George Berkeley, Empiricist
Philosopher and Bishop
GEORGE BERKELEY (16851753)
Berkeley was born in Ireland near Kilkenny. His
father was a customs officer, and was reasonably well
off. His grandfather had been English, but both
grandfather and father lived in Ireland. Berkely did
not go to England until 1713, and consider himself
Irish. Still, he was Anglo-Irish and not Catholic Irish.
The 17th century was filled with English Irish conflict.
Cromwell came to Ireland in the 1650s and brutally
supressed the country. After his ascession to the throne
in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, William III came
to Ireland on a military campaign which culminated at
the battle of the Boyne and the surrender of Limerick
in 1690.
Berkeley was educated at Kilkenny College,
where he was proceeded by Jonathan Swift, and
was contemporary with Congreve. In 1700, at
the age of fifteen, he was sent to Trinity
College, Dublin. Berkeley studied Latin, and
Greek, French and Hebrew, mathematics and,
among other contemporary works of
philosophy, Locke's Essay Concerning Human
Understanding. Berkeley got his B.A. in 1704,
and stayed on a Trinity in the hope that a
fellowship might become available. On June
9th, 1707 he was admitted as a fellow and
ordained as an Anglican priest.
In 1707 Berkeley started to keep a note book,
filled with reflections about a wide range of
philosophical subjects. There are two of these
note books filled with some nine hundred
entries. They are clearly intended for his own
use and not intended for publication. They give
us a rare glimpse in the mind of a great
philosopher working on problems. These note
books have been published as Berkeley's
Philosophical Commentaries. Berkely had
already developed his immaterialist hypothesis - the view that matter does not exist.
In 1709 Berkeley was ordained as an Anglican
deacon. He published his first major work: An
Essay toward a New Theory of Vision. In 1710
he is ordained a priest. He published A Treatise
concerning the Principles of Human
Knowledge. This is arguably Berkeley's most
important work, and contains his critique of
materialism, dualism and his arguments for his
immaterialist hypothesis.
In April 1713 Berkely visited England for the
first time is presented to the English court by
Jonathan Swift and he quickly becomes a court
favorite. He publishes the Three Dialogues
between Hylas and Philonous. This is the
popular version of the doctrines presented in
the Principles. This is the book you are reading.
Berkeley is unusual among the great
philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth
century for two reasons. He married and he
made the voyage to the Americas.
In 1724 he was appointed Dean of Derry. He devised a
scheme to found a college in the Bermudas. He was
promised a grant from the government for 20,000
pounds to fund the project. In August, 1728 he
married Anne Forster, the daughter of a Judge. In
September, after four years of preparation for the new
college, he set sail for America and spent three years
in Rhode Island awaiting the promised grant from the
government. In 1732 he finished Alciphron or the
Minute Philosopher critically examining the various
forms of free-thinking in the age. Upon hearing the
grant would not be forthcoming, he gave the books
and supplies for the new college to Yale college and
returned to England.
Berkeley's Extravagant
Opinion
The main point of Berkeley's philosophy is that there is
no such thing as matter. It doesn't exist. There are only
minds, and ideas that occur in those minds. All the things
we perceive are ideas; the fact that we perceive them
means that we are ourselves essentially minds.
Berkeley dared to question Sir Isaac Newton on his
mathematics, particularly infinitesimals. He was himself
an able and subtle mathematician; but he insisted that
nothing in the real world could be divided infinitely. He
also challenged Newton's notions that space and time
could be said to exist on their own without anything
happening in them. Time, said Berkeley, does not 'flow
equably' regardless of its contents; time is the succession
of ideas in the mind.
The Freethinker
How he arrived at his immaterialism is
perhaps plain enough to see. He started out as
a constantly-questioning youngster, as he tells
us in his private notebook: he was 'distrustful
at eight years old'. The fashionable attitude
for young bucks at the beginning of the 18th
Century was the adoption of a thoroughgoing
radicalism called 'Freethinking', which
challenged all accepted wisdom, and religion
in particular.
The young Berkeley seems to have applied the method of
freethinking to everything he came across. When he studied
philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, the new and exciting
textbook was John Locke's Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, and in it Berkeley's eagle eye fell on a decidedly
dodgy description of substance. This is defined as
something which we suppose to underlie all the perceptible
features of things, though substance is not in itself perceptible,
according to Locke.
Applying to Substance the scepticism the Freethinkers applied to
God, Berkeley concluded that this mysterious matter is
something which makes no appearance in the world, and which
we can do perfectly well without. Logically, to say that we cannot
imagine doing without something is not sufficient to prove that
such a thing is present. Indeed, by Occam's Razor we are bound
to discredit such an imaginary entity.
We are left then with nothing but our perceptions; but the
evident fact that our perceptions are well-knit and coherent in
daily life amounted, for Berkeley, to nothing short of the
divine. In this way his scepticism, followed unflinchingly to its
conclusion, brought him back to religion. Nothing essentially
inaccessible to mind can be presumed to exist: Berkeley's
motto became esse est percipi - 'to be is to be perceived'. We
are not, however, isolated minds; we rely on shared
experience in the greatest and least things in life. The ground
of our unity, the universal mind within which we commonly
perceive, act and communicate, he concluded, is God.
Berkeley accordingly became an advocate of religion; he took
holy orders, as was required of those lecturing at Trinity
College.
He lectured in Greek, Hebrew and Divinity, becoming a
Fellow of the
College in his early twenties. It may seem in
hindsight a large step for Berkeley to decide
that the Source Of All is identical with the
Holy Trinity as worshipped in the Church of
Ireland, and to go all the way to becoming a
bishop of that church; but he took that path,
and it certainly helped him achieve a good
deal in his lifetime.
Vanessa and the
American Venture
Berkeley must have been a most engaging and persuasive
person. He became acquainted with Alexander Pope in London,
who described him as possessing 'every virtue under heaven'extraordinary praise from such a sharp satirist. He was also
friends with Jonathan Swift, who called him 'an absolute
philosopher', in the sense of one who does what is right rather
than what is gratifying or convenient. Swift had a wealthy lover,
Esther Vanhomrigh, whose story he told in the poem Cadenus
and Vanessa. When Esther died she left a very large sum to
Berkeley, although she was 'a perfect stranger' to him. Berkeley
accepted this money as a godsend and made good use of it. He
persuaded the British Government to grant him a further
enormous sum, £20,000, to go and found a university in
America. Berkeley sailed to New England, where he stayed for
over two years. His plan was to build a seminary that would
educate not only the European settlers' sons, but also young
Native Americans and African slaves, so that they could become
ministers and teachers among their own peoples.
On the map, Bermuda seemed the ideal place for this. So
much the worse for those who trust maps, as Berkeley
realised when he arrived in New England; Bermuda was
utterly impractical for many reasons. By that time it was
impossible to alter the terms of his government grant, which
in any case never came through, so he endowed existing
colleges instead. On leaving America, Berkeley sent Harvard
and Yale boxes of books, enriching their libraries. He also
gave Yale a farm to support the college, which was at the time
a struggling rural seminary with thirty or forty students.
When Berkeley was in America (1728 - 31), he was the most
famous person ever to have travelled there: his books had
been published in London and he was a dean of the
(Anglican) Church of Ireland. At that time, to be a bishop, or
even a dean, was no small matter; it was a position of
influence perhaps comparable to that of a present-day senior
executive of a major corporation.
Berkeley enlisted at least one effective disciple there,
the American Samuel Johnson, who consulted him
and followed Berkeley's plan in setting up what is
now Columbia University. The University of
Pennsylvania also acknowledges his influence, as
does the Berkeley Divinity School at Newhaven.
There are now many towns in the USA named after
George Berkeley, including the home of
the University of California. These were so named,
probably not so much in recognition of his
philosophy, or his philanthropy, as for a
stirring poem he wrote whose last verse begins
'Westward the course of Empire takes its way.
It's All In Your Head
Berkeley's American friend Samuel Johnson is not to be
confused with his namesake, the English lexicographer, who
made an impatient attempt at refuting Berkeley's
immaterialism. He kicked a rock, so that his foot rebounded
off it, to show that it contained matter; but in that act he only
showed his failure to grasp what Berkeley's theory said. It
has been misunderstood fairly consistently ever since, though
some philosophers, notably Ludwig Wittgenstein, have found
it both logically sound and meaningful. In the Chapel of
Trinity College Dublin there is a stained glass window
dedicated to George Berkeley, erected a hundred years after
his death and furnished with the wry quote: 'And when the
multitude heard him, they were astonished at his doctrine'
(Matthew 22:32).
To see the world in Berkeley's terms requires a mental change
of perspective such as the following
Question: How far away is the Milky Way?
Hint: The nearest star we see at night, Alpha Centauri, is
4.24 light years away, and it is indeed in the Milky Way.
That however is not the right answer.
Answer: Our own local star the Sun is in the Milky Way,
as are we. Therefore the Milky Way is at no distance at
all.
Just as our solar system is completely in the galaxy, the
physical world we inhabit is completely in perception,
that is to say, in the realm of the perceptible.
Something - it could be impatience or reluctance - has
consistently prevented people from working out just
what is and is not implied by Berkeley's immaterialism.
It is perhaps easier to point to what
Berkeley did not claim. He did not say that
everything is 'in your head'. This makes no
sense, since heads are also in the realm of
perceptible things. He did not say that things
have no solidity; solidity is a perceptible
feature. He did not question the reality of the
world, as perceived; on the contrary, the
obstinate empirical facts of the real world
were the grounds of his objection to Newton’s
infinitesimals.
Remove matter and the world is left exactly as it was,
only without one explanation of what holds it together;
an explanation which Berkeley found to be both
unnecessary and insufficient. One consequence to the
thinker who takes this step is that the greatest miracles
of religion and fable become trivial compared to the
single mystery that anything can appear to exist at all.
Berkeley excluded such scientific extensions of
perception as telescopes and microscopes from his
common-sense world, the world in which we live and
make our moral choices; he said that what is seen
through the microscope is another world. To this extent
he was perhaps anti-scientific; but on the other hand the
scientific community has quietly come round to
accepting Berkeley's opinion as to the provisional and
necessarily falsifiable status of scientific hypotheses
Common Sense
Berkeley denied the existence of substance, defined as
something essentially inert or passive. He allowed only two
ways for something to have a claim to existence: either by
perceiving, or by being perceived. Locke's inert matter failed
on both counts. Without the stimulus of Locke's unfortunate
description of substance, Berkeley's argument might not have
arisen. The interesting thing, though, is how many problems
Berkeley solved with this stroke - too many, for his
contemporaries. Transubstantiation, for one, simply ceases to
be an issue. Berkeley's stance was ecumenical, as shown in his
most successful publication, A Word to the Wise (1749).
Addressed to the bishops and clergy of the Roman Catholic
Church, it urged them to take steps to improve the
circumstances of the Irish poor, by encouraging industry and
self-esteem. His words were direct and forceful, yet so
tactfully chosen that the Roman Catholic bishops and clergy
responded with an enthusiastic endorsement.
In his later life, as Bishop of Cloyne in County
Cork, Berkeley became a practical and
energetic promoter of the Irish people's
wellbeing. He wrote The Querist, a challenging
and ingenious tract on economics and became
famous as a healer of many various ills, using
a purgative potion whose recipe he may have
learnt from the Native Americans: tar water.
This became such a fad that an apothecary in
late 18th-Century London, when asked if he
sold tar water, is said to have replied that 'he
sold nothing else'.