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 impugn the belief in physical facts reported by the senses and by natural science, such as the existence of a ring of Saturn, reducing them to appearances, which are facts reported by personal remembrance; and this is actually the choice made by British and German critics of knowledge, who, relying on memory and history, have denied the existence of anything but experience. Yet the opposite procedure would seem more judicious; knowledge of the facts reported by history is mediated by documents which are physical facts; and these documents must first be discovered and believed to have subsisted unknown and to have had a more or less remote origin in time and place, before they can be taken as evidence for any mental events; for if I did not believe that there had been any men in Athens I should not imagine they had had any thoughts. Even personal memory, when it professes to record any distant experience, can recognise and place this experience only by first reconstructing the material scene in which it. occurred. Memory records moral events in terms of their physical occasions; and if the latter are merely imaginary, the former must be doubly so, like the thoughts of a personage in a novel. My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.

Romantic solipsism, in which the self making up the universe is a moral person endowed with memory and vanity, is accordingly untenable. Not that it is unthinkable or self-contradictory; because all the complementary objects which might be requisite to give point and body to the idea of oneself might be only ideas and not facts; and a solitary deity imagining a world or remembering his own past constitutes a perfectly conceivable universe. But this imagination