The natural or created ideas which God impresses on us are copies of the eternal ideas which he himself perceives, not, indeed, by passive sensation, but through his creative reason.  Accordingly when it was maintained that things do not exist independently of perception, the reference was not to the individual spirit, but to all spirits.  When I turn my eyes away from an object it continues to exist, indeed, after my perception has ended—­in the minds of other men and in that of the Omnipresent One.  The pantheistic conclusion of these principles, in the sense of Geulincx and Malebranche,[1] which one expects, was really suggested by Berkeley.  Everything exists only in virtue of its participation in the one, permanent, all-comprehensive spirit; individual spirits are of the same nature with the universal reason, only they are less perfect, limited, and not pure activity, while God is passionless intelligence.  But if, in the last analysis, God is the cause of all, this does not hold of the free actions of men, least of all of wicked ones.  The freedom of the will must not be rejected because of the contradictions which its acceptance involves; motion, also, and mathematical infinity imply incomprehensible elements.  In the philosophy of nature Berkeley prefers the teleological to the mechanical view, since the latter is able to discover the laws of phenomena only, but not their efficient and final causes.  Sense and experience acquaint us merely with the course of phenomenal effects; the reason, which opens up to us the realm of causation, of the spiritual, is the only sure guide to science and truth.  The understanding does not feel, the senses do not know.  We have no (sensuous) idea of other spirits, but only a notion of them; instead of themselves we perceive their activities merely, from which we argue to souls like ourselves, while we know our own mind by immediate self-consciousness.[2]

[Footnote 1:  The example of Arthur Collier shows that the same results which Berkeley reaches empirically can be obtained from the standpoint of rationalism.  Following Malebranche, and developing further the idealistic tendencies of the latter, Collier had, independently of Berkeley, conceived the doctrine of the “non-existence or impossibility of an external world “; but had not worked it out in his Clavis Universalis, 1713, until after the appearance of Berkeley’s chief work, and not without consideration of this.  The general point of view and the arguments are the same:  Existence is equivalent to being perceived by God; the creation of a real world of matter apart from the ideal world in God and from sensuous perceptions in us would have been a superfluous device, etc.]

[Footnote 2:  It should be remembered, however, that this immediate knowledge of ourselves is also “not after the manner of an idea or sensation.”  Our knowledge of spirits is always mediated by “notions” not by “ideas” in the strict sense, that is, not by “images.”  Cf. Principles, Sec.Sec. 27, 135 seq., especially in the second edition.—­TR.]