Note 562 — CANTO THE ELEVENTH.

{427}[Berkeley did not deny the reality of existence, but the reality of matter as an abstract conception. "It is plain," he says (On the Principles of Human Knowledge, sect. ix.), "that the very notion of what is called matter or corporeal substance, involves a contradiction in it." Again, "It were a mistake to think that what is here said derogates in the least from the reality of things." His contention was that this reality depended, not on an abstraction called matter, "an inert, extended unperceiving substance," but on "those unextended, indivisible substances or spirits, which act, and think, and perceive them [unthinking beings]."—Ibid., sect. xci., The Works of George Berkeley, D.D., 1820, i. 27, 69, 70.]