* * * * *

To sum up.  If the materialist affirms that the universe and all its phenomena are resolvable into matter and motion, Berkeley replies, True; but what you call matter and motion are known to us only as forms of consciousness; their being is to be conceived or known; and the existence of a state of consciousness, apart from a thinking mind, is a contradiction in terms.

I conceive that this reasoning is irrefragable.  And therefore, if I were obliged to choose between absolute materialism and absolute idealism, I should feel compelled to accept the latter alternative.  Indeed, upon this point Locke does, practically, go as far in the direction of idealism, as Berkeley, when he admits that “the simple ideas we receive from sensation and reflection are the boundaries of our thoughts, beyond which the mind, whatever efforts it would make, is not able to advance one jot.”—­Book II. chap, xxiii.  Sec. 29.

But Locke adds, “Nor can it make any discoveries when it would pry into the nature and hidden causes of these ideas.”

Now, from this proposition, the thorough materialists dissent as much, on the one hand, as Berkeley does, upon the other hand.

The thorough materialist asserts that there is a something which he calls the “substance” of matter; that this something is the cause of all phenomena, whether material or mental; that it is self-existent and eternal, and so forth.

Berkeley, on the contrary, asserts with equal confidence that there is no substance of matter, but only a substance of mind, which he terms spirit; that there are two kinds of spiritual substance, the one eternal and uncreated, the substance of the Deity, the other created, and, once created, naturally eternal; that the universe, as known to created spirits, has no being in itself, but is the result of the action of the substance of the Deity on the substance of those spirits.

In contradiction to which bold assertion, Locke affirms that we simply know nothing about substance of any kind.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Berkeley virtually makes the same confession of ignorance, when he admits that we can have no idea or notion of a spirit ("Principles of Human Knowledge,” Sec. 138); and the way in which he tries to escape the consequences of this admission, is a splendid example of the floundering of a mired logician.]

“So that if anyone will examine himself concerning his notion of pure substance in general, he will find he has no other idea of it at all, but only a supposition of he knows not what support of such qualities, which are capable of producing simple ideas in us, which qualities are commonly called accidents.

“If anyone should be asked, what is the subject wherein colour or weight inheres? he would have nothing to say but the solid extended parts; and if he were demanded what is it that solidity and extension inhere in? he would not be in much better