Journal of the History of Philosophy

Commentators have long noted that Berkeley's doctrine of archetypes plays a role in his explanation of how God perceives and how different finite minds can be said to have the same ideas. Understanding what that role is, though, is complicated by the fact that Berkeley uses "archetype" sparingly and recognizes that talk of archetypes invites comparisons with Malebranche that often distract readers from seeing how archetypes function in his immaterialism. Still, by appealing to the vocabulary of archetypes, Berkeley shows that Malebranche an insights, when properly understood, can focus attention on the distinctly Christian Neoplatonic way in which ideas can be said to exist "in" the mind of God.

These invocations of Malebranche and Christian Neoplatonism hint at how Berkeley's treatment of archetypes opens up much larger issues about how minds are related to their ideas. His references to those issues appear in his early unpublished Philosophical Commentaries (1707-8) and in his Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Dialogues between Hylas andPhilonous (1713), but it is not until his late work Siris (1744) that he situates his notion of mind in an explicitly Christian Neoplatonic context. In that context he shows how archetypes can be used to circumvent some of the difficulties that seem to arise out of his earlier portrayal of minds as discrete substances that "contain" ideas. Indeed, his later comments on archetypes reveal how Christian Neoplatonism (and specifically Trinitarian thought) provides a model for understanding why he (in contrast to Descartes or Locke) thinks that mind (spiritual substance) and ideas (the objects of mind) cannot exist or even be thought of apart from one another.

Instead of interpreting Siris in terms of Berkeley's well-known works in epistemology, I propose to consider the Principles and the Dialogues in light of his [End Page 239] Christian Neoplatonic metaphysics. I suggest that that metaphysics is already present in his early works and is most noticeable in his attempts to adapt a Lockean vocabulary to Neoplatonic doctrines about mind and archetypes. However, those attempts inevitably appear forced because in the metaphysics of Descartes and Locke, minds can be considered apart from their ideas, God can be considered apart from his creation, and (though in a more mysterious way) the three Persons of the Trinity can be considered apart from one another.

In the Christian Neoplatonic mentality that Berkeley adopts, this isolation of a mind or subject from the relations by virtue of which it has its identity is inconceivable. For Berkeley, there are no ideas apart from minds ("for an idea to exist in an unperceiving thing is a manifest contradiction"), there are no minds apart from ideas ("take away the perceptions and you take away the mind"), and both minds and ideas are significant or meaningful only in relation to one another.¹ To explain how God and other minds can have the "same" ideas, we cannot begin with the assumption that God communicates ideas to minds that somehow exist prior to or independent of the communication. As Berkeley remarks, "Say you the mind is not the perceptions, but that thing which perceives. I answer, you are abused by the words 'that' and 'thing': these are vague, empty words without a meaning" (PC 581). To assume that God's communication of ideas is distinct from his creation of finite minds is already to think of minds and ideas as if they were distinct entities apart from their relation to one another. That would assume that God's ideas or the archetypes of our ideas are themselves intelligible apart from our perceptions and that they exist in some sense "in" God's mind. But such an assumption would make it difficult to explain how my ideas are the same as God's ideas or, for that matter, the same as the ideas of other minds.

To avoid these difficulties I suggest that we have to think of archetypes from an entirely different perspective—one that requires that we no longer think (e.g., with Locke) of God and minds as things that exist or have identities apart from their relations to ideas. Instead, we have...