Time & Perspective Quote by Sydney Smith

Smith is doing that very English trick: sounding like a polite dinner guest while setting off intellectual fireworks under the table. The line is a comic miniature of Enlightenment philosophy turned into a demolition derby. Berkeley, with his immaterialism, "destroys this world" by arguing matter isn’t ultimately real. Smith reduces a metaphysical revolution to a neat publishing detail - "one volume octavo" - as if reality were mislaid by an overconfident author and a convenient book format. The joke isn’t just that Berkeley was wrong (Smith doesn’t bother to argue that); it’s that a whole “world” can be talked out of existence by clever prose.

Then he tightens the screw: if Berkeley leaves us with "nothing... but mind", Hume arrives to wreck that too. Hume’s skepticism, especially in the Treatise (1739-40, though Smith pointedly says 1737), undermines any sturdy notion of a continuous self or certain causation. So the refuge philosophy flees to after Berkeley becomes the next target. Smith’s pacing makes it feel inevitable: first matter goes, then mind follows, until the whole enterprise starts to look like a parlor game with catastrophic stakes.

As a clergyman writing in a culture anxious about skepticism’s social consequences, Smith’s subtext is conservative but not dull: these systems aren’t merely abstruse, they’re corrosive. He’s not pleading for anti-intellectualism; he’s skewering a style of reasoning that treats common sense and lived reality as disposable, then acts surprised when nothing solid is left to stand on.