7 Metaphysics Varieties of Idealism n the first part of the nineteenth century the most significant philosophers were all idealists of one kind or another The period was the heyday of transcendental idealism in Germany, with Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel working towards a theory of the universe as the developing history of an absolute consciousness But even those who were most critical of absolute idealism owed allegiance to a different form of idealism, the empiricist idealism of Berkeley according to which to be is to be perceived John Stuart Mill in England and Arthur Schopenhauer in Germany both take as their starting point Berkeley’s thesis that the world of experience consists of nothing but ideas, and both try to detach Berkeley’s theory of matter from its theological underpinning.1 According to Mill, our belief that physical objects persist in existence when they are not perceived amounts to no more than our continuing expectation of further perceptions in the future He defines matter as ‘a permanent possibility of sensation’; he tells us that the external world is the world of possible sensations succeeding one another in a lawful manner Right at the start of his World as Will and Idea Schopenhauer tells us, ‘The world is my idea.’ Everything in the world exists only as an object for a subject, exists only in relation to consciousness To achieve philosophical wisdom a man must accept that ‘he has no knowledge of a sun and of an earth, but only of an eye that sees the sun and a hand that feels the earth’ (WWI 3) The subject, Schopenhauer says, is that which knows all things and is known by none; it is therefore the bearer of the world I See vol III, pp 76, 315