Once such second-generation Cartesians, who viewed Descartes himself as having one foot still implanted in the scholastic mud, had purified and “normalized” Cartesian doctrine, we got the full-fledged version of the “‘idea’ idea,” the one which made it possible for Berkeley to think of extended substance as a hypothesis of which we had no need. This thought could never have occurred to a pre-Cartesian bishop, struggling with the flesh rather than with intellectual confusion. With this full-fledged “‘idea’ idea” there came the possibility of philosophy as a discipline which centered around, of
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