[A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley, 1710]
iii-iv I had no inclination... to trouble the reader with large volumes. What I have done was rather with
the view of giving hints to thinking men, who have leisure and curiosity to go to the bottom of things, and pursue them in
their own minds. Two or three times reading these small tracts, and making what us read the occasion of thinking, would, I
believe, render the whole familiar and easy to the the mind, and take off that shocking appearance which hath often been observed
to attend speculative truths.'
vii 'I am not changing things into ideas,' he says, 'but rather ideas into things; since those immediate
objects of perception, which according to you (Berkeley might have said, according to philosophers) are only appearances
of things, I take to be the real things themselves... In short, you do not trust your senses; I do.' [JLJ
- for Berkeley, we must begin all philosophy with what the senses provide us - the senses produce the reality that
we should be interested in. His starting point for his philosophy was what the plain dictates of his senses furnished.]
p.29 It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are
either ideas actually imprinted on the senses; or else as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the
mind; or lastly, ideas formed by help of memory and imagination - either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those
originally perceived in the aforesaid ways. [JLJ - a great opening line. You might say that he knows knowledge, or has knowledge
of knowledge.]
p.47 The ideas imprinted on the Senses by the Author of nature are called real things; and those
excited in the imagination being less regular, vivid, and constant, are more properly termed ideas, or images
of things, which they copy and represent.
p.82 Ideas imprinted on the senses are real things, or do really exist; this we do not deny
p.86 The plainest things in the world, those we are most intimately acquainted with and perfectly know,
when they are considered in an abstract way, appear strangely difficult and incomprehensible..
