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December 1751. His literary life is of insignificant interest in comparison with the record of his political adventures. His Dissertation on Parties appeared in book-form in 1735, and the famous Letter to Sir William Wyndham, originally written in 1716, was posthumous, 1753. The Idea of a Patriot King bears no date, but was probably issued in 1735.

The opposite fate has rewarded the clear and starry genius of GEORGE BERKELEY. In his own day respected, but not highly regarded as a writer, he

has gradually so strengthened his hold upon us by the purity of his taste, that in an age of predominance in prose we regard him as a master. In spite of Shaftesbury, Berkeley is the greatest English thinker between Locke and Hume, and as a pure metaphysician he is perhaps without a rival. His person and his character were as charming as his genius, and when he came up to London for the first time in 1713 he conquered all hearts. Pope expressed everybody's conviction when he declared that there had been given "to Berkeley every virtue under heaven." He had at that time already circulated his curious hypothesis of phenomenalism, his theory that what we see and touch is only a symbol of what is spiritual and eternal-that nothing is, but only seems to be. His writings, long pondered and slowly produced, culminated in 1744 in. the brilliant and paradoxical treatise on the merits of tar-water, which was afterwards called Siris.

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George Berkeley

After the Portrait by John Smiberi

Locke had almost removed philosophy outside the confines of literature; Shaftesbury had shown that the philosopher could be elegant, florid, and illustrative; it remained for Berkeley to place it for a moment

George Berkeley (1685-1753)

on the level of poetry itself. There had, perhaps, been written in English no prose so polished as that of Berkeley. Without languor or insipidity, with a species of quiet, unstrained majesty, Berkeley achieved the summit of a classic style. No student of the age of Anne should fail to study that little volume of dialogues which Berkeley issued under the title of Hylas and Philonous. It belongs to the annus mirabilis 1713, when Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, Addison, Steele, were all at the brilliant apex of their genius, and when England had suddenly combined to present such a galaxy of literary talent as was to be matched, or even approached, nowhere on the Continent of Europe.

George Berkeley (1685-1753) was the son of William Berkeley, of Thomastown in County Kilkenny, where he was born on the 12th of March 1685. When he was eleven years of age, he was sent to the famous grammar-school of Kilkenny, and four years later (March 1700) he entered Trinity College, Dublin. He distinguished himself in his studies, particularly in Greek, mathematics, and metaphysics, and in 1707 was elected fellow and tutor of his college. His earliest technical works belong to the same year. Berkeley now took holy orders. As early as 1705, and apparently without external influence of any kind, he had developed his famous theory of the non-existence of matter, and in 1709 he attempted to expound it in his Essay towards a New Theory of Vision; this was followed in 1710 by the Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. He pushed his metaphysical refinements still further in his Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, in which he expressly asserts that the external existence of matter cannot be proved by all our senses united. He came to England in January 1713 for the purpose of printing this book, and was warmly welcomed in London literary society, his avowed object being "to make acquaintance with men of merit, rather than to engage the interests of those in power." He became the close friend of Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Steele, and arrived in time to sit in Addison's box at the first performance of Cato. Everybody was charmed with Berkeley, and even Atterbury, from whom compliments were not easily wrung, said that "so much understanding, so much knowledge, so much innocence, and so much humility, I did not think had been the portion of any but angels, till I saw this gentleman." After some brilliant months in London, Berkeley was recommended by Swift to the Earl of Peterborough, who took him as chaplain on his embassy to the King of Sicily in November 1713. He spent ten months in Italy and France, and after a while passed in London, spent his time mainly in Italy until 1720. During these years he published nothing; but in 1721, after the bursting of the South Sea Bubble, he issued an appeal for moderate expenditure and simplicity of life, called An Essay towards Freventing the Ruin of Great Britain. He went back to Dublin, being made lecturer in Divinity and in Greek to his college, and chaplain to the Lord Lieutenant. In 1723 he was lifted above financial anxiety by the sum of £4000 being left him by Swift's "Vanessa," who, however, had never spoken to Berkeley. In May 1724 he received a fresh addition to his fortune in the rich deanery of Derry. But no sooner was Berkeley settled there than he began to form the project of founding a missionary college in the Bermudas, for the purpose of

training young clergymen to evangelise America. Swift, who took a somewhat cynical view of the matter, nevertheless commended it for Berkeley's sake to Carteret, saying, "I entreat you either to keep one of the first men in this kingdom quiet at home, or else assist him to compass his romantic design, which is

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very noble and generous." The members of the Scriblerus Club were called together to dine with Lord Bathurst, for the purpose of rallying Berkeley out of his project, but he listened quietly to their jokes and then laid his plans before them with such astonishing force of enthusiasm, that the wits stood up together and exclaimed, "Let us all set out with him immediately!" In June 1725 Berkeley contrived to get from the Government a charter for his college, and

published a Proposal. His ideas were accepted in London with extraordinary zeal, and a vote of £20,000 to endow the missionary university was carried with acclamation through both Houses of Parliament. It was not, however, until September 1728, that, having married a month before, Berkeley set sail for America, and then, not for Bermuda, but Rhode Island. Sir Robert Walpole, however, was determined to wreck the scheme, and from information received from the Treasury, the Bishop of London recommended Berkeley to return in 1731. He had resigned his deanery, but on the written understanding that the deed should not take force until after the Government had paid the grant of £20,000; he was therefore able to return to Derry. In 1733 Berkeley was made Bishop of Cloyne, having returned the year before to literature, by the publication of his Alciphron, the largest of his works, which he had composed in Rhode Island. He lived at Cloyne from 1734 to 1752, although in 1745 he was offered the much more valuable diocese of Clogher. He set up in the palace at Cloyne a distillery of tar-water, a medicine which had long attracted him, because he conceived it to have the anti-materialistic quality of being charged with "pure invisible fire, the most subtle and elastic of bodies." Accordingly, in 1744, Berkeley published his Chain of Philosophical Reflections concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water, to which, in the second and all subsequent editions, was given the more convenient title of Siris. This extraordinary work has been more read than any other of its author's writings, and exhibits in perfection the admirable beauty of his style. It was expanded by Farther Thoughts on Tar-Water in 1752. In the summer of that year Berkeley seems to have grown tired of his long exile at Cloyne, and asked George II. to permit him to resign. The King replied that he might reside wherever he liked, but that live and die a Bishop he should. Berkeley, therefore, in the summer of 1752, found occasion in his son George's proceeding to Oxford as a student of Christ Church, to settle near him, and he took a house in Holywell Street. But his residence there was short, for on the evening of Sunday, January 14, 1753, appearing to have never been in better health, and having just expounded a chapter of the first Corinthians to his family, Berkeley withdrew to the sofa for a nap, from which he never awakened. He was buried in the cathedral of Christ Church, Oxford. It was not Pope alone, but all his contemporaries, who attributed "to Berkeley every virtue under heaven.” No one, in that age of plain speaking, had a word to say to his disadvantage. His beauty of person, his grace of manner, his kindliness, his unselfishness, his intelligence, his simplicity are celebrated by all who knew him; even Voltaire was impressed with his goodness of heart, and in Swift's eyes he was the one "absolute philosopher." As one of his clergy said, "If ever there lived a Christian, it was Dr. Berkeley."

I desire it may be considered that most men want leisure, opportunity, or faculties, to derive conclusions from their principles, and establish morality on a foundation of human science. True it is-as St. Paul observes-that the "invisible things of God, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen;" and from thence the duties of natural religion may be discovered. But these things are seen and discovered by those alone who open their eyes and look narrowly for them. Now, if you look throughout the world, you shall find but few of these narrow inspectors and inquirers, very few who make it their business to analyse opinions, and pursue them to their rational source, to examine whence truths spring, and how they are inferred. In short, you shall find all men full of opinions, but knowledge only in a few.

It is impossible, from the nature and circumstances of humankind, that the multitude should be philosophers, or that they should know things in their causes. We see every day that the rules, or conclusions alone, are sufficient for the shopkeeper to state his account, the sailor to navigate his ship, or the carpenter to measure his timber; none of which understand the theory, that is to say, the grounds and reasons either of arithmetic or geometry. Even so in moral, political, and religious matters, it is manifest that the rules and opinions early imbibed at the first dawn of understanding, and without the least glimpse of science, may yet produce excellent effects, and be very useful to the world; and that, in fact, they are so, will be very visible to every one who shall observe what passeth round about him.

THE SPIRIT OF PLANTS.

The balsam or essential oil of vegetables contains a spirit, wherein consist the specific qualities, the smell and taste of the plant. Boerhave holds the native presiding spirit to be neither oil, salt, earth, nor water, but somewhat too fine and subtle to be caught alone and rendered visible to the eye. This, when suffered to fly off, for instance, from the oil of rosemary, leaves it destitute of all flavour. This spark of life, this spirit or soul, if we may so say, of the vegetable, departs without any sensible diminution of the oil or water wherein it was lodged.

It should seem that the forms, souls, or principles of vegetable life subsist in the light or solar emanation, which in respect to the macrocosm is what the animal spirit is to the microcosm-the interior tegu

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ens primum or scintilla spirituosa, as
it is called, of plants should be a thing
so fine and fugacious as to escape our
nicest search. It is evident that nature
at the sun's approach vegetates, and
languishes at his recess; this terrestrial
globe seeming only a matrix disposed
and prepared to receive life from his
light. . . . The luminous spark which is
the form or life of a plant, from whence
its differences and properties flow, is
somewhat extremely volatile.

No wonder, then, that the

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
After the Portrait by F. Zincke

The most prominent woman-writer of the first half of the eighteenth century was Lady Mary Pierrepont (16891762), daughter of Evelyn Pierrepont, afterwards Duke of Kingston, who was born in lodgings in Covent Garden, on the 26th May 1689, and who married Edward Wortley Montagu in 1712. By means of her husband, who was much older than she, Lady Mary was introduced to Addison, Congreve, and Steele, and her earliest writings were suppressed by the advice of the first-named. She persevered, however, and in 1716 her Court Poems were privately and anonymously printed. In that year she left England with her husband, and remained in Vienna and Constantinople until the autumn of 1718; her letters during this period were of high value and interest. Returning to London, she made the personal acquaintance of Pope, with whom she

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