Bishop Berkeley and the Progress of Arts and Learning: Notes on a Literary Convention

Abstract

HE IDEA of the heliotropic or westward progress of civilization 1 and the arts and sciences is a commonplace in literature, recognized by many literary historians including Richard Foster Jones, Tucker Brooke, Rene Wellek, and Ernest Lee Tuveson, and is considered of sufficient importance in the history of thought to merit refutation in Toynbee's Study of History.' The genesis of the commonplace may be in the speculations of antiquity on mythic realms to the west. The first appearance of the convention in its simplest mode is in medieval literature. Its culmination in English literature appears in the progress pieces of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it becomes an explicit or implicit element in so many of those pseudo-historical poems which traced the course of learning, or liberty, or poetry, or genius, or religion, or man himself through the ages and brought the subject at last safely and triumphantly to England's shores.2 The idea is, of course, immortalized in George Berkeley's line, Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way' from his Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America, which he wrote in 1726 but did not publish until I752.3 Though frequently acknowledged a literary convention, the idea