ABSTRACT
In George Berkeley books he denied the existence of the material world; his memorial window at Trinity College, Dublin, is inscribed ‘He astonished the multitude’. In the first of his Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous Berkeley says the facts that an object can have, or appear to have, different colours at different times, and different shapes and sizes on different occasions, are absurdities and so not facts at all. His account of the matter is sometimes called ‘the paradox of incompatible predicates’. In the real world of so-called incompatible predicates a blue spotlight falling on a white face makes a blue patch or spot. If every object had just one permanent colour there could be no coloured spotlights. If each thing had just one unchanging shade of colour and just one degree of brightness there could be no spotlights at all, white or coloured.
