ABSTRACT
George Berkeley begins his discussion of abstraction by outlining the claims of the abstractionists. This chapter shows that Berkeley’s criticisms of the doctrine of abstraction is independent of a construal of abstract ideas as mental images. There are two points one should notice regarding Berkeley’s discussion of the inseparability thesis. First, Berkeley merely reports that the abstractionists universally accepted the inseparability thesis without concerning himself with the grounds upon which they accepted that thesis. Secondly, Berkeley’s reference to the inseparability of “qualities or modes” tends to mask a distinction between several philosophical theories. The chapter discusses the well-known argument from introspection in which Berkeley looks into his mind and finds that he can abstract in the sense of imagining proper parts of things in isolation from those things of which they are parts, but that he cannot, in fact, conceive of a simple quality or a complex quality in isolation from all others.
