made real
to the plain man this seems a denial of the existence of matter
it has led to much criticism good and bad beginning with Dr johnson who thought he could refute Berkeley by kicking a stone and continuing till it inspired a recent writer of Limericks
But it does seem true that the world we know is only made real by the senses
we cannot know the world of reality which may or may not lie beneath though with Locke we may think its existence a fair inference from the knowledge of appearance revealed by the senses
David hume went farther and denied reality to mind as well as to matter : all that he left real was a succession of impressions and ideas
he argued that the empiricists in appealing exclusively to sense experience made it impossible to pass to the inductive inference of universal laws
Hume held that to look on one happening as the cause of another is merely an instinct perhaps founded on coincidence and unwarranted
Both locke and Hume regarded metaphysical reality as beyond the reach of human reason
Hume also separated reason and faith as the late mediaevalists revolted against the rational synthesis of Scholasticism
Scepticism as regards the possibility of knowledge of reality was held also by Kant and extended to allthe principles of science and philosophy
The world of science is the world revealed by the senses the world of appearance not necessarily the world of ultimate reality
Leibniz thought that pure reason could unfold external unchanging truth Kant set himself to save as much of leibniz’s pure reason as Hume had left standing
Kant maintained we could still believe that the moral sense is as real as the starry heaven indeed more real the one form in which reality discloses itself to the human mind