The Works of George Berkeley. Vol. 1 of 4 · George Berkeley
GEORGE BERKELEY, BY THE EDITOR
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. 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.
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.”
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.
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.
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?
We find it impossible to determine with absolute certainty the character 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).
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.