George Berkeley

George Berkeley (1685–1753) was an Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher who gave Western thought its most uncompromising early statement of idealism: the doctrine that nothing exists except minds and their ideas.

His slogan esse est percipi — “to be is to be perceived” — denied the existence of mind-independent matter altogether. For Berkeley, the apparent solidity and regularity of the physical world is not evidence of inert substance but of ideas continuously sustained in the mind of God, who perceives all things and so keeps them in being even when no human observes them.

His major works, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues (1713), argued this case with a rigor that forced every subsequent philosopher to take immaterialism seriously.

Berkeley is a foundational ancestor of the mind-power claim that consciousness, not matter, is fundamental. Long before quantum mysticism or analytic idealism, he supplied the technical philosophical machinery for saying that reality is mental “all the way down.” New Thought writers and later idealists inherited, often without attribution, his core intuition that the world is more like a thought than a thing.

The honest distinction: Berkeley was a careful theistic metaphysician who never claimed individual minds could reshape the shared world by willing — that world is God’s idea, not ours — so his idealism underwrites “consciousness is fundamental” but not naive manifestation.