illustration of the strong but purely personal impressions on which Berkeley often acted, that he should not only have given this story in the Guardian' as a kind of excuse for the severity of his attack on Collins, but have deliberately repeated it twenty years afterwards in the preface to the Minute Phi'losopher,' as an implied justification of its bitterest passages. Had Berkeley seriously realised the responsibility attaching to opinion, he never could have ventured to attack and condemn, without justice or charity, a man as honourable and high-minded as himself, on the strength of mere club rumour or coffee-house gossip. It may be said, however, in extenuation of his conduct in this respect, that he but followed the custom of his time, and that he sincerely believed the school he attacked was fraught with national danger as threatening the foundations of morality and religion. Still, it might have been hoped that even under excitement he would not have descended to the level of the vulgar and violent controversialists of the day.

Berkeley's disquietude, and even alarm at the progress of freethinking, was undoubtedly the strongest impression made upon his mind during his first visit to London; and he had probably brooded at intervals over the subject in his wanderings on the Continent. On returning home, the South Sea failure would naturally seem like the realisation of his worst fears. He would see in the catastrophe simply the triumph of practical materialism and infidelity, the widespread ruin produced by the atheistic greed of private gain. This would revive with fresh poignancy his former thoughts on the subject, and, as the result, he evidently resolved to devote his first leisure to an elaborate exposure and denunciation of the whole school. The four years' quiet waiting in his comfortable home at Rhode Island afforded the required leisure under circumstances peculiarly favourable to the development of his best powers. The fresh country life, perfect domestic happiness, rural beauty, and invigorating sea-breezes of his temporary home, give a spring and animation to the thoughts, and a beauty to the writing that is traceable in almost every part of Alciphron,' and especially in the earlier dialogues. The style seems to combine the freshness of open-air life with the exquisite flavour of varied reading, and the endless charm of active fancy and graceful illustration. In some of the dialogues, too, the thought is of living interest, and the moral reasoning of permanent value. But, as a whole, the work is extremely unsatisfactory, and in many ways altogether ineffective. In the first place, Berkeley never took the trouble to understand the

school of critical and speculative inquiry that had provoked his antagonism; and in the nature of the case he would hardly have succeeded had he seriously made the attempt. On such questions his feelings were too deeply excited to admit of his examining an opponent's position with anything like candour or fairness, to say nothing of critical impartiality. Satisfied with a strong general impression as to the drift and tendency of the doctrines he disliked, he proceeded to manipulate them in his own way, to develope their details and results very much out of his own moral consciousness, and to arrange their imaginary authors according to the exigencies of his special polemic. There is thus no approach to historical accuracy; hardly, indeed, any reflective discrimination in his representations of the school. He does not distinguish the critical from the speculative elements, and he freely charges with irreligion, and even atheism, writers who were as sincere and earnest theists as himself. Then, again, his method of treatment is essentially negative and unfruitful. He adopts his usual plan of seeming to agree with his opponents at the outset, and then on the basis of this agreement developing after his own fashion the irrational or immoral results of the principles in the way of retort and reprisals. The bulk of his reasoning consists of arguments ad hominem or ad verecundiam; and, on such deep and vital subjects as morality and religion, these arguments are least likely to influence sincere and truth-seeking minds. Then, too, the spirit animating the more aggressive parts of his argument is in keeping with its barren and negative character. Unhappily it is often narrow, bitter, and essentially unjust. In general, it is true, his refined taste and strong sense of literary form restrain the manifestations of this feeling, or mould it into shapes of grace and beauty that soften its harshness, and not unfrequently disguise its real character. But when his argument touches on the Church or the Clergy, on Shaftesbury or Collins, he loses all command over himself, and, as Sir James Mackintosh most truly says, sinks to the level of a railing polemic.' The truth is, that in Berkeley's mind, religion and morality are completely identified with the Church and the Clergy, and any adverse criticism of the latter he accordingly regarded as a direct and dangerous assault on virtue and truth. Then it must be remembered that many of his special arguments, and those, too, the most powerfully developed, rest on his own paradoxical notions, his crude and contradictory system of psychology and metaphysics. The result is, that the Minute Philosopher,' though a beautiful piece of writing, had scarcely any serious influence on the

controversy in its author's own day, and has been virtually neglected ever since.

The Bermuda Scheme having finally broken down from lack of the promised government help, Berkeley left Rhode Island at the end of 1731, and arrived in London with his wife and family in January 1732. In the following March ' Alciphron' was published; and, though it apparently failed to impress any of the great thinkers of the day, it had for a time considerable popularity. The next two years he spent in London in occasional intercourse with those of his old friends who still remained, including Pope, Sherlock, Lord Burlington, and Queen Caroline. The Queen specially interested herself on his behalf, commanding his attendance at Court in order to discourse with him on what he had observed most worthy of notice in America.' Through her influence he was appointed, in March 1734, to the Bishopric of Cloyne, and soon afterwards left London to spend the remainder of his life in that secluded spot. During his two years' stay in London, Berkeley produced the Analyst,' almost the last act in his great polemic against the freethinkers. This time the infidel mathematician is the object of attack; and, as in the case of his other controversial writings, the attack is largely due to a strong personal impression made on his excitable mind by what he saw and heard in London. In the first paragraph of the treatise the author says he is credibly informed that confidence in the judgment and ability of mathematicians who reject Christianity is a short way of making infidels. And he subsequently explains this account of its origin in the more explicit statement that the celebrated Mr. Addison assured me the infidelity of a noted mathematician still living was one principal reason assigned by a witty man of those times for his being an infidel.' The polemic is avowedly from first to last an argumentum ad hominem, the main point enforced by way of retort against the mathematicians being the speculative difficulties involved in the current doctrine of fluxions. Berkeley endeavours to show that the infinitesimal quantities the doctrine assumes involve mysteries quite as great as those of the Christian faith. In pressing this argument against the mathematicians, he runs as usual to extremes, as Professor Fraser fully acknowledges.

Not contented with pressing the incomprehensibility, on a sensationalistic basis, of the principles of mathematics, and especially of fluxions, he alleges fallacies in the new science of Newton. He speaks as if fluxions involved certain contradictions as well as relative incomprekensibility and mathematicians complain that he is blind to the New

tonian conception of continuity, confounding it with the monadism of Leibnitz.'

6

Though past middle life, he still displays in his favourite field of controversy the ardent dogmatism of an earlier day, and without pausing to consider the missing links in the reasoning, rushes as of old to the desired conclusion. One of the ablest of his recent critics represents Berkeley as taking other ground in the Analyst,' as arguing against the mathematicians that 'the idea of force is as little capable of being made clear to the 'understanding as that of grace.' But this is an obvious mistake arising from the confusion of Alciphron' with the Analyst.' The analogy, though pertinent enough in reference to physics, is too general for the special and detailed retort of the Analyst,' and Berkeley accordingly makes no use of it there. But in the last dialogue of 'Alciphron,' the difficulty or rather impossibility of forming an adequate idea of force-in other words, of realising force through sensible impressions merely-is urged with considerable power in the defence of Christian mysteries. The Analyst' called into the field more than one champion on behalf of the assailed mathematicians, and by way of rejoinder Berkeley published a vigorous pamphlet, entitled A Defence of Freethinking in Mathematics.' This with A 'Defence of the New Theory of Vision,' which appeared about a year before, are Berkeley's last acts in the great polemic against the freethinkers, which had occupied his available leisure for more than a quarter of a century. The comparative neglect into which his share of the controversy has fallen is an instructive commentary on the temporary and limited value of the merely defensive and negative arguments he so largely employed. Very few of his reasonings have any living force, or are of any real value in the changed aspects of the great conflict between scientific scepticism and rational faith in our own day.

6

Soon after publishing the Analyst,' Berkeley retired with his family to Cloyne, and spent the remainder of his days in the quiet discharge of professional duties, and the perfect enjoyment of home life. The picture of the good Bishop in the midst of his family during these years is a beautiful one from the perfect union, refined intelligence, and cultivated taste of its members, and the grateful interchange of affectionate offices, rational employments, and superior pleasures in which they all shared. Berkeley's mind was still active in his retirement, and he employed his leisure in publishing from time to time the pregnant social, industrial, and political questions of the Querist,' and towards the close of his career, in elaborating

the long train of somewhat mystical meditations suggested by the strong impression the virtues of tar-water had made on his enthusiastic nature. Within six months of his death, he realised what had long been a cherished dream, that of spending his last days amidst the academic associations and in the learned retirement he loved so well. In July 1772 he removed with his family to Oxford, and died there almost suddenly on the second Sunday evening of January in the following year.

We have dealt with Berkeley's career mainly in its literary and philosophical aspects as those of most permanent interest; and in order to complete the review, we must attempt to sum up briefly the leading features of his philosophical character and work. From the analysis of his chief productions already given, it will be seen that Berkeley's mind was acute, flexible, and vehement, rather than penetrating, massive, and profound. Always subtle, eager, and dextrous, he was never a very rational, far-sighted, or consistent thinker. The whole movement of his mind was critical rather than constructive, narrowly aggressive and polemical, rather than vitally organic, expansive, or illuminating. How little real growth or progress there is in his mental history, is apparent from the fact that his best works were produced before he was twenty-seven. They are indeed marked by the vices of youthful thought, being crude, one-sided, and extreme, and rushing to a foregone conclusion with almost suicidal haste and eagerness. But with all their faults they are his best work. In his later writings, excepting perhaps the very last, the same vices of thought reappear with less of youthful feeling and inexperience to atone for them. All along, he merely seizes in every department of inquiry the facts and principles that suited the controversial exigencies of the moment. He had so little real insight into the deeper meaning and relations of philosophical principles, that he often unconsciously sacrificed the substance of the very truth he was defending for the sake of a shadowy or seeming controversial advantage. With an extraordinary power of manipulating recognised or established principles for his special purposes, he apparently had no interest in going deeper, and never attempted to investigate the principles themselves. He never seriously examined what may be called the fundamental articles of his faith, or inquired into the grounds of his most important beliefs in politics, philosophy, or religion. The working of his mind was thus absolutely restricted to the circle of secondary or derivative conceptions, all beyond being evidently regarded as the sacred enclosure of dogmatical assumptions and traditional beliefs not to be invaded by secular criticism. As he never inquired into