Appendix D. a Lately Discovered Tractate by Berkeley Forms Appendix E. in

the Fourth Volume, numerous queries contained in the first edition of the Querist, and omitted in the later editions, are given in an Appendix, which enables the reader to reconstruct that interesting tract in the form in which it originally appeared.

The present edition is thus really a new work, which possesses, I hope, a certain philosophical unity, as well as pervading biographical interest.

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As Berkeley is the immediate successor of Locke, and as he was educated by collision with the Essay on Human Understanding, perhaps Locke ought to have had more prominence in the editorial portion of this book. Limitation of space partly accounts for the omission; and I venture instead to refer the reader to the Prolegomena and notes in my edition of Locke’s Essay, which was published by the Clarendon Press in 1894. I may add that an expansion of thoughts which run through the Life and many of the annotations, in this edition of Berkeley, may be found in my Philosophy of Theism(1).

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The reader need not come to Berkeley in the expectation of finding in his Works an all-comprehensive speculative system like Spinoza’s, or a reasoned articulation of the universe of reality such as Hegel is supposed to offer. But no one in the succession of great English philosophers has, I think, proposed in a way more apt to invite reflexion, the final alternative between Unreason, on the one hand, and Moral Reason expressed in Universal Divine Providence, on the other hand, as the root of the unbeginning and endless evolution in which we find ourselves involved; as well as the further question, Whether this tremendous practical alternative can be settled by any means that are within the reach of man? His Philosophical Works, taken collectively, may encourage those who see in a reasonable via media between Omniscience and Nescience the true path of progress, under man’s inevitable venture of reasonable Faith.

One is therefore not without hope that a fresh impulse may be given to philosophy and religious thought by this reappearance of George Berkeley, under the auspices of the University of Oxford, at the beginning of the twentieth century. His readers will at any rate find themselves in the company of one of the most attractive personalities of English philosophy, who is also among the foremost of those thinkers who are masters in English literature—Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, George Berkeley and David Hume.

A. Campbell Fraser.

GORTON, HAWTHORNDEN, MIDLOTHIAN, March, 1901.

GEORGE BERKELEY, BY THE EDITOR

I. Early Life (1685-1721).

Towards the end of the reign of Charles the Second a certain William Berkeley, according to credible tradition, occupied a cottage attached to the ancient Castle of Dysert, in that part of the county of Kilkenny which is watered by the Nore. Little is known about this William Berkeley except that he was Irish by birth and English by descent. It is said that his father went over to Ireland soon after the Restoration, in the suite of his reputed kinsman, Lord Berkeley of Stratton, when he was Lord Lieutenant. William Berkeley’s wife seems to have been of Irish blood, and in some remote way related to the family of Wolfe, the hero of Quebec. It was in the modest abode in the valley of the Nore that George, the eldest of their six sons, was born, on March 12, 1685.

There is nothing in the recorded family history of these Dysert Berkeleys that helps to explain the singular personality and career of the eldest son. The parents have left no mark, and make no appearance in any extant records of the family. They probably made their way to the valley of the Nore among families of English connexion who, in the quarter of a century preceding the birth of George Berkeley, were finding settlements in Ireland. The family, as it appears, was not wealthy, but was recognised as of gentle blood. Robert, the fifth son, became rector of Middleton and vicar-general of Cloyne; and another son, William, held a commission in the army. According to the Register of Trinity College, one of the sons was born “near Thurles,” in 1699, and Thomas, the youngest, was born in Tipperary, in 1703, so that the family may have removed from Dysert after the birth of George. In what can be gleaned of the younger sons, one finds little appearance of sympathy with the religious and philosophical genius of the eldest.

Regarding this famous eldest son in those early days, we have this significant autobiographical fragment in his Commonplace Book: “I was distrustful at eight years old, and consequently by nature disposed for the new doctrines.” In his twelfth year we find the boy in Kilkenny School. The register records his entrance there in the summer of 1696, when he was placed at once in the second class, which seems to imply precocity, for it is almost a solitary instance. He spent the four following years in Kilkenny. The School was in high repute for learned masters and famous pupils; among former pupils were the poet Congreve and Swift, nearly twenty years earlier than George Berkeley; among his school-fellows was Thomas Prior, his life-long friend and correspondent. In the days of Berkeley and Prior the head master was Dr. Hinton, and the School was still suffering from the consequences of “the warre in Ireland” which followed the Revolution.

Berkeley in Kilkenny School is hardly visible, and we have no means of estimating his mental state when he left it. Tradition says that in his school-days he was wont to feed his imagination with airy visions and romance, a tradition which perhaps originated long after in popular misconceptions of his idealism. Dimly discernible at Kilkenny, only a few years later he was a conspicuous figure in an island that was then beginning to share in the intellectual movement of the modern world, taking his place as a classic in English literature, and as the most subtle and ardent of contemporary English-speaking thinkers.

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In March, 1700, at the age of fifteen, George Berkeley entered Trinity College, Dublin. This was his home for more than twenty years. He was at first a mystery to the ordinary undergraduate. Some, we are told, pronounced him the greatest dunce, others the greatest genius in the College. To hasty judges he seemed an idle dreamer; the thoughtful admired his subtle intelligence and the beauty of his character. In his undergraduate years, a mild and ingenuous youth, inexperienced in the ways of men, vivacious, humorous, satirical, in unexpected ways inquisitive, often paradoxical, through misunderstandings he persisted in his own way, full of simplicity and enthusiasm. In 1704 (the year in which Locke died) he passed Bachelor of Arts, and became Master in 1707, when he was admitted to a Fellowship, “the only reward of learning which that kingdom had to bestow.”

In Trinity College the youth found himself on the tide of modern thought, for the “new philosophy” of Newton and Locke was then invading the University. Locke’s Essay, published in 1690, was already in vogue. This early recognition of Locke in Dublin was chiefly due to William Molyneux, Locke’s devoted friend, a lawyer and member of the Irish Parliament, much given to the experimental methods. Descartes, too, with his sceptical criticism of human beliefs, yet disposed to spiritualise powers commonly attributed to matter, was another accepted authority in Trinity College; and Malebranche was not unknown. Hobbes was the familiar representative of a finally materialistic conception of existence, reproducing in modern forms the atomism of Democritus and the ethics of Epicurus. Above all, Newton was acknowledged master in physics, whose Principia, issued three years sooner than Locke’s Essay, was transforming the conceptions of educated men regarding their surroundings, like the still more comprehensive law of physical evolution in the nineteenth century.

John Toland, an Irishman, one of the earliest and ablest of the new sect of Free-thinkers, made his appearance at Dublin in 1696, as the author of Christianity not Mysterious. The book was condemned by College dignitaries and dignified clergy with even more than Irish fervour. It was the opening of a controversy that lasted over half of the eighteenth century in England, in which Berkeley soon became prominent; and it was resumed later on, with greater intellectual force and in finer literary form, by David Hume and Voltaire. The collision with Toland about the time of Berkeley’s matriculation may have awakened his interest. Toland was supposed to teach that matter is eternal, and that motion is its essential property, into which all changes presented in the outer and inner experience of man may at last be resolved. Berkeley’s life was a continual protest against these dogmas. The Provost of Trinity College in 1700 was Dr. Peter Browne, who had already entered the lists against Toland; long after, when Bishop of Cork, he was in controversy with Berkeley about the nature of man’s knowledge of God. The Archbishop of Dublin in the early years of the eighteenth century was William King, still remembered as a philosophical theologian, whose book on the Origin of Evil, published in 1702, was criticised by Boyle and Leibniz.

Dublin in those years was thus a place in which a studious youth, who had been “distrustful at eight years old,” might be disposed to entertain grave questions about the ultimate meaning of his visible environment, and of the self-conscious life to which he was becoming awake. Is the universe of existence confined to the visible world, and is matter the really active power in existence? Is God the root and centre of all that is real, and if so, what is meant by God? Can God be good if the world is a mixture of good and evil? Questions like these were ready to meet the inquisitive Kilkenny youth in his first years at Dublin.

One of his earliest interests at College was mathematical. His first appearance in print was as the anonymous author of two Latin tracts, Arithmetica and Miscellanea Mathematica, published in 1707. They are interesting as an index of his intellectual inclination when he was hardly twenty; for he says they were prepared three years before they were given to the world. His disposition to curious questions in geometry and algebra is further shewn in his College Commonplace Book.

This lately discovered Commonplace Book throws a flood of light upon Berkeley’s state of mind between his twentieth and twenty-fourth year. It is a wonderful revelation; a record under his own hand of his thoughts and feelings when he first came under the inspiration of a new conception of the nature and office of the material world. It was then struggling to find adequate expression, and in it the sanguine youth seemed to find a spiritual panacea for the errors and confusions of philosophy. It was able to make short work, he believed, with atheistic materialism, and could dispense with arguments against sceptics in vindication of the reality of experience. The mind-dependent existence of the material world, and its true function in the universe of concrete reality, were to be disclosed under the light of a new transforming self-evident Principle. “I wonder not at my sagacity in discovering the obvious and amazing truth. I rather wonder at my stupid inadvertency in not finding it out before—’tis no witchcraft to see.” The pages of the Commonplace Book give vent to rapidly forming thoughts about the things of sense and the “ambient space” of a youth entering into reflective life, in company with Descartes and Malebranche, Bacon and Hobbes, above all, Locke and Newton; who was trying to translate into reasonableness his faith in the reality of the material world and God. Under the influence of this new conception, he sees the world like one awakening from a confused dream. The revolution which he wanted to inaugurate he foresaw would be resisted. Men like to think and speak about things as they have been accustomed to do: they are offended when they are asked to exchange this for what appears to them absurdity, or at least when the change seems useless. But in spite of the ridicule and dislike of a world long accustomed to put empty words in place of living thoughts, he resolves to deliver himself of his burden, with the politic conciliation of a skilful advocate however; for he characteristically reminds himself that one who “desires to bring another over to his own opinions must seem to harmonize with him at first, and humour him in his own way of talking.”

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In 1709, when he was twenty-four years old, Berkeley presented himself to the world of empty verbal reasoners as the author of what he calls modestly An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision. It was dedicated to Sir John Percival, his correspondent afterwards for more than twenty years; but I have not discovered the origin of their friendship. The Essay was a pioneer, meant to open the way for the disclosure of the Secret with which he was burdened, lest the world might be shocked by an abrupt disclosure. In this prelude he tries to make the reader recognise that in ordinary seeing we are always interpreting visual signs; so that we have daily presented to our eyes what is virtually an intelligible natural language; so that in all our intercourse with the visible world we are in intercourse with all-pervading active Intelligence. We are reading absent data of touch and of the other senses in the language of their visual signs. And the visual signs themselves, which are the immediate objects of sight, are necessarily dependent on sentient and percipient mind; whatever may be the case with the tangible realities which the visual data signify, a fact evident by our experience when we make use of a looking-glass. The material world, so far at least as it presents itself visibly, is real only in being realised by living and seeing beings. The mind-dependent visual signs of which we are conscious are continually speaking to us of an invisible and distant world of tangible realities; and through the natural connexion of the visual signs with their tactual meanings, we are able in seeing practically to perceive, not only what is distant in space, but also to anticipate the future. The Book of Vision is in literal truth a Book of Prophecy. The chief lesson of the tentative Essay on Vision is thus summed up:—

“Upon the whole, I think we may fairly conclude that the proper objects of Vision constitute the Universal Language of Nature; whereby we are instructed how to regulate our actions in order to attain those things that are necessary to the preservation and well-being of our bodies, as also to avoid whatever may be hurtful and destructive of them. And the manner wherein they signify and mark out unto us the objects which are at a distance is the same with that of languages and signs of human appointment; which do not suggest the things signified by any likeness or identity of nature, but only by an habitual connexion that experience has made us to observe between them. Suppose one who had always continued blind be told by his guide that after he has advanced so many steps he shall come to the brink of a precipice, or be stopped by a wall; must not this to him seem very admirable and surprising? He cannot conceive how it is possible for mortals to frame such predictions as these, which to him would seem as strange and unaccountable as prophecy does to others. Even they who are blessed with the visive faculty may (though familiarity make it less observed) find therein sufficient cause of admiration. The wonderful art and contrivance wherewith it is adjusted to those ends and purposes for which it was apparently designed; the vast extent, number, and variety of objects that are at once, with so much ease and quickness and pleasure, suggested by it—all these afford subject for much and pleasing speculation, and may, if anything, give us some glimmering analogous prænotion of things that are placed beyond the certain discovery and comprehension of our present state(2).”

Berkeley took orders in the year in which his Essay on Vision was published. On February 1, 1709, he was ordained as deacon, in the chapel of Trinity College, by Dr. George Ashe, Bishop of Clogher. Origen and Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas, Malebranche, Fenelon, and Pascal, Cudworth, Butler, Jonathan Edwards, and Schleiermacher, along with Berkeley, are among those who are illustrious at once in the history of philosophy and of the Christian Church. The Church, it has been said, has been for nearly two thousand years the great Ethical Society of the world, and if under its restrictions it has been less conspicuous on the field of philosophical criticism and free inquiry, these names remind us of the immense service it has rendered to meditative thought.

The light of the Percival correspondence first falls on Berkeley’s life in 1709. The earliest extant letters from Berkeley to Sir John Percival are in September, October, and December of that year, dated at Trinity College. In one of them he pronounces Socrates “the best and most admirable man that the heathen world has produced.” Another letter, in March, 1710, accompanies a copy of the second edition of the Essay on Vision. “I have made some alterations and additions in the body of the treatise,” he says, “and in the appendix have endeavoured to meet the objections of the Archbishop of Dublin;” whose sermon he proceeds to deprecate, for “denying that goodness and understanding are more to be affirmed of God than feet or hands,” although all these may, in a metaphorical sense. How far, or whether at all, God is knowable by man, was, as we shall see, matter of discussion and controversy with Berkeley in later life; but this shews that the subject was already in his thoughts. Returning to the Essay on Vision, he tells Sir John that “there remains one objection, that with regard to the uselessness of that book of mine; but in a little time I hope to make what is there laid down appear subservient to the ends of morality and religion, in a Treatise I have in the press, the design of which is to demonstrate the existence and attributes of God, the immortality of the soul, the reconciliation of God’s foreknowledge and the freedom of man; and by shewing the emptiness and falsehood of several parts of the speculative sciences, to induce men to the study of religion and things useful. How far my endeavours will prove successful, and whether I have been all this time in a dream or no, time will shew. I do not see how it is possible to demonstrate the being of a God on the principles of the Archbishop—that strictly goodness and understanding can no more be assumed of God than that He has feet or hands; there being no argument that I know for God’s existence which does not prove Him at the same time to be an understanding and benevolent being, in the strict, literal, and proper meaning of these words.” He adds, “I have written to Mr. Clarke to give me his thoughts on the subject of God’s existence, but have got no answer.”

The work foreshadowed in this letter appeared in the summer of 1710, as the “First part” of a Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, wherein the chief causes of error and difficulty in the Sciences, with the grounds of Scepticism, Atheism, and Irreligion, are inquired into. In this fragment of a larger work, never finished, Berkeley’s spiritual conception of matter and cosmos is unfolded, defended, and applied. According to the Essay on Vision, the world, as far as it is visible, is dependent on living mind. According to this book of Principles the whole material world, as far as it can have any practical concern with the knowings and doings of men, is real only by being realised in like manner in the percipient experience of some living mind. The concrete world, with which alone we have to do, could not exist in its concrete reality if there were no living percipient being in existence to actualise it. To suppose that it could would be to submit to the illusion of a metaphysical abstraction. Matter unrealised in its necessary subordination to some one’s percipient experience is the chief among the illusions which philosophers have been too ready to encourage, and which the mass of mankind, who accept words without reflecting on their legitimate meanings, are ready to accept blindly. But we have only to reflect in order to see the absurdity of a material world such as we have experience of existing without ever being realised or made concrete in any sentient life. Try to conceive an eternally dead universe, empty for ever of God and all finite spirits, and you find you cannot. Reality can be real only in a living form. Percipient life underlies or constitutes all that is real. The esse of the concrete material world is percipi. This was the “New Principle” with which the young Dublin Fellow was burdened—the Secret of the universe which he had been longing to discharge upon mankind for their benefit, yet without sign of desire to gain fame for himself as the discoverer. It is thus that he unfolds it:—

“Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, viz. that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a Mind; that their being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind, or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit: it being perfectly unintelligible, and involving all the absurdity of abstraction, to attribute to any single part of them an existence independent of a Spirit(3).”

This does not mean denial of the existence of the world that is daily presented to our senses and which includes our own bodies. On the contrary, it affirms, as intuitively true, the existence of the only real matter which our senses present to us. The only material world of which we have any experience consists of the appearances (misleadingly called ideas of sense by Berkeley) which are continually rising as real objects in a passive procession of interpretable signs, through means of which each finite person realises his own individual personality; also the existence of other finite persons; and the sense-symbolism that is more or less interpreted in the natural sciences; all significant of God. So the material world of concrete experience is presented to us as mind-dependent and in itself powerless: the deepest and truest reality must always be spiritual. Yet this mind-dependent material world is the occasion of innumerable pleasures and pains to human percipients, in so far as they conform to or contradict its customary laws, commonly called the laws of nature. So the sense-symbolism in which we live is found to play an important part in the experience of percipient beings. But it makes us sceptics and atheists when, in its name, we put a supposed dead abstract matter in room of the Divine Active Reason of which all natural order is the continuous providential expression.

Accordingly, God must exist, because the material world, in order to be a real world, needs to be continually realised and regulated by living Providence; and we have all the certainty of sense and sanity that there is a (mind-dependent) material world, a boundless and endlessly evolving sense-symbolism.

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In the two years after the disclosure of his New Principle we see Berkeley chiefly through his correspondence with Percival. He was eager to hear the voice of criticism; but the critics were slow to speak, and when they did speak they misconceived the question, and of course his answer to it. “If when you receive my book,” he writes from Dublin, in July, 1710, to Sir John, who was then in London, “you can procure me the opinion of some of your acquaintances who are thinking men, addicted to the study of natural philosophy and mathematics, I shall be extremely obliged to you.” He also asks Percival to present the book of Principles to Lord Pembroke, to whom he had ventured to dedicate it, as Locke had done his Essay. The reply was discouraging.

“I did but name the subject-matter of your book of Principles to some ingenuous friends of mine,” Percival says, “and they immediately treated it with ridicule, at the same time refusing to read it; which I have not yet got one to do. A physician of my acquaintance undertook to describe your person, and argued you must needs be mad, and that you ought to take remedies. A bishop pitied you, that a desire and vanity of starting something new should put you upon such an undertaking; and when I justified you in that part of your character, and added other deserving qualities you have, he could not tell what to think of you. Another told me an ingenious man ought not to be discouraged from exerting his wit, and said Erasmus was not worse thought of for writing in praise of folly; but that you are not gone as far as a gentleman in town, who asserts not only that there is no such thing as Matter, but that we ourselves have no being at all.”

It is not surprising that a book which was supposed to deny the existence of all that we see and touch should be ridiculed, and its author called a madman. What vexed the author was, “that men who had never considered my book should confound me with the sceptics, who doubt the existence of sensible things, and are not positive of any one thing, not even of their own being. But whoever reads my book with attention will see that I question not the existence of anything we perceive by our senses. Fine spun metaphysics are what on all occasions I declaim against, and if any one shall shew anything of that sort in my Treatise I will willingly correct it.” A material world that was real enough to yield physical science, to make known to us the existence of other persons and of God, and which signified in very practical ways happiness or misery to sentient beings, seemed to him sufficiently real for human science and all other purposes. Nevertheless, in the ardour of youth Berkeley had hardly fathomed the depths into which his New Principle led, and which he hoped to escape by avoiding the abstractions of “fine-spun metaphysics.”

In December Percival writes from London that he has “given the book to Lord Pembroke,” who “thought the author an ingenious man, and to be encouraged”; but for himself he “cannot believe in the non-existence of Matter”; and he had tried in vain to induce Samuel Clarke, the great English metaphysician, either to refute or to accept the New Principle. In February Berkeley sends an explanatory letter for Lord Pembroke to Percival’s care. In a letter in June he turns to social questions, and suggests that if “some Irish gentlemen of good fortune and generous inclinations would constantly reside in England, there to watch for the interests of Ireland, they might bring far greater advantage than they could by spending their incomes at home.” And so 1711 passes, with responses of ignorant critics; vain endeavours to draw worthy criticism from Samuel Clarke; the author all the while doing work as a Tutor in Trinity College on a modest income; now and then on holidays in Meath or elsewhere in Ireland. Three discourses on Passive Obedience in the College Chapel in 1712, misinterpreted, brought on him the reproach of Jacobitism. Yet they were designed to shew that society rests on a deeper foundation than force and calculations of utility, and is at last rooted in principles of an immutable morality. Locke’s favourite opinion, that morality is a demonstrable, seems to weigh with him in these Discourses.

But Berkeley was not yet done with the exposition and vindication of his new thought, for it seemed to him charged with supreme practical issues for mankind. In the two years which followed the publication of the Principles he was preparing to reproduce his spiritual conception of the universe, in the dramatic form of dialogue, convenient for dealing popularly with plausible objections. The issue was the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, in which Philonous argues for the absurdity of an abstract matter that is unrealised in the experience of living beings, as against Hylas, who is put forward to justify belief in this abstract reality. The design of the Dialogues is to present in a familiar form “such principles as, by an easy solution of the perplexities of philosophers, together with their own native evidence, may at once recommend themselves as genuine to the mind, and rescue philosophy from the endless pursuits it is engaged in; which, with a plain demonstration of the Immediate Providence of an all-seeing God, should seem the readiest preparation, as well as the strongest motive to the study and practice of virtue(4).”

When the Dialogues were completed, at the end of 1712, Berkeley resolved to visit London, as he told Percival, “in order to print my new book of Dialogues, and to make acquaintance with men of merit.” He got leave of absence from his College “for the recovery of his health,” which had suffered from study, and perhaps too he remembered that Bacon commends travel as “to the younger sort a part of education.”

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Berkeley made his appearance in London in January, 1713. On the 26th of that month he writes to Percival that he “had crossed the Channel from Dublin a few days before,” describes adventures on the road, and enlarges on the beauty of rural England, which he liked more than anything he had seen in London. “Mr. Clarke” had already introduced him to Lord Pembroke. He had also called on his countryman Richard Steele, “who desired to be acquainted with him. Somebody had given him my Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge, and that was the ground of his inclination to my acquaintance.” He anticipates “much satisfaction in the conversation of Steele and his friends,” adding that “there is lately published a bold and pernicious book, a Discourse on Free-thinking(5).” In February he “dines often with Steele in his house in Bloomsbury Square,” and tells in March “that you will soon hear of Mr. Steele under the character of the Guardian; he designs his paper shall come out every day as the Spectator.” The night before “a very ingenious new poem upon ‘Windsor Forest’ had been given to him by the author, Mr. Pope. The gentleman is a Papist, but a man of excellent wit and learning, one of those Mr. Steele mentions in his last paper as having writ some of the Spectator.” A few days later he has met “Mr. Addison, who has the same talents as Steele in a high degree, and is likewise a great philosopher, having applied himself to the speculative studies more than any of the wits I know. I breakfasted with him at Dr. Swift’s lodgings. His coming in while I was there, and the good temper he showed, was construed by me as a sign of the approaching coalition of parties. A play of Mr. Steele’s, which was expected, he has now put off till next winter. But Cato, a most noble play of Mr. Addison, is to be acted in Easter week.” Accordingly, on April 18, he writes that “on Tuesday last Cato was acted for the first time. I was present with Mr. Addison and two or three more friends in a side box, where we had a talk and two or three flasks of Burgundy and Champagne, which the author (who is a very sober man) thought necessary to support his spirits, and indeed it was a pleasant refreshment to us all between the Acts. Some parts of the prologue, written by Mr. Pope, a Tory and even a Papist, were hissed, being thought to savour of Whiggism; but the clap got much the better of the hiss. Lord Harley, who sat in the next box to us, was observed to clap as loud as any in the house all the time of the play.” Swift and Pope have described this famous first night of Cato; now for the first time we have Berkeley’s report. He adds, “This day I dined at Dr. Arbuthnot’s lodging in the Queen’s Palace.”

His countryman, Swift, was among the first to welcome him to London, where Swift had himself been for four years, “lodging in Bury Street,” and sending the daily journal to Stella, which records so many incidents of that memorable London life. Mrs. Vanhomrigh and her daughter, the unhappy Vanessa, were living in rooms in the same street as Swift, and there he “loitered, hot and lazy, after his morning’s work,” and “often dined out of mere listlessness.” Berkeley was a frequent visitor at Swift’s house, and this Vanhomrigh connexion with Swift had an influence on Berkeley’s fortune long afterwards. On a Sunday in April we find him at Kensington, at the Court of Queen Anne, in the company of Swift. “I went to Court to-day,” Swift’s journal records, “on purpose to present Mr. Berkeley, one of the Fellows of Trinity. College, to Lord Berkeley of Stratton. That Mr. Berkeley is a very ingenious man, and a great philosopher, and I have mentioned him to all the ministers, and have given them some of his writings, and I will favour him as much as I can.” In this, Swift was as good as his word. “Dr. Swift,” he adds, “is admired both by Steele and Addison, and I think Addison one of the best natured and most agreeable men in the world.”

One day about this time, at the instance of Addison, it seems that a meeting was arranged between Berkeley and Samuel Clarke, the metaphysical rector of St. James’s in Piccadilly, whose opinion he had in vain tried to draw forth two years before through Sir John Percival. Berkeley’s personal charm was felt wherever he went, and even “the fastidious and turbulent Atterbury,” after intercourse with him, is reported to have said: “So much understanding, so much knowledge, so much innocence, and such humility, I did not think had been the portion of any but angels till I saw this gentleman.” Much was expected from the meeting with Clarke, but Berkeley had again to complain that although Clarke had neither refuted his arguments nor disproved his premisses, he had not the candour to accept his conclusion.

It was thus that Berkeley became known to “men of merit” in that brilliant society. He was also brought among persons on whom he would hardly have conferred this title. He tells Percival that he had attended several free-thinking clubs, in the pretended character of a learner, and that he there heard Anthony Collins, author of “the bold and pernicious book on free-thinking,” boast “that he was able to demonstrate that the existence of God is an impossible supposition.” The promised “demonstration” seems to have been Collins’ Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty, which appeared two years later, according to which all that happens in mind and matter is the issue of natural necessity. Steele invited Berkeley to contribute to the Guardian during its short-lived existence between March and September, 1713. He took the Discourse of Collins for the subject of his first essay. Three other essays are concerned with man’s hope of a future life, and are among the few passages in his writings in which his philosophy is a meditation upon Death.

In May, Percival writes to him from Dublin that he hears the “new book of Dialogues is printed, though not yet published, and that your opinion has gained ground among the learned; that Mr. Addison has come over to your view; and that what at first seemed shocking is become so familiar that others envy you the discovery, and make it their own.” In his reply in June, Berkeley mentions that “a clergyman in Wiltshire has lately published a treatise wherein he advances something published three years ago in my Principles of Human Knowledge.” The clergyman was Arthur Collier, author of the Clavis Universalis, or demonstration of the impossibility of an external world(6).

Berkeley’s Three Dialogues were published in June. In the middle of that same month he was in Oxford, “a most delightful place,” where he spent two months, “witnessed the Act and grand performances at the theatre, and a great concourse from London and the country, amongst whom were several foreigners.” The Drury Lane Company had gone down to Oxford, and Cato was on the stage for several nights. The Percival correspondence now first discloses this prolonged visit to Oxford in the summer of 1713, that ideal home from whence, forty years after, he departed on a more mysterious journey than any on this planet. In a letter from thence to Percival, he had claimed Arbuthnot as one of the converts to the “new Principle.” Percival replied that Swift demurred to this, on which Berkeley rejoins: “As to what you say of Dr. Arbuthnot not being of my opinion, it is true there has been some difference between us concerning some notions relating to the necessity of the laws of nature; but this does not touch the main points of the non-existence of what philosophers call material substance; against which he acknowledges he can assert nothing.” One would gladly have got more than this from Berkeley, about what touched his favourite conception of the “arbitrariness” of law in nature, as distinguished from the “necessity” which some modern physicists are ready vaguely to take for granted.

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The scene now changes. On October 15 Berkeley suddenly writes from London: “I am on the eve of going to Sicily, as chaplain to Lord Peterborough, who is Ambassador Extraordinary on the coronation of the new king.” He had been recommended by Swift to the Ambassador, one of the most extraordinary characters then in Europe, who a few years before had astonished the world in the war of the Succession in Spain, and afterwards by his genius as a diplomatist: in Holland, nearly a quarter of a century before, he had formed an intimate friendship with John Locke. Ten months in France and Italy in the suite of Lord Peterborough brought the young Irish metaphysician, who had lately been introduced to the wits of London and the dons of Oxford, into a new world. It was to him the beginning of a career of wandering and social activity, which lasted, with little interruption, for nearly twenty years, during which metaphysics and authorship were in the background. On November 25 we find him in Paris, writing letters to Percival and Prior. “From London to Calais”, he tells Prior, “I came in company of a Flamand, a Spaniard, a Frenchman, and three English servants of my Lord. The three gentlemen, being of three different nations, obliged me to speak the French language (which is now familiar), and gave me the opportunity of seeing much of the world in little compass.... On November 1 (O.S.) I embarked in the stage-coach, with a company that were all perfect strangers to me. There were two Scotch, and one English gentleman. One of the former happened to be the author of the Voyage to St. Kilda and the Account of the Western Isles(7). We were good company on the road; and that day se’ennight came to Paris. I have since been taken up in viewing churches, convents, palaces, colleges, &c., which are very numerous and magnificent in this town. The splendour and riches of these things surpasses belief; but it were endless to descend to particulars. I was present at a disputation in the Sorbonne, which indeed had much of the French fire in it. I saw the Irish and the English Colleges. In the latter I saw, enclosed in a coffin, the body of the late King James.... To-morrow I intend to visit Father Malebranche, and discourse him on certain points.”

The Abbé D’Aubigné, as he informs Percival, was to introduce him to Malebranche, then the chief philosopher of France, whose Vision of the world in God had some affinity with Berkeley’s own thought. Unfortunately we have no record of the intended interview with the French idealist, who fourteen years before had been visited by Addison, also on his way to Italy, when Malebranche expressed great regard for the English nation, and admiration for Newton; but he shook his head when Hobbes was mentioned, whom he ventured to disparage as a “poor silly creature.” Malebranche died nearly two years after Berkeley’s proposed interview; and according to a story countenanced by Dugald Stewart, Berkeley was the “occasional cause” of his death. He found the venerable Father, we are told, in a cell, cooking, in a pipkin, a medicine for a disorder with which he was troubled. The conversation naturally turned on Berkeley’s system, of which Malebranche had received some knowledge from a translation. The issue of the debate proved tragical to poor Malebranche. In the heat of disputation he raised his voice so high, and gave way so freely to the natural impetuosity of a man of genius and a Frenchman, that he brought on a violent increase of his disorder, which carried him off a few days after(8). This romantic tale is, I suspect, mythical. The Percival correspondence shews that Berkeley was living in London in October, 1715, the month in which Malebranche died, and I find no trace of a short sudden visit to Paris at that time.

After a month spent in Paris, another fortnight carried Berkeley and two travelling companions to Italy through Savoy. They crossed Mont Cenis on New Year’s Day in 1714—“one of the most difficult and formidable parts of the Alps which is ever passed over by mortal man,” as he tells Prior in a letter from Turin. “We were carried in open chairs by men used to scale these rocks and precipices, which at this season are more slippery and dangerous than at other times, and at the best are high, craggy, and steep enough to cause the heart of the most valiant man to melt within him.” At the end of other six weeks we find him at Leghorn, where he spent three months, “while my lord was in Sicily.” He “prefers England or Ireland to Italy: the only advantage is in point of air.” From Leghorn he writes in May a complimentary letter to Pope, on the occasion of the Rape of the Lock: “Style, painting, judgment, spirit, I had already admired in your other writings; but in this I am charmed with the magic of your invention, with all those images, allusions, and inexplicable beauties which you raise so surprisingly, and at the same time so naturally, out of a trifle.... I remember to have heard you mention some half-formed design of coming to Italy. What might we not expect from a muse that sings so well in the bleak climate of England, if she felt the same warm sun and breathed the same air with Virgil and Horace.” In July we find Berkeley in Paris on his way back to England. He had “parted from Lord Peterborough at Genoa, where my lord took post for Turin, and thence designed passing over the Alps, and so through Savoy, on his way to England.” In August they are in London, where the aspect of English politics was changed by the death of the Queen in that month. He seems to have had a fever soon after his return. In October, Arbuthnot, in one of his chatty letters to Swift, writes thus: “Poor philosopher Berkeley has now the idea of health, which was very hard to produce in him, for he had an idea of a strange fever upon him, so strange that it was very hard to destroy it by introducing a contrary one.”

Our record of the two following years is a long blank, first broken by a letter to Percival in July, 1715, dated at London. Whether he spent any time at Fulham with Lord Peterborough after their return from Italy does not appear, nor whether he visited Ireland in those years, which is not likely. We have no glimpses of brilliant London society as in the preceding year. Steele was now in Parliament. Swift had returned to Dublin, and Addison was the Irish chief secretary. But Pope was still at Binfield, among the glades of Windsor, and Berkeley congratulated him after receiving the first volume of his Homer. Of his own literary pursuits we hear nothing. Perhaps the Second Part of the Principles, which was lost afterwards in his travels, engaged him. In the end of July he wrote to Lord Percival(9) from Flaxley(10) on the Severn; and in August, September, October, and November he wrote from London, chiefly interested in reports about “the rebels in Scotland,” and “the forces under Lord Mar, which no doubt will languish and disperse in a little time. The Bishop of Bristol assured me the other day that the Court expect that the Duke of Orleans would, in case of need, supply them with forces against the Pretender.” Our next glimpse of him is in May, 1716, when he writes to Lord Percival that he is “like soon to go to Ireland, the Prince of Wales having recommended him to the Lords Justices for the living of St. Paul’s in Dublin.” This opening was soon closed, and the visit to Ireland was abandoned. A groundless suspicion of Jacobitism was not overcome by the interest of Caroline, Princess of Wales. In June, 1716, Charles Dering wrote from Dublin, that “the Lords Justices have made a strong representation against him.” He had to look elsewhere for the immediate future.

We find him at Turin in November, 1716, with a fresh leave of absence for two years from his College. It seems that Ashe, Bishop of Clogher, had engaged him as travelling tutor to his son, a means not then uncommon for enabling young authors of moderate fortune to see new countries and mix with society. Addison had visited Italy in this way sixteen years before, and Adam Smith long afterwards travelled with the young Duke of Buccleuch. With young Ashe, Berkeley crossed Mont Cenis a second time. They reached Rome at the beginning of 1717. His Journal in Italy in that year, and occasional letters to Percival, Pope, and Arbuthnot, shew ardent interest in nature and art. With the widest views, “this very great though singular sort of man descended into a minute detail, and begrudged neither pains nor expense for the means of information. He travelled through a great part of Sicily on foot; clambered over the mountains and crept into the caverns, to investigate its natural history and discover the causes of its volcanoes; and I have known him sit for hours in forges and foundries to inspect their successive operations(11).” If the Journal had been transformed by his own hand into a book, his letter to Pope from Inarime shews that the book might have rivalled Addison’s Remarks on Parts of Italy in grace of style and large human interest.

In the summer of 1720 we find the travellers at Florence, afterwards for some time at Lyons, and in London at the beginning of the next year. On the way home his metaphysical inspiration was revived. The “Cause of Motion” had been proposed by the French Academy as the subject of a prize dissertation. The subject gave an opportunity for further unfolding his early thought. In the Principles and the Dialogues he had argued for the necessary dependence of matter, for its concrete substantial reality, upon living percipient mind. He would now shew its powerlessness as it is presented to us in sense. The material world, chiefly under the category of substance, inspired the Principles. The material world, under the category of cause or power, inspired the De Motu. This Latin Essay sums up the distinctive thought of Berkeley, as it appears in the authorship of his early life. Moles evolvit et agitat mentes might be taken as the formula of the materialism which he sought to dissolve. Mens percipit et agitat molem significantem, cujus esse est percipi expresses what Berkeley would substitute for the materialistic formula.

The end of the summer of 1721 found Berkeley still in London. England was in the social agitation and misery consequent upon the failure of the South Sea Company, a gigantic commercial speculation connected with British trade in America. A new inspiration took possession of him. He thought he saw in this catastrophe signs of a decline in public morals worse than that which followed the Restoration. “Political corruption”, “decay of religion,” “growth of atheism,” were descriptive words used by the thoughtful. Berkeley’s eager imagination was apt to exaggerate the evil. He became inspired by social idealism, and found vent for his fervour in An Essay towards preventing the Ruin of Great Britain, which, as well as the De Motu, made its appearance in 1721. This Essay is a significant factor in his career. It was the Cassandra wail of a sorrowful and indignant prophet, prepared to shake the dust from his feet, and to transfer his eye of hope to other regions, in which a nearer approach to Utopia might be realised. The true personality of the individual is unrealisable in selfish isolation. His favourite non sibi, sed toti mundo was henceforward more than ever the ruling maxim of his life.

II. Middle Life (1722-34).

In October, 1721, Berkeley was in Dublin. The register of the College shews that “on November 14, 1721, Mr. Berkeley had the grace of the House for the Degree of Bachelor and Doctor of Divinity.” There is no ground for the report that he returned to Ireland at this time as Chaplain to the Duke of Grafton, the Lord Lieutenant(12). But preferment in the Church seemed within his reach. “I had no sooner set foot on shore,” he wrote to Percival in that October, “than I heard that the Deanery of Dromore was vacant.” Percival used his influence with the Lord Lieutenant, and in February, 1722, Berkeley’s patent was “passing the Seals for the Deanery of Dromore.” But the Bishop of Dromore claimed the patronage, and this led to a protracted and ineffectual lawsuit, which took Berkeley to London in the following winter, “to see friends and inform himself of points of law,” and he tells that “on the way he was nearly drowned in crossing to Holyhead(13).”

Berkeley’s interest in church preferment was not personal. He saw in it only means to an end. In March, 1723, he surprised Lord Percival by announcing, in a letter from London, a project which it seems for some time had occupied his thoughts. “It is now about ten months,” he says, “since I have determined to spend the residue of my days in Bermuda, where I trust in Providence I may be the mean instrument of doing great good to mankind. Whatever happens, go I am resolved, if I live. Half a dozen of the most ingenious and agreeable men in our College are with me in this project, and since I came hither I have got together about a dozen Englishmen of quality, who intend to retire to those islands.” He then explains the project, opening a vision of Christian civilisation radiating from those fair islands of the West, whose idyllic bliss poets had sung, diffused over the New World, with its magnificent possibilities in the future history of mankind.

I find no further record of the origin of this bright vision. As it had become a practical determination “ten months” before March, 1723, one is carried back to the first months after his return to Dublin and to the Essay that was called forth by the South Sea catastrophe. One may conjecture that despair of England and the Old World—“such as Europe breeds in her decay”—led him to look westward for the hopeful future of mankind, moved, perhaps, by the connexion of the catastrophe with America. His active imagination pictured a better Republic than Plato’s, and a grander Utopia than More’s, emanating from a College in the isles of which Waller had sung.

In the meantime a curious fortune unexpectedly favoured him. Swift’s unhappy Vanessa, associated with Bury Street in 1713, had settled on her property at Marley Abbey near Dublin; and Swift had privately married Stella, as she confessed to Vanessa, who thereafter revoked the bequest of her fortune to Swift, and left it to be divided between Berkeley and Marshal, afterwards an Irish judge. Vanessa died in May, 1723. A few days after Berkeley wrote thus to Lord Percival: “Here is something that will surprise your lordship as it doth me. Mrs. Hester Vanhomrigh, a lady to whom I was a perfect stranger, having never in the whole course of my life exchanged a word with her, died on Sunday. Yesterday her Will was opened, by which it appears that I am constituted executor, the advantage whereof is computed by those who understand her affairs to be worth £3000.... My Bermuda scheme is now stronger in my mind than ever; this providential event having made many things easy which were otherwise before.” Lord Percival in reply concludes that he would “persist more than ever in that noble scheme, which may in some time exalt your name beyond that of St. Xavier and the most famous missionaries abroad.” But he warns him that, “without the protection of Government,” he would encounter insurmountable difficulties. The Vanessa legacy, and the obstructions in the way of the Deanery of Dromore, were the subjects of a tedious correspondence with his friend and business factotum, “Tom Prior,” in 1724 and the three following years. In the end, the debts of Vanessa absorbed most of the legacy. And as to the Deanery of Dromore, he tells Percival, on September 19, 1723: “I despair of seeing it end to my advantage. The truth is, my fixed purpose of going to Bermuda sets me above soliciting anything with earnestness in this part of the world. It can be of no use to me, but as it may enable me the better to prosecute that design; and it must be owned that the present possession of something in the Church would make my application for an establishment in those islands more considered.”

Nevertheless, he got a Deanery at last. In May, 1724, he informs Lord Percival from Trinity College: “Yesterday I received my patent for the best Deanery in the kingdom, that of Derry. It is said to be worth £1500 per annum. But as I do not consider it with an eye to enriching myself, so I shall be perfectly contented if it facilitates and recommends my scheme of Bermuda, which I am in hopes will meet with a better reception if it comes from one possessed of so great a Deanery.” In September he is on his way, not to Derry, but to London, “to raise funds and obtain a Charter for the Bermuda College from George the First,” fortified by a remarkable letter from Swift to Lord Carteret, the new Lord Lieutenant, who was then in Bath(14). As Swift predicted in this letter, Berkeley’s conquests spread far and fast in England, where he organised his resources during the four following years. Nothing shews more signally the magic of his personality than the story of his life in London in those years of negotiation and endeavour. The proposal met with a response wonderful in a generation represented by Walpole. The subscriptions soon reached five thousand pounds, and Walpole was among the subscribers. The Scriblerus Club, meeting at Lord Bathurst’s, agreed to rally Berkeley, who was among them, on his Bermuda scheme. He asked to be heard in defence, and presented the case with such force of enthusiasm that the company “were struck dumb, and after a pause simultaneously rose and asked leave to accompany him.” Bermuda for a time inspired London.

Berkeley was not satisfied with this. He remembered what Lord Percival had said about failure without help from Government. Accordingly he obtained a Charter from George the First early in 1726, and after canvassing the House of Commons, secured a grant of £20,000, with only two dissentient votes, in May of that year. This was the beginning of his difficulties. Payment was indefinitely delayed, and he was kept negotiating; besides, with the help of Prior, he was unravelling legal perplexities in which the Vanessa legacy was involved. It was in these years that he was seen at the receptions of Caroline at Leicester Fields, when she was Princess of Wales, and afterwards at St. James’s or at Kensington, when she became Queen in 1727; not, he says, because he loved Courts, but because he loved America. Clarke was still rector of St. James’s, and Butler had not yet migrated to his parsonage at Stanhope; so their society was open to him. The Queen liked to listen to a philosophical discussion. Ten years before, as Princess of Wales, she had been a royal go-between in the famous correspondence between Clarke and Leibniz. And now, Berkeley being in London, he too was asked to her weekly reunions, when she loved to hear Clarke arguing with Berkeley, or Berkeley arguing with Hoadley. Also in 1726 Voltaire made his lengthened visit to England, a familiar figure in the circle of Pope’s friends, attracted to the philosophy of Locke and Newton; and Voltaire mentions that he met “the discoverer of the true theory of vision” during his stay in London.

From the summer of 1727 until the spring of 1728 there is no extant correspondence either with Percival or “Tom Prior” to throw light on his movements. In February, 1728, he was still in London, but he “hoped to set out for Dublin in March, and to America in May.” There is a mystery about this visit to Dublin. “I propose to set out for Dublin about a month hence,” he writes to “dear Tom,” “but of this you must not give the least intimation to anybody. It is of all things my earnest desire (and for very good reasons) not to have it known that I am in Dublin. Speak not, therefore, one syllable of it to any mortal whatsoever. When I formerly desired you to take a place for me near the town, you gave out that you were looking for a retired lodging for a friend of yours; upon which everybody surmised me to be the person. I must beg you not to act in the like manner now, but to take for me an entire house in your own name, and as for yourself; for, all things considered, I am determined upon a whole house, with no mortal in it but a maid of your own putting, who is to look on herself as your servant. Let there be two bed-chambers: one for you, another for me; and, as you like, you may ever and anon lie there. I would have the house, with necessary furniture, taken by the month (or otherwise, as you can), for I propose staying not beyond that time; and yet perhaps I may. Take it as soon as possible.... Let me entreat you to say nothing of this to anybody, but to do the thing directly.... I would of all things ... have a proper place in a retired situation, where I may have access to fields and sweet air provided against the moment I arrive. I am inclined to think one may be better concealed in the outermost skirt of the suburbs, than in the country or within the town.... A house quite detached in the country I should have no objection to, provided you judge that I shall not be liable to discovery in it. The place called Bermuda I am utterly against. Dear Tom, do this matter cleanly and cleverly, without waiting for further advice.... To the person from whom you hire it (whom alone I would have you speak of it to) it will not seem strange you should at this time of the year be desirous, for your own convenience or health, to have a place in a free and open air.” This mysterious letter was written in April. From April till September Berkeley again disappears. There is in all this a curious secretiveness of which one has repeated examples in his life. Whether he went to Dublin in that spring, or why he wanted to go, does not appear.

But in September he emerges unexpectedly at Gravesend, newly married, and ready to sail for Rhode Island, “in a ship of 250 tons which he had hired.” The marriage, according to Stock, took place on August 1, whether in Ireland or in England I cannot tell. The lady was Anne, daughter of John Forster, late Chief Justice, and then Speaker of the Irish House of Commons. She shared his fortune when he was about to engage in the most romantic, and ideally the grandest, Christian mission of the eighteenth century. According to tradition she was a devoutly religious mystic: Fénelon and Madame Guyon were among her favourites. “I chose her,” he tells Lord Percival, “for her qualities of mind and her unaffected inclination to books. She goes with great thankfulness, to live a plain farmer’s life, and wear stuff of her own spinning. I have presented her with a spinning-wheel.” A letter to Prior, dated “Gravesend September 5, 1728,” thus describes the little party on the eve of their departure:—“To-morrow, with God’s blessing, I set sail for Rhode Island, with my wife and a friend of hers, my Lady Handcock’s daughter, who bears us company. I am married since I saw you to Miss Forster, whose humour and turn of mind pleases me beyond anything that I know in her whole sex. Mr. James(15), Mr. Dalton, and Mr. Smibert(16) go with us on this voyage. We are now all together at Gravesend, and are engaged in one view.” We are further told(17) that they carried stores and goods to a great value, and that the Dean “embarked 20,000 books, besides what the two gentlemen carried. They sailed in September for Rhode Island, where the Dean intends to winter, and to purchase an estate, in order to settle a correspondence and trade between that island and Bermudas.” Berkeley was in his forty-fourth year, when, full of glowing visions of Christian Empire in the West, “Time’s noblest offspring,” he left England, on his way to Bermuda, with the promise of Sir Robert Walpole that he should receive the promised grant after he had made an investment. He bought land in America, but he never reached Bermuda.

Towards the end of January, in 1729, the little party, in the “hired ship of 250 tons,” made their appearance in Narragansett Bay, on the western side of Rhode Island. “Blundering about the ocean,” they had touched at Virginia on the way, whence a correspondent, sceptical of the enterprise, informs Lord Percival that the Dean “had dined with the Governor, and visited our College,” but thinks that “when the Dean comes to put his visionary scheme into practice, he will find it no better than a religious frenzy,” and that “he is as much a Don Quixote in zeal as that renowned knight was in chivalry. I wish the good Dean may not find out at last that Waller really kidnapt him over to Bermuda, and that the project he has been drawn into may not prove in every point of it poetical.”

We have a picture of the landing at Newport, on a winter day early in 1729. “Yesterday arrived here Dean Berkeley of Londonderry, in a pretty large ship. He is a gentleman of middle stature, of an agreeable, pleasant, and erect aspect. He was ushered into the town with a great number of gentlemen, to whom he behaved himself after a very complaisant manner. ’Tis said he proposes to tarry here with his family about three months(18).” Newport was then a flourishing town, nearly a century old, an emporium of American commerce, in those days the rival of Boston and New York. He was “never more agreeably surprised,” he says, than “at the size of the town and harbour.” Around him was some of the softest rural and grandest ocean scenery in the world, which had fresh charms even for one whose boyhood was spent in the valley of the Nore, who had lingered in the Bay of Naples, and wandered in Inarime and among the mountains of Sicily. He was seventy miles from Boston, and about as far from Newhaven and Yale College. A range of hills crosses the centre of the island, whence meadows slope to the rocky shore. The Gulf Stream tempers the surrounding sea. “The people,” he tells Percival, “are industrious; and though less orthodox have not less virtue, and I am sure they have more regularity, than those I left in Europe. They are indeed a strange medley of different persuasions.” The gentry retained the customs of the squires in England: tradition tells of a cheerful society: the fox chase, with hounds and horses, was a favourite recreation. The society, for so remote a region, was well informed. The family libraries and pictures which remain argue culture and refinement. Smibert, the artist of the missionary party, who had moved to Boston, soon found employment in America, and his pictures still adorn houses in Rhode Island(19).

The Dean and his young wife lived in Newport for some months after their arrival. Mr. Honeyman, a missionary of the English Society, had been placed there, in Trinity Church, in 1704. The church is still a conspicuous object from the harbour. Berkeley preached in it three days after his arrival, and occasionally afterwards. Notes of his sermons are included in this edition among his Miscellaneous Works.

In the summer of 1729 he moved from Newport to a quiet valley in the interior of the island, where he bought a farm, and built a house. In this island-home, named Whitehall, he lived for more than two years—years of domestic happiness, and of resumed study, much interrupted since he left Dublin in 1713. The house may still be seen, a little aside from the road that runs eastward from Newport, about three miles from the town. It is built of wood. The south-west room was probably the library. The ocean is seen in the distance, while orchards and groves offer the shade and silence which soothed the thinker in his recluse life. No invitations of the three companions of his voyage(20), who had migrated to Boston, could allure him from this retreat, where he diverted his anxieties about Bermuda by the thoughts which found expression in the dialogues of Alciphron, redolent of Rhode Island and the invigorating breezes of its ocean shore. Tradition tells that much of Alciphron was the issue of meditation in the open air, at a favourite retreat, beneath the Hanging Rocks, which commands an extensive view of the beach and the ocean; and the chair in which he sat in this alcove is still preserved with veneration.

While Berkeley loved domestic quiet at Whitehall(21) and the “still air of delightful studies,” he mixed occasionally in the society of Newport. He found it not uncongenial, and soon after he was settled at Whitehall he led the way in forming a club, which held occasional meetings, the germ of the Redwood Library, still a useful Newport institution. His own house was a place of meeting for the New England missionaries.

Whitehall, Berkeley’s Residence in Rhode Island

Soon after his arrival in Rhode Island, Berkeley was visited by the Reverend Samuel Johnson, missionary at Stratford, an acute and independent thinker, one of the two contemporary representatives of philosophy in America. The other was Jonathan Edwards, at that time Congregational minister at Northampton on the Connecticut river. They had both adopted a conception of the meaning and office of the material world in the economy of existence that was in many respects similar to Berkeley’s(22). It seems that Berkeley’s book of Principles had before this fallen into Johnson’s hands. He hastened to visit the author when he heard of his arrival. A succession of visits and a life-long correspondence followed. The “non-existence of Matter,” interpreted as a whimsical and even insane paradox, was found by Johnson to mean the absence of unrealisable Substance behind the real material world that is presented to our senses, and of unrealisable Power in the successive sense-presented appearances of which alone we are percipient. He came to see the real existence of the things of sense in the constant order of the data of sense, through which we gain our knowledge of the existence of our fellow men, and of the omnipresent constant Providence of God; whose Ideas are the true archetypes of the visible world. He adopted and applied this conception with a lucidity and force which give him a high place among American thinkers.

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All the while a cloud darkened the recluse life at Whitehall. In June, 1729, Berkeley explains to Percival the circumstances and secrecy of his departure from England:—

“Before I left England I was reduced to a difficult situation. Had I continued there, the report would have obtained (which I had found beginning to spread) that I had dropped the design, after it had cost me and my friends so much trouble and expense. On the other hand, if I had taken leave of my friends, even those who assisted and approved my undertaking would have condemned my coming abroad before the King’s bounty was received. This obliged me to come away in the private manner that I did, and to run the risque of a tedious winter voyage. Nothing less would have convinced the world that I was in earnest, after the report I knew was growing to the contrary.”

Months passed, and Walpole’s promise was still unfulfilled. “I wait here,” he tells Lord Percival in March, 1730, “with all the anxiety that attends suspense, until I know what I can depend upon, or what course I am to take. On the one hand I have no notion that the Court would put what men call a bite upon a poor clergyman, who depended upon charters, grants, votes, and the like engagements. On the other hand, I see nothing done towards payment of the money.” Later on he writes—“As for the raillery of European wits, I should not mind it, if I saw my College go on and prosper; but I must own the disappointments I have met with in this particular have nearly touched me, not without affecting my health and spirits. If the founding a College for the spread of religion and learning in America had been a foolish project, it cannot be supposed the Court, the Ministers, and the Parliament would have given such public encouragement to it; and if, after all that encouragement, they who engaged to endow and protect it let it drop, the disappointment indeed may be to me, but the censure, I think, will light elsewhere.”

The suspense was at last ended. Gibson, the Bishop of London, pressed Walpole for a final answer. “If,” he replied, “you put this question to me as a Minister, I must, and can, assure you that the money shall most undoubtedly be paid, as soon as suits with public convenience; but if you ask me as a friend, whether Dean Berkeley should continue in America expecting the payment of twenty thousand pounds, I advise him by all means to return home to Europe, and to give up his present expectations.” It was thus that in 1731 the Prime Minister of England crushed the project conceived ten years before, and to which the intervening period had, under his encouragement, been devoted by the projector with a singular enthusiasm.

Berkeley’s Alcove, Rhode Island

A few months after this heavy blow, Berkeley, with his wife, and Henry their infant child, bade farewell to the island home. They sailed from Boston in the late autumn of 1731, and in the following February we find them in London. Thus ended the romantic episode of Rhode Island, with its ideal of Christian civilisation, which so moves the heart and touches the imagination in our retrospect of the eighteenth century. Of all who have ever landed on the American shore, none was ever moved by a purer and more self-sacrificing spirit. America still acknowledges that by Berkeley’s visit on this mission it has been invested with the halo of an illustrious name, and associated with religious devotion to a magnificent ideal, even if it was sought to be realised by impracticable means. To reform the New World, and mankind at last, by a College on an island in the Atlantic, six hundred miles from America, the Indians whom it was intended to civilise being mostly in the interior of the continent, and none in Bermuda, was not unnaturally considered Quixotic; and that it was at first supported by the British Court and Parliament is a wonderful tribute to the persuasive genius of the projector. Perhaps he was too much influenced by Lord Percival’s idea, that it could not be realised by private benevolence, without the intervention of the Crown. But the indirect influence of Berkeley’s American inspiration is apparent in many ways in the intellectual and spiritual life of that great continent, during the last century and a half, especially by the impulse given to academical education. It is the testimony of an American author that, “by methods different from those intended by Berkeley, and in ways more manifold than even he could have dreamed, he has since accomplished, and through all coming time, by a thousand ineffaceable influences, he will continue to accomplish, some portion at least of the results which he had aimed at in the founding of his university. It is the old story over again; the tragedy of a Providence wiser than man’s foresight; God giving the victory to His faithful servant even through the bitterness of overruling him and defeating him(23).” American Empire, as we now see it with its boundless beneficent influence, is at least an imperfect realisation of Berkeley’s dream.

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Berkeley’s head quarters were in London, in Green Street, for more than two years after the return to England in the beginning of 1732. Extant correspondence with Lord Percival ends in Rhode Island, and our picture of the two years in London is faintly formed by letters to Prior and Johnson. These speak of ill-health, and breathe a less sanguine spirit. The brilliant social life of former visits was less attractive now, even if old friends had remained. But Swift had quitted England for ever, and Steele had followed Addison to the grave. Gay, the common friend of Berkeley and Pope, died soon after the return from Rhode Island, and Arbuthnot was approaching his end at Hampstead. Samuel Clarke had passed away when Berkeley was at Whitehall; but Seeker now held the rectory of St. James’s, and Butler was in studious retirement on the Wear; while Pope was at Twickenham, publishing his Essay on Man, receiving visits from Bolingbroke, or visiting Lord Bathurst at Cirencester Park. Queen Caroline, too, was holding her receptions at Kensington; but “those who imagine (as you write),” he tells Prior in January, 1734, “that I have been making my court here all this time, would never believe (what is most true) that I have not been at the Court or at the Minister’s but once these seven years. The care of my health and the love of retirement have prevailed over whatsoever ambition might have come to my share.” There is a hint of a visit to Oxford, at Commemoration in 1733, when his friend Seeker received the honorary degree.

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Soon after he had settled in London, the fruit of his studies in Rhode Island was given to the world in the Seven Dialogues of Alciphron, or The Minute Philosopher. Here the philosophical inspiration of his early years is directed to sustain faith in Divine Moral Order, and in the Christian Revelation. Alciphron is the longest, and in literary form perhaps the most finished of his works, unsurpassed in lively strokes of irony and satire. Yet if it is to be regarded as a philosophical justification of religion, as against modern agnosticism, one may incline to the judgment of Mr. Leslie Stephen, that it is “the least admirable of all its author’s admirable works.” As we have seen, the sect of free-thinkers was early the object of Berkeley’s ridicule and sarcasm. They claimed for themselves wide intellectual vision, yet they were blind to the deep realities of the universe; they took exclusive credit for freedom of thought, although their thinking was confined within the narrow compass of our data in sense. The book of Principles, the Dialogues, and the De Motu of his early years, were designed to bring into clear light the absolute dependence of the world that is presented to our senses on Omnipresent Spirit; and the necessary subjection of all changes in our surroundings to the immediate agency or providence of God. Boasted “free-thinking” was really a narrow atheism, so he believed, in which meaningless Matter usurped the place that belonged in reason to God, and he employed reason to disclose Omnipotent Intelligence in and behind the phenomena that are presented to the senses in impotent natural sequence.

The causes of the widespread moral corruption of the Old World, which had moved Berkeley so profoundly, seem to have been pondered anew during his recluse life in Rhode Island. The decline of morals was explained by the deification of Matter: consequent life of sensuous pleasure accounted for decay of religion. That vice is hurtful was argued by free-thinkers like Mandeville to be a vulgar error, and a fallacious demonstration was offered of its utility. That virtue is intrinsically beautiful was taught by Shaftesbury; but Berkeley judged the abstract beauty, with which “minute philosophers” were contented, unfit to move ordinary human beings to self-sacrificing action; for this involves devotion to a Perfect Person by whom goodness is finally distributed. Religion alone inspires the larger and higher life, in presenting distributive justice personified on the throne of the universe, instead of abstract virtue.

The turning-point in Alciphron is in man’s vision of God. This is pressed in the Fourth Dialogue. The free-thinker asserts that “the notion of a Deity, or some invisible power, is of all prejudices the most unconquerable; the most signal example of belief without reason for believing.” He demands proof—“such proof as every man of sense requires of a matter of fact.... Should a man ask, why I believe there is a king of Great Britain? I might answer, Because I had seen him. Or a king of Spain? Because I had seen those who saw him. But as for this King of kings, I neither saw Him myself, nor any one else that ever did see Him.” To which Euphranor replies, “What if it should appear that God really speaks to man; would this content you? What if it shall appear plainly that God speaks to men by the intervention and use of arbitrary, outward, sensible signs, having no resemblance or necessary connexion with the things they stand for and suggest; if it shall appear that, by innumerable combinations of these signs, an endless variety of things is discovered and made known to us; and that we are thereby instructed or informed in their different natures; that we are taught and admonished what to shun and what to pursue; and are directed how to regulate our motions, and how to act with respect to things distant from us, as well in time as place: will this content you?” Euphranor accordingly proceeds to shew that Visible Nature is a Language, in which the Universal Power that is continually at work is speaking to us all, in a way similar to that in which our fellow men speak to us; so that we have as much (even more) reason to believe in the existence of the Universal Person who is the Speaker, as we have to believe in the existence of persons around us; who become known to us, when they too employ sense-symbols, in the words and actions by which we discover that we are not alone in the universe. For men are really living spirits: their bodies are only the sign of their spiritual personality. And it is so with God, who is also revealed in the visible world as a Spirit. “In a strict sense,” says Euphranor, “I do not see Alciphron, but only such visible signs and tokens as suggest and infer the being of that invisible thinking principle or soul. Even so, in the self-same manner, it seems to me that, though I cannot with eyes of flesh behold the invisible God, yet I do, in the strictest sense, behold and perceive, by all my senses, such signs and tokens ... as suggest, indicate, and demonstrate an invisible God as certainly, and with the same evidence, at least, as any other signs, perceived by sense, do suggest to me the existence of your soul, spirit, or thinking principle; which I am convinced of only by a few signs or effects, and the motions of one small organised body; whereas I do, at all times, and in all places, perceive sensible signs which evince the being of God.” In short, God is the living Soul of the Universe; as you and I are the living souls that keep our bodies and their organs in significant motion. We can interpret the character of God in the history of the universe, even as we can interpret the character of our neighbour by observing his words and outward actions.

This overwhelmed Alciphron. “You stare to find that God is not far from any one of us, and that in Him we live and move and have our being,” rejoins Euphranor. “You who, in the beginning of this conference, thought it strange that God should leave Himself without a witness, do now think it strange the witness should be so full and clear.” “I must own I do,” was the reply. “I never imagined it could be pretended that we saw God with our fleshly eyes, as plain as we see any human person whatsoever, and that He daily speaks to our senses in a manifest and clear dialect.”

Although this reasoning satisfied Alciphron, others may think it inconclusive. How one is able to discover the existence of other persons, and even the meaning of finite personality, are themselves questions full of speculative difficulty. But, waiving this, the analogy between the relation of a human spirit to its body, and that of the Omnipresent and Omnipotent Spirit to the Universe of things and persons, fails in several respects. God is supposed to be continually creating the world by constant and continuous Providence, and His Omniscience is supposed to comprehend all its concrete relations: a man’s body is not absolutely dependent on the man’s own power and providence; and even his scientific knowledge of it, in itself and in its relations, is scanty and imperfect, as his power over it is limited and conditioned. Then the little that a man gradually learns of what is going on in the surrounding universe is dependent on his senses: Omniscience comprehends Immensity and Eternity (so we suppose) in a single intuition. Our bodies, moreover, are visible things: the universe, this organism of God, is crowded with persons, to whom there is nothing corresponding within the organism which reveals one man to another.

But this is not all. After Euphranor has found that the Universal Power is Universal Spirit, this is still an inadequate God; for what we want to know is what sort of Spirit God is. Is God omnipotent or of limited power, regarded ethically, fair or unfair in His treatment of persons; good or evil, according to the highest yet attained conception of goodness; a God of love, or a devil omnipotent? I infer the character of my neighbour from his words and actions, patent to sense in the gradual outward evolution of his life. I am asked to infer the character of the Omnipresent Spirit from His words and actions, manifested in the universe of things and persons. But we must not attribute to the Cause more than it reveals of itself in its effects. God and men alike are known by the effects they produce. The Universal Power is, on this condition, righteous, fair, and loving to the degree in which those conceptions are implied in His visible embodiment: to affirm more or other than this, on the basis of analogy alone, is either to indulge in baseless conjecture, or to submit blindly to dogma and authority.

Now the universe, as far as it comes within the range of human experience on this planet, is full of suffering and moral disorder. The “religious hypothesis” of a perfectly righteous and benevolent God is here offered to account for the appearances which the universe presents to us. But do these signify exact distributive justice? Is not visible nature apparently cruel and unrelenting? If we infer cruelty in the character of a man, because his bodily actions cause undeserved suffering, must we not, by this analogy, infer in like manner regarding the character of the Supreme Spirit, manifested in the progressive evolution of the universal organism?

We find it impossible to determine with absolute certainty the character even of our fellow men, from their imperfectly interpreted words and actions, so that each man is more or less a mystery to his fellows. The mystery deepens when we try to read the character of animals,—to interpret the motives which determine the overt acts of dogs or horses. And if we were able to communicate by visible signs with the inhabitants of other planets, with how much greater difficulty should we draw conclusions from their visible acts regarding their character? But if this is so when we use the data of sense for reading the character of finite persons, how infinite must be the difficulty of reading the character of the Eternal Spirit, in and through the gradual evolution of the universe of things and persons, which in this reasoning is supposed to be His body; and the history of that universe the facts of His biography, in and by which He is eternally revealing Himself! For we know nothing about the unbeginning and unending. The universe of persons is assumed to have no end; and I know not why its evolution must be supposed to have had a beginning, or that there ever was a time in which God was unmanifested, to finite persons.

Shall we in these circumstances turn with Euphranor, in the Fifth and Sixth Dialogues, to professed revelation of the character of the Universal Mind presented in miraculous revelation, by inspired prophets and apostles, who are brought forward as authorities able to speak infallibly to the character of God? If the whole course of nature, or endless evolution of events, is the Divine Spirit revealed in omnipresent activity, what room is there for any other less regular revelation? The universe of common experience, it is implied by Berkeley, is essentially miraculous, and therefore absolutely perfect. Is it consistent with fairness, and benevolence, and love of goodness in all moral agents for its own sake, that the Christian revelation should have been so long delayed, and be still so incompletely made known? Is not the existence of wicked persons on this or any other planet, wicked men or devils, a dark spot in the visible life of God? Does not perfect goodness in God mean restoration of goodness in men, for its own sake, apart from their merit; and must not Omnipotent Goodness, infinitely opposite to all evil, either convert to goodness all beings in the universe who have made themselves bad, or else relieve the universe of their perpetual presence in ever-increasing wickedness?

Sceptical criticism of this sort has found expression in the searching minute philosophy of a later day than Berkeley’s and Alciphron’s; as in David Hume and Voltaire, and in the agnosticism of the nineteenth century. Was not Euphranor too ready to yield to the demand for a visible God, whose character had accordingly to be determined by what appears in nature and man, under the conditions of our limited and contingent experience? Do we not need to look below data of sensuous experience, and among the presuppositions which must consciously or unconsciously be taken for granted in all man’s dealings with the environment in which he finds himself, for the root of trustworthy experience? On merely physical reasoning, like that of Euphranor, the righteous love of God is an unwarranted inference, and it even seems to be contradicted by visible facts presented in the history of the world. But if Omnipotent Goodness must a priori be attributed to the Universal Mind, as an indispensable condition for man’s having reliable intercourse of any sort with nature; if this is the primary postulate necessary to the existence of truth of any kind—then the “religious hypothesis” that God is Good, according to the highest conception of goodness, is no groundless fancy, but the fundamental faith-venture in which man has to live. It must stand in reason; unless it can be demonstrated that the mixture of good and evil which the universe presents, necessarily contradicts this fundamental presupposition: and if so, man is lost in pessimistic Pyrrhonism, and can assert nothing about anything(24).

The religious altruism, however inadequate, which Berkeley offered in Alciphron made some noise at the time of its appearance, although its theistic argument was too subtle to be popular. The conception of the visible world as Divine Visual Language was “received with ridicule by those who make ridicule the test of truth,” although it has made way since. “I have not seen Dean Berkeley,” Gay the poet writes to Swift in the May following the Dean’s return, and very soon after the appearance of Alciphron, “but I have been reading his book, and like many parts of it; but in general think with you that it is too speculative.” Warburton, with admiration for Berkeley, cannot comprehend his philosophy, and Hoadley shewed a less friendly spirit. A Letter from a Country Clergyman, attributed to Lord Hervey, the “Sporus” of Pope, was one of several ephemeral attacks which the Minute Philosopher encountered in the year after its appearance. Three other critics, more worthy of consideration, are mentioned in one of Berkeley’s letters from London to his American friend Johnson at Stratford: “As to the Bishop of Cork’s book, and the other book you allude to, the author of which is one Baxter, they are both very little considered here; for which reason I have taken no public notice of them. To answer objections already answered, and repeat the same things, is a needless as well as disagreeable task. Nor should I have taken notice of that Letter about Vision, had it not been printed in a newspaper, which gave it course, and spread it through the kingdom. Besides, the theory of Vision I found was somewhat obscure to most people; for which reason I was not displeased at an opportunity to explain it(25).” The explanation was given in The Theory of Visual Language Vindicated, in January, 1733, as a supplement to Alciphron. Its blot is a tone of polemical bitterness directed against Shaftesbury(26).

Although Berkeley “took no public notice” of “the Bishop of Cork’s book(27)” it touched a great question, which periodically has awakened controversy, and been the occasion of mutual misunderstanding among the controversialists in past ages. “Is God knowable by man; or must religion be devotion to an object that is unknowable?” In one of his first letters to Lord Percival, as we saw, Berkeley animadverted on a sermon by the Archbishop of Dublin, which seemed to deny that there was goodness, or understanding God, any more than feet or hands. An opinion somewhat similar had been attributed to Bishop Browne, in his answer to Toland, and afterwards in 1728, in his Procedure and Limits of Human Understanding.

This touched to the quick Berkeley’s ultimate conception of the universe, as realisable only in, and therefore necessarily dependent on, living mind. We are reminded of the famous analogy of Spinoza(28). If the omnipresent and omnipotent Mind, on which Euphranor rested, can be called “mind” only metaphorically, and can be called “good” only when the term is used without human meaning, it may seem to be a matter of indifference whether we have unknowable Matter or unknowable Mind at the root of things and persons. Both are empty words. The Power universally at work is equally unintelligible, equally unfit to be the object of worship in the final venture of faith, whether we use the term Matter or the term Mind. The universe is neither explained nor sustained by a “mind” that is mind only metaphorically. To call this “God” is to console us with an empty abstraction. The minutest philosopher is ready to grant with Alciphron that “there is a God in this indefinite sense”; since nothing can be inferred from such an account of God about conduct or religion.

The Bishop of Cork replied to the strictures of Euphranor in the Minute Philosopher. He qualified and explained his former utterances in some two hundred dull pages of his Divine Analogy, which hardly touch the root of the matter. The question at issue is the one which underlies modern agnosticism. It was raised again in Britain in the nineteenth century, with deeper insight, by Sir William Hamilton; followed by Dean Mansel, in controversy with F. D. Maurice, at the point of view of Archbishop King and Bishop Browne, in philosophical vindication of the mysteries of Christian faith; by Mr. Herbert Spencer and by Huxley in a minute philosophy that has been deepened by Hume’s criticism of the rationale of theism in Berkeley(29).

Andrew Baxter’s Inquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul, referred to in Berkeley’s letter to Johnson, appeared in 1733. It has a chapter on “Dean Berkeley’s Scheme against the existence of Matter and a Material World,” which is worthy of mention because it is the earliest elaborate criticism of the New Principle, although it had then been before the world for more than twenty years. The title of the chapter shews Baxter’s imperfect comprehension of the proposition which he attempts to refute. It suggests that Berkeley argued for the non-existence of the things we see and touch, instead of for their necessary dependence on, or subordination to, realising percipient Mind, so far as they are concrete realities. Baxter, moreover, was a Scot; and his criticism is interesting as a foretaste of the protracted discussion of the “ideal theory” by Reid and his friends, and later on by Hamilton. But Baxter’s book was not the first sign of Berkeley’s influence in Scotland. We are told by Dugald Stewart, that “the novelty of Berkeley’s paradox attracted very powerfully the attention of a set of young men who were then prosecuting their studies at Edinburgh, who formed themselves into a Society for the express purpose of soliciting from him an explanation of some parts of his theory which seemed to them obscurely or equivocally expressed. To this correspondence the amiable and excellent prelate seems to have given every encouragement; and I have been told on the best authority that he was accustomed to say that his reasoning had been nowhere better understood than by this club of young Scotsmen(30).” Thus, and afterwards through Hume and Reid, Berkeley is at the root of philosophy in Scotland.

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The two years of indifferent health and authorship in London sum up what may be called the American period of Berkeley’s life. Early in 1734 letters to Prior open a new vista in his history. He was nominated to the bishopric of Cloyne in the south of Ireland, and we have now to follow him to the remote region which was his home for eighteen years. The interest of the philosophic Queen, and perhaps some compensation for the Bermuda disappointment, may explain the appearance of the metaphysical and social idealist in the place where he shone as a star of the first magnitude in the Irish Church of the eighteenth century.

III. Later Years (1734-53).

In May, 1734, Berkeley was consecrated as Bishop of Cloyne, in St. Paul’s Church, Dublin. Except occasional visits, he had been absent from Ireland for more than twenty years. He returned to spend eighteen years of almost unbroken seclusion in his remote diocese. It suited a growing inclination to a recluse, meditative life, which had been encouraged by circumstances in Rhode Island. The eastern and northern part in the county of Cork formed his diocese, bounded on the west by Cork harbour, and on the east by the beautiful Blackwater and the mountains of Waterford; the sea, which was its southern boundary, approached within two miles of the episcopal residence in the village of Cloyne.

As soon as he was settled, he resumed study “with unabated attention,” but still with indifferent health. Travelling had become irksome to him, and at Cloyne he was almost as much removed as he had been in Rhode Island from the thinking world. Cork took the place of Newport; but Cork was twenty miles from Cloyne, while Newport was only three miles from Whitehall. His episcopal neighbour at Cork was Bishop Browne, the critic of Alciphron. Isaac Gervais, afterwards Dean of Tuam, often enlivened the “manse-house” at Cloyne by his wit and intercourse with the great world. Secker, the Bishop of Bristol, and Benson, the Bishop of Gloucester, now and then exchanged letters with him, and correspondence was kept up as of old with Prior at Dublin and Johnson at Stratford. But there is no trace of intercourse with Swift, who was wearing out an unhappy old age, or with Pope, almost the only survivor of the brilliant society of other years. We are told, indeed, that the beauty of Cloyne was so described to the bard of Twickenham, by the pen which in former days had described Ischia, that Pope was almost moved to visit it. And a letter from Secker in February, 1735(31), contains this scrap: “Your friend Mr. Pope is publishing small poems every now and then, full of much wit and not a little keenness(32).” “Our common friend, Dr. Butler,” he adds, “hath almost completed a set of speculations upon the credibility of religion from its analogy to the constitution and course of nature, which I believe in due time you will read with pleasure.” Butler’s Analogy appeared in the following year. But I have found no remains of correspondence between Berkeley and their “common friend”; the two most illustrious religious thinkers of the Anglican communion.

When he left London in 1734 Berkeley was on the eve of what sounded like a mathematical controversy, although it was in his intention metaphysical, and was suggested by the Seventh Dialogue in Alciphron. In one of his letters to Prior, early in that year, he told him that though he “could not read, owing to ill health,” yet his thought was as distinct as ever, and that for amusement “he passed his early hours in thinking of certain mathematical matters which may possibly produce something(33).” This turned, it seems, upon a form of scepticism among contemporary mathematicians, occasioned by the presence of mysteries of religion. The Analyst was the issue. It was followed by a controversy in which some of the most eminent mathematicians took part. Mathematica exeunt in mysteria might have been the motto of the Analyst. The assumptions in mathematics, it is argued, are as mysterious as those of theologians and metaphysicians. Mathematicians cannot translate into perfectly intelligible thought their own doctrines in fluxions. If man’s knowledge of God is rooted in mystery, so too is mathematical analysis. Pure science at last loses itself in propositions which usefully regulate action, but which cannot be comprehended. This is the drift of the argument in the Analyst; but perhaps Berkeley’s inclination to extreme conclusions, and to what is verbally paradoxical, led him into doubtful positions in the controversy to which the Analyst gave rise. Instead of ultimate imperfect comprehensibility, he seems to attribute absolute contradiction to the Newtonian fluxions. Baxter, in his Inquiry, had asserted that things in Berkeley’s book of Principles forced the author “to suspect that even mathematics may not be very sound knowledge at the bottom.” The metaphysical argument of the Analyst was obscured in a cloud of mathematics.

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The social condition of Ireland attracted Berkeley almost as soon as he was settled in Cloyne. He was surrounded by a large native Irish population and a small group of English colonists. The natives, long governed in the interest of the stranger, had never learned to exert and govern themselves. The self-reliance which Berkeley preached fifteen years before, as a mean for “preventing the ruin of Great Britain,” was more wanting in Ireland, where the simplest maxims of social economy were neglected. It was a state of things fitted to move one who was too independent to permit his aspirations to be confined to the ordinary routine of the Irish episcopate, and who could not forget the favourite moral maxim of his life.

The social chaos of Ireland was the occasion of what to some may be the most interesting of Berkeley’s writings. His thoughts found vent characteristically in a series of penetrating practical queries. The First Part of the Querist appeared in 1735, anonymously, edited by Dr. Madden of Dublin, who along with Prior had lately founded a Society for promoting industrial arts in Ireland. The Second and Third Parts were published in the two following years. A Discourse to Magistrates occasioned by the Enormous Licence and Irreligion of the Times, which appeared in 1736, was another endeavour, with like philanthropic intention. And the only important break in his secluded life at Cloyne, in eighteen years of residence, was when he went for some months to Dublin in 1737, to render social service to Ireland in the Irish House of Lords.

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His metaphysic, at first encountered by ridicule, was now beginning to receive more serious treatment. A Scotsman had already recognised it. In 1739 another and more famous Scotsman, David Hume, refers thus to Berkeley in one of the opening sections of his Treatise of Human Nature: “A very material question has been started concerning abstract or general ideas—whether they be general or particular in the mind’s conception of them. A great philosopher, Dr. Berkeley, has disputed the received opinion in this particular, and has asserted that all general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annexed to a certain term which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals which are similar to them. I look upon this to be one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries that has been made of late years in the republic of letters.” It does not appear that Berkeley heard of Hume.

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A curious interest began to engage him about this time. The years following 1739 were years of suffering in the Irish diocese. It was a time of famine followed by widespread disease. His correspondence is full of allusions to this. It had consequences of lasting importance. Surrounded by disease, he pondered remedies. Experience in Rhode Island and among American Indians suggested the healing properties of tar. Further experiments in tar, combined with meditation and much curious reading, deepened and expanded his metaphysical philosophy. Tar seemed to grow under his experiments, and in his thoughts, into a Panacea for giving health to the organism on which living mind in man is meanwhile dependent. This natural dependence of health upon tar introduced thoughts of the interdependence of all things, and then of the immediate dependence of all in nature upon Omnipresent and Omnipotent Mind. The living Mind that underlies the phenomena of the universe began to be conceived under a new light. Since his return to the life of thought in Rhode Island, he had been immersed in Platonic and Neoplatonic literature, and in books of mystical Divinity, encouraged perhaps by the mystical disposition attributed to his wife. An eccentric ingenuity connected the scientific experiments and prescriptions with the Idealism of Plato and Plotinus. The natural law according to which tar-water was universally restorative set his mind to work about the immanence of living Mind. He mused about a medicine thus universally beneficial, and the thought occurred that it must be naturally charged with ’pure invisible fire, the most subtle and elastic of bodies, and the vital element in the universe’; and water might be the natural cause which enables this elementary fire to be drawn out of tar and transferred to vegetable and animal organisms. But the vital fire could be only a natural cause; which in truth is no efficient cause at all, but only a sign of divine efficiency transmitted through the world of sense: the true cause of this and all other natural effects must be the immanent Mind or Reason in which we all participate; for in God we live and move and have our being.

It is thus that Berkeley’s thought culminates in Siris, that Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries concerning the Virtues of Tar-water, and divers other subjects connected together and arising one from another, which appeared in 1744. This little book made more noise at the time of its appearance than any of his books; but not because of its philosophy, which was lost in its medicinal promise to mankind of immunity from disease. Yet it was Berkeley’s last attempt to express his ultimate conception of the universe in its human and divine relations. When Siris is compared with the book of Principles, the immense difference in tone and manner of thought shews the change wrought in the intervening years. The sanguine argumentative gladiatorship of the Principles is exchanged for pensive speculation, which acknowledges the weakness of human understanding, when it is face to face with the Immensities and Eternities. Compare the opening sections of the Introduction to the Principles with the closing sections of Siris. The contingent data of our experience are now felt to be insufficient, and there is a more or less conscious grounding of the Whole in the eternal and immutable Ideas of Reason. “Strictly, the sense knows nothing. We perceive, indeed, sounds by hearing and characters by sight. But we are not therefore said to understand them.... Sense and experience acquaint us with the course and analogy of appearances and natural effects: thought, reason, intellect, introduce us into the knowledge of their causes.... The principles of science are neither objects of sense nor imagination: intellect and reason are alone the sure guides to truth.” So the shifting basis of the earlier thought is found to need support in the intellectual and moral faith that must be involved in all reasonable human intercourse with the phenomena presented in the universe.

The inadequate thought of God, as only a Spirit or Person supreme among the spirits or persons, in and through whom the material world is realised, a thought which pervades Alciphron, makes way in Siris for the thought of God as the infinite omnipresent Ground, or final sustaining Power, immanent in Nature and Man, to which Berkeley had become accustomed in Neoplatonic and Alexandrian metaphysics. “Comprehending God and the creatures in One general notion, we may say that all things together (God and the universe of Space and Time) make One Universe, or τὸ Πᾶν. But if we should say that all things make One God, this would be an erroneous notion of God; but would not amount to atheism, as long as Mind or Intellect was admitted to be τὸ ἡγεμονικόν, or the governing part.... It will not seem just to fix the imputation of atheism upon those philosophers who hold the doctrine of τὸ Ἕν.” It is thus that he now regards God. Metaphysics and theology are accordingly one.

No attempt is made in Siris to articulate the universe in the light of unifying Mind or Reason. And we are still apt to ask what the truth and goodness at the heart of all really mean; seeing that, as conceived in human minds, they vary in the gradual evolution of intellect and conscience in men. Omnia exeunt in mysteria is the tone of Siris at the end. The universe of reality is too much for our articulate intellectual digestion: it must be left for omniscience; it transcends finite intelligence and the via media of human understanding. Man must be satisfied to pass life, in the infinitesimal interval between birth and death, as a faith-venture, which he may convert into a growing insight, as the generations roll on, but which can never be converted into complete knowledge. “In this state we must be satisfied to make the best of those glimpses within our reach. It is Plato’s remark in his Theætetus, that while we sit still we are never the wiser; but going into the river, and moving up and down, is the way to discover its depths and shallows. If we exercise and bestir ourselves, we may even here discover something. The eye by long use comes to see even in the darkest cavern; and there is no subject so obscure but we may discern some glimpse of truth by long poring on it. Truth is the cry of all, but the game of a few. Certainly where it is the chief passion it doth not give way to vulgar cares and views; nor is it contented with a little ardour in the early time of life: a time perhaps to pursue, but not so fit to weigh and revise. He that would make a real progress in knowledge must dedicate his age as well as his youth, the later growth as well as the first-fruits, at the altar of Truth.” Such was Berkeley, and such were his last words in philosophy. They may suggest the attitude of Bacon when, at a different view-point, he disclaims exhaustive system: “I have made a beginning of the work: the fortune of the human race will give the issue. For the matter in hand is no mere felicity of speculation, but the real business and fortunes of the human race(34).”

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While Berkeley’s central thought throughout his life is concerned with God as the one omnipresent and omnipotent Providential Agent in the universe, he says little about the other final question, of more exclusively human interest, which concerns the destiny of men. That men are born into a universe which, as the visible expression of Moral Providence, must be scientifically and ethically trustworthy; certain not to put man to confusion intellectually or morally, seeing that it could not otherwise be trusted for such in our ultimate venture of faith—this is one thing. That all persons born into it are certain to continue living self-consciously for ever, is another thing. This is not obviously implied in the former presupposition, whether or not it can be deduced from it, or else discovered by other means. Although man’s environment is essentially Divine, and wholly in its smallest details Providential, may not his body, in its living organisation from physical birth until physical death, be the measure of the continuance of his self-conscious personality? Is each man’s immortal existence, like God’s, indispensable?

Doubt about the destiny of men after they die is, at the end of the nineteenth century, probably more prevalent than doubt about the underlying Providence of God, and His constant creative activity; more perhaps than it was in the days of Toland, and Collins, and Tindal. Future life had been made so familiar to the imagination by the early and mediaeval Church, and afterwards by the Puritans, as in Milton, Bunyan, and Jonathan Edwards, that it then seemed to the religious mind more real than anything that is seen and touched. The habit wholly formed by natural science is apt to dissipate this and to make a human life lived under conditions wholly strange to its “minute philosophy” appear illusory.

A section in the book of Principles(35) in which the common argument for the “natural immortality” of the human soul is reproduced, strengthened by his new conception of what the reality of body means, is Berkeley’s metaphysical contribution for determining between the awful alternatives of annihilation or continued self-conscious life after physical death. The subject is touched, in a less recondite way, in two of his papers in the Guardian, and in the Discourse delivered in Trinity College Chapel in 1708, in which a revelation of the immortality of men is presented as the special gospel of Jesus Christ. To argue, as Berkeley does in the Principles, that men cannot be annihilated at death, because they are spiritual substances having powers independent of the sequences of nature, implies assumptions regarding finite persons which are open to criticism. The justification in reason for our venture of faith that Omnipotent Goodness is at the heart of the universe is—that without this presupposition we can have no reasonable intercourse, scientific or otherwise, with the world of things and persons in which we find ourselves; for reason and will are then alike paralysed by universal distrust. But it can hardly be maintained a priori that men, or other spiritual beings in the universe, are equally with God indispensable to its natural order; so that when they have once entered on conscious existence they must always continue to exist consciously. Is not the philosophical justification of man’s hope of endless life ethical rather than metaphysical; founded on that faith in the justice and goodness of the Universal Mind which has to be taken for granted in every attempt to interpret experience, with its mixture of good and evil, in this evanescent embodied life? Can a life such as this is be all for men, in a universe that, because it is essentially Divine, must operate towards the extinction of the wickedness which now makes it a mystery of Omnipotent Goodness?

A cheerful optimism appears in Berkeley’s habit of thought about death, as we have it in his essays in the Guardian: a sanguine apprehension of a present preponderance of good, and consequent anticipation of greater good after death; unlike those whose pessimistic temperament induces a lurid picture of eternal moral disorder. But his otherwise active imagination seldom makes philosophy a meditation upon death. He does not seem to have exercised himself in the way those do who find in the prospect of being in the twenty-first century as they were in the first, what makes them appalled that they have ever come at all into transitory percipient life; or as those others who recoil from an unbodied life after physical death, as infinitely more appalling than the thought of being transported in this body into another planet, or even to a material world outside our solar system. In one of his letters to Johnson(36) he does approach the unbodied life, and in a characteristic way:—

“I see no difficulty in conceiving a change of state, such as is vulgarly called death, as well without as with material substance. It is sufficient for that purpose that we allow sensible bodies, i.e. such as are immediately perceived by sight and touch; the existence of which I am so far from questioning, as philosophers are used to do, that I establish it, I think, upon evident principles. Now it seems very easy to conceive the soul to exist in a separate state (i.e. divested from those limits and laws of motion and perception with which she is embarrassed here) and to exercise herself on new ideas, without the intervention of these tangible things we call bodies. It is even very possible to apprehend how the soul may have ideas of colour without an eye, or of sounds without an ear(37).”

But while we may thus be supposed to have all our present sensuous experience in an unbodied state, this does not enable one to conceive how unbodied persons can communicate with one another in the absence of all sense signs; whether of the sort derived from our present senses, or from other senses of whose data we can in this life have no imagination.

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Berkeley’s tar-water enthusiasm lasted throughout the rest of his life, and found vent in letters and pamphlets in support of his Panacea, from 1744 till 1752. Notwithstanding this, he was not forgetful of other interests—ecclesiastical, and the social ones which he included in his large meaning of “ecclesiastical.” The Rising under Charles Edward in 1745 was the occasion of a Letter to the Roman Catholics of Cloyne, characteristically humane and liberal. It was followed in 1749 by an Exhortation to the Roman Catholic Clergy of Ireland in a similar spirit; and this unwonted courtesy of an Irish Protestant bishop was received by those to whom it was addressed in a corresponding temper.

It is difficult to determine Berkeley’s relation to rival schools or parties in Church and State. His disposition was too singular and independent for a partisan. Some of his early writings, as we have seen, were suspected of high Tory and Jacobite leanings; but his arguments in the suspected Discourse were such as ordinary Tories and Jacobites failed to understand, and the tenor of his words and actions was in the best sense liberal. In religious thought Siris might place him among latitudinarians; perhaps in affinity with the Cambridge Platonists. His true place is foremost among the religious philosophers of the Anglican Church; the first to prepare the religious problem for the light in which we are invited to look at the universe by modern agnostics, and under the modern conception of natural evolution. He is the most picturesque figure in that Anglican succession which, in the seventeenth century, includes Hooker and Cudworth; in the eighteenth, Clarke and Butler; and in the nineteenth, may we say Coleridge, in lack of a representative in orders; although Mansel, Maurice, Mozley, and Jowett are not to be forgotten, nor Isaac Taylor among laymen(38): Newman and Arnold, illustrious otherwise, are hardly representatives of metaphysical philosophy.

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A more pensive tone runs through the closing years at Cloyne. Attempts were made in vain to withdraw him from the “remote corner” to which he had been so long confined. His friends urged his claims for the Irish Primacy. “I am no man’s rival or competitor in this matter,” were his words to Prior. “I am not in love with feasts, and crowds, and visits, and late hours, and strange faces, and a hurry of affairs often insignificant. For my own private satisfaction, I had rather be master of my time than wear a diadem.” Letters to his American friends, Johnson and Clap, shew him still moved by the inspiration which carried him over the Atlantic, and record his influence in the development of American colleges(39). The home education of his three sons was another interest. We are told by his widow that “he would not trust his sons to mercenary hands. Though old and sickly, he performed the constant tedious task himself.” Of the fruit of this home education there is little to tell. The death of William, his favourite boy, in 1751, “was thought to have struck too close to his father’s heart.” “I am a man,” so he writes, “retired from the amusements, politics, visits, and what the world calls pleasure. I had a little friend, educated always under mine own eye, whose painting delighted me, whose music ravished me, and whose lively gay spirit was a continual feast. It has pleased God to take him hence.” The eldest son, Henry, born in Rhode Island, did not long survive his father. George, the third son, was destined for Oxford, and this destiny was connected with a new project. The “life academico-philosophical,” which he sought in vain to realise in Bermuda, he now hoped to find for himself in the city of colleges on the Isis. “The truth is,” he wrote to Prior as early as September 1746, “I have a scheme of my own for this long time past, in which I propose more satisfaction and enjoyment to myself than I could in that high station(40), which I neither solicited, nor so much as wished for. A greater income would not tempt me to remove from Cloyne, and set aside my Oxford scheme; which, though delayed by the illness of my son(41), yet I am as intent upon it and as much resolved as ever.”

The last of Berkeley’s letters which we have is to Dean Gervais. It expresses the feeling with which in April, 1752, he was contemplating life, on the eve of his departure from Cloyne.

“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. 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.”

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Four months after this, Berkeley saw Cloyne for the last time. In August he quitted it for Oxford, which he had long pictured in imagination as the ideal home of his old age. When he left Cork in the vessel which carried his wife, his daughter, and himself to Bristol, he was prostrated by weakness, and had to be taken from Bristol to Oxford on a horse-litter. It was late in August when they arrived there(42).

Our picture of Berkeley at Oxford is dim. According to tradition he occupied a house in Holywell Street, near the gardens of New College and not far from the cloisters of Magdalen. It was a changed world to him. While he was exchanging Ireland for England, death was removing old English friends. Before he left Cloyne he must have heard of the death of Butler in June, at Bath, where Benson, at the request of Secker, affectionately watched the last hours of the author of the Analogy. Benson followed Butler in August.

We hear of study resumed in improved health in the home in Holy well Street. In October a Miscellany, containing several Tracts on various Subjects, “by the Bishop of Cloyne,” appeared simultaneously in London and Dublin. The Tracts were reprints, with the exception of Further Thoughts on Tar-water, which may have been written before he left Ireland. The third edition of Alciphron also appeared in this autumn. But Siris is the latest record of his philosophical thought. A comparison of the Commonplace Book and the Principles with the Analyst and Siris gives the measure of his advancement. After the sanguine beginning perhaps the comparison leaves a sense of disappointment, when we find metaphysics mixed up with mathematics in the Analyst, and metaphysics obscurely mixed up with medicine in Siris.

It is curious that, although in 1752 David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature had been before the world for thirteen years and his Inquiry concerning Human Understanding for four years, there is no allusion to Hume by Berkeley. He was Berkeley’s immediate successor in the eighteenth-century evolution of European thought. The sceptical criticism of Hume was applied to the dogmatic religious philosophy of Berkeley, to be followed in its turn by the abstractly rational and the moral reconstructive criticism of Kant. Alciphron is, however, expressly referred to by Hume; indirectly, too, throughout the religious agnosticism of his Inquiry, also afterwards in the Dialogues on Natural Religion, in a vindication of minute philosophy by profounder reasonings than those which satisfied Lysicles and Alciphron. Berkeley, Hume, and Kant are the three significant philosophical figures of their century, each holding the supreme place successively in its beginning, middle, and later years. Perhaps Reid in Scotland did more than any other in his generation to make Berkeley known; not, however, for his true work in constructive religious thought, but for his supposed denial of the reality of the things we see and touch.(43)

The ideal life in Oxford did not last long. On the evening of Sunday, January 14, 1753, Berkeley was suddenly confronted by the mystery of death. “As he was sitting with my mother, my sister, and myself,” so his son wrote to Johnson at Stratford, in October, “suddenly, and without the least previous notice or pain, he was removed to the enjoyment of eternal rewards; and although all possible means were instantly used, no symptom of life ever appeared after; nor could the physicians assign any cause for his death. He arrived at Oxford on August 25, and had received great benefit from the change of air, and by God’s blessing on tar-water, insomuch that for some years he had not been in better health than he was the instant before he left us(44).”

Six days later he was buried in Oxford, in the Cathedral of Christ Church(45), where his tomb bears an appropriate inscription by Dr. Markham, afterwards Archbishop of York.

ERRATA

Vol. I

Page 99, line 3 for 149-80 read 149-60.

Page 99, line 22 for—and to be “suggested,” not signified read—instead of being only suggested.

Page 100, line 10 for hearing read seeing.

Page 103, note, lines 5, 6 for pp. 111, 112 read p. 210.

Page 200, note, line 14 for Adam read Robert.

Page 364, line 8 from foot for and read which.

Page 512, note 6, line 3 for imminent read immanent.

Vol. II

Page 194, note, line 3 for Tyndal read Tindal.

Page 207, line 1, insert 13. before Alc..

Page 377, line 6 for antethesis read antithesis.

Vol. IV

Page 285, lines 4, 5 for Thisus Alus Cujus, &c. read Ursus. Alus. Cuius. &c. The inscription, strictly speaking, appears on the Palace of the Counts Orsini, and is dated MD.

COMMONPLACE BOOK. MATHEMATICAL, ETHICAL, PHYSICAL, AND METAPHYSICAL

Written At Trinity College, Dublin, In 1705-8

First published in 1871

Editor’s Preface To The Commonplace Book

Berkeley’s juvenile Commonplace Book is a small quarto volume, in his handwriting, found among the Berkeley manuscripts in possession of the late Archdeacon Rose. It was first published in 1871, in my edition of Berkeley’s Works. It consists of occasional thoughts, mathematical, physical, ethical, and metaphysical, set down in miscellaneous fashion, for private use, as they arose in the course of his studies at Trinity College, Dublin. They are full of the fervid enthusiasm that was natural to him, and of sanguine expectations of the issue of the prospective authorship for which they record preparations. On the title-page is written, “G. B. Trin. Dub. alum.,” with the date 1705, when he was twenty years of age. The entries are the gradual accumulation of the next three years, in one of which the Arithmetica and the Miscellanea Mathematica made their appearance. The New Theory of Vision, given to the world in 1709, was evidently much in his mind, as well as the sublime conception of the material world in its necessary subordination to the spiritual world, of which he delivered himself in his book of Principles, in 1710.

This disclosure of Berkeley’s thoughts about things, in the years preceding the publication of his first essays, is indeed a precious record of the initial struggles of ardent philosophical genius. It places the reader in intimate companionship with him when he was beginning to awake into intellectual and spiritual life. We hear him soliloquising. We see him trying to translate into reasonableness our crude inherited beliefs about the material world and the natural order of the universe, self-conscious personality, and the Universal Power or Providence—all under the sway of a new determining Principle which was taking profound possession of his soul. He finds that he has only to look at the concrete things of sense in the light of this great discovery to see the artificially induced perplexities of the old philosophers disappear, along with their imposing abstractions, which turn out empty words. The thinking is throughout fresh and sincere; sometimes impetuous and one-sided; the outcome of a mind indisposed to take things upon trust, resolved to inquire freely, a rebel against the tyranny of language, morally burdened with the consciousness of a new world-transforming conception, which duty to mankind obliged him to reveal, although his message was sure to offend. Men like to regard things as they have been wont. This new conception of the surrounding world—the impotence of Matter, and its subordinate office in the Supreme Economy must, he foresees, disturb those accustomed to treat outward things as the only realities, and who do not care to ask what constitutes reality. Notwithstanding the ridicule and ill-will that his transformed material world was sure to meet with, amongst the many who accept empty words instead of genuine insight, he was resolved to deliver himself of his thoughts through the press, but with the politic conciliation of a persuasive Irish pleader.

The Commonplace Book steadily recognises the adverse influence of one insidious foe. Its world-transforming-Principle has been obscured by “the mist and veil of words.” The abstractions of metaphysicians, which poison human language, had to be driven out of the author’s mind before he could see the light, and must be driven out of the minds of others before they could be got to see it along with him: the concrete world as realisable only in percipient mind is with difficulty introduced into the vacant place. “The chief thing I pretend to is only to remove the mist and veil of words.” He exults in the transformed mental scene that then spontaneously rises before him. “My speculations have had the same effect upon me as visiting foreign countries,—in the end I return where I was before, get my heart at ease, and enjoy myself with more satisfaction. The philosophers lose their abstract matter; the materialists lose their abstract extension; the profane lose their extended deity. Pray what do the rest of mankind lose?” This beneficent revolution seemed to be the issue of a simple recognition of the fact, that the true way of regarding the world we see and touch is to regard it as consisting of ideas or phenomena that are presented to human senses, somehow regularly ordered, and the occasions of pleasure or pain to us as we conform to or rebel against their natural order. This is the surrounding universe—at least in its relations to us, and that is all in it that we have to do with. “I know not,” he says, “what is meant by things considered in themselves, i.e. in abstraction. This is nonsense. Thing and idea are words of much about the same extent and meaning. Existence is not conceivable without perception and volition. I only declare the meaning of the word existence, as far as I can comprehend it.”

In the Commonplace Book we see the youth at Trinity College forging the weapons which he was soon to direct against the materialism and scepticism of the generation into which he was born. Here are rough drafts, crude hints of intended arguments, probing of unphilosophical mathematicians—even Newton and Descartes, memoranda of facts, more or less relevant, on their way into the Essay on Vision and the treatise on Principles—seeds of the philosophy that was to be gradually unfolded in his life and in his books. We watch the intrepid thinker, notwithstanding the inexperience of youth, more disposed to give battle to mathematicians and metaphysicians than to submit even provisionally to any human authority. It does not seem that his scholarship or philosophical learning was extensive. Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke were his intimates; Hobbes and Spinoza were not unknown to him; Newton and some lesser lights among the mathematicians are often confronted. He is more rarely in company with the ancients or the mediaevalists. No deep study of Aristotle appears, and there is even a disposition to disparage Plato. He seeks for his home in the “new philosophy” of experience; without anticipations of Kant, as the critic of what is presupposed in the scientific reliability of any experience, against whom his almost blind zeal against abstractions would have set him at this early stage. “Pure intellect I understand not at all,” is one of his entries. He asks himself, “What becomes of the aeternae veritates?” and his reply is, “They vanish.” When he tells himself that “we must with the mob place certainty in the senses,” the words are apt to suggest that the senses are our only source of knowledge, but I suppose his meaning is that the senses must be trustworthy, as ’the mob’ assume. Yet occasionally he uses language which looks like an anticipation of David Hume, as when he calls mind “a congeries of perceptions. Take away perceptions,” he adds, “and you take away mind. Put the perceptions and you put the mind. The understanding seemeth not to differ from its perceptions and ideas.” He seems unconscious of the total scepticism which such expressions, when strictly interpreted, are found to involve. But after all, the reader must not apply rigorous rules of interpretation to random entries or provisional memoranda, meant only for private use, by an enthusiastic student who was preparing to produce books.

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I have followed the manuscript of the Commonplace Book, omitting a few repetitions of thought in the same words. Here and there Berkeley’s writing is almost obliterated and difficult to decipher, apparently through accident by water in the course of his travels, when, as he mentions long after in one of his letters, several of his manuscripts were lost and others were injured.

The letters of the alphabet which are interpreted on the first page, and prefixed on the margin to some of the entries, may so far help to bring the apparent chaos of entries under a few articulate heads.

I have added some annotations here and there as they happened to occur, and these might have been multiplied indefinitely had space permitted.

Commonplace Book

I. = Introduction. M. = Matter. P. = Primary and Secondary qualities. E. = Existence. T. = Time. S. = Soul—Spirit. G. = God. Mo. = Moral Philosophy. N. = Natural Philosophy.

Qu. If there be not two kinds of visible extension—one perceiv’d by a confus’d view, the other by a distinct successive direction of the optique axis to each point?

(M1) No general ideas(46). The contrary a cause of mistake or confusion in mathematiques, &c. This to be intimated in ye Introduction(47).

The Principle may be apply’d to the difficulties of conservation, co-operation, &c.

(M2) Trifling for the [natural] philosophers to enquire the cause of magnetical attractions, &c. They onely search after co-existing ideas(48).

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(M3) Quæcunque in Scriptura militant adversus Copernicum, militant pro me.

(M4) All things in the Scripture wch side with the vulgar against the learned, side with me also. I side in all things with the mob.

(M5) I know there is a mighty sect of men will oppose me, but yet I may expect to be supported by those whose minds are not so far overgrown wth madness. These are far the greatest part of mankind—especially Moralists, Divines, Politicians; in a word, all but Mathematicians and Natural Philosophers. I mean only the hypothetical gentlemen. Experimental philosophers have nothing whereat to be offended in me.

Newton begs his Principles; I demonstrate mine(49).

(M6) I must be very particular in explaining wt is meant by things existing—in houses, chambers, fields, caves, &c.—wn not perceiv’d as well as wn perceived; and shew how the vulgar notion agrees with mine, when we narrowly inspect into the meaning and definition of the word existence, wh is no simple idea, distinct from perceiving and being perceived(50).

The Schoolmen have noble subjects, but handle them ill. The mathematicians have trifling subjects, but reason admirably about them. Certainly their method and arguing are excellent.

God knows how far our knowledge of intellectual beings may be enlarg’d from the Principles.

(M7) The reverse of the Principle I take to have been the chief source of all that scepticism and folly, all those contradictions and inextricable puzzling absurdities, that have in all ages been a reproach to human reason, as well as of that idolatry, whether of images or of gold, that blinds the greatest part of the world, and that shamefull immorality that turns us into beasts.

(M8) היה Vixit & fuit.

οὐσία, the name for substance, used by Aristotle, the Fathers, &c.

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If at the same time we shall make the Mathematiques much more easie and much more accurate, wt can be objected to us(51)?

We need not force our imagination to conceive such very small lines for infinitesimals. They may every whit as well be imagin’d big as little, since that the integer must be infinite.

Evident that wch has an infinite number of parts must be infinite.

We cannot imagine a line or space infinitely great—therefore absurd to talk or make propositions about it.

We cannot imagine a line, space, &c., quovis lato majus. Since yt what we imagine must be datum aliquod; a thing can’t be greater than itself.

If you call infinite that wch is greater than any assignable by another, then I say, in that sense there may be an infinite square, sphere, or any other figure, wch is absurd.

Qu. if extension be resoluble into points it does not consist of?

No reasoning about things whereof we have no ideas(52); therefore no reasoning about infinitesimals.

No word to be used without an idea.

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(M9) If uneasiness be necessary to set the Will at work, Qu. how shall we will in heaven?

Bayle’s, Malbranch’s, &c. arguments do not seem to prove against Space, but onely against Bodies.

(M10) I agree in nothing wth the Cartesians as to ye existence of Bodies & Qualities(53).

Aristotle as good a man as Euclid, but he was allowed to have been mistaken.

Lines not proper for demonstration.

(M11) We see the house itself, the church itself; it being an idea and nothing more. The house itself, the church itself, is an idea, i.e. an object—immediate object—of thought(54).

Instead of injuring, our doctrine much benefits geometry.

(M12) Existence is percipi, or percipere, [or velle, i.e. agere(55)]. The horse is in the stable, the books are in the study as before.

(M13) In physiques I have a vast view of things soluble hereby, but have not leisure.

(M14) Hyps and such like unaccountable things confirm my doctrine.

Angle not well defined. See Pardies’ Geometry, by Harris, &c. This one ground of trifling.

(M15) One idea not the cause of another—one power not the cause of another. The cause of all natural things is onely God. Hence trifling to enquire after second causes. This doctrine gives a most suitable idea of the Divinity(56).

(M16) Absurd to study astronomy and other the like doctrines as speculative sciences.

(M17) The absurd account of memory by the brain, &c. makes for me.

How was light created before man? Even so were Bodies created before man(57).

(M18) Impossible anything besides that wch thinks and is thought on should exist(58).

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That wch is visible cannot be made up of invisible things.

M.S. is that wherein there are not contain’d distinguishable sensible parts. Now how can that wch hath not sensible parts be divided into sensible parts? If you say it may be divided into insensible parts, I say these are nothings.

Extension abstract from sensible qualities is no sensation, I grant; but then there is no such idea, as any one may try(59). There is onely a considering the number of points without the sort of them, & this makes more for me, since it must be in a considering thing.

Mem. Before I have shewn the distinction between visible & tangible extension, I must not mention them as distinct. I must not mention M. T. & M. V., but in general M. S., &c.(60)

Qu. whether a M. V. be of any colour? a M. T. of any tangible quality?

If visible extension be the object of geometry, ’tis that which is survey’d by the optique axis.

(M19) I may say the pain is in my finger, &c., according to my doctrine(61).

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Mem. Nicely to discuss wt is meant when we say a line consists of a certain number of inches or points, &c.; a circle of a certain number of square inches, points, &c. Certainly we may think of a circle, or have its idea in our mind, without thinking of points or square inches, &c.; whereas it should seem the idea of a circle is not made up of the ideas of points, square inches, &c.

Qu. Is any more than this meant by the foregoing expressions, viz. that squares or points may be perceived in or made out of a circle, &c., or that squares, points, &c. are actually in it, i.e. are perceivable in it?

A line in abstract, or Distance, is the number of points between two points. There is also distance between a slave & an emperor, between a peasant & philosopher, between a drachm & a pound, a farthing & a crown, &c.; in all which Distance signifies the number of intermediate ideas.

Halley’s doctrine about the proportion between infinitely great quantities vanishes. When men speak of infinite quantities, either they mean finite quantities, or else talk of [that whereof they have(62)] no idea; both which are absurd.

If the disputations of the Schoolmen are blam’d for intricacy, triflingness, & confusion, yet it must be acknowledg’d that in the main they treated of great & important subjects. If we admire the method & acuteness of the Math[ematicians]—the length, the subtilty, the exactness of their demonstrations—we must nevertheless be forced to grant that they are for the most part about trifling subjects, and perhaps mean nothing at all.

Motion on 2d thoughts seems to be a simple idea.

(M20) Motion distinct from ye thing moved is not conceivable.

(M21) Mem. To take notice of Newton for defining it [motion]; also of Locke’s wisdom in leaving it undefin’d(63).

Ut ordo partium temporis est immutabilis, sin etiam ordo partium spatii. Moveantur hæ de locis suis, et movebuntur (ut ita dicam) de seipsis. Truly number is immensurable. That we will allow with Newton.

(M22) Ask a Cartesian whether he is wont to imagine his globules without colour. Pellucidness is a colour. The colour of ordinary light of the sun is white. Newton in the right in assigning colours to the rays of light.

A man born blind would not imagine Space as we do. We give it always some dilute, or duskish, or dark colour—in short, we imagine it as visible, or intromitted by the eye, wch he would not do.

(M23) Proinde vim inferunt sacris literis qui voces hasce (v. tempus, spatium, motus) de quantitatibus mensuratis ibi interpretantur. Newton, p. 10.

(M24) I differ from Newton, in that I think the recession ab axe motus is not the effect, or index, or measure of motion, but of the vis impressa. It sheweth not wt is truly moved, but wt has the force impressed on it, or rather that wch hath an impressed force.

D and P are not proportional in all circles. d d is to 1/4d p as d to p/4; but d and p/4 are not in the same proportion in all circles. Hence ’tis nonsense to seek the terms of one general proportion whereby to rectify all peripheries, or of another whereby to square all circles.

N. B. If the circle be squar’d arithmetically, ’tis squar’d geometrically, arithmetic or numbers being nothing but lines & proportions of lines when apply’d to geometry.

Mem. To remark Cheyne(64) & his doctrine of infinites.

Extension, motion, time, do each of them include the idea of succession, & so far forth they seem to be of mathematical consideration. Number consisting in succession & distinct perception, wch also consists in succession; for things at once perceiv’d are jumbled and mixt together in the mind. Time and motion cannot be conceiv’d without succession; and extension, qua mathemat., cannot be conceiv’d but as consisting of parts wch may be distinctly & successively perceiv’d. Extension perceived at once & in confuso does not belong to math.

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The simple idea call’d Power seems obscure, or rather none at all, but onely the relation ’twixt Cause and Effect. When I ask whether A can move B, if A be an intelligent thing, I mean no more than whether the volition of A that B move be attended with the motion of B? If A be senseless, whether the impulse of A against B be followed by ye motion of B(65)?

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Barrow’s arguing against indivisibles, lect. i. p. 16, is a petitio principii, for the Demonstration of Archimedes supposeth the circumference to consist of more than 24 points. Moreover it may perhaps be necessary to suppose the divisibility ad infinitum, in order to demonstrate that the radius is equal to the side of the hexagon.

Shew me an argument against indivisibles that does not go on some false supposition.

A great number of insensibles—or thus, two invisibles, say you, put together become visible; therefore that M. V. contains or is made up of invisibles. I answer, the M. V. does not comprise, is not composed of, invisibles. All the matter amounts to this, viz. whereas I had no idea awhile agoe, I have an idea now. It remains for you to prove that I came by the present idea because there were two invisibles added together. I say the invisibles are nothings, cannot exist, include a contradiction(66).

I am young, I am an upstart, I am a pretender, I am vain. Very well. I shall endeavour patiently to bear up under the most lessening, vilifying appellations the pride & rage of man can devise. But one thing I know I am not guilty of. I do not pin my faith on the sleeve of any great man. I act not out of prejudice or prepossession. I do not adhere to any opinion because it is an old one, a reviv’d one, a fashionable one, or one that I have spent much time in the study and cultivation of.

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Sense rather than reason or demonstration ought to be employed about lines and figures, these being things sensible; for as for those you call insensible, we have proved them to be nonsense, nothing(67).

(M25) If in some things I differ from a philosopher I profess to admire, ’tis for that very thing on account whereof I admire him, namely, the love of truth. This &c.

(M26) Whenever my reader finds me talk very positively, I desire he’d not take it ill. I see no reason why certainty should be confined to the mathematicians.

I say there are no incommensurables, no surds. I say the side of any square may be assign’d in numbers. Say you assign unto me the side of the square 10. I ask wt 10—10 feet, inches, &c., or 10 points? If the later, I deny there is any such square, ’tis impossible 10 points should compose a square. If the former, resolve yr 10 square inches, feet, &c. into points, & the number of points must necessarily be a square number whose side is easily assignable.

A mean proportional cannot be found betwixt any two given lines. It can onely be found betwixt those the numbers of whose points multiply’d together produce a square number. Thus betwixt a line of 2 inches & a line of 5 inches a mean geometrical cannot be found, except the number of points contained in 2 inches multiply’d by ye number of points contained in 5 inches make a square number.

If the wit and industry of the Nihilarians were employ’d about the usefull & practical mathematiques, what advantage had it brought to mankind!

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(M27) You ask me whether the books are in the study now, when no one is there to see them? I answer, Yes. You ask me, Are we not in the wrong for imagining things to exist when they are not actually perceiv’d by the senses? I answer, No. The existence of our ideas consists in being perceiv’d, imagin’d, thought on. Whenever they are imagin’d or thought on they do exist. Whenever they are mentioned or discours’d of they are imagin’d & thought on. Therefore you can at no time ask me whether they exist or no, but by reason of yt very question they must necessarily exist.

(M28) But, say you, then a chimæra does exist? I answer, it doth in one sense, i.e. it is imagin’d. But it must be well noted that existence is vulgarly restrain’d to actuall perception, and that I use the word existence in a larger sense than ordinary.(68)

N. B.—According to my doctrine all things are entia rationis, i.e. solum habent esse in intellectum.

(M29) [(69)According to my doctrine all are not entia rationis. The distinction between ens rationis and ens reale is kept up by it as well as any other doctrine.]

You ask me whether there can be an infinite idea? I answer, in one sense there may. Thus the visual sphere, tho’ ever so small, is infinite, i.e. has no end. But if by infinite you mean an extension consisting of innumerable points, then I ask yr pardon. Points, tho’ never so many, may be numbered. The multitude of points, or feet, inches, &c., hinders not their numbrableness (i.e. hinders not their being numerable) in the least. Many or most are numerable, as well as few or least. Also, if by infinite idea you mean an idea too great to be comprehended or perceiv’d all at once, you must excuse me. I think such an infinite is no less than a contradiction(70).

(M30) The sillyness of the current doctrine makes much for me. They commonly suppose a material world—figures, motions, bulks of various sizes, &c.—according to their own confession to no purpose. All our sensations may be, and sometimes actually are, without them; nor can men so much as conceive it possible they should concur in any wise to the production of them.

(M31) Ask a man, I mean a philosopher, why he supposes this vast structure, this compages of bodies? he shall be at a stand; he’ll not have one word to say. Wch sufficiently shews the folly of the hypothesis.

(M32) Or rather why he supposes all ys Matter? For bodies and their qualities I do allow to exist independently of our mind.

(M33) Qu. How is the soul distinguish’d from its ideas? Certainly if there were no sensible ideas there could be no soul, no perception, remembrance, love, fear, &c.; no faculty could be exerted(71).

(M34) The soul is the Will, properly speaking, and as it is distinct from ideas.

(M35) The grand puzzling question, whether I sleep or wake, easily solv’d.

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Qu. Whether minima or meer minima may not be compar’d by their sooner or later evanescence, as well as by more or less points, so that one sensible may be greater than another, though it exceeds it not by one point?

Circles on several radius’s are not similar figures, they having neither all nor any an infinite number of sides. Hence in vain to enquire after 2 terms of one and ye same proportion that should constantly express the reason of the d to the p in all circles.

Mem. To remark Wallis’s harangue, that the aforesaid proportion can neither be expressed by rational numbers nor surds.

We can no more have an idea of length without breadth or visibility, than of a general figure.

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One idea may be like another idea, tho’ they contain no common simple idea(72). Thus the simple idea red is in some sense like the simple idea blue; ’tis liker it than sweet or shrill. But then those ideas wch are so said to be alike, agree both in their connexion with another simple idea, viz. extension, & in their being receiv’d by one & the same sense. But, after all, nothing can be like an idea but an idea.

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No sharing betwixt God & Nature or second causes in my doctrine.

(M36) Materialists must allow the earth to be actually mov’d by the attractive power of every stone that falls from the air, with many other the like absurditys.

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Enquire concerning the pendulum clock, &c.; whether those inventions of Huygens, &c. be attained to by my doctrine.

The ... & ... & ... &c. of time are to be cast away and neglected, as so many noughts or nothings.

Mem. To make experiments concerning minimums and their colours, whether they have any or no, & whether they can be of that green wch seems to be compounded of yellow and blue.

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(M37) Qu. Whether it were not better not to call the operations of the mind ideas—confining this term to things sensible(73)?

(M38) Mem. diligently to set forth how that many of the ancient philosophers run into so great absurditys as even to deny the existence of motion, and of those other things they perceiv’d actually by their senses. This sprung from their not knowing wt Existence was, and wherein it consisted. This the source of all their folly. ’Tis on the discovering of the nature and meaning and import of Existence that I chiefly insist. This puts a wide difference betwixt the sceptics &c. & me. This I think wholly new. I am sure this is new to me(74).

We have learn’d from Mr. Locke that there may be, and that there are, several glib, coherent, methodical discourses, which nevertheless amount to just nothing. This by him intended with relation to the Scholemen. We may apply it to the Mathematicians.

Qu. How can all words be said to stand for ideas? The word blue stands for a colour without any extension, or abstract from extension. But we have not an idea of colour without extension. We cannot imagine colour without extension.

Locke seems wrongly to assign a double use of words: one for communicating & the other for recording our thoughts. ’Tis absurd to use words for recording our thoughts to ourselves, or in our private meditations(75).

No one abstract simple idea like another. Two simple ideas may be connected with one & the same 3d simple idea, or be intromitted by one & the same sense. But consider’d in themselves they can have nothing common, and consequently no likeness.

Qu. How can there be any abstract ideas of colours? It seems not so easily as of tastes or sounds. But then all ideas whatsoever are particular. I can by no means conceive an abstract general idea. ’Tis one thing to abstract one concrete idea from another of a different kind, & another thing to abstract an idea from all particulars of the same kind(76).

(M39) Mem. Much to recommend and approve of experimental philosophy.

(M40) What means Cause as distinguish’d from Occasion? Nothing but a being wch wills, when the effect follows the volition. Those things that happen from without we are not the cause of. Therefore there is some other Cause of them, i.e. there is a Being that wills these perceptions in us(77).

(M41) [(78)It should be said, nothing but a Will—a Being which wills being unintelligible.]

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One square cannot be double of another. Hence the Pythagoric theorem is false.

Some writers of catoptrics absurd enough to place the apparent place of the object in the Barrovian case behind the eye.

Blew and yellow chequers still diminishing terminate in green. This may help to prove the composition of green.

There is in green 2 foundations of 2 relations of likeness to blew & yellow. Therefore green is compounded.

A mixt cause will produce a mixt effect. Therefore colours are all compounded that we see.

Mem. To consider Newton’s two sorts of green.

N. B. My abstract & general doctrines ought not to be condemn’d by the Royall Society. ’Tis wt their meeting did ultimately intend. V. Sprat’s History S. R.(79)

Mem. To premise a definition of idea(80).

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(M42) The 2 great principles of Morality—the being of a God & the freedom of man. Those to be handled in the beginning of the Second Book(81).

Subvertitur geometria ut non practica sed speculativa.

Archimedes’s proposition about squaring the circle has nothing to do with circumferences containing less than 96 points; & if the circumference contain 96 points it may be apply’d, but nothing will follow against indivisibles. V. Barrow.

Those curve lines that you can rectify geometrically. Compare them with their equal right lines & by a microscope you shall discover an inequality. Hence my squaring of the circle as good and exact as the best.

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(M43) Qu. whether the substance of body or anything else be any more than the collection of concrete ideas included in that thing? Thus the substance of any particular body is extension, solidity, figure(82). Of general abstract body we can have no idea.

(M44) Mem. Most carefully to inculcate and set forth that the endeavouring to express abstract philosophic thoughts by words unavoidably runs a man into difficulties. This to be done in the Introduction(83).

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Mem. To endeavour most accurately to understand what is meant by this axiom: Quæ sibi mutuo congruunt æqualia sunt.

Qu. what the geometers mean by equality of lines, & whether, according to their definition of equality, a curve line can possibly be equal to a right line?

If wth me you call those lines equal wch contain an equal number of points, then there will be no difficulty. That curve is equal to a right line wch contains the same points as the right one doth.

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(M45) I take not away substances. I ought not to be accused of discarding substance out of the reasonable world(84). I onely reject the philosophic sense (wch in effect is no sense) of the word substance. Ask a man not tainted with their jargon wt he means by corporeal substance, or the substance of body. He shall answer, bulk, solidity, and such like sensible qualitys. These I retain. The philosophic nec quid, nec quantum, nec quale, whereof I have no idea, I discard; if a man may be said to discard that which never had any being, was never so much as imagin’d or conceiv’d.

(M46) In short, be not angry. You lose nothing, whether real or chimerical. Wtever you can in any wise conceive or imagine, be it never so wild, so extravagant, & absurd, much good may it do you. You may enjoy it for me. I’ll never deprive you of it.

N. B. I am more for reality than any other philosophers(85). They make a thousand doubts, & know not certainly but we may be deceiv’d. I assert the direct contrary.

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A line in the sense of mathematicians is not meer distance. This evident in that there are curve lines.

Curves perfectly incomprehensible, inexplicable, absurd, except we allow points.

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(M47) If men look for a thing where it’s not to be found, be they never so sagacious, it is lost labour. If a simple clumsy man knows where the game lies, he though a fool shall catch it sooner than the most fleet & dexterous that seek it elsewhere. Men choose to hunt for truth and knowledge anywhere rather than in their own understanding, where ’tis to be found.

(M48) All knowledge onely about ideas. Locke, B. 4. c. 1.

(M49) It seems improper, & liable to difficulties, to make the word person stand for an idea, or to make ourselves ideas, or thinking things ideas.

(M50) Abstract ideas cause of much trifling and mistake.

Mathematicians seem not to speak clearly and coherently of equality. They nowhere define wt they mean by that word when apply’d to lines.

Locke says the modes of simple ideas, besides extension and number, are counted by degrees. I deny there are any modes or degrees of simple ideas. What he terms such are complex ideas, as I have proved.

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Wt do the mathematicians mean by considering curves as polygons? Either they are polygons or they are not. If they are, why do they give them the name of curves? Why do not they constantly call them polygons, & treat them as such? If they are not polygons, I think it absurd to use polygons in their stead. Wt is this but to pervert language? to adapt an idea to a name that belongs not to it but to a different idea?

The mathematicians should look to their axiom, Quæ congruunt sunt æqualia. I know not what they mean by bidding me put one triangle on another. The under triangle is no triangle—nothing at all, it not being perceiv’d. I ask, must sight be judge of this congruentia or not? If it must, then all lines seen under the same angle are equal, wch they will not acknowledge. Must the touch be judge? But we cannot touch or feel lines and surfaces, such as triangles, &c., according to the mathematicians themselves. Much less can we touch a line or triangle that’s cover’d by another line or triangle.

Do you mean by saying one triangle is equall to another, that they both take up equal spaces? But then the question recurs, what mean you by equal spaces? If you mean spatia congruentia, answer the above difficulty truly.

I can mean (for my part) nothing else by equal triangles than triangles containing equal numbers of points.

I can mean nothing by equal lines but lines wch ’tis indifferent whether of them I take, lines in wch I observe by my senses no difference, & wch therefore have the same name.

Must the imagination be judge in the aforementioned cases? but then imagination cannot go beyond the touch and sight. Say you, pure intellect must be judge. I reply that lines and triangles are not operations of the mind.

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If I speak positively and with the air of a mathematician in things of which I am certain, ’tis to avoid disputes, to make men careful to think before they answer, to discuss my arguments before they go to refute them. I would by no means injure truth and certainty by an affected modesty & submission to better judgments. Wt I lay before you are undoubted theorems; not plausible conjectures of my own, nor learned opinions of other men. I pretend not to prove them by figures, analogy, or authority. Let them stand or fall by their own evidence.

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(M51) When you speak of the corpuscularian essences of bodys, to reflect on sect. 11. & 12. b. 4. c. 3. Locke. Motion supposes not solidity. A meer colour’d extension may give us the idea of motion.

(M52) Any subject can have of each sort of primary qualities but one particular at once. Lib. 4. c. 3. s. 15. Locke.

(M53) Well, say you, according to this new doctrine, all is but meer idea—there is nothing wch is not an ens rationis. I answer, things are as real, and exist in rerum natura, as much as ever. The difference between entia realia & entia rationis may be made as properly now as ever. Do but think before you speak. Endeavour rightly to comprehend my meaning, and you’ll agree with me in this.

(M54) Fruitless the distinction ’twixt real and nominal essences.

We are not acquainted with the meaning of our words. Real, extension, existence, power, matter, lines, infinite, point, and many more are frequently in our mouths, when little, clear, and determin’d answers them in our understandings. This must be well inculcated.

(M55) Vain is the distinction ’twixt intellectual and material world(86). V. Locke, lib. 4. c. 3. s. 27, where he says that is far more beautiful than this.

(M56) Foolish in men to despise the senses. If it were not for

(M57) them the mind could have no knowledge, no thought at all. All ... of introversion, meditation, contemplation, and spiritual acts, as if these could be exerted before we had ideas from without by the senses, are manifestly absurd. This may be of great use in that it makes the happyness of the life to come more conceivable and agreeable to our present nature. The schoolemen & refiners in philosophy gave the greatest part of mankind no more tempting idea of heaven or the joys of the blest.

The vast, wide-spread, universal cause of our mistakes is, that we do not consider our own notions. I mean consider them in themselves—fix, settle, and determine them,—we regarding them with relation to each other only. In short, we are much out in study the relations of things before we study them absolutely and in themselves. Thus we study to find out the relations of figures to one another, the relations also of number, without endeavouring rightly to understand the nature of extension and number in themselves. This we think is of no concern, of no difficulty; but if I mistake not ’tis of the last importance,

(M58) I allow not of the distinction there is made ’twixt profit and pleasure.

(M59) I’d never blame a man for acting upon interest. He’s a fool that acts on any other principles. The not considering these things has been of ill consequence in morality.

My positive assertions are no less modest than those that are introduced with “It seems to me,” “I suppose,” &c.; since I declare, once for all, that all I write or think is entirely about things as they appear to me. It concerns no man else any further than his thoughts agree with mine. This in the Preface.

(M60) Two things are apt to confound men in their reasonings one with another. 1st. Words signifying the operations of the mind are taken from sensible ideas. 2ndly. Words as used by the vulgar are taken in some latitude, their signification is confused. Hence if a man use words in a determined, settled signification, he is at a hazard either of not being understood, or of speaking improperly. All this remedyed by studying the understanding.

Unity no simple idea. I have no idea meerly answering the word one. All number consists in relations(87).

Entia realia et entia rationis, a foolish distinction of the Schoolemen.

(M61) We have an intuitive knowledge of the existence of other things besides ourselves & order, præcedaneous(88). To the knowledge of our own existence—in that we must have ideas or else we cannot think.

(M62) We move our legs ourselves. ’Tis we that will their movement. Herein I differ from Malbranch(89).

(M63) Mem. Nicely to discuss Lib. 4. c. 4. Locke(90).

(M64) Mem. Again and again to mention & illustrate the doctrine of the reality of things, rerum natura, &c.

(M65) Wt I say is demonstration—perfect demonstration. Wherever men have fix’d & determin’d ideas annexed to their words they can hardly be mistaken. Stick but to my definition of likeness, and ’tis a demonstration yt colours are not simple ideas, all reds being like, &c. So also in other things. This to be heartily insisted on.

(M66) The abstract idea of Being or Existence is never thought of by the vulgar. They never use those words standing for abstract ideas.

(M67) I must not say the words thing, substance, &c. have been the cause of mistakes, but the not reflecting on their meaning. I will be still for retaining the words. I only desire that men would think before they speak, and settle the meaning of their words.

(M68) I approve not of that which Locke says, viz. truth consists in the joining and separating of signs.

(M69) Locke cannot explain general truth or knowledge without treating of words and propositions. This makes for me against abstract general ideas. Vide Locke, lib. 4. ch. 6.

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(M70) Men have been very industrious in travelling forward. They have gone a great way. But none have gone backward beyond the Principles. On that side there lies much terra incognita to be travel’d over and discovered by me. A vast field for invention.

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Twelve inches not the same idea with a foot. Because a man may perfectly conceive a foot who never thought of an inch.

A foot is equal to or the same with twelve inches in this respect, viz. they contain both the same number of points.

Mem. To mention somewhat wch may encourage the study of politiques, and testify of me yt I am well dispos’d toward them.

(M71) If men did not use words for ideas they would never have thought of abstract ideas. Certainly genera and species are not abstract general ideas. Abstract ideas include a contradiction in their nature. Vide Locke(91), lib. 4. c. 7. s. 9.

A various or mixt cause must necessarily produce a various or mixt effect. This demonstrable from the definition of a cause; which way of demonstrating must be frequently made use of in my Treatise, & to that end definitions often præmis’d. Hence ’tis evident that, according to Newton’s doctrine, colours cannot be simple ideas.

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(M72) I am the farthest from scepticism of any man. I know with an intuitive knowledge the existence of other things as well as my own soul. This is wt Locke nor scarce any other thinking philosopher will pretend to(92).

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(M73) Doctrine of abstraction of very evil consequence in all the sciences. Mem. Barrow’s remark. Entirely owing to language.

Locke greatly out in reckoning the recording our ideas by words amongst the uses and not the abuses of language.

(M74) Of great use & ye last importance to contemplate a man put into the world alone, with admirable abilitys, and see how after long experience he would know wthout words. Such a one would never think of genera and species or abstract general ideas.

(M75) Wonderful in Locke that he could, wn advanced in years, see at all thro’ a mist; it had been so long a gathering, & was consequently thick. This more to be admir’d than yt he did not see farther.

Identity of ideas may be taken in a double sense, either as including or excluding identity of circumstances, such as time, place, &c.

(M76) I am glad the people I converse with are not all richer, wiser, &c. than I. This is agreeable to reason; is no sin. ’Tis certain that if the happyness of my acquaintance encreases, & mine not proportionably, mine must decrease. The not understanding this & the doctrine about relative good, discuss’d with French, Madden(93), &c., to be noticed as 2 causes of mistake in judging of moral matters.

Mem. To observe (wn you talk of the division of ideas into simple and complex) that there may be another cause of the undefinableness of certain ideas besides that which Locke gives; viz. the want of names.

(M77) Mem. To begin the First Book(94) not with mention of sensation and reflection, but instead of sensation to use perception or thought in general.

(M78) I defy any man to imagine or conceive perception without an idea, or an idea without perception.

(M79) Locke’s very supposition that matter & motion should exist before thought is absurd—includes a manifest contradiction.

Locke’s harangue about coherent, methodical discourses amounting to nothing, apply’d to the mathematicians.

They talk of determining all the points of a curve by an equation. Wt mean they by this? Wt would they signify by the word points? Do they stick to the definition of Euclid?

(M80) We think we know not the Soul, because we have no imaginable or sensible idea annex’d to that sound. This the effect of prejudice.

(M81) Certainly we do not know it. This will be plain if we examine what we mean by the word knowledge. Neither doth this argue any defect in our knowledge, no more than our not knowing a contradiction.

The very existence of ideas constitutes the Soul(95).

(M82) Consciousness(96), perception, existence of ideas, seem to be all one.

Consult, ransack yr understanding. Wt find you there besides several perceptions or thoughts? Wt mean you by the word mind? You must mean something that you perceive, or yt you do not perceive. A thing not perceived is a contradiction. To mean (also) a thing you do not perceive is a contradiction. We are in all this matter strangely abused by words.

Mind is a congeries of perceptions(97). Take away perceptions and you take away the mind. Put the perceptions and you put the mind.

Say you, the mind is not the perception, not that thing which perceives. I answer, you are abused by the words “that a thing.” These are vague and empty words with us.

(M83) The having ideas is not the same thing with perception. A man may have ideas when he only imagines. But then this imagination presupposeth perception.

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(M84) That wch extreamly strengthens us in prejudice is yt we think we see an empty space, which I shall demonstrate to be false in the Third Book(98).

There may be demonstrations used even in Divinity. I mean in revealed Theology, as contradistinguish’d from natural; for tho’ the principles may be founded in faith, yet this hinders not but that legitimate demonstrations might be built thereon; provided still that we define the words we use, and never go beyond our ideas. Hence ’twere no very hard matter for those who hold episcopacy or monarchy to be established jure Divino to demonstrate their doctrines if they are true. But to pretend to demonstrate or reason anything about the Trinity is absurd. Here an implicit faith becomes us.

(M85) Qu. if there be any real difference betwixt certain ideas of reflection & others of sensation, e.g. betwixt perception and white, black, sweet, &c.? Wherein, I pray you, does the perception of white differ from white men....

I shall demonstrate all my doctrines. The nature of demonstration to be set forth and insisted on in the Introduction(99). In that I must needs differ from Locke, forasmuch as he makes all demonstration to be about abstract ideas, wch I say we have not nor can have.

(M86) The understanding seemeth not to differ from its perceptions or ideas. Qu. What must one think of the will and passions?

(M87) A good proof that Existence is nothing without or distinct from perception, may be drawn from considering a man put into the world without company(100).

(M88) There was a smell, i.e. there was a smell perceiv’d. Thus we see that common speech confirms my doctrine.

(M89) No broken intervals of death or annihilation. Those intervals are nothing; each person’s time being measured to him by his own ideas.

(M90) We are frequently puzzl’d and at a loss in obtaining clear and determin’d meanings of words commonly in use, & that because we imagine words stand for abstract general ideas which are altogether inconceivable.

(M91) “A stone is a stone.” This a nonsensical proposition, and such as the solitary man would never think on. Nor do I believe he would ever think on this: “The whole is equal to its parts,” &c.

(M92) Let it not be said that I take away existence. I only declare the meaning of the word, so far as I can comprehend it.

(M93) If you take away abstraction, how do men differ from beasts? I answer, by shape, by language. Rather by degrees of more and less.

Wt means Locke by inferences in words, consequences of words, as something different from consequences of ideas? I conceive no such thing.

(M94) N. B. Much complaint about the imperfection of language(101).

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(M95) But perhaps some man may say, an inert thoughtless Substance may exist, though not extended, moved, &c., but with other properties whereof we have no idea. But even this I shall demonstrate to be impossible, wn I come to treat more particularly of Existence.

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Will not rightly distinguish’d from Desire by Locke—it seeming to superadd nothing to the idea of an action, but the uneasiness for its absence or non-existence.

(M96) Mem. To enquire diligently into that strange mistery, viz. How it is that I can cast about, think of this or that man, place, action, wn nothing appears to introduce them into my thoughts, wn they have no perceivable connexion with the ideas suggested by my senses at the present?

(M97) ’Tis not to be imagin’d wt a marvellous emptiness & scarcity of ideas that man shall descry who will lay aside all use of words in his meditations.

(M98) Incongruous in Locke to fancy we want a sense proper to see substances with.

(M99) Locke owns that abstract ideas were made in order to naming.

(M100) The common errour of the opticians, that we judge of distance by angles(102), strengthens men in their prejudice that they see things without and distant from their mind.

(M101) I am persuaded, would men but examine wt they mean by the word existence, they wou’d agree with me.

c. 20. s. 8. b. 4. of Locke makes for me against the mathematicians.

(M102) The supposition that things are distinct from ideas takes away all real truth, & consequently brings in a universal scepticism; since all our knowledge and contemplation is confin’d barely to our own ideas(103).

(M103) Qu. whether the solitary man would not find it necessary to make use of words to record his ideas, if not in memory or meditation, yet at least in writing—without which he could scarce retain his knowledge.

We read in history there was a time when fears and jealousies, privileges of parliament, malignant party, and such like expressions of too unlimited and doubtful a meaning, were words of much sway. Also the words Church, Whig, Tory, &c., contribute very much to faction and dispute.

(M104) The distinguishing betwixt an idea and perception of the idea has been one great cause of imagining material substances(104).

(M105) That God and blessed spirits have Will is a manifest argument against Locke’s proofs that the Will cannot be conceiv’d, put into action, without a previous uneasiness.

(M106) The act of the Will, or volition, is not uneasiness, for that uneasiness may be without volition.

(M107) Volition is distinct from the object or idea for the same reason.

(M108) Also from uneasiness and idea together.

The understanding not distinct from particular perceptions or ideas.

The Will not distinct from particular volitions.

(M109) It is not so very evident that an idea, or at least uneasiness, may be without all volition or act.

The understanding taken for a faculty is not really distinct from ye will.

This allow’d hereafter.

(M110) To ask whether a man can will either side is an absurd question, for the word can presupposes volition.

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(M111) Anima mundi, substantial form, omniscient radical heat, plastic vertue, Hylaschic principle—all these vanish(105).

(M112) Newton proves that gravity is proportional to gravity. I think that’s all(106).

Qu. whether it be the vis inertiæ that makes it difficult to move a stone, or the vis attractivæ, or both, or neither?

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Mem. To express the doctrines as fully and copiously and clearly as may be. Also to be full and particular in answering objections(107).

(M113) To say ye Will is a power; [therefore] volition is an act. This is idem per idem.

Wt makes men despise extension, motion, &c., & separate them from the essence of the soul, is that they imagine them to be distinct from thought, and to exist in unthinking substance.

An extended may have passive modes of thinking good actions.

There might be idea, there might be uneasiness, there might be the greatest uneasiness wthout any volition, therefore the....

(M114) Matter once allow’d, I defy any man to prove that God is not Matter(108).

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(M115) Man is free. There is no difficulty in this proposition, if we but settle the signification of the word free—if we had an idea annext to the word free, and would but contemplate that idea.

(M116) We are imposed on by the words will, determine, agent, free, can, &c.

(M117) Uneasiness precedes not every volition. This evident by experience.

(M118) Trace an infant in the womb. Mark the train & succession of its ideas. Observe how volition comes into the mind. This may perhaps acquaint you with its nature.

(M119) Complacency seems rather to determine, or precede, or coincide wth & constitute the essence of volition, than uneasiness.

(M120) You tell me, according to my doctrine a man is not free. I answer, tell me wt you mean by the word free, and I shall resolve you(109).

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(M121) Qu. Wt do men mean when they talk of one body’s touching another? I say you never saw one body touch, or (rather) I say, I never saw one body that I could say touch’d this or that other; for that if my optiques were improv’d, I should see intervalls and other bodies behind those whch now seem to touch.

Mem. Upon all occasions to use the utmost modesty—to confute the mathematicians wth the utmost civility & respect, not to style them Nihilarians, &c.

N. B. To rein in ye satyrical nature.

Blame me not if I use my words sometimes in some latitude. ’Tis wt cannot be helpt. ’Tis the fault of language that you cannot always apprehend the clear and determinate meaning of my words.

Say you, there might be a thinking Substance—something unknown—wch perceives, and supports, and ties together the ideas(110). Say I, make it appear there is any need of it and you shall have it for me. I care not to take away anything I can see the least reason to think should exist.

I affirm ’tis manifestly absurd—no excuse in the world can be given why a man should use a word without an idea(111). Certainly we shall find that wt ever word we make use of in matter of pure reasoning has, or ought to have, a compleat idea, annext to it, i.e. its meaning, or the sense we take it in, must be compleatly known.

’Tis demonstrable a man can never be brought to imagine anything should exist whereof he has no idea. Whoever says he does, banters himself with words.

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(M122) We imagine a great difference & distance in respect of knowledge, power, &c., betwixt a man & a worm. The like difference betwixt man and God may be imagin’d; or infinitely greater(112) difference.

(M123) We find in our own minds a great number of different ideas. We may imagine in God a greater number, i.e. that ours in number, or the number of ours, is inconsiderable in respect thereof. The words difference and number, old and known, we apply to that wch is unknown. But I am embrangled(113) in words—’tis scarce possible it should be otherwise.

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The chief thing I do or pretend to do is onely to remove the mist or veil of words(114). This has occasion’d ignorance & confusion. This has ruined the schoolmen and mathematicians, lawyers and divines.

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(M124) The grand cause of perplexity & darkness in treating of the Will, is that we imagine it to be an object of thought: (to speak with the vulgar), we think we may perceive, contemplate, and view it like any of our ideas; whereas in truth ’tis no idea, nor is there any idea of it. ’Tis toto cælo different from the understanding, i.e. from all our ideas. If you say the Will, or rather volition, is something, I answer, there is an homonymy(115) in the word thing, wn apply’d to ideas and volition and understanding and will. All ideas are passive(116).

(M125) Thing & idea are much what words of the same extent and meaning. Why, therefore, do I not use the word thing? Ans. Because thing is of greater latitude than idea. Thing comprehends also volitions or actions. Now these are no ideas(117).

(M126) There can be perception wthout volition. Qu. whether there can be volition without perception?

(M127) Existence not conceivable without perception or volition—not distinguish’d therefrom.

(M128) N. B. Several distinct ideas can be perceived by sight and touch at once. Not so by the other senses. ’Tis this diversity of sensations in other senses chiefly, but sometimes in touch and sight (as also diversity of volitions, whereof there cannot be more than one at once, or rather, it seems there cannot, for of that I doubt), gives us the idea of time—or is time itself.

Wt would the solitary man think of number?

(M129) There are innate ideas, i.e. ideas created with us(118).

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(M130) Locke seems to be mistaken wn he says thought is not essential to the mind(119).

(M131) Certainly the mind always and constantly thinks: and we know this too. In sleep and trances the mind exists not—there is no time, no succession of ideas(120).

(M132) To say the mind exists without thinking is a contradiction, nonsense, nothing.

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(M133) Folly to inquire wt determines the Will. Uneasiness, &c. are ideas, therefore unactive, therefore can do nothing, therefore cannot determine the Will(121).

(M134) Again, wt mean you by determine?

(M135) (M136) For want of rightly understanding time, motion, existence, &c., men are forc’d into such absurd contradictions as this, viz. light moves 16 diameters of earth in a second of time.

(M137) ’Twas the opinion that ideas could exist unperceiv’d, or before perception, that made men think perception(122) was somewhat different from the idea perceived, i.e. yt it was an idea of reflection; whereas the thing perceiv’d was an idea of sensation. I say, ’twas this made ’em think the understanding took it in, receiv’d it from without; wch could never be did not they think it existed without(123).

(M138) Properly speaking, idea is the picture of the imagination’s making. This is ye likeness of, and refer’d to the real idea, or (if you will) thing(124).

(M139) To ask, have we an idea of Will or volition, is nonsense. An idea can resemble nothing but an idea.

(M140) If you ask wt thing it is that wills, I answer, if you mean idea by the word thing, or anything like any idea, then I say, ’tis no thing at all that wills(125). This how extravagant soever it may seem, yet is a certain truth. We are cheated by these general terms, thing, is, &c.

(M141) Again, if by is you mean is perceived, or does perceive, I say nothing wch is perceived or does perceive wills.

(M142) The referring ideas to things wch are not ideas, the using the term “idea of(126),” is one great cause of mistake, as in other matters, so also in this.

(M143) Some words there are wch do not stand for ideas, viz. particles, will, &c. Particles stand for volitions and their concomitant ideas.

(M144) There seem to be but two colours wch are simple ideas, viz. those exhibited by the most and least refrangible rays; [the others], being the intermediate ones, may be formed by composition.

(M145) I have no idea of a volition or act of the mind, neither has any other intelligence; for that were a contradiction.

N. B. Simple ideas, viz. colours, are not devoid of all sort of composition, tho’ it must be granted they are not made up of distinguishable ideas. Yet there is another sort of composition. Men are wont to call those things compounded in which we do not actually discover the component ingredients. Bodies are said to be compounded of chymical principles, which, nevertheless, come not into view till after the dissolution of the bodies—wch were not, could not, be discerned in the bodies whilst remaining entire.

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(M146) All our knowledge is about particular ideas, according to Locke. All our sensations are particular ideas, as is evident. Wt use then do we make of abstract general ideas, since we neither know nor perceive them?

(M147) ’Tis allow’d that particles stand not for ideas, and yet they are not said to be empty useless sounds. The truth really is, they stand for operations of the mind, i.e. volitions.

(M148) Locke says all our knowledge is about particulars. If so, pray wt is the following ratiocination but a jumble of words? “Omnis homo est animal; omne animal vivit: ergo omnis homo vivit.” It amounts (if you annex particular ideas to the words “animal” and “vivit”) to no more than this: “Omnis homo est homo; omnis homo est homo: ergo, omnis homo est homo.” A mere sport and trifling with sounds.

(M149) We have no ideas of vertues & vices, no ideas of moral actions(127). Wherefore it may be question’d whether we are capable of arriving at demonstration about them(128), the morality consisting in the volition chiefly.

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(M150) Strange it is that men should be at a loss to find their idea of Existence; since that (if such there be distinct from perception) it is brought into the mind by all the ways of sensation and reflection(129), methinks it should be most familiar to us, and we best acquainted with it.

(M151) This I am sure, I have no idea of Existence(130), or annext to the word Existence. And if others have that’s nothing to me; they can never make me sensible of it; simple ideas being incommunicable by language.

(M152) Say you, the unknown substratum of volitions & ideas is something whereof I have no idea. I ask, Is there any other being which has or can have an idea of it? If there be, then it must be itself an idea; which you will think absurd.

(M153) There is somewhat active in most perceptions, i.e. such as ensue upon our volitions, such as we can prevent and stop: e.g. I turn my eyes toward the sun: I open them. All this is active.

(M154) Things are twofold—active or inactive. The existence of active things is to act; of inactive to be perceiv’d.

(M155) Distinct from or without perception there is no volition; therefore neither is there existence without perception.

(M156) God may comprehend all ideas, even the ideas wch are painfull & unpleasant, without being in any degree pained thereby(131). Thus we ourselves can imagine the pain of a burn, &c. without any misery or uneasiness at all.

(M157) Truth, three sorts thereof—natural, mathematical, & moral.

(M158) Agreement of relation onely where numbers do obtain: of co-existence, in nature: of signification, by including, in morality.

(M159) Gyant who shakes the mountain that’s on him must be acknowledged. Or rather thus: I am no more to be reckon’d stronger than Locke than a pigmy should be reckon’d stronger than a gyant, because he could throw off the molehill wch lay upon him, and the gyant could onely shake or shove the mountain that oppressed him. This in the Preface.

(M160) Promise to extend our knowledge & clear it of those shamefull contradictions which embarrass it. Something like this to begin the Introduction in a modest way(132).

(M161) Whoever shall pretend to censure any part, I desire he would read out the whole, else he may perhaps not understand me. In the Preface or Introduction(133).

(M162) Doctrine of identity best explain’d by taking the Will for volitions, the Understanding for ideas. The difficulty of consciousness of wt are never acted surely solv’d thereby.

(M163) I must acknowledge myself beholding to the philosophers who have gone before me. They have given good rules, though certainly they do not always observe them. Similitude of adventurers, who, tho’ they attained not the desired port, they by their wrecks have made known the rocks and sands, whereby the passage of aftercomers is made more secure & easy. Preface or Introduction.

(M164) The opinion that men had ideas of moral actions(134) has render’d the demonstrating ethiques very difficult to them.

(M165) An idea being itself unactive cannot be the resemblance or image of an active thing.

(M166) Excuse to be made in the Introduction for using the word idea, viz. because it has obtain’d. But a caution must be added.

Scripture and possibility are the onely proofs(135) with Malbranch. Add to these what he calls a great propension to think so: this perhaps may be questioned. Perhaps men, if they think before they speak, will not be found so thoroughly persuaded of the existence of Matter.

(M167) On second thoughts I am on t’other extream. I am certain of that wch Malbranch seems to doubt of, viz. the existence of bodies(136).

(M168) Mem. To bring the killing blow at the last, e.g. in the matter of abstraction to bring Locke’s general triangle in the last(137).

(M169) They give good rules, tho’ perhaps they themselves do not always observe them. They speak much of clear and distinct ideas, though at the same time they talk of general abstract ideas, &c. I’ll [instance] in Locke’s opinion of abstraction, he being as clear a writer as I have met with.

Such was the candour of this great man that I perswade myself, were he alive(138), he would not be offended that I differ from him: seeing that even in so doing I follow his advice, viz. to use my own judgement, see with my own eyes, & not with another’s. Introduction.

(M170) The word thing, as comprising or standing for idea & volition, usefull; as standing for idea and archetype without the mind(139), mischievous and useless.

(M171) To demonstrate morality it seems one need only make a dictionary of words, and see which included which. At least, this is the greatest part and bulk of the work.

(M172) Locke’s instances of demonstration in morality are, according to his own rule, trifling propositions.

(M173) Qu. How comes it that some ideas are confessedly allow’d by all to be onely in the mind(140), and others as generally taken to be without the mind(141), if, according to you, all are equally and only in the mind? Ans. Because that in proportion to pleasure or pain ideas are attended with desire, exertion, and other actions which include volition. Now volition is by all granted to be in spirit.

(M174) If men would lay aside words in thinking, ’tis impossible they should ever mistake, save only in matters of fact. I mean it seems impossible they should be positive & secure that anything was true wch in truth is not so. Certainly I cannot err in matter of simple perception. So far as we can in reasoning go without the help of signs, there we have certain knowledge. Indeed, in long deductions made by signs there may be slips of memory.

(M175) From my doctrine there follows a cure for pride. We are only to be praised for those things which are our own, or of our own doing; natural abilitys are not consequences of our volitions.

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(M176) Mem. Candidly to take notice that Locke holds some dangerous opinions; such as the infinity and eternity of Space and the possibility of Matter’s thinking(142).

(M177) Once more I desire my reader may be upon his guard against the fallacy of words. Let him beware that I do not impose on him by plausible empty talk, that common dangerous way of cheating men into absurditys. Let him not regard my words any otherwise than as occasions of bringing into his mind determin’d significations. So far as they fail of this they are gibberish, jargon, & deserve not the name of language. I desire & warn him not to expect to find truth in my book, or anywhere but in his own mind. Wtever I see myself ’tis impossible I can paint it out in words.

(M178) N. B. To consider well wt is meant by that wch Locke saith concerning algebra—that it supplys intermediate ideas. Also to think of a method affording the same use in morals &c. that this doth in mathematiques.

(M179) Homo is not proved to be vivens by means of any intermediate idea. I don’t fully agree wth Locke in wt he says concerning sagacity in finding out intermediate ideas in matter capable of demonstration & the use thereof; as if that were the onely means of improving and enlarging demonstrative knowledge.

(M180) There is a difference betwixt power & volition. There may be volition without power. But there can be no power without volition. Power implyeth volition, & at the same time a connotation of the effects following the volition(143).

(M181) We have assuredly an idea of substance. ’Twas absurd of Locke(144) to think we had a name without a meaning. This might prove acceptable to the Stillingfleetians.

(M182) The substance of Body we know(145). The substance of Spirit we do not know—it not being knowable, it being a purus actus.

(M183) Words have ruin’d and overrun all the sciences—law, physique, chymistry, astrology, &c.

(M184) Abstract ideas only to be had amongst the learned. The vulgar never think they have any such, nor truly do they find any want of them. Genera & species & abstract ideas are terms unknown to them.

(M185) Locke’s out(146)—the case is different. We can have an idea of body without motion, but not of soul without thought.

(M186) God ought to be worship’d. This easily demonstrated when once we ascertain the signification of the words God, worship, ought.

(M187) No perception, according to Locke, is active. Therefore no perception (i.e. no idea) can be the image of, or like unto, that which is altogether active & not at all passive, i.e. the Will.

(M188) I can will the calling to mind something that is past, tho’ at the same time that wch I call to mind was not in my thoughts before that volition of mine, & consequently I could have had no uneasiness for the want of it.

(M189) The Will & the Understanding may very well be thought two distinct beings.

(M190) Sed quia voluntas raro agit nisi ducente desiderio. V. Locke, Epistles, p. 479, ad Limburgum.

You cannot say the m. t. [minimum tangibile] is like or one with the m. v. [minimum visibile], because they be both minima, just perceiv’d, and next door to nothing. You may as well say the m. t. is the same with or like unto a sound, so small that it is scarce perceiv’d.

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Extension seems to be a mode of some tangible or sensible quality according as it is seen or felt.

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(M191) The spirit—the active thing—that wch is soul, & God—is the Will alone. The ideas are effects—impotent things.

(M192) The concrete of the will & understanding I might call mind; not person, lest offence be given. Mem. Carefully to omit defining of person, or making much mention of it.

(M193) You ask, do these volitions make one Will? Wt you ask is meerly about a word—unity being no more(147).

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N. B. To use utmost caution not to give the least handle of offence to the Church or Churchmen.

(M194) Even to speak somewhat favourably of the Schoolmen, and shew that they who blame them for jargon are not free of it themselves. Introd.

Locke’s great oversight seems to be that he did not begin with his third book; at least that he had not some thought of it at first. Certainly the 2d & 4th books don’t agree wth wt he says in ye 3d(148).

(M195) If Matter(149) is once allow’d to exist, clippings of weeds and parings of nails may think, for ought that Locke can tell; tho’ he seems positive of the contrary.

Since I say men cannot mistake in short reasoning about things demonstrable, if they lay aside words, it will be expected this Treatise will contain nothing but wt is certain & evident demonstration, & in truth I hope you will find nothing in it but what is such. Certainly I take it all for such. Introd.

(M196) When I say I will reject all propositions wherein I know not fully and adequately and clearly, so far as knowable, the thing meant thereby, this is not to be extended to propositions in the Scripture. I speak of matters of Reason and Philosophy—not Revelation. In this I think an humble, implicit faith becomes us (when we cannot comprehend or understand the proposition), such as a popish peasant gives to propositions he hears at mass in Latin. This proud men may call blind, popish, implicit, irrational. For my part I think it is more irrational to pretend to dispute at, cavil, and ridicule holy mysteries, i.e. propositions about things that are altogether above our knowledge, out of our reach. When I shall come to plenary knowledge of the meaning of any fact, then I shall yield an explicit belief. Introd.

Complexation of ideas twofold. Ys refers to colours being complex ideas.

Considering length without breadth is considering any length, be the breadth wt it will.

(M197) I may say earth, plants, &c. were created before man—there being other intelligences to perceive them, before man was created(150).

(M198) There is a philosopher(151) who says we can get an idea of substance by no way of sensation or reflection, & seems to imagine that we want a sense proper for it. Truly if we had a new sense it could only give us a new idea. Now I suppose he will not say substance, according to him, is an idea. For my part, I own I have no idea can stand for substance in his and the Schoolmen’s sense of that word. But take it in the common vulgar sense, & then we see and feel substance.

(M199) N. B. That not common usage, but the Schoolmen coined the word Existence, supposed to stand for an abstract general idea.

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Writers of Optics mistaken in their principles both in judging of magnitudes and distances.

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(M200) ’Tis evident yt wn the solitary man should be taught to speak, the words would give him no other new ideas (save only the sounds, and complex ideas which, tho’ unknown before, may be signified by language) beside wt he had before. If he had not, could not have, an abstract idea before, he cannot have it after he is taught to speak.

(M201) “Homo est homo,” &c. comes at last to Petrus est Petrus, &c. Now, if these identical propositions are sought after in the mind, they will not be found. There are no identical mental propositions. ’Tis all about sounds and terms.

(M202) Hence we see the doctrine of certainty by ideas, and proving by intermediate ideas, comes to nothing(152).

(M203) We may have certainty & knowledge without ideas, i.e. without other ideas than the words, and their standing for one idea, i.e. their being to be used indifferently.

(M204) It seems to me that we have no certainty about ideas, but only about words. ’Tis improper to say, I am certain I see, I feel, &c. There are no mental propositions form’d answering to these words, & in simple perception ’tis allowed by all there is no affirmation or negation, and consequently no certainty(153).

(M205) The reason why we can demonstrate so well about signs is, that they are perfectly arbitrary & in our power—made at pleasure.

(M206) The obscure ambiguous term relation, which is said to be the largest field of knowledge, confounds us, deceives us.

(M207) Let any man shew me a demonstration, not verbal, that does not depend on some false principle; or at best on some principle of nature, which is ye effect of God’s will, and we know not how soon it may be changed.

(M208) Qu. What becomes of the æternæ veritates? Ans. They vanish(154).

(M209) But, say you, I find it difficult to look beneath the words and uncover my ideas. Say I, Use will make it easy. In the sequel of my Book the cause of this difficulty shall be more clearly made out.

(M210) To view the deformity of error we need onely undress it.

(M211) “Cogito ergo sum.” Tautology. No mental proposition answering thereto.

(M212) Knowledge, or certainty, or perception of agreement of ideas—as to identity and diversity, and real existence, vanisheth; of relation, becometh merely nominal; of co-existence, remaineth. Locke thought in this latter our knowledge was little or nothing. Whereas in this only real knowledge seemeth to be found(155).

(M213) We must wth the mob place certainty in the senses(156).

’Tis a man’s duty, ’tis the fruit of friendship, to speak well of his friend. Wonder not therefore that I do wt I do.

(M214) A man of slow parts may overtake truth, &c. Introd. Even my shortsightedness might perhaps be aiding to me in this matter—’twill make me bring the object nearer to my thoughts. A purblind person, &c. Introd.

(M215) Locke to Limborch, &c. Talk of judicium intellectus preceding the volition: I think judicium includes volition. I can by no means distinguish these—judicium, intellectus, indifferentia, uneasiness to many things accompanying or preceding every volition, as e.g. the motion of my hand.

(M216) Qu. Wt mean you by my perceptions, my volitions? Both all the perceptions I perceive or conceive(157), &c. are mine; all the volitions I am conscious to are mine.

(M217) Homo est agens liberum. What mean they by homo and agens in this place?

(M218) Will any man say that brutes have ideas of Unity & Existence? I believe not. Yet if they are suggested by all the ways of sensation, ’tis strange they should want them(158).

(M219) It is a strange thing and deserves our attention, that the more time and pains men have consum’d in the study of philosophy, by so much the more they look upon themselves to be ignorant & weak creatures. They discover flaws and imperfections in their faculties wch other men never spy out. They find themselves under a necessity of admitting many inconsistent, irreconcilable opinions for true. There is nothing they touch with their hand, or behold with their eyes, but has its dark sides much larger and more numerous than wt is perceived, & at length turn scepticks, at least in most things. I imagine all this proceeds from, &c. Exord. Introd.(159)

(M220) These men with a supercilious pride disdain the common single information of sense. They grasp at knowledge by sheafs & bundles. (’Tis well if, catching at too much at once, they hold nothing but emptiness & air.) They in the depth of their understanding contemplate abstract ideas.

It seems not improbable that the most comprehensive & sublime intellects see more m.v.’s at once, i.e. that their visual systems are the largest.

Words (by them meaning all sorts of signs) are so necessary that, instead of being (wn duly us’d or in their own nature) prejudicial to the advancement of knowledge, or an hindrance to knowledge, without them there could in mathematiques themselves be no demonstration.

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Mem. To be eternally banishing Metaphisics, &c., and recalling men to Common Sense(160).

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(M221) We cannot conceive other minds besides our own but as so many selves. We suppose ourselves affected wth such & such thoughts & such and such sensations(161).

(M222) Qu. whether composition of ideas be not that faculty which chiefly serves to discriminate us from brutes? I question whether a brute does or can imagine a blue horse or chimera.

Naturalists do not distinguish betwixt cause and occasion. Useful to enquire after co-existing ideas or occasions.

(M223) Morality may be demonstrated as mixt mathematics.

(M224) Perception is passive, but this not distinct from idea. Therefore there can be no idea of volition.

Algebraic species or letters are denominations of denominations. Therefore Arithmetic to be treated of before Algebra.

2 crowns are called ten shillings. Hence may appear the value of numbers.

Complex ideas are the creatures of the mind. Hence may appear the nature of numbers. This to be deeply discuss’d.

I am better informed & shall know more by telling me there are 10,000 men, than by shewing me them all drawn up. I shall better be able to judge of the bargain you’d have me make wn you tell me how much (i.e. the name of ye) money lies on the table, than by offering and shewing it without naming. I regard not the idea, the looks, but the names. Hence may appear the nature of numbers.

Children are unacquainted with numbers till they have made some progress in language. This could not be if they were ideas suggested by all the senses.

Numbers are nothing but names—never words.

Mem. Imaginary roots—to unravel that mystery.

Ideas of utility are annexed to numbers.

In arithmetical problems men seek not any idea of number. They only seek a denomination. This is all can be of use to them.

Take away the signs from Arithmetic and Algebra, and pray wt remains?

These are sciences purely verbal, and entirely useless but for practice in societies of men. No speculative knowledge, no comparing of ideas in them(162).

Qu. whether Geometry may not properly be reckon’d amongst the mixt mathematics—Arithmetic & Algebra being the only abstracted pure, i.e. entirely nominal—Geometry being an application of these to points(163)?

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(M225) Locke of Trifling Propositions. [b. 4. c. 8] Mem. Well to observe & con over that chapter.

(M226) Existence, Extension, &c. are abstract, i.e. no ideas. They are words, unknown and useless to the vulgar.

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(M227) Sensual pleasure is the summum bonum. This the great principle of morality. This once rightly understood, all the doctrines, even the severest of the Gospels, may clearly be demonstrated.

(M228) Sensual pleasure, quâ pleasure, is good & desirable by a wise man(164). But if it be contemptible, ’tis not quâ pleasure but quâ pain, or cause of pain, or (which is the same thing) of loss of greater pleasure.

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(M229) Wn I consider, the more objects we see at once the more distant they are, and that eye which beholds a great many things can see none of them near.

(M230) By idea I mean any sensible or imaginable thing(165).

(M231) To be sure or certain of wt we do not actually perceive(166) (I say perceive, not imagine), we must not be altogether passive; there must be a disposition to act; there must be assent, wch is active. Nay, what do I talk; there must be actual volition.

What do we demonstrate in Geometry but that lines are equal or unequal? i.e. may not be called by the same name(167).

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(M232) I approve of this axiom of the Schoolmen, “Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuit in sensu.”(168) I wish they had stuck to it. It had never taught them the doctrine of abstract ideas.

(M233) “Nihil dat quod non habet,” or, the effect is contained in the cause, is an axiom I do not understand or believe to be true.

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(M234) Whoever shall cast his eyes on the writings of old or new philosophers, and see the noise is made about formal and objective Being, Will, &c.

(M235) Absurd to argue the existence of God from his idea. We have no idea of God. ’Tis impossible(169).

(M236) Cause of much errour & confusion that men knew not what was meant by Reality(170).

(M237) Des Cartes, in Med. 2, says the notion of this particular wax is less clear than that of wax in general; and in the same Med., a little before, he forbears to consider bodies in general, because (says he) these general conceptions are usually confused.

(M238) Des Cartes, in Med. 3, calls himself a thinking substance, and a stone an extended substance; and adds that they both agree in this, that they are substances. And in the next paragraph he calls extension a mode of substance.

(M239) ’Tis commonly said by the philosophers, that if the soul of man were self-existent it would have given itself all possible perfection. This I do not understand.

(M240) Mem. To excite men to the pleasures of the eye & the ear, which surfeit not, nor bring those evils after them, as others.

(M241) We see no variety or difference betwixt volitions, only between their effects. ’Tis one Will, one Act—distinguished by the effects. This Will, this Act, is the Spirit, i.e. operative principle, soul, &c. No mention of fears and jealousies, nothing like a party.

(M242) Locke in his 4th Book(171), and Des Cartes in Med. 6, use the same argument for the existence of objects, viz. that sometimes we see, feel, &c. against our will.

(M243) While I exist or have any idea, I am eternally, constantly willing; my acquiescing in the present state is willing.

(M244) The existence of any thing imaginable is nothing different from imagination or perception(172). Volition or Will, Wch is not imaginable, regard must not be had to its existence(?) ... First Book.

(M245) There are four sorts of propositions:—“Gold is a metal;” “Gold is yellow;” “Gold is fixt;” “Gold is not a stone”—of which the first, second, and third are only nominal, and have no mental propositions answering them.

(M246) Mem. In vindication of the senses effectually to confute what Des Cartes saith in the last par. of the last Med., viz. that the senses oftener inform him falsely than truely—that sense of pain tells me not my foot is bruised or broken, but I, having frequently observed these two ideas, viz. of that peculiar pain and bruised foot go together, do erroneously take them to be inseparable by a necessity of Nature—as if Nature were anything but the ordinance of the free will of God(173).

(M247) Des Cartes owns we know not a substance immediately by itself, but by this alone, that it is the subject of several acts. Ans. to 2d objection of Hobbs.

(M248) Hobbs in some degree falls in with Locke, saying thought is to the mind or himself as dancing to the dancer. Object.

(M249) Hobbs in his Object. 3 ridicules those expressions of the scholastiques—“the will wills,” &c. So does Locke. I am of another mind(174).

(M250) Des Cartes, in answer to Object. 3 of Hobbs, owns he is distinct from thought as a thing from its modus or manner.

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(M251) Opinion that existence was distinct from perception of horrible consequence. It is the foundation of Hobbs’s doctrine, &c.

(M252) Malbranch in his illustration(175) differs widely from me. He doubts of the existence of bodies. I doubt not in the least of this.

(M253) I differ from Cartesians in that I make extension, colour, &c. to exist really in bodies independent of our mind(176). All ye carefully and lucidly to be set forth.

(M254) Not to mention the combinations of powers, but to say the things—the effects themselves—do really exist, even wn not actually perceived; but still with relation to perception(177).

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The great use of the Indian figures above the Roman shews arithmetic to be about signs, not ideas—or at least not ideas different from the characters themselves(178).

(M255) Reasoning there may be about things or ideas, or about actions; but demonstration can be only verbal. I question, no matter &c.

(M256) Quoth Des Cartes, The idea of God is not made by me, for I can neither add to nor subtract from it. No more can he add to or take from any other idea, even of his own making.

(M257) The not distinguishing ’twixt Will and ideas is a grand mistake with Hobbs. He takes those things for nothing which are not ideas(179).

(M258) Say you, At this rate all’s nothing but idea—mere phantasm. I answer, Everything as real as ever. I hope to call a thing idea makes it not the less real. Truly I should perhaps have stuck to the word thing, and not mentioned the word idea, were it not for a reason, and I think a good one too, which I shall give in the Second Book(180).

(M259) Idea is the object of thought. Yt I think on, whatever it be, I call idea. Thought itself, or thinking, is no idea. ’Tis an act—i.e. volition, i.e. as contradistinguished to effects—the Will.

(M260) Locke, in B. 4. c. 5, assigns not the right cause why mental propositions are so difficult. It is not because of complex but because of abstract ideas. Ye idea of a horse is as complex as that of fortitude. Yet in saying the “horse is white” I form a mental proposition with ease. But when I say “fortitude is a virtue” I shall find a mental proposition hard, or not at all to be come at.

(M261) Pure intellect I understand not(181).

Locke is in ye right in those things wherein he differs from ye Cartesians, and they cannot but allow of his opinions, if they stick to their own principles or causes of Existence & other abstract ideas.

(M262) The properties of all things are in God, i.e. there is in the Deity Understanding as well as Will. He is no blind agent, and in truth a blind agent is a contradiction(182).

(M263) I am certain there is a God, tho’ I do not perceive Him—have no intuition of Him. This not difficult if we rightly understand wt is meant by certainty.

(M264) It seems that the Soul, taken for the Will, is immortal, incorruptible.

(M265) Qu. whether perception must of necessity precede volition?

(M266) Error is not in the Understanding, but in the Will. What I understand or perceive, that I understand. There can be no errour in this.

(M267) Mem. To take notice of Locke’s woman afraid of a wetting, in the Introd., to shew there may be reasoning about ideas or things.

(M268) Say Des Cartes & Malbranch, God hath given us strong inclinations to think our ideas proceed from bodies, or that bodies do exist. Pray wt mean they by this? Would they have it that the ideas of imagination are images of, and proceed from, the ideas of sense? This is true, but cannot be their meaning; for they speak of ideas of sense as themselves proceeding from, being like unto—I know not wt(183).

(M269) Cartesius per ideam vult omne id quod habet esse objectivum in intellectu. V. Tract. de Methodo.

(M270) Qu. May there not be an Understanding without a Will?

(M271) Understanding is in some sort an action.

(M272) Silly of Hobbs, &c. to speak of the Will as if it were motion, with which it has no likeness.

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(M273) Ideas of Sense are the real things or archetypes. Ideas of imagination, dreams, &c. are copies, images, of these.

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(M274) My doctrines rightly understood, all that philosophy of Epicurus, Hobbs, Spinosa, &c., which has been a declared enemy of religion, comes to the ground.

(M275) Hobbs & Spinosa make God extended. Locke also seems to do the same(184).

(M276) Ens, res, aliquid dicuntur termini transcendentales. Spinosa, p. 76, prop. 40, Eth. part 2, gives an odd account of their original. Also of the original of all universals—Homo, Canis, &c.

(M277) Spinosa (vid. Præf. Opera Posthum.) will have God to be “omnium rerum causa immanens,” and to countenance this produces that of St. Paul, “in Him we live,” &c. Now this of St. Paul may be explained by my doctrine as well as Spinosa’s, or Locke’s, or Hobbs’s, or Raphson’s(185), &c.

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(M278) The Will is purus actus, or rather pure spirit not imaginable, not sensible, not intelligible, in no wise the object of the understanding, no wise perceivable.

(M279) Substance of a spirit is that it acts, causes, wills, operates, or if you please (to avoid the quibble yt may be made of the word “it”) to act, cause, will, operate. Its substance is not knowable, not being an idea.

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(M280) Why may we not conceive it possible for God to create things out of nothing? Certainly we ourselves create in some wise whenever we imagine.

(M281) “Ex nihilo nihil fit.” This (saith Spinoza, Opera Posth. p. 464) and the like are called veritates æternæ, because “nullam fidem habent extra mentem.” To make this axiom have a positive signification, one should express it thus: Every idea has a cause, i.e. is produced by a Will(186).

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(M282) The philosophers talk much of a distinction ’twixt absolute & relative things, or ’twixt things considered in their own nature & the same things considered with respect to us. I know not wt they mean by “things considered in themselves.” This is nonsense, jargon.

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(M283) It seems there can be no perception—no idea—without Will, seeing there are no ideas so indifferent but one had rather have them than annihilation, or annihilation than them. Or if there be such an equal balance, there must be an equal mixture of pleasure and pain to cause it; there being no ideas perfectly void of all pain & uneasiness, but wt are preferable to annihilation.

Recipe in animum tuum, per cogitationem vehementem, rerum ipsarum, non literarum aut sonorum imagines. Hobbs against Wallis.

’Tis a perfection we may imagine in superior spirits, that they can see a great deal at once with the utmost clearness and distinction; whereas we can only see a point(187).

Mem. Wn I treat of mathematiques to enquire into the controversy ’twixt Hobbes and Wallis.

(M284) Every sensation of mine, which happens in consequence of the general known laws of nature, & is from without, i.e. independent of my will, demonstrates the being of a God, i.e. of an unextended, incorporeal spirit, which is omnipresent, omnipotent, &c.

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(M285) I say not with J.S. [John Sergeant] that we see solids. I reject his “solid philosophy”—solidity being only perceived by touch(188).

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(M286) It seems to me that will and understanding—volitions and ideas—cannot be separated, that either cannot be possibly without the other.

(M287) Some ideas or other I must have, so long as I exist or will. But no one idea or sort of ideas being essential(189).

(M288) The distinction between idea and ideatum I cannot otherwise conceive than by making one the effect or consequence of dream, reverie, imagination—the other of sense and the constant laws of nature.

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(M289) Dico quod extensio non concipitur in se et per se, contra quam dicit Spinoza in Epist. 2a ad Oldenburgium.

(M290) My definition of the word God I think much clearer than those of Des Cartes & Spinoza, viz. “Ens summe perfectum & absolute infinitum,” or “Ens constans infinitis attributis, quorum unumquodque est infinitum(190).”

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’Tis chiefly the connexion betwixt tangible and visible ideas that deceives, and not the visible ideas themselves.

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(M291) But the grand mistake is that we know not what we mean by “we,” or “selves,” or “mind,” &c. ’Tis most sure & certain that our ideas are distinct from the mind, i.e. the Will, the Spirit(191).

(M292) I must not mention the understanding as a faculty or part of the mind. I must include understanding & will in the word Spirit—by which I mean all that is active. I must not say that the understanding diners not from the particular ideas, or the will from particular volitions.

(M293) The Spirit, the Mind, is neither a volition nor an idea.

(M294) I say there are no causes (properly speaking) but spiritual, nothing active but Spirit. Say you, This is only verbal; ’tis only annexing a new sort of signification to the word cause, & why may not others as well retain the old one, and call one idea the cause of another which always follows it? I answer, If you do so I shall drive you into many absurditys: you cannot avoid running into opinions you’ll be glad to disown, if you stick firmly to that signification of the word Cause.

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(M295) In valuing good we reckon too much on the present & our own.

(M296) There be two sorts of pleasure. The one is ordained as a spur or incitement to somewhat else, & has a visible relation and subordination thereto; the other is not. Thus the pleasure of eating is of the former sort, of musick of the later sort. These may be used for recreation, those not but in order to their end.

(M297) Three sorts of useful knowledge—that of Coexistence, to be treated of in our Principles of Natural Philosophy; that of Relation, in Mathematiques; that of Definition, or inclusion, or words (which perhaps differs not from that of relation), in Morality(192).

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(M298) Will, understanding, desire, hatred, &c., so far forth as they are acts or active, differ not. All their difference consists in their objects, circumstances, &c.

(M299) We must carefully distinguish betwixt two sorts of causes—physical & spiritual.

(M300) The physical may more properly be called occasions. Yet (to comply) we may call them causes—but then we must mean causes yt do nothing.

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(M301) According to Locke, we must be in an eternal uneasiness so long as we live, bating the time of sleep or trance, &c.; for he will have even the continuance of an action to be in his sense an action, & so requires a volition, & this an uneasiness.

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(M302) I must not pretend to promise much of demonstration. I must cancell all passages that look like that sort of pride, that raising of expectation in my friend.

(M303) If this be the case, surely a man had better not philosophize at all: no more than a deformed person ought to cavil to behold himself by the reflex light of a mirrour.

(M304) Or thus, like deformed persons who, having beheld themselves by the reflex light of a mirrour, are displeased with their diseases.

(M305) What can an idea be like but another idea? We can compare it with nothing else—a sound like a sound, a colour like a colour.

(M306) Is it not nonsense to say a smell is like a thing which cannot be smelt, a colour is like a thing wh cannot be seen?

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(M307) Bodies exist without the mind, i.e. are not the mind, but distinct from it. This I allow, the mind being altogether different therefrom(193).

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(M308) Certainly we should not see motion if there was no diversity of colours.

(M309) Motion is an abstract idea, i.e. there is no such idea that can be conceived by itself.

(M310) Contradictions cannot be both true. Men are obliged to answer objections drawn from consequences. Introd.

(M311) The Will and Volition are words not used by the vulgar. The learned are bantered by their meaning abstract ideas.

Speculative Math, as if a man was all day making hard knots on purpose to unty them again.

Tho’ it might have been otherwise, yet it is convenient the same thing wch is M.V. should be also M.T., or very near it.

(M312) I must not give the soul or mind the scholastique name “pure act,” but rather pure spirit, or active being.

(M313) I must not say the Will or Understanding are all one, but that they are both abstract ideas, i.e. none at all—they not being even ratione different from the Spirit, quâ faculties, or active.

(M314) Dangerous to make idea & thing terms convertible(194). That were the way to prove spirits are nothing.

(M315) Qu. whether veritas stands not for an abstract idea?

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(M316) ’Tis plain the moderns must by their own principles own there are no bodies, i.e. no sort of bodies without the mind, i.e. unperceived.

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(M317) Qu. whether the Will can be the object of prescience or any knowledge?

(M318) If there were only one ball in the world, it could not be moved. There could be no variety of appearance.

According to the doctrine of infinite divisibility, there must be some smell of a rose, v. g. at an infinite distance from it.

(M319) Extension, tho’ it exist only in the mind, yet is no property of the mind. The mind can exist without it, tho’ it cannot without the mind. But in Book II. I shall at large shew the difference there is betwixt the Soul and Body or extended being.

(M320) ’Tis an absurd question wch Locke puts, whether man be free to will?

Mem. To enquire into the reason of the rule for determining questions in Algebra.

It has already been observed by others that names are nowhere of more necessary use than in numbering.

(M321) I will grant you that extension, colour, &c. may be said to be without the mind in a double respect, i.e. as independent of our will, and as distinct from the mind.

(M322) Certainly it is not impossible but a man may arrive at the knowledge of all real truth as well without as with signs, had he a memory and imagination most strong and capacious. Therefore reasoning & science doth not altogether depend upon words or names(195).

(M323) I think not that things fall out of necessity. The connexion of no two ideas is necessary; ’tis all the result of freedom, i.e. ’tis all voluntary(196).

(M324) If a man with his eyes shut imagines to himself the sun & firmament, you will not say he or his mind is the sun, or is extended, tho’ neither sun or firmament be without mind.

(M325) ’Tis strange to find philosophers doubting & disputing whether they have ideas of spiritual things or no. Surely ’tis easy to know. Vid. De Vries(197), De Ideis Innatis, p. 64.

(M326) De Vries will have it that we know the mind agrees with things not by idea but sense or conscientia. So will Malbranch. This a vain distinction.

August 28th, 1708. The Adventure of the [Shirt?].

It were to be wished that persons of the greatest birth, honour, & fortune, would take that care of themselves, by education, industry, literature, & a love of virtue, to surpass all other men in knowledge & all other qualifications necessary for great actions, as far as they do in quality & titles; that princes out of them might always chose men fit for all employments and high trusts. Clov. B. 7.

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One eternity greater than another of the same kind.

In what sense eternity may be limited.

(M327) Whether succession of ideas in the Divine intellect?

(M328) Time is the train of ideas succeeding each other.

Duration not distinguish’d from existence.

Succession explain’d by before, between, after, & numbering.

Why time in pain longer than time in pleasure?

Duration infinitely divisible, time not so.

(M329) The same τὸ νῦν not common to all intelligences.

Time thought infinitely divisible on account of its measure.

Extension not infinitely divisible in one sense.

Revolutions immediately measure train of ideas, mediately duration.

(M330) Time a sensation; therefore onely in ye mind.

Eternity is onely a train of innumerable ideas. Hence the immortality of ye soul easily conceiv’d, or rather the immortality of the person, that of ye soul not being necessary for ought we can see.

Swiftness of ideas compar’d with yt of motions shews the wisdom of God.

Wt if succession of ideas were swifter, wt if slower?

(M331) Fall of Adam, use of idolatry, use of Epicurism & Hobbism, dispute about divisibility of matter, &c. expounded by material substances.

Extension a sensation, therefore not without the mind.

(M332) In the immaterial hypothesis, the wall is white, fire hot, &c.

Primary ideas prov’d not to exist in matter; after the same manner yt secondary ones are prov’d not to exist therein.

Demonstrations of the infinite divisibility of extension suppose length without breadth, or invisible length, wch is absurd.

(M333) World wthout thought is nec quid, nec quantum, nec quale, &c.

(M334) ’Tis wondrous to contemplate ye World empty’d of all intelligences.

Nothing properly but Persons, i.e. conscious things, do exist. All other things are not so much existences as manners of ye existence of persons(198).

Qu. about the soul, or rather person, whether it be not compleatly known?

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Infinite divisibility of extension does suppose the external existence of extension; but the later is false, ergo ye former also.

Qu. Blind man made to see, would he know motion at 1st sight?

Motion, figure, and extension perceivable by sight are different from those ideas perceived by touch wch goe by the same name.

Diagonal incommensurable wth ye side. Quære how this can be in my doctrine?

(M335) Qu. how to reconcile Newton’s 2 sorts of motion with my doctrine?

Terminations of surfaces & lines not imaginable per se.

Molyneux’s blind man would not know the sphere or cube to be bodies or extended at first sight(199).

Extension so far from being incompatible wth, yt ’tis impossible it should exist without thought.

(M336) Extension itself or anything extended cannot think—these being meer ideas or sensations, whose essence we thoroughly know.

No extension but surface perceivable by sight.

(M337) Wn we imagine 2 bowls v. g. moving in vacuo, ’tis only conceiving a person affected with these sensations.

(M338) Extension to exist in a thoughtless thing [or rather in a thing void of perception—thought seeming to imply action], is a contradiction.

Qu. if visible motion be proportional to tangible motion?

(M339) In some dreams succession of ideas swifter than at other times.

(M340) If a piece of matter have extension, that must be determined to a particular bigness & figure, but &c.

Nothing wthout corresponds to our primary ideas but powers. Hence a direct & brief demonstration of an active powerfull Being, distinct from us, on whom we depend.

The name of colours actually given to tangible qualities, by the relation of ye story of the German Count.

Qu. How came visible & tangible qualities by the same name in all languages?

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Qu. Whether Being might not be the substance of the soul, or (otherwise thus) whether Being, added to ye faculties, compleat the real essence and adequate definition of the soul?

(M341) Qu. Whether, on the supposition of external bodies, it be possible for us to know that any body is absolutely at rest, since that supposing ideas much slower than at present, bodies now apparently moving wd then be apparently at rest?

(M342) Qu. What can be like a sensation but a sensation?

Qu. Did ever any man see any other things besides his own ideas, that he should compare them to these, and make these like unto them?

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(M343) The age of a fly, for ought that we know, may be as long as yt of a man(200).

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Visible distance heterogeneous from tangible distance demonstrated 3 several ways:—

1st. If a tangible inch be equal or in any other reason to a visible inch, thence it will follow yt unequals are equals, wch is absurd: for at what distance would the visible inch be placed to make it equal to the tangible inch?

2d. One made to see that had not yet seen his own limbs, or any thing he touched, upon sight of a foot length would know it to be a foot length, if tangible foot & visible foot were the same idea—sed falsum id, ergo et hoc.

3dly. From Molyneux’s problem, wch otherwise is falsely solv’d by Locke and him(201).

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(M344) Nothing but ideas perceivable(202).

A man cannot compare 2 things together without perceiving them each. Ergo, he cannot say anything wch is not an idea is like or unlike an idea.

Bodies &c. do exist even wn not perceived—they being powers in the active being(203).

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Succession a simple idea, [succession is an abstract, i.e. an inconceivable idea,] Locke says(204).

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Visible extension is [proportional to tangible extension, also is] encreated & diminish’d by parts. Hence taken for the same.

If extension be without the mind in bodies. Qu. whether tangible or visible, or both?

Mathematical propositions about extension & motion true in a double sense.

Extension thought peculiarly inert, because not accompany’d wth pleasure & pain: hence thought to exist in matter; as also for that it was conceiv’d common to 2 senses, [as also the constant perception of ’em].

Blind at 1st sight could not tell how near what he saw was to him, nor even whether it be wthout him or in his eye(205). Qu. Would he not think the later?

Blind at 1st sight could not know yt wt he saw was extended, until he had seen and touched some one self-same thing—not knowing how minimum tangibile would look in vision.

(M345) Mem. That homogeneous particles be brought in to answer the objection of God’s creating sun, plants, &c. before animals.

In every bodie two infinite series of extension—the one of tangible, the other of visible.

All things to a blind at first seen in a point.

Ignorance of glasses made men think extension to be in bodies.

(M346) Homogeneous portions of matter—useful to contemplate them.

Extension if in matter changes its relation wth minimum visibile, wch seems to be fixt.

Qu. whether m.v. be fix’d?

(M347) Each particle of matter if extended must be infinitely extended, or have an infinite series of extension.

(M348) If the world be granted to consist of Matter, ’tis the mind gives it beauty and proportion.

Wt I have said onely proves there is no proportion at all times and in all men between a visible & tangible inch.

Tangible and visible extension heterogeneous, because they have no common measure; also because their simplest constituent parts or elements are specifically different, viz. punctum visibile & tangibile. N. B. The former seems to be no good reason.

(M349) By immateriality is solv’d the cohesion of bodies, or rather the dispute ceases.

Our idea we call extension neither way capable of infinity, i.e. neither infinitely small or great.

Greatest possible extension seen under an angle wch will be less than 180 degrees, the legs of wch angle proceed from the ends of the extension.

(M350) Allowing there be extended, solid, &c. substances without the mind, ’tis impossible the mind should know or perceive them; the mind, even according to the materialists, perceiving onely the impressions made upon its brain, or rather the ideas attending these impressions(206).

Unity in abstracto not at all divisible, it being as it were a point, or with Barrow nothing at all; in concreto not divisible ad infinitum, there being no one idea demonstrable ad infinitum.

(M351) Any subject can have of each sort of primary qualities but one particular at once. Locke, b. 4. c. 3. s. 15.

Qu. whether we have clear ideas of large numbers themselves, or onely of their relations?

(M352) Of solidity see L. b. 2. c. 4. s. 1, 5, 6. If any one ask wt solidity is, let him put a flint between his hands and he will know. Extension of body is continuity of solid, &c.; extension of space is continuity of unsolid, &c.

Why may not I say visible extension is a continuity of visible points, tangible extension is a continuity of tangible points?

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(M353) Mem. That I take notice that I do not fall in wth sceptics, Fardella(207), &c., in that I make bodies to exist certainly, wch they doubt of.

(M354) I am more certain of ye existence & reality of bodies than Mr. Locke; since he pretends onely to wt he calls sensitive knowledge(208), whereas I think I have demonstrative knowledge of their existence—by them meaning combinations of powers in an unknown substratum(209).

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(M355) Our ideas we call figure & extension, not images of the figure and extension of matter; these (if such there be) being infinitely divisible, those not so.

’Tis impossible a material cube should exist, because the edges of a cube will appear broad to an acute sense.

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Men die, or are in state of annihilation, oft in a day.

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(M356) Powers. Qu. whether more or one onely?

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Lengths abstract from breadths are the work of the mind. Such do intersect in a point at all angles. After the same way colour is abstract from extension.

Every position alters the line.

Qu. whether ideas of extension are made up of other ideas, v.g. idea of a foot made up of general ideas of an inch?

The idea of an inch length not one determin’d idea. Hence enquire the reason why we are out in judging of extension by the sight; for which purpose ’tis meet also to consider the frequent & sudden changes of extension by position.

No stated ideas of length without a minimum.

(M357) Material substance banter’d by Locke, b. 2. c. 13. s. 19.

(M358) In my doctrine all absurdities from infinite space &c. cease(210).

Qu. whether if (speaking grossly) the things we see were all of them at all times too small to be felt, we should have confounded tangible & visible extension and figure?

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(M359) Qu. whether if succession of ideas in the Eternal Mind, a day does not seem to God a 1000 years, rather than a 1000 years a day?

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But one only colour & its degrees.

Enquiry about a grand mistake in writers of dioptricks in assigning the cause of microscopes magnifying objects.

Qu. whether a born-blind made to see would at 1st give the name of distance to any idea intromitted by sight; since he would take distance yt that he had perceived by touch to be something existing without his mind, but he would certainly think that nothing seen was without his mind(211)?

(M360) Space without any bodies existing in rerum natura would not be extended, as not having parts—in that parts are assigned to it wth respect to body; from whence also the notion of distance is taken. Now without either parts or distance or mind, how can there be Space, or anything beside one uniform Nothing?

Two demonstrations that blind made to see would not take all things he saw to be without his mind, or not in a point—the one from microscopic eyes, the other from not perceiving distance, i.e. radius of the visual sphere.

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(M361) The trees are in the park, i.e. whether I will or no, whether I imagine anything about them or no. Let me but go thither and open my eyes by day, & I shall not avoid seeing them.

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By extension blind would mean either the perception caused in his touch by something he calls extended, or else the power of raising that perception; wch power is without, in the thing termed extended. Now he could not know either of these to be in things visible till he had try’d.

Geometry seems to have for its object tangible extension, figures, & motion—and not visible(212).

A man will say a body will seem as big as before, tho’ the visible idea it yields be less than wt it was; therefore the bigness or tangible extension of the body is different from the visible extension.

Extension or space no simple idea—length, breadth, & solidity being three several ideas.

Depth or solidity now perceived by sight(213).

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Strange impotence of men. Man without God wretcheder than a stone or tree; he having onely the power to be miserable by his unperformed wills, these having no power at all(214).

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Length perceivable by hearing—length & breadth by sight—length, breadth, & depth by touch.

(M362) Wt affects us must be a thinking thing, for wt thinks not cannot subsist.

Number not in bodies, it being the creature of the mind, depending entirely on its consideration, & being more or less as the mind pleases(215).

Mem. Quære whether extension be equally a sensation with colour? The mob use not the word extension. ’Tis an abstract term of the Schools.

(M363) Round figure a perception or sensation in the mind, but in the body is a power. L, b. 2. c. 8. s. 8.

Mem. Mark well the later part of the last cited section.

Solids, or any other tangible things, are no otherwise seen than colours felt by the German Count.

(M364) “Of” and “thing” causes of mistake.

The visible point of he who has microscopical eyes will not be greater or less than mine.

Qu. Whether the propositions & even axioms of geometry do not divers of them suppose the existence of lines &c. without the mind?

(M365) Whether motion be the measure of duration? Locke, b. 2. c. 14. s. 19.

Lines & points conceiv’d as terminations different ideas from those conceiv’d absolutely.

Every position alters a line.

(M366) Blind man at 1st would not take colours to be without his mind; but colours would seem to be in the same place with the coloured extension: therefore extension wd not seem to be without the mind.

All visible concentric circles whereof the eye is the centre are absolutely equal.

Infinite number—why absurd—not rightly solv’d by Locke(216).

Qu. how ’tis possible we should see flats or right lines?

Qu. why the moon appears greatest in the horizon(217)?

Qu. why we see things erect when painted inverted(218)?

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(M367) Question put by Mr. Deering touching the thief and paradise.

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(M368) Matter tho’ allowed to exist may be no greater than a pin’s head.

Motion is proportionable to space described in given time.

Velocity not proportionable to space describ’d in given time.

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(M369) No active power but the Will: therefore Matter, if it exists, affects us not(219).

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Magnitude when barely taken for the ratio partium extra partes, or rather for co-existence & succession, without considering the parts co-existing & succeeding, is infinitely, or rather indefinitely, or not at all perhaps, divisible, because it is itself infinite or indefinite. But definite, determined magnitudes, i.e. lines or surfaces consisting of points whereby (together wth distance & position) they are determin’d, are resoluble into those points.

Again. Magnitude taken for co-existence and succession is not all divisible, but is one simple idea.

Simple ideas include no parts nor relations—hardly separated and considered in themselves—nor yet rightly singled by any author. Instance in power, red, extension, &c.

(M370) Space not imaginable by any idea received from sight—not imaginable without body moving. Not even then necessarily existing (I speak of infinite space)—for wt the body has past may be conceiv’d annihilated.

(M371) Qu. What can we see beside colours? what can we feel beside hard, soft, cold, warm, pleasure, pain?

Qu. Why not taste & smell extension?

Qu. Why not tangible & visible extensions thought heterogeneous extensions, so well as gustable & olefactible perceptions thought heterogeneous perceptions? or at least why not as heterogeneous as blue & red?

Moon wn horizontal does not appear bigger as to visible extension than at other times; hence difficulties and disputes about things seen under equal angles &c. cease.

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All potentiæ alike indifferent.

A. B. Wt does he mean by his potentia? Is it the will, desire, person, or all or neither, or sometimes one, sometimes t’other?

No agent can be conceiv’d indifferent as to pain or pleasure.

We do not, properly speaking, in a strict philosophical sense, make objects more or less pleasant; but the laws of nature do that.

(M372) A finite intelligence might have foreseen 4 thousand years agoe the place and circumstances, even the most minute & trivial, of my present existence. This true on supposition that uneasiness determines the will.

(M373) Doctrines of liberty, prescience, &c. explained by billiard balls.

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Wt judgement would he make of uppermost and lowermost who had always seen through an inverting glass?

All lines subtending the same optic angle congruent (as is evident by an easy experiment); therefore they are equal.

We have not pure simple ideas of blue, red, or any other colour (except perhaps black) because all bodies reflect heterogeneal light.

Qu. Whether this be true as to sounds (& other sensations), there being, perhaps, rays of air wch will onely exhibit one particular sound, as rays of light one particular colour.

Colours not definable, not because they are pure unmixt thoughts, but because we cannot easily distinguish & separate the thoughts they include, or because we want names for their component ideas.

(M374) By Soul is meant onely a complex idea, made up of existence, willing, & perception in a large sense. Therefore it is known and it may be defined.

We cannot possibly conceive any active power but the Will.

(M375) In moral matters men think (’tis true) that they are free; but this freedom is only the freedom of doing as they please; wch freedom is consecutive to the Will, respecting only the operative faculties(220).

Men impute their actions to themselves because they will’d them, and that not out of ignorance, but whereas they have the consequences of them, whether good or bad.

This does not prove men to be indifferent in respect of desiring.

If anything is meant by the potentia of A. B. it must be desire; but I appeal to any man if his desire be indifferent, or (to speak more to the purpose) whether he himself be indifferent in respect of wt he desires till after he has desired it; for as for desire itself, or the faculty of desiring, that is indifferent, as all other faculties are.

Actions leading to heaven are in my power if I will them: therefore I will will them.

Qu. concerning the procession of Wills in infinitum.

Herein mathematiques have the advantage over metaphysiques and morality. Their definitions, being of words not yet known to ye learner, are not disputed; but words in metaphysiques & morality, being mostly known to all, the definitions of them may chance to be contraverted.

(M376) The short jejune way in mathematiques will not do in metaphysiques & ethiques: for yt about mathematical propositions men have no prejudices, no anticipated opinions to be encounter’d; they not having yet thought on such matters. ’Tis not so in the other 2 mentioned sciences. A man must [there] not onely demonstrate the truth, he must also vindicate it against scruples and established opinions which contradict it. In short, the dry, strigose(221), rigid way will not suffice. He must be more ample & copious, else his demonstration, tho’ never so exact, will not go down with most.

Extension seems to consist in variety of homogeneal thoughts co-existing without mixture.

Or rather visible extension seems to be the co-existence of colour in the mind.

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(M377) Enquiring and judging are actions which depend on the operative faculties, wch depend on the Will, wch is determin’d by some uneasiness; ergo &c. Suppose an agent wch is finite perfectly indifferent, and as to desiring not determin’d by any prospect or consideration of good, I say, this agent cannot do an action morally good. Hence ’tis evident the suppositions of A. B. are insignificant.

Extension, motion, time, number are no simple ideas, but include succession to them, which seems to be a simple idea.

Mem. To enquire into the angle of contact, & into fluxions, &c.

The sphere of vision is equal whether I look onely in my hand or on the open firmament, for 1st, in both cases the retina is full; 2d, the radius’s of both spheres are equall or rather nothing at all to the sight; 3dly, equal numbers of points in one & t’other.

In the Barrovian case purblind would judge aright.

Why the horizontal moon greater?

Why objects seen erect?

(M378) To what purpose certain figure and texture connected wth other perceptions?

Men estimate magnitudes both by angles and distance. Blind at 1st could not know distance; or by pure sight, abstracting from experience of connexion of sight and tangible ideas, we can’t perceive distance. Therefore by pure sight we cannot perceive or judge of extension.

Qu. Whether it be possible to enlarge our sight or make us see at once more, or more points, than we do, by diminishing the punctum visibile below 30 minutes?

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(M379) Speech metaphorical more than we imagine; insensible things, & their modes, circumstances, &c. being exprest for the most part by words borrow’d from things sensible. Hence manyfold mistakes.

(M380) The grand mistake is that we think we have ideas of the operations of our minds(222). Certainly this metaphorical dress is an argument we have not.

Qu. How can our idea of God be complex & compounded, when his essence is simple & uncompounded? V. Locke, b. 2. c. 23. s. 35(223).

(M381) The impossibility of defining or discoursing clearly of such things proceeds from the fault & scantiness of language, as much perhaps as from obscurity & confusion of thought. Hence I may clearly and fully understand my own soul, extension, &c., and not be able to define them(224).

(M382) The substance wood a collection of simple ideas. See Locke, b. 2. c. 26. s. 1.

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Mem. concerning strait lines seen to look at them through an orbicular lattice.

Qu. Whether possible that those visible ideas wch are now connected with greater tangible extensions could have been connected with lesser tangible extensions,—there seeming to be no necessary connexion between those thoughts?

Speculums seem to diminish or enlarge objects not by altering the optique angle, but by altering the apparent distance.

Hence Qu. if blind would think things diminish’d by convexes, or enlarg’d by concaves?

(M383) Motion not one idea. It cannot be perceived at once.

(M384) Mem. To allow existence to colours in the dark, persons not thinking, &c.—but not an actual existence. ’Tis prudent to correct men’s mistakes without altering their language. This makes truth glide into their souls insensibly(225).

(M385) Colours in ye dark do exist really, i.e. were there light; or as soon as light comes, we shall see them, provided we open our eyes; and that whether we will or no.

How the retina is fill’d by a looking-glass?

Convex speculums have the same effect wth concave glasses.

Qu. Whether concave speculums have the same effect wth convex glasses?

The reason why convex speculums diminish & concave magnify not yet fully assign’d by any writer I know.

Qu. Why not objects seen confus’d when that they seem inverted through a convex lens?

Qu. How to make a glass or speculum which shall magnify or diminish by altering the distance without altering the angle?

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No identity (other than perfect likeness) in any individuals besides persons(226).

(M386) As well make tastes, smells, fear, shame, wit, virtue, vice, & all thoughts move wth local motion as immaterial spirit.

On account of my doctrine, the identity of finite substances must consist in something else than continued existence, or relation to determined time & place of beginning to exist—the existence of our thoughts (which being combined make all substances) being frequently interrupted, & they having divers beginnings & endings.

(M387) Qu. Whether identity of person consists not in the Will?

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No necessary connexion between great or little optique angles and great or little extension.

Distance is not perceived: optique angles are not perceived. How then is extension perceiv’d by sight?

Apparent magnitude of a line is not simply as the optique angle, but directly as the optique angle, & reciprocally as the confusion, &c. (i.e. the other sensations, or want of sensation, that attend near vision). Hence great mistakes in assigning the magnifying power of glasses. Vid. Moly, p. 182.

Glasses or speculums may perhaps magnify or lessen without altering the optique angle, but to no purpose.

Qu. Whether purblind would think objects so much diminished by a convex speculum as another?

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Qu. Wherein consists identity of person? Not in actual consciousness; for then I’m not the same person I was this day twelvemonth but while I think of wt I then did. Not in potential; for then all persons may be the same, for ought we know.

Mem. Story of Mr. Deering’s aunt.

Two sorts of potential consciousness—natural & præternatural. In the last § but one, I mean the latter.

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If by magnitude be meant the proportion anything bears to a determined tangible extension, as inch, foot, &c., this, ’tis plain, cannot be properly & per se perceived by sight; & as for determin’d visible inches, feet, &c., there can be no such thing obtain’d by the meer act of seeing—abstracted from experience, &c.

The greatness per se perceivable by the sight is onely the proportion any visible appearance bears to the others seen at the same time; or (which is the same thing) the proportion of any particular part of the visual orb to the whole. But mark that we perceive not it is an orb, any more than a plain, but by reasoning.

This is all the greatness the pictures have per se.

Hereby meere seeing cannot at all judge of the extension of any object, it not availing to know the object makes such a part of a sphærical surface except we also know the greatness of the sphærical surface; for a point may subtend the same angle wth a mile, & so create as great an image in the retina, i.e. take up as much of the orb.

Men judge of magnitude by faintness and vigorousness, by distinctness and confusion, with some other circumstances, by great & little angles.

Hence ’tis plain the ideas of sight which are now connected with greatness might have been connected wth smallness, and vice versâ: there being no necessary reason why great angles, faintness, and distinctness without straining, should stand for great extension, any more than a great angle, vigorousness, and confusion(227).

My end is not to deliver metaphysiques altogether in a general scholastic way, but in some measure to accommodate them to the sciences, and shew how they may be useful in optiques, geometry, &c.(228)

Qu. Whether per se proportion of visible magnitudes be perceivable by sight? This is put on account of distinctness and confusedness, the act of perception seeming to be as great in viewing any point of the visual orb distinctly, as in viewing the whole confusedly.

Mem. To correct my language & make it as philosophically nice as possible—to avoid giving handle.

If men could without straining alter the convexity of their crystallines, they might magnify or diminish the apparent diameters of objects, the same optic angle remaining.

The bigness in one sense of the pictures in the fund is not determin’d; for the nearer a man views them, the images of them (as well as other objects) will take up the greater room in the fund of his eye.

Mem. Introduction to contain the design of the whole, the nature and manner of demonstrating, &c.

Two sorts of bigness accurately to be distinguished, they being perfectly and toto cælo different—the one the proportion that any one appearance has to the sum of appearances perceived at the same time wth it, wch is proportional to angles, or, if a surface, to segments of sphærical surfaces;—the other is tangible bigness.

Qu. wt would happen if the sphæræ of the retina were enlarged or diminish’d?

We think by the meer act of vision we perceive distance from us, yet we do not; also that we perceive solids, yet we do not; also the inequality of things seen under the same angle, yet we do not.

Why may I not add, We think we see extension by meer vision? Yet we do not.

Extension seems to be perceived by the eye, as thought by the ear.

As long as the same angle determines the minimum visibile to two persons, no different conformation of the eye can make a different appearance of magnitude in the same thing. But, it being possible to try the angle, we may certainly know whether the same thing appears differently big to two persons on account of their eyes.

If a man could see ... objects would appear larger to him than to another; hence there is another sort of purely visible magnitude beside the proportion any appearance bears to the visual sphere, viz. its proportion to the M. V.

Were there but one and the same language in the world, and did children speak it naturally as soon as born, and were it not in the power of men to conceal their thoughts or deceive others, but that there were an inseparable connexion between words & thoughts, so yt posito uno, ponitur alterum by the laws of nature; Qu. would not men think they heard thoughts as much as that they see extension(229)?

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All our ideas are adæquate: our knowledge of the laws of nature is not perfect & adæquate(230).

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(M388) Men are in the right in judging their simple ideas to be in the things themselves. Certainly heat & colour is as much without the mind as figure, motion, time, &c.

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We know many things wch we want words to express. Great things discoverable upon this principle. For want of considering wch divers men have run into sundry mistakes, endeavouring to set forth their knowledge by sounds; wch foundering them, they thought the defect was in their knowledge, while in truth it was in their language.

Qu. Whether the sensations of sight arising from a man’s head be liker the sensations of touch proceeding from thence or from his legs?

Or, Is it onely the constant & long association of ideas entirely different that makes me judge them the same?

Wt I see is onely variety of colours & light. Wt I feel is hard or soft, hot or cold, rough or smooth, &c. Wt resemblance have these thoughts with those?

A picture painted wth great variety of colours affects the touch in one uniform manner. I cannot therefore conclude that because I see 2, I shall feel 2; because I see angles or inequalities, I shall feel angles or inequalities. How therefore can I—before experience teaches me—know that the visible leggs are (because 2) connected wth the tangible ones, or the visible head (because one) connected wth the tangible head(231)?

(M389) All things by us conceivable are—

1st, thoughts;

2ndly, powers to receive thoughts;

3rdly, powers to cause thoughts; neither of all wch can possibly exist in an inert, senseless thing.

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An object wthout a glass may be seen under as great an angle as wth a glass. A glass therefore does not magnify the appearance by the angle.

(M390) Absurd that men should know the soul by idea—ideas being inert, thoughtless. Hence Malbranch confuted(232).

I saw gladness in his looks. I saw shame in his face. So I see figure or distance.

Qu. Why things seen confusedly thro’ a convex glass are not magnify’d?

Tho’ we should judge the horizontal moon to be more distant, why should we therefore judge her to be greater? What connexion betwixt the same angle, further distant, and greaterness?

(M391) My doctrine affects the essences of the Corpuscularians.

Perfect circles, &c. exist not without (for none can so exist, whether perfect or no), but in the mind.

Lines thought divisible ad infinitum, because they are suppos’d to exist without. Also because they are thought the same when view’d by the naked eye, & wn view’d thro’ magnifying glasses.

They who knew not glasses had not so fair a pretence for the divisibility ad infinitum.

No idea of circle, &c. in abstract.

Metaphysiques as capable of certainty as ethiques, but not so capable to be demonstrated in a geometrical way; because men see clearer & have not so many prejudices in ethiques.

Visible ideas come into the mind very distinct. So do tangible ideas. Hence extension seen & felt. Sounds, tastes, &c. are more blended.

Qu. Why not extension intromitted by the taste in conjunction with the smell—seeing tastes & smells are very distinct ideas?

Blew and yellow particles mixt, while they exhibit an uniform green, their extension is not perceiv’d; but as soon as they exhibit distinct sensations of blew and yellow, then their extension is perceiv’d.

Distinct perception of visible ideas not so perfect as of tangible—tangible ideas being many at once equally vivid. Hence heterogeneous extension.

Object. Why a mist increases not the apparent magnitude of an object, in proportion to the faintness(233)?

Mem. To enquire touching the squaring of the circle, &c.

That wch seems smooth & round to the touch may to sight seem quite otherwise. Hence no necessary connexion betwixt visible ideas and tangible ones.

In geometry it is not prov’d that an inch is divisible ad infinitum.

Geometry not conversant about our compleat determined ideas of figures, for these are not divisible ad infinitum.

Particular circles may be squar’d, for the circumference being given a diameter may be found betwixt wch & the true there is not any perceivable difference. Therefore there is no difference—extension being a perception; & a perception not perceivd is contradiction, nonsense, nothing. In vain to alledge the difference may be seen by magnifying-glasses, for in yt case there is (’tis true) a difference perceiv’d, but not between the same ideas, but others much greater, entirely different therefrom(234).

Any visible circle possibly perceivable of any man may be squar’d, by the common way, most accurately; or even perceivable by any other being, see he never so acute, i.e. never so small an arch of a circle; this being wt makes the distinction between acute & dull sight, and not the m.v., as men are perhaps apt to think.

The same is true of any tangible circle. Therefore further enquiry of accuracy in squaring or other curves is perfectly needless, & time thrown away.

Mem. To press wt last precedes more homely, & so think on’t again.

A meer line or distance is not made up of points, does not exist, cannot be imagin’d, or have an idea framed thereof,—no more than meer colour without extension(235).

Mem. A great difference between considering length wthout breadth, & having an idea of, or imagining, length without breadth(236).

Malbranch out touching the crystallines diminishing, L. 1. c. 6.

’Tis possible (& perhaps not very improbable, that is, is sometimes so) we may have the greatest pictures from the least objects. Therefore no necessary connexion betwixt visible & tangible ideas. These ideas, viz. great relation to sphæra visualis, or to the m. v. (wch is all that I would have meant by having a greater picture) & faintness, might possibly have stood for or signify’d small tangible extensions. Certainly the greater relation to s. v. and m. v. does frequently, in that men view little objects near the eye.

Malbranch out in asserting we cannot possibly know whether there are 2 men in the world that see a thing of the same bigness. V. L. 1. c. 6.

Diagonal of particular square commensurable wth its side, they both containing a certain number of m. v.

I do not think that surfaces consist of lines, i.e. meer distances. Hence perhaps may be solid that sophism wch would prove the oblique line equal to the perpendicular between 2 parallels.

Suppose an inch represent a mile. 1/1000 of an inch is nothing, but 1/1000 of ye mile represented is something: therefore 1/1000 an inch, tho’ nothing, is not to be neglected, because it represents something, i.e. 1/1000 of a mile.

Particular determin’d lines are not divisible ad infinitum, but lines as us’d by geometers are so, they not being determin’d to any particular finite number of points. Yet a geometer (he knows not why) will very readily say he can demonstrate an inch line is divisible ad infinitum.

A body moving in the optique axis not perceiv’d to move by sight merely, and without experience. There is (’tis true) a successive change of ideas,—it seems less and less. But, besides this, there is no visible change of place.

Mem. To enquire most diligently concerning the incommensurability of diagonale & side—whether it does not go on the supposition of units being divisible ad infinitum, i.e. of the extended thing spoken of being divisible ad infinitum (unit being nothing; also v. Barrow, Lect. Geom.), & so the infinite indivisibility deduced therefrom is a petitio principii?

The diagonal is commensurable with the side.

(M392) From Malbranch, Locke, & my first arguings it can’t be prov’d that extension is not in matter. From Locke’s arguings it can’t be proved that colours are not in bodies.

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Mem. That I was distrustful at 8 years old; and consequently by nature disposed for these new doctrines(237).

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Qu. How can a line consisting of an unequal number of points be divisible [ad infinitum] in two equals?

Mem. To discuss copiously how & why we do not see the pictures.

(M393) Allowing extensions to exist in matter, we cannot know even their proportions—contrary to Malbranch.

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(M394) I wonder how men cannot see a truth so obvious, as that extension cannot exist without a thinking substance.

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(M395) Species of all sensible things made by the mind. This prov’d either by turning men’s eyes into magnifyers or diminishers.

Yr m. v. is, suppose, less than mine. Let a 3rd person have perfect ideas of both our m. vs. His idea of my m. v. contains his idea of yours, & somewhat more. Therefore ’tis made up of parts: therefore his idea of my m. v. is not perfect or just, which diverts the hypothesis.

Qu. Whether a m. v. or t. be extended?

Mem. The strange errours men run into about the pictures. We think them small because should a man be suppos’d to see them their pictures would take up but little room in the fund of his eye.

It seems all lines can’t be bisected in 2 equall parts. Mem. To examine how the geometers prove the contrary.

’Tis impossible there should be a m. v. less than mine. If there be, mine may become equal to it (because they are homogeneous) by detraction of some part or parts. But it consists not of parts, ergo &c.

Suppose inverting perspectives bound to ye eyes of a child, & continu’d to the years of manhood—when he looks up, or turns up his head, he shall behold wt we call under. Qu. What would he think of up and down(238)?

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(M396) I wonder not at my sagacity in discovering the obvious tho’ amazing truth. I rather wonder at my stupid inadvertency in not finding it out before—’tis no witchcraft to see.

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(M397) Our simple ideas are so many simple thoughts or perceptions; a perception cannot exist without a thing to perceive it, or any longer than it is perceiv’d; a thought cannot be in an unthinking thing; one uniform simple thought can be like to nothing but another uniform simple thought. Complex thoughts or ideas are onely an assemblage of simple ideas, and can be the image of nothing, or like unto nothing, but another assemblage of simple ideas, &c.

(M398) The Cartesian opinion of light & colours &c. is orthodox enough even in their eyes who think the Scripture expression may favour the common opinion. Why may not mine also? But there is nothing in Scripture that can possibly be wrested to make against me, but, perhaps, many things for me.

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(M399) Bodies &c. do exist whether we think of ’em or no, they being taken in a twofold sense—

1. Collections of thoughts.

2. Collections of powers to cause those thoughts.

These later exist; tho’ perhaps a parte rei it may be one simple perfect power.

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Qu. whether the extension of a plain, look’d at straight and slantingly, survey’d minutely & distinctly, or in the bulk and confusedly at once, be the same? N. B. The plain is suppos’d to keep the same distance.

The ideas we have by a successive, curious inspection of ye minute parts of a plain do not seem to make up the extension of that plain view’d & consider’d all together.

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Ignorance in some sort requisite in ye person that should disown the Principle.

Thoughts do most properly signify, or are mostly taken for the interior operations of the mind, wherein the mind is active. Those yt obey not the acts of volition, and in wch the mind is passive, are more properly call’d sensations or perceptions. But yt is all a case of words.

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Extension being the collection or distinct co-existence of minimums, i.e. of perceptions intromitted by sight or touch, it cannot be conceiv’d without a perceiving substance.

(M400) Malbranch does not prove that the figures & extensions exist not when they are not perceiv’d. Consequently he does not prove, nor can it be prov’d on his principles, that the sorts are the work of the mind, and onely in the mind.

(M401) The great argument to prove that extension cannot be in an unthinking substance is, that it cannot be conceiv’d distinct from or without all tangible or visible quality.

(M402) Tho’ matter be extended wth an indefinite extension, yet the mind makes the sorts. They were not before the mind perceiving them, & even now they are not without the mind. Houses, trees, &c., tho’ indefinitely extended matter do exist, are not without the mind.

(M403) The great danger of making extension exist without the mind is, that if it does it must be acknowledg’d infinite, immutable, eternal, &c.;—wch will be to make either God extended (wch I think dangerous), or an eternal, immutable, infinite, increate Being beside God.

(M404) Finiteness of our minds no excuse for the geometers.

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(M405) The Principle easily proved by plenty of arguments ad absurdum.

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The twofold signification of Bodies, viz.

1. Combinations of thoughts(239);

2. Combinations of powers to raise thoughts.

These, I say, in conjunction with homogeneous particles, may solve much better the objections from the creation than the supposition that Matter does exist. Upon wch supposition I think they cannot be solv’d.

Bodies taken for powers do exist wn not perceiv’d; but this existence is not actual(240). Wn I say a power exists, no more is meant than that if in the light I open my eyes, and look that way, I shall see it, i.e. the body, &c.

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Qu. whether blind before sight may not have an idea of light and colours & visible extension, after the same manner as we perceive them wth eyes shut, or in the dark—not imagining, but seeing after a sort?

Visible extension cannot be conceiv’d added to tangible extension. Visible and tangible points can’t make one sum. Therefore these extensions are heterogeneous.

A probable method propos’d whereby one may judge whether in near vision there is a greater distance between the crystalline & fund than usual, or whether the crystalline be onely render’d more convex. If the former, then the v. s. is enlarg’d, & the m. v. corresponds to less than 30 minutes, or wtever it us’d to correspond to.

Stated measures, inches, feet, &c., are tangible not visible extensions.

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(M406) Locke, More, Raphson, &c. seem to make God extended. ’Tis nevertheless of great use to religion to take extension out of our idea of God, & put a power in its place. It seems dangerous to suppose extension, wch is manifestly inert, in God.

(M407) But, say you, The thought or perception I call extension is not itself in an unthinking thing or Matter—but it is like something wch is in Matter. Well, say I, Do you apprehend or conceive wt you say extension is like unto, or do you not? If the later, how know you they are alike? How can you compare any things besides your own ideas? If the former, it must be an idea, i.e. perception, thought, or sensation—wch to be in an unperceiving thing is a contradiction(241).

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(M408) I abstain from all flourish & powers of words & figures, using a great plainness & simplicity of simile, having oft found it difficult to understand those that use the lofty & Platonic, or subtil & scholastique strain(242).

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(M409) Whatsoever has any of our ideas in it must perceive; it being that very having, that passive recognition of ideas, that denominates the mind perceiving—that being the very essence of perception, or that wherein perception consists.

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The faintness wch alters the appearance of the horizontal moon, rather proceeds from the quantity or grossness of the intermediate atmosphere, than from any change of distance, wch is perhaps not considerable enough to be a total cause, but may be a partial of the phenomenon. N. B. The visual angle is less in cause the horizon.

We judge of the distance of bodies, as by other things, so also by the situation of their pictures in the eye, or (wch is the same thing) according as they appear higher or lower. Those wch seem higher are farther off.

Qu. why we see objects greater in ye dark? whether this can be solv’d by any but my Principles?

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(M410) The reverse of ye Principle introduced scepticism.

(M411) N. B. On my Principles there is a reality: there are things: there is a rerum natura.

Mem. The surds, doubling the cube, &c.

We think that if just made to see we should judge of the distance & magnitude of things as we do now; but this is false. So also wt we think so positively of the situation of objects.

Hays’s, Keill’s(243), &c. method of proving the infinitesimals of the 3d order absurd, & perfectly contradictions.

Angles of contact, & verily all angles comprehended by a right line & a curve, cannot be measur’d, the arches intercepted not being similar.

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The danger of expounding the H. Trinity by extension.

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(M412) Qu. Why should the magnitude seen at a near distance be deem’d the true one rather than that seen at a farther distance? Why should the sun be thought many 1000 miles rather than one foot in diameter—both being equally apparent diameters? Certainly men judg’d of the sun not in himself, but wth relation to themselves.

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(M413) 4 Principles whereby to answer objections, viz.

1. Bodies do really exist, tho’ not perceiv’d by us.

2. There is a law or course of nature.

3. Language & knowledge are all about ideas; words stand for nothing else.

4. Nothing can be a proof against one side of a contradiction that bears equally hard upon the other(244).

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What shall I say? Dare I pronounce the admired ἀκρίβεια mathematica, that darling of the age, a trifle?

Most certainly no finite extension divisible ad infinitum.

(M414) Difficulties about concentric circles.

(M415) Mem. To examine & accurately discuss the scholium of the 8th definition of Mr. Newton’s(245) Principia.

Ridiculous in the mathematicians to despise Sense.

Qu. Is it not impossible there should be abstract general ideas?

All ideas come from without. They are all particular. The mind, ’tis true, can consider one thing wthout another; but then, considered asunder, they make not 2 ideas. Both together can make but one, as for instance colour & visible extension(246).

The end of a mathematical line is nothing. Locke’s argument that the end of his pen is black or white concludes nothing here.

Mem. Take care how you pretend to define extension, for fear of the geometers.

Qu. Why difficult to imagine a minimum? Ans. Because we are not used to take notice of ’em singly; they not being able singly to pleasure or hurt us, thereby to deserve our regard.

Mem. To prove against Keill yt the infinite divisibility of matter makes the half have an equal number of equal parts with the whole.

Mem. To examine how far the not comprehending infinites may be admitted as a plea.

Qu. Why may not the mathematicians reject all the extensions below the M. as well as the dd, &c., wch are allowed to be something, & consequently may be magnify’d by glasses into inches, feet, &c., as well as the quantities next below the M.?

Big, little, and number are the works of the mind. How therefore can ye extension you suppose in Matter be big or little? How can it consist of any number of points?

(M416) Mem. Strictly to remark L, b. 2. c. 8. s. 8.

Schoolmen compar’d with the mathematicians.

Extension is blended wth tangible or visible ideas, & by the mind præscinded therefrom.

Mathematiques made easy—the scale does almost all. The scale can tell us the subtangent in ye parabola is double the abscisse.

Wt need of the utmost accuracy wn the mathematicians own in rerum natura they cannot find anything corresponding wth their nice ideas.

One should endeavour to find a progression by trying wth the scale.

Newton’s fluxions needless. Anything below an M might serve for Leibnitz’s Differential Calculus.

How can they hang together so well, since there are in them (I mean the mathematiques) so many contradictoriæ argutiæ. V. Barrow, Lect.

A man may read a book of Conics with ease, knowing how to try if they are right. He may take ’em on the credit of the author.

Where’s the need of certainty in such trifles? The thing that makes it so much esteem’d in them is that we are thought not capable of getting it elsewhere. But we may in ethiques and metaphysiques.

The not leading men into mistakes no argument for the truth of the infinitesimals. They being nothings may perhaps do neither good nor harm, except wn they are taken for something, & then the contradiction begets a contradiction.

a + 500 nothings = a + 50 nothings—an innocent silly truth.

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(M417) My doctrine excellently corresponds wth the creation. I suppose no matter, no stars, sun, &c. to have existed before(247).

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It seems all circles are not similar figures, there not being the same proportion betwixt all circumferences & their diameters.

When a small line upon paper represents a mile, the mathematicians do not calculate the 1/10000 of the paper line, they calculate the 1/10000 of the mile. ’Tis to this they have regard, ’tis of this they think; if they think or have any idea at all. The inch perhaps might represent to their imaginations the mile, but ye 1/10000 of the inch cannot be made to represent anything, it not being imaginable.

But the 1/10000 of a mile being somewhat, they think the 1/10000 inch is somewhat: wn they think of yt they imagine they think on this.

3 faults occur in the arguments of the mathematicians for divisibility ad infinitum—

1. They suppose extension to exist without the mind, or not perceived.

2. They suppose that we have an idea of length without breadth(248), or that length without breadth does exist.

3. That unity is divisible ad infinitum.

To suppose a M. S. divisible is to say there are distinguishable ideas where there are no distinguishable ideas.

The M. S. is not near so inconceivable as the signum in magnitudine individuum.

Mem. To examine the math, about their point—what it is—something or nothing; and how it differs from the M. S.

All might be demonstrated by a new method of indivisibles, easier perhaps and juster than that of Cavalierius(249).

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(M418) Unperceivable perception a contradiction.

(M419) Proprietates reales rerum omnium in Deo, tam corporum quum spirituum continentur. Clerici, Log. cap. 8.

Let my adversaries answer any one of mine, I’ll yield. If I don’t answer every one of theirs, I’ll yield.

The loss of the excuse(250) may hurt Transubstantiation, but not the Trinity.

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We need not strain our imaginations to conceive such little things. Bigger may do as well for infinitesimals, since the integer must be an infinite.

Evident yt wch has an infinite number of parts must be infinite.

Qu. Whether extension be resoluble into points it does not consist of?

Nor can it be objected that we reason about numbers, wch are only words & not ideas(251); for these infinitesimals are words of no use, if not supposed to stand for ideas.

Axiom. No reasoning about things whereof we have no idea. Therefore no reasoning about infinitesimals.

Much less infinitesimals of infinitesimals, &c.

Axiom. No word to be used without an idea.

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(M420) Our eyes and senses inform us not of the existence of matter or ideas existing without the mind(252). They are not to be blam’d for the mistake.

I defy any man to assign a right line equal to a paraboloid, but wn look’d at thro’ a microscope they may appear unequall.

(M421) Newton’s harangue amounts to no more than that gravity is proportional to gravity.

One can’t imagine an extended thing without colour. V. Barrow, L. G.

(M422) Men allow colours, sounds, &c.(253) not to exist without the mind, tho’ they have no demonstration they do not. Why may they not allow my Principle with a demonstration?

(M423) Qu. Whether I had not better allow colours to exist without the mind; taking the mind for the active thing wch I call “I,” “myself”—yt seems to be distinct from the understanding(254)?

(M424) The taking extension to be distinct from all other tangible & visible qualities, & to make an idea by itself, has made men take it to be without the mind.

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I see no wit in any of them but Newton. The rest are meer triflers, mere Nihilarians.

The folly of the mathematicians in not judging of sensations by their senses. Reason was given us for nobler uses.

(M425) Keill’s filling the world with a mite(255). This follows from the divisibility of extension ad infinitum.

Extension, or length without breadth, seems to be nothing save the number of points that lie betwixt any 2 points(256). It seems to consist in meer proportion—meer reference of the mind.

To what purpose is it to determine the forms of glasses geometrically?

Sir Isaac(257) owns his book could have been demonstrated on the supposition of indivisibles.

(M426) Innumerable vessels of matter. V. Cheyne.

I’ll not admire the mathematicians. ’Tis wt any one of common sense might attain to by repeated acts. I prove it by experience. I am but one of human sense, and I &c.

Mathematicians have some of them good parts—the more is the pity. Had they not been mathematicians they had been good for nothing. They were such fools they knew not how to employ their parts.

The mathematicians could not so much as tell wherein truth & certainty consisted, till Locke told ’em(258). I see the best of ’em talk of light and colours as if wthout the mind.

By thing I either mean ideas or that wch has ideas(259).

Nullum præclarum ingenium unquam fuit magnus mathematicus. Scaliger(260).

A great genius cannot stoop to such trifles & minutenesses as they consider.

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1. (261)All significant words stand for ideas(262).

2. All knowledge about our ideas.

3. All ideas come from without or from within.

4. If from without it must be by the senses, & they are call’d sensations(263).

5. If from within they are the operations of the mind, & are called thoughts.

6. No sensation can be in a senseless thing.

7. No thought can be in a thoughtless thing.

8. All our ideas are either sensations or thoughts(264), by 3, 4, 5.

9. None of our ideas can be in a thing wch is both thoughtless & senseless(265), by 6, 7, 8.

10. The bare passive recognition or having of ideas is called perception.

11. Whatever has in it an idea, tho’ it be never so passive, tho’ it exert no manner of act about it, yet it must perceive. 10.

12. All ideas either are simple ideas, or made up of simple ideas.

13. That thing wch is like unto another thing must agree wth it in one or more simple ideas.

14. Whatever is like a simple idea must either be another simple idea of the same sort, or contain a simple idea of the same sort. 13.

15. Nothing like an idea can be in an unperceiving thing. 11, 14. Another demonstration of the same thing.

16. Two things cannot be said to be alike or unlike till they have been compar’d.

17. Comparing is the viewing two ideas together, & marking wt they agree in and wt they disagree in.

18. The mind can compare nothing but its own ideas. 17.

19. Nothing like an idea can be in an unperceiving thing. 11, 16, 18.

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N. B. Other arguments innumerable, both a priori & a posteriori, drawn from all the sciences, from the clearest, plainest, most obvious truths, whereby to demonstrate the Principle, i.e. that neither our ideas, nor anything like our ideas, can possibly be in an unperceiving thing(266).

N. B. Not one argument of any kind wtsoever, certain or probable, a priori or a posteriori, from any art or science, from either sense or reason, against it.

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Mathematicians have no right idea of angles. Hence angles of contact wrongly apply’d to prove extension divisible ad infinitum.

We have got the Algebra of pure intelligences.

We can prove Newton’s propositions more accurately, more easily, & upon truer principles than himself(267).

Barrow owns the downfall of geometry. However I’ll endeavour to rescue it—so far as it is useful, or real, or imaginable, or intelligible. But for the nothings, I’ll leave them to their admirers.

I’ll teach any one the whole course of mathematiques in 1/100 part the time that another will.

Much banter got from the prefaces of the mathematicians.

(M427) Newton says colour is in the subtil matter. Hence Malbranch proves nothing, or is mistaken, in asserting there is onely figure & motion.

I can square the circle, &c.; they cannot. Wch goes on the best principles?

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The Billys(268) use a finite visible line for an 1/m.

(M428) Marsilius Ficinus—his appearing the moment he died solv’d by my idea of time(269).

(M429) The philosophers lose their abstract or unperceived Matter. The mathematicians lose their insensible sensations. The profane their extended Deity. Pray wt do the rest of mankind lose? As for bodies, &c., we have them still(270).

N. B. The future nat. philosoph. & mathem. get vastly by the bargain(271).

(M430) There are men who say there are insensible extensions. There are others who say the wall is not white, the fire is not hot, &c. We Irishmen cannot attain to these truths.

The mathematicians think there are insensible lines. About these they harangue: these cut in a point at all angles: these are divisible ad infinitum. We Irishmen can conceive no such lines.

The mathematicians talk of wt they call a point. This, they say, is not altogether nothing, nor is it downright something. Now we Irishmen are apt to think something(272) & nothing are next neighbours.

Engagements to P.(273) on account of ye Treatise that grew up under his eye; on account also of his approving my harangue. Glorious for P. to be the protector of usefull tho’ newly discover’d truths.

How could I venture thoughts into the world before I knew they would be of use to the world? and how could I know that till I had try’d how they suited other men’s ideas?

I publish not this so much for anything else as to know whether other men have the same ideas as we Irishmen. This is my end, & not to be inform’d as to my own particular.

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My speculations have the same effect as visiting foreign countries: in the end I return where I was before, but my heart at ease, and enjoying life with new satisfaction.

Passing through all the sciences, though false for the most part, yet it gives us the better insight and greater knowledge of the truth.

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He that would bring another over to his opinion, must seem to harmonize with him at first, and humour him in his own way of talking(274).

From my childhood I had an unaccountable turn of thought that way.

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It doth not argue a dwarf to have greater strength than a giant, because he can throw off the molehill which is upon him, while the other struggles beneath a mountain.

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The whole directed to practise and morality—as appears 1st, from making manifest the nearness and omnipresence of God; 2dly, from cutting off the useless labour of sciences, and so forth.

AN ESSAY TOWARDS A NEW THEORY OF VISION

First published in 1709

Editor’s Preface To The Essay Towards A New Theory Of Vision

Berkeley’s Essay towards a New Theory of Vision was meant to prepare the way for the exposition and defence of the new theory of the material world, its natural order, and its relation to Spirit, that is contained in his book of Principles and in the relative Dialogues, which speedily followed. The Essay was the firstfruits of his early philosophical studies at Dublin. It was also the first attempt to show that our apparently immediate Vision of Space and of bodies extended in three-dimensioned space, is either tacit or conscious inference, occasioned by constant association of the phenomena of which alone we are visually percipient with assumed realities of our tactual and locomotive experience.

The first edition of the Essay appeared early in 1709, when its author was about twenty-four years of age. A second edition, with a few verbal changes and an Appendix, followed before the end of that year. Both were issued in Dublin, “printed by Aaron Rhames, at the back of Dick’s Coffeehouse, for Jeremy Pepyat, bookseller in Skinner Row.” In March, 1732, a third edition, without the Appendix, was annexed to Alciphron, on account of its relation to the Fourth Dialogue in that book. This was the author’s last revision.

In the present edition the text of this last edition is adopted, after collation with those preceding. The Appendix has been restored, and also the Dedication to Sir John Percival, which appeared only in the first edition.

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A due appreciation of Berkeley’s theory of seeing, and his conception of the visible world, involves a study, not merely of this tentative juvenile Essay, but also of its fuller development and application in his more matured works. This has been commonly forgotten by his critics.

Various circumstances contribute to perplex and even repel the reader of the Essay, making it less fit to be an easy avenue of approach to Berkeley’s Principles.

Its occasion and design, and its connexion with his spiritual conception of the material world, are suggested in Sections 43 and 44 of the Principles. Those sections are a key to the Essay. They inform us that in the Essay the author intentionally uses language which seems to attribute a reality independent of all percipient spirit to the ideas or phenomena presented in Touch; it being beside his purpose, he says, to “examine and refute” that “vulgar error” in “a work on Vision.” This studied reticence of a verbally paradoxical conception of Matter, in reasonings about vision which are fully intelligible only under that conception, is one cause of a want of philosophical lucidity in the Essay.

Another circumstance adds to the embarrassment of those who approach the Principles and the three Dialogues through the Essay on Vision. The Essay offers no exception to the lax employment of equivocal words familiar in the early literature of English philosophy, but which is particularly inconvenient in the subtle discussions to which we are here introduced. At the present day we are perhaps accustomed to more precision and uniformity in the philosophical use of language; at any rate we connect other meanings than those here intended with some of the leading words. It is enough to refer to such terms as idea, notion, sensation, perception, touch, externality, distance, and their conjugates. It is difficult for the modern reader to revive and remember the meanings which Berkeley intends by idea and notion—so significant in his vocabulary; and touch with him connotes muscular and locomotive experience as well as the pure sense of contact. Interchange of the terms outward, outness, externality, without the mind, and without the eye is confusing, if we forget that Berkeley implies that percipient mind is virtually coextensive with our bodily organism, so that being “without” or “at a distance from” our bodies is being at a distance from the percipient mind. I have tried in the annotations to relieve some of these ambiguities, of which Berkeley himself warns us (cf. sect. 120).

The Essay moreover abounds in repetitions, and interpolations of antiquated optics and physiology, so that its logical structure and even its supreme generalisation are not easily apprehended. I will try to disentangle them.

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The reader must remember that this Essay on Vision is professedly an introspective appeal to human consciousness. It is an analysis of what human beings are conscious of when they see, the results being here and there applied, partly by way of verification, to solve some famous optical or physiological puzzle. The aim is to present the facts, the whole facts, and nothing but the facts of our internal visual experience, as distinguished from supposed facts and empty abstractions, which an irregular exercise of imagination, or abuse of words, had put in their place. The investigation, moreover, is not concerned with Space in its metaphysical infinity, but with finite sections of Space and their relations, which concern the sciences, physical and mathematical, and with real or tangible Distance, Magnitude, and Place, in their relation to seeing.

From the second section onwards the Essay naturally falls into six Parts, devoted successively to the proof of the six following theses regarding the relation of Sight to finite spaces and to things extended:—

I. (Sect. 2-51.) Distance, or outness from the eye in the line of vision, is not seen: it is only suggested to the mind by visible phenomena and by sensations felt in the eye, all which are somehow its arbitrarily constituted and non-resembling Signs.

II. (Sect. 52-87.) Magnitude, or the amount of space that objects of sense occupy, is really invisible: we only see a greater or less quantity of colour, and colour depends upon percipient mind: our supposed visual perceptions of real magnitude are only our own interpretations of the tactual meaning of the colours we see, and of sensations felt in the eye, which are its Signs.

III. (Sect. 88-120.) Situation of objects of sense, or their real relation to one another in ambient space, is invisible: what we see is variety in the relations of colours to one another: our supposed vision of real tangible locality is only our interpretation of its visual non-resembling Signs.

IV. (Sect. 121-46.) There is no object that is presented in common to Sight and Touch: space or extension, which has the best claim to be their common object, is specifically as well as numerically different in Sight and in Touch.

V. (Sect. 147-48.) The explanation of the tactual significance of the visible and visual Signs, upon which human experience proceeds, is offered in the Theory that all visible phenomena are arbitrary signs in what is virtually the Language of Nature, addressed by God to the senses and intelligence of Man.

VI. (Sect. 149-60.) The true object studied in Geometry is the kind of Extension given in Touch, not that given in Sight: real Extension in all its phases is tangible, not visible: colour is the only immediate object of Sight, and colour being mind-dependent sensation, cannot be realised without percipient mind. These concluding sections are supplementary to the main argument.

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The fact that distance or outness is invisible is sometimes regarded as Berkeley’s contribution to the theory of seeing. It is rather the assumption on which the Essay proceeds (sect. 2). The Essay does not prove this invisibility, but seeks to shew how, notwithstanding, we learn to find outness through seeing. That the relation between the visual signs of outness, on the one hand, and the real distance which they signify, on the other, is in all cases arbitrary, and discovered through experience, is the burden of sect. 2-40. The previously recognised signs of “considerably remote” distances, are mentioned (sect. 3). But near distance was supposed to be inferred by a visual geometry—and to be “suggested,” not signified by arbitrary signs. The determination of the visual signs which suggest outness, near and remote, is Berkeley’s professed discovery regarding vision.

An induction of the visual signs which “suggest” distance, is followed (sect. 43) by an assertion of the wholly sensuous reality of colour, which is acknowledged to be the only immediate object of sight. Hence visible extension, consisting in colour, must be dependent for its realisation upon sentient or percipient mind. It is then argued (sect. 44) that this mind-dependent visible outness has no resemblance to the tangible reality (sect. 45). This is the first passage in the Essay in which Touch and its data are formally brought into view. Tactual or locomotive experience, it is implied, is needed to infuse true reality into our conceptions of distance or outness. This cannot be got from seeing any more than from hearing, or tasting, or smelling. It is as impossible to see and touch the same object as it is to hear and touch the same object. Visible objects and ocular sensations can only be ideal signs of real things.

The sections in which Touch is thus introduced are among the most important in the Essay. They represent the outness given in hearing as wholly sensuous, ideal, or mind-dependent: they recognise as more truly real that got by contact and locomotion. But if this is all that man can see, it follows that his visible world, at any rate, becomes real only in and through percipient mind. The problem of an Essay on Vision is thus, to explain how the visible world of extended colour can inform us of tangible realities, which it does not in the least resemble, and with which it has no necessary connexion. That visible phenomena, or else certain organic sensations involved in seeing (sect. 3, 16, 21, 27), gradually suggest the real or tangible outness with which they are connected in the divinely constituted system of nature, is the explanation which now begins to dawn upon us.

Here an ambiguity in the Essay appears. It concludes that the visible world cannot be real without percipient realising mind, i.e. not otherwise than ideally: yet the argument seems to take for granted that we are percipient of a tangible world that is independent of percipient realising mind. The reader is apt to say that the tangible world must be as dependent on percipient mind for its reality as the visible world is concluded to be, and for the same reason. This difficulty was soon afterwards encountered in the book of Principles, where the worlds of sight and touch are put on the same level; and the possibility of unperceived reality in both cases is denied; on the ground that a material world cannot be realised in the total absence of Spirit—human and divine. The term “external” may still be applied to tactual and locomotive phenomena alone, if men choose; but this not because of the ideal character of what is seen, and the unideal reality of what is touched, but only because tactual perceptions are found to be more firm and steady than visual. Berkeley preferred in this way to insinuate his new conception of the material world by degrees, at the risk of exposing this juvenile and tentative Essay on Vision to a charge of incoherence.

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The way in which visual ideas or phenomena “suggest” the outness or distance of things from the organ of sight having been thus explained, in what I call the First Part of the Essay, the Second and Third Parts (sect. 52-120) argue for the invisibility of real extension in two other relations, viz. magnitude and locality or situation. An induction of the visual signs of tangible size and situation is given in those sections. The result is applied to solve two problems then notable in optics, viz. (1) the reason for the greater visible size of the horizontal moon than of the moon in its meridian (sect. 67-87); and (2) the fact that objects are placed erect in vision only on condition that their images on the retina are inverted (sect. 88-120). Here the antithesis between the ideal world of coloured extension, and the real world of resistant extension is pressed with vigour. The “high” and “low” of the visible world is not the “high” and “low” of the tangible world (sect. 91-106). There is no resemblance and no necessary relation, between those two so-called extensions; not even when the number of visible objects happen to coincide with the number of tangible objects of which they are the visual signs, e.g. the visible and tangible fingers on the hand: for the born-blind, on first receiving sight, could not parcel out the visible phenomena in correspondence with the tangible.

The next Part of the Essay (sect. 121-45) argues for a specific as well as a numerical difference between the original data of sight and the data of touch and locomotion. Sight and touch perceive nothing in common. Extension in its various relations differs in sight from extension in touch. Coloured extension, which alone is visible, is found to be different in kind from resistant extension, which alone is tangible. And if actually perceived or concrete extensions differ thus, the question is determined. For all extension with which man can be concerned must be concrete (sect. 23). Extension in the abstract is meaningless (sect. 124-25). What remains is to marshal the scattered evidence, and to guard the foregoing conclusions against objections. This is attempted in sections 128-46.

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The enunciation of the summary generalisation, which forms the “New Theory of Vision” (sect. 147-8), may be taken as the Fifth and culminating Part of the Essay.

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The closing sections (149-60), as I have said, are supplementary, and profess to determine the sort of extension—visible or tangible—with which Geometry is concerned. In concluding that it is tangible, he tries to picture the mental state of Idominians, or unbodied spirits, endowed with visual perceptions only, and asks what their conception of outness and solid extension must be. Here further refinements in the interpretation of visual perception, and its organic conditions, which have not escaped the attention of latter psychologists and biologists, are hinted at.

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Whether the data of sight consist of non-resembling arbitrary Signs of the tactual distances, sizes, and situations of things, is a question which some might prefer to deal with experimentally—by trial of the experience of persons in circumstances fitted to supply an answer. Of this sort would be the experience of the born-blind, immediately after their sight has been restored; the conception of extension and its relations found in persons who continue from birth unable to see; the experience (if it could be got) of persons always destitute of all tactual and locomotive perceptions, but familiar with vision; and the facts of seeing observed in infants of the human species, and in the lower animals.

Berkeley did not try to verify his conclusions in this way. Here and there (sect. 41, 42, 79, 92-99, 103, 106, 110, 128, 132-37), he conjectures what the first visual experience of those rescued from born-blindness is likely to be; he also speculates, as we have seen, about the experience of unbodied spirits supposed to be able to see, but unable to touch or move (sect. 153-59); and in the Appendix he refers, in confirmation of his New Theory, to a reported case of one born blind who had obtained sight. But he forms his Theory independently of those delicate and difficult investigations. His testing facts were sought introspectively. Indeed those physiologists and mental philosophers who have since tried to determine what vision in its purity is, by cases either of communicated sight or of continued born-blindness, have illustrated the truth of Diderot’s remark—“préparer et interroger un aveugle-né n’eût point été une occupation indigne des talens réunis de Newton, Des Cartes, Locke, et Leibniz(275).”

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Berkeley’s New Theory has been quoted as a signal example of discovery in metaphysics. The subtle analysis which distinguishes seeing strictly so called, from judgments about extended things, suggested by what we see, appears to have been imperfectly known to the ancient philosophers. Aristotle, indeed, speaks of colour as the only proper object of sight; but, in passages of the De Anima(276) where he names properties peculiar to particular senses, he enumerates others, such as motion, figure, and magnitude, which belong to all the senses in common. His distinction of Proper and Common Sensibles appears at first to contradict Berkeley’s doctrine of the heterogeneity of the ideal visible and the real tangible worlds. Aristotle, however, seems to question the immediate perceptibility of Common Sensibles, and to regard them as realised through the activity of intelligence(277).

Some writers in Optics, in mediaeval times, and in early modern philosophy, advanced beyond Aristotle, in explaining the relation of our matured notion of distance to what we originally perceive in seeing, and in the fifteenth century it was discovered by Maurolyco that the rays of light from the object converge to a focus in the eye; but I have not been able to trace even the germ of the New Theory in these speculations.

Excepting some hints by Descartes, Malebranche was among the first dimly to anticipate Berkeley, in resolving our supposed power of seeing outness into an interpretation of visual signs which we learn by experience to understand. The most important part of Malebranche’s account of seeing is contained in the Recherche de la Vérité (Liv. I. ch. 9), in one of those chapters in which he discusses the frequent fallaciousness of the senses, and in particular of our visual perceptions of extension. He accounts for their inevitable uncertainty by assigning them not to sense but to misinterpretation of what is seen. He also enumerates various visual signs of distance.

That the Recherche of Malebranche, published more than thirty years before the Essay, was familiar to Berkeley before the publication of his New Theory, is proved by internal evidence, and by his juvenile Commonplace Book. I am not able to discover signs of a similar connexion between the New Theory and the chapter on the mystery of sensation in Glanvill’s Scepsis Scientifica (ch. 5), published some years before the Recherche of Malebranche, where Glanvill refers to “a secret deduction,” through which—from motions, &c., of which we are immediately percipient—we “spell out” figures, distances, magnitudes, and colours, which have no resemblance to them.

An approach to the New Theory is found in a passage which first appeared in the second edition of Locke’s Essay, published in 1694, to which Berkeley refers in his own Essay (sect. 132-35), and which, on account of its relative importance, I shall here transcribe at length:—

“We are further to consider concerning Perception that the ideas we receive by sensation are often, in grown people, altered by the judgment, without our taking notice of it. When we set before our eyes a round globe of any uniform colour, e.g. gold, alabaster, or jet, it is certain that the idea thereby imprinted in our mind is of a flat circle, variously shadowed, with several degrees of light and brightness coming to our eyes. But, we having by use been accustomed to perceive what kind of appearance convex bodies are wont to make in us, what alterations are made in the reflection of light by the difference in the sensible figures of bodies—the judgment presently, by an habitual custom, alters the appearances into their causes; so that, from that which is truly variety of shadow or colour, collecting the figure, it makes it pass for a mark of figure, and frames to itself the perception of a convex figure and an uniform colour, when the idea we receive from them is only a plane variously coloured, as is evident in painting.

“To which purpose I shall here insert a problem of that very ingenious and studious promoter of real knowledge, the learned and worthy Mr. Molyneux, which he was pleased to send me in a letter some months since, and it is this:—Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt the one and the other, which is the cube and which the sphere. Suppose then the cube and the sphere placed on a table, and the blind man be made to see: quere, whether, by his sight, before he touched them, he could not distinguish and tell, which is the globe and which the cube? To which the acute and judicious proposer answers: ‘Not.’ For, though he has obtained the experience of how a globe, how a cube affects his touch; yet he has not obtained the experience that what affects his touch so and so, must affect his sight so and so; so that a protuberant angle in the cube, that pressed his hand unequally, shall appear to his eye as it does in the cube.—I agree with this thinking gentleman, whom I am proud to call my friend, in his answer to this his problem, and am of opinion that the blind man, at first sight, would not be able to say with certainty which was the globe and which the cube, whilst he only saw them; though he would unerringly name them by his touch, and certainly distinguish them by the difference in their figures felt.

“This I have set down, and leave with my reader, as an occasion for him to consider how much he may be beholden to experience, improvement, and acquired notions, where he thinks he had not the least use of, or help from them: and the rather because this observing gentleman further adds that, having, upon the occasion of my book, proposed this problem to divers very ingenious men, he hardly ever met with one that at first gave the answer to it which he thinks true, till by hearing his reasons they were convinced.

“But this is not I think usual in any of our ideas but those received by sight: because sight, the most comprehensive of the senses, conveying to our minds the ideas of light and colours, which are peculiar only to that sense; and also the far different ideas of space, figure, and motion, the several varieties of which change the appearance of its proper object, i.e. light and colours; we bring ourselves by use to judge of the one by the other. This, in many cases, by a settled habit, in things whereof we have frequent experience, is performed so constantly and so quick, that we take that for the perception of our sensation, which is an idea formed by our judgment; so that one, i.e. that of sensation, serves only to excite the other, and is scarce taken notice of itself; as a man who reads or hears with attention and understanding takes little notice of the character or sounds, but of the ideas that are excited in him by them.

“Nor need we wonder that this is done with so little notice, if we consider how very quick the actions of the mind are performed; for, as itself is thought to take up no space, to have no extension, so its actions seem to require no time, but many of them seem to be crowded into an instant. I speak this in comparison of the actions of the body.... Secondly, we shall not be much surprised that this is done with us in so little notice, if we consider how the facility we get of doing things, by a custom of doing, makes them often pass in us without notice. Habits, especially such as are begun very early, come at last to produce actions in us which often escape our observation.... And therefore it is not so strange that our mind should often change the idea of its sensation into that of its judgment, and make the one serve only to excite the other, without our taking notice of it.” (Essay concerning Human Understanding,