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Most 18th-century thinkers gave up the quest for metaphysical knowledge after imbibing Bayle’s arguments. The Irish bishop George Berkeley, an empiricist and idealist, fought skeptical doubts by identifying appearance and reality and offering a spiritualistic metaphysics. He was immediately seen as just another skeptic, however, since he effectively denied the existence of a world beyond experience. Bayle’s chief 18th-century successor was David Hume. Combining empirical and skeptical arguments, Hume asserted that neither inductive nor deductive evidence can establish the truth of any matter of fact. Knowledge can consist of intuitively obvious matters or demonstrable relations of ideas but not of ...(100 of 5470 words)