George Berkeley has been described by some as a brilliant abstract thinker,

while others have regarded his views as inconsistent and unconvincing.

George Berkeley was born on March 12, 1685 in Kilkenny, Ireland. His family
was of English origin and appears to have come to Ireland following the
Restoration. Little is known of his early life except that his family was
moderately prosperous and were Protestant, as were most Irish of English
descent.
George Berkeley (1685-1753) was an Irish clergyman and philosopher who
studied and taught at Trinity College in Ireland, where he completed some of
his best known works on the immateriality of matter (believing that all
matter was composed of ideas of perception and therefore did not exist if it
was not being perceived).
Berkeley is best known for his early works on vision (An Essay towards a New
Theory of Vision, 1709) and metaphysics (A Treatise concerning the
Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710; Three Dialogues between Hylas and
Philonous, 1713).
Berkeleys empirical theory of vision challenged the then-standard account of
distance vision, an account which requires tacit geometrical calculations. His
alternative account focuses on visual and tactual objects. Berkeley argues
that the visual perception of distance is explained by the correlation of ideas
of sight and touch. This associative approach does away with appeals to
geometrical calculation while explaining monocular vision and the moon
illusion, anomalies that had plagued the geometric account.
Berkeley claimed that abstract ideas are the source of all philosophical
perplexity and illusion.

In his Introduction to the Principles of Human

Knowledge he argued that, as Locke described abstract ideas (Berkeley

considered Lockes the best account of abstraction), (1) they cannot, in fact,

be formed, (2) they are not needed for communication or knowledge, and (3)
they are inconsistent and therefore inconceivable.
In the Principles and the Three Dialogues Berkeley defends two metaphysical
theses: idealism (the claim that everything that exists either is a mind or
depends on a mind for its existence) and immaterialism (the claim that
matter does not exist). His contention that all physical objects are composed
of ideas is encapsulated in his motto esse is percipi (to be is to be
perceived).

For Berkeley the philosopher, things that do not have the ability to think, like
ideas, are perceived and it is the mind (human or divine) that perceives
them. Berkeley's theory shows that individuals can only know the sensations
and ideas of objects, but not abstractions like matter or general entities.
Berkeleys central principle of his philosophy is that ideas do not exist
outside of a mind perceiving them. This is also an intuitive kind of truth:
when I say that an object exists, I mean that I can feel it, that I can see it, or
that it is perceived by another mind. As a result, for Berkeley it is impossible
to conceive of an absolute and independent reality; esse est percipi (to be is
to be perceived). The esse or being of the object is in its percipi or being
perceived. Therefore we can only speak of things to the extent that they are
in direct relationship with our mind.
George Berkeley was an immaterialist. He believed that objects were merely
collections of ideas and rejected the notion that material things were mindindependent or substances (here the term materialism is used to mean
the doctrine that material things exist). Berkeley argued that when we
perceive ordinary objects (a house for example), we perceive only ideas (the
idea of house as opposed to the thing house). Therefore ordinary objects are
ideas. To him the world was made up of nothing but minds and ideas. For
example in his discourse on vision he explains how ones vision is learned by

the perception of touch which then allows one to judge distance, magnitude
and so forth. The ideas of one sense evolve into the signs of ideas of other
senses. For Berkeley, this is how we construct our understanding of the
world, and its application is far-reaching. Based on this argument scientific
constructs are thus disregarded. Newtonian time and space vanish and time
becomes the progression of ideas in individual minds. Mathematics is
simplified to a system of signs in which words and numerals signify simply
words and numerals, and science is a system of natural signs.
As a devoted believer of God, Berkeley felt that materialism was dangerous
because it promoted skepticism by questioning the validity of our senses.
Berkeley thought that materialism also promoted atheism as it discounts the
importance of God, trying to show that the world could run without his
assistance. When Berkeley was appointed as Anglican Dean of the city of
Derry in May 1724, he resigned his position at Trinity College. However,
Berkeley was actually very involved during that time in the establishment of
a seminary in Bermuda so he was never actually a Dean in residence.
Berkeley soon left for Newport, Rhode Island in America on August 1st 1728
with his new bride, Anne Foster. Even though Berkeley had secured private
donations for a new seminary, he waited three years, unfortunately in vain,
for the grant for his seminary project. Regardless, Berkeley made good use of
his time, as an acting cleric and continuing his writing. Berkeley wrote most
of Alciphron, also known as The Minute Philosopher, which defended
Christianity against freethinking, during that time. Berkeley met many
prominent American intellectuals. Yet without the necessary political support
for the Bermuda seminary, they canceled the project and Berkeley and his
wife returned to Britain in 1731. Berkeley continued his humanitarian work in
London in which he participated in establishing a home for abandoned
children.
Berkeley's earliest published

works

were

on mathematics and

on optics (the latter, dealing with matters of visual distance, magnitude,

position and problems of sight and touch, was controversial at the time,
but became an established part of the theory of optics). But all
the philosophical works for which he has become famous were also
written while he was still a young man in in his 20s.
In 1710, still only 25 years old, his "Treatise concerning the Principles of
Human Knowledge" was published, his first exposition of the then
revolutionary

theory

that

objects

exist

only

as perception and

not

as matter separate from perception, summed up in his dictum "Esse est

percipi" ("To be is to be perceived"). The work is beautifully written and
dense with cogent arguments, no matter how counter-intuitive the system
may appear at first sight .
He called the theory Immaterialism (conceived as it was in opposition to
the prevailing Materialism of the time), although it was later referred to by
others

as Subjective

that reality consists

Idealism.
exclusively

The

theory

propounds

the

view

of mindsand

their ideas,

and

that

individuals can only directly know sensations and ideas, not the objects
themselves.

The position that the mind is

the only

thing

that can

be known to exist (and that knowledge of anything outside the mind

is unjustified) is known as Solipsism, and forms the root of the later
doctrine of Phenomenalism. It can also be seen as an extreme type
of Empiricism, whereby any knowledge of the empirical world is to be
obtained only through direct perception.