rew the
conception of material substance, in two directions. For neither mind of
the finite type nor mind of the divine type is perceived. But the first
of these may yet be regarded as a direct empirical datum, even though
sharply distinguished from an object of perception. In the third
dialogue, Philonous thus expounds this new kind of knowledge:

"I own I have properly no _idea_, either of God or any other
spirit; for these being active, cannot be represented by
things perfectly inert, as our ideas are. I do nevertheless
know that I, who am a spirit or thinking substance, exist as
certainly as I know my ideas exist. Farther, I know what I
mean by the terms _I_ and _myself_; and I know this
immediately or intuitively, though I do not perceive it as I
perceive a triangle, a color, or a sound."[284:15]

The knowledge here provided for may be regarded as empirical because
the reality in question is an individual present in the moment of the
knowledge. Particular acts of perception are said directly to reveal not
only perceptual objects, but perceiving subjects. And the conception of
spiritual substance, once accredited, may then be extended to account
for social relations and to fill in the nature of God. The latter
extension, in so far as it attributes such further predicates as
universality and infinity, implies still a third epistemology, and
threatens to pass over into rationalism. But the knowledge of one's
fellow-men may, it is claimed, be regarded as immediate, like the
knowledge of one's self. Perceptual and volitional activity has a sense
for itself and also a sense for other like activity. The self is both
self-conscious and socially conscious in an immediate experience of the
same type.

[Sidenote: Schopenhauer's Spiritualism, or Voluntarism. Immediate
Knowledge of the Will.]

Sect. 135. But this general spiritualistic conception is developed with
less singleness of purpose in Berkeley than among the _voluntarists_ and
_panpsychists_ who spring from Schopenhauer, the orientalist, pessimist,
and mystic among the German Kantians of the early nineteenth century.
His great book, "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung," opens with the
phenomenalistic contention that "the world is my idea." It soon appears,
however, that the "my" is more profoundly significant than the "idea."
Nature is my creation, due to the working within me of certain fixed
principles of thought, such as