Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/311

Rh thus, as he would undoubtedly have done had he been alive, for such a reply is in harmony with the whole spirit of his philosophy, we do not, indeed, see what Hume, with all his subtle dialect, could have made of him. But the champion of common sense, he alone who could have foiled the prince of sceptics at his own weapons, was dead, and the cause had fallen into the hands of Dr Reid, a far easier customer, who, when he could not avoid both horns of the dilemma, preferred to encounter the second, as apparently the less mischievous of the two.

The first great point, then, on which Berkeley differed from the ordinary philosophical doctrine, and sided with the vulgar, is that he contended, with the whole force of his intellect, for the inviolable identity of objects and the appearances of objects. The external world in itself, and the external world in relation to us, was a philosophic distinction which he refused to recognise. In his creed, the substantive and the phenomenal were one. And, though he has