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yet matter is not. Berkeley believed that he corrected
this lapse, committed perhaps for the sake of clear
exposition, by going on to say: "The ideas imprinted
on the Senses by the Author of nature are called real
things; . . . yet still they are ideas, and certainly no
idea, whether faint or strong, can exist otherwise than
in a mind perceiving it." 1 And in another place he said:
"To me it is evident . . . that sensible things cannot
exist otherwise than in a mind or spirit. Whence I
conclude, not that they have no real existence, but
that, seeing they depend not on my thought, and have
an existence distinct from being perceived by me, there
must be some other mind wherein they exist
." 2 In fine,
the physical world, including the sense organs them-
selves, is God's idea imparted to us.

From this it is perfectly clear that Berkeley means
that the world is idea in the unallowable sense--every
least fragment of the world, the world distributively,
is idea. And why, once more, is it unallowable? Why is
the proposition true collectively, but false distribu-
tively? Why must consciousness or mind be like the
regiment, which is destroyed if the men are distributed
to their homes, rather than be a fundamental substance
of which every least thing consists? This is the reason.
Let it be granted that the world distributively is com-
posed of ideas, that each least feature is idea. Then
'idea' becomes at once the fundamental, undefined con-
cept of which simply nothing more can be said. By being
everywhere present, as logicians who love paradox are
apt to say, it is nowhere present: it is the zero-class.
If the several terms (a, b, c, -- --) of a class are all

____________________
1 Of the Principles of Human Knowledge. Section 33.
2 The Second Dialogue between Hylas and Philono.

-92-

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Publication Information: Book Title: The Concept of Consciousness. Contributors: Edwin B. Holt - author. Publisher: Macmillan. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1914. Page Number: 92.
    
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