Le opere di George Berkeley, vol. 1 di 4: opere filosofiche, 1705-21

COMMONPLACE BOOK. MATHEMATICAL, ETHICAL, PHYSICAL, AND METAPHYSICAL Written At Trinity College, Dublin, In 1705-8 _First published in 1871_ Editor’s Preface To The Commonplace Book Berkeley’s juvenile _Commonplace Book_ is a small quarto volume, in his handwriting, found among the Berkeley manuscripts in possession of the late Archdeacon Rose. It was first published in 1871, in my edition of Berkeley’s Works. It consists of occasional thoughts, mathematical, physical, ethical, and metaphysical, set down in miscellaneous fashion, for private use, as they arose in the course of his studies at Trinity College, Dublin. They are full of the fervid enthusiasm that was natural to him, and of sanguine expectations of the issue of the prospective authorship for which they record preparations. On the title-page is written, “G. B. Trin. Dub. alum.,” with the date 1705, when he was twenty years of age. The entries are the gradual accumulation of the next three years, in one of which the _Arithmetica_ and the _Miscellanea Mathematica_ made their appearance. The _New Theory of Vision_, given to the world in 1709, was evidently much in his mind, as well as the sublime conception of the material world in its necessary subordination to the spiritual world, of which he delivered himself in his book of _Principles_, in 1710. This disclosure of Berkeley’s thoughts about things, in the years preceding the publication of his first essays, is indeed a precious record of the initial struggles of ardent philosophical genius. It places the reader in intimate companionship with him when he was beginning to awake into intellectual and spiritual life. We hear him soliloquising.…