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Rh appeal to experience, and gave to his constant thesis—that the world is immaterial—a metaphysical rather than an empiric character.

In 1734 the episcopal period of Berkeley's life begins. From then on, his name was always accompanied by the title "Bishop of Cloyne." During this period he was much occupied by the affairs of his diocese, in which the Catholics were numerous, became greatly interested in the Irish question, and continued his insistent struggle against unbelief. In 1740 Ireland was devastated by famine and disease, and Berkeley remembered a remedy of which he had learned in America: tar-water. It was tried with success in several cases. Berkeley then lost his head and thought he had discovered a universal panacea. His friend Dr. Prior advertised the new medicine extensively. It soon became fashionable, and Berkeley, with increasing enthusiasm, wrote one of the strangest of all books, the Siris, which starts off as a treatise on pharmacopœia, turns successively into a medical discussion and an essay in physics, and is finally transformed into a transcendental synthesis of neo-Platonic thought and Christian revelation. Berkeley's tar-water brought him a popularity that his immaterialism had failed to win; and his philosophical theories now made their way everywhere in England and abroad, in the suite of his directions for the use