sand,
amid irrational habits and passions. He was accordingly repelled by
whatever philosophy was in him, no less than by his religious
prejudices, from submergence in external interests, and he could see no
better way of vindicating the supremacy of moral goods than to deny the
reality of matter, the finality of science, and the constructive powers
of reason altogether. With honest English empiricism he saw that science
had nothing absolute or sacrosanct about it, and rightly placed the
value of theory in its humane uses; but the complementary truth escaped
him altogether that only the free and contemplative expression of
reason, of which science is a chief part, can render anything else
humane, useful, or practical. He was accordingly a party man in
philosophy, where partisanship is treason, and opposed the work of
reason in the theoretical field, hoping thus to advance it in the moral.

[Sidenote: Puerility in morals.]

Of the moral field he had, it need hardly be added, a quite childish and
perfunctory conception. There the prayer-book and the catechism could
solve every problem. He lacked the feeling, possessed by all large and
mature minds, that there would be no intelligibility or value in things
divine were they not interpretations and sublimations of things
natural. To master the real world was an ancient and not too promising
ambition: it suited his youthful radicalism better to exorcise or to
cajole it. He sought to refresh the world with a water-spout of
idealism, as if to change the names of things could change their values.
Away with all arid investigation, away with the cold algebra of sense
and reason, and let us have instead a direct conversation with heaven,
an unclouded vision of the purposes and goodness of God; as if there
were any other way of understanding the sources of human happiness than
to study the ways of nature and man.

Converse with God has been the life of many a wiser and sadder
philosopher than Berkeley; but they, like Plato, for instance, or
Spinoza, have made experience the subject as well as the language of
that intercourse, and have thus given the divine revelation some degree
of pertinence and articulation. Berkeley in his positive doctrine was
satisfied with the vaguest generalities; he made no effort to find out
how the consciousness that God is the direct author of our incidental
perceptions is to help us to deal with them; what other insights and
principles are to be subst