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Updated: June 14, 2025
In the melodramatic fashion so common in what is called philosophy we may delight ourselves with such flashes of lightning as this: esse est percipi. The truth of this paradox lies in the fact that through perception alone can we get at being a modest and familiar notion which makes, as Plato's "Theætetus" shows, not a bad point of departure for a serious theory of knowledge.
Were such a question proposed, we should be tempted to answer, what is not Life that really is? Our reason convinces us that the quantities of things, taken abstractedly as quantity, exist only in the relations they bear to the percipient; in plainer words, they exist only in our minds, ut quorum esse est percipi.
An affirmative answer to this question would imply, that nothing whatever exists except only in the mind that perceives it; that, according to Bishop Berkeley, "the existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived" is an absurd or impossible supposition; that "their esse is percipi," that is, that their being consists in their being perceived or known; whence it would follow, as Berkeley himself admits, that we have no reason to believe in the continued existence of the desk at which we write, after we have left the room in which we see it, excepting such as may arise from the supposition, that if we returned to that room we might still see it, or that in our absence it may still be perceived by some other mind.
John supplied mortar with a slamp a sound like the fall of a pasty Titan on loose boards. The grievance was resumed, but with a consolation. "Got 'im there, accordin' as I think of it! Wot's his idear of good? that's wot I want to know. Things is as you see 'em...." Mr. Bartlett would have said the esse of things was percipi, had he been a Philosopher, and would have felt as if he knew something.
For what is harmony but a mode of relation, the very esse of which is percipi? an ens rationale, which pre-supposes the power, that by perceiving creates it? The razor's edge becomes a saw to the armed vision; and the delicious melodies of Purcell or Cimarosa might be disjointed stammerings to a hearer, whose partition of time should be a thousand times subtler than ours.
But is there not in such compositions a kind of unconscious self-detection, which seems to carry their own antidote with them? For surely no one who cordially and truly either hates or despises the world will publish a volume every three months to say so. There is a secret in all this, which I will elucidate with a dusky remark. According to Berkeley, the esse of things is percipi.
Here is one which seems to arise directly from the facts, and appears for a long time to have constituted an impregnable position for idealists. It may be expressed in three words: esse est percipi.
If the universe contained only blind and deaf beings, it is impossible for us to imagine but that darkness and silence should reign everywhere. It is undoubtedly true, then, of all the simple sensations that, as Berkeley says, their "esse is percipi" their being is to be "perceived or known."
Wherefore in respect of matter itself, as well as of the qualities of matter, esse is percipi, essence is perception, to be is to be perceived. Wherefore, finally, if there were no mind to perceive matter, matter could not exist.
To take the most surprising instance of his neglect he assured the world that his whole doctrine pointed to, and hung upon, theology. But what sort of a theology? He scarcely took the first steps in the formulation of it. He preferred to keep on defending and explaining his esse est percipi.
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