George Berkeley
Refusing the invisible material support supposed to lie behind things: nothing but minds and their ideas, and God to keep the world from vanishing when we stop looking at it.
Irish · 1685 – 1753
Anglican bishop and Anglo-Irish philosopher, the third great name of British alongside and . Born near Kilkenny and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, he published his decisive works while still young, the and the , before long travels, a failed plan for a missionary college in Bermuda, a stay in Rhode Island, and finally the bishopric of Cloyne. Taking up Locke's empiricism in order to radicalise it, he drew an unexpected conclusion: if every idea comes from the senses, the idea of a matter existing outside any mind is an empty word. Hence his , long caricatured as a denial of the world, which Samuel Johnson thought to refute by kicking a stone, and which and then had to confront at close quarters.
There is no matter: to be is to be perceived, and bodies are only ordered collections of ideas in minds.
If things exist when no human perceives them, an infinite mind perceives them all: the world is the language by which God speaks to us.
It is matter that breeds scepticism: remove that veil between us and things, and perception becomes secure knowledge again.
One cannot form the idea of a triangle that is no particular triangle: are a fiction, and it is this fiction that forged the empty concept of matter.
It is by keeping faith with experience alone, against himself, that one discovers nothing exists outside minds and their ideas.
Justification
All knowledge arises from experience: for Berkeley there are only ideas received through the senses or reflected upon, and no . This is 's strict empiricism, but carried further than Locke took it: Berkeley refuses even the remnant of a beyond-experience that Locke had let stand, matter as an unknown substratum. The sensible is given in full, with nothing behind it, which paradoxically leads this uncompromising empiricism to an anti-materialist metaphysics: it is by keeping faith with experience alone that one discovers there are only minds and ideas.
Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction and §§1-2
Justification
Berkeley takes scepticism to be the disease to cure, and immaterialism to be its remedy. Modern doubt, he says, springs entirely from matter: once one posits real things hidden behind our ideas, one can never know whether our ideas resemble them, hence the veil of perception into which the sceptic rushes. Remove that unknowable matter, and the gap vanishes: things are no more than what we perceive, immediately and with certainty. Far from the rationalist dogmatism of , who grounds certainty on reason, Berkeley relocates it in sensible perception itself, made secure because there is no longer anything outside it to miss.
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Preface and III · Principles of Human Knowledge, §§86-88
Justification
The introduction to the opens with a polemic against 's : one cannot, Berkeley argues, form the idea of a triangle that is neither equilateral nor scalene, nor of a colour that is no particular colour. Every idea is particular; a word becomes general not because it signifies an abstract essence but because a particular sign stands indifferently for all the individuals resembling it. This is an outright nominalism, and it is not incidental: for Berkeley it is precisely the belief in abstractions that had made it possible to forge the empty concept of matter, the idea of a thing stripped of every perceived quality.
Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, §§6-20
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Justification
In De Motu, Berkeley anticipates scientific : the force, attraction and absolute space of Newton's mechanics are not hidden realities that physics would uncover but convenient terms, calculational fictions that let us predict and order phenomena. The physicist does not unveil real causes; he establishes rules of use among signs. This distrust of science's claim to describe a mind-independent structure of the world removes him from scientific realism, without amounting to a social constructivism: it is idealism that gives it its colour.
De Motu (On Motion), §§1-6 and 35-42
Justification
If bodies are passive, made of inert ideas, then that which perceives and wills must be of a wholly different nature: an active, simple and indivisible substance, which Berkeley calls spirit or soul. The self is therefore not one idea among ideas but that which has them and acts upon them, known not by perception but by a we have of our own activity. Here is a sharp break with , who in introspection will find only a of perceptions with no subject: for Berkeley, to remove the perceiving subject would be to remove that without which no idea would exist at all. The self as substance is saved at the very point where matter as substance is denied.
Principles of Human Knowledge, §§2, 27 and 139-142 · Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, III
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Justification
My own body does not escape the general rule: it is, like any body, a collection of sensible ideas that I perceive. What is me is never this perceived body but the active mind that perceives and moves it. The body thus stays on the side of the object, instrument and sensible appearance rather than subject of my experience, which places Berkeley near the body-as-instrument, even though he developed no philosophy of the lived body.
Principles of Human Knowledge, §§135-141
Justification
Berkeley starts from a simple empiricist remark: whatever I have an idea of, I have it through the senses, hence as a perception. But to posit, behind my perceptions, a matter that would exist without being perceived is to posit the idea of a thing of which, by definition, I can have no idea: a contradiction. He thus turns 's empiricism against matter itself: what we call bodies is only an ordered collection of sensible ideas, and for them to exist is to be perceived. What remains is that which perceives, the mind, the one genuine substance. Far from denying the world, he claims to save it from scepticism by removing the veil of an unknowable matter set between us and it.
Their being is to be perceived; nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds which perceive them.Principles of Human Knowledge, §3
Principles of Human Knowledge, §§3-7 · Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, I
Justification
Immaterialism makes God indispensable, and Berkeley turns this into a new proof of his existence. My sensible ideas do not depend on my will: I do not open my eyes without seeing what forces itself on me, in a constant order I did not make. If to exist, for things, is to be perceived, and if they persist when no human perceives them, then there must be an infinite mind that perceives them all and sustains them: God. The world becomes the language God speaks to us, his ideas imprinted on us according to regular laws. A theism, then, deeply affirmed and of a rare kind, where God is not only creator but continual perceiver, guarantor of the existence and the order of the real.
Principles of Human Knowledge, §§25-33 and §§146-149 · Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, II
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Justification
The real does not stand on its own: both its existence and its order rest at every instant on a mind that surpasses and sustains it. God is not an immanent force diffused through nature, in the manner of , but a personal mind, distinct from the world, of which bodies are only the sensible discourse. The sacred, for Berkeley, thus lies on the side of what transcends perceived nature, even as God makes himself everywhere present by speaking to us ceaselessly through it.
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, II · Principles of Human Knowledge, §§146-149
Justification
A bishop as much as a philosopher, Berkeley sees no opposition between well-conducted reason and faith: his immaterialism presents itself as a rational demonstration that issues in the existence of God and defends religion against the free-thinkers. Reason, far from threatening faith, would be its natural ally once freed from matter, the mother of scepticism and irreligion. This confidence in the agreement of reason and revelation ranges him on the side of harmony, in the line of an , rather than of a fideism of the leap.
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Preface · Principles of Human Knowledge, §§133-156
Justification
For Berkeley sensible ideas are utterly inert: an idea can produce nothing, so no body is ever a true cause. The only real causality is that of a will, and we experience it solely in the activity of a mind. The regularity of nature is therefore not a mechanical chain of impacts but the constant order by which God, the one cause, produces our ideas in us: what we take for natural causes are merely the regular signs of effects to come. Nature thus receives a finalist reading, governed by the ends of an ordering mind, against the mechanism of , for whom matter acts by its motion alone.
Principles of Human Knowledge, §§25-33 and §§60-66