COMMON BASIS OF EMPIRICISM AND RATIONALISM 2/ 



senses, it is absolute universality. The rationalists would not 

 even admit that a genuinely universal idea could in any way be 

 built up from the data of sensation. Generalized images (sup- 

 posed to be formed by the blurring together of a great number of 

 similar sense-perceptions) were, indeed, acknowledged to exist; 

 but these were to be carefully distinguished from the true ideas 

 of reason. Thus, for example, the somewhat dim and hazy image 

 of a triangle that may start up in the mind at the mention of the 

 word, was believed to be a radically distinct and separate thing 

 from the scientific conception of triangle which is treated of in 

 geometry. This whole distinction Berkeley proposed, not to de- 

 molish, but utterly to transform, by pointing out that universality 

 of meaning is not primarily a peculiarity of origin or structure of 

 ideas, but a peculiar function which certain ideas have acquired. 

 That is to say, "an idea, which, considered in itself, is particular, 

 becomes general by being made to represent or to stand for all 

 other particular ideas of the same sort." Now what evidence 

 had he to support this position? Simply. the fact that after 

 careful introspection he could discover no such general ideas as 

 Locke or the rationalists had described. "If any man has the 

 faculty of framing in his mind such an idea of a triangle as is 

 here [by Locke] described, it is in vain to pretend to dispute him 

 out of it, nor would I go about it. All I desire is that the reader 

 would fully and certainly inform himself whether he has such an 

 idea or no. And this, methinks, can be no hard task for anyone 

 to perform .... So long as I confine my thoughts to my own 

 ideas divested of words, I do not see how I can easily be mis- 

 taken. The objects I consider, I clearly and adequately know. I 

 cannot be deceived in thinking I have an idea which I have not. 

 It is not possible for me to imagine that any of my own ideas are 

 alike or unlike that are not truly so." 1 The final appeal is thus 

 to the same authority which Descartes too recognized as supreme 

 and infallible, the immediate consciousness of the contents of 

 one's own mind. 



^Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, 13; our italics 



