The great Idealist certainly never denied the existence of matter in the sense in which Johnson understood it. As the touched, the seen, the heard, the smelled, and the tasted, he admitted and maintained its existence as readily and completely as the most illiterate and unsophisticated of mankind.
In what sense, then, was it that Berkeley denied the existence of matter? He denied it not in the sense in which the multitude understood it, but solely in the sense in which philosophers[1] understood and explained it. And what was it that philosophers understood by matter? They understood by it an occult something which, in itself, is not touched, not seen, not heard, not smelled, and not tasted; a phantom-world lying behind the visible and tangible universe, and which, though constituting in their estimation the sum and substance of all reality, is yet never itself brought within the sphere or apprehension of the senses. Thus, under the direction of a misguided imagination, they fancied that the sensible qualities which we perceive in things were copies of other occult qualities of which we have no perception, and that the whole sensible world was the unsubstantial representation of another and real world, hidden entirely from observation, and inaccessible to all our faculties.
Now it was against this metaphysical phantom of
- ↑ Berkeley's Works: 'Of the Principles of Human Knowledge,' sec. 35, 37, 56. First Dialogue, vol. i. pp. 110, 111. Second Dialogue, vol. i. p. 159. Third Dialogue, vol. i. p. 199, 222. Ed. 1820.
