unifying Mind or Reason. And we are still apt to ask what the truth and
goodness at the heart of all really mean; seeing that, as conceived in
human minds, they vary in the gradual evolution of intellect and
conscience in men. _Omnia exeunt in mysteria_ is the tone of _Siris_ at
the end. The universe of reality is too much for our articulate
intellectual digestion: it must be left for omniscience; it transcends
finite intelligence and the _via media_ of human understanding. Man must
be satisfied to pass life, in the infinitesimal interval between birth and
death, as a faith-venture, which he may convert into a growing insight, as
the generations roll on, but which can never be converted into complete
knowledge. “In this state we must be satisfied to make the best of those
glimpses within our reach. It is Plato’s remark in his _Theætetus_, that
while we sit still we are never the wiser; but going into the river, and
moving up and down, is the way to discover its depths and shallows. If we
exercise and bestir ourselves, we may even here discover something. The
eye by long use comes to see even in the darkest cavern; and there is no
subject so obscure but we may discern some glimpse of truth by long poring
on it. Truth is the cry of all, but the game of a few. Certainly where it
is the chief passion it doth not give way to vulgar cares and views; nor
is it contented with a little ardour in the early time of life: a time
perhaps to pursue, but not so fit to weigh and revise. He that would make
a real progress in knowledge must dedicate his age as well as his youth,
the later growth as well as the first-fruits, at the altar of Truth.” Such
was Berkeley, and such were his last words in philosophy. They may suggest
the attitude of Bacon when, at a different view-point, he disclaims
exhaustive system: “I have made a beginning of the work: the fortune of
the human race will give the issue. For the matter in hand is no mere
felicity of speculation, but the real business and fortunes of the human
race(34).”
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While Berkeley’s central thought throughout his life is concerned with God
as the one omnipresent and omnipotent Providential Agent in the universe,
he says little about the other final question, of more exclusively human
interest, which concerns the destiny of men. That men are born into a
universe which, as the visible expression of Moral Providence, must be
scientifically and ethically trustworthy; certain not to put man to
confusion intellectually or morally, seeing that it could not otherwise be
trusted for such in our ultimate venture of faith—this is one thing. That
all persons born into it are certain to continue living self-consciously
for ever, is another thing. This is not obviously implied in the former
presupposition, whether or not it can be deduced from it, or else
discovered by other means. Although man’s environment is essentially
Divine, and wholly in its smallest details Providential, may not his body,
in its living organisation from physical birth until physical death, be
the measure of the continuance of his self-conscious personality? Is each
man’s immortal existence, like God’s, indispensable?
Doubt about the destiny of men after they die is, at the end of the
nineteenth century, probably more prevalent than doubt about the
underlying Providence of God, and His constant creative activity; more
perhaps than it was in the days of Toland, and Collins, and Tindal. Future
life had been made so familiar to the imagination by the early and
mediaeval Church, and afterwards by the Puritans, as in Milton, Bunyan,
and Jonathan Edwards, that it then seemed to the religious mind more real
than anything that is seen and touched. The habit wholly formed by natural
science is apt to dissipate this and to make a human life lived under
conditions wholly strange to its “minute philosophy” appear illusory.
A section in the book of _Principles_(35) in which the common argument for
the “natural immortality” of the human soul is reproduced, strengthened by
his new conception of what the reality of body means, is Berkeley’s
metaphysical contribution for determining between the awful alternatives
of annihilation or continued self-conscious life after physical death. The
subject is touched, in a less recondite way, in two of his papers in the
_Guardian_, and in the _Discourse_ delivered in Trinity College Chapel in
1708, in which a revelation of the immortality of men is presented as the
special gospel of Jesus Christ. To argue, as Berkeley does in the
_Principles_, that men cannot be annihilated at death, because they are
spiritual substances having powers independent of the sequences of nature,
implies assumptions regarding finite persons which are open to criticism.
The justification in reason for our venture of faith that Omnipotent
Goodness is at the heart of the universe is—that without this
presupposition we can have no reasonable intercourse, scientific or
otherwise, with the world of things and persons in which we find
ourselves; for reason and will are then alike paralysed by universal
distrust. But it can hardly be maintained _a priori_ that men, or other
spiritual beings in the universe, are equally with God indispensable to
its natural order; so that when they have once entered on conscious
existence they must _always_ continue to exist consciously. Is not the
philosophical justification of man’s hope of endless life ethical rather
than metaphysical; founded on that faith in the justice and goodness of
the Universal Mind which has to be taken for granted in every attempt to
interpret experience, with its mixture of good and evil, in this
evanescent embodied life? Can a life such as this is be _all_ for men, in
a universe that, because it is essentially Divine, must operate towards
the extinction of the wickedness which now makes it a mystery of
Omnipotent Goodness?
A cheerful optimism appears in Berkeley’s habit of thought about death, as
we have it in his essays in the _Guardian_: a sanguine apprehension of a
present preponderance of good, and consequent anticipation of greater good
after death; unlike those whose pessimistic temperament induces a lurid
picture of eternal moral disorder. But his otherwise active imagination
seldom makes philosophy a meditation upon death. He does not seem to have
exercised himself in the way those do who find in the prospect of being in
the twenty-first century as they were in the first, what makes them
appalled that they have ever come at all into transitory percipient life;
or as those others who recoil from an unbodied life after physical death,
as infinitely more appalling than the thought of being transported _in
this body_ into another planet, or even to a material world outside our
solar system. In one of his letters to Johnson(36) he does approach the
unbodied life, and in a characteristic way:—
“I see no difficulty in conceiving a change of state, such as is vulgarly
called _death_, as well without as with material substance. It is
sufficient for that purpose that we allow sensible bodies, i.e. such as
are immediately perceived by sight and touch; the existence of which I am
so far from questioning, as philosophers are used to do, that I establish
it, I think, upon evident principles. Now it seems very easy to conceive
the _soul_ to exist in a separate state (i.e. divested from those limits
and laws of motion and perception with which she is embarrassed here) and
to exercise herself on new ideas, without the intervention of these
tangible things we call _bodies_. It is even very possible to apprehend
how the soul may have ideas of colour without an eye, or of sounds without
an ear(37).”
But while we may thus be supposed to have all our present sensuous
experience in an unbodied state, this does not enable one to conceive how
unbodied persons can communicate with one another in the absence of _all_
sense signs; whether of the sort derived from our present senses, or from
other senses of whose data we can in this life have no imagination.
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Berkeley’s tar-water enthusiasm lasted throughout the rest of his life,
and found vent in letters and pamphlets in support of his Panacea, from
1744 till 1752. Notwithstanding this, he was not forgetful of other
interests—ecclesiastical, and the social ones which he included in his
large meaning of “ecclesiastical.” The Rising under Charles Edward in 1745
was the occasion of a _Letter to the Roman Catholics of Cloyne_,
characteristically humane and liberal. It was followed in 1749 by an
_Exhortation to the Roman Catholic Clergy of Ireland_ in a similar spirit;
and this unwonted courtesy of an Irish Protestant bishop was received by
those to whom it was addressed in a corresponding temper.
It is difficult to determine Berkeley’s relation to rival schools or
parties in Church and State. His disposition was too singular and
independent for a partisan. Some of his early writings, as we have seen,
were suspected of high Tory and Jacobite leanings; but his arguments in
the suspected _Discourse_ were such as ordinary Tories and Jacobites
failed to understand, and the tenor of his words and actions was in the
best sense liberal. In religious thought _Siris_ might place him among
latitudinarians; perhaps in affinity with the Cambridge Platonists. His
true place is foremost among the religious philosophers of the Anglican
Church; the first to prepare the religious problem for the light in which
we are invited to look at the universe by modern agnostics, and under the
modern conception of natural evolution. He is the most picturesque figure
in that Anglican succession which, in the seventeenth century, includes
Hooker and Cudworth; in the eighteenth, Clarke and Butler; and in the
nineteenth, may we say Coleridge, in lack of a representative in orders;
although Mansel, Maurice, Mozley, and Jowett are not to be forgotten, nor
Isaac Taylor among laymen(38): Newman and Arnold, illustrious otherwise,
are hardly representatives of metaphysical philosophy.
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A more pensive tone runs through the closing years at Cloyne. Attempts
were made in vain to withdraw him from the “remote corner” to which he had
been so long confined. His friends urged his claims for the Irish Primacy.
“I am no man’s rival or competitor in this matter,” were his words to
Prior. “I am not in love with feasts, and crowds, and visits, and late
hours, and strange faces, and a hurry of affairs often insignificant. For
my own private satisfaction, I had rather be master of my time than wear a
diadem.” Letters to his American friends, Johnson and Clap, shew him still
moved by the inspiration which carried him over the Atlantic, and record
his influence in the development of American colleges(39). The home
education of his three sons was another interest. We are told by his widow
that “he would not trust his sons to mercenary hands. Though old and
sickly, he performed the constant tedious task himself.” Of the fruit of
this home education there is little to tell. The death of William, his
favourite boy, in 1751, “was thought to have struck too close to his
father’s heart.” “I am a man,” so he writes, “retired from the amusements,
politics, visits, and what the world calls pleasure. I had a little
friend, educated always under mine own eye, whose painting delighted me,
whose music ravished me, and whose lively gay spirit was a continual
feast. It has pleased God to take him hence.” The eldest son, Henry, born
in Rhode Island, did not long survive his father. George, the third son,
was destined for Oxford, and this destiny was connected with a new
project. The “life academico-philosophical,” which he sought in vain to
realise in Bermuda, he now hoped to find for himself in the city of
colleges on the Isis. “The truth is,” he wrote to Prior as early as
September 1746, “I have a scheme of my own for this long time past, in
which I propose more satisfaction and enjoyment to myself than I could in
that high station(40), which I neither solicited, nor so much as wished
for. A greater income would not tempt me to remove from Cloyne, and set
aside my Oxford scheme; which, though delayed by the illness of my
son(41), yet I am as intent upon it and as much resolved as ever.”
The last of Berkeley’s letters which we have is to Dean Gervais. It
expresses the feeling with which in April, 1752, he was contemplating
life, on the eve of his departure from Cloyne.
“I submit to years and infirmities. My views in this world are mean and
narrow; it is a thing in which I have small share, and which ought to give
me small concern. I abhor business, and especially to have to do with
great persons and great affairs. The evening of life I choose to pass in a
quiet retreat. Ambitious projects, intrigues and quarrels of statesmen,
are things I have formerly been amused with, but they now seem to be a
vain, fugitive dream.”
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Four months after this, Berkeley saw Cloyne for the last time. In August
he quitted it for Oxford, which he had long pictured in imagination as the
ideal home of his old age. When he left Cork in the vessel which carried
his wife, his daughter, and himself to Bristol, he was prostrated by
weakness, and had to be taken from Bristol to Oxford on a horse-litter. It
was late in August when they arrived there(42).
Our picture of Berkeley at Oxford is dim. According to tradition he
occupied a house in Holywell Street, near the gardens of New College and
not far from the cloisters of Magdalen. It was a changed world to him.
While he was exchanging Ireland for England, death was removing old
English friends. Before he left Cloyne he must have heard of the death of
Butler in June, at Bath, where Benson, at the request of Secker,
affectionately watched the last hours of the author of the _Analogy_.
Benson followed Butler in August.
We hear of study resumed in improved health in the home in Holy well
Street. In October a _Miscellany, containing several Tracts on various
Subjects_, “by the Bishop of Cloyne,” appeared simultaneously in London
and Dublin. The Tracts were reprints, with the exception of _Further
Thoughts on Tar-water_, which may have been written before he left
Ireland. The third edition of _Alciphron_ also appeared in this autumn.
But _Siris_ is the latest record of his philosophical thought. A
comparison of the _Commonplace Book_ and the _Principles_ with the
_Analyst_ and _Siris_ gives the measure of his advancement. After the
sanguine beginning perhaps the comparison leaves a sense of
disappointment, when we find metaphysics mixed up with mathematics in the
_Analyst_, and metaphysics obscurely mixed up with medicine in _Siris_.
It is curious that, although in 1752 David Hume’s _Treatise of Human
Nature_ had been before the world for thirteen years and his _Inquiry
concerning Human Understanding_ for four years, there is no allusion to
Hume by Berkeley. He was Berkeley’s immediate successor in the
eighteenth-century evolution of European thought. The sceptical criticism
of Hume was applied to the dogmatic religious philosophy of Berkeley, to
be followed in its turn by the abstractly rational and the moral
reconstructive criticism of Kant. _Alciphron_ is, however, expressly
referred to by Hume; indirectly, too, throughout the religious agnosticism
of his _Inquiry_, also afterwards in the _Dialogues on Natural Religion_,
in a vindication of minute philosophy by profounder reasonings than those
which satisfied Lysicles and Alciphron. Berkeley, Hume, and Kant are the
three significant philosophical figures of their century, each holding the
supreme place successively in its beginning, middle, and later years.
Perhaps Reid in Scotland did more than any other in his generation to make
Berkeley known; not, however, for his true work in constructive religious
thought, but for his supposed denial of the reality of the things we see
and touch.(43)
The ideal life in Oxford did not last long. On the evening of Sunday,
January 14, 1753, Berkeley was suddenly confronted by the mystery of
death. “As he was sitting with my mother, my sister, and myself,” so his
son wrote to Johnson at Stratford, in October, “suddenly, and without the
least previous notice or pain, he was removed to the enjoyment of eternal
rewards; and although all possible means were instantly used, no symptom
of life ever appeared after; nor could the physicians assign any cause for
his death. He arrived at Oxford on August 25, and had received great
benefit from the change of air, and by God’s blessing on tar-water,
insomuch that for some years he had not been in better health than he was
the instant before he left us(44).”
Six days later he was buried in Oxford, in the Cathedral of Christ
Church(45), where his tomb bears an appropriate inscription by Dr.
Markham, afterwards Archbishop of York.
ERRATA
Vol. I
Page 99, line 3 _for_ 149-80 _read_ 149-60.
Page 99, line 22 _for_—and to be “suggested,” not signified _read_—instead
of being only suggested.
Page 100, line 10 _for_ hearing _read_ seeing.
Page 103, note, lines 5, 6 _for_ pp. 111, 112 _read_ p. 210.
Page 200, note, line 14 _for_ Adam _read_ Robert.
Page 364, line 8 from foot _for_ and _read_ which.
Page 512, note 6, line 3 _for_ imminent _read_ immanent.
Vol. II
Page 194, note, line 3 _for_ Tyndal _read_ Tindal.
Page 207, line 1, insert 13. before _Alc._.
Page 377, line 6 _for_ antethesis _read_ antithesis.
Vol. IV
Page 285, lines 4, 5 _for_ Thisus Alus Cujus, &c. _read_ Ursus. Alus.
Cuius. &c. The inscription, strictly speaking, appears on the Palace of
the Counts Orsini, and is dated MD.
COMMONPLACE BOOK. MATHEMATICAL, ETHICAL, PHYSICAL, AND METAPHYSICAL
Written At Trinity College, Dublin, In 1705-8
_First published in 1871_
Editor’s Preface To The Commonplace Book
Berkeley’s juvenile _Commonplace Book_ is a small quarto volume, in his
handwriting, found among the Berkeley manuscripts in possession of the
late Archdeacon Rose. It was first published in 1871, in my edition of
Berkeley’s Works. It consists of occasional thoughts, mathematical,
physical, ethical, and metaphysical, set down in miscellaneous fashion,
for private use, as they arose in the course of his studies at Trinity
College, Dublin. They are full of the fervid enthusiasm that was natural
to him, and of sanguine expectations of the issue of the prospective
authorship for which they record preparations. On the title-page is
written, “G. B. Trin. Dub. alum.,” with the date 1705, when he was twenty
years of age. The entries are the gradual accumulation of the next three
years, in one of which the _Arithmetica_ and the _Miscellanea Mathematica_
made their appearance. The _New Theory of Vision_, given to the world in
1709, was evidently much in his mind, as well as the sublime conception of
the material world in its necessary subordination to the spiritual world,
of which he delivered himself in his book of _Principles_, in 1710.
This disclosure of Berkeley’s thoughts about things, in the years
preceding the publication of his first essays, is indeed a precious record
of the initial struggles of ardent philosophical genius. It places the
reader in intimate companionship with him when he was beginning to awake
into intellectual and spiritual life. We hear him soliloquising. We see
him trying to translate into reasonableness our crude inherited beliefs
about the material world and the natural order of the universe,
self-conscious personality, and the Universal Power or Providence—all
under the sway of a new determining Principle which was taking profound
possession of his soul. He finds that he has only to look at the concrete
things of sense in the light of this great discovery to see the
artificially induced perplexities of the old philosophers disappear, along
with their imposing abstractions, which turn out empty words. The thinking
is throughout fresh and sincere; sometimes impetuous and one-sided; the
outcome of a mind indisposed to take things upon trust, resolved to
inquire freely, a rebel against the tyranny of language, morally burdened
with the consciousness of a new world-transforming conception, which duty
to mankind obliged him to reveal, although his message was sure to offend.
Men like to regard things as they have been wont. This new conception of
the surrounding world—the impotence of Matter, and its subordinate office
in the Supreme Economy must, he foresees, disturb those accustomed to
treat outward things as the only realities, and who do not care to ask
what constitutes reality. Notwithstanding the ridicule and ill-will that
his transformed material world was sure to meet with, amongst the many who
accept empty words instead of genuine insight, he was resolved to deliver
himself of his thoughts through the press, but with the politic
conciliation of a persuasive Irish pleader.
The _Commonplace Book_ steadily recognises the adverse influence of one
insidious foe. Its world-transforming-Principle has been obscured by “the
mist and veil of words.” The abstractions of metaphysicians, which poison
human language, had to be driven out of the author’s mind before he could
see the light, and must be driven out of the minds of others before they
could be got to see it along with him: the concrete world as realisable
only in percipient mind is with difficulty introduced into the vacant
place. “The chief thing I pretend to is only to remove the mist and veil
of words.” He exults in the transformed mental scene that then
spontaneously rises before him. “My speculations have had the same effect
upon me as visiting foreign countries,—in the end I return where I was
before, get my heart at ease, and enjoy myself with more satisfaction. The
philosophers lose their abstract matter; the materialists lose their
abstract extension; the profane lose their extended deity. Pray what do
the rest of mankind lose?” This beneficent revolution seemed to be the
issue of a simple recognition of the fact, that the true way of regarding
the world we see and touch is to regard it as consisting of ideas or
phenomena that are presented to human senses, somehow regularly ordered,
and the occasions of pleasure or pain to us as we conform to or rebel
against their natural order. This is the surrounding universe—at least in
its relations to us, and that is all in it that we have to do with. “I
know not,” he says, “what is meant by things considered in themselves,
i.e. in abstraction. This is nonsense. Thing and idea are words of much
about the same extent and meaning. Existence is not conceivable without
perception and volition. I only declare the meaning of the word
_existence_, as far as I can comprehend it.”
In the _Commonplace Book_ we see the youth at Trinity College forging the
weapons which he was soon to direct against the materialism and scepticism
of the generation into which he was born. Here are rough drafts, crude
hints of intended arguments, probing of unphilosophical
mathematicians—even Newton and Descartes, memoranda of facts, more or less
relevant, on their way into the _Essay on Vision_ and the treatise on
_Principles_—seeds of the philosophy that was to be gradually unfolded in
his life and in his books. We watch the intrepid thinker, notwithstanding
the inexperience of youth, more disposed to give battle to mathematicians
and metaphysicians than to submit even provisionally to any human
authority. It does not seem that his scholarship or philosophical learning
was extensive. Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke were his intimates;
Hobbes and Spinoza were not unknown to him; Newton and some lesser lights
among the mathematicians are often confronted. He is more rarely in
company with the ancients or the mediaevalists. No deep study of Aristotle
appears, and there is even a disposition to disparage Plato. He seeks for
his home in the “new philosophy” of experience; without anticipations of
Kant, as the critic of what is presupposed in the scientific reliability
of any experience, against whom his almost blind zeal against abstractions
would have set him at this early stage. “Pure intellect I understand not
at all,” is one of his entries. He asks himself, “What becomes of the
_aeternae veritates_?” and his reply is, “They vanish.” When he tells
himself that “we must with the mob place certainty in the senses,” the
words are apt to suggest that the senses are our only source of knowledge,
but I suppose his meaning is that the senses must be trustworthy, as ’the
mob’ assume. Yet occasionally he uses language which looks like an
anticipation of David Hume, as when he calls mind “a congeries of
perceptions. Take away perceptions,” he adds, “and you take away mind. Put
the perceptions and you put the mind. The understanding seemeth not to
differ from its perceptions and ideas.” He seems unconscious of the total
scepticism which such expressions, when strictly interpreted, are found to
involve. But after all, the reader must not apply rigorous rules of
interpretation to random entries or provisional memoranda, meant only for
private use, by an enthusiastic student who was preparing to produce
books.
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