Towards the end of the Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision Berkeley concludes that ... the proper objects of vision constitute an universal language of the Author of Nature, whereby we are instructed how to regulate our actions in order to attain those things that are necessary to the preservation and well-being of our bodies, as also to avoid whatever may be hurtful and destructive of them... And the manner wherein they signify and mark unto us the objects which are at a distance is the same with that of languages of human appointment, which do not suggest the things signified by any likeness or identity of nature, but only by an habitual connexion between them. 1 Berkeley is not arguing that the proper objects of vision, namely "light, shades, and colours, variously combined ''2 are like a language, or even that they are very much like a language, but rather proposes the much stronger claim that the proper objects of vision are a language. 3 The model of language is not, therefore to be thought of as a merely useful heuristic device -perhaps suggestive of a theory -but it is rather that the concept of 'language' and the word "language" can be applied directly and without qualification to the proper objects of the senses. This implausible claim would seem to be an evident and obvious mistake, and would appear to be a clear case of falling prey to one's own heuristic fictions. Yet it is abundantly clear from Berkeley's works that this claim is one of the central tenets of the theory of immaterialism, and primafacie it