tellectual calibre and the character of Berkeley. He was possessed of great acuteness and ingenuity, of great taste and refinement, but was not distinguished for good sense or shrewdness. From an early date he was addicted to dreaming reflection. "I was distrustful at eight years old and consequently by nature disposed for these new doctrines." In gazing so intently into the spiritual world, the material covering was lost sight of. He had a taste for beauty in nature fostered by the pleasant Irish scenery on the banks of the Nore and gratified by the nice little rocks and lovely bays on the shore of Rhode Island, but he seemed to have had no appreciation of the grandeur of Alpine scenery as he passed through it. He was benevolent in a high degree, but was not bold or independent: he clung resolutely to the slavish doctrine of passive obedience, and allowed the Lord Lieutenant to send him to dine with the steward, being reconciled to it by the hope of receiving a deanery. His heart was full of gratitude and love to God, and he had a high admiration of the more lovely features of Christianity, but the cure of souls does not seem to have sat very heavily upon him. The religion which he loved and defended was that of the Church of England in Ireland, and other denominations are called "sectaries." In his Queries he probes many of the sores of Ireland with a searching hand; but he has not a word against the infamous Penal Code passed in his time, and depriving all except Episcopalians of their civil rights, nor against the existence of an Established Church, then in the fermentation of its worst corruptions in a hostile nation of Catholics and Presbyterians.

In Trinity College, Dublin, he was trained in mathematics and in the natural philosophy of Newton, and he made himself acquainted with the philosophy of Descartes, Malebranche and Locke. He was introduced to the philosophy of Locke by Locke's friend and correspondent, Dr. Thomas Molyneux; and he fell under the influence of the great English metaphysicianquite as much as Prof. Fraser is in the grasp of Hamilton, even when wishing to escape from him. His nature shrank from many of the tenets of Locke, from his declaration that mind might be material, from his dwelling so much on sensation and disparaging faith-but he could not break away from the paths in which Locke had taught him to walk. First he was as decidedly an experientialist as Locke was; appealing incidentally, as Locke,

did, to intuition, but never explaining what intuition is or justifying the appeal to it. But if Reid and Kant have established any truth, it is that the great principles of philosophy, morality and religion have a deeper foundation than mere experience. Then, secondly, he became hopelessly entangled by the constant use of the word "idea,” with all its duplicity and misleading associations, philological and historical; as signifying originally an image, and historically as having so many meanings from the time of Plato downwards. Berkley broke out from the narrow paths which Locke cut out; but was never able to get out of them to survey the whole domain of philosophy, even when at a later date he put himself under the guidance of Plato. Berkeley noticed some of the deficiencies of Locke's philosophy, but did not see the way to rectify them.

The truth is, there was a defect in Berkeley's intellectual organization which I believe was incurable. With a keen, penetrating insight, and a superfluity of ingenuity, he was without the crowning good sense which characterized Aristotle, Locke, Reid and the Scottish school generally. The fact is, Berkeley was a visionary in everything. His Bermuda scheme and his belief in the virtues of tar-water, were not wilder than his philosophy was. It is amusing, meanwhile, to observe how he claimed to be so practical. He convinced British statesmen of great shrewdness, by an array of calculations, that the best way of converting the Indians and of christianizing the continent of America, was by a college instituted at Bermuda. By an undiscerning agglomeration of facts he convinced numbers in his own day, and he has had believers in Ireland down to our day, that tar-water would cure all sorts of diseases. In a like way he persuaded himself that his philosophy is the expression of vulgar belief and the perfection of common-sense. He professes "to be eternally banishing metaphysics and recalling men to common-sense,' ," "to remove the mist and veil of words," and to. be "more for reality than other philosophies." Every student of human nature knows that those who have a secret consciousness of their weakness in a certain point are disposed to assert their eminence in that point-thus Thomas Brown, with a true metaphysical acumen, was nervously anxious to show that he possessed poetical genius in a far higher degree. It may have been this natural weakness which led Berkeley to dwell so much

on details in the Bermuda and tar-water business, and to appeal so much to fact and experience in defending his idealism.

His style is acknowledged on all hands to be graceful and attractive. He avoids, as Locke does, all technical and scholastic phrases; but his language is much more flowing than that of the English metaphysician. As Locke affected the style of the conversation which he had heard among the better classes, so Berkeley adopted the style of the literature of the day, that is of the wits of Queen Anne. This mode of composition has its disadvantages. If it has the ease of conversation and literature, it has also the looseness. Berkeley is by no means very precise in his use of language: "Blame me not if I use my words sometimes in some latitude; this is what cannot be helped. It is the fault of language that you cannot always apprehend the clear and determinate meaning of my words" (IV. 443). His editor complains of "the chronic tendency to misconceive" Berkeley's philosophy. His admirers are ever telling us that he has been. misunderstood; and in particular that his opponents of the Scottish school, such as Baxter, Reid, and Beattie, never apprehend his meaning. His opponents are apt to feel, if not to say, that his speculations are so undefined that any one may form the shape that pleases him out of the cloud. Those who have attacked him, suppose that he denies the existence of matter; those who defend him maintain that he holds resolutely by the existence of matter. But surely there is some defect in a philosophic writer, who has so expounded his doctrine as to be forever misunderstood by able and candid minds. With all these imperfections, we feel that some of his works, such for instance as his "Three Dialogues between Phylas and Philonous," are the finest philosophic dialogues in the English tongue, and are worthy of being placed along side of those of Plato.

Many of our higher literary reviews, such as the Quarterly (London), the Edinburgh and the North American have taken advantage of this edition to give us sketchy articles on Berkeley. I am in this paper to undertake a more serious work required by the state of philosophic opinion in our day; I am to review the fundamental positions of the Irish metaphysician.

Theory of Vision. Berkeley is best known in connection with this theory, which he expounded in his "Essay toward a New Theory of Vision" (1709) and defended in his "Theory of Vision

Vindicated and Explained" (1733) and, indeed, in most of his works. Prof. Fraser is of opinion that in respect of his theory he has not so much originality as is commonly attributed to him. "He takes the invisibility of distance in the line of sight for granted as a common scientific truth of the time." It is well known that there were notices by Descartes of the way by which the eye perceives distances, and Malebranche specifies some of the signs by which distance is estimated. William Molyneux, in a treatise on optics, published in 1690, declared that distance of itself is not to be perceived, for "tis a line or a length presented to the eye with its end toward us, which must therefore be only a point and that is invisible" (I. 17); and then he shows that distance is chiefly perceived by means of interjacent objects, by the estimate we make of the comparative magnitude of bodies or their faint colors: this for objects considerably remote; as to nigh objects their distance is perceived by the turn of the eyes or the angle of the optic axis. Locke, in the fourth edition of his essay, mentions a problem put to him by Molyneux, whether, if a cube and a sphere were placed before a blind man who was made to see, he would be able to tell which is the globe and which the cube, to which both Molyneux and Locke answered "not." These statements by well-known philosophers were known to all interested in such studies before Berkeley's work appeared. But the New Theory of Vision treated of the subject specially and in a more elaborate way, and has commonly got the credit, not certainly of originating the doctrine, but of establishing it; and it has ever since been generally accepted-the only exceptions of men of note being the late Samuel Bailey and Mr. Abbot of Dublin. In particular, he has shown that there are three arbitrary signs of near distances: The organic sensation accompanying the adjustment of the eye to the object; the degree of perceived confusion in the object; and the organic sensation of showing. The theory has been confirmed by a series of experimental cases of persons born blind but who were afterward made to see. Beginning with the Cheselden case (1728) Prof. Frazer professes to give an account of such cases, but has inexcusably omitted by far the best conducted and reported ones: the Franz case detailed in the Transactions of the Royal Society (1841), and the Trinchinetti cases mentioned by Abbot in his Sight and Touch, cases which seem to me to settle all the points still dis

puted as to the original capacity of the sense of sight.* Prof. Fraser has shown that Berkeley all along meant his views as to vision to establish a far more important principle, that by all the senses we perceive only signs of mental realities, a doctrine cherished by him from an early date but kept in the back-ground in his early work.

Idea. Berkeley takes the word not in the sense of Plato, or the schoolmen, but in that of Descartes and Locke, specially the latter. Locke uses the term "to stand for whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks;" whatever is meant by "phantasm, notion, and species." But this is giving the phrase a very wide comprehension. The objects of the understanding when it thinks are of a very varied character: they are very different things I am thinking of when I look at the carpet of the room in which 1 sit, when I recall that carpet, when I think of my past feelings or my present feelings, when I think of duty or of Deity. There may be no impropriety in calling all these objects of thought external and internal, by one and the same name; but of all words "idea" is about the most unfortunate that could be employed from its literal meaning, which ever cleaves to it, being image, and from its applied meanings in philosophy being so many and inconsistent. It stands for what the schoolmen denoted by "phantasm, notion and species;" but the schoolmen drew distinctions between these phrases, and certainly did not confound the intellectual notion with the mere phantasm of the reproductive or imaging power of the mind. The liberal meaning always stuck to it in Locke's apprehension, and breeds inextricable confusion. He habitually regards the object of the mind when it thinks as an idea in the sense of image. He supposes there is such an image when we use the senses, even such senses as smelling and hearing, and he seeks for such an image when we think of space, time, and eternity. He sees the difficulty in the mind forming an ideain this sense of the product of abstraction and generalization. He acknowledges that it doth "require some pains and skill to form this general idea of a triangle," "for it must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scal

* There is a later case reported by Critchett in Med. Chis. Trans., Vol. xxxviii. See Contemporary Review, Feb., 1872.