knows perfectly well.  Nor is this all:  you are not only ignorant of the true nature of everything, but you know not whether anything really exists, or whether there are any true natures at all; forasmuch as you attribute to your material beings an absolute or external existence, wherein you suppose their reality consists.  And, as you are forced in the end to acknowledge such an existence means either a direct repugnancy, or nothing at all, it follows that you are obliged to pull down your own hypothesis of material Substance, and positively to deny the real existence of any part of the universe.  And so you are plunged into the deepest and most deplorable scepticism that ever man was.  Tell me, Hylas, is it not as I say?

HYL.  I agree with you.  Material substance was no more than an hypothesis; and a false and groundless one too.  I will no longer spend my breath in defence of it.  But whatever hypothesis you advance, or whatsoever scheme of things you introduce in its stead, I doubt not it will appear every whit as false:  let me but be allowed to question you upon it.  That is, suffer me to serve you in your own kind, and I warrant it shall conduct you through as many perplexities and contradictions, to the very same state of scepticism that I myself am in at present.

Phil.  I assure you, Hylas, I do not pretend to frame any hypothesis at all.  I am of a vulgar cast, simple enough to believe my senses, and leave things as I find them.  To be plain, it is my opinion that the real things are those very things I see, and feel, and perceive by my senses.  These I know; and, finding they answer all the necessities and purposes of life, have no reason to be solicitous about any other unknown beings.  A piece of sensible bread, for instance, would stay my stomach better than ten thousand times as much of that insensible, unintelligible, real bread you speak of.  It is likewise my opinion that colours and other sensible qualities are on the objects.  I cannot for my life help thinking that snow is white, and fire hot.  You indeed, who by snow and fire mean certain external, unperceived, unperceiving substances, are in the right to deny whiteness or heat to be affections inherent in them.  But I, who understand by those words the things I see and feel, am obliged to think like other folks.  And, as I am no sceptic with regard to the nature of things, so neither am I as to their existence.  That a thing should be really perceived by my senses, and at the same time not really exist, is to me a plain contradiction; since I cannot prescind or abstract, even in thought, the existence of a sensible thing from its being perceived.  Wood, stones, fire, water, flesh, iron, and the like things, which I name and discourse of, are things that I know.  And I should not have known them but that I perceived them by my senses; and things perceived by the senses are immediately perceived; and things immediately perceived