Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

212 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
ter are distinct and separate. The difficulty for the materialists is that their
investigations lead them to the conclusion that only the material world is
“real,” yet it can be known only indirectly, through the mental world of
sensation and perception. They rejected the idea that we can directly
“know” the material world—the concept known as “naive realism”—and
espoused instead something known as the representative theory of perception
or representative realism. We do not, according to this theory, directly
perceive the outside world; we only experience sensations presumably
caused by that mind-independent world and transform those sensations
through perception into what John Locke called “ideas.” The act of perception
is analogous to inference in that it is indirect and subject to error. We
do not perceive material objects themselves; we perceive “ideas” that represent
those objects.
When presented in this fashion, materialism reveals an obvious weakness:
contending that only matter really “exists,” it concedes that matter
can be known only indirectly, through mind, which alone can be known
directly. What is known does not exist, and what exists cannot directly be
known. Berkeley’s system of idealism begins with an attempt to exploit
that apparent contradiction. He proposed to reconcile philosophy with
common sense by asserting the reality of our perceptions and sensory experience
but defied common sense by denying the reality of matter. In a
sense, he affirmed the primary idea behind naive realism—that we can
directly apprehend reality—while denying the secondary idea that what
we directly apprehend is the physical world. The mind alone—all of our
thoughts, perceptions, sensations, memories, and the rest of our awareness—really
exists. We do apprehend reality directly, and it is entirely
mental in nature. Berkeley did not, it should be stressed, endorse solipsism,
the doctrine that the contents of my mind alone exist. Reality, for Berkeley,
consisted of the contents of all minds, everywhere. We are not isolated
inside the shells of our individual awareness, for the consciousness of individuals
overlaps. It makes sense to speak of physical objects such as pencils
and tables, but such things exist entirely as perceptions. “Their esse is
percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence, out of the minds
or thinking things which perceive them” (25). But surely such perceptions
have causes. We cannot will them in or out of existence, so the causes must
be independent of our own minds. For Berkeley it is obvious that the cause
cannot be material objects, which he argues do not exist, and just as obviously
must actually be God. His argument against the existence of the