Monday, June 16, 2008

George Berkeley


Knossos, Greece - 2006

1. "All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth - in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world - have not any subsistence without a mind."
2. "I have no reason for believing the existence of matter. I have no immediate intuition thereof: neither can I immediately, from any sensations, ideas, notions, actions or passions infer an unthinking, unperceiving, inactive substance - either by probable deduction or necessary consequence."
3. "The brain therefore you speak of, being a sensible thing, exists only in the mind."
4. "Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowled ge, are entirely owing to ourselves. We have first raised a dust, and then complain we cannot see.
5. "Whenever I attempt to frame a simple idea of time, abstracted from the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows uniformly, and is participated by all beings, I am lost and embrangled in inextricable difficulties"