74 COSMIO PHILOSOPHY. [pt. i. 



to date from Berkeley. To say nothing of his discovery of 

 the true theory of vision, the first truth ever discovered in 

 psychology which stands upon the same footing as the 

 demonstrated truths of physical science; to say nothing of 

 the magnificent arguments by which he brought to a close 

 the seven hundred years' war between the Realists and 

 the Nominalists; his doctrine of Idealism, the psychologic 

 basis of which has never been shaken, forms the pivot upon 

 which all subsequent metaphysical speculation has turned. 

 It is the first point which inevitably presents itself for dis- 

 cussion 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 with 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 existence of something inde- 

 pendent 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. 1 He denied the Nou- 

 menon. " It is a mere abstraction, he says. If it is unknown, 

 unknowable, it is a figment, and I will have none of it ; for 

 it is a figment worse than useless ; it is pernicious, as the 



1 Or, to speak more accurately, what Berkeley really denied was the scho- 

 lastic 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 fundamental error.— 

 an error which has been adopted by Positivism, and which vitiates that 

 system of philosophy from beginning to end. 



