Page:Idealism and the Theory of Knowledge.djvu/7

Rh into ourselves and in a literal sense to make our mind a ‘kingdom’ to itself is suicidal. It would be like the attempt of the abstract pleasure-seeker to get pleasure apart from all interest in anything but pleasure itself.

Berkeleianism, if we neglect the somewhat artificial expedients by means of which Berkeley tried to find his way back to an objective world or at least to an objective deity, may easily be pushed into the abyss of Solipsism. And, perhaps, there may still be some one who, taking the doctrine in this sense, would repeat the paradoxical assertion of Hume that Berkeley’s argument ‘cannot be refuted,’ though it ‘carries no conviction.’ In truth, it is so far from being incapable of refutation, that in its very statement it refutes itself, by setting up an ‘ipse’ or self with no not-self as its correlate, and indeed, by assuming the possibility of the existence of a finite individual, who is conscious of himself in his individuality, and yet is not, ipso facto, aware of his relation to any greater whole in which he is a part. In like manner, in the similar but more developed doctrine of Leibniz the monads ‘have no windows,’ or, perhaps we might say irreverently, no front-windows, through which they may come into real relations with objects; but the result is that they have to be conceived as under continual illumination by a God, who gives them the apparent experience of a world of which directly they could know nothing. They are isolated from reality in a phantom universe of their own, a sort of spiritual theatre set up in their own souls; but care is taken that the great drama of existence shall be re-enacted on this private stage. Berkeley, in the end, had accepted nearly the same modified form of Subjectivism, dismissing, what on this theory was superfluous, the reality of any world but a world of spirits and their conscious states. And in this shape, which is supposed to derive some support from Kant, the doctrine seems still to be accepted by some writers, as the genuine result of idealism, and it has been both attacked and defended on this basis. For, while there are those who find in such a doctrine a reductio ad absurdum of all idealism, there are others to whom, as to Berkeley, it seems a valuable safeguard against materialism, and a fundamental element in any spiritualistic theory of the world. Fearing the abyss of Solipsism, and reading in a onesided way the truth that all objects as such are relative to the subject, such writers would compromise with the enemy, and abandon to him all parts of the universe in which they cannot find thought and will, or at least some form of consciousness; and they would