To Be Is To Be Perceived

All That Stock Of Arguments [the Skeptics] Produce To Depreciate Our Faculties, And Make Mankind Appear Ignorant And Low, Are Drawn Principally From This Head, To Wit, That We Are Under An Invincible Blindness As To The True And Real Nature Of Things.

If We Admit A Thing So Extraordinary As The Creation Of This World, It Should Seem That We Admit Something Strange, And Odd, And New To Human Apprehension, Beyond Any Other Miracle Whatsoever.

Atheism ... That Bugbear Of Women And Fools ... Is The Very Top And Perfection Of Free-thinking. It Is The Grand Arcanum To Which A True Genius Naturally Riseth, By A Certain Climax Or Gradation Of Thought, And Without Which He Can Never Possess His Soul In Absolute Liberty And Repose.

The Real Essence, The Internal Qualities, And Constitution Of Even The Meanest Object, Is Hid From Our View; Something There Is Inevery Drop Of Water, Every Grain Of Sand, Which It Is Beyond The Power Of Human Understanding To Fathom Or Comprehend. But It Is Evidentthat We Are Influenced By False Principles To That Degree As To Mistrust Our Senses, And Think We Know Nothing Of Those Things Which We Perfectly Comprehend.

But, Say You, Surely There Is Nothing Easier Than For Me To Imagine Trees, For Instance, In A Park [. . .] And Nobody By To Perceive Them. [...] The Objects Of Sense Exist Only When They Are Perceived; The Trees Therefore Are In The Garden [. . .] No Longer Than While There Is Somebody By To Perceive Them.