At any rate, in his reasoned exposition of his Principles he is anxious to distinguish those phenomena that are presented to the senses of all mankind from the private ideas or fancies of individual men (sect. 28-33). The former constitute the world which sentient beings realise in common. He calls them _ideas_ because they are unrealisable without percipient mind; but still on the understanding that they are not to be confounded with the chimeras of imagination. They are more deeply and truly real than chimeras. The groups in which they are found to coexist are the individual things of sense, whose fixed order of succession exemplifies what we call natural law, or natural causation: the correlation of their changes to our pleasures and pains, desires and aversions, makes scientific knowledge of their laws practically important to the life of man, in his embodied state.
Moreover, the real ideas presented to our senses, unlike those of imagination, Berkeley would imply, cannot be either representative or misrepresentative. Our imagination may mislead us: the original data of sense cannot: although we may, and often do, misinterpret their relations to one another, and to our pleasures and pains and higher faculties. The divine meaning with which they are charged, of which science is a partial expression, they may perhaps be said to represent. Otherwise representative sense-perception is absurdity: the ideas of sense cannot be representative in the way those of imagination are; for fancies are faint representations of data of sense. The appearances that sentient intelligence realises _are_ the things of sense, and we cannot go deeper. If we prefer accordingly to call the material world a dream or a chimera, we must understand that it is the _reasonable_ dream in which all sentient intelligence participates, and by which the embodied life of man must be regulated.
Has Berkeley, in his juvenile ardour, and with the impetuosity natural to him, while seeking to demonstrate the impotence of matter, and the omnipresent supremacy of Spirit, so spiritualised the material world as to make it unfit for the symbolical office in the universe of reality which he supposes it to discharge? Is its potential existence in God, and its percipient realisation by me, and presumably by innumerable other sentient beings, an adequate account of the real material world existing in place and time? Can this universal orderly dream experienced in sense involve the objectivity implied in its being the reliable medium of social intercourse? Does _such_ a material world provide me with a means of escape from absolute solitude? Nay, if Matter cannot rise into reality without percipient spirit as realising factor, can my individual percipient spirit realise _myself_ without independent Matter? Without intelligent life Matter is pronounced unreal. But is it not also true that without Matter, and the special material organism we call our body, percipient spirit is unreal? Does not Nature seem as indispensable to Spirit as Spirit is to Nature? Must we not assume at least their unbeginning and unending coexistence, even if we recognise in Spirit the deeper and truer reality? Do the New Principles explain the _final_ ground of trust and certainty about the universe of change into which I entered as a stranger when I was born? If they make all that I have believed in as _outward_ to be in its reality _inward_, do they not disturb the balance that is necessary to _all_ human certainties, and leave me without any realities at all?