Berkeley, GEORGE, Bishop of Cloyne, an historical figure in the 18th century, whose romantic life of unselfish enthusiasm and self-sacrificing philanthropy animated a metaphysical genius still powerful in philosophical speculation. He was born in the neighbourhood of Kilkenny, on the 12th of March 1685 (N.S.), according to reliable tradition, in the half-ruined castle of Dysert, on the bank of the Nore. He was a scion of the noble House of Berkeley; his mother was a Wolfe, of the same Irish family as the hero who afterwards fell at Quebec. At the age of eleven he was sent to the Duke of Ormond's School at Kilkenny, from which he proceeded, in his fifteenth year, to Trinity College, Dublin. There he continued to reside, as student and fellow, for thirteen years. Trinity College was then influenced by independent thinkers. The philosophy of John Locke, which gave form to, and expressed the spirit of the 18th century, was already in vogue there, and, along with Descartes and Malebranche and the new physics of Newton, was superseding medieval scholasticism. To these stimulating influences the young student from Kilkenny responded with characteristically ardent enthusiasm. A Commonplace Book of 1705-6, lately discovered, and first published in the collected edition of his works in 1871, reveals an intellectual fermentation of extraordinary interest. Throughout its pages we see a subtle and original mind, stimulated by Locke's psychology to a conception of the universe which Locke himself never consciously approached.
The ardent spirit of the Commonplace Book soon found vent in philosophical authorship. Its 'new principle' was soon given to the world, first in its application only to our visual perception of things, and then, in two succeeding treatises, with philosophical comprehensiveness, as a system of universal immaterialism in which the whole world of sense is spiritualised. Accordingly, in 1709, he produced an Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, the purpose of which was to show that the act of seeing, which seems so immediate and indecomposable, is not really a direct and inexplicable revelation of something outside all self-conscious intelligence, but is an act of interpretation, involving a process essentially (if unconsciously) rational, which presupposes too a rational or orderly constitution in the visually interpreted phenomena themselves. The Essay is thus a psychological analysis of visual perception, with an ontological outcome. It was Berkeley's first step towards a clarification of the confused popular, and self-contradictory philosophical conceptions of matter, by its translation of the semi-conscious processes of sight into a virtual recognition of the perpetual creative agency of Supreme Reason. The argument was enlarged in scope in a Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge, in 1710, followed in 1713 by Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, in which the new conception of matter is popularised. These three books set in motion in Europe a train of speculation which, slow at first, through popular and philosophical misunderstanding, has not ceased since to move human thought about all the ultimate questions of our life and our surroundings. The central conception of the three continued to develop in Berkeley's mind throughout his life. His 'new principle'—that the world which we see and touch is not an abstract independent substance, of which conscious mind may be an effect, but is the very world that is presented to our senses, and which depends for its actuality on being perceived—was long misconstrued as the monstrous paradox that matter has no perceived existence. We are only now learning to realise, through its help, that phenomena in a sense presuppose the presence and continual agency of Supreme Reason; that external nature is thus throughout and always supernatural; that the orderly evolution of its sense phenomena, in inorganic and organic things, interpreted in natural science, is, for mere science, only a succession of phenomena, but that to the eye of philosophy these phenomena are severally and collectively dependent on the immanence of Reason, and ultimately on the moral agency of Spirit—so that the evolution of finite things, even in an endless succession, is in no way inconsistent with their being the subjects of constant creative activity. The material world of Berkeley is just what the senses present: all in it beyond this belongs to the world of mind, which converts the presented phenomena into a language that is expressive of absent sense phenomena, of other finite spirits, and of the all-pervading Reason that is supreme and absolute. What we know beyond sense phenomena is their intelligible synthesis in the form of variously qualified things. Our objective perception of this external or interpretable world is reached, not through any single sense, but through sense symbolism, which enables us to connect what is actually present in one sense with what is conditionally presentable in the others. Belief in the real existence of the external world is belief in the permanence of this intelligible connection among sense phenomena. This belief presupposes that we are in a trustworthy and intelligible universe, in which the sense signals presented to us to regulate our lives by may be depended on. Our security for the reality of the Berkeleyan external world is the thus inevitable assumption that nature is reasonable; that its phenomena express thought akin to our own; that it is more or less interpretable by us in progressive physical or natural science; and that even in the world of the senses we are living and moving and having our being in the supreme all-pervading Reason, theologically called God.
In 1713 Berkeley went to London, and was introduced by his countryman Swift to the statesmen and men of letters who there formed a brilliant society in the reign of Queen Anne. After spending nearly a year in London, he gave seven years to travel in France and Italy, first as chaplain to the brilliant and eccentric Earl of Peterborough, and afterwards as tutor to a son of the Bishop of Clogher. His journals, lately recovered, contain vivid descriptions of this continental experience, including adventures in crossing Mont Cenis in winter, a perilous visit to the crater of Vesuvius during an eruption, and an interview and metaphysical discussion at Paris with the aged Malebranche.
On his return to Ireland in 1721 he was distressed by the symptoms of social corruption and disorder occasioned by the South Sea Mania. This was the beginning of his public career as a missionary-philanthropist in pursuit of ideals for society. His sociological thoughts first found expression in a short Essay towards preventing the Ruin of Great Britain, charged with suggestions economical and ethical, significant of his own chivalrous indifference to wealth. In 1724 he resigned his fellowship in Trinity College, on being made Dean of Derry, with an income of £1100, which put him for the first time in easy circumstances. Yet that very year he carried to London a letter from Swift to Lord Carteret, the lord-lieutenant of Ireland, bearing that it was 'to introduce an absolute philosopher with regard to money, titles, and power, who for three years past has been struck with the romantic notion of founding, by a charter from the crown, a college at the Bermudas for the Christian civilisation of America, where he exorbitantly proposes a whole hundred pounds a year for himself as its head, and whose heart will break if his dearness be not for this purpose taken from him.' With a foresight of our vast colonial empire, he laboured in London for three years to interest Sir R. Walpole and other leading politicians in this missionary project, the grandest conceived in the 18th century. At last £20,000 was voted by the House of Commons for the endowment. On the faith of this he sailed for America in September 1728, taking with him a congenial auxiliary in his newly-married wife. To prepare for Bermuda, he made a romantic temporary home for himself for nearly three years in Rhode Island, where a few years before some American missionaries had settled. In one of them, a Dr Samuel Johnson, he found congenial companionship and a philosophical disciple, whose works, as well as those of Jonathan Edwards, helped to propagate his metaphysical conception of matter in America. Berkeley never reached Bermuda, as the promised grant was in the end withdrawn. In the autumn of 1731 he returned to England, carrying with him literary fruit ripened in Rhode Island, in 'the still air of delightful studies,' and given to the world in 1732 under the title of Aleiphrion, or the Minute Philosopher, the most finished of his works, with pleasant pictures of American scenes and life, while in form and ideas it resembles dialogues of Plato. Its philosophy cannot be out of date as long as agnostic contention with personality in man and God is continued. Aleiphrion was followed in 1733 by a Vindication of Berkeley's early visual immaterialism. In the Analyst, published in 1735, his theological philosophy was further unfolded, in an argument meant to show that the higher mathematics involve assumptions which as truly exclude definite or exhaustive conception as do any of the mysteries of religion, and which equally with the latter illustrate the spiritual fact, that the ultimate or marginal conceptions of an intelligence like ours must be only half-conceived truths.
Meantime, in 1734, Berkeley was made Bishop of Cloyne, in the south of Ireland, where in a beautiful home-life of eighteen years he found a channel for his ardent philanthropy in devotion to the social problems of Ireland. Two years after he went to Cloyne, he began the publication of the Querist, which appeared, in that and the two following years, in three instalments, consisting of about five hundred questions suggested by Ireland, with 'more hints, then original, still unapplied, in legislation and political economy than are to be found in any equal space.' The Querist was followed, in succeeding years, by other pamphlets on Ireland, and appeals for a larger toleration of its religious differences. The medical virtues of tar-water, on which he had been experimenting, were characteristically connected in Berkeley's mind with the ultimate conceptions of religious philosophy. In 1744 he published Siris, or a chain of philosophical reflections on the virtues of tar-water, a treatise which he said cost him more research and thought than any of his other works. Through the crude mechanics, chemistry, and physiology of a past age, it suggests a connection between the resinous element in tar and the Spiritual Power by which the universe is being perpetually created. Plato and the Neo-Platonists, the companions of his advancing years, appear here as his authorities, and throw into the background Locke and the empirical teachers of his youth. In Siris he traces the steps by which, at the dawn of the Christian era, Greek and Græco-oriental speculation sought to rise towards the Infinite and Ineffable, and to connect the sensible world and the embodied spirits of men in an intellectual unity in the Divine Reason.
The beautiful home-life at Cloyne ended in 1752, when declining health hastened the execution of a long-formed project to resign his episcopate and make Oxford the home of his old age. Six months after he had reached Oxford, on the 14th of January 1753, he suddenly passed from the world of sense. His body was buried in the cathedral of Christ Church.
Berkeley's life has been one of the principal forces in modern philosophy. His thought has indeed been for the most part only unconsciously operative, beneath the shock and sense of strangeness with which, interpreted as an absurd paradox, it has been popularly received. But it is at the root of all the great conflicts of ultimate speculation about the universe in the 18th and 19th centuries. David Hume, looking only at what Berkeley denied, so misapplied the 'new principle' as to disintegrate spirit as well as matter into a succession of isolated feelings; although Berkeley had really resolved even matter, not into isolated feelings, but into a continuous presentation of significant sense phenomena. Reid and the Scottish psychologists were roused to attempt a deeper and truer psychology than Locke's by the desire to refute the Berkeley they saw in Hume. English and French empirical psychology, from Hartley and Condillac to John Stuart Mill and Comte, has accepted the phenomenalist theory of matter, but emptied of the originating and directing Reason which in Berkeley's thought was its philosophically necessary constitution. In Germany, Kant told that he was roused into philosophical criticism from his 'dogmatic slumber' by the metaphysical nescience which Hume had discovered in his one-sided Berkeley; and the Kantian criticism has formed the European thought of the 19th century, as Lockian psychology formed it in the 18th, and the dogmatic constructions of Cartesianism in the 17th. The abstract self-consciousness of Neo-Kantianism has a certain affinity with the Neo-Platonic idealism of Siris—not yet sublimated into Hegelian abstractness in Berkeley's concrete spiritualism, which recognises Reason as at once personal and supreme. It is thus a fact of history that Berkeley has employed the modern philosophical world in a struggle, virtually about his new conception of the universe, which has lasted for nearly two hundred years.
The only complete edition of Berkeley is the Clarendon Press 'Collected Works' (4 vols., Oxford, 1871), annotated with dissertations and a Life by Professor Campbell Fraser, who has also published Selections from Berkeley (3d ed. 1884), and Berkeley (2d ed. 1885), in Blackwood's 'Philosophical Classics.'