Berkeley's system, whatever may be the right textbook
label to apply to it, was
plainly a piece of religious apologetics, the outline of a constructive
natural theology,
of a theistic metaphysic. From the Principles onwards he was fashioning
a reasoned
case for the existence of God, of a certain kind of God with a
certain kind of relation to the world.
Berkeley's introductory remarks to several of his treatises
verify Jessop's
evaluation. Berkeley saw his task to be the defence of the central tenets
of
classical theism, achieved through ‘a plain demonstration of the
immediate
Providence of an all-seeing God, and the natural immortality
of the soul...’. At the foundation of this defence, as is
well known, lies the metaphysic
commonly called ‘immaterialism’, which holds that, contrary
to popular
belief, physical objects are not enduring material substances, but rather
ideas
inhering in finite and infinite spirit.