Editor's Preface
This work is the gem of British metaphysical literature. Berkeley's claim to be the great modern master of Socratic dialogue rests, perhaps, upon Alciphron, which surpasses the conversations between Hylas and Philonous in expression of individual character, and in dramatic effect. Here conversation is adopted as a convenient way of treating objections to the conception of the reality of Matter which had been unfolded systematically in the book of Principles. But the lucid thought, the colouring of fancy, the glow of human sympathy, and the earnestness that pervade the subtle reasonings pursued through these dialogues, are unique in English metaphysical literature. Except perhaps Hume and Ferrier, none approach Berkeley in the art of uniting metaphysical thought with easy, graceful, and transparent style. Our surprise and admiration are increased when we recollect that this charming production of reason and imagination came from Ireland, at a time when that country was scarcely known in the world of letters and philosophy.
The immediate impression produced by the publication [pg 352] of the Principles, is shewn in Berkeley's correspondence with Sir John Percival. Berkeley was eager to hear what people had to say for or against what looked like a paradox apt to shock the reader; but in those days he was not immediately informed by professional critics. “If when you receive my book”—he wrote from Dublin in July, 1710, to Sir John Percival[777], then in London,—“you can procure me the opinion of some of your acquaintances who are thinking men, addicted to the study of natural philosophy and mathematics, I shall be extremely obliged to you.” In the following month he was informed by Sir John that it was “incredible what prejudice can work in the best geniuses, even in the lovers of novelty. For I did but name the subject matter of your book of Principles to some ingenious friends of mine and they immediately treated it with ridicule, at the same time refusing to read it, which I have not yet got one to do. A physician of my acquaintance undertook to discover your person, and argued you must needs be mad, and that you ought to take remedies. A bishop pitied you, that a desire of starting something new should put you upon such an undertaking. Another told me that you are not gone so far as a gentleman in town, who asserts not only that there is no such thing as Matter, but that we ourselves have no being at all.”
Berkeley's reply is interesting. “I am not surprised,” he says, “that I should be ridiculed by those who won't take the pains to understand me. If the raillery and scorn of those who criticise what they will not be at the pains to understand had been sufficient to deter men from making any attempts towards curing the ignorance and errors of mankind, we should not have been troubled with some very fair improvements in knowledge. The common [pg 353] cry's being against any opinion seems to me, so far from proving false, that it may with as good reason pass for an argument of its truth. However, I imagine that whatever doctrine contradicts vulgar and settled opinion had need be introduced with great caution into the world. For this reason it was that I omitted all mention of the non-existence of Matter in the title-page, dedication, preface and introduction to the Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge; that so the notion might steal unawares upon the reader, who probably might never have meddled with the book if he had known that it contained such paradoxes.”
With characteristic fervour he disclaims “variety and love of paradox” as motives of the book of Principles, and professes faith in the unreality of abstract unperceived Matter, a faith which he has held for some years, “the conceit being at first warm in my imagination, but since carefully examined, both by my own judgment and that of ingenious friends.” What he especially complained of was “that men who have never considered my book should confound me with the sceptics, who doubt the existence of sensible things, and are not positive as to any one truth, no, not so much as their own being—which I find by your letter is the case of some wild visionist now in London. But whoever reads my book with attention will see that there is a direct opposition between the principles that are contained in it and those of the sceptics, and that I question not the existence of anything we perceive by our senses. I do not deny the existence of the sensible things which Moses says were created by God. They existed from all eternity, in the Divine Intellect; and they became perceptible (i.e. were created) in the same manner and order as is described in Genesis. For I take creation to belong to things only as they respect finite spirits; there being nothing new to God. Hence it follows that the act of creation consists in [pg 354] God's willing that those things should become perceptible to other spirits which before were known only to Himself. Now both reason and scripture assure us that there are other spirits besides men, who, 'tis possible, might have perceived this visible world as it was successively exhibited to their view before man's creation. Besides, for to agree with the Mosaic account of the creation, it's sufficient if we suppose that a man, in case he was existing at the time of the chaos of sensible things, might have perceived all things formed out of it, in the very order set down in scripture; all which is in no way repugnant to my principles.”
Sir John in his next letter, written from London in October, 1716, reports that the book of Principles had fallen into the hands of the highest living English authority in metaphysical theology, Samuel Clarke, who had produced his Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God four years before. The book had also been read by Whiston, Newton's successor at Cambridge. “I can only report at second-hand,” he says, “that they think you a fair arguer, and a clear writer; but they say your first principles you lay down are false. They look upon you as an extraordinary genius, ranking you with Father Malebranche, Norris, and another whose name I forget, all of whom they think extraordinary men, but of a particular turn of mind, and their labours of little use to mankind, on account of their abstruseness. This may arise from these gentlemen not caring to think after a new manner, which would oblige them to begin their studies anew; or else it may be the strength of prejudice.”
Berkeley was vexed by this treatment on the part of Clarke and Whiston. He sent under Sir John's care a letter to each of them, hoping through him to discover “their reasons against his notions, as truth is his sole aim.” “As to what is said of ranking me with Father Malebranche [pg 355] and Mr. Norris, whose writings are thought to be too fine-spun to be of any great use to mankind, I have this answer, that I think the notions I embrace are not in the least agreeing with theirs, but indeed plainly inconsistent with them in the main points, inasmuch as I know few writers I take myself at bottom to differ more from than from them. Fine-spun metaphysics are what on all occasions I declare against, and if any one shall shew anything of that sort in my Treatise I will willingly correct it.” Sir John delivered the letters to two friends of Clarke and Whiston, and reported that “Dr. Clarke told his friend in reply, that he did not care to write you his thoughts, because he was afraid it might draw him into a dispute upon a matter which was already clear to him. He thought your first principles you go on are false; but he was a modest man, his friend said, and uninclined to shock any one whose opinions on things of this nature differed from his own.” This was a disappointment to the ardent Berkeley. “Dr. Clarke's conduct seems a little surprising,” he replies. “That an ingenious and candid person (as I take him to be) should refuse to shew me where my error lies is something unaccountable. I never expected that a gentleman otherwise so well employed as Dr. Clarke should think it worth his while to enter into a dispute with me concerning any notions of mine. But, seeing it was clear to him I went upon false principles, I hoped he would vouchsafe, in a line or two, to point them out to me, that so I may more closely review and examine them. If he but once did me this favour, he need not apprehend I should give him any further trouble. I should be glad if you have opportunity that you would let his friend know this. There is nothing that I more desire than to know thoroughly all that can be said against what I take for truth.” Clarke, however, was not to be drawn. The incident is thus referred to by Whiston, in his Memoirs of Clarke. “Mr. Berkeley,” he [pg 356] says, “published in 1710, at Dublin, the metaphysical notion, that matter was not a real thing[778]; nay, that the common opinion of its reality was groundless, if not ridiculous. He was pleased to send Mr. Clarke and myself each of us a book. After we had perused it, I went to Mr. Clarke to discourse with him about it, to this effect, that I, being not a metaphysician, was not able to answer Mr. Berkeley's subtle premises, though I did not believe his absurd conclusions. I therefore desired that he, who was deep in such subtleties, but did not appear to believe Mr. Berkeley's conclusion, would answer him. Which task he declined.”
What Clarke's criticism of Berkeley might have been is suggested by the following sentences in his Remarks on Human Liberty, published seven years after this correspondence: “The case as to the proof of our free agency is exactly the same as in that notable question, whether the [material] world exists or no? There is no demonstration of it from experience. There always remains a bare possibility that the Supreme Being may have so framed my mind, that I shall always be necessarily deceived in every one of my perceptions as in a dream—though possibly there be no material world, nor any other creature existing besides myself. And yet no man in his senses argues from thence, that experience is no proof to us of the existence of things. The bare physical possibility too of our being so framed by the Author of Nature as to be unavoidably deceived in this matter by every experience of every action we perform, is no more any ground to doubt the truth of our liberty, than the bare natural possibility of our being all our lifetime in a dream, deceived in our [natural] belief of the existence of [pg 357] the material world, is any just ground to doubt the reality of its existence.” Berkeley would hardly have accepted this analogy. Does the conception of a material world being dependent on percipient mind for its reality imply deception on the part of the “Supreme Being”? “Dreams,” in ordinary language, may signify illusory fancies during sleep, and so understood the term is misapplied to a universally mind-dependent universe with its steady natural order. Berkeley disclaims emphatically any doubt of the reality of the sensible world, and professes only to shew in what its reality consists, or its dependence upon percipient life as the indispensable realising factor. To suppose that we can be “necessarily deceived in every one of our perceptions” is to interpret the universe atheistically, and virtually obliges us in final nescience to acknowledge that it is wholly uninterpretable; so that experience is impossible, because throughout unintelligible. The moral trustworthiness or perfect goodness of the Universal Power is I suppose the fundamental postulate of science and human life. If all our temporal experience can be called a dream it must at any rate be a dream of the sort supposed by Leibniz. “Nullo argumento absolute demonstrari potest, dari corpora; nec quidquam prohibet somnia quædam bene ordinata menti nostræ, objecta esse, quæ a nobis vera judicentur, et ob consensum inter se quoad usum veris equivalent[779].”
The three Dialogues discuss what Berkeley regarded as the most plausible Objections, popular and philosophical, to his account of living Mind or Spirit, as the indispensable factor and final cause of the reality of the material world.
The principal aim of the First Dialogue is to illustrate [pg 358] the contradictory or unmeaning character and sceptical tendency of the common philosophical opinion—that we perceive in sense a material world which is real only in as far as it can exist in absolute independence of perceiving mind. The impossibility of any of the qualities in which Matter is manifested to man—the primary qualities not less than the secondary—having real existence in a mindless or unspiritual universe is argued and illustrated in detail. Abstract Matter, unrealised in terms of percipient life, is meaningless, and the material world becomes real only in and through living perception. And Matter, as an abstract substance without qualities, cannot, without a contradiction, it is also argued, be presented or represented, in sense. What is called matter is thus melted in a spiritual solution, from which it issues the flexible and intelligible medium of intercourse for spiritual beings such as men are; whose faculties moreover are educated in interpreting the cosmical order of the phenomena presented to their senses.
The Second Dialogue is in the first place directed against modifications of the scholastic account of Matter, which attributes our knowledge of it to inference, founded on sense-ideas assumed to be representative, or not presentative of the reality. The advocates of Matter independent and supreme, are here assailed in their various conjectures—that this Matter may be the active Cause, or the Instrument, or the Occasion of our sense-experience; or that it is an Unknowable Something somehow connected with that experience. It is argued in this and in the preceding Dialogue, by Philonous (who personates Berkeley), that unrealised Matter—intending by that term either a qualified substance, or a Something of which we cannot affirm anything—is not merely unproved, but a proved impossibility: it must mean nothing, [pg 359] or it must mean a contradiction, which comes to the same thing. It is not perceived; nor can it be suggested by what we perceive; nor demonstrated by reasoning; nor believed in as an article in the fundamental faith of intuitive reason. The only consistent theory of the universe accordingly implies that concrete realities must all be either (a) phenomena presented to the senses, or else (b) active spirits percipient of presented phenomena. And neither of these two sorts of concrete realities is strictly speaking independent of the other; although the latter, identical amid the variations of the sensuous phenomena, are deeper and more real than the mere data of the senses. The Second Dialogue ends by substituting, as concrete and intelligible Realism, the universal and constant dependence of the material world upon active living Spirit, in place of the abstract hypothetical and unintelligible Realism, which defends Matter unrealised in percipient life, as the type of reality.
In the Third Dialogue plausible objections to this conception of what the reality of the material world means are discussed.
Is it said that the new conception is sceptical, and Berkeley another Protagoras, on account of it? His answer is, that the reality of sensible things, as far as man can in any way be concerned with them, does not consist in what cannot be perceived, suggested, demonstrated, or even conceived, but in phenomena actually seen and touched, and in the working faith that future sense-experience may be anticipated by the analogies of present sense-experience.
But is not this negation of the Matter that is assumed to be real and independent of Spirit, an unproved conjecture? It is answered, that the affirmation of this abstract matter is itself a mere conjecture, and one self-convicted [pg 360] by its implied contradictions, while its negation is only a simple falling back on the facts of experience, without any attempt to explain them.
Again, is it objected that the reality of sensible things involves their continued reality during intervals of our perception of them? It is answered, that sensible things are indeed permanently dependent on Mind, but not on this, that, or the other finite embodied spirit.
Is it further alleged that the reality of Spirit or Mind is open to all the objections against independent Matter; and that, if we deny this Matter, we must in consistency allow that Spirit can be only a succession of isolated feelings? The answer is, that there is no parity between self-conscious Spirit, and Matter out of all relation to any Spirit. We find, in memory, our own personality and identity; that we are not our ideas, “but somewhat else”—a thinking, active principle, that perceives, knows, wills, and operates about ideas, and that is revealed as continuously real. Each person is conscious of himself; and may reasonably infer the existence of other self-conscious persons, more or less like what he is conscious of in himself. A universe of self-conscious persons, with their common sensuous experiences all under cosmical order, is not open to the contradictions involved in a pretended universe of Matter, independent of percipient realising Spirit.
Is it still said that sane people cannot help distinguishing between the real existence of a thing and its being perceived? It is answered, that all they are entitled to mean is, to distinguish between being perceived exclusively by me, and being independent of the perception of all sentient or conscious beings.
Does an objector complain that this ideal realism dissolves the distinction between facts and fancies? He is reminded of the meaning of the word idea. That term [pg 361] is not limited by Berkeley to chimeras of fancy: it is applied also to the objective phenomena of our sense-experience.
Is the supposition that Spirit is the only real Cause of all changes in nature declaimed against as baseless? It is answered, that the supposition of unthinking Power at the heart of the cosmos of sensible phenomena is absurd.
Is the negation of Abstract Matter repugnant to the common belief of mankind? It is argued in reply, that this unrealised Matter is foreign to common belief, which is incapable of even entertaining the conception; and which only requires to reflect upon what it does entertain to be satisfied with a relative or ideal reality for sensible things.
But, if sensible things are the real things, the real moon, for instance, it is alleged, can be only a foot in diameter. It is maintained, in opposition to this, that the term real moon is applied only to what is an inference from the moon, one foot in diameter, which we immediately perceive; and that the former is a part of our previsive or mediate inference, due to what is perceived.
The dispute, after all, is merely verbal, it is next objected; and, since all parties refer the data of the senses and the things which they compose to a Power external to each finite percipient, why not call that Power, whatever it may be, Matter, and not Spirit? The reply is, that this would be an absurd misapplication of language.
But may we not, it is next suggested, assume the possibility of a third nature—neither idea nor Spirit? Not, replies Philonous, if we are to keep to the rule of having meaning in the words we use. We know what is meant by a spirit, for each of us has immediate experience of one; and we know what is meant by sense-ideas and [pg 362] sensible things, for we have immediate and mediate experience of them. But we have no immediate, and therefore can have no mediate, experience of what is neither perceived by our senses, nor realised in inward consciousness: moreover, “entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.”
Again, this conception of the realities implies, it is said, imperfection, because sentient experience, in God. This objection, it is answered, implies a confusion between being actually sentient and merely conceiving sensations, and employing them, as God does, as signs for expressing His conceptions to our minds.
Further, the negation of independent powerful Matter seems to annihilate the explanations of physical phenomena given by natural philosophers. But, to be assured that it does not, we have only to recollect what physical explanation means—that it is the reference of an apparently irregular phenomenon to some acknowledged general rule of co-existence or succession among sense-ideas. It is interpretation of sense-signs.
Is the proposed ideal Realism summarily condemned as a novelty? It can be answered, that all discoveries are novelties at first; and moreover that this one is not so much a novelty as a deeper interpretation of the common faith.
Yet it seems, at any rate, it is said, to change real things into mere ideas. Here consider on the contrary what we mean when we speak of sensible things as real. The changing appearances of which we are percipient in sense, united objectively in their cosmical order, are what is truly meant by the realities of sense.
But this reality is inconsistent with the continued identity of material things, it is complained, and also with the fact that different persons can be percipient of the same thing. Not so, Berkeley explains, when we attend to the true meaning of the word same, and dismiss from [pg 363] our thoughts a supposed abstract idea of identity which is nonsensical.
But some may exclaim against the supposition that the material world exists in mind, regarding this as an implied assertion that mind is extended, and therefore material. This proceeds, it is replied, on forgetfulness of what “existence in mind” means. It is intended to express the fact that matter is real in being an objective appearance of which a living mind is sensible.
Lastly, is not the Mosaic account of the creation of Matter inconsistent with the perpetual dependence of Matter for its reality upon percipient Spirit? It is answered that the conception of creation being dependent on the existence of finite minds is in perfect harmony with the Mosaic account: it is what is seen and felt, not what is unseen and unfelt, that is created.
The Third Dialogue closes with a representation of the new principle regarding Matter being the harmony of two apparently discordant propositions—the one-sided proposition of ordinary common sense; and the one-sided proposition of the philosophers. It agrees with the mass of mankind in holding that the material world is actually presented to our senses, and with the philosophers in holding that this same material world is realised only in and through the percipient experience of living Spirit.
Most of the objections to Berkeley's conception of Matter which have been urged in the last century and a half, by its British, French, and German critics, are discussed by anticipation in these Dialogues. The history of objections is very much a history of misconceptions. Conceived or misconceived, it has tacitly simplified and [pg 364] purified the methods of physical science, especially in Britain and France.
The first elaborate criticism of Berkeley by a British author is found in Andrew Baxter's Inquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul, published in 1735, in the section entitled “Dean Berkeley's Scheme against the existence of Matter examined, and shewn to be inconclusive.” Baxter alleges that the new doctrine tends to encourage scepticism. To deny Matter, for the reasons given, involves, according to this critic, denial of mind, and so a universal doubt. Accordingly, a few years later, Hume sought, in his Treatise of Human Nature, to work out Berkeley's negation of abstract Matter into sceptical phenomenalism—against which Berkeley sought to guard by anticipation, in a remarkable passage introduced in his last edition of these Dialogues.
In Scotland the writings of Reid, Beattie, Oswald, Dugald Stewart, Thomas Brown, and Sir W. Hamilton form a magazine of objections. Reid—who curiously seeks to refute Berkeley by refuting, not more clearly than Berkeley had done before him, the hypothesis of a wholly representative sense-perception—urges the spontaneous belief or common sense of mankind, which obliges us all to recognise a direct presentation of the external material world to our senses. He overlooks what with Berkeley is the only question in debate, namely, the meaning of the term external; for, Reid and Berkeley are agreed in holding to the reality of a world regulated independently of the will of finite percipients, and is sufficiently objective to be a medium of social intercourse. With Berkeley, as with Reid, this is practically self-evident. The same objection, more scientifically defined—that we have a natural belief in the existence of Matter, and in our own immediate perception of its qualities—is Sir W. Hamilton's assumption against Berkeley; but Hamilton does not explain the reality thus [pg 365] claimed for it. “Men naturally believe,” he says, “that they themselves exist—because they are conscious of a Self or Ego; they believe that something different from themselves exists—because they believe that they are conscious of this Not-self or Non-ego.” (Discussions, p. 193.) Now, the existence of a Power that is independent of each finite Ego is at the root of Berkeley's principles. According to Berkeley and Hamilton alike, we are immediately percipient of solid and extended phenomena; but with Berkeley the phenomena are dependent on, at the same time that they are “entirely distinct” from, the percipient. The Divine and finite spirits, signified by the phenomena that are presented to our senses in cosmical order, form Berkeley's external world.
That Berkeley sows the seeds of Universal Scepticism; that his conception of Matter involves the Panegoism or Solipsism which leaves me in absolute solitude; that his is virtually a system of Pantheism, inconsistent with personal individuality and moral responsibility—these are probably the three most comprehensive objections that have been alleged against it. They are in a measure due to Berkeley's imperfect criticism of first principles, in his dread of a departure from the concrete data of experience in quest of empty abstractions.
In England and France, Berkeley's criticism of Matter, taken however only on its negative side, received a countenance denied to it in Germany. Hartley and Priestley shew signs of affinity with Berkeley. Also an anonymous Essay on the Nature and Existence of the Material World, dedicated to Dr. Priestley and Dr. Price, which appeared in 1781, is an argument, on empirical grounds, which virtually makes the data of the senses at last a chaos of isolated sensations. The author of the Essay is said to have been a certain [pg 366] Russell, who died in the West Indies in the end of the eighteenth century. A tendency towards Berkeley's negations, but apart from his synthetic principles, appears in James Mill and J.S. Mill. So too with Voltaire and the Encyclopedists.
The Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous were published in London in 1713, “printed by G. James, for Henry Clements, at the Half-Moon, in St. Paul's churchyard,” unlike the Essay on Vision and the Principles, which first appeared in Dublin. The second edition, which is simply a reprint, issued in 1725, “printed for William and John Innys, at the West End of St. Paul's.” A third, the last in the author's lifetime, “printed by Jacob Tonson,” which contains some important additions, was published in 1734, conjointly with a new edition of the Principles. The Dialogues were reprinted in 1776, in the same volume with the edition of the Principles, with Remarks.
The Dialogues have been translated into French and German. The French version appeared at Amsterdam in 1750. The translator's name is not given, but it is attributed to the Abbé Jean Paul de Gua de Malves[780], by Barbier, in his Dictionnaire des Ouvrages anonymes et pseudonymes, tom. i. p. 283. It contains a Prefatory Note by the translator, with three curious vignettes (given in the note below) meant to symbolise the leading thought in each Dialogue[781]. A German translation, [pg 367] by John Christopher Eschenbach, Professor of Philosophy in Rostock, was published at Rostock in 1756. It forms the larger part of a volume entitled Sammlung der vornehmsten Schriftsteller die die Wirklichkeit ihres eignen Körpers und der ganzen Körperwelt läugnen. This professed Collection of the most eminent authors [pg 368] who are supposed to deny the reality of their own bodies and of the whole material world, consists of Berkeley's Dialogues, and Arthur Collier's Clavis Universalis, or Demonstration of the Non-existence or Impossibility of an [pg 369]External World. The volume contains some annotations, and an Appendix in which a counter-demonstration of the existence of Matter is attempted. Eschenbach's principal argument is indirect, and of the nature of a reductio ad absurdum. He argues (as others have done) that the reasons produced against the independent reality of Matter are equally conclusive against the independent reality of Spirit.
An interesting circumstance connected with the Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous was the appearance, also in 1713, of the Clavis Universalis, or demonstration of the impossibility of Matter, of Arthur Collier, in which the merely ideal existence of the sensible world is maintained. The production, simultaneously, without concert, of conceptions of the material world which verbally at least have much in common, is a curious coincidence. It shews that the intellectual atmosphere of the Lockian epoch in England contained elements favourable to a reconsideration of the ultimate meaning of Matter. They are both the genuine produce of the age of Locke and Malebranche. Neither Berkeley nor Collier were, when they published their books, familiar with ancient Greek speculations; those of modern Germany had only begun to loom in the distance. Absolute Idealism, the Panphenomenalism of Auguste Comte, and the modern evolutionary conception of nature, have changed the conditions under which the universal problem is studied, and are making intelligible to this generation a manner of conceiving the Universe which, for nearly a century and a half, the British and French critics of Berkeley were unable to entertain.
Berkeley's Principles appeared three years before the Clavis Universalis. Yet Collier tells us that it was “after a ten years' pause and deliberation,” that, “rather than the world should finish its course without once offering to inquire in what manner it exists,” he had “resolved [pg 370] to put himself upon the trial of the common reader, without pretending to any better art of gaining him than dry reason and metaphysical demonstration.” Mr. Benson, his biographer, says that it was in 1703, at the age of twenty-three, that Collier came to the conclusion that “there is no such thing as an external world”; and he attributes the premises from which Collier drew this conclusion to his neighbour, John Norris. Among Collier's MSS., there remains the outline of an essay, in three chapters, dated January, 1708, on the non-externality of the visible world.
There are several coincidences between Berkeley and Collier. Berkeley virtually presented his new theory of Vision as the first instalment of his explanation of the Reality of Matter. The first of the two Parts into which Collier's Clavis is divided consists of proofs that the Visible World is not, and cannot be, external. Berkeley, in the Principles and the Dialogues, explains the reality of Matter. In like manner the Second Part of the Clavis consists of reasonings in proof of the impossibility of an external world independent of Spirit. Finally, in his full-blown theory, as well as in its visual germ, Berkeley takes for granted, as intuitively known, the existence of sensible Matter; meaning by this, its relative existence, or dependence on living Mind. The third proposition of Collier's system asserts the real existence of visible matter in particular, and of sensible matter in general.
The invisibility of distances, as well as of real magnitudes and situations, and their suggestion by interpretation of visual symbols, propositions which occupy so large a space in Berkeley's Theory of Vision, have no counterpart in Collier. His proof of the non-externality of the visible world consists of an induction of instances of visible objects that are allowed by all not to be external, although they seem to be as much so as any that are called external. His Demonstration consists of nine proofs, [pg 371] which may be compared with the reasonings and analyses of Berkeley. Collier's Demonstration concludes with answers to objections, and an application of his account of the material world to the refutation of the Roman doctrine of the substantial existence of Christ's body in the Eucharist.
The universal sense-symbolism of Berkeley, and his pervading recognition of the distinction between physical or symbolical, and efficient or originative causation, are wanting in the narrow reasonings of Collier. Berkeley's more comprehensive philosophy, with its human sympathies and beauty of style, is now recognised as a striking expression and partial solution of fundamental problems, while Collier is condemned to the obscurity of the Schools[782].