The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

Hegel and Hamilton stand together upon it. So much is not speculation: it
is demonstration; and yet to the mass of minds this demonstrated fact in
metaphysics seems as palpable and ridiculous a falsehood as could be
devised.
What modern philosophy can do here will be best seen by looking at
such of its results and efforts as most decidedly involve the matter under
discussion.
Theological idealism,--Berkeley.
The school of theological idealism, in which Berkeley is the great
master, maintained that there is no substance proper except spirit, the
divine Spirit, God, or created or finite spirits, among whom are men. While
the common theistic view is that the will of God is the ultimate cause of
properties or phenomena, and that he has made them inhere in substances,
which thus become intermediate causes of the properties which inhere in
them, Berkeley holds that there is no intermediate cause of properties, no
substance in which they inhere, but that the ultimate cause, God's will, is
the only cause, and that it groups them without substance, under the same
laws of manifestation, as the common view supposes to be conditioned by
substance. Spirit is the only substance; there is no essential nonego
relative to an individual ego, except other egos. Objective reality
presupposes originating mind, and mind acted upon. There are but two
factors in all finite cognition: the ultimate causal mind, and the mind
affected by it. Phenomena are but operations under laws of mind on mind,
and in ultimate cause, of the infinite upon the finite. Annihilate spirit, and
all reality ceases. The world which appeals to our consciousness is but the
result of the operations of the Divine mind upon the human. Berkeley
does not deny the reality of the phenomena, but he says that the solution of
the phenomena is not the existence of a material substance--a thing which
all philosophy grants that we can only conceive and can never reach--but
the solution is the direct agency of that divine cause which, in the ordinary
philosophy, is considered as a cause of causes, that is, what the ordinary
philosophy says, God works through substance "intermediately," the
idealist says God works through phenomena, without substance,
"immediately." The whole