criticism on its last conclusion: “It is the mind that creates the world.”
This thesis strikes at the duality—consciousness and object; it gives the supremacy to the consciousness by making of the object an effect or property of the former. We can object that this genesis cannot be clearly represented, and that for the very simple reason that it is impossible to clearly accept “mind” as a separate entity and distinct from matter. It is easy to affirm this separation, thanks to the psittacism of the words, which are here used like counterfeit coin, but we cannot represent it to ourselves, for it corresponds to nothing. The consciousness constitutes all that is mental in the world; nothing else can be described as mental. Now this consciousness only exists as an act; it is, in other terms, an incomplete form of existence, which does not exist apart from its object, of which the true name is matter. It is therefore very difficult to understand this affirmation, “It is the mind that creates the world,” since to be able to do so, we should have to imagine a consciousness without an object.
Moreover, should we even succeed in doing so, we should be none the more disposed, on that account, to give assent to this proposition. Consciousness and matter represent to us the most different and antithetical terms of the whole of the
