The treatise was written and published by Berkeley in 1721 in Latin as a competition work for the Paris Academy of Sciences.

“In reality we perceive nothing by the senses except actions or sensible qualities and corporeal things - completely passive, whether in motion or at rest; reason and experience tell us that there is nothing active except the mind or soul. Everything that is imagined beyond this should be attributed to hypotheses and mathematical abstractions, it must be thoroughly mastered." ― George Berkeley