GEORGE BERKELEY
(1685 to 1753)
CONTENTS
 Berkeley: An Overview
 His Life and Works
 His Major Ideas
 His Legacy
 Berkeley's Writings
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Anglican bishop (Platonist?).
No proof that matter truly exists; only our impressions of such matter
exist in our minds. The basis for all thought are ideas which God
impresses on our minds.
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His Early Life and Education
in Ireland
George Berkeley was born on
March 12, 1685, at Dysert Castle near Thomastown, Ireland, into an Anglo-Irish
family. In 1700, at age 15, he entered Trinity College, Dublin.
During those undergraduate
days he was introduced to the thinking of John Locke, in particular Locke's
Essay
concerning Human Understanding.
As a consequence, Berkeley began to
keep a journal of his thoughts on Locke's ideas and started to fashion
a response to Locke's work.
Berkeley received his BA
degree from Trinity College in 1704--and in 1707, at age 22, he became
a fellow of the College. In that same year (1707) Berkeley became ordained
as an Anglican priest.
His Early Works on Perception
and Reality
In 1709 Berkeley was ready to
publish his reflections on the popular Lockean philosophy with his own
Essay
toward a New Theory of Vision. In this work he demonstrated that
the manner by which the mind becomes conscious of what the eyes see in
no way proves the reality of the objects that we apparently see.
The following year, 1710, he gave further thrust to this line of thought
with his Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge.
Here he takes an idealist position reminiscent of Plato. He attacks
the "materialism" of Locke, claiming that things become "real" only as
the mind contemplates them. It is in our perceiving the things outside
the mind that they assemble in our minds into sensations and ideas that
then become real to us. They have no "existence" of their own apart
from being thus perceived by a conscious mind--including the mind of God.
Travels to England and the Continent
In 1713 he left Dublin and came
to London where he began to make acquaintances among philosophical circles--including
Swift and Pope (the latter becoming a life-time friend). In that
same year he published Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous,
which made his philosophical idealism a bit more accessible to the general
reader.
He then in late 1713 journed
to Italy in the company of the Earl of Peterborough, serving as his
secretary and chaplain through the summer of 1714. In 1715 he visited
Paris where he met Malebranche--and became so involved in a heated debate
with Malbranche that the latter took sick and died a few days later (!)
He moved on to Italy, where he took up the study of architecture and then
returned to France, where he submitted a paper, De motu, to the
Academie Francaise--having it published upon his return to England in 1721.
During this time he also continued to work on the second part of his
Principles.
However his manuscript became lost in his journeys and he never took up
the work again.
A Growing Concern about the
British Moral-Spiritual Life
In 1721 he returned from the
continent to England--and became alarmed at what seemed to him to be a
decided decline in the country's moral and spiritual fiber. He accordingly
wrote An Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain and
published it in that same year.
Return to Ireland
He then returned to Ireland
under the patronage of the Duke of Grafton, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.
Berkeley had been absent from his homeland since 1713. During that
absence he had been elected a senior fellow of Trinity College. Upon
his return he received both the Batchelor and Doctor of Divinity degrees
from the College. He also received the good news that a woman whom
he had never met left him half of her estate. And the Duke of Grafton
appointed Berkeley to the deanery of Derry with a monthly stipend of 11,000
pounds per annum.
The Project for Educating Indians
in Bermuda (His Newport, R.I., Years)
Berkeley himself now took up
the role of benefactor. He had been contemplating the idea of establishing
a college for American Indians in Bermuda--and to spend the rest of his
life teaching such converts to Christianity the ways of Christian civilization,
even ordaining them as ministers of the Christian gospel. In 1725
he began to gather support for his project--even approaching King George
I and his chief minister, Robert Walpole, with the idea. He obtained
a charter for his college and received promises from Parliament for funding
for his project. He also drew in a large sum of money in the form
of private subscriptions to the project.
In the meantime in 1728 he
married Anne Forster, daughter of the Speaker of the Irish House of Commons.
Shortly thereafter the newly-weds
traveled to Newport, Rhode Island, to establish a mainland link with his
Bermuda project. In addition to the huge sum of money he arrived
with, Berkeley brought with him a huge library to get this first phase
of his project up and running. He built a home in Newport and proceeded
to preach and teach at the Trinity Church in Newport--and wait for royal
action on the larger parts of his project.
But with the passing of several
years and no action from Parliament, it became apparent that the promises
of financial support from the royal government were not going to
be forthcoming. Thus Berkeley was forced to give up this life project
of his. He gave his books away, returned all private subscriptions
for his College and he and Anne returned to England in 1732.
His Moral-Theological Writings
Once again he took up publishing--more
along moral and theological than metaphysical lines however. The
Minute Philosopher, published in 1732, was a socratic dialogue with
a variety of spokesmen: the deist, atheist, skeptic, enthusiast, scoffer,
etc.
Berkeley became a favorite
conversationalist with Queen Caroline--who saw to it in 1734 that Berkeley
was appointed as the Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland. He and his
family thus established themselves in Cloyne, where they lived for the
next 18 years.
As a result of funeral of
a friend Berkeley encountered and entered into discussion with Addison,
who took the view that religion was an imposture. Berkeley answered
him and his materialist philosophy in his Analyst: a Discourse addressed
to an infidel mathematician (1734).
In 1735 he published TheQuerist,
a
study designed to improve of social policy in Ireland.
His Later Years
Declining health and experimentation
with a variety of cures led him to become an advocate of the curative
powers of "tar-water." Indeed, in 1744 he published a work entitled
Siris,
a Chain of Philosophical Reflections and Enquiries concerning the Virtues
of Tar-water. Amazingly this went through a second printing in
1747--and in 1752 he published yet another work on the same subject, Farther
Thoughts on Tar-Water. This unfortunately did nothing to improve
his admiration among later philosophers who saw him becoming increasingly
eccentric as he aged.
Shortly after publishing
this last work he moved his family to Oxford, England, (July 1752)
to supervise the entry of his son to the university there. However
his health was very bad and he died in Oxford early the next year (January
1753).
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The Lockean Setting of the Early
1700s
John Locke's influence in the
early 1700s cannot be overestimated. He (and Newton) had succeeded
in conveying to their times the notion that the world was essentially composed
of countless bits of matter drawn together through gravity to form physical
objects which moved through space in response to mechanical laws--which
in fact gave life a machine-like quality.
According to Locke, the physical
objects making up this world had both primary and secondary qualities to
them. Primary qualities were qualities of extension and motion: solidity,
shape, size, number, velocity, etc. Secondary qualities had no such
extension or motion: color, smell, sound, taste.
Locke explained that we know
of this physically extensive and active world around us because this world
constantly is "acting" upon our senses. In doing so, it stimulates
the perceptions of our mind concerning this world. These physical
or material stimuli from our outside world cause ideas about that world
to form in our minds.
Our minds, not being part
of our own physical bodies, Locke considered to be made of an "immaterial
substance." Thus mind and matter were two different substances. Mind
became aware of matter as matter imposed itself upon the mind through the
working of the senses.
The mind merely mirrored
the external material or physical world--though this mirroring Locke understood
to be most probably a fairly accurate representation of that external reality.
At least this was true with respect to the the mind's understanding of
the primary qualities of the world (extension and motion). The seconday
qualities (color, sound, smell, etc) were not themselves really part of
the material reality of the external world, but were merely colorations
of that external world given by the mind. They were subjective reactions
of the mind to the world--and not an integral part of that external material
reality itself.
Locke's theories left some
important questions open: how in fact does the mind indeed know that
the world it perceives is the world as it is--and how is it that Locke
knows that the secondary qualities of that world (color, smell, sound,
etc.) are not an integral part of that larger world? Locke's theories
could not really answer these questions.
Berkeley's Early Theory on Vision
Berkeley's Essay toward a
New Theory of Vision (1709--at age 24) took on Lockean thinking.
Interestingly, he did so by challenging the notion of Locke (and all other
"materialists") that there is a fixed, material, or absolutely real world
"out there."
Berkeley picked up on an
earlier challenge once issued to Locke concerning whether or not a person
born blind, but gaining vision in his later years, would automatically
make a connection between the shapes he had come to know over the years
through feel and the shapes he had recently come to see with his restored
vision. Locke answered "no" to the proposition. Thus, for instance,
the sense of "squareness" about an object that the blind person knew through
feel would not automatically lead to his understanding the "squareness"
that his eyes were now able to detect. He would have to learn to
establish the relationship between the way an object presented itself to
him through feel and the way it presented itself to him through sight.
Berkeley agreed with Locke
on this observation--though he went on from there to draw quite different
conclusions concerning this hypothetical situation. Berkeley put
forth the idea that the "realities" of what we see and what we feel are
of quite different orders--which is why the person with restored vision
would not make an immediate connection between "squreness" felt and "squareness"
seen.
Each of our five sense composes
an interpretation of the "reality" of our external world--each in its own
distinct way. What we thus understand of "reality," is the result
of the co-operative working of our senses. We learn over time
to relate to each other the quite different ways that each of our senses
composes the external world for our own understanding. This is how
we come ultimately to think of the world of sight, touch, sound, smell
and taste as being integral--as being one reality. But in fact what
is integral is our thinking on that world. Of the world itself we
cannot say what it really is--independent of how our physical senses organize
our perceptions of that world.
His Search for Reality
In his work Principles of
Human Knowledge, published the following year (1710) and in Three
Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, published three years after
that (1713), Berkeley carried his thinking on these matters even further.
Concerning our world, Berkeley
wrote that what is actually "out there" we cannot say with any degree of
certainty--because what is ultimately real is merely what we have come
to observe, the manner we have come to observe it. Thus to Berkeley,
"reality" is in the eyes of the beholder--so to speak. We cannot
say anything more about that world out there that we perceive. All
we can honestly affirm about our surrounding world is that particular portion
of it we are able to perceive. We can only affirm the "existence"
of that world in accordance to the measure by which we perceive it.
The grasp we do have on our
world, our hold on "reality," is located in the realm of our ideas
of that world. It is our ideas of the world, ideas found in our mind,
that constitute for us our "reality" concerning our world. These
ideas are conventionalized symbols of that world, symbols that convey some
kind of meaning to us about the surrounding world. They are reflections
of, and upon, that external world. They are not that world itself.
These ideas are like our words--mental conventions we use to organize our
response to that external world. These conventions are analytical
tools used to approach our world--they are not that world itself.
Reflecting on what that world
actually is, apart from our perceptions of it, is itself a meaningless
and vain enterprise. There is no reality to such an external world.
"Reality" only arises when our we address our world with observation, thought,
inquiry--only as ideas form in our minds about that external world.
The external world is definitely there to stimulate our thoughts, to give
rise to our ideas. But what ulitmately is "real" is not that external
world that stimulates our thought--but the thoughts or ideas themselves
that we hold about the external world. Thus ultimately for Berkeley,
there is no distinction between reality and ideas--for they are one and
the same thing.
How Could We Be Sure That Our
Ideas Are True?
Taking a bit of a page from
Locke, Berkeley himself viewed the human mind as something quite apart
from the "reality" of ideas that the mind itself reflected on. The
mind itself was "spirit." It was not part of the realm of perceived
ideas--it was part of the realm of the perceiver itself. It was the
active ingredient in reality--the thing that gave rise to reality, without
being part of that realm of reality itself.
Berkeley compared the human
mind or spirit to the mind or spirit of God. God is mind or spirit--the
very mind or spirit that engineers everything into existence through the
action of contemplating reality. When we think, we are participating
in the very process by which God engineers existence into being.
Indeed it is the spirit of God that gives us the ideas ourselves concerning
the world around us.
God in the Ultimate Scheme of
Things
To Berkeley, this connection
of our thoughts with God's thoughts was the ultimate proof of the validity
of our ideas--and the basis for his sense that his philosophy was superior
to the philosophy of those deists who limited God's role in their cosmology
to mere originator of the universe and nothing more. To Berkeley,
to be able to demonstrate a necessary relationship between our ideas and
the realm of God was a much loftier philosophy--for it not only gave a
stronger underpinning to the truth of human thought, but it preserved the
notion of the indispensible role of God in the continuance of all reality.
What to Do with Modern "Science"?
In one of his writings,
De
motu (1721), he addressed the question as to what to do with modern
science, especially its physics based on a materialistic vision of nature.
His response was to accept physics as a useful methodology, and nothing
more. It was indeed a very useful procedure for predicting the action
or behavior of the perceived world of our senses. However science's
ability to predict actions in the surrounding world did not for Berkeley
in any way validate that world itself as ultimate reality.
His recommendation was to
use the methodology of science without becoming drawn into the belief that
this world of science was the final statement on ultimate reality itself.
His Move to a Platonic Idealism
in His Later Years
In Berkeley's Siris:
A Chain of Philosophical Reflections, and Inquiries concerning the Virtues
of Tar-Water (published in 1744), despite the work's apparent focus
on tar-water as a medical cure, his focus is on the relationship between
the body and the soul. His thinking has evolved from earlier years.
The realm of perceptions are no longer the focal point of his interest.
His ideas are not just merely representations of the perceived world.
He is now more focused on how human thoughts are linked with the higher
thoughts of God.
His philosophical focus has
shifted from the operations of the mind in relation to the perceived world
to the operations of the human soul in its relation to God.
He has not by any means left
behind him the realm of perceptions and ideas that so fascinated him as
a youth. But he has relegated this realm to sort of a first-stage
in the larger process of human understanding. This process is conceived
of now more as a spiritual pilgrimage toward God, a process that moves
the soul from its focus on the surrounding world (the perceptual realm),
to a focus on the meaning of that world (the rational or conceptional realm),
to a focus on the transcendant world of God (the spiritual realm).
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Berkeley was an individual
who was out of step with the philosophical "cutting-edge" of his own times--especially
as it was just coming enthusiastically into the new era of modern materialist
science.
Today we might recognize
Berkeley as an early forerunner of the phenomenalists (such as John Stuart
Mill of the mid-1800s)--who took the view that the only thing we can know
with certainty is what we know in our thoughts. However these phenomenalists
would disagree strongly with Berkeley's move from pure phenomenalism to
his theism, or belief that ultimate reality is grounded in God, in particular
in the thoughts of God.
Perhaps now with the rise
of quantum mechanics and the strange attractions phenomenon of chaos theory
there is a reason to look again at how Berkeley's mind evolved to the "higher"
view that consciousness actually constitutes reality, and does not just
merely mirror it.
This removes life, the human
soul, from the passive, almost non-existent quality that materialism forced
on modern thinking--a materialism that Berkeley fought with all his intellectual
might. Perhaps finally he is beginning to see his battle being won.
That remains, of course, to be seen.
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Berkeley's major works or writings:
The New Theory
of Vision (1709)
Principles
of Human Knowledge (1710)
Three
Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (1713)
De motu (1721)
Essay towards preventing
the ruin of Great Britain 1721)
A Proposal for the
Better Supplying of Churches in our
Foreign Plantations, and for converting
the savage
Americans to Christianity by a college to be erected
in the Summer Islands, otherwise called the Isles of
Bermuda (1725)
Alciphron or the Minute
Philosopher (1732)
Theory of Vision,
or Visual Language Vindicated and
Explained (1733)
The
Analyst (1734)
The
Querist (1735)
Discourse addressed
to Magistrates (1736)
Siris: A Chain
of Philosophical Reflections, and
Inquiries concerning the Virtues ofTar-Water
(1744)
Maxims concerning
Patriotism (1750)
Farther Thoughts on
Tar-water (1752)
Philosophical Commentaries [an 1871 collection of his
notes during his Trinity College days]
A
Defence of Free-Thinking in Mathematics
 Miles
H. Hodges
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