[265:24] Quoted from Balfour: _Foundations of Belief_, pp. 29-31. [265:25] Ferguson: _Religion of Democracy_, p. 10. [266:26] Haeckel: _Op. cit._, p. 344. [266:27] Huxley: _Evolution and Ethics_, p. 45. _Collected Essays_, Vol. IX. CHAPTER IX SUBJECTIVISM[267:1] [Sidenote: Subjectivism Originally Associated with Relativism and Scepticism.] § 126. When, in the year 1710, Bishop Berkeley maintained the thesis of empirical idealism, having rediscovered it and announced it with a justifiable sense of originality, he provoked a kind of critical judgment that was keenly annoying if not entirely surprising to him. In refuting the conception of material substance and demonstrating the dependence of being upon mind, he at once sought, as he did repeatedly in later years, to establish the world of practical belief, and so to reconcile metaphysics and common-sense. Yet he found himself hailed as a fool and a sceptic. In answer to an inquiry concerning the reception of his book in London, his friend Sir John Percival wrote as follows: "I did but name the subject matter of your book of _Principles_ to some ingenious friends of mine and they immediately treated it with ridicule, at the same time refusing to read it, which I have not yet got one to do. A physician of my acquaintance undertook to discover your person, and argued you must needs be mad, and that you ought to take remedies. A bishop pitied you, that a desire of starting something new should put you upon such an undertaking. Another told me that you are not gone so far as another gentleman in town, who asserts not only that there is no such thing as Matter, but that we ourselves have no being at all."[268:2]