ABSTRACT
George Berkeley’s main argument seems intended to apply generally to all abstract ideas and to show that they are impossible on logical grounds. According to Berkeley’s famous theory of perception, see, feel and otherwise perceive nothing but ideas; the whole of the sensible world with its trees and rocks, sun and stars, consists of nothing but idea sequences. One view ascribes to Berkeley a more or less deliberate tendency to think that an idea as the features of what it is the idea of: the idea of a triangle is triangular. Having clarified Berkeley’s objection to abstraction, in a position to consider the uses to which he puts the impossibility of abstract ideas. He maintains that the false doctrine of abstraction lends support to the opinion that material things exist unperceived, and further he uses the impossibility of abstract ideas as a positive argument for the mind-dependence of sensible things.
