Butterflies

David Pears

• Berkeley: The Central Arguments by A.C. Grayling
  Duckworth, 218 pp, £19.50, January 1986, ISBN 0 7156 2065 7
• Essays on Berkeley: A Tercentennial Celebration edited by John Foster and Howard Robinson
  Oxford, 264 pp, £22.50, October 1986, ISBN 0 19 824734 6

As a child I collected butterflies, and I remember being impressed by a comic cartoon which showed another collector, older and more experienced than myself, who had accidentally swallowed a specimen he had been chasing. Later I felt the same sense of incongruity when I read Berkeley’s claim that everything he perceived was really in his mind. Surely he was overdoing it. True, his was only a case of mental ingestion, and anyway the butterfly would not be taken in by a single act: first, the blue of its wings, then with more difficulty their shape and size, and finally even the grainy arrangement of their scales which would only show up under a microscope. But how could he do it? His portrait does not show him with his hand over his mouth and an expression of dismay on his face like the man in the cartoon. On the contrary, he looks like someone who is happy to have made his point.