II THE VINLAND OF THE NORTHMEN (continued 2)

But all this lay in a still remote future when, in 1728, Berkeley landed at Rhode Island with projects not unsuited to the dream of a Vinland the Good, where a university was to be reared as a centre of culture and regeneration for the aborigines of the New World. The indispensable prerequisite of needful funds had been promised him by the English Government; but the promised grant was never realised. Meanwhile he bought a farm, the purposed site perhaps of his beneficent centre of intellectual life for the Island state, and sojourned there for three years in pleasant seclusion, leaving behind him kindly memories that endeared him to many friends. He planned, if he did not realise many goodly Utopias; speculated on space and time, and objective idealism; and then bade farewell to Rhode Island, and to his romantic dream of regenerated savages and a renovated world. Soon after his return home the practical fruits of his quiet sojourn beyond the Atlantic appeared in the form of his Alciphron: or the Minute Philosopher; in which, in the form of a dialogue, he discusses the varied forms of speculative scepticism, at the very period when Pope was embodying in his Essay on Man the brilliant, but superficial philosophy which constituted the essence of thought for men of the world in his age. It is in antithesis to such speculations that Berkeley there advances his own theory, designed to show that all nature is the language of God, everywhere giving expressive utterance to the Divine thought.

So long as the American continent lay half revealed in its vague obscurity, as a new world lying beyond the Atlantic, and wholly apart from the old, it seemed the fitting site for imaginary Vinlands, Utopias, Summer Islands, and earthly paradises of all sorts: the scenes of a realised perfectibility beyond the reach of Europe “in her decay.” Nor was the refined metaphysical idealist the latest dreamer of such dreams. In our own century, Southey, Coleridge, and the little band of Bristol enthusiasts who planned their grand pantisocratic scheme of intellectual communism, created for themselves, with like fertile fancy, a Utopia of their own, “where Susquehana pours his untamed stream”; and many a later dreamer has striven after like ideal perfectibility in “peaceful Freedom’s undivided dale.”