GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE

SELECTIONS.

THE design of these Selections is to afford appropriate mental exercise to those who are engaged in Psychology and Metaphysics.

Berkeley may be used for this purpose for the following among other reasons:

1. His philosophical writings, although only philosophical fragments, are English classics of true metaphysical genius, which present subtle thought in graceful and transparent language.

2. Their principal doctrine, about the metaphysical meaning of Matter, is itself an acknowledged 'touchstone of metaphysical sagacity,' while it is found on further reflection to raise the chief questions of physical and theological philosophy.

3. Berkeley is an important factor in the development of modern philosophy. Its sceptical crisis in Hume was precipitated by the new question about Matter that Berkeley raised, and the intellectual revolution followed in which Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke were exchanged for the transcendental criticism of Kant, the Association psychology or physiology, and Reid's appeal to the common rational sense.

The intrinsic freshness of Berkeley's thought, the literary charm of its expression, the romantic interest of his Immaterialism, its intellectual reach when it is pushed into its issues, with his historical importance, all unite in recom

mending him as a good companion for a student of philosophy at an early period in his course.

This estimate of the educational value of Berkeley does not of course oblige us to receive his most celebrated conclusion as final and sufficient; nor even as a profound answer to the ultimate question.

Berkeley's personal history is full of interest. His early years and ancestry are curiously shrouded in a mystery that is in keeping with the halo of romance in which his life is enveloped. The following facts are well known. He was born in the county of Kilkenny, in March, 1685. In March, 1700, he entered Trinity College, Dublin, where his next thirteen years were spent. Peter Browne, afterwards the philosophical bishop of Cork, was then provost of Trinity, and the seeds of modern thought were then finding their way into the College. Through the influence of Locke's friend and correspondent, William Molyneux, the Essay of Human Understanding had been introduced in Dublin, and Malebranche, the French philosophical contemporary of Locke, was not unknown there. The spirit of Descartes and of Bacon, the early operations of the Royal Society, and the discoveries of Newton and Leibnitz, were all rousing Irish intellect to action. Berkeley's published and unpublished writings show his early familiarity with Locke and Newton, Descartes and Malebranche.

When Berkeley was in Dublin, and before he reached his thirtieth year, he produced the three small volumes which state and defend his famous new conception of Matter. In 1709 his Essay towards a New Theory of Vision appeared, and opened the way for the other two. It was followed in 1710 by the Principles of Human Knowledge—the most systematically reasoned exposition of this new conception. In 1713 he popularly explained and illustrated it in Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. Thus,

like Descartes, Spinoza, and Hume, and in contrast to Locke, Kant, and Reid, the distinctive speculation of Berkeley was given to the world in early life, a fact in keeping with the fervid impetuosity of his temperament.

The stages of his intellectual growth in his first years at Trinity College may be traced in his metaphysical Commonplace Book. This is one of the most interesting records in existence of the juvenile struggles of philosophical genius. It was written in 1705 and the two or three following years, and was first published in 1871, in the Clarendon Press edition of his Works and Life.

In 1713 Berkeley visited London. The next twenty years of his life were spent for the most part in England, on the Continent, and in America. The accomplishment and charm of his conversation, as well as the surprise occasioned by his paradoxical expression of what is meant by the reality of the material world, attracted his most eminent contemporaries. During some of these years he indulged an artistic taste by a long stay in Italy. On his return, although in 1724 he became Dean of Derry, ardent philanthropy carried him to North America, at the age of forty-five, to devote the remainder of his life to spreading Christian civilisation and learning there, by a College at the Bermudas. After three years of delay in Rhode Island, withdrawal of the support on which the enterprise depended obliged him to return home.

His last twenty years were spent in comparative retirement, in the south of Ireland, as Bishop of Cloyne.

Neither in the twenty years of movement, nor in the closing twenty years of retirement, was philosophy forgotten by Berkeley. A Latin tract on the uncaused cause of Motion, the fruit of studies in Italy, appeared in 1721, on his return from the Continent. Alciphron or the Minute Philosopher, a book of dialogues, directed against sceptics in religion, containing important fragments of psychology and applications of his conception of Matter, was the fruit of studies in Rhode

Island. It was published in 1732, soon after his return from America. This was followed, the year after, by a subtle Vindication of his theory of vision. The latest development of his philosophical thought was the issue of his seclusion at Cloyne. It appeared in 1744, under the title of Siris: a Chain of Philosophical Reflexions. Here the Immaterialism of his youth, regarded now from the point of view of Plato and Plotinus rather than of Locke, becomes more comprehensive in its scope, and more ready to connect itself with speculations at the point of view of Kant or of Hegel.

Berkeley spent the evening of his days in works of philanthropy and in meditative quiet. For Cloyne he had a particular fondness. Its very obscurity and remoteness had a contemplative charm. But at last, when declining health needed change, his love for learned retirement carried him to Oxford, which for years had been before him in imagination as the ideal home of his old age. He enjoyed it only for a few months. There death suddenly closed this pious, ingenious, and beautiful life, in January 1753. His body rests in the Cathedral of Christ Church1.

That all the things we see and touch, with their supposed inherent powers, are neither more nor less than appearances in the five senses, presented by Divine power, in what is called natural order; and further, that the natural appearances so presented are dependent on living minds being percipient of them-this was the new conception of Matter announced and defended throughout Berkeley's philosophical works. It arose in his mind in the natural course of English metaphysical thought under the influence of Locke, and it was modified in his later life by sympathy with Plato. The

For the details of Berkeley's history the reader is referred to my Life of Berkeley, in vol. iv of the Clarendon Press edition of his Works (published separately), which likewise contains his Commonplace Book. See also Etude sur la Vie et les Euvres Philosophiques de Georges Berkeley, par A. Penjon (Paris, 1878).

historical consequences of its publication justify us in regarding it as one of the epoch-making doctrines that are springs of intellectual progress.

The history of modern philosophy as it was before and after Berkeley illustrates this. A survey of the history, with this in view, may prepare the reader for the Selections.

DESCARTES (1596-1650) was the father of modern philosophy. It originated in his famous endeavour to explode Dogmatism by means of tentative Doubt. As the first step in philosophy Descartes refused to accept without proof any belief which, after trial, he might find it intellectually possible to hold in suspense. He announced this as the best method for purifying conclusions from irrationality and prejudice in their premisses, and for finding the ultimate constitution of reason. He recommended it to others as a panacea for transforming the early life of blind trust in authority into the philosophic life of rational insight. This Cartesian spirit of free inquiry, stimulated by temporary doubt, is the distinctive mark of modern thought.

In trying what may be called the mental experiment of temporarily suspending all his ordinary beliefs, as well as all philosophical dogmas, Descartes found his tentative doubt arrested by one irresistible conviction—that of his own existence as a conscious person. This consciousness, and this only, it seemed to him that he could not even experimentally hold in suspense. He expressed the philosophical experience thus obtained in the celebrated formulacogito ergo sum. This means that the ever-changing phenomena that each one is conscious of, so necessarily presuppose an unchanging ego or self, to sustain and connect them, that one cannot, even when one tries the experiment, conceive them appearing and the transcendent ego