SOURCE: “Berkeley's Existence in the Mind,” in Locke and Berkeley: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by C. B. Martin and D. M. Armstrong, Anchor Books, Inc., 1968, pp. 184-95.

[In the following essay, Luce examines the use of the term “in the mind” in Berkeley's works, arguing that Berkeley refers to perceivable existence rather than mental existence.]

We find existence in the mind asserted and existence outside the mind denied scores of times, probably more than a hundred times, in the Principles.² In the earlier portion of the work there is scarcely a section without a reference to the doctrine. The term in the mind is clearly a hinge of Berkeley's system, and it has been persistently misunderstood, in my opinion, from his day to ours.

Kant took it to mean that ‘the objects in space are mere products of the imagination’.³ Critics to-day are reluctant to attribute such nonsense to a sensible thinker; but many of them make much the same mistake as Kant. They put the charge less bluntly and more broadly; for Kant's words ‘products of the imagination’, they would substitute ‘products of our faculties’; but that change would not affect the gravamen of the charge, viz., that Berkeley's existence in the mind is mental existence.

My task is to show that by existence in the mind Berkeley does not mean mental existence, but does mean non-mental existence, perceived or perceivable by the mind.

If by existence in the mind Berkeley had meant mental existence, he would have said so, we may be sure. He was not the man to use four words habitually where two would do. The term mental occurs in Locke. Berkeley uses it in his Commonplace Book (740, 805, 821), and occasionally in his published works (e.g., Princ. Intro., 9), but always in its proper meaning, i.e., ‘of or belonging to the mind’. He nowhere applies it, or, as far as I have observed, any equivalent term, to objects of sense.⁴ No, Berkeley's key phrase does not mean mental existence.

What it does mean is clearly stated at the first occurrence of the term in the Principles, section 2.⁵ In the previous section Berkeley has described his first type of created reality, ideas, and now he turns to his second type, mind, spirit, soul or my self, and says, ‘By which words I do not denote any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceiv'd’. This is official doctrine, explicit, decisive, and often repeated. To exist in the mind, for Berkeley, is to be perceived by the mind, and yet to be entirely distinct from the mind. From this definition he never deviates. This is his axiom, his New Principle, the positive aspect of his denial of matter. There is no matter, he teaches, because ‘we eat, and drink, and are clad with the immediate objects of sense which cannot exist unperceiv'd or without the mind’ (38). Objects seen, touched, heard, tasted, or smelled, sensible qualities or things or ideas, sensations, sensa, or sense-data, call them what you please or what fashion dictates, they, one and all, when I perceive them, are in my mind, only in my mind, and are entirely distinct from my mind; and that, says Berkeley, is what I mean by existence in the human mind.

Now mind, in Berkeley, may also mean the divine mind; and this and other ambiguities, or should I say obscurities, in the key phrase require to be cleared up before we go further.

Berkeley's term in the mind is flexible, at times indefinite, but it is not intentionally ambiguous; if it is ambiguous to us, we must not blame Berkeley. It is an elastic term, and to a certain extent it takes its colour from its context, and the reader has to be on the alert about it. Take first the preposition. The in is the equivalent of in relation to;⁶ but the full phrase is too awkward for general use. In our idiom ‘I have it in mind’ is a neat expression for the cognitive relation in general, and Berkeley is correct linguistically in using ‘in the mind’ as an abbreviation for ‘in direct cognitive relation to the mind’. The phrase is not to ‘be understood in the gross literal sense’.⁷ The preposition implies, not situation in, not forming part of, but apprehension by.⁸ Thus the British Museum is in my mind when I am in the British Museum, provided I am perceiving it or thinking about it. Things are not in my mind as the brain is in the head or as Monday is in the week or as the act of synthesis is in conception.

Then analyse the noun. Mind, in the Principles, is a very flexible term. It may mean the divine mind or the human mind, or it may be the negation not-matter. When Berkeley is merely the controversialist, attacking materialism, his in the mind means not in matter. Matter, ex hypothesi, is outside the mind and beyond its range. Berkeley says there is no such thing; he has looked; the things he sees and touches are in his mind and not outside. But of course he does not long remain at the stage of denial; mind soon becomes to him positive and a substance. It may be only mind in general, at the outset; for he can go a long way on that road without being specific; but sooner or later he has to distinguish sharply between the mind of God and the mind of man. And he does so. When he is drawing the line between sense and imagination, or between the perceived and the perceivable, the contrast between mind infinite and mind finite steps into the centre of the stage. Idealists to-day may think of mind as a vague, impersonal ether of spirit; but to Berkeley mind was minds, the mind of God or the minds of men.⁹

Having cleared up these ambiguities I return to my point that existence in the mind is not mental existence. I shall be met with the argument that Berkeley called things of sense ideas, which is equivalent to calling them mental. He does call them ideas of course; in his early books¹⁰ he tried to establish the usage, because idea implies immediacy and ‘a necessary relation to the mind’. It was a young man's experiment in technique, reasonable enough in its day, defensible by experts, but doomed to failure at the bar of average opinion. It was like trying to get the man in the street to-day to call shoes and ships and sealing wax sense-data. They are sense-data, but the term is too technical to make good. The Berkeleian idea of sense is exactly the sense-datum; but to apply either term to things opens the door to misunderstanding and to ridicule. But we must not make the wrong inference from this mistake in tactics. In calling things ideas Berkeley did not mean that they are mental; for he meant the opposite.

Mind and idea are sharply distinguished in Berkeley's philosophy. Mind is active; the idea is passive. He was an uncompromising dualist; he takes the thing into the mind, but does not let it become the mind, nor infect the mind, nor merge with the mind. He takes it in, but keeps it at arm's length. The thing of sense is so in the mind as to remain distinct from the mind. This distinctness is formally stated at the first mention of existence in the mind (Princ. 2), and is repeated with growing emphasis at several turning-points of the argument (e.g., sect. 27, 86, 89, 139). Berkeley seems to have become, as he worked, more and more conscious of the activity of active mind and the passivity of passive idea. They are ‘two kinds entirely distinct and heterogeneous, and which have nothing in common but the name’ (thing or being, sect. 89); they are ‘natures perfectly disagreeing and unlike’ (sect. 139). He taught the same thing ten years later, ‘Duo sunt summa rerum genera, corpus et anima’.¹¹ Within the truth of the creation Berkeley was a convinced dualist. He believed that God made the finite spirit and the sensible world, creating the one for the other, giving man's mind to know and the things of sense to be known, but not giving to either the power to produce or generate the other. The key phrase must be interpreted by the key doctrines; when Berkeley says a thing is in the mind, and calls it an idea, he thereby says that it is not a mental existence.

The root of the trouble is the assumption, natural but mistaken, that to an immaterialist things must be mental, because there is nothing else for them to be. If there is no matter, then all is mind; so argues the average man, because he starts from the equation, All reality is mind and matter, and, on subtracting matter, he is left with the equation, All is mind. Now there is no subtraction sum of that sort in the Principles; Berkeley nowhere says that all is mind, and he says things¹² quite incompatible with that wild fancy. The more firmly he asserts the mind and its rights, the more firmly he asserts the not-mind too. There is nothing outside the range of mind, for him, but there is much that is not mind. There is, to take a striking instance, the brain. Berkeley says that the brain ‘being a sensible thing, exists only in the mind’.¹³ Of course he does not mean that the brain is the mind, or is mental; he means that it is immediately perceived or perceivable.

Berkeley so denied the material as to assert the sensible. Giving up matter he held on to sensible things and the sensible world. His phrase in the mind was the war-cry, not of monism, nor mentalism, nor subjectivism, nor solipsism, but of direct awareness. He maintained a two-term theory of perception, and was up against thinkers, notably Locke, who held a three-term theory and put reality outside the mind. Knowledge is not knowledge, argued Berkeley, if the real be outside the mind, and only a pale copy thereof within. He insists, quite sensibly, that sensible reality is in the mind, is not outside the mind, exists only in the mind, and has neither absolute nor twofold existence. Existence in the mind is the elimination of the third term from knowledge, the removal of the cataract from mental vision, and the assurance that we see what we see, and not a tertium quid.

A river in brown flood builds its banks, while appearing to break them down. Berkeley's thought is like that river. It breaks matter, but builds the sensible. It destroys absolute existence, but establishes relative existence. It abolishes twofold existence in order to lay well and truly the foundation for the simple existence of the thing perceived. Thus Berkeley restores our native confidence in our senses, assuring us that what we actually sense is there, is given, is in our minds when we are minding it, and that when we are not minding it, it is still there, still offered, still in the mind of God.

Berkeley had the dramatic talent; he was able to think and feel with the other man, and he knew just where his opponent would misunderstand him. He foresaw the three main misrepresentations of his philosophy, and he deals with them as, respectively, the first, the fourth, and the fifth Objections to it.¹⁴ In each of these passages he makes important statements about existence in the mind. We will consider them in order.

‘By the foregoing principles, all that is real and substantial in nature is banish'd out of the world; and instead thereof a chimerical scheme of ideas takes place. All things that exist, exist only in the mind, that is, they are purely notional.’¹⁵ That is the first Objection, Kant's objection, and the gist of it is that Berkeley gives things of sense only a mental existence, and thereby obliterates the distinction between real and imaginary. Berkeley, in reply, refers to sections 29, 30, and 33 to prove that on his principles, (1) the things we see, hear, touch, etc., really exist; (2) there is a rerum natura; and (3) the distinction between real and imaginary retains its full force.

In other words, Berkeley requires us so to understand existence in the mind as to preserve intact the real existence of the sensible world, the laws of nature, and the contrast between real and imaginary.

Can it be done? I do not see why not. I, for one, have no difficulty at all about it. I hold existence in the mind, in what I take to be Berkeley's sense of that term, and I believe in the reality of the sensible world, and in laws of nature, and I can tell the difference between real and imaginary; but, of course, one has to accept ex animo Berkeley's contention that the realities of sense are significant entities (ideas), produced and sustained by omnipresent Deity, and ‘that they are not fictions of the mind perceiving them’ (sect. 36).

Turn now to the fourth Objection (sects. 45-48). It is vividly summarised in the objector's cavil, ‘Upon shutting my eyes all the furniture in the room is reduc'd to nothing, and barely upon opening 'em it is again created’.¹⁶ The objector is urging that on Berkeley's principles things are every moment annihilated and created anew, that sensible things, being ideas, must have only an intermittent existence, dawning in and fading out like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland, or like the fairy, Tinkabell, in Peter Pan. After stating the objection in section 45a, giving it its full force, Berkeley (sect. 45b) replies in effect; well, even if that charge be a true bill, it shall not move me from my primary intuition, nor make me assent to meaningless propositions. I actually perceive the tree; therefore it exists; and to claim for it an existence outside all mind at bottom has no meaning.

At this point Berkeley digresses; in sections 46 and 47 he points out that intermittency is accepted by Lockeans and Cartesians in respect of the ‘secondary qualities’, and that annihilation and continual creation are taught by the Schoolmen, and are assumed by the materialism of his day, notably in the infinite divisibility. These are ad hominem arguments only, designed to secure side-wind for his sails; for he did not accept Locke's ‘secondary qualities’, nor Malebranche's ‘modifications of the soul’, nor the ‘matter’ of scholastic and mathematician. He makes his position plain when he returns to his main argument at the opening of section 48. He says that we are not to conclude that objects of sense ‘have no existence except only while they are perceiv'd by us, since there may be some other spirit that perceives them tho' we do not’. He then expressly denies that annihilation, continual creation and intermittency follow from his principles. As to whether they can be held along with his principles, he is silent; he does not commit himself one way or the other. But he clearly dissociates himself from those tenets, when he speaks of some other spirit perceiving the objects of sense ‘tho' we do not’. Without a doubt then Berkeley's official teaching on existence in the mind is that objects of sense may go in and out of the small circle of the mind of man, but do not thereby go in and out of existence; for they are conserved in the great circle of the mind of God. Therefore the furniture in the room is not reduced to nothing when I shut my eyes.

Now to the fifth Objection, our third and final passage (sect. 49), ‘If extension and figure exist only in the mind, it follows that the mind is extended and figured’. This is a damaging criticism on the traditional view of the Berkeleian philosophy, but does it no harm on a true view. The objector raises the searching question, What does existence in the mind involve for the mind itself? If the divine mind be in view, Berkeley is charged with Spinozism and the deification of space; if the human mind be in view, he is charged with the denial of the distinction between mind and body. Berkeley's reply takes us right away from traditional Berkeleianism. He states positively what he means, and negatively what he does not mean, by existence in the mind. Extension and figure, he says, ‘are in the mind only as they are perceiv'd by it, that is not by way of mode or attribute but only by way of idea’. The way of mode or attribute is Spinoza's way, the way of pantheism and mentalism, and the way back to materialism. Berkeley rejected that way; for him there can be no confounding of distinct natures, no fusion of mind and not-mind, no infecting of subject by object. He substituted the way of idea,¹⁷ explaining it to mean that things ‘are in the mind only as they are perceiv'd by it’.

Why should not Berkeley be taken at his word? In view of his plain, reiterated and common-sense statements, what is the point of making the man into a mystic, and his chairs and tables into mental entities? ‘My meaning is only that the mind comprehends or perceives them’ (Hyl., [Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous] p. 470). Why not give the speaker credit for ordinary sincerity? It is no compliment to try to make him mean something subtler than he says he means. Berkeley simply takes his stand on the facts of perception, and bids his readers understand perception, if they would understand his existence in the mind. ‘The way of idea’ is the way of the object which is not subject, the way of the immediate object which is the only object, the way of direct awareness, and that is the only way, for Berkeley, in which things are in the mind, because it is the only way in which things are perceived. His ideas of sense are sensible ideas, passive entities in the active mind, not mental, nor partaking in the nature of mind, not modes or attributes or properties of mind; they belong to a different genus. Often unknown by man, they are always knowable; they can be perceived and known, as trout can be angled for and caught. Berkeley nowhere teaches that the human mind is creative, constitutive or generative; he just teaches the common-sense doctrine that when a man minds a thing, that thing is in his mind, and therefore is not in matter.

We have studied Berkeley's direct statements about existence in the mind, his answers to objections, and the general tenor of his philosophy, and the results of all three lines of study agree. Before I sum up and have done, I must make a brief reference to the ‘development’ of Berkeley's thought; for some would blunt the edge of my argument by asserting that there were two Berkeleys, and that I have concentrated upon the realist aspect of his teaching, and have ignored the idealist aspect, “refuted” by Kant. I reply that the statement that there were in fact two Berkeleys cannot be substantiated. I believe, after close study of the question, in the unity of the Berkeleian philosophy. There were not two Berkeleys, at any rate during the period that matters, from 1710 to 1713 inclusive, the period during which he published his full philosophy. My first quotation on existence in the mind was from the opening of the Principles, my last was from the closing pages of the Three Dialogues, and the two quotations are in complete agreement. Over that period, about existence in the mind there is not a shadow of turning. I am prepared to admit a marked change of view before that period began,¹⁸ a change which enhances the significance of his final decision. Berkeley had faced the issue; he had hesitated and deliberated; he had toyed with subjectivism, and had learned to distinguish in the mind from of the mind. When he was making the opening entries in the Commonplace Book, he did, I think, entertain the view that existence in the mind is mental existence; but the later entries tell a different story,¹⁹ and before he finished the Commonplace Book and months before the Principles went to the press, his monism had given place to dualism, and the way of mode was replaced by the way of idea.

Let me summarise the conclusions of this article. Berkeley's key phrase has three shades of meaning, negative, psychological, and metaphysical. His in the mind may mean, (1) not in matter, (2) perceived by the human mind, or (3) perceived by the divine mind only. No hard and fast line can be drawn between these meanings; the reader must go by the context. In many passages the assertion of existence in the mind is, primarily, a denial of the existence of matter, and the distinction between mind human and mind divine does not arise; but in some passages the distinction becomes of cardinal importance. A sensible object, actually being perceived by you or me, is actually in the mind of man; but a sensible object, strictly so called, i.e., one not being actually perceived by you, me, or other finite mind, exists, Berkeley teaches, in the mind of God, and in the mind of God alone.

These three shades of meaning correspond to Berkeley's three philosophical interests. He needed a flexible term for his varied tasks. First he was the controversialist, denying matter, ‘the founder of a sect called the Immaterialists’,²⁰ and he said in the mind meaning not in matter, as poets say in heaven meaning not on earth. Secondly, he was the psychologist, author of a new theory of vision; he believed in immediacy and direct awareness; he believed that what he saw, he saw, and not another thing or pale copy; and he expressed that belief by saying that the thing sensed was in his mind and not elsewhere. Thirdly, he was the metaphysician seeking ultimate answers to ultimate questions. He wanted to fathom the distinction between the perceived and the perceivable, between man's grasp and man's reach; he wanted to know the cause of change and the principles of human knowledge. He found the final solution of his problems in ‘the vision of all things in God’, and therefore existence in the mind, in Berkeley's last analysis, is existence in Him ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’.²¹

Notes

1. References to the Three Dialogues (abbrev. Hyl.) give the page number of Fraser's edition (1901) of the Works. References to the other works give the section number. For the Commonplace Book (CPB) I use Johnston's numbering of the entries.

2. The Three Dialogues is equally insistent on the point from start to finish.

3. Refutation of Idealism.

4. I have carefully verified this statement with regard to the Principles and the Three Dialogues, which together constitute the proper field of Berkeleian exegesis. The only doubtful terms, to my mind, are notions and passions. The former is applied to things of sense in Princ. 5 and perhaps, 74, the latter in Princ. 89. Both designate the object of knowledge, not the subject. Notion is one of the vaguest terms used by Berkeley. Passion is the equivalent of passive entity, and does not mean emotion. Both terms may be relics of the early stage of his thought (reflected in the first part of the Commonplace Book), when mind, for him, was passive, and not distinguished from its contents. The nearest approach to mental existence is notional existence, which in Hyl. 426 is opposed to real existence, real existence being repeatedly in the context predicated by Berkeley of things of sense. On notional, as used by the Objector in Princ. 34, see below, p. 290.

5. Many other sections, notably 7, 14, 23, 24, 33, 38, 41, 82, 86, 87, 90, 94, 124, may be cited in evidence, but I shall here concentrate upon sections 2, 34, 45-48, and 49, because in them Berkeley is expressly expounding the meaning of the term.

6. Cf. CPB, 814; Princ. 3; and Hyl., pp. 384, 453.

7. Hyl., p. 470. This passage is perfectly explicit, and deserves careful study.

8. Ibid. ‘My meaning is only that the mind comprehends or perceives them.’

9. Berkeley moved in circles keenly alive to this distinction. His Provost in T.C.D., Peter Browne, made analogy without identity the cornerstone of his philosophy. His archbishop, William King, carried the distinction to the extreme, virtually denying all resemblance, and making divine thought and will as metaphorical as divine hands and feet.

10. Hyl., p. 453. Berkeley never quite abandoned this technique; even in Siris he once or twice calls things of sense ideas.

11. De Motu, 21.

12. E.g., Princ., 35. ‘That the things I see with my eyes and touch with my hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least question. The only thing whose existence we deny, is that which philosophers call matter or corporeal substance.’

13. Hyl., p. 421.

14. Princ. 34, 45-8, 49.

15. The words, ‘that is, they are purely notional’ are not Berkeley's, but the objector's gloss; cf. CPB, 540, which contains this passage in brief.

16. Some readers have taken these words as representing Berkeley's own views; and I grant that these sections are not as carefully written as most; but the words are not his views, and the fact becomes quite plain, if sections 45 and 48 are read continuously. The insertion of sections 46, 47 has obscured the main sequence of thought.

    (For a more careful exposition of Sections 45-8, although without substantial alteration, see the author's The Dialectic of Immaterialism, Hodder and Stoughton, 1963.)

17. The phrase deserves more attention than it has received. It is quite technical with Berkeley; it occurs again, Princ. 142, ‘our souls are not to be known in the same manner as senseless, inactive objects, or by way of idea’, and by implication in Hyl., p. 455, ‘in which they exist, not by way of mode or property, but as a thing perceived in that which perceives it’. See also Hyl., p. 470, for the same contrast, and Hyl., p. 458, for the impassibility of the divine mind.

18. See my Development within Berkeley's Commonplace Book, Mind, Vol. XLIX, N.S., No. 193.

19. See especially No. 24, ‘Nothing properly but persons, i.e., conscious things do exist, all other things are not so much existences as manners of ye existence of persons’. With which contrast No. 434, ‘Impossible anything Besides that which thinks and is thought on should exist’, also No. 820.

20. Swift to Lord Carteret, 3rd Sept., 1724.

21. It is so stated in Hyl., p. 453.

From Mind, Vol. L (1941). Reprinted, with minor corrections, by permission of the author and Mind.