ABSTRACT
The most persuasive defence of idealism against the complaint is to be found in the writings of Bishop Berkeley, which have had much influence on the development of modern idealism. Modern philosophers have coined the word “sense-datum” as an unambiguous technical term to distinguish the visible object from the material object. Material objects have different shapes, sizes, positions, colours; but they all, as material objects, share the characteristics of permanence, independence, and publicity. Both physics and materialist philosophy require the distinction which has just been drawn between sense-data and material objects, between things as they appear and things as they really are. The representative theory of perception has for long periods proved satisfactory to the working scientist. But the objections brought against it by Berkeley and by subsequent thinkers are so formidable that few philosophers of the present day are satisfied with it.
