on his hands also. The very terms “solipsism” and “present moment” betray this impurity. An actual intuition, which by hypothesis is fresh, absolute, and not to be repeated, is called and is perhaps conceived as an ipse, a self-same man. But identity (as I shall have occasion to observe in discussing identity in essences) implies two moments, two instances, or two intuitions, between which it obtains. Similarly, a “present moment” suggests other moments, and an adventitious limitation either in duration or in scope; but the solipsist and his world (which are not distinguishable) have by hypothesis no environment whatsoever, and nothing limits them save the fact that there is nothing more. These irrelevances and side glances are imported into the mind of the sceptic because in fact he is retreating into solipsism from a far more ambitious philosophy. A thought naturally momentary would be immune from them.
A perfect solipsist, therefore, hardly is found amongst men; but some men are zealous in bringing their criticism down to solipsism of the present moment just because this attitude enables them to cast away everything that is not present in their prevalent mood, or in their deepest thought, and to set up this chosen object as the absolute. Such a compensatory dogma is itself not critical; but criticism may help to raise it to a specious eminence by lopping off everything else. What remains will be different in different persons: some say it is Brahma, some that it is Pure Being, some that it is the Idea or Law of the moral world. Each of these absolutes is the sacred residuum which the temperament of different philosophers or of different nations clings to, and will not criticise, and in each case it is contrasted with the world in which the vulgar believe, as something deeper, simpler, and more real. Perhaps when solipsism of the present moment is reached by a philosopher trained in abstrac-
