record that he ever protested against the Penal Code. But when it was enacted he was immersed in speculation, and probably did not think on the subject; and though his later writings prove that his feelings towards his Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen were more liberal than those of his contemporaries, it is not likely that he would have repudiated a policy which had the sanction of Somers and of St. John, of Locke and of Swift, of Addison and Harley.

In the year 1709, at the age of twenty-five, he published The Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, at once the most original and soundest of his metaphysical works. In the next year his famous scheme of immaterialism appeared in the Principles of Human Knowledge. It is very remarkable, but only a proof of the paradoxes to which the theory of subjective idealism was forcing able thinkers, that the very same doctrines contained in this treatise were at this time in manuscript, within the writingdesk of Mr. Arthur Collier, who had never met Berkeley in all his life. The time was not propitious to a work of audacious and refined speculation. The mind of England was stirred to its depths by the news of battles abroad, and by the fury of faction at home. The war of the Succession was still raging; but the crown of Spain had been lost on the field of Almanza; the victory of Malplaquet had been dearly bought; the accession of the Archduke Charles to the empire had frustrated a main object of the alliance; and France, though humbled, was unconquered. Public opinion began to turn against the great Whig Ministry, and was stimulated by the creeping arts of Harley; by the bedchamber gossip of Mrs. Masham; and by the Tory leanings of Anne. At last the prosecution of Sacheverell, unwisely pressed by Godolphin, and suddenly condensing into menacing forms all the elements of Jacobite, Tory, High Church, and popular discontent, gave the signal of a revolution. The Whig Ministry was turned out, to be replaced by very equivocal foes of France and the Pretender; Marlborough, though not yet superseded, was thwarted and denounced; peace was already under consideration; and from both Whigs and Tories burst forth a storm of crimination and abuse, sustained by the ablest pens that ever wrote for party, and swelled by a noisy popular outcry. It would not have been strange if the voice of philosophy could not have found a hearing in the uproar. But Berkeley's extraordinary doctrines, mocking common sense, giving the lie to consciousness, sweeping away materialism, and in many parts assailing the whole philosophy of Locke, seem to have attracted immediate attention. Undoubtedly, too, the clear and precise style in which they were set was a great recommendation; since Collier's book,

His Sermons on Passive Obedience.

79

which appeared shortly afterwards, and which is the same in purport, but very inferior as a composition, fell still-born from the press, and was nearly lost. Berkeley's system was carped at by Whiston, late Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, and then famous for his contest with the expiring convocation. It excited, as we shall see hereafter, the peculiar aversion of Malebranche, who probably was horror-stricken at beholding a scheme, so akin to his own, carried out logically in all its consequences. It was also assailed by Clarke, who perhaps felt bitterly its bold annihilation of space, out of which he had evolved his demonstration of the Deity, and who afterwards seems to have treated it in a different temper from that exhibited in his controversy with Butler. But, according to Swift, it quickly gained 'many eminent proselytes,' and it instantly introduced its author to the highest society in London, then brilliant with literary genius. For the next three years, however, he chiefly resided at the University of Dublin, devoting his time to the development of his famous theory.

In 1712, he preached three sermons in the University Chapel, upon the duty of Passive Obedience. They were made the pretext of calling him a Jacobite, and, in after years, were used against him as a bar to preferment. But, in truth, they would have disgusted Filmer; and though they glance sharply at Locke, they would scarcely have vexed him: for they are quite consistent with loyalty to the house of Hanover, and are brilliant evasions of the real point at issue; full of principles of undoubted soundness. We would not dwell on them, but that, in our opinion, they completely anticipate Paley's argument for the basis of moral obligation, and Butler's remark in the Analogy, that the justice of general laws is to be measured by their natural results, in the majority of instances, and not in their fortuitous incidence.

The true object of self-love, argues Berkeley, is our greatest, and therefore our eternal happiness. But this must result from a conformity to God's will, inasmuch as He plainly ordains the general welfare of the universe. God's will, however, is expressed in general laws, the effect of which is the greatest good of all things, although in their application to particular cases, evil appears to be incidental to them, and hence we are under an obligation to obey them. But one of these laws is, that resistance shall not be made to the Supreme Legislative Authority, although this may be, accidentally, the occasion of much suffering and inconvenience. We think that as regards the dogma of passive obedience to tyranny in every conceivable case, these principles do not help the argument in the least; unless by non-resistance

to the Supreme Legislative Authority it be meant, that obedience in political society must always be due, in all particulars, to every despotic force that may be enabled to wreak its will upon it. Berkeley, however, expressly guards himself from this interpretation, by admitting that obedience may be limited as to its 'objects; that we are not obliged to submit the disposal of our ' lives and fortunes to the discretion of madmen and lunatics, or of those who by craft and violence invade the supreme power;' and therefore by conceding that the elements of 'supreme legislative authority' may be vested in the governed as well as in the governing body, he resolves into thin air the faith of the tyrant. And thus the real issue is evaded; for no one denies that obedience to government is the general rule; all that is contended for is, that it may and should be resisted, when it arrays against itself the true elements of authority. As regards all the premises in the above argument, we think that our readers will find them again in the great writers we have mentioned.

In the next year, Berkeley published, in London, his Three Dialogues between Philonous and Hylas, which reproduce his metaphysics, in the graceful form adopted by Plato. In breadth and execution, this work is very superior to the original treatise. His reputation was now fully established; and in London, at this period, literary fame was a certain passport to social eminence. For men of letters were now the interpreters to the nation of the fiercest controversy which ever divided Whig and Tory; and, in their own elevation, Addison, Steele, and Swift had raised their order to peculiar dignity. The Peace of Utrecht had been concluded, and the Treaty of Commerce was under angry discussion. At home there seemed a prospect of a counterrevolution, which might place James the Third upon the throne, undo the work of twenty-five years, renew the dependence of England upon the House of Bourbon, establish a Tory cabal in protracted power, and be the signal of a Whig proscription. Abroad, although the cannon of Marlborough had well nigh affrighted the echoes of Versailles, and although his glory was dimmed, and his kingdom desolated, Louis could repeat his boast that there were no more Pyrenees, for Philip was on the throne of Spain. The Whig outcry that England was sold to France, that her trade was sacrificed, that the Pretender had Harley and Bolingbroke in his pay, that the cause of the Grand Alliance had been basely betrayed, was encountered by the Tory rejoinder that the Church and the Crown were in danger, that the war was a mere Whig interest, that the public accounts were all a cheat, that the nation was sinking under debt and jobbing. The benches of both Houses of Parliament echoed these fierce recri

He becomes the friend of Swift, Addison, and Pope. 81

minations; they were the staple of hustings' speeches at the election of 1713; and they were spread abroad through the nation in the lively prose of Steele, the flowing and polished irony of Addison, and the apostate sarcasm and blighting humour of Swift. Steele was now of sufficient importance to be made a parliamentary martyr; Addison had recently been Chief Secretary for Ireland; Swift had just received the reward of tergiversation in the Deanery of St. Patrick's; and with these men-the glory of friendly, the terror of hostile statesmen-Berkeley associated in friendly equality. About this time, too, he became intimate with Pope, then just rising into poetic fame. But though a Tory in principle, he did not at this, nor indeed at any time, steep in the gall of party-writing a pen dedicated to philosophy; nor would, in truth, his chaste and precise style, severely logical, and only copious in illustration, have at all suited a pamphleteer. Two or three papers of his, about this time, written for the Guardian, do not shine with peculiar lustre in that mediocre publication.

At this moment it is probable that the din of London society, agitated by unexampled political fury, was not congenial to his retiring and contemplative disposition. In November, 1713, he became chaplain to the brilliant and eccentric Earl of Peterborough-in war a Ney, in peace a second Zimri-and with him left England for the embassy to Sicily, which had just been ceded to Victor Amadeus by the treaty of Utrecht. They were not, however, companions long, for the fidgety soldier, in one of his wonted fits of hurry, left chaplain, family, and baggage at Leghorn, and sped onwards without such impediments. Berkeley's letters to his friend Thomas Prior-one of the few unobtrusive patriots of whom Ireland can boast-give a lively account of this journey. He notices the splendour and riches of the churches, convents, palaces, and colleges' of Paris, and significantly alludes to the misery of the people, ruined by the long war of the Succession; although, from fear of the French Post-office, he 'declines speaking of it.' He listens to a disputation at the 'Sorbonne,'' full of French fire,' and meditates a visit to Malebranche, which, however, was unpaid. In crossing the Alps, on his way from Lyons to Turin, he is carried across Mont Cenis in open chairs, along rocks and precipices, where a false step 'was death;' a route more like that of Hannibal's soldiers, than that which is now open to the traveller. At Turin, his Tory feeling for the Peace of Utrecht makes him glad to find that it has not alienated the Piedmontese, and that there every Eng'lishman is sure of respect.' He stays three weeks at Genoa, to admire its painted palaces, its groves of orange and fig, and its

stately port; and at Leghorn-in the course of a complimentary letter upon the Rape of the Lock-he informs Pope of his abandonment by his patron. It would appear, indeed, that Peterborough had quite forgotten his chaplain, and never took him to Sicily at all.

But the relation between these contrasts was about to terminate. In July, 1714, St. John had driven Harley from office. He was virtually prime minister; and the first step of this brilliant cheat -a very Mark Antony in morals and politics-was vainly to try to conciliate the Whigs; his next to traffic with the Pretender for his own aggrandizement. The Queen was dying, and the Tories were in power; the great mass of the nation was apathetic, or smarting under Whig taxes; the recognised successor to the Crown was a foreigner of unenviable reputation and unknown person, and a bold policy might now secure the throne to James the Third, and give a long lease of power to the faction of Bolingbroke. But the conspiracy was destined to fail, though not, we think, devoid of elements of success. St. John had placed confidence in Charles, Duke of Shrewsbury-skilled in dissimulation even among the public men of the day-and was outwitted by him. The crisis came with the sudden decline of Anne; and the plausible and accomplished' King of Hearts'treacherous, but for once free from vacillation-with Somerset and Argyle, arranged the counterplot. The Whig party was quietly organized; the Queen's dying hands gave the Lord Treasurer's staff to Shrewsbury, who accepted the trust in the sole interest of George the First; to the astonishment of the Jacobites, all the instruments of revolution were taken out of their hands; and, without the loss of a life, the Protestant succession was secured. Atterbury in vain advised that James the Third should be proclaimed; St. John might idly boast that the Tories only wanted self-reliance to win; by September the new king was on the throne, and the Pretender had lost the best chance that had ever appeared for him. At the first news of the great change, Peterborough set off from Sicily at his wonted speed; from Paris he brought word that Louis, made wise by experience, had recognised George; and in the rapidity of his motions, and of the times, he probably forgot all about his chaplain; for Berkeley and he were not companions again. It would seem, indeed, that the uncongenial associates did not keep up any subsequent correspondence.

Berkeley, however, was soon to become a traveller again. After recovering from a severe illness-as to which Arbuthnot rejoices, that philosopher Berkeley has now again the idea of health-he complied with the wish of his former tutor, now a