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I am not for changing things into ideas, but rather ideas into things; since those immediate objects of perception, which according to you, are only appearances of things, I take to be the real things themselves.

This is a clear statement of Berkeley's idealism. He is not trying to thin down reality, he tells us, but rather to bulk up ideas. His aim is not to prove that the world is composed ofmereideas, mere figments; rather, he is saying that the world is comprised of these very substantial, very real things, that happen to be mind-dependent. These are as real as we now mistakenly think that matter is. The only difference is that we believe that matter can exist outside of any mind, whereas he happens to know that real things cannot exist independently of mind.

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