Locke admits the existence, though he denies the demonstrability, in man of an immaterial and immortal principle, the soul. Berkeley denies the objective basis of universal ideas and indeed of the whole material universe. He still retains the substance-reality of the human soul and of spirits generally, God included. The French sensist retained the spiritual soul, but his followers disposed of it as Hume had done with the Berkeleian soul relic. The actual existence of things is their persistence in consciousness.
Consciousness contains only subjective feelings.
The theory here proposed may be called empirico-intellectualism since it conjoins a sensuous factor with the purely intellectual or immaterial agency in the genesis of knowledge. Now none of these peculiarities of the idea can be discovered in any sensation or image, which always represents sensuous phenomena, existent and concrete. Ideas as representative of essences, are available as predicates, and are the terms whereof absolutely universal principles are constituted. Hence ideas are universal, whereas sensations and images can represent only objects that affect the sensory organs, i.e. individual, physically existing objects. No intellectual judgment whatsoever would be possible, since every predicate is a generalized term and hence in some degree abstract.