Relations between the Physical and the Moral. 247 



space, and causality. The supreme reality would be will, which 

 alone springs not from intellectual experience, and which alone is 

 directly conceived. Yet will thus posed, without and above all 

 consciousness, all idea, is only in name like that will of which we 

 have consciousness, or of that which enters into the texture of the 

 effects and causes which constitute experience. We cannot define 

 this absolute will because, ex hypothesi, it is not knowable, 

 and because nothing exists for us, except so far as we know it. 

 But not to dwell on these inner discordances of idealism, let us 

 admit that thought, in its broad sense, is the principle of all things. 

 Astonishing and paradoxical as this thesis might at first appear 

 to the average mind, it is in many respects true, incontestable, 

 even in the eyes of the partisan of pure experience. By an un- 

 scientific illusion, we imagine that were man and, in general, every 

 thinking and sensing brain to disappear, the universe would still sub- 

 sist with its light, its colours, its forms, its harmonies, its aesthetics. 

 But this is not so, since the universe, at least for us, is only a sum 

 of states of consciousness. Resistance, form, colour in short, all 

 the attributes of matter exists for us only on this condition. The 

 order of these phenomena, their existences, or their uniform suc- 

 cessions that is to say, their laws exist for us only on this condi- 

 tion. 'And this world,' says Schopenhauer, 'would no longer 

 exist if human brains were not unceasingly multiplied, springing up 

 like mushrooms, to take in the universe, which is ready to founder 

 in nothingness, and to toss between them like a ball this great 

 image identical in all, of which they express the identity by the 

 word object* 



Without accepting this absolute idealism, which is hypothetical, 

 experience alone compels us to admit that for us all real or 

 possible existence is bounded by the limits of our real or pos- 

 sible thought If, then, we place thought at the summit of all 

 things as well in the absolute as in the experience, since it is 

 thought which, in revealing itself, reveals all things it follows that, 

 for idealism, in proportion as we descend from pure thought to 

 sensation, from sensation to the vital phenomena, and from the 

 vital phenomena to chemical and mechanical action, the universe 

 grows obscure and mean ; there is constant diminution of reality, 

 of being. Sensation and sense-impressions are intelligible, but life 



