Berkeley and the Infidel

George Berkeley, philosopher and Anglican bishop, is best known
among mathematicians for "The Analyst" (1734), a critique of 
the principles of the calculus.  This work was addressed to "the
infidel mathematician", believed to have been Edmund Halley.  
(Berkeley was upset because Halley had persuaded a mutual 
friend that Christianity was a myth.)

Even aside from his impressive foray into the foundations of 
mathematics, Berkeley was an interesting man.  He was born in 
March of 1685, just seven months after Halley visited Cambridge 
to ask Newton if he knew how to prove the planets move in 
eliptical orbits, assuming an inverse square law of gravitation.  
Berkeley became an Anglican bishop and a fellow of Trinity 
College, Dublin, where he lectured on Greek, Hebrew, and divinity.  
He spent time on the continent and also in London, where he 
associated with Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, 
Richard Steele, etc.

At some point he got enthusiastic about founding a college in 
Bermuda to instruct the American colonists AND the Indians.  He 
travelled to Rhode Island and lived there for a few years, trying 
to find support for the project, but it never got off the ground.  
For his encouragement of higher education in America during these 
years he became well enough known that, among other things, the 
university and town of Berkeley, CA was named after him.  (He had 
written of America as "a shining city on a hill", serving to 
enlighten the world, and this image evidently seemed appropriate 
to the founders of the University of California, perhaps partly 
because of the geography of the site.)

He is most famous for his writings in philosophy; "esse est percipi" 
(to be is to be perceived) is his most famous doctrine.  In other 
words,
 
 "...that the very existence of the immediate objects of 
  sensation consists in their being perceived.  The whole 
  corporeal world, then, can exist only as a set of objects 
  of consciousness, as a system of ideas."  

Samual Johnson, when challenged to argue against Berkeley's 
proof that matter does not exist, impatiently kicked a large 
nearby rock, saying "I refute it THUS!"

I find Berkeley's friendship with Swift and Pope interesting 
because of his obvious wit and deft touch for sarcasm.  Who, 
after once reading it, ever forgets his phrase "the ghosts of 
departed quantities" or his remark that "he who can digest a 
second or third fluxion...need not, methinks, be squeamish 
about any point in divinity"?