BERKELEY.--To the "sensualist" Locke succeeded Berkeley, the
unrestrained "idealist," like him an Englishman. He began to write when
very young, continued to write until he was sixty, and died at
sixty-eight. He believed neither in matter nor in the external world. There
was the whole of his philosophy. Why did he not believe in them? Because
all thinkers are agreed that we cannot know whether we see the external
world _as it is_. Then, if we do not know it, why do we affirm that it
exists? We know nothing about it. Now we ought to build up the world only
with what we know of it, and to do otherwise is not philosophy but yielding
to imagination. What is it that we know of the world? Our ideas, and
nothing but our ideas. Very well then, let us say: there are only
ideas. But whence do these ideas come to us? To explain them as coming from
the external world which we have never seen is to explain obscurity by
denser darkness. They are spiritual, they come to us without doubt from a
spirit, from God. This is possible, it is not illogical, and Berkeley
believes it.

This doctrine regarded by the eyes of common sense may appear a mere
phantasy; but Berkeley saw in it many things of high importance and great
use. If you believe in matter, you can believe in matter only, and that is
materialism with its moral consequences, which are immoral; if you believe
in matter and in God, you are so hampered by this dualism that you do not
know how to separate nature from God, and it therefore comes to pass that
you see God in matter, which is called pantheism. In a word, between us and
God Berkeley has suppressed matter in order that we should come, as it
were, into direct contact with God. He derives much from Malebranche, and
it may be said he only pushes his theories to their extreme. Although a
bishop, he was not checked, like Descartes, by the idea of God not being
able to deceive us, and he answered that God does not deceive us, that He