Critiques and Addresses eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 350 pages of information about Critiques and Addresses.

Critiques and Addresses eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 350 pages of information about Critiques and Addresses.
“Distance is in its own nature imperceptible, and yet it is perceived by sight.  It remains, therefore, that it is brought into view by means of some other idea, that is itself immediately perceived in the act of vision.”—­Sec. 11.

    “Distance or external space.”—­Sec. 155.

The explanation is quite simple, and lies in the fact that Berkeley uses the word “distance” in three senses.  Sometimes he employs it to denote visible distance, and then he restricts it to distance in two dimensions, or simple extension.  Sometimes he means tangible distance in two dimensions; but most commonly he intends to signify tangible distance in the third dimension.  And it is in this sense that he employs “distance” as the equivalent of “space.”  Distance in two dimensions is, for Berkeley, not space, but extension.  By taking a pencil and interpolating the words “visible” and “tangible” before “distance” wherever the context renders them necessary, Berkeley’s statements may be made perfectly consistent; though he has not always extricated himself from the entanglement caused by his own loose phraseology, which rises to a climax in the last ten sections of the “Theory of Vision,” in which he endeavours to prove that a pure intelligence able to see, but devoid of the sense of touch, could have no idea of a plane figure.  Thus he says in section 156:—­

“All that is properly perceived by the visual faculty amounts to no more than colours with their variations and different proportions of light and shade; but the perpetual mutability and fleetingness of those immediate objects of sight render them incapable of being managed after the manner of geometrical figures, nor is it in any degree useful that they should.  It is true there be divers of them perceived at once, and more of some and less of others; but accurately to compute their magnitude, and assign precise determinate proportions between things so variable and inconstant, if we suppose it possible to be done, must yet be a very trifling and insignificant labour.”

If, by this, Berkeley means that by vision alone, a straight line cannot be distinguished from a curved one, a circle from a square, a long line from a short one, a large angle from a small one, his position is surely absurd in itself and contradictory to his own previously cited admissions; if he only means, on the other hand, that his pure spirit could not get very far on in his geometry, it may be true or not; but it is in contradiction with his previous assertion, that such a pure spirit could never attain to know as much as the first elements of plane geometry.

Another source of confusion, which arises out of Berkeley’s insufficient exactness in the use of language, is to be found in what he says about solidity, in discussing Molyneux’s problem, whether a man born blind and having learned to distinguish between a cube and a sphere, could, on receiving his sight, tell the one from the other by vision.  Berkeley agrees with Locke that he could not, and adds the following reflection:—­

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Critiques and Addresses from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.