Berkeley's Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge was published in 1710, when he was only twenty-five. The public silence that greeted it stunned him. Even the ridicule that he had anticipated was initially confined to private circles. No doubt this mortifying experience reinforced his belief “that whatever doctrine contradicts vulgar and settled opinion” must “be introduced with great caution into the world”. It had, indeed, been for this reason that he had “omitted all mention of the non-existence of matter in the title-page, dedication, preface, and introduction to” his performance. In this way he hoped that “the notion of [immaterialism] might steal unawares on the reader, who possibly would never have meddled with a book that he had known contained such paradoxes”.
This article prints two hitherto unknown letters by Adam Smith to Henry Beaufoy (1750‐95), MP for Great Yarmouth, concerning legislation that beaufoy and William Pitt had promoted. In the first letter (14 November 1786) Smith comments on changes to existing customs and exicese regulations(26 Geo. III c.49 and c.59), and implicitly takes some credit for legislation concerning the hering fishery (25 Geo. III c.65, 26 Geo. III c.81, 27 Geo. III c.10). In the second letter (29 January 1787) Smith expresses considerable pessimism about the philanthropic proposals of the British Fisheries Society to build fishing villages in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.
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