cess of logic he makes himself futile; yet we cannot contest the supremacy it confers. And thus, looking back along the line of ages, there appears to us a line of great figures-figures almost more notable in their calm than those of the greatest practical agents the world has seen. Bacon, for example, in the rich Elizabethan age. The greatest of English poets is on the same scene, and with him a sovereign of personal note and mark, great statesmen, and some of the most picturesque and noble gentlemen-Sidney, Raleigh, Essex-that ever adorned England. Yet, even in presence of Shakespeare, it is difficult to say that Bacon is not the most illustrious-for his deeds? alas! no-his deeds damn the man-but because of his transcendent eminence as a philosopher. It is thought, and thought only, that gives him his supremacy. It is needless to pursue through history the names of those who have won on the same ground a long-enduring fame. Yet the science which has conferred this fame has become in modern times the most unsatisfactory, the least beneficial, the most unpractical of all knowledges. Amid the busy world, in which every man has his work to do and his burden to bear, to walk over real thorns that tear his flesh, and burning ploughshares that penetrate to the bone, the greatest thinkers have but lived to prove that nought is everything and everything is nought. Their researches have only led them to the conclusion that nothing can be found out. It is the labour of Sisyphus, never ending, still beginning, which has cast over them the mist of splendour through which posterity beholds them. Instead of expanding our horizon and bringing new truths to our knowledge, the only practical issue of their labours has been to reduce the number of our beliefs and make us uncertain of all things. Each new thinker who has risen in the world of modern philosophy has taken something from us. Even

con

the concession grudgingly made by one has been annulled by his successor. Let one man afford us the cheering certainty that our sciousness is a reality, and that we can know and be sure that we live; another comes after him to declare, no that Something lives of which we are a part; Something which we cannot understand, yet may believe; and that this Something is the sole reality in the universe. If one grants us the power of perceiving the image of things so truly as to be able to trust in our conception of them, another contradicts him with the assertion that the images alone exist, while of the things we can have no assurance; and a third follows with the still more disheartening warning, that we must not trust even those images, our minds being like a distorted mirror, full of false reflections. A discouraging, humiliating, unadvancing science, making progress, perhaps, in method and form, but, so far as result goes, arriving only at the conclusion that it is itself a delusion and impossibility. All other knowledges have contributed something to the common stock of human profit: philosophy alone has given us nothing. She has bidden us believe that we live as shadows in an unreal world-that nature and all her glories are but the phantasmagoria of a dreamthat the skies and the winds are but so many notions of our own uneasy, restless brain. While we, the ignorant, have been roaming, not uncheerily, about a world full of sunshine and of moonlight, she has groped on from one darkness to another, losing a faculty, a faith, a scrap of feeble certainty, at every step. Such is the story as traced even by her own votaries. Yet it is this constantly-failing, constantlydissatisfied science which has given their chief title to immortality to some of the names most known and famous in the ordinary world.

Let it be understood, to begin with, that the present writer has no

the bewildered spectator; and neither from within nor from without is there any reply.

The reigning philosophy of the time was that of Locke, when George Berkeley came into the world; one of those serious moderate compromises between two systems of which the English mind seems peculiarly capable. Rejecting as untenable the philosophy which deduced everything from individual consciousness, and yet not material enough to deny some power to the mind itself in conjunction with the senses, Locke formed the conception of a double action always going on in those dark recesses of the human intellect which have never yet given forth their secret to any inquirer. His decision was, that though sense supplied the mind with all its materials, yet there was in the mind a certain power of reflection and rumination over the material supplied which made every final conclusion a joint process effected by two powers acting together experience bringing in the corn, but reflection grinding it in the mill. According to this theory, no innate principle, no intuitive certainty, belonged to man. True, he might move about among the phantasms of earth with a certain vulgar external sense of their reality, but to know any one thing exactly as it is, was for ever denied to him by laws immutable. His own ideas of things were all his possession; they might not even resemble the things themselves, and probably did not but they were all to which he could attain. The ground on which he walked presented to him certain appearances of verdure, beauty, solidity, various and extended surface; but these were but impressions made on his senses, combined and accumulated by his intellect, and not, so far as he knew, affording even a fair representation of the earth in its own individuality. And yet the earth possessed an individuality, and the something, the

substance, whatever it was, really existed. With these impressions, Locke insisted, it was meet that man should be satisfied. Satisfied or not, he had reached the end of his tether. To go farther was impossible-to gain anything like absolute knowledge was impossible: the contentment thus enjoined might be to an eager spirit only the forlorn and pathetic resignation of a being blindly stumbling among the ghosts of things; but to Locke's calm and unexaggerated intelligence it was the reasonable contentment of a creature born to no better enlightenment, able to derive pleasure and pain, though not knowledge and certainty, from the shows of nature, and bound to make a virtue of necessity and put up with its inevitable deprivations. Most men do so without finding any difficulty in the matter; and it was fit and right that they should do so, concluded the philosopher, with a calmness and moderation which were indeed the characteristic sentiments in his case of philosophical despair. He was resigning his own science when he said it. "Locke gave up philosophy as hopeless," says Mr Lewes. To this point had the silent tide crept up when Berkeley came into the world.

And here the spectator who knows the age will brighten with a thrill of warmer interest. The philosopher who was about to awaken the discussions, the laughter, the ridicule of the eighteenth century, is no abstract being shut up in a fictitious world. In him life gives no contradiction to fame. There is not a spot in his existence for which his warmest admirer need fear the light of day. Bishop Berkeley was not only a philosopher, he was a man. His being was not starved upon the meagre fare of speculation, but nourished by all the generous currents of existence. A life full of active service to his kind, full of the warm impulses of a spontaneous, frank, open-hearted Irish naturea sensibility so keen as to lead him

even to Quixotisms and oddities of kindness-give such a warm background to his philosophy as no other great thinker within our recollection can equal. A man who is ready, at an age when men are supposed to consider their own comfort, to sacrifice himself in one of the least comfortable of missionsa man moved in later years to pause in his philosophy in order to promulgate tar-water-grand specific for all the physical ills of humanity-one who feared neither poverty nor neglect nor derision for what seemed to him at the moment the best he could do for his fellow-creatures, is such a man as is rarely met with in the sphere of philosophy. No mental system has called forth such contemptuous criticism, rude laughter, and foolish condemnation -none has been denounced as so visionary and unreal; yet Berkeley is the one philosopher of modern times who brings the race within the warmest circle of human sympathies, and casts a certain interest and glow of light from his own nature upon metaphysics themselves.

He was born in the county of Kilkenny, in March 1684, of one of those families of English colonists who have so curiously affected the history and character of Ireland. He himself was of the second generation after the immigration of the household, and presents himself to us with so many of the best features of the traditional Irishman that it is difficult to refrain from identifying him with that busy, eloquent, restless Celtic genius which common opinion has given to the country of his birth. There are no details but the driest of his youth. He was educated, in the first place, at Kilkenny School, then taught by a Dr Hinton, and at fifteen was admitted a pensioner of Trinity College, Dublin. Wealth there seems to have been none to make his family conspicuous; and their descent from the Berkeleys of Stratton was apparently illegitimate, and did not count.

His

extreme youth at the time of his entering the University would seem a sign that his great powers had been early developed; and it is apparent that his vivacious temperament, and the ferment of universal rebellion against recognised views and modes of thought so common to young men of genius, soon drove him into utterance. His first publications were upon mathematical subjects, and one of them, at least, was written before he was twenty. At twenty-three he was admitted Fellow of his College, and two years after published his 'Theory of Vision,' a work which we cannot here discuss, but which Mr Lewes tells us, in his History of Philosophy,' made " "an epoch in science." Up to this moment no light except the feeblest twinkle of history falls upon the young man. How he lived, or what were his surroundings, are matters entirely invisible to us. "He was much addicted to reading" the "airy visions of romances," his biographer tells us, not without an insinuation that these studies helped "to give birth to his disbelief of the existence of matter." The connection is one which we fear it would be difficult to trace, though the suggestion is delicious. The romances with which Berkeley amused his eager and manifold intelligence must have been those splendid fictions of the school of the 'Grand Cyrus,' which little Lady Mary Pierrepont a few years before was reading in her nursery. But the young philosopher, it is evident, did not confine himself to fiction. "Disgust at the books of metaphysics then received in the University, and that inquisitive attention to the operations of the mind which about this time was excited by the writings of Mr Locke and Father Malebranche," concurred with his novel-reading to incline him towards a new system of thought. And it is evident that there were in Berkeley other elements at work,

differing from the ordinary motives of the philosopher. Though there is no want of candour in his reasoning, nor any disingenuous attempt at the probation of any system distinct from that of metaphysics, there is a foregone conclusion essentially unphilosophical in his mind from the outset. It is "in opposition to sceptics and atheists"-it is "to promote" not only "useful knowledge," but "re ligion," that he gives forth his philosophy to the world. This motive gives warmth and force to his words, and heightens every energy of thought within him; but it is not the passionless search for truth, whatsoever that truth might happen to be, which is the ideal temper of philosophy. One can imagine the young man's nature rising into a glow of pious enthusiasm-high indignation with the frivolous doubting world around him—a passion of lofty eagerness to change the spirit and atmosphere which fills his country and debases his age. Under all the measured composure of his demonstrations, this light of meaning glows subdued, like the sunshine through the golden-tinted marble which serves for windows, as many of our readers will remember, on that Florentine hill where San Miniato watches the dead. He is betrayed not by any act or even word, but by the intense still light of purpose and meaning in all his speculations. Each step he takes conducts him not into new and undiscovered lands, where each inch of space may, for aught he knows, contain a discovery, but, with a steady regularity and stateliness, to one great point at which he has aimed from the beginning. He has covered over the cross on his buckler, and fights for the moment in armour which bears no cognisance; but yet he is as truly, according to his perceptions, the champion of religion, as if he wore the outward appearance of a Crusader. It is curious enough,

and looks like a kind of natural punishment for this beautiful and touching disingenuousness, that Berkeley's idealism holds the place of a stepping-stone to the unmitigated scepticism of Hume. The strain was too great for the common mind, and produced a reaction; and the assumption by the idealist of all power and perception to the intellect alone, provoked an examination of that intellect on the part of the sceptic such as nothing human can bear. But, we repeat, there is no disingenuousness in Berkeley's reasonings. They are even pronounced to be (philosophically) irrefutable-a fact which is no demonstration whatever, either of their truth or of the cessation of other attempts equally irrefutable (philosophically) to prove them at once futile and foolish. So charming is divine philosophy!

But the impression we derive of Berkeley as a man, in the first outburst of his powers, is by just so much the more attractive and lovable as this secret meaning within him is unphilosophical. Such an ardent, impassioned, generous young soul, as those which, some forty years ago, facing the infidel world with all the fervour of youthful opposition made beautiful by piety, began that peaceful revolution in France, which has, alas! developed into Ultramontanism, and many things less lofty and lovely than Montalembert and Lacordaire; such a young knight of Christianity as about the same period the English Church gave birth to, among the earlier followers of Newman-to develop (again alas!) into Oratorists and Ritualists-was the Irish youth, fallen upon evil days for religion, surrounded by scepticism and that brutal freethinking which belonged to the eighteenth century, reading Locke and Malebranche and the 'Grand Cyrus' in his rooms at Trinity, and feeling his heart burn within him. Such a one, throbbing all over with spirit and soul and genius-half scornful of, half indifferent to, the body