ESSAYS 



CAUSALITY AND MEMOUT IN LOSSET'S EFISTEMOLOGY 

 (Joshua C. Gregory, B.Sc.) 



The root of scepticism, wrote Berkeley, Is in supposing a twofold existence 

 of objects of sense — one intelligible or in the mind, the other real and with- 

 out it.^ Hylas was in one stage of the journey to final scepticism when he 

 deduced, from the original assumption, a distinction between real things or 

 external objects and immediately perceived ideas, which are their images 

 or representations .2 He soon took the final step : "I tell you that colour, 

 figure, and hardness, which you perceive, are not the real natures of these 

 things, or in the least like them." Yellowness, weight, etc., he adds, are 

 only relative to the senses, and we are ignorant of things — knowing neither 

 their true nature nor even their existence.^ 



Hylas prefigured the course to be run by thought on its way from Des- 

 cartes to Hume. About 200 years after Berkeley, Lossky again complains 

 that " most epistemologists are inclined to maintain that immediate ex- 

 perience consists entirely of the individual mental states of the knowing 

 subject." * A perceived object is still assigned a " twofold existence," in 

 the outer world and in conscious representation. Thought still blunders in 

 and out of scepticism, misled by the notion of mental copies of things or 

 of ideas symbolising reality. 



Berkeley dealt summarily with this " twofold existence " by conferring 

 upon sensible objects the status of " ideas." '' To me it is evident, for the 

 reasons you allow of, that sensible things cannot exist otherwise than in a 

 mind or spirit." " The ordinary distinction between things and thoughts 

 was not completely annulled by Berkeley when he thus converted their 

 separate modes of existence into a single one as " idea." He recognised 

 that some form of duality was required to account for the invasive quality of 

 the " ideas " which were his equivalents for the physical objects of common 

 thought. " Whence I conclude," Philonous adds when he has referred 

 " sensible things " to existence in a mind, " not that they have no real 

 existence, but that, seeing they depend not on my thought, and have an 

 existence distinct from being perceived by me, there must be some other 

 mind wherein they exist." ^ This transference of duality from a distinction 

 between physical things independent of minds and mental things, to a dis- 

 tinction between " ideas " originating in a superhuman mind and " ideas " 

 originating in human minds, involved a limitation on the realm of causality. 

 " There is nothing of power or agency included " in " all our ideas, sensa- 

 tions, notions, or the things which we perceive." Incorporeal active sub- 

 stance or spirit is the cause of all ideas. Here, as elsewhere, and often more 

 explicitly, Berkeley extracts causality completely from the physical world 

 (regarded by him as " idea " in a superhuman mind) and confines it to the 



1 



Principles of Human Knowledge, § 86. 

 First Dialogue between Hylas and Philonous. 

 Third Dialogue between Hylas and Philonous. 

 The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge (Duddington's trans.), p. 76. 

 Second Dialogue between Hylas and Philonous. ® Ibid. 



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