A Bibliography of George Berkeley: With Inventory of Berkeley’s Manuscript Remains

169 Pages·1973·14.68 MB·English

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF GEORGE BERKELEY
ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D'HISTOIRE DES IDEES
INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
66
T. E.JESSOP
A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF GEORGE BERKELEY
Directors: P. Dibon (Paris) and R. Popkin (Un iv. of California, La J oUa).
Editorial Board:J. Aubin (Paris) ;J. Collins (St. Louis Univ.); P. Constabel (Paris);
A. Crombie (Oxford); 1. Dambska (Cracow); H. de la Fontaine-Verwey (Amster-
dam); H. Gadamer (Heidelberg); H. Gouhier (Paris); T. Gregory (Rome); T. E.
Jessop (Hull); P. O. Kristeller (Columbia Univ.); Elisabeth Labrousse (Paris);
S. Lindroth (Upsala); A. Lossky (Los Angeles); J. Orcibal (Paris); 1. S. Revah t
(Paris); J. Roger (Paris); H. Rowen (Rutgers Univ., N.J.); G. Sebba (Emory
Univ., Atlanta); R. Shackeleton (Oxford); J. Tans (Groningen); G. Tonelli
(Binghamton, N.Y.).
A BIBLIOGRAPHY
OF GEORGE BERKELEY
by
T. E. JESSOP
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy
University of Hull
WITH
INVENTORY OF BERKELEY'S
MANUSCRIPT REMAINS
by
A. A. LUCE
Berkeley Professor of Metaphysics
University of Dublin
SECOND EDITION
(revised and enlarged)
MARTINUS NIJHOFF / THE HAGUE / 1973
© 1973 by Martinus Nijholf, The Hague, Netherlands
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 15t edition 1973
All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form
ISBN-13: 978-94-010-2471-6 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-010-2469-3
001: 10.1007/978-94-010-2469-3
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Priface VII
Berkeley's Life: Chronological Outline XIII
Berkeley's Writings: Alphabetical Key-list xv
Abbreviations XIX
PART I. BERKELEY'S WRITINGS
Collected Works and Selections
3
Works published by Berkeley, and translations
Philosophical, Mathematical, Physical
7
Arithmetica and misc. mathematica (7); Essay on vision (7); Principles of
human knowledge (9); Three dialogues (14); De motu (18); Alciphron (18);
Theory of vision of vindicated (21); Analyst (21); Defense of free-thinking in
mathematics (22); Reasons for not replying to Walton (2g); Siris (2g)
Miscellaneous
Passive obedience (28); Guardian essays (28); Advice to the tories (29); Report
on Vesuvius (29); Ruin of Gt. Britain (29); Missionary proposal for America
(29); A missionary sermon (go); The querist (go); Letter on a national bank
(gg); Discourse to magistrates (g4); Pieces on tar-water (g4); On the second
Jacobite rebellion (g6); On petrifactions (g7); More pieces on tar-water (37);
Word to the wise (g8); Concerning patriotism (g9); Concerning earthquakes
(g9); Verses on America (40) ; On tar-water (40) ; Miscellany (40) ; Inscriptions
(4°)
Posthumously published remains
Spuria
PART II. WRITINGS ON BERKELEY
49
Miscellanea-Biographical, literary, etc. 51
On the tar-water controversy 69
On the Analyst controversy
74
PREFACE
Since the first appearance of this bibliography (1934, Oxford Uni-
versity Press), which has long been out of print, so much attention has
been paid to Berkeley that a mere reprint would be inept. Besides
bringing it up to date I have added collations of those editions of
Berkeley's writings that were published in his lifetime. In doing so
I have used a form of description simple enough for anyone to follow
yet sufficient to enable librarians to check their catalogues and to
identify copies in which the titlepage is missing or mutilated. As
before, I have marked with an asterisk throughout the bibliography
every book, edition and article that has not been seen by me or, in
a few cases, by a competent friend.
My primary interest not being bibliographical in the present-day
highly technical sense, but philosophical, I have aimed chiefly at (a)
providing advanced students (and their hard-pressed advisers) of
Berkeley, or of the subjects on which he wrote, with a guide to the
materials for research, and (b) displaying the range in time and place,
and the direction, of the attention which he has attracted. These two
aims account for the classification of the entries under a few general
subject-headings and of the philosophical entries under countries, and
for the arranging of the entries in each section or subsection in chrono-
logical order, the alphabetical ordering of the authors' names being
given in the Index. To facilitate reference and cross-reference each
entry is numbered.
Of the editions of Berkeley's works in English and translations of
these, completeness has been aimed at, though perhaps not achieved.
Concerning books that deal wholly or largely with Berkeley, I have
also tried to be complete, but may have missed a few in languages not
widely known. Of books and works of reference in which he receives
some treatment I have had to make a selection, listing some for their
VIII PREFACE
intrinsic value, and some as signs of the state of knowledge and
judgment at a certain period or in a certain country: it would have
been unhelpful to include, for instance, all histories of philosophy and
most encyclopaedias. As for articles in periodicals, I have not wished
to act as an arbiter of worth (though I have omitted obviously trivial
pieces) and have therefore included as much as one man, with other
things to do, could fairly be expected to track down in the growing
mass of periodicals. Reviews of books I have not hunted fOf, except
eighteenth-century ones. The work has been carried far enough to
result in what may be called a schematic history and geography of
Berkeley's influence.
The persons who gave me help when I was preparing the edition
of 1934 I need not name again. Ofthose who since then have pointed
to pathways which I have been able to follow I must mention Professor
Jean Lameere of Brussels (self-effacing, yet large in his service to
philosophical scholarship; his recent death is a serious loss), who
guided his students to compile a supplement to my first edition,
carrying it to 1952 (entry 9°4); Professor C. M. Turbayne of Rochester,
N.Y., who with the collaboration of R. Ware compiled a further and
fuller supplement (entry 409); and Professor H. M. Bracken of
Montreal, who has kindly done some searching for me, and whose
monograph of 1959 (entry 765) has illuminated a hitherto obscure
corner of Berkeleian scholarship. As before, lowe much to the staffs
of libraries in several countries, who have served me liberally in the
reading-rooms and in some cases allowed me to roam among their
stacks.
On Professor Luce's Inventory of Berkeley's MSS., which follows
the bibliography, I must repeat what I wrote in the first edition -
that it "proceeds from an unrivalled familiarity with Berkeley's hand.
Elsewhere he has exemplified the fruitfulness of a fresh exploration
of the manuscript remains; here he presents a detailed guide to them
which will spare every future investigator many a weary hour of
search through volumes of disordered, untidy, and often scarcely legible
sheets". Since then he has published his own transcriptions of some
of the MSS., one of them being his superb edition of the so-called
Commonplace Book (entry 2II), and has further used his knowledge
of the MSS. in the volumes he prepared for the 1948-57 edition of
Berkeley's collected works. The volume there devoted to the letters
shows how considerably he has enlarged the corpus by his own
assiduous searching, one result being a lengthening of the list of known
PREFACE IX
autograph letters that closes his Inventory. The references under his
name in the Index point to his outstanding contributions to our
knowledge and understanding of the thinker who, like himself, is on
the roll of the sons and Fellows of Trinity College, Dublin.
* *
*
What the bibliographical record of Berkeley's work and influence
tells or reminds us is that he was many things else besides a philosopher.
In his own day it was a manysided gentleman that caught the public
eye. Consequently, researchers in several of the grooves of history will
meet him, and when they do they may be glad to have at hand a list
in which his own writings are exhaustively, and writings on him
adequately, set forth.
His debut was his feeblest step: no one seems to have noticed his
attempt to place the teaching of arithmetic and algebra on a simpler
basis. Nevertheless, it was the first spurt of an abiding mathematical
interest. His later criticism of Newton's fluxional calculus is described
in a standard history of mathematics (464) as "the most spectacular
mathematical event of the eighteenth century in England". It exposed
a logical flaw in the calculus, and started the fruitful controversy that
issued in Maclaurin's famous work. His second essay, on vision, has
given him a secure place in the history of psychology. The Fellow of
his own college who a century and a half later wrote "an attempt to
disprove the received (or Berkeleian) theory of vision" bears witness
in this designation to the status held by Berkeley's view that some of
the apparent data of sight are added to sight from our muscular and
tactual experiences. In his Passive Obedience the student of political
ideas will find a reflection of a delicate phase of civic loyalty; the social
historian could well read his essay on the aftermath of the South Sea
Bubble; and no account of the deistic movement would be complete
without his vivid satire and criticism of it in his Alciphron. The writing
of this latter in Rhode Island was an interlude in his Bermuda venture
(which an Oxford man tried to revive as lately as 1852; see 271 & 272),
which figures not only in the Anglican Church's record of its overseas
missions, but also in histories of the British colonial expansion, to
account in part for the colonial settlement in Georgia. America cannot
forget the impetus he gave to her cultural life by his personal presence,
his writings, his invited counsel to the leaders of higher education, and
his gifts to her first universities. The libraries of Harvard and Yale
x PREFACE
were handsomely enriched by him ; Yale still has three Berkeley
scholars in classics provided for out of an estate gifted by him for the
purpose; the colleges that are now the universities of Columbia and
Pennsylvania were shaped in part after his ideas; and several schools
and even two cities bear his name. His Q,uerist, written soon after he
became Bishop of Cloyne, and the work of his that was most printed
in his lifetime, has brought him the credit of being one of the chief
forerunners of Adam Smith in respect of the theory of money. This
same work, and others now less known (especially the Word to the Wise)
are documents for the social history of Ireland. In his closing years,
after having been psychologist, philosopher, pamphleteer, courtier,
traveller, missionary, educationist, Christian apologist, and economist,
for love of his plague-stricken flock he turned himself into a physician,
and so made England and Ireland (and the Continent too) drink and
talk of tar-water that even the pharmacopoeias had to recognise it,
with the consequence that students of the by-ways of medicine have
to note the episode and sometimes tarry to assess its worth. Finally, in
the history of English letters Berkeley stands as a brilliant figure in one
of the most brilliant of its periods, a writer eminent in the purity,
clarity, forcefulness and effortlessness of his style, superlatively eminent
in so far as this style emerged in a subjectmatter that is counted the
most abstruse the mind can think on, the abstruseness of which he had
set himself to destroy. One of our distinguished critics has confessed
that it was Berkeley who first gave him "the idea of beautiful prose as
such" (327). It is strange that so exquisite an artist, as much a poet in
the quality of his impulses and the manner of his obedience to them
as in his sensibility to words, should have published only one poem (if
we except his rough satirical pieces On Siris and its Enemies and Disputes
about Tar-water, and the conventional On Tar), but this one, Verses on
America (1752), after passing through many anthologies, has attained
a niche in the Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse.
All this apart from his philosophy, of which this is not the place to
write except to say summarily for the non-philosophical that it stands
in the very highway of British thought, that it has had to suffer more
persistent misunderstanding than any other system that has voiced
itself in decent English, and that it teases us still to ask whether any
physical thing is more than its manifest properties, whether these
properties are apprehended directly or through the distorting mediation
of subjective concepts, whether there is a causal power resident in
physical things, and whether the term "exist" can mean anything
PREFACE XI
other than either a mind or an object of mind. From his answers to
the last two of these questions he strode with only a single step, auda-
cious yet logical, to a theistic interpretation of the universe. Berkeley,
it seems to me, is one of the clearest, concisest, and most daring of
Europe's philosophers.
Such diversity of gifts, work and fame deserves and is most dispas-
sionately delineated in a bibliographical record.
T. E. JESSOP