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The Notions of George Berkeley
 Also available from Bloomsbury

Descartes and the Doubting Mind, by James Hill

Locke on Knowledge, Politics and Religion, edited by Kiyoshi Shimokawa
and Peter R. Anstey
The Philosophy of Anne Conway, by Jonathan Head
The Evolution of Consciousness, by Paula Droege
The Notions of George Berkeley
Self, Substance, Unity and Power

James Hill
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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To Anna
The grand Mistake is that we think we have Ideas of the Operations of our
Minds.
George Berkeley
 Contents

Acknowledgements viii
List of Abbreviations x

1 Introduction 1
2 Berkeley’s predecessors on self-knowledge 15
3 A notion of an active self 35
4 Notions and innatism 55
5 Sense perception: A passive or an active power? 71
6 Berkeley’s conceptual dynamism 87
7 A notion of goodness 105
8 Number and the notion of God 115

Appendix 131
Notes 133
Bibliography 157
Index 165
 Acknowledgements

I am grateful to audiences at the University of Neuchâtel, the Jagellonian

University in Cracow, Trinity College Dublin, King’s College London and
the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague for their responses to papers
I have presented on Berkeley’s notions at these various establishments.
I am grateful to my colleagues and students at Charles University for our
numerous discussions on and around the themes of this book over the last
years, particularly Lukáš Kollert, Jakub Mihálik, Jindřich Karásek and Marina
Barabas. The book has also benefitted greatly from the patient and penetrating
questioning of Benjamin Hill, Benjamin Formanek, Alberto Lopez, James
Mackey and Brad Thomson in a series of online, transatlantic, covid-defying
seminars. I thank Stefan Storrie, who participated in these discussions too,
and who also sent me detailed written criticisms which have corrected a range
of blind spots and oversights. I thank Samuel Rickless for his penetrating
comments in correspondence. I am grateful to Lilian Alweiss not only for
her comments to the manuscript but also for our wider discussions on the
nature of self-consciousness. I thank John Milton, who read draft versions
of chapters, and whose encouragement and expertise have been immensely
important to me over the years. Above all, let me thank David Berman for our
many discussions and for giving me the benefit of his knowledge of Berkeley’s
life and work, as well as his own philosophical insight. While these friends
and colleagues may not agree with all the conclusions that I come to, their
open and critical voices have been an invaluable stimulus to the interpretation
of Berkeley’s notions and his philosophy of mind in the pages that follow. Let
me finally thank the referees of Bloomsbury Press for their helpful critical
observations.
Parts of this book have appeared in a different form elsewhere. In composing
Chapters 5, 6 and 7, I have drawn on material from my articles ‘The Synthesis
of Empiricism and Innatism in Berkeley’s Doctrine of Notions’ and ‘The Active
Self and Perception in Berkeley’s Three Dialogues’. For their kind permission
in this respect, I would like to thank the editors of Berkeley Studies, where the
 Acknowledgements ix

first of these articles appeared (2010), and Stefan Storrie and Oxford University
Press who edited and published Berkeley’s Three Dialogues: New Essays (2018)
in which the second article appeared. Finally, I would like to thank the Grant
Agency of the Czech Republic (GAČR: P401/12/0833) for the support they
have given me during the writing of this book.
 Abbreviations

George Berkeley

Works The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, edited by

A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop. London: Nelson. 1947–53.
ALC Alciphron or the Minute Philosopher (1732), Works III.
(References are to dialogue, section and page number: e.g.
ALC III, v, 298).
DHP Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713),
Works II, pp. 163–263). (References are to dialogue and
page number: e.g. DHP III, 231.)
DM De motu (1721), Works IV, pp. 11–52 (Latin text with
English translation by A. A. Luce). (References are to
section number: e.g. DM §31.)
Notebooks As ‘Philosophical Commentaries’, Works I, pp. 7–104.
(References are to entry number.)
NTV An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), Works
I, pp. 159–239. (References are to section number: e.g.
NTV §105.)
OWG Sermon X, ‘On the Will of God’, Works VII, pp. 129–38.
(References are to page number: e.g. OWG 130.)
PHK A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
(1710), Works II, pp. 19–113. (References are to section
number: e.g. PHK §142.)
PO Passive Obedience (1712), Works VI, pp. 13–46.
(References are to section number: e.g. PO §12.)
Siris Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries
concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water and divers other
Subjects connected together and arising One from Another
(1744), Works V, pp. 25–164. (References are to section
number: e.g. Siris §308.)
 Abbreviations xi

TVV The Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained

(1733), Works I, pp. 249–76. (References are to section
number: e.g. TVV §24.)

René Descartes
AT Oeuvres de Descartes, edited by Charles Adam and Paul
Tannery, Paris: Vrin, 1996. (References are to volume and
page number: e.g. AT VII 35.)
CSM The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, translated by
John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. (References
are to volume and page number: e.g. CSM II 17.)

David Hume
T A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge,
with revisions by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978.
(References are to page number: e.g. T 174.)
E Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and
Concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by L. A. Selby-
Bigge, with revisions by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon,
1975. (References are to page number: e.g. E 6.)

John Locke
Drafts Drafts for the Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
and Other Philosophical Writings, edited by Peter
H. Nidditch and G. A. J. Rogers, Volume 1: Drafts A and B,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Essay An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited
by Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
(References are to book, chapter, section and page
numbers: e.g. E.II.xxiii.15, p. 305.)
xii Abbreviations

Examination An Examination of P. Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing All

Things in God, in The Works of John Locke Esq, London,
1714, volume III, pp. 429–50.
Corres The Correspondence of John Locke, edited by Esmond de
Beer, 8 volumes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976–89.
(References are to volume number, letter number and
page: e.g. Corres. 4, L 1544, p. 533.)

Immanuel Kant
CPR The Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp
Smith. London: Macmillan, 1933. (References are to page
number to the first and second editions of the German
original: e.g. A417/B444.)
 1

Introduction

One might divide George Berkeley’s philosophical work into two fundamental
projects. The first is that of persuading his readers of the soundness of his
‘immaterial hypothesis’1 – the negative claim that material substance does
not exist. Immaterialism exercises Berkeley’s considerable argumentative
skills as he provides many different reasons for treating matter as not only
an unnecessary or empty category, but – more strongly – as suffering from
internal contradiction. This project includes his denial of abstract ideas, his
views on linguistic meaning and his delimitation of the representative power
of ideas, all of which are primarily motivated by the denial of matter. It also
includes his defence of immaterialism on the principles of ‘common sense’. It is
this strand in Berkeley’s thinking that takes pride of place in his Principles and
the Three Dialogues, and it is the part of his work that made him famous – or
infamous – among his contemporaries, and which receives most attention in
the literature today.
Alongside the polemical attack on matter and materialism, however, is a
second, positive project. Berkeley seeks to establish a defensible metaphysical
picture of the world in the absence of matter. Central to this positive
endeavour is a conception of the nature of the mind, along with conceptions
of the fundamental ontological categories of substance, unity and causation.
This positive project also includes answers to the questions of how the mind
becomes aware of itself and its acts, and of how it gains knowledge of other
minds including the divine active principle that, in Berkeley’s view, directs
and sustains the phenomenal world. It is in addressing these epistemological
questions that Berkeley develops his doctrine of ‘notions’ which is the subject
of this monograph.
The doctrine of notions explains how mind with its different operations –
its substance-hood, unity and its causality – are known to us. Berkeley’s use of
2 The Notions of George Berkeley

the term ‘notion’ indicates his dissatisfaction with the widespread tendency in
the ‘New Philosophy’ of his day to characterize knowledge of the inner sphere
as mediated by ‘ideas’. Berkeley introduced the term ‘notion’ in the narrow
sense that distinguishes it from ‘idea’, in his 1734 editions of the Principles and
the Three Dialogues. However, this relatively late terminological innovation
did not mark a doctrinal change. Berkeley had, in his earlier writings, already
rejected the view that it is by the representative power of ideas that we have
knowledge of the inner sphere. Indeed, such a rejection is visible as early as his
Notebooks, and the first edition of the Principles of 1710 was crystal clear on
this point. While nominally introduced in 1734, then, the doctrine of notions
is in fact a part of his system from the first period of his philosophy.2
We shall examine, in Chapter 2, how some of the most influential thinkers
on Berkeley’s early philosophy – Hobbes, Malebranche and Locke – had denied
that immediate knowledge of mind, or spiritual substance, was attainable at
all, and, in Chapter 3, we shall see how Berkeley, with his doctrine of notions,
sought to vindicate immediate knowledge of the active, spiritual, self. We shall
examine how exactly self-knowledge is achievable, in Berkeley’s view, and why
he insists on our rejecting the easy, and seemingly natural, locution that we
have an ‘idea of the mind’. Knowledge of the mind, Berkeley argues, is not to
be treated as in any parallel way to the perceptual knowledge of objects, and
thus cannot be captured by the contemplation of an idea or representation,
particularly not one perceived by an ‘inner sense’ when construed on analogy
with the outer senses.
Berkeley’s account of our knowledge of the mind will be examined in
Chapters 3 and 4, and we will see that it also becomes the pathway to a proper
grasp of the primary ontological categories of substance and causality. These
categories, he holds, must be understood through the direct knowledge we
have of our own active mind and its acts – the species of knowledge that he
refers to as ‘notions.
Furthermore, our own essentially active nature allows us, on Berkeley’s
view, to understand the divine mind which takes the place of inert material
substance as the source of our perceptions, as discussed in Chapter 8. It is also
reflected in his positive account of conceptual thought, discussed in Chapter 6,
according to which concepts are treated as things we do rather than things we
perceive, and therefore necessarily draw on notions as well as ideas.
 Introduction 3

Of course, the negative and positive projects that we have outlined are
not fully independent of one another but are rather mutually supportive in
Berkeley’s philosophy. A proper recognition of the nature of mind or spirit
allows Berkeley’s opposition to the existence of matter to become a serious
and natural proposition. One reason why Berkeley rejects any role for an
inert material substance is because he finds that causal power can be fully
understood in terms of mental acts. The mind is the causal foundation of the
world of things that we perceive. Such a view, one should note, had already been
anticipated in the Scholastic and Cartesian doctrine that the world lacks the
power to continue in existence without the active support of God. As Berkeley
himself stresses, the world in his idealism is no more inert and lacking in self-
sustaining power than the material world described by Descartes in which
matter is dependent on continuous divine conservation.3
Our task of making sense of Berkeley’s doctrine of notions, and his
philosophy of mind in general, will only be successful if we recognize an
important obstacle that stands in its way. There is an entrenched reading which
treats Berkeley as belonging to one side of the empiricist–rationalist divide.
I believe it is the widespread perception that Berkeley is an empiricist that
has often thwarted attempts to make proper sense of his conception of mind
and of self-knowledge, and indeed of the whole of the second project outlined
above. The empiricist reading will be examined in detail below, particularly in
Chapters 4, 5 and 8, but let me now make an initial sketch of its fundamental
features.

The empiricist paradigm

The interpretation of Berkeley’s philosophical work that has been dominant

since the middle of the nineteenth century treats Berkeley as the second great
British empiricist and as the philosopher who stands between, and connects,
the work of Locke and Hume. I shall call this interpretation the ‘empiricist
paradigm’.
I find it useful to treat the empiricist reading as a paradigm because it has a
holistic structure of theses and assumptions that makes it almost impervious to
piecemeal criticism. To question this interpretation, it is never enough to point
4 The Notions of George Berkeley

to anomalies – recalcitrant statements or passages – because the empiricist

reading is able to neutralize their impact by telling us they are elliptical or
‘tactical’ or, in certain cases, by downplaying the importance of the text in
which they appear.
I also call the empiricist reading a paradigm because I want to stress its
historical character. It arose in a particular period, and since then it has been
supported by the institutional practice of philosophy – particularly by how
Berkeley is taught and how he is categorized by journals and libraries. But
I shall not attempt to describe this historical and sociological dimension of the
empiricist interpretation – I trust the reader will be already familiar with it,
and that its presence need not be detailed or demonstrated.
Let me confine myself to a few brief comments about the history of this
interpretational paradigm. It was first established by the Hegelian school, then
maintained and refined by British empiricist thinkers of the twentieth century,
and today it remains the default framework for understanding Berkeley. We
find expression of the paradigm, in embryonic form, in the ‘Lectures on the
History of Philosophy’ that were delivered by Hegel in Jena and published after
his death.4 Hegel’s conviction that Berkeley ‘proceeds from the standpoint of
Locke’ is then taken up by Kuno Fischer, Wilhelm Windelband and other
German historians of philosophy of the latter part of the nineteenth century.5
In England, it was made popular by the T. H. Green, a follower of Hegel, in his
‘Introduction’ to Hume’s Philosophical Works.6 It was espoused with particular
verve and wit by Bertrand Russell,7 and it is also a fundamental part of the
popular interpretations of A. J. Ayer and J. O. Urmson.8 But its influence and
expression goes far beyond the handful of thinkers I have just named. The
empiricist reading remains the established view today, often providing the
implicit framework for interpretations of Berkeley in scholarly work. It makes
four large claims.
Firstly, and most importantly, Berkeley is treated as a concept empiricist.
He is thus seen as part of a tradition of empiricism in which John Locke is the
most significant forerunner. Berkeley ‘proceeds directly from’ the standpoint
of Locke, Hegel declares.9 While Berkeley may have disagreed with Locke on
important issues, relating particularly to ontology, it is still thought that he was
working within the same epistemological framework, and that his thought was
thus in principle opposed to the Cartesian rationalist tradition.
 Introduction 5

Concept empiricism can be encapsulated in the scholastic maxim: nihil

est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu. In accordance with this, it
rejects the possibility of innate content in the mind and excludes any appeal
to a faculty, such as the ‘pure intellect’, with access to content underived from
sense experience. This interpretation thus treats Berkeley as siding, in so far
as epistemology is concerned, with Gassendi, Hobbes and Locke, and against
Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche and Leibniz.
The second claim of the empiricist interpretation of Berkeley is that his
famous critique and rejection of material substance leads, almost inevitably, to
David Hume’s rejection of spiritual substance. This claim has been advanced
in a stronger form, such that Berkeley had already, covertly, endorsed the
Humean move.10 But usually the claim is more circumspect. Berkeley’s rejection
of material substance, along with his maintenance of spiritual substance, is
held to be a philosophically precarious position – a leaning tower that soon
falls when Hume brings pressure to bear on it. Interpreters thus treat Hume’s
famous view of the mind in his Treatise, according to which it is nothing more
than a ‘bundle of perceptions’, as the natural extension of Berkeley’s critique of
material substance. T. H. Green wrote that
in his zeal against matter [Berkeley] took away the ground from under the
spiritualism which he sought to maintain. He simply invited a successor in
speculation, of colder blood than himself, to try the solution of spirit in the
same crucible with matter.11

Or, as A. J. Ayer puts it:

Berkeley had eliminated matter, at least as the physicists conceived it, but
left minds intact. Hume, an avowed sceptic, showed that this favouritism
was unjustified.12

Of course, this second claim about the relation between the philosophy of
Berkeley and Hume is not exclusive to proponents of the empiricist paradigm.
Thomas Reid, in the late eighteenth century, had seen Berkeley and Hume
as philosophical brothers-in-arms, with Hume extending a sceptical attack
that had been started by Berkeley and other proponents of what he called the
‘theory of ideas’. Yet Reid did not develop an empiricist reading because he
thought that Berkeley and Hume were working out the sceptical implications
of a premise that all early modern philosophers since Descartes – empiricist
6 The Notions of George Berkeley

and rationalist alike – had signed up to: ‘We can have no conception of
anything but what resembles some idea in our minds.’13
The third claim of the empiricist interpretation is usually made by implication
rather than by straightforward assertion. It is that Berkeley’s doctrine of
notions, which accounts for the self-knowledge of spirit, is a problematic and
evasive part of his thought that, as it stands, is of only marginal significance.
Berkeley’s distinction between ideas and notions is either treated as a merely
terminological issue or dismissed as too sketchy to be worth expounding in
detail. Interpreters therefore lament Berkeley’s failure to publish the Second
Part of the Principles, in which, it seems, this doctrine would have been
properly set forth.14
When the doctrine of notions has become the focus of inquiry it has typically
been thought in need of very extensive reconstruction. In the one book-
length study of Berkeley’s doctrine of notions, Daniel Flage, committed to the
empiricist reading, interpreted Berkeley’s discussion of notions through the
lens of semantic theory developed in twentieth-century analytical philosophy.
He defended the thesis that, for Berkeley, we do not know our own minds and
its actions immediately, or ‘by acquaintance’, but only ‘by description’.15 Such a
conclusion seems to run counter to Berkeley’s own explicit statements that we
have ‘immediate’ and ‘intuitive’ knowledge of our own selves,16 and, as I will
show, it renders the most interesting part of his philosophy of spirit obscure
and lacking in coherence.17
A fourth and final claim – which is again usually made by implication
rather than by explicit assertion – concerns the development of Berkeley’s
philosophy. It is thought that Berkeley’s early philosophical view remained
unchanged until, late in life, he published Siris (1744). This last philosophical
work is thought to constitute a significant change of orientation, occasioned
perhaps by a serious decline in his philosophical powers. It is widely held that
Siris can be safely set aside and ignored. As a result, Berkeley’s philosophical
heritage is treated as contained in his early works, which are read as if he had
written them – along with important changes in editions as late as 1734 – in a
single burst of philosophical creativity.
It is by no means coincidental, of course, that Siris is treated so harshly by
the empiricist paradigm. In Siris Berkeley’s favourable view of Platonist and
rationalist doctrine is most explicit. If this work was to be included in Berkeley’s
 Introduction 7

philosophical legacy, then the first claim of the traditional interpretation – that
Berkeley’s philosophical thought is founded on concept empiricism – would
have to be at least seriously questioned. When Siris is mentioned, it is often
described as if it lacked any philosophical content. George Pitcher, for
example, writes that ‘Siris begins as a tract about tar-water, and then passes
on through chemistry and cosmology to religion’.18 The implication that the
philosophical discussions of the nature of spirit, of the intellect, of knowledge
and of number that occupy Berkeley, particularly in the final eighty (or so)
sections of Siris, can be passed off as either ‘cosmology’ or ‘religion’ suggests a
highly unconventional conception of those two fields.
In this book I shall question the empiricist paradigm for interpreting
Berkeley, and I shall put forward opposing views on all these four main points.
But I do not wish to deny that there is real justification for the orthodox
reading, and that the four claims I have described do have real grounding in
historical fact. My objection to the empiricist paradigm is rather that it is one-
sided. It throws light on only a part of Berkeley’s philosophy, obscuring as
much of his thought as it illuminates. Above all, I believe that the empiricist
reading cannot make sense of the most fundamental distinction, lying at the
heart of Berkeley’s philosophy, the distinction between ideas and spirits. This
distinction is so clear-cut, especially in Berkeley’s early works, that it has been
described, by David Berman, as Berkeley’s ‘dualism’.19

Berkeley’s dualism

We are certainly more accustomed to seeing the term ‘dualism’ applied to

Descartes’ split between matter and mind. Indeed, the term dualism has often
been used in the literature as a synonym for substantial dualism. Berkeley,
who thought that material substance did not exist, is thus usually treated as
a monist rather than a dualist. This is harmless enough if substantial dualism
is understood. But, when Berkeley distinguishes between the active spiritual
substance and its passive ideas, he makes a split which is arguably more radical
than Descartes’ substantial dualism. After all, the two finite substances in
Descartes’ philosophy – matter and mind – have quite a lot in common from a
metaphysical point of view. They mirror one another in ontological structure,
8 The Notions of George Berkeley

each grounding a single main attribute that is modified by a variety of modes.

Berkeley’s ideas and spirits, on the other hand, are utterly unalike.
Certainly, there is a relation of mutual dependency between ideas and
spirits. Ideas cannot exist without perceiving spirits, and finite spirits cannot
operate without ideas. We are not talking of two self-contained substances as
in the Cartesian system. But the mutual relatedness of spirit and idea does
not stop Berkeley’s dualism being a ‘stark bifurcation of being’, as Roberts has
called it:20
Thing or being is the most general name of all, it comprehends under it two
kinds entirely distinct and heterogeneous, and which have nothing common
but the name, to wit, spirits and ideas.21

And Berkeley confirms towards the end of the Principles that the ontological
divide corresponds to an epistemological divide:
Spirits and ideas are things so wholly different, that when we say, they exist,
they are known, or the like, these words must not be thought to signify
anything common to both natures. There is nothing alike or common in
them.22

Now, this book takes these statements seriously. Berkeley urges us to

recognize not only the ontological heterogeneity of spirits and ideas, but also
their epistemological heterogeneity. They are known in utterly divergent ways.
The difference from Descartes is again noteworthy. Descartes’ substantial
dualism does not bring with it a fundamental epistemological division. True,
the mind is known first by those who reason ‘in an orderly way’. But Descartes
finds that knowledge of matter, once attained, is the work of the same faculty –
the pure intellect – that gives us knowledge of the mind. What is more, we
have an idea of material substance just as we have an idea of the mind, or res
cogitans. Both species of knowledge are treated by Descartes as the objects of
clear and distinct intellectual ‘perception’.
Berkeley’s dualism of idea and spirit asserts – in contrast to Descartes – that
our knowledge is gained in two utterly distinct ways. This leads Berkeley to
abandon the Cartesian use of the same language of ideas for both the corporeal
and spiritual spheres because he thinks that it papers over this fundamental
epistemological divide. Certainly, Berkeley allows that we may not always be
free to determine our terminology unless ‘the world will have it so’,23 but in
 Introduction 9

his own writings he consistently refused to use the word ‘idea’ to describe our
immediate knowledge of spirit, and, from 1734, uses the term ‘notion’ in this
respect.
This dualism means that we must contrast Berkeley not only with the
Cartesian tradition, but also with early modern empiricism. Despite its
different disputes with rationalism, the empiricism of Locke still accepted the
Cartesian perceptual model of cognition, with its broad use of the term ‘idea’
for all the immediate objects of knowledge, including those of the inner sphere.
Locke gives us the internal sense of reflection which perceives our own mental
operations, furnishing the mind with ideas of them. Berkeley’s rejection of
this internal sense, and his advocacy of a non-perceptual approach to spiritual
knowledge, marks a departure from Locke that is at least as significant as
anything the two philosophers held in common.
My aim here will be to steer a middle course when it comes to interpreting
Berkeley with relation to the empiricist–rationalist divide. On the one hand,
the ontological and epistemological distinction between spirits and ideas will
make much better sense to us if we treat his account of our knowledge of
spirits as akin to (though never identical with) the doctrine of innatism. While,
on the other hand, we need to see how the empiricist nihil est in intellectu
principle is applicable to Berkeley’s account of ideas, or the passive objects
of perception. As a first approximation we might then say that Berkeley’s
doctrine of notions shows an affinity to rationalism, while his account of
ideas is empiricist.
If we keep Berkeley’s dualism in mind we will appreciate how Hume’s
critique of spiritual substance – which seeks a perception of spiritual
substance – misconstrued Berkeley’s account of spirit (if it was indeed meant
as a critique of that account), something I hope to show in Chapter 3. We will
also see why Siris offers us reflection on his earlier thought about spirit that
develops themes already present in his philosophy. Although the philosophical
sections of Siris should not be thought of as constituting the lost second part
of the Principles, they do give us mature reflection on some of the themes that
the missing manuscript would have dealt with. Overall, I hope to show how
Berkeley’s account of spirit, and of our awareness of the spiritual sphere, was
highly original and that it led him to depart from the assumptions which had
made the empiricist–rationalist divide so pronounced.
10 The Notions of George Berkeley

A developmental framework

Now, if Berkeley’s thinking about mind develops over his writing career, then
we need to establish a straightforward way of referring to the stages in that
development. I shall adopt a relatively loose three-part framework. Though
what Berkeley says about the mind and its notions is often expanded between
consecutive publications, such as the Principles and the Three Dialogues, we
may delineate three broad stages in the Berkeley’s reflection on spirit.

(1) The Heroic Period (1707–21). David Berman originally used the term
‘heroic period’ to refer to the publication of the Principles and Three
Dialogues in the years 1710 to 1713.24 This is the key episode in a more
general early period which extends both backwards, to include the
Notebooks (1707–8) and Essay on Vision (1709), as well as forwards to
include De motu (1721). In this first phase, Berkeley’s published thought
about spirit is restricted to fundamentals. The core of the doctrine is
certainly visible, but it is somewhat isolated from his main preoccupation
with the denial of matter. This period includes the writing of Berkeley’s
lost manuscript of the second part to his Principles that would have dealt
in more detail with spirit as well as with ethics. De motu, the first work
Berkeley published after this loss, contains perhaps some indications of
what went into the lost draft.25
(2) The Middle Period (1731–4). This second stage is constituted by the
publishing activity in the years after Berkeley’s return to the British Isles
at the end of 1731, following his frustrated efforts to establish a school in
Bermuda. Berkeley now strengthens the place of notions in his thought,
adding passages to the editions of the Principles and Three Dialogues
of 1734 that establish the narrow use of the term ‘notion’ which we are
concerned with. He also explicitly claims that relations are known not
by idea but by notion – a move that Alexander Fraser described as a
‘germ of Kantism’.26 This phase also includes the apologetical dialogue
Alciphron in which Berkeley is more expansive in his approach to
ethical concepts, and expresses his opposition to those philosophers
(Shaftesbury and Hutcheson) who claim that we owe our knowledge of
the Good to a peculiar ‘sense’.
(3) The Final Period (1734–53). The final phase of the development
of Berkeley’s philosophy of spirit is contained in Siris (1744). It is
 Introduction 11

characterized by a systematic attempt to merge his doctrine of notions

with Plato’s Ideas, which had in his view been subjected to a ‘monstrous
representation’ by Aristotle and his followers.27 In this final phase,
notions have taken centre stage in his discussions of the mind and
the divine nature, and he now openly disparages ideas as ‘the fleeting,
transient objects of sense’.28 Likewise, Berkeley clarifies and broadens his
opposition to the Aristotelian concept of substance with its assumption
that accidents require a ‘substrate’.

One will notice that the second and third phases are relatively close to
one another in time, with only ten years separating the new editions of the
Principles and Three Dialogues of 1734, on the one hand, and the publication of
Siris in 1744, on the other. In fact, the temporal proximity may be yet closer as
the philosophy of Siris had probably ripened in Berkeley’s mind in the decade
preceding its publication. We should not, therefore, be surprised if features of
the Middle Period already anticipate the last neo-Platonic phase.
More generally, the developmental story that I wish to present is marked by
overall continuity. There are no outright denials of previous doctrine. Instead,
we find Berkeley filling in and extending what he had said in earlier works.
Like a painter who first makes a sketch before returning to it to introduce
detail and colour, and perhaps an occasional modification, Berkeley in the two
later periods adds more developed doctrine to the remarks made about spirit
in the heroic period. But it is recognisably the same picture.29

A coincidence of opposites

Let us now return to the overall view of the mind or spirit that develops over
these three periods. As I have said, the aim of this book is not to deny the
empiricist reading tout court, even in the final stage of the development. I am
not seeking to prove that Berkeley belonged to the ‘other side’, as one of the
rationalist opponents of empiricism. Such an innatist reading was defended
by Henry Bracken, who regarded Berkeley not as a British empiricist, but ‘an
Irish Cartesian’.30 It is tempting to say that the innatist reading ‘goes too far’. In
one sense, this is true because it ignores the empiricist element in Berkeley’s
thought that undeniably exists, and which is particularly apparent in his
12 The Notions of George Berkeley

critique of material substance. It switches Berkeley’s allegiance from one camp

to the other, recognizing no third way.
Really, however, the innatist reading does not go far enough. We should
not forget that contraries are only opposed to one another insofar as they fall
under the same class. To see Berkeley as an innatist or rationalist is to accept
that his philosophy belongs to the ‘new way of ideas’. Such an interpretation
fails to appreciate Berkeley’s dissatisfaction with this whole framework when
he argued – just as forcefully in the Heroic Period as in the later periods – that
the inner sphere is not known to us by ideas, nor by any kind of perception.
I shall argue that Berkeley sought to reject the perceptual model for
self-knowledge, and indeed for the inner sphere per se. As we shall see, his
immediate predecessors and his contemporaries routinely assumed that to
know oneself meant to somehow perceive oneself. Sometimes the perception
in question was of a quasi-sensory kind delivered by inner sense; sometimes it
was a perception of the intellect, working independently of sense; sometimes
it was even held that the relevant perception was humanly inaccessible, but
present in the mind of God. Despite the diversity of these views, all of them
agreed that knowledge of spirit, to the extent that it is attainable, is achieved
by a special perception of our own selves, or of our states or activities. It is
this assumption of mainstream early modern philosophy that Berkeley
wholeheartedly rejects.31
In this book, I shall argue that by breaking with the ‘new way of ideas’ on this
point, and by abandoning the perceptual model of cognition in his treatment
of spirit, Berkeley is able to combine the insights of both empiricism and
innatism. He does this without diluting the two doctrines or blending them
in a compromise solution. He recognizes and respects both poles, reconciling
them with one another. Berkeley shows us how we may assert the empiricist
principle nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, and yet, at the same
time, recognize, with the rationalists, that our knowledge of substance, of unity,
of causation – and of a host of other intellectual elements – is not derived from
sense experience at all.
This marriage of the two perspectives can, I think, be usefully described
as a ‘coincidence of opposites’.32 By this I mean that Berkeley is not simply
seeking a middle position, or an Aristotelian mean, between two extremes.
Nor is he being eclectic, juxtaposing disparate doctrines. Rather he came to
 Introduction 13

think each side has lighted upon a distinct truth and that these truths when
properly understood are mutually supportive. The point is to embrace both
truths at once by applying them to the different but complementary sides of
the idea–spirit dualism.
If ‘the owl of Minerva takes wing at dusk’, it should not surprise us that this
reconciliation is most clearly expressed by Berkeley in his last work, Siris:

[Aristotle] held that the mind of man was a tabula rasa, and that there were
no innate ideas. Plato, on the contrary, held original ideas in the mind; that
is, notions which never were or can be in the sense, such as being, beauty,
goodness, likeness, parity. Some, perhaps, may think the truth to be this: that
there are properly no ideas, or passive objects, in the mind but what were
derived from sense: but that there are also besides these her own acts or
operations; such are notions.33

In this passage, Aristotle stands for the empiricist tradition, as is suggested

by the reference to the tabula rasa, and the allusion to the nihil est in intellectu
principle. Plato, on the other hand, stands for the innatist tradition, in which
there are ‘original ideas in the mind’. The important point for us is that Berkeley
sees his dualism as incorporating these two opposing views. Aristotle and
the latter-day empiricists are right in so far as ideas, or the objects of mental
perception, are concerned – there are, indeed, no passive mental objects that
are underived from sense or that sit in the mind from its very inception. But
Berkeley also recognizes the truth which Plato and the innatists draw our
attention to. The mind does include more than sense-based ideas because its
acts and operations are native to it, and these amount to ‘notions’, providing
us with a second kind of direct knowledge. Berkeley seeks to show how the
elements of intellectual thought – particularly those dearest to the rationalist
philosophers – are best understood as our own activities. They are not ideas,
to be peered at by a mental eye, but rather the mind’s ‘own acts or operations’.
These original notions, as we shall see, are constituted by what the intellect
does with the different ideas that it perceives.
14
 2

Berkeley’s predecessors on self-knowledge

What is the thinking, conscious self? This is a question that no systematic

philosopher can avoid. But that does not mean that a clear-cut positive answer
to the question must be given. One response is to say that the real nature of the
self or mind is obscure or even quite unknowable. This sceptical response was
well-represented among Berkeley’s immediate predecessors. It was given in
different forms by Malebranche and Locke. Hobbes too, though he embraced
a mechanical explanation of the mind, was certainly sceptical of any reflective
knowledge of a spiritual self. These different expressions of scepticism about
true self-knowledge were a source of dismay to Berkeley. He thought that they
were symptomatic of a defective approach to the inner sphere.
In this chapter, we will explore the views of the four thinkers whose view on
self-cognition would have been most familiar to Berkeley: Descartes, Hobbes,
Malebranche and Locke. It should be borne in mind that we elucidate these
thinkers from Berkeley’s own point of view, highlighting aspects of their
thought that he would have found significant or controversial. In Chapter 4,
we shall turn to Berkeley’s critique of these accounts of self-reflection.

Descartes and the perceptual model of cognition

Descartes was not one to profess scepticism when it came to the nature of
the self. Knowledge of the mind, self or soul – Descartes uses these terms
synonymously – was foundational to his metaphysics. The self is the first
thing that is known by a philosopher who proceeds in ‘an orderly way’, and it
marks the point of departure for the construction and proof of his system. On
this question there was a clear divide between Descartes and the scholastics,
for whom self-knowledge was a derivative sort of knowledge, arrived at by
16 The Notions of George Berkeley

analogy with our knowledge of external objects. For Descartes external objects
provide no help in the quest for self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is attainable
even if we look upon our experience of the external world as a mere dream.
It is analytically prior to knowledge of external things, and it constitutes the
exemplary case of certain knowledge, or of what Descartes calls a ‘clear and
distinct perception’.
Central to Descartes’s account of self-knowledge is his claim that we have
an idea of the self. One cannot begin to understand what he says about self-
awareness without appreciating his innovative use of this term ‘idea’. Descartes
knew that the term had traditionally been used – by Christian Platonists – to
refer to intellectual forms in the mind of God. But it was a term that he wished
to bring down from the heavens and to apply to all the objects of thought
and knowledge in finite human minds. This new understanding of idea was
adopted by others and Descartes’s work signalled the beginning of what
Edward Stillingfleet called the ‘new way of ideas’, so characteristic of early
modern philosophy.
What is an idea? Descartes was challenged on his unusual employment of
‘idea’ by Thomas Hobbes in the Third Set of Objections to the Meditations.
In response, Descartes defined his most important technical term as follows:

I am taking the word ‘idea’ to refer to whatever is immediately perceived by

the mind [immediate à mente percipitur].1

This definition leans, quite explicitly, on the concept of perception, and it

naturally prompts the further question of what ‘perception’ itself signifies. On
this point, however, Descartes is less forthcoming, and no explicit definition
of perception is put forward in his writings. Indeed, the term ‘perception’
(perceptio) is so fundamental to Descartes’s philosophy, and its meaning is
presupposed in so many different passages, that it would probably be hard to
elucidate it without simultaneously setting forth the whole system. But we can
at least make some comments.
One thing is obvious: when Descartes talks of ‘perception’ he is not just
talking of sense perception, even when that includes sensory images in the
memory or imagination. Rather, perception is taken to mean any receptive
state of cognition. He is at pains to show that there are purely intellectual
perceptions that lack any sensory ingredient. Among these are the perceptions
 Berkeley’s Predecessors on Self-Knowledge 17

of the simple notions of metaphysics as well as of geometrical entities, such

as point, line and triangle, which cannot be depicted in the images of the
corporeal imagination, although inadequate images of these things may be
entertained.
Perception does not refer even primarily to sense perception. Rather it is
these purely intellectual acts of perception that are to be treated as paradigmatic
when we think about Cartesian perception. The images of sense perception,
which involve the body, are taken to be inferior, ‘impure’ perceptions. Having
said that, sensory perception may, unofficially, play a larger role. After all,
Descartes couches his presentation of intellectual perception in the language
of vision. His guiding analogy is one of light, and a mental organ of sight is
often implicitly assumed. Thus, when Descartes tells us (in the definition of
idea above) that ideas are perceived ‘by the mind’, the mind would seem to be a
kind of ‘fleshless eye’.2 While intellectual vision is meant to be the primary form
of perception, the physical sense of sight may still work as the unconscious
model that Descartes draws upon when making intellectual vision perspicuous
to himself and his readers.

Descartes on self-cognition

Now Descartes uses his perceptual model of cognition to make sense of self-
knowledge.3 The mind knows itself by having a perception, or idea, of itself.
This idea is one of pure intellect, which is only possible when we draw off the
veil of sensory imagery that normally occupies our attention.4

I … realise that none of the things that the imagination enables me to grasp
is at all relevant to this knowledge of myself which I possess, and that the
mind must therefore be more carefully diverted from such things if it is to
perceive [ut percipiat] its own nature as distinctly as possible.5

Let us look a little closer at what Descartes says about this perception of the self
in other places. As previously remarked, he frequently couches self-awareness
in the language of vision, using a systematic analogy with the eye. He writes,
for example, of how the meditator ‘turns his mind’s eye upon himself ’ to
directly perceive an idea of his own mind.6 Indeed, the turning of the mind’s
18 The Notions of George Berkeley

eye onto the mind itself is an analogy that Descartes calls up in numerous
places to illuminate self-knowledge.
Pierre Gassendi was quick to point out a fundamental problem in this
analogy, writing:

The faculty itself, not being outside itself, cannot transmit a semblance of
itself to itself, and hence cannot produce any awareness of itself or, in other
words, cannot perceive itself. … The eye can see itself in a mirror, but it
cannot see itself in itself.7

Descartes’s response to this objection is to disavow any analogy with the

physical process of vision at all. The perception of the mind is unique and sui
generis. In fact, it underlies all corporeal perception, and thus enables sense
perception itself, since the mind is the only real perceiver. The sense of sight is,
then, really made possible by a perception of the mind:

It is … easy to answer this by saying that it is not the eye which sees the
mirror rather than itself, but the mind alone which recognizes the mirror,
the eye and itself.8

So, Descartes’s official position, stated when his talk of mental vision is subject
to criticism, is that we cannot begin to understand the perception of the mind
by making observations about any form of sensory perception, including
visual perception. But whether Descartes can really stand by this official
disavowal is another matter. It seems to render his use of the term ‘perception’
systematically confusing, for if there is no good analogy between perception
by sense and mental perception, then the word ‘perception’ may be little more
than a misleading homonym in these two applications. What’s more, if the
specifically visual metaphor is a mere façon de parler, one might wonder why
it is used so often by Descartes and thought to be so apt.
Descartes wishes to be understood quite literally when he says that we have
a clear and distinct idea of the mind, perceived by only the mind itself. Yet, this
claim is fraught with paradox even if we ignore the analogy with sight. Any
perception, after all, would seem to involve a separation of subject and object.
But such a separation would surely thwart the act of self-perception. The
perceptual model of the mind’s self-knowledge suggests that we can survey
our own nature, and yet at the same time capture the subject of that surveying.
 Berkeley’s Predecessors on Self-Knowledge 19

An infinite regress threatens, with an indefinite series of mental acts each

perceiving its predecessor. As we will see, it is this kind of worry that seems
to occupy Berkeley in his critique of the perceptual model in the Principles.9
The threat to Descartes’s account is intensified by two other specific views
that are usually attributed to him. Firstly, he seems to hold that all thinking –
and by that he means all mental activity – is conscious.10 If this is so, it would
mean that the infinite regress we have mentioned is a live problem. For if an
unconscious mental act had been possible then the regress might have been
halted by our positing a mental act of self-perception that was unconscious
to the self. But where unconscious mental activity is ruled out, an act of self-
consciousness, qua thought, will always require a further act of perception,
and so on ad infinitum.11
A second problem, which would have been acutely apparent to Berkeley,
arises from Descartes’s split between active and passive faculties of the mind.
When we come to the purely active thoughts of the mind, typified by willing,
and by the volitional component in judgement (and perhaps also by the
emotions) it is not clear how they could be known by the perception of an
idea. And yet Descartes tells us, on different occasions, that all the objects of
our thoughts are ideas, acts of the will not excepted. Descartes responds to
Hobbes’s probing on this matter as follows:

When I want something, or am afraid of something, I simultaneously

perceive that I want, or am afraid; and this is why I count volition and fear
among my ideas.12

Here Descartes seems to be positing two parallel mental processes. For

every act of will there is, at the very same time, a perception of that act. The
passive perception of our volitions accompanies those volitions in an inner
duet. Descartes talks here as if the coincidence of the two mental events –
volition and perception of the volition – was universal, but not founded on any
necessary inner connection. Really, however, the perceptions of volition must
have a necessary bond to the volitions perceived for, as we have just indicated,
unconscious mental activity of any sort, including volition, seems to have been
ruled out in principle.
A further vulnerability in this account of our knowledge of volition, and
other mental activity, is that it fails to explain how I own my volitions. One
20 The Notions of George Berkeley

might ask why the act of will perceived is felt to be my activity. If it is made
conscious to me by my perception of it, then it threatens to become only a
mere event that occurs within me, not an act of mine produced by my agency.
The Cartesian account seems to have me peering at my volitions to discover
when they occur and what exactly they dictate. But that would hardly seem
necessary if I were their inner motive force.
Perhaps it is for these reasons that Descartes, in his last work The Passions
of the Soul, published in 1649, shows dissatisfaction with the perceptual model
for understanding volition. In Section 19, he begins by reasserting the broad
position he had espoused in reply to Hobbes:

It is certain that we cannot will anything without thereby perceiving that we

are willing it. And although willing something is an action with respect to our
soul, the perception of such willing may be said to be a passion in the soul.

Then, however, he is inclined to fuse these active and passive components

together:

But because this perception is really one and the same thing as the volition,
and names are always determined by whatever is most noble, we do not
normally call it a ‘passion’, but solely an ‘action’.13

The perception of the willing seems, in this passage, to have become an

aspect of the act of will itself. This would suggest that the term ‘perception’,
and its conceptual twin, ‘idea’, have become redundant, and even misleading,
when applied to the mind’s acts of will. Perhaps Descartes is indicating here
that he no longer finds the perceptual model of self-awareness adequate. If
this is so, then Berkeley’s account of self-awareness, that we shall examine
in the chapters that follow, might be seen as arising from Descartes’s own
discomfort with the perceptual model he had introduced and made so
popular.14

Hobbes: ‘The soul is something of which

we have no idea at all’

We know, from his Notebooks, that Berkeley paid attention to the views of
Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was a materialist, and a reputed atheist. This made
 Berkeley’s Predecessors on Self-Knowledge 21

him one of Berkeley’s natural adversaries, standing alongside Spinoza and

the ‘free-thinkers’, such as John Toland and Anthony Collins. Berkeley seems
to have been primarily acquainted with Hobbes’s thought by reading the
trenchant critique of Descartes’s Meditations in the Third Set of Objections.15
Central to Hobbes’s Objections is a root-and-branch rejection of Descartes’s
account of spiritual substance. I wish to focus on this negative part of Hobbes’s
thought because – strange as it may seem – Berkeley’s doctrine of notions shows
that he recognized its soundness. Hobbes’s critical approach to Descartes also
found an echo, in succeeding years, in the writings of Malebranche and Locke.
Foremost among Hobbes’s negative claims is the assertion that we have no idea
of our finite spiritual substance, nor indeed of the divine spiritual substance.
Hobbes writes that ‘the soul is something of which we have no idea at all’ and
that ‘we have no idea or image corresponding to the sacred name of God’.16
What led Hobbes to make these forthright denials? To answer this question,
it will help to turn to a later work, Leviathan, where, in the first book ‘On Man’,
Hobbes discusses the human mind and its faculties. What he says, here might
be treated as a preface to the ‘Objections’ to Descartes, despite Leviathan being
published ten years later. Hobbes argues that philosophers have been perverted
in their doctrines by language. Words, he wrote, can make people ‘excellently
wise’, but also ‘excellently foolish’.17 It is the latter effect that Hobbes observed
in the writings of the scholastics. He sought to deflate their bombastic Latin
by translating key terms into literal English. The imposing language is then
shown to be vacuous or self-contradictory or, where it does make sense, the
doctrine propounded is shown to be hopelessly far-fetched.
This literalist approach to etymology is combined with Hobbes’s espousal
of a strong form of concept empiricism. Early in the work, Hobbes states, in
his own materialist terms, the key principle of concept empiricism – ironically,
itself originally a scholastic principle – nihil est in intellectu quod non prius
fuerit in sensu:

There is no conception in a man’s mind, which hath not at first, totally, or by

parts, been begotten upon the organs of Sense.18

The empiricist principle is supported by the literalist understanding of Greek

and Latin terms, which allows Hobbes to trace intellectual concepts back to
their putative sensory roots.
22 The Notions of George Berkeley

Let us look at one notable example of Hobbes’s approach to scholastic

terminology which appears in the very first chapter of Leviathan. It is the
Latin term species. Aware of the derivation from the Latin specere, meaning ‘to
look at’ or ‘to behold’, Hobbes suggests that this term be rendered into English
as ‘shew, apparition, or aspect, or a being seen’. Thus, the technical scholastic
phrase ‘visible species’ becomes, in Hobbes’s English, the utterly vacuous
‘visible being seen’. Hobbes then mischievously suggests that the term ‘audible
species’ be rendered with the phrase ‘audible being seen’. ‘Intelligible species’
becomes ‘intelligible being seen’ and so the satirical pattern of translation
goes on. Hobbes’s point is that ‘species’, the central term of cognition in
scholasticism, has deviated from what he calls ‘natural sense’ and has thus
rendered the utterances of philosophers ‘excellently foolish’.19
It is the same strategy that Hobbes then employs to undermine the
intellectual and spiritual language of Cartesianism. Aware that species was
the Latin equivalent of ‘idea’, his remarks about the Cartesian term follow
the pattern of his deflationary view of ‘species’. Hobbes, the translator of
Homer and Thucydides, reminds us that the term ‘idea’ was ‘derived from
the language of the Grecians, with whom the word Eϊδω signifieth to See.’20
And so an idea is literally an image, or ‘that which is seen’. It is no surprise,
then, that Hobbes treats ideas as sense-based pictures. Hobbes rarely uses the
word ‘idea’ in Leviathan, but when he does, it means exactly this – a sensory
image.21
In his Objections to Descartes’s Meditations, we find Hobbes concentrating
his fire on Descartes’s philosophical use of the term ‘idea’ in connection with
self-knowledge:

As for the idea of myself, this arises from sight, if we are thinking of ‘myself ’
as my body; and if we are thinking of the soul, then the soul is something of
which we have no idea at all.22

For Hobbes there is no idea of a spiritual self because there is no image

beyond the depictions in sense of one’s own body. It is only by misusing
language that Descartes can convince himself and others that there is a
peculiar representation of an inner immaterial self. Thus, Hobbes locates what
he takes to be a vacuity at the centre of the Cartesian system – when the mind
attempts to turn away from physical things and to perceive itself, no idea and
 Berkeley’s Predecessors on Self-Knowledge 23

no knowledge is forthcoming. The Cartesians have been deceived by their own

scholastic terminology.
When Hobbes turns to the concept of God, he again denies that there is any
idea to be had.23 The claim now, though, has a rather different significance. It
is not just that we have no idea of God as a spiritual being, but that rather any
attempt to conceive of his nature by finite idea must fail. God is not a corporeal
being at all and, because our conceptions are limited to the pictures derived
from sense, we can form no image that would begin to represent the divine
nature. God’s infinite being is necessarily inconceivable to finite minds like
our own, and we can only characterize Him negatively (as with the negative
term ‘infinite’ itself), or heap on Him superlatives, that express our awe, but
which lack strict cognitive significance (‘greatest’ being one example). This
allows Hobbes to interpret the biblical injunction forbidding all vain attempts
to form a physical image of God as reflecting the essential incapacity of finite
human thought to represent the Creator.24
These are the negative findings of Hobbes’s examination of the Cartesian
account of self-knowledge and knowledge of God. But how does Hobbes treat
the self? He accepts there is a ‘thinking thing’ in the trivial sense of an entity
that thinks, but he finds the ‘thing’ in question to be corporeal. When he says
there is no idea of the self, what he means is that the self, when framed in
characteristic Cartesian fashion as a spiritual substance perceived by the pure
intellect, is a mere nothing. This self is an illusion, trading on an implicit and
misleading metaphor. The only perception of ourselves that Hobbes’s strict
concept empiricism will allow is a perception of our physical selves by the
organs of sense. This means that, for Hobbes, the sentient self is to be identified
with the body – particularly its interior parts, including the heart, the brain
and that section of the nervous system that is enclosed by the pia mater.25

Malebranche: ‘We are but shadows to ourselves’

That Hobbes, a materialist, should reject Descartes’s claim that we have an

immediate idea of the spiritual self is no more than what one would expect.
Surprising, though, is that Father Malebranche, who thought the soul to be
‘the most noble part of our being’, should also exhibit scepticism about our
24 The Notions of George Berkeley

ability to know the nature of the soul substance. Berkeley paid close attention
to what Malebranche said in this regard and Malebranche’s influence on him
was probably both positive and negative. One thing seems clear, though –
the conclusions that Malebranche offered as to our lack of knowledge of the
soul confirmed to Berkeley that something had gone seriously wrong with
Descartes’s account of self-knowledge in terms of ideas.
Malebranche’s view of spirit is not always perfectly consistent, and even in
his most important philosophical work, Recherche de la Vérité, we find varying
pronouncements. But his most important sceptical claim, that we have no idea
of our own spiritual nature, can be seen to be unchanging if we first clear up
an equivocation in the term ‘idea’. For Malebranche, the term can have two
meanings. Loosely, it can mean ‘anything that represents some object to the
mind’. But Malebranche more often uses the term in the narrower, normative
sense of ‘anything that represents things to the mind in a way so clear that we
can discover by simple perception whether such and such modifications belong
to them’.26 It is in this second sense – as a perception of the pure intellect – that
Malebranche claims we lack any idea of the soul. It is this fundamental thesis
that Malebranche sought to elaborate and defend.
Instead of a perspicuous representation of the soul, Malebranche
held that we know ourselves by ‘inner sensation’ (sentiment intérieur) or
‘consciousness’. By this he meant a murky kind of knowledge, involving
confused and disconnected feelings, rather than the perceptions of pure
intellect which are able to constitute a demonstrative science. These internal
sensations cannot be clearly defined, and they can be known only by our
direct experience of them.27 So the modifications of the mind, familiar to
us in experience, cannot become part of a fluent scientia in the way that the
modifications of intelligible extension can constitute Euclidean geometry.
Instead, we must discover the mind’s properties by piecemeal empirical
observation. Not only can we not deduce and predict the modifications of
the mind prior to experience, but we naturally tend to mix up our sensations
with perceptions of external objects, as, for example, when we see colours
spread out on the surface of objects though they are really modifications of
our own minds.28
The result is that while self-consciousness is not strictly speaking deceptive,
it does not reveal what is most essential to us. Indeed, ‘the consciousness we
 Berkeley’s Predecessors on Self-Knowledge 25

have of ourselves perhaps shows us only the least part of our being’.29 Certainly,
inner sensation proves that we exist, and Malebranche thinks this (somehow)
suffices to guarantee our immortality, spirituality and freedom. But inner
sensation gives no indication of what our real nature is, nor does it reveal what
our soul would be like in detachment from our body.
Despite this sceptical tendency in his thought, Malebranche never doubts
that, in principle, an ‘idea’, or perspicuous representation, of our spiritual
selves is to be had. Indeed, it must be present in the mind of God, our creator,
as part of the blueprint of his creation, though it remains inaccessible to finite
human inquirers. Why does God deny us proper knowledge of ourselves
in this way? Malebranche argues that it is for our own good. If we had a
perspicuous perception of ourselves, we would no longer experience ourselves
as embodied, as ‘dispersed through all our members’, which would be highly
detrimental to the pursuit of our own well-being and to our survival in the
corporeal world in which we currently find ourselves.30
The upshot is that, on Malebranche’s view:

We are but shadows to ourselves; to see ourselves, we must look beyond

ourselves, and we shall never know what we are until we view ourselves in
Him who is our light and in whom all things become light.31

Here Malebranche’s Christian Platonism shines forth. Presupposing his

normative understanding of the term ‘idea’, he is led to locate the idea of
our own spiritual substance, along with the ideas of intelligible extension, in
the mind of God. It is only by the divine light that we might one day ‘view
ourselves in Him’, gaining thereby complete knowledge of what we are. While
God has chosen to present us with the idea of extension and thus provides us
with the light to understand the deductive knowledge of geometry, he has not
disclosed to us an idea of the thinking subject which might ground a spiritual
scientia. In our current state we must content ourselves with self-knowledge
that is seriously defective and incomplete.
Sometimes it is said that Berkeley is close to Malebranche on the subject of
self-knowledge. This was the view of A. A. Luce, who wrote in his classic study
of Malebranche’s influence on Berkeley:

Berkeley regarded our self-knowledge, as Malebranche did, as partial and

imperfect but immediate and quite real.32
26 The Notions of George Berkeley

Despite Malebranche’s undoubted influence on Berkeley – something Luce did

so much to draw our attention to – this assertion of the proximity of the two
philosophers on self-knowledge cannot be sustained. Not only did Berkeley
show no inclination to describe knowledge of the self as imperfect or partial,
he rejected Malebranche’s very ideal of self-knowledge which sought to gain a
perception of the self. Berkeley clearly has this ideal of Malebranche’s in mind
when he scrawled into his Notebooks the following blunt verdict:

Absurd that men should know the soul by idea ideas being inert, thoughtless,
Hence Malbranch confuted.33

Berkeley’s diagnosis of Malebranche’s error is actually, in broad outline, no

different to his diagnosis of the errors of his other contemporaries and near
contemporaries. Philosophers are striving for something that cannot be
had: an idea of the self. It is little wonder that in seeking this impossibility, they
end up in scepticism about knowledge of the self. The cause of the scepticism
is the Cartesian assumption that self-knowledge is to be treated as a form of
perception, parallel to the perception of extended things. It is this assumption
that has led Malebranche to pursue a chimera, and, in his disappointment, to
look upon our actual knowledge of ourselves as seriously deficient. To ‘confute’
Malebranche we need only ponder the absurdity of his ambition of achieving
an idea of the self.
Yet, Berkeley may have found something congenial in Malebranche’s
more general reflections on knowledge by idea. Malebranche, despite his
celebration of the epistemic lucidity of ideas, also made plain their limitations.
He conceded that all knowledge by idea is necessarily indirect. To know by
idea is to know things ‘through something different from themselves’.34 Such
knowledge is therefore inferior to a direct knowledge of things, where those
things ‘are intelligible by themselves’. Accordingly, Malebranche drops the
language of ideas – and, indeed of representation altogether – for what he held
to be the most direct form of knowledge when we grasp ‘unbounded being’, or
God. Here there is no need for any mediating representation. In this unique
case, says Malebranche, we know the being – the deity – ‘through himself ’ (par
lui-même).35
If Berkeley took something positive away from his reading of Malebranche,
then it is perhaps this: knowledge need not only be had by means of idea.
 Berkeley’s Predecessors on Self-Knowledge 27

Indeed, the most intimate and direct form of knowledge owes its special
status to the very lack of an intervening idea. Berkeley, of course, was neither
tempted by Malebranche’s assertion that it is our knowledge of God that
evinces this peculiar immediate relation, nor by the more general doctrine of
the ‘intimate union’ of our minds with God’s. Such a view about our relation
to the divine was looked upon by Berkeley as incomprehensible and probably,
also, as a form of ‘enthusiasm’.36 But Berkeley may still have noticed the species
of knowledge that Malebranche had delineated and drawn attention to – and it
may have seemed appropriate to Berkeley to apply this species of knowledge in
an account of self-awareness. However, on this question of positive influence
we can only speculate. What is evident in Berkeley’s writings is his rejection
of Malebranche’s scepticism with regard to self-knowledge, and his diagnosis
of this scepticism as stemming from the misguided assumption that self-
knowledge should involve an idea.

Locke on the ‘internal sense’ of reflection

While Berkeley was no doubt struck by the doubts expressed by Hobbes and
Malebranche with regard to knowledge of spiritual substance, I believe that it
was Locke’s subtler form of scepticism that most exercised him. Certainly, it
is Locke who is the most frequent target of his critical remarks on this issue.37
It should not be forgotten, in considering Locke’s account of knowledge and
reflection, that Berkeley’s view of Locke would be deeply influenced – perhaps
even warped – by the way in which John Toland, Anthony Collins and the
Third Earl of Shaftesbury had, in different ways, sought to radicalize his
philosophical legacy. Toland and Collins discovered a tendency to scepticism
and materialism, while Shaftesbury extended Locke’s internal sense of reflection
to make sense of moral and aesthetic judgement. All three interpretations
were considered by Berkeley as inimical to Christian doctrine and directly
stemming from Locke’s principles.
To understand the significance of Locke’s view of the spiritual sphere for
Berkeley we must first appreciate his overall philosophical orientation. Locke,
like Hobbes but unlike Malebranche, was committed to concept empiricism.
Certainly, Locke espoused a less strict concept empiricism than Hobbes, and
28 The Notions of George Berkeley

he went further in accommodating aspects of Descartes’s spiritual knowledge.

But concept empiricism had the same axiomatic status in his philosophical
project as it had had for Hobbes. Indeed, it is revealed in the very first sentence
that Locke committed to paper on the subject of the human mind in 1671. In
a manuscript he entitled ‘de Intellectu humano’, now known as ‘Draft A’ of the
Essay, Locke began:
I imagin that all knowleg is founded on and ultimately derives its self from
sense, or something analogous to it.38

And after discussing sense perception itself, he tells us what he understands by

‘something analogous to it’:

The other fountaine of all our knowledg though it be not sense, yet is some
thing very like it & may properly enough be called sensation & is noething
but the experience of the operations of our owne mindes within of which very
operations being often repeated we frame certaine Ideas such as Thinkeing
Beleiveing or to Thinke beleive assent doubt desire love feare hope hate &c.39

Here we see, in embryo, what will come to be Locke’s doctrine of reflection. The
perception of our own mental operations is held to be strongly analogous to
sense perception, or ‘sensation’. This is a view that Locke maintains throughout
the three extant drafts of the Essay, and which he stresses and develops in the
four published editions of the Essay that he oversaw, beginning in 1690.
In the Essay itself, Locke expands on this analogy between sense perception
and reflection. He tells us that there are two ‘Fountains of Knowledge, from
whence all the Ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring’. The first, which
Locke calls ‘sensation’, is directed towards external objects, and it conveys to the
mind all the ideas we have of body. The second, which Locke now calls ‘reflection’,
is conceived on explicit analogy with sensation. It is not literally sensation, or
sense, because it lacks a bodily organ and has ‘nothing to do with external Objects’.
But it parallels sense perception, as one of ‘the Windows by which light is let into
this dark Room’,40 supplying original content to the mind. Locke is happy to call it
‘internal sense’, and at one point even talks of ‘internal sensation’.41
How are we to understand the parallel between sensation and reflection?
Certainly, both are forms of perception for Locke. But what does this mean?
After all, as we have seen, ‘perception’ was used by Descartes and his successors
broadly to denote all kinds of cognition, including knowledge attributed to the
 Berkeley’s Predecessors on Self-Knowledge 29

pure intellect. Locke clearly wants to make more of the analogy than merely
to indicate, in this general way, that both sense perception and reflection
are forms of knowing. Locke’s treatment of reflection as analogous to sense
perception has, for him, the following more specific implications.
Firstly, the analogy means that we observe ourselves in a way that is familiar
from the way we observe a physical object of sense. The observation of the
operations of the mind may involve a peculiar ‘turn’, redirecting our perceptual
attention inwards. But once that is accomplished, it involves the same kind
of observation as the perception of external objects. We perceive our mental
operations as if with an inner eye. Locke is suggesting a modest, empiricist
rendering of the Cartesian inward turn:
Mind … turns its view inward upon it self, and observes its own Actions
about those Ideas it has, takes from thence other Ideas, which are as capable
to be the Objects of its Contemplation as any of those it received from
foreign things.42

Like Descartes, Locke judges that children and some adults (including even
a few philosophers) have not arrived at this inward turn. So, while they are
aware of the objects of sense and their ‘Thoughts are immersed in Matter’,
they fail to notice the acts of mind that accompany these objects and therefore
lack lasting ideas of reflection.43 No doubt Hobbes was among those being
chastised here.
Secondly, more narrowly, Locke bids us to recognize the passivity of the
mind towards the contents of both these kinds of perceptual observation.
When we observe ourselves, the ideas of our mental operations are imprinted
on our minds, just as the impressions of the qualities of external bodies
are passively received. The contents of reflection are beyond our power to
determine or change:

The Understanding can no more refuse to have, nor alter, when they are
imprinted, nor blot them out, and make new ones in it self, than a mirror
can refuse, alter, or obliterate the Images or Ideas, which, the Objects set
before it, do therein produce.44 (Emphasis in the original)

In reflection we mirror ourselves and suffer the operations of our own minds
to affect our understandings, just as our senses mirror external objects in
ordinary sense perception.
30 The Notions of George Berkeley

This perceptual model of reflection soon gives rise to an ambiguity that

Locke perhaps never quite resolves. It is not clear whether the act of reflection
is itself a possible object of observation, or whether it is a kind of meta-activity
that is never known in the way that our other mental operations, such as
believing, abstracting or doubting, are known. If we treat reflection as a mental
act alongside the others, then an infinite regress will threaten with each act
of reflection demanding another for us to be conscious of it, and so on ad
infinitum. But if reflection is an unconscious meta-activity then it is not clear
how it can count as a kind of perception after all. For Locke says, in more than
one place, that any mental act of perceiving is conscious to us – indeed it is
known by reflection.45 One cannot help concluding that Locke’s inward turn,
just like Descartes’s, is fraught with paradox.46
The situation is further complicated by Locke’s characterization of
consciousness itself as ‘the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind’.47
It is not clear whether this is just a turn of phrase, innocent enough. If so, it
would not refer to an additional perception of the mind, but would merely
mark the fact that all ideas, including those reflective ones of our mental
activities, are transparent to their subject. Speaking against this innocent
interpretation, however, is Locke’s supposition that the ideas of some of our
mental operations can occur unreflectingly and perhaps unconsciously, as in
a young child.48 If this is the case, then consciousness would only be bestowed
on these operations by an additional perceptual act.49
When Locke comes to itemize the simple ideas that are known by the
internal sense of reflection there are again ambiguities. Initially he talks only of
ideas of the mind’s own operations, with examples such as perception, thinking,
doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing ‘and all the different actings of
our own Minds’.50 But it becomes clear, almost immediately, that reflection will
include the affective states that typically attend, or are caused by, these mental
actings, for Locke tells us he is using the term ‘operations’ ‘in a large sense’

as comprehending not barely the Actions of the Mind about its Ideas,
but some sort of Passions arising sometimes from them, such as is the
satisfaction or uneasiness arising from any thought.51

The role of reflection in perceiving our affective states is confirmed later in the
Essay when Locke tells us that ‘delight and uneasiness’ are ideas of sensation
 Berkeley’s Predecessors on Self-Knowledge 31

and reflection, and that passions are modes of these pleasurable and painful
states.52 At various other points in the Essay we are told that the ideas of power,
existence, unity, duration, succession, number and life, all gain admittance to
our minds by reflection as well as by sense perception.53 Reflection thus comes
to be a source of ideas that are fundamental to intellectual knowledge. When
originally introduced, reflection had seemed to only explain the knowledge we
have of our own actions, but in the course of the Essay it acquires the additional
role of helping to furnish us with many of the concepts that Cartesians took to
be innate. Locke held that these concepts are not ready formed in the mind ab
initio, instead they pervade all experience, both outer and inner. The idea of
an active causal power was said by Locke to be more clearly found in reflection
than sensation, suggesting that this key intellectual concept was really derived
from the ‘internal sense’.54
We have, so far, expounded Locke’s internal sense of reflection, but now we
must relate that doctrine to his wider scepticism about the nature of spiritual
substance. It is when he comes to the question of the essence of our spiritual
selves that Locke makes his characteristic disavowal of knowledge. While
reflection certainly reveals that something in us thinks, it does not disclose
to us the inner nature of that thing.55 Both the external senses and the inner
sense of reflection only provide us with ‘some few superficial Ideas of things’
not with their ‘internal Constitution’.56
As noted above, Locke wishes to clearly distinguish his position from that
of Hobbes. Hobbes and the materialists deny the very existence of spiritual
phenomena. They fail to recognize any kind of ‘internal sense’ and therefore
pass over the simple ideas of our mental operations. Thus, while they
acknowledge the external objects of sensation, they remain blind to the act
of perception itself. This is treated by Locke as a natural human failing. In our
eagerness to understand outward things, we tend to overlook the deliverances
of the faculty of reflection:

It is for want of reflection, that we are apt to think, that our Senses shew us
nothing but material things. Every act of sensation, when duly considered,
gives us an equal view of both parts of nature, the Corporeal and Spiritual.
For whilst I know, by seeing or hearing, etc. that there is some Corporeal
Being without me, the Object of that sensation, I do more certainly know,
that there is some Spiritual Being within me, that sees and hears.57
32 The Notions of George Berkeley

But while Hobbes’s straightforward materialism is eschewed, Locke does not

want to commit himself to the existence of a spiritual substance. Notice the
non-committal use of ‘being’ in the passage just quoted (‘there is some Spiritual
Being’). This statement was added to the fourth edition of the Essay and it
seems designed both to deflect Edward Stillingfleet’s charge of materialism
and, yet, to fall short of endorsing a soul substance. Locke accepts the spiritual
operations that are revealed by reflection, but, in accordance with his concept
empiricism, he refrains from offering any certain claim to knowledge of the
substance underlying those operations.
The passage is evidence of Locke’s even-handed epistemic pessimism
towards material and spiritual substance to be found in many other passages
of the Essay. In each case our simple ideas provide us with knowledge of the
existence of material and spiritual things, but they do not reveal the essence
of those things, or the substances which underlie the qualities. Therefore,
while we can say with certainty that these two kinds of things exist, we cannot
go further and characterise their inner natures. Locke’s concept empiricism
precludes our intellects from having access to content not derived from sense.
We are therefore in the dark not only when it comes to the nature of matter,
but also with regard to the nature of spirit.
There are two ways of interpreting this even-handedness. An innocent
interpretation would say that Locke wishes to caution us against preferring
matter to spirit, and against assuming that the nature of matter, unlike that of
spirit, is properly known to us. However, more subversive readings are available,
and were alive in early reactions to the Essay, and it is likely that Berkeley would
have favoured such readings. On one reading Locke was nodding towards a
quasi-Spinozist monism.58 By saying that the substances of both matter and spirit
were unknown, he was acknowledging that they might share a hidden essence.
The material and spiritual properties known to sensation and reflection, on this
reading, would both inhere in a tertium quid. An alternative interpretation –
equally subversive and perhaps carrying more weight – would treat Locke as
leaving the backdoor open to a subtle, but thoroughgoing, form of materialism,
according to which thinking emerges from complex combinations of material
components. This suspicion gains support from Locke’s ‘thinking matter’
hypothesis – his refusal to exclude the possibility that matter, when formed into
systems ‘fitly disposed’, might be endowed, by God, with the faculty of thought.59
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