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IntroductionIntroductory Note
Essays
Introductory Note
George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, was born in the County of Kilkenny,
Ireland, March 12, 1685. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he
became acquainted with the writings of Locke, and grew enthusiastically
interested in the "new philosophy," as it was called, in contrast to the
scholasticism which Trinity College had not yet officially discarded. When he
was only twenty-four he published his "Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision,"
and in the next year his "Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human
Knowledge"; but being disappointed in the comparative neglect of his new ideas
by the philosophers of the day, he proceeded to discuss both objections and
answers in the "Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous" published in 1713, and
here reprinted.
Meantime, Berkeley had been appointed to various college offices; and in
1713 he crossed to England and gained access to the circles of Addison and
Pope. Through Swift`s influence he went to Italy as chaplain to Lord
Peterborough; and after several years, spent partly in London and partly on
the Continent, he returned to Ireland in 1721 as chaplain to the Lord
Lieutenant, became Dean of Derry, and inherited property.
Berkeley had now become possessed with the idea of a great future for
Christianity in America, planned a college in Bermuda, and, while the grants
of money which he hoped for were in suspense, he crossed the Atlantic and
spent the years 1728-31 in Rhode Island. Becoming hopeless of ever getting the
required endowment for his college, he returned to England, published,
"Alciphron," which he had written on his American farm, and retired to the
Bishopric of Cloyne, where he lived almost to the end of his life, practising
benevolence in his diocese and publishing the virtues of tar-water, a panacea
in which he believed with characteristic enthusiasm. He died at Oxford,
January 14, 1753.
The following Dialogues are the best defense of Berkeley`s main
doctrines, and are regarded by Leslie Stephen as "the finest specimen in our
language of the conduct of argument by dialogue." His chief editor, Fraser,
calls them "the gem of British metaphysical literature."
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