ABSTRACT
Many commentators have found the connection obscure. Most it has puzzled J. O. Urmson. George Berkeley is being a little misleading when he suggests that the notion that sensible things can exist unperceived ‘will, perhaps, be found at bottom to depend on the doctrine of abstract ideas’. The argument so far has been conducted with reference to matter or materiality. Urmson expressed his puzzlement with respect to matter, but I. C. Tipton’s reservations concerned unperceived existence. The latter concept is more generic than the former, and there are philosophers who believe in the existence of unperceived and mind-independent qualities, without wishing to attach any sense to matter or materiality as a further notion. The imagist theory of thought is, quite rightly, dismissed out of hand. Without that theory the argument as presented collapse.
