Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/258

ordinary realism has to put no questions to the inner life. But the very essence of idealism it is to say, My moon, the moon that I see and talk about, the moon of my own world of outer show and of empirical knowledge, is just one of my ideas. You see the same moon only in so far as in your world, in your inner life, there is a fact truly corresponding to what I call the moon in my inner life. Therefore, if you and I are to continue to see the same moon, that must be because both of us have some common and necessary deeper nature, a true and abiding oneness of spirit, that forces us to agree in this respect as to our inner life. Hence, not the abiding matter of the moon, as something that should stay there when you and I had both departed, but some common law that holds for your spirit as for mine, is the basis for the seeming permanence and common outer reality of the moon for us. The moon has the same sort of objective existence that, for instance, at this moment, my lecture has. The lecture exists as thought in me, and as experience in you. But because of a certain community of our thoughts, we all of us have the same lecture more or less present to us. We all of us, moreover, regard the lecture as an outer reality, and we therefore seem to be as much in presence of an objective fact as if the lecture were made of real atoms, instead of ideas. Or again, for the idealistic view, the existence of the events in matter, or of any other external events, resembles the existence at any instant of the price of a stock in the stock-market, or the credit of a great firm in the commercial world. A consensus of the thoughts of the buyer and sellers exists at any moment, which, however well founded, or again however arbitrary and changing this consensus may be, is expressed for the instant as if it were a hard and fast material thing in a genuinely outer world. In fact, prices and credits are ideas, and exist in the show-world of market values and of commercial securities, being but the projections of the various