Elizabeth Montagu, in a letter to Gilbert West of 28 January 1753, reflects on the life and character of George Berkeley, who had died two weeks before. She confirms the testimony of all who knew Berkeley, that he was a man ‘eminent in every Christian virtue’ and was prized as one who ‘excelled every one in the arts of conversation’. Montagu's assessment of Berkeley's philosophical writings, however, is less than glowing:

And thinking, no doubt, of Berkeley's late and extraordinary work, Siris, she worries that ‘he had an imagination too lively to be trusted to itself’; during his last years of isolation at Cloyne Berkeley worked the rich ore of his imagination into ‘bright but useless medals’.

Montagu's letter is typical in its response to Berkeley's work. Almost all his contemporaries found the immaterialism propounded in the Principles of Human Knowledge and the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous unconvincing, and many chose to dismiss it as ‘subtile’. And yet they all conceded that Berkeley ‘cannot be confuted’, conscious of their own inability to refute any of his premises. This consciousness of the integrity of Berkeley's argument can only be attributed to his lucid and direct exposition of the few, seemingly simple arguments on which his system rests.