xui.J THE METAPHYSICS OF SKNSATWX. 326 



that, in this battle, the Goliath of Freethinking overcame 

 the champion of what was considered Orthodoxy. 



But in Dublin, all this while, there was a little David 

 practising his youthful strength upon the intellectual lions 

 and bears of Trinity College. This was George Berkeley, 

 who was destined to give the same kind of development 

 to the idealistic side of Descartes' philosophy, that the 

 Freethinkers had given to its sceptical side, and the 

 Newtonians to its mechanical side. 



Berkeley faced the problem boldly. He said to the 

 materialists : " You tell me that all the phenomena of 

 nature are resolvable into matter and its affections. I 

 assent to your statement, and now I put to you the 

 further question, * What is matter ? ' In answering this 

 question you shall be bound by your own conditions ; 

 and I demand, in the terms of the Cartesian axiom, that 

 in turn you give your assent only to such conclusions as 

 are perfectly clear and obvious." 



It is this great argument which is worked out in the 

 "Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Know- 

 ledge," and in those " Dialogues between Hylas and 

 Philonous," which rank among the most exquisite ex- 

 amples of English style, as well as among the subtlest 

 of metaphysical writings ; and the final conclusion of 

 which is summed up in a passage remarkable alike for 

 literary beauty and for calm audacity of statement. 



" Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man 

 need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one 

 to be, viz., that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth 

 in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the 

 world have not any substance without a mind; that their being is 

 to be perceived or known ; that consequently, so long as they are 

 not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of 

 any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all 

 or else subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit ; it being perfectly 

 unintelligible, and involving all the absurdity of abstraction, to 



