Browne, Peter

« Browne, Peter (1666-1735) Peter Browne, an Irish bishop, was a critic of Locke 's theory of ideas.

His chief philosophical concern was to explain how human beings can conceive of God.

He proposed that God's existence and attributes can be understood analogically, by their real - though inevitably partial - resemblance to human things.

He distinguished between analogy, which turns on a 'real resemblance' , and metaphor, which turns on a merely imagined one. Browne entered Trinity College Dublin in 1682 and became a fellow in 1692.

He served as provost of Trinity from 1699 until 1710, when he became Bishop of Cork and Ross in the south of Ireland.

George Berkeley was a student and fellow at the college during Browne's tenure as provost.

Years later, in the Fourth Dialogue of Alciphron , Berkeley, without naming Browne, attacked his analogical theology ( Berkeley, G.

§11 ).

He took Browne to be denying that we have any notion at all of God's attributes.

Browne's angry reply occupies the long final chapter of his Things Divine and Supernatural (1733). Browne's first publication of philosophical interest was his Letter (1697) on John Toland 's Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) ( Toland, J. ).

Relying on a simple version of the doctrine of analogy elaborated in his later works, Browne argues that although religious mysteries can be understood only in part, they can be understood and can therefore be believed.

He also argues that they can be believed with good reason.

It is perfectly legitimate to trust informants we know to be truthful and able, even if we cannot fully comprehend what they relate.

And if their authority is confirmed by miracles our 'evidence or degree of knowledge' will mount even higher. Browne's main philosophical work, The Procedure, Extent, and Limits of Human Understanding (1728), is in part a logic textbook meant to correct 'the false and Pernicious principles in some of our modern Writers of Logic and Metaphysics' (1728: 34).

John Locke is the foremost example ( Locke, J.

§§3-6 ).

Like John Sergeant , Browne rejects Locke 's definition of knowledge as perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas.

'The Word Idea ,' he writes, 'should be limited and confined to our simple Sensations only' , and to the 'various Alterations and Combinations of them' which he calls 'compounded ideas' (1728: 63).

Compounded ideas differ from 'complex notions' or 'conceptions' , in which ideas are combined with an immediate consciousness of the mind's operations and affections.

Locke 's over-broad use of the word 'idea' is, Browne suggests, one sign of his tendency to overestimate the mind's passivity.

Another is Locke 's denial, in his assault on the syllogism, of 'all true Illation , or the Actual infering one thing from another' (1728: 422).

Instead Locke gives us 'a mere naked juxta-Position of Ideas' (1728: 422). Browne's mature doctrine of analogy is presented in the Procedure , but it is spelled out more fully in Things Divine and Supernatural (1733).

The doctrine rests on a distinction between analogy and metaphor.

In each case we use one idea or conception to stand for another.

But in analogy there is a 'real resemblance' or 'true correspondence' between the terms; in metaphor the resemblance is merely imagined.

In what Browne calls 'human' analogy, each term is known - or knowable - directly; it follows that 'human' analogy can, at least in principle, be paraphrased away.

In 'divine' analogy, the second, divine term cannot be known directly.

Divine analogy is therefore 'necessary' or inescapable, if things divine are to be understood at all.

'Thus we contemplate things Supernatural ', as he had written in the Procedure , 'not by looking directly Upward for any Immediate View of them; but as we behold the heavenly Bodies, by casting our Eyes Downward to the Water ' (1728: 425).. »