Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/607

Rh BERKELEY, a market-town in the county of Gloucester, near the River Severn, on the Midland Railway. It is pleasantly situated on a gentle eminence, in a rich pastoral vale to which it gives name, and which is celebrated for its dairies, producing the famous cheese known as &quot; double Gloucester.&quot; The town has a handsome church, a grammar school, a town-hall, a market-house, and some trade in coal, timber, malt, and cheese. Berkeley was the birthplace of the celebrated Dr Jenner, whose remains are interred in the church. Berkeley castle, on an eminence S.E. of the town, was built in the reign of Henry I. out of the ruins of a nunnery which had been in existence some time before the Conquest. It suffered considerably during the civil wars of the 17th century, but is still one of the noblest baronial castles existing in England. It is noted as the scene of the barbarous murder of Edward II. Since the time of Henry II. it has been in the hands of the Berkeley family. Population of the parish in 1871, 4607, about a fourth of the number being in the town.  BERKELEY,, bishop of Gloyne, one of the most subtle and original English metaphysicians, was born on the 12th March 1685, at Dysert castle, on the banks of the Nore, about two miles below Thomastown, Ireland. Not much is known of his family, who seem to have been connected with the noble English house of the same name. His father, William Berkeley, was an officer of customs, and appears to have had at one time the rank of captain in the army. We know next to nothing of the mental character of either him or his wife. George, their eldest son, was entered in 1696 at the famous Kilkenny school, of which he was not the only pupil afterwards distinguished. He was remarkably well advanced in studies for his years, and in 1700 was qualified to matriculate at Trinity College, Dublin. There, for the first time, we begin to have a fair knowledge of the circumstances in which he was placed, and of the peculiar mental qualities with which he was endowed. From his own account, and from the few notices of contemporaries, we can gather that his was a mind of peculiar subtilty, keen to probe to the very founda tion any fact presented to it, and resolutely determined to rest satisfied with no doctrine which had only the evidence of authority or custom, and was not capable of being realized in consciousness. This turn of mind naturally led him somewhat off the beaten track of university studies ; he was not understood by his college companions, and began to be looked upon as either the greatest dunce or the greatest genius in the university. To such a reputation his eccentricity of manner, which seems to have resulted from his occasional absorption or passionate enthusiasm, largely contributed. Of the greatest importance for the development of his rare powers in a definite direction was the general condition of thought at the time of his residence at Dublin. The older text-books of physics and philosophy were no doubt in use (Dublin in this respect has always been conservative), but alongside of them the influences of the new modes of thinking were streaming in. The opposed physical systems of Descartes and Newton had begun to be known ; the new and powerful calculus was being handled ; the revolution in metaphysical speculation inaugurated by Descartes had reached Dublin ; and, above nil, the first great English work on pure philosophy, the Essay of Locke, had been translated into Latin, and its doctrines were being eagerly and minutely discussed by the young Trinity College students. Add to this the undoubted influence exercised by the presence in Dublin of such men as the university provost, Peter Browne, afterwards bishop of Cork, and King, archbishop of Dublin from 1703, and it will readily be seen that Berkeley, to use Professor Eraser s words, &quot;entered an atmosphere which was beginning to be charged with the elements of reaction against traditional scholasticism in physics and in meta physics.&quot; Although more competent than any man of his time to appreciate these new movements of thought, Berkeley did not neglect the routine work of the university. He had a distinguished career, was made scholar in 1702, took his B.A. degree in 1704, and obtained a fellowship in 1707. That his interest, however, was mainly directed towards subjects purely philosophical, is evidenced partly by the share he took in setting afloat a speculative society in which the problems suggested by Descartes and Locke seem to have been discussed with infinite vigour, but, above all, by his Common Place Book, containing his thoughts on physics and philosophy from about the year 1703. This curious document, one of the most valuable autobiographical records in existence, throws a flood of light on the growth of Berkeley s own conceptions, and enables us to understand, far more cleaiiy than we otherwise could, the significance of his first published works. In the Common Place Boole, if in any writing, is to be found the keen consciousness of possessing a fresh, creative thought, the application of which will change the whole aspect of speculative science. The very first sentences refer to some new principle, and the whole book thereafter is occupied turning over and over again the new conception, showing the different aspects it assumes, and the various applications it has, bringing it face to face with possible objections, and critically con sidering the relation in which it stands to the fundamental thoughts of his great predecessors, Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke. So far as reading goes, the Common Place Book shows but a slight acquaintance with ancient or scholastic philosophies ; it is evident that the author does not appreciate Spinoza ; he does not refer to Leibnitz ; Malebranche is frequently mentioned, but hardly in such a way as to manifest sympathetic understanding of him ; Norris, the English follower of Malebranche, seems to be unnoticed; More and the Mystics, when referred to, are quoted on isolated points, and to their system the young philosopher evidently felt no attraction. Descartes and Locke, above all the latter, are his real masters in specula tion, and it is from the careful consideration of their systems that the new principle has sprung to light. And what is this principle] As Professor Fraser has said, there are many ways of expressing it, and Berkeley himself has never given any very definite enunciation. To put it in a form as nearly as possible resembling the statements in the Common Place Book, it may be expressed in the pro position that no existence is conceivable and therefore possible which is not either conscious spirit or the ideas (i.e., objects) of which such spirit is conscious. Existing things consist of ideas or objects perceived or willed, while perception and volition are inconceivable and impossible save as the operations of mind or spirit. In the language of a later philosophy, the principle is that of the absolute synthesis of subject and object; no object exists apart from mind. Mind is therefore the deepest reality ; it is the 2)rius both in thought and in existence, if for the moment we assume the popular distinction between these two. From this primitive truth, which, it seems to Berkeley, merely requires careful consideration in order to be at once accepted, he never wavers. Let attention be but confined to the only possible meaning which existence can have, and, Berkeley thinks, the principle must appear self-evident. Thus he puts in a new light the perennial problems of philosophy, and instead of discussing the nature and relations of assumed entities, such as matter, substance, or cause, would ask us to consider whether or not these have any significance apart from the perceptions or volitions of conscious spirit, what in that case they do mean, and whether the supposed difficulties connected with them do 