and under the influence of a misleading terminology, he failed to distinguish this true proposition-there is nothing real apart from thought-from this false one, its virtual contradictory-there is nothing other than feeling. The confusion was covered, if not caused, by the ambiguity, often noticed, in the use of the term 'idea.' This to Berkeley's generation stood alike for feeling proper, which to the subject that merely feels is neither outer nor inner, because not referring itself to either mind or thing, and for conception, or an object thought of under relations. According to Locke, pain, colour, solidity, are all ideas equally with each other and equally with the idea of pain, idea of colour, idea of solidity. If all alike, however, were feelings proper, there would be no world either to exist or be spoken of. Locke virtually saves it by two suppositions, each incompatible with the equivalence of idea to feeling, and implying the conversion of it into conception as above defined. One is that there are abstract ideas; the other that there are primary qualities of which ideas are copies, but which do not come and go with our feelings. The latter supposition gives a world that 'really exists,' the former a world that may be known and spoken of; but neither can maintain itself without a theory of conception which is not forthcoming in Locke himself. We need not traverse again the contradictions which according to his statement they involve contradictions which, under whatever disguise, must attach to every philosophy that admits a reality either in ForLocke's things as apart from thought or in thought as apart from idea of a things, and only disappear when the thing as thought of, and thing he through thought individualised by the relations which consti- 'idea' tute its community with the universe, is recognised as alone simply the real. Misled by the phrase 'idea of a thing,' we fancy that idea and thing have each a separate reality of their own, and then puzzle ourselves with questions as to how the idea can represent the thing-how the ideas of primary qualities can be copies of them, and how, if the real thing of experience be merely individual, a general idea can be abstracted from it. These questions Berkeley asked and found unanswerable. There were then two ways of dealing with them before him. One was to supersede them by a truer view of thought and its object, as together in essential correlation constituting the real; but this way he did not take. The other was to avoid them by merging both thing and idea in the indifference of substitutes ing, does away with space and body. simple feeling. For a merely sentient being, it is true-for one who did not think upon his feelings-the oppositions of inner and outer, of subjective and objective, of fantastic and real, would not exist; but neither would knowledge or a world to be known. That such oppositions, misunderstood, may be a heavy burden on the human spirit, the experience of current controversy and its spiritual effects might alone. suffice to convince us; but the philosophical deliverance can only lie in the recognition of thought as their author, not in the attempt to obliterate them by the reduction of thought and its world to feeling-an attempt which contradicts itself, since it virtually admits their existence while it renders them unaccountable. Which, if 174. That Berkeley's was such an attempt, looking merely idea feel to his treatment of primary qualities and abstract ideas, we certainly could not doubt: though, since language does not allow of its consistent statement, and Berkeley was quite ready to turn the exigencies of language to account, passages logically incompatible with it may easily be found in him. The hasty reader, when he is told that body or distance are suggested by feelings of sight and touch rather than immediately seen, accepts the doctrine without scruple, because he supposes that which is suggested to be a present reality, though not at present felt. But if not at present felt it is not according to Berkeley an idea, therefore without the mind,' therefore an impossibility.' That which is suggested, then, must itself be a feeling which consists in the expectation of other feelings. Distance, and body, as suggested, can be no more than such an expectation; and as actually existing, no more than the actual succession of the expected feelingsa succession of which, as of every succession, 'no two parts exist together.'2 There is no time, then, at which it can be said that distance and body exist. 175. This, it may seem, however inconsistent with the doctrine of primary qualities, is little more than the result which Locke himself comes to in his Fourth Book; since, if 'actual present succession' forms our only knowledge of real existence, there could be no time at which distance and body might be known as really existing. But Locke, as we have and relations' as objects of knowledge being postponed. Reference is here merely made to the doctrine by which Berkeley disposes of matter,' the consideration of its reconcilability with his doctrine of ‘spirits' 2 Locke, Book II. chap. xv. sec. 1. seen, is able to save mathematical, though not physical, knowledge from the consequences of this admission by his doctrine of abstract ideas-'ideas removed in our thoughts from particular existence'-whose agreement or disagreement is stated in propositions which concern not existence,' and for that reason may be general without becoming either uncertain or uninstructive. This doctrine Berkeley expressly rejects on the ground that he could not perceive separately that which could not exist separately ('Principles of Human Knowledge,' Introduction, sec. 10); a ground which to the ordinary reader seems satisfactory because he has no doubt, and Berkeley's instances do not suggest a doubt, as to the present existence of individual objects'-this man, this horse, this body. But with Berkeley to exist means to be felt (Principles of Human Knowledge,' sec. 3), and the feelings, which I name a body, being successive, its existence must be in succession likewise. The limitation, then, of possibility of conception' by possibility of existence, means that conception,' too, is reduced to a succession of feelings. ited f permanent should dig. appear. 176. Berkeley, then, as a consequence of the methods by On the which he disposes at once of the 'real existence' and 'abstract, same principle all idea of matter,' has to meet the following questions :-How are either reality or knowledge possible without permanent relations relations? and, How can feelings, of which one is over before the next begins, constitute or represent a world of permanent relations? The difficulty becomes more obvious, though not more serious, when the relations in question are not merely themselves permanent, as are those between natural phenomena, but are relations between permanent parts like those of space. It is for this reason that its doctrine of geometry is the most easily assailable point of the 'sensational' philosophy. Locke distinguishes the ideas of space and of duration as got, the one from the permanent parts of space, the other 'from the fleeting and perpetually perishing parts of succession.' He afterwards prefers to oppose the term 'expansion to 'duration,' as bringing out more clearly than 'space' the opposition of relation between permanent facts to that between fleeting successive facts which never exist together.' How, then, can a consciousness, consisting simply of 'fleeting successive facts,' either be or represent that of which the differentia is that its facts are permanent and co-exist? 1 Book II. chap. xiv. sec. 1. y By making colour= points, Berkeley represents relation as seen. 177. This crucial question in regard to extension does not relations of seem even to have suggested itself to Berkeley. The reason coloured why is not far to seek. Professor Fraser, in his valuable edition, represents him as meaning by visible extension coloured experience in sense,' and by tangible extension resistent experience in sense.' No fault can be found with this interpretation, but the essential question, which Berkeley does not fairly meet, is whether the experience in each case is complete in a single feeling or consists in a succession of feelings. If in a single feeling, it clearly is not extension, as a relation between parts, at all; if in a succession of feelings, it is only extension because a synthetic principle, which is not itself one of the feelings, but equally present to them all, transforms them into permanent parts of which each qualifies the other by outwardness to it. Berkeley does not see the necessity of such a principle, because he allows himself to suppose extension-at any rate visible extension-to be constituted by a single feeling. Having first pronounced that the proper object of sight is colour, he quietly substitutes for this situations of colour, degrees of strength and faintness in colour, and quantities of coloured points, as if these, interchangeably with mere colour, were properly objects of sight and perceived in single acts of vision. Now if by object of sight were meant something other than the sensation itselfsomething which to a thinking being it suggests as its cause -there would be no harm in this language, but neither would there be any ground for saying that the proper object of sight is colour, for distinguishing visible from tangible extension, or for denying that the outwardness of body to body is seen. Such restrictions and distinctions have no meaning, unless by sight is meant the nervous irritation, the affection of the visual organ, as it is to a merely feeling subject; yet in the very passages where he makes them, by saying that we see situations and degrees of colour, and quantities of coloured points, Berkeley converts sight into a judgment of extensive and intensive quantity. He thus fails to discern that the transition from colour to coloured extension cannot be made without on the one hand either the presen 1 See Fraser's Berkeley, Theory of Vision,' note 42. I may here say that I have gone into less detail in my account of Berkeley's system than I should otherwise have thought necessary, because Professor Fraser has supplied, in the way of explanation of it, all that a student can requiro. tation of successive pictures or (which comes to the same) successive acts of attention to a single picture, and on the other hand a synthesis of the successive presentations as mutually qualified parts of a whole. In other words, he ignores the work of thought involved in the constitution alike of coloured and tangible extension, and in virtue of which alone either is extension at all. space is by a sue cession of feelings. 178. But though he does not scruple to substitute for colour Still he situations and quantities of coloured points, these do not with admits that him constitute space, which he takes according to Locke's constituted account of it to be distance between bodies or parts of the same body.' This, according to his Theory of Vision,' is tangible extension, and this again is alone the object of geometry. As in that treatise a difference is still supposed between tangible extension and the feeling of touch, the question does not there necessarily arise whether the tactual experience, that constitutes this extension, is complete in a single feeling or only in a succession of feelings; but when in the subsequent treatise the difference is effaced, it is decided by implication that the experience is successive: and all received modifications of the theory, which assign to a locomotive or muscular sense the office which Berkeley roughly assigned to touch, make the same implication still more clearly. Now in the absence of any recognition of a synthetic principle, in relation to which the successive experience becomes what it is not in itself, this means nothing else than that space is a succession of feelings, which again means that space is not space, not a qualification of bodies or parts of body by mutual externality, since to such qualification it is necessary that bodies or their parts coexist. Thus, in his hurry to get rid of externality as independence of the mind, he has really got rid of it as a relation between bodies, and in so doing (however the result may be disguised) has logically made a clean sweep of geometry and physics. 179. Of this result he himself shows no suspicion. He If so, it is professes to be able, without violence to his doctrine, to accept the sciences as they stand, except so far as they rest upon the needless and unmeaning assumptions (as he reckoned not space at all; but Berkeley thinks it is only not able, this may have helped to disguise 'pure' |