be somehow." As cause of our
sensations and ground of our belief in externality, he substituted for
an unintelligible material substance an equally unintelligible
operation of divine power. His book exhibits no traces of a scientific
development. The most that can be said about him is that he was an
intelligent student of Descartes and Malebranche, and had the ability
to apply the results of his reading to the facts of his experience. In
philosophy he is a curiosity, and nothing more. His biographer
attributes the comparative failure of the _Clavis_ to its inferiority
in point of style, but the crudeness of his thought had quite as much
to do with his failure to gain a hearing. Hamilton (_Discussions_, p.
197) allows greater sagacity to Collier than to Berkeley, on the
ground that he did not vainly attempt to enlist men's natural belief
against the hypothetical realism of the philosophers. But Collier did
so as far as his light enabled him. He appealed to the popular
conviction that the proper object of sense is the sole reality,
although he despaired of getting men to give up their belief in its
externality, and asserted that nothing but prejudice prevented them
from doing so; and there is little doubt that, if it had ever occurred
to him, as it did to Berkeley, to explain the genesis of the notion of
externality, he would have been more hopeful of commending his theory
to the popular mind.

In theology Collier was an adherent of the High Church party, though
his views were by no means orthodox. In the Jacobite _Mist's Journal_
he attacked Bishop Hoadly's defence of sincere errors. His views on
the problems of Arianism, and his attempt to reconcile it with
orthodox theology, are contained in _A Specimen of True Philosophy_
(1730, reprinted in _Metaphysical Tracts_, 1837) and _Logology, or a
Treatise on the Logos in Seven Sermons on John i. 1, 2, 3, 14_ (1732,
analysed in _Metaph. Tracts_). These may be compared with Berkeley's
_Siris_.

See Robt. Benson, _Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Arthur Collier_
(1837); Tennemann, _History of Philosophy_; Hamilton, _Discussions_;
A. C. Fraser, edition of _Berkeley's Works_; G. Lyon, "Un Idealiste
anglais au XVIII. siecle," in _Rev. philos._ (1880), x. 375.

COLLIER, JEREMY (1650-1726), English nonjuring divine, was born at
Stow-with-Quy, Cambridgeshire, on the 23rd of September 1650. He was
educate