QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

George Berkeley (1685-1753) Berkeley was a sincerely religious man who was deeply
concerned about the conflict between scientific and religious views. For him the root of the
trouble was the supposed independent existence of matter which he aimed to deny, without
denying the validity of scientific enterprise. Berkeley leaned towards Idealism pointing out that
both the primary and secondary qualities are relative to the perceiver. Even though the physical
world was said to contain only quantitative properties, the world of which people had explicit
experience consisted of secondary qualitative things and phenomena. Nowhere could quantity be
found without quality. Quantity without quality was therefore merely an abstraction, a formal
view of specific aspects of reality. Consequently, the physicist’s material world was no actual
reality, it was a pure abstraction derived from the world of the mind. To be means to-beperceived,
to be an object for mind. Since substance was something that depended only on itself,
only the mind could be substance and nature as we saw it was a product of the mind. 317
Berkeley did not ask exactly which mind carried out the creation of the physical world. He was
however satisfied that it was not created by the finite human mind but by the infinite mind of
God, since the latter guaranteed the existence of physical bodies even when no-one observed
them. In this way, Berkeley rejected the pantheism of Renaissance thinkers in which the world
was the body of God. To Berkeley, as to Plato of the Christian theologists, God was a
transcendental concept whose thinking created the world , and to him (i.e. Berkeley), minds
which created the secondary qualities were human. 318 More cautious than Berkeley, Immanual
Kant postulated that the mind which created the world was also human. Kant did not however
believe that Copernicus had created the heliocentric world, that Kepler had created the elliptical
orbits of the planets, or that Newton had created the law of gravity. The world was not made by
an individual mind but by pure reason, a transcendental ego immanent in all of human thought.
As a consequence of the structure of human understanding, the world inevitably appeared to
humans just as it appeared.
Since the categories of the human mind influenced our conception of the world, our knowledge,
according to Kant, applied only to that world of phenomena which to Plato had been fit for
nothing more than beliefs and sources of opinion. Both the foundations of mind and things
themselves therefore remained obscure to us. The scientific method could not attain them, nor
317 Jones 1969, 281-289. Collingwood 1960, 113-114. Berkeley’s position is compatible with the existence of
scientific laws, which are considered to be generalisations about the relations of certain ideas to certain other ideas
318 Collingwood 1960, 115-116.
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