supporter at the time he formulated his critique was Swift, then in Dublin as
chaplain to the Lord Justice of Ireland; Swift introduced Berkeley to the Dublin
court, and soon after into the Whig literary circle at London. Swift was busy
just then fighting Deists, publishing his satirical Argument against Abolishing
Christianity in 1711, and carrying on controversy with Collins in 1713 (Luce,
1968). Swift too followed a clerical career; like Berkeley, he had studied at
Kilkenny College (“the Irish Eton”) and at Trinity, Dublin, sought government
preferment, and acquired a church living in Ireland. Swift’s early network
connections, however, were not with the scientists but with a literary circle.
Swift was Dryden’s cousin, and in the 1690s happened to be chaplain to the
diplomat Sir William Temple, who had imported into England the quarrel of
the ancients versus the moderns. This had originated as a literary dispute over
the merits of classical versus modern poetry and drama; when Fontenelle had
revived the debate in France in 1688, he had marshaled science on the side of
the moderns. Swift’s first publication (1704) joined the side of his employer,
attacking modern scientists and philosophers in Battle of the Books. It was a
slot Swift never left. The same vehement satire is found in 1726 in Gulliver’s
Travels. One section recapitulates the battle of ancients and moderns: (Voyage
to Laputa, Chapter 9); Gassendi’s and Descartes’s systems are described as
exploded, and Newton’s as a fashion which will go the same way. Bacon’s
house of learning is satirized as a collection of impractical fools engaged in
odoriferous experiments such as returning human excrement into its original
food. One scientist is a blind man who attempts to mix colors by feel and
smell, a joke straight out of Berkeley and Molyneux.
Less scatological than Swift, Berkeley shows a similar concern to cut down
science. Numbers are never found in experience but are only an imputation
added by the mind (Berkeley, [1709] 1925: 119); the immediate objects of sight
are fleeting and mutable, and “to compute their magnitudes,” even if possi-
ble, “must yet be a very trifling and insignificant labour” (Berkeley, [1709]
1925: 84). Berkeley criticizes Newton’s fluxions and the differential calculus;
infinitesimals cannot exist, since they are not matters of experience (Robles
Garcia, 1991).
Berkeley’s idealist move was there to be made in the existing structure of
the intellectual field. We can see this through several other British clergymen
nearby in the network, who followed a similar path but whose fame was
preempted by Berkeley. John Norris (106) was a former Oxford fellow and
village rector, a correspondent of Henry More and of Locke, and a religious
poet of the “metaphysical” style. Norris quarreled with Locke, who considered
the former reactionary, and criticized the Deist Toland. In 1701 Norris pro-
duced his own philosophy, a version of Malebranche’s occasionalism—God is
always present, upholding the causality of the world. Norris’s neighbor, Arthur
612 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths