III

SUBSTANCE AND REALITY

11. Substance

BERKELEY attacked Locke’s doctrine of material substance, as everyone knows. But Locke had no doctrine of material substance: he was the victim of exegetical and philosophical mistakes initiated by Berkeley and inherited by many later writers. Locke did discuss the concept of substance, and he had a theory of reality. These two bits of work contributed to the hybrid which Berkeley called his theory of ‘material substance’; and in this chapter I shall expound them, stressing the issues raised by Berkeley’s mistake. In Chapter IV I shall consider the third ingredient in the doctrine of ‘material substance’, namely Locke’s theory about primary and secondary qualities. Only then will it be possible, in Chapters V and VI, to focus on the work of Berkeley’s which most interests us today, namely his dislodgement of Locke’s theory of reality.

First, then, the concept of substance. Locke entertained -- I would not say adopted -- a certain line of thought about substance, which runs as follows. [1]

What concepts are involved in the subject of the statement that The pen in my hand is valuable? Certainly, the concepts of being a pen and of being in my hand; but these are not all, for the statement is about a thing which falls under these two concepts. What thing is this? It is the purple thing which I now see; but when I say that the purple thing I now see is a pen and is in my hand, I speak of a thing which is purple etc., and so I have still failed to capture the whole concept of the subject in my original statement. Any further expansion along these lines can only be a delaying action, for it must omit an essential element from the concept of the pen in my hand. What will be missing from any list of descriptive concepts is the concept of a ‘thing which. . .‘: this is an ingredient in the concept of a ‘thing which is F’ for each value of F, and so it cannot be identical with the concept of a ‘thing which is F’ for any value of F. This constituent of every subject-concept is

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the concept of a property-bearer, or of a possible subject of predication -- let us call it the concept of a substance. So, if any existential or subject-predicate statement is true, then there are two sorts of item -- substances, and properties or qualities. The former have the privilege of bearing or supporting the latter without themselves being in the same way borne by anything. We imply the existence of ‘substances’ in this sense every time we imply that some property is instantiated.

Note the stress on ‘general’: Locke is describing the entirely general concept of a thing which… . According to a certain theory, our concepts of particular substances or specific kinds of substance include this concept of substance-in-general; but one may speak of gold as a kind of substance, or complain of the sticky substance on the kitchen floor, without being committed to this theory about the analysis of what one is saying. In Locke’s words:

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Besides showing how ‘substance in general’ relates to ‘particular sorts of substances’, that passage shows Locke’s ambivalent attitude to the former. He says we have ‘no other idea’ of gold etc. than one composed wholly of certain ‘simple ideas’, and then proceeds to ‘take notice’ that there is after all a further ingredient in our ideas of gold etc. This wavering reflects his lack of enthusiasm for ‘the idea of substance in general’. Sometimes he abuses it in the act of giving it primacy:

Elsewhere he just abuses it:

I think that Locke’s treatment of ‘substance in general’ was mainly sceptical in content and ironical in form. This is not true of the Stillingfleet correspondence, but is Locke likely to have been less clear and candid in his magnum opus than in his letters to a touchy and not very intelligent bishop? I shall not defend this minority opinion at length, however, and am content to call the substratum analysis of the concept of substance ‘Lockean’, meaning, at least, that Locke said a good deal about it. I want to consider the analysis itself, starting from R. I. Aaron’s discussion of it.

Aaron credits Locke with the view that we have no experience of substance-in-general, and therefore no idea of substance-in-general. [6] Thus far, I agree with him: but two aspects of the following require comment:

Locke certainly ‘bantered the idea of substance’, to use Berkeley’s phrase. He showed that the traditional view could not stand examination. He did not deny the being of substance, and he did not deny the

 

    [4] Essay II. xii. 6.

    [5] Essay II. xiii. 19-20.

    [6] R. I. Aaron, John Locke (Oxford, 1955) pp. 174-5.

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need of a support to qualities. But he denied that we have knowledge of this substance. Experience itself suggests its existence, but it does not reveal its nature. It is hidden from us and will remain hidden from us, until we gain faculties, which we do not now possess, whereby the inner nature of the being of things will be revealed. [7]

First, a general point. Someone who says ‘We have no idea of substratum-substance’, meaning that the expression ‘substratum substance’ has no meaning for us, cannot properly go on to say " ... but still there may be substratum-substances’ or to say " ... and I don’t think there are any substratum-substances’. If an expression is meaningless then we may not use it, however humbly, agnostically, or subjunctively. Perhaps Locke did take the position Aaron describes, but its incoherence should be pointed out.

It could arise, incidentally, from a mistake of which Locke is sometimes guilty, [8] namely that of making a point about meaning, expressing it in terms of ‘ideas’, and then treating it as only a point about knowledge. Such a sentence as ‘We have no ideas of substratum-substance’ has an ambiguity generated by the double use of ‘idea’ discussed in §4 above.

Secondly, there is something wrong with: ‘Experience. . . does not reveal [substance’s] nature. It . . . will remain hidden from us until we gain faculties . . . etc.’ The Lockean analysis implies that nothing could count as experience of substratum-substance, but there is also a deeper objection, namely that Lockean substratum-substance cannot have a ‘nature’ at all. [9] Locke himself speaks of ‘the secret abstract nature of substance in general’, [10] but on this point Leibniz saw more clearly:

Leibniz’s insight can be generalized into the following argument, which exposes the vital defect in the substratum theory. Is there a property S-ness which defines substantiality -- a value of S

 

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such that x is a substance if and only if Sx? (a) If a proponent of the Lockean theory says ‘Yes’, then his account of what it is for a property to be instantiated, viz, that P is instantiated if and only if some substance bears P, says merely that P is instantiated if and only if some item is both S and P. His analysis of a statement about the instantiation of one property thus yields, uselessly, a statement about the joint instantiation of two properties. (b) So he must say ‘No’. That is, he must deny that substances are items of a certain kind: to be of a kind is to have the properties which define the kind, and there cannot be properties which items must have in order to qualify as substances. But the claim that substances are items of a certain kind is the Lockean theory of property-instantiation. The theory’s whole point and interest lies in its claim that every subject-concept includes the concept of a kind of item whose special right and duty it is to bear properties.

The theory’s crucial error is the move from ‘There is a concept of a thing which. . ., which enters into every subject-concept’ to ‘There is a kind of item about which nothing can be said except that such items bear properties’. There are many kinds of things, but things do not constitute a kind. There is, perhaps, a ‘concept of a subject in general’; but it is to be elucidated in terms of the ways in which more special concepts function in certain kinds of statements, and is not to be regarded as a concept which picks out a class of items.

 

12. Reality

Locke’s theory of reality is a view about the nature of the distinction between the subjective and objective, inner and outer, appearance and reality; the distinction between there being sensory evidence for something’s being the case, and its really being the case.

The words ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ do not, as they stand, mark the distinction I want. In the statement ‘John appeared to be ill -- he was white-faced and trembling’, John’s pallor and tremors are represented as appearances of the reality which is his illness; but colour, movement, etc., are objective, inter-personal facts which Locke and I want to put on the ‘reality’ side of the appearance/reality distinction. Any statement at all may provide evidence

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for something’s being the case, and in that sense may report what ‘appears’ to be the case; but I use ‘appearance’/’reality’ to refer to the distinction which has facts about sensory states on one side of it and everything else on the other.

This terminological choice does not matter in itself, but the reason for it does. I attend to what I call ‘the distinction between appearance and reality’, and I choose that label for it, because I share with Locke and Berkeley and Hume the belief that one's evidence for what is objectively the case consists in or rests ultimately upon facts about one’s own sensory states. For example, even if I offer ‘John was white-faced and trembling’ in explanation of my saying ‘John appeared to be ill’, the former statement will in its turn rest upon something in the realm of ‘appearance’ in my specialized sense -- e.g. it will rest upon the evidence of my eyes. The evidence of someone else’s eyes might be relevant, of course; but only if he tells me what he saw, so that my belief about John’s condition rests partly upon the evidence of my ears. For this reason, the ‘distinction between appearance and reality’ (in my sense) goes deeper than the sliding, vernacular distinction involved in such statements as ‘He appeared to be ill -- he was white-faced and trembling’.

The distinction to which I am calling attention is one which we do often enough employ. It is involved in much of our knowledge that things which appear to be thus are really so: I have been working with royal blue so that the eggshell-blue wall now looks green to me; the circular saw sounded like a child screaming; a drunken fight looked like a street-accident; they were mussels, but they smelled like squid. When a question of this kind arises, we can check whether what appears to be so is really so. I may compare the wall with the sample labelled ‘eggshell blue’, or ask my wife whether the things in the tin look to her like mussels. These checks introduce further sensory evidence, the reliability of which may in its turn be supported by further checks. But although we can check anything, we cannot check everything. To assess any item of sensory evidence, it seems, we must simply accept some other such item.

Consider now the question ‘Is anything in the objective realm really in any way as it appears to be ?‘ -- which turns into the question ‘Is there really an objective realm at all?’ We cannot tackle this question, all in a lump, by any of the methods we

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ordinarily use to check on the evidence of our senses; for those methods involve assessing some bits of sensory evidence by trusting others, whereas our present question forbids us to trust our senses at all until after the question has been answered. The conjecture ‘Perhaps there is no objective realm’ is not a mere expansion of ‘Perhaps the wall is not really green’, any more than ‘Teach me how to apply classificatory words’ is a mere expansion of ‘Teach me how to apply the word "neurotic" ’.

So someone who conjectures that perhaps there is really no objective world ‘out there’ is either misusing the ordinary distinction between what is really the case and what (going by what we see, feel, etc.) appears to be the case, or else he is employing some unordinary distinction which could be expressed in the same words. In the latter case, of course, he owes us an explanation of what unordinary distinction he has in mind.

Locke addresses himself to such conjectures several times, and always fumbles them. [12] He does not criticize the question ‘Is anything really as it appears to be ?‘ -- or, in his words, ‘How shall the mind, when it perceives nothing but its own ideas, know that they agree with things themselves ?"‘ -- on the grounds that it precludes any use of the ordinary appearance/reality distinction without introducing and explaining an unordinary alternative to it. Rather, he seeks to answer the question just as it stands:

But the questioner, once started, will rightly refuse to be fobbed off with this; for he is asking, among other things, whether we do ever really look on the sun or taste wormwood. He will say: ‘The mere fact that what is commonly called ‘‘imagining the sun" differs markedly from what is commonly called "seeing the sun

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does not imply that the latter kind of experience really is, at least sometimes, a seeing of a real sun.’ In giving him that reply, I am not guessing as to his probable character, but merely following out the logic of his original question. The same point arises when Locke says:

Again, why? What reason can Locke give, without begging the question at issue, for saying that if there were no ‘things affecting us from abroad’ any given kind of ‘idea’ would be either always or never accompanied by pain?

Some of his arguments explicitly beg the question: ‘It is plain those perceptions are produced in us by exterior causes affecting our senses: because those that want the organs of any sense, never can have the ideas belonging to that sense produced in their minds.' [16] This argument for the conclusion that ‘our senses... do not err in the information they give us of the existence of things without us' [17] has a premiss about senseorgans, including those of other people. But sense-organs are among the ‘things without us’ whose reality is in question.

Locke has another argument whose premiss was also the cornerstone of Berkeley’s metaphysics and theology:

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There is indeed this ‘manifest difference’, but why ‘needs must’ it be explained in that way? Locke cannot reply without begging the original question.

What is wrong with the question is, precisely, that nothing could count as a legitimate argument for an affirmative answer to it.

Locke’s trouble is not that he is too patient with the question, but that he is impatient with it in the wrong way and for wrong reasons. He says (emphases mine) that we have ‘the greatest assurance we are capable of concerning the existence of material beings’, that ‘God has given me assurance enough of the existence of things without me’, and, combining both points, that ‘The certainty of things existing in rerum natura when we have the testimony of our senses for it is not only as great as our frame can attain to, but as our condition needs’. [19] All this suggests that there is room left for residual doubt, and if that is conceded then everything is conceded.

Also, Locke thinks it relevant to criticize the questioner’s character. [20] He says: ‘I think nobody can, in earnest, be so sceptical... .‘, and speaks of the sceptic’s desire ‘to surmount every the least (I will not say reason, but) pretence of doubting’. He snaps that it is ‘foolish and vain. . . to expect demonstration [= rigorous proof] and certainty in things not capable of it’. And he makes the debating point that the sceptic ‘will never have any controversy with me; since he can never be sure I say anything contrary to his own opinion’. Locke’s tormentor, however, can evade this onslaught by a ‘retreat’ which yields no ground at all. For he can say: ‘I agree that I neither need nor could be entitled to have greater assurance than I do have as to the reality of things outside me. All I want to know is what entitles me to this great assurance which I have.’ This raises the old embarrassing question, and Locke’s replies are fatally flawed -- not by falling short of ‘demonstration’ but by having no force at all except on assumptions which include the whole conclusion.

Empirical arguments, just because they must make assumptions about the objective or ‘real’ in Locke’s sense, must move from limited premisses about sensory states to limited conclusions about the objective realm. Any such argument turns on the fulcrum of an unquestioned acceptance of the existence of an objective world about which we know a good deal. If we stand back and try to

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focus on the relation between sensory states as a whole and the objective realm as a whole, asking en bloc whether the former are ever reliable guides to the latter, empirical arguments cannot get a grip; and the ‘cannot ‘is a logical one.

That is our clue. There is a connexion between ‘sensory states as a whole’ and ‘the objective realm as a whole’, or between the concepts of appearance and reality, of such a kind that the question ‘Is appearance ever a reliable guide to reality?’ should be answered ‘Yes’ on logical grounds. (Or of such a kind that the question is logically improper -- depending on how the questioner takes it. Analogously, if someone asked ‘Are facts about actual plumbers ever a guide to facts about the average plumber?’ we might answer ‘Yes’ on logical grounds; but if the questioner expected us to base our answer on facts about actual or average plumbers, or to be embarrassed because we couldn’t, we might say that his question involved a logical mistake.) Using a familiar short-hand which will later be explained and defended: reality is a logical construction out of appearances.

This will be called phenomenalism, and so indeed it is. Though disinclined to apologize, I wish at this stage to be placatory. All I need now is agreement, which may be given even by those who have been swayed by the anti-phenomenalist literature, that Locke did mis-handle the general question ‘Is appearance a reliable guide to reality?’ and its immediate offspring ‘Is there really an objective realm?’; [21] that he went wrong not in detail but in principle; and that the following are important parts, causes or symptoms of his mistake. (a) He tended to view the general sceptical question as just the sum of all limited sceptical questions. (b) He thought that the question needed to be answered rather than criticized. (c) He did not think it relevant to inquire into the meanings of such expressions as ‘real things without us’. (d) He thought that empirical arguments could support an affirmative answer to the general sceptical question.

Agreement on those points will suffice for the purposes of the rest of this chapter and the next.

13. The ‘veil-of-perception’ doctrine

Locke represents the difference between (a) seeing a tree and (b) being in a visual state as of seeing a tree though there is no

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tree there to be seen, as the difference between (a) having a visual ‘idea’ while in the presence of a corresponding ‘real thing’ and (b) having such an ‘idea’ while not confronted by any such ‘real thing’. This is harmless in itself. It becomes noxious only if ‘real things’ are logically divorced from ‘ideas’, so that an empirical basis is sought for a rebuttal of total scepticism about the objective realm. I speak of Locke’s ‘theory of reality’, referring mainly to his fumbling of the issues associated with the general sceptical question; and so the word ‘theory’ is just a convenient misnomer. Berkeley has popularized the opinion that Locke’s thought on these issues had the weight and deliberateness ordinarily associated with a ‘theory’ or ‘doctrine’, but the opinion is false.

Locke puts the objective world, the world of ‘real things’, beyond our reach on the other side of the veil of perception; so I call this aspect of his thought his ‘veil-of-perception doctrine’. The more usual label, ‘representative theory of perception’, is unsatisfactory because it does not express what is wrong with the theory. There is nothing wrong with saying that when I see a tree my visual field ‘represents’ a real thing with which I am confronted. Nor is it objectionable to say that I see the tree by the mediation of my ideas or visual sense-data, if this means that without the sense-data I should not see the tree, or that my having those sense-data is part but not the whole of my seeing of the tree. ‘But isn’t it objectionable if it means that your seeing of the tree is only indirect?’ I do not know, because I cannot find clear meaning in the uses philosophers of perception make of ‘direct’ and its cognates.

Locke often speaks of a ‘correspondence’, ‘agreement’ or ‘conformity’ between my visual field and the tree, suggesting that the two resemble one another. This is indeed objectionable (see §5 above), but it is independent of the essential error in Locke’s theory of reality, [22] namely his setting the entire range of facts about sensory states over against the entire range of facts about the objective realm and then looking for empirical links between them. The blanket question ‘Do sensory states ever represent the objective realm?’ is indeed a bad one -- not because of what ‘represent’ means, but just because the question is a blanket one. The phrase ‘representative theory of perception’ does not capture this fact.

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Perhaps Locke also has a causal theory of perception. He does say that when I see a tree there is a real thing causing me to have a certain visual ‘idea’. But this too is in itself harmless, for there may in any given case be such a causal connexion as Locke postulates. To know that there was, however, we should need independent access to empirical facts about the objective realm, and so the reference to causal connexions ought not to take the blanket form: ‘The fundamental relation between the whole range of subjective facts and the whole range of objective facts is a causal one.’ I have elaborated this point elsewhere. [23]

In short, whether we say that ideas represent or are caused by real things, there is serious error only if the thesis is expressed in an all-at-once way, purporting to relate sensory states en bloc to objective states of affairs en bloc. The fact that Locke erred in that way is expressed, fairly satisfactorily, by calling his position ‘the veil-of-perception doctrine.

 

14. The two doctrines in Berkeley

The Lockean theory of substance (§11) is utterly distinct from the veil-of-perception doctrine which I have excogitated from Locke’s handling of scepticism (§§12-13). The former tries to say what concepts we use when we say Something is F, while the latter has to do with the difference between I see a tree and It is as though I were seeing a tree. Although these two concerns are as different as chalk from cheese, the Lockean treatments of them have been confidently identified by Berkeley and many others.

Sometimes Berkeley does isolate one or other of the doctrines. He discusses the substratum theory, without introducing the veil-of-perception doctrine, in just two passages of which this is one:

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Elsewhere, much of the case against the veil-of-perception doctrine can be found unmixed with polemic against substrata. [25]

Nearly always, though, Berkeley welds the two doctrines together to form a single view about ‘material substance’. He uses the word ‘matter’ and its cognates to refer to Locke’s purported ‘real things’ which lie beyond the veil of perception. (He also, with more warrant from Locke’s text, associates ‘matter’ with Locke’s views about primary qualities; but that must wait until Chapter IV.) His use of the word ‘substance’, on the other hand, connects with Locke only in respect of the substratum theory about what it is for a property to be instantiated: the other contexts where Locke uses it lie outside Berkeley’s purview. The phrase ‘material substance’, then, which Berkeley uses so lavishly and which hardly occurs in Locke, gives any discussion of one of the doctrines a good chance of becoming entangled with a discussion of the other.

Sometimes the mixture is fairly innocent. For example, one of Berkeley’s attacks on the substratum theory, although ostensibly concerned with ‘matter’, is not seriously infected by anything which is appropriate to the veil-of-perception doctrine rather than the substance doctrine. [26]

Often, though, the mixture is lethal: ‘It is said extension is a mode or accident of matter, and that matter is the substratum that supports it. Now I desire that you would explain what is meant by matter’s supporting extension.’ [27] Berkeley wants to make a point about substratum-substance. Not only does he distractingly call it ‘matter’, but he also drags ‘extension’ into the limelight. In Locke, ‘extension’ has much to do with primary qualities and a little to do with the real things beyond the veil of perception, but it has no special role in the substratum theory. Locke clearly regarded the latter as equally relevant or irrelevant to every sort of item -- whether creaturely or divine, extended or unextended -- that can instantiate or ‘support’ a quality. [28]

Here is Berkeley’s next attempt to locate the target:

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This fairly enough reports the Lockean theory not of ‘material substance’ but of ‘substance’. The adjective is important, for Berkeley adds that he does not understand the proffered account of the ‘meaning annexed to those sounds’, and continues:

Then, with the phrase ‘existence without the mind’ as his pivot, he modulates into an attack on the veil-of-perception doctrine! A complaint against a wrong analysis of subject-concepts is thus jumbled with a complaint against Locke’s insufficiently idealist analysis of the concept of reality.

Some of Berkeley’s turns of phrase could, without much strain, be construed in either way:

This might mean ‘Of course there are things with properties, but in saying this we do not employ a concept of naked thinghood’; or it might mean ‘Of course there are real objects, but that statement can be analysed purely in terms of mental states’. There is no basis for preferring either reading: ‘support’ tends one way, but then ‘without the mind’ tends the other way.

Here are just two more examples:

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There are many other examples of Berkeley’s conflating or identifying the two doctrines. Some of the clearest cases also introduce Locke’s view about primary qualities, and will be quoted later.

This calamitous mistake of Berkeley’s can be explained. His philosophy put intellectual and linguistic pressures on him to make it -- pressures transmitted almost wholly by his use of the word ‘idea’. I shall try to explain how.

In §4 above I noted Locke’s preparedness to use ‘idea of x’ to mean ‘quality of x by virtue of which x causes an idea in a percipient’, and I suggested that his contentment with this curious ellipsis might be partially explained thus: ‘Ideas (= sense-data) give us all our data about the qualities of things, and so what we have to say about things’ qualities might as well be expressed in terms of the ideas which things cause in us.’ Now, Berkeley’s alternative to the veil-of-perception doctrine is a strong form of idealism: the real things in the objective realm are just collections of sensory states -- the sensory states which, for Locke, are just symptoms and effects of the presence of real things. So Berkeley could replace the line of thought which explains Locke’s ideal quality ellipsis by something like this: ‘Real things are sets of ideas (= sense-data), and so statements about the qualities of things are statements about ideas.’ Thus, for Berkeley the use of ‘idea’ to mean ‘quality of a thing’ is simply, literally correct: ‘Qualities, as hath been shewn, are nothing else but sensations or ideas, which exist only in a mind perceiving them.’ [34] And 'the identification of qualities with ideas is also highlighted by this statement of Berkeley’s idealist rival to the veil-of-perception doctrine:

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(I suggested in §4 that Locke’s ellipsis was also encouraged by the role of ‘ideas’ as meanings. This could apply to Berkeley too, perhaps, but there is no need of it: the above account of why Berkeley identifies ideas with qualities, involving only ideas considered as sense-data, is quite sufficient. My earlier published attempt to involve both the primary roles of ‘idea’ in a single explanation is, as I indicated in §4 above, an embarrassing muddle.)

Given this fact about Berkeley’s use of ‘idea’, it is natural that he should conflate the two Lockean doctrines; for each purports to offer an anchor for free-floating ‘ideas’ -- one tying sensory states to objects, the other tying qualities to substrata -- and of each doctrine Berkeley can say that it over-populates the world by postulating something unknowable when known ‘ideas’ would suffice. The rather Berkeleian sentence ‘Things are just collections of ideas, not something over and above them’ can be interpreted, taking ideas to be sensory states, as denying the veil-of-perception doctrine; or, taking ideas to be qualities, as denying the substratum theory.

I am not saying that Berkeley, given his idealism and his resultant identification of ideas with qualities, was entitled to identify the two Lockean doctrines. He should have seen that he was confronted by what looked like two doctrines, and then perhaps argued from idealism to the conclusion that the pair were really just two versions of a single thesis. No such argument occurs in Berkeley’s pages. So far from saying ‘That looks like a gap, but I shall use idealism to show that it isn’t’, Berkeley did not even see that there might be thought to be a gap, and ran the two doctrines together even in his arguments for idealism.

 

15. The two doctrines in Locke

The Lockean theories of substance and reality are distinct in fact, but are they also distinct in Locke? One might expect not, given Locke’s tendency to use ‘idea’ to mean ‘quality’. Lacking Berkeley’s reason for treating this as more than a mere ellipsis, he nevertheless has the other reason mentioned in ~ 4 above: the set of qualities a thing must have for W to apply to it uniquely determines the meaning of W, and thus the ideas associated with W; but ideas are indisputably sense-data as well; and so ‘idea of x’

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can univocally mean both ‘quality of x’ and ‘appearance of x’. With this conclusion flowering from roots which run fairly deep in his thought, Locke might well have identified the substratum and veil-of-perception doctrines.

Yet my citations on substance in §11 above contain not a word about ‘real things’ or ‘things without us’; nor, in all the anti-sceptical polemic quoted in §12, does ‘substance’ occur even once. This is not because of bias in my selection of passages to quote; no bias was needed. In the relevant parts of the Essay, Locke simply does not make the wrong identification which subsequently loomed so large in Berkeley’s exegesis of him. (Berkeley notwithstanding, these parts are not extensive. Locke says little about ‘the idea of substance in general’, I think because he regards it as embarrassing and trivial; and little about ‘real things’, perhaps because he does not see the depth of his problem about them.)

‘Locke simply does not make... ‘ -- or rather he complicatedly does not make the identification. Without intending to identify the substratum and veil-of-perception doctrines, Locke cannot help expounding the former, and some of its relatives, in ways appropriate to the latter. The two drift towards one another of their own accord, drawn by forces inherent in Locke’s basic assumptions and choice of language. In this section I present some examples.

First, Locke’s substance/mode polarity needs to be explained:

I think that modes are just (ideas of) properties or qualities, and that Locke’s peculiar choice of examples is to be explained by his distaste for overtly universalist language. [37] The geometrical study of ‘triangles’ is really a study of triangularity; yet a sturdy anti-universalist, who will not want ‘triangularity’ in his inventory of the world’s contents, may feel that he can safely include ‘triangles (of the sort studied in geometry)’. Again, although he regards redness and validity and manhood as parts of the universalist mythology, he may feel safe in admitting such apparently

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down-to-earth, unabstract, observable items as gratitude and murder. In short, modes are properties or qualities or universals; and Locke, wanting to allow such items while still maintaining that ‘All things that exist are only particulars’, has to select examples of modes which do not give the game away by their verbal form -- e.g. has to select ‘incest’ rather than ‘incestuousness’.

The other side of the polarity is presented thus:

Something ‘subsists by itself’ if it is a thing and not a quality, not an ‘affection’ of something else, not logically dependent on anything else as a mode is on a substance, e.g. as a murder is on a murderer.

The substance/mode distinction, then, draws the line between particulars and properties. It is a purely logical distinction, whose left-hand side is not restricted to particulars of some special kind, e.g. to ‘material substances’ or to ‘real things without me’. So the substratum theory, which offers an analysis of the distinction, is a piece of wholly general philosophical logic: it implies something about what there is, but not specially about what there is in the objective realm or the world ‘without me’. As even Berkeley sometimes sees, [39] the analysis purports to deal with ‘I am unhappy’ as well as with ‘That is square’. That Locke credits the substratum theory with this degree of generality is shown by his way of introducing the substance/mode distinction; and there is other evidence too. For example, when he suggests that the belief in substrata arose from the quasi-reifying of qualities or ‘accidents’: ‘They who first ran into the notion of accidents, as a sort of real beings that needed something to inhere in, were forced to find out the word substance to support them’, [40] there is no hint that substances are confined to ‘real things without us’. In the preceding section he teasingly asks the substratum theorists whether God and finite minds and bodies are all ‘substances ‘in the same sense; which presupposes that the substratum theory is intended to have full generality. [41]

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So much for the apartness of the substance and reality doctrines in the Essay. I now turn to the other half of the story.

(1) When Locke explains ‘substances’ as things ‘subsisting by themselves’, the self-subsistence in question is clearly meant to be logical; but the phrase could mean ‘existing independently of any percipient’, and so could link the substance doctrine with the theory of reality -- ’Are there substances, i.e. things subsisting by themselves, i.e. real things without us?’ A shift of this kind does occur in Locke’s writings. He maintains that in constructing complex ideas of modes we are subject only to the laws of logic: ‘There is nothing more required to this kind of ideas to make them real, but that they be so framed, that there be a possibility of existing conformable to them’, [42] whereas our ideas of substance are subject to a more stringent requirement:

If these passages are stipulatively defining ‘real’ as applied to ideas, then what they say cannot be false. But if, as seems likely, Locke thinks that an idea (or the expression which ‘signifies’ it) is legitimate only if the idea is ‘real’, then what he says about the ‘reality’ of ideas of substances is surely wrong. If ‘gratitude’ is all right in a world where no-one is ever grateful, why may we not have ‘horse’ in a world devoid of horses? All that, though, is by the way. My main point is that in making this mistake Locke explicitly connects ‘ideas of substances’ with ‘things without us’, which threatens to infect the substratum theory with the veil-of-perception doctrine. But he does not carry out the threat: in this passage, where ideas of substances are so overtly connected with ‘things without us’, there is no mention of the supposed idea of substance.

(2) Some of Locke’s versions of the substratum doctrine have a feature which quietly nudges it over towards the appearance/ reality area. The general theory of substratum-substance, I have maintained, is addressed to the question ‘What is it for a quality to be instantiated by a particular?’ Locke, however, says that ‘we

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accustom ourselves to suppose some substratum’ as a support for a certain number of simple ideas [which] go constantly together’; [44] and this seems to narrow the doctrine’s scope (a) to the species of cases where several qualities are jointly instantiated by one particular, and (b) to the sub-species where the qualities in question ‘go constantly together’. (a) does not matter, for Locke could argue that since we have no room for the notion of a thing with only one quality, the question of a quality’s being ‘had’ by something does not arise unless other qualities are also ‘had’ by that same thing. But (b) is puzzling: why does Locke confine himself to cases where the qualities all ‘go constantly together’, and what does he mean by that anyway?

I have, of course, been construing ‘idea’ to mean ‘quality’, for only thus does the passage under discussion bear on the substance doctrine at all. Our puzzle about ‘ideas which go constantly together’, however, is solved if we take these ‘ideas’ to be not qualities but sensory states. For then the puzzling phrase refers to cases where one’s sensory history manifests certain kinds of pattern or order–the kinds, in fact, which are our basis for thinking that there are ‘things without us’. So instead of expressing a queerly restricted version of the substratum doctrine, the passage on this reading of it gestures towards the province of the veil-of-perception doctrine.

Locke makes nothing of this opportunity for error. Indeed, a mere four sections later he uses arguments which, in effect, positively insist that the whole point of the substratum theory is its being applied to particulars of every kind and not just ‘real things without us’. Still, it is worth noting that a basis for linking ‘substance’ with ‘real thing’ is laid down in the connexion of the former with ‘ideas which go constantly together’.

(3) The passage in which that phrase occurs, like some others in the Essay, contains something else which drags the substratum doctrine off towards the veil-of-perception doctrine. When we notice several ideas which ‘go constantly together’, Locke says, ‘not imagining how these simple ideas can subsist by themselves, we accustom ourselves to suppose some substratum wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result, which therefore we call substance’.45 If this concerns the substratum doctrine at all, the ‘ideas’ in question must again be qualities; but in that case

 

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Locke is saying that substances are supposed to cause their qualities; and one wonders why he should think that anyone has ever supposed this. This puzzle too is removed when we recall that ‘ideas’ can also be sensory states; for then the clause ‘from which [ideas] do result’ echoes the causal aspect of Locke’s theory of reality.

Still Locke does not cash in on the unhappy verbal overlap between the two doctrines. On the contrary, he proceeds immediately to drag ‘idea’ apart from ‘quality’, and thus to cleanse the substance doctrine from any causal element by saying that substrata support qualities and that qualities cause ideas:

Observe that Locke is no more explicit or deliberate in separating the two doctrines, and the two relevant senses of ‘idea’, than he is in running them together. He sometimes nearly commits Berkeley’s outright identification of them, and sometimes implicitly resists it; but at no stage does he seem to be aware of what is going on.

16. The two doctrines in the 20th century

So much for Berkeley and Locke; but what of those philosophers who, unaided by the conviction that ‘Qualities are nothing else but sensations or ideas’, have nevertheless collapsed the substratum theory into the veil-of-perception doctrine?

I cannot fully explain why Berkeley’s problems are so often taken at his own valuation; but the following hypothesis may have some force. Someone might follow in Berkeley’s footsteps by illustrating the distinction between appearance and reality by the question ‘It seems to me that I see something square, but is there really something square which I see ?‘, and equating this with ‘I am in the presence of an instance, in my visual field, of squareness; but am I in the presence of something which is square?’ A question about appearance and reality would thus be quietly transmuted into a question about property-instantiation. And someone who noticed that each question could wrongly

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though plausibly be analysed in terms of an elusive ‘something we know not what’, might be further encouraged to view them as two versions of a single question to which Locke gave a single wrong analysis.

The train of thought I have sketched is invalid, for the question ‘Given that I seem to see something square, is there really something square that I see?’ is not about the instantiation of a presented property, and the substratum doctrine is irrelevant to it. I prove this by a dilemma, with one horn for those who reify sense-data and another for those who don’t.

(a) If it is all right to reify sense-data, then we can say that I have or apprehend a square sense-datum; or that some part of my visual field is square. But in that case the sense-datum is the ‘thing which’ is square, i.e. it bears the property of squareness with which I am now presented. A Lockean substratum-substance need not be physical or objective or extra-mental: the whole point of the doctrine, as is often remarked even by victims of Berkeley’s muddle, is that it separates the substance from all its properties, claiming that properties are borne by items of which nothing can be said except that they bear properties. So: If I have a square sense-datum, I am not in the presence of a property for which I am seeking a bearer, for the property in whose presence I am already has a bearer.

(b) If it is wrong to reify sense-data, then I don’t have a square sense-datum but am in a state like those I am ordinarily in when seeing square things. But then my question as to whether there is something square which I see implies agnosticism about whether I am presented with an instance of squareness at all. My question ‘Is the world at this point really as it appears to be?’ is therefore not of the form ‘Is there a bearer for this property?’ So: If I do not have a square sense-datum, I am not in the presence of a property for which I am seeking a bearer, for I am not, in the required sense, ‘in the presence of a property’ at all.

(My treatment of (a) implies that if it is right to reify ideas then they are substances. [47] Locke would not have drawn such a conclusion, but he was committed to it for all that, and his failure to see the commitment had less to do with unthoroughness about ‘substance’ than with unclarity about the status of ‘ideas’.)

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The foregoing dilemma is conclusive, but I do not know whether anyone has adopted the line of thought it attacks. The nearest thing to it that I have found is in Berkeley himself, who shifts from ‘Does something real correspond to this sensory state?’ to ‘Does something have this property?’ in something like the way I have described:

As for our contemporaries, I can only show that they do, for whatever reason, make Berkeley’s mistake. I select examples which help to expose the mistake’s logical structure.

O’Connor sees that there is a doctrine about substance of a purely logical kind. But he brings it in as an afterthought, and dismisses it, without argument, as an impossible reading of ‘the substratum theory’:

With satisfying explicitness, Morris presents Berkeley’s idealism as contradicting something said ‘on the credit of Aristotle’s logic’:

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Warnock mixes the substratum and veil-of-perception doctrines by sliding smoothly from ‘matter’ to ‘the essential "support" of qualities’. [51] Also, and more interestingly, he says that according to Locke: ‘There is a world of physical ("external") objects [which within certain limits] actually have the qualities which our ideas incline us to assign to them’, [52] and also that: ‘Locke had asserted the existence of"matter", "material sub stance", a something of which nothing could be either said or known.’ [53] Warnock purports to be describing a single Lockean doctrine in these two passages. Yet the two are inconsistent: items which ‘actually have the qualities...’ cannot be ones about which ‘nothing could be said’. Of course the inconsistency is not Locke’s (for him it is ‘real things’ which ‘actually have the qualities.. .‘, and substrata of which ‘nothing could be said’), but results from the Berkeleian exegesis. Of all the writers who credit Locke with thinking that the essentially unqualitied items which support qualities may also resemble our ideas, I have not found one who calls attention to the inconsistency.

The error of Berkeley’s that I have been discussing does not occur in Gibson’s masterly work on Locke; and Armstrong and Broad have both rejected it–fairly explicitly though without detailed diagnosis. [54] With those three exceptions, Berkeley’s error seems to run untrammelled through the entire literature of Locke-Berkeley commentary.

Nor are ‘historical’ writings the only source of the mistake. It is in the course of a piece of straight philosophy that Ayer uses the phrase ‘sensible properties’ in high Berkeleian fashion to

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effect a slide from ‘the thing itself as opposed to anything which may be said about it’ to ‘the thing itself [as opposed to] its appearances':

17. Connecting substance with reality

Despite my arguments in this chapter, there is a connexion between the reality issue and a certain issue about substance. It certainly does not legitimize Berkeley’s proven tendency to identify the reality and substance questions, but it may provide a sound basis -- to which Berkeley could have appealed though in fact he didn’t -- for partly expressing idealism in the sentence ‘There are no material substances’. In explaining this connexion between the two issues, I shall be repairing a serious gap in my published paper on this topic -- a gap made clear to me by Robert M. Adams, to whom I am much indebted.

The substratum analysis of property-instantiation, or of the concept of substance, is a bad attempt to answer a serious question, namely: ‘What is it for an item to be a thing rather than a property or attribute of a thing or a process which a thing undergoes?’ This can be expressed in the form: ‘What is the difference between substances and properties?’ or ‘What are the criteria

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governing the substance/property distinction?’ One may dismiss the ‘substratum’ answer without objecting to the question itself.

Nevertheless, the question is hard, if not impossible, to answer at that level of generality. I can make no headway with the concept of substance except within some area which, even if extremely large, excludes some possible topics of discourse. One such area is that of what I call the objective realm. Within this, we can ask and at least partly answer the question: ‘What are the criteria for the distinction between something’s being an object or objective substance and its being a property of an object or a process which objects undergo?’ Consider, for example, the borderline case of a magnetic field. This can be regarded as an object which is created by electric currents etc., and whose presence causes compasses etc. to behave in certain ways; but it is also plausible to say that the existence of the magnetic field consists in facts about the presence of electric currents, the behaviour of compasses etc. The former way of thinking of the magnetic field views it as substantial, the latter as non-substantial or attributive. A consideration of the choice between them might help us to see what is going on in clearer cases, such as the substantiality of my hand and the non-substantiality of the whiteness of my hand.

The magnetic field example, as well as suggesting what a serious question of the form ‘Are. . . substantial?’ might be like, points the way to how such questions should be answered. The inclination to refuse a thing-like status to magnetic fields connects essentially, I suggest, with the belief that we do not need any such substantival expression as ‘magnetic field’; that the facts we can report by means of it can also be expressed in statements whose substantival expressions refer only to wires, dynamos, compasses and so on; that magnetic fields, in short, can be fully accommodated in a language which handles them adjectivally rather than substantivally. On this criterion for substantiality, a house is substantial while a fight is not, because what we say with the substantive ‘fight’ can easily be said without it. We can replace ‘The fight was a fierce one’ by something like ‘The men fought fiercely’, and so on; whereas no such replacements seem to be available for everything we might say using ‘the house’.

The suggested criterion for substantiality leaves a question open: is an item to be deemed non-substantial if the facts about it can, never mind how, be expressed without a substantival

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expression referring to that item? Or is to count as non-substantial only if we cannot easily or economically handle it adjectivally while still covering all the facts? The latter alternative still leaves questions open (how easily? with what sorts of economy?), but my concern is with the former alternative. That is, I am concerned with the idea that an item counts as substantial, or as a substance, only if we must handle it substantivally in our language -- only if we cannot express the facts about it without availing ourselves of a substantival expression referring to it.

This rather strong requirement for substantiality has found favour with some philosophers, e.g. with Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant. [56] It goes with thinking of substances as the basic and fundamental and irreducible stuff of reality, as for example in this: ‘The only substances are physical atoms. The basic facts about the universe are all facts about what atoms there are and about their various properties and relations; and the things we say using substantival expressions like "house" and "dust-storm" are really just complex facts about the qualities and relations and dispositions of atoms. Given substantives referring to atoms, and an unrestricted range of non-substantival expressions, I could in principle say all that there is to be said about reality.’ This line of thought illustrates a sense of ‘substance’ which is not absurd, which has had a good deal of currency in the philosophical tradition, and which we may conjecture to have exerted some influence, whether recognized or not, upon Berkeley’s uses of the word ‘substance’.

Now Berkeley’s idealism entails that facts about material objects are, or boil down to, facts about ‘ideas’. Furthermore, he usually thinks that any statement about someone’s having an idea is a fact about the state the person is in, a fact expressible in a one-noun statement whose subject-term refers to a particular person or mind or ‘spirit’. (That is, he accepts the anti-reification thesis of §5, though he certainly does not see all its implications. In §6 I accused Berkeley of thinking, like a reifier, that an idea of a triangle must be triangular; and so he does. But he does not reify ideas -- rather, he idealizes things.) Given these two views of Berkeley’s, he could, using ‘substance’ according to the strong criterion I have sketched, say that the only substances are minds

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or spirits. He could say that although there are chairs and tables and houses, such items as these–items including all material ‘things’–are not substances; they are not part of the basic story of what there is; for the basic story can be told in a language which refers only to ‘spirits’ and their sensory states, and then statements about ‘chairs’ and ‘houses’ can be introduced later as facons de parler–as convenient ways of expressing the basic facts rather than as introducing a new range of facts.

So there is a connexion between substance and reality after all. For there is a reasonable sense of ‘substance’ in which Berkeley can express a large part of his claim about reality–or about why the veil-of-perception doctrine is wrong–by saying ‘There are no material substances’. It is important that the word ‘substances’ is doing real work here. The position is not that Berkeley can say ‘There are no material items of any kind’ and thence draw trivial corollaries of the form ‘There are no material Fs’ where ‘F’ could stand for ‘ducks’ or ‘substances’ or any idle word at all. On the contrary, Berkeley says that there are material items, including chairs and ducks and houses; and much of the force of his opposition to Locke’s view about reality can be brought out by his adding ... . but these material items are not substances.’

If Berkeley appreciated, at some level of his mind, the possibility of using ‘substance’ in the way I have described, [57] that would help to explain his saying some of the things he does say -- and especially his thinking that ‘substance’ has a central role to play in his denial of Locke’s theory of reality. But this explanation has nothing to do with the supposed notion of a substratum. The legitimate way in which Berkeley could have used ‘There are no material substances’ does not equate this with ‘There are no material substrata’; and, indeed, it requires an understanding of the term ‘substance’ which has no coherent and straightforward connexion with the substratum analysis. A fortiori, nothing in the foregoing pages has the slightest tendency to justify Berkeley and many commentators in confusing the question about ideas/objects with the question about properties/substrata.

(When Berkeley addresses himself to the sort of substances which he thinks do exist, namely mental or spiritual ones, he does accept a thoroughly substratum-type analysis of the concept of substance [see §45 below]. This suggests that he ties ‘There are

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no material substances’ to ‘There are no material substrata’ simply because he takes them to be synonymous–because he cannot see how to avoid a substratum analysis of the concept of a substance. This would imply, ironically, that passages in which Berkeley is thought to attack the veil-of-perception doctrine and the substratum analysis are really attacks on the former in terms of Berkeley’s whole-hearted acceptance of the latter. The irony is pleasing, but the interpretation which implies it is wrong: the two clean-cut thrusts at the substratum analysis are there, and cannot be ignored. It can indeed be argued that Berkeley cared very much about the veil-of-perception theory, and very little about the substratum analysis; but I think we have to see him as trying to attack both these Lockean doctrines, and as confusing them with one another in the ways I have described.)

I have tried to present a link between the concepts of substance and reality–a link which may be relevant to Berkeley’s procedures even if he did not explicitly avail himself of it. It is relevant at all, as I noted earlier, only if Berkeley does regard ideas as adjectival on minds or spirits; and some writers have said that he does not, and that Berkeleian ideas are radically other than spirits, are not mental, are ‘perceived’ in a genuinely relational way, are ‘immaterial’ only in the sense that they are not Lockean ‘real things’. This interpretation creates a sensible, cheerful, likeable Berkeley, who ‘restores our native confidence in our senses’ [58] (supposing that we had ever lost it), but who has no claim on our attention as philosophers. As well as flattening out the depths and complexities in Berkeley’s metaphysics, the disputed interpretation puts its adherents to some desperate shifts on matters of relative detail: they have to construe ‘ideas are in the mind’ as meaning ‘ideas are perceived’ and nothing more; since Berkeley equates ‘idea’ with ‘sensation’ they have to say that ‘A sensation in Berkeley’s usage is.. . an object sensed’; [59] and they cannot explain why Berkeley should say that ‘unperceived idea’ is a ‘contradiction’. This last point is rightly treated as crucial in Pitcher’s definitive treatment of this matter, [60] to which the reader is referred for–among many things–a discussion of the two main passages in Berkeley which do favour the disputed

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interpretation. [61] I ought to mention an entry in the Philosophical Commentaries which has been adduced in support of the disputed interpretation: ‘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.’ [62] Against this entry, which clearly implies that ideas are states of minds, Berkeley later put a sign which means ‘Reject’ or ‘False’ or the like; and this has been adduced as powerful evidence of his having finally come to the view credited to him by the disputed interpretation. [63] Even if he did arrive at that view firmly enough to put a ‘Reject’ sign in a notebook, the fact remains that all the significant structure of his thought requires the assumption that ideas are indeed states of mind. And in any case, the ‘Reject’ sign means many things: [64] that Berkeley has come to think that the entry is false, or that he no longer approves of its wording, or that he has decided for some other reason not to use it in his published work. The quoted entry’s use of ‘existence’ as a non-abstract noun is quite untypical of the published writings; and the word ‘persons’ is one which Berkeley later decided to avoid as far as possible, [65] and which in fact occurs nowhere in the Principles. It is likely enough that Berkeley marked the entry as not to be used, for those two quasi-stylistic reasons. [66]

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[end]