It is a pity that the beautiful system of Berkeley should have appeared in
an unspiritual age, when religion was mundane and perfunctory, and the
free spirit, where it stirred, was romantic and wilful. For that system
was essentially religious: it put the spirit face to face with God,
everywhere, always, and in everything it turned experience into a divine
language for the monition and expression of the inner man. Such an
instrument, in spiritual hands, might have served to dispel all natural
illusions and affections, and to disinfect the spirit of worldliness and
egotism. But Berkeley and his followers had no such thought. All they
wished was to substitute a social for a material world, precisely because
a merely social world might make worldly interests loom larger and might
induce mankind, against the evidence of their senses and the still small
voice in their hearts, to live as if their worldly interests were absolute
and must needs dominate the spirit.
Morally this system thus came to sanction a human servitude to material
things such as ancient materialists would have scorned; and theoretically
the system did not escape the dogmatic commitments of common sense against
which it protested. For far from withdrawing into the depths of the
private spirit, it professed to describe universal experience and the
evolution of all human ideas. This notion of "experience" originally
presupposed a natural agent or subject to endure that experience, and to
profit by it, by learning to live in better harmony with external
circumstances.
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