Berkeley's Idealism 223 



of our sensations ; just as our knowledge of matter is 

 restricted to those feelings of which we assume it to be 

 the cause." Huxley's exact position in regard to ma- 

 terialism is most plain in his expositions of the writings 

 of Berkeley, with whom began in England the greatest 

 movement towards an idealistic philosophy. 



"Berkeley faced the problem boldly. He said to the ma- 

 terialists : ' You tell me that all the pheuomena of uature are 

 resolvable into matter and its affections. I assent to your 

 statement, and now I put to you the further question, What 

 is matter? lu answering this question you shall be bound by 

 your own conditions ; and I demand, in the terms of the Car- 

 tesian axiom, that you in turn give your assent only to such 

 conclusions as are perfectly clear and obvious.' " 



Huxley then goes on to state the general lines of the 

 arguments by which Berkeley arrived at the apparently 

 paradoxical conclusion "that all the choir of heaven 

 and furniture of the earth — in a word, all those bodies 

 which compose the mighty frame of the world," have 

 an existence only so far as they are in a perceiving 

 mind. And he proceeds at length to explain the im- 

 mense importance of the truths underlying Berkeley's 

 position. 



" The key to all philosophy lies in the clear apprehension of 

 Berkeley's problem — which is neither more nor less than one 

 of the shapes of the greatest of all questions, ' What are the 

 limits of our faculties ? ' And it is worth any amount of trouble 

 to comprehend the exact nature of the argument by which 

 Berkeley arrived at his results, and to know by one's own 

 knowledge the great truth which he discovered — that the hon- 

 est and rigorous following up of the argument which leads us 

 to materialism inevitably carries us beyond it." 



Huxley, however, while he opposed a materialistic 

 explanation of the universe with the strength of ex- 



