An ideal time to get real

If, by that formulation, Berkeley meant there are two sources of ideas in the brain - one as a result of external stimuli acting on our nervous system, the other arising from reorganising those ideas within the brain itself, I, for one, would agree with him.

Berkeley starts, however, with the belief that there is a supernatural world peopled by minds without bodies: that is, the mind can have an existence without a body or brain. It was a short step then for him to conceive that an idea can also exist without a physical brain.

Berkeley developed a principle esse is percipi - to be is to be perceived. In other words, things of our world exist only while a mind perceives them. Since all human minds die, the world can only continue to exist while an everlasting mind continues to perceive it. And the only everlasting mind is the mind of God, the conclusion Berkeley set out to reach in the first place.

On the contrary, materialists believe the mind is a product of the brain’s processing of all the information provided through the body’s sensory organs. A mind is impossible without a human body and brain. Individual bodies and minds die but the ideas which they generate live on forever by being passed on, in one form or another, to future generations.

Ideas, however they are formed, are untrammelled. One can imagine some denizen of the supernatural world in any form one likes, and the works of artists are full of such varied imaginings. Little green men from outer space are easily pictured in the mind but remain abstract ideas until one can capture one and examine it in reality.

The material basis of science is that any idea, hypothesis or theory (and there are many of them, good, bad or indifferent) is not accepted into the useful body of scientific knowledge until it has been applied in practice and shown to work. If it works it’s true, at least until a situation is found in which it doesn’t work and it must be revised.

Nearly 300 years have passed since Berkeley’s Treatise was published. The developments in human understanding and control of little things like electrons and atoms which have taken place in that time should have eliminated any further wordy debates about idealism versus materialism, or the existence of an immaterial world.

The fact that it has not is an indictment of our education system. There are many problems, now and to come in the future, which require continued and deeper understanding of the material nature of the world. The intellectual base for that task is disarmed if future generations are allowed, through lack of adequate teaching, to continue to accept the belief that the world is in any way controlled by supernatural beings.

In the first issue of the scientific journal Nature in November 1869, Wordsworth’s words were printed at the masthead: “To the solid ground of Nature trusts the mind which builds for aye.”

That thought remains relevant today, and should be the guiding principle for teaching throughout the nation’s schools.