there is not a God, but neither are they convinced that there is. Since it is downright impossible that a soul pierced and enlightened with a thorough sense of the omnipresence, holiness, and justice of that Almighty Spirit should persist in a remorseless violation of His laws. We ought, therefore, earnestly to meditate and dwell on those important points; that so we may attain conviction without all scruple that the eyes of the Lord are in every place beholding the evil and the good; that He is with us and keepeth us in all places whither we go, and giveth us bread to eat and raiment to put on;' that He is present and conscious to our innermost thoughts; in fine, that we have a most absolute and immediate dependence on Him. A clear view of which great truths cannot choose but fill our hearts with an awful circumspection and holy fear, which is the strongest incentive to VIRTUE and the best guard against VICE.

156. For, after all, what deserves the first place in our studies is the consideration of GOD and our DUTY; which to promote, as it was the main drift and design of my labours, so shall I esteem them altogether useless and ineffectual if, by what I have said, I cannot inspire my readers with a pious Sense of the Presence of God; and, having shewn the falseness or vanity of those barren speculations which make the chief employment of learned men, the better dispose them to reverence and embrace the salutary truths of the Gospel, which to know and to practise is the highest perfection of

human nature.

effect,' which can be interpreted only so far as this present life of sense is concerned (and even that in a merely probable interpretation), but which at last dissolves in a riddle, an ænigma, an inexplicable mystery.' Does not the true philosophical analysis show that our knowledge of the universe cannot be even so much as this without being more than this?

It was the great object of Berkeley's Theory of Vision to shew the effect of constant and early habits, and it is this which gives to that work its chief value when considered in connexion with the philosophy of the human mind.-Stewart's Dissertation.

In Him we live, and move, and have our being.-Acts xvii. 28.

L

PREFATORY NOTE.

THE Essay towards a New Theory of Vision was published in 1709, a year before the Principles. It is the first in chronological order of those writings of Berkeley which, ostensibly concerned with Visual Perception, treat by implication of the nature of inductive science and our belief in the Order of Nature, in relation to our theistic belief. Twenty-three years after the publication of the juvenile Essay on Vision-in which the student is introduced to the psychology of the Five Senses, especially of seeing and touching-certain theological inferences involved in the Essay were followed out in the Fourth Dialogue of Alciphron, on 'Visual Language.' And in the following year he gave his last word on these subjects in his Theory of Visual Language Vindicated and Explained. The selections which follow are taken from these three works.

According to Berkeley's Principles of Knowledge, the supposition that body exists unperceived is unintelligible : the existence of a material world divorced from perception involves the absurdity of conscious experience existing without any one to be conscious of it.

Yet all bodies exist without mind,' if what is meant by without' is, that they exist in space.' And that they exist in space, or consist of partes extra partes, cannot be doubted. Do we not see them so existing-in seeing that they are extended; and also in seeing that each extra-organic body is placed relatively to other extra-organic bodies, and to the living body of the percipient? Now what, Berkeley

asks, is the deepest and truest meaning of that 'outness' or 'externality' which consists in occupying space; and is the space which bodies occupy originally seen? This question leads us into the heart of the philosophy of Perception.

In

The Essay on Vision is part of Berkeley's answer. this Essay he holds in reserve the more sweeping doctrine of the Principles-that the material world cannot in any of its qualities exist actually or intelligibly without being perceived he is satisfied with the more limited thesis, that its visible extension is dependent on a percipient. The claims of what is perceived by touch to independent externality are meanwhile reserved. He argues that, because the relations of space are unintelligible apart from the experience we have when we touch things, and when we move our bodies, therefore space cannot be perceived originally by sight. The Essay is concerned with the origin-whether in sight, or touch, or otherwise—of our perception of Extension, as well as with the suggestions and judgments which this perception involves when it is developed. It may be used for mental exercises in the part of psychology that relates to the Five Senses and the growth of Perception.

The reader has to observe that what Berkeley has written -nominally about Vision-in the Essay, the Dialogue, and the Vindication, advances from the qualities of the things of sense, through the theory of their natural laws as inductively interpreted in the physical sciences, to our faith in the Supreme Mind, here alleged as the ultimate or philosophical explanation of all the changes of the sensible world. Our power of seeing things in 'ambient space' is thus explained to be virtually a power of seeing sensible signs of the constant regulative activity of God, and one is thus led from the lower to the higher faculties of Intellect.

The Essay on Vision was the first elaborate attempt by any philosopher to shew that our ordinary visual perceptions' of extended things, existing outside of our bodies, are