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A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

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Berkeley's argument that to exist is to be perceived, and that matter conceived as existing apart from any mind is a fiction. The world is real but mental, a steady stream of ideas held in being by the perceiving of God.

It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects, have an existence, natural or real, distinct from their being perceived. But what are these objects but the things we perceive by sense?

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