SOURCE: “Berkeley's Idealism: Yet Another Visit,” in Berkeley's Metaphysics: Structural, Interpretive, and Critical Essays, edited by Robert G. Muehlmann, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995, pp. 23-37.

In the following essay, Allaire surveys the ontology of Berkeley's philosophy of idealism, and why it fails.

In these remarks, I try to show that Berkeley's idealism was inevitable and that its failings continue to be instructive. Being too long indifferent to epistemological matters, I have only recently come to believe the former. All ontological solutions to the problems of knowledge issue in idealism or a variant of it, I think.

Berkeley's ontology contains two basic kinds: minds and ideas, as he calls them. The former—also called spirits, souls, and selves—are acknowledged to be (mental) substances (PR [A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge] 7); the latter, except for some simple ideas that are deemed qualities, though not relative to...