We may consider first a certain view of the mind by which Berkeley was, not surprisingly, tempted, though he eventually rejects it. His term — shared with John Locke — for the successive actual contents of experience is, of course, 'ideas', and early in his notebook he had laid down (with his theory of perception in mind) the general principle that 'Language and knowledge are all about ideas, words stand for nothing else'. If so, then clearly language and knowledge about the mind must be 'about ideas', and accordingly in later entries we find Berkeley saying that 'the very existence of Ideas constitutes the soul. ... Mind is a congeries of Perceptions. ... Say you the Mind is not the Perceptions but that thing wch. perceives. I answer you are abus'd by the words that & thing: these are vague empty words without a meaning.' These remarks of course suggest a theory of the mind resembling that later put forward by David Hume — and much later by William James and Bertrand Russell — in which the mind is, not a persistent entity distinct from the contents of experience, but a 'logical construction' out of those contents themselves. Such a view, however, is directly and flatly contradicted in the second paragraph of the Principles, where Berkeley writes: 'But, besides all that endless variety of ideas or objects of knowledge, there is likewise something which knows or perceives them; and exercises divers operations, as willing, imagining, remembering, about them. This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul, or myself. 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 perceived.'
It is perhaps clearer why Berkeley rejected the Humean 'logical construction' view than what the view actually was with which he sought to replace it. He held — and this was indeed crucial in his criticism of Locke's 'causal' theory of perception — that ideas, and indeed any other non-animate entities if any others exist, are essentially 'inert', inactive, incapable of doing anything; and he no doubt took it, reasonably enough, that a 'congeries' of such inactive elements could not but be itself inactive. He came to regard it, by contrast, as the fundamental truth about the mind that it is essentially active — and uniquely as well as essentially so, for he came to hold that mental agency was in fact the only case of real activity, of actual doing. That is why, in the passage quoted above, he was careful to speak of mind as 'this perceiving, active being', and it follows of course that he must regard such 'active beings' as 'entirely distinct' from ideas or any other inanimate items. It should be added that he does not mean to say that mind is active in addition to perceiving, for he came to hold that perceiving, 'taking notice', is itself an act, not merely passive receptiveness. In one notebook entry he goes so far as to say, 'The soul is the will properly speaking', and in another asks 'Whether Identity of Person consists not in the Will'.
Since Berkeley held without question that we could speak intelligibly about, and have knowledge of, minds, then, since minds are 'entirely distinct' from ideas, he naturally had to modify his simple empiricist's maxim that 'language and knowledge are all about ideas'. He does little more, however, than concede that the case of minds is an evident exception to that principle. Though we have no idea of the mind, he says, we have — from our own case — a 'notion' of it; but what it is to have a 'notion' of the mind he then elucidates no further than to insist that 'we understand the meaning of the word' — which, though doubtless true, is unilluminating.
There is one further point, however, on which Berkeley is clear and explicit. While insisting that the mind is 'entirely distinct' from its ideas, he insists no less that it is not distinct from its 'acts'. Just as the existence of an inanimate thing consists in, is, its being perceived — just as its being perceived and its existing are not to be distinguished — so the existence of 'mind, soul, or spirit' is its acting, and so its acting and its existing are not to be distinguished. Hence Berkeley boldly asserts in the Principles, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, that 'it is a plain consequence that the soul always thinks'. Since the very existence of 'the soul' is thinking, the very notion of a mind not thinking, not active, is self-contradictory.
Now this conclusion, as Berkeley was of course aware, appears to fly in the face of very obvious facts: for it at least seems to be a fact of common experience that, in the history of 'myself', there are intervals of complete unconsciousness in which the mind is inactive. Remarkably, of the possible ways of attempting to get round this difficulty Berkeley seems quite deliberately to choose the most extraordinary of all. In theory, he might have argued that, while my mind does not exist continuously through periods of complete unconsciousness, I do; it is, however, not realistic to suppose that Berkeley could have taken that line, since it requires a distinction between 'myself' and 'my mind' which (however wrongly) he would never have thought of making — like Descartes, he took it for granted that a person is, and is only, a mind or 'spirit', a 'thinking thing'. Again, he might have argued that, through periods of what is commonly called unconsciousness, the mind is really in some way active after all; but that line has a decidedly ad hoc, unempirical look about it, and Berkeley seems never to have found it tempting. What he held at one time, boldly embracing the paradox, was that persons actually do not exist continuously; since the mind is active only intermittently, 'men die or are in state of annihilation oft in a day'. But that too he rejects, and the doctrine he finally adopts is the very extraordinary one that there can be in a person's life no periods of unconsciousness, since the passage of time itself is nothing but the succession of his 'perceptions'; we cannot ask what the position is during the mind's unconsciousness, for if the mind is not active there is no duration. It is clear that, in this strange doctrine of 'private times', with its evident rejection of any public, objective time ordering, desperate paradoxes lurk, and one can only speculate how Berkeley might have tried to deal with them, or alternatively how he might have so modified his theory of the mind as to avoid them, if his projected second volume of the Principles had ever been completed.
(Published 1987)
See also Locke on the mind.
— Sir Geoffrey Warnock
