invariably find the constitution of his nature to be such, that, instead of being able to tell us anything about it—he is compelled to revert to a description of his own human perceptions of it, perceptions which, however, ought to be left altogether out of the account; for what he is bound to describe to us is the universe itself, abstracted from all those impressions of it which were supposed to be non-existent. But this is what it is impossible for him to describe. A man declares that if he were annihilated the universe would still exist. But what universe would still exist? The bright, the green, the solid, the sapid, the odoriferous, the extended, and the figured universe would still exist. Certainly it would. But this catalogue comprises the series of your perceptions of the universe, and this is not what we want; this is precisely what you undertook not to give us. In mixing up the thought of these perceptions with the universe, professedly thought to exist independently of them, you have transgressed the stipulated terms of the question—the conclusion from which is, that, in supposing yourself annihilated, you did not suppose yourself annihilated—you took yourself back into being in the very same breath in which you puffed yourself away into nonentity.
We must here beg to guard ourselves most particularly against the imputation of having said, that, in thinking of the external universe, man thinks only of his own perceptions of it; or that, when he has it actually present before him, he is conscious only of the impressions which it makes upon him. This is a doctrine very commonly espoused by the idealistic writers. It is a tempting trap into which they have all been too prone to fall; and Berkeley himself—and a man as great as he—Fichte, have not altogether escaped the snare. But it cuts up the very roots of genuine speculative idealism, and controverts the first and strongest principle on which it rests. This principle, we may remind the reader, is that the thing is the appearance, and that the appearance is the thing; that the object is our perception of it, and that our perception of it is the object; in short, that these two are convertible ideas, or, more properly speaking, are one and the same idea. But this use of the word only implies that we possess a faculty of abstraction, in virtue of which we are able to distinguish between objects and our perceptions of objects, between things and the appearances of things—a doctrine which, if admitted (and admit it we must, if we use the word only in the application alluded to above), would leave this as the distinction between realism and idealism—that whereas the former separates objects from our perceptions of them for the purpose of preserving the objects, the latter separates the two for the purpose of annihilating the objects. And the truth is, that this is precisely the distinction between spurious realism and spurious idealism. They both found upon the assumed capability of making this abstraction, only they differ, as we have said, herein, that the one makes it in order to preserve the objects, and the other in order to destroy them. But genuine idealism, looking only to the fact, and instructed by the unadulterated dictates of common sense, denies altogether the capability of making the abstraction—denies that we can separate in thought objects and perceptions at all; and hence this system has nothing whatever to do either with the preservation or with the destruction of the material universe: and hence, too, it is identical, in its length, and in its breadth, and in its whole significance, with genuine unperverted realism, which just as stoutly refuses to acknowledge the operation of this pretended faculty. Let us beware, then, of maintaining that man, in his intercourse with the external universe, has only his own perceptions or impressions to deal with. It was this unwary averment which gave rise to the systems, on the one hand, of subjective idealism, with all its hampering absurdities; and, on the other hand, of hypothetical realism, with all its unwarrantable and unsatisfying conclusions.
To return to our question. It seems certain, then, that the question—Would matter exist if man were annihilated?—cannot be intelligibly asked, when we consider it as answered in the affirmative, because it is clear that its terms cannot be complied with. Conceiving the universe to remain entire, we cannot conceive ourselves as abstracted or removed from its sphere. We think ourselves back, in the very moment in which we think ourselves away.
But, in the second place, suppose that we attempt to answer the question
