is no more real when rightly, than when wrongly, interpreted; while on the ground of liveliness and involuntariness it is as real when taken for a ghost as when referred to an excess of blood in the head. Berkeley retains this notion, only substituting ‘God’ for ‘body’. 189. As has been pointed out above, it is in respect not of the ‘ratio cognoscendi’ but of the ‘ratio essendi’ that Berkeley’s doctrine of reality differs from Locke’s. With him it is not as an effect of an outward body, but as an immediate effect of God, that an ‘idea of sense’ is real. Just as with Locke real ideas and matter serve each to explain the other, so with Berkeley do real ideas and God. If he is asked, What is God? the answer is, He is the efficient cause of real ideas; if he is asked, What are real ideas? the answer is, Those which God produces, as opposed to those which we make for ourselves. To the inevitable objection, that this is a logical see-saw, no effective answer can be extracted from Berkeley but this--that we have subjective tests of the reality of ideas apart from a knowledge of their cause. In his account of these Berkeley only differs from Locke in adding to the qualifications of liveliness and involuntariness those of ‘steadiness, order, and coherence’ in the ideas. This addition may mean either a great deal or very little. To us it may mean that the distinction of real and unreal is one that applies not to feelings but to the conceived relations of feelings; not to events as such, but to the intellectual interpretation of them. The occurrence of a feeling taken by itself (it may be truly said) is neither coherent nor incoherent; nor can the sequence of feelings one upon another with any significance be called coherence, since in that case an incoherence would be as impossible as any failure in the sequence. As little can we mean by such coherence an usual, by incoherence an unusual, sequence of feelings. If we did, every sequence not before experienced--such, for instance, as is exhibited by a new scientific experiment--being unusual, would have to be pronounced incoherent, and therefore unreal. Coherence, in short, we may conclude, is only predicable of a system of relations, not felt but conceived; while incoherence arises from the attempt of an imperfect intelligence to think an object under relations which cannot ultimately be held together in thought. The qualification then of ‘ideas’ as coherent has in truth no meaning unless ‘idea’ be taken to mean not _feeling_ but _conception_: and thus understood, the doctrine that coherent ideas _are_ (Berkeley happily excludes the notion that they merely _represent_) the real, amounts to a clear identification of the real with the world of conception. Not regarding the world as a system of intelligible relations, he could not regard God as the subject of it.