Part 3

One day about this time, at the instance of Addison, it seems that a meeting was arranged between Berkeley and Samuel Clarke, the metaphysical rector of St. James’s in Piccadilly, whose opinion he had in vain tried to draw forth two years before through Sir John Percival. Berkeley’s personal charm was felt wherever he went, and even “the fastidious and turbulent Atterbury,” after intercourse with him, is reported to have said: “So much understanding, 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.” Much was expected from the meeting with Clarke, but Berkeley had again to complain that although Clarke had neither refuted his arguments nor disproved his premisses, he had not the candour to accept his conclusion.

It was thus that Berkeley became known to “men of merit” in that brilliant society. He was also brought among persons on whom he would hardly have conferred this title. He tells Percival that he had attended several free-thinking clubs, in the pretended character of a learner, and that he there heard Anthony Collins, author of “the bold and pernicious book on free-thinking,” boast “that he was able to demonstrate that the existence of God is an impossible supposition.” The promised “demonstration” seems to have been Collins’ _Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty_, which appeared two years later, according to which all that happens in mind and matter is the issue of natural necessity. Steele invited Berkeley to contribute to the _Guardian_ during its short-lived existence between March and September, 1713. He took the _Discourse_ of Collins for the subject of his first essay. Three other essays are concerned with man’s hope of a future life, and are among the few passages in his writings in which his philosophy is a meditation upon Death.

In May, Percival writes to him from Dublin that he hears the “new book of Dialogues is printed, though not yet published, and that your opinion has gained ground among the learned; that Mr. Addison has come over to your view; and that what at first seemed shocking is become so familiar that others envy you the discovery, and make it their own.” In his reply in June, Berkeley mentions that “a clergyman in Wiltshire has lately published a treatise wherein he advances something published three years ago in my _Principles of Human Knowledge_.” The clergyman was Arthur Collier, author of the _Clavis Universalis_, or demonstration of the impossibility of an external world(6).

Berkeley’s _Three Dialogues_ were published in June. In the middle of that same month he was in Oxford, “a most delightful place,” where he spent two months, “witnessed the Act and grand performances at the theatre, and a great concourse from London and the country, amongst whom were several foreigners.” The Drury Lane Company had gone down to Oxford, and _Cato_ was on the stage for several nights. The Percival correspondence now first discloses this prolonged visit to Oxford in the summer of 1713, that ideal home from whence, forty years after, he departed on a more mysterious journey than any on this planet. In a letter from thence to Percival, he had claimed Arbuthnot as one of the converts to the “new Principle.” Percival replied that Swift demurred to this, on which Berkeley rejoins: “As to what you say of Dr. Arbuthnot not being of my opinion, it is true there has been some difference between us concerning some notions relating to the necessity of the laws of nature; but this does not touch the main points of the non-existence of what philosophers call material substance; against which he acknowledges he can assert nothing.” One would gladly have got more than this from Berkeley, about what touched his favourite conception of the “arbitrariness” of law in nature, as distinguished from the “necessity” which some modern physicists are ready vaguely to take for granted.

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The scene now changes. On October 15 Berkeley suddenly writes from London: “I am on the eve of going to Sicily, as chaplain to Lord Peterborough, who is Ambassador Extraordinary on the coronation of the new king.” He had been recommended by Swift to the Ambassador, one of the most extraordinary characters then in Europe, who a few years before had astonished the world in the war of the Succession in Spain, and afterwards by his genius as a diplomatist: in Holland, nearly a quarter of a century before, he had formed an intimate friendship with John Locke. Ten months in France and Italy in the suite of Lord Peterborough brought the young Irish metaphysician, who had lately been introduced to the wits of London and the dons of Oxford, into a new world. It was to him the beginning of a career of wandering and social activity, which lasted, with little interruption, for nearly twenty years, during which metaphysics and authorship were in the background. On November 25 we find him in Paris, writing letters to Percival and Prior. “From London to Calais”, he tells Prior, “I came in company of a Flamand, a Spaniard, a Frenchman, and three English servants of my Lord. The three gentlemen, being of three 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 little compass.... On November 1 (O.S.) I 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. Kilda_ and the _Account of the Western Isles_(7). We were good company on the road; and that day se’ennight came to Paris. I have since been taken up in viewing churches, convents, palaces, colleges, &c., which are very numerous and magnificent in this town. 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, enclosed in a coffin, the body of the late King James.... To-morrow I intend to visit Father Malebranche, and discourse him on certain points.”

The Abbé D’Aubigné, as he informs Percival, was to introduce him to Malebranche, then the chief philosopher of France, whose Vision of the world in God had some affinity with Berkeley’s own thought. Unfortunately we have no record of the intended interview with the French idealist, who fourteen years before had been visited by Addison, also on his way to Italy, when Malebranche expressed great regard for the English nation, and admiration for Newton; but he shook his head when Hobbes was mentioned, whom he ventured to disparage as a “poor silly creature.” Malebranche died nearly two years after Berkeley’s proposed interview; and according to a story countenanced by Dugald Stewart, Berkeley was the “occasional cause” of his death. He found the venerable Father, we are told, in a cell, cooking, in a pipkin, a medicine for a disorder with which he was troubled. The conversation naturally turned on Berkeley’s system, of which Malebranche had received some knowledge from a translation. The issue of the debate proved tragical to poor Malebranche. In the heat of disputation he raised his voice so high, and gave way so freely to the natural impetuosity of a man of genius and a Frenchman, that he brought on a violent increase of his disorder, which carried him off a few days after(8). This romantic tale is, I suspect, mythical. The Percival correspondence shews that Berkeley was living in London in October, 1715, the month in which Malebranche died, and I find no trace of a short sudden visit to Paris at that time.

After a month spent in Paris, another fortnight carried Berkeley and two travelling companions to Italy through Savoy. They crossed Mont Cenis on New Year’s Day in 1714—“one of the most difficult and formidable parts of the Alps which is ever passed over by mortal man,” as he tells Prior in a letter from Turin. “We were carried in open chairs by men used to scale these rocks and precipices, which at this season are more slippery and dangerous than at other times, and at the best are high, craggy, and steep enough to cause the heart of the most valiant man to melt within him.” At the end of other six weeks we find him at Leghorn, where he spent three months, “while my lord was in Sicily.” He “prefers England or Ireland to Italy: the only advantage is in point of air.” From Leghorn he writes in May a complimentary letter to Pope, on the occasion of the _Rape of the Lock_: “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 inexplicable beauties which you raise so surprisingly, and at the same time so naturally, out of a trifle.... I remember to have heard you mention some half-formed design of coming to Italy. What might we not expect from a muse that sings so well in the bleak climate of England, if she felt the same warm sun and breathed the same air with Virgil and Horace.” In July we find Berkeley in Paris on his way back to England. He had “parted from Lord Peterborough at Genoa, where my lord took post for Turin, and thence designed passing over the Alps, and so through Savoy, on his way to England.” In August they are in London, where the aspect of English politics was changed by the death of the Queen in that month. He seems to have had a fever soon after his return. In October, Arbuthnot, in one of his chatty letters to Swift, writes thus: “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 strange that it was very hard to destroy it by introducing a contrary one.”

Our record of the two following years is a long blank, first broken by a letter to Percival in July, 1715, dated at London. Whether he spent any time at Fulham with Lord Peterborough after their return from Italy does not appear, nor whether he visited Ireland in those years, which is not likely. We have no glimpses of brilliant London society as in the preceding year. Steele was now in Parliament. Swift had returned to Dublin, and Addison was the Irish chief secretary. But Pope was still at Binfield, among the glades of Windsor, and Berkeley congratulated him after receiving the first volume of his _Homer_. Of his own literary pursuits we hear nothing. Perhaps the Second Part of the _Principles_, which was lost afterwards in his travels, engaged him. In the end of July he wrote to Lord Percival(9) from Flaxley(10) on the Severn; and in August, September, October, and November he wrote from London, chiefly interested in reports about “the rebels in Scotland,” and “the forces under Lord Mar, which no doubt will languish and disperse in a little time. The Bishop of Bristol assured me the other day that the Court expect that the Duke of Orleans would, in case of need, supply them with forces against the Pretender.” Our next glimpse of him is in May, 1716, when he writes to Lord Percival that he is “like soon to go to Ireland, the Prince of Wales having recommended him to the Lords Justices for the living of St. Paul’s in Dublin.” This opening was soon closed, and the visit to Ireland was abandoned. A groundless suspicion of Jacobitism was not overcome by the interest of Caroline, Princess of Wales. In June, 1716, Charles Dering wrote from Dublin, that “the Lords Justices have made a strong representation against him.” He had to look elsewhere for the immediate future.

We find him at Turin in November, 1716, with a fresh leave of absence for two years from his College. It seems that Ashe, Bishop of Clogher, had engaged him as travelling tutor to his son, a means not then uncommon for enabling young authors of moderate fortune to see new countries and mix with society. Addison had visited Italy in this way sixteen years before, and Adam Smith long afterwards travelled with the young Duke of Buccleuch. With young Ashe, Berkeley crossed Mont Cenis a second time. They reached Rome at the beginning of 1717. His _Journal in Italy_ in that year, and occasional letters to Percival, Pope, and Arbuthnot, shew ardent interest in nature and art. With the widest views, “this very great though singular sort of man descended into a minute detail, and begrudged neither pains nor expense for the means of information. He travelled through a great part of Sicily on foot; clambered over the mountains and crept into the caverns, to investigate its natural history and discover the causes of its volcanoes; and I have known him sit for hours in forges and foundries to inspect their successive operations(11).” If the _Journal_ had been transformed by his own hand into a book, his letter to Pope from Inarime shews that the book might have rivalled Addison’s _Remarks on Parts of Italy_ in grace of style and large human interest.

In the summer of 1720 we find the travellers at Florence, afterwards for some time at Lyons, and in London at the beginning of the next year. On the way home his metaphysical inspiration was revived. The “Cause of Motion” had been proposed by the French Academy as the subject of a prize dissertation. The subject gave an opportunity for further unfolding his early thought. In the _Principles_ and the _Dialogues_ he had argued for the necessary dependence of matter, for its concrete substantial reality, upon living percipient mind. He would now shew its powerlessness as it is presented to us in sense. The material world, chiefly under the category of substance, inspired the _Principles_. The material world, under the category of cause or power, inspired the _De Motu_. This Latin Essay sums up the distinctive thought of Berkeley, as it appears in the authorship of his early life. _Moles evolvit et agitat mentes_ might be taken as the formula of the materialism which he sought to dissolve. _Mens percipit et agitat molem significantem, cujus esse est percipi_ expresses what Berkeley would substitute for the materialistic formula.

The end of the summer of 1721 found Berkeley still in London. England was in the social agitation and misery consequent upon the failure of the South Sea Company, a gigantic commercial speculation connected with British trade in America. A new inspiration took possession of him. He thought he saw in this catastrophe signs of a decline in public morals worse than that which followed the Restoration. “Political corruption”, “decay of religion,” “growth of atheism,” were descriptive words used by the thoughtful. Berkeley’s eager imagination was apt to exaggerate the evil. He became inspired by social idealism, and found vent for his fervour in _An Essay towards preventing the Ruin of Great Britain_, which, as well as the _De Motu_, made its appearance in 1721. This _Essay_ is a significant factor in his career. It was the Cassandra wail of a sorrowful and indignant prophet, prepared to shake the dust from his feet, and to transfer his eye of hope to other regions, in which a nearer approach to Utopia might be realised. The true personality of the individual is unrealisable in selfish isolation. His favourite _non sibi, sed toti mundo_ was henceforward more than ever the ruling maxim of his life.

II. Middle Life (1722-34).

In October, 1721, Berkeley was in Dublin. The register of the College shews that “on November 14, 1721, Mr. Berkeley had the grace of the House for the Degree of Bachelor and Doctor of Divinity.” There is no ground for the report that he returned to Ireland at this time as Chaplain to the Duke of Grafton, the Lord Lieutenant(12). But preferment in the Church seemed within his reach. “I had no sooner set foot on shore,” he wrote to Percival in that October, “than I heard that the Deanery of Dromore was vacant.” Percival used his influence with the Lord Lieutenant, and in February, 1722, Berkeley’s patent was “passing the Seals for the Deanery of Dromore.” But the Bishop of Dromore claimed the patronage, and this led to a protracted and ineffectual lawsuit, which took Berkeley to London in the following winter, “to see friends and inform himself of points of law,” and he tells that “on the way he was nearly drowned in crossing to Holyhead(13).”

Berkeley’s interest in church preferment was not personal. He saw in it only means to an end. In March, 1723, he surprised Lord Percival by announcing, in a letter from London, a project which it seems for some time had occupied his thoughts. “It is now about ten months,” he says, “since I have determined to spend the residue of my days in Bermuda, where I trust in Providence I may be the mean instrument of doing great good to mankind. Whatever happens, go I am resolved, if I live. Half a dozen of the most ingenious and agreeable men in our College are with me in this project, and since I came hither I have got together about a dozen Englishmen of quality, who intend to retire to those islands.” He then explains the project, opening a vision of Christian civilisation radiating from those fair islands of the West, whose idyllic bliss poets had sung, diffused over the New World, with its magnificent possibilities in the future history of mankind.

I find no further record of the origin of this bright vision. As it had become a practical determination “ten months” before March, 1723, one is carried back to the first months after his return to Dublin and to the _Essay_ that was called forth by the South Sea catastrophe. One may conjecture that despair of England and the Old World—“such as Europe breeds in her decay”—led him to look westward for the hopeful future of mankind, moved, perhaps, by the connexion of the catastrophe with America. His active imagination pictured a better Republic than Plato’s, and a grander Utopia than More’s, emanating from a College in the isles of which Waller had sung.

In the meantime a curious fortune unexpectedly favoured him. Swift’s unhappy Vanessa, associated with Bury Street in 1713, had settled on her property at Marley Abbey near Dublin; and Swift had privately married Stella, as she confessed to Vanessa, who thereafter revoked the bequest of her fortune to Swift, and left it to be divided between Berkeley and Marshal, afterwards an Irish judge. Vanessa died in May, 1723. A few days after Berkeley wrote thus to Lord Percival: “Here is something that will surprise your lordship as it doth me. Mrs. Hester Vanhomrigh, a lady to whom I was a perfect stranger, having never in the whole course of my life exchanged a word with her, died on Sunday. Yesterday her Will was opened, by which it appears that I am constituted executor, the advantage whereof is computed by those who understand her affairs to be worth £3000.... My Bermuda scheme is now stronger in my mind than ever; this providential event having made many things easy which were otherwise before.” Lord Percival in reply concludes that he would “persist more than ever in that noble scheme, which may in some time exalt your name beyond that of St. Xavier and the most famous missionaries abroad.” But he warns him that, “without the protection of Government,” he would encounter insurmountable difficulties. The Vanessa legacy, and the obstructions in the way of the Deanery of Dromore, were the subjects of a tedious correspondence with his friend and business factotum, “Tom Prior,” in 1724 and the three following years. In the end, the debts of Vanessa absorbed most of the legacy. And as to the Deanery of Dromore, he tells Percival, on September 19, 1723: “I despair of seeing it end to my advantage. The truth is, my fixed purpose of going to Bermuda sets me above soliciting anything with earnestness in this part of the world. It can be of no use to me, but as it may enable me the better to prosecute that design; and it must be owned that the present possession of something in the Church would make my application for an establishment in those islands more considered.”

Nevertheless, he got a Deanery at last. In May, 1724, he informs Lord Percival from Trinity College: “Yesterday I received my patent for the best Deanery in the kingdom, that of Derry. It is said to be worth £1500 per annum. But as I do not consider it with an eye to enriching myself, so I shall be perfectly contented if it facilitates and recommends my scheme of Bermuda, which I am in hopes will meet with a better reception if it comes from one possessed of so great a Deanery.” In September he is on his way, not to Derry, but to London, “to raise funds and obtain a Charter for the Bermuda College from George the First,” fortified by a remarkable letter from Swift to Lord Carteret, the new Lord Lieutenant, who was then in Bath(14). As Swift predicted in this letter, Berkeley’s conquests spread far and fast in England, where he organised his resources during the four following years. Nothing shews more signally the magic of his personality than the story of his life in London in those years of negotiation and endeavour. The proposal met with a response wonderful in a generation represented by Walpole. The subscriptions soon reached five thousand pounds, and Walpole was among the subscribers. The Scriblerus Club, meeting at Lord Bathurst’s, agreed to rally Berkeley, who was among them, on his Bermuda scheme. He asked to be heard in defence, and presented the case with such force of enthusiasm that the company “were struck dumb, and after a pause simultaneously rose and asked leave to accompany him.” Bermuda for a time inspired London.

Berkeley was not satisfied with this. He remembered what Lord Percival had said about failure without help from Government. Accordingly he obtained a Charter from George the First early in 1726, and after canvassing the House of Commons, secured a grant of £20,000, with only two dissentient votes, in May of that year. This was the beginning of his difficulties. Payment was indefinitely delayed, and he was kept negotiating; besides, with the help of Prior, he was unravelling legal perplexities in which the Vanessa legacy was involved. It was in these years that he was seen at the receptions of Caroline at Leicester Fields, when she was Princess of Wales, and afterwards at St. James’s or at Kensington, when she became Queen in 1727; not, he says, because he loved Courts, but because he loved America. Clarke was still rector of St. James’s, and Butler had not yet migrated to his parsonage at Stanhope; so their society was open to him. The Queen liked to listen to a philosophical discussion. Ten years before, as Princess of Wales, she had been a royal go-between in the famous correspondence between Clarke and Leibniz. And now, Berkeley being in London, he too was asked to her weekly reunions, when she loved to hear Clarke arguing with Berkeley, or Berkeley arguing with Hoadley. Also in 1726 Voltaire made his lengthened visit to England, a familiar figure in the circle of Pope’s friends, attracted to the philosophy of Locke and Newton; and Voltaire mentions that he met “the discoverer of the true theory of vision” during his stay in London.