Lindsey

There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first, the Orwellian culture becomes a prison. In the second, the Huxleyan culture becomes a burlesque.

What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countena

He maintained that material objects only exist through being perceived. To the objection that, in that case, a tree, for instance, would cease to exist if no one was looking at it, he replied that God always perceives everything; if there were no God, what we take to be material objects would have a jerky life, suddenly leaping into being when we l

“To be is to be perceived,” said the Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753). We exist and give existence by virtue of perception. Berkeley meant that God’s omniscient perception maintains all things. For a moralist—and Berkeley was a bishop—this could mean you’re never out of the sight of God, so you’d better be good! For a metaphysician, “E

the object of perception cannot be separated from the mind that perceives it.

Berkeley summed up this strange view in Latin as ‘Esse est percipi’ – to be (or exist) is to be perceived. So the fridge light can't be on, and the tree can't make a noise when there is no mind there to experience them. That might seem the obvious conclusion to draw from Berkeley's immaterialism. But Berkeley didn't think that objects were continua