GEORGE, celebrated as the bishop of Cloyne, by which title he is almost as often referred to in philosophical writings as by his family name, was born at Kilkerrin, near Thomastown, in the county of Kilkenny, and was the eldest son of William Berkeley, a cadet of the family of Earl Berkeley. On his monument it is stated that the year of his birth was 1679; and as he died in 1753, his life would thus be exactly contemporaneous with that of the great German philosopher Christian Wolf. In truth, however, he was born five years later, namely, on the 12th of March 1684. Sent very young to Kilkenny school, where Swift had already received his early education, he at the age of fifteen followed Swift to Trinity College, Dublin, and obtained a fellowship in 1707. It was there probably that he first became acquainted with his great Irish contemporary, who seems to have patronized him in some degree, and to have been the means of introducing him at a later period to Steele and Addison, Arbuthnot, and Pope.

He not only became a fellow in 1707; he also became an author, publishing a tract, Arithmetica absque Algebra aut Euclide demonstrata, which, however, appears from the preface to have been written three years before, at the age of twenty. But far more important, and indeed so important as to form an epoch in science, was the work which made its appearance in 1709, An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, in which he is considered to have established the doctrine that the eye, no more than the ear, has any natural perception of space; all its perceptions of distance, of magnitude, and of situation, being acquired from the sense of touch. Mr Stewart has, in his Preliminary Dissertation, dwelt upon this theory at such length, that here it is only necessary to record that a great living authority in optics, Sir David Brewster, has questioned the truth of it; and that the question is interesting not only to the optician, but also far more to the psychologist, suggesting, as it does, many inquiries into the origin of our ideas generally. It may also be added, that twenty-four years afterwards (1733), Berkeley published a pamphlet in vindication of his theory, which is not, however, collected in his works. Its title is, The Theory of Vision, or Visual Language, showing the immediate Presence and Providence of the Deity, vindicated and explained. By the author of Alciphron, or, the Minute Philosopher.

From this title it will be seen, that his early essay on the nature of vision contains the germs which afterwards fructified into the Berkeleyan philosophy; and, especially, it will be seen that his speculations were not merely speculations, but had a noble practical object in view—the service of religion. The common opinion of him would seem to be, that he was a dreamer, who wrote romances in philosophy, and acted romances in religion. Judged by the standard of his own time, judged by any ordinary standard, his missionary zeal was certainly romantic; but in philosophy he was no romancer. The premises with which he starts, premises almost universally accepted amongst philosophers until the time of Reid, drag absolute idealism after them by a chain of the most irresistible logic; and the distinguishing characteristic of Berkeley's system is, that it is more reasonable than all previous ones, while it is at the same time applied to a more practical end.

This system was first promulgated (1710) in A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, wherein the chief causes of error and difficulty in the sciences, and the grounds of scepticism, atheism, and irreligion, are inquired into. We have quoted this title in full, that we may again call attention to the end which young Berkeley had in view,—it was to erect a polemic against the infidelity of the age. And he did so by denying, on the received principles of philosophy, the reality of an external world; thence arguing, that as there is no such world, we must, in order to account for the phenomena of sense, postulate a Deity continually acting on the minds of men, and necessitating certain perceptions. This scheme of objective or theistic idealism, it will be seen, is essentially distinct from the subjective or egotistic idealism of Fichte and the later German schools; it fraternalizes with the idealism of Malebranche (to a certain extent), of Collier, and, in later times, of Schelling. (But for a more explicit statement of Berkeley's position, we must refer to Sir William Hamilton's Discussions, No. VI. p. 187, and to his Dissertations prefixed to Reid's Works, pp. 816-819.)

Three years later, Berkeley went to London, and published a defence of his system in Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. This was in 1713, a date which ought to be remembered, as it was in the same year that Arthur Collier first published in the Clavis Universalis his demonstration of the existence of the impossibility of an external world. So that, although Collier's speculations are quite independent of Berkeley's, they were published three years after; and Berkeley is thus the first philosopher who proposed a scheme of absolute idealism.

These dialogues, without making many converts, procured Berkeley many friends. He became intimate, chiefly

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1 This pamphlet seems to have been utterly unknown until it was lately discovered by Sir William Hamilton, who is in possession of a copy which he has kindly shown to the present writer, at the same time pointing out a footnote in the works of Berkeley (vol. i. p. 146, ed. 1784) where the existence of this pamphlet is expressly indicated. Berkeley, through Swift, with the great wits of the time, contributing several essays to the *Guardian*; and before the end of the year accompanied the Earl of Peterborough to Italy, as chaplain and secretary of legation—this also, on the recommendation of Swift, who seems to have taken a fancy to him. Berkeley's letters from the Continent are interesting in themselves, and as showing the sociability of his nature; he writes like a poet to Pope; he writes like a naturalist to Arbuthnot; he writes like a boon companion to Thomas Prior—his dear Tom. He returned next year to England, but soon again departed on a continental tour with a Mr Ashe. It was on this tour that he paid the celebrated visit to Malebranche, which ended in the death of the reverend father. On his former trip to Paris, he wrote to Prior:

"To-morrow I intend to visit Father Malbranck, and discourse him on certain points;" so that probably the present was not his first visit. On this occasion "he found the ingenious father in his cell, cooking in a small pipkin a medicine for a disorder with which he was then troubled, an inflammation in the lungs. The conversation naturally turned on our author's system, of which the other had received some knowledge from a translation just published. But the issue of the debate proved tragic 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 parts and a Frenchman, that he brought on himself a violent increase of his disorder, which carried him off a few days after." And no wonder, for Berkeley must easily have demolished the peculiar system of the father. The principles of Malebranche lead directly to absolute idealism, and Berkeley followed them to that result. But if absolute idealism be true, what becomes of the doctrine of transubstantiation? To save himself from heresy, the Catholic father had to bolster up his philosophy with an hypothesis, a mere hypothesis, which was, after all, but a vain attempt to frustrate the logical result of his speculations.

Berkeley returned to London in 1721. During his absence he had been elected senior fellow of his college, and on his return he took the degrees of bachelor and doctor in divinity. In the year following his fortune received a considerable accession from a very unexpected bequest. On his first going to London (1713), Swift introduced him to the family of the celebrated Vanessa, Mrs Esther Vanhomrigh, and took him often to dine at her house. It was the intention of this lady to have made the dean of St Patrick's her heir, but—her story is well known—she was disappointed in him, and left the whole of her fortune, about £8000, to be divided equally between her near relation, Mr Justice Marshall, and Dr Berkeley. If money were an object to the philosopher, he shortly afterwards (1724) received a deanery, the value of which, about £1100 a-year, his more worldly friends constantly, wonderingly, pityingly, contrasted with the paltry £100 for which his missionary zeal very soon prompted him to exchange it. He resigned his fellowship, and became dean of Derry.

The scheme on which he had set his heart, and which the ease and comparative wealth of his deanery could not make him forego, was that of erecting a college in the Bermudas, to train pastors for the colonial churches, and missionaries for the American Indians. His position is thus described by Swift in a letter of recommendation to Lord Carteret, which we quote entire, as it conveys a very lively idea of what Berkeley's contemporaries thought of him:

"September 3, 1724. There is a gentleman of this kingdom just gone for England; it is Dr George Berkeley, dean of Derry, the best preferment among us, being worth about £1100 a year. He takes the Bath in his way to London, and will, of course, attend your excellency, and be presented, I suppose, by his friend my Lord Burlington; and because I believe you will choose out some very idle minutes to read this letter, perhaps you may not be ill entertained with some account of the man and his errand. He was a fellow in Berkeley the university here, and going to England very young, about thirteen years ago, he became the founder of a sect there called the Immaterialists, by the force of a very curious book on that subject: Dr Smallridge and many other eminent persons were his proselytes. I sent him secretary and chaplain to Sicily, with my Lord Peterborough; and upon his lordship's return, Dr Berkeley spent above seven years in travelling over most parts of Europe, but chiefly through every corner of Italy, Sicily, and other islands. When he came back to England, he found so many friends that he was effectually recommended to the Duke of Grafton, by whom he was lately made dean of Derry. Your excellency will be frighted when I tell you, all this is but an introduction; for I am now to mention his errand. He is an absolute philosopher with regard to money, titles, and power; and for three years past, hath been struck with a notion of founding a university at Bermuda, by a charter from the crown. He hath seduced several of the hopefullest young clergymen and others here, many of them well provided for, and all of them in the fairest way of preferment; but in England his conquests are greater, and I doubt will spread very far this winter. He showed me a little tract which he designs to publish, and there your excellency will see his whole scheme of a life academico-philosophical (I shall make you remember what you were), of a college founded for Indian scholars and missionaries, where he most exorbitantly proposeth a whole hundred pounds a-year for himself, forty pounds for a fellow, and ten for a student. His heart will break if his dearness be not taken from him, and left to your excellency's disposal. I discourage him by the coldness of courts and ministers, who will interpret all this as impossible and a vision, but nothing will do. And therefore I do humbly entreat your excellency either to use such persuasions as will keep one of the first men in the kingdom for learning and virtue quite at home, or assist him by your credit to compass his romantic design, which, however, is very noble and generous, and directly proper for a great person of your excellent education to encourage." With much importunity, and after a tedious attendance, Berkeley at length obtained from the minister an assurance that his scheme would be supported, and it was in the happiness of this prospect that he penned these well-known lines:

"Westward the course of empire takes its way, The four first acts already past; A fifth shall close the drama with the day; Time's noblest offspring is the last."

Being now certain of success, Berkeley prepared to depart, and his first step was to marry. In August 1728, he married Anne, eldest daughter of the Right Hon. John Forster, speaker of the Irish House of Commons; and next month he set sail for Rhode Island. But in vain; the promises of the government were never fulfilled; he was left alone to fight his own battle; and after years of weary waiting beyond the sea, worried to death by creditors, all his expectations baffled, he returned to England sick at heart, having spent seven years of his prime, and the greater part of his fortune, in attempting to establish a scheme which, with all its simplicity, was yet too grand and too pure for the powers that then were to appreciate. His only earthly comfort seems to have been in his wife and child. In his wife he must have been very happy. When he married her, he wrote to his dear Tom, with a beautiful simplicity,

"Her humour and turn of mind pleases me beyond anything I knew in her whole sex." Perhaps he was easily pleased; at least we gather as much from the way in which he talks of her painting and singing. Of her painting he says:

"For my part, I think she shows a most uncommon genius;" the worthy bishop being then more than sixty years of age, and his wife having never handled a brush till six months before. Then of her singing: "My wife, I am told, is this Berkeley, day inferior to no singer in the kingdom?" the bishop not being himself able to judge as having no ear for music, but seeming to take great delight in the music lessons, and summoning his family at four in the morning to the bass-viol and the Italian master.

By this time, however, Berkeley was settled in the bishopric of Cloyne, which he received in 1734 as a special mark of favour from the queen. It will be remembered that Queen Caroline was fond of listening to metaphysical conversations, and debates often arose in her presence between Clarke and Berkeley as principals, Hoadly and Sherlock as seconds. Hoadly had no sympathy whatever with Berkeley, blasting his philosophy and his Bermuda project as the reveries of a visionary. Sherlock, on the other hand, we are told, warmly espoused his cause, and particularly when The Minute Philosopher made its appearance, carried a copy of it to the queen as a triumphant testimony in favour of Berkeley. Her Majesty gave Berkeley the first bishopric that fell vacant. And so we find him happy and content as ever at the little village of Cloyne, admiring his own portrait painted by his wife after six months' lessons, and enjoying her singing without understanding a note of the music.

The Minute Philosopher was written against freethinkers of the Shaftesbury class. Soon after he became bishop of Cloyne, Berkeley wrote another polemic, The Analyst, against the mathematical sceptics, and especially against Halley, who had in conversation hazarded the remark, that the doctrines of Christianity are incomprehensible, and the religion itself an imposture; and he showed in this work that mysteries in faith are unjustly objected to by mathematicians, who admit much greater mysteries in science—the doctrine of fluxions for example. The most important of his remaining treatises are, Queries proposed for the good of Ireland (1735); a letter addressed to Roman Catholics during the rebellion of 1745; another to the Catholic clergy, entitled A Word to the Wise (1749); Siris, a Chain of Philosophical Reflections and Enquiries concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water (1744); and Farther Thoughts on Tar-Water, published 1752. This was his last performance for the press, and he did not survive it long. His health was delicate, he was somewhat of a hypochondriac, and drenched himself, perhaps hurt himself, with copious draughts of tar-water, the receipt of which he was constantly sending to his friends: "Give a heaped spoonful of common rosin, powdered in a little broth, &c. &c." Hypochondriac in his later days, tar-water was the absorbing idea of his mind; to drink it seemed to be in his eyes a moral obligation incumbent on all mankind. He advises a friend, in one letter, to shun late hours and drink tar-water; again he announces in another, that a spoonful half tar half honey is the remedy for cold. "My cholic," he says in a third letter, "is changed to gout and sciatica, the tar-water having drove it into my limbs." What a horrible complication of maladies campaigning it through his poor body,—stormed out of this fastness only to be driven into some out-of-the-way limb! So entirely did tar-water at this time seem to engage his highest intellect, that in the above-mentioned treatise entitled Siris he not only appears to regard it as the infallible all-heal of creation, but easily and naturally passes from the contemplation of it to the contemplation of the loftiest mysteries, so that, beginning with tar, he ends with the Holy Trinity.

In 1751, feeling the infirmities of age, and wishing to retire from the care of his diocese to superintend the education of his son, then nominated a student of Christ Church, that the revenues of the church might not be misapplied, nor the interest of religion suffer by the absence of the pastor from his flock, he sought to resign his bishopric, the annual income of which was not less at that time than £1,400. Failing of success in this application, he let the lands of his demesne at Cloyne on very easy terms, at the rent of £200, which he directed to be distributed every year until his return among the poor housekeepers of Cloyne, Youghal, and Aghadda. He removed to Oxford in July 1752, being then in a very feeble state of health. "On Sunday evening, January 14, 1753, as he was sitting in the midst of his family, listening to a sermon of Dr Sherlock's, which his lady was reading to him, he was seized with what the physician termed a palsy of the heart, and instantly expired. The accident was so sudden, that his body was quite cold and his joints stiff before it was discovered, as the bishop lay on a couch, and seemed to be asleep, till his daughter, on presenting him with a dish of tea, first perceived his insensibility."

The best edition of Berkeley's works is that published in London in 1784, 2 vols. 4to. (See Life of Berkeley, prefixed to his works.) Tenneman says that it was written by Dr Arbuthnot. It was really drawn up by Dr Joseph Stock, most of the particulars having been furnished by the bishop's brother, the Rev. Robert Berkeley, D.D.)

a market-town in the county of Gloucester, near the river Severn, on the Bristol and Gloucester railway. It is pleasantly situated on a gentle eminence, in a rich pastoral vale to which it gives name, and which is celebrated for its dairies, producing the famous cheese known as "double Gloucester." The town has a handsome church, a grammar-school, town-hall, market-house, and some trade in timber, malt, and cheese, by means of the Gloucester and Berkeley canal. Berkeley was the birthplace of the celebrated Dr Jenner, whose remains are interred in the church. Market-day Wednesday. Pop. (1861) 949.

Berkeley Castle, on an eminence S.E. of the town, is still in good preservation. This magnificent structure was built in the reign of Henry I., but it suffered considerably during the civil wars of the seventeenth century. It is still one of the noblest baronial castles extant in England. It is noted as the scene of the most barbarous murder of Edward II.