thus, as he would undoubtedly have done had he been alive, for such a reply is in harmony with the whole spirit of his philosophy, we do not, indeed, see what Hume, with all his subtle dialect, could have made of him. But the champion of common sense, he alone who could have foiled the prince of sceptics at his own weapons, was dead,[1] and the cause had fallen into the hands of Dr Reid, a far easier customer, who, when he could not avoid both horns of the dilemma, preferred to encounter the second, as apparently the less mischievous of the two.
The first great point, then, on which Berkeley differed from the ordinary philosophical doctrine, and sided with the vulgar, is that he contended, with the whole force of his intellect, for the inviolable identity of objects and the appearances of objects. The external world in itself, and the external world in relation to us, was a philosophic distinction which he refused to recognise. In his creed, the substantive and the phenomenal were one. And, though he has
- ↑ Was dead. This is not precisely true, for Hume's 'Treatise of Human Nature,' from which the above extract is taken, was published in 1739, and Berkeley did not die until 1753. But we explain it by saying that Hume's work fell dead-born from the press, and did not attract any degree of attention until long after its publication; and when at length, after a lapse of many years, the proper time for answering it arrived, on account of the general notoriety which it had suddenly obtained, that then Berkeley was no more.
from the 'Edinburgh Review,' have been translated into French (Paris, 1840) by M. Peisse, a very competent translator, who has prefixed to the work an introduction of his own, not unworthy of the profound disquisitions that follow.
