the material world about
him; poring over Locke and Plato, breathing an atmosphere saturated
with Cartesianism, his active mind eagerly investigating, exploring,
inquiring in all directions, and his hand recording day by day the
notes and stages of his mental development.

His early philosophical writings rapidly earned him a reputation in the
great world of London, to which at that time the eyes of all
men--divines, wits, statesmen, philosophers, and poets--turned. It is
not necessary here to dwell upon the nature of those philosophical
writings, or to enter into any study of the great theory of idealism in
which he affirmed that there is no proof of the existence of matter
anywhere save in our own perceptions. Byron, in his light-hearted way,
more than two generations later, dismissed Bishop Berkeley and his
theory in the famous couplet--

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"When Bishop Berkeley said there is no matter,
It clearly was no matter what he said"

--a smart saying which Byron did not intend to put forth, and which
nobody would be likely to regard, as a serious summing up of the mental
work of Berkeley.

Berkeley came to London in the first winter month of 1713, and made the
acquaintance of his great countryman Swift. The Dean was a great
patron of Berkeley's in those early London days. Swift took Berkeley
to Court, and introduced him or spoke of him to all the great
ministers, and pushed his fortunes by all the ways--and they were
many--in his power. Berkeley, with the aid of Swift, was soon made
free of that wonderful republic of letters which then held sway in
London, and which numbered among its members such men as Steele and
Addison, Bolingbroke and Harley, Gay and Arbuthnot, and Pope. Berkeley
was in Addison's box at the first performance of "Cato," and tasted of
the author's champagne and burgundy there, and listened with curious
delight to the mingled applause and hisses that greeted Mr. Pope's
prologue. A little later Berkeley went to Italy as the travelling
tutor, the bear-leader, of the son of Ashe, Bishop of Clogher. In
Italy he passed some four enchanted years.

Berkeley came back to England in 1720 to find all England writhing in
the welter and chaos of the South Sea crash. The shame and misery of
the time appear to have inspired him with a kind of horror of the
hollow civilization of the age, and to have given him his first
promptings towards that ideal community in the remote Atlantic to which
hi