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 CHAPTER IV

MODERN THEORIES

may be thought that the objection taken above to parallelism and materialism is personal to myself, because I have put it forward as the consequence of my analysis of the respective shares of thought and matter in every act of cognition. This is not so. I am here in harmony with other philosophers who arrived at the same conclusions long before me, and it may be useful to quote them.

We will begin with the prince of idealists, Berkeley. “‘Everything you know or conceive other than spirits,’ says Philonous to Hylas, ‘is but your ideas; so then when you say that all ideas are occasioned by impressions made in the brain, either you conceive this brain or you do not. If you conceive it, you are in that case talking of ideas imprinted in an idea which is the cause of this very idea, which is absurd. If you do not conceive it, you are talking unintelligibly, you are not forming a reasonable hypothesis.’ ‘How can it be reasonable,’ he goes on to say, ‘to think that the brain, which is a sensible thing, i.e.