6 - From Berkeley to Hume: The Radicalization of Empiricism

Summary

ALL THE OBJECTS OF UNDERSTANDING ARE ONLY IDEAS

In 1710, the twenty-five year old George Berkeley (1685–1753) was ordained a priest of the Church of England; he would eventually be appointed Bishop of Cloyne in 1734. And in that same twenty-fifth year he published his landmark philosophical work, the Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. At the head of this work, Berkeley declares the purpose of his book to be the philosophical defense of the fundamental concepts of religion:

WHAT I here make public has, after a long and scrupulous inquiry, seemed to me evidently true and not unuseful to be known—particularly to those who are tainted with Scepticism, or want a demonstration of the existence and immateriality of God, or the natural immortality of the soul.

Berkeley had in the previous year established his credentials in the modern sciences with the publication of his book, A New Theory of Vision. His defense of religion therefore would be in the spirit of the new sciences. When a certain philosophical prejudice has been removed, he argued, it will be clear that the new sciences are completely consistent with the fundamental principles of religion and spirituality. All that is needed is to eliminate an illusory philosophical concept that has been the mainstay of atheists of all stripes—the concept that all reality is based on unconscious, inert matter. All that is needed to staunch the growth of skepticism and put down the threat of atheism is to show that, contrary to certain appearances, not only does the sun not revolve around the earth, but that neither the sun nor the earth have any existence at all outside of their being objects of human consciousness.

On the Berkeleyan grounds that to be is to be perceived, there are no independently existing sun and earth, or any of the planets and galaxies, except as objects of perception. If this can be demonstrated, the atheist's claim that the world is a blindly evolving result of interactions of unconscious material particles, and that the human mind is but an unreal phantasm floating absurdly on its surface, will have been utterly demolished.