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.