Art. VIII.—Professor Fraser's Edition of Bishop Berkeley's Works.
(1.) The Works of George Berkeley, D.D., formerly Bishop of Cloyne. Collected and Edited, with Prefaces and Annotations, by Alexander Campbell Fraser, M.A., Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1871.
(2.) Life and Letters of George Berkeley, D.D., formerly Bishop of Cloyne, and an Account of his Philosophy; with many writings of Bishop Berkeley hitherto unpublished. By Alexander Campbell Fraser, M.A., Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1871.
The English people have not treated their great philosophers well. They have profited by them, made use of their results, and embodied in political, social, and religious life the principles which men like Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume have laboriously thought out and sent forth to enrich the common stock of human knowledge; but they have not sufficiently honoured their intellectual guides. They have not striven to obtain a clear and consistent conception of the whole of each great man's life, nor have they cared to estimate the full sweep of his influence upon the thought of his fellows. They have been content to sum up the result of life labours in the meagre formula, Hobbes, who was the father of Locke, who was the father of Berkeley, who was the father of Hume. They have measured the ingathering influence of the lake by the amount of water carried into it by the stream coming from the lake above, its outgoing action by the amount of water which the river bears away to the lake beneath. The thousand rills which trickle down from the hills and neighbouring highlands are forgotten, the constant unseen action of air and heat and light bearing away the myriad waterdrops to store them in the clouds of the firmament, ready to hear when the corn and the vine call to the earth, and the earth calleth to the heavens, and to answer in life-bringing showers, is left unremembered. Until Cambridge gave us Bacon's Works, edited by Messrs. Ellis and Spedding, England had not one good annotated edition of her great philosophers. Oxford has now given us Berkeley. We have only hope to trust to for Locke and Hume, the greatest and most powerful of all. And English philosophy pays the penalty of the neglect in the one-sidedness, superficiality, and inadequateness which have to some extent characterized it. It is with great pleasure, therefore, that we welcome this beautiful, complete, and carefully-edited edition of the works of Bishop Berkeley, and thank the authorities of the Clarendon Press for what we hope is only the first fruits of a series of our great philosophers.
There is wisdom in the selection. Bishop Berkeley, of all English thinkers, is most easily misunderstood when detached portions of his writings are studied by themselves apart from their relation to the whole, and when his philosophy is criticised by those who have no knowledge of his life. How many of those who know and have discussed Berkeley's theory of vision, his nominalism, and his sensationalism, are aware that the theory of vision was only the first step in the exposition of a comprehensive theory of causality,—that his nominalism was only the denial of the conceptualist doctrine of universals, was suppressed in his latest writings, as if he had felt it to have been too sweeping, and was supplanted by a doctrine of realism almost akin to Plato's,—and that his sensationalism, inherited from Locke and bequeathed to Hume, was only one moment in a Platonic idealism, which he had learnt in his youth from More and Norris, in his old age from Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists, and which he left to be developed by Kant. The truth is, that in Berkeley we have the meeting-place of two distinct streams of thought, both of which had already received distinct but inadequate expression in England. He inherits the intellectual wealth of the Cambridge Platonists, as well as the clearer, though less profound results of Hobbes and Locke. He has been misunderstood and misrepresented because his double position, inadequately expressed, and not uniformly maintained, has been unknown to so many of his readers, Berkeley, the disciple of Locke, the Nominalist, the amiable, unconscious sceptic, is familiar to most students of philosophy. Berkeley, the Platonist, the Realist, the idealist combatant of scepticism, who found in Miss Forster the mystic and the disciple of Fénélon and Madame Guyon the lady 'whose humour and turn of mind pleased him beyond anything that he knew in her whole sex,' is not so well known.
The great value which this edition of Berkeley's philosophical writings will have is that it presents us with the whole of his philosophy, and by some pregnant annotations enables us to trace the unity of the principle which binds them into a more or less consistent whole. Professor Fraser, in preparing this edition, has kept the following objects chiefly in view:—
'(1.) To revise the text of the works formerly published, and to present them in a satisfactory arrangement.
'(2.) To help the reader to reach Berkeley's own point of view in each work, by means of bibliographical and analytical prefaces, and occasional annotations or brief dissertations, in which the author might be compared with himself, and studied in his relations to the circumstances in which he wrote.
'(3.) To collect and publish any hitherto unpublished writings of Berkeley which might illustrate his opinions or character.