A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
George Berkeley 1710
This treatise presents a step-by-step argument about what we can know through our senses. An apple provides an early example of how separate sensations become a single thing in the mind.
129 pages 2h 31m reading time
- A founding work of idealism, the view that reality is made of minds and ideas rather than of matter.
- Argues that for ordinary objects like tables and trees, to exist is to be perceived, so nothing exists apart from a mind that perceives it.
- Argues that the idea of "matter" existing on its own, beyond anything we can sense, makes no sense, and that God's constant perception keeps the world steady and orderly.
- Became a central text of British empiricism (the view that knowledge comes from experience), linking John Locke before it and David Hume after it, and Hume built on its attack on abstract ideas.
- Gave philosophy the famous puzzle of whether a tree falling in a forest with no one around makes a sound, a question still used to introduce debates about perception and reality.
Lost second part
Planned as only the first of several parts, its sequel was lost during Berkeley's travels in Italy and never rewritten.
Built from private notebooks
Berkeley worked out its arguments in private notebooks while he was a young teacher at Trinity College in Dublin.
Readers called him mad
In London, one doctor who heard about the book decided that its author must be out of his mind.
Retold as a conversation
Because few readers were convinced, Berkeley restated its arguments three years later as an easier talk between two friends.