Berkeley, Malebranche, and Vision in God

Berkeley, Malebranche, and Vision in God NICHOLAS JOLLEY IN THE SECOND of the Three Dialogues Hylas, the materialist, asks Philonous: "But what say you, are not you too of opinion that we see all things in God? If I mistake not, what you advance comes near it."' In the first edition of the Dialogues Philonous's response was a temperate one; he expressed his agreement with Malebranche's emphasis on the Scriptural text that in God we live, move, and have our being, and confined his disagreement with Malebranche to pointing out that, for him, the things we perceive are our own ideas. In the third edition, by contrast, Berkeley inserted a lengthy and rather ill-tempered expression of his differences from Malebranche: Few men think, yet all will have opinions. Hence men's opinions are superficial and confused. It is nothing strange that tenets, which in themselves are ever so different, should nevertheless be confounded with each other by those who do not consider them attentively. I shall not therefore be surprised, if some men imagine that I run into the enthusiasm of Malebranche, though in truth I am very remote from it. He builds on the most abstract general ideas, which I entirely disclaim. He asserts an absolute external world, which I deny. He maintains that we are deceived by our senses, and know not the real natures or the true forms and figures of extended beings; of all which I hold the direct contrary. So that upon the whole there are no principles more fundamentally opposite than his and mine. * Presumably Berkeley felt the need to distance himself so emphatically from Malebranche in the third edition because some of his readers thought that he was simply a disciple of the French philosopher. One early critic of Berkeley, ThreeDialoguesbetweenHylasandPhilonousII, in A. A. Luce and T. E.Jessop, eds., The Works ofGeorgeBerkeley,BishopofCloyne(London: Nelson, 1948-57), z: z14. Versions of this paper were read to the Northwest Conference on Philosophy, a conference on Descartes and Cartesianism at the Universityof California at Irvine, and a departmental colloquium at the Universityof California at San Diego; I am grateful to members of the audiences for their comments. I should also like to thank Steven Nadler, Kenneth Winkler and two anonymous referees for helpful criticisms. •Ibid. [535] 536 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:4 OCTOBER ~996 for instance, said that he was a Malebranchist in good faith (un Malebranchiste de bonne foi).~ Is Berkeley right to insist on the distance between his own philosophy and Malebranche's doctrine of vision in God? Or does the intemperate nature of Berkeley's reaction suggest that he protests too much? Now there is no doubt that there are important affinities between the philosophies of Berkeley and Malebranche which have been documented by a number of scholars.~ In general terms, Berkeley and Malebranche both offer examples of theocentric metaphysics of fundamentally Cartesian inspiration. Moreover, on a more specific level, it is clear that even in his published works Berkeley is to some extent an occasionalist; he argues for the quasi-occasionalist thesis that there are no genuine causal relationships between physical phenomena from the Malebranchian premise that there is an absolutely necessary connection between a cause and its effect.s Nonetheless, on the issue of perception it may seem that there are good reasons for taking Berkeley at his word when he says that his own position is "ever so different" from that of Malebranche. 6 For one thing, though Berkeley and Malebranche agree in defining ideas as the immediate objects of the understanding, they disagree fundamentally over how the definition should be interpreted:7 whereas, for Malebranche, ideas are con-strued in a quasi-Platonic manner as logical concepts, for Berkeley, ideas are mental items which have more in common with sense-data than with Platonic forms. Relatedly, although God is central to both theories of perception, the role that he is assigned seems to be quite different: whereas, for Malebranche, God is the locus of all ideas, for Berkeley, he is the cause of ideas in finite spirits. It is tempting, then, to conclude with Genevieve Brykman that, at least on the...