The Works of George Berkeley. Vol. 1 of 4 · George Berkeley
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.
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.”
“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.”
“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. ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ 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.”
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.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.