A dispositional ontology?

Two features of the Lee interpretation are particularly striking. The first is his claim that Edwards developed a novel ontology, influenced by the (then) recent developments in the natural sciences and philosophy by Newton and Locke in particular. The second concerns his assertion that Edwards carried his dispositional account of ontology over into his doctrine of God.Footnote ⁶ We shall concern ourselves with the first of these claims only. This paper offers no objection to the view that Edwards had an important and controversial place for the concept of disposition in his doctrine of God. But it does set forth a critique of one aspect of the Lee interpretation of Edwards's dispositional ontology of the created order.

According to Lee, Edwards set aside key components of the essentialist ontology indebted to Aristotle. This is the doctrine according to which the world is composed of substances and their attributes, which are organized in a certain way by the form of a particular substance. In place of this way of thinking about what exists, Lee believes Edwards developed a dispositional account of the nature of reality: ‘dispositions and habits, conceived as active and ontologically abiding principles … play the roles substance and form used to fulfil’. Indeed, ‘[t]he created world is a network of divinely established habits and dispositions (or the so-called laws of nature)’. What is more, ‘[t]he permanence of being is no longer defined in terms of substance or inert matter but rather in terms of the abiding reality of laws themselves’ (PTJE, 4, 8, and 11 respectively).

But what does this dispositional account of the created order actually amount to? First, and most fundamentally, there is the question of the relationship between the concept of substance and that of habit in Lee's account of the Edwardsian ontology. According to Lee, Edwards believed that the essence of created things is a compound of habits and/or laws. Habit is a concept Edwards takes up and develops from a basically Aristotelian understanding of hexis, that is, an active principle. In Edwards's thought the concept of habit becomes an active tendency to do such and such a thing, which has causal or purposive powers to bring such and such a thing about when actualized.Footnote ⁷ Moreover, habits are law-like relations between events or actions, and are really present in some virtual or potential manner even when they are not exercised (YE21, 7). Finally, Lee believes that habits are relational; they exist in a nexus; and there is a complex relationship between one habit and another, such that the exercise of one habit has important implications for the exercise of other habits in the great system of being (PTJE, 34–46; 76–82). So habit as a particular sort of active tendency seems to be a way of describing a certain class of dispositional attributes that a particular entity has. And it appears Lee thinks Edwards's view is that all attributes are dispositional, they are all ‘active tendencies’ of the sort he envisages.

I suppose it is fairly commonplace to claim that entities have at least some dispositional attributes. But it is more controversial to think that all the attributes a given agent has are dispositional. Here we might distinguish between a weak and a strong account of dispositions, the weak view being simply that created beings have some dispositional attributes (e.g. ‘being able to run’), and the strong view being that all the attributes created beings have are dispositional in nature. It seems that Lee's view is that Edwards's ontology requires the latter, stronger view: all the attributes of created things are dispositional.

In order to better understand the Lee interpretation of this ‘Edwardsian’ notion of habit, let us consider the habit or disposition (i.e. active tendency) to run, present in the mind of some imaginary human called Trevor. According to the account of habit just outlined, Trevor's disposition to run brings about his running where, say, Trevor desires to run. Trevor has the disposition to run; he has the capacity to run (possessing working legs and so forth); he desires to run. His running is just his actualizing of this disposition, or habit.Footnote ⁸ Or, perhaps better, his running is just his actualization of a particular dispositional attribute he possesses. But, according to the logic of Lee's position, the Edwardsian notion of habit also governs the type of action that can occur on a given occasion. Trevor desires to run, and actualizes this desire by realizing his dispositional capacity to run in an act of running. But Trevor's desire to run can only result in him running where he has the capability to run. He may desire to run but be incapacitated through injury. In such circumstances there can be no realization of his desire in action, though he may still have the disposition to act in the way he desires. Furthermore, on Lee's way of thinking about Edwards, there must be a ‘fit’ between disposition and the sort of act that is realized on a particular occasion. Thus, if Trevor desires to run, the action that results will not be the ‘realization’ of a disposition to fly, say, for that would not be an appropriate consequence of Trevor's desire. And since God governs what habits and dispositions are realized on such and such occasions, Trevor's desire to run will not result in an act of flying.

So far, so good: but what of attributes Trevor possesses that do not seem to be dispositional? What, for example, of the property ‘being human’ or ‘being Trevor’? Neither of these attributes is dispositional. Trevor cannot ‘activate’ these attributes by intending upon an action of some kind. For these attributes are such that, without them, Trevor would simply not exist. They are essential to Trevor and they are intrinsic to his ‘Trevorhood’, as it were. So it is very difficult to see how this Lee interpretation of Edwards's account of habit can apply to all the attributes a creature has, let alone to all the attributes God has. And this, I suggest, should make us wary of accepting that this is Edwards's view without a very good argument. For I suppose that one should not attribute obviously problematic views to a particular thinker unless one has very good reason for thinking that the given thinker actually held such views.Footnote ⁹

Thus far, Lee's interpretation of Edwards seems to require a rather strange account of the attributes of a given entity, all of which are dispositional. But it does not require the excision of the concept of substance.Footnote ¹⁰ One could believe in a world populated by substances that have ‘habits’, that is, dispositional attributes, in the sense Lee seems to think Edwards does, although the idea that a substance only has dispositional attributes is a notion of which it is more difficult to make sense. However, Lee believes Edwards eschews the notion of substance: ‘dispositions and habits, conceived as active and ontologically abiding principles … play the roles substance and form used to fulfil’ in Edwards's thinking (PTJE, 4, emphasis added). Dispositions or habits in Edwards's ontology are, according to Lee, law-like relations between events or actions, not the accidental quality of a substance (PTJE, 39, 47, 76). It is his opinion that Edwards thinks habits do not belong to substances, but are constitutive of their being and mean that being is essentially dynamic and relational (PTJE, 48, 50). Lee sums it up in this way, ‘Things … do not have habits but are habits and laws, which are the essence of things’ (PTJE, 49, emphasis original). In his more recent work on Edwards's ontology, he even goes so far as to say ‘Edwards replaces substance with the idea of “disposition,” which he calls “habit,” “propensity,” “law,” “inclination,”, “tendency,” and “temper”’(YE21, 6, emphasis added).Footnote ¹¹ But this is a much more radical thesis about the role habit plays in Edwardsian ontology. As such it requires some explanation.

Suppose the sort of thing Lee calls a habit or disposition is an attribute of a given thing.Footnote ¹² Then, with a little adjustment, we might think that humans are composed of bundles of attributes, or of certain sorts of attributes, namely habits and dispositions with no remainder, and with no need to posit such occult things as substances as a kind of ontologically fundamental ‘thing’ in which attributes (whether properties, tropes or predicates) inhere, or which exemplify or give rise to, such attributes. Such radical revisions to traditional Aristotelian ways of carving up ontology into substances and their properties was very much part of the intellectual furniture of the period in which Edwards was active. For instance, on at least one traditional way of understanding him, Hume thought things like humans are merely collections of attributes or predicates of a certain sort bundled together, and that there was no need to posit substances or bare substrata as the subjects of such attribute-instances or ‘bundles’ – which is why this is sometimes called ‘bundle theory’.Footnote ¹³

On this Humean way of thinking, to speak of Trevor is to refer to a given entity that is constituted by a particular bundle of attributes that, taken together, distinguish him from his friend, Wayne, and, for that matter, from all other created beings. (For instance, Wayne has the attribute ‘being short and blond haired’ whereas Trevor has the attribute of ‘being tall and dark-haired’, and so on.) But there is nothing more to Trevor or Wayne than the cluster or bundle of attributes that constitutes them, on this view. Were we to exhaust the list of attributes Trevor exemplifies, we would have exhausted what there is to say about Trevor. According to bundle theorists, the ontological ‘glue’ that holds different attributes of a given thing ‘together’ constituting the thing it does, involves a special, contingent relation between those attributes, which is sometimes called collocation. A particular cluster of attributes is collocated in a particular location, e.g. Trevor. Although this particular bundle of attributes might not have occurred together, e.g. Trevor having alopecia rather than having long, dark hair, in fact this particular cluster of attributes does occur together and is collocated such that Trevor does have long, dark hair. But there is nothing more ontologically fundamental that underlies or somehow ‘grounds’ the attributes Trevor exemplifies, such as the bare substratum philosophers like John Locke posited.Footnote ¹⁴ For some bundle theorists attracted to the austere empiricism of the Humean tradition, this means there are no bare substrata underlying physical objects whatsoever, whether material or immaterial in nature. Let us call this robust version of bundle theory that denies the existence of any substances or bare substrates at all, the Humean view in honour of the Scottish philosopher. (Whether the historical Hume actually held this view or not is a question we can put to one side for present purposes.)Footnote ¹⁵

One need not be quite so austere in the application of bundle theory, however. It is perfectly possible to hold a version of bundle theory alongside the claim that there are immaterial substances or bare particulars that exemplify attributes. In other words, one could hold to mental phenomenalism with respect to perceptible entities, understood in terms of a bundle theory, and also maintain a version of idealism. This, or something very like it, seems to have been the view of Bishop Berkeley. He believed that the world is composed of uncreated and created minds and their ideas, material substance being, for Berkeley at least, literally nonsense. ‘Matter’ turns out to be an idea, along with every other supposed ‘physical’ thing. What is more, the perceptible parts of other entities are really simply clusters of such ideas perceived by the mind, with God being the guarantor of the continued existence of created objects that are unperceived for some period by other created entities. Let us call the bundle theoretic aspect of the mental phenomenalism that is a constituent of this idealist position the Berkeleyan view in honour of the bishop – though for the purposes of teasing out different permutations of bundle theory nothing much hangs on whether Berkeley held this view or not.Footnote ¹⁶ On the Berkeleyan view, it is not inconceivable that all material entities (or what we commonly think of as material entities) are simply bundles of attributes that continue to exist through the constant activity of God, and that there are immaterial substances in addition to such attribute bundles, which are somehow more fundamental than these attribute bundles. In fact I will suggest that something very like this sort of view is indeed what Edwards believed to be the case.

If Lee thinks that dispositions or habits ‘play the role of’ or even ‘replace’ that of the substance and substantive forms of Aristotelian essentialism, then perhaps clusters of such dispositions/habits are what he is after, consistent with some version of bundle theory. This does raise the issue of what sort of bundle theory best fits with the Lee interpretation, whether Humean, Berkeleyan, or something else. Lee is willing to concede that Edwards does sometimes speak of substances. But what he means by this has changed in important respects (PTJE, 49). For Edwards's view, according to Lee, is that ‘Substances in the sense of the subject of properties and activities is not needed or is collapsed into the activity of resistance itself. Or, if one were to speak of the ultimate source of the existence of an entity, the substance of bodies is nothing other than God's power’ (PTJE, 54). This sounds like it is somewhere in between a Humean and a Berkeleyan version of bundle theory. For Lee's view seems to be that Edwards believed the following three things:

1. (1) Ontologically speaking, all created beings are nothing more than bundles of attributes. (The Aristotelian notion of substantial forms organizing the matter of particular entities having dropped out of Edwards's ontology.)Footnote ¹⁷

2. (2) There is no material or immaterial ‘bare substratum’ upholding or underlying the attribute bundles that comprise created things, which is the subject of these attribute bundles. (The concept of substance is no longer needed to ‘play this role’; it is ‘replaced’.)

3. (3) All attribute bundles are upheld by the immediate exercise of divine power without which they would cease to exist.

The third of these notions goes beyond the Humean bundle theory, but is not quite the Berkeleyan view, since it is not clear from this whether God is merely a bundle of attributes or some other thing – a substance that exemplified certain attributes, for instance. In fact, as Lee observes, Edwards believed that God is the only true substance, strictly speaking – although he goes on to argue that Edwards's God is essentially dispositional as His creatures are.Footnote ¹⁸ There is certainly ample evidence that Edwards thought that God is an immaterial substance. For instance, in his early notebook ‘Of Atoms’, Edwards opines ‘speaking most strictly, there is no proper substance but God himself (we speak at present with respect to bodies only). How truly, then, is he said to be the ens entium.’Footnote ¹⁹ Taking this into account, we would have to add a fourth proposition to the previous three,

1. (4) The only true substance is the divine substance, which upholds all created beings, that is, all attribute bundles that compose such beings.

And this is clearly consistent with essentialism, though an essentialist doctrine in which there is, strictly speaking, only one (divine) substance.

The problem is that Lee does not appear to think this is a constituent of Edwards's position. What he says implies that Edwards held something much more akin to the Humean version of bundle theory, extended to include God himself, despite Lee's claim (just noted) that Edwards does hold to some ‘modified’ view of divine substance. He remarks, ‘For Edwards, God is essentially a perfect actuality as well as a disposition to repeat that actuality through further exercises’, and continues, ‘[t]he world, in other words, is meant to be the spatio-temporal repetition of the prior actuality of the divine being, an everlasting process of God's self-enlargement of what he already is’ (PTJE, 6). Moreover, ‘God is essentially a disposition, and dispositions are not exhausted by their exercises’ (YE21, 8). But Edwards's stated views are not consistent with this understanding of his ontology, since, as we have already seen, Edwards is clear that his ontology does include at least one substance, namely, God.Footnote ²⁰

To be fair to Lee, Edwards's early manuscripts, from which he draws much of his data, are difficult to make sense of at times. Matters are complicated by the fact that Edwards's earliest views concerning ontology are not entirely consistent with his later views. Lee is cognisant of this and offers a carefully plotted discussion of Edwards's intellectual development from his early papers, ‘Of Atoms’ and ‘Of Being’, through early entries in his ‘Miscellanies’ notebooks (notably, entry ‘pp’), to his more mature thinking in ‘The Mind’.Footnote ²¹ In the earliest of these notebooks Edwards begins to develop his brand of idealism, and it appears to be because of this idealist strand of Edwards's thought that he is driven to espouse the strong doctrine of habit – at least, according to the Lee interpretation. Edwards's initial position is that material bodies are characterized chiefly by the notion of ‘resistance’ (to other bodies and forces). But he quickly modifies this to the claim that all material bodies are really just ideas, resistance included (PTJE, 56–57). And if they are ideas, they must be the ideas of a mind – ultimately, of the divine mind. This raises the problem familiar to students of idealist philosophy, to wit, do unperceived objects exist? Edwards says that they do – as items in the divine consciousness. This is clear in ‘Miscellany pp’, one of the earliest entries in his ‘Miscellanies’ notebook: ‘Supposing a room in which none is, none sees in that room, no created intelligence; the things in the room have no being any other way than only as God is conscious [of them], for there is no color, nor any sound, nor any shape, etc.’Footnote ²²

But according to Lee, Edwards reneges on this early Berkeley-like idealist view, moving to an explicitly dispositional version of idealism, wherein the world continues to exist (including objects unperceived by created observers) because God establishes a nexus of laws and habits that cause particular objects to perdure even when unperceived. An extended citation from Lee makes this clear:

It is at this point that Lee's interpretation of Edwards begins to unravel. For none of the evidence Lee musters in favour of this dispositional account requires a dispositional ontology in order to make sense of Edwards's more considered views concerning the ontology of the world. In fact, his considered views are entirely consistent with an account of ontology where there are uncreated and, in a qualified sense, created substances (i.e. divine and human minds) that have attributes, and where material objects are really nothing more than ideas (here read: qualities) a given immaterial substance exemplifies. This way of thinking about Edwards's ontology is much more in keeping with earlier studies of his idealism that predate Lee's work and reflect the fact that Edwards's thought is a synthesis of different philosophical elements he has fused together from his thinking and reading.Footnote ²³

Edwards vs Lee: habit, occasionalism, substance, and idealism

It would be tedious to go through every example that Lee adduces in favour of his own dispositional understanding of Edwardsian ontology. But in order to show that this particular aspect of Lee's reading of Edwards is tendentious I shall adduce several of the most important works that Lee uses to make the point. I will not present these in the order Edwards wrote them, but in terms of their priority in his mature ontology.

To begin with, let us consider Lee's conception of habit. Here Miscellany 241 is particularly important for the Lee interpretation. But examination of this Miscellany shows that the passage at the end of this Miscellany that Lee cites is actually dealing with a specific issue, namely, regeneration. Edwards speaks of a ‘habit of grace’ that is wrought in the soul of the person who is regenerate, commenting in the course of his explanation of this act of grace that ‘a habit can be of no manner of use till there is occasion to exert it’. He then goes on in the passage Lee cites as follows,

The problem for the Lee interpretation in this Miscellany is that Edwards does not say anything that would imply that all attributes a given entity possesses are dispositional. What he says does apply to all habits being laws ‘that God has fixed, that such actions upon such occasions should be exerted’. But this entails nothing about the nature of all attributes. Nor is his concession that the essence of created souls ‘consists in powers and habits’ inconsistent with commitment to the notion that there are immaterial substances, since any essentialist of an Aristotelian variety will allow that beings have natures or essences that consist in powers and habits of the sort Edwards has in mind. As far as I can see, Lee adduces no evidence in Edwards's corpus that unambiguously substantiates this strong account of dispositions the Lee interpretation requires. I suggest that such an unambiguous statement is required in this instance, because what Lee proposes is controversial. In order to be sure a thinker as careful as Edwards was committed to such a problematic idea as that entailed by the Lee interpretation of Edwardsian habits, one would need clear evidence of Edwards's commitment to this position. As far as I can make out, Lee has not provided this.

A second, related item in Lee's interpretation of Edwards that is worth dealing with here is his idea that habits are abiding, though (sometimes) dispositional, laws established by God, that are not created ex nihilo at each moment as such, but move ‘from virtuality to full actuality every moment through an immediate exercise of his [i.e. God's] power’ (PTJE, 63). Since this aspect of the Lee interpretation has been discussed elsewhere at length in the recent literature,Footnote ²⁴ my comments on this matter can be brief.

I take it that occasionalism is the philosophical view according to which God: (a) continually creates the world ex nihilo moment-by-moment, which collapses the notions of creation and conservation into one (by identifying conservation with continuous creation), with (b) the idea that God is the only causal agent in the world. All creaturely ‘acts’ are merely the ‘occasions’ of God's activity. If occasionalism is true, then there are no causal agents other than God, and no created entity persists for more than a moment. God creates the world, which momentarily ceases to exist, to be replaced by a facsimile that has incremental differences built into it to account for what appears to be motion and change across time. This, in turn is annihilated, or ceases to exist, and is replaced by another facsimile world that has incremental differences built into it to account for what appears to be motion and change across time, and so on. In this way, the occasionalist thinks of the world on analogy with a cinematic motion picture.

When watching a movie at the cinema we appear to see a sequence of actions across time represented in the projected images on the silver screen. But in reality, the images are a reel of photographic stills run together at speed to give the illusion of motion and action across time. Similarly with occasionalism: the world seems to persist through time, but in fact it does not. ‘The world’ (meaning here, the created cosmos) is merely shorthand for that series of created ‘stills’ – that is, the complete, maximal, but momentary states of affairs – God brings about in sequence, playing, as it were, on the silver screen of the divine mind. In the same way we might say that Gone with the Wind is shorthand for the motion picture of the same name, comprising the stills that make up that movie.

It seems clear that Edwards endorses occasionalism in his mature work, e.g. his treatise, Original Sin. Footnote ²⁵ There he affirms continuous creation with these words, ‘God's preserving created things in being is perfectly equivalent to a continued creation, or to his creating those things out of nothing at each moment of their existence’ (YE3, 401). God's upholding created things is ‘altogether equivalent to an immediate production out of nothing at each moment, because its existence is not merely in part from God, but is wholly from him’ (YE3, 402). This means that there is ‘no identity or oneness in the case [of created objects that persist through time] but what depends on the arbitrary constitution of the Creator’, who ‘so unites these successive new effects, that he treats them as one … and so, leads us to regard and treat them as one’ (YE3, 403). In short, ‘if we consider matters strictly, there is no such thing as any identity or oneness in created objects, existing at different times, but what depends on God's sovereign constitution’. What is more ‘a divine constitution is the thing which makes truth, in affairs of this nature’ (YE3, 404).

Taken together with his endorsement of a basically Malebranchean notion of causation as an occasion of divine action, this yields occasionalism.Footnote ²⁶ In which case, the ‘laws’ to which Lee refers are nothing other than the ‘arbitrary’ actions of God (to use Edwards's phrase) by which God makes the world created at one time qualitatively very similar, though not quite identical in its operations to the world He creates at the next moment, in the series of worlds ‘screened’ on the divine mind in succession.Footnote ²⁷ No momentary ‘world’ in the series of created ‘stills’ is qualitatively identical to the previous one since, according to Edwards, certain incremental differences are built into each ‘world’ in the series of momentary worlds God creates, in order to account for apparent motion and change from one moment to the next. The same would be true, by analogy, with the photographic stills that make up Gone with the Wind, or any other motion picture. As should be clear from the foregoing it is also true on the Edwardsian view that each momentary world created out of nothing by God is numerically distinct from the previous world, though qualitatively similar. God ensures that things seem to occur with regularity across time, so that things like the ‘law’ of gravity seem to obtain with regularity at different times. But in fact there is no law in operation distinct from God's decision to order successive worlds in this fashion, in accordance with His will and wisdom.Footnote ²⁸

This has very serious implications for Edwards's ontology, since occasionalism entails the denial of persistence through time as well as undercutting the reality of secondary causes. It is also difficult to see how it does not also destroy moral responsibility for created beings, since God is the sole cause of all that takes place, creatures being merely the ‘occasions’ of divine actions. But, strange to say, this also means that Lee's interpretation of Edwardsian ‘habit’ is not nearly radical enough in one respect: habits are nothing more than the immediate arbitrary operations of God in continuously creating successive numerically distinct but qualitatively identical (or nearly-identical) worlds, segueing them together seriatim as he sees fit.

Of course, if this is right (and I think it is indisputable that Edwards was an occasionalist), then there is literally no time in Edwards's ontology for any dispositional attributes to be realised since no created beings persist for long enough to perform any action; God is constantly recreating the world – or, in fact, facsimile worlds – out of nothing. In addition, no created being is a causal agent, strictly speaking, because no created being exists for long enough to cause any given act.Footnote ²⁹ But then, no created being can bring about any act that would include the realization of a dispositional state or attribute. In fact, there appears to be no way that Lee's interpretation of the Edwardsian ontology can even get off the ground if Edwards is an occasionalist. For then one of two possible outcomes must be true. Either no dispositional attributes can obtain, as per the Lee interpretation, or Edwards believed two contradictory things: that created entities are composed of dispositional ‘habits’ and that no created entities persist for long enough to have dispositional ‘habits’. This consideration alone is fatal to the Lee interpretation of Edwards's ontology.Footnote ³⁰

We come to the third contentious component of Lee's dispositional ontology, that is, the claim that the doctrine of substance does not play a significant ‘role’ in, and is effectively excised from, his metaphysics. We have already had cause to note that Lee cites ‘Of Atoms’ as an instance of where Edwards uses the language of substance but means by it something ‘radically new’ (PTJE, 49). But in fact, the relevant passage in ‘Of Atoms’ has to do with explaining the concepts of body and solidity, which Edwards says are immediate exercises of divine power. Philosophers, he maintains, have mistakenly thought there is some ‘unknown substance’ standing under, and in some fashion, ‘upholding’ the properties of a given thing. But, says Edwards, ‘solidity’ does this job without positing such a material substance.Footnote ³¹ However, he does not deny that there is (at least) one substance, namely, God, who is the ontological guarantor, as it were, of ideas like solidity and body. In a passage we have already had cause to cite, Edwards goes on to say:

This is echoed in his notebook ‘Things to be considered an[d] written fully about’ (Long Series), entry 44:

And,

But from this all that follows is that bodies are not proper substances and that, strictly speaking, only God is truly a substance, though there are created immaterial substances of a sort (e.g. souls).Footnote ³² Yet this is consistent with Berkeley-like idealism, and is an endorsement of the concept of substance, not a repudiation of it. That this is the right way to understand Edwards here is underscored by other passages in his early philosophical works, such as ‘Of Being’, where he remarks that the universe ‘exists nowhere but in the divine mind’. What is more:

The notion that the corporeal world is really only a shadow of the spiritual world is a common trope in Edwards's thought, as is his claim that God is the only true substance.Footnote ³³ But it is notable that in these passages Edwards makes ontological room, as it were, for created substances.Footnote ³⁴ This is consistent with his occasionalism, provided we understand Edwards to mean that God is, strictly speaking, the only true substance, and the only causal agent in the momentary world-stages He creates, coupled with the idea that created immaterial substances are, in a very real sense, only the occasions of God's action.Footnote ³⁵

Earlier, and following Lee, I noted the fact that Edwards's ontology evolves over the course of his early notebooks. This can be seen in ‘The Mind’, which is one of the last of his early philosophical works. There Edwards corrects his own earlier endorsement of Henry More's notion that God is space, to make his thinking consistent with his emerging idealism:

It is clear from Edwards's own work in this early period of his intellectual development that one issue much on his mind is the materialism of Thomas Hobbes, a matter of pressing concern to a number of Christian philosophers in the period, including Cambridge Platonists like More.Footnote ³⁷ Thus, for instance, in his early notebook of ‘Things to be considered an[d] written fully about”, item 26 reads, ‘To bring in an observation somewhere in a proper place, that instead of Hobbes’ notion that God is matter and that all substance is matter; that nothing that is matter can possibly be God, and that no matter is, in the most proper sense, matter' (YE6, 235).Footnote ³⁸ Edwards's considered response to this perceived threat was, like Berkeley, to opt for a version of idealism. What is interesting is the way in which Edwards tweaks his version of idealism so as to be consistent with occasionalism. I suggest that it is precisely in terms of his idealist occasionalism that Edwards's famous comments about matter and substance should be understood.

One of the most extensive discussions of substance in Edwards's early work can be found in ‘The Mind’, entry 61, entitled ‘SUBSTANCE’. But rather than supporting Lee's dispositional ontology, this entry only underlines Edwards's commitment to a version of idealism similar in many respects (though distinct from) that of Berkeley, along with a species of phenomenalism about the objects of perception. As with his other words noted previously, Edwards's chief object seems to be to establish that all phenomenal things, and all created entities, are upheld in being by a deity who is, in one important respect, prior to all created things.Footnote ³⁹ In the context of this reasoning he observes that by substance is meant ‘only “something,” because of abstract substance we have no idea that is more particular than only existence in general’ (YE6, 378). But this hardly constitutes a retreat from the doctrine of substance, and is in keeping with Locke's discussion of substance in the Essay II, XXIII.

Finally, in ‘Notes on knowledge and existence’, Edwards has a paragraph in answer to Hobbesian materialism. His answer to such materialist thinkers is ‘[t]hat all existence is perception. What we call body is nothing but a particular mode of perception; and what we call spirit is nothing but a composition and series of perceptions, or an universe of coexisting and successive perceptions connected by such wonderful methods and laws’ (YE6, 398). But since this is written just after Edwards's confession that God is ‘as it were the only substance’, this should surely be taken as an indication of Edwards's commitment to a mental phenomenalism, where all perceptible things are ideas, which is part and parcel of his idealism.