Editor’s Preface To The Treatise Concerning The Principles Of Human Knowledge This book of _Principles_ contains the most systematic and reasoned exposition of Berkeley’s philosophy, in its early stage, which we possess. Like the _Essay on Vision_, its tentative pioneer, it was prepared at Trinity College, Dublin. Its author had hardly completed his twenty-fifth year when it was published. The first edition of this “First Part” of the projected Treatise, “printed by Aaron Rhames, for Jeremy Pepyat, bookseller in Skinner Row, Dublin,” appeared early in 1710. A second edition, with minor changes, and in which “Part I” was withdrawn from the title-page, was published in London in 1734, “printed for Jacob Tonson”—on the eve of Berkeley’s settlement at Cloyne. It was the last in the author’s lifetime. The projected “Second Part” of the _Principles_ was never given to the world, and we can hardly conjecture its design. In a letter in 1729 to his American friend, Samuel Johnson, Berkeley mentions that he had “made considerable progress on the Second Part,” but “the manuscript,” he adds, “was lost about fourteen years ago, during my travels in Italy; and I never had leisure since to do so disagreeable a thing as writing twice on the same subject(466).” An edition of the _Principles_ appeared in London in 1776, twenty-three years after Berkeley’s death, with a running commentary of _Remarks_ by the anonymous editor, on the pages opposite the text, in which, according to the editor, Berkeley’s doctrines are “carefully examined, and shewn to be repugnant to fact, and his principles to be incompatible with the constitution of human nature and the reason and fitness of things.” In this volume the _Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous_ are appended to the _Principles_, and a “Philosophical Discourse concerning the nature of Human Being” is prefixed to the whole, “being a defence of Mr. Locke’s principles, and some remarks on Dr. Beattie’s _Essay on Truth_,” by the author of the _Remarks on Berkeley’s Principles_. The acuteness of the _Remarks_ is not in proportion to their bulk and diffuseness: many popular misconceptions of Berkeley are served up, without appreciation of the impotence of matter, and of natural causation as only passive sense-symbolism, which is at the root of the theory of the material world against which the _Remarks_ are directed.