Berkeley and The Microworld

Berkeley and the Microworld
by Catherine Wilson (Edmonton)

Introduction
Intensely debated in the 1930s, the question of the unity of Berkeley's
philosophy from the time of the Principles of 1710 to the Siris of 1744
was abandoned when it seemed to lead only to the exhaustion of the
original participants without establishing any new avenues for re-
search.
1
The problem was how to reconcile Berkeley's view that things
are only ideas and are as such inefficacious with the Siris
9
s apparent
commitment to insensible particles and spiritistic but non-mental agen-
cies. In the 1980s there was a sudden resurgence of interest. In his 1982
paper, "The Philosopher by Fire in Berkeley's Alciphron", I. C. Tipton,
though stating that he was confident that this aether is not corporeal
and active and that the doctrines of Siris are reconcilable with esse es t
percipi, observed that most commentators "have been embarrassed by
what Berkeley says concerning the 'invisible fire', light, or aether"
2
. In
1986, J. O. Urmson raised the issue of corpuscularianism in Siris again
and confessed himself baffled as to how the active aether of that work
1
The extremes were represented by J. D. Mabbott, who, in "The Place of God in
Berkeley's Philosophy", J. Phil. Studies (Philosophy) 6, 1931, regarded the Siris
as a deeply uncharacteristic, even aberrant work, and A. A. Luce in "The Unity
of the Berkeleian Philosophy", Mind 46, 1937, 44-52 and 180-90; and by J.
Linnell, "Berkeley's Siris" Personalist 42, 1960, 5 12, who saw it as continuing
the main themes of the earlier books. The thesis that Siris represents in some
sense the 'real' Berkeley, who is not the figure of the Dialogues and the Principles,
is advanced by P. J. Werz "Berkeley's Christian Neo-Platonism", Journal of the
History of Ideas 37, 1976, and J. Wild, George Berkeley: A Study of his Life and
Philosophy, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1936, following A. C.
Eraser's studies of 1881 and 1909. T, E. Jessop's introduction to Siris strives to
maintain the official editorial unity position, but this fine discussion actually
undercuts it considerably.
2
I. C. Tipton, "The 'Philosopher by Fire' in Berkeley's Alciphron", in: C. Turbaync,
ed. Berkeley: Critical and Interpretive Essays, Minneapolis, Univ. of Minnesota,
1982.
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38 C a t h e r i n e Wi l s o n
was supposed to be reconciled wi t h the esse est percipi doctrine.
3
More
r ecent ly, Gabriel Moked, by investigating the scientific scheme of the
wor k has supplied a sound basis for discussion of the issue, arguing
t h a t Berkeley did change his mi nd, offering, in later life, "his own
br and of 'the corpuscularian philosophy,' which perhaps lacks some
i nt r ansi gent features of his epistemology in its heroic age, but takes
i nt o account many aspects of philosophy of science without rejecting
the basic premisses of immaterialism"
4
.
In the original debate, as in the latest one, the last word seems to
have been had by the contingent defending the unity of Berkeley's
philosophy. A.A. Luce constructed a sort of concordance to all of
Berkeley's works and showed that, whatever Berkeley says about cor-
puscles, the active aether, etc., the same theses: the passivity of matter,
laws as statements of regularities observed in nature, and the existence
of the world in the mind are written down in Sins as in the Dialogues
and Principles, and he based his case on these incontestable re-inscrip-
tions. Moked too concludes that Berkeley remains an "immaterialist"
in the same sense as before, and that what is new in the Sir is is a
willingness to accept hypothetico-deductive forms of explanation. Any
historian might wonder what point there could be to re-opening a
question in which the textual evidence is apparently so unambiguous.
Adding to that voice, the philosopher is apt to point out that, once
someone has asserted that the world is in the mind, it does not much
matter what particular scientific ontology that person goes on to assert;
idealism which is the name I will give to the doctrine that "things"
are just ideas in some mind is a sort of operator which can be
prefaced to any account of the world, even one mentioning corpuscles
and interactions, with a slight alteration of sense but no alteration of
truth-values.
5
3
J. O. Urmson, "Two Central Issues in Bishop Berkeley's Corpuscularian Philoso-
phy in the Siris", History of European Ideas 7,1986, 63341.
4
G. Moked, Particles and Ideas: Bishop Berkeley's Corpuscularian Philosophy.,
Oxford, Clarendon, 1988, 25.
5
Thus Tipton's solution is to say that the corpuscles of aether are perceivable in
principle, though they lie beyond the range of conceivable microscopes, and, as
such, may be both immaterial and passive ideas, "The 'Philosopher by Fire'",
169 f. Other contributions to this question include D. Garber, "Locke, Berkeley
and Corpuscular Skepticism", in C. Turbayne, ed., Berkeley: Critical and Inter-
pretive Essays, 17483; M. Wilson, "Berkeley and the Essences of the Corpuscu-
larians", Essays on Berkeley, ed. J. Foster and H. Robinson, Oxford, Clarendon,
1985, 131 -48, and most recently, Ch. 6, "Corpuscularianism", in K. P. Winkler,
Berkeley: An Interpretation, Oxford, Clarendon, 1989.
Berkeley and the Microworld 39
The purpose of this paper is to argue that the unity thesis in both
the traditional form and even in its updated and qualified version are
wrong. The re-inscriptions on which Luce laid the entire burden of his
argument are not sufficient to hold it up; they render the work at best
technically inconsistent and at worst they mask the real principle
of unity of Berkeley's philosophy. There are-two claims which are
continuously present in Berkeley's work: (a) that no material object
ever acts; and (b) that plants and animals have internal processes,
which are linked, via the concept of natural law, to the phenomena of
life. But (a) is given an idealist sense in the early works and a very
different immaterialist sense in the later works. Berkeley does come to
accept the existence of a world outside the mind, that is, outside of
any mind including God's, even if the emphasized entities in that world
are so fine, tenuous, and, at the same time, so quality-laden, that they
do not resemble the material corpuscles which the "corpuscularian
philosophers" of the 17th century had posited as ultimate entities. As
for (b), Berkeley accepts throughout his oeuvre some notion of really-
existing-interior-mechanisms-invisible-to-our-eyes. In this sense he is a
hypothetico-deductivist all the way through. However, just as it would
be seriously misleading to call him on that account a "mechanical
philosopher", it is difficult to make the hypothetico-deductive suit fit
his contours very well, either in his earlier phase or in his later phase,
since, for significant reasons, he bypasses the whole question of the
confirmation of hypotheses.
My aim then is to show that Berkeley succeeds in Siris in describing
a category of object and giving it a central role in his account of
nature which leaves him only two options: the non-mind-dependent
existence of an external world, in case this object is not identical with
God, or pantheism if it is. Supposing that Berkeley has reasons for
rejecting the second alternative, that leaves us with the first.
As observed, one might feel on a priori grounds that such revisionist
theses have little chance of being true unless the case is made on the
basis of previously unpublished documents. But recent work on the
history of English science has opened up perspectives which make it
possible to look at Berkeley's metaphysics in something of a new light.
His refusal to take "material substance" or any stand-in for it as a
fundamental term of metaphysics and epistemology once seemed a sort
of eccentricity. We now know, however, that Berkeley was hardly alone
in his mistrust of a science construed, after the Cartesian fashion, as
operating entirely with material particles and material objects subject
to mechanical laws. Natural philosophy in England from 1660 to 1740
4 0 C a t h e r i n e W i l s o n
i s e mph a t i ca l l y not based on corpuscles i n col l i si on: i t a bounds wi t h
r e fe r e n ce s t o t h e a e r i a l n i t r e , fe r me n t a t i ve spi ri t s, aethers, airs, vital,
a n i ma l , a n d s e mi n a l pr i n ci pl e s , chemi cal essences a n d i nvi si bl e fi r e .
6
To our eyes, t hes e e n t i t i e s a l l seem h i gh l y "speculative". But , as Newton
e mph a s i ze d for hi s own a ct i ve pr i nci pl es, t hey were t o be considered
e mpi r i ca l n o t i o n s , whose exi st ence was ma n i fe s t e d by exper i ment s and
di r e ct o bs e r va t i o n : C a r t e s i a n mechani sm was, by cont rast , irremediably
h ypo t h e t i ca l .
7
Un de r s t a n di n g t h a t a non-qual i t at i ve physics a physics based on
the so-called pr i ma r y pr oper t i es alone was powe r ful l y resisted by
e xpe r i me n t a l i s t s and t heor i st s of n a t ur a l science in the early years of
the 18th ce n t ur y, bo t h on the gr ounds t hat it was inadequate to explain
co mbus t i o n , r es pi r at i on and vital phenomena, and on the grounds t h a t
it was da n ge r o us to r el i gi on to deny the ready intelligibility of agency
whi ch was i nvi si bl e and non-material, helps us to see t hat Berkeley
was not jus t a maker of paradoxes and an isolated saboteur. Concerned
to stave off mat er i al i s m, he focussed on the weakest feat ure of Carte-
sianism, its r ender i ng of the causal t heor y of perception, and found
himself giving a st range account of wha t "things" were. But if he could
later accept non-mental existence while asserting the indispensability
and primacy of immaterial agents, this position was ultimately the one
to be preferred as less paradoxical, as giving a better scientific account
of the world, and in a sense to be explained later as truer to his
experience, not of external phenomena, but of internal phenomena.
There is a second obstacle, in addition to the overgenerous estimation
of the rejection of strict corpuscularian mechanism in his time, to the
right reading of Berkeley. This is the common valuation of Siris as a
wild, ext r avagant work by contrast wi t h the Dialogues, whose argu-
ment s can engage almost anyone. The strange morbi di t y of his last
6
See esp. Simon Schaffer , "Godly Men and Mechanical Philosophers: Souls and
Spirits in Restoration Na t ur a l Philosophy", Science in Context 1, 1987, 55 86;
E. McMullin, Newton on Matter and Activity, Not r e Dame, University of Notre
Dame, 1978; J. E. McGuire, "Force, Active Principles and Newton's Invisible
Realm", Ambix 15, 1968, 154-208; I.E. McGuire and P. Rattansi, "Newton
and the 'Pipes of Pan'", Notes and Records of the Royal Society 21, 1966,
10843; B.J.T. Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1975. > " . "
7
Where some philosophers feign hypotheses for explaining all things mechanically,
"the main Business of nat ur al Philosophy is to argue fr om Phaenomena wi t hout
fei gni ng Hypotheses, and to deduce Causes fr o m Effects". Opticks, 4th ed., New
York, Dover, 1952, Bk. Ill, Pt. 1, Query 27, p. 369.
. Berkeley and the Microworld 41
major work, the excursuses, the hypochondria, the hermetic profundity,
can stall or alienate the reader and prevent him from seeing that it is
precisely these features which furnish important clues to the interpreta-
tion of the work. And in fact the modern evaluation of the two works
has become inverted. The reaction of Berkeley's contemporaries was
that the Principles were fantastic and paradoxical while they saw Siris
as well within normal parameters; at least it went through six printings
and sold well.
8
So the commentator who asks "How could the sensible
philosopher of the Dialogues and Principles become the author of a
mystical treatise on the virtues of tar water of no philosophical interest
or importance?" is already on the wrong track to understanding him,
while the commentator who asks "How did anyone taking the extreme
and unique position of the young Berkeley get drawn back to a
somewhat more conventional one?" is on the right one.
With that question guiding the investigation, let us look first at the
issue of Berkeley's early attitude towards a constellation of concepts:
invisible entities, subvisible entities, and the mechanical and corpuscula-
rian philosophies.
1. Berkeley acknowledges the importance of internal structure
As Tipton remarks in his paper, the clue to the Sins-problem "lies in Berkeley's
interest in the very minute, an interest wholly natural in the age of the development
of the microscope"
9
. This means that we have to view Berkeley against a background
involving both (a) speculations about the unobservable as well as the just unobserved
internal structure of objects; and (b) actual experiences and presentations visual
representations of observed internal structure. We need also to consider the alleged
relationship between internal structure and the phenomena of life, such as growth,
movement, and warmth, and between internal structure and perceptual qualities,
such as redness, sweetness, and acidity. It needs to be remembered that not all
"corpuscularians" were "mechanists" and vice-versa. Many theorists and even propa-
gandists for the mechanical philosophy, like Boyle and Hooke, believed that material
8
For details, see H. M. Bracken, The Early Reception of Berkeley's Immaterialism
1710-1733, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1959, and J. M. Hone and M. M. Rossi, Bishop
Berkeley, New York, Macmillian, 1931, 235 f.
9 I. C. Tipton, "The 'Philosopher by Fire'", 168. See the article of G. Brykman,
"Microscopes and Philosophical Method in Berkeley" in C. Turbayne, ed. ,
Berkeley, 69-82. Berkeley's belief that the microscope encouraged philosophers
to believe in such absurdities as the infinite divisibility of matter, though con-
nected with his views on micro-structure, will not be enlarged upon here.
42 Cat her i ne Wi l son
corpuscles were important and basic in scientific theory, but also allowed for entities
and modes of action f alling outside strict def initional lines, such as seminal effluvia.
To be a consistent, restricted, corpuscularian mechanist, like Descartes, one would
have to believe both that matter was paniculate, inert, and qualityless except for
the shape, size, and weig ht of its constituent particles, and that all effects were
produced by mechanical interactions between particles or throug h the operation of
machines composed of such particles
10
.
Meanwhile, the new iconog raphy of the microscope, established by Hooke in the
Micrographia of 1665, and furthered especially by Malpighi and Grew in their work
of the 1680s on the fine anatomy of plants and animal organs, introduced a
problematic set of visual experiences for the primary observers and a problematic
set of images for the readers of their books; for, according to the terms of the
mechanical (not necessarily "corpuscularian") philosophy, it was supposed to be
possible to understand plant and animal bodies as interrelated micro-machines
which, acting in harmony, produced all the phenomena of plant and animal life.
11
By the time Berkeley began to write, microscopical observations sometimes seemed
to support this supposition, by revealing "glands" and "organs" in plants, supposedly
the counterparts of structures in animals. At the same time, however, the apparent
simplicity of the plant, as Francois Delaporte has argued, impeded theory-deriva-
tion.
12
Plants do not, macroscopically or microscopically observed, look very much
like ensembles of integrated machines; unlike animals they do not even have a heart
to function as a pump.
In Principles 60 66, Berkeley shows that he is well aware of mechanical theories
of the organism: he praises "the curious organization of plants, and the admirable
mechanism in the parts of animals [...] and all the clockwork of Nature, the greater
part whereof, he says, "is so wonderfully fine and subtle as scarce to be discerned
by the best microscope"
13
. This passage suggests two things: (a) Berkeley believes
that animal bodies have an analogy to clocks; and: (b) We cannot have adequate
visual ideas of the smallest functionally-relevant parts of plants and animals. Perhaps
we can succeed in seeing 'them with the microscope but we don't see them well. These
points immediately raise two problems about the unity of Berkeley's philosophy even
within the boundaries of the Dialogues and Principles, problems which can however
be disposed of fairly easily. The first is that he says in the Dialogues that the
10
See for a programmatic statement Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, Pt. IV,
Articles 199-201.
11
For Malpighi's iatromechanical bias, see H. Adelmann, Mar cello Malpighi and
the Development of Embryology, 5 vols., Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1966,
Vol. I: 150 f.
12
F. Delaporte, Nature's Second Kingdom, transl. A. Goldhammer, Cambridge
MA, M.I.T. Press, 1982 (orig. pubL. as La Second Regne de la Nature, Paris,
Flammarion, 1979), 24.
13
Principles of Philosophy m A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, eds., The Works of
George Berkeley, 9 vols., London, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1948 57, Vol. II;
hereafter cited as Works.
microscope does not give us a better view of an object than we have with the naked
eye but actually shows us a new object.
14
There seems then to be no basis for
complaint about the quality of the microscopic image which ought just to be
whatever it is. But there need be no inconsistency here: the same problem arises
when we consider the case of any "object" seen under less than optimal conditions,
say, through a wavy windowpane. Expectations and hopes set up by previous
experience are violated in both cases; we expect a different kind of image and regret
that we are not getting it, but that does not compel us to say that what we expected
and regret not getting is a better view of that object where "that object" is not
reducible by the usual phenomenalistic type of paraphrase to some collection of
visual impressions.
15
The second problem is that Berkeley appears to accept the favorite metaphor of
mechanists, the famous clock metaphor.
16
The latter point allows some commenta-
tors to infer that Berkeley believed that animals, plants, and perhaps substances in
general possess a corpuscular microstructure which it would be profitable and
illuminating to investigate. As the ordinary corpuscularian would 'try to find the
configuration of corpuscles that all gold has in common and that is responsible for
its color, weight, malleability, and so on', so the Berkeleian idealist, non-causalist
corpuscularian will exactly repeat his procedures, while telling himself a slightly
different metaphysical story about them. So long as we accept the Berkeleyan
Newspeak and agree that "things" are just "ideas" and "causes" are just "signs of*
their "effects" which do not produce them, the Boyle program for science can remain
intact.
17
But this point of view involves a confusion between corpuscularianism and
mechanism. The problem with this happy acceptance of equivalences is that Berkeley
did write in his Notebooks "My doctrine affects the Essences of the Corpusculari-
ans"
18
. He saw himself as the opponent of atomists, Epicureans, Spinozists, Cartesi-
ans and Locke and Boyle to the extent that they believed in the reduction of
experiences to the causal effects of the movement and pressure of particles. "The
14
Dialogue III in Works II: 245. Cf. A New Theory of Vision, Sect. 85 f., in Works
I: 205 f., where he endorses Locke's point that "microscopic eyes" would be of
no help to us.
15
Thus Bruce Silver may be overstating the case for an inconsistency in Berkeley's
appeal to the microscope to show that objects have no "true" color. "The
Conflicting Microscopic Worlds of Berkeley's Three Dialogues", Journal of the
History of Ideas, 37, 1976, 343-9. Berkeley's argument can simply be taken as
a reductio ad absurdum of the hypothesis that a microscope shows us the true
color of an object, the falsity of which is consistent with his "new world" theory.
16
As developed by Descartes, Boyle, and Locke; see L. Laudan "The Clock
Metaphor and Probabilism", Annals of Science 22, 1966, 73-104. Various
statements of it can be found in Boyle's essays, e. g. "On the Vulgarly Received
Notion of Nature", in Works of the Honorable Robert Boyle, ed. T Birch (1972),
6 vols., Hildesheim, Olms, 1965 f., V: 245.
17
"Corpuscular Skepticism", 186f.
18
Notebook B 234, Works I: 30.
44 Ca t he r i ne Wi l son
sillyncss of the Currant (sic) Doctrine makes much for me. they commonly suppose
a material world, figures, bulks of various sizes etc according to their own confession
to no purpose, all our sensations may be & sometimes actually are without them.
Nor can we so much as conceive it possible that they should concur in any wise to
the produc tion of them."*
9
He has no diffic ulty endorsing, under his own interpreta-
tion, the clock-metaphor; what disturbs him is the idea that material particles could
in any way be involved in the production of surface qualities. There could be no
point in try ing to investigate such a relation because it does not exist.
There is no possibility of accommodation then between corpuscularian essential-
ists of the Boyle-Locke school and Berkeley himself. It would not help if they agreed
to adopt Berkeleyan Newspeak and describe inner corpuscular structure as a "sign"
of surface qualities. Berkeley wants to replace talk about events involving material
objects causing other events involving material objects with talk about one idea's
being a sign of another. But he does not mean by this that whenever there is a
regular correlation between A and B A is a sign of B; Berkeley's talk of "signs" is
essentially parasitic on normal talk of causes.
20
And this means that we must feel
a sort of natural impulsion towards the idea of B when having the idea of A. That
is why perceptions constitute what he calls a divine visual language. One idea seems
to mean another in the sense of tending to lead to it, and forming a sensible sequence
together with it, despite the fact that there is no intrinsic linkage between ideas, just
as certain combinations of letters and not others spell out something meaningful.
21
Thus the sequence of appearances is analogous to a reasoned discourse; to see is to
receive instruction and something like the gift of prophecy, both of which imply to
Berkeley that our seeing is the direct effect of some higher intelligence.
22
Berkeley
would agree, I take it, that the wheels of the watch's mechanism going around
"mean" the movement of the dial, if we can trace out the mechanism for ourselves.
And it is conceivable that the micro-appearance of the liver could "mean" that it
works like a kind of filter, in virtue of which a person's face and body do not turn
yellow. But could "essence" in the corpuscularian's sense mean surface qualities?
Here Berkeley has to disagree. Corpuscularian essences can never be or become
signs or surface qualities, and that is the flaw in the corpuscularian program. To
turn the point around. If Berkeley were favorably disposed towards the Boyle
program, he could simply have treated Boyle's talk of material corpuscles and the
production of effects as a harmless linguistic habit and accepted him as a forerunner
19
Notebook A 476, Works I: 60.
20
See, for a discussion of the relation of "causal" language to "sign" language and
its effect on construals of the laws of nature, G. Buchdahl, Metaphysics and
the Philosophy of Science, Oxford, Blackwell, 1969, 304 ff.; Richard J. Brook,
Berkeley's Philosophy of Science, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1973, Ch. 1.
21
On divine visual language see esp. Alciphron, Fourth Dialogue, Works III:
159-162; also. New Theory of Vision, Sect. 64, Works I: 195f.
22
Alciphron, Works III: 161. The minute philosopher is incapable of understanding
prophecy, just as the corpuscularian is incapable of predicting. Cf. Sins 254,
Works V: 120.
of the Berkeleyan program for science, which involves looking for an orderly system
of signs, not in order to be able to understand the causes of phenomena, but rather
how to regulate our conduct and anticipate the future.
Of course Berkeley's worries about the corpuscularian account of qualities are
not idiosyncratic. In a sense he is simply calling on the corpuscularians to show
greater accountability, given that they have already admitted that they do not fully
understand what they are talking about. Boyle himself seemed to be unable to
bridge the gap between his declaration that qualities and powers of substances were
the result of their inner texture and his experimental manipulations, which were
simply variations on the theme of changing the qualities of a substance by some
mixing, heating or cooling operation, as though as Leibniz suggested the more
of these manipulations he could perform, the greater the certainty of the mechanical
hypothesis. Neither Boyle nor anyone else, to put the point simply, had any idea
how to go about finding the configuration of corpuscles which would truly explain
an object's surface qualities. "According to their own confession to no purpose"
23
was how Berkeley saw matters standing with respect to Boyle's famous trio of bulk,
figure, and motion. Locke was notoriously unhappy about the inaccessibility to
direct observation hence manipulation of the corpuscles supposedly responsible for
qualities and powers, and both Boyle and Locke bemoan the fact that they can see
no evidence of any intrinsic relation between colors and their causes in the asperity
or roughness of the surface of bodies.
24
In Boyle's paper on Colours, he cites reports of people being able to discriminate
colors via their fingertips as evidence for his surface roughness theory. We are to
conceive them as existing in bodies as "latent ruggednesses", as "little protuberances
and cavities" which "interrupt and dilate" the light.
25
But what has the tactile
impression of roughness to do with color? Newton's supposition that sound is really
a trembling motion of the air which only takes the "form" of a sound in the
23
Notebook A 476, Works I: 60.
24
See the well-known passage in Locke's Essay IV: iii: 12: "Besides this ignorance
of the primary Qualities of the insensible Parts of Bodies, on which depend all
their secondary Qualities, there is yet another and more incurable part of
Ignorance [...]; and that is, that there is no discoverable connection between any
secondary Quality and those primary Qualities that it depends on." (An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch, Oxford, Clarendon, 1975,
545). Cf. Boyle, "The Experimental History of Colors": "I would further know,
why this contemperation of light and shade, that is made, for example, by the
skin of a ripe cherry, should exhibit a red, and not a green, and the leaf of the
same tree should exhibit a green rather than a red. And indeed, lastly, why since
the light that is modified into these colours consists but of corpuscles moved
against the retina or pith of the optic nerve, it should there not barely give a
stroke, but produce a colour; whereas a needle wounding likewise the eye would
not produce color but pain [...] whensoever I would descend to the minute and
accurate explication of particulars, I find myself very sensible of the great
obscurity of things [...]." (Works of Boyle I: 696)
25
Experimental History of Colors, Works of Boyle I: 680 IT.
scnsorium, t hat colors arc a disposition of an object to reflect a certain non-colored
type of corpuscle which then causes the "sensations of those motions under the
form of Colors"
26
does not fare much better: what, after all, is a motion under the
form of a color?
27
If what we saw were, in the veridical case, a true image of some
ex ternally ex isting thing, then, as Descartes put it, "we would not hear sounds but
rather conceive the motion of the parts of the air which is then vibrating against
our ears"
28
.
Thus Berkeley's position includes and goes beyond Locke's. Both
concede some truth to the claim that internal fine structure is linked,
causally or semiotically, with what is superficially observable. But
neither one perceives that much progress in science has been made as
a result. For Locke, there is no predictive science based on material
corpuscles, as their arrangements cannot be isolated and inspected; it
is 'lost labour' to seek after such a thing. Fortunately, however, science
can proceed very well without referring to them, as Sydenham showed
at the bedside, Newton with his mathematical proofs, and Boyle with
his fund of chemical "experiments". For Berkeley too science is not
missing anything in having limited visual acces^. Science can develop
a system of diagnostic, predictive signs based on the appearance
even perhaps the microappearance of glands, tissues and organs,
and with autopsies one may retrodict the cause of death. Only all this
has nothing to do with corpuscles or mechanical interaction between
them.
29
Berkeley's position gained plausibility not only from the difficulty
involved in taking hypothetical processes and structures as explana-
tions, but from the difficulty of taking actually observed internal
structures as explanations. And it gained not only from the problem
of accounting for qualities, but from the difficulty of carrying out the
aspirations of fine anatomy. Grew, who had filled pages with detailed
drawings of plant sections as seen under the microscope, was forced
to ask himself the question, what is this structure for?
For when upon the Dissection of Vegetables, we see so great a difference in them,
that not only their Outward Figures, but also their inward Structure, is so Elegant;
and in all so Various; it must needs lead us to Think, That the Inward Varieties,
26
Newton, Opticks, Bk. I, Pt. II, Prop. II, Theorem II, "Definition", p; 124.
27
See Dialogue I, Works II: 186f.
28
Descartes, Treatise of Light, Sect. 1, in J. Cottingham et al., eds.,The Philosophi-
cal Writings of Descartes, 2 vols., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985,
I: 82.
29
As Margaret Wilson rightly points out in "Berkeley and the Essences of the
Corpuscularians", 137f.
were either to no End; or if they were, we must assign to what. To imagine the
first, were exceeding vain; as if Nature, the Handmaid of Divine Wisdom, should
with Her fine Needle and Thread stitch up so many several Pieces, of so difficult,
and yet so groundless a Work. But if for some End, then either only to be looked
upon or some other besides.
30
But to be looked upon cannot be their purpose, Grew says, as some
of their tiniest parts will remain forever unseen. Hence we must suppose
that their purpose is vegetation.
Berkeley's theory mediates then between the extreme anthropopathic
view that the inner structure of plants exists for our aesthetic enjoy-
ment, a position he can entertain in the New Theory of Vision when
he suggests that microscopic eyes could at best afford us "the empty
amusement of seeing"
31
while fulfilling no productive function, and the
view that a plant is somehow a machine. In one sense the structure
really is just there to be seen; it does not produce anything, certainly
not the characteristics of plant life. The microsection of a plant stem
is scientifically quiet. Even the observer who can see the flow of sap
cannot grasp the plant as a dynamic system like a mechanical device;
for the readers of Grew's books, the interior of a plant is just a complex
design. And that of course is how Berkeley often conceives the interiors
of things in general; as a series of inert pictures, as "groundless". His
pessimism about the microscope as a research tool thus seems as much
an effect of the new genre of micrographia as it is of his study of the
corpuscularians. The microscope gives us only pictures, or views; it
cannot show us how a plant blooms, or poisons, or reeks. And if the
microscopic picture is a step on the way to the picture that the
corpuscularian would like to be able to draw, why should we expect
that the explanation of these qualities should magically appear at some
even more distant level?
The "hollow animal" hypothesis presented in the Principles must
thus be understood not as indicating Berkeley's indifference to interior
structure, as one might otherwise suspect from his discussion of the
reality of gloves in the Dialogues, nor as a misunderstanding of what
anatomists were actually arguing. Here he says that the fabrication of
all the parts and organs of the animal body is not "absolutely necessary
to the producing of any effect"
32
. God could make changes on the dial
30
N. Grew, The Anatomy of Plants (1682), New York, London, Johnson Reprint,
1965, 8.
31
New Theory of Vision 86, Works I: 206.
32
Principles, Sect. 62, Works II: 67.
48 C a t h e r i n e W i l s o n
of t h e clock di r e ct l y; he does not need to use the i nne r jnechanism of
the clock. And so God could ma ke pl a nt s grow and shoot for t h
blossoms and leaves and a n i ma l s per for m al l t hei r motions, wi t hout
t h e r e be i ng a n yt h i n g un de r t he surface. However he immediately states
t h a t t h a t fa br i ca t i o n i s necessary t o t he produci ng of t hi ngs i n a
"const ant , regular way, according to the Laws of Nature"
33
.
Now it needs to be said t ha t no philosopher, wi t h the exception
per haps of Kenelm Digby, was in the habi t of claiming that inner
mechani sms worked by necessity. Most nat ur al philosophers were good
vol unt ar i s t s who maintained t hat God could do anything! (Though if
an angel want ed to br i ng about some surface effect, Boyle says, it
would have to use mechanical means.) Their claim is rather t hat inner
mechanisms are suffi ci ent ; the action of God or, more likely, a vital
spirit, is not needed. But Berkeley's question is, if you concede that
God could do it directly, what makes you so sure that your mechanism
is really sufficient? To imagine t hat God could do it directly is to admit
that inner mechanism is one thing, the vital phenomenon another.
Thus you mechanists have no warrant for supposing that your inner
mechanisms are actually effective, you are just imagining them as
effective, that is to say, as sufficient. The picture of the microworld in
Berkeley's early work then can be described as one in which nothing
essential or important occurs at the edge of our perceptual world or,
more exactly, in those worlds the microscope shows us. But what we
see inside an animal is not near the perceptual horizon, or, more
exactly, in one of those worlds that would be blurred and indistinct
images associated with even our best imaginable microscopes. Rather
t han supposing that nature becomes more interpretable and intelligible
as one descends into its interior, Berkeley argues that it becomes less
so. As Winkler points out, the question of the existence of unperceived
corpuscles or other micro-entities is allowed to "float"
34
; it is not, for
Berkeley, a pertinent question, one which needs to be answered before
he can articulate a theory of science.
The fadi ng of significance at the micro-level is confirmed by the
draining out of the qualities of the image. As Boyle had first argued
and as now many people knew, the microscope removes the vivid
colors of ordinary experience; opaque bodies sliced thin enough to see
appear transparent; blood grows gray, while strange haloes, rainbows,
33
Ibid.
34
K. R Winkler, Berkeley: An Interpretation, 270.
and colored fringes may appear around the object. The latent image -
supposedly near to the "real essence" - is fading, on Boyle's account,
out of sight altogether: "[T]he leaves will afford the most transparent
sort of consistent bodies [...]; and a single leaf or plate will be so far
from being opacous, that it will scarce be so much as visible. And
multitudes of bodies there are, whose fragments seem opacous to the
naked eye, which yet, when I have included them in good microscopes,
appeared transparent [...]. I am not yet sure that there are no bodies,
whose minute particles even in such a microscope as that of mine, will
not appear diaphanous."
35
It was not only the case that the latent image seemed to become
visually transparent and epistemologically mute. It frustrated thereby
the physico-theological instinct. The helplessness of the corpuscularians
to show how the appearance of color was produced by the colorless
(and the allied point that any corpuscle we could see, whose causal
role we could appreciate, would already have, inexplicably, a color),
renders them ignorant of the beauties of the divine creation.
36
The
verdure of the fields, the azure of the sky and the black veil of night
about which Berkeley rhapsodizes at the start of his Second Dialogue
belong to the mode of theologia ruris with its high valuation of natural
scenery.
37
2. Berkeley absorbs and develops a qualitative chemistry
Hail vulgar juice of never-fading pine!
Cheap as thou art, thy virtues are divine.
38
So begins one of Berkeley's poems on tar-water, a poem not to be
scorned in the search for textual evidence of the unity or disunity of
35
Experimental History of Colors, Works V: 690. Newton confirmed that "the least
parts of all bodies are in some measure transparent" (Opticks, Bk. II, Pt. Ill,
Prop. 2, p. 248).
36
The old anti-materialists had a well-evolved and eloquenty-stated position on
color. As Plotinus says, the wax-modellers may succeed in making shapes, but
they "cannot make colours unless they bring colours from elsewhere to the things
they make." Enneads III: 8 in Plotini Opera, ed./transl. A. H. Armstrong, 6 vols.,
Cambridge, MA/London, Loeb Classical Library, 1966 ff., Ill: 363.
37
Cf. the opening disclosures of the Theologia Runs sive Schola et Scala Naturae
(author unknown) London, 1686, repr. Los Angeles, William Andrews Clark
Library, 1956.
38
Reprinted in Works V: 225.
50 C a t h e r i n e W i l s o n
his phi l os ophy. If the t ar -wat er theory is meant to show, through an
e xpl o r a t i o n of its ont ol ogi cal r equi r ement s, the scientific inadequacy of
mechani s m and rigorous corpuscularianism by contrast with hermetic
i at r ochemi s t r y, it is also the case t hat the treatise is meant to show,
t h r o ugh its very st ruct ure and organization, the existential inadequacy
of a science of phenomena. The corpuscularian texture of the Siris
is not an i ndi cat i on of a more favorable at t i t ude towards matter,
corpuscul ari ani sm, or mechanism; the particles Berkeley discusses here
are not obviously material, if by "material" we mean tangible, measur-
able, and having mass or weight. Insensible corpuscles are rather a
stage on the mind's way to the acknowledgement of invisible active
beings.
Siris meaning, literally "a little chain", is, like the Principles, divided
i nt o numbered paragraphs. It begins with a description of the prepara-
tion of therapeutic tarwater, lists the indications for its use, and praises
its medicinal properties as disinfectant, analgesic, solvent, expectorant,
and so on. It then moves on to a discussion of the reasons for the
efficacy of this substance and sketches a general theory of the active
virtues of plants, the vital economy of nature as a whole, and its
ground in an aether orpneuma emitted by the sun. It aims at a statement
of Hermetic-platonic doctrine in which the trinity of "Authority, Life,
and Light" pervade the macrocosm and the microcosm. And it conclu-
des with a set of self-reflective remarks in which the author turns back
to assess his own work.
Tar, which is a secretion of pine and fir trees, contains, on Berkeley's
account, an acid spirit containing the pharmacologically beneficial
properties, which needs however to be separated from the irritating
oils mixed with it. It is manufactured within the plant, as in a factory.
The microscope shows that "a plant or tree is a very nice and compli-
cated machine" and may be considered "as an organized system of
tubes and vessels containing several sorts of fluid".
39
These tubes and
vessels are not inert, useless structures. In fact, he says, "some will
think it not unreasonable to suppose the mechanism of plants more
curious than t hat of animals"
40
. Their role is the "imbibing or attracting
of proper nourishment, the distributing thereof through all parts of
the vegetable, the discharge of superfluities, the secretion of particular
juices"
41
. It is these juices which contain "a spirit, wherein consist the
39
.Siris 35, Works V: 43.
40
ra 31, Works V: 42.
41
Siris 29, Works V: 41.
specific qualities, the smell and taste, of the plant"
42
. The qualities and
virtues of the specific plant type are extracted from the sun's rays in
which they subsist; the plant's "attractive and organical powers" act
like a Newtonian prism in dividing and exhibiting particular qualities
which the "capillary organs" then concentrate and retain.
43
As Grew
suspected, and Boerhaave declared, the solar emanation is something
different from the culinary fire, for it contains these specific qualities
"virtually or eminently"
44
as ordinary flame does not. On a slightly
different account, the juices of a plant result from the impregnation of
the air by the light of the sun; the air impregnates a vapour, and the
vapour is distilled by the plant into a juice.
This luminous spirit which is the form of life of a plant, from whence its
differences and properties flow, is somewhat extremely volatile. It is not the oil
but a thing more subtle, whereof oil is the vehicle, which retains it from flying
off, and is lodged in several parts of the plant, particularly in the cells of the
bark and in the seeds. This oil, purified and exalted by the organical powers of
the plant, and agitated by warmth, becomes a proper receptacle of the spirit.
45
There are a number of features of this account which deserve comment.
(1) The "essence" of a plant is conceived in a manner which is neither
scholastic nor corpuscularian, but alchemical. The identification of the
"life" of a plant with its odor; its essence with something that is
released and invisibly drifts away at the death of the plant is originally
Paracelsian.
46
(2) Plants are said to have "organical powers" which
enable them to distill, purify, and exalt. The plant resembles a chemical
laboratory in which mixed or crude substances are converted into purer
and nobler ones. It does not resemble a clock, whatever mechanical
operations might be performed in it. (3) There are numerous references
to causal interaction, e.g. "agitated by warmth", "impregnated by
light" which refer to processes never glimpsed by any human being
and perhaps never to be glimpsed. (4) The dominant mode of action
in this system is a kind of non-violent flowing, as opposed to violent
corpuscular collision. We are in the realm of'gentle science'. This mode
43
44
Ibid.
46
Cf. Paracelsus, Die neun Bcher De Natura rerum, Bk. II in Smtliche Werke,
ed. K. Sudhoff l W. Matthiessen, 14 vols., Munich/Berlin, R. Oldenbourg, 1928 ff.,
XI: 320 ff. On a similar doctrine in Boerhaave, see the passages assembled by T, E.
Jessop in Works, V: 233-5; for a brief defense of the idea that the main
source of Berkeley's chemical doctrines is W. Homberg (1652-1715) rather than
Boerhaave, see Hone and Rossi, Bishop Berkeley, 228 f., fn. 1.
of action stands to the mechanico-corpuscularian mode as tar-water
stands to ot her drugs; it is "not a violent and sudden medicine, always
to produce its effect at once ... but a safe and mild alternative, which
penet rat es the whole system"
47
.
The el ements of primary importance in Berkeley's account, after the
oils and spirits "essences" in the druggist's and perfumer's sense
are air, acid spirit and 'pure fire'. The air is apparently corpuscular in
structure and "a general agent, not only exerting its own, but calling
forth the qualities or powers of all other bodies, by a division, commi-
nut i on, and agitation of their particles, causing them to fly off and
become volatile and active"
48
. The air is also described as a receptacle
of all sublunary forms: "The air or atmosphere that surrounds our
earth contains a mixture of all the active volatile parts of the whole
habitable world, that is of all vegetables, minerals and animals"
49
which
exhale into this chaos and draw back breath from it. The air we breathe
contains the virtue of every drug, salutary as well as poisonous, and
the air is responsible for animal warmth, heartbeat, digestion, and
respiration.
50
The acid spirit also seems to surround the globe and is
found, always in combination with sulfur, in animal, vegetable, and
mineral bodies; acidity is responsible for effervescence, fermentation,
and the assimilation of food, which is a kind of fermentation.
51
It is
described as "so fugitive as to escape all the filtrations and perquisitions
of the most nice observers"
52
; though acid salts and crystals are visible
macroscopically and microscopically
53
. The third substance, the 'pure
fire' or aether of 'invisible fire' is even less easy to describe than the
other two active agents.
Unlike ordinary (culinary) fire and the aether which is in some way
associated with it, which, it is suggested, have a particulate structure,
pure aether or pure fire is invisible and, it seems, non-corpuscular.
54
47
Siris 110, Works VI: 68: "It gives nevertheless a speedy relief [...]".
48
49
Siris 137
9
Works V: 77.
50
51
Siris 126 ff., Works V: 74 ff. For Newton's acid-theory, printed in John Harris's
Lexicon Technicum of 1710, see Isaac Newton's Papers and Letters on Natural
Philosophy, ed.' I. B. Cohen, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1978,
255-8.
52
53
54
The aether can apparently become "clogged" with particles, and air is said to
cohere with particles of aether (Siris 151); but the whole is still permeated by
"pure aether" (ibid.) Moked observes however that at least sometimes the aether
seems to be particulate; see, e. g., Particles and Ideas, 59.
"Fire is a subtle invisible thing, whose operation is not to be discerned
but by means of some grosser body, which serves [...] for a vehicle to
arrest and bring it into view".
55
In order to become sensible the fire
must penetrate and agitate some body so as to affect us with "light,
heat, or some other sensible alteration [...]. In the focus of a burning-
glass exposed to the sun, there is real actual fire, though not discerned
by the sense till it hath somewhat to work on, and can shew itself in
its effects, heating, flaming, melting, and the like."
56
Fire is thus a real
thing but not even in principle a visible thing; we see only its effects,
for example a luminous or radiant body. This addition to the ontology
creates more of a problem for idealism than the existence of tiny
insensible corpuscles did or which a corpuscular aether would. For
whatever can be seen is an idea, hence real. But the reality of the pure
aether seems to consist, not in its being perceivable, but in its having
effects. If, contrary to the argument offered here, Berkeley were scrupu-
lous about avoiding reference to all entities of which we can have no
sensory idea, rather than a selective applier of rigorous standards to
dangerous theories only, one might well wonder what assured him that
this aether, which is the bearer or producer of all qualities and virtues,
actually exists.
But if Berkeley's main target all along was a reductive materialism,
the question of his warrant for asserting the existence of an invisible
aether is beside the point. There is obviously no single ground or
argument for asserting the existence of pure fire. That assertion is a
re-inscription from contemporary authoritative chemical texts (Mayow,
Newton, Boerhaave, Homberg), and from ancient authoritative texts,
and a transcription as I will argue later of Berkeley's own
psychosomatic states. The new theoretical apparatus shares some fea-
tures with other corpuscularian and micromechanical theories. It offers
a scientific image of the world, a latent image, which is different from
the manifest image. But, as was not the case in the theories of Descartes,
Boyle, and Locke, there is no principled commitment to reduction
here; the latent image is in fact richer than the manifest image. Berkeley
is drawn to the example of Newton's experimentally eliciting the colors
in a ray of white light for precisely this reason. Even though it commits
him to some form of reductionism - a color, odor or flavor "seemeth
55 Siris 197, Works V: 99.
56 Siris 198, Works V: 99. On the "elementary fire" notion and its religious
significance, see R. Love, "Some Sources of Herman Boerhaave's Concept of
Fire", Ambix 15, 1968, 159-72.
to depend on peculiar particles of l i ght or fire"
57
it furnishes an
effective contrast (experimentally proved!) to the hypothetical, wholly
uns ubs t ant i at ed, and impossible to substantiate, proposal of Boyle that
colors are the effect of roughnesses on a body's surface. Forms and
qual i t i es subsist, unreduced, in the atmosphere that all creatures brea-
the in and out, and in the sunlight.
58
Perhaps it is right to say that
God knows and comprehends these qualities which bathe us invisibly,
and so t hat Siris retains the esse est percipi doctrine. But I will try in
what follows to show that the hermetico-chemical account is what
enables Berkeley to abandon esse est percipi while keeping up and even
strengthening his immaterialism.
At times Berkeley seems willing to accept even a relatively hard
reduction of qualities, just as long as he does not have to accept an
account in terms of figures and motions, but can avail himself of a
terminology which has more resonance in the psychological realm.
Thus at Siris 162 we read that parts of the aether are
impressed with different forces, or subjected to different laws of motion, attrac-
tion, repulsion, and expansion, and endued with divers distinct habitudes towards
other bodies. These seem to constitute the many various qualities [...] virtues,
flavors, odors, and colors which distinguish natural productions. The different
modes of cohesion, attraction, repulsion, and motion appear to be the source
from whence specific properties are derived, rather than different shapes or
figures,
59
And in general "Nature seems better known and explained by attrac-
tions and repulsions than by those other mechanical principles of size,
57
Siris 165; Works V: 86.
58
Newton said specifically that he did not think that colors existed as real qualities
in white light as "vulgar people in seeing all these Experiments" might suppose
(Opticks, Bk. I, Pt. II, Prop. II, Theorem II, "Definition", p. 124). But Berkeley's
interpretation suggests a realism about qualities whose sources lie not in scholasti-
cism but in Renaissance medicine and mineralogy; Palissy, for example, believed
that all colors, odors and virtues exist invisibly in the earth and are drawn up
and separated by plants. Hooke, the microscopist, apparently took Newton to
be arguing something similarly occult: "But why there is a necessity, that all
those motions, or whatever else it may be that makes colors, should be originally
in the simple rays of light I do not yet understand the necessity of, no more
than that all those sounds must be in the air of the bellows, which are afterwards
heard to issue from the organ pipes", he objects, unable to assent to the
proposition that colors are not "qualifications of light, derived from refractions,
or refections (sic) of natural bodies but original and connate properties", Isaac
Newton's Papers and Letters on Natural Philosophy, ed. I. B. Cohen, 112f.
figure and the like; That is, by Sir Isaac Newton than Descartes"
60
.
But, pace Luce and Jessop who say that the favorable reference to
Newton is an acceptance of mechanism as a natural science hypothesis,
this statement is a rejection of mechanism borrowing the authority of
Newton, who, as observed earlier, could not achieve and did not want
to achieve that form of science.
61
"Attraction" and "repulsion" might
sound like terms belonging to hard reduction: reduction in which a
qualitative impoverishment is involved, but we need to see them here
as examples of "distinct habitudes" towards bodies, with powerful
analogies in the human realm. There is love and hate in the world of
corpuscles too.
62
Now even soft reduction has its limits for Berkeley. He will not
allow the human soul to be a volatile essence which drifts away from
the body after death, as Boerhaave had suggested was the case with
the soul of a plant, the volatile salt in the rosemary flying off to be
reunited with the sun. "What relation hath the soul of man to chemic
art?" Crito asks in the Alciphron, putting the hypothesis of the "philoso-
pher by fire" in the same category as other hypotheses of the profession-
ally obsessed that the soul is a harmony, that it is extended, that it
is a vulgar error.
63
But soft reduction of the soul is impossible because
the manifest image is maximally rich already. The scientist can't give
us a better, more human, qualitatively denser story about the human
soul than the one we already have. Because the acts and sufferings of
the human soul are maximally dense, it is they which establish the
language of the lower level. The aether down at the fundamental level
thus has affective, vital properties. It bathes, nourishes, illuminates,
and is like the enlivening touch of a God.
The question that now needs to be asked is whether Berkeley in Siris
did accept the latent image conceived on his terms as an image
60
Sir is 243, Works V: 116.
61
"The cause of reflexion" (on which colors depend), he says in the Opticks, "is
not the impinging of Light on the solid or impervious parts of bodies, as is
commonly believed." Opticks, Bk. II, Pt. Ill, Prop. VIII, p. 262.
62
Thus Cartesians, or quasi-Cartesians like Leibniz, rejected Newtonian attraction,
not without reason, as "occult". There exists a history of affective readings of
physics and chemistry: the fabulist Ramsay discusses ca. 1720 the ancient atomic
doctrine of Moschus, as retaught, he thinks, by Newton, according to which the
plastic spirit of the universe brings the atoms together by love. See D. P. Walker,
The Ancient Theology, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1972, 262. There is also,
farther along in the century, Goethe's Elective Affinities to consider.
Alciphron, Works III: 246.
0/the world? The al t ernat i ve would be to say that he accepted it only
as an image related in certain ways to other images, just as he might
or i gi nal l y have seen the microscopic drawings of plants in Grew or
anot her microscopist as belonging to a certain category of visual ideas:
fa mi l i a r images of pl ants tended to precede and accompany the having
of these visual ideas in conjunction with the visual idea of a microscope,
etc. And if he did accept it as an image of the world in the Siris, then
we should have to say that, despite instances of inscriptions to that
effect in the work, the doctrine of esse est percipi is left behind. The
thesis that the latent image delivered by the microscope is closer to the
truth of things and that the explanation of a substance's qualities and
powers could be seen in some even more distant image is not consistent
with idealism. For the latent and manifest images are then images of
the same thing, a thing which is other than a collection of visual
impressions, no one of which explains or produces another.
My suggestion then is that Berkeley was able to abandon the "new
world" interpretation of the latent image and acknowledge philosophi-
cal substance because he was now able to do so while retaining and
even extending the distribution of real qualities in nature. The difficulty
is nevertheless to catch him in Siris in a contradiction. "We see all
nature alive or in motion"
64
sounds like a contradiction to his claims
that our ideas have no power and that all we are aware of is our ideas,
but of course it is not. For it can be that with our powerless ideas we
represent to ourselves an illusory dynamism of Nature. But, just-as
Berkeley mocked the corpuscularians for their combination of dogma-
tism and skepticism, their conviction even when they expressed this
as a hypothesis ' that magnitude, figure and motion were the real
and the only real affectations of things, together with their inability
ever to assign a particular corpuscular structure to any given substance,
the doctrine of Siris put him into a position which is both dogmatic
and skeptical. From the skeptical idea that attraction, repulsion, and
cohesion, though "responsible" for a great variety of effects, are not
things but phenomena, he moves to the dogmatic assertion of invisible
fire. This fire too is only known through its effects. But it must be a
thing and not a phenomenon.
In a series of steps perhaps not clearly discernible to himself, Berkeley
moves from a version of the divine visual language theory on which
there are only visual appearances and no visual appearance is a cause
64
of any other, to a theory according to which forces act but are not
seen and cannot be seen, to a theory according to which a certain non-
ideal substance acts but cannot be seen. His mature doctrine is thus:
nothing which acts can be seen, a doctrine consistent with his early
idealism but not identical to it. Let us examine the steps of this
transition more closely.
"In strict truth all agents, are incorporeal, and as such are not
properly of physical consideration."
65
This statement is a pivot between
the old phenomenalism and the new recognition of mind-external
beings and agents. Having decided that Newtonian long-range attrac-
tive forces (gravity) and short-range attractive forces (cohesion) and
repulsion provided a better theory of celestial motions and of chemistry,
particularly the chemistry of acids, Berkeley feels confirmed in his
theory that no corporeal thing can effect any change. Gravity is not a
substance, or a hidden mechanism of substances, that could be ex-
plained e. g. in terms of pressure and displacement.
66
The inverse square
"law", he decides, does not describe the activities of any corporeal
agent upon some corporeal patient, but states a regularity which tells
us what changes in the position of objects to expect. In fact, even
mechanical laws don't really describe the activities of any corporeal
agent but again predict how certain "before" states will be related to
certain "after" states involving billiard balls and things like them.
67
Thus Newtonian physics and chemistry do seem to Berkeley to rein-
force his theory that "all phenomena are, to speak truly, appearances
in the soul or mind"
68
, a pronouncement he makes at the end of his
discussion of Newtonian forces. It is when he attempts to introduce
the pure aether that his scheme runs into trouble. A pure aether which
is invisible except when it penetrates and agitates some subject fits
Berkeley's conception of an active agent as an invisible thing perceived
only through its effects. And Boerhaave's own language recalls the
sign theory: elementary invisible fire exists, he states, wherever a spark
can be struck, or a flame produced by a burning mirror, "for by this
means alone we shall be able to come at the knowledge of it, a sign
being of no manner of service, if the thing signify'd may nevertheless
be concealed, and not be discovered by it"
69
. But pure fire or aether
66 S/m 246, Works V: 117.
67 Siris 234 -6, Works V: 112 f.
68 Siris 251, Works V: 119 .
69 Quoted in R. Love, "Boerhaave's Concept of Fire", 158.
58 Ca t h e r i n e Wi l s on
is not a term on the same footing as gravity. "Gravity" is not, in
Berkeley's scheme, a name for an immaterial agent; it is simply a
term that is essential for making the calculations that will predict the
appearances. But "pure aether" is not such a dummy term. It does not
help us to predict any. particular appearance, and it does not*help us
to predict that nature, say, will appear to be something living rather
than something dead. As in Boerhaave, the sensory phenomenon can
only be the sign of the noumenon and not vice-versa. We know that
"gravity causes masses to attract each other" is, on Berkeley's view, a
tautology.
70
Yet "gravity", though not a name of God, indicates the
existence of a God who "connects, moves and disposes all things
according to such rules, and for such purposes, as seem good to
Him".
71
'The pure aether animates Nature' is not, however, a tautology
but a genuine causal statement, as is 'The pure aether becomes visible
by becoming united with some subject'. Because he thinks of the pure
aether as in some way a direct instrument of God, Berkeley is unafraid
to have it act. Because he has stipulated that it is in principle impercep-
tible, he sees himself as far from the threat of materialism. But in fact
he has described a thing whose existence does not consist in its being
perceived. And this makes it inevitable that the world that it nourishes,
animates, and makes visible should also have an existence which does
not consist in its being perceived, for a non-idea cannot act upon an
idea.
The revival of chemistry, then, after Cartesian mechanism had re-
vealed both its explanatory limits and its theological dangers, lulled
Berkeley into a false sense of security. It enticed him into acknowledg-
ing the latent image of science, though the only hope for idealism lay
in a strict adherence to the thesis that the fine structure that we see in
the body or imagine it to have provides no account of the manifest
image and is simply another manifest image. It is true that he goes on
asserting that reality is purely intra-mental, quoting with approval
Plotinus's alleged remark that: "The world is in the soul and not the
soul in the world".
72
But he keeps forgetting and remembering how
the account is supposed to go: "Instruments, occasions and signs occur
in", he says, "or rather make up the whole visible course of Nature."
73
70
"Newton's Harange amounts to no more than that gravity is proportional to
gravity", Notebook B 361, Works I: 43.
71
73 Siris 258, Works V: 122. .
And again: "[P]hysical causes, as the ancients knew, were only instru-
ments or rather marks and signs."
74
The "or rathers" here mark a
desperate attempt to get back on track. In the remainder of the paper
I will try to strengthen the claim that Berkeley has effectively ceased
to be an idealist by showing.how the discussion of the medicinal value
of tar water confirms the abandonment of esse est percipi and shows
that the aim of that text is not a proof of the non-existence of any
substance apart from minds, but a process of divestment and spiritual
enablement in which science plays the double role of physical beauty
in the Symposium', an obstacle and a gate at the same time, cheap and
divine.
3. The latent image of sickness
In a study of 1953, J. O. Wisdom concluded that the unity of Berkeley's philoso-
phy is grounded in his fear of poisoning and contamination.
75
But, according to
Wisdom, there is a difference between the Principles and Siris. In his youth, Berkeley
was worried about the poisonous aspect of the external world; in his old age,
suffering from the cholic, the flux, and chronic episodes of incapacitation, he was
worried about the poison inside him. He retained, Wisdom thought, an intellectual
belief in esse est percipi but without concentrating his emotional life upon it.
76
His
emotional life was concentrated on his own physical troubles. Is Siris
9
Wisdom asks,
"to be explained as a rational attempt to alleviate disease, or is it not rather, with
all its quality of myth, a sign of hypochondria?"
77
The proposed distinction between "rational attempts" and "signs" or symptoms
need not, however, be understood as exclusive, and fortunately it is not necessary
to accept Wisdom's dubious interpretive apparatus to learn something from his
unorthodox approach; namely the extent to which the existential concerns of the
author may determine the timing and character of arguments, and the extent to
which new experiences, including the experience of physical debility or the threat
of it, may provoke revisions of earlier theory. In any case, Siris should be looked
at both as a rational attempt to explain the nature and treatment of chronic illnesses
with neurasthenic symptoms, and as the literary expression of the associated miseries
and hopes. A few passages will help to illustrate this: "fT]here are so many fine
persons", Berkeley says, "of both sexes [...] who are inwardly miserable and sick of
life [...] those delicate people who, as if their skin was peeled off, feel to the quick
N Siris 266, Works V: 125.
75
J. O. Wisdom, The Unconscious Origins of Berkeley's Philosophy, London,
Hogarth Press, 1953.
Ibid., 144.
77
Ibid., 135.
60 Ca t h e r i n e Wi l s on
everything that touches them."
78
Seeking relief in fermented "or even distilled"
liquors, they increase rather than ameliorate their miseries, for "small imperceptible
i rri t at i ons of the minutest fibres or filaments, caused by the pungent salts of wines
and sauces, do shake and disturb the microcosms of high livers [...]; whereas the
gentle vibrations that are raised in the nerves by a fine subtle acid sheathed in a
smooth volatile oil, [...], creates a calm satisfied sense of health"
79
.
We have in S iris a veritable treatise de subtilitate, a portrayal of the invisible
causes of physical unease and mental distress. The sufferer depicts to himself a
multitude of destructive processes occurring within him, processes distant and
tenuous, but forcing their way up to the level of conscious awareness. In the calming
and soothing applications of tar water, the universal balsam of the life spirit may
be experienced in microcosm. The subject, in this metaphysics, is not the bundle of
perceptions with the power to act of the Dialogues but, literally, a bundle of nerves.
"As the body is said to clothe the soul, so the nerves may be said to constitute her
inner garment."
80
The latent image and the manifest image the abrasions and
vibrations of the nerves on one hand, the anxieties, hypersensitivity, and malaise of
the writer on the other are images of one being. My claim here is not the crude
one that chronic illness teaches materialism. It is that Berkeley's theoretical account
of what is actually wrong with the people he describes, represents a kind of
translation of the manifest image into the latent. What they feel is what they are.
The author of these passages in Siris, then, cannot consistently maintain that
there is only a non-productive association, an arbitrary correlation, learnable only
by inspection after the fact, between the two levels. The autopsy of a person who
has just died will, as Berkeley knew, tend to reveal, if it reveals anything at all,
either an internal state of affairs which can immediately be grasped as explaining
the death (massive internal bleeding, for instance), or as an indication which the
trained physician has learned to associate with death (grossly enlarged liver and
spleen, for example). In both cases we can speak, without too much discomfort, the
original Berkeley language of signs, and we can perhaps even agree with the original
Berkeley that that degree of internal bleeding or enlargement is neither logically
necessary nor logically sufficient to put an end to the vital phenomena: God could
have killed him without his insides being at all affected. But did the later Berkeley
mean to take his abraded nerves and vibrating fibres as no more than "signs" of
mental and physical discomfort, as signs which do not even pertain to exactly the
same being? Even if it is possible to analyze the matter in this way, it does not seem
to me that this is how Berkeley understood his own theory. To be sure, as long as
his attention is focused on "outer" phenomena, especially those involving attraction
and repulsion, he stands firmly by his old theory of signs and rules. When his
attention is fastened on the inter-corporeal case, he appears to forget it and to
accept both productive causation and the identity of the macro-object and its micro-
78
-Siris 104 f., Works V: 66.
79
>&86, Works V: 60.
80
Ibid.
components. In terms of the theory of perception Berkeley has found, through the
use of quality-laden micro-entities and micro-structures, a scheme which preserves
both resemblance and causality, which the primary-secondary property scheme of
the corpuscularians clearly did not.
4. The "Siris" does not deny the existence of matter
but presents it as an obstacle to be transcended .
"We are embodied", Siris says, "that is we are clogged by weight and hindered
by resistance."
81
This remark has ontological and not merely phenomenological
significance in the context of Siris as a whole. In the Dialogues, Berkeley had
admitted that he was non-voluntarily connected to a body but had shown how this
fact was to be understood in terms of sequences of ideas: "We are chained to a
body, that is to say, our perceptions are connected with corporeal motions [...] but
this connection [...] means no more than a correspondence in the order of Nature
between two sets of ideas"
82
. On such an analysis, the idea of a transcendence of
physicality is wholly meaningless. Whatever the word "chained" might suggest to
the contrary, there can be nothing higher than ideas to fly up to. But the project
of Siris is liberation; the liberation of humanity from its physical ailments and the
liberation of science from an ignorant materialism. The spiritual agents in the essay
have a double function; they are terms of the scientific theory of tar and organic
life in general, and they are the channels through which the text seeks to transcend
its origins; to re-constitute itself at a higher level so that it is not a vulgar medical
treatise about a cheap, plentiful, sap-like remedy, but a philosophical discourse of
the highest sort, one which proves the way out of mortality and finitude.
As Siris progresses, a series of active agents, each more tenuous, subtle, and
elevated than the last, make their appearance. We move from the tar extract, to the
vital juice of the plant, to the solar emanation, to something like the world spirit.
At the lower levels, the concoction of the lower agent from the higher has all the
aspects of a material process; the solar virtue is refracted, the volatile acid spirit is
somehow concocted in the vessels of the plants, etc. At the middle levels, there is a
certain amount of quasi-mechanical activity such as penetrating, dividing, and flying
off when released. But at the upper end of the scale, the actions of the agents seem
to be restricted to flowing and pervading. They "enliven and actuate the whole
mass, and all the members of this visible world"
83
. And here one is drawn inevitably
to the Stoic analogies, which have their echo in Newton; as the vital spirit flows
through the human body and makes it alive, mobile and sentient, so the divine
spirit flows through the entire world making it alive, mobile and rich in qualities.
Newton's active principles gravity and fermentation, the latter being the cause
si Siris 290, Works V: 138.
82
Dialogue III, Works II: 241.
S3 Siris 290, Works V: 135.
62 Cat her i ne Wi l son
of animal warmth and motion, the solar radiance, putrefaction, generation, and
vegetation are not just metaphorically the life of the world, they are its empirically-
determinable, non hypothetical, cause.
84
The expression of such views nevertheless
raised, as had Newton's suggestion that space be understood as the sensorium of
God, the red flag: pantheism. If active principles are independent of God, God is
not needed to sustain the world; if they are not independent of God, then God is
the soul of the world, not above it proposing and disposing. He is in the slowly
brooded chicken's egg and in the pile of weeds decaying in the corner. Berkeley
insists, naturally, on the middle course: invisible fire is not the same as God or even
a manifestation of God but only an instrument (recall that it cannot be a sign). The
world is indeed an animal, but it is not the body of God, for the world has no
mind.
85
The 'whole mass' or 'gross corporeal system' thus reaches a degree of worthi-
ness a worthiness which could not be in question if that system were simply
ideas by being permeated, governed and enriched by invisible fire. But the
redemptive task is not complete and the chain of reflections is not finished. Invisible
fire is a concept situated at the horizon of science, not, as the transparent corpuscles
were, as a pure obstacle, but as signifying something beyond the horizon, the
intelligible world. And here Berkeley proposes to go beyond even the scientists who
appreciated the role of the immaterial in nature.
He describes the philosopher as climbing a sort of ladder or following a chain
extending from the grossly sensible to the purely intellectual.
86
At the lowest rung
he is concerned only with the "outward forms of gross masses which occupy the
vulgar"
87
. At the next rung he seems to become a natural scientist, for he directs
his attention to "inward structure and minute parts"
88
. At the next level, he becomes
a mathematical physicist, reflecting on the laws of motion and their status as rules
though this in a phenomenalist way. Still his climb is not ended:
But if proceeding still in his analysis and inquiry, he ascends from the sensible
into the intellectualworld, and beholds things in a new light and a new order,
he will then change his system, and perceive that what he took for substances
and causes are but fleeting shadows; that the mind contains all and acts all, and
is to all created beings the source of unity and identity, harmony and order,
existence and stability.
89
84
Opticks, Query 31, 369.
85
Siris 289, Works V: 134 f. Note that Berkeley in De Motu, Section 20, had argued
against such obscure and non-sensory notions as "hylarchic principles" and the
instincts, wants, or appetites of nature. It would be interesting to investigate
whether Siris continues this policy by denying any intentional properties to
active agents, or abandons it under the influence of Berkeley's studies in the
interim.
86
Siris 295 f., Works V: 137. Cf. his poem "On Tar", reprinted in Works V: 225.
87
88
Ibid.
89
In this Plotinus-inspired passage, it is corporeal forces, absolute motions, and real
spaces which Berkeley feels he must warn against. These are just the abstractions
and non-entities which belong to the negative side of Newtonian physics, by contrast
with the positive side. Yet this ascent into the intelligible world has occurred through
science and through successive levels of abstraction, just as the Platonic ascent to
the Forms proceeds through terrestrial beauty which must be apprehended as such
before it can be abandoned as inadequate. Tar and the vegetating life of nature are
rungs on a ladder to be kicked away once they have served their purpose of
indicating the way up. The work shows how the ascent is to be managed: how to
get from link to link by reflection.
But the terminal insight of the ascent in Siris is described as the ancients' insight
that whatever real things exist independent of the soul "were neither sensible things
nor clothed with sensible qualities"
90
Now this is a departure, for the teaching of
the early Berkeley was that sensible things alone were real. "Foolish in Men to
despise the senses"
91
, says Notebook A; "Vain is the Distinction twixt Intellectual
and Material World". Locke was wrong to say (Essay IV: iii: 27) that the former
was more beautiful than the latter.
92
So profound was Berkeley's attachment to
sensory things and to the idea of a theology of landscape and color that he assigned
them morally an absolute value: "Sensual Pleasure is the Summum Bonum".
93
He
writes down that it is an aim of his "to excite men to the pleasures of the Eye and
the Ear which surfeit not"
94
.
It is tempting to suppose that Berkeley's early idealism in some sense allowed
him to be a sensualist; the pleasures of the eye and ear, which are harmless and
guiltless, are intellectual pleasures, according to the idealist scheme. The move away
from idealism then necessitated some adjustment with respect to the value of
experiences, which now were seen to depend on some non-mind-dependent existents
outside the subject. But these suggestions are not essential to the account: what is
important is his early conviction that dualism is an intrinsically unstable position.
"Matter once allowed. I defy any man to prove that God is not matter"
95
, he writes
in Notebook A, and "If Matter is once allow'd to exist Clippings of beards & parings
of nails may Think for ought that Locke can tell"
96
. Whether we take "allowed" in
the sense of "acknowledged" or in the sense of "permitted", it is plain that Berkeley
thought that to admit matter was to have no serious line of defence against
materialism and mortalism. His revulsion in the face of those possibilities amply
motivated his intellectual inquiry into the philosophical weaknesses of the corpuscu-
larian philosophy, weaknesses which were tolerated by less dialectically gifted and
less fanatical figures like Boyle and Locke.
90
91
Notebook A 539, Works I
92
93
94
95
96
67.
67.
93.
77.
77.
87.
There is something both impressive and naive in the young Berkeley's understand-
ing of these threats and his reaction to them, the attempt to prove there is no death
by inferring this from the absence of an intelligible relationship between the manifest
and latent image of the world. Siris is, to be sure, more obviously a work in which
the claims for a power of matter are neutralized and mind is victorious. And there
is a sense in which, with its Hellenizing and invocation of authority, with its
wholehearted acceptance of a discourse seemingly organized by reference to celestial
bodies, emanations, and ascensions, it appears to reject the effective, wholesome,
arguments drawn from direct experience which characterize the Dialogues in particu-
lar. But despite the text's extraordinary qualities Jessop describes the narrative
as insufflated "with a breath as aromatic as the .balsams with which it began"
97

the microworld is brought into proper focus. Berkeley did at least come to grasp
that what happens at the visual surface happens on account of what is going on
beneath it, and that whether it is perceivable or not.
At the end of Siris he seems to be on some ancient riverbank; his self-understand-
ing is now expressed in metaphors of encasement and struggle: "those bodies wherein
we are now imprisoned like oysters"; the depths and shallows which we learn by
going into the river and moving up and down. There is the pessimistic remark that
"Truth is the cry of all but the game of a few". But the last lines
98
present something
of an interpretive puzzle. Berkeley here tells us that he sacrificed the "first fruits"
of his pursuit of knowledge, meaning perhaps not just his idealism but his commit-
ment to a planned, demonstrating text, on the altar of Truth; but he also says that
he is prepared to sacrifice the fruits of his age too, so that we do not know what
to make of this statement, in which the ambiguity of sacrifice, with its double
meaning of something given as a present and something destroyed, is allowed to
stand.*
97
"The eye by long use comes to see even in the darkest cavern: and there is no
subject to obscure but that we may discern some glimpse of truth by long poring
on it ... He that would make real progress in knowledge must first dedicate his
age as well as youth, the later growth as well as the first fruits, at the altar of
Truth. Cujusvis est errare, nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare." -Siris
368, Works V: 164.
98
Berkeley states disarmingly that as a "mere essay-writer" he is no longer bound
by considerations of method and system, and he confesses that the work has
"by insensible transitions" drawn the reader into "remote inquiries and specula-
tions that were not thought of either by him or by the author at first setting
out", Siris 297, Works V: 138. So here too we move from rules and laws and
a system of logically connected propositions to insensibilia and unconceived
existents.
* I am grateful for detailed criticisms by Ernan McMullin, Lome Falkenstein, and
two anonymous referees for the Archiv, which contributed much to the sharpen-
ing of the thesis argued here.

Berkeley and The Microworld

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Berkeley and the Microworld

by Catherine Wilson (Edmonton)

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