V
BERKELEY
I
Berkeley was one of those men who cannot or will not decide whether to devote themselves to thought or to action. They are enamored of ideas, but they would have ideas triumph at once in the reality of daily life. They would influence men, they would transform the world, but they rely on thought and word as instruments. They know the pleasure of intellectual activity and the joy of discovery, but they soon weary of solitary meditation. They seek to do good, and to mingle in the affairs of the social group to which they belong, but they cannot make up their minds to sacrifice truth to possibility, the things of the spirit to the necessities of common life. And even if they succeed in winning men by their enthusiasm, they fall victims at the last to their own intellectual ingenuousness. Thus their speculations are disturbed by their practical purposes, they are fatally hampered by considerations of moral propriety or by dogma; and on the other hand, their action is thwarted and delayed by their ideological prejudices and by that element of the paradoxical which is to be found in every thinker who is not content merely to repeat the ideas of his predecessors.
Thus they waver between the search for general concepts and the management of particular undertakings, between the tower of the philosopher and the pulpit of the preacher. They are too theoretical to start a true religious or social revolution, too oratorical to be taken seriously by professional scientists and metaphysicians. The learned look down on them a little, and the people pity them. They love many things, they often change occupation, they sometimes change opinion. Not that they are dilettantes—far from it! They are very much in earnest about their own activities, but they are men of such multiform vivacity that they cannot stay for forty or fifty years in a single rut. Among them you will find the discoverers of the intuitions which are ultimately developed by those mastodontic pedants who cannot assimilate ideas less than fifty years old. Among them you will find the agitators, the revolutionists, the aristocratic propagandists who form an intermediate class between the disdainful metaphysicians—outspoken enemies of clearness and of utility—and the great simple apostles of the people, men of intuition who stir the city as though by magic, and draw their words not from books but from the heart.
This class of men has not yet been thoroughly described nor patiently studied, but it is larger than one would think. The pure, absolute types of the philosopher, the artist, the practical man, are very rare. A careful scrutiny will discover Utopians among business men, empiricists among philosophers, money-makers among poets.
All this is illustrated in the case of Berkeley. In him, indeed, if you scratch the philosopher, you will find the Christian apostle; if you scratch the man of religion, you will find the civic moralist; if you scratch the preacher, you will find the practical man and the artist; and after all these scratchings, you will not know which of all these persons is the true, the fundamental, the irreducible Berkeley.
The first period of his life (1685–1713) is devoted wholly to knowledge, and in particular, to philosophy. This is the period when he wins high honors at Trinity, when he studies mathematics and publishes his Arithmetic, when he and his friends, in a sort of philosophic academy which he had founded, discuss natural philosophy, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, and Newton. But it is preëminently the period when enter triumphant exclamations and mysterious hints in his Commonplace Book—hasty notes concerning that "new principle," that "great discovery," that theory of the non-existence of matter, which was to be one of the three important fixed ideas of his life (the other two, as we shall see, were his scheme for the evangelization of the American Indians and his belief in the virtues of tar-water). The Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), in which the new principle is applied somewhat timidly to the sensations of sight, belongs to these years. Soon after this came the Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), in which the inconceivability of a material substance is demonstrated and defended at great length, and the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713), which are the polite manifesto of immaterialism. The great principle, presented as the best philosophic preventive against the plagues of skepticism and immorality, is thus brought within the range of parlor vision.
In 1713, with Berkeley's journey to London, begins the period of his mundane and wandering life. The young Irishman makes acquaintances, becomes the friend of Swift, who presents him at court, continues in Steele's Guardian his campaign against free-thinkers, and all at once sets out for Sicily in the suite of Lord Peterborough. In 1714 he was again in London, but he soon left to accompany the son of Bishop Ashe to France and Italy. This second journey lasted for five years. Berkeley stopped for a while in Paris, where he seems to have made the acquaintance of Malebranche; then, crossing the Alps on the first of January, 1715, he entered Italy. He traversed the entire peninsula, making his longest stops at Florence, Rome, and Naples. His journal indicates that he was much interested in archæology and in modern painting, and that he played to perfection his part as traveling tutor, visiting palaces, churches, private collections, and the ruins of ancient monuments. He did also something which very few visitors have done before or since: he traveled through a great part of southern Italy, stopping in many places—often in monasteries—and interesting himself in agriculture, in the political organization of the country, and most of all in the famous question of the dance of the tarantula. In 1720 he started back toward London, but stopped at Lyons to write a Latin essay, De motu, to be presented in a competition held by the Parisian Academy of Science.
His return to England marks the beginning of a new period in his life: the period of his apostleship. He found his country convulsed by the catastrophe of the South Sea Bubble, and he published almost at once a little work in which he sought to remind his fellow citizens that nothing but moral renovation could save England from greater disasters.
Like an earlier Rousseau, however, he believed that the corruption of Europe was hopelessly advanced, that the disease had gone too far to be eradicated by preachments or pamphlets. It would be better, he thought, to turn to America, where the English had already founded colonies and cities; where one might perhaps inaugurate a new civilization, purer and more Christian than that of the Old World. With a little good will, and plenty of money, one might convert and educate the aborigines, who might then be employed in the furtherance of the cause. Thus there sprang up in Berkeley's head the evangelistic, Rousseauistic, and somewhat Utopian idea of founding in Bermuda a sort of university to train young Indian pastors. Berkeley's enthusiasm and tranquil assurance were contagious. Many noblemen promised money. A number of people prepared to go with him. Public opinion was favorable. Parliament approved the project. The king granted a charter to the future university; and the prime minister, Horace Walpole, though at first opposed to the plan, was compelled by the pressure of the Court, of Parliament, of public opinion, and of the friends of Berkeley, to promise a subsidy of twenty thousand pounds. Without waiting for the delivery of this money, he began preparations for his departure. It was at this time that he married Anne Forster, a lady of mystic leanings, a reader of Fénelon and of Mme Guyon. Early in September, 1728, he left Greenwich, with his wife and a few companions (among them the painter Smibert), and in January, 1729, he reached America. He landed, however, not in Bermuda, but at Newport, Rhode Island, where for two years he waited for the money which never came, read many ancient philosophers, fell in love with Plato, converted some of the American clergy to the doctrine of immaterialism, founded a philosophic society, and wrote his most extensive work, Alciphron, or The Minute Philosopher.
Late in 1731, following the advice of his friends, he returned to England, where he published the Alciphron and a defense of his Theory of Vision. For some time he was engaged in polemics with free-thinkers and mathematicians, and brought out new editions of his early philosophical works, modifying his thought in some respects.
Berkeley's stay in Rhode Island divides his philosophic activity into two parts. In his youth he was a positivist and phenomenalist, wary of metaphysics. In his maturity, under the influence of Platonism, he held psychology in less esteem, made more use of dialectics than of the appeal to experience, and gave to his constant thesis—that the world is immaterial—a metaphysical rather than an empiric character.
In 1734 the episcopal period of Berkeley's life begins. From then on, his name was always accompanied by the title "Bishop of Cloyne." During this period he was much occupied by the affairs of his diocese, in which the Catholics were numerous, became greatly interested in the Irish question, and continued his insistent struggle against unbelief. In 1740 Ireland was devastated by famine and disease, and Berkeley remembered a remedy of which he had learned in America: tar-water. It was tried with success in several cases. Berkeley then lost his head and thought he had discovered a universal panacea. His friend Dr. Prior advertised the new medicine extensively. It soon became fashionable, and Berkeley, with increasing enthusiasm, wrote one of the strangest of all books, the Siris, which starts off as a treatise on pharmacopœia, turns successively into a medical discussion and an essay in physics, and is finally transformed into a transcendental synthesis of neo-Platonic thought and Christian revelation. Berkeley's tar-water brought him a popularity that his immaterialism had failed to win; and his philosophical theories now made their way everywhere in England and abroad, in the suite of his directions for the use of the fashionable specific. But he by no means forgot his duties as bishop and as citizen. In the last years of his life he wrote several pamphlets directed against the Catholics, and those Maxims concerning Patriotism which are, as it were, his civic testament.
In 1751 his health broke, misfortunes came, and he decided to go to Oxford with his son George. He left Cloyne in 1752; but he was not destined long to enjoy the learned life of the university city, for he died of paralysis on the twentieth of January, 1753, amid the sincere regret of all who had known him.
He was one of the most lovable of men. His moral qualities were highly esteemed during his life, while the full value of his teachings was not recognized until much later. For eighteenth-century England he stood as the model of the active and cultivated churchman and the unselfish citizen, so full of initiative and of enthusiasm for religion and for the common weal that he might readily be pardoned for his curious philosophical ideas.
II
Those who regard Berkeley merely as a philosopher are but slightly acquainted with him. Berkeley was a philosopher also, just as he was also a botanist,[1] also a mathematician, also a poet. Those who know him best are well aware that the central purpose of his life was neither the tranquil contemplation of concepts nor the dispassionate search for truth. Unless this point be first established, we cannot rightly understand even his philosophy.
What though continental opinion allows Berkeley no legal domicile save in those heavy histories of philosophy wherein a long tradition assigns him a comfortable place between the armchair of Locke and the footstool of Hume? What though little remains of Berkeley in the memory of the average student save his reputation as immaterialist and the famous equation esse est percipi? This is by no means proof that Berkeley was merely an inspector and tester of the terms most often used in the discussion of the theory of knowledge, or that his greatest interest was the endeavor to achieve a profounder definition of the word "exist," and thus to free men's thought of the old belief in an external, independent, and material substance.
If you compare his life with the lives of the typical philosophers—the inevitable Spinoza or the inevitable Kant—a striking difference appears. Their lives hold nothing beyond their philosophy save the common life of every-day, the provision of food—by the polishing of lenses, or the teaching of physical geography—and its consmuption. In Berkeley, on the contrary, philosophic activity was but a part, and not always the dominant part, of a broader spiritual activity. For he was priest as well as philosopher: he was a true and ardent apostle of Christianity, a resourceful champion of morality and of Christian dogma. From the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) to the Maxims concerning Patriotism (1750) he labored with all his might, for forty years, to establish belief and to increase righteousness in England.
Those who know all the works of Berkeley know that he regarded the defense of religion as the most important of all things, and that his life was a constant battle against skeptics, atheists, nihilarians, libertins, esprits forts, "men of fashion," "minute philosophers," against all who in any way, by argument or mockery, by treatise or by apologue, offended and menaced belief in God, belief in the spirituality of the world, or Christian morals. The Principles of Human Knowledge were written—as the young philosopher proclaimed upon the title-page—to remove "the bases of atheism and of irreligion." The pamphlet on Passive Obedience (1712) is merely a development of the evangelical principle of non-resistance to the Supreme Power. The Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) seek to demonstrate the providence of God and the incorporeal nature of the soul, to the confusion of skeptics and atheists. The essays of the Guardian (1713) are nearly all directed against free-thinkers. The Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721) was written to remind Englishmen, then distressed by financial disaster, that a society cannot be safe or sane unless it is sober, pure, and religious. The Proposal for the Better Supplying of the Churches in our Foreign Plantations (1725) is the public statement of Berkeley's famous project for the founding of a university in Bermuda, and the conversion of the American Indians to Christianity. The seven dialogues of the Alciphron constitute a complete system of Christian apologetics, philosophic and moral in method and emphasis. The Analyst (1734) is a critique of the differential calculus—which had recently been invented and was attracting much attention—designed to show that there are mysteries in mathematics as well as in faith, and that one of the most famous anti-Christian arguments of the rationalists has therefore no validity. The Discourse Addressed to Magistrates (1738) is from beginning to end an invective against the license and irreligion of the times. The Siris (1744), though devoted in particular to the praise of tar-water, ends with a metaphysical and religious portion in which the writer resumes one of the favorite theses of the Renaissance: the marvelous agreement between the philosophy of Plato and the Christian revelation. The list might easily be continued, but as it stands it includes all the important works of Berkeley; and in every one of them the attack on irreligion, even if it does not afford the subject matter, is the moving principle of the work.
Berkeley was not content to watch life from a window, or to withdraw into the world of thought in the pure search for truth. He was a practical man who used theoretical means. As a priest he believed in Christianity; and as a practical man he saw that morality was based upon Christianity, and that a morality based upon religion is necessary for any society that is to escape an evil end. He therefore considered as his personal enemies all those who attacked the faith and the morals of the people and the prosperity of the nation. Atheists, to his mind, were not merely superficial thinkers and cheap philosophers, but also, and primarily, enemies to humanity and traitors to their fatherland. As a shepherd of souls and as a citizen he felt that his first duty was to harass, to pursue, and to attack such enemies. He did his best to fulfil that duty. And since philosophy is one of the weapons unbelievers use, he sought to blow the ground from under their feet by a philosophic mine: the theory of immaterialism. His development of this theory, which in the eyes of most historians constitutes the whole of Berkeley, is in reality merely one phase of his Glaubenkampf.
III
A thorough examination of Berkeley's leading characteristics would compel us, in any case, to conclude that he could never have been a pure philosopher, even had he so desired. Indeed, to say nothing of the dogmatic assumptions and the moral purposes to which I have already referred, he was dominated by considerations which are usually regarded as hostile to abstract speculation. He was inclined, as he himself recognized, to take up with what was new and paradoxical; and he was the sworn enemy of all that is not clear, precise, completely and universally intelligible, and in harmony with that famous "common sense" which has always been the guardian deity of British thought. Berkeley approached philosophy, at least in the first period of his career, as a good positivist, a student of physical science, and a reader of Locke. He sought to affirm nothing save that which is actually established. His denial of the independent existence of matter looks at first sight like a metaphysical leap foretokening the more fatal leaps of the German idealists; but to his mind it was merely the consequence of a more exact and positive examination of human knowledge—a conclusion that might serve to drive the cold spectres of metaphysics out of every head and every school. "I am more for reality than any other philosopher," said he in youth in his Commonplace Book,[2] in which he was assembling the materials for his work on The Principles of Human Knowledge. And again: "Mem. To be eternally banishing Metaphysics, etc., and recalling men to Common Sense."[3]
Furthermore, like a good Englishman and a good practical man, he scorned all that which is of no use to mankind. For him the word "useless" was tantamount to an unanswerable objection, a definitive condemnation. The value of his theories lay, to his mind, in their theological implications—ultimately, therefore, in their social and moral efficacy.
This practical spirit led him to hate anything long or complicated. He started out by trying to make arithmetic briefer and easier. Later he tried to simplify philosophy by canceling the material world and the whole repertory of scholasticism. Finally, he tried to reduce and to prune Christian apologetics by removing those elements which were too speculative or merely oratorical. His program in philosophy, in short, was this: to reach results useful for humanity in the least possible time and with the least possible exertion.
Another proof of Berkeley's positivist spirit appears in his keen and constant criticism of words. Words, he said, were in reality responsible for the confusions and the follies of earlier philosophers.[4]
Berkeley believed also in the experimental method, and was one of the first, perhaps, to attempt personal experiments in psychology. One of these experiments nearly cost him his life. In his youth he went to witness a hanging at Kilkenny, and on his way home he began to wonder what the condemned man's sensations must have been in the last moments of his life. After reaching Dublin, he decided that the only way to obtain any exact information on this point was to make a trial himself. He therefore arranged with a friend of his, a Venetian named Contarini, to attempt an experiment in hanging. It was arranged that at a given signal Contarini should let him down and release him from the noose. But as soon as he felt the knot about his throat he lost consciousness, so that he could not give the signal they had agreed upon. Contarini waited, astonished at the young philosopher's power of resistance; but he finally got frightened, and let poor Berkeley down. If he had waited a few minutes more, the world would have had to wait a while for the theory of immaterialism.[5]
Berkeley placed great reliance on the examination of one's own experience, if made directly, and without scholastic prejudice. The way in which he constantly appeals to the experience of the reader, or rather, the way in which he constantly orders the reader to perform certain experiments, constitutes, indeed, one of the most original features of his method. When he has set forth one after another, in that clear and agile style of his, the arguments that seem best adapted to support his thesis or to overthrow that of his adversary, he has recourse finally to the introspective command. "Do you yourself, O reader," he says, "think of this matter seriously, and consider whether it is indeed conceivable or possible." Poor Hylas lends himself again and again to this forced reflection, and after a moment or two confesses humbly to Philonous that he cannot in fact conceive the matter in question. Not all Berkeley's readers, it is to be noted, will be as speedily submissive as Hylas. Nevertheless, this frequent insistence on stopping to consider the real meaning of a term, and on thinking with one's own brain—instead of accepting outworn words and truths on the authority of tradition—is one of the best lessons to be learned from the youthful works of the good Bishop of Cloyne.
IV
Yet in spite of the fact that Berkeley is not in the first instance a philosopher, and in spite of the fact that he approached philosophy with a practical rather than a speculative intention, his name is indissolubly associated with one of the greatest philosophic discoveries of the eighteenth century: the definitive reduction of matter to spirit. The Cartesian dualism of matter and spirit had already been transformed by Malebranche into a sort of spiritual monism, in which matter little by little faded away; and Locke had already reduced secondary qualities to sensations, and the concepts of cause and substance to mere relationships between ideas. But it was Berkeley who carried the implicit spirituality of Descartes to its logical conclusion and extended the arguments of Locke to primary qualities. The elements of his immaterialism, then, were ready for his hand, but to Berkeley himself belongs the credit of having extended and developed the theories of his fathers in philosophy, the credit of setting forth as a dominant idea, clear, central, and in full light, the great principle that the world consists of naught save spirit and spiritual activity.
Even here, to be sure, one may discern Berkeley's theological preoccupations. Matter is an ancient enemy. Philosophers have sought in many ways to discredit it, to reduce it to dust, to make it an obedient slave of the spirit, but it has remained an insistent annoyance in all theistic philosophy. If matter exists independently of spirit, if it is governed by its own laws and is capable even of influencing the soul, then the position of God becomes embarrassing. It may of course be said that God created matter, and that matter must obey the laws established by God; but the rôle and the dignity of God are much diminished nevertheless. We can conceive of God only as spirit; and if the world is composed for the most part of matter, which is the opposite of spirit, we may readily be led to conclude that matter is indeed the only reality, and that thought itself is merely a manifestation of the force contained in matter. Tendencies such as this were appearing among the free-thinkers of Berkeley's time, and Berkeley took delight in his discovery precisely because it eliminated that blind, deaf mass of matter which threatened to exile the Supreme Spirit from the universe.
Berkeley's immaterialism, then, sprang from a theological motive and was utilized for a theological purpose: but his great principle was none the less true in itself, and its truth has now been accepted by the better part of the thinking world. I shall not reassume the several arguments which Berkeley invents, expounds and repeats in the Principles and in the Dialogues. Anyone can find them in a good history of philosophy, or better still, in Berkeley's own books, which are excellent reading and by no means difficult. And those who desire really to feel the discovery of Berkeley in all its ecstatic completeness, should read by preference the obscure and hurried notes of the Commonplace Book, in which, amid ingenuous remarks and ill-expressed revelations of the pride of discovery, one can witness the unfolding, or rather the explosion, of the theory of immaterialism. It is not a treatise fairly adorned and skillfully arranged, like a French garden; it is one of the few documents that reveal philosophic thought in action—uncertain at times, often animated, and always beautiful, like every young and growing thing.
For I believe that it is not enough, even in the field of philosophy, to know a theory. One must live it and feel it with all one's soul, must fill one's thought with it, must make it, for the time being, the content, the coloring and the significance of one's whole life. Berkeley's principle lends itself excellently well to this integral possession of truth. When a man truly discovers the great principle—and that may be long after he has known it at second hand—he is seized by a sort of idealistic intoxication which transforms the whole world for him. Think for a moment, think intensely of the real implications of these words: "The whole world is composed of spirit." All that had seemed solid and foreign becomes fluid, becomes immediately personal; the contrast between the ego and the world is diminished; the immense and formidable mass of matter is transmuted into a moving picture within the mind; the ego is no longer a drop in the sea or a leaf in the forest, but a marvelous mirror, able to create for itself the images that appear in it. You are master of the world; you hold within yourself the whole range of future possibility.
From this idealistic exaltation one may pass easily enough into the absurdity of solipsism—and this I know, for I have gone through that crisis. But the great liberating and suggestive value of Berkeley's principle remains: we are forced to recognize that the world cannot be formed of a substance different from that of our own thought. How, indeed, can we say that we know the world if we admit the possibility of knowing something foreign to thought, something which is not thought? From this principle, through Hume, the great reversal of Kant and all German idealism down to Hegel are derived; human thought henceforth, despite all the possible stupidities of science, cannot go back beyond this point.
Berkeley himself, it is true, did not maintain his principle in absolute purity to the end. In the Siris, the work of his old age, though he remains a spiritualist, Plato has led him toward the more naturalistic idealism of the Greeks. His ideas are no longer those of the Principles, they are those of Plato; and between the Supreme Spirit and the spirits of men there intervenes the universal fire or ether, which displays the chemical and biological phenomena of the universe, and can scarcely be reduced to spirit, though conceived as a divine emanation.
But men will forget the erudite neo-Platonism of Berkeley's old age, and will remember the immaterialism of his youth. For that theory, though expressed in empiric language by a positive mind, has been, and will forever be, the implicit premise of all metaphysics.
V
The contemporaries of Berkeley, however, were not quick to understand the greatness of his discovery. He found a few followers in England, and a few more in America, but his works were read rather from curiosity than for serious purposes. His famous contemporary, Clarke, confessed that he could not answer the pressing arguments of Philonous, but declared at the same time that he refused absolutely to follow Philonous in his conclusions. The facts are that Berkeley was regarded chiefly as a pleasant maker of paradoxes and a zealous gentleman, and that he won fame late in life, and then only as the discoverer of the virtues of tar-water.
As preacher and apologist of Christianity he was well received; but even the Alciphron, his summa, brought no replies from the disciples of the unbelievers whom he had attacked—Collins and Mandeville—though it did bring answers from the mathematicians, offended, it would seem, by the philosopher's ironical attack on the new calculus of variations.
But the religious campaign of Berkeley met a real need in the English life of his time. England is to all appearances the most conservative country in the world, but it has always had its revolutions long before other countries. England first went through the political revolution for the establishment of representative government, the theoretical revolution against scholasticism, and the industrial revolution against landed property; and in the eighteenth century it went through the anti-religious revolution against Christianity. England had had its Aufklärung and its Encyclopedists before Berkeley began his work. But in this, as in the other English revolutions, the natural moderation of the race and its tendency toward balance kept the movement from attaining an excessive development and from wreaking such destruction as to compel its adversaries to oppose it without compromise. So the English tendency toward unbelief did not degenerate, but remained in part within the field of religious thought, thus obliging the apologists of religion to seek new arguments, and to jettison some old ones.
In the apologetics of Berkeley one cannot readily separate the part of morals and the part of religion, and it is not always easy to decide whether he is insisting on morality for religious reasons, or defending belief in God for moral reasons. His position, which has been called "religious utilitarianism," affords a new instance of that practical-theoretical dualism to which I have already referred. Nevertheless, some of his views on the problem of God are to a certain extent independent of his ethical preoccupations. One of his proofs of the existence of a supreme spirit is derived, in fact, from his immaterialism. He could not sink to the absurdity of believing that things exist only as we see them and hear them, and that they appear and disappear according as we are present or absent; nor could he admit, without giving up his entire system, that things exist in themselves, and not as mere objects of thought. When things are not seen by us they must then exist in some other thought: either in the thought of other men, or in the thought of God. To the thought of man belongs only that which is conscious and present. All that which is invisible, all that which is unconscious, even within ourselves, belongs to the activity of God.
Berkeley sought also, therefore, to reveal the nature of God; and in the works of his last period the problem of the significance of the material world is replaced by the problem of the significance of the Supreme Power of whom the material world is merely a manifestation. And Berkeley was obliged, in consequence, to combat not only the atheists of his time, but also the agnostics and the mystics; for they, reviving a thesis once dear to the Pseudo-Dionysius and to Erigena, were proclaiming the impossibility of talking about God, of determining his qualities and attributes, or of forming any idea about him whatsoever—thus clearing the way for the atheists, who declared triumphantly that there was no reason to believe in the existence of a being of whom nothing could be known and nothing could be said. Berkeley, on the contrary, felt the need of a positive God, a God of whom one could speak, a God who should be in particular a regulator of morals. So, while he rejected the anthropomorphic and metaphysical analogy which sees in God merely an enlargement of man, he turned to what he calls the proper analogy, the analogy, that is, which proceeds from the partial perfections of which there is some trace in man to the absolute perfections which must exist in God. Berkeley's God, then, is neither the wonder-working God of the crowd, nor the abstract God of the metaphysicians. He is the God of wisdom and of goodness, an ethical God, precisely suited to the purposes of the guardians of morality. And here begins the interweaving of morality and religion. We seek the good, but the good we seek is an eternal—not a transitory—good, and we know that the end established by a just and good God must in itself be good. Consequently, the best means of attaining eternal felicity is to discover the nature of the divine will as expressed in natural and in moral law, and to obey that will in all respects. We are to believe in God because only thus may we obtain the imperishable good. Religion is useful, therefore it must be true—yet after all the very basis of its utility is its truth.
In the Siris this somewhat narrow religious utilitarianism becomes broader. God is still the wise and good Ruler, and He is still the infinite Spirit who provides finite spirits with their ideas: but, thanks to the influence of Plato, He has become the cosmic principle, the creator of that universal ether which explains the life of the world better than any mechanistic theory. The Master of Morals has become a Demiurge; and beyond him the philosopher, liberated for the moment from the necessities of apologetics, believes that he can perceive the very essence of divinity, the ineffable One of the neo-Platonists.
But though Berkeley rises to great heights in the last pages of the Siris, he is less original there than elsewhere. His importance in the history of English religious thought consists primarily in his reconciliation between the divine will and the human desire for well-being. For Locke, the validity of moral law is derived from the omnipotence of God; for Paley, that validity lies purely in the goodness and usefulness of its practical consequences. Berkeley, on the other hand, creates a God who is primarily ethical, and tends toward a system of morality which is primarily religious. He appeals to utility to induce men to believe in God; he appeals to divinity to compel them to goodness.
This conception may seem to have been dictated primarily by practical exigencies; but those who have followed the latest developments of Christian apologetics will realize that in this respect also Berkeley was a precursor of the moderns. The religious pragmatism of certain Anglo-Saxon thinkers is to be found in germ in the works of the Bishop of Cloyne; and Le Roy's recent and profound attempt to escape from the scholastic demonstrations of the existence of God and to form a new concept of divinity has led precisely to the identification of God with that instinct for moral progress which is immanent in the human soul.
- ↑ When he was in Sicily he collected materials for a natural history of the island, but on the return voyage he lost the manuscript, at the same time, perhaps, when he lost the continuation of his Principles.
- ↑ Ed. by A. C. Fraser in his Life and Letters of George Berkeley, Oxford, 1871, p. 432.
- ↑ P. 455.
- ↑ See especially Commonplace Book, Fraser's Edition, pp. 434, 435, 479; Theory of Vision, § 120; the introduction to the Principles of Human Knowledge; and Alciphron, Dialogue VII, § 2.
- ↑ It would not have had to wait very long, for there appeared in London in 1713, almost at the same time as Berkeley's Dialogues, the curious work of A. Collier entitled: Clavis Universalis, or, A New Inquiry after Truth, Being a Demonstration of the Nonexistence and Impossibility of an External World.