But I should have thought myself that the conclusion which follows is quite otherwise. I should have said that what was proved from the premises was not that A-B exists naked, but that A-B, if unconditioned, is false and unreal, and ought never to have been asserted at all except as a useful working fiction. In other words the observed absence of one of the terms from its place, i.e. the field of observation, is not a proof that this term exists elsewhere, but is rather here a negative instance to disprove the assumed universal A-B, if that is taken unconditionally. Of course if you started by supposing A-B to be unconditionally true, you would at the start have assumed the conclusion to be proved.
And, taken as directed against Solipsism, the argument once more is bad, as I think any argument against Solipsism must be, unless it begins by showing that the premises of Solipsism are in part erroneous. But any attempt at refutation by way of elimination seems to me even to be absurd. For in any observation to find in fact the absence of all Cœnesthesia and inner feeling of self is surely quite impossible. Nor again would the Solipsist lightly admit that his self was co-extensive merely with what at any one time is present to him. And if further the Solipsist admits that he cannot explain the course of outward experience, any more than he can explain the sequence of his inmost feelings, and that he uses all such abstract universals as your A-B simply as useful fictions, how can you, by such an argument as the above, show that he contradicts himself? A failure to explain is certainly not always an inconsistency, and to prove that a view is unsatisfactory is not always to demonstrate that it is false. Mr. Hobhouse’s crucial instance to prove the reality of A-B apart from the self could to the Solipsist at most show a sequence that he was unable to explain.[1] How in short in this way you are to drive him out of his circle I do not see—unless of course he is obliging enough to contradict himself in advance by allowing the possibility of A-B existing apart, or being real or true independently and unconditionally.
The Solipsist, while he merely maintains the essential necessity of his self to the Universe and every part of it, cannot in my opinion be refuted, and so far certainly he is right. For, except as a relative point of view, there is no apartness or independence in the Universe. It is not by crude attempts at elimination that
- ↑ The position of the Solipsist I understand to be this, that no reality or fact has any existence or meaning except the reality of his self. And when he is pressed as to an order of phenomena which he cannot explain, I do not see how on and from his own premises he is to be precluded from appealing to unknown conditions in his self. ‘Surely,’ he might reply, ‘on any view no one can actually explain everything, and merely for the sake of explaining things somewhat better I decline to assert what is demonstrable nonsense.’ And the only proper course is, as I have pointed out, to show that his premises are partly mistaken.
