ts, in the continuity of
experience, and in its discoverable laws. His objection to
material objects, therefore, could not consistently be that
they are objects of knowledge rather than absolute feelings,
exhausted by their momentary possession in consciousness. It
could only be that they are unthinkable and invalid objects,
in which the materials of sense are given a mode of existence
inconsistent with their nature. But if the only criticism to
which material objects were obnoxious were a dialectical
criticism, such as that contained in Kant's antinomies, the
royal road to idealism coveted by Berkeley would be blocked;
to be an idea in the mind would not involve lack of cognitive
and representative value in that idea. The fact that material
objects were represented or conceived would not of itself
prove that they could not have a real existence. It would be
necessary, to prove their unreality, to study their nature and
function and to compare them with such conceptions as those of
Providence and a spirit-world in order to determine their
relative validity. Such a critical comparison would have
augured ill for Berkeley's prejudices; what its result might
have been we can see in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. In
order to escape such evil omens and prevent the collapse of
his mystical paradoxes, Berkeley keeps in reserve a much more
insidious weapon, the sceptical doubt as to the representative
character of anything mental, the possible illusiveness of all
knowledge. This doubt he invokes in all those turns of thought
and phrase in which he suggests that if an idea is in the mind
it cannot have its counterpart elsewhere, and that a given
cognition exhausts and contains its object. There are, then,
two separate maxims in his philosophy, one held consistently,
viz., that nothing can be known which is different in
character or nature from the object present to the thinking
mind; the other, held incidentally and inconsistently, since
it is destructive of all predication and knowledge, viz., that
nothing can exist beyond the mind which is similar in nature
or character to the "ideas" within it; or, to put the same
thing in other words, that nothing can be revealed by an idea
which is different from that idea in point of existence. The
fir