sceptical cant follows from our supposing a difference between things and ideas... The arguments urged by sceptics in all ages depend on the supposition of external objects."[1] He is resolved himself to make a clear riddance of all such sceptical cant. On Berkeley's principles there is no opening for doubt either as to the existence of a real world or as to the truth of our knowledge of it, because the knowledge, the immediate conscious fact, is the existence and (along with a possibility of similar conscious facts) the whole of the existence. "That what I see, hear, and feel doth exist, that is to say, is perceived by me, I no more doubt than I do of my own being." Unquestionably not, for if existence be understood in this sense, the two facts are simply identical. Doubt cannot touch the existence of a present feeling while it is being felt. But if I thus reduce the existence of a permanent external world to unreferred feelings, Hume is of course at hand to apply the same argument to "my own being" which Berkeley here and elsewhere treats as a fundamental certainty. These same perceptions or ideas whose presence in consciousness I have asserted to be the existence of sensible things, constitute the evidence of my own existence: in fact they are my existence. As Berkeley himself says, the duration of any finite spirit must be measured by the number of ideas or actions succeeding each other in that same spirit or mind; ... and in truth whoever shall go about to divide in his thoughts or abstract the existence of a spirit from its cogitation will, I believe, find it no easy task."[2] My own being, in fact, as something more than the existence of my present conscious states, will be found by a sound philosophy to rest ultimately on a process of rational construction substantially similar to that which establishes the existence of an independent object of knowledge. Hence an Idealism or Spiritualism which does not guarantee the rights of the object is a lop-sided theory which has no defence against the further inroads of its own logic. Put forward as a short and easy method with the sceptics, Berkeleianism only preluded to the sceptical nihilism of Hume.
