Note 224 — THE BRITISH QUARTERLY APRIL 1871 (continued 6)

The advance which Berkeley made from the stand-point of Locke may not have been made very clear by this abstract statement; but the difference of conception was just the difference between the Baconian and modern induction. Bacon endeavoured to explain everything by referring it to its form; and this form was a contemporaneous cause, corresponding very much to the abstract ideas of Locke, or rather to those abstract ideas which are supposed to be the more important, viz., the primary qualities (cf. Ellis and Spedding's Ed. of Bacon, I., p. 29). Modern induction explains by referring a consequent to its invariable antecedent. It introduces the idea of motion, succession, or flow, and explains a thing by showing its place in the flow of phenomena. It is interesting to note that while Berkeley was thus substituting a living causality for the abstract ideas of Locke, and explaining the construction and objective knowledge of things by their position in the successive moments of a personal agency, other philosophers were endeavouring to solve the same metaphysical and psychological problem in somewhat the same way. Leibnitz's 'Monadologie' was really an attempt to explain the existence of universals and objective principles of knowledge by the thought of growth or development or flow; but Leibnitz's explanation differs from Berkeley's in this, that he kept chiefly the thought of the development itself before his mind, and conceived a gradual progression through impersonal existences up to the conscious self, while Berkeley, keeping to his direct spiritual intuition, ever looks at this flow as manifesting the presence and action of a free personal spirit. The same general thought is also at the basis of Wolff's hint that the causal-nexus, not abstract ideas, enables us to explain how universal judgments are formed out of individual experiences (logica, § 706). It has developed since then into the conception of organic development, which plays such an important part in Kant's 'Kritik der Urtheilskraft,' is the fundamental thought in such post Kantian metaphysics as the 'Natur-Philosophie' of Schelling, and the 'Mikrokosmos' of Herman Lotze, and may be called the metaphysical foundation for the scientific method which has led to the theories of Darwin in natural history, of Aug. Schleicher in philology, and of the Leyden School in the history of religions.