Berkeley's Principles

Expanded and Explained

George Berkeley, Tyron Goldschmidt, Scott Stapleford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317389064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Berkeley's Principles: Expanded and Explained includes the entire classical text of the Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge in bold font, a running commentary blended seamlessly into the text in regular font and analytic summaries of each section. The commentary is like a professor on hand to guide the reader through every line of the daunting prose and every move in the intricate argumentation. The unique design helps today'sstudents learn how to read and engage with one of modern philosophy's most important and exciting classics.

Of the Principles of Human Knowledge: Part I

The objects of human knowledge are ideas—nothing else is or can be perceived. The proper object of perception differs for each sensory modality: Sight perceives light and colours, hearing perceives sounds, smell perceives odours and so on. Clusters of ideas regularly perceived in unison are treated as objects and typically given a name. They trigger positive or negative emotions in us depending on whether we find them pleasing or displeasing.

1. Let us reflect on what is present to the conscious mind. What sorts of things do we perceive? We’ll call the things we perceive—the things that are immediately present to the conscious mind—the ‘objects of human knowledge’. It is evident to any one who looks inside his own mind and takes a survey of these objects of human knowledge that they fall into three distinct groups. When I focus on the objects before me, it is clear that they are either (1) ideas actually imprinted on and coming from the senses, or else (2) such objects as are perceived by attending to the passions I undergo—such as a feeling of satisfaction or desire—and concentrating on the operations of the mind while it is working, or lastly (3) ideas formed by the help of memory and imagination, either uniting and compounding sensory data, or dividing it, or else reproducing through recollection—what you might call ‘barely representing’—those things originally perceived in the aforesaid ways. Here I am partly in agreement with my English predecessor, John Locke (1632–1704), who calls them (1) ideas of sensation, (2) ideas of reflection and (3) ideas of the imagination (which includes the ideas of memory). A point of disagreement concerns (2): As will become clear shortly, there are no ideas of reflection, but only what I will later call notions (see Sections 27 and 143). We’ll talk about the third group in Sections 28 to 33. For now, we should direct our attention to the first group—the ideas of sensation. We have five senses and each of them gives us a certain type of idea. By sight I have the ideas of light and colours with their several degrees of intensity and variations in hue. By touch I perceive, for example, hard and soft, heat and cold, motion and resistance, and of all these qualities I perceive more and less either as to their quantity—the number of things moving, for instance—or their degree—more swiftly, say, or very slow. Smelling furnishes me with odours; the palate supplies me with tastes, and hearing conveys sounds to the mind in all their variety of tone and composition. And as several of these are observed to accompany each other regularly in my experience, they come to be marked by one name, and so to be reputed, or viewed as, one individual thing. Thus, for example, a certain colour, taste, smell, figure and consistence having been observed to go together on various occasions, are accounted and regarded as one distinct thing, signified and set off from all others by the name ‘apple’. The object itself is just this cluster of ideas which we pick out with that word as a matter of convenience. Other collections of ideas constitute a stone, a tree, a book, and so on. For what I say of the apple holds, likewise, for all other sensible things; which things, insofar as they are pleasing or disagreeable to us, stir up and excite the passions of love, hatred, joy, grief, and so forth, causing us to seek them out or to avoid them, as the case may be.

The subject of human knowledge is the mind—also called the ‘soul’, ‘spirit’ or ‘self’. It is the thinking thing which has ideas and in which they exist. It is neither reducible to ideas nor built up out of them. The mind is an active being that can perceive, will, imagine and remember.

2. But besides all that endless variety of ideas there are in the mind or soul, above and beyond all the objects of human knowledge, there is likewise the mind itself, something which knows ideas or perceives them. In addition to knowing and perceiving, moreover, the mind manipulates ideas in various ways and exercises diverse operations, such as willing (I may call up the idea of red), imagining (I imagine eating an apple), and remembering (I remember reading a book). The mind evidently has this power to perceive ideas, to recollect and think about them when they are no longer present in sensation, to break them apart, as it were, and reassemble them in new combinations (see Introduction, Section 10). This perceiving, active being that wills, imagines, recalls and reassembles is what I call a ‘mind’, ‘spirit’, ‘soul’ or ‘my self’. Though others may invest these terms with different meanings, I use them interchangeably. By which words—‘mind’, ‘soul’, ‘spirit’—therefore, I do not mean to pick out or denote any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, that very thing wherein they exist. The mind is thus the receptacle of ideas or, putting it more plainly, it is that which ‘has’ them. To say that the mind ‘has’ ideas is the same as saying that it is the thing, whereby they are perceived; for the existence of an idea consists solely in being perceived by a mind.

No one supposes that a mere thought, an emotion or something imagined can exist outside the mind and unperceived. The same thing holds for sensations: They cannot exist outside of a mind perceiving them. In order to grasp this truth—that no idea of sensation can exist unperceived—we need only understand what an idea is. Understanding what an idea is involves—at least in part—understanding the existence conditions for ideas. And since sensible objects are collections of sensory ideas (see Section 1), their existence conditions are the same as those for ideas. To understand that the being of sensible objects consists in their being perceived, therefore, you need only understand what it means to say that an idea—or a collection of ideas—exists. Berkeley identifies three existence conditions here in support of his idealist principle that no sensible object can exist outside of a mind perceiving it.

3. Consider a thought (that 12 is greater than seven, for instance), a passion (say, a feeling of happiness) and an idea formed by the imagination (maybe the idea of Medusa or Pegasus). That none of these things—neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, whether we take the examples just given or others—exist without the mind, is what every body believes and will certainly allow to be true. For who could suppose that bare ideas like these exist outside the mind independently of being perceived? Their existence is reducible to our perception of them—they are mere ideas, after all. And it seems no less evident to me that the same thing must hold for ideas of sensation, taken individually or in combination. What I mean to say is that the various sensations or ideas imprinted on the mind by the five senses, however they are blended or combined together (that is, whatever objects they compose—an apple, a tree, a book or whatever) cannot exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving them. Some truths are as clear as daylight to anyone who thinks them through. That ideas cannot exist outside of minds perceiving them is a case in point. I think a clear and intuitive knowledge may be obtained of this obvious truth, by any one that shall attend to his thoughts carefully and consider what is meant by the term ‘exist’ when it is applied to sensible things. I ask you, what does it mean to say that a sensible object exists? What are we asserting when we claim that something sensible is? Here I am in my study with papers spread out before me. The table I write on, I say, exists, and to say that is no more than to say that I perceive it, that I see and feel it; and even if I were to go out of my study and head downstairs to the kitchen, I should still say it existed, meaning thereby, not that I perceive it now, but that if I was in my study I might perceive it, indeed, that I would perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it—it could be God or just some other person, such as my maid or my servant. It’s not as if there’s a table perceived and a table unperceived. I don’t even understand the expression ‘a table unperceived’. And I doubt that my reader does either. Consider the claim: ‘There was an odour’. By this, I mean only that I had a perception of smell—that is to say, that it, the odour, was smelled; when I say there was a sound, I mean only that I perceived something by hearing—that is to say, that it, the sound, was heard; and when I say there was a colour or figure, I just mean that I had a visual or tactile sensation and thus that it, the colour or figure, was perceived by sight or touch. This is all that I can understand by these and the like expressions—they are simply reports on perceptions I had. They make no reference to things existing apart from the mind or perception. For as to what is said by some philosophers of the material or absolute existence of unthinking things outside the mind and without any relation to their being perceived, that seems to me perfectly unintelligible and totally meaningless. For sensible objects, to be is to be perceived, plain and simple. Their esse is percipi, in other words, nor is it possible they should have any existence, outside of the minds or thinking things which perceive them. So I am not denying that a table exists. I am explaining what it means to say that a table exists. And the only sense I can put on that expression is in terms of actual and possible perceptions. That’s what we all mean, and the only thing we can mean, by ‘exist’ when applied to objects of the senses.

Philosophers believe that the things around us—ordinary objects such as apples and oranges, tables and chairs—exist outside our minds. But this is a mistake. For the objects around us are what we perceive by sense. And what we perceive by sense are ideas, as explained already in Section 1. Thus, the objects around us are id...