2i8 THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE. guished from the ideas of imagination, which we can excite and alter at pleasure, by their greater strength, liveli- ness, and distinctness, by their steadiness, regular order, and coherence, and by the fact that they arise without our aid and whether we will or no. Unless these ideas are self- originated they must have an external cause. This, how- ever, can be nothing else than a willing, thinking Being; for w^ithout will it could not be active and act upon me, and without ideas of its own it could not communicate ideas to me. Because of the manifoldness and regularity of our sensations the Being which produces them must, fur- ther, possess infinite power and intelligence. The ideas of imagination are produced by ourselves, real perceptions are produced by God. The connected whole of divinely produced ideas we call nature, and the constant regularity in their succession, the laws of nature. The invariableness of the divine working and the purposive harmony of creation reveal the wisdom and goodness of the Almighty more clearly than "astonishing and exceptional events." When we hear a man speak we reason from this activity to his existence. How much less are we entitled to doubt the existence of God, who speaks to us in the thousandfold works of nature. The natural or created ideas which God impresses on us are copies of the eternal ideas which he himself perceives, not, indeed, by passive sensation, but through his creative reason. Accordingly when it was maintained that things do not exist independently of perception, the reference was not to the individual spirit, but to all spirits. When I turn my eyes away from an object it continues to exist, indeed, after my perception has ended — in the minds of other men and in that of the Omnipresent One. The pantheistic conclusion of these principles, in the sense of Geulincx and Malebranche,* which one expects, was really suggested by jj
- The example of Arthur Collier shows that the same results which Berke-
ley reaches empirically can be obtained from the standpoint of rationalism. Following Malebranche, and developing further the idealistic tendencies of the latter, Collier had, independently of Berkeley, conceived the doctrine of the j " non-existence or impossibility of an external world "; but had not worked i< j'4 out in his Clavis Universalis, 1 713, until after the appearance of Berkeley s chief work, and not without consideration c/f this. The general point of v:c,/
