Early modern Europe · 1685–1753
George Berkeley
Irish bishop who argued that to be is to be perceived
We never perceive matter itself, only ideas, so the notion of unthinking material substance is empty. Objects are collections of ideas, kept in being when no human is looking by the continual perception of God.
Life and thought
George Berkeley was born in Ireland and studied at Trinity College Dublin, where, still in his twenties, he wrote his main philosophical books. From 1729 to 1731 he lived in Rhode Island, waiting for government funds for a college in Bermuda that never arrived. He became Anglican Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland in 1734, worked on the poverty around him, and in later life promoted tar-water as a medicine.
Berkeley’s immaterialism starts from Locke: what we directly perceive are ideas. But then, he argues, we have no reason — indeed no coherent idea — for unthinking matter lying behind them. For a sensible thing, to be is to be perceived. A cherry is its colour, taste, shape and softness, and all of these are ideas. This does not make the world unreal: things exist in the minds that perceive them, and go on existing when we look away because God always perceives them. Berkeley meant this as a defence of common sense and religion against skeptics and atheists. Hume took over his attack on abstract ideas.