Page:A Collection of Esoteric Writings.djvu/113

99 Perhaps for the latter reason your readers may find an interest in his thoughts, which I allow myself to render as follows:—

"The world is my mental perception,"—this is a self-evident truth for every living and discerning being, although man alone can bring it into a reflecting abstract consciousness, and when he does do so, in fact, then philosophical reflection has begun in him. Then also it becomes a clear certainty to him, that what he knows is no Sun, no Earth, but only an eye that sees a Sun, a hand that touches an Earth, that the surrounding world is there only as a mental representation, i.e., absolutely in relation to something else, which something else is himself. If any truth can be pronounced a priori, then it is this one, the statement of that form of all possible and thinkable experiences, more universal than all others, more so than time, space and causality. All these, in fact, presuppose already the former; it is only the division in object and subject that makes possible and imaginable phenomena of whatsoever kind, abstract or intuitive, pure or empirical. Therefore, no truth is more certain, more independent of all others, or requiring less proof than that everything that exists in our perception is only Object in relation to Subject, the perception of that which perceives; in a word,—our own mental representation.

"And this applies as much to all Past as to the Present, and all Future; to what is most distant, and to what is most near, because it applies to time and space themselves, in which alone the relations can exist.

"This is by no means a new truth. It was already contained in the sceptical premises from which Descartes proceeded. Berkeley, however, was the first to give it an absolute form, and has thereby deserved much of philosophy, though his other doctrines cannot bear criticism. The principal mistake of Kant was his neglect of this axiom.

"How long ago, however this fundamental truth has been acknowledged by the Sages of India, appearing as the