GOD The God of Berkeley We have seen that Leibniz found much to approve in Berkeley’s early writings The admiration, however, does not seem to have been reciprocated Berkeley was scornful of Leibniz’s ontological argument for the existence of God On the other hand he oVered a new proof of his own—a ‘direct and immediate demonstration’ of the being of God— which could be regarded as a gigantic expansion of the argument from eternal truths borrowed by Leibniz from St Augustine In the dialogue, having established to his satisfaction that sensible things cannot exist otherwise than in a mind or spirit, he continues: Whence I conclude, not that they have no real existence, but that, seeing they depend not on my thought, and have an existence distinct from being perceived by me, there must be some other Mind wherein they exist As sure, therefore, as the sensible world really exists, so sure is there an inWnite omnipresent Spirit who contains and supports it (BPW, 175) Thus, not only the august truths of logic and mathematics dwell as ideas in the mind of God, so does the most everyday empirical truth, such as the fact that there is a ladybird walking across my desk at this moment Berkeley is not simply saying that God knows such humble truths—that had long been the majority opinion among theologians He is saying that the very thing that makes such a proposition true is nothing other than a set of ideas in God’s mind—God’s idea of the ladybird and God’s idea of my desk This was indeed an innovation ‘Men commonly believe that all things are known or perceived by God, because they believe the being of a God, whereas I on the other side immediately and necessarily conclude the being of a God, because all sensible things must be perceived by Him’ (BPW, 175) If we grant to Berkeley, for the sake of argument, that the sensible world consists only of ideas, there still seems to be a Xaw in his proof of God’s existence One cannot, without fallacy, pass from the premiss ‘There is no Wnite mind in which everything exists’ to the conclusion ‘therefore there is an inWnite mind in which everything exists’ It could be that whatever exists exists in some Wnite mind or other, even though no Wnite mind is capacious enough to hold every existent Few would be convinced by the following parallel argument ‘All humans are citizens; there is no nation 315