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
