Bishop of our holy and undivided

Bishop George Berkeley, the Irish philosopher whose dictum was "To be is to be perceived". Basically, the theory is that we can only directly know sensations and ideas of objects, not abstractions such as "matter".

Berkeley's theorizing was Empiricism at its most extreme. As a young man, Berkeley theorized that we cannot know if an object is, we can only know if an object is perceived by a mind. We can't think or talk about an object's being. We can only think or talk about an object's being perceived by someone. We can't know any "real" object (matter) "behind" the object as we perceive it, which "causes" our perceptions. All that we know about an object is our perception of it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Berkeley

Berkeley was misunderstood and ridiculed for supposedly stating that the world didn't exist, that it was a dream. In the dream-state that is Finnegans Wake, reality and the dreamer are "undivided", there is no separate reality behind the existence of objects and people within the dream.

A few lines down, Berkeley's "to be is to be perceived" is alluded to through Shakespeare's "to be, or not to be, that is the question": "me ken or no me ken Zot is the Quiztune". The passage goes on to describe how the events described are "utterly impossible" and are as alike as events "which may have taken place" as other events which never took place. This confusion is similar to the confusion invoked by Berkeley's philosophy.

Berkeley repudiated John Locke's ("lock" appears a few lines down) concept of substance.