. It is little, after all, that we
are capable to know; and the man of heroic mind and generous enterprise,
will not refuse the discoveries that are placed within his reach. The
subtleties of grammar are as the porch, which leads from the knowledge
of words to the knowledge of things. The subtleties of mathematics
defecate the grossness of our apprehension, and supply the elements of
a sounder and severer logic. And in the same manner the faculty which
removes the illusions of external appearance, and enables us to "look
into the seeds of time," is one which we are bound to estimate at its
genuine value. The more we refine our faculties, other things equal,
the wiser we grow: we are the more raised above the thickness of the
atmosphere that envelops our fellow-mortals, and are made partakers of a
nature superhuman and divine.

There is a curious question that has risen out of this proposition of
Berkeley, of the supposed illusion we suffer in our conceptions of the
material universe. It has been said, "Well then, I am satisfied that
the chairs, the tables, and the other material substances with which I
conceive myself to be surrounded, are not what they appear to be, but
are merely an eternal chain of antecedents and consequents, going on
according to what Leibnitz calls a 'preestablished harmony,' and thus
furnishing the ground of the speculations which mortals cherish, and the
motives of their proceeding. But, if thus, in the ordinary process of
human affairs, we believe in matter, when in reality there is no such
thing as matter, how shall we pronounce of mind, and the things which
happen to us in our seeming intercourse with our fellow-men, and in
the complexities of love and hatred, of kindred and friendship, of
benevolence and misanthropy, of robbery and murder, and of the wholesale
massacre of thousands of human beings which are recorded in the page of
history? We absolutely know nothing of the lives and actions of others
but through the medium of material impulse. And, if you take away
matter, the bodies of our fellow-men, does it not follow by irresistible
consequence that all knowledge of their minds is taken away also? Am not
I therefore (the person engaged in reading the present Essay) the only
being in existence, an entire universe to myself?"

Certainly this is a very different conclusion from any that Berkeley
ever contemplated. In the very title of the Treatise in which his
notions on this subject are u