Part 5

Although this reasoning satisfied Alciphron, others may think it inconclusive. How one is able to discover the existence of other persons, and even the meaning of finite personality, are themselves questions full of speculative difficulty. But, waiving this, the analogy between the relation of a human spirit to its body, and that of the Omnipresent and Omnipotent Spirit to the Universe of things and persons, fails in several respects. God is supposed to be continually creating the world by constant and continuous Providence, and His Omniscience is supposed to comprehend all its concrete relations: a man’s body is not absolutely dependent on the man’s own power and providence; and even his scientific knowledge of it, in itself and in its relations, is scanty and imperfect, as his power over it is limited and conditioned. Then the little that a man gradually learns of what is going on in the surrounding universe is dependent on his senses: Omniscience comprehends Immensity and Eternity (so we suppose) in a single intuition. Our bodies, moreover, are visible things: the universe, this organism of God, is crowded with _persons_, to whom there is nothing corresponding within the organism which reveals one man to another.

But this is not all. After Euphranor has found that the Universal Power is Universal Spirit, this is still an inadequate God; for what we want to know is what _sort_ of Spirit God is. Is God omnipotent or of limited power, regarded ethically, fair or unfair in His treatment of persons; good or evil, according to the highest yet attained conception of goodness; a God of love, or a devil omnipotent? I infer the _character_ of my neighbour from his words and actions, patent to sense in the gradual outward evolution of his life. I am asked to infer the _character_ of the Omnipresent Spirit from _His_ words and actions, manifested in the universe of things and persons. But we must not attribute to the Cause more than it reveals of itself in its effects. God and men alike are known by the effects they produce. The Universal Power is, on this condition, righteous, fair, and loving to the degree in which those conceptions are implied in His visible embodiment: to affirm more or other than this, on the basis of analogy _alone_, is either to indulge in baseless conjecture, or to submit blindly to dogma and authority.

Now the universe, as far as it comes within the range of human experience on this planet, is full of suffering and moral disorder. The “religious hypothesis” of a perfectly righteous and benevolent God is here offered to account for the appearances which the universe presents to us. But do these signify exact distributive justice? Is not visible nature apparently cruel and unrelenting? If we infer cruelty in the character of a man, because his bodily actions cause undeserved suffering, must we not, by this analogy, infer in like manner regarding the character of the Supreme Spirit, manifested in the progressive evolution of the universal organism?

We find it impossible to determine with absolute certainty the character even of our fellow men, from their imperfectly interpreted words and actions, so that each man is more or less a mystery to his fellows. The mystery deepens when we try to read the character of animals,—to interpret the motives which determine the overt acts of dogs or horses. And if we were able to communicate by visible signs with the inhabitants of other planets, with how much greater difficulty should we draw conclusions from their visible acts regarding _their_ character? But if this is so when we use the data of sense for reading the character of finite persons, how infinite must be the difficulty of reading the character of the Eternal Spirit, in and through the gradual evolution of the universe of things and persons, which in this reasoning is supposed to be His body; and the history of that universe the facts of His biography, in and by which He is eternally revealing Himself! For we know nothing about the unbeginning and unending. The universe of persons is assumed to have no _end_; and I know not why its evolution must be supposed to have had a _beginning_, or that there ever was a time in which God was unmanifested, to finite persons.

Shall we in these circumstances turn with Euphranor, in the Fifth and Sixth Dialogues, to professed revelation of the character of the Universal Mind presented in miraculous revelation, by inspired prophets and apostles, who are brought forward as authorities able to speak infallibly to the _character_ of God? If the whole course of nature, or endless evolution of events, is the Divine Spirit revealed in omnipresent activity, what room is there for any other less regular revelation? The universe of common experience, it is implied by Berkeley, is essentially miraculous, and therefore absolutely perfect. Is it consistent with fairness, and benevolence, and love of goodness in all moral agents for its own sake, that the Christian revelation should have been so long delayed, and be still so incompletely made known? Is not the existence of wicked persons on this or any other planet, wicked men or devils, a dark spot in the visible life of God? Does not perfect goodness in God mean restoration of goodness in men, for its own sake, apart from their merit; and must not Omnipotent Goodness, infinitely opposite to all evil, either convert to goodness all beings in the universe who have made themselves bad, or else relieve the universe of their perpetual presence in ever-increasing wickedness?

Sceptical criticism of this sort has found expression in the searching minute philosophy of a later day than Berkeley’s and Alciphron’s; as in David Hume and Voltaire, and in the agnosticism of the nineteenth century. Was not Euphranor too ready to yield to the demand for a visible God, whose character had accordingly to be determined by what appears in nature and man, under the conditions of our limited and contingent experience? Do we not need to look below data of sensuous experience, and among the presuppositions which must consciously or unconsciously be taken for granted in all man’s dealings with the environment in which he finds himself, for the root of _trustworthy_ experience? On merely physical reasoning, like that of Euphranor, the righteous love of God is an unwarranted inference, and it even seems to be contradicted by visible facts presented in the history of the world. But if Omnipotent Goodness must _a priori_ be attributed to the Universal Mind, as an indispensable condition for man’s having reliable intercourse of any sort with nature; if this is the primary postulate necessary to the existence of truth of any kind—then the “religious hypothesis” that God is Good, according to the highest conception of goodness, is no groundless fancy, but the fundamental faith-venture in which man has to live. It _must_ stand in reason; unless it can be _demonstrated_ that the mixture of good and evil which the universe presents, necessarily contradicts this fundamental presupposition: and if so, man is lost in pessimistic Pyrrhonism, and can assert nothing about anything(24).

The religious altruism, however inadequate, which Berkeley offered in _Alciphron_ made some noise at the time of its appearance, although its theistic argument was too subtle to be popular. The conception of the visible world as Divine Visual Language was “received with ridicule by those who make ridicule the test of truth,” although it has made way since. “I have not seen Dean Berkeley,” Gay the poet writes to Swift in the May following the Dean’s return, and very soon after the appearance of _Alciphron_, “but I have been reading his book, and like many parts of it; but in general think with you that it is too speculative.” Warburton, with admiration for Berkeley, cannot comprehend his philosophy, and Hoadley shewed a less friendly spirit. _A Letter from a Country Clergyman_, attributed to Lord Hervey, the “Sporus” of Pope, was one of several ephemeral attacks which the _Minute Philosopher_ encountered in the year after its appearance. Three other critics, more worthy of consideration, are mentioned in one of Berkeley’s letters from London to his American friend Johnson at Stratford: “As to the Bishop of Cork’s book, and the other book you allude to, the author of which is one Baxter, they are both very little considered here; for which reason I have taken no public notice of them. To answer objections already answered, and repeat the same things, is a needless as well as disagreeable task. Nor should I have taken notice of that Letter about Vision, had it not been printed in a newspaper, which gave it course, and spread it through the kingdom. Besides, the theory of Vision I found was somewhat obscure to most people; for which reason I was not displeased at an opportunity to explain it(25).” The explanation was given in _The Theory of Visual Language Vindicated_, in January, 1733, as a supplement to _Alciphron_. Its blot is a tone of polemical bitterness directed against Shaftesbury(26).

Although Berkeley “took no public notice” of “the Bishop of Cork’s book(27)” it touched a great question, which periodically has awakened controversy, and been the occasion of mutual misunderstanding among the controversialists in past ages. “Is God knowable by man; or must religion be devotion to an object that is unknowable?” In one of his first letters to Lord Percival, as we saw, Berkeley animadverted on a sermon by the Archbishop of Dublin, which seemed to deny that there was goodness, or understanding God, any more than feet or hands. An opinion somewhat similar had been attributed to Bishop Browne, in his answer to Toland, and afterwards in 1728, in his _Procedure and Limits of Human Understanding_.

This touched to the quick Berkeley’s ultimate conception of the universe, as realisable only in, and therefore necessarily dependent on, living mind. We are reminded of the famous analogy of Spinoza(28). If the omnipresent and omnipotent Mind, on which Euphranor rested, can be called “mind” only metaphorically, and can be called “good” only when the term is used without human meaning, it may seem to be a matter of indifference whether we have unknowable Matter or unknowable Mind at the root of things and persons. Both are empty words. The Power universally at work is equally unintelligible, equally unfit to be the object of worship in the final venture of faith, whether we use the term Matter or the term Mind. The universe is neither explained nor sustained by a “mind” that is mind only metaphorically. To call this “God” is to console us with an empty abstraction. The minutest philosopher is ready to grant with Alciphron that “there is a God in this indefinite sense”; since nothing can be inferred from such an account of God about conduct or religion.

The Bishop of Cork replied to the strictures of Euphranor in the _Minute Philosopher_. He qualified and explained his former utterances in some two hundred dull pages of his _Divine Analogy_, which hardly touch the root of the matter. The question at issue is the one which underlies modern agnosticism. It was raised again in Britain in the nineteenth century, with deeper insight, by Sir William Hamilton; followed by Dean Mansel, in controversy with F. D. Maurice, at the point of view of Archbishop King and Bishop Browne, in philosophical vindication of the mysteries of Christian faith; by Mr. Herbert Spencer and by Huxley in a minute philosophy that has been deepened by Hume’s criticism of the rationale of theism in Berkeley(29).

Andrew Baxter’s _Inquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul_, referred to in Berkeley’s letter to Johnson, appeared in 1733. It has a chapter on “Dean Berkeley’s Scheme against the existence of Matter and a Material World,” which is worthy of mention because it is the earliest elaborate criticism of the New Principle, although it had then been before the world for more than twenty years. The title of the chapter shews Baxter’s imperfect comprehension of the proposition which he attempts to refute. It suggests that Berkeley argued for the non-existence of the things we see and touch, instead of for their necessary dependence on, or subordination to, realising percipient Mind, so far as they are concrete realities. Baxter, moreover, was a Scot; and his criticism is interesting as a foretaste of the protracted discussion of the “ideal theory” by Reid and his friends, and later on by Hamilton. But Baxter’s book was not the first sign of Berkeley’s influence in Scotland. We are told by Dugald Stewart, that “the novelty of Berkeley’s paradox attracted very powerfully the attention of a set of young men who were then prosecuting their studies at Edinburgh, who formed themselves into a Society for the express purpose of soliciting from him an explanation of some parts of his theory which seemed to them obscurely or equivocally expressed. To this correspondence the amiable and excellent prelate seems to have given every encouragement; and I have been told on the best authority that he was accustomed to say that his reasoning had been nowhere better understood than by this club of young Scotsmen(30).” Thus, and afterwards through Hume and Reid, Berkeley is at the root of philosophy in Scotland.

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The two years of indifferent health and authorship in London sum up what may be called the American period of Berkeley’s life. Early in 1734 letters to Prior open a new vista in his history. He was nominated to the bishopric of Cloyne in the south of Ireland, and we have now to follow him to the remote region which was his home for eighteen years. The interest of the philosophic Queen, and perhaps some compensation for the Bermuda disappointment, may explain the appearance of the metaphysical and social idealist in the place where he shone as a star of the first magnitude in the Irish Church of the eighteenth century.

III. Later Years (1734-53).

In May, 1734, Berkeley was consecrated as Bishop of Cloyne, in St. Paul’s Church, Dublin. Except occasional visits, he had been absent from Ireland for more than twenty years. He returned to spend eighteen years of almost unbroken seclusion in his remote diocese. It suited a growing inclination to a recluse, meditative life, which had been encouraged by circumstances in Rhode Island. The eastern and northern part in the county of Cork formed his diocese, bounded on the west by Cork harbour, and on the east by the beautiful Blackwater and the mountains of Waterford; the sea, which was its southern boundary, approached within two miles of the episcopal residence in the village of Cloyne.

As soon as he was settled, he resumed study “with unabated attention,” but still with indifferent health. Travelling had become irksome to him, and at Cloyne he was almost as much removed as he had been in Rhode Island from the thinking world. Cork took the place of Newport; but Cork was twenty miles from Cloyne, while Newport was only three miles from Whitehall. His episcopal neighbour at Cork was Bishop Browne, the critic of _Alciphron_. Isaac Gervais, afterwards Dean of Tuam, often enlivened the “manse-house” at Cloyne by his wit and intercourse with the great world. Secker, the Bishop of Bristol, and Benson, the Bishop of Gloucester, now and then exchanged letters with him, and correspondence was kept up as of old with Prior at Dublin and Johnson at Stratford. But there is no trace of intercourse with Swift, who was wearing out an unhappy old age, or with Pope, almost the only survivor of the brilliant society of other years. We are told, indeed, that the beauty of Cloyne was so described to the bard of Twickenham, by the pen which in former days had described Ischia, that Pope was almost moved to visit it. And a letter from Secker in February, 1735(31), contains this scrap: “Your friend Mr. Pope is publishing small poems every now and then, full of much wit and not a little keenness(32).” “Our common friend, Dr. Butler,” he adds, “hath almost completed a set of speculations upon the credibility of religion from its analogy to the constitution and course of nature, which I believe in due time you will read with pleasure.” Butler’s _Analogy_ appeared in the following year. But I have found no remains of correspondence between Berkeley and their “common friend”; the two most illustrious religious thinkers of the Anglican communion.

When he left London in 1734 Berkeley was on the eve of what sounded like a mathematical controversy, although it was in his intention metaphysical, and was suggested by the Seventh Dialogue in _Alciphron_. In one of his letters to Prior, early in that year, he told him that though he “could not read, owing to ill health,” yet his thought was as distinct as ever, and that for amusement “he passed his early hours in thinking of certain mathematical matters which may possibly produce something(33).” This turned, it seems, upon a form of scepticism among contemporary mathematicians, occasioned by the presence of mysteries of religion. The _Analyst_ was the issue. It was followed by a controversy in which some of the most eminent mathematicians took part. _Mathematica exeunt in mysteria_ might have been the motto of the _Analyst_. The assumptions in mathematics, it is argued, are as mysterious as those of theologians and metaphysicians. Mathematicians cannot translate into perfectly intelligible thought their own doctrines in fluxions. If man’s knowledge of God is rooted in mystery, so too is mathematical analysis. Pure science at last loses itself in propositions which usefully regulate action, but which cannot be comprehended. This is the drift of the argument in the _Analyst_; but perhaps Berkeley’s inclination to extreme conclusions, and to what is verbally paradoxical, led him into doubtful positions in the controversy to which the _Analyst_ gave rise. Instead of ultimate imperfect comprehensibility, he seems to attribute absolute contradiction to the Newtonian fluxions. Baxter, in his _Inquiry_, had asserted that things in Berkeley’s book of _Principles_ forced the author “to suspect that even mathematics may not be very sound knowledge at the bottom.” The metaphysical argument of the _Analyst_ was obscured in a cloud of mathematics.

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The social condition of Ireland attracted Berkeley almost as soon as he was settled in Cloyne. He was surrounded by a large native Irish population and a small group of English colonists. The natives, long governed in the interest of the stranger, had never learned to exert and govern themselves. The self-reliance which Berkeley preached fifteen years before, as a mean for “preventing the ruin of Great Britain,” was more wanting in Ireland, where the simplest maxims of social economy were neglected. It was a state of things fitted to move one who was too independent to permit his aspirations to be confined to the ordinary routine of the Irish episcopate, and who could not forget the favourite moral maxim of his life.

The social chaos of Ireland was the occasion of what to some may be the most interesting of Berkeley’s writings. His thoughts found vent characteristically in a series of penetrating practical queries. The First Part of the _Querist_ appeared in 1735, anonymously, edited by Dr. Madden of Dublin, who along with Prior had lately founded a Society for promoting industrial arts in Ireland. The Second and Third Parts were published in the two following years. _A Discourse to Magistrates occasioned by the Enormous Licence and Irreligion of the Times_, which appeared in 1736, was another endeavour, with like philanthropic intention. And the only important break in his secluded life at Cloyne, in eighteen years of residence, was when he went for some months to Dublin in 1737, to render social service to Ireland in the Irish House of Lords.

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His metaphysic, at first encountered by ridicule, was now beginning to receive more serious treatment. A Scotsman had already recognised it. In 1739 another and more famous Scotsman, David Hume, refers thus to Berkeley in one of the opening sections of his _Treatise of Human Nature_: “A very material question has been started concerning abstract or general ideas—whether they be general or particular in the mind’s conception of them. A great philosopher, Dr. Berkeley, has disputed the received opinion in this particular, and has asserted that all general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annexed to a certain term which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals which are similar to them. I look upon this to be one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries that has been made of late years in the republic of letters.” It does not appear that Berkeley heard of Hume.

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A curious interest began to engage him about this time. The years following 1739 were years of suffering in the Irish diocese. It was a time of famine followed by widespread disease. His correspondence is full of allusions to this. It had consequences of lasting importance. Surrounded by disease, he pondered remedies. Experience in Rhode Island and among American Indians suggested the healing properties of tar. Further experiments in tar, combined with meditation and much curious reading, deepened and expanded his metaphysical philosophy. Tar seemed to grow under his experiments, and in his thoughts, into a Panacea for giving health to the organism on which living mind in man is meanwhile dependent. This natural dependence of health upon tar introduced thoughts of the interdependence of all things, and then of the _immediate_ dependence of all in nature upon Omnipresent and Omnipotent Mind. The living Mind that underlies the phenomena of the universe began to be conceived under a new light. Since his return to the life of thought in Rhode Island, he had been immersed in Platonic and Neoplatonic literature, and in books of mystical Divinity, encouraged perhaps by the mystical disposition attributed to his wife. An eccentric ingenuity connected the scientific experiments and prescriptions with the Idealism of Plato and Plotinus. The natural law according to which tar-water was universally restorative set his mind to work about the immanence of living Mind. He mused about a medicine thus universally beneficial, and the thought occurred that it must be naturally charged with ’pure invisible fire, the most subtle and elastic of bodies, and the vital element in the universe’; and water might be the natural cause which enables this elementary fire to be drawn out of tar and transferred to vegetable and animal organisms. But the vital fire could be only a natural cause; which in truth is no efficient cause at all, but only a sign of divine efficiency transmitted through the world of sense: the true cause of this and all other natural effects must be the immanent Mind or Reason in which we all participate; for in God we live and move and have our being.