- Length
- 128 pagesAdams, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Hackett, 1979
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous
The most elegant destructive argument in English philosophy, conducted over three mornings in a garden by a man not yet thirty. Berkeley uses nothing but premises Locke had already conceded, and arrives at the conclusion that matter does not exist.
- Date
- 1713
- Author
- George Berkeley
- Region
- Dublin and London
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Dialogue
- Method
- Dialogue — Argument staged between speakers
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years to the reply
- 26 years
- Years back to what it answers
- 24 years
Dismissed for a century as an ingenious absurdity that nobody could refute, and now read as one of the most rigorous applications of empiricist premises anyone has made.
What the book says
Two friends meet in a garden on three successive mornings, and one of them argues the other out of believing in matter. Hylas holds what everyone holds: that there are material things which exist whether or not anyone perceives them, and that our sensations are caused by them. Philonous asks what he actually perceives. Heat? Then intense heat is a pain, and pain is in the perceiver. Colour? Then the same object is one colour in daylight and another by candle, and a different colour again under a microscope. Sweetness, sound, smell all go the same way, and Hylas concedes they exist only in the mind. He falls back on the qualities that seemed safe - shape, size, motion, solidity - and Philonous shows that these vary with the perceiver too: the same thing is large to a mite and small to us, and no shape can be conceived apart from some colour or other sensible quality. Hylas then retreats to matter as an unknown substratum, and is asked what he means by supporting, and by existing unperceived, and cannot say. By the third morning the conclusion is in place: to be is to be perceived, the things around us are collections of ideas, and they persist because they are perceived by God.
What it argues
That the idea of something existing unperceived is not a difficult idea but an incoherent one. Everything we can point to about a thing - its warmth, colour, taste, shape, weight - turns out on examination to be a way it is sensed, varying with the sensor; strip all of it away and the material substance that supposedly remains has no describable content, and calling it a support for qualities uses a word borrowed from tables and pillars where no such relation can be meant. What follows is not that the world is a dream. The house is exactly as solid as it was, since solidity is a quality of the experience; what goes is the extra thing behind the experience that nobody has ever met. Continuity is secured by God, in whose perception things persist when nobody else is looking.
What it answered
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 1689John Locke
Locke, and through him the whole picture of a veil of ideas with matter behind it. Berkeley's motive is also apologetic and he says so: he holds that the notion of inert matter existing on its own is the foundation of atheism and of scepticism together, and that removing it removes both. This is why the argument is so economical - he is not building a system but pulling out one plank and showing that the objections fall with it.
What answered it
A Treatise of Human Nature 1739-40David Hume
Hume, by extending it, and Reid, by rejecting the starting point both shared. Johnson famously kicked a stone and said he refuted it thus, which misses the argument entirely and has never stopped being repeated. Kant took the charge that his own idealism was Berkeley's seriously enough to add a refutation of idealism to the second edition of the first Critique. The most damaging modern response is not a refutation but a reframing: the position is treated as a demonstration of where Locke's premises lead, and used as a reason to reject the premises.
How it argues
As a dialogue, and the choice is tactical. The Principles had stated the doctrine directly in 1710 and had been dismissed as a joke, so Berkeley rewrote it as a conversation in which the reader's own objections are voiced by a sensible man and answered one at a time. Hylas is not a fool; he makes every move a reader would make, in the order they would make them, and gives ground only when he must. It is the best-constructed philosophical dialogue in English and one of the few that does not feel rigged, even though it obviously is.
The moment
Dublin, in the generation after Locke and Newton, with a young fellow of Trinity College working out what the new philosophy actually committed one to. Berkeley went on to a long and varied life - a scheme for a college in Bermuda, three years in Rhode Island waiting for funding that never came, a bishopric in Cork, and a late book recommending tar water as a universal medicine - but the philosophy was done by 1713.
How it travelled
As a curiosity that would not go away. For most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Berkeley was the philosopher everyone knew to be wrong and nobody could say why, which is a peculiar kind of survival. Hume's use of him made him unavoidable; Reid's attack made him a permanent reference point in the Scottish tradition; and twentieth-century philosophy, which took the analysis of perception seriously, found the arguments about primary qualities and about the unperceived to be live rather than quaint.
The strongest objection
That God is doing work the argument has not earned. Berkeley needs continuity: the tree in the quad must not go out of existence when the last observer leaves, so he has it perceived by an infinite mind. But the whole method has been to admit only what is met with in experience, and a divine perceiver is not met with in experience - it is postulated to solve a problem, which is precisely what he accused the materialists of doing with matter. Hume saw this and simply dropped the God, at the cost of the continuity; the position that results is harder to hold and more consistent, which is the shape of most objections to Berkeley.
Why read it
Because it is short, funny, and the single best demonstration in philosophy of what a well-made argument feels like from inside. Read the first dialogue at least; the movement from heat to colour to shape to substratum takes an hour and is worth more than most textbooks. Almost nobody finishes it agreeing, and almost nobody finishes it able to say where it went wrong.
- First printed
- 1713
- First in English
- 1713
- Digitised
- Yes
The Principles of Human Knowledge of 1710 states the same position in expository form. The Dialogues were written because the Principles had been ignored or laughed at, and Berkeley revised both for a second edition in 1734.
Written in English. The text is public domain.
Where it stands
Live. Few defend idealism, but the arguments are standard equipment in philosophy of perception, and the question Berkeley pressed - what content is left in the notion of a thing beyond all possible experience of it - runs directly into twentieth-century debates about verification and about realism.
The passage
their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds
The formula as Berkeley states it in the Principles, section 3, 1710. Public domain, and his own words.
Contested
Whether Berkeley is best read as an idealist or as a common-sense realist who is redescribing what everyone already believes is genuinely argued, and he insists on the second. The role of God is disputed - device, conclusion or premise. His notion of spirits, which are substances and are not ideas, sits awkwardly with the rest and he admits we have no idea of them, only a notion. And how much his position is driven by the apologetic aim he states, as opposed to the arguments he gives, is a standing question about his motives rather than his logic.