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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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George Berkeley
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(also known as Bishop Berkeley, 1685–1753) Anglo-Irish philosopher, the leading exponent of empiricism (the theory that things exist only through being perceived), as expressed in his Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). He was the Anglican bishop of Cloyne in County Cork from 1734 to 1752.
Berkeley's lasting popular fame derives from a scene in Boswell's life of Johnson. The two men were outside a church in Harwich in 1763 and began discussing 'Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter'. Boswell observed that the theory was clearly wrong but impossible to refute, whereupon Dr Johnson kicked a large stone and said 'I refute it thus'.
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If anything, Johnson's stubbed toe would seem to demonstrate the bishop's theory about matter and perception, but he had also misunderstood the point. Berkeley, like Boswell, took it as obvious that matter continued to exist when unseen; but he considered this to be proof of the existence of God, whose entire creation was under His constant observation.
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