The Works of George Berkeley. Vol. 1 of 4: Philosophical Works, 1705-21Berkeley, George
Philosophy
The Works of George Berkeley. Vol. 1 of 4: Philosophical Works, 1705-21
Berkeley, George
Philosophy -- Early works to 1800
If Berkeley does not say all this,
his New Principles tend thus.
At any rate, in his reasoned exposition of his Principles he is anxious to
distinguish those phenomena that are presented to the senses of all
mankind from the private ideas or fancies of individual men (sect. 28-33).
The former constitute the world which sentient beings realise in common.
He calls them _ideas_ because they are unrealisable without percipient
mind; but still on the understanding that they are not to be confounded
with the chimeras of imagination. They are more deeply and truly real than
chimeras. The groups in which they are found to coexist are the individual
things of sense, whose fixed order of succession exemplifies what we call
natural law, or natural causation: the correlation of their changes to our
pleasures and pains, desires and aversions, makes scientific knowledge of
their laws practically important to the life of man, in his embodied
state.
Moreover, the real ideas presented to our senses, unlike those of
imagination, Berkeley would imply, cannot be either representative or
misrepresentative. Our imagination may mislead us: the original data of
sense cannot: although we may, and often do, misinterpret their relations
to one another, and to our pleasures and pains and higher faculties. The
divine meaning with which they are charged, of which science is a partial
expression, they may perhaps be said to represent. Otherwise
representative sense-perception is absurdity: the ideas of sense cannot be
representative in the way those of imagination are; for fancies are faint
representations of data of sense. The appearances that sentient
intelligence realises _are_ the things of sense, and we cannot go deeper.
If we prefer accordingly to call the material world a dream or a chimera,
we must understand that it is the _reasonable_ dream in which all sentient
intelligence participates, and by which the embodied life of man must be
regulated.
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