Philosophy and Religion | Page 9

that only means, Berkeley
explains, that if we or any one else were to come back into the room,
we should perceive them. Moreover, even in thinking of them as things
which might be perceived under certain conditions, they have entered
our minds and so proclaimed their ideal or mind-implying character. To
prove that things exist without the mind we should have to conceive of
things as unconceived or unthought of. And that is a feat which no one
has ever yet succeeded in accomplishing.
Here is Berkeley's own answer to the objection:
'But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees,
for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to
perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it; but
what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind certain
ideas which you call books and trees, and {15} at the same time
omitting to frame the idea of any one that may perceive them? But do
not you yourself perceive or think of them all the while? This therefore
is nothing to the purpose: it only shews you have the power of
imagining or forming ideas in your mind; but it does 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.
When we do our utmost to conceive the existence of external bodies,
we are all the while only contemplating our own ideas. But the mind,
taking no notice of itself, is deluded to think it can and does conceive
bodies existing unthought of or without the mind, though at the same
time they are apprehended by, or exist in, itself. A little attention will
discover to any one the truth and evidence of what is here said, and
make it unnecessary to insist on any other proofs against the existence
of material substance.'[5]
Berkeley no doubt did not adequately appreciate the importance of the
distinction between mere sensations and mental relations. In the

paragraph which I have read to you he tends to explain space away into
mere subjective feelings: in this respect and in many others he has been
corrected by Kant and the post-Kantian Idealists. Doubtless we cannot
analyse away our conception of space or of substance into mere
feelings. But relations imply mind no less than sensations. Things are
no mere {16} bundles of sensations; we do think of them as objects or
substances possessing attributes. Indeed to call them (with Berkeley),
'bundles of sensations' implies that the bundle is as important an
element in thinghood as the sensations themselves. The bundle implies
what Kant would call the intellectual 'categories' of Substance, Quantity,
Quality, and the like. We do think objects: but an object is still an
object of thought. We can attach no intelligible meaning to the term
'object' which does not imply a subject.
If there is nothing in matter, as we know it, which does not obviously
imply mind, if the very idea of matter is unintelligible apart from mind,
it is clear that matter can never have existed without mind.
What then, it may be asked, of the things which no human eye has ever
seen or even thought of? Are we to suppose that a new planet comes
into existence for the first time when first it sails into the telescope of
the astronomer, and that Science is wrong in inferring that it existed not
only before that particular astronomer saw it, but before there were any
astronomers or other human or even animal intelligences upon this
planet to observe it? Did the world of Geology come into existence for
the first time when some eighteenth-century geologist first suspected
that the world was more than six thousand years old? Are all those ages
of past {17} history, when the earth and the sun were but nebulae, a
mere imagination, or did that nebulous mass come into existence
thousands or millions of years afterwards when Kant or Laplace first
conceived that it had existed? The supposition is clearly
self-contradictory and impossible. If Science be not a mass of illusion,
this planet existed millions of years before any human--or, so far as we
know, any animal minds--existed to think its existence. And yet I have
endeavoured to show the absurdity of supposing that matter can exist
except for a mind. It is clear, then, that it cannot be merely for such
minds as ours that the world has always existed. Our minds come and

go. They have a beginning; they go to sleep; they may, for aught that
we can immediately know, come to