ready to sail for Rhode Island, “in a ship of 250 tons which he had
hired.” The marriage, according to Stock, took place on August 1, whether
in Ireland or in England I cannot tell. The lady was Anne, daughter of
John Forster, late Chief Justice, and then Speaker of the Irish House of
Commons. She shared his fortune when he was about to engage in the most
romantic, and ideally the grandest, Christian mission of the eighteenth
century. According to tradition she was a devoutly religious mystic:
Fénelon and Madame Guyon were among her favourites. “I chose her,” he
tells Lord Percival, “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.” A letter to Prior, dated “Gravesend September 5,
1728,” thus describes the little party on the eve of their
departure:—“To-morrow, with God’s blessing, I set sail for Rhode Island,
with my wife and a friend of hers, my Lady Handcock’s daughter, who bears
us company. I am married since I saw you to Miss Forster, whose humour and
turn of mind pleases me beyond anything that I know in her whole sex. Mr.
James(15), Mr. Dalton, and Mr. Smibert(16) go with us on this voyage. We
are now all together at Gravesend, and are engaged in one view.” We are
further told(17) that they carried stores and goods to a great value, and
that the Dean “embarked 20,000 books, besides what the two gentlemen
carried. They sailed in September for Rhode Island, where the Dean intends
to winter, and to purchase an estate, in order to settle a correspondence
and trade between that island and Bermudas.” Berkeley was in his
forty-fourth year, when, full of glowing visions of Christian Empire in
the West, “Time’s noblest offspring,” he left England, on his way to
Bermuda, with the promise of Sir Robert Walpole that he should receive the
promised grant after he had made an investment. He bought land in America,
but he never reached Bermuda.
Towards the end of January, in 1729, the little party, in the “hired ship
of 250 tons,” made their appearance in Narragansett Bay, on the western
side of Rhode Island. “Blundering about the ocean,” they had touched at
Virginia on the way, whence a correspondent, sceptical of the enterprise,
informs Lord Percival that the Dean “had dined with the Governor, and
visited our College,” but thinks that “when the Dean comes to put his
visionary scheme into practice, he will find it no better than a religious
frenzy,” and that “he is as much a Don Quixote in zeal as that renowned
knight was in chivalry. I wish the good Dean may not find out at last that
Waller really kidnapt him over to Bermuda, and that the project he has
been drawn into may not prove in every point of it poetical.”
We have a picture of the landing at Newport, on a winter day early in
1729. “Yesterday arrived here Dean Berkeley of Londonderry, in a pretty
large ship. He is a gentleman of middle stature, of an agreeable,
pleasant, and erect aspect. He was ushered into the town with a great
number of gentlemen, to whom he behaved himself after a very complaisant
manner. ’Tis said he proposes to tarry here with his family about three
months(18).” Newport was then a flourishing town, nearly a century old, an
emporium of American commerce, in those days the rival of Boston and New
York. He was “never more agreeably surprised,” he says, than “at the size
of the town and harbour.” Around him was some of the softest rural and
grandest ocean scenery in the world, which had fresh charms even for one
whose boyhood was spent in the valley of the Nore, who had lingered in the
Bay of Naples, and wandered in Inarime and among the mountains of Sicily.
He was seventy miles from Boston, and about as far from Newhaven and Yale
College. A range of hills crosses the centre of the island, whence meadows
slope to the rocky shore. The Gulf Stream tempers the surrounding sea.
“The people,” he tells Percival, “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.” The gentry retained the customs of the squires in England:
tradition tells of a cheerful society: the fox chase, with hounds and
horses, was a favourite recreation. The society, for so remote a region,
was well informed. The family libraries and pictures which remain argue
culture and refinement. Smibert, the artist of the missionary party, who
had moved to Boston, soon found employment in America, and his pictures
still adorn houses in Rhode Island(19).
The Dean and his young wife lived in Newport for some months after their
arrival. Mr. Honeyman, a missionary of the English Society, had been
placed there, in Trinity Church, in 1704. The church is still a
conspicuous object from the harbour. Berkeley preached in it three days
after his arrival, and occasionally afterwards. Notes of his sermons are
included in this edition among his Miscellaneous Works.
In the summer of 1729 he moved from Newport to a quiet valley in the
interior of the island, where he bought a farm, and built a house. In this
island-home, named Whitehall, he lived for more than two years—years of
domestic happiness, and of resumed study, much interrupted since he left
Dublin in 1713. The house may still be seen, a little aside from the road
that runs eastward from Newport, about three miles from the town. It is
built of wood. The south-west room was probably the library. The ocean is
seen in the distance, while orchards and groves offer the shade and
silence which soothed the thinker in his recluse life. No invitations of
the three companions of his voyage(20), who had migrated to Boston, could
allure him from this retreat, where he diverted his anxieties about
Bermuda by the thoughts which found expression in the dialogues of
_Alciphron_, redolent of Rhode Island and the invigorating breezes of its
ocean shore. Tradition tells that much of _Alciphron_ was the issue of
meditation in the open air, at a favourite retreat, beneath the Hanging
Rocks, which commands an extensive view of the beach and the ocean; and
the chair in which he sat in this alcove is still preserved with
veneration.
While Berkeley loved domestic quiet at Whitehall(21) and the “still air of
delightful studies,” he mixed occasionally in the society of Newport. He
found it not uncongenial, and soon after he was settled at Whitehall he
led the way in forming a club, which held occasional meetings, the germ of
the Redwood Library, still a useful Newport institution. His own house was
a place of meeting for the New England missionaries.
[Illustration]
Whitehall, Berkeley’s Residence in Rhode Island
Soon after his arrival in Rhode Island, Berkeley was visited by the
Reverend Samuel Johnson, missionary at Stratford, an acute and independent
thinker, one of the two contemporary representatives of philosophy in
America. The other was Jonathan Edwards, at that time Congregational
minister at Northampton on the Connecticut river. They had both adopted a
conception of the meaning and office of the material world in the economy
of existence that was in many respects similar to Berkeley’s(22). It seems
that Berkeley’s book of _Principles_ had before this fallen into Johnson’s
hands. He hastened to visit the author when he heard of his arrival. A
succession of visits and a life-long correspondence followed. The
“non-existence of Matter,” interpreted as a whimsical and even insane
paradox, was found by Johnson to mean the absence of unrealisable
Substance behind the real material world that is presented to our senses,
and of unrealisable Power in the successive sense-presented appearances of
which alone we are percipient. He came to see the real existence of the
things of sense in the constant order of the data of sense, through which
we gain our knowledge of the existence of our fellow men, and of the
omnipresent constant Providence of God; whose Ideas are the true
archetypes of the visible world. He adopted and applied this conception
with a lucidity and force which give him a high place among American
thinkers.
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All the while a cloud darkened the recluse life at Whitehall. In June,
1729, Berkeley explains to Percival the circumstances and secrecy of his
departure from England:—
“Before I left England I was reduced to a difficult 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 coming 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 risque of a tedious winter voyage. Nothing less would
have convinced the world that I was in earnest, after the report I knew
was growing to the contrary.”
Months passed, and Walpole’s promise was still unfulfilled. “I wait here,”
he tells Lord Percival in March, 1730, “with all the anxiety that attends
suspense, until I know what I can depend upon, or what course I am to
take. On the one hand I have no notion that the Court would put what men
call a _bite_ upon a poor clergyman, who depended upon charters, grants,
votes, and the like engagements. On the other hand, I see nothing done
towards payment of the money.” Later on he writes—“As for the raillery of
European wits, I should not mind it, if I saw my College go on and
prosper; but I must own the disappointments I have met with in this
particular have nearly touched me, not without affecting my health and
spirits. If the founding a College for the spread of religion and learning
in America had been a foolish project, it cannot be supposed the Court,
the Ministers, and the Parliament would have given such public
encouragement to it; and if, after all that encouragement, they who
engaged to endow and protect it let it drop, the disappointment indeed may
be to me, but the censure, I think, will light elsewhere.”
The suspense was at last ended. Gibson, the Bishop of London, pressed
Walpole for a final answer. “If,” he replied, “you put this question to me
as a Minister, I must, and can, assure you that the money shall most
undoubtedly be paid, as soon as suits with public convenience; but if you
ask me as a friend, whether Dean Berkeley should continue in America
expecting the payment of twenty thousand pounds, I advise him by all means
to return home to Europe, and to give up his present expectations.” It was
thus that in 1731 the Prime Minister of England crushed the project
conceived ten years before, and to which the intervening period had, under
his encouragement, been devoted by the projector with a singular
enthusiasm.
[Illustration]
Berkeley’s Alcove, Rhode Island
A few months after this heavy blow, Berkeley, with his wife, and Henry
their infant child, bade farewell to the island home. They sailed from
Boston in the late autumn of 1731, and in the following February we find
them in London. Thus ended the romantic episode of Rhode Island, with its
ideal of Christian civilisation, which so moves the heart and touches the
imagination in our retrospect of the eighteenth century. Of all who have
ever landed on the American shore, none was ever moved by a purer and more
self-sacrificing spirit. America still acknowledges that by Berkeley’s
visit on this mission it has been invested with the halo of an illustrious
name, and associated with religious devotion to a magnificent ideal, even
if it was sought to be realised by impracticable means. To reform the New
World, and mankind at last, by a College on an island in the Atlantic, six
hundred miles from America, the Indians whom it was intended to civilise
being mostly in the interior of the continent, and none in Bermuda, was
not unnaturally considered Quixotic; and that it was at first supported by
the British Court and Parliament is a wonderful tribute to the persuasive
genius of the projector. Perhaps he was too much influenced by Lord
Percival’s idea, that it could not be realised by private benevolence,
without the intervention of the Crown. But the indirect influence of
Berkeley’s American inspiration is apparent in many ways in the
intellectual and spiritual life of that great continent, during the last
century and a half, especially by the impulse given to academical
education. It is the testimony of an American author that, “by methods
different from those intended by Berkeley, and in ways more manifold than
even he could have dreamed, he has since accomplished, and through all
coming time, by a thousand ineffaceable influences, he will continue to
accomplish, some portion at least of the results which he had aimed at in
the founding of his university. It is the old story over again; the
tragedy of a Providence wiser than man’s foresight; God giving the victory
to His faithful servant even through the bitterness of overruling him and
defeating him(23).” American Empire, as we now see it with its boundless
beneficent influence, is at least an imperfect realisation of Berkeley’s
dream.
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Berkeley’s head quarters were in London, in Green Street, for more than
two years after the return to England in the beginning of 1732. Extant
correspondence with Lord Percival ends in Rhode Island, and our picture of
the two years in London is faintly formed by letters to Prior and Johnson.
These speak of ill-health, and breathe a less sanguine spirit. The
brilliant social life of former visits was less attractive now, even if
old friends had remained. But Swift had quitted England for ever, and
Steele had followed Addison to the grave. Gay, the common friend of
Berkeley and Pope, died soon after the return from Rhode Island, and
Arbuthnot was approaching his end at Hampstead. Samuel Clarke had passed
away when Berkeley was at Whitehall; but Seeker now held the rectory of
St. James’s, and Butler was in studious retirement on the Wear; while Pope
was at Twickenham, publishing his _Essay on Man_, receiving visits from
Bolingbroke, or visiting Lord Bathurst at Cirencester Park. Queen
Caroline, too, was holding her receptions at Kensington; but “those who
imagine (as you write),” he tells Prior in January, 1734, “that I have
been making my court here all this time, would never believe (what is most
true) that I have not been at the Court or at the Minister’s but once
these seven years. The care of my health and the love of retirement have
prevailed over whatsoever ambition might have come to my share.” There is
a hint of a visit to Oxford, at Commemoration in 1733, when his friend
Seeker received the honorary degree.
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Soon after he had settled in London, the fruit of his studies in Rhode
Island was given to the world in the Seven Dialogues of _Alciphron, or The
Minute Philosopher_. Here the philosophical inspiration of his early years
is directed to sustain faith in Divine Moral Order, and in the Christian
Revelation. _Alciphron_ is the longest, and in literary form perhaps the
most finished of his works, unsurpassed in lively strokes of irony and
satire. Yet if it is to be regarded as a philosophical justification of
religion, as against modern agnosticism, one may incline to the judgment
of Mr. Leslie Stephen, that it is “the least admirable of all its author’s
admirable works.” As we have seen, the sect of free-thinkers was early the
object of Berkeley’s ridicule and sarcasm. They claimed for themselves
wide intellectual vision, yet they were blind to the deep realities of the
universe; they took exclusive credit for freedom of thought, although
their thinking was confined within the narrow compass of our data in
sense. The book of _Principles_, the _Dialogues_, and the _De Motu_ of his
early years, were designed to bring into clear light the absolute
dependence of the world that is presented to our senses on Omnipresent
Spirit; and the necessary subjection of all changes in our surroundings to
the immediate agency or providence of God. Boasted “free-thinking” was
really a narrow atheism, so he believed, in which meaningless Matter
usurped the place that belonged in reason to God, and he employed reason
to disclose Omnipotent Intelligence in and behind the phenomena that are
presented to the senses in impotent natural sequence.
The causes of the widespread moral corruption of the Old World, which had
moved Berkeley so profoundly, seem to have been pondered anew during his
recluse life in Rhode Island. The decline of morals was explained by the
deification of Matter: consequent life of sensuous pleasure accounted for
decay of religion. That vice is hurtful was argued by free-thinkers like
Mandeville to be a vulgar error, and a fallacious demonstration was
offered of its utility. That virtue is intrinsically beautiful was taught
by Shaftesbury; but Berkeley judged the abstract beauty, with which
“minute philosophers” were contented, unfit to move ordinary human beings
to self-sacrificing action; for this involves devotion to a Perfect Person
by whom goodness is finally distributed. Religion alone inspires the
larger and higher life, in presenting distributive justice personified on
the throne of the universe, instead of abstract virtue.
The turning-point in _Alciphron_ is in man’s vision of God. This is
pressed in the Fourth Dialogue. The free-thinker asserts that “the notion
of a Deity, or some invisible power, is of all prejudices the most
unconquerable; the most signal example of belief without reason for
believing.” He demands proof—“such proof as every man of sense requires of
a matter of fact.... Should a man ask, why I believe there is a king of
Great Britain? I might answer, Because I had seen him. Or a king of Spain?
Because I had seen those who saw him. But as for this King of kings, I
neither saw Him myself, nor any one else that ever did see Him.” To which
Euphranor replies, “What if it should appear that God really speaks to
man; would this content you? What if it shall appear plainly that God
speaks to men by the intervention and use of arbitrary, outward, sensible
signs, having no resemblance or necessary connexion with the things they
stand for and suggest; if it shall appear that, by innumerable
combinations of these signs, an endless variety of things is discovered
and made known to us; and that we are thereby instructed or informed in
their different natures; that we are taught and admonished what to shun
and what to pursue; and are directed how to regulate our motions, and how
to act with respect to things distant from us, as well in time as place:
will this content you?” Euphranor accordingly proceeds to shew that
Visible Nature is a Language, in which the Universal Power that is
continually at work is speaking to us all, in a way similar to that in
which our fellow men speak to us; so that we have as much (even more)
reason to believe in the existence of the Universal Person who is the
Speaker, as we have to believe in the existence of persons around us; who
become known to us, when they too employ sense-symbols, in the words and
actions by which we discover that we are not alone in the universe. For
men are really living spirits: their _bodies_ are only the sign of their
spiritual personality. And it is so with God, who is also revealed in the
visible world as a Spirit. “In a strict sense,” says Euphranor, “I do not
see Alciphron, but only such visible signs and tokens as suggest and infer
the being of that invisible thinking principle or soul. Even so, in the
self-same manner, it seems to me that, though I cannot with eyes of flesh
behold the invisible God, yet I do, in the strictest sense, behold and
perceive, by all my senses, such signs and tokens ... as suggest,
indicate, and demonstrate an invisible God as certainly, and with the same
evidence, at least, as any other signs, perceived by sense, do suggest to
me the existence of _your_ soul, spirit, or thinking principle; which I am
convinced of only by a few signs or effects, and the motions of one small
organised body; whereas I do, at all times, and in all places, perceive
sensible signs which evince the being of God.” In short, God is the living
Soul of the Universe; as you and I are the living souls that keep our
bodies and their organs in significant motion. We can interpret the
character of God in the history of the universe, even as we can interpret
the character of our neighbour by observing his words and outward actions.
This overwhelmed Alciphron. “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,”
rejoins Euphranor. “You who, in the beginning of this conference, thought
it strange that God should leave Himself without a witness, do now think
it strange the witness should be so full and clear.” “I must own I do,”
was the reply. “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.”
Although this reasoning satisfied Alciphron, others may think it
inconclusive. How one is able to discover the existence of other persons,
and even the meaning of finite personality, are themselves questions full
of speculative difficulty. But, waiving this, the analogy between the
relation of a human spirit to its body, and that of the Omnipresent and
Omnipotent Spirit to the Universe of things and persons, fails in several
respects. God is supposed to be continually creating the world by constant
and continuous Providence, and His Omniscience is supposed to comprehend
all its concrete relations: a man’s body is not absolutely dependent on
the man’s own power and providence; and even his scientific knowledge of
it, in itself and in its relations, is scanty and imperfect, as his power
over it is limited and conditioned. Then the little that a man gradually
learns of what is going on in the surrounding universe is dependent on his
senses: Omniscience comprehends Immensity and Eternity (so we suppose) in
a single intuition. Our bodies, moreover, are visible things: the
universe, this organism of God, is crowded with _persons_, to whom there
is nothing corresponding within the organism which reveals one man to
another.
But this is not all. After Euphranor has found that the Universal Power is
Universal Spirit, this is still an inadequate God; for what we want to
know is what _sort_ of Spirit God is. Is God omnipotent or of limited
power, regarded ethically, fair or unfair in His treatment of persons;
good or evil, according to the highest yet attained conception of
goodness; a God of love, or a devil omnipotent? I infer the _character_ of
my neighbour from his words and actions, patent to sense in the gradual
outward evolution of his life. I am asked to infer the _character_ of the
Omnipresent Spirit from _His_ words and actions, manifested in the
universe of things and persons. But we must not attribute to the Cause
more than it reveals of itself in its effects. God and men alike are known
by the effects they produce. The Universal Power is, on this condition,
righteous, fair, and loving to the degree in which those conceptions are
implied in His visible embodiment: to affirm more or other than this, on
the basis of analogy _alone_, is either to indulge in baseless conjecture,
or to submit blindly to dogma and authority.
Now the universe, as far as it comes within the range of human experience
on this planet, is full of suffering and moral disorder. The “religious
hypothesis” of a perfectly righteous and benevolent God is here offered to
account for the appearances which the universe presents to us. But do
these signify exact distributive justice? Is not visible nature apparently
cruel and unrelenting? If we infer cruelty in the character of a man,
because his bodily actions cause undeserved suffering, must we not, by
this analogy, infer in like manner regarding the character of the Supreme
Spirit, manifested in the progressive evolution of the universal organism?