Page:Appearance and Reality (1916).djvu/543

 The Other, which it asserts, is found on enquiry to be really no Other. It implies, against its will and unconsciously, some mode of experience; it affirms something else, if you please, but still something else of the same kind. And the form of otherness and of opposition, again, has no sense save as an internal aspect of that which it endeavours to oppose. We have, in short, in the end but one idea, and that idea is positive. And hence to deny this idea is, in effect, to assert it; and to doubt it, actually and without a delusion, is not possible.

If I attempted to labour this point, I should perhaps but obscure it. Show me your idea of an Other, not a part of experience, and I will show you at once that it is, throughout and wholly, nothing else at all. But an effort to anticipate, and to deal in advance with every form of self-delusion, would, I think, hardly enlighten us. I shall therefore assume this main principle as clearly established, and shall endeavour merely to develope it and to free it from certain obscurities.

I will recur first to the difficult subject of Solipsism. This has been discussed perhaps sufficiently in Chapter xxi., but a certain amount of repetition may be useful here. It may be objected that, if Reality is proved to be one experience, Solipsism follows. Again, if we can transcend the self at all, then we have made our way, it may be urged, to something perhaps not experience. Our main conclusion, in short, may be met not directly but through a dilemma. It may be threatened with destruction by a self-contradictory development of its own nature.

Now my answer to this dilemma is a denial of that which it assumes. It assumes, in the first place, that my self is as wide as my experience. And it assumes, in the second place, that my self is something hard and exclusive. Hence, if you are inside you are not outside at all, and, if you are