active power to produce our ideas, which is not to be found in ideas themselves, for we are conscious that they are inert, nor in matter, since that is but a name for a bundle of ideas; which must therefore be in spirit, since of that we are conscious as active; yet not in the spirit of which we are conscious, since then there would be no difference between real and imaginary ideas; therefore in a Divine Spirit, to whom, however, may forthwith be ascribed the attributes of the spirit of which we are conscious.’ Such is the sum of Berkeley’s natural theology. [1] Above, paragraph 180. [2] [Greek μέγα ζῶον (mega zoon) = great being. Tr.] ... a necessity which Hume does not see. A different turn should have been given to his idealism, if it was to serve his purpose. 194. From a follower of Hume it of course invites the reply that he does not see the necessity of an active power at all, to which, since, according to Berkeley’s own showing, it is no possible ‘idea’ or object of an idea, all his own polemic against the ‘absolute idea’ of matter is equally applicable; that the efficient power, of which we profess to be conscious in ourselves, is itself only a name for a particular feeling or impression which precedes certain other of our impressions; that, even if it were more than this, the transition from the spiritual efficiency of which we are conscious to another, of which it is the special differentia that we are not conscious of it, would be quite illegitimate, and that thus in saying that certain feelings are real because, being lively and involuntary, they must be the work of this unknown spirit, we in effect say nothing more than that they are real because lively and involuntary. Against a retort of this kind Berkeley’s theistic armour is even less proof than Locke’s. His ‘proof of the being of God’ is in fact Locke’s with the sole _nervus probandi_ left out. The value of Locke’s proof, as an argument from their being something now to their having been something from eternity, lay, we saw, in its convertibility into an argument from the world as a system of relations to a present and eternal subject of those relations. For its being so convertible there was this to be said, that Locke, with whatever inconsistency, at least recognised the constitution of reality by permanent relations, though he treated the mere relation of external efficiency--that in virtue of which we say of nature that it consists of bodies outward to and acting on each other--as if it alone constituted the reality of the world. Berkeley’s reduction of the ‘primary qualities of matter’ to a succession of feelings logically effaces this relation, and puts nothing intelligible, nothing but a name, in its place. The effacement of the distinction between the real and unreal, which would properly ensue, is only prevented by bringing back relation to something under the name of God, either wholly unknown and indeterminate, or else, under a thin