Berkeley’s Last Word on Spirit
Readers of Berkeley have frequently been unhappy that he had so little
to say about what should be a cornerstone of his theory, immaterial substance
or spirit. They have lamented that he never finished the Part II of Principles of
Human Knowledge in which he planned to discuss mind or spirit, and some
have uncharitably speculated that it was in fact problems with the account he
projected that is the reason why Berkeley never gave us this work. Some
have tried, with considerable success to fill in the gaps in the published works
by mining the notes Berkeley made for himself in his Philosophical
Commentaries.1
But relying on these notes is always tricky, since there is no
sure way of knowing which of the positions expressed there are ones to which
Berkeley is going to end up committed, hence what he might have put into
Part II of the Principles. There is, however, one other place to turn for hints
about what Berkeley would have said if he had written more on spirit and that
is to the four speeches that Berkeley added to the 1734 edition of Three
Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, some twenty-one years after he had
brought out the first edition, and long after he had given up the idea of writing
further parts of the Principles. What I am going to propose is that we can
regard these speeches as encapsulating Berkeley’s final view on spirit and
that we can use them as a touchstone in assessing the viability of particular
interpretations of Berkeley’s account of mind or spirit.
1
I want to concentrate, in particular, on Philonous’ last speech, where
Berkeley permits him a note of exasperation. “How often must I repeat”,
Philonous says, and it is easy to imagine that Berkeley is speaking for himself
here. Perhaps Berkeley, like Philonous, felt that he has had to clear up
misunderstandings more frequently than he would have liked. I think this
speech is especially interesting, because it covers several important points
about self, mind or spirit. The full speech runs as follows:
How often must I repeat, that I know or am conscious of my own
being; and that I my self am not my ideas, but something else, a
thinking active principle that perceives, knows, wills, and
operates about ideas. I know that I, one and the same self,
perceive both colours and sounds: that a colour cannot perceive
a sound nor a sound a colour: that I am therefore one individual
principle, distinct from colour and sound; and for the same
reason, from all other sensible things and inert ideas. But I am
not in like manner conscious either of the existence or essence of
matter. On the contrary, I know that nothing inconsistent can
exist, and that the existence of matter implies an inconsistency.
Farther, I know what I mean, when I affirm there is a spiritual
substance or support of ideas, that is, that a spirit knows and
perceives ideas. But I do not know what is meant, when it is said,
that an unperceiving substance hath inherent in it and supports
2
either ideas or the archetypes of ideas. There is therefore upon
the whole no parity of case between spirit and matter.2
This then is what I am calling Berkeley’s last word on spirit, and I am
going to propose that it includes all the points that must be included in
an interpretation of Berkeley’s theory of spirit.3
The context in which Philonous lays down this set of remarks is
known as “Hylas’ parity argument”, the argument that accuses
Berkeley of inconsistently rejecting material substance while
embracing spiritual substance.4 In the passage Berkeley gives a
description of “my self”, as “a thinking, active principle that perceives,
knows and wills and operates about ideas”, a description which is
similar, indeed, strikingly similar, to others he has given. Consider two
that come early in the Principles. The first identifies
Something which knows or perceives [ideas], and exercises
divers operations, as willing, imagining, remembering about
them. The perceiving active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul,
or my self. (PHK 2)
Or, still in the early sections of the Principles, Berkeley tells us
A spirit is one, undivided active being: as it perceives ideas, it is
called the understanding, and as it produces or otherwise
operates about them, it is called the will. (PHK 27)
The passage added in 1734 does not, it would seem intend to alter
significantly our understanding of what a self or mind is. It does, however,
3
make several important points about this “thinking active being”. Berkeley
tells us that it is coherent to understand this being as a “spiritual substance or
support for ideas.” He also tells us that we are conscious of the existence and
essence of this being. And finally, he says that we are aware that this
principle of which we are conscious is “distinct from all sensible things and
inert ideas.” So, taking this passage seriously, no account of Berkeley’s
theory of self, mind or spirit is adequate unless it explains the sense in which
spirit is a substance supporting ideas, that it is accessible, sometimes
Berkeley says immediately, to consciousness, and that it is distinct from ideas.
I have, it might be said, thrown down a gauntlet here in insisting that no
account of Berkeley’s theory of mind is adequate unless it is consistent with
this passage. There are many readers of Berkeley who have found one or
another element of the picture drawn here to be sufficiently problematic that
they have been prepared to argue that Berkeley is not actually committed to
all of the claims being made here. Some have been unhappy with Berkeley’s
claim that mind is a substance and have put forward interpretations in which
he does not endorse this view.5 Others have been puzzled about how
Berkeley could suppose we are conscious or aware of immaterial substance.6
Still others have asked how Berkeley could hold both that ideas are distinct
from the mind and that they depend upon the mind.7 The family of claims
made in this passage however is not entirely new. Descartes’ account of self
or mind relies on some similar points. One way, therefore, to make sense of
the passage Berkeley added to Three Dialogues would be to follow the lead of
4
those who maintain that Berkeley’s account of mind is to all intents and
purposes Cartesian.8
The first and most central claim on which Descartes and Berkeley
apparently agree as well as one of the most difficult to understand is the
ontological claim that mind, self or spirit is a substance. The first issue I want
to look at, then, is whether what Descartes means by substance and his
reasons for calling mind a substance will be helpful in understanding
Berkeley’s similar claim. Descartes does not use the word “substance” all that
often; indeed, there are only two places where he explains what he means by
substance in the context of mind. The first is in the Second Set of Replies to
the Objections to the Meditations, in which Descartes had been requested to
lay out his argument more geometrico. In complying, Descartes gave a
definition of substance as “everything in which whatever we perceive
immediately resides, as in a subject, or to everything by means of which
whatever we perceive exists.” (CSM I I, 114)9 He goes on to explain that he is
speaking of a “property, quality or attribute” so long as we have a real idea of
such properties, qualities or attributes. So, in this case, a substance is just that
in which properties, qualities and attributes reside, and mind, as he goes on
to say, is the substance in which thought resides.
Descartes is apparently not telling us much more here than that a
substance is the subject of predication. Mind is that thing of which thought is
predicable. This account of mental substance seems fairly unhelpful as a way
of understanding what Berkeley is getting at. It seems to run afoul of
5
passages, such as PHK 49, where Berkeley rejects this way of talking. He
writes there:
As to what philosophers say of subject and mode, this seems
very groundless and unintelligible. For instance, in this
proposition, a die is hard, extended and square, they will have it
that the word die denotes a subject or substance, distinct from
the hardness, extension and figure, which are predicated of it,
and in which they exist. This I cannot comprehend: to me a die
seems to be nothing distinct from those things which are termed
its modes or accidents. And to say a die is hard, extended and
square, is not to attribute those qualities to a subject distinct from
and supporting them, but only an explication of the word die.
(PHK 49)
It is true that the example discussed here is of a piece of matter, and matter or
material substance is considered by Berkeley to be entirely incoherent, but it
is not implausible to imagine Berkeley saying that the sentence, “a mind is
thinking”, is saying something about what “mind” means, and not attributing
a quality to a subject distinct from that quality
Descartes’ second discussion of substance, in Principles of Philosophy,
however, is much more elaborate and informative. He gives an entirely new
definition of what it is to be a substance:
6
By substance we can understand nothing other than a thing which
exists in such a way as to depend on no other thing for its
existence. (PP I Art. 51, CSM I, 210)
Substance is no longer the subject of predication, but is instead an
independently existing entity. When applied to created entities, it is that
which depends on nothing else (but God’s concurrence) in order to exist. The
picture is that anything that is not a substance depends on the nature of some
substance in order to exist and hence can be understood only in terms of the
nature of the substance on which it depends. We can make use of this
conception of substance as an independent being on which other things
depend only through a grasp of the nature of the substance, what Descartes
calls its principal attribute. In the case of mind, this principal attribute is
thought. In order to understand the being of mind, all I have to grasp is its
nature as thought, but everything else about mind has to be understood as
dependent upon thought to exist. Descartes makes a couple of distinctions
that he thinks need to be taken into account in order to understand the
relation between a substance and its nature, and between independent and
dependent being. He says that the distinction between a substance and its
principal attribute or nature is just a conceptual one, and not a real distinction.
This is because the nature identifies what has to exist or to be present in order
for a thing of this sort to exist. Without thinking, there is no mind. There is no
substance waiting as it were to have thinking pinned on it because thinking is
the way in which substances of this sort exist. Descartes says:
7
Thought and extension can be regarded as constituting the
natures of intelligent substance and corporeal substance; they
must then be considered as nothing else but thinking substance
itself and extended substance itself—that is, as mind and body.
In this way we will have a very clear and distinct understanding
of them. (PP I, Art. 63, CSM I, 215)
So in this sense, mind just is a thinking substance, a thing that thinks.
Descartes goes on to say, however, that there is a sense in which thought is
not the same as mind, for, when we are talking about a single mind with many
thoughts, then we want to consider these many thoughts as modes of the one
mind. Here, we want to think of these thoughts as modes in order to bring to
the fore their dependency on minds, that is, that they are not separable from
minds. Were this to be the case, Descartes says, we would be treating these
thoughts, falsely, as if they were substances. This discussion of thinking
substance, as it is laid out in Principles of Philosophy, is no longer open to the
kind of criticism Berkeley leveled in PHK 49. Descartes has been at pains to
point out that it is not appropriate to think of substance as a distinct subject to
which attributes are pinned, because, on the one hand, the very being of the
thing that thinks is its thinking, and on the other, because thoughts are
determinations of that thinking, with only a dependent existence.
Descartes’ second account of thinking substance is a much more
promising model to use in interpreting Berkeley’s similar claims. It would
suggest that we take Berkeley’s statement that mind is a substance because it
8
supports ideas as an expression of the dependency relation that Descartes
takes to exist between mind and its states. But before we plunge ahead with
this line of argument, there is one serious problem with using Descartes’
theory as a model for understanding Berkeley’s that needs to be addressed.
In the way in which Descartes lays out his account in Principles of Philosophy,
in the passages we have just been discussing, Descartes maintains a strict
parallel between thinking substance and corporeal substance. Everything he
says about corporeal substance he also says about thinking substance. So far
as Descartes is concerned, there is parity between the two kinds of
substances. How then is it possible to call Berkeley’s a Cartesian mind,
without opening him up to Hylas’ parity argument, the very argument our
passage is designed to refute? There is, in addition, one matter that might
seem to rule out any meaningful comparison between Descartes and Berkeley
right from the start and that is that Berkeley denies that we can have any idea
of minds, while Descartes thinks I can have a clear and distinct idea of my self
or mind. The importance of this difference has been disputed by Charles
McCracken, who suggests that both men would be prepared to agree that we
have no image of mind. In any case, I think a resolution of this matter must
await further clarification, so I want to set it aside for a moment to look at
Descartes’ treatment of mind and body.
There are two crucial issues that need attention. The first is the way in
which Descartes identifies the nature of each kind of independent being or
substance, and the second is the way in which he characterizes the
9
relationship between substance and that which depends upon it. Descartes’
position with respect to body is fairly well understood. The principal attribute
of body is extension, that without which no body exists, and that which
constitutes the way in which bodies exist as bodies. Any property of a body is
a determined way of being extended, hence a mode of body, and unless the
property in question is a way of being extended, it doesn’t belong to body.
On this kind of view to say that modes of body depend upon body is in fact to
say they are conceptually dependent upon body, and flow from the nature of
body in the sense that they can be demonstrated to exist as a determinable of
that nature. As Descartes explains in Principles of Philosophy II, 64, it is
because of the way in which properties of body follow from the nature of body
that physics can be understood as a branch of geometry. So, if this is
Descartes’ account of the nature of body, what would a parallel account of
mind look like? Walter Ott, in a very interesting paper,10 offers an approach
that is, in fact, strictly parallel. His idea is that, on Descartes’ theory of body,
to say that the distinction between the corporeal substance and its essence or
nature is strictly conceptual is to say the substance and its essence are
actually identical. A body just is extension in length, breadth and depth. So
the parallel claim for mind is that thinking substance just is thought and
properties of thinking substances are determinables of its nature as thought,
modes of thought in the same sense that properties of bodies are modes of
extension.
10
Ott’s view, and this certainly seems right, is that if this is Descartes’
theory of mind, then Berkeley was not adopting Descartes’ account, but was
instead opposing it. He offers as evidence that Berkeley was thinking
critically of Descartes a letter Berkeley wrote to Samuel Molyneux on Dec 8,
1709, in which he said:
In Med 3 and in the Answer to the 3: Objection of Hobbes he
plainly distinguisheth betwixt himself and cogitation, betwixt an
extended substance and extension, and nevertheless throughout
his Principles he confounds those things as do likewise his
followers.11
Interestingly, the points covered by Berkeley in his letter to Molyneux also
form the subject of a series of remarks towards the end of his Notebooks,
presumably made at the same time that he was writing to Molyneux. Two of
these remarks are particularly germane. Entry 795 reads:
M.S.
Descartes owns we know not a substance immediately by
it self but by this alone that it is the subject of several acts.
Answer to the 2nd objection of Hobbs.12
Hobbes’ objection concerns the inference from “I am thinking” to “I am a
thinking thing”. In his reply, Descartes asserts that he is not, as Hobbes
charges, identifying mind and its faculties, but rather claiming minds are
things endowed with thought. Berkeley’s second entry, 798, emphasizes this
point.
11
S
Descartes in answer to Object: 3 of Hobbs owns he is
distinct from thought as a thing from its modus or manner.
It seems that Berkeley in the letter to Molyneux is saying nothing more than
what many readers of Descartes (including Ott) have pointed out: that
Descartes’ position is not easy to identify from his scattered and not always
clear remarks. Berkeley, however, seems to be well aware of at least one
reading of Descartes in which mind is not held to be identical to its essence.
Malebranche’s views on mind also suggest the possibility of a reading
of Descartes that presupposes an account of mind at variance with a parallel
account of body. Malebranche holds that we do not in fact have an idea of
mind at all, since such an idea, if we had one, as God does, would allow us to
treat psychology, just like physics, as a demonstrative science. But, of course,
we can do no such thing. We have, Malebranche says, only inner sensation,
which allows us to observe, for example, a passion such as anger, but allows
no demonstrations about what further mental states we might be subject to.
So long as Descartes might be prepared to agree with this last observation,
then he might also be prepared to endorse the view that his account of mind
as a thing that thinks is not strictly parallel to his account of bodies whose
nature it is to be extended. This is a possibility, I am proposing, Berkeley
might have been aware of. This means that he would recognize as an option
an account of mind as a thing whose properties depend upon its essence and
so are inseparable from its essence, but which is not identical to its essence,
and whose properties are not demonstrable from its essence.
12
Before we proceed to make use of this Cartesian model to explicate
Berkeley’s views of mind, there is one further disanalogy between the two that
must be addressed. In the various discussions Descartes provides of mind I
have been looking at here, he identifies ideas as modes or modifications of
mind. But this is specifically something Berkeley disavows, most strikingly in
the passage from the Principles, PHK 49, from which I have already quoted.
Earlier in that self-same passage Berkeley has denied that ideas are in the
mind as modes of mind. Here is what he says in the first part of the passage:
…it may perhaps be objected, that if extension and figure exist
only in the mind, it follows that the mind is extended and figured,
since extension is a mode or attribute, which (to speak with the
Schools) is predicated of the subject in which it exists. I answer,
these qualities are in the mind only as they are perceived by it,
that is, not by way of mode or attribute, but only by way of idea,
and it no where follows, that the soul or mind is extended
because extension exists in it alone, than it does that it is red or
blue, because these colours are on all hands scknowledged to
exist in it and no where else.
The objection Berkeley is looking at is one that says, starting from a
consideration of extension and figure, that, if they are to be attributed to the
mind, then the mind has to be extended and figured. In his response,
Berkeley denies that this captures the way in which extension and figure are
in the mind. They are in the mind because they are perceived by it, and not
13
as a mode or attribute. Having made this point, Berkeley goes on to make one
of his remarks about what is agreed “on all hands.” Everyone, he says, thinks
that colors like red or blue exist only in the mind, but no one thinks this means
that the mind is red or blue. Such a remark, as always, presents us with the
problem of working out who Berkeley might have had in mind and what they
were all in agreement about.13 But Descartes is at least a potential candidate,
since Descartes certainly held that sensations of color exist only in the mind.
This suggests Berkeley might have been aware of the possibility that, even
though Descartes did refer to thoughts as modes of mind, he did not think this
meant that he thought sensations were in the mind by qualifying it, but were
instead in the mind because of some other relation sensations and ideas bear
to mind. So, because it has been possible to suppose that, in various ways,
Descartes might not have been committed to an exact parallel between
thinking and corporeal substance, the possibility that Berkeley’s is a
Cartesian mind still exists.
Certainly both Descartes and Berkeley describe the self, soul, mind or
spirit as a substance. Berkeley most often characterizes this substance as
perceiving, Descartes as thinking, the thing that thinks or the subject of
conscious thought. So in both cases, the way the substance exists is by doing
something, thinking or perceiving. In neither case is it necessary to think of
the mind as a propertyless substrate or to take the mind to be identical with
thought or with its thoughts. And in both cases, what the mind does, thinking
or perceiving, is that to which we look in order to understand the existence of
14
ideas. Berkeley says that perceiving supports ideas and Descartes says that
thoughts depend on mind. In both cases, the relation between minds and
ideas is not symmetrical.14 It is an asymmetrical dependency relation, in
which the thinking or perceiving that is the existence of minds constitutes the
existence of ideas. Ideas only exist because of something that minds do, and
it is the doing or the agency of minds that makes possible the existence of
ideas. This asymmetry is the reason why ideas have an existence distinct
from minds, they have a distinct kind of existence, dependent existence, not
like the independent existence of minds. The existence of ideas is not
separable from minds, however. Unless perceiving is taking place, there are
no ideas, but in being perceived, ideas exist. Descartes’ account of substance
in the Principles of Philosophy in which the important relation is between
independent and dependent existence has provided a template for thinking
about both Descartes’ and Berkeley’s account of mind.15
So far, this has been a roundabout way of unpacking what Berkeley is
getting at when he says in our passage, “I know what I mean, when I affirm
that there is a spiritual substance or support of ideas, that is, a spirit knows
and perceives ideas.” I have argued that it is not out of place to accept the
help of Descartes in elucidating this part of the passage. The passage begins
with a statement which has been no less controversial. It talks about the fact
that this self, whose substantial nature we have just been discussing is in fact
accessible to consciousness : “I know or am conscious of my own being; and
that I my self am not my ideas, but something else, a thinking active principle
15
that perceives, knows, wills, and operates about ideas.” Berkeley is in this
passage telling us that the perceiving mind we have just identified as the
immaterial support for ideas is something of which I am consciously aware.
The thinking or perceiving does not describe some engine in us, outside the
realm of our consciousness but generating the ideas of which we are
conscious, but is instead included as part of the event of perceiving ideas.
When I perceive red or blue or loud or soft I am also supposed to be aware of
something else, which is that on which ideas depend. Still worse, in
developing an account of mind as substance, it has been described as doing
something, thinking or perceiving. It is through the agency of the thinking or
perceiving mind that ideas come to exist. But in perceiving ideas of sense
like red or blue or soft or hard, we are most often described as receptive. We
talk about these ideas as had by or received by the mind, rather than talking
about the mind’s doing something in order for these ideas to exist. And, for
Berkeley, it is of course important to stress the mind’s passivity with respect to
ideas of sense, and to call our attention to the fact that the agent of sensible
ideas is not our own mind. The problem that we are currently facing then is
how to put this particular bit of the passage we are considering, about the
consciousness we have of our selves, with the account of perceiving
substance we have been developing.
It is indubitably the case that the questions I am raising here are ones
that have led many readers to long for the lost Part Two of the Principles. But I
am going to suggest that, while a complete answer to these questions must
16
wait for another time, it is at least possible to look to Descartes for hints about
how to go about thinking about answers to these questions. Descartes is, on
the one hand, an obvious place to look for answers, as the source of the view
that identifies mind with consciousness, and whose cogito argument trades on
a willingness he expects from his audience to admit that we are aware in
thinking, not only of our own existence but of our nature as conscious thought.
But unfortunately Descartes’ own account of the workings of mind, although
revolutionary, is almost as sparse and unsatisfactory as Berkeley’s. I am going
to suggest, however, that it is possible to reconstruct a line of argument on
Descartes’ behalf that will link the mind’s substantiality with its accessibility to
consciousness, starting with what is the problem area, ideas of sense.
Descartes’ basic position on the nature and existence of sensations is
not all that different from Berkeley’s. In Principles of Philosophy, for example
Descartes tells us with respect to sensations:
These may be clearly perceived provided we take great care in
our judgements concerning them to include no more than what is
strictly contained in our perception—no more than that of which
we have inner awareness. (PP!, 66, CSM I, 216)
We make a grave error when we include in our judgment anything except
what is immediately perceived and instead suppose that a sensation has an
extramental existence. Descartes, it would seem, is telling us here with
respect to sensations that their essence lies in their being perceived.
Descartes also thinks that sensations require a good deal of corporeal
17
pushings and pullings before they happen, so that Descartes too thinks we are
passive in perception and that the content of the sensations we perceive are a
result of the nature of the pushings and pullings to which we have been
subjected. But, finally, he also thinks that the mind has to do something
before we have sensations. He tells us this in the Optics, where he writes:
We know for certain that it is the soul which has sensory
perceptions, and not the body. For when the soul is distracted
by an ecstasy or deep contemplation, we see that the whole
body remains without sensation, even though it has various
objects touching it. (Optics, IV, CSM I, 164)
What Descartes is saying here, in a very interesting and suggestive argument,
is that without what might be called attentive awareness, there are no ideas.16
All the right corporeal things might be present, but for sensations to exist the
mind is required to do something as well, to be present and undistracted. So
what I am proposing is that we pick up on this hint from Descartes’ Optics and
look at this attentive awareness as the root or basic activity of the mind,
without which nothing mental can exist. What is interesting about the view
put forward in this passage is that it allows us to think about an activity of the
mind that must exist so that there are ideas but which is not an activity
responsible for the content of these ideas, which in Descartes’ eyes, still
depends upon the objects touching the body.
What I am proposing is that we can use this notion, pulled from
Descartes, in getting a sense of the self of which Berkeley tells us we are
18
always consciously aware. What he would be pointing to is that each idea we
perceive is accompanied and indeed supported by attentive awareness. It is
when we are attentively aware that ideas exist. The picture would be that
attentive awareness is something of which we are conscious—we certainly
know when we are doing it as opposed to the times when we are not.. And in
thinking of attentive awareness as something the mind does, we can also get a
sense of what Berkeley is getting at when he says: “I know that I, one and the
same self, perceive both sounds and colours.” What we are aware of is a
single mental agent, bringing its attentive awareness to bear first on sounds
and then on colors (or indeed, simultaneously, on both.)
I think this proposal opens up several areas of exploration. It might be
possible to develop an account of mental activity in sensation which
nevertheless requires the presence of inert content, passively received. The
idea here is that the mental activity in question is not an independent source
of action brought to bear on a distinct object—rather, the activity exists
inseparably from the content of perception. So it might be possible to
develop a way of thinking about how we can, in perception, be aware of both
an inert idea and an active self, distinguishing them, as Ott has suggested,
through something like selective attention.17 And it might provide an answer
to a worry Charles MacCracken has raised about the accounts that both
Berkeley and Descartes give of a unitary mind. How, he asks, can they claim
that the mind is a unitary, simple substance if it both wills and understands? It
might be that we could say in this case, as in the sound and color case, that
19
both willing and understanding are operations of the same basic mental
activity and require the same attentive awareness in order to exist.
There is a great deal more that can be said both in favor of this proposal
and no doubt against as well. I am not in the least suggesting that I have given
the last word on Berkeley on spirit. All that I have tried to suggest is that by
carefully taking Descartes as a model, it is possible to understand what
Berkeley says about mind in which perceiving is both a substance supporting
ideas and the self accessible to consciousness. If we identify perceiving, the
core mental activity or what the mind does with attentive awareness, then it is
possible to think about how Berkeley and Descartes thought that the
consciousness of the self perceiving is part of each act of perceiving. And,
attentive awareness, as described by Descartes, can also be understood as
that which supports ideas, that on which they depend, hence, spiritual
substance. Putting these two elements together, then, makes it possible to
produce a coherent account of Berkeley’s last word on spirit.
Margaret Atherton, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
20
1
See, for example, Charles McCracken, “Berkeley’s Notion of Spirit” History of
European Ideas, 7, (1986) 597-602, and “Berkeley’s Cartesian Concept of Mind:
The Return through Malebranche and Locke to Descartes”, The Monist 71 (1988)
596-611, and Bertil Belfrage, “Berkeley’s Four Concepts of the Soul (1707-17-9) in
Reexamining Berkeley’s Philosophy, edited by Stephen H. Daniel, Toronto,
University of Toronto Press, 2007, 172-187.
2
All references are to The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, edited by TE
Jessop and A. A. Luce, London, Thomas Nelson and Sons, LTD, 1948-1957.
References to Three Dialogues will be to 3Dx, page number, references to Principles
of Human Knowledge will be to PHK and section number.
3
I hope it is understood that I am speaking somewhat loosely here, and I do not
mean to suggest that Berkeley had nothing to say about spirit in his subsequent
works.
4
Phillip Cummins, “Hylas’ Parity Argument” in Berkeley: Critical and Interpretive
Essays, edited by Colin M. Turbayne, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
Press, 1982.
5
See for example Stephen H. Daniel, in particular in “Berkeley’s Christian
Neoplatonism, Archetypes and Divine Ideas, Journal of the History of Philosophy,
39 (2001), 239-58, and “Berkeley’s Stoic Notion of Spiritual Substance” in New
21
Interpretations of Berkeley’s Thought, edited by Stephen H. Daniel, Amherst, N.Y.,
Humanity Books, 2008, 203-230, Robert Muehlmann, Berkeley’s Ontology,
Indianapolis, Hackett, 1992, and Genevieve Midgely, “Berkeley’s Actively
Passive Mind” in Reexamining Berkeley’s Philosophy, edited by Stephen H. Daniel,
Toronto, University of Toronto Press, Press, 2007, 153-171. For a critical
discussion of these claims, see Marc Hight and Walter Ott, “The New Berkeley”,
Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 34 (2004), 1-24.
6
For a discussion of this literature, although not a rejection of this claim, see
Laurent Jaffro, “Le cogito de Berkeley” Archives de philosophie, 67, 2004, 85-111,
and Talia Mae Bettcher, Berkeley’s Philosophy of Spirit: Consciousness, Ontology and
the Elusive Subject, Continuum International Publishing Group, London, 2007.
7
For a discussion of this issue, see Colin M. Turbayne, “Lending a Hand to
Philonous: The Berkeley, Plato, Aristotle Connection” in Berkeley: Critical and
Interpretive Essays, edited by Colin M. Turbayne, Minneapolis, University of
Minnesota Press, 1982, 295-310, Richard Glauser, “Berkeley, Collier, et la
distinction entre l’esprit fini et le corps, in Berkeley et le catesianisme, edited by
Genevieve Brykman, Le Temps Philosophique: Publications du department de
Philosophie Paris X-Nanterre, 1997, 91-116.
8
This view has been argued most strenuously by Charles McCracken,
“Berkeley’s Cartesian Concept of Mind: The Return through Malebranche and
22
Locke to Descartes” The Monist, 71, 1988, 596-610, but see also William Beardsley,
“Berkeley on Spirit and its Unity” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 18 2001, 259-278
and Margaret Atherton, “The Coherence of Berkeley’s Theory of Mind”,
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 43, 1983, 389-399.
9
All quotations from Descartes are taken from The Philosophical Writings of
Descartes, vols. I and II, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and
Dugald Stewart, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984-5. References
will be in the text to CSM, volume and page number.
10
“Descartes and Berkeley on mind: the fourth distinction”, British Journal for the
History of Philosophy, 14 , 2006, 437-450.
11
Works, VIII, 26
12
Works, I, 96
13
An interesting subproblem is that Malebranche is clearly not a candidate since
he was willing to speak of a rainbow colored mind.
14
The relation between mind and ideas is not then as Tom Stoneham suggests, a
pure relation, not constituted by either relata. See Berkeley’s World: an
examination of the Three Dialogues, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002.
15
The account that I have given of Berkeley’s substantial mind is similar to that of
Phillip Cummins, with whom I largely agree. I am taking a slightly different
approach in emphasizing similarities to Descartes, however.
23
16
I am using the term “attentive” here because it has been associated with Descartes, as
when he says that a perception is clear when it is present to the attentive mind. I do not
mean, however, to be associating this phrase with any particular theory of attention.
17
Walter Ott, op. cit.
24