Daily Inspiration Quote by George Berkeley

Berkeley’s line is a trap laid with politeness. He begins by borrowing the reader’s confidence - “what every body will allow” - as if he’s merely cashing a consensus check. But the content of that consensus is explosive: thoughts, passions, and imaginative ideas don’t merely happen in us; they have no standalone existence apart from mind. He smuggles in his core idealist program under the guise of common sense, turning an apparently modest psychological observation into a metaphysical crowbar.

The phrasing matters. By bundling “passions” with “ideas formed by the imagination,” Berkeley collapses the boundary between what we treat as inner data (feelings) and what we treat as private fictions (imagined objects). Both are equally mind-dependent. Once you grant that, the next step becomes easier: why stop at fantasies and emotions? If the only things you ever encounter are perceptions, and perceptions are mind-involving by definition, then the “material world” starts looking like an unnecessary duplicate - a shadow substrate you never actually meet.

Context sharpens the intent. Berkeley is writing against Locke’s emerging empiricism and, more broadly, the early modern confidence that matter can be described as a mind-independent mechanism. His move is not to deny experience, but to radicalize it: keep the evidence (what appears), discard the metaphysical extra (matter as an unperceived thing-in-itself). The subtext is theological and political, too: if reality is inseparable from perception, the stability of the world can be anchored in an ever-perceiving divine mind, not in inert stuff. The charm is that he frames a controversial thesis as social obviousness, daring you to object without sounding unreasonable.