George Berkeley

Irish philosopher

• Born: March 12, 1685
• Birthplace: Dysert Catle, near Thomastown, Kilkenny, Ireland
• Died: January 14, 1753
• Place of death: Oxford, Oxfordshire, England

Berkeley developed a novel theory of sense perception that led to the denial of the existence of physical—or material—objects. Serving as the link between John Locke’s commonsense materialism and David Hume’s skepticism, Berkeley’s ideas spanned the philosophical gap between classical traditionalism and the emergence of modern science.

Early Life

George Berkeley was the eldest son of William Berkeley. Little is known of his boyhood, but there is evidence that he was a precocious child. In 1696, he attended the Kilkenny School, and in 1700, Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied mathematics, logic, languages, and philosophy. He was graduated in 1704 and received his master’s degree in 1707, becoming a fellow of Trinity College. During this period, the principal influences upon his thought were the ideas of English philosopher John Locke and the continental thinkers Nicolas Malebranche and Pierre Bayle.

Berkeley had begun the line of thought that he was to pursue in his later major works, that is, his argument for the immateriality of objects, based on the subjectivity of sense perceptions. Before the age of thirty, he had published three of the most important philosophical works in eighteenth century England—books that have become classics in English philosophy. All three were published within a four-year period: in 1709, An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision; in 1710, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge; and, in 1713, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous.

Life’s Work

In the first work, George Berkeley’s design is to show how human sight conceptualizes distance, magnitude, and the location of objects, and whether ideas of sight and touch are similar or different. His goal in the second work is to demonstrate that an uncritical acceptance of materialism inevitably leads to skepticism and atheism. The last work is a fascinating refinement and extension of A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, in which Berkeley argues in dialogue form that the notion of a “material substratum” is a meaningless verbal abstraction.

Even though these books, as an example of English prose, are superb in style and clarity, they were, when they appeared, either dismissed, ridiculed, or ignored. Common sense convinced most people that “matter” was real enough, and Samuel Johnson’s declaration, “I refute him thus,” upon kicking a large stone, was refutation enough.

In 1709, Berkeley was made a deacon in the Church of England, and he was ordained a priest in 1710. In 1713, Berkeley traveled to London, where he met Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. Berkeley was present at the first night of Addison’s play Cato (1713) and wrote a lively description of the evening. He wrote essays for Steele’s Guardian against the ideas of the freethinkers. Pope praised Berkeley, and Swift presented him at court.

In 1713-1714, Berkeley traveled on the Continent, where he probably met and conversed with Malebranche. He returned there in 1716-1720, serving as tutor to George Ashe, son of the bishop of Clogher. On his return, he published De motu (1721), in which he argued against Sir Isaac Newton’s notion of absolute space, time, and motion and made reference to his ideas on immaterialism. This work also earned for Berkeley the title “precursor of Mach and Einstein.” He retained his fellowship at Trinity College until 1724, when he became dean of Derry.

Disappointed in having failed to attract the interest of educated English society in his philosophical theories, Berkeley turned his attention toward propagating the Christian Gospel and educating American Indians, even settling on a scheme to build a college in Bermuda for this purpose. He was granted a charter, with the archbishop of Canterbury acting as trustee and Parliament allotting a grant of œ20,000 for the project. There was, however, some opposition to the plan, and the project was eventually abandoned.

In 1728, Berkeley was married to Anne Forster, an intelligent and well-educated woman, and they moved to Newport, Rhode Island. The marriage was a happy one, and six children—four sons and two daughters—would be born to the couple. Returning to Ireland in 1731, Berkeley was appointed bishop of Cloyne. There he administered his diocese with skill and grace for eighteen years. At the time of his leaving America he had donated generously of his books and money to Yale University, and it is interesting to note that America honored his largess 150 years later when the university town of Berkeley, California, was given his name.

In Ireland, Berkeley’s writing continued. He produced works on religious apologetics, optics, and mathematics. In his later work, he attacked Deism, analyzed geometrical optics, and raised questions concerning the theory of physical fluxions. (On this latter issue, he was a constant opponent of Newton.) These topics appear in Alciphron: Or, The Minute Philosopher (1732); The Theory of Vision: Or, Visual Language, Showing the Immediate Presence and Providence of a Deity, Vindicated and Explained (1733), a revised and expanded version of An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision; The Analyst: Or, A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician (1734); A Defense of Free-Thinking in Mathematics (1735); The Querist (1735-1737); and Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflextions and Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar Water and Divers Other Subjects (1744).

Alciphron, The Theory of Vision, The Analyst, and A Defense of Free-Thinking in Mathematics all reflect the same general objective: to mount a critical attack against materialism, religious freethinking, and atheism. Berkeley’s position, although not an idiosyncratic view of matter, perception, and mathematics, is essentially negative. It is an attempt to destroy what had become the generally accepted eighteenth century viewpoint on these issues. His opponents, he argued, find the entities of religious belief mysterious and difficult to understand, but they are no more mysterious or difficult to believe, he concluded, than the scientific picture of the world offered by Galileo and Newton. Any person who can digest, he writes, the notions of force, gravity, fluxions, and infinitesimals should not be squeamish about accepting the hidden points of divinity.

The Querist, in contrast, is a treatise on economics and an analysis of the relations among work, production, and wealth. Siris is a curious piece written toward the end of his life, in which he maintains that tar water (resinous residue of pine and fir trees) is an efficacious medical treatment against famine and dysentery. Siris is a pious book pervaded with mysticism, yet, at the same time, it contains Berkeley’s most systematic and penetrating account of the philosophical assumptions of science. In Siris, Berkeley achieved what he had sought in all of his other books—a large, sympathetic readership. The book was an instant success, going through six editions in the first year.

After 1745, Berkeley continued to be active in public affairs, speaking out often on political events. In 1752, the Berkeleys moved to Oxford, where Berkeley entered Christ Church College. He died suddenly on January 14, 1753, and was buried in Christ Church Chapel.

Significance

As a man whose life was ideas, George Berkeley’s life must be evaluated in terms of the contribution he made to empiricist philosophy. Berkeley’s works serve as the philosophical bridge between John Locke’s notions of common sense and the skepticism of David Hume. Yet in a fundamental way, Berkeley stands alone. He was a more tenacious empiricist than Locke, for he insisted that the senses are the avenue of knowledge. Moreover, while Berkeley rejected every noetic intuitive device as an access to knowledge, as did Hume, his conclusions do not end in skepticism. Berkeley’s method of direct sensory experience leads neither to Locke’s contradictions nor to Hume’s doubt and agnosticism, but to an irresistible vision of God.

Berkeley argued that the source of intellectual confusion can be traced to Galileo’s, Newton’s, and Locke’s hypothesis that something called “matter” exists independent of the mind and sensory experience. It is, Berkeley declares, quite the other way around. Sensory experiences do not lead to doubt and an abstracted notion of “substratum” called matter but, rather, to a direct manifestation of the reality of mind or spirit. As a human entity, mind or spirit is finite and temporal; as a divine entity it is infinite and eternal. It is, on one hand, “inner,” the private sensation that induces thought, memory, dreams, and imagination; on the other hand, it is “outer,” the public sensory entities that reveal the nature of the external world of objects. In Berkeley’s view, experience never provides an account of materiality standing apart from the reality of mind.

Berkeley further argued that the empirical method offers no sensory distinction between objective and subjective qualities; in fact, primary qualities are as subjective as the senses of color, taste, and sound. Berkeley’s point is that experience is a complex of visual, factual, and locomotor sensations, a product of the mind. All that is known is comprehended as immediacy; in Berkeley’s most famous phrase, esse es percipi, meaning, to be is that, and only that, which is perceived.

Berkeley started with the lofty goal of solving the philosophical problems of his time and ended with a book for curing bodily ills. Sadly, no clear assessment of his great philosophical contribution was available during his lifetime. It took the next great British empiricist, David Hume, to demonstrate the significance of Berkeley’s philosophical skepticism and its systematic doctrine of immaterialism.

Berkeley’s influence on contemporary philosophy is significant. He taught the Anglo-American philosophers who followed him that there is a conceptual difference between the subjective, inchoate impressions spun within imagination and memory, and objective reality that requires cognitive order, vividness, and repetition. Berkeley insisted unequivocally that claims about the external world, if they are to have meaning, must be verbal declarations about undiluted sensory experience. For this reason, contemporary philosophical phenomenalism owes him much. “The table I write on,” he wrote, “I say, exists, that is, I see and feel it, and were I out of my study I should say it existed, meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit does perceive.” In the language of contemporary phenomenology, meaningful utterances about sense data require sensate experience, and the meaningfulness of unsensed assertions requires, at least conditionally, an accounting of what sensory experience must occur if the utterance is going to be more than empty nonsense. Contemporary theories of knowledge learned this lesson well from Berkeley’s unrelenting view of empiricism.

Bibliography

Berkeley, George. Alciphron. 2 vols. London: Printed for J. Tonson, 1732. A defense of the Christian religion written in the form of a dialogue between Alciphron, the speaker of truth, and all “free-thinkers, fatalists, skeptics, enthusiasts, and libertines.”

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A New Theory of Vision and Other Select Philosophical Writings. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1910. Berkeley’s analysis of the perception of space. He assumes that visual space is a quality of the mind, reducible to visual signs of tangible space.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. Chicago: Open Court, 1947. A charming dialogue between Hylas (the materialist) and Philonous (the person of wisdom). Philonous eventually persuades Hylas to give up his belief in the existence of matter, thus allowing him to hold consistent views about the real world of the spirit. This is a book of the highest literary quality written in a century noted for its great literary achievements.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Edited by C. M. Turbayne. New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1965. Berkeley’s systematic attack on the materialism of the new science, and the attending result of skepticism, irreligion, and atheism.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne. Edited by A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop. 9 vols. Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1948-1957. The exhaustive collection of Berkeley’s work, including private manuscripts and letters.

Fraser, Alexander Campbell. Life and Letters of George Berkeley, D.D. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1871. The most definitive single volume about Berkeley’s philosophy. Traces his life from his family roots in Kilkenny to his last days in Oxford. Included are some rare documents, including a memoir of Berkeley’s travels in Italy and sermons preached in Trinity College, Dublin, and Rhode Island.

Pappas, George S. Berkeley’s Thought. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000. An overview of Berkeley’s philosophy, including his ideas on abstraction, perception, common sense, and skepticism.

Richie, A. D. George Berkeley: A Reappraisal. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1967. Richie argues that the key to understanding Berkeley can be found in his theory of vision.

Stoneham, Tom. Berkeley’s World: An Examination of the Three Dialogues. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. A clear, detailed study of Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. Provides an overview of the work and examines its ideas, including Berkeley’s thoughts on substance, causation, action, and free will.

Umbaugh, Bruce. On Berkeley. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2000. A concise, understandable 96-page introduction to Berkeley’s philosophy.

Warnock, G. J. Berkeley. London: Penguin Books, 1953. Warnock’s volume is a good modern introduction, particularly useful in its account of Berkeley’s views of science, mathematics, and language. Also examines Berkeley’s continued influence on modern philosophy.