tial derangement in his profoundly
spiritual nature, 'he was for ever, in his writings, girding at the
"mere moral law" as the letter that killeth. His conversation, his
writings, his designs, were equally marked by theoretic licence and
virtual guilelessness.'[634]

Bishop Berkeley's name could not be passed over even in such a sketch as
this without a sense of incompleteness. He was, it is true, strongly
possessed with the prevalent feeling of aversion to anything that was
called enthusiasm. When, for example, his opinion was asked about John
Hutchinson--a writer whose mystic fancies as to recondite meanings
contained in the words of the Hebrew Bible[635] possessed a strange
fascination for William Jones of Nayland, Bishop Horne, and other men of
some note[636]--he answered that he was not acquainted with his works,
but 'I have observed him to be mentioned as an enthusiast, which gave
me no prepossession in his favour.'[637] But the Christianity of
feeling, which lies at the root of all that is sound and true in what
the age called enthusiasm, was much encouraged by the theology and
philosophy of Berkeley. It may not have been so to any great extent
among his actual contemporaries. A thoroughly prosaic generation, such
as that was in which he lived, was too unable to appreciate his subtle
and poetic intellect to gain much instruction from it. He was much
admired, but little understood. 'He is indeed,' wrote Warburton to Hurd,
'a great man, and the only visionary I ever knew that was.'[638] It was
left for later reasoners, in England and on the Continent, to separate
what may be rightly called visionary in his writings from what may be
profoundly true, and to feel the due influence of his suggestive and
spiritual reflections.

The purely mystic element in Berkeley's philosophy may be illustrated by
the charm it had for William Blake, a man of whom Mr. Swinburne says
that 'his hardest facts were the vaguest allegories of other men. To him
all symbolic things were literal, all literal things symbolic. About his
path and about his bed, around his ears and under his eyes, an infinite
play of spiritual life seethed and swarmed or shone and sang.'[639] To
this strange artist-poet, in whose powerful but fantastic mind fact and
imagination were inextricably blended, whose most intimate friends could
not tell where talent ended and hallucination began, whom Wordsworth
delighted in,[640] and whose conversation in any country wa