It is difficult to determine Berkeley's relation to rival schools or parties in Church and State. His disposition was too singular and independent for a partisan. Some of his early writings, as we have seen, were suspected of high Tory and Jacobite leanings; but his arguments in the suspected _Discourse_ were such as ordinary Tories and Jacobites failed to understand, and the tenor of his words and actions was in the best sense liberal. In religious thought _Siris_ might place him among latitudinarians; perhaps in affinity with the Cambridge Platonists. His true place is foremost among the religious philosophers of the Anglican Church; the first to prepare the religious problem for the light in which we are invited to look at the universe by modern agnostics, and under the modern conception of natural evolution. He is the most picturesque figure in that Anglican succession which, in the seventeenth century, includes Hooker and Cudworth; in the eighteenth, Clarke and Butler; and in the nineteenth, may we say Coleridge, in lack of a representative in orders; although Mansel, Maurice, Mozley, and Jowett are not to be forgotten, nor Isaac Taylor among laymen(38): Newman and Arnold, illustrious otherwise, are hardly representatives of metaphysical philosophy.
A more pensive tone runs through the closing years at Cloyne. Attempts were made in vain to withdraw him from the "remote corner" to which he had been so long confined. His friends urged his claims for the Irish Primacy. "I am no man's rival or competitor in this matter," were his words to Prior. "I am not in love with feasts, and crowds, and visits, and late hours, and strange faces, and a hurry of affairs often insignificant. For my own private satisfaction, I had rather be master of my time than wear a diadem." Letters to his American friends, Johnson and Clap, shew him still moved by the inspiration which carried him over the Atlantic, and record his influence in the development of American colleges(39). The home education of his three sons was another interest. We are told by his widow that "he would not trust his sons to mercenary hands. Though old and sickly, he performed the constant tedious task himself." Of the fruit of this home education there is little to tell. The death of William, his favourite boy, in 1751, "was thought to have struck too close to his father's heart." "I am a man," so he writes, "retired from the amusements, politics, visits, and what the world calls pleasure. I had a little friend, educated always under mine own eye, whose painting delighted me, whose music ravished me, and whose lively gay spirit was a continual feast. It has pleased God to take him hence." The eldest son, Henry, born in Rhode Island, did not long survive his father. George, the third son, was destined for Oxford, and this destiny was connected with a new project. The "life academico-philosophical," which he sought in vain to realise in Bermuda, he now hoped to find for himself in the city of colleges on the Isis. "The truth is," he wrote to Prior as early as September 1746, "I have a scheme of my own for this long time past, in which I propose more satisfaction and enjoyment to myself than I could in that high station(40), which I neither solicited, nor so much as wished for. A greater income would not tempt me to remove from Cloyne, and set aside my Oxford scheme; which, though delayed by the illness of my son(41), yet I am as intent upon it and as much resolved as ever."