It was undoubtedly a hindrance to the completeness of Berkeley's thoughts that he had no clear and distinct scheme of ethical relations before his mind when he was investigating the relations between mind and phenomena. It is true that, as Professor Fraser says, 'the moral presumption of our individual free and proper agency is obscurely involved in Berkeley's philosophy of sense from the first.' But the ethical relations of the individual human spirit were nowhere clearly seen, and were not made its leading and peculiar characteristic. It was reserved for Kant to place the moral relations of these individuals and their significance in the world of things in due prominence, and it has been easier for men such as Schleiermacher and Herman Lotze, who have come after Kant, and who have maintained a doctrine of the spiritual relations which exist in and give order, cohesion, and permanence to the universe, not unlike Berkeley's, to develop the doctrine of these relations so far as the human spirit goes, and give more thoroughness and completeness to the scheme. We may conceive Berkeley carefully working out the double relation of human to divine spirit, and finding in the sensible universe the veil which hangs between, not merely the orderly and pregnant language of the Creator Spirit to be interpreted and made intelligible by the creature spirit, but also the shadowy reflection of the working of the Creator towards the creature, and of the striving of the creature towards the Creator. Each thing, class, order, genus, and race, with all its relations to all the other parts of the vast order of things, filling the place in the organism in which the Creator placed it, acting, influencing, and ruling, according to its function and place in the arrangement of the whole; just as the individual, or class, or nation fulfils, or ought to fulfil, the ethical duties which its hands find to do, so that the universe, in all its spheres of animate and inanimate life, of organic and inorganic bodies, becomes in its mutual action and reaction, as Schleiermacher says, a 'fainter ethic.'
Berkeley approaches this in his greatest metaphysical work, the 'Siris.' It is here that the thought of organism or development in things and in the universe, which comes in occasionally in his earlier writings, is more fully expressed and even elaborated. The very name suggests it, the book is a chain of philosophical reflections and inquiries. Faithful to the method of his younger days, Berkeley takes a concrete instance of the concatenation of nature. He discourses on the virtues of tar-water, and thoughts on these lead up to the highest mysteries of the universe. But when we divest the thoughts of this particular form, we have such a system of the universe as Bacon working with Plotinus might have conceived. The centre source and light of all is the One Supreme Spirit—the personal omnipresent God in whom we and all things live and more and have our being. The universe is his reflection, it represents his thoughts, it is the revelation of his mind and will, it is his language. But the old puzzling word 'arbitrary' has disappeared, and this language of nature is seen to depend upon great laws and to be capable of interpretation because so dependent. The esse of sensation and of the sense-world generally, is still percipi, but the ambiguity lying in the word is carefully distinguished. On the one hand all things are dependent on the creative and upholding influence of the Supreme Spirit. He it is that, making all things after their kinds, sends forth and sustains the archetypes of things. On the other hand, the fleeting sense-world is framed and shaped by the individual mind into the universe of things, in accordance with the divine ideas or archetypes which lie hidden in it. There is a double meaning in the phrase, esse is percipi. It means both that these ideas are dependent for the possibility of existence on the divine thoughts, or archetypes whose sensible shadows they are, and also that all sensible things are dependent for their particular formation and position on the formative powers of the human mind, which works in each man by general laws of human intelligence, in accordance with and for the discovery of the divine ideas lying immanent in things. And thus human knowledge is a reproduction, or discovery and representation of the thoughts which the divine creative thinking has built into things;[231] human science is a presaging or reading of the letters and words of nature which manifest its order and harmony, in the faith and expectancy that this same order and harmony now prevailing, because it depends on the divine ideas of the Creator, is fixed and enduring;[232] and the 'proper name of this world is Spirit—free immortal Spirit—Spirit in communication with Spirit—Spirit in dependence on and in reconciliation, through Christ, with the one absolute Spirit—God.'[233]
Art. IX.—The Future of Europe.
(1) Der Deutschen Volkszahl und Sprachgebiet in den Europaischen staaten eine statistische untersuchung von Richard Böekh. Berlin: J. Guttenay. 1871.
(2.) France, Alsace and Lorraine. London: Trübner & Co. 1870.
(3.) The French Case Truly Stated. By Augustus Granville Stapleton. London: E. Stanford. 1871.
(4.) La France et la Prusse, pendant l'invasion de 1870. Par Erard de Choiseul Gouffier. 2me Edition. Luxembourg: Pierre Bruck. 1870.
(5.) La France devant l'Europe. By Jules Michelet. 2me Edition. Ferrier: Hachette and Cie. 1871.
(6.) Elsass und Lothringen nachweise wie diese provenzen dem deutschen Reiche verloren gingen. Von Adolf Schmidt. Dritte auf. Leipzic: Vert and Co. 1870.