In December Percival writes from London that he has “given the book to Lord Pembroke,” who “thought the author an ingenious man, and to be encouraged”; but for himself he “cannot believe in the non-existence of Matter”; and he had tried in vain to induce Samuel Clarke, the great English metaphysician, either to refute or to accept the New Principle. In February Berkeley sends an explanatory letter for Lord Pembroke to Percival’s care. In a letter in June he turns to social questions, and suggests that if “some Irish gentlemen of good fortune and generous inclinations would constantly reside in England, there to watch for the interests of Ireland, they might bring far greater advantage than they could by spending their incomes at home.” And so 1711 passes, with responses of ignorant critics; vain endeavours to draw worthy criticism from Samuel Clarke; the author all the while doing work as a Tutor in Trinity College on a modest income; now and then on holidays in Meath or elsewhere in Ireland. Three discourses on _Passive Obedience_ in the College Chapel in 1712, misinterpreted, brought on him the reproach of Jacobitism. Yet they were designed to shew that society rests on a deeper foundation than force and calculations of utility, and is at last rooted in principles of an immutable morality. Locke’s favourite opinion, that morality is a demonstrable, seems to weigh with him in these _Discourses_. But Berkeley was not yet done with the exposition and vindication of his new thought, for it seemed to him charged with supreme practical issues for mankind. In the two years which followed the publication of the _Principles_ he was preparing to reproduce his spiritual conception of the universe, in the dramatic form of dialogue, convenient for dealing popularly with plausible objections. The issue was the _Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous_, in which Philonous argues for the absurdity of an abstract matter that is unrealised in the experience of living beings, as against Hylas, who is put forward to justify belief in this abstract reality. The design of the _Dialogues_ is to present in a familiar form “such principles as, by an easy solution of the perplexities of philosophers, together with their own native evidence, may at once recommend themselves as genuine to the mind, and rescue philosophy from the endless pursuits it is engaged in; which, with a plain demonstration of the Immediate Providence of an all-seeing God, should seem the readiest preparation, as well as the strongest motive to the study and practice of virtue(4).” When the _Dialogues_ were completed, at the end of 1712, Berkeley resolved to visit London, as he told Percival, “in order to print my new book of Dialogues, and to make acquaintance with men of merit.” He got leave of absence from his College “for the recovery of his health,” which had suffered from study, and perhaps too he remembered that Bacon commends travel as “to the younger sort a part of education.”