re is no material world at all.

When we examine with care the objects of sense, the "things" which
present themselves to us, he argues, we find that they resolve
themselves into sensations, or "ideas of sense." What can we mean by
the word "apple," if we do not mean the group of experiences in which
alone an apple is presented to us? The word is nothing else than a
name for this group as a group. Take away the color, the hardness, the
odor, the taste; what have we left? And color, hardness, odor, taste,
and anything else that may be referred to any object as a quality, can
exist, he claims, only in a perceiving mind; for such things are
nothing else than sensations, and how can there be an unperceived
sensation?

The things which we perceive, then, he calls complexes of ideas. Have
we any reason to believe that these ideas, which exist in the mind, are
to be accepted as representatives of things of a different kind, which
are not mental at all? Not a shadow of a reason, says Berkeley; there
is simply no basis for inference at all, and we cannot even make clear
what it is that we are setting out to infer under the name of matter.
We need not, therefore, grieve over the loss of the material world, for
we have suffered no loss; one cannot lose what one has never had.

Thus, the objects of human knowledge, the only things of which it means
anything to speak, are: (1) Ideas of Sense; (2) Ideas of Memory and
Imagination; (3) The Passions and Operations of the Mind; and (4) The
Self that perceives all These.

From Locke's position to that of Berkeley was a bold step, and it was
much criticised, as well it might be. It was felt then, as it has been
felt by many down to our own time, that, when we discard an external
world distinct from our ideas, and admit only the world revealed in our
ideas, we really do lose.

It is legitimate to criticise Berkeley, but it is not legitimate to
misunderstand him; and yet the history of his doctrine may almost be
called a chronicle of misconceptions. It has been assumed that he drew
no distinction between real things and imaginary things, that he made
the world no better than a dream, etc. Arbuthnot, Swift, and a host of
the greater and lesser lights in literature, from his time to ours,
have made merry over the supposed unrealities in the midst of which the
Berkeleian must live.

But it should be remembered that Berkeley tried hard to do full justice
to the world of things in