George Berkeley

“ But a greater and better philosopher than they, though equally imaginative, at an earlier period, came personally to our stormiest coast, and thereon planted the first elements of a lofty culture. George Berkeley left rich worldly emoluments on the western extremity of the old world, and voluntarily bore the quintessence of all its dialectical skill to enrich the eastern extremity of the new. ”

“ BERKELEY, GEORGE (1601–1658) , eighth Baron Berkeley (since the writ of 1421) , and thirteenth baron (since the writ of 1295) [see Berkeley, Family of] , son of Sir Thomas Berkeley, by Elizabeth Cary, daughter of George, Lord Hunsdon, was born at Lowlayton on 7 Oct. 1601, and succeeded to the honours of Berkeley, Mowbray, Segrave and Bruce, on 26 Nov. 1613, by the death of his grandfather, Henry. He married, 13 April 1616, Elizabeth, daughter and heir of Sir Michael Stanhope of Sudborn, Suffolk. ”

“ There is a gentleman of this kingdom just gone for England; it is Dr. George Berkeley, dean of Derry, the best preferment among us, being worth eleven hundred pounds a year. He takes the Bath in his way to London; and will, of course, attend your excellency, and be presented, I suppose, by his friend my lord Burlington. And because I believe you will choose out some very idle minutes to read this letter, perhaps you may not be ill entertained with some account of the man, and his errand. ”

“ Thus ended the romantic episode of Rhode Island, with its ideal of Christian civilisation, which so moves the heart and touches the imagination in our retrospect of the eighteenth century. Of all who have ever landed on the American shore, none was ever moved by a purer and more self-sacrificing spirit. America still acknowledges that by Berkeley's visit on this mission it has been invested with the halo of an illustrious name, and associated with religious devotion to a magnificent ideal, even if it was sought to be realised by impracticable means. ”

“ So that to a piety inspired by conventional theology and a psychology that refused to pass, except grudgingly and unintelligently, beyond the sensuous stratum, Berkeley had nothing to add by way of philosophy. An insignificant repetition of the truism that ideas are all “in the mind” constituted his total wisdom. To be was to be perceived. ”

“ He proposed to exchange Cloyne for some Oxford headship or canonry. He then proposed to resign his bishopric absolutely. Such a precedent was not to be set. The king declared that Berkeley might live where he pleased, but that he should die a bishop.
Berkeley resolved to retire. He made arrangements about his revenues, including a distribution of 200l. a year, the rent of his demesne lands, amongst poor householders, and at last sailed for England in August 1752. His son George was already matriculated at Christ Church, and the desire to be near him was doubtless one inducement to the change. ”

“ In order to escape such evil omens and prevent the collapse of his mystical paradoxes, Berkeley keeps in reserve a much more insidious weapon, the sceptical doubt as to the representative character of anything mental, the possible illusiveness of all knowledge. This doubt he invokes in all those turns of thought and phrase in which he suggests that if an idea is in the mind it cannot have its counterpart elsewhere, and that a given cognition exhausts and contains its object. ”

“ With Berkeley the world of external ideas is distinguished from Spirit by its essential passivity. Active power is with him the essence of Mind, distinguishing me from the changing ideas of which I am percipient. We must not attribute free agency to phenomena presented to our senses. ”

“ His "Ideal of a Patriot King" also preserves his literary reputation (1738) . Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) , was an elegant philosopher, a thinker of taste; while George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (born at Kilkenny 1685, died 1753) , was an idealistic [Pg 421] philosopher and man of science ("The Theory of Vision") whose style, in grace and irony, is akin to the manners of Plato and of Pascal. The best and most delightful of his works is the dialogue "Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher," directed against the Sceptics, and deistical writers. ”

“ George Berkeley, 1684-1753: he was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and soon engaged in metaphysical controversy. In 1724 he was made Dean of Derry, and in 1734, Bishop of Cloyne. A man of great philanthropy, he set forth a scheme for the founding of the Bermudas College, to train missionaries for the colonies and to labor among the North American Indians. As a metaphysician, he was an absolute idealist. This is no place to discuss his theory. In the words of Dr. Reid, "He maintains ... that there is no such thing as matter in the universe ”

“ It seemed presumptuous to undertake what might have been entrusted to some one probably more in touch with living thought; and in one's eighty-second year, time and strength are wanting for remote research. But the recollection that I was attracted to philosophy largely by Berkeley, in the morning of life more than sixty years ago, combined with the pleasure derived from association in this way with the great University in which he found an academic home in his old age, moved me in the late evening of life to make the attempt. ”

“ He that would make a real progress in knowledge must dedicate his age as well as his youth, the later growth as well as the first-fruits, at the altar of Truth.” Such was Berkeley, and such were his last words in philosophy. They may suggest the attitude of Bacon when, at a different view-point, he disclaims exhaustive system: “I have made a beginning of the work: the fortune of the human race will give the issue. For the matter in hand is no mere felicity of speculation, but the real business and fortunes of the human race34.” ”

“ I. Early Life (1685-1721) . Towards the end of the reign of Charles the Second a certain William Berkeley, according to credible tradition, occupied a cottage attached to the ancient Castle of Dysert, in that part of the county of Kilkenny which is watered by the Nore. Little is known about this William Berkeley except that he was Irish by birth and English by descent. It is said that his father went over to Ireland soon after the Restoration, in the suite of his reputed kinsman, Lord Berkeley of Stratton, when he was Lord Lieutenant. ”

“ You’re only a corpse. For us, yes. Ready, Nesbitt? Then you creep very softly in by the door here, George, and take up your former position. We will enter by the French windows, talking in gruff voices in a foreign tongue, to match your beard and decorations. We are, as a matter of fact, inhabitants of Jugo-Chzechovina, and converse almost entirely in ‘z’s’ and ‘x’s.’ Let her rip!”
George crept dutifully off, and Guy, pulling his soft hat well down over his eyes, led the way down the passage. Mr. Doyle hovered near his fiancée, who was keeping a superintendent’s eye upon all of them. ”

“ Berkeley can keep a secret as well as any man."
He spoke very politely, but with a keen eye on me to notice whether I should show any confusion or change colour. But I made as though I attached no significance to his words beyond mere urbanity. He told us how he made his passage to the Guinea Coast as a sailor before the mast, and then fell in with George Glen. It seemed prudent to counterfeit a friendly opinion that the cross would be enough for all. But when they discovered the cross was gone from its hiding place, he took the first occasion to give them the slip. ”

“ Berkeley allows to bodies unperceived by me potential, but (for me) not real existence. When I say a body exists thus conditionally, I mean that if, in the light, I open my eyes, I shall see it, and that if I move my hand, I must feel it. 617. i.e. unperceived material substance. 618. Berkeley remarks, in a letter to the American Samuel Johnson, that “those who have contended for a material world have yet acknowledged that natura naturans (to use the language of the Schoolmen) is God ”

“ It agrees with the mass of mankind in holding that the material world is actually presented to our senses, and with the philosophers in holding that this same material world is realised only in and through the percipient experience of living Spirit.
Most of the objections to Berkeley's conception of Matter which have been urged in the last century and a half, by its British, French, and German critics, are discussed by anticipation in these Dialogues. The history of objections is very much a history of misconceptions. ”

“ These two propositions are a summary of Berkeley's conception of the material world. With him, the immediate objects of sense, realise in perception, are independent of the will of the percipient, and are thus external to his proper personality. Berkeley's “material world” of enlightened Common Sense, resulting from two factors, Divine and human, is independent of each finite mind; but not independent of all living Mind. 925. “voces male intellectæ.” Cf. Principles of Human Knowledge, “Introduction,” sect. 6, 23-25, on the abuse of language, especially by abstraction. ”

“ The universe of Berkeley consists of Active Spirits that perceive and produce motion in impotent ideas or phenomena, realised in the percipient experience of persons. All supposed powers in Matter are refunded into Spirit. ”

“ Berkeley seems to hold that in things there is no identity other than perfect similarity—only in persons. And even as to personal identity he is obscure. Cf. Siris, sect. 347, &c. 906. But the question is, whether the very ideas or phenomena that are perceived by me can be also perceived by other persons; and if not, how I can discover that “other persons” exist, or that any finite person except myself is cognizant of the ideal cosmos—if the sort of sameness that Berkeley advocates is all that can be predicated of concrete ideas ”

“ In the Principles and the Dialogues he had argued for the necessary dependence of matter, for its concrete substantial reality, upon living percipient mind. He would now shew its powerlessness as it is presented to us in sense. The material world, chiefly under the category of substance, inspired the Principles. The material world, under the category of cause or power, inspired the De Motu. This Latin Essay sums up the distinctive thought of Berkeley, as it appears in the authorship of his early life. ”

“ What is immediately realised in our percipient experience must be presumed or trusted in as real, if we have any hold of reality, or the moral right to postulate that our universe is fundamentally trustworthy. 104. But he distinguishes, in the Principles and elsewhere, between an idea of sense and a percipient ego. 105. They reappear in Siris. 106. In one of Berkeley's letters to Johnson, a quarter of a century after the Commonplace Book, when he was in America, he observes that “the mechanical philosophers pretend to demonstrate that matter is proportional to gravity. ”

“ Vanessa died in May, 1723. A few days after Berkeley wrote thus to Lord Percival: “Here is something that will surprise your lordship as it doth me. Mrs. Hester Vanhomrigh, a lady to whom I was a perfect stranger, having never in the whole course of my life exchanged a word with her, died on Sunday. Yesterday her Will was opened, by which it appears that I am constituted executor, the advantage whereof is computed by those who understand her affairs to be worth £3000.... My Bermuda scheme is now stronger in my mind than ever ”

“ Dora leapt off that portion of Mr. Doyle on which she was reclining as if she had suddenly discovered that it was not her fiancé at all, but a very large hornet. “George, you ass!” she cried, going so red that it seemed as if she must set fire to her frock.
“George, you goop!” exclaimed Mr. Doyle, no less fiery.
“George, you old idiot!” cackled Guy.
“George, you scream!” shrieked Monica, quite untruthfully.
Alan contented himself with merely guffawing at George.
George sighed. Whatever happened, everybody seemed to blame him. Whatever he did was always wrong. Life was a bleak business. ”

“ In one of his first letters to Lord Percival, as we saw, Berkeley animadverted on a sermon by the Archbishop of Dublin, which seemed to deny that there was goodness, or understanding God, any more than feet or hands. An opinion somewhat similar had been attributed to Bishop Browne, in his answer to Toland, and afterwards in 1728, in his Procedure and Limits of Human Understanding. ”

“ George, Lord (Earl) Berkeley, descended from Robert Fitzharding of the Royal House of Denmark, was 13th Lord Berkeley, succeeded to the title 1658, was privy councillor in the reigns of Charles II. and James II., and was one of those who invited William III. of Orange to England: created Viscount Dursley and Earl Berkeley 1679. Died 1698. 52
255. Duke of Lauderdale, 1672. Obv. Bust r., in armour and cloak. Rev. Minerva seated r., resting her arm on shield, arms of Lauderdale, whose helmet and crest she holds in her left hand. Motto, CONSILIO ET ANIMIS. 1672. Joan Rott. F. Silver. ”

“ In his folly George expanded like a flower in the sun, and looked back with incredulous astonishment to the remote time when he had brooded sorrowfully upon radiators and petrol-tanks in connection with this extraordinarily nice young person.
A very pleasant morning was spent.
George and Monica were not the only two people to spend a pleasant morning. Cynthia did also in her way, and Mr. Doyle and Guy too, were not ill-pleased with it, though their enjoyment was not wholly unmixed. It was one thing to realise the use to them of Alan’s presence; it was another to obtain a monopoly of it. ”