The genetic view of Berkeley's religious motivation, by G. Stanley Hall ... Reprinted from Journal of religious psychology, April 1912, vol. v ... / Hall, Granville Stanley, 1846-1924

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The Genetic View of Berkeley's 
Religious Motivation 



BY 



G. STANLEY HALL, Ph. D., LL. D. 

President, Clark University, and Professor of Psychology and Education 



Reprinted from JOUBNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 
April, 1912, Vol. V, pp. 137-162 



THE GENETIC VIEW OF BERKELEY'S RELIGIOUS 
MOTIVATION. 

BY G. STANLEY HALL, Ph. D., LL. D., 

President, Clark University, and Professor of Psychology and Education. 

Geneticism, which I believe to be at once the philosophy and 
the psychology of the future, regards the world not sub specie 
eternitatis, but sub specie generationis. It recognizes both prag- 
matism and absolutism, and justifies each as factors in its I 
higher synthesis. It holds that all things in life and mind 
will find their ultimate explanation only when all the stages 
of their origin are simply but correctly described, and their 
evolution set forth with maximal fulness. It believes that 
nothing that mind is or does, has been or has done in the past, 
or will be and will do in the future, is without its sufficient 
reason; that this is true of all mental products, whether they 
be the apparent incoherence of mania and verbigeration, or 
philosophical problems such as whether unperceived objects 
exist, whether we think of things differently from what they 
are, why Plato postulated good, and Spinoza substance, as their 
absolutes, and so on. It would subject all these themes to its 
own psychoanalysis, and also the study of practicalities from 
Kant to Schiller, James and Dewey, in order to find out the 
deeper meanings and their latent content. It assumes that 
Thorndike's meliorism, Strong's substitutionism, Pitken's 
world-picture, Tawney's purposive consistency, and all the 
newest and oldest problems of epistemology, and the present 
struggle back towards the terra firma of realism, even in re- 
ligion, do not one of them say all that they mean, and some 
only a small part; that most of the expressions of psychic 
life are more or less symbolic, and that their half-concealed, 

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RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 

half-revealed meaning will be brought out only when we can 
get through and back of their form in consciousness and tell 
what deeper tendencies they express and how historically they 
came to take on their present forms. With Perry, geneticism 
holds that the theory of knowledge arose from postulating 
matter without qualities and mind without extension, and that 
consciousness must be reduced to a form of energy, but that 
this objective is only another aspect of subjective psychology. 
W. F. Marvin (Syllabus of an Introduction to Philosophy, p. 
129) says, ''Consciousness is nowhere, that is, it does not exist 
in space," "nor is it a non-extended point in space," "it is, in 
fact, non-spatial." And McCosh says practically the same. 
What relation then can it possibly have with the brain or 
nerves? Can it move, or can anything in it move? Is it in 
time? 

It is frankly admitted that, so far, geneticism is 'little more 
than an ideal with even its program but partially developed, 
/ but it affords a new and lofty viewpoint from which to survey 
\ with equanimity and with a wide horizon all the conflicts of 
.present opinion, and to give them fairly a true perspective. 
It can already rather completely solve some problems, although, 
at present, it asks a score of questions for every one it can 
answer. For this reason, it will not appeal to those who seek 
completeness, or believe that we have already arrived, or that 
it is noon-day rather than a very early morning hour in phil- 
osophy. Thus, it is not a view that will commend itself to 
those who seek finality, still less to those who have already 
accepted or wrought out a closed system. All these should 
be warned betimes that their place is not in the camp of the 
/geneticists. 

Geneticism began but recently and obscurely with a few 
empirical data, its view being for the most part neglected by 
those who wrought in the field of mind, and we were very 
modest. But its growth has, of late, been amazing, and far 
beyond the early dreams of its originators, or the knowledge 
of those who have neglected it. It is already beginning to read 
its title clear to become the chief stone of the corner, entirely 
ignored though it still is by most of the guild of system-build- 
ers. From the observation of simpler and higher animal forms, 
and of the minds and conduct of children, normal and defec- 
tive, it has already come to realize that the great speculative 



GENETICISM AND BERKELEY 139 

minds of history are but children of a larger growth, that each 
system is only a set of more or less carefully wrought-out 
returns to nature's great unwritten questionnaire, which, from 
long before the days of the Sphinx down, has always been ask- 
ing what is man and his place in the world, what can he know, 
what should he do, how feel, how did he and all his problems 
arise from great Mother Nature, and what will be his end? To 
the geneticists, all philosophemes, whether of children or adults, 
wise or otherwise, are only more or less precious data for study- 
ing human types of soul, temperament, diathesis and disposi- 
tion. 1 Hence the geneticist can never be a materialist or an 
idealist, a dogmatist or a positivist, or any of the rest, because 
to him each is legitimate and has its own justification, and 
expresses a type of character and mental tastes and opinions, 
which it is his task thoroughly to know and sympathetically 
appreciate and, in the end, harmoniously synthetize into a new 
and greater harmony, nothing less than the symphony of man- 
soul itself. Those who need to do so may still make the per- 
sonally-conducted and well-traveled tour through Locke, Berke- 
ley, Hume and Kant, viewing the absolute idealism of the 
theory of knowledge, the best lesson of which is the realization 
that every psychic bane produces its own antidote or antiseptic, 
in this case, the new realism of the immediate intuitionists like 
Stumpf and, in a different way, Mach and Bergson ; while others 
may prefer Schurman and the old short circuit of the Scotch 
philosophy (Reid and Stewart) of common sense, which bars 
this detour. 

The epistemological microbe is most infectious at the very 
dawn of the teens, as so many studies have shown. At no age 
is the mind so prone to sudden and spontaneous obsessions of 
the question-mania regarding ultimate things. The collections 
of childish queries and speculations upon these themes should 
be very suggestive to philosophers. Like childish distempers, 
however, all these insistent questionings as to what knowledge 
and reality really are are innocuous and leave a very whole- 
some immunizing agency behind them, unless they come too 

*As an early illustration of this tendency, see " Visualization as a 
Chief Source of the Psychology of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume," 
by Alexander Eraser. Am. Jour, of Psy. Dec., 1891. Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 
230-247. Also his " The Psychological Foundation of Natural Real- 
ism." Jtid. April, 1892. Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 429-450. 



140 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 

late in life, when they are much more severe and the effects 
more lasting and harder to recover from. 

Thus, while the geneticist yields not even to the metaphysi- 
cian and epistemologist in his appreciation of .the great phil- 
osophic systems, he regards them in a very different light. He 
sees in none of them ultimate or eternal truth, but considers 
/ \ them as expressions of two things: First, of a certain age, race 
and nation. Not one of these systems could possibly have been 
developed in any other time or environment. Thus, like the 
ancient prophets each has always a primarily historical and 
never a scientific value. Their authors do not address us or 
our time, but others of a very different one. This is the new, 
historic, versus the old dogmatic and partisan view, which 
since Zeller and Fischer has been progressively recognized. 
Discipleship takes us out of our own age into that of one that 
has passed and gone. Many of the problems and issues that 
inspired both methods and conclusions of the great classical 
writers are simply dead from atrophy, or they are settled ; and 
it is robbing the grave to resurrect them, save as an academic 
exercise in the history of thought and culture. 

The second determining element in the old systems is the 
personality of the philosopher himself, for his biography is 
always the other key to his scheme of things. Idealists, episte- 
mologists, dogmatists, empiricists, and all other schools, are 
some more, some less, temperamental as well as creedal. Phil- 
osophers have been always partisan, criticizing and rejecting 
those of other sects. Each interprets the universe according 
to his own individuality and is not content, like scientific men, 
to contribute a tiny brick to the same vast temple others are 
building. To the geneticists, these schools and creeds must 
always be studied judiciously, comparatively, sympathetically, 
but none of them can ever, possibly be regarded as a finality. 
Each represents a species of the genus, "man of culture." A 
philosophy is the very acme of self-expression, as science often 
is of self-abnegation and subordination. There is no other 
field, not even literature or art, in which a man of education 
can vent himself with more self -abandon over so wide an area, 
and can choose his own periscope almost anywhere in it. He 
cannot be a specialist, but must be a generalist. He alone can 
follow his own thought freely, fearlessly, wherever it may lead 
him, weaving into it any color or patterns that seem to him good, 



GENETICISM AND BERKELEY 141 

provided only he weave a careful or well-wrought picture. More 
than any other writer's, a philosopher's opinions are matters 
of his own taste, which no amount of disputation can change. 
If expression be the supreme luxury, the speculative philosopher 
attains this felicity of complete self-indulgence in his own opin- 
ions most completely. To be carefully explained by posterity, 
has been called the highest criterion of success in authorship, 
and we may add that, to explain the philosopher psychologically, 
is one of the chief new duties which our science now owes to 
the great speculative minds of the past. For geneticism, they 
all represent what Hegel characterizes as an animal kingdom 
of mind. They challenge us to study their types. No other 
intellects have ever blossomed so fully, none written so con- 
fessionally or revelatorily of what is in man's soul. In vino 
veritas, that is, men are all drunk with the spirit of truth and 
the passion to utter it, to show forth their inmost soul, only 
we must have the wit to do much interpretation. Psychological 
criticism thus must go back of what these systems say, in order 
to find all or most that they mean. They thought that they 
expressed certain things in certain ways. We shall find that 
they expressed very different things in very different ways. 
We must first take the trouble of understanding their own con- 
sciousness and, to do this, must often lay bare what they would 
fain conceal. We must seek for a deeper motive for all they 
said. Their documents tell us how the world looked from be- 
neath their own skull-pans, and we must not only vividly 
revive their images and sentiments, as a starting point from 
which to proceed to a further analysis, comparison, interpreta- 
tion, diagnosis of Anlagen, but trace out genetic stages to their 
causes and motivations till we understand them far better than 
they could possibly understand themselves. This genetic psy- 
chology is far vaster than all systems or creeds, for these are 
but two of the many fields it cultivates, 

Appallingly great as is this task, even it is but part, for the 
geneticist must also consider not only the latest twigs on the 
old tree of psychic life, as represented by the most cultivated 
adult men and women of to-day, but he must consider all 
phases and stages of development of mind in every animal form, 
with each extinct species of which a specific type of soul-life 
went out and was lost to the world. He must peer wherever 
possible into the past, list and scrutinize every vestige of 



. 



142 JOURNAL OP RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 

psychic adaptation from the very beginning, and everything 
else that may serve as a key to what is gone, so as to restore 
the missing links of mind wherever possible. Hence, while 
he must introspect to the uttermost, he must realize that what 
he finds in himself is only a small and fragmentary part of 
the entire world of mind and that objective methods and data 
must be his chief reliance ; that he must, in a new sense, become 
a citizen of all times, lands and climes and the spectator of 
all events. He must especially be on his guard against be- 
coming a banausic provincial solipsist in his own field or a 
stand-patter of any school. To be a humanist, large as the 
term is, is not enough. 

What, for the geneticist, is the most perfect type of knowl- 
edge, and what wins man's most complete belief? It is sen- 
\sation, which is also the first and oldest of all psychic processes. 
Seeing is believing. What sane man, with normal senses, ever 
really did or could doubt the great body of their deliverances? 
Countless generations of beings have relied implicitly on their 
evidence. Had they not for eons been the most trustworthy of 
all witnesses, no psyche would ever have been evolved and ani- 
mal life without them is inconceivable. Subjectively considered, 
sensation is not only the primordial but the most direct and 
immediate of all intuitions, and has, from the first, shaped not 
only all vital functions but structures into conformity with 
and adaptation to the external world. Now, what is the essen- 
tial feature in all sensation? What is its purpose and end? 
Not the act of perception itself, as Berkeleyans aver, but a real 
outer object independent of the perceiver, not his eject, pro- 
ject, or any extradition of his consciousness. If we perceive, we 
perceive something not ourselves. Whether it be perceived 
truly as it is, or in a symbolic way, every candid analysis of 
the act of sensation or perception finds an object over against 
a subject, a counterposed non-ego over against an ego. Thus, 
there is an ineluctable realistic basis, no matter how trans- 
formed it be, to every true perception. This bottom fact, the 
exceptional cases of illusions and hallucinations should no more 
discredit than the fact of the existence of idiots and deviates 
of many kinds should shock our confidence in sanity, or sick- 
ness and weakness make us doubt health and strength. For 
the most part, then, the senses are the most truthful of all our 
faculties, the creators of automatisms and habits, the sovereign 



GENETICISM AND BERKELEY 143 

lords of behavior and conduct, the mother of mind throughout 
both the animal and human world. They may err, but they 
do so rarely or under peculiar conditions, and all errors tend 
to be corrected. Most of the defects philosophers are so fond 
of charging up against them are really faults of interpretation, 
showing no lack of faithful deliverances on their part. Indeed, 
so invincible is their testimony, that, where subjective stimuli 
cause false sensations, they do not need to be very often repeated 
to compel belief in the objective reality they falsely assert, so 
that, as Helmholtz says, the soundest mind can not long re- 
main proof against habitual illusions of perception. To suspect 
the habitual veracity of sense thus brings panic and confusion 
and is due, on the part of those who stress them, either to an 
exceptional number of illusions in their own experience, or else 
to some often hidden motivation or unconscious wish which 
causes them to over-emphasize the exceptional fallacies of pen*- 
ception and to interpret sound in the light of unsound experi- 
ences, rather than conversely, as they should. Implicit_bejief 
in the senses, therefore, is the most common form of sound 
common sense, for there is no reality or certainty in the unl- 
verse that can begin for a moment to compare with that of a 
thing seen, felt, or otherwise sensed. That gives us a paradigm 
of every other kind of reality, knowledge, and certainty, the 
degree of which is directly in proportion as it approximates 
this, which can never be suppressed. The very etymologies 
of every one of the terms designating the so-called higher or 
more complex psychic processes show how sense forms and 
images of the various types pervade all mental processes. Even 
science, according to Avenarius, grows perfect just in propor- 
tion as it formulates the universe in terms of possible sense- 
experience, for this makes us able to think the world with the 
greatest economy or conservation of mental energy. 

Conversely, whatever we try ta take out of the sense-world 
loses reality just as far as we succeed in the attempt. To deny 
space relations of extension and position to anything, even God, 
soul, thought, is to rob it of its most essential reality, and con- 
demn it to lead a hovering limbo-life in the pallid realms of 
nominalism: it is to cut the tap-root of genuine belief in its 
existence, because everything that truly is, even mind, thought, 
soul, God, is somewhere, although we may know nothing as to 
its position, size or shape. For the geneticist, thus, sense is 



144 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 

the foundation of everything in the psyche; and one of his 
great problems is to trace, step by step, how the world of mind 
evolved from this basis. To impeach its witness, is, therefore, 
to make psychology and philosophy air-plants striking no roots 
into mother-earth, and to rob them of the most essential criteria 
of truth. It condemns philosophizing to do its business with 
a paper of currency of promises to pay, when there is no specie 
basis. 

This being so, the geneticist who must explain, evaluate 
and find partial truth in all things, deviative as well as norma- 
tive, must tell us why, for instance, Berkeley and the subjective 
idealists came to proclaim sense-perception bankrupt, and must 
weigh their evidences, must ask what was the underlying motive 
of their elaborated solipsism, their rejection of what is so car- 
dinal and inexpugnable. What was the deeper faith that 
underlay their honest doubts, for that these always exist, the 
geneticist, for whom there is no error, must always assume. 

For this new psychoanalysis, despite the little known of his 
early family life, the case of Berkeley offers us, on the whole, 
a most favorable example. His biographer, Eraser, speaks of 
his ' ' singularly emotional disposition. ' ' Irish, his fervid genius 
may in many points well be compared with that of his great 
Irish precursor, Scotus Erigena, the morning-star of medieval, 
as Berkeley became of modern, scholasticism. The dreamery 
and imaginings of this "romantic boy," "distrustful at the 
age of eight years," and "so by nature disposed for new doc- 
trine," as he says of himself, were matured by a country -home 
near an old castle, such as fired the genius of Walter Scott, 
till at the age of eleven he was sent to the nearest town-school 
at Kilkenny, the Eton of Ireland, where he spent the four most 
susceptible years of pubescence. "Precocious," well-prepared 
and finding the curriculum easy, there is a tradition, says 
Fraser, that "he fed his imagination with the airy vision of 
romance and thus weakened the natural sense of the difference 
between illusion and reality." He was also very susceptible 
to the charms that nature had lavishly spread about this region, 
which he loved to explore and to feel all its thanatopsis and 
other mystic moods, and the inevitable provocation to specu- 
late as to its meaning and man's origin, and place in all the 
mighty scheme. How deeply he could appreciate this is seen 



GENETICISM AND BERKELEY 145 

in one of the very earliest of his writings, an account of a visit 
to the cave of Dunmore near by. 

At the age of fifteen, in 1700, he went to Trinity College, 
Dublin, where, some three years later, he began his lately dis- 
covered (printed in 1871) Common-place Book, kept for years, 
which gives us exceptional insight into the seethings of his mind. 
In it he communes with himself, apparently with no thought 
that any other eye would see these jottings. In this precious, 
almost confessional document, we see that the reveried gropings 
and obstinate questioning so germane to childhood, as it begins 
to merge into manhood and realize things in a new way, had not 
in his case been left to fade into the light of common day, but 
that he had mused and pondered over them with rare fascina- 
tion. His enthusiasm and perfervid fancy teemed with queries 
concerning the true meaning of reality in the world of sense. 
We find here a consuming desire to promulgate a new doctrine 
which should "make short work of all the supposed powers of 
dead unconscious matter;" should banish perplexity and con- 
tradiction, sap the roots of religious scepticism, and bring - a 
new harmony of science and theology. All these centered in his 
new-old scepticism concerning things we see and touch, or the 
visibilia and the tangibilia. He would make a great coup, which 
should bring consternation to the critics of religion, by his tu 
quoque argument that students of nature also work by faith, 
knowing the material world only by a system of symbols slowly 
evolved and associated in ways that could be subjected to a 
most destructive criticism. During his thirteen years at Dub- 
lin, which he left at twenty-eight, this Guy Fawkes of naive 
natural realism had pretty well matured and had scrappily laid 
his plot against common sense, but had done it in the sweetest 
unconsciousness of all the negative implications that ever since 
have flowed from it. He would impeach and discredit the most 
ancient trusted oracles of mankind by a flank movement against 
the critics of transcendentalities, by showing that matter too 
was really immaterial, was only a practical postulate on the 
plane of sense, which must be, in fact, everywhere accepted by 
an act of faith. He would subjectify even the objects of per- 
ception, and make each individual the creator of his own phys- 
ical world, and bring to Modern Europe the old Indie psychosis 
of maya, which looks out upon nature as only a phantasmagoria 
of magic-lantern effects projected upon the tabula rasa of time 



146 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 

and space, the objective reality of which latter it never occurred 
to him to doubt. Things are only phenomenal; noumena are 
spiritual, higher, surer, truer, in fact, the only actual realities. 
Though not deeply concerned for things ecclesiastical, caring 
little for the conventional orthodoxy of his day, he was heart 
and soul a religionist, and most of all concerned to vindicate the 
ways of God in nature and mind, and to subject science to faith. 
Long he pondered the ways and means of the most effective 
propaganda of these doctrines, so that they should bring most 
startling consternation into the camp of the scientists, whose 
claims constituted the chief atmosphere of academic Dublin, 
which he found saturated and fermenting with them, for no- 
where in Britain was there any center of scientific interest and 
activity to be compared at that time with Trinity, which had 
so lately been awakened to the new light. 

To a youth of Berkeley's genius, whose mind was still full of 
the dreams of boyhood, all this was stimulating to the point of 
exhilaration and yet baffling to all his deeply-rooted and hitherto 
fondly-cherished tendencies. He was charmed, yet recusant; 
"drawn, but repelled. Where was the place, and what was the 
justification, in an atmosphere so charged and saturated with 
science, for a purely idealistic diathesis, closing in about which 
the world of law and necessity brought almost claustrophobic 
symptoms? He could not, like the more prosaic Lotze, whose 
soul was long perturbed by the same antithesis, admit that the 
mechanical view of the world was everywhere present, but every- 
where subordinate, for this would imply compromise, and of 
this the Berkeleyan type of mind never knows even the meaning. 
Ordained at the age of twenty-four, preaching occasionally, he 
had given hostages to the Christian religion, and his impetuous 
temperament, chafed as it was, stormed at by free-thinkers like 
Tolland, John Browne, Molyneux (in his new dioptrics), Locke, 
Newton, Hobbes, Descartes, Boyle and the great Greeks (for he 
became Greek professor at the age of twenty-two), his realiza- 
tion that "things are thinks," to use Bronson Alcott's expres- 
sion, brought thus a great revolution, and also a profound peace 
to his perturbed soul. This was all new and most stimulating 
to him. He felt that his own view would clear up "all those 
contradictions and inexplicable, perplexing absurdities that 
have in all ages been a reproach to human reason." He knew 
too that there was "a mighty set of men" who would oppose 




GENETICISM AND BERKELEY 

and vilipend him, but he vows to cling to his transrrming 
thought. With it, he says, he has "a heart of ease," knowing 
that things of sense are ideas, a thesis, as Fraser says, "not in- 
telligible to his contemporaries and immediate successors, and 
he had only an imperfect consciousness of it himself." He 
sought with the greatest enthusiasm to restore spiritual beliefs 
and higher ideals of life in a materialistic age. He was really ' 
" against his own intention, opening the door for the most thor- 
oughgoing scepticism and agnosticism ever offered to the world." 

This made Berkeley the enfant terrible of modern philoso- 
phers, the arch-sceptic of all sceptics, casting doubt upon the 
most fundamental belief of the world. Never has there been a 
philosophy so purely one of temperament and so infectious to 
those of like diathesis. To the sedentary aloofness from prac- 
tical affairs of academic life and isolation greater for specu- 
lators than for those in any other chairs, he added his own 
visionary temperament, his theological bias, and the special 
incitement of finding himself in the midst of the hottest battle 
so far waged between science and faith, where, with lines 
closely drawn and combatants in serried array on either side, 
he would be a new David coming forth with his sling against 
the great Philistine, science. But here the simile ends, for his 
sling did chief execution in his own ranks, which have ever since 
been more discomfited than have either the scientists or the 
every-day naive realists. > His great secret of visual and tactual 
immaterialism consisted in applying what Locke had said of the 
secondary to the primary qualities of matter, and it was both 
inspired and used as a method of causing physical things to 
vanish and to reveal in their places the eternal spirit and uni- 
versal reason. 1 The early stages of his writings were negative, 
while later the dominating motive was more in evidence. We 
live and move and have our being in God. We realize this ' ' in- 
tellectually, philosophically and practically by assimilation to 
God who is reason and spirit and reality, so supreme" that, in 
His presence, the sensible world fades away and only things 
unseen are really eternal. , 

Thus we find the underlying motive deeper than his own con- 
sciousness, a bias probably never realized by himself. His 
all-dominant wish was to exalt the cause of faith and reason 
above, and at the expense of, that of sense, not content like 
Paul to postulate a new special organ of transcendentalities, to 



r 



148 JOURNAL OP RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 

parallel the domain of the sensory, thus giving us a dual world 
order; not quite a visionary, he yet believed the pipe-dreams 
of his own imagination until this faculty had become so vivid 
as to claim the same credence as sense. Like Swedenborg, he 
was satisfied with the mystic and absorbed contemplation of 
things divine till the physical world seemed empty and for- 
gotten, as to the ecstatic newer Platonists. To these views 
he turned with special fondness in his old age. Incapable of 
the unique ontological method of Parmenides or Spinoza in 
resting everything on the deductive or mathematical elabora- 
tion of an absolutist's creed, his pugnacious Irish disposition 
impelled him as Philonous to carry aggressive warfare into 
the Hylic Court with the new weapon that turned the burden 
of proof on his adversaries and opened a new mine of psycho- 
logical veins of doubt beneath their very feet, by convincing 
all who put their trust in sense of a credulity if not a super- 
stition even grosser than that which scepticism had charged 
up against religionists. Thus, by breaking the bonds of sense, 
C human might be sublimated into divine thought as in his later 
writings, especially in Alciphron and Siris he seeks to doi posi- 
tively. Even Micromegas on the dog star, with his thousand 
senses, got no satisfaction, but only growing perplexity from 
them. Thus, this author of the philosophy of a recrudescent 
Hindu maya gave the world a shock, which for subsequent stu- 
dents in the field brought actual disenchantment with nature 
by tarnishing its pristine charm and immediateness, and those 
who felt its full force and then succeeded in facing it down, 
returned to the world somewhat as convalescents, after grave 
disease, look out through the sickroom windows upon the pal- 
pitating life of man, while they muster strength again to face 
the world with courage and resolution as recuperative agencies 
bring them back to it again. They have trod the way of death 
far enough toward the end to have lost their way back for a 
time, but this experience was necessary, and was prescribed, 
in fact, not only as giving immunity against all less mortal 
microbes of doubt, but because those sick nigh unto death may 
return to life with a more vivid sense of the reality of things 
unseen beyond the veil. 

His Bermuda scheme occupied a prominent, if not the chief, 
place in his mind from the age of thirty-six to forty-six. Realiz- 
ing, from his travels on the continent and his life in London, 



GENETICISM AND BERKELEY 149 

the corruption of Europe, which, to his pure soul, seemed to 
predict ruin, his ardent social idealism led him to plan a college 
on the Bermuda Islands, 600 miles from land, where both the 
sons of British colonists and native Indians from the continent 
of America could be educated. Long he schemed to raise 
money for his Utopian institution on these beautiful summer 
islands, to which his fancy gave a halo of romance. When 
Swift privately married Stella, and the unhappy Vanessa, 
whom he had never seen, bequeathed to Berkeley her fortune 
of some 3,000 pounds, this asset and the charter and grant 
from Parliament, together with private subscriptions, seemed 
to him to warrant the realization of his hopes, and so, in 1829, 
he landed, not at the Bermudas, but at Newport, where he 
began his bucolic life, wrote and waited for the special grant 
of 30,000 pounds which had been voted for his project, but 
which Walpole never sent. Here too he wrote his Alciphron, 
which marked a distinct advance from his phenomenological 
standpoint to an actual hypostatization of Plato's ideas, and 
here he inspired Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Edwards. But, 
after nearly three years, he sailed for home, a disappointed 
man, never having seen the Bermudas nor his college, but con- 
soled by his transcendental speculations. In America, he 
charmed everyone, as he always did, and gave a great impulse 
to metaphysical speculation to the few scholars here inclined 
that way. He had found consolation for the disenchantments 
of immaterialism in a greatly augmented sense of the reality 
of the supernal world, where alone noumena were found. All 
phenomena were only media through which we discern the in- 
telligent and divine spirit. Eeligion alone is the perfection of 
man. Indeed, we can see God even more truly than we can 
see nature or the soul of our friends. Reason is begotten of 
faith. All nature is but a revelation of God. Thus Berkeley 
\ sought to regenerate the New World by his new idealism. In 
the crude practical civilization of this country, as it was in his 
day, where the chief energies of men were directed to the con- 
quest of nature, the enthusiastic espousal of his crude idealism 
by the chosen few was a contrast effect of reaction from a 
materialistic civilization, and suggests the strange success of 
Dr. William Harris' propaganda of Hegelism in the raw cul- 
ture of St. Louis, thirty years ago. Pioneer-life complemented 
itself by crass religious creeds, while the few more thoughtful 



150 JOURNAL OP RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 

minds turned to a crass philosophy which was the diametrical 
opposite of their practical lives. Thus extremes met, and this 
effect was heightened by the fact that Berkeley's socialistic 
ideas were favored by the callow Utopian democratic dream- 
eries of our pre-Revolutionary days. 

This was the most romantic of all romantic missionary enter- 
prises, and might almost be compared with the South Sea Bubble 
and the tulip-mania. 

In remote rural Cloyne, where, after a period of controversy, 
the last eighteen years of his life, from forty-nine on, were spent, 
when famine and fever had ravaged the region, and his own 
health was impaired, he sought a panacea for all bodily, as 
hitherto he had for all mental and social ills, and found it in 
tar-water, and his Siris or chain of aphorisms on this subject 
was written and became at once by far the most popular of 
all his works. The culminating thought of his life was of a 
universal agent, the one true remedy of remedies, the great 
reality revealed though concealed by sense. This nauseous drug, 
now shrunken to a very humble place in the medical pharma- 
copoeia, became the only drug in his household, and about it 
he spun a system of philosophical halos. It became the fashion, 
and factories were established to make it. It was to open a 
new era to the world. Though itself a phenomenal drug, it had 
behind it the infinite source of life, and those charged with 
it would make unprecedented advances, physically, mentally 
and morally. It thus became, as his biographer says, the ruling 
passion of his closing years, and yet he slowly sank into melan- 
choly, a baffled ontologist. 

p In all this, his type of reason was somewhat paralleled twenty 
'years ago by Brown-Sequard and his disciples' advocacy of 
testicular extracts, which many savants here and in Europe 
used with great confidence in their amazing rejuvenating effects. 
Jj Unlike modern American idealistic professors, who left others 
to draw the ineluctable practical consequences of their creed in 
the theory and practice of faith-cure, he did not hesitate to 
enter the therapeutic field himself. If there be a universal 
sin-cure, as Christianity teaches, which all must experience to 
be saved, there must also be a universal bodily panacea. If 
there be one supreme creative energy, why not a sustaining and 
curative one? No doubt tar-water ten grams of tar- water to 
ten grams of faith did work cures, but so can almost anything 



GENETICISM AND BERKELEY 151 

else, provided the faith be not wanting, and provided the remedy 
be not particularly harmful. But how sedulously explain that 
it was not the tar-water itself, for that was only phenomenal, 
but the great principle of life back of it which brought the 
cures? Here we psychoanalysts find a remarkable recrud- 
escence in Berkeley's mind of the transubstantiation psychosis ] 
which the Medieval Church experienced in the doctrine that the 
bread and wine of the Sacrament were made into the veritable 
body and blood of Our Lord. As the one regenerated the soul, 
so the other did the body, not by its phenomenal material, the 
pitch and resin, but by its inner principle, the vital life, which 
expressed the life-giving energy of God, who had singled 
it out and imparted to it a unique and special power. Berkeley 
sought no patent for his new medicine, although perhaps no 
patent medicine was ever so effectively advertised on so high 
a plane. 

Siris won the author, then but little known outside of Eng- 
land and her colonies, immediate and world-wide fame, and 
was translated into many languages. That and his further 
writings on tar-water were the largest of his works, save Al- 
ciphron, and by far the most scholarly, with allusions to a wide 
range of philosophical literature, which was generally lacking 
in his other writings. Very many, if not most, of his con- 
temporaries knew him by this treatise only, which is now 
almost entirely ignored by both the history of philosophy and 
epistemologists. Those who treat his Theory of Vision, Human 
Knowledge, Alciphron, Philonous and Hylas seriously, usually 
wish his Siris forgotten, but to the geneticists, it is precious ( 
and indispensable, and it absorbed the chief energies of nearly 
a decade and a half of his maturest years. In it he not only 
hypostatized ideas, as he had begun to do in the Alciphron, but 
passed from the standpoint of Plato almost to that of the Neo- 
Platonists. Tar-water is charged with pure empyrean fire. It 
is not only the soul of all vegetable life, but the theoretical fire 
of the thermal principle. It is the soul of the world, which 
will go out when the world cools off. It is the principle of 
life, which the plant bequeaths to the animal world. Thus, the 
chain passes from the physical to the spiritual. Deity is spiritu- 
alized tar-water, a universe of ideas realized in living persons, 
they and it derived from absolute being. It is the link between 
physics and metaphysics, medicine and theosophy. It is some- 



152 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 

times compared with Plato's Timaeus for unintelligibility. The 
type of emanationism it represents is rather more Heraclitic 
than Alexandrian. 

The tar-water psychosis in Berkeley was an expression of 
the unconscious wish of his soul to fill the great void which 
existed in almost every great and thoughtful mind till evolu- 
tion, now supplemented by geneticism, came. Tar-water was 
more than his ''flower in the crannied wall" to start with, 
and it became in the end the embodiment of his one and all. 
It was to him all that ether means to the physicist, and proto- 
plasm to the biologist, noumenalized. In the beginning was 
tar-water. It was the primal source and therefore also the 
regenerator of life: the supreme quintessence of the alchemist, 
sifted out of nature by pine and fir trees, the most precious 
bequest of the plant-soul. It was the supreme type and symbol 
too of salvation and of deity. As the great and good before 
Christ, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the rest were said to have 
anticipated the great salvation of the cross, so Berkeley by this 
chain of aphorisms filled the void that yawned and ached, con- 
sciously or unconsciously, in nearly every soul, before evolution 
came to fill it and he gained by his tar- water dreameries all that 
he could of the wished fulfilment or the lasting satisfaction 
which the genetic view of the world always has and always will 
give those who know what is to be known, and put their faith in 
and cast their burdens upon it, for the sake of its great uplift. 
This was the latent content of his patent emanationistic dream. 
This is the mother-lye of nature, and, at the same time, the 
web of thought spun from nature to nature's God. "Ohne 
Phosphor (=tar- water), kein Gedanke." It was more than 
Pfliiger assigns to cyanogen. Indeed, it was more than the 
essential ingredient in the sacramental blood and wine of the 
soul-communion, for it regenerates the body as well as the soul. 
Thus idealists always take amazing liberties with the world 
of things as they are, but Berkeley outdoes them all, for his 
brooding had bred a profound sense of the unreality of facts. 
Otherwise, he never could have gone against them so naively 
with such a flimsy tissue of speculations. Xo philosopher is so 
like the Baconian spider who ejects a mesh of web from its 
spinnerette on the top of a picket and then floats from the 
air suspended by it. For subjective idealists there can be no 
criterion of truth, save the fitting coherence of ideas, one with 



AXD BEEKEi 153 

another. Here there is no logical consistency, but only the 
crassest syncretism of quod libet eclecticism. The same in- 
genuity might have made any object, element, or drug what- 
ever, as credible a eatholieon. Not a living soul ever did or 
could accept his system, not even the Hermetics, and Eraser 
himself is only painfully apologetic. Many delusions of the 
madhouse have been more systematized. Thus the time has 
surely come when we must ask whether these sickly vagaries 
of Berkeley, which haunted all his maturer years, may not be 
used as a wholesome admonition to youth to cleave close to 
reality, to wreak the fullest intensity of belief upon the world 
as it is to sense, lest they too cripple their own souls, and be 
left to believe any lie that speculative fancy, which has filled 
the world with metaphysical ghosts, may suggest. This is the 
Nemesis of immaterialism. That Berkeley's soul still goes march- 
ing on in the academic world to-day and is not relegated to the 
sibilant limbo of mere historicity is not creditable to our phil- 
osophic sanity, for, measured by higher modern standards of 
normality, his soul and career are simply pathological, although 

a ease for psychoanalysis, he will long be of unique interest 
It is not therefore ghoulish to dig up and mutilate even a 
decent corpse like his, if it lies right athwart what has become 
a most traveled highway, where it trips and hips most and 
maims a few who traverse it. He wished posterity to judge 
him chiefly by his tar-water philosophy. We certainly cannot 
ignore it. When any professor to-day draws about himself the 
awful and inviolable circle of academic freedom, I would pause 
long before invading it. I would reflect how, in Germany, 
Fechner was allowed to teach that plants and planets were 
besouled, that the psyche of the sun and moon were regnant 
deities; how Bauer thought that the Gospels were myths, when 
myth had a very low connotation as mere fancy; how Zollner, 
the great Leipzig astronomer, lectured on slate-writing tricks 

lemonstrate spiritism; how Kirschmann was allowed to teach 
red socialism right across the street from the most absolute 
monarch west of Russia, but I would not forget that Hygeia 
is a goddess on whose shrine authority is compelling us more 
and more to make oblations of even liberty personal, social 
corporate, academic and Berkeleyism with its languishing 
mental involutions brings such a unique blight and murrain, and 
raise the question of mental and moral hygiene; and there are 



154 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 

others in the history of philosophy that need this new, higher 
criticism and censorship on the grounds of academic sanitation. 
Eddyism is the inevitable logical consequence of New England 
transcendentalism, and Emmanuelism is the conclusion of aca- 
demic epistemology. The authors of these systems of thought 
did not have the courage or the practical efficiency to draw con- 
clusions, but left that to Mrs. Eddy and Worcester. Berkeley 
had the courage to apply his system. 

Alciphron or the Minute Philosopher, contains seven dia- 
logues, written in America, which are chiefly devoted to an 
attack upon British free-thinkers, deists, theists and atheists. 
Lysicles stands for a light-hearted worldling Mandeville, who 
taught that private vices were public benefits. Against Shaftes- 
bury 's reduction of conscience to good taste and virtue to beauty, 
Euphrator shows that aesthetics is not sufficient to inspire vir- 
tue or morality, but that we must have faith in God, whose 
existence we know by the same evidences that we know that the 
souls of our friends exist. 

The Analyst, which followed, attacked infidel mathematicians 
and astronomers and the minute philosophers who dealt in 
infinitesimals rather than men of the world. It sought to show 
that force was as inconceivable as grace. The doctrine of con- 
tinuity and fluctuations, the basis of calculus, he thought very 
minute and philosophy resting on presuppositions that were 
quite as much credulity as faith. His antagonism was specially 
directed against the astronomer Halley who could not accept 
the hypothesis of God because he could find no place for him 
in the universe. 

Thus, to go back early in his life, when man is normally in 
the closest touch with his environment in nature, Berkeley com- 
mitted himself to the hyperidealistic creed that degraded nature 
to a mere set of symbols, making a great negation before he 
had wrought out the great affirmation which always and only 
can justify denial. Berkeley's mature and later life furnishes 
us with the spectacle of a pure, ardent, ingenuous soul that 
had early mutilated itself, and ever after was seeking consola- 
tion in the spiritual for losses in the physical world, and this 
is the motive with which his philosophy is still taught. To wean 
from nature, impels man to take refuge in something higher. 
Full consolation, however, Berkeley never found, as may have 



GENETICISM AND BERKELEY 155 

happened with a more abstract thinker like Spinoza and one 
with less ties to and sympathy with mundane things. His later v 
sadness was that of an ontologist who, despite all his subse- 
quent findings in the transcendent world, felt himself baffled 
and defeated. He, too, felt the malign spell of the spirit and 
method he had conjured up, which has paled life in so many 
since. How can one agnostic to the real world of sense be 
truly gnostic to spiritual verities? He did not pass through 
nature to nature's God, but found Him by turning away from 
nature as effectively as anchorites renounced the world. 
f* Also, genetically, affirmations precede rather than follow 
'' denials. His scepticism was the most radical in all the history 
of philosophy. To be sure it was the jeu d' esprit of the lush, 
life-loving, gifted adolescent, sentimentally a perfervid lover 
of nature, and always preferring to live where her great heart 
beat strongest, in the country. A temperament that peculiarly 
needs to feel the authoritativeness of objective reality when it 
subjectifies it all, does experience a great and dizzying tempor- 
ary exaltation, a mild inebriation, which is the great charm of 
epistemology, in the thought that the majestic spectacle of 
sky, landscape, sea, and even the works of man and the being 
of one's friends, are phantasmagorical evolutions of our indi- 
vidual selves, that all we thought to be from without is really 
from within the individual. This is a delusion, to some measure 
of which the adolescent soul is normally prone, as it breaks : 
the chrysalis of childhood and first really looks out into the 
wide world of nature and man, but it is legitimate only as 
dreamy revery. It is a stage full of significance, but it should J 
be evanescent, for it is only a waking dream belonging to the 
realm of poetry and myth, and indeed abundantly expressed 
in both, but not fit for prose, still less for science, the very 
root of which it cuts. Berkeleyan immaterialism has its place f 
again in senescence, as a stage of its involution, for the weary 
soul withdrawing from earth. Its phenomena are those of 
renunciation? This, the long Mst of scientific men from Huxley 
to W. K. Brooks, who have been fascinated by it, after a life 
of devotion to nature and science, shows. The flitting intro- 
version of youth is only like so many other things, a very faint 
anticipatory fore-gleam of old age, and, if intensified in early 
life and taken seriously, brings senescence before its time. If J 



156 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 

we have found anything in a life's experience with philosophy 
better than the world of sense, then of course we turn from 
the latter to the former, but this withdrawal and valedictory 
must never be first or forced. Youthful nature need not be 
"sicklied o'er with this pale cast of thought," which belongs 
only to those who have achieved a wholesome culture, and a 
Ciceronian or perhaps even a Metschnikoffian old age. Sub- 
jective idealism is a kit of tools too sharp for college youth 
to more than handle with great circumspection. The imma- 
terialism argument is the most desperate of all vengeances that 
religion, the spiritual and ideal view of the world, has ever 
attempted to take upon all who in all ages have scoffed at its 
faith. If all its masked batteries are exploded in the youthful 
soul, progressive atrophy results, for it tends to wean both 
from aesthetic and scientific devotion to nature's form and 
phenomena. Thus, do the young men completely infected with 
it ever thereafter achieve anything worth while in either art, 
or science 1 Are they not all just at the time when they should 
be superlatively real and earnest, sad precocious wiseacres aloof, 
superior, always brandishing a few simple phrases with endless 
variations and chanting a theme of vanitas vanitatum as old 
as Ecclesiastes ? 

f* There is now quite a literature with many well-described 
cases of abnormal weakening or loss of the sense of reality 
and of the outer world (in Wernicke's allo-psychic field). 
These patients feel that all objects of sense are unsubstantial, 
fading, shadowy, and this brings depression, alarm and dis- 
tress. Is this really a house, a tree, my brother, or am I dream- 
ing? I can make nothing seem real. Am I awake? This is 
their plaint. It is especially the visibilia and tangibilia that are 
affected. This disorder usually begins with states of fatigue; 
is seen sometimes in involutions and in dementia praecox, and 
it also predisposes to these conditions. The only explanation 
so far suggested is that two things occur in such cases, first the 
muscular tension and response which sensation normally ex- 
cites, and which has been the chief factor in the so-called extra- 
dition of consciousness or of sensation, is weakened or lost; 
and secondly, that the usual associations evoked by the act of 
perception are not aroused, that is, the patient does not see with 
all he has seen, touch with all he has touched, but this single 
experience is isolated from its natural complexes. F. H. Pack- 



GENETICISM AND BERKELEY 157 

ard 1 describes a remarkable patient of his who when fatigued 
saw all solids as flat surfaces, as Berkeley says we all really 
do. In looking over this literature 2 I cannot find evidence of 
any case on record who ever read Berkeley, and he certainly 
never read of such cases. It would be interesting to know 
what both they and he would have said of each other. To him, 
they would have illustrated the sense of phenomenality or im- 
materialism, but they are mentally crippled thereby. They in 
turn might have felt the fears which go with this distemper 
allayed by finding that they had only drifted toward the posi- 
tion advocated by a great philosopher. But, had the perusal 
of his writings led them to the feeling that their senses were 
deluders, he would have had only their imprecations. They 
certainly have felt precisely what he wishes us all at least to 
know if not to feel, viz., the unreality of the objective world. 
Can we have a logical conviction that the verdicts of sense 
are false, without sooner or later coming to feel more or less 
as these patients do? Should we strive to attain this realiza- 
tion of unreality? Are not these patients, in fact, practical 
Berkeleyans, who, had they taken him in dead earnest, would 
thus be realizing precisely what he argues for? There may be 
different answers to this question, but one thing remains cer- 
tain, viz., that the degree of intensity of the sense of reality of 1 
things rises and falls with the degree of muscular tension or ,' 
reaction and also with the range, irradiation and vividness of 
association. With loss of the reality sense goes relaxation or 
atrophy of muscular tonus and narrowing of the breath and 
richness of association among the synapses, or a shrinking of 
the field of apperception. Thus a Berkeleyan creed must in- 
evitably bring some loss of vigor, of the energy and fidelity 
of response to facts and events in the outer world. If the doubt 
is held to in a Pickwickian way, in the sphere of purely reasoned 
events, the weakening of response would lie more in the domain, 
not of reflexes but of deliberately planned voluntary conduct 
as directed toward outer reality. Again, with this distemper 

111 The Feeling of Unreality. " Journal of Abnormal Psychology. June, 
1906. Pp. 141-147. 

* Very conveniently summarized by A. Hoch. { * A Review of Some 
Recent Papers upon the Loss of the Feeling of Reality and Kindred Symp- 
toms." Psy. Butt. 1905. Vol. 11, pp. 233-241. 



158 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 

of mind are generally associated disorders in the somato- and 
auto-psychic field. 

f These disassociative states, with their depressive syndromes, 
involve retarded and weakened movements, both of body and 
of mind. Most tests of sensation show no defect whatever, save 
in a few cases, and very slight analgesia. Even ideas and feel- 
ings are dim. There is also loss of interest owing to psyehas- 
thenic lowering of self-activity. Recognition fails; parts of 
the body are not felt unless touched or possibly moved. The 
eye does not reach out; the patient does not know how things 
before him look when his eyes are closed, and there is a growing 
sense of insufficiency and aboulia with progressive agnoscia. 
This is the precise opposite of Janet's conception of the most 
perfect normality, which consists in the most vital recognition 
of and response to present environment and the greatest absorp- 
tion in it. 

Just in proportion as this loses its power, the soul loses^its 
grasp on things. From growing indifference and nil admirari 
the psyche may gradually pass to the opposite state called the 
delire de negation. In this state, the hold of presentative words 
is weakened and those of symbolic words increased. 

Many from Aristotle down have recognized that the eye only 
perceives color and shade, that size, figure and motion are com- 
mon to sight and touch, that rays of light converge to a focus 
in the eye and diverge again, inverting the image on the retina, 
and not a few (quoted by Fraser) before Berkeley have realized 
that we have to learn how to correlate and interpret the crude 
material of sensation and have seen the representative and 
symbolic character of impressions, that we never see but infer 
distance and that the bonds between sight and touch are knit 
up in early life; but all this pertains to the genetic or evolu- 
tionary history of the individual and the race. Hence, the fact 
that the adult immediacy of perception is acquired does not 
affect its validity. To consciousness itself the immediacy is 
indecomposable and the certainty is beyond all possibility of 
doubt. Philosophers have fallen into the inveterate fallacy that 
has been so characteristic of theologians that whatever is evolved 
cannot be perfect, that a unity made up of elements is not 
complete and that to demonstrate stages of development impairs 
the perfection of the product. But the legitimate inference from 
all Berkeley's facts on which he bases his new theory of vision 



GENETICISM AND BERKELEY 159 

as well as all the very much we have learned since in this field 
is that God and nature have spent much time and made many 
a trial and error and effort in evolving senses that now act 
perfectly, instantaneously and truly and thus have been tri- 
umphantly successful and have not blundered or failed in their 
work. As atomism does not destroy spacial continuity, nor the 
paradox of Achilles and the tortoise disprove motion, so the fact 
that mental powers have been acquired by many tedious and 
intricate genetic stages does not invalidate their action. Thus 
in his vision-theory he is only a geneticist without knowing it 
and so was led to draw negative and destructive when he should 
have drawn positive and constructive conclusions. His and all 
analyses of perception only make the immediacy and certainty 
I with which it now acts all the more precious and all the more 
/ trustworthy. Had Berkeley enjoyed the unimpaired healthful 
common-sense respect for reality that characterizes men who 
have attained real efficiency, he never could have blown the 
Bermuda bubble, which was only a dreamer's reaction to a 
world not real enough to be treated with proper respect. This 
plan has always been thought to be one of the wildest and weird- 
est of all schemes in the whole history of education. Had 
Berkeley not been sickened, like the medieval alchemists, by 
drinking his own elixir, he could never have evolved his almost 
lunatic creed concerning tar-water. He, doubtless, believed in 
this as profoundly as he believed in the external world, and 
('probably far more so, but with the weakening of his sense of 
everything in the allo-psychic field, he had no criterion of truth, 
and so, because he believed in tar-water, that was the nostrum 
of all nostrums. It needs only a slight psychoanalysis of 
Berkeley's mind to show that his creed both expressed and had 
eaten into his life, most of which was spent in rural isolation, 
as if practical realities rather repelled him, making his mind 
his own kingdom, and like Descartes, occasionally coming into 
the great world to launch some scheme so fantastic that had 
it not been made plausible by a simple, attractive personality, 
great persuasive power and scholarly ingenuity, would have 
sent those who held it to the madhouse with delusions of great- 
ness. This distemper often goes with disorders in the somato- 
and 1 auto-psychic spheres, that is, the patient's notion of the 
reality of his own body and of his inmost ego is impaired, and 
so, the self in its psycho-physic aspect suffers. Whether this 



160 JOURNAL OP RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 

tendency is logically or psychologically associated in the field 
of philosophy with loss of outer reality, we shall discuss affirma- 
tively in the case of Hume, and show how, while Berkeley's 
self had been unduly exalted, that of Hume had been unduly 
mortified, and that his denial of cause and self was^jdirectly 
favored by tendencies and experiences in his own life.l 

It was Hume (Treatise of Human Nature, 1739 and Inquiries, 
1748) who read only Berkeley's early sceptical writings, and 
who would have abhorred his positive religious views, who, if 
he did not save the Berkeleyan negative way of thought from 
progressive oblivion, developed it with a vigor of thought far 
greater than that of Berkeley, and lent to it the influence of 
his name, which shone with a wider luster. It was Hume who 
made Berkeleyism an integral part of the history of philosophy. 
Hume's chief motive was to weaken the hold of theological 
thought, rather than to strengthen it, so that, even if Berkeley 
contributed anything that strengthened the religious faith of 
mankind, Hume used Berkeley's prime principle far more 
effectively to upset faith. Indeed, Hume almost saved Berkeley 
from being a joke. Moreover, was it not significant that Fraser, 
at the morturi salutamus age of eighty, edited Berkeley almost 
as his valedictory to life, as if saying "Farewell, vain world, 
I'm going home." Geneticists see all three dimensions of life, 
never forgetting the temporal perspective, as even experimenters 
are now prone to do. For psychoanalysis trivial and undeter- 
mined details are often graver than those of seemingly serious 
import. Geneticists believe that philosophy is the love and 
pursuit of wisdom, and may even prefer its pursuit to possession, 
and do not feel compelled to decide even between parallelism 
and interaction. 

Can man accept only so much that is given from without? 
Are there more or less fixed quanta of credibilia, whether per- 
cepts, facts or faith? Is the faculty of belief easily over-taxed, 
so that elimination at either end of the scale that connects 
sensuous and spiritual intensifies absorption in and docility to 
the other? Must we put out either the inner or the outer eye 
in order to see more clearly with the other? Does active doubt 
in the world of metaphysics or of physics depend on apperception 
of or quickened interest in the other? Is the carrying power 
of the soul for sense weakened, if we practice it for spiritual 



GENETICLSM AND BERKELEY 161 

things, and vice versa, as we often conceive reason and faith 
to be rivals, one flourishing at the expense of the other? Must 
we specialize in cleaving to the one and rejecting the other? 
If this be so, can we not say that Berkeley inverted the natural 
order by turning from sense before he had felt the natural im- 
pulse which had, in every thinker of the past, who has grown 
negligent of sense, given him the only normal motivation to 
do so, viz., absorption in metaphysical or spiritual verities? 
They have never scuttled the ship of sense before they have been 
well established with all their belongings on the ship of faith. 
They have become denizens of the_higherjbefore they forswore 
their allegiance to the lower kingdom. They have built secure 
heavenly mansions before they vacated the earthly tenements 
of sense. They have not burned this world in order that their 
homelessness here might impel them to seek a higher one. 

Finally, no subjective analysis of the process oL seeing and 
touching can ever reveal anything but a simple, immediate, 
unitary act of direct intuition. Berkeley's analysis is essen- 
tially not subjective, but objective. It regards nerves, brain 
processes, conjectural developmental associations, observations 
on those restored to sight, babies, etc., and only by this method 
can the act of perception appear to be complex or in any way 
accessible to doubt. Introspection can never doubt that e.g. 
if we see a stick, we could put forth our hand and touch it. 
If we knew nothing of the anatomy and physiology of the eye 
and central nervous system, or of abnormalities, we normal 
adults could never possibly even distinguish between visibilia 
and tangibilia. The Berkeleyan procedure, therefore, is an ob- 
jective construction, according to which a series of sense images 
of what might and approximately does go on in the brain, which 
from the standpoint of psychology is only an abstraction, is 
taken inward and used to confuse thought. It is an alien point 
of view, imported from the objective into the very different 
subjective sphere. Otherwise, we could never conceive that a 
sensation or perception could occur without a real outer cause, 
independent of it and persisting, indifferent as to whether it 
was perceived or not. Thus, the psychologist, if he remain true 
to his own consciousness, will always be able to see that things 
I/perceived are really outer things. Though I may not know 
all about their meta-sensuous nature, they are external and inde- 



162 JOURNAL OP RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 

pendent of myself. To deny this, means to impair the founda- 
tions of the very idea of causation and of the ego, both of 
which find their best paradigms in the perceptive process. 

The New Theory of Vision wrecks youth and leaves ingenuous 
souls floating in gurgite vasto. The wreckers thus have them 
at their mercy. Euclid rests back on a more primitive eye- 
geometry, which it amplifies and confirms. But Berkeleyism 
rests only upon the dreamy revery of fatigue, and daily life, 
to say nothing of serious science, is its standing refutation. 



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