Robert Adamson and John Malcolm Mitchell

“ Physical science is occupied in endeavouring to decipher the divine ideas which find realization in our limited experience, in trying to interpret the divine language of which natural things are the words and letters, and in striving to bring human conceptions into harmony with the divine thoughts. Instead, therefore, of fate or necessity, or matter, or the unknown, a living, active mind is looked upon as the centre and spring of the universe, and this is the essence of the Berkeleian metaphysics. ”

“ Is there any such happiness as for a man’s mind to be raised above the confusion of things, where he may have the prospect of the order of nature and error of man? But is this a view of delight only and not of discovery? of contentment and not of benefit? Shall he not as well discern the riches of nature’s warehouse as the beauty of her shop? ”

“ This other of God, which is in truth one with him, is matter. The universe, then, is a living cosmos, an infinitely animated system, whose end is the perfect realization of the variously graduated forms. The unity which sunders itself into the multiplicity of things may be called the monas monadum, each thing being a monas or self-existent, living being, a universe in itself. Of these monads the number is infinite. The soul of man is a thinking monad, and stands mid-way between the divine intelligence and the world of external things. As a portion of the divine life, the soul is immortal. ”

“ This Apology gives a most fair and temperate history of the relations between Bacon and Essex, shows how the prudent counsel of the one had been rejected by the other, and brings out very clearly what we conceive to be the true explanation of the matter. Everything that Bacon could do was done by him, until the real nature of Essex’s design was made apparent, and then, as he had repeatedly told the earl, his devotion and respect were for the queen and state, not for any subject; friendship could never take rank above loyalty. Those who blame Bacon must acquit Essex of all wrong-doing. ”

“ Not so, but by following the new aim we shall also arrive at a true knowledge of the universe in which we are, for without knowledge there is no power; truth and utility are in ultimate aspect the same; “works themselves are of greater value as pledges of truth than as contributing to the comforts of life.” [56] Such was the conception of philosophy with which Bacon started, and in which he felt himself to be thoroughly original. As his object was new and hitherto unproposed, so the method he intended to employ was different from all modes of investigation hitherto attempted. ”

“ To restore the original commerce between man and nature, and to recover the imperium hominis, is the grand object of all science. The want of success which had hitherto attended efforts in the same direction had been due to many causes, but chiefly to the want of appreciation of the nature of philosophy and its real aim. Philosophy is not the science of things divine and human ”

“ The mysteries of faith are scoffed at. The Jewish records are put on a level with the Greek myths, and miracles are laughed at as magical tricks. Through all this runs the train of thought resulting naturally from Bruno’s fundamental principles, and familiar in modern philosophy as Spinozism, the denial of particular providence, the doctrine of the uselessness of prayer, the identification in a sense of liberty and necessity, and the peculiar definition of good and evil. ”

“ To discover exactly the characteristics and the object of natural philosophy it is necessary to examine the place it holds in the general scheme furnished in the Advancement or De Augmentis. All human knowledge, it is there laid down, may be referred to man’s memory or imagination or reason. In the first, the bare facts presented to sense are collected and stored up; the exposition of them is history, which is either natural or civil. ”

“ If, then, Bacon himself made no contributions to science, if no discovery can be shown to be due to the use of his rules, if his method be logically defective, and the problem to which it was applied one from its nature incapable of adequate solution, it may not unreasonably be asked, How has he come to be looked upon as the great leader in the reformation of modern science? How is it that he shares with Descartes the honour of inaugurating modern philosophy? ”

“ That in knowing objects certain thoughts are implied which are not presentations or their copies is at times dimly seen by Berkeley himself; but he was content to propound a question with regard to those notions, and to look upon them as merely Locke’s ideas of relation. Such ideas of relation are in truth the stumbling-block in Locke’s philosophy, and Berkeley’s empiricism is equally far from accounting for them.
With all these defects, however, Berkeley’s new conception marks a distinct stage of progress in human thought. ”

“ It is impossible to overstep the limits of self-consciousness; whatever words I use, whatever notions I have, must refer to and find their meaning in facts of consciousness. But this is by no means the whole or even the principal part of Berkeley’s philosophy; it is essentially a theory of causality, and this is brought out gradually under the pressure of difficulties in the first solution of the early problem. To merely subjective idealism, sense percepts differ from ideas of imagination in degree, not in kind ”

“ Thus the form of heat or the form of light is the same thing as the law of heat or the law of light.” [64] “Matter rather than forms should be the object of our attention, its configurations and changes of configuration, and simple action, and law of action or motion; for forms are figments of the human mind, unless you will call those laws of action forms.” ”

“ Bacon’s services to the king’s cause had been most important; and as he had, at the same time, acquired great favour with Villiers, his prospects looked brighter than before. According to his custom, he strove earnestly to guide by his advice the conduct of the young favourite. His letters, in which he analyses the various relations in which such a man must stand, and prescribes the course of action suitable for each, are valuable and deserving of attention. ”

“ Is truth ever barren? Shall he not be able thereby to produce worthy effects, and to endow the life of man with infinite commodities?” [51] Philosophy is altogether practical; it is of little matter to the fortunes of humanity what abstract notions one may entertain concerning the nature and the principles of things. [52] This truth, however, has never yet been recognized; [53] it has not yet been seen that the true aim of all science is “to endow the condition and life of man with new powers or works,” [54] or “to extend more widely the limits of the power and greatness of man.” ”

“ Matter, as an abstract, unperceived substance or cause, is shown to be impossible, an unreal conception; true substance is affirmed to be conscious spirit, true causality the free activity of such a spirit, while physical substantiality and causality are held to be merely arbitrary, though constant, relations among phenomena connected subjectively by suggestion or association, objectively in the Universal Mind. In ultimate analysis, then, nature is conscious experience, and forms the sign or symbol of a divine, universal intelligence and will. ”

“ Such are the general causes of the errors that infest the human mind; by their exposure the way is cleared for the introduction of the new method. The nature of this method cannot be understood until it is exactly seen to what it is to be applied. What idea had Bacon of science, and how is his method connected with it? Now, the science [60] which was specially and invariably contemplated by him was natural philosophy, the great mother of all the sciences; it was to him the type of scientific knowledge, and its method was the method of all true science. ”

“ Knowledge being limited to the ideas produced could never extend to the unperceived matter, or substance, or cause which produced them, and it became a problem for speculative science to determine the grounds for the very belief in its existence. Philosophy seemed about to end in scepticism or in materialism. Now Berkeley put this whole problem in a new light by pointing out a preliminary question. Before we deduce results from such abstract ideas as cause, substance, matter, we must ask what in reality do these mean—what is the actual content of consciousness which corresponds to these words? ”

“ The essence of the answer is that the universe is inconceivable apart from mind—that existence, as such, denotes conscious spirits and the objects of consciousness. Matter and external things, in so far as they are thought to have an existence beyond the circle of consciousness, are impossible, inconceivable. External things are things known to us in immediate perception. To this conclusion Berkeley seems, in the first place, to have been led by the train of reflection that naturally conducts to subjective or egoistic idealism. ”

“ His theory is quite distinct from this, which really amounts to nothing more than subjective idealism. External things are produced by the will of the divine intelligence; they are caused, and caused in a regular order; there exists in the divine mind archetypes, of which sense experience may be said to be the realization in our finite minds. Our belief in the permanence of something which corresponds to the association in our minds of actual and possible sensations means belief in the orderliness of nature; and that is merely assurance that the universe is pervaded and regulated by mind. ”

“ Manifold errors also result from the weakness of the senses, which affords scope for mere conjecture; from the influence exercised over the understanding by the will and passions; from the restless desire of the mind to penetrate to the ultimate principles of things; and from the belief that “man is the measure of the universe,” whereas, in truth, the world is received by us in a distorted and erroneous manner. ”

“ Physics inquires into the efficient and material causes of things; metaphysics, into the formal and final causes. The principal objects of physics are concrete substances, or abstract though physical qualities. The research into abstract qualities, the fundamental problem of physics, comes near to the metaphysical study of forms, which indeed differs from the first only in being more general, and in having as its results a form strictly so called, i.e. a nature or quality which is a limitation or specific manifestation of some higher and better-known genus. ”

“ To this process he was led by his doctrine of forms, of which it is the necessary consequence; it is the infallible result of his view of science and its problem, and is as original as that is. Whoever accepts Bacon’s doctrine of cause must accept at the same time his theory of the way in which the cause may be sifted out from among the phenomena. It is evident that the Socratic search for the essence by an analysis of instances—an induction ending in a definition—has a strong resemblance to the Baconian inductive method. ”

“ We do not think, indeed, that the notiones of which he speaks in any way correspond to what Whewell and Ellis would call “conceptions or ideas furnished by the mind of the thinker”; nor do we imagine that Bacon would have admitted these as necessary elements in the inductive process. But he was certainly not ignorant of what may be called a deductive method, and of a kind of hypothesis. This is clear from the use he makes of the Vindemiatio, from certain hints as to the testing of axioms, from his admission of the syllogism into physical reasoning, and from what he calls Experientia Literata. ”

“ Its aim is to acquire command over nature by knowledge, and to invent new arts, whereas the old logic strove only after dialectic victories and the discovery of new arguments. In method the difference is even more fundamental. Hitherto the mode of demonstration had been by the syllogism; but the syllogism is, in many respects, an incompetent weapon. It is compelled to accept its first principles on trust from the science in which it is employed; it cannot cope with the subtlety of nature ”

“ By his action the world is produced, and his action is the law of his nature, his necessity is true freedom. He is living, active intelligence, the principle of motion and creation, realizing himself in the infinitely various forms of activity that constitute individual things. ”

“ When I speak of forms I mean nothing more than those laws and determinations of absolute actuality which govern and constitute any simple nature, as heat, light, weight, in every kind of matter and subject that is susceptible of them. ”

“ In accordance with this, Bacon placed at the basis of the particular sciences which treat of God, nature and man, one fundamental doctrine, the Prima Philosophia, or first philosophy, the function of which was to display the unity of nature by connecting into one body of truth such of the highest axioms of the subordinate sciences as were not special to one science, but common to several. ”

“ In the mathematics there is no reason why it should not be employed. It is the flux of matter and the inconstancy of the physical body which requires induction, that thereby it may be fixed as it were, and allow the formation of notions well defined. In physics you wisely note, and therein I agree with you, that after the notions of the first class and the axioms concerning them have been by induction well made out and defined, syllogism may be applied safely ”

“ It may be freely admitted that in the domain of logic there is nothing in the Organum that has not been more instructively analysed either by Aristotle himself or in modern works; at the same time, there is probably no work which is a better and more stimulating introduction to logical study. Its terse, epigrammatic phrases sink into the fibre of the mind, and are a healthy warning against crude, immature generalization. ”

“ Lastly, the true form is such that it deduces the given nature from some source of being which is inherent in more natures, and which is better known in the natural order of things than the form itself. ”

“ Bacon analyses his own mental character and lays before us the objects he had in view when he entered on public life. If his opening sentence, “Ego cum me ad utilitates humanas natum existimarem” (“since I thought myself born to be of advantage to mankind”) , seems at first sight a little arrogant, it must be remembered that it is the arrogance of Aristotle’s μεγαλόψυχος, [1] who thinks himself worthy of great things, and is worthy. The ideal of production of good to the human race through the discovery of truth, was combined in him with the practical desire to be of service to his country. ”

“ In the language of a later period this principle may be expressed as the absolute synthesis of subject and object; no object exists apart from Mind. Mind is, therefore, prior both in thought and in existence, if for the moment we assume the popular distinction. Berkeley thus diverted philosophy from its beaten track of discussion as to the meaning of matter, substance, cause, and preferred to ask first whether these have any significance apart from the conscious spirit. ”

“ The inductive formation of axioms by a gradually ascending scale is a route which no science has ever followed, and by which no science could ever make progress. The true scientific procedure is by hypothesis followed up and tested by verification; the most powerful instrument is the deductive method, which Bacon can hardly be said to have recognized. The power of framing hypothesis points to another want in the Baconian doctrine. If that power form part of the true method, then the mind is not wholly passive or recipient ”

“ The proposition that our knowledge of nature necessarily begins with observation and experience, is common to Bacon and many contemporary reformers of science, but he laid peculiar stress upon it, and gave it a new meaning. What he really meant by observation was a competent natural history or collection of facts. “The firm foundations of a purer natural philosophy are laid in natural history.” ”