George Berkeley (1685–1753)

The Irish philosopher and Anglican bishop George Berkeley is best known today for his contributions to metaphysics and the philosophy of perception. He was born in Kilkenny in Ireland, where he was educated at the Duke of Ormonde’s School whose former pupils included William Congreve and Jonathan Swift. While still a pupil, Berkeley established a friendship with Thomas Prior, who subsequently became both his trusted agent in Dublin and a frequent correspondent.

Berkeley matriculated at Trinity College, Dublin, at the age of fifteen and seven years later, in 1707, was elected Fellow. On 19 February 1709, he was ordained deacon and, the following year, priest. During these early years in Dublin, he established what was to become another lasting friendship, this time with Sir John Perceval (subsequently the first earl of Egmont), who had been returned, in 1704, to the Irish House of Commons as the member for County Cork. The two men corresponded over the next four decades, until Perceval’s death in 1748.

Berkeley’s early works include ‘Of infinites’, which was read to the Dublin Philosophical Society on 19 November 1707 and revealed his early interest in questions of mathematics. A number of book publications followed. His Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709) was dedicated to Perceval and sought to demonstrate the limitations of human vision. This was followed by a major epistemological tract, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), which aimed at proving that the external world consists only in ideas in the perceiver’s mind and was dedicated to Locke’s patron, the earl of Pembroke. The poor reception of this work, only the first part of which was published, led him to rewrite its arguments in discursive form, the result of this reconfiguration appearing as Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713). Using the dialogical form, he openly attacked among others Locke’s theory of knowledge. In De motu, published in 1721, Berkeley argued against the doctrine of absolute space, time, and motion in Newton. In The Analyst Berkeley attacks the foundations of mathematics: not only the use by contemporary mathematicians of infinitesimal quantities, but also the very existence of numbers. He seeks thereby to show that, like Christians, mathematicians rely on the acceptance of incomprehensible mysteries.

In 1713, Berkeley obtained leave to visit England where he met Richard Steele, who recruited him to write for his newly-launched publication The Guardian. It was Steele’s bookseller, Jacob Tonson, who published the Three Dialogues as well as the three-volume Ladies Library (which was indicated to be ‘by a Lady‘ and for which Steele wrote a preface). Whilst in London, Berkeley also met Joseph Addison and others connected to the circles of Alexander Pope and John Arbuthnot, including Richard Boyle, Lord Burlington, while being feted by Swift. He was also given a number of introductions at court, including to Charles Mordaunt, earl of Peterborough, and visited George Smalridge in Oxford.

Berkeley was appointed as chaplain to Mordaunt for his journey to attend the king of Sicily’s coronation in 1713. The Earl and his entourage travelled to Paris, where Berkeley met the philosopher Nicolas Malebranche, before proceeding to northern Italy. He left the group early, returning to London via Paris and the Low Countries. In 1717 he was employed as the travelling companion to the youthful George Ashe (d. 1721). This second continental journey took Berkeley to southern Italy and Sicily. While there, he twice climbed Vesuvius in anticipation of volcanic activity and dispatched his observations to the Royal Society of London. Following his return to England, and in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble crisis, he published An Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721), in which he condemned speculation rather than investment in trade and manufacture. In May 1724, he was awarded the deanery of Derry, but he did not take up residence and moved to London, where he worked on his proposal to set up a college in Bermuda for both colonists (to educate and encourage them to reform their communities) and indigenous people (to convert them to Christianity and educate them in civil life). He secured a royal charter, in 1725, to establish St Paul’s College in Bermuda and, within three years, had married Anne Forster and sailed with her to America, where he encountered considerable difficulties in realizing his ambitions. Berkeley returned to England with his young family in 1731.

Upon his subsequent appointment as Bishop of Cloyne, Berkeley used this position to criticize the English exploitation of the Irish economy and advocated for the integration of the Catholic population into the economic life of the country. He called for a self-sufficient economy, for banking reform, and for the introduction of paper currency. His controversial work, Siris, reconciled medicine with metaphysics and set out the case for the medicinal value of tar water. Berkeley is best known for his rejection of materialism and his belief in idealism, the notion that the material world does not exist independently of perception. He held that the material world is no more than a collection of ideas in the mind of God, a theory became known as ‘immaterialism’ and, as a mathematician, he believed that calculus could be used to prove the existence of God.

Following the death of his youngest son in 1751, Berkeley relocated his family and took them on an extended visit to Oxford. They rented a house in, or near to, 7 Holywell Street where Berkeley died on 14 January 1753. Despite his request for a simple funeral, he was buried six days later in Christ Church Cathedral.