16 BEING AND FACULTIES OF MAN. 



crowded on the back of that fallacy. Berkeley confesses 

 to a desire to defeat the materialist philosophy by a 

 'sweeping conclusion against the whole basis of their 

 arguments the existence of matter and he lost his 

 impartiality in the eagerness of his zeal. " Matter," he 

 says, " being once expelled out of Nature drags with it 

 many sceptical notions * * * * without it your Epi- 

 cureans, Hobbists, and the like have not even the shadow of 

 a pretence, but become the most cheap and easy triumph in 

 the world." He fell, therefore, into the weakness and 

 error of seeking to destroy a reality for the purpose of 

 confounding those who perverted it. How little the cause 

 of truth is capable of being so served or promoted is 

 conspicuously illustrated by the fact that the very means 

 employed in achieving his object laid the foundation of 

 just as mucli evil as it sought to cure, and reared up Hume 

 instead of Hobbes, and something more than even absolute 

 Egomism* in the place of Epicurus. For it is painfully 

 evident that, if Bishop Berkeley had not sacrificed his 

 candour to his zeal, he would have made it much more 

 difficult, if not impossible, for David Hume to have been 

 an infidel. 



The power of self-deception, it will be found, from the 

 preceding remarks, is by no means impaired by the study 

 and pursuits of philosophy. Let us hope that candour, 

 and an inflexible love of truth for its own sake, are able 

 to steer clear of those subtle shallows on which theory and 

 speculation have so often foundered and gone to ruin. 

 Many eminently wise men have lived and died without 

 being a whit the more foolish from not knowing much 

 of metaphysics. Is it impossible to believe that these 

 great minds have perceived, altogether outside of meta- 

 physical science, that the great primary perceptive faculty, 



* The denial of everything but one's own existence. Hume 

 denied even the reality of his own existence. 



