Justified True Belief

(●) The Irish bishop who argued that matter does not exist, and argued it in order to put God back at the center of the world. + Almost everyone has heard the summary and almost nobody has heard the reason. George Berkeley taught that there is no such thing as matter: no dead, mindless stuff sitting behind the colours and sounds and textures we actually experience. Say that in a sentence and it sounds like a man denying that chairs are real. Berkeley spent his life insisting on the opposite. Chairs are real, he said, and so are stones and stars and the pain in your foot when you kick one. What is not real is the invisible something-underneath that philosophers had invented to stand behind them all, and that invention, he thought, was doing terrible work: it had made God optional. He is here because of what he was defending. The Age of Reason had produced a picture of the world as a great machine of particles knocking into one another, complete in itself, in no obvious need of God once it was wound up. Berkeley looked at that picture and refused it at the root. If the world is not made of self-standing stuff, then the ordinary steadiness of things, the fact that the room is still there when you shut the door on it, has to rest on something, and there is only one thing left for it to rest on. He thought he had found a proof of God so short and so near that a child could follow it: you do not have to reason your way out to God from the world, because the world is God speaking, all the time, to everyone. He had the whole system in print before he was thirty. The two books that carry it, the Principles and the Three Dialogues, came out when he was twenty-five and twenty-eight, and everything else in a long and busy life came afterwards: forty more years of travel, an American college that came to nothing, nineteen years as a bishop, famine relief, economics, mathematics and medicine. He spent them defending that argument rather than replacing it.

(●) 1685 AD: Born in County Kilkenny into the Protestant minority of Ireland, and sent to school with the sons of the ascendancy. + George Berkeley was born on 12 March 1685, in or near Kilkenny city, and grew up at Dysart Castle by the river Nore, a few miles from Thomastown. His family were English settlers of no great wealth. In most countries that last detail would be a footnote, and in Ireland in the 1680s it decided a life: a Protestant minority held the land and the offices, a Catholic majority worked them, and the question of who would rule was about to be settled by armies rather than by argument. The Protestant families who held the land and the offices were known as the ascendancy, and Berkeley’s people belonged to them by religion if not by fortune. He was four when the Jacobite war began, the fighting that followed the deposing of the Catholic king James II and set his Irish supporters, the Jacobites, against the new king William, and he was six when it ended. So he grew up in a country that had just been fought over, and he was educated by the side that won. At eleven he entered Kilkenny College, a school that had already turned out Jonathan Swift and William Congreve, which gives some idea of what a clever boy could get there. At fifteen, in March 1700, he went up to Trinity College Dublin, took his degree in 1704, and then simply stayed. Trinity would hold him for the next twenty-four years.

(●) 1707 AD: Elected a fellow at twenty-two, he began filling two private notebooks with an idea he had found in no book. + He won his fellowship in June 1707 and published two small mathematical tracts the same year. What he was actually doing, though, survives in two notebooks he kept for himself and never printed. They were first published in 1871 and are now called the Philosophical Commentaries, and reading them is like watching someone talk himself into something in real time: hundreds of short entries, arguing with Locke, arguing with Descartes, arguing with himself, circling the same thought and getting closer each time. The thought was this. Everything you have ever met, you met through a sensation. You know the fire by its light and heat, the apple by its red and its sweetness. Philosophers then said that behind all those sensations stood the real thing, matter, which had none of the qualities you experience and which nobody could ever perceive. Berkeley noticed that this made the real world a thing no one had ever encountered or could ever encounter, and he began asking a question that is easy to state and hard to shake off: what work is the word doing? All the while he was making a perfectly ordinary career. He was ordained deacon in 1709 and priest in 1710, and he held one college office after another: librarian, junior dean, Greek lecturer, divinity lecturer, Hebrew lecturer. Then the private thought went into print. In 1709 he published An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, and in 1710, at twenty-five, A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge.

(●) 1713 AD: He carried his argument to London, where the poets liked him better than the philosophers did. + The Principles had not gone well. Berkeley complained that readers set him down as a man of paradoxes, and the joke was already forming that here was a clergyman who had proved his own dinner did not exist. So in 1713 he went to London and tried again in a friendlier form. Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous puts the whole case into three morning conversations in a garden between two friends, one of whom starts out sure that Berkeley’s position is madness. It is one of the few philosophical works in English that a reader with no training can simply enjoy. London took to him personally in a way it never quite took to his argument. Swift introduced him at court; Steele had him write essays for the Guardian; Addison, Arbuthnot and Pope became friends. Pope later set him in a couplet on the bishops of the day, in the Epilogue to the Satires of 1738, and it has followed Berkeley ever since: "Manners with candour are to Benson given, To Berkeley, every virtue under heaven." Then, for most of the next seven years, he was out of the country. He crossed to France and Italy in 1713 and 1714 as chaplain to Lord Peterborough, and went again from 1716 to 1720 as tutor to a bishop’s son, and he kept journals of what he saw as he went, from Sicilian antiquities to the eruption of Vesuvius he stood and watched in 1717. A man who had argued that the visible world is a language was not likely to stop reading it. The travelling produced one piece of philosophy. At Lyon in 1720 he wrote De Motu, a short Latin essay on the cause of motion, arguing that the forces physicists calculate with are useful mathematical devices for working out how bodies will move rather than hidden powers anyone has found inside them. Then he came home to an Ireland wrecked by the collapse of the South Sea Bubble, the speculating frenzy of 1720 in which investors of every rank poured their savings into a trading company whose shares turned out to be worth a small fraction of what they had paid. Berkeley wrote a furious little pamphlet about the moral rot he believed lay behind it, and in 1724 he was made Dean of Derry, one of the richest posts in the Irish church.

(●) 1728 AD: He gave up the deanery, married, and sailed for America to found a college that was never built. + Berkeley had convinced himself that Europe was exhausted and that the future of Christianity lay west. His plan, set out in A Proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches in our Foreign Plantations (1725), was a college on Bermuda, St Paul’s, that would train clergy for the American colonies and educate colonists and Native Americans together. He resigned a deanery worth eleven hundred pounds a year to do it. He got a royal charter in 1725, and in 1726 the House of Commons voted to recommend a grant of twenty thousand pounds, with only two members dissenting. On 1 August 1728 he married Anne Forster, daughter of an Irish chief justice, and in September they sailed. They landed at Newport, Rhode Island, in January 1729, meaning to wait there until the money came. Berkeley bought a farm of ninety-six acres with a small seventeenth-century farmhouse standing on it, put a new front on the house in the English taste, named the place Whitehall, and settled in to write. Most of Alciphron, his long defense of Christianity against the freethinkers, was written during those three years. The freethinkers were the fashionable unbelievers of the day, writers who kept revealed religion at arm’s length and held that reason on its own was enough for morals and for God, and Berkeley had been answering them since his Guardian essays. A local tradition says he worked at a rock ledge above the sea. The money never came. Sir Robert Walpole, the prime minister, would not release it, and word finally reached Newport that it never would be released. The Berkeleys buried an infant daughter, Lucia, in the churchyard of Trinity Church, Newport, on 5 September 1731, left the island a few days later, and took ship for England from Boston. They were home by the following February, when Berkeley preached the anniversary sermon before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in the church of St Mary-le-Bow. Before he left, and then formally in 1733, Berkeley gave the Whitehall farm and about a thousand books to Yale College, then a small and poorly stocked school in Connecticut.

(●) 1734 AD: The year he was made a bishop, he also published the pamphlet that put the calculus on trial. + Back in London he published Alciphron in 1732, seven dialogues in which two urbane unbelievers state the case against Christianity at length and are answered at greater length. Then, in 1734, he did something nobody expected of a philosopher of religion. The Analyst is addressed to "an infidel mathematician," widely taken to be Newton’s friend Edmond Halley, and its argument is a challenge rather than a refutation. Mathematicians were mocking Christians for believing mysteries. Very well, said Berkeley: look at your own foundations. Newton’s calculus worked by taking a quantity, letting it shrink toward nothing, and then dividing by it, which meant treating the same quantity as something and as nothing in the space of two lines. Newton had a word for the rate at which a changing quantity is changing at an instant, the speed of a falling stone at the moment it passes the window: he called it a fluxion. The vanishing scraps of quantity used to work a fluxion out he called evanescent increments, increments because they are little added bits, evanescent because they are on their way to nothing. Berkeley’s question about those scraps has never been bettered: "And what are these Fluxions? The Velocities of evanescent Increments? And what are these same evanescent Increments? They are neither finite Quantities nor Quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the Ghosts of departed Quantities?" He was right, and it took mathematics roughly a century to answer him properly. In January 1734 he was named Bishop of Cloyne, a small diocese in County Cork, and was consecrated in Dublin on 19 May.

(●) 1740 AD: Famine came to his diocese, and the philosopher spent his last decade on the Irish poor and a barrel of tar-water. + Berkeley lived at Cloyne for eighteen years and hardly left it. He had already begun The Querist (1735 to 1737), a book made of nothing but numbered questions about the Irish economy, hundreds of them, asking why a country with land, rivers and people should be poor, and whether money is a thing or a ticket. Then the winter of 1739 to 1740 froze the country, the harvests failed, and famine and disease killed a large fraction of the population of Ireland. Joseph Stock, who wrote his life a generation later, records that every Monday morning he gave away twenty pounds to the poor of Cloyne, and that he left off the powder in his wig to set a precedent of frugality, a small and half-comic gesture from a man who plainly meant it. He pushed local crafts as well, so that people would have work and not only alms. He also turned physician, which for a bishop watching his diocese die was less a change of trade than the same duty carried one step further. In Rhode Island he had learned of tar-water, made by stirring pine tar into cold water and letting it stand, and in the epidemic he dosed the sick with it and believed he saw them recover. Out of that came Siris (1744), the strangest book he wrote and by far the most popular: it begins with the medicinal virtues of tar-water and climbs, chapter by chapter, through chemistry and the physics of light and the ancient philosophers, until it ends in the doctrine of the Trinity. Six editions came out in six months. His readers wanted the recipe; he wanted the ladder. His son William died in 1751, and Berkeley called it a grief he did not recover from.

(●) 1753 AD: He died on a Sunday evening at Oxford, listening to his wife read. + In the summer of 1752 Berkeley moved with his family to Oxford, where his son George was beginning at Christ Church. He would not resign the bishopric of Cloyne, which he thought a trust rather than a job, and asked instead to be allowed to live away from it; he continued to send its revenues back to the diocese. On the evening of Sunday 14 January 1753 he was lying on a couch with his family around him while his wife read aloud, and when they went to him he was dead. He was buried at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, on 20 January. He had left directions that the funeral should be plain and cost no more than twenty pounds. He was sixty-seven, and he had been arguing the same case for forty-five years, in the same unhurried and good-humoured voice, against a century that mostly found it funny.

What He Taught

(T1) To be is to be perceived: there is no mindless stuff standing behind the world we experience. + Pick up an orange. What have you actually got hold of? A particular colour, a weight in the hand, a dimpled texture, a smell, and later a taste. Take those away one at a time and ask what is left over. Berkeley’s claim is that nothing is left over, and that the orange simply is that bundle of qualities, held together and held in existence by being perceived. The philosophers of his day said otherwise. Behind the qualities, they held, lay material substance: the underlying stuff itself, colourless, tasteless, soundless, possessing only size, shape and motion, and never in principle perceived by anybody. Berkeley’s objection was not that this is false but that it is empty. You are being asked to believe in something defined as forever beyond experience, and then told it is the only thing that is really real. His summary hangs on two Latin words, esse and percipi: for a sensible thing, to be is to be perceived. Notice what he is not saying. He is not saying that objects are imaginary, or that the world runs on your say-so, or that shutting your eyes destroys the furniture. He insisted he was on the side of the plain man against the philosophers. The plain man says the table is exactly what he sees and touches; it was the philosophers who had put a phantom behind it. Take away the phantom and the table stays.

(Q) "For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that seems perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them." + Source: George Berkeley, A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, section 3 (1710; text of the 1734 edition). The sentences just before this are the homeliest in the book. Berkeley says that the table he writes on exists, meaning that he sees and feels it, and that if he were out of his study he would still say it existed, meaning that if he went back in he would perceive it, or that some other spirit does perceive it. Everything in (T1) and (T2) is already in that ordinary remark about a writing desk.

(T2) The world does not blink out when nobody is in the room, because God never stops perceiving it. + This is the obvious objection, and Berkeley met it head on rather than waiting to be asked. If to be is to be perceived, what happens to the kitchen when the last person leaves the house? Does the loaf on the counter wink out and wink back when someone comes home? His answer is that it never stops being perceived, because human beings are not the only perceivers. The kitchen goes on existing in the mind of God, who is not one more observer wandering in and out but the constant and comprehensive one, and whose perceiving is what keeps everything in being. So the steadiness of the world, the thing the whole objection is worried about, is not lost. It is explained. It is exactly as reliable as God is. That is why Berkeley thought his argument was worth making. He is not offering a fifth or sixth proof of God to file alongside the others. He is saying that on any other account the world is a machine that runs itself and God is a hypothesis you can drop, whereas on his account the continued existence of the ordinary world is God’s continuous act. Scripture says something a Christian reader will hear at once behind it: "in him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17), and God upholds "the universe by the word of his power" (Hebrews 1:3). Whether Berkeley’s route to that conclusion works is disputed, and always has been. What he was reaching for is not obscure.

(Q) "All the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit." + Source: George Berkeley, A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, section 6 (1710; text of the 1734 edition). Berkeley introduces it as one of those truths so near and obvious that a man need only open his eyes to see it. "Created spirit" means any finite mind, yours or mine or an angel’s; the Eternal Spirit is God. The whole of (T2) turns on that last phrase.

(T3) The regularities we call laws of nature are not causes at work but a language being spoken. + You see dark cloud and you reach for a coat. Nobody thinks the sight of the cloud is what makes the rain fall; the sight is how you find out that rain is coming. Berkeley’s proposal is that all of nature works like that, and that we have systematically mistaken the reading of signs for the discovery of causes. Take fire and pain. We say that fire causes the pain of a burn. Berkeley says that what we actually observe is a reliable pairing: this sight, then that feeling, over and over, never once with a visible link between them. The fire I see, he wrote, is not the cause of the pain I suffer on approaching it, but the mark that forewarns me of it. Science, on this account, loses nothing of its value; it is only being described differently. The scientist is a grammarian of the world, learning the vocabulary and the regular constructions of a language, and the better he learns it the more accurately he can predict what comes next. What he never finds, because it is not there to find, is a power inside one billiard ball that pushes the other. And if nature is a language, someone is speaking it. That is the payoff Berkeley cared about, and it is why he thought his account of vision was the front door to everything else. A language is the sort of thing that has an author, is addressed to somebody, and is meant to be understood. This is a version of what theologians call general revelation, the knowledge of God available to everyone through the created order rather than through the Bible, and Scripture makes the same move when it says "The heavens declare the glory of God" (Psalm 19:1), or when Paul says God’s power and nature have been plain since the creation of the world in the things that have been made (Romans 1:20).

(Q) "Upon the whole, I think we may fairly conclude that the proper objects of vision constitute an universal language of the Author of Nature, whereby we are instructed how to regulate our actions in order to attain those things that are necessary to the preservation and well-being of our bodies, as also to avoid whatever may be hurtful and destructive of them." + Source: George Berkeley, An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, section 147, in the revised text of 1732; the first edition of 1709 read "an universal language of nature," and Berkeley later made the Author explicit. The book is a study of how the eye works, and its central finding is that distance, size and position are not seen directly at all. What the eye receives is flat; we learn by long experience to read depth out of it, the way a reader learns to see meaning rather than ink. Berkeley then makes the leap in this sentence: that learned reading is not an accident of our biology but the shape of a message. He returned to the argument twenty-three years later in Alciphron and used it there as his central proof that God exists and speaks.

(T4) Matter was the main pillar of unbelief, and pulling it out brings the building down. + Here is the motive under all of it, stated by Berkeley himself as plainly as he ever stated anything. He thought the doctrine of matter was not a neutral piece of physics but the load-bearing wall of two things he meant to demolish. The first was scepticism, the position that we cannot really know the world. Put an unperceivable substance behind the apple, and everything anyone actually experiences becomes a curtain hung in front of the real thing, with no way to lift a corner and check the fit. Berkeley’s move takes the curtain down: what you perceive is the apple itself, not a rumour of it. The second thing he meant to demolish was atheism, and here it was his reading of history that did the work. The ancient materialists, he pointed out, had made matter uncreated and co-eternal with God, or had done without God altogether, and every system of that kind since had rested on the same corner-stone. Take the corner-stone away, he wrote, and the fabric cannot help falling. Most people get off the train here, and the objection deserves its full weight. Berkeley’s critics from his own day to ours have answered that you can be a thorough Christian and a thorough believer in matter, and that God can perfectly well create real physical stuff and sustain it in being, which is what most Christians have always thought. That reply is a good one and it is the majority Christian position. What is harder to dismiss is Berkeley’s diagnosis of his century. He saw a picture forming in which the physical world was a closed system of causes needing nothing outside itself, and he saw where it was going a hundred and fifty years before it got there.

(Q) "How great a friend material substance has been to Atheists in all ages were needless to relate. All their monstrous systems have so visible and necessary a dependence on it that, when this corner-stone is once removed, the whole fabric cannot choose but fall to the ground." + Source: George Berkeley, A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, section 92 (1710; text of the 1734 edition). It comes after a long stretch in which Berkeley has been answering the charge that he has destroyed the world. His answer is that he has destroyed nothing except a word, and that the word was holding up a structure he wanted down.

(Q) "It seems to be a general pretence of the unthinking herd that they cannot see God. Could we but see Him, say they, as we see a man, we should believe that He is, and believing obey His commands. But alas, we need only open our eyes to see the Sovereign Lord of all things, with a more full and clear view than we do any one of our fellow-creatures." + Source: George Berkeley, A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, section 148 (1710; text of the 1734 edition). He goes on to make the comparison exact. You never see another person’s mind either. You see a face, a size, a set of movements, and from that collection you rightly conclude that a thinking being is there. God is known the same way, he says, except that the collection of signs is not one narrow bundle in front of you but everything, everywhere, at every moment. A few lines later he quotes Paul at Athens on the God in whom "we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28), and adds that men surrounded by such clear evidence seem, as it were, blinded with excess of light.

What Came of His Work

(†) His own century answered him with a kicked stone, and the joke has outlived the argument. + On 6 August 1763, ten years after Berkeley’s death, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson came out of church talking about what Boswell called Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter. Boswell said that though the doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. Johnson struck his foot against a large stone with such force that he rebounded from it, and said, "I refute it thus." It is the most famous response Berkeley ever received and it is beside the point, since he had already agreed that the stone is there and that it hurts. What Johnson had refuted was the caricature. Still, the caricature won the room, and for two centuries Berkeley was filed under charming absurdity. The philosophers who read him properly took him very seriously indeed. David Hume picked up Berkeley’s tools, agreed that we never observe causal power anywhere in nature, and then declined to supply God as the missing term, which left a scepticism far deeper than anything Berkeley had wanted. Immanuel Kant thought Berkeley important enough to answer directly, and added a section called the Refutation of Idealism to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in order to keep his own position clear of what he took Berkeley’s to be. Idealism is the family of views holding that reality is at bottom mental rather than material, that what exists is minds and what minds perceive, and Berkeley is the name most firmly attached to it in English. Berkeley did not persuade them. He set the terms they had to argue on.

(†) A pamphlet written to defend religion made mathematics honest. + The immediate effect of The Analyst was a brawl. James Jurin and John Walton wrote replies, Berkeley wrote replies to the replies, and the mathematicians were sure a meddling bishop had missed the point. The long effect was different. Berkeley had put his finger on a real hole: the calculus gave right answers by a procedure nobody could justify, in which a quantity was treated as non-zero long enough to divide by it and as zero immediately afterward. Filling that hole took Augustin-Louis Cauchy in the 1820s and Karl Weierstrass after him, and the rigorous definition of a limit that every calculus student now learns is the answer to the question Berkeley asked. It is a striking episode in the long argument about faith and science, and it runs the opposite way from the usual story. Here the churchman is the one demanding rigour, refusing to accept a result because the reasoning behind it does not hold, and telling the scientists that they are asking for more credulity than they will grant to anyone else. His actual complaint was about a double standard, and he had put it in one sentence in the pamphlet’s seventh section: "But he who can digest a second or third Fluxion, a second or third Difference, need not, methinks, be squeamish about any Point in Divinity."

(†) America kept him better than Britain did, and the argument itself is being taken seriously again. + The Bermuda college failed, but the three years Berkeley spent waiting for it were not wasted. His thousand volumes were the largest gift of books Yale had yet received, and the rents of the Whitehall farm paid for scholarships there; one of Yale’s residential colleges carries his name, and a Berkeley Divinity School founded in Connecticut in 1854 is now part of the university. He also acquired a disciple. Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, an Anglican clergyman and no relation to the stone-kicking one, corresponded with him about the Principles, pressed him with sharp objections, and went on to become the first president of King’s College in New York, later Columbia. In May 1866 the trustees of the College of California stood on a rock above San Francisco Bay, and one of them, Frederick Billings, remembered a line from a poem Berkeley had written about his American venture, "Westward the course of empire takes its way." They named the town Berkeley. The philosophy has had a longer road back. The nineteenth century read him mainly as a stepping stone between Locke and Hume. In the twentieth, A. A. Luce, a clergyman and Trinity College Dublin scholar who edited the standard nine-volume edition of the works with T. E. Jessop, argued that Berkeley had been misread from the start. Immaterialism, which is the name Berkeley’s doctrine goes by, the denial that any mindless material stuff exists, had on Luce’s reading been a religious argument from the very first notebook entry, rather than a piece of technical epistemology, the study of how we know what we know, that happened to mention God somewhere near the end. Christian philosophers today who defend idealism, and the wider argument that the regularity of nature is better explained by a mind than by brute physical necessity, are working ground Berkeley cleared.

(†) Where his own record fails: he owned enslaved people, and taught planters that the gospel left slavery standing. + This has to be said plainly, and it comes from Berkeley’s own writings rather than from what anyone later made of them. - What he did. During the three years at Newport he bought at least three enslaved people to work the Whitehall farm. In October 1730 he paid eighty pounds for a boy of about fourteen called Philip and eighty-six for a man of about twenty called Edward, or Anthony; a woman called Agnes came to Whitehall about the same time and by the same means. On 11 June 1731 he had the three of them baptized at Trinity Church, Newport, and the register enters them as Philip, Anthony and Agnes Berkeley. He did not free them. - What he wrote. The 1725 Proposal that launched the Bermuda scheme urges planters to have their slaves baptized, and the reasons it gives are these: that it would be to the planters’ own advantage to have slaves who obey their masters in singleness of heart, that "gospel liberty consists with temporal servitude," and that "their slaves would only become better slaves by being Christian." The verse he leans on is Paul’s instruction to bondservants (Colossians 3:22). - What is true in it. Berkeley was arguing against something worse. Colonial planters were refusing baptism to the people they held, some on the legal worry that a baptized Christian could not be kept a slave, and some on the view that Africans were not fully human. The 1725 Proposal said that leaving such people heathen was to the infamy of England and the scandal of the world, and when Berkeley preached before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in February 1732 he named as a main obstacle to their conversion "an irrational contempt of the Blacks, as creatures of another species, who had no right to be instructed or admitted to the sacraments." He was on the right side of the question his contemporaries were actually asking. - Where Scripture will not go with him. He asked the wrong question. Paul’s letters address people already inside a slave economy they had no power to abolish; they are not a licence to buy. The law given to Israel makes the trade itself a capital crime: "Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death." (Exodus 21:16). Paul lists enslavers among those the law stands against (1 Timothy 1:10), tells Philemon to take Onesimus back "no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother" (Philemon 1:16), and writes that in Christ "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28). Every human being is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), and a man who had just argued that persons are the only substances there are should have seen it soonest. Christians were making that argument in his own lifetime. The Germantown Quakers had protested against slaveholding in 1688, three years after Berkeley was born, and within forty years of his death William Wilberforce and the Clapham circle were prosecuting the case in Parliament on grounds Berkeley could have read in his own Bible. He is not being judged by a standard unavailable to him. He is being judged by the one he preached from.