A cheerful optimism appears in Berkeley’s habit of thought about death, as we have it in his essays in the _Guardian_: a sanguine apprehension of a present preponderance of good, and consequent anticipation of greater good after death; unlike those whose pessimistic temperament induces a lurid picture of eternal moral disorder. But his otherwise active imagination seldom makes philosophy a meditation upon death. He does not seem to have exercised himself in the way those do who find in the prospect of being in the twenty-first century as they were in the first, what makes them appalled that they have ever come at all into transitory percipient life; or as those others who recoil from an unbodied life after physical death, as infinitely more appalling than the thought of being transported _in this body_ into another planet, or even to a material world outside our solar system. In one of his letters to Johnson(36) he does approach the unbodied life, and in a characteristic way:— “I see no difficulty in conceiving a change of state, such as is vulgarly called _death_, as well without as with material substance. It is sufficient for that purpose that we allow sensible bodies, i.e. such as are immediately perceived by sight and touch; the existence of which I am so far from questioning, as philosophers are used to do, that I establish it, I think, upon evident principles. Now it seems very easy to conceive the _soul_ to exist in a separate state (i.e. divested from those limits and laws of motion and perception with which she is embarrassed here) and to exercise herself on new ideas, without the intervention of these tangible things we call _bodies_. It is even very possible to apprehend how the soul may have ideas of colour without an eye, or of sounds without an ear(37).” But while we may thus be supposed to have all our present sensuous experience in an unbodied state, this does not enable one to conceive how unbodied persons can communicate with one another in the absence of _all_ sense signs; whether of the sort derived from our present senses, or from other senses of whose data we can in this life have no imagination. ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Berkeley’s tar-water enthusiasm lasted throughout the rest of his life, and found vent in letters and pamphlets in support of his Panacea, from 1744 till 1752. Notwithstanding this, he was not forgetful of other interests—ecclesiastical, and the social ones which he included in his large meaning of “ecclesiastical.” The Rising under Charles Edward in 1745 was the occasion of a _Letter to the Roman Catholics of Cloyne_, characteristically humane and liberal. It was followed in 1749 by an _Exhortation to the Roman Catholic Clergy of Ireland_ in a similar spirit; and this unwonted courtesy of an Irish Protestant bishop was received by those to whom it was addressed in a corresponding temper.