187. Now this passage clearly does not mean--as it ought to mean if the ‘_esse_’ of the motion were the ‘_percipi_’ by us--that the motion of the earth would begin as soon as we were there to see it. It means that it is now going on as an ‘established law of nature,’ which may be ‘collected from the phenomena.’ In other words, it means that our successive feelings are so related to each other as determined by one present and permanent system, on which not they only but all possible feelings depend, that by a certain set of them we are led--not to expect a recurrence of them in like order according to the laws of association, but, what is the exact reverse of this--to infer that certain other feelings, of which we have no experience, would now occur to us if certain conditions of situation on our part were fulfilled, because the ‘ordo ad universum,’ of which these feelings would be the ‘ordo ad nos,’ does now obtain. But though Berkeley’s words mean this for us, they did not mean it for him. That such relation--merely intelligible, or according to his phraseology not an idea or object of an idea at all, as he must have admitted it to be--gives to our successive feelings the only ‘nature’ that they possess, he never recognised. By the relation of idea to idea, as he repeatedly tells us, he meant not a ‘necessary connexion,’ _i.e._ not a relation without which, neither idea would be what it is, but such _de facto_ sequence of one upon the other as renders the occurrence of one the unfailing but arbitrary sign that the other is coming. It is thus according to him (and here Hume merely followed suit) that feelings are symbolical--symbolical not of an order other than the feelings and which accounts for them, but simply of feelings to follow. To Berkeley, indeed, unlike Hume, the sequence of feelings symbolical of each other is also symbolical of something farther, viz. the mind of God: but when we examine what this ‘mind’ means, we find that it is not an intelligible order by which our feelings may be interpreted, or the spiritual subject of such an order, but simply the arbitrary will of a creator that this feeling shall follow that. Locke had explained reality by relation of ideas to outward body. Liveliness in the idea evidence of this relation.