ABSTRACT
‘George Berkeley’s system, whatever may be the right textbook label to apply to it, was plainly a piece of religious apologetics, the outline of a constructive natural theology, of a theistic metaphy-sic. From the Principles onwards he was fashioning a reasoned case for the existence of God, of a certain kind of God with a certain kind of relation to the world.’ A. A. Luce says: Some expositors have declared that God is an afterthought in the Berkeleian philosophy, a buttress for a tottering metaphysic, a deus ex machina dragged in to save a collapsing theory of perception, originally conceived in terms of human psychology. And Luce is right in criticizing this view, for in writing at all Berkeley was impelled by a desire to bring men to a sense of the immanence of the Deity. God is seen, not only as creator of the natural world, but as vitally concerned in all that happens in that world.
