in the negative, and to maintain that the material universe would no longer exist if we and all percipient beings were annihilated: how will this hypothetical conclusion help us out of the difficulty which hampers the very enunciation of the problem? We are aware that this is the favourite conclusion of idealism as commonly understood, and it is a conclusion not altogether uncountenanced by the reasonings of Berkeley himself. But still the form of idealism which espouses any such conclusion, is unguarded and shortsighted in the extreme. The ampler and more wary system refuses to have anything to do with it; for this system sees that, when the question is attempted to be answered in the negative, the conditions of its statement are not one whit more faithfully discharged than they were when a reply was supposed to be given to it in the affirmative. For let us try the point. Let us say that, man being annihilated, there would no longer be any external universe; that is to say, that there would be universal colourlessness, universal silence, universal impalpability, universal tastelessness, and so forth. But universal colourlessness, universal silence, universal impalpability, universal tastelessness, and so forth, are just as much phenomena requiring, in thought, the presence of an ideal percipient endowed with sight and hearing and taste and touch, as their more positive opposites were phenomena requiring such a percipient. Non-existence itself is a phenomenon requiring a percipient present to apprehend it, just as much as existence is. No external world is no more no external world without an ideal percipient, than an external world is an external world without an ideal percipient. Therefore, in saying that there would be no external world if man were annihilated, we involve ourselves in precisely the same incapacity of rationally enunciating the question as we did in the former case. We are compelled to bring back in thought our very percipient selves, whom we declared we had conceived of as annihilated. In neither case can we adhere to the terms of the question; in neither case can we construe it intelligibly to our own minds; and therefore the question is unanswerable—not because it cannot be answered, but because it cannot be asked.
Now for the great truth to which these observations are the precursor. We have already taken occasion to remark that discussions of the kind we are engaged in, are carried on, not for the sake of any conclusion we may arrive at with respect to the existence or the non-existence of the material universe, but solely for the sake of the laws of human thought which may be evolved in the course of the research. Now, the conclusion to which we are led by the train of our present speculation is this—that no question and no proposition whatever can for a moment, be entertained which involves the supposition of our annihilation. It is an irreversible law of human thought, that no such idea can be construed to the mind by any effort of the understanding, or rationally articulated by any power of language. We cannot, and we do not think it; we only think that we think it. And upon the basis of this law, and upon it alone, independently of revelation, rests the great doctrine of our immortality. The fear of death is a salutary fear, and the thought of death is a salutary thought, not because we can really think the thought or really entertain the fear, but only because we imagine that we can do so. This imagination of ours (we say it with the deepest reverence) is a gracious imposition practised upon us by the Author of our nature, for the wisest and most benevolent of purposes. We appear to ourselves to be able to realize the thought and the fear, and this it is which drives us back so irresistibly into the busy press of life, and weds us so passionately to its rosy forms: we are not able to realize the thought or the fear, and this it is which makes us secretly to rejoice "in the sublime attractions of the grave." Wo to us, if we could indeed think of death! In the real thought of it we should be already dead, but in the mere illusive imagination of the thought we are already an immortal race. We have nothing to wait for; eternity is even now within us, and time, with all its vexing troubles, is no more. [1]
But to return to Berkeley. What then is the precise position in which he
- ↑ Wordsworth's little poem, entitled 'We are Seven,' illustrates this great law of human thought—the natural inconceivability of death; and hence, simple as its character may be, it is rooted in the most profound and recondite psychological truth.
