As man progressed through the various stages of evolution, it
is assumed that at a certain point he began to ponder the world around
him. Of course, these first attempts fell short of being scholarly,
probably consisting of a few grunts and snorts at best. As time passed
on, though, these ideas persisted and were eventually tackled by the
more intellectual, so-called philosophers. Thus, excavation of "the
external world" began. As the authoritarinism of the ancients gave way
to the more liberal views of the modernists, two main positions
concerning epistemology and the nature of the world arose. The first
view was exemplified by the empiricists, who stated that all knowledge
comes from the senses. In opposition, the rationalists maintained that
knowledge comes purely from deduction, and that this knowledge is
processed by certain innate schema in the mind. Those that belonged to
the empiricist school of thought developed quite separate and distinct
ideas concerning the nature of the substratum of sensible objects.
John Locke and David Hume upheld the belief that sensible things were
composed of material substance, the basic framework for the
materialist position. The main figure who believed that material
substance did not exist is George Berkeley. In truth, it is the
immaterialist position that seems the most logical when placed under
close scrutiny.
The initial groundwork for Berkeley's position is the truism
that the materialist is a skeptic. In the writing of his three
dialogues, Berkeley develops two characters: Hylas (the materialist)
and Philonous (Berkeley himself). Philonous draws upon one central
supposition of the materialist to formulate his argument of skepticism
against him; this idea is that one can never perceive the real essence
of anything. In short, the materialist feels that the information
received through sense experience gives a representative picture of...
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