even to Quixotisms and oddities of kindness-give such a warm background to his philosophy as no other great thinker within our recollection can equal. A man who is ready, at an age when men are supposed to consider their own comfort, to sacrifice himself in one of the least comfortable of missionsa man moved in later years to pause in his philosophy in order to promulgate tar-water-grand specific for all the physical ills of humanity-one who feared neither poverty nor neglect nor derision for what seemed to him at the moment the best he could do for his fellow-creatures, is such a man as is rarely met with in the sphere of philosophy. No mental system has called forth such contemptuous criticism, rude laughter, and foolish condemnation -none has been denounced as so visionary and unreal; yet Berkeley is the one philosopher of modern times who brings the race within the warmest circle of human sympathies, and casts a certain interest and glow of light from his own nature upon metaphysics themselves.

He was born in the county of Kilkenny, in March 1684, of one of those families of English colonists who have so curiously affected the history and character of Ireland. He himself was of the second generation after the immigration of the household, and presents himself to us with so many of the best features of the traditional Irishman that it is difficult to refrain from identifying him with that busy, eloquent, restless Celtic genius which common opinion has given to the country of his birth. There are no details but the driest of his youth. He was educated, in the first place, at Kilkenny School, then taught by a Dr. Hinton, and at fifteen was admitted a pensioner of Trinity College, Dublin. Wealth there seems to have been none to make his family conspicuous; and their descent from the Berkeleys of Stratton was apparently illegitimate, and did not count. His

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extreme youth at the time of his entering the University would seem a sign that his great powers had been early developed; and it is apparent that his vivacious temperament, and the ferment of universal rebellion against recognised views and modes of thought so common to young men of genius, soon drove him into utterance. His first publications were upon mathematical subjects, and one of them, at least, was written before he was twenty. At twenty-three he was admitted Fellow of his College, and two years after published his Theory of Vision,' `a which we cannot here discuss, but which Mr. Lewes tells us, in his History of Philosophy,' made "an epoch in science." Up to this moment no light except the feeblest twinkle of history falls upon the young man. How he lived, or what were his surroundings, are matters entirely invisible to us. "He was much addicted to reading" the "airy visions of romances," his biographer tells us, not without an insinuation that these studies helped "to give birth to his disbelief of the existence of matter." The connection is one which we fear it would be difficult to trace, though the suggestion is delicious. The romances with which Berkeley amused his eager and manifold intelligence must have been those splendid fictions of the school of the 'Grand Cyrus,' which little Lady Mary Pierrepoint a few years before was reading in her nursery. But the young philosopher, it is evident, did not confine himself to fiction. 68 Disgust at the books of metaphysics then received in the University, and that inquisitive attention to the operations of the mind which about this time was excited by the writings of Mr. Locke and Father Malebranche," concurred with his novel-reading to incline him towards a new system of thought. And it is evident that there were in Berkeley other elements at work,

differing from the ordinary motives of the philosopher. Though there is no want of candour in his reasoning, nor any disingenuous attempt at the probation of any system distinct from that of metaphysics, there is a foregone conclusion essentially unphilosophical in his mind from the outset. It is "in opposition to sceptics and atheists"-it is "to promote" not only "useful knowledge," but (6 religion," that he gives forth his philosophy to the world. This motive gives warmth and force to his words, and heightens every energy of thought within him; but it is not the passionless search for truth, whatsoever that truth might happen to be, which is the ideal temper of philosophy. One can imagine the young man's nature rising into a glow of pious enthusiasm-high indignation with the frivolous doubting world around him a passion of lofty eagerness to change the spirit and atmosphere which fills his country and debases his age. Under all the measured composure of his demonstrations, this light of meaning glows subdued, like the sunshine through the golden-tinted marble which serves for windows, as many of our readers will remember, on that Florentine hill where San Miniato watches the dead. He is betrayed not by any act or even word, but by the intense still light of purpose and meaning in all his speculations. Each step he takes conducts him not into new and undiscovered lands, where each inch of space may, for ought he knows, contain a discovery, but, with a steady regularity and stateliness, to one great point at which he has aimed from the beginning. He has covered over the cross on his buckler, and fights for the moment in armour which bears no cognisance; but yet he is as truly, according to his perceptions, the champion of religion, as if he wore the outward appearance of a Crusader. It is curious enough,

and looks like a kind of natural punishment for this beautiful and touching disingenuousness, that Berkeley's idealism holds the place of a stepping-stone to the unmitigated scepticism of Hume. The strain was too great for the common mind, and produced a reaction; and the assumption by the idealist of all power and perception to the intellect alone, provoked an examination of that intellect on the part of the sceptic such as nothing human can bear. But, we repeat, there is no disingenuousness in Berkeley's reasonings. They are even pronounced to be (philosophically) irrefutable-a fact which is no demonstration whatever, either of their truth or of the cessation of other attempts equally irrefutable (philosophically) to prove them at once futile and foolish. So charming is divine philosophy!

But the impression we derive of Berkeley as a man, in the first outburst of his powers, is by just so much the more attractive and lovable as this secret meaning within him is unphilosophical. Such an ardent, impassioned, generous young soul, as those which, some forty years ago, facing the infidel world with all the fervour of youthful opposition made beautiful by piety, began that peaceful revolution in France, which has, alas! developed into Ultramontanism, and many things less lofty and lovely than Montalembert and Lacordaire; such a young knight of Christianity as about the same period the English Church gave birth to, among the earlier followers of Newman-to develop (again alas !) into Oratorists and Ritualists-was the Irish youth, fallen upon evil days for religion, surrounded by scepticism and that brutal freethinking which belonged to the eighteenth century, reading Locke and Malebranche and the 'Grand Cyrus' in his rooms at Trinity, and feeling his heart burn within him. Such a one, throbbing all over with spirit and soul and genius-half scornful of, half indifferent to, the body

which was, as he felt to his fingerpoints, but the docile servant of his growing, swelling, creating mind such a one to acknowledge that sense was all, or almost all, that man had to guide him! The fashion of the age did not run in the way of great missionary exertions in our sense of the word; and Berkeley had actually embarked in the tortuous ways of metaphysics. It is not difficult to imagine with what a silent ardour, with what light in his young eyes, he turned to elaborate his own system of thought. Philosophy is always free to do what youth is always inclined to; and that is, to spurn all previous foundations, and begin from the beginning for its own hand. Thus the field was open for the Idealist; no tradition of his science bound him to respect the theories which had preceded his. An iconoclast is nothing to a philosopher. Berkeley put his foot upon Locke without a moment's hesitation, and strode on to the often-contested and never-conquered field.

It was in the year 1710, when he was a young man of six-and-twenty, Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, working with his pupils in the obscurity of an island much more distant in all practical ways from England than it is now, that the 'Principles of Human Knowledge' were published. He does not seem in all his subsequent life to have gone beyond or much developed this early work. But in order to enable the ordinary reader, who is not a philosopher, to follow the true sense of his argument, it must be permit ted to us to pause once more and make clear the difference between the world of actual life and the world of philosophy. If the arguments belonging to the one are received as applying to the other, they are simple absurdities, such as no man other than a food or madman could hold or dwell upon. Dr. Johnson's "peremptory refutation," as Mr. Lewes called it, of Berkeley's theory by the easy expe

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dient of kicking a stone, and Reid's similar argument about breaking his head against a post or stepping into a dirty kennel, are simple sillinesses, strange though it may be to give such a name to the sayings of two such authorities. They suggest a confusion of the two worlds, quite excusable in the vulgar, but unpardonable in the learned. Outside everything is real to us. In our practical concerns we do not pause to discuss what images are imprinted on the eye, or what sounds on the tympanum. We hear and we see, which is quite enough for us. Neither do we pause to consider how it is that an impression of something snowy white or blazing crimson is conveyed to us when we look at a rose; the rose does not seem, but is, red or white. It is rich with perfume; it has thorns that prick and moss that clothes it, walk on solid soil without for an instant contradicting reason by the supposition that the foot which strikes that steady surface, and the earth that receives it, are but phantasms of our senses. The most profound and the most ideal of philosophers walks abroad like other men, and accepts the ordinary accidents of nature with that unhesitating natural conviction which he can no more contest than he can→→ doubt he ever so much-doubt his own existence. The stone and, the post are as indubitable to him as to ourselves. Few philosophers have lived so healthful and full a material life as the man who denied the existence of matter; but then he never denied its existence in the outer sphere of fact and everyday reality. "That what I see, hear, and feel doth exist-i.e., is perceived by me-I no more doubt than I do of my own being," says Berkeley. "I do not argue against the existence of any one thing that we can apprehend either by sensation or reflection. That the things I see with my eyes and touch with my hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least question."

Out of doors, in common daylight, common air, in the life which he enjoyed fully, with all his young faculties strung to its pleasures and its wonders, Berkeley was as other men. A keen observation of everything going on around him is apparent in his letters. The "horrible rocks" of the Alpine passes make his heart melt within him; the miseries he sees in France as he passes through it "spoil his mirth." Wherever he goes it is with open eyes, full of vivacity and human kindness. This is the world we live in, the world familiar and homely, whose facts are incontestable, whose delights console, whose horrors appal us. In respect to its stones and its posts, its roses and its landscapes, Berkeley is at one with all mankind.

But lift the curtain which hangs over the door of the philosopher's study, and it is a different world which you enter. He sits there in the silence, with his books round him, with his desk before him, a musing and bewildered creature, and asks himself what is real, and what is a vain show. In that silence there is but one thing that makes itself evident, so as no man can contradict it. He himself is that is the point from which he starts. It may not, perhaps, be capable of elaborate demonstration, but yet it is, even by a philosopher, indisputable. He is there, but what are these visions around him? All that he can understand of the merest table or chair is, that it conveys a certain notion to his mind. The tree that looks in at his window is, he knows, not green in itself, but green by right of some property in his eyes that makes it

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His hand touches something on which he leans-what is it? But for the hand that touches, the arm that leans on it, the thing would have of itself no conscious being. What is it, then? What can we ever know about it? Folly to laugh at to the echo outside, but within actually the subject

which has occupied for ages the closest thoughts of the greatest thinkers. The carpenter who made this bit of oak or mahogany into shape, no doubt, with open mouth and eyes, and with inextinguishable laughter, would tell the philosopher all about it; but the philosopher, for his part, knows nothing about it. He cannot tell how that dead thing can be. He looks at it on every side, and can make nothing of it. Is it the shadow of some mysterious unknown thing which exists unseen, unfathomable, in the wide wastes of earth? or is it only so far as it impresses its likeness upon a seeing eye that it exists at all? This is the question he makes to the blank silence, which gives him no reply. The conclusion come to by the philosophy of Locke was, that a vast phantom called Matter did exist in the worldthat houses and mountains, and even tables and chairs, were, in some shadowy way, because of this vast substantial soul, if such an expression may be used, which was behind them. As the soul lives, according to the Christian faith, because God lives, so things were, according to philosophy, because Matter was. What it was, how it was, or what connection it had with all these eccentric signs of its presence, nobody could tell any more than anybody, unassisted by the light of revelation, can tell what God is, or how He unites Himself to His creatures. The other was an Earth-God, a kind of heavy inanimate soul to the inanimate universe. It brooded upon the depths a visible darkness. It found an Avatar, like the Hindoo Divinity, in every new development of solid shape and size. Such was the idea current in the darkling world of philosophy. We repeat, all this had no more to do with the ordinary globe than a chemical knowledge of its constituent parts has to do with the refreshing influence of a draught of water. Outside, all was plain matter of fact, indisputable reality, a

world full of things and beings of many sorts and varieties; inside, there were but, as it were, the shadows glimmering confused upon a mirror sometimes growing into dark shapes, sometimes dispersing into mere vapour. To bring the processes, the reasonings of one world into another, would be simply absurdity. In the one, liberal nature takes everything for granted; in the other, nothing is believed, nothing allowed-every thing put to severest examination. Without fully acknowledging and perceiving this distinction, and that with a candour and clearness which is not displayed by either Johnson or Reid, we can neither understand Berkeley's system nor that of any other great leader of (so-called) thought.

After this preface, we may venture to give such an indication as comes within the range of an ordinary observer of the views contained in the 'Principles of Human Knowledge,' written when he was six-and-twenty, by the brilliant young Irishman, which, Mr. Lewes tells us, "made an epoch in metaphysics," These principles are: That spirit, the unseen being of God and of man, is the only real and knowable existence in the world: that the Earth-God-the inanimate abstraction Matter, in which external things were supposed to live and have their being, as the soul lives and has its being in the life of God is a mere invention of human fancy: and that we can form no conception of the world around us except as perceived by us. Such are the plain and simple foundations of Berkeley's system, From this it will be seen that much laughter was expended by the age, and many shafts of dull wit shot at the philosopher which fell en irely wide of their mark. In these clear and simple principles there is nothing about the non-existence of stones or posts.

"The only thing," he says, "whose existence I deny, is that which philosophers call matter or corporeal substance.

And in doing this," he adds, with a touch of humour, "there is no damage done to the rest of mankind, who, I daresay, will never miss it. So long as we attribute a real existence to unthinking things distinct from their being perceived, it is not only impossible

for us to know with evidence the nature of that it exists. Hence it is that we see any real unthinking being, but even philosophers distrust their senses, and doubt of the existence of heaven and earth-of everything they see and feel, even of their own bodies. And after all their labour and struggle of thought, they are forced to own we cannot attain to any self-evident or demonstrative knowledge of the existence of sensible things. But all this doubtfulness which so bewilders and confounds the mind, and makes philosophy ridiculous in the eyes of the world, vanishes if we annex a meaning to our words, and do not amuse ourselves with the terms absolute, external, exist, and suchlike, signifying we know what. I can as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things which I actually perceive by sense-it being a manifest contradiction that any sensible object should be immediately perceived by sight or touch, and at the same time have no existence in nature, since the very existence of an unthinking being consists in being perceived."

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