George Berkeley: Unseen Author of Nature

Author/Compiler: Tihomir Dimitrov (http://nobelists.net; also see http://scigod.com/index.php/sgj/issue/view/3)

GEORGE BERKELEY (1685-1753), Irish philosopher and mathematician, founder of modern idealism, famous as “the precursor of Mach and Einstein”

Dr. Berkeley’s philosophy of science anticipated Ernst Mach’s physics and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Two centuries before Einstein, Berkeley rejected the theory of absolute space, time, and motion, in his treatise De Motu (On Motion, 1721). Berkeley’s major mathematical work The Analyst (1734) comprises numerous objections to the doctrine of fluxions and the concept of infinitesimals. (See Sir Karl Popper, “A Note on Berkeley as Precursor of Mach and Einstein,” in Conjectures and Refutations, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1992; see also K. Popper, “Berkeley’s Anticipation of Mach and Einstein,” in Locke and Berkeley, ed. C. B. Martin & D. M. Armstrong, London: Macmillan, 1968).

1. “Raise now your thoughts from this ball of earth to all those glorious luminaries that adorn the high arch of heaven. The motion and situation of the planets, are they not admirable for use and order? Were those (miscalled erratic) globes once known to stray, in their repeated journeys through the pathless void? Do they not measure areas round the sun ever proportioned to the times? So fixed, so immutable are the laws by which the unseen Author of nature actuates the universe.” (Berkeley 1910, 2nd Dial.)

2. “When I say the being of a God, I do not mean an obscure general Cause of things, whereof we have no conception, but God, in the strict and proper sense of the word. A Being whose spirituality, omnipresence, providence, omniscience, infinite power and goodness, are as conspicuous as the existence of sensible things, of which (notwithstanding the fallacious pretences and affected scruples of Sceptics) there is no more reason to doubt than of our own being.” (Berkeley 1910, 3rd Dial.)