262 HUMANISM 



XIV 



Subject and Object are mutually interdependent is crypto- 

 solipsistic. It begins, tamely enough, by holding that the 

 Object must exist for a Subject, and no subject can exist 

 without objects. This doctrine, in its proper meaning, is 

 a purely verbal truth, an affair of definitions, stating the 

 meaning of the words subject and object. But in 

 Oxford it is, for some inscrutable reason, still regarded as 

 important ; and strangely enough is credited to idealism, 

 instead of being classed as thoroughgoing relativism. 



At any rate the doctrine becomes either Solipsism or 

 nonsense so soon as an attempt is made to apply it. If 

 it seriously means to affirm that the existence of the 

 Object is conditional upon that of the Subject, it implies 

 that whenever a subject dies the world of objects must be 

 annihilated with it. But this is clearly not what happens 

 to our common world whenever one of us dies. It 

 follows therefore either that the death of a subject is 

 inconceivable and impossible, or that what died was not a 

 subject, or that the common world is not an object, or 

 that what was annihilated was not the common world 

 and so that the latter is not dependent on its relation to 

 a subject. But the first of these alternatives seems 

 contrary to fact, while the last is contrary to the theory ; 

 the others render it irrelevant to the problem of know 

 ledge. For what we wanted to know was what happened 

 to the objective world when a subject died, on the 

 idealistic assumption that a subject is implied in the 

 persistence of every object. Clearly if this is so, the per 

 sistence of the Object after the death of a subject shows 

 that the Subject which sustained it does not die when one 

 of us dies (alike whether that death means our extinction 

 or our transfer to a different world). We, therefore, and 

 our world are not Subject and Object in the sense re 

 quired by the theory. The Subject is not one of us, but 

 must be a category, or a Cosmic Ego, or what not. But 

 if so, how is it, and its Object, relevant to the nature of 

 our knowledge ? There is on the one hand the deathless 

 Subject of an indestructible world, and on the other we, 

 who are not subjects in this sense, perceiving objects 



