35

George Berkeley

1685–1753

 

 

George Berkeley was one of the most important and interesting philosophers which Ireland has produced, though his career ranged from England to America.  He was born at Dysart Castle near Kilkenny on 12th March 1685, and educated at Trinity College.  He became a fellow in 1701, and taught at the university as a fellow and tutor until 1713.

      His main studies were of Descartes and Newton, at a time when Locke's Essay on Human Understanding (published in 1609) was already influencing philosophical investigations.  From 1705 to 1706, he kept his Commonplace Book (published in 1871) which reveals the general trend of his thinking.  In this he first outlined his new principle of philosophy that matter, substance, and cause have no meaning apart from the conscious spirit of man.

      His first books were Arithmetica and Miscellanea Mathematica (both in 1707), and in 1709 he took holy orders.  He made a wide impression in 1709 with the publication of An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision.  The idealistic ideas in this were developed further in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710).  In 1711 he published A Discourse on Passive Obedience.

      JONATHAN SWIFT [34], then at the height of his London years, introduced Berkeley to the Court and into the intellectual circles of the city. Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonus (1713) was a popular outline of his ideas.  He told Dr Samuel Johnson, 'I had no inclination to trouble the world with large volumes.  What I have [published] was rather a view to giving hints to thinking men who have leisure and curiosity to go to the bottom of things and pursue them in their own minds.'

      Though worked out before he was thirty, his chief ideas were expressed in these publications.  As a philosopher, Berkeley attempted to solve problems Locke left unresolved.  It was Locke's work that suggested to Berkeley the central principle that nothing existed apart from perception (esse est percipi, 'to be is to be perceived').  He said that this principle was intuitively obvious and manifest common sense.  Dr Johnson, a bluff, down-to-earth personality, thought that kicking a stone - what in the world could be a more densely material object? - was proof enough that Berkeley's extreme idealism was absurd, and other contemporary people of common sense would have agreed with him.

      Hume claimed that Berkeley was attempting to show the non-existence of matter, and that everything in the universe was merely idea.

      Berkeley argued that everything that is seen, felt, or heard, or in any way observed is a real being, that it actually exists, while a thing not perceived cannot be known, and without being known (that is perceived by a mind) cannot exist.  The only intelligible cause of all phenomena is mind.  Pain and pleasure cannot exist apart from their being felt.

      Between 1714 and 1721 Berkeley travelled in Europe as the chaplain to Lord Peterborough, and then as the tutor to Bishop Ashe's son, but his mind was as much on the countries he had left behind, as shown by the publication of a further essay on the state of the nation, which he blamed on the decline of religion and public spirit.  The collapse of the South Sea Bubble, a huge investment scheme that swept the country like a mania and proved a disaster for investors of all kinds, had just taken place (with an effect rather like the stock market crash in New York in 1929).

      Berkeley was appointed dean of Dromore in 1722, and dean of Derry in 1724.  He then became involved in a scheme to create a college in Bermuda.  This was intended to be an intellectual base from which the American continents could be Christianized and brought within the pale of civilization.  Through Robert Walpole, the prime minister, he received a promise of a government grant of £20,000 for this, and in 1728 left for the Americas.

      However, he never reached Bermuda, but spent three years (1728-1731) in the colony of Rhode Island.  There he made a contribution to the growth of American academic life and philosophy.  One of his innovations was the introduction of the seminar as a teaching device.  At last he realized that his grant (as is so often the way with government promises) would not be forthcoming.

      His Alciphron, or The Minute Philosopher, a defence of religion against deists and others, was written in Rhode Island and published in London (1733).  A supplement, Visual Language, showing the immediate present providence of a deity, appeared the next year.

      Berkeley returned to Ireland, where he was appointed bishop of Cloyne, in Cork, in 1734, through the favouritism of Queen Caroline.  This found him on the verge of a controversy concerning mysteries, that is, the spiritual, transcendent elements in religion, which rationalists denied.  This arose from a passage in Alciphron.  Some free-thinking mathematicians (influenced perhaps by JOHN TOLAND [38] and the ancestors of many of today's scientists) held that mysteries were fatal to the moral authority of religion.  The Analyst (1734) was Berkeley's answer, and The Querist, which dealt with matters of social economic policy, followed serially from 1735 to 1737.

      He turned his mind to other inventions, maths, the social problems of Ireland, and questions of religious toleration.  In 1739 the diocese of Cloyne was greatly affected by famine and the associated cholera fever.  From his experiences in America, Berkeley had been much taken with the medicinal properties of tar water.  (Tar water was a preparation of pine resin, which was steeped in water for several weeks, strained, and then taken with milk three times a day as a remedy for all kinds of illnessess.)  His experiences set off a train of thought.  In his mind the properties of tar water became associated with the studies of Plato, the neo-platonists, and other mystics which he had been following for years.  Tar water, as a universal healer, a panacea in the literal sense, suggested to him the final interpretation of the universe.

      Siris, published in 1744, was ostensibly about the benefits of tar water, but its pages contain some of Berkeley's most profound metaphysical speculations.  Though it was to be George Berkeley's last word on philosophy, it was also a most curious book on metaphysics.  But his high flights of speculation were obscured by the controversy that followed on just whether or not tar water was a panacea.

      He resigned in 1752 due to ill health, and left Ireland to live in the calmer academic atmosphere of Oxford, where he died in January 1753.  Berkeley's idealism was very influential on both Hume and Kant, but it was not perhaps until the middle of the nineteenth century that his ideas began to receive more sympathetic treatment.  Since then they have had a critical influence on the development of philosophy in both Europe and America.  Among his other Irish admirers was W.B. YEATS [8], who saw Berkeley as an exemplar of that Anglo-Irish tradition which he elevated to one of the great cultures of the world.