Berkeley also denied the existence of what are called abstract objects “universals” and “forms” or “ideas. With Berkeley, there had been no necessary material basis for experience, though the mind had retained a certain independent spiritual power derived from God’s mind, and the world experienced by the mind derived its order from the same source.īerkeley’s theory is that God upholds all of the ideas, which comprise human reality, and people perceive these ideas as sensations directly from God’s infinite mind. Locke had retained a certain faith in the capacity of the human mind to grasp, however imperfectly, the general outlines of an external world by means of combining operations. Instead of the materialists’ belief in the representative theory of perception, where a material object has real qualities which humans perceive as sensible qualities. These perceptions of God are also ideas, and it follows that these ideas comprise the reality beheld in the finite human mind. On the other hand, God’s mind is infinite and is thus able to have multiple perceptions. Berkeley also shows that the perceived qualities of an object are ideas that exist only in a mind since sensations are the same as ideas humans can only have one idea at once. Therefore Locke claims that “primary qualities are objective whereas, secondary qualities are contingent on perception” Locke did not believe that there was anything innate in anyone and that all concepts, ideas, and thoughts were the result of sensory experience.Īccording to Locke, there is no such thing as innate knowledge. Primary qualities are immediately visible in the object, while secondary qualities require our sensory system to respond to the primary qualities of an object first. These secondary qualities depend on and thus can be altered by altering primary qualities, as they do not actually exist within the object, nor do they exist independently of our minds. However, he suggested that secondary qualities were only powers that the object has to cause us to have ideas about its color, smell, taste, sound etc. He supported his definition of primary qualities by claiming that if an object were continuously divided, the primary qualities would remain the same.
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