223 [“Omnes reales rerum proprietates continentur in Deo.” What means Le Clerc &c. by this? Log. I. ch. 8.]—AUTHOR, on margin.
M381 G.
M382 M.
M383 P.N.
M384 M. P.
225 This way of winning others to his own opinions is very characteristic of Berkeley. See p. 92 and note.
M385 M. P.
226 See _Third Dialogue_, on _sameness_ in things and _sameness_ in persons, which it puzzles him to reconcile with his New Principles.
M386 N.
M387 S.
229 “distance”—on opposite page in the MS. Cf. _Essay on Vision_, sect.
140.
230 Direct perception of phenomena is adequate to the perceived phenomena; indirect or scientific perception is inadequate, leaving room for faith and trust.
M388 M. P.
M389 M.
M390 S.
232 The Divine Ideas of Malebranche and the sensuous ideas of Berkeley differ.
M391 N.
234 Cf. Malebranche, _Recherche_, Bk. I. c. 6. That and the following chapters seem to have been in Berkeley’s mind.
235 He here assumes that extension (visible) is implied in the visible idea we call colour.
236 This strikingly illustrates Berkeley’s use of “idea,” and what he intends when he argues against “abstract” ideas.
M392 M. P.
237 An interesting autobiographical fact. From childhood he was indisposed to take things on trust.
M393 M. P.
M394 M.
M395 M.
M396 M.
M397 M.
M398 M.
M399 M.
M400 P.
M401 M. P.
M402 M.
M403 M.
M404 I.
M405 M.
239 “thoughts,” i.e. ideas of sense?
240 This, in a crude way, is the distinction of δύναμις and ἐνέργεια. It helps to explain Berkeley’s meaning, when he occasionally speaks of the ideas or phenomena that appear in the sense experience of different persons as if they were absolutely independent entities.
M406 M.
M407 M.
241 To be “in an unperceiving thing,” i.e. to be real, yet unperceived.
Whatever is perceived is, because realised only through a percipient act, an _idea_—in Berkeley’s use of the word.
M408 I.
242 This as to the “Platonic strain” is not in the tone of _Siris_.
M409 M.
M410 M.
M411 M.
243 John Keill (1671-1721), an eminent mathematician, educated at the University of Edinburgh; in 1710 Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, and the first to teach the Newtonian philosophy in that University. In 1708 he was engaged in a controversy in support of Newton’s claims to the discovery of the method of fluxions.
M412 M. P.
M413 M.
244 This suggests a negative argument for Kant’s antinomies, and for Hamilton’s law of the conditioned.
M414 M.
M415 N.
245 Newton became Sir Isaac on April 16, 1705. Was this written before that date?
246 These may be _considered_ separately, but not _pictured_ as such.
M416 P.
M417 M.
247 In as far as they have not been sensibly realised in finite percipient mind.
248 [Or rather that invisible length does exist.]—AUTHOR, on margin.
249 Bonaventura Cavalieri (1598-1647), the Italian mathematician. His _Geometry of Indivisibles_ (1635) prepared the way for the Calculus.
M418 M.
M419 P. G.
250 [By “the excuse” is meant the finiteness of our mind—making it possible for contradictions to appear true to us.]—AUTHOR, on margin.
251 He allows elsewhere that words with meanings not realisable in imagination, i.e. in the form of idea, may discharge a useful office. See _Principles_, Introduction, sect. 20.
M420 M. P.
252 We do not perceive unperceived matter, but only matter realised in living perception—the percipient act being the factor of its reality.
M421 M.
M422 P.
253 The secondary qualities of things.
M423 M. P.
254 Because, while dependent on percipient sense, they are independent of _my_ personal will, being determined to appear under natural law, by Divine agency.
M424 P.
M425 M.
curious work, dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke.
256 [Extension without breadth—i. e. insensible, intangible length—is not conceivable. ’Tis a mistake we are led into by the doctrine of abstraction.]—AUTHOR, on margin of MS.
257 Here “Sir Isaac.” Hence written after April, 1705.
M426 M.
_ 258 Essay_, Bk. IV. ch. iv. sect. 18; ch. v. sect. 3, &c.
259 He applies _thing_ to self-conscious persons as well as to passive objects of sense.
261 [These arguments must be proposed shorter and more separate in the Treatise.]—AUTHOR, on margin.
262 “Idea” here used in its wider meaning—for “operations of mind,” as well as for sense presented phenomena that are independent of individual will. Cf. _Principles_, sect. 1.
263 “sensations,” i.e. objective phenomena presented in sense.
266 An “unperceiving thing” cannot be the factor of material reality.
267 [To the utmost accuracy, wanting nothing of perfection. _Their_ solutions of problems, themselves must own to fall infinitely short of perfection.]—AUTHOR, on margin.
M427 P.
268 Jean de Billy and René de Billy, French mathematicians—the former author of _Nova Geometriæ Clavis_ and other mathematical works.
M428 T.
269 According to Baronius, in the fifth volume of his “Annals,” Ficinus appeared after death to Michael Mercatus—agreeably to a promise he made when he was alive—to assure him of the life of the human spirit after the death of the body.
M429 M.
270 So far as we are factors of their reality, in sense and in science, or can be any practical way concerned with them.
M430 P.
273 Lord Pembroke (?)—to whom the _Principles_ were dedicated, and to whom Locke dedicated his _Essay_.
274 This is an interesting example of a feature that is conspicuous in Berkeley—the art of “humoring an opponent in his own way of thinking,” which it seems was an early habit. It is thus that he insinuates his New Principles in the _Essay on Vision_, and so prepares to unfold and defend them in the book of _Principles_ and the three _Dialogues_—straining language to reconcile them with ordinary modes of speech.
275 In Diderot’s _Lettre sur les aveugles, à l’usage de ceux qui voient_, where Berkeley, Molyneux, Condillac, and others are mentioned. Cf. also Appendix, pp. 111, 112; and _Theory of Vision Vindicated_, sect. 71, with the note, in which some recorded experiments are alluded to.
intellectual value to the sense of sight. See, for instance, his 277 Sir A. Grant, (_Ethics of Aristotle_, vol. II. p. 172) remarks, as to the doctrine that the Common Sensibles are apprehended concomitantly by the senses, that: “this is surely the true view; we see in the apprehension of number, figure, and the like, not an operation of sense, but the mind putting its own forms and categories, i.e. itself, on the external object. It would follow then that the senses cannot really be separated from the mind; the senses and the mind each contribute an element to every knowledge.
Aristotle’s doctrine of κοινὴ αἴσθησις would go far, if carried out, to modify his doctrine of the simple and innate character of the senses, e.g. sight (cf. _Eth._ II. 1, 4), and would prevent its collision with Berkeley’s _Theory of Vision_.”—See also Sir W.
Dugald Stewart (_Collected Works_, vol. I. p. 341, note) quotes Aristotle’s _Ethics_, II. 1, as evidence that Berkeley’s doctrine, “with respect to the acquired perceptions of sight, was quite unknown to the best metaphysicians of antiquity.”
278 A work resembling Berkeley’s in its title, but in little else, appeared more than twenty years before the _Essay_—the _Nova Visionis Theoria_ of Dr. Briggs, published in 1685.
279 See _Treatise on the Eye_, vol. II. pp. 299, &c.
_Essays on the Intellectual Powers_, II. ch. 10 and 19.
281 While Sir W. Hamilton (_Lectures on Metaphysics_, lxxviii) acknowledges the scientific validity of Berkeley’s conclusions, as to the way we judge of distances, he complains, in the same lecture, that “the whole question is thrown into doubt by the analogy of the lower animals,” i.e. by their probable _visual instinct_ of distances; and elsewhere (Reid’s _Works_, p. 137, note) he seems to hesitate about Locke’s Solution of Molyneux’s Problem, at least in its application to Cheselden’s case. Cf. Leibniz, _Nouveaux Essais_, Liv. II. ch. 9, in connexion with this last.
282 An almost solitary exception in Britain to this unusual uniformity on a subtle question in psychology is found in Samuel Bailey’s _Review of Berkeley’s Theory of Vision, designed to show the unsoundness of that celebrated Speculation_, which appeared in 1842.
It was the subject of two interesting rejoinders—a well-weighed criticism, in the _Westminster Review_, by J.S. Mill, since republished in his _Discussions_; and an ingenious Essay by Professor Ferrier, in _Blackwood’s Magazine_, republished in his _Philosophical Remains_. The controversy ended on that occasion with Bailey’s _Letter to a Philosopher in reply to some recent attempts to vindicate Berkeley’s Theory of Vision, and in further elucidation of its unsoundness_, and a reply to it by each of his critics. It was revived in 1864 by Mr. Abbott of Trinity College, Dublin, whose essay on _Sight and Touch_ is “an attempt to disprove the received (or Berkeleian) Theory of Vision.”
283 Afterwards (in 1733) Earl of Egmont. Born about 1683, he succeeded to the baronetcy in 1691, and, after sitting for a few years in the Irish House of Commons, was in 1715 created Baron Percival, in the Irish peerage. In 1732 he obtained a charter to colonise the province of Georgia in North America. His name appears in the list of subscribers to Berkeley’s Bermuda Scheme in 1726. He died in 1748. He corresponded frequently with Berkeley from 1709 onwards.
284 Similar terms are applied to the sense of seeing by writers with whom Berkeley was familiar. Thus Locke (_Essay_, II. ix. 9) refers to sight as “the most comprehensive of all our senses.” Descartes opens his _Dioptrique_ by designating it as “le plus universal et le plus noble de nos sens;” and he alludes to it elsewhere (_Princip._ IV. 195) as “le plus subtil de tous les sens.” Malebranche begins his analysis of sight (_Recherche_, I. 6) by describing it as “le premier, le plus noble, et le plus étendu de tous les sens.” The high place assigned to this sense by Aristotle has been already alluded to. Its office, as the chief organ through which a conception of the material universe as placed in ambient space is given to us, is recognised by a multitude of psychologists and metaphysicians.
285 On Berkeley’s originality in his Theory of Vision see the Editor’s Preface.
286 In the first edition alone this sentence followed:—“In treating of all which, it seems to me, the writers of Optics have proceeded on wrong principles.”
287 Sect. 2-51 explain the way in which we learn in seeing to judge of Distance or Outness, and of objects as existing remote from our organism, viz. by their association with what we see, and with certain muscular and other sensations in the eye which accompany vision. Sect. 2 assumes, as granted, the invisibility of distance in the line of sight. Cf. sect. 11 and 88—_First Dialogue between Hylas and Philonous—Alciphron_, IV. 8—_Theory of Vision Vindicated and 288 i.e. outness, or distance outward from the point of vision—distance in the line of sight—the third dimension of space. Visible distance is visible space or interval between two points (see sect. 112). We can be sensibly percipient of it only when _both_ points are seen.
289 This section is adduced by some of Berkeley’s critics as if it were the evidence discovered by him for his _Theory_, instead of being, as it is, a passing reference to the scientific ground of the already acknowledged invisibility of outness, or distance in the line of sight. See, for example, Bailey’s _Review of Berkeley’s Theory of Vision_, pp. 38-43, also his _Theory of Reasoning_, p. 179 and Touch_, p. 10, where this sentence is presented as “the sole positive argument advanced by Berkeley.” The invisibility of outness is not Berkeley’s discovery, but the way we learn to interpret its visual signs, and what these are.
290 i.e. aerial and linear perspective are acknowledged signs of remote distances. But the question, in this and the thirty-six following sections, concerns the visibility of _near_ distances only—a few yards in front of us. It was “agreed by all” that beyond this limit distances are suggested by our experience of their signs.
291 Cf. this and the four following sections with the quotations in the 292 In the author’s last edition we have this annotation: “See what Des Cartes and others have written upon the subject.”
293 In the first edition this section opens thus: “I have here set down the common current accounts that are given of our perceiving near distances by sight, which, though they are unquestionably received for true by mathematicians, and accordingly made use of by them in determining the apparent places of objects, do nevertheless,” &c.
294 Omitted in the author’s last edition.
295 i.e. although immediately invisible, it is mediately seen. Mark, here and elsewhere, the ambiguity of the term _perception_, which now signifies the act of being conscious of sensuous phenomena, and again the act of inferring phenomena of which we are at the time insentient; while it is also applied to the object perceived instead of to the percipient act; and sometimes to imagination, and the higher acts of intelligence.
296 “Some men”—“mathematicians,” in first edition.
298 “any man”—“all the mathematicians in the world,” in first edition.
299 Omitted in the author’s last edition.
300 Omitted in the author’s last edition.
301 Sect. 3, 9.
302 Observe the first introduction by Berkeley of the term _suggestion_, used by him to express a leading factor in his account of the visible world, and again in his more comprehensive account of our knowledge of the material universe in the _Principles_. It had been employed occasionally, among others, by Hobbes and Locke. There are three ways in which the objects we have an immediate perception of in sight may be supposed to conduct us to what we do not immediately perceive: (1) Instinct, or what Reid calls “_original suggestion_” (_Inquiry_, ch. VI. sect. 20-24); (2) Custom; (3) Reasoning from accepted premisses. Berkeley’s “suggestion” corresponds to the second. (Cf. _Theory of Vision Vindicated_, sect. 42.)
303 In the _Theory of Vision Vindicated_, sect. 66, it is added that this “sensation” belongs properly to the sense of touch. Cf. also sect. 145 of this _Essay_.
304 Here “natural”=“necessary”: elsewhere=divinely arbitrary connexion.
305 That our _mediate_ vision of outness and of objects as thus external, is due to media which have a contingent or arbitrary, instead of a necessary, connexion with the distances which they enable us to see, or of which they are the signs, is a cardinal part of his argument.
306 Sect. 2.
307 Here, as generally in the _Essay_, the appeal is to our inward experience, not to phenomena observed by our senses in the organism.
308 See sect. 35 for the difference between confused and faint vision.
Cf. sect. 32-38 with this section. Also _Theory of Vision 309 See sect. 6.
310 These sections presuppose previous contiguity as an associative law of mental phenomena.
311 See Reid’s _Inquiry_, ch. vi. sect. 22.
312 Sect. 16-27.—For the signs of remote distances, see sect. 3.
313 These are muscular sensations felt in the organ, and degrees of confusion in a visible idea. Berkeley’s “arbitrary” signs of distance, near and remote, are either (_a_) invisible states of the visual organ, or (_b_) visible appearances.
Barrow’s difficulty is stated. Cf. sect. 40 below.
315 Christopher Scheiner, a German astronomer, and opponent of the Copernican system, born 1575, died 1650.
316 Andrea Tacquet, a mathematician, born at Antwerp in 1611, and referred to by Molyneux as “the ingenious Jesuit.” He published a number of scientific treatises, most of which appeared after his death, in a collected form, at Antwerp in 1669.
317 In what follows Berkeley tries to explain by his visual theory seeming contradictions which puzzled the mathematicians.
318 This is offered as a verification of the theory that near distances are suggested, according to the order of nature, by non-resembling visual signs, contingently connected with real distance.
319 Cf. sect. 78; also _New Theory of Vision Vindicated_, sect. 31.
320 Berkeley here passes from his proof of visual “suggestion” of all outward distances—i.e. intervals between extremes in the line of sight—by means of arbitrary signs, and considers the nature of visible externality. See note in Hamilton’s _Reid_, p. 177, on the distinction between perception of the external world and perception of distance through the eye.
322 Berkeley here begins to found, on the experienced connexion between extension and colour, and between visible and tangible extension, a proof that _outness_ is invisible. From Aristotle onwards it has been assumed that colour is the only phenomenon of which we are immediately percipient in seeing. Visible extension, visible figure, and visible motion are accordingly taken to be dependent on the sensation of colour.
323 In connexion with this and the next illustration, Berkeley seems to argue that we are not only unable to see distance in the line of sight, but also that we do not see a distant object in its _real visible_ magnitude. But elsewhere he affirms that only _tangible_ magnitude is entitled to be called _real_. Cf. sect. 55, 59, 61.
324 The sceptical objections to the trustworthiness of the senses, proposed by the Eleatics and others, referred to by Descartes in his _Meditations_, and by Malebranche in the First Book of his _Recherche_, may have suggested the illustrations in this section.
Cf. also Hume’s Essay _On the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy_.
The sceptical difficulty is founded on the assumption that the object seen at different distances is the _same visible object_: it is really different, and so the difficulty vanishes.
325 Here Berkeley expressly introduces “touch”—a term which with him includes, not merely organic sense of contact, but also muscular and locomotive sense-experience. After this he begins to unfold the antithesis of visual and tactual phenomena, whose subsequent synthesis it is the aim of the _New Theory_ to explain. Cf.
_Principles of Human Knowledge_, sect. 43—_Theory of Vision Vindicated_, sect. 22 and 25. Note here Berkeley’s reticence of his idealization of Matter—tangible as well as visible. Cf.
326 This connexion of our knowledge of distance with our locomotive experience points to a theory which ultimately resolves space into experience of unimpeded locomotion.
327 Locke (_Essay_, Introduction, § 8) takes _idea_ vaguely as “the term which serves best to stand whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks.” Oversight of what Berkeley intends the term idea has made his whole conception of nature and the material universe a riddle to many, of which afterwards.
328 The expressive term “outness,” favoured by Berkeley, is here first used.
329 “We get the idea of Space,” says Locke, “both by our sight and antithesis of visible and tangible extension, and the consequent ambiguity of the term extension; which sometimes signifies _coloured_, and at others _resistant_ experience in sense.
330 For an explanation of this difficulty, see sect. 144.
331 “object”—“thing,” in the earlier editions.
332 This is the issue of the analytical portion of the _Essay_.
333 Cf. sect. 139-40.
334 Here the question of externality, signifying independence of all percipient life, is again mixed up with that of the invisibility of distance outwards in the line of sight.
335 Omitted in author’s last edition.
336 i.e. including muscular and locomotive experience as well as sense of contact. But what are the _tangibilia_ themselves? Are they also significant, like _visibilia_, of a still ulterior reality? This is the problem of the _Principles of Human Knowledge_.
337 In this section the conception of a natural Visual Language, makes its appearance, with its implication that Nature is (for us) virtually Spirit. Cf. sect. 140, 147—_Principles_, sect.
44—_Dialogues of Hylas and Philonous_—_Alciphron_, IV. 8, 11—and _Theory of Vision Vindicated_, passim.
338 Sect. 52-87 treat of the invisibility of real, i.e. tactual, Magnitude. Cf. _Theory of Vision Vindicated_, sect. 54-61.
339 Sect. 8-15.
340 Sect. 41, &c.
342 See sect. 122-126.
343 In short there is a point at which, with our limited sense, we cease to be percipient of colour, in seeing; and of resistance, in locomotion. Though Berkeley regards all visible extensions as sensible, and therefore dependent for their reality on being realised by sentient mind, he does not mean that mind or consciousness is extended. With him, extension, though it exists only in mind,—i.e. as an idea seen, in the case of visible extension, and as an idea touched, in the case of tangible extension,—is yet no _property_ of mind. Mind can exist without being percipient of extension, although extension cannot be realised without mind.
344 But this is true, though less obviously, of tangible as well as of visible objects.
345 Sect. 49.
347 “situation”—not in the earlier editions.
348 Sect. 55.
349 Omitted in the author’s last edition.
350 Ordinary sight is virtually foresight. Cf. sect. 85.—See also Malebranche on the external senses, as given primarily for the urgent needs of embodied life, not to immediately convey scientific 351 Sect. 44.—See also sect. 55, and note.
Yet the sensible extension given in touch and locomotive experience is also relative—an object being _felt_ as larger or smaller according to the state of the organism, and the other conditions of our embodied perception.
353 What follows, to end of sect. 63, added in the author’s last edition.
354 “outward objects,” i.e. objects of which we are percipient in tactual experience, taken in this _Essay_ provisionally as the real external objects. See _Principles_, sect. 44.
355 Cf. sect. 144. Note, in this and the three preceding sections, the stress laid on the _arbitrariness_ of the connexion between the signs which suggest magnitudes, or other modes of extension, and their significates. This is the foundation of the _New Theory_; which thus resolves _physical_ causality into a relation of signs to what they signify and predict—analogous to the relation between words and their accepted meanings.
356 In sect. 67-78, Berkeley attempts to verify the foregoing account of the natural signs of Size, by applying it to solve a phenomenon, the cause of which had been long debated among men of science—the visible magnitude of heavenly bodies when seen in the horizon.
357 Cf. sect. 10.
358 Omitted in the author’s last edition. Cf sect. 76, 77.—The explanation in question is attributed to Alhazen, and by Bacon to Ptolemy, while it is sanctioned by eminent scientific names before and since Berkeley.
359 “Fourthly” in the second edition. Cf. what follows with sect. 74.
Why “lesser”?
360 When Berkeley, some years afterwards, visited Italy, he remarked that distant objects appeared to him much nearer than they really were—a phenomenon which he attributed to the comparative purity of the southern air.
361 i.e. the original perception, apart from any synthetic operation of suggestion and inferential thought, founded on visual signs.
362 In Riccioli’s _Almagest_, II. lib. X. sect. 6. quest. 14, we have an account of many hypotheses then current, in explanation of the apparent magnitude of the horizontal moon.
363 Gassendi’s “Epistolæ quatuor de apparente magnitudine solis humilis et sublimis.”—_Opera_, tom. III pp. 420-477. Cf. Appendix to this _Essay_, p. 110.
364 See _Dioptrique_, VI.
366 The paper in the Transactions is by Molyneux.
Berkeley’s _New Theory_ is referred to, and pronounced to be at variance with experience. Smith concludes by saying, that in “the second edition of Berkeley’s _Essay_, and also in a Vindication and Explanation of it (called the _Visual Language_), very lately published, the author has made some additions to his solution of the said phenomenon; but seeing it still involves and depends on the principle of faintness, I may leave the rest of it to the reader’s consideration.” This, which appeared in 1738, is one of the very few early references to Berkeley’s _New Theory of Vision Vindicated_.
368 Sect. 2-51.
369 This sentence is omitted in the author’s last edition.
370 What follows to the end of this section is not contained in the first edition.
371 i.e. tangible.
372 Cf. sect. 38; and _Theory of Vision Vindicated_, sect. 31.
373 “Never”—“hardly,” in first edition.
_Remarks_, p. 56, in which he “leaves it to be considered, whether the said phenomenon is not as clear an instance of the insufficiency of faintness” as of mathematical computation.
375 A favourite doctrine with Berkeley, according to whose theory of visibles there can be no absolute visible magnitude, the _minimum_ being the least that is _perceivable_ by each seeing subject, and thus relative to his visual capacity. This section is thus criticised, in January, 1752, in a letter signed “Anti-Berkeley,” in the _Gent. Mag._ (vol. XXII, p. 12): “Upon what his lordship asserts with respect to the _minimum visibile_, I would observe that it is certain that there are infinite numbers of animals which are imperceptible to the naked eye, and cannot be perceived but by the help of a microscope; consequently there are animals whose whole bodies are far less than the _minimum visibile_ of a man. Doubtless these animals have eyes, and, if their _minimum visibile_ were equal to that of a man, it would follow that they cannot perceive anything but what is much larger than their whole body; and therefore their own bodies must be invisible to them, because we know they are so to men, whose _minimum visibile_ is asserted by his lordship to be equal to theirs.” There is some misconception in this. Cf. Appendix to _Essay_, p. 209.
376 Those two defects belong to human consciousness. See Locke’s _Essay_, II. 10, on the defects of human memory. It is this imperfection which makes reasoning needful—to assist finite intuition. Reasoning is the sign at once of our dignity and our weakness.
377 Sect. 59.
378 Sect. 80-82.
379 Sect. 88-119 relate to the nature, invisibility, and arbitrary visual signs of Situation, or of the localities of tangible things.
Cf. _Theory of Vision Vindicated_, sect. 44-53.
381 This illustration is taken from Descartes. See Appendix.
383 Sect. 2-51.
384 Omitted in author’s last edition.
385 This is Berkeley’s universal solvent of the psychological difficulties involved in visual-perception.
386 Cf. sect. 103, 106, 110, 128, &c. Berkeley treats this case hypothetically in the _Essay_, in defect of actual experiments upon the born-blind, since accumulated from Cheselden downwards. See however the Appendix, and _Theory of Vision Vindicated_, sect. 71.
387 i.e. tangible things. Cf. _Principles_, sect. 44.
388 The “prejudice,” to wit, which Berkeley would dissolve by his introspective analysis of vision. Cf. _Theory of Vision Vindicated_, sect. 35.
389 Thus forming individual concrete things out of what is perceived separately through different senses.
390 This briefly is Berkeley’s solution of “the knot about inverted images,” which long puzzled men of science.
tactual situation. Pure vision, he would say, has nothing to do with “high” and “low,” “great” and “inverted,” in the real or tactual meaning of those terms.
392 i.e. tangible.
393 e.g. “extension,” which, according to Berkeley, is an equivocal term, common (in its different meanings) to _visibilia_ and 395 i.e. real or tangible head.
“Anti-Berkeley” thus argues the case of one born blind. “This man,” he adds, “would, by being accustomed to feel one hand with the other, have perceived that the extremity of the hand was divided into fingers—that the extremities of these fingers were distinguished by certain hard, smooth surfaces, of a different texture from the rest of the fingers—and that each finger had certain joints or flexures. Now, if this man was restored to sight, and immediately viewed his hand before he touched it again, it is manifest that the divisions of the extremity of the hand into fingers would be visibly perceived. He would note too the small spaces at the extremity of each finger, which affected his sight differently from the rest of the fingers; upon moving his fingers he would see the joints. Though therefore, by means of this lately acquired sense of seeing, the object affected his mind in a new and different manner from what it did before, yet, as by _touch_ he had acquired the knowledge of these several divisions, marks, and distinctions of the hand, and, as the new object of _sight_ appeared to be divided, marked, and distinguished in a similar manner, I think he would certainly conclude, _before he touched his hand_, that the thing which he now saw was _the same_ which he had felt before and called his hand.”
397 Locke, _Essay_, II. 8, 16. Aristotle regards number as a Common 398 “If the visible appearance of two shillings had been found connected from the beginning with the tangible idea of one shilling, that appearance would as naturally and readily have signified the unity of the (tangible) object as it now signifies its duplicity.” Reid, _Inquiry_, VI. 11.
399 Here again note Berkeley’s inconvenient reticence of his full theory of matter, as dependent on percipient life for its reality. Tangible things are meantime granted to be real “without mind.” Cf.
sensuous phenomenon only.
400 Cf. sect. 131.
402 In short, we _see_ only _quantities of colour_—the real or tactual distance, size, shape, locality, up and down, right and left, &c., being gradually associated with the various visible modifications of colour.
403 i.e. tangible.
404 Sect. 41-44.
405 i.e. tangible things.
406 i.e. visible.
407 Cf. sect. 41-44. The “eyes”—visible and tangible—are themselves objects of sense.
408 Cf. _Principles_, Introduction, sect. 21-25.
409 “Visible ideas”—including sensations muscular and locomotive, _felt_ in the organ of vision. Sect. 16, 27, 57.
410 i.e. objects which, in this tentative _Essay_, are granted, for argument’s sake, to be external, or independent of percipient mind.
411 i.e. to inquire whether there are, in this instance, Common Sensibles; and, in particular, whether an _extension_ of the same kind at least, if not numerically the same, is presented in each.
The Kantian theory of an _a priori_ intuition of space, the common condition of tactual and visual experience, because implied in sense-experience as such, is not conceived by Berkeley. Cf. _Theory of Vision Vindicated_, sect. 15.
412 In the following reasoning against abstract, as distinguished from concrete or sense presented (visible or tangible) extension, Berkeley urges some of his favourite objections to “abstract ideas,” fully unfolded in his _Principles_, Introduction, sect. 6-20.—See also _Alciphron_, VII. 5-8.—_Defence of Free Thinking in