Descartes, the leading Continental rationalist, held that we have an innate idea of ourselves and of infinite perfection. When looking at this long history of belief in innate ideas, Locke said that enough was enough, and he launched a powerful attack on the very concept. For Locke, we simply have no innate ideas, and all notions that we have come to us through experience. His attack focuses exclusively on the ideas that we are born with.
The lead character has an idea of a mountain embedded in his mind by some aliens from outer space. The idea obsesses him to the point that one evening at the supper table he scoops a pile of mashed potatoes onto his plate and then shapes it into the image he has of the mountain. Instead, according to Locke, there are two types of innate ideas that philosophers commonly allege: speculative ones and practical ones.
The chair in front of me is identical to the chair in front of me. The tree in the yard is identical to the tree in the yard. While this seems to be a painfully obvious truth, it does play an important role in logical systems. It is impossible for the chair in front of me to exist and not exist at the same time. It is impossible for the apple on the table to be completely red and not completely red at the same time. The second type of alleged innate idea involves practical ones, that is, ideas that regulate moral behavioral practices.
They are 1 There exists a supreme God, 2 We should worship God, 3 The best form of worship is proper moral behavior, 4 We should repent for our immoral conduct, 5 We will be rewarded or punished in the afterlife for our conduct on earth.
Herbert argued that all humans have an inborn knowledge of these truths and we find these truths exhibited in virtually all religions around the world. Locke has two main arguments against the innateness of ideas, both speculative and practical.
First, he argues, people in fact do not universally hold to these ideas, contrary to what defenders of innate ideas typically claim. This is particularly obvious with the laws of thought, which children and mentally challenged people have no conception of whatsoever:. If therefore children and idiots have souls, have minds, with those impressions upon them, they must unavoidably perceive them, and necessarily know and assent to these truths. Which since they do not, it is evident that there are no such impressions.
For if they are not notions naturally imprinted, how can they be innate? To say a notion is imprinted on the mind, and yet at the same time to say, that the mind is ignorant of it, and never yet took notice of it, is to make this impression nothing.
Again, particularly with the laws of thought, children reason perfectly well regarding identity and non-contradiction, yet at the same time are completely incapable of articulating those specific ideas. If these ideas really were innate, then children should be able to verbally express them.
Also, it is obvious that may adults have reached the so-called age of reason, such as the illiterate and those from primitive societies, and yet lack these ideas. According to Locke, then, we should completely reject the theory of innate ideas and instead look for the true source of our ideas within human experience. However, the process by which we form our ideas through experience has two main steps. We first acquire simple ideas through experience, and then recombine those simple ideas in different ways to create more complex ideas.
Simple ideas are the building blocks from which all other ideas are formed, and, for Locke, there are two main sources of simple ideas. The first and most obvious source is that they come from sensation , specifically our five senses which give us perceptions of colors, tastes, smells, tactile solidity. The color of blue, the taste of sweetness, the tactile sensation of smoothness, the sound of a high-pitched squeak are all basic sensory experiences that are building bocks for our ideas about the external world.
I can shut my eyes and think about how my mind operates: how I perceive things through my senses, how I think about problems, how I doubt questionable ideas, how I believe reasonable ideas, how I will to perform actions.
According to Locke, some of our simple ideas come solely through sensation without any introspective reflection, such as our perceptions of colors, sounds and smells. Others come solely through introspective reflection, such as our notions of perceptions of the mental acts of thinking and willing.
Nothing that we perceive through our five senses will give us ideas of these. Then there is an especially interesting group of simple ideas that we can get either through sensation or introspective reflection. Pleasure and pain is a good example. I can feel physical pain through my senses as when a candle flame burns me; but I can also experience emotional pain in my mind when a loved one dies.
Through my senses, I see a volcano spew out lava with great causal force. But through introspective reflection I can also experience causal force when I reflect on my own willful decisions, such as when I will to conjure up in my mind the idea of a rock, a tree or a unicorn.
My will itself is a causal power. Other ideas that we get through both sensation and reflection are existence, unity, and succession. But as we store these raw simple notions in our memories, our minds mechanically shuffle them around and create new ones which he calls complex ideas.
There are three specific mental processes that form complex ideas. First, some are the result of simply combining together more simple ideas. For example, I can get a complex idea of an apple by assembling the simple ideas of roundness, redness, sweetness, and moistness. As the mind then churns out complex ideas from simple ones, the complex ideas will be of two types: ideas of substances and ideas of modes.
Ideas of substances are those of individual objects such as such as rocks, trees, houses, animals, people and God. The issue involves a distinction between qualities of objects that actually belong to the object itself, and qualities of objects that we impose on them.
Suppose, for example, that I made a list of the qualities that I perceive in an apple. It has a round shape, red surface, smooth texture, and a sweet taste.
It also has a particular size and weight. Some of these qualities are part of the object itself, and others are qualities that I am imposing on the apple. For Locke, a primary quality is an attribute of that is inseparable for a physical body, and includes solidity, shape, motion, number. These are components that an object retains, regardless of how we might modify the object, such as by cutting it into pieces.
He illustrates this by considering changes that we might impose on a grain of wheat:. Take a grain of wheat, divide it into two parts; each part has still solidity, extension, figure, and mobility: divide it again, and it retains still the same qualities; and so divide it on, till the parts become insensible; they must retain still each of them all those qualities.
For division which is all that a mill, or pestle, or any other body, does upon another, in reducing it to insensible parts can never take away either solidity, extension, figure, or mobility from any body, but only makes two or more distinct separate masses of matter, of that which was but one before; all which distinct masses, reckoned as so many distinct bodies, after division, make a certain number.
No matter how much we grind down the grain of wheat, the parts still retain the qualities of solidity and shape which were inherent in the original grain. In contrast with primary qualities, there are also secondary qualities that are spectator-dependent: we impose the attributes onto objects, and these include colors, sounds, and tastes. For example, there is something in the apple that makes it appear red to me, but the redness itself does not reside within the apple but instead is a function of my sense organs and biology.
The phenomenon of colorblindness is ample proof of this: while the structure of the apple itself might trigger the perception of redness in my mind, I need to have the appropriately designed eyes to have that perception.
So too with other qualities of the apple like taste and smell: the specific sensations of taste and smell directly depend upon the construction of my tongue and nose. Locke adds there is a third type of quality of objects— tertiary qualities —which involves the power that an object has to produce new ideas or sensations in us.
For example, the mere sight of an apple may produce a feeling of hunger within me. Being near a fire may produce a feeling of warmth within me. Perhaps the main difference between secondary and tertiary qualities is that with secondary ones we often improperly mistake them for primary attributes of the objects themselves.
With tertiary qualities, though, we are less apt to make this mistake; for example, I would never presume that my feeling of hunger resides in the apple itself. Aesthetic feelings, such as the sense of beauty I get when viewing a landscape, might also be included among tertiary qualities.
As influential as Locke was in this regard, however, his impact was even greater with his political philosophy. Even today, people around the world are familiar with the idea that the function of governments is to protect our freedoms, and citizens are morally entitled to overthrow governments when they fail to perform that task. Locke was strongly opposed to this notion, in part because of his personal experience in England where the people recently overthrew their despotic king.
Locke supported the overthrow and composed his Two Treatises of Government to justify rebellion against bad rulers. Locke, though, is a little more optimistic than Hobbes. Yes, the state of nature sometimes can be brutal, but there still are moral rules that everyone must follow. The four main natural rights are those of life, health, liberty and possessions:. The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.
What if someone does violate my rights by mugging me and taking my wallet, for example? By violating my rights, the mugger has thereby forfeited all of his own rights, including his right to life, and at that point I am fully entitled to hunt him down, punish him, and even kill him as I see fit. The mugger has thus declared war on me and, at that point, I have the right to punish him by any means whatsoever. While in the state of nature, vigilante justice is the only recourse we have to retaliate against attackers.
Once we create a civil society with a government, however, all that changes. Following Hobbes, Locke argues that we create societies by forming a social contract with each other: we agree to mutually set aside our hostilities in the name of preserving peace.
And, to assure that we all follow the rules, we set up a government that has the authority to punish anyone who breaks the rules and thereby violates our basic rights. The whole point of establishing societies and governments to begin with is to preserve our natural rights, particularly, Locke argues, our right to possessions:.
The reason why men enter into society, is the preservation of their property. And the end why they choose and authorize a legislative, is, that there may be laws made, and rules set, as guards and fences to the properties of all the members of the society, to limit the power, and moderate the dominion, of every part and member of the society. What happens, though, when governments fail at their assigned task, and, rather than protecting our rights they undermine them?
His answer is that we are thrown back into a state of war, this time a war with our government. By violating our rights, the government has forfeited its authority over us, and we are fully entitled to remove the offending government and set up a better one:. If it comes to that, according to Locke, the blame lies with the government, not with the revolutionaries. Declaration of Independence , penned by Thomas Jefferson:.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Jefferson, though, deemphasizes our property rights and implies that the governmental violation of any of our fundamental natural rights may justify revolution. The second major figure in British Empiricism was George Berkeley Born into a moderately wealthy family near Kilkenny, Ireland, his father was a customs officer who migrated there from England. Berkeley received his B. Still in his twenties he, he wrote his two main philosophical works, upon which his fame today rests: A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous In his thirties he was ordained into the Anglican Church of Ireland and received is Doctor of Divinity degree.
Shortly after, he devised a plan to establish a college in the Bermuda Islands to train ministers and missionaries for the colonies. He traveled to Rhode Island to prepare for the project, but after three years abandoned it when governmental funding for it never came through. He then donated land and books to the newly founded Yale College and returned to Ireland.
Back home he was appointed Bishop of Cloyne in south Ireland, a position that he retained for most of the remainder of his life. He died of a stroke at age Consider again what Descartes suggested. For all I know, there is no material world whatsoever, and all of my experiences are hallucinations that are imposed into my mind by an evil genius. It might appear that I have a body and am sitting on a chair, but it could be that there is no three-dimensional world at all, and an evil genius is just making those things appear in my mind, while my mind itself floats around without any body.
Descartes, we noted, did not actually believe this hypothesis, but only proposed it as a strategy for arriving at certainty about the world around us. Berkeley, however, does take this scenario seriously, although he rejects that there is anything sinister or deceptive about it. This is simply the way that God constructed the world: it is a virtual reality that consists of God continually feeding our spirit-minds sensory information in a very consistent way.
Key here for Berkeley is the regularity and consistency with which God feeds our minds sensory data. God stores all sensible perceptions in his mind — in something like a master database — and he feeds them to us at the appropriate time.
Imagine that I perceive myself to be in a room conversing with five friends. For Berkeley, the reality is that I and five other spirit-minds are being consistently fed similar sense data by God. Drawing from his master database of perceptions, God feeds us all sense data of walls, tables and chairs within the room. We might then ask what happens to the empty room since God is no longer feeding us sense perceptions of it.
Does the room go out of existence? According to Berkeley, no it does not: God himself is still perceiving the sensory information about the room and it continues to exist in his mind.
Indeed, God continually monitors his master database of perceptions, and thus keeps the perceptions active. Berkeley expresses this point with the idealist motto that to be is to be perceived. On face value, the idealist position of denying material objects seems ridiculous.
The vast majority of us believe that we live in a world of material objects that includes physical things like rocks, houses, chairs, and our own bodies. Berkeley, though, takes the opposite view: it is belief in the existence of material objects that is ridiculous.
He writes,. It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, 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. But, with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this principle may be entertained in the world, yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction.
For, what are the fore-mentioned objects but the things we perceive by sense? This sensory data is all that I really know, and it is a colossal fabrication to assume that some physical thing is the source of my perceptions of the table.
Berkeley recognizes that there is indeed some external source of my perception of the table, but that source is God, not some mysterious physical stuff. So natural is this position, he argues, that it is backed by common sense:. I am content. Ask the gardener why he thinks yonder cherry-tree exists in the garden, and he shall tell you, because he sees and feels it; in a word, because he perceives it by his senses.
Ask him why he thinks an orange-tree not to be there, and he shall tell you, because he does not perceive it. What he perceives by sense, that he terms a real, being, and says it is or exists ; but, that which is not perceivable, the same, he says, has no being.
The question between the materialists and me is not, whether things have a real existence out of the mind of this or that person, but whether they have an absolute existence, distinct from being perceived by God, and exterior to all minds. The answer is that the central point of empiricism involves gaining knowledge through the senses, rather than through innate ideas.
And Berkeley wholeheartedly believes that we do acquire all of our knowledge through sense perception. The only issue involves what the source is of those sense perceptions. Whereas Locke believed that material objects feed us sensory information, Berkeley believed that God performs that role, not material things. Berkeley rises to the occasion, though, offering an abundance of arguments for his position. The first is his argument from primary and secondary qualities.
According to Locke, the fundamental difference between the two types of qualities is whether they are spectator dependent. Primary ones, such as shape, motion and solidity, are part of the external things themselves and not spectator dependent, where as secondary ones such as colors, sounds and tastes are not part of external things and are spectator dependent.
To believe in external material objects, then, requires a commitment to the reality of primary qualities that exist in things, independently of what a spectator might perceive.
Berkeley denies that there are any primary qualities of objects in this sense, and he argues instead that all so-called primary qualities are just as spectator dependent as secondary ones. In other words, all qualities of objects are really secondary and thus spectator dependent. His main argument is here:. They who assert that figure, motion, and the rest of the primary or original qualities do exist without the mind in unthinking substances, do at the same time acknowledge that colors, sounds, heat cold, and suchlike secondary qualities, do not—which they tell us are sensations existing in the mind alone, that depend on and are occasioned by the different size, texture, and motion of the minute particles of matter.
This they take for an undoubted truth, which they can demonstrate beyond all exception. Now, if it be certain that those original [primary] qualities are inseparably united with the other sensible [secondary] qualities, and not, even in thought, capable of being abstracted from them, it plainly follows that they exist only in the mind.
But I desire any one to reflect and try whether he can, by any abstraction of thought, conceive the extension and motion of a body without all other sensible qualities. For my own part, I see evidently that it is not in my power to frame an idea of a body extended and moving, but I must withal give it some color or other sensible quality which is acknowledged to exist only in the mind. His main point is that so-called primary qualities are nothing beyond the secondary qualities that we perceive in things.
Visual perceptions of shape, for example, are just patches of color, which are secondary. To make his case, Berkeley examines several so-called primary qualities and explains with each one how it is spectator dependent. Take, for example, the quality of extension, that is, three-dimensional shape. The leg of a bug, for example, appears exceedingly small to us; to the bug itself it would appear to be a medium sized thing, yet to an even tinier microscopic organism it would appear to be huge.
The texture of an object similarly hinges on the perspective from which we examine it. The point is that everything that we know about shape depends upon where we stand in relation to the things that we are perceiving; thus, all notions of shape are spectator dependent.
The so-called primary quality of motion is also relative to the perceiver. Imagine, for example, that a leaf is falling from a tree directly in front of a humming bird, a human, and a sloth. To the human it would appear to be moving at a normal pace. To the sloth it might appear exceedingly rapid. According to Berkeley, speed and time are measured by the succession of ideas in our minds, which varies in different perceivers.
Everything we need to perceive sensible qualities is accounted for more efficiently through idealism: God directly feeds us sensory information without creating the material world as a useless middleman. If therefore it were possible for bodies to exist without the mind, yet to hold they do so, must needs be a very precarious opinion; since it is to suppose, without any reason at all, that God has created innumerable beings that are entirely useless, and serve to no manner of purpose.
In theory, we might think that God could have created the material world as a middleman if he wanted to, sort of as an instrument to accomplish the task. Instruments are used only when there is a need. However, God, who has infinite powers, has no needs and thus has no use of any instrument that might help him accomplish some task.
Berkeley writes:. We indeed, who are beings of finite powers, are forced to make use of instruments. Whence it seems a clear consequence, that the supreme unlimited agent uses no tool or instrument at all. Thus, God is perfectly capable of feeding us sensory information directly without the need for him to create the material world as a crutch. This difference, Berkeley held, precisely marks the distinction between real and imaginary things. What I merely imagine exists in my mind alone and continues to exist only so long as I think of it.
But what is real exists in many minds, so it can continue to exist whether I perceive it or not. In fact, the persistence and regularity of the sensible objects that constitute the natural world is independent of all human perception, according to Berkeley.
Even when none of us is perceiving this tree, god is. The mind of god serves as a permanent repository of the sensible objects that we perceive at some times and not at others. It emphasizes that bodies or sensible objects really are just the ideas we have of them, yet can also explain their apparent independence of our perception.
All he rejects is the mysterious philosophical notion of the material object as an extended substance capable of existing independently of any perception. That suppostion, he argued, is both unnecessary and untenable. But Berkeley maintained that natural science, if properly conceived, could proceed and even thrive without assuming that bodies are material substances existing outside the mind.
Astronomy and optics seem to suppose that what we see exists at some distance from us. But Berkeley argued in his New Theory of Vision that our apparent perception of distance itself is a mental invention, easily explained in terms of the content of visual ideas, without any reference to existing material objects. In fact, Berkeley held, our visual and tactile perceptions are entirely independent.
What we see and what we touch have nothing to do with each other; we have merely learned by experience to associate each with the other, just as we have learned to associate the appearance, the taste, and the smell of an apple. There is no reason to suppose that all of these qualities inhere in a common material substratum.
It follows that Locke was mistaken in supposing that our ideas of primary qualities have a special status because they arise from more than one of our senses. Although the corpuscularian hypothesis has yielded interesting results so far, Berkeley believed that science will soon enough outgrow it, learning to rely more directly on what we perceive for its hypotheses about what new experiences we rightly anticipate.
The causal regularities we observe in the natural world rely upon the same source. Natural science has plenty to do even in the absence of material objects, then: it is nothing less than a systematic exploration of the mind of god. Here Berkeley came very close to the philosophy of Malebranche. More significantly for us, he also correctly anticipated much of the physical science of the twentieth century.
Like Berkeley, we believe that the solidity of bodies is merely apparent, that a proper cosmology depends upon our capacity to conceive it, and that the role of science is to gather and correlate the independent observations of human perceivers.
It is not surprising that physicists like Mach expressed an appreciation for the thought of Berkeley. The affinity between immaterialism and traditional religion is somewhat easier to understand. Materialism leads to atheism no less than to skepticism , Berkeley believed, since its belief that bodies exist outside the mind encourages the notion that the physical realm may always have existed independently of any spiritual influence.
Immaterialism, by contrast, restores god to a role of central importance, not only as the chief among active thinking substances but also as the source of all sensible objects. Since sensible objects are mind-dependent yet exhibit a persistence and regularity that transcends our perception of them, it follows that there must be a master-perceiver, god, in whose mind they always are. Thus, in the Dialogues , Philonous extols the beauty and majesty of the natural world, attributing them to the power and elegance of the divine mind.
This leads to the traditional conception of god as deserving of worship because of the benevolent creation of all that we observe. All in all, Berkeley developed a philosophical system worthy of no little respect. As Berkeley is well aware, one may reply to this sort of argument by claiming that only one of the incompatible qualities is truly a quality of the object and that the other apparent qualities result from misperception.
By noting the differences between animal perception and human perception, Berkeley suggests that it would be arbitrary anthropocentrism to claim that humans have special access to the true qualities of objects. Further, Berkeley uses the example of microscopes to undermine the prima facie plausible thought that the true visual qualities of objects are revealed by close examination.
Thus, Berkeley provides a strong challenge to any direct realist attempt to specify standard conditions under which the true mind-independent qualities of objects are directly perceived by sense.
Thus, Hylas allows that color, taste, etc. Berkeley opposes this sort of mechanism throughout his writings, believing that it engenders skepticism by dictating that bodies are utterly unlike our sensory experience of them. Here Philonous has a two-pronged reply: 1 The same sorts of relativity arguments that were made against secondary qualities can be made against primary ones. Philonous needs to convince him as Berkeley needed to convince his readers in both books that a commonsensical philosophy could be built on an immaterialist foundation, that no one but a skeptic or atheist would ever miss matter.
As a matter of historical fact, Berkeley persuaded few of his contemporaries, who for the most part regarded him as a purveyor of skeptical paradoxes Bracken Nevertheless, we can and should appreciate the way in which Berkeley articulated a positive idealist philosophical system, which, if not in perfect accord with common sense, is in many respects superior to its competitors.
As this passage illustrates, Berkeley does not deny the existence of ordinary objects such as stones, trees, books, and apples. On the contrary, as was indicated above, he holds that only an immaterialist account of such objects can avoid skepticism about their existence and nature.
What such objects turn out to be, on his account, are bundles or collections of ideas. An apple is a combination of visual ideas including the sensible qualities of color and visual shape , tangible ideas, ideas of taste, smell, etc.
He does make clear that there are two sides to the process of bundling ideas into objects: 1 co-occurrence, an objective fact about what sorts of ideas tend to accompany each other in our experience, and 2 something we do when we decide to single out a set of co-occurring ideas and refer to it with a certain name NTV Thus, although there is no material world for Berkeley, there is a physical world, a world of ordinary objects.
This world is mind-dependent, for it is composed of ideas, whose existence consists in being perceived. For ideas, and so for the physical world, esse est percipi.
In addition to perceived things ideas , he posits perceivers, i. Spirits, he emphasizes, are totally different in kind from ideas, for they are active where ideas are passive. This suggests that Berkeley has replaced one kind of dualism, of mind and matter, with another kind of dualism, of mind and idea. He argues by elimination: What could cause my sensory ideas? Berkeley eliminates the first option with the following argument PHK 25 :.
The second option is eliminated with the observation that although I clearly can cause some ideas at will e. The hidden assumption here is that any causing the mind does must be done by willing and such willing must be accessible to consciousness.
Berkeley is hardly alone in presupposing this model of the mental; Descartes, for example, makes a similar set of assumptions. This leaves us, then, with the third option: my sensory ideas must be caused by some other spirit.
Berkeley thinks that when we consider the stunning complexity and systematicity of our sensory ideas, we must conclude that the spirit in question is wise and benevolent beyond measure, that, in short, he is God.
Berkeley himself sees very well how necessary this is: Much of the Principles is structured as a series of objections and replies, and in the Three Dialogues , once Philonous has rendered Hylas a reluctant convert to idealism, he devotes the rest of the book to convincing him that this is a philosophy which coheres well with common sense, at least better than materialism ever did. Perhaps the most obvious objection to idealism is that it makes real things no different from imaginary ones—both seem fleeting figments of our own minds, rather than the solid objects of the materialists.
Berkeley replies that the distinction between real things and chimeras retains its full force on his view. One way of making the distinction is suggested by his argument for the existence of God, examined above: Ideas which depend on our own finite human wills are not constituents of real things. Not being voluntary is thus a necessary condition for being a real thing, but it is clearly not sufficient, since hallucinations and dreams do not depend on our wills, but are nevertheless not real.
Berkeley notes that the ideas that constitute real things exhibit a steadiness, vivacity, and distinctness that chimerical ideas do not. The most crucial feature that he points to, however, is order. They are thus regular and coherent, that is, they constitute a coherent real world.
They allow him to respond to the following objection, put forward in PHK Thus, whenever we have ideas of a working watch, we will find that if we open it, [ 15 ] we will see have ideas of an appropriate internal mechanism.
Likewise, when we have ideas of a living tulip, we will find that if we pull it apart, we will observe the usual internal structure of such plants, with the same transport tissues, reproductive parts, etc. A bit of background is needed here to see why this issue posed a special challenge for Berkeley. One traditional understanding of science, derived from Aristotle, held that it aims at identifying the causes of things. But surely, one might object, it is a step backwards to abandon our scientific theories and simply note that God causes what happens in the physical world!
What makes this advice legitimate is that he can reconstrue such talk as being about regularities in our ideas. Natural philosophers thus consider signs, rather than causes PHK , but their results are just as useful as they would be under a materialist system. Moreover, the regularities they discover provide the sort of explanation proper to science, by rendering the particular events they subsume unsurprising PHK The sort of explanation proper to science, then, is not causal explanation, but reduction to regularity.
The worry, of course, is that if to be is to be perceived for non-spirits , then there are no trees in the Quad at 3 a. Interestingly, in the Principles Berkeley seems relatively unperturbed by this natural objection to idealism. He claims that there is no problem for. So, when I say that my desk still exists after I leave my office, perhaps I just mean that I would perceive it if I were in my office, or, more broadly, that a finite mind would perceive the desk were it in the appropriate circumstances in my office, with the lights on, with eyes open, etc.
This is to provide a sort of counterfactual analysis of the continued existence of unperceived objects. The truth of the counterfactuals in question is anchored in regularity: because God follows set patterns in the way he causes ideas, I would have a desk idea if I were in the office. Unfortunately, this analysis has counterintuitive consequences when coupled with the esse est percipi doctrine McCracken , If to be is, as Berkeley insists, to be perceived, then the unperceived desk does not exist, despite the fact that it would be perceived and thus would exist if someone opened the office door.
Consequently, on this view the desk would not endure uninterrupted but would pop in and out of existence, though it would do so quite predictably. One way to respond to this worry would be to dismiss it—what does it matter if the desk ceases to exist when unperceived, as long as it exists whenever we need it? Berkeley shows signs of this sort of attitude in Principles 45—46, where he tries to argue that his materialist opponents and scholastic predecessors are in much the same boat.
If the other spirit in question is God, an omnipresent being, then perhaps his perception can be used to guarantee a completely continuous existence to every physical object. In the Three Dialogues , Berkeley very clearly invokes God in this context.
Interestingly, whereas in the Principles , as we have seen above, he argued that God must exist in order to cause our ideas of sense, in the Dialogues , —5 he argues that our ideas must exist in God when not perceived by us.
Indeed, they must exist continuously, since standard Christian doctrine dictates that God is unchanging. Although this solves one problem for Berkeley, it creates several more. And, even worse, God has ideas of all possible objects Pitcher , —2 , not just the ones which we would commonsensically wish to say exist.
Such an account in terms of divine decrees or volitions looks promising: The tree continues to exist when unperceived just in case God has an appropriate volition or intention to cause a tree-idea in finite perceivers under the right circumstances. Furthermore, this solution has important textual support: In the Three Dialogues , Hylas challenges Philonous to account for the creation, given that all existence is mind-dependent, in his view, but everything must exist eternally in the mind of God.
Philonous responds as follows:. As with the counterfactual analysis of continued existence, however, this account also fails under pressure from the esse est percipi principle:. And what is perceivable but an idea? And can an idea exist without being actually perceived? These are points long since agreed between us. Fortunately, Kenneth Winkler has put forward an interpretation which goes a great distance towards resolving this difficulty.
While the principle is never explicitly invoked or argued for by Berkeley, in a number of passages he does note the interdependence of will and understanding. Winkler plausibly suggests that Berkeley may have found this principle so obvious as to need no arguing. With it in place, we have a guarantee that anything willed by God, e. Of course, it remains true that God cannot have ideas that are, strictly speaking, the same as ours.
This problem is closely related to another that confronts Berkeley: Can two people ever perceive the same thing? One way to dissolve this difficulty is to recall that objects are bundles of ideas. Either account might be applied in order to show either that God and I may perceive the same object, or that God and I may perceive, loosely speaking, the same thing.
It also captures the fact that the bundling of ideas into objects is done by us. He does, however, have an account of error, as he shows us in the Dialogues :. He is not mistaken with regard to the ideas he actually perceives; but in the inferences he makes from his present perceptions. Thus in the case of the oar, what he immediately perceives by sight is certainly crooked; and so far he is in the right.
But if he thence conclude, that upon taking the oar out of the water he shall perceive the same crookedness; or that it would affect his touch, as crooked things are wont to do: in that he is mistaken.
Extrapolating from this, we may say that my gray idea of the cherry, formed in dim light, is not in itself wrong and forms a part of the bundle-object just as much as your red idea, formed in daylight. Arguably, however, less tractable difficulties confront him in the realm of spirits. Early on, Berkeley attempts to forestall materialist skeptics who object that we have no idea of spirit by arguing for this position himself:. Two very different responses are available to Berkeley on this issue, each of which he seems to have made at a different point in his philosophical development.
One response would be to reject spiritual substance just as he rejected material substance. Spirits, then, might be understood in a Humean way, as bundles of ideas and volitions.
Fascinatingly, something like this view is considered by Berkeley in his early philosophical notebooks see PC ff.
Why he abandons it is an interesting and difficult question; [ 25 ] it seems that one worry he has is how the understanding and the will are to be integrated and rendered one thing. The second response would be to explain why spiritual substances are better posits than material ones. To this end, Berkeley emphasizes that we have a notion of spirit, which is just to say that we know what the word means.
In the Dialogues , however, Berkeley shows a better appreciation of the force of the problem that confronts him:. Nevertheless, it is disappointing that he never gave an explicit response to the Humean challenge he entertained in his notebooks:. A closely related problem which confronts Berkeley is how to make sense of the causal powers that he ascribes to spirits.
Here again, the notebooks suggest a surprisingly Humean view:. Those things that happen from without we are not the Cause of therefore there is some other Cause of them i. There may be volition without Power. But there can be no Power without Volition. In these notebook entries, however, Berkeley seems to be suggesting that all there is to causality is this regular consequence, with the first item being a volition. Some commentators, most notably Winkler, suppose that Berkeley retains this view of causality in the published works.
The main difficulty with this interpretation is that Berkeley more than once purports to inspect our idea of body, and the sensory qualities included therein, and to conclude from that inspection that bodies are passive DM 22, PHK This procedure would make little sense if bodies, according to Berkeley, fail to be causes by definition, simply because they are not minds with wills.
Winkler , —1 supplies such an account, according to which activity means direction towards an end. But this is to identify efficient causation with final causation, a controversial move at best which Berkeley would be making without comment or argument. On this interpretation, Berkeley would again have abandoned the radical Humean position entertained in his notebooks, as he clearly did on the question of the nature of spirit.
One can only speculate as to whether his reasons would have been primarily philosophical, theological, or practical. References to these works are by section numbers or entry numbers, for PC , except for 3D, where they are by page number. A collection, useful to students, of primary texts constituting background to Berkeley or early critical reactions to Berkeley:.
Life and philosophical works 2. Dialogues 3. Other philosophically important works [Not yet available] 4. Life and philosophical works Berkeley was born in near Kilkenny, Ireland. But with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this principle may be entertained in the world; yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question, may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For what are the forementioned objects but the things we perceive by sense, and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations; and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these or any combination of them should exist unperceived?
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