Note 86 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

It belonged to the overstrung temperament of Berkeley that, like a nervous artist, he should figure to himself all his freethinking antagonists as personally odious, himself growing odious under the obsession; and he solemnly asserts, in his Discourse to Magistrates, that there had been “lately set up within this city of Dublin” an “execrable fraternity of blasphemers,” calling themselves “blasters,” and forming “a distinct society, whereof the proper and avowed business shall be to shock all serious Christians by the most impious and horrid blasphemies, uttered in the most public manner.”86 There appears to be not a grain of truth in this astonishing assertion, to which no subsequent historian has paid the slightest attention. In a period in which freethinking books had been again and again burned in Dublin by the public hangman, such a society could be projected only in a nightmare; and Berkeley’s hallucination may serve as a sign of the extent to which his judgment had been deranged by his passions.87 His forensic temper is really on a level with that of the most incompetent swashbucklers on his side.