173. His purpose was the maintenance of Theism, and a true instinct told him that pure Theism, as distinct from nature-worship and daemonism, has no philosophical foundation, unless it can be shown that there is nothing real apart from thought. But in the hurry of theological advocacy, and under the influence of a misleading terminology, he failed to distinguish this true proposition--there is nothing real apart from thought--from this false one, its virtual contradictory--there is nothing other than feeling. The confusion was covered, if not caused, by the ambiguity, often noticed, in the use of the term ‘idea.’ This to Berkeley’s generation stood alike for feeling proper, which to the subject that merely feels is neither outer nor inner, because not referring itself to either mind or thing, and for conception, or an object thought of under relations. According to Locke, pain, colour, solidity, are all ideas equally with each other and equally with the _idea of_ pain, _idea of_ colour, _idea of_ solidity. If all alike, however, were feelings proper, there would be no world either to exist or be spoken of. Locke virtually saves it by two suppositions, each incompatible with the equivalence of idea to feeling, and implying the conversion of it into conception as above defined. One is that there are abstract ideas; the other that there are primary qualities of which ideas are copies, but which do not come and go with our feelings. The latter supposition gives a world that ‘really exists,’ the former a world that may be known and spoken of; but neither can maintain itself without a theory of conception which is not forthcoming in Locke himself. We need not traverse again the contradictions which according to his statement they involve--contradictions which, under whatever disguise, must attach to every philosophy that admits a reality either in things as apart from thought or in thought as apart from things, and only disappear when the thing as thought of, and through thought individualised by the relations which constitute its community with the universe, is recognised as alone the real. Misled by the phrase ‘idea of a thing,’ we fancy that idea and thing have each a separate reality of their own, and then puzzle ourselves with questions as to how the idea can represent the thing--how the ideas of primary qualities can be copies of them, and how, if the real thing of experience be merely individual, a general idea can be abstracted from it. These questions Berkeley asked and found unanswerable. There were then two ways of dealing with them before him. One was to supersede them by a truer view of thought and its object, as together in essential correlation constituting the real; but this way he did not take. The other was to avoid them by merging both thing and idea in the indifference of simple feeling. For a merely sentient being, it is true--for one who did not think upon his feelings--the oppositions of inner and outer, of subjective