The Works of George Berkeley. Vol. 1 of 4: Philosophical Works, 1705-21Berkeley, George
Philosophy
The Works of George Berkeley. Vol. 1 of 4: Philosophical Works, 1705-21
Berkeley, George
Philosophy -- Early works to 1800
It is difficult to determine Berkeley’s relation to rival schools or
parties in Church and State. His disposition was too singular and
independent for a partisan. Some of his early writings, as we have seen,
were suspected of high Tory and Jacobite leanings; but his arguments in
the suspected _Discourse_ were such as ordinary Tories and Jacobites
failed to understand, and the tenor of his words and actions was in the
best sense liberal. In religious thought _Siris_ might place him among
latitudinarians; perhaps in affinity with the Cambridge Platonists. His
true place is foremost among the religious philosophers of the Anglican
Church; the first to prepare the religious problem for the light in which
we are invited to look at the universe by modern agnostics, and under the
modern conception of natural evolution. He is the most picturesque figure
in that Anglican succession which, in the seventeenth century, includes
Hooker and Cudworth; in the eighteenth, Clarke and Butler; and in the
nineteenth, may we say Coleridge, in lack of a representative in orders;
although Mansel, Maurice, Mozley, and Jowett are not to be forgotten, nor
Isaac Taylor among laymen(38): Newman and Arnold, illustrious otherwise,
are hardly representatives of metaphysical philosophy.
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A more pensive tone runs through the closing years at Cloyne. Attempts
were made in vain to withdraw him from the “remote corner” to which he had
been so long confined. His friends urged his claims for the Irish Primacy.
“I am no man’s rival or competitor in this matter,” were his words to
Prior. “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.” Letters to his American friends, Johnson and Clap, shew him still
moved by the inspiration which carried him over the Atlantic, and record
his influence in the development of American colleges(39). The home
education of his three sons was another interest. We are told by his widow
that “he would not trust his sons to mercenary hands. Though old and
sickly, he performed the constant tedious task himself.” Of the fruit of
this home education there is little to tell. The death of William, his
favourite boy, in 1751, “was thought to have struck too close to his
father’s heart.” “I am a man,” so he writes, “retired from the amusements,
politics, visits, and what the world calls pleasure. I had a little
friend, educated always under mine own eye, whose painting delighted me,
whose music ravished me, and whose lively gay spirit was a continual
feast. It has pleased God to take him hence.” The eldest son, Henry, born
in Rhode Island, did not long survive his father. George, the third son,
was destined for Oxford, and this destiny was connected with a new
project. The “life academico-philosophical,” which he sought in vain to
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