George Berkeley

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Biography

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The Anglo-Irish thinker and Anglican bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) developed a unique type of idealism based on an empirically oriented attack on abstract philosophizing combined with a defense of immaterialism.

Although born on March 3, 1685, at Dysert Castle in County Kilkenny, Ireland, George Berkeley considered himself to be English. He entered the county school at the age of 11 and in 1700 went to Trinity College, Dublin. He earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1704 and a master of arts degree in 1707, the year in which he became a fellow. Berkeley maintained his appointment until 1724, when he became dean of Derry, but taught at Dublin only until 1712. During this time he formed a club to discuss the "new philosophy" and wrote his most important works: Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709); Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, pt. 1 (1710); and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713).

Berkeley traveled to England in 1713. He was an intellectual and social success in London; he met the essayists Joseph Addison and Richard Steele and later contributed articles to the Guardian. The poet Alexander Pope described the young philosopher as possessed of "every virtue under heaven." Most of Berkeley's introductions to English literati were arranged by his older Dublin colleague and fellow clergyman, the satirist Jonathan Swift. The most important of these contacts was Lord Peterborough, whom Berkeley accompanied to Europe as chaplain in 1714-1715. During this journey he may have met the French philosopher Nicholas Malebranche. Between 1716 and 1720 Berkeley resided mainly in Italy and France, and while traveling he lost the manuscript of the second part of Principles of Human Knowledge, which was never rewritten.

In 1721 he published a short treatise on natural philosophy, De motu. and an anonymous book on social reformation, Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain. About this time Berkeley conceived the idea of establishing a college in the Bermudas to reform the manners of the English colonists and introduce the gospel to the "American savages." Through the influence of his friends he received the necessary patents from Parliament and promises of financial assistance. In September 1728 he married Anne Foster, and shortly thereafter he sailed for the New World. From January 1729 until the fall of 1731 he lived in Newport, R. I. During this period he wrote Alciphron, a series of dialogues directed against freethinkers. The financing of the Bermuda scheme eventually failed and, after donating his books and property to Yale College, he returned with his family to London.

In 1734 Berkeley returned to Ireland as bishop of Cloyne, and he remained there for the next 18 years. Distressed at the widespread famine and disease in Ireland, he devoted himself to social and medical studies. In 1744 he created a considerable stir by publishing Siris, a work that extolled the virtues of tar-water as a cure for virtually all bodily ills and presented his final metaphysical and religious ideas. On the occasion of fighting between Catholics and Protestants, he wrote several liberal tracts promoting tolerance and humanity. Berkeley retired to Oxford University in 1752 and died suddenly on Jan. 14, 1753.

His Philosophy

The "new way of ideas" of British empiricism had been prepared for Berkeley by John Locke. In a broad sense empiricism is an attempt to derive all knowledge from experience. According to Locke, all knowledge is derived from the external five senses or the internal sense of reflection. But from a psychological viewpoint both sensations and concepts are found in the mind. Thus, even sensations are ideal as images which re-present external objects.

The ubiquity of ideas, as sense images as well as concepts, led Berkeley to original psychological and metaphysical views. In Essay towards a New Theory of Vision he argued that man does not immediately perceive either the distance of objects from him or their spatial relations to others. He states that distance and magnitude are suggested by past experience of the correlation between sight and touch.

According to Berkeley, it was a short step for him from the psychological recognition of the ideality of sense perceptions to the metaphysical acknowledgement of the immateriality of all reality. He was the first thinker to take the position of denying material reality. In Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues he argues that if the only evidence for an object's existence is its being perceived, then the conclusion is that existence consists entirely in being perceived or perceiving and that minds and their ideas constitute reality.

This immaterialist thesis, Esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived), is more important as a criticism of materialism than as an exposition of his own spiritualism. In Berkeley's view it is God and His active perception who preserves man from vanishing worlds when objects are not being perceived by him. This means that minds and ideas, which can be empirically verified, are the only realities and that reality is identical with appearance.

Further Reading

The standard edition of Berkeley is edited by A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, (9 vols., 1948-1957). The best biography is by A. A. Luce, The Life of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (1949). See also J. Wild, George Berkeley: A Study of His Life and Philosophy (1936); A. A. Luce, Berkeley's Immaterialism (1945); E. A. Sillem, George Berkeley and the Proofs for the Existence of God (1957); D. M. Armstrong, Berkeley's Theory of Vision (1960); and A. A. Luce, The Dialectic of Immaterialism (1963).

For more information on George Berkeley, visit Britannica.com.

Berkeley, George (1685-1753). Philosopher and bishop. One of the most renowned philosophers of his day, Berkeley was born in Kilkenny of English descent. He became a fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, but spent 1713-20 in London or on continental travel. In 1724 he was appointed dean of Derry but his main interest was in raising support for a college in Bermuda to preach the gospel and he was in America 1728-32. From 1734 he was bishop of Cloyne and spent almost all his later years in the diocese. His idealist philosophy, attacking the materialism of Locke and Newton, is to be found largely in Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues (1713).

Berkeley, George (1685-1753), philosopher and Bishop of Cloyne; born at Dysart Castle, Co. Kilkenny, and educated at Kilkenny College, and at TCD. In 1709 he issued An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, followed in the next year by The Principles of Human Knowledge, the main exposition of his immaterialism. Berkeley went to London in 1713 and published Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. He became friendly with Addison, Pope, and Richard Steele, through Swift, who presented him at Court. De Motu (1721) criticized Newton's philosophy of nature and Leibniz's theory of force. He returned in 1721 to Ireland. In 1724 Berkeley was appointed Dean of Derry, but he wished to establish a missionary college in Bermuda. He sailed for Rhode Island in 1729, and established himself in Newport, awaiting funds, returning in 1731 when the money was not forthcoming. Alciphron (1732), written during his stay in Rhode Island, is an apologetic work designed to combat atheism and free-thinking. His Theory of Vision Vindicated (1733) defends his first essay. A polemical work on mathematics, The Analyst (1734), shows that free-thinking mathematicians are themselves guilty of logical absurdity. In 1734 he was appointed Bishop of Cloyne, and he took up residence in Co. Cork in the following year. He was particularly exercised by the poor economic state of Ireland at the time. He gave an account of the facts and proposed remedies in The Querist, published in three parts in 1735, 1736, and 1737. He wished to promote harmony between the established Church and the Catholic clergy, and in Words to the Wise (1749) he appealed for conciliation. One of Berkeley's last published works was Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water (1744). He believed in tar-water as a universal medical panacea. His philosophy is a rejoinder to John Locke's on the nature of perception and the material world. Berkeley took the view in his Principles and New Theory of Vision that a sufficient explanation of knowledge can be found in the claim that our perceptions constitute what there is (hence esse est percipi, ‘to be is to be perceived’). This denial of objects independent of minds and their contents is immaterialism. He had, also, recourse to a God who underpins human experience of a common rather than a private world.

Bibliography

David Berman, George Berkeley: Idealism and the Man (1993).

Berkeley, George (1685-1753) Irish idealist. Born at Kilkenny in Ireland, Berkeley entered Trinity College, Dublin in 1700. In 1707 he became a Fellow of the College and two years later published An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (his Philosophical Commentaries were unpublished notes of the years before 1709). This was followed by the first (and only extant) part of A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713), which was an attempt to explain the doctrines of the earlier work in a more readily understood form. Berkeley moved to London and spent much of the next decade travelling in France and Italy. However, the fact that he was in London in 1715 seems to disprove the story that it was a fit of apoplexy, brought on by arguing with Berkeley, that carried off the philosopher Malebranche. In 1721 Berkeley published De Motu (‘On Motion’) attacking Newton's philosophy of space, a topic he returned to much later in The Analyst of 1734. In 1724 he entered with enthusiasm on a project for founding a College in Bermuda, for the Christian education of both colonial and indigenous people of America. With his new wife he set sail westward in 1728, arriving and settling in Rhode Island. While there he corresponded with the American philosopher Samuel Johnson, and wrote Alciphron, which was eventually published in 1732. Government support promised for his educational project never materialized, and Berkeley returned to London in 1732, and was made Bishop of Cloyne in 1734. Thenceforth his publications concerned the well-being of the people of his diocese, although Siris (1744) contains discussions of the philosophy of nature, as is promised by its full title (A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water, and divers other subject connected together and arising from one another). He died in Oxford.

Berkeley is notorious for his immaterialism, or apparent denial of the reality of any external world, with the consequent shrinking of reality down to a world of minds and their own sensations or ‘ideas’. The theme of the impossibility of ‘inert senseless matter’, and the merits of a scheme based on a pervading, all-wise providence whose production is the conceptual world, the world of ideas, that make up our lives, runs through all Berkeley's writing. What he saw and emphasized with great rigour was the impossibility of bridging the gap opened up by the Cartesian split between mind and matter. Berkeley's target is the comfortable, commonsense view of mind as entirely different from matter, yet in satisfactory contact with a material world about which it can know a great deal. He deploys many of the arguments of ancient scepticism, and others found in Malebranche and Bayle, to undermine this synthesis, showing that once the separation of mind from the material world is as complete as Descartes makes it, the hope of knowing or understanding anything about the supposed external world quite vanishes. A relationship of resemblance, for example, whereby our ideas can be taken to resemble qualities in things that give rise to them, is unknowable and unintelligible. Unlike Cartesian scepticism, which stresses the bare possibility of things not being as we take them to be, Berkeley urges the actual inconsistencies within the conceptual scheme left by Cartesianism, that entrap such thinkers as Locke (and, arguably, common sense itself). His way out is not to advocate scepticism, which he consistently regards with extreme repugnance, but to reformat the relation between mind and the world so that contact is re-established. Unfortunately this introduces subjective idealism, in which what the subject apprehends as the world is just the relationship between the subject's own mental states (plus an uneasy relationship with archetypes of the subject's ideas in the mind of God). In promoting his system Berkeley makes brilliant use of the sceptical problems that will bedevil alternatives, as well as of the problems faced by particular elements of the conceptual scheme he opposes: problems of causation, substance, perception and understanding. Although his system has proved incredible to virtually all subsequent philosophers, its importance lies in the challenge it offers to a common sense that vaguely hopes that these notions fit together in a satisfactory way.

Berkeley, George (bär'klē, bûr–) , 1685–1753, Anglo-Irish philosopher and clergyman, b. Co. Kilkenny, Ireland. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, he became a scholar and later a fellow there. Most of Berkeley's important work in philosophy was done in his younger years. His Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), and the famous Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (1713) are among his more important works. At considerable personal sacrifice he organized a movement to establish a college in the Bermudas to convert the indigenous peoples, going to Rhode Island in 1728 to wait for promised support. This support never came, and after three years he returned to England. He was made bishop of Cloyne in 1734. Berkeley in his subjective idealism went beyond Locke, who had argued that such qualities as color and taste arise in the mind while primary qualities of matter such as extension and weight have existence independent of the mind. Berkeley held that both types of qualities are known only in the mind and that therefore there is no existence of matter independent of perception (esse est percipi). The observing mind of God makes possible the continued apparent existence of material objects. God arouses sensations in us in a regular coherent order. Selves and God make up the universe. Berkeley felt that his argument constituted a complete disproof of atheism. He believed that qualities, not things, are perceived and that the perception of qualities is relative to the perceiver.

Bibliography

See edition of his works by A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (9 vol., 1948–57); G. Pitcher, ed., The Philosophy of George Berkeley (8 vol., 1988–89); biographies by J. O. Urmson (1982) and G. J. Warnock (1983).

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.

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

(1685–1753). Idealist philosopher. He was born in Ireland, went to school at Kilkenny College, and in 1700 proceeded to Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated in 1704 and became a Fellow in 1707. He retained his Fellowship, though with long periods of absence, until 1724, in which year he became Dean of Derry.

His intellectual development was strikingly precocious, and he was fortunate in his education. In 1700, although Ireland had so recently been the scene of prolonged turmoil and civil war, the state of learning at Trinity College was much livelier and more progressive than at either of the English universities at that time. It is clear that Berkeley was early and thoroughly acquainted with John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (published in 1690) and with the physical theories of Isaac Newton and others which underlay that work. He learned much also — perhaps more than he afterwards cared to admit — from Malebranche's Recherche de la vérité. His own first book, An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, was published in Dublin in 1709, when he was 24, and his most important work, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, followed in 1710. He first visited England in 1713, and the third major work of his youth, the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, was published in London in that year. These are the works on which his fame securely rests, all written and well established before he was 30.

Berkeley was, with the zeal and confidence of youth, in a sense a reactionary figure. He rightly discerned, in the writings of Locke and his scientific mentors, the steady progress towards general acceptance of a certain scientific 'world-view', which he hated and believed that he could utterly confute. This was the idea that mathematics and mechanics are the keys to the understanding of nature — that all matter is fundamentally atomic, or 'corpuscular', in structure, and that its properties, on both the largest and the smallest scale, are ultimately a matter of mechanical interactions. Berkeley believed this idea to be fatal to religion and dangerous to morality; he thought also that he could show it to be philosophically absurd and untenable. His own sweeping solution, by which he believed that all could be set right at a stroke, was his denial of the existence of matter. For if there is no matter, there is nothing that mechanistic materialism can even pretend to be true of, and the pretensions of the physical scientist are completely undermined. Not surprisingly, a major theme of Berkeley's writings is his struggle to persuade his readers that, by the denial of the existence of matter, no one — other than the sinister physicist — need be surprised or disturbed. At no time was this struggle particularly successful. Berkeley's contemporary readers, to his chagrin and surprise, were inclined to praise him for his dialectical ingenuity, but to dismiss his conclusions as the paradoxes of an amusing Irishman.

Berkeley's middle years, from about 1722 until late in 1731, were almost wholly given over to a project for founding a college in Bermuda, intended for both indigenous and white colonial Americans. For this project he secured a charter from the king, the promise of a large grant from the public revenues, and wide support from individuals — on this topic at least, his powers of persuasion, supported by what all observers agree to have been great personal charm, proved most efficacious. In September 1728 he set sail for Newport, Rhode Island, where he built himself a house (which still stands) and waited for his project to mature. But he was disappointed. The pragmatic Sir Robert Walpole had always regarded the scheme as visionary, and, once Berkeley's persuasive presence was withdrawn, he worked quietly against it. The crucial grant was found at last not to 'suit with public convenience', and after 3 years in America Berkeley returned, empty-handed, to London.

In 1734 — in spite of having, as it appears, never once visited the deanery he had held for 10 years — he was appointed Bishop of Cloyne, in the extreme south of Ireland. Here in 1744 he published his strange work Siris, a disquisition on the supposed medicinal virtues of 'tar-water', decked out — in a manner astonishingly unlike that of his graceful, rapid, and lucid early writings — with an oppressive bulk of miscellaneous scientific, medical, and philosophical learning. It has been held that his enthusiasm for tar-water was eccentric enough to catch the professional eye of the psychoanalyst, but it must be remembered that, if Berkeley's medical opinions were somewhat wild and uncritical, they differed little in that respect from those of many of his contemporaries.

Berkeley died in January 1753, while visiting Oxford to supervise his second son's entry to Christ Church. The memorial tablet erected in the cathedral there is noteworthy in that, presumably on his widow's authority, it records his date of birth as six years earlier than it actually was.

(Published 1987)

See also Berkeley on perception; Berkeley on the mind.

— Sir Geoffrey Warnock

The complete and definitive modern edition is The Works of George Berkeley (eds. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop) (1949–57), 9 vols. The authoritative biography is Luce, A. A. (1949), Life of George Berkeley, published uniformly with the Works.

Bibliography
• Bennett, J. (1971). Locke, Berkeley, Hume. (An able, selective commentary on 'central themes'.)
• Foster, J., and Robinson, H. (eds.) (1985). Essays on Berkeley: A Tercentennial Celebration. (A valuable collection, issued to mark the tercentenary of Berkeley's birth.)
• Luce, A. A. (1945). Berkeley's Immaterialism. (The work of a learned but somewhat uncritical partisan.)
• Pitcher, G. W. (1977). Berkeley. (An unusually detailed scrutiny, step by step, of the particular arguments by which Berkeley sought to support his conclusions.)
• Tipton, I. C. (1974). Berkeley: The Philosophy of Immaterialism. (A notably careful and scholarly work, particularly useful on those topics, for instance Berkeley's theory of the mind, which other commentators have tended to neglect.)
• Warnock, G. J. (1969). Berkeley (2nd edn.). (A general analytical survey, perhaps over-stressing Berkeley's 'defence of common sense' and underplaying his very curious metaphysical and religious views.)

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Quotes:

"What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind."

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