The Works of George Berkeley. Vol. 1 of 4: Philosophical Works, 1705-21Berkeley, George
Philosophy
The Works of George Berkeley. Vol. 1 of 4: Philosophical Works, 1705-21
Berkeley, George
Philosophy -- Early works to 1800
Voltaire and Condillac gave currency to the _New Theory_ in France, and it
soon became a commonplace with D’Alembert, Diderot, Buffon, and other
French philosophers. In Germany we have allusions to it in the Berlin
Memoirs and elsewhere; but, although known by name, if not in its
distinctive principle and latent idealism, it has not obtained the
consideration which its author’s developed theory of the material as well
as the visible world has received. The Kantian _a priori_ criticism of our
cognition of Space, and of our mathematical notions, subsequently
indisposed the German mind to the _a posteriori_ reasoning of Berkeley’s
_Essay_.
Its influence is apparent in British philosophy. The following passages in
Hartley’s _Observations on Man_, published in 1749, illustrate the extent
to which some of the distinctive parts of the new doctrine were at that
time received by an eminent English psychologist:—
“Distance is judged of by the quantity of motion, and figure by the
relative quantity of distance.... And, as the sense of sight is much more
extensive and expedite than feeling, we judge of tangible qualities
chiefly by sight, which therefore may be considered, agreeably to Bishop
Berkeley’s remark, as a philosophical language for the ideas of feeling;
being, for the most part, an adequate representative of them, and a
language common to all mankind, and in which they all agree very nearly,
after a moderate degree of experience.
“However, if the informations from touch and sight disagree at any time,
we are always to depend upon touch, as that which, according to the usual
ways of speaking upon these subjects, is the true representation of the
essential properties, i.e. as the earnest and presage of what other
tangible impressions the body under consideration will make upon our
feeling in other circumstances; also what changes it will produce in other
bodies; of which again we are to determine by our feeling, if the visual
language should not happen to correspond to it exactly. And it is from
this difference that we call the touch the reality, light the
representative—also that a person born blind may foretell with certainty,
from his present tangible impressions, what others would follow upon
varying the circumstances; whereas, if we could suppose a person to be
born without feeling, and to arrive at man’s estate, he could not, from
his present visible impressions, judge what others would follow upon
varying the circumstances. Thus the picture of a knife, drawn so well as
to deceive his eye, would not, when applied to another body, produce the
same change of visible impressions as a real knife does, when it separates
the parts of the body through which it passes. But the touch is not liable
to these deceptions. As it is therefore the fundamental source of
information in respect of the essential properties of matter, it may be
considered as our first and principal key to the knowledge of the external
world.” (Prop. 30.)
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