ABSTRACT
Writers on George Berkeley have tended to make two mistakes in treating of his views on spirit, the first being that of supposing that because he says relatively little about spirit in the published works he must have had little to say. The second being that of supposing that the view he did hold was essentially the same as John Locke’s. The very common criticism of Berkeley that he just failed to realize that on his principles matter and spirit should be treated as on a par, is one that very largely misses the mark, and this because too often it rests upon a false assumption about what the view actually was. In the Dialogues Philonous vigorously rejects this, arguing that there is ‘upon the whole no parity of case’, but at one stage in the Commentaries Berkeley had talked as if he himself had accepted what he was to make Hylas claim.
