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 EDITED BY 
 
 WILLIAM KNIGHT, LL.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY, UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS 
 
 BERKELEY 
 
The Volumes published of this Series contain- 
 
 1. DESCARTES, ... By Professor Mahafft, Dublin. 
 
 2. BUTLER, ... By the Rev. W. Lucas Collins, M.A. 
 
 3. BERKELEY, . By Professor Campbell Fraser, Edinburgh. 
 
 4. FICHTE, By Professor Adamson, Owens College, Manchester. 
 
 5. KANT, .... By Professor Wallace, Oxford. 
 
 6. HAMILTON, ... By Professor Veitch, Glasgow. 
 
 7. HEGEL, . . .By Professor Edward Caird, Glasgow. 
 
 8. LEIBNIZ, By John Theodore Merz. 
 
 9. VICO, .... By Professor Flint, Edinburgh. 
 
 10. HOBBES, . . By Professor Croom Robertson, London. 
 
 11. HUME, , . . .By Professor Knight, St Andrews. 
 
 12. SPINOZA ; By Principal Caird, Glasgow. 
 
 13. BACON. Part I., . . By Professor Nichol, Glasgow. 
 
 14. BACON. Part II., . . By Professor Nichol, Glasgow. 
 
 15. LOCKE, . . By Professor Campbell Fraser, Edinburgh. 
 
 MILL, 
 
 In preparation — 
 
 . By the Right Hon. A. J. Balfour. 
 
BERKELEY 
 
 A? CAMPBELL PHASER D.O.L. Oxon. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS IN THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 
 
 EDINBURGH AND LONDON 
 
 1881.— REPRINT, 1890 
 
 L ■ 
 
 All Rights reserved 
 
42475 
 
 ^ 
 ^ 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 This volume is an attempt to present, for the first time, 
 Berkeley's philosophic thought in its organic unity. 
 The thought is unfolded in connection with his per- 
 sonal history, and it is compared with the results of 
 later philosophical endeavours, including those of chief 
 scientific and theological interest at the present day. 
 
 Eesides important new biographical material, the 
 author is fortunate in being able to present an original 
 portrait of Berkeley, and one, too, from a. picture taken 
 at a much earlier period in his life than those hitherto 
 published. It was painted when be was in Borne. The 
 picture was inherited by his descendant, the late Mr 
 Eobert Berkeley, Q.C., Dublin, and has been kindly lent 
 to the publishers by his widow. It is an old oil-paint- 
 ing, very difficult to copy ; but even as it is, this glimpse 
 of his sanguine youth, now first presented to the world, 
 may be preferred to the familiar engravings which repre- 
 sent him at a more advanced age. 
 
I 
 

 Mens a£utat molem. 
 
 BERKELEY 
 
 FROM AN ORIGINAL OIL PAINTING. 
 
 Jk 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAKT L— 1685-1713. 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. EARLY LIFE IN IRELAND, ... 1 
 
 II. LOCKE ON IDEAS AND THEIR CAUSES, . 17 
 
 III. VISUAL IMMATERIALISM, ... 32 
 
 IV. UNIVERSAL IMMATERIALISM, . . 48 
 V. SIR JOHN PERCIVAL AND DR SAMUEL CLARKE, 69 
 
 VI. OBJECTIONS TO IMMATERIALISM, . . 79 
 
 PAET II. — 1713-34. 
 
 I. ENGLAND, FRANCE, AND ITALY, 
 II. SOCIAL IDEALISM AND AMERICA, . 
 III. RECLUSE LIFE IN RHODE ISLAND, . 
 IV. CONTROVERSIAL AUTHORSHIP, 
 V. WHETHER GOD CAN BE SEEN, AND WHAT 
 GOD IS, . 
 
 97 
 117 
 129 
 142 
 
 156 
 
Vlll 
 
 Contents. 
 
 PART III — 1734-53. 
 
 I. MEDICINE AND PHILOSOPHY AT CLOYNE, . 170 
 
 II. OXFORD, . . . . .186 
 
 III. SIRIS AND THE SUPERSENSIBLE, . . 190 
 
 IV. SCEPTICISM AGNOSTICISM — GNOSTICISM — 
 
 FAITH, . . . .213 
 
BEKKELEY. 
 
 PAET L — 1685-1713. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 EARLY LIFE IX IRELAND. 
 
 Towards the close of the reign of Charles the Second, 
 a certain "William Berkeley and his wife, according to 
 credible tradition, occupied a cottage attached to the 
 ancient castle of Dysert, in that part of the county of 
 Kilkenny which is watered by the ^ore. In this modest 
 abode their philosophical son George, the eldest of six 
 sons, was born, on the 12th of March 1685 (n. s.) 
 Little is known about William Berkeley, except that 
 he was an Irishman by birth and an Englishman by 
 descent. It is said that his father (or grandfather) 
 migrated from England to Ireland early in Charles's 
 reign, in the suite of his kinsman the first Lord Berkeley 
 of Stratton. William Berkeley's wife was probably 
 Irish ; but about her even so much as this cannot be 
 confidently asserted. 
 
2 Berkeley. 
 
 Thus ignorant of the family, one cannot, on the ground 
 of known facts, refer the singular mental dispositions of 
 the eldest son either to heredity or to home education. 
 The parents have left no mark. We have not light 
 enough now to see into this Irish family life, as it went 
 on two centuries ago in that secluded region. From 
 occasional glimpses of the five younger brothers, on 
 their respective courses afterwards, we may infer that 
 they were little able to sympathise intellectually with the 
 only one among them who revealed religious and phil- 
 osophical genius. The little in the early history of the 
 eldest brother that can be gleaned to explain his unique 
 character, must be sought for elsewhere than in the 
 known facts of the family life and its antecedents. 
 
 The ruined castle of Dysert, with the remains of the 
 adjoining farmhouse, may still be seen on a grassy 
 meadow on the bank of the Nore, about twelve miles 
 below the city of Kilkenny. The occupants had within 
 their view a scene well fitted to inspire a romantic boy 
 with sympathy for nature and natural religion. The 
 young idealist, if he was unintelligible to his family, had 
 room to brood in solitude, during the latter years of the 
 seventeenth century, in the fair vale through which the 
 Nore descends, amidst the foliage of Woodstock, to its 
 junction with the Barrow at New Ross. " I was dis- 
 trustful at eight years," he says of himself afterwards, 
 " and so by nature disposed for the new doctrines." The 
 imagination of the thoughtful boy, moreover, may have 
 been roused not only by surrounding nature, but also by 
 contemporary doings among his countrymen. The "warre 
 in Ireland " was going on while he was passing from his 
 fourth to his sixth year. He was about six when the 
 
Boyhood in Kilkenny. 3 
 
 battle of the Boyne was fought, and was, we may fancy, 
 at Dysert when James made his rapid retreat down the 
 Xore to Waterford, and William of Orange was enter- 
 tained in the ancient castle of the Butlers at Kilkenny. 
 
 A few years later we find traces of George Berkeley 
 in Kilkenny school. The register records his appear- 
 ance there on a day in early summer in 1696, when he 
 was eleven years old. He was placed at once in the 
 second class. This fact seems to mean that he was 
 unusually precocious, for the school record contains 
 hardly another instance of similar advancement. At 
 this well-known school he spent ahont four years. Kil- 
 kenny, noted for its learned masters and famous pupils, 
 has been called the "Eton of Ireland." Swift as well 
 as Berkeley has added to its fame. One of Berke- 
 ley's school-fellows was Thomas Prior, afterwards known 
 as the Irish philanthropist, his constant friend and cor- 
 respondent for half a century. There is an idle tradition 
 that in these school-days young Berkeley fed his imag- 
 ination with the " airy visions of romance," and thus 
 weakened his natural sense of the difference between 
 illusion and reality. The myth probably had its origin 
 long after, in the popular misinterpretation of his phi- 
 losophy. What we have evidence of is, that his eye 
 was then open to the phenomena of nature, and that he 
 diligently explored what was curious among them within 
 his reach. He wrote a minute and characteristic account 
 of the Cave of Dunmore in the neighbourhood, founded 
 on these youthful observations. 1 The Kilkenny coun- 
 try, as well as Dysert, was fitted to call forth the sense 
 of beauty in nature. The city has been compared to 
 1 See Works, vol. iv. pp. 503-511. 
 
 
4 Berkeley. 
 
 Warwick, and Windsor, and Oxford. One who visits it 
 cannot soon forget the charms of the Nore, as seen tip- 
 wards or downwards on an autumn day from the school 
 meadow ; or the mingling of buildings, new and old, 
 castle, cathedral, and round tower, so happily grouped 
 on the high ground, with the free and careless grace of 
 nature in all the neighbouring country. 
 
 It was out of this fair Irish vale, remote from the 
 ways of men, that George Berkeley, thus dimly discern- 
 ible at first, so unexpectedly emerged, in an island that 
 was only beginning to take part in the intellectual and 
 literary work going on in the world. In a few years 
 more he became one of the acknowledged masters of Eng- 
 lish literature, and proved himself, before he reached 
 middle life, to possess the most significant philosophical 
 mind then at work in Europe. 
 
 In March 1700, Berkeley, fifteen years of age, left 
 Kilkenny and the picturesque region of the Nore, to 
 matriculate at Trinity College, Dublin. This was his 
 home for the next thirteen years. Of his mental his- 
 tory for three or four years after his matriculation there 
 is no direct record. But we are now able to trace 
 the subsequent working of his mind, in the crisis of 
 its development. His lately discovered " Commonplace 
 Book " reveals him to us at Trinity College, in his 
 twentieth year, suddenly exulting, with the impetuous 
 enthusiasm of a warm imagination, in a new and revolu- 
 tionary thought about the true meaning of that reality 
 which we all attribute to the world that is presented to 
 our senses. With this new thought he had somehow 
 then and there become inspired. Under a conviction 
 
Trinity College, Dublin. 5 
 
 of its value to mankind, he was longing to make it 
 known. It was to make short work, lie was certain, of 
 all supposed "powers" in dead unconscious Matter; and 
 so its promulgation wo aid relieve perplexities and con- 
 tradictions, otherwise inexplicable, by which scepticism 
 in religious thought had been sustained. It solved for 
 him the difficulties of natural science and of theology, 
 in a new philosophy which showed that both science 
 and religion were essentially reasonable. The conclu- 
 sions to which this startling inspiration gave birth, 
 could not long be kept to himself. Before the thirteen 
 years at Trinity College were ended, they had overflown in 
 published as well as unpublished writings. An argumen- 
 tative exposition and defence of this transforming belief, 
 about the real meaning of the things we see and touch, was 
 thus early pressed by him upon the world, with a subtle 
 and ingenious advocacy, in small successive volumes. 
 
 The influences which turned the Kilkenny youth who 
 was " distrustful at eight years " thus impetuously and 
 permanently towards the metaphysics of matter, are 
 wortlry of investigation. Some of them, at any rate, can 
 be ascertained. 
 
 "When one looks back to Dublin and its College in 
 the beginning of last century, new and strong intellec- 
 tual forces begin to show themselves. The head of the 
 College was Dr Peter Browne, already known as the 
 literary antagonist of Toland the free-thinker. Toland's 
 1 Christianity not Mysterious ' about this time had raised 
 a theological ferment in Dublin, which was probably 
 not without effect in the end on young Berkeley. 
 .As a controversialist in metaphysical theology, Browne's 
 name became afterwards more widely known. Long 
 
6 Berkeley. 
 
 after this, when Bishop of Cork, he was a vigorous critic 
 of Locke's philosophy, and of the nature and limits of 
 our theological knowledge. Those interested in this 
 may refer to his two not forgotten volumes, on the 
 ' Procedure and Limits of Human Understanding,' and 
 on 'Divine Analogy.' The chief representative of the 
 Irish Church in Dublin at the beginning of the eigh- 
 teenth century, was not less eminent as a speculative 
 thinker than the head of the College. The Archbishop 
 of Dublin during the years in which Browne was Pro- 
 vost was William King, still remembered as a philoso- 
 phical theologian. The Archbishop's speculations about 
 the analogical and negative nature of man's knowledge 
 of God were much in harmony with those afterwards 
 published by Browne. King was already known as the 
 author of the treatise on the 'Origin of Evil' which 
 engaged the controversial pens of Bayle and Leibnitz. 
 But a stronger intellectual influence than either 
 Browne or King was now perceptible in Trinity Col- 
 lege. Locke's ' Essay on Human Understanding,' pub- 
 lished in 1690, was already famous, and in its fourth 
 edition, when Berkeley came to Dublin in 1700. The 
 ' Essay ' had been introduced into the course of study at 
 Dublin, and it has ever since been a characteristic feat- 
 ure of the philosophical studies of the place. This 
 early and emphatic recognition of Locke at Dublin was 
 due to William Molyneux, a man not to be forgotten, 
 either on his own account, or as the friend and philo- 
 sophical correspondent of Locke, during the latter years 
 of the English philosopher's life. Molyneux was a 
 Dublin lawyer, and a member of the Lish Parliament, 
 fond of the new experimental methods of research, and 
 
Locke's 'Essay' and Carlesianism. 7 
 
 above all an inquisitive and critical student of the new 
 logic and philosophy. 1 Locke's 'Essay 5 had attracted 
 him on its first appearance, and an enthusiastic eulogy 
 of the book followed in 1692, in the "Dioptica Nova" 
 of Molyneux. The eulogy led to that correspondence of 
 Molyneux with the author of the ' Essay ' which now 
 throws so charming a light for several years upon Locke's 
 recluse life at Oates in Essex, where Molyneux visited 
 him in the month before his own sudden death. In this 
 way the * Essay on Human Understanding ' was in the 
 hands of reading men in Dublin in Berkeley's under- 
 graduate days; and when Locke died in 1704, his name 
 must have been familiar in Trinity College. 
 
 But besides Locke, other strong modern philosophical 
 influences had been at work. Cartesianism, with its 
 resolute scrutiny of all traditional beliefs, and its dis- 
 position to spiritualise the powers of matter, now 
 affected the whole atmosphere of European thought. 
 Descartes was thus a familiar classic in Dublin, and 
 Malebranche was not unknown. Hobbes and Gas- 
 sendi, representatives of the opposite tendency, had 
 helped to make inquiring persons intimate with mate- 
 rialistic conceptions of the universe, reviving in modern 
 forms the atomism of Democritus and the ethics of 
 Epicurus. Active investigations were going on regard- 
 ing the laws and qualities of the things we see and 
 touch, as well as amongst the principles and facts of 
 the world of mind. The Eoyal Society, too, had been 
 in existence for forty years, and had already diffused 
 its spirit as far as the Irish capital. Newton had pub- 
 
 1 See 'Descartes,' by Professor J. P. Mahaffy, p. 79 — Blackwood's 
 " Philosophical Classics." 
 
8 Berkeley. 
 
 lislied his 'Principia' a few years before Locke pub- 
 lished his 'Essay,' and the method of fluxions was 
 struggling with the calculus of Leibnitz among the 
 mathematicians of Dublin. 
 
 Through these conspiring influences, it so happened 
 that when Berkeley commenced his undergraduate course, 
 he entered an atmosphere unusually charged with forces 
 of reaction against the traditions and verbal logic of the 
 schools, in physics as well as in metaphysics. Above 
 all, however, the new methods of research recommended 
 by Bacon and Descartes were taking shape in the the- 
 ory of knowledge of which Locke was the European 
 representative. 
 
 Such was Dublin when Berkeley began to study there. 
 The youth himself, then fresh from his native valley on 
 the Nore, was at first a mystery to the ordinary under- 
 graduate. The opinion formed of him came to be that 
 he was either the greatest genius or the greatest dunce 
 in the college. Those who looked at him on the sur- 
 face took him for a foolish dreamer; his intimates 
 thought him a miracle of intellectual subtlety and 
 goodness of heart. A mild and ingenious youth, inex- 
 perienced in the ways of men, he was also full of 
 humorous and even eccentric inquisitiveness. Conte- 
 rini, the "good uncle" of Oliver Goldsmith, and one 
 of Berkeley's college friends, tells a story about him. 
 They had gone together to see an execution, and young 
 Berkeley returned curious about the sensations that 
 accompany the process of dying. It was agreed that 
 he should begin to try the experiment for himself, his 
 friend relieving him before it was carried so far as to 
 make a report impossible. He was accordingly tied to 
 
A mysterious Undergraduate. 9 
 
 the ceiling. Losing consciousness, the appointed sig- 
 nal for relief was looked for in vain. He might have 
 died in good earnest, for on being released he fell sense- 
 less on the floor. His first words on recovery were, 
 " Bless my heart, Conterini, you have rumpled my 
 hand ! " There was already some undisciplined ardour 
 in mental analysis, and a brave indifference to life in 
 the service of knowledge. 
 
 Through all this surrounding misunderstanding, ac- 
 cording to report, he steadfastly pursued his course, full 
 of simplicity and enthusiasm. We have records of 
 graver employments in his college manuscripts. Early 
 in 1705, he and some of his friends formed a society to 
 meet weekly for promoting inquiry in the line of the 
 "New Philosophy," of Boyle and Newton in physics, 
 and of Locke in metaphysics. There is evidence that 
 Locke's ' Essay,' above all, was the prominent subject 
 of debate and criticism at these meetings. The pro- 
 motion of societies, literary and philosophical, was a 
 work which through life Berkeley seemed fond of, for 
 this Dublin reunion was the first of several with which 
 he was connected. 
 
 The college books record the usual steps of academical 
 advance. In 1702 Berkeley was elected a Scholar; in 
 170-4 he passed Bachelor of Arts. He took his Master's 
 degree in 1707, and in the same year was admitted to a 
 junior fellowship. From 1 707 onwards he was a college 
 tutor, and Samuel Molyneux, the son of Locke's friend, 
 was one of his pupils, or at least in intimate relations. 
 His college duty must have been considerable, for he 
 was tutor, Greek lecturer, and junior dean. Including 
 fees, his income was hardly fifty pounds a-year, but this, 
 
10 Berkeley. 
 
 measured by our standard, means at least three times as 
 much. Still, as the family resources were moderate, 
 we must not suppose that in the early part of his life 
 he was in easy circumstances. 
 
 Whether or not Berkeley was intended by his family 
 for the Church, and sent to Dublin with that view, 
 does not appear. At any rate he soon took orders. 
 He was ordained deacon in 1709 in the old College 
 Chapel. There is no evidence of any objection to 
 church formularies or to ecclesiastical life. For more 
 than twenty years after he was ordained, an occasional 
 service or sermon sums up his work in this department. 
 While ardently loyal in promoting the spiritual educa- 
 tion of man, for which the Church professedly exists, 
 he can hardly be called ecclesiastical in the partisan 
 sense ; nor can he often be charged with sacrificing the 
 love of truth — his earliest and latest aspiration — to 
 the spirit of the sectarian polemic. 
 
 Berkeley had hardly emerged from undergraduate life 
 when he became, in a modest way, an author. Two 
 mathematical tracts in Latin, entitled ' Arithmetica' and 
 ' Miscellanea Mathematical written by him three years 
 before, were published anonymously in 1707. Even in 
 abstract science his impetuous temperament appears, as 
 well as his interest in the metaphysics of mathematics, 
 and also that inclination to what is novel and eccentric, 
 which is so apt to animate courageous beginners in a 
 course of research. These performances help us a little 
 to take his measure both as a mathematician and a stu- 
 dent of books when he was hardly twenty years old. 
 Their allusions to Bacon, Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, 
 and the 'Philosophical Transactions,' show the bent of 
 
His " Commonplace Hook" 11 
 
 his early reading. One of these tracts is dedicated to 
 young Samuel Molyneux. 
 
 But a far fuller and more remarkable revelation of 
 the state of Berkeley's mind in 1 705 and the two fol- 
 lowing years than can be found either in recorded an- 
 ecdotes, or in rules of philosophical societies, or in 
 mathematical puzzles, is that treasured for us in his 
 " Commonplace Book," charged with its startling inspira- 
 tion. 1 On its pages he gives exj^ression, just as they 
 occurred, to rapidly forming thoughts about the meta- 
 physical meaning of the things of sense, and of their 
 ambient space. This must be ranked among the most 
 precious records in existence of the crude, solitary struggles 
 of subtle philosophical genius. It enables us to watch 
 Berkeley when he was awakening into intellectual life, 
 in company with Locke, and Descartes, and Malebranche. 
 AVe find him gradually satisfying himself, as to the rea- 
 sonableness of our beliefs about ourselves, and nature, 
 and God, by the help of a new thought which had 
 occurred to him about the meaning of the word " real," 
 when applied to the things of sense. AVe have only, he 
 argued, to look at things in the light of this new con- 
 ception of which he had become conscious. The artifi- 
 cially induced perplexities of philosophers are then found 
 to disappear, along with their metaphysical abstractions, 
 which turn out to be only empty words. Through- 
 out these private utterings of his thoughts, fresh and 
 
 1 This college " Commonplace Book " of queries and occasional 
 thoughts in psychology, metaphysics, anrl ethics, was contained in 
 two small cmarto MS. volumes. It was discovered among the Berke- 
 ley Papers in possession of Archdeacon Rose, and was first published 
 in 1871, in the Clarendon Press Edition of Berkeley's Works, vol. iv. 
 pp. 419-502. 
 
1 2 Berkeley. 
 
 earnestly real, written as they arose, one finds a mind 
 everywhere labouring under the consciousness of a 
 new world-transforming conception, the sense of which 
 gives rise to successive flashes of speculative and moral 
 enthusiasm. He was burdened with a thought, through 
 which things were found to be different from what 
 philosophers had argued them to be, and also from 
 what ordinary men had without argument taken for 
 granted that they were. The intellectual transforma- 
 tion was sure, he foresaw, to offend the unphilosophical. 
 They naturally like to think about things as they have 
 been accustomed to think about them ; they are shocked 
 by a metaphysic revolution which they cannot follow, 
 with its inevitable accompaniment of new meanings 
 thrown into old words, and the strain of demands that 
 cannot be met by ordinary consciousness untrained in 
 reflection. This new metaphysical conception of the 
 material world he instinctively felt must disturb those 
 accustomed to live only in the outward and visible ; who 
 take for an axiom that sensible outwardness and vis- 
 ibility must belong to whatever is real ; and who never 
 trouble themselves to ask in what the assumed reality 
 of the seen and felt truly consists. So we find him in 
 these curious effusions bracing himself to meet an enemy 
 even in the common phrases of mankind. Despite the 
 ridicule and dislike his transformed world was sure to 
 encounter, amongst the many who are obliged to put 
 words in the place of thoughts, he resolved to deliver 
 himself of his intellectual burden through a book, but 
 with the politic conciliation of an ingenious advocate. 
 
 Here are a few of the many characteristic sentences in 
 the " Commonplace Book : " — 
 
A World-transforming Conception. 13 
 
 " The reverse of the [new] Principle I take to be the chief 
 source of all that scepticism and folly, all those contradictory 
 and inexplicable puzzling absurdities, that have in all ages 
 been a reproach to human reason. I know there is a mighty 
 sect of men who will oppose me. I am young, I am an up- 
 start, I am vain, 'twill be said. Very well. I will endeavour 
 patiently to bear up under the most lessening, vilifying ap- 
 pellations the pride and rage of man can devise. But one 
 thing I know I am not guilty of— I do not pin my faith as 
 the slave of any great man. I act not out of prejudice or 
 prepossession. I do not adhere to any opinion because it is 
 an old one, or a revived one, or a fashionable one, or one 
 that I have spent much time in the study and cultivation of. 
 If in some things I differ from a philosopher that I profess 
 to admire [e.g., Locke], it is for that very thing on account 
 of which I admire him — namely, the love of truth. . . . 
 From my childhood I had an unaccountable turn of thought 
 that way. . . . But he that would bring another to his 
 own opinion must seem to harmonise with him at first, and 
 humour him in his way of talking." 
 
 He sees one great bar to the popular acceptance of his 
 new, world-transforming thought. It is concealed by 
 " the mist and veil of words." The abstractions which 
 were abstractions of verbal metaphysics at first, but 
 which are now mixed up with ordinary language, had to 
 be cleared away from his own mind before he could see 
 the light himself ; and must be removed from the minds 
 of others before he could get them to see it too. 
 
 " The chief thing I do, or pretend to do, is only to remove 
 the mist and veil of words. This it is that has occasioned 
 ignorance and confusion. This has ruined the schoolmen 
 and mathematicians, the lawyers and divines. If men would 
 lay aside words in thinking, 'tis impossible they should ever 
 mistake, save only in matters of fact." 
 
14 Berkeley. 
 
 He then recognises with joy the mentally- transformed 
 world that arose in his new philosophical consciousness. 
 
 " My speculations," he finds, " have had the same effect 
 upon me as visiting foreign countries. In the end I return 
 where 1 was before ; get my heart at ease, and enjoy myself 
 with more satisfaction. The philosophers lose their [abstract] 
 matter ; the mathematicians lose their [abstract] extension ; 
 the profane lose their extended deity. Pray what do the 
 rest of mankind lose ? " 
 
 All this wonderful intellectual transformation was, it 
 seems, brought about simply by a recognition of the fact 
 that things are ideas or phenomena, and that the truest 
 way of looking at the world we see and touch, is when 
 it is looked at as ideal or phenomenal only. 
 
 " The philosophers talk much of a distinction between 
 absolute and relative things — i. e., things considered in their 
 own nature, and the same things considered in respect to us. 
 I know not what they mean by [sensible] things considered 
 in themselves. This is nonsense — jargon. Thing and idea 
 are words of much about the same extent and meaning. By 
 idea I mean any sensible or imaginable thing. A thing not 
 perceived is a contradiction. Existence is not conceivable 
 without perception and volition. I only declare the mean- 
 ing of the word, as far as I can comprehend it. Existence is 
 perceiving and willing, or else being perceived and willed. 
 Existence is not intelligible without perception and volition 
 — not distinguishable therefrom. All things are ideas." 
 
 Berkeley, charged with thoughts like these, issued 
 from what he calls an "obscure corner" to become a 
 leader in European philosophy. The governing concep- 
 tion of his philosophical life was unintelligible to his 
 contemporaries and immediate successors ; and he had 
 only an imperfect consciousness of it himself. His place 
 
Discovery of Manuscripts. 15 
 
 in the history of thought should be better understood 
 now, in the light of the intervening period. We should 
 be more able than our predecessors to determine whether 
 one who sought with characteristic ardour to restore 
 spiritual beliefs and high ideals of life in a materialistic 
 age, by new principles of philosophy, was really, against 
 his own intention, opening a door for the most thorough- 
 going scepticism and agnosticism ever offered to the 
 world. 
 
 Within the last ten years materials for a just estimate 
 of Berkeley and his philosophical conception of the uni- 
 verse have accumulated. They are of various kinds : — 
 
 (1) The Berkeley Papers, in possession of the family of 
 the late Archdeacon Eose. These include (a) Berkeley's 
 " Commonplace Book ; " (b) four small manuscript vol- 
 umes containing a journal of his travels in Italy ; (c) a 
 mass of correspondence addressed to him, along with 
 some letters written by him. All that is important in 
 these Papers was published for the first time in 1871, 
 in the Clarendon Press Edition of Berkeley's Works. 1 
 
 (2) About eighty letters from Berkeley to Sir John 
 
 1 ' The Works of George Berkeley, D.D., formerly Bishop of Cloyne, 
 including many of his Writings hitherto unpublished. With Pre- 
 faces, Annotations, his Life and Letters, and an Account of his Phil- 
 osophy.' By Alexander Campbell Fraser, Professor of Logic and 
 Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh. 4 vols. Oxford : At 
 the Clarendon Press: 1871. — Also, ' Selections from Berkeley.' By 
 the Same. Second Edition. Oxford, 1879. 
 
 In the merely narrative parts of this volume, I have of course occa- 
 sionally drawn upon my own Memoir of Berkeley, in the Clarendon 
 Press Edition ; but I have not thought it necessary to note the refer- 
 ence in each case. The reader is referred for full details of the exter- 
 nal facts of the life, as then known to me, to that work, to which 
 this is, in that respect, auxiliary and supplementary. 
 
16 . Berkeley. 
 
 Percival, afterwards Earl of Egmont, from 1709 to 
 1730, not hitherto published. Some account of them is 
 given in the Seventh Report of the Boyal Commission 
 on Historical Manuscripts (1879). 1 Through the kind- 
 ness of Lord Egmont, I am happily able, in the follow- 
 ing chapters, to avail myself of this valuable collection, 
 and to present portions of hitherto unpublished letters 
 of Berkeley that are of biographical and philosophical 
 interest. (3) The numerous criticisms of Berkeley and 
 his philosophy which have appeared in this country, and 
 also in Germany, Holland, France, and America, since 
 the publication of the Clarendon Press Edition of his 
 works, by eminent contemporary thinkers — including 
 among others, Mr J. S. Mill, Dean Mansel, Professor 
 Huxley, Dr Hutcheson Stirling, Mr Arthur Balfour, 
 Professor Green, Professor Caird, Professor Adamson, 
 Mr Collyns Simon, Professor Ueberweg, Professor Van 
 der Wyk, M. Penjon, Dr M'Cosh, and Professor Krauth 
 of Philadelphia. 
 
 In this volume Berkeley's thought, newly interpreted, 
 is used as a help towards the best thought available 
 amidst our present philosophical or theological difficul- 
 ties. The result may be found in the last chapter, read 
 carefully in the light of the preceding ones. 
 
 1 I am indebted for the reference to the Rev. Mark Pattison. 
 
17 
 
 CHAPTEE II. 
 
 LOCKE ON IDEAS AND THEIR CAUSES. 
 
 We have something more distinct than the almost 
 colourless picture of Berkeley's external life in his early 
 'years, when we turn to the spiritual world of his birth as 
 f i philosopher, and the early years of his mental growth 
 f m it. For we have then, for the most part, to look into 
 Locke's ' Essay,' and at the same time to remember the 
 | Cartesian atmosphere in which Locke as well as Berkeley 
 | jived. Berkeley's immediate starting-point was, without 
 1 doubt, in Locke. It is true that in one of the earliest of 
 the hitherto unpublished letters to Sir John Percival, 
 written at Trinity College in 1709, he refers with ad- 
 miration to Plato, to the delight with which he read 
 the " Phsedo " and other dialogues years before, and to 
 the harmony of the Platonic spirit with " the perfection 
 and badge of Christianity, which is its generous con- 
 tempt for the things of this sentient life." 1 Some of the 
 
 1 In another letter to Percival, written soon, after this from Dublin, 
 he says: "I must own this corner furnishes scarce anything that 
 deserves to be commemorated. We Irish are a nation in its nonage, 
 ut under the guardianship of a people that do everything for us, 
 and leave us the liberty of transacting nothing material for ourselves, 
 r having any part in the affairs of Europe." 
 P. — III. B 
 
18 Berkeley. 
 
 spirit of Plato may be discovered even in Berkeley's 
 early writings, more latent, however, than it became 
 long afterwards. But external and internal evidence 
 combine to show that it was Locke more than any oth<~~ 
 who put him into the mental attitude in which \ 
 find him when he was at Trinity College. It is tr 
 that he then showed more of a spirit of antagonism 
 the doctrines of the 'Essay' than of submissive discip] 
 ship. Still, to account for what he had become, ^ 
 must rethink the chief thoughts of Locke, and see th 
 ultimate problems at the point of view of the ' Essa 
 on Human Understanding.' 
 
 The distinctive word with Locke is "idea." Th« 
 * Essay ' is a philosophical treatise on ideas and then 
 causes. But we must note the wide meaning that 
 " idea " has when Locke uses it, as he does so often 
 on almost every page of his book. It is not with 
 him, as in ordinary English now, a synonym for tlii 
 internal thoughts or fancies of the mind; nor, as in 
 Platonic usage, for the objective archetypes or exemplars 
 according to which the universe is constituted What- 
 ever we apprehend — whether it be a real phenomenon, 
 mental or material, or a mere image in the phantasy, 
 and whether we are conscious of it intuitively or sym- 
 bolically — in all these phases, what is apprehended is 
 generically called by Locke an idea. When I am con- 
 scious of a pleasant or of a disagreeable smell or sound 
 — when I see the sun or touch a tree — when I remem- 
 ber any of these — when I form a mental picture of si 
 centaur — when I understand scientifically the meaning 
 of "circle," "planet," "wisdom," or any other common 
 
/, 
 
 What ZocL'c means hy "idea" 19 
 
 jr abstract term, — in all these cases Locke would say that 
 [ am having ideas. This is the meaning of the word 
 ,dea, to which Descartes had given currency in the 
 seventeenth century, and which Locke for a long time 
 established in England. 
 
 Other terms have been used, before and since, to 
 express this delicate and comprehensive meaning. Phil- 
 osophy, as the theory of knowledge, always needs some 
 distinctive word to express the essential dependence of 
 what is known on the power of knowing. " Idea" was 
 used for this purpose in the seventeenth century ; some- 
 times with " perception," and afterwards, in Hume, 
 with "impression," as, in whole or part, synonymous. 
 Mind was supposed to be manifested in being conscious 
 of ideas or perceptions or impressions ; and the scientific 
 study of mind was a study of the ideas or perceptions or 
 impressions with which it is concerned. To investigate 
 these was to investigate mind. It is nowadays more 
 common to use the word " phenomenon " for this pur- 
 pose, and to speak of the phenomena — that is, the 
 appearances or aspects of existence of which we are 
 conscious in the course of our lives — rather than of the 
 ideas or perceptions or impressions which make the 
 materials of this experience. The terms "sensation" 
 or "feeling," though subjective, and more conveniently 
 limited to a species of mental state, have been em- 
 ployed by some psychologists in the same comprehensive 
 universality. At present a favourite term for the pur- 
 pose is "consciousness" — "fact or state of conscious 
 ness." What Locke and his contemporaries called 
 " ideas " or " perceptions," we, looking a them in 
 their relation to the knowing mind, call " conscious- 
 
20 Berkeley. 
 
 
 nesses," " states," or " modes " of consciousness. Bu 
 whatever the term chosen may be — " idea," " perl/ 
 ception," " phenomenon," " impression," " sensation,'! 
 " feeling," or " consciousness " — it must, in virtue oi 
 its function, be often met with in the writings of thi 
 philosopher by whom it is adopted. For all terms so' 
 used involve the fundamental assumption of philosophy] 
 — that real things, as well as imaginary things, what- 
 ever their absolute existence may involve, can exist for' 
 us only through becoming involved in what we men- 
 tally experience in the course of our self-conscious lives. 
 They imply that it must be only in, and as, phenomena 
 of which we are percipient, that the things of sense can 
 become for us more than blank abstract negations. 
 
 The adoption of the mental attitude thus presupposed 
 in all philosophy, which the term "idea" expresses for 
 Locke, is the first and indispensable philosophical lesson. 
 It is a hard lesson to learn, and most of us never learn it at 
 all. Most men, living without reflection, take for granted 
 that things would be exactly what they are now felt and 
 perceived to be, although no persons in the universe ex- 
 isted to perceive or be conscious of them : they even call 
 this assumption a dictate of common-sense. But philo- 
 sophy is the discovery that a thing receives a part, if not 
 all, of what it seems to be composed of — part, if not all, 
 of all its phenomenal existence — in becoming the object 
 of a sentient, percipient, imagining mind. So that a 
 word is wanted to express this mental transformation 
 of the things of sense — unreflectingly supposed to be 
 independent of our feelings and thoughts — into the 
 conscious experience of individual persons. 
 
 " Ideas," " perceptions," " feelings," " sensations," 
 
Ideas of Sense mean Phenomena of Sense. 21 
 
 " impressions," " modes " or " states " of " conscious- 
 ness " — in a word, " phenomena " — are none of tliem un- 
 exceptionable terms when so used. Idea is notoriously 
 ambiguous, for it is apt to take its Platonic meaning in 
 the mind of a philosopher, and its popular meaning in 
 the ordinary unphilosophical mind. " Perception," not 
 to speak of other objections, is now commonly confined to 
 sense-consciousness. "Feeling" more readily connotes 
 either the mere irrelative data of touch, or the senses 
 generally — in distinction from developed perception, or 
 else those complex states of consciousness called emotions. 
 " Consciousness " is apt to suggest our private conscious- 
 ness in its internal perceptions only. A "conscious- 
 ness " of what is objective or external, is foreign to the 
 ordinary signification of the word, and is thus apt to be 
 dropt out of its meaning even in philosophical discus- 
 sions. — On the whole, with Berkeley himself, in his 
 later writings, I shall translate his idea of sense into 
 phenomenon of sense, in explaining his theory of the 
 material world. 1 
 
 So it came to pass that "idea," throughout the 'Essay 
 on Human Understanding/ was a recurring memorandum 
 of the truth that, till external things were looked at on the 
 side at which they could be considered part of the present- 
 ative and representative experience of a conscious per- 
 son, they did not enter at all into the proper problems of 
 the philosopher. The "qualities" of all real, as well of 
 all imaginary, things, must exist in a state of dependence 
 on a sentient intelligence, in order that the words used 
 about them may have any meaning. What are pains 
 
 1 One should speak of W\z phenomenalism rather than of the idealism 
 (ideaism, one might call it) of Berkeley— in this meaning of "idea." 
 
22 Berkeley. 
 
 and pleasures, heat and cold, tastes and smells, sounds 
 and colours, in a dead unconscious universe, empty of 
 all rational and even sentient persons 1 As light virtu- 
 ally creates colour, so the sensations and thoughts of a 
 person at least help to create the things that person feels 
 and knows. " Help to create " was all that Locke im- 
 plied ; for he, at any rate, was not prepared to dissolve 
 extension with the primary or mathematical qualities 
 of matter, in sentiency and cognition, nor to look at 
 atoms and their motions exclusively on the ideal or 
 phenomenal side, as he looked at heat and cold, taste 
 and smell, sound and colour. 
 
 The philosophical point of view suggested by the 
 words "idea" or "phenomenon" is thus at the opposite 
 extreme to that of materialism. It assumes that body 
 can make no appearance apart from the conscious life of 
 mind, in which alone things can be realised. The mate- 
 rialist, on the other hand, supposes that there can be no 
 knowledge of mind apart from body ; on the ground of 
 the observed correspondence between what goes on in 
 consciousness and what goes on in the brain and nerves ; 
 and infers that our ideas — the phenomena of which we 
 are conscious — are ultimately and absolutely dependent 
 on the qualities and molecular motions of nerve-tissues. 
 This inference Locke disavows ; but he professedly ex- 
 cludes questions about the dependence of our conscious 
 acts and states on organism, in our embodied conscious- 
 ness, in his desire to concentrate regard upon "ideas" 
 or "phenomena." 
 
 This use of idea, phenomenon, or any other single 
 term, to express at once objective sense-perceptions and 
 the subjective thoughts or fancies which belong only to 
 
What causes ideas ? 23 
 
 the privacy of individual consciousness, is inconveni- 
 ent, on account of the confusion it is apt to produce 
 between our original presentative experience in the ex- 
 ternal senses, and the merely representative and often 
 illusory mental states to which " idea " is popularly re- 
 stricted. Locke overlooked this, in his wish to keep be- 
 fore his reader the part played by sentient if not also by 
 rational consciousness, in giving actuality to what could 
 otherwise be only abstract and negative. So he did not 
 scruple sometimes to call real things ideas, thereby mean- 
 ing real things viewed as mentally transformed in 
 becoming perceptions, instead of abstract entities in 
 nature. But we require in consequence always to re- 
 mind ourselves, in reading his 'Essay,' of the distinc- 
 tion, which he only obscurely presents, between those 
 ideas that are commonly called real sensible things, and 
 those merely private or personal ideas that form the 
 stream of inward thoughts and fancies, under laws of 
 association, in each individual consciousness. 
 
 In thus expressing the necessary dependence of what- 
 ever is known on the sensations and thoughts of some 
 person who knows, the term idea presents only one 
 side of what Locke taught about human knowledge 
 and belief. Looked at on the other side, ideas are 
 manifestations or effects — Locke took for granted — of 
 powers and permanent beings, substantially different from 
 the persons who are percipient of the ideas. Thus they 
 are at once phenomena of which persons are percipient, 
 and they also represent qualities which exist external to 
 our individual conscious life : they are " effects in us," 
 produced by substantial powers that are independent 
 
21 Berkeley. 
 
 of us. Through, the ideas or phenomena in which ex- 
 istence shows itself, we find ourselves, he reported, in 
 conflict and collision with " something " that is foreign 
 to us and our ideas. 
 
 Locke's 'Essay' is concerned, accordingly, with two 
 problems. In one part of it, the ideal or phenomenal 
 side of things is kept in view. There our ideas — the 
 phenomena with which we are concerned — are described 
 and arranged ; their dependence on words, and the de- 
 pendence of words on them, is enforced. In the other 
 part, he unfolds and applies the relations under which 
 real knowledge and probable beliefs as to what transcends 
 our individual ideas, are constituted and unfolded. The 
 Second and Third Books of the ' Essay ' are mostly con- 
 cerned with ideas or phenomena; the Fourth Eook 
 treats of the constitution and certainty of the "know- 
 ledge" and "beliefs" we form out of the ideas or 
 phenomena of which we are conscious, — especially our 
 knowledge of God, and of things and persons external 
 to ourselves. He explains the reasonableness or reality 
 of affirmations we make about the Supreme Power in 
 the universe ; and also about the forces of nature, and 
 the wills of our fellow-men, that encompass and affect 
 us continually in so many ways. 
 
 A far-reaching assumption runs through Locke's treat- 
 ment of this second question. In dealing, in the Second 
 Book of the 'Essay,' with the problem of knowledge, in 
 its first aspect, he had taken for granted that things, 
 whatever else they may be, must, so far as Ave are con- 
 cerned with them, be at least ideas or phenomena of 
 which we are conscious. In the Fourth Book, in ex- 
 plaining how the phenomena of which we are conscious 
 
Intellectual Xcccssity for Eternal Mind. 25 
 
 yield real knowledge, he quietly takes for granted the 
 principle of causality, and its adequacy to carry us from 
 the phenomenal to the unphenomenal or transcendent. 
 He does not, like Kant, try to justify this principle by 
 arguments, as a necessary constituent in a rational 
 experience. He simply assumes it, as a truth that is 
 proceeded upon by all sane men, whether they have 
 ever reflected about it or not. His account of the ex- 
 ternal powers which we, and the phenomena we are 
 conscious of, presuppose, is his logical application of the 
 principle of causality as a metaphysical dogma. 
 
 By one application of the causal principle, Locke 
 finds intellectual necessity for Eternal Mind, as the only 
 intelligible cause of his own beginning to exist, as a 
 self-conscious individual, nearly sixty years before the 
 1 Essay ' was given to the world. This implies that he 
 believes in his own existence, which his ideas pre- 
 suppose, and of which, like Descartes, he declares that 
 he has thus an " intuitive knowledge." 1 — By another 
 
 1 See ' Essay/ B. IV. ch. ix., x. The tenth chapter attracted much 
 attention in Locke's own generation. Curiously, in consequence, 
 he was actually accused of Spinozism. Nowadays it is the fashion 
 to contrast what is called his "individualism" with the "univer- 
 salism" of the Dutch metaphysician. The charge of Spinozism 
 was alleged in a forgotten ' Dissertation upon the First Chapter 
 of the Fourth Book of Mr Locke's " Essay;" wherein the author's 
 endeavours to establish Spinoza's atheistic hypothesis are discovered 
 and confuted.' By William Carroll (London, 1706). — Locke is charged 
 by Carroll with giving " the holy name of God to the eternal exist- 
 ence of cogitation and extended material substance, differently modi- 
 tied in the whole world — i.e., maintaining the eternal existence of 
 the whole world itself, all by an ingenious abuse of Avoids ; " and 
 this is argued at great length throughout the book. The first Lord 
 Shaftesbury is said to have referred on his deathbed to the same 
 chapter (then unpublished) as the source of his own theological 
 heterodoxy. 
 
26 Berkeley. 
 
 application of the same principle of causality, lie 
 found himself under an intellectual necessity (or some- 
 thing like it) for believing that extended and solid 
 substances are the immediate causes of the ideas or 
 phenomena he was conscious of in touching, seeing, 
 hearing, smelling, tasting, moving, and in experiencing 
 the pleasures and pains involved in having bodily sensa- 
 tions. The existence of God he had argued for, on the 
 ground of the mental need for a cause which we feel in 
 view of the bare fact of the commencement of our own 
 existence. Knowledge of the real existence of " other 
 tilings or powers besides God, external to what we call 
 ourselves," Locke did not find — as he did that of God 
 — in the bare fact of our once having begun to be 
 conscious of ideas. The external world of matter 
 is discovered, he thinks, only in and through those 
 particular sorts of mental experience in which "other 
 things, by actual operation upon our senses, make them- 
 selves perceived by us." " The mere having an idea of 
 any outward thing no more proves the real outwardness 
 of that thing than the picture of a man proves his real 
 existence, or than the visions of a dream make it a true 
 history." It is only "the actual receiving of ideas of 
 sense from without that gives us notice of the existence 
 of external things, and makes us know that something 
 doth exist, at that time without us, which causeth that 
 idea in us, though perhaps we neither know nor consider 
 how it does it. It takes not from the certainty of our 
 senses, and the ideas we receive by them, that we know 
 not the manner in which they are produced. " l 
 
 Locke, in short, announced that he found himself, 
 i See ' Essay/ B. IV. cli. xi. 
 
"Matter causes the Ideas of Sense" 27 
 
 when receiving phenomena through the live senses, 
 and then only, percipient of ideas or phenomena, which 
 had this remarkable characteristic, that they appeared 
 and disappeared independently of his own will, while 
 they all presupposed his own conscious existence. The 
 principle of causality, by him unexplained, yielded the 
 conclusion, that as he himself existed, Eternal Mind 
 must also exist. The dependent character of the pheno- 
 mena whose appearance and disappearance he was con- 
 scious in his five senses, seemed to him, on the same 
 causal dogma, to imply the present existence of finite 
 substances and powers, extended and solid, the ex- 
 ternal causes of the (by us) uncontrollable phenomena 
 of sense ; and to be the basis of our habitual beliefs 
 in their orderly, and therefore interpretable, connection 
 with one another. The Ego, God, and Matter, are thus 
 the three related realities of human knowledge, of which 
 Locke's ' Essay on Human Understanding ' was a pro- 
 fessed explanation. 
 
 Throughout the 'Essay,' Locke is fonder of dealing 
 with the question of how our ideas and knowledge have 
 become what we now find them, than with the other 
 question of what they now are, irrespectively of the 
 processes through which they have become what they 
 are. Yet it is surely as they are now, and not as they 
 were in infancy, that we must reason from them. 
 Indeed philosophers of all schools have to proceed in 
 their reasonings from the point of view to which they 
 have attained when they philosophise, and not from the 
 point of view of the jprimum cognltum in the previously 
 undeveloped infant. 
 
28 Berkeley. 
 
 Locke, moreover, supposes a human experience which 
 begins in a consciousness of relationless ideas or phe- 
 nomena, of various sorts, admitted- through the five 
 senses. He never dreams either of an original perception 
 of individual things, like Eeid, or of a necessary consti- 
 tution of phenomenal experience, like Kant. He speaks 
 as if all of us at first saw colours per se, heard sounds 
 per se, were conscious of smells and odours per se, or 
 had sensations of heat and of cold per se ; and as if 
 afterwards, by some unexplained mental process, we 
 learned to combine those different sorts of isolated sense 
 phenomena into the aggregates or "complex ideas" 
 commonly called individual things or individual sub- 
 stances. The possibility of our perceptions of sense 
 presenting necessarily, and therefore from the first, phe- 
 nomena in complexity and in conjunction, as individual 
 things, seems never to occur to him. A student of the 
 ' Essay ' is accustomed by it to suppose that human 
 beings consciously advance from the phenomenally 
 simple and isolated to the phenomenally complex and 
 connected, in the growth of their real experience — 
 that they were in the beginning conscious only irrela- 
 tively of the phenomena of which individual things 
 now seem to consist ; — instead of conversely proceeding 
 by abstraction, from compound things already given, to 
 separable qualities, of which sensible things are found, 
 by analysis, to be made up. The question whether 
 there may not be certain laws, in the very constitution 
 of intellect and experience as such, which require com- 
 plexity and connection in order to any intelligent con- 
 sciousness at all, — that is, in order to any perception 
 even of sense-given phenomena, — was foreign to Locke's 
 
Can we be conscious of " Simple Ideas " t 29 
 
 way of thinking. He wrote as if an idea or pheno- 
 menon per se was a possible perception ; as if there was 
 no occasion to inquire whether the " complexity " in- 
 volved in a phenomenon being regarded as virtually the 
 "quality" of a "thing," might not even be necessarily 
 included in perception. "Why phenomena are signifi- 
 cant of one another, and thus interpretable, and how 
 they become aggregated as qualities of individual things, 
 were questions which afterwards occurred to Berkeley, 
 Hume, and Kant. 
 
 The two problems of Locke — his classification of the 
 ideas or phenomena of which we are conscious, and his 
 account of the causes of this self-conscious experience — 
 gave Berkeley his intellectual starting-point. He had 
 been accustomed by Locke, in the first place, to regard 
 all that exists on its phenomenal or ideal side ; and, at 
 least in the " secondary qualities " of matter, to regard 
 only this ideal or phenomenal existence. In this con- 
 nection, too, he had been taught to demand an idea for 
 every term he made use of, and to reject as jargon terms 
 whose meanings could not be realised phenomenally ; and 
 he had also been told that some ideas are "abstract" 
 — science and philosophy being concerned only with 
 those supposed "abstract ideas." — But he had been in- 
 vited, in the second place, to assert, with Descartes, his 
 intuitive knowledge of his own conscious existence. 
 Then, proceeding, without question, upon the validity of 
 the domna of causality, he had been led to demonstrate 
 from his own conscious existence that of Eternal Mind ; 
 and to infer from the present existence of the ideas or 
 phenomena of his five senses, the present existence of 
 extended and solid substances and powers. Locke, be- 
 
30 Berkeley. 
 
 sides, had throughout the 'Essay' taught Berkeley to 
 refer all the phenomenal data of human knowledge about 
 anything, to phenomena given in sensation and reflec- 
 tion. He had not taught him to inquire into the neces- 
 sary constitution of reason ; or into the nature of those 
 judgments of common sense, or common consciousness, 
 which he nevertheless used for the transformation of 
 otherwise irrelative ideas or phenomena into the real 
 knowledge and warrantable beliefs that make up our 
 intelligible experience. 
 
 Taking this departure from Locke, Berkeley's own 
 mental history till his death presents three stages of 
 progress. Trinity College, Dublin, was the scene of the 
 First — with its literary outcome in his juvenile, which 
 are also his most celebrated, philosophical treatises. The 
 Second was reached when he was for the most part out 
 of Ireland, in England, France, Italy, and America; 
 it closes with another instalment of works in philosophy. 
 For the Third, we are carried back to Ireland ; it too, 
 like the preceding ones, makes its own characteristic 
 contribution to metaphysical literature. Each period in 
 the life is a stage in the development of the philosophy, 
 which attains its most comprehensive form in the last 
 period. 
 
 The four following chapters deal with the results of 
 Berkeley's intellectual labour in the first of these pe- 
 riods, during which he lived at Trinity College, Dublin, 
 in circumstances which have already been described. 
 
 The pervading teaching of the whole life was, we 
 shall find, — that the things we see and touch are only 
 superficial shows, which themselves disappear in re- 
 
Tlic Pervading Conception. 
 
 31 
 
 treating the Eternal Spirit or Universal Reason wherein 
 Ave live and have our being ; and that we become con- 
 scious of this, intellectually in philosophy, and practi- 
 cally through assimilation to God. The more nega- 
 tive part of this great lesson is what is prominent in the 
 first period of Berkeley's history, and in his juvenile 
 works ; Ins later thoughts and writings become fuller of 
 the Spirit or Universal Reason within, in the presence 
 of which the sensible world seems to dissolve, and 
 eartldy objects vanish away. 
 
32 
 
 CHAPTEK III. 
 
 VISUAL IMMATERIALISM. 
 
 Berkeley soon began to make known to the world the 
 intellectual secret about Matter to which an independent 
 critical study of Locke's famous ' Essay ' had helped to 
 lead him. But he did not fully announce at once the 
 startling change in the common way of thinking about 
 the things of sense in which the secret consisted. 
 He unfolded it by degrees. In 1709, when he was 
 twenty-four years of age, he produced a part of it, in 
 the form of an explanation of what is really meant by 
 "seeing a thing," or an 'Essay towards a Xew Theory 
 of Vision.' This * Essay,' dedicated to Sir John Percival, 
 was his first step. It is an argument for the phenomenal, 
 and therefore mind-dependent, nature of the material 
 world, as far as our power of seeing the things of which it 
 consists can carry us into knowledge of its nature ; but it 
 does not prejudge the further question of what the things 
 of sense may turn out to be in the sense perceptions of 
 touch and locomotion. Its conclusion is — that all ordin- 
 ary seeing is really foreseeing, — that the "sight" of tan- 
 gible things is the expectation, produced by habit, of ex- 
 periencing unuerceived phenomena of touch and muscular 
 
Problem regarding Sight proposed by Molyneux. 33 
 
 movement, on occasion of the ideas or phenomena of 
 which alone we are actually conscious when we see, but 
 which thus become signs of the former. By implica- 
 tion, indeed, it is an analysis of expectations in general 
 into habits that are unconsciously rational. 
 
 Some sentences which Locke introduced into the 
 second edition of his ' Essay,' on the suggestion of his 
 friend Molyneux, probably helped to draw Berkeley 
 into this path of approach to his own new philosophical 
 account of the ultimate nature of the material world. 
 The passage is worth study. It is meant to illustrate 
 the unconscious presence of judgments of "suggestion" 
 in what seem to be simple intuitions of sight. 
 
 are 
 
 often, in grown people, altered by the judgment, without 
 our taking notice of it. When we set before our eyes a 
 round globe of any uniform colour, — e.g., gold, alabaster, or jet, 
 it is certain that the idea thereby imprinted on our minds 
 [i.e., the phenomenon of which we become immediately con- 
 scious] is of a flat circle, variously shadowed, with several 
 degrees of light and brightness coming to our eyes. But we 
 have, by use, been accustomed to perceive what kind of ap- 
 pearance convex bodies are wont to make in us, what altera- 
 tions are made in the reflections of light by the differences 
 in the sensible figures of bodies ; and the judgment presently 
 — by an habitual custom — alters the appearances into their 
 causes, so that, from that which is truly variety of shadow or 
 colour, collecting the figure, it makes it pass for a mark of 
 figure, and frames to itself the perception of a convex figure, 
 and an uniform colour, when the idea we receive from hence 
 [the phenomenon of which we are thence visually conscious] 
 is only a plane, variously coloured, as is evident in painting. 
 
 1 See 'Essay/ B. IT. ch. ix. § 
 TTT. 
 
34 Berkeley. 
 
 To which purpose I shall here insert a problem of that very 
 ingenious and studious promoter of real knowledge, the 
 learned and worthy Mr Molyneux, which he was pleased to 
 send me in a letter some months since, and it is this : — ' Sup- 
 pose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch 
 to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, 
 and nearly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt the 
 one and the other, which is the cube and which the sphere. 
 Suppose then the cube and the sphere placed on a table, and 
 the blind man made to see: qucere, whether by his sight, 
 before he touched them, he could now distinguish and tell 
 which is the globe, which the cube.' — To which the acute and 
 judicious proposer answers, No. For though he has obtained 
 experience of how a globe, how a cube, affects his touch, yet 
 he has not yet obtained the experience that what affects his 
 touch so and so, must affect his sight so and so ; or that a 
 protuberant angle in the cube, that pressed his hand un- 
 equally, shall appear to his eye as it does in the cube. I 
 agree with this thinking gentleman, whom I am proud to 
 call my friend, in his answer to this problem ; and am of 
 opinion that the blind man, at first sight, would not be able 
 with certainty to say which was the globe, which the cube, 
 whilst he only saw them ; though he could unerringly name 
 them by his touch, and certainly distinguish them by the 
 difference of their figures felt. This I have set down and 
 leave with my reader, as an occasion for him to consider how 
 much he may be beholden to experience, improvement, and 
 acquired notions, where he thinks he had not the least use 
 for or help from them." 
 
 Among Locke's readers Berkeley at any rate was 
 early led into the train of thought so naturally set 
 agoing by this paragraph. His " Commonplace Book " 
 is full of similar problems. Here are a few examples : — 
 
 " Qucere : Whether a man born blind, made to see, would 
 at first give the name of distance to any idea intromitted by 
 
More Problems regarding Sight. 35 
 
 sight, since lie would take distance that he had perceived by 
 touch to be something existing without his mind, but he 
 would certainly think that nothing seen was without his 
 mind. ... By extension a born blind man would mean 
 either the perception caused in his mind by something he 
 calls extended, or else the power of raising that perception ; 
 which power is without in the things extended. Now he 
 could not know either of these to be in visible things till he 
 had tried. ... A blind man, at first, would not take colours 
 to be without his mind ; but colours would seem to be in the 
 same plane with coloured extension : therefore [coloured] 
 extension would not seem to be without the mind. . . . 
 Qucere, whether the sensations of sight arising from a man's 
 head be liker the sensations of touch proceeding from thence 
 or from his legs ; or is it only the constant and long associa- 
 tion of ideas in themselves entirely different that makes us 
 judge them to be the same ? What I see is only variety of 
 colours and light. What I feel is hard and soft, hot or cold, 
 rough or smooth. What resemblance have these thoughts 
 with those 1 A picture painted with great variety of colours 
 yet affects the touch in one uniform manner. I cannot there- 
 fore conclude that because he sees two I shall feel two ; be- 
 cause I see angles or inequalities, I shall feel angles or in- 
 equalities. How, therefore, can I — before experience teaches 
 me — know that the visible legs are, because two, connected 
 with the tangible ones ; or the visible head, because one, 
 connected with the tangible head ? Writers in optics are 
 often mistaken in their principle of judging of magnitudes 
 and distances. . . . Length is perceivable by hearing ; length 
 and breadth by sight ; length, breadth, and depth by touch." 
 
 Berkeley's ' Essay on Vision/ after showing the kind 
 and amount of knowledge afforded by our eyes alone, 
 without the assistance of the other senses, proceeds to 
 verify by facts the striking hypothesis — that light becomes 
 a visual language, expressive of those conceptions of 
 solid and resisting things which one born blind would 
 
36 Berkeley. 
 
 derive from the experience of contact and bodily move- 
 ment ; and that it is so simply because, by custom, 
 persons with sound eyes have learned rapidly to trans- 
 late the visual language into what would be the tactual 
 conceptions of the man born blind. Our adult visible 
 world is the original sense phenomena of sight uncon- 
 sciously translated; the fact of the translation is dis- 
 covered by psychological analysis. When an adult per- 
 son, possessed of good eyes, stands in the centre of an 
 extensive landscape, he seems to unreflecting common- 
 sense to apprehend by sight at a glance the fields, and 
 trees, and houses, and hills, and animated beings around, 
 with the concave vault of heaven over all; and he is apt 
 to suppose that he has been always able to do this. 
 What Berkeley does in his ' Essay ' is to produce facts 
 which oblige our supposed observer to modify this un- 
 reflecting supposition ; since they prove to him that, 
 instead of seeing the landscape and its contents "at a 
 glance," he has really been mentally translating into 
 phenomena of touch what alone he really saw, helped 
 by his common -sense trust in the constant relations, 
 and therefore intelligibility, of visible and tangible 
 phenomena. 
 
 The facts produced by Berkeley for verifying this 
 far-reaching hypothesis are of various sorts. 
 
 The consent of those who have studied the original 
 phenomenal data of sight, since the days of Aristotle, is, 
 in the first place, taken as sufficient evidence of the fact, 
 that the only phenomena of which we are at first per- 
 cipient in seeing are those of colour. We can simulta- 
 neously see only a greater or smaller number of coloured 
 ends of lines of light. Now it is certain that what is 
 
Berkeley's Hypothesis and its Verification. 37 
 
 thus seen must be dependent on sentient mind. Their 
 Aery nature makes it impossible tliat colours, as seen, 
 could exist after the annihilation of all sentient mind. 
 Colours, then, are only ideas or phenomena ; so that 
 ideas or phenomena are really all, properly speaking, 
 that we can see. It is true, as we find when we exa- 
 mine the organic conditions under which we are thus 
 sentient of the coloured ends of lines, that visible 
 phenomena are accompanied by invisible muscular sen- 
 sations in the organ of sight ; but these sensations like- 
 Avise are only ideas or phenomena. Sights and their 
 organic accompaniments, in short, are essentially mind- 
 dependent phenomena. 
 
 But this is not all. The sight of colour is the sight 
 of simultaneous phenomena of finite length and breadth, 
 — in other words, we see an extension that is charac- 
 terised by visible length and breadth. "We cannot, 
 however, see depth or thickness — distance outwards in 
 the line of sight — in seeing this sort of extension. The 
 best optical authorities, including Molyneux, grant, 
 Berkeley argues, that distance in a line straight out 
 from the eye cannot be seen. For, sight presupposes 
 rays of light proceeding in straight lines from the 
 differently sized, shaped, and placed things of touch, 
 which we seem to see in their respective places and 
 sizes, at various distances from one another and from 
 our bodies, in an ambient space. But all these lines of 
 light fall endways and not sideways upon the retina ; so 
 that it can be only the end, and not the depth outwards, 
 of each line that is seen. Distance, accordingly — that is 
 to say, a visible interval between the visible end of the 
 line and its other extremity — cannot be seen. The lines 
 
38 Berkeley. 
 
 themselves cannot be seen, only their inner extremities ; 
 and thus the "outness" of extension is invisible, and 
 must be discovered by some other means than sight 
 proper. 
 
 Further : Xo mathematical or a priori demonstration 
 of the existence of this third dimension of space can be 
 drawn from the coloured extension we see, and the 
 organic phenomena that accompany vision proper, re- 
 garded as data and premises. For, the phenomena pre- 
 sented to sight, with which alone seeing per se has 
 to do, have no necessary or rational connection with 
 the depth or outness of space ; nor, of course, with the 
 sizes or quantities of the three-dimensioned space occu- 
 pied by solid things ; nor Avith the places in that space 
 which one solid thing occupies relatively to another. 
 "We find all these relations only after we have had 
 sufficient experience, in the senses of touch and bodily 
 movement, and have compared that experience with our 
 experiences of coloured expanse, which in the order of 
 nature are steadily connected with the former. 1 
 
 The mental connection between the phenomenal data 
 of touch and locomotion and the phenomenal data of 
 sight is established, Berkeley concludes, by what he 
 variously calls "custom," "experience," "suggestion." 
 By these terms he implies that there is at work here 
 a sort of unconscious induction. This visual induction, 
 like the conscious and deliberate inductions of science, 
 and on the same general principle of the intelligibility 
 or consistent orderliness of nature, is explicable, he would 
 
 1 See the late Professor Ferrier's brilliant expository criticism of 
 the Theory of Vision in the second volume of his ' Philosophical 
 Remains.' 
 
Unconscious Inductions. 39 
 
 probably say, in the way that all human foresight, in- 
 cluding the foresight called sight, is explicable. Visual 
 " perceptions " of solid things placed in an ambient 
 space are really, on this supposition, unconscious induc- 
 tions. They are expectations, generated somehow in us 
 and for us, before we were able, by a conscious com- 
 parison of instances, to form them deliberately for our- 
 selves. This suggestion or unconscious inference implies 
 mind, and is produced by the rational action of a mind, 
 if not of our individual mind. Eeason is somehow latent 
 in visible nature ; and this explains how adults are able 
 to see as they now see. Visible extension itself — whether 
 it be the visible room in which I am now writing, and 
 its visible contents, or the starry heaven with its celestial 
 furniture — is only a number of simultaneous visible 
 and visual phenomena ; and these phenomena are cap- 
 able of being inductively interpreted, because they are 
 reasonable or orderly in their changes, and thus part of 
 the intelligible natural system, of which science is the 
 interpretation. 
 
 In the presence of verifying facts such as these, Ber- 
 keley argued that we must, as reasonable beings, acknow- 
 ledge that what seemed a visible panorama, taken in 
 by the eye at a glance, has really been formed by cus- 
 tom, through an unconscious inductive interpretation of 
 what we have seen and touched. This enables us to 
 foresee whenever we now see. Sight in its adult state 
 has become habitual foresight : vision is now always 
 prevision. So much is sight foresight, that no human 
 being could now perform the experiment of seeing with- 
 out also foreseeing. It is a question (though Berkeley 
 does not make it one) whether an infant even has ever 
 
40 Berkeley. 
 
 performed it. If an adult could now perform it, the 
 ambient space, with its supposed visible contents of solid 
 things, at different distances from us, and variously sized 
 and placed, would suddenly dissolve before our eyes, 
 leaving only coloured extensions, along with certain 
 ocular sensations of muscular resistance and movement 
 which in ordinary experience receive no attention. 
 
 The conclusion of the whole is, that our supposed 
 spectator was profoundly mistaken in asserting that he 
 really saw at a glance the landscape around his body. 
 The bare original vision of phenomena of colour, along 
 with certain organic sensations in the eye, had really 
 been mentally transformed into the wonderful panorama 
 that roused his sense of beauty. 
 
 The ultimate or philosophical explanation of this 
 transformation Berkeley hardly touches, or indeed re- 
 cognises, in this juvenile 'Essay.' An attempt to reach 
 it carries us into some deep philosophical problems. 
 It involves the rationale of our conscious and uncon- 
 scious expectations of natural events, and of scientific 
 induction. One would have to inquire, for instance, 
 Avhether the foresight, latent in ordinary adult seeing, 
 is due (a) to unconscious psychical or cerebral processes ; 
 or (b) to very rapid and therefore unremembered con- 
 scious processes ; or (c) to the divine agency going on 
 in all nature, in which human nature somehow shares. 
 To solve such problems we must also be able to settle 
 what are the necessary intellectual constituents of induc- 
 tive expectation — those without which " experience," in 
 any fruitful meaning of that term, would be impossible. 
 
 These questions do not rise in Berkeley's early ' Essay 
 
The Booh of Vision. 41 
 
 on Vision.' He is contented to argue that we learn by 
 "experience" to see outward distances, the nearest as 
 well as the most remote. He founds this experience on 
 suggestions similar to those by which, with consent of 
 all, we learn to estimate the distance of things that are 
 far away from us ; but he does not pursue the philo- 
 sophy of suggestion itself. He is satisfied to refer it 
 to custom. The argument, however, takes for granted 
 that such suggestions involve elements adequate in 
 reason to convert visual ideas or phenomena into visual 
 signs, or a visual language. This visual language is 
 a part of the interpretable language of external na- 
 ture. The original visual phenomena become, under 
 this conception, a grand procession of natural signs, 
 which we have been learning to interpret ever since 
 we were born, in the beautiful Book of Vision that is 
 always open before us. We began to learn the lesson 
 so early that all remembrances of the original process, 
 and of the mental state in which we were before we 
 learned it, have passed away. Our only possible visual 
 experience now is a compound of the original ideas 
 or phenomena of sight, interpreted, through help of 
 habit, by our common - sense trust in the permanence 
 of order in the connection between visual and other 
 sorts of phenomena in nature. This has generated an 
 assurance that we now find to be practically rational. 
 We are all now led by habit to believe that the visible 
 colours, and the accompanying muscular sensations of 
 the eye, are reliable signs of approaching experiences 
 of muscular resistance, as well as of bodily pains and 
 pleasures; so that they can in this way practically 
 regulate our actions. 
 
42 Berkeley. 
 
 But, although Berkeley stops here, one may still ask, 
 What means this universal sense - symbolism — this 
 significance in the ideas or phenomena which Ave see 1 
 On what sort of connection does it depend? What 
 causes the connection 1 ? A sufficient answer to these 
 questions would carry us far, not only into the philo- 
 sophy of sight but into the philosophy of the material 
 world, and even into the highest philosophy of alL 
 
 One thing that Berkeley insists much upon is, that 
 when we try the mental experiment, we always find that 
 the connection between the visual signs and their mean- 
 ing is not one of rational necessity — that there is no 
 absurdity in our supposing that the " meaning " of the 
 signs might have been different from what it now is. 
 We find, when we try, that the meanings can be re- 
 versed in imagination. The present signs, for instance, 
 of a thing being far away, might really have been made 
 to mean that it is near. The signs and their meanings 
 being connected in the way they now are, is, as far as 
 we can discover, only the result of a constitution of 
 nature that is arbitrary, that might have been different 
 from what it is. What the actual connections are, can 
 be found only by observation : future observation may 
 conceivably show that the language of nature has been 
 altered. That is to say, in our visual interpretations, as 
 indeed in all interpretation of nature, we are dealing 
 with "laws" which are the expressions of ever Active 
 Mind, and not with the outcome of a blindly fated 
 necessity. The laws of nature are, as it were, God's 
 habit of acting in regulating phenomena. Though the 
 laws which make visible nature interpretable are steady 
 enough for the purposes of human action, we find no 
 
Faith in the Book. 43 
 
 eternal rational necessity for their being what they are, 
 more than we do for the spoken or written signs of 
 Greek, English, or any other artificial human language 
 being what they are. A different set of meanings from 
 the established ones now attached to each sign would 
 not create a contradiction in terms ; nor indeed con- 
 tradict reason in any way that we can find. 
 
 But if an inexorable necessity does not connect in 
 nature ideas or phenomena, how do the visual pheno- 
 mena become so connected in our minds that their mean- 
 ings are "at a glance " suggested 1 How comes it that 
 true judgments about their meaning now arise in our 
 minds as soon as we open our eyes'? Berkeley does 
 not discuss this. He would grant that it is due to the 
 faith, somehow induced, in the supremacy of rational 
 agency in the universe. For this is implied in the in- 
 telligibility and trustworthiness of visual signs. This 
 faith would give consistency to the tissue of the web 
 we are unravelling whenever we are " seeing things." 
 And to this result he approached in the end. 
 
 " Upon the whole," he concludes, even in this juvenile 
 Essay, in summing up the results of this his first speculative 
 adventure in the world of the senses J — " upon the whole, 
 I think we may fairly conclude that the proper objects of 
 vision constitute a universal language of the author of 
 nature, whereby we are instructed how to regulate our 
 actions, in order to attain those things that are necessary to 
 the preservation and wellbeing of our bodies, and also to 
 avoid whatever may be hurtful and destructive to them. It 
 is by their information that we are principally guided in all 
 transactions and concerns of life. And the manner in which 
 
 ' Essay on Vision,' §§ 147, 148. 
 
44 Berkeley. 
 
 they signify and mark unto us the objects which are at a 
 distance is the same with that of languages and signs of 
 human appointment, which do not suggest the things signi- 
 fied by any likeness or identity of nature, but only by an 
 habitual connection that experience has made us observe be- 
 tween them. Suppose one who had always continued blind 
 to be told by his [seeing] guide, that after he had advanced 
 so many steps he shall come to the brink of a precipice, or 
 be stopped by a wall — must not this to him seem very ad- 
 mirable and surprising ? He cannot conceive how it is pos- 
 sible for mortals to form such predictions as these, which to 
 him would seem as strange and unaccountable as prophecy 
 doth to others. Even those who are blessed with the visive 
 faculty find therein sufficient cause of admiration. The 
 wonderful art and contrivance wherewith it is adjusted to 
 those ends and purposes for which it was apparently de- 
 signed — the vast extent, number, and variety of objects that 
 are at once, with so much ease, and quickness, and pleasure, 
 suggested by it — all these afford subject for much and pleas- 
 ing speculation, and may, if anything, give us some glim- 
 mering analogous prenotion of things which are placed be- 
 yond the certain discovery and comprehension of our present 
 state." 
 
 A modern scientific observer asks whether this beauti- 
 ful hypothesis is verified by external facts, as well as by 
 facts of internal consciousness. Does it appear, when 
 the experiment is tried, that the visual consciousness of 
 persons born blind, when first made to see, is really in 
 the state supposed by this theory of adult sight being 
 an interpretation of visual signs 1 Is it true that before 
 they have visual experience, their conceptions of exter- 
 nal things are formed out of their blind experience of 
 collision with otherwise unknown forces of resistance 1 ? 
 The direct way, it may be thought, for finding out what 
 sight per se is, would be to take a human instance of it 
 
The Born Blind. 45 
 
 (if one can be got) altogether isolated from the experi- 
 ence of the other senses. An experimental isolation of 
 the simple data of each sense, by the method of differ- 
 ence, is the logical method of science ; and it may seem 
 possible to use it in cases of persons born blind, whose 
 power to see has suddenly been communicated to them. 
 It may therefore be asked, whether the facts which in 
 such cases present themselves correspond to the hypo- 
 thesis — that all actual seeing of things is really read- 
 ing a prophetic book, which the reader has learned 
 through custom to interpret by degrees. 
 
 Berkeley did not busy himself in experiments of this 
 kind, although he expressed interest in them. He 
 argued out his conclusions from data of the common 
 consciousness, diligently reflected upon. He inferred 
 from this evidence what the first mental experience of 
 those rescued from born-blindness would be ; he specu- 
 lated, too, about the consciousness of "unbodied spirits," 
 able to see, but, from their birth, destitute of the sense 
 of muscular resistance and the power of corporeal move- 
 ment. In a note to the second edition of the ' Essay on 
 Vision,' indeed, he referred with curiosity to some re- 
 ported instance of one born blind who had been made 
 to see, and who thus might be " supposed a proper judge 
 how far some tenets laid down in several places in the 
 foregoing 'Essay' are agreeable to truth," — adding, "if 
 any curious person hath the opportunity of making pro- 
 per interrogations, I should gladly see my notions either 
 amended or confirmed by experience." But his own 
 testing facts were found in consciousness, and not 
 by external experiments on other persons. An appeal 
 to consciousness for verification of the antithesis be- 
 
46 Berkeley. 
 
 tween the original data of mere sight and the original 
 data of mere touch and muscular movement, — with the 
 evidence — virtually given by common-sense — contained 
 in the fact that we spontaneously trust the significance 
 of what we see and of the organic sensations that 
 accompany seeing, — seemed to him to fulfil all the con- 
 ditions of proof. And indeed, the many physiologists 
 and mental philosophers since Berkeley, who have tried 
 to settle how we learn to see by external experiments, 
 have usually illustrated the truth of Diderot's remark, 
 that to interrogate one born blind, in a way fitted to 
 test psychological hypotheses about sight, is an occupa- 
 tion, from its difficulty, not unworthy of the united in- 
 genuity of Newton and Descartes, Locke and Leibnitz. 
 
 Even more remote from Berkeley is the endeavour of 
 some German savants of this generation to explain, by 
 an examination of the functions of the visual organs, 
 how we get our present perception of space, and how 
 we are able to distinguish between the simultaneous 
 sense phenomena of sight and of touch. Whatever 
 physiological interest the relative scientific speculations 
 of Lotze, Helmholtz, or Wundt may possess on other 
 grounds, from Berkeley's point of view, at any rate, they 
 are destitute of philosophical value. Facts and investi- 
 gations of the sort are of interest in a physiological or 
 merely physical study of mind, which aims at determin- 
 ing the terms of the dependence, under our present con- 
 stitution, of states and acts of conscious life upon the 
 constitution of nerve -tissues and organs. They may 
 help us to read better the facts of consciousness in terms 
 of the organic structure and functions. But they do 
 not solve, nor even entertain, the philosophical questions 
 
The Book of Vision a Booh of Prophecy. 47 
 
 that are latent in the very presuppositions of physio- 
 logical and all other natural science. The Book of 
 Vision, whose existence Berkeley discovered, is one that 
 might be possessed or used by any unembodied spirit 
 whose phenomena were really significant of other phen- 
 omena. The one cardinal point with him was that, as 
 a fact, we find visual sense impressions daily arising in 
 our conscious experience, which we also find practically 
 capable of being translated; and that they thus make 
 the Book of Vision, which, even though many know it 
 not, we are all continually reading. The profound philo- 
 sophical lessons in self-knowledge and in divine know- 
 ledge involved in this were what he laboured in later 
 life to unfold. But his first lesson in philosophy was, 
 that when we seem at a single glance to be seeing 
 the things of sense around us, in their places in an 
 "ambient space," we are really interpreting our visual 
 impressions, which thus make one of the Books of God, 
 and a Book, too, which is in literal truth a Book of 
 Prophecy. 
 
48 
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 UNIVERSAL IMMATERIALISM. 
 
 Berkeley's discovery of the Divine Book of Vision 
 paved the way to his discovery of the Divine Book of 
 Sense, of which the Book of Vision was only a part. 
 " The bookseller who printed my ' Essay on Vision/ " 
 he writes from Dublin, in March 1710, to Sir John 
 Percival, then in London, 1 "imagining he had printed 
 too few, retarded the publication of it on that side the 
 water till he had printed this second edition. I have 
 made some alterations and additions in the body of the 
 treatise, and in the Appendix have endeavoured to answer 
 the objections of the Archbishop of Dublin. There 
 still remains one objection — -with regard to the useless- 
 ness of that book of mine, — but in a little time I hope to 
 make what is there laid down appear subservient to the 
 ends of morality and religion, in a treatise I have now 
 in the press, the design of which is to demonstrate the 
 existence and attributes of God ; the immortality of the 
 soul; the realisation of God's pre-knowledge and the 
 freedom of man; and by showing the emptiness and 
 falsehood of several parts of the speculative sciences, to 
 i Percival MSS. 
 
The Book of Sense. 49 
 
 reduce men to the study of religion and things useful. 
 How far my endeavours will prove successful, and 
 whether I have been all this time in a dream or no, 
 time will show. ... I do not see," he adds, " how 
 it is possible to demonstrate even the being of a God on 
 the principle of the Archbishop — that strictly goodness 
 and understanding can no more be assumed of God than 
 that He has feet and hands; there being no argument 
 that I know of for God's existence which does not prove 
 Him at the same time to be an understanding, wise, and 
 benevolent Being, in the strict, and literal, and proper 
 meaning of these words." The book foreshadowed in 
 this letter appeared in the summer of 1710, as the 
 "First Part" of a 'Treatise concerning the Principles of 
 Human Knowledge, wherein the chief Causes of Error 
 and Difficulty in the Sciences, with the Grounds of 
 Scepticism, Atheism, and Irreligion, are inquired into.' 
 In this still unfinished fragment of a larger work, 
 Berkeley's new view of the meaning of reality, when 
 reality is affirmed of the things of sense, is explained, 
 defended, and applied. It contains the germ of a 
 Theory of Knowledge, which indeed was never fully 
 unfolded, perhaps, even in his own thoughts. 
 
 The ' Essay on Vision ' dealt with an artificially 
 isolated world of visual ideas and phenomena. The 
 1 Treatise on Human Knowledge ' was an endeavour to 
 show that what was true of the isolated phenomena of 
 sight was also true of the whole phenomenal world of 
 sense. In his explanation of the way in which Ave learn 
 to see things, Berkeley had tried to prove that what is at 
 first a chaos of unintelligible visual impressions becomes 
 transformed into an interpretable and partly interpreted 
 
 p. — III. d 
 
50 Berkeley. 
 
 system of visual signs, dependent in their very nature 
 on a sentient mind. The same sort of transformation of 
 phenomena, he now argued, takes place in our perception 
 of the whole material world. For, by analysis, all the 
 solid things in space, and space itself, are found to 
 dissolve into what he called sense ideas, but what 
 we may call sense impressions, or phenomena of sense. 
 These impressions or phenomena, through custom -in- 
 duced " suggestions " of their actual but arbitrarily estab- 
 lished relations of coexistence and succession, are gradu- 
 ally converted — when our sense experience is in process 
 of making — into perceptions of what we now call the 
 " qualities " of "sensible things." Thus, not "the mani- 
 fold " (as Kantists say) of the visual sense, but the entire 
 "manifold" of our sense impressions, becomes — through 
 what Berkeley calls " suggestion," — an intelligible phe- 
 nomenal world, which, because intelligible, can be con- 
 verted by us into natural science. Visual signs and 
 visual symbolism accordingly expand, in the ' Treatise on 
 Human Knowledge,' into sense signs generally, or natural 
 symbolism. The successive and coexisting phenomena 
 of colour, and visible size, shape, and position ; of re- 
 sistance and tangible size, shape, and position, involved 
 in the consciousness of our bodily movements ; of sound, 
 taste, smell, heat and cold, — all go to make up the 
 alphabet of our real perceptions of solid, extended, and 
 movable things. The letters of this natural alphabet 
 of the senses would have been meaningless if they had 
 not been the mind-dependent phenomena of sense, pre- 
 sented by Mind, and interpreted by finite minds, which 
 we find them to be. Were they not this, we could 
 not have had any experience of what is real at all. 
 
Sensuous Phenomena are Significant. 51 
 
 We begin to learn the letters of this natural alphabet 
 when we first use our five senses. In continuing to use 
 them, we gradually learn, through a rude and crude ex- 
 perience, the meaning implied in their orderly connec- 
 tions. The intelligence thus by degrees awakened in the 
 "suggestions" which follow, is what we call our "sen- 
 suous perception " of the material world. It is through- 
 out previsive. Developed sensuous perception is just 
 expectation, and expectation is essentially prophetic. 
 
 Take any material object — large or small — a planet or 
 a grain of sand ; inorganic or organic — a mountain or a 
 man's body. "We find, when we reflect, Berkeley would 
 argue, that our real knowledge of it is, — that it consists 
 of significant sense phenomena, dependent on sentient 
 minds, aggregated in the clusters we call individual 
 things simply by the constant orderliness or significance 
 of their phenomenal constituents. These clusters of 
 phenomena are in turn isolated from one another, so as 
 to make up the separate "things" we see, by help of our 
 perception and imagination of visible space. The sense 
 phenomena of which the individual and locally sepa- 
 rate things of sense are made up, rise, we find, in the 
 current of our personal consciousness, without effort 
 on our part, and indeed without our being able to 
 summon or to dismiss them at our pleasure. The laws 
 which govern their appearance, disappearance, and re- 
 appearance in our perceptions, are not laws made by us, 
 or which Ave can change. But the daily employment of 
 every human being is that of interpreting, well or ill, 
 the sense phenomena of which he is thus the subject, 
 and on which his happiness is found largely to depend. 
 He is daily determining, by the sense phenomena of 
 
52 Berkeley. 
 
 which he is actually conscious, what others, which he 
 is not yet conscious of, may be expected by him, and by 
 other sentient beings. Progress in this work of inter- 
 pretation is what we commonly call progress in know- 
 ledge of nature. In the very beginning of this pro- 
 cess of interpreting sense phenomena, we find ourselves 
 obliged to assign to the phenomenal clusters what we 
 call their respective places, sizes, and distances from one 
 another ; : we are by this means helped to realise, with 
 distinctness, the real and very practical " dream " in 
 which we all share — of a world of phenomenal things, 
 contained in a vast ambient phenomenal sphere, — a 
 world, too, by which we find the pains and pleasures of 
 our conscious lives are very much affected throughout 
 their whole course. 
 
 Berkeley's theory of Knowledge, in this Treatise, is 
 an attempt to explain by " suggestion," and ultimately 
 by common sense or ineradicable faith, the practically 
 real dream in which human life, amidst the transitory 
 shows of sense, is found to consist. The explanation 
 is given in his account of the construction of sense 
 knowledge and physical science, out of phenomena or 
 impressions, dependent on a being who is conscious of 
 them. How, for instance, he has to ask, does my merely 
 private or subjective "feeling of heat and colour "get 
 translated into part of this universal or objective dream — 
 if we may call that a dream which is so practically real 
 — as it does in the judgment, "I see the sun " 1 How 
 
 1 This may be compared with Kant's account of the manner in 
 which, through onr a priori perception of space, the irrelative phe- 
 nomena of sense are obliged to take on space and time relations, as 
 the condition of their metamorphosis into "objects," from then- 
 original chaos. 
 
Translation of Sensuous Phenomena into Things. 53 
 
 does my phenomenal sense of resistance, and colour, and 
 odour become the perception of an orange 1 In these 
 perceptions we know "things" in their "qualities," and 
 do not merely feel transitory, uninterpreted sense impres- 
 sions. If we did not rise above these last, we could 
 have no sense experience of the " sun " or the " orange ; " 
 and therefore no experience at all in any intelligible 
 meaning of the word. There must therefore be some- 
 thing more, a Eerkeleyan may be supposed to argue, in 
 external things than meaningless sense phenomena or 
 sense impressions, incapable of suggesting expectations, 
 and which per se can never translate themselves into per- 
 ception or sense knowledge. What is this "something 
 more," through which the impressions were converted 
 into the sun or the orange — things which are now 
 distinctly recognised as real by the eye or the hand? 
 
 This deep question never occurs to the unphilosophical, 
 and so it does not perplex them. 
 
 The philosophers, in Berkeley's time and previously, 
 had answered it in a way that seemed to him the chief 
 cause of the triumphs of scepticism in its perennial 
 struggle with faith. For they had, he thought, given 
 a merely abstract answer, unrealisable in any human 
 imagination; and that although an intelligible and 
 easily realisable one lay ready to their hands. They 
 had thus confused the minds of men, and put into cir- 
 culation a number of meaningless words. " It might 
 with reason be expected," he exclaims, in the open- 
 ing sentences of his new book on 'Human Knowledge,' 
 " that those who had spent most time and pains in 
 philosophy should enjoy a greater calm and serenity 
 of mind, a greater clearness and evidence of knowledge, 
 
54 Berkeley. 
 
 and be less disturbed with doubts and difficulties than 
 other men. Yet so it is, we see the illiterate bulk of 
 mankind, that walk the highroad of plain common 
 sense and are governed by the dictates of nature, for 
 the most part easy and undisturbed. To them nothing 
 that is familiar appears unaccountable, or difficult to 
 comprehend. They complain not of any want of evi- 
 dence in their senses, and are out of all danger of 
 becoming sceptics. But no sooner do we depart from 
 sense and instinct to follow the light of a supreme prin- 
 ciple — to reason, meditate, and reflect on the nature of 
 things, but a thousand scruples spring up in our minds 
 concerning those things which before we seemed fully 
 to comprehend. . . . The cause of this is thought [e.g., 
 by Locke] to be the obscurity of things, or the natural 
 weakness and imperfection of our understandings. . . . 
 But perhaps we may be too partial to ourselves, in 
 placing the fault originally in our faculties, and not 
 rather in the wrong use we ourselves make of them. 
 It is a hard thing to suppose that right deductions 
 from true principles should ever end in consequences 
 which cannot be maintained or made consistent. . 
 Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far 
 greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have 
 hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to 
 knowledge, are entirely owing to ourselves — that we have 
 first raised a dust, and then complain we cannot see." 1 
 
 Berkeley's aim, accordingly, was to recover men from 
 misleading abstractions of metaphysicians ; and to do 
 this by an appeal to their own common sense or in- 
 tuitive consciousness of certainty — after he had, in the 
 
 i Works, vol. i. pp. 137, 138. 
 
A Bet urn from Abstractions. 55 
 
 first place, induced them to develop it by reflection. This 
 was virtually to think back into the Eternal Eeason, in 
 which we all consciously or unconsciously share ; and 
 which the things of sense either conceal or reveal, in pro- 
 portion as we have a superficial or a deep perception of 
 their meaning. The empty answer of mere metaphysi- 
 cal abstraction to the question about the ultimate mean- 
 ing of the word Matter was his crucial instance, as 
 Bacon would say, of philosophically raised " dust," fol- 
 lowed by the complaint that "we cannot see." Even 
 Locke had taught that the very things of sense them- 
 selves were not actually present in perception, but only 
 those effects of their power which we call "sensations " 
 — pleasant and painful ; and he had further taught that 
 we are obliged, by our instinctive causal judgment, to 
 refer sensations to independent extended bodies that 
 are unperceived in sense, and whose existence we can 
 only infer. He had distinguished bodies, in their pri- 
 mary qualities or mathematical essence, from bodies in 
 their relative or secondary qualities ; which last depend, 
 he held, on the mathematical relations of the atoms 
 of matter to a sentient organism. In the absence of 
 all sentient organism, Locke's Matter had only the 
 qualities which make its mathematical essence, and 
 which were called primary. These last, as well as the 
 former, he further taught, are the attributes of an un- 
 perceived substance ; and of pure substance we have no 
 other notion, he confessed, than that it is " a something 
 we know not what." In all this, Berkeley insisted, 
 there is nothing conceivable or that we can realise in 
 imagination, except the sense phenomena of which per- 
 sons are conscious. The supposed mathematical qualities 
 
-St 
 
 56 Berkeley. 
 
 existing independently of the others, and the pure sub- 
 stance, too, are only empty metaphysical abstractions. 
 They must be melted into sensuous phenomena, like the 
 secondary qualities. With these last, indeed, when we 
 look into the facts, we find the former are inseparably 
 blended, and they must therefore share their fate. 
 
 It was this dark background, this misleading fiction 
 of a metaphysical substance, Berkeley thought, that 
 made the merely phenomenal realities we see and touch 
 conceal the Eternal Spirit and Eeason within. When 
 once this fictitious power and substance of Matter, 
 endowed with unsensuous qualities, was acknowledged, 
 Matter became the convenient centre to which whatever 
 happened in the universe of sense and of consciousness 
 might be referred as its cause. The phenomena pre- 
 sented to our senses, and hitherto attributed to Matter, 
 were, for the mass of mankind, the very type and 
 standard of reality. This supposed independent Matter 
 in the dark background was accordingly deified, and 
 was offered as the last explanation not only of what is 
 perceived, but also of the percipient act. Even Locke 
 raised much " philosophical dust" about Matter, and then 
 complained that he "could not see." Materialists since 
 Locke, still adopting abstract and unintelligible dogmas, 
 fane} 7- that they find in dead, unconscious, material pheno- 
 mena, " the promise and potency of all self-conscious life." 
 
 In the midst of the philosophical and popular pre- 
 judice that Matter could do this or that — could make 
 minds perceive, and could even evolve from itself all 
 the reason and rational life that exists — Berkeley loudly 
 called for an answer to certain previous questions, the 
 answers to which had been, and still were, too dogmati- 
 
Uselessness of Uhphenomenal Matter. 57 
 
 Dally assumed. What, lie asked, is the true philoso- 
 phical meaning of the words Matter, Space, and Force 1 
 Does the principle of intuitive certainty, or common 
 sense (in the philosophical meaning of " common sense "), 
 afford any ground for attributing either an independent 
 subsistence or independent powers to the sense-presented 
 phenomena which compose the phenomenal things seen 
 and touched ? Let us inquire, he may be supposed to 
 ask, what the actual office of sense phenomena and 
 phenomenal things is, in a human conscious life. "What 
 am I justified, as a reasonable human being, in assum- 
 ing, when I say that in my perception of a stone, for 
 instance, I am not merely conscious of certain transient 
 sense impressions of colour and hardness, but that I 
 know something that is not transient, nor subject to 
 causal metamorphoses, like the appearances given in the 
 senses — that is not dependent on any one being per- 
 cipient of it, but is on the contrary persistent, through 
 all changes and interruptions of conscious state and act 
 in all intelligent beings'? Bravely press questions of 
 this sort — one almost hears Berkeley saying throughout 
 his book — and then any one who can truly read the 
 revelations of the common consciousness must put a 
 very different interpretation upon " reality " in the 
 world of sense phenomena, from the absurd and con- 
 tradictory interpretation put upon it by Locke, and in- 
 deed by the whole array of philosophers. Lor it can 
 be demonstrated that the dark entities called Matter 
 and Space, and the " powers " Matter is supposed to 
 possess, are not only unnecessary — because expressive 
 of no known office discharged by sense phenomena 
 and phenomenal things in the economy of our experi- 
 
58 Berkeley. 
 
 ence — but that the very suppositions they proceed upon 
 are meaningless, and even expressly self-contradictory. 
 They are the " dust " raised by those who find in con- 
 sequence that they "cannot see." 
 
 In order to correct all this, Berkeley simply tried to 
 be more thorough-going than Locke. The ' Essay on 
 Human Understanding ' had only done half its work, he 
 thought, when its author had indulged in the presup- 
 position involved in the use of his favourite term idea 
 — that Matter, in its secondary qualities only, must con- 
 sist "partly" of spirit, or rather of spirit - dependent 
 phenomena. The truth was, he argued, there could 
 be no such unphenomenal Matter, independent of all 
 conscious experience, as the residuum, with its primary 
 or mathematical qualities, supposed by Locke. The 
 only substantial and powerful realities must be spirits : 
 all other real things must be significant or orderly sense 
 phenomena or impressions — presented in the form of 
 individual phenomenal things to spirits by spirits. The 
 phenomenal things which alone we see and touch, while 
 very real, are, because phenomenal, unsubstantial and 
 impotent : the counter - hypothesis of unphenomenal 
 things, perceived or unperceived, is either a self-contra- 
 diction or meaningless. 
 
 On the other hand, we do find a persistence and power, 
 involving neither inconsistency nor meaninglessness of 
 verbal abstraction, implied in the fact of our being con- 
 scious or having experience. This is found in the 
 inevitable use, for all purposes of experience, of the 
 personal pronoun "I" Here is a sufficient ground 
 for the assertion, that if the universe is to be regarded 
 
Reality of Uhphenomenal Spirit. 59 
 
 philosophically, it must, in the last analysis, be regarded 
 as composed of spirits or self-conscious persons, with 
 their respective sense phenomena, by which as signals 
 they are brought into communion with one another. 
 This conception of things and persons had appeared 
 in the "Commonplace Book." "Xothing," he there 
 wrote, — "nothing properly but persons — i.e., con- 
 scious things — does exist. All other things are not so 
 much existences themselves as manners of the existence 
 of conscious persons." The universe, so conceived, 
 seeEied to him an intelligible universe, from which the 
 dust of metaphysical abstractions had been cleared away. 
 One knows what one means in using the personal pro- 
 nouns "I" and "you." One's own continued personal 
 existence, through all changes and interruptions of con- 
 scious state and act, is a fact of which all sane people 
 are convinced. It is a datum of the common sense or 
 common reason — a principle involved in the very con- 
 stitution of a conscious experience. One understands, 
 too, what one means by significant and therefore inter- 
 pretable sense phenomena. But a pretended unperceived 
 and unperceiving substance and power, which philoso- 
 phers dogmatically affirm, when they speak of Matter 
 and its forces ; and which ordinary mortals, echoing their 
 meaningless jargon, speak about too — this is empty ver- 
 balism, which is not, because it cannot be, experienced 
 in sense, or imagined either, by any human or other 
 conscious being. Accordingly we find ourselves obliged, 
 when we verify the meanings of the words we use, 
 to think of the Universe as consisting only of our 
 own self-conscious spirits, persistent and powerful, and 
 of other self-conscious spirits in like manner persistent 
 
60 Berkeley. 
 
 and powerful • — each spirit percipient of its own interpre- 
 table sense phenomena. It is by interpreting these pheno- 
 mena that each is able to form natural science ; also, by 
 using the phenomena of sense as signals of communica- 
 tion with one another, we can discover in some degree the 
 states and acts of the other conscious spirits that coexist 
 with our own — all governed and sustained in this Cosmos 
 by the supremacy of Spirit. In a habitual conception of 
 the Universe as so constituted, Berkeley believed that 
 the " dust " metaphysicians had raised by their meaning- 
 less abstractions would soon subside. 
 
 All this may be viewed as a dawning apprehension on 
 his part of the higher truth — that visible and tangible 
 things, as phenomenal of the deepest and truest reality, 
 are only the shows of life, which dissolve into insignifi- 
 cance when reflection reveals the Eternal Spirit or Reason 
 beyond, in which we all live and have our being. In true 
 philosophy we become speculatively aware of all this : 
 we realise it practically in the divine life of religion. 
 
 And all this, Berkeley would say, is at bottom in- 
 tuitively seen to be true. It is too evident to admit of 
 being proved by reasoning. The conception, he would 
 have added, is found on trial to satisfy the essential facts 
 of experience, and to resolve the difficulties of thought ; 
 and if it can do this, it has the only sort of evidence that 
 is available for any philosophical theory. The office of 
 reasoning in philosophy is to call out the latent common 
 sense, and also to raise it above the level at which it 
 rests in the stupid gaze of the unreflecting multitude ; 
 though Berkeley insists that even their confused concep- 
 tion turns out in the end to be nearer his reconciling 
 truth than the abstractions of the schools, or the halting 
 
Tlic World Externalised in other Spirits. 61 
 
 metaphysics of Descartes and Locke. "It is indeed an 
 opinion strangely prevailing among men," he exclaims, 
 "that houses, mountains, rivers, in a word, all sensible 
 things, have an [abstract] existence, distinct from their 
 being [actually] perceived [by any person]. But with 
 how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this 
 principle may be entertained in the world, yet whoever 
 shall find in his heart to call it in question may, if I 
 mistake not, find it to involve a manifest contradic- 
 tion." That is to say, it would be a contradiction 
 to suppose that we see what is at the same time un- 
 seen — that we are conscious phenomenally of that 
 which is unphenomenal — that we are conceiving what 
 is inconceivable. "We cannot detach phenomena from 
 perception, apart from which they must cease to be 
 phenomenal. All this is self-evident. "Some truths 
 there are," he proceeds, " so near and obvious to the mind, 
 that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such 
 I take this important truth to be, that all the choir 
 of heaven and furniture of the earth — in a word, all 
 those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the 
 world — have not any substance without a mind; that 
 their very being is to be perceived or known [i.e., to be 
 part of the significant and interpretable sense experience 
 of a conscious person] ; that, consequently, so long as 
 they are not actually perceived by me, or do not actually 
 exist in my mind or in that of any created spirit, they 
 must either have no existence at all [which would be 
 contrary to common sense], or they must exist in the 
 mind [thought and will] of some Eternal Spirit." 
 
 Berkeley's " external world " thus, in its deepest mean- 
 ing, consists of spirits external to his own spirit ; con- 
 
62 Berkeley. 
 
 scious, in concert with himself, of intelligible and inter- 
 pretable sense impressions, by which, as sense signals, 
 they can communicate with one another. This external- 
 ity of spirit to spirit is realisable in thought. One can 
 understand what is meant in saying that one's own per- 
 sonal consciousness, with its successive states or acts, is 
 numerically different from the conscious life of another 
 person. The one conscious life might cease, and the 
 other still go on ; just as self-conscious lives, with their 
 respective sense experiences, were going on long before 
 one's own began. Powers of this sort, external to the 
 individual spirit, can conceivably, and do actually, exist. 
 It is really such external powers that our common sense 
 — if we reflect on what it means — obliges us to 
 acknowledge, when each of us finds himself obliged to 
 acknowledge the existence of a world external to his 
 own individual experience. But this externality of in- 
 dividual spirits to individual spirits, with their respect- 
 ive interpretable sense experiences, which is an intelli- 
 gible sort of "externality," seemed enough for the de- 
 mand of common sense. Even if the hypothesis of 
 unperceived and unperceiving external substance were 
 not absurd or contradictory, it was enough to say with 
 Occam, entia non sunt multiplicanda proeter necessitatem. 
 " I assert, as well as you," Berkeley could say, "that, since 
 we are all affected independently of our will and contriv- 
 ance, we must grant the existence of forces without, refer- 
 able to some being not ourselves, and for whose activity 
 we are not responsible. The point of difference is as to 
 tohat this powerful external being is. I will have it to 
 be conscious spirit ; you abstract independent matter, or 
 I know not what third nature. I prove it to be spirit. 
 
Faith that we arc living in a Cosmos. 63 
 
 For, from the effects I find produced in my senses, I 
 conclude that there must be action going on indepen- 
 dently of my personal power, and because action, voli- 
 tion ; but if there are external volitions, there must be a 
 Will external to my own, for my will is the centre only 
 of my own personality and sphere of responsibility. 
 Again, the things I see and touch, or else their arche- 
 types, must exist out of me ; but, the things being phe- 
 nomenal only, neither they nor their archetypes can ex- 
 ist phenomenally otherwise than as perceived or perceiv- 
 able. There is therefore an external Intellect. Now, 
 Will and Intellect constitute spirit. The powerful Cause 
 of impotent and unsubstantial, but for us practically 
 real, significant, and interpretable phenomena of sense, 
 must therefore be Spirit." 
 
 Berkeley's belief in the existence of an external 
 material world thus resolves into belief that the phe- 
 nomena of sense coexist and undergo metamorphoses 
 cosmically — not chaotically. This belief itself he vir- 
 tually regards as, and indeed denominates, a con- 
 viction of the "common sense," developed by custom 
 or experience. Accordingly, in dealing with sense-given 
 phenomena, he proceeds on this common sense assump- 
 tion, that they are intelligible, or that they make an 
 experience which is interpretable ; and that they are also 
 the common medium through which the existence of other 
 conscious persons, with some of their individual experi- 
 ences, may be ascertained by each percipient. Belief in 
 the existence of the material world, according to Berke- 
 ley's explanation of it, is belief in this ; and the practi- 
 cal dissolution of this belief he would at once grant to 
 be inconsistent with the saneness of the person in whose 
 
64 Berkeley. 
 
 mind it was dissolved. He was ready to retain the name 
 "matter," provided that we all accustom ourselves to 
 mean only this when we use it. Things being only ideal 
 or phenomenal — that is, being only significant or inter- 
 pretable appearances, whose actual reality consists in their 
 orderly manifestation by and to a conscious mind — does 
 not dissolve them in chaos or illusion. On the contrary, 
 we find ourselves obliged by common sense, in every action 
 we perform, to take for granted that sense phenomena 
 (mixed up though they are with our own consciousness, 
 and dependent for their phenomenal character upon a 
 person being conscious of them, nevertheless) spring up 
 independently of individual consciousness, in an orderly 
 or intelligible, and therefore interpretable way ; and we 
 have all hitherto found that the assumption we are thus 
 obliged to make has been verified by the event. The 
 chaos of sense phenomena, which at first seems to burst 
 upon our nascent being, becomes, through this common 
 sense suggestion, converted in our thoughts into the 
 cosmos which all physical research presupposes, and 
 which the discoveries of science are making more and 
 more familiar to each succeeding generation. The obli- 
 gation to assume cosmos to be latent in what at first 
 would seem to be a chaos of sense phenomena, is the 
 firm platform on which we emerge from the obscure 
 infantile consciousness of sensations. This common 
 sense obligation, however produced, and not the irrational 
 state of the sensuous infant, is surely our criterion of 
 reality. Our developed and therefore intelligible expe- 
 rience is surely more real and trustworthy than our un- 
 intelligible sensations ; and that whatever the process 
 may be according to which the development takes place. 
 
The "Something more" than Phenomena. 65 
 
 The individual things we perceive are thus, for Berke- 
 ley, more than mere isolated sense phenomena. They 
 are sense phenomena which, in the way now explained, 
 are connected in clusters or aggregates, and in their 
 ordered aggregates form the system of nature — all 
 evoked for us from the chaos of our infant sensations in 
 the custom-developed expectations of common sense. 
 Our knowledge of a planet, or of a grain of sand, is 
 resolved, under this metaphysical analysis, into the intel- 
 ligible common sense belief, that sense phenomena can- 
 not exist in isolation — that, on the contrary, each is sig- 
 nificant of other sense phenomena, of which at the time 
 one is not actually conscious, and which therefore are 
 not at the time phenomenal in sense, but which, under 
 ascertainable rules, may become phenomenal. There is 
 in this the all-pervading belief that phenomenal changes 
 cannot be capricious, but must proceed according to 
 rules, on the observance of which our personal happiness 
 depends. Faith in these rules is the " something more " 
 than mere phenomena, which forms the very essence of 
 our belief in material things ; for it is that without which 
 phenomena could not be converted into "phenomenal 
 things," nor our experience be rationally constituted 
 
 This common sense conviction is at the bottom of 
 Berkeley's explanation of our so-called "perception" of 
 the things of sense. He finds it in all men ; but 
 in individuals, during infancy, it is only imperfectly 
 awake. Although it is the animating soul of human 
 action — the very essence of reasonableness — it is, as such, 
 incapable of independent proof. The permanence of 
 law in nature — the intelligibility or rationality of the 
 •in of phenomena in which we find ourselves — is 
 
 p. — ITT. . E 
 
66 Berkeley. 
 
 taken for granted, because we cannot help taking it for 
 granted, if we are to have any experience of placed 
 things. 1 These would dissolve in chaos if we ceased 
 for a moment to take it for granted. It is this persistent 
 conviction that is the pith and marrow of perceptions of 
 sense, and of expectations about the things of sense ; 
 also of physical or natural science, which is only a 
 further development of ordinary perception or expecta- 
 tion. It is the deepest reality, which, after reflective 
 analysis of our beliefs, we can find latent in our ordinary 
 and also in our scientific conceptions of the world. An 
 apple, for instance, consists of sense phenomena which 
 are the appointed signs of each other — their significance 
 being its "consistence." It is not true to say that I 
 can see the apple which is placed before my eyes ; 
 for I can see only those phenomena, in the phenomenal 
 apple, that are visible : many of the qualities of an 
 apple are invisible ; for they are tangible, gustable, 
 odorous, &c. Still — through common sense trust in 
 what the visible phenomena naturally signify — I have 
 a rational assurance that, being conscious as I am of the 
 visible phenomena, I might, if I pleased, become con- 
 scious of those other phenomena commonly called the 
 taste, or the smell, or the hardness of the apple. In 
 other language, the visible phenomena " suggest " the 
 other phenomena, as naturally aggregated with them, 
 in an objective order, thus creating and guaranteeing 
 their practical objectivity to each suggesting mind. 
 As far as one can affirm, prior to experience, any sort 
 
 1 So Berkeley held ; for lie regarded space and its relations as an 
 arbitrary issue of natural law and arrangement, not, like Kant, as 
 the necessary precondition of our converting relationless impressions 
 into objects. 
 
Phenomenal Order and the Eternal Order. 67 
 
 of sense phenomenon might, in orderly coexistence or 
 succession, be cosmically connected with any other sort 
 of sense phenomenon. So far as that goes, the connec- 
 tions of phenomena in the real phenomenal world may 
 be called "arbitrary." 1 We have, notwithstanding, a 
 working trust that particular sorts of sense phenomena, 
 which we find now connected under physical law with 
 certain other phenomena, will continue connected with 
 such, so that the one sort is permanently — i.e., really — 
 the sign of the other sort ; and may, in all circumstances, 
 be trusted to for being this, till we discover some deeper 
 law to which the observed connection is subordinate, 
 and by which it may be modified. This deeper law 
 may in turn be the subordinate of one deeper and more 
 comprehensive still, and so on indefinitely. But however 
 far Ave go, we cannot outrun our faith in an ultimate 
 order, meaning, or rationality — moral it may be at last, 
 and not properly physical or sensible. That there is 
 an Eternal Order or Eeasonableness in the universe 
 is involved in our own rationality : — Eternal Order or 
 Eeasonableness, this at least is not arbitrary. But the 
 established order of sense-phenomenal nature is arbitrary, 
 if it might have been, or may ever become, other than 
 it now phenomenally is. And this, for all we can tell, 
 it might have been, or may yet become, in consistence 
 with the deepest and truest Order of All, which is God — 
 
 " Whose kingdom is where time and space are not." 
 
 It was thus that Berkeley transformed Locke's world 
 of sense. Locke phenomenalised the secondary quali- 
 
 1 As Berkeley calls them — reiterating this "arbitrariness " of the 
 laws of nature. 
 
6S Berkeley. 
 
 ties of matter, while still holding to the dogma of in- 
 dependent material substances and powers. Berkeley 
 phenomenalised all the qualities of matter — dismissed as 
 superfluous Locke's unphenomenal substances or causes 
 of secondary qualities — and explained reality in pheno- 
 menal things, by the activity of Locke's Eternal Mind, in 
 and through whom phenomena, otherwise isolated and 
 meaningless, become aggregated in a scientifically intel- 
 ligible system. Common sense asserts that we know 
 external things as they are ; Berkeley explains that ex- 
 ternal things as they are are only phenomenal things, and 
 thus tries to reconcile Philosophy with Common Sense. 1 
 
 1 Berkeley's express aim was to show the harmony of the philoso- 
 phical or rational intuition of the universe with common sense, right- 
 ly understood. I am glad to adduce in support of this the high 
 authority of the late Dean Mansel, in his comparison of Berkeley 
 with Beid : "The two systems [Beid's and Berkeley's] may be re- 
 garded as in truth sister streams, springing from the same source, 
 and flowing, though by different channels, to the same ocean. The 
 aim of both alike was to lay a sure foundation for human knowledge 
 in principles, secure from the assaults of scepticism ; the method of 
 both alike was to appeal to the common consciousness of mankind, 
 as a witness to the existence of certain primary and ineradicable 
 convictions on which all others depend, and to disencumber these 
 convictions from the rash hypotheses and unwarranted deductions 
 with which they had been associated and obscured in previous sys- 
 tems of philosophy. Both, in short, though with very different 
 results, were ixnited in appealing from the theories of metaphysicians 
 to the common sense of men." — Mansel on the "Idealism of Berke- 
 ley," in his ' Letters, Lectures, and Beviews,' p. 382 (1873). 
 
 With Berkeley the reality of the material world is rooted in faith 
 in the phenomenal order, and faith in phenomenal orderliness is part 
 of the common sense of men ; while the supposition of unperceiv- 
 able material substance is argued to be inconsistent with the com- 
 mon sense out of which science springs. Consciousness of our spir- 
 itual personality and agency, and faith in the principle of causality 
 — the other pillar of Berkeley's system — are also regarded by him as 
 part of our common sense. 
 
69 
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 SIR JOHN PERCIVAL AND DR SAMUEL CLARKE. - 
 
 One is curious to ascertain the first impression pro- 
 duced by Berkeley's new conception of the substance of 
 Matter — as consisting not in an unknowable and incon- 
 ceivable substratum, but in the rationally established 
 and intelligible regulation of phenomena — and by his 
 bold challenge to the philosophical world. We can 
 now, for the first time, have this curiosity gratified. 
 His hitherto unpublished correspondence with his friend 
 Sir John Percival throws light on much that happened. 
 He was himself eager, we find, to hear what people 
 had to say about the philosophy promulgated in the 
 1 Treatise on Human Knowledge,' but in those days 
 there was no periodical criticism to inform him at once. 
 " If when you receive my book," he wrote in July 1710 
 to Sir John, 1 then in London, " you can procure me the 
 opinion of some of your acquaintances who are thinking 
 men, addicted to the study of natural philosophy' and 
 mathematics, I shall be extremely obliged to you." In 
 the month after he was assured that it was incredible 
 what prejudice can work in the best geniuses — nay, 
 i Percival MSS. 
 

 70 Berkeley. 
 
 even in the lovers of novelty. " For I did but name 
 the subject-matter of your book of Principles to some 
 ingenious friends of mine," Sir John adds, " and they 
 immediately treated it with ridicule, at the same time 
 refusing to read it, which I have not yet got one to do ; 
 and indeed I have not been able myself to discourse on 
 the book, because I had it so lately : neither, when I set 
 about it, may I be able to understand it thoroughly, for 
 want of having studied philosophy more. A physician 
 of my acquaintance undertook to describe your person, 
 and argued you must needs be mad, and that you ought 
 to take remedies. A bishop pitied you, that a desire and 
 vanity of starting something new should put you upon 
 such an undertaking ; and when I justified you in that 
 part of your character, and added other deserving quali- 
 ties you have, he said he could not tell what to think 
 of you. Another told me an ingenious man ought not 
 to be discouraged from exerting his wit, and said Eras- 
 mus was not the worse thought of for writing in praise 
 of folly ; but that you are not gone so far as a gentle- 
 man in town, who asserts not only that there is no 
 such thing as Matter, but we ourselves have no being 
 at all. My wife, who has all the good esteem of you 
 that is possible, from your just notions of marriage and 
 happiness, 1 desires to know, if there be nothing but 
 Spirit and ideas, what you make of that part of the 
 six days' creation that preceded man." 
 
 1 Sir John Percival's marriage took place shortly before this letter 
 was written, and Berkeley had sent his congratulations. Sir John 
 was for many years a member of the Irish House of Commons. He 
 was raised to the Irish peerage as Lord Percival in 1715, and in 1733 
 as Earl of Egmont. In 1732 he obtained a charter to colonise the 
 province of Georgia in North America. He died in 1718, aged 60. 
 
Misunderstandings, 71 
 
 Berkeley's reply to this, written at Trinity College, 
 Dublin, in September 1710, is philosophically interest- 
 ing. 1 "I am not surprised," he says, "that I should be 
 ridiculed by those who won't take the pains to under- 
 stand me. My comfort is, that they who have entered 
 most into what I have written speak most advantageously 
 of it. If the raillery and scorn of those who critique 
 what they will not be at the pains to understand had 
 been sufficient to deter men from making any attempts 
 towards curing the ignorance and errors of mankind, we 
 should not have been troubled with some very fair im- 
 provements in knowledge. The common cry's being 
 against any opinion seems to me, so far from proving it 
 false, that it may with as good reason pass for an argu- 
 ment of its truth. However, I imagine that whatever 
 doctrine contradicts vulgar and settled opinion had need 
 be introduced with great caution into the world. For 
 this reason it was that I omitted all mention of the non- 
 existence of Matter in the title-page, dedication, preface, 
 and introduction to my 'Treatise on Human Know- 
 ledge,' that so the notion might steal unawares on the 
 reader, who possibly would never have meddled with a 
 book that he had known contained such paradoxes. If, 
 therefore, it shall at any time be in your way to dis- 
 course your friends on the subject of my book, I entreat 
 you not to take notice to them that I deny the being of 
 Matter in it, but only that it is a treatise on the prin- 
 ciples of human knowledge, designed to promote true 
 knowledge and religion, particularly in opposition to 
 those philosophers who vent dangerous notions with 
 regard to the existence of God and the natural immor- 
 i Percival MSS. 
 
i 
 
 72 Berkeley. 
 
 tality of the soul, both which I have endeavoured to 
 demonstrate, in a way not hitherto made use of." 
 
 "With characteristic energy he disclaims " vanity and 
 love of paradox " as motives of the book, and professes 
 an earnest belief in the non-existence of unphenomenal 
 and unperceiving Matter, — "a belief," he adds, "which 
 I have held for some years, the conceit being at first 
 warm in my imagination, but since carefully examined, 
 both by my own judgment and that of ingenious friends." 
 "What he deprecated most of all was, "that men who 
 have never considered my book should confound me 
 with the sceptics who doubt the existence of sensible 
 things, and are not positive as to any one truth, no, not so 
 much as their own being, which I find by your letter is 
 the case of some wild visionist now in London. 1 But 
 whoever reads my book with attention will see that 
 there is a direct opposition betwixt the principles con- 
 tained in it and those of the sceptics, and that I question 
 not the existence of anything that we perceive by our 
 
 1 We see here how Berkeley disclaims, by anticipation, the meta- 
 physical nihilism or pan-phenomenalism of Hume, according to whom 
 "I " am only a congeries of "impressions and ideas," out of whose 
 union the notion of a self or subject is artificially formed in imagi- 
 nation — and also disclaims the indetermination of Kant as to whether 
 "I" am a permanent substance or a transitory phenomenon. Yet 
 in several passages of his " Commonplace Book," he himself verbally 
 approaches a similar view. Thus he says, — " The very existence of 
 ideas constitutes the soul. Mind is a congeries of perceptions. Take 
 away perception, and you take away mind. Put the perceptions, and 
 you put the mind." — Works, vol. iv. p. 438. To the same effect lie 
 is perplexed by the probability of unconscious intervals during sleep, 
 which on this view would mean non-existence : he argues that we 
 cannot exist in an unconscious state, but suggests a theory of time 
 Avhich might solve the difficulty. " One of my earliest inquiries was 
 about Time, which led me into several paradoxes that I did not think 
 fit or necessary to publish." 
 
Lady PcrcivaVs Difficulty. 73 
 
 senses As to your lady's objection," he continues, "I 
 am extremely honoured by it. I must beg you to inform 
 her ladyship I do not deny the existence of the sensible 
 things which Moses says were created by God. They 
 existed from all eternity in the Divine Intellect, and 
 then became perceptible {i.e., were created) in the same 
 manner and order as is described in Genesis. 1 For I take 
 creation to belong to things only as they respect finite 
 spirits, there being nothing new to God. Hence it 
 follows that the act of creation consists in God's willing 
 that those things should become perceptible to other 
 spirits which before were known only to Himself. ISTow 
 both reason and Scripture assure us that there are other 
 spirits besides men, who, 'tis possible, might have per- 
 ceived this visible world as it was successively exhibited 
 to their view before man's creation. Besides, for to 
 agree with the Mosaic account of the creation, it's suffi- 
 cient if we suppose that a man, in case he was created 
 and existing at the time of the chaos of sensible things, 
 might have perceived all things formed out of it in the 
 very order set down in Scripture, all which is no way 
 repugnant to my principles." 2 
 
 Sir John in his next letter, written from London in 
 
 1 Note this early expression of Platonic Idealism, blending with 
 his phenomenalism (i. e. , with his ideaism, in the Cartesian and 
 Lockian meaning of " idea "). 
 
 2 This touches a difficulty often urged against the merely phenom- 
 enalist conception of the reality of sensible things — viz., its incon- 
 sistency with the real existence of the material world before there 
 were human beings for whom there could be phenomena. Pheno- 
 maialisation not being possible in the absence of sense- conscious 
 spirits, the world, it is argued, could not have existed before man (as 
 we know it did), if its reality is only phenomenal. It does not seem 
 that Berkeley's explanation of this difficulty is weakened by any pro- 
 
bs= 
 
 
 74 Berkeley. 
 
 October, 1 reports that the new book had fallen into the 
 hands of the highest English authority in metaphysics 
 then living, still a young man under forty. This was 
 Dr Samuel Clarke, who had produced his 'Demon- 
 stration of the Being and Attributes of God ' four 
 years before. Berkeley's ' Treatise ' had also been 
 seen by Whiston, Newton's successor at Cambridge. 
 " Two clergymen have perused your book — Clarke and 
 Whiston. Kot having myself any acquaintance with 
 these gentlemen, I can only report at second hand that 
 they think you a fair arguer and a clear writer, but 
 they say your first principles' you lay down are false. 
 They look upon you as an extraordinary genius, but say 
 they wish you had employed your thoughts less upon 
 metaphysics, ranking you with Father Malebranche, 
 jSTorris, and another whose name I have forgot — all of 
 whom they think extraordinary men, but of a particular 
 turn, and their labours of little use to mankind on 
 account of their abstruseness. This may arise from 
 these gentlemen not caring to think after a new manner, 
 which would oblige them to begin their studies anew, 
 or else it may be the strength of prejudice." 
 
 Berkeley was vexed by the expressions of Clarke 
 and Whiston. He sent to Sir John's care a letter to 
 each of them, hoping, through him, " to obtain their 
 reasons against his notions, as truth is his sole aim ; " 
 and there is nothing he more desires than being " helped 
 forward in the search for truth by the concurring studies 
 of thoughtful and impartial men. As to what is said 
 
 gress in modem science. Discoveries in science can still be described 
 in terms of perception or phenomena. 
 1 Percival MSS. 
 
Dr Clarke declines to cxplctin. 75 
 
 of ranking me with Father Malebranche and Mr JNorris, 
 whose writings are thought to be too fine-spun to be of 
 any great use to mankind, I have this answer, that I 
 think the notions I embrace are not in the least coinci- 
 dent or agreeing with theirs, but indeed plainly incon- 
 sistent with them in the main points, inasmuch as I 
 know few writers I take myself at bottom to differ more 
 from than from them. Fine-spun metaphysics are what 
 I on all occasions declare against, and if any one shall 
 show anything of that sort in my Treatise, I will willingly 
 correct it." 
 
 "Your letters to Dr Clark and Mr Whiston," Sir 
 John replied, 1 " I delivered to two friends of theirs. Dr 
 Clarke told his friend in reply that he did not care to 
 write you his thoughts, because he was afraid it might 
 draw him into a dispute upon a matter which was 
 already clear to him. He thought your first principles 
 you go on are false ; but he was a modest man, his friend 
 said, and uninclined to shock any one whose opinions on 
 things of this nature differed from his own." 
 
 This was a great disappointment to Berkeley's youth- 
 ful ardour. " Dr Clarke's conduct seems a little surpris- 
 ing," he writes. 2 "That an ingenious and candid person 
 (as I take him to be) should refuse to show me where 
 my error lies, is something unaccountable. For my own 
 part, as I shall not be backward to recede from the 
 opinion I embrace when I see good reason against it, so, 
 on the other hand, I hope to be excused if I am con- 
 firmed in it the more upon meeting with nothing but 
 positive and general assertions to the contrary. I never 
 
 i Dec. 28, 1710— Percival MSS. 
 2 Jan. 19, 1711— Percival MSS. 
 
J G Berkeley. 
 
 expected that a gentleman, otherwise so well employed 
 as Dr Clarke, should think it worth his while to enter 
 into a dispute with me concerning any notions of mine. 
 But, seeing it was so clear to him that I went upon 
 false principles, I hoped he would vouchsafe, in a line 
 or two, to point them out to me, that so I may more 
 closely review and examine them. If he but once did 
 me this favour, he need not apprehend I should give 
 him any further trouble, or offer any the least occasion 
 for drawing him into a dispute with me. This was all 
 my ambition, and I should be glad if you have oppor- 
 tunity that you would let his friend know this. There 
 is nothing that I more desire than to know thoroughly 
 all that can be said against what I take for truth." 
 
 The attempt failed. Clarke was not to be drawn into 
 a statement of his objections in the complacent way in 
 which, three years afterwards, he dealt with Joseph 
 Butler, then a student at the Dissenters' Academy at 
 Tewkesbury, in their famous correspondence about 
 Clarke's 'Demonstration.' Berkeley's attempt to corre- 
 spond with Clarke is, however, referred to by Whiston 
 in his 'Memoirs of Clarke.' "Mr Berkeley," he there 
 says, "published in 1710, at Dublin, the metaphysical 
 notion that Matter was not a real thing ; nay, that the 
 common opinion of its reality was groundless, if not 
 ridiculous. He was pleased to send Mr Clarke and 
 myself each of us a book. After we had both perused 
 it, I went to Mr Clarke to discourse with him about 
 it to this effect, that I, being not a metaphysician, was 
 not able to answer Mr Berkeley's subtle premises, though 
 I did not believe his absurd conclusion. I therefore 
 
Tlie Orderly Dream. 77 
 
 desired that he, who was deep in such subtleties, but did 
 not appear to believe Mr Berkeley's conclusion, would 
 answer him. Which task he declined." 
 
 What Clarke's answer to Berkeley woidd have been, 
 if he had chosen to commit himself, we may perhaps 
 gather from a passage in his published writings. Seven 
 years after this correspondence through Sir J. Perci- 
 val, he wrote as follows, in his 'Kemarks on Human 
 Liberty:' " The case as to the proof of our free agency is 
 exactly the same as in that notable question, Whether 
 the World exists or no 1 There is no demonstration of 
 it from experience. There always remains a bare possi- 
 bility that the Supreme Being may have so framed my 
 mind that I shall always be necessarily deceived in 
 every one of my perceptions, as in a dream, though 
 possibly there be no material world, nor any other 
 creature existing besides myself. And yet no man in 
 his senses argues from thence, that experience is no 
 proof to us of the existence of things. The bare physi- 
 cal possibility, too, of our being so framed by the Author 
 of Xature as to be unavoidably deceived in this matter 
 [our free agency] by every experience of every action 
 we perform, is no more any just ground to doubt 
 the truth of our liberty, than the bare natural possi- 
 bility of our being all our lifetime in a dream, de- 
 ceived in our belief of the existence of the material 
 world, is any just ground to doubt the reality of its 
 existence." 
 
 The word "dream" is used in ordinary language for 
 the illusory visions of sleep, so that it is apt to carry this 
 connotation with it when employed to represent the phe- 
 
78 Berkeley. 
 
 nomenal universe of Berkeley, with its steady order, and 
 charged with its unfulfilled prophecies which regulate 
 our actions. 1 
 
 1 So Leibnitz contrasts the real dreams of sense reality with the 
 capricious visions of the night : " Nullo argumento absolute demon- 
 strari potest, dari corpora ; nee quicquam prohibet somnia quaedani 
 bene ordinata menti nostra objecta esse, quae a nobis vera judicentur, 
 et ob consensum inter se quoad usum veris aequivaleant. " — De modo 
 distinguendi Phsenomena Kealia ab Imaginariis (1707). 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE OBJECTIONS TO IMMATERIALISM. 
 
 The objections to the immaterialist theory of an essenti- 
 ally spiritual universe, which reached Berkeley through 
 Sir John Percival and others, annoyed him as expres- 
 sions of misconception founded on prejudiced indiffer- 
 ence. jSot long after the publication of the First Part 
 of the ' Treatise on Human Knowledge,' accordingly, 
 he began to prepare a volume of dialogues, in which, 
 after the manner of Plato, plausible objections to the 
 new doctrine could be readily discussed. The little 
 book was published in London in the summer of 1713, 
 and entitled, ' Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, 
 the Design of which is Plainly to Demonstrate the 
 Reality and Perfection of Human Knowledge, the In- 
 corporeal Xature of the Soul, and the Immediate Pro- 
 vidence of a Deity, in Opposition to Sceptics and 
 Atheists.' Philonous tries to convince Hylas of the un- 
 substantiality and impotence of the things of sense, and 
 to show that, as revealed in the five senses, the world is 
 altogether phenomenal and evanescent ; the permanence, 
 independence, and powers attributed to things visible 
 and tangible truly belonging to Eternal Mind, on whose 
 
80 Berkeley. 
 
 Will they depend, and of whose Ideas their constitution 
 and laws are the manifestation. 
 
 English philosophical literature contains no work in 
 which literary art and a pleasing fancy are more attrac- 
 tively blended with ingenious metaphysical thought 
 than in these ' Dialogues.' Soon after they appeared, 
 Sir John Percival wrote 1 to their author that he was 
 "satisfied he had now made his meaning much easier 
 to understand, dialogue being the proper method for 
 meeting objections." "It is not common," he added, 
 " for men possessed of a new opinion to raise so many 
 arguments against it as you have done. Indeed I am 
 much more of your opinion than I was before. The 
 least I can say is, that your notion is as probable as the 
 one you argue against. There is at least equal difficulty 
 against both opinions." 
 
 It is always to be remembered that the ideas or phe- 
 nomena of which things are composed, according to the 
 Eerkeleyan conception, are not, as with Fichte, modifi- 
 cations of the mind to which they are presented, but 
 are, on the contrary, perception - dependent presenta- 
 tions, exhibited under "laws of nature," in individual 
 minds. They exist " in mind," in Berkeley's words, 
 " not by way of mental mode or attribute, but by way of 
 idea ; " and this is an altogether unique manner of ex- 
 istence. We are each of us, accordingly, related to the 
 "real phenomenal dream," with all its innumerable prac- 
 tical consequences to us, simply as percipients and per- 
 ceived — knowers and phenomenal things known — with 
 whatever " otherness " this mi generis relation may be 
 found to involve; but we are not so rela f ^d as that we 
 i July 17, 1713— Percival MSS. 
 
Micromcgas. 81 
 
 become what we perceive, or that what we perceive 
 becomes part of us. Our conviction of our spiritual 
 individuality and identity, and of our personal respon 
 sibility, opposes us to the phenomenal things of sense, 
 which appear in consciousness without becoming con- 
 sciousness. The phenomenal things and the self are 
 both real, but of the one we are conscious as pheno- 
 menal, and of the other as a hyper-phenomenal reality. 
 
 Still more must it be remembered that phenomenal 
 things need not be composed only of the phenomena 
 presented in the "five senses" popularly attributed to 
 man Phenomena of innumerable sorts, which do not 
 appear in human sense experience, may form part of the 
 experience of other sentient spirits, and thus contribute 
 to the composition of their things of sense, while those 
 of which we are percipient may be wanting to them. 
 Their world and our world would in that case have 
 different qualities, and qualities of which we can form 
 no imagination at alL In the ingenious philosophical 
 romance of Voltaire, the inhabitants of the planet Saturn 
 are credited with seventy -two senses, and are " every 
 day complaining of the smallness of the number." This 
 was small indeed compared to the resources of "Micro- 
 megas, the inhabitant of one of the planets of the Dog- 
 star," with his "one thousand senses" and millions of 
 years of life, and withal his "listless inquietude and 
 vague desires." His conceptions of phenomenal realities 
 were indeed enlarged, as compared with ours ; but it was 
 only phenomenal existence still — not the self-contradic- 
 tory conception of phenomena and phenomenal things 
 that were not phenomena and phenomenal things, 
 against which Berkeley argued. 
 
 P. — UL F 
 
82 Berkeley. 
 
 Professor Huxley, in the piano argument of his 
 charming essay on Berkeley, 1 seems to overlook the 
 point. He supposes a piano that is conscious of sound 
 and nothing else. Having no conception of any other 
 mode of existence, he makes it reason thus : " All my 
 knowledge consists of sounds and the perception of the 
 relation of sounds; now the being of sound is to be 
 heard ; and it is inconceivable that the existence of 
 sounds I know should depend upon any other exist- 
 ence than that of the mind of a hearing being." That 
 the sounds depend (as we know they do) on " the exist- 
 ence of a substance of brass, wood, and iron," would, he 
 thinks, be voted unimaginable, and therefore impossible, 
 by a Berkeleyan piano. The piano in that case must 
 have been ill -trained in Berkeley's conception, which 
 puts no limits on the sorts of phenomena with which 
 sounds may be related as phenomenal signs. These may 
 be more numerous than even in the world of Micro- 
 megas. Y/hat Berkeley would say is, that we are at 
 the end still within the world of only phenomenal 
 matter, and no nearer the unphenomenal substance 
 against which alone his argument was directed, than 
 we were at the beginning. The Berkeleyan piano that 
 reasoned according to Berkeley would at once admit the 
 possibility of phenomenal brass and wood and iron, 
 though their visible and tangible phenomena must be 
 unimaginable by it ; but it would reject unphenomenal 
 substances — neither phenomenal matter nor the rational 
 constitution called "mind" — as at best a synonym for 
 Nothing. 
 
 It is further to be remembered, in dealing with objec- 
 1 In 'Macmillan's Magazine/ June 1871. 
 
Disembodied Consciousness of Phenomena. 83 
 
 tions to Tm materialism, tliat it assumes the possibility of 
 our having phenomenal experience, and perceptions of 
 phenomenal things, in a disembodied as well as in this 
 embodied state of conscious life. There is no a priori 
 connection between the dissolution of that phenomenal 
 thing- 1 call my body, and the extinction of my conscious- 
 ness of phenomenal things, and of all besides. " It 
 seems," Berkeley says, " very easy to conceive the soul 
 to exist in a separate state, divested from the laws and 
 limits of motion and perception with which she is em- 
 barrassed here, and to exercise herself on new ideas 
 [i.e., phenomena by us at present unimaginable], without 
 the intervention of those tangible things we call our 
 bodies. It is even very possible to conceive how the 
 soul may have ideas of colour [i.e., become percipient of 
 phenomena of colour] without an eye, or of sound with- 
 out an ear." This train of thought, it may be granted, 
 is less satisfactory at a time when physiological science 
 insists upon the organic unity of conscious life and the 
 corporeal frame, as proved by a sufficient induction of 
 facts — whatever may be the abstract possibility of sup- 
 posing our consciousness of phenomenal things in sense 
 to go on independently of our having phenomenal bodies 
 of our own. The only conscious life we have any ex- 
 perience of, it would be argued, is one in organic union 
 with the corporeal structure, in correlation with which it 
 grows, so that speculations like this of Berkeley are at 
 best unverified hypotheses. 
 
 The supposed need for the existence after death of a 
 moral agent who is undergoing a divine education, one 
 may still allege, however, is incapable of being disposed 
 of in this way by scientific reasoning, which, within its 
 
84 Berkeley. 
 
 sphere of phenomenal things, is ignorant of the agency 
 and moral government of persons. In the moral experi- 
 ence of the spiritual being I call myself, there may be 
 evidence that the organic change called Death is not 
 the end of me. The result of that change, it is said, 
 lies within the veil where our present experience does 
 not extend. But in another view, the rising of the sun 
 to-morrow, and the conscious life after death of a person 
 who has not yet died, are both " beyond experience," 
 and each must remain so till it has actually happened 
 Again, neither is beyond it, if the former can be shown 
 to be rationally involved in our present physical or phe- 
 nomenal, and the latter in our present moral and religi- 
 ous experience. 
 
 The chief objections discussed in the c Three Dia- 
 logues,' as well as others which have since been raised 
 against immateriaHsm, resolve themselves, I think, into 
 an allegation of its covert scepticism — partial or uni- 
 versal Phenomenal matter, it is argued, cannot be 
 concluded to be unsubstantial and impotent without 
 absurd conclusions following in the train. For, imma- 
 terialism logically involves — so it is assumed — the sub- 
 jectivity of physical and mathematical science; and, 
 even according to its more moderate antagonists, it 
 obliges him who holds it to consider himself solitary 
 in the universe, without any fellow - creature, animate 
 or inanimate. Then, according to its more uncompro- 
 mising critics, it further involves the dissolution of all 
 beliefs, and of all that exists, spirit as well as body. 
 
 These objections are in a degree recognised and 
 argued against in the 'Dialogues. 5 I shall try to pre- 
 
Phenomenal Matter and Modern Science. 85 
 
 sent them in their strength, with Berkeley's replies, 
 so far as they go at the stage in the development of 
 his thought to which he had now attained. 
 
 A merely phenomenal material world, dependent on 
 percipient mind for the permanence we all naturally 
 attribute to things, must consist, it may be objected, of 
 as many sensible things as there are percipient persons, 
 or indeed as there are numerically different perceptions 
 of individual things by each separate person. The 
 things of sense can have no numerical identity; they 
 and their laws must all be capricious mental pheno- 
 mena. Even although I may so interpret the pheno- 
 mena of which I am conscious in my senses, as to be 
 able to predict phenomena of which I shall become 
 percipient, and may thus form a subjective physical 
 science of the sense portion of my mental experience; 
 and though the very things seen and felt by me are 
 thus the real phenomenal things that exist, — still such 
 things, it has been argued, 1 cannot discharge the offices 
 which Berkeley supposes his phenomenal material world 
 able to discharge instrumentally, for the substantial and 
 powerful world of spirits. He would have the final end 
 of its intelligible and interpretable existence to be — that 
 of awakening, in a person who is percipient of sense 
 phenomena, a reasonable belief in the existence of other 
 finite minds, and in the existence of Supreme Mind. 
 But then the " phenomenal things " of Berkeley's world, 
 from their dependence on perceptions, can have only an 
 intermittent and fragmentary, and not a permanent and 
 always complete existence. They exist only as pre- 
 sented to perception, and when actually perceived. Even 
 1 E.cj. , by Uebenveg. 
 
86 Berkeley. 
 
 their mathematical qualities and relations are not neces- 
 sary, nor indeed other than they are perceived to be in the 
 shifting perceptions of sense. On this conception of what 
 Matter is, the tree that I see at a little distance from me 
 exists only while I (or some other person, if there lie any 
 other person) am actually looking at it ; and even then 
 only in part of the aggregate of phenomena which we call 
 its "qualities." Tor, as merely seen, it is untouched, so 
 that its tangible qualities are in abeyance. If "things" 
 mean only actual sensuous perceptions, all their visible 
 qualities must relapse for the time into nonentity, when 
 they are left in the dark unseen by any one ; and their 
 tangible ones too, unless a percipient is always in 
 conscious contact with every part of them. The force 
 of the objection is aggravated to the imagination (not 
 created, however, as some seem to think) by the dis- 
 coveries of modern science, for instance, in geology and 
 astronomy. It is objected that the world we now see 
 and touch could not have existed millions of years 
 before man or other sentient beings began to perceive, 
 as modern science proves that it did, if all that can be 
 legitimately meant by its real existence is, that it is the 
 sensuous experience of a person; nor can it have the 
 continuity which is presupposed in the modern concep- 
 tion of its changes as equivalent metamorphoses. 1 
 
 1 This has perhaps not "been enough kept in view in the chapter 
 on Berkeley in one of the acutest "books of recent philosophical litera- 
 ture—Mr A. J. Balfour's ' Defence of Philosophic Doubt ' (1879) — 
 where the Berkeleyan conception of the material world is eviscerated, 
 and transformed into a chaos of phenomena, viewed apart from 
 supreme Intellect and Will as the constant constructive power. To 
 the same effect Mr J. S. Mill's "permanent possibility of sensation," 
 and so-called "psychological idealism," is identified with Berkeley, 
 though it is Berkeley with his eyes put out. 
 
" Sameness " and " Similarity" 87 
 
 This sort of objection to the new way of thinking 
 about Matter was touched in Lady PercivaPs difficulty, 
 already mentioned, and in Berkeley's explanation, that 
 he understands by the " creation " of visible and tang- 
 ible things — the development of successive perceptions, 
 in a universal order, in sentient beings. 
 
 The want of numerical sameness in the things we 
 perceive, if things are only phenomena dependent on 
 the perceptions of persons, is one of the chief difficulties 
 of Hylas. " The same idea which is in my mind cannot 
 be in yours or in any other mind," Hylas objects. 
 " Doth it not therefore follow," he concludes, " that no 
 two persons can see the same thing 1 " And is not this 
 liigldy absurd? To which Philonous ingeniously re- 
 plies : — 
 
 " If the term ' same ' be taken in the vulgar acceptation, 
 it is certain (and not at all repugnant to the principles 
 I maintain) that different persons may perceive the same 
 thing, and the same thing or idea exist in different minds. 
 Words are of arbitrary imposition ; and since men are used 
 to apply the term ' same ' where no distinction or variety is 
 perceived, and I do not pretend to alter their perceptions, it 
 follows that, as men have said before, ' several saw the same 
 thing,' so they may, upon like occasions, still continue to use 
 the phrase, without any deviation either from propriety of 
 language or the truth of things. But if the term ' same ' be 
 used in the acceptation of philosophers — who pretend to an 
 abstracted notion of identity — then, according to their sundry 
 definitions of this notion (for it is not yet agreed wherein 
 that philosophic identity consists), it may or may not be 
 possible for divers persons to perceive the same thing. But 
 whether philosophers shall see fit to call a tiling the same 
 or no, is, I conceive, of small importance. Let us suppose 
 several men together, all endued with the same faculties, and 
 iquently affected in like sort by their senses, and who 
 
88 Berkeley. 
 
 had yet never known the use of language, they would with- 
 out question agree in their perceptions. Though, perhaps, 
 when they came to the use of speech, some, regarding only 
 the uniformness of what was perceived, might call it the 
 same thing ; others, especially regarding the diversity of 
 persons who perceived, might choose the denomination of 
 different things. But who sees not that all the dispute is 
 about a word ? to wit, whether what is perceived by different 
 persons may yet have the term ' same ' applied to it. Men 
 may dispute about identity and diversity, without any real 
 difference in their thoughts and opinions, abstracted from 
 names." 
 
 Though Hylas was satisfied with this answer, other 
 critics of the new thought may still feel that Philonous 
 has not got to the bottom of the question, and that he 
 has failed to distinguish numerical identity from com- 
 plete similarity. The sameness which consists in 
 similarity is the only sameness which he acknowledges 
 for the things of sense. It follows that things, as 
 exclusively phenomenal, can only have an interrupted 
 existence in private minds. But this is to regard his 
 theory only on one side. Philonous accepts the common- 
 sense conviction, in fact ineradicable, that phenomenal 
 things involve a continuance of existence when human 
 beings are not percipient, even before human beings 
 existed, and before the first sense experience of any 
 sentient intelligence. He gives his own explanation, 
 however, of what this common conviction really means. 
 Without the explanation, the new thought would dis- 
 solve the aggregates of sense phenomena into isolated 
 sense phenomena, void of meaning or reasonableness. 
 The common conviction, he intends to say, really means 
 the permanence of Mind or Eeason, as the ground of the 
 
Intercommunion through sensuous Phenomena. 89 
 
 constitution of the sensible world, for without this it 
 could neither become nor continue to be a world. In 
 theological language, the permanence of the things we see 
 and touch presupposes the persistence of Divine Intellect 
 and Action in the heart of things. It is through this 
 that they are substantiated ; and it is through this that 
 the regular order of the perceptions in each finite mind 
 — that is, the order of the phenomena of which the 
 things consist, and of the phenomenal changes in the 
 things — is determined. 
 
 The world of sense, according to this theory of it, has 
 two sorts of reality — a phenomenal and a hyper-phe- 
 nomenal As phenomenal in sense, its reality must be 
 conceived and spoken about only in terms of sensuous 
 perception and of imagination. Hyper-phenomenally re- 
 garded, it has a continuous existence, in the ideal arche- 
 types of the Divine Eational Will ; but as such it cannot 
 be seen or touched, nor even imagined. When Berkeley 
 speaks about reality in sensible things, he usually refers 
 only to what can be seen and touched, and represented 
 in imagination ; this, he says, is plainly only phenomenal, 
 and therefore dependent on the sensuous perception or 
 on the imagination. The ideal archetypes in the Divine 
 Intellect and Will, as invisible, intangible, and unim- 
 aginable, do not belong to the world of sense — tho 
 material world, in its common meaning. But as for 
 the sensuous manifestations, these must be only as and 
 when they are seen, touched, or otherwise experienced 
 in any of the senses. 
 
 As to the objection that I must acknowledge myself 
 to be alone in existence, without any fellow-creatures, if 
 Matter — as far as science is concerned with it — is only 
 
90 Berkeley. 
 
 phenomenal, Berkeley has not cleared up the difficulty. 
 He nowhere tries to show how a perception-dependent 
 material world is adequate to discharge the office of a 
 reliable medium of intelligent and practical intercourse 
 between one otherwise private and solitary spirit and 
 another. The question how intercommunion is possible 
 without a numerical identity — not a mere similarity — 
 in the phenomenal signs perceived by each spirit, hardly 
 occurs to him. He is already full of the conviction 
 that other minds exist contemporaneously with his own ; 
 and the sensible world is for him an object of interest 
 chiefly as the medium of social intercourse between men 
 and men, and even of God with men. But he rather 
 assumes its adequacy for this office — on grounds of 
 ordinary common sense — than explains the consistency 
 of the common sense assumption with the separate in- 
 dividuality of material worlds, conceived only in terms 
 of the phenomena of which each person is individually 
 percipient ; and he erects no philosophical barrier against 
 absolute, or at least theological, Egoism. The explana- 
 tion would have carried him further into the relations of 
 Eeason and Sense than he went, in the earlier stages of 
 his mental development. The immanence of Supreme 
 Mind in nature and the human soul was then less in 
 his thoughts than the dependence of what is seen and 
 touched, and of the space in which we see and touch, 
 upon sentient consciousness. 
 
 That the logical issue of the Berkeleyan paralysis of 
 Matter and its powers is the impossibility of any scientific 
 knowledge of nature, and also absolute Egoism, is only 
 a part of its destructive issues, according to its bolder 
 
Sceptical Consequences. 91 
 
 critics. The premises that unsubstantiate Matter, they 
 would argue, unsubstantiate everything. If unpheno- 
 menal matter and force is impossible and absurd, 
 because inconceivable, unconscious Spirit must be im- 
 possible and absurd too, because unrealisable in con- 
 sciousness. Reason in us and in nature is illusion, if 
 phenomenality and being imaginable is the final test of 
 reality. Are not the arguments for the unsubstantial 
 and impotent character of the phenomenal things of 
 sense good also against the persistence and power of 
 Spirit? If the material world can only be a system 
 of phenomena dependent on mind for its continuous 
 existence, can spirit or mind be more than a series of 
 perceptions, without any persistent and powerful self 
 of whom perceptions are only manifestations'? Does 
 not Berkeley's weapon against materialism and scep- 
 ticism literally turn against himself, with suicidal effect 1 
 Was not the "visionist" who denied "his own" ex- 
 istence as well as that of Matter, only a more firm 
 and consequent reasoner than Berkeley 1 ? If the "in- 
 conceivability" of an independent persistence of the 
 material world was a sufficient reason for assuming 
 that phenomenal things must be absolutely dependent 
 on self-conscious Mind, must not Mind, too, for a like 
 reason, be nothing, except as a succession of ever-perish- 
 ing perceptions? Does not the personal pronoun "I" 
 resolve itself into phenomenal perceptions, and all ex- 
 istence dissolve in unconnected impressions 1 Instead 
 of the materialistic extreme, at which conscious states 
 and acts are regarded as effects which mysteriously 
 follow certain motions and collocations of atoms, — 
 against which Berkeley revolted ; and the spiritualistic 
 

 92 Berkeley. 
 
 extreme, at which atoms and their motions are resolved 
 into the significant and interpretable sensuous experi- 
 ence of a spirit — which Berkeley accepted, — both atoms 
 and spirits now disappear in a nihilism that logically 
 puts an end alike to philosophy, and physical science, 
 and common knowledge. 
 
 This objection, though not in all its strength, did 
 occur to Berkeley, suggested perhaps by a passage in 
 Locke : — 
 
 " ' You admit,' Hylas objects, 1 in sentences introduced into 
 the third edition of the ' Three Dialogues ' in 1734 — ( you ad- 
 mit that there is a spiritual substance, although you have no 
 idea of it, while you deny that there can be such a thing as 
 a material substance, because you have no idea of it. Is this 
 fair dealing ? to act consistently you must admit Matter or 
 reject Spirit. What say you to this?' — 'I say, in the first 
 place,' replies Philonous, ' that I do not deny the existence 
 of material substance, merely because I have no notion or 
 idea of it. Many things, for aught I know, may exist 
 whereof neither I nor any other man hath, or can have, any 
 idea or notion whatever. But then those things must be 
 possible — that is, nothing inconsistent must be included in 
 their definition. I say, secondly, that although we believe 
 things to exist which we do not perceive, yet we may not 
 believe that any particular thing exists without some reason 
 for such belief. But I have no reason for believing the 
 existence of Matter. Whereas the being of Myself I imme- 
 diately know by reflection.' — ' Notwithstanding all you have 
 said,' Hylas still objects, ' to me it seems that, according to 
 your own way of thinking, and in consequence of your own 
 principles, it should follow that "you" are only a system 
 of fleeting ideas, without any substance to support them. 
 Words are not to be used, you say, without a meaning. 
 
 Works, vol. i. pp. 327-329. 
 
" I am Conscious of Myself." 93 
 
 And as there is no more meaning in spiritual substance 
 than in material substance, the one ought to be exploded 
 as well as the other.' — ' How often/ retorts Philonous, — 'how 
 often must I repeat that I know and am conscious of my 
 own being, and that I myself am not my own ideas, but 
 somewhat else, a thinking active principle that perceives, 
 knows, wills, and operates about ideas ? . . . But I am 
 not, in like manner, conscious of the' existence and essence of 
 Matter. On the contrary, I know that nothing inconsistent 
 can exist, and that the existence of Matter [i.e., as distinct 
 from the existence of intelligible and interpretable sensuous 
 phenomena] implies an inconsistency [i.e., the existence of 
 unphenomenal phenomena]. Further, I know what I mean 
 when I affirm that there is a spiritual substance or support 
 of ideas. . . . But I don't know what is meant when it 
 is said that an unperceiving substance hath inherent in it 
 and supports either ideas or [unperceiving and unperceived] 
 archetypes of ideas. There is, therefore, on the whole, no 
 parity of case between Spirit and Matter.' " 
 
 This is, on the whole, to say that, though we have a 
 consciousness of the material world as only phenomenally 
 real, we are conscious in what we call "I" of more than 
 a phenomenal reality — of what has ontological as well 
 as phenomenal meaning — of what gives their only con- 
 crete meaning to the abstract words " substance " and 
 11 power," and its only complete meaning to the word 
 " cause." The answer satisfied Hylas. It did not satisfy 
 David Hume, who, soon after, in his 'Treatise of Hu- 
 man Nature,' read into Berkeley's Immaterialism a 
 Universal Scepticism, in which the hyper-phenomenal 
 reality of the Ego and of God was, along with Matter, 
 suicidally dissolved in a confession of universal mean- 
 inglessness, and the unattainability of any reasonable 
 experience. 
 
94 Berkeley. 
 
 " There are some philosophers," says Hume, 1 " who imagino 
 that we are every moment conscious of what we call our 
 self ; that we feel its existence, and its continuance in 
 existence. . . . For my part, when I enter most intimately 
 into what I call ' myself, 5 I always stumble at some particu- 
 lar perception or other. I can never observe anything but 
 the perception. When my perceptions are removed for a 
 time, as in sound sleep, so long I am insensible myself, 
 and may truly be said not to exist. . . . Setting aside 
 some metaphysicians, I may venture to affirm of the rest of 
 mankind that they are nothing, — a bundle or collection 
 of different perceptions, which succeed one another with 
 inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and 
 movement." 
 
 The need for reason in that which gives rise to reason 
 is also disclaimed by Hume as an unsupported dogma, 
 apart from this suicidal scepticism. He denies our right 
 to assume that a "cause" — that is, a caused or phenomenal 
 cause, which is the only cause he and his disciples think 
 about — must be "sufficient," according to any notion we 
 can form of sufficiency, to produce certain effects; for 
 "effects" are only invariable consequences, and these 
 are to be found by experience, apart from a priori con- 
 ceptions of what the antecedent phenomena are or are 
 not " sufficient " to cause. Causation is only constant 
 conjunction, according to the pure phenomenalism of 
 Hume ; we can never find an a priori reason why 
 "anything may not produce anything;" and therefore 
 why the phenomena or impressions we call Matter may 
 not cause the phenomena or impressions we call Mind. 
 
 1 ' Treatise of Human Nature,' B. I., Pt. i., sect. 6. But compare 
 this with the relative remarks in the Appendix to Part III. (pp. 300- 
 305, in vol. iii., ed. 1740)— a remarkable passage which posits Kant's 
 problem. 
 
Might anything have 'produced anything? 95 
 
 If we see a constant conjunction between conscious life 
 ami organised matter, they reason hastily, he would say, 
 who conclude — from a dogmatic assumption of "insuf- 
 ficiency " in the cause, about which we can affirm 
 nothing — that it is impossible that motion can ever 
 produce thought, or a different position of parts give 
 rise to a different passion or reflection; while from 
 experience " we may certainly conclude that motion 
 may be, and actually is, the cause of thought and 
 perception." 
 
 It was thus that Hume, years afterwards, carried 
 Berkeley's war against metaphysical abstractions from 
 the merely phenomenal world of the senses into the 
 world of Spirit, and, dismissing " substances " and 
 "powers," dissolved all that exists into unsubstantial 
 and impotent impressions, without Universal Mind, 
 either external or immanent. If, as Hume did, and as 
 the critics and the historians of philosophy have since 
 done, the constructive or unphenomenal side of the 
 Berkeleyan theory is left out of account, and the Eternal 
 Reason which shines through the phenomena of sense 
 and sensible things — even in his earlier, but chiefly in 
 his later thought — is made no account of, it is easy to 
 show that mere phenomena, without immanent reason, 
 can be no world at all. They make only an uninter- 
 pretable chaos, perhaps occasionally coexistent and 
 connected, but in which the personal pronouns " I " and 
 " you " have no right to appear. 
 
 That Berkeley made Sense and Custom more promin- 
 ent than Reason or Intellect, in the volumes which issued 
 so impetuously from his musings at Trinity College ; and 
 that those writings, as more accommodated than his 
 
96 Berkeley. 
 
 later works to- the course of thought in Europe in the 
 last century, were treated as his only writings, — may 
 excuse the one-sided representation of his theory of 
 knowledge and existence which has long been accepted. 
 But it is time that it should be conceived in its fulness, 
 and that we should remember the sacrifices of his " later 
 growth " as well as his " first-fruits " at " the altar of 
 truth." 
 
 Meantime we must follow him in romantic wander- 
 ings through many lands, amidst surroundings very 
 different from those of Dublin and Trinity College. 
 
PAET 11—1713-34 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 ENGLAND, FRANCE, AND ITALY. 
 
 Early in January 1713, Berkeley, still full of his new 
 thought about the phenomenal nature of things and 
 their necessary dependence on Eternal Governing Spirit, 
 found his way from Dublin to London, thus emerging 
 for the first time from his " obscure corner." The 
 College leave of absence given to him says that it was 
 on the ground of " health," which may have suffered 
 from the impetuous ardour expended in the 'Essay on 
 Vision,' the 'Treatise on Human Knowledge,' and the 
 'Three Dialogues.' In a letter from London, a few 
 days after he got there, to Sir John Percival, 1 who was 
 then in Dublin, he says that he had crossed the Channel 
 " to print his new book of Dialogues, and to make ac- 
 quaintance with men of merit, rather than to engage 
 the interests of those in power." He describes the ad- 
 ventures of his journey, and gives his first impressions 
 of the new country, enlarging, with a genuine feeling for 
 
 1 January 26, 1713— Percival MSS. 
 r. — in. g 
 
98 Berkeley. 
 
 nature in all its softer aspects, on the extraordinary 
 beauty of rural England, even in winter, which, he 
 liked better than anything he saw in London, 
 
 His good-natured erratic countryman, Eichard Steele, 
 was among the first to welcome him on his arrival. In 
 that same January letter, from the "Pall Mall Coffee- 
 House in the Pall Mall," he mentions a meeting with 
 Steele, and soon after he writes again that he dines often 
 with him in Bloomsbury Square, " where he has a good 
 house, table, servants, and coach. Somebody had given 
 him my Treatise on Human Knowledge, and that was the 
 ground of his inclination to my acquaintance. You will 
 soon hear of him under the character of the ' Guardian:' 
 he designs his paper should come out every day, as the 
 * Spectator.' " This was the house in Bloomsbury Square, 
 "much finer, larger, and grander" than one Steele had al- 
 ready had in Jerrnyn Street, for which he could not pay; 
 or than another at Hampton, on which he had borrowed 
 money, and which poor Steele with his " dear Prue " had 
 taken in 1712 — where his unhappy landlord " got no bet- 
 ter satisfaction than his friend in St James's, and where it 
 is recorded that Dick, giving a grand entertainment, had 
 half-a-dozen men in livery to wait upon his noble guests, 
 and confessed that his servants were bailiffs to a man." * 
 
 In this first summer in England, Berkeley wrote 
 several essays in the ' Guardian,' mostly sarcastic squibs 
 against materialistic free-thinkers, for whom Steele had 
 a strong aversion. Although an immaterialist basis of 
 religious thought is hardly perceptible in these papers, 
 they show the direction in which he was disposed to 
 apply his new conception of Matter, more evident twenty 
 1 See Thackeray's ' English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century.' 
 
Steele and Collins. 99 
 
 years afterwards, when lie engaged in controversy with 
 the Free-thinkers in a more systematic way. 
 
 This disposition may have been produced partly by 
 his recollection of the old Toland controversies in Dub- 
 lin, but it was now strengthened by the appearance 
 of Anthony Collins's 'Discourse of Free - Thinking,' 
 shortly after his own arrival in London. We are less 
 able than we should like to be to reproduce Collins as he 
 lived and thought, for no sufficient biography of this re- 
 markable man has been written. He was a barrister, born 
 of a good Essex family, who in 1713 was talked about 
 in town, especially in the ecclesiastical world, on account 
 of this little book, most of which reads rather common- 
 place to-day. Ten years before, this Essex gentleman had 
 been in affectionate correspondence and companionship 
 with Locke, at Lady Masham's at Oates, in the last year 
 of Locke's life. The great author of the ' Essay,' and of 
 the 'Letters on Toleration,' found himself wonderfully 
 in sympathy with his young friend. He praised his love 
 of truth and moral courage as superior to almost any he 
 had ever known, and by his will he made him one of his 
 executors. Soon after Locke's death, Collins got involved 
 in ecclesiastical disputes, which made him conceive 
 a strong antipathy to the clergy. He supported Dod- 
 well against Clarke, by clever reasonings which Swift 
 has preserved for ridicule in Martinus Scriblerus. In 
 1709 he wrote against priestcraft, and assailed King, 
 the Archbishop of Dublin, for his discourse on divine 
 predestination and foreknowledge. Collins is remem- 
 bered now by historians of philosophy for his contro- 
 versy with Samuel Clarke about necessity and the moral 
 agency of man, in which he states the arguments against 
 
100 Berkeley. 
 
 human freedom with a logical force unsurpassed by any 
 necessitarian In the 'Discourse of Free -Thinking,' 
 he denounced priests, and believers in church religion, 
 as enemies of honest philosophical inquiry, and the 
 paid advocates of a foregone conclusion. This exclus- 
 ive claim to freedom of research and candour, made 
 by Collins and others of his school on their own be- 
 half, roused Berkeley's indignation. Now, and after- 
 wards in the deistical and atheistical polemics of his 
 middle life, he presents himself as the " free-thinking " 
 antagonist of free-thinking materialists and necessitarians. 
 There must be belief of some sort at the root of every 
 human life, he means to say — for to live at all is to 
 believe ; and he could not, he professed, find more can- 
 dour and true courage in a creed of theological disbelief 
 than in the creed of religious faith. 
 
 His countryman, Swift, was one of Berkeley's patrons 
 in these first weeks in London, as well as his country- 
 man Steele. On an April Sunday in 1713, we find 
 him at the Court of Queen Anne, in the company of 
 Swift. "I went to Court to-day," Stella's journal 
 of that Sunday records, " on purpose to present Mr 
 Berkeley, one of our fellows of Trinity College, to Lord 
 Berkeley of Stratton. That Mr Berkeley is a very ingeni- 
 ous man and great philosopher, and I have mentioned 
 him to all the Ministers, and have given them some of 
 his writings, and I will favour him as much as I can." 
 After that his name appears often in the famous jour- 
 nal. Swift was as good as his word in helping him 
 into the London world of letters, in the last year of the 
 reign of Queen Anne, so that he became known as he 
 deserved to " men of merit," and was brought into contact 
 
Swift. 101 
 
 with others on whom he would hardly have conferred 
 tins title. He told a friend long afterwards that he used to 
 attend one of the free-thinking clubs, in the pretended 
 character of a learner, and that he there heard Anthony 
 Collins announce that he was able to demonstrate the 
 impossibility of God's existence — whatever Collins may 
 have meant by these words. The promised "demon- 
 stration," Berkeley added, was afterwards in part pub- 
 lished, in Collins's 'Philosophical Inquiry concerning 
 Human Liberty,' which appeared in 1717, where he 
 argues that every action attributed to man, as well as 
 all else in the universe, must be the issue of Fate or 
 causal Necessity. This might be interpreted as an 
 attempt to demonstrate atheism, unless " God " is con- 
 sidered only a synonym for Fate or Necessity. 
 
 Swift had now been living in London for more than 
 four years, in his " lodging in Bury Street," absorbed in 
 the political intrigues of the last years of Queen Anne, 
 and sending the daily journal to Stella, in Dublin, 
 which so faithfully preserves the incidents of those 
 years. Mrs Yanhomrigh and her daughter, the famous 
 and unhappy " Vanessa," were settled near him in their 
 house in the same street, and there, as he writes to 
 Stella, he "loitered hot and lazy after his morning's 
 work," and often dined "out of mere listlessness." This 
 Yanhomrigh connection, as we shall see, had its effect 
 on Berkeley's fortunes long afterwards. 
 
 In this summer of 1713, Pope, then hardly twenty- 
 five years of age, was at Binneld, among the glades of 
 Windsor, but not seldom too with Addison in their 
 favourite coffee-house kept by Button near Covent Gar- 
 den. Addison himself was in St James's Place, for 
 
102 Berkeley. 
 
 a time withdrawn from politics, but giving literary- 
 breakfasts, preparing 'Cato,' and writing his refined 
 essays in the 'Spectator' and the 'Guardian' In a 
 letter to Sir John Percival from "Pall Mall," written 
 soon after his arrival in London, 1 P>erkeley mentions 
 that the night before, " a very ingenious new poem 
 upon Windsor Porest " was given to him " by the 
 author, Mr Pope, a Papist, but a man of excellent wit 
 and learning. Mr Addison," he goes on to say, "has 
 the same talents as Steele, in a high degree, and is like- 
 wise a great philosopher, having applied himself to the 
 speculative studies more than any other of the wits here 
 I know. I breakfasted with him at Dr Swift's lodgings 
 in Bury Street. His coming when I was there, and the 
 good temper he showed, I construed as a sign of an 
 approaching coalition of parties. Dr Swift is admired 
 by both Steele and Addison, and I think him one of 
 the best - natured and most agreeable men in the 
 world. Cato, a most noble play of his, and the only 
 one he writ, is to be acted in Easter Week." Prom a 
 subsequent letter, on the 18th of April, accordingly, 
 we learn that, " on Tuesday last, Cato was acted 
 for the first time. I was present with Mr Addison 
 and two or three more friends, in a side box, where 
 we had a table, and two or three flasks of Burgundy 
 and champagne, with which the author (who is a 
 sober man) thought it necessary to support his spirits, 
 and indeed it was a pleasant refreshment between the 
 acts. Some parts of the prologue, written by Mr Pope, 
 a Tory and even a Papist, were hissed, being thought to 
 savour of Whiggism, but the clap got much the better 
 i March 7, 1713— Percival MSS. 
 
Addison, Pope, and Arbuthnot. 103 
 
 of the hiss. Lord Harley, who sat in the box next us, 
 was observed to clap as loud as any in the house all the 
 time of the play." — Swift and Pope have both given us 
 their account of the first night of ' Cato : ' here for the 
 first time we have Berkeley's. 
 
 In the same week he mentions that he " dined at 
 Dr Arbuthnot's lodgings in the Queen's Palace at Ken- 
 sington," and that " he was the first proselyte he had 
 made of the Treatise ['The Three Dialogues'] he had 
 come over from Dublin to print, and which will soon be 
 published." Arbuthnot, the Aberdonian physician at the 
 Court of the Queen, was a well-known leader in the 
 Scriblerus Club, the witty assailant of the verbal meta- 
 physics of the schools, and no mean authority on ques- 
 tions of philosophy 
 
 Percival writes from Dublin in May, that he hears the 
 book of • Dialogues ' is printed, though not yet published ; 
 that immaterialism is daily gaining ground among the 
 learned, as it becomes better understood ; that Mr Addi- 
 son is coming over to the new opinion ; and that now 
 what seemed shocking at first is become so familiar that 
 others envy him the discovery of the secret of matter, and 
 would fain make it their own. " You have now, too," he 
 adds, " an opportunity of gratifying one piece of curiosity 
 I have heard you very inquisitive about ; I mean, the 
 surprise of a person born blind when first made to see. 
 One Grant, an oculist, has put forth an advertisement 
 of his art in this way, with whom I believe you would 
 find satisfaction in discoursing. " 1 
 
 In the course of this summer, at the instance of 
 
 Addison, it seems that a meeting was arranged between 
 
 1 See 'Works/ vol. i. pp. Ill, 112, and note (Clarendon Press ed.) 
 
104 Berkeley. 
 
 Berkeley and Dr Samuel Clarke, then the metaphysical 
 rector of St James's in Piccadilly, whose objections he 
 had in vain tried to draw forth three years before 
 through Sir John Percival. Berkeley's indescribable 
 fascination of manner and goodness of heart had charmed 
 the world of London, and even Atterbury after an inter- 
 view with him could say, " So much understanding, so 
 much knowledge, so much innocence, and such humility, 
 I did not think had been the portion of any but angels, 
 till I saw this gentleman." Still, the new philosophical 
 thought of the young Irishman was becoming a matter 
 of ridicule to some of the wits, who translated it into 
 the madman's paradox, that all we see and touch is only 
 an idle fancy. Much was hoped from this meeting 
 with Clarke, but it ended without any common under- 
 standing, and Berkeley had again to complain that 
 though Clarke did not refute his arguments, or show 
 what he had unduly assumed in his argument, he had 
 not the candour to accept the conclusion. 
 
 Immaterialism, however, was springing up spontane- 
 ously in other quarters. In a letter to Percival, in 
 June, Berkeley mentions a " clergyman in Wiltshire, who 
 has produced a book in which he advances something 
 published three years ago in my treatise concerning 
 Human Knowledge." The allusion is to Arthur Col- 
 lier's ' Clavis Universalis, or JSTew Inquiry after Truth ; 
 being a Demonstration of the JSTon-existence or Impossi- 
 bility of an External World.' This curious little volume 
 appeared in London early in the summer of 1713, full 
 of acute arguments cogitated by its retired and studious 
 author, in the peaceful seclusion of a rural English par- 
 sonage not far from Salisbury. It was overlooked in 
 
Arthur Collier. 105 
 
 Britain (but not in Germany) till Dr Eeid called atten- 
 tion to it in his "Essays," seventy years after it was 
 published. 1 Long extremely scarce, it is now gener- 
 ally accessible, in two editions, published in 1836 and 
 1837. Collier, with much argumentative subtlety, is 
 wanting in imaginative sentiment, and in that sense 
 of the relation of immaterialism to the philosophy 
 of religion, and the many sides of human life, which, 
 along with his artistic beauty of conception and ex- 
 pression, have enabled Berkeley to affect the main cur- 
 rent of modern thought. Their intellectual points of 
 view, too, were very different. Berkeley started from 
 that love of experience, and aversion to the " vermiculate 
 questions of the schools," in which he had been trained 
 by Locke. Collier argued, from the abstract assump- 
 tions of the cloister, in the spirit of a schoolman who 
 was at the same time infected with the mysticism of 
 Malebranche and Morris. The coincidence is, neverthe- 
 less, curious. Berkeley at least cannot have borrowed 
 from Collier, who alludes in the ' Clavis ' to the ' Treatise 
 on Human Knowledge,' but also tells us that as early 
 as 1703 he had reached an immaterialist conclusion for 
 himself. The coincidence shows the existence of some- 
 thing in the intellectual atmosphere at the time favour- 
 able to immaterialist ways of thinking about the world of 
 which we are percipient in the senses. Collier, like Ber- 
 keley, sought the judgment of Samuel Clarke about his 
 reasonings, and was able to draw from him' " a learned 
 and civil answer," which unfortunately has been lost. 2 
 
 1 See Hamilton's ' Reid,' p. 287, and note. 
 
 - See Benson's 'Memoirs of the Rev. Arthur Collier' (1837), pp. 
 33-41. 
 
106 Berkeley. 
 
 The Percival correspondence informs us for the first 
 time that Berkeley spent two months of this summer 
 in Oxford, and that he found it "a most delightful 
 place." "Grand performances," he writes to Percival, 
 "have been going on at the Sheldonian Theatre, and 
 a great concourse were at the Act, from London and 
 the country, amongst whom were several foreigners, 
 particularly about thirty Frenchmen of the ambassador's 
 company, who, it is reported, were all robbed by a 
 single highwayman." It is interesting to find that 
 Oxford had thus early taken possession of his imagin- 
 ation; for this was his first visit to the place which, 
 forty years after, in a fit of academical idealism, be- 
 came the chosen retreat of his old age. His new philo- 
 sophy was not forgotten by him at Oxford. "As to 
 what you write of Dr Arbuthnot not being of my 
 opinion," he writes thence to Percival in August, " it 
 is true there has been some difference between us con- 
 cerning some notions relating to the necessity of the 
 laws of nature ; but this does not touch the main point 
 of the non-existence of what philosophers call material 
 substance, against which he has acknowledged he can 
 assert nothing." Though it "does not touch the main 
 point," one would gladly have heard more about what 
 seems to have touched Berkeley's favourite conclusion 
 of the " arbitrariness " of the laws of nature, as opposed 
 to that self-existence and "necessity" of the laws and 
 properties of the material world, which men of science 
 are so ready to take for granted. 1 
 
 1 On this subject, as recently treated on lines somewhat similar to 
 Berkeley, see Sir Edmund Beckett, ' On the Origin of the Laws of 
 Nature ' (London, 1879). 
 
Paris and Malcbranchc. 107 
 
 So Berkeley's first spring and summer in England 
 passed away. He spent the following winter in France 
 and Italy. 
 
 In October lie wrote to Percival that he was " on the 
 eve of leaving London, and going to Sicily as chaplain 
 to Lord Peterborough, who is going ambassador-extra- 
 ordinary on the coronation of the king." He was thus, 
 on the recommendation of Swift, associated with the 
 most brilliant wit amongst the political personages of that 
 generation, who, as it happened, had a quarter of a cen- 
 tury before been the intimate of Locke when they were 
 both exiles in Holland, and afterwards one of his corre- 
 spondents and visitors at Oates. He was now the friend 
 of Swift and Pope. Ten months hi Prance and Italy, in 
 this connection, was a fresh experience of life to the fervid 
 and ingenious reasoner, who had been viewed with curi- 
 ous interest by the wits of London. It was one of the 
 turns opening into the long course of restless movement, 
 with occasional relapses into studious seclusion, which 
 marked this middle period of Berkeley's life, in con- 
 trast with its first and its last stages. He left his new 
 thought about things to work its way at home among 
 any who were inclined to think, and turned an eager 
 inquiring eye to nature and art on the continent of 
 Europe. Through his letters to Sir John Percival we 
 can follow him on his journey. Writing to him from 
 Paris in Xovember, he describes his adventures from 
 London, and his companions on the road — among others, 
 " a Scotch gentleman named Martin, who wrote about St 
 Kilda." 1 He adds, "The Abbe D'Aubigne is to intro- 
 
 1 This was Murdoch Martin, a native of Skye, author of a ' Voyage 
 
108 Berkeley. 
 
 duce me to-morrow to Father Malebranche." Berkeley- 
 was a month in Paris ; but we hear no more about Male- 
 branche. On ]S"ew Year's Day he crossed Mont Cenis, 
 in a storm of snow, and made Leghorn his headquarters 
 till May, while Peterborough was in Sicily. In July 
 he was again in Paris, on his way home. In August 
 he returned to London. It was the month in which the 
 whole outlook of English politics had been changed by 
 the death of Queen Anne. 
 
 The two next years were spent in London, with con- 
 genial retreats now and then into the soft scenes of the 
 midland and southern counties. His Percival correspon- 
 dence at this time refers much to the rising in Scotland 
 under Mar, which was the outcome of a course of 
 intrigues and secret steps, intended to dethrone George 
 I., and to set aside the Protestant succession. Another 
 subject was the efforts of Berkeley's friends to find some 
 preferment for him in the Irish Church. A groundless 
 suspicion of Jacobitism, caused by some misinterpreted 
 expressions in his discourses on "Passive Obedience," 
 delivered in 1712 in Trinity College Chapel, and 
 perhaps strengthened by the Cavalier traditions of his 
 name, was not overcome even by the interest of Caro- 
 line, the philosophical Princess of Wales, the friend of 
 Clarke and Butler, and the correspondent of Leibnitz. 
 In June 1716, Charles Dering, Percival's cousin, 
 wrote from Dublin that, after all that had been done 
 by his friends, his prospects were bad, as " the 
 Lords Justices had made a strong representation 
 
 to St Kilda' (1698), and a 'Description of the Western Islands of 
 Scotland' (1703). 
 
How Malebranche died. 109 
 
 against him." He had no encouragement to return 
 to Ireland. 
 
 In Xovember 1716, accordingly, Ave find him again on 
 his way to Italy, where he spent the four following years. 
 Ashe, the Bishop of Clogher, Swift's friend, by whom 
 Berkeley had been admitted to holy orders nine years 
 before, had, it seems, persuaded him to accompany his 
 son on a tour as his travelling tutor. 
 
 It was about this time that the two most famous 
 metaphysicians then living passed away. Malebranche 
 died at Paris in October 1715, and Leibnitz died at 
 Hanover in ISTovember 1716. Berkeley was thus left 
 in the front place — with Samuel Clarke and Anthony 
 Collins in England, Buffier and Huet in France, Leclerc 
 in Holland, and Yico in Italy, as his most distinguished 
 contemporaries. Butler, Hutcheson, and Wolf were as 
 yet unknown, and Shaftesbury was dead. 
 
 The historians of philosophy have associated Berkeley 
 with the death of Malebranche in a tragical way. " It 
 forms an interesting circumstance in the history of these 
 two memorable persons," according to Dugald Stewart, 
 " that they had once, and only once, the pleasure of a 
 short interview. The conversation, we are told, turned 
 on the non-existence of matter. Malebranche, who had 
 an inflammation in his lungs, and whom Berkeley found 
 preparing a medicine in his cell, and cooking it in a 
 small pipkin, exerted his voice so violently in the heat 
 of their dispute, that he increased his disorder, which 
 carried him off a few days after. It is impossible not to 
 regret," Stewart adds, " that of this interview there is no 
 other record ; or rather, that Berkeley had not made it 
 
110 Berkeley. 
 
 the groundwork of one of his own Dialogues. Fine as 
 his imagination was, it could scarcely have added to the 
 picturesque effect of the real scene." 1 I fear that facts 
 must henceforward make this celebrated story take its 
 place among myths, for I find from the Percival Cor- 
 respondence that Berkeley was in England throughout 
 1715, the year in which Malebranche died. The only 
 evidence that he ever saw the eloquent French idealist is 
 the allusion to the promised introduction through the 
 Abbe D'Aubigne, two years before. 
 
 The philosophical doctrines of Malebranche and 
 Berkeley about Matter have so much superficial re- 
 semblance that the story of their tragical interview 
 not unnaturally grew out of it. Berkeley, as we have 
 already seen, disavowed all community with the French 
 Father in his own new thought about the world, and 
 maintained that no two sets of principles about real 
 knowledge were more opposed than those of Male- 
 branche and his own. The theory of Malebranche 
 about matter was simply a development of the Cartesian 
 theory of causation and power in the universe. For, 
 according to Descartes, our sensations are not pro- 
 duced by an active and external material substance, 
 but by the constant agency of God; who makes us 
 conscious of the appropriate perceptions, on occasion 
 of correlative extra - organic changes, which, also by 
 divine agency, affect our organism. This, no doubt, 
 presupposes the existence of extra - organic matter, 
 
 1 Stewart's "Dissertation" ('Works,' vol. i. p. 161, Hamilton's 
 Edition). See also Stock's Life of Berkeley (prefixed to the old 
 editions of Berkeley's Works); 'Biog. Brit.,' art. "Berkeley;" and 
 Advocat's 'Diet. Hist.' There is a version of the story by De Quin- 
 cey, in his essay on " Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts." 
 
Berkeley i Malebranche, and Spinoza. Ill 
 
 and its divinely communicated power of affecting 
 the human body ; but it also presupposes that per- 
 ceptions corresponding to the organic affections could 
 be caused only by Supreme Mind, and not by the 
 derived power of matter. Such was the famed Car- 
 tesian theory of occasional causation through divine 
 assistance. Malebranche merely relieved it of an ex- 
 crescence. Instead of sense perceptions produced in 
 human minds by the constant divine agency inherent 
 in extended things, he seems to have believed that we 
 are, in a measure at least, conscious, in the Universal 
 Reason, of the very archetypal Ideas of the sensible 
 world, ever present in the mind of God, in whom all 
 finite spirits live and have their being. We all exist 
 in God, thought Malebranche, and in this way we all 
 become actually conscious of His Ideas that are in- 
 volved in the constitution of sensible things. Instead of 
 supposing numerically different sensible phenomena, ex- 
 isting in each finite sentient spirit, as Berkeley was 
 logically obliged to do, Malebranche found the same 
 divine archetypal Ideas revealed in the common per- 
 ceptions of men, who, on occasion of sense, rise into 
 an apprehension of the Intelligible World, which the 
 sensible one only dimly adumbrates. In this theory, as 
 in Berkeley's, though for different reasons, independent 
 Matter, if not contradictory in its very conception, is 
 at least useless. Berkeley, perhaps, exaggerated their 
 differences. In both there is the tendency to view the 
 world of the senses as a superficial show, which dissolves 
 into phenomena, and reveals the Eternal Mind as the 
 true reality. But in Malebranche's view, finite voluntary 
 agents are more lost in God. He thus approaches 
 
112 Berkeley. 
 
 Spinozisni, from, which Berkeley was kept back by his 
 conviction of the spiritual individuality in man that is 
 involved in our moral and immoral agency. Berkeley 
 phenomenalises finite things, but not finite persons. 
 
 Berkeley's ' Italian Journal,' first published in 1871, 1 
 and his correspondence with Lord Percival, only now 
 discovered, enable us to follow his movements in 1717 
 more continuously and distinctly than in any other 
 year of his life. "We see him at Rome in January and 
 February, at Naples throughout April and May, and 
 in the fairyland of Ischia in autumn. In 1718, most of 
 the letters are dated at Rome, where medals and statues, 
 pictures and architecture, filled his fancy. In archi- 
 tecture he thought " the old Romans inferior to the 
 Greeks, and the moderns infinitely short of both, in 
 grandeur, and simplicity, and taste." His strong sense 
 of natural beauty, and even of community with external 
 nature, favoured by his philosophic thought of the im- 
 manence of divine power in the world of phenomenal 
 reality, appears in his descriptions of Italy, and especially 
 of his favourite isle of Ischia. His philosophy naturally 
 leads to the recognition in the world of the senses of 
 something "far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling 
 is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and 
 the living air." The taste for scenery so perceptible 
 in his ' Dialogues,' and in his letters to Pope from the 
 land of Theocritus and Virgil, was little felt in England 
 till it appeared in Gray and Shenstone, and still more 
 in Cowper, and Scott, and "Wordsworth. 
 
 In 1719 Berkeley almost disappears from view. An 
 1 See ' Works,' vol. iv. pp. 512-594 (Clarendon Press edition). 
 
Sicily and the lost Manuscripts. 113 
 
 allusion in one of his letters shows that it was the year 
 in which he made a pedestrian tour through Calabria 
 and Sicily. He was particularly interested in Sicily, and 
 collected materials for a natural history of the island, 
 which were lost along with other manuscripts on the 
 passage to ^Naples. In the summer of the folio wing- 
 year we find him on his way back to England. " I 
 hope we shall be in London before the cold weather 
 comes on," he wrote from Florence in July to Lord 
 Percival. " I have indeed been detained so long, against 
 my expectations and wishes, on this side of the Alps, 
 that I have lost all patience. Every month these six 
 months we have designed to begin our journey home, 
 and have been as often disappointed." Later in the 
 year he was with his pupil at Lyons. About the end 
 of 1720 he reached London. 
 
 Berkeley had now been away from Ireland for eight 
 years, and in circumstances less favourable to continued 
 meditation than when he was at Trinity College. But 
 the charms of nature and art, and intercourse with 
 "men of merit," had not withdrawn from his mind 
 the thought about the phenomenal nature of the 
 things of sense, which had so early transformed his 
 habitual way of looking at life and the external world. 
 The ' Treatise on Human Knowledge,' as already men- 
 tioned, was avowedly an unfinished book when it 
 appeared in 1710. A Second Part was then promised, 
 but it never came, and the ' Three Dialogues ' closed his 
 first and most productive period of authorship. He 
 seemed to have abandoned the original design of that 
 treatise, and his readers and critics have forgotten that 
 
 P. — III. H 
 
114 Berkeley. 
 
 it professed to be only a fragment. A lately discovered 
 letter of his, written in Khode Island ten years after 
 his return from Italy, proves that there was no aban- 
 donment ; and indeed we may infer from what he says 
 there that the Second Part of the ' Treatise on Human 
 Knowledge ' was the first-fruit of his studies after he 
 left his native island in 1713. 1 This letter is besides 
 instructive, as an expression of his own view of the three 
 little books which were the fruit of his early philoso- 
 phical studies in Ireland, before he was thirty years of 
 age. 
 
 " What you have seen of mine," he writes, " was published 
 when I was very young, and without doubt hath many de- 
 fects. For, though the notions should be true (as I verily 
 think they are), yet it is difficult to express them clearly and 
 consistently, language being framed to common use and 
 received prejudices. I do not therefore pretend that my 
 books can teach truth. All I hope for is that they may be 
 an occasion to inquisitive men of discovering truth, by con- 
 sulting their own minds, and looking into their own thoughts. 
 As to the Second Part of my Treatise concerning the Prin- 
 ciples of Human Knowledge, the fact is that I had made a 
 considerable progress in it, but the manuscript was lost dur- 
 ing my travels in Italy ; and I never had leisure since to do 
 so disagreeable a thing as writing twice on the same subject." 
 
 What that "subject" was we are left to conjecture. 
 But we do know that Berkeley did not pass through 
 France, on his way home in 1720, without showing that 
 his mind was still given to the favourite thought of his 
 early years in Ireland. A prize essay on the " Cause 
 of Motion" had been proposed by the French Eoyal 
 
 1 See Dr Beardsley's 'Life and Correspondence of Samuel Johnson, 
 D.D.' (New York, 1874), pp. 71, 72. 
 
The Cause of Motion. 115 
 
 Academy. The subject was exactly in the line of 
 Berkeley's early speculations, which had converged on 
 the alternative of the imsubstantiality and impotence 
 either of Spirit or of Matter. He accordingly prepared 
 a Latin dissertation, De Motu, which was finished at 
 Lyons on his way from Italy to England, and published 
 after his return to London. Whether it was ever 
 presented to the Academy seems uncertain. The prize 
 at any rate was conferred on Crousaz, the well-known 
 logician and professor at Lausanne. Berkeley's disser- 
 tation shows the bent of his thoughts about this time. 
 The imsubstantiality of Matter is left more in the back- 
 ground. Its impotence is what he insists on, and on 
 the intellectual need for the unphenomenal and free 
 causation, found only in Spirit or active Season. Mens 
 agitat molera might be the motto of the whole. He 
 argues — with more dependence, too, on authorities, 
 ancient and medieval, than in his former books — that 
 the rational and voluntary activity of Supreme Mind, 
 and subordinately of free finite agents, must be the 
 uncaused cause of all changes in sensible phenomena. 
 Natural law or physical causation is therefore not real 
 causality, but only the arbitrarily constituted effect 
 of the constant acting of the true and unphenomenal 
 Cause. To represent science in this way, as only the 
 interpretation of the (voluntarily ordered) laws of sen- 
 sible or phenomenal change ; and to conclude that even 
 mathematical space, so far as the term space has any 
 positive meaning, is only an established coexistence of 
 sense impressions, having no existence as a huge quan- 
 titative Infinite, was too foreign to the prejudices of 
 natural philosophers and mathematicians to find favour 
 
116 Berkeley. 
 
 in the French Academy. The ordinary good sense 
 of the unspeculative Crousaz was more likely to be 
 accepted. 
 
 This Latin tractate on the ultimate cause of Motion 
 was Berkeley's last essay in philosophy for many 
 years. Events in England after his arrival turned his 
 enthusiasm for a time in a new direction — as a devotee 
 in the service of Humanity. 
 
117 
 
 CHAPTEE II. 
 
 SOCIAL IDEALISM AND AMERICA. 
 
 On his return from Italy, Berkeley found the nation 
 plunged into the agitation and misery that followed the 
 failure of the South Sea scheme. He now threw him- 
 self with his usual impetuosity, but with a direct prac- 
 tical purpose, into the social and economical difficulties 
 of the time, and the condition of England became 
 his dominant interest. He was shocked by the prevail- 
 ing tone of social morals. He seemed to see himself 
 living in a generation averse to all lofty ideals, with 
 whom the extreme of prudential secularism had super- 
 seded the fanatical spiritualism of the preceding age. 
 He was in collision, in short, with the bad elements of 
 the eighteenth century. A commercial crisis had brought 
 them out, and this was then a novelty. His ever-active 
 imagination and eager temperament exaggerated the 
 symptoms. They found vent in a fervid ' Essay towards 
 Preventing the Euin of Great Britain,' published in 
 1721. 
 
 The ' Essay ' was a lamentation over the corrupt civi- 
 lisation of England, by an ardent social idealist, who 
 could now compare what he saw at home with life in 
 
118 Berkeley. 
 
 other lands. We are undone, he seems to say, and lost 
 to all sense of our true interest. If we are to escape 
 at all, it can only be by the persons who compose the 
 nation becoming individually industrious, frugal, public- 
 spirited, and religious. This, and not any royal road, is 
 the way to the salvation of the country. Sumptuary 
 laws might perhaps do something; masquerades might 
 be prohibited ; the theatre, which had been a school 
 for taste and morals and experience of life to the 
 ancients, and to England as well a century earlier, might 
 perhaps be reformed; art might be made, as in other 
 countries and ages, to inspire society with great thoughts 
 and unworldly feelings. But till selfishness and sen- 
 suality were superseded in individuals by public spirit, 
 and atheistic free-thought by religious trust and rever- 
 ence, the case seemed hopeless. In the South Sea dis- 
 aster he saw not the root of the social disorder, but 
 only one of many symptoms, all foreshadowing social 
 dissolution. 
 
 Though the few pages of this tract reveal no new 
 thought in philosophy, they are important as a revela- 
 tion of their author. This was the first distinct symp- 
 tom of that longing for the realisation of a state of 
 society nearer his own pure and lofty ideal, which there- 
 after mixed so much with what he wrote and did. We 
 now hear for the first time the Cassandra wail of a 
 sorrowful prophet, who soon after turned his eye of 
 hope to other regions, in which a nearer approach to 
 Utopia might be found. 
 
 In passing from Italy to Ireland, he spent some 
 months in London in 1721. Addison had passed away 
 two years before, Swift was in Dublin, and Steele, 
 
Jut urn to Dublin. 110 
 
 broken in health and fortune, was in retirement in 
 the country. But Pope invited hini to Twickenham. 
 Arbuthnot was to be found in London, and Atterbury 
 at his deanery in "Westminster, or in his country re- 
 treat at Bromley. Clarke was still preaching sermons 
 on philosophical theology in St James's. Sherlock was 
 Master of the Temple, and Butler was delivering his 
 sombre moral dissertations in the Chapel at the Eolls. 
 
 In autumn Berkeley returned, after an absence of 
 more than eight years from Ireland, to his old academic 
 home in Trinity College. The architectural Earl of 
 Burlington had recommended him to the Duke of 
 Grafton, the newly-appointed Lord-Lieutenant. It was 
 in his thirty - seventh year that he thus revisited the 
 scenes of his youth, 1 to resume work for a little as a 
 tutor in his college, and perhaps to find some prefer- 
 ment in the Irish Church. This was not for the sake of 
 the preferment, but only as a means to the design of 
 learned leisure, combined with philanthropy, in which 
 lie was now beginning to indidge. " I had no sooner 
 set foot on shore," he wrote to Lord Percival from 
 Dublin in October, " than I heard that the deanery of 
 Dromore was vacant, with £500 a-year and a sinecure 
 — a circumstance that recommends it to me beyond 
 any preferment in the kingdom, though there are some 
 deaneries of twice that value." Lord Percival used his 
 interest with the Duke. In February his patent passed 
 the great seal. A lawsuit interposed. The bishop of the 
 
 1 He tells Lord Percival soon after his arrival that he "wrote the 
 Latin inscription on the king's equestrian statue," which had been 
 uncovered a few clays before. 
 
120 Berkeley. 
 
 diocese claimed the nomination. With characteristic 
 eagerness Berkeley employed " eight lawyers," being 
 assured that " the expense will be several hundreds, and 
 that against one in possession of the deanery, who has 
 been practised in lawsuits for twenty-five years." Twelve 
 months after this he was again in London for weeks, 
 a to see friends and to inform himself on some points 
 of law which are not so well known in Ireland." He 
 was nearly lost on this occasion in crossing to Holyhead. 
 
 The new enterprise which had gradually fired his 
 imagination became now the chief spring of action. It 
 was thus disclosed in March 1723, in a letter from 
 London to Lord Percival, who was then at Bath : — 
 
 "It is now about ten months since I have determined 
 to spend the residue of my days in Bermuda, where I 
 trust in Providence I may be the mean instrument of 
 doing great good to mankind. . . . The reforma- 
 tion of manners among the English in our "Western 
 plantations, and the propagation of the Gospel among 
 the American savages, are two points of high moment. 
 The natural way of doing this is by founding a college 
 or seminary in some convenient part of the West Indies, 
 where the English youth of our plantations may be edu- 
 cated in such sort as to supply their churches with pas- 
 tors of good morals and good learning — a thing (God 
 knows) much wanted. In the same seminary a number of 
 young American savages may also be educated till they 
 have taken the degree of Master of Arts. And being 
 by that time well instructed in the Christian religion, 
 practical mathematics, and other liberal arts and sciences, 
 and early imbued with public-spirited principles and in- 
 clinations, they may become the fittest instruments for 
 
A Bright Vision. 121 
 
 spreading religion, morals, and civil life among their 
 countrymen, who can entertain no suspicion or jealousy 
 of men of their own blood and language, as they might 
 do of English missionaries, who can never he well quali- 
 fied for that work." He then goes on to describe the 
 plans of education for American youth which he had 
 conceived, gives his reasons for preferring the Bermuda 
 or Summer Islands for the college, and presents the 
 bright vision of an academic home in those fair lands 
 of the West, whose idyllic bliss poets had sung, and 
 from which Christian civilisation might now be made to 
 radiate over the vast continent of America, with its mag- 
 nificent possibilities in the future history of the race of 
 man. He sees before him, in these Summer Islands, 
 under a halo of romance, an Arcadia with its constant 
 spring, nature in its gentlest moods, verdant fields and 
 groves of palms, and cool ocean breezes; a people of 
 simple manners, and without the enriching commodities 
 which turn men away from academic pursuits ; and all 
 so placed geographically as to be fitted to spread religion 
 and learning, in a spiritual commerce, over the western 
 regions of the world. 
 
 "We are left to conjecture the origin hi Berkeley's 
 imagination of this bright vision which so suddenly 
 arose. According to his own account, it had occurred 
 to him ten months before he wrote this letter, — our 
 earliest intimation of it. That carries us back to his 
 first months at Trinity College, after his long absence in 
 Italy and England, when his thoughts were still full of 
 the social revelations that followed the South Sea dis- 
 aster. That despair about Great Britain led him to look 
 westward for the future course of empire, one cannot 
 
122 Berkeley. 
 
 confidently affirm; but we know at least that his thoughts 
 in the present year had been much diverted from Matter, 
 Space, Time, and Motion, to the problems of human 
 life in society. America was then, for the philanthropic 
 imagination, what India, China, and Japan are now. 
 The growth of American empire since — and of Britain, 
 too, whose latent powers Berkeley so underrated in his 
 'Essay' — might well have then filled the prophetic 
 fancy of a seer to whose vision was disclosed a future 
 history of mankind largely under the guidance of the 
 English race. Berkeley seemed to see a better Eepublic 
 than Plato's, and a grander Utopia than More's, as the 
 issue of his ideal university in those Summer Isles of 
 which 'Waller had sung. 
 
 The social vision did not divert him from his law- 
 suit, which indeed was undertaken only to help the realisa- 
 tion of the vision. In May 1724 it was still undecided, 
 but, through the good offices of Lady Percival, a more 
 valuable preferment was then conferred upon him. "Yes- 
 terday," he writes, " I received my Patent for the best 
 deanery in this kingdom, that of Deny. It is said to be 
 worth £1500 per annum, but I do not consider it with a 
 view to enriching myself. I shall be perfectly contented 
 if it facilitates and recommends my scheme of Bermuda." 
 
 In the meantime curious fortune had favoured him in 
 an unexpected way. Swift's unhappy Vanessa, last en- 
 countered by us in Bury Street, was settled on her pro- 
 perty at Marley Abbey, ten miles from Dublin, after the 
 death of her mother, Mrs Vanhomrigh, in 1717. Swift 
 in the meantime had privately married Stella, as she 
 confessed to Vanessa, who thereupon revoked the be- 
 quest of her fortune to Swift, and left her estate to 
 
('ur Ions Fortune. 
 
 123 
 
 be divided between Berkeley (whom she knew only by 
 report), and Mr Marshall, afterwards an Irish judge. 
 The unhappy lady died broken-hearted in May 1723. 
 A few days afterwards Berkeley wrote to Lord Perci- 
 val : "Here is something that will surprise your lord- 
 ship, as it doth me. Mrs Hester Vanhomrigh, a lady 
 to whom I was a perfect stranger, having never in the 
 whole course of my life exchanged a word with her, 
 died on Sunday night. Yesterday her will was opened, 
 by which it appears that I am constituted executor, the 
 advantage whereof is computed by those who understand 
 her affairs to be worth £3000; — if a suit she had be 
 carried, it will be considerably more. ... I know not 
 what your thoughts are on the long account I sent you 
 from London to Bath of my Bermuda scheme, which is 
 now stronger on my mind than ever, this providential 
 event having made many things easy in my private affairs 
 which were otherwise before." Lord Percival in his re- 
 ply concluded that he would "now persist more than 
 ever in the thoughts of settling in Bermuda, and pro- 
 secute that noble scheme, which, if favoured by our Court, 
 may," he added, " in some time exalt your name beyond 
 that of St Xavier or the most famous missionaries 
 abroad." He warned him, however, that " without the 
 protection of Government " he would have to encounter 
 insurmountable difficulties in the West. 
 
 The Vanessa legacy — with the obstructions to a settle- 
 ment — was the theme of many letters about this time to 
 his friend, Tom Prior. Most of the extant letters to 
 Prior were written in 1724 and the three following years. * 
 Though they illustrate some points in his character, they 
 1 See 'Works,' vol. iv. pp. 110-152. 
 
124 Berkeley. 
 
 have no philosophical interest. The debts of Vanessa 
 absorbed much of the fortune. "I am still likely to 
 make £2000 clear," he writes, 1 " not reckoning on the 
 lawsuit depending between the executors and Mrs 
 Partington. As to the deanery of Dromore, I despair 
 of seeing it end to my advantage. The truth is, my 
 first purpose of going to Bermuda sets me above solicit- 
 ing anything with earnestness in this part of the world. 
 It can be of no use to me, but as it may enable me 
 the better to prosecute that design; and it must be 
 owned that the present possession of something in the 
 Church would make my application for an establish- 
 ment in those islands more considered. I mean the 
 charter for a college there, which of all things I desire, 
 as being what would reconcile duty and inclination, 
 making my life at once more useful to the public, and 
 more agreeable to myself, than I can possibly expect 
 elsewhere." 
 
 He got the wished-for deanery at last, and was thus 
 advanced a step towards Bermuda. "Yesterday," he 
 writes in May 1724, "I received my patent for the best 
 deanery in this kingdom, that of Deny." Next month 
 he went to visit his new possession. He was charmed with 
 Londonderry. "The walls with walks round, planted 
 with trees, are like those of Padua. I have hardly seen 
 a more agreeable situation, much gusto grande in the 
 laying out this whole country, which recalls to my mind 
 many prospects of Naples and Sicily. I may chance 
 not to be twopence richer for the preferment; for by 
 the time I have paid for the house and first-fruits, I 
 hope I shall have brought the Bermuda project to an 
 i September 19, 1723— Percival MSS. 
 
"A Life acadcmico-philosophical." 125 
 
 issue, which, God willing, is to be my employment this 
 winter in London." l 
 
 To London, accordingly, he went in September, to 
 raise funds and obtain a charter from the king, fortified 
 by a letter from Swift, then in Dublin, recommending 
 him to Lord Carteret at Bath, who was coming over to 
 succeed the Duke of Grafton as Lord Lieutenant. Swift 
 was as cordial as ever, and bore him no ill-will on ac- 
 count of the Vanessa affair. In this remarkable letter 
 he thus describes Berkeley's previous career and present 
 mission : — 
 
 " Going to England very young, about thirteen years ago, 
 the bearer of this became founder of a sect called the Im- 
 materialists, by the force of a very curious book upon 
 that subject. ... He is an absolute philosopher with re- 
 gard to money, titles, and power ; and for three years past 
 lias been struck with a notion of founding a university at 
 Bermudas, by a charter from the Crown. He has seduced 
 several of the hopefullest young clergymen and others here, 
 many of them well provided for, and all in the fairest way for 
 preferment ; but in England his conquests are greater, and 
 I doubt will spread very far this winter. He showed me 
 a little tract which he designs to publish, and there your 
 Excellency will see his whole scheme of a life academico- 
 philosophical, of a college founded for Indian scholars and 
 missionaries ; where he most exorbitantly proposes a whole 
 hundred pounds a-year for himself. . . . His heart will 
 break if his deanery be not taken from him, and left to 
 your Excellency's disposal. I discouraged him by the cold- 
 ness of Courts and Ministers, who will interpret all this as 
 impossible and a vision ; but nothing will do." 2 
 
 1 June 8, 1724— Percival MSS. In the same letter he says, " I 
 have farmed out my lands for £1250 a-year, but am assured they are 
 worth £200 more." 
 
 2 'Works,' vol. iv. p. 102. 
 
126 Berkeley. 
 
 As Swift had predicted, his conquests spread far and 
 fast in England. Nothing shows more the magic of 
 Berkeley's presence and influence than the history of 
 this reception in London. The scheme met with en- 
 couragement from all sorts of people, in a generation 
 represented by Sir Kobert Walpole. The subscriptions 
 soon reached £5000, and the list included Sir Eobert 
 Walpole himself. The members of the Scriblerus Club 
 being met at Lord Bathurst's house at dinner, they agreed 
 to rally Berkeley, who was also his guest, on his Ber- 
 muda scheme. Having listened to the many lively 
 things the party had to say, he begged to be heard in 
 his turn, and " displayed his plan with such an astonish- 
 ing and amazing force of eloquence and enthusiasm that 
 they were struck dumb, and after some pause, rose all 
 up together, with earnestness exclaiming, 'Let us set 
 out with him immediately.' " 1 Bermuda was the fashion 
 among the wits of London, and Bolingbroke wrote to 
 Swift that he would "gladly exchange Europe for its 
 charms, only not in a missionary capacity." 
 
 Berkeley was not satisfied with subscriptions, and 
 remembered what Lord Percival had said about the 
 protection and aid of Government. He interceded with 
 George the First, and obtained royal encouragement to 
 hope for a grant of £20,000, to endow the Bermuda 
 College, out of the purchase money of St Christopher, 
 given to England by the Treaty of Utrecht. He can- 
 vassed every member of both Houses. The vote was 
 carried in the House of Commons with only two dis- 
 sentient voices, in May 1726. "Walpole, while he did 
 not oppose, hoped that the bill would be thrown out, 
 1 Warton's ' Essay on Pope,' vol. ii. p. 254. 
 
A London Lion. 127 
 
 and secretly resolved that it should come to nothing in 
 the end. For the four years which followed September 
 1724, Berkeley lived in London, negotiating and other- 
 wise forwarding this enterprise of social idealism. Lon- 
 don was his home now for the third time. It was in 
 these years that he used to attend the Court of Caro- 
 line, at Leicester Fields, when she was Princess of 
 Wales ; and afterwards at St James's, or at Kensington, 
 when in 1727 she became the Queen-Consort of George 
 the Second — not, he says, because he loved Courts, but 
 because he loved America. Clarke was still in London, 
 but Butler had gone into the seclusion of his Stanhope 
 rectory. Voltaire, then unknown to fame, was on a 
 visit to England, and mentions that he met "the dis- 
 coverer of the true theory of vision," when he was in 
 London in 1726. The Queen, as all know, was fond 
 of theological and philosophical discussion. Ten years 
 before, when Princess of Wales, she had been a royal 
 go-between in the famous philosophical correspondence 
 between Clarke and Leibnitz. And now, with Berkeley 
 in London, she was glad to include him along with 
 Clarke, Sherlock, and Hoaclley at her weekly reunions, 
 and to hear Lloadley supporting Clarke, and Sherlock 
 arguing for Berkeley. " He was idolised in England 
 before he set off for America. He used to go to St 
 James's two days a-week to dispute with Dr Samuel 
 Clarke before Queen Caroline, then Princess of Wales, 
 and had a magnificent gold medal presented to him by 
 George the Second ; but he complained of the drudgery 
 of taking part in these useless disputes." 1 
 
 1 Preface to the ' Literary Kelics of George Monck Berkeley ' 
 (1789). 
 
128 Berkeley. 
 
 At last his patience was rewarded. In September 
 1728 we all of a sudden find him at Greenwich, newly 
 married too, and about to sail for Ehode Island, on his 
 "mission of godlike benevolence." "To-morrow," he 
 writes on the 3d of September to Lord Percival, " we 
 sail down the river. Mr James and Mr Dalton go with 
 me ; so doth my wife, a daughter of the late Chief- 
 Justice Forster, whom I married since I saw your lord- 
 ship. I chose her for her qualities of mind, and her 
 unaffected inclination to books. She goes with great 
 thankfulness, to live a plain farmer's life, and wear stuff 
 of her own spinning. I have presented her with a 
 spinning-wheel. Her fortune was .£2000 originally, but 
 travelling and exchange have reduced it to less than 
 .£1500 English money. I have placed that, and about 
 <£600 of my own, in South Sea annuities." We are 
 told that the young wife was disposed to mystical 
 quietism, and that Fenelon and Madame Guyon were 
 her favourite characters. 
 
 Berkeley was in his forty-fourth year, when, in deep 
 devotion to his Ideal, and full of glowing visions of a 
 Fifth Empire in the West, he sailed for Ehode Island 
 as the pioneer of the enterprise, with the promise of Sir 
 Eobert Walpole that the parliamentary grant should be 
 paid as soon as he had made the necessary investments. 
 He bought land in America, and lived there for nearly 
 three years, but he never saw the Islands that had 
 touched his imagination. 
 
129 
 
 CHAPTEE III. 
 
 RECLUSE LIFE IX RHODE ISLAND. 
 
 Towards the end of January in 1729, the "hired ship of 
 250 tons," in which Berkeley and his party sailed from 
 the Thames, appeared in the Narragansett waters, on the 
 western shore of Ehode Island, and landed them in the 
 harbour at Newport. They had touched at Virginia on 
 their way, where he "received many honours from the 
 governor and the principal inhabitants," after they had 
 been, he writes, 1 "a long time blundering about the ocean." 
 The 'New England Courier' of the day gives this 
 picture of the disembarkation at Newport : " Yesterday 
 arrived here Dean Berkeley of Londonderry. He is a 
 gentleman of middle stature, of an agreeable, pleasant, 
 and erect aspect. He was ushered into the towm with 
 a great number of gentlemen, to whom he behaved 
 himself after a very complaisant manner." Writing to 
 Percival a few days after his arrival, he says he was 
 "never more agreeably surprised than at the sight of 
 the town and harbour of Newport. There is a more 
 probable prospect of doing good here than in any other 
 part of the world ; were it in my power I should not 
 
 1 February 7, 1729- Percival MSS. 
 P. — III. I 
 
130 Berkeley. 
 
 demur about situating our college here. But no step 
 can be taken herein without the consent of the Crown." 
 Around him at Newport was some of the softest rural 
 and grandest ocean scenery in the world, which had 
 fresh charms even for one whose childhood was spent 
 in the vale of the Nore, who was familiar with rural 
 England, had lingered at Naples and at Ischia, and wan- 
 dered among the mountains of Sicily. 
 
 The island in which Berkeley found himself on that 
 January day is about fifteen miles long and four or five 
 broad. It was his home during three years of waiting 
 for the fulfilment of the promise on the faith of which 
 he left England. It is about seventy miles from Boston, 
 and also about seventy miles from ISTewhaven and Yale 
 College. The Indians called it the Isle of Peace. A 
 ridge of hills crosses the centre, from which pleasant 
 meadows slope to a rocky shore. The air is balmy, 
 with gorgeous sunsets in summer and autumn, and the 
 Gulf Stream tempers the surrounding seas. It con- 
 tained about 15,000 inhabitants, including about 1500 
 negro slaves. The climate attracted visitors from the 
 mainland and from the West Indies ; while the toler- 
 ation which reigned within the little society made it 
 then in America what Holland had long been in Europe. 
 The people, he writes, 1 "are industrious, and though less 
 orthodox have not less virtue, and I am sure they have 
 more regularity than those I left in Europe. They are 
 indeed a strange medley of different persuasions, which 
 nevertheless do all agree in one point, — that the Church 
 of England is the second best." The Rhode Island 
 gentry of that day preserved the customs of the squires 
 i March 28, 1729— Percival MSS, 
 
A Rural Home. 131 
 
 in the old country, from whom they were descended ; 
 for tradition speaks of a cheerful society. The fox-chase 
 with hounds and horns, as well as fishing and fowling, 
 wore favourite sports in Narragansett. 
 
 In the summer after his arrival, Berkeley and his 
 wife moved from Newport to a sequestered valley in the 
 interior of the island, where he bought a farm and "built 
 a house. He named this island -home Whitehall, in 
 loyal remembrance of the palace of the monarchs of 
 England. Here he began domestic life, and became the 
 father of a family. The house may still be seen near a hill 
 which commands a wide view of land and ocean. The 
 neighbouring groves, and the rocks that skirt the coast, 
 offered the shade and silence and solitude that soothed 
 him in his recluse life. The friends with whom he had 
 crossed the ocean went to stay in Boston, but no solicita- 
 tions could withdraw him from the quiet of his island- 
 home. " After my long fatigue of business," he wrote to 
 Lord Percival, 1 "this retirement is very agreeable to me; 
 and my wife loves a country life and books, as well as 
 to pass her time continually and cheerfully without any 
 other conversation than her husband and the dead." 
 Till now he had lived in Trinity College, or in hired 
 apartments in London and in Italy. At Whitehall he 
 was better placed for meditative work than since he first 
 left Dublin in 1713, and he had one to share his life 
 whose sympathy was with mystic quietism and Fenelon. 
 
 Though Berkeley loved the peace of this rural home, 
 
 and the " still air of delightful studies," he mixed in the 
 
 society of Newport, with its lawyers, physicians, and 
 
 enterprising merchants, some of whom had been trained 
 
 1 March 29, 1730— Percival MSS. 
 
132 Berkeley. 
 
 in the universities of Europe. He helped to form a 
 philosophical reunion there, and found persons who 
 could understand how his new conception of outward 
 things implied no distrust of the eyes and hands, nor 
 disregard of common-sense in the conduct of life. 
 
 He appears in Ehode Island as an ingenious student 
 more than as the aggressive leader, resolved upon the 
 success of an apostolic mission. TTe find him much 
 among his books, often at a favourite retreat below a 
 projecting rock which commanded a view of the beach 
 and the ocean — seldom out of the island-home, to no 
 extent a traveller on the continent of America, gather- 
 ing experience and organising plans. The "eloquence 
 and enthusiasm " which years before carried away Lord 
 Bathurst and his friends, seem diverted now from out- 
 ward action to meditation on the philosophical founda- 
 tions of theology, but always with moral and human 
 ends in view. This sort of life was probably, after all, 
 more according to his disposition. 
 
 From the first he had so planned his enterprise that 
 it was at the mercy of Sir Eobert "Walpole. The pros- 
 pects, which were doubtful when he left England, 
 darkened even to his sanguine eyes after he reached 
 Ehode Island, which he soon began to prefer even to 
 Bermuda for his college. " The truth is," he told Lord 
 Percival in the June after he landed, 1 " I am not in my 
 own power, not being at liberty to act without the con- 
 currence as well of the Ministry as of my associates. 
 I cannot therefore place the college where I please \ and 
 though on some accounts I did, and do still think, it 
 would more probably be attended with success if placed 
 i Percival MSS. 
 
Disappointment. 133 
 
 here rather than in Bermuda, yet if the Government 
 and those engaged with me should persist in the old 
 scheme, I am ready to go thither, and will do so as 
 soon as I hear the money is received and my associates 
 arrived. Before I left England I was reduced to a diffi- 
 cult situation. Had I continued there, the report would 
 have obtained (which I had found beginning to spread) 
 that I had dropped the design, after it had cost me and 
 my friends so much trouble and expense. On the other 
 hand, if I had taken leave of my friends, even those 
 who assisted and approved my undertaking would have 
 condemned my living abroad before the king's bounty 
 was received. This obliged me to come away in the 
 private manner that I did, and to run the risk of a tedi- 
 ous winter voyage. Xothing less could have convinced 
 the world that I was in earnest." " I wait here," he 
 writes to him a year later, " with all the anxiety that 
 attends suspense, until I know what I can depend upon, 
 and what course I am to take. I must own the disap- 
 pointments I have met with have really touched me, not 
 without much affecting my health and spirits. If the 
 founding of a college for the spread of religion and 
 learning in America had been a foolish project, it can- 
 not be supposed the Court, the Ministers, and the Par- 
 liament could have given such encouragement to it ; and 
 if, after all that encouragement, they also engaged to 
 endow and protect it lest it drop, the disappointment 
 indeed may be to me, but the censure, I think, will 
 light elsewhere." 
 
 He had embarked to realise a beautiful vision, but by 
 means which hardly commend themselves to ordinary 
 men of the world, who coidd see only "a foolish pro- 
 
134 Berkeley. 
 
 ject" in making, on the one hand, islands like the 
 Bermudas, six hundred miles out in the Atlantic, or, 
 on the other hand, Ehode Island, far from the chief 
 Indian population, the basis of operations for the Chris- 
 tian civilisation of America. The crisis of the enter- 
 prise at last came. Sir Eobert Walpole had never en- 
 tered into it. What must have seemed to him knight- 
 errantry was not embraced in his scheme of policy. The 
 presence in London of the enthusiastic leader of the 
 expedition, four years before, had carried the grant 
 through the House of Commons. But the ardent mis- 
 sionary, with his action misconceived, was now a studi- 
 ous recluse at Whitehall. " If you put the question to 
 me as a Minister," Walpole at last said, early in 1730, 
 " I must and can assure you that the money shall most 
 undoubtedly be paid — as soon as suits with public con- 
 venience ; but if you ask me as a friend whether Dean 
 Berkeley should continue in America, expecting the 
 payment of .£20,000, I advise him by all means to re- 
 turn to Europe, and to give up his present expecta- 
 tions." " I do not wonder at your disappointment^' 
 Lord Percival said, 1 in making this known to him. " The 
 design was too great and good to be accomplished in an 
 age when men lov e darkness better than the light, and 
 where nothing is considered but with a political view. 
 A very great lord asked me the other day whether I 
 thought the Indians could not be saved as well as we ; 
 and whether I had considered that learning tended to 
 make the plantations independent of their mother coun- 
 try ; adding that the ignorance of the Indians, and the 
 variety of sects, was our best security. He was even 
 1 December 23, 1730— Percival MSS. 
 
Samuel Johnson. 135 
 
 sorry that Ave had a university in Dublin ; and yet this 
 Lord is the ornament of the nobility for learning and 
 sobriety, but he reduced all to policy." 
 
 Berkeley's life in Rhode Island was the beginning of 
 his return to study and philosophy. Those of his re- 
 maining letters which are of most philosophic interest 
 were written there ; and his ' Alciphron,' was prepared 
 in the library at Whitehall, or in a natural alcove under 
 the Hanging Rocks near the shore. 
 
 Soon after the arrival at Newport, he was visited by 
 Samuel Johnson, the Episcopal missionary at Stratford, 
 one of the most acute and learned men then to be found 
 in America. 1 Johnson had already made some ac- 
 quaintance with Berkeley's writings on vision and on the 
 material world, and was well-disposed to the theory that 
 sight is foresight, and even that esse is perciiii. Inter- 
 course with their author by visits and correspondence 
 confirmed this disposition. Explanations and vindica- 
 tions of the new philosophical theory were proposed in 
 letters to him from "Whitehall. Johnson became an 
 ardent convert, who illustrated and applied to theology, 
 in his own 'Elementa Philosophica,' twenty years after- 
 wards, the lessons he then learned. This intercourse 
 with one whom he describes as "a man of parts and a 
 philosophic genius," was one of Berkeley's chief pleasures 
 in his studious seclusion. 
 
 1 Johnson was afterwards president of King's College in New York. 
 He died in 1772. A short account of him, by Dr Chandler, was 
 published in 1824. We have now the large volume of his 'Life and 
 Correspondence,' by the Rev. Dr Beardsley (New York, 1874), which 
 contains an interesting chapter on Berkeley, and some additional 
 letters from his correspondence with Johnson. 
 
136 Berkeley. 
 
 These Whitehall letters contain some interesting eluci- 
 dations of what Berkeley thought about the hyper-phe- 
 nomenal realities symbolised in the phenomenal things 
 of sense ; also about space and time, abstract ideas, and 
 the true meaning of causation. The following sentences 
 in one of them point towards objective idealism : — 
 
 " I have no objections against calling the Ideas in the mind 
 of God archetypes of ours. But I object against those arche- 
 types by philosophers supposed to be real things, and to have 
 an absolute rational or intelligible existence distinct from 
 their being perceived (or conceived) by any mind whatso- 
 ever ; it being the opinion of all materialists that an ideal 
 existence in the divine mind is one thing, and the real exist- 
 ence of material things another." 
 
 His view of Avhat space and time mean is presented 
 in some new lights in the sentences which follow : — 
 
 " As to space, I have no notion of any but that which is 
 relative. . . . Sir Isaac Newton supposeth an absolute space 
 distinct from relative, and consequent thereto absolute motion 
 distinct from relative motion ; and with all other mathema- 
 ticians he supposeth the infinite divisibility of the finite 
 parts of this absolute space : he also supposeth material 
 bodies to drift therein. ... I cannot agree with him in 
 these particulars. I make no scruple to use the word space 
 as Avell as all other words in common use ; but I do not 
 mean thereby a distinct absolute being. . . . By to vvv 
 I suppose to be implied that all things past and to come are 
 present to the mind of God, and that there is in Him no 
 change, variation, or succession of time. A succession of 
 ideas I take to constitute time, and not to be only the sens- 
 ible measure thereof, as Mr Locke and others think. But in 
 these matters every one is to think for himself, and speak 
 as he finds. One of my earliest inquiries was about Time, 
 which led me into several paradoxes that I did not think fit 
 
Metaphysical Letters. 
 
 137 
 
 or necessary to publish, particularly into tlie notion that the 
 resurrection follows next moment to death. We are con- 
 founded and perplexed about time (a) supposing a succession 
 in God, (b) conceiving that we have an abstract idea of time, 
 (c) supposing that time in one mind is to be measured by 
 succession of ideas in another, (d) not considering the true 
 end and use of words, which as often terminate in the will as 
 in the understanding, being employed rather to excite influ- 
 ence and divert action than to produce clear and distinct ideas." 
 
 Here are some sentences on abstractions : — 
 
 " Abstract general ideas was a notion that Mr Locke held 
 in common with the schoolmen, and, I think, all other phil- 
 osophers. It runs through his whole book of Human Un- 
 derstanding. He holds an abstract idea of existence, exclu- 
 sive of perceiving and being perceived. I cannot find I have 
 any such idea, and this is my reason against it. ... I think 
 it might prevent a good deal of obscurity and confusion to 
 examine well what 1 have said about abstraction, and about 
 the true use and significancy of words, in several parts of 
 these things that I have published, though much remains to 
 be said on that subject. You say you agree with me that 
 there is nothing within your mind [i.e., knowable] but God 
 and other spirits, with the attributes or properties belonging 
 to them ; and the ideas contained in them [i.e., the pheno- 
 menal things present to them]. This is a principle from 
 which, and from what I have laid down about abstract ideas, 
 much may be deduced." 
 
 What follows on causality is important : — 
 
 " Mechanical philosophy does not assign any one natural 
 efficient cause, in the proper sense of causality ; nor is it, as 
 to its use, concerned at all about [substantial or hyper-phe- 
 nomenal] Matter. . . . Cause is taken in different senses. 
 A proper, active, efficient cause I can conceive none but 
 Spirit ; nor action but where there is Will. But this doth 
 not hinder the allowing occasional causes [caused or pheno- 
 
138 Berkeley. 
 
 menal causes], which are in truth but signs; and more is 
 not requisite in the best physics. Neither doth it hinder 
 the admitting other [free or uncaused and unphenomenal] 
 causes besides God ; such as [finite] spirits of different 
 orders, which may be termed active causes, as acting indeed, 
 though by limited and derivative powers. As for an un- 
 thinking agent, no point of physics is explained by it, nor 
 is it conceivable. That the divine conservation of sensible 
 things is the same thing with a continued creation was a 
 common opinion of the schoolmen and others. . . . The 
 very poets teach a doctrine not unlike the schools — mens 
 agitat molem. The Stoics and Platonists are full of the same 
 notion. I am not therefore singular in this point itself so 
 much as in my way of proving it. . . . As to guilt, it is the 
 same thing whether I kill a man with my hands or by an 
 instrument. The imputation, therefore, upon the sanctity 
 of God, is equally, whether we suppose our sensations [i.e., 
 phenomenal things] to be produced immediately by God, or 
 by the mediation of subordinate [i. e., phenomenal] causes, 
 which are all His creatures and moved by His laws. This 
 theological consideration is beside the question ; for such I 
 hold all points to be which bear equally hard on both sides 
 of it. Difficulties about the principle of moral actions will 
 cease if we consider that all guilt is in the [causal — i.e., 
 free] will, and that our ideas [i.e., the phenomena of which 
 we are percipient in the senses], from whatever cause they 
 are produced [i.e., whether it be God or unphenomenal Mat- 
 ter], are alike inert." x 
 
 New England at this time possessed, in Jonathan 
 Edwards, the most subtle metaphysical reasoner that 
 
 1 This consists with the faith that unphenomenal or free causation 
 is given to us in our moral consciousness of our own spiritual in- 
 dividuality and responsible agency. As nothing analogous to this 
 is found in sense, or representable in imagination, phenomenal caus- 
 ation only (which properly is not causation at all) is discoverable in 
 the world of sense. 
 
Jonathan Edwards. 
 
 139 
 
 America has ever produced. Edwards represents the 
 genius of Puritan religion in the highest sphere of ab- 
 stract thought, as Bunyan and Milton represent it in the 
 world of creative imagination. Though he does not name 
 Berkeley, his writings show that he adopted his con- 
 ception of the material world and its laws. This famous 
 Calvinistic thinker was one of Johnson's pupils at Yale 
 College, or living a life of devout meditation on the 
 bank of the Hudson river, when Berkeley was in Bhode 
 Island. Edwards's ' Freedom of the Will ' did not 
 appear till 1754. It is in earlier writings that his 
 metaphysical conclusions about matter are to be found. 
 The "universal necessity" of Edwards was foreign to 
 the thought of Berkeley, whose recognition of moral, 
 and therefore independent, agency and power in finite 
 spirits, saved him from conclusions avowed by Spi- 
 noza, and logically implied by Malebranche and by the 
 American Puritan. Edwards, however, defended the 
 conclusion that the objects of our sensuous perceptions 
 can have no actual and intelligible existence abstract- 
 ed from the sense - experience of a spirit. He also 
 argued that, although the phenomena of which things 
 consist, and the laws that regulate these phenomena, are 
 not originated by men, but by a power external to all 
 human minds — that power cannot be a mindless sub- 
 stance, but must be the reason and will of God. The 
 phenomena of sense are thus signs of thoughts, which 
 are communicated to finite minds by God's will, in 
 whom things move and have their being and consist. 
 The world is a phenomenal one; but the laws of the 
 coexistence and the succession of its phenomena are 
 steady and rational. To suppose the universe exist- 
 
140 Berkeley. 
 
 ing in this way does not, Edwards sees, in the least 
 affect the stability of physical science. The vulgar 
 objection of the want of persistence in sensible things, 
 on the immaterialist hypothesis as to what is meant by 
 their "reality," he answers in an ingenious manner, 
 showing his belief in their want of independent sub- 
 stance and power. The " substance " of bodies, when 
 the word is so applied at all, with him only means 
 " the infinitely exact and precise divine Idea, together 
 with an unwaverable, perfectly exact, precise, and stable 
 Will, with respect to corresponding communications to 
 created minds, and effects on their minds." The objec- 
 tion that all this contradicts " common-sense " he en- 
 counters by showing the absurdity of the common 
 opinion, that we can perceive distant things, and by 
 contrasting our visual with our tactual perceptions. 
 Withdraw from anything its colour, and other second- 
 ary, which, by consent of all, are sense-dependent quali- 
 ties; think of them as a person born blind must do. 
 All we can then be conscious of is a blind feeling of 
 resistance. Every one who reflects must therefore allow 
 that bodies are at any rate very different from what they 
 are supposed to be, in the assumptions of ordinary 
 unreflecting common-sense. It is thus that Edwards 
 paves the way to his general conclusions — that the 
 only substance in the universe is and must be spirit- 
 ual, in which he coincides with Berkeley ; and that the 
 only causes in existence, "bodily or spiritual," must 
 themselves be effects or caused causes, in which he fun- 
 damentally differs from Berkeley. Whether Edwards 
 drew his thoughts from Berkeley's early writings at first 
 hand, or through Johnson, is uncertain ; but it is a fact 
 
American Empire. Ill 
 
 worthy of remembrance, that Berkeley's new thought 
 about things — though not about persons and personal 
 freedom — was also the thought of the most metaphysical 
 mind in America. 1 
 
 Berkeley, with his wife and their infant son, bade 
 farewell to America in the autumn of 1731. 2 They sailed 
 from Boston in October, and reached London in January. 
 
 Thus ended the romantic episode of Ehode Island, 
 which warms the heart and affects the imagination more 
 perhaps than any other incident even in Berkeley's life. 
 Of all who have ever landed on the American shore, none 
 was animated by a more unworldly spirit. The country 
 in which and for which he lived now acknowledges that 
 in his visit it was touched by the halo of an illustrious 
 reputation. His dream of future American Empire has 
 not been without its influence in promoting its own ful- 
 filment in these latter times. 
 
 " Westward the course of Empire takes its way ; 
 The four first Acts already past : 
 A fifth shall close the Drama with the day ; 
 Time's noblest offspring is the last." 
 
 1 I am glad to be able to refer, in confirmation of the statement in 
 the text, that Edwards was a Berkeley an — hazarded also in my 
 edition of Berkeley's Works — to the authority of the learned Pro- 
 fessor Fisher of Yale College, in his ' Discussions in History and 
 Theology ' (New York, 1880). This volume contains a valuable 
 essay on "The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards," pp. 227-252. 
 
 - An infant daughter died at Whitehall a few days before they 
 left it. 
 
14< 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 CONTEOVERSIAL AUTHORSHIP. 
 
 Berkeley lived for more than two years in London after 
 his return from America. This fifth and last time in 
 which he made London his home was marked by his 
 reappearance as a philosophical author, after the in- 
 effectual endeavour to realise a grand social ideal which 
 had consumed the ten best years of his life. So it hap- 
 pened that his restless middle age closed with contribu- 
 tions to the literature of philosophy, as his early life in 
 Ireland had done twenty years before. This fresh issue 
 of books bore traces of his surroundings at the time. 
 
 Indisposition to society and indifferent health were 
 now apparent. Even before he left Rhode Island there 
 were signs of a less buoyant spirit, and already, at the age 
 of forty-seven, of approaching old age. His constitution 
 was never very robust, burdened as it was by the eager 
 impetuous temperament. 
 
 The London to which he returned contained almost 
 none of those with whom he had been brought into con- 
 nection at the brilliant social gatherings of former years. 
 Samuel Clarke and his antagonist Anthony Collins 
 both died in the year in which Berkeley sailed from 
 
London. 143 
 
 the Thames. Swift had left London for ever, and 
 Steele had followed Addison to the grave. Gay, the 
 friend of Berkeley and Pope, died abont the time of 
 the return from America, and Arbuthnot was approach- 
 ing his end at Hampstead. Butler was buried in the 
 deep seclusion of his northern rectory at Stanhope, pon- 
 dering the thoughts which four years later found expres- 
 sion in the 'Analogy.' But Pope was still at Twicken- 
 ham, busy with his 'Essay on Man,' receiving visits 
 from Bolingbroke, or visiting Lord Bathurst at Ciren- 
 cester Park. Berkeley's instruction to his American 
 correspondent Samuel Johnson, to direct his letters "to 
 Lord Percival's, at his house in Pall Mall," shows con- 
 tinued intimacy with his early patron, who had been 
 his correspondent for a quarter of a century. Once or 
 twice, " in obedience to the Queen's command," he 
 attended as of old at Court, " to discourse with her 
 Majesty on what he had observed worthy of notice in 
 America." 
 
 The immediate occasion of this return to philosophical 
 authorship was the increase of scepticism about religion. 
 To vanquish the free-thinkers was, according to J. S. Mill, 
 "the leading purpose of Berkeley's career as a philoso- 
 pher." It would be nearer the truth to say that it was the 
 purpose of his authorship in middle life. The pervading 
 intellectual and moral outcome of his life as a whole was 
 — to awaken our common consciousness of the Eternal 
 Spirit or Eeason, concealed yet revealed in the sensuous 
 phantasmagoria — the true and deep reality, symbolised 
 by the phenomenal things of sense in their very consti- 
 tution. Instead of Eternal Spirit or Eeason, unintelli- 
 gible Matter and Force — blind or non-rational, and there- 
 
144 Berkeley. 
 
 fore, untrustworthy — was the only " God " he found in 
 the teaching of Toland and Collins, who arrogated to 
 themselves the honourable title of free-thinkers. With- 
 out explaining indeed what he means by atheism, he as- 
 sured himself that Collins was an " atheist ; " and also 
 that the selfish and sensuous utilitarianism of Mande- 
 ville, and even the sentimental ethics of Shaftesbury, 
 to both of which he had a strong dislike, were con- 
 sequences of concealed atheism. That the main cur- 
 rent of thought among the self-styled "free-thinkers" 
 of the time was a sort of materialistic fatalism, incon- 
 sistent with the supremacy of Eeason and Goodness in 
 the universe, he took for granted in the controversial 
 writings which belong to this period of his life. He 
 connected it, too,, with the contemptuous outcry against 
 theology, as based on faith in mere mysteries, which was 
 countenanced by some contemporary mathematicians and 
 natural philosophers. 
 
 The fervid impatience natural to Berkeley was apt to 
 blind him in some degree to the wide scope of the ques- 
 tions underlying the argumentative criticism of contem- 
 porary free-thinkers, though, in a great measure uncon- 
 sciously to themselves. For they gave currency, in a 
 popular fashion, to consequences of principles contained 
 in the then obscure and forgotten books of Spinoza j 1 and 
 to others that were afterwards involved in the searching 
 scepticism of Hume, and even in the later rationalism of 
 Germany. With his subject in clear outline, in a trans- 
 parent atmosphere of thought, at his own point of view, 
 there may be found in Berkeley's confident polemic, by 
 
 1 See Mr Frederick Pollock's masterly treatise on ' Spinoza : his 
 Life and Philosophy ' (1880), pp. 381-384. 
 
" Minute Philosophers" 145 
 
 those familiar with Spinoza and Hume, a want of that 
 large intellectual grasp which adequately comprehends 
 the speculative difficulties of an intellectual system of 
 the universe. There is along with this perhaps an in- 
 sufficient sense of its sublime and awful mystery ; and 
 it must be confessed that he now and then approaches 
 too near the tone of sectarian controversy. 
 
 He had been reading in Ehode Island what free- 
 thinkers in England were writing, and his repeated resi- 
 dences hi London had made him personally familiar with 
 theological sceptics. The result of the reading and the 
 personal intercourse, and of meditation upon both, ap- 
 peared in 'Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher,' writ- 
 ten in Ehode Island, and published soon after his arrival 
 in London. This is the largest, and was at the time of its 
 first appearance the most popular, of all .Berkeley's books. 
 It is a philosophical argument for religion, offered about 
 the time when, according to Bishop Butler, it had "come 
 to be taken for granted that Christianity is not so much 
 as a subject for inquiry, but that it is now at length dis- 
 covered to be fictitious; and nothing remained but to set 
 it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it 
 were by way of reprisals, for its having so long inter- 
 rupted the pleasures of the world." 1 Berkeley's polemic 
 is in the form of dialogues that are more fitted than any 
 in our language to enable the English reader to under- 
 stand the charm of Cicero and Plato. The " minute phi- 
 losophers " are the English free-thinkers ; the argument 
 is directed to restore theological beliefs, and, on grounds 
 of reason, to sustain faith in the divinity of that order 
 of which nature and physical law are the embodiment. 
 
 1 Butler's ' Analogy ' — Advertisement. 
 P. III. K 
 
146 Berkeley. 
 
 There is more appearance of learning in ' Alciphron ' 
 than in any of Berkeley's earlier works. Authorities, 
 ancient and modern, are frequently cited, with allu- 
 sions which imply greater familiarity than formerly with 
 literature, and a more extensive observation of life. The 
 appeals to the imagination in the way of rural pictures 
 are characteristic, and in some parts the dialogue has all 
 the charm and sentiment of a pastoral poem. Its artistic 
 features are due to its author's stay in Rhode Island, for 
 the pictures were suggested "by scenes around White- 
 hall; and the reader is thus often carried back to the 
 green vales and ocean shores, with winch the writer was 
 familiar in that Arcadia. 
 
 'Alciphron' consists of seven dialogues. The first 
 opens the discussion; in the second and third, ques- 
 tions of ethics are debated ; the fourth argues the per- 
 petual providence and supremacy of constantly creating 
 Mind in the very constitution of visible things, and the 
 existence of divine law in nature ; in the three last, the 
 spiritual and civilising advantages of religion, as well as 
 objections to it on account of its ultimate mysterious- 
 ness, are considered. Subtle intellect is employed in 
 defending a more generous morality against selfish ethical 
 theories, founded on organic pleasure and pain, like 
 Mandeville's ; or on enthusiastic sentiment like Shaftes- 
 bury's ; while the new thought about the sort of reality 
 that belongs to sensible things is applied in vindication 
 of theism, and to meet objections to the practical quick- 
 ening of theistic beliefs by the historical facts of Chris- 
 tianity. The utility — in the wide meaning of utility — 
 of virtue, and of faith in the continued life of moral 
 agents after the dissolution of the organism of the body; 
 
The Seven Dialogues. 147 
 
 the sufficiency of the evidence of religion for the de- 
 mands of practical reason ; with the inevitableness and 
 utility of the mysterious terms which symbolise religious 
 thought — are some of the questions raised for settlement. 
 
 Among the interlocutors Alciphron and Lysicles rep- 
 resent "minute philosophy," — the former in its more 
 intellectual and generous aspect; the latter as adopted 
 by shallow men of the world, who live for transitory 
 pleasures. Euphranor and Crito advocate morality and 
 religion ; Dion is mostly a spectator. 
 
 In the first dialogue the party try to find some com- 
 mon principles applicable to disputed questions in moral- 
 ity and religion ; and in the end Alciphron is made to 
 confess that all beliefs that are indispensable to the com- 
 mon weal are natural, and therefore true, rules for human 
 action. He had before tried to show that the only real 
 constituents of human nature, in which all men are prac- 
 tically agreed, are the pleasures and pains of the body ; 
 and that faith in a morality transcending sensuous phe- 
 nomena and their pleasures — faith in God or the suprem- 
 acy of moral government — and faith in the continued 
 life of moral agents after the death of the body, — have 
 been artificially produced and sustained, not being always 
 and originally acknowledged by men. Yet he has in 
 the end to allow that beliefs which may make no appear- 
 ance in early life, or which are not reached at all in the 
 experience of many men, may still be latent in the 
 constitution of man. It may in this way belong to our 
 original constitution that each of us should be obliged 
 to consider his own individuality as included in a social 
 whole — to the common good of which he is bound to 
 contribute, if he would live according to the genuine, 
 
1 48 Berkeley. 
 
 though it may be often the latent, nature of humanity. 
 So the question in the remaining dialogues resolves into 
 this : Have beliefs in the supremacy of the divine 
 order or physical Providence, and in the future life 
 of moral agents — which free-thinkers abandon — a ten- 
 dency to promote the highest good of men 1 Are they 
 in this respect in harmony with, and required for, the 
 satisfaction of human nature 1 
 
 ]\Iandeville's ' Fable of the Bees,' with its ambiguous 
 generalisation — "private vices, public benefits" — is the 
 particular object of criticism in the second dialogue; 
 and it is argued that there are ascertainable differences 
 in kind among the pleasures of which men are capable. 
 The moral theory of Shaftesbury is taken up by the 
 interlocutors in their next discussion, with its analogy 
 between conscience and taste, and its disparagement of 
 a faith in the future that is grounded on the present 
 inequality of rewards and punishments, as a faith apt to 
 minister to selfishness, and to foster an ignoble spirit. 
 The opposed argument is, that this enthusiastic morality 
 is unsuited to human nature, which needs a firmer mo- 
 tive than romantic sentiment, and has to be sustained by 
 an appeal to the complex elements of our constitution. 
 
 But Alciphron is not satisfied with evidence that 
 belief in God, and in divine realities deeper than sense, 
 is advantageous to society. That a belief is consolatory, 
 and that its decay introduces despair and misery, does 
 not show that it is true. The question that has really 
 to be met is this : Are we obliged, on grounds of reason, 
 to believe that God exists ; or do we even know what 
 we mean, when we affirm God's existence, and use this 
 mysterious name 1 The visual immaterialism of Berke- 
 
A Visible God. 149 
 
 ley is introduced to help the answer to this question. 
 Euphranor and Crito maintain that, as the visible world 
 can have no independent existence, being merely the phe- 
 nomenal expression of Intelligence and Will, we have in 
 its constitution or intelligibility the same hind of proof 
 that God exists that we have of the existence of a fellow- 
 man, when we watch phenomenal expressions of his 
 existence, in his calculated actions and reasonable speech. 
 This sort of theological knowledge, the argument further 
 urges, is not merely negative and analogical, as Arch- 
 bishop King and Bishop Browne, as well as the free- 
 thinkers, had maintained that all theological knowledge 
 must be. "We are not obliged to worship an unknown 
 and unknowable God ; for we see in visible phenomena 
 and phenomenal things the acting of intelligent Spirit, 
 similar to what we are conscious of in ourselves, and to 
 what we recognise through the mediation of sight in 
 our fellow-men. 
 
 The theological way of thinking about the universe 
 would thus be true free-thought, and a life correspond- 
 ing to it the ideal of human nature. Eeligious faith 
 would be the perfection of man — intellectual or philoso- 
 phical ; a corresponding practice would be the perfection 
 of man — seeking to realise his ideal of duty. 
 
 If Berkeley did not fully fathom the deep and complex 
 questions involved in this conclusion, his own argument 
 in these dialogues was a mystery to the free-thinkers 
 of his time. "'Alciphron' is hard to be understood," 
 Bolingbroke writes. " I propose, however, to reconcile 
 you to metaphysics by showing how they may be em- 
 ployed against metaphysicians ; and that whenever you 
 
150 
 
 Berkeley. 
 
 do not understand them nobody else does, — no, not even 
 those who wrote them." The book encountered a number 
 of ephemeral attacks in pamphlets in the course of 1732; 
 and its introduction of visual immaterialism into theo- 
 logical dialectic was a stumbling-block to many. 
 
 In September of that year the ' Daily Post-Boy ' con- 
 tained a letter full of objections to visual immaterialism. 
 Berkeley in consequence, a few months after, produced 
 'The Theory of Visual Language Vindicated and Ex- 
 plained.' In this important tract he unfolds more 
 fully the grounds for faith in supreme Beason and 
 intending "Will, as the only ultimate explanation of 
 the changes in phenomena and phenomenal things, 
 through which the hierarchy of finite spirits, all de- 
 pendent on the Supreme, maintain communion with 
 one another, and with the Spirit in whom they all 
 live and have their being. 
 
 Though Berkeley's explanation of the knowledge of 
 which Ave are conscious in sense had been published to 
 the world for more than twenty years, this short letter of 
 objections in the ' Post-Boy,' was the only published 
 criticism it had drawn forth. More imposing hostile 
 criticisms were now beginning to appear. "As to the 
 Bishop of Cork's book, and the other book you allude 
 to, the author whereof is Mr Baxter," he says in a letter 
 written about this time to his American friend Johnson, 
 " they are both very little read and considered here, for 
 which reason I have taken no public notice of them. 
 To answer objections already answered, and repeat the 
 same things, is a needless as well as a disagreeable task. 
 iSTor should I have taken notice of that letter about 
 Vision, had it not been printed in a newspaper, which 
 
Browne and Baxter. 151 
 
 gave it course, and spread it through the kingdom." — The 
 " Bishop of Cork " referred to was Browne, provost of 
 Trinity College in Berkeley's undergraduate days, whose 
 'Divine Analogy ' had appeared early in 1733. It con- 
 tains a dissertation on the nature and extent of our know- 
 ledge of God. This is chiefly in answer to the objec- 
 tions in ' Alciphron ' to human knowledge in matters 
 of theology being only analogical, there interpreted to 
 mean negative. Browne had formerly enlarged on the 
 incomprehensible difference between a human and the 
 divine mind. This seemed to make it impossible to 
 apply the term " mind " in the same meaning to both. 
 He concluded, accordingly, that it was as absurd to 
 attribute consciousness, intelligence, or goodness, in the 
 ordinary meaning, to Deity, as to suppose God pos- 
 sessed of hands or feet. This appeared to Berkeley to 
 differ little, except in words, from atheism, and to imply 
 logically that Deity, like Matter, is a meaningless word. 
 He argued that the only ground we have for believing 
 that God exists at all, also shows Him to be intelligent, 
 wise, and benevolent, in the ordinary meaning of those 
 words. Otherwise the name God is merely an equiva- 
 lent for x, and its empty meaning may be left out of 
 account in dealing with human affairs. — The " Baxter " 
 mentioned in the letter to Johnson was a Scotchman, 1 
 who had published a year or two before an ' Inquiry 
 into the Nature of the Human Soul,' which contained 
 a chapter on " Dean Berkeley's scheme against the 
 existence of a material world," and professed to prove 
 its inconclusiveness. Baxter treats Immaterialism as 
 
 1 Baxter was born in Old Aberdeen, about 1687, and died at West 
 Whittinghame, in East Lothian, in 1750. 
 
152 Berkeley. 
 
 scepticism, its advocate as one logically obliged to be a 
 sceptic, and his new theory as "a complication of all 
 the varieties of scepticism that had ever been broached.' 1 
 To make this out he has to play on the ambiguous 'word 
 "idea;" to overlook the interpretable significance through 
 which alone Berkeley's sensuous phenomena become 
 phenomenal things, and sensations perceptions or ex- 
 pectations. Then, after confounding the " real ideas 
 of sense" with the subjective illusions of fancy, he is 
 easily able to show that a world of this sort cannot 
 be a world or cosmos at all, and that the new con- 
 ception of matter does not afford even the practical 
 knowledge needed for the regulation of life; while it 
 implies that the Supreme Power must be either non- 
 rational, or conscious of an intention to deceive. Bax- 
 ter's criticism is interesting now as evidence that the 
 Berkeleyan conception of an unsubstantial, impotent, 
 and only phenomenal material world, was beginning to 
 attract Scotch metaphysical intellect ; which soon after, 
 in the person of David Hume, became, through the in- 
 citement of the negative part of Berkeley's views, the 
 moving force of the modern revolution in European 
 thought. 
 
 In 1734 Berkeley got involved in what seemed 
 a mathematical controversy only. It was really one 
 form of the collision between faith and finite science. 
 His " Commonplace Book " shows that the metaphy- 
 sical principles which underlie mathematical reason- 
 ing had interested him at College. Throughout the 
 1 Treatise on Human Knowledge,' the tract on the 
 'Cause of Motion,' and the 'Minute Philosopher,' he 
 
MatJiematics and Theology. 153 
 
 maintained that the words " space " and " time " have 
 a positive and intelligible meaning only so far as their 
 meanings can be traced to phenomena, and that absolute 
 space is the mere negation of sense consciousness. So 
 Baxter argued that, to be consistent with himself, Berke- 
 ley was logically bound " to suspect that even mathema- 
 tics may not be very sound knowledge at the bottom." 
 It happened that during these London years of renewed 
 philosophical authorship, his attention was drawn to a 
 ground for scepticism about religion which some mathe- 
 maticians thought they had found in theological mysteries, 
 and in the want of a logical justification for the principles 
 of theology. "We find him telling his friend Tom 
 Prior, in January, that though his "health then hindered 
 reading," he could " think as well as ever ; " and that 
 "for amusement" he "passed his early horns in certain 
 mathematical matters which might possibly produce 
 something." The issue was the 'Analyst,' which ap- 
 peared early in 1734. This little book caused a con- 
 troversy in which Jurin, Pemberton, Benjamin Bobins, 
 Colin M'Laurin, Walton, and other distinguished mathe- 
 maticians took part, and which left its mark in English 
 mathematics and theology in last century. 
 
 The 'Analyst,' in its philosophical design, was an 
 ingenious example of the argumentum ad liominem. Its 
 argument is that even boasted mathematical science 
 cannot logically justify its own fundamental axioms; 
 and that its covert assumptions and conclusions are 
 as inexplicable as those of the theologian. Hence re- 
 ligious thought is really in no worse position than this 
 most exact and certain of the external sciences. Some 
 of the reasoning resembles that brought forward in the 
 
154 Berkeley. 
 
 seventh dialogue of ' Alciphron,' where it is argued 
 that some words have another office than that of sug- 
 gesting phenomena in the imagination, and that they 
 are connected with unimaginable meanings. Yet these 
 words may legitimately influence our feelings and actions. 
 As a Kantist might say, they belong to the sphere of the 
 practical reason, operative in the region of transcendent 
 truth. For Berkeley here implies that, at the root of 
 our positive or phenomenal knowledge of the universe, 
 there are practical principles which cannot be resolved 
 into imaginable meaning, and which it is unreasonable 
 to insist on translating into impressions of sense, or 
 corresponding pictures of imagination. Here, too, re- 
 ligion and science would be on the same footing. 
 "Force," for instance, is as incomprehensible a word 
 in natural philosophy as "grace" is in theology; yet 
 each is useful, for each has a practical, though not an 
 imaginable meaning. The case is similar with the 
 mathematical infinite. Mathematicians cannot translate 
 into consistent imaginable meanings some of then own 
 conclusions about fluxions. If religion is rooted in 
 mysteries and apparent contradictions, so, too, is the 
 venerable science of number and space. Modern ana- 
 lysts, in their vaunted discoveries, proceed upon what 
 is unrealisable in imagination; and they have there- 
 fore no right to reject theology, merely because reasoners 
 about religion make a demand on faith similar to what 
 they do themselves. The argument ultimately comes to 
 this, that all human knowledge — mathematical or the- 
 ological — whether about nature and its quantitative re- 
 lations in space, or about God — must merge at last into 
 mysterious common convictions, which have a bearing 
 
The Quantitative Infinite. 155 
 
 indeed on life and action, but which cannot be trans- 
 lated into ideas of the imagination, or freed from an 
 appearance of self-contradiction. 
 
 This is, perhaps, the drift of Berkeley's argument, but 
 without a full recognition of it on his own part. His 
 inclination to push thought to the verge of paradox led 
 him, moreover, into less defensible positions than the 
 preceding, in the 'Analyst' controversy. He was not 
 satisfied to show the incomprehensibility of the prin- 
 ciples and reasonings of mathematicians about a quanti- 
 tative infinite in space and time ; he speaks as if their 
 science of fluxions involved what is absolutely self- 
 contradictory, and not merely what is relatively myste- 
 rious. That the highest philosophy might solve such 
 difficulties, by resolving "contradiction" into a higher 
 unity, was a thought foreign to Berkeley. 
 
156 
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 WHETHER GOD CAN BE SEEN, AND WHAT GOD IS. 
 
 The works produced by Berkeley in tins period of con- 
 troversial authorship showed a certain amount of change, 
 if not in his philosophical point of yiew, at any rate hi 
 the questions for which he was trying to find a philo- 
 sophical answer. The writings of his youth, which 
 issued from Trinity College, were meant to demonstrate 
 the unsubstantiality and impotence of the phenomenal 
 things of Sense, and the meaninglessness of the words 
 '•matter" and "force," abstracted from phenomena and 
 their implied perceptions. What he now wanted to 
 explain was — what is meant by God, to whose per- 
 sistence and power the persistence and power at- 
 tributed to the things we see and touch had been 
 referred by him. He was now more bent on proving 
 that the Supreme Pow T er is Spirit, and that the " shows 
 of sense " are truly the revelation of Spirit, than even ' 
 in arguing that the things of sense themselves depend 
 on perception. His little tract on the ' Cause of Mo- 
 tion' showed this tendency years before. 
 
 But a grave difficulty lay in his way. It is one apt 
 to perplex those who meditate deeply in philosophical 
 
Aii Unknowable God. 157 
 
 theology, though I am not sure that Berkeley yet saw, 
 or ever fully saw, its magnitude. It had been seen by 
 Spinoza ; it was afterwards seen, from very different 
 points, by Hume and by Kant. It rises in the form of 
 questions like these : Is the name " God," after all, 
 more intelligible than the unperceived and unperceiving 
 "matter "and "force," that Berkeley had dislodged on 
 account of their unintelligibleness 1 If the one can be 
 resolved into the residual x, must not the other 1 We 
 cannot see or touch unphenomenal matter; but have 
 we evidence, in sense or otherwise, for an unphenome- 
 nal Supreme Being'? If both Avords are meaningless, 
 what gain, or satisfaction to reason, is there in sub- 
 stituting one meaningless word for another meaningless 
 word, which, on account of its meaninglessness, had 
 been already dismissed 1 Are we not inviting material- 
 ists to worship an unknown and unknowable Go&l 
 AVe may apply the names "mind" and "spirit" to the 
 Being to which all is thus at last referred; but this 
 is presumptuously attributing to Supreme Being attri- 
 butes like those we find in our own self-conscious 
 personality. As Spinoza had said, "A triangle, if it 
 could speak, must in like manner say that its God is 
 triangular, or a circle that the divine nature is circular.' 
 Even the pious and practical Locke, in one of the last 
 sentences he ever wrote, to be found in a letter sent 
 from his deathbed to his young friend Anthony Collins, 
 confessed that he could not, " because of the common 
 name, equal the mind that he found in himself to the 
 infinite and incomprehensible Being, which, for want of 
 right and distinct conceptions, is called mind also, or the 
 Eternal Mind." 
 
158 Berkeley. 
 
 With an inadequate view of this difficulty, yet with 
 some apprehension that it must be met, Berkeley ex- 
 changed the question of his youth — How we find, and 
 what we are entitled to mean by, the material or sense- 
 given world? — into this question of his middle age — 
 How we find, and what we are entitled to mean by, the 
 Supreme Power, whose constant presence is signified 
 by the shows of sense 1 ? 
 
 The reader has already found that the juvenile rever- 
 sal of materialism, in the ' Treatise on Human Know- 
 ledge,' has a side on which it looks like universal scep- 
 ticism, or at least agnosticism. Sceptics, and agnostics 
 in theology, like Hume, have been very ready to detect 
 this. The argument which leads to the merely phe- 
 nomenal constitution of things has accordingly been 
 employed to prove the merely phenomenal constitution 
 of self, and the delusiveness of the personal pronouns 
 " I " and " you." Deny the persistence and independ- 
 ence of the phenomena we see and touch, and we must, 
 it then seems, also deny persistence and independence 
 altogether — which is to deny that anything exists, or 
 that the word existence has any meaning. 
 
 This universal denial was of course very far from 
 Berkeley's thought and intention. Like every other 
 believer in reality, he supposed persistence and power to 
 centre somewhere; he had no thought of treating as 
 transitory phenomena the individual persons, as well 
 as the sensible things, in the universe. He thought 
 that reason obliged him to banish permanence and 
 power only from the phenomena he saw and touched. 
 In the " common sense," as some philosophers call it, 
 in which we all consciously or unconsciously share 
 
Sense significant of Spirits. 159 
 
 (for in many this common sense or common faith 
 remains largely latent), he found evidence that the phe- 
 nomenal and ever-fluctuating world of the senses has for 
 one of its functions — if not for its chief end — to make 
 conscious beings aware of one another's existence; and for 
 another of its functions, to educate intellect through the 
 work of forming physical science. For the world of phe- 
 nomenal things, transitory, and dependent on the percep- 
 tions of a mind, has plainly this very remarkable charac- 
 teristic somehow attached to it, — that it is the medium 
 for intelligent communion among individual or separate 
 conscious beings. It enables them, as it were, to make 
 signals to one another. One phenomenon, too, is trusted 
 as the sign of others. Thus the data of sight suggest 
 data of touch; phenomena presented in any of our 
 senses may be interpreted into phenomena presentable 
 only in another ; and all may be read in the language 
 of vision. The phenomena of our five human senses 
 might, if our senses were as many as those of the Micro- 
 megas of Voltaire, become significant of numberless 
 aspects of existence that are now unimaginable by men. 
 But all this would be only a discovery of phenomenal 
 or caused causes. These so-called causes, Berkeley 
 would say, are not properly causes. Their very connec- 
 tion, under what we call laws of nature, is itself the 
 effect of the rational Cause or Power which the merely 
 phenomenal connections of natural science either conceal 
 or reveal. The remarkable characteristic of sensuous 
 phenomena and phenomenal things is, not merely that 
 they " suggest " other phenomena and other phenomenal 
 things, but that they, in a faith that is reasonable, 
 enable us to communicate with other finite persons, and 
 
160 Berkeley. 
 
 with the Universal Mind. Faith is latent in sense ; 
 reason is latent in faith. The faith on which we rest, 
 when we presuppose significance and interpretability 
 in the phenomena of sense, is nothing else than latent 
 reason ; and it is a further outcome of the same latent 
 reason that carries us on, through sense, above nature, 
 to the invisible reality. Is it consistent to trust the 
 lower faith — reason implied in suggestion, on which 
 scientific interpretations of nature as coexistent and 
 successive rest — and then to reject, because destitute 
 of logical proof, the deeper faith, still more begotten 
 of reason, on which theology reposes'? We all "live 
 by faith," even when we live in sense. 
 
 These noteworthy characteristics of what we see, touch, 
 hear, taste, or smell, are brought more fully into light 
 in the works that belong to this middle period of 
 Berkeley's life. But here, too, a want may be found, 
 which perhaps unconsciously led him on, a stage nearer 
 to intellectual Transcendentalism, as appeared when he 
 next gave his philosophic thought to the world, ten 
 years later. In the meantime, he made much of free 
 or uncaused causation, as the rational origin of the 
 phenomenal or caused causes which seem to precede 
 one another in time, in an endless orderly regress ; 
 and insisted that the former only are entitled to be 
 called causes.. As yet he used only the analogical ar- 
 gument of empiricism to escape from disbelief in the 
 Supreme Cause or Eeason; and from the meaningless- 
 ness, too, which he had argued was fatal to unphenom- 
 enal Matter. 
 
 The contrast in the following sentences between " ob- 
 jects," or phenomenal things — which can only be signs, 
 
Phenomenal Objects and Spiritual Power. 1G1 
 
 not real causes — and causation proper, which with 
 Berkeley transcends the successions of phenomena in 
 nature, illustrates the point to which his thought was 
 now approaching : — 
 
 " The objects [i.e., phenomena or impressions, either sever- 
 ally, or as aggregated in phenomenal things] of sense, being 
 tilings immediately perceived, are called ideas. The cause 
 of these ideas, or the power of producing them [i.e., the 
 origin of our sense impressions, and of external nature, of 
 which they are a part], is not the object of sense, not being 
 itself perceived [i.e., not being phenomenal], but only in- 
 ferred by reason from its effects — viz., from the objects or 
 ideas which are perceived by sense [i.e., which are pheno- 
 menal]. Hence it follows that the Power or Cause of ideas 
 [i.e., of sense phenomena, and their aggregates, which we 
 call individual things of sense] is not an object of Sense, 
 but of Reason. Whenever, therefore, the appellation of 
 sensible object, is used in a determined, intelligible sense [i.e., 
 one which can be realised in imagination], it is not em- 
 ployed to signify the absolutely existing outward Cause or 
 Power, but the ideas [sensuous phenomena or impressions, 
 and expectations of such] produced thereby. Ideas [sensuous 
 phenomena] which are observed to be connected together, 
 are vulgarly considered under the relation of cause and 
 effect, whereas in strict philosophic truth they are only 
 related as sign and the thing signified." 1 
 
 Physical sciences are all, of course, confined to the 
 phenomena and phenomenal things of sense, under the 
 arbitrary relation — not category — of " sign and thing 
 signified." They have nothing to do with the power 
 in which phenomenal things, and their established laws, 
 originate, and through which they receive rational ex- 
 planation. The " power " that thus exists without us, to 
 
 1 : Works/ vol. i. pp. 377, 378. 
 P. — III. L 
 
162 Berkeley. 
 
 which the ever-passing, but practically useful, phantas- 
 magoria of the sensible world are to be referred, is . con- 
 cerned with mind in its highest faculty — above the 
 operation involved in the expectations of sense, and 
 above the inductive generalisations of sciences which 
 deal with events in time. The sphere of merely physi- 
 cal causation (if we are to call it causation), while not 
 inconsistent with, is exclusive of the sphere of true 
 causation, which is efficient and finaL 
 
 " As to the outward [not immanent] Cause of these ideas 
 [i.e., of those sensuous phenomena or impressions, and the 
 phenomenal things which they compose, through their sig- 
 nificant and interpretable but arbitrary connections of coex- 
 istence and succession], whether it be one and the same, or 
 various and manifold ; whether it be thinking or unthink- 
 ing, spirit or body, or whatever else we conceive about it, — 
 the visible appearances [phenomenal things and their laws 
 which alone concern physical science] do not alter their 
 nature. Though I may have an erroneous notion of the 
 [unphenomenal and uncaused, final or efficient] Cause, and 
 though I may be utterly ignorant of its nature, yet this does 
 not hinder my making true and certain judgments about my 
 ideas [i.e., the phenomena given in the perceptions and antici- 
 pations of sense and science] ; — my knowing which of them 
 are [phenomenally] the same, and which different ; wherein 
 they agree, and wherein they disagree [phenomenally] ; which 
 are [phenomenally] connected together, and wherein this 
 connection consists ; whether it be founded in a likeness of 
 nature, in a geometrical necessity, or merely in experience 
 and custom." 1 
 
 Theological inferences, in short, are irrelevant to 
 natural science, which grows up out of "suggestions" 
 due — psychologically regarded, at least — to custom or 
 i ' Works,' vol. i. pp. 380, 381. 
 
An Analogical Argument. 163 
 
 past experience. Science, as concerned with what is 
 phenomenal only — that is to say, with orderly effects — 
 lias nothing to do with the uncaused and unpheno- 
 menal Power, on which the phenomenal order depends ; 
 for our perceptions by the senses, and our merely 
 scientific inferences from them, will be the very same, 
 however we determine about their transcendent Cause 
 or Beason. " Perhaps " — for " perhaps " is all Berkeley 
 ventures to say now — "I think that the same Being 
 which causes our ideas of sight [i.e., the things we see], 
 doth not only cause our ideas of touch likewise [i.e., 
 the things we touch], but also all our ideas of [i.e., 
 phenomena given in] all the other senses, with all the 
 varieties thereof" [i.e., phenomenal nature and its whole 
 constitution]. 1 
 
 So Berkeley's real world — in the deepest meaning of 
 " real " — was not found in the world of merely phenom- 
 enal things perceived in sense, or anticipated in sense. 
 The sensible world was for him only symbolic of a truer 
 reality, and that even though the phenomena of which 
 phenomena of sense are significant were to be as varied 
 in kind as those presented to " the little man of Saturn," 
 or to Micromegas himself. The true reality is the un- 
 phenomenal Power to which the whole is at last to be 
 referred. 
 
 Xow, what can we say, or can we say anything, 
 about this Power ] It is in treating this question that 
 Berkeley's analogical argument appears. 
 
 His way of putting it might be something like this : 
 We all acknowledge that we can, through the data of 
 the five senses, find human spirits, consciously living 
 » 'Works,' vol. i. p. 383. 
 
164 Berkeley. 
 
 and working outside of our own stream of conscious 
 life — the uncaused causes or creators of effects for 
 which they are responsible ; as we are ourselves respon- 
 sible for effects of which we therefore allow that we 
 are the free or responsible causes. By analogy, we 
 can equally find Spirit (objective reason, some might 
 call it) expressed in the interpretable phenomena of 
 vision, and indeed of perception generally, as well 
 as in all the discoveries of physical science. It 
 is true that we are dull, — imperfectly awake to the 
 perpetual presence of this pervading Spirit — and apt 
 to refer what is due to this to the secondary causes 
 presented to the senses — which are not causes at all, 
 but only signs of the coexistences and successions di- 
 vinely established within the physical cosmos. "What 
 is needed is that, through reflection, we should get our 
 otherwise dormant common sense, or common conscious- 
 ness, awakened to perceive the analogy. "We are all 
 practically alive to our intellectual obligation to inter- 
 pret the words and acts of other men, as signifying the 
 existence and operation of human spirits, with their 
 individual shares of real knowledge. The analogous 
 intellectual obligation to recognise Supreme Spirit, in 
 the sense symbolism or intelligibility of nature, is apt, 
 through obvious influences, not to be so much felt ; this 
 deeper constituent of the common sense needs, therefore, 
 to be drawn forth by much philosophical and religious 
 exercise. But when it is drawn forth, we find the in- 
 tuitive obligation to recognise that we daily " see God " 
 — in the same sense, at least, as we may be said daily 
 to see our fellow-men ; for even they, in strictness, can- 
 not be seen, although their bodies can. 
 
" We see God as ive see Men." 165 
 
 Nor, he might say, is this sight of God which we have 
 daily, the sight of an unknowable " something." We 
 find through inner experience what conscious life is, 
 though we have no sense-phenomenal knowledge of the 
 " I " or the " You." We can attribute this, can we not, 
 to God as well as to our fellow-men 1 Unphenomenal 
 Matter, on the contrary, is x or Abracadabra. So " God " 
 is more than a meaningless name — more than the Un- 
 knowable behind the sense symbolism of nature. God 
 means the eternally sustaining Spirit — the active con- 
 scious Eeason of the universe. Of God's existence we 
 have the same sort of proof as we have of the existence 
 of other conscious agents like ourselves, when we say 
 we " see " them. Of course we never see, and never 
 can see, another human spirit, even when his body, 
 as a phenomenal thing, is present to our senses ; we can 
 only perceive the visible and tangible appearances, behind 
 which reason obliges us to recognise an invisible indi- 
 vidual spirit, numerically different from our own. We 
 implicitly trust the phenomena of sense, when discharg- 
 ing their function of thus making us aware of the exist- 
 ence, and of some of the mental states, of other human 
 spirits like ourselves. We are apt to distrust their 
 exercise of an analogous office, in revealing to us the 
 thoughts of the Supreme Spirit that are embodied in 
 physical laws ; yet His presence is universal, and always 
 active, while finite spirits only act within a circumscribed 
 sphere, and at intervals. 
 
 Berkeley insists that it is the duty of the philo- 
 sopher to overcome this unreasonable distrust, and ar- 
 gues that faith in God is even more a necessity of 
 reason than the faith which is our rational assurance 
 
166 Berkeley. 
 
 of the real existence of the human spirits who are 
 signified by what we see. The spiritual world glimmers 
 through the visible, in the very fact of the visibility 
 of things, when read according to a theory of visual im- 
 materialism. Reason, begotten of faith, is then found 
 to be indeed latent in sense. 
 
 " ' Nothing,' said the sceptical Alciphron, 1 ' so much con- 
 vinces me of the existence of another person as his speaking 
 to me. It is my hearing you talk that, in strict and philoso- 
 phical truth, is to me the best argument for your being. 
 And this is a peculiar argument, inapplicable to your 
 purpose ; for you will not, I suppose, pretend that God 
 speaks to man in the same clear and sensible manner that 
 one man doth to another ? ' — ' That,' Euphranor replies, ' is 
 really, in truth, my opinon ; and it should be yours, too, if 
 you are consistent with yourself, and abide by your own 
 definition of language. ... In consequence of your own 
 sentiments and concessions, you have as much reason to 
 think the Universal Agent or God speaks to your eyes, as you 
 can have for thinking any particular person speaks to your 
 ears. You stare to find that God is not far from any one of 
 us, and that in Him we live, and move, and have our being. 
 You who in the beginning of this our conference thought it 
 strange that God [if He exists] should leave Himself without 
 a witness, do now think it strange that the witness should be 
 so full and clear.' — ' I must own I do,' Alciphron is made to 
 acknowledge. ' I never imagined it could be pretended that 
 we saw God with our fleshly eyes as plain as we see any 
 human person whatsoever, and that He daily speaks to our 
 senses in a manifest and clear dialect.' — ' This language of 
 vision,' Crito interposes, 'has a necessary connection with 
 knowledge, wisdom, and goodness. It is equivalent to a 
 constant creation, betokening an immediate act of power and 
 providence. The instantaneous production and reproduction 
 
 Works/ vol. ii. pp. 146, &c. 
 
What the Analogy Proves. 167 
 
 of so many phenomenal signs, combined, dissolved, trans- 
 posed, diversified, and adapted to such an endless variety of 
 purposes, ever shifting with the occasions suited to them, 
 doth set forth and testify the immediate [external or imma- 
 nent ?] operation of a Spirit or thinking Being. J " 
 
 But without a previous assumption of the perfec- 
 tion or infinity of God, this analogical reasoning, which 
 Berkeley so beautifully unfolds, can carry us only to an. 
 inadequate conclusion. It suggests that we are now 
 in the presence of a Power that operates according to 
 rules; but it contains no proof that the ordered phe- 
 nomenal changes will continue, in similar orderly co- 
 existences and successions ; still less that the Power is 
 trustworthy and perfect. Why may not our whole ex- 
 perience be due to the operation of a malignant con- 
 triver, who finds pleasure in our temporary delusions, 
 and through whose influence our common sense, or irre- 
 sistible faith in things, is only inherited deception 1 The 
 argument presupposes the trustworthiness of the Power 
 that is continually addressing us in the language of the 
 senses. This universal language itself can afford no 
 evidence of the continued veracity of the unknown 
 speaker, which is the main thing for us. Eternity, 
 omnipotence, perfect trustworthiness, and goodness, all 
 presuppose other grounds, either in faith or in reason, 
 than those expressed in the empirical argument from 
 analogy. Putting aside the evidence of spiritual con- 
 sciousness or moral experience, and regarding the ques- 
 tion with the eye of natural science, 1 the assumption 
 
 1 NaUiral and biological science, per se, is philosophically agnostic 
 — phenomena of sense, and faith in their necessary phenomenal 
 order, being its only data, while faith in what transcends this is put 
 
168 Berkeley. 
 
 involved in Berkeley's answer is a bold one. How 
 do we know that it is true 1 We have proved, by 
 this analogy of the universal language of natural law 
 with the languages of men, that — at present, and 
 through long past time — men have been in intercourse 
 through their senses with a calculating Being, aged 
 therefore, but destined, for all we can tell, soon to 
 die, powerful now, who has customary ways of acting, 
 and is perhaps kindly disposed; — but what of his 
 absolute trustworthiness? As far as this merely em- 
 pirical analogy goes, Hume was warranted in think- 
 ing that the theory of " the universal energy and 
 operation " of a divine or perfect Being was " too 
 bold ever to carry conviction with it to a man fully 
 apprised of the weakness of human reason, and the 
 narrow limits to which it is confined in all its opera- 
 tions. Though the chain of arguments which conducts 
 to it was ever so logical, there must arise a strong 
 suspicion that it has carried us beyond the reach of our 
 faculties. We are got into fairyland; and there we 
 have no reason to trust our common methods of argument, 
 or to think that our usual analogies have any authority. 
 Our line is too short to fathom such immense abysses." 
 
 An apprehension of this sort was at the bottom of the 
 fallacious attempt of Descartes to prove by argument 
 the validity of the faith which assures us of reality, 
 and that we awoke in a universe that is dependent 
 on a reliable Power. It was an expression of felt 
 need for evidence that we are not the sport of a 
 malignant Being, who finds pleasure in our illusions, 
 
 aside, as unscientific, which indeed it is, according to this conception 
 of science. 
 
Physical Analogy Inadequate. 169 
 
 — the need for evidence that conscious life may not, 
 instead of a "well ordered," turn out to be in the end 
 a deceptive dream. Berkeley had to go deeper than 
 mere empirical analogies could carry him, in order 
 to show the reasonableness of consoling trust in the 
 Power that it had been the governing thought of his 
 life to realise, as "not far from any one of us," for 
 " in Him Ave live, and move, and have our being." His 
 Liter thought, too, expressed more of the sense of infinity 
 being involved in the case : " Who by searching can 
 find out God 1 who can find out the Almighty unto 
 perfection 1 " We find him more in this mental attitude, 
 in the next and last appearance of his philosophical 
 thought about things. Eut we must first follow him 
 into a new scene. 
 
PART III.— 1734-53. 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 MEDICINE AND PHILOSOPHY AT CLOYNE. 
 
 In May 1734, Berkeley returned to Ireland. Except 
 occasional visits, he had been a wanderer for more than 
 twenty years. He returned to take possession of the 
 bishopric of Cloyne. That remote region was hencefor- 
 ward to be his home. The interest of the philosophic 
 Queen, and some regard to what was due to him after 
 the Bermuda disappointment, probably explains the 
 mystery of the unworldly idealist appearing in high 
 office in the Irish Church of the eighteenth century. 
 He thus resumed life in his native island, able to devote 
 his benevolent sympathies to the service of his country- 
 men, and his mind to contemplation and search for truth. 
 Berkeley spent eighteen years of almost unbroken 
 seclusion at Cloyne. The place itself suited an increas- 
 ing inclination for a meditative domestic life, which had 
 been fostered by his circumstances in America. The 
 eastern and northern part of the county of Cork formed 
 his diocese. It was bounded on the west by Cork har- 
 
A Meditative Retreat. 171 
 
 bour and the river Lee, and on the east by the beautiful 
 Mackwater and the mountains of Waterford ; the hills of 
 Limerick protected it on the north ; and the sea, which 
 was its southern boundary, approached within two miles 
 of his new home in the village of Cloyne. This is a 
 compact territory, apart from the great currents of life, 
 about twenty miles in length, and extending inwards 
 about twelve miles from the coast. The interior consists 
 of two nearly parallel limestone valleys, cultivated and 
 fertile, but bare of trees. In one of these stood the 
 cathedral, with the village, its round tower, and its 
 1500 inhabitants. What was then the bishop's resi- 
 dence may still be seen, screened from the road by 
 shrubs and trees, whilst its other sides look towards a 
 large garden, in which is a broad walk, Berkeley's favour- 
 ite resort for meditative purposes, once lined by hedges 
 of myrtles planted by his own hand. The name was 
 significant, as well as the place — for Cloyne, in its origi- 
 nal meaning, is a cave or place of retirement. 
 
 Here, before the summer of 1734 was ended, Berkeley 
 was settled, " continuing his studies with unabated at- 
 tention." Plato and Hooker, we find, were among his 
 constant companions. The Cloyne life seems soon to 
 have become a sedentary one, and with increasing ill- 
 health. Idealising his new home, he saw charms around 
 it not so obvious to the ordinary eye. Travelling was 
 now irksome to him, and he was as much removed as he 
 had been at Bhode Island from any who remained of 
 the men of thought and letters of his more social days. 
 Cork took the place of Newport, but Cork was twenty 
 miles from Cloyne, while Newport was only three from 
 Whitehall. His episcopal neighbour at Cork at first 
 
172 Berkeley. 
 
 was Dr Peter Browne, Provost at Trinity College a 
 quarter of a century before, and lately involved with him 
 in controversies of theological philosophy. The county 
 squires and their families, as we see in the allusions of 
 letters and diaries, supplied most of the society. Among 
 the neighbouring clergy, Isaac Gervais, one of the pre- 
 bendaries of Lismore, and afterwards Dean of Tuam, 
 was a frequent correspondent and visitor, who often en- 
 livened the episcopal residence by his wit. The annual 
 visits of Thomas Prior, and his steady correspondence, 
 maintained that early friendship to the end. Seeker, 
 the common friend of Berkeley and Butler, now Bishop 
 of Bristol, and Benson, the Bishop of Gloucester, whom 
 he had known in Italy, often exchanged letters with 
 him. 1 Cloyne was far from the life of courts, or colleges, 
 or the coffee-houses of London, and with the sound of 
 the melancholy ocean to interrupt its silence. Swift was 
 wearing out an unhappy old age, and Pope was almost 
 the sole survivor of the men of letters among whom he 
 had moved in other days. There are no remains of 
 Cloyne correspondence with Pope. We are told, indeed, 
 that its beauty was represented to the bard of Twicken- 
 ham by the imagination that in former days had repre- 
 sented Ischia, so that Pope had "almost determined to 
 make a visit to Ireland to see a place which his friend 
 had painted out to him with all the brilliancy of colour- 
 
 1 In a letter from Seeker, for instance, in February 1735, we 
 read : " Your friend Mr Pope is publishing small poems every now 
 and then, full of much wit, and not a little keenness. Our common 
 friend Dr Butler hath almost completed a set of speculations upon 
 the credibility of religion from its analogy to the constitution and 
 course of nature, which I believe in due time you will read with 
 pleasure." Butler's ' Analogy' appeared in the year after. 
 
Domestic Life at Cloyne. 173 
 
 ing, though to common eyes it presents nothing that is 
 very worthy of attention." 
 
 One finds almost no trace of impressions made by 
 Berkeley at Cloyne. An episcopal successor writes, that 
 "of Berkeley little is remembered." His ways were too 
 quiet to strike, and his thoughts were too subtle to be 
 appreciated by the squires and peasants of Imokilly. 
 The recluse thinker, of cosmopolitan aspirations, whose 
 thoughts were habitually in regions towards which it 
 was difficult to follow him, left no deep local mark. 
 
 The only interruption to this secluded domestic life 
 was in the autumn of 1737, when he went to Dublin for 
 some months to attend the Irish House of Lords. This 
 seems to have been the last year in which he went be- 
 yond the limits of the county of Cork till he left it to 
 return no more. Suffering in health, he lived year after 
 year happy in his home, devoted to books and to his 
 thoughts. The letters disclose pleasant pictures of the 
 family life, and his share in the education of his chil- 
 dren. Of his only daughter he writes : " So bright a 
 little gem ! were it only to prevent her doing mischief 
 among the illiterate squires, I am resolved to treat her 
 like a boy, and make her study eight hours a-day." The 
 love of art, as well as the love of truth, which was so 
 much shown in his youth, followed him into his con- 
 templative old age, and was encouraged among his chil- 
 dren. He had no ear for music himself, but music was 
 an enthusiasm in the family, and he retained the well- 
 known Signor Pasquilino for years to teach his chil- 
 dren. It was then that the Signor, who had been learn- 
 ing English from a dictionary, exclaimed in an outbreak 
 of gratitude, " ]\fay God %ric~kle your lordship ! " The 
 
174 Berkeley. 
 
 county neighbours were often invited into the palace for 
 concerts of music, or to enjoy pictures of the best French 
 and Italian masters. 
 
 The perennial "condition of Ireland question" at- 
 tracted him almost as soon as he was settled in Cloyne. 
 The South Sea disaster had first distinctly shown the 
 sympathy in social progress which was so much at the 
 bottom of his American mission. In the remote south 
 of Ireland he found a large population of native Irish 
 — a religious people, with strong ideas of race — and 
 settled among them a small society of English colonists 
 — aliens in race and religion. The aborigines, long ruled 
 in the interest of the. stranger, had become unable to rule 
 themselves. The self-reliance which, fifteen years before, 
 he had preached as the only " means for preventing the 
 ruin of Great Britain," was even more needed in Ireland, 
 where the gospel of self-supporting work was unknown, 
 and where the simplest maxims of economy * were un- 
 practised. The Protestant bishops were not then the 
 leaders in enterprises which aimed at the good of the 
 whole Irish nation, but Berkeley was never hindered 
 by ecclesiastical conventionality. Musing on the mis- 
 fortunes of Ireland, he rose from the special case to 
 scientific principles, and worked his way to much that 
 is true in economic science, forty years before Adam 
 Smith published the ' "Wealth of Nations,' and ten years 
 before David Hume produced his political essays. 
 
 The result, characteristically enough, appeared in the 
 form of a series of queries. The First Part of Berkeley's 
 'Querist' was published in Dublin, 1735. It was fol- 
 lowed by other two Parts in the two following years. 
 
The Condition of Ireland. 175 
 
 The ' Querist ' shows characteristic humour and saga- 
 city, and is still interesting, though some of its lessons 
 would now be rejected as economically fallacious. He 
 dreaded imports and luxurious expenditure, as a cause of 
 loss, and acted as well as wrote for the encouragement 
 of home-made productions of every kind ; his own dress 
 and that of his family being made at the village of 
 Cloyne. He strongly supported a paper money, and 
 maintained that industry was the only source of wealth, 
 the true idea of money being that of "a ticket or 
 counter." The 'Querist' abounds in maxims of large 
 and generous regard for the whole Irish population. 
 " Berkeley," says Sir James Mackintosh, " was the first 
 eminent Protestant, after the unhappy contest at the 
 Revolution, who avowed his love for all his countrymen. 
 His patriotism was not, like Swift's, confined to a colony 
 of English. The ' Querist ' perhaps contains more hints, 
 then original, still unapplied in legislation and political 
 economy, than are to be found in any equal space." 
 Here are a few examples of the queries, taken at random 
 out of nearly six hundred : — ■ 
 
 " "Whether the creating of wants be not the likeliest way 
 to produce industry in a people ? Whether a scheme for the 
 welfare of this nation should not take in the whole inhabi- 
 tants ? Whether it is not a vain attempt to project the flour- 
 ishing of our Protestant gentry, exclusive of the bulk of the 
 natives ? Whether, in imitation of the Jesuits in Paris, who 
 admit Protestants to study in their colleges, it may not be 
 right for us also to admit Roman Catholics into our college, 
 without obliging them to attend chapel duties, or catechisms, 
 or divinity lectures ? Whether the fable of Hercules and 
 the carter ever suited any nation like this nation of Ireland ? 
 Whether there ever was, is, or will be, an industrious na- 
 
176 Berkeley. 
 
 tion poor, or an idle rich ? Whether it were not wrong to 
 suppose land, or gold and silver either, to be wealth 1 
 Whether we can propose to thrive so long as we entertain 
 a wrong-headed distrust of England ? " 
 
 Some years after Berkeley settled in Cloyne, the 
 neighbourhood was ravaged by famine and fever. Num- 
 bers of the poor perished. Dark months of suffering, 
 in the winter of 1739, had consequences of lasting in- 
 terest in his mental history. They gave rise to a mo- 
 dified development of his early philosophic thought. 
 The deaths among his neighbours led him to search for 
 a remedy for disease. He had been proposing medicine 
 for the body social ; he now wanted to find a medicine 
 for the bodily organism, on which the happiness and 
 vigour of the embodied human spirit so much depends. 
 Some American experience reminded him of wonderful 
 medicinal properties of tar, especially tar dissolved in 
 water. The American Indians believed in it as a panacea 
 for the ills of flesh. Some of his own experiments 
 seemed to verify a large conception of its possible uses. 
 It so happened that he was about the same time much 
 immersed in Platonic and JSTeoplatonic studies, and was 
 learning to recognise the Universal Reason, shared in 
 by men, as the Universal Principle or Agent — adum- 
 brated in the phenomenal things of sense, and in their 
 established laws. An eccentric ingenuity united these 
 two subjects in the train of his thoughts, — the law 
 of the medicinal agency of tar-water, and the univer- 
 salising Reason or Intellect. He made experiments with 
 tar-water for years. Its success in some diseases en= 
 couraged him to try it in others, and with a result that 
 seemed to correspond' to his expectations. He mused 
 
Tar- Water and Plato. 177 
 
 over the question 'why tar-water should be so universally 
 beneficial. The hypothesis occurred that tar must be 
 charged to an extraordinary degree with " pure invisible 
 fire, the most subtle and elastic of bodies," and the vital 
 element of the universe ; and also that water might be the 
 means by which this contribution of life was to be drawn 
 off from tar, and communicated to vegetable and animal 
 organisms. Still, the vital fire, however interesting from 
 the point of view of natural science and medical art, 
 and however wide its medicinal applications, could, after 
 all, at the philosophical point of view, be only a pheno- 
 menal or instrumental cause. Its own true cause, and 
 the cause of its so-called effects, must be the Universal 
 Agent or Infinite Mind. 
 
 This speculation aroused in Berkeley the imaginative 
 enthusiasm of which he had so large a store, which, 
 with a certain excess in each instance, had been drawn 
 in different directions by ideals successively presented 
 throughout his life. It was now kindled by a supposed 
 discovery which seemed to mitigate, if not in the end 
 completely to remove, the physical suffering of disease, 
 and thus to open a new vista of happiness for mankind 
 in their present state of embodied conscious life. The en- 
 thusiasm was natural to one so susceptible and benevo- 
 lent. The corporeal organism and the conscious spirit in 
 man are so connected — at least in this mortal life — that 
 what invigorates a human body also supplies new re- 
 sources of intellect and spiritual life for the common 
 good. Human beings with bodies more largely charged 
 with the vital fire might make unprecedented advances 
 in the struggle with prejudice and vice, and the future 
 history of mankind might thus become a happy con- 
 
 P.— III. m 
 
178 Berkeley. 
 
 trast to its past. Berkeley had himself suffered for 
 years from a complication of maladies, by which his 
 old intellectual and social energy had been reduced. 
 He might now be restored. The whole conception 
 awakened a fervid admiration for tar -water, and a 
 missionary zeal in the proclamation of its virtues hardly 
 inferior to that with which, twenty years before, he had 
 projected the Christian civilisation of North America. 
 It became the ruling passion of the closing years of his 
 life. He set up an apparatus for manufacturing tar- 
 water at Cloyne. It was the one medicine in his house- 
 hold ; and he tried, by offering it in new and more pal- 
 atable forms, or surrounding it with a halo of philoso- 
 phical speculation, to make the nauseous drug the one 
 great medicine for his neighbours and for all the world. 
 
 In 1744 this tar-water enthusiasm brought him out 
 once more as an author in metaphysical philosophy, as 
 it happened for the last time in his life, and for the first 
 time since his settlement in his " serene corner " at 
 Cloyne. The most lasting consequence of the famine 
 and fever of 1739 has been the curious volume of 
 aphorisms, in which Berkeley made the effects of the 
 supposed panacea an occasion for a chain of medita- 
 tive thoughts upon the Power at work in or behind 
 phenomenal things, and upon the principle of causality 
 in the universe. The more empirical phenomenalism 
 of his youth now enlarged itself into an intellectual 
 phenomenalism, as it went on to unfold principles of 
 rational connection, which, in making phenomenal know- 
 ledge possible, enable us to rise from physical science 
 into philosophical theology. The phenomenal shadows 
 seemed to vanish more than ever, in the blaze of this 
 
The Tar-Water Controversy. 179 
 
 new revelation of the Eternal Spirit, or universalising 
 Intellect and Will, through which they receive a reflected 
 reality. 
 
 In the spring of 1744, accordingly, a considerable 
 volume made its appearance, entitled ' A Chain of Philo- 
 sophical Eeflections and Inquiries concerning Tar-Water, 
 and divers other subjects connected together and arising 
 out of one another.' The book had a great run for some 
 years. ~No former work of Berkeley so soon or so widely 
 engaged general attention. A second edition, under the 
 name of 'Siris,' or the ' Chain/ 1 appeared a few weeks 
 after the first. Tar- water, here proclaimed to be " of 
 a nature so mild and benign, and proportioned to the 
 human constitution, as to warm without heating, and 
 to cheer but not inebriate," 2 became the fashion every- 
 where. Manufactories of the professed panacea were 
 established in Dublin and London, as well as in differ- 
 ent places on the Continent and in America. Professional 
 physicians were roused against the philosophical and 
 ecclesiastical intruder into their province. Pamphlets 
 were published to discredit the new medicine, and 
 these provoked replies. A tar-water controversy en- 
 sued, — not less prolific than 'Alciphron' and the 'Ana- 
 lyst ' had been in the controversy with the free-thinkers 
 ten years before. The contagion spread to other coun- 
 tries. ' Siris ' was translated into French, German, 
 Dutch, and Portuguese. The subject was often alluded 
 
 1 Setpi, a chain — i.e., of philosophical reflections about the universe- 
 
 2 Siris, § 217. So Cowper— 
 
 " The cups 
 That cheer, but not inebriate, wait on each." 
 
 —The Task, B. iv. 39. 
 
180 Berkeley. 
 
 to in the correspondence and literature of the times. 
 " A panacea." Fielding wrote ten years afterwards, 
 " one of the greatest of scholars and best of men did 
 lately apprehend that he had discovered. It is true he 
 was no physician; and yet perhaps no other modern 
 hath contributed so much to make his physical skill 
 useful to the public. I mean the late Bishop of Cloyne, 
 and the discovery is that of the virtues of tar water." 
 
 The popularity of ' Siris ' during Berkeley's life was 
 due not to the metaphysics so curiously engrained in it, 
 but to its supposed discovery of a fact in physics which 
 was to produce a revolution in medicine. The phys- 
 ical hypothesis passed into oblivion when experience 
 failed to verify it, and when the promised panacea was 
 reduced to the comparatively humble position assigned 
 to tar and creosote in the modern pharmacopoeia. With 
 his characteristic impetuosity, Berkeley had forgotten 
 Bacon's contrast of the two ways of searching for physical 
 truth. " The one flies from the senses and particulars 
 to the highest generalisations, which it too readily takes 
 for granted, and proceeds at once to apply for the dis- 
 covery of middle axioms. The other draws its princi- 
 ples cautiously from the senses and particulars, rising 
 by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it reaches the 
 highest generalisations last of all." 1 On the other hand, 
 the metaphysics of the supersensible which Berkeley 
 mixed up with his medical physics, important as it is, 
 as an even extravagant expression of the great culmin- 
 ating thought of his life — the Universal Agent and 
 Intellect, the one true reality, concealed and yet re- 
 vealed in Sense — was too foreign to the prevailing modes 
 1 'Novum Organum.' 
 
A Change of Tone. 181 
 
 of thought to engage sympathy at the time. It left no 
 mark in the history of philosophy. And so the teach- 
 ing of which ' Siris ' was the final expression has de- 
 scended, shorn of those very elements for the sake of 
 which its analysis — destructive of abstractions in sense 
 — was carried on in its early stage. It has come to be 
 interpreted as universal immaterialism, but without its 
 (still crude) reconstructive spiritual consciousness and 
 intellectualism. 
 
 The tone of ' Siris 'is in a marked way different from 
 what we find in the productions of the second, and 
 still more the first, part of Berkeley's life. With some 
 of the old disposition to exaggerate one element in 
 the complex constitution of our experience, there is an 
 increase of tolerance, and a philosophical eclecticism 
 hitherto latent. There is also less determination to see 
 the final solution of all the difficulties of philosophy 
 in his early conception of material things, as in them- 
 selves unsubstantial, impotent, and merely phenomenal. 
 He recognises that there is more in the universe for the 
 philosopher to think about than that esse must loepercipi. 
 This favourite conclusion of former years is now insin- 
 uated more modestly, as the beginning rather than the 
 outcome of the philosopher's insight into things. Greek 
 experience and Greek reading had taught him that the 
 world in which we participate when we become con- 
 scious is not so easily divested of its ultimate mysteri- 
 ousness as it seemed in long past days in Dublin. This 
 feeling of its mysteriousness had indeed been growing 
 upon him ; we can trace it through ' Alciphron ' and in 
 the 'Analyst.' The attempt in c Siris' to fly in the 
 empyrean of pure intellect divorced from sense seems 
 
182 Berkeley. 
 
 accompanied by a feeling of intellectual collapse. It 
 was as with " the buoyant dove " of Kant's illustration, 
 "which, when with free wing it traverses the air of 
 which it feels the resistance, is apt to imagine it might 
 fly still better in the vacuum beyond." " So Plato," 
 Kant goes on to say, " forgets and looks slightingly on 
 the sensible world, because it imposes on his reason such 
 narrow limitations, and ventures on the wings of Ideas 
 into the empty space of pure intellect. He has not 
 remarked that in spite of his efforts he makes no pro- 
 gress, for he has no point of support on which to uphold 
 him in his attempt to bear the understanding out of its 
 natural place." It was so with the Berkeleyan Platon- 
 ism of ' Siris.' This inability to move in the region to 
 which he had now betaken himself, compared with his 
 easy argumentative career when demonstrating the phe- 
 nomenal nature of sensible things, disposed him more to 
 theological and philosophical eclecticism. He welcomed 
 religious faith in any form of thought consistent with 
 the supremacy of Mind, immanently or externally, in the 
 world. Altogether, in whatever way the mental change 
 may have occurred, he looks larger and more liberal, 
 if also more grave and mystical, in this new book, with 
 its indistinct and undigested conceptions from the writ- 
 ings of ancients and moderns. He leaves us at the end 
 with the parting thought that " in this mortal state we 
 must be satisfied to make the best of those glimpses of 
 truth within our reach ; " — yet encouraged by his own 
 experience to add that " the eye by long use comes to 
 see even in the darkest cavern," and that there is " no 
 subject so obscure but we may discern some glimpse of 
 truth by long poring on it." He has found, indeed, 
 
Contemplative Melancholy. 183 
 
 that " truth is the cry of all, but the game of onl} r a 
 few. Certainly where it is the chief passion, it doth 
 not give way to vulgar cares and views ; nor is it con- 
 tented with a little ardour in the early time of life, 
 active perhaps to pursue, but not so fit to weigh and 
 revise. He that would make a real progress in know- 
 ledge must dedicate his age as well as youth, the later 
 growth as well as first-fruits, at the altar of truth." 
 Such was the spirit in which Berkeley lived at Cloyne. 
 Instead of the vehement argumentative pursuit of one 
 thought into logical consequences which were to resolve 
 all philosophical differences and difficulties — as in the 
 1 Treatise on Human Knowledge,' we have in ' Siris ' 
 an unfinished weighing and revision of the whole, in 
 years given to much reading and contemplative thought. 
 A vein of melancholy becomes more discernible in 
 the years after ' Siris ' appeared. Attempts were made 
 in vain to induce him to exchange the extreme seclu- 
 sion and supposed gloom of Cloyne for episcopal pre- 
 ferment that would involve him more in society. But 
 he still showed himself the same " absolute philosopher 
 with regard to money, titles, and power," that Swift had 
 described him more than twenty years before. "A 
 greater income would not tempt me to remove from 
 Cloyne," he writes to Tom Prior in 1746, "or to set 
 aside my Oxford scheme, which was delayed by the 
 illness of my son ; yet I am as intent upon it and as 
 much resolved as ever. The truth is, I have a scheme 
 of my own for this long time past in which I propose 
 more satisfaction and enjoyment to myself than I could 
 in that high station." 1 He was " no man's rival " in 
 1 The Primacy. 
 
184 Berkeley. 
 
 these matters. " I am not in love with feasts, and crowds, 
 and visits, and late hours, and strange faces, and a 
 hurry of affairs often insignificant. For my private 
 satisfaction, I had rather be master of my own time 
 than wear a diadem. As for the argument from the 
 opportunity of doing good, I observe that duty obliges 
 men in high stations to decline occasions of doing good, 
 but duty doth not oblige men to solicit such high 
 stations." 
 
 In 1751 a deep sorrow visited the beautiful home-life, 
 in the death of the second son, William, at the age of 
 sixteen. The loss was thought to have struck too close 
 to his father's heart. " I was a man," so he writes, 1 
 " retired from the amusement of politics, visits, and what 
 the world calls pleasure. I had a little friend, educated 
 under mine own eye, whose painting delighted me, whose 
 music ravished me, and whose lively gay spirit was a 
 continual feast. It has pleased God to take him hence. 
 God, I say, in mercy hath deprived me of this pretty 
 gay plaything. His parts and person, his innocence and 
 piety, his particularly uncommon affection for me, had 
 gained too much upon me. Eot content to be fond of 
 him, I was vain of him. I had set my heart too much 
 upon him — more, perhaps, than I ought to have done 
 upon anything in this world." 
 
 The last of his letters which remains was addressed 
 to Dean Gervais. It expresses the sombre sentiments 
 with which, in April 1752, he was looking to the 
 close of his recluse life in the " serene corner " in which 
 he spent eighteen years. " We have often wanted your 
 eiilivening company to dissipate the gloom of Cloyne. 
 i March 8, 1751. 
 
A New Project. 185 
 
 This I look on as enjoying France at second hand. I 
 wish anything but the gout could fix you among us. 
 For my own part, I submit to years and infirmities. My 
 views in this world are mean and narrow • it is a thing 
 in which I have small share, and which ought to give 
 me small concern. I abhor business, and especially to 
 have to do with great persons and great affairs, which I 
 leave to such as you, who delight in them and are fit 
 for them. The evening of life I choose to pass in a 
 quiet retreat. Ambitious projects, intrigues and quarrels 
 of statesmen, are things I have been formerly amused 
 with, but now they seem to be a vain, fugitive dream." 
 
 About four months after these words were written, 
 Berkeley saw Cloyne for the last time. He had formed 
 a new project, of which hints have already appeared in 
 his letters. The " life academico-philosophical," which 
 he once sought to realise in Bermuda, he now hoped 
 to find at Oxford. 
 
186 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 OXFORD. 
 
 In August 1752 Berkeley set out in quest of a retreat 
 whose charm he had experienced during his first summer 
 in England. He had visited Oxford forty years before. 
 It had now for some time occupied his imagination as 
 the ideal home of his old age. He found the desired 
 opportunity in having sent his son George there instead 
 of to Dublin. . This confirmed the desire to spend his 
 remaining days in indulging that passion for learned 
 retirement which had so strong a hold of him, and was 
 really one of the motives of his American mission. In 
 1724 he wanted to resign a deanery, if it should interfere 
 with what he longed for in Bermuda : he wanted now 
 to resign a bishopric, that he might realise the beauti- 
 ful vision in Oxford. He first tried to exchange Cloyne 
 for an Oxford headship or canonry. Eailing in this, he 
 put an unconditional resignation in the hands of the 
 Secretary of State. The oddness of the proposal excited 
 the curiosity of George the Second. When the king 
 discovered by whom it was made, he said that Berkeley 
 should die a bishop in spite of himself, but that he might 
 live where he pleased. And now in this month of 
 
 
Academical Idealism. 187 
 
 August, in 1752, we find him with his wife and daugh- 
 ter on their way to the city of colleges, in the fair vale 
 of the Isis and Cherwell, so dear to sensibilities like his, 
 with gathered memories of a thousand years. 
 
 He made his Will a few days before he left Cloyne, 
 bequeathing any property he might have to his wife, 
 with the characteristic injunction that " the expense 
 of his funeral should not exceed twenty pounds." 1 As 
 it happened, any property he left was the scanty residue 
 possible at the end of a life of large-hearted munificence, 
 with its favourite motto — non sibi sed toti. One curi- 
 ous provision, requiring his body to be kept five days 
 above ground, or longer, before it is buried, " even till 
 it grow offensive by the cadaverous smell," shows that 
 he had somehow conceived the possibility of being- 
 buried alive. 2 When he left Cork in the ship which 
 carried his wife, his daughter, and himself to Bristol, 
 he was prostrated by weakness, and had to be taken 
 from the landing-place to Oxford on a horse-litter. 3 
 It was on the 25th August that the little party from 
 Cloyne saw the domes and church towers around their 
 new home, amidst the soft repose of the rural English 
 scenery which he loved. 
 
 Our picture of Berkeley at Oxford is dim. According 
 
 1 See 'Works,' vol. iv. p. 345. 
 
 2 Perhaps on the suggestion of a curious little book I have lately 
 stumbled upon, which had appeared in Dublin a few years before he 
 died, entitled, — ' The Uncertainty of the Signs of Death, and the 
 Danger of Precipitate Interments Demonstrated' (Dublin, 1748). 
 It contains a number of cases of persons thus buried alive, " and 
 directions for preventing such accidents," almost in the words of 
 Berkeley's Will. 
 
 3 His friend Bishop Butler died at Bath, as it happened, a few 
 weeks before this landing at Bristol. 
 

 188 Berkeley. 
 
 to tradition, lie lived with his family in a house in Holy- 
 well Street, near the gardens of New College, and not 
 far from the cloisters of Magdalen. Oxford itself, in 
 the middle of the eighteenth century, was living on 
 the inherited glories of the past. Among the residents 
 in 1752 hardly any name suggests more than medioc- 
 rity. His friend Dr Conybeare was Dean of Christ 
 Church, and to him he had intrusted his son. Seeker 
 had now been bishop of Oxford for many years, and 
 spent his summers at Cuddesden and his winters in 
 London. A few years earlier Adam Smith had gone 
 to study at Oxford; and in the spring of this year 
 Edward Gibbon entered Magdalen to spend fourteen 
 months, — according to his own account, " the most idle 
 and unprofitable in his whole life." The torpor of 
 the place was beginning to be moved by Wesley, whose 
 sermons in St Mary's had denounced with evangelical 
 fervour the frivolous life of the University. Through 
 him and others Oxford became the source of the re- 
 vival of one of the three schools of religious life, which 
 it is the glory of the Church of Hooker and Andrewes 
 and Cudworth to unite within its ample fold ; and the 
 life of the other two was afterwards restored from the 
 same academic centre by Newman and Arnold. 
 
 Berkeley resumed study at Oxford in improved health. 
 In October a ' Miscellany containing several Tracts,' by 
 the Bishop of Cloyne, appeared in London and Dublin. 
 Except one, 'Farther Thoughts on Tar- Water,' it con- 
 sisted of reprints of the 'De Motu' and other short 
 pieces. A third edition of ' Alciphron ' was published 
 about the. same time. This edition is remarkable for 
 omitting the sections in the seventh dialogue which con- 
 
Sudden Death. 189 
 
 tain a defence of the early phenonienalist Nominalism, 
 now out of harmony with the Platonic Eealism and 
 supersensible philosophy of ' Siris.' 
 
 Nothing remains to show how far his domestic seclu- 
 sion in Holywell Street realised the dream of an aca- 
 demic retreat. At any rate the realisation did not last 
 long : he suddenly realised instead the mystery of death. 
 On the evening of Sunday the 14th of January 1753 
 he passed away without any warning. His son told Dr 
 Johnson, 1 in the most authentic account we have of 
 the event, that, — "as he was sitting with my mother, 
 sister, and myself, suddenly, and without the least pre- 
 vious notice or pain, he was removed to the enjoyment 
 of eternal rewards ; and although all possible means 
 were instantly used, no symptom of life ever appeared 
 after. He had arrived at Oxford on the 25th of August, 
 and had received great benefit from the change of air, 
 and by God's blessing on tar- water, insomuch that for 
 some years he had not been in better health than he 
 was the instant before he left us." 
 
 Six days after he died, he was buried in the Cathedral 
 of Christ Church. 
 
 1 In a letter dated Christ Church, October 16, 1753. See Beards- 
 ley's ' Life of Johnson,' p. 171 — in which this interesting letter ap- 
 peared for the first time, in 1874. 
 
190 
 
 CHAPTEE III. 
 
 SIRIS AND THE SUPERSENSIBLE. 
 
 The third and latest stage of Berkeley's philosophical 
 development is reached in ' Siris.' This is his last 
 word in a life-long endeavour — often interrupted by 
 movements from place to place, and by pursuit of so- 
 cial ideals — to reach the essentially reasonable view of 
 things in which philosophy should consist, and towards 
 which the different speculative systems of the world 
 may be regarded as so many approximations. In ex- 
 ploring ' Siris,' we naturally ask how far Berkeley's 
 philosophic insight carried him; and whether, as there 
 seen in its final stage, it contributes any element of 
 lasting value to the common stock of the world's phi- 
 losophical endeavours. A true and complete philosophy 
 must be in harmony with all the facts of our complex, 
 intellectual and moral, experience. A new system de- 
 deserves acceptance, in proportion as it agrees with 
 itself, and with the essential parts of this experience : 
 it deserves credit in proportion to the energy of belief 
 by which it is then animated. 
 
 ' Siris,' Berkeley used to say, cost him more meditative 
 thought and studious reading than any of his other 
 
A Curious Chain. 191 
 
 books. This does not surprise one "who examines its 
 contents. It contains much that has been gathered on 
 remote by-ways of past philosophy, as well as on the 
 main tracks. A growing inclination towards Platonism, 
 in its Xeoplatonic mystical form, and an affectionate 
 sympathy with Greek ways of thinking, are manifest 
 on almost every page. The physical hypothesis of the 
 universal efficacy of tar-water, encouraged by daily com- 
 panionship with Plato and the JSTeoplatonists, led him, 
 by subtle transitions, from the vital essence of plants 
 and animals to the vital spirit of the universe; from 
 that to the necessary dependence of all merely pheno- 
 menal causation on what transcends nature ; and at last 
 to the intuition of the whole phenomenal world, organic 
 as well as inorganic, as realisable for reason only in and 
 through Spirit. The outcome of ' Siris ' is a struggle to 
 apprehend supreme Intellect or Spirit, as the ground 
 of that intelligibility of the phenomenal things of sense 
 which had engaged the eager argumentative activity 
 of the youth in Trinity College. This mental struggle 
 finds expression in the curious " chain " of aphorisms, 
 about the interpretability of .sensuous phenomena; about 
 the dependence of space and time upon the contents 
 of an experience which must be placed and dated, in 
 order to a rational construction of its meaning; about 
 the essential unreasonableness of a universe grounded 
 in unintelligent fate; about the impossibility of satis- 
 fying the philosophising reason otherwise than by 
 acknowledging, in one form or other, free rational 
 Will, as the external, or at least the immanent, cause 
 of all; and about the inexplicable mystery of triune 
 Deity. Whether the Mind thus supreme is " abstracted 
 
192 Berkeley. 
 
 from the external world, and to be considered by itself, 
 as distinct from and presiding over the created system ; " 
 or whether "the whole universe, including mind to- 
 gether with the mundane body, is conceived to be God, 
 and the creatures to be partial manifestations of the 
 divine essence" — there is "no atheism," he is ready to 
 grant, " in either case, whatever misconceptions there 
 may be — so long as Mind or Intellect is understood to 
 preside over, govern, and conduct the whole frame of 
 things." In either way we have, within the transitory 
 things of sense, a natural order that is steady, and a 
 higher government going on, with a moral purpose that 
 is absolute. This Eternal Fact, however it may be ex- 
 pressed in thought, is what is meant by God. 
 
 The change of the point of view in ' Siris ' is from 
 negation to construction. Instead of the argumentative 
 unsubstantiation of phenomenal things, we have now 
 Spirit as the foundation and practical realisation of all. 
 This change was accompanied by a significant verbal 
 change. What in the ' Treatise on Human Knowledge ' 
 are called " ideas " are in ' Siris ' called " phenomena." 
 " Idea," on the other hand, is used in ' Siris ' almost 
 always in its Platonic meaning. The early phenomenal- 
 istic Nominalism — expressed by the use of " idea " in a 
 meaning that is strange to us — is here transformed into 
 a Platonic Eealism, in which Berkeley often appears as 
 if struggling to reach a knowledge that is empty, because 
 the help of the sensuous imagination has been with- 
 drawn. The Ideas of ' Siris ' are not like the " ideas " 
 of Locke ; nor yet like Berkeley's own " ideas of sense," 
 whose esse is pereipi — " inert, inactive objects of per- 
 ception." They are " self-existent, necessary, active prin- 
 
 
Ideas and ideas. 193 
 
 ciples." Neither are they the " abstract ideas " against 
 which he argued so vehemently at Trinity College and 
 long after. As "abstract," these were not phenomena 
 of sense or imagination ; and yet as Lockian ideas 
 they were phenomena. The inconsistency of a pheno- 
 menal representation of universality Berkeley was then 
 fond of exposing. But the " Ideas " of ' Siris ' are very 
 different. They are " most real beings, intellectual and 
 unchangeable ; and therefore more real than the fleeting, 
 transient objects of sense, which, wanting stability, can- 
 not be objects of science, much less of intellectual know- 
 ledge." The most refined human intellect, exerted to its 
 utmost reach, can only seize " some imperfect glimpses " 
 of the Ideas now dawning upon him, obscured as they 
 are in this mortal life of sense by things corporeal and 
 imaginable. 
 
 The text on which the metaphysical part of 'Siris' 
 is a commentary, is the principle — assumed to be self- 
 evident — that law and system in nature must itself be 
 caused — must be the manifestation of eternally active 
 Universal Mind. The occasion for commenting on this 
 text was a supposed biological law, according to which 
 the vital element contained in tar is the "cause" of 
 healthy life in a diseased animal organism into which 
 it is introduced in combination with water. This, if 
 really a law of nature, would be an example of the 
 merely phenomenal causation with which alone biology 
 can be concerned. All the laws in nature are examples 
 of this sort of causation. It makes what we call Xature. 
 The philosophical question which lies behind this is, 
 Whether people are rightly said to find causality at all 
 
 p. — III. N 
 
194 Berkeley. 
 
 in the merely phenomenal conditions that are thus 
 called causes % These, no doubt, it is the prime office 
 of students of physical and biological science to ascer- 
 tain ; in so doing they interpret nature, as nature now 
 exists, charged with its great unfulfilled prophecies. Is 
 the discovery of these prophecies, however, the discovery 
 of what is ultimately involved in causation and power 1 
 Can we properly be said to have satisfied the search for 
 cause, when we have only found that the phenomena of 
 sense, or the conscious states and acts, about whose 
 origin we are curious, issue as natural sequences from 
 certain antecedent phenomena in inorganic or organic 
 bodies 1 
 
 The often-repeated answer to this question given in 
 1 Siris ' is, that we can in no instance whatever say that 
 "cause" has been found when only phenomenal con- 
 ditions, organic or otherwise, have been found. The 
 phenomenal antecedent is itself, in every case, an effect. 
 Each phenomenal " cause " is itself only a caused, and 
 therefore not the real, cause ; for it presupposes pheno- 
 menal antecedents or conditions, without which it could 
 not itself exist; and. these in turn presuppose still 
 ulterior phenomenal antecedents, as their conditions, 
 without which they could not be manifested; and so 
 on, in an endless regress. But the greatest of all 
 effects is that the whole phenomenal world is in fact 
 thus connected as the system of interpretable signs we 
 call Nature. If it were not so connected it would 
 not be a world ; there could be no such thing as 
 experience ; at least the experience would be insane, 
 unintelligible, chaotic. Everything then would be in- 
 dependent of everything else; indeed there could be 
 
The infinite regress of Seience. 195 
 
 no phenomenal thing at all, for each phenomenon 
 would be independent of every other, isolated, and 
 therefore incapable of making a part of a real thing. 
 The " world," after the withdrawal of phenomenal con- 
 catenation, would at once dissolve, and its present reality 
 would disappear in unintelligible impressions. — Still, the 
 web of phenomenal connection that is presupposed in 
 science, and in ordinary experience too, does not com- 
 prehend within it, according to Berkeley, the unpheno- 
 menal cause which we are in quest of, when we seek 
 philosophically for the rational meaning of events. 
 Eeal power cannot be found among phenomena, nor in 
 phenomenal organisms. Events in sense no doubt send 
 us in quest of it. But the established rules which the 
 things of sense and their events obey, instead of satisfy- 
 ing us in this quest, are only so much added to the sum 
 of the facts that demand explanation. The true seat of 
 power and causality is within the veil. It is in the 
 supersensible or transcendent ; not among phenomena, 
 nor in the world of phenomenal experience. Can we 
 follow it within the veil? 
 
 That depends upon the possibility of our having, 
 either a sort of knowledge that is unphenomenal, or else 
 a faith that transcends both the data of the senses and 
 faith in merely physical law. The answer, in short, 
 presumes a philosophical theory of human knowledge. 
 Berkeley did not attempt what Kant tried afterwards : 
 he did not deliberately set himself to settle the boundary 
 within which "knowledge" must be confined, in order 
 to be real knowledge. Kant did this, and announced 
 that on trial he had found the way to all supposed tran- 
 scendent reality barred — that there was no scope for tho 
 
196 Berkeley . 
 
 functions of the understanding, in elaborating real know- 
 ledge, a single step beyond phenomena and phenomenal 
 things. Intellect, according to Kant, has objective val- 
 idity only so far as there are aspects of existence pre- 
 sented, for it to enter into and convert into real know- 
 ledge. Whenever men try to think beyond this boundary, 
 thought must collapse ; there can be no reality in the sup- 
 posed knowledge got. The causal craving, accordingly, is 
 confined within this sphere. We are obliged, as rational 
 beings, to assume a phenomenal parent, or caused cause, 
 in a chain of natural causation, for each new pheno- 
 menal birth ; and we are forbidden, with a due regard 
 to our own limits, to go outside the sphere of phenome- 
 nal or caused causes, in quest of the free or terminating 
 cause. If we do so, we are warned that, as we have then 
 parted from the matter which gives reality to our concep- 
 tions, our judgments must become empty and invalid, 
 leaving us without ground for either affirmation or denial. 
 
 Berkeley has no conception of this sort of intellectual 
 criticism. In the absence of it, his position is not easy 
 to define ; nor the evidence on which he rests in his flight 
 in 'Sins' into the world beyond sense. He seems to 
 say that we have supersensible experience, and to imply 
 that he had secured footing within the supersensible 
 region, in the common sense conviction of his own 
 spiritual existence, with which, like Descartes, he had 
 started in his principles of human knowledge. For he had 
 steadily maintained that we are conscious of ourselves 
 as spirits — conscious, too, of our spiritual individuality 
 and continued identity. He had thus found in him- 
 self a first, free, and unphenomenal cause. 1 He had 
 
 1 He so guarded himself that Hume's universal scepticism is no 
 
" / am a Power" 197 
 
 latterly expressed this, by saying that, though we can 
 have no ¥ idea " of ourselves as spirits — for a self is not 
 a phenomenon — yet we have a " notion " which we con- 
 nect with the personal pronouns ; we know what " I " 
 means, and also what " you " means. This unphenomenal 
 knowledge of spirit, which Kant afterwards repudiated, 
 was the bridge over which Berkeley passed, from the 
 purely passive world of phenomenal things and pheno- 
 menal causes, in which exclusively natural science has its 
 home, into the world of free spiritual agency, where alone 
 there is rest and satisfaction for the causal tendency. 
 He might, perhaps, have agreed now to put it thus : — 
 The craving for a cause, which originates in the moral 
 consciousness of self, is evoked by the spectacle of pheno- 
 menal changes. This obliges us to assume the orderli- 
 ness or intelligibility of their coexistence and succession 
 in a system of nature. But man cannot find final satis- 
 faction in natural order. The search for causes among 
 phenomena would be an infinite search ; for each pheno- 
 menal cause must be in turn an effect. To explain 
 the rationality of the whole spectacle, we must turn 
 to reason or spirit, from which we started in common 
 consciousness with Descartes. We find in the macro- 
 cosm only what we at first found in embryo in the 
 microcosm — objective Spirit or Eeason, in which our 
 
 legitimate expansion of the " Principles of Human Knowledge." 
 Berkeley presents himself as an advocate of the common sense or 
 common consciousness in two respects. (1.) In his acknowledgment 
 of faith— immediate, or at least implied in moral experience — in the 
 transcendent reality of individual agency. (2.) In maintaining — also 
 as ineradicable faith — that sensible things, as given in the senses, are 
 oyily phenomenal things ; and that Ave perceive them immediately, in 
 their phenomenal reality, and do not need to prove this by reasoning. 
 
198 Berkeley. 
 
 own individual spirit may be said to participate, and 
 of which we had experience in the primary act of 
 knowledge, when we found anchorage in our own spir- 
 itual reality. 
 
 It is through the rational faith in causality that the 
 phenomenal things of sense are so concatenated, in sub- 
 ordination to Spirit, that there is phenomenal connection 
 between the present, the past, and the future. Without 
 this connecting principle, which is the essence of reason- 
 ableness, not only is natural order at an end, but the 
 individual things of sense themselves must dissolve in 
 chaos. The particular manner of their constitution, and 
 the particular laws according to which they resolve into 
 a physical system, are no doubt " arbitrary " — if by this 
 is meant, that the constitution might be conceived to 
 be different, and the laws other than they actually are. 
 But that there should be constitution and law of some 
 kind among phenomena is not an arbitrary alternative. 
 It is, on the contrary, a necessity that is implied in 
 the fact that Reason or Intellect is at the root of all. 
 It is the result of the phenomenal world being, in itself 
 and in its constitution and laws, dependent on Spirit. 
 There may be no absolute or rational necessity in the 
 present phenomenal connections : there is rational neces- 
 sity, however, for the existence of phenomenal connec- 
 tion of some sort ; for this is involved in the convic- 
 tion of the supremacy of Spirit, which is the primitive 
 voice of conscious man. The principle of causality, so 
 understood, is the universal form of the original fact out 
 of which human knowledge arises, which Berkeley thus 
 reaffirmed after Descartes, and then universalised. 
 
 Our discoveries of the particular phenomenal connec- 
 
Nature involves God. 199 
 
 tions of coexistence and succession, which now hold good 
 in nature, Berkeley had, years before, expressly referred to 
 sense and its "suggestions." The intellectual obligation 
 to refer the phenomenal world and all its actual connec- 
 tions to a hyper-phenomenal cause, efficient and final, 
 was recognised by him as due to intellect proper, as 
 distinguished from the tendency to suggest, produced by 
 custom. "To be suggested," he had already said in the 
 1 Vindication of Visual Language,' " is one thing, and to 
 be inferred is another. Things are suggested and per- 
 ceived by sense; we make judgments and inferences 
 by the understanding. We infer causes (proper) from 
 effects, effects from causes (proper), and properties one 
 from another, where the connection is necessary." 1 In 
 all this there was an approach to the more emphatic 
 recognition of reason, as an element presupposed in 
 sense, and superior to mere sense, which became trans- 
 parent in ' Siris.' 
 
 Here are some expressions by which in ' Siris ' the 
 supersensible realities of intellect and the spiritual world, 
 which alone give stability and cohesion to the world of 
 nature, are enforced, in what is really an appeal to our 
 ultimate philosophical faith : — 
 
 " Though it be supposed the chief business of a natural 
 philosopher to trace out causes from their effects, yet this is 
 to be understood not of agents, but of component parts in one 
 sense, or of laws or rules in another. In strict truth all 
 agents are incorporeal, and as such are not properly of phy- 
 sical consideration. . . . The mechanical philosopher in- 
 quires properly concerning the rules or modes of operation 
 alone, and not concerning the cause ; forasmuch as nothing 
 
 i ' Works,' vol. i. p. 389. 
 

 200 Berkeley. 
 
 mechanical is or really can be a cause. ... It passeth 
 with many, I know not how, that mechanical principles give 
 a clear solution of the phenomena. The Democritic hypo- 
 thesis, saith Dr Cud worth, doth more handsomely and intel- 
 ligibly solve the phenomena than that of Aristotle or Plato. 
 But things rightly considered, perhaps it will not be found 
 to solve any phenomena at all. . . . Those principles 
 do not solve — if by solving is meant assigning the real, 
 either efficient or final cause of appearances, but only reduce 
 them to general rules. There is a certain analogy, constancy, 
 and uniformity in the phenomena or appearances of nature, 
 which are a foundation for general rules : and these rules 
 are a grammar for the understanding of nature, or that series 
 of effects in the visible world whereby we are enabled to 
 foresee what will come to pass in the natural course of 
 things. ... As this natural connection of signs with the 
 tilings signified is regular and constant, it forms a sort of 
 rational discourse, and is therefore the immediate effect of an 
 intelligent cause." 
 
 TThat may "be called biological psychology of course, 
 on this view, shares the fate of all other professedly 
 philosophical or ultimate, but really scientific and merely 
 natural, explanations. The " modes of motion of the 
 cerebral substance," of which Professor Huxley speaks, 1 
 may be connected, as sign and thing signified, with cor- 
 relative states of consciousness. An established con- 
 nection of this sort, however, even if it could be verified 
 of every conscious act and state through which man 
 passes, only constitutes one set of rules in the system 
 of effects called nature, as nature goes on under the usual 
 phenomenal conditions. It does not carry us a step 
 towards the power to which this and every other part of 
 nature's phenomenal language is to be referred ; though 
 i See Huxley's < Hume,' pp. 76-82. 
 
 
Berkeley and Spinoza. 201 
 
 the latent prophecies with which in this instance our 
 organism would be charged might "be put to much useful 
 account, in the medical management of our bodies. And 
 this is so, whether we read the phenomena in terms of 
 matter and motion or in terms of sensations. Sensations 
 are in themselves as far from proper power or causality 
 as motions are. They are as remote as motions them- 
 selves from Idealism proper, and from moral or unpheno- 
 inenal causality. 
 
 Philosophy, with Berkeley, ever turns its eye towards 
 the hyper-phenomenal reality. It had been the endeav- 
 our of his early life to dispel the supposition of an active 
 intervening medium called "matter." But throughout, 
 what he really wanted to do was, to show the irration- 
 ality of absolute independence of Mind being attributed 
 to this supposed active medium. Its present " activity," 
 he tried to demonstrate, must be a dependent activity; 
 but if all so - called " action " throughout the pheno- 
 menal world of sense were acknowledged to be ulti- 
 mately the action of Mind or Spirit, he would probably 
 have been satisfied with this acknowledgment, as a suffi- 
 cient unsubstantiation of matter. 
 
 Xor does he mean that all the action in the universe 
 is the action of one Supreme Spirit, which would thus 
 become one Supreme Substance, in itself neither Spirit 
 nor Matter. Berkeley professed to find other spiritual 
 agents besides God. He did not intend to reduce all 
 to God and phenomena. On the contrary, unlike Spin- 
 oza, he recognised the existence of free agents, finite yet 
 responsible, subject to a moral government conducted 
 through the medium of the phenomenal order. In 
 referring, for instance, to the motion of the heart and 
 
202 Berkeley. 
 
 other organs of the body — while objecting to the hypo- 
 thesis that " unknowing nature " is their cause — he adds 
 that "the true inference is, that the self -thinking indi- 
 vidual or human person is not the real author of these 
 natural motions." Why? Because, "in fact, no man 
 blames himself if they are wrong, or values himself if 
 they are right." 1 These words make personal respon- 
 sibility the test for distinguishing the agency of finite 
 spirits from the agency of the Supreme Spirit or Uni- 
 versal Mind. 
 
 While Berkeley's eye was thus turned to the super- 
 sensible, towards which he was making ready to take 
 his intellectual flight, he felt the difficulty of the posi- 
 tion, and the impediments in the way of the ascent : — 
 
 " Human souls in this low situation, bordering on mere 
 animal life, bear the weight and see through the dusk of 
 a gross atmosphere, gathered from wrong judgments daily 
 passed, false opinions daily learned, and early habits of an 
 older date than either judgment or opinion. Through such 
 a medium the sharpest eye cannot see clearly. And if by 
 some extraordinary effort the mind should surmount this 
 dusky region, and snatch a glimpse of pure light, she is soon 
 drawn backwards, and depressed by the heaviness of the 
 animal nature to which she is chained. And if again she 
 chanceth, amidst the agitations of wild fancies and strong 
 affections, to spring upwards, a second relapse speedily suc- 
 ceeds into this region of darkness and dreams. Neverthe- 
 less, as the mind gathers strength by repeated acts, we should 
 not despond, but continue to exert the prime and flower of 
 our faculties, still recovering, and reaching on, and strug- 
 gling into the upper region, whereby our natural weakness 
 and blindness may be in some degree remedied, and a taste 
 attained of truth and intellectual life." 2 
 
 Works,' vol. ii. p. 461. 2 Ibid., p. 
 
Physical and Metaphysical Causality. 203 
 
 'Siris' is the philosophy of Causation, first in its 
 scientific or physical, and next in its metaphysical or 
 theological phase. 1 The whole book is devoted to this 
 correlation and contrast. 
 
 Throughout the former half at least of the book, we 
 contemplate phenomena of sense undergoing transfor- 
 mation into other phenomena of sense, in a steady suc- 
 cession of orderly metamorphoses. This is the language 
 of nature, of which positive science is the interpretation. 
 The other or spiritual side of existence is then turned 
 towards us. We are there made to see as through 
 a glass darkly the phenomenal causes, which are not 
 real causes but effects of causes, resolving themselves 
 into the unity of reason, in unphenomenal cause or 
 power ; and with this side theology or metaphysics 
 has to do. Thus there is the scientific way of looking 
 at the universe, in which it is seen to be a system 
 of significant, and therefore interpretable, appearances ; 
 a language that is arbitrary, inasmuch as it might have 
 been, or may become, different from what it now is — 
 but which, by necessity of reason, must be language 
 of some sort; for unless the appearances were also 
 trustworthy signs there could be no such thing as ex- 
 perience. Then there is the moral or spiritual intui- 
 tion and trust. Towards this we are struggling when 
 we aspire beyond interpretable phenomena that can be 
 placed and dated, and look towards the universal rational 
 agency in which they all centre; itself uncaused, and 
 therefore causally inexplicable, since for Eeason no 
 reason can be given other than itself. The conception 
 
 1 Some might object to this extension of the word "cause," but 
 that is a matter of verbal concern. 
 
I 
 
 204 Berkeley. 
 
 of causality, first applied to the phenomenal universe, 
 thus becomes at last the most general expression for 
 faith in the reality, transcendent or at least immanent, 
 of Eternal Spirit or Reason. He who supposes all things 
 to be ordered rationally or by mind, should not pretend 
 to assign any other necessary cause for them. 1 The 
 rationality of the order is itself sufficient for reason and 
 philosophic faith. 
 
 It follows on this interpretation of causality, which 
 seems to contain the rudiments of truth, that scientific 
 imagination and faith — concerned with coexistence and 
 succession among phenomena of sense, and religious 
 imagination and faith — concerned with spiritual life and 
 moral agency, — must be in harmony, when each works 
 within its sphere. The conjectured laws of phenomenal 
 evolution, and of endless integrations and disintegra- 
 tions of the phenomenal universe, or indeed any sup- 
 posed laws in nature (if verified), are as little at vari- 
 ance with a theological conception of things as the 
 law of gravitation. Yet an eye for merely physical 
 causation deadens insight, in sincere lovers of truth, 
 for the facts and necessary conditions of our moral 
 experience, which transcend phenomenal science ; in the 
 same way as, at an opposite extreme, the one-sided 
 religious faith of other lovers of truth repudiates, as 
 atheistic materialism, the uniformity of physical law, 
 and the phenomenal dependence of consciousness in man 
 upon correlative functions of the human organism. 
 
 The contrast and correlation of Sense and Intellect 
 is another way of expressing the double aspect of causa- 
 tion ; and the train of thought in ' Siris ' often assumes 
 1 ' Siris ' — 1 
 
Sense and Intellect. 205 
 
 this form. Some pregnant expressions are used when 
 it does so. Here is one which, in anticipation of Kant, 
 implies that even science and common experience in- 
 volve uniting reason : — ■ 
 
 " Strictly the sense knows nothing. We perceive indeed 
 sounds by hearing, and characters by sight. But we are not 
 therefore said to understand them. After the same manner, 
 the phenomena of nature are alike visible to all ; but all have 
 not alike learned the connection of natural things, or un- 
 derstand what they signify, or know how to vaticinate by 
 them." 1 
 
 Again : — 
 
 " Sense and experience acquaint us with [i.e., accustom us 
 to] the course and analogy of appearances or natural effects. 
 Thought, reason, intellect introduce us into the knowledge 
 of their causes. Sensible appearances, though of a flowing, 
 unstable, and uncertain nature, yet having first occupied the 
 mind, they do, by an easy prevention, render the after-task 
 of thought more difficult ; and as they amuse the eyes and 
 ears, and are more suited to vulgar uses and the mechanic 
 arts of life, they easily obtain a preference, in the opinion of 
 most men, to those superior principles, which are the later 
 growth of the human mind arrived to maturity and perfec- 
 tion ; but, not affecting the corporeal sense, are thought to be 
 so far deficient in point of solidity and reality — sensible and 
 real, to common apprehensions, being the same thing. Al- 
 though it be certain that the principles of science are neither 
 objects of sense nor imagination; and that intellect and reason 
 are alone the sure guides to truth." 2 
 
 The immanence in sense of supreme reason or in- 
 tellect seems almost involved in some turns of ex- 
 pression in ' Siris.' Nature is " reason immersed in 
 
 i ' Works,' vol. ii. p. 460. 2 Ibid., p. 464. 
 
206 Berkeley. 
 
 matter ; " philosophy is the endeavour fully to disengage 
 the immanent reason. Existence is reason entering into 
 sense. Without its presence sense is unintelligible; 
 without phenomena of some sort reason is only latent. 
 The thought, when it takes this form, struggles for 
 adequate expression : — 
 
 " Comprehending God and the creatures in one general 
 notion, we may say that all things together make one uni- 
 verse, or to 7rav. But if we should say that all things make 
 one God; — this would indeed be an erroneous notion of God, 
 but would not amount to atheism, as long as mind or intel- 
 lect was admitted to be to fjje/xoviKov, the governing part. It 
 is, nevertheless, more respectful, and consequently the truer 
 notion of God, to suppose Him neither made up of parts, 
 nor to be Himself a part of any whole whatever. All 
 those who conceived the universe to be an animal, must, in 
 consequence of that notion, suppose all things to be One. 
 But to conceive God to be the sentient soul of an animal is 
 altogether unworthy and absurd. There is no sense nor 
 sensory, nor anything like a sense or sensory, in God. Sense 
 implies an impression from some other being, and denotes a 
 dependence in the soul which hath it. Sense is a passion : 
 and passions imply imperfection. God knoweth all things 
 as pure mind or intellect ; but nothing by sense, nor in nor 
 through a sensory." 1 
 
 It is not so with intellect or reason in man. " We 
 are embodied." Intellect in us is at present conditioned 
 by the phenomenal things we call our bodies. In pass- 
 ages in ' Siris,' there is a transition from contemplation 
 of pure Intellect or God to contemplation of intel]ect 
 as finite men share in it, which reminds the reader of 
 sentences in Pascal : — 
 
 1 ' Works,' vol. ii. p. 476. 
 
Innate ideas and innate Ideas. 207 
 
 " Man is a compound of contrarieties, which breed a rest- 
 less struggle in his nature, between flesh and spirit, the beast 
 and the angel, earth and heaven, ever weighed down and 
 ever bearing up. ... It is the same in regard to our fac- 
 ulties. Sense at first besets and overbears the mind. The 
 sensible appearances are all in all : our reasonings are em- 
 ployed about them : our desires terminate in them : we look 
 no further for realities or causes ; — till intellect begins to 
 dawn, and cast a ray on this shadowy scene. "We then per- 
 ceive the true principle of unity, identity, and existence. 
 Those things that before seemed to constitute the whole of 
 Being, upon taking an intellectual view of things, prove to 
 be but fleeting phantoms.'' x 
 
 As men rise from the life of sense towards the 
 reason that is found to shine in and through sense, 
 they approach that union with God which is the chief 
 end of man. Berkeley finds this Divine or Universal 
 Reason at the root of our personal being or spiritual 
 individuality — as he ascends on the chain in which 
 "each lower faculty in us is a step that leads to one 
 above it," — the uppermost bringing us to God, who is 
 Eeason. There is that in us, he insists, which is not 
 given by sense ; though it is in us only in a latent state, 
 till it is awakened by reflection, so that " this sort of 
 learning seemeth in effect reminiscence." Ideas are not 
 innate, if an idea means a phenomenon ; but the rational 
 constitution of things is innate in that intellect which 
 we share with God. Here is a pregnant passage in this 
 connection : — 
 
 " Aristotle held that the mind of man was a tabida rasa, 
 and that there were no innate ideas. Plato, on the contrarv, 
 
 1 ' Works,' vol. ii. p. 478. 
 
208 Berkeley. 
 
 held original ideas in the mind; — i.e., notions which never were 
 or can be in the sense. . . . Some perhaps may think the 
 truth to be this : — that there are properly no ideas [i.e., phe- 
 nomena], or passive objects, in the mind but What were de- 
 rived from sense ; but that there are also besides these her 
 own acts or operations. . . . This notion seemeth somewhat 
 different from that of innate ideas, as understood by those 
 moderns [e.g., Locke] who have attempted to explode them." 1 
 
 The account given in ' Siris ' of what psychologists 
 call " faculties " of cognition in man is in harmony with 
 all this : — 
 
 " The perceptions of sense are gross. ... By experi- 
 ments of sense we become acquainted with the lower faculties 
 of the soul ; and from them, whether by a gradual evolution 
 or ascent, we arrive at the highest. Sense supplies images to 
 memory. These become subjects for fancy to work upon. 
 Reason considers and judges of the imaginations. And these 
 acts of reason become new objects of the understanding. In 
 this scale each lower faculty is a step that leads to one above 
 it. And the uppermost naturally leads to the Deity ; which 
 is rather the object of intellectual knowledge than even of 
 the discursive faculty, not to mention the sensitive." 2 
 
 Some of the most beautiful expressions in ' Siris ' are 
 those which describe the " restlessness " of the finite 
 mind of man, when — becoming obscurely conscious of 
 participation in the universalising intellect — he strives 
 to shake off the slumber in which he is, through sense, 
 disposed to remain, so as to " recover the lost region 
 of light," but in which a " perfect intuition " of the 
 supreme intellectual order is granted to be unattainable. 
 
 ' Siris ' so much magnifies causation and philosophy 
 i ' Works,' vol. ii. pp. 484, 485. 2 Ibid., p. 482. 
 
Phenomenal Space and Time. 209 
 
 on the transcendent side, that the phenomenal almost 
 disappears. The light of the Universal Mind shines so 
 brightly, that there is less need for unsnbstantiating 
 and reducing to impotence the " active medium " called 
 Matter, by which it had been obscured. Now and 
 then, however, Berkeley's thoughts return to the old 
 groove, as he finds support for them in the insight of 
 earlier thinkers. Thus he brings Aristotle as well as 
 Plato to defend the proposition that " actual knowledge 
 and the thing known are all one " — otherwise expressed 
 by Parmenides, when he taught that "to understand 
 and to be are the same thing." Again, — "As to an 
 absolute actual existence of sensible or corporeal things, 
 it doth not seem to have been admitted either by Plato 
 or Aristotle." And- if passages are found in Aristotle 
 which appear to imply that the phenomenal objects of 
 sense exist independently of mind, he reminds us that 
 Aristotle distinguishes "a twofold existence — potential 
 and actual. It will not, therefore, follow that, because 
 a thing is, it must actually exist." 1 There is a po- 
 tential existence which things have, distinct from their 
 actual or intelligible existence, as significant pheno- 
 mena interpreted by us. Por they exist in Supreme 
 Intellect and "Will; and this unphenomenal existence 
 is only potential, relatively to individual human 
 minds. 
 
 The relative and dependent, because phenomenal, 
 character of Space is as favourite a thought as ever in 
 'Siris,' but less is said about the phenomenal and 
 created existence of Time. " Natural phenomena " are 
 
 1 ' Works/ vol. ii. p. 4S6. 
 P. — ill. o 
 
210 Berkeley. 
 
 pronounced to be " only natural appearances. They are 
 therefore such as we see and perceive them. Their real 
 and objective 1 natures are therefore the same — passive 
 without anything active, fluent and changing without 
 anything permanent in them." Yet " they are not only 
 first considered by all men, but most considered by most 
 men. They and the phantoms that result from those 
 appearances — the children of imagination grafted upon 
 sense — such, for example, as pure space — are thought 
 by many the very first in existence and stability, — and 
 to embrace and comprehend all other beings." 2 When 
 Berkeley, as here, uses the word " space," he does not 
 mean a huge entity that has an actual existence inde- 
 pendently of phenomena and conscious spirit, within 
 which God and the universe are contained. Space with 
 him, so far as it has a positive meaning, is the coexistence 
 of actual sense impressions, or of potential ones measured 
 by successions of sensations; negatively, it is the ab- 
 sence of sense impressions. Time is change in the 
 states and acts of which we are conscious ; negatively, 
 it is the absence of such changes. 
 
 After all, perhaps tins is only a paradoxical way of 
 expressing what has been felt, and expressed in other 
 ways, by deep thinkers from Plato to Kant. According 
 to Kant, time and space relations have no ontological 
 reality. They are only necessary preconditions of our 
 becoming conscious of phenomena as objects. Berke- 
 ley does not say this; for, instead of their necessity, 
 he dwells upon their arbitrariness, their being the issue 
 of creative will rather than necessary involvements of 
 
 1 "Objective" — i.e., phenomenal or apparent. 
 
 2 ' Works,' vol. ii. p. 477. 
 
 I 
 
Lost in Boundlessness and Endlessness. 211 
 
 finite experience. But with Berkeley, as with Kant, 
 space and time are virtually relations among phenom- 
 ena, or mental functions limited by the horizon of the 
 phenomenal world. They are not boundless external 
 entities; individual experience is their limit in the 
 actual; and neither an actual nor a potential infinity 
 can be predicated of them ontologically. 
 
 Berkeley and Kant, each in his own way, thus far 
 close those sublime avenues towards the Infinite that 
 seemed to open, in our convictions of the Boundlessness, 
 as a matter of fact, by which our bodies are surrounded, 
 and of the Endlessness, as a matter of fact, within 
 which our mortal lives are contained. A sense of these 
 was a powerful incitement to the metaphysical imagi- 
 nation of Pascal, for instance, and it has been a means 
 of rousing dormant reflection on the ultimate meaning 
 of things, in many minds inferior to his. Men feel the 
 fascination of their little spots in space, and their infin- 
 itesimal periods in time, being actually parts of what, 
 as boundless, becomes unimaginable in one relation ; 
 as infinitely divisible, unimaginable in another. It is 
 thus that thought has found exercise for itself, in vainly 
 applying the category of quantity to the Infinite. The 
 "space" about which we speak — whose finite place 
 relations man practically understands; and the time 
 about which we speak — whose dates and other finite 
 relations man can also understand — we find, when we 
 try, that Ave are intellectually obliged to lose, the one 
 in a Boundlessness that is inconsistent with the very 
 imagination of place, and the other in an Endlessness 
 that transcends all dates. 
 
 Yet Berkeley's ways of thinking on this subject and 
 
212 Berkeley. 
 
 also Kant's, lead us by other routes than the common 
 one to a similar goal. All alike seem to carry thought 
 towards a point at which place and date, space and 
 time, as quantities, are withdrawn from God or Supreme 
 Intellect ; and also from reality at the Divine point of 
 view. They are all different ways of asserting that these 
 perceptions belong to a lower sphere, and that they 
 awaken the sense of sublimity from their very impotence. 
 They are ways of showing that God is not within the 
 space which loses itself in Boundlessness, nor within the 
 time which loses itself in Endlessness. This is just 
 to say that for God, or in the Perfect Thought, place 
 disappears, and past, present, and future times are 
 nothing ; or, otherwise, it is to say that space and time 
 are only modes of representation for finite conscious 
 beings, which have no account when things are viewed, 
 as man cannot view them, sub specie ceternitatis. Men 
 image things according to their finitiide, but not as 
 they are in themselves. For God or Supreme In- 
 tellect, things exist neither placed nor dated ; but how 
 they so exist we cannot tell, unless we can pass in imagi- 
 nation beyond quantitative space into Boundlessness, 
 and beyond periods of time into Endlessness. Are not 
 space and time thus constant evidence that man can- 
 not mentally realise existence according to the Divine 
 Thought — that our placing and dating intelligence must 
 be inadequate to the placeless and dateless Intellect 1 
 
213 
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 SCEPTICISM AGNOSTICISM GNOSTICISM — FAITH. 
 
 Some years before the death of Berkeley, his immaterial- 
 ism, and the assault on metaphysical abstractions with 
 which it was connected, were spoken of eulogistically in 
 two works, which attracted little attention on their first 
 appearance ; although they gave rise afterwards to the 
 chief revolution that has occurred in the methods and 
 conceptions of modern philosophy, since its birth in the 
 writings of Descartes. David Hume's ' Treatise of 
 Human Nature ' was published in 1739; his 'Inquiry 
 Concerning Human Understanding' followed in 1748. 
 In these books the influence of Berkeley's peculiar way 
 of thinking, upon a philosophic mind of extraordinary 
 power, was for the first time distinctly perceptible. That 
 influence had previously appeared only in the forgotten 
 criticisms of men not strong enough to affect the main 
 current of European philosophical opinion. 
 
 It is curious that although when Berkeley died the 
 1 Treatise of Human Nature ' had been before the world 
 for fourteen years, and the ' Inquiry ' for four years, and 
 though both, along with allusions to Berkeley, 1 were 
 
 1 For instance, in the 'Treatise of Human Nature' (B. I. Pt. i. 
 
211 
 
 Berkeley. 
 
 full of discussions which went to the root of materialism 
 and the theory of causation, yet no allusion to Hume is 
 found in any of Berkeley's writings. There is indeed 
 no evidence that Hume was known to him even by 
 name. On the other hand, the important statements 
 about Berkeley made by the Scotch philosopher refer 
 only to his early writings. The ' Essay on Vision,' 
 the fragment on ' Human Knowledge,' and the ' Three 
 Dialogues,' were obviously familiar to the author of 
 the ' Treatise of Human Xature.' It does not appear 
 that he had heard of ' Shis.' At any rate, if he had, 
 it was probably on account of its tar-water nostrum; not 
 
 sect. 7), where lie pronounces the phenomenalist nominalism of 
 Berkeley " one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries that has 
 been made of late years in the republic of letters." In the ' In- 
 quiry ' (vol. ii., Note N) he observes that most of the writings of Ber- 
 keley "form the best lessons in scepticism which are to be found 
 among the ancient and modern philosophers, Bayle not excepted." 
 In thus transforming Berkeley into an unconscious sceptic, Hume 
 ignores the Berkeleyan appeal to common sense on behalf of the beliefs 
 (a) that the interpretable phenomena of sense, viewed objectively, 
 are the real things ; and (b) that in his moral consciousness of him- 
 self, as a free self-acting spiritual person, each of us reaches the 
 ontological reality of substance and cause, and the spiritual basis of 
 things — the datum universalised in 'Siris.' Sense phenomenalism is 
 only the introduction to Berkeley's spiritual philosophy. If it were 
 the whole of it, he might be classed with the agnostics, or even the 
 sceptics. And with reference to identity and causal connection, Hume 
 himself confessed, in a passage already referred to, that "the diffi- 
 culty was too hard" for his understanding. "1 pretend not, how- 
 ever, to pronounce it absolutely insuperable. Others perhaps, or 
 myself, upon more mature reflections, may discover some hypothesis 
 that will reconcile those contradictions." — (Appendix to vol. iii. p. 
 305 of 'Treatise of Human Nature.' Compare this with vol. i. pp. 
 436-457.) It is difficult to determine to what extent Hume meant 
 in the end to allow "faith" to be read into his professed scepticism. 
 (J. S. Mill was arrested by a like difficulty in the way of pan-pheno- 
 menalism, and the reduction of Mind to " a series of feelings." See 
 his ' Examination of Hamilton,' pp. 241, 242, third ed.) 
 
Next great Intellectual Movement. 215 
 
 certainly as the repository of principles which subordin- 
 ate to themselves the phenomenalist iminaterialism prom- 
 inent in the little volumes that emanated from Trinity 
 College in Dublin. 
 
 Still Hume must be regarded as immediately following- 
 Berkeley in the philosophical succession of European 
 thought. The next great intellectual move was made 
 by him. It consisted in an expansion or exaggeration 
 of the one part of his predecessor's theory, which Hume 
 had come to regard as the whole. Hume was also Ber- 
 keley's only immediate successor in subtle genius and 
 intrepid philosophical analysis. In the two books al- 
 ready named, he pursued, with kindred ingenuity and 
 acuteness, to extreme negative and sceptical issues, the 
 war against metaphysical abstractions in sense, on which 
 Berkeley had entered with the ardour of youth, as the 
 means of clearing the way to a vision of the super- 
 sensible. Berkeley's assault upon abstractions, with his 
 destructive criticism of mathematical quantity, and of an 
 independent material world, had probably more than 
 anything else to do with the intellectual awakening of 
 Hume, and with the direction taken by his thoughts. 
 Hume in his turn set modern thought on the lines on 
 which we find it at the present day. This has hap- 
 pened, partly through the discipleship of those now 
 called Positivists or Agnostics, who have possessed them- 
 selves of his heritage; partly, however, through the 
 antagonist reconstructive activity which his sceptical 
 dissolution of knowledge aroused. And the antagon- 
 ism has worked either in the name of common sense or 
 the ineradicable beliefs of mankind, as in Beid; or in 
 the name of speculative and practical reason — of what 
 
216 Berkeley. 
 
 is necessary to our thought and to our moral agency, 
 as in Kant. 
 
 Berkeley's latest phase of thought, given in ' Siris,' 
 and Hume's publication of his sceptical disintegration of 
 all knowledge, both fall within the third or Cloyne period 
 of Berkeley's life ; but the work of each, in this period of 
 their lives, remained unaffected by and unaffecting the 
 work of the other. Yet the ' Treatise of Human Nature ' 
 and ' Siris,' both in their way works of genius, were 
 significant facts in the historical sequel. Berkeley, 
 Hume, Beid, and Kant, are four representative names in 
 the philosophy of the eighteenth century. They are con- 
 nected in rational as well as in chronological succession. 
 The three last had reached middle life when Berkeley 
 died. Hume, indeed, had then ended his course as a 
 speculative philosopher ; but Beid and Kant were only 
 beginning to publish their thoughts. The three names 
 were all unknown to Berkeley when he so suddenly 
 passed away at Oxford. 
 
 About that time other names of historic importance, 
 representative men too, were becoming known. That 
 of Hartley became in due time famous by the ' Observa- 
 tions on Man,' which appeared in 1749, in which the 
 laws of mental association were offered as the only and 
 sufficient solvent of human knowledge and mental life. 
 Hartley's representative place has been commemorated by 
 Coleridge, in one of the most remarkable chapters of the 
 ' Biographia Literaria.' Almost contemporaneously with 
 the ' Observations on Man,' Condillac's ' Essai sur l'Ori- 
 gine des Connaissances Humaines ' laid the foundation 
 of French empiricism, in a caricature of Locke. Francis 
 Hutcheson, too, the countryman of Berkeley and the 
 
Berkeley the Prelude of three Systems. 217 
 
 pioneer of Eeid, had magnified common sense or inerad- 
 icable faith, in works published before Berkeley em- 
 barked for America, and his death took place only three 
 years after the appearance of ' Siris.' But Hartley, 
 Condillac, and Hutcheson, seem to have been all outside 
 the life that was wearing away at Cloyne, and that 
 ended at Oxford. 
 
 In Berkeley's mental history, revealed as a whole 
 in the writings of its three stages, one seems to hear a 
 sort of prelude or rehearsal of each of the three acts in 
 which European philosophy has since presented itself. 
 The subtle argumentative analysis and negative pheno- 
 menalism, so prominent in the Trinity College treatises, 
 was the Berkeley to whom Hume and afterwards John 
 Stuart Mill avowed allegiance. The appeals to the com- 
 mon faith or common sense, in our consciousness of 
 self, and in connection with the favourite thought of 
 significant and interpretable sense phenomena, of all 
 which ' Alciphron ' and the ' Vindication ' are so full, 
 forecast Beid, while they recall the cogito of Descartes. 
 Lastly, the philosophical rationalism of 'Siris,' which sees 
 in the phenomenal things of sense the creative working 
 of that intelledus ipse in which each separate conscious 
 spirit shares, in its way anticipates Kant and Hegel. 
 What corresponds to the association and evolution phi- 
 losophy — in his phenomenalism; to the philosophy of 
 common sense — in his appeals to common convictions ; 
 and to transcendental philosophy — in the recognition of 
 universal constitutive reason, — may all, I think, be found 
 in Berkeley — although he himself had only an obscure 
 consciousness of this. 
 
218 Berkeley. 
 
 The reaction that followed Hume's revolutionary specu- 
 lations disengaged the three elements that were thus 
 latent in Berkeley. The first disengaged itself in Eng- 
 lish and French association psychology, and latterly in 
 agnostic Positivism. The second appeared in the " vigor- 
 ous protest " on behalf of common sense or the natural 
 action of our intellectual and moral faculties, so charac- 
 teristic of Eeid and the Scotch psychologists usually 
 classed with him. The Platonic intellectuahsm of 'Siris' 
 has found its counterpart in the Kantian and neo-Kantian 
 philosophies. These three types of philosophy have 
 occupied the interval between the revolution of Hume 
 and the present age. The first came from the reconstruc- 
 tive efforts of Hume himself. The second is the con- 
 servative recoil of the moral and practical side of human 
 nature. The third seeks to satisfy the utmost demands 
 of reason in a perfect manifestation of the reasonableness 
 of the universe. Individual thinkers cannot, it is true, 
 be summarily placed in cut-and-dry fashion in one or 
 other of these three places. Their more characteristic 
 features may be those of the first, or of the second, or 
 of the third variety, but then these may be blended 
 with other features which belong more to the other two 
 types. 
 
 Although these three kinds of philosophy may be 
 traced in germ in the thought of Berkeley — when looked 
 at all round — the connection between his thought, and 
 the subsequent development of either the common sense 
 or the gnostic kind, was coincidence more than conscious 
 succession. Hume alone was distinctly conscious of the 
 Berkeleyan influence. He read phenomenal scepticism 
 between the lines in the ' Treatise on Human Know- 
 
Scepticism and Ecid's "ideas." 219 
 
 ledge.' He interpreted all existence in this light ; and 
 so, in his hands, the material world and all else along 
 with it melt into phenomena capriciously connected 
 in coexistences and successions. This exclusive atten- 
 tion of Hume to one aspect only of Berkeley has pro- 
 bably helped more than anything else to the popular 
 association of their names as twin patrons of " scep- 
 ticism;" and also to Berkeley's being placed beside 
 Locke and other supposed "empiricists," who it is 
 fancied had not the courage of their opinions, and 
 whose unconscious scepticism was logically laid bare in 
 the 'Treatise of Human Nature.' 
 
 Hume undid all received knowledge and belief, by 
 setting out with the assumption that the common 
 theory of the experts of his time was empiricism. 
 At least, he supposes knowledge to depend ultimately on 
 impressions or phenomena, and to be in the position of 
 needing to argue its way to belief in self and in not- 
 self, but without any intellectual presuppositions or first 
 principles to enable it to do so. This, under the formula, 
 " common theory of ideas," was what Eeid, unconscious- 
 ly to himself, was fighting against, in his long battle 
 with "ideas," as our only data for reasoning our way 
 to reality. For the weakness Beid attributed to that 
 theory lay in its merely phenomenalist character, which 
 left phenomena destitute of interpretability, and incap- 
 able of being the signs of anything. They could, as such, 
 be signs neither of the merely phenomenal material world 
 of Berkeley, nor of an unphenomenal world of matter ; 
 still less could they symbolise the Ideal world of super- 
 sensible realism. Hence it was in the " idea " or mere 
 phenomenon — irrelative and unintelligible — that Beid 
 
220 Berkeley. 
 
 believed lie found the seed -plant of scepticism and 
 agnosticism. This subjective idealism or mere pheno- 
 menalism he charged against what he calls the " Car- 
 tesian system," Avhich, itself and in its Lockian modifi- 
 cation, was supreme in the century that followed the 
 death of Descartes. 1 Its first advocates, he said, had 
 tried, on its data, to vindicate our complex physical and 
 moral experience — to prove the existence of matter, 
 and even to prove their own existence as conscious 
 agents; but their "proofs" were signal failures. They 
 could not but be so, if they had only ideas or pheno- 
 mena to start from, and if even the existence of a subject 
 of these ideas or phenomena had to be introduced by an 
 ergo. 2 Hume's strength, Eeid thought, lay in his insight 
 into this weakness of the Cartesian system. 
 
 It is easy to see how knowledge and belief disinte- 
 grate in Hume's hands, when he avails himself of this 
 interpretation of the " Cartesian system ; " or of the 
 covert and incoherent empiricism, attributed to Locke, 
 but not to Descartes, by more recent and more learned 
 critics of the past than Reid. Ordinary beliefs, as well 
 as science and philosophy, can then at once be dissolved 
 into impressions or unintelligible phenomena. Hume in- 
 sists, with Locke, in referring all that claims acceptance 
 in our knowledge or belief to the test of experience. 
 Hume's " experience," however, is only isolated impres- 
 sions — transitory unintelligible phenomena. So what 
 
 3 See Eeid's * Inquiry into the Human Mind, or the Principles of 
 Common Sense '(1764) — Introduction and Conclusion. 
 
 2 As in the " cogito ergo sum " of Descartes, according to Reid's 
 interpretation of it. But compare what is said in Professor Veitch's 
 powerfully reasoned "Introduction" to his Translation of the Me- 
 thod and Meditations of Descartes (1879). 
 
Are " ideas " seeds of Scepticism 1 221 
 
 he really means is, that one has no right to believe 
 anything that has no counterpart in some phenomenon 
 (Descartes and Locke call it " idea," and he himself calls 
 it " impression ") to which one can point as evidence of 
 its validity. Our primary data are not " perceived 
 things," as Eeid afterwards held they were, but only 
 the phenomena, out of which Berkeley taught that the 
 things of sense are composed — in virtue, however, of a 
 significance and interpretability due according to him to 
 the grounding of all in Eeason. By the rigid applica- 
 tion of the phenomenal criterion, the spiritual intellec- 
 tualism of Berkeley was made by Hume to disappear. 
 Except as a transitory phenomenon or feeling, the per- 
 sonal pronoun "I" could have no legitimate standing 
 Avith him, because no possible phenomenal meaning. 
 Equally meaningless, as Berkeley himself allowed, are 
 " space " and " time," except in their phenomenal mean- 
 ing. Then, too, as no phenomena could be per- 
 ceived in any of the five senses, or imaged in the 
 phantasy, that corresponded to what we were sup- 
 posed to intend by " identity," " substance," " cause," or 
 11 power " — these words, and their supposed intellectual 
 relations, also disappear in the cloud-land of illusion. 
 The transcendent beliefs which are the cement or co- 
 hesion of real knowledge, along with the individual 
 conscious personality which all belief presupposes, and 
 in and through which we are brought into participa- 
 tion with the universe of experience, are one after an- 
 other removed — because in their nature unphenomenal. 
 In the end we find ourselves, if we follow Hume on 
 these lines, committing mental suicide, in the act of 
 descending into an abyss where all assertions and all 
 
222 Berkeley. 
 
 denials are alike uncertain, and indeed all alike incap- 
 able of being made, in the complete sceptical suspense of 
 intellectual action. Such was the issue of a method 
 which refused to recognise as real anything beyond what 
 a Berkeleyan might have called the phenomenal side 
 of reality, and which proceeded on what Reid denounces 
 under the name of the "ideal system." It ended in the 
 disengagement of reality — permanence and cohesion — 
 not from the things of sense only, but also from the con- 
 scious persons, out of whose powers and capacities the 
 things of sense draw their meaning and human interest. 
 
 This was the outcome of the 'Treatise of Human 
 Nature.' 
 
 Hume's ' Inquiry ' pointed to a way of partial recovery 
 of lost belief, in the form of a "sceptical solution of 
 sceptical doubts," although Hume still confessed his 
 own philosophical inconsistency in believing anything. 
 The " sceptical solution " went to work in this way. Re- 
 peated companionship of similar phenomena has been 
 found, he attests, though he cannot tell why it should 
 be so, gradually to fuse companion phenomena together, 
 in the intense and complex impressions commonly called 
 beliefs. For beliefs seem to him to be only inexplicable 
 habits of feeling that inexplicably follow an inexplicable 
 custom of companionship among phenomena. Pheno- 
 mena thus come to cohere in those clusters or aggregates 
 we call individual things ; and our consciousness corre- 
 spondingly becomes a perception of the things. Indivi- 
 dual things, so formed by unintelligible associations, are 
 found further to be connected among themselves, under 
 the laws of coexistence and succession which experi- 
 mental science makes known. 
 
The Sceptic a Suicide. 223 
 
 In this great fact of arbitrary phenomenal association, 
 which Hume employs for the constructive part of his 
 philosophy, one can still trace Berkeley. For it recalls 
 the habitual " suggestions " of arbitrary coexistences 
 and successions — in Berkeley's explanation of how we 
 learn to see — in his explanation of our perceptions in 
 all the senses — and in his explanation of induction. It 
 is just his analysis of perception and induction into 
 expectation, and of expectation into habit. But the 
 habit was not with Berkeley rooted in unreason. It 
 was the unconscious expression of supreme all-pervading 
 Mind. Its rationale was the constitution of things 
 in "mind," if not expressly in rational thought. He 
 considered habit, founded on the custom of experience, 
 to be the phenomenal occasion, not the actual constitu- 
 tion, of intellectual life ; and also the substitute for intel- 
 lectual activity after custom has done its work — the un- 
 fatiguing way of preserving intellectual results in indivi- 
 dual memories. Tor habit is itself a phenomenon, and, 
 like the phenomena of sense, needs something unphe- 
 nomenal to transform its results into rational science. 
 
 A philosophy like Hume's, which insists on keeping 
 exclusively to the phenomenal side of reality, fails to 
 find even phenomenal things. It can make assertions 
 and denials at all only by acts in which it is incon- 
 sistent with itself. But, on the other hand, in the 
 ordeal thus applied to knowledge and belief, weak 
 points are found in current philosophies, and so the 
 way is prepared for improvements in the philosophical 
 conceptions of the future. Otherwise this scepticism 
 is an intellectual amusement which can conduct to 
 no results ; for it can neither be proved nor dis- 
 
224 Berkeley. 
 
 proved logically. " A refutation " of Humist scepticism 
 is not possible, except by a previous assumption of 
 what, to avoid begging the question, has to be proved. 
 Neither Eeid nor Kant can be said to refute Hume. He 
 professes, as a " universal sceptic," to show the essential 
 absurdity of experience; and he demands evidence of 
 the trustworthiness of the very faculty of reason by which 
 he pretends to have reached this result — if the sceptic 
 can without contradiction be supposed to reach " re- 
 sults," either negative or positive. Hume is not refuted, 
 on his own ground, by Eeid's vigorous appeal to our 
 ineradicable beliefs, as trustworthy; nor by Kant's critical 
 analysis of necessities of thought implied in the existence 
 of mathematics, and of physical experience. To show, 
 by means of suspected faculties, that the " experience " 
 which has been charged with illusion, because only phe- 
 nomenal, really presupposes more than phenomena, is to 
 presume as real what the sceptic asks to be proved real. 
 There is always an abstract possibility that our faculties 
 may be false ; but if even self -consciousness and memory 
 must be vindicated before they can be used, we can never 
 get to work at all. 
 
 Yet this scepticism, in itself alike incapable of proof or 
 disproof, besides the mental exercise which it afforded, 
 was a useful propellent force. It made men of thought 
 rethink ultimate beliefs, and criticise anew the essential 
 constitution of knowledge. And it is always practi- 
 cally refuted, by the imperishable trust which reason 
 reposes in its own validity ; so that no human mind can 
 permanently surrender to it. 
 
 This has been illustrated in those protests on behalf 
 of fundamental faiths of humanity which transcend 
 
Uses of Universal Scepticism. 
 
 120 
 
 
 phenomena; and also by those struggles to show the 
 essential reasonableness of experience or real knowledge, 
 which the history of philosophy records since the days 
 of Hume. For Hume's writings have been the direct or 
 indirect occasion of the philosophical activity of Europe 
 for more than a century. They have obliged physicists 
 and moralists and theologians to reconsider their as- 
 sumptions, and to trace the roots of knowledge further 
 back, if they were to assure themselves, in a rational 
 way, that it was rooted at all. 
 
 If phenomena alone are the reason as well as the phy- 
 sical causes of all knowledge and belief, can anything at 
 all be believed, consistently with tins supposition? Mere 
 phenomena, as irrelative, must go where Berkeley sent 
 the unphenomenal matter that inconsistently claimed to 
 be phenomenal. They must either mean nothing, or else 
 their meaning must be incoherent. Phenomenal things 
 could not have become what they are without something, 
 in the form of either constitutive faith or constitutive 
 thought, that transcends phenomena. Of that faith or 
 thought Berkeley was at first only dimly aware, under 
 the name of "suggestion" — which was really rational 
 habit, unconscious of its own rationality. Going deeper, 
 he also acknowledged a common sense or common faith. 
 At last, the constitutive principle became in his eyes the 
 reason in which we are in communion with the Universal 
 Mind. Suggestion or association, common sense, and 
 Universal Beason — all latent in Berkeley, became, as I 
 have already said, through Hume's disintegrative influ- 
 ence, disengaged, for more critical treatment, and have 
 since been made factors in new philosophical formations. 
 Let us look at these formations. 
 
 p. — in. p 
 
226 Berkeley. 
 
 First of all, phenomenal science itself undertook to 
 give a philosophic account of itself, without any tran- 
 scendental help beyond faith in merely physical causa- 
 tion. Accordingly, one of the chief intellectual forma- 
 tions, in the interval since Hume, has been what is now 
 called Positive or Agnostic Philosophy. In this pan- 
 phenomenalism, knowledge is limited to physically pro- 
 duced beliefs in coexistences and successions — extended 
 by " inferences from particulars to particulars " 1 — all at 
 last regarded as an evolution, through habit and asso- 
 ciation, individual or inherited. With regard to every- 
 thing beyond, this sort of philosophy is professedly 
 agnostic. 
 
 Agnosticism must be distinguished from the universal 
 scepticism that does not admit either of proof or dis- 
 proof. The latter dissolves the cement of all belief, even 
 beliefs in relations of coexistence or succession among 
 phenomena. The former only alleges that outside the 
 coexisting and successive phenomena of sense there is 
 nothing to be cemented — that all assertions or denials 
 about supposed realities beyond the range of natural 
 science are illusions. Agnosticism is Berkeley's sense 
 significance and interpretability — isolated from all the 
 rest of his teaching — incoherently accepted — and then 
 rejected in its Berkeleyan issues. Atheism and Theism 
 are, I believe, alike incapable of being proved or dis- 
 proved, and are alike foreign to human life, at the point 
 of view of merely physical and biological Science. 
 
 This incoherent empiricism was Hume's own way of 
 recovery from total suspense of all beliefs and all dis- 
 
 1 The inductive and deductive extension of phenomenal knowledge 
 is methodised by J. S. Mill, for instance, in his 'Logic' 
 

 Agnosticism. 227 
 
 beliefs. 1 It finds expression with him in the " sceptical 
 solution " of " sceptical doubts." 2 This " solution " 
 consists in acknowledging the reconstructive tendency 
 of custom or association, as the physical cause (Berkeley 
 would call it natural sign) of our beliefs about law in 
 nature being what they are. " Wherever the repetition 
 of any particular act or operation produces a propensity 
 to renew the same act or operation, without being im- 
 pelled by any reason or process of the understanding, 
 we always say that this propensity is the effect of Cus- 
 com. By employing that word we pretend not to have 
 given the ultimate reason of such propensity. We 
 only point out a principle of human nature, which is 
 universally acknowledged, and which is well known 
 by its effects. Perhaps ive can push our inquiries no 
 further^ 
 
 This " sceptical solution " is the only philosophic 
 reasonableness that is recognised in the natural science 
 philosophy of the present day, with its far-reaching and 
 beautiful conception of Evolution, as in Mr Herbert 
 Spencer. But evolution itself, if proved, would be only 
 an expression of physical causation — of phenomenal 
 significance and interpretability — though it may yet 
 turn out to be the most comprehensive of all merely 
 phenomenal laws, and the highest expression of the 
 sense symbolism, or physical causation, which Berkeley 
 has so emphatically contrasted with spiritual and tran- 
 scendent causality. 
 
 1 In his 'Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding.' "Total 
 suspense " was the state in which he was in the ' Treatise of Human 
 Nature ' some years hefore. 
 
 2 ' Inquiry,' sect. v. 
 
228 Berkeley. 
 
 A second philosophical formation, since Hume's time, 
 appears at the opposite extreme to Positivism or Agnos- 
 ticism — not without illustrating how curiously extremes 
 may approach one another. It has arisen in tins way. 
 Critical search into experience was initiated by Kant. 
 He went in quest of something necessary to thought, 
 without which, as an ingredient, phenomena could not 
 become intelligible experience. This critical search, 
 with an expenditure of speculative genius, 1 has at last 
 issued in a Gnosticism which offers — as the truly rea- 
 sonable or philosophical conception of the universe of 
 things and persons — a single general principle which, in 
 its rational consequences, is credited with explaining all 
 existence in the perfect unity of the Divine Thought. 
 Some anticipatory sounds of like import may be heard 
 even in 'Siris.' But it first became distinct after the 
 Kantian criticism of experience, in justification of the 
 categories and of a rational phenomenalism. Rente's 
 dissatisfaction with any professed philosophy that failed 
 to attain intellectual unity, confirmed the philosophical 
 prejudice of Germany against what Bacon (speaking of 
 theology) calls "abruptness," — that is to say, acknow- 
 ledgment of an unexplained residuum of mystery, which 
 forbids the perfection of philosophical science. " As for 
 perfection or completeness in divinity, it is not to be 
 sought. In divinity [or philosophy] many things must 
 be left abrupt." Yet the Hegelian seems to claim, as 
 attainable philosophy, an intuition of the rational artic- 
 
 1 In this country, within the last few years, as in Dr Stirling's 
 ' Secret of Hegel ' (1865), Professor Green's edition of Hume (1874), 
 Mr Wallace's ' Logic of Hegel ' (1874), Professor Caird's ' Philosophy 
 of Kant ' (1877), Professor Adamson's ' Philosophy of Kant ' (1879), 
 and Principal Caird's ' Philosophy of Religion' (1880). 
 
Gnosticism. 229 
 
 illation of the universe of tilings and persons in the unity 
 of the creative thought. This, if really attained, would 
 eliminate mystery from our physical and moral experi- 
 ence, and convert philosophy into absolute science. If 
 it has fulfilled its promise, it has translated all faith 
 into rationalised thought. But I cannot find that this 
 all-comprehensive system really tallies with the experi- 
 ence which it is bound to formulate adequately, and also 
 to explain ; or that it has yet got so far as to solve even 
 so clamant a difficulty as the existence within the uni- 
 verse of immoral agents and moral evil. 1 "We ask for 
 intellectual relief for moral difficulties, and we are offered 
 the " organisation of thought." . "We look for bread and 
 we find a stone. 
 
 To be distinguished from, if not intermediate between, 
 the Positivists or Agnostics, who are satisfied with the 
 11 sceptical solution " of sceptical doubts, and the Gnos- 
 tics, who offer a key to the knowledge of the Infinite — 
 there have been and are those, both before and since 
 Hume, who, with faith in the absolute reasonableness 
 of the universe, have not faith in the possibility of 
 either ordinary or philosophic men being able to reach 
 and apply the transcendent or divine thought in which 
 this reasonableness consists. Legitimate relief from 
 
 1 The distinction between phenomenal things and acting persons 
 — between nature and individual moral agency — which this Gnosti- 
 cism fails, as far as I see, to explain, or even to provide for, is touched, 
 for example, in Wordsworth's well-known noonday hymn : — 
 
 "Look up to Heaven! the industrious Sun 
 Already half his race hath run ; 
 He cannot halt nor go astray, 
 But our immortal Spirits may." 
 
230 Berkeley. 
 
 scepticism in a rational restoration of belief— wise philo- 
 sophy for finite intelligence — is by them sought else- 
 where. It is claimed as the result of a surrender to 
 certain transcendent " tendencies to believe/' often latent 
 in individuals, which nevertheless are the common con- 
 sciousness or common sense — in short, the Eaith of 
 Mankind. This Faith is not made by philosophy, and 
 philosophy cannot be filled in without it. Through 
 Faith individual human spirits, with their finite share 
 in the universal thought of the Supreme Spirit, reach 
 their apprehension of Infinity, and also their finite 
 practical comprehension of what is phenomenally real. 
 It is in this attitude that we have, in preceding chap- 
 ters, found Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley ; and that we 
 might have found Pascal and Buffier, or long afterwards 
 their countrymen, Jouffroy, Royer Collard, and Cousin. 
 A philosophy grounded on Faith was the highest lesson 
 of Eeid and his successors, especially Hamilton, in Scot- 
 land ; more covertly of Kant, in Germany, in the moral 
 solution offered, in his practical reason. In an impres- 
 sive form, it was the essence of the teaching of Jacobi. 
 
 Philosophical restoration of what is called Faith, be- 
 cause it cannot be expanded into rational unity as an 
 imaginable system, has, in most of these instances, been 
 prompted more by wise moral reaction against sceptical 
 suicide, than by speculative interest in the attainment 
 of rational unity. This philosophy does not offer an 
 intellectual system of the actual universe — a compre- 
 hension of it in the Infinite. On the contrary, it offers 
 faiths, verified by much reflection, as the philosophical 
 basis and constitution of all philosophical knoAvledge. It 
 sees in philosophers, when they are doing their proper 
 
Faith and ThmgH. 231 
 
 work, the intellectual and moral police for protecting men 
 against speculations that discredit those impulses to be- 
 lieve which are independent of philosophy. It assigns 
 to philosophy an office that has been likened to that of 
 the spear of Achilles, "which healed the wounds given by 
 itself. It is the aim of this philosophy to revive by 
 reflection dormant faith, physical and spiritual ; and to 
 interpret, as far as possible, human tendencies to be- 
 lieve, that might be blighted by " sceptical solutions," 
 or that might be sublimated in transcendental claims 
 to re-think, from the central point of God, the Divine 
 Thought according to which the world of phenomenal 
 nature and finite moral agents exist. It condemns, as 
 demonstrably irrational, the expectation that any human 
 philosophy can deduce this complex, phenomenal and 
 unphenomenal, universe, out of a single fundamental 
 principle. It distinguishes between the Eternal Intel- 
 lect, that sees all in each and each in all, and the finite 
 or faith-constituted knowledge, in which moral agents 
 share, in their " broken " fashion, in Divine Know- 
 ledge. Those who look philosophically at things from 
 this point, are satisfied that they find what is deepest 
 and truest, in their relations to reality, not in pure 
 thought, but in the faith — reasonable inspiration — 
 irresistible impulse to believe — from which, when in a 
 normal healthy state, a human being cannot escape. 
 They are satisfied that the ideal state of wisdom is not 
 to be attained by man in or through his share of know- 
 ledge ; and that if " philosophy " must be the purely 
 intellectual attainment of the all-comprehensive rational 
 unity of phenomenal things and self-conscious spirits, 
 as at the Divine point of view, then there can for man 
 
232 Berkeley. 
 
 be no philosophy. Their philosophy is the rational 
 intuition that this must be so — that the sense of its being 
 so is the predicament in which man finds himself at 
 last, when he applies reason adequately to the ultimate 
 question. It is the awakening through reflection of 
 elements of common consciousness, which cannot be 
 translated into human or imaginable thought under con- 
 ditions of time ; and the confession that, for finite intel- 
 ligence with a finite experience, timeless or transcendent 
 thought about real things and persons must be a highly 
 attenuated formalism, which leaves in as much dark- 
 ness as before the philosophic questions of chief human 
 interest regarding the destiny of conscious spirits. 
 
 I find no reason to doubt that human thought cannot 
 be sublimated philosophically into Divine Thought — 
 that a human philosophy of what must appear to men 
 under relations of time is necessarily " broken " — and 
 that it has to be cemented by beliefs which refuse to be 
 fully resolved into pure thought, though the reasonable- 
 ness of their office may be vindicated. 
 
 The three elements, dimly discernible in Eerkeley, 
 disengaged by the scepticism of Hume, which have thus 
 given rise to three opposed philosophical formations, each 
 of which now struggles for predominance, have severally 
 their right to exist, as so far genuine elements involved 
 in the attempt to know things and persons philosophi- 
 cally. May it not be said of Agnosticism and Gnosticism, 
 that each is right in much that it affirms, but wrong in 
 something that it denies, and that mutual explanations 
 might induce approximation to the Philosophy of Faith 1 
 Perhaps the next step in advance may be the realisa- 
 
Nature and Moral Government. 233 
 
 tion of a better understanding of the mutual relations of 
 Agnosticism, Gnosticism, and Faith. Present in a crude 
 way in Berkeley — then disengaged by Hume for antag- 
 onism with each other — they may, in the next move- 
 ment of European and American philosophy, be recon- 
 nected, in a better union than Berkeleyism offers, as the 
 issue of what has happened in the interval 
 
 Is there nothing, then, to which the philosopher can 
 look as eternally fixed? Though man fails to unfold, 
 in unbroken intellectual order, the actual divine mani- 
 festation in the worlds of nature and spirit, for the 
 complete satisfaction of his speculative curiosity, — is 
 there not the moral anchorage to which Butler with grave 
 and anxious countenance points, when he proclaims the 
 supremacy of conscience, and at which Kant hears the 
 voice of the awful categorical imperative 1 Although a 
 purely intellectual solution of the mystery of existence, 
 in Divine Science of the Infinite, may be unattainable, 
 we can still be told by Butler, and, at the end of a more 
 subtle course of reasoning, by Kant, that we ought to 
 live the absolutely good, even while we cannot realise in 
 thought the perfect rational unity of the actual universe 
 that is revealed to man only under relations of time. 
 
 This, unconsciously to himself, is in a manner wrapped 
 up in Berkeley's lifelong philosophic thought. That 
 thought becomes, when we pursue it further than he did, 
 a sublime intuition of the phenomenal realities of sense, 
 inorganic and organic, as established media for the intel- 
 lectual education of finite spirits by means of physical 
 sciences ; for intercourse between individual moral agents ; 
 and for a revelation of the Eternal Spirit, in whom the 
 
 p.— III. Q 
 
234 Berkeley. 
 
 merely phenomenal things of sense, and moral agents too, 
 have their being. It includes the fundamental faith that 
 the universe exists for an eternal moral purpose, so that 
 our experience in it, with the conditions of thought and 
 belief presupposed in the experience, must be practically- 
 trustworthy and reasonable. According to this concep- 
 tion, the Government of Nature, with the physical and 
 biological sciences in which it has been partially inter- 
 preted, is subordinate and ancillary to Moral Govern- 
 ment. The universe consists of persons or conscious 
 moral agents, and also of phenomenal things which are 
 in a process of constant creation ; and the things seem 
 to be made for and regulated by the persons. The one 
 of Kant's two great objects of admiration and awe is 
 only the minister of the other. The " starry heavens " 
 pass away; space, under whose relations phenomenal 
 things are presented, becomes lost in the unimaginable 
 Infinite of Boundlessness; time, which the heavenly 
 bodies measure, becomes lost in the unimaginable In- 
 finite of Endlessness. But Moral Government and 
 moral agents cannot thus be lost or pass away. 
 
 END OF BERKELEY. 
 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS. 
 
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