Berkeley, George (1685–1753)

BERKELEY, GEORGE (1685–1753)

BERKELEY, GEORGE (1685–1753), bishop of Cloyne, Anglo-Irish philosopher and cleric. Berkeley was born near Kilkenny; little is known of his parents, but they seem to have been minor gentry who claimed some allegiance to the powerful English aristocrats of the same name. In any case Berkeley went to good schools, studying first at Kilkenny College and then Trinity College, Dublin, where he took his B.A. (1704) and M.A. (1707) and became a junior fellow. In his early years at Trinity he wrote An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), in which he argues that our perception of depth is a matter of inference from experience, and the two works in which he expounds his "immaterialism," A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713), the latter deploying the dialogue form to render his philosophy more attractive and accessible. In the years ahead Berkeley was often absent from Trinity, but he kept his fellowship, eventually becoming Doctor of Divinity (1721).

Berkeley left Ireland for the first time in 1713, spending time in London—where he was quickly drawn into literary circles by his countrymen, satirist Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) and essayist Richard Steele (1672–1729)—before embarking on extensive continental tours as a chaplain and tutor. Serious preferment within the church did not come until 1724, when he was appointed to the deanery of Derry, but by then Berkeley's ambitions lay across the Atlantic. He was proposing to found and preside over a college in Bermuda to educate the sons of settler and indigenous families from throughout the English colonies, partly with an eye to better establishing the English Church in America. Berkeley raised considerable sums by public subscription, but a government grant promised by prime minister Robert Walpole (1676–1745) was not forthcoming.

In 1728, in an attempt to force Walpole's hand, Berkeley sailed for America, where he was to live in Rhode Island for several years. Here he passed his time writing Alciphron: or, the Minute Philosopher (1732), an extended defense of Christianity, directed in part against the ethical writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and Bernard de Mandeville (1670–1733). The Bermuda college was never built. In 1734, three years after his return to England, Berkeley was nominated to the bishopric of Cloyne, an impoverished see in the south of Ireland, where he spent the remainder of his life. His last major work was Siris (1744), an extremely popular medical essay, densely packed with maxims from ancient philosophy, which promoted tar-water as a panacea.

Berkeley is known for the concise and highly original, even idiosyncratic, metaphysical system expounded in the Principles and the Three Dialogues and usually referred to as "immaterialism." This system is best understood as an intervention in late seventeenth-century doctrines of substance, reacting specifically to the thought of the English epistemologist and political theorist John Locke (1632–1704) and the French Cartesian philosopher Nicholas Malebranche (1638–1715). These philosophers adhered to a dualism that proposed two fundamentally different kinds of substance in the world—matter and spirit. They also accepted that our knowledge of material substances was tenuous at best: we have mind-dependent "ideas" that might somehow represent external objects, but since we have no immediate access to those objects apart from our ideas, we can only surmise their existence. Berkeley proposed a radical simplification: there are only active minds and the passive ideas they entertain; material substances simply do not exist. Berkeley observed that there are ideas we make up ourselves—we can dream of a unicorn or imagine a tree—but there are also the more vivid and orderly ideas of sense experience—the ball we turn in our hands. Since ideas can only be the properties of mind, these potent ideas of sense must come from another, more powerful mind. For Berkeley, the only possible explanation is that our sense experience is a direct communication from the mind of God.

Berkeley vigorously defended immaterialism as vindicated by common sense: our ideas of things are surely sufficient for the business of life, in which we never make reference to the elusive material substances of philosophy. Alarmed by what he saw as the growing skepticism of his generation, he also promoted his theocentric system as an antidote to atheism. But despite all this, Berkeley won no adherents. An age that embraced the philosophy of John Locke and the physics of Isaac Newton (1642–1727) naturally found the elimination of matter difficult to digest. Many refused to take Berkeley seriously—literary critic Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) famously refuted immaterialism by kicking a stone—but English philosophers, notably David Hume (1711–1776) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), have studied Berkeley's writings carefully and adapted many of his arguments, even as they refused to admit his conclusions.

See also Hume, David ; Locke, John ; Newton, Isaac.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Source

Berkeley, George. The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne. Edited by A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop. 9 vols. London, 1948–1957. The definitive edition.

Secondary Sources

Luce, A. A. The Life of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne. London, 1949.

Tipton, I. C. Berkeley: The Philosophy of Immaterialism. 1974. Reprint: Bristol, 1994. A thorough and accessible study of Berkeley's metaphysics.

Peter Walmsley