Page:Appearance and Reality (1916).djvu/268

 doctrine. Upon our general theory they lose their foundation and vanish.

The argument in favour of Solipsism, put most simply, is as follows. “I cannot transcend experience, and experience must be my experience. From this it follows that nothing beyond my self exists; for what is experience is its states.”

The argument derives its strength, in part, from false theory, but to a greater extent perhaps from thoughtless obscurity. I will begin by pointing out the ambiguity which lends some colour to this appeal to experience. Experience may mean experience only direct, or indirect also. Direct experience I understand to be confined to the given simply, to the merely felt or presented. But indirect experience includes all fact that is constructed from the basis of the “this” and the “mine.” It is all that is taken to exist beyond the felt moment. This is a distinction the fatal result of which Solipsism has hardly realized; for upon neither interpretation of experience can its argument be defended.

I. Let us first suppose that the experience, to which it appeals, is direct. Then, we saw in our ninth chapter, the mere “given” fails doubly to support that appeal. It supplies, on the one hand, not enough, and, on the other hand, too much. It offers us a not-self with the self, and so ruins Solipsism by that excess. But, upon the other side, it does not supply us with any self at all, if we mean by self a substantive the possessor of an object or even its own states. And Solipsism is, on this side, destroyed by defect. But, before I develope this, I will state an objection which by itself might suffice.

My self, as an existence to which phenomena belong as its adjectives, is supposed to be given by a direct experience. But this gift plainly is an illusion. Such an experience can supply us with no reality beyond that of the moment. There is no faculty which can deliver the immediate revelation