In contrast to the fearlessness with which Berkeley propounds his spiritualism, his anxious endeavors to take away the appearance of paradox from his immaterialistic doctrine, and to show its complete agreement with common sense, excite surprise.  Even the common man, he argues, desires nothing more than that his perceptions be real; the distinction between idea and object is an invention of philosophers.  Here Berkeley cannot be acquitted of a certain sophistical play upon the term “idea,” which, in fact, is ambiguous.  He understands by it that which the soul perceives (its immediate, inner object), but the popular mind, that through which the soul perceives an object.  The reality of an idea in us is different from the idea of a real thing, or from the reality of that which is perceived without us by means of the idea, and it is just this last meaning which common sense affirms and Berkeley denies.  In any case it was a work of great merit to have transferred the existence of objects beyond our ideas, of things-in-themselves, out of the region of the self-evident into the region of the problematical.  We never get beyond the circle of our ideas, and if we posit a thing-in-itself as the ground and object of the idea, this also is simply a thought, an idea.  For us there is no being except that of the perceiver and the perceived.  Later we shall meet two other forms of idealism, in Leibnitz and Fichte.  Both of these agree with Berkeley that spiritual beings alone are active, and active beings alone real, and that the being of the inactive consists in their being perceived.  But while in Berkeley the objective ideas are impressed upon finite spirits by the Infinite Spirit from without and singly, with Leibnitz they appear as a fullness of germs, which God implanted together in the monads at the beginning, and which the individual develops into consciousness, and with Fichte they become the unconscious productions of the Absolute Ego acting in the individual egos.  For the two former as many worlds exist as there are individual spirits, their harmony being guaranteed, in the one case, by the consistency of God’s working, and, in the other, by his foresight.  For Fichte, on the other hand, there is but one world, for the absolute is not outside the individual spirits, but the uniformly working force within them.

(b) Hume.—­David Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711, and died in the same city, 1776.  His position as librarian, which he held in the place of his birth, 1752-57, gave the opportunity for his History of England( 1754-62).  His chief work, the Treatise on Human Nature, which, however, found few readers, was composed during his first residence in France in 1734-37.  Later he worked over the first book of this work into his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748); the second book into A Dissertation on the Passions; and the third into An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals.  These, and others of his essays, found so much favor that, during his second sojourn in France, as secretary to Lord Hertford, in 1763-66, he was already honored as a philosopher of world-wide renown.  Then, after serving for some time as Under-Secretary of State, he retired to private life at home (1769).