BERKELEY, GEORGE. — English philosopher and Anglican bishop, born on 12 March 1685 at Dysert, in County Kilkenny, Ireland, into an immigrant Anglican family; died at Oxford on 14 January 1753. At the age of 15 he entered Trinity College, the celebrated University of Dublin, where he completed his studies with distinction and later taught Greek, Hebrew, and theology. During this period he wrote the Commonplace Book (published only by Fraser in 1871; the Johnston edition of 1930 is much better), a book of personal notes and jottings, highly useful for understanding the formation and development of his thought. At the same University B. served as a preacher, after receiving Holy Orders in 1709. In that same year he published his first work, Essay towards a new Theory of Vision, and in the following year, 1710, his principal work, Treatise on the principles of human knowledge. Toward the end of 1712 he went to London, where he met many of the leading scholars of the time and engaged in a polemic against the free-thinkers, with various articles in the journal The Guardian. In 1713 he published Three dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, in which he presented, in a livelier and more literary form, the same ideas as in the Treatise. In 1714 he came to Italy for the first time, and returned there in 1716, remaining for four years; while passing through Paris, he had the opportunity to converse with Malebranche. Having returned to London, and after working toward an ethical and religious reform, which he regarded as the only effective remedy for the ills of his country, he hoped to carry out his project of evangelization among the American Indians by founding a missionary institute in the Bermudas: accompanied by his wife, several companions, and an exceptional supply of books, he sailed for the New World in 1728. After a three-year stay in Rhode Island, however (during this time he composed the dialogue Alcyphron or the minute philosopher against the free-thinkers), his hopes were frustrated by the failure to send subsidies, and he returned to London. In 1734 he was appointed bishop of Cloyne in Ireland. In this office he displayed active zeal in every field, together with broad tolerance toward the Catholics, who constituted the overwhelming majority of his diocese. In addition to various publications on different subjects, in 1744, on the occasion of an epidemic, B. published a curious medical-philosophical work, inspired by the therapeutic properties of tar-water, which he had tested in America: Siris (from σειρά = chain), A Chain of philosophical reflexions and enquiries concerning the virtues of tar-water. From a philosophical standpoint, this latter work reveals a partly new conception of the world, with a mystical-Neoplatonic background, without, however, reaching—as some maintain—a true antithesis to his earlier thought. In 1751 B. left his see and retired to Oxford, where he spent the final years of his life until his death.
THOUGHT. — The starting point of B.’s philosophical system, developed with the explicit aim of combating the atheism, scepticism, and rationalism of his age, is to be sought in Cartesian subjectivism and Locke’s empiricist nominalism, not without a direct dependence on the spiritualism of Malebranche. Proceeding from the Cartesian presupposition that the object, insofar as it is given in knowledge, is only an idea or representation, and carrying further the criticism that Locke had directed against the objectivity of the secondary qualities of bodies, B. arrives at the clear denial of matter as an objective reality transcending our representations. Indeed, he maintains, the same reasons that demonstrate the subjectivity of secondary qualities—sounds, colours, etc.—apply also to primary qualities, namely extension and motion. These too (B. endeavours to demonstrate this in the careful Theory of Vision) are irredeemably subjective, since space is not, as is commonly believed, a datum of external perception, but rather the purely ideal result of previous experiences and psychological associations. Once the objectivity of space is denied, there is no longer any reason to admit, with Locke, beyond our representations of bodies, an unknown material substance (Principles, § 73): the body is nothing other than the complex of our ideas or representations, “that which is seen, smelled, touched.” “Matter,” at bottom, is merely a name (nominalism) by which we designate the totality of our sensible representations; the being of bodies is resolved into their appearing before our consciousness, into their being perceived, “their ease is percipi” (Principles, § 3). To think of an unknown and ineffable material substance as existing beyond our representations, as their substratum, origin, or cause, is to mistake a mere “scholastic abstraction” for reality.
But if it is true, B. maintains, that bodies are nothing other than ideas, it does not follow that reality is denied or destroyed: the world is not an illusion or a hallucination. Reality remains firm and stable; it is, however, entirely resolved into the spiritual world. Substantial reality, albeit relative, is our spirit, the self, which cannot be reduced to a mere bundle of representations, but is intuited as the subject and active principle of ideas, which it can in fact revive and reproduce through imagination and memory. This spiritual activity of our self nevertheless has an evident limit: the world of external sensations is not within our discretion or power; the corporeal universe does not depend upon us (Principles, §§ 29, 146). From this immediate datum of our psychological reflection B. concludes that the ideas of the world derive directly from God into our spirit: He, infinite and absolute spirit, is the supreme and fundamental reality, the eternal productive activity that impresses ideas upon our spirit according to a regularly uniform order and succession, which constitutes the so-called natural law (Principles, § 30). Consequently, the reality and consistency of the world do not depend at all upon my present perception, or that of any other finite spirit, but solely upon the activity of absolute spirit: according to B., it is in their independence from any particular spirit that the reality of ideas identified with things consists.
Thus, rather than in an idealism in the modern sense of the word, B.’s system resolves itself into an immaterialist and theistic realism. Against the sceptics he can assert that not only is knowledge of reality possible for us, but that reality coincides with our very ideas and knowledge; and against atheism B. arrives at the affirmation of God, not as the mere first cause of a material and objective world, but as the centre and immediate origin of our own spiritual life: a conception, as can be seen, essentially mystical, in keeping with B.’s genuinely religious temperament, and accentuated in his final philosophical work, Siris.
In harmony with the fundamental lines of his system, B. resolves the remaining philosophical problems, for example those of truth and causality. Everything thought and willed by God is true; what is thought only by our spirit is false; every simple original perception (intuition) is true; error arises from our fallacious associations of primitive data. Furthermore, every product of abstraction is false and unreal: abstract ideas, against which he directed a tenacious and subtle criticism, have no consistency for B., not even in the mind. As for causality, it belongs exclusively to spirit. There is no causal nexus among representations in themselves (Principles, §§ 64–65), but only an order of succession and finality, according to the will and Providence of God, who can freely suspend or violate that order through the miracle. Mechanism, therefore, as a system for interpreting reality, is false, although it has a utilitarian and practical aspect. Sciences likewise possess a purely practical value; truth and reality are an achievement that only philosophy can attain.
B.’s system, the work of a penetrating and original philosophical mind, is an extremist reaction against materialism; yet it contains its share of truth, as does every product of genius. For traditional philosophy too, the universe exists insofar as it is thought and willed by God; it is not the knowledge of God that is dependent upon things, but things that are dependent upon II. This was B.’s fundamental intuition. But his error, serious and in no way excusable on account of the manifest inadequacy of his logical and metaphysical presuppositions, was to deny the reality of matter insofar as it is distinct from spirit. It is true that nothing exists independently of God’s present thought and will, but this does not remove the fact that things have a reality of their own; once this is denied, the way is opened to idealism and pantheism. The very assertion of the reality and substantiality of our self as spirit will not withstand the logical development that the Berkeleyan presuppositions will find in another great English philosopher, D. Hume (v.); the same must be said, analogously, of causality, which B. denied to matter and reserved for the self.
Nor is it difficult to observe how, in B.’s immaterialism, even though animated by the most sincere religious spirit, in addition to the essential alteration of the concept of truth already indicated, it is extremely difficult, not to say impossible, to preserve other fundamental concepts of the Christian philosophical tradition, such as creation and freedom. This difficulty is inherent in every philosophical system that disregards the objectivity of being and the transcendent reality of nature, the indispensable condition and at the same time the limit of the life and activity of the human spirit.