The rearrangement of the Works is a feature in the present edition. Much of the new material that was included in the 1871 edition reached me when the book was far advanced in the press, and thus the chronological arrangement, strictly followed in the present edition, was not possible. A chronological arrangement is suggested by Berkeley himself. “I could wish that all the things I have published on these philosophical subjects were read in the order wherein I published them,” are his words in one of his letters to Johnson; “and a second time with a critical eye, adding your own thought and observation upon every part as you went along.” The first three volumes in this edition contain the Philosophical Works exclusively; arranged in chronological order, under the three periods of Berkeley’s life. The First Volume includes those of his early life; the Second those produced in middle life; and the Third those of his later years. The Miscellaneous Works are presented in like manner in the Fourth Volume. The four little treatises in which Berkeley in early life unfolded his new thought about the universe, along with his college _Commonplace Book_ published in 1871, which prepared the way for them, form, along with the Life, the contents of the First Volume. It is of them that the author writes thus, in another of his letters to Johnson:—“I do not indeed wonder that on first reading what I have written men are not thoroughly convinced. On the contrary, I should very much wonder if prejudices which have been many years taking root should be extirpated in a few hours’ reading. I had no inclination to trouble the world with large volumes. What I have done was rather with a view of giving hints to thinking men, who have leisure and curiosity to go to the bottom of things, and pursue them in their own minds. Two or three times reading these small tracts, and making what is read the occasion of thinking, would, I believe, render the whole familiar and easy to the mind, and take off that shocking appearance which hath often been observed to attend speculative truths.” Except Johnson, none of Berkeley’s eighteenth-century critics seem to have observed this rule. _Alciphron, or The Minute Philosopher_, with its supplement in the _Theory of Visual Language Vindicated_, being the philosophical works of his middle life, associated with its American enterprise, form the Second Volume. In them the conception of the universe that was unfolded in the early writings is applied, in vindication of religious morality and Christianity, against the Atheism attributed to those who called themselves Free-thinkers; who were treated by Berkeley as, at least by implication, atheistic.