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 dispensed with in practice. This prescribed formula can always be imagined or even understood. We shall be in accord with idealism by the use of this easy little formula, “If some one had been there,” or even by saying, “For a universal consciousness. . . .” The difference of the realist and idealist theory becomes then purely verbal. This amounts to saying that it disappears. But there is always much verbalism in idealism.

One more objection: if this witness—the consciousness—suffices to give objects a continuity of existence, we may content ourselves with a less important witness. Why a man? The eyes of a mollusc would suffice, or those of infusoria, or even of a particle of protoplasm: living matter would become a condition of the existence of dead matter. This, we must acknowledge, is a singular condition, and this conclusion condemns the doctrine.