The Star in the West

THE NEW WINE 217 storm arose , scarce dare open our eyes for fear of being blinded . A mystic by nature and a priest by profession , we must , in reviewing his bequests to knowledge , always remember how much of the one side to deduct from the other , should we wish to prove him either an Adept or a Bishop . But with such inborn predilection , and such outward assumption , it is easy to understand why it was that he threw the whole energy of his life into an attempt to refute the advancing scepticism latent in the works of Hobbes and Locke . He saw , and seeing fought the many children which had sprung from the fertile womb of the Cartesian doctrine , of abstract general ideas and secondary qualities ; which alone found birth in the powers of language, and in the delusion of words . But behind the didactic Berkeley stands the mystic , that other Berkeley , whose knowledge has alone been attained by a very few ; for he spoke with God face to face . “ Could men but forbear to amuse themselves with words, we should , I believe , soon come to an agree ment in this point . that the absolute existence of unthinking things are words without a meaning , or which include a contradiction . Berkeley , as has only too often been repeated and too frequently misunderstood , did not deny the mean ing of substance as taken in the vulgar sense -- a com bination of sensible qualities , and though it may be possible , he stated , “ that solid , figured , movable substances may exist without the mind , corresponding to the ideas we have of bodies , yet how is it possible for us to know this ? Either we must know it by sense 1 | The Principles of Human Knowledge , p. 43.