THE CONCEPTUAL WORLD 47 



that there are other Egos that perceive, and that the 

 universe which our Ego perceives is also the same 

 universe that other Egos perceive. If we did not 

 believe that there were other men and women that 

 perceived — other consciousnesses like our own, all that 

 part of our own behaviour that we call morality would 

 be meaningless. In a philosophy of pure idealism 

 other men and women are only phenomena ; only 

 bodies moving in nature. Why, then, should these 

 elements of our consciousness influence the rest of our 

 consciousness as if they were men and women like 

 ourselves. All this amounts to saying that while our 

 speculative thought suggests to us that all that exists 

 is our stream of consciousness, our actions must 

 convince us that there are other thinking individuals 

 like ourselves. 1 



Even if we do surrender ourselves to phenomenal- 

 ism and try to believe that all that exists is our own 

 consciousness, the fact of our duration would suggest 

 to us that this present consciousness is not all. Our 

 reality is not only that which is present in our minds 

 now, but all that was ever present in our mind. All 

 that we have ever thought and done persists and forms 

 our conscious and unconscious experience. This past 

 of ours is something that is ever being added to, or 

 becoming incorporated with, our present state of con- 

 sciousness ; and if it is something other than that which 

 we now perceive and conceptualise, it is something that 

 has an existence of its own. 



We must believe that there is something that we 

 perceive, and not that we merely perceive. For the 

 phases of our immediate givenness, that is, those things 

 which were present in our minds from moment to 



1 The reader may recognise in this argument that of Driesch's Three 

 Windows into the Absolute. 



