The Philosophy of the Enlightenment

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: be affected, the primary qualities of form, figure, extension and solidity, nevertheless, do fairly represent the nature of the object as it really is. Berkeley, on the contrary, completely wipes out all distinctions whatsoever between the supposed primary and secondary qualities of matter, and considers...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: be affected, the primary qualities of form, figure, extension and solidity, nevertheless, do fairly represent the nature of the object as it really is. Berkeley, on the contrary, completely wipes out all distinctions whatsoever between the supposed primary and secondary qualities of matter, and considers the ideas of extension, figure, motion, rest, solidity and number quite as subjective as taste, colour or sound. The primary and secondary qualities shade off so imperceptibly the one into the other that it is impossible to draw a consistent line of demarcation between them. Here, again, is the fallacy and the folly of abstract ideas. If the colour is subjective, so also is the extended surface, because you cannot have a surface which is not at the same time coloured as well. Mere extension void of colour is a highly abstract idea which represents a tour de force of our mental activity without any correspondence whatsoever with our actual experiences. In an early essay, which was the result of his philosophical thinking while still in Dublin, and published when he was only twenty-four years of age, entitled Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision, Berkeley had already laid the foundation for this veiw as to the indirect and subjective character of our perception of the so-called primary qualities of matter; and consequently it became the foundation also of his theory of idealism. In this Essay he attempts to show in detail that we have no immediate intuition of distance by sight, but that our perception of it is indirect, composed of a group of suggestions and inferences connected with the elemental sensations attending the process of vision, and further complicated by the intimate associations with the materials of knowledge furnished by the sense of touch. It follows, therefore, ..