"Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one volume octavo; and nothing remained, after his time, but mind; which experienced a similar fate from the hand of Mr. Hume in 1737"

This quote by Sydney Smith is an amusing recommendation to the philosophical works of Bishop Berkeley and Mr. Hume. Bishop Berkeley was an 18th century theorist who argued that the physical world is made up of ideas and that physical things are just concepts in the mind of God. Mr. Hume was a thinker who argued that the only thing that can be known for particular is the contents of one's own mind. Smith's quote suggests that Berkeley's philosophy destroyed the physical world, leaving only the mind, which was then ruined by Hume's viewpoint. Smith's quote is an amusing method of revealing the concept that philosophical arguments can be so effective that they can appear to damage the physical world. It likewise suggests that philosophical arguments can be so effective that they can even damage the concept of the mind itself.