The Strange Consequences of Berkeleianism

When Decartes divorced the mind from the body, metaphysics split into two basic schools, those who thought that the evidence revealed that we could only be sure of the mind, and those who thought that the evidence revealed we could only be sure of matter. Most of what you know about the post-Cartesian history of philosophy comes from the second school. But the first school was for a long time equally dominant, the father of which was George Berkeley. He thought that 'matter', rather than 'mind' was an abstraction, since all perceptions as experienced (and therefore truly known) are mental states, not physical states. (To actual historians of philosophy, apologies for my gross simplification.)

In and since the nineteenth century tumult of scientific discovery, Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Einstein, his ideas have been rather lost to the respectable public. But, though I don't know enough to trace their particular history, they pop up in an extraordinary place. In 30s and 40s Oxford, amongst the Inklings, no less, who were steeped in questions of parapsychology and elevated consciousness, and took oriental philosophy very seriously. Some of even C.S. Lewis' shorter stories are explorations of these psychic questions. I had always thought it strange that the most clear-thinking of the twentieth Christian apologists and poets should be fascinated with such an obviously unchristian and moreover absurd idea, but I discover just today that Anthony Flew (of There is A God) lived and studied at Oxford at the same time, had the same psychic interests, explicitly attributes his early philosophical ideas to Berkeley, and strange to say possesses precisely the same clear-thinking argumentation and prose style I find in the Inklings. It can't be a coincidence.

Edit: What matters most here is the similarity in the argumentation and prose style. I'm pretty sensitive to the feel of the prose I'm reading - the intellectual sensation, if you will - and Flew's style reminds me of nothing so much as those essays I've read by the Inklings, and not just Lewis. It could be just that Oxford intellectuals from the 30s and 40s in general wrote in that fashion. I'd have to read more widely to know. But the connection to Idealism is very interesting. If it's real, it would be worth a semi-popular book.