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 ap-
- ↑ 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.
