berkeley and the microworld

Berkeley and the Microworld

by Catherine Wilson (Edmonton)

Introduction

Intensely debated in the 1930s, the question of the unity of Berkeley'sphilosophy from the time of the Principles of 1710 to the Siris of 1744was abandoned when it seemed to lead only to the exhaustion of theoriginal participants without establishing any new avenues for re-search.1 The problem was how to reconcile Berkeley's view that thingsare only ideas and are as such inefficacious with the Siris9 s apparentcommitment to insensible particles and spiritistic but non-mental agen-cies. In the 1980s there was a sudden resurgence of interest. In his 1982paper, "The Philosopher by Fire in Berkeley's Alciphron", I. C. Tipton,though stating that he was confident that this aether is not corporealand active and that the doctrines of Siris are reconcilable with esse es tpercipi, observed that most commentators "have been embarrassed bywhat Berkeley says concerning the 'invisible fire', light, or aether"2. In1986, J. O. Urmson raised the issue of corpuscularianism in Siris againand confessed himself baffled as to how the active aether of that work

1 The extremes were represented by J. D. Mabbott, who, in "The Place of God inBerkeley's Philosophy", J. Phil. Studies (Philosophy) 6, 1931, regarded the Sirisas a deeply uncharacteristic, even aberrant work, and A. A. Luce in "The Unityof the Berkeleian Philosophy", Mind 46, 1937, 44-52 and 180-90; and by J.Linnell, "Berkeley's Siris" Personalist 42, 1960, 5 — 12, who saw it as continuingthe main themes of the earlier books. The thesis that Siris represents in somesense the 'real' Berkeley, who is not the figure of the Dialogues and the Principles,is advanced by P. J. Werz "Berkeley's Christian Neo-Platonism", Journal of theHistory of Ideas 37, 1976, and J. Wild, George Berkeley: A Study of his Life andPhilosophy, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1936, following A. C.Eraser's studies of 1881 and 1909. T, E. Jessop's introduction to Siris strives tomaintain the official editorial unity position, but this fine discussion actuallyundercuts it considerably.

2 I. C. Tipton, "The 'Philosopher by Fire' in Berkeley's Alciphron", in: C. Turbaync,ed. Berkeley: Critical and Interpretive Essays, Minneapolis, Univ. of Minnesota,1982.

Archiv f, Gesch. d, Philosophie 76. Bd., S. 37-64© Walter de Gruyter 1994ISSN 0003-9101

Brought to you by | Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek KölnAuthenticated | 134.95.7.243

Download Date | 5/4/13 6:25 PM

38 Ca the r ine Wilson

was supposed to be reconciled with the esse est percipi doctrine.3 Morerecently, Gabriel Moked, by investigating the scientific scheme of thework has supplied a sound basis for discussion of the issue, arguingthat Berkeley did change his mind, offering, in later life, "his ownbrand of 'the corpuscularian philosophy,' which perhaps lacks someintransigent features of his epistemology in its heroic age, but takesinto account many aspects of philosophy of science without rejectingthe basic premisses of immaterialism"4.

In the original debate, as in the latest one, the last word seems tohave been had by the contingent defending the unity of Berkeley'sphilosophy. A.A. Luce constructed a sort of concordance to all ofBerkeley's works and showed that, whatever Berkeley says about cor-puscles, the active aether, etc., the same theses: the passivity of matter,laws as statements of regularities observed in nature, and the existenceof the world in the mind are written down in Sins as in the Dialoguesand Principles, and he based his case on these incontestable re-inscrip-tions. Moked too concludes that Berkeley remains an "immaterialist"in the same sense as before, and that what is new in the Sir is is awillingness to accept hypothetico-deductive forms of explanation. Anyhistorian might wonder what point there could be to re-opening aquestion in which the textual evidence is apparently so unambiguous.Adding to that voice, the philosopher is apt to point out that, oncesomeone has asserted that the world is in the mind, it does not muchmatter what particular scientific ontology that person goes on to assert;idealism — which is the name I will give to the doctrine that "things"are just ideas in some mind — is a sort of operator which can beprefaced to any account of the world, even one mentioning corpusclesand interactions, with a slight alteration of sense but no alteration oftruth-values.5

3 J. O. Urmson, "Two Central Issues in Bishop Berkeley's Corpuscularian Philoso-phy in the Siris", History of European Ideas 7,1986, 633—41.

4 G. Moked, Particles and Ideas: Bishop Berkeley's Corpuscularian Philosophy.,Oxford, Clarendon, 1988, 25.

5 Thus Tipton's solution is to say that the corpuscles of aether are perceivable inprinciple, though they lie beyond the range of conceivable microscopes, and, assuch, may be both immaterial and passive ideas, "The 'Philosopher by Fire'",169 f. Other contributions to this question include D. Garber, "Locke, Berkeleyand Corpuscular Skepticism", in C. Turbayne, ed., Berkeley: Critical and Inter-pretive Essays, 174—83; M. Wilson, "Berkeley and the Essences of the Corpuscu-larians", Essays on Berkeley, ed. J. Foster and H. Robinson, Oxford, Clarendon,1985, 131 -48, and most recently, Ch. 6, "Corpuscularianism", in K. P. Winkler,Berkeley: An Interpretation, Oxford, Clarendon, 1989.



Berkeley and the Microworld 39

The purpose of this paper is to argue that the unity thesis in boththe traditional form and even in its updated and qualified version arewrong. The re-inscriptions on which Luce laid the entire burden of hisargument are not sufficient to hold it up; they render the work at besttechnically inconsistent and at worst they mask the real principleof unity of Berkeley's philosophy. There are-two claims which arecontinuously present in Berkeley's work: (a) that no material objectever acts; and (b) that plants and animals have internal processes,which are linked, via the concept of natural law, to the phenomena oflife. But (a) is given an idealist sense in the early works and a verydifferent immaterialist sense in the later works. Berkeley does come toaccept the existence of a world outside the mind, that is, outside ofany mind including God's, even if the emphasized entities in that worldare so fine, tenuous, and, at the same time, so quality-laden, that theydo not resemble the material corpuscles which the "corpuscularianphilosophers" of the 17th century had posited as ultimate entities. Asfor (b), Berkeley accepts throughout his oeuvre some notion of really-existing-interior-mechanisms-invisible-to-our-eyes. In this sense he is ahypothetico-deductivist all the way through. However, just as it wouldbe seriously misleading to call him on that account a "mechanicalphilosopher", it is difficult to make the hypothetico-deductive suit fithis contours very well, either in his earlier phase or in his later phase,since, for significant reasons, he bypasses the whole question of theconfirmation of hypotheses.

My aim then is to show that Berkeley succeeds in Siris in describinga category of object — and giving it a central role in his account ofnature — which leaves him only two options: the non-mind-dependentexistence of an external world, in case this object is not identical withGod, or pantheism if it is. Supposing that Berkeley has reasons forrejecting the second alternative, that leaves us with the first.

As observed, one might feel on a priori grounds that such revisionisttheses have little chance of being true unless the case is made on thebasis of previously unpublished documents. But recent work on thehistory of English science has opened up perspectives which make itpossible to look at Berkeley's metaphysics in something of a new light.His refusal to take "material substance" or any stand-in for it as afundamental term of metaphysics and epistemology once seemed a sortof eccentricity. We now know, however, that Berkeley was hardly alonein his mistrust of a science construed, after the Cartesian fashion, asoperating entirely with material particles and material objects subjectto mechanical laws. Natural philosophy in England from 1660 to 1740




is emphatically not based on corpuscles in collision: it abounds withreferences to the aerial nitre, fermentative spirits, aethers, airs, vital,animal, and seminal principles, chemical essences and invisible fire.6

To our eyes, these entities all seem highly "speculative". But, as Newtonemphasized for his own active principles, they were to be consideredempirical notions, whose existence was manifested by experiments anddirect observation: Cartesian mechanism was, by contrast, irremediablyhypothetical.7

Understanding that a non-qualitative physics — a physics based onthe so-called primary properties alone — was powerfully resisted byexperimentalists and theorists of natural science in the early years ofthe 18th century, both on the grounds that it was inadequate to explaincombustion, respiration and vital phenomena, and on the grounds thatit was dangerous to religion to deny the ready intelligibility of agencywhich was invisible and non-material, helps us to see that Berkeleywas not just a maker of paradoxes and an isolated saboteur. Concernedto stave off materialism, he focussed on the weakest feature of Carte-sianism, its rendering of the causal theory of perception, and foundhimself giving a strange account of what "things" were. But if he couldlater accept non-mental existence while asserting the indispensabilityand primacy of immaterial agents, this position was ultimately the oneto be preferred as less paradoxical, as giving a better scientific accountof the world, and — in a sense to be explained later — as truer to hisexperience, not of external phenomena, but of internal phenomena.

There is a second obstacle, in addition to the overgenerous estimationof the rejection of strict corpuscularian mechanism in his time, to theright reading of Berkeley. This is the common valuation of Siris as awild, extravagant work by contrast with the Dialogues, whose argu-ments can engage almost anyone. The strange morbidity of his last

6 See esp. Simon Schaffer, "Godly Men and Mechanical Philosophers: Souls andSpirits in Restoration Natural Philosophy", Science in Context 1, 1987, 55 — 86;E. McMullin, Newton on Matter and Activity·, Notre Dame, University of NotreDame, 1978; J. E. McGuire, "Force, Active Principles and Newton's InvisibleRealm", Ambix 15, 1968, 154-208; I.E. McGuire and P. Rattansi, "Newtonand the 'Pipes of Pan'", Notes and Records of the Royal Society 21, 1966,108—43; B.J.T. Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy, Cambridge,Cambridge University Press, 1975. > " . · "

7 Where some philosophers feign hypotheses for explaining all things mechanically,"the main Business of natural Philosophy is to argue from Phaenomena withoutfeigning Hypotheses, and to deduce Causes from Effects". Opticks, 4th ed., NewYork, Dover, 1952, Bk. Ill, Pt. 1, Query 27, p. 369.



. Berkeley and the Microworld 41

major work, the excursuses, the hypochondria, the hermetic profundity,can stall or alienate the reader and prevent him from seeing that it isprecisely these features which furnish important clues to the interpreta-tion of the work. And in fact the modern evaluation of the two workshas become inverted. The reaction of Berkeley's contemporaries wasthat the Principles were fantastic and paradoxical while they saw Sirisas well within normal parameters; at least it went through six printingsand sold well.8 So the commentator who asks "How could the sensiblephilosopher of the Dialogues and Principles become the author of amystical treatise on the virtues of tar water of no philosophical interestor importance?" is already on the wrong track to understanding him,while the commentator who asks "How did anyone taking the extremeand unique position of the young Berkeley get drawn back to asomewhat more conventional one?" is on the right one.

With that question guiding the investigation, let us look first at theissue of Berkeley's early attitude towards a constellation of concepts:invisible entities, subvisible entities, and the mechanical and corpuscula-rian philosophies.

1. Berkeley acknowledges the importance of internal structure

As Tipton remarks in his paper, the clue to the Sins-problem "lies in Berkeley'sinterest in the very minute, an interest wholly natural in the age of the developmentof the microscope"9. This means that we have to view Berkeley against a backgroundinvolving both (a) speculations about the unobservable as well as the just unobservedinternal structure of objects; and (b) actual experiences and presentations — visualrepresentations — of observed internal structure. We need also to consider the allegedrelationship between internal structure and the phenomena of life, such as growth,movement, and warmth, and between internal structure and perceptual qualities,such as redness, sweetness, and acidity. It needs to be remembered that not all"corpuscularians" were "mechanists" and vice-versa. Many theorists and even propa-gandists for the mechanical philosophy, like Boyle and Hooke, believed that material

8 For details, see H. M. Bracken, The Early Reception of Berkeley's Immaterialism1710-1733, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1959, and J. M. Hone and M. M. Rossi, BishopBerkeley, New York, Macmillian, 1931, 235 f.

9 I. C. Tipton, "The 'Philosopher by Fire'", 168. See the article of G. Brykman,"Microscopes and Philosophical Method in Berkeley" in C. Turbayne, ed.,Berkeley, 69-82. Berkeley's belief that the microscope encouraged philosophersto believe in such absurdities as the infinite divisibility of matter, though con-nected with his views on micro-structure, will not be enlarged upon here.




corpuscles were important and basic in scientific theory, but also allowed for entitiesand modes of action falling outside strict definitional lines, such as seminal effluvia.To be a consistent, restricted, corpuscularian mechanist, like Descartes, one wouldhave to believe both that matter was paniculate, inert, and qualityless except forthe shape, size, and weight of its constituent particles, and that all effects wereproduced by mechanical interactions between particles or through the operation ofmachines composed of such particles10.

Meanwhile, the new iconography of the microscope, established by Hooke in theMicrographia of 1665, and furthered especially by Malpighi and Grew in their workof the 1680s on the fine anatomy of plants and animal organs, introduced aproblematic set of visual experiences for the primary observers and a problematicset of images for the readers of their books; for, according to the terms of themechanical (not necessarily "corpuscularian") philosophy, it was supposed to bepossible to understand plant and animal bodies as interrelated micro-machineswhich, acting in harmony, produced all the phenomena of plant and animal life.11

By the time Berkeley began to write, microscopical observations sometimes seemedto support this supposition, by revealing "glands" and "organs" in plants, supposedlythe counterparts of structures in animals. At the same time, however, the apparentsimplicity of the plant, as Francois Delaporte has argued, impeded theory-deriva-tion.12 Plants do not, macroscopically or microscopically observed, look very muchlike ensembles of integrated machines; unlike animals they do not even have a heartto function as a pump.

In Principles 60 — 66, Berkeley shows that he is well aware of mechanical theoriesof the organism: he praises "the curious organization of plants, and the admirablemechanism in the parts of animals [...] and all the clockwork of Nature, the greaterpart whereof, he says, "is so wonderfully fine and subtle as scarce to be discernedby the best microscope"13. This passage suggests two things: (a) Berkeley believesthat animal bodies have an analogy to clocks; and: (b) We cannot have adequatevisual ideas of the smallest functionally-relevant parts of plants and animals. Perhapswe can succeed in seeing 'them with the microscope but we don't see them well. Thesepoints immediately raise two problems about the unity of Berkeley's philosophy evenwithin the boundaries of the Dialogues and Principles, problems which can howeverbe disposed of fairly easily. The first is that he says in the Dialogues that the

10 See for a programmatic statement Descartes, Principles of Philosophy·, Pt. IV,Articles 199-201.

11 For Malpighi's iatromechanical bias, see H. Adelmann, Mar cello Malpighi andthe Development of Embryology, 5 vols., Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1966,Vol. I: 150 f.

12 F. Delaporte, Nature's Second Kingdom, transl. A. Goldhammer, CambridgeMA, M.I.T. Press, 1982 (orig. pubL.as La Second Regne de la Nature, Paris,Flammarion, 1979), 24.

13 Principles of Philosophy m A.A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, eds., The Works ofGeorge Berkeley, 9 vols., London, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1948 — 57, Vol. II;hereafter cited as Works.




microscope does not give us a better view of an object than we have with the nakedeye but actually shows us a new object.14 There seems then to be no basis forcomplaint about the quality of the microscopic image which ought just to bewhatever it is. But there need be no inconsistency here: the same problem ariseswhen we consider the case of any "object" seen under less than optimal conditions,say, through a wavy windowpane. Expectations and hopes set up by previousexperience are violated in both cases; we expect a different kind of image and regretthat we are not getting it, but that does not compel us to say that what we expectedand regret not getting is a better view of that object where "that object" is notreducible by the usual phenomenalistic type of paraphrase to some collection ofvisual impressions.15

The second problem is that Berkeley appears to accept the favorite metaphor ofmechanists, the famous clock metaphor.16 The latter point allows some commenta-tors to infer that Berkeley believed that animals, plants, and perhaps substances ingeneral possess a corpuscular microstructure which it would be profitable andilluminating to investigate. As the ordinary corpuscularian would 'try to find theconfiguration of corpuscles that all gold has in common and that is responsible forits color, weight, malleability, and so on', so the Berkeleian idealist, non-causalistcorpuscularian will exactly repeat his procedures, while telling himself a slightlydifferent metaphysical story about them. So long as we accept the BerkeleyanNewspeak and agree that "things" are just "ideas" and "causes" are just "signs of*their "effects" which do not produce them, the Boyle program for science can remainintact.17

But this point of view involves a confusion between corpuscularianism andmechanism. The problem with this happy acceptance of equivalences is that Berkeleydid write in his Notebooks "My doctrine affects the Essences of the Corpusculari-ans"18. He saw himself as the opponent of atomists, Epicureans, Spinozists, Cartesi-ans and Locke and Boyle to the extent that they believed in the reduction ofexperiences to the causal effects of the movement and pressure of particles. "The

14 Dialogue III in Works II: 245. Cf. A New Theory of Vision, Sect. 85 f., in WorksI: 205 f., where he endorses Locke's point that "microscopic eyes" would be ofno help to us.

15 Thus Bruce Silver may be overstating the case for an inconsistency in Berkeley'sappeal to the microscope to show that objects have no "true" color. "TheConflicting Microscopic Worlds of Berkeley's Three Dialogues", Journal of theHistory of Ideas, 37, 1976, 343-9. Berkeley's argument can simply be taken asa reductio ad absurdum of the hypothesis that a microscope shows us the truecolor of an object, the falsity of which is consistent with his "new world" theory.

16 As developed by Descartes, Boyle, and Locke; see L. Laudan "The ClockMetaphor and Probabilism", Annals of Science 22, 1966, 73-104. Variousstatements of it can be found in Boyle's essays, e. g. "On the Vulgarly ReceivedNotion of Nature", in Works of the Honorable Robert Boyle, ed. T Birch (1972),6 vols., Hildesheim, Olms, 1965 f., V: 245.

17 "Corpuscular Skepticism", 186f.18 Notebook B 234, Works I: 30.




sillyncss of the Currant (sic) Doctrine makes much for me. they commonly supposea material world, figures, bulks of various sizes etc according to their own confessionto no purpose, all our sensations may be & sometimes actually are without them.Nor can we so much as conceive it possible that they should concur in any wise tothe production of them."*9 He has no difficulty endorsing, under his own interpreta-tion, the clock-metaphor; what disturbs him is the idea that material particles couldin any way be involved in the production of surface qualities. There could be nopoint in trying to investigate such a relation because it does not exist.

There is no possibility of accommodation then between corpuscularian essential-ists of the Boyle-Locke school and Berkeley himself. It would not help if they agreedto adopt Berkeleyan Newspeak and describe inner corpuscular structure as a "sign"of surface qualities. Berkeley wants to replace talk about events involving materialobjects causing other events involving material objects with talk about one idea'sbeing a sign of another. But he does not mean by this that whenever there is aregular correlation between A and B A is a sign of B; Berkeley's talk of "signs" isessentially parasitic on normal talk of causes.20 And this means that we must feela sort of natural impulsion towards the idea of B when having the idea of A. Thatis why perceptions constitute what he calls a divine visual language. One idea seemsto mean another in the sense of tending to lead to it, and forming a sensible sequencetogether with it, despite the fact that there is no intrinsic linkage between ideas, justas certain combinations of letters and not others spell out something meaningful.21

Thus the sequence of appearances is analogous to a reasoned discourse; to see is toreceive instruction and something like the gift of prophecy, both of which imply toBerkeley that our seeing is the direct effect of some higher intelligence.22 Berkeleywould agree, I take it, that the wheels of the watch's mechanism going around"mean" the movement of the dial, if we can trace out the mechanism for ourselves.And it is conceivable that the micro-appearance of the liver could "mean" that itworks like a kind of filter, in virtue of which a person's face and body do not turnyellow. But could "essence" in the corpuscularian's sense mean surface qualities?Here Berkeley has to disagree. Corpuscularian essences can never be or becomesigns or surface qualities, and that is the flaw in the corpuscularian program. Toturn the point around. If Berkeley were favorably disposed towards the Boyleprogram, he could simply have treated Boyle's talk of material corpuscles and theproduction of effects as a harmless linguistic habit and accepted him as a forerunner

19 Notebook A 476, Works I: 60.20 See, for a discussion of the relation of "causal" language to "sign" language and

its effect on construals of the laws of nature, G. Buchdahl, Metaphysics andthe Philosophy of Science, Oxford, Blackwell, 1969, 304 ff.; Richard J. Brook,Berkeley's Philosophy of Science, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1973, Ch. 1.

21 On divine visual language see esp. Alciphron, Fourth Dialogue, Works III:159-162; also. Λ New Theory of Vision, Sect. 64, Works I: 195f.

22 Alciphron, Works III: 161. The minute philosopher is incapable of understandingprophecy, just as the corpuscularian is incapable of predicting. Cf. Sins 254,Works V: 120.




of the Berkeleyan program for science, which involves looking for an orderly systemof signs, not in order to be able to understand the causes of phenomena, but ratherhow to regulate our conduct and anticipate the future.

Of course Berkeley's worries about the corpuscularian account of qualities arenot idiosyncratic. In a sense he is simply calling on the corpuscularians to showgreater accountability, given that they have already admitted that they do not fullyunderstand what they are talking about. Boyle himself seemed to be unable tobridge the gap between his declaration that qualities and powers of substances werethe result of their inner texture and his experimental manipulations, which weresimply variations on the theme of changing the qualities of a substance by somemixing, heating or cooling operation, as though — as Leibniz suggested — the moreof these manipulations he could perform, the greater the certainty of the mechanicalhypothesis. Neither Boyle nor anyone else, to put the point simply, had any ideahow to go about finding the configuration of corpuscles which would truly explainan object's surface qualities. "According to their own confession to no purpose"23

was how Berkeley saw matters standing with respect to Boyle's famous trio of bulk,figure, and motion. Locke was notoriously unhappy about the inaccessibility todirect observation hence manipulation of the corpuscles supposedly responsible forqualities and powers, and both Boyle and Locke bemoan the fact that they can seeno evidence of any intrinsic relation between colors and their causes in the asperityor roughness of the surface of bodies.24

In Boyle's paper on Colours, he cites reports of people being able to discriminatecolors via their fingertips as evidence for his surface roughness theory. We are toconceive them as existing in bodies as "latent ruggednesses", as "little protuberancesand cavities" which "interrupt and dilate" the light.25 But what has the tactileimpression of roughness to do with color? Newton's supposition that sound is reallya trembling motion of the air which only takes the "form" of a sound in the

23 Notebook A 476, Works I: 60.24 See the well-known passage in Locke's Essay IV: iii: 12: "Besides this ignorance

of the primary Qualities of the insensible Parts of Bodies, on which depend alltheir secondary Qualities, there is yet another and more incurable part ofIgnorance [...]; and that is, that there is no discoverable connection between anysecondary Quality and those primary Qualities that it depends on." (An EssayConcerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch, Oxford, Clarendon, 1975,545). Cf. Boyle, "The Experimental History of Colors": "I would further know,why this contemperation of light and shade, that is made, for example, by theskin of a ripe cherry, should exhibit a red, and not a green, and the leaf of thesame tree should exhibit a green rather than a red. And indeed, lastly, why sincethe light that is modified into these colours consists but of corpuscles movedagainst the retina or pith of the optic nerve, it should there not barely give astroke, but produce a colour; whereas a needle wounding likewise the eye wouldnot produce color but pain [...] whensoever I would descend to the minute andaccurate explication of particulars, I find myself very sensible of the greatobscurity of things [...]." (Works of Boyle I: 696)

25 Experimental History of Colors, Works of Boyle I: 680 IT.




scnsorium, that colors arc a disposition of an object to reflect a certain non-coloredtype of corpuscle which then causes the "sensations of those motions under theform of Colors"26 does not fare much better: what, after all, is a motion under theform of a color?27 If what we saw were, in the veridical case, a true image of someexternally existing thing, then, as Descartes put it, "we would not hear sounds butrather conceive the motion of the parts of the air which is then vibrating againstour ears"28.

Thus Berkeley's position includes and goes beyond Locke's. Bothconcede some truth to the claim that internal fine structure is linked,causally or semiotically, with what is superficially observable. Butneither one perceives that much progress in science has been made asa result. For Locke, there is no predictive science based on materialcorpuscles, as their arrangements cannot be isolated and inspected; itis 'lost labour' to seek after such a thing. Fortunately, however, sciencecan proceed very well without referring to them, as Sydenham showedat the bedside, Newton with his mathematical proofs, and Boyle withhis fund of chemical "experiments". For Berkeley too science is notmissing anything in having limited visual acces^. Science can developa system of diagnostic, predictive signs based on the appearance —even perhaps the microappearance — of glands, tissues and organs,and with autopsies one may retrodict the cause of death. Only all thishas nothing to do with corpuscles or mechanical interaction betweenthem.29

Berkeley's position gained plausibility not only from the difficultyinvolved in taking hypothetical processes and structures as explana-tions, but from the difficulty of taking actually observed internalstructures as explanations. And it gained not only from the problemof accounting for qualities, but from the difficulty of carrying out theaspirations of fine anatomy. Grew, who had filled pages with detaileddrawings of plant sections as seen under the microscope, was forcedto ask himself the question, what is this structure for?

For when upon the Dissection of Vegetables, we see so great a difference in them,that not only their Outward Figures, but also their inward Structure, is so Elegant;and in all so Various; it must needs lead us to Think, That the Inward Varieties,

26 Newton, Opticks, Bk. I, Pt. II, Prop. II, Theorem II, "Definition", p; 124.27 See Dialogue I, Works II: 186f.28 Descartes, Treatise of Light, Sect. 1, in J. Cottingham et al., eds.,The Philosophi-

cal Writings of Descartes, 2 vols., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985,I: 82.

29 As Margaret Wilson rightly points out in "Berkeley and the Essences of theCorpuscularians", 137f.




were either to no End; or if they were, we must assign to what. To imagine thefirst, were exceeding vain; as if Nature, the Handmaid of Divine Wisdom, shouldwith Her fine Needle and Thread stitch up so many several Pieces, of so difficult,and yet so groundless a Work. But if for some End, then either only to be lookedupon or some other besides.30

But to be looked upon cannot be their purpose, Grew says, as someof their tiniest parts will remain forever unseen. Hence we must supposethat their purpose is vegetation.

Berkeley's theory mediates then between the extreme anthropopathicview that the inner structure of plants exists for our aesthetic enjoy-ment, a position he can entertain in the New Theory of Vision whenhe suggests that microscopic eyes could at best afford us "the emptyamusement of seeing"31 while fulfilling no productive function, and theview that a plant is somehow a machine. In one sense the structurereally is just there to be seen; it does not produce anything, certainlynot the characteristics of plant life. The microsection of a plant stemis scientifically quiet. Even the observer who can see the flow of sapcannot grasp the plant as a dynamic system like a mechanical device;for the readers of Grew's books, the interior of a plant is just a complexdesign. And that of course is how Berkeley often conceives the interiorsof things in general; as a series of inert pictures, as "groundless". Hispessimism about the microscope as a research tool thus seems as muchan effect of the new genre of micrographia as it is of his study of thecorpuscularians. The microscope gives us only pictures, or views; itcannot show us how a plant blooms, or poisons, or reeks. And if themicroscopic picture is a step on the way to the picture that thecorpuscularian would like to be able to draw, why should we expectthat the explanation of these qualities should magically appear at someeven more distant level?

The "hollow animal" hypothesis presented in the Principles mustthus be understood not as indicating Berkeley's indifference to interiorstructure, as one might otherwise suspect from his discussion of thereality of gloves in the Dialogues, nor as a misunderstanding of whatanatomists were actually arguing. Here he says that the fabrication ofall the parts and organs of the animal body is not "absolutely necessaryto the producing of any effect"32. God could make changes on the dial

30 N. Grew, The Anatomy of Plants (1682), New York, London, Johnson Reprint,1965, 8.

31 New Theory of Vision 86, Works I: 206.32 Principles, Sect. 62, Works II: 67.



48 Ca ther ine Wilson

of the clock directly; he does not need to use the inner jnechanism ofthe clock. And so God could make plants grow and shoot forthblossoms and leaves and animals perform all their motions, withoutthere being anything under the surface. However he immediately statesthat that fabrication is necessary to the producing of things in a"constant, regular way, according to the Laws of Nature"33.

Now it needs to be said that no philosopher, with the exceptionperhaps of Kenelm Digby, was in the habit of claiming that innermechanisms worked by necessity. Most natural philosophers were goodvoluntarists who maintained that God could do anything! (Though ifan angel wanted to bring about some surface effect, Boyle says, itwould have to use mechanical means.) Their claim is rather that innermechanisms are sufficient; the action of God or, more likely, a vitalspirit, is not needed. But Berkeley's question is, if you concede thatGod could do it directly, what makes you so sure that your mechanismis really sufficient? To imagine that God could do it directly is to admitthat inner mechanism is one thing, the vital phenomenon another.Thus you mechanists have no warrant for supposing that your innermechanisms are actually effective, you are just imagining them aseffective, that is to say, as sufficient. The picture of the microworld inBerkeley's early work then can be described as one in which nothingessential or important occurs at the edge of our perceptual world or,more exactly, in those worlds the microscope shows us. But what wesee inside an animal is not near the perceptual horizon, or, moreexactly, in one of those worlds that would be blurred and indistinctimages associated with even our best imaginable microscopes. Ratherthan supposing that nature becomes more interpretable and intelligibleas one descends into its interior, Berkeley argues that it becomes lessso. As Winkler points out, the question of the existence of unperceivedcorpuscles or other micro-entities is allowed to "float"34; it is not, forBerkeley, a pertinent question, one which needs to be answered beforehe can articulate a theory of science.

The fading of significance at the micro-level is confirmed by thedraining out of the qualities of the image. As Boyle had first arguedand as now many people knew, the microscope removes the vividcolors of ordinary experience; opaque bodies sliced thin enough to seeappear transparent; blood grows gray, while strange haloes, rainbows,

33 Ibid.34 K. R Winkler, Berkeley: An Interpretation, 270.




and colored fringes may appear around the object. The latent image -supposedly near to the "real essence" - is fading, on Boyle's account,out of sight altogether: "[T]he leaves will afford the most transparentsort of consistent bodies [...]; and a single leaf or plate will be so farfrom being opacous, that it will scarce be so much as visible. Andmultitudes of bodies there are, whose fragments seem opacous to thenaked eye, which yet, when I have included them in good microscopes,appeared transparent [...]. I am not yet sure that there are no bodies,whose minute particles even in such a microscope as that of mine, willnot appear diaphanous."35

It was not only the case that the latent image seemed to becomevisually transparent and epistemologically mute. It frustrated therebythe physico-theological instinct. The helplessness of the corpusculariansto show how the appearance of color was produced by the colorless(and the allied point that any corpuscle we could see, whose causalrole we could appreciate, would already have, inexplicably, a color),renders them ignorant of the beauties of the divine creation.36 Theverdure of the fields, the azure of the sky and the black veil of nightabout which Berkeley rhapsodizes at the start of his Second Dialoguebelong to the mode of theologia ruris with its high valuation of naturalscenery.37

2. Berkeley absorbs and develops a qualitative chemistry

Hail vulgar juice of never-fading pine!Cheap as thou art, thy virtues are divine.38

So begins one of Berkeley's poems on tar-water, a poem not to bescorned in the search for textual evidence of the unity or disunity of

35 Experimental History of Colors, Works V: 690. Newton confirmed that "the leastparts of all bodies are in some measure transparent" (Opticks, Bk. II, Pt. Ill,Prop. 2, p. 248).

36 The old anti-materialists had a well-evolved and eloquenty-stated position oncolor. As Plotinus says, the wax-modellers may succeed in making shapes, butthey "cannot make colours unless they bring colours from elsewhere to the thingsthey make." Enneads III: 8 in Plotini Opera, ed./transl. A. H. Armstrong, 6 vols.,Cambridge, MA/London, Loeb Classical Library, 1966 ff., Ill: 363.

37 Cf. the opening disclosures of the Theologia Runs sive Schola et Scala Naturae(author unknown) London, 1686, repr. Los Angeles, William Andrews ClarkLibrary, 1956.

38 Reprinted in Works V: 225.



50 Cather ine Wilson

his philosophy. If the tar-water theory is meant to show, through anexploration of its ontological requirements, the scientific inadequacy ofmechanism and rigorous corpuscularianism by contrast with hermeticiatrochemistry, it is also the case that the treatise is meant to show,through its very structure and organization, the existential inadequacyof a science of phenomena. The corpuscularian texture of the Sirisis not an indication of a more favorable attitude towards matter,corpuscularianism, or mechanism; the particles Berkeley discusses hereare not obviously material, if by "material" we mean tangible, measur-able, and having mass or weight. Insensible corpuscles are rather astage on the mind's way to the acknowledgement of invisible activebeings.

Siris meaning, literally "a little chain", is, like the Principles, dividedinto numbered paragraphs. It begins with a description of the prepara-tion of therapeutic tarwater, lists the indications for its use, and praisesits medicinal properties as disinfectant, analgesic, solvent, expectorant,and so on. It then moves on to a discussion of the reasons for theefficacy of this substance and sketches a general theory of the activevirtues of plants, the vital economy of nature as a whole, and itsground in an aether orpneuma emitted by the sun. It aims at a statementof Hermetic-platonic doctrine in which the trinity of "Authority, Life,and Light" pervade the macrocosm and the microcosm. And it conclu-des with a set of self-reflective remarks in which the author turns backto assess his own work.

Tar, which is a secretion of pine and fir trees, contains, on Berkeley'saccount, an acid spirit containing the pharmacologically beneficialproperties, which needs however to be separated from the irritatingoils mixed with it. It is manufactured within the plant, as in a factory.The microscope shows that "a plant or tree is a very nice and compli-cated machine" and may be considered "as an organized system oftubes and vessels containing several sorts of fluid".39 These tubes andvessels are not inert, useless structures. In fact, he says, "some willthink it not unreasonable to suppose the mechanism of plants morecurious than that of animals"40. Their role is the "imbibing or attractingof proper nourishment, the distributing thereof through all parts ofthe vegetable, the discharge of superfluities, the secretion of particularjuices"41. It is these juices which contain "a spirit, wherein consist the

39.Siris 35, Works V: 43.40 Ära 31, Works V: 42.41 Siris 29, Works V: 41.




specific qualities, the smell and taste, of the plant"42. The qualities andvirtues of the specific plant type are extracted from the sun's rays inwhich they subsist; the plant's "attractive and organical powers" actlike a Newtonian prism in dividing and exhibiting particular qualitieswhich the "capillary organs" then concentrate and retain.43 As Grewsuspected, and Boerhaave declared, the solar emanation is somethingdifferent from the culinary fire, for it contains these specific qualities"virtually or eminently"44 as ordinary flame does not. On a slightlydifferent account, the juices of a plant result from the impregnation ofthe air by the light of the sun; the air impregnates a vapour, and thevapour is distilled by the plant into a juice.

This luminous spirit which is the form of life of a plant, from whence itsdifferences and properties flow, is somewhat extremely volatile. It is not the oilbut a thing more subtle, whereof oil is the vehicle, which retains it from flyingoff, and is lodged in several parts of the plant, particularly in the cells of thebark and in the seeds. This oil, purified and exalted by the organical powers ofthe plant, and agitated by warmth, becomes a proper receptacle of the spirit.45

There are a number of features of this account which deserve comment.(1) The "essence" of a plant is conceived in a manner which is neitherscholastic nor corpuscularian, but alchemical. The identification of the"life" of a plant with its odor; its essence with something that isreleased and invisibly drifts away at the death of the plant is originallyParacelsian.46 (2) Plants are said to have "organical powers" whichenable them to distill, purify, and exalt. The plant resembles a chemicallaboratory in which mixed or crude substances are converted into purerand nobler ones. It does not resemble a clock, whatever mechanicaloperations might be performed in it. (3) There are numerous referencesto causal interaction, e.g. "agitated by warmth", "impregnated bylight" which refer to processes never glimpsed by any human beingand perhaps never to be glimpsed. (4) The dominant mode of actionin this system is a kind of non-violent flowing, as opposed to violentcorpuscular collision. We are in the realm of'gentle science'. This mode

« Siris 42, Works V: 45.43 Siris 40, Works V: 45.44 Ibid.

Siris 44, Works V: 46.46 Cf. Paracelsus, Die neun Bücher De Natura rerum, Bk. II in Sämtliche Werke,

ed. K. Sudhoff l W. Matthiessen, 14 vols., Munich/Berlin, R. Oldenbourg, 1928 ff.,XI: 320 ff. On a similar doctrine in Boerhaave, see the passages assembled by T, E.Jessop in Works, V: 233-5; for a brief defense of the idea that the mainsource of Berkeley's chemical doctrines is W. Homberg (1652-1715) rather thanBoerhaave, see Hone and Rossi, Bishop Berkeley, 228 f., fn. 1.




of action stands to the mechanico-corpuscularian mode as tar-waterstands to other drugs; it is "not a violent and sudden medicine, alwaysto produce its effect at once ... but a safe and mild alternative, whichpenetrates the whole system"47.

The elements of primary importance in Berkeley's account, after theoils and spirits — "essences" in the druggist's and perfumer's sense —are air, acid spirit and 'pure fire'. The air is apparently corpuscular instructure and "a general agent, not only exerting its own, but callingforth the qualities or powers of all other bodies, by a division, commi-nution, and agitation of their particles, causing them to fly off andbecome volatile and active"48. The air is also described as a receptacleof all sublunary forms: "The air or atmosphere that surrounds ourearth contains a mixture of all the active volatile parts of the wholehabitable world, that is of all vegetables, minerals and animals"49 whichexhale into this chaos and draw back breath from it. The air we breathecontains the virtue of every drug, salutary as well as poisonous, andthe air is responsible for animal warmth, heartbeat, digestion, andrespiration.50 The acid spirit also seems to surround the globe and isfound, always in combination with sulfur, in animal, vegetable, andmineral bodies; acidity is responsible for effervescence, fermentation,and the assimilation of food, which is a kind of fermentation.51 It isdescribed as "so fugitive as to escape all the filtrations and perquisitionsof the most nice observers"52; though acid salts and crystals are visiblemacroscopically and microscopically53. The third substance, the 'purefire' or aether of 'invisible fire' is even less easy to describe than theother two active agents.

Unlike ordinary (culinary) fire and the aether which is in some wayassociated with it, which, it is suggested, have a particulate structure,pure aether or pure fire is invisible and, it seems, non-corpuscular.54

47 Siris 110, Works VI: 68: "It gives nevertheless a speedy relief [...]".48 Siris 139, Works V: 78.49 Siris 1379 Works V: 77.50 Siris 140, Works V: 78.51 Siris 126 ff., Works V: 74 ff. For Newton's acid-theory, printed in John Harris's

Lexicon Technicum of 1710, see Isaac Newton's Papers and Letters on NaturalPhilosophy, ed.'I. B. Cohen, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1978,255-8.

52 Siris 126, Works V: 74.53 Siris 131, Works V: 76.54 The aether can apparently become "clogged" with particles, and air is said to

cohere with particles of aether (Siris 151); but the whole is still permeated by"pure aether" (ibid.) Moked observes however that at least sometimes the aetherseems to be particulate; see, e. g., Particles and Ideas, 59.




"Fire is a subtle invisible thing, whose operation is not to be discernedbut by means of some grosser body, which serves [...] for a vehicle toarrest and bring it into view".55 In order to become sensible the firemust penetrate and agitate some body so as to affect us with "light,heat, or some other sensible alteration [...]. In the focus of a burning-glass exposed to the sun, there is real actual fire, though not discernedby the sense till it hath somewhat to work on, and can shew itself inits effects, heating, flaming, melting, and the like."56 Fire is thus a realthing but not even in principle a visible thing; we see only its effects,for example a luminous or radiant body. This addition to the ontologycreates more of a problem for idealism than the existence of tinyinsensible corpuscles did or which a corpuscular aether would. Forwhatever can be seen is an idea, hence real. But the reality of the pureaether seems to consist, not in its being perceivable, but in its havingeffects. If, contrary to the argument offered here, Berkeley were scrupu-lous about avoiding reference to all entities of which we can have nosensory idea, rather than a selective applier of rigorous standards todangerous theories only, one might well wonder what assured him thatthis aether, which is the bearer or producer of all qualities and virtues,actually exists.

But if Berkeley's main target all along was a reductive materialism,the question of his warrant for asserting the existence of an invisibleaether is beside the point. There is obviously no single ground orargument for asserting the existence of pure fire. That assertion is are-inscription from contemporary authoritative chemical texts (Mayow,Newton, Boerhaave, Homberg), and from ancient authoritative texts,and a transcription — as I will argue later — of Berkeley's ownpsychosomatic states. The new theoretical apparatus shares some fea-tures with other corpuscularian and micromechanical theories. It offersa scientific image of the world, a latent image, which is different fromthe manifest image. But, as was not the case in the theories of Descartes,Boyle, and Locke, there is no principled commitment to reductionhere; the latent image is in fact richer than the manifest image. Berkeleyis drawn to the example of Newton's experimentally eliciting the colorsin a ray of white light for precisely this reason. Even though it commitshim to some form of reductionism - a color, odor or flavor "seemeth

55 Siris 197, Works V: 99.56 Siris 198, Works V: 99. On the "elementary fire" notion and its religious

significance, see R. Love, "Some Sources of Herman Boerhaave's Concept ofFire", Ambix 15, 1968, 159-72.



54 Ca ther ine Wilson

to depend on peculiar particles of light or fire"57 — it furnishes aneffective contrast (experimentally proved!) to the hypothetical, whollyunsubstantiated, and impossible to substantiate, proposal of Boyle thatcolors are the effect of roughnesses on a body's surface. Forms andqualities subsist, unreduced, in the atmosphere that all creatures brea-the in and out, and in the sunlight.58 Perhaps it is right to say thatGod knows and comprehends these qualities which bathe us invisibly,and so that Siris retains the esse est percipi doctrine. But I will try inwhat follows to show that the hermetico-chemical account is whatenables Berkeley to abandon esse est percipi while keeping up and evenstrengthening his immaterialism.

At times Berkeley seems willing to accept even a relatively hardreduction of qualities, just as long as he does not have to accept anaccount in terms of figures and motions, but can avail himself of aterminology which has more resonance in the psychological realm.Thus at Siris 162 we read that parts of the aether are

impressed with different forces, or subjected to different laws of motion, attrac-tion, repulsion, and expansion, and endued with divers distinct habitudes towardsother bodies. These seem to constitute the many various qualities [...] virtues,flavors, odors, and colors which distinguish natural productions. The differentmodes of cohesion, attraction, repulsion, and motion appear to be the sourcefrom whence specific properties are derived, rather than different shapes orfigures,59

And in general "Nature seems better known and explained by attrac-tions and repulsions than by those other mechanical principles of size,

57 Siris 165; Works V: 86.58 Newton said specifically that he did not think that colors existed as real qualities

in white light as "vulgar people in seeing all these Experiments" might suppose(Opticks, Bk. I, Pt. II, Prop. II, Theorem II, "Definition", p. 124). But Berkeley'sinterpretation suggests a realism about qualities whose sources lie not in scholasti-cism but in Renaissance medicine and mineralogy; Palissy, for example, believedthat all colors, odors and virtues exist invisibly in the earth and are drawn upand separated by plants. Hooke, the microscopist, apparently took Newton tobe arguing something similarly occult: "But why there is a necessity, that allthose motions, or whatever else it may be that makes colors, should be originallyin the simple rays of light I do not yet understand the necessity of, no morethan that all those sounds must be in the air of the bellows, which are afterwardsheard to issue from the organ pipes", he objects, unable to assent to theproposition that colors are not "qualifications of light, derived from refractions,or refections (sic) of natural bodies but original and connate properties", IsaacNewton's Papers and Letters on Natural Philosophy, ed. I. B. Cohen, 112f.

59 Siris 162, Works V: 85.




figure and the like; That is, by Sir Isaac Newton than Descartes"60.But, pace Luce and Jessop who say that the favorable reference toNewton is an acceptance of mechanism as a natural science hypothesis,this statement is a rejection of mechanism borrowing the authority ofNewton, who, as observed earlier, could not achieve and did not wantto achieve that form of science.61 "Attraction" and "repulsion" mightsound like terms belonging to hard reduction: reduction in which aqualitative impoverishment is involved, but we need to see them hereas examples of "distinct habitudes" towards bodies, with powerfulanalogies in the human realm. There is love and hate in the world ofcorpuscles too.62

Now even soft reduction has its limits for Berkeley. He will notallow the human soul to be a volatile essence which drifts away fromthe body after death, as Boerhaave had suggested was the case withthe soul of a plant, the volatile salt in the rosemary flying off to bereunited with the sun. "What relation hath the soul of man to chemicart?" Crito asks in the Alciphron, putting the hypothesis of the "philoso-pher by fire" in the same category as other hypotheses of the profession-ally obsessed — that the soul is a harmony, that it is extended, that itis a vulgar error.63 But soft reduction of the soul is impossible becausethe manifest image is maximally rich already. The scientist can't giveus a better, more human, qualitatively denser story about the humansoul than the one we already have. Because the acts and sufferings ofthe human soul are maximally dense, it is they which establish thelanguage of the lower level. The aether down at the fundamental levelthus has affective, vital properties. It bathes, nourishes, illuminates,and is like the enlivening touch of a God.

The question that now needs to be asked is whether Berkeley in Sirisdid accept the latent image — conceived on his terms — as an image

60 Sir is 243, Works V: 116.61 "The cause of reflexion" (on which colors depend), he says in the Opticks, "is

not the impinging of Light on the solid or impervious parts of bodies, as iscommonly believed." Opticks, Bk. II, Pt. Ill, Prop. VIII, p. 262.

62 Thus Cartesians, or quasi-Cartesians like Leibniz, rejected Newtonian attraction,not without reason, as "occult". There exists a history of affective readings ofphysics and chemistry: the fabulist Ramsay discusses ca. 1720 the ancient atomicdoctrine of Moschus, as retaught, he thinks, by Newton, according to which theplastic spirit of the universe brings the atoms together by love. See D. P. Walker,The Ancient Theology, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1972, 262. There is also,farther along in the century, Goethe's Elective Affinities to consider.

« Alciphron, Works III: 246.




0/the world? The alternative would be to say that he accepted it onlyas an image related in certain ways to other images, just as he mightoriginally have seen the microscopic drawings of plants in Grew oranother microscopist as belonging to a certain category of visual ideas:familiar images of plants tended to precede and accompany the havingof these visual ideas in conjunction with the visual idea of a microscope,etc. And if he did accept it as an image of the world in the Siris, thenwe should have to say that, despite instances of inscriptions to thateffect in the work, the doctrine of esse est percipi is left behind. Thethesis that the latent image delivered by the microscope is closer to thetruth of things and that the explanation of a substance's qualities andpowers could be seen in some even more distant image is not consistentwith idealism. For the latent and manifest images are then images ofthe same thing, a thing which is other than a collection of visualimpressions, no one of which explains or produces another.

My suggestion then is that Berkeley was able to abandon the "newworld" interpretation of the latent image and acknowledge philosophi-cal substance because he was now able to do so while retaining andeven extending the distribution of real qualities in nature. The difficultyis nevertheless to catch him in Siris in a contradiction. "We see allnature alive or in motion"64 sounds like a contradiction to his claimsthat our ideas have no power and that all we are aware of is our ideas,but of course it is not. For it can be that with our powerless ideas werepresent to ourselves an illusory dynamism of Nature. But, just-asBerkeley mocked the corpuscularians for their combination of dogma-tism and skepticism, their conviction — even when they expressed thisas a hypothesis — ' that magnitude, figure and motion were the realand the only real affectations of things, together with their inabilityever to assign a particular corpuscular structure to any given substance,the doctrine of Siris put him into a position which is both dogmaticand skeptical. From the skeptical idea that attraction, repulsion, andcohesion, though "responsible" for a great variety of effects, are notthings but phenomena, he moves to the dogmatic assertion of invisiblefire. This fire too is only known through its effects. But it must be athing and not a phenomenon.

In a series of steps perhaps not clearly discernible to himself, Berkeleymoves from a version of the divine visual language theory on whichthere are only visual appearances and no visual appearance is a cause

64 Siris 291, Works V: 135.




of any other, to a theory according to which forces act but are notseen and cannot be seen, to a theory according to which a certain non-ideal substance acts but cannot be seen. His mature doctrine is thus:nothing which acts can be seen, a doctrine consistent with his earlyidealism but not identical to it. Let us examine the steps of thistransition more closely.

"In strict truth all agents, are incorporeal, and as such are notproperly of physical consideration."65 This statement is a pivot betweenthe old phenomenalism and the new recognition of mind-externalbeings and agents. Having decided that Newtonian long-range attrac-tive forces (gravity) and short-range attractive forces (cohesion) andrepulsion provided a better theory of celestial motions and of chemistry,particularly the chemistry of acids, Berkeley feels confirmed in histheory that no corporeal thing can effect any change. Gravity is not asubstance, or a hidden mechanism of substances, that could be ex-plained e. g. in terms of pressure and displacement.66 The inverse square"law", he decides, does not describe the activities of any corporealagent upon some corporeal patient, but states a regularity which tellsus what changes in the position of objects to expect. In fact, evenmechanical laws don't really describe the activities of any corporealagent but again predict how certain "before" states will be related tocertain "after" states involving billiard balls and things like them.67

Thus Newtonian physics and chemistry do seem to Berkeley to rein-force his theory that "all phenomena are, to speak truly, appearancesin the soul or mind"68, a pronouncement he makes at the end of hisdiscussion of Newtonian forces. It is when he attempts to introducethe pure aether that his scheme runs into trouble. A pure aether whichis invisible except when it penetrates and agitates some subject fitsBerkeley's conception of an active agent as an invisible thing perceivedonly through its effects. And Boerhaave's own language recalls thesign theory: elementary invisible fire exists, he states, wherever a sparkcan be struck, or a flame produced by a burning mirror, "for by thismeans alone we shall be able to come at the knowledge of it, a signbeing of no manner of service, if the thing signify'd may neverthelessbe concealed, and not be discovered by it"69. But pure fire or aether

65 Siris 247, Works V: 118.66 S/m 246, Works V: 117.67 Siris 234 - 6, Works V: 112 f.68 Siris 251, Works V: 119.69 Quoted in R. Love, "Boerhaave's Concept of Fire", 158.




is not a term on the same footing as gravity. "Gravity" is not, inBerkeley's scheme, a name for an immaterial agent; it is simply aterm that is essential for making the calculations that will predict theappearances. But "pure aether" is not such a dummy term. It does nothelp us to predict any. particular appearance, and it does not*help usto predict that nature, say, will appear to be something living ratherthan something dead. As in Boerhaave, the sensory phenomenon canonly be the sign of the noumenon and not vice-versa. We know that"gravity causes masses to attract each other" is, on Berkeley's view, atautology.70 Yet "gravity", though not a name of God, indicates theexistence of a God who "connects, moves and disposes all thingsaccording to such rules, and for such purposes, as seem good toHim".71 'The pure aether animates Nature' is not, however, a tautologybut a genuine causal statement, as is 'The pure aether becomes visibleby becoming united with some subject'. Because he thinks of the pureaether as in some way a direct instrument of God, Berkeley is unafraidto have it act. Because he has stipulated that it is in principle impercep-tible, he sees himself as far from the threat of materialism. But in facthe has described a thing whose existence does not consist in its beingperceived. And this makes it inevitable that the world that it nourishes,animates, and makes visible should also have an existence which doesnot consist in its being perceived, for a non-idea cannot act upon anidea.

The revival of chemistry, then, after Cartesian mechanism had re-vealed both its explanatory limits and its theological dangers, lulledBerkeley into a false sense of security. It enticed him into acknowledg-ing the latent image of science, though the only hope for idealism layin a strict adherence to the thesis that the fine structure that we see inthe body or imagine it to have provides no account of the manifestimage and is simply another manifest image. It is true that he goes onasserting that reality is purely intra-mental, quoting with approvalPlotinus's alleged remark that: "The world is in the soul and not thesoul in the world".72 But he keeps forgetting and remembering howthe account is supposed to go: "Instruments, occasions and signs occurin", he says, "or rather make up the whole visible course of Nature."73

70 "Newton's Harange amounts to no more than that gravity is proportional togravity", Notebook B 361, Works I: 43.

71 Siris 237, Works V: 234.72 Siris 270, Works V: 127.73 Siris 258, Works V: 122. .




And again: "[P]hysical causes, as the ancients knew, were only instru-ments or rather marks and signs."74 The "or rathers" here mark adesperate attempt to get back on track. In the remainder of the paperI will try to strengthen the claim that Berkeley has effectively ceasedto be an idealist by showing.how the discussion of the medicinal valueof tar water confirms the abandonment of esse est percipi and showsthat the aim of that text is not a proof of the non-existence of anysubstance apart from minds, but a process of divestment and spiritualenablement in which science plays the double role of physical beautyin the Symposium', an obstacle and a gate at the same time, cheap anddivine.

3. The latent image of sickness

In a study of 1953, J. O. Wisdom concluded that the unity of Berkeley's philoso-phy is grounded in his fear of poisoning and contamination.75 But, according toWisdom, there is a difference between the Principles and Siris. In his youth, Berkeleywas worried about the poisonous aspect of the external world; in his old age,suffering from the cholic, the flux, and chronic episodes of incapacitation, he wasworried about the poison inside him. He retained, Wisdom thought, an intellectualbelief in esse est percipi but without concentrating his emotional life upon it.76 Hisemotional life was concentrated on his own physical troubles. Is Siris9 Wisdom asks,"to be explained as a rational attempt to alleviate disease, or is it not rather, withall its quality of myth, a sign of hypochondria?"77

The proposed distinction between "rational attempts" and "signs" or symptomsneed not, however, be understood as exclusive, and fortunately it is not necessaryto accept Wisdom's dubious interpretive apparatus to learn something from hisunorthodox approach; namely the extent to which the existential concerns of theauthor may determine the timing and character of arguments, and the extent towhich new experiences, including the experience of physical debility or the threatof it, may provoke revisions of earlier theory. In any case, Siris should be lookedat both as a rational attempt to explain the nature and treatment of chronic illnesseswith neurasthenic symptoms, and as the literary expression of the associated miseriesand hopes. A few passages will help to illustrate this: "fT]here are so many finepersons", Berkeley says, "of both sexes [...] who are inwardly miserable and sick oflife [...] those delicate people who, as if their skin was peeled off, feel to the quick

N Siris 266, Works V: 125.75 J. O. Wisdom, The Unconscious Origins of Berkeley's Philosophy, London,

Hogarth Press, 1953.™ Ibid., 144.77 Ibid., 135.




everything that touches them."78 Seeking relief in fermented "or even distilled"liquors, they increase rather than ameliorate their miseries, for "small imperceptibleirritations of the minutest fibres or filaments, caused by the pungent salts of winesand sauces, do shake and disturb the microcosms of high livers [...]; whereas thegentle vibrations that are raised in the nerves by a fine subtle acid sheathed in asmooth volatile oil, [...], creates a calm satisfied sense of health"79.

We have in S iris a veritable treatise de subtilitate, a portrayal of the invisiblecauses of physical unease and mental distress. The sufferer depicts to himself amultitude of destructive processes occurring within him, processes distant andtenuous, but forcing their way up to the level of conscious awareness. In the calmingand soothing applications of tar water, the universal balsam of the life spirit maybe experienced in microcosm. The subject, in this metaphysics, is not the bundle ofperceptions with the power to act of the Dialogues but, literally, a bundle of nerves."As the body is said to clothe the soul, so the nerves may be said to constitute herinner garment."80 The latent image and the manifest image — the abrasions andvibrations of the nerves on one hand, the anxieties, hypersensitivity, and malaise ofthe writer on the other — are images of one being. My claim here is not the crudeone that chronic illness teaches materialism. It is that Berkeley's theoretical accountof what is actually wrong with the people he describes, represents a kind oftranslation of the manifest image into the latent. What they feel is what they are.

The author of these passages in Siris, then, cannot consistently maintain thatthere is only a non-productive association, an arbitrary correlation, learnable onlyby inspection after the fact, between the two levels. The autopsy of a person whohas just died will, as Berkeley knew, tend to reveal, if it reveals anything at all,either an internal state of affairs which can immediately be grasped as explainingthe death (massive internal bleeding, for instance), or as an indication which thetrained physician has learned to associate with death (grossly enlarged liver andspleen, for example). In both cases we can speak, without too much discomfort, theoriginal Berkeley language of signs, and we can perhaps even agree with the originalBerkeley that that degree of internal bleeding or enlargement is neither logicallynecessary nor logically sufficient to put an end to the vital phenomena: God couldhave killed him without his insides being at all affected. But did the later Berkeleymean to take his abraded nerves and vibrating fibres as no more than "signs" ofmental and physical discomfort, as signs which do not even pertain to exactly thesame being? Even if it is possible to analyze the matter in this way, it does not seemto me that this is how Berkeley understood his own theory. To be sure, as long ashis attention is focused on "outer" phenomena, especially those involving attractionand repulsion, he stands firmly by his old theory of signs and rules. When hisattention is fastened on the inter-corporeal case, he appears to forget it and toaccept both productive causation and the identity of the macro-object and its micro-

78 -Siris 104 f., Works V: 66.79 Λ>&·86, Works V: 60.80 Ibid.




components. In terms of the theory of perception Berkeley has found, through theuse of quality-laden micro-entities and micro-structures, a scheme which preservesboth resemblance and causality, which the primary-secondary property scheme ofthe corpuscularians clearly did not.

4. The "Siris" does not deny the existence of matterbut presents it as an obstacle to be transcended .

"We are embodied", Siris says, "that is we are clogged by weight and hinderedby resistance."81 This remark has ontological and not merely phenomenologicalsignificance in the context of Siris as a whole. In the Dialogues, Berkeley hadadmitted that he was non-voluntarily connected to a body but had shown how thisfact was to be understood in terms of sequences of ideas: "We are chained to abody, that is to say, our perceptions are connected with corporeal motions [...] butthis connection [...] means no more than a correspondence in the order of Naturebetween two sets of ideas"82. On such an analysis, the idea of a transcendence ofphysicality is wholly meaningless. Whatever the word "chained" might suggest tothe contrary, there can be nothing higher than ideas to fly up to. But the projectof Siris is liberation; the liberation of humanity from its physical ailments and theliberation of science from an ignorant materialism. The spiritual agents in the essayhave a double function; they are terms of the scientific theory of tar and organiclife in general, and they are the channels through which the text seeks to transcendits origins; to re-constitute itself at a higher level so that it is not a vulgar medicaltreatise about a cheap, plentiful, sap-like remedy, but a philosophical discourse ofthe highest sort, one which proves the way out of mortality and finitude.

As Siris progresses, a series of active agents, each more tenuous, subtle, andelevated than the last, make their appearance. We move from the tar extract, to thevital juice of the plant, to the solar emanation, to something like the world spirit.At the lower levels, the concoction of the lower agent from the higher has all theaspects of a material process; the solar virtue is refracted, the volatile acid spirit issomehow concocted in the vessels of the plants, etc. At the middle levels, there is acertain amount of quasi-mechanical activity such as penetrating, dividing, and flyingoff when released. But at the upper end of the scale, the actions of the agents seemto be restricted to flowing and pervading. They "enliven and actuate the wholemass, and all the members of this visible world"83. And here one is drawn inevitablyto the Stoic analogies, which have their echo in Newton; as the vital spirit flowsthrough the human body and makes it alive, mobile and sentient, so the divinespirit flows through the entire world making it alive, mobile and rich in qualities.Newton's active principles — gravity and fermentation, the latter being the cause

si Siris 290, Works V: 138.82 Dialogue III, Works II: 241.S3 Siris 290, Works V: 135.




of animal warmth and motion, the solar radiance, putrefaction, generation, andvegetation — are not just metaphorically the life of the world, they are its empirically-determinable, non hypothetical, cause.84 The expression of such views neverthelessraised, as had Newton's suggestion that space be understood as the sensorium ofGod, the red flag: pantheism. If active principles are independent of God, God isnot needed to sustain the world; if they are not independent of God, then God isthe soul of the world, not above it proposing and disposing. He is in the slowlybrooded chicken's egg and in the pile of weeds decaying in the corner. Berkeleyinsists, naturally, on the middle course: invisible fire is not the same as God or evena manifestation of God but only an instrument (recall that it cannot be a sign). Theworld is indeed an animal, but it is not the body of God, for the world has nomind.85

The 'whole mass' or 'gross corporeal system' thus reaches a degree of worthi-ness — a worthiness which could not be in question if that system were simplyideas — by being permeated, governed and enriched by invisible fire. But theredemptive task is not complete and the chain of reflections is not finished. Invisiblefire is a concept situated at the horizon of science, not, as the transparent corpuscleswere, as a pure obstacle, but as signifying something beyond the horizon, theintelligible world. And here Berkeley proposes to go beyond even the scientists whoappreciated the role of the immaterial in nature.

He describes the philosopher as climbing a sort of ladder or following a chainextending from the grossly sensible to the purely intellectual.86 At the lowest runghe is concerned only with the "outward forms of gross masses which occupy thevulgar"87. At the next rung he seems to become a natural scientist, for he directshis attention to "inward structure and minute parts"88. At the next level, he becomesa mathematical physicist, reflecting on the laws of motion and their status as rules —though this in a phenomenalist way. Still his climb is not ended:

But if proceeding still in his analysis and inquiry, he ascends from the sensibleinto the intellectual·world, and beholds things in a new light and a new order,he will then change his system, and perceive that what he took for substancesand causes are but fleeting shadows; that the mind contains all and acts all, andis to all created beings the source of unity and identity, harmony and order,existence and stability.89

84 Opticks, Query 31, 369.85 Siris 289, Works V: 134 f. Note that Berkeley in De Motu, Section 20, had argued

against such obscure and non-sensory notions as "hylarchic principles" and theinstincts, wants, or appetites of nature. It would be interesting to investigatewhether Siris continues this policy by denying any intentional properties toactive agents, or abandons it under the influence of Berkeley's studies in theinterim.

86 Siris 295 f., Works V: 137. Cf. his poem "On Tar", reprinted in Works V: 225.87 Siris 295, Works V: 137.88 Ibid.89 Siris 295, Works V: 137.




In this Plotinus-inspired passage, it is corporeal forces, absolute motions, and realspaces which Berkeley feels he must warn against. These are just the abstractionsand non-entities which belong to the negative side of Newtonian physics, by contrastwith the positive side. Yet this ascent into the intelligible world has occurred throughscience and through successive levels of abstraction, just as the Platonic ascent tothe Forms proceeds through terrestrial beauty which must be apprehended as suchbefore it can be abandoned as inadequate. Tar and the vegetating life of nature arerungs on a ladder to be kicked away once they have served their purpose ofindicating the way up. The work shows how the ascent is to be managed: how toget from link to link by reflection.

But the terminal insight of the ascent in Siris is described as the ancients' insightthat whatever real things exist independent of the soul "were neither sensible thingsnor clothed with sensible qualities"90 Now this is a departure, for the teaching ofthe early Berkeley was that sensible things alone were real. "Foolish in Men todespise the senses"91, says Notebook A; "Vain is the Distinction twixt Intellectualand Material World". Locke was wrong to say (Essay IV: iii: 27) that the formerwas more beautiful than the latter.92 So profound was Berkeley's attachment tosensory things and to the idea of a theology of landscape and color that he assignedthem morally an absolute value: "Sensual Pleasure is the Summum Bonum".93 Hewrites down that it is an aim of his "to excite men to the pleasures of the Eye andthe Ear which surfeit not"94.

It is tempting to suppose that Berkeley's early idealism in some sense allowedhim to be a sensualist; the pleasures of the eye and ear, which are harmless andguiltless, are intellectual pleasures, according to the idealist scheme. The move awayfrom idealism then necessitated some adjustment with respect to the value ofexperiences, which now were seen to depend on some non-mind-dependent existentsoutside the subject. But these suggestions are not essential to the account: what isimportant is his early conviction that dualism is an intrinsically unstable position."Matter once allowed. I defy any man to prove that God is not matter"95, he writesin Notebook A, and "If Matter is once allow'd to exist Clippings of beards & paringsof nails may Think for ought that Locke can tell"96. Whether we take "allowed" inthe sense of "acknowledged" or in the sense of "permitted", it is plain that Berkeleythought that to admit matter was to have no serious line of defence againstmaterialism and mortalism. His revulsion in the face of those possibilities amplymotivated his intellectual inquiry into the philosophical weaknesses of the corpuscu-larian philosophy, weaknesses which were tolerated by less dialectically gifted andless fanatical figures like Boyle and Locke.

90 Siris 316, Works V: 146.91 Notebook A 539, Works I92 Notebook A 538, Works I93 Notebook A 769, Works I94 Notebook A 625, Works I95 Notebook A 625, Works I96 Notebook A 718, Works I

67.67.93.77.77.87.




There is something both impressive and naive in the young Berkeley's understand-ing of these threats and his reaction to them, the attempt to prove there is no deathby inferring this from the absence of an intelligible relationship between the manifestand latent image of the world. Siris is, to be sure, more obviously a work in whichthe claims for a power of matter are neutralized and mind is victorious. And thereis a sense in which, with its Hellenizing and invocation of authority, with itswholehearted acceptance of a discourse seemingly organized by reference to celestialbodies, emanations, and ascensions, it appears to reject the effective, wholesome,arguments drawn from direct experience which characterize the Dialogues in particu-lar. But despite the text's extraordinary qualities — Jessop describes the narrativeas insufflated "with a breath as aromatic as the .balsams with which it began"97 —the microworld is brought into proper focus. Berkeley did at least come to graspthat what happens at the visual surface happens on account of what is going onbeneath it, and that whether it is perceivable or not.

At the end of Siris he seems to be on some ancient riverbank; his self-understand-ing is now expressed in metaphors of encasement and struggle: "those bodies whereinwe are now imprisoned like oysters"; the depths and shallows which we learn bygoing into the river and moving up and down. There is the pessimistic remark that"Truth is the cry of all but the game of a few". But the last lines98 present somethingof an interpretive puzzle. Berkeley here tells us that he sacrificed the "first fruits"of his pursuit of knowledge, meaning perhaps not just his idealism but his commit-ment to a planned, demonstrating text, on the altar of Truth; but he also says thathe is prepared to sacrifice the fruits of his age too, so that we do not know whatto make of this statement, in which the ambiguity of sacrifice, with its doublemeaning of something given as a present and something destroyed, is allowed tostand.*

97 "The eye by long use comes to see even in the darkest cavern: and there is nosubject to obscure but that we may discern some glimpse of truth by long poringon it ... He that would make real progress in knowledge must first dedicate hisage as well as youth, the later growth as well as the first fruits, at the altar ofTruth. Cujusvis est errare, nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare." -Siris368, Works V: 164.

98 Berkeley states disarmingly that as a "mere essay-writer" he is no longer boundby considerations of method and system, and he confesses that the work has"by insensible transitions" drawn the reader into "remote inquiries and specula-tions that were not thought of either by him or by the author at first settingout", Siris 297, Works V: 138. So here too we move from rules and laws anda system of logically connected propositions to insensibilia and unconceivedexistents.

* I am grateful for detailed criticisms by Ernan McMullin, Lome Falkenstein, andtwo anonymous referees for the Archiv, which contributed much to the sharpen-ing of the thesis argued here.



berkeley and the microworld

Documents