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A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge 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: selves than the images that are seen in water, or behind a glass, do really exist in those places where they seem to be... In truth, neither accident nor substan... more »ce hath any being but only in the mind, and by the virtue of cogitation or thought.'1 III. Summaries of Berkeley's System. § I: In common with every great thinker of every age, Berkeley has been misunderstood and misrepresented in various ways. Men of various schools have been unconsciously biased in their judgment of Berkeley's views by their own. Where there has been no misrepresentation, there has been a difference in the proportion and prominence assigned by different writers to different parts. It will therefore be both interesting and useful to present a number of summaries from distinguished writers of different schools. They will have value as testimony also, where differences of opinion may still exist as to Berkeley's meaning. §2: Reid (1710-1796).—'Berkeley maintains, and thinks he has demonstrated, by a variety of arguments, grounded on principles of philosophy universally received, that there is no such thing as matter in the universe; that sun and moon, earth and sea, our own bodies and those of our friends, are nothing but ideas in the minds of those who think of them, and that they have no existence when they are not the objects of thought; that all that is in the universe may be reduced to two categories, to wit, minds, and ideas in the mind.'2 §3: Kant (1724-1804). — 'Material idealism is the theory which maintains that the existence of objects in space exterior to us is either dubious and incapable of proof, or false and impossible. The former is the problematic idealism of Descartes, who holds that there is but one empirical assertion which is beyond doubt, to wit, I am; the second is ...« less