It seems I may have been unduly harsh in my initial reaction to Berkeley's abstruse epistemological essay. When I came to review sections 110-117, in which Berkeley critiques Newtonian notions of Absolute Space and Absolute Time, he seems to come extraordinarily close to a conclusion which was made famous by a Swiss patent office clerk in a paper in physics published in 1905. Of course, having only read Einstein's The Meaning of Relativity, and that in my boyhood, it would be presumptuous of me to suggest that Berkeley prefigured the discovery for which Einstein received the Nobel Prize by some 195 years. Making a less veiled accusation of plagiarism would require, at the very least, reading the 1905 Special Theory of Relativity and possibly the 1922 General Theory as well; in other words, a detailed study of the whole of early twentieth-century physics.
In the words of Gerald Ford (in his Chevy Chase avatar), "I was told there would be no math."
362 days, 50 novels, 49 books of non-fiction to go.
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