Truth and Dreaming

Berkeley enters tenuous philosophical territory and invites such criticism when he argues that there is no such thing as matter, as material existence. The realm of the mind is abstract enough without removing the world of matter and placing all reality in the mind, even if that mental territory includes the mind of God. Other philosophers used the material world to at least ground the mind, but Berkeley is trying to argue that all reality is immaterial. Berkeley's theory is slippery enough when we limit ourselves to the activities of the sober, sane mind which is operating in a conscious state. Clearly, when we try to discern the perceptions of the hallucinating or dreaming mind from the conscious and sober mind, we are entering into even more mystifying waters.

Berkeley's basic philosophical argument is that something exists only insofar as it is perceived. However, the perception of a waking mind can be argued to be no more certain than the perception of a dreaming or hallucinating mind. The dreaming or hallucinating mind is just as certain as the conscious, sober mind that what it is perceiving is "real" The senses perceive the thing, and these perceptions register in the mind, whether the mind is wakin

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, like many philosophers, has a pre-determined destination for his journey, and, in Berkeley's case, that destination is a spiritual reality. He argues that there is no material reality not simply in order to advance a non-material argument, but in order to advance the argument that reality is spiritual, specifically God-based. Everything Philonous says, then, is directly or indirectly designed to lead Hylas and the reader toward the conclusion that reality is spiritual, and that we rely finally for our knowledge of truth upon a standard rooted in God. In other words, does the idea or sensation reflect an attribute or attributes of God, or does it not? On the surface of his response to Hylas' suggestion that real things and dreams or chimeras are the same because they are "equally in the mind" (p. 68), Philonous simply argues that real things are more distinct than those things conjured by the imagination: "The ideas formed by the imagination are faint and indistinct . . . But the ideas perceived by sense, that is, real things, are more vivid and clear . . . There is therefore no danger of confounding these [i.e., real things] with the foregoing [i.e., imagined things]: and there is as little of confounding them with the vis
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Approximate Word count = 1530
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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