"3. Sir Isaac Newton says that space is an organ which God makes use of to perceive things by. But if God stands in need of any organ to perceive things by, it will follow that they do not depend altogether upon Him, nor were produced by Him.
"4. Sir Isaac Newton and his followers have also a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to their doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up His watch from time to time; otherwise it would cease to move.[1] He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. Nay, the machine of God's making is so imperfect, according to these gentlemen, that He is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it as a clockmaker mends his work."
[Footnote 1: Goethe seems to have had this saying of Leibnitz in his mind when he wrote his famous lines—
"Was wär' ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse Im Kreis das All am
Finger laufen liesse.">[
It is beside the mark, at present, to inquire how far Leibnitz paints a true picture, and how far he is guilty of a spiteful caricature of Newton's views in these passages; and whether the beliefs which Locke is known to have entertained are consistent with the conclusions which may logically be drawn from some parts of his works. It is undeniable that English philosophy in Leibnitz's time had the general character which he ascribes to it. The phenomena of nature were held to be resolvable into the attractions and the repulsions of particles of matter; all knowledge was attained through the senses; the mind antecedent to experience was a tabula rasa. In other words, at the commencement of the eighteenth century, the character of speculative thought in England was essentially sceptical, critical, and materialistic. Why "materialism" should be more inconsistent with the existence of a Deity, the freedom of the will, or the immortality of the soul, or with any actual or possible system of theology, than "idealism," I must declare myself at a loss to divine. But in the year 1700 all the world appears to have been agreed, Tertullian notwithstanding, that materialism necessarily leads to very dreadful consequences. And it was thought that it conduced to the interests of religion and morality to attack the materialists with all the weapons that came to hand. Perhaps the most interesting controversy which arose out of these questions is the wonderful triangular duel between Dodwell, Clarke, and Anthony Collins, concerning the materiality of the soul, and—what all the disputants considered to be the necessary consequence of its materiality—its natural mortality. I do not think that anyone can read the letters which passed between Clarke and Collins, without admitting that Collins, who writes with wonderful power and closeness of reasoning, has by far the best of the argument, so far as the possible materiality of the soul goes; and that, in this battle, the Goliath of Freethinking overcame the champion of what was considered Orthodoxy.
But in Dublin, all this while, there was a little David practising his youthful strength upon the intellectual lions and bears of Trinity College. This was George Berkeley, who was destined to give the same kind of development to the idealistic side of Descartes' philosophy, that the Freethinkers had given to its sceptical side, and the Newtonians to its mechanical side.
Berkeley faced the problem boldly. He said to the materialists: "You tell me that all the phenomena of nature are resolvable into matter and its affections. I assent to your statement, and now I put to you the further question, 'What is matter?' In answering this question you shall be bound by your own conditions; and I demand, in the terms of the Cartesian axiom, that in turn you give your assent only to such conclusions as are perfectly clear and obvious."
It is this great argument which is worked out in the "Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge," and in those "Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous," which rank among the most exquisite examples of English style, as well as among the subtlest of metaphysical writings; and the final conclusion of which is summed up in a passage remarkable alike for literary beauty and for calm audacity of statement.
"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 any substance 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."[1]
[Footnote 1: "Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge,"
Part I. § 6.]