BERKELEY, George.
Traktat o nachalakh chelovecheskogo znaniia.
St Petersburg, O. N. Popov, 1905.
8vo, pp. 183, [1]; partially uncut, lightly browned throughout; a very good copy in the original printed paper wrappers, spine chipped at foot, a few small tears to spine; library stamp of J. Sokoloff to title-page.
First Russian edition of George Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge, translated by E. Dobolsky and edited by N.G. Dobolsky. The text, on the chief causes of error and difficulty in the sciences, examining the grounds of scepticism, atheism and irreligion, was first published in Dublin in 1710, and was originally intended to be the first of four parts, the remaining parts covering issues of ethics and metaphysics, the principles of natural philosophy, and mathematics. Unfortunately ‘the manuscript was lost… during my travels in Italy,’ (so wrote the author to Samuel Johnson in 1713), and the work remained in its current form. Berkeley’s preface to the work described it as ‘a new demonstration of the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul’ (q.v. Hone & Rossi p. 54), thus building upon Berkeley’s first work, The New Theory of Vision. In short, it expands upon the principle ‘if a tree falls in forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a noise?’, pondering whether matter, divine or mortal, exists if one is not there to perceive it. It did not immediately win success, probably because ‘it is not conceivable how Berkeley can be answered by pure reasoning’ (Life of Johnson, 1887), and thus scholars preferred to leave it well alone.
The first critical work on Berkeley in Russian appeared in 1873, Smirnov’s ‘Philosophia Berkeley.’ This was followed by Vagretsov’s ‘Few words on Berkeley’ in 1908. No Russian collected edition existed before 1978. Therefore eminent Russian philosophers, including Lenin himself, must have read Berkeley either from the current edition or in translation.
Jessop 56.
