The Works of George Berkeley. Vol. 1 of 4 · George Berkeley
GEORGE BERKELEY, BY THE EDITOR
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.
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.
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.
No attempt is made in _Siris_ to articulate the universe in the light of 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.
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. ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ 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.
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.”
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)
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.