Bishop George Berkeley, 1685-1753.

Irish philosopher, clergymen, and reformer, of notable Tory persuasion.

George Berkeley was born to a notable Anglo-Irish family in Kilkenny and educated at Trinity College Dublin, earning his master's degree in 1707, and remaining as a tutor and junior fellow, writing his first few works on mathematics. 

Berkeley's principal claim to fame is probably his youthful work in empiricist metaphysics - most famously the  idealist epistemology laid out in his  Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). He conflated Locke's primary and secondary qualities into mere "ideas" thus reduced all human knowledge into mental interpretations.   It is to Berkeley whom we owe that tiresome question of the existence of the tree falling unobserved in the forest .  It was not understood or well-received at the time, and subjected to some derision, but proved to be greatly significant (it was in radicalizing Berkeley that David Hume made his philosophical debut.)   Other works in this vein include the Three Dialogues (1713), the Latin De Motu (1721) and the maturer Theory of Vision (1733)

Berkeley was ordained Church of Ireland (Anglican) deacon of Trinity College chapel in 1709, and sometime after (uncertain when) took priestly vows. In 1711, he produced his Passive Obedience, a tract defending the notion that it was a Christian duty to obey supreme civil power unflinchingly.  It was his first foray in what can be characterized as High Toryism, and may have been motivated as an answer to Locke's treatises on government.

Berkeley took a leave of absence from Trinity and left Ireland in 1713 making for London, where he was introduced by fellow Irish philosophe Jonathan Swift to the leading intellectual and literary figures of the Augustan age. Berkeley wrote several articles for Richard Steele's The Guardian, principally satires against 'free-thinkers' (fashionable atheists).  Berkeley's Three Dialogues (1713) were an attempt to restate his Treatise in the form of Augustan wit, hoping thereby for a little more success. 

In late 1713, Berkeley accompanied Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough through France and Italy, on the way to Sicily, where the earl was to take up his position as British ambassador.  But Queen Anne's sudden death in 1714 cut that trip short. With the political turmoil of the transition, Berkeley found his Tory connections profitless, and was even suspected of being a Jacobite sympathizer.  Berkeley readily took up an opportunity to undertake another European tour in 1715, this time as tutor to the young St. George Ashe.  This tour would last until 1720, and was spent principally in Italy.  Towards the end of that journey, he composed a Latin treatise, De Motu, attempting to apply his idealist philosophy to science, principally motion. 

Berkeley arrived in England in late 1720 just in time for the unraveling of the South Sea Bubble.  His Essay toward Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721) was written as an alarmist  piece of Tory social commentary.  The disenchanted Berkeley blamed the crisis as a natural outcome of the easy money, recklessness, corruption and general moral decadence of early Hanoverian Britain.    He urged a return to simple principles of individual exertion, frugality, religion, public spiritedness, etc. He urged active government involvement in job creation, workhouses and public investment projects, as well as intervention in social life (bachelor taxes, sumptuary laws, regulating art, drama, etc.) to promote public virtue and population growth.  However, Berkeley remained  thoroughly pessimistic about long-term prospects - warning that increased prosperity naturally promoted luxurious tastes, which would likely lead to ruin and depopulation of the country.

In late 1721, Berkeley finally returned to Dublin, possibly (initially) as chaplain of Charles FitRoy, Duke of Grafton (the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland), and subsequently the Deanery of Dromore.  He also might have taken a doctor of divinity at Trinity and become senior lecturer at this point.  All that is certain is  that in 1722, Berkeley returned to the academic world and took up the chair of Hebrew Lecturer at Trinity  in 1722 and, a year later, he was surprised to inherit a considerable fortune from a Dutch merchant's widow Vanessa Vanhomrigh, whom Berkeley barely knew (she had briefly been Swift's intimate, and wrote her will in Berkeley's favor possibly to spite Swift).

In 1724, Berkeley left Trinity College to take up a substantial appointment as Dean of Derry.  With his financial situation more settled, Berkeley threw himself into a project to establish a Christian college in the Bermudas (1725).  He moved to London to garner support, eventually the project gained parliamentary approval, and a charter for the College of St. Paul was issued, with Berkeley as its first president was issued in 1726.  After marrying in 1728, Berkeley finally set sail with his new wife for the New World to establish the college.  However, it was not to be.  For obscure reasons (accidental or intentional), the ship ended up anchoring in Newport, Rhode Island in early 1729 (Berkeley possibly intended to establish in Newport a support base for his Caribbean college).  Berkeley ended up staying in Rhode Island for three years, setting himself up on a farm and an unusual period of quiet domesticity, ostensibly waiting for pledges for the college to materialize. The project was finally quashed by the prime minister Robert Walpole in 1731 and Berkeley returned to Europe disappointed.  He left his farm (and later sent his library) to Yale college.

Soon after arriving in London, Berkeley published his Alciphron (1732), a set of dialogues composed while in Rhode Island against atheistic 'free-thinkers', in various guises, and contained a  subtly-argued defense of Christian spirituality and mysteries.  It provoked a bit of a debate, prompting Berkeley to revisit his old theory of vision (1733) to illustrate its connections to his idealist philosophy.  In these polemics, Berkeley took particular aim at the hedonic ethics of Shaftesbury and the vices-benefits thesis of  Mandeville.

The controversy provoked by Alciphron led some commentators to speculate that Berkeley might even hold mathematical knowledge as unsound.  Berkeley decided to address the matter in his polemical Analyst (1734).  Addressed to the royal astronomer and skeptic Edmund Halley, Berkeley challenged mathematics head on, most notably Newton's popular theory of 'fluxions' (differential calculus).  With the ardor of a 'free-thinker', Berkeley sets about uncovering numerous 'gaps in proof', and attacking the use of infinitesimals ('ghosts of departed quantities'), diagonal of the unit square, the infinitely-divisible length, and the very existence of numbers.  These were used to illustrate Berkeley's general point that mathematicians, like Christians, rely on incomprehensible 'mysteries' for the foundations of their reasoning. The certainty of mathematics is no greater than the certainty of religion. 

In 1734, George Berkeley was appointed and consecrated as Bishop of Cloyne, in one of the remoter parts of County Cork in southern Ireland.  His first year was spent in follow-up parries with the mathematicians, but he soon turned his inquiries into the social and economic condition of his diocese - particularly the state of the native poor Irish Catholic population (an unusual concern for a planted Anglican bishop).  The result was The Querist, published anonymously in three parts between 1735 and 1737, set in the form of several hundred questions (really, pseudo-questions, for which the reader is expected to answer 'yes' for nearly all of them, and carry the argument).  The queries (esp. Part III) are essentially geared to advocating the creation of an Irish Mint and National Bank (a project earlier floated in parliament, but sunk in 1721). He made Law's doctrine that "easy money is the engine of trade" central to his policy conclusions, basing this on his argument that money was effectively only a "ticket" for a credit transaction (presaging the ideas of Boisguilbert, Steuart and, much later, H.D. Macleod). 

(In a sense, the Querist is yet another demolition of John Locke, whose outsized influence on British thought always grated Berkeley.  Having disposed of Locke's philosophy (1710) and his political theory (1712), this time, Berkeley assaults Locke's metal-focused quantity theory of money.) 

The Querist was his principal economics tract.  Berkeley was an opponent of Mandeville's economic-ethical philosophy of 'private vice, public benefits', condemning his Fable in at least two tracts (1732, 1736). 

Berkeley's proceeded to lead the life of a near-recluse at Cloyne, emerging only intermittently to attend the house of lords in Dublin.  The Jacobite rebellion of 1745 prompted his Letter to the Catholics and, a few years later, a Word to the Wise (1749) addressing the Catholic clergy and the Maxims concerning Patriotism (1750).  In declining age and health, Berkeley found the medicinal qualities of tar-water helpful, he set about writing several tracts lauding its properties.

In 1752, already in grievous health, Berkeley moved to England, to accompany his son, who had enrolled at Oxford.  He died not long after, in early 1753.  Berkeley was buried in Christchurch, Oxford. 

George Berkeley is referred to in W.B. Yeats's "Seven Sages" as one of the great opponents of 'Whiggery'.  The city of Berkeley, where the flagship campus of  the University of California was established in 1866, was named after him.  

Top

Top

Top

All rights reserved, Gonçalo L. Fonseca