Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/77

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BERKELEY
61

agnostics and the mystics; for they, reviving a thesis once dear to the Pseudo-Dionysius and to Erigena, were proclaiming the impossibility of talking about God, of determining his qualities and attributes, or of forming any idea about him whatsoever—thus clearing the way for the atheists, who declared triumphantly that there was no reason to believe in the existence of a being of whom nothing could be known and nothing could be said. Berkeley, on the contrary, felt the need of a positive God, a God of whom one could speak, a God who should be in particular a regulator of morals. So, while he rejected the anthropomorphic and metaphysical analogy which sees in God merely an enlargement of man, he turned to what he calls the proper analogy, the analogy, that is, which proceeds from the partial perfections of which there is some trace in man to the absolute perfections which must exist in God. Berkeley's God, then, is neither the wonder-working God of the crowd, nor the abstract God of the metaphysicians. He is the God of wisdom and of goodness, an ethical God, precisely suited to the purposes of the guardians of morality. And here begins the interweaving of morality and religion. We seek the good, but the good we seek is an eternal—not a transitory—good, and we know that the end established by a just and good God must in itself be good. Con-