One of the most influential philosophers there
has ever been was the Englishman John Locke, born in 1632. He's been generally credited with laying the
intellectual foundations both of liberal democracy and of modern empirical philosophy. An empiricist is someone who believes that
our conceptions about what exist can never pass entirely beyond the bounds of experience--
that everything we conceive of has either been experienced or is constructed out of
elements which have been experienced. Some version of this doctrine has been accepted
by many of the greatest philosophers since Locke, and philosophy in the English-speaking
world has never escaped its dominance for long. So familiar has it become that many people
nowadays regard it as obvious-- just plain common sense. But when Locke propounded it, it was an idea
with revolutionary implications, whether in philosophy or the natural sciences or politics,
part of Locke's message always was, don't blindly follow convention or authority. Look at the facts and think for yourself. In politics, this was revolutionary in an
almost literal sense. In France, it had a decisive influence on
Voltaire and the encyclopedists, and thus on the intellectual foment that preceded the
French revolution. In America, the founding fathers had Locke
consciously in mind, and made repeated references to him when they were drawing up the American
constitution. Locke was educated at two institutions that
are still there, and still famous-- Westminster School and Christchurch Oxford, where he became
a don until his mid 30s. He also qualified as a medical practitioner,
and when he left university life, he became involved in both politics and medical research. In his own day, he was occasionally known
as "Dr. Locke." In the turmoil leading up to what the English
call their "glorious revolution" of 1688, he had, for his own safety, to go into exile
in Holland. And he was one of those Englishman who followed
William of Orange over to England to oust the Stuart Kings. By this time, he'd been working for years
on what was to be his philosophical masterpiece, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It was published in 1689, when Locke was 57. But it had the date 1690 on the flyleaf, and
that's often mistakenly given as the year of publication. Also published in 1689 was A Letter Concerning
Toleration. There followed in quick succession the Two
Treatises of Government in 1690 and Some Thoughts Concerning Education in 1693. Although Locke lived to be 72 and wrote other
things, nearly all his influential writings came out of a period of less than five years. The next philosopher in the English language
who is still of international reputation, George Berkeley, was in part reacting against
Locke, and it can therefore be helpful to consider the two together. Berkeley was born in Ireland in 1685 and educated
at Trinity College Dublin. All the philosophical works for which he's
now famous were published when he was in his 20s-- A New Theory of Vision in the year 1709,
The Principles of Human Knowledge in 1710, and Three Dialogues in 1713. Some of his other works deserve to be better
known than they are, but his fame rests on those I've mentioned. In 1734, he was made a bishop, and to this
day, he's often referred to as Bishop Berkeley. Much of his life was spent in public activity,
some of it in the new world. He had connections with Yale university, where
one of the colleges is named after him. And the town of Berkeley in California is
also named after him. He died at the age of 67, in 1753, and he's
buried in Christchurch, which, of course, was Locke's Oxford college. Here to discuss with me the work of these
two philosophers is someone whose writings about them have made his academic reputation,
Michael Ayers, fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. Mr. Ayers, let's start with Locke. If anyone's studying the history of philosophy
chronologically, as many people do, and so they come to Locke via his predecessors. One thing that's bound to strike them is the
number of central ideas in Locke that had already been expressed by other people-- for
instance, by Descartes. I'm thinking of the notion of the whole world
as being divided into minds and matter as one example. Or the conception of the whole universe as
one gigantic mechanical system as another example. What is it about Locke that was distinctively
different? Well, like Descartes, Locke was part of a
movement in the 17th century to oust the previously dominant view of the world, which is the Aristotelian
view. And central to this was, of course, the view
of the world as a great machine subject to mechanical laws-- composed of lesser machines,
but all subject to the same laws of physics, necessary laws of nature. Superficially, too, his theory of thought
and knowledge can look like Descartes'. He explains thought as a series of ideas before
the mind. An idea is something in the mind, or before
the mind, which represents things outside the mind. In reasoning, the mind confronts these ideas,
so to speak-- or is confronted by them. And his definition of knowledge is the perception
of the relation between ideas. And this intuitionist view of knowledge can
look very like Descartes'-- the view that in knowing something, we, as it were, grasp
or perceive its nature. On the other hand, there are very big differences. Chief among these, perhaps, or one of the
chief differences, is the different status he gives to the senses. For Descartes, the senses deliver certain
data and they incline us to have certain beliefs. But these beliefs don't count as knowledge. The senses have to be interpreted and explained
by reason before we can suppose that through the senses we have acquired any knowledge
of the world. Basically, the senses don't deliver knowledge. It's reason that delivers knowledge, or the
intellect operating on the data of sense. But for Locke, the senses themselves are basic
or fundamental faculty. They deliver knowledge in their own right. And this shows in the different approach to
skepticism of the two philosophers. Descartes, so to speak, accepts the skeptic's
challenge to supply reasons for believing in an external world-- in a world of objects
outside us. Locke simply dismisses the challenge. He says that the skeptic is casting doubt
on one of the fundamental faculties of the human mind. And yet, he himself introducing his skeptical
reasoning is relying on human faculties. And in effect, you reject the whole thing. He's prepared to say that if anybody is wild
enough to be a skeptic, reasons can be produced. But the senses don't need reasons. I mean, they just supply us with knowledge. Another thing that I think one must mention
as being central to Locke is his very special use of the word "ideas." I know he didn't coin that, but in chapter
one of The Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he actually apologizes to the reader for the
frequency with which he's going to use the word in the book. Can you say something about that? Yes, well-- it was, in fact, a very well-used
term by the time he used it. I mean, there's nothing very new about it
at all. But for Locke, an idea is something very different
from what it is for Descartes. For Descartes, it's something really fundamentally
intellectual. For Locke, it's fundamentally something sensory. I mean, even if we're thinking about something
that we're not actually perceiving, we have an image-- a sensory image of that thing. And he explains even the most abstract thinking
in these terms. Of course, his there has to get more complicated
at this point. But basically, thought is, for him, the possession
of, having images before the mind. Now this theory-- "imagism," as we could call
it-- was not an uncommon one in the 17th century. And it tended to go in one of two directions. One of these directions is taken by Hobbes--
that since all our knowledge and understanding is dependent on the senses, Hobbes produced
a dogmatic view of the world, which was a materialist one. He thought that we could analyze experience
in such a way that we could arrive at the sort of understanding of the world that Descartes
thought we arrived at through the intellect. But Locke developed a different line of--
which is more agnostic, or skeptical, really-- that, although the senses give us knowledge,
they give us limited knowledge. And because all our thought about the world
is restricted to the concepts that we have through the senses-- and, in fact, our thought
involves sensory images-- that restricts our knowledge of the world. And he thought there was no method by which
we could arrive at the underlying nature of things. So he was a sort of modified skeptic. I mean, we know the world is there, but we
don't know what it's like. This use of the word "ideas," and this particular
theory of knowledge, was so influential that I'd like to dwell on it just for a moment. And Locke thought, didn't he, that everything
that was present to the mind was, in his sense of the word, an idea. And he used that to mean not just thought,
as we tend to do, but sensory images-- even memories, pains, emotions. Everything immediately present to the mind
was an idea. Now, when it came to our apprehension of the
external world, he thought that we didn't have direct access to objects. I mean, if I look at that table, I haven't
got that table inside my head. What I've got inside my head is a visual image
of that table. The light shines from the table onto the retina
of my eye. That transmits an image to my brain, and I
have the experience that I call "seeing the table." But the whole of my experience, through all
five of my senses, consists not of being in immediate contact with the objects of the
external world, but of having images and representations of them. Now, he never doubted, did he, that although
that means that the objects of the external world out there are things of which I do not
have and never can have immediate knowledge, he never doubted that they were out there,
did he? I mean, he believed that there were materials
substances out there in the world giving me these experiences. Why was he sure of that? Well, he thought it just didn't make sense
to suppose that all there is, so to speak, are lots of sensible qualities. I mean, his model is that there is the object
there. It's affecting us in various ways, and it's
affecting other objects around it. And it's through its effects on us, and through
it's perceptible effects on other objects-- that's to say, the objects in turn affect
us in regular ways-- that's how we have knowledge of this thing. And so what, for us, is simply-- we have to
think simply in terms of a sort of list of sensible qualities, and powers to affect other
things and so forth. What's actually there is something really
rather simple. But he believed that because he believed the
world must make sense. He believed that the world is an intelligible
place-- that it is governed by necessary laws, and that it's ultimately the kind of place
that an ideal science could explain and understand. Now, at the level of sense perception, although
there are regularities, they're only relative regularities. I mean, we don't get that kind of absolute
law-likeness at the level of ordinary experience that would be the sign that we had arrived
at the truth of things. It's because we don't have a simple, comprehensive
science, really, of things that he can be sure that the senses don't give us knowledge
of their nature. Now, you say that Locke believed that the
world was the sort of place that a law-like science could explain, but I think the question
still needs to be asked. If he thought that all the knowledge we have
of things is this intermediate knowledge, that we immediately experience images and
sensations and representations, which in turn represent or picture things, if we never have
access to the things, how is a successful science possible on Locke's view? How can we know what the nature of things
is? Well, in a certain level, it's not possible,
because we can never be sure, he thought-- in his situation, at any rate, in the 17th
century. I mean, he was really trying to prick a lot
of balloons, so to speak. He was trying to cut the pretensions of philosophers
like Descartes, who thought that they really arrived at a deductive science of things. What we're restricted to, in Locke's view,
is a speculation. And not only are we restricted to speculation,
but we must employ in that speculation concepts that we get from experience. So there was, in Locke's view, a very good
speculation to hand. But there was clearly something wrong with
it. And that was Boyle's view of the world as
a whole lot of little atoms, particles bouncing around and clinging together, and functioning
mechanically. And he thought that's what the world must
be like-- that it would be Boyle's explanation of chemical change, for example. If we take a chemical substance, and we see
that it behaves in a whole variety of different ways in different conditions, then Boyle said,
well, that's not because it just, so to speak, has an arbitrary and contingent list of powers
to affect other things in various ways, but because it has a certain structure-- a certain
mechanical structure. And because when it meets things of different
varying mechanical structures, then obviously it's going to behave in different ways when
it interacts with these things. Now, Locke accepted that view provisionally. But he thought there were certain questions
it left unanswered. One of the questions concerned the particles
themselves. I mean, why do atoms cohere as little, unchanging
things? It's all very well if you postulate them and
then get on from there, but why isn't it the case that when one atom hits another, it doesn't
fall apart, or bits fall off and so forth? So the problem of coherence was one of the
problems that he raised. Newton's Principia had been published just
a few years before the essay. And of course, the inverse square law is an
important part of Newton's system. I think I'd better mention what that is, because
some of our viewers might not know. And that is that every object in the universe
attracts every other object in the universe with a force which is inversely proportional
to the square of the distance between them. That's it, isn't it? Yes, well-- Sorry, just an interruption. One must not assume that everybody knows this. Locke accepted that Newton had shown that
this law holds, and he accepted that the probability was that it holds absolutely universally. But nonetheless, it seemed to Locke just like
a kind of brute fact, and not a really intelligible one in itself. What science is explaining is not the inner
nature of things, which we can't know, but how things behave, which we can observe--
which we can experience. Well, he thought that in the end, that's what
Newton had achieved-- a sort of spectacularly good description of how things behaved. And this interpretation was one that Newton
himself was inclined to. And in fact, in the second edition of Principia
he published after Locke's death, he introduced a number of philosophical passages which were
pretty obviously heavily influenced by Locke. Yes, he said this famous phrase, "I don't
make hypotheses." That's right. "Hypotheses non fingo." And he was referring to that, wasn't he? I just tell you that there is gravity. I don't try to explain how it comes about
that there is gravity. And so on for the whole of his science. The new science made actually prodigious use
of mathematics. And from Galileo to Newton-- and above all,
with Newton-- men began to understand that throughout the universe, there are, so to
speak, equations buried in reality. How did Locke see this? I mean, how did he view the nature of mathematics
and, through science, its application to reality? Well, his explanation of the possibility of
mathematical science, and geometry in particular, is really rather different from Descartes'. I mean, for Descartes, geometry is a part
of the science of space. I mean, it's part of the science of reality. But for Locke, it's an abstract science which
is created by us. We, so to speak, pick off geometrical properties
of things. And we can construct them ad lib. And we can create a sort of science for that
reason, precisely because it's not really concerned with the nature of things at all,
which is unknown. It's simply concerned, as he puts it, with
our own ideas. When we observe things, they affect us in
ways which cause us to observe, as we think, properties in the things. Now, Locke thought that these properties were
all of two basic kinds, didn't he? That there were some properties in things
which they possessed whether anyone was observing them or not. He called those primary qualities, didn't
he? And that would include, I suppose, all the
mathematical ones, the measurable ones-- The mechanical ones. The mechanical ones, like the dimensions and
the weight and so on. And there were other qualitative properties,
like sounds and smells and tastes and colors, that he thought depended on an observer. We're beginning to gather the materials together
for a sort of outline sketch of a whole picture of the world. And I'd like to draw the threads together
before we take anymore forward steps. It's really going back to the beginning of
our discussion and taking it up to this point, that Locke thought that the world, as we experience
it, consists of two fundamentally different sorts of entities-- minds and material objects. That we can't know what these are in their
inner nature-- and in their inner nature these remain mysterious to us-- but we do have direct
experience of what they do and how they behave. One of the things that material objects do
is they affect us. They affect us through our senses in various
ways, which give us experiences-- or representations or images-- of their properties. And that we perceive their properties of being,
again, of two fundamental kinds. There are the primary qualities, which are
the mathematical properties, and the secondary qualities, which are mind dependant-- another
sensory, or qualitative, nature. Now, this sort of view of the world is extraordinarily
close, it seems to me, to one which is still very widely held, and widely regarded as a
sort of common sense view. Up to this point in the discussion, though,
we haven't said anything at all about one thing which is of enormous importance to 20th
century philosophers. And it was of enormous importance to Locke,
though we haven't mentioned it yet. And that's language. The Essay Concerning Human Understanding is
written in four books. And one whole book is devoted to the use of
words. How did Locke see language as coming into,
or being related to, our experience of the world? Well, I think I'd first like to just qualify
you're summing up. Please do. I don't want you to appear to agree with it
if you don't. The way you summed it up, you made Locke seem
a little bit inconsistent. Because as a matter of fact, it's true. He's inclined to think that the world is composed
of matter and minds. But he is consistent enough to say that since
we don't know the nature of either, we can't even be sure of that. So he is-- Ah, that's a very important further point. --very ready to accept the possibility that
materialism is true-- that we thinking things are in fact complex and subtle machines. How we work, we have no idea at all. But he's ready to accept the possibility that
there is no Cartesian soul-- no immaterial naturally immortal soul. No. Actually, I'm glad you pulled me up on that,
because he has an argument about that which I think is marvelous, and which I still think
carries its full clout today. Of us human beings, he says that one of two
things must be true, but both seem to us impossible to grasp. Either we must be material objects that think
and have emotions, or there must be something immaterial in us which thinks and has emotions,
and is, in that case, mysteriously allied to a physical object-- namely, our body. Now, Locke says, when we try to think our
way through these two alternatives, we find that both of them are in a profound way unintelligible
to us. And yet, one of them must be true. Yes. I still believe that. I think that's a good argument. Yes. The argument there is so strong that one wonders
why on other occasions he says that dualism is probably true. But he never tells us why he says it-- never
justifies the "probably." Well, you were right to bring that in. Now, let me try and move us on, as I did before,
to language. How does Locke's view of language fit in to
his view of our knowledge of the world? Well, the book on language is really a book
on classification in all the various departments of knowledge-- what makes for good classification. The most interesting, I think, is the classification
of the natural world. And what he wants to do here is to reject
the Aristotelian view that the world is composed of natural kinds, and that science is a matter
of identifying the natural kind and examining the nature of each kind more or less separately. So you have to study the essence or nature
of horses, cows, dogs, cats, and so forth. There just are these categories in the world. Yes. And he wants to reject that view, of course. But this has implications for classification. For the Aristotelians-- You say "of course," but somebody who hasn't
thought about this before might not see the "of course." I mean, somebody might say, but there are
dogs, or there are cows, or there are horses. Well, the "of course" came from what went
before, because given the view of the world as this great kind of mechanical object composed
of lesser machines, then dogs and cats are little machines and they function according
to the basic laws of physics. So there isn't a separate nature of dogs and
a separate nature of cats. There's a different structure, but the nature
involved is really the same. I mean, the laws of nature involved are the
same. Well, given that view-- I mean, his own view
of the world as that sort of place, then he concluded that there were no natural divisions
into kinds, but there were resemblances at the level of observation. And these resemblances caused us to, quite
reasonably, to slice the world up. But in the end, the slicing is done by us. It's not done by nature. I mean, for the Aristotelian, there are these
natural divisions, natural species, and we simply identify them and name them. But for Locke, we do the slicing up. And the consequence of this is that the terms
we use-- like gold, water, horse, dog, and so on-- these are really, in the end, arbitrarily
defined by us. They're human categories. Yes. What would he have said about his own distinction
between minds and material objects that we've talked about so much so far? I mean, isn't that a distinction of natural
kinds? Isn't that found in reality, and not just
a distinction made by us in language? I think that would be. I mean, I think he would agree that if that
were-- if dualism were true, if that's the way it is, that that would be a distinction
of kinds. The kinds that he's attacking are the Aristotelian
kinds, which are all bodily. I mean, there isn't, in the Aristotelian philosophy,
anything quite like the soul of Descartes-- I mean, that immaterial substance. Now, if Locke thinks that our bodies are ultimately
mysterious to us, simply because all material bodies are, in their nature, mysterious to
us, and we're not even sure what our minds are either, what view did he take of personal
identity? What did he see people as being? Well, the discussion of personal identity
is one of the most original and interesting parts of the essay. He agreed with Descartes that one knew one
was a thinking thing, but one didn't know what kind of thing one is. In the 17th century, the followers of Cartesian
modes of thought thought that a very powerful argument for their view was that it explained
immortality and personal identity-- that the identity of a person-- despite the flux of
matter, so to speak, in the body-- the identity of the person is determined in life by the
identity of the soul. And this soul could go on to the afterlife. And that would constitute our identity then. Now, Locke started from a different consideration,
which is that immortality has to be personal immortality. The whole point of immortality is-- well,
to put it bluntly, reward and punishment, with a certain emphasis on punishment very
often. But unless the thing that was being punished
in the afterlife was conscious of the deeds that it had done in life on Earth, then somehow
Locke thought that punishment lost its whole point. So-- Yes, it would be as if a quite different person
were being punished. Right. So he argued that-- I mean, suppose that we
grant that there is such a thing as an immortal, immaterial soul. And suppose we grant that this receives punishment. If that thing has no recollection of what
happened on Earth, the whole notion of immortality loses its point. So what really matters, Locke said, is not
the supposed immaterial soul, but consciousness. But the consciousness of the individual, which
is-- The continuity. The continuity of consciousness-- the consciousness
of the individual of its past deeds. And of course, in this life, what matters
is the thought that it's going to be us who's going to get punished in the world to come. In my introduction to this program, I referred
to the enormous impact that Locke's political philosophy made, both in the period that Locke
lived in-- and, in fact, ever since. It's always continued to have an influence. So I don't want us to get off Locke and onto
Berkeley before we say something about that. One thing that I admire-- in fact, the thing
I think I admire most in Locke's political philosophy-- is the clarion call for tolerance. And at least one of his arguments for that
is based on his insistence that, after all, we don't really know all that much in this
life. We are wrong about a lot of things. A great deal is mysterious to us. And therefore, we are not justified in imposing
our opinions on others by force. He has a very moving expression of that argument
at one point, which I like very much, I must say. Yes. I think that is an important connection with
this views on politics, and religious tolerance in particular. He has what you might call an individualistic
view of knowledge-- that nobody else can do my knowing for me. I mean, I have to think things out for myself
in order to have knowledge. Other people can pass on opinions. Now, in certain areas, in ethics and religion,
he thought that people ought to spend time, and ought to be given the time to spend, on
thinking things out for themselves as far as possible. And if you have that coupled with a very strong
sense of how difficult this is, and how hard it is to get things right, then you've obviously
got the recipe for a tolerant society. We take it for granted, but of course, in
his day, it was very far from being taken for granted. Before we do move on, I'd like you to sum
up in some way what you see Locke's lasting contribution to philosophy-- or that's too
big a question-- what you see his most important contribution to philosophy as having been. Well, historically, of course, something that
you hinted at before-- that he supplied a framework within which people could make sense
of things like Newtonian science and so forth. And a way of looking at the world in which
we recognize that there's a lot about the world we don't understand. And we recognize the speculative nature of
science and so forth. And that was very important. He had another effect, which was that some
of his arguments-- for example, his emphasis on the point that the knowledge we get through
the senses is really just knowledge of things with powers to act on us, we don't really
understand what lies behind those powers-- those arguments were employed by philosophers--
like Berkeley himself-- who were really aiming at quite a different kind of view of the world
or philosophy from Locke's, but were able to make use of what, to them, were concessions--
concessions to idealism, or to skepticism-- I mean, to quite a different sort of philosophy. Now, I think that Locke has a lot, still,
to say to us, partly just because he was, so to speak, the last great realist before
the tendency towards idealist philosophy. And we can-- I think there's something deeply
wrong with idealist philosophy, myself, and I think it's very valuable to go back to Locke
as a sort of pre-idealist realist. And in some ways, to see what went wrong,
but also to pick up points which we've forgotten, which we've lost. Well, I have much more sympathy with idealism
than you have, but let that appear as it may. Let's now move onto the first of absolutely
major idealists-- namely, Berkeley. And in a way, we've prepared the ground for
the step we're now taking, haven't we? Because the philosophical doctrine that Berkeley
is most famous for is his rejection of the notion of material substance. He just said there is no such thing. All we have is experience. And we've no warrant for inferring the existence
of anything that isn't experience. Now, can you-- I mean, that was partly a reaction
against Locke. Can you, as it were, start the discussion
of his philosophy from that point? Well, the way you put it, you make Berkeley
look like a skeptic. And he hotly contented that his philosophy
was anti-skeptical, and that he wasn't doubting that there was something out there, in a sense. But what's out there is not the material world. He wanted the world basically to consist of
spirits, with-- He thought the whole of reality was spiritual. Well, the sensible world is given a very subordinate
role. I mean, he doesn't deny its existence, he
says, but he wants it to be in some way dependent on spirits. I mean, there's God and there are finite spirits. His motive is fundamentally theological. To his mind, philosophers like Locke and Descartes
had turned the world into a kind of God, almost-- turned the material world. Because matter is something which has a nature
of its own, which doesn't need God anymore, in some way. Once God has created matter, it's like a great
clock. It can go ticking on while God goes on holiday. And this, for Berkeley, was a sort of atheistic
doctrine. I mean, a lot of philosophers had thought
that materialism was a sort of atheism, and had attacked any view which gave matter an
equal status to spirit-- I mean, a group called the Cambridge Platonists, or the Cartesians
themselves were like this-- had this view. But Berkeley was perhaps-- well, one of the
first to have the idea of turning the tables on matter, in a way, by making the sensible
world nothing but, so to speak, something which is mine dependent. So that Locke's distinction between the world
as it appears to us and the world as it is in itself, you see-- Berkeley just chops off
the world as it is in itself. And all that's left is the world as it prepares
to us. And he contends that he's not denying the
existence of anything in this way-- at least, not the existence of anything that counts
or matters. How does Berkeley-- if Berkeley thinks that
there is no world as it is in itself, that everything is in the nature of spirit or ideas
or experience, how does he account for the success of modern science? I mean, how can there be a science if there's
no matter? He thought in a way he could account for it
better than Locke would, because whereas Locke was left with this worry about things like
the Inverse Square Law being just sort of brute fact, for Berkeley, all laws are just
brute facts. And they are, in fact-- they represent the
order in which God affects us with ideas. And the sequence of ideas is what constitutes
the laws of nature. And he had his own story-- explanation of
this sequence. His analogy is with language. God is simply informing us of what is to come,
in a way. So that if I see a fire, then I know if I
stretch out my hand, I'll get burnt. And this is useful knowledge. Unless the ideas which God instills in us
were-- unless they were in this sort of order, then they would be useless to us. So he has this-- it's a sort of-- in fact,
he constructs an argument for God's existence out of all this. In fact, so one could sum up Berkeley's view
of total reality like this. There's an infinite spirit, which is God. There's a whole number of finite spirits,
which is us. And we are somehow in communication with God
via our experience-- that what we take to be our whole experience of the world is, in
this rather poetic metaphor, God's language to us. God is talking to us. And science-- all the regularities in the
world, all the scientific laws, all the equations of mathematics that are built into our experience--
are, so to speak, the grammar and the syntax of God's language. They are the structure of the divine communication
to human minds. There's no need-- It's a magnificent idea. There's no need to postulate matter at all. It doesn't do any work. If all reality is mental, in Berkeley's view,
how is it that I can't choose what I see? I mean, when I-- if I close my eyes and open
them again, I can't choose to see Charlie Chaplin sitting on that sofa. I can't choose to see nobody sitting on the
sofa. There you, Michael Ayers. Now, anyone else would say, Locke would say,
common sense would say, well, yes, that's because Michael Ayers is there independently
of being perceived. Berkeley can't say that. At least, he can't say that about all the
other kinds of material objects in the universe. How does he explain it? In the end, he comes out with a notion which
I think was there in his earlier writing, but just not expressed very clearly, that
there is something that exists independently of you, and that is an idea in God's mind. And there is at least an intention of God
to produce appropriate ideas in your mind when you open your eyes. So the real object is really explained in
terms both of the orderliness-- the order of your ideas and what exists in God's mind
as the basis of that order. But what is really important to Berkeley,
you see, is not the leap from your idea to something else-- for example, an idea in God's
mind. Some people think that that leap has made
Berkeley just as vulnerable as the materialist ever was to the skeptical argument. But the important thing for Berkeley is that
what he postulates is something mind dependent. And it's also, he claims, more intelligible. Because it's totally unintelligible, as Locke
admitted to us, as to how matter should act on mind. But he doesn't have that problem, because
God's activity is something which is fundamentally unintelligible. In fact, it's the only kind all genuine causality
there is in the universe, is the activity of a spirit, whether of ourselves or God,
for Berkeley. I think there's much more to be said for Berkeley
than we're making it sound. I mean, this insistence that all of the objects
of our knowledge can possibly ever be is the data of experience, and experience alone,
came long after Berkeley's death to be one of the orthodoxes of science. And in fact, Karl Popper wrote a famous article
called, "A Note on Berkeley as a Precursor of Mach and Einstein," in which he extracts
21 theses from Berkeley's work, which he then shows have been put forward by modern physicists
like Einstein under the impression that they were saying something new and revolutionary. I think there is a lot more to be said for
Berkeley than one can easily be inclined to allow. Well, it's perfectly true that there is a
powerful argument for the view that our concept of anything must, in the end, come back to
our experience of that sort of thing, however indirect. And that argument has been very powerful. Now, of course, this, in a way, is Locke's
argument too. But Locke wants to say, that doesn't mean
to say that there isn't something with its own independent nature out there. And Berkeley just wanted to sort of chop that
off and deny that. I mean, for Berkeley, the world is not a mysterious
place. He's a dogmatic philosopher. It's-- for us, in his terms-- a rather surprising
place, because there's no material world in the sense in which most people think of it. But it's not a mysterious place for Berkeley,
whereas for Locke, you see, he's prepared to accept that there is something mysterious
there. Thank you very much, Mr. Ayers.
