Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 02.djvu/888

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BEKISLAV.
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BERKELEY.


Russia, Do) It is the centre of the grain-trade Jor the neiKliborhood. Benslav is supposed to have been founded in 1450 by the Turks, by wliom it was called Kizi-Kermen. It was taken in 1G9G by Peter the Great, and its name was later changed to Berislav. Population, in 1897, 12,000.

BERKELEY, berk'Ii or bark'll (AS. Birce, Ger. Birke, Engl, birch + leah, Engl. lea. lei/, district, meadow, field). A small town of Gloucestershire, England, 15 miles southwest of the to^ni of Gloucester, on the Avon a mile and a half east of its junction with the estuarv of the Severn (Map: England, D 5). It is situated in a fertile valley, which has long been noted for its dairies and manufactures of cheese. In Berke- ley Castle, which contains an interesting collec- tion of portraits and relics, Edward II. murdered in 1.327 by ilaltravers and Gournev. Dr. Edward Jennor, the discoverer of vaccination, Mas a native of Berkelev. Population, in 1901, 0277.

BERKELEY, lierk'li. A city in Alameda County, Cal., 5 miles north of Oakland, the eounty-.seat ; on the California and Nevada and the Southern Pacific railroads (Map: California, B 3). It has a fine location on heights over- looking San Francisco Bay and the Gofden Gate, and is the seat of the University of Cali- fornia (q.v. ), which has several notable build- ings, and occupies 2.50 acres of beautiful ground the reality of the external world. If there is no external world, he argued, the phenomena of sense can be explained only by supposing a deity continually necessitating perception. Common sense has tried to refute Berkeley bv kicking a stone and pointing to the reality of the effect produced; but common sense does not realize that the effect is in that case evidently a sensa- tion and an affection. Berkeley's rejection of abstract matter has been justified by subsequent philosophic thought, although the crudeness of liis ^idealism is quite generally recognized. Espe- of the State .4gricultural and Mechanical Col- lege, of the Berkeley Bible Seminary (Disciples existence of a God to give permanence to the fleeting sensations of human experience. The procedure was a vicious circle. He set out to prove the existence of a God, and then at last assumed that existence in order to make his philosophical view tenable. , d history has avenged itself for this illogicality; for Hume, working in the same philosophical spirit, came to an opposite theological conclusion. In the Introduction to the Principles, Berkeley broached a doctrine that has proved of revolu- tionaiy significance in modern philosophy, viz., that there are no abstract general ideas. " To be sure, this thesis had been maintained by the Nominalists of the Middle Ages (see Nominal- ism), but Berkeley's statement of the position gave it its classical expression. "If any man has the faculty of framing in his mind siieh an idea of a triangle," as had been described bv of Christ), and of the State Institution for the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind. It also contains the Boone University School, Bowen Academy, both non-sectarian: Head Preparatory School for Girls (Protestant Episcopal), and public and several school libraries. Berkeley, named after Bishop Berkeley, was settled in 'l868, and was incorporated as a town in 1878. Population, in IS90. 5101; in 1900, 13,21-1.

BERKELEY, berk'li or bark'li, George (1685-1753). Bishop of C'loyne, a distinguished philosopher. He was bom near Thomastown, county of Kilkenny, Ireland, and was the eld- est son of William ]!erkeley, a cadet of the family of the Earl of Berkeley. As a boy he studied at Kilkenny School, at "which Swift' also received his early education, and in his fifteenth year he followed his great countryman to Trin- ity College, Dublin, where in 1707 he obtained a fellowship. At Trinitv he enjoved the society of Swift, who patronized him, as he did almost everybody, and :vho subsequently had a great deal to do in shaping his fortunes, while his philosophical views were formed upon the basis of Locke's.

Berkeley's career as an author began in 1707 (the j'car in which he obtained his fellowsliip) by the publication of a work written three years before, at the age of 19, entitled Arilhn'ietica ahsqne Algebra aut Euclide Dcmonstrata. This was followed in 1709 by the celebrated Essay Towards a Neic Theory of Vision, in which he propounded the doctrine of the ideal character of visual space. Locke had already championed the view of the subjective character of the sec- ondary qualities (q.v.), but "solidity, extension, figure, motion, or rest, and numl)er," the primary qualities, were for him ideas whose "patterns do really exist in the bodies themselves." Berkeley, in his Essay, left solidity and number unques- tioned, but reduced the re emaining primary qual- ities to subjectivity, making the distance of any object mean the succession of muscular feelings that must be experienced before a tactual sensa- tion of that object can be obtained. Space as the form of outness is thus explained as nothing but a way of looking at time. In his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), Berkeley went much further with his idealism. He maintained that matter cannot be conceived to exist, the only possible substance being mind. The material world is nothing but a complex of sensations, which come and go with an 'order and coherence' that constitutes the laws of nature. This doctrine is epitomized in the sentence 'esf:e est percipi,' i.e. 'being is to be perceived or known.' Berkeley's object was to undermine the materialism of the ao-e bv denvine- Locke, a triangle "neither oblique nor rectangii lar, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once, it is in vain to pretend to dispute him out of it." Bilt "I cannot by any eff'ort of thought conceive the ab- stract idea above described." And since Berke- ley's day more and more thinkers have confessed to a similar inal)ility. See Ai!ste.ction.

In 1713 Berkeley went to reside in London, where in the same year he published a defense of his ideal system. Three Dialogues Betneen Eylas and Philonoiis, which is remarkable, as indeed all his writings are, for the clearness and beauty of the style. Shortly after this he was appointed chaplain and secretary of legation under Lord Peterborough, whom he accompanied to Italy; but his first stay there was short. In 1716 he went abroad again, to stay four years. Upon his return he wrote, in 1721, an Essay Toicard Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain,

oially unfortunate, from the philosophical point "f view, was his dogmatism in assuming the