In Lieu of an Introduction¶
Core Argument¶
In the opening chapter, “In Lieu of an Introduction,” the author establishes a devastating historical parallel: the supposedly “new” philosophical discoveries of the early twentieth-century Machians are, in fact, a direct revival of arguments advanced by Bishop George Berkeley in 1710. Berkeley’s Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge refuted materialism with the claim that objects are merely “collections of ideas” or “combinations of sensations,” encapsulated in the formula esse est percipi — to exist is to be perceived. He explicitly attacked the notion of “things-in-themselves” as an absurdity, declaring matter to be a “nonentity” and a remnant of prejudice. For Berkeley, the materialist belief in an external world independent of mind led to a “twofold existence” of objects, an error he claimed engendered atheism, fatalism, and idolatry. He did not deny the reality of sense experience, but only the “philosophic” concept of matter as a substance outside the mind. Moreover, Berkeley advanced a theory of “empirio-symbolism,” replacing causation with the relation of a sign to the thing signified — a position later revived by the Machian Yushkevich.
Berkeley’s criterion of reality rests on a distinction between individual and collective perception, using simultaneous sensation by many people as a test. By deriving ideas from a deity’s action on the human mind, he approaches objective idealism: the world becomes the product of a single supreme spiritual cause. The author invokes Fraser, a consistent idealist, who identifies the fundamental philosophical division as between materialists (attributing phenomena to material substance) and idealists (attributing them to Rational Will). This mirrors Engels’ division of philosophers into materialists (nature primary, spirit secondary) and idealists (the reverse), with Humeans and Kantians placed as agnostics between them. Hume argued that men naturally believe in an external universe, but philosophy shows only perceptions are present to the mind; the connection between perceptions and external objects cannot be proved by experience. Diderot, approaching contemporary materialism, argued that sensation is a general property of matter or a product of its organisation, and that there is only one substance in the universe. The chapter’s core polemic is thus established: the Machians have adduced no argument against the materialists that Berkeley had not already advanced, revealing their “new” discoveries as a product of ignorance of basic philosophical trends.