The Doctrine Attacked
The Introduction to the Principles takes aim at Locke. Philosophers claim the mind can single out what is common to all men — leaving out colour, stature, shape — and frame from it an abstract idea of humanity in general. Berkeley reproduces the doctrine faithfully, including its own admission that such ideas are difficult and cost pains to attain.
The Test of Introspection
Then he simply looks. He can imagine a particular man — white or black or tawny, straight or crooked, tall or middle-sized — but the abstract man, stripped of every particular, he cannot frame at all.
Likewise the idea of man that I frame to myself must be either of a white, or a black, or a tawny, a straight, or a crooked, a tall, or a low, or a middle-sized man. I cannot by any effort of thought conceive the abstract idea above described.
Words Without Ideas
If we cannot conceive abstract ideas, how does general reasoning work? Berkeley’s answer anticipates modern nominalism: a word becomes general not by naming an abstract idea but by standing indifferently for any of many particular ideas. Generality lives in the use of signs, not in a special class of objects. And once abstraction is exposed as a fiction, the abstract idea of "existence apart from being perceived" — the very notion of matter — collapses with it.
The attack on abstraction fills the Introduction to the Principles (seeded here as the Introduction chapter).
Related Concepts
