In 1709, when he was twenty-four years old, Berkeley presented himself to the world of empty verbal reasoners as the author of what he calls modestly An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision. It was dedicated to Sir John Percival, his correspondent afterwards for more than twenty years; but I have not discovered the origin of their friendship. The Essay was a pioneer, meant to open the way for the disclosure of the Secret with which he was burdened, lest the world might be shocked by an abrupt disclosure. In this prelude he tries to make the reader recognise that in ordinary seeing we are always interpreting visual signs; so that we have daily presented to our eyes what is virtually an intelligible natural language; so that in all our intercourse with the visible world we are in intercourse with all-pervading active Intelligence. We are reading absent data of touch and of the other senses in the language of their visual signs. And the [pg xxix] visual signs themselves, which are the immediate objects of sight, are necessarily dependent on sentient and percipient mind; whatever may be the case with the tangible realities which the visual data signify, a fact evident by our experience when we make use of a looking-glass. The material world, so far at least as it presents itself visibly, is real only in being realised by living and seeing beings. The mind-dependent visual signs of which we are conscious are continually speaking to us of an invisible and distant world of tangible realities; and through the natural connexion of the visual signs with their tactual meanings, we are able in seeing practically to perceive, not only what is distant in space, but also to anticipate the future. The Book of Vision is in literal truth a Book of Prophecy. The chief lesson of the tentative Essay on Vision is thus summed up:—
“Upon the whole, I think we may fairly conclude that the proper objects of Vision constitute the Universal Language of Nature; whereby we are instructed how to regulate our actions in order to attain those things that are necessary to the preservation and well-being of our bodies, as also to avoid whatever may be hurtful and destructive of them. And the manner wherein they signify and mark out unto us the objects which are at a distance is the same with that of languages and signs of human appointment; which do not suggest the things signified by any likeness or identity of nature, but only by an habitual connexion that experience has made us to observe between them. Suppose one who had always continued blind be told by his guide that after he has advanced so many steps he shall come to the brink of a precipice, or be stopped by a wall; must not this to him seem very admirable and surprising? He cannot conceive how it is possible for mortals to frame such predictions as these, which to him would seem as strange and unaccountable as prophecy does to others. Even [pg xxx] they who are blessed with the visive faculty may (though familiarity make it less observed) find therein sufficient cause of admiration. The wonderful art and contrivance wherewith it is adjusted to those ends and purposes for which it was apparently designed; the vast extent, number, and variety of objects that are at once, with so much ease and quickness and pleasure, suggested by it—all these afford subject for much and pleasing speculation, and may, if anything, give us some glimmering analogous prænotion of things that are placed beyond the certain discovery and comprehension of our present state[2].”
Berkeley took orders in the year in which his Essay on Vision was published. On February 1, 1709, he was ordained as deacon, in the chapel of Trinity College, by Dr. George Ashe, Bishop of Clogher. Origen and Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas, Malebranche, Fenelon, and Pascal, Cudworth, Butler, Jonathan Edwards, and Schleiermacher, along with Berkeley, are among those who are illustrious at once in the history of philosophy and of the Christian Church. The Church, it has been said, has been for nearly two thousand years the great Ethical Society of the world, and if under its restrictions it has been less conspicuous on the field of philosophical criticism and free inquiry, these names remind us of the immense service it has rendered to meditative thought.
The light of the Percival correspondence first falls on Berkeley's life in 1709. The earliest extant letters from Berkeley to Sir John Percival are in September, October, and December of that year, dated at Trinity College. In one of them he pronounces Socrates “the best and most admirable man that the heathen world has produced.” Another letter, in March, 1710, accompanies a copy of the second edition of the Essay on Vision. “I have made some alterations and additions in the body of the treatise,” he says, “and in the appendix have endeavoured to meet the [pg xxxi] objections of the Archbishop of Dublin;” whose sermon he proceeds to deprecate, for “denying that goodness and understanding are more to be affirmed of God than feet or hands,” although all these may, in a metaphorical sense. How far, or whether at all, God is knowable by man, was, as we shall see, matter of discussion and controversy with Berkeley in later life; but this shews that the subject was already in his thoughts. Returning to the Essay on Vision, he tells Sir John that “there remains one objection, that with regard to the uselessness of that book of mine; but in a little time I hope to make what is there laid down appear subservient to the ends of morality and religion, in a Treatise I have in the press, the design of which is to demonstrate the existence and attributes of God, the immortality of the soul, the reconciliation of God's foreknowledge and the freedom of man; and by shewing the emptiness and falsehood of several parts of the speculative sciences, to induce men to the study of religion and things useful. How far my endeavours will prove successful, and whether I have been all this time in a dream or no, time will shew. I do not see how it is possible to demonstrate the being of a God on the principles of the Archbishop—that strictly goodness and understanding can no more be assumed of God than that He has feet or hands; there being no argument that I know for God's existence which does not prove Him at the same time to be an understanding and benevolent being, in the strict, literal, and proper meaning of these words.” He adds, “I have written to Mr. Clarke to give me his thoughts on the subject of God's existence, but have got no answer.”
The work foreshadowed in this letter appeared in the summer of 1710, as the “First part” of a Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, wherein the chief causes of error and difficulty in the Sciences, with the grounds of Scepticism, Atheism, and Irreligion, are inquired into. In this fragment of a larger work, never finished, Berkeley's [pg xxxii] spiritual conception of matter and cosmos is unfolded, defended, and applied. According to the Essay on Vision, the world, as far as it is visible, is dependent on living mind. According to this book of Principles the whole material world, as far as it can have any practical concern with the knowings and doings of men, is real only by being realised in like manner in the percipient experience of some living mind. The concrete world, with which alone we have to do, could not exist in its concrete reality if there were no living percipient being in existence to actualise it. To suppose that it could would be to submit to the illusion of a metaphysical abstraction. Matter unrealised in its necessary subordination to some one's percipient experience is the chief among the illusions which philosophers have been too ready to encourage, and which the mass of mankind, who accept words without reflecting on their legitimate meanings, are ready to accept blindly. But we have only to reflect in order to see the absurdity of a material world such as we have experience of existing without ever being realised or made concrete in any sentient life. Try to conceive an eternally dead universe, empty for ever of God and all finite spirits, and you find you cannot. Reality can be real only in a living form. Percipient life underlies or constitutes all that is real. The esse of the concrete material world is percipi. This was the “New Principle” with which the young Dublin Fellow was burdened—the Secret of the universe which he had been longing to discharge upon mankind for their benefit, yet without sign of desire to gain fame for himself as the discoverer. It is thus that he unfolds it:—
“Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, viz. that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not [pg xxxiii] any subsistence without a Mind; that their being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind, or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit: it being perfectly unintelligible, and involving all the absurdity of abstraction, to attribute to any single part of them an existence independent of a Spirit[3].”
This does not mean denial of the existence of the world that is daily presented to our senses and which includes our own bodies. On the contrary, it affirms, as intuitively true, the existence of the only real matter which our senses present to us. The only material world of which we have any experience consists of the appearances (misleadingly called ideas of sense by Berkeley) which are continually rising as real objects in a passive procession of interpretable signs, through means of which each finite person realises his own individual personality; also the existence of other finite persons; and the sense-symbolism that is more or less interpreted in the natural sciences; all significant of God. So the material world of concrete experience is presented to us as mind-dependent and in itself powerless: the deepest and truest reality must always be spiritual. Yet this mind-dependent material world is the occasion of innumerable pleasures and pains to human percipients, in so far as they conform to or contradict its customary laws, commonly called the laws of nature. So the sense-symbolism in which we live is found to play an important part in the experience of percipient beings. But it makes us sceptics and atheists when, in its name, we put a supposed dead abstract matter in room of the Divine Active Reason of which all natural order is the continuous providential expression.
Accordingly, God must exist, because the material world, in order to be a real world, needs to be continually [pg xxxiv] realised and regulated by living Providence; and we have all the certainty of sense and sanity that there is a (mind-dependent) material world, a boundless and endlessly evolving sense-symbolism.