morality and religion. Such a prospect would be rudely disturbed by the state of affairs on his arrival in England. As we have seen, in the violent reaction of excited feeling, he virtually despaired of the country. Panting to do a great work in the Church, he still felt himself unequal to cope with the chronic, aggravated, and increasing corruption of morals and manners at home. Under these circumstances, he would thankfully recall the vision, and turn with animation and hope to the New World. During the next three years, he was busily, though according to his wont for a time, secretly engaged in elaborating the details of his plan. In the first place, he would sweep the American coast and the Atlantic main for an appropriate site, and this he at length found in the Summer Islands. They realised in rare perfection the very combination of advantages that constituted his ideal of an academic and missionary residence. He then proceeded to perfect the moral and material parts of his scheme. The organisation of the collegiate body followed very much the pattern of Trinity College, the head, however, being designated Principal instead of Provost. With regard to the public buildings of the projected university and city of Bermuda, Berkeley determined to be his own architect, and in the plans he designed we may clearly trace the result of his Roman experiences and impressions. The actual plans have been lost, but Mrs. Berkeley gives a sketch in outline of the town and college according to her husband's design.

'Dean Berkeley,' she tells us, 'was an excellent architect, and he had completed elegant plans of his projected town, as well as of his seminary. The last edifice was to have occupied the centre of a large circus; and this circus was to have consisted of the houses of the Fellows, to each of which, in front, a spacious garden was allotted. Beyond this academical circus was another composed of houses for gentlemen, many of which houses had been actually bespoken, and the Dean had been requested to superintend the building of them. Beyond. this circus was one more, which was calculated for the reception of shops and artificers. Dr. Berkeley disliked burying in churches, for which reason a cypress walk, called "The Walk of Death," was to be solemnly appropriated to the sole purpose of interment. There monumental urns or obelisks might be erected.'

Having matured his plan, he started for London in the autumn of 1724 with the Proposal' in his pocket. The Pro'posal,' urging the various motives in favour of the scheme, is well drawn up and forcibly written. As an Irish Protestant, Berkeley does not forget to appeal to the powerful argument of Protestant ascendency. He thinks that by the prompt and effectual execution of his plan, Romanism, having as yet but

a feeble hold upon it, may be soon driven from the New World. A number of other advantages, political and commercial, to be derived from the scheme are ingeniously and eloquently expounded. In London he pushed his plan with extraordinary zeal and enthusiasm, and, strange to say, with extraordinary success. He at once called into requisition the good offices of his friends, and employed to the utmost his personal influence, diplomatic skill, and rare powers of persuasion, until at length, having gained the ear of the King, and a favourable vote in the House of Commons, the scheme, to the surprise of everybody, was fairly afloat, and its author, with his newly-married wife and a few chosen companions, started on the strange academico-philosophical mission.

We have no space to follow in detail the history and fortunes of the Bermuda Scheme. Nor is this necessary, the enterprise being amongst the most romantic, and therefore the best known incidents of Berkeley's life. It is probably fortunate for his fame that the project failed, as it did, before he reached the Bermudas. Though minutely planned with all Berkeley's care about theoretical details, it was never fitted to succeed. Nor was Berkeley himself gifted with the executive genius, the indomitable endurance and persistency, the power of grappling with practical difficulties and overcoming them which are absolutely essential to the success of such an enterprise. Had he actually reached the Bermudas, and attempted to carry his elaborate scheme of the city and college into execution, the collapse would have been still more disastrous, and he would certainly have incurred a far heavier amount of responsibility. Nor is there any evidence to show that Berkeley himself was at all dissatisfied at the result. On the contrary, it seems clear from his letters, that after his four years' experience of Rhode Island, he was sincerely glad to return home again. Nor did he suffer any material loss during his temporary exile, having enjoyed the income from his rich deanery during the whole period. On leaving Rhode Island, indeed, he was not only in easy circumstances, but wealthy enough to make magnificent presents of land and books to Yale and Harvard Colleges.

The truth seems to be that the Bermuda project did not, after all, fail to realise some at least of the purposes for which it was projected. From the first Berkeley had two main objects in view-the establishment of a missionary college for the Americans, and an ample provision in the way of academical leisure and study for himself. All along a scheme of reading and literary labour of his own occupied his mind, and

VOL. CXXXVI. NO. CCLXXVII.

D

6

had, perhaps almost unconsciously to himself, a prominent place in his conception of the great design. And this part of the original plan was fully realised. In the retirement of Rhode Island, he wrote under favourable circumstances of domestic ease, freedom, and enjoyment by far the largest as well as the most popular and readable of his works, Alciphron ; or, the Minute Philosopher.' The seven dialogues of which the work consists may probably include some of the thoughts and arguments he had intended to employ in the second part of the Principles. But, however this may be, they would probably never have seen the light but for the painful shock which Berkeley experienced during his first visit to London, through his personal contact with freethinkers and freethinking sentiments. The form and substance of the Minute Philosopher are determined by his deep and almost passionate antipathy to the whole freethinking school. This antipathy seems to have been directed with concentrated bitterness against Collins, who had published, just before Berkeley's visit to London, a discourse in defence of freethinking. Collins' work would probably be regarded now as a mild plea on behalf of independent criticism, of the right to examine evidence and judge impartially of its relevancy and value in every department of inquiry and speculation. But, as it indirectly criticised existing institutions, it was in Berkeley's view a criminal assault on the foundations of society; and he accordingly attacked the author with singular violence and injustice in some papers he contributed to the Guardian.' The keynote of the Minute Philosopher' is, indeed, struck in these short papers against Collins and the freethinkers. They betray, however, at the outset a strong professional animus, and are in spirit and language altogether unworthy of the author. Early in the first paper he says it is a special characteristic of a dissolute and ungoverned mind to speak disrespectfully of the clergy; and at the close he asserts, with emphatic truculence, that if ever man deserved to be denied the common benefits of air and water, it is the author of " A Discourse of Freethinking.' He not only rails at Collins, who was a man of high character and pure life, but reproaches him for his virtues, suggesting that it would be far better if he were a man of dissolute manners and profligate habits. The ground of this intense and unreasonable feeling against Collins appears to have been a story he had somewhere heard to the effect that the apologist of freethinking had discovered a demonstration against the being of a God. There is no trustworthy evidence in support of this story, and it is probably untrue. But it is a singular

6

6

illustration of the strong but purely personal impressions on which Berkeley often acted, that he should not only have given this story in the Guardian' as a kind of excuse for the severity of his attack on Collins, but have deliberately repeated it twenty years afterwards in the preface to the Minute Philosopher,' as an implied justification of its bitterest passages. Had Berkeley seriously realised the responsibility attaching to opinion, he never could have ventured to attack and condemn, without justice or charity, a man as honourable and high-minded as himself, on the strength of mere club rumour or coffee-house gossip. It may be said, however, in extenuation of his conduct in this respect, that he but followed the custom of his time, and that he sincerely believed the school he attacked was fraught with national danger as threatening the foundations of morality and religion. Still, it might have been hoped that even under excitement he would not have descended to the level of the vulgar and violent controversialists of the day.

Berkeley's disquietude, and even alarm at the progress of freethinking, was undoubtedly the strongest impression made upon his mind during his first visit to London; and he had probably brooded at intervals over the subject in his wanderings on the Continent. On returning home, the South Sea failure would naturally seem like the realisation of his worst fears. He would see in the catastrophe simply the triumph of practical materialism and infidelity, the widespread ruin produced by the atheistic greed of private gain. This would revive with fresh poignancy his former thoughts on the subject, and, as the result, he evidently resolved to devote his first leisure to an elaborate exposure and denunciation of the whole school. The four years' quiet waiting in his comfortable home at Rhode Island afforded the required leisure under circumstances peculiarly favourable to the development of his best powers. fresh country life, perfect domestic happiness, rural beauty, and invigorating sea-breezes of his temporary home, give a spring and animation to the thoughts, and a beauty to the writing that is traceable in almost every part of Alciphron,' and especially in the earlier dialogues. The style seems to combine the freshness of open-air life with the exquisite flavour of varied reading, and the endless charm of active fancy and graceful illustration. In some of the dialogues, too, the thought is of living interest, and the moral reasoning

The

permanent value. But, as a whole, the work is extremely unsatisfactory, and in many ways altogether ineffective. In the first place, Berkeley never took the trouble to understand the

school of critical and speculative inquiry that had provoked his antagonism; and in the nature of the case he would hardly have succeeded had he seriously made the attempt. On such questions his feelings were too deeply excited to admit of his examining an opponent's position with anything like candour or fairness, to say nothing of critical impartiality. Satisfied with a strong general impression as to the drift and tendency of the doctrines he disliked, he proceeded to manipulate them in his own way, to develope their details and results very much out of his own moral consciousness, and to arrange their imaginary authors according to the exigencies of his special polemic. There is thus no approach to historical accuracy; hardly, indeed, any reflective discrimination in his representations of the school. He does not distinguish the critical from the speculative elements, and he freely charges with irreligion, and even atheism, writers who were as sincere and earnest theists as himself. Then, again, his method of treatment is essentially negative and unfruitful. He adopts his usual plan of seeming to agree with his opponents at the outset, and then on the basis of this agreement developing after his own fashion the irrational or immoral results of the principles in the way of retort and reprisals. The bulk of his reasoning consists of arguments ad hominem or ad verecundiam; and, on such deep and vital subjects as morality and religion, these arguments are least likely to influence sincere and truth-seeking minds. Then, too, the spirit animating the more aggressive parts of his argument is in keeping with its barren and negative character. Unhappily it is often narrow, bitter, and essentially unjust. In general, it is true, his refined taste and strong sense of literary form restrain the manifestations of this feeling, or mould it into shapes of grace and beauty that soften its harshness, and not unfrequently disguise its real character. But when his argument touches on the Church or the Clergy, on Shaftesbury or Collins, he loses all command over himself, and, as Sir James Mackintosh most truly says, sinks to the level of a railing polemic.' The truth is, that in Berkeley's mind, religion and morality are completely identified with the Church and the Clergy, and any adverse criticism of the latter he accordingly regarded as a direct and dangerous assault on virtue and truth. Then it must be remembered that many of his special arguments, and those, too, the most powerfully developed, rest on his own paradoxical notions, his crude and contradictory system of psychology and metaphysics. The result is, that the Minute Philosopher,' though a beautiful piece of writing, had scarcely any serious influence on the