even of our fellow men, from their imperfectly interpreted words and
actions, so that each man is more or less a mystery to his fellows. The
mystery deepens when we try to read the character of animals,—to interpret
the motives which determine the overt acts of dogs or horses. And if we
were able to communicate by visible signs with the inhabitants of other
planets, with how much greater difficulty should we draw conclusions from
their visible acts regarding _their_ character? But if this is so when we
use the data of sense for reading the character of finite persons, how
infinite must be the difficulty of reading the character of the Eternal
Spirit, in and through the gradual evolution of the universe of things and
persons, which in this reasoning is supposed to be His body; and the
history of that universe the facts of His biography, in and by which He is
eternally revealing Himself! For we know nothing about the unbeginning and
unending. The universe of persons is assumed to have no _end_; and I know
not why its evolution must be supposed to have had a _beginning_, or that
there ever was a time in which God was unmanifested, to finite persons.
Shall we in these circumstances turn with Euphranor, in the Fifth and
Sixth Dialogues, to professed revelation of the character of the Universal
Mind presented in miraculous revelation, by inspired prophets and
apostles, who are brought forward as authorities able to speak infallibly
to the _character_ of God? If the whole course of nature, or endless
evolution of events, is the Divine Spirit revealed in omnipresent
activity, what room is there for any other less regular revelation? The
universe of common experience, it is implied by Berkeley, is essentially
miraculous, and therefore absolutely perfect. Is it consistent with
fairness, and benevolence, and love of goodness in all moral agents for
its own sake, that the Christian revelation should have been so long
delayed, and be still so incompletely made known? Is not the existence of
wicked persons on this or any other planet, wicked men or devils, a dark
spot in the visible life of God? Does not perfect goodness in God mean
restoration of goodness in men, for its own sake, apart from their merit;
and must not Omnipotent Goodness, infinitely opposite to all evil, either
convert to goodness all beings in the universe who have made themselves
bad, or else relieve the universe of their perpetual presence in
ever-increasing wickedness?
Sceptical criticism of this sort has found expression in the searching
minute philosophy of a later day than Berkeley’s and Alciphron’s; as in
David Hume and Voltaire, and in the agnosticism of the nineteenth century.
Was not Euphranor too ready to yield to the demand for a visible God,
whose character had accordingly to be determined by what appears in nature
and man, under the conditions of our limited and contingent experience? Do
we not need to look below data of sensuous experience, and among the
presuppositions which must consciously or unconsciously be taken for
granted in all man’s dealings with the environment in which he finds
himself, for the root of _trustworthy_ experience? On merely physical
reasoning, like that of Euphranor, the righteous love of God is an
unwarranted inference, and it even seems to be contradicted by visible
facts presented in the history of the world. But if Omnipotent Goodness
must _a priori_ be attributed to the Universal Mind, as an indispensable
condition for man’s having reliable intercourse of any sort with nature;
if this is the primary postulate necessary to the existence of truth of
any kind—then the “religious hypothesis” that God is Good, according to
the highest conception of goodness, is no groundless fancy, but the
fundamental faith-venture in which man has to live. It _must_ stand in
reason; unless it can be _demonstrated_ that the mixture of good and evil
which the universe presents, necessarily contradicts this fundamental
presupposition: and if so, man is lost in pessimistic Pyrrhonism, and can
assert nothing about anything(24).
The religious altruism, however inadequate, which Berkeley offered in
_Alciphron_ made some noise at the time of its appearance, although its
theistic argument was too subtle to be popular. The conception of the
visible world as Divine Visual Language was “received with ridicule by
those who make ridicule the test of truth,” although it has made way
since. “I have not seen Dean Berkeley,” Gay the poet writes to Swift in
the May following the Dean’s return, and very soon after the appearance of
_Alciphron_, “but I have been reading his book, and like many parts of it;
but in general think with you that it is too speculative.” Warburton, with
admiration for Berkeley, cannot comprehend his philosophy, and Hoadley
shewed a less friendly spirit. _A Letter from a Country Clergyman_,
attributed to Lord Hervey, the “Sporus” of Pope, was one of several
ephemeral attacks which the _Minute Philosopher_ encountered in the year
after its appearance. Three other critics, more worthy of consideration,
are mentioned in one of Berkeley’s letters from London to his American
friend Johnson at Stratford: “As to the Bishop of Cork’s book, and the
other book you allude to, the author of which is one Baxter, they are both
very little 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 disagreeable task. Nor should I have
taken notice of that Letter about Vision, had it not been printed in a
newspaper, which gave it course, and spread it through the kingdom.
Besides, the theory of Vision I found was somewhat obscure to most people;
for which reason I was not displeased at an opportunity to explain
it(25).” The explanation was given in _The Theory of Visual Language
Vindicated_, in January, 1733, as a supplement to _Alciphron_. Its blot is
a tone of polemical bitterness directed against Shaftesbury(26).
Although Berkeley “took no public notice” of “the Bishop of Cork’s
book(27)” it touched a great question, which periodically has awakened
controversy, and been the occasion of mutual misunderstanding among the
controversialists in past ages. “Is God knowable by man; or must religion
be devotion to an object that is unknowable?” In one of his first letters
to Lord Percival, as we saw, Berkeley animadverted on a sermon by the
Archbishop of Dublin, which seemed to deny that there was goodness, or
understanding God, any more than feet or hands. An opinion somewhat
similar had been attributed to Bishop Browne, in his answer to Toland, and
afterwards in 1728, in his _Procedure and Limits of Human Understanding_.
This touched to the quick Berkeley’s ultimate conception of the universe,
as realisable only in, and therefore necessarily dependent on, living
mind. We are reminded of the famous analogy of Spinoza(28). If the
omnipresent and omnipotent Mind, on which Euphranor rested, can be called
“mind” only metaphorically, and can be called “good” only when the term is
used without human meaning, it may seem to be a matter of indifference
whether we have unknowable Matter or unknowable Mind at the root of things
and persons. Both are empty words. The Power universally at work is
equally unintelligible, equally unfit to be the object of worship in the
final venture of faith, whether we use the term Matter or the term Mind.
The universe is neither explained nor sustained by a “mind” that is mind
only metaphorically. To call this “God” is to console us with an empty
abstraction. The minutest philosopher is ready to grant with Alciphron
that “there is a God in this indefinite sense”; since nothing can be
inferred from such an account of God about conduct or religion.
The Bishop of Cork replied to the strictures of Euphranor in the _Minute
Philosopher_. He qualified and explained his former utterances in some two
hundred dull pages of his _Divine Analogy_, which hardly touch the root of
the matter. The question at issue is the one which underlies modern
agnosticism. It was raised again in Britain in the nineteenth century,
with deeper insight, by Sir William Hamilton; followed by Dean Mansel, in
controversy with F. D. Maurice, at the point of view of Archbishop King
and Bishop Browne, in philosophical vindication of the mysteries of
Christian faith; by Mr. Herbert Spencer and by Huxley in a minute
philosophy that has been deepened by Hume’s criticism of the rationale of
theism in Berkeley(29).
Andrew Baxter’s _Inquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul_, referred to
in Berkeley’s letter to Johnson, appeared in 1733. It has a chapter on
“Dean Berkeley’s Scheme against the existence of Matter and a Material
World,” which is worthy of mention because it is the earliest elaborate
criticism of the New Principle, although it had then been before the world
for more than twenty years. The title of the chapter shews Baxter’s
imperfect comprehension of the proposition which he attempts to refute. It
suggests that Berkeley argued for the non-existence of the things we see
and touch, instead of for their necessary dependence on, or subordination
to, realising percipient Mind, so far as they are concrete realities.
Baxter, moreover, was a Scot; and his criticism is interesting as a
foretaste of the protracted discussion of the “ideal theory” by Reid and
his friends, and later on by Hamilton. But Baxter’s book was not the first
sign of Berkeley’s influence in Scotland. We are told by Dugald Stewart,
that “the novelty of Berkeley’s paradox attracted very powerfully the
attention of a set of young men who were then prosecuting their studies at
Edinburgh, who formed themselves into a Society for the express purpose of
soliciting from him an explanation of some parts of his theory which
seemed to them obscurely or equivocally expressed. To this correspondence
the amiable and excellent prelate seems to have given every encouragement;
and I have been told on the best authority that he was accustomed to say
that his reasoning had been nowhere better understood than by this club of
young Scotsmen(30).” Thus, and afterwards through Hume and Reid, Berkeley
is at the root of philosophy in Scotland.
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The two years of indifferent health and authorship in London sum up what
may be called the American period of Berkeley’s life. Early in 1734
letters to Prior open a new vista in his history. He was nominated to the
bishopric of Cloyne in the south of Ireland, and we have now to follow him
to the remote region which was his home for eighteen years. The interest
of the philosophic Queen, and perhaps some compensation for the Bermuda
disappointment, may explain the appearance of the metaphysical and social
idealist in the place where he shone as a star of the first magnitude in
the Irish Church of the eighteenth century.
III. Later Years (1734-53).
In May, 1734, Berkeley was consecrated as Bishop of Cloyne, in St. Paul’s
Church, Dublin. Except occasional visits, he had been absent from Ireland
for more than twenty years. He returned to spend eighteen years of almost
unbroken seclusion in his remote diocese. It suited a growing inclination
to a recluse, meditative life, which had been encouraged by circumstances
in Rhode Island. The eastern and northern part in the county of Cork
formed his diocese, bounded on the west by Cork harbour, and on the east
by the beautiful Blackwater and the mountains of Waterford; the sea, which
was its southern boundary, approached within two miles of the episcopal
residence in the village of Cloyne.
As soon as he was settled, he resumed study “with unabated attention,” but
still with indifferent health. Travelling had become irksome to him, and
at Cloyne he was almost as much removed as he had been in Rhode Island
from the thinking world. Cork took the place of Newport; but Cork was
twenty miles from Cloyne, while Newport was only three miles from
Whitehall. His episcopal neighbour at Cork was Bishop Browne, the critic
of _Alciphron_. Isaac Gervais, afterwards Dean of Tuam, often enlivened
the “manse-house” at Cloyne by his wit and intercourse with the great
world. Secker, the Bishop of Bristol, and Benson, the Bishop of
Gloucester, now and then exchanged letters with him, and correspondence
was kept up as of old with Prior at Dublin and Johnson at Stratford. But
there is no trace of intercourse with Swift, who was wearing out an
unhappy old age, or with Pope, almost the only survivor of the brilliant
society of other years. We are told, indeed, that the beauty of Cloyne was
so described to the bard of Twickenham, by the pen which in former days
had described Ischia, that Pope was almost moved to visit it. And a letter
from Secker in February, 1735(31), contains this scrap: “Your friend Mr.
Pope is publishing small poems every now and then, full of much wit and
not a little keenness(32).” “Our common friend, Dr. Butler,” he adds,
“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 following year. But I have found no remains of
correspondence between Berkeley and their “common friend”; the two most
illustrious religious thinkers of the Anglican communion.
When he left London in 1734 Berkeley was on the eve of what sounded like a
mathematical controversy, although it was in his intention metaphysical,
and was suggested by the Seventh Dialogue in _Alciphron_. In one of his
letters to Prior, early in that year, he told him that though he “could
not read, owing to ill health,” yet his thought was as distinct as ever,
and that for amusement “he passed his early hours in thinking of certain
mathematical matters which may possibly produce something(33).” This
turned, it seems, upon a form of scepticism among contemporary
mathematicians, occasioned by the presence of mysteries of religion. The
_Analyst_ was the issue. It was followed by a controversy in which some of
the most eminent mathematicians took part. _Mathematica exeunt in
mysteria_ might have been the motto of the _Analyst_. The assumptions in
mathematics, it is argued, are as mysterious as those of theologians and
metaphysicians. Mathematicians cannot translate into perfectly
intelligible thought their own doctrines in fluxions. If man’s knowledge
of God is rooted in mystery, so too is mathematical analysis. Pure science
at last loses itself in propositions which usefully regulate action, but
which cannot be comprehended. This is the drift of the argument in the
_Analyst_; but perhaps Berkeley’s inclination to extreme conclusions, and
to what is verbally paradoxical, led him into doubtful positions in the
controversy to which the _Analyst_ gave rise. Instead of ultimate
imperfect comprehensibility, he seems to attribute absolute contradiction
to the Newtonian fluxions. Baxter, in his _Inquiry_, had asserted that
things in Berkeley’s book of _Principles_ forced the author “to suspect
that even mathematics may not be very sound knowledge at the bottom.” The
metaphysical argument of the _Analyst_ was obscured in a cloud of
mathematics.
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The social condition of Ireland attracted Berkeley almost as soon as he
was settled in Cloyne. He was surrounded by a large native Irish
population and a small group of English colonists. The natives, long
governed in the interest of the stranger, had never learned to exert and
govern themselves. The self-reliance which Berkeley preached fifteen years
before, as a mean for “preventing the ruin of Great Britain,” was more
wanting in Ireland, where the simplest maxims of social economy were
neglected. It was a state of things fitted to move one who was too
independent to permit his aspirations to be confined to the ordinary
routine of the Irish episcopate, and who could not forget the favourite
moral maxim of his life.
The social chaos of Ireland was the occasion of what to some may be the
most interesting of Berkeley’s writings. His thoughts found vent
characteristically in a series of penetrating practical queries. The First
Part of the _Querist_ appeared in 1735, anonymously, edited by Dr. Madden
of Dublin, who along with Prior had lately founded a Society for promoting
industrial arts in Ireland. The Second and Third Parts were published in
the two following years. _A Discourse to Magistrates occasioned by the
Enormous Licence and Irreligion of the Times_, which appeared in 1736, was
another endeavour, with like philanthropic intention. And the only
important break in his secluded life at Cloyne, in eighteen years of
residence, was when he went for some months to Dublin in 1737, to render
social service to Ireland in the Irish House of Lords.
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His metaphysic, at first encountered by ridicule, was now beginning to
receive more serious treatment. A Scotsman had already recognised it. In
1739 another and more famous Scotsman, David Hume, refers thus to Berkeley
in one of the opening sections of his _Treatise of Human Nature_: “A very
material question has been started concerning abstract or general
ideas—whether they be general or particular in the mind’s conception of
them. A great philosopher, Dr. Berkeley, has disputed the received opinion
in this particular, and has asserted that all general ideas are nothing
but particular ones, annexed to a certain term which gives them a more
extensive signification, and makes them recall upon occasion other
individuals which are similar to them. I look upon this to be one of the
greatest and most valuable discoveries that has been made of late years in
the republic of letters.” It does not appear that Berkeley heard of Hume.
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A curious interest began to engage him about this time. The years
following 1739 were years of suffering in the Irish diocese. It was a time
of famine followed by widespread disease. His correspondence is full of
allusions to this. It had consequences of lasting importance. Surrounded
by disease, he pondered remedies. Experience in Rhode Island and among
American Indians suggested the healing properties of tar. Further
experiments in tar, combined with meditation and much curious reading,
deepened and expanded his metaphysical philosophy. Tar seemed to grow
under his experiments, and in his thoughts, into a Panacea for giving
health to the organism on which living mind in man is meanwhile dependent.
This natural dependence of health upon tar introduced thoughts of the
interdependence of all things, and then of the _immediate_ dependence of
all in nature upon Omnipresent and Omnipotent Mind. The living Mind that
underlies the phenomena of the universe began to be conceived under a new
light. Since his return to the life of thought in Rhode Island, he had
been immersed in Platonic and Neoplatonic literature, and in books of
mystical Divinity, encouraged perhaps by the mystical disposition
attributed to his wife. An eccentric ingenuity connected the scientific
experiments and prescriptions with the Idealism of Plato and Plotinus. The
natural law according to which tar-water was universally restorative set
his mind to work about the immanence of living Mind. He mused about a
medicine thus universally beneficial, and the thought occurred that it
must be naturally charged with ’pure invisible fire, the most subtle and
elastic of bodies, and the vital element in the universe’; and water might
be the natural cause which enables this elementary fire to be drawn out of
tar and transferred to vegetable and animal organisms. But the vital fire
could be only a natural cause; which in truth is no efficient cause at
all, but only a sign of divine efficiency transmitted through the world of
sense: the true cause of this and all other natural effects must be the
immanent Mind or Reason in which we all participate; for in God we live
and move and have our being.
It is thus that Berkeley’s thought culminates in _Siris_, that _Chain of
Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries concerning the Virtues of
Tar-water, and divers other subjects connected together and arising one
from another_, which appeared in 1744. This little book made more noise at
the time of its appearance than any of his books; but not because of its
philosophy, which was lost in its medicinal promise to mankind of immunity
from disease. Yet it was Berkeley’s last attempt to express his ultimate
conception of the universe in its human and divine relations. When _Siris_
is compared with the book of _Principles_, the immense difference in tone
and manner of thought shews the change wrought in the intervening years.
The sanguine argumentative gladiatorship of the _Principles_ is exchanged
for pensive speculation, which acknowledges the weakness of human
understanding, when it is face to face with the Immensities and
Eternities. Compare the opening sections of the Introduction to the
_Principles_ with the closing sections of _Siris_. The contingent data of
our experience are now felt to be insufficient, and there is a more or
less conscious grounding of the Whole in the eternal and immutable Ideas
of 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.... Sense and experience acquaint us with the course and
analogy of appearances and natural effects: thought, reason, intellect,
introduce us into the knowledge of their causes.... The principles of
science are neither objects of sense nor imagination: intellect and reason
are alone the sure guides to truth.” So the shifting basis of the earlier
thought is found to need support in the intellectual and moral faith that
must be involved in all reasonable human intercourse with the phenomena
presented in the universe.
The inadequate thought of God, as only a Spirit or Person supreme among
the spirits or persons, in and through whom the material world is
realised, a thought which pervades _Alciphron_, makes way in _Siris_ for
the thought of God as the infinite omnipresent Ground, or final sustaining
Power, immanent in Nature and Man, to which Berkeley had become accustomed
in Neoplatonic and Alexandrian metaphysics. “Comprehending God and the
creatures in One general notion, we may _say_ that all things together
(God and the universe of Space and Time) make One Universe, or τὸ Πᾶν. But
if we should say that all things make One God, this would be an erroneous
notion of God; but would not amount to atheism, as long as Mind or
Intellect was admitted to be τὸ ἡγεμονικόν, or the governing part.... It
will not seem just to fix the imputation of atheism upon those
philosophers who hold the doctrine of τὸ Ἕν.” It is thus that he now
regards God. Metaphysics and theology are accordingly one.