ABSTRACT
Berkeley is what we call a modern philosopher, although he was active in the eighteenth century. His approach to the problem of appearance and reality and his religious phenomenalistic solution to it were stimulated by the science of his time, which meant above all the theories of Sir Isaac Newton. Berkeley did not gainsay the immense power and elegance of Newton’s ideas, and the capacity of some of them to give us accurate predictions about the course of events. What he objected to were what he considered the shaky metaphysical foundations of the work, especially such ‘occult’ concepts as gravity and such ‘fictions’ as the infinitesimal. He subjected these to severe scrutiny and found them wanting. In their place he wanted an acknowledgment that science be grounded in perception, that it aims at prediction, and it leaves deep matters like the nature of the world to religion.
