If all knowledge is of experience and experience cannot be
knowledge of anything else, knowledge proper is evidently impossible.
There can be only feeling; and the least self-transcendence, even in
memory, must be an illusion. You may have the most complex images you
will; but nothing pictured there can exist outside, not even past or
alien experience, if you picture it.[1] Solipsism has always been the
evident implication of idealism; but the idealists, when confronted
with this consequence, which is dialectically inconvenient, have never
been troubled at heart by it, for at heart they accept it. To the
uninitiated they have merely murmured, with a pitying smile and a wave
of the hand: What! are you still troubled by that? Or if compelled to
be so scholastic as to labour the point they have explained, as usual,
that oneself cannot be the absolute because the _idea_ of oneself, to
arise, must be contrasted with other ideas. Therefore, you cannot well
have the idea of a world in which nothing appears but the _idea_ of
yourself.
[Footnote 1: Perhaps some unsophisticated reader may wonder if I am
not trying to mislead him, or if any mortal ever really maintained
anything so absurd. Strictly the idealistic principle does not justify
a denial that independent things, by chance resembling my ideas, may
actually exist; but it justifies the denial that these things, if they
existed, could be those I know.
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