Collier’s book possesses an interest for the student of philosophy on account of the resemblance between his views and those of his contemporary Berkeley.. Both were impelled to philosophize by their dissatisfaction with the theory of representative perception. Both have the feeling that it is inconsistent with the common sense of mankind, which will insist that the very object perceived is the sole reality, and both claim to substitute for the theory held in favour, and vainly sought to be demonstrated by their predecessors, another that will meet the demands of common sense. They equally affirm that the so-called representative image is the sole reality, aud discard the unperceiving material cause of the philosophers as an unthinkable monstrosity. Of objects of sense, they say, their esse is percipi. But Collier never got beyond a bald assertion of the fact, while Berkeley addressed himself to an explanation of it, which gave him ever profounder matter for philosophical reflection all his days. The thought of a distinction between direct and indirect perception never dawned upon Collier’s mind. He could only meet the doctrine of the representationists, therefore, with a flat negation. To the question how all matter exists in dependence on percipient mind he could only reply, “Just how my reader pleases, provided it be somehow.” As cause of our sensations and ground of our belief in externality, he substituted for an unintelligible material substance an equally unintelligible operation of divine power. But his illustrious contemporary gave a fresh start to philosophy by his exposition of the association between visual and tactual sensations; and his glimpses, faint at first, gradually grew more distinct of an intelligible order in the universe. Collier’s book exhibits no traces of a scientific development. In the first part, which may be compared with Berkeley’s Theory oj Vision, he merely brings together a few instances of visual experience, which throw discredit upon the popular opinion. . The most that can be said about him is that he was an intelligent student of Descartes and Malebranche, and had the ability to apply the results of his reading to the facts of his experience. He starts no original conception, contributes nothing to the development of philosophy. The latter half of his book reads like the ingenious quibbling of the schoolmen. In philosophy he is a curiosity, and nothing more. His biographer tries to make out that the Clavis fell flat on the English public in comparison with the reception accorded to Berkeley’s writings, on account of its inferiority in point of style. No doubt it is immensely inferior in that respect; but the crudeness of Collier’s thought had quite as much to do with his failure to gain a hearing. Hamilton allows greater sagacity to Collier than to Berkeley, for not vainly attempting to enlist men’s natural belief against the hypothetical realism of the philosophers. But Collier did so as far as his light enabled him. He appealed to the popular conviction that the proper object of sense is the sole reality, although he despaired of getting men to give up their belief in its externality. He moreover distinctly asserted that nothing but prejudice prevented them from doing so; and there is little doubt that if it had ever occurred to him, as it did to Berkeley, to explain the genesis of the notion of externality, he would have been more hopeful of commending his theory to the popular mind. What.Collier simply denied Berkeley tried to explain, and therein lies that real difference between the two writers which accounts for the comparative oblivion that has been the fate of the one, and justifies the place assigned to the other in the history of philosophy.

In a curious discourse on Genesis i. 1, which Collier published in 1730, under the modest title, A Specimen of a True Philosophy, we have a jumble of his theological views and his philosophical opinions. Inasmuch as we are often told in Scripture that God created all things in and by the Son, the aρχ∙f ∣ of the passage commented on must refer to the only begotten Son of God. If then we exist in God, because we are made by Him, as St Paul says, “in him we live, and move, and have our being,” we must believe that we exist mor,e immediately in the Son, being told, as in the text, that God made us and all things by and in His Son. Christ, the aρχh of the whole creation, must needs be in some sense the subject or object of all that is called science. Things, however, do not exist immediately in Christ, but at various distances and projections from II im. Everything in particular is in its own proper or immediate apχh or substance; but all these terminate in one, the Son of God, the substance of the whole creation. This interpretation.of the passage is corroborated by the conclusion reached in the Glavis Universalis; for it is there proved that the visible or material world exists immediately in the mind of the percipient, and hence the meaning of the text must be that mind or spirit is the αρχ⅛ in which God created the heaven and the earth. As the objects of sense exist immediately in the mind, so the mind exists immediately in the Son of God; and thus the ladder of being is completed in this Specimen of a True Philosophy. TheLogology, oraTreatise on the Logos, in Seven Sermons on John i. 1, 2, 3, and 14, was published in 1732, the year of Collier’s death. It further applies his theory of inexistence to the Son, who is said to be in the Father, as men are in Him, and material objects are in them. The Son is the “mean proportional” between God and us. Collier was heterodox in regard to the incarnation, as well as the Trinity, maintaining “that the pre-existent Word, or Son of God, was not united to a created human soul or spirit, but was himself the man called Jesus and the Christ. ’ '

See Benson’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Arthur Collier, 1837; Parr’s Metaphysical Tracts by English Philosophers of the Eighteenth, Century, 1837; T ennem.a.nn’a History of Philosophy; Hamilton’s Discussions; Professor Fraser’s edition of Berkeley s Works.

COLLIER, Jeremy (1650-1726), a learned English nonjuring divine, born at Stow-cum-Quy, Cambridgeshire, in 1650, and was educated at Caius College, Cambridge. His first appointment was to the small rectory of Ampton, near Bury St Edmunds, which, after six years, he resigned in order to proceed to London, where in 1685 he was made lecturer of Gray’s Inn. The change of Government at the Revolution, however, soon rendered the public exercise of his function impracticable. He was committed to Newgate for writing in favour of the dethroned monarch, and again on a charge of carrying on a treasonable correspondence with the enemies of the popular movement; but he was released on both occasions without trial, by the intervention of his friends. So far did he carry his scruples at this period, that he submitted to confinement rather than make a tacit acknowledgment of the jurisdiction of the court by accepting his liberty upon bail. In the two following years he continued to harass the Government by his publications; but for his boldness in granting absolution at their execution to Sir John Friend and Sir William Perkins, who had attempted the assassination of William, he was obliged to flee, and for the rest of his life continued under sentence of outlawry. When the storm had blown over he returned to London, and employed his leisure in literary works, which were less political in their tone. In 1697 appeared the first volume of his Essays on Several Moral Subjects, to which a second was added in 1705, and a third in 1709. All three series enjoyed great popularity at the time of their appearance. It was in 1798, however, that Collier produced the book by which he is best known, and for which he has been most justly praised, the famous Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. Its publication involved him in a lengthened controversy with Congreve, Vanbrugh, and the other wits of the day. The book abounds in hypercriticism and in useless display of learning, neither intrinsically valuable nor conducive to the argument. Yet, in the words of Macaulay, who gives an admirable account of the discussion in bis essay on the Comic Dramatists of the Restoration, “when all deductions have been made, great merit must be allowed to the work. There is hardly any book of that time from which it would be possible to select specimens of writing so excellent and so various.” The Short View was followed by a Defence, a Second Defence, and a Farther Vindication, and in 1703 by Mr Collier's Dissuasive from the Playhouse, in a Letter to a Person of Quality. The fight lasted in all some ten years; but Collier had right on his side, and triumphed; and the reformation of the English stage, so greatly needed, may be said to date from the publication of the Short View. From 1701 to 1721 Collier was employed in the translation and publication (in six volumes folio) of Moreri’s Dictionnaire Historique, and in the compilation and issue of the two volumes folio of his own Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain. The latter work was attacked by Burnet and others, but the author showed himself as keen a controversialist as ever. Many attempts were made to shake his fidelity to the lost cause of the Stuarts, but he continued indomitable to the end. His last work was a volume of Practical Discourses, published in 1725. He died April 26, 1726.