nature upon metaphysics themselves. OLIPHANT, MARGARET, 1869, Historical Sketches of the Reign of George II., Blackwood's Magazine, vol. 105, p. 4. The man who stands out as one of the noblest and purest figures of his time: that Berkeley from whom the jealousy of Pope did not withhold a single one of all "the virtues under heaven;" nor the cynicism of Swift, the dignity of "one of the first men of the kingdom for learning and virtue;" the man whom the pious Atterbury could compare to nothing less than an angel; and whose personal influence and eloquence filled the Scriblerus Club and the House of Commons with enthusiasm for the evangelization of the North American Indians; and even led Sir Robert Walpole to assent to the appropriation of public money to a scheme which was neither business nor bribery.-HUXLEY, THOMAS HENRY, 1871, Bishop Berkeley on the Metaphysics of Sensation, Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 24, p. 147. Yale College is fortunate in the possession of a portrait of Berkeley, painted in this country by Smibert, an English artist, who accompanied Berkeley to this country. The Berkeley Divinity School honors him in its name. The seat of the University of California, at the extreme limit of that westward course of empire to which Berkeley's eyes were turned, is, owing to the happy suggestion of the present President of the Johns Hopkins University, most appropriately named Berkeley, and the portrait of the philosopher adorns its walls. There will be academic shrines to his memory in this country as long as our land shall endure.MORRIS, GEORGE S., 1880, British Thought and Thinkers, p. 231. The greatest of the sons of Ireland who came to us in those days was George Berkeley, and he, like Penn, reposed hopes for humanity on America. Versed in ancient learning, exact science, and modern literature, disciplined by travel and reflection, adverse factions agreed in ascribing to him "every virtue under heaven." Cherished by those who were the pride of English letters and society, favored with unsolicited dignities and revenues, he required for his happiness, not fortune or preferment, but a real progress in knowledge. The material tendencies of the age in which he lived were hateful to his purity of sentiment; and having a mind kindred with Plato and the Alexandrine philosophers, with Barclay and Malebranche, he held that the external world was wholly subordinate to intelligence; that true existence can be predicted of spirits alone.-BANCROFT, GEORGE, 1883, History of the United States, pt. iii, ch. xv. Though it be true, therefore, thatphilosophy apart-Berkeley effected little; though he did not write enough to rank in the first class among men of letters, nor perform enough to be counted a successful man of action; though he was neither a great social power, nor a great missionary, nor a great ecclesiastic, it is also true that scarce any man of his generation touched contemporary life at so many points. In reading his not very voluminous works we find ourselves not only in the thick of every great controversytheological, mathematical, and philosophical-which raged in England during the first half of the eighteenth century, but we get glimpses of life in the most diverse conditions: in the seclusion of Trinity College, Dublin, in the best literary and fashionable society in London, among the prosperous colonists of Rhode Island, among the very far from prosperous peasants and squireens of Cork. And all this in the company of a man endowed with the subtlest of intellects, lit up with a humour the most delicate and urbane.— BALFOUR, ARTHUR JAMES, 1897, Berkeley's Works, ed. Sampson, Biographical Introduction, p. ix. UNIVERSITY OF BERMUDA It is now about ten months since I have determined to spend the residue of my days in Bermuda, where I trust in Providence I may be the mean instrument of doing great good to mankind. The reformation of manners among the English in our Western plantations, and the propagation of the Gospel among the American savages, are two points of high moment. The natural way of doing this is by founding a college or seminary in some convenient part of the West Indies, where the English youth of our plantations may be educated in such sort as to supply their churches with pastors of good morals and good learning a thing (God knows) much wanted. In the same seminary a number of young American savages may also be educated till they have taken the degree of Master of Arts. And being by that time well instructed in the Christian religion, practical mathematics, and other liberal arts and sciences, and early imbued with public-spirited principles and inclinations, they may become the fittest instruments for spreading religion, morals, and civil life among their countrymen, who can entertain no suspicion or jealousy of men of their own blood and language, as they might do of English missionaries, who can never be well qualified for that work.BERKELEY, GEORGE, 1723, Letter to Sir John Percival, March. He is an absolute philosopher with regard to money, titles, and power, and for three years past has been struck with a notion of founding an university at Bermudas, by a charter from the Crown. He has seduced several of the hopefullest young clergymen and others here, many of them well provided for, and all of them in the fairest way of preferment; but in England his conquests are greater, and I doubt will spread very far this winter. He showed me a little tract which he designs to publish, and there your Excellency will see his whole scheme of a life academico-philosophical of a college founded for Indian scholars and missionaries, where he most exorbitantly proposeth a whole hundred pound a-year for himself, forty pounds for a fellow, and ten for a student. His heart will break if his deanery be not taken from him and left to your Excellency's disposal. I discourage him by the coldness of courts and ministers, who will interpret all this as impossible and a vision, but nothing will do. And therefore I do humbly entreat your Excellency either to use such persuasions as will keep one of the first men in this kingdom for learning and virtue quiet at home, or assist him by your credit to compass his romantic design, which, however, is very noble and generous, and directly proper for a great person of your excellent education to encourage.-SWIFT, JONATHAN, 1724, Letter to Lord Carteret, Sept. 3. But in the meantime no news or bad news came from England. The money from which the endowment of the Bermuda College was to have come was otherwise appropriated; and Sir Robert Walpole, on being finally appealed to, made answer, that of course the money would be paid as soon as suited the public convenience, but, as a friend, he counselled Dean Berkeley to return home and not to wait that far-off contingency. Thus the whole chivalric scheme broke down. Berkeley had wasted four years in the blank existence of the little New England town, had "expended much of his private property," and spent infinite exertions and hopes in vain. A long period before his actual setting-out had been swallowed up in negotiations to obtain this futile charter and unpaid grant. He gave up, on the whole, some seven years of the flower and prime of his life to the scheme thus cruelly and treacherously rendered abortive. It is so that England treats the generous movements and attempted self-devotion of her sons. Had it been a factory or a plantation, there might have been some hope for Berkeley; but a college with only ideal advantages, mere possibilities of influence and evangelisation, -what was that to Walpole, or to the slumbrous prosaic nation over which he ruled?OLIPHANT, MARGARET, 1869, Historical Sketches of the Reign of George II., Blackwood's Magazine, vol. 105, p. 21. With a character like that of Berkeley, and a scheme so calculated to strike the imagination and the finer sentiments of men, it is natural that there should be little but reprobation for the unimaginative and unsympathetic minister by whom Berkeley's project was crushed. But a word of justice remains to be spoken, even here, on the side of the prosaic practical sense by which the business of the world is carried on. The truth is, that Berkeley's project never commended itself to the practical tact of men. From the first announcement of it in Swift's letters to Lord Carteret down to the callous mockery of Walpole's advice, the project is treated very generally as a visionary's dream, which is not to be laughed down simply out of respect for the visionary's character, and for the purity of the motives out of which his dream arose. Even Blackwell of Aberdeen, and the other scholars who at first proposed to act under Berkeley in his new university, all drew back at the last, and left their principal to go out as a lonely pioneer. Berkeley's scheme in fact, ignored one essential condition of success: it was altogether unnecessary, for the work he planned had long been carried on by men better fitted to cope with all its requirements than the best selection of scholars from the universities of the Old World. The Puritan settlers of New England had, soon after their arrival, recognised the importance of the work which Berkeley's biographers sometimes give him the credit of having been the first to conceive. Harvard College was started nearly a century before Berkeley left England, and even Yale dates back to his boyhood. It seems strange that, before entering on his romantic task, he either did not find out, or did not appreciate, the nature of the work which these institutions were already performing in the field that was to be cultivated by his own labours.-MURRAY, J. CLARK, 1887, The Revived Study of Berkeley, Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 56, p. 169. The scheme seems now so impracticable that we may well wonder how any single person, let alone the representatives of a whole nation, could be found to support it. In order that religion and learning might flourish in America, the seeds of them were to be cast in some rocky islets severed from America by nearly six hundred miles of stormy ocean. In order that the inhabitants of the mainland of the West Indian colonies might equally benefit by the new university, it was to be placed in such a position that neither could conveniently reach it.BALFOUR, ARTHUR JAMES, 1893, Essays and Addresses, p. 69. Berkeley's American visit was, in its plan, its execution, and its fruit, much more than it seemed to the public eye, either at that time or since; and while it was a thing that could have been projected only by an idealist and a moral enthusiast -such as Berkeley was-it must be pronounced, even on cool survey, a mission of chivalric benevolence certainly, but also of profound and even creative sagacity. In its boldness and its generosity it was dictated by an apostolic disinterestedness and courage to which, of course, that age was unaccustomed, and which places it in the light of an almost comic incongruity with the spirit of the time in which it occurred. In the history of our colonial period it forms a romantic chapter. But, in order to understand it, we need first to understand Berkeley himself, as well as his attitude toward the period he lived in. -TYLER, MOSES COIT, 1895, Three Men of Letters, p. 11. A NEW THEORY OF VISION 1709 Two clergymen have perused your book -Clarke and Whiston. Not having myself any acquaintance with these gentlemen, I can only report at second hand they think you a fair arguer and a clear writer, but they say your first principles you lay down are false. They look upon you as an extraordinary genius, but say they wish you had employed your thoughts less upon metaphysics, ranking you with Father Malebranche, Norris, and another whose name I have forgot-all of whom they think extraordinary men, but of a particular turn, and their labours of little use to mankind on account of their abstruseness. This may arise from these gentlemen not caring to think after a new manner, which would oblige them to begin their studies anew, or else it may be the strength of prejudice. PERCIVAL, SIR JOHN, 1710, Letter to Berkeley, Oct. He published this metaphysic notion, that matter was not a real thing; nay, that the common opinion of its reality was groundless, if not ridiculous. He was pleased to send Dr. Clarke and myself, each of us, a book. After we had both perused it, I went to Dr. Clarke, and discoursed with him about it to this effect: that I, being not a metaphysician, was not able to answer Mr. Berkeley's subtile premises, though I did not at all believe his absurd conclusion. I therefore desired that he, who was deep in such subtilities, but did not appear to believe Mr. Berkeley's conclusions, would answer him: which task he declined.-WHISTON, WILLIAM, 1730, Life of Samuel Clarke. The first attempt that ever was made to distinguish the immediate and natural objects of sight, from the conclusions we have been accustomed from infancy to draw from them; a distinction from which the nature of vision hath received great light, and by which many phænomena in optics, before looked upon as unaccountable, have been clearly and distinctly resolved.-REID, THOMAS, 1764, An Inquiry into the Mind. The doctrine concerning the original and derivative functions of the sense of sight, which, from the name of its author, is known as Berkeley's "Theory of Vision," has remained, almost from its first promulgation, one of the least disputed doctrines in the most disputed and most disputable of all sciences, the Science of Man. This is the more remarkable, as no doctrine in mental philosophy is more at variance with first appearances, more contradictory to the natural prejudices of mankind. Yet this apparent paradox was no sooner published, than it took its place, almost without contestation, among established opinions; the warfare which has since distracted the world of metaphysics, has swept past this insulated position without disturbing it; and while so many of the other conclusions of the analytical school of mental philosophy, the school of Hobbes and Locke, have been repudiated with violence by the antagonist school, that of Common Sense or innate principles, this one doctrine has been recognised and upheld by the leading thinkers of both schools alike. Adam Smith, Reid, Stewart, and Whewell (not to go beyond our own island) have made the doctrine as much their own, and have taken as much pains to enforce and illustrate it, as Hartley, Brown, or James Mill.-MILL, JOHN STUART, 184250, Bailey on Berkeley's Theory of Vision, Dissertations and Discussions, vol. II, p. 84. Berkeley's "Essay towards a New Theory of Vision" is the chronological and also a logical introduction to his metaphysical philosophy. It is virtually an inquiry into the nature and origin of our conception of Extension in Space, that distinctive characteristic of the material world. The "Essay" was the first fruits of Berkeley's philosophical studies at Dublin. It was also the first elaborate attempt to demonstrate that our apparently immediate visual perceptions of space, and of bodies existing in it apart from our organism, are actually suggestions induced by the constant association of visible ideas, and of certain organic sensations which accompany vision, with objects presented in our tactual experience. Various circumstances contribute to make this "Essay" more perplexing to the reader than any of Berkeley's other works.-FRASER, A. C., 1871, ed., The Works of George Berkeley, vol. 1, pp. 1, 4. THE PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE 1710 It was only by degrees that this scheme of Berkeley's philosophy attracted the attention due to so original and ingenious a mode of conceiving the Universe. A fragment of metaphysics, by a young and almost unknown author, published at a distance from the centre of English intellectual life, was apt to be overlooked. In connection with the "Essay on Vision,' however, it drew enough of regard to carry its author with éclat on his first visit to London, three years after the publication of the "Principles." He then published the immortal "Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous," in which the absurdity of Absolute Matter is illustrated, and the doctrine defended against objections, in a manner meant to recommend to popular acceptance what, on the first statement, seemed an unpopular paradox.-FRASER, ALEXANDER CAMPBELL, 1871, ed. The Works of George Berkeley, vol. 1, p. 130. Which rank among the most exquisite examples of English style, as well as among the subtlest of metaphysical writings; and the final conclusion of which is summed up in a passage remarkable alike for literary beauty and for calm audacity of statement.-HUXLEY, THOMAS HENRY, 1871, Bishop Berkeley on the Metaphysics of Sensation, Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 24, p. 149. The treatise, "Of the Principles of Human Knowledge," is probably the most entertaining metaphysical work in the English language, and many men who turn away disgusted from ordinary presentations of philosophical doctrines, have read it with amusement if not with satisfaction. -ALEXANDER, ARCHIBALD, 1885, The Idealism of Bishop Berkeley, The Presbyterian Review, vol. 6, p. 307. HYLAS AND PHILONOUS In this work Berkeley first displayed his wonderful skill as a manipulator of the English language, which had never been employed for the discussion of philosophical ideas with anything like so much grace and refinement.-GOSSE, EDMUND, 1888, A History of Eighteenth Century Literature, p. 198. A book marked by that consummate beauty of style for which he is distinguished.-DENNIS, JOHN, 1894, The Age of Pope, p. 222. ALCIPHRON, OR THE MINUTE 1732 The style and manner of this work are built on the model of Plato, and may be justly deemed one of the most happy imitations of the Grecian philosopher, of which our language can boast. There was in Berkeley, indeed, much of the sublimity, the imagination, and enthusiasm, which characterize the genius of Plato.-DRAKE, NATHAN, 1804, Essays Illustrative of the Tatler, Spectator and Guardian, vol. III, p. 69. Now, I want you, and pray you to read Berkeley's "Minute Philosopher;" I want you to learn that the religious belief which Wordsworth and I hold, and which -I am sure you know in my case, and will not doubt in his—no earthly considerations would make us profess if we did not hold it, is as reasonable as it is desirable; is in its historical grounds as demonstrable as any thing can be which rests upon human evidence; and is, in its life and spirit, the only divine philosophy, the perfection of wisdom; in which, and in which alone, the understanding and the heart can rest. -SOUTHEY, ROBERT, 1829, Letter, Oct., Life and Correspondence by C. C. Southey, ch. xxxii. Berkeley's "Minute Philosopher" is the least admirable performance of that admirable writer. The most characteristic part is the attempt to erect a proof of theology upon his own peculiar metaphysical theory. The remainder consists for the most part of familiar commonplaces, expressed in a style of exquisite grace and lucidity, but not implying any great originality. STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1876, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. II, p. 43. In this noble composition the author combats, through his own method, the different types of infidelity current at the time. Berkeley's conception of the nature of religion was more spiritual than that which was prevalent in his day.-FISHER, GEORGE PARK, 1896, History of Christian Doctrine, p. 386. The elegance and easiness of the style, and the freshness and beauty of the descriptions of natural scenery by which the tedium of the controversy is relieved, render this not only a readable, but a fascinating book; but Berkeley falls into the usual error of men who write on controversial subjects in the dialogistic form. He makes his adversaries state their case much more weakly than they would really have done; the giants he raises, only to knock down, are weak-kneed giants. Certainly the same may be said of Tindal, the chief of the Deists; but faults on one side do not justify similar faults on the other.-OVERTON, JOHN HENRY, 1897, The Church in England, vol. II, p. 225. "Alciphron" was, and is likely to be, the most generally enjoyed of Berkeley's volumes. It is simply and variously entertaining with merits that far out-balance its defects. It has to be remembered that "Alciphron" is not directed against the specific doctrines of Deists or Atheists, so much as against the general influence. of such writers on people unwilling to think for themselves, yet willing because of their more doubtful lives to deny the existence of God. Deep and close argument throughout would have helped his special object but little; and those who condemn the work as shallow seem to forget this. The "Analogy" of Butler and the "Alciphron" of Berkeley are as different in special aim as any two works on one subject can possibly be; and to expect the same result from each is strangely perverse and unreasonable. Were its philosophical value even less, it would still be eagerly read, for in an age of delicate and symmetrical prose, it stands distinguished by its delicacy and its symmetry.-SAMPSON, GEORGE, 1898, ed., Works of George Berkeley, vol. II, 148. p. GAUDENTIO DI LUCCA "Gaudentio di Lucca" is generally, and I believe, on good grounds, supposed to be the work of the celebrated Berkeley, |