Is God carrying too much explanatory weight?
The continuity and order of the world depend heavily on Berkeley's theism.
Early modern philosophy · 1685–1753
George Berkeley
Berkeley argues that material substance adds nothing intelligible to the ideas we perceive, recasting ordinary objects as mind-dependent without calling them imaginary.
George Berkeley was an Irish philosopher and Anglican bishop associated with early-modern empiricism. He defended immaterialism: the view that ordinary objects are collections of ideas rather than mind-independent material substances.
KnowledgeMind
The question he enters
The question George Berkeley enters
If everything you know of an object is given in experience, what work is an unknowable material substance doing?
The central move
Remove the material support nobody can perceive
Berkeley accepts an empiricist starting point and turns it against materialism. Sensible objects are collections of ideas perceived by minds; to exist as such an object is to be perceived. He retains a stable world through finite spirits and God's perception, rather than reducing reality to one person's private imagination.
Key ideas
Terms that carry the argument.
- Immaterialism
- The denial that mind-independent material substance is needed to explain ordinary sensible objects.
- Esse est percipi
- For sensible things, to be is to be perceived; their existence is not an inaccessible material layer behind experience.
- Ideas and spirits
- Passive ideas are perceived; active minds or spirits perceive and will.
- Master argument
- An attempt to show that conceiving an unconceived sensible object covertly makes it an object of thought.
Where the view strains
Objections and limits.
Conceivable is not the same as perceived
Critics argue that thinking about an unperceived object does not show the object could not exist without being thought about.
Sources and routes
Read the work. Follow the argument.
Primary texts
Where to meet the position.
- Project GutenbergA Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human KnowledgeWebThe principal statement of immaterialism.Project Gutenberg edition of Berkeley's English text. · Readable online with downloadable ebook formats from the catalogue page. Checked Aug 2026.
- Project GutenbergThree Dialogues between Hylas and PhilonousWebA staged defence of idealism against materialist objections.Original English text; Project Gutenberg catalogue edition. · Readable online with downloadable ebook formats from the catalogue page. Checked Aug 2026.
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