Collier Arthur (1680–1732), English philosopher, a Wiltshire parish priest whose Clavis Universalis (1713) defends a version of immaterialism closely akin to Berkeley’s. Matter, Collier contends, ‘exists in, or in dependence on mind.’ He emphatically affirms the existence of bodies, and, like Berkeley, defends immaterialism as the only alternative to skepticism. Collier grants that bodies seem to be external, but their ‘quasi-externeity’ is only the effect of God’s will. In Part I of the Clavis Collier argues (as Berkeley had in his New Theory of Vision, 1709) that the visible world is not external. In Part II he argues (as Berkeley had in the Principles, 1710, and Three Dialogues, 1713) that the external world ‘is a being utterly impossible.’ Two of Collier’s arguments for the ‘intrinsic repugnancy’ of the external world resemble Kant’s first and second antinomies. Collier argues, e.g., that the material world is both finite and infinite; the contradiction can be avoided, he suggests, only by denying its external existence.
Some scholars suspect that Collier deliberately concealed his debt to Berkeley; most accept his report that he arrived at his views ten years before he published them. Collier first refers to Berkeley in letters written in 1714–15. In A Specimen of True Philosophy (1730), where he offers an immaterialist interpretation of the opening verse of Genesis, Collier writes that ‘except a single passage or two’ in Berkeley’s Dialogues, there is no other book ‘which I ever heard of’ on the same subject as the Clavis. This is a puzzling remark on several counts, one being that in the Preface to the Dialogues, Berkeley describes his earlier books. Collier’s biographer reports seeing among his papers (now lost) an outline, dated 1708, on ‘the question of the visible world being without us or not,’ but he says no more about it. The biographer concludes that Collier’s independence cannot reasonably be doubted; perhaps the outline would, if unearthed, establish this.
See also BERKELEY. K.P.W.