'Phil. As I am no sceptic with regard to the nature of things, so neither am I as to their existence. That a thing should be really perceived by my senses, and at the same time not really exist is to me a plain contradiction; since I cannot prescind or abstract even in thought, the existence of a sensible thing from its being perceived. Wood, stones, fire, water, flesh, iron, and the like things, which I name and discourse of, are things that I know. And I should not have known them but that I perceived them by my senses; and things perceived by the senses are immediately perceived; and things immediately perceived are ideas; and ideas cannot exist without the mind; their existence therefore consists in being perceived; when therefore they are actually perceived there can be no doubt of their existence.... I might as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things I actually see and feel.
'Hyl. Not so fast, Philonous; you say you cannot conceive how sensible things should exist without the mind. Do you not?
'Phil. I do.
'Hyl. Supposing you were annihilated, cannot you conceive it possible that things perceivable by sense may still exist?
'Phil. I can; but then it must be in another mind. When I deny sensible things an existence out of the mind, I do not mean my mind in particular, but all minds. Now, it is plain they have an existence exterior to my mind; since I find them by experience to be independent of it. There is therefore some other mind wherein they exist, during the intervals between the times of my perceiving them; as likewise they did before my birth, and would do after my supposed annihilation. And as the same is true with regard to all other finite created spirits, it necessarily follows there is an omnipresent, eternal Mind, which knows and comprehends all things, and exhibits them to our view in such a manner, and according to such rules, as He Himself hath ordained, and are by us termed the Laws of Nature.'
'Truth is the cry of all,' says Berkeley in the final paragraph of Siris, 'but the game of a few. Certainly, where it is the chief passion, it doth not give way to vulgar cares and views, nor is it contented with a little ardour, active perhaps to pursue, but not so fit to weigh and revise. He that would make a real progress in knowledge, must dedicate his age as well as youth, the latter growth as well as firstfruits at the altar of truth.'
Elsewhere in this famous treatise he writes:
'It cannot be denied that with respect to the universe of things we in this mortal state are like men educated in Plato's cave, looking on shadows with our backs turned to the light. But though our light be dim and our situation bad, yet if the best use be made of both, perhaps something may be seen. Proclus, in his commentary on the theology of Plato, observes there are two sorts of philosophers. The one placed body first in the order of beings, and made the faculty of thinking depend thereupon, supposing that the principles of all things are corporeal; that body most really or principally exists, and all other things in a secondary sense and by virtue of that. Others making all corporeal things to be dependent upon soul or mind, think this to exist in the first place, and primary senses and the being of bodies to be altogether derived from, and presuppose that of the mind.'
This was Berkeley's creed, and his great aim throughout is to prove the phenomenal nature of the things of sense, or in other words the non-existence of independent matter. He makes, he says, not the least question that the things we see and touch really exist, but what he does question is the existence of matter apart from its perception to the mind. Hobbes said that the body accounted for the mind, and that matter was the deepest thing in the universe, while to Berkeley the only true reality consists in what is spiritual and eternal.
'The great idealist,' says an able writer, 'certainly never denied the existence of matter in the sense in which Johnson understood it. As the touched, the seen, the heard, the smelled, the tasted, he admitted and maintained its existence as readily and completely as the most illiterate and unsophisticated of mankind,' and he adds that the peculiar endowment for which Berkeley was distinguished 'far beyond his predecessors and contemporaries, and far beyond almost every philosopher who has succeeded him, was the eye he had for facts, and the singular pertinacity with which he refused to be dislodged from his hold upon them.'[62]