Collier (119), another Oxford graduate and rural clergyman, published his
Clavis Universalis in 1713, almost coinciding with Berkeley (and apparently
without knowledge of him). Collier declared that perception gives no direct
evidence that the external world exists; indeed, the concept of an external
world is self-contradictory, as is the notion of infinite divisibility.
A more popular version of the attack on materialism also sprang from
the English scientific network. Swedenborg, the son of a Swedish bishop,
visited England during these same years (1710–1713) and met with the New-
tonian astronomers (103–104). Returning to Sweden, he became a mining
assessor and worked in geological and other sciences. Later (during 1734–
1756) Swedenborg transmuted science into theosophy, creating a metaphysics
out of metallurgy and a cosmology of three heavens and three hells with
correspondences among the levels. The realm of creation, he said, is dead; life
is only apparent, the investing of matter by an omnipresent God who alone is
alive. Swedenborg combined the same strands of cultural capital as Berkeley—
Lockean empiricism together with the superiority of Christianity—and both
came out with a new idealism. Swedenborg became a constructive dogmatist,
aiming at a popular following and producing a theology for a new sect.
Berkeley explicitly addressed himself to the cognoscenti, whose intellectual
errors he wished to combat (see Preface to Principles of Human Knowledge).
Compared to his rivals in this intellectual niche, Berkeley was much more in
the center of intellectual networks, and he stuck to an austere argument using
the dominant philosophical techniques to undermine themselves. Norris and
Collier were upstaged; Malebranche’s influence, largely limited to France, died
with his generation; Swedenborg left the realm of tightly argued philosophical
abstraction for a popular reception. Berkeley became famous in the long-term
philosophical community by exemplifying the distinctiveness of its turf. The
struggle over science moved epistemology into the central region of philosophy
in its own right. Berkeley’s idealist position anchored one extreme in the array
of philosophical arguments and opened a heritage of problems to which
successors keep returning.
The Triumph of Epistemology
Berkeley and Hume formed two prongs of the movement by which the empiri-
cist movement inadvertently renewed abstract philosophy. Berkeley’s wing
turned scientific analysis against itself, thereby exposing the terrain of more
highly reflexive epistemological and metaphysical argument. Hume crystallized
the opposite wing, loyalists of the new secularism and empiricism, which
nevertheless found its own methodological issues returning to abstract philo-
sophical terrain. Hume had strongly secular ambitions, to use a thoroughgoing
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