hs there are so near and obvious to the mind that
a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this
important one to be, viz., that 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 substance
without a mind; that their being is to be perceived or known;
that consequently, so long as they are not actually perceived
by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created
spirit, they must either have no existence at all or else
subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit; it being
perfectly unintelligible, and involving all the absurdity
of abstraction, to attribute to any single part of them an
existence independent of a spirit."[1]

[Footnote 1: "Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge,"
Part I. Sec. 6.]

Doubtless this passage sounds like the acme of metaphysical paradox,
and we all know that "coxcombs vanquished Berkeley with a grin;" while
common-sense folk refuted him by stamping on the ground, or some such
other irrelevant proceeding. But the key to all philosophy lies in the
clear apprehension of Berkeley's problem--which is neither more nor
less than one of the shapes of the greatest of all questions, "What
are the limits of our faculties?" And it is worth any amount of
trouble to comprehend the exact nature of the argument by which
Berkeley arrived at his results, and to know by one's own knowledge
the great truth which he discovered--that the honest and rigorous
following up of the argument which leads us to materialism, inevitably
carries us beyond it.

Suppose that I accidentally prick my finger with a pin. I immediately
become aware of a condition of my consciousness--a feeling which I
term pain. I have no doubt whatever that the feeling is in myself
alone; and if anyone were to say that the pain I feel is something
which inheres in the needle, as one of the qualities of the
substance of the needle, we should all laugh at the absurdity of the
phraseology. In fact, it is utterly impossible to conceive pain except
as a state of consciousness.

Hence, so far as pain is concerned, it is sufficiently obvious
that Berkeley's phraseology is strictly applicable to our power of
conceiving its existence--"its being is to be perceived or known," and
"so long as it is not actually perceived by me, or does not exist in
my mind, or that of any other cre