Philosopher George Berkeley was born at Dysert Castle, near Thomastown, Ireland, on March 12, 1685. He graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, with a Bachelor of Arts in 1704 and was elected a fellow of the college in 1707. Three years after taking holy orders, he traveled to London, where he became acquainted with such literary figures as Swift, Addison, and Pope. After spending several years traveling across Europe, Berkeley returned to Ireland in 1721, where he filled various academic posts, including Divinity Lecturer, Hebrew Lecturer, Proctor, Dean of Dromore, and in 1724, Dean of Derry.
Hoping to establish a college in the Bermuda Islands, Berkeley sailed for America in 1728, landing at Newport, Rhode Island. After waiting three years for funding that never materialized, Berkeley aborted his mission and returned to London in 1732. Two years later, in 1734, he was appointed Bishop of Cloyne. Berkeley resided in Cloyne until 1752 at which time he retired to Oxford to live the remainder of his life with his son, a senior student at Christ Church. Berkeley died on January 14, 1753.
Berkeley's first publication An Essay Toward a New Theory of Vision concerns the relation between the senses of sight and touch. "The objects of sight and touch," he writes, "make, if I may so say, two sets of ideas which are widely different from each other.... A man born blind, being made to see, would at first have no idea of distance by sight: the sun and stars, the remotest objects as well as the nearer, would all seem to be in his eye, or rather in his mind." Because the objects or ideas of sight and the objects of touch are distinct, any correlation between the two must be learned by observing a constant, albeit arbitrary, connectedness. What we see is what we can expect to touch.
The primary exposition of Berkeley's philosophy of idealism, for which he is best known, appears in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713). To refute Locke's acceptance of Descartes' dualism of spirit and matter, which he believed would lead to skepticism and atheism, Berkeley built on his previous writings regarding the primacy of the mind (i.e., sight) as the source of knowing, ultimately concluding that "no object exists apart from the mind, mind is therefore the deepest reality." Whereas Locke affirmed the physical presence of an object which is perceived by the mind, but whose existence does not depend on that perception, Berkeley starts with the mind, suggesting that nothing that is not perceived can exist.
Because a person can only be aware of the world insofar as the person has ideas about the world, Berkeley considered his argument to be in support of common sense. If ordinary objects are a "collection of ideas," then there can be no doubt that we perceive things as they are. The visible world is a compilation of ideas of the mind, which for Berkeley was an affirmation, not a rejection, of the existence of a real, cognizable world. He further validates the source of our perceptions by arguing that they cannot come from the material (as Locke would suggest) because inert object have no power to cause a perception. Rather, Berkeley asserts that only an intelligent mind could cause an idea to act on the mind, namely God, "who works all in all, and by whom all things consist."
Although Berkeley continued to modify and defend his philosophy of idealism throughout his life, after he became bishop in 1734 many of his writings centered on social and religious concerns and the need for reforms, outlined primarily in The Querist (1735). Later, he wrote about his fascination with tar-water as a universal medicine, including Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar-water (1744). From his earliest days, he wrote scathing articles against the free-thinkers and materialists and bemoaned the disintegration of morals and spirituality in society. Arguably Ireland's greatest philosopher, in his book George Berkeley: Idealism and the Man (1996) biographer David Berman calls Berkeley's attempt to create a philosophy that reunited spirit and body "a magnificent achievement, possibly the last great and creative theological synthesis."
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