The Works of George Berkeley Part 79

466 Beardsley's _Life and Correspondence of Samuel Johnson, D.D., First President of King's College, New York_, p. 72 (1874).

467 Beardsley's _Life of Johnson_, pp. 71, 72.

468 Chandler's _Life of Johnson_, Appendix, p. 161.

_ 469 Commonplace Book._

470 Moreover, even if the outness or distance of things _were_ visible, it would not follow that either they or their distances could be real if unperceived. On the contrary, Berkeley implies that they _are_ perceived _visually_.

471 It is also to be remembered that sensible things exist "in mind,"

without being exclusively _mine_, as creatures of _my will_. In one sense, that only is mine in which my will exerts itself. But, in another view, my involuntary states of feeling and imagination are _mine_, because their existence depends on my consciousness of them; and even sensible things are so far _mine_, because, though present in many minds in common, they are, for me, dependent on _my_ percipient mind.

472 Thomas Herbert, eighth Earl of Pembroke and fifth Earl of Montgomery, was the correspondent and friend of Locke-who dedicated his famous _Essay_ to him, as a work "having some little correspondence with some parts of that n.o.bler and vast system of the sciences your lords.h.i.+p has made so new, exact, and instructive a draft of." He represents a family renowned in English political and literary history. He was born in 1656; was a n.o.bleman of Christ Church, Oxford, in 1672; succeeded to his t.i.tles in 1683; was sworn of the Privy Council in 1689; and made a Knight of the Garter in 1700. He filled some of the highest offices in the state, in the reigns of William and Mary, and of Anne. He was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1707, having previously been one of the Commissioners by whom the union between England and Scotland was negotiated. He died in January 1733.

473 Trinity College, Dublin.

474 In his _Commonplace Book_ Berkeley seems to refer his speculations to his boyhood. The conception of the material world propounded in the following Treatise was in his view before the publication of the _New Theory of Vision_, which was intended to prepare the way for it.

475 Cf. Locke, in the "Epistle Dedicatory" of his _Essay_.

Notwithstanding the "novelty" of the New Principles, viz. _negation_ of abstract or unperceived Matter, s.p.a.ce, Time, Substance, and Power; and _affirmation_ of Mind, as the Synthesis, Substance, and Cause of all-much in best preceding philosophy, ancient and modern, was a dim antic.i.p.ation of it.

476 Cf. sect. 6, 22, 24, &c., in ill.u.s.tration of the demonstrative claim of Berkeley's initial doctrine.

477 Berkeley entreats his reader, here and throughout, to take pains to understand his meaning, and especially to avoid confounding the ordered ideas or phenomena, objectively presented to our senses, with capricious chimeras of imagination.

478 "Philosophy is nothing but the true knowledge of things." Locke.

479 The purpose of those early essays of Berkeley was to reconcile philosophy with common sense, by employing reflection to make _latent_ common sense, or common reason, reveal itself in its genuine integrity. Cf. the closing sentences in the _Third Dialogue between Hylas and Philonous_.

480 Cf. Locke's _Essay_, Introduction, sect. 4-7; Bk. II. ch. 23, -- 12, &c. Locke (who is probably here in Berkeley's eye) attributes the perplexities of philosophy to our narrow faculties, which are meant to regulate our lives, not to remove all mysteries. See also Descartes, _Principia_, I. 26, 27, &c.; Malebranche, _Recherche_, III. 2.

481 His most significant forerunners were Descartes in his _Principia_, and Locke in his _Essay_.

482 Here "idea" and "notion" seem to be used convertibly. See sect. 142.

Cf. with the argument against _abstract ideas_, unfolded in the remainder of the Introduction, _Principles_, sect. 97-100, 118-132, 143; _New Theory of Vision_, sect. 122-125; _Alciphron_, Dial. vii.

5-7; _Defence of Free Thinking in Mathematics_, sect. 45-48. Also _Siris_, sect. 323, 335, &c., where he distinguishes Idea in a higher meaning from his sensuous ideas. As mentioned in my Preface, the third edition of _Alciphron_, published in 1752, the year before Berkeley died, omits the three sections of the Seventh Dialogue which repeat the following argument against abstract ideas.

483 As in Derodon's _Logica_, Pt. II. c. 6, 7; _Philosophia Contracta_, I. i. ---- 7-11; and Ga.s.sendi, _Leg. Inst.i.t._, I. 8; also Cudworth, _Eternal and Immutable Morality_, Bk. IV.

484 Omitted in second edition.

485 We must remember that what Berkeley intends by an _idea_ is either a percept of sense, or a sensuous imagination; and his argument is that none of _these_ can be an abstraction. We can neither perceive nor imagine what is not concrete and part of a succession.

486 "abstract notions"-here used convertibly with "abstract ideas." Cf.

_Principles_, sect. 89 and 142, on the special meaning of _notion_.

487 Supposed by Berkeley to mean, that we can imagine, in abstraction from all phenomena presented in concrete experience, e.g. imagine _existence_, in abstraction from all phenomena in which it manifests itself to us; or _matter_, stripped of all the phenomena in which it is realised in sense.

488 Omitted in second edition.

489 Locke.

490 Descartes, who regarded brutes as (sentient?) machines.

491 "To this I cannot a.s.sent, being of opinion that a word," &c.-in first edition.

492 "an idea," i.e. a concrete mental picture.

493 So that "generality" in an idea is our "consideration" of a particular idea (e.g. a "particular motion" or a "particular extension") not _per se_, but under general relations, which that particular idea exemplifies, and which, as he shews, may be signified by a corresponding word. All ideas (in Berkeley's confined meaning of "idea") are particular. We rise above particular ideas by an intellectual apprehension of their relations; not by forming _abstract pictures_, which are contradictory absurdities.

494 Locke is surely misconceived. He does not say, as Berkeley seems to suppose, that in forming "abstract ideas," we are forming abstract mental images-pictures in the mind that are not individual pictures.

495 Does Locke intend more than this, although he expresses his meaning in ambiguous words?

496 It is a particular idea, but considered relatively-a _significant_ particular idea, in other words. We realise our notions in examples, and these must be concrete.

497 i.e. "ideas" in Locke's meaning of idea, under which he comprehends, not only the particular ideas of sense and imagination-Berkeley's "ideas"-but these considered relatively, and so seen intellectually, when Locke calls them abstract, general, or universal. Omniscience in its all-comprehensive intuition may not require, or even admit, such general ideas.

498 Here and in what follows, "abstract _notion_," "universal _notion_,"

instead of abstract _idea_. Notion seems to be here a synonym for idea, and not taken in the special meaning which he afterwards attached to the term, when he contrasted it with idea.

499 "notions," again synonymous with ideas, which are all particular or concrete, in his meaning of _idea_, when he uses it strictly.

_ 500 idea_, i.e. individual mental picture.

501 In all this he takes no account of the intellectual relations necessarily embodied in concrete knowledge, and without which experience could not cohere.

502 "have in view," i.e. actually realise in imagination.

503 What follows, to the end of this section, was added in the second or 1734 edition.

504 So Bacon in many pa.s.sages of his _De Augmentis Scientiarium_ and _Novum Organum_.

505 "wide influence,"-"wide and extended sway"-in first edition.

506 "idea," i.e. individual datum of sense or of imagination.

507 See Leibniz on Symbolical Knowledge (_Opera Philosophica_, pp. 79, 80, Erdmann), and Stewart in his _Elements_, vol. I. ch. 4, -- 1, on our habit of using language without realising, in individual examples or ideas, the meanings of the common terms used.

508 "doth"-"does," here and elsewhere in first edition.

509 "ideas," i.e. representations in imagination of _any_ of the individual objects to which the names are applicable. The sound or sight of a verbal sign may do duty for the concrete idea in which the notion signified by the word might be exemplified.

510 This sentence is omitted in the second edition.

511 Elsewhere he mentions Aristotle as "certainly a great admirer and promoter of the doctrine of abstraction," and quotes his statement that there is hardly anything so incomprehensible to men as notions of the utmost universality; for they are the most remote from sense.

_Metaph._, Bk. I. ch. 2.

512 Added in second edition.