intended recipient of the discourse is put into doubt by a passage that appears toward the end of the book: "Query 58: Whether it be really an effect of Thinking, that the same Men admire the great author for his Fluxions, and deride him for his Religion?"

Here Berkeley ridicules those who celebrate Newton (the inventor of "fluxions", roughly equivalent to the differentials of later versions of the differential calculus) as a genius while deriding his well-known religiosity. Since Berkeley is here explicitly calling attention to Newton's