Daily Inspiration Quote by George Berkeley

Berkeley’s neat reversal is a trap sprung on the reader: follow skepticism far enough and you don’t end in freefall, you land back on the floorboards of ordinary life. The line works because it weaponizes a posture that was fashionable in his era - radical doubt - and turns it into an argument for stability. In early modern philosophy, skepticism wasn’t just an attitude; it was an existential acid, dissolving the reliability of the senses, the certainty of knowledge, even the solidity of “matter.” Berkeley lets that acid run until it eats through the very materialism it was supposed to protect.

The subtext is strategic: skepticism isn’t the enemy of belief, it’s a tool for cleaning house. Berkeley’s own “immaterialism” (the notorious claim that to be is to be perceived) is often caricatured as airy paradox. This sentence reveals the sales pitch beneath the metaphysics. If you start by distrusting perception, you might end by distrusting the extra machinery philosophers bolt onto perception - a hidden material substance lurking behind experience. At that point, “common sense” reappears, not as naive realism, but as a disciplined acceptance of what actually shows up in experience.

Context matters: Berkeley is writing against both the skeptical tremors following Descartes and the emerging Newtonian-empiricist confidence that matter is the bedrock. His move is to deny the skeptic the final word while still borrowing the skeptic’s method. Doubt becomes a boomerang: throw it hard enough, it comes back carrying a stricter, leaner version of everyday certainty.