“I did but name the subject-matter of your book of _Principles_ to some ingenuous friends of mine,” Percival says, “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 describe your person, and argued you must needs be mad, and that you ought to take remedies. A bishop pitied you, that a desire and vanity of starting something new should put you upon such an undertaking; and when I justified you in that part of your character, and added other deserving qualities you have, he could not tell what to think of you. Another told me an ingenious man ought not to be discouraged from exerting his wit, and said Erasmus was not worse thought of for writing in praise of folly; but that you are not gone as far as a gentleman in town, who asserts not only that there is no such thing as Matter, but that we ourselves have no being at all.” It is not surprising that a book which was supposed to deny the existence of all that we see and touch should be ridiculed, and its author called a madman. What vexed the author was, “that men who had never considered my book should confound me with the sceptics, who doubt the existence of sensible things, and are not positive of any one thing, not even of their own being. But whoever reads my book with attention will see that I question not the existence of anything we perceive by our senses. Fine spun metaphysics are what on all occasions I declaim against, and if any one shall shew anything of that sort in my _Treatise_ I will willingly correct it.” A material world that was real enough to yield physical science, to make known to us the existence of other persons and of God, and which signified in very practical ways happiness or misery to sentient beings, seemed to him sufficiently real for human science and all other purposes. Nevertheless, in the ardour of youth Berkeley had hardly fathomed the depths into which his New Principle led, and which he hoped to escape by avoiding the abstractions of “fine-spun metaphysics.”