George Berkeley Quotes on Mind
Berkeley's Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) defend the immaterialist thesis esse est percipi — to be is to be perceived. The argument is that Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities cannot be sustained, since both are equally mind-dependent ideas, and that the supposed material substance underlying perception is therefore an unintelligible postulate. The mind for Berkeley is not the same kind of thing as its ideas: it is the active spirit that perceives them, and the orderly continuance of the world while no finite mind perceives it depends on the perception of God, in whose mind the natural world is continually held.
Quotes
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“To be is to be perceived.”
A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, §3 -
“Few men think, yet all will have opinions.”
Philonous to Hylas. The Second Dialogue. This appears in a passage first added in the third edition, (1734) -
Attributed to George Berkeley:
“All the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind.”
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Attributed to George Berkeley:
“It is impossible that I should conceive in my thoughts any sensible thing or object distinct from the sensation or perception of it.”
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Attributed to George Berkeley:
“Whenever I attempt to frame a simple idea of time, abstracted from the succession of ideas in my mind, I am lost.”
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“Abstract terms (however useful they may be in argument) should be discarded in meditation, and the mind should be fixed on the particular and the concrete, that is, on the things themselves.”
De Motu(1721) | Paragraph 4 -
“Doth the reality of sensible things consist in being perceived? or, is it something distinct from their being perceived, and that bears no relation to the mind?”
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous(1713) | Philonous to Hylas -
“Since therefore, as well those degrees of heat that are not painful, as those that are, can exist in a thinking substance; may we not conclude that external bodies are absolutely incapable of any degree of heat whatsoever?”
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous(1713) | Philonous to Hylas. Hylas replies with, "So it seems". -
“That there is no such thing as what philosophers call material substance, I am seriously persuaded: but if I were made to see any thing absurd or skeptical in this, I should then have the same reason to renounce this, that I imagine I have now to reject the contrary opinion.”
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous(1713) | Philonous to Hylas