288 PSYCHOLOGY. 



real, and to which we perceive that the candle does not 

 belong ; it belongs exclusively to that individual mind, has 

 no status anywhere else, etc. It exists, to be sure, in a 

 fashion, for it forms the content of that mind's hallucina- 

 tion ; but the hallucination itself, though unquestionably 

 it is a sort of existing fact, has no knowledge of other facts ;, 

 and since those other facts are the realities ^ar excellence for 

 us, and the only things we believe in, the candle is simply 

 outside of our reality and belief altogether. 



By the hypothesis, however, the miind ivhich sees the candle 

 can spin no such considerations as these about it, for of 

 other facts, actual or possible, it has no inkling whatever. 

 That candle is its all, its absolute. Its entire faculty of 

 attention is absorbed by it. It is, it is that ; it is there ; no 

 other possible candle, or quality of this candle, no other 

 possible place, or possible object in the place, no alterna- 

 tive, in short, suggests itself as even conceivable ; so how 

 can the mind help believing the candle real ? The suppo- 

 sition that it might possibly not do so is, under the sup- 

 posed conditions, unintelligible.* 



This is what Spinoza long ago announced : 



"Let us conceive a boy," he said, "imagining to himself a horse, 

 and taking note of nothing else. As this imagination involves the ex- 

 istence of the horse, and the hoy has no perception which annuls its 

 existence, he will necessarily contemplate the horse as present, nor will 

 he be able to doubt of its existence, however little certain of it he may 

 be. I deny that a man in so far as he imagines [percipit] affirms noth- 

 ing. For what is it to imagine a winged horse but to affirm that the 

 horse [that horse, namely] has wings ? For if the mind had nothing- 

 be fore it but the wanged horse it would contemplate the same as pres- 

 ent, would have no cause to doubt of its existence, nor any power of 

 dissenting from its existence, unless the imagination of the winged 

 horse were joined to an idea which contradicted [tollit] its existence." 

 (Ethics, n. 49, Scholium.) 



The sense that anything we think of is unreal can only 

 come, then, when that thing is contradicted by Some other 



* We saw near the end of Chapter XIX that a caudle-image taking ex- 

 clusive possession of the mind in this way would probably acquire the 

 sensational vividness. But this physiological accident is logically im- 

 material to the argument in the text, which ought to apply as well to the 

 dimmest sort of mental image as to the brightest sensation. 



