THE METAPHYSICS OF SENSATION 251 



furniture of the earth in a word, all those bodies which com- 

 pose the mighty frame of the world have not any substance 

 without a mind ; that their being is to be perceived or known ; 

 that consequently, so long as they are not actually perceived by 

 me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created 

 spirit, they must either have no existence at all or else subsist 

 in the mind of some eternal spirit ; it being perfectly unintel- 

 ligible, and involving all the absurdity of abstraction, to 

 attribute to any single part of them an existence independent of 

 a spirit." l 



Doubtless this passage sounds like the acme of 

 metaphysical paradox, and we all know that 

 " coxcombs vanquished Berkeley with a grin ; " 

 while common-sense folk refuted him by stamp- 

 ing on the ground, or some such other irrelevant 

 proceeding. But 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 know- 

 ledge the great truth which he discovered that 

 the honest and rigorous following up of the argu- 

 ment which leads us to " materialism," inevitably 

 carries us beyond it. 



Suppose that I accidentally prick my finger 

 with a pin. I immediately become aware of a 



1 Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 

 Part I. 6. 



