Philosophy and Religion | Page 8

not in point A or in point B taken by themselves. It is all in the 'between': 'betweenness' from its very nature cannot exist in any one point of space or in several isolated points of space or things in space; it must exist only in some one existent which holds together and connects those points. And nothing, as far as we can understand, can do that except a mind. Apart from mind there can be no relatedness: apart from relatedness no space: apart from space no matter. It follows that apart from mind there can be no matter.
It will probably be known to all of you that the {12} first person to make this momentous inference was Bishop Berkeley. There was, indeed, an obscure medieval schoolman, hardly recognized by the historians of Philosophy, one Nicholas of Autrecourt, Dean of Metz,[3] who anticipated him in the fourteenth century, and other better-known schoolmen who approximated to the position; and there are, of course, elements in the teaching of Plato and even of Aristotle, or possible interpretations of Plato and Aristotle, which point in the same direction. But full-blown Idealism, in the sense which involves a denial of the independent existence of matter, is always associated with the name of Bishop Berkeley.
I can best make my meaning plain to you by quoting a passage or two from his Principles of Human Knowledge, in which he extends to the primary qualities of matter the analysis which Locke had already applied to the secondary.
'But, though it were possible that solid, figured, moveable substances may exist without the mind, corresponding to the ideas we have of bodies, yet how is it possible for us to know this? Either we must know it by Sense or by Reason.--As for our senses, by them we have the knowledge only of our sensations, ideas, or those things that are immediately perceived by sense, call them what you will; but they do not inform us that things exist {13} without the mind, or unperceived, like to those which are perceived. This the Materialists themselves acknowledge.--It remains therefore that if we have any knowledge at all of external things, it must be by Reason inferring their existence from what is immediately perceived by sense. But what reason can induce us to believe the existence of bodies without the mind, from what we perceive, since the very patrons of Matter themselves do not pretend there is any necessary connexion betwixt them and our ideas? I say it is granted on all hands--and what happens in dreams, frenzies, and the like, puts it beyond dispute--that it is possible we might be affected with all the ideas we have now, though there were no bodies existing without resembling them. Hence, it is evident the supposition of external bodies is not necessary for the producing our ideas; since it is granted they are produced sometimes, and might possibly be produced always in the same order we see them in at present, without their concurrence.
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'In short, if there were external bodies, it is impossible we should ever come to know it; and if there were not, we might have the very same reasons to think there were that we have now. Suppose--what no one can deny possible--an intelligence without the help of external bodies, to be affected with the same train of sensations or ideas that you are, imprinted in the same order and with like vividness in his mind. I ask whether that intelligence hath not all the reason to believe the existence of corporeal substances, represented by his ideas, and exciting them in his mind, that you can possibly have for believing the same thing? Of this there can be no {14} question--which one consideration were enough to make any reasonable person suspect the strength of whatever arguments he may think himself to have, for the existence of bodies without the mind.'[4]
Do you say that in that case the tables and chairs must be supposed to disappear the moment we all leave the room? It is true that we do commonly think of the tables and chairs as remaining, even when there is no one there to see or touch them. But that only means, Berkeley explains, that if we or any one else were to come back into the room, we should perceive them. Moreover, even in thinking of them as things which might be perceived under certain conditions, they have entered our minds and so proclaimed their ideal or mind-implying character. To prove that things exist without the mind we should have to conceive of things as unconceived or unthought of. And that is a feat which no one has ever yet succeeded in accomplishing.
Here is Berkeley's own answer to the objection:
'But, say you, surely there