nius of any one man, however gifted, is permitted to add to the mighty and illimitable work. It is therefore no reproach to Berkeley to say that he left his labours incomplete; that he was frequently misunderstood, that his reasonings fell short of their aim, and that he perhaps failed to carry with him the unreserved and permanent convictions of any one of his contemporaries. The subsequent progress of philosophy shows how much the science of man is indebted to his researches. He certainly was the first to stamp the indelible impress of his powerful understanding on those principles of our nature, which, since his time, have brightened into imperishable truths in the light of genuine speculation. His genius was the first to swell the current of that mighty stream of tendency towards which all modern meditation flows—the great gulf-stream of Absolute Idealism.
The peculiar endowment by which Berkeley was distinguished, far beyond his predecessors and contemporaries, and far beyond almost every philosopher who has succeeded him, was the eye he had for facts, and the singular pertinacity with which he refused to be dislodged from his hold upon them. The fact, the whole fact, and nothing but the fact, was the clamorous and incessant demand of his intellect, in whatever direction it exercised itself. Nothing else, and nothing less, could satisfy his intellectual cravings. No man ever delighted less to expatiate in the regions of the occult, the abstract, the impalpable, the fanciful, and the unknown. His heart and soul clung with inseparable tenacity to the concrete realities of the universe; and with an eye uninfluenced by spurious theories, and unperverted by false knowledge, he saw directly into the very life of things. Hence he was a speculator in the truest sense of the word; for speculation is not the art of devising ingenious hypotheses, or of drawing subtle conclusions, or of plausibly manœuvring abstractions. Strictly and properly speaking, it is the power of seeing true facts, and of unseeing false ones; a simple enough accomplishment to all appearance, but nevertheless one which, considered in its application to the study of human nature, is probably the rarest, and, at any rate, has been the least successfully cultivated, of all the endowments of intelligence.
What a rare and transcendent gift this faculty is, and how highly Berkeley was endowed with it, will be made more especially apparent when we come to speak of his great discoveries on the subject of vision. In the meantime, we shall take a survey of those broader and more fully developed doctrines of Idealism to which his speculations on the eye were but the tentative herald or preliminary stepping-stone.
People who have no turn for philosophic research are apt to imagine that discussions on the subject of matter are carried on for the purpose of proving something, either pro or con, concerning the existence of this disputed entity. No wonder, then, that they should regard the study of philosophy as a most frivolous and inane pursuit. But we must be permitted to remark, that these discussions have no such object in view. Matter and its existence is a question about which they have no direct concern. They are entirely subservient to the far greater end of making us acquainted with our own nature. This is their sole and single aim; and if such knowledge could be obtained by any other means, these investigations would certainly never have encumbered the pages of legitimate inquiry. But it is not so to be obtained. The laws of thought can be discovered only by vexing, in all its bearings, the problem respecting the existence of matter. Therefore, to those interested in these laws, we need make no further apology for disturbing the dust which has gathered over the researches on this subject of our country's most profound, but most misrepresented, philosopher.
Berkeley is usually said to have denied the existence of matter; and in this allegation there is something which is true, combined with a great deal more that is false. But what is matter? That is matter, said Dr Johnson, once upon a time, kicking his foot against a stone—a rather peremptory explanation, but, at the same time, one for which Berkeley, to use the Doctor's own language, would have hugged him. The great Idealist certainly never denied the existence of matter in the sense in which Johnson understood it.
