While Berkeley’s central thought throughout his life is concerned with God as the one omnipresent and omnipotent Providential Agent in the universe, he says little about the other final question, of more exclusively human interest, which concerns the destiny of men. That men are born into a universe which, as the visible expression of Moral Providence, must be scientifically and ethically trustworthy; certain not to put man to confusion intellectually or morally, seeing that it could not otherwise be trusted for such in our ultimate venture of faith—this is one thing. That all persons born into it are certain to continue living self-consciously for ever, is another thing. This is not obviously implied in the former presupposition, whether or not it can be deduced from it, or else discovered by other means. Although man’s environment is essentially Divine, and wholly in its smallest details Providential, may not his body, in its living organisation from physical birth until physical death, be the measure of the continuance of his self-conscious personality? Is each man’s immortal existence, like God’s, indispensable? Doubt about the destiny of men after they die is, at the end of the nineteenth century, probably more prevalent than doubt about the underlying Providence of God, and His constant creative activity; more perhaps than it was in the days of Toland, and Collins, and Tindal. Future life had been made so familiar to the imagination by the early and mediaeval Church, and afterwards by the Puritans, as in Milton, Bunyan, and Jonathan Edwards, that it then seemed to the religious mind more real than anything that is seen and touched. The habit wholly formed by natural science is apt to dissipate this and to make a human life lived under conditions wholly strange to its “minute philosophy” appear illusory.