working through a similar family of deep troubles. The similarity in the context
is that here too a rationalized monotheism was confronted with a conception
of an independently existing—that is, created, not emanated—material world.^25
In Islam, the naturalism was already present in the commonsensical religious
texts of anthropomorphic monotheism, while the rationalism grew with philo-
sophical debate. In Europe, philosophical rationalism was long-standing from
the first textual imports onward, while naturalist materialism came to the fore
with the overthrow of Neoplatonism and Aristoteleanism around 1600. Des-
cartes now brought out the two-substance problem in full force. Debate, which
always takes off from a successful new focus of the attention space, flamed up
over fruitful inconsistencies in Descartes’s position. The result was an array of
solutions: Malebranche and Geulincx formulated an occasionalism of time-in-
stants constantly re-created by God; Spinoza avoided two-substance dilemmas
by positing a single substance with mental and material aspects; Leibniz for-
mulated a plurality of self-enclosed monads linked by a pre-established har-
mony. Concentrated in this generation are parallels to positions laid out in
Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic philosophy at points where the same deep trouble
was confronted.
The same circle of problems in Islamic and European networks results in
the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Locke reconciles the
plurality of substances by translating them into ideas originating in the senses.
Instead of material substance there are simple ideas containing the relations of
extension and motion. From these in turn the mind generates the secondary
qualities characterizing the visible world. The AshÀarites had come to a similar
conclusion: primary attributes of motion, rest, and location always accompany
substance, while other attributes are derivative of these. The AshÀarites arrived
at this conception through the theological debates of the MuÀtazilites, from
whom they had split. Locke’s primary-secondary distinction is often interpreted
as an early formulation of the scientific standpoint, in which physics generates
the subjective qualities of human experience. The Islamic comparison shows
us something deeper: much the same distinction can be produced by theological
issues; and in fact the same range of theological-philosophical deep troubles
were the context in which Locke’s formulation emerged as well.
Locke’s solution was unstable, which is to say, the deep troubles it con-
tained were taken up again in the following generation. Berkeley (along with
several figures overshadowed by him, Collier and Norris) stressed that there
is no direct evidence of any substance at all underlying the visible qualities of
experience, nor of bare primary qualities shorn of secondary qualities such as
color. The order of the world can be attributed instead to the constant inter-
vention of God. This is a version of the occasionalist position, except that
instead of intervening to establish the connection between physical and mental
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^843