Berkeley's imagination

Ian Tipton

pp. 85-102

in: Ernest Sosa (ed), Essays on the philosophy of George Berkeley, Berlin, Springer, 1987

Abstract

In Principles, 22-3, and in a parallel passage in the Dialogues,¹ Berkeley presents an argument that is important in his eyes because he thinks, or appears to think, that it is sufficient to establish his immaterialism. He is, he says, "content to put the whole" upon the issue of whether his reader can "conceive it possible for one extended moveable substance, or in general, for any one idea or any thing like an idea, to exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving it." The reader, or Hylas in the Dialogues, has only to look into his own thoughts to find the answer. To be sure, one can frame the idea of books. or trees without framing the idea of any onlooker, but that does not do the trick. "… it only shows you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind; but it doth not shew that you can conceive it possible, the objects of your thought may exist without the mind: to make out this, it is necessary that you conceive them existing unconceived or unthought of, which is a manifest repugnancy."

Cited authors

Berkeley George