PROF. EERRIEE ON KNOWING AND BEING. 117 



views by comparing them with those of Bishop Berkeley, and as Ber- 

 keley is the sole metaphysician of modern times whom he admits to 

 have made an approximation to truth, it may not be useless or out of 

 place to notice the relation in which the system of the Institutes 

 stands to that expounded in the u Dialogues between Hylas and 

 " Philonous, " and in the "Treatise concerning the principles of 

 human knowledge. " Berkeley did not aspire to frame a necessary 

 theory of knowledge. He limited himself to the knowledge of 

 which we are the subjects ; aud this is, in fact, urged in the Insti- 

 tutes as the main defect of his philosophy. "Berkeley's system, " 

 we are told, " was invalidated by a fundamental weakness, which was 

 ■" this, that it was rather an exposition of the contingent structure 

 " of our knowledge than an exposition of the necessary structure of 

 " all knowledge. " And on this account " his Ontology, " it is added, 

 ""breaks down; for his conclusion is, that the subject and object 

 "together, the synthesis of mind and the universe, is what alone 

 ■"truly and absolutely exists or can exist. " Berkeley considered 

 the objects of perception to be sensible qualities ; and it was an es- 

 sential point in his doctrine that these are incapable of existing ex- 

 cept in a mind. He made no distinction in this respect between 

 what are termed the secondary qualities of matter — taste, warmth, 

 •colour, audible sound, and so forth — and those whieh have been called 

 primaries— extension, figure, motion, &c. The extension, figure, 

 etc., which we perceive, are in the mind as truly, and in the same 

 manner, as the warmth, the sweetness, the redness, or the sound 

 which we perceive. Berkeley has often been represented as denying 

 the real existence of sensible things : but he himself repeatedly and 

 vehemently protests against the imputation. The real existence of 

 sensible things is, he says, incontrovertible ; but they do not exist 

 apart from the mind. Their esse is percipi. Must not matter 

 however, an unthinking, inactive substance, be assumed as the sub- 

 stratum of sensible qualities ? Berkeley answers that such a sub- 

 stratum is inconceivable. JN"ay, the conception of it which we are 

 asked to form, involves a contradiction : for sensible qualities being 

 incapable of existing out of a mind, how can they, without contra- 

 diction, be spoken of as existing in an unthinking substratum, that 

 is, in what is not mind ? But granting that nothing besides sensible 

 qualities is perceived ; and that the existence of matter, as a sub- 

 stratum of sensible qualities, is an absurdity ; may we not still be- 

 lieve in matter as the cause or occasion or instrument of our per- 

 iious ? Berkeley examines this question very minutely; and en- 

 ours to show that in any meaning which we are able to affix to 



