tive mind, has been, and will forever be, the implicit premise of all metaphysics.
V
The contemporaries of Berkeley, however, were not quick to understand the greatness of his discovery. He found a few followers in England, and a few more in America, but his works were read rather from curiosity than for serious purposes. His famous contemporary, Clarke, confessed that he could not answer the pressing arguments of Philonous, but declared at the same time that he refused absolutely to follow Philonous in his conclusions. The facts are that Berkeley was regarded chiefly as a pleasant maker of paradoxes and a zealous gentleman, and that he won fame late in life, and then only as the discoverer of the virtues of tar-water.
As preacher and apologist of Christianity he was well received; but even the Alciphron, his summa, brought no replies from the disciples of the unbelievers whom he had attacked—Collins and Mandeville—though it did bring answers from the mathematicians, offended, it would seem, by the philosopher's ironical attack on the new calculus of variations.
But the religious campaign of Berkeley met a
