The Works of George Berkeley Part 82

609 Ibid. sect. 16-28.

610 Ibid. sect. 51.

611 Ibid. sect. 47-49, 121-141.

612 Ibid. sect. 43.

613 i.e. what we are _immediately_ percipient of in seeing.

614 Touch is here and elsewhere taken in its wide meaning, and includes our muscular and locomotive experience, all which Berkeley included in the "tactual" meaning of distance.

615 To explain the condition of sensible things _during the intervals of our perception of them_, consistently with the belief of all sane persons regarding the material world, is a challenge which has been often addressed to the advocates of ideal Realism. According to Berkeley, there are no intervals in the existence of sensible things. They are permanently perceivable, under the laws of nature, though not always perceived by this, that or the other individual percipient. Moreover they always exist _really_ in the Divine Idea, and _potentially_, in relation to finite minds, in the Divine Will.

616 Berkeley allows to bodies unperceived by me potential, but (for me) not real existence. When I say a body exists thus conditionally, I mean that if, in the light, I open my eyes, I shall see it, and that if I move my hand, I must feel it.

617 i.e. unperceived material substance.

618 Berkeley remarks, in a letter to the American Samuel Johnson, that "those who have contended for a material world have yet acknowledged that _natura naturans_ (to use the language of the Schoolmen) is G.o.d; and that the Divine conservation of things is equipollent to, and in fact the same thing with, a continued repeated creation;-in a word, that conservation and creation differ only as the _terminus a quo_. These are the common opinions of Schoolmen; and Durandus, who held the world to be a machine, like a clock made up and put in motion by G.o.d, but afterwards continued to go of itself, was therein particular, and had few followers. The very poets teach a doctrine not unlike the Schools-_mens agitat molem_ (Virgil, aeneid, VI). The Stoics and Platonists are everywhere full of the same notion. I am not therefore singular in this point itself, so much as in my way of proving it." Cf. _Alciphron_, Dial. IV. sect. 14; _Vindication of New Theory of Vision_, sect. 8, 17, &c.; _Siris_, _pa.s.sim_, but especially in the latter part. See also _Correspondence between Clarke and Leibniz_ (1717). Is it not possible that the universe of things and persons is in continuous natural creation, unbeginning and unending?

619 Cf. sect. 123-132.

620 He distinguishes "idea" from "mode or attribute." With Berkeley, the "substance" of _matter_ (if the term is still to be applied to sensible things) is the naturally const.i.tuted aggregate of phenomena of which each particular thing consists. Now extension, and the other qualities of sensible things, are not, Berkeley argues, "in mind" either (_a_) according to the abstract relation of substance and attribute of which philosophers speak; nor (_b_) as one idea or phenomenon is related to another idea or phenomenon, in the natural aggregation of sense-phenomena which const.i.tute, with him, the _substance_ of a _material_ thing. Mind and its "ideas" are, on the contrary, related as percipient to perceived-in whatever "otherness"

that altogether _sui generis_ relation implies.

621 "Matter," i.e. abstract material Substance, as distinguished from the concrete things that are realised in living perceptions.

622 "take away natural causes," i.e. empty the material world of all originative power, and refer the supposed powers of bodies to the constant and omnipresent agency of G.o.d.

623 Some philosophers have treated the relation of Matter to Mind in _perception_ as one of cause and effect. This, according to Berkeley, is an illegitimate a.n.a.lysis, which creates a fict.i.tious duality. On his New Principles, philosophy is based on a recognition of the fact, that perception is neither the cause nor the effect of its object, but in a relation to it that is altogether _sui generis_.

624 He refers to Descartes, and perhaps Geulinx and Malebranche, who, while they argued for material _substance_, denied the _causal efficiency_ of sensible things. Berkeley's new Principles are presented as the foundation in reason for this denial, and for the essential spirituality of all active power in the universe.

625 On the principle, "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem."

626 "external things," i.e. things in the abstract.

627 That the unreflecting part of mankind should have a confused conception of what should be meant by the _external reality_ of matter is not wonderful. It is the office of philosophy to improve their conception, making it deeper and truer, and this was Berkeley's preliminary task; as a mean for shewing the impotence of the things of sense, and conclusive evidence of omnipresent spiritual activity.

628 Cf. sect. 4, 9, 15, 17, 22, 24.

629 i.e. their _sense-ideas_.-Though sense-ideas, i.e. the appearances presented to the senses, are independent of the _will_ of the individual percipient, it does not follow that they are independent of _all perception_, so that they can be real in the absence of realising percipient experience. Cf. sect. 29-33.

630 By shewing that what we are percipient of in sense must be _idea_, or that it is immediately known by us only as sensuous appearance.

631 i.e. "imprinted" by unperceived Matter, which, on this dogma of a representative sense-perception, was a.s.sumed to exist behind the perceived ideas, and to be the _cause_ of their appearance. Cf.

_Third Dialogue between Hylas and Philonous_.

632 Hence the difficulty men have in recognising that Divine Reason and Will, and Law in Nature, are coincident. But the advance of scientific discovery of the laws which express Divine Will in nature, instead of narrowing, extends our knowledge of G.o.d. And _divine_ or _absolutely reasonable_ "arbitrariness" is not caprice.

633 "ideas," i.e. ideas of _sense_. This "experience" implied an a.s.sociation of sensuous ideas, according to the divine or reasonable order of nature.

634 Cf. sect. 25-33, and other pa.s.sages in Berkeley's writings in which he insists upon the _arbitrariness_-divine or reasonable-of the natural laws and sense-symbolism.

635 Cf. sect. 3, 4, 6, 22-24, 26, in which he proceeds upon the intuitive certainty of his two leading Principles, concerning _Reality_ and _Causation_.

636 In short, what is virtually the language of universal natural order is the divine way of revealing omnipresent Intelligence; nor can we conceive how this revelation could be made through a capricious or chaotic succession of changes.

637 He here touches on moral purpose in miraculous phenomena, but without discussing their relation to the divine, or perfectly reasonable, order of the universe. Relatively to a fine knowledge of nature, they seem anomalous-exceptions from general rules, which nevertheless express, immediately and constantly, perfect active Reason.

638 "ideas," i.e. the phenomena presented to the senses.

639 "imaginable"-in first edition.

640 "the connexion of ideas," i.e. the presence of law or reasonable uniformity in the coexistence and succession of the phenomena of sense; which makes them interpretable signs.

641 According to Berkeley, it is by an abuse of language that the term "power" is applied to those ideas which are invariable antecedents of other ideas-the prior forms of their existence, as it were.

642 Berkeley, in meeting this objection, thus implies Universal Natural Symbolism as the essential character of the sensible world, in its relation to man.

643 See Locke's _Essay_, Bk. IV, ch. 3, -- 25-28, &c., in which he suggests that the secondary qualities of bodies may be the natural issue of the different relations and modifications of their primary qualities.

644 With Berkeley, _material substance_ is merely the natural combination of sense-presented phenomena, which, under a _divine_ or _reasonable_ "arbitrariness," const.i.tute a concrete thing. Divine Will, or Active Reason, is the constantly sustaining cause of this combination or substantiation.

645 i.e. that it is not realised in a living percipient experience.

646 For "place" is realised only as perceived-percipient experience being its concrete existence. Living perception is, with Berkeley, the condition of the possibility of concrete locality.

647 So in the Cartesian theory of occasional causes.

648 So Geulinx and Malebranche.

649 As known in Divine intelligence, they are accordingly _Divine Ideas_. And, if this means that the sensible system is the expression of Divine Ideas, which are its ultimate archetype-that the Ideas of G.o.d are symbolised to our senses, and then interpreted (or misinterpreted) by human minds, this allies itself with Platonic Idealism.

650 "It seems to me," Hume says, "that this theory of the universal energy and operation of the Supreme Being is _too bold_ ever to carry conviction with it to a mind sufficiently apprised of the weakness of human reason, and the narrow limits to which it is confined in all its operations." But is it not virtually presupposed in the a.s.sumed trustworthiness of our experience of the universe?

651 Accordingly we are led to ask, what the deepest support of their reality must be. Is it found in living Spirit, i.e. Active Reason, or in blind Matter?

652 e.g. Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, &c.

653 In short, if we mean by Matter, something unrealised in percipient experience of sense, what is called its _reality_ is something unintelligible.

654 And if sensible phenomena are _sufficiently_ externalised, when regarded as regulated by Divine Reason.

655 Twenty years after the publication of the _Principles_, in a letter to his American friend Johnson, Berkeley says:-"I have no objection against calling the Ideas in the mind of G.o.d _archetypes_ of ours.

But I object against those archetypes by philosophers supposed to be real things, and so to have an absolute rational existence distinct from their being perceived by any mind whatsoever; it being the opinion of all materialists that an ideal existence in the Divine Mind is one thing, and the real existence of material things another."

656 Berkeley's philosophy is not inconsistent with Divine Ideas which receive expression in the laws of nature, and of which human science is the imperfect interpretation. In this view, a.s.sertion of the existence of Matter is simply an expression of faith that the phenomenal universe into which we are born is a reasonable and interpretable universe; and that it would be fully interpreted, if our notions could be fully harmonised with the Divine Ideas which it expresses.