Berkeley, born in Ireland in 1685, is usually classified as an “Empiricist”, along with two other Brits John Locke and David Hume. But as you will see, he was a character all his own. He started out following Locke claiming that all we have on which to base our knowledge claims are the “impressions” made on our minds by sense data. Locke ended up not being able to explain where these sense data come from since we do not actually “see” or experience the “objects” making up the physical world directly, Our minds shape our various sense data into objects.
It occurred to Berkeley that perhaps all this talk about sense data and impressions forming the objects we experience in our minds is simply “extra baggage”. Would it not be easier to do away with all this talk about physical objects altogether and simply stick with what we do in fact experience, namely mental sense data. Berkeley argued that “physical objects” are nothing but figments of our imaginations, or rather, figments of the imaginations of philosophers. What we actually experience are various combinations of sense data that come to us on a regular basis, and we learn to call these “physical objects.”
So, Berkeley concluded that things would be a lot simpler and rational if we would stick with talk about our sense data and simply drop all this talk about hypothetical “physical objects” altogether. As a Bishop in the Anglican Church, his next move was unsurprising. He claimed that reality is exclusively comprised of our minds and that of God, the Superior Mind. God has arranged for our minds to receive the ideas from His mind, the combination of which comprise what we call the “real world”. In short, our world, the sum total of all the sense data we receive, is the result of our “thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” Clearly, Berkeley thought that he had herby constructed a new and foolproof argument for the existence of God.
In a sense, to be sure, nothing has really changed. Berkeley’s argument for the non-existence of physical objects and the existence of God leaves everything as it was, except now we will talk only of sense-data and various combinations thereof instead of “physical objects”. These combinations come directly from the mind of God not from some fictious things called “physical objects”. As strange as all this sounds, no less a great mind as that of Bertrand Russell claimed that: “While no one has ever been able to refute Berkeley, neither has anyone ever taken him seriously.” It seems that Berkeley has simply altered the terminology that we use to speak of our experience without actually altering the world of reality. Something seems to have gone amuck here. Absolutely valid yet empty.
Berkeley, of course, thought he had not only solved the difficulties of metaphysics and epistemology, as well as that of theology too, all in one stroke. Clearly, his position as a Bishop in the Anglican Church was secured. Surprisingly, however, Berkeley had even broader plans. He proposed to start a Church related college in Bermuda in order to convert the natives there to Christianity. He submitted his plan to the Queen and departed for Rhode Island in America to wait for the necessary funds to arrive. Unfortunately, they never did materialize, and Berkeley returned to Ireland where he continued his work as a Bishop. I have visited his Rhode Island home, which is still standing and well-kept as a tourist attraction.
Interestingly enough David Hume, the ultimate empiricist, skeptic, and critic of religion, took Berkeley’s line of thought one step further. He argued that we cannot even know whether our future experiences will be like the past ones, since there is no valid reason to assume that the future will be like the past. All we can know, according to Hume, is how our experience has been in the past. The world may simply go bonkers and we will be left holding the bag.