Yes, you are right, that was my slip. I had to revisit Berkeley again. When doing my undergrad I somehow got the wrong impression of Berkeley’s philosophy when I was first introduced to it, in particular because I thought his philosophy ultimately entailed that, with the exception of God, to ‘exist’ is to be perceived (which entails that relations are ontologically prior to their relata). This would entail that even persons are not immaterial substances (in any recognizable sense) per se, but are emergent entities which supervene upon God’s perceptions/thoughts. I thought the ontological constitution of persons, on Berkeley’s view, was analogous to the ontological constitution of tables and chairs (i.e., that they exist only insofar as they are perceived, and there is ultimately one perceiver). To make matters worse, I knew atheists who adopted an atheistic version of subjective idealism and who ostensibly held the belief that to exist is simply to be perceived (or something along those lines), and made themselves vocal opponents of the principle of sufficient reason.
Berkeley does, however, concede that there are perceivers whose existence is not based upon their being perceived, even by God. To say that Berkeley’s philosophy can be summed up in the phrase “to be is to be perceived” (as a professor put it to me in an introductory class), is to dangerously misrepresent his philosophy. This fundamental misapprehension of mine has sort of haunted me since I first misunderstood Berkeley, and it arose again, somewhat to my embarrassment, in this thread. Thank you for making me revisit it again and refresh my memory about the differences between modern (atheistic) subjective idealism and Berkeley’s subjective idealism.
This may also help highlight a difficulty to which I already gestured. If Berkeley admits of no substances which are not minds, then (Eucharistic) transubstantiation is literally impossible on his ontology. That would make it inconsistent with the Catholic faith.
