaken inferential judgements, suggest that counterfactual truths play a constitutive role in the existence of what we take to be ordinary objects (P 30; 3D 3:235). It should be quickly added that such a view does not commit Berkeley to the position that the truth of various counterfactual statements by itself is sufficient for the existence of ordinary objects. As a result, one may see the idealist and phenomenalist threads in Berkeley’s treatment of ordinary objects as reinforcing one another, as together

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laying out a pair of individually non-sufficient, but mutually necessary conditions for the existence of ordinary objects (see especially, Winkler 1989, pp. 204–37). Woven together, these threads may considerably strengthen what is essentially one side of Berkeley’s account of ordinary objects. On offense, Berkeley famously argues that what exists most fundamentally in the world are spirits and ideas, extols the virtues of his immaterialism, and attacks what he sees as the confused and pernicious postulate of a mind-independent material world. On defense, however, Berkeley engages in a secondary project aimed at showing how his immaterialism may be reconciled as far as possible with accepted philosophical doctrine, theological commitment and commonsense belief. His treatment of the problem of the persistence of ordinary objects belongs firmly to this secondary project, but it is a serious treatment nonetheless, directed at showing how many – if perhaps not all – of our commonsense convictions concerning things like apples and trees, chairs and desks can be recaptured in a framework that incorporates both idealist and phenomenalist elements.

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Berkeley’s Philosophy of Mind Talia Mae Bettcher

The substance of mind in Berkeley’s philosophy Berkeley’s theory of mind, as defended principally in the Principles and the Dialogues, has traditionally been the source of considerable perplexity. One of the perennial concerns is how Berkeley can reject material substance while retaining spiritual substance.1 More generally, however, there is simply deep confusion about just what Berkeley’s account of the mind is supposed to be. While the Principles and Dialogues together certainly contain Berkeley’s most detailed elaboration of his view, they are not, for all that, very detailed at all. What is a Berkeleian mind? The question does not merely concern fine-tuned details about the account. The question concerns, rather, its basic ontological outlines. Is Berkeleian spirit like Descartes’s thinking thing?2 Or, on the contrary, is it perhaps like Locke’s unknown spiritual substratum?3 Or is it more like Locke’s self?4 Or is it, rather, in the end, actually much more like Hume’s bundleconception of the mind?5 That such widely disparate models have all been proposed for understanding Berkeleian spirit speaks volumes about the depth of confusion about just what a Berkeleian spirit is supposed to be. One of the main sources of confusion about these basic ontological contours concerns Berkeley’s claim that spirits are substances that support ideas (and that ideas are dependent upon spirits ‘supporting’ them for their existence). It is very unclear how Berkeley understands this support relation. Another source of confusion is Berkeley’s puzzling thesis that spirits are things ‘entirely distinct’ from ideas. It is not clear what this thesis even amounts to and why Berkeley thought it was important. A final source of confusion is that the two preceding claims are in some tension with each other. The first mention of ‘mind, spirit, soul or my self’ occurs at P 2, where Berkeley makes plain that such terms ‘do not denote any one of my ideas’ but rather

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something that is ‘entirely distinct from them’. In the same sentence he then says that spirit is that ‘wherein they exist’, which he explicitly treats as synonymous with ‘whereby they are perceived’. Later in the Principles Berkeley appears to identify ‘existing in a mind’ with ‘being supporting by a mind’ (P 89). So the expressions ‘is perceived by a mind’, ‘is supported by a mind’ and ‘exists in a mind’ all appear as equivalences for Berkeley. The question concerns how this relation of ‘support’ is to be understood. Let us distinguish Berkeley’s claim that sensible things are mind-dependent from his claim that ideas are mind-dependent. His claim that sensible things are mind-dependent amounts to the view that such items are nothing but ideas or combinations thereof (P 4). In essence, the first claim identifies sensible things with ideas. What this identification does not explain, however, is the nature of support that exists between spirit and its ideas. For one could accept this identification while endorsing the view that minds are nothing but collections of ideas. And, if so, there would appear to be no relation of dependence between mind and idea (rather, minds would be dependent on ideas). Indeed some have defended a deflationary reading according to which this second type of dependence relation does no work in Berkeley’s theory at all.6 Such a move confronts the inconvenience of deflating what appears to be of central importance to Berkeley’s theory of mind. The problem, at any rate, is that perception is not a good candidate for the support relation. The fact that a tree is perceived by a mind does not in itself imply that a tree is supported by a mind unless it can be shown that the tree cannot exist without being perceived by a mind (or perhaps, that mind specifically). To be sure, Berkeley’s explanation of his claim that sensible things cannot exist unperceived comes down to his claim that they are ideas or combinations thereof. But, then, the question we are left with is this: What is it to perceive an idea? Indeed, what is an idea? And why is it that an idea cannot exist unperceived? What is needed is some deeper account – some ‘metaphysical machinery’ – that elucidates the nature of ideas and their dependence upon this something ‘entirely distinct’ from them. Consequently, it has been tempting to understand perception of ideas in terms of the more explicitly metaphysical notions of ‘support’ and ‘existence in’ (rather than the other way around). Alas, Berkeley himself appears to claim that the explanation works in the opposite direction – ‘support’ or ‘existence in’ is explained in terms of ‘perception’ (3D 250). But the lack of any account of how perception could constitute such support might be thought serious enough to motivate overlooking this claim. And so the temptation is to go looking at other metaphysical conceptions of support.

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While Aristotelian-Scholastic, Cartesian and Lockean accounts of substance are by no means the same, there are nonetheless important commonalities. For the most part ‘accidents’, ‘modes’, ‘modifications’, ‘properties’ and the like were thought to be ontologically distinct items (at least insofar as they possessed their own being). Such items were not capable of ‘subsisting on their own’ (unlike substances) and so require a substance in which to exist. In this model, such dependent items exist in, inhere in or are supported by a substance. And the relation of support roughly conforms to a subject-predicate structure whereby items that exist in a substance are predicated of it. Perhaps, it has been thought, Berkeley’s support relation can be understood within this framework. There are two ways this has been attempted. The first involves explaining perception in terms of the traditional support (or inherence) relation.7 One difficulty, however, is that Berkeley does not endorse the view that sensible qualities are predicated of the mind (spirits are not hot, big, and so forth). Indeed, he explicitly rejects this at P 49. So this view leaves Berkeley in the awkward position of endorsing a conception of substance that is fundamentally at odds with one of its most central elements. The second strategy is to identify ideas with states of perception (or with ways of perceiving).8 This affords a possible distinction between viewing ideas as thought-contents (which are not predicated of the mind) and viewing them as modifications of mind (which are so predicated) thereby avoiding the difficulty with the inherence account. By itself, the identification of ideas with perceptions leaves open how they are thought to be related to the mind – indeed, it is compatible with a bundle account according to which the mind is nothing but a collection of perceptions. The intuition, however, is that the mind is something over and above its perception – it is the thing that does the perceiving. Thus, the relation of support will be given by the relation between mental subject and perception (namely, inherence). There are difficulties with both of the preceding strategies, however – particularly with regard to making the underlying metaphysical account of spiritual substance consistent with Berkeley’s rejection of material substance. In both the Principles and the Dialogues Berkeley attacks what appears to be a Lockean conception of material substratum (P 16, 3D 197–8). The thrust of the argument is that it is not clear what expressions such as ‘support’ even mean when used in a traditional way. If this is right, then it is hard to see how an appeal to traditional relations of support or inherence is going to help elucidate his account spiritual substance. For the attack on the vacuity of such expressions would appear to cut against spiritual support as well – at least if such expression are taken in the traditional way.

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To be sure, it is not clear that the argument works so well against a Cartesian conception of mind according to which the mind is constituted by conscious thought itself, and its various perceptions are but modifications thereof. In the Dialogues version of the argument, at least, Berkeley makes plain, as part of the argument, that ‘the thing supported is different from the thing supporting’ and that the substratum is ‘somewhat in its own nature entirely distinct from extension’ (3D 197). And this is not something that is accepted in the Cartesian view. Instead, modes are merely the substance itself existing in a determinate way – effectively obviating the need for any explanation of the support relation. Yet a Cartesian reading is not without its problems. In the Dialogues, Berkeley has Philonous argue against the Cartesian account of extension. The basic idea is that one cannot frame an idea of extension abstracted from particular sensible extensions (3D 193). It seems, however, that the same argument can be made about thought: Is it possible for there to be a conception of thought in general, abstracted from all particular thoughts? If not, how can Berkeley secure that unity of a mind over and above the multiplicity of its particular thoughts? The result appears to be a collapse of the mind into something like a Humean bundle. So both ways of understanding Berkley’s support relation using traditional metaphysical machinery have serious problems. And what makes this problem of understanding the support relation yet more difficult is Berkeley’s other metaphysical thesis that spirits and ideas are ‘entirely distinct’. His clearest formulation of the claim is in the Principles. He writes: ‘Thing or being is the most general name of all, it comprehends under it two kinds entirely distinct and heterogeneous, and which have nothing common but the name’ (P 89), And then later: ‘Spirits and ideas are things so wholly different, that when we say, they exist, they are known, or the like these words must not be thought to signify anything common to both natures’ (P 142). The basic thought is that spirit and idea are very different sorts of things. The problem, however, is that it puts pressure on the claim that spirits support ideas. If ideas are mental states of perceiving, for example, then won’t they have something in common – namely, the subject that bears the state? The problem is particularly acute on a Cartesian reading of Berkeley according to which ideas are just determinate manifestations of spirit itself and which cannot be even ‘somewhat entirely distinct’ from it. For surely, in that case, spirit and idea would have something in common. The natural solution is to deflate the significance of Berkeley’s entire distinctness claim by interpreting it as merely indicating that spirit and idea belong to different ontological categories (just as substance and mode belong to different ontological

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categories).9 The problem, however, is that this deflation runs against the importance that Berkeley appears to assign to it. First, Berkeley’s introduction of the claim at Principles 89 seems to suggest its importance in addressing scepticism in general. Moreover, he indicates the importance of this principle in addressing concerns about knowledge of the mind (P 135–40). Finally, the principle seems almost to ground a kind of dualism in Berkeley’s ontology that serves as an analogue to Cartesian Dualism. If this is right, then a deflationary reading may undercut important aspects of Berkeley’s project. One non-deflationary way of understanding the distinctness claim sees Berkeley as endorsing a stoic conception of mind. In this view, the mind is its active perception of ideas (activity that involves the individuation and discrimination thereof); indeed, in this view, mind just is the very existence of its ideas.10 This move has the effect of placing spirit and idea on extremely different ontological levels. In an important way, in this view, spirits don’t count as things or being at all, rather, they count as the sheer existence of things (ideas). One difficulty with this move, therefore, is it departs radically from the traditional conception of substance, according to which substances are things par excellence. Another concern is that, despite reading the entire distinctness claim in a nondeflationary way, elements of that claim, such as the thesis that spirits and ideas have nothing in common, do not seem to be well accommodated. How could it be that an idea and its very existence have nothing in common? Isn’t the idea itself common to both? Another non-deflationary reading of the entire distinctness claim sees Berkeley as rejecting the view that ideas are mental states that are adjectival on the subject and that inhere in them. Instead, Berkeley may endorse a model in which the subject is related to an object through the relation of perception, where perception is not itself reduced to traditional notions of inherence.11 In what might be called a subject–object model, neither idea nor perception are understood as intrinsic states of mind. Rather, perception is the relation that links the subject (or perception) to the object (of perception). The problem, of course, is how to make sense of perception as a genuine relation of support. One line of thought involves noting that it was generally accepted during Berkeley’s day that mental items such as pain could not exist outside of consciousness (i.e. could not exist unperceived). If the perception of ideas is understood as the consciousness of ideas, then we can see how, for Berkeley, perception might have been a relation of support (insofar as ideas cannot possibly exist except as objects of conscious awareness). The remaining question, of course, is how the spirit itself figures in this equation. One possibility is that

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Berkeley recognized a self-conscious being – a self or I – likewise given in consciousness, but nonetheless distinct from ideas. In such a view, then, ideas could not exist unperceived/unsupported. That is to say, they could not exist except as objects of the consciousness of some I or self.12 What, exactly, this self might come to, what is included in the content, however, is far from clear. For example, awareness of oneself as a sheer being or even as a self-conscious being may prove too thin to provide a robust account of spirit and how it is known.

The epistemology of mind in Berkeley’s philosophy In the Principles and the Dialogues, Berkeley makes it plain that spirit cannot be ‘of itself ’ perceived and that there cannot be any idea of spirit (P 27). His main argument for the latter is that while ideas are passive, spirits are active and so ideas cannot represent spirits through a kind of resemblance (P 27). This obviously raises the question of how spirit is known at all. After all, it is clear that Berkeley thinks that spirit is known. He makes many weighty pronouncements about it – spirit is active, simple, the supporter of ideas, a substance, and naturally immortal (P 7, 27, 141). So how does one secure this knowledge of spirit given that spirits cannot be perceived and given that there cannot be any ideas of them? On the face of it, the answer appears to be Berkeley’s appeal to ‘notions’. For example, he writes, ‘It must be owned . . . that we have some notion of soul, spirit, and the operations of the mind, such as willing, loving, hating, in as much as we know or understand the meaning of those words’ (P 27). But this appeal raises its own worry. Berkeley does not use ‘notion’ in any evident technical way in the early editions of the Principles and Dialogues. And this perhaps suggests that he added it only when he realized the problem of how spirits are known (if not by idea). It makes the appeal seem ad hoc. If Berkeley can help himself to a notion of spirit, one wonders, why can a materialist not help himself to a notion of matter? Complicating this concern is the fact that even in the first edition of the Principles, Berkeley touts his claim that there cannot be an idea of spirit as if it were crucial in unlocking problems about knowledge of mind: ‘The great reason that is assigned for our being ignorant of the nature of spirits, is, our not having an idea of it. But surely it ought not be looked on as a defect in a human understanding, that it does not perceive the idea of spirit, if it is manifestly impossible that there should be any such idea’ (P 135). The impossibility of there being ideas of spirit does not undo (rather than secure with necessity) our

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alleged ignorance of spirits, however, unless there is another way that spirits are known that is to be distinguished from knowledge by way of idea suggesting that there is perhaps something more going on with Berkeley’s account, than a mere ad hoc appeal. So how are spirits known, according to Berkeley? His view about other minds appears relatively straightforward. First, Berkeley claims that one understands other minds simply by using one’s own mind as a kind of model or ‘image’: ‘We know other spirits by means of our own soul, which in that sense is the image or idea of them, it having a like respect to other spirits’ (P 140). So while idea and spirit are too unlike to yield a resemblance, according to Berkeley, one spirit can be taken as a resemblance of another.13 According to Berkeley, we infer the existence of other spirits on the basis of ‘their operations, or the ideas by them excited in us’ (P 145). In his rather platonic conception, a human being is nothing but a finite spirit that has a body where the body is nothing more than a collection of ideas – a kind of ‘sensible badge’. One does not perceive humans, therefore. Rather one perceives the ideas that lead one to conclude the existence of the spirit. And this is likewise the case in our knowledge of God. Unlike the small collection of ideas that directs us to the existence of some finite spirit, the natural world (as a collection of ideas) directs us to the existence of God. One demonstratively concludes the existence of God, according to Berkeley, because only spirits can produce ideas and because the spirit responsible for all sensible ideas (and their order and regularity) must necessarily be a Supreme Being (3D 232). In the case of finite minds, by contrast, one merely probabilistically concludes the existence of a unique centre of rationality based on certain movements of the sensible body (3D 233). (The inference is not necessary, since it is possible that God is actually responsible for all movement.) The tough question is how one knows one’s own mind. At the beginning of the Principles, Berkeley encourages the reader to look at his own ideas, divested of words in order to avoid confusion. He writes, ‘We need only draw the curtain of words, to behold the fairest tree of knowledge, whose fruit is excellent, and with the reach of our hand’ (PI 24). So one way to put the question is to ask whether one finds only ideas in drawing back the curtain of words, or whether, rather, there is something else there. And if there is nothing else there, then how is spirit known? One possibility is that one likewise infers the existence of one’s own mind. Some passages might seem to suggest this reading. For example, Berkeley writes: ‘Such is the nature of spirit, or that which acts, that it cannot be of it self perceived, but only by the effects which it produceth’ (P 27). On such a view, one would

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perceive only ideas as effects of one’s wilful activity, and then inferentially conclude the existence of one’s mind as a willing agent on the basis of that. In this strong inferential reading, there is nothing about one’s mind that is not inferred (not even one’s perceivings and willings); the only things one has non-inferential cognition of are ideas.14 In a weaker variant of this, by contrast, Berkeley can say that he has at least an immediate awareness of his own perceivings and willings, and, on the basis of this, infers the existence of the thing that has such states or activities.15 In this later view, at least some portion of the mind is present, if you will, once the curtain of words is pealed back. And on the basis of this, one then infers the existence of oneself (i.e. the things that possesses these states). Both views, in this regard, seem to be in tension, with what Philonous actually says: ‘The being of my self . . . I evidently know by reflexion’ (3D 233) and then later ‘I know or am conscious of my own being’ (ibid.). In the Principles he says, ‘We comprehend our own existence by inward feeling or reflexion’ (89). And in De Motu: ‘The sentient, percipient, thinking thing we know by a certain internal consciousness’ (21). Such remarks are clearly suggestive of a non-inferential reading – at least with regard to the sheer existence of one’s own self – a view that seems to have been endorsed by philosophers such as John Locke: ‘In every Act of Sensation, Reasoning, or Thinking, we are conscious to our selves of our own Being’ (E. 4.9.3, 619). In this reading, Berkeley commits to the view that he has a datum of the self or, perhaps more correctly, that the self is, in addition to ideas, present in the given. One important question to be noted is just how robust this datum is for Berkeley. In a weak view, it is merely an awareness of one’s own being, or one’s being a conscious thing (i.e. a self). In a more robust view, such awareness is also awareness of oneself as an agent. This second, stronger, reading is suggested in De Motu as Berkeley writes: ‘A thinking, active thing is given in experience as the principle of motion in ourselves’ (30).16 If there is any evidence of an inference at all it concerns the nature (rather than the existence) of one’s mind: ‘I know that I, one and the same self, perceive both colours and sounds: that a colour cannot perceive a sound, nor a sound a colour: that I am therefore one individual principle, distinct from colour and sound’ (3D 234). In this passage, Philonous appears to conclude that he is not a collection of ideas by appeal to something like the unity of consciousness and the further claim that ideas cannot perceive, or at least perceive each other. Yet even this apparent inferential move is in tension with Berkeley’s claim that, ‘My own mind and my own ideas I have an immediate knowledge of; and by the help of these, do mediately apprehend the possibility of the existence of other spirits and ideas’ (3D 232). And, again: ‘I know what I mean by the terms I or

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myself, and I know this immediately, or intuitively’ (3D 231). To be sure, much depends upon what Berkeley means by ‘immediately’ and ‘intuitively’ (in the second passage he seems to treat them as interchangeable). Obviously, to sustain some variant of the inferential reading, both ‘immediately’ and ‘intuitively’ need to be compatible with an inference. And the problem is that Berkeley uses ‘immediate’ in a highly technical way in his discussion of sense perception. He has Hylas concede ‘that in truth the senses perceive nothing which they do not perceive immediately: for they make no inferences. The deducing therefore of causes or occasions from effects and appearances, which alone are perceived by sense, entirely relates to reason’ (3D 174). Philonous then uses this concession against Hylas later on in the Dialogues: Whenever there is an inference of something, there is no immediate perception of it (202–3). The defender of an inferential reading must therefore argue that he is using ‘immediate’ in a radically different sense when he discusses our knowledge of spirit. However, there is no clear basis for doing this. Worse, Berkeley says that he has an immediate knowledge of both his own mind and his own ideas in the same sentence, and so it is hard to believe that he is using ‘immediately’ equivocally there – in one case incompatible with inference, in the other case not. That said, it also worth noting that whenever Berkeley discusses our immediate knowledge of what spirit is – particularly as it is defined in terms of its powers of willing and perceiving, as well as other mental operations, this occurs in the context of our knowledge of what words such as ‘spirit’ mean. And this suggests the importance of Berkeley’s theory of meaning. It is clear that to at least some degree, Berkeley rejects Locke’s thesis that a term becomes intelligible only by having some pre-linguistic mental item (i.e. an idea) annexed to it. Berkeley outlines this departure in the Introduction to the Principles. And in Alciphron, Berkeley flags an even stronger departure from Locke. The first (weak) possibility is this: While there is indeed something in the pre-linguistic given that provides terms like ‘I’ and ‘spirit’ with their cognitive content, this something is so different from everything else that we had better not call it ‘an idea’ and we had better not say that we perceive it. This reading has Berkeley staying fairly close to Lockean semantics in this case insofar as some pre-linguistic phenomenon provides the relevant terms with their cognitive content. The only departure is the claim that this phenomenon is sufficiently different that it is not properly called an idea. The more radical possibility is that Berkeley denies that there is anything at all in the given that provides terms like ‘spirit’ and ‘I’ their cognitive content. In the Introduction to the Principles, Berkeley notes that an idea does not need to be

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stirred in a mind every time a term is used. It can simply have its cognitive value fixed at the outset by an idea without that idea popping up on every deployment. More radically, he then claims that the chief end of language is not always to convey an idea in the first place to the ‘raising of some passion, the exciting to, or deterring from an action, but, rather, the putting of mind in some particular disposition’ (PI 19). While in the Introduction, Berkeley suggests that in such cases there may have been an idea originally annexed to the term (providing the term with its cognitive content), in Alciphron, Berkeley drops even that requirement: ‘A discourse, therefore, that directs how to act or excites to the doing or forbearance of an action may, it seems, be useful and significant, although the words whereof it is composed should not bring each a distinct idea into our mind’ (VII 5). Berkeley specifically argues that this is the case with respect to terms like ‘force’ and ‘grace’. Some interpreters have read Berkeley as endorsing an emotive theory of meaning (with respect to terms such as ‘grace’ and ‘force’) according to which sentences including such terms do not express true or false proposition, but rather, merely exhort, inspire, or encourage to action.17 Such readings have, however, been contested in the literature.18 At any rate, in the second possibility mentioned above, terms such as ‘spirit’ and ‘I’ are like ‘grace’ and ‘force’ in that they do not actually name anything that can be found among the pre-linguistic given.19 There meaning would only be derived from their use. While this seems to be a fairly radical reading, it is worth noting that some commentators have read Berkeley’s discussion of mind as metaphoric in nature.20 And, indeed, Berkeley himself acknowledges the metaphoric nature of our talk of things spiritual in both Three Dialogues and in Alciphron (3D 250, ALV VII 13). Such a view is compatible with the position that, ultimately, the mind is nothing but a collection of ideas. However, in Alciphron, Berkeley discusses our knowledge of spirit and our knowledge of force and grace in two rather different ways. For the latter, we find outright denials that any corresponding idea can be found when we turn to look for it (VII 4, 6). In a minimal way, to be sure, Berkeley does assign both ‘force’ and ‘grace’ some cognitive content. Alciphron claims, ‘Everyone knows what is meant by force’ (VII 5). Indeed, he appears to provide an explication of the meaning of the word in saying, ‘Force is that in bodies which produceth motion and other effects’ (ibid.). And Euphranor could presumably define Grace as ‘that principle by which God brings about virtue and piety in men’. What is lacking, however, are any distinct ideas answering to or denoted by the terms ‘grace’ and ‘force’.

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For the former (i.e. spirit), by contrast, there is no similar turning to look for an idea and failing to find one. Rather, Euphranor merely says that because an agent is altogether different from an idea ‘those words which denote an active principle, soul, or spirit do not, in a strict and proper sense, stand for ideas’ (VII 5, my italics) – a remark that echoes Berkeley’s Notebook entry: ‘It seems improper and liable to difficulties to make the word person stand for an idea, or to make our selves ideas or thinking things ideas’ (NB 523). This is suggestive of the first, weaker possibility. If that is right, then something is available to us when we peal back the veil of words. After all, it is difficult to believe that empirical knowledge of one’s own existence or agency should somehow fall out of the sheer meaning of a term. Indeed, this minimal content (agent) would likewise appear to be needed in order for the terms used to explicate ‘grace’ (e.g. God as author, man as subject) to have even the minimal content described above. What isn’t exactly clear, however, is what else there is to be found once the words are set aside. To further explore that question, of course, we must turn to Berkeley’s account of mental activity.

The activity of mind in Berkeley’s philosophy If anything is clear in Berkeley’s theory of mind it is that spirits are active beings, while ideas are ‘passive and inert’ (P 25, 27). Unfortunately, it is far from clear what this activity comes to. Indeed, this is easily the most underdeveloped aspect of his already meagre theory of mind. According to Berkeley, only spirits are causes. Berkeley rules out ideas as causes on the grounds that they are ‘visibly inactive’ (P 25) – a ‘bare observation’ is all that is required to see that ‘there is nothing of power or agency included in them’. And material substance is ineligible, of course, since Berkeley rejects the very notion of such a thing as incoherent. Berkeley writes that ‘when we talk of unthinking agents, or of exciting ideas exclusive of volition, we only amuse our selves with words’ (P 28). Berkeley bases his claim that spirits are active on the empirical observation that he can create and destroy imaginary ideas at will: ‘I find I can excite ideas in my mind at pleasure. . . . It is no more than willing, and straightway this or that idea arises in my fancy’ (P 28). Thus, it appears that the imaginative production and destruction of ideas is the paradigm case of agency, for Berkeley: ‘This making and unmaking of ideas doth very properly denominate the mind active’, he writes (ibid.).

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One of the most perplexing features of Berkeley’s account, however, is his admission that finite spirits are passive in their perception of sensible ideas (3D 197). While he allows that we are active in the wilful motion of our bodies often implicated in sense perception (e.g. ‘opening and turning the eyes’), the very perception of sensible ideas themselves (e.g. ‘light and colours’) is passive insofar as we are not their causal source. One concern is that this admission appears to undermine his claim that spirits and ideas have nothing in common by making both finite spirits and ideas ‘passive’. This seems easily answered, however, by recognizing that the two are passive in altogether different ways: Finite spirits are passive in that they perceive some ideas that they don’t produce. Ideas, by contrast, neither perceive nor produce anything at all, and so cannot be passive in that sense. Rather, they are passive in the sense that they lack causal efficacy altogether and are the mere effects of spiritual production. Spirits are clearly not passive in that sense.21 The tougher question concerns the compatibility of the passivity admission with Berkeley’s further claim that spirit is ‘one simple, undivided active being’ (P 27).22 First, it seems spirit cannot be called an ‘active being’ with respect to its sense perception. Second, it now seems that a finite spirit has two parts – an active part and a passive part, and hence that it cannot be simple. One plausible way to address the first concern is to claim that for Berkeley, even in senseperception, a spirit remains an active being in its on-going thinking. Indeed, this would appear necessary in order for it to be passive (to receive will-independent ideas) in the way that Berkeley describes.23 But reconciling the simplicity claim with both the passivity and activity of finite spirits seems to depend much on how Berkeley’s ontology of mind is understood – that is, how ideas are conceived of in relation to spirits. And that is, as we have seen, a complicated affair.24 There is another problem here that arises from Berkeley’s assigning finite spirits limited causal powers over their own bodies, such as the opening and turning of one’s eyes (P 147, 3D 237). Berkeley claims that God is the immediate cause of all ideas of sense (P 29–30) and all ‘motions in nature’ (3D 236). If this is so, however, in what sense do human spirits move their own bodies, which are presumably collections of sensible ideas? At best, it would seem that we can form imaginary ideas of bodily motion, and then God himself produces the actual sensible ideas of that motion that follow. But does this not make God the immediate cause of all of our bodily actions (3D 236)? Berkeley allows that ‘the will of man hath no other object, than barely the motion of the limbs of his body’ (P 147). And in the Dialogues Philonous speaks of ‘the use of limited powers, ultimately derived from God, but immediately under the direction of their own

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wills’ (3D 237). But how can we have immediate power over our own limbs, one wonders? The answer, if there is one, is far from clear.25 But one possibility is that Berkeley allowed finite spirits to produce internal, kinaesthetic ideas of motions that were vivid (and hence, non-imaginary). Such ideas would be part of the causal order of the natural world so that by producing the kinaesthetic idea, the visible idea of one’s arm moving, say, would typically follow in accordance with the natural laws.26 Regardless of such difficulties, Berkeley allows for the sheer activity of thinking. He lists diverse ‘operations of the mind’ – including willing, imagining, remembering, loving and hating (P 2 and P 27). And this raises the important question: What is the ontological status of these diverse operations? Are they all to be found among the given when one pulls back the curtain of words? Towards the very end of his Notebooks, Berkeley remarks: ‘Will, Understanding, desire, Hatred etc. so far forth as they are acts or active differ not, all their difference consists in their objects, circumstances etc.’ (NB 854). So one possibility is that, for Berkeley, all mental operations ultimately reduce to one kind of act – namely, volition. Regardless of whether this is correct, however, it is nonetheless clear that volition is the common denominator of all operations of thought (3D 196). This raises some interrelated questions. First, what is the relationship, for Berkeley, between acts of the will and perception? Obviously perception must somehow be involved in volitional activity of the sort Berkeley has in mind (e.g. the imaginative production of an idea). Second, what are volitions? How are they related to spirit? The first question concerns the denial of blind agency – a view that prevailed at the time. According to this view, there can be no agency without a prior intention or end in sight to bring about the desired effect.27 That is, all acts of will are guided by an idea of the effect to be wrought. Such a view poses some specific challenges for Berkeley’s account. Is the ideational content an intrinsic component of the volition? If not, then how does the ideational content give the volition foresight of the effect? If it is an intrinsic component, then is there a resemblance between that ideational content and the ideational effect? If there is, then does this not undermine the thesis that ideas cannot resemble mental operations? If there is not, then how is the content aligned with ideational effect?28 Notably, Berkeley nowhere states a commitment to the denial of blind agency in either the Principles or the Dialogues. He does make it plain in his Notebooks (812) ‘There is in the Deity Understanding as well as Will. He is no Blind agent & in truth a blind Agent is a contradiction’. But even here, there is only the insistence

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that a willing agent also understand (perceive), not that it must always possess an idea of an intended effect before bringing it about. Indeed, subsequent remarks in the Notebooks indicate unclarity on Berkeley’s part. ‘Qu: Whether perception must of necessity precede volition?’ (NB 815), and ‘Qu: Whether the Will can be the object of Prescience or any knowledge’ (NB 875). While ideational content in a volition may make sense in the case of bodily movement (one’s act of moving one’s arm is guided by a prior idea of one’s moving arm), it makes little sense in the case of sheer thought or idea-production (Berkeley’s paradigm case of agency). Indeed, it yields a redundancy: The relevant idea has already been postulated as a guiding idea of the volition, and hence there is no need to produce any further idea-effect in accordance with it. To put it plainly: The view that one needs to intend to think about a unicorn before one goes ahead and just thinks about a unicorn is surely absurd. So perhaps Berkeley did not affirm the pre-existence of a guiding idea in the case of sheer thought. Perhaps Berkeley only required an awareness of what one was doing when one was doing it – at least in the case of thinking qua activity. Such an awareness would, of course, require that the cause of an idea also perceive it. Part of the issue here depends upon what Berkeley took the term ‘volition’ to mean. In one gloss, a volition is an act of choosing something or choosing to do something. And if this is right, then it does appear that some guiding ideational content would be required. It is worth noting, however, that Berkeley does not gloss ‘volition’ that way. Rather, he characterizes it merely as an act of will (3D 196, NB 611) and that does not have any similar entailment. Let us now turn to the other interrelated questions: What exactly are volitions? And how are they related to the agent that performs them? In the Dialogues, Berkeley says that ‘neither can I conceive volition to be any where but in a spirit’ (3D 239). This suggests that volitions, like ideas, ‘exist in’ a spirit. But clearly Berkeley cannot mean ‘is perceived by’ a spirit since that would make them mere ideas. But, then, what does he mean? As we saw in the first section, Berkeley demands that such expressions be explicated, yet in this case he never provides such an explication. Certainly, it would appear difficult to view volitions as mere states or modifications of spirit given that Berkeley appears to reject the traditional support relation between substance and its modifications or properties. Notably, he never says that spirits are substances in their supporting of volitions. Such a view also entails a distinction between spirit (an agent) and its volitions. But if spirit and its volitions are distinct, they are surely not ‘entirely distinct’ as spirit and ideas are. So there would need to be a weaker distinction and it is not

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clear what such a distinction would come to. Worse, it would appear that two causal sequences need to be introduced. The volition causes an idea, presumably. But what causes the volition? Surely, it must be the agent: If agents do not produce their own volitions, then in what sense are they agents at all? Thus, it now seems that there are two causal relations – one between an agent and its volitions, the other between volitions and produced ideas. But if agents can produce volitions without further intervening volitions (i.e. without an infinite regress), why postulate a volition in the first place? One possible response to this doubling of causal relation is to simply identify spirit with its volitions. However, this would appear to run contrary to Berkeley’s claim that spirits are simple. Moreover, it would be far from clear what held the discrete volitions together. A variant of this strategy would involve viewing spirit as simply volitional activity in general. That is, various volitions, in this view, would merely be determinate manifestations of one on-going volition. While this might appear to solve both the simplicity and unity problem, the problem now is that this appears to involve an illicit abstraction from particular volitions to volition in general. If it does not involve such an abstraction, it is hard to see why we should speak of only one act of the will that, on the face of it, goes against the empirical evidence suggesting we engage in many acts of the will over the course of time. A final possibility is to say that volitions (i.e. acts of the will) are nothing more than instances of idea production and destruction: In thinking about a horse, one ipso facto creates an idea of a horse. And the awareness that one is producing an idea just is an awareness of an act of will. That is, awareness of oneself as an agent, in such a view, would not require an awareness of further discrete items (volitions) insofar as awareness of oneself qua agent as the cause of some ideaeffect would already constitute one’s awareness of a volition.29 In support of this reading, one could note that Berkeley claims in the Principles, ‘Men have imagined they could frame abstract notions of the powers and acts of the mind, and consider them prescinded, as well from the mind or spirit it self, as from their respective objects and effects’ (P 143). Spirit itself and its ideas (i.e. object and effects) are considered basic here and one cannot consider acts (acts of will, one presumes) apart from agent and effect. This remark is notably similar to statements in Alciphron where Euphranor denies that there is a distinct idea of grace ‘separate or abstracted from God the author, from man the subject, and from virtue and piety its effects’ (ALC VII 7) and that there is an idea of force ‘excluding body, time, space, motion, and all its sensible measures and effects’ (VII 6). According to the reading proposed, then,

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‘volition’, like the terms ‘grace’ and ‘force’, has nothing answering to it in the given, no pre-linguistic cognitive content. Instead, it is defined through terms that do have pre-linguistic content (‘agent’ and ‘effect’). If so, the immediacy that Berkeley assigns to our knowledge of the operations of spirit, while noninferential, differs from the immediacy by which we perceive our ideas insofar as the former would merely concern our non-inferential knowledge of what the relevant terms mean rather than some underlying item in the given. One difficulty with the reduction of all acts of the will to acts of idea production/ destruction, however, concerns the plausibility of supposing Berkeley can actually accommodate all forms of mental activity in this way. For example, does the comparison of two ideas reduce to the production of two ideas side-’by-side’ in the same view? Or would something more be required? Perhaps the principle of charity may lead to an interpretation of Berkeley that allows for acts of the will that do not reduce to the making and unmaking of ideas. If so, the challenge to explain what volitions actually are and how they are related to their agents will remain in full-force.

The development of Berkeley’s account of mind In addition to the perplexity that has beset Berkeley’s account of spirit, as defended in the Principles and the Dialogues, has been the complicating concern that Berkeley may have had different versions of that account. In particular, it seems on the face of it that some of his early Notebooks offer views that seem to conflict with his ‘official one’. Moreover, there are key changes in the text between the initial publications (1710 and 1713 respectively) and the second edition of the Principles and the third edition of the Dialogues, both published in 1734. Thus, questions are raised as to whether Berkeley’s views changed and, if so, why and how, or whether the apparently conflicting texts can be interpreted as one coherent view.

The Notebooks (1707–1709) Perhaps the most fascinating fact is that Berkeley appears to have anticipated something like a Humean account of the mind in his Notebooks. He writes, for example, ‘Mind is a congeries of Perceptions. Take away Perception & you take away the Mind put the Perceptions & you put the mind’ (NB 580). This has led some commentators to see Berkeley as concealing his true view behind an

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official account that he did not really believe in.30 Other commentators have attempted to read the entries in such a way that conforms to his published view.31 Another plausible interpretation, of course, is that this is a view that Berkeley considered and then abandoned.32 Complicating this issue is the thesis, defended by A. A. Luce, that the ‘+’ sign (obelus) that marks some of Berkeley’s entries indicates subsequent rejection or a ‘black list’ (many of the so-called Humean entries are so marked) – a thesis that has been refuted by Bertil Belfrage.33 It is important to note, however, that it does not follow from the rejection of the Black List hypothesis that Berkeley continued to endorse the view outlined in these passages. Certainly, doctrinal development in the Notebooks remains a plausible scenario. Indeed, a cursory review of the Notebooks suggests that, overall, this is probably the case. The earliest entries of Berkeley’s Notebooks suggest that he thought of the soul as something akin to a Lockean person (NB 14, 25). Towards the end of the Notebooks he also reminds himself not to use the word ‘person’ as it would offend the churchmen (NB 713). This suggests that he continued to think of the soul as a person throughout the Notebooks, although he officially avoided the term. It is also clear, however, that while Berkeley identified person as a ‘conscious being’ (NB 24) he did not accept Locke’s memory-based account of personal identity. Berkeley spells out the grounds for rejection at NB 200. Even earlier, it seems that Berkeley’s account of the person differs from Locke’s. Indeed, Berkeley appears to have allowed for an ever-changing momentary self-consciousness, thereby rejecting identity over time, writing, ‘Eternity is only a train of innumerable ideas . . . the immortality of the person . . . not being necessary for ought we can see’ (NB 14) and ‘Men die or are in a state of annihilation oft in a day’ (NB 83). At this early stage he also indicated interest in how the soul is known. His first proposal was a complex idea made up of the ideas of existence, willing and perception (NB 154) – a view that he inarguably came to reject. This rejection first appears at 176a: ‘The grand mistake is that we think we have ideas of the operations of our minds. Certainly this metaphorical dress is an argument we have not.’ As it was written on the verso page, it may have come later. But by 230, we find him writing, ‘Absurd that men should know the soul by idea.’ This theme is taken up against at 523: ‘It seems improper and liable to difficulties to make the word person stand for an idea, or to make our selves ideas or thinking things ideas.’ Of course, once it becomes clear that Berkeley made at least one change in his Notebooks, it becomes far easier to believe that he made more.

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Much of the subsequent entries on mind appear to concern how to conceptualize the nature of this conscious being, how to characterize its central defining features. He asks: ‘How is the soul distinguish’d from its’ ideas? Certainly if there were no sensible ideas there could be no soul, no perception, remembrance, love, fear etc.’ (NB 478). Specifically, Berkeley is interested in accounting for the constituting properties of the mind’s essence. By understanding what a soul is, one would thereby have a handle on its ‘substance’. Unsurprisingly, much of his discussion concerns the will and the understanding. His first move was to identify the understanding with its particular perceptions: ‘The understanding seemeth not to differ from its perceptions or Ideas. Qu: what must think of the Will & the passions’ (NB 587), indicating that he not yet have given the will much thought. By NB 615 he has answered his question, however, by identifying the will with particular volitions, following a reiteration of his identification of the understanding with perceptions or ideas (614). The so-called Humean passages occur in between his initial question at 478 and his claims about the will at 615. He writes, for example: ‘The very existence of Ideas constitutes the soul’ (NB 577). The entries raises two pertinent questions. First, did Berkeley mean to identify the entire soul with the perception of ideas, or was he merely speaking about the understanding? In light of his remarks at 587, it would seem the latter is more plausible.34 Second, did he distinguish between the perception of ideas (i.e. their existence) and the ideas themselves? If the answer is ‘yes’, it may be, as some commentators have argued, that he did not endorse a Humean bundle, but something else (i.e. volitionally conditioned perception of ideas).35 Both NB 587 and 614 treat ‘idea’ and ‘perception’ interchangeably, however, suggesting the answer to this last question is ‘no’. The verso entries of 614 and 615 indicate a subsequent change of heart in Berkeley’s identification of the understanding with its ideas and the will with its volitions: ‘The Understanding taken for a faculty is not really distinct from the Will’ (614a) and ‘This alter’d hereafter’ (615a). It seems likely that the verso entries were not written until sometime later, as by NB 708 he still regarded the understanding and the will as ‘two distinct beings’ and by 714 he continued to identify the will with its volitions, ‘unite being no more’. During this period, Berkeley strongly insists that the will cannot be an object of the understanding on the grounds that while ideas are passive, volitions are active (NB 643) and he begins to identify the soul (which he now calls spirit) as the will alone (NB 712). Notably, he allows that one is conscious of one’s various volitions (NB 744) and that ‘particles’ can be used to denote them (NB 667): ‘Tis allw’d that Particles

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stand not for Ideas & yet they are not said to be empty useful sounds. The truth on’t is they stand for the operations of the mind i.e. volitions.’ The verso entry changes mentioned above become clear later on, however. At NB 788 he appears to relinquish the identification of the will with particular volitions: ‘We see not variety or difference betwixt the Volitions, only between their effects. Tis One Will one Act distinguished by the effects.’ And by NB 821 he has written ‘Understanding is in some sort an Action.’ This last shift appears to indicate his growing recognition that while the reception of at least sensible ideas is passive, the soul ever actively thinks about what it perceives and that the complex process of forming mental propositions about what one perceives requires mental activity. At any rate, by NB 848 he writes, ‘I must not say that the Understanding differs not from the particular Ideas, or the Will from particular Volitions.’ And while the phrasing of this last entry is consistent with a mere terminological recommendation, NB 788, 821, as well as the verso entries mentioned above, suggest otherwise. Finally, it is possible that Berkeley came even to reject his view of the soul as ‘one act’: ‘I must not give the Soul or Mind the Scholastique Name pure act, but rather pure Spirit or active Being’ (NB 870).36 This, of course, is precisely how Berkeley comes to speak of spirit in the Principles and the Dialogues – namely, as an active being, rather than as an act. Again, while this is consistent with a mere terminological adjustment, Berkeley’s next entry reads: ‘I must not say that Will & Understanding are all one but that they are both Abstract Ideas, i.e. none at all. They not even ratione different from the Spirit, Qua faculties, or Active’ (NB 871). If Berkeley continued to view the soul in terms of ‘one act’, surely he could allow that will and understanding were all one (namely, the act). If the act were rejected as an illicit abstraction, however, he would have no recourse but to refer to an agent alone, making them not even ‘ratione different’ from the Spirit. At any rate, at this stage Berkeley appears to move away from locating the substance or essence of the soul within the given, instead relying on the inclusion of these so-called various properties within the definition of the word ‘spirit’: ‘I must not Mention the Understanding as a faculty or part of the mind, I must include Understanding & Will etc. in the word Spirit by which I mean all that is active’ (NB 848) – a move that Berkeley makes in his published work: ‘For by the word spirit we mean only that which thinks, will, and perceives’ (P 138). And: ‘A spirit is one simple, undivided, active being: as it perceives ideas, it is called the understanding, and as it produces or otherwise operates about them, it is called the will’ (P 27). This stage may therefore reflect a rejection of there being anything in the given, such as an on-going volition that constitutes the essence

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or substance of spirit. Instead, Berkeley now appears to be relying only on the self qua agent alone. As he writes, ‘The Spirit, the Mind, is neither a Volition nor an Idea’ (NB 849).

The 1734 revisions of the Principles and Dialogues The second edition of the Principles and the third edition of the Dialogues see some important textual revisions with regard to Berkeley’s claims about our knowledge of spirit. First, Berkeley adds to two exchanges between Philonous and Hylas concerning worries about possible parity of reasoning between the rejection of material substance and the rejection of spiritual substance. In the first and second editions, the exchange only concerns how the existence of things in the mind of God could be conceived, given that there is no idea of God (God being active, ideas being passive and inert).37 Second, Berkeley denies that we possess a notion of spirit in some passages of the first edition of the Principles. At 138 he writes, ‘If therefore it is impossible that any degree of those powers should be represented in an idea or notion, it is evident there can be no idea or notion of spirit.’ And at 139 he writes, ‘What I am my self, that which I denote by the term I, is the same with what is meant by soul or spiritual substance. But if I shou’d say, that I was nothing, or that I was an idea or notion, nothing cou’d be more evidently absurd than either of these propositions.’ In the second edition, portions of these passages are deleted and he adds several sentences claiming that while he lacks an idea of spirit (and its operations), he still possesses ‘some notion’ of them (P 27, 89, 140, 142). He also now adds that we ‘comprehend our own existence by inward feeling or reflexion’ (P 89). Such changes raise the concern that Berkeley introduced ‘notion’ as a technical term in order to salvage his account of spirit that had earlier effectively committed to our not knowing spirit at all. This fear, in turn, colours our understanding of the additional exchanges between Hylas and Philonous introduced in the Dialogues. Part of the problem is that Berkeley uses ‘notion’ in different ways. In the first edition of the Principles, for example, he sometimes uses it, very roughly, as equivalent to definition (qua explication of the meaning of a term). At P 9 he writes, ‘By matter therefore we are to understand an inert, senseless substance, which extension, figure, and motion, do actually subsist. . . . It is plain, that the very notion of what is called matter or corporeal substance, involves a contradiction in it.’ Clearly, he does not mean to deny that there can be a notion of spirit in this sense, as he also affirms a definition ‘spirit’ in the first edition at

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P 138: ‘By the word spirit we mean only that which thinks, will and perceives; this, and this alone, constitutes the signification of the term.’ Second, in the earlier editions of the Dialogues, he uses it in a way that is equivalent to ‘knowledge’: He writes that ‘All the notion I have of God, is obtained by reflecting on my own soul’ (231). Clearly, he allows, right in this passage, that we have some knowledge of spirit. The question, then, is just what is he denying in the first edition of the Principles? Did he mean, for example, to deny even a consciousness of his own existence? This seems inconsistent with his denial that he is nothing. However there are perhaps delicate issues here as to whether he recognizes this merely as a self-evident proposition rather than a datum of consciousness (an internal feeling).38 Notably, if this was a change in Berkeley’s philosophy it is one that occurred earlier than the 1734 revisions as he very explicitly commits to a datum view in De Motu (1721). That said, the postulation of any change here also seems implausible given Berkeley’s long-standing commitment to a variant of the Lockean self in his Notebooks. Recall, for example, his remark: ‘It seems improper and liable to difficulties to make the word person stand for an idea, or to make our selves ideas or thinking things ideas’ (NB 522), which suggests a mere terminological decision to not call something an idea, rather than a denial that the self is part of the given. Indeed, this seems to accord quite well with the first edition claim that calling himself an idea (or notion) is absurd. Another question concerns whether or not he is simply (and redundantly) using ‘notion’ as a synonym for ‘idea’ in the deleted passages. If he is, then he is simply making the point that selves are not ideas. Recall, however, that Berkeley had also once allowed what he called particles to stand for individual volitions. And note that Berkeley’s first edition claim at P 138 that his self is neither an idea nor a notion is fairly close to his denial at NB 849, ‘The Spirit, the Mind, is neither a Volition nor an Idea.’ So another possibility is that he meant ‘notion’ to apply to anything, besides ideas and his self, that was available in the given once the curtain of words was pulled away. If so, his claim at 138 that the powers of willing, thinking and perceiving cannot be represented in an ‘idea or notion’ may be suggesting that such powers cannot be represented in a volition either, since these powers are nothing but spirit itself (i.e. the self-aware agent that is part of the given). Regardless of how these passages are read, however, it seems fairly plausible Berkeley did not introduce a new sense of ‘notion’ in the subsequent editions in an about-face or ad hoc appeal. Rather, he simply restricted the term ‘notion’ to the two other senses described above – affirming what he had earlier affirmed,

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namely that we do have a definition (a notion) of ‘spirit’, that we do have some knowledge (some notion) thereof. The foundation of such knowledge, for Berkeley, is plausibly viewed as the self as it appeared in the given – namely, as a conscious agent.

Notes 1 For a classic formulation, see Colin Turbayne (1959): Turbayne, C. M. (1959), ‘Berkeley’s Two Concepts of Mind’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 20:1, 85–92. 2 See Margaret Atherton, Atherton, M. (1983), ‘The Coherence of Berkeley’s Theory of Mind’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 43, 389–99 and William Beardsley, Beardsley, W. H. (2001), ‘Berkeley on Spirit and Its Unity’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 18: 3, 259–77. (2001) for this reading. 3 See Daniel Flage: Flage, D. (1987), Berkeley’s Doctrine of Notions: A Reconstruction Based on his Theory of Meaning. London: Croom Helm, 133–70. While Flage does not explicitly claim that that Berkeleian spirit should be understood as a Lockeanstyle substratum, he does argue that Berkeley spirit is only known through its relations to ideas. We have no positive conception of its essence. See also Melissa Frankel: Frankel, M. (2009), ‘Something-We-Know-Not-What, Something-WeKnow-Not-Why: Berkeley, Meaning, and Minds’, Philosophia 37, 381–402. 4 See Ian Tipton (1966) for this reading: Tipton, I. C. (1966), ‘Berkeley’s View of Spirit’ in W. Steinkraus (ed.), New Studies in Berkeley’s Philosophy. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, pp. 59–71. See also John Russell Roberts (2007): Roberts, J. R. (2007), A Metaphysics for the Mob: The Philosophy of George Berkeley. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 5 See Robert Muehlmann (1995a) for this reading. 6 Ibid. 7 See Edwin B. Allaire (1963) for this view: Allaire, E. B. (1963), ‘Berkeley’s Idealism’, Theoria 29, 229–44. Muehlmann (1995a) provides extension overview of the literature. See, also George Pappas (2000) pp. 128–31 for a critique: Pappas, G. (2000), Berkeley’s Thought. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 8 See George Pitcher: Pitcher, G. (1977), Berkeley. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 189–203; Atherton (1983); Beardsley (2001). See Kenneth Winkler: Winkler, K. (1989). Berkeley: An Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, and Pappas (2000) for critique. 9 See Beardsley (2001). 10 See: Daniel, S. H. (2008), ‘Berkeley’s Stoic Notion of Spiritual Substance’ in S. H. Daniel (ed.), New Interpretations of Berkeley’s Thought. Amherst: Humanity Books, pp. 203–30.

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11 See Talia Bettcher (2007): Bettcher, T. M. (2007), Berkeley’s Philosophy of Spirit: Consciousness, Ontology, and the Elusive Subject. London: Continuum; Philip Cummins (2005): Cummins, P. D. (2005), ‘Berkeley on Minds and Agency’ in K. Winkler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 190–229 and Cummins, P. D. (2007), ‘Perceiving and Berkeley’s Theory of Substance’ in S. H. Daniel (ed.), Reexamining Berkeley’s Philosophy, pp. 121–52. 12 See Bettcher (2007). 13 See Frankel (2009) for some difficulties with this position. 14 See Frankel (2009) for a view that approaches but does not fully endorse this position. 15 See Flage (1987). 16 See Laurent Jaffro (2004) for a discussion: Jaffro, L. (2004), ‘Le cogito de Berkeley’, Archives de Philosophie 67, 85–111. 17 See, for example, see David Berman (1981): Berman, D. (1981), ‘Cognitive theology and emotive mysteries in Berkeley’s Alciphron’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 81: 7, 219–29, and Bertil Belfrage (1986): Belfrage, B. (1986), ‘Berkeley’s Emotive Theory of Meaning (1708)’, History of European Ideas 7:6, 643–99. The latter’s emotivist account applies only to Berkeley’s Notebooks. 18 See Roomet Jakapi (2002): Jakapi, R. (2002), ‘Emotive Meaning and Christian Mysteries in Berkeley’s Alciphron’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 10: 3, 401–11. 19 See Jaffro (2004) for a discussion of this possibility as well as a more moderate version. 20 Turbayne (1959). 21 For discussion and further references, see Genevieve Migely (2007): Migely, G. (2007), ‘Berkeley’s Actively Passive Mind’ in S. H. Daniel (ed.) Reexamining Berkeley’s Philosophy, pp. 153–71. 22 For an excellent articulation of this problem, see Charles McCracken (1986). 23 See Migely (2007). 24 For an attempted solution, see Migely (2007). 25 For discussion, see Robert McKim (1984): McKim, R. (1984), ‘Berkeley on Human Agency’, History of Philosophical Quarterly 1:2, 181–94, and Tom Stoneham (2002): Stoneham, T. (2002), Berkeley’s World: An Examination of the Three Dialogues. Oxford: Oxford Press, p. 187. 26 See Bettcher (2007, 85–6). 27 See Kenneth Winkler (1989). 28 For discussion of these types of problems, see Muelmann (1995b, 149–69) and Cummins (2005, 222–3). 29 See Bettcher (2007, 72–4). 30 Turbayne (1959), Muehlmann (1995).

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31 Daniel (2013). 32 Charles McCracken (1986), Belfrage (2007). 33 A. A. Luce (1944): Luce, A. A. (1944), Introduction to Philosophical Commentaries, generally called the Commonplace Book, by George Berkeley. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, xiii–xxxvi; Bertil Belfrage (1987): Belfrage, B. (1987), ‘A New Approach to Berkeley’s Philosophical Notebooks’ in E. Sosa (ed.), Essays on The Philosophy of George Berkeley. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing, pp. 217–30. 34 See McCracken (1986) for this view. 35 Daniel (2013). 36 For this view, see Belfrage (2007). 37 For a discussion of these passages, see Cummins (1982). 38 See George Pitcher (1977, 214–19).

24

Berkeley on the Philosophy of Language John Russell Roberts

I am inclined to think the doctrine of signs a point of great importance and general extent, which, if duly considered, would cast no small light upon things, and afford a genuine solution of many difficulties. PI §4

The dust metaphor Berkeley was a revolutionary figure in the philosophy of language and he gave the topic a uniquely privileged position in his work. To appreciate the former point will require some stage setting. But to draw out the privileged position he gives the philosophy of language we need look no further than the Published Introduction to the Principles. Towards the beginning, he gives us his memorable dust metaphor of philosophical perplexity. Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not the whole, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to ourselves. That we have first raised a dust, and then complain, we cannot see. PI §3

Stripped from its context, that may come across as cynical. But in context it is clearly not. Berkeley is opposing his view of the source of philosophical perplexity to those that take the cause to lie in either the inherent ‘obscurity of things’, or ‘the natural weakness and imperfection of our understandings’ (PI §2). His own outlook is more optimistic. As he sees it, it is more likely that ‘we [are] too partial to our selves in placing the fault originally in our faculties’ rather than ‘in the wrong use we make of them’ (PI §3).

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Importantly, Berkeley immediately follows up this diagnosis of philosophical perplexity by telling us how he intends to proceed. ‘My purpose therefore is, to try if I can discover what those principles are, which have introduced all that doubtfulness and uncertainty, those absurdities and contradictions into the several sects of philosophy’ (PI §4). Given the title of the work, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, one would expect that Berkeley’s aim is to provide the basic principles on which to build a sound philosophical system. But what we find is that the principles he is first concerned with are here characterized as principal causes of error. As he goes on to say, we have reason to suspect that ‘those lets and difficulties, which stay and embarrass the mind in its search after truth, do not spring from any darkness and intricacy in the objects, or natural defect in the understanding, so much as from false principles which have been insisted on, and might have been avoided’ (PI §4). The suggestion is that if we can identify and eliminate these false principles, then we can keep our philosophical inquiries from leading us into confusion; we can keep from kicking up a dust. Berkeley proceeds to identify his initial target: In order to prepare the mind of the reader for the easier conceiving what follows, it is proper to premise somewhat, by way of introduction, concerning the nature and abuse of language. But the unravelling this matter leads me in some measure to anticipate my design, by taking notice of what seems to have had a chief part in rendering speculation intricate and perplexed, and to have occasioned innumerable errors and difficulties in almost all parts of knowledge. And that is the opinion that the mind hath a power of framing abstract ideas or notions of things. PI §6, emphasis added

Actually, what we get here is a pair of targets. Berkeley’s focus is going to be ‘the nature and abuse of language’ and ‘abstract ideas’. Traditionally, scholarship has concentrated its attention on the latter. And not without justification. As Berkeley sees it, ‘of all the false principles that have obtained in the world, amongst all which there is none, methinks, hath a more wide influence over the thoughts of speculative men, than this of abstract ideas’ (PI §17). However, what tends to get overlooked is that this only underscores the fundamental importance of the philosophy of language because what we find as the Introduction proceeds is that this false belief in abstract ideas has its source in a more fundamental error, a false philosophy of language. Thus, the aim of §19, Berkeley tells us, is to identify the source from which the belief in abstract ideas flows. There he begins

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to ‘give a farther account of how [a view about] words came to produce the doctrine of abstract ideas’ (PI §19). Given the fundamental importance that Berkeley places on the issue, one might reasonably expect there to be general agreement on just what Berkeley’s basic philosophy of language is or at the absolute least, what the false view is. But there isn’t. The focus of the debate is the Ideational Theory and Berkeley’s attitude towards it.

The Ideational Theory The Ideational Theory, although often referred to simply as a theory of meaning, is more accurately a package of views about meaning, communication and thought. Berkeley himself provides a helpful summary of the position. It is worth quoting at length. Words are signs: they do or should stand for ideas, which so far as they suggest they are significant. But words that suggest no ideas are insignificant. He who annexeth a clear idea to every word he makes use of speaks sense; but where such ideas are wanting, the speaker utters nonsense. In order therefore to know whether any man’s speech be senseless and insignificant, we have nothing to do but lay aside the words, and consider the ideas suggested by them. Men, not being able immediately to communicate their ideas one to another, are obliged to make use of sensible signs or words; the use of which is to raise those ideas in the hearer which are in the mind of the speaker; and if they fail of this end they serve to no purpose. He who really thinks hath a train of ideas succeeding each other and connected in his mind; and when he expresseth himself by discourse each word suggests a distinct idea to the hearer or reader; who by that means hath the same train of ideas in his which was in the mind of the speaker or writer. As far as this effect is produced, so far the discourse is intelligible, hath sense and meaning. Hence it follows that whoever can be supposed to understand what he reads or hears must have a train of ideas raised in his mind, correspondent to the train of words read or heard. Alc 7, §2

According to the Ideational Theory of meaning, words are signs, but what those signs immediately signify is ideas. Thus, when I utter the sound, ‘Bjork’, my utterance is only meaningful because it immediately signifies my idea of a certain Icelandic singer. It is the representational power of my idea of Bjork that ultimately makes that utterance about her. If I uttered ‘blictri’ the sound would be

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meaningless because there is no idea conventionally associated with that word. I also will not be able to communicate anything to another by the latter utterance because my utterance of the word will not bring about an idea in someone else’s mind. Finally, thinking is here characterized simply as a matter of having a train of ideas present before the mind. Where there are no ideas, there can be no thought and, thus, no understanding.

Four interpretive options But what is Berkeley’s attitude towards the Ideational Theory? Is he advocating it or attacking it? There are four main interpretative options. I will first consider a ‘Simple Ideational Interpretation’, then two modifications of it, the ‘Late Revolution Interpretation’, and ‘The Periphery of Language Interpretation’. Finally, I will consider the ‘Anti-Ideational Interpretation’.

1. The Simple Ideational Interpretation As we will see, the view that Berkeley simply accepts the Ideational Theory is the least plausible of our interpretive options. However, it is the place to start because there are two important, mutually supportive arguments in its favour that together give this interpretation undeniable prima facie appeal. First, the Simple Ideational Interpretation provides a straightforward reading of Berkeley’s concerns about the aforementioned ‘nature and abuse of language’ that begins the Principles. To make the connection to the Ideational Theory one can simply point to the conclusion of the Introduction: Unless we take care to clear the first principles of knowledge from the embarrass and delusion of words, we may make infinite reasonings upon them to no purpose; we may draw consequences from consequences, and be never the wiser. The farther we go, we shall only lose ourselves the more irrecoverably, and be the deeper entangled in difficulties and mistakes. Whoever therefore designs to read the following sheets, I entreat him to make my words the occasion of his own thinking, and endeavour to attain the same train of thoughts in reading that I had in writing them. By this means it will be easy for him to discover the truth or falsity of what I say. He will be out of all danger of being deceived by my words, and I do not see how he can be led into an error by considering his own naked, undisguised ideas. PI §25

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The call to attain the same ‘train of thoughts’ as Berkeley suggests that he conceives of thinking as a matter of having a ‘train of ideas’ before the mind – just as the Ideational Theory would have it. To this one might add that in Alciphron, immediately after the title character gives the above quoted summary of the Simple Ideational Theory, he then explicitly connects it to the dust metaphor itself. We may perhaps raise a dust and disputes about tenets purely verbal: but what is this at bottom more than mere trifling? All which will be easily admitted with respect to human learning and science; wherein it is an allowed method to expose any doctrine or tenet by stripping them of the words, and examining what ideas are underneath, or whether any ideas at all? This is often found the shortest way to end disputes, which might otherwise grow and multiply without end, the litigants neither understanding one another nor themselves. Alc 7, §3

In short, according to the Simple Ideational Interpretation, Berkeley is joining the chorus of his contemporaries in the standard criticism of the empty jargon of the scholastic philosophers. So, this interpretation not only fits the tone of Berkeley’s complaints about how language can mislead, it also places Berkeley in a larger historical narrative in a very natural way.

Ideation and abstraction The second argument in support of the Simple Ideational Interpretation is that if we read Berkeley as advocating an empiricist version of it, it makes ready sense of the connection he explicitly draws at §23 of the Introduction between the danger of the deception of words and Berkeley’s famous attack on abstract ideas. To see this we first need to say a little bit about what abstract ideas are supposed to be. It is easiest to begin by explaining what they are supposed to do. Following Berkeley, it will be best to focus on John Locke’s treatment of the issue. Locke asked, ‘How come we by general terms?’ (Locke 1979, 3.3.6). By a ‘general term’ or ‘general word’, Locke means, for instance, a word like ‘human’. Where a singular term, like the proper name, ‘Bjork’, names just one particular thing, and my utterance of ‘Bjork’ allows me to talk about one particular human, the word ‘human’ has a much broader reach. It lets me talk about all humans that have ever existed, or that ever might. So why is there a problem about the meaning of the word ‘human’? Well, if that word is going to be meaningful it will have to signify an idea. Locke is a concept empiricist; he holds that we get all of our ideas from sensory experience. He also believes that all things are particular; there are no

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universals. That makes it much easier to see how my use of ‘Bjork’ is meaningful than how the word ‘human’ is. My idea of Bjork can be traced to its experiential source in a perceivable particular, Bjork. But what about ‘human’? Meeting with any given particular human should just give me an idea of that particular human. Thus Locke asks, ‘[f]or since all things that exist are only particulars, how come we by general Terms, or where find those general Natures they are supposed to stand for?’ (Locke 1979, 3.3.6). Travel as I might, I do not expect to bump into the general nature of humanhood. So how is it that my utterance of the word ‘human’ lets me talk not just about one particular person, but rather all humans that have ever existed and ever might? Where am I getting the general idea that is, according to the Ideational Theory, necessary to make the general word meaningful? Well, since the world cannot provide us with an idea for ‘human’ to signify, Locke concludes that we must have a power to supply the needed idea ourselves. He calls this process ‘abstraction’. Words become general, by being made the signs of general ideas: and ideas become general, by separating from them the circumstances of Time and Place, and any other ideas that may determine them to this or that particular Existence. By this way of abstraction they are made capable of representing more individuals than one; each of which, having in it a conformity to that Abstract Idea, is (as we call it) of that sort. Locke 1979, 3.3.6

It would seem that to form the general idea of a human for my word ‘human’ to signify, I must focus my attention on some particular human, say Bjork, and then narrow my focus onto what she has in common with all other humans to the exclusion of all of her other properties – what time of day I saw her, where I saw her, what colour her hair is, how tall or short she is, etc. This then gives me the needed abstract general idea. For his part, Berkeley says he can make nothing of this process of abstraction, or rather that it makes nothing. Whether others have this wonderful faculty of Abstracting their ideas, they best can tell: for myself, I find indeed I have a faculty of imagining, or representing to myself, the ideas of those particular things I have perceived, and of variously compounding and dividing them. I can imagine a man with two heads, or the upper parts of a man joined to the body of a horse. I can consider the hand, the eye, the nose, each by itself abstracted or separated from the rest of the body. But then whatever hand or eye I imagine, it must have some particular shape and

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colour. Likewise the idea of man that I frame to myself must be either of a white, or a black, or a tawny, a straight, or a crooked, a tall, or a low, or a middlesized man. I cannot by any effort of thought conceive the abstract idea above described. . . . I deny that I can abstract from one another, or conceive separately, those qualities which it is impossible should exist so separated; or that I can frame a general notion, by abstracting from particulars in the manner aforesaid. PI §10

As Berkeley sees it, if I try to frame the idea of human by abstracting away from all the features not shared by every human I will end up abstracting away the entire idea. Whatever might be left, if anything, would have no content with which to do its representational work. In light of which, the Simple Ideational Interpretation says that Berkeley is here objecting to Locke on Lockean grounds. He is simply applying the implications of the Ideational Theory more rigorously than Locke himself did. Locke is kicking up dust with his abstract ideas. In all, this might seem to make a very strong case for the Simple Ideational Interpretation. Certainly, it has struck many as the natural way to read Berkeley. Just the same, it is perfectly clear that Berkeley rejects the Simple Ideational Theory. First, we should note that the summary and advocacy of the Ideational Theory quoted above is given by the character of Alciphron. Alciphron is the designated opponent to the views that Berkeley advocates in the Alciphron dialogue. In the ‘Seventh Dialogue’, after introducing the Ideational Theory, Alciphron uses it to attack a host of religious terms, most prominently ‘Grace’ and the ‘Trinity’, as meaningless bits of noise since we cannot form ideas for either of them to signify. Since the words are deemed meaningless, Alciphron concludes that belief in Grace and/or the Trinity of God is impossible. In response, Berkeley does not attempt to argue that in fact we do have ideas of Grace and the Trinity. Instead, he attacks the Ideational Theory. For instance, in response to Alciphron’s complaint that no one can believe in the Trinity, Berkeley’s chief advocate in the dialogue, Euphranor, responds: I do not wonder you thought so, as long as you maintained that no man could assent to a proposition without perceiving or framing in his mind distinct ideas marked by the terms of it. But, although terms are signs, yet having granted that those signs may be significant, though they should not suggest ideas represented by them, provided they serve to regulate and influence our wills, passions, or conduct, you have consequently granted that the mind of man may assent to

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propositions containing such terms, when it is so directed or affected by them, notwithstanding it should not perceive distinct ideas marked by those terms. Alc 7, §8

This passage alone puts paid to the Simple Ideational Interpretation. Berkeley straightforwardly rejects its basic assumption, i.e. that every meaningful word must signify an idea.

2. The Late Revolution Interpretation In response, the Ideationalist might abandon the Simple version for a slightly more complex one. She might say, with Anthony Flew, that, [I]n the Alciphron we find a revolutionary and historically premature insight. But that, of course, is not to say that Berkeley himself saw how far he had moved; or that he himself appreciated how drastically the development of this insight might affect some of his own most cherished and distinctive philosophical moves. On the contrary: the claim that it was historically premature should suggest the very opposite. 1993, 225

As Flew saw it, Berkeley’s rejection of the Ideational Theory in Alciphron marked a radical innovation for the philosophy of language in general, and for Berkeley in particular. But recognition of this means we need to partition Berkeley’s views about language into an early and late period. In the early period, i.e. when the Introduction to the Principles was written, he embraces the Simple Ideational Theory and uses it to attack abstract ideas. But in the later period he rejects it in order to rescue the meaningfulness of key religious terms, all the while not realizing that it undercuts his attack on abstract ideas. Berkeley effects a revolution in the philosophy of language, but within the scope of his works, it is a late revolution. However, this modified Ideational Interpretation faces a serious difficulty. If we look at the Introduction to the Principles, we find Berkeley clearly rejecting the claim that in order for a word to be meaningful it must signify some idea. May we not, for example, be affected with the promise of a good thing, though we have not an idea of what it is? Or is not the being threatened with danger sufficient to excite a dread, though we think not of any particular evil likely to befall us, nor yet frame to ourselves an idea of danger in abstract? If any one shall join ever so little reflexion of his own to what has been said, I believe that it will evidently appear to him that general names are often used in the propriety of

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language without the speaker’s designing them for marks of ideas in his own, which he would have them raise in the mind of the hearer. PI §20

He extends the point to some uses of proper names. Even proper names themselves do not seem always spoken with a design to bring into our view the ideas of those individuals that are supposed to be marked by them. For example, when a schoolman tells me ‘Aristotle has said it,’ all I conceive he means by it is to dispose me to embrace his opinion with the deference and submission which custom has annexed to that name. And this effect is often so instantly produced in the minds of those who are accustomed to resign their judgment to authority of that philosopher, as it is impossible any idea either of his person, writings, or reputation should go before. PI §20

Such remarks make it difficult to justify partitioning Berkeley’s attack on the Ideational Theory to a supposed ‘late period’ starting with Alciphron. It seems he has it in his sights very early on, even if, as Flew suggests, that means that in doing so Berkeley undercuts his own attack on abstract ideas.

3. The periphery of language interpretation These remarks, however, might suggest the possibility of a different way to partition the Ideational Interpretation, one that would not necessarily undercut his attack on abstract ideas. One might think that Berkeley is only objecting to the Simple version of the Ideational Theory, i.e. as an account of the meaningfulness of words for all areas of discourse. According to Jonathan Bennett, when Berkeley claims that ‘the mind of man may assent to propositions containing . . . terms’ even though not ‘perceiving or framing in his mind distinct ideas marked by the terms’ he is only talking about the ‘periphery of language’, he is not talking about language that is used to communicate claims about facts (1971, 55). As he sees it, ‘Berkeley is right to stress that words may be used “in propriety of language” for purposes other than theoretical ones of stating or misstating what is the case about some factual matter, e.g. that one may speak in order to “raise some passion” in the hearer’ (1971, 56). What Berkeley is saying is that ‘words can be used meaningfully in the absence of ideas only because words can be used non-theoretically’ (1971, 56). So, according to this interpretation, Berkeley is not rejecting the Ideational theory for the whole of language, just the periphery.

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Of course, this too is to see Berkeley as a revolutionary figure in the philosophy of language, albeit of a more limited stripe. It credits Berkeley with appreciating that words can be used to do different things and can correspondingly acquire meaning in different ways. They can, for instance, be used for emotive purposes. When I am promised a good thing or threatened with danger, this talk is meaningful not because the words ‘good’ and ‘danger’ signify ideas in the speaker’s head that are then communicated to the hearer but, rather, because it successfully expresses some passion of mine and/or gives rise to a certain passion and a corresponding disposition to action in another. However, when I wish to make meaningful truth-evaluable claims, there must be ideas. I may be able to get you out of harm’s way by screaming ‘Bear!’ without raising an idea of a bear in you, but if I want to make a meaningful truth-evaluable claim such as, ‘There is a bear trying to steal your picnic basket,’ I will need a train of ideas in my mind. And if I am to successfully communicate a truth-evaluable claim to you my utterance must successfully give rise to a train of ideas in you. But the Periphery Language Interpretation has its own serious problems. First and foremost is the fact that consistently, and repeatedly, Berkeley denies that we can have any idea of human spirits or God. As he repeatedly tells us, spirits are not known by way of having an idea of them. What’s more, the contrary belief is identified as the source of pernicious errors. From the opinion that spirits are to be known after the manner of an idea or sensation have risen many absurd and heterodox tenets, and much scepticism about the nature of the soul. It is even probable that this opinion may have produced a doubt in some whether they had any soul at all distinct from their body since upon inquiry they could not find they had an idea of it. That an idea which is inactive, and the existence whereof consists in being perceived, should be the image or likeness of an agent subsisting by itself, seems to need no other refutation than barely attending to what is meant by those words. P §137

According to Berkeley, our talk of spirits is meaningful even though we do not and cannot have an idea of any spirit. To see that this fact leaves the advocate of the Periphery of Language Interpretation with an ugly dilemma, we need only add that spirits, simple active substances, are the fundamental component of Berkeley’s ontology. Thus, the advocate will either have to say that Berkeley holds that claims like ‘I am a spirit,’ ‘Spirits are simple active substances’ or ‘God exists’ are not true because they are not claims about matters of fact, or she will have to say that Berkeley somehow failed to see that his own philosophy of language has absolutely devastating consequences for his metaphysics as a whole.

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4. The Anti-Ideational Interpretation These considerations recommend an Anti-Ideational Interpretation, i.e. the view that Berkeley rejected the Ideational Theory in all its forms right from the beginning. To bolster this case, the Anti-Ideationalist will draw our attention back to our opening discussion of the Introduction. It will be recalled that Berkeley promised to show us that it was a mistaken view of the nature of language that produced the pernicious doctrine of abstract ideas. His answer occupies §§18–20 of the Introduction. Berkeley begins, in §18, I come now to consider the source of this prevailing notion and that seems to me to be language. And surely nothing of less extent than reason itself could have been the source of an opinion so universally received. The truth of this appears as from other reasons so also from the plain confession of the ablest patrons of abstract ideas, who acknowledge that they are made in order to naming; from which it is a clear consequence that if there had been no such things as speech or universal signs there never had been any thought of abstraction.

He then proceeds, in §19, to identify a particular view about the nature of language as the source of the trouble. What he identifies is the Ideational Theory. [I]t is a received opinion that language has no other end but the communicating our ideas, and that every significant name stands for an idea. This being so, and it being withal certain that names which yet are not thought altogether insignificant do not always mark out particular conceivable ideas, it is straightway concluded that they stand for abstract notions.

As we saw, this is precisely what led Locke to posit abstract ideas. He assumed the truth of the Ideational Theory and then seeing that this required abstract general ideas for general terms to signify he introduced the process of abstraction to provide the needed ideas. In §19 of the Introduction, Berkeley attacks the heart of the Ideational Theory. ‘The communicating of ideas marked by words is not the chief and only end of language, as is commonly supposed.’ The belief that the primary function of language is to communicate ideas is the central motivation for the Ideational Theory. So the fact that Berkeley targets it both here and in Alciphron provides powerful support for the view that Berkeley’s revolutionary thoughts about the nature of language were no late addition. Already in the Introduction he attacks it as the ultimate source of the most pernicious doctrine in philosophy, abstract ideas.

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This, however, should immediately raise a concern. Isn’t Berkeley’s attack on abstract ideas premised on an acceptance of the Ideational Theory? Did he not object to abstract ideas on the basis that no one can form such ideas? If so, this means that the argument of the Introduction is simply an inconsistent mess. And if that is an implication of the Anti-Ideational Interpretation, then it seems no better off than either of the modified versions of the Ideational Theory. It too leaves Berkeley looking implausibly confused about the obvious implications of his own views. However, the Anti-Ideationalist has a ready reply to this objection. The objection mistakenly assumes that Berkeley’s rejection of abstract ideas is premised upon his own acceptance of the Ideational Theory. Thus, it assumes that when Berkeley points out that one cannot form an idea of a human that is neither tall, nor short, nor fat, nor slim etc., that this commits him to holding that a word can only be meaningful if it is associated with a non-abstract idea. But that is obviously not necessary. One need not embrace a theory in order to point out that it makes impossible demands. Thus, according to the Anti-Ideational Interpretation, the message of the Introduction is that it is a mostly unwitting acceptance of the Ideational Theory that causes us to kick up the dust of abstract ideas.

Berkeley and the Use Theory Since Berkeley’s aim is primarily the rooting out of principles of error, it is not terribly surprising that there is less effort in his work devoted to developing a positive philosophy of language. But what Berkeley does say suggests that he was attracted to a ‘Use Theory’ approach. According to the Use Theory of Meaning, signs are not meaningful in virtue of the fact that they denote some representational mental entity, an ‘idea’, but rather because they can be used in certain ways. And just as the Ideational Theory tends to come naturally packaged with a view of understanding and thought, so does the Use Theory. It suggests that we see concept possession not in terms of the perception of ideas before the mind but rather as the possession of certain abilities. So, I may be said to understand signs because I have mastered their correct usage. Thinking, likewise, is not the having of a ‘train of ideas’ before the mind, but should be thought of more along lines of an exercise of certain kinds of abilities. So, for instance, Euphranor tells Alciphron, ‘signs may be significant, though they should not suggest ideas represented by them, provided they serve to regulate

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and influence our wills, passions, or conduct’ (Alc 7, §8; emphasis added). He claims that words can be meaningful because they serve to [influence] our conduct and actions, which may be done either by forming rules for us to act by, or by raising certain passions, dispositions, and emotions in our minds. A discourse, therefore, that directs how to act or excites to the doing or forbearance of an action may, it seems, be useful and significant, although the words whereof it is composed should not bring each a distinct idea into our minds. Alc 7, §5

Just how complete Berkeley’s commitment to a Use Theory was is hard to say. His attacks on the Ideational Theory are normally accompanied by qualifiers. So, when, for instance, in the Introduction, he denies that the communicating of ideas is the ‘chief and only end’ of language, this leaves open the possibility that it is still one of the ends of language. We find similar qualifications in Alciphron. For instance, Euphranor says, ‘there may be another use of words besides that of marking and suggesting distinct ideas’. However, it should be noted that these qualifications always occur in context of approaching language from the perspective of what language does. Note that Euphranor’s qualification is that there may be ‘another use of words’. Likewise in the Introduction, the Ideationalist’s mistake ultimately lies in that she has misidentified the chief end of language. Berkeley consistently encourages us to approach the philosophy of language from the perspective of language’s many functions. Language should be studied from the perspective of its connection with human activity. As Berkeley tells us, ‘[T]he true end of speech . . . is not merely, or principally, or always, the imparting or acquiring of ideas, but rather something of an active operative nature, tending to a conceived good’ (Alc 7, §14). In addition to these considerations, the advocate of the Use Theory Interpretation will point out that, as we saw, the Ideational Interpretation seems incompatible with Berkeley’s commitment to a metaphysics of spiritual substances. In stark contrast, the Use Theory proves an excellent fit. According to Berkeley, spirits are simple active substances. And, as Berkeley tells us, activity is volition (D3, 217, 239). The upshot is that Berkelean spirits are, fundamentally, agents. Ideas however are wholly passive. As such they are nothing like spirits, they are even, in a sense, opposites. Consequently, Berkeley insists that they cannot be represented by them. So, if concept possession is, as the Ideational Theory would have it, a matter of possessing a representational idea, then we should not have any conception of spirits. In contrast, the Use Theory encourages

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us to see concept possession as a matter of possessing certain abilities. And abilities are exactly the sort of things that agents have. Unlike the Ideational Theory, the Use Theory nicely dovetails with the fundamentals of Berkeley’s ontology. Consequently, there is no need to see Berkeley as a revolutionary figure in the philosophy of language who gave the topic a uniquely privileged position in his work while, at the same time, thinking of him as having failed to see that his views undercut his basic metaphysical commitments. The Use Theory Interpretation has the distinctive advantage of seeing Berkeley’s approach to the philosophy of language as of a piece with his revolutionary metaphysics as a whole.

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Berkeley’s Philosophy of Mathematics Wolfgang Breidert

The scientific situation In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the development of mathematics was founded on two important innovations: The first was during the Middle Ages: The interest in infinity caused an enormous increase in theology and, as a consequence, its employment in science and culture was intensely stimulated. This movement initiated the now famous changes in cosmology by the conceptions of infinity in space and time, and in mathematics by the invention of the calculus (Leibniz’s infinitesimals, Newton’s fluxions). Nicholas of Cusa said ‘mathematical things are finite’,1 but the enthusiasm for infinity beyond theology increased, as is paradigmatically marked by the Spanish scholar Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz in a sentence in 1670: ‘In every science there are infinite worlds; each of them is infinitely extended.’2 The second movement of mathematical innovation was the increasing importance of signs for mathematical variables and the use of symbols in algebra. Since antiquity, algebra had been in a way an appendix to arithmetic, but now it became a third discipline almost independent of arithmetic and geometry. The new notation of power admitted exceeding the third power to arbitrary ‘dimensions’, whereas geometry was limited to the cube. By developing analytical geometry, Descartes surpassed that limitation. Though Cartesianism influenced many of the seventeenth-century philosophers, the antagonism of Platonistic rationalism and nominalistic empiricism imbued philosophy and science. When Berkeley began his studies at Trinity College Dublin in the early eighteenth century, Locke’s philosophy and Newton’s scientific works intensively attracted scholars’ attention because these were the most modern theories, and Berkeley was involved in both areas, as can be proved by his early Notebooks. Shortly before Berkeley entered Trinity College,

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the doctrines of John Locke and Isaac Newton had been introduced into the studies at the college by George Ashe, the provost of the college, during the last decade of the seventeenth century. A member of the Philosophical Society of Dublin for Promoting Natural Knowledge, Ashe had published some mathematical papers, for instance an article in the Philosophical Transactions of 1684 on some of Euclid’s propositions. Ashe was an advocate of classical accuracy in mathematics, and he derived the assumed security of mathematical propositions from his opinion that mathematical objects, i.e. the quantities, were sensible things, with which we are acquainted in everyday life. We have no evidence that Berkeley read any mathematical work written by Ashe, but it is important to know that a teacher of mathematics with a sensualistic attitude had some influence at Trinity College at that time.

Arithmetic Berkeley was no professional mathematician, nevertheless his first publications were concerned with mathematical subjects. In a twin book (Arithmetica absque algebra aut Euclide demonstrata/Miscellanea mathematica) he delivered an introduction into the use of numbers in the first part, and in the second part he presented a collection of papers concerned with irrational numbers, geodesy (the shape of the earth), a geometrical proposition (about the proportions of the cylinder and the equilateral cone circumscribed to the sphere)3 and an algebraic game (for the production of equations). In that game (De ludo algebraico) we do not find any support for solving equations, the whole game serves for the invention of equations only. The rules of the game concern the production of systems of equations, but the task to solve the invented equations is no intrinsic move in the game.4 De ludo algebraico is rather a pedagogical or moral work than a mathematical one. In its introduction Berkeley enthusiastically recommends the study of algebra, and eulogizes Descartes and Malebranche for having given such recommendations. The book exhibits more of its author’s enthusiasm for algebra than he may have later wished, nevertheless the recommendation of the algebraic game is restricted to aims of learning, or at least to recreation, but it does not include mere amusement. Playing did not have its own value, it was nothing more than an instrument for instruction or recreation. Nowadays we are accustomed to looking at the game of chess as a logical or mathematical game, but Berkeley invented his algebraic game against the passion for chess. The reason being that chess was not yet considered as a logical or mathematical game.

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The reason that Berkeley later regretted his recommendation of algebra was because he became aware of the dangers to religion emanating from the universal mathematization of all the branches of knowledge. Therefore he developed his unusual mathematics founded on primarily finite concepts. But in his early writings, Berkeley, following Francis Bacon, René Descartes and Nicolas Malebranche, is recommending mathematics and especially algebra for educational reasons, and he is convinced that it would be good training for the mind, like sport is for the body. Beyond the practical utility of mathematics, algebra seems to him to be useful by distracting the mind away from sensible things in accordance with the Platonistic attitude. In this respect, and during that early time, Berkeley shows himself as a Platonistic idealist, but that is not his final philosophy of mathematics. That early booklet shows also that Berkeley emphasizes the traditional distinction of arithmetic and geometry, which Descartes’ analytical geometry began to lessen. In spite of Berkeley’s explicit intention of answering the demand for reasons and rational foundation in mathematics, his Arithmetica delivers only some bare rules for computing and instructions for the use of numbers. That is in accordance with his considerations in his early Notebooks, where he remarked that numbers do not have any fixed relationships to things they refer to. There is no specific number belonging to any empirically given set of objects. For example, six apples are three pairs of apples, both expressions referring to the same set of real things. Numerals are uninterpreted signs before they are interpreted or connected to a specific context. In opposition to the Platonists, Berkeley maintains that numbers are mere signs without any particular reference, and in the Principles he says: ‘In arithmetic therefore we regard not the things but the signs, which nevertheless are not regarded for their own sake, but because they direct us how to act with relation to things, and dispose rightly them.’5 Like words in language, numerical signs have to be studied only with respect to a possible use in practical situations. Otherwise it would be a waste of time. As well as signs for the immediate signification of extensions, Berkeley also uses mathematical signs that have no separate reference, but are meaningful together with their context or concerning their application. In his early writings, Berkeley still intended a strict correlation between words and ideas to avoid meaningless speech but already, in the introduction to his Principles (§ 20), he recognized with respect to theology the need for an extension of meaningful language not only admitting terms supported by context (synkategormatike) but also allowing the use of language for the motivation to act (emotive language theory). And in Alciphron he declares: Words may be significant ‘although they

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should not, every time they are used, excite the ideas they signify in our minds; it being sufficient that we have it in our power to substitute things or ideas for their signs when there is occasion’.6 In this manner, arithmetical and algebraic signs are significant. But Berkeley added a second sort of significance: ‘It seems also to follow that there may be another use of words besides that of marking and suggesting distinct ideas, to wit, the influencing our conduct and actions, which may be done either by forming rules for us to act by, or by raising certain passions, dispositions, and emotions in our mind.’7 Numerals are helpful instruments for adjusting our actions, even if every number is not representing a particular idea. Though the subject of Alciphron VII (§§ 13 and 14) is the language and the problem of signification in the theological area, Berkeley uses a mathematical example as proof that ‘the true end of speech . . . is not merely, or principally, or always, the imparting or acquiring of ideas’. Contrary to his early convictions, Berkeley admits meaningful signs, which do not signify ideas: ‘for instance, the algebraic mark, which denotes the root of a negative square, hath its use in logistic operations, although it be impossible to form an idea of any such quantity’. Leibniz had already taken just the contrary path, namely from mathematics to theology, by remarking that the result of calculations with imaginary numbers can be a real number. And he made the theological note: For the Nature of things, the mother of eternal varieties, or rather the Divine Mind is more jealous than that she would admit to press all things into one genus. Therefore she invented a distinguished and wonderful way out in that miracle of analysis, the monster of the ideal world, almost an amphibian between being and not-being, which we call imaginary root.8

Leibniz noticed (in a letter to Huygens) the following example:9 √(1 + √ – 3) + √(1 – √ – 3) = √6, [proof : the square of the left side makes 6] which is a real number. Another example is: The result of the multiplication of (x + 1)(x – 1)(x + √ – 1)(x – √ – 1) = (x4 – 1), which is a real number. In calculation the merely imagined numbers may serve as instruments for the transition from real numbers to other real numbers, though they do not represent any real quantity by themselves. They work like a black box with some input and output. In the Analyst Berkeley is convinced that infinitesimals work in this way. We may use them in mathematical operations, but they represent nothing. Therefore Berkeley calls the mathematicians ‘nihilarians’. The mathematicians

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could have replied: Yes, we have realized that signs denoting nothing are not senseless because they may be used for something. Yet the transition through the black box by not-representing signs is explained neither by Berkeley nor by the mathematicians, whereas they detect one of the main functions that language has, i.e. to speak of temporally and spatially absent things and even to speak of impossible things, if it is allowed to use the word ‘things’ in an expression like ‘impossible things’. We need language for impossible references. Berkeley denied that it is possible to represent things in themselves by ideas in our spirit. In Principles § 87 he says, ‘We see only the appearances, and not the real qualities of things [in themselves]. . . . Things remaining the same, our ideas vary, and which of them, or even whether any of them at all represent the true quality really existing in the thing, it is out of our reach to determine.’ And in the Three Dialogues he argues against the opinion that our ideas might be representations or copies of things in themselves: ‘it is impossible to know how far our ideas resemble them; or whether they resemble them at all’.10 We cannot have any knowledge except the knowledge produced by a connection of ideas, i. e. either the connection of an image with the original thing, that means a connection by similarity (or even equality), or an arbitrary connection of things without any similarity, that means a non-pictorial representation, for instance the representation of a spoken word by some letters. Though the relation of representation may be arbitrary, the related things may fit together, more or less. In the Theory of Vision (§§ 141–4) Berkeley emphasizes that no kind of similarity between the represented and the representing thing is necessary, but one thing is more suitable than another to represent the original, if its complexity is closer to the complexity of the original. So ‘the visible square is fitter than the visible circle to represent the tangible square, then it is not because it is liker, or more of a species with it, but because the visible square contains in it several distinct parts, whereby to mark the several distinct corresponding parts of a tangible square, whereas the visible circle doth not’ (§ 142). Moreover, the representation of tangibles by visibles in ‘visual language’ is not totally arbitrary, since it is intercultural. It is the same language in Europe and America (§ 152). In a similar way, Leibniz argued in his Nouveaux Essais that a person born blind and made to see can identify the visible cube and the visible globe in virtue of the edges of the cube,11 but he has no regard to the fact that this is only true under the condition that both bodies are illuminated in the ‘normal’ way. Otherwise a reflecting globe may show a very complicated visual structure. And

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a cube may be illuminated in a certain way so that some edges vanish. Not to mention other optical illusions! Visual things are signs signifying tangible things. The visual language is, like each language, a medium or instrument.

Geometry and minima sensibilia In Berkeley’s view, the fundamental error in mathematics is the admission of abstract general ideas, and that these ideas are supposed to exist without the mind.12 He opposes the abstract ideas of number to prevent ‘the most trifling numerical speculations’ and mysteries, which he considers to be mere gimmickry (difficiles nugae).13 At first glance, Berkeley’s philosophy of geometry looks like a Platonistic or realistic one, but then the question arises as to how that attitude could consist with Berkeley’s sensualistic theory of knowledge and his principle of perceptibility. In Berkeley’s view, geometry has no place outside the area of sensible perception, but he advocates Euclid’s definitions, according to which points lack any extension at all and lines have no breadth. By Berkeley’s principle (esse is percipi) the area of entities is restricted to the area of perceptibility. Except the reference to spirits all speech without any relation to perceivable ideas has to be avoided, because it would be meaningless. Therefore perceptibility has to be the limit in the speech about geometrical extension. Words or signs allegedly referring to extension below perceivable magnitude are meaningless. So, Berkeley thought of a geometry of minima sensibilia. Based on this principle, Berkley disavows that one could get any idea either of a line without breadth or even of a point. According to him ‘point’, ‘line’ and ‘surface’ must refer to sensible entities. According to Euclid’s definition, a point is something that has no part. If a line is divided as far as is possible, the process of division will end in a point, because the result will not have any piece, otherwise it would be divisible once more. Therefore Berkeley holds that the smallest part of a sensible line (minimum sensibile) is a point. But since a finite sensible line contains only a finite set of minima sensibilia in this Berkeleyan geometry each finite line contains only a finite set of points. And there is a ‘natural’ measure for the length of a line, namely the number of its points. In his Notebooks Berkeley is pondering about that geometry: ‘If wth me you call those lines equal wch contain an equal number of points, then there will be no difficulty. that curve is equal to a right line wch contains as [many] points as the right one doth.’14

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Such a finitistic geometry, as it had been discussed since antique atomism, entails some advantages: (1) The Aristotelian heterogeneity of right and curved lines is hurdled; (2) There will be no incommensurable magnitudes;15 (3) The paradoxes of infinity vanish (e.g. a big circle does not contain more points than a small circle). But with respect to Euclid’s geometry, it implies grave disadvantages: Lines containing an odd number of points cannot be divided into two equal parts;16 there will be points on a circle line that do not have any straight connection to the centre of the circle etc. This outcome looks mathematically strange at first glance, but nowadays it is easily realized on a computer display digitizing discrete points. Furthermore, the question may be raised as to whether a minimum sensibile could be extended. If it were unextended, a set of minima could not be extended. Therefore it is indivisible but extended. PC 439: ‘if you say it may be divided into insensible parts. I say these are nothings’. Though Berkeley emphasizes that the minimum visibile and the minimum tangibile are heterogeneous, he denies that there are two heterogeneous geometries. For Berkeley’s philosophy of mathematics it is very important that he does not develop his geometry of minima as a second geometry besides the standard geometry, a system that could perhaps be useful for particular cases. Since to him geometry seemed to be necessarily linked to the real world in a very close way, he was unable to think of several geometries, and therefore he searched for the only true geometry.

Abstraction in mathematics Berkeley denied emphatically the possibility of general abstract ideas. The term ‘general triangle’ has no general referent, because each triangle must be, as John Locke remarked, either acute-angled or rectangular or obtuse-angled. There is no Platonic idea of triangle.17 To avoid the total collapse of geometry by abandoning abstraction, a nominalist like Berkeley has to find a way out. In the introduction to the Principles he tried to explain how a particular triangle is nevertheless able to represent any arbitrary triangle. The key for solving that problem is Berkeley’s theory of representation. Berkeley was asked by Samuel Molyneux ‘whether the ideas laid up in the imagination are all images of what they represent’,18 and Berkeley answered in a letter,

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That the Ideas laid up in the Imagination need not be Images, strictly speaking of what they represent, for Example, in demonstrating the Proposition which says, that the Sum of the Angles of any Polygon is equall to twice as many right Ones, as there be Sides in the Figure, bating four, You may make use of any one Polygon, e.g. a pentogon [sic] to represent all the infinite Variety of regular and irregular Polygons that may possibly exist.

This question put by Molyneux concerns the representation of image, but Berkeley’s answer goes on to the problem of universality. One polygon represents an infinite variety of polygons. And it is remarkable that the problem of general ideas explained in the introduction to the Principles (PI § 12) is also illustrated by a geometrical example. In geometrical cases as given by Berkeley we have no total arbitrariness between represented and representing things. The representing particular idea ‘stand[s] for all other particular ideas of the same sort’. In this section a black line ‘represents all particular lines whatsoever’. It ‘becomes general, by being made a sign’. In the Principles § 65 Berkeley explains a fundamental relation between ideas, namely the relation of signification. There he does not reflect on how the process of signification is possible or how it is possible to comprehend a thing or an idea as a sign. What does it mean being a sign, and what is the difference between a mere thing and a signifying thing? Moreover: How can one sign stand for many signified things? In Principles § 68 Berkeley answers the question only in the negative way, saying that the relation between a mark (or sign) and the thing signified is not a relation between cause and effect: ‘the connexion of ideas does not imply the relation of cause and effect, but only of a mark or sign with the thing signified’. The fire that I see forewarns me of the pain I will suffer upon my approaching it. But what is the relation of representation? Is it a relation sui generis? In Alciphron Berkeley mentions the general ‘doctrine of signs’, but he does not answer these general questions.19 Anyway, he thought to have solved the problem of abstract general ideas in geometry by his theory of representation presupposing the doctrine of signs, developed by John Locke in his Essay, which Berkeley used in several battles against his opponents.

Infinite divisibility The conception of representation is a fundamental one in Berkeley’s philosophy of mathematics, for it is not only used for the expressing of general propositions

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in geometry, but it enables him to hold infinite divisibility within his finite concept of perception. Infinity is a central point pervading Berkeley’s thinking, because philosophy and mathematics meet in that issue. A very important aspect of his principle of perceptibility is the finiteness of perception. Berkeley underlines that we are unable to perceive innumerable parts in any finite extension.20 So, that principle achieves a very helpful service for Berkeley’s theological intention, because to reserve infinity for God alone Berkeley was compelled to eliminate the infinite from all profane sciences and mathematics or at least to restrict them to the application of potentially infinite considerations only. This means that only quantities of arbitrary, but finite, magnitude are admitted. The infinite divisibility of a line is a fundamental concept in geometry, and Berkeley has to deliver an explanation for how to escape that concept or how it would be possible to handle it. His way out is taken via his theory of representation. It is possible to represent an extension by another (enlarged or diminished) extension that is, in some sense, similar to the first one. So in NB 260 Berkeley writes: ‘Suppose an inch represents a mile.’ In this case the inch is selected for the representation because it is similar to the mile, for the proportions between the parts of the inch are equal to the proportions between the parts of the mile. But with respect to Berkeley’s principle of perceptibility there is the problem of unlimited divisibility. If we proportionally divide both extensions, we will arrive at the minimum perceptibile in the case of the inch earlier than in the case of the mile. And Berkeley says in NB 260: ‘1/1000 of an inch is nothing [because it is not perceivable], but 1/1000 of ye mile represented is something therefore 1/1000 of an inch tho’ nothing is not to be neglected, because it represents something i.e. 1/1000 of a mile.’21 This entry looks strange, because a ‘nothing’ is supposed to represent something. (1) Either we take the entry as a Berkeleyan argumentum ad absurdum against infinite divisibility. This would be in accordance with the entries 247 and 248: ‘In Geometry it is not prov’d that an inch is divisible ad infinitum’ (247); ‘Geometry not conversant about our compleat determin’d ideas of figures, for these are not divisible ad infinitum’ (248). And in 261 Berkeley says: ‘Particular Determin’d lines are not divisible ad infinitum, . . . Yet a Geometer [. . .] will very readily say he can demonstrable [demonstrate?] an inch line is divisible ad Infinitum.’ (2) Or we take the representation as a serious strategy to handle the imagined parts of a line, which are less than minima sensibilia. Indeed, such imagined lines are not perceivable, but their representatives are perceivable and some of their collections, if they are large enough, are perceivable, too. Therefore it could be

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possible to use these imagined extensions as instruments or ‘like the scaffold of a building . . . as things to be laid aside or got rid of as soon as finite lines were found proportional to them’.22 This application of ‘unperceivable extensions’ may look dangerous, but the method of representation by magnifying makes sure that there are always lines proportional to the represented, though unperceivable, lines. But there is still a problem. The reasoning is based on the supposition that proportionality of the parts consists at each stage in the process of division. How can we be sure that this condition is in force? Though the most famous mathematicians in the first half of the eighteenth century were convinced that this condition of continued proportionality stands in the process of proportional division,23 in Berkeley’s view it seems to be a petitio principii. Now we can ask the question in a general way: If we apply representatives with respect to similarity between the representing and the represented thing, how can we ensure the similarity? If we immediately perceive the similarity, why should we use representatives for things we immediately perceive? If we do not immediately perceive the represented things, we cannot be sure of the similarity. This is a fundamental problem for all knowledge by proportion or analogy, and especially in mathematics, which Berkeley revealed in his P (128): ‘it is necessary we speak of the lines described on paper, as though they contained parts which really they do not’. This means: The mathematicians speak about inexistent things.

The inducement for the Analyst Following his early entries in his Notebooks, Berkeley devoted himself to the new mathematics of the infinitesimals, and his main reproach was that mathematicians were dealing with nothings. But he did not publish anything on the subject before the Principles appeared, though he had already written his, posthumously published, short paper Of Infinites, which contains his first critique of the calculus. Modern research on Berkeley’s philosophy of mathematics and the interest of historians of mathematics are concerned primarily with the Analyst and the Analyst controversy, but Dominique Berlioz also performed some interesting investigations into Berkeley’s lecture Of Infinites, and Silvia Parigi enlightened the mathematical background of the Notebooks and the Principles. Furthermore, we have the important works on Berkeley’s philosophy of mathematics and his

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relationship with other mathematicians by Michel Blay, Douglas Jesseph and David Sherry.24 Ben Vermeulen traced the connexions between Berkeley and Nieuwentijt with regard to infinitesimals,25 and Bjørn Smestad wrote a thesis on Roger Paman, who was a hitherto neglected participant in the Analyst controversy.26 In Berkeley’s view, the influence of sciences and mathematics in all of the cultural domains that increased during the Enlightenment, particularly promoted by Descartes in France as well as by Leibniz and Wolff in Germany, seemed to be a dangerous threat for religion, though in the eighteenth century the tendency towards rationalism and mathematization was perhaps much stronger on the continent than in British philosophy. So the German translation of Berkeley’s Alciphron, published in 1737, appeared together with an additional introduction about the question of ‘Whether one could introduce profitably the mathematical way of learning into theology’.27 It is obvious from the Analyst how strong the relationship between theology, philosophy and mathematics affected Berkeley, and how ambivalent was his interest in mathematics. He had to respect the fact that his contemporaries were in high regard of mathematics but at the same time he was aware that inappropriate applications could lead to atheism, and he was therefore anxious to restrict the influence of the ‘exact’ sciences in metaphysical matters. When Berkeley, during his stay in Rhode Island, saw the failure of his Bermuda project he suspected that it was brought down by some atheistic mathematicians and scientists. Therefore he wrote his Analyst to undermine their reputation. It is addressed to an infidel mathematician who was identified to be Edmond Halley, but Berkeley did not name him, because Halley was exemplarily to stand for any infidel mathematician. Though the Analyst was induced by apologetic intentions the arguments claim to be based only on philosophical or logical reasoning, and they are really independent of Berkeley’s theological ambition. In the Principles and in the Analyst Berkeley underlines his intention to rid mathematics of dispensable quibbles but he endeavours to retain all of the practically useful results in the calculus: ‘whatever is useful in geometry and promotes the benefit of human life, doth still remain firm and unshaken on our principles’.28

The new ‘Cavalierian method’ With respect to Berkeley’s critique of the infinitesimal calculus in the Analyst, one may ask the question of what he knew about the calculus and where he had

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got that knowledge. In his Notebooks Berkeley refers to Newton’s fluxions in several entries, but Leibniz is named only once. Although Leibniz and other mathematicians considered Bonaventura Cavalieri as one of the most important forerunners of the calculus, it is noteworthy that Berkeley, obviously with regard to his geometry of minima sensibilia, mentioned Cavalieri only once in his Notebooks (346): ‘all might be demonstrated by a new method of indivisibles, easier perhaps & juster than that of Cavallerius’.29 Therefore it appears that Berkeley did know something about Cavalieri, though he assumed a detached attitude to this Italian mathematician. In books on Berkeley’s philosophy of mathematics we find the plain statement that Berkeley did know many of the mathematical books written in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and particularly that he was acquainted with Cavalieri’s method of indivisibles.30 It was common practice to make a reference to Cavalieri’s most famous book, namely to the Geometria, which appeared in a first edition in 1635 and in a second one in 1653. But there are some reasons why Berkeley did not use these or any other of Cavalieri’s works.31 Writing about indivisibles in his Notebooks Berkeley mentioned Newton and Barrow, but the corresponding section in Newton’s Principia mathematica does not contain any reference to Cavalieri.32 Indeed Berkeley quotes explicitly Barrow’s Mathematicae lectiones.33 Though we can be sure that Berkeley used Barrow’s book, Cavalieri’s method is not explained there in such a way that the reader could get an adequate idea thereof, because there is nothing more than an almost commonplace sentence that Cavalieri’s method is founded on the congruence of geometrical figures. The source of Berkeley’s knowledge of the Cavalierian method is a mathematical text by Claude-François Milliet Dechales. Before Berkeley made his early private notes on Cavalieri, he had mentioned Dechales’s book on the method of indivisibles already in the Micellanea mathematica, where the proposition about a cylinder and a cone is demonstrated. Without any doubt Berkeley was well acquainted with Dechales’s book, for he quotes correctly the number of the needed proposition, but a separate publication of Dechales’s work on indivisibles does not exist. Instead there is a treatise on indivisibles in his voluminous book entitled Cursus seu, mundus mathematicus,34 and the section on indivisibles is contained in the first edition only. The difference between the first and the second edition (1674, 1690) characterizes a noteworthy change in the history of mathematics. In the first edition the section on indivisibles and a section of algebra are added at the end of the last volume. Obviously the author intended additionally to take into consideration the

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‘modern’ tendencies in mathematics. This may be inferred from the fact that in the second edition the section about algebra appears earlier on, where it ought to have its place from a systematic point of view, but the method of Cavalieri’s indivisibles disappears completely. For in the intervening time it had been considered to be obsolete, because Newton’s theory of fluxions and the Leibnizian differential calculus initiated an alteration of mathematical analysis. Dechales does not merely repeat Cavalierian ideas but he offers a rather original interpretation thereof. Dechales’s fictionalistic reading may have the greatest importance with regard to its effect on Berkeley. When Cavalieri published his new method of indivisibles for the first time, the concepts of the indivisible, of the point, of the atom etc. were quite controversial ideas. While Cavalieri’s indivisibles are nothing but the geometrical figures limiting the continuous figure of a higher dimension and the indivisible of a line, i.e. a point, does not have any extension, and while other mathematicians tried to demonstrate that a point does not have any extension at all,35 Dechales took quite a different view, and disregarded Cavalieri’s caution with respect to the composition of the continuum. He wrote explicitly that the hemisphere ‘consists’ of hemispherical shells around one centre, and that a cone could be ‘resolved’ in circular surfaces.36 Cavalieri himself did not use such expressions. Dechales held that any arbitrary extension could be considered ‘as a point’. But during one and the same reasoning we should take care to handle it as an indivisible and to admit no extension less than the assumed minimal one. If it were necessary one could use another extension which is less than the first minimal extension for the aim of another demonstration. With this idea Dechales leaves the known Aristotelian way of thinking, according to which a point could never be divided, whereas all the other extensions were divisible in infinitum. Dechales also accepted the infinite divisibility, but he founded it upon the possibility to take even a ‘point’, i.e. a thing hitherto considered as indivisible, as a divisible thing in the next step of reasoning. This fictionalistic attitude is not like Hilbert’s formalistic view, for Dechales starts from an empirical and intuitive base, which he changes, if it is needed by the geometrical reasoning, whereas Hilbert uses arbitrary objects as points applying formal systems to them. Berkeley may have been impressed by Dechales’s doctrine and its relationship to empirical intuition, for it is similar to Berkeley’s doctrine of the infinite divisibility by successive representation of indivisibles by divisible extensions, which we find in the Notebooks. How limited the accordance between Berkeley’s views and Cavalieri’s original attitude is may be seen by the fact that Berkeley does not consider the geometrical

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figures as continuous and that he means by ‘continuity’ nothing but the divisibility with the help of the successive representability, substituting the minor extension to be the larger one for further divisibility. Strictly speaking it is not a ‘further’ division, for the extension divided in such a way is not quite identical to the original one, because the first extension is substituted by the second one but not ‘enlarged’. Berkeley’s view is essentially finitistic and therefore totally different from the Cavalierian conception.

The claim for exactitude Berkeley’s main reproach against the new calculus concerned the exactitude in mathematical reasoning. Since Greek antiquity, mathematics had been famous for its exactitude. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Euclid’s geometry was considered the pure example of an exact deductive system that was worthy of imitation in all sciences and, as Spinoza attested, even in ethics. But in the new calculus, be it by Newton’s fluxions or by Leibniz’s infinitesimals, mathematicians themselves abandoned their own standard of exactness. In Berkeley’s time mathematicians used infinitesimals or fluxions (moments, prime or ultimate ratios) that were declared to be quantities different from zero, but at some point of reasoning they were neglected as if they were nothing. Therefore already in his early Notebooks Berkeley mockingly called the mathematicians of the new calculus ‘nihilarians’. He censured the lack of exactitude in the calculus, and in his paper Of Infinites he particularly attacked the Leibnizian infinitesimals with disdain, because this famous mathematician had explicitly rejected scrupulosity in mathematics and intended to justify formulas such as x = x + dx which obviously contradicted every standard of mathematical exactitude. With reference to the principles of logic, Berkeley insisted on asking the question of whether the quantity dx would assign either zero or a positive magnitude. If it were zero, it could be neglected, but if it were another quantity, then the asserted equation would be wrong, even if dx means an infinitely or incomparably small quantity. In Newton’s theory of fluxions there arose an analogous problem. He considered quantities (‘fluents’) kinetically generated by continuous motions. The momentary increment of a fluent is called its ‘moment’, and is defined by the part of the quantity increased in an ‘infinitely small’ time. The incremental

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velocity is called ‘fluxion’. And again Berkeley insisted on asking the question of whether ‘indefinitely small’ does mean either zero (nothing) or a positive quantity, although very small. Newton’s own dissatisfaction with the theory of moments instigated him to project a second draft of foundation himself, namely the theory of prime and ultimate ratios. These ratios correspond in some sense to the differential quotients in the modern terminology. Newton wrote in the Introduction to the Quadrature of Curves: ‘Fluxions are very nearly as the augments of the Fluents, generated in equal, but infinitely small part of Time; and so to speak exactly, are in the Prima Ratio of the nascent Augments: but they may be expounded by any Lines that are proportional to them.’ Though the words ‘infinitely small part of Time’ are followed by ‘to speak exactly’ it is by no means clear what an infinitely small part of time could be. There arises the same question as in the Leibnizian context. Without doubt, in his critique of the infinitesimals and fluxions, Berkeley was absolutely right in his time, for the foundation of the calculus by contemporary mathematicians was certainly insufficient, and this historical case is a paramount example showing that in the development of mathematical thought logically founded proof is not needed for antecedent mathematical success. The foundation of a mathematical theory may be adopted at any remote period of time.

The compensation of error Berkeley refused the calculus with respect to its foundations and applied notions but not with regard to its results, because in spite of his intense attack on the foundation of the new calculus Berkeley was not able to disavow the correct results it reached. Therefore, he was compelled to explain how it could be possible that those unfounded methods yielded valid and useful results. As a learned logician he knew that true conclusions may be drawn from false premises by logically correct inferences. By virtue of this Aristotelian knowledge he asserted that the numerous valid results could be obtained by a compensation of error. At first glance the compensation of error is a general conjecture, which could be doubted, but Berkeley tried to prove his assertion. However, his demonstration is by no means a general one. As a proof of the principle of compensation in the case of derivation he delivered only one example, namely the computation of the subtangent of a parabola. His argumentation is as follows:

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Figure 25.1

TP /y = dx/dy + z (by similar triangles) The mathematicians make the first error taking dy instead of dy + z, i.e. they take a quantity less than the true one, putting TP /y = dx/dy.

(1)

According to their rule of derivation they get from the original equation (y2 = px) a new one: 2y dy/dx = p. Therefore dy = pdx/2y.

(2)

Berkeley argues that this value for dy is bigger than the true value, for substituting y by y + dy and x by x + dx we get y2 + 2ydy + (dy)2 = px + pdx, Therefore dy = pdx/2y – (dy)2/2y. If dy designates a finite value, in accordance with the figure and to the initial suppositions, then the values of dy both in (1) and (2) are wrong, and the errors do compensate each other, as Berkeley emphasized. Berkeley insists strictly on

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the suppositions made at the beginning, where the quantities dx, dy and z were supposed to differ from zero. Therefore critiques taking them to be differentials in respect of infinitely small quantities cannot meet the argumentation. Indeed, Berkeley avoids infinite quantities as well as infinitesimals, nor does he use limiting values. It may be expected that some errors could be found in his considerations but it is strange to see that they were not clearly recognized by neither his contemporaries nor his modern interpreters. Berkeley never discussed the question of whether the supposed compensation of error, which he demonstrated in the case of the parabola, would also work in a more general case, or even in every case. He was never asked such questions. It is strange that his opponents did not attack him where he was mathematically most vulnerable. One of Berkeley’s weakest points is his reasoning in sections 28 and 29 of the Analyst, where he aims to demonstrate the derivation of xn without the application of infinitesimals. There he compares some analytical terms with some geometrical figures (surfaces), and it is his opinion that it would be possible to adjoin homological terms corresponding to each other in a natural way. He does not drop any hint of a definition of ‘homology’ between an algebraic term and a geometrical quantity, much less how to find it out. Perhaps on this point Berkeley was seduced by the antique principle of homogeneity allowing the comparison of solely homogeneous quantities, i.e. lines with lines, surfaces with surfaces, and bodies with bodies. It seems that Berkeley’s opponents did not notice the weakness of this argumentation, nor did they recognize the fact that the evidence of an error in one of Berkeley’s demonstrations could not in the least confirm the foundations and methods of their calculus.

The Analyst controversy Berkeley’s Analyst elicited a lot of reactions. James Jurin, alias Philalethes Cantabrigiensis, a Newtonian physician and scientist, published several writings objecting to Berkeley.37 In a satirical diction he submitted some weak arguments. For instance, in the Principia mathematica Newton calculated the moment of an increasing rectangle AB, but he did not consider the point of time when the sides were increased by a and b respectively. Instead he considered the rectangle, when a was less by ½a and b was less by ½b. Then the magnitude of the rectangle was: (A – ½a)(B – ½b) = AB – ½aB – ½Ab + ¼ab.

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When the sides are increased by a and b respectively the rectangle will be (A + ½a)(B + ½b) = AB + ½aB + ½Ab + ¼ab. The difference will be aB + Ab, which Newton took for the increment of AB . Berkeley revealed this calculation as a deceitful trick, because starting with AB the increment will come out to aB + Ab – ab. Jurin replied in a ridiculous way that both the increment and the decrement were moments, and therefore to get the true moment these quantities had to toss, and therefore one has to take that method of averaging. Such arguments could scarcely be considered for serious reasoning. Similarly, Jacob Walton could not really defeat Berkeley’s attack on the calculus, because he did not recognize that Berkeley was not bent on admitting infinitely small quantities or infinite decrease.38 At that time neither Berkeley nor the mathematicians had a distinct mathmatical notion of limit. Berkeley insisted, regarding the unanswered question, how it could be possible to consider the proportions of quantities after they disappeared. With reference to a quotation from Butler’s Hudibras he calls them ‘the ghosts of departed quantities’.39 In his Defence of Free-Thinking in Mathematics (1735) Berkeley tried to undermine the authority of mathematicians, for he took science to be a republic where verifiability had to be respected and foundations must be understandable even for laymen, which is a very doubtful demand, and this point was quite rightly attacked by his opponents. The set of participants in the Analyst controversy increased during the following ten years.40 The debate was based on several antitheses: the faithful Christian against the ‘atheistic’ mathematicians, Newton’s defender against the Leibnizian (aftermath of the battle about the priority of the calculus), the expert against the layman, the theorist philosophically concerned with foundations against the practically calculating mathematician. At last the controversy stimulated the mathematicians to develop a satisfying foundation for the calculus, which was finally reached in the middle of the nineteenth century (Karl Weierstrass).

Formalist or Instrumentalist? Modern Berkeley scholars have tried to answer the question of whether Berkeley was a formalist or an instrumentalist or a philosopher of mathematics in any other sense.41 There is no simple solution to that problem, for we find various attitudes in various contexts in the development of Berkeley’s thinking.

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In Alciphron (VII ,5) Berkeley says, ‘it seems neither you nor I can form distinct simple ideas of number, we can nevertheless make a very proper and significant use of numeral names’. In this respect Berkeley is a nominalist, because numbers are mere names, which are assigned to things by a process of counting. They are not founded in the things themselves but marks supporting memory.42 There is no thing which is five. Nevertheless there is a system ruling the relationships among these names. So we find a formalistic attitude in Berkeley’s philosophy of arithmetic. According to modern philosophy of mathematics, formalistic mathematicians develop bare algorithms that have their own mathematical objectivity, but they may be interpreted on a second level of reasoning. In this way mere formulas are the immediate objects of mathematics and may be useful instruments. But the mere use of instruments does not make an instrumentalist, who believes that mathematical formulas have no other meaning than to be an instrument. An instrumentalist or pragmatist is characterized by substituting truth with utility. In this regard Berkeley was no instrumentalist, though he considered some mathematical concepts and operations to be mere tools, particularly as instruments for abbreviation. By the same reason he was no formalist in the sense of David Hilbert, who developed his concept of formalism with respect to geometry. For Hilbert even geometry is concerned only with formal axiomatic systems independent of their interpretation. He is said to maintain that we could use the words ‘tables, chairs, and beer mugs’ instead of ‘points, lines, and surfaces’. In contrast, Berkeley denied any philosophy of formalism with respect to geometry. For him the famous work of Euclid entailed the paradigm of scientific geometry.

On the verge of non-Euclidean geometry It would not be appropriate to say that Berkeley kept Euclidean geometry in mind, for he did not think of more than one and only one geometry. The multitude of geometries were not yet discovered or invented, though Leibniz contemplated in the context of Molyneux’s problem about the identity of two geometries, namely the geometry of the blind and the geometry of people unable to move.43 For the history of philosophy it was a pity that Berkeley could not know this passage because it was posthumously published after 1765. But in his Theory of Vision (1709), Berkeley put a similar question. He did not ask the question, as Leibniz did, whether the geometry of sight and the geometry of touch were identical; instead he imagined a fictitious spirit who could not move

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or touch, but who would be able to see and think. Would such a spirit be able to develop geometry? Since Berkeley did not take into consideration any other geometry than the traditional one, the question of which sort of geometry such a spirit would develop was beyond his horizon. The main reason for Berkeley’s denying that the immovable spirit could not have any geometry was its inability to conceive the third dimension, because the visual field of one fixed eye entails no more than two dimensions. It is remarkable that Berkeley did not worry about other items that could prohibit the aforementioned spirit to achieve geometry. There is no consideration of the angle sum or the missing of infinite lines. Obviously Berkeley is bound by his pondering over the heterogeneity of sight and touch, where it is his main aim to prove that distance from the perceiving eye is not perceivable by mere sight. Nevertheless, by his only seeing spirit Berkeley was led to the brink of a new mathematical discovery that he was not able to fully explore. He stood only at the edge of the non-Euclidean geometries. Starting with Berkeley’s heterogeneity of sight and touch and his fictitious spirit, Thomas Reid made the important step forward.44 He realized that the visual field is governed by a second geometry different from that of the tactual field. There are lines that have indistinguishable sides and whose points are indistinguishable from each other. According to Euclid’s definition, they are straight lines, even if the visual field may be modelled by a sphere in a three-dimensional space, where these ‘straight lines’ are represented by great circles. So Thomas Reid deserves a prominent place in the history of non-Euclidean geometry, and Berkeley has to be mentioned therein as an important inspirer.

Notes 1 Nicholas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia I [On Learned Ignorance], 1440, cap. 12: ‘cum omnia mathematicalia sint finita’. In Hopkins, J. (1985), Nicholas of Cusa on Learned Ignorance: A Translation and an Appraisal of De Docta Ignorantia. Arthur J. Banning. 2 Caramuel y Lobkowitz, J., Mathesis biceps, Campaniae 1670, tom. I, p. 117: In qualibet Scientia infiniti sunt Mundi: quicunque ex ipsis infinite est extensus. 3 This proposition was already demonstrated by André Tacquet, but Berkeley maintains that he invented it independently. 4 That is not recognized e.g. by D. M. Jesseph: Jesseph, D. M. (1990), ‘Berkeley’s Philosophy of Geometry’. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 72, 301–32, p. 307.

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

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P, § 122. Alciphron VII , 5 (Works, III , 292) Op. cit. Leibniz, G. W. (1971), Mathematische Schriften, ed. C. I. Gerhardt, Halle 1849 ff., Reprint Hildesheim. New York: Olms, vol. 5, p. 357 (Specimen novum analyseos, Acta Eruditorum 1702): Verum enim vero tenacior est veritatis suae pulcherrimae Natura rerum, aeternarum varietatum parens, vel potius Divina Mens, quam ut omnia sub unum genus compingi patiatur. Itaque elegans et mirabile effugium reperit in illo Analyseos miraculo, idealis mundi monstro, pene inter Ens et non-Ens Amphibio, quod radicem imaginariam appelamus. (Transl. W. B.). G. W. Leibniz, 1971, vol. 1 (2), p. 12 and vol. 7, p. 141. III , [§ 17]; Works II , p. 246. B. II , chap. 9, §§ 8 ff. P, § 118. P, § 119. NB , No. 516. NB , No. 263. 264: ‘The Diagonal is commensurable with the Side.’ NB , No. 276: ‘It seems all lines can’t be bisected in 2 equall parts, Mem: to examine how the Geometers prove the contrary.’ Defence of Free-thinking in Mathematics, § 45. Works, VIII , p. 25 (Berkeley’s letter, 8 December 1709). Alc VII , §§ 13 and 14; Works III , 307. P, § 124. Cf. P, § 127. Berkeley uses this expression with respect to the infinitesimals in Analyst § 35. E.g. L. Euler, ‘Lettres à une princesse d’Allemagne’, in L. Euler, Opera omnia, Ser. 3, vol 11, Turici 1960. Berlioz, D. (1982), ‘G. Berkeley: “Of Infinites” ’. Revue philosophique, 45–57; Berlioz, D. (1988), ‘Berkeley et la polémique du calcul infinitésimal’, in O. Bloch, B. Balan, P. Carrive (eds.), Entre form et histoire, Paris: Méridiens-Klinicksieck, 71–85; Parigi, S. (1993), ‘I filosofi e il microscopio: da Descartes a Berkeley’. Rivista di storia della scienza 1, 155–72; Blay, M. (1986), ‘Deux moments de la critique du calcul infinitésimal: Michel Rolle et George Berkeley’. Revue d’histoire des sciences 39, 223–53; D. Jesseph, 1990; Sherry, D. (1987), ‘The Wake of Berkeley’s Analyst: Rigor Mathematicae?’ Studies of the History and Philosophy of Science 18, 455–80. Vermeulen, B. (1985), ‘Berkeley and Nieuwentijt on Infinitesimals’. Berkeley Newsletter 8, 1–5. Smestad, B. (1995), Foundations for fluxions, Cand. Scient Thesis in Mathematics, Department of Mathematics, University of Oslo. http://home.hio.no/~bjorsme/ hovedoppg.HTM ; Breidert, W. (2000), ‘Maximinus und Minimajus – Roger Pamans

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Begründung der Fluxionsrechnung’, in R. Thiele (ed.), Mathesis, Festschrift zum siebzigsten Geburtstag von Matthias Schramm. Berlin – Diepholz: Verlag für Geschichte der Naturwiss. und der Technik, 119–27. ‘Ob man die Mathematische Lehr = Art mit Vortheil in die Theologie einführen könne.’ P, § 131. Works, I, p. 42. E.g. Jesseph, D. M. (1987), Berkeley’s Philosophy of Mathematics. Ph. D. Princeton University (Univ. Microfilm International, Ann Arbor, No. 8705020), p. 115. One of the minor arguments comes from the fact that there is no reference to Cavalieri in the catalogue of the Berkeleyan library (R. Maheu, ‘Le catalogue de la bibliothèque des Berkeley’. Revue des sciences humaines, Lille 1929, pp. 180–99). NB No. 374 concerns Newton’s Principia mathematica, lib. I, sect. 1 (Opera, ed. S. Horsley, London 1779, Reprint Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1964, II , p. 39 f.). NB , No. 462. Isaac Barrow, Mathematicae lectiones (1665), London 1684, p. 51. Claude-François Milliet Dechales, Cursus, seu mundus mathematicus, Lugduni: Anisson 1674. E.g. Jacques du Chevreul (Capreolus), De demonstratione magnitudinis in puncto quaestio singularis, s.l., s.a. (1636). Claude-François Milliet Dechales, Cursus, seu mundus mathematicus, Lugduni 1674, t. III , p. 766, 771, 779. Geometry no Friend to Infidelity, London 1734; The Minute Mathematician: or, the Free-Thinker no Just-Thinker, London 1735; Considerations upon some passages contained in two Letters to the Author of the ‘Analyst’ . . . (November 1735); Considerations occassioned by a Paper . . . concerning some late Objections against the Doctrine of Fluxions . . . (January 1736); Considerations upon some passages of a Dissertation concerning the Doctrine of Fluxions (July 1736); The Remainder of the Paper begun in our last, entituled, Considerations . . . (August 1736). A Vindication of Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles of Fluxions, Dublin 1735. The Catechism of the Author of the Minute Philosopher [i.e. Berkeley] Fully Answer’d, Dublin (also London) 1735. Analyst, § 35. (B. Robins), A Review of some of the principal Objections that have been made to the Doctrines of Fluxions and Ultimate Proportions (December 1735). (B. Robins), Remarks on the Considerations relating to Fluxions (August 1736). J. Colson, A perpetual comment, in: Isaac Newton, The Method of Fluxions and Infinite Series, London 1736. J. Hodgson, The Doctrine of Fluxions, London 1736. (Th. Bayes), An Introduction to the Doctrine of Fluxion, London 1736. J. Muller, A Mathematical Treatise: Containing a System of Conic-Sections; with the Doctrine of Fluxions and Fluents, applied to various Subjects, London 1736. J. Smith, A New Treatise of

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Fluxions, London 1737. Th. Simpson, A New Treatise of Fluxions, London 1737. B. Martin, Pangeometria; or the Elements of all Geometry, London 1739. J. Rowe, An Introduction to the Doctrine of Fluxions, London 1741. (F. Blake), An Explanation of Fluxions, London 1741. (Anonym), An Explanation of Fluxions, London 1741. C. Maclaurin, A Treatise of Fluxions, Edinburgh 1742 (2 vols.). William Emerson, The doctrine of fluxions, London 1743. R. Paman, The Harmony of the Ancient and Modern Geometry asserted, London 1745. C. Schwartz (2010) referring to Baum, Brook, Pycior, Jesseph, Sherry: Schwartz, C. (2010), ‘Berkeley and His Contemporaries: The Question of Matheamtical Formalism’, in S. Parigi (ed.), George Berkeley: Religion and Science in the Age of Enlightenment, Dordrecht etc., pp. 43–56. P, § 121. G. W. Leibniz, Nouveaux essais, II , chap. 9. Th. Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, Dublin 1764, in Philosophical Works, ed. W. Hamilton, vol. I, Edinburgh 1895, Reprint Hildesheim 1967. W. Breidert (1973), ‘Die nichteuklidische Geometrie bei Thomas’.

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Berkeley’s Philosophy of Religion Kenneth L. Pearce

Religion has traditionally been divided into two parts: natural religion, which purports to be justified by natural reason alone, and revealed religion, which purports to be justified only by means of supernatural revelation. One of the central aims of Berkeley’s philosophy is to understand and defend religious doctrines and practices of both sorts. This chapter provides a survey of this aspect of Berkeley’s thought.

Natural religion Berkeley, like many of his contemporaries, holds that natural religion is founded upon two principal doctrines, the existence of God and the natural immortality of the soul. These doctrines provide the foundation for moral motivation, and the resulting moral behaviour is the practice of natural religion.

Berkeley’s arguments for the existence of a super-mind Berkeley’s early works contain two arguments for the existence of God, known as the ‘Passivity Argument’ and the ‘Continuity Argument’ (Bennett 1971, ch. 7). Additionally, an argument for the existence of God from Berkeley’s theory of visual language appears in the fourth dialogue of Alciphron.1 Each of these arguments purports to establish the existence of a mind superior to us. However, the arguments do not, by themselves, show that this mind has the traditional divine attributes. Establishing traditional monotheism requires further argument (Olscamp 1970a; Bennett 1971, 165; Grayling 1986, 194–5; Ksenjek & Flage 2012). In this section, we will consider each of the three groups of texts as providing an argument for the existence of a ‘super-mind’. The

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following section will address the question of whether the arguments, if successful, would support traditional monotheism.

The Passivity Argument The explicit premises and conclusions of the Passivity Argument are these (P 25–6, 29):

(1) Changes in my ideas occur. Therefore,

(2) Something causes changes in my ideas. (3) No idea causes anything. Therefore,

(4) Changes in my ideas are caused by a substance. (5) All substances are spirits. (6) Changes in my ideas of sense do not depend on my will. Therefore,

(7) Every change in my ideas of sense is caused by some spirit distinct from myself. In order to render this argument valid, additional premises must be supplied. However, most scholars agree that on Berkeley’s principles, an argument of this sort succeeds in establishing that a mind distinct from myself sometimes causes ideas in me. Thus the argument, although in a certain sense successful, has two limitations. First, it depends on controversial premises, some of which Berkeley defends elsewhere, and others of which he simply assumes. Second, the conclusion it supports is weaker than traditional monotheism. Most crucially, this argument gives no reason for supposing that all of my sensory perceptions are caused by one and the same mind (Tipton 1974, 299; Pitcher 1977, 133; Grayling 1986, 194–7; Roberts 2007, 159n36; Ksenjek & Flage 2012, 282–5). Given the theory of ideas, premise (1) is a datum of experience, and so needs no defence. However, in order to get to (2), we need:2

(1*) Every change is caused by something. Berkeley supports premise (3) by remarking that ideas ‘are visibly inactive’ (P 25, emphasis added): we do not perceive any activity or causal power in them.

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To support (3), this observation must be combined with Berkeley’s claim that ‘there is nothing in [our ideas] but what is perceived’ (P 25). One of the fundamental principles of Berkeley’s theory of ideas is that ideas have only those features they are perceived to have. But, he claims, ideas are not perceived to have any causal powers. Therefore, they have none.3 An implicit premise is again required to make the inference to (4). Berkeley is however certainly committed to the claim:

(3*) Everything is either an idea or a substance. This renders the inference valid. Berkeley defends (5) at Principles 7. From (4) and (5) we can conclude:

(5*) Every change in my ideas is caused by some spirit. Berkeley next argues that some changes in my ideas are caused by a spirit distinct from myself. He does not hold that all changes in my ideas are caused by a spirit distinct from myself, for Berkeley believes that I cause ideas in myself when I imagine things (P 28). He therefore brings in the distinction between ideas of sense and ideas of imagination and claims that changes in the former do not depend on my will. In order to get to Berkeley’s conclusion (7), we then assume:

(6*) If a spirit S is the cause of a change c, then c depends on S’s will. In a passage in Berkeley’s notebooks that gives an early version of the Passivity Argument, we read: ‘[a] Cause [is] . . . nothing but a Being wch wills wn the Effect follows the volition’ (NB 499; see Tipton 1974, 307). Berkeley here takes (6*) to be implicit in the very notion of (efficient) causation. Many scholars believe that Berkeley implicitly assumes this principle both here and elsewhere (Tipton 1974, 320; Pitcher 1977, 132–3; Winkler 1989, §7.2; Stoneham 2002, §5.2; Roberts 2007, §4.2). Berkeley’s ultimate conclusion, that changes in my ideas of sense are caused by a spirit distinct from myself, follows from (5*), (6) and (6*). The Passivity Argument is valid. Its premises are among the central commitments of Berkeley’s philosophy. The mind (or minds) referred to in the conclusion can properly be described as a ‘super-mind’ insofar as it has a power that I evidently do not: the power to excite ideas in other minds (P 33). According to some interpretations, Berkeley holds that I do something like this when I move the parts of my body, but I certainly cannot cause in other minds all the sorts of ideas that I receive by sense.

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The continuity argument In the Principles, Berkeley insists that in denying that objects of sense can exist outside the mind, he ‘would not be understood to mean this or that particular mind, but all minds whatsoever’. It is therefore not a consequence of Berkeley’s theory that bodies ‘have no existence except only while they are perceived by us’ (P 48). In the Dialogues, this line of thought becomes an argument for the existence of a super-mind (3D 212, 230–1). Following Jonathan Bennett, we call the argument found in these texts ‘the Continuity Argument’. Bennett chose this label because he held that in these passages Berkeley was arguing from the premise that objects have continuous existence despite gaps in human perception to the existence of a super-mind (Bennett 1971, §37). Similar interpretations have been advocated by Ian Tipton and Georges Dicker (Tipton 1974, 320–50; Dicker 2011, §13.3). This approach is disputed by another group of scholars who deny that the (so-called) Continuity Argument is actually about continuity at all. According to these scholars, the central premise of the argument is the independence of objects from human perceivers (Ayers 1987; Atherton 1995; Stoneham 2002, §§5.3–5.4). Bennett formulates the Continuity Argument as follows:

(a) No collection of ideas can exist when not perceived by some spirit; (b) Objects are collections of ideas; (c) Objects sometimes exist when not perceived by any human spirit; Therefore

(d) There is a non-human spirit which sometimes perceives objects (Bennett 1971, 169). It is a matter of controversy whether Berkeley is committed to premise (b),4 but the argument can clearly be adapted to other interpretations of Berkeley’s account of physical objects. Subject to this caveat, most interpreters agree that Berkeley accepts all of the premises. Furthermore, the argument is valid. However, two difficulties remain: first, there is a problem about the status of premise (c); second, the conclusion of the argument is weaker than Berkeley’s stated conclusion. It has seemed to many scholars that Berkeley is not entitled to premise (c). As Bennett points out, premise (b) casts doubt on the commonsense principle that objects exist when no human perceives them (ibid. 170). According to Bennett, Berkeley has done nothing to dispel this doubt because Berkeley was ‘indifferent’

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to continuity: although he wishes to show that the continuity of objects is compatible with his system, he has no interest in showing that objects actually exist when humans do not perceive them (ibid. §38). According to Tipton and Dicker, Bennett is mistaken about Berkeley’s attitude to continuity: Berkeley defends continuity in other contexts (Tipton 1974, 320– 50; Dicker 2011, 253–4). This does not, however, solve the problem. Dicker explains: Berkeley cannot even legitimately use the continuity argument as a supplementary argument for the existence of God. For in his system the key premise of the continuity argument – the premise that objects continue to exist when no finite minds are perceiving them – rests solely on the existence of an all-perceiving God. Dicker 2011, 261

The Continuity Argument is, therefore, problematically circular. Bennett, Tipton and Dicker all believe that Berkeley has made a serious error in the passages under discussion. One option for those who wish to escape this conclusion is to reject the continuity interpretation in favour of an independence interpretation of the sort to be discussed below. A second option, which has not previously appeared in the literature, is to appeal to the differences in dialectical situation between the Principles and the Dialogues. At the beginning of the Dialogues, the characters agree ‘to admit that opinion for true, which upon examination shall appear most agreeable to common sense and remote from scepticism’ (3D 172). The continuity of objects could be regarded as an antisceptical principle and, if it is, then it might be held that, in the context of the Dialogues, it needs no defence. Immaterialism with God preserves continuity and immaterialism without God does not. This makes the former more ‘agreeable to common sense and remote from scepticism’ than the latter. Immaterialism with God must therefore be ‘admitted for true’.5 Even if the dialectical problem can be solved, we are still faced with the problem that Berkeley’s conclusion is stronger than Bennett’s. One strategy for getting from (d) to the existence of ‘an omnipresent eternal Mind’ (3D 231) would be to argue that the supposition of one mind that perceives everything is simpler than the supposition of a variety of different minds plugging the gaps in human perception to ensure continuity. Since distance is a sensible quality (P 44) and time is merely the succession of ideas (P 98), a mind that perceived everything would exist in every time and place. However, the introduction of these simplicity considerations would render the argument less than

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demonstrative, which means that Philonous’ claim that by this argument ‘the whole system of atheism, is . . . entirely overthrown’ (3D 213) would have to be regarded as hyperbolic. Responding to the difficulties faced by continuity interpretations, some interpreters have denied that the continuity of objects figures as a premise in the (so-called) Continuity Argument. Michael Ayers points out that both of the texts in question mention the existence of objects outside my mind. On this basis, Ayers suggests that Berkeley’s argument proceeds ‘from causal independence to ontological independence’ (Ayers 1987, 120–1). On Ayers’ interpretation, the key premise of the Continuity Argument is also one of the key premises in the Passivity Argument: sensible ideas do not depend on my will. From this, Berkeley concludes that sensible things exist outside my mind. But (Berkeley has already argued) sensible things can only exist in a mind, so they must exist in some mind distinct from me. The step from the claim that sensible ideas do not depend on my will to the claim that sensible things exist outside my mind sounds like an equivocation: Berkeley’s premise is that sensible ideas are causally independent of me (I don’t cause them), and his conclusion is that they are ontologically independent of me (they exist ‘outside’ me). Bennett has argued that this sort of equivocation is found throughout Berkeley’s writings (Bennett 1971, §§35–8). Ayers argues, however, that this is not a simple equivocation between two unrelated meanings of ‘independent’, but an inference from one species of independence to another (Ayers 1987, 117–19). Is this inference legitimate? Kenneth Winkler argues that the inference here, and in the other texts where Bennett charges Berkeley with equivocation, makes use of a suppressed premise which Winkler calls ‘the Denial of Blind Agency’ (Winkler 1989, §7.2). According to this thesis, which was widely accepted in the period and is explicitly endorsed by Berkeley in other contexts (NB 812, 841–2; 3D 239), an agent cannot act without having some conception of what she is trying to accomplish. Once this thesis is accepted, it will follow from the fact that some other mind is the cause of an idea in me that some other mind has that idea (or an idea like it). In other words, God has to have the idea of redness in order to cause me to have the idea of redness. This principle renders the first step of the argument, from causal independence to ontological independence, valid. Advocates of independence interpretations have often held that the Continuity Argument is much more closely related to the Passivity Argument than the advocates of continuity interpretations suppose. For instance, according to Margaret Atherton, the Passivity Argument relies on the premise that the ideas

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of sense are independent of my will, whereas the Continuity Argument relies on the premise that the ideas of sense are independent of my thought (Atherton 1995, 247). According to Berkeley, ‘A spirit is one simple, undivided, active being. As it perceives ideas it is called the understanding, and as it produces or otherwise operates on them, it is called the will’ (P 27; cf. Ayers 1987, 123). It can thus be said that, on the independence interpretation, the central premise of Berkeley’s argument for the existence of God in both the Principles and the Dialogues is really that my ideas of sense are independent of me. Independence interpretations do not face the dialectical difficulty faced by continuity interpretations: they do not rely on any premises that Berkeley elsewhere derives from the existence of God. However, there are other problems. First, as Stoneham has emphasized, the notion of ontological independence in this argument is somewhat puzzling. Ideas, on Berkeley’s theory, depend on minds at least in the sense that they cannot exist without being perceived by some mind, but, on Berkeley’s theory, the real things are the things sensed by us, and not merely known by God (Stoneham 2002, 158–9). The Denial of Blind Agency allows Berkeley to infer only that my ideas of sense must be copied from an ‘archetype’ in some other mind. This is, however, not a particularly robust form of independence. Stoneham argues that Berkeley is instead appealing to a notion of ontological dependence from traditional theistic metaphysics, that is, to the world’s dependence on God to sustain it in existence (ibid. 159–61). This, Stoneham thinks, vitiates the argument since atheists have no reason for thinking the world (i.e. on Berkeley’s theory, our ideas) needs to be sustained in this way. Independence interpretations also do not solve the problem of how Berkeley gets to his stated conclusion. It is not clear why, even given that my ideas are ontologically independent of me, I should suppose that all of them depend on one and the same other mind, let alone that that mind has many or all of the traditional divine attributes (ibid. 158, 161–2).

The Divine Language Argument In Alciphron IV, Berkeley argues, through his character Euphranor, that any argument that will justify belief in other minds can be used, mutatis mutandis, as a justification for belief in God. Euphranor’s opponent Alciphron says that he is most convinced of the presence of another intelligence when he witnesses ‘the arbitrary use of sensible signs, which have no similitude or necessary connexion with the things signified . . . directing me how to act, not only with regard to things near and present, but also with regard to things distant and future’ (Alc 4.7). In the 1709 New Theory of Vision, which was included as an appendix to

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Alciphron, Berkeley had argued that vision was just such a system of signs: visual stimulus conveys complex practical information to us regarding our tangible environment, and the connection between these signs and their significations is arbitrary (see Chapter 5 of this volume). Thus, Berkeley thinks, if upon hearing human language we are entitled to infer the existence of human minds, then the visual language gives us grounds to infer the existence of a ‘speaker’ of that language, a super-mind. E. G. King takes this to be a version of the analogical design argument (E. G. King 1970), similar to William Paley’s claim that observing biological organisms is like finding a watch on a heath: if the inference to a maker is justified in the latter case, it is likewise justified in the former (Paley 1809, 1–3). Berkeley’s analogy, on this interpretation, would be between the system of visual stimulus and a text or speech. If, Berkeley might say, one were to find a book on the heath, one would infer that it had an author. But, Berkeley argues, the total system of our visual stimulus is like a book in all the relevant respects. We should therefore conclude that our visual stimulus has an author. Analogical arguments have been a staple of religious apologetics since long before Berkeley’s time. On this interpretation, all Berkeley has done is to adapt the argument to rely on his own idiosyncratic views. Some interpreters have, however, found more original lines of thought in Berkeley’s text. According to an interpretation suggested by Michael Hooker, Berkeley’s argument can be seen as intended to uncover a presupposition of the commonsense assumption that vision is informative (Hooker 1982, 267–9). It is rational for us to treat language as informative only because we take it to be a product of the intentions of agents. Since vision, like human language, consists of signs that are connected only arbitrarily to what they signify, it is not rational to take vision as informative unless we presuppose that there is a ‘speaker’ of the language of vision. An interpretation along these general lines has more recently been defended by John Russell Roberts. Roberts interprets Berkeley as arguing that the world can be rendered intelligible to us only if we adopt what Roberts calls the ‘religious stance’. To adopt the religious stance is to treat the deliverances of the senses as utterances of a perfectly trustworthy person (Roberts 2007, 83–7). No other way of looking at the world can, according to Roberts’ interpretation of Berkeley, justify our trust in the predictability of nature. A. David Kline emphasizes Berkeley’s comparison of our knowledge of God to our knowledge of other minds, and argues that Berkeley’s Divine Language Argument is based on René Descartes’ account of our knowledge of other minds

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(Kline 1987).6 Descartes held that the complexity with which signs are recombined appropriately in human linguistic behaviour was impossible to explain mechanically, and that we must therefore posit other souls like our own. Kline takes Berkeley to be arguing that all of the same features are to be found in much greater degree in vision. According to Tom Stoneham, the central premise of Berkeley’s argument is that vision is literally a language. Since a language must have a speaker, the existence of a super-mind follows immediately (Stoneham 2013; cf. Olscamp 1970a). It is widely held that Berkeley’s argument here is an inference to the best explanation (Kline 1987, 131–2; Atherton 1995, 233–4; Jesseph 2005). If so, then it must be regarded as merely probable and not demonstrative. The argument does, however, appear to favour a more religiously adequate conception of God than more ‘metaphysical’ arguments, such as the Passivity and Continuity Arguments (see Alc, 4.14).

Is Berkeley’s super-mind God? Berkeley’s Passivity Argument shows that, if Berkeley is right that only minds are causes and that minds cause only by volition, then many of my perceptions are caused by a mind or minds distinct from myself. Immediately following the Passivity Argument, Berkeley argues that this cause is a single ‘more powerful spirit’ (P 33) characterized by ‘goodness and wisdom’ (P 32). Near the end of the Principles Berkeley defends the stronger conclusion that there is ‘one, eternal, infinitely wise, good, and perfect . . . spirit, “who works all in all,” and “by whom all things consist” ’ (P 146; cf. NB 838; 3D 215). The latter definition closely resembles a description of God found in the Thirty-Nine Articles, the doctrinal standard of Berkeley’s church (Ksenjek & Flage 2012, 291–2). Both the earlier and the later argument are generally agreed to be inferences to the best explanation (Pitcher 1977, 133–5; Stoneham 2002, §4.4; Jesseph 2005; Ksenjek & Flage 2012, 292). Berkeley concludes that there is one ‘Author’ of our sensations, and that this author is wise and benevolent, from the fact that the ideas of sense ‘are not excited at random . . . but in a regular train or series . . . [which] gives us a sort of foresight, which enables us to regulate our actions for the benefit of life’ (P 30–1). Similarly, the evidence cited later in the Principles is the constant regularity, order, and concatenation of natural things, the surprising magnificence, beauty, and perfection of the larger, and the exquisite contrivance

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of the smaller parts of creation, together with the exact harmony and correspondence of the whole, but above all, the never enough admired laws of pain and pleasure, and the instincts or natural inclinations, appetites, and passions of animals. P 146

The orderliness of the world does seem to favour the hypothesis of one super-mind over many. Simplicity considerations, which are admissible in inferences to the best explanation, also favour positing a single super-mind as the cause of all those perceptions which ‘are not produced by or dependent on the wills of men’ (P 146; see Ksenjek & Flage 2012, 286–7). The existence of a single super-mind thus seems to be supported by Berkeley’s argument. If, however, there is only a single super-mind, then that mind must be eternal, at least in the sense of existing at every time the world does, since the existence of the world depends on there being a super-mind to cause sensory perceptions. The super-mind must also be able to keep track of the total state of the world and its complex laws so as to preserve its orderliness, and must therefore have wisdom far beyond mine. Furthermore, the super-mind appears to have selected rules which bring about a variety of beautiful and otherwise desirable results. For this reason, Berkeley says that the ‘consistent uniform working’ of nature ‘displays the goodness and wisdom of that governing spirit whose will constitutes the laws of nature’ much more clearly than exceptions to this consistent uniform working (P 32).7 Berkeley’s argument gives us some reason to suppose that there is only one super-mind and that wisdom, power and benevolence are among the respects in which that mind is superior to us. Nevertheless, Berkeley’s claim that the supermind is infinitely wise, powerful and benevolent seems rather extravagant if it is meant to be drawn only from empirical observation of the character of our sensory perceptions (cf. Grayling 1986, 184–9, 195–8). Indeed, considerations of natural and moral evil seem to suggest just the opposite (P 151–3; Winkler 1989, 286). Berkeley’s natural theology is ambitious, and it does not seem ultimately to succeed in its ambitions. However, it does come to a more modest conclusion, which is still interesting and significant. If Berkeley’s basic metaphysical premises are accepted, then I can have deductive proof that there exists at least one mind that is in certain respects superior to me and, further, I can have good reason to suppose that there is exactly one such mind, and that it is eternal, exceeds human beings in wisdom and power, and is at least somewhat benevolently inclined towards me. The further claim that this being is infinitely or perfectly wise,

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powerful and benevolent can perhaps be regarded as a teaching of revealed theology, that is, an article of faith (cf. Grayling 1986, 188).8

The natural immortality of the soul In addition to the existence of God, Berkeley saw the natural immortality of the soul as ‘a fundamental Doctrine . . . of natural Religion’ (Works, 7:114). In fact, he goes so far as to say that the denial of this doctrine is ‘the most effectual antidote against all impressions of virtue and religion’ (P 141). Berkeley understands the natural immortality of the soul as the doctrine that the soul ‘is not liable to be broken or dissolved by the ordinary laws of nature or motion’ (P 141). The religious (and moral) importance of this claim stems from the fact that it opens up the possibility of judgement after death.9 Berkeley begins his discussion by noting that the doctrine is not to be understood as the claim ‘that [the soul] is absolutely incapable of annihilation even by the infinite power of the Creator’. Rather, the doctrine states that the operation of ‘the ordinary laws of nature or motion’ cannot lead to the destruction of the soul (P 141). The view that the soul can be so destroyed follows from materialist theories of the mind: if the soul is ‘a thin vital flame or system of animal spirits’ or if the soul (mind) is identical to the brain, then the destruction of the body would destroy the soul. However, Berkeley has argued that souls alone are substances, and bodies are ‘barely passive ideas in the mind’ (P 141). Bodies cannot, therefore, act on souls in any way. Furthermore, Berkeley has argued that the ‘laws of nature’ and the causal relations we attribute to bodies are merely regularities in our ideas of sense, and should be understood as relations of signification rather than genuine causation (P 66, 108). As a result, it is impossible that the soul should be destroyed by ‘the ordinary laws of nature’. This is a weak doctrine. It simply opens up the possibility that the soul may survive the destruction of the body. However, Berkeley believes that this mere possibility has a substantial effect on moral motivation, for if it is possible that I may continue to exist after the destruction of my body, then the fact that I escape punishment for my misdeeds, or go unrewarded for my good deeds, in this life, is no guarantee that I will escape punishment, or go unrewarded, altogether.

The language of natural religion The traditional view in Western philosophical theology has been that all, or nearly all, religious language is analogical: when we apply predicates to God, we

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use them in a way that differs from their use as applied to creatures. Thus, for instance, the meaning of the word ‘wise’ in ‘God is wise’ differs from its meaning in ‘Socrates is wise’. In the traditional view, these uses are thought to be somehow related, but there is no consensus, within the tradition, on precisely how they are related. In Berkeley’s immediate context, the doctrine of analogy had two influential proponents, William King and Peter Browne (W. King 1709; Browne 1697, 1729, 1733). King had attempted to use the doctrine of analogy to solve such problems as the existence of evil and the compatibility of human freedom with divine foreknowledge and predestination. All of these problems, King says, stem from the error of attributing goodness, foreknowledge, predestination and other such attributes to God literally (W. King 1709, §§6–7). When these predicates are understood analogically, they will not support these inferences. As the Deist Anthony Collins pointed out, this seems to be because they will not support any inferences at all (Collins 1710; cf. Hight 2013, letter 12). In Alciphron IV, the freethinker Lysicles deploys Collins’ objections to argue that the dispute about the existence of God is purely verbal.10 Lysicles first argues that King’s doctrine of analogy makes God ‘an unknown subject of attributes absolutely unknown’ (Alc 4.17), then points out that ‘You cannot argue from unknown attributes. . . . You cannot prove, that God is to be loved for his goodness, or feared for his justice, or respected for his knowledge’ (Alc 4.18). Thus the existence of God becomes a point of, literally, no consequence. In response to Lysicles, Crito describes King’s strategy as a ‘method of growing in expression, and dwindling in notion, of clearing up doubts by nonsense, and avoiding difficulties by running into affected contradictions’ (Alc 4.19). Crito argues that the correct notion of ‘proper’ (as opposed to ‘metaphorical’) analogy, and the only notion of analogy which is needed in theology, is simply the mathematical notion of a ratio: divine knowledge is to human knowledge as the infinite to the finite.11 ‘We may therefore . . . affirm that all sorts of perfection, which we can conceive in a finite spirit, are in God’ in the very same sense, but in infinite degree (Alc 4.21). Berkeley thus agrees with Collins, against King and Browne, that the attributes ascribed to God by natural religion must be ascribed literally, differing only in degree from the human ‘perfections’ from which they get their names. The central reason for this is simply that, according to Collins’ published position,12 and according to Berkeley, design arguments show that God is wise, powerful, etc., in the ordinary, everyday senses of those terms (Collins 1710, 5).

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In this discussion, Berkeley reveals a fundamental methodological disagreement with most of the defenders of divine analogy, especially Peter Browne.13 Browne seeks to support his theological position by quotations from the ‘Doctors of the Church’. He takes these quotations to be authoritative both as to what the teaching of Christianity is and as to what the truth is.14 Berkeley, on the other hand, consistently seeks to answer the freethinkers on their own terms, allowing them to banish authority from discussions of natural theology (Alc 4.2). Furthermore, it is not often noticed that Berkeley’s famous comment about ‘siding in all things with the mob’ is made in a religious context. The complete notebook entry reads: ‘All things in Scripture wch side with the Vulgar against the Learned side with me also. I side in all things with the mob’ (NB 405).15 For Berkeley, although ‘the writings of the primitive fathers’ are a source of theological truth (Works, 7:146), in the end ‘our notions about faith [must be] taken from the commerce of the world, and practice of mankind, rather than from the peculiar systems of refiners’ (Alc 7.10). Those, such as Browne, who think otherwise ‘confound Scholasticism with Christianity’ (Alc 7.9). For Berkeley, philosophical theology attempts to systematize the beliefs of ordinary Christians, so that the success of the ‘particular systems of refiners’ is to be judged by whether they accurately capture the beliefs of ordinary Christians. When ordinary Christians say ‘God is wise’, they mean that God is wise.

The practice of natural religion Berkeley consistently insisted that the end of speculation must be practice (3D 167). Belief in natural religion is meant to lead to the practice of natural religion, which consists in moral behaviour. The view that belief in the existence of God and the natural immortality of the soul is foundational to moral motivation was the philosophical orthodoxy of Berkeley’s day. However, it had recently come under fire from the Earl of Shaftesbury, who held that the foundation of moral motivation must be placed in aesthetic appreciation of the intrinsic beauty of virtue. In the third dialogue of Alciphron, the title character makes use of Shaftesbury’s moral theory to argue that ‘all the ends of society are secured without religion, and that an infidel bids fair to be the most virtuous man, in a true, sublime, and heroic sense’ (Alc 3.3).16 According to Alciphron, genuine virtue cannot be produced by fear of punishment or hope of reward. Instead it can come only from appreciation of ‘the moral excellence, the beauty, and decorum’ of the virtues (Alc 3.3; cf. Shaftesbury 1714, 2:21, 29–31, 55).

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Euphranor agrees that virtue and the moral order are beautiful, and that the appreciation of this beauty is a strong source of moral motivation. However, according to Euphranor, this appreciation is tied up with ‘regard [for] the opinion of others concerning it’ and is therefore not ‘a sufficient ground or principle of virtue, for a man to act upon, when he thinks himself removed from the eye and observation of every other intelligent being’ (Alc 3.4; cf. Shaftesbury 1714, 2:57). Furthermore, Euphranor argues, the beauty of virtue is often insufficient as a motive to overcome our selfish desire for pleasure (cf. Shaftesbury 1714, 2:61). Later in the dialogue, Euphranor provides a further argument for the fundamental dependence of moral motivation on natural religion. Alciphron had held that the moral sense consisted in an aesthetic appreciation of the beauty of virtue. Euphranor argues that beauty always consists in fitness for an end (Alc 3.8–9). To suppose that the ‘moral system’ is beautiful is thus to suppose that it aims at some end. However, it cannot aim at an end unless it is a product of design (Alc 3.10). Thus Shaftesbury’s moral theory is to be seen as fundamentally presupposing theism, and hence is not a genuine alternative to a morality based on natural religion after all. Berkeley also addresses this issue in Passive Obedience, where he argues that it is rational to obey God’s commands because God alone is able to determine our eternal fate, which infinitely outweighs temporal goods (Passive Obedience 6). However, our natural knowledge (i.e. our knowledge independent of revelation) of God’s commands can only come from a prior conception of the good and of divine rationality (Passive Obedience 7). From here, Berkeley argues that God’s commands consist in a beautiful, harmonious collection of moral laws, which together maximize human well-being. The goodness of the outcome (namely, human well-being) is prior to God’s command, and so it is not merely because God commands it that we ought to value and pursue universal human well-being. However, knowledge that there is a good and rational God, and that it is within his power to confer a life after death, of whatever sort he chooses, upon us, ensures that we always have sufficient reason to follow these rules. As Vanessa Nurock has emphasized (Nurock 2010), Berkeley’s interest in moral motivation is fundamentally different from Shaftesbury’s. Shaftesbury has an elitist conception of ethics, whereas Berkeley the clergyman is concerned for the moral education of the common folk. Accordingly, Crito shrugs off the question of whether the virtuous atheist is a possible character (Alc 3.12), and focuses instead on insisting that an atheistic moral theory patterned on Shaftesbury does not provide adequate moral motivation for the ordinary person. As a result, by casting doubt on traditional religion and demeaning

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motivation based on reward and punishment, Shaftesbury has, ‘under pretence of making men heroically virtuous, endeavour[ed] to destroy the means of making them reasonably and humanly so’ (Alc 3.13; cf. TVV, 3–5). Berkeley’s central claim is that belief in God and in at least the possibility of reward and punishment in an afterlife is essential if we ordinary (non-heroic) human beings are to do our duty consistently. This consistency in our duty, done in obedience to divine commands, is the practice of natural religion.

Revealed religion ‘Revealed religion’ is that part of religious belief and practice which is accepted on the basis of faith. The starting point, therefore, in any philosophical examination of revealed religion should be an examination the nature of faith and its relation to reason.

Faith and reason John Locke defined ‘faith’ as belief on the basis of divine testimony (Locke 1689, §4.18.2). A crucial consequence of Locke’s definition of faith is that one must believe that God exists and has revealed some particular propositions before one can have faith. These claims must therefore be established by reason, that is, by our natural faculties, and cannot themselves be articles of faith (ibid., §§4.18.6, 10; Jolley 2007, 443–4). Furthermore, Locke holds that, although it can be demonstrated that God exists, the claim that God has revealed some particular proposition is a historical claim and hence can never be more than merely probable (Locke 1689, §§4.18.5–6, 4.16.8–11). A consequence is that ‘no Proposition can be received for Divine Revelation . . . if it be contradictory to our clear intuitive Knowledge’ (ibid. §4.18.5), or, as Nicholas Jolley puts it ‘knowledge trumps faith’ (Jolley 2007, 445). Unlike most of Locke’s early religious critics, Berkeley accepts Locke’s account of faith, along with these consequences (Pearce 2014). Berkeley’s aim in his defence of Christianity, especially in the fifth and sixth dialogues of Alciphron, is to provide probable arguments in favour of the belief that the Bible is a revelation from God, and to rebut claims that it contains propositions known to be false.17 On Berkeley’s broadly Lockean view, if it can be shown, by natural reason, that it is probable that the Bible contains a revelation from God, then it is rational to accept any proposition contained in the Bible as an article of faith.

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Although both Locke and Berkeley usually treat faith as a purely doxastic state, they also both sometimes employ a more practical conception of faith. According to Berkeley, an individual has ‘saving faith’ when Christian doctrine ‘makes proper impressions on his mind, producing therein love, hope, gratitude, and obedience, and thereby becomes a lively operating principle, influencing his life and actions’ (Alc 7.8; cf. Locke 1823, 7:131). Here again ‘speculation [must be] referred to practice’ (3D, 168).

Bodily resurrection The standard view of the afterlife in Berkeley’s Anglican context was roughly as follows.18 Upon death, each soul is subject to an immediate ‘personal’ judgement, so that the (disembodied) soul experiences either immediate conscious bliss or immediate conscious torment until the end of the world. At the end of the world, the bodies of the dead will be raised and each soul will be reunited with its own body, the very same body it animated in its earthly life. At this point, there will be a public judgement and the creation of a ‘new heaven and new earth’ (Revelation 21:1) to be inhabited by the elect, while the reprobate are now sent permanently to hell. When Berkeley mentions ‘Socinian scruples’ about this doctrine (P 95), he probably has in mind Locke’s doubts, expressed in his correspondence with Edward Stillingfleet, about the identity of the resurrected body with the earthly body (Locke 1823, 4:301–30).19 According to Berkeley, ‘the most plausible of [these scruples] depend on the supposition that a body is denominated the same, with regard not to the form or that which is perceived by sense, but the material substance which remains the same under several forms’ (P 95; cf. Stillingfleet 1698, 35). Thus, Berkeley suggests: Take away this material substance, about the identity whereof all the dispute is, and mean by body what every plain ordinary person means by that word, to wit, that which is immediately seen and felt, and which is only a combination of sensible qualities, and then [the Socinians’] most unanswerable objections come to nothing. P 95

Berkeley claims here that the identity of bodies across a large gap, such as the gap between death and resurrection, is, on his view, utterly unproblematic. This is an exaggeration, for it is unclear how Berkeleian bodies can persist over time at all, even in the most ordinary cases. However, it seems likely that, for Berkeley,

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the identity of bodies over time consists in some kind of systematic, lawful relationship between one perception and another. If this is true, then there will not be any special problem about the identity of resurrection bodies as there is for the materialist (see Hight 2007).

The language of revealed religion Even more than the debate about the divine attributes, the Anglo-Irish intellectual scene in Berkeley’s lifetime was dominated by an extremely contentious debate about religious ‘mysteries’, such as the doctrine of the Trinity. In 1696, John Toland, a native Irish convert to Protestantism, published a tract entitled Christianity Not Mysterious, in which he used Locke’s theory of ideas as a platform to attack traditional Christian doctrines as inventions of ‘priestcraft’. Most notoriously, Toland argued that Arianism and orthodox Trinitarianism are both incomprehensible (Toland 1696, 27).20 The overarching argument of Christianity Not Mysterious is simple. Toland defines ‘mystery’ as ‘a thing of its own Nature inconceivable, and not be judg’d of by our ordinary Faculties and Ideas’ (ibid. 66) This implies that mysteries are really ‘Words that have no Ideas at all’ (ibid. 135). However, if the words to which we verbally assent in confessing our belief in mysteries do not correspond to ideas, we may as well be confessing ‘that something call’d Blictri [has] a Being in Nature’ (ibid. 128): the alleged belief has no content, and thus cannot be a genuine belief, but is only an empty form of words (ibid. 134–5). It is therefore impossible to believe in mysteries. Providing a response to Toland was one of Berkeley’s main philosophical preoccupations, beginning at least as early as 1708 (Works, 7:9–15).21 Berkeley’s earliest detailed treatment of the matter can be found in the Manuscript Introduction, which had been written by November of that year (Belfrage 1987, 20–3). Here, Berkeley considers St. Paul’s statement that ‘the Good Things which God hath prepared for them that love [him]22 are such as Eye hath not seen nor Ear heard nor hath it enter’d into the Heart of Man to conceive (MI 36; see 1 Corinthians 2:9). Berkeley notes that the apostle says quite explicitly that the heavenly reward is presently inconceivable by us, but nevertheless expects us to understand him when he tells us that there is such a reward. The conclusion Berkeley draws from this is that the aim of St. Paul’s statement ‘is not to raise in the Minds of Men the Abstract Ideas of Thing or Good nor yet the particular Ideas of the Joys of the Blessed. The Design is to make them more chearfull and fervent in their Duty’ (MI 36).

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In order to explain how this works, Berkeley provides an account of how children learn the proper use of the English word ‘reward’. According to Berkeley, we are conditioned by experience to increase our ‘Zeal and Activity’ upon hearing the promise of a reward from ‘an honest Man’ (MI 37; see Berman 1994, 162). Berkeley does say that it may sometimes happen that upon a person’s hearing the word ‘reward’,‘there may be excited in his Understanding an Idea of the particular good thing to him proposed for a Reward’ (MI 37). However, Berkeley holds that even in many ordinary cases, in which we are capable of having ideas of the particular rewards in question, the effect of the words is nevertheless directly to motivate us, without the mediation of an idea. In the case of the heavenly reward – a particular example of a religious mystery – it is impossible for us (now) to have any such idea, but we nevertheless can and should be motivated by the promise of a heavenly reward, and that use of language is therefore meaningful. According to Bertil Belfrage, Berkeley’s view here is that, What the apostle intends to do is to make people act in a certain way. Therefore, instead of saying: 4. There are inconceivably pleasant joys in store for blessed souls in heaven, one could equally well say: 5. Act in accordance with what Christian doctrine prescribes as being our duty! Belfrage 1986a, 646

This interpretation of the Manuscript Introduction has been criticized by Kenneth Williford. Williford complains that Belfrage’s interpretation reduces religious mysteries to nothing more than ‘useful nonsense’ (Williford 2003, 291). Although Belfrage notes that Berkeley could not possibly accept the characterization of religious mysteries as ‘nonsense’ (Belfrage 1986b, 321), on his interpretation the ‘sense’ that religious mysteries make is merely emotional and practical, with no descriptive or cognitive component. Thus it is unclear how, on Belfrage’s account, the mysteries can count as true (or false) rather than merely useful (or useless). On Williford’s alternative interpretation, although the promise of an unspecified reward does not communicate any ideas, it does communicate the speaker’s intentions. With respect to the heavenly reward, this theory has the benefit of explaining how, on Berkeley’s view, we can expect really to be rewarded in the afterlife (something to which, as we saw above, Berkeley is clearly committed) despite the fact that the promise on which this expectation is based conveys no ideas.

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In Alciphron VII , the title character argues, following Toland, that religious mysteries are ‘empty notions, or, to speak more properly, . . . mere forms of speech, which mean nothing, and are of no use to mankind’ (Alc 7.1). Alciphron’s particular target is the concept of grace, which, he observes, ‘is the main point in the Christian dispensation’ (Alc 7.4). To the word ‘grace’, Alciphron says, no idea can be attached. However, ‘there can be no assent where there are no ideas: and where there is no assent there can be no faith: and what cannot be, that no man is obliged to’ (Alc 7.4). Euphranor responds by arguing that there are in fact a great many meaningful words that do not stand for ideas (Alc 7.5–8 [1732 ed.]). He emphasizes in particular the use of the word ‘force’ as a technical term in physics. Despite the lack of any idea corresponding to the word ‘force’, Euphranor says, ‘there are very evident propositions or theorems relating to force, which contain useful truths’ (Alc 7.7). Euphranor emphasizes that these theorems of force guide our actions, explain various phenomena, and allow the construction of machines ‘by means of which things difficult and otherwise impossible may be performed’. Furthermore, ‘the same doctrine, which is so beneficial here below, serves also as a key to discover the nature of the celestial motions’. In light of these important results, Berkeley thinks, it would be absurd to ‘deny that [‘force’] is of use, either in practice or speculation, because we have no distinct idea of force’ (Alc 7.7). From the fact that ‘force’ does not stand for an idea, but must nonetheless be regarded as meaningful because of its practical utility, Euphranor concludes that ‘grace’, despite not standing for any idea, can ‘be an object of our faith, and influence our life and actions, as a principle destructive of evil habits and productive of good ones’ (Alc 7.7). The same, he says, applies to other Christian mysteries. For instance, although no one can ‘frame in his mind any abstract or distinct idea of Trinity, substance, or personality’ it is nevertheless possible that ‘the doctrine of a Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier makes proper impressions on [one’s] mind, producing therein, love, hope, gratitude, and obedience, and thereby becomes a lively operative principle influencing [one’s] life and actions, agreeably to that notion of saving faith which is required of a Christian’ (Alc 7.8). Euphranor’s claim is clearly that ‘grace’ and ‘Trinity’ have legitimate uses, and are therefore meaningful, whether or not they stand for ideas. These uses evidently have to do with moral motivation. Beyond this, things become rather murky. In the discussion of ‘grace’ there is a use/mention ambiguity. It sounds as though Euphranor is saying that grace itself ‘influence[s] our life and actions, as a principle destructive of evil habits and productive of good ones’ (Alc 7.7), and this would certainly be in line with traditional Protestant theology, and with Alciphron’s

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earlier description of what grace is supposed to be (‘an active, vital, ruling principle, influencing and operating on the mind of man’ – Alc 7.4). However, in the discussion of ‘Trinity’ it is not the Trinity Itself, but the ‘doctrine of a Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier’ that ‘becomes a lively operative principle’ (Alc 7.8, emphasis added). Similarly, it is belief in Original Sin that is said to ‘produce in [the believer’s] mind a salutary sense of his own unworthiness, and the goodness of his Redeemer: from whence may follow good habits, and from them good actions’ (Alc 7.10). Furthermore, it is not clear how our lack of an idea of grace could be thought to be a hindrance to its being ‘a principle destructive of evil habits and productive of good ones’. On the other hand, if it is our belief in grace that is meant to be such a principle, then one can clearly see how it could be thought that the lack of an idea of grace would prevent this from happening. What is clear is that the notion we have of grace cannot be ‘separate or abstracted from God the author, from man the subject, and from virtue and piety its effects’ (Alc 7.7). That ‘grace’ and ‘Trinity’ are connected to other notions in this way is crucial here, since Berkeley had said that ‘force’ is meaningful in virtue of the theorems which can be demonstrated by the use of that word. Thus Berkeley’s defence will not work if the mysteries are inferentially inert; instead, it must be possible to demonstrate ‘theorems of grace’, analogous to the theorems of force (Pearce 2008, 261–2), and these theorems must, like the theorems of force, have practical import. David Berman has characterized Berkeley’s thought on religious language as involving a contrast between ‘cognitive theology’ and ‘emotive mysteries’ (Berman 1993b). It is indeed clear that there is a contrast to be drawn between Berkeley’s treatment of the language of natural theology and the language of revealed theology. However, Berman’s use of twentieth-century terminology is apt to mislead (Williford 2003; Belfrage 2007). ‘Emotivism’ or ‘non-cognitivism’ about a domain of discourse is often understood as involving the claim that the statements (or pseudo-statements) in that domain of discourse are not truth evaluable (see, e.g., Ayer 1952, 107; cf. Williford & Jakapi 2009, 100). However, as Berman recognizes (Berman 1994, 161–3), Berkeley seems to think that claims about grace are genuinely true (Alc 7.7; cf. Jakapi 2007, 189–190). Furthermore, in comparing ‘grace’ with ‘force’, Berkeley connected the uses of language in religious mysteries with the use of language in physics, a paradigmatically cognitive domain of discourse (Williford & Jakapi 2009, 106; cf. Roberts 2007, 59–60). Berman sees Alciphron VII as arguing that terms like ‘grace’ and ‘Trinity’ are meaningful in virtue of their ability to ‘produce emotions, dispositions, and actions’. In this, they are like such utterances as ‘Cheer up!’, ‘Life’s a bore’ and ‘Get out!’ (Berman 1994, 148).

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This account has been challenged by Kenneth Williford and Roomet Jakapi, who argue that the motivational force had by terms like ‘grace’ is not constitutive of their meaning, but simply evidence of their meaningfulness (Williford & Jakapi 2009, 105). In place of the emotional and motivational associations of words, Williford and Jakapi emphasize the inferential relations in which the words stand, and claim that it is only indirectly, by means of these inferences, that the words impact actions and emotions. On either of these interpretations, Berkeley has a serious theological problem, for Berkeley says that ‘grace’ and ‘Trinity’ are meaningful in much the same way that ‘force’ is. However, Berkeley’s De Motu was dedicated to showing that ‘ “Force”, “gravity”, “attraction” and similar terms are useful for reasoning, and for calculations about motion and moving bodies, but not for understanding the simple nature of motion itself or for designating so many distinct qualities’ (DM 17). If the analogy is to hold, Berkeley would seem to be committed to the claim that ‘grace’ and ‘Trinity’ are useful for religious and moral reasoning, but not for understanding the nature of God or for designating qualities of God. To state the matter more emphatically, Berkeley’s aim in his discussions of ‘force’ is to argue that discourse involving ‘force’ can be useful and perhaps even (in some sense) true, despite the fact that, strictly speaking, there are no such things as forces. From the perspective of Christian orthodoxy, the application of the same line of thought to revealed theology would be a disaster. Berman and Belfrage seem to hold that Berkeley does indeed depart from (or at least radically reinterpret) Christian orthodoxy in this way, while Williford and Jakapi argue that Berkeley would have found this conclusion unacceptable (see especially Jakapi 2007).23 This problematic aspect of Berkeley’s view was recognized early on by Peter Browne. Browne complains that ‘in the particular Instance of divine Grace, [Berkeley] in effect gives up the whole Cause of Revelation and Mystery’ (Browne 1733, 508), and, more generally, that, on Berkeley’s account, Christian faith ‘is no other than believing in certain Sounds and Syllables’, so that belief in God becomes ‘no more than Faith in a Monosyllable’ (ibid. 539). Berkeley never answered these strong words of Browne’s. As a result, the question of whether he would have accepted Browne’s characterization of his view remains open.

The practice of revealed religion At the end of the Principles, Berkeley indicated that it was part of ‘the main drift and design of [his] labours’ to ‘dispose [us] to reverence and embrace the salutary truths of the Gospel, which to know and to practise is the highest perfection of

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human nature’ (P 156). In revealed religion, as in natural religion and in life in general, belief must not be divorced from practice. According to Berkeley, the central elements of Christianity are ‘the love of God and man, the practising every virtue, the living reasonably while we are here upon earth, proportioning our esteem to the value of things, and so using this world as not to abuse it’ (Alc 5.5; cf. 5.15). This is very similar to Berkeley’s account of the practice of natural religion, and indeed Berkeley holds that one of the most important recommendations of Christianity is that it has succeeded in popularizing natural religion (Alc, 5.9, 5.27; cf. Leibniz 1710, 50–1). Nevertheless, Berkeley holds that the specific, distinctive doctrines of Christianity can shape our practice in morally beneficial ways which go beyond the effects of natural religion. Berkeley says that when the ‘doctrine of a Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier makes proper impressions on [one’s] mind, producing therein, love, hope, gratitude, and obedience, [it] thereby becomes a lively operative principle influencing [one’s] life and actions’ (Alc 7.8). Why exactly this doctrine should produce love, hope, gratitude and obedience is not explained by Berkeley. However, it is clear that these attitudes towards God provide a deeper sort of moral motivation than a mere prudential calculation on the basis of the promise of reward and threat of punishment. In this way, revealed religion goes beyond natural religion with respect to moral motivation. In the succeeding portions of Alciphron, Berkeley discusses the motivational impact of two other distinctive Christian doctrines. Berkeley says that when we ‘believe the divinity of our Saviour, or that in him God and man make one Person . . . by virtue of such persuasion [we] submit to His government, believe His doctrine, practice His precepts’ (Alc 7.8). In other words, the doctrine that God became a visible human person in concrete historical circumstances makes it easier for us to accept that certain beliefs and practices are backed by divine authority. Similarly, the doctrine of Original Sin,24 we are told, ‘may produce in [our] mind[s] a salutary sense of [our] own unworthiness, and the goodness of [our] Redeemer: from whence may follow good habits, and from them good actions’ (Alc 7.10). Here the effect of the doctrine is tolerably clear: a belief in one’s own innate moral corruption, accompanied by the belief that one has been saved by the grace of God, produces humility and gratitude toward God. These mental attitudes have a positive effect on moral behaviour. Moral behaviour is not, however, exhaustive of religious practice. According to Berkeley, the claim that ‘God Ought to be worship’d’ is an analytic truth, and

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so a proposition of natural theology (NB 705). The manner of worship is, however, a matter of revealed religion. The government and precepts of Christ, which belief in the Incarnation leads us to obey, include regular communal meetings for worship featuring the Christian sacraments. The sacraments are ‘means of grace’ and grace, for Berkeley, is ‘a principle destructive of evil habits and productive of good ones’ (Alc 7.7), which is to say that God’s grace is his supernatural intervention for the reformation of the believer’s moral character. Thus, in Berkeley’s view, participation in Christian worship is important in large part because of its effect on moral character (Works, 7:121). In revealed as well as natural religion, ‘the end of speculation [is] practice’ (3D 167). In particular, ‘the sum and substance, scope and end of Christ’s religion, [is] the love of God and man’ (Alc 5.15). It is the practice of this religion that Berkeley’s philosophy aims to promote (P 156).

Notes 1 On the theory of visual language, see Chapter 21 of this volume. 2 Tipton 1974: Tipton, I. C. (1974), Berkeley: The Philosophy of Immaterialism. London: Methuen & Co, 302–20; Pitcher 1977, 131: Pitcher, George (1977), Berkeley. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Muehlmann 1992, 249–50: Muehlmann, Robert G. (1992) Berkeley’s Ontology. Indianapolis: Hackett; and Dicker 2011, 231: Dicker, Georges (2011), Berkeley’s Idealism: A Critical Examination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, all take Berkeley to rely on a premise like this one. 3 As Richard Brook pointed out, Berkeley at one point concedes that we are often inclined to ‘attribute power or agency to the ideas themselves, and make one the cause of another’ (p. 32, emphasis added). Nevertheless, we do not perceive any power or agency in our ideas, hence they have none. 4 On Berkeley’s theory of bodies, see Chapter 21 of this volume. 5 On the sceptical consequences of ‘Godless immaterialism’, see Stoneham 2013: Stoneham, Tom (2013), ‘Response to Atherton: no atheism without scepticism’, in Stewart Duncan and Antonia LoLordo (eds), Debates in Modern Philosophy: Essential Readings and Contemporary Responses. New York: Routledge, pp. 216–26. 6 Roberts also lays a great deal of stress on the comparison to our knowledge of other minds, but does not take Berkeley to be following Descartes here. 7 This causes obvious problems for belief in miracles. For Berkeley’s response to these difficulties, see P 63; Passive Obedience 14. 8 For Berkeley’s view of the status of articles of faith, see the section ‘Faith and reason’ below.

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9 In a 1713 Guardian essay, Berkeley makes a slightly more ambitious attempt ‘to evince that there are grounds to expect a future state, without supposing in the reader any faith at all, not even the belief of a Deity’ (Works 7:181). One of the arguments from the Guardian essay reappears in two later sermons (Works 7:73, 114–15), and also in Alciphron (Alc 6.11). Due to limitations of space, these arguments will not be discussed here. 10 Collins appears under the pseudonym ‘Diagoras’ (Taranto 2010: Taranto, Pascal (2010) ‘Le personnage de Diagoras’, in Jaffro, Laurent, Geneviéve Brykman, and Claire Schwartz, eds, (2010), Berkeley’s Alciphron: English Text and Essays in Interpretation. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, pp. 361–70). 11 According to James O’Higgins, in this discussion Berkeley follows the late Medieval philosopher-theologian Thomas de Vio Cajetan ‘with remarkable closeness’ (O’Higgins 1976: O’Higgins, James (1976), ‘Browne and King, Collins and Berkeley: agnosticism or anthropomorphism?’, Journal of Theological Studies, 27, (1), 88–112, 96). 12 Although Collins purported to be a Deist, Berkeley accused him of secretly being an atheist (Alc Advertisement, 4.16; TVV 6). For discussion, see: Berman 1988, ch. 3: Berman, David (1988), A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell. London: Croom Helm; Berman 1994, 78, 164–6: Berman, David (1994), George Berkeley: Idealism and the Man. Oxford: Clarendon Press; Taranto 2010, 361. 13 Browne interpreted Berkeley’s discussion in Alciphron as a criticism of his Procedure (Browne 1729: Browne, Peter (1729), The Procedure, Limits, and Extent of Human Understanding (2nd edn). London: Williman Innys), so that when he published Divine Analogy (Browne 1733: Browne, Peter (1733), Things Divine and Supernatural Conceived by Analogy with Things Natural and Human. London: William Innys/ Richard Manby) he appended a reply to Berkeley that took up nearly one-third of the book. It seems, though, that Browne was mistaken and King was Berkeley’s primary target in Alciphron (Berman 1976, 23: Berman, David (1976), Introduction to W. King 1709; O’Higgins 1976, 94). Berkeley would, however, have been familiar with Browne’s earlier discussion of the doctrine of analogy in his Letter against Toland (Browne 1697, 37–58: Browne, Peter (1697), A Letter in Answer to a Book Entitled Christianity not Mysterious. Dublin: John North; see Berman 1976, 21–2; Pearce 2014: Pearce, Kenneth L. (2014), ‘Berkeley’s Lockean religious epistemology’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 75, (3), 417–38.). On Berkeley’s relation to Browne, see Hight 2013, letter 246: Hight, Marc A., ed. (2013), The Correspondence of George Berkeley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; TVV 6; Olscamp 1970b, ch. 9: Olscamp, P. J. (1970b), The Moral Philosophy of George Berkeley. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff; Winnett 1974, ch. 11: Winnett, Arthur Robert (1974), Peter Browne: Provost, Bishop, Metaphysician. London: SPCK . 14 One of the main aims of Browne 1697 had been to argue that ‘authority’ is an independent source of knowledge, distinct from ‘evidence’.

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15 One commentator who does quote the entry in full and recognize its primarily religious significance is Roberts 2007, 142–3: Roberts, John Russell (2007), A Metaphysics for the Mob: The Philosophy of George Berkeley. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 16 On Berkeley’s interpretation of Shaftesbury, see Olscamp 1970b, ch. 6; Jaffro 2007: Jaffro, Laurent (2007), ‘Berkeley’s criticism of Shaftesbury’s moral theory in Alciphron III ’, in Daniel 2007, pp. 199–213. 17 The structure of the argument in Alciphron VI has been examined by Jakapi 2010: Jakapi, Roomet (2010), ‘Berkeley’s defense of the Scripture in Alciphron VI ’, in Jaffro et al. 2010, pp. 353–6, and Charles 2011: Charles, Sébastien (2011), ‘Foi, croyance et raison selon Berkeley’, Science et Esprit, 63, (2), 135–47. For more details on Alciphron and its arguments, see Chapter 10 of this volume. 18 The doctrine of the afterlife I describe can be found in the Belgic Confession (1561), art. 37; the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), questions 57–8; the Irish Articles of Religion (1615), §§101–3; and the Westminster Confession (1647), chs. 32–3. None of these documents was considered authoritative by the Anglican Church in Berkeley’s day (and the Thirty-Nine Articles are silent on this matter), but the view continued to be the standard one. 19 Locke’s ambivalence on this point led to his being charged with Socinianism (Milner 1700, 187: Milner, John (1700), An Account of Mr. Locke’s Religion, Out of his Own Writings, and in his Own Words. London: J. Nutt). Socinianism was among the most extreme movements of the radical Reformation, emphasizing individual, rational interpretation of Scripture and showing open hostility toward tradition. Locke’s relationship to Socinianism is studied in detail by Marshall 2000: Marshall, John (2000), ‘Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism”, and Unitarianism’, in M. A. Stewart (ed.), English Philosophy in the Age of Locke, vol. 3 of Oxford Studies in the History of Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 111–82. 20 Arianism is the view that the Son of God was the first and greatest creature, by whom all other creatures were made, and is called ‘god’ or ‘divine’ only as an honorific title. Orthodox Trinitarianism, by contrast, holds that the Son is ‘begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father’ (‘The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed’, in Schaff 1931, 2:58: Schaff, Philip, ed, (1931), The Creeds of Christendom (6th edn), revised by David S. Schaff. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007), and hence is a divine person in precisely the same sense as the Father. 21 On the circumstances that may have occasioned this preoccupation, see Belfrage 1985, 117–19: Belfrage, Bertil (1985), ‘The clash on semantics in Berkeley’s Notebook A’, Hermathena, 139, 117–26; Berman 1994, 11–17. 22 Inserted above a caret mark. 23 Belfrage, however, never applied his thesis beyond the Manuscript Introduction, and in a later paper he explicitly agrees that Berkeley would have been dissatisfied with

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this account. He therefore holds that Berkeley’s view underwent significant ‘transformation’ throughout the course of his career (Belfrage 2007, 51: Belfrage, Bertil (2007), ‘The theological positivism of George Berkeley (1707–1708)’, Acta Philosophica Fennica, 83, 37–52.). 24 The doctrine of Original Sin states that human beings inherit moral corruption from the first sin of Adam. In the West, a stronger version, sometimes called ‘Original Guilt’, has traditionally been held. According to this view each of us bears moral responsibility for Adam’s sin.

Bibliography Works by George Berkeley For a detailed account of Berkeley’s works, see Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne. The Soho Bibliographies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.

Works published in Berkeley’s lifetime Arithmetica absque Algebra aut Euclide Demonstrata. Cui accesserunt, Cogitata Nonnulla de Radicibus Surdis. de Æstu Aeris, de Ludo Algebraico, &c. [Arithmetic demonstrated without Euclid or algebra. To which are added, some thoughts concerning surds, the atmospheric tide, the Algebraic Game, etc.]. The book has this second title page for the ‘Cogitata Nonnulla’: Miscellanea Mathematica: sive Cogitata Nonnulla, de Radicibus, de Æstu Aeris, de Cono æquilatero & Cylindro eidem Sphæræcircumscriptis, de Ludo Algebraico; & Parænetica quædam ad Studium Matheseos, præsertim Algebræ [Mathematical miscellanies: or some thoughts on surd roots, the atmospheric tide, an equilateral cone and cylinder circumscribed with the same sphere, on the Algebraic Game; and some reasons for studying mathematics, especially algebra] London: Typis J. Matthews, Impenis A. & J. Churchill, . . . & Jer. Pepyat Dubl . . . MDCCVII . [This edition appeared in London (1707) in two versions. In the second, he added a few errata and a comment connected with the Algebraic Game.] An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision. Dublin: Jeremy Pepyat, 1709. [A second edition, including an Appendix answering criticism (from William King), appeared the same year. Three further editions followed in 1732, appended to editions of Alciphron, without the Appendix.] A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowle[d]ge. Part I. Wherein the chief Causes of Error and Difficulty in the Sciences, with the Grounds of Scepticism, Atheism, and Irreligion, are inquir’d into. Dublin: Jeremy Pepyat, 1710. [A second edition was published with the Three Dialogues, London: Jacob Tonson, 1734.] Passive Obedience, or, the Christian Doctrine of Not Resisting the Supreme Power, Proved and Vindicated upon the Principles of the Law of Nature. In a Discourse Deliver’d at the College-Chappel. Dublin: Jeremy Pepyat, 1712. [Two London editions followed the same year. Berkeley did not include Passive Obedience in A Miscellany 1752.] Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. The Design of which Is plainly to demonstrate the Reality and Perfection of Humane Knowle[d]ge, the Incorporeal Nature

484

Bibliography

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of the Soul, and the Immediate Providence of a Deity: In Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists. Also, To Open a Method for Rendering the Sciences More Easy, Useful, and Compendious. London: Henry Clements, 1713. [Unsold sheets of this edition were bound in 1725 with a new title page, misleadingly presented as ‘The Second Edition’. A second edition, printed with the Principles, appeared in London: Jacob Tonson, 1734. The Dedication and the Preface are omitted from this edition, and the sentence ‘Also, To open a Method for rendering the Sciences more easy, useful, and compendious’ is excluded from the title page.] Advice to the Tories Who have Taken the Oaths. [A pamphlet published anonymously. London: R. Burleigh, 1715.] De Motu; sive, De Motus Principio & Natura, & de Causa Communicationis Motuum [On Motion: Or The Principle and Nature of Motion and the Cause of the Communication of Motions]. London: Jacob Tonson, 1721. [New editions were included in the Dublin and London editions of A Miscellany 1752.] An Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain. London: J. Roberts, 1721. [New editions were included in the Dublin and London editions of A Miscellany 1752.] A Proposal For the better Supplying of Churches in our Foreign Plantations, and for Converting the Savage Americans to Christianity. London: H. Woodfall, 1724. [A second London edition appeared in 1725 with several additions. The title page adds ‘By a College to be erected in the Summer Islands, otherwise called the Isles of Bermuda’. On a few copies the title page adds ‘sold by J. Roberts’. The first Dublin edition 1725, as well as the editions included in A Miscellany 1752, follow the second London edition.] A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts; at their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-Bow, On Friday, February 18, 1731. London: J. Downing, 1732. [A second issue of this edition appeared the same year with a slightly different title page. New editions were included in the editions of the Miscellany 1752.] Alciphron: or, the Minute Philosopher. In Seven Dialogues. Containing an Apology for the Christian Religion, against those who are called Free-thinkers [in two volumes with the Theory of Vision appended] London: J. Tonson, 1732. [A Dublin edition and a second London edition appeared in 1732 with the Theory of Vision. The third, onevolume, London edition in 1752 did not include the Theory of Vision. The numbering of the sections in the seventh dialogue of the 1752 edition is confusing, because Berkeley omitted sections 5–7 on abstract ideas, so sections 8–23 in the three first editions are numbered 5–20 in the last edition, in which no sections are numbered 21–23. From section 24 the numbering is the same in all editions.] The Theory of Vision, or Visual Language, shewing The Immediate Presence and Providence of a Deity, Vindicated and Explained. London: J. Tonson, 1733. The Analyst; or, A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician. Wherein It is examined whether the Object, Principles, and Inferences of the modern Analysis are more distinctly conceived, or more evidently deduced, than Religious Mysteries and Points of Faith. London: J. Tonson, 1734. [A Dublin edition appeared the same year.]

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A Defence of Free-Thinking in Mathematics. In Answer To a Pamphlet of Philalethes Cantabrigiensis, intituled, Geometry no Friend to Infidelity, or a Defence of Sir Isaac Newton, and the British Mathematicians. Also an Appendix concerning Mr. Walton’s Vindication of the Principles of Fluxions against the Objections contained in the Analyst. Wherein It is attempted to put this Controversy in such a Light as that every Reader may be able to judge thereof. London: J. Tonson, 1735. [A Dublin edition was published the same year.] Reasons For not Replying to Mr. Walton’s Full Answer In a Letter to P. T. P. By the Author of the Minute Philosopher. Dublin: R. Gunne, 1735. [A second issue, to which the Appendix of Walton’s pamphlet was added to the second impression of this edition.] The Querist, containing Several Queries, Proposed to the Consideration of the Public. Dublin: G. Tisk, G. Ewing, and W. Smith, 1735. [A new edition appeared in London: J. Roberts, 1736.] The Querist, containing Several Queries, Proposed to the Consideration of the Public. Part II . Dublin: G. Tisk, G. Ewing, and W. Smith, 1736. [A London edition, printed for J. Roberts, was published the same year.] The Querist, containing Several Queries, Proposed to the Consideration of the Public. Part III . Dublin: G. Tisk, G. Ewing, and W. Smith, 1737. [With another edition in London: J. Roberts, 1737.] Queries Relating to a National Bank, Extracted from the Querist. Also a Letter containing A Plan or Sketch of such Bank. Republished with Notes. Dublin: George Faulkner, 1737. The Querist containing Several Queries, Proposed to the Consideration of the Public. The Second Edition, with Additions. Dublin: George Failkner, 1750. [Berkeley writes in the ‘Advertisement by the Author’: ‘The three Parts [forming the first edition] are published in one: some few Queries are added and many omitted, particularly of those relating to the Sketch or Plan of a national Bank; which it may be Time enough to take again in Hand, when the Public shall seem disposed to make Use of such an Expedient.’ Four issues of this edition appeared with new title pages announcing (incorrectly) the ‘third’, ‘fourth’ and ‘fifth edition’. A second London edition appeared the same year with ‘A Word to the Wise’. New editions, with ‘A Word to the Wise’, followed in London and Glasgow 1751. Finally, The Querist was included in the editions of A Miscellany in 1752.] A Discourse Addressed to Magistrates and Men in Authority. Occasioned By the enormous Licence, and Irreligion of the Times. Dublin: George Faulkner, 1738. [A Cork edition and a London edition in three issues followed the same year. The second and third of these London impressions added ‘A Report from the Lords Committees for Religion’, 1737. In a second Dublin edition, 1738, there are a few changes including the addition of footnotes. The Discourse was included in the editions of A Miscellany 1752. Geoffrey Keynes observed that there are two states of the Dublin edition of A Miscellany with considerable changes in the Discourse. One section was added in the second state, two sections and a few footnotes omitted, and a few pages reset with a number of minor changes.]

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Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar Water, And diverse other Subjects connected together and arising one from another. Dublin: R. Gunnes, 1744. [This was a great success. It appeared in several editions and occasioned a great number of books and pamphlets.] A Word to the Wise: or, an Exhortation to the Roman Catholic Clergy of Ireland. By a Member of the Established Church. Dublin: 1749. [This pamphlet was first published anonymously, but in the second Dublin edition 1749, and in later editions, it was published as ‘the Bishop of Cloyne’s Exhortation to the Roman Catholic Clergy’. It was appended to the London and Glasgow editions of The Querist 1750 and included in the editions of A Miscellany 1752.] Berkeley, G. ed. (1714), The Ladies Library, 3 Volumes. London: Jacob Tonson. A Miscellany, containing Several Tracts on Various Subjects (Dublin and London 1752).

Collected works of George Berkeley Stock, J., ed. (1784), Works of George Berkeley, D.D. Late Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland. To which is added, An Account of his Life, and Several of his Letters . . . In two volumes. Dublin: Printed by John Exshaw, and London: Printed for G. Robinson, and John Exshaw, in Dublin. [Stock, J., ed.] (1820), The Works. Reprinted in three volumes. London: Printed by J. F. Dove for Richard Priestley. [Stock, J., ed.] (1837), The Works. Reprinted in one volume. London: Printed for Thomas Tegg and Son. [Stock, J., ed.] (1853), The Works. Reprinted in two volumes with translations of Arithmetica absque Algebra aut Euclide Demonstrata . . . & Miscellanea Mathematica . . ., and of De Motu, and annotations to the Introduction to the Principles by G. N. Wright. London: Printed for Thomas Tegg. Fraser, A. C., ed. (1871), The Works of George Berkeley, D.D. Formerly Bishop of Cloyne. Collected and Edited with Prefaces and Annotations. In three volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sampson, G., ed. (1897), The Works of George Berkeley, D. D. Bishop of Cloyne. In three volumes. With a biographical introduction by the rt. Hon. A. J. Balfour, M. P. London: George Bell and Sons. Fraser, A. C., ed. (1901), The Works of George Berkeley D.D.; Formerly Bishop of Cloyne. With Prefaces, Annotations, Appendices, and an Account of his Life. In four volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Luce, A. A. and Jessop, T. E., eds. (1948–57), The Works of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne. In nine volumes. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons. Ayers, M. R., ed. (1975), George Berkeley. Philosophical Works, including the Works on Vision, London: J. M. Dent.

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Separate editions of manuscripts and letters Belfrage, B., ed. (1987), George Berkeley’s Manuscript Introduction. An edition diplomatica transcribed and edited with introduction and commentary. Oxford: Doxa. Breidert, W., ed. (1969), Berkeley, G., Schriften über die Grundlagen der Mathematik und Physik, Einleitung und Übersetzung von Wolfgang Breidert, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp (reprinted 1985). Hight, M. A., ed. (2013), The Correspondence of George Berkeley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luce, A. A., ed. (1944), Philosophical Commentaries, Generally Called the Commonplace Book. London: Thomas Nelson. Park, D., ed. (1984), The Notebooks of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne. Facsimile of Add. MS . 39305 (British Library). Oxford: Alden Press. Thomas, G. H., ed. (1975), Philosophical Commentaries with explanatory notes by A. A. Luce (reprinted 1989). New York: Garland.

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Wangermann, E. (1973), The Austrian Achievement, 1700–1800. London: Thames and Hudson. Warnock, G. J. (1982 [1953]), Berkeley. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. Warnock, G. J. (1986), ‘On Passive Obedience’. History of European Ideas 7, 555–62. Weinberg, J. (1965), ‘Relation’, in his Abstraction, Relation and Induction, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Welch, H. T. (2009), ‘Edward Hinton’, in James McGuire and James Quinn (eds), Dictionary of Irish Biography (vol. 4). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press/The Royal Irish Academy, pp. 716–17. Wendel, J. (1978), Turgot et l’Encyclopédie, Ph. D Thesis, Ohio State University, 1978, p. 182. Whitrow, G. J. (1953), ‘Berkeley’s philosophy of motion,’ British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 4, 13, 37–45. Williford, K. (2003), ‘Berkeley’s theory of operative language in the Manuscript Introduction’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 11, 271–301. Williford, K. and Jakapi, R. (2009), ‘Berkeley’s theory of meaning in Alciphron VII’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 17, 99–118. Wilson, M. (1987), ‘The phenomenalisms of Leibniz and Berkeley,’ in E. Sosa (ed), Essays on the Philosophy of George Berkeley. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, pp. 3–22. Wilson, F. (1996), ‘F. H. Bradley’s impact on empiricism’, in Bradley, J. (ed), Philosophy after F. H. Bradley. Bristol: Theommes Press, pp. 251–81. Winkler, K. (1986), ‘Berkeley, Newton and the stars’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 17, 1, 23–42. Winkler, K. (1989), Berkeley: An Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Winkler, K. (2005), ‘Berkeley and the doctrine of signs’ in K. Winkler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 125–65. Winnett, A. R. (1974), Peter Browne: Provost, Bishop, Metaphysician. London: SPCK . Wisdom, J. O. (1941), ‘The compensation of errors in the method of fluxions’. Hermathena 57, 49–81. Wisdom, J. O. (1942), ‘The analyst controversy : Berkeley as mathematician’. Hermathena 59, 111–28. Wisdom, J. O. (1954), ‘Berkeley’s criticism of the infinitesimal’. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 4, 22–5. Woolhouse, R. (2007), Locke, a Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wyss, H. E. (2000), Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Yandell, David. (1995), ‘Berkeley on common sense and the privacy of ideas’. History of Philosophy Quarterly 12, 411–23.

Index Academics 127 Abbott, Thomas 85 absolute motion 158, 164 abstract ideas 240, 241, 422, 423, 425, 426, 428, 431, 432 abstraction, doctrine of 101–3, 114, 116, 117, 411, 415, 425–7, 431, 441 action 438 active, 434 Addison, Joseph 9, 27, 59 Advice to the Tories 9, 15 aesthetics 178, 181 aether 216 afterlife 151, 458, 468, 473–5 agent 232, 430, 433 agistment tithe 212 agriculture 198, 200, 201 Airaksinen, Timo 157, 191 Alciphron 209, 217, 446, 454, 464–6, 469–72 Philosophy of language in 423, 427–9, 431–3, 437, 438, 442, 476–8 Aldridge, Alfred Owen 178 algebra 435, 437, 447, 448, 452 algebraic game 436 Allaire, Edwin B. 399 America 198, 219 Analyst 438, 446, 452 Analyst controversy 452, 453 Anglicanism 466, 473 animal spirits 182, 191 Annesley, Dorothea 53 Anselm of Canterbury 182 aphelion 163 aporia 127 appearances 127, 129 Arbuthnot, John 59 archetypes 464 argument from the PPI 271–4 argumentum ad absurdum 443 Aristotle 68, 102, 115, 182, 185, 200, 208 272, 448, 450 arithmetic 436, 437, 454

514

Arithmetica 436, 437 Armstrong, David 68, 85 Arnauld, Antoine 248, 339 Ashe, St George 7, 436 Ashe, St George, Jr. 10 Astell, Mary 9, 26–9, 34 atheism 121, 334, 446, 453, 462–4, 470, 471 Atherton, Margaret 314, 347, 373, 397, 463–4 atomism 441 Aubry, Jean-Baptiste 339 Augustine of Hippo 115 authority 470 A Word to the Wise 15, 206, 208 Ayer, A. J. 71 Ayers, Michael 463 Bacon, Francis 437 Bailey, Samuel 85 bank advantages of 204 management of 204 public or private 205 banking, history of 204 Barrow, Isaac 93, 447 Barruel, Augustin 338 Barry, James, 7th earl of Barrymore 208 Bayle, Pierre 100, 122–4, 127, 133, 248, 249, 293, 314, 335 Beardsley, William 397 Beattie, James 288 being 438 Belfrage, Bertil 44, 48, 210, 413, 419, 420, 475, 478, 482, 483 benevolence and sociability 152, 202 Bennett, Jonathan 345, 347, 388, 389, 429, 461–3 Benson, Martin 12, 58, 61 Bergier, Nicolas-Sylvestre 337 Berington, Joseph 338 Berkeley (née Forster), Anne 5, 11, 12, 21, 24 Berkeley (née Frinsham), Eliza 11, 55

Index Berkeley, George appeal to Catholic clergy 206 as bishop of Cloyne 61 and the Bermuda project 58, 60 and book donation to Yale 58, 60 master argument 65 meeting Benson in Italy 58 and missing family letters 61 occasionalism 295 and tar water 61 Berkeley, George and Leibniz 254 divisibility 258 explanation 259 force 257 happiness 262 language of nature 262 phenomenalism 256 teleology 262 Berkeley, George Jr. 5 Berkeley, George Monck 55 Berkeley, Robert (Robin) 61 Berkeley, Thomas 61 Berlioz, Dominique 445 Berman, David 15, 50, 54, 95, 174, 190, 237, 347, 406, 477, 478 Bermuda project 56, 446 Bernon, Gabriel 53, 60 Bettcher, Talia 401, 411 Bible 186, 187, 470, 472–4, 482 Bindon, David 196, 203 Bird, Alexander 73 Biro, John 325 Blackburn, Simon 70 Blay, Michel 446 blind agency 409, 463–4 bodies 127, 367, 374, 461, 464, 468, 473–4 Boerhaave, Herman 221 Bolingbroke, Henry 288 Boncerf, Claude Joseph 339 Bonnet, Charles 338 Bordner, S. Seth 348 Boscovich, R. J. 73 Boullier, David-Renaud 338 Boyle, Dorothy 52 Boyle, Richard, 4th earl of Orrery 208 Boyle, Robert 226 Boyle, John 52 Bracken, Harry M. 342

515

Bradley, F. H. 68 Bray, Thomas 22, 31, 32, 40, 41, 43 Brewer, Bill 75 Britain 198, 200, 201 Brook, Richard 98, 376, 384, 460 Browne, Peter 177, 183, 184, 190, 469, 470, 478 Brykman, Geneviève 1, 174 Buffier, Claude 335 Burgersdijck, Franco 7 Burnyeat, Myles 127 Butler, Joseph 186, 189 Butler, Samuel 453 Byrd, William 12 Caffentzis, George 204 Cajetan, Thomas de Vio 481 calculus 435, 445, 446, 448–50, 452, 453 Campailla, Tommaso 54, 60 Campbell, John 74 Caraccioli, Louis Antoine 338 Caramuel, Juan 435 Cartesianism 127, 335, 435 Catholic clergy 206 causality 230, 233, 336, 442, 459, 460, 463, 466–8 cause efficient 159, 261 final 261 of sensations, not immediately perceived 271 Cavalieri, Bonaventura 447, 448 Cavalierian method 446, 447 centrifugal effect 165 Chalmers, David 73 Chandler, Edward 187 Charles, Sébastien 334 chess 436 Chisholm, Roderick M. 273 Christianity, orthodox 122 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 177 circulation, of money and goods 199 Clap, Thomas 60 Clarke, Henry 53 Clarke, Samuel 288 coach example 271, 272 Collier, Arthur 121, 249 Collins, Anthony 175, 177, 187, 469, 481

516

Index

colours apparent 131 not inherent in external bodies 301 real 131 commerce 29, 32–4, 43 common sense 121, 182, 335, 385, 386, 388–90, 395, 396, 461, 462, 465 apologetic defense 344 dismissive accounts 345 and materialism 349 and monotheism 349 perspectival accounts 348 propositional accounts 347 and scepticism 350, 351 vindication account 350 compensation of error 450, 452 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 336 consciousness 417 consumption, stimulus to growth 199, 200, 202 context 437 continuity argument 449, 458, 461–4, 466 continuum 448 Coram, Thomas 31, 32, 40, 43 Cordemoy, Géraud de 248 corpuscularism 217 cosmological proof 335 covering law 160 creation 393 Creator 183, 184 ‘crooked oar’ passage 276, 277 Cummins, Philip 416 Dalton, Richard 60 Daniel, Stephen 401, 413 Dechales, Claude-François Milliet 447, 448 Defence of Free-Thinking in Mathematics 453 deism 469, 481 De ludo algebraico 436 demonstration 462–3, 466, 477 de Montaigne, Michel 100 De Motu 10 Descartes, René 7, 102, 137, 182, 217, 218, 228, 229, 231, 233, 247–52, 270, 278, 291, 296, 300, 308, 314, 339, 435–7, 446, 465, 466 Dewey, John 279 Dicker, Georges 98, 317, 343, 364, 461, 462

Diderot, Denis 311, 337 differentials 452 Diogenes Laertius 124 Discourse to Magistrates 13 disposition 438 distance, not perceived immediately by sight 304, 305, 312 divine language thesis 320 divine mind 438 divine plan 202, 209 divisibility 258, 440, 449 infinite 442, 443, 448 Dobbs, Arthur 196, 198, 201 dogmatism 123, 127, 129, 130 Donellan, Anne 11 Doney, Willis 251 Downing, Lisa 189 dream 275, 277, 280, 283, 284 dualism 238 Dublin Philosophical Society 7 Dubois, Dorothea 61 Ducasse, C. J. 66 Dummett, Michael 64, 70 a modern Berkelian 75 Dykstal, Timothy 177 Earman, John 169 economic activity/growth 202 and education 208 increases employment 199 education of Native Americans 22–4, 26, 28, 29, 36–8, 40, 43 of women 26–9, 34, 40 educational reform 24, 25, 28, 29, 31–9 egoism 334 Einstein, Albert 71 Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess 112 emotion 438 emotive language theory 156, 437, 477 empiricism 435 Empiricus, Sextus 122, 123, 125–7, 129–31 Epicureans 112, 114 epistemology 335 Essay towards preventing the Ruin of GB 10 esse is percipere 135 esse is percipi 101, 105, 128, 387, 390, 391, 394 essence 336

Index ethical objectivism 153 ethics 217, 458, 468, 474, 476, 479 Euclid of Alexandria 190, 436, 440, 441, 449, 454, 455 Euclidean geometry 117 Euler, Leonhard 307 evil 467, 469 Ewing, A. C. 63 exactitude 449 experience 337 experimentalism 218 experimentum crucis 303 explanans 161 explanation 259 extension 336, 440, 437, 443, 449 Cartesian view of 135 conception of 303 external (material) things 300 inconceivability of 302 reality of 127 unknowability of 300 faculties of the mind imagination 274 reason or understanding 274 Fairfax, Brian 60 faith 185, 188, 468, 472, 473, 478 famine 198, 206 Fardella, Michelangelo 248 fashion 203 Fénelon, Bertrand Salignac de la Mothe 9 Fénelon, François 26 fictionalism 448 finitism 449 fixed stars 166 Flage, Daniel 176, 178, 397, 404 Flew, Anthony 314, 428, 429 fluxions 435, 447–50 force 161, 257 formalism 448, 453, 454 Forster, Nicholas 61 ‘deviant space’ argument 79 a modern Berkelian 78 Foster, John 64 Foucher, Simon 133 Frankel, Melissa 397 Fraser, A.C. 50, 54 freedom 175, 186, 189–91, 235 freethinkers 121, 470

517

free will 234, 235, 240, 469 agent causation 322 automaticity 321 compatibilism 322 determinism 323 fundamentalism 154 Galenic medicine 221, 225 Galilei, Galileo 103 Garrett, Don 320 Gassendi, Pierre 7, 112, 122 generalizing abstraction 100 geodesy 436 geometry 437, 440, 452, 454 finitistic 441 of minima 441 non-Euclidean 454, 455 of sight 454 of touch 454 Gervais, Isaac 53, 58 ghosts of departed quantities 453 Gibson, Edmund 12, 53, 54, 60 God 181, 182, 184, 374, 390, 391, 427, 430, 443, 477 attributes of 458, 464, 466, 468, 474 causality 229, 230 existence of 105, 106, 182, 184, 185, 189, 458–66, 468, 470, 472 grace 188, 189, 467–8 knowledge of 416, 465 language 183–5 gold and silver 198, 199, 200, 208 Gooch, William 12 goodness divine 150 natural 149 good will 337 grace 427 gravity, gravitational 160 Guardian essays 9 Hall, A.R. 162 Halley, Edmond 446 hallucination 275, 277, 279, 280, 283, 284 Hanmer, Thomas 54, 62 happiness 202, 203, 209, 262 Harvey, William 232

518 Hegelian idealism, British 63, 66 Helvétius, Claude-Adrien 337 heterogeneity 311, 357, 441, 455 Hicks, George 240 Higgins-Biddle, John C. 186 Hilbert, David 448, 454 Hinton, Edward 6 Hoadly, John 53, 61, 274 Hobbes, Thomas 112, 115, 177, 179 Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry d’ 337 Holland 205 Homberg, Wilhelm 221 homogeneity 452 homology 452 Hooker, Michael 465 Hume, David 63, 181, 187, 299–301, 303 copy principle 320 empiricist principle of 302 scepticism 314 separability principle 321 table argument of 300, 306 Humphreys, David 60 Hutcheson, Francis 181, 190 Hutchinson, John 226 Huygens, Christiaan 438 Hypostases 123 iatrochemists 221, 223 idealism 99, 104, 299, 343, 393 advantage of 112–14, 116 objections to 106–11 proof of 101, 102, 107 idealist 390 ideas abstract 440–2, 474 can be like nothing but ideas 302 connection of 439 of imagination 460 in the mind 126 material causes of 126 passivity of 459–60, 468 of quantity 438 of sense 359, 460, 466–8 sensible 359 of spirit 413, 416 identity 473 illusion 275, 279 imagination 442 faculty of 314, 316, 321

Index immaterialism 123, 125, 136, 238, 343, 352, 387, 388, 396, 462 Cartesian roots of 248 immediate perception 270–2, 281, 355 conflation of no-inference and epistemological sense 275, 276, 279, 365 conflation of no-inference and no-suggestion senses 273, 274 and distance 272, 304 epistemological sense 275, 276, 282, 283 of ideas 270 material things not immediately perceived 270, 281 no-inference sense 273–5, 282 no-suggestion sense 271, 272, 275, 283 psychological (no-inference) sense 283, 365 senses of 274 strong epistemological sense 276, 277 immortality 335, 468, 470 impenetrability 336 impression 336 incommensurability 441 indivisibles 447, 448 inference 272, 273 conscious 273 distinguished from suggestion 274, 363 from ideas 274 to the best explanation 284, 466, 467 unconscious 273 versus perception 273 infinite regress of corroborations 280, 283 infinitesimals 435, 438, 445, 446, 449, 450, 452 infinity 435, 443 Ingram, Robert 186 innate, in Hume’s sense 303 instrumentalism 438, 445, 453, 454 intentionalism 75 inverted retinal image, problem of the 304, 308–10, 312 inverting lenses 309–11 invisible hand 202 Ireland depressed condition 196, 198 differential rationality in 202 economic crisis in, responses to 198

Index isolated economy 199 National Bank 199, 204 natural resources 198 woollen exports 201 Irish gentry absentees 201 extravagance 199 growth benefits 201 promote local economy 203 self-interest 203 Irish parliament, legislators Berkeley’s criticism of 205, 206, 208 directs economy 200, 202 establish National Bank 199, 204 failure to set up National Bank 205 role in National Bank 205 Irish poor benefit rich 203 coerced to work 203 favoured over rich 199, 204 idleness 201, 203, 206 irrationality 203 restricted expectations 203 irreligion 121 Jacobite Rebellion 206, 208 Jaffro, Laurent 174, 178, 404 Jakapi, Roomet 406, 478 James, John 60 Jammer, Max 164 Jan Baptist van 222 Janssson, Lina 161 Jesseph, Douglas 446 Jessop, T. E. 1, 177, 217, 238 Joannet, Claude 339 Johnson, Samuel 54, 57, 60, 251 Johnston, G. A. 249 Jolley, Nicholas 472 judgement, suspension of 123 Jurin, James 452, 453 Kant, Immanuel 181, 274 Kendrick, Nancy 9, 157 Kennet, Basil 9 Kepler, Johannes 187, 308 Keynes, Geoffrey 174, 176 Kilkenny College 6

519

King, E. G. 465 King, William 8, 87, 469, 470 Kivy, Peter 181 knowledge by analogy 445 immediate 412 Knox, Ronald 387, 390 Kochiraas, Hylari 164 language 183, 239, 421–4, 428, 430–1, 434 437–9 analogical 468–70 human 465 of nature 458, 464–6 religious 468–70, 474–8 Lanion, François de 248 Law, John 204 law of visual direction 303, 309 laws of motion 159 LeClerc, Jean 53, 59 Le François, Laurent 337 Leibniz, G. W. 68, 162, 164, 254, 435, 438, 439, 446–9, 453, 454 divisibility 258 explanation 261 force 257 happiness 263 phenomenalism 256 Lelarge de Lignac, Joseph-Adrien 339 Leyburn, Ellen 207 libertinism 335 life 234 Liger, René 338 Likeness Principle 268, 285, 302 limit value 452, 453 Linden, D.W. 55, 62 linguistic idealism 67 Locke, John 7, 9, 26, 68, 100, 102, 107, 132, 178, 179, 187, 189, 200, 250, 252, 268–71, 279, 285, 286, 292, 297, 311, 351, 413, 425, 426, 435, 441, 442, 472–4 abstract ideas 425–7 ‘concurrent reasons’ passage 280, 282 inference to the best explanation 280, 282 moral judgements 156 political liberalism 31, 41 primary qualities 293

520

Index

Lockwood, Michael 73 logic 449 Luce, A. A. 1, 6, 15, 50, 289, 351, 413 and missing Swift letters 59 luxury 201 Mach, Ernst 71, 158 Machamer, Peter 164 Madden, Samuel 204 magnitude apparent and real 301 visible and tangible 301, 306 Malebranche, Nicolas 9, 110, 248, 249, 270, 300, 307, 314, 334, 436, 437 existence of matter hard to prove 290 primary qualities, relativity of 292 vision of things in God 294 Mander, W. J. 63 Mandeville, Bernard 175, 177–9, 190, 200 Martin, C. B 73 master argument 104, 105, 345 materialism 101, 103, 104, 106, 110–17, 123, 126, 334, 468, 473, 474 material things, 336 denial of 126 not known by inference 282 mathematics 435 mathematization 446 matter, schoolmen’s concept of 292 Maxwell, Grover 73 McCracken, Charles 96–7, 249, 293, 408, 413 McDonnell, Thomas 50 McDowell, John 67 McGuire, J.E. 164 McKim, Robert 409 meaning 438 meaning, theory of 118, 119, 406, 438 mediate perception 270, 271, 355 mental representation 314, 321 psychological association 318 resemblance 316 suggestion 314 mercantilism harms Ireland 198 state direction of economy 200, 208 metaphysics 158, 121, 136 Micellanea mathematica 447

Migely, Genevieve 408 Mill, John Stuart 85, 314 mind 159, 232, 233 Cartesian account 397 Humean account 397, 412 nature of 250 minima sensibilia 440, 441, 443, 444, 447 miracles 187, 188, 467 Mississippi scheme 204, 205 ‘mite’ argument 74 Molnar, George 73 Molyneux, Samuel 7, 53, 59, 441, 454 Molyneux, William 7, 16, 247, 307 Molyneux’s Problem 70, 79, 311, 312, 315, 319 monad 336 money different forms of 212 paper 198, 199, 204 as pledge 200 substance of 200 as ticket 200 monism 238, 334 Montaigne, Michel de 122, 124, 127 moon illusion 304, 306, 307, 312 Moore, G. E. 66 moral goods vs. public goods 30, 33, 43 moral motivation 150, 458, 468, 476, 479 moral sense 181 morality 121, 176, 181, 189, 436 utilitarianism 178 Mordaunt, Charles, Third Earl of Peterborough 9 Moses 393 motion 136 Muehlmann, Robert G. 344, 397, 413 Mumford, Stephen 73 Mun, Thomas 198 mysteries 145–7, 150, 474–8 Nagel, Thomas 74 natural law 150, 178 natural philosophy 158 negative theology 184 Nélis, Corneille de 338 Neo-platonism 69 neutral monism 72 Newman, Henry 58 Newton, criticism of

Index on absolute space, time, and motion 116 Optics 164 Principia 158 Newton, Isaac 115, 187, 216, 218, 226, 227, 229–31, 236, 435, 447–50, 452, 453 Nicholas of Cusa 435 Nieuwentijt, Bernhard 446 nihilarians 438, 449 nominalism 441, 454 Nonnotte, Claude-François 337 Norris, John 248 Notebooks 435, 437, 440, 443, 445–7, 449 nothing 443, 445, 450 notions 303, 416, 417 abstract 189 number 436–8, 454 Nurock, Vanessa 471 objects ordinary 385 sensible 99, 100, 102, 104, 106, 109, 338, 391 occasionalism 295 occult quality 162 Of Infinites 7, 8, 445, 449 O’Higgins, James 470 Olscamp, Paul 178 optical illusions 440 Owen, David 325 Paley, William 465 Paman, Roger 446 Pappas, George 271, 285, 286, 317, 344, 347, 364, 399 Paracelcus 221, 223 paradoxes 124 of infinity 441 Para du Phanjas, François 339 Parfit, Derek 69 Parigi, Silvia 445 particles 414, 417 passions 186, 438 passive 433 Passive Obedience 8, 150–4, 186–8 inconsistency in 141 passivity argument 458–460, 463, 466 Peacocke, Christopher 73 pedagogy 436

521

Pellham-Holles, Thomas 61 perceptibility 440, 443 perception 355, 391, 443 act-object model of 136 acquired vs. original 304, 305 conceptual and non-conceptual 356, 371, 372, 383 immediate v. mediate 317, 355 infallibility thesis 361 manifest quality thesis 360 natural 357 representative theory of 356–7 sensible 440 of situation 308–10 Percival, John 5, 11, 50, 51, 56, 204 Percival, Lady 393 Perceval, Philip 204 persistence 391 person 413, 417 person born blind 439 Petty, William 200 phenomena, denial of 126 phenomenalism 256, 393 phenomenalist 392 Philosophical Society of Dublin 436 Philosophical Transactions 436 philosophy of mathematics 435, 445 philosophy of science 136 physics 476–8 Pichon, Thomas-Jean 338 Pinto, Isaac de 338 Pitcher, George 347, 368, 381, 391, 399 Plato 182, 235, 279 Platonism 217, 437, 440 Plug, Cornelis 307 Pluquet, François André Adrien 338 political liberalism 31, 41 Pope, Alexander 9, 59 Popkin, Richard 122–4, 127, 133, 314 Popper, Karl 63, 71, 158 population 200, 208 positivism 72 PPI (Principle of Perceptual Immediacy) 270, 272, 273, 275 prejudices 187 prejudices, exploitation of 205 Prévost, Antoine François 335 primary qualities 335

522 principle of charity 270 principles 422, 424 Principles 8, 10, 15, 437–9, 441, 442, 445, 446 Prior, Thomas 11, 14, 54, 55, 57, 196, 198, 204, 207 Project Prakash 312 proof, mathematical 450 proper object of sense 272 providence 178, 181 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 184 Ptolemy, Claudius 306 public good 178 pyrrhonism 127, 336, 337 qualities primary and secondary 103, 115, 133–5, 270, 335 sensible 107, 128, 473 quantity 443 infinite 452 Queries Relating to a National Bank 197 Querist ambiguities 197 editions 196 format 196, 197 repetition 197 reprintings 197 responses 196, 209 Querist, 1st edn 197 London issue 210, 212 Querist 1750 edn Advertisment 206 background 206, 207 on Catholics 208 changes 207 material omitted 207 Querist in the Miscellany 197 Ramsay, Michael 314 Rand, Benjamin 50, 66 rationalism 240, 435, 446 rationality 176, 178, 179, 182 realism, ‘veil of perception’ 127 reality denial of 135 extra-mental 125 reason 336 Regius, Henricus 248

Index Reid, Thomas 288, 299–313, 314, 455 relations 68 religion 176, 189, 217, 458 natural 175, 185, 458, 459, 477, 479, 480 revealed 175, 185, 458, 472 social function 185 religious practice 458, 470–2, 475, 478–80 representability 449 representation 439, 441–3, 445, 448 representationalism 75 republic of science 453 Rickless, Samuel 271, 275–7, 279, 317, 324 Riemann, Bernhard 307 Roberts, John Russell 349, 351, 397, 465, 480, 482 Rock, Irwin 309 Rogers, G. A. J. 187 Rorty, Richard 67 Ross, Helen 307 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 336 Russell, Bertrand 65, 72 Saunderson, Nicholas 312 savage Americans 22–6, 28–30, 33, 35, 37, 41, 43 scepticism 101, 104, 112, 121, 123, 126, 136, 137, 177, 190, 299, 334, 391, 462 definition of 124 doubt-condition for 123 early modern understandings of 124 sceptics 123, 127 Schliesser, Eric 159 Schwartz, Claire 174 sciences 446 Scripture 187, 188 Secker, Thomas 61, 186 and Benson 58 self 417 sensations 336, 338 sense experience 182, 183 sensible object 111, 112, 127 sensible things 123 denial of 123, 126, 127, 133, 136 reality of 126 sensualism 436, 440 Sextus Empiricus 100 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper 175, 177–9, 181, 187, 190, 470–21

Index Sherry, David 446 Sicily 208 significance 437 signification 438, 442, 464, 465, 468 signs 421, 423, 426, 427, 431, 432, 437, 438, 442 natural 357 similarity 439, 445 ‘simple-perception-cannot-err’ passage 276, 277, 279 simplicity 411 singling abstraction 100, 102 Siris 14 active principles 228 aether 227 aim of 237 alcohol 221 ancient learning 236 animal spirits 225, 233 burning glass 226 chemical principles 222 fermentation 232 fire 227, 229 gravity 231 human perfectibility 238 illness 225 life 224 light 222, 224, 229 macrocosm 236 magnetism 231 meaning of 217 microcosm 236 microscope 226, 228 monad 237 occult cause 231 particles 220, 228 prism 226 realism 240 spirit 231 tar water as panacea 216 trinity 237 the universe 224 world-animal 236 slavery 31, 39–41, 203 Sloane, Hans 59 Smestad, Bjorn 446 Smibert, John 10, 60 Smiglecki, Marcin 7 Smith, Adam 181, 202, 208

523

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 52, 58 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts 51 Socinianism 114, 473 solipsism 336, 338 soul 127, 188, 335, 430 sound, two opposing accounts of 125 South Sea Bubble 196, 204, 205 South Seas Company 56 space, absolute 158 Spinoza, Baruch 334, 449 spirits 302, 391, 430, 434, 440 Sportelli, Silvano 342 Sprigge, Timothy 68 Stanley, Thomas 123, 124, 130 Steele, Richard 9, 27, 29, 40, 43, 59 stereopsis 305 Stewart, M. A. 16 Stillingfleet, Edward 473 Stock, Joseph 6, 15, 55 Stoneham, Tom 344, 409, 464, 466 Stratton, G.M. 309, 310 Strawson, Galen 73 Suarez, Francisco 184 subject 338 substances active 430, 433, 434 immaterial 102, 103, 105, 112, 117, 335 material 101, 103–5, 109, 110, 112–14, 128 substance-dualism 103 substance-monism 103 substratum 397 Suchting, W. A. 169 suggestion 271–3, 283 and automatic assciation 273 different from conscious inference 274 involved in sense perception 274 and perception by sense 272 super-mind 458, 466 Swift, Jonathan 9, 11, 23, 59, 177, 196, 198 Szymanska-Lewoszewska, Marta 157 tar God given 220 panacea 223 in Scandinavia 219

524

Index

tar water 206, 216 how to make 218 as medicine 219 science of 219 Taylor, Thomas 289, 291 tenderness and benevolence, apt to corrupt the mind 152, 154 testimony 472 The Ladies Library 9, 25, 27, 36 the Matrix 80 The Querist appeal to Catholic clergy 206 economic principles 199 essentially mercantilist 200 focus on medium to long term 207 on the common good 202 radicalism of economic proposals 198, 199 rejects limitless accumulation 209 reservations on commercial society 209 things, real nature of 128 theological positivism the positivistic aspect 143 the restrictive aspect 144 theology 136, 435, 438, 443, 446, 469–70, 473–8 Theory of Vision 8, 183, 314, 454 Theory of Vision, atomistic approach in the Association Thesis 92 atomistic principle 89, 95 basic micro relations 91 causality 89 composing heterogeneous units 92 descriptive and operative elements 91 instruments for describing visual appearances 90 instruments for structuring visual data 91 the law of specific sense responses 90 raw data in microcosm 89 Reid’s appropriation of and reaction to 304 Theory of Vision, beyond atomism conditioning processes in visual perception 88, 94, 95 the failure of introspection 94 sensations and perceptions defined 94 Theory of Vision, criticism of by Bailey and Atherton 86–8

Theory of Vision, reply by Berkeley it does not ask questions about external objects 86 it includes geometrical optics 87 it includes physiological observations 88 it investigates processes in visual perception 88 Theory of Vision, suggestion 316 Theory of Vision, supporting the Principles 96 theory vs. practice 453 The Querist 14 and Alciphron 200, 209 and Guardian essays 202 and Maxims on Patriotism 207 and sermons indicating a divine plan 202, 209 and Siris 206 and The Irish Patriot 205 and Word to the Wise 206 Thomas Aquinas 182 Three Dialogues 8, 439 Tillins, Laura 162 Tillotson, John 9 time 450, 462 Tindal, Matthew 175, 187 Tipton, Ian 397, 461, 462 Toland, John 175, 177, 184, 187, 470, 474, 476 touch 336 Tournemine, René-Joseph de 334 towns 201 trade domestic 200, 201 favourable balance of 199 foreign 201 triangle, general 441 Trinity 427, 474, 476, 478, 479 Trinity College Dublin 6, 7, 142, 435, 436 truth 237, 475, 477, 478 Turbayne, Colin 397, 406, 413 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques 336 universality 442 Ussher, James 11, 187, 235 Van Fraassen, Baas 80 Van Homrigh, Hester 11, 57, 59 value statements 147–8

Index ‘veil of perception’ 268–71, 274 Venice 205 Vermeulen, Ben 446 vices, intellectual 121 ‘view from nowhere’ 74 visible language 439 vis insita 162 vision 458 visual experience 183 visual field 455 visual language 440 volition 410, 460, 466 Voltaire 335 Wadsworth, Benjamin 60 Wake, William 52, 60 Walmsley, Peter 177 Walton, Jacob 453 Warnock, G. J. 279, 286 way of ideas 299–302

525

wealth, real 198, 199 Weierstrass, Karl 453 Wesley, John 55, 61 ‘what-we-see-we-know’ passage 277, 279 Whiston, William 187 Wiener, Philip 314 Williams, Elisha 60 Williford, Kenneth 475, 478 Winkler, Kenneth 316, 317, 343, 399, 463 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 68 Wolff, Christian 446 Wollaston, William 175 Wood’s Halfpence 200 words, use of 438 world external 128 extra-mental 125 material 127 Zeno of Elea 123

526