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Gilt Of Mrs. William Dinsmore Brlggs STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES |
1 |
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1 1 |
■ |
LIFE AND LETTERS
OF
GEORGE BERKELEY, D.D.
FORMERLY BISHOP OF CLOYNE.
VOL. IV.
MACMILLAN AND CO.
pUBLiaaxRS TO tbs vKivERsirr of 0>(orft
THE WORKS
07
GEORGE BERKELEY, D.D.
FOXIIEIILT BUHOr OP djOYHBs
IKCLUmNG MAinr OW HIS WRITINGS HITHERTO UNPUmSflED.
Wiik Prefaces^ Amnoiaiiims, His Life and LMers^ and an Aceauni of his Pkitoso^^
BT
ALEXANDER CAMPBELL ERASER, M.A.
PK0PBS90R OP LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS IN THB UNIVBHSITY OP BDINBUKCU.
IN FOUR VOLUMES,
Vol. IV.
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
MJ)CCCLXXI c» q j
\^All righti reserved']
Ill
764624
#rwi^-^-
LIFE AND LETTE
OF '
GEORGE BERKELEY, ,
AND AN ACCOUNT OF HIS PHILOSOPHY.
WITH MAffY
WRITINGS OF BISHOP BERKELEY HITHERTO UNPl METAPHYSICAL, DESCRIPTIVE, THEOLOGIC
ALEXANDER CAMPBELL ERASER, M.A.
^ %
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
M.DCCC.LXXI
[Alt rigb,, «.<mrfl
PRE FACE.
IT is curious that a fife so good and beaidifid m its devotion to a few great des^ns, so powerful in modem tbouj^t, and every way so unoommon. as Bidiop Beriuk/s should have been allawed by his oootcat^ pontries to pass away without any tolefafale tnterpeta^ ticn or even record cf it. The present vohnne does not pretend to meet the want wfaidi die I^pse of move than a hundred years, and n^;lected opportunities have made it difficult if not impos^Ue to sappfy.
The earliest biographical account oi BcAdey known to me is the slight and inaccurate dcetdi iriiidi appeared in the British Plutarch in 1762, and in die Ammal - Register in the following year. I have not discovered by whom it was written.
The only authentic Life we have is that by Bishop Stock, who was an intimate friend of the family'. It appeared in 1776, twenty-three yqars after Berkeley's death. It was re-published, with some additional notes, in 1780, in the second volume of the Biographia Britannica. A second edition of Stock's memoir, with appended extracts of some letters from Berkeley to Thomas Prior and to Dean Gervais, appeared in 1 784,
' Joseph Stock, D.D., was bom ihence to the see of Waterford in
m Dublin, in December 1741. He 1810. In 1798 the French landed
became a Fellow of Trinity College at KiUala and took possession of the
iboQt 1 765, and was made rector of bishop's palace and person — events
Conwall in 1779, vicar of Lusk in of which he afterwards published
i78o,andrectorofDelgan}'ini788. a narrative. Bishop Stodt died at
He was a prebendary of Lismore in Waterford in 1813. Some of his
1793- In 1798 he was made bishop writings are mentioned in Cotton's
oTKillala, and was transferred Irom Fatli, vol. I. p. 134.
viii
PREFACE.
and was also prefixed to the first collected edition of Berkeley's Works, published in that year. In thafc^ edition the reader is informed that Stock's biographical facts were for the most part communicated by Dr. Robert Berkeley, rector of Midleton, near Cloyne, brother to the Bishop, and then living. This brief memoir of a few pages is prefixed to all the collected editions of Ber- keley. One regrets that when Dr. Stock had so good an opportunity for collecting and authenticating materials he should have produced so faint an outline of Berkeley's history.
A few facts in supplement of Stock, authenticated by the Bishop's widow and by his son George, are contained in 'Addenda and Corrigenda' in the third volume of the Bio- graphia BHtannica, which appeared in 1 784; and we have a few anecdotes, in the curious Preface, by Bishop Berke- ley's daughter-in-law, to the Poems of his grandson George Monck Berkeley, published in 1 797^ Mr. Monck Berkeley himself, in his interesting volume of Literary Relics^, pub-
* Poems by the late George Monck Berkeley, Esq., LLB.^F.S.SA, With a Preface fy the Editor, consisting of some A mc dotes of Mr. Monck Berkeley, and several of his friends. London, printed by J. Nichols, 1797. The editor was Monck Berkeley's mother, Mrs. Eliza Berkeley, widow of Bishop Berke- ley's last surviving son, Dr. George Berkeley, Prebendary of Canter- bury. She was accomplished and pious, not without acuteness and wit, but eccentric to the verge of insanity. Her extraordinary Preface occupies 630 pages of the handsome quarto, and there are besides some pages of Postscript. The Poems themselves occupy 170 pages. The book is very rare. It is hardly to be found in any of our public libraries. In fact it
was suppressed, and a fire at Mr. Nichols' warehouse, I believe, after- wards destroyed the copies. For an account of this singular work, and of the >vriter, see Gent. Mag. vols. LXVII. pp. 403, 455, and LXIX. p. 565 ; also Nichols' Liter- ary Anecdotes, vol. IX. pp. 733 — 35. ' Literary Relics, by George Monck Berkeley, Esq., LL.B. in the University of Dublin, a mem- ber of St Mary Magdalen Hall, Oxford, and of the Inner Temple, London. The preface is dated, * Dublin, January 27, 1789.' Re- ferring to the numerous letters from Berkeley to Prior which the book contains, the writer says : — * Those of Bishop Berkeley I received from my friend Mr. Archdall, the learned author of the Monasticon Hiber- nicum, dec. From these letters, some
PREFACE. ix
bed in 1789, has given fully many of Berkeley's letters Thomas Prior, extracts from some of which were ►pended, as already mentioned, to the later editions of lock's memoir.
The memoirs of Berkeley in Chalmers and elsewhere, well as the biographical accounts of him in the dif- srent histories of Philosophy, Continental and British, founded on Stock, and very much copied from him. *rofessor Archer Butler produced, in tlie Dublin Uni- 'sify Magazine, in 1837, an eloquent philosophical in- apretation of Berkeley's life and writings, but made Hmost no addition to the previous knowledge of the icts of his personal history. Two years ago, an excellent ^ipreciative essay on Berkeley, as 'the philosopher' of ifce age he lived in, was given by Mrs. Oliphant, in ker Historical Sketches of the Reign of George II.
When I undertook to prepare the edition of the works of Berkeley which accompanies this volume, tod which is published under the auspices of the Uni- fcrsity of Oxford, it seemed almost too late to attempt to tmcdy the loss the world has suffered by biographical egtcct when the materials were fresh, and before death taken away his friends and associates. It was, ac- Ordingly. at first thought that any account of the Uthor that might be associated with the Works
ist be ver)' much a re-statement of what Stock had ffitten — perhaps his short memoir with a few anno- uions. Further consideration and investigation, how- Str, led to the formation of this volume, which is the
iperfect result of an attempt, thus far followed out. to
I, together wilh a tnosl im- in quarto.' (p. x.) Mr. Monck
Feet lire of the wriCcT. were pub- Berkeley died soon after the pub-
rf by Dr. Stock in Dubliu, and licalion of ihe LiUiary Rtlus. Sled to the Works of the Bishop
X PREFACE.
recover all that immediately concerns Berkeley which the stream of time has not carried irrecoverably away.
The Works and Letters of Berkeley previously published, together with Stock's meagre outline of facts, formed my starting-point.
The Letters, as it seemed, might be read with more interest if they were collected, arranged in chronological order, and blended with the Life, with an annotation now and then. The largest, and probably the most interest- ing, portion of Berkeley's correspondence has I fear gone beyond recovery. His letters to Thomas Prior form the bulk of what remains. For them I have fol- lowed Monck Berkeley's edition, in his Literary Relict, amending the arrangement, however, and supplementing what is given there by a few additional letters to Prior drawn from other sources. For the letters to Dean Gervais I have had no resource beyond the appendix to Stock. The previously published letters to Pope I have collected in their order, but have failed to find any not hitherto published, or to discover anywhere any addressed to Swift, Steele, Addison, Clarke, Butler, or others among the brilliant society in which Berkeley moved in the early part of his life. Of his long cor- respondence with Samuel Johnson, his American disciple, I have recovered several letters — four published in the Appendix to Chandler's Life of yohnson, and for the rest I am indebted to Mr. Oilman, the eminent librarian of Yale College. A few additional letters, and rough drafts of letters to various persons have been gathered in other quarters. It is possible that more may still be found.
By far the most important original material connected with Berkeley, not hitherto given to the world, which has been disclosed since his death, has been made availably
PREFACE. 3d
ht this volume, througfa the Idndtiess of Archdeacon Jiose, iriio possesses the <»ily known collection of Ber* kd^s manusdripts, including some of his correspon-
f The history of these Papers is interesting. After Bishop fierkele/s dteath they passed into the hands of his son^ I^.Oeorge Berkeley, vfho died in 1795. In 1797, Dr. Bcrkde/s widow writes thus, in her edition of her son's Poems : — ^'The Editor has several stone weight of papers ^ Id inqiect of Bishop Berkele/s — his Journal when in Italy, 9kl && ; of Mr. Qierry's ; of Archlushop Sedcer^s ; Miss Tadbot's; Mr. Monde Berkeley's ^' After the death of 4m dai^to'-in-kw, and the &mily cUssolution> these Badtdey Papers were lost sight of for a while. They ime thus referred to in 1812 by Southey^: — ' Bisk(^ Merieley. A journal of his travek in Italy, and many ^dier of his papers, remain unpublished. His grand- son, George Monck Berkeley, had he lived, would have given them to the public. I know not what is become of them since the family has been extinct, but of such a man not a relick should be lost.'
The family of Bishop Berkeley was extinct in the early part of this century. The Berkeley Papers referred to by Mrs. Berkeley and by Southey then came into the possession of the Grimston family. One member of that ancient and honourable family, Henry Grimston, Esq., of Grimston Hall in Yorkshire, often mentioned in the volume of Monck Berkeley's Poems, is there spoken of as Monck's * chosen, beloved, and bosom friend,' * his unwearied friend to his latest hour.' Through the Grimston family they became the property of the late Reverend Hugh James Rose, the learned and eminent Principal of King's College, London. After his death,
* Preface to Monck Berkel^^ ' See Southe/s Omniana, vol. I.
p- dczxviiL p. 251,
xii PREFACE.
in 1838, they belonged to his widow®, who eventually gave them to his brother, the Venerable Henry John Rose, now Archdeacon of Bedford, who has, without reserve, placed them at the disposal of the Clarendon Press for publication in this volume. Those of them which seemed suitable for publication occupy here more than two hundred and fifty pages.
The Berkeley Papers consist of the following manu- scripts : —
I. Two small quarto volumes.
One of these volumes seems to have formed a Common- ^ place Book for queries and other occasional thoughts in ] Metaphysics, written when Berkeley was a student at : Trinity College, Dublin, apparently between his nine- teenth and twenty-third year, and before he had published ' anything in philosophy. This curious manuscript volume contains also a description of the Cave of Dunmore, in the County of Kilkenny, in Berkeley's handwriting. I have appended the Commonplace Book to the Life a$ii Letters, and also the account of the Dunmore Cave. The reader must remember that the former consists of j the stray speculations of one hardly beyond the years: of boyhood, set down, in solitary study, as private memoranda for further consideration, and without a thought that they were ever to meet the public eye.
The companion quarto is of much less interest It contains what seems to be a rough draft of parts of the Discourse on Passive Obedience ; fragments of what was perhaps meant for a sermon on the text * Let your zeal be according to knowledge;' a draft of the Prin- ciples 0/ Human Knowledge^ from Sect 85 to Sect 145,
• The Berkeley Papers, when in the Colonial Church, which contains
her possession, were seen by the an interesting chapter (xxviii) on
Rev. J. S. M. Anderson, and they Berkeley's efforts on behalf of the
are referred to in his History of iDolonies.
u-ly =
I print ;
PRKFACE.
I few stray thoughts similar to tho;
Commonplace Book ; some jottings ot what may be agraents of letters, in Latin and English, written ap- irently at Trinity College. Very little here seemed ited for publication.
2. Four small volumes. These seem to have been erkeley's travelling companions in Italy. They contain minute account of what he saw there from day to day, some of the months of i 7 1 7, and during a short period J 718. They are perhaps fragments of private journals
Cpt during his stay on the Continent In 1715 — 20, some [which, it is said, were lost at sea. Nearly all that the ur volumes contain is now offered to the world.
3. Some Sermons preached by Berkeley in the Chapel Trinity College, Dublin, and in Leghorn ; Skeletons of Smons preached in Rhode Island ; the primary Epi- opal Charge at Cloyne ; and a Confirmation Address,
prm another portion of the Berkeley Papers. All of liese which seemed in a state to admit of being published given in this volume.
4. The Berkeley Papers likewise include a number of Stters addressed to Bishop Berkeley, chiefly by Arch- ■hop Seeker, when he was Bishop of Bristol, and after-
tJs of Oxford ; by Benson. Bishop of Gloucester ; and Gibson, Bishop of London. We have also a long
tter from Berkeley to Sir John James, on points in
xAogy. one or two letters of his to Thomas Prior.
well as some rough drafts of letters to other corre- pondents, and of portions of one or two of his published prks. All of these which seemed proper for publica-
n have been incorporated with his Li/c and Letters^
chronological order.
Almost all in the Berkeley Papers that is immediately
hnected with Bishop Berkeley is summed up under foregoing heads. The remaining portion of the
xiv PREFACE.
manuscripts consists of numerous letters, addressed mosdy to his son George, or to his son's wife, by the Bishop's widow, or by Miss Talbot, Bishop Home, Bishop Gleig, and others. Some of these are very interesting, but only remotely connected with the subject of this volume
It is singular that so large an amount of hitherto unpublished manuscript of the great Bishop Berkeley should remain to be given to the world nearly a hundred and twenty years after his death. It may be truly said that this large collection contains nothing that is not fitted to add to our reverence for him : not a line has been found that is at variance with the overflowing purity and charity which marked his life ^.
To Archdeacon Rose the world is indebted not only for these writings, but also for his kind co-operation with me in the superintendence of the Italian Journal and the Sermons while they were in the press, as well as for his prefatory notes to those two portions of the Papers.
While these Papers have supplied the largest part of the new matter illustrative of Berkeley's life of which I have been able to avail myself in this volume, many other interesting contributions have been graduall) gathered from various quarters.
In the course of a visit to Ireland for the purpose, and of an extensive correspondence with various persons there, previously and since, I have collected curious and valuable particulars of Berkeley's family, birthplace, school and college life in Ireland, his short residence there on his return from Italy, and his eighteen years afterwards at Cloyne. It is singular, however, that while
^ Some of the Papers are much immersed in the sea, that greai dilapidated, and in some places so care and a strong light are neces- obliterated, as if the MS. had been sary in reading them.
PREFACE. x^
fame as a philosopher has spread over the worlds kxal
about him have mostly perished in the country
his iHrdi, and what remains camiot tnom be traced
amdi laboar. Where I am indebted to so many
help, in collecting and interpreting the few scattered
it is difficult to name any. Yet I cannot withhold
ej^Mressoon of my gratitude to the Rev. Dr. Reeves,
learning in all that concerns Ireland is widely
; the Rev. James Graves, the eminent Irish
logist; Richard Caulfield, LL.D., (rf* Cork: also
die Reverend the Provost and the Fellows of Trinity
Dublin. I am much indebted to the Rev.
Br. Didcson, the librarian of Trinity College. And
faave to thank the clergy of Ireland, Protestant and
Catholic, to whom I have been led tQ apply^
their uniform courtesy and valued help.
I r^^ret that notwithstanding the assistance so readily
given by Sir Bernard Burke, I have not been able to
dear up the difficulties connected with Berkeley's
pedigree.
The kindness of many distinguished persons in Ame- rica has enabled me to throw some fresh light on the romantic and charming episode of Berkeley's recluse life in Rhode Island, when he went to try to realize the noblest enterprise in Christian missions of last century, or of almost any century since the Apostolic age. Here too it is difficult to select among so many, but I wish to express in some degree what I owe to the kind efforts of Dr. Porter, the distinguished philosopher of Yale College, and Mr. Gilman, its librarian ; also to Mr. Rowland Hazard, of Peacedale, in Rhode Island, who now culti- vates philosophy in the vales where Berkeley studied ; the Rev. Dr. Park of Andover, and the Rev. W. E. Park of Lawrence, Massachusetts ; the Hon. J. R. Bartlett, Secretary of State, Rhode Island; the Rev. Dr. Beardsley,
xvi PREFACE.
of the Episcopal Church at Newhaven ; Dr. King of Newport; Mr. Langdon Sibley of Harvard College ; and Mr. Samuel Tyler of the Maryland Bar.
To the Abb6 Rabbe, the Abb^ Blampignon, and the Baroness Blaze de Bury, I am indebted for assistance in my ineffectual endeavours to throw satisfactory light upon Berkeley in France, and in his personal relations to Malebranche.
The fruit of these efforts in Ireland, America, and France is scanty. But one felt that the very attempt to penetrate the mystery in which so much of Berkeley's pure and beautiful life has been left enveloped, and to rescue from oblivion the fast diminishing remains which have survived the ravages of time, was so far its own reward. Perhaps the publication of this volume may draw out some more facts from their hiding-places. To me it has been thus far a pleasant excursion into some of the dimly discernible society of that olden time — in Ireland, England, France, Italy, and America — in the days of William, and Anne, and the first two Georges.
In the last chapter of the ' Life and Letters,' I have tried to give the outcome of Berkeley's intellectual life as a whole, touching upon some of its implied relations to other phases of our national philosophy in the eighteenth century, and to later philosophy looked at from Berkeley's point of view.
A. C ERASER.
College of Edinburgh, February y 1871.
CONTENTS.
LIFE AND LETTERS OF BERKELEY.
CHAPTER I. he Btaktkf Pimflj m Kflkemqr:— itSSfi-ijoo i
CHAPTER n. )MtT College Dnl^: A N«w PhUosophicd Prindple; —
1700-1713 15
CHAPTER in. ^hnd, France, and Italy: — 1713-ijai 54
CHAPTER IV. Bick to Ireland : The American Enthusiasm : In London
again, and letters from England: — 1711-1728 ... 9a
CHAPTER V. .\ Recluse in Rhode Island: — 1728-1731 154
CHAPTER VI. B«k to London: — 1731-173* 191
CHAPTER Vl[. First years in the Irish Diocese: — 1734-1738 218
CHAPTER VIII. fliilanihropy. Theology, and Philosophy at Cloyne : Tar-water : —
'738-1752 261
VOL. IV. b
xviii CONTENTS.
CHAPTER IX.
PAM
Oxford : The End : The Family Dissolution : — 1752-1753 . . 336
CHAPTER X. The Philosophy of Berkeley.
A. Berkeley's New Question, and the Essence of his Answers
to it 36a
B. Berkeleian Immediate Perception of Extended Sensible
Reality 383
C. Berkeleian Mediate Perception, or Presxmiptive Inference
of the Existence of Sensible Things and their Rela- tions— illustrated in the New Theory of Vision . . 392
D. Berkeleian Intellectual Knowledge of Providential or
Divine Reality and Universal Conceptions .... 402
HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS OF
BISHOP BERKELEY.
Commonplace Book of Occasional Metaphysical Thoughts . 419
Description of the Cave of Dunmore 503
Journal of a Tour in Italy in 17 17, 17 18 512
Sermons preached in Trinity College, Dublin, and at Leghorn . . 598
Skeletons of Sermons preached in Rhode Island 629
Primary Visitation Charge at Cloyne 650
Confirmation Charge at Cloyne 657
LIFE AND LETTERS.
LIFE AND LETTERS
I
|GEORGE BERKELEY, D.JD.
BISHOP OF CXOTNS.
ERRATA AND ADDENDA.
Pace 4, Hue ia,Jbr'ifeaceT' nad'Sptaatt,'
Page 6a, L 3, yir ' Smahridge ' mi^ ' Snulridge.'
nge to7, in lirt cf snbacriptions for Bermuda, Jbr 'Hntchinaoa* nod ' Hotdieaon ;' also on p. ijB, L }i, and note }9, L i; p. ij9, L 6. [Archibald Hotcheson was of the Middle Temple, London, and M.P. for Hastings. He published in 1730 and 1731 various treatises relating to the South Sea scheme ; also, previously, tracts relating to the National Debt.]
Page iS9i note 7j 1- 'tfir 'Upside' rtaJ 'Updike,'
Page >0l, note la, i. s,/Dr 'Ubiii Sjlloge nova Efiit.' read ' Uhlii Sjlhgt nova Bpittolarum •varii argummti.' [This is a rare work, in 4 vols. 8vo., printed at Nuremberg in 1760-64, The writer speaks slightiagly of Berkeler's Nevi Tbeotj of riiion, as well as of Mcipbren, both of which had been recommended to him.]
Page J J J, note 3, 1. s, /or 'Tyndal' rM^'Tindal."
*e nth of March, 1684, that he received the first part of hi, «du<aUon at Kilkenny School, under Dr. Hinton, and that he »tered Tr.n,ty College, Dublin, at the age of fifteen, exhausts tne loionnation thus given.
The trtith Is that almost no light now fills upon the femily life in which Berkeleys first revealed itself. What his parents were ftom whom descended, why they were living in the County of Kilkenny at his birth, what the eiart spot of his birth was and ^l-iv. ,
LIFE AND LETTERS
OF
GEORGE BERKELEY, D.D.
BISHOP OF CLOYNE.
. CHAPTER I.
THE BERKELEY FAMILY IN KILKENNY.
1685 — 170a
The early years and the ancestry of George Berkeley are curiously shrouded in mystery. He comes forth the most subtle and accomplished philosopher of his time, almost from darkness.
The dry statements of the biographers may be soon summed up. They tell us that his father, William Berkeley, of Thomas- town in the County of Kilkenny, was the son of an English royalist (somehow connected with the noble family of Berkeley), who was rewarded for his loyalty to Charles I by a collector- ship at Belfast in the reign of Charles II. Further, that the philosopher was bom at Kilcrin, or Killerin, near Thomastown, on the 1 2th of March, 1684, that he received the first part of his education at Kilkenny School, under Dr. Hinton, and that he entered Trinity College, Dublin, at the age of fifteen, exhausts the information thus given.
The truth is that almost no light now falls upon the family life in which Berkeley's first revealed itself. What his parents were, from whom descended, why they were living in the County of Kilkenny at his birth^ what the exact spot of his birth was, and
VpL. IV. B
Life and Letters of Berkeley.
[Cttj
what thoughts and aspirations the boy experienced in his eazj^j years, have all been left in a darkness which the lapse of makes it now difficult in any degree to remove.
The earliest authentic documents about Berkeley which I been able to find belong to the places in which he was edu The first is in the curious old Register of the Free School or Col of Kilkenny^. On a page in that part of this Rosier contains ' the names of such as were admitted into his Grace Duke of Ormonde's School in Kilkenny, since the warre ended Ireland, in the year 1691,' the following entry may be seen : —
* George Berkley', gent, aged ii years, entered the Second Class, July 17, l6j)6.'
And in another part of the Book, in a list of * names of such as left his Grace the Duke of Ormonde's School at Kilkenny since October the first, an. dom. 1684,' we read: —
* Mr. George Berkley left the First Class, January 1 700, and was entered the Uiiivcnl(^|
of Dublin.'
The Register, as then kept, unfortunately does not give names and residences of the parents, except in a few cases persons of rank. The boy is usually designated *gent.' or * man,' according to his father's social position.
The Register of Trinity Collegej Dublin, contains the fbllowiflt] entry : —
|
Anntu |
PttpUlus |
|
«8« |
Geo. Berkley |
|
Martii,die a I. |
Pens. |
|
Parens |
A etas |
Uhi Natus |
Ubi Educatus |
TWor |
|
Filius Gulieli |
annum |
Natus |
Ibi Educatus |
D^Jo. |
|
Berkley |
agens |
Kilkenniae. |
sub D'* |
Han |
|
gen. |
H- |
Hinton. |
V.Pracp. |
Parish registry of births was hardly known in Ireland before titf- year 1800. Any original record (if any) of Berkeley's birth or! baptism has been lost. But, as he was only eleven years old whet he entered school at Kilkenny, in July 1696, and only fifteen what he matriculated at Trinity College, on the 21st of Mardi 1700^ we may infer that j68| was the year of his birth. On the au- thority of the biographers I assume that the day was the lath of March.
According to modern style, therefore, Berkeley was bom on
* The Rev. Dr. Martin, the present Head Master, kindly allowed me to examine this Register at Kilkenny, in May 1870.
' Here, as well as in the Trinity College Register, the name is spelt * Berkley,' as it
is in several other early documents. Indeed we occasionally find * Berkly ' and * Barldy' as well. Berkeley's own signature, in i7>I* and, so far as can be ascertained, prevknoif and sincp, was uniformly * Berkeley.*
G
The BerkeUy Famify in KiUefm^.
March 1685*. In tiie month p-eceding his birth, lad. passed tfaraagh his last hours in Whitehall, and \ entering on his short and disastrous reign. Before was ended, James was at the height of his power, and the were approaching wiudi ushered in tiie reign of i Maiy in iralaiid.
lliespol in the County of Kilkenny at which Berkeley was bom called by some ^Kikrin, near Thomastown;' ^Killerin,^ near same place, by others. This seons to be a mistake^ and it is difficult to ex{dain how originated. In the first place^ Kikrln ox Killerin is not known 'near Tbomastown/ In the second piacc^ tiie uniform and vivid Itkm of all that country points to Dysert Castle or Tower, on bank of tibe Ncm, about two miles below Thomastown^ and miles below Ihe City of Kilkenny, as the {dace of Berkdey^ In tiie third place, tins tradition is confirmed by various in the Corpontion Records of the andent town of Inis* I, near Dysert, whidi show tiiat Dysert was inhabited by Berkeleys, at any rate in the early part of last century. These Records prove that ^Randolph Berkely de Dysert, gent./ was admitted as a freeman on the 15th of April, 1728. The name ^ Ralph Berkeley' also appears in that year, and in 1756. There are several reasons for supposing that 'Randolph' and 'Ralph* refer to the same person, which is important, for Berkeley, as we shall see, had a brother named Ralph. It is a pity that the Records do not date forther back than 171 7 : if earlier ones were ever kept they have been lost 4. In the fourth place, the tradi- tion is countenanced by the high local authority of the late Mr. Tighe. In his Statistical Observations relative to the County of Ejlkeuny (p. 638), published in 1802, he says that 'the Castle of Dysett is remarkable for having been the birth-place of Bishop
' In the sequel h may be aisamed by the reader that the dates are given, so ^r as known, according to the New Style. (In some of my annotations upon the Works, I inadTertently followed the old account of the year of Berkeley's birth.)
* For the ficts of the Inistiogue Records, I am indebted to the kindness of Colonel Tighe of Woodstock and Mr. Connellan of
Coolmore. The family of Deaoe as well as the Berkeleys are prominent in these Records. The signatures of Deanes, and of the Rev. Maurice Berkeley (* Maurice Berkly, Clerk') occur often between 1741 and 1753' Mau- rice Berkeley first appears in 1717* ^^ 2oi!ti December. 1756, * Ralph Berkeley' signs as the first burgess on the list. This is the last appearance of a Berkeley in the book.
B 2
4 Life and Letters of Berkeley. [cH.
Berkeley.' Mr. Tighe died in 1814, at an advanced age, and might have known those who knew Berkeley's father.
A tradition, thus confirmed, may perhaps be accepted as satis- factory evidence that Berkeley was born at Dysert, in the absence of direct documentary proofs
This old monastic ruin is in one of the loveliest r^ons in Ireland. It may well be that Berkeley was not a little indebted i for his deep-seated love of nature and fervid imagination to the , sparkling Nore^ and to a childhood spent among the wooded hilb \ that enfold the valley through which it flows. The position of ' the graceful ruin, on a grassy meadow on the bank of the river, under the wooded hill-side on which a road from Thomastown to Inistiogue now passes, shows at once to the eye that it was' not erected as a stronghold. It was originally a grange which belonged to the rich priory of Kells, and was given, in the sixteenth century, with other possessions of the Abbey, to JameS| the ninth Earl of Ormond. A ruined church adjoins the tower to the east. The tower itself was probably inhabited at one time by the vicar of the monks.
Some comparatively modern remains of what might fbrmoly have been a considerable farm house, attached to the Tower oa . the south, mark the site of the modest abode of the Berkeleys of Dysert. The family inhabiting the house must also have oc- J cupied the Keep, and from the two windows of its upper chamber | they had within their view a charming scene. One can hardly picture a place more suited to nourish the heart of the boy bjf communion with nature, than this now classic part of the fiEur vale through which the Nore descends from the city of Kilkenny and Thomastown, through Inistiogue and amidst the foliage of \ Woodstock, to its junction with the Barrow above New Ro» The river itself is one of the three ^renowned brethren* to whidi Spencer conducts us : —
* The first, the gentle Shure that, making way By iweet Clonmel, adorns rich Waterford ; The next, the stubboroe Newre, whose waten gray. By fair Kilkenny and Rossponte boord; The third, the goodly Barow.*
* How Kilcrin, or Killerin, came to be asso- arctueological friend suggests to me eiy* ciated with the birth-place of Berkeley it is mological affinities between Kilerin and Dj** difficult to say. An ingenious and eminent sert — the last a name common in Ireland. 1
1 Tfu Bcrkiley Family in Kilkenny. 5
The peasantry of Kilkenny have had their quaint stories of the Berkelcys of Dj-scrt. With an inversion of facts not uncommon in Irish traditions, thc>- would tell that in his youth the philosojAer kpt a school in the neighbourhood, and taught his scholars that ftcre was no spirit, but that when the body died the man was KuithiUtcid. He used, they added, to moke the boys leap over the idxiol benches till they were bruised and bled, and then explain jhai after the blood all ran out there was an end of them. Another ', equally absurd, was that Berkeley's own corporeal remains •ere buried within the masonry of the battlements of Dysert*.
Thus the family of William Berkeley may be imagined in the
modest abode attached to Dysert Castle, in the vale of the Nore,
fa March, i6tfj. But who and what was this William Berkeley,
nd why then living there ? Bishop Stock, who professes to
fare got much of the material in his brief biographical outline
ton Elcrkclcy's brother Robert, says, that William's father ' went
to Irel^id, after the Restoration (the family having suffered
pcatly for their loyalty to Charles I], and there obtained the
nUcctoiship of Belfast.' In a note, in Wright's edition, it is added
he went over ' in the suite of his reputed father. Lord Berkeley
if Stratton, who had been appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.'
Lccording to this addition to the story, our Kilkenny branch
the great Berkeley family must have gone to Ireland in 1670;
r it was in April of that year that the first Lord Berkeley of
latton landed to assume the Lord Lieutenancy, an office which
bcltl till April, 1671. As to the Bellast collectorship, it is
Drthy of note that until itfjt Carrickfergus was tlic head-quarters
tiie icvcnue in those parts. Belfast, then an insignificant place,
not tnctttioned at all in the Records till that year. The first
dcaowledgment of Belfast as a revenue town coincides, indeed,
Vith the period of Lord BerketeyofStratton's rule in Ireland. But
tbe name of Berkeley has not been found in the lists of Belfast
itrenue officials at that time. A recent carefiji search in the
.Record Oifice, Dublin', has failed to discover a Berkeley, at or
bhnt 1670, employed as a collector of any branch of the revenue,
■ ' far Xnii and Oonwn q^ov Cmaay. ditioni in Iidand.
^ Uf. Piia tt ElkcoDy. I hare moie < Kindly nude by Simucl FngUKn, LLD.,
■M tno tgco«aHr«J thtM whinuicil ira- Public Record OIIkc. \it\i\ii.
6 Life and Letters of Berkeley. [ch
either in Belfast or in any part of Ulster. And it is rathe difEcult to reconcile with ascertained chronological facts the un supported assertion that the supposed grandfether-collector was ; natural son of the first Lord Berkeley of Stratton. That noble man was born about 1608, and it is not obvious to suppose, ii the absence of positive evidence, that he was the great-grandfathe of the philosopher, born in 1685. That Berkeley's family wa originally from Berkeley Castle need not, however, be doubted nor that it was more immediately connected with the Berkeley of Stratton. He was afterwards introduced by Swifl to th representative of the Stratton Berkeleys as a kinsman, and also t« Earl Berkeley, as related to the family ". And his femily is else where mentioned as a younger branch of the Earls of Berkeley.
The garrulous writer of the rambling Preface ^ to Monck Berkcle/i Poems speaks of Ireland as only * accidentally* the country of th philosopher Berkeley, his father and all his ancestors having been born in England ^^. ' His grandfather,' she adds, ' expended a larp fortune in the service of king Charles I, and in remitting monq to king Charles II and his brothers. The only return was makiD| his son, the bishop's father ^^, collector of the port of ii
Ireland, a more respectable post than in England, noblemen's son often accepting it. This occasioned the old gentleman's leaving hi malediction on any descendant of his who should ever in any wa assist any monarch.' That an English Cavalier in the seventeent century should devote his fortune to the first Charles, and b requited with ingratitude by the second Charles— that till the kin was again in danger the injured Cavalier should grumble at th king's ingratitude — all this was not uncommon in those days, an with this the reader may take what satisfaction he can in tk glimpse of the Berkeley family and their history that is thus ofiere in the eccentric Preface.
We know, at any rate, in a general way, that the condition ( Ireland after the Restoration aflForded openings of which loyalv adventurers of small fortune and good family in England the
' Swift is said to have introduced him in ^^ It may be remarked that in the
this characteristic way: 'My lord, here is (sect. 91, 92) Berkeley speaks of hunsi
a young gentleman of your family. I can rather as if ranking his people unoog tl
assure your lordship it is a much greater English.
honour to you to be related to him, than to " Not grandfather, but foAer^ accocdb
'him to be related to you.' to this account.
' p. ccclxxzii.
Berkeley Family in Kilkenny.
themselves in considerable numbers. In 1662 an Act was 1 :*for encouraging Protestant strangers and others to inhabit Jiant in the Kingdom of Ireland,' A Commission of In- quiry, issued in the same year, 'with instructions concerning the regicides in Ireland,' included the name of Sir Maurice Berkeley, one of the brothers of Lord Berkeley of Stralton'^. Sir Charles Berkeley, their elder brother, who became Viscount Fitzhardingc in 1665, and died in 1688, filled several important offices in Ire- land, and, for the steadfastness of his loyalty, was rewarded after the Restoration with grants of lands in the counties of Wicklow, Carlow, and Kilkenny. His position in Ireland induced some of his relations to settle there, amongst them the ancestors of the Berkcleys of Skark in Wexford.
Sir Maurice Berkeley himself has been claimed as the grand- , &ther of the philosopher, and as the common ancestor of the Bcrkeieys of Dysert and the Berkelcys of Skark. This, though in some respects fully as likely as the Berkeley of Stratton story, I have, as little as the other, been able to verify by documentary evidence'''.
Our Dysert Berkeleys, then, may have made their way to the vale of the Nore, as one of many families of English colonists or adventurers, who, in the quarter of a century preceding Berkeley's birth, were finding permanent or temporary settlements in that and other parts of Ireland. It does not seem however that they had any firm holding in their adopted country. They appear indeed in the Inistiogue corporation, but there is no mention of them in various records in which the names of holders of land, officials of consideration might be expected to occur. The
" Tlwie f>cu ire recndcd in the LiUr vitnm Publieorum Hibtmia. ■ Sir MiDrioe Beikdcy. hii of Sir lianj '^~'' :y til Bruftni (descended. Ihruugh Sir i at S«^e Oillbrd in the County of yaanget ion of Miurice dcjr. who diediD 1316), bid five
If ttioe Sir Chirlci. ibc eideti, <rho
It VilConM t'ilihinlinge, died vrithoDt ^mm Imoc, wbcD hii title becime extiucl. A joaagB uHi. Sii Jubn Bukeley, wu in I65S <Teitcd Lord BetkiJey of Stnnon.
■-■toil in 1670. lit died JD 1G7S. Thii ! too twonic exiini-l. in dcrault of mile t, hi ijjl. The other three loni were IjSii tiwnty. Sir WiUiim (the eccmtiic go-
Tcmui of Virginia), and Sii Maurice above
Mjuri™ Beikeley, who in r6ai wai pot in potseuion of tlie liiids of Slcark, utar New Rosi. in the County of Wiifetd.itMid 10 have been a (on of thii Sir Maurice; itid Wiltiim Berkeley, the falber of the philo- sopher, it is suggeiled. may have been in- other ion, IcDiporuily tettled about the lame lime in the County of Kilkenny. Colonel Berkeley, the grandEon of thi* Maurice, and ion of the Rev. Maurice Berkeley of Skark. bequeathed Ihe bndi of Skaik 10 hii coniin Joseph Dcane, who iben | called the place Berkeley Foreit. ThcM are probably Ihe 'Deanct' and lhe'Mauric«. I Beikly. Clerk' of the l.iisliogue Recordi
8
Life and Letters of Berkeley.
[CH.
symptoms suggest that they were not wealthy, but still recognised as of gentle birth ^*.
In the successive matriculation records of William Berkeley^ sons, in Trinity College, Dublin, he is variously described as ^gim- rosus (as already mentioned) in the case of George, in 1700; ^vexil. equestris* (comet), when his son Robert matriculated, in 1716 J and ^dux militum^ (captain of horse), when his son Thomas was enrolled, in 1721. The facts may have been that he was at one time, as tradition affirms, an officer of customs, and that he afterwards engaged in military service".
Nothing perfectly trustworthy is recorded of Berkeley's mother. She was probably Irish. In the gossiping Preface *• already quoted, we are told that she was ^aunt to old General Wolfe, father of the famous general of that name* — the Quebec hera That there was a connection between the Berkeleys and the Wolfes is not without other circumstantial evidence, as we shall see; and the Wolfes were of Irish connection. I have not found any confirmation of another assertion of this lady — ^that Berkeley was * nephew to Archbishop Usher, as well as his cousin-german General Wolfe.' She also tells us that the philo-
^* The number of untitled Berkeleys in different parts of Ireland, in the seventeenth century, was considerable, and the history of their connection with the heads of the family in England is in most cases obscure. Berke- leys had estates in the County of Carlow in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Viscount Fitzhardinge had a grant of land in that county in 1666, under the Act of Settlement. A * Henry Berkeley ' was named a burgess of Carlow, in the charter granted to the town in 1675 by Charles II; the same name appears in the charter granted to the same town by James II in 1689. • Dr. Henry Berkeley* was one of the Jus- tices of Peace in County Carlow, appointed by William and Mary, in July, 1690. Digby lierkeley served as High Sheriff of the county in 1 707. Berkeleys were settled in Wexford in Uie seventeenth century. In the same century there was a Rowland Berkeley of Kelmerix in the County of Tipperary. In the early part of the century a Berkeley is placed in Ireland, by the following pedigree in the Herald's College in London, pointed out to me by Sir Albert Woods : — * John Berkeley, Mayor of Hereford, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, son of Richard Berkeley
of Dursley, son of Richard also of Dnrsley, son of Thomas, brother of Maurice Lord Berkeley (in Henry VII) ; had a ton WiUiam, who married the daughter of Burghill, whote son, William Berkeley, is now (cir. 1635) living in Ireland.'
^ The register of Trinity Col!^^ seems almost to imply that the hxmXy removed from the Nore and the County of Kilkemij into the County of Tipperary some time after the birth of the philosopher. The matriculation entry of Robert bean that he was bom 'near Thuries,' about 1699; that of Thomas, who seems to have been the youngest son, that he too was bom in the County of Tipperary about 1703. (Robert was educated at Kilkenny, under Dr. Dagrell, and Thomas at Dublin, under Mr. Sheridan. This Sheridan was probably Swift's friend, who kept a school of high repute in Dublin about that time.) I find no clue to the Tipperary movement. The •Will Pedigrees' in Ulster's Office, Dublin, give a Rowland Berkeley in Tipperary (Will dated 1706), which proves some Berkeley connection in that quarter.
" p. ccccxcviii.
^^H Tfu Berkeley Family in Kilkenny. 9
^»et% father and mother ' both died in the same week, and re interred at the same time, in the same grave." It cannot said,' she adds, * that they died an untimely death j both being IT ninety. They lived to breed up six sons gentlemen. They rd to see their eldest son a bishop some years before their
If all tliis is true, they must bave lived almost till 1740. Leaving the ancestry, and inquiring about the descendants, we id, from various sources, that William Berkeley had six sons, and Dbably one daughter. The six sons, whom the parents ' lived I breed up gentlemen,' were : —
I. George, born (as already mentioned) March 12, 1685. He
seems to have been the eldest. 1. Rowland, 'of Newmarket, Co, Cork,' according to the Will Pedigrees in Ulster's Office. His Will is dated May 5, 1 757. Of his history I have no trace.
3. Ralph, according to the same authority, ' of Scarteen, near
Newmarket, Co. Cork,' Will proved 1778. ('Ralph Berkeley,' as already mentioned, appears in the In- istiogue Record in 1728, and in 1756.) Ralph married ' Anne Hobson.' A son, William, and a daughter, Elizabeth, were the issue of this marriage. The daughter married the Rev. Edward Kippax, Vicar of Cionfert, near Newmarket. They had two sons, George and Charles Berkeley, and two daughters, Mary and Anne. Charles Berkeley Kippax was clerk in the chief secre- tary's office, Dublin Castle, and corresponded with Lord Comwallis in 1798''.
4. William, afterwards a commissioned officer in the army,
of whom it is recorded, in the same 'Pedigrees,' that
he married 'Anne,' and that three daughters, Anne,
Elizabeth, and Eleanor, were the issue of the marriage '**.
^^^^ibert, born about i'i99, 'near Thurles' (as already men-
^^^B tioned), afterwards Rector of Midleton, and Vicar-
^^^H General of Cloyne, died in 1787. Of htm afterwards.
^^^Blomas, regarding whom the Dublin College Register
exhausts the information, was born in the County of
" OriataHu CorrtipoaiUnci, Tol. iii. " In ihi I'fcfMc W Moluk Uetkeley (p.
daughlen. ill twiiii
d that William had Una
lo Life and Letters of Berkeley. [ch.
Tipperary about 1704, and entered Trinity College in 1721.
Of the daughter I have no distinct account. Ber- keley alludes to a ^ sister* in one of his letters to Prior, written in 1744-
Berkeley's Common-place Book, that precious record of his thoughts in his early years at College, reveals this much about his inner child-life in the Kilkenny valley, among these domestic surroundings : —
* From my childhood I had an unaccountable turn of thought that way. Mtm. That I was distrustful at 8 years old, and consequently by nature disposed for these new doctrines.'
It is not probable that Berkeley's dawning speculative reason and imagination met with much sympathy in the family circle ; though an even eccentric individuality, and much chivalry, may be traced among his reputed ancestry^®. His parents have left no discernible mark. In the glimpses we have of any of his brothers we do not detect symptoms of community of spirit with one born to be a philosopher in thought and action. On the con- trary, Berkeley could hardly have been intelligible to the family, we should fancy, fix)m what we hear of them.
The imagination of the precocious child might, however, have been disturbed by the circumstances of the time, if his singular intellect was little quickened by family sympathy. The ^ warre in Ireland' was going on whilst he was advancing from his fourth to his sixth year. He had not reached his sixth year when the battle of the Boyne was fought; and we may imagine him at Dysert on those now long past days when James made his rapid retreat to Waterford, or when William of Orange was receiving the hospitality which could be given at such a time in the ancient castle of the Butlers at Kilkenny. We may picture the Berkeley family in the neighbourhood when James, soon followed by William, hu ried down the valley of the Nore.
But we must return from excursions of fancy to the Kilkenny
^' Recorded anecdotes show that the his- have had its effect upon the imagination of tory of the noble house of Berkeley may the philosopher.
The BerkiUy Family in Kilkenny.
:hool, and to the Register*" which records the simple fact of ! rkctcy's appearance there on a summer day in 1696, when he IS placcrd in the Second Class. That he was placed so high is nnorkablc. The lowest class at that time was the Fifth. ' One is ispoecd to interpret as a sign of unusual precocity the feet, that boy, entering school at the age of eleven, was considered tit this advanced place. The old Register contains almost no parallel instance^'.
The page on which the name of 'George Berkley' occurs con- tains a list of long-forgotten names — his school companions in the old school. But the following entries refer to one who must Fcmain associated with Berkeley's history, as long as his life is kqit in distinct remembrance : —
oui Pijor, £«U , aged 15 ;on, entered the Third Cliu. Jan. 11, id. dom. \fi^y , . ' Mr. Thoniu Pij'oi lef) the Secani) Cliii, Apiil i6gg. and was entered in the
tUwiv or Dublin.-
ft has escaped the biographers of Berkeley that his life-long intimacy with Thomas Prior^^ of Rathdowney, the 'dear Tom* of Jo many letters, commenced at Kilkenny School. Berkeley there in the summer of 169(5, and Thomas Prior crossed the
JOaflta. 1084, on ohicb da^ twenlv boji ^^ ■ The le^orgaoiialuin of the Scbooi RtteacalHin o( Ctutla It mnit 1 a good manj' jctn eitliet. Dr. ana (■ftenraidi Dan of Liiiaore. Df> oflSojrtw in 1683I. wu Hod DOi 1670 bi t68a ; and Dt, Henry SUa (aAvTwodd Ar^hd^tacouof Oawry. and K^ of KiUaloe io 1693). from 16S0 to rtif Ttw RqtkKT comnunca vhtn Dr. ^imml UkMoo vu xpfnlnted in 1664. It h BMkaed (Tilbout luMnuplion till Julj U >M. *Aci "hich a latiaa of oeaHr (■■ Tan occnn, during which time ilic U>i< KdM ts hire beat iliDI Dp. Ftom .V^f. 1691, the wiia of eoUH ii com- MliB Aagnat 6. 1716.
* TV Sdwcit *rat rc4pcncd after the *■ n llr* »oth of January, 1G91, Inur ^W aid * half before Dnkdef entered ^ Sn(nlT.tw boyi |a>aed in Ihu inlcml. ^ iBfcricjr'i lame i> the feteoij-lhlrd in <hbL OTalllbai.ai veil ai the olben who tOI iba dow of the earturji, Berkeley ' iIk facood ClaH at the early
rjsL*-
the lame age, were placed in one of the junior clut^ Betkeley't me u in fad unique in the eailv biitoty of Kilkenny School.
" Prior ii (pelt ■ Pryor' in the Regitter. The Piioit of Ralhdowaej were of iome CDmidenlion in that pan of ihe country. Grainii of laoda were made to ibem won alter the Retloration. The bmily, I belieTC, ii DOW extinct. In the liiter pail of latt cenlorj, Andrew Prior of Ratbdowuey mat- ried a liiter of the (irtt Lord Franklort.
Thomaj Prior. Betkeley"! ftiend. WJi bom abODl 168]. We are indebted to hit care for The grealer pari of Berkeley'! now eilant correipondeoce. He wu of) delicate eon- nitution, and did not enter any profcnion. To promote the happintH of hii counlry and hit Eiicadi wai Ihe object of hit hiic. He wai one of the faunden (in June 1731) □f the DaUin Society, in which he long acted u Secietaty. He pobMied A Li'l aj dn Abmtm 0/ IrHmd (ijag): Ointrva- HOHt 01. Cain (I7K)) 1 0» '6* Effrtlt nf Tar Wattr (1746): Eaaj on ibi Una ManufattuTt in Irtland (1749). He died
1 2 Life and Letters of Berkeley. [ch.
country from Rathdowney, in Queen's County, in the following winter, to enter the same school.
The two boys found themselves in a quaint old house, three stories high, with a garden attached to it which reached to the Nore, the whole commanded by the ancient castle of the Or- monds on the opposite bank. The present building is not the one in which Berkeley and Prior formed their lasting friend- ship. The modern School or College of Kilkenny is a large square house, three stories high. Turning its back, as has been said, in suitable abstraction from the hum and bustle of the small though populous city, it faces toward the green country, an extensive lawn spreading before it, which was washed by the placid Nore. But the original edifice, with which Berkeley was familiar, was a little farther back, and faced the street, ^a grey reverend pile, of irregular and rather stra^ling design, or perhaps of no design at all; having partly a monastic physic^oray, and partly that of a dwelling-house.* The entrance to the school-room was immediately to the street ; the rough oak folding doors, arching at top, and gained by flights of steps at each side, made a platform before the entrance, with a passage below by which visitors approached. To the left was another gateway by which carriages had egress. The fit)nt of the building was of cut stone, with Gothic windows; giving an appearance of a side or back rather than a front, with its grotesque gables, chimneys, and spouts. The spouts jutted into the street, and the platform before the school-room entrance is said to have tempted the boys to contrive various annoyances to passers by.
It was in this quaint building that Berkeley spent the greater part of four years. It was pulled down about eighty years ago, but when he entered it must have been comparatively new. The School itself— the ' Eton of Ireland,' as it has been called— before and since famed for its excellent masters, and its many celebrated pupils, was originally an appendage to the magnificent Cathedral of St. Canice. It declined in the early part of the seventeenth century, and had almost disappeared, when the original Ormond foundation was revived, and placed upon a more ample footing, soon after the Restoration. In 1684 it was confirmed by the grant of a new Charter by the Duke of Ormond, and about that
, Tke Berkeley Family i?t Kilkenny. 13
was reared the curious gabled building, with its small central , in which Berkeley studied.
e School had not escaped the troubles of the time. Dr. jn, who was Head Master while Berkeley was a pupil, had d to England during Tyrconncl's government. In hJs absence ouse was converted into a military hospital. After the rout ' Boyne, the second Duke of Ormond returned to his ancestral
at Kilkenny. The School endowed by his grandftither was cd to the original foundation. It was opened again by Dr. M»M in January, 1693.
tides Berkeley, Swift has helped to make the Kilkenny School js. His name is not to be found in the Register, for he [here before the earliest entry in it was commenced. But
is Swift's own authority for it, and that of the Matriculation StCT of Trinity College-*, Provust Baldwin, Harris the rian. Flood the orator, and Banim the novelist, are among atcr ornaments. Scions of the noble houses of Desert, quin, Waterford, Mornington, Lismore, Charlmont, Boyle, uo, and Shannon, were in those days to be found upon its les. A late learned Head Master laments that now 'the great uid the little men of Ireiand are no longer salis^cd with an ;tion in their own country,' and adds that 'the consequence unlearned and mentally enfeebled race, instead of the giants ; days when Ireland educated her own sons^'.' these four years, Berkeley may be supposed to have learned instmc Latin books, and perhaps easy Greek ones. Nor
questions of mathematics, we may imagine, entirely
r. Hmloa wu M»tR rioni 1684 till di in 1703. He wii t1(o (1693- Afdidacni of Caihd.
\ Tbomae j annot
Jaoalhiai ' qiutuo
Svift I dcciin
^itui I Educatbt I TuWr
comi- I iub ferula St. Gsoige
u Dub- Mag. RiJci Aihe.
llnailr mcnlioDfd, Ridei (a iiMnc ihice brothfn (inclDding the r>lh« of the
.> >u Miner of Kilkenny School Dean of Si. Patrick'.), to go o.ct « coloni.U
M« to 1684. la ibii country, vhtrc they obliiued agin-
I, llk< Bctkclcy. wu oT Eneliih and cici and other empbyntcnli. acrarding to
» daccot. His graiulfathcr, the the feihioo of the lime. "boDm Svift. a ncu in Heieford " See ■ Kilkenny College,' by the Rev.
laOctcd for hii nal in the caiue of John Browae, LL D., in the Trataactirmt vj
. L The eldot ton. Godwin, ob- Ibt KMnity ArchMtogitid SocUiy. »ol. i.
M tppointmart in Ireland, under the pp. lit — 119 — >n attidle ti> which I am
rf Onnnnd, vnI hii luccew indoced indebted.
14 Life and Letters of Berkel^.
strange to him and his companions. But what exactly he was asked to learn, and how he learned it, is not clear. It has been affirmed and denied ^<^ that in his youthful days he fed his imaginap tion with the airy visions of romances, and that these helped to dissolve his sense of the difference between illusion and reality. What the romances may have been we are not told, nor can we readily conjecture. There is some evidence that he indulged in observation of nature, with a propensity to explore the country round Kilkenny. His hitherto unpublished account (contained in another part of this volume) of a visit, perhaps about this time, to the Cave of Dimmore, four miles from the city, is more in keep- ing than the books of romance of that day with his inquisitive curiosity about all physical jdienomena, afterwards remarked bjr Blackwell. The new neighbourhood was not less apt to awaken a love for the visible world than the scenes of his childhood on the Nore below Thomastown. Kilkenny has been compared to Warwick, and to Windsor, and to Oxford. However one may judge of these comparisons, no modern visitor of the Irish dty can soon forget the still beauty of the Nore, as viewed upwards or downwards on a fair summer evening from John's bridge, or from the College meadow ; or the intermixture of buildings, new and old — Castle, Cathedrals, and Round Tower, so happily grouped on the high ground on which the city stands ; or the free and careless grace of nature in all the neighbouring country.
Such were the surroundings of the boy Berkeley, as we now dimly discern him and his family doings through the mists of nearly two centuries. Out of them emerged soon after, on the death of Locke and Leibnitz, one who was then without doubt the foremost psychologist and metaphysician in Europe.
** The affirmation is in the Biog, Brit, et Corrigenda), on the authority of Mn. (vol. ii. art. * Berkeley") and by Stock; the Berkeley, denial in the Biog, Brit, (vol. iii. — Addenda
CHAPTER 11.
TRINiry COLLEGE, DUBLIN. ENTHUSIASM ABOUT A NEW
PHILOSOPHICAL PRINCIPLE.
1700— 1713.
On die aist of Mardi, 1700, Berkeley, leaving the ancient city of Kilkenny, and the picturesque valley of the Nore, matriculated in Trinity CoU^^, Dublin. Trinity College was his head-quarters during tiie thirteen years which followed. Not long after his matriculation, we find him exulting, with the fervour of an en- thusiastic temperament, in a New Principle, for the relief of the difficulties of human knowledge, with which he somehow felt himself inspired, and which he was eager to apply to our conception of the material world and its supposed powers. His thoughts soon began to overflow in writings, published and un- published, so that we cannot follow him during these thirteen years without becoming involved in the speculations of metaphysical philosophy. We have in this chapter to trace the beginnings of his intellectual history.
Let us first look at the City and University where this Kil- kenny boy found himself nine days after he had completed his (ifiteenth year, and in which the inclination of his childhood to reflective thought found energetic expression.
Dublin in those days little resembled the brilliant and pros- perous city which pleases the eye of the stranger who now visits the Irish capital. The ground now covered by its most graceful buildings was then waste land or meadow. The population, which in 1 700 was probably less than 50,000, was gathered round the Castle and the Cathedrals, with some signs of new streets on
1 6 Life and Letters of Berkel^. [CH.
the opposite side of the LifFey, where old ones are now found. The original buildings of Trinity College, erected partly in the reign of Elizabeth, were becoming ruinous, and, although standing where the classic modem structure stands, were then in the outskirts of the city. The College was designated Trinity College * near Dublin/
The City and the surrounding country, at the opening of the new century, were beginning to recover from the effects of the ^warre.in Ireland,' which had ended ten years before. The Univer- sity was about to renew its youth, after having been on the verge of ruin. The contest into which the Revolution of 1688 plung^l Ireland, involved Trinity College, as well as the ^ famous school' of Kilkenny, in its collisions. Early in 1689 the Registry reveals preparations for flight on the part of the Fellows. A month later the College was occupied by the military, and most of the Fellows were in England. Then James arrived in Dublin, and converted the academical buildings into a garrison, and the old CoU^ Chapel into a magazine for gunpowder. It was even proposed to commit the Library to the flames.
The battle of the Boyne, in July 1690, saved the University in the crisis of its fete. After this, it recovered rapidly, by the fostering care of the Government, and the sagacity of its Provosts and other ofificials. Even in 1693, it was able to celebrate its first centenary in a way not unbecoming. It gradually engag^ the attention and support of the Irish Parliament. Successive grants of money were made in the early part of the eighteenth century and afterwards. New buildinp began to rise. Many of the extensive and handsome academical structures which now form Trinity College were reared in the reigns of Anne and the first two Georges. Little remains of the decayed build- ings, desecrated in war, which met Berkeley's eye when he came to matriculate in March 1700. The present magnificent library was erected between 1710 and 1720. The elegant west front belongs to a still later period, as well as the new College Chapel, which stands a little to the north of the old one, where Berkeley went to daily prayers, and delivered discourses on Sundays. Intellectual activity, and extension of the means of knowledge seem, as the century advanced, to have feirly kept pace with the renovation of the College buildings. The influence of the dis-
.] Trinity College, Dublin. I 7
s of Newton, Boyle, Hooke, and Locke, and of the splendid bypotbeses of Des Cartes, Malebranche, and Leibnitz — a galaxy of I of genius who were passing away as the eighteenth century Was opening — began gradually to show itself. Lectureships in chemistry, botany, and anatomy were added to the College courses 1710. Experimental philosophy soon followed, A complete Khool of physic was designed, and to a great extent organised, btcr in the century. Nor was modern science the only object i regard. In 1718, Archbishop King endowed a Divinity Lecture, o be held by a Senior Fellow, for the better instruction of fiacfaetoTs of Arts intended for holy orders.
A scholasticism out of which the subtle intellectual life of the intddle ages had departed apparently still prevailed in the Uni- versity, at the close of the seventeenth century, especially in logic and metaphysics, ethics and theology. From more than one eminent man subjected to the influences of Trinity College at this time, there came complaints of the tendency of the system to crush Ifxmtaaeous thought and inquiry, similar to those of contemporary Ituticats in other European Universities. Logic, according to the model of that time, was in vain presented to Swift's notice, for mcc, during the years in which he was at Trinity (ifi82 — 87), although it was then and there a principal object of learning. 'His disposition,' says Scott, ' altogether rejected the scholastic sophistry f Smiglicius, Keckermannus, Burgersdicius, and other ponderous worries, now hardly known by name; nor could his tutor ever persuade him to read three p.iges in one of them, though some Kquaintance with the commentators of Aristotle was then abso- fately necessary at passing examination for his degrees '.' Swift naturally averse to the subtleties of the schools, but this ^version to a then dead philosophy was shared by more spccu- htivc minds, and only waited for a powerfiji philosophical voice Q give it practical expression.
The Provost of Trinity, in March 1700, was Dr. Peter Bro 4 man not unworthy of note in the philosophical annals of Iff land, as the author afterwards of the Procedtire and Limits of Human
' Life urSirift Ri- IJ. 16- milled in fivoui of Bt&writ." by ihe moit
' TWoftJiogtiplij—- Blown 'or -Browne' nuiuei<'ni and weighty (but noi by ill) Ihe
■fe«M whidi t hiire hilbeno hetitued. in oiigiiul intbontici. In fact Iba pnctieo
t BOwBtt of piEccdenti. hit been detci- wu not uoiforni, » io the cue of * Bakclejr.' VOL. IV, C
i8
Life and Letters of Berkeley.
[CH.
Understanding and the Divsne Analogy^ and as a learned critical an- tagonist of Locke. Many now remember him, when they remember him at all, only for his whimsical sermons and pamphlets^ against drinking healths, and against drinking in remembrance of the dead. The life of Browne is unwritten, but it deserves research. Ac- cording to contemporary report, he was * an austere, . learned, and mortified man.' The gravity of his manner, and the severe beauty of his eloquence as a preacher are said to have checked the ' false glitter of words' in which his countrymen are apt to indulge themselves. In 1700 he was known as the author of the most learned and vigorous reply* then encountered by Tolancfi Christianity not Mysterious^ 3. reply which contains the germs of some of his own philosophical theology. He was born in the county of Dublin soon after the Restoration, and he entered Trinity College in June 1682. Ten years later he became a Fellow. He was raised to the Provostship in August 1699, a few months before Berkeley matriculated, and was promoted to the bishopric of Cork and Ross in January 17 lo^ Browne was thus Provost during the greater part of Berkeley's residence in Trinity. Long after this, they encountered one another as philosophical and theolc^ical antagonists, and we shall find them near neighbours for a few months in a distant part of Ireland.
In his early years at Trinity, Berkeley was under the tuition of Dr. John Hall, who was Vice-Provost from 1697 till 1713. To Hall he attributes, in the Preface to his Arithmetical his own early enthusiasm in mathematics^ and he refers with gratitude to his example and instructions. Of other contemporary Fellows or Professors nothing particular is recorded. Pratt and Baldwin,
' (l) Drinking in Rtmemhrance of the Dead, being the subttance rf a Discourse delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Cork. Dublin, 1713. (2) Second Part 0/ Drinking in Remembrance of the Dead^ d:c, Dublin, 1714 {$) An Answer to a Rigbt Reverend Prelate's Defence of Eating and Drinking to the Memory of the Dead. Dublin, 1715. (4) ii Discourse of Drinking Healths ; wherein the great evil of the custom is shewn. Dublin, 1716. (5) il Letter to a Gentleman in Oxford on the Subject of Health Drinking. 1722.
The Jacobites were said to indulge in the practice of drinking in remembrance of the dead King James.
* A Letter in Answer to a Book maUki * Christianity not Mysterious;* «u also to tM those who set up for Reasom amd Evtdma in op f option to RevdaHon and MytHeitL Dublin, 1697. This work broa^ dit author the pairo. age of Marsh, ktStHAlkaf of Dublin, whose influence gained for Browit the Provostsh*p of the College, and aftfl^ wards the bishopric of Cork. Tobnd, ao> cordingly, used to saj that it was he wIm» made Browne Bishop of Cork.
' Swift expected this bishopric wbiok Browne got it, and the disappointmeDt it said to have been the inmiediatc occasoa of his going over to the Tories.
»] Timiiy CoOql*, DuiHn, 19
lAemardf. distimiiished Provosts^ seem to have been amcMig the as weU as Nidiolas Fcmter, afterwards Bishop of KiUaloe of Raphoe^ and Rkhard Helsham, afterwards Professor of Pliiloaoiihj.
'bi Dublia, outside tiie Universitjr, cossiderahle intellectual were at woilc. One remarkable figure^ associated both with O^ and liie 'Uniwrsitjr in the last two decades of the ceatey, was William Mdyneoz, bom of a family m kliers and ia fofalic life% whose keen and delicate an represented in his pictore in the JBzamination Hall fke College. The oonespondence of Mcdjrneoz with Locke^ visit to the Jgngiish philosopher at Oates^ and the story of his iati^ after ihe.pIeasiEuit weeks in Essex, are familiar Oose aoqnainted with the history of the English ^losopher. was bom in DUUin in 1655^ and entered the University in In June \^^ he liecame a member of the Middle Temple, qpitfed himself for a time to the study of law. But his lay in anotimr direction. He was delicate from his fadancy, and through life he suffered from a dangerous chronic disease. This did not interfere with his strong bias to mathe- matics and the modern philosophy, nor with his expressions of contempt for the scholasticism then dominant in the University. He was active in promoting the modern spirit of inquiry. In 1680^ he published a translation of the Meditations of Des Cartes, the objections of Hobbes, and Des Cartes' rejoin- ders, along with a short biographical account of the French philosopher. In 1683, he founded a Society in Dublin, similar to the Royal Society of London, in which he acted as secretary, and which continued in vigour for several years, till it was dispersed by the storms of 1688. About that time the severities of Tyrconnel obliged Molyncux to fly to England. He ^)ent some time with his family at Chester, and there his son S^uel was bom, afterwards the friend of Berkeley. After his
• The father of Williim Mol3meux (spelt lician. The grandfather, Daniel, was Ulster
Molynex in the matriculation registry of King at Arms, called by Ware veneranda
TrioitjCollege, and elsewhere Molineux) was antiquitatis cuUor. A Thomas Molyneux
as emtDcnt engineer, and an author in that was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Ireland
defMirtment. He died in 1 696. A brother, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Sir Thomtf Mdyneoz, was an eminent phy-
C 2
20 Life and Letters of Berkeley. [ch.
return to Dublin, he devoted himself to optics and philosophy, and to the social questions of Ireland. His Diaptrka Nova appeared in 1692 and was warmly praised by Halley. In the same year he was chosen to represent the University of Dublin in the Irish Parliament, a position which he held till his death in 1698. In politics he was a champion for the independence of his native country, and published in 1697 his celebrated Case rf IrtUmi heing hound by Acts of Parliament in England, His cordial cor* respondence with Locke, from 1692 till his death in 1698, suggested some important additions to the Essay on Human Under^ standing, and occasioned the interesting visit to Oates in tiie month before he died.
Partly through the influence of William Molyneux, the Essof on Human Understanding found its way into the hands of readiif men in Dublin before the end of the seventeenth century. It was translated into Latin, in 1701, by Ezekiel Burridge, a native of Cork, and a member of Trinity College. The name of Locke, as well as that of Des Cartes, must have been tolerably familiar there in March 1700. The Recherche of Malebranche too, the contemporary rival of the Essay in the philosophical world, cannot have been unknown; and curiolis readers may have en- countered the Ideal or Intelligiile World of John Norris, the English Malebranche, soon after it appeared in 1701 — ^4. At the same time the rivalry between the natural philosophy of Des Cartes and the natural philosophy of Newton was going on, and both were drawing attention away from the natural philosophy of Aristotle. The Princifia of Newton was published thirteen years before Berkeley entered Trinity College. The method of Fluxions was beginning to be employed, and was struggling for mastery with the Calculus of Leibnitz. The Dioptrics of Molyneux was soon followed by the Oftics of Newton. Wallis and the Oxford mathematicians, with the works of the founders and leaders of the Royal Society, then forty years old, might have been cominoD talk in the academic circle of Dublin in the opening years of the century. Berkeley, in short, entered an atmosphere, in the College of Queen Elizabeth, which was beginning to be charged with the elements of reaction against traditional scholasticism in physics and in metaphysics.
During the greater part of these thirteen years, the archbishopric
ii.J Trinity College, Dublin. ar
of Oablin was held by a prelate who takes a distinguished place amoDg the philosophical theologians of his time. William King, ftlrcady known as the author of the treatise Dt Origine Mali which employed tlic controversial pens of Bayle and Leibnitz, was translated from Derry to Dublin in 1 703. He was the sagacious, witty, and sarcastic ecclesiastical governor of that province for twenly-six years. The personal appearance and discourses of the philosophic Archbishop cannot have been unknown to the idergntduates and graduates of Trinity College of those years. Traces of intercourse between the subtle Berkeley and King, the discreet and dignified politician, if any ever existed, are now lost. Browne as Provost, and King as Archbishop, must have been known to each other. And references to the philosophical fiicolf^ of the other two are to be found in the subsequent writings of ail the three.
The yea/ in which Berkeley matriculated in Dublin was also the year in which Swift was settled at Laracor, about twenty lilcs north-west of the city. Laracor was his home during the lirtcen years of Berkeley's residence in Trinity, and it was at the id of the thirteen years that Swift became Dean of St. Patrick's, was in tliosc years that he was planting his willows, and making s canal, and enjoying, as much as his frequent visits to London Duid permit, *the garden, and the river, and the holly and the icrry trees, and the river walk.' Before he went to London 1710, to spend three years there, the intimate of Earls Ambassadors, he had probably heard of Berkeley, one of the Fellows of Trinity College, then the author of a remark- itebook.
Among his undergraduate compeers, Berkeley found his old ilkcnny schoolfellow, Thomas Prior. Samuel Madden, the founder, ith Prior, of the Royal Irish Society, some thirty years after, was an undergraduate in those days, William Palliser, son of the rchbishop to whom Trinity College is indebted for its Biiliotkeca ttSttrum^y seems to have been also a College chum. Later on Berkeley's course, Edward Syngc, afterwards Bishop of Ferns and Elpbin, was an intimate associate, and so too might have been irry Hartwell, afterwards btother-in-law of the Dean Gcrvais, bo was the friend and correspondent of Berkeley's old age.
22
Life and Letters of Berkeley.
[CH.
Conterini'^, the good uncle of Oliver Goldsmith, another of his chums, is connected by a characteristic story with Berkeley's early years at College. Oiriosity, it is said, led the young student from Kilkenny to go to see an execution. He returned pensive and melancholy, but inquisitive about the sensations experienced by the criminal in the crisis of his fate. He informed Conterini of his eccentric curiosity. It was agreed between them that he should himself try the experiment, and be relieved by his friend on a signal arranged, after which Conterini, in his turn, was to repeat the experiment. Berkeley was accordingly tied up to the ceiling, and the chair removed from under his feet. Losing consciousness, his companion waited in vain for the signal. The enthusiastic inquirer might have been hung in good earnest,— and as soon as he was relieved he fell motionless upon the floor. On recovering himself his first words were — 'Bless my heart, Conterini, you have rumpled my band.* After this his friend's curiosity was not enough to induce him to fulfil the (original agreement. If not true in the letter, this story is at least true to the spirit of Berkeley's ardent psychological analysis, and brave indifference even to life in the interest of truth.
This among other eccentric actions, we are told, made Berkeley a mystery. Ordinary people did not understand him, and laughed at him. Soon after his entrance, he began to be looked at as either the greatest genius or the greatest dunce in College. Those who were slightly acquainted with him took him for a fool; but those who shared his intimate friendship thought him a prodigy of learning and goodness of heart. When he walked about, which was seldom, he was surrounded by the idlers, who came to enjoy a laugh at his expense. Of this, it is said, he sometimes complained, but there was no redress^ the more he fretted the more he amused them.
' The Rev. Thomas Conterini, or Con- terine, as I find by the College Register, entered Trinity College October 2, 1702, in his eighteenth year — ^•filius Austin Conte- rine, Coloni, natus Cestuae, educatus Wrexom, in Wallia/ He was descended from a mem- ber of the noble family of Conterini in Venice, who took refuge in England, and was for a time settled in Cheshire. Thomas was bom there, and went thence to school at Wrexham, in Denbighshire. Removing to
Ireland in 1 701, he entered Trinity CoOe^ where he was distinguished for intdUgaice and goodness of heart, and for his intimtte friendship with Berkeley. He long held the living of Gran in Roscommon. He married Goldsmith's aunt, and it was by his kiodiicss that the poet was enabled to ponoe his studies at college. It is to him that Gold- smith alludes in his DtstrUd Viilagt-^ * Near yonder copse, where ODce the garden smiled,' 8cc.
H.]
Trinity €oU^^ Dublin.
23
I& qiite of tiiese impediments^ he pursued his studies, in those ink ]«ufs at Trinity^ according to report, with extraordinary Vd^ <fiiU of atmplidty and enthusiasm.' He was made a Sdioiar in 1702*. In the spring of 1704 (the year Locke died) Ik became Badhdor of Arts^. He took his Master's degree in tte ^rii^ of 1707. After the customary arduous examination of Ifaat Uniyeistty, conducted in presence of nobility, gentry, and k^ officiah, be passed with unprecedented applause, and was admitted to a Fellowship, June 9, 1707^% ^the only reward of Ifaming that kingdom has to bestow/ as one of his biographers cutly says*
The 'Berkeley Papers' throw fresh and interesting lig^t upon his coqployments, and upon the occupation and progress of his Ihoi^ts, in the seven years between his matriculation and his decttoa as Fellow.
One academical enterprise which these Papers record deserves to be mentioned. Early in 1705, it seems that Berkeley and seme of his College friends fbrm^ a Society to promote their investigations in the New Philosophy of Boyle, Newton, and Locke. The manuscript commences with these words in Berkeley's own handwriting: — ^'Mem. The following Statutes were agreed to and signed by a Society consisting of eight persons, January 10, A.D. 1705/ The 'Statutes' are then given, as follows, in the handwriting of another : —
' That the Oflficers of this Society be a President, Treasurer, Secretary, and Keeper of the Rarities.
That these OflScers be elected out of the Members by the majority of voices.
' The exnoloments of a Scholar in those days seem not to have exceeded £3.
* The following extract from Temple's Statutes, which were then virtually in force, throws light on the necessary qualifications of a Bachelor of Arts: — * Cap. VIL De Grzci et Hebraici Idiomatis oognitione, quanta esse dcbeat in iis qui Bacchalaareatum in Artibus Toluit assumere.
Ut ilium Bacchalaurei nomine in-
<fignaro potemus, qui non possit totius Novi Testameoti textum Grsecum Latine inter- pertari. Qood vero ad Hebraicae lingux cognitioncm attinet satis erit ad Baccha-
laurei titulum consequendum, si quis Hebrai- cse QrammaticsB pratcepta sic intelligat, ut eorum ductu possit voces Hebrxas, sive nomina sint sive verba, expedite flccterc, ct primum secundumque Psalmum in Hebrseo in Latinam convertere.*
*• For the following entry or note occurs in the records of Trinity College regarding Berkeley : — * In 1 706 no Fellowship vacant, but in September Mr. Mullart resigned on a living. In 1 707, Mr. Berkeley, who had entered in -(f^, under Dr. Hall, was elected a Fellow.*
24 Life and Letters of Berkeley. [ciL
That every Member when he speaks address himself to the President
That in case of equality the President have a casting-voice.
That when two offer at once the President name the person that shall speak.
That the Assembly proceed not to any business till the President give orders.
That in the absence of the President the Assembly choose a Chairman.
That no new Member be admitted before the 9th of July, 1 706.
That the Treasurer disburse not any money but by order of the House, signed by the President, and directed by the Secretary.
That he shall make up his accounts quarterly, or upon resignation of his office.
That the notes signed by the President and directed by the Secretaiy make up the Treasurer's accounts.
That the Treasurer may disburse money for public letters without a note from the President, but shall acquaint the Assembly with it next meeting and then get a note.
That the Secretary have the charge of all papers belonging to the Society.
That the Keeper of the Rarities attend at the Museum from a to 4 on Friday, or the person whom he shall depute.
That at the request of any of the Members the Keeper of the Rarities attend in person, or send the key to the Member.
That no one interrupt a Member when he is speaking.
That no one speak twice to the same matter before every one who pleases has spoken to it.
That no one reflect on the person or opinions of any one whatever.
That if any one uses an unwary expression he may have leave to explain himself.
That no Member reveal the secrets of the Assembly.
That when any of the Members bring in a paper, the President appoint any three he pleases to examine it against next meeting, and give in their opinion of it in writing.
That the time appointed for meeting be 5 of the clock every Friday evening.
That whoever is absent from the meeting be fined sixpence, and he that comes after six of the clock threepence.
That the punishment for the transgression of any other Statute be determined by the Assembly.
^
tkj^ Trimty Colkge^ DttbUn^ ^
* Tbit tbese pnnWtments be paid the Treasurer eitber befic»e or at ■i meetiiig.
Tbat die AsBemhtjr way repeal or alter these Statutes or make new
Tliat eveiydung not provided fiir otherwise be d^ermined 1^ pi voioes.
That the Elections of Oflkers be made at the last meetiiig of every fHtfter, and that the Officers then deOed continue for the three ioi- lowing months.
That whoever leaves &e Assembly before it's brdien up pay
That eveiy meetfaig the majority appoint a sabject Ux next conferaice.
That first die President speak concerning the matter to be discoused \pa9 and after him die next <m his right hand, and so on every one diit pleases in order as they sit, and that such member stand up as
That when diese more solemn disooorses are over, and not tiQ then, eveiy one may talk fieefy on the matter, and propose and answer whapt- ever doiibts or objecdons may arise.
That when the sabject of the conference has been suffidentty dis- die members may propose to the Assembty thdr inventions, new dioii^;hts, or observadons in any of the sdences.
That the conference continue for three hours at least, or longer if the Assembly think fit
That the conference begin at three in the afternoon on Friday and continue till eight'
The following queries and other memoranda in Berkeley's writing, obviously connected with Locke's Essay^ follow in the Common-place Book immediately after the Statutes, but whether they were to be considered at any of the meetings of the Society does not appear : —
* Qa Whether number be in the objects without the mind. L. [Locke] b. a. c. 8. s. 9.
Why powers mediately perceivable thought such, immediately per- ceivable not. b. 2. c. 8. s. 19.
Whether solids seen. b. 2. c. 9. s. 9.
Whether discerning, comparing, compounding, abstracting, &c., remembering, knowing simple or complex ideas — ^the same with, or different from perception ?
Whether taste be a simple idea, since it is combined with existence, unity, pleasure, or pain ?
26 Life and Lettet's of Berkeley. [cH.
Whether all the last mentioned do not make a complex idea as well as the several component ideas of a
Wherein brutes distinguished from men? Wherein idiots from madmen ?
Whether any knowledge without memory ?
God space, b. 2. c 13. s. 326 and 15. 2.
Rotation of a fire-brand, why makes a circle ?
Why men more easily admit of infinite duration than infinite expansion ?
Demonstration in numbers, whether more general in their use for the reason? L. qu. b. 2. ch. 10.
Inches, &c., not settled, stated lengths against, b. 2. c. 13. s. 4.
Qu. Whether motion, extension, and time be not definable, and there- fore complete ?
Qu. Whether the clearness or distinctness of each greater mode of number be so verified ?
Qu. Why Locke thinks we can have ideas of no more modes of number than have names ?
Not all God's attributes properly infinite. Why other ideas besides number be not capable of infinity ? Not rightly solved.
Infinity and infinite. No such thing as an obscure, confused idea of infinite space.
Power is not perceived by sense.
Locke not to be blamed if tedious about innate ideas, soul always thinking, tension not essence of body, tune can be conceived and measured when no motion, willing not force, &c.
A thing may be voluntary though necessary. Qu. Whether it can be involuntary ?
Things belonging to reflection are for the most part expressed by forms borrowed from things sensible.'
One other record, either of the same or of a similar Society, immediately follows these queries and notes : —
' December the seventh, in the year one thousand seven hundred and six, Agreed —
That we the under written persons do meet on every Thursday, at five of the clock in the evening.
That the business of our meeting be to discourse on some part of the New Philosophy.
That the junior begin the Conference, the second senior speak next, and so on.
College, Dublin.
That at the close of every Conference, we appoint a Subject for tlie ■ fcUowing.'
The ' underwTittcn ' names unfortunately are not given. We ifc left in the dark about Berkeley's associates at these Thursday evening meetings, for the discussion of the * New Pliilosophy;' and also very much as to the questions they discussed, and the con- clusions (if any) which they reached. The office of 'Keeper of the Rarities' probably implies that observation and experiment were as much in vogue among them as the mathematical and metaphysical speculations of the hitherto unpublished Common- place Book in which the memorials of this Society appear. The other contents of that Book, written by Berkeley's own hand, and now published in another part of this volume, may perhaps exemplify some of the questions which engaged these Trinity Collide inquirers in the two years before he obtained his Fellowship.
The promotion of Societies, literary and philosophic, was a work in which through life Berkeley seemed fond of engaging. We &cul instances of this afterwards.
Tbe Common-place Book, to a stray page in which we owe our infbrmation about this academical reunion, represents Berkeley's studies, and the course of his thoughts, apparently from about his eighteenth till about his twenty-second year — the yea^s immediately before he presented himself to the world as an author. It is a biographical document of great value to those whose conception of biography comprehends analysis of the prc^ressive unfolding of individual human mind. It contains thoughts, self- originated, or immediately occasioned by reading, partly in natural philosophy and mathematics, chiefly in psychology, metaphysics, ethics, and theology. The prevailing tendency of the whole is to the banishment of scholasticism from philosophy, as well as all talk about things which cannot be resolved into living experience of coocrete matter of fact, — called by him idta or sensation. He is everywhere eager to simplify things and make knowledge practi- cal, to bring men back to facts, and to expel empty abstractions from philosophy, as the banc of religion and morality not less i than of physical science. There is also a disposition towards the
28 Life and Letters of Berkeley. [cft
intellectual independence which rebels against the bondage of words, and an enthusiastic straightforwardness of character, s^ to be regarded as eccentricity by the multitude — but with a desire to conciliate too. What he writes plainly flows from himself if ever any writing did flow from the mind of the writer.
The mathematical observations contained in the Common- mon-place Book do not suggest a high standard of proficiency; but it must be remembered that they are the work of one hardly beyond the age of a schoolboy. In the early parts, infinite divisi- bility and incommensurables recur. These Berkeley exclaims against as examples of the unmeaning verbal abstractions which might, he thought, be banished from science by an all-comprehen- sive purgative Principle which he was then beginning to sec, and in the first indistinct recognition of which he indulges in successive outbreaks of intellectual enthusiasm. It may be alleged perhaps, by mathematicians, that Berkeley in these memoranda contrasts with indivisibles only infinite divisibility, and not the continuous flow which is at the bottom of Newton's theory of Fluxions. He would probably have denied that an idem di con- tinuity is possible. But we find no distinct allusion to Newton and Fluxions till we advance pretty far into the Common-place Book, where he returns to mathematics through optics. The re- marks on optics are at first very elementary.
Berkeley's obvious inclination exclusively to the metaphysical side of mathematics, in these juvenile speculations and after- wards, probably indisposed him to a minute study of the details, or even of the professed theory, of Fluxions and of the Calculus. His own psychological theory of physical points {minima semsiUSs) must have obscured Newton's Fluxions, which rest on a doctrine of continuity that is hard to reconcile with Berkeley's sensible indi- visibles. Perhaps neither then nor afterwards did he sufficiently appreciate the radical antagonism between Newton and himself in their whole way of regarding sensible quantity. He looked at it, so to speak, statically j Newton, dynamically. Besides this, Newton, writing for practical purposes, leaves his own not very lucid metaphysical theory in the background, which may in part explain why Berkeley did not directly criticise, or even recognise it. At any rate, determined by his abhorrence of scholastic ver-
IE.] TrMtf.CaU^ Dui&t. 09
balism and empty abstractions, he rejects infinite divisibility, and the whole mathcmatica] doctrine of incommeiuunUes, as ex* pressive of nothing that can be resolved into idea of sense and imagination.
In the memoranda which deal with Optics there SMins to be a mixture of the mathematical and physiological with tfae ps)rdio- logical. This shows that Berkeley was at that time only ivtekii^ his way to the purely psychological mtthod whidi at last i the one basis of his New Theory of Vititm. Internal C , what is experienced in the mental state of stehgy as distinguished both from physiolc^ical observation of the eye, and fhxn toaHtem VaAicaX reckoning about lines and angles, wal the fiold witiiia I he restricted himself at last.
The non- mathematical speculations, which oocui^ \ff far ths la^r portion of the Common-place Book, are mostly concerned iritb Matter and its Qualities, Space and Timt^ Ezisteoce, Soul, God, and Duty. The nature of visible extension, and its relations to tangible extension are often remarked upon, with occasional hesitation ab<.iut details. But Berkeley's mind everywhere labours under thf inspiration of a new thought, with which it is evidently charged, and ilie consciousness of which calls out ever and anon tbc flash of philosophical enthusiasm. A new Principle is once and again referred to as what bis soul was labouring with; and this, notwithstanding the opposition and ridicule it and its applications might occasion among impatient thinkers and the thou^tless, he was resolved soon to discharge himself of through the press, but in as conciliatory a way as he could — ^with some politic art, in short.
Now what is this new Principle? It dawns upon us in the Common-place Book by degrees. When we compare one expression of it with another, we find that it implies neither more nor less than this : — a conception of the impossibility of anything existing in the universe that is independent of perception and volition ; that is not either percipient and voluntary, or perceived and willed. This is Berkeley's dualism. He vacillates in the abstract ex- pression of it, but it generally approaches this. All so-called existence that cannot be resolved into this, is, he is beginning to see, only 'abstract idea,' and therefore absurd— to be swept
30 Life and Letters of .Berkeley. [cH.
away as sophistry and illusion. He is gradually discovering that the pressure of this new Principle, in its various phases, delivers Science from abstract or unperceived Matter (as dis- tinguished from sensible things); from abstract or unperceived Space (as distinguished from sensibly extended things)^ fiom abstract or unperceived Time (as distinguished from perceived changes); Arom abstract or unperceived Substance (as distinguished from our personal consciousness); and from abstract or un- perceived Cause (as distinguished from free voluntary agency). It is the same Principle which in mathematics, with a dim con- ception of it, he found to press hard against incommensurability and infinite divisibility. At times he is in awe of its tremendous consequences, and of the shock which these may occasion when it is proclaimed to a learned world which had long tried to feed itself upon abstractions. But he is resolved, nevertheless, to employ it for purging science and sustaining faith.
Here, more intensely, but not more really, than in Berke- ley's mathematical jottings, one feels the presence of the spirit of scientific independence, the parent of all discovery, in whidi only a few can sympathise, and which is ever in antagonism to the unintelligent mediocrity, by which discovery has been crushed or retarded. It was the same spirit as that which moved Des Cartes, and Spinoza, and Locke, in the time preceding^ or Hume and Kant in time that followed, and which moves all who leave their mark on the course of human thought.
A few examples of the philosophical remarks in the Com- mon-place Book, taken from the chaos in which the reader finds them there, and arranged in groups, may help to show the state of Berkeley's mind about this time. The reader may enlarge the size of each of the following groups, and add some new ones, by a study of the Common-place Book itself, in another part of this volume. There is a freshness in the very immaturity of the thoughts. Here are some regarding the im- portance of his new Principle : —
* The reverse of the Principle I take to have been the chief source of all that scepricism and folly — all those contradictory and inex- tricable puzzling absurdities, that have in all ages been a reproach to human reason; as well as of the idolatry, whether of images
|l] Trmify CeUige^ Dublin. 3t
or of God» ffaH faEnd die gmrten part of tbe ivorid; as well as of that
ihaBiAd inmendhf that turns va into beasls. I know there ia
a aijfthlji aoct of men wBl oppose me. I am yoong, I am an
aprtar^ I am vani. Veiy wdl, I diall endeavour patiently to bear up nder die moat fcaaening» idifying aiq[>eUitfion8 the pride and ragr of man. caQ deviaew Bot one dung I know I am not giul^ of. . 1 46 not pin Bf Udi on die ideeve of anjr great man. I act not out of {mjudioe or pvepoaaeaakm. ' I do not adhoe to ai^ opinion because it is an old one^ or % leviied cme, or a fiidnonaUe one, or one that I have spent
wmik doe in tlie atodjr and cultivation kX If in some, tidng^
I dUfcr from a pfaiksopiier I prc^fess to admire,^ it is for that very thing OB aooout of wfaidi I admiie him, namely, the tove of troth.'
Then we have ^mpaes of the Principle itself, more distinct as it takes fUler possession of him, while he revolves it in his innHgnts:—
'Mem. Diiigendy to set fcmh that many of the ancient phitosoidiers mn mto so great absmdides aa to deny the existence of motion and dnse odier dmigs they perceived actually by their senses. This sprung from their not knowing what Existence was, or wherein it consisted. This is the source of their folly. 'Tis on the discovery of the nature and meaning and import of Existence that I chiefly insist. This puts the wide difference betwixt the Sceptics and me. This I think wholly
new. I am sure this is new in me I take not away Substances.
I ought not to be accused of discarding Substance out of the reasonable world. I only reject the philosophic sense, which is in effect nonsense, of die word Substance. Ask a man, not tainted with their jargon, what he means by corporeal Substance, or the Substance of body. He shall answer — bulk, solidity, and suchlike sensible qualities. These I retain. The philosophic nequid, nequanHim, fuquale^ whereof I have no idea, I discard — ^if a man may be said to discard that which never had any being, was never so much as imagined or conceived. In short/ he adds, (as it were in a soliloquy of agonised earnestness), ' be not angry. You lose nothing, whether real or chimerical, whichever you in any wise conceive or imagine, be it never so wild, so extravagant, so absurd. Much good may it do you. I am more for reality than any other. Philosophers, diey make a thousand doubts, and know not certainly but we may be
deceived. I assert the direct contrary The philosophers talk
nmch <A a distinction 'twixt absolute and relative things, and 'twixt things considered in their own nature and the same things considered with
32 Life and Letters of Berkeley. [cH.
respect to us. I know not what they mean by " things considered in
themselves." This is nonsense, jargon • . Thing and idea arc
much-what words of the same extent and meaning. ... By idea I mean
any sensible or imaginable thing Time a sensation; therefore
only in the mind. . . . Extension a sensation; therefore only in the
mind A thing not perceived is a contradiction Existence
is not conceivable without perception or volition. . . . Let it not be said that I take away existence. I only declare the meaning of the word, so far as I can comprehend it . . . What means cause, as distinguished from occasion ? Nothing but a being which wills, when the effect follows
the volition There is nothing active but spirit. . . . Existence
is perceiving and willing, or being perceived and willed. Soul is
the will only, and is distinct from ideas Existence not
conceivable without perception or volition, not distinguishable there- from. . . . Every idea has a cause, i. e. is produced by a will. ... Say you, there must be a thinking substance — something unknown, whidi perceives, and supports, and ties together the ideas. Say I, Make it appear that there is any need of it, and you shall have it for me. I care not to take away anything I can see the least reason to think should exist'
And so the Principle is turned round and round in Berkeley's musings. He finds himself, under its pressure, resolving Sub> stance and Cause, Space and Time, into modifications and rela* tions of living perception, and of what is sensibly perceived by a living percipient j or into the volitions of a conscious agent, and into their sensible effects.
The Principle banishes scepticism, he thinks, because it means that the real things themselves, and not their supposed effects, or the representations (possibly fallacious) of an unperceived archetypal Something, are what we are conscious or percipient of in the senses : —
' Ideas of sense are the real things or archetypes. Ideas of imagina* tion — dreams, &c., are copies, images of these. . . . Say Des Cartes and Malebranche : God both gives us strong inclinations to think our ideas proceed from bodies, and that bodies do exist. What mean theybf this ? Would they have it that the ideas of imagination are images ofi and proceed from, the ideas of sense ? This is true, but cannot be thdr meaning ; for they speak of ideas of sense proceeding from, being like unto— I know not what I am the farthest from scepticism of any
y THmty^ CoUtg0, DuiUm. 33
mb Ifamrvkkan h^stne kninriedge the ezfitence of other dnngt »;«d M Bf o«B sodL Tfab !■ lAat Locke, nor tcwce aajadier pUl« pfafloiKiplier, win pretend to.*
IW oonuiKm mxffoA^oa: tiiat we actually mt things oistiiig •iAcMt na in an ambient spKe is likely, Berkeley anticipates, to • one great ofaatiuction to an accqitaace oiF the Prind^. Tliis MmlUuu be enoowtets in these aoliloquie^ as one mi^ call ten. In an cnficaa Tariety of waya: —
> The common error of the opticians, that we Jndge (rf* '*'■*■'■" by ngles, strengthens men in their prejudice that diey see things witboot, nd distant from, their mind. . . . Extension to ez^ in a dibig void of
erception a contradiction Extension, dKxi^ it ezilt dnfy \a the
lind, is jet no property of the mind ; the mind can exist witiboot it, liough it cannot without the mind. . . . Tangible and via&le extension eierogeneous, because they have no common measore, and abo because heir simplest constituent parts are specifically different, i e. pmittKm •itibile and langibile. . . . Extension seems to be percrived hf the e^ ts thought by the ear. ... I saw gladness in bis looks; I saw shame n his face. So I see figure or distance.'
Then we have allusions to the theory that thought or meaning pervades the whole sensible world, that an interpretable language is given especially in all visible phenomena: —
' Were there but one and the same language in the world, and did i^dren speak it naturally as soon as born, and were it not in the power )f men to conceal their thoughts or deceive others, but that there were m insuperable connexion between words and thoughts, Qu. Would not oen think that they heard thoughts as much as that they see extension?'
But the antithesis to the Principle, and in Berkeley's eye, the ;reat root of intellectual evil, is the phantom of Abstract Ideas, n ^>stractions and their scholastic verbiage, all the absurdities nd contradictions which retard science and nourish scepticism eemed to him to find cover.
' The chief thing I do, or pretend to do, is only to remove the mist or hi of words. This has occauoned ignorance and confusion. This vou IV. D
34 Life and Letters of Berkeley. [ch.
has ruined the schoohnen and mathematicians^ lawyers and divines. . . . If men would lay aside words in thinking, 'tis impossible they should ever mistake, save only in matters of fact.'
And then, in the more advanced parts, in reviewing what his thoughts have led him to : —
' My speculations have the same effect as visiting foreign countrieSi In the end I return where I was before ; yet my heart at ease, and en* joying myself with more satisfaction. . . . The philosophers lose thdr matter ; the mathematicians lose their insensible sensations ; the profane lose their extended Deity. Pray what do the rest of mankind lose ? As for bodies, we have them still. The future metaphysic and mathematic gain vastly by the bargain. . . . The whole directed to practice and morality, as appears — i. From making manifest the nearness and omnir presence of God ; 2. From cutting oflf the useless labour of sciences and so forth.'
The Common-place Book, from which these examples are arranged, is among the most interesting revelations whidi philosophical biography affords of the rise of reflection in a mind of extraordinary ingenuity and intrepidity. No candid reader will forget that in these records of Berkeley's inner history, at or about the age of twenty, we have the miscellaneous out- pourings of an ardent youth, in rapid intellectual growth, placing on paper, for the writer's own further consideration, the random speculations of the hour, without a thought of their meeting the public eye nearly a hundred and seventy years afterwards. TKat this mathematical and philosophical Miscellany is in all its parts consistent with itself, only vulgar ignorance could anticipate. Those who at all understand the struggles of one young in years, loving truth for its own sake, pregnant with a great thought by which the whole of life and existence seem to be simplified, will pardon some real, as well as some seeming inconsistency in casual memoranda of temporary results reached by the labouring mind. We have the rudiments of the more orderly, if less fresh and outspoken, revelation which was made through the press in the years immediately following.
The Common-place Book helps us also to trace some of Berkeley's reading in his early years at College. His central thought was indeed essentially self-originated. There is internal evidence of
Trinily ColUge, Dublin. 35
we also sec that Locke was the prevailing external
in putting him, as it were, into position for reflection,
he proceeded in his intellectual work on the basis of
italcs which he partly borrowed from Locke, and partly as-
in antagonism to him. In his early philosophy he was
kc's successor, somewhat as Fichte was the successor of Kant.
Ctiticising the Essay on Haman VntiersttniJiwg, he makes Locke
re consistent with himself, and occupiesa position which is partly
immediate consequence of the one his predecessor had taken.
il human knowledge may be analysed into ideas or personal
icnces of things, and that the secondary qualities of matter,
ing irlattvc or muublc, arc only ideas or personal experiences,
the position of Locke. That the primary as well as the
■coodary qualities of Matter, tc^cther with Space and Time, all
like manner relative and mutable, arc sensations, or relations
sensations; and that, thus, Matter, Time, and Space are
:al or phenomenal in their very essence, was the first con-
Bion reached by Berkeley. He was feeling his way to it in
! Ownmon-place Book, and treating Locke as a patron of
diolastic verbalism because he did not receive it.
Many other names as well as Locke's meet us in the Common-
Kc Book. Dzs Cartes, Nlalcbranchc, Hobbes, and Spinoza,
Bcur often J Newton, Barrow, and Wailis, now and then;
cibattz, Le Clerc, Dc Vries, Sergeant, Bayle, Molyncux, and
ooce or twice; seldom the ancients or the schoolmen.
Bcrltclcy's ardour and earnestness of purpose, joined to his ivacious imagination, disposed him to become an author at an if age, and to expose to the criticism of the world the con- epUoo with which he was struggling in these early years at 'riaity College. He first appeared in print in a modest way, short time before he took his Master's d.'grec. Early in 1707, »o tracts— one an attempt to demonstiate arithmetic without help of Euclid or of algebra, and the other consisting of Its on some questions in mathematics, both written in Latin, kI published at London — were attributed on llie title-page to Bubctor of Arts in Trinity College, Dublin. Ever since, and Mrithoal dispute, they have been assigned to Berkeley. They are contained in all the editions of his collected works. And this
36 Life and Letters of Berkeley, [ch.
evidence is now confirmed by various coincidences and corre- sponding passages in the Common-place Book.
One source of more than mathematical interest in these two tracts is the illustration they give of Berkeley's constitutional tendency to what is novel and eccentric — a tendency inseparable, in some d^ree, from every genuine discoverer in science, bat which his characteristic impetuosity was sometimes apt to carry to an extreme that frustrates discovery. They are interest!]^ too for the enthusiasm they show in mathematical studies^ and as an index of Berkeley's knowledge of that science when he was not twenty years of age. Though published in 1707, they were written, as the Preface informs us, nearly three years before — perhaps at an early stage in his studies for a Fellowship. The allusions to Bacon, Des Cartes, Malebranche, Locke, NewtODj Sir W. Temple, and the Philosophical Transactions, confirm what we now know from other sources of the direction of his early reading. The Arithmtthm is dedicated to William Palliser, and the Miscellanea Mathematica to his young friend Samuel Molyneu]^ the son of Locke's friend and disciple.
Three other years elapsed before Berkeley was . prepared to announce to the world the great thought with which we have found him labouring for years. He presented it at first under cover, in a one-sided way — unsatisfactory, even so far as it went The "Essay towards a Nev Theory of Vision^ with Berkeley's name on the title-page, appeared early in 1709. It was an attempt towards the psychology of our sensations, but directed immediately to the most comprehensive sense of all, and intended to eradicate a deeply-rooted prejudice. If it halts in its metaphysics, and if its physiology is defective, it proclaims in psycholc^ what has since been accepted as a great discovery, which involves subtle applications of the laws of mental association in the formation of habits.
The analytic parts of the Essay show the absolute hetero- geneity of what we see and what we touch. The explanation of the synthesis of these heterogeneous elements by means of arbitrary association is its constructive part. In this analysis and theory Berkeley is original in the rigour of his distinction
b
Trinily College^ Dublin.
n
ween the seen and the felt, and also in the extent to which
carries subjective and objective association as a solvent of
UDily which we make and find in individual stones, trees,
^les, and nthcr sensible things. The book is much occupied
illustrating the arbitrariness of association among percepts
sight and touch. It is inferred from this arbitrariness that
hesc associations, commonly called laws of nature, are founded
Supreme Will, and not in materialistic necessity. That the
trious natural laws, of which physical science is the discovery,
the sensible expression of an intending Will is its domi-
|nt conception. Further, that sensible phenomena — those ele-
ients of which sensible things are the associated aggregates, and
which we are assumed to be immediately percipient — may be
nalyscd into minima imslii/iaj which are connected into aggre-
les, not by unperceived substances and causes, but in mind,
d by means of voluntary agency, is undoubtedly the philosophy
lich underlies the Eisaj. A distinct expression of the philo-
>hy is needed, however, in order to make the Esfay obviously
imsistent with itself. Now, this implied philosophy is neither
3TC nor less than the new Principle already privately expressed
the Common-place Book.
In the Essay of 1709, the Berkeleian Principle is applied to sight X not to touch. Tangible phenomena are left in undisturbed of a kind of reality that is inconsistent with it, while irisiblc phenomena arc subjected to its sway. The reason for this partial application of what, if applicable at all, was to ke universally applied, lay probably in Berkeley's unwillingness shock the world with a conception of its own existence inst which he anticipated a storm of opposition. Its actual Hcct has been to expose the New Theory of Vision to criti- JKns not in all cases undeserved. This reserve of a foregone Miclusiun makes Berkeley's first essay on philosophy his least rtistic. Its main conclusion cannot be fully comprehended irttbout the New Principle, and yet the New Principle is held in (Serve. Hence the acute reasoning is apt to lose itself in a taos of details, unrelieved by the ultimate constructive thought pquired to form them into a philosophy.
The question of the Essay comes to this : — What is really meant If our treimg things in ambient space ? Berkeley's answer, when
38 Life and Letters of Berkeley. [ch.
developed, may be put thus: — What, before we reflected, wc had supposed to be a seeing of real things, is not seeing really extended things at all, but only seeing something that is coit- stantly connected with their extension: what is vulgarly called seeing them is in fact reading about them : when we arc every day using our eyes, we are virtually interpreting a book : ¥rtien by sight we are determining for ourselves the actual distances^ sizes, shapes, and situations of things, we are simply translatii^ the words of the Universal and Divine Language of the Senses.
It is of course difficult fully and constantly to realise this, to dissolve the prejudice which obscured it, and to distinguish what we see from the meaning of what we see. But then this difficulty is not peculiar, Berkeley would say, to the visual, or to any other sensible language. It is common to the language of nature with all artificial languages. For instance, it is not found easy to read an intelligible and interesting sentence in a book, in the state of mental vacancy one is in when one reads a sentence ia an unknown language. Yet the connection between visible or audible signs, and their meanings, in any artificial language, is not a constant and universal association. There are hundreds of artificial languages in the world. There is only one visual or natural language. We find it difficult to disentangle the mere signs from their meanings in any of the artificial languages we are acquainted with. We may therefore expect it to be impos- sible (as we find it to be) to separate a visual sign from the signification which universal experience and habit have wrapped up in it. Berkeley's Essay invites us to recognise the differ- ence between the visual sign and its meaning, even when we cannot actually make a separation between them in imagina- tion. It sets before us the visible signs on the one hand, and their meanings on the other. Throughout it is an appeal to reflection and mental experiment. Varieties of colour or coloured extension are the only proper objects of sight. Nothing else can be seen. Now extended colours, together with certain muscular affections in the eye, are, under the arbitrarily estab- lished system of nature, the signs of varieties of felt extension. That is to say, they are signs of what are usually called the rw/ distances, sizes, shapes, and situations of things. Now, our visual experience of quantities and qualities of colour, and of the
0
Trinity College^ Dublin.
organic sensations in the c'^c., is what enables us to foresee, with more or less accuracy, what our experience in feeling and in Bloving our bodies is to be in any particular case. Real dis- iDCc from the eye outwards, as well as real size, shape, uk) situation, are absolutely invisible: we can see their signs only.
All this, according to Berkeley, may be proved intuitively to those who take the trouble to reflect. He announced the dis- covery as one founded on a strict analysis of the facts, the whole fects, and nothing but the facts to which we arc conscious in our sense perceptions. The only difficulties he could find connected with il were, the difficulty of separatii^ what invariable experience has , united in our thoughts, and the difficulty of finding artificial Ian- , piage pure and precise enough to express his meaning. Till we have apprehended this analysis by reflection, however, we have not ' learned our 6ret lesson in the psychotc^ of the senses. When we have done so, he is ready with a theory which treats vision as a Divine Book that contains more surprising and profound lessons than any human book can contain. When we seem to be seeing, we arc really reading an illuminated Book of God, which, in literal truth, is a Book of Prophecy.
This, I think, is the outcome of this juvenile Essay. But 1 its want of artistic unity and completeness, and its dispro- pmttoned digressions and applications^ resulting paitly from Berkeley's inexperience as an author, and partly from the cir- cumstance that the Theory is sustained by a Principle in the ciprcssion of which the author is, I think, restraining himself — make this psychological Essay, in its actual form, an inconvenient introduction to the metaphysical philosophy, for one who is ignorant of Berkeley's great central thought.
It is not here that any critical observations should be offered upon the Theory of Vision, which indeed in 1709 was only partly j developed by Berkeley. One is here looking at this and his other early writings, only as an unfolding of his intellectual life, in modes which must be undersKxx] before its ulterior evolutions can be well comprehended by the analyst of his intellectual character. ! have tried elsewhere, in prefatory observations and subse- quent .annotations, to explain the logical structure of the Essay I Ml yisian. The reader will find that a great part of it is taken
40 Life and Letters of Berkeley. [ch.
up in determining what are the true visible and felt signs of the
real distances, signs, and situations of things, in contrast to
sCMralled * sights' which are not seen at all, but are merely ^suggestions' occasioned by what is visible.
That the Esssy towards s New Theory rf Visiom attracted some attention on its appearance, we may infer from its reaching a second edition before the end of the year. With this pioneer in 1709, Berkeley, in 17 10, in a Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge^ boldly announced the great conception of which for years he had been full.
This book is a systematic assault upon scholastic abstrac- tions, especially upon abstract or unperceived Matter, Space, and Time. It assumes that these are the main cause of confusion and difficulty in the sciences, and of materialistic Atheism. The new Principle, in its various phases and applications, is offered as the effectual means of cleansing the human mind from these abstractions. He finds philosophers all taking for granted the existence of a dead, unperceived, and unimagin- able Something, of indefinite power and capability. They had concealed the intrinsic absurdity of the supposition, by calling its object an abstract idea— something that, as an *idea,' must be knowable in sense and imagination^ but that, as ^abstract,' could only be known with difficulty. Accordingly, as it was with abstract ideas that philosophy was held to be concerned, philosophers invented a number of abstract words, and these words got into general circulation. Then, to this unknown Something, under the name of Matter, they attributed indefinite powers, and under cover of its powers, some of them pretended to explain the human mind, and supposed that all the conscious life in the universe might be accounted for by the dark abstraction. Thus, under the abstractions of Space, Time, and Number, the mathe- maticians, he thought, had lost themselves in doctrines about infinite divisibility, and other forms of words without meaning. Locke's imperfect reformation from Scholasticism, as Berkeley regarded it, added the sanction even of modern philosophy to the hypothesis that unperceived Matter is the cause of our perceptions. He complains, accordingly, that Locke sanctions abstract ideas ^ that he recognises substance, or, as we might
Trinity College, Dublin.
41
, Ae thin
i-itsclf: and
distinguishes this from which alone we see and touch. With ckc, as with philosophers generally, the tliing-in-itself the real thing ; what wc see and touch only an ideal istitute for the real thing. The reality, he tells us, we can rer reach.
tcason itself, Berkeley now proclaims, is at war with these imptions. They are empty words. Reason requires us to irn to what is concrete and to abide there. Beyond this we ftod nothing, because beyond this nothing exists. All that [ts, or can exist, is the mental experience of persons. It must sist of living persons, the ideas or phenomena of which they conscious, the voluntary activity which they exercise, and the •xxs, of that activity. The actual universe must be made up that. Human knowledge of the actual universe is all at last llTcd into that. Whatever is not so resolvable, must be an traction, and therefore a delusion. The common convic- 1 of scientific, and also of unscientific, men about the need causes, and for an ultimate cause, of all actual changes in wotkj are acknowledged by Berkeley as they were before, be asks us to reflect that the universe, regarded as a con- es of eficcts, and in itsultimatecause, consists, and can consist ^ of living persons, the ideas or phenomena which they have, i the ^-oluntary activity which they exercise. It follows that the rrsally acknowledged ultimate cause cannot be the empty traction called Matter. There must be living mind at the root Mind must be the very substance and consistence and of whatever is. In recognising this wondrous Principle, life impti6ed to him; light finds its way into the darkest corner, sciences are relieved from the abstractions which choked them. Igious ftiith in Universal Mind becomes the highest expression leflcctivc reason. This supreme Principle virtually becomes teley's Method of Thought. His first step in philosophy is wm the habit of thinking the universe under its regulation. It how do we know that it is true? This, Berkeley plainly »C3, is not so much to be argued from premisses as accepted 1^ in^iration — through its own intuitive light. 'Some truths aie so near and obvious to the mind,' he says, *that a man ooIjDpen his eyes to sec them.' 'Such,' he adds, ' I take this
42 Life and Letters of Berkeley. [ch,
important one to be — that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind ; that their esse is to be perceived or known ; that, con- sequently, so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind, or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit; it being perfectly unintelligible^ and involving all the mystery of abstraction, to attribute to any single part of them an existence independent of a spirit* That the universe must be the personal experience of living mind is thus proclaimed with all the light and evidence of an axiom.
That the actual phenomena, or Ide^s (as Berkeley calls them) of which the external universe consists are all determined in their co-existences and successions by more or less reasonable volitions; that voluntary activity is the only possible cause of whatever happens; and that the ideal world present in our senses cannot itself contain power or causality, is a phase of the Principle wfaidi is less clearly dealt with by him than the former. It, too, seems, like the other, to be accepted as an intuition of reason, which, on reflection, flashes upon us by inspiration. But here Berkeley avoids an exact statement.
The reader who wants to watch the yoimg Fellow of Trinity College defending and applying his new conception in the presence of the public must study the Principles. It would be difficult to name a book in ancient or modern philosophy which contains more fervid and ingenious reasoning than is here employed to meet supposed objections, or to unfold possible applications to religion and science. An eager spirit glows beneath the calm surface, hardly restrained from undue expression.
The book of Principles published in 1710 is called *Part 1 5' *Part II' never appeared. We can only conjecture what the unfinished design was. Neither the book itself, nor any of Berke- ley's other writings informs us. As *Part I' was dropped from the title-page and the running titles in the later editions, it appears that the design, at least in this form, was abandoned. j
There is, however, philosophical room for a Second Part. Berkeley's book, as we now have it, unfolds his central thought
Trinily College, Dublin.
L its applications to what he ca!!s Utas — in short, to sensible hings. But the theory of mind and its »o//oiw— concerned with msible things, yet distinguished from them — is not made so istinct: it has hardly been expressed, and it is certainly not Forked out. Finite minds, and their personal identity; their elatioos to one another, and to Supreme Mind in which they 1 to participate; the notions of pure intellect — as distin- Mishcd from the original ideas of sense, and the subjective ideas F imagination — are left unexamined. Berkeley's whole doctrine f abstraction, and of the distinction between notions and ideas, I 1710, left in an unsatisfactory state. Whether there arc locreated necessities of thinking, according to which all mental xpericnce of ideas must evolve itself in every mind, is a ijues- lion hardly entertained. That the universe must be substantiated md caused, that cause and substance are relations of knowledge Rjr all minds, and that to say 'all changes must be caused,' is
e way of saying that aU changes must, by an absolute, uncreated necessity, be referred to an intending Will, are assumptions which perhaps Berkeley virtually makes, but without criticism, or the scientihc insight which criticism gives. That Space and Time ■Day also be uncreated necessities of sense perception he does contemplate, for he reduces Space to arbitrary relations of our visual and tactual sensations, and he makes Time (about which his thoughts were first of all employed, he afterwards says) literally consist in changes. He does not inquire critically whether all sensible phenomena must not, by an uncreated ne- cessity, cmci^e as it were in the form of extended things, and •bcthcr all changes must not by a like necessity emerge in the form of successive events.
But it is not fair to apply thought and language which Europe in the nineteenth century owes to Kant, to the state of mind in which Berkeley was in 17 10.
And after al! deduction has been made, the Prineiplts of Human KmamMge -inticipatc later thoughts, found in Hume, or in the Scotch and German reaction against him. Berkeley's theory of fhysical causation anticipates Hum?, while it consummates Bacon, ind opens the way to the true conception of physical induction, iln his account of sense perception, he anticipates the spirit of ihc prescntativc psychology of Reid and Hamilton. And in his
44
Life and Letters of Berkeley.
[CH.
new central conception itself, he more than anticipates the Coper- nican point of view of Kant. But in 1710, the book was too far in advance of an unmetaphysical generation to draw general attention *^
We have no data for determining how long Berkeley was engaged in preparing his psychological Essay on Ftsiamy and his metaphysical book of Principles. His Common-place Book is a sort of magazine of the thought which was gradually worked into the two. This Book, and the manuscript of portions of the Prwr- ciples^ which I have given in another volume, show successive variations of phrase through which his thought passed before it was given to the printer. The date written on the margin of the rough draft of the Introduction to the PrincifieSy seems to imply that he was working at this in November 1708. Fragments in the Common-place Book were no doubt written years before.
^' Yet we have dim anticipations both of Berkeley and of Kant — rather of Kant than of Berkeley, whose new conception is missed — in a hardly remembered work, An Essay upon Reason^ and the Nature o/Spirits, by Richard Burthogge, M.D., London, 1694. The de- sign of this work, announced in the Dedica- tion * to Mr. John Lock, author of the Essay upon Humane Understanding,' is * to show the true way of Human Knowledge, and, by showing that it is real notional, to unite and recondle the experimental or mechanical with the scholastic method.' The union of objects and universais is implied when it is said (pp. 561, &c.) that * in every conception there is something that is purely objective, purely notional ; insomuch that few, if any, of the ideas which we have of things are properly pieturn; our conceptions of things no more resembling them in strict propriety than our words do our conceptions for which they do stand, and with which they have a kind of correspondence and answering ; just as figures do stand for numbers, yet are nowise like
them As the eye has no perceivance
of things but under colours that are not in them (and the same, with due alteration, must be said of the other senses \ so the understanding apprehends not things, or any habitudes or aspects of them, but under cer- tain notions, that neither have their being in objects, or that being of objects that they
seem to have; but are in all respects the very same to the mind or understanding that colours are to the eye .... It is certain that things to us men are nothing but as they do stand in our analogy; that it, in plain terms, they are nothing to us, but as they are known to us ; and as certain, that they stand not in our analogy, nor are known by us, but as they are in our facul- ties— in our senses, imagination, or mind; and they are not in our faculties, either in their own reality, or by way of a true re- semblance or representation, but only in respect of certain appearances or sentiments, which, by the various impressions that they make upon us, or cause, or (which is moit probable) concur in causing with onr lactit- ties. Every cogitative faculty, though it is not the sole cause of its own immediate (apparent) object, yet has a share in making it .... In sum, the immediate objects oc cogitation, as it is exercised by men, are eniia eogitationiSf all phenomena; appear- ances that do no more exist without ovi faculties in the things themselves than the images that are seen in water, or behind a glass, do really exist in those places where
they seem to be In truth, neither
accident nor substance hath any being but only in the mind, and by the virtue of cogitation or thought.' See Chap. III. V.
>
Trinity College, Dublin. 45
ic design of the frindpUs and the Exfi*/, either as parts of one
the same work, or as separate treatises, was probably in his
ind when he obtained his Fellowship in 1707.
Berkeley's leading thought and method were published when he
was your\g. Some of his philosophical predecessors and successors
resemble him in this, but none to the same degree. Dcs Cartes pro-
bced his great philosophical writings soon after he was forty. Spi-
\ announced his philosophy still earlier, and died soon after be
forty. Hume's greatest work of speculation appeared when he
twenty-seven. Berkeley offered his philosophy at an earlier age
ban any of these. In (aa, his is the most extraordinary instance
original reflective precocity on record. Locke, in contrast with
kis, was hardly known as an author till he was almost sixty, and
Lant was about the same age when he published the first of the
great critical works which contain his philosophy. The
politics of tile precocious philosophers are obviously different from
sc of the others. If ardent precocity has succeeded in burning
way more into the heart of things, the more tardy, phlegmatic,
•ad sober are usually more attentive in their reasonings to the
imitations and compromises of our human condition.
Berkeley's book oiPrindplet was a sort of cliallenge to the philo- Pphical world. E>ublin contained few who were likely to listen I it. The austere theological philosopher who had governed 'rinity College, was translated to the diocese of Cork and Ross youX the very time the book appeared. If he read it he was not onvertcd by it. The judicious philosophical divine who was then krchbLshup of Dublin was not likely to adopt the paradoxically {pressed and revolutionary conception of a Junior Fellow. Bcr- ardour as a discoverer made him anxious to gain a hearing. lot satisfied with the provincial audience of Ireland, he courted opinion of the great men in London. He sent copies of his book to Samuel Clarke, the most eminent contemporary losopfaical theologian, and to Whiston, the friend of Newton, then occupied Newton's chair at Cambridge. Whiston has uoatcly commemorated the circumstance in his Memoirs of ■it. *Mr. Berkeley,' he says, ' published, in 1710, at Dublin, mctap^ysick notion — that Matter was not a real thing; nay,
I
46 Life and Letters of Berkel^, [ctt
that the common opinion of its reality was groundless, if not ridiculous. He was pleased to send Dr. Clarke and myself each of us a book. After we had both perused it, I went to Dr. ClarkCi and discoursed with him about it to this effect : That I [being not a metaphysician] was not able to answer Mr. Berkeley^ [subtle] premises, though I did not believe his [absurd] conclusion. I therefore desired that he, who was deep in such subtleties, but did not appear to believe Mr. Berkeley's conclusion, would answer him. Which task he declined.* (p. 133.)
The challenge of the young Dublin philosopher was not ac- cepted. The mathematical Whiston treated it as a mere mathematician might be expected to do, except that he had more candour than most of his class, in supposing that it de- served an answer, and more modesty in seeing that he couU not answer it himself. What Clarke's answer, if he sent one to Berkeley, might have been, we may suppose from the only rele- vant passage in his writings. S^ven years later, in his ReMuris on Collins on Human Uherty^ Clarke writes thus, and we may take what he writes as the substitute for a lost letter to Berkeley in acknowledgment of his book : — * The case [the fact of free agency] is exactly the same as in that notable question. Whe- ther the World exists or no. There is no demonstration of it from experience. There always remains a bare possibility that the Supreme Being may have so framed my mind, as that I shall always be necessarily deceived in every one of my perceptions, as in a dream, though possibly there be no mate- rial world, nor any other creature existing, besides myself. Of this I say there always remains a bare possibility. And yet no man in his senses argues from thence, that experience is no proof to us of the existence of things The bare physical possi- bility of our being so framed by the Author of nature, as to be unavoidably deceived in this matter by every experience of every action we perform, is no more any just ground to doubt the truth of our Liberty, than the bare natural possibility of our being all our lifetime as in a dream deceived in our belief of the existence of the Material World is any just ground to doubt of the reality of its existence.* [Remarks^ pp. 20, 24.)
In short, the principle which Berkeley had applied to illustrate how immediate our knowledge of sensible things is, and the impos-
Trinily College^ Dublin. 47
tticism about them, was construed by Clarke into a ; assumption that our whole experience in the senses The New Piinciple had a sorry prosp;ct in that century, when its application to the material world thus reversed at the outset by tlie most metaphysical English lor of the time. Whether Malebranche, the great contemporary rench metaphysician, also received 'a book' we are not informed. Clarke's deification of space in his famous work of metaphysical tology was a bar to his candid entertainment of the conception It space is only a part of the sensible creation of God, we could idly expect the aged French philosopher to surrender the reasonings 3 life in behalf of an unperceived external world, or to forego B resolution of all power — human as well as physical — into ioe, OR the suggestion of a juvenile essay which accepted existence of sensible things without proof, by simply explain- wbat their existence means, and in which the free agency of \ was a fundamental principle.
The year in which the Btiay on Vuion was published was the year . which its author first appeared in a new character. On the % of February, 1709, Berkeley received ordination as Deacon in t old chapel of Trinity College. He was ordained by Dr. St.
icorge Ashe, Bishop of Cloghcr, of whom we shall hear again. t was presented by Nicholas Forster, a Senior Fellow {afler- ifds Bishop of Raphoe, and the uncle as it happened of his future fcj, who vouched for his learning and good character. Six other
uulidates were ordained on the same Sunday. I have not discovered when or where Berkeley received Priest's dcrs. As there is no record of this in Dublin, it may be sup- Gcd that it was not within that province.
Wc have no account of wliat his thoughts were in becoming I official teacher of religion. It would be interesting to discover rm. Unobtrusive practical piety is apparent throughout his life, A fcvf in the annals of the Oirislian ministry have preserved cmselvcs freer from ecclesiastical and professional bias, or have jrc successfully maintained, among many temptations, the love
'tiuth as a 'chief passion' from the beginning to the end of this
urtal life. The Christian ministry, ancient, mediieval, and
48 Life and Letters of Berkeley. [ch.
modern, has engaged more than one of those who rank in tbe bright chapters of the history of philosophy — with whom theology is the highest form of philosophy, and the reverential spirit of religion its noblest consecration. We have Origen and St. Augustin, Abelard and Aquinas, according to the light of their own times; Malebranche and Fenelon, Cudworth and Berkeley in the full tide of modem life. The last is perhaps the most distinct example.
Berkeley's ecclesiastical service about this time was confined to an occasional sermon in the College Chapel. He seems to have delivered there what is called a common-place more than once even before he was ordained, a custom permitted in that University. As a preacher his discourses were care- fully reasoned, and in beautifully simple language they occa- sionally present great thoughts, without any marked theological bias.
Three characteristic common-places, delivered probably in 171 1, and published in the following year, as a Discourse of Passive Obt£enci^ constitute something to our knowledge of the history of Berkeley's mind. This tract is a closely argued defence of the Christian duty of not resisting the supreme civil power, wherever placed in a nation. We have found Berkeley working as a reflective analyst of human knowledge, with a view to its purification, and to its being re-animated with religious trust and reverence. We now see him as a Christian teacher of political morals, working out logically his own notion of the constructive or conservative prinr ciple in society. The fervid consecutiveness which in the Prw- ctpUs of Human Knowledge applied Berkeley's conception of what external Existence means, is here not less conspicuous in unfolding his conception of the basis of Society, and of our duty as members of a social organism. Locke's two treatises on Government turned his attention to the subject, in its connection with the general principles of morals, which his Common-place Book shows that he had long been ruminating.
In this Discourse^ Berkeley is a philosophical advocate of hi^ Tory principles. In the supreme civil power he sees mcMfC than the mere creature of popular desires: it is not the result of an arbitrary compact among the governed. There is some- thing deeper and truer than this unhistorical fiction in the
Uj Trinity CoUtgi, DiOUn. 49
tcart of every Nation. There is a law of or6tt and justice vliich originates in the conceptioe of the happiness of the living petsoos who constitute the universe^ and belongs to the uncreated Knstitution of the Supreme, while it is shared by his creatures. 'nils conception, tlius derived, forms with him the principle. of moral obligation. Our obligatioas in particular cases are discovered by an induction of the tendencies of actions to pro> mote the general welfare of men; and, among the general rules » established, Don-rcsistance to the ultimate depository of civil aathority is, he argues, one of the diie£ The fluctuating- pcpilar desire is not that depository; nor is it necessarily to be found in the claims of an arbitrary monarch. The particular nature of the government aod constitution in eadi nation is foreign to his inquiry, The though which runs throuj^ lus words is, that the supreme power in every society lies deeper than these accidents, and is sonething bef^ whidi people and king alike should pause reverentially: it is the ordinance of God: Government is of divine ri^it.
If the intellectual philosophyof Berkeley iriien he was at Trinity Qdkge was a Theolc^ical Sensationalism, his moral and social phi- losophy was a Theological Utilitarianism— each in curious anal<^ with the other, and both the expressions of the same deeply religious spirit. The IXseeurse an Passive Oteditmte leaves room for plenty of casuistry about individual duty in revolutionary times. But it ilhistiates Berkeley's inclination to determine questions on broad grounds of reason and conscience, and not by local and ephemeral considerations. It points to a philosophical field above Toryism and Liberalism, where those superior to party on either side may Djeet, And it suggests one of Berkeley's own latest thoughts — 'Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human mind, and the summuta hpnum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a lorry patriot and a sorry statesman".'
These common-places on political morality gave rise to .a notion that Berkeley was in the interest of the exiled Stuart lamily. Non-resistance and passive obedience were then asso- ciated with Jacobttism, and supported in Queen Anne's reign in Nonjurist tracts and pamphlets. Two years before he delivered " Siru, «ect. 350. vol.. IV. E
50
Life and Letters of Berkeley.
[CH.
his common-places in the College Chapel at Dublin, Sacheverell had preached his notorious sermons at Derby and in St. Paul's. Sachevereirs trial had raised a hot controversy and turned out a Whig ministry. It is not very surprising that the Dublin sermons should in these circumstances have given rise to suspicion. The ^ false accounts that were gone abroad' regarding their meaning were mentioned by him as a reason for publishing the D^xrMnf. The publication does not seem to have put an end to the rumours Years afterwards his political opinions were referred to by Lwd Galway as an objection to his claim for ecclesiastical promotioo, and the sermons on Passive Obedience were vaguely mentioned in confirmation. But Berkeley could not be a mere party politidan, and his loyalty to the House of Hanover was attested by Samuel Molyncux, who is said to have first introduced him to the Princess of Wales, and to have produced the Discourse^ as a proof that its author taught nothing disloyal. It kept him, however, for a while in the shade i^.
" The Berkeley Papers contain what seems to be a draft or sketch of a letter written by Berkeley to a friend. It is entitled Tbougbh on Alliances in War. Its tone is not that of the Jacobite party, about this time, on the subject of which it treats; and while its poli- tical morality is lofty, its diplomatic tact is deficient. It does not appear who the friend was for whom it was intended. It seems to have been written, however, about 1 71 a. It refers to the * Union with Hanover ' as future ; and the question with which it deals was one discussed in the years which pre- ceded the Peace of Utrecht. The following are some passages : — •Sir, I do not wonder that you or any true Englishman should be no less jealous for the honour than for the safety of his country, and offended at anything which has the face of baseness or treachery, however advan- tageous it may be thought to the Public; nor, by consequence, that you should scru- pulously inquire into the justice of a separate Peace, as being apprehensive the necessity of our affairs, together with the backwardness of the allies, may oblige our Ministry to enter upon some such measures. . . .
[Berkeley then, after deprecating the task of giving an opinion on a subject he is not acquainted with, and sa3ring that he feels
himself obliged to comply with the com* mands of his friend % adds that he will pre all the satisfaction he is able by lajring down some general tl eorems and reasonings vpcn the sacredness of Treaties and Alliances, tad considering when, or on what accounts tbcy may be broken without guilt.] . . .
I lay it down in the first place for a fooda- mental axiom, that no Law of . . . ought to be violated ether for the obtaining any advantage or [escaping any] inconvenicnoe whatever. . . .
From these principles it cletily foDom that Public Faith ought not to be sacrificed to private regards, nor even to the moK pressing wants of a whole People. The violation therefore of a compact with foreign nations can never be justified on any preteatt of that kind. Hence one nation havii^ solemnly entered into articles of aDiaiicc with another, in case they af^erwardi per* ceive it highly for their advantage to bieak the«e articles ; yet a breach upon that looit must certaitily be looked upon as unjust and dishonourable. Nor doth it alter the case that the Alliance having been made under 1 former Ministry is disliked and condemned by the succeeding. For though the admini- stration of affairs pass through several hndi, yet the Prin' e and the nation continue stiB the same ; every Ministry therefore is in dotj
* He says this friend had an exact knowledge of our engagements and interests. He was therefore probably connected with the Minis^y.
"•]
Trinity College^ Dublin.
51
After this publication, Berkeley again becomes almost invisible for a time. He had been nominated a Sub-Lecturer in 1710^^, and was elected Junior Dean in November of that year, and again in
boood to presenre sacred and entire the foith and honoor of their Prince and country by standing firm to all alliances contracted ooder former Ministries. Bnt with this dif- ference, that in case the erils attending soch an alliance shaD appear to be fortuitous, or ■idi at, at the making of it, could not have been foreseen, then tfie conditions of that disadrantageotts alliance ought to be fulfilled at the public charge ; whereas if the Treaty shall appear originally and in itself preju- dicial to the Public, then the fortunes of tboae ministers who made it ought to go to- wards defira3ring the expenses which, through mhnesi or treachery, they had engaged their country in.
Hitherto I hare proceeded on the sup- position that the foundations of the Alliance were jnst, or included nothing contrary to the bws of Nature and Religion. But in case screral States enter into an agreement for commencing and carrying on war upon wjust motives, no sooner shall any of those Slates be satisfied of the injustice of the cause on which the alltame is grounded, but they may with honour look upon themselves as disengaged from it. For example, sup- pose a parcel of Popish Potentatts shou'd, oat of a pretence of doing right to the Pre- tender, engage in a war for placing him on the throne of Great Britain and some one of them was afterwari's convinced. . . . [Here the MS. is defective and almost illegible.]
It is also to be esteemed an unwarrantable procedure in case divers Potentates enter into a confederate war against an adjacent State for no other reason but because they apprehended it may otherwise become too powerful, and consequently too formidable a ne:ghb<»ur. For examp'e. suppose the Dutch, jeaion$ of that accession of strength to the British nation which will follow upon its nnion with Hanover, should engage them- selves or friends in a war in order to force us to alter our Succession ; we would, I pre- surne. think this unlawful, and that it was the duty of any one of the confederates, so soon as he became sensible of the injustice of his cause, to cease from all hostilities, and (iu cas>e his all'es were for continuing them) to enter into a separate peace with us. 1 he truth of these positions is plain from the two principles at fiist laid down.
Further, it cannot be denied that one party may. without consent of the rest.
break off from an alliance in war originally founded on honourable motives, upon con- viction that the ends for which the war was begun are sufficiently answered ; although his allies, whether blinded by passicx) or find- ing their advantage in carrying on the war, should not concur with him in the same judgment. For it is no excuse for a man's acting against his conscience that he made a bargain to do so. Youll demand what must be thought in case it was a fundamental article of the alliance, that no one party should hearken to proposals of peace without con- sent of the rest. I answer that any such engagement is in itself absolutdy void, for- asmuch as it is sinful, and what no Prince or State can lawfully enter into, it being in effect no less than binding themselves to the commission of murder, rapine, sacrilege, and of violence, so long as it shall seem good to . . . what else I beseech you is war ab- stracted from the necessity . . . but a com- plication of all these ' [MS. defective.]
In a P.S. Berkeley adds — * Another indis- putable case there is which absolves a party from fulfilling the conditions of any contract, namely, when those with whom the con- tract was made fail to perform their part of it. Lastly, in case two or more States, for their mutual security, enter into a league to deprive a neighbouring Prince of sonic part of his possessions and add them unto those of another in order to constitute a ballance of Power. Allowing the grounds whereon the war is founded to be just, yet if, during the progress of the war, the Prince whose territories were to be enlarged shall by some unexpected turn, grow far more great and powerful than he was at the making of the treary, it should seem the afToresaid States are disengaged from their contiact to each other, which, having been originally by all parties introduced and understood only as a means to obtain a ballance of Power, can never be of force to oblige them to act for a direct contrary purpose.'
" Berkeley's nunc is last on the list of those nominated Sub-Lecturers, from which we may infer that he had to lecture the First (lass, now called ' Junior Freshmen.* A principal part of his duty would be to expound Porphyry's Introduction, and to examine Students on the text, as well as to lecture his own pupils privately. The duties of Sub-Lecturers and Tutors were defined bv Statute.
E 2
52
Life and Letters of Berkeley.
[CH.
November 171 1. Though all who have written about him seem unaware of it, he visited England in 1712, apparently for the first time. The College Registry records that in March of that year ' Mr. Berkeley's health and necessary business requiring his longer stay in England, the Vice-Provost and Fellows have thought fit to continue his leave of absence for two months longer.' In May, ' Mr. Berkeley being still in England for the recovery of his health, his leave of absence is continued.' He must have returned before winter, for in November he was elected Junior Greek Lecturer, and the entries show that he borrowed a book from the Library ^ in December ^^
Berkeley was a Tutor in Trinity College from 1707 to 1724, though only nominally after 1711 or 171a. According to Stock, Samuel Molyneux was one of his pupils. That this youth, who took his Bachelor's Degree in 1708, was one of his intimates, is proved by the Dedication of the Miscellanea Mathematical But I do not find in the College Records that he was a pupil of Berkeley's, who seems to have had only five pupils while he was Tutor — three Fellow Commoners and two Sizars ". Their names, with the dates of their entrance, are as follows: — Nov. 17, 1709, Thomas Bligh, F.C.; May 29, 1710, David Bosquet, Siz.; Jan. 18, 17 1 1, Arthur Dawson, F.C.; June 29, 1711, Michael Tisdal, F.C; June 14, 1 7 14, Michael Wall, Siz. None of these names are known to fame, nor can we tell how Bligh and Bosquet^ Dawson and Tisdal, long since forgotten, were aflFected by daily inter- course with one who was then producing thoughts which have since determined the course of European speculation.
In 171 2, Berkeley had been for five years a Junior Fellow and
" It is interesting to note the names of books borrowed by Berkeley from the Li- brary in these years, recorded in the Loan Book: —
1 707 A Treatisi on Human Reason.
1 709 Grotius, De Jure Belli et Pacts.
171a, Jan. Philip de Comines.
El^mens de Matbimatique.
Quinctilian.
Hebrew Bible.
Cartesii Oeometria.
Ludovici Grammaiici Condones.
^schines, &c., Latine.
Barrow's Sermons.
Hebrew Bible, Tom. HI.
iBschines, &c., Orationes,
171a, Dec. Vossius, De Historicis Laiims.
'* He is marked * non-co.' on the Buttery Books from 1711 to 1721. This muk is not absolute proof of absence, for in those days the Provost sometimes exerted his pre- rogative of giving Junior Felk>ws and Scholars the money compensation for tber commons, even when they were resident in College. But it is singular that Berkeley should have been elected Junior Dean, when so marked, because a part of the Dean's duty is to dine in Hall.
'^ The Sizars were at that time nominated by the Tutors. The last entry is no proof that Berkeley was resident in College in 1714.
^1
Trimly ColUge^ Du6Un.
53
Tolor, besides holding, during part oS that time, the offices of SUb-Lectnrery Junior Greek Lecturer, and Junior Dean. His con* sequent duties were considerable, and besides, he occasionally oHiriafrd in tiie CoU^e ChapeL His academical emoluments, anminal|y small, are not to be measured by the present value of HKMiey* The salary of a Junior Fellow was then ten pounds, and of a Junior Dean ei^ pounds. As Sub-Lecturer he had eight ponds more. But, including his fees as Tutor, his emoluments pobaUy did not exceed forty pounds a^year, a sum which may be twmsbtrd into periiap^ a hundred and fcMty when estimated bf onr standard. His private resources were, I should think, seamy, and his philosophical publications cannot have added mudi to them ».
Same of Berkeley's time in 1712 was given, we may surmise, to ficparing the beautiful Bimhgues in which, in the following year^ he son^ to reconunend his new conception of sensible things Id the fiteiary world and to common readers, who might be fepdled by the systematic form, and the unrelieved reasonings of the FrMfks ff Hmmmm Knowledge.
He was now to enter a wider world of life, with which the tranquil speculations of philosophy were perhaps less in harmony than the one described in this chapter.
'^ I am faroored by theRer. Dr. Dickson, the learned Librariao, with the following note of Salaries in Trinity College, Dublin, in 1676 aod 1733: —
Salaries in 1676.
Provost Senior Fellow Jonior Fellow Native Scholar Other Scholar Caiecfaist
£joo
30 10
3 I
20
o o o o
5 o
o o o o o o
Angmenta-
tions made
July 19,
1722.
£176 o o
18
5
1
6 8
o o
o o
5 o
Senior Dean i6
Junior Dean 8
Senior Lecturer 1 6 Sub-Lecturer 8
Bursar 20
Auditor lo
Librarian 8
Kitchen allowance 1 ^
for each Fellow ) Kitchen allowance 1
for each Scholar ] ^
o o o o o o o
o o o o o o o
IS 6
II
4
2
4
12 30
n
7
o o o o o 6 o
o o o o o 8 o
4^ 13 4
2 12 5
» 4 5
The annual fee paid by Fellow Commoners to the Tutor was £4. Sizars paid nothing.
CHAPTER III.
ENGLAND, FRANCE, AND ITALY. 1713— 172I.
On an April Sunday, in 17 13, Berkeley appeared at the Court of Queen Anne in the company of Swift. The Journal to StelU^ that curious revelation of Swift's brilliant connection with the political and literary world of London from September 17 10 till June 1 713, contains the following entry :—' April 12, [1713] — I went to Court to-day on purpose to present Mr. Berkeley, one of our Fellows of Trinity College, to Lord Berkeley of Stratton* That Mr. Berkeley is a very ingenious man and great philosopher, and I have mentioned him to all the ministers, and have given them some of his writings^ and I will favour him as much as I can. This, I think, I am bound to — in honour and conscience to use all my little credit towards helping forward men of worth in the world.'
It is probable that before Swift left Ireland, in 1710, Berkeley was not unknown to him, though from the way in which he is here mentioned one can hardly suppose that he had been a fre- quent visitor at Laracor. The origin of their acquaintance, which helped in several ways to shape Berkeley's course, can only be conjectured. Swift was a generous and steady friend, though his * severe sense' could scarcely appreciate the peculiar merit of this 'great philosopher's' writings. Berkeley's * Passive Obedi- ence,' and his 'duty of not resisting the supreme civil power,* however, were no unwelcome watchwords for the political friend and adviser of Oxford and Bolingbroke. Perhaps, too, the memory of long past days on the bank of the Nore, in the 'famous school' of Kilkenny, might have had its influence with Swift. At any
London.
^OT^Ook the lead in introducing the
young
Dublin Fellow
the great in letters and in rank.
On the i6th of April, four days after Berkeley was presented at Court to his kinsman. Lord Berkeley of Stratton, his name again app^an in Swiffs diary. Swift had been visiting Lady Masham in the mornings and receiving her condolences on his approach- ing banishment to St. Patrick's, the only reward the Tories could jivc him in return for his perversion and his pen. He was * never more moved than to sec so much friendship,' He would not stay with her that day, but 'went and dined with Dr. Ar- buthr>ot, and with Mr. Berkeley, one of your Fellows, whom I have iccommendeil to the doctor, and to Lord Berkeley of Stratton.* And on the list of April.amid Swift's fluctuations of feeling about tlic deanery of St. Patrick's, he 'dined in an alehouse with Pamell and Berkeley;' not being in humour to go among the ministers, tbou^ Lord Dartmouth had invited him to dine with him, and Lwd Treasurer was to be there. He had told them he would do so if he were ' out of suspense.'
Swift was put out of suspense a few days after. Early in June he was at Chester, 'after a ride of six days from London, pre- paring to proceed to Holyhead and Dublin, condemned again to Btc in Ireland, but intending to return to London 'before winter.' His enforced residence afterwards in his native island left him free to apply his early principles of liberty, and his stfoog patriotic feeling, to rouse resentment against the wrongs of his country.
The Jvtmal to Stella^ in that spring of 1713, reveals in its minute details the London life into which Swift introduced Berkeley. Let us look through this faithful medium a little at what was then going on. A few days before Berkeley's name appears. Swift was 'at the rehearsal of Mr. Addison's play called Cato,' where his friend Dr. Ashe, Bishop of Clt^hcr, was too, but 'privately in a gallery.' On the ist of April he Rcords that 'Steele has begun a new daily paper called the GmarJi^B 1 they say good for nothing. I have not seen it.' In March, 'Pamell's poem was mightily esteemed, but poetry sells ill. Mr. Pope has published a tine poem called Windsor Forest' On one day he walked to Chelsea to see Dr. Attcrbury, then Dean of Christ Cliurch; on another day he saw the Bishop of Clogher at
4
56 Life and Letters of Berkeley. [ch. -
Court. Again, he dines with the Duke of Ormond and Sir Thomas Hanmer. Sir Thomas was the most considerable man in the House of Commons. He was, it seems, much out of humour with things, and thought the Peace was kept off too long, and was full of fears and doubts. People thought he was designed for Secretary of State, instead of Lord Dartmouth. An evening is spent with Dr. Pratt and the Bishop of Clogher, and they * play at ombre fbr threepence.' On another day, while he is at dinner at Lord Treasurer's, with some of the Sixteen Brothers, a servant an- nounces that Lord Peterborough is at the door. Lord Treasurer and my Lord Bolingbroke go out to meet him, and bring him in. He is just returned from abroad, where he has been for above a year. When he sees Swift, he leaves the Duke of Ormond and the other lords, and runs and kisses him before he speaks to them. He is at least sixty, and has more spirits than any young fellow in England. After church, on another Sunday, Swift showed the Bishop of Clogher at Court ' who is who.' The Bishop, it seems, had taken his lodgings in town for the winter. There were in town abundance of people from Ireland — 'half a dozen Bishops at least.* 'Poor Master Ashe has a redness in his face; it is St. Anthony's fire.' Then he dines with Lady Oxford, and sits with Lord Treasurer, who shows him a letter from an unknown hand, relating to Dr. Peter Browne, Bishop of Cork, recommending him to a better bishopric somewhere else. But the Bishop of Cork remained where he was. Again, after a Sunday at Court — ^'I make no figure at Court, where I affect to turn from a lord to the meanest of my acquaintance. I love to go there on Sundays to see the world. But, to say the truth, I am growing weary of it I presented Pratt to Lord Treasurer, and young Molyneux would have had me present him too, but I directly answered him, I would not, unless he had business with him. He is the son of Mr. Molyneux of Ireland. His father wrote a book. I suppose you know it.' On another day he meets * Mr. Addison and pastoral Philips on the Mall,' and takes a turn with them; but they both looked terribly dry and cold. ' A curse of party.* Then Dr. Cog- hill and he dine by invitation at Mrs. Van.'s. After a dinner somewhere else, the company parted early, but Freind, Prior, and Swift sat a while longer and * reformed the State.' Again at Court, but nobody, it seems, invited him to dinner, except one or
sl] LandoH. 57
two iriiom he did not care to dine witii. So he dined with Mrs. VaniKMnrig^.
He fiad been livix^ tibus tiiroa^ montibs and years of political iBtf%iie amoi^ tlie Sixteen ftottiers, and oS literary gossip at BMDn*% or now in the ScriUems Chib.
ft was some time in the wet and dreary spring of 1713^ Utat the fhilosojphical enthusiast dl Trinity College found his wwf fiom Dublin, probably through f]oI]rhead and Chester^ to IxMidon. We can only conjecture the motives of his journey. Hie Qdlqge minute reports ill healdu Peihaps^ too, he wanted to see tile world. He may have been moved by literary ambttkm; or by the zeal of a j^osophical missionary, bent on getting peof^e to conceive tiie material universe according to his owanewwayofthinking about it. We have no record c^his arrival, er how he looked at London, which was tiien speculating about die Peace of Utredit, or admiring its new catiiedral dl St. VmYs. His arrival may have been a montii or two before tiie April morning ; on wfaich, in S wiftfs company, he made his appearance at the Court ef Qgeen Anne. Before April came he was writing essays against Ae Free-thinkers, in the ^new paper called the GuarMan^ and he seems already to have found his way into some of the free- thinking clubs as an observer. Steele commenced the Guardian on the 1 2th of March in that year, soon after the temporary cessation of the Spectator^ and the new paper was abruptly dropped in a little more than six months. Berkeley's connection with it as a con- tributor seems to have extended from the 14th of March to the 5th of August, when he contributed fourteen essays. These essays are now contained for the first time in an edition of Berkeley's works.
Probably the Junior Fellow of Trinity was not unwilling to earn bread by his pen, as well as to tell the world what was deep in his thoughts. Each essay brought him a guinea, and also a dinner from his countryman Steele, perhaps among the wits at Button's,
^ By rqwrt that spring in London was *It is rainy again; never saw the like'
a reiy wet one. Swift, among others, (April 6). * It rains every day ' (April lo).
records it. * Terrible rain all day ' (March And on July ao, Pope writes to Addison,
99V. 'I have fires still, though April *I am more joyed at your return than I
is begun, against my old maxim ; but the should be at that of the sun, so much as I
weather is wet and cold. I never saw wish for him in this melancholy wet season.'
such a long mn of ill weather in my life' (Aiken's Lxf9 0/ Addium^ vol. II. p. 9a.) - (April a). * It rained aU day * (April 4).
58 Life and Letters of Berkeley. [cH.
or in his country cottage on Haverstock Hill. Berkeley, we are told, never spoke or thought highly of Steele's ability. But he regarded him as ^a man of uncommon good nature, and more witty in conversation than any peison he had ever seen^.*
About the time of Berkeley's arrival in London, Anthony Collins, a gentleman of good family in Essex, under forty years of age, had attracted the talk of the town, and roused the theo- logical world, by a Discourse of FrU'thmksngy occasioned by the rise mU growth of a Sect called Free-thinkers^ which was published in Feb- ruary, 1713. Ten years before, Locke, then at Oates in Essex, was in affectionate correspondence with this Essex gentleman, in whom the venerable philosopher thought he found a candour and ingenuousness superior to almost any of his contemporaries. Soon after Locke's death^ Collins got involved in theological con* troversy. He supported Dodwell against Clarke, by reasoningi which Swift has preserved for ridicule in Martinus Scriblerus. In 1709 he published a tract against priestcraft; and in the follow- ing year he attacked King, the Archbishop of Dublin, for his sermon on predestination and foreknowledge. And now, in this Disconrse^ he boldly took for granted that all believers in supernatural revelation must be hostile to free inquiry. Berkeley may have met Collins in the course of this season in London. In the society of that time, Steele and Addison, and all who mixed freely with the wits and politicians, might be found in their private hours in femiliar intercourse with persons who openly avowed that they had abandoned Christianity. Berkeley is reported to have said that, being present in one of the deistical clubs in the pretended character of a learner, he was informed that Collins had an- nounced himself as the discoverer of a demonstration against the existence of God ^K
The exclusive claim to free inquiry made by the ^Free- thinkers ' roused the indignation of Berkeley. In those essays in the Guardian he appears as a free-thinking Anti-free-thinker. His simplicity and earnestness, as well as his subtle imagination, refined humour, and sarcasm, are seen in his contributions The author of the Principles of Human Knowledge^ and of the Discourse of Passive Oiedience appears in the new character of a
■ Biografbia Britatmiea, vol. III. — * Ad- » Chandler's Lift 0/ Johnson, p. 57.
denda and Corrigenda.'
Londom.
59
contributor to popular periodical litEiature, trying to describe the believer in God and iaunortality t^ contrasts witli. the ao^ believer in both. It was his first act- in a omtFoversy to whidi ite long afterwards rtturned>
Through Swirt and Steele^ Berlcelejr 9000 found his way annng other men of Queen Anne's ttme. In this summer of 1713, Pope was still living at Binlield, ""^wg the ^ades of Windsor, but he was no doubt to be found in llie neig^ibourhood of St. James's, ' or in his favourite cofFee-house at Covent Garden. Berlceleyand the young poet must have been soon bnx^t togetlwr, and we find them in correspondence in the foUtnidng winter. Swift had intro- duced him to his kinsman the Eael of Berlceley, and by the Earl he was sometime after introduced to Atterbtu7. The story of their meeting is well known*. Atttrbuiy, having beard niudi of Berkeley, wished to see him. Accordingly he was introduced to the Bishop by the Earl. After some time the other quitted the room, and when Lord Berkeley said to the Biabq), *Does my cousin answer your lonUiip^ expectations?* Atterbuiy, lifting up his hands in astonishment, replied, *So much under- standing, so much knowledge, so much innocence, and such humility, I did not think had been the portion of any but angels till I saw this gentleman."
Berkeley now met the serene and cheerful Addison, as well as the warm and impulsive Steele, and the sensitive, fastidious poet of Binfield. Nor was he confined to poets. At the instance of Addison, a meeting. Stock says, was arranged with Clarke, the metaphysical divine, to discuss the reality of the existence of Sensible things. Berkeley was believed to profess the monstrous paradox that sensible things do not exist at all ; and his philosophy, naturally, was becoming an object of ridicule to the wits *. Great hopes were entertained of the issue of this meeting. But the parties separated without coming nearer than when they met; and Berkeley is reported to have complained that his anta- gtmist, though he could not answer his arguments, bad not the candour to acknowledge himself convinced.
* Sn Hugbo' I^Utn, id. II. p. l.
* So Brown, long ifier thu — bt nnqoiih Beikalc]' with agrin.'
6o Life afid Letters of Berkeley. [ch.
In 1 7 13, Clarke was preaching, in the parish church of St. James'Si , Westminster, those discourses of clear and strong argumentative texture many volumes of which have descended to us in print Nine years before, he had delivered, in the cathedral church of ■ St. Paul, that famous Demonstratiom of the Being and ^ttrihaes ef Gody with which Berkeley must have been acquainted, and which | attracted the ablest thinkers of his time. In the autumn of 17131 j the Demanstrattm brought Clarke into contact with young Joseph Butler, afterwards author of the Analogy^ whose letters, with Clarke's rejoinders, form a correspondence unmatched in its kind in English philosophical literature. Perhaps on some Sunday, not long after his arrival in London, the Dublin Junior Fellav ; might have been found in the parish church of St. James's. Wc '. do not know when or where Clarke and Berkeley first met The meeting, said to have been arranged by Addison, may ha?e ' occurred in 17 13, or in either of the two following years. It cannot have been later, for Addison died in 1719, when Berkeley had been for years abroad.
Among his other occasional associates in the summer of 1713 were Arbuthnot, the London wit and Scotch doctor at the Court of Queen Anne, the poets Gay and Parnell, Dr. John Frcind, the ' eminent English physician, and his brother Dr. Robert Freindi the learned head master of Westminster School. Matthew Prior, | the poet and diplomatist, was most of this year at the Court of \ Versailles, or employed in negotiations about the Peace. But f Thomas Prior of Dublin, the companion of Berkeley's boyish days .j at Kilkenny, and of his undergraduate years at Dublin, was in London in November, if not sooner. They may have come over together from Ireland, or the one may have preceded the other, j and perhaps induced his friend to follow him. It was probably j in the spring or summer of this year, too, that a dinner occurred j at Mrs. Vanhomrigh's house, which, recollected years after, strangely affected Berkeley's fortune. He may have been carried there by Swift, on one of those many occasions, some of which are recorded in the Diary for the entertainment of poor Stella.
It was not merely as a subtle satirist of the Free-thinkers that Berkeley addressed the world through the press in the course of this year. He wanted to produce, in a form more suited to the
• • •
. <! I '^«l
J London. '. ' ' ' 6i
« and to tibe mass of mankiiid, the great thougjbt contained in Urime^bf tfSbmum KmmoMgey some of the minor applications yAddk may be fixmd in his essays in the GumrtBsm. This was attempted in his DtsUpm Utnonm HyUs mtd whicfa are concerned witii the metaphysical meaning liK material workL In the Preface to this charming work describes his philosophy as intended ^ to divert the busy of man from vain researdies • . • • to conduct men back paradoxes to Common Sense^ in accordance with tiie of Nature and Providence— ^that the end of speculation is and tibe improvement and r^ulation ^ our lives and • to counteract the pains that have been taken [by ic meta{riiysicians] to perplex the plainest things, with the distrust of the senses, the doubts and scruples, the and refinements that oonir in the very entrance of sciences • • • • to lay down such Principles as, by an easy solu- of Hie perjriiexities ^ idiilo8opher% together with their own [llitive evidence^ may at once recommend themselves for genuine the mind, and rescue philosophy from the endless pursuits it is engaged in; which, with a plain demonstration of the Immediate Pirovidence of an All-seeing God, should seem the readiest prepa- ration, as well as the strongest motive, to the study and practice of virtue.' * If the Principles,' he adds, ' which I endeavour to propagate are admitted for true, the consequences which I think evidently follow from them are, that Scepticism and Atheism will be utterly destroyed, many intricate points made plain, great difficulties solved, several useless parts of Science re- trenched, speculation referred to practice, and men reduced from paradoxes to common sense.' The spirit of the Berkeleian philo- S(^y is nowhere more distinctly expressed than in these words.
Probably, as I have already said, his last year at Dublin was given to preparation of these immortal Dialogues^ which, with little dramatic versatility, contain the most pleasing passages of fancy to be found in English metaphysical literature. It is not unlikely that a desire to publish them with good effect may have been a motive of his visit to London. I have not discovered the month in 17 13 in which the book appeared. We may conclude diat it was after the Sunday in April when Berkeley was presented to the Lord Berkeley of Stratton, to whom it is dedicated.
62 Life and Letters of Berkeley. [ch.
It is difficult at this distance of time to ascertain the immediate influence upon philosophical opinion of this attempt to popularize the new conception of the material world, which is said to have made some influential converts in England, among others, Dr. Smallridge, the well-known Bishop of Bristol. But even the educated mind was not then ripe for the due appreciation of a doctrine so paradoxical in its sound. More than twenty years were to elapse before it found an intellectual audience in David Hume and other Scotchmen and Americans *.
The simple and transparent beauty of Berkeley's style is not less remarkable than the ingenuity of his reasonings. He emnged in provincial Ireland the most elegant writer of the English language for philosophical purposes who had then, or who has since, appeared, at a time too when Ireland, like Scotland, was in a state of provincial barbarism. The greatest master of nervoiis English prose then living was no doubt also an Irishman. But Swift had been in England, and was for years in the family of Sir William Temple, who brought English style to perfection, and was accustomed to employ language that is less antiquated at the present day than that of any of his contemporaries. The case of Berkeley is unique.
In the same year in which the Dialogues were published at the Half Moon in St. Paul's Church-yard, a small volume, entitled C/avis Universalis y or a Demonstration of the Non-existence amd LmfoS" siMity of an External World^ written by Arthur Collier, Rector of Langfoid Magna, near Old Sarum, was printed by Robert Gosling, at the Mitre and Crown, against St. Dunstan's Church in Fleet Street. The coincidence is among the most curkxis in the history of philosophy. There is no evidence that either author drew his thought from the other. Berkeley, at least, can- not have borrowed from Collier, for the Frinciples of Hnrnsm Kwem" ledge had been in circulation for three years when Collier pub- lished his Clavis. So far as the speculation of the English Rector agrees with that of the Dublin Fellow, the agreement may be refe:red to the common philosophical point of view at the time. The scientific world was preparing for that reconstruction of its conception of what sensible things and externality mean, which
* In the Aetn Emditorum for August 1737 there is a short icoonnt of the DitJogML
London.
63
has since darUird and simplified physical research. Collier, in his own way, was not wanting in force; but he expressed iiis acute thoughts in awkward English, with the pedantry of a school- man, and wanted the sentiment, and imagination, and constant recognition d[ the relation of speculation to human action, which in the ciiorse of time made the contemporary writings of Berkc- !ry an iniluencc that has left its mark upon all later thought. Tne theory of sense symbolism, which connected Berkeley with ine Baconian movement, and also with religion, is wanting in Colticr, whose arid reasonings are divorced from the living in- terests of men. The starting-point of Berkeley was more in the nirrrnt philosophy of Locke; Collier produced the meditative rca.'<onings t:^ a recluse student of Malcbranche and the schoolmen. Collier too, like Butler and Berkeley, addressed Clarke, 'the ^physical patriarch of his time,' as he is called by Sir James ckintosh. A letter from Collier to Clarke, printed in B-n- "s Uf* sf Collier^ may interest the reader who wishes to com- e his thoughts with those of Berkeley regarding the metaphysical ining of a material world. The letter contains an allusion to author of Prinnplti of Hamnti Kna^ltJge. It is much to be Iprtted that we have no extant letters from Clarke either to leriseley or to Collier.
And so Berkeley's first spring and summer in London passed away, In autumn we find him amidst other scenes.
He had been introduced by Swift to Mordaunt, Earl of Pt'ter-
DTot^, then one of the most extraordinary characters in Europe, a few years before had astonished the world by tlie rapid
piradour nf his movements in the war of the Succession in Spain, I siace^ by his restless versatility as a diplomatist. A scholar I a man of the world, an enemy to religion who nevertheless said to have written sermons to rival christian preachers; ighty, ycl fond of popularity; of frugal habits, and possessed of 5; estates, yet always to appearance poor and in debt; the rival Marlborough in war, but who, in non? of his campaigns,
nxight solid advantages to his country; this eccentric p;er con- id in his own very varied personal experience much of the
tpcricncc of his generation. We have his picture about this time
64 Life and Letters of Berkeley. [cH.
small well-shaped thin man, with a brisk look, endowed with a supernatural activity, and more than fifty years of age. In HoU land, nearly a quarter of a century before, he formed an intimate friendship with Locke. Their correspondence proves the wit and keen intellect of Peterborough not less than their mutual regard^
Berkeley, with his eyes open to what was going on, was now brought in contact with this strange and contradictory character. Notwithstanding the distrust in his discretion, the Earl of Peter- borough was, in November 17 13, appointed Ambassador Extraor- dinary to Victor Amodeus, King of Sicily, who had then obtained from Spain the crown of that island. At Swift's recommendation, he took Berkeley with him, as his chaplain and secretary.
The Ambassador remained a fortnight in Paris on his way, and went from thence to Toulon, parting from his chaplain, who entered Italy by another route. At Toulon, he took ship for Genoa and Leghorn, where he again left his chaplain and the greater part of his retinue, embarking in a Maltese brig for Sicily with only two servants. Having remained there for a time incognito, he returned to Genoa, and awaited the arrival from England of a yacht in which his equipage was embarked; When it came, he returned to Sicily and made his appearance in state. He was recalled from his embassy in August 1714 — one of the many changes which followed the death of the Queen — after a mission unattended with any more advantageous result, according to his biographer, than that of relieving the ministry from the embarrassment either of his opposition or his support.
Ten months in France and Italy with Lord Peterborough must have been life in a new world to the subtle analyst who had so lately been introduced to the wits of London. It does not seem, however, after all, that he saw much of this inscrutable personage. But it was to Berkeley the beginning of a career of wandering,
^ Peterborough was afterwards commemonited by Pope, amoag the other companions of his Tusculam —
• There, my retreat the best companions grace, Chiefs out of war, and statesmen out of place. There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl The feast oi reason and the flow of soul : And he whose lightning pierced the Iberian lines. Now forms my quincunx, and now ranks my rines. Or tames the genius of the stubborn plain. Almost as quickly at he conquered Spain.'
ImiiatioHs o/Horaei^ Sat. I. 135.
France. 65
vhich, with little interruption, lasted fiw nunjr jrean, during which philosophy and the printing press were in the bftd^nmd. He left the thought, of which he had Dow delivered bimaelf to the world, to do its work, and, with the ardour of man]/ Toutli, directed his inquiring eye to nature and bumgn life on tiie Gon- tioent of Europe.
By the statutes of Trinity College, Dublin, a. Junior Fellow can obtain leave of absence for sixty-three days with ttie consent of the Provost. For a longer absence, a dlqiensation must be ob- tained from the Crown. The following (^een's Letter to the Provost and Fellows, wiiich I have obtained fiom the Register, gives the reasons for which a leave of absence for two years was now granted to Berkeley : — Anne R.
Tniaty and well beloved, we grett ywi wefl. Whereas by f statutes of that our College, the Fellows thereof are not permitted to be absent froin Lhence above sixt}--three days in ai^ one year without onr Royal Dispensation in that behalf. And whenas famnUe suit bath been made unto us in behalf of our trusty and wdl beloved George Berkeley, me <^ y* Junior Fellows of that our College, that we woidd give him kave to travel and return abroad during y^ space of two years, for y* recovery of his health and his improvement in learning ; we being padousty pleased to condescend thereimto, have thought fit to dispense with y« said Statutes of residence, and all other Statutes, on behalf of y* nid George Berkeley. And our will and pleasure is that y^ said George Berkeley, during y« aforesaid time of two years, have, receive, and enjoy an profits, priviledges, and advantages to his Fellowship belonging, and that nich his absence shall in no wise prejudice him in y« right and pre- tensions to his said Fellowship, whereof we have thought fit hereby to give you notice, that due obedience be paid to our pleasure herein imme- diately. And so wc bid you farewell
Given at our Castle at Windsor, y« ninth day of September 1713, in the twelfth year of our reign. By Her Majesty's command.
BOLINGBROKE.
Beilceley's arrangements with Lord Peterborough were probably made in August. His leave to travel and live abroad for two years was recorded by the College on the 6th of November.
We have already had a revelation of Berkeley's intellectual
VOL. IV. F
66 Life and Letters of Berkeley. [cH.
activity, in his own words — some of than published by him, and others not written ioc puMication. Now, far the first time, we have an account, also in his own words, of some of his move- ments from place to place. The earbest of his letters that has been preserved is addressed to Thomas Prior. It was written at Paris a few days after his departure from England. He left London, it seems, on the 1 3th, and arrived there on the 20th of November. This is his account of the journey, and of his first impressions of France : —
Paris, November 25, 1713, NS. Dear Tom,
From London to Calais I came in the company of a Flamand, a Spaniard, a Frenchman, and three English servants of my Lord. The three gentlemen being of those different nations obliged me to speak the French language (which is now familiar), and gave me the opportunity of seeing much of the world in a litde compass. After a very remark* able escape from rocks and banks of sand, and darkness and storm, and the hazards that attend rash and ignorant seamen, we arrived at Calais in a vessel which, returning the next day, was cast away in the harbour in open daylight, (as I think I already told you). From Calais, Colond du Hamel left it to my choice either to go with him by post to Paris, or come after in the stage-coach. I chose the latter ; and, on November i, O. S, embarked in the stage-coach with a company that were all perfect strangers to me. There were two Scotch, and one English gentleman. One of the former happened to be the author® of the Voyage to St. KUda^ and the Account of the Western Isles, We were good company on the road ; and that day se'ennight came to Paris.
I have been since taken up in viewing churches, convents, palaces, .colleges, &c., which are very numerous and magnificent in this towa The splendour and riches of these things surpasses belief; but it were endless to descend to particulars. I was present at a disputation in the Sorbonne, which indeed had much of the French fire in it. I saw the Irish and the English colleges. In the latter I saw, inclosed in a coffin, the body of the late king James '. Bits of the coffin, and of the clodi thai
* NfunKKh Martin, a native of the Isle of 1698, and his Description of ibe WnMit
Skye, born about 1665. He travelled much. Islands 0/ Scotland in 1703. The latta
aiHl was induced by his friends in the Royal contains a curious account of the Second
S\Kicty to explore the Western Islands of Sight. Martin is referred to in Johnson'^
S^H^land. Some of his observations ap- Jowmey to the Western Islands,
(KJtrrd in the Transactions of the Society. * James II, who died in 1 701, at St.Gtf-
His l*)y«vr' f^ ^f' Kilda was published in mains.
I XnJ Frame:- 6fi
f"
I lungs the room, have been cut avray for i«&(i>> he bdag Mteemed s great saint by the people. The day after I came tQ town, I dined at the! ambassador of Sicily's ; and this day with Ur. Frior ". I snatched ui opportunity to mention you to him, and do jam character justice. To^ QiotTow I intend to \-isit Father Malcbrsndief, and disoourse turn on certain points. I have some reasons to dedtne qteaking of the oaaotiy: or villages that I saw as I came along.
My Lord is just now arrived, and teOl me be hu an of^KUtimity of sending my letters to my friends to-monow nKMHiag, which occasions my writing this. My humble service to 3b- Jdin JUwdon **, Mn. Rawdon^ Mrs. Kempsy, and all other friends. Mjr Loid thinlta he shall stay a fortnight here. I am, dear Tom, your afiectionate hiimbte servant,
G. BERKELEY. :
I must give you the trouble of putting die indosed in the penny-post To Mr. Thomas Prior, Pall Mall Coffet Hmati
A month was spent in Paris. Anotbnr fottni^ carried Berkeley,- and two companions, Colonel du fbmel and Mr. O^etborpe", by the route into Italy which thejr preferred, tbrot^ Savojr.' They crossed Mount Cenis on Nev Year's Day^ in 1714. Here is Berkeley's narrative of the formidable journey, in a letter ti3 Prior from Turin; —
Turin, Jan. 6, N.S. 1713-4. Dear Tom, Ar Lyons, where I was about eight days, it was left to my choice whether I would go from thence to Toulon, and there embark for Genoa, or else pass through Savoy, cross the Alps, and so through Italy.
■* Mitthcw Piiar, ihc diplomatitt lad Court of Oreit Biitain to the king of Sidly.
pott. Hit origin wai obicurc, and 1 trice See Nkhol'i Ul. Ante. vol. II. p. 19, But
iKi cwuKCtion wiih Thomai Priai. B«k(k]r, in the following letter, cilli hit
" Tbii if the only ailuiian by Betkeley companion 'Adjut»nl-GeneialofiheQueen'«
10 peiKAUt inlCTCouiK with Matebranche. tbrcet.' wfaich, at thit time, Jam«i Ogle-
" Father oi the Gni Eirl of Moin. He ihorpe could hardly hire been. Hii brother
married, in 1717, » daughter of Sit Richiril Theophilui (who about 1714 retired to
Lrringe. Biit. ^Kalter of the Irish HoUie Sicily) wai. in the opinion of Mr. Wright
of Conimoni. (3 biographer of the General), (he Mr. Ogle-
■■ Ji has hrcii awciitd aud denied thai ihij ihoipe mentioned by Berkeley. 1 he rtme-
wu Jamet Oglethorpe (afterwiidi General), rican biographer of Jamei Oglethorpe lug-
the phUanthiopiit, and founder of Georgia, in ge^li thai thii tuppo»d companionihlp with
America. General Jamei Oglethorpe wii Berkeley may hare alforded opportunity for
bom ia Wenniinitet in 16S9, and entered concerting philinlhropic plant, the etTecji uf
the army u eniign (according to hit which were ailerwar^ apparent in the life
latctt biognphet) in 1710. In 1714, he of each. Jamo Oglelhorpe died in 17S5.
it laid to hare been in the mile of the In hii -" — ■- ■" "'
Earl of PeteriMron^, Ambauador ftom the Johnioi
68 Life and Letters of Berkel^. [cH.
I chose the latter route, though I was obliged to ride post, in company of Colonel du Hamel and Mr. Oglethorpe, Adjutant-General of die Queen's forces, who were sent with a letter from my Lord to the King^s mother at Turin.
The first day we rode from Lyons to Chambery, the capital of Savoy, which is reckoned sixty miles. The Lionnois and Dauphin^ were veiy well ; but Savoy was a perpetual chain of rocks and mountains, almost impassible for ice and snow. And yet I rode post through it, and came off with only four falls ; from which I received no other damage thia the breaking my sword, my watch, and my snuff-box.
On New Year's Day we passed Mount Cenis, one of the most difficult and formidable parts of the Alps which is ever passed over by mortal men. We were carried in open chairs by men used to scale these rocks and precipices, which in this season are more slippery and dangerous than at other times, and at the best are high, craggy, and steep enouj^ to cause the heart of the most valiant man to melt within him. My life often depended on a single step. No one will think that I exaggerate, who considers what it is to pass the Alps on New Year's Day. But I shall leave particulars to be described by the fire-side.
We have been now five days here, and in two or three more design to set forward towards Genoa, where we are to join my Lord, who em- barked at Toulon. I am now hardened against wind and weather, earth and sea, frost and snow ; can gallop all day long, and sleep but three or four hours at night. The court here is polite and splendid, the city beautiful, the churches and colleges magnificent, but not much lesuning stirring among them. However, all orders of people, clergy and laity, are wonderfully civil, and everywhere a man finds his account in beiog an Englishman, that character alone being sufficient to gain respect My service to all friends, particularly to Sir John and Mrs. Rawdon, and Mrs. Kempsy. It is my advice that they do not pass the Alps in their way to Sicily. I am, dear Tom, yours, &c.,
At the end of six vtreeks more vtre find Berkeley at Leg^XMH, vjrhere he lived for three months, while Lord Peterborough was in Sicily. The circumstances are thus reported to Prior, in a letter which contains a reference to the condition of France^ in the last year of Lewis XIV: —
Dear Tom, Mrs. Rawdon is too thin, and Sir John too fat, to agree with the English climate. 1 advise them to make haste and transport themselves
Ilafy.
69
:cio this wann clear air. Your best way is to come through France ; !!oi nuike no long slay there ; for the air is loo cold, and there are instances enough of poverty and distress to spoil the mirth of any one ■bo feets the sufieringa of his fellow -creatures, I would prescribe you "•o Of three operas ai Paris, and as many days amusement at Versailles. My next redpe shall be, 10 ride post from Paris to Toulon, and there to onbaik for Genoa; for I would by no means have you shaken to pieces, u I was, riding post over the rocks of Savoy, or put out of humour by he most horrible precipices of Mount Cenis, that part of the Alps which ■ides Hedmonl from Savoy. T shall not anticipate your pleasure by ly description of Italy or France ; only with regard 10 the latter, I can- H help observing, that the Jacobites have little to hope, and others little I feai, front that reduced nation. The king indeed looks as he neither ■nted meat nor drink, and his palaces are in good repair ; but through- it tbe land there is a different face of things. I staid about a month at kris, eight days at Lyons, eleven at Turin, three weeks at Genoa ; and B DOW to be above a fortnight with my Lord's secretary (an Italian) and Rne others of his retinue, my Lord having gone aboard a Maltese vessel hence to Sicily, with a couple of servants. He designs to stay lere incognito a few days, and then return hither, having put off his rtiiic entry till the yacht with his equipage arrives. ! have wrote to you several times before by post- In answer to all gr lettets, I desire you to send me one great one, close writ, and filled all sides, containing a particular account of all transactions in London sd Dublin. Inclose it in a cover to my Lord Ambassador, and that gxin in another cover to Mr. Hare at my Lord Bolingbroke's office. tyou have a mind 10 travel only in the map, here is a list of all the . where t lodged since my leaving England, in their natural order ; , Boulogne, Montreuil, Abbeville, Poix, Beauvais, Paris, Melun, Sle Ncufe le Roi, Vermonton, Saulieu, Chalons, Ma^on, Lyons, Chara- By, Sl Jean de Maurienne, Lanebourg, Susa, Turin, Alexandria, Campo bro, Genoa. Lestri di Levante, Lerici, Leghome. My humble service I Sir John, Mrs. Rawdon and Mrs, Kempsy, Mr. Digby, Mr. French, Ac. im, dear Tom, your afTectionaie humble servant,
G. BERKELEY. Ltgktnm, Fth. 16, N.S. 1713-4.
An amusing incident of this Leghorn residence was authentic lied long after Berkeley's death, in the Gent/eman't MagaiJnr^*. \ Kcnnct, the well-known author of the Roman Anri^ultles, a
" Vol XLVI. p. J69,
70 Life and Letters of Berkeley, [cH.
brother of Bishop Kennet, and a friend of Addison, happened to be chaplain at the English factory at Leghorn during Berkeley's stay. He had been sent there in 1706, and maintained a difficult position with moral courage. Leghorn was the only place in Italy at which the English service was then tolerated by the Government, a favour obtained from the Grand Duke at the particular instance of Queen Anne. Kennet asked Berkeley td officiate for him one Sunday. The day after, a procession of priests in surplices, with sundry formalities, entered the room in which he was sitting, and without taking any notice of its wondering occupant, marched round it, uttering certain prayers. His fears at once suggested a visit from the Inquisition. As soon as the priests were gone, he ventured cautiously to ask the cause of the sudden invasion, and was amused by the information that this was the season appointed by the Church for blessing the houses of Catholics, that they might be relieved of rats and other domestic vermin.
Berkeley's imagined offence on the Sunday in question was not his only one. He preached several times in the factory chapel at Leghorn.
In May he addressed a more famous correspondent than Prior. The following complimentary letter was sent to Pope, on occasion of the Rape of the Lock^ an enlarged edition of which, with the author's name, had appeared in the spring of the year : —
Leghorn J May i, 17 14.
As I take ingratitude to be a greater crime than impertinence, I chose rather to run the risk of being thought guilty of the latter, than not to return you my thanks for the very agreeable entertainment you just now gave me. I have accidentally met with your Rape of the Lock here, having never seen it before*". Style, painting, judgment, spirit, I had already admired in your other writings ; but in this I am charmed with the magic of your invention, with all those images, allusions, and in- explicable beauties which you raise so surprisingly, and at the same time so naturally, out of a trifle. And yet I cannot say that I was more pleased with the reading of it, than I am with the pretext it gives me to renew in your thoughts the remembrance of one who values no happiness beyond the friendship of men of wit, learning, and good nature.
^ The poem was »t first published (anonymously) in 171a.
Ml.]
mneniber to have heard yon mention some half fonned design of 1 conih^ to Italy. What might we not e.tpect from a muse chat sings [ K> weB in the bleak cUmatc of England, if she felt the same w anil breaibcd the same air with ^'i^gil and Horace.
Tho* is here an incredible number of poets that have all the inclina- tion, boi want the genius, or perhaps the an of die ancients. Some voong tbcm, who understand English, begin to relish our authors ; and I am inforrned that at Florence tbey liave translated Milton into Italian Tcree'*. If one who knows so well how to write like the old Latin poets tame aiDOng thero. it would probably be a means to retrieve them from ttidr cold trivial conceits, to an imitation of their predecessors.
A« mcTcbaots, antiquaries, men of pleasure, Ac, have all different •ieirs in travetliiig, I know not whether it might not be worth a poet's while to iravel, in order to store his mind with strong images of nature.
Gfccn fields and groves, flowery meadows and purling streams, are aowbrre in such perfection as in England ; but if you would know light- some days, wann suns, and blue skies, you must come lo Italy ; and to enable a man to describe rocks and precipices, it is absolutely necessary tttai be pass the Alps.
Yon win easily perceive ihai it is self interest makes me so fond of giving advice to one who has no need of it If you came into these parts, ] should fly to see you. I am here {by the favour of my good friend the Dean of Sl Patrick's} in quality of chaplain to the Earl of Peterborough, who about three months since left the greatest part of his family in this town. God knows how long we shall stay here. I am yours &c.
The death of the Queen on the ist of August 1714 suddenly transformed the whole aspect of things in England. It probably t^rteoed Berkeley's stay on the Continent. On the arrival of George I fn.im Hanover, the Tory ministry was dissolved, and Orfbrd and Bolingbrokc were impeached. Peterborough was re- called. He returned indignant at a want of confidence with which he now believed that he had been treated throughout the negotia- tions which preceded the Peace of Utrecht. Bolingbroke, who lad at once withdrawn into France to avoid the storm in England, met flie 'ex-ambassador, lingering on his homeward journey, on
" ApfatKaify t!ii» wit i ttititUlion of lithed. See 7Wrf"i MilKm. vol. IV. p. 535
/>aWM l4Mr l>)r ihe AbM SaJvini. which (rd, i8j)), RoJIi'i venion, pablithed at
wu »MO in mutntaipt h Floieacc by ihe Lonilan in 17.15. it the eulied luliin tnni-
Tqgwer Kkhirdua. W ht> not bun pab- hiion of MiliMi known to be in ptmt.
72 Life and Letters of Berkeley. [cH.
the road between Paris and Calais. Peterborough, it is said, took the opportunity of showing his resentment, by passing him without exchanging a word.
Berkeley returned to London in August 1714. It is difficult to follow his movements for some time after this. We have a glimpse of him in illness in one of Arbuthnot's chatty letters to Swift: — * Poor philosopher Berkeley has now the idea of health, which was very hard to produce in him ; for he had an Idea of a strange fever upon him, so strong that it was very hard to destroy it by intro- ducing a contrary one.' This letter is dated October 19, 17 14. It is hardly necessary to refer to its equivocal use of the term ' idea.'
The death of the Queen destroyed Berkeley's chance of Church preferment through Swift or Lord Peterborough. The Tories were now out of power. It is not unlikely, however, that an efibrt was made soon after his return to London to find a place for him in the Irish establishment. The suspicion of Jacobitism, raised by his common-places on Passive Ohedience^ is said to have now met him again. He was presented, it seems, to the Prince and Princess of Wales by Samuel Molyneux, who was secretary to the Prince: he was then recommended by the Princess to Loixi Galway for promotion in the Church. Lord Galway, having heard of the sermons, alleged a rumour of Jacobitism. Mr. Molyneux produced the Discourse^ and proved that what Berkeley maintained was, the divine right of Government, and not the divine right of the Stewart Kings ^''. We are not told when this incident occurred It might have been in 1715, when the Duke of Grafton and Lord Galway were Lords Justices in Ireland, and the Prince of Wales Chancellor of the University of Dublin. I have not found, how- ever, that Berkeley visited Ireland in that or the preceding year.
The following scrap, an extract preserved from a letter from Berkeley to Pope, can hardly have been written in London : —
/«^7, 1715. .... Some days ago three or four gentlemen and myself, exerting that right which all the readers pretend to over authors, sat in judgment upon the two new translations of the first Iliad *'. Without partiality to my
^ The incident is mentioned by Stock. other version referred to is Tickell's, wboM
" The first rolume of Pope's Homer was translation of the First Book of the Diad
bsued to subscribers in June 1715. The appeared in the same year. It was the oc-
England and Fra
i .1
bUDtmneD. I assure you ihcy all gave ihe preference where it was due ; nnanimouslj of opinion ihat yours was equally just to the sense liUi Mr. 's, and without comparison, more easy, more poetical, and
Me sublime. But I will say no tnore on such a threadbare subject as
ur bte performance at this time
It was probably in 1715 that Dr. Ashe, the Bishop of Clogher, 'ift's friend, by whom Berkeley was admitted to holy orders,
skcd bim to accompany his only son, St. George Ashe, who was ir to a considerable property, in a tour on the Continent, as his ivelling tutor. The Register of Trinity College informs us that,
on the 19th of November 1715, leave of absence was granted for
<ro years longer to George Berkeley, Junior Fellow, to travel and
emain abroad.' BcJiare November we hear of him in France. Father Malcbranche died at Paris on the 13th of October 1715, his 77th year. If we are to believe the common story of his rt illDCSS, Berkeley and young Ashe must have been there in the a of that year, for Berkeley, according to the story, was the
occasional cause' of the death of Malebranche. He had proposed visit the aged philosopher of Fiance nearly two years before, when ; was in Paris with Lord Peterborough '^ Here is the account ven by Stock of a meeting during this second visit to Paris : —
' Having now [17 15 ?] more leisure than when he first passed through U diy [November 1713], he took care to pay his respects to his iBtrious rival in metaphysical sagacity". He found the ingenious Father a ceD, cooking, in a small pipkin, a medicine for a disorder with which ■ was then troubled — an inflammation on the lungs. The conversation dundly turned on Berkeley's system, of which he had received some io»lc<lge from a iranslatioo just published". But the issue of the debate nnd tragical to poor Malebranche. In the heat of the disputation, he )A bis voice so high, and gave way so freely to the natural impetuosity nun of pans and a Frenchman, that he brought on himself a violent of his disorder, which carried him off a few days after ".'
French ot tnj or Berlcelcy't i
«rly «
'7'S-
mlinpHi
I
1 10 Prior, p. 6;. Boat imptic* Uut he di in 1713. • I In** no ln« of i tnntli
I* S«c alio Biog. Brit. an. ' Bwkele) Adi-ocit'i Dirt. Hill. Pari. There i> lion of Ihe itniy bj De Quincej, i qaa£nt eiuy. Murdtr conttdtrtd fji <
rl- Fi«t Am.
74 L,ife and Letters of Berkeley, [ch.
That the most subtle metaphysician in the British Islands should encounter the profound and eloquent French mystic in such circumstances, and with an issue so tragical, is one of those incidents upon which imagination likes to exercise itself. It is unfortunate that we have no authentic account of the meeting especially one by Berkeley himself, nor any authority that I can find, except the biographers, for its having occurred at all. The biographers of Malebranche do not refer to any visit of Berkeley to the Oratoire'\ They do not even name him.
We can however conjecture what some of the points in dis- pute might have been. Malebranche nowhere criticises Berkeley. But we know many of Berkeley's objections to Malebranche. In his published, and in his hitherto unpublished writings, he is fond of insisting upon differences between their respective doctrines. The individualities of men, and the imperfection of