Berkeley’s philosophy of immaterialism takes Locke’s empiricism a stage further. Locke argued that we experience what he called primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities were those that inhere in the objects themselves, outside the human mind. An example of a primary quality would be shape. So in the case of...
Unlock This Answer Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
a ball, its spherical shape is actually in the object itself, not just in our minds.
Secondary qualities, on the other hand, only exist in the mind. An example of this would be color. Let us imagine that we are looking at a red ball. The redness, the ball’s color, is in our minds, whereas the shape and size are in the object itself. The shape and size are primary qualities, the color a secondary quality.
Another way of looking at this is to say that if we extract the secondary quality—in this case, the color—from the object, it would still be a ball; it would still be the thing that it is. But we wouldn’t be able to do that with the object’s primary qualities, its shape, size, and so on. One simply can’t imagine a ball without a shape; it simply wouldn’t be a ball.
Berkeley agrees with Locke, but only up to a point. He argues that the distinction between primary and secondary qualities is wholly unnecessary and doesn’t correspond to how we actually perceive the world around us.
In Locke’s scheme of things, we have the perceiver, the object, and our ideas of that object. Berkeley, however, cuts out the middle man, as it were, by getting rid of the object. To him, there are no material objects existing “out there” in the real world. All there are, and all we have, are ideas. Everything we perceive around us is as real as we think it is. Only what we perceive consists entirely of ideas, not matter. To return to our example of the red ball, both the redness of the ball and its shape, what for Locke are primary and secondary qualities, are ideas.
Berkeley’s immaterialism can be criticized on a number of grounds. One of the most powerful arguments against his philosophy is that it is really no more than an elaborate justification of Berkeley’s religious beliefs.
Berkeley was a bishop in the Church of Ireland, and he believed that materialism of any kind always leads to skepticism and atheism. This is because materialism, such as Locke’s belief in primary substances, encourages the notion that there is a physical realm outside us that may always have existed independently of any spiritual influence, i.e. God.
Critics have therefore argued that Berkeley’s philosophy, though highly stimulating and suggestive in many respects, is nonetheless based on theological assumptions that are not amenable to rational argument.