The Works of George Berkeley D.D.
Formerly Bishop of Cloyne
Including his Posthumous Works
With Prefaces, Annotations, Appendices, and An Account of his Life, by
Alexander Campbell Fraser
Hon. D.C.L., Oxford
Hon. LL.D. Glasgow and Edinburgh; Emeritus Professor of Logic and
Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh
In Four Volumes
Vol. 1: Philosophical Works, 1705-21
Oxford
At the Clarendon Press
1901
CONTENTS
Preface
George Berkeley, By The Editor
Errata
Commonplace Book. Mathematical, Ethical, Physical, And Metaphysical
Editor’s Preface To The Commonplace Book
Commonplace Book
An Essay Towards A New Theory Of Vision
Editor’s Preface To The Essay Towards A New Theory Of Vision
Dedication
An Essay Towards A New Theory Of Vision
An Appendix To The Essay On Vision
A Treatise Concerning The Principles Of Human Knowledge
Editor’s Preface To The Treatise Concerning The Principles Of Human
Knowledge
Dedication
The Preface
Introduction
Part First
Three Dialogues Between Hylas And Philonous The Design Of Which Is Plainly
To Demonstrate The Reality And Perfection Of Human Knowledge, The
Incorporeal Nature Of The Soul, And The Immediate Providence Of A Deity,
In Opposition To Sceptics And Atheists, Also To Open A Method For
Rendering The Sciences More Easy, Useful, And Compendious
Editor’s Preface
Dedication
The Preface
The First Dialogue
The Second Dialogue
The Third Dialogue
De Motu: Sive; De Motus Principio Et Natura, Et De Causa Communicationis
Motuum
Editor’s Preface To De Motu
De Motu
Footnotes
PREFACE
[Frontispiece]
More than thirty years ago I was honoured by a request to prepare a
complete edition of the Works of Bishop Berkeley, with Notes, for the
Clarendon Press, Oxford. That edition, which contains many of his writings
previously unpublished, appeared in 1871. It was followed in 1874 by a
volume of annotated Selections from his philosophical works; and in 1881 I
prepared a small volume on “Berkeley” for Blackwood’s “Philosophical
Classics.”
The 1871 edition of the Works originated, I believe, in an essay on “The
Real World of Berkeley,” which I gave to _Macmillan’s Magazine_ in 1862,
followed by another in 1864, in the _North British Review_. These essays
suggested advantages to contemporary thought which might be gained by a
consideration of final questions about man and the universe, in the form
in which they are presented by a philosopher who has suffered more from
misunderstanding than almost any other modern thinker. During a part of
his lifetime, he was the foremost metaphysician in Europe in an
unmetaphysical generation. And in this country, after a revival of
philosophy in the later part of the eighteenth century, _idea_, _matter_,
_substance_, _cause_, and other terms which play an important part in his
writings, had lost the meaning that he intended; while in Germany the
sceptical speculations of David Hume gave rise to a reconstructive
criticism, on the part of Kant and his successors, which seemed at the
time to have little concern with the _a posteriori_ methods and the
principles of Berkeley.
The success of the attempt to recall attention to Berkeley has far
exceeded expectation. Nearly twenty thousand copies of the three
publications mentioned above have found their way into the hands of
readers in Europe and America; and the critical estimates of Berkeley, by
eminent writers, which have appeared since 1871, in Britain, France,
Germany, Denmark, Holland, Italy, America, and India, confirm the opinion
that his Works contain a word in season, even for the twentieth century.
Among others who have delivered appreciative criticisms of Berkeley within
the last thirty years are J.S. Mill, Mansel, Huxley, T.H. Green, Maguire,
Collyns Simon, the Right Hon. A.J. Balfour, Mr. Leslie Stephen, Dr.
Hutchison Stirling, Professor T.K. Abbott, Professor Van der Wyck, M.
Penjon, Ueberweg, Frederichs, Ulrici, Janitsch, Eugen Meyer, Spicker,
Loewy, Professor Höffding of Copenhagen, Dr. Lorenz, Noah Porter, and
Krauth, besides essays in the chief British, Continental, and American
reviews. The text of those Works of Berkeley which were published during
his lifetime, enriched with a biographical Introduction by Mr. A.J.
Balfour, carefully edited by Mr. George Sampson, appeared in 1897. In 1900
Dr. R. Richter, of the University of Leipsic, produced a new translation
into German of the _Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous_, with an
excellent Introduction and notes. These estimates form a remarkable
contrast to the denunciations, founded on misconception, by Warburton and
Beattie in the eighteenth century.
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In 1899 I was unexpectedly again asked by the Delegates of the Oxford
University Press to prepare a New Edition of Berkeley’s Works, with some
account of his life, as the edition of 1871 was out of print; a
circumstance which I had not expected to occur in my lifetime. It seemed
presumptuous to undertake what might have been entrusted to some one
probably more in touch with living thought; and in one’s eighty-second
year, time and strength are wanting for remote research. But the
recollection that I was attracted to philosophy largely by Berkeley, in
the morning of life more than sixty years ago, combined with the pleasure
derived from association in this way with the great University in which he
found an academic home in his old age, moved me in the late evening of
life to make the attempt. And now, at the beginning of the twentieth
century, I offer these volumes, which still imperfectly realise my ideal
of a final Oxford edition of the philosopher who spent his last days in
Oxford, and whose mortal remains rest in its Cathedral.
Since 1871 materials of biographical and philosophical interest have been
discovered, in addition to the invaluable collection of MSS. which
Archdeacon Rose then placed at my disposal, and which were included in the
supplementary volume of _Life and Letters_. Through the kindness of the
late Earl of Egmont I had access, some years ago, to a large number of
letters which passed between his ancestor, Sir John (afterwards Lord)
Percival, and Berkeley, between 1709 and 1730. I have availed myself
freely of this correspondence.
Some interesting letters from and concerning Berkeley, addressed to his
friend Dr. Samuel Johnson of Stratford in Connecticut, afterwards
President of King’s College in New York, appeared in 1874, in Dr.
Beardsley’s _Life of Johnson_, illustrating Berkeley’s history from 1729
till his death. For these and for further information I am indebted to Dr.
Beardsley.
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In the present edition of Berkeley’s Works, the Introductions and the
annotations have been mostly re-written. A short account of his romantic
life is prefixed, intended to trace its progress in the gradual
development and application of his initial Principle; and also the
external incidents of his life in their continuity, with the help of the
new material in the Percival MSS. and the correspondence with Johnson. It
forms a key to the whole. This biography is not intended to supersede the
_Life and Letters_ of Berkeley that accompanied the 1871 edition, which
remains as a magazine of facts for reference.
The rearrangement of the Works is a feature in the present edition. Much
of the new material that was included in the 1871 edition reached me when
the book was far advanced in the press, and thus the chronological
arrangement, strictly followed in the present edition, was not possible. A
chronological arrangement is suggested by Berkeley himself. “I could wish
that all the things I have published on these philosophical subjects were
read in the order wherein I published them,” are his words in one of his
letters to Johnson; “and a second time with a critical eye, adding your
own thought and observation upon every part as you went along.”
The first three volumes in this edition contain the Philosophical Works
exclusively; arranged in chronological order, under the three periods of
Berkeley’s life. The First Volume includes those of his early life; the
Second those produced in middle life; and the Third those of his later
years. The Miscellaneous Works are presented in like manner in the Fourth
Volume.
The four little treatises in which Berkeley in early life unfolded his new
thought about the universe, along with his college _Commonplace Book_
published in 1871, which prepared the way for them, form, along with the
Life, the contents of the First Volume. It is of them that the author
writes thus, in another of his letters to Johnson:—“I do not indeed wonder
that on first reading what I have written men are not thoroughly
convinced. On the contrary, I should very much wonder if prejudices which
have been many years taking root should be extirpated in a few hours’
reading. I had no inclination to trouble the world with large volumes.
What I have done was rather with a view of giving hints to thinking men,
who have leisure and curiosity to go to the bottom of things, and pursue
them in their own minds. Two or three times reading these small tracts,
and making what is read the occasion of thinking, would, I believe, render
the whole familiar and easy to the mind, and take off that shocking
appearance which hath often been observed to attend speculative truths.”
Except Johnson, none of Berkeley’s eighteenth-century critics seem to have
observed this rule.
_Alciphron, or The Minute Philosopher_, with its supplement in the _Theory
of Visual Language Vindicated_, being the philosophical works of his
middle life, associated with its American enterprise, form the Second
Volume. In them the conception of the universe that was unfolded in the
early writings is applied, in vindication of religious morality and
Christianity, against the Atheism attributed to those who called
themselves Free-thinkers; who were treated by Berkeley as, at least by
implication, atheistic.
The Third Volume contains the _Analyst_ and _Siris_, which belong to his
later life, _Siris_ being especially characteristic of its serene quiet.
In both there is a deepened sense of the mystery of the universe, and in
_Siris_ especially a more comprehensive conception of the final problem
suggested by human life. But the metaphysics of the one is lost in
mathematical controversy; that of the other in medical controversy, and in
undigested ancient and mediæval learning. The metaphysical importance of
_Siris_ was long unrecognised, although in it Berkeley’s thought
culminates, not in a paradox about Matter, but in the conception of God as
the concatenating principle of the universe; yet this reached through the
conception of Matter as real only in and through living Mind.
The Miscellaneous Works, after the two juvenile Latin tracts in
mathematics, deal with observations of nature and man gathered in his
travels, questions of social economy, and lessons in religious life.
Several are posthumous, and were first published in the 1871 edition. Of
these, perhaps the most interesting is the _Journal in Italy_. The
_Discourse on Passive Obedience_ is the nearest approach to ethical theory
which Berkeley has given to us, and as such it might have taken its place
in the First Volume; but on the whole it seemed more appropriately placed
in the Fourth, where it is easily accessible for those who prefer to read
it immediately after the book of _Principles_.
I have introduced, in an Appendix to the Third Volume, some matter of
philosophical interest for which there was no place in the editorial
Prefaces or in the annotations. The historical significance of Samuel
Johnson and Jonathan Edwards, as pioneers of American philosophy, and also
advocates of the new conception of the material world that is associated
with Berkeley, is recognised in Appendix C. Illustrations of the
misinterpretation of Berkeley by his early critics are presented in
Appendix D. A lately discovered tractate by Berkeley forms Appendix E. In
the Fourth Volume, numerous queries contained in the first edition of the
_Querist_, and omitted in the later editions, are given in an Appendix,
which enables the reader to reconstruct that interesting tract in the form
in which it originally appeared.
The present edition is thus really a new work, which possesses, I hope, a
certain philosophical unity, as well as pervading biographical interest.
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As Berkeley is the immediate successor of Locke, and as he was educated by
collision with the _Essay __ on Human Understanding_, perhaps Locke ought
to have had more prominence in the editorial portion of this book.
Limitation of space partly accounts for the omission; and I venture
instead to refer the reader to the Prolegomena and notes in my edition of
Locke’s _Essay_, which was published by the Clarendon Press in 1894. I may
add that an expansion of thoughts which run through the Life and many of
the annotations, in this edition of Berkeley, may be found in my
_Philosophy of Theism_(1).
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The reader need not come to Berkeley in the expectation of finding in his
Works an all-comprehensive speculative system like Spinoza’s, or a
reasoned articulation of the universe of reality such as Hegel is supposed
to offer. But no one in the succession of great English philosophers has,
I think, proposed in a way more apt to invite reflexion, the final
alternative between Unreason, on the one hand, and Moral Reason expressed
in Universal Divine Providence, on the other hand, as the root of the
unbeginning and endless evolution in which we find ourselves involved; as
well as the further question, Whether this tremendous practical
alternative _can_ be settled by any means that are within the reach of
man? His Philosophical Works, taken collectively, may encourage those who
see in a reasonable _via media_ between Omniscience and Nescience the true
path of progress, under man’s inevitable venture of reasonable Faith.
One is therefore not without hope that a fresh impulse may be given to
philosophy and religious thought by this reappearance of George Berkeley,
under the auspices of the University of Oxford, at the beginning of the
twentieth century. His readers will at any rate find themselves in the
company of one of the most attractive personalities of English philosophy,
who is also among the foremost of those thinkers who are masters in
English literature—Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, George Berkeley and
David Hume.
A. Campbell Fraser.
GORTON, HAWTHORNDEN, MIDLOTHIAN,
_March, 1901_.
GEORGE BERKELEY, BY THE EDITOR
I. Early Life (1685-1721).
Towards the end of the reign of Charles the Second a certain William
Berkeley, 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 Nore. Little is known about this William Berkeley except
that he was Irish by birth and English by descent. It is said that his
father went over to Ireland soon after the Restoration, in the suite of
his reputed kinsman, Lord Berkeley of Stratton, when he was Lord
Lieutenant. William Berkeley’s wife seems to have been of Irish blood, and
in some remote way related to the family of Wolfe, the hero of Quebec. It
was in the modest abode in the valley of the Nore that George, the eldest
of their six sons, was born, on March 12, 1685.
There is nothing in the recorded family history of these Dysert Berkeleys
that helps to explain the singular personality and career of the eldest
son. The parents have left no mark, and make no appearance in any extant
records of the family. They probably made their way to the valley of the
Nore among families of English connexion who, in the quarter of a century
preceding the birth of George Berkeley, were finding settlements in
Ireland. The family, as it appears, was not wealthy, but was recognised as
of gentle blood. Robert, the fifth son, became rector of Middleton and
vicar-general of Cloyne; and another son, William, held a commission in
the army. According to the Register of Trinity College, one of the sons
was born “near Thurles,” in 1699, and Thomas, the youngest, was born in
Tipperary, in 1703, so that the family may have removed from Dysert after
the birth of George. In what can be gleaned of the younger sons, one finds
little appearance of sympathy with the religious and philosophical genius
of the eldest.
Regarding this famous eldest son in those early days, we have this
significant autobiographical fragment in his _Commonplace Book_: “I was
distrustful at eight years old, and consequently by nature disposed for
the new doctrines.” In his twelfth year we find the boy in Kilkenny
School. The register records his entrance there in the summer of 1696,
when he was placed at once in the second class, which seems to imply
precocity, for it is almost a solitary instance. He spent the four
following years in Kilkenny. The School was in high repute for learned
masters and famous pupils; among former pupils were the poet Congreve and
Swift, nearly twenty years earlier than George Berkeley; among his
school-fellows was Thomas Prior, his life-long friend and correspondent.
In the days of Berkeley and Prior the head master was Dr. Hinton, and the
School was still suffering from the consequences of “the warre in Ireland”
which followed the Revolution.
Berkeley in Kilkenny School is hardly visible, and we have no means of
estimating his mental state when he left it. Tradition says that in his
school-days he was wont to feed his imagination with airy visions and
romance, a tradition which perhaps originated long after in popular
misconceptions of his idealism. Dimly discernible at Kilkenny, only a few
years later he was a conspicuous figure in an island that was then
beginning to share in the intellectual movement of the modern world,
taking his place as a classic in English literature, and as the most
subtle and ardent of contemporary English-speaking thinkers.
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In March, 1700, at the age of fifteen, George Berkeley entered Trinity
College, Dublin. This was his home for more than twenty years. He was at
first a mystery to the ordinary undergraduate. Some, we are told,
pronounced him the greatest dunce, others the greatest genius in the
College. To hasty judges he seemed an idle dreamer; the thoughtful admired
his subtle intelligence and the beauty of his character. In his
undergraduate years, a mild and ingenuous youth, inexperienced in the ways
of men, vivacious, humorous, satirical, in unexpected ways inquisitive,
often paradoxical, through misunderstandings he persisted in his own way,
full of simplicity and enthusiasm. In 1704 (the year in which Locke died)
he passed Bachelor of Arts, and became Master in 1707, when he was
admitted to a Fellowship, “the only reward of learning which that kingdom
had to bestow.”
In Trinity College the youth found himself on the tide of modern thought,
for the “new philosophy” of Newton and Locke was then invading the
University. Locke’s _Essay_, published in 1690, was already in vogue. This
early recognition of Locke in Dublin was chiefly due to William Molyneux,
Locke’s devoted friend, a lawyer and member of the Irish Parliament, much
given to the experimental methods. Descartes, too, with his sceptical
criticism of human beliefs, yet disposed to spiritualise powers commonly
attributed to matter, was another accepted authority in Trinity College;
and Malebranche was not unknown. Hobbes was the familiar representative of
a finally materialistic conception of existence, reproducing in modern
forms the atomism of Democritus and the ethics of Epicurus. Above all,
Newton was acknowledged master in physics, whose _Principia_, issued three
years sooner than Locke’s _Essay_, was transforming the conceptions of
educated men regarding their surroundings, like the still more
comprehensive law of physical evolution in the nineteenth century.
John Toland, an Irishman, one of the earliest and ablest of the new sect
of Free-thinkers, made his appearance at Dublin in 1696, as the author of
_Christianity not Mysterious_. The book was condemned by College
dignitaries and dignified clergy with even more than Irish fervour. It was
the opening of a controversy that lasted over half of the eighteenth
century in England, in which Berkeley soon became prominent; and it was
resumed later on, with greater intellectual force and in finer literary
form, by David Hume and Voltaire. The collision with Toland about the time
of Berkeley’s matriculation may have awakened his interest. Toland was
supposed to teach that matter is eternal, and that motion is its essential
property, into which all changes presented in the outer and inner
experience of man may at last be resolved. Berkeley’s life was a continual
protest against these dogmas. The Provost of Trinity College in 1700 was
Dr. Peter Browne, who had already entered the lists against Toland; long
after, when Bishop of Cork, he was in controversy with Berkeley about the
nature of man’s knowledge of God. The Archbishop of Dublin in the early
years of the eighteenth century was William King, still remembered as a
philosophical theologian, whose book on the _Origin of Evil_, published in
1702, was criticised by Boyle and Leibniz.
Dublin in those years was thus a place in which a studious youth, who had
been “distrustful at eight years old,” might be disposed to entertain
grave questions about the ultimate meaning of his visible environment, and
of the self-conscious life to which he was becoming awake. Is the universe
of existence confined to the visible world, and is matter the really
active power in existence? Is God the root and centre of all that is real,
and if so, what is meant by God? Can God be good if the world is a mixture
of good and evil? Questions like these were ready to meet the inquisitive
Kilkenny youth in his first years at Dublin.
One of his earliest interests at College was mathematical. His first
appearance in print was as the anonymous author of two Latin tracts,
_Arithmetica_ and _Miscellanea Mathematica_, published in 1707. They are
interesting as an index of his intellectual inclination when he was hardly
twenty; for he says they were prepared three years before they were given
to the world. His disposition to curious questions in geometry and algebra
is further shewn in his College _Commonplace Book_.
This lately discovered _Commonplace Book_ throws a flood of light upon
Berkeley’s state of mind between his twentieth and twenty-fourth year. It
is a wonderful revelation; a record under his own hand of his thoughts and
feelings when he first came under the inspiration of a new conception of
the nature and office of the material world. It was then struggling to
find adequate expression, and in it the sanguine youth seemed to find a
spiritual panacea for the errors and confusions of philosophy. It was able
to make short work, he believed, with atheistic materialism, and could
dispense with arguments against sceptics in vindication of the reality of
experience. The mind-dependent existence of the material world, and its
true function in the universe of concrete reality, were to be disclosed
under the light of a new transforming self-evident Principle. “I wonder
not at my sagacity in discovering the obvious and amazing truth. I rather
wonder at my stupid inadvertency in not finding it out before—’tis no
witchcraft to see.” The pages of the _Commonplace Book_ give vent to
rapidly forming thoughts about the things of sense and the “ambient space”
of a youth entering into reflective life, in company with Descartes and
Malebranche, Bacon and Hobbes, above all, Locke and Newton; who was trying
to translate into reasonableness his faith in the reality of the material
world and God. Under the influence of this new conception, he sees the
world like one awakening from a confused dream. The revolution which he
wanted to inaugurate he foresaw would be resisted. Men like to think and
speak about things as they have been accustomed to do: they are offended
when they are asked to exchange this for what appears to them absurdity,
or at least when the change seems useless. But in spite of the ridicule
and dislike of a world long accustomed to put empty words in place of
living thoughts, he resolves to deliver himself of his burden, with the
politic conciliation of a skilful advocate however; for he
characteristically reminds himself that one who “desires to bring another
over to his own opinions must seem to harmonize with him at first, and
humour him in his own way of talking.”
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In 1709, when he was twenty-four years old, Berkeley presented himself to
the world of empty verbal reasoners as the author of what he calls
modestly _An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision_. It was dedicated to
Sir John Percival, his correspondent afterwards for more than twenty
years; but I have not discovered the origin of their friendship. The
_Essay_ was a pioneer, meant to open the way for the disclosure of the
Secret with which he was burdened, lest the world might be shocked by an
abrupt disclosure. In this prelude he tries to make the reader recognise
that in ordinary seeing we are always interpreting visual signs; so that
we have daily presented to our eyes what is virtually an intelligible
natural language; so that in all our intercourse with the visible world we
are in intercourse with all-pervading active Intelligence. We are reading
absent data of touch and of the other senses in the language of their
visual signs. And the visual signs themselves, which are the immediate
objects of sight, are necessarily dependent on sentient and percipient
mind; whatever may be the case with the tangible realities which the
visual data signify, a fact evident by our experience when we make use of
a looking-glass. The material world, so far at least as it presents itself
visibly, is _real_ only in being _realised_ by living and seeing beings.
The mind-dependent _visual_ signs of which we are conscious are
continually speaking to us of an invisible and distant world of _tangible_
realities; and through the natural connexion of the visual signs with
their tactual meanings, we are able in seeing practically to perceive, not
only what is distant in space, but also to anticipate the future. The Book
of Vision is in literal truth a Book of Prophecy. The chief lesson of the
tentative _Essay on Vision_ is thus summed up:—
“Upon the whole, I think we may fairly conclude that the proper objects of
Vision constitute the Universal Language of Nature; whereby we are
instructed how to regulate our actions in order to attain those things
that are necessary to the preservation and well-being of our bodies, as
also to avoid whatever may be hurtful and destructive of them. And the
manner wherein they signify and mark out 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 signified by any likeness or
identity of nature, but only by an habitual connexion that experience has
made us to observe between them. Suppose one who had always continued
blind be told by his guide that after he has 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 admirable and surprising? He cannot conceive how it
is possible for mortals to frame such predictions as these, which to him
would seem as strange and unaccountable as prophecy does to others. Even
they who are blessed with the visive faculty may (though familiarity make
it less observed) 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 designed; 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
pleasing speculation, and may, if anything, give us some glimmering
analogous prænotion of things that are placed beyond the certain discovery
and comprehension of our present state(2).”
Berkeley took orders in the year in which his _Essay on Vision_ was
published. On February 1, 1709, he was ordained as deacon, in the chapel
of Trinity College, by Dr. George Ashe, Bishop of Clogher. Origen and
Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas, Malebranche, Fenelon, and Pascal, Cudworth,
Butler, Jonathan Edwards, and Schleiermacher, along with Berkeley, are
among those who are illustrious at once in the history of philosophy and
of the Christian Church. The Church, it has been said, has been for nearly
two thousand years the great Ethical Society of the world, and if under
its restrictions it has been less conspicuous on the field of
philosophical criticism and free inquiry, these names remind us of the
immense service it has rendered to meditative thought.
The light of the Percival correspondence first falls on Berkeley’s life in
1709. The earliest extant letters from Berkeley to Sir John Percival are
in September, October, and December of that year, dated at Trinity
College. In one of them he pronounces Socrates “the best and most
admirable man that the heathen world has produced.” Another letter, in
March, 1710, accompanies a copy of the second edition of the _Essay on
Vision_. “I have made some alterations and additions in the body of the
treatise,” he says, “and in the appendix have endeavoured to meet the
objections of the Archbishop of Dublin;” whose sermon he proceeds to
deprecate, for “denying that goodness and understanding are more to be
affirmed of God than feet or hands,” although all these may, in a
metaphorical sense. How far, or whether at all, God is knowable by man,
was, as we shall see, matter of discussion and controversy with Berkeley
in later life; but this shews that the subject was already in his
thoughts. Returning to the _Essay on Vision_, he tells Sir John that
“there remains one objection, that with regard to the uselessness 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 in the press, the design of which is to demonstrate the existence and
attributes of God, the immortality of the soul, the reconciliation of
God’s foreknowledge and the freedom of man; and by shewing the emptiness
and falsehood of several parts of the speculative sciences, to induce 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 shew. I do not see how it is possible to demonstrate the being
of a God on the principles of the Archbishop—that strictly goodness and
understanding can no more be assumed of God than that He has feet or
hands; there being no argument that I know for God’s existence which does
not prove Him at the same time to be an understanding and benevolent
being, in the strict, literal, and proper meaning of these words.” He
adds, “I have written to Mr. Clarke to give me his thoughts on the subject
of God’s existence, but have got no answer.”
The work 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 fragment of a larger work, never finished,
Berkeley’s spiritual conception of matter and cosmos is unfolded,
defended, and applied. According to the _Essay on Vision_, the world, as
far as it is visible, is dependent on living mind. According to this book
of _Principles_ the whole material world, as far as it can have any
practical concern with the knowings and doings of men, is real only by
being realised in like manner in the percipient experience of some living
mind. The concrete world, with which alone we have to do, could not exist
in its concrete reality if there were no living percipient being in
existence to actualise it. To suppose that it could would be to submit to
the illusion of a metaphysical abstraction. Matter unrealised in its
necessary subordination to some one’s percipient experience is the chief
among the illusions which philosophers have been too ready to encourage,
and which the mass of mankind, who accept words without reflecting on
their legitimate meanings, are ready to accept blindly. But we have only
to reflect in order to see the absurdity of a material world such as we
have experience of existing without ever being realised or made concrete
in any sentient life. Try to conceive an eternally dead universe, empty
for ever of God and all finite spirits, and you find you cannot. Reality
can be real only in a living form. Percipient life underlies or
constitutes all that is real. The _esse_ of the concrete material world is
_percipi_. This was the “New Principle” with which the young Dublin Fellow
was burdened—the Secret of the universe which he had been longing to
discharge upon mankind for their benefit, yet without sign of desire to
gain fame for himself as the discoverer. It is thus that he unfolds it:—
“Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need
only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, viz.
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
subsistence without a Mind; that their _being_ is to be perceived or
known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me,
or do not exist in my mind, or that of any other created spirit, they must
either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some
Eternal Spirit: it being perfectly unintelligible, and involving all the
absurdity of abstraction, to attribute to any single part of them an
existence independent of a Spirit(3).”
This does not mean denial of the existence of the world that is daily
presented to our senses and which includes our own bodies. On the
contrary, it affirms, as intuitively true, the existence of the only real
matter which our senses present to us. The only material world of which we
have any experience consists of the appearances (misleadingly called
_ideas_ of sense by Berkeley) which are continually rising as real objects
in a passive procession of interpretable signs, through means of which
each finite person realises his own individual personality; also the
existence of other finite persons; and the sense-symbolism that is more or
less interpreted in the natural sciences; all significant of God. So the
material world of concrete experience is presented to us as mind-dependent
and in itself powerless: the deepest and truest reality must always be
spiritual. Yet this mind-dependent material world is the occasion of
innumerable pleasures and pains to human percipients, in so far as they
conform to or contradict its customary laws, commonly called the laws of
nature. So the sense-symbolism in which we live is found to play an
important part in the experience of percipient beings. But it makes us
sceptics and atheists when, in its name, we put a supposed dead abstract
matter in room of the Divine Active Reason of which all natural order is
the continuous providential expression.
Accordingly, God must exist, because the material world, in order to be a
real world, needs to be continually realised and regulated by living
Providence; and we have all the certainty of sense and sanity that there
_is_ a (mind-dependent) material world, a boundless and endlessly evolving
sense-symbolism.
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In the two years after the disclosure of his New Principle we see Berkeley
chiefly through his correspondence with Percival. He was eager to hear the
voice of criticism; but the critics were slow to speak, and when they did
speak they misconceived the question, and of course his answer to it. “If
when you receive my book,” he writes from Dublin, in July, 1710, to Sir
John, who was 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.” He also
asks Percival to present the book of _Principles_ to Lord Pembroke, to
whom he had ventured to dedicate it, as Locke had done his _Essay_. The
reply was discouraging.
“I did but name the subject-matter of your book of _Principles_ to some
ingenuous friends of mine,” Percival says, “and they immediately treated
it with ridicule, at the same time refusing to read it; which I have not
yet got one to do. 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
qualities you have, 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 Erasmus was not worse thought of for writing in praise of folly; but
that you are not gone as far as a gentleman in town, who asserts not only
that there is no such thing as Matter, but that we ourselves have no being
at all.”
It is not surprising that a book which was supposed to deny the existence
of all that we see and touch should be ridiculed, and its author called a
madman. What vexed the author was, “that men who had never considered my
book should confound me with the sceptics, who doubt the existence of
sensible things, and are not positive of any one thing, not even of their
own being. But whoever reads my book with attention will see that I
question not the existence of anything we perceive by our senses. Fine
spun metaphysics are what on all occasions I declaim against, and if any
one shall shew anything of that sort in my _Treatise_ I will willingly
correct it.” A material world that was real enough to yield physical
science, to make known to us the existence of other persons and of God,
and which signified in very practical ways happiness or misery to sentient
beings, seemed to him sufficiently real for human science and all other
purposes. Nevertheless, in the ardour of youth Berkeley had hardly
fathomed the depths into which his New Principle led, and which he hoped
to escape by avoiding the abstractions of “fine-spun metaphysics.”
In December Percival writes from London that he has “given the book to
Lord Pembroke,” who “thought the author an ingenious man, and to be
encouraged”; but for himself he “cannot believe in the non-existence of
Matter”; and he had tried in vain to induce Samuel Clarke, the great
English metaphysician, either to refute or to accept the New Principle. In
February Berkeley sends an explanatory letter for Lord Pembroke to
Percival’s care. In a letter in June he turns to social questions, and
suggests that if “some Irish gentlemen of good fortune and generous
inclinations would constantly reside in England, there to watch for the
interests of Ireland, they might bring far greater advantage than they
could by spending their incomes at home.” And so 1711 passes, with
responses of ignorant critics; vain endeavours to draw worthy criticism
from Samuel Clarke; the author all the while doing work as a Tutor in
Trinity College on a modest income; now and then on holidays in Meath or
elsewhere in Ireland. Three discourses on _Passive Obedience_ in the
College Chapel in 1712, misinterpreted, brought on him the reproach of
Jacobitism. Yet they were designed to shew that society rests on a deeper
foundation than force and calculations of utility, and is at last rooted
in principles of an immutable morality. Locke’s favourite opinion, that
morality is a demonstrable, seems to weigh with him in these _Discourses_.
But Berkeley was not yet done with the exposition and vindication of his
new thought, for it seemed to him charged with supreme practical issues
for mankind. In the two years which followed the publication of the
_Principles_ he was preparing to reproduce his spiritual conception of the
universe, in the dramatic form of dialogue, convenient for dealing
popularly with plausible objections. The issue was the _Three Dialogues
between Hylas and Philonous_, in which Philonous argues for the absurdity
of an abstract matter that is unrealised in the experience of living
beings, as against Hylas, who is put forward to justify belief in this
abstract reality. The design of the _Dialogues_ is to present in a
familiar form “such principles as, by an easy solution of the perplexities
of philosophers, together with their own native evidence, may at once
recommend themselves as genuine to the mind, and rescue philosophy from
the endless pursuits it is engaged in; which, with a plain demonstration
of the Immediate Providence of an all-seeing God, should seem the readiest
preparation, as well as the strongest motive to the study and practice of
virtue(4).”
When the _Dialogues_ were completed, at the end of 1712, Berkeley resolved
to visit London, as he told Percival, “in order to print my new book of
Dialogues, and to make acquaintance with men of merit.” He got leave of
absence from his College “for the recovery of his health,” which had
suffered from study, and perhaps too he remembered that Bacon commends
travel as “to the younger sort a part of education.”
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Berkeley made his appearance in London in January, 1713. On the 26th of
that month he writes to Percival that he “had crossed the Channel from
Dublin a few days before,” describes adventures on the road, and enlarges
on the beauty of rural England, which he liked more than anything he had
seen in London. “Mr. Clarke” had already introduced him to Lord Pembroke.
He had also called on his countryman Richard Steele, “who desired to be
acquainted with him. Somebody had given him my _Treatise on the Principles
of Human Knowledge_, and that was the ground of his inclination to my
acquaintance.” He anticipates “much satisfaction in the conversation of
Steele and his friends,” adding that “there is lately published a bold and
pernicious book, a _Discourse on Free-thinking_(5).” In February he “dines
often with Steele in his house in Bloomsbury Square,” and tells in March
“that you will soon hear of Mr. Steele under the character of the
_Guardian_; he designs his paper shall come out every day as the
_Spectator_.” The night before “a very ingenious new poem upon ‘Windsor
Forest’ had been given to him by the author, Mr. Pope. The gentleman is a
Papist, but a man of excellent wit and learning, one of those Mr. Steele
mentions in his last paper as having writ some of the _Spectator_.” A few
days later he has met “Mr. Addison, who has the same talents as Steele in
a high degree, and is likewise a great philosopher, having applied himself
to the speculative studies more than any of the wits I know. I breakfasted
with him at Dr. Swift’s lodgings. His coming in while I was there, and the
good temper he showed, was construed by me as a sign of the approaching
coalition of parties. A play of Mr. Steele’s, which was expected, he has
now put off till next winter. But _Cato_, a most noble play of Mr.
Addison, is to be acted in Easter week.” Accordingly, on April 18, he
writes 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 talk and two or three flasks of Burgundy and Champagne,
which the author (who is a very sober man) thought necessary to support
his spirits, and indeed it was a pleasant refreshment to us all 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 of the hiss. Lord Harley, who sat in the next box to
us, was observed to clap as loud as any in the house all the time of the
play.” Swift and Pope have described this famous first night of _Cato_;
now for the first time we have Berkeley’s report. He adds, “This day I
dined at Dr. Arbuthnot’s lodging in the Queen’s Palace.”
His countryman, Swift, was among the first to welcome him to London, where
Swift had himself been for four years, “lodging in Bury Street,” and
sending the daily journal to Stella, which records so many incidents of
that memorable London life. Mrs. Vanhomrigh and her daughter, the unhappy
Vanessa, were living in rooms in the same street as Swift, and there he
“loitered, hot and lazy, after his morning’s work,” and “often dined out
of mere listlessness.” Berkeley was a frequent visitor at Swift’s house,
and this Vanhomrigh connexion with Swift had an influence on Berkeley’s
fortune long afterwards. On a Sunday in April we find him at Kensington,
at the Court of Queen Anne, in the company of Swift. “I went to Court
to-day,” Swift’s journal records, “on purpose to present Mr. Berkeley, one
of the Fellows of Trinity. College, to Lord Berkeley of Stratton. That Mr.
Berkeley is a very ingenious man, and a 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.” In this, Swift was as
good as his word. “Dr. Swift,” he adds, “is admired both by Steele and
Addison, and I think Addison one of the best natured and most agreeable
men in the world.”
One day about this time, at the instance of Addison, it seems that a
meeting was arranged between Berkeley and Samuel Clarke, the metaphysical
rector of St. James’s in Piccadilly, whose opinion he had in vain tried to
draw forth two years before through Sir John Percival. Berkeley’s personal
charm was felt wherever he went, and even “the fastidious and turbulent
Atterbury,” after intercourse with him, is reported to have said: “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.” Much was expected from the meeting with Clarke, but Berkeley
had again to complain that although Clarke had neither refuted his
arguments nor disproved his premisses, he had not the candour to accept
his conclusion.
It was thus that Berkeley became known to “men of merit” in that brilliant
society. He was also brought among persons on whom he would hardly have
conferred this title. He tells Percival that he had attended several
free-thinking clubs, in the pretended character of a learner, and that he
there heard Anthony Collins, author of “the bold and pernicious book on
free-thinking,” boast “that he was able to demonstrate that the existence
of God is an impossible supposition.” The promised “demonstration” seems
to have been Collins’ _Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty_, which appeared
two years later, according to which all that happens in mind and matter is
the issue of natural necessity. Steele invited Berkeley to contribute to
the _Guardian_ during its short-lived existence between March and
September, 1713. He took the _Discourse_ of Collins for the subject of his
first essay. Three other essays are concerned with man’s hope of a future
life, and are among the few passages in his writings in which his
philosophy is a meditation upon Death.