George Berkeley

196 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY augurated by Defoe, of whom there is no premonition in Milton. The interval between John Milton Sr. in the shop below-there is a good account of the premises in Bread Street in volume I-as he prepared to meet the suit of Samuel Burton in a matter of £200.0.0, and the poet in the parlor above, writing "Elegy I" to Diodati, is not to be measured by a few feet of wood and plaster; but when the shutters were up the scrivener was not entirely a stranger in his son's world, and they met in their love of music. The essential background of Milton is the whole inherited culture of his age and the movement of those forces, social, political, and (above all) religious, which were to produce the Puritan Revolution. In his scope Masson was perfectly right. This is not to say that Professor French should have adopted Masson's generous conception, much less to question the utility of the book he has produced. To read it is to be brought into intimate contact with the daily life of Milton's household and with its passing (as well as with some of his permanent) concerns. It does not give us the whole background of the poet-or much, perhaps, except his own statements, that is indispensable for an understanding of him; but what it gives us is a body of indisputable facts, and facts are never to be despised. It raises the question, nevertheless, whether we do not also need a comparable record of the poet's age which should find its focal point in his known interests and attainment>. But this would be a yet more formidable undertaking. Except for the matter of dating noticed above, the compiler's work appears to be as painstaking as it is learned. Inevitably, there are a few slips, such as phrases (I, 404) perpetuating Milton's longexploded attribution of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor to Alexander More (but see II, 88, where it is correctly ascribed to Peter du Moulin), or the statement (I, 94) that Wordsworth, who was at St. John's, occupied Milton's rooms at Christ's! The book is beautifully produced by the Rutgers University Press. GEORGE BERKELEY' R.F. McRAE Deism is one of the least interesting of religions, and the small points of the deist controversy belong now to the antiquarian of ideas. When Berkeley directed his attack on "Skepticism, Atheism and Irre- *The Works of George Berkeley. Bishop 0/ eloyne. Edited by A. A. LUCE and T. E. JESSOP, Vol. III, AlciphTon or The Minute Philosopher, edited by T. E. JESSOP; vol. IV, De Motu, The Analyst, etc., edited by A. A. LueE. Edinburgh and Toronto: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd. 1950, 1951. pp. vi, 337, viii, 264. 30s. per volume. REVIEWS 197 ligion" at the level maintained in his Principles, the result was one of the great classics in the history of philosophy. When he tried to meet those he so much hated and despised at the level of point-by-point controversy, as in Alciphron, his points are as arid philosophically as their points. Only on the infrequent occasions when he drops this method to develop directly a doctrine of his own does this work achieve the excellence of his other philosophical writings. The tone of discus.. sion in Alciphron is set early with the question, "Would anyone in his senses give a fig for meditations and discoveries made over a bottle?" "And yet," Berkeley continues, "it is certain that, instead of thought, books, and study, most free-thinkers are the proselytes of a drinking club. Their principles are often settled, and decisions on the deepest points made, when they are not fit to make a bargain." 1£ we are not to give a fig for the views of Mandeville and others like him, where, then, is the basis for decent philosophical discussion, and can the outcome be, as Professor Jessop maintains, a work of art which "stands supreme in the whole body of our English literature of philosophy"? In the attack on Shaftesbury there is not only misrepresentation, as Professor Jessop allows...