A BABY boy called George Berkeley was born in Ireland 340 years ago. He was a very clever little boy and attended Trinity College, Dublin, where he then became a lecturer in Greek. He visited England, studied at Balliol, Oxford, and travelled all over Europe. He was ordained into the Church of Ireland aged 26 and became Dean of Derry.

George led a busy life. For example, he set about creating an ideal city in Bermuda but then went to the United States (where he owned a plantation with slaves). Returning to the UK, he was made Bishop of Cloyne aged 49 where he remained until he died in 1753. He also founded a home for abandoned children in London.

The main reason he is remembered in history now is that he was also a philosopher. He published his first major work in 1709 when he was only 24 years old, and continued to publish books on philosophy, mathematics and physics throughout his life.

Berkeley was of the ‘idealist’ school of philosophy, holding that familiar objects like mountains, tables and apples are ideas perceived by the mind rather than material substances, and, as a result, they cannot exist without being perceived. The fact that things do exist in everyday life means there must be a universal perceiver of them, i.e. God.

There is a popular story about a tree in the quad at an Oxford college which Berkeley maintained was not there unless it was being perceived by somebody. This has led to various limericks.

There once was a man who said “God must think it exceedingly odd if he finds that this tree continues to be when there’s no one about in the Quad.”

Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd. I am always about in the Quad. And that’s why the tree will continue to be since observed by ‘Yours faithfully’, God.

Although many disputed Berkeley’s view at the time, and still do, he actually foreshadowed much of Einstein and modern physics. Something to think about today!

John Keast

St John’s Methodist Church