At Kilkenny School, the Eton of Ireland, where Congreve and Swift had also been pupils, George Berkeley received his early education _sub ferula_ a Dr. Hinton. At the age of fifteen he entered Trinity, and soon after became Scholar and Fellow of the house. Mathematics chiefly occupied the attention of the more eminent scholars of the day, but the larger problems claimed Berkeley’s allegiance. The philosophical issues raised by Locke and Malebranche had given a new impulse to the study of metaphysics, now emancipated from the fetters of scholasticism. Dublin was abreast of the thought of the time, for Locke’s _Essay_ was adopted as a text-book immediately on its publication, and is still a part of the course in Logics. On accepting the Deanery of Derry in 1724, Berkeley resigned all his College offices, but before that time his best known work had been done. _The New Theory of Vision_ and _The Principles of Human Knowledge_ are the direct outcome of his thought while a Junior Fellow of Trinity. The originality of Berkeley’s mind was equalled by its purity. The “good Berkeley,” as Kant calls him, charmed, as some rare spirits have the power to charm society which cared nothing for his theories, no less than philosophical friends and foes. To him the satiric vivisector Pope ascribed “every virtue under Heaven;” and Swift, misanthropist and scorner of friendship, made him a confidential friend. In some men, as has often been remarked, there resides a nameless power, the effluence of a character at once strong and good. No less a philosopher in life than in theory, no word of bitterness has ever been breathed against one of the fairest fames in history. In what exquisite words he declined, when Bishop of Cloyne, to apply for the Archiepiscopal See of Armagh: “I am no man’s rival or competitor in this matter. I am not in love with feasts, and crowds, and visits, and late hours, and strange faces, and a hurry of affairs often insignificant. For my own private satisfaction, I had rather be master of my time than wear a diadem.” But in the interest of others he was willing to spend that time. Like every other idealist thinker, he had his Utopia. “He is an absolute philosopher,” wrote Swift to Lord Carteret, “with regard to money, titles, and power, and for three years past has been struck with a notion of founding a University at Bermudas by a charter from the Crown.”