“Upon the whole, I think we may fairly conclude that the proper objects of Vision constitute the Universal Language of Nature; whereby we are instructed how to regulate our actions in order to attain those things that are necessary to the preservation and well-being of our bodies, as also to avoid whatever may be hurtful and destructive of them. And the manner wherein they signify and mark out unto us the objects which are at a distance is the same with that of languages and signs of human appointment; which do not suggest the things signified by any likeness or identity of nature, but only by an habitual connexion that experience has made us to observe between them. Suppose one who had always continued blind be told by his guide that after he has advanced so many steps he shall come to the brink of a precipice, or be stopped by a wall; must not this to him seem very admirable and surprising? He cannot conceive how it is possible for mortals to frame such predictions as these, which to him would seem as strange and unaccountable as prophecy does to others. Even they who are blessed with the visive faculty may (though familiarity make it less observed) find therein sufficient cause of admiration. The wonderful art and contrivance wherewith it is adjusted to those ends and purposes for which it was apparently designed; the vast extent, number, and variety of objects that are at once, with so much ease and quickness and pleasure, suggested by it—all these afford subject for much and pleasing speculation, and may, if anything, give us some glimmering analogous prænotion of things that are placed beyond the certain discovery and comprehension of our present state(2).” Berkeley took orders in the year in which his _Essay on Vision_ was published. On February 1, 1709, he was ordained as deacon, in the chapel of Trinity College, by Dr. George Ashe, Bishop of Clogher. Origen and Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas, Malebranche, Fenelon, and Pascal, Cudworth, Butler, Jonathan Edwards, and Schleiermacher, along with Berkeley, are among those who are illustrious at once in the history of philosophy and of the Christian Church. The Church, it has been said, has been for nearly two thousand years the great Ethical Society of the world, and if under its restrictions it has been less conspicuous on the field of philosophical criticism and free inquiry, these names remind us of the immense service it has rendered to meditative thought.