THE METAPHYSICS OF SENSATION 281 



pulling as he would pull. And I suppose that 

 this difficulty of thinking of force except as some- 

 thing comparable to volition, lies at the bottom of 

 Leibnitz's doctrine of monads, to say nothing of 

 Schopenhauer's " Welt als Wille und Vorstel- 

 lung; " while the opposite difficulty of conceiving 

 force to be anything like volition, drives another 

 school of thinkers into the denial of any connection, 

 save that of succession, between cause and effect. 



To sum up. If the materialist affirms that the 

 universe and all its phenomena are resolvable into 

 matter and motion, Berkeley replies, True; but 

 what you call matter and motion are known to us 

 only as forms of consciousness; their being is to 

 be conceived or known; and the existence of a 

 state of consciousness, apart from a thinking mind, 

 is a contradiction in terms. 



I conceive that this reasoning is irrefragable. 

 And therefore, if I were obliged to choose between 

 absolute materialism and absolute idealism, I 

 should feel compelled to accept the latter alter- 

 native. .Indeed, upon this point Locke does, prac- 

 tically, go as far in the direction of idealism as 

 Berkeley, when he admits that " the simple ideas 

 we receive from sensation and reflection are the 

 boundaries of our thoughts, beyond which the 

 mind, whatever efforts it would make, is not able 

 to advance one jot." Book II. chap, xxiii. 29. 



But Locke adds, "Nor can it make any dis- 



