THERE is nothing in the world which it is, apparently, more difficult for mankind to concede than the unreality of matter. Even the philosophers who have preached the theory have studiously eschewed the practice. The explanation, of course, is that the human mind itself is material, and that, matter being its subjective condition, it naturally has some difficulty in combating the evidence of its own senses. The result of this is seen in the contemptuous denial of the theory by otherwise extremely intelligent individuals. When Dr. Johnson and Lord Byron, of all people, combine to discredit Berkeley, it is evident that metaphysical shortsightedness, like misfortune, makes strange bedfellows. Yet Dr. Johnson was eminently a religious man. He worshiped regularly, as Carlyle says, at St. Clement Danes, in the era of Voltaire. Dr. Johnson had, therefore, to discover a reason for the faith that was in him, when he maintained that infinite Spirit had produced a material universe. For the philosophy of the Bishop of Cloyne he professed the utmost contempt, going so far as to expose his own absolute ignorance of metaphysics by kicking a stone to prove its reality. Yet all that the Bishop of Cloyne maintained was that mind was externalized in matter, a saying which a celebrated ecclesiastic of today has repeated in the phrase that Spirit is the ultimate of matter. What Dr. Johnson was intent upon proving was that Spirit made lumps of stuff; he could not conceive it as intelligible that the divine Mind should have formed a universe of mental concepts.
Now Dr. Johnson would have been quite right if he had taken exception to the Berkeleian theory of a material universe produced by infinite Spirit; but he could not have taken exception to such a theory, because it was his own theory. What he did take exception to was the idea that matter was a thought creation, the subjective condition of the human mind, and not an objective creation formed by divine Spirit out of nothing. Now whichever horn of the dilemma the human mind may face impalement on one or the other has to be accepted by the disciple of orthodox theology. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, and one of the greatest of medieval thinkers, chose the materialistic horn; Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, when George II was king, chose the idealistic one. But Anselm and Berkeley both impaled themselves on the same dilemma, the dilemma of attributing matter to Spirit, and so contradicting flatly the statement of the founder of Christianity that it is impossible to gather figs of thorns, or grapes of a bramble bush.
Lord Byron probably had no convictions. His famous couplet on the subject of the Berkeleian philosophy, to the effect,
