Berkeley's argument for idealism, as I hear it, goes like this: Look. Even if there are objects in the world (which there aren't), it would still be true that all we could have of them that might reasonably be called reality is our knowledge. And since so-called objects seem to change as our point of view on them varies, so our knowledge of them is, at best, relative, never certain. This makes communication necessary if we are to understand one another, so we invent and use words to make our knowledge more certain and to make communication possible. And in the end, all we can know about the objective world are ideas existing in the mind.
Berkeley offers an argument for each of these claims:
P.l To begin with, the claim that none of the objects of our knowledge can "exist otherwise but in a mind perceiving them." 1 Objects don't exist unperceived, as exists, for Berkeley, implies perception. It is "impossible for me," he says, "to conceive in my thoughts any sensible thing or object distinct from the sensation or perception of it. "2 Berkeley-- rightly, I think, and against the science of his day -- disavowed the objectification of knowledge, the deliberate focus on surfaces, perimeters and differences that were then and are today, at least where living matter is concerned, a violation of the dignity of consciousness. Itis a misguided act of abstraction, Berkeley claims, to distinguish "the existence of sensible objects from their being perceived, so as to conceive them existing unperceived. "3 Reality is altogether dependent on there being a thinking thing to perceive it. "[A]Il those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind ... their being is to be perceived or known ... so long as they are not actually perceived ... they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit ..."(which is the beginning of his argument for God, but that's for another paper).4
Whereas Decartes had inferred the existence of objects indirectly from sensory
impressions, and Leibniz said there was no divisible individuals, only indivisible monads, while Spinoza said these arejust different views about the same substance, Berkeley holds that reality depends on interaction between the object and the subject, which are inseparably united in sensory experience. All the former were "foundationalists", according to whom knowledge of objects is obtained only by inference from sensory experience; none used direct perception as evidence. Thus, for Berkeley, sensory experience has no object. It is here immediate, not intentional, as it had been for Decartes. No matter how clear such impressions are, according to Berkeley, such knowledge can't be direct. To qualify as direct, the object must causally interact with mind-- in classically physical terms, and none could admit to this. Hume responded that it is, on the contrary, objects of direct awareness which constitute the most certain of knowledges. Images of a tree are caused by the tree itself. For Locke, a dualist, the existence of objects is inferred from knowledge of them, that is, knowledge of physical objects is the cause of mental states, and coherence between these indicates truth. But for Berkeley, "reality" is not defined by the edges of physical objects that we can kick; it's not that obvious. To understand human knowledge in his way, we need to understand the interaction of subject and object in our conception of reality, our ideas.
For Berkeley, human knowledge is passive in perception, but active in imagination.
"Whatever power I may have over my own thoughts," he says, "I find the ideas actually perceived by sense have not a like dependence on my will ... it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or no ... the ideas imprinted on [sensations] are not creatures of my will. .,5 Spirit is equal in this conception to "that which perceives,"6 or conscious attention. Attention (mind, spirit, or soul) is considered active, and self-interested, if not always self-directed in its subjective reaction to primary stimuli. There is no "power or activity" in any seeming objects of our knowledge, for Berkeley, including ideas, and it follows that these cannot thus be the cause of our sensations. "[T]he cause of ideas is an
incorporeal active substance or spirit..,7 Thus, objects do not precede our focus as much as appear in the course of attentions' adventures. Ideas do not have objects; they are not intentional. They are not objects of perception at all, but constituents. Perception grants momentary existence to images that exist at the point of attention, the intersection of mind and world, but "objects," as such, are fictions.
This form of idealism does not deny objectivity, it merely denies the obvious objects of intentionality, and dignifies subjectivity as playing a proper role of stimuli assimilation and healthy growth of the mind. "In truth the object and the sensation are the
same thing, and cannot therefore be abstracted from each other. "8
P.2 He goes on to show that, even if it were possible for objects to exist without the mind, we would have no way of knowing it. "When we do our utmost to conceive the existence of external bodies, we are all the while only contemplating our own ideas. "9 "[I]f there were external bodies, it is impossible we should ever come to know it; and if there were not, we might have the very same reasons to think there were that we have now." 10
P.3 The relativity of subjective perspectives bothers Berkeley only so far as it makes communication necessary and desirable. The variation arguments amount to the claim that the world looks different from different points of view, and holds that there is no nonarbitrary perspective from which the world or any given object in it is properly viewed. "Now why may we not as well argue that figure and extension are not patterns or resemblances of qualities existing in matter, because to the same eye at different stations, or eyes of a different texture at the same station, they appear various, and cannot therefore be the images of anything settled and determinate without the mind?" 11 What you see, after all, is what you want to see, or are, at any rate, interested in. We can and do choose our views of the world, but, as Einstein made quite clear, some time after Berkeley gave it his thought, there are no privileged frames of reference. It is common sense perception, despite wide subjective variation and distortion, which points to an objective and essential truth which words carry us ever closer to understanding, as to understanding one another. (The fact that different people see the same objects also underlies Berkeley's argument for the existence of God ... but again, that's is for another paper).
Words are, for Berkeley, general ideas, which are themselves "fictions and
contrivances of the mind," 12 (though not pure fictions, for they seem to have more or less truth value in Berkeley, but symbols with tight or loose fit to their meaning) -- they just are not abstract general ideas, in the sense of being objects. B) To call abstracts "objects" is to rigidify the flow of deep reality; a romantic, almost Buddhist view -- the Tao of Psychology. For Berkeley, words are tools "for the conveniency of communication and enlargement of knowledge." 14 They are arbitrary symbols, invented by the capacity of mind and language to refer to things in the world and conventionally designate objects in order to facilitate communication. Words are also for the sake of exciting ideas and thus exploring and grasping knowledge, making what is vague more "clear and distinct". Conventional relations between words and things become habits, which we sometimes overuse and abuse by imposing their meaning onto the deeper reality of our thoughts. Thoughts are not conventionally defined, for Berkeley, as are words. They are, in some sense, prior to words -- "ideas...bare and naked." 15 As one certainly need not know the word "hot" to feel hot, neither need we ever know the agreed upon nomenclature to have the sensory experience. To feel the thought one needn't understand the word which denotes it. Thoughts are objectively real, and yet demand interpretation by words.
Again, to be an idealist with regard to these matters does not require throwing out objective reality, for thoughts are objectively real nonarbitrary images -- they just aren't physical and concrete objects. Here, as for Locke, thoughts= ideas, which are objectively real, just not objects in and of themselves; rather, they require subjective interpretation and arbitrary word association to establish the connections of communication with others. Ideas, or thoughts, or concepts, or notions, for Berkeley, are independently real, perceivable whether we know the words for them or not. Whereas words, by their power to refer, are the subjective inventions we use to communicate ideas. And "we need only
draw the curtain of words, to behold the fairest tree of knowledge." 16
Thus, Berkeley concludes that "for an idea to exist in an unperceiving thing, is a manifest contradiction; for to have an idea is all one as to
perceive ... there can be no unthinking substance ... extension, figure and motion are only ideas existing in the mind ... the ideas themselves do not exist without the mind." 17 For Berkeley, anything dependent on human consciousness is not a physical object; a physical object is extended and mind independent, while sensory experiences are not static objects, they are dynamic processes. "Hence it is plain, that the very notion of what is called matter. .. involves a contradiction,"18 for anything with primary qualities has secondary qualities, hence is mind-dependent.19 "A little attention will discover to anyone the truth and evidence of what is here said," Berkeley prescribes, "and make it unnecessary to insist on any other proofs against the existence of material substance. "20
Thus, according to Berkeley, indirect realism is implausible, and realism is improbable. So according to Berkeley, why be a realist at all? Idealism is the only plausible approach, because so-called "physical objects" do depend for their existence on the mind, thus, reality exists rather at that point where attention meets the world -- which is not limited to the obvious perimeters of physical objects, and, according to Berkeley, not even to the perimeters of abstract objects. The difficulty for Berkeley is, therefore, that while he's right that a certain amount of experience is nonintentional, how can he say all of it is? Wbat about sense experience, which seems to clearly have an object? One is tempted to lean the way of Russell in response to such an argument (to qualify Berkeley's extreme statement of idealism with the claim that reality exists on a continuum from the concrete to the abstract, and therefore, that objects are more or less obvious or evident to the perception of the physical senses -- we do have more than physical senses, after all, and one might say we are able to perceive abstract objects with the psychological senses) --but Berkeley says no, abstraction is not the way to describe the intentionality of mind. Abstraction of objects from experience is the wrong use of our faculties. Berkeley denies the good of "abstraction" of mental contents as objects in and of themselves, and he went so far as to attribute the intellectual conflict of his and all days since Aristotle to the "learned dust" raised in this wrong use of the mind -- "weeds in all the sciences," a "fine and subtle net of abstract ideas, which has so miserably perplexed and entangled the minds of men."21
The answer to this difficulty, I think, lies in seeing the flow of conscious experience as the only reasonable measure of so-called reality. What is real depends in large part upon one's momentary focus, and this focus, along with its complimentary refocus, is the Hegelian power of attention and language to change discourse toward ever tighter fit between words and ideas, subject and object, as well as subject and subject.
I think Berkeley succeeds, second only to Foucault, in his deconstruction of all that
we think we know about the world. And as well in his prescriptions of how we might
reconstruct it by respect for the deep conscious self.
So look, he says, all you've got are thoughts, words, and the will to make them
connect, first with each other, then with other persons. That's enough. This kind of idealism seems at first to reduce reality to knowledge, and knowledge to perception-- but
direct understanding of ideas is no matter to be undervalued. Sensory content is understood in this form of idealism as the flowing images of consciousness, experiencing reality directly, primarily, and using words only to connect by association our meaningful images with those of others. The capacity of mind that is language allows reference and the possibility of communication that allows for the intelligent use of words. But it is thoughts which give reason to words to begin with. Words are arbitrary subjective symbols agreed upon as common points of reference to the objective world. Because of the nature of this relationship, the association between thoughts and words is often loose. The sheer difference and diversity of subjective perspectives makes for an elastic fit between words and ideas. And the promise of a tight fit makes communication possible, desirable, and even necessary ... if understanding is the goal. The possibility of congruence between words and idea admits to the potential for resolution of the conflict which is intrinsic to the psychodiversity of the social multiverse. While truth, by Locke, means correspondence between ideas and objects, for Berkeley truth is correspondence between ideas and words.
I would suggest that these are both important aspects of the whole truth. Words are arbitrary symbolic inventions designed to facilitate the subjective intercourse of
understanding, which is still and always potential. They make possible the resolution of the conflict of subjective misunderstanding. Utilizing language well, for Berkeley, means using it to facilitate coherence between ideas, or thoughts, and the words we use to share them with one another. The objective reality underlying the language, the thoughts underlying the words, are what I would call the deeper, and in this, the more fundamental, and, at the same time, larger aspect of reality. Sensory experience may often be of physical objects, but it is not these objects themselves which are its end, but the experience of understanding. The words are merely the shared tools of communal consciousness, the means through conflict resolution to peace, understanding, and growth.
His point is that we have the power to change our topics of habitual conversation by understanding words differently than we do, and by using them as tools to discern and describe the objective world ever more certainly. He suggests we might reform our conception of what he (arbitrarily) calls "man", or in less offensive language, "humanity", or "personhood", for the structure of our language doesn't consider with our common experience. He calls for a new understanding of the universal human being, which, rather than an abstracted stereotype taken from particular individuals known from direct experience being used to generalize over "man in general", is a concept of human being which does not limit our becoming. Since it required only "mental manufacturing" to begin with, it needs only mental reformulation to change. It is an idea that was invented and is amendable by "men" (too obviously) or, at any rate, people. Our idea of personhood needs reevaluation, toward retaining only what is common to all -- the essence, or principle of humanness -- in order to see the potential that human beings still have.
Footnotes
I [Treatise: p 24]
2[Treatise: p.25]
3[Treatise: p.25]
4[Treatise: p.25]
5. Treatise: p.35]
6[Treatise: p.26]
7[Treatise: p.34]
8[Treatise: p.25]
9[Treatise: p.33]
10[Treatise: p.30-31]
11[Treatise: p.29]
12[Treatise:p.14]
13[Treatise:p.l2]
14[Treatise:p.l4]
15[Treatise:p20]
16[Treatise:p22]
17[Treatise: p.26-27]
18[Treatise: p.26-27]
19 .along with Berkeley. held that inferred objects have primary qualities (which are objective, as extension and resistance, which can be quantified, and are perceived by more than one sense; e.g.temperature) which cause secondary qualities (which are subjective, and are perceived by a single sense, e.g. heat).]
20[Treatise: p.33]
21[Treatise:p.20] (there is, however, a form of abstraction which Berkeley keeps, i.e. the process of moving from particulars to universals, from specific to general, from content to essence -- ,retaining that only which is common to all. "[Treatise:p.!O])
Berkeley offers an argument for each of these claims:
P.l To begin with, the claim that none of the objects of our knowledge can "exist otherwise but in a mind perceiving them." 1 Objects don't exist unperceived, as exists, for Berkeley, implies perception. It is "impossible for me," he says, "to conceive in my thoughts any sensible thing or object distinct from the sensation or perception of it. "2 Berkeley-- rightly, I think, and against the science of his day -- disavowed the objectification of knowledge, the deliberate focus on surfaces, perimeters and differences that were then and are today, at least where living matter is concerned, a violation of the dignity of consciousness. Itis a misguided act of abstraction, Berkeley claims, to distinguish "the existence of sensible objects from their being perceived, so as to conceive them existing unperceived. "3 Reality is altogether dependent on there being a thinking thing to perceive it. "[A]Il those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind ... their being is to be perceived or known ... so long as they are not actually perceived ... they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit ..."(which is the beginning of his argument for God, but that's for another paper).4
Whereas Decartes had inferred the existence of objects indirectly from sensory
impressions, and Leibniz said there was no divisible individuals, only indivisible monads, while Spinoza said these arejust different views about the same substance, Berkeley holds that reality depends on interaction between the object and the subject, which are inseparably united in sensory experience. All the former were "foundationalists", according to whom knowledge of objects is obtained only by inference from sensory experience; none used direct perception as evidence. Thus, for Berkeley, sensory experience has no object. It is here immediate, not intentional, as it had been for Decartes. No matter how clear such impressions are, according to Berkeley, such knowledge can't be direct. To qualify as direct, the object must causally interact with mind-- in classically physical terms, and none could admit to this. Hume responded that it is, on the contrary, objects of direct awareness which constitute the most certain of knowledges. Images of a tree are caused by the tree itself. For Locke, a dualist, the existence of objects is inferred from knowledge of them, that is, knowledge of physical objects is the cause of mental states, and coherence between these indicates truth. But for Berkeley, "reality" is not defined by the edges of physical objects that we can kick; it's not that obvious. To understand human knowledge in his way, we need to understand the interaction of subject and object in our conception of reality, our ideas.
For Berkeley, human knowledge is passive in perception, but active in imagination.
"Whatever power I may have over my own thoughts," he says, "I find the ideas actually perceived by sense have not a like dependence on my will ... it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or no ... the ideas imprinted on [sensations] are not creatures of my will. .,5 Spirit is equal in this conception to "that which perceives,"6 or conscious attention. Attention (mind, spirit, or soul) is considered active, and self-interested, if not always self-directed in its subjective reaction to primary stimuli. There is no "power or activity" in any seeming objects of our knowledge, for Berkeley, including ideas, and it follows that these cannot thus be the cause of our sensations. "[T]he cause of ideas is an
incorporeal active substance or spirit..,7 Thus, objects do not precede our focus as much as appear in the course of attentions' adventures. Ideas do not have objects; they are not intentional. They are not objects of perception at all, but constituents. Perception grants momentary existence to images that exist at the point of attention, the intersection of mind and world, but "objects," as such, are fictions.
This form of idealism does not deny objectivity, it merely denies the obvious objects of intentionality, and dignifies subjectivity as playing a proper role of stimuli assimilation and healthy growth of the mind. "In truth the object and the sensation are the
same thing, and cannot therefore be abstracted from each other. "8
P.2 He goes on to show that, even if it were possible for objects to exist without the mind, we would have no way of knowing it. "When we do our utmost to conceive the existence of external bodies, we are all the while only contemplating our own ideas. "9 "[I]f there were external bodies, it is impossible we should ever come to know it; and if there were not, we might have the very same reasons to think there were that we have now." 10
P.3 The relativity of subjective perspectives bothers Berkeley only so far as it makes communication necessary and desirable. The variation arguments amount to the claim that the world looks different from different points of view, and holds that there is no nonarbitrary perspective from which the world or any given object in it is properly viewed. "Now why may we not as well argue that figure and extension are not patterns or resemblances of qualities existing in matter, because to the same eye at different stations, or eyes of a different texture at the same station, they appear various, and cannot therefore be the images of anything settled and determinate without the mind?" 11 What you see, after all, is what you want to see, or are, at any rate, interested in. We can and do choose our views of the world, but, as Einstein made quite clear, some time after Berkeley gave it his thought, there are no privileged frames of reference. It is common sense perception, despite wide subjective variation and distortion, which points to an objective and essential truth which words carry us ever closer to understanding, as to understanding one another. (The fact that different people see the same objects also underlies Berkeley's argument for the existence of God ... but again, that's is for another paper).
Words are, for Berkeley, general ideas, which are themselves "fictions and
contrivances of the mind," 12 (though not pure fictions, for they seem to have more or less truth value in Berkeley, but symbols with tight or loose fit to their meaning) -- they just are not abstract general ideas, in the sense of being objects. B) To call abstracts "objects" is to rigidify the flow of deep reality; a romantic, almost Buddhist view -- the Tao of Psychology. For Berkeley, words are tools "for the conveniency of communication and enlargement of knowledge." 14 They are arbitrary symbols, invented by the capacity of mind and language to refer to things in the world and conventionally designate objects in order to facilitate communication. Words are also for the sake of exciting ideas and thus exploring and grasping knowledge, making what is vague more "clear and distinct". Conventional relations between words and things become habits, which we sometimes overuse and abuse by imposing their meaning onto the deeper reality of our thoughts. Thoughts are not conventionally defined, for Berkeley, as are words. They are, in some sense, prior to words -- "ideas...bare and naked." 15 As one certainly need not know the word "hot" to feel hot, neither need we ever know the agreed upon nomenclature to have the sensory experience. To feel the thought one needn't understand the word which denotes it. Thoughts are objectively real, and yet demand interpretation by words.
Again, to be an idealist with regard to these matters does not require throwing out objective reality, for thoughts are objectively real nonarbitrary images -- they just aren't physical and concrete objects. Here, as for Locke, thoughts= ideas, which are objectively real, just not objects in and of themselves; rather, they require subjective interpretation and arbitrary word association to establish the connections of communication with others. Ideas, or thoughts, or concepts, or notions, for Berkeley, are independently real, perceivable whether we know the words for them or not. Whereas words, by their power to refer, are the subjective inventions we use to communicate ideas. And "we need only
draw the curtain of words, to behold the fairest tree of knowledge." 16
Thus, Berkeley concludes that "for an idea to exist in an unperceiving thing, is a manifest contradiction; for to have an idea is all one as to
perceive ... there can be no unthinking substance ... extension, figure and motion are only ideas existing in the mind ... the ideas themselves do not exist without the mind." 17 For Berkeley, anything dependent on human consciousness is not a physical object; a physical object is extended and mind independent, while sensory experiences are not static objects, they are dynamic processes. "Hence it is plain, that the very notion of what is called matter. .. involves a contradiction,"18 for anything with primary qualities has secondary qualities, hence is mind-dependent.19 "A little attention will discover to anyone the truth and evidence of what is here said," Berkeley prescribes, "and make it unnecessary to insist on any other proofs against the existence of material substance. "20
Thus, according to Berkeley, indirect realism is implausible, and realism is improbable. So according to Berkeley, why be a realist at all? Idealism is the only plausible approach, because so-called "physical objects" do depend for their existence on the mind, thus, reality exists rather at that point where attention meets the world -- which is not limited to the obvious perimeters of physical objects, and, according to Berkeley, not even to the perimeters of abstract objects. The difficulty for Berkeley is, therefore, that while he's right that a certain amount of experience is nonintentional, how can he say all of it is? Wbat about sense experience, which seems to clearly have an object? One is tempted to lean the way of Russell in response to such an argument (to qualify Berkeley's extreme statement of idealism with the claim that reality exists on a continuum from the concrete to the abstract, and therefore, that objects are more or less obvious or evident to the perception of the physical senses -- we do have more than physical senses, after all, and one might say we are able to perceive abstract objects with the psychological senses) --but Berkeley says no, abstraction is not the way to describe the intentionality of mind. Abstraction of objects from experience is the wrong use of our faculties. Berkeley denies the good of "abstraction" of mental contents as objects in and of themselves, and he went so far as to attribute the intellectual conflict of his and all days since Aristotle to the "learned dust" raised in this wrong use of the mind -- "weeds in all the sciences," a "fine and subtle net of abstract ideas, which has so miserably perplexed and entangled the minds of men."21
The answer to this difficulty, I think, lies in seeing the flow of conscious experience as the only reasonable measure of so-called reality. What is real depends in large part upon one's momentary focus, and this focus, along with its complimentary refocus, is the Hegelian power of attention and language to change discourse toward ever tighter fit between words and ideas, subject and object, as well as subject and subject.
I think Berkeley succeeds, second only to Foucault, in his deconstruction of all that
we think we know about the world. And as well in his prescriptions of how we might
reconstruct it by respect for the deep conscious self.
So look, he says, all you've got are thoughts, words, and the will to make them
connect, first with each other, then with other persons. That's enough. This kind of idealism seems at first to reduce reality to knowledge, and knowledge to perception-- but
direct understanding of ideas is no matter to be undervalued. Sensory content is understood in this form of idealism as the flowing images of consciousness, experiencing reality directly, primarily, and using words only to connect by association our meaningful images with those of others. The capacity of mind that is language allows reference and the possibility of communication that allows for the intelligent use of words. But it is thoughts which give reason to words to begin with. Words are arbitrary subjective symbols agreed upon as common points of reference to the objective world. Because of the nature of this relationship, the association between thoughts and words is often loose. The sheer difference and diversity of subjective perspectives makes for an elastic fit between words and ideas. And the promise of a tight fit makes communication possible, desirable, and even necessary ... if understanding is the goal. The possibility of congruence between words and idea admits to the potential for resolution of the conflict which is intrinsic to the psychodiversity of the social multiverse. While truth, by Locke, means correspondence between ideas and objects, for Berkeley truth is correspondence between ideas and words.
I would suggest that these are both important aspects of the whole truth. Words are arbitrary symbolic inventions designed to facilitate the subjective intercourse of
understanding, which is still and always potential. They make possible the resolution of the conflict of subjective misunderstanding. Utilizing language well, for Berkeley, means using it to facilitate coherence between ideas, or thoughts, and the words we use to share them with one another. The objective reality underlying the language, the thoughts underlying the words, are what I would call the deeper, and in this, the more fundamental, and, at the same time, larger aspect of reality. Sensory experience may often be of physical objects, but it is not these objects themselves which are its end, but the experience of understanding. The words are merely the shared tools of communal consciousness, the means through conflict resolution to peace, understanding, and growth.
His point is that we have the power to change our topics of habitual conversation by understanding words differently than we do, and by using them as tools to discern and describe the objective world ever more certainly. He suggests we might reform our conception of what he (arbitrarily) calls "man", or in less offensive language, "humanity", or "personhood", for the structure of our language doesn't consider with our common experience. He calls for a new understanding of the universal human being, which, rather than an abstracted stereotype taken from particular individuals known from direct experience being used to generalize over "man in general", is a concept of human being which does not limit our becoming. Since it required only "mental manufacturing" to begin with, it needs only mental reformulation to change. It is an idea that was invented and is amendable by "men" (too obviously) or, at any rate, people. Our idea of personhood needs reevaluation, toward retaining only what is common to all -- the essence, or principle of humanness -- in order to see the potential that human beings still have.
Footnotes
I [Treatise: p 24]
2[Treatise: p.25]
3[Treatise: p.25]
4[Treatise: p.25]
5. Treatise: p.35]
6[Treatise: p.26]
7[Treatise: p.34]
8[Treatise: p.25]
9[Treatise: p.33]
10[Treatise: p.30-31]
11[Treatise: p.29]
12[Treatise:p.14]
13[Treatise:p.l2]
14[Treatise:p.l4]
15[Treatise:p20]
16[Treatise:p22]
17[Treatise: p.26-27]
18[Treatise: p.26-27]
19 .along with Berkeley. held that inferred objects have primary qualities (which are objective, as extension and resistance, which can be quantified, and are perceived by more than one sense; e.g.temperature) which cause secondary qualities (which are subjective, and are perceived by a single sense, e.g. heat).]
20[Treatise: p.33]
21[Treatise:p.20] (there is, however, a form of abstraction which Berkeley keeps, i.e. the process of moving from particulars to universals, from specific to general, from content to essence -- ,retaining that only which is common to all. "[Treatise:p.!O])