Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists

Who really loses the world — the man who believes in matter or the man who denies it? Berkeley's boldest move is to pin the skepticism on his opponent.

The Principles had been met with ridicule and the charge that its author was a skeptic. In the Dialogues Berkeley turns that charge back: it is Hylas, the believer in matter, who ends unable to say the world is really colored, or warm, or there at all, because he has placed reality behind an unknowable material screen. Philonous, the immaterialist, keeps every ordinary thing exactly as it seems. So the counterintuitive doctrine, Berkeley argues, is the sober defence of common sense, and belief in matter is the road to doubt. The reversal is the whole rhetorical engine of the book.

• skepticism
• materialism
• common sense
• immaterialism
• idealism
• metaphysics
• reality

Is the warmth of a thing in the thing, or in you? Berkeley walks through the senses one by one to show that every sensible quality belongs to the perceiving mind.

The dialogue argues by working through the senses. Heat felt intensely is indistinguishable from pain, which is plainly in the perceiver; water feels warm to one hand and cold to the other, so warmth cannot be in the water itself. Case by case, Berkeley draws color, sound, taste and the rest into the mind, then collapses the line Locke had drawn between primary qualities like shape and motion, supposedly in the object, and secondary ones like color, supposedly in us. If the secondary qualities are mind-dependent, the same reasoning takes the primary ones too, leaving nothing for matter to have.

• perception
• sensation
• sensible qualities
• primary qualities
• matter
• empiricism
• substance

If every quality is in the mind, what becomes of the world when no one looks? Berkeley answers that the whole sensible world is drawn into mind, and God is what holds it in being.

Once every sensible quality has been drawn into the mind, the whole world of experience turns out to exist only in being perceived — and what keeps it steady and shared, present whether or not any human attends to it, is God, in whose perception all things stand. Berkeley insists this loses nothing ordinary: the stone, the tree, the fire are all still there, still exactly as felt; only the inert matter supposed to lie behind them is gone. Samuel Johnson's famous reply, kicking a stone, misses this, since Berkeley never denied the stone — only the matter imagined behind it.

• idealism
• spirit
• theology
• creation
• existence
• reality
• mind
• ideas