Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/71

Rh that thought itself is merely a manifestation of the force contained in matter. Tendencies such as this were appearing among the free-thinkers of Berkeley's time, and Berkeley took delight in his discovery precisely because it eliminated that blind, deaf mass of matter which threatened to exile the Supreme Spirit from the universe.

Berkeley's immaterialism, then, sprang from a theological motive and was utilized for a theological purpose: but his great principle was none the less true in itself, and its truth has now been accepted by the better part of the thinking world. I shall not reassume the several arguments which Berkeley invents, expounds and repeats in the Principles and in the Dialogues. Anyone can find them in a good history of philosophy, or better still, in Berkeley's own books, which are excellent reading and by no means difficult. And those who desire really to feel the discovery of Berkeley in all its ecstatic completeness, should read by preference the obscure and hurried notes of the Commonplace Book, in which, amid ingenuous remarks and ill-expressed revelations of the pride of discovery, one can witness the unfolding, or rather the explosion, of the theory of immaterialism. It is not a treatise fairly adorned and skillfully arranged, like a French garden; it is one of the few documents that reveal philosophic thought in action—uncertain at times,