Part 6

It is thus that Berkeley’s thought culminates in _Siris_, that _Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries concerning the Virtues of Tar-water, and divers other subjects connected together and arising one from another_, which appeared in 1744. This little book made more noise at the time of its appearance than any of his books; but not because of its philosophy, which was lost in its medicinal promise to mankind of immunity from disease. Yet it was Berkeley’s last attempt to express his ultimate conception of the universe in its human and divine relations. When _Siris_ is compared with the book of _Principles_, the immense difference in tone and manner of thought shews the change wrought in the intervening years. The sanguine argumentative gladiatorship of the _Principles_ is exchanged for pensive speculation, which acknowledges the weakness of human understanding, when it is face to face with the Immensities and Eternities. Compare the opening sections of the Introduction to the _Principles_ with the closing sections of _Siris_. The contingent data of our experience are now felt to be insufficient, and there is a more or less conscious grounding of the Whole in the eternal and immutable Ideas of Reason. “Strictly, the sense knows nothing. We perceive, indeed, sounds by hearing and characters by sight. But we are not therefore said to understand them.... Sense and experience acquaint us with the course and analogy of appearances and natural effects: thought, reason, intellect, introduce us into the knowledge of their causes.... The principles of science are neither objects of sense nor imagination: intellect and reason are alone the sure guides to truth.” So the shifting basis of the earlier thought is found to need support in the intellectual and moral faith that must be involved in all reasonable human intercourse with the phenomena presented in the universe.

The inadequate thought of God, as only a Spirit or Person supreme among the spirits or persons, in and through whom the material world is realised, a thought which pervades _Alciphron_, makes way in _Siris_ for the thought of God as the infinite omnipresent Ground, or final sustaining Power, immanent in Nature and Man, to which Berkeley had become accustomed in Neoplatonic and Alexandrian metaphysics. “Comprehending God and the creatures in One general notion, we may _say_ that all things together (God and the universe of Space and Time) make One Universe, or τὸ Πᾶν. But if we should say that all things make One God, this would be an erroneous notion of God; but would not amount to atheism, as long as Mind or Intellect was admitted to be τὸ ἡγεμονικόν, or the governing part.... It will not seem just to fix the imputation of atheism upon those philosophers who hold the doctrine of τὸ Ἕν.” It is thus that he now regards God. Metaphysics and theology are accordingly one.

No attempt is made in _Siris_ to articulate the universe in the light of unifying Mind or Reason. And we are still apt to ask what the truth and goodness at the heart of all really mean; seeing that, as conceived in human minds, they vary in the gradual evolution of intellect and conscience in men. _Omnia exeunt in mysteria_ is the tone of _Siris_ at the end. The universe of reality is too much for our articulate intellectual digestion: it must be left for omniscience; it transcends finite intelligence and the _via media_ of human understanding. Man must be satisfied to pass life, in the infinitesimal interval between birth and death, as a faith-venture, which he may convert into a growing insight, as the generations roll on, but which can never be converted into complete knowledge. “In this state we must be satisfied to make the best of those glimpses within our reach. It is Plato’s remark in his _Theætetus_, that while we sit still we are never the wiser; but going into the river, and moving up and down, is the way to discover its depths and shallows. If we exercise and bestir ourselves, we may even here discover something. The eye by long use comes to see even in the darkest cavern; and there is no subject so obscure but we may discern some glimpse of truth by long poring on it. Truth is the cry of all, but the game of a few. Certainly where it is the chief passion it doth not give way to vulgar cares and views; nor is it contented with a little ardour in the early time of life: a time perhaps to pursue, but not so fit to weigh and revise. He that would make a real progress in knowledge must dedicate his age as well as his youth, the later growth as well as the first-fruits, at the altar of Truth.” Such was Berkeley, and such were his last words in philosophy. They may suggest the attitude of Bacon when, at a different view-point, he disclaims exhaustive system: “I have made a beginning of the work: the fortune of the human race will give the issue. For the matter in hand is no mere felicity of speculation, but the real business and fortunes of the human race(34).”

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While Berkeley’s central thought throughout his life is concerned with God as the one omnipresent and omnipotent Providential Agent in the universe, he says little about the other final question, of more exclusively human interest, which concerns the destiny of men. That men are born into a universe which, as the visible expression of Moral Providence, must be scientifically and ethically trustworthy; certain not to put man to confusion intellectually or morally, seeing that it could not otherwise be trusted for such in our ultimate venture of faith—this is one thing. That all persons born into it are certain to continue living self-consciously for ever, is another thing. This is not obviously implied in the former presupposition, whether or not it can be deduced from it, or else discovered by other means. Although man’s environment is essentially Divine, and wholly in its smallest details Providential, may not his body, in its living organisation from physical birth until physical death, be the measure of the continuance of his self-conscious personality? Is each man’s immortal existence, like God’s, indispensable?

Doubt about the destiny of men after they die is, at the end of the nineteenth century, probably more prevalent than doubt about the underlying Providence of God, and His constant creative activity; more perhaps than it was in the days of Toland, and Collins, and Tindal. Future life had been made so familiar to the imagination by the early and mediaeval Church, and afterwards by the Puritans, as in Milton, Bunyan, and Jonathan Edwards, that it then seemed to the religious mind more real than anything that is seen and touched. The habit wholly formed by natural science is apt to dissipate this and to make a human life lived under conditions wholly strange to its “minute philosophy” appear illusory.

A section in the book of _Principles_(35) in which the common argument for the “natural immortality” of the human soul is reproduced, strengthened by his new conception of what the reality of body means, is Berkeley’s metaphysical contribution for determining between the awful alternatives of annihilation or continued self-conscious life after physical death. The subject is touched, in a less recondite way, in two of his papers in the _Guardian_, and in the _Discourse_ delivered in Trinity College Chapel in 1708, in which a revelation of the immortality of men is presented as the special gospel of Jesus Christ. To argue, as Berkeley does in the _Principles_, that men cannot be annihilated at death, because they are spiritual substances having powers independent of the sequences of nature, implies assumptions regarding finite persons which are open to criticism. The justification in reason for our venture of faith that Omnipotent Goodness is at the heart of the universe is—that without this presupposition we can have no reasonable intercourse, scientific or otherwise, with the world of things and persons in which we find ourselves; for reason and will are then alike paralysed by universal distrust. But it can hardly be maintained _a priori_ that men, or other spiritual beings in the universe, are equally with God indispensable to its natural order; so that when they have once entered on conscious existence they must _always_ continue to exist consciously. Is not the philosophical justification of man’s hope of endless life ethical rather than metaphysical; founded on that faith in the justice and goodness of the Universal Mind which has to be taken for granted in every attempt to interpret experience, with its mixture of good and evil, in this evanescent embodied life? Can a life such as this is be _all_ for men, in a universe that, because it is essentially Divine, must operate towards the extinction of the wickedness which now makes it a mystery of Omnipotent Goodness?

A cheerful optimism appears in Berkeley’s habit of thought about death, as we have it in his essays in the _Guardian_: a sanguine apprehension of a present preponderance of good, and consequent anticipation of greater good after death; unlike those whose pessimistic temperament induces a lurid picture of eternal moral disorder. But his otherwise active imagination seldom makes philosophy a meditation upon death. He does not seem to have exercised himself in the way those do who find in the prospect of being in the twenty-first century as they were in the first, what makes them appalled that they have ever come at all into transitory percipient life; or as those others who recoil from an unbodied life after physical death, as infinitely more appalling than the thought of being transported _in this body_ into another planet, or even to a material world outside our solar system. In one of his letters to Johnson(36) he does approach the unbodied life, and in a characteristic way:—

“I see no difficulty in conceiving a change of state, such as is vulgarly called _death_, as well without as with material substance. It is sufficient for that purpose that we allow sensible bodies, i.e. such as are immediately perceived by sight and touch; the existence of which I am so far from questioning, as philosophers are used to do, that I establish it, I think, upon evident principles. Now it seems very easy to conceive the _soul_ to exist in a separate state (i.e. divested from those limits and laws of motion and perception with which she is embarrassed here) and to exercise herself on new ideas, without the intervention of these tangible things we call _bodies_. It is even very possible to apprehend how the soul may have ideas of colour without an eye, or of sounds without an ear(37).”

But while we may thus be supposed to have all our present sensuous experience in an unbodied state, this does not enable one to conceive how unbodied persons can communicate with one another in the absence of _all_ sense signs; whether of the sort derived from our present senses, or from other senses of whose data we can in this life have no imagination.

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Berkeley’s tar-water enthusiasm lasted throughout the rest of his life, and found vent in letters and pamphlets in support of his Panacea, from 1744 till 1752. Notwithstanding this, he was not forgetful of other interests—ecclesiastical, and the social ones which he included in his large meaning of “ecclesiastical.” The Rising under Charles Edward in 1745 was the occasion of a _Letter to the Roman Catholics of Cloyne_, characteristically humane and liberal. It was followed in 1749 by an _Exhortation to the Roman Catholic Clergy of Ireland_ in a similar spirit; and this unwonted courtesy of an Irish Protestant bishop was received by those to whom it was addressed in a corresponding temper.

It is difficult to determine Berkeley’s relation to rival schools or parties in Church and State. His disposition was too singular and independent for a partisan. Some of his early writings, as we have seen, were suspected of high Tory and Jacobite leanings; but his arguments in the suspected _Discourse_ were such as ordinary Tories and Jacobites failed to understand, and the tenor of his words and actions was in the best sense liberal. In religious thought _Siris_ might place him among latitudinarians; perhaps in affinity with the Cambridge Platonists. His true place is foremost among the religious philosophers of the Anglican Church; the first to prepare the religious problem for the light in which we are invited to look at the universe by modern agnostics, and under the modern conception of natural evolution. He is the most picturesque figure in that Anglican succession which, in the seventeenth century, includes Hooker and Cudworth; in the eighteenth, Clarke and Butler; and in the nineteenth, may we say Coleridge, in lack of a representative in orders; although Mansel, Maurice, Mozley, and Jowett are not to be forgotten, nor Isaac Taylor among laymen(38): Newman and Arnold, illustrious otherwise, are hardly representatives of metaphysical philosophy.

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A more pensive tone runs through the closing years at Cloyne. Attempts were made in vain to withdraw him from the “remote corner” to which he had been so long confined. His friends urged his claims for the Irish Primacy. “I am no man’s rival or competitor in this matter,” were his words to Prior. “I am not in love with feasts, and crowds, and visits, and late hours, and strange faces, and a hurry of affairs often insignificant. For my own private satisfaction, I had rather be master of my time than wear a diadem.” Letters to his American friends, Johnson and Clap, shew him still moved by the inspiration which carried him over the Atlantic, and record his influence in the development of American colleges(39). The home education of his three sons was another interest. We are told by his widow that “he would not trust his sons to mercenary hands. Though old and sickly, he performed the constant tedious task himself.” Of the fruit of this home education there is little to tell. The death of William, his favourite boy, in 1751, “was thought to have struck too close to his father’s heart.” “I am a man,” so he writes, “retired from the amusements, politics, visits, and what the world calls pleasure. I had a little friend, educated always under mine own eye, whose painting delighted me, whose music ravished me, and whose lively gay spirit was a continual feast. It has pleased God to take him hence.” The eldest son, Henry, born in Rhode Island, did not long survive his father. George, the third son, was destined for Oxford, and this destiny was connected with a new project. The “life academico-philosophical,” which he sought in vain to realise in Bermuda, he now hoped to find for himself in the city of colleges on the Isis. “The truth is,” he wrote to Prior as early as September 1746, “I have a scheme of my own for this long time past, in which I propose more satisfaction and enjoyment to myself than I could in that high station(40), which I neither solicited, nor so much as wished for. A greater income would not tempt me to remove from Cloyne, and set aside my Oxford scheme; which, though delayed by the illness of my son(41), yet I am as intent upon it and as much resolved as ever.”

The last of Berkeley’s letters which we have is to Dean Gervais. It expresses the feeling with which in April, 1752, he was contemplating life, on the eve of his departure from Cloyne.

“I submit to years and infirmities. My views in this world are mean and narrow; it is a thing in which I have small share, and which ought to give me small concern. I abhor business, and especially to have to do with great persons and great affairs. The evening of life I choose to pass in a quiet retreat. Ambitious projects, intrigues and quarrels of statesmen, are things I have formerly been amused with, but they now seem to be a vain, fugitive dream.”

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Four months after this, Berkeley saw Cloyne for the last time. In August he quitted it for Oxford, which he had long pictured in imagination as the ideal home of his old age. When he left Cork in the vessel which carried his wife, his daughter, and himself to Bristol, he was prostrated by weakness, and had to be taken from Bristol to Oxford on a horse-litter. It was late in August when they arrived there(42).

Our picture of Berkeley at Oxford is dim. According to tradition he occupied a house in Holywell Street, near the gardens of New College and not far from the cloisters of Magdalen. It was a changed world to him. While he was exchanging Ireland for England, death was removing old English friends. Before he left Cloyne he must have heard of the death of Butler in June, at Bath, where Benson, at the request of Secker, affectionately watched the last hours of the author of the _Analogy_. Benson followed Butler in August.

We hear of study resumed in improved health in the home in Holy well Street. In October a _Miscellany, containing several Tracts on various Subjects_, “by the Bishop of Cloyne,” appeared simultaneously in London and Dublin. The Tracts were reprints, with the exception of _Further Thoughts on Tar-water_, which may have been written before he left Ireland. The third edition of _Alciphron_ also appeared in this autumn. But _Siris_ is the latest record of his philosophical thought. A comparison of the _Commonplace Book_ and the _Principles_ with the _Analyst_ and _Siris_ gives the measure of his advancement. After the sanguine beginning perhaps the comparison leaves a sense of disappointment, when we find metaphysics mixed up with mathematics in the _Analyst_, and metaphysics obscurely mixed up with medicine in _Siris_.

It is curious that, although in 1752 David Hume’s _Treatise of Human Nature_ had been before the world for thirteen years and his _Inquiry concerning Human Understanding_ for four years, there is no allusion to Hume by Berkeley. He was Berkeley’s immediate successor in the eighteenth-century evolution of European thought. The sceptical criticism of Hume was applied to the dogmatic religious philosophy of Berkeley, to be followed in its turn by the abstractly rational and the moral reconstructive criticism of Kant. _Alciphron_ is, however, expressly referred to by Hume; indirectly, too, throughout the religious agnosticism of his _Inquiry_, also afterwards in the _Dialogues on Natural Religion_, in a vindication of minute philosophy by profounder reasonings than those which satisfied Lysicles and Alciphron. Berkeley, Hume, and Kant are the three significant philosophical figures of their century, each holding the supreme place successively in its beginning, middle, and later years. Perhaps Reid in Scotland did more than any other in his generation to make Berkeley known; not, however, for his true work in constructive religious thought, but for his supposed denial of the reality of the things we see and touch.(43)

The ideal life in Oxford did not last long. On the evening of Sunday, January 14, 1753, Berkeley was suddenly confronted by the mystery of death. “As he was sitting with my mother, my sister, and myself,” so his son wrote to Johnson at Stratford, in October, “suddenly, and without the least previous notice or pain, he was removed to the enjoyment of eternal rewards; and although all possible means were instantly used, no symptom of life ever appeared after; nor could the physicians assign any cause for his death. He arrived at Oxford on August 25, and had received great benefit from the change of air, and by God’s blessing on tar-water, insomuch that for some years he had not been in better health than he was the instant before he left us(44).”

Six days later he was buried in Oxford, in the Cathedral of Christ Church(45), where his tomb bears an appropriate inscription by Dr. Markham, afterwards Archbishop of York.

ERRATA

Vol. I

Page 99, line 3 _for_ 149-80 _read_ 149-60.

Page 99, line 22 _for_—and to be “suggested,” not signified _read_—instead of being only suggested.

Page 100, line 10 _for_ hearing _read_ seeing.

Page 103, note, lines 5, 6 _for_ pp. 111, 112 _read_ p. 210.

Page 200, note, line 14 _for_ Adam _read_ Robert.

Page 364, line 8 from foot _for_ and _read_ which.

Page 512, note 6, line 3 _for_ imminent _read_ immanent.

Vol. II

Page 194, note, line 3 _for_ Tyndal _read_ Tindal.

Page 207, line 1, insert 13. before _Alc._.

Page 377, line 6 _for_ antethesis _read_ antithesis.

Vol. IV

Page 285, lines 4, 5 _for_ Thisus Alus Cujus, &c. _read_ Ursus. Alus. Cuius. &c. The inscription, strictly speaking, appears on the Palace of the Counts Orsini, and is dated MD.

COMMONPLACE BOOK. MATHEMATICAL, ETHICAL, PHYSICAL, AND METAPHYSICAL

Written At Trinity College, Dublin, In 1705-8

_First published in 1871_

Editor’s Preface To The Commonplace Book

Berkeley’s juvenile _Commonplace Book_ is a small quarto volume, in his handwriting, found among the Berkeley manuscripts in possession of the late Archdeacon Rose. It was first published in 1871, in my edition of Berkeley’s Works. It consists of occasional thoughts, mathematical, physical, ethical, and metaphysical, set down in miscellaneous fashion, for private use, as they arose in the course of his studies at Trinity College, Dublin. They are full of the fervid enthusiasm that was natural to him, and of sanguine expectations of the issue of the prospective authorship for which they record preparations. On the title-page is written, “G. B. Trin. Dub. alum.,” with the date 1705, when he was twenty years of age. The entries are the gradual accumulation of the next three years, in one of which the _Arithmetica_ and the _Miscellanea Mathematica_ made their appearance. The _New Theory of Vision_, given to the world in 1709, was evidently much in his mind, as well as the sublime conception of the material world in its necessary subordination to the spiritual world, of which he delivered himself in his book of _Principles_, in 1710.

This disclosure of Berkeley’s thoughts about things, in the years preceding the publication of his first essays, is indeed a precious record of the initial struggles of ardent philosophical genius. It places the reader in intimate companionship with him when he was beginning to awake into intellectual and spiritual life. We hear him soliloquising. We see him trying to translate into reasonableness our crude inherited beliefs about the material world and the natural order of the universe, self-conscious personality, and the Universal Power or Providence—all under the sway of a new determining Principle which was taking profound possession of his soul. He finds that he has only to look at the concrete things of sense in the light of this great discovery to see the artificially induced perplexities of the old philosophers disappear, along with their imposing abstractions, which turn out empty words. The thinking is throughout fresh and sincere; sometimes impetuous and one-sided; the outcome of a mind indisposed to take things upon trust, resolved to inquire freely, a rebel against the tyranny of language, morally burdened with the consciousness of a new world-transforming conception, which duty to mankind obliged him to reveal, although his message was sure to offend. Men like to regard things as they have been wont. This new conception of the surrounding world—the impotence of Matter, and its subordinate office in the Supreme Economy must, he foresees, disturb those accustomed to treat outward things as the only realities, and who do not care to ask what constitutes reality. Notwithstanding the ridicule and ill-will that his transformed material world was sure to meet with, amongst the many who accept empty words instead of genuine insight, he was resolved to deliver himself of his thoughts through the press, but with the politic conciliation of a persuasive Irish pleader.