BISHOP BERKELEY.*

[FIRST NOTICE.]

PROFESSOR FRASER has extinguished one of our deepest regrets in the department of speculative philosophy, and has put in its place an abiding satisfaction. We could never reperuse the masterly sketch of Bishop Berkeley, in the too allusive dissertation of Sir James Mackintosh, without experiencing the fruitless wish that he had become Berkeley's editor and interpreter ; for to us it had appeared, at least so far as Europe was concerned, that that modest, but withal subtle and profound thinker, had grasped the Bishop's meaning with a more direct and tenacious apprehension than any other of the many writers who have either espoused or impugned the principles which first startled the philosophic world a hundred and sixty years ago. But the present editor and biographer has done his work so wisely and so well, that we cannot imagine how any other writer could have presented the good Bishop himself in a more life-like form to his readers, or given us a more luminous account of his philosophy.

Sir James Mackintosh was, indeed, widely justified in saying that Berkeley's immaterialism is chiefly valuable as a touchstone of metaphysical sagacity ; showing those to be altogether without it who, like Johnson—the English Samuel, not the American one, who had thoroughly assimilated Berkeley's idea—and Beattie, be- lieved that his speculations were sceptical, that they implied any distrust of the senses, or that they had the smallest tendency to disturb reasoning or alter conduct.

We believe it was this statement of Mackintosh which first led the present writer to the study of Berkeley, and all the scholarly, astute, and comprehensive commentaries of Professor Fraser have only deepened the impressions which that great and reverend thinker first awoke within us. Berkeley claims, par excellence, to be the common-sense philosopher. He sides with the vulgar, he tells us, and he says in his third dialogue of Hylas and Philonons

:- "I am 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. These I know, and finding they answer all the necessities and purposes of my life, have no reason to be solicitous about any other unknown beings. A piece of sensi- ble bread, for instance, would stay my stomach better than ten thousand times as much of insensible, unintelligible. real bread you speak of. It is likewise my opinion that colour and other sensible qualities are in their objects. I cannot for my life help thinking that snow is white and fire hot. . . . And as I am no sceptic with regard to the nature of things, so neither am I as to their existence. That a thing should be really per- ceived by my senses, and at the same time not really exist, is to me a plain contradiction ; since I cannot prescind, or abstract, even in thought, the existence of a sensible thing from its being perceived. Wood, atones, fire, water, flesh, iron, and the like things, which I would dis- course of, are things that I know. Away, then, with all scepticism, all those ridiculous philosophic doubts ! What a jest is it for a philosopher * The Works of George Berkeley, D.D., formerly Bishop of Cloyne, including many of his hitherto Unpublished Writings ; with Preface, Annotations, his Life and Letters, and an _Account of his Philosophy. By Alexander Campbell Fraser, MA., Professor of Logic -and Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh. 4 vols. Oxford: the Clarendon Press.

t " Elements of the Philosophy of the Unman Mind," p. 87. —alluding to the thesis of Des Cartes—to question the existence of sensible things till he bath it proved to him from the veracity of God, or to pretend our knowledge in this point falls short of intuition or demonstration. I might as well doubt my own being as the being of those things I actually see and feel."

After reading sentences like these, readers who know Berkeley a. _ only at second-hand, or who can repeat the lines of Byron in Don

Juan, which, however, mean more than they say ?—

0 When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter, And proved it : 'twas no matter what he said,"

will be ready to ask, what on earth was Berkeley's heresy, accord- ing to the received standard of conception, and how did a man who asserted, in language so terse and plain, his acceptance of the common beliefs of the " vulgar," acquire the reputation of a dreamer or a sceptic? The answer is that Berkeley was too inexorable a thinker. He tracked suggestion to its inmost cell. He put the contents of the consciousness, in each act of perception, into the fiery furnace of a remorseless scrutiny ; and he found himself face to face with realities. Coleridge, taught by Schelling, in a later day could say :—" When the hammer strikes the bell, it is the vibrations only which pass into the metal, but we have the direct or immediate consciousness of the entire object which on any given occasion is mediated by our senses." And this is the position of Berkeley, though, as Professor Fraser naturally reminds us, his process of reaching it is less elaborate and critical than that of the German school. Berkeley is even passionately intent on realities. Without sapping the foundation of all belief, he must believe in that which is nearest to him— in himself, as a free spirit, and in those presentations of an objective reality which, he finds, come and go quite independent of his own volition. He calls his perceptions of ex- ternality " ideas " ; but he does not employ the term " idea " in the sense in which it was used by Des Cartes, or Locke, or Male-

branche. With all these great men the idea was a mediators and inference must be introduced to prove that the mediatorial function fully and adequately and truthfully represented the unknown substratum of matter beyond the cognition of the senses. Berkeley struck boldly into this phantom world. He abjured the

dens ex machind, in the form of the mediating idea, and proclaimed that we see only what we see,—sight itself, his great discovery, revealing a mere colour-world, apart from touch and muscular activity ; that we touch only what we touch, and that to pure thought the abstract substance called matter is a contradiction in terms, an absurdity, an impossibility. Perhaps the difficulty which many have experienced in understanding Berkeley, and Professor Fraser is quite aware of this, arises from his use of the word " idea.' In his later years he found a resting-place for his contemplation in' the fontal and effective ideas of Plato—the invisible archetypes, invisible save to the purified intellection—of all the fleeting phenomena of Nature, and Mackintosh and Professor Fraser both admit that in his Platonic idealism he approximated to the affirma- tions of the modern German philosophy. But in his Principles of Human Knowledge, and in his graceful Platonic Dialogues, Berkeley uses the term " idea " not as archetypal, much less as substitu- tional, and representative of we know not what, in the sense of Locke and Des Cartes, but as equivalent to sense-perception. He knows the idea or form in which objects, wholly distinct from his Ego, are presented to him, and in that he believes. But for him any given idea in this sense exists only because it is perceived ; and he is quite unable to think of any possible entity as existing, without either being perceived, or a percipient. He main- tains an object unperceived by any mind whatever to be a mere

creation of the phantasy or imagination ; but as in the sensation of each object we are bound by the laws of our being to refer it to an external source, and as the reference is a strictly logical one, we are, he holds, inevitably led on to the conclusion that the phenomena which awaken mental sensations in us must have, as their abiding cause, not an unperceived substratum, which we cannot think, but a Supreme Mind. We have put this conception of Berkeley— this two-fold recognition, as he would allow us to term it—of the impossibility of thinking the existence of that which is neither per- cipient nor perceived to the severest tests available by us ; and wk- are free to confess that at times it may have seemed to us to partake of the nature of demonstration. But it does not embrace the whole

contents of our consciousness.

We are of opinion that to this extent at least all competent metaphysicians will agree with Berkeley that in any given group of phenomena we have a direct, and not mediated, perception of their existence. It will be admitted that he swept clean out of

the domain of our recognitions a whole legion of chimeras, he wiped the windows of the soul, and suffered the direct ingress to al

the percipient ego of the self-manifestation of external nature. It will further be allowed that it is simply impossible for us to imagine,' i.e., in Berkeleian phraseology, to conceive the " idea " or form of an object never perceived by us, or by any percipient subject. Unquestionably the formal esse of any conceivable exist- ence is percipi, but Reid and Hamilton would, while conceding this assumption, maintain that, beneath the " idea," say of a planet, temporarily formulated in the consciousness of the per- cipient, there is, according to all the known experience of man, an objective reality, and not a mere abstraction, which renders the phenomenon in any case perceivable. They would say, agreeing with Locke in this instance, there is a substratum not compre- hended, but apprehensible, invariably found to exist in the con- sciousness, whensoever the percipient begins to reflect upon his experience of the impression produced by objects which lie beyond the sphere of his volition. And some of these common-sense philoso- phers would add : that without affronting or denying an ultimate fact of our consciousness, you are as much shut up to believe in an actual substratum for the sense-perceptions of consciousness, in any sensuous experience, as you are bound to believe in a living, but unspeakable ground of righteousness in the supersensuous experi- ence of the action of conscience. In plain language, it must be urged against Berkeley, that while, like Diogenes, he summarily commanded the intruder to step aside, and not stand between him- self and the sun, he would not allow the sun to hold his own in the firmament. Berkeley, as Professor Fraser rightly observes, was somewhat too exacting in his claims for the demonstration of a Supreme Mind, and we would add he was altogether exorbitant in relegating " matter " to the percipient mind. Instead of the affirmation that a phenomenon exists only because it is perceived, the common-sense of humanity proclaims that it is perceived be- cause it exists. The percipient self-consciousness is ultimately and indefeasibly, we do not say dualistic, but bipolar. I and not I, subject and object, constitute the ultima Thule of experience, and of reflection too, beyond which we simply cannot go. We are quite aware that Berkeley says, " This is exactly what I strove to demonstrate. I perfectly agree with you. We only differ about the guaranteeship of our sensations of material objects." But this is a vast difference. It may, or may not, as some hold, be true that we cannot think the existence of that which is not perceived by some mind, and that failing finite percipients we are obliged to fall back upon omniscience ; but the question is this : is an Atheist unable to believe that Mont Blanc would continue to exist if no human eye were ever to see it again ? Practically it may be alleged that the difference is of no moment ; but here we are deal- ing with the facts of consciousness and speculative recognition of their existence, and Berkeley in sweeping the idealists out of the precincts of perception, was bold enough to dream that nothing now remained but himself, his sensations, and God,—a very devout imagination, no doubt, but one reached rather by aid of a leaping- pole, than by logical stepping-stones.

Advancing from the immediateness of our sense-perceptions, we light upon two other phases of the Berkeleian psychology—the one that all sensible phenomena constitute a vast symbolism—a natural language, which, however, has to be learned, like all other languages, but in the acquisition of which we become such adepts that we read its signs with less conscious perception that they are signs than is the case when we are reading the words of a book. All day long we are busy in unconsciously translating the presentations of one sense into ideas or words which are in reality supplied by another. Thus, to take Professor Fraser's instance, there is an orange on the table before us. We spontaneously say that we both touch it and see it. But, in fact, we do not see, we cannot see, the orange of mere touch, and we never touch, we cannot touch the orange of mere sight. For coloured extension is antithetical to felt extension. But " in this curious life of ours " sight is foresight. The visual sign of expanded colour is the sure and certain word of prophecy touching the tactual experience which will be ours when we take the orange in our hand. But secondly, even more remarkable than this swift and unerring transference of the signs of vision to Yi the realities of touch is the genesis of the conception of " outness," or distance. For distance is not the resultant either of sight, or of touch, or even of the two combined ; but it is the conclusion of the interpretative reason transfiguring the mere impressions of the two senses into " ambient space." And here piety and philosophy will go hand in hand in affirming the, absolute necessity of faith in the inductive reasoning of the human spirit, as the basis of all scientific inquiry into sense-phenomena. Surely, instead of the mere impressions of Hume, we have here supplied by Berkeley as impregnable an intellectual foundation for our construction of the meaning of sensible phenomena as that of Kant himself. It is we who mediate, or shall we say, are compelled by the very nature of our understanding to recognize order, permanence, and causality in the otherwise isolated and fleeting phenomena around us.

Causality, but what is that? According to Hume, the relations of physical phenomena are the one and only causality which exists. Invariable, sequence being one of those relations, it would follow, on Hume's principles, as was pointed out long ago, that day must be the cause of night. With Berkeley, on the other hand, all sense-phenomena are a constant effect, and they and the percipient are only links in a vast sins or chain, which loses itself in Him, who is the cause of the first cause. If we mistake not, it is from the action of our moral nature, with its individuality and freedom of agency, as well as from the logical necessity of recognizing a supreme rational will, that Berkeley evolves his idea of causation, and as Professor Fraser has been careful to indicate, this idea remains wholly unaffected by the assumption or the demonstration of the truth of the Darwinian theory. For how- ever circuitous the process may be, whatever the intervening factors of the development, here, at last, is Mind and Conscience, and it is simply irrational to maintain—if, indeed, Mr. Darwin does maintain, which we are far from thinking is the case—that these can have derived their existence from a non-mental or unmoral source.

Reserving for a second article a sketch of Berkeley's life, we will conclude at present with congratulating the philosophic world on the possession of this noble edition of Berkeley's works, so ably edited, and, may we add, the students of Edinburgh in having a man so scholarly and a thinker so clear in occupation of the chair once held by Hamilton.