A good deal of foolish ridicule was excited by this book. Berkeley was supposed to maintain the absurd paradox that sensible things do not exist at all. The reader will remember how Dr. Johnson undertook to refute the postulate by striking his foot against a stone, while James Beattie (1735-1803), the poet and moral philosopher, in a volume for which he was rewarded with a pension of £200 a year, denounced Berkeley’s philosophy as ‘scandalously absurd.’ ‘If,’ he writes, ‘I were permitted to propose one clownish question, I would fain ask ... Where is the harm of my believing that if I were to fall down yonder precipice and break my neck, I should be no more a man of this world? My neck, Sir, may be an idea to you, but to me it is a reality, and a very important one too. Where is the harm of my believing that if in this severe weather I were to neglect to throw (what you call) the idea of a coat over the ideas of my shoulders, the idea of cold would produce the idea of such pain and disorder as might possibly terminate in my real death? What great offence shall I commit against God or man, church or state, philosophy or common sense if I continue to believe that material food will nourish me, though the idea of it will not, that the real sun will warm and enlighten me, though the liveliest idea of him will do neither; and that if I would obtain here peace of mind and self-approbation, I must not only form ideas of compassion, justice and generosity, but also really exert those virtues in external performance?’
Beattie continues in this foolish strain to throw contempt upon a system which he had not taken the trouble to understand, and upon one of the sanest and noblest of English philosophers, and he does so without a thought that the absurdity is due to his own ignorance and not to the theory of Berkeley. The author of the Minstrel was an honest man and a respectable poet, but he prided himself too much on what he called common sense, and failed to see that in the search after truth other and even higher faculties may be also needed. Moreover, Berkeley, so far from being an enemy to common sense, endeavours, as he says, to vindicate it, although in so doing, he ‘may perhaps be obliged to use some ambages and ways of speech not common.’ A significant passage may be quoted from the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) in illustration of his method and style so far indeed as a short extract can illustrate an argument sustained by a long course of reasoning.
‘Phil. As I am no sceptic with regard to the nature of things, so neither am I as to their existence. That a thing should be really perceived by my senses, and at the same time not really exist is to me a plain contradiction; since I cannot prescind or abstract even in thought, the existence of a sensible thing from its being perceived. Wood, stones, fire, water, flesh, iron, and the like things, which I name and discourse of, are things that I know. And I should not have known them but that I perceived them by my senses; and things perceived by the senses are immediately perceived; and things immediately perceived are ideas; and ideas cannot exist without the mind; their existence therefore consists in being perceived; when therefore they are actually perceived there can be no doubt of their existence.... I might as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things I actually see and feel.
‘Hyl. Not so fast, Philonous; you say you cannot conceive how sensible things should exist without the mind. Do you not?
‘Phil. I do.
‘Hyl. Supposing you were annihilated, cannot you conceive it possible that things perceivable by sense may still exist?
‘Phil. I can; but then it must be in another mind. When I deny sensible things an existence out of the mind, I do not mean my mind in particular, but all minds. Now, it is plain they have an existence exterior to my mind; since I find them by experience to be independent of it. There is therefore some other mind wherein they exist, during the intervals between the times of my perceiving them; as likewise they did before my birth, and would do after my supposed annihilation. And as the same is true with regard to all other finite created spirits, it necessarily follows there is an omnipresent, eternal Mind, which knows and comprehends all things, and exhibits them to our view in such a manner, and according to such rules, as He Himself hath ordained, and are by us termed the Laws of Nature.’
‘Truth is the cry of all,’ says Berkeley in the final paragraph of Siris, ‘but the game of a few. Certainly, where it is the chief passion, it doth not give way to vulgar cares and views, nor is it contented with a little ardour, active perhaps to pursue, but not so fit to weigh and revise. He that would make a real progress in knowledge, must dedicate his age as well as youth, the latter growth as well as firstfruits at the altar of truth.’
Elsewhere in this famous treatise he writes:
‘It cannot be denied that with respect to the universe of things we in this mortal state are like men educated in Plato’s cave, looking on shadows with our backs turned to the light. But though our light be dim and our situation bad, yet if the best use be made of both, perhaps something may be seen. Proclus, in his commentary on the theology of Plato, observes there are two sorts of philosophers. The one placed body first in the order of beings, and made the faculty of thinking depend thereupon, supposing that the principles of all things are corporeal; that body most really or principally exists, and all other things in a secondary sense and by virtue of that. Others making all corporeal things to be dependent upon soul or mind, think this to exist in the first place, and primary senses and the being of bodies to be altogether derived from, and presuppose that of the mind.’
This was Berkeley’s creed, and his great aim throughout is to prove the phenomenal nature of the things of sense, or in other words the non-existence of independent matter. He makes, he says, not the least question that the things we see and touch really exist, but what he does question is the existence of matter apart from its perception to the mind. Hobbes said that the body accounted for the mind, and that matter was the deepest thing in the universe, while to Berkeley the only true reality consists in what is spiritual and eternal.
‘The great idealist,’ says an able writer, ‘certainly never denied the existence of matter in the sense in which Johnson understood it. As the touched, the seen, the heard, the smelled, the tasted, he admitted and maintained its existence as readily and completely as the most illiterate and unsophisticated of mankind,’ and he adds that the peculiar endowment for which Berkeley was distinguished ‘far beyond his predecessors and contemporaries, and far beyond almost every philosopher who has succeeded him, was the eye he had for facts, and the singular pertinacity with which he refused to be dislodged from his hold upon them.’
Pope’s age produced a few great masters of style, and among them Berkeley holds an undisputed place. He succeeded, too, in the most difficult department of intellectual labour, since to express abstruse thought in language as beautiful as it is clear is the rarest of gifts.
‘His works are beyond dispute the finest models of philosophic style since Cicero. Perhaps they surpass those of the orator, in the wonderful art by which the fullest light is thrown on the most minute and evanescent parts of the most subtle of human conceptions.’
William Law (1686-1761).
William Law was born in 1686 at King’s Cliffe in Northamptonshire, and entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as a Sizar in 1705. He obtained a Fellowship, and received holy orders in 1711, but having made a speech offensive to the heads of houses, he was degraded. Law believed in the divine right of kings, and on the death of Queen Anne, declared his principles as a non-juror. In 1717 he published his first controversial work, Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor; Hoadly, the famous bishop, having, in his opponent’s judgment, uttered lax and latitudinarian views with regard to the Church of which he was one of the chief pastors. These Letters have been highly praised for wit as well as for argument, and Dean Hook, writing of the Bangorian Controversy in his Church Dictionary, states that ‘Law’s Letters have never been answered and may, indeed, be regarded as unanswerable.’ Law was also the most powerful assailant of Warburton’s Divine Legation, which he opposed with a burning zeal that was not always
wise. But as a controversialist he was an infinitely stronger man than his opponent, and unlike Warburton, he never debased controversy by scurrility, which the bishop generally found a more potent weapon than argument.
On the publication, in 1723, of Dr. Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, it was vigorously attacked by Law. In this masterly pamphlet, instead of attempting to refute the physician by showing that virtue is more profitable to the State than vice, and that, therefore, private vices are not public benefits, Law takes a higher ground, and asserts that morality is not a question of profit and loss, but of conscience. Mandeville maintains that man is a mere animal governed by his passions; his opponent, on the other hand, argues that man is created in the image of God, that virtue ‘is a law to which even the divine nature is subject,’ and that human nature is fitted to rise to the angels, while Mandeville would lower it to the brutes.
John Sterling, writing to F. D. Maurice of the first section of Law’s remarks, says: ‘I have never seen in our language the elementary grounds of a rational ideal philosophy, as opposed to empiricism, stated with nearly the same clearness, simplicity, and force,’ and it was at Sterling’s suggestion that Maurice published a new edition of Law’s argument with an introductory essay (1844).
The following passage from the Remarks on the Fable of the Bees will illustrate Law’s method as a polemic:
‘Deists and freethinkers are generally considered as unbelievers; but upon examination they will appear to be men of the most resigned and implicit faith in the world; they would believe transubstantiation, but that it implies a believing in God; for they never resign their reason, but when it is to yield to something that opposes salvation. For the Deist’s creed has as many articles as the Christian’s, and requires a much greater suspension of our reason to believe them. So that if to believe things upon no authority, or without any reason, be an argument of credulity, the freethinker will appear to be the most easy, credulous creature alive. In the first place, he is to believe almost all the same articles to be false which the Christian believes to be true.
‘Now, it may easily be shown that it requires stronger acts of faith to believe these articles to be false, than to believe them to be true. For, taking faith to be an assent of the mind to some proposition, of which we have no certain knowledge, it will appear that the Deist’s faith is much stronger, and has more of credulity in it, than the Christian’s. For instance, the Christian believes the resurrection of the dead, because he finds it supported by such evidence and authority as cannot possibly be higher, supposing the thing was true; and he does no more violence to his reason in believing it, than in supposing that God may intend to do some things, which the reason of man cannot conceive how they will be effected.
‘On the contrary, the Deist believes there will be no resurrection. And how great is his faith, for he pretends to no evidence or authority to support it; it is a pure naked assent of his mind to what he does not know to be true, and of which nobody has, or can give him, any full assurance. So that the difference between a Christian and a Deist does not consist in this, that the one assents to things unknown, and the other does not; but in this, that the Christian assents to things unknown on account of evidence; the other assents to things unknown without any evidence at all. Which shows that the Christian is the rational believer and the Deist the blind bigot.’
It is probable that Law, like other writers on the orthodox side, did not sufficiently take into account the service rendered by the Deists in arousing a spirit of inquiry. Free-thinking is right thinking, and ‘it was a result of the Deistic controversy, which went far to make up many evils in it, that in the end it widened and enlarged Christian thought.’
The author’s next and weakest work, On the Unlawfulness of Stage Entertainments (1726), is mentioned elsewhere.
In the same year he published Christian Perfection, a profoundly earnest but puritanically narrow work, in which our earthly life is regarded simply as the road to another. ‘There is nothing that deserves a serious thought,’ he writes, ‘but how to get out of the world and make it a right passage to our eternal state.’ No man ever practised what he preached with more sincerity and persistency than William Law, but it can hardly be doubted that he narrowed the range of his influence by the views he expressed with regard to culture and to all human learning. He forgot that, without the logic, the wit, the irony, the singular force and lucidity of style displayed in his own writings, he would have lost the power as a religious teacher which he was so eager to exercise.
Literature quâ literature Law regarded with contempt, and he is said to have looked upon the study even of Milton as waste of time. Yet his biographer states what seems likely enough, considering the fine qualities of Law’s own writings, that ‘no author was ever a favourite with him, unless he was a man of literary merit.’
In 1727, and probably before that date, Law held the position of tutor to Edward Gibbon, whose famous son, the historian, in his Autobiography, gives to him the high praise of having left in the family ‘the reputation of a worthy and pious man, who believed all that he professed, and practised all that he enjoined.’
Law accompanied his pupil to Cambridge, and it is conjectured that during this residence at the university he wrote what Gibbon justly called his ‘master work,’ A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729), the most impressive book of its class produced in the eighteenth century. The historian’s father was a man of feeble character. He left Cambridge without a degree, and went on his travels, the tutor meanwhile remaining in the family house at Putney, where he seems to have gathered round him a number of disciples.
The Serious Call had an immediate and strong influence on many thoughtful men, and Law’s book stimulated in no common measure the religious life of the country. John Wesley spoke of it as a treatise hardly to be excelled in the English tongue ‘either for beauty of expression, or for justness and depth of thought.’ Whitefield, Venn, and Thomas Scott, the commentator, acknowledged their indebtedness to the work, and Dr. Johnson, speaking of his youthful days, said: ‘I became a sort of lax talker against religion, for I did not much think against it; and this lasted till I went to Oxford, when I took up Law’s Serious Call to a Holy Life, expecting to find it a dull book (as such books generally are), but I found Law quite an over-match for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest.’ The first Lord Lyttelton, the historian and friend of Thomson, is said to have taken up the book one night at bed-time, and to have read it through before he went to bed; but, perhaps, the most unimpeachable evidence in its favour comes from the pen of Gibbon, who writes: ‘Mr. Law’s precepts are rigid, but they are founded on the Gospel. His satire is sharp, but it is drawn from the knowledge of human life, and many of his portraits are not unworthy of the pen of La Bruyère. If he finds a spark of piety in his reader’s mind he will soon kindle it to a flame.’
Law’s art as a portrait painter will be seen in the following sketch of Flavia:
‘Flavia would be a miracle of piety if she was but half so careful of her soul as she is of her body. The rising of a pimple on her face, the sting of a gnat, will make her keep her room two or three days, and she thinks they are very rash people that do not take care of things in time. This makes her so over careful of her health that she never thinks she is well enough, and so over indulgent that she never can be really well. So that it costs her a great deal in sleeping draughts and waking draughts, in spirits for the head, in drops for the nerves, in cordials for the stomach, and in saffron for her tea.
‘If you visit Flavia on the Sunday, you will always meet good company, you will know what is doing in the world, you will hear the last lampoon, be told who wrote it, and who is meant by every name that is in it. You will hear what plays were acted that week, which is the finest song in the opera, who was intolerable at the last assembly, and what games are most in fashion. Flavia thinks they are atheists who play at cards on the Sunday, but she will tell you the nicety of all the games
, what cards she held, how she played them, and the history of all that happened at play, as soon as she comes from church. If you would know who is rude and ill-natured, who is vain and foppish, who lives too high and who is in debt; if you would know what is the quarrel at a certain house, or who and who are in love; if you would know how late Belinda comes home at night, what clothes she has bought, how she loves compliments, and what a long story she told at such a place; if you would know how cross Lucius is to his wife, what ill-natured things he says to her, when nobody hears him; if you would know how they hate one another in their hearts though they appear so kind in public; you must visit Flavia on the Sunday. But still she has so great a regard for the holiness of the Sunday, that she has turned a poor old widow out of her house as a profane wretch, for having been found once mending her clothes on the Sunday night.’
Between the years 1733-37, owing to his acquaintance with the writings of the famous mystic, Jacob Boehme, Law became a mystic himself. The ‘blessed Jacob’ as he calls him exercised an influence which colours all his later writings and lasted till his death. In 1740 he retired to his native village and to solitude; but after a while two wealthy and devout ladies, one of them a widow, the other the historian’s aunt, Miss Hester Gibbon, joined him in his retreat and devoted to charitable objects their labours and their fortunes. ‘Out of a joint income of not less than three thousand pounds a year, only about three hundred pounds were spent upon the frugal expenses of the household and the simple personal wants of the three inhabitants. The whole of the remainder was spent upon the poor.’ Report says, let us hope it may be scandal, that after the master’s death the love of earthly vanities revived in two of his pupils. His favourite niece had a new dress every month, and Miss Gibbon ‘appeared resplendent in yellow stockings.’ This is not the place to follow Law’s self-denying career, neither are we concerned with the volumes which contain his later views. Admirably written though they be, these works do not belong to the field of literature. Law lived in vigour both of mind and body to a good old age, and died in 1761.
Alexander Pope - Delphi Poets Series Page 193
