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thought. According both to Malebranche and to Norris, reality is of two kinds, spiritual and material; and God, the supreme spirit, contains both the intelligible world of Ideas and the finite spirits, who are thus in direct communion with him. Since these two are, both alike, in him and of his substance, the divine ideas are directly intelligible to finite minds without proof or intervention. These divine ideas are the representative forms of material bodies in a natural world, which is somehow caused by God, and inadequately represents him, but is yet outside and apart from him. The existence of this material world Norris practically disproves, though he still clings to its reality on the foundation of faith. Sir Wm. Hamilton remarks that Malebranche as a Catholic was "obliged to burden" his theory with the incumbrance of matter, but that to Norris as a Protestant, little credit is due for not rejecting this material world. It remained for Collier and Berkeley to give up the material world altogether as a sacrifice to the received philosophy of ideas.[1]
The fact that these two men, Collier and Berkeley, came to the same conclusion at precisely the same time, seems to many critics a coincidence too curious to be accidental; and the reputation of Berkeley, compared with the neglect of Collier, seems hardly due to chance alone. Yet the facts
- ↑ Sir Wm. Hamilton in "Discussions on Philosophy and Literature," pp. 199 ff.