George Berkeley's Manuscript Introduction

This drawing of Trinity dates from c. 1681, and shows the College as Berkeley would have known it.

Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

The Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge was published in Dublin in 1710. This was the first public presentation of Berkeley’s philosophical theories.

Although some of the text is included in the edition of Berkeley’s Works edited by A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (published 1948–1957), this version does not indicate the numerous markings, insertions, deletions, and marginal comments that appear in the manuscript. These can be found only in the diplomatic edition prepared by Bertil Belfrage, which was printed in a limited run of only 500 copies in 1987.

The original layer of text in the manuscript is written in careful, neat handwriting, using the recto (right hand) pages only.

The line down the right margin of the recto of folio 20 is apparently intended to indicate the rejection of this entire passage, to be replaced by the text written on the verso page.

The lengthy section Berkeley has marked for omission, beginning on folio 20, discusses in detail two examples that are used to illustrate Berkeley’s view that not every meaningful word stands for an idea. The first example is the proposition ‘Melampus is an animal’. (‘Proposition’ is Berkeley’s word for a sentence.) Regarding the word ‘animal’ in this example, Berkeley writes: “Nor does it as used in that Proposition stand for any Idea [at all] at all. All that I intend to signify thereby being only this. That the particular [creature] thing I call Melampus has a right to be called by the name animal.”

This example does not appear anywhere in the published text.

The second example Berkeley gives in this passage is the Biblical asssertion “[that] the good things which God hath prepared for them that love him are such as Eye hath not seen nor Ear heard nor hath it enter’d into the Heart of Man to conceive.” According to Berkeley, no one has any idea corresponding to the words ‘good things’ in this promise yet it is meaningful.

In the manuscript, there is a lengthy discussion, spanning folios 22–24, of how words like ‘good thing’ and ‘reward’ are able to influence our feelings and actions without standing for ideas. In the published version this detailed discussion has been reduced to a single rhetorical question.

Perhaps the most intriguing section of the manuscript is this discussion on the bottom of folio 25 and top of folio 26. Berkeley seems to have been particularly emphatic in rejecting this, drawing a double line down the margin and scribbling out the text.