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Great Thinkers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Extract

Berkeley belonged to the days when it was possible to write philosophy without being learned, when it was sufficient to have fundamental convictions and to be able to write about them clearly. His contribution to the stock of philosophical possibilities was substantially complete when he was twenty-five, at which age no man can or should be learned. Not until he became a bishop did he pile up the burden of scholarship, and the work in which he expressed it, the Siris, has remained a stumbling-block to his expositors. In his day philosophy was not learning but culture and wisdom. He

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1937

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References

page 279 Note 1 Berkeley here had in mind providence rather than miracles. His avoidance of any stress on the evidential value of the latter is another sign of his modernity. One of the main aims of his thought was to preserve the vast regularities discovered by the new science. But by making them depend directly on the will and purpose of God and interpreting them exclusively as the condition of human living he preserved also his religious point.

page 282 Note 1 No. 792 (Johnston) “I approve of this axiom of the Schoolmen, ‘Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuit in sensu.’ “

page 282 Note 2 Berkeley is quite clear about the two senses of esse. See Principles, § 142, ad init.

page 282 Note 3 Arguments about the changes in the second edition are unreliable in so far as they are based on Fraser's text, which, despite his claims, is at many points an amalgam of the two editions. For this reason I have prepared a new recension of the Principles, giving in full the text of the first edition, and noting all deviations in the second. It is now in the press.

page 287 Note 1 Lyon, G., L'idialisme en Angleterre au 18 siècle (1888), p. 337.Google Scholar

page 287 Note 2 SeeCommonplace Book, nos. 511 and 819, and Principles, § 144.

page 288 Note 1 Three Dialogues, Fraser, (1901), vol. i, p. 462.Google Scholar

page 289 Note 1 Science and the Modern World, p. 106.