the facts which had been staring the world in the face for ages, the solitary genius of the Irish Bishop put an interpretation upon them which, to those who accept it, has turned the world upside down, or rather inside out, more completely than the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system in physical science. It may be that we have as yet seen only the beginning of the revolution in thought which Berkeley inaugurated, and that Idealism, under one form or another, has a career before it far more important than the half-acceptance which it has hitherto met with from the philosophic fraction of the world. What if Idealism should yet become popular! Time has brought round revenges as strange as that. While our perceptions, of course, remain precisely what they are, we might come to accept the appearances of things in general with as widespread a mental reservation as when we see the sun manifestly springing above or sinking below the horizon. We might come, I mean, to have metaphysical, no less than physical, science ever ready as a corrective of our spontaneous notions-and that, too, without altering the received modes of speech. All that is necessary is to avoid confusion between ourselves regarded as physical organisms, and ourselves regarded as so much mind, spirit, or consciousness. There is a material world external to, and independent of, our bodies: there is not, and cannot be, such a world independent of our minds. All that exists independently of our minds is the cause of Matter. And if we inquire into the nature of that cause, we find some presumption for believing it to be Will, and no presumption at all for believing it to be anything else.

The reader will observe that in what is here urged in Berkeley's favour, Will is spoken of as possibly a creative, but not as an ultimate cause. The object of the foregoing remarks has been to show that we have some ground for believing Will to be the phenomenal antecedent of the presentation to our faculties of an objective world, in

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which case we may push the chain of cause and effect one step further back than it is usually carried, without venturing to assert that we thereby reach the ultimate cause. The writer himself shares the opinion that we know nothing of cause" except as a term in a series.

One word now as to the simplicity of Berkeley's theory. Hitherto we have contrasted it only with that sheer Materialism which would ascribe efficiency to unintelligent atoms. That theory is simple enough, yet Berkeley's is simpler still. For the former postulates a world without us, resembling, to some extent, the world we are conscious of, and forces us to distinguish between objective and subjective qualities of matter, whereas Berkeley abolishes this artificial distinction, declaring all our perceptions alike to be directly produced in us by an external cause no way resembling them. But what figures in Berkeley's writings under the title of Materialism is not this simple, though groundless, hypothesis, but that theory of perception which, while ascribing the origin of all things to God, regards His Will as operating upon us, not directly, but through the intervention of a created substance called Matter. Our philosopher sapped the foundations of this conception, still dominant in theology, by taking the properties of Matter, one by one, and showing them to be affections of Mind. What, then, he could ask, did God create beyond our perceptions? "Forcecentres," say certain thinkers at the present day; and the answer no doubt deserves serious consideration, though the present writer can find in it at least when combined with belief in a Deity-nothing but an attempt to localize volitions, which sounds like a contradiction in terms. It is, in truth, hard to understand why any one who agrees with Berkeley in accepting the existence of a Deity as an unquestionable fact, should persist in running up a partition-wall between Him and His creatures. When Berkeley has said all that he has to say, it is still

quite open to us to believe in the existence of Noumena, or things in themselves; but if we also believe in a Deity who made them, it is certainly simpler and more reasonable to cut out the unnecessary link. Here, if anywhere, we may apply the famous principle of William of Occam: "Entia non sunt multiplicanda præter necessitatem; frustra fit per plura quod fieri potest per pauciora."

All that now remains is to glance at the deep religious significance of Berkeley's conception of the universe. So long as Matter was regarded as an independent entity, there was danger of its usurping the place of Deity, a danger to which Berkeley was keenly alive. If our perceptions could be aroused in us by a lifeless substance, what need to seek further for the living God? But in our author's scheme of things, Matter was relegated to an essentially relative and subordinate position. It was but the impress of God's spirit on man's-a strain drawn from the human soul by the touch of the Divine Musician, as expressed by one who thought not of Berkeley when he wrote

"A spirit went forth from the Lord,
To play on the spirit of man,
That thrilled like a wind-shaken chord
When the hymn of the ages began."

Thus Matter was doubly dependent, existing by reason of the Will of God, and in, though not by reason of, the mind of man.

Again, a sense of nearness and intimate communion with the Divine Being has been characteristic of the religious mind in all ages. Men have retired into the wilderness to feel alone with God. But, on Berkeley's view of things, retirement is needless, for even amid the din and stir of life men are alone with God. All the thronging perceptions that constitute the outer life of man proceed as truly and immediately from God as the

"still, small voice" of the inner spiritual consciousness.* All Nature everywhere is but the language of the Almighty Father, whereby He imparts His thoughts to His children-thoughts couched under sensible symbols, as all instruction to children must be. The more we learn of science-the more unerringly we detect the connexion of the sign with the thing signified-the more we come to know of the thought of God, unfolded gradually in the sublime panorama of the universe. It is not too much to say that of all philosophies which have ever been given to the world, Berkeley's is the best adapted to conciliate piety with strong common sense. Based wholly upon experience, it thrills and glows with religious fervour. Yet this was the philosophy which Beattie and the chorus of the orthodox denounced as

atheistical," while magnanimously acquitting its authors of ill intention-a philosophy which could tinge with deeper meaning even the devout declaration of the Psalmist By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth."

*This applies in the fulness of its meaning rather to the junction of Hume with Berkeley-the fusion of Positivism and Spiritualism-which is proposed in this paper. For Berkeley did not consider God to be the only agent, though we look in vain in his writings for any clear demarcation of the limits and relations of Divine and human action.

ILLUSION AND DELUSION:

THE WRITINGS OF CHARLES BRAY.

THE works of Mr. Charles Bray, of Coventry, have been long before the world without attracting a degree of attention at all adequate to their deserts.

But how, indeed, can the average Briton, with that "bloodthirsty clinging to life" which Mr. Matthew Arnold ascribes to him, be expected to sympathise with a system in which the vanity of things in general and the eternal death that awaits the individual are two of the cardinal doctrines? The gospel of pure Nihilism is a name which has been not inaptly bestowed on the writings of this truculent philosopher. But let the reader form his own judgment as to their tendency from an abstract with which we here present him, culled from the works of our author, and given, to a great extent, in his own words.

We imagine, indeed, that outside of and around us there is a real world, with an actual sun in the heavens above and the veritable verdure of earth beneath, a world wherein we and our friends-friends with real faces-live and move, love and hate, raise seed after our kind, and disappear; but all this is an illusion and delusion, a jugglery of the senses, which conspire with the intellect to impose upon us. The constitution of our faculties, it is true, forces us to believe in such a world; but still this world is no more a reality than our dreams, which we believe in while they last. Each creature, as we call it, is itself a creator; it makes its own world and