Bishop Berkeley Quotes

Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.

I don't think," he said, "that a vicar is supposed to beat a bishop to death, or even back to death." Mr. Berkeley looked down upon the remains of Bishop Bernard. "If anyone asks, we'll say he fell over," he said. "Lots of times.

HE who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave.

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it thus.

And so they would go on talking or rather, understanding, which has become the main art of speech in an age when words are growing daily so scanty in comparison with ideas that ‘the biscuits ran out’ has to stand for kissing a negress in the dark when one has just read Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy for the tenth time. (And from this it follows that only the most profound masters of style can tell the truth, and when one meets a simple one–syllable writer, one may conclude, without any doubt at all, that the poor man is lying.)

Wherein, he resembled my Right Reverend friend, Bishop Berkeley - truly, one of your lords spiritual - who, metaphysically speaking, holding all objects to be mere optical delusions, was, notwithstanding, extremely matter-of-fact in all matters touching matter itself. Besides being pervious to the points of pins, and possessing a palate capable of appreciating plum-puddings: - which sentence reads off like a pattering of hailstones.

For if we regard space and time as properties that must, as regards their possibility, be found in things in themselves, [...] then we really cannot blame the good Bishop Berkeley for degrading bodies to mere illusion. Nay, even our own existence, which would thus be made dependent on the self-subsistent reality of a non-entity such as time, would, along with this time, be changed into mere illusion - an absurdity of which hitherto no one has been guilty.

If the fact that brutes abstract not be made the distinguishing property of that sort of animal, I fear a great many of those that pass for men must be reckoned into their number.

Already uneasy over the foundations of their subject, mathematicians got a solid dose of ridicule from a clergyman, Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753). Bishop Berkeley, in his caustic essay 'The Analyst, or a Discourse addressed to an Infidel Mathematician,' derided those mathematicians who were ever ready to criticize theology as being based upon unsubstantiated faith, yet who embraced the calculus in spite of its foundational weaknesses. Berkeley could not resist letting them have it: 'All these points [of mathematics], I say, are supposed and believed by certain rigorous exactors of evidence in religion, men who pretend to believe no further than they can see... But he who can digest a second or third fluxion, a second or third differential, need not, methinks, be squeamish about any point in divinity.' As if that were not devastating enough, Berkeley added the wonderfully barbed comment: 'And what are these fluxions? The velocities of evanescent increments. And what are these same evanescent increments? They are neither finite quantities, nor quantities infinitely small, not yet nothing. May we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities...?' Sadly, the foundations of the calculus had come to this - to 'ghosts of departed quantities.' One imagines hundreds of mathematicians squirming restlessly under this sarcastic phrase. Gradually the mathematical community had to address this vexing problem. Throughout much of the eighteenth century, they had simply been having too much success - and too much fun - in exploiting the calculus to stop and examine its underlying principles. But growing internal concerns, along with Berkeley's external sniping, left them little choice. The matter had to be resolved. Thus we find a string of gifted mathematicians working on the foundational questions. The process of refining the idea of 'limit' was an excruciating one, for the concept is inherently quite deep, requiring a precision of thought and an appreciation of the nature of the real number system that is by no means easy to come by. Gradually, though, mathematicians chipped away at this idea. By 1821, the Frenchman Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789-1857) had proposed this definition: 'When the values successively attributed to a particular variable approach indefinitely a fixed value, so as to end by differing from it by as little as one wishes, this latter is called the limit of all the others.

Scientists are extremely keen on “common sense”, yet their hero Albert Einstein dismissively said, “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by the age of eighteen.” Your senses and your common sense are both insufficient to the task that scientism assigns to them. They don’t tell you shit. As Bishop Berkeley pointed out, you have no experience of any objective thing called “matter”. Instead, you have a subjective experience of a subjective idea of what you label “matter”. You always encounter the idea of matter in your mind. You have no non-mental encounter with anything called matter, so where is your evidence that matter even exists? As Berkeley demonstrated, “matter” is a redundant hypothesis.

To be is to be perceived.” Or, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? – Bishop George Berkeley To be is to be perceived, executes contradictions in its context of various insights. To be is to exist and present; otherwise, it is only a perception, and it exists not; it never to be when it occurs; it results not in anymore as a perception; it becomes a reality. Thus, to be is neither perception, nor it is to be until its physical visibility. As an exemplification that, a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear the sound; it sounds logical impact and fact; however, not the perception. - Ehsan Sehgal

* To be is to be perceived.” Or, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? – Bishop George Berkeley * To be is to be perceived, executes contradictions in its context of various insights. To be is to exist and present; otherwise, it is only a perception, and it exists not; it never to be when it occurs; it results not in anymore as a perception; it becomes a reality. Thus, to be is neither perception, nor it is to be until its physical visibility. As an exemplification that, a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear the sound; it sounds logical impact and fact; however, not the perception - Ehsan Sehgal

[Dick] had absorbed Hume's argument that we cannot verify causality (that B follows A does not prove that A caused B), Bishop Berkeley's demonstration that physical reality cannot be objectively established (all we have are sensory impressions that seem to be real), and Kant's distinction between noumena (unknowable ultimate reality) and phenomena (a priori categories, such as space and time, imposed upon reality by the workings of the human brain). From Jung he adopted the theory of projection: The contents of our psyches strongly color our perceptions. As a coup de grace, Phil's study of Vedic and Buddhist philosophy led to a fascination with maya: True reality is veiled from unenlightened human consciousness. We create illustory realms in accordance with our fears and desires.

The Copenhagen interpretation, for instance, seems much more economical than EWG — as I have presented it. However, all too often physicists have presented it, not in E-Prime but in standard English, including the "is of identity." When stated with the "is of identity" the Copenhagen view always seems to say that we literally create the physical universe by observing it — a position previously espoused only by Bishop Berkeley, and easily caricatured as solipsism. (As noted, one physicist has even written, "There is no reality.")

NAUDSONCE Bishop Berkeley's famous question about the sound of a falling tree may have no standing in Science. But there is a highly interesting question about "sound" that Science needs to consider....

Copies of Ficino’s translations were owned by Ben Jonson, John Milton, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean Racine in France, by Bishop Berkeley in Ireland and Baruch Spinoza in the Netherlands, and by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Immanuel Kant in Germany.56 The Ripoli Press’s 1484 edition is recorded at Harvard in 1735, at Yale in 1742, and even, by 1623, in China.57 More than 120 copies have survived into the twenty-first century: thirty-six in Italy, the remainder scattered from Malta, Slovakia, and Sweden to libraries in California, Kansas, Oregon, and the Rare Book Division of the Library of Congress.

To be is to be perceived.” Or, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? – Bishop George Berkeley -- To be is to be perceived; executes contradictions in the context of various insights. To be is to exist and present; otherwise, it is only a perception, and it exists not; it never to be when it occurs; it results not in anymore as a perception; it becomes a reality. Thus, to be is neither perception nor is to be until its physical visibility. As an exemplification that a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear the sound; it sounds logical impact and fact; however, not the perception - Ehsan Sehgal

semiquaver skinned the feelings of the manifold.” Certainly the division of words into grammatical categories such as nouns, adjectives, and verbs is not our sole guide concerning the use of words in producing English text. What does influence the choice among words when the words used in constructing grammatical sentences are chosen, not at random by a machine, but rather by a live human being who, through long training, speaks or writes English according to the rules of the grammar? This question is not to be answered by a vague appeal to the word meaning. Our criteria in producing English sentences can be very complicated indeed. Philosophers and psychologists have speculated about and studied the use of words and language for generations, and it is as hard to say anything entirely new about this as it is to say anything entirely true. In particular, what Bishop Berkeley wrote in the eighteenth century concerning the use of language is so sensible that one can scarcely make a reasonable comment without owing him credit. Let us suppose that a poet of the scanning, rhyming school sets out to write a grammatical poem. Much of his choice will be exercised in selecting words which fit into the chosen rhythmic pattern, which rhyme, and which have alliteration and certain consistent or agreeable sound values. This is particularly notable in Poe’s “The Bells,” “Ulalume,” and “The Raven.