Berkeley on the Mind as a Principle of Motion

Abstract

In De Motu, his treatise on motion and natural philosophy, Berkeley famously writes that “the mind can be called, correctly enough, a principle of motion” (DM 25). This paper grapples with the question of how to understand this remark. Specifically, the paper considers whether and how human agency, for Berkeley, can extend into the natural world, especially in light of his view in De Motu that natural laws can provide complete explanations of natural phenomena, as well as his view elsewhere in the corpus that natural laws are grounded in the constant and uniform activity of God.