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Commonplaces
Piquant excerpts lifted from Touchstone editors' own reading & listening.
If Berkeley is right, Orion and the Pleiades, whether considered as points of twinkling light, or as celestial balls, or as whorls of flaming gas, are essentially significant, bearing an indefeasible, inalienable relation to mind, and the persistent attempts of the human mind to think away their meaning, and to resolve them, in thought, into meaningless atoms or similar entities, barely existing, are suicidal. They subsist in the mind of God, because He thought and thinks them, willed and wills them, created and conserves them, orders them, and has set them for signs. To his act and will and thought and law they owe their permanence, their subsistence, from night to night, from age to age, whether they are actually perceived by man or not. A “lost Pleiad” is a loss to man’s perception of “the flight of doves,” but is no casualty in God’s host. To say, then, that bodies subsist in the mind of God is to say that God is the home of the perceivable when it is unperceived by man.
—A. A. Luce
Berkeley’s Immaterialism (1945)
— Nature — Commonplaces #166 — May/June 2023 —
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