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IV. BERKELEYANISM: ITS INFLUENCE.

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a them. No idea of spirit can be formed, as all ideas are passive, and cannot present us images of that which is active. We have furthermore the faculty of calling forth in ourselves certain ideas at will; but there is another class of ideas which press upon us from without, of which our will is not the source,-press upon us, in fact, in accordance with well-defined rules, what are called Laws of Nature. There must consequently be another will or spirit which originates them, and this spirit is God. The ideas impressed by the Author of nature on our senses are called actual things, but those which are evoked by our own imagination are ideas in the narrower sense, or images of things. The senseideas have indeed more reality, they are more forcible, more orderly, are less dependent on the percipient spirit, as they are evoked by the will of another-God. God is one only, eternal, infinitely wise, good and perfect; he works all in all, and through him all subsists; he upholds all things by the word of his power, and maintains the relation between spirits whereby they have the faculty of knowing the existence one of another. (For perceiving the different movements, changes, linkings of ideas, I draw from them the inference that there are distinct, individual, active beings like myself who stand in connection with those movements and participate in bringing them forth.

'The object of human knowledge can be only spirits, ideas, and their relations in all their species. The source of all errors Berkeley finds in the supposition of the eternal existence of objects of sense, and in the doctrine of abstract ideas.'

IV. Berkeleyanism: its friends, affinities, and influence.

§ 1: INFLUENCE.-Berkeley's position in the history of Philosophy is a commanding one. By direct or indirect influence, by development, or by opposition, he has borne part in all the speculative thinking since his day. The removal of Berkeley would take away an essential link in the chain of modern philosophy. Without Berkeley, as Hamann long ago observed, we should not have had Hume, without Hume we should not have had Kant, without Kant the gigantic structure of the speculation

Philosoph. Repetitorium, 1873, 92-95.

which ends in the school of Hegel would not have been reared, and without this progressive line of thinkers we should not have had the noble antagonism of witnesses to other forms of thought, essential to the highest development of intellectual man. Without Berkeley we should neither have had the developed philosophy of Germany, nor the developed 'Common Sense' of Scotland. 'Berkeley's doctrine,' says Ueberweg,' 'has never had a large number of adherents, but it has had no trifling influence on the further development of Philosophy.'

§ 2: FIRST RECEPTION.—' It is difficult at this distance of time to ascertain the immediate influence upon philosophical opinion' of Berkeley's new conception of the material world. It is said to have made some influential converts in England.' Swift speaks of him in a letter, 1724, as 'founder of a sect called the Immaterialists,' and adds, Dr. Smalridge (Bishop of Bristol) and many other eminent persons were his proselytes.' 'But even the educated mind was not then ripe for the due appreciation of a doctrine so paradoxical in its sound. More than twenty years were to elapse before it found an intellectual audience in David Hume, and other Scotchmen and Americans.'2

§3: JOHNSON.-The first place in the Berkeleyan roll of honour is due to Dr. Samuel Johnson (1696-1772), the Episcopal missionary at Stratford, Connecticut, Berkeley's American friend and disciple, who was on terms of personal intimacy with him while he resided in Rhode Island. The Principles of Human Knowledge' had early fallen into his hands. His intimacy with Berkeley finished the work of conviction. His 'Elementa Philosophica,' printed by Franklin, 1752, as a text-book for the University of Pennsylvania, was dedicated to Berkeley: It consists of two treatises-Noetica, or Things relating to the Mind or Understanding; and Ethica, or Things relating to the Moral Behaviour. It is thoroughly Berkeleyan in its main features, though 'the part of the Noetica which deals with the pure Intellect and its notions, and with intuitive Intellectual Light, is more akin to Plato and Malebranche, and even Kant, than to Berkeley's early philo

B.'s Leben u. Schriften, in his translation of the Principles. See also his Preface, given in Prolegom., I., ? 16.

2 Fraser: Life and Letters, 62.

sophical works.' Johnson was 'one of the most learned scholars and acute thinkers of his time in America.'2

$4: JONATHAN EDWARDS (1703-1758).-The second illustrious name also belongs to America. Jonathan Edwards, the prince of the New England theological metaphysicians, was a pupil of Johnson at Yale College. He was a defender of Berkeley's conception of the material world. He nowhere names Berkeley, and there is no evidence that they ever met. Edwards says, When I say the Material Universe exists only in the mind, I mean that it is absolutely dependent on the conception of the mind for its existence; and does not exist as Spirits do, whose existence does not consist in, nor in dependence on, the conceptions of other minds. . . . All existence is mental. . . the existence of all exterior things is ideal.' 'That which truly is the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable Idea in God's mind, together with his stable Will, that the same shall gradually be communicated to us, and to other minds, according to fixed and exact established methods and laws.' Fraser says, 'If he thus agrees with Berkeley in his account of sensible things, they separate in their theory of causation and free-will. Free agency, which is involved in the Dualism of Berkeley, is argued against by Edwards, whose speculative theology or philosophy is hardly to be distinguished from that of Spinoza. Berkeleyism is essentially a philosophy of causation.' 3 The influence of Edwards possibly connects itself with the fact that 'the fanciful theory of Bishop Berkeley, as a kind of philosophical day-dream, maintained its prevalence for a season' at Princeton. +

§ 5: BERKELEY IN OUR OWN DAY.-Nor is there wanting in our own day interest in Berkeley's views, and sympathy in various degrees with them. 'I am not without hope,' says Fraser,5 'that the reappearance of Berkeley in the modern philosophical world, in these latter years of the nineteenth century, under the auspices of the great University with which death has associated

Fraser: Berkeley's Life and Letters, 176.

3 Berkeley's Life and Letters, 182, 404, 405. See also p. 382.

2 Ibid., 174.

▲ Dr. Beaseley (Provost of the University of Pennsylvania): A Search of Truth. Dedication to Hobart, ii.

5 Preface: Berkeley's Works, I., xvi.

him, may be the occasion of a candid consideration of this good philosopher's explanation of the meaning of human existence, and of a fresh impulse to philosophy in Europe and America. There are signs which encourage this hope, in a retrospect of the history of recent opinion and metaphysical literature in England. The return to the deeper questions in metaphysics, inaugurated by Coleridge and Hamilton more than forty years since, in conjunction with the increased inclination in the interval to discuss first principles in theology and in the physical sciences, including physiology, is more favourable to the entertainment of the thoughts which occupied so much of Berkeley's life, and perhaps to harmony between science and faith, than the state of things in almost any former period of the history of this country. There are besides definite signs of an inclination to reconsider Berkeley in particular, and to draw from him what may be available for amending our conception of the nature of the existence we are participating in among the phenomena of sense; or at least for assisting us before we finish our course to inquire what this sense-conscious life through which we are now passing really means.' 'Many,' says Dr. McCosh, 'are turning toward it with longing.'

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§ 6: FERRIER.-Among the illustrious thinkers of recent date who have been admirers of Berkeley, we may mention Ferrier. He gives in his adhesion in language such as this: 'The speculations of this philosopher [Berkeley], whether we consider the beauty and clearness of his style, or the depth of his insight, have done better service to the cause of metaphysical science than the lucubrations of all other modern thinkers put together.' 'Among all philosophers, ancient or modern, we are acquainted with none who present fewer vulnerable points than Bishop Berkeley. His language, it is true, has sometimes the appearance of paradox; but there is nothing paradoxical in his thoughts, and time has proved the adamantine solidity of his principles. With less sophistry than the simplest and with more subtlety than the acutest of his contemporaries, the very perfection of his powers prevented him from being appreciated by the age in which he lived.' 'The subsequent progress of philosophy shows how

1 Presbyter. Quarterly and Princeton Review, Jan. 1873.

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much the science of man is indebted to his researches. He certainly was the first to stamp the indelible impress of his powerful understanding on those principles of our nature which since his time have brightened into imperishable truths in the light of genuine speculation.' 'Berkeley accomplished the very task which, fifty or sixty years afterwards, Reid laboured at in vain. He taught a doctrine of intuitive, as distinguished from a doctrine of representative, perception; and he taught it on the only grounds on which such a doctrine can be maintained.'

'The ingenious and acute metaphysical works of the late Professor Ferrier . . . unfold a system which differs in some important respects from that of Berkeley, being constructed from the ontological, and not, like his, from the psychological point of view. With more form of demonstration, Ferrier leaves in the background the sense-symbolism and intuition of efficient causality, which are essential to the externality and dualism of Berkeley.' 2

§7: PROFESSOR GROTE.-'The strikingly candid speculations of the late Professor Grote of Cambridge, which contain some of the most interesting English contributions to the higher philosophy of this generation, have also a tendency to Berkeley's point of view.' 3

Professor John Grote (not to be confounded with George Grote, the historian of Greece and biographer of Plato and Aristotle) had published (1865) the Exploratio Philosophica: Rough Notes on Modern Intellectual Science. Part I. His death in 1866 left the second part in a fragmentary condition.

§ 8: MANSEL.-' Dean Mansel's learned and closely-reasoned works in philosophy, besides reviving metaphysical discussion in England, have occasionally approached the speculation of Berkeley, bringing valuable critical light.' 4

$9: SIMON. The assiduous zeal and subtlety of Mr. Collyns Simon, his book On the Nature and Elements of the Material World, and his various essays since, have drawn attention to the subject not only in these islands but also in Germany.'5

1 Lectures and Philosophical Remains, ii., 292, 293. 2 Fraser: Berkeley's Works, vol. i., Pref., xvii.

3 Fraser: Berkeley's Works, vol. i., Pref., xvii. 5 Fraser: Berkeley's Works, vol. i., Pref., xvii.

4 Fraser: Pref., xvii.