Andrew Baxter’s _Inquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul_, referred to in Berkeley’s letter to Johnson, appeared in 1733. It has a chapter on “Dean Berkeley’s Scheme against the existence of Matter and a Material World,” which is worthy of mention because it is the earliest elaborate criticism of the New Principle, although it had then been before the world for more than twenty years. The title of the chapter shews Baxter’s imperfect comprehension of the proposition which he attempts to refute. It suggests that Berkeley argued for the non-existence of the things we see and touch, instead of for their necessary dependence on, or subordination to, realising percipient Mind, so far as they are concrete realities. Baxter, moreover, was a Scot; and his criticism is interesting as a foretaste of the protracted discussion of the “ideal theory” by Reid and his friends, and later on by Hamilton. But Baxter’s book was not the first sign of Berkeley’s influence in Scotland. We are told by Dugald Stewart, that “the novelty of Berkeley’s paradox attracted very powerfully the attention of a set of young men who were then prosecuting their studies at Edinburgh, who formed themselves into a Society for the express purpose of soliciting from him an explanation of some parts of his theory which seemed to them obscurely or equivocally expressed. To this correspondence the amiable and excellent prelate seems to have given every encouragement; and I have been told on the best authority that he was accustomed to say that his reasoning had been nowhere better understood than by this club of young Scotsmen(30).” Thus, and afterwards through Hume and Reid, Berkeley is at the root of philosophy in Scotland. ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ The two years of indifferent health and authorship in London sum up what may be called the American period of Berkeley’s life. Early in 1734 letters to Prior open a new vista in his history. He was nominated to the bishopric of Cloyne in the south of Ireland, and we have now to follow him to the remote region which was his home for eighteen years. The interest of the philosophic Queen, and perhaps some compensation for the Bermuda disappointment, may explain the appearance of the metaphysical and social idealist in the place where he shone as a star of the first magnitude in the Irish Church of the eighteenth century. III. Later Years (1734-53).