]
This explanation, in pretending to refute solipsism, of course assumes
and confirms it; for all these _cans_ and _musts_ touch only your idea
of yourself, not your actual being, and there is no thinkable world
that is not within you, as you exist really. Thus idealists are wedded
to solipsism irrevocably; and it is a happy marriage, only the name of
the lady has to be changed.
Nevertheless, lest peace should come (and peace nowadays is neither
possible nor desired), a counter-current at once overtakes the
philosophy of the immediate and carries it violently to the opposite
pole of speculation--from mystic intuition to a commercial cult of
action and a materialisation of the mind such as no materialist had
ever dreamt of. The tenderness which the pragmatists feel for life in
general, and especially for an accelerated modern life, has doubtless
contributed to this revulsion, but the speculative consideration of
the immediate might have led to it independently. For in the immediate
there is marked expectancy, craving, prayer; nothing absorbs
consciousness so much as what is not quite given. Therefore it is a
good reading of the immediate, as well as a congenial thing to say to
the contemporary world, that reality is change, growth, action,
creation.
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