There once was a man who said, "God Must think it exceedingly odd If he finds that this tree Continues to be When there's no one about in the Quad."
(Ronald Knox)
Dear Sir, Your astonishment's odd I am always about in the Quad. And that's why the tree Will continue to be, Since observed by Yours faithfully, God. ' Thus, with a pair of limericks, does Bertrand Russell aptly saterize the Irish Bishop Berkeley's immaterialist argument for the existence of God. Russell concedes, however, that aside from failing to establish the existence of God, Berkeley's immaterialist epistemology remains unrefuted.2
The primary weakness of Berkeley's extension of immaterialist epistemology into a proof for the existence of God as omnipresent perceiver is that even if one is prepared to agree that it is impossible to conceive of anything existing independently of perception, the most obvious conclusion is that an object, a tree for example, simply ceases to exist when it ceases to be perceived. Berkeley felt that it is inconceivable that "bodies are annihilated and created every moment, or exist not at all during the intervals between our perception of them",3 but this is precisely the position of the Buddhist logician Dignaga and his followers, most notably Dharmakirti. To the Buddhist immaterialist the problem of the continued existence of a tree in an uninhabited quad would be a problem only for a naive immaterialist who had not completely banished materialist preconceptions from his thinking. According to strict immaterialism, the tree does not exist in the quad, it exists in my mind, as does the quad itself. I do not leave the quad; the quad leaves my mind. And Journaloflndian Philosophy 13 (1985) 265-272. 0022-1791/85.10.