by Will Durant
Under Locke’s supervision, and on Locke’s scheme of teaching a language by conversation, Elizabeth Birch, skilled in Greek and Latin, enabled Anthony to read both these languages with ease by the age of eleven. Then off to Winchester School; then three years of travel, during which he learned French and French ways, and acquired such a flair for art as must have seemed unseemly in an English lord. He served for a year in Parliament—long enough to note “the injustice and corruption of both parties”; 163 but London smoke so aggravated his asthma that he retreated to Holland, where he found the intellectual air vibrant with Spinoza and Bayle. Having succeeded to the earldom (1699), he spent the remainder of his life at his country estate. Four years before his death he married, and was astonished to find himself as happy as before. 164 In 1711 he published his collected essays under the omnibus title Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times. In 1713, only forty-two years old, he died.
It was not to be expected that a man who had inherited such a fortune on the earth should bother much about heaven. He deprecated the “enthusiasm”—by which his time meant fanaticism—of those Englishmen who thought that they exhaled divine revelations. Any form of violent emotion or speech was in his judgment a mark of ill-breeding. But he thought it wiser to smile at such people than to persecute them; indeed, wit and humor, which he made the subject of an originative essay, appeared to him the best approach to everything, even to theology. He agreed with Bayle that atheists could be decent citizens, and that they had done less harm to religion and morality than the brutality of faiths wielding power. 165 He protested against “the adoration and love of a God whose character it is to be captious and of high resentment, subject to wrath and anger, furious and revengeful . . . , encouraging deceit and treachery amongst men, favorable to a few . . . and cruel to the rest.” 166 He wondered what effect such a conception of the deity had had upon human character and conduct. He thought it abject and cowardly to be virtuous from hope of heaven or fear of hell; virtue is real only when practiced for its own sake. However, man being what he is, it is necessary to inculcate belief in such future punishments and rewards. 167 “’Tis real humanity and kindness to hide strong truths from tender eyes. . . . It may be necessary . . . for wise men to speak in parables.” 168 So Shaftesbury defended an established church, and tried to reconcile evil and theism with an optimistic philosophy that reduced evil to a human prejudice. 169 Nevertheless Alexander Pope thought that the Characteristics had done more harm to revealed religion in England than all the works of explicit infidels. 170
Shaftesbury agreed with Aristotle and Locke that happiness is the rightful aim of human actions; he defined philosophy as “the study of happiness.” 171 But he opposed the reduction of all human motives to egoism or self-interest. According to that analysis (recently expounded by Hobbes and La Rochefoucauld),
civility, hospitality, humanity towards strangers or people in distress, is only a more deliberate selfishness. An honest heart is only a more cunning one; and honesty and good nature a . . . better regulated self-love. The love of kindred, children, and posterity is purely love of self and one’s own immediate blood. . . . Magnanimity and courage, no doubt, are modifications of this universal self-love! 172
Against this view Shaftesbury alleged the double equipment of human nature with instincts for personal gain and instincts for living in a group. He believed that society and the state had originated not in a social contract but in the “herding principle and associating inclination . . . so natural and strong in most men.” 173 There are “natural affections . . . founded in love, complacency, goodwill, and sympathy with the kind. . . . To have these natural and good affections in full strength is to have the chief means of self-enjoyment; to want them is certain misery and ill.” 174 To be “good” is to have one’s inclinations consistently directed toward the good of the group: the larger the group that inspires these feelings, the better the man. The consciousness of such social sympathy is the moral sense. This is innate, not in its specific commands (which vary from group to group), but in its instinctive ground, “the sense of right and wrong . . . being as natural to us as natural affection itself, and being a first principle in our constitution.” 175
Shaftesbury passed from ethics to aesthetics by identifying them. The good and the beautiful are one: morality is “the taste of beauty and the relish of what is decent”; so we speak of some unsocial acts as ugly, for we feel that they offend that harmony of the part with the whole which is both goodness and beauty. A man can make his life a work of art—of unity and harmony—by developing an aesthetic sense in which morality will be an element; a man “of thorough good breeding” (our aristocrat believed) does this, and is by training “incapable of doing a rude or brutal action”; 176 his formed good taste will guide him in conduct as in art. Truth too is a kind of beauty, a harmony of the parts of knowledge with the whole. Hence Shaftesbury took readily the side of classicism in art: form, unity, and harmony seemed to him the essentials of excellence in poetry, architecture, and sculpture; and in painting color is less basic and noble than line. He was the first modern who made beauty a fundamental problem in philosophy; he began the discussion that at the end of the eighteenth century culminated in Lord Kames and Burke.
This was one line of Shaftesbury’s influence; there were many others. His emphasis on feeling affected the romantic movement, especially in Germany through Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, and Herder—who called him “Europe’s amiable Plato.” 177 In France this influence appeared in Diderot as well as in Rousseau. His interpretation of religion as theoretically weak but morally indispensable touched Kant’s practical nerve. His stress on sympathy as the basis of morals reappeared in Hume and Adam Smith. His ideas on art shared in forming Winckelmann’s classical ecstasy. Beginning as a pupil of the intellectual and not too aesthetic Locke, he became (perhaps by the natural resistance of every generation to its generators) the philosopher of feeling, sentiment, and beauty. Lover of the classic style in art, he became a source of the romantic revival on the Continent, though in England poetry and architecture followed his classic bent. And he had the distinction of making philosophy shine with a grace of style reminiscent of Plato, and then rivaled only by Berkeley.
VII. GEORGE BERKELEY: 1685–1753
He was born at Dysert Castle in County Kilkenny. At fifteen he entered Trinity College, Dublin. At twenty he formed a club to study “the new philosophy,” which meant Locke. At twenty-one he entered into his “commonplace book” the idea which, he hoped, would crush materialism forever: that nothing exists except by being perceived, that therefore mind is the only reality, and matter is a myth.
As . . . the doctrine of matter, or corporeal substance [has been] the main pillar and support of skepticism, so likewise upon the same faith have been raised all the impious schemes of atheism and irreligion. . . . How great a friend material substance hath been to atheists in all ages, were needless to relate. All their monstrous systems have so visible and necessary a dependence on it, that when this cornerstone is once removed, the whole fabric cannot choose but fall to the ground; insomuch that it is no longer worth while to bestow a particular consideration on the absurdities of every wretched sect of atheists. 178
So in the next seven years, and before completing his twenty-ninth birthday, Berkeley issued his most important works: An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists (1713). The first was a brilliant contribution to psychology and optics; the others profoundly stirred the waters of modern philosophy.
The essay on vision stemmed from a passage in Locke, 179 which told how William Molyneux (a tutor in Trinity College, Dublin) had posed a problem to him: Would a man born blind be able, on recovering his sight, to distinguish by sight alone a sphere from a cube if both of these were of like material and size? Molyneux and Locke had concurred in the negative; Berkel
ey agreed with them and added his own analysis. Sight gives us no perception of the distance, size, relative positions, or movements of objects, except after correction by the sense of touch; through repeated experiences this correction becomes almost instantaneous; and sight then gives us such a judgment of the shape, distance, place, and motion of objects seen as we should have if we touched them.
A man born blind, being made to see, would at first have no idea of distance by sight; the sun and stars, the remotest objects as well as the nearer, would all seem to be in his eye, or rather in his mind. The objects intromitted by sight would seem to him (as in truth they are) no other than a new set of thoughts or sensations, each whereof is as near to him as the perception of pain or pleasure or the most inward passions of the soul. For our judging objects perceived by sight to be at any distance, or without the mind, is entirely the effect of experience. 180
Space, then, is a mental construct; it is a system of relationships built up in the course of experience to co-ordinate our perceptions of sight and touch. Operations reported by the Royal Society (1709, 1728) confirmed this view: when a congenitally blind person was surgically given sight, he was at first “so far from making any judgment about distances that he thought all objects whatever touched his eyes. . . . He knew not the shape of anything, nor any one thing from another, however different in shape or magnitude.” 181
The Principles of Human Knowledge was a remarkable product for a lad of twenty-five. Again Berkeley took a leap out of Locke’s Essay. If all knowledge comes from the senses, nothing has reality for us unless we perceive or have perceived it; esse est percipi—to be is to be perceived. Locke had supposed that perceptions were caused by external objects pressing upon our sense organs. How do you know, asked Berkeley, that such objects exist? Have we not in our dreams ideas as vivid as in our waking hours? Locke tried to save the independent reality of objects by distinguishing between their primary and secondary qualities: the latter were subjective, “in the mind”; the others—extension, solidity, figure, number, motion, rest—were objective; they subsisted in some mysterious substratum of which Locke confessed himself ignorant, but which he and the world identified with “matter.” Berkeley now announced that the primary qualities are as subjective as the secondary; that we know the extension, solidity, figure, number, motion, and rest of objects only through perception; that therefore these primary qualities too are subjective, are ideas. The world is for us just a bundle of perceptions. “It is the mind that frames all that variety of bodies which compose the visible world, any one whereof does not exist longer than it is perceived.” 182 Take away from “matter” the primary as well as the secondary qualities, and “matter” becomes a meaningless nonentity. The materialist is left mouthing nothings. 183
Berkeley was well aware that others besides materialists would protest against this sleight-of-hand evaporation of the external world. He was not at a loss when asked if the furniture in our rooms ceases to exist when no one is there to perceive it. 184 He did not deny the reality of an external world, an external source for our perceptions; 185 he merely denied the materiality of that world. External objects may continue to exist when we do not perceive them, but that is only because they exist as percepts in the mind of God. 186 And in truth (he went on) our sensations are caused not by external matter, but by the divine power acting upon our senses, Only spirit can act upon spirit; God is the sole source of our sensations and ideas. 187*
Berkeley’s contemporaries thought this was all an Irish lark. Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son that
Doctor Berkeley, a very worthy, ingenious, and learned man, has written a book to prove that there is no such thing as matter, and that nothing exists but an idea. . . . His arguments are, strictly speaking, unanswerable; but yet I am so far from being convinced by them that I am determined to go on to eat and drink, and walk and ride, in order to keep that matter, which I so mistakenly imagine my body at present to consist of, in as good plight as possible. 188
And all the world knows what pains Dr. Johnson took to answer Dr. Berkeley:
After we came out of church [says Boswell] we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that everything in the universe is merely ideal. I observed that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I shall never forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it thus!” 189
Berkeley, of course, would have pointed out to the Great Cham that all that he knew of the stone, including the pain in his toe, was subjective: a bundle of perceptions called a stone, mingling with a bundle of auditory sensations called Boswell and a bundle of indoctrinated ideas called philosophy, had generated a response resulting in another bundle of sensations. Hume agreed with Boswell and Chesterfield: Berkeley’s arguments “admit of no answer and produce no conviction.” 190
Hume found Berkeley’s puzzle fascinating, but drew from it a devastating conclusion. He admitted that “matter” vanishes when we divest it of all the qualities which our perceptions ascribe to it, but he suggested that the same could be said of “mind.” We have seen Locke’s preview of this point; but Berkeley foresaw it, too. In the third of the Dialogues he makes Hylas challenge Philonous:
You acknowledge you have, properly speaking, no idea of your own soul. . . . You admit, nevertheless, that there is a spiritual substance, although you have no idea of it; while you deny there can be such a thing as material substance, because you have no notion or idea of it. Is this fair dealing? . . . To me it seems that according to your own way of thinking, and in consequence of your own principles, it should follow that you are only a system of floating ideas, without any substance to support them. Words are not to be used without a meaning. And as there is no more meaning in spiritual substance than in material substance, the one is to be exploded as well as the other. 191
Philonous (lover of mind) answers Hylas (Mr. Matter):
How often must I repeat, that I know or am conscious of my own being; and that I myself and not my ideas, but somewhat else, a thinking, active principle that perceives, knows, wills, and operates about ideas? I know that I, one and the same self, perceive both colors and sounds; that a color cannot perceive a sound, nor a sound a color; that I am therefore one individual principle, distinct from color and sound. 192
Hume was not convinced by this reply; he concluded that Berkeley, willynilly, had destroyed both matter and soul, and that the writings of the brilliant bishop, who had longed to defend religion, “form the best lessons of skepticism which are to be found either among the ancient or modern philosophers, Bayle not excepted.” 193
Forty years remained to Berkeley after publishing his three treatises. In 1724 he was appointed dean of Derry. In 1728, on a promise of funds from the government, he sailed to found a college in Bermuda for “the reformation of manners among the English in our western plantations, and the propagation of the Gospel among the American savages.” 194 Having reached Newport, Rhode Island, he waited for the promised twenty thousand pounds, none of which ever came. While there he composed Alciphron, or The Minute Philosopher (1732), to put an end to all religious doubt. He left his mark upon the mind of Jonathan Edwards, and wrote a famous line: “Westward the course of empire takes its way.” After three years of vain expectations he returned to England. In 1734 he was appointed bishop of Cloyne. We have seen how Swift’s Vanessa made him one of her executors, and left him half her property. In 1744 he issued a strange treatise, Siris, . . . the Virtues of Tar-Water—to which he had been introduced by the aforesaid savages, and which he now recommended as a cure for smallpox. He died at Oxford in 1753, aged sixty-eight.
No man ever surpassed him in proving the unreality of the real. In his effort to restore religious belief, and to exorcise the Hobbesian materialism that was infecting England, he turned philosophy outside in, and made �
��all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, . . . all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world,” 195 to exist for man as merely ideas in his mind. It was a risky enterprise, and Berkeley would have shuddered to see Hume and Kant draw from his pious principles a critique of reason that left no basic dogma undislodged in the ancient and beloved edifice of the Christian faith. We admire the subtlety of his web-weaving, and concede that no one since Plato had written nonsense so charmingly. We shall find his influence everywhere in Britain and Germany in the eighteenth century, less in France, but rising again in the epistemological abracadabra of nineteenth-century Kantians. Even today European philosophy has not yet quite made up its mind that the external world exists. Until it reconciles itself to the extreme probability thereof, and faces the problems of life and death, the world will pass it by.
All in all, this was the finest epoch in the history of English philosophy. The bell that Francis Bacon had rung to call the wits together had been heard after the subsiding fury of the Civil War. Hobbes was the bridge over that mindless void, Newton was the lever by which mechanics moved theology, Locke was the peak from which the problems of modern philosophy came clearly into view. From that English quartet, soon abetted by the canny, uncanny Hume, came a powerful influence into France and Germany. The French thinkers of this period were not so profound or original as the English, but more brilliant, partly because they were Gauls, partly because a more stringent censorship compelled them to spend their substance upon form and dispense their wisdom in wit. Then in 1726 Voltaire came to England. When he returned he carried Newton, Locke, Bacon, Hobbes, and other contraband in his bags; and France for half a century thereafter used English science and philosophy as weapons to écraser l’infâme of superstition, obscurantism, and ignorance. An English midwife served at the accouchement of the French Enlightenment.