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An Englishman, John Dudley The philosophical doctrine of empiricism as propounded by John Locke (1632-1704) was a notable feature of the Enlightenment in eighteenth century Britain. It elicited many different responses. George Berkeley (1685-1753), an Irishman and Bishop of Cloyne, saw several weaknesses in the original doctrine. He sought to correct these weaknesses and proposed his own doctrine of immaterialism which became a focus of considerable interest among the educated classes of the time. This brief paper will be concerned with the approach of two men of the same name, ‘Samuel Johnson’, to Berkeley’s views. Despite the form of the title there may be some amusement in this paper but it is not intended as a joke! The Englishman was Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). You are all, I would assume, reasonably familiar with him. Lexicographer, essayist and critic, he was chiefly famous for his Dictionary of the English Language, The Lives of the Poets, his edition of Shakespeare’s works and the Rambler essays. Robust in conversation many people admired, and still admire, his ability to express his opinions. These opinions, couched in such illuminating terms and so deftly phrased, are frequently quoted to this day. His words have achieved the status of, at the very least, pithy aphorisms if not proverbs. Our American, also named Samuel Johnson, was born in Guilford, Connecticut 14 October 1696 and died in Stratford, Connecticut in 1772. He graduated at Yale in 1714 and became a tutor there when it moved to New Haven in 1716. He studied theology and became ordained in the Anglican Church (in England) and returned to Stratford. When George Berkeley arrived at Rhode Island, Johnson made his acquaintance and began a correspondence with him which lasted throughout Berkeley’s life. Johnson’s major work, A System of Morality (1746), was well received and was later enlarged in 1752 by Benjamin Franklin and published as Elementa Philosophica. This work became a standard textbook in many university and college courses. Such was Johnson’s reputation that he became President of King’s College New York – later to become Columbia University. He received honorary degrees from many prestigious institutions including Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Our American Samuel Johnson died in 1772 at Stratford, Connecticut. The Irishman, George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, was born in County Kilkenny near Thomastown on 12 March 1685. At fifteen he entered Trinity College, Dublin and became a Fellow in 1707. Whilst at Trinity he formed a society to study the effects of the new scientific discoveries of Newton and Boyle and the ‘New Philosophy’ of John Locke. This philosophy - known as empiricism – was expounded in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Berkeley’s treatment of some weaknesses in Locke’s position resulted in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). The ideas in this work were the subject of some correspondence between Berkeley and our American Samuel Johnson when Berkeley visited Rhode Island in 1728 in order to forward a project to found a missionary college in the Bermudas. The project failed and Berkeley returned to Ireland in 1732. In response to Locke’s Essay Berkeley developed the idea that knowledge of the world is limited to the knowledge of one’s own mental states. He came to this remarkable view because of the weaknesses that he noted in Locke’s working out of the thesis that the human mind is formed only from experience. He was also probably fired by a desire to defend basic Christian beliefs in God against new scientific discoveries of the likes of Boyle and Newton. If the new science was to be believed then human beings were little more than flesh and blood machines living on a world circling the sun in the manner of a clockwork model. There seemed to be little room for the spark of human spirit or the guiding hand of God. The laws of Isaac Newton seemed, to many Christians, to challenge the Laws of God. Berkeley’s ingenious solutions to the weaknesses of empiricism and his moves to place God at the centre of human experience must have been a source of constant discussion amongst the eighteenth century chattering classes. A famous incident, described in Boswell’s Life, illustrates the point. Boswell recounts an event that took place in 1763 as he was about to leave for the continent. Johnson had accompanied him to Harwich. They had been visiting a church. Boswell records it as follows:
I am certain that most people would agree with this demonstration of sturdy Anglo-Saxon commonsense. It also is imbued with the scientific spirit of the age. On this view the stone and the foot are physical entities. The reaction between them may be observed, measured and studied. In philosophical terms it shows a pragmatic caste of mind where the assumption is that we exist in a physical world and we take part in it. Johnson would not have had to read Berkeley’s works in order to make his criticism. It was the act of a commonsense man. He was, however, using a different set of assumptions from those of Berkeley. I shall attempt to unpack these assumptions later in a brief examination of empiricism. Just for the moment however, it is salutary to think that if Johnson had applied this same robust approach to other areas of his intellectual life he might not have been very comfortable with the results. For example the sort of pragmatism revealed in kicking the stone was kind to his views on scientific research but it would not have been so kind to his views on the Christian religion in general and God in particular. Berkeley did not see things in this pragmatic way. Within his own doctrine of empiricism he would have had no trouble in dealing with Johnson’s physical demonstration as we shall see later. In philosophy, which is a bit of a specialised closed shop, one must try to use terms according to precise definitions and try not to make unwarranted assumptions. Unfortunately this can cause one to become locked inside a certain set of ideas and lose sight of any weaknesses in them. Berkeley’s great ability as a philosopher enabled him to see the same difficulties with empiricism that Locke had tried to tackle. Berkeley regarded Locke’s solutions to these problems as unsatisfactory and proposed his own solution to, for example, the problem of ‘general ideas’ and the process of ‘abstraction’. His solution, sometimes called ‘immaterialism’, was ingenious but flawed. It certainly was not a Platonic solution. He did not propose the existence of any ideal ‘forms’ as implied by Boswell. Perhaps then we should outline briefly some of the central tenets of empiricism and then look at some points in Berkeley’s version of it. The remarkable thing about empiricism is that it starts from a few commonsense ideas, not to say assumptions, but when followed through in a rigorous way as Berkeley did, this same commonsense destroys itself. But let us start with the father of empiricism, John Locke. Here is how he characterises the core of his philosophy - after he has attacked the notion that there are any innate ideas in the mind (a central tenet of René Descartes):
He goes on to explain that our senses provide the raw data which our minds process:
Our minds then work on this raw data to bring about understanding.
So here we have it then. The entity we call a mind starts as a blank. Our mind is filled by the experiences provided by our senses. We refine these experiences by the operation of our minds, that is to say, by reflection on the data experienced through our senses. This is both a psychological theory about minds and also a theory about how we acquire knowledge (an epistemological theory). On this theory the mind takes in information about the world but is in touch with it only through the senses. This is the point to which Berkeley constantly returns and which causes him, eventually, to rule out the world of physical objects completely. As Berkeley developed his critique of Locke the model of the mind provided by empiricism seemed to cut the mind off from any direct contact with the physical world. Straight away, therefore, we can see an objection to Johnson’s refutation of Berkeley by kicking the stone. Remember, in a philosophical debate one must stick to the terms as they have been defined. On the empiricist model Johnson may well be kicking an object but the only evidence for this is the information provided by his senses. Remember, if we are to stick strictly to Locke’s basic position, as analysed by Berkeley, then Johnson was making an assumption on the basis of the visual and tactile information provided by his senses and interpreted by his mind – the raw data from the senses is processed as the mind reflects on it. (Berkeley would have said to Johnson something like, ‘Whence comes this idea of hardness? Is it in the stone or in the mind?’) If in Lichfield Guildhall we raise our eyes to the board showing the names of the past Mayors of the City of Lichfield, ask yourself this question, ‘Am I seeing a board or am I seeing an impression on my visual cortex?’ An extreme sceptic would say that you are simply ‘seeing’ the visual impressions on your retinas. This visual data has been reflected on by your mind. In this context Berkeley was a sceptic. According to him the commonsense answer to problems such as this was that we see ‘sense data’, or rather ideas in our minds. We do not actually ‘see’ physical objects. At very best we see impressions of them. This is probably why Boswell refers to Berkeley’s work as ‘sophistry’. It could be his way of implying that Berkeley’s position was well argued but deceitful. Berkeley however had noticed several weaknesses in Locke’s basic position. His treatment of general ideas was one of these. Locke says as follows about general terms:
The difficulty here described is the fact that one word is applied to many different objects. Given this, how do we apply these general words to our particular experiences? Locke explains that gradually we apply a process of abstraction by which we confine certain words to certain ideas. This process gives rise to abstract ideas: Now if a mind is that which is produced only by the impressions of the data input from the senses how does this process of abstraction measure up? Surely this process of abstraction is being provided by the mind and thus the general ideas which result from this process are not learned from experience as Locke had stated but must come from the mind itself. Thus Berkeley, while accepting Locke’s thinking on ideas, rejected his doctrine of abstract ideas. A brief reconsideration of some empiricist assumptions might be useful at this point in order to see where Berkeley went wrong. These assumptions miss the notion that, as later philosophers and psychologists have demonstrated, the mind is active, not passive. We are, for example, constantly reacting with our environment and classifying our experiences in the light of our previous experience. We know that our minds operate in an unconscious way to classify all the data they receive. They add, in other words, to the information received. Of course this is not allowed in a strict interpretation of Locke’s empiricism which only allows what is in the mind to come from experience. But, given the empiricist premises about the mind noted above, Berkeley followed them through with remarkable results. Naturally though these results were faulty because his assumptions were faulty. He did not allow that the mind added, as it were, anything to the basic sensory information. Abstraction, therefore, did not work on purely empiricist terms. Where for example, on empiricist principles, is the common quality of the idea ‘colour’ to be found in the observation of ‘red’ and ‘green’. Berkeley attacked this formulation. He said that talk about abstract ideas of colour, or for example, a ‘triangle’, is nonsense because it is not something that could appear before the mind. Only particular triangles appear before the mind. Does this make sense? Well, try the experiment of thinking of a triangle for yourself. Is it equilateral? Scalene? A right angle? Whatever you do you will be imagining a particular triangle. Now imagine another triangle. Is this the same or different? Even if you think it is the same it is in fact another one! Try again if you like. Can you pin down the pure general idea of a triangle unencumbered by any other quality? It’s not so easy. If a mind, as noted above, can only operate on sense data then from whence comes the general idea ‘triangle’? That the mind could already be furnished with such an idea was out of the question. If there are ideas which we cannot immediately perceive then some part of reality must be unperceivable. This is not allowed according to Berkeley. Abstraction thus destroys the basis of Locke’s empiricist assumptions of mental passivity where a mind is completely formed from experiences only. And this experience consists of the mind working neutrally on sense data to which it adds nothing. Berkeley’s answer to this problem and the problem of contact with the physical world was breathtakingly simple. If we are cut off from the physical world and we cannot know it directly then Berkeley’s move is as follows which he explains in his Principles of Human Knowledge: Similarly, Berkeley’s answer to the problem of general ideas also leads him to his argument for the existence of God. According to him all ideas are particular but these particular ideas are ‘associated’. This process of association of ideas cannot take place in the mind because this would mean that the mind would be adding to the experience. This was a difficulty for the basic tenets of empiricism, even to Berkeley’s empiricism, because the mind cannot be assumed to be adding something to the data. How does Berkeley deal with this problem? His answer is that this association is imposed upon us because some other mind thinks them. This mind is the mind of God. Berkeley argues that the world that we perceive is a world of ideas held in the mind of God. His only escape route was to make God responsible for the whole edifice of human experience. Sam Johnson of Lichfield as reported by Boswell and quoted above clearly gave this view short shrift. Nevertheless, on this occasion, the robust reply to Boswell indicates that Sam Johnson had not got to grips with Berkeley’s subtleties on Berkeley’s own terms. Our American Samuel Johnson, however, clearly had done so and he made more philosophical objections in his letters to Berkeley. In these letters he makes many telling points and questions Berkeley about some of his assumptions. In a letter of 1729 he indicates his astonishment at Berkeley’s ‘speculations’. He goes on, however, to make a number of cogent points, arguing that many of our ideas do seem to have a generality and that they seem to be causally related to each other. In Berkeley’s scheme of things of course, ideas are particular and related to each other through the will of God. Writing from Stratford, Connecticut on 10 September 1729, he says: Johnson also makes some interesting points about the assumption of God as the origin and mover of the whole system. For example he says that if a supreme being, i.e., God, is the ultimate force behind all natural phenomena then surely he should have been able to construct a self-regulating system that did not need his constant attention even in its minutest details. In another example American Johnson uses a variety of the principle known as ‘Ockham’s razor’ to make his point. This takes its name from the English philosopher, William of Ockham (1285-1347). To use Ockham’s razor one should choose the simplest explanation with the least amount of variables when attempting to explain phenomena. Our American Johnson does this in tackling Berkeley’s immaterialism. His approach is less robust but more subtle than his English counterpart. He does not kick anything but reflects on the scientific examination of the human eye: Well the robust answer to this is that no further argument is necessary. Apply Ockham’s razor. The simplest theory would be that these eyes are organs shaped for the perception of the physical world. Of course we would not expect Berkeley to reply in these terms. Broadly speaking Berkeley retreats to the same position the whole time which is that the world is, as it is, and is held before our minds by God and that the presence of matter makes no difference at all. Berkeley dealt with visual perception, eyes, lenses and optics in his An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709). However it seems to me to be his least satisfactory effort. At one point he refuses to accept that in seeing objects the images on our retinas are inverted and that we convert them, as it were, ‘in our minds’ to the vertical. His version of empiricist doctrine will not allow this as we see when he writes: According to Berkeley’s position here, it is impossible to see things as we do in a world of physical objects without a knowledge of optics. Today we assume that there are some unconscious mediating processes through which our raw sensory data is processed. We are aware that what we sense is subject to many subconscious mediating processes and that we still sense things whether we know about these processes or not. To Berkeley and Locke any such interpretation was not allowed because it meant that the mind was adding something not given in the original data. From a position like this Berkeley pushes the material world to one side and retreats to a world of ideas before the mind administered by God. Viewed from the privileged perspective of the twenty-first century, some of what our eighteenth-century forbears believed and argued about may seem strange if not comical. But their attempts to explain the world and humanity’s place in it provided the motive forces behind all later advances in knowledge. This period of history is often referred to as the Enlightenment. Rightly so, people in all walks of life were imbued with the confident spirit that rational study and explanation could conquer all. In this spirit new discoveries were made and, importantly, mistakes recognised. We should, therefore, thank George Berkeley for running so strongly with the baton of empiricism. He cleared the way for others to push beyond empiricist assumptions. It is salutary, however, to think that a version of empiricism was alive in the twentieth century and is alive yet. Two of our most famous philosophers Bertrand Russell and A J Ayer both considered that the best test for truth lies in testing mental constructs against the evidence of experience – an empiricist approach if ever there was one. George Berkeley and our two great Samuel Johnsons lived at a time when people of great ability could converse with each other on equal terms in a whole range of different disciplines. As we have seen the great lexicographer and the learned theologian had the ability, the spirit and the license to dispute the great philosopher’s assertions. Here in England Sam Johnson altered the foundations of lexicography and literary criticism. In America Samuel Johnson presided over an institution which was to become one of the premier seats of learning in the whole continent. A great triumvirate, and certainly no joke!
1 Everybody’s Boswell, London 1930, p. 99. 2 J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), ed. A. D. Woozley, Glasgow, 1964, pp. 89-90. 3 Ibid, p. 263. 4 Ibid, p. 267. 5 A. D. Lindsay, ed. A NewTheory of Vision and other Select Philosophical Writings by George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, London, n.d., pp. 121-22. 6 S. Johnson, Letter (Sept 10, 1729), in G. Berkeley, Philosophical Works including Works on Vision, ed. M. R. Ayers , London, 1975, paperback in Everyman Classics, 1980, p. 339. 7 Ibid, p. 340. 8 Ibid, p. 340. 9 Ibid, p. 341. 10 A. D. Lindsay, ed., op. cit., p. 55.
Lars Sonesson
In a letter dated 24 December 1757, Johnson wrote to Dr Burney: . . . I remember with great pleasure your commendation of my Dictionary . . . Yours is the only letter of goodwill that I have yet received, though indeed I am promised something of that sort from Sweden . . . So far, it has remained a mystery as to who this Swede could be. My theory is that it could be the Reverend Dean Jacob Serenius (1700-1776). He was for many years chaplain of the Swedish congregation in London and was author of Dictionarium anglo-svetico-latinum. On March 5th, 1757, he wrote from Sweden to the London publisher Edward Lye, who was connected with Johnson’s circle: In a footnote commenting on the letter to Dr Burney, Bruce Redford thinks the ‘learned Swede’ may have been Daniel Juslenius (1676-1752), who presented Johnson with a copy of his Finnish dictionary, Fennici Lexici Tentamen (Stockholm, 1745), but Juslenius died three years before Johnson’s Dictionary appeared. Jacob Serenius began his career as chaplain to the Swedish embassy in London, and he was very active in the establishment of the Swedish congregation and church there. He returned to Sweden in 1735, and was eventually nominated bishop of Strängnäs. During his stay in England and afterwards he had close relations with the English establishment and was a keen promoter of cultural relations between the two countries. His Swedish-English Dictionary, begun in London, was first published in 1734. A revised edition appeared in 1757, with a foreword praising Johnson’s Dictionary and adding some interesting new headwords which can be traced back to Johnson. This influence can only be seen in the latter part of Serenius’ dictionary, suggesting that he must have begun the revision before getting hold of Johnson’s work. |
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The Johnson Society, The Birthplace Museum, Breadmarket
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