would have no truth and this remembrance no control; so that the fond belief of such a deity that he knew his own past would be the most groundless of dogmas; and while by chance the dogma might be true, that deity would have no reason to think it so. At the first touch of criticism he would be obliged to confess that his alleged past was merely a picture now before him, and that he had no reason to suppose that this picture had had any constancy in successive moments, or that he had lived through previous moments at all; nor could any new experience ever lend any colour or corroboration to such a pathological conviction. This is obvious; so that romantic solipsism, although perhaps an interesting state of mind, is not a position capable of defence; and any solipsism which is not a solipsism of the present moment is logically contemptible.
The postulates on which empirical knowledge and inductive science are based — namely, that there has been a past, that it was such as it is now thought to be, that there will be a future and that it must, for some inconceivable reason, resemble the past and obey the same laws — these are all gratuitous dogmas. The sceptic in his honest retreat knows nothing of a future, and has no need of such an unwarrantable idea. He may perhaps have images before him of scenes somehow not in the foreground, with a sense of before and after running through the texture of them; and he may call this background of his sentiency the past; but the relative obscurity and evanescence of these phantoms will not prompt him to suppose that they have retreated to obscurity from the light of day. They will be to him simply what he experiences them as being, denizens of the twilight. It would be a vain fancy to imagine that these ghosts had once been men; they are simply nether gods, native to the Erebus they inhabit. The world present to the sceptic may continue to fade into these opposite
