When he left London in 1734 Berkeley was on the eve of what sounded like a mathematical controversy, although it was in his intention metaphysical, and was suggested by the Seventh Dialogue in _Alciphron_. In one of his letters to Prior, early in that year, he told him that though he “could not read, owing to ill health,” yet his thought was as distinct as ever, and that for amusement “he passed his early hours in thinking of certain mathematical matters which may possibly produce something(33).” This turned, it seems, upon a form of scepticism among contemporary mathematicians, occasioned by the presence of mysteries of religion. The _Analyst_ was the issue. It was followed by a controversy in which some of the most eminent mathematicians took part. _Mathematica exeunt in mysteria_ might have been the motto of the _Analyst_. The assumptions in mathematics, it is argued, are as mysterious as those of theologians and metaphysicians. Mathematicians cannot translate into perfectly intelligible thought their own doctrines in fluxions. If man’s knowledge of God is rooted in mystery, so too is mathematical analysis. Pure science at last loses itself in propositions which usefully regulate action, but which cannot be comprehended. This is the drift of the argument in the _Analyst_; but perhaps Berkeley’s inclination to extreme conclusions, and to what is verbally paradoxical, led him into doubtful positions in the controversy to which the _Analyst_ gave rise. Instead of ultimate imperfect comprehensibility, he seems to attribute absolute contradiction to the Newtonian fluxions. Baxter, in his _Inquiry_, had asserted that things in Berkeley’s book of _Principles_ forced the author “to suspect that even mathematics may not be very sound knowledge at the bottom.” The metaphysical argument of the _Analyst_ was obscured in a cloud of mathematics. ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ The social condition of Ireland attracted Berkeley almost as soon as he was settled in Cloyne. He was surrounded by a large native Irish population and a small group of English colonists. The natives, long governed in the interest of the stranger, had never learned to exert and govern themselves. The self-reliance which Berkeley preached fifteen years before, as a mean for “preventing the ruin of Great Britain,” was more wanting in Ireland, where the simplest maxims of social economy were neglected. It was a state of things fitted to move one who was too independent to permit his aspirations to be confined to the ordinary routine of the Irish episcopate, and who could not forget the favourite moral maxim of his life.