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- |