BERKELEY, berkl I or Uiirk'li. GEORGE (1685-1753). Bishop of Cloyne. a distinguished philosopher. He was born near Thomastown, county of Kilkenny. Ireland, and was the eld est son of NVilliam Berkeley, a cadet of the family of the Earl of Berkeley. As a boy lie studied at Kilkenny School, at which Swift also received his early education, and in his fifteenth year he followed his great countryman to Trin ity College, Dublin. where in 1707 he obtained a fellowship. At Trinity he enjoyed the society of Swift, who patronized him, as he did almost everybody, and who subsequently had a great deal to do in shaping his fortunes, while his philosophical views were formed upon the basis of Locke's.
Berkeley's career as an author began in 1707 (the year in which he obtained his fellowship) by the publication of a work written three years before, at the age of 19, entitled Arithinctice absque Algebra out Euclide Demonstrate. This was followed in 1709 by the celebrated Essay Towards a New Theory of in which he propounded the doctrine of the ideal character of visual space. Locke had already championed the view of the subjective character of the sec ondary qualities (q.v.), but "solidity, extension, figure, motion, or rest, and number." the primary qualities, were for him ideas whose "patterns do really exist in the bodies themselves." Berkeley, in his Essay, left solidity and number unques tioned, but reduced the remaining primary qual ities to subjectivity, making the distance of any object mean the succession of muscular feelings that must be experienced before a tactual sensa tion of that object can be obtained. Space as the form of outness is thus explained as nothing but a way of looking at time. In his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), Berkeley went much further with his idealism. He maintained that matter cannot be conceived to exist, the only possible substance being mind. The material world is nothing but a complex of sensations, which come and go with an 'order and coherence' that constitutes the laws of nature. This doctrine is epitomized in the sentence 'case est percipi,' i.e. 'being is to be perceived or known.' Berkeley's object was to undermine the materialism of the age by denying the reality of the external world. If there is no external world, he argued. the phenomena of sense can be explained only by supposing a deity continually necessitating perception. Common sense has tried to refute Berkeley by kicking a stone and pointing to the reality of the effect produced; but common sense does not realize that the effect is in that case evidently a sensa tion and an affection. Berkeley's rejection of
abstract matter has been justified by subsequent philosophic thought, although the crudeness of his idealism is quite generally recognized. Espe cially unfortunate, from the philosophical point of view, was his dogmatism in assuming the existence of a God to give permanence to the fleeting sensations of human experience. The procedure was a vicious circle. Ho set out to prove the existence of a God, and then at last assumed that existence in order to make his philosophical view tenable. And history has avenged itself for this illogicality; for flume. working in the same philosophical spirit, came to an opposite theological conclusion.
In the Introduction to the Principles, Berkeley broached a doctrine that has proved of revolu tionary significance in modern philosophy, viz., that there are no abstract general ideas. To lie sure, this thesis had been maintained by the Nominalists of the Middle Ages (see NOMINAL ISM ) but Berkeley's statement of the position gave it its classical expression. "If any man has the faculty of framing in his mind such an idea of a triangle," as had been described by Locke, a triangle "neither oblique nor rectangu lar, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor sealenon, but all and none of these at once, it is in vain to pretend to dispute him out of it." Btlt "I cannot by any effort of thought conceive the ab stract idea above described." And since Berke ley's day more and more thinkers have confessed to a similar inability. See ABSTRACTION. In 1713 Berkeley went to reside in London. where in the same year he published a defense of his ideal system, Three Dialogues Between Ryles and Philouoils. which is remarkable, as indeed all his writings are, for the clearness and beauty of the style. Shortly after this he was appointed chaplain and secretary of legation under Lord Peterborough, whom he accompanied to Italy; but his first stay there was short. In 1716 he went abroad again, to stay four years. Upon his return lie wrote, in 1721, an Essay Toward Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain, which was called forth by the craze in connection with the South Sea soheme. In 1721 he re turned to Ireland, and in 1724 he became Dean of Derry, with an income of £1500, and resigned his fellowship.