Daily Inspiration Quote by George Berkeley

Berkeley pulls off a sly inversion: if you can swallow Creation, don’t get squeamish about lesser wonders. The line is doing rhetorical judo on the early modern skeptic who wants a tidy, mechanistic universe but balks at “miracles” as violations of reason. Berkeley’s move is to widen the frame until the skeptic’s confidence looks parochial. The existence of a world at all, he suggests, is the strangest datum on the table; everything else is just quibbling over the size of the anomaly.

The phrasing matters. “Admit” is legalistic, almost courtroom language, as if belief is a reluctant concession forced by evidence. Then he stacks adjectives - “strange, and odd, and new” - mimicking a mind trying (and failing) to domesticate the shock of existence. “Human apprehension” quietly limits the authority of “common sense”: what feels plausible is a function of our cognitive equipment, not a stamp of metaphysical truth.

Context sharpens the edge. Berkeley, the immaterialist bishop-philosopher, is fighting on two fronts: against atheistic materialism and against a deism that accepts a distant Creator but rejects ongoing divine action. By recasting Creation itself as the maximal “miracle,” he undercuts the idea that nature is a closed system whose regularities are self-explanatory. Subtext: the real superstition isn’t believing in miracles; it’s pretending the world’s existence is less mysterious than our theories make it sound.