I have long admired the three great empiricist philosophers, whose times spanned the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They set the scene of justification for the sowing of modern scientific thought. Their thinking is also used to assess the fruits of that thought. I suppose nearly everyone has heard of the Englishman (Locke) and the Scotsman (Hume), but not so many have heard of the Irishman, George Berkeley. In his time his ideas were not well-received (though Hume was impressed by them) ; but since the end of the nineteenth century he has inspired much research.
A deep thinker, and an acute observer, he made some startling claims. For example, he once said, “The eyes are but instruments for gathering light.” The eyes alone cannot ‘see’ ; they also need the sense of ‘touch’ to get them working.
Such a claim is certainly counter-intuitive, even to most people today. But, in the nineteen-sixties, researchers, demonstrated some of truth in Bishop Berkeley’s argument. In brief, they raised some kittens in complete darkness for a short period after their birth, until they were able to walk ; they then proceeded to show that, unless the kittens were given the experience of walking, they were practically blind. And, once they started walking, their eyesight began to develop normally. Later experiments have confirmed the findings.
Berkeley claimed that the most important sense is not sight (as most people believed) but what he called touch – or, to use the more inclusive modern word, proprioception, which includes the sense of motion and balance and other bodily sensations. Berkeley placed great importance on infants being encouraged to be physically active to ensure proper sensory development.
Another confirmation of Berkeley’s ideas came in the mid twentieth-century. A man in his fifties, who had been blind from the age of three had his sight restored by surgery. Of course, all the ologists pounced on him to test their theories about ‘recovered senses’ and, in all, the poor patient had a pretty miserable time from all the attention he attracted.
But some interesting findings emerged. For example, when the newly-seeing man was taken out into the streets, he was quizzed about what he could see. He was shown a typical London double-decker bus, and asked to draw a sketch of it. His drawing was good, but with some striking blanks in it : the driver’s cab was blank and the entire upper deck was missing, too. It turned out that he had used buses when he had been blind – and his sketch showed good detail of all the parts of a bus that he had actually touched – but almost no detail of the parts that he had not. He simply could not see those parts.
So, Berkeley showed his astuteness again. His critics were confounded.
So, ‘touch’ or (more completely) proprioception is really the queen of senses, anterior to sight. And not only sight. It has been shown that young infants who are compelled to be immobile do badly in tests of intelligence ; but they make up for that once they are old enough to be allowed to walk about.
And then there is the young Einstein. It is said that, at the age of eleven he discovered that physical exercise interfered with his thinking ; so he gave up playing sports. Was it this withdrawal from the world of ‘touch’ that facilitated his highly abstract ideas of relativity? And, even here, Berkeley pops up again – for the good bishop was writing his own theories of relativity nearly three centuries before Einstein.
And what happened to the blind man who had his sight restored? Sadly, he became very depressed ; he shut himself up in the dark of his home and turned his back on the complicated world of light. I read that he took his own life in the end. So, suddenly springing the rich sense of seeing on someone is not the unalloyed blessing it would seem to be.
