COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



shaken, forms the pivot upon which all subse- 

 quent metaphysical speculation has turned. It 

 is the first point which inevitably presents it- 

 self for discussion in any system of philosophy 

 which, after settling upon its criterion of truth, 

 attempts with the aid thereof to found a valid 

 explanation of the relations of man w'ith the 

 Cosmos of which he is a part. Nay more, it is, 

 as Berkeley himself held, narrowly implicated 

 with our theories of religion, though not in the 

 way which Berkeley supposed, but in a way 

 which he did not foresee, and could not have 

 been expected to foresee. 



In characterizing the Idealism of Berkeley as 

 contrary to our ineradicable belief in the exist- 

 ence of something independent of ourselves, it 

 is well to note at the outset that the point of 

 antagonism is not what — with extreme, though 

 perhaps excusable carelessness — it was assumed 

 to be by Reid. The objective reality which 

 Berkeley denied was not what is known as the 

 external world of phenomena. What Berkeley 

 really denied was the Absolute Existence of 

 which phenomena are the manifestations.^ He 



^ Or, to speak more accurately, what Berkeley really denied 

 was the scholastic theory of occult substrata underlying each 

 group of phenomena. In this denial we maintain that he was 

 right ; but his denial was made in such wise as to ignore the 

 fact of an Absolute Existence of which phenomena are the 

 manifestations, and herein, as we maintain, was his funda- 



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