believed his personages real, he would be deceived: and so would that deity if he supposed his world to exist merely because he thought of it. Before the creation could be actual, or the novel historical, it would have to be enacted elsewhere than in the mind of its author. And if it was so enacted, it would evidently not be requisite to its existence that any imaginative person, falsely conceiving himself to be its author, should form an image of it in his mind. If he did so, that remarkable clairvoyance would be a fact requiring explanation; but it would be an added harmony in the world, not the ground of its existence.
If for the sake of argument I accept the notion that presence to intuition is existence, I may easily disprove it by a reductio ad absurdum. If nothing not given in intuition can exist, then all those beliefs in existing facts beyond my intuition, by which thought is diversified when it is intelligent, would be necessarily false, and all intelligence would be illusion. This implication might be welcome to me, if I wished not to entertain any opinions which might conceivably be wrong. But the next implication is more disconcerting, namely, that the intuitions in which such illusion appears can have no existence themselves: for being instances of intuition they could not be data for any intuition. At one moment I may believe that there are or have been or will be other moments; but evidently they would not be other moments, if they were data to me now, and nothing more. If presence to intuition were necessary to existence, intuition itself would not exist; that is, no other intuition would be right in positing it; and as this absence of transcendence would be mutual, nothing would exist at all. And yet, since presence to intuition would be sufficient for existence, everything mentionable would exist without question, the non-existent could never be thought of, to deny anything (if I knew what I was
