sense, that is, not by "images." Cf. _Principles_,
Sec.Sec. 27, 135 _seq_., especially in the second edition.--TR.]

In contrast to the fearlessness with which Berkeley propounds his
spiritualism, his anxious endeavors to take away the appearance of paradox
from his immaterialistic doctrine, and to show its complete agreement with
common sense, excite surprise. Even the common man, he argues, desires
nothing more than that his perceptions be real; the distinction between
idea and object is an invention of philosophers. Here Berkeley cannot be
acquitted of a certain sophistical play upon the term "idea," which, in
fact, is ambiguous. He understands by it _that which_ the soul perceives
(its immediate, inner object), but the popular mind, _that through which_
the soul perceives an object. The reality of an idea in us is different
from the idea of a real thing, or from the reality of that which is
perceived without us by means of the idea, and it is just this last meaning
which common sense affirms and Berkeley denies. In any case it was a work
of great merit to have transferred the existence of objects beyond our
ideas, of things-in-themselves, out of the region of the self-evident into
the region of the problematical. We never get beyond the circle of our
ideas, and if we posit a thing-in-itself as the ground and object of the
idea, this also is simply a thought, an idea. For us there is no being
except that of the perceiver and the perceived. Later we shall meet two
other forms of idealism, in Leibnitz and Fichte. Both of these agree with
Berkeley that spiritual beings alone are active, and active beings alone
real, and that the being of the inactive consists in their being perceived.
But while in Berkeley the objective ideas are impressed upon finite spirits
by the Infinite Spirit from without and singly, with Leibnitz they appear
as a fullness of germs, which God implanted together in the monads at the
beginning, and which the individual develops into consciousness, and with
Fichte they become the unconscious productions of the Absolute Ego acting
in the individual egos. For the two former as many worlds exist as there
are individual spirits, their harmony being guaranteed, in the one case, by
the consistency of God's working, and, in the other, by his foresight. For
Fichte, on the other hand, there is but one world, for the absolute is not
outside the individual spirits, but the uniformly working force within
them.