We have remarked that one of the presuppositions of this period of the Enlightenment is the independence of the individual. The individual around which Berkeley’s philosophy centres is the spiritual individual, and is therefore unique even for this period. Such an individual is superior to his environment because he belongs not to a material world, but to a community of religious beings who can talk and walk with God. The English Enlightenment passed from Locke to Berkeley. The inner life came into complete ascendency and the spiritual individual emerged. From the Lockian philosophy, with its many contradictory motives, there appeared the audacious one-sided philosophy of Berkeley, with its proclamation of the reign of spirituality. It stood in marked contrast with the development of the Enlightenment in France――a development of materialism and material atoms. The spectral although stubborn boundaries of the unknowable material world, which Locke supposed to shut around the powers of the human intellect, crumbled before the hand of Berkeley. The casual reader of the history of thought is, however, often disconcerted at the appearance of such a philosophy as Berkeley’s in this period of empiricism, and especially as the immediate follower of Locke. The English school is called the empirical school, and yet Berkeley is also called an idealist. But we must remember that empiricism and idealism are not antithetical. Empiricism refers to the source of our knowledge; it means that all our knowledge is primarily derived from sense-perceptions. These sense-perceptions may be of two kinds: they may be (1) psychological facts, or (2) material facts. Berkeley was, like Locke and Hume, an empiricist of the first class; and yet because he denied the independent existence of material facts, he was also an idealist. He was an empirical idealist, just as the French philosophers of the Enlightenment were empirical materialists. The critic may find that Berkeley is not a consistent empiricist, to be sure, but neither was Locke. Berkeley started out by affirming the testimony of experience against scholastic ♦speculation and abstraction; yet all along he assumed the scholastic conception of mind. Nevertheless, this assumption of the individual makes Berkeley a true child of the Enlightenment.[41]