9 - Argument into satire

Summary

Alciphron: or, the Minute Philosopher (1732), Berkeley's second philosophical dialogue, followed the Three Dialogues by nearly twenty years, years in which Berkeley was preoccupied with the struggle for preferment and the promotion of his Bermuda project. Alciphron itself was written during an unexpected lull in Berkeley's affairs as he waited in vain on Rhode Island for Walpole to release the funds for his college. Despite the fact that Alciphron and the Three Dialogues share a genre, they are in both form and purpose very different works. The Three Dialogues, like the Principles, was a model of concise exposition. It worked its single metaphysical theme into a tight comic shape. Its coherence reflected the simplicity and unity of the immaterialist system it propounded. But Alciphron is a much longer work, and its subject matter of much broader scope. In the course of its seven dialogues it examines a variety of ethical views and touches on most of the key points of Christianity. The reason for this breadth is clear from Berkeley's title-page, which claims the book contains ‘an APOLOGY for the Christian Religion against those who are called Free-thinkers’. Alciphron is an apology. The fact that Berkeley is able to work some of his personal metaphysical notions into the debate – his rejection of abstract ideas, for example, and his psychological theory of perception – shows, more than anything else, the extent to which his religious and metaphysical tenets are integrated in his own mind. Berkeley is not here expounding his own novel metaphysical system, but vindicating a great body of orthodox thought in ethics and religion. The subject matter of Alciphron is determined by his opponents, the ‘free-thinkers’.