Esse Est Percipi

"...neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what everybody will allow. And to me it is no less evident that the various sensations or ideas imprinted on the sense, however blended or combined together (that is, whatever objects they compose) , cannot exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving them … The table I write on I say exists, that is, I see and feel it; and if I were out of my study I should say it existed-meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it ... or as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that is to me perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them. [Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge, quoted by JLB]

...
With the continuities of matter and spirit denied,
with space denied, I do not know by what
right we retain that continuity which is time.
Outside each perception (real or conjectural),
matter does not exist;
outside each mental state,
spirit does not exist;
neither then must time exist
outside each present moment.
...

[We] are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity ... The mind is a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations ... The comparison of the theater must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials of which it is composed. [Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, quoted by JLB]"

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
A New Refutation of Time