Principles Of Human Knowledge - pg. 66

The clearest trace of the scholastic tradition in Berkeley's work is his view that in perception we share ideas with God. This is a later version of St Augustine's doctrine of divine illumination, according to which God is the interior light of the human soul. A vision of things as they really are is present in us by virtue of the light that is in us, namely God; it cannot be extracted from sense-experience alone. This view is also clearly related to Malebranche's conception of seeing all things in God. Similarly, in my view Berkeley wants to retain a sense that there is natural necessity in the world. He cannot do it in Locke's mechanistic way, as we say, and he is worried (as Dun Scotus was) by the thought that nothing can be necessary if God could have ordained things otherwise -- or, to put it the other way round, that if there were natural necessities, they would consitute a constraint on the power of God.

Principles Of Human Knowledge - pg. 59

The overall story, as I see it, of how Berkeley stands in relation to the work of these four men is roughly as follows. Malebranche represents an intellectual tradition that stretches back to the scholastics and eventually to St Augustine. Descartes and Locke represents a distinctive philosophical position, informed by the new science. Newton was the new science personified. Berkeley was deeply impressed by Newton's work, and wanted to give it pride of place in his philosophical picture. But he wanted to overtun much of the philosophy of Locke and Descartes, and return as (always still informed by the new science) more nearly to the ways of Malebranche and his tradition.