Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/237

 BERKELEY. 215 relativity alone would forbid us to consider them objective. And material substances, the "support " of qualities invented by the philosophers, are not only unknown, but entirely non- existent. Abstract matter is a phrase without meaning, and individual things are collections of ideas in us, nothing more. If we take away all sense-qualities from a thing, abso- lutely nothing remains. Our ideas are not merely the only objects of knowledge, but also the only existing things — nothing exists except minds mid their ideas. Spirits alone are active beings, they only are indivisible substances, and have real existence, while the being of bodies (as dependent, inert, variable beings, which are in a constant process of becoming) consists alone in their appearance to spirits and their being perceived by them. Incogitative, hence passive, beings are neither substances, nor capable of producing ideas in us. Those ideas which we do not ourselves produce are the effects of a spirit which is mightier than we. With this a second inconsistency was removed which had been over- looked by Locke, who had ascribed active power to spirits alone and denied it to matter, but at the same time had made the former affected by the latter. If external sense is to mean the capacity for having ideas occasioned by the action of external material things, then there is no external sense. A third point wherein Locke had not gone far enough for his successor, concerned the favorite English doctrine of nominalism. Locke, with his predecessors, had maintained that all reality is individual, and that universals exist only in the abstracting understanding. From this point Berkeley advances a step further, the last, indeed, which was possible in this direction, by bringing into question the possibility even of abstract ideas. As all beings are particu- lar things, so all ideas are particular ideas. Berkeley looks on the refutation of these two fundamen- tal mistakes — the assumption of general ideas in the mind, and the belief in the existence of a material world outside it — as his life work, holding them the chief sources of atheism, doubt, and philosophical discord. The first of these errors arises from the use of language. Because we employ words which denote more than one object, we have believed our- selves warranted in concluding that we have ideas which