My Dear Friend:—I admire your frankness, am glad you are pleased with my letter, and that you mean to prosecute your inquiries further. I fear, however, the field opened up by your letter of acknowledgment is too large for us to enter, much less to hope to cover, in this correspondence. In the first place, Bishop Berkeley never held to the nonsense unwittingly ascribed to him by your teacher, and his philosophy has not been "demolished" by Hume, or by any one, as your teacher appears to suppose. I say unwittingly with the greatest assurance, because both assumptions appear to have been taken for granted by writers of some prominence, and your teacher, in common with other very well-informed people, may, without any especial discredit to himself, have fallen into this popular error.
Hume, who, as you know, was a sceptic in religion, as in everything, falsely assumed that Bishop Berkeley taught certain things which Bishop Berkeley did not teach, and then proceeded by the reductio ad absurdum method to prove that, upon his assumption, all knowledge is equally impossible. While you must understand I am not defending Bishop Berkeley's philosophy, except from misrepresentation, my opinion is his position has never been successfully assailed, and never can be successfully assailed by any school of materialists. No English philosopher has been more universally admired than Bishop Berkeley, and the writings of no one more universally misunderstood, or perhaps more innocently misrepresented. This has largely resulted from the fact that he wrote probably two hundred years in advance of English thought, and because all of the earlier editors of his "Principles of Human Knowledge," except, perhaps, Dr. Simon, were unfriendly to his philosophy.
English philosophy has always been strangely wedded to materialism. England was the home of Hobbes, of whom even Hume could write, "Hobbes' politics are fitted only to promote tyranny, and his ethics to encourage licentiousness." To get at an idea of what has probably been America's inheritance from England in this respect, read what Mr. Huxley says on Berkeley, in his "Critiques and Addresses," from which I make this brief extract: "When Locke and Collins maintained that matter may possibly be able to think, and Newton himself could compare infinite space to the sensorium of the Deity, it is not wonderful that the English philosophers should be attacked as they were by Leibnitz in his famous letter to the Princess of Wales." Also his quotations from Leibnitz's letters; viz., "Natural religion itself seems to decay [in England] very much. Many will have human souls to be material; others make God himself a corporeal Being. Mr. Locke and his followers are uncertain, at least; whether the soul be not material and naturally perishable. Sir Isaac Newton says that space is an organ which God makes use of to perceive things by."
