Berkeley's treatment of the notion of matter is so well
known as to need hardly more than a mention. So far from denying the
external world which we know, Berkeley corroborated it. It was the
scholastic notion of a material substance unapproachable by us,
BEHIND the external world, deeper and more real than it, and needed
to support it, which Berkeley maintained to be the most effective of
all reducers of the external world to unreality. Abolish that
substance, he said, believe that God, whom you can understand and
approach, sends you the sensible world directly, and you confirm the
latter and back it up by his divine authority. Berkeley's criticism
of 'matter' was consequently absolutely pragmatistic. Matter is
known as our sensations of colour, figure, hardness and the like.
They are the cash-value of the term. The difference matter makes to
us by truly being is that we then get such sensations; by not being,
is that we lack them. These sensations then are its sole meaning.
Berkeley doesn't deny matter, then; he simply tells us what it
consists of. It is a true name for just so much in the way of
sensations.
Locke, and later Hume, applied a similar pragmatic criticism to the
notion of SPIRITUAL SUBSTANCE.
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