"I refute it thus"

Raymond Tallis kicks immaterialism into touch.

- Raymond Tallis

Readers may be familiar with Bishop George Berkeley’s (in)famous claim that objects exist only insofar as they are perceived. From this it follows that reality consists only of minds and their ideas. Ordinary objects such as cups and saucers and tables and chairs are bundles or collections of ideas, and their being consists in their being perceived by a mind. There is no hidden, mind-independent stuff called ‘matter’. When Berkeley (1685-1753) was questioned as to how objects could continue to be when no-one was perceiving them, he claimed they were still in the mind of God. God’s busy mind also explained how the properties of perceived objects would cluster in a coherent way: how, in the absence of matter, perceptions could still be bundled together into enduring things.

It’s no surprise that these ideas were widely rejected as absurd. Perhaps the most famous dismissal was issued by that standard-bearer for ‘stout common sense’, Dr Samuel Johnson of the original English Dictionary. According to his biographer James Boswell, after he and Johnson came out of church, they "stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter and that everything in the universe is merely ideal. I shall never forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot against a large stone, till he rebounded from it: 'I refute it thus'."