"I Refute It Thus!" (Kicking a Stone)

For my sins, I decided to take a break from the current batch of reading and essay something a bit more challenging, Bishop Berkeley's Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge.  As exercises in antiquated epistemology go, this one was arduous but manageable, a claim that cannot be made for the tome which it attacks, John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.  Having read Locke's Second Essay Concerning Civil Governnent little more than a month ago, I had high hopes that Berkeley's 1710 magnum opus would be less of an ordeal.  No such luck.

Berkeley prefaces the main body of his work with an Introduction of 25 sections which disputes the existence of abstract ideas.  So far, so good.  Then, in sections 1-33 of his treatise, he advances his main argument:  that as we have no direct experience of external reality, but only sense-impressions or ideas within the mind, it is entirely impossible to state with any certainty that any such externally existing material universe actually exists. Realizing how counter-intuitive this seems, he addresses twelve obvious objections in sections 34-81 and some religious quibbles in 82-84.  Then, he examines the ramifications of his Principles, first looking at IDEAS (85-100) and how they relate to Science (101-117), in which the 25-year-old Berkeley presumes to correct the mistakes in Newton's Principia, and Mathematics (118-132), in which he stumbles badly.  Finally, examining SPIRITS, he develops from his Principles closely related arguments for the Immortality of the Soul (133-144) and the existence of the God of the Christian scriptures (145-156) ending with a ringing condemnation of philosophy:

" . . .having shewn the falseness or vanity of those barren speculations which make the chief employment of learned men, [my treatise seeks] the better [to] dispose them to reverence and embrace the salutary truths of the Gospel, which to know and to practice is the highest perfection of human nature."

(As noted above, Berkeley's most flagrant error comes when he denies the infinite divisibility of line segments in geometry, an odd mistake to commit but perhaps inevitable given his orientation towards metaphysical pragmatism.)

While Berkeley was included in "The Great Books of the Western World", I can't see the value of this other than as a historical curiosity, and as a pretext for Dr. Johnson's amusing foray into the stone-kicking alluded to above.

363 days, 50 novels, 49 books of non-fiction to go.