Berkeleyan Idealism. A universe of inane mathematical points, attracting
and repelling each other, must appear to the ordinary mind a sorry
substitute for the firm-set earth, and the majestically-fretted vault
of heaven, with its planets, stars, and galaxies. It takes a special
education to reconcile any one to this theory. Even if it were
everything that a scientific hypothesis should be, the previously
established modes of speech would be a permanent obstruction to its
being received as the popular doctrine.

But the best illustrations occur in the Ethical and Metaphysical
departments. For example, some ethical theorists endeavour to show that
Conscience is not a primitive and distinct power of the mind, like the
sense of colour, or the feeling of resistance, but a growth and a
compound, being made up of various primitive impulses, together with a
process of education. Again and again has this view been represented as
denying conscience altogether. Exactly parallel has been the handling of
the sentiment of Benevolence. Some have attempted to resolve it into
simpler elements of the mind, and have been attacked as denying the
existence of the sentiment. Hobbes, in particular, has been subjected to
this treatment. Because he held pity to be a form of self-love, his
opponents charged him with declaring that there is no such thing as pity
or sympathy in the human constitution.

A more notable example is the doctrine of the alliance of Mind with
Matter. It is impossible that any mode of viewing this alliance can
erase the distinction between the two modes of existence--the material
and the mental; between extended inert bodies, on the one hand, and
pleasures and pains, thoughts and volitions, on the other. Yet, after
the world has been made familiar with the Cartesian doctrine of two
distinct substances--the one for the inherence of material facts, and