What is the Nature of Reality? Berkeley's Inconceivability Argument

The evidence of material veracity is so compelling to immediate experience, and the immediate experience of human beings drumheads around the public is so varied, that it is difficult to see how Berkeley lowlife reject it so radically. Yet Berkeley's idea of what is factual seems to bring Plato's doctrine of Ideal Forms to the extreme and a refutation of mind-body dualism to its extreme. In Berkeley's look on, anything that can be imagined (walking on air, a Cubs World Series) has the uniform populace as that which can be inferred by simile or confirmed by experience (walking a tightrope, a golden mountain). This same verity is that it is no tangibleity at all. It is only an object of imagination conceptualized as perception. To support this view Berkeley cites the inability of materialists to explain "how our ideas argon produced, since they own themselves unable to continue in what manner body can act upon spirit, or how it is possible it should imprint any idea in the mind" (158). The ability to form ideas about objects is non the same as the ability of the objects to exist independently of the mind (159-60).

There mud the problem of what causes the ideas, and as Berkeley explains this, it is difficult not to suspect that the rigidity of his logic has a subtext that is apart from the proofs he makes of the contradiction enter in assertion of material reality. First of all, as he later explains, he does not have the "least pass" about t

he cosmea of things perceived by the senses. His question and objection turns out to be to the assertion of philosophical "matter and corporeal substance" as primary constituents of reality (164). Thus the difficulty of conceptualizing the material world as nonsense, which vexes the first half of the text, turns out to have been as it were a chimera meant to exercise the mental processes.

There is therefore some cause of these ideas, whereon they depend, and which produces and changes them. . . .

It must therefore be a substance; but it has been shewn that there is no corporeal or material substance: it remains therefore that the cause of ideas is an unbodied active substance of Spirit (161).

That Spirit comes down to the reason of God, which functions as container for the shared coherence of perception, concept, and experience. It turns out that Berkeley conceives of a power structure mental realities, with "ideas imprinted on the senses by the Author of nature . . . real things; and those excited in the imagination, being less regular, vivid, and constant, are much properly termed ideas, or images of things, which they occupy and represent" (163). The lower-order real things "are allowed to have more [material] reality in them" (163), but their reality nevertheless depends on the fact that the mind has created it. In any case, such reality is contained in the fact that notional reality itself is a product of mental process. The difficulty that the mind whitethorn have in grasping the idea that idea itself is real while its objects are not does not deter Berkeley, not least because he appeals to the fact that the Supreme Spirit, "which excites those ideas in our minds,
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