abysses, the past and the future; but having renounced all prejudice and checked all customary faith, he will regard both as painted abysses only, like the opposite exits to the country and to the city on the ancient stage. He will see the masked actors (and he will invent a reason) rushing frantically out on one side and in at the other; but he knows that the moment they are out of sight the play is over for them; those outlying regions and those reported events which the messengers narrate so impressively are pure fancy; and there is nothing for him but to sit in his seat and lend his mind to the tragic illusion.
The solipsist thus becomes an incredulous spectator of his own romance, thinks his own adventures fictions, and accepts a solipsism of the present moment. This is an honest position, and certain attempts to refute it as self-contradictory are based on a misunderstanding. For example, it is irrelevant to urge that the present moment cannot comprise the whole of existence because the phrase “a present moment” implies a chain of moments; or that the mind that calls any moment the present moment virtually transcends it and posits a past and a future beyond it. These arguments confuse the convictions of the solipsist with those of a spectator describing him from outside. The sceptic is not committed to the implications of other men’s language; nor can he be convicted out of his own mouth by the names he is obliged to bestow on the details of his momentary vision. There may be long vistas in it; there may be many figures of men and beasts, many legends and apocalypses depicted on his canvas; there may even be a shadowy frame about it, or the suggestion of a gigantic ghostly something on the hither side of it which he may call himself. All this wealth of objects is not inconsistent with solipsism, although the implication of the conventional terms in which those objects are described may render
