customer, who, when he could not avoid both horns of the dilemma, preferred to encounter the second as apparently the less mischievous of the two.
The first great point then, on which Berkeley differed from the ordinary philosophical doctrine, and sided with the vulgar, is that he contended, with the whole force of his intellect, for the inviolable identity of objects and the appearances of objects. The external world in itself, and the external world in relation to us, was a philosophic distinction which he refused to recognise. In his creed, the substantive and the phenomenal were one. And, though he has been accused of sacrificing the substance to the shadow—and though he still continues to be charged, by every philosophical writer, with reducing all things to ideas in the mind, he was guilty of no such absurdity, at least when interpreted by the spirit, if not by the letter of his speculations. Nay, the very letter of his philosophy, in general, forestalls, and bears him up against, all the cavils of his opponents. His own words, in answer to these allegations, are the following. "No," says he, addressing his antagonist Hylas, who is advocating the common opinion of philosophers, and pressing against him the objections we have spoken of—"No, I am not for changing things into ideas, but rather ideas into things; since those immediate objects of perception, which, according to you, are only appearances of things, I take to be the real things themselves."
"Things!" rejoins Hylas; "you may pretend what you please; but it is certain you leave us nothing but the empty forms of things, the outside of which only strikes the senses."
"What you," answers Berkeley, "what you call the empty forms and outside of things, seem to me the very things themselves. . . . We both, therefore, agree in this, that we perceive only sensible forms; but herein we differ, you will have them to be empty appearances, I, real beings. In short, you do not trust your senses, I do." [1]
So far, then, there does not appear to be much justice in the ordinary allegation, that Berkeley discredited the testimony of the senses, and denied the existence of the material universe. He merely denied the distinction between things and their appearances, and maintained that the thing was the appearance, and that the appearance was the thing. But this averment brings us into the very thick of the difficulties of the question. For does it not imply that the external world exists only in so far as it is perceived—that its esse, as Berkeley says, is percipi; that its existence is its being perceived, and that, if it were not perceived, it would not exist? At first sight the averment certainly does imply something very like all this; therefore, we must now be extremely cautious how we proceed.
We have already remarked that Berkeley, in vindicating the cause of common sense, frequently appeared to overshoot the mark, and to give vent to opinions which somewhat staggered even the simplest of the vulgar, and seemed less reconcilable with the obvious sentiments of nature, than the philosophical doctrines themselves which they were brought forward to supplant. And the opinion now stated is the most startling of these tenets, and one which, to all appearance, is calculated rather to endamage than to help the cause which it is intended to support. But, in advancing it, Berkeley knew perfectly well what he was about; and though he is far from having fenced it with all the requisite explanations—and though he did not succeed in putting it in a very clear light, or in giving it an adequate and ultimate form of expression—or in obviating all the cavils and strong objections to which it was exposed—or in sounding the depths of its almost unfathomable significance; still he felt, with the instinct of a prophet, that it was a stronghold of impregnable truth, and that in resting on it he was treading on a firm footing of fact which could never be swept away. Time, and the labours of his successors, have done for him what the span of one man's life,—
- ↑ Berkeley's Works; vol. i. p. 201. Ed. 1820.
and when at length, after a lapse of many years, the proper time for answering it arrived, on account of the general notoriety which it had suddenly obtained, that then Berkeley was no more.
