In his meteoric political
career he represents and typifies one phase of the time in which he lived.
_George Berkeley_, 1684-1753: he was educated at Trinity College, Dublin,
and soon engaged in metaphysical controversy. In 1724 he was made Dean of
Derry, and in 1734, Bishop of Cloyne. A man of great philanthropy, he set
forth a scheme for the founding of the _Bermudas College_, to train
missionaries for the colonies and to labor among the North American
Indians. As a metaphysician, he was an _absolute idealist_. This is no
place to discuss his theory. In the words of Dr. Reid, "He maintains ...
that there is no such thing as matter in the universe; that the sun and
moon, earth and sea, our own bodies and those of our friends, are nothing
but ideas in the minds of those who think of them, and that they have no
existence when they are not objects of thought; that all that is in the
universe may be reduced to two categories, to wit, _minds_ and _ideas in
the mind_." The reader is referred, for a full discussion of this
question, to Sir William Hamilton's _Metaphysics_.
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