[In the following essay, which was written in 1936, Wild provides a survey of Berkeley's career and an overview of his philosophical development.]

Berkeley completed the Siris, his last and definitive philosophical work, in 1744. His health, already failing, was further impaired by the exhausting study and meditation which had been necessary for its composition. He himself declared, according to his first biographer Stock, “that this work cost him more time and pains than any other he had ever been engaged in.” He was able, however, to carry on his episcopal duties with unabated zeal, and several more or less occasional writings of this period have survived.

Among these is a “Letter to the Roman Catholics of The Diocese of Cloyne,” which he wrote in 1745 in a remarkably sympathetic tone, advising them against siding with the Pretender, whose conquest, he maintained, would be a disaster to them as well as to the representatives of the Irish Protestant Church, whom he similarly advised in “A Letter to his Clergy by the Bishop of Cloyne on the Occasion of the Rebellion in 1745.” The friendly recognition of Catholics by a Protestant Bishop was an unprecendented step in the history of the Irish Church.

The See of Cloyne had never been congenial,¹ and the Earl of Chesterfield, who had come to admire Berkeley's character,² and who was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1745, offered to translate him to the far more pleasant and lucrative Bishopric of Clogher.³ Berkeley, however, “did not love episcopal translations,”⁴ and in spite of the entreaties of his intimate friends refused the offer.⁵ In 1746 he was mentioned in connection with the Primacy.⁶ His indifference to this suggestion, however, is indicated in a letter to Prior written in 1747.⁷ “As to what you say,” writes Berkeley, “that the Primacy would have been a glorious thing, for my part I could not see, all things considered, the glory of wearing the name of Primate in these days, or of getting so much money, a thing every tradesman in London may get if he pleases … and for doing good to the world, I imagine I may, upon the whole, do as much in a lower station.” The extent to which he loathed the whole machinery of self-promotion involved in ecclesiastical preferment is also revealed in the following ironical letter which he addressed at this time to Dr. Clarke, the Vice Provost of Trinity College, who had solicited his recommendation. Berkeley writes:⁸

I would not suppose your affairs are at all the worse for my not being in towne; for, to speak the truth, I would have been of no use with my Lord Lieutenant unless he had given me a decent opportunity of speaking to the point by consulting or advising with me about it, a thing which I had no right to expect. I have been told His Excellency expressed a particular esteem for you publickly at the Castle, on occasion of the compliment you made him on his first arrival. This personal prepossession in your favour, grounded on his sense of your merit, is, in my opinion, worth twenty recommendations, even of those great men in power, who alone have a right to make them. To conclude, I wish you all success in your undertakings, being with sincere regard &.

That the remoteness of the realm, into which his practical speculation had led him tended to make him even somewhat oblivious to ecclesiastical as distinguished from theological issues is indicated by the essay addressed to the Irish Catholics in 1749, entitled A Word to the Wise or an Exhortation to the R. C. Clergy of Ireland, in which he pleads for tolerance and cooperation to achieve the welfare of “Our Country.” He comments particularly upon the poverty and sloth of the “native Irish” as a disgrace to the land and to the Church. He says that the prevailing conditions lead one to suspect that the Irish are the only nation which is “wedded to dirt on principle,” but he, for his part, refuses to believe that there is any necessary connection between indolence and Catholicism.⁹ He exhorts the Catholic clergy “to act with vigour in this cause”¹⁰ of awakening their fellow “wretched countrymen from their sweet dream of sloth.” In some cases, he concludes, it is wise even “ab hoste doceri,” but qualifies this remark almost immediately by a final paragraph which is as characteristic for its tact as for its spirit of tolerance. “In truth,” he says, “I am no enemy to your persons, whatever I may think of your tenets. On the contrary, I am your sincere well-wisher. I consider you as my countrymen, as fellow-subjects, as professing belief in the same Christ. And I do most sincerely wish, there was no other contest between us but—who shall most completely practice the precepts of Him by whose name we are called, and whose disciples we all profess to be.”¹¹ A very civil reply, signed by the Roman Catholic clergy of the Diocese of Dublin, was printed soon after in the Dublin Journal.

Berkeley saw clearly that he was fighting a losing battle against Deism and “free-thinking,” and that his contemporaries were being carried in a direction diametrically opposed to that of his own conviction and life. The “impiety” and “indifference” within as well as without the Church continuously oppressed his thought. In a letter to his friend Gervais,¹² he speaks of the “wretched and unhappy times,” and concludes with the melancholy words of Horace:

Aetas Parentum, pejor avis, tulit
Nos nequiores, mox daturos
Progeniem vitiosiorem.

The extent to which his hard-headed countrymen had misread the clear and simple treatises of his youth leads him to see the hopelessness of expecting them to follow him into the transcendental regions where his later speculations had taken him. The thought takes ever firmer possession of his mind that he is now a stranger to the time. In a short letter concerning earthquakes,¹³ he concludes that there seems nothing in the physical situation of London which should render it immune to such a catastrophe, and “whether,” he remarks, “there be anything in the moral state thereof that should exempt it from that fear, I leave others to judge.”

His health was becoming too precarious for the performance of anything more than his necessary ecclesiastical duties. In 1750, however, a short collection of conversational aphorisms preserved by his wife was published under the title Maxims Concerning Patriotism.¹⁴ According to the twentieth maxim, “He who saith there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave,” and the incident of which this statement is perhaps the conclusion is recorded in full by his daughter-in-law:

His predecessor once on a visit at Cloyne to Bishop Berkeley asserted (a vast circle at the table) that “all mankind were either knaves or fools.” Bishop Berkeley instantly said, “Pray my good Lord, to which class does your Lordship belong?” He hummed a little while, then replied “Why, I believe to both.” Bishop Berkeley made a graceful assenting bow; and, when relating the anecdote, used to say “There never was a truer character given by man of any man.”¹⁵

In 1751 his son William died, and the letter which he wrote his friend Benson, Bishop of Gloucester, shows how deeply he was affected. “I had set mine heart too much upon him,” he writes, “more perhaps than I ought to have done upon anything in this world.” The final paragraph reveals clearly the sense of spiritual isolation that increasingly marked his later years. “Thus much suffer me,” he concludes, “in the overflowing of my soul to say to your Lordship, who, though distant in place, are much nearer to my heart than any of my neighbors.”¹⁶ His daughter-in-law states that, after this time, he seemed to see William “incessantly” before his eyes.¹⁷ But though ill and feeble, he continued to supervise the education of his surviving children and to carry on his ecclesiastical duties.

In the spring of 1751 he published, on Whitsunday, a sermon on the text: “Thy will be done in earth as it is in Heaven,” which was probably his farewell to the pulpit, and which constitutes the last surviving record of his speculative life. His thought has now reached a stage impossible to express in an abstractly philosophical form, though he is equally far from an abstract anti-rationalism. There is now no trace of the juvenile enthusiasm for reason which had led him previously to hope great things from the “new philosophy,” to place the human mind at the heart of reality, and to subordinate even God, as in the Passive Obedience, to the eternal laws of nature. This sermon is saturated with the thought of transcendence. “Religion,” he says, “is nothing else but the conforming our faith and practice to the will of God. To this single point,” he adds, “may be reduced all religion, all moral vertue, all human happiness.”¹⁸ The infinite difference between this God and the rational postulate of the early works is indicated by Berkeley's statement that “our understanding is in its own nature not only very weak and imperfect, but much obscured by passion and prejudice.”¹⁹ There are, he says, “many unsearchable perfections in the Deity, whose nature is infinitely above our knowledge. …”²⁰

Yet Berkeley's scepticism is far too radical to enable him to find refuge in irrationalism. If the natural light of reason is an untrustworthy guide, as it most evidently is, then it is even more absurd to trust any other human faculty, such as will. “It will be very evident,” says Berkeley, “that we are too imperfect creatures to be governed by our own wills,”²¹ and again, “our power is at least as imperfect as our knowledge.”²² The weakness and fallibility of reason are, indeed, discovered by reason itself, not by any other “higher sense.” Reason is man's “distinguishing character,”²³ and “whatsoever is most reasonable is most natural to him.”²⁴ It is not, therefore, necessary to rely upon any mystic intuition to “shew how reasonable it is, that the will of God should be done upon earth.”²⁵ It is reason itself which appreciates that “there is no reason so right, no rule so just as the will of God,”²⁶ and hence passes beyond itself to revelation. Indeed, what we call reason is only the beginning of this passage beyond itself, and reason, taken concretely in its entirety, is precisely the revelation of that which is transcendent. It is only in this “subordinate” position, as dependent on a perfection which is higher than itself, that reason ceases to be dependent upon something lower than itself, and thus becomes what it truly is, the mediator or λόγοs.

We now find hardly a trace of the subjectivism and psychologism of his youth. Percipi, far from contributing to the objectivity of esse, is rather a relativizing and distorting factor. What is true in our perceptions is derived from an esse existing in its own right, and hence lying beyond them. Reason itself cannot achieve true being, though it may lead us away from the flux of mere perception, and thus point the way. There is no esse cognoscere, however, for “our understanding is in its own nature … weak and imperfect.”²⁷ The more we think, the more we are led away from thought to that which lies essentially beyond it as its source, the principle of value (o oν oντωs). It is with respect to this underlying principle that the dialectical contrast between the objective and the subjective, what truly is and what seems to be, the truly transcendent and the spuriously transcendent, becomes most sharply defined. Hence, Berkeley now abandons the identification of the good with the dogmatic concept of interest, uncritically accepted in the Commonplace Book²⁸ as that which men desire. Solipsism in ethics can no more withstand scepticism than solipsism in epistemology. It is, says Berkeley, “no sure sign that a thing is good, because we desire, or evil because we are displeased with it.”²⁹

This fundamental antithesis between practical action and the transcendental norm conditioning it is the final “result,” if it may be so called, of Berkeley's concrete logic, since the synthesis of reason is only the mediation of this polarity. Reason itself, in its entirety, is practical in character, and hence, like every other form of action, reduced to relativity and subordination by its norm. The last “result” of Berkeley's concrete logic is an antithesis rather than a synthesis. Beyond the speculative absolute of reason is the absolute itself and the “creatures.”³⁰ “Life” is neither an idealistic absorption in the divine whole nor a naturalistic process, but a voyage or “pilgrimage”³¹ in which “we” are brought into relation with that which we are not. Neither as “organisms” nor as phases of the absolute would we be what we really are, “creatures” acting from choice. Prior to “the infinite mind of all things” is man the creature; prior to synthesis is antithesis. But practical or axiological choice is confronted not by a being which at the same time is not, and a non-being which nevertheless is, but by an absolute antithesis, the either/or. This absolute antithesis, between a being which truly is and a non-being which is not, is prior to the mediating antitheses of reason which are at the same time syntheses. Prior to theory is practice.

The final human virtue is “resignation,”³² in which “the inferior faculties remain subordinate,”³³ and man sinks to the level of a “creature.” The “will or mind of man, in this subordinate, regular situation, may be said to act in its proper sphere, and answer the ends for which it was created.”³⁴ This is the positive side of virtue. But, since virtue can never be complete, this aspect alone is an abstraction. Resignation is primarily antithesis. The will of man cannot be “thus subordinate,”³⁵ and hence must remain “dislocated” and “be restless and uneasy.”³⁶ We are to live our lives neither with the easy confidence of the pagan nor with the fanatical confidence of the mystic but with “care.”³⁷ Virtue itself is beyond our reach. We may hope only for “zeal.”³⁸

It is obviously impossible to reconcile Berkeley's last sermon with the mystical dream-idealism of his early writings, which historical tradition has permanently attached to his name. In this last surviving fragment, he does not speak as one whose philosophy has united him permanently with the universe, nor as one who has been able to quiet his doubts by pleasant dreams, either rational or emotional. What seems rather to dominate these pages is that “distrust” of which he spoke in the Commonplace Book³⁹ as having “disposed” him even in childhood for “new doctrines.” The concrete level of existence to which this “distrust” has finally forced him is dominated by antithesis rather than synthesis, by anxiety rather than confidence. Berkeley speaks in his last address not as the mouth-piece of the λόγοs, but as a man. The nothingness which he had so vainly endeavored to grasp in his reflections assumes in this context the more concrete shape of death, and the restless scepticism which had led him “through all the sciences”⁴⁰ now takes the more concrete form of an “anxiety” or “care,” appropriate not so much for a disembodied spirit as for a man about to die.

His Will, drawn in July 1752, contains an item which seems astonishingly inconsistent to those who accept the common view of Berkeley as a romantic subjectivist or “immaterialist,” but which loses something of its strangeness when read in the light of his later reflections. The document reads as follows:⁴¹

In the name of God Amen. I, George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, being sound of mind and memory, do make this my last Will and Testament.

First, I do humbly recommend my Soul into the hands of my blessed Redeemer by whose merits and intercession I hope for Mercy.

As to my Body and Effects, I dispose of them in the following manner:—

It is my will that my Body be buried in the Churchyard of the parish in which I die:

Item, that the expense of my funeral do not exceed twenty pounds, and that as much more be given to the poor of the parish where I die:

Item, that my Body, before it is buried, be kept five days above ground or longer, even till it grow offensive by the cadaverous smell, and that during the said time it lye unwashed, undisturbed, and covered by the same bed-clothes in the same bed the head being raised upon pillows.

Item, that my dear wife Anne be sole executrix of this my Will, and guardian of my children—to which said wife Anne I leave and bequeathe all my worldly goods and substance, to be disposed of as to her shall seem good:

Item, it is my will that in case my said wife should die intestate, all my worldly goods, substance and possessions of what kind soever, shall be equally divided among my children:

In witness whereof I have herewith put my hand and seal this thirty-first day of July Anno Domini, One thousand seven hundred and fifty-two.

George Cloyne.

It is apparent that the curious item concerning the “body” is not written from the standpoint of “immaterialism.” Berkeley's concrete logic has, indeed, carried him beyond all isms. He speaks now not as a “spirit” but as a “man,” confronting the nothingness which hovers over all concrete existence. The item undoubtedly expresses a certain lack of confidence in medical science, which is not surprising in the author of the Siris. Berkeley wishes to die, as he had come to live, remote from the thoughts and attentions of his contemporaries, in peace and “undisturbed.”

The deaths of his old friends Prior and Benson intensified his sense of loneliness. In a letter written in the previous spring⁴² to the active Gervais he had expressed his intention of finding a retreat where he could die in peace, as far as possible from that modern spirit which he could now no longer share.

For my own part 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, which I leave to such as you who delight in them and are fit for them. 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.

In 1752, Berkeley took active steps to realize this dream of retiring even further from the world to “that city of eternal evening” where he had first sensed the futility of worldly affairs, and where “a number of gentlemen living independently” make “divine things their study.”⁴³ Accordingly, he attempted to resign his Bishopric, but George II, curious as to the origin of this strange application, upon discovering the identity of the applicant, swore that Berkeley should die a Bishop, though he might live where he pleased. In August, 1752, he set out for Oxford with his wife, daughter, and son. He was so ill that for the last part of the journey he had to be carried on a litter, but he survived the change of domicile, and settled down in a small house on Broad Street near Christ Church. For the next months he lived the life for which he had so long hoped, revising and editing several of his works, but spending most of his days in quiet meditation. On the fourteenth of January, at tea, while his wife was reading to him from the fifteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians,⁴⁴ his daughter, offering him another cup, observed that he did not reach out his hand, and it was discovered that he was dead.

BERKELEY'S PHILOSOPHICAL DEVELOPMENT

To one first becoming acquainted with Berkeley's philosophy as a whole, it appears more as a chaos of conflicting theories and opinions than as a consistent “system.” In the early writings he is an empiricist, denying the pure concept as an abstraction, or even a word, and appealing to direct sensory experience and the psychical “action” of the will as the only concrete realities. In the Siris, sense experience and will sink to the level of “fleeting shadows,” possessing no intrinsic reality, since they are always in fieri, and reality itself is held to be apprehended only through the pure concept. In the early writings, the realm of nature is no more than appearance for the individual self, and the view of matter, even as an instrument in the hands of God, is dismissed as too extravagant for serious discussion. In the Siris, Berkeley takes great pains to outline a philosophy of nature based upon just such an “imperceptible,” material instrument. It is not difficult to recognize Locke, even where disagreement with him is expressed, as the great inspirer of the Commonplace Book, whereas in the Siris he is not even mentioned.

The difference between the youthful and the mature Berkeley is perhaps most clearly understood when we realize the extent to which all the early positions revolve about man as psychologically conceived. Reality is what man perceives or wills. The good is what man psychologically desires. Even God is a necessary rational postulate constructed after the analogy of the human soul. In the later writings, man sinks to a “subordinate” position, and humanism is replaced by transcendentalism. Being is no longer being because we take it to be so, nor is anything true because we believe it, nor anything really good because we desire it. Truth, being, and value, as humanly conceived, are seen to be possible only through a transcendental perfection. Man himself can be what he is only through his relation to that which lies beyond himself essentially. This is without doubt the chief contrast dominating Berkeley's works as a whole, and dividing them into an earlier and later group. But many other differences, often occurring in successive works, strike the eye of even the superficial reader. There is, for example, the sharp antithesis between the loose pragmatic procedure advocated in the Alciphron and the rigid rationalism of the Analyst, and there are many other “contradictions” no less evident. If Berkeley's thought as a whole is to be comprehended it must be conceived as a development. Without a sense of the direction of his reflections, they dissolve into a chaos of separate “positions.” When understood chronologically, however, these isolated points become significant.

The key to this development, as we have attempted to show, is Berkeley's theory of abstraction, or what we have called his “concrete logic.” This is the constant method which, expressing itself in the various positions through which Berkeley successively passed, holds them together as an unified structure, finally philosophically realized in the Siris. Various and even essentially opposed as are the points of view and “theories” maintained in his published writings, there is, nevertheless, not one of these which does not embody a polemic against abstract ideas. The “new principle” of the Commonplace Book, as we have seen, is itself an application of the concrete or “mental” mode of reasoning. The doctrine of abstraction, says Berkeley in the New Theory of Vision of 1709, “is the prolific womb which has brought forth innumerable errors and difficulties, in all parts of philosophy and in all the sciences.”⁴⁵

It is unnecessary to comment upon the vital role played by the doctrine of abstraction in the Principles, since this is made sufficiently clear by the author himself in the methodological introduction with which he found it necessary to preface the work. The Dialogues, written in 1713, make use of the principle of abstraction not only to show the relativity of all objects or ideas but also “the dependency I find in myself. …”⁴⁶ Berkeley's logic leads him here to the conception of the speculative absolute, or as he phrases it, “the infinite mind of God, in whom we live and move and have our being.”⁴⁷ “How doth it follow,” he asks, “that because I can pronounce the word motion by itself, I can form the idea of it in my mind exclusive of body? or, because theorems may be made of extension and figures without any mention of great or small, or any other sensible mode or quality, that therefore it is possible such an abstract idea of extension should be … apprehended by the mind?”⁴⁸

The essential importance of Berkeley's concrete logic in the argument of the De Motu, written in 1720, is equally apparent. “Melius itaque foret,” he says, “si, missa qualitate occulta, homines attenderent solummodo ad effectus sensibiles; vocibusque abstractis (quantumvis illae ad disserendum utiles sint) in meditatione omissis, mens in particularibus et concretis, hoc est in ipsis rebus, defigeretur.”⁴⁹ That the important development of Berkeley's thought during the ten succeeding years did not at any rate change his attitude towards abstraction but is rather to be viewed as a result of his concrete method is indicated by the letter to Johnson of November 25, 1729, in which he cautions his ambitious disciple “to consider whether any new objection that shall occur doth not suppose the doctrine of abstract general ideas.”⁵⁰ The concrete method is emphasized in unmistakable language in the Alciphron of 1732. “I do not deny,” says Berkeley, almost repeating the words of the Principles and the earlier letter to Leclerc, “it [the mind] may abstract in a certain sense: inasmuch as those things that can really exist or be really perceived asunder, may be conceived asunder, or abstracted one from the other; for instance a man's head from his body, colour from motion, figure from weight. But it will not thence follow that the mind can frame abstract general ideas, which appear to be impossible.”⁵¹

Finally, we have seen, at the end of his life Berkeley rediscovered his concrete method in the dialectic of Proclus and Plotinus, and incorporated it in the thought transitions of the Siris. What is most truly real or “in itself” is no longer apprehended in the fleeting show of sense but rather in the χωριsτòν ε[UNK]δοs. This, however, is “not an abstract idea compounded of inconsistencies, and prescinded from all real things, as some moderns understand abstraction.”⁵² Reality (o oν oντωs) is not to be gained through any intellectualistic dismemberment of what is “given” to us, for everything that is “given,” including the self to which it is “given,” is dependent or relative, and therefore already abstract and unreal. Actually existing reality (ο[UNK]sία oντωs ο[UNK]sα), therefore, is to be found only in the transcendent.

While it cannot be denied, therefore, that Berkeley's conception of the truly real underwent the most revolutionary changes during the course of his reflections, it must, on the other hand, be granted that the goal towards which he was striving remained essentially the same. The guiding motive of Berkeley's thought, from its earliest inceptions to the last pages of the Siris, is the attempt to understand reality concretely, or to think things together as they really are. Stated negatively, this means the avoidance of verbalism, partiality, or abstraction in general, and it is in this form that Berkeley tended to think of his aim in the early writings. During this period of his life, it seemed to him that his goal might be achieved solely through the rejection of certain more or less obvious forms of abstraction, such as the stubborn verbalism lying at the root of such a theory as materialism. A concrete or synthetic logic must be substituted for the “symbolic” logic of ordinary discourse. Instead of verbalizing certain phases of reality, and hence granting them a spurious substantiality, it is necessary to think the aspects together synthetically, or concretely, as they actually are. This at first seemed to him a very simple matter, and he often appeals, as in the New Theory of Vision, to “any man's experience.”⁵³

It did not take him long to discover, however, that common sense is a tissue of artificial verbalisms, and that the problem he had set for himself was something far more difficult than he had, in the first enthusiasm of youth, supposed. Concrete thought can be achieved by nothing short of a revolutionary development not only in the logic of philosophy but in that of ordinary thought as well. There is not only a veil of language, separating us from things as they are in themselves, but a veil of sense, and finally, and most difficult of all, a veil of thought, for thought, even at its most concrete level, is still only thought, and hence abstraction. Concrete thought, therefore, must be something more than thought. This is why Berkeley, at the end of his life, ceased to state his goal negatively in terms of the avoidance of abstraction, as though reality could be thought adequately by the mere adherence to a few easily remembered rules. In the Siris, the goal is stated positively as the thought of τ[UNK] oντα oντωs, though it is not difficult to recognize in this more mature statement the res ipsae of the De Motu⁵⁴ and the early writings.

But whether stated negatively as the avoidance of abstraction, or positively as concrete or absolute thought, the aim of all of Berkeley's philosophical endeavours from first to last was not to think reality conveniently, neatly, beautifully, morally, or even convincingly, but to think reality concretely as it is. His reflection began with a distrust of the artificial hypostatizations of language. It ended with a far deeper distrust of the artificial hypostatizations of thought itself, which, if employed uncritically, raise an insurmountable barrier between ourselves and truth. But whatever the specific form assumed by Berkeley's scepticism, it was always directed against whatever exaggerations, preconceptions, or peculiarities seemed most obstinately to obstruct our apprehension of things as they really are. To achieve this goal, Berkeley was willing to pay any price, in youth the price of absurdity and paradox in the eyes of his hard-headed contemporaries, in maturity the price of that complete neglect which is the natural reward of one for whom the very spirit and content of the age in which he lives has become incredible and strange. The key to the understanding of Berkeley, not as the inventor of paradoxical phrases, not as the builder of another system of philosophy, but as a thinker, lies in his uninterrupted effort to think reality neither cleverly, nor economically, nor rationally, nor irrationally, but rather as it is.

This effort led to the almost always original and sometimes devious course of reflections we have attempted to follow in these chapters. First of all, filling him with discontent at the mathematical ideal which, in the manner of Descartes and Locke, he had himself enthusiastically brandished before the world in his earliest publications, it led him, in the Commonplace Book, to abandon mathematical proof as analytic or symbolic in character. Mathematical thought, in spite of its deceptive “certainty,” is not adequate for the purposes of philosophy, because of its abstractness and artificiality. Leaving the mathematical method, therefore, to those who prefer tautology to truth, Berkeley proceeded to develop his concrete or “mental” mode of reasoning as a means of thinking things together, or as they really are, rather than clearly and distinctly. Reality in the concrete is not mathematical, and it is more important in philosophy at least to adapt one's thought to the outlines of reality itself, even when vague or confused, than to a certain set of convenient but arbitrary rules.

Reality, furthermore, is far from being the set of isolated terms which the intellectualist moves about, or “relates” at will.⁵⁵ In reality, the terms are already related, and without their essential contexts would not be what they are. Ordinary thought is abstract in that it beholds things now from one point of view, now from another, always attempting to dignify and perpetuate its perspectives through the categories of reality and substance, but thereby closing its mind to the fringe of context or relation really essential to these hypostatizations. The deep-seated distrust which Berkeley found opposing him at every point is in truth the confusion we feel when customary abstractions, or so-called “real things,” dissolve in the acid of reflection and leave us confronting—reality. Berkeley's concrete logic is the attempt to remain conscious of the relative whole or universe of discourse within which analysis proceeds. When this all-important context is kept in mind, the analytic components cease to be isolated “things” or substances, and sink to the level of phases or, as Berkeley calls them, “considerations” of a larger whole, which is far more difficult to grasp. When one's attention, however, is concentrated upon this whole, he may become thoroughly aware of the artificiality of the analytic technique, and may utilize this technique, subordinating it, that is, to the ends of truth, rather than truth to “considerations.”

The fringe of meaning, in which truth lies, constantly eludes the grasp of the intellectualist as long as he takes his analysis too seriously. There is not one of Berkeley's early discoveries which does not rest upon insight into an essential synthetic connection between aspects eluding the grasp of an abstract logic which would regard them as independent things or entities. Thus, colour and extension, which are conceived analytically as discrete entities, are in reality “concreted” together in such a way that colour is impossible without the latter, and universals, which abstract logic considers to be independent, subsistent entities, are bound up with what it calls particulars in such a way that it is impossible to conceive of the one without the other. But the most important and dangerous instance of such abstraction Berkeley discovered in what is generally called the external or material world. Such a world, as it is ordinarily conceived, in abstraction from the internal or psychical, is meaningless. A material object without a mind to perceive it is an artificial construction without actual or concrete existence.

Berkeley at first confused concrete reality with the “given” world of “experience,” and it was not until the end of his early reflections that he succeeded in purifying his thought from the consequences of this unfortunate error. Experience, he first maintained, consists of two elements, a world of passive objects or ideas and an active self or will. The esse of the one is percipi; the esse of the other percipere.⁵⁶ His concrete logic soon led him to see, however, that there was an essential connection between the two such that the former is inconceivable in the concrete without the latter. This truth he incorporated in the formula esse est percipi, which is by no means an analytic tautology, but the indication of a necessary, synthetic relation. At the very climax of the Commonplace Book, Berkeley perceives that the relation is one of mutual interdependence such that the act of perception, as it is in reality, is also inconceivable without an object to perceive. The phrase esse est percipi was probably the result of this important movement of thought, since both the active and passive sides of perception are telescoped together in the concrete word percipi. Berkeley nevertheless still clung to his original notion of an independent, truncated will or soul substance “given” in experience, or, in his own words, something of which we have a direct intuition by a certain reflexive act of mind. It was not until the third of the Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous that Berkeley fully appreciated the significance of the dialectic of the Commonplace Book, and explicitly recognized the relativity of all meaning, the artificiality of all abstraction, and hence the “dependency” in the self or will. It is the persistence of the early soul substance or “intuitive” view, however, in the Principles and the first two dialogues, which is responsible for the subjectivism of these early writings, as well as for the consequent confusion of idealism with psychologism in the later English tradition.

Criticism of Berkeley has ignored the concrete logic underlying his thought which, as is indicated by the dialectical discussions of the Commonplace Book, leads to an entirely different sort of idealism. History, however, has “frozen” Berkeley, so to speak, at the point in his development at which his synthetic logic had destroyed all fixed substances or abstractions save the empirical self or psyche. The result of thus relativizing everything with respect to an artificially stabilized or “intuited” self is the solipsism or psychologism so perfectly analogous to the “materialism” which had easily fallen before the attack of his “mental” logic in the Principles. But once this logic had started its destructive course, there was no stopping it by any fixed abstraction, or by the “intuition” and “self-evidence” with which such an abstract logic seeks in vain to ward off the pricks of scepticism. In the third of the Dialogues, the self is explicitly recognized as being in a state of “dependency” exactly analogous to that of all intuited objects whatsoever. Never again does the uncritical “we” or “I” creep into Berkeley's thought, nor is the absolute ever again confused with the finite subject. All such finite objects are relative or dependent,—one upon the other. He sees that such a universal relativity is impossible without some transcendental basis, and hence explicitly introduces into the argument the Platonic theory of ideas which had previously been obscured by his spiritism and the “causal” theory of perception to which it inevitably led. The differences between our finite perceptions require a transcendental or ideal identity, as their discontinuity and incompleteness require that which is continuous and complete. Berkeley's concrete logic thus brings him to that speculative absolute which is the final conclusion of his early reflections, and to which he refers as the “infinite Mind in whom we live and move and have our being.”

The most obvious consequence of Berkeley's discussion of the absolute of reason is scepticism, and all of Berkeley's speculations after this critical period contain a sceptical moment. None of the abstract things or entities of common sense is really a substance at all, nor is even what we call by the name “I” or “we” a fixed entity capable of existing in isolation from external things. Such “things” are rather phases of something lying beyond. When we come to the pure “ideas” presupposed by such empirical objects, it seems at first as though here at least we were confronted with something self-existent. But the very priority of such forms is a relation which reduces them to dependency. The dialectic of reason cannot rest either with the immediate or the mediate, with object or idea. It reaches its goal only in that infinite mind or absolute within which all that is real finds a place. But this absolute is nothing but scepticism, or the pure form of reason itself, which thinks all things, passes through them, and rests with none. It does in a sense include its objects, and is hence the synthesis or absolute whole of reality, but it includes them only by relativizing or transcending them. As the absolute whole, it is relative to its parts, or dependent upon them, and is hence not the end or goal of reason at all.

The speculative absolute is not really the absolute, but only reason itself. Nevertheless, while it does not transcend the form of reason, it does transcend all specific rationality, and hence contains a moment of absoluteness. It is at least sufficient for the purposes of scepticism, and capable of negating, or setting in flux, any theoretical formulation. After the third dialogue, therefore, Berkeley's rationalism divides itself into the aspect of scepticism on the one hand and absolutism on the other, though, at first, this absolute moment consists only of a vague fermentation arising from the insight that reason is in no form, not even the most transcendental form which is thinkable, the absolute itself. “God is a Being of transcendent and unlimited perfections.”⁵⁷

This dissatisfaction with reason and the Deistic presuppositions of his early writings, while it may be discerned as a vague undercurrent in the third dialogue, did not actually take possession of Berkeley's consciousness until his sudden plunge into contemporary life in 1713. In London, he was able to observe the broad, cultural results of the “scientific philosophy” he had himself been propagating. Greeted upon his arrival by the Discourse of Anthony Collins, he made an extended first-hand study of the free-thinkers and their clubs. The mass of dull and badly reasoned tracts and arguments disgusted him almost as intensely as the moral torpor of the Deists themselves, and he was glad to make use of the opportunity afforded him by Steele of opposing as bitterly as he could the very rationalism he had so ingeniously defended in his earlier writings. Turning to his friends among the great wits of the day, all of whom affected scorn for the smart free-thinker, he found them, nevertheless, Deists at heart. Indeed, the verbal wit and external gracefulness with which men like Pope and Addison attempted to counterbalance the vacuum they had created to replace their souls, only intensified his disgust.

Retiring to the quiet atmosphere of Oxford, and there meditating alone in the country, he realized that his enemy was nothing less than the age itself. Free-thinking was not an ephemeral social phenomenon, confined to a few Collins' and Chubbs', but the modern spirit itself. Wearing the disarming guise of the “light” of reason it is welcomed by the aspiring mind, which is then seared and blinded to such a degree that it is finally willing to part with every birthright, even its innate freedom and very rationality, in return for plausible argument. Having attempted to convey something of this revised conception of Deism to the general public in his Guardian essays, Berkeley, abandoning altogether his life of contemplation, plunged, as a practical idealist, into the stream of contemporary “life,” resolved upon the hopeless task of combating the spirit of the age. Such writings as have survived from this practical stage of his life are all critical or polemic in tone. Contemplation is not carried on for its own sake. The center of his spiritual axis has shifted from the contemplative to the active, from the theoretical to the practical.

First of all, in the De Motu, he employs his scepticism to attack the dogmas of Newtonian science by laying bare the essential relativity in the spatial and temporal absolutes upon which the whole mechanical edifice was founded. What finally confirmed his scientific scepticism was the “pragmatic” argument which was the sole justification for its loose and uncritical procedure. It is, therefore, in the vague and inarticulate form of “utility” that the principle of value, closely associated with his scepticism, really enters Berkeley's thought as an active principle. Later, it was to become a fully developed and articulate theory purged of its humanistic implications. In the De Motu, however, as undeveloped pragmatism, it is only an ally to scepticism, helping it to break down scientific dogmatism by revealing the extent to which its “advance” is based not upon what is true, but rather upon what seems to be “useful.”

In the Alciphron, Berkeley turns his sceptical weapons upon the moral philosophy and theology of Deism, as embodied particularly in Shaftesbury's system of “sweetness and light.” The Alciphron is governed by the same alliance of scepticism with practical philosophy which dominated the De Motu, but the essential relation between the two is far more profoundly grasped, and the conception of value, which is now the determining force in Berkeley's thought, is no longer left at the incoherent level of “pragmatism,” but is deepened into practical philosophy. In the seventh dialogue, Berkeley fully works out his conception of practical knowledge, and grasps the significance of that faith in which it culminates, though the latter is perhaps even more distinctly apprehended in the sermon preached by Berkeley after his return from America.

The absolute, approached at last through this culmination of his practical philosophy, enables him in the Analyst to see the possibility of a permanently stable basis for rationality, which he now realizes is to be identified with neither the superficial plausibility of the Deist nor the equally superficial irrationality of the pragmatist, but only with the intrinsic intelligibility of mediation. Resting upon the foundation of a philosophy of value, reason may dare at last to be intelligible. Berkeley, therefore, revives the Platonic theory of ideas, to which his earliest speculations had finally forced him in the third dialogue, and to which he had given the name of philosophia prima in the De Motu. It is only upon the critical foundation of such a “transcendental science” of meaningful logic or intelligibility that any science, including that of mathematics, may securely rest. Otherwise, proceeding “pragmatically,” the “scientist” will be, like “the ignorant sailor,” mechanically following a routine the meaning of which he does not understand.

Just as the meaning which is granted to existent facts by science arises from a field of pure significance lying beyond existence, so does the field of significance itself have its origin in a further transcendental source. This final absolute is the absolute of value. Berkeley's concrete logic, having passed into a scepticism capable of setting all concepts in flux, could clearly have no further end. Having passed through the theoretical dialectic of synthesis, and the practical dialectic of antithesis, it rests, if this may be said to be rest, with that which is neither the absolute whole of reason nor the absolutization of any human ideal, but the absolute itself, the transcendent. The first philosophy, or as Berkeley calls it, the transcendental philosophy of meaning, resting on this basis, and the interpretation, or meaning, which this in turn was able to bestow upon the world of existence, he outlined in the Siris, with the assistance of the Greek writers who, as he increasingly realized, were the discoverers of the field of true significance. In the Siris, reason sinks into its proper, mediate station as the λόγοs, moving between the non-being which is commonly called “existence” and that which truly is. In this intermediate position, it affords, to one caught in the toils of time and change, a way to the eternal, as well as a means of expression to the philosopher, firmly established in absolute scepticism, who wishes to transmit something of the value of significance to the world.

Both of these movements are apparent in the Siris. It is, on the one hand, the most philosophical of all of Berkeley's works, being written like all true philosophy, from the absolute point of view. It is not forgotten, however, that such a point of view (which is no point of view) is possible, humanly speaking, only on the ground (which is no ground) of paradox or faith.

The Siris, therefore, is even more than first philosophy. It is the record of a struggle. It is only through the endless contradictions of the λόγοs that being touches us. It is only after all ends have been condemned and all concepts set in motion by the goad of negation that the transcendent may be apprehended. God speaks only to the sceptic, and often not to him. It is for this reason that after his last excursion into transcendental philosophy Berkeley returns soberly to “this mortal state.”⁵⁸ It is not an organism which is transcended, nor a psychological being, nor a logical being, nor an alogical soul, for experience itself transcends these, but all of them, in their entirety, taken together concretely as man himself, “the creature.” The final position, therefore, to which Berkeley is led by his concrete logic is the position (which is also no position) of concrete existence, or practical philosophy. It is this “position” which is actually the farthest from the abstract psychologism with which he started, though at first the two seem identical. Fortunately, however, man is not psychology, nor is he biology nor logic nor philosophy, nor a substance, nor the categories, nor the absolute, but a “creature” passing through all of these.

Such was, in brief, the strange and tortuous course of reflection through which Berkeley was driven by his pertinacious attempt to think concretely. Many aspects of this development, particularly in its final stages, remain obscure. Berkeley's later writings are generally philosophical rather than psychological in character, and offer almost insuperable difficulties to the modern reader. The thought is critical, and therefore unclear. The ideas are also not distinct, but merge in a most confusing manner. The Siris, furthermore, is so full of ancient lore that it is difficult to discern how much is Berkeley and how much is Plato or Plotinus. These reasons are sufficient to explain why Berkeley remains, and must remain for us, who have followed a very different course, the youthful genius who completed the work of Descartes in establishing psychological subjectivism on its apparently impregnable throne.

There is no more typically modern picture than that of the young Berkeley throwing away his mediaeval textbooks and, together with a few chosen spirits of Trinity College, plunging with iconoclastic enthusiasm into the study of the “new philosophy.” Except for a tinge of deep religious feeling, which he could not altogether conceal, his early writings breathe the very breath of modernism on every page. His subjectivism is clearly an outgrowth of the Lockianism with which he was saturated at an early age, merely Locke, in fact, made partially consistent with himself. He speaks of Newton with genuine admiration, and, indeed, made such a profound study of the works of this great writer that he was able to detect several very minor fallacies therein,—thus contributing to future mathematical research. Experimental science is the one field he properly excepts in the Commonplace Book from the general devastation he glories in accomplishing. His New Theory of Vision is a brilliant contribution to the budding science of psychology, and his concept of the sensory minimum or threshold has played an important role in the history of that peculiarly modern subject.

The picture of the older Berkeley, however, poring over Ocellus Lucanus and other obscure and ancient writers, having failed to convert himself to his subjectivism, is anything but persuasive. His writings are no longer self-assured. The Siris is written in a style so restrained as to be almost hesitant. If many aspects of Berkeley's later system are plunged in obscurity, one fact stands out with perfect clearness. Wherever his concrete logic has led him, it has certainly taken him extremely far from anything that has any right to be called modern. The Siris is not only obscure but obscurantist.

The disrelish Berkeley now affects for the Deistic shibboleths of his youth often approaches something not far removed from a contempt which is rendered even more disconcerting by the fact that, in this case at least, his opinion cannot be totally disregarded as that of a tyro. There is no phase of the modern spirit which he did not actually live through with burning ardour in the time of his youth. The respect he evinced for “reason” and the mathematical method had been worthy of the most impeccable Aufklärer. Now, however, he treats Newton with scant respect and, on the whole, prefers to fall back on the Stoics for his natural philosophy. The unmitigated psychologism of his youth, which had led him to confuse reality with what we perceive and truth with what we think, is completely abandoned for a Platonism which, whatever else may be urged against it, may at least be maintained without implicit contradiction. The self-assured humanism which had led him to identify the good with the useful and to think of God as an exaggerated man now gives way to a transcendentalism so thoroughgoing that it transforms the apprehension of truth into paradox. Indeed, it is the growing weight of transcendentalism in his thinking that led him to that disillusionment with modernism which is the dominant feature of his later life. Whether we view him as one of the first of those atavistic minds which have sought solace in the past from the burden of modern progress, or whether we think of him as one whose life is in a sense prophetic of some far distant disillusionment of the modern spirit with itself, the facts are sufficiently inescapable.

Berkeley's philosophy is, like his life, a process in which he passes from mathematical rationalism to practical philosophy, and from practical philosophy to the absolute. His concrete logic led him finally from humanism to religion, from Locke to Plato, from psychologism to transcendentalism. During this transition, the science to which he had made such original contributions becomes in his eyes a system of unintelligible incantations; the humanistic ethics which he had embraced so eagerly, a superficial rationalization of selfishness, and the Deistic religion he had himself defended, a form of sacrilege too trivial to be considered blasphemy. In this he may have been mistaken. The historian, however, cannot but record the fact that so brilliant and influential a genius, after contributing to many sciences, and by his acumen and wit startling his shrewd contemporaries, retired to a distant corner of the world to bury himself in the writings of a bygone day, and withdrew at last to what he considered a haven even more remote, to die.

Notes

1. “Bishop Berkeley never had any idea of Cloyne as a beautiful situation.” Mrs. Berkeley in Biog. Brit., Corr. and Add., III, p. 258.

2. “Soon after Lord Chesterfield's return from his first Embassy in Holland, Dr. Berkeley presented him with his Minute Philosopher which was just then published, and met with uncommon approbation. His Lordship esteemed the author still more than the book; but no intimacy subsisted between them. When he came to Dublin, with the power as well as desire of rewarding merit, he embraced the first opportunity of showing his regard for so respectable a character, and accordingly made an offer to the Doctor of changing his Bishopric of Cloyne for that of Clogher, which was of a much greater value.” Dr. Maty's Memoirs of Lord Chesterfield, vol. I, p. 163, Misc. Works of Lord Chesterfield, Dublin, 1777.

3. “… That nobleman [Chesterfield] offered to him the See of Clogher where he was told he might immediately receive fines to the amount of ten thousand pounds, he consulted Mrs. Berkeley as having a family, and with her full approbation not only declined the Bishopric of Clogher, but the offer which accompanied that proposal of any other translation which might become feasible during Lord Chesterfield's administration. The Primacy was vacated before the expiration of that period.” Biog. Brit., Corr. and Add., p. 258.

4. Biog. Brit., loc. cit.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.; cf. Fraser, Life and Letters, p. 302.

7. March 22, 1747; Fraser, op. cit., p. 315.

8. Bernard, Peplographia Dublinensis, III, p. 77; not published by Fraser.

9. F. iv, p. 556.

10. Ibid., p. 555.

11. F. iv., p. 557.

12. February 24, 1746.

13. Gent. Mag., XX, p. 166, 1750. Cf. pp. 161, 162.

14. F. iv, p. 561.

15. Berkeley, Poems, p. cccclix n.

16. March 8, 1751, F. Life, p. 325,—a statement hard to reconcile with the view of Berkeley as the national philosopher of Ireland.

17. “The Bishop used frequently to say to Dr. Berkeley [George Jr.], I see him incessantly before my eyes.” Ibid., p. ccccxxxviii.

18. A. A. Luce, Hermathena, vol. XXII, 1932, p. 38.

19. Ibid., p. 36.

20. Ibid., p. 32.

21. Ibid., p. 31.

22. Ibid., p. 36.

23. Ibid., p. 39.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., p. 31.

26. Ibid., p. 38.

27. Ibid., p. 36.

28. Commonplace Book, J., 547.

29. Luce, op. cit., p. 35.

30. Ibid., p. 31.

31. Ibid., p. 39.

32. Ibid., pp. 34 ff.

33. Ibid., p. 38.

34. Ibid., p. 39.

35. The earlier Trinity College Ms. writes “coincident with.”

36. Luce, op. cit., p. 40.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid. Cf. early sermon, “Let your zeal be according to knowledge.”

39. J., 275.

40. F. i, p. 92.

41. F. Life, p. 345.

42. April 6, 1752, F. Life, pp. 333-334.

43. Letter to Sir John James, F. iv, p. 530.

44. Biog. Brit., III, 258.

45. Sec. 125.

46. F. i, p. 448.

47. Ibid., p. 453.

48. Ibid., pp. 403-404.

49. Sec. 4.

50. Schneider, Samuel Johnson, vol. II, p. 274.

51. Alc., VII, F. ii, p. 328.

52. Sec. 323.

53. Sec. 43.

54. Sec. 4.

55. Cf. C. B. J., 746.

56. C. J. J., 426.

57. 3 D., F. i, p. 475.

58. Siris, sec. 367.

Bibliographical Note

All references to Berkeley's works in the text, unless otherwise specified, are to The Works of George Berkeley in four volumes, edited by A. C. Fraser, Oxford, 1901 (F. i, ii, iii, iv). The following abbreviations also will be generally employed.

P.O. Passive Obedience, F. iv, pp. 101 ff.

G. Ess. Essays in the Guardian, F. iv, pp. 139 ff.

J.J. A Letter to Sir John James, Bart. on the Differences between the Roman and Anglican Churches, F. iv, pp. 521 ff.

N.T.V. An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, F. i, pp. 277 ff.

N.T.V.V. The Theory of Vision, or Visual Language Vindicated and Explained

Pr. A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I, F. i, pp. 233 ff.

Pr. Int. Author's Introduction to the Principles of Human Knowledge, F. i, pp. 237 ff.

Pr. Ms. Rough Draft of the Introduction, F. iii, pp. 357 ff.

3 D. (also 1D., 2D., 3D.) Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, F. i, pp. 373 ff.

D.M. De Motu, F. i, pp. 501 ff.

Alc. Alciphron or the Minute Philosopher in Seven Dialogues, F. ii, pp. 31 ff.

An. The Analyst or a Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician, F. iii, pp. 17 ff.

S. Siris, a Chain of Philosophical Reflections and Inquiries concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water, F. iii, pp. 141 ff.

C.B.J. or J. Berkeley's Commonplace Book, ed. by G. A. Johnston, London, Faber & Faber, 1930

C.B.H. or H. Philosophisches Tagebuch, ed. by Hecht, Leipzig, Meiner, 1926

Unless otherwise stated, Berkeley's letters to Percival refer to Rand, The Correspondence of George Berkeley and Sir John Percival, Cambridge, 1914; and his letters to Prior, to Fraser, Life and Letters of George Berkeley, Oxford, 1871 (Life).

Bibliography

note: The following list does not include the titles of all works cited in the text and notes. It does include the titles of most of the important works directly concerning Berkeley which have been published in Europe or America, together with all titles of such works abbreviated in the footnotes. The names of all authors cited are contained in the Name Index. For a more exhaustive Berkeley bibliography, together with useful information concerning manuscript remains, the reader should refer to T. E. Jessop's Bibliography of George Berkeley, Oxford, 1934.

Anonymous. “Bishop Berkeley's Philosophy vindicated from injurious imputation by K. H.,” Gentleman's Magazine, vol. LVIII, 1788, pp. 955-956.

Berkeley, George. Commonplace Book. First published in Fraser ed. of Works, Oxford, 1871. Also ed. of A. Hecht, Leipzig, 1926, and G. A. Johnston, London, 1930.

Berkeley, George Monck. Poems by the late George Monck Berkeley, Esq, LLB, FSSA. With a preface by the editor, consisting of some anecdotes of Mr. Monck Berkeley, and several of his friends, London, 1797. Cf. Gent. Mag., vol. LXVII, 1797, pp. 403 and 455; vol. LXIX, 1799, p. 565. Also J. Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, London, 1815, vol. IX, pp. 733-735.

Bernard, J. H. “Bishop Berkeley,” in Peplographia Dublinensis, London, 1902.

Biographia Britannica. Berkeley, vol. 2, London, 1780. Written by Stock, but notes by Kippis. Also vol. 3, corrections and addenda.

Fraser, A. C. Life and Letters of George Berkeley, Oxford, 1871.

Gentleman's Magazine. See Anonymous.

Johnston, G. A. See also under Berkeley.

Luce, A. A. “Berkeley's Commonplace Book,” Hermathena, Dublin, vol. XXII, 1932, pp. 99-131.

Schneider, Herbert and Carol. Samuel Johnson, President of King's College; His Career and Writings, ed. H. and C. Schneider, New York, 1929, 2v. Vol. 2 contains the Elementa Philosophica.