How Matter Breeds Doubt
The sceptic’s move is to drive a wedge between appearance and reality: we perceive only ideas, but the real things are material substances behind them, forever hidden. Berkeley accepts the first half and rejects the second. If the real things just are the ideas we perceive, the wedge cannot be inserted — there is no unperceived original to fall short of.
The Wager on Conceivability
Philonous rests everything on a single test: can Hylas frame in thought the very thing he asserts — an abstract idea of unperceived existence?
If you can frame in your thoughts a distinct ABSTRACT IDEA of motion or extension, divested of all those sensible modes, as swift and slow, great and small, round and square, and the like, which are acknowledged to exist only in the mind, I will then yield the point you contend for.
Certainty Regained
By collapsing the gap between what we perceive and what is, Berkeley claims to restore certainty. We are not trapped behind a veil of ideas guessing at things-in-themselves; the ideas are the things. The atheist’s refuges — an eternal succession of unthinking causes, a fortuitous concourse of atoms — are overthrown at a stroke, because nothing sensible can exist without a mind, and the sensible world’s existence therefore points straight to God.
The anti-sceptical aim is announced in the full title and argued across all three Dialogues.
Related Concepts
