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 [pg lxxx] 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.
A section in the book of Principles[35] in which the common argument for the “natural immortality” of the human soul is reproduced, strengthened by his new conception of what the reality of body means, is Berkeley's metaphysical contribution for determining between the awful alternatives of annihilation or continued self-conscious life after physical death. The subject is touched, in a less recondite way, in two of his papers in the Guardian, and in the Discourse delivered in Trinity College Chapel in 1708, in which a revelation of the immortality of men is presented as the special gospel of Jesus Christ. To argue, as Berkeley does in the Principles, that men cannot be annihilated at death, because they are spiritual substances having powers independent of the sequences of nature, implies assumptions regarding finite persons which are [pg lxxxi] open to criticism. The justification in reason for our venture of faith that Omnipotent Goodness is at the heart of the universe is—that without this presupposition we can have no reasonable intercourse, scientific or otherwise, with the world of things and persons in which we find ourselves; for reason and will are then alike paralysed by universal distrust. But it can hardly be maintained a priori that men, or other spiritual beings in the universe, are equally with God indispensable to its natural order; so that when they have once entered on conscious existence they must always continue to exist consciously. Is not the philosophical justification of man's hope of endless life ethical rather than metaphysical; founded on that faith in the justice and goodness of the Universal Mind which has to be taken for granted in every attempt to interpret experience, with its mixture of good and evil, in this evanescent embodied life? Can a life such as this is be all for men, in a universe that, because it is essentially Divine, must operate towards the extinction of the wickedness which now makes it a mystery of Omnipotent Goodness?
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 [pg lxxxii] 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 [pg lxxxiii] 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.
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.