Selections from Berkeley Author:George Berkeley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: I. Matter necessarily dependent on Mind. A TREATISE CONCERNING THE PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE. The same Principles which, at first view, lead t... more »o Scepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to Common Sense.—Berkeley's Third Dialogue. EDITOE'S PEEFATORY NOTE. This Treatise is a reasoned statement and defence of the theory that the Material World depends for its actual existence on percipient and active Mind. The latter part of it is an application of this theory to the promotion of physical, psychological, and theological science. The Introduction (pp. 14-34) contains an exposure of the abuse of terms andLanguage,bymen in general,but particularly by philosophers. Language had been the shield of scholastic abstractions. The key to Berkeley's original point of view may be found in his attack on ' abstract ideas' in this Introduction—resumed in other places. The underlying principle is,—that real knowledge is concerned only with individual things; that there can be no intelligible reality in the things of sense apart from the perceptions of a living mind; and that to test the meaning of common terms, especially terms which have become so abstract as Matter and Mind, we must realise in actual perception, or in imagination, individual things which they denote. This means that all genuine knowledge of things may be individualised. It is what has been called his Nominalism. Not to pretend in words to substantiate mere abstractions which cannot be individualised, and always to verify our terms by what is conceivable, is the lesson of the Introduction. It warns those entering on philosophy that above all they must avoid empty verbal abstractions. The first two sections of the Principles (pp. 35, 36) offer a statement of the sorts of ideas we are c...« less