The mediaeval mind found the world a bio-sphere, a living entity, ruled by God, by divine regula-tion, a creature approachable, amenable, amendable, at least by prayerful intercession and miracle. When Newton found the world a machine, he had the depth of soul to see it still as God’s machine. Many contemporaries proved unable to rise up and peer through Newton’s hagioscope; they saw the world as merely an “it”, a tool to be used, a thing to be mined for profit or pleasure. Such “freethinkers” were numerous, and their number was reflected in abandoned pews and abandoned morals.
George Berkeley, Oxford scholar, missionary, Bishop of Cloyne, took up the task of refuting the materialism of his countrymen. If sensible impressions on the mind are the immediate objects of our knowledge and only a qualified affirmation, at best, can be given to any external “reality”, why bother with the affirmation? If all we know or can know is “in us”, why pretend there is something “out there”, something beyond us to which impressions correspond? Berkeley avers we must stop indulging in this phantasy. There is no material world. There is only spirit, the non-material, the mental. All reality consists of minds or spirits to whom a supreme mind or spirit communicates both itself and all ideas. If all impressions are felt by the subject, all impressions are subjective. If there exits any substratum, any substance separate from these impressions, from our sensations, it is unknowable, unprovable, inconceivable, and, therefore, insignificant.
When we claim X exits, we are simply saying we perceive X. The being of X consists wholly in its being perceived. The material world exists only as a mental act; it is a product of the mind. To be is to be perceived or to perceive.
The factuality of ideas, of mental impressions, verifies not only the non-existence of the material, but also the existence of the spiritual, the non-material, for the non-material or spiritual alone can produce ideas, can imagine, can remember. Furthermore, only the spiritual can receive ideas, and this passivity reveals to us the presence of other finite spirits like unto ourselves and an infinite spirit who is the cause of all spirits and of the harmony and order of all phenomena, of all that is perceived. This superior spirit is the font of all ideas commonly thought of as the material world, the ideas that impress us, the ideas that impress themselves upon us. These ideas constitute the very language of God; they are, in echo of Erigena, his self-manifestation.
However, talk of finite spirits distinct from the impressions and ideas bespeaks a spiritual substance, something they affect, something in which they reside. Talk of activity and passivity imply cause. His may be a brilliant counter-attack upon Locke, materialism, and scepticism, but the heft of the weapon Berkeley wields is an assumption, perhaps self-evident to some minds, but not to all.
The alternate ending to this British exercise comes from a Scot, David Hume. He took Locke’s thesis that sensible, subjective impressions are the objects of immediate knowledge to the other possible conclusion—any passage beyond them is not only illogical, but impossible. No item of traditional metaphysics can be either affirmed or supposed. Causality, external substances (the world), internal substances (soul), transcendental substances (God) are all tossed aside. All we have, all we know are vivid impressions and copies of impressions (ideas). We link these together in various ways to form complex ideas which in turn we associate with one another according to likeness, constancy, continuity, habit, expectancy. This fosters (perhaps we might better say festers) the talk about substances and other metaphysical realities, but such talk is merely talk, it cannot be justified. Only a constant relationship between two ideas that are themselves constant can be taken as certain (mathematics). Even the constancy of union does not imply a necessary connection, a state of cause and effect; it merely records an historical constancy that has been observable to the present. Any notion of universality or necessity is unattainable.
With the principle of causality, sufficient reason, etc., declared illicit, how shall we define the three great metaphysical items—God, world, soul? While each impression is distinct, we sense many as being constantly similar. Thus, we simply imagine them to be identical, we make believe a degree of constancy reveals something coherent, that there is some unchanging or underlying principle of unity and permanence. This creates a distinction between impressionable subject and impressing object; this makes a “world”. This, however, is fantasy, fiction, a world imagined. We know no objective world, only our impressions. Likewise, there is no substratum within us. We have no impression of an ego or a soul. Impressions may be gathered together into complexes, and we may fantasize there is something that is holding them all together, but such is merely a practical, logical fiction. We know no ego, no soul. The same avenue of argumentation eliminates God.
Hume never explicitly denies there is a God. But if we make bold to infer the existence of God from the experience of the cosmos, we cannot say of him anything more than the cosmos does. We have no basis to ascribe the traditional divine attributes or providential actions. Philosophy cannot resolve an omniscient, loving, and providential creator of all that is with the facts of sin, moral turpitude, and evil in all its forms. Indeed, the argument for a creator God is fallacious from the root for it relies upon the notions of cause and effect, but, as marked above, a regularity of impressions does not establish either a continued constancy or necessity.
Immortality suffers the same epistemological death. We have no experience of disembodied consciousness. Nor has the argument that virtue and vice require some after-life in which to be resolved, awarded or punished, any logical basis. Society is sufficiently rational and ordered such that its interests, both individual and communal, are dealt with in proper manner in this life. There is no one so good or so evil as to merit eternal bliss or damnation. (This optimistic assessment of man and society, this new and ill-born faith in the reasonableness of humankind’s natural powers, stands contradictory to the vision of man resident in both Roman and Reformed theology, and while it will soon bleed to death on French soil in a “reign of terror”, its ghost will live to haunt modern politics, philosophy, psychology, and spirituality, and few will remember there exist sacred powers to exorcise hubris and the pollution of evil beyond those preserved in the Rites of Rome.)
Religion, as in Hobbes, is a matter of fear and curiosity becoming imagined in anthropological guise and interpreted in philosophical argument. Monotheism, the acclamation of a singular God, tends to produce a single-minded devotee disposed to being prosecutorial toward others. Polytheism instils a certain ambivalence into its adherents, and is, thus, the better choice. Yet, be it resolute or adiaphorous, it is superstition all.
If Descartes had made man a ghost inhabiting a machine, and if his continental confreres could only proffer the solution that God makes the ghost and the machine to operate in a synchronized parallel, Hume, cementing the work of both Hobbes and Locke, dismisses both the ghost and God, and declares man merely a constant flux of impressions. Religion and morality become matters of practicality, systems useful in the face of terror or to gain the approval of others. The Renaissance unleashed a thrust toward individualism and utilitarianism. Here they reveal themselves furtively growing toward becoming the beast that will beset the industrialized and post-industrialized world, a terror that uncovers (literally apocalypsizes) the absence of both God and graciousness.
Sigismond Gerdil, Cardinal, and once nearly Pope, attempted to turn the tide away from the scepticism inherent in seventeenth century rationalism and empiricism and back to the even-keeled vision of Aristotle and Aquinas. His thesis rests upon the assumption that the fundamental object of our cognition is being, the recognition that “…is”. He does not dismiss the necessity of sensation or idea as mediating twixt mind and world, but hangs the essence of his considerations on the observation that no finite being can contain within itself the reality, the truth, of another being. A particular thing is always and in all ways the particular, only the infinite has the capacity to contain “the truth” of all particulars. All, therefore, resides in the mind of God. Aquinas had continued the ancient tradition of making the Mind of God the seat of the archetypes of all particulars, but that ontological, structural vision is here, as in rationalists and empiricists alike, made the epistemological. The idea of God itself is not an item empirically given or abstracted, but demonstrated in reflection upon the finitude and contingency of particular beings. Nevertheless, all knowledge is founded upon the activity of the divine and infinite mind upon the receptivity of finite mind. Once again, the structure of being and the structure of knowledge are equated rather than related.
Etienne Condillac also sought to restore the foundation of metaphysics, and was of a mind that it was buried in the investigations of Locke. The persistent error of the times was to presume the mind was endowed with certain principles from which knowledge could be deduced. It is, however, a gross presumption to think anything can be decocted form an abstracted principle, the assumption of something as universally true, distinctively and definitively evident, or innate in the mind. The basal objects of metaphysical or philosophical consideration (God, world, soul) are beyond irrefutable definition either as ideas or as words. The world and our knowing constitute an inter-related whole resting upon the inexplicable. We can explain world and self in terms of their varied relationships, but never on the presumption of knowing their unknowable underpinning and base. Thus, ideas in the mind arise from sensation of the world. Indeed, the mind, intellect itself, comes from sensation, sensation transformed, transfigured. Descartes made ideas atomic, irreducible entities, Condillac makes sensations fundamental, clear and distinct facts. They are true. It is our judgements about them that are open to distortion. Thus, the world is given as the immediate datum of sensation. Extension and endurance are given in sensation. We do actually touch the world and discover ourselves as a continuum given within the continuum of the world.
Self-consciousness is simply the perception, the sensation of self. The self is the prime sensation, the base perception. The mind, the soul, the knowing subject evolves in relation to the world. Locke’s “intuitive” supposition of an active subject is here superseded by self-transformative sensation. This transformation is effected by utilizing accidental signs founded in personal memory and natural signs founded in nature’s interconnections as a type of shorthand by which to summarily relate sundry sensations. This adaptability ultimately manifests as an ability to create arbitrary signs which liberate the mind to give signs to itself, to its ideas, and to thereby interrelate ideas themselves and develop into deeper complexity. This notion of an abiogenic or self-evolving mind-in-the-world is nascent in Condillac. Despite this, in his analysis mind (soul, self) still retains an almost essential passivity, an aspect he at least once attributed to the Fall.
Thomas Reid sought to undermine the scepticism of the seventeenth century with a variant tack. Descartes began with an existential doubt that reached to the core of self. Locke doubted thought implied mind. Malebranche doubted the efficacy of the external world. Berkeley doubted the external world. Hume dismissed both soul and world. Reid doubts ideas; the existence of ideas is the unprovable! To say the world, the stuff of the world, can only be perceived via ideas, through mental impressions resting on sensation, makes those ideas or impressions the sole and immediate objects of knowledge. But, sensation, or the idea or impression emanating therefrom is something that does not, cannot, exist in a vacuum; it resides in a sentient being, and the sentient being receives the sensation as a reality, as something within the parameters of a basic and primitive judgment: “This is”. This primal judgment is as given as the primal judgment that “I am”. This marks the world and the self as the primarily given, as the platform of all knowledge, the fact beyond the reach of explanation. All approaches to knowing that posit an idea or sensation as a simple apprehension are in error; they have torn asunder an inseparable experience. An apprehension always appears as “this” + “is”. This is not a matter of innate ideas or mental principles, simply of common sense and observation. The sketch of empiricism began with Bacon’s summons to observation. Upon the horizon stands a time known as the Enlightenment, and its summons shall be to common sense.