Here is one way of sympathizing with it. Suppose we think of Hylas as seeking to show that he can understand the realist notion of an object ‘independent’ of his actual modes of comprehension. He undertakes to ‘abstract’ away from contingencies of his own perceptual experience or contingencies of his own modes of thought, or his own conceptual choices. Then we can see Berkeley, in the person of Philonous, reminding him that this feat of abstraction is impossible. Whatever he succeeds in imagining or conceiving, he is doomed to bring his own perspective to it.
