ted Essays_, Vol.
IX.

CHAPTER IX

SUBJECTIVISM[267:1]

[Sidenote: Subjectivism Originally Associated with Relativism and
Scepticism.]

Sect. 126. When, in the year 1710, Bishop Berkeley maintained the thesis
of empirical idealism, having rediscovered it and announced it with a
justifiable sense of originality, he provoked a kind of critical
judgment that was keenly annoying if not entirely surprising to him. In
refuting the conception of material substance and demonstrating the
dependence of being upon mind, he at once sought, as he did repeatedly
in later years, to establish the world of practical belief, and so to
reconcile metaphysics and common-sense. Yet he found himself hailed as a
fool and a sceptic. In answer to an inquiry concerning the reception of
his book in London, his friend Sir John Percival wrote as follows:

"I did but name the subject matter of your book of
_Principles_ to some ingenious friends of mine and they
immediately treated it with ridicule, at the same time
refusing to read it, which I have not yet got one to do. A
physician of my acquaintance undertook to discover your
person, and argued you must needs be mad, and that you ought
to take remedies. A bishop pitied you, that a desire of
starting something new should put you upon such an
undertaking. Another told me that you are not gone so far as
another gentleman in town, who asserts not only that there is
no such thing as Matter, but that we ourselves have no being
at all."[268:2]

There can be no doubt but that the idea of the dependence of real things
upon their appearance to the individual is a paradox to common-sense. It
is a paradox because it seems to reverse the theoretical instinct
itself, and to define the real in those very terms which disciplined
thought learns to neglect. In the early history of thought the nature of
the thinker himself is recognized as that which is likely to distort
truth rather than that which conditions it. When the wise man, the
devotee of truth, first makes his appearance, his authority is
acknowledged because he has renounced himself. As witness of the
universal being he purges himself of whatever is peculiar to his own
individuality, or even to his human nature. In the aloofness of his
meditation he escapes the cloud of opinion and prejudice that obscures
the vision of the common man. In short, the element of belief dependent
upo