Whereas Locke, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz believed that the physical world is real, Berkeley questioned that we actually perceive matter. He believed we do not perceive matter as solid because perception itself is not physical. Perception and every-thing else is God’s spirit. Berkeley is noted for saying, “To be is to be perceived.”
Berkeley’s Life
George Berkeley (pronounced Bark-lee) (1685–1753) was born in Ireland. At age 15, he entered Trinity College in Dublin to study philosophy. While there, he became a fellow of the college and an ordained Anglican priest.
For 11 years after graduation, he traveled widely and met many of the thinkers of the day, including Joseph Addison and
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Jonathan Swift. During his stay in London, he asked Parliament to fi nance his project of founding a college in Bermuda to teach the Gospel and English manners to the “American savages.”
With the promise of fi nancial support, he and his wife sailed for Th e British Empiricists
George Berkeley believed everything that exists has a mind, or depends for its existence on a mind. Berkeley took the bold position that physical objects, or matter, do not exist. Berkeley’s belief regarding the nature of objects is called “immaterialism.”
America. After arriving in Rhode Island, he waited three years for the money but it never arrived. Finally, he gave up and re-turned to Ireland to become the bishop of Cloyne.
Berkeley opposed scientifi c materialism because he saw sci-ence as dangerous to the Christian way of life and as a threat to faith in God. God, he said, created nature and preserves nature.
Science interferes with God’s creation. Berkeley proposed edu-cation as a cure to poverty and promoted the medicinal value of “tar-water,” which he made from pine tree pitch, a remedy he learned from the American Indians. In fact, he often prescribed tar-water to members of his diocese as a cure for illness as well as aches and pains.
When his oldest son died, Berkeley and his family moved to Oxford, where another son attended college. A year later, at age 68, Berkeley died unexpectedly. In his will, he asked that his body not be buried “until it grows off ensive by the cadaverous smell.” We do not know whether his family waited that long.
One of the United States’ leading university towns, Berke-ley, California, is named for him. His Rhode Island home, White Hall, was designated a United States First National Monument and still stands today.
To Be Is to Be Perceived
As an empiricist, Berkeley agreed with Locke that we could only know what we perceive through the senses. Yet, Berkeley went a step further when he added that we do not perceive matter. We do not see physical objects as solid because our perception itself is not a material thing.
We do, he said, experience sensations or ideas such as color, taste, smell, size, and shape. Yet, objects that do not have color, taste, smell, size, and shape cannot exist because we fi nd no matter in them. Physical objects, then, are clusters of ideas or sensations, and only exist when a mind perceives them.
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His thinking produced the shocking conclusion, “To be is to be perceived.” Th is conclusion means that, when we do not perceive an object, we have no idea if it exists or not.
Th rough the eyes of Berkeley’s philosophy, when a person looks at a dog on a sofa, he or she experiences the sensation of seeing a dog on the sofa. Th e dog that appears in the person’s perception is an idea and not physical matter. Th e dog and the sofa consist of the same ingredients as his or her sensation. All physical things such as computers, books, apples, horses, and people exist only if there is some mind to perceive them.
Berkeley did not deny that the physical world exists. If it did not exist, we could not experience it. He said this, however:
Matter that makes up the physical world is not a true substance.
Th e only true substance is the substance of God and the human mind, which is a thinking substance. No unthinking substance exists. Th is line of reasoning puts Berkeley in the philosophical school called idealism, in which spirit is reality.
Yet, if “to be is to be perceived,” what happens to the dog and the sofa when the person leaves the room? What happens to any object when there is no one around to perceive it?
Over a century after Berkeley put forth this question, Ron-ald Knox, an English theologian and writer, created the follow-ing two-part limerick and posted it on a tree in a college quad:
Th ere was a young man who said, “God Must think it exceedingly odd
If he fi nds that this tree Continues to be
When there’s no one about in the Quad.”
(the reply):
Dear Sir: Your astonishment’s odd:
I am always about in the Quad.
And that’s why this tree Th e British Empiricists
Will continue to be, Since observed by
Yours faithfully, God.
“God’s” reply in the limerick was how Berkeley would an-swer the fi rst part of the limerick; namely, that objects exter-nal to our minds exist when we do not see them. Th ere exists, Berkeley said, an “omnipresent eternal mind” that knows every-thing and reveals it to our view. Everyevery-thing we see and feel is “an eff ect of God’s power.” Th e whole world and our whole life exist only in the mind of God.