fours with it, that if that last individual were to be annihilated in
and with him the whole world would be destroyed. It was in this sense
that the mystic Angelas Silesius[1] declared that God could not live
for a moment without him, and that if he were to be annihilated God
must of necessity give up the ghost:

_Ich weiss dass ohne mich Gott nicht ein Nu kann leben;
Werd' ich zunicht, er muss von Noth den Geist aufgeben_.

[Footnote 1: _Translator's Note_.--Angelus Silesius, see _Counsels and
Maxims_, p. 39, note.]

But the empirical point of view also to some extent enables us to
perceive that it is true, or at least possible, that our self can
exist in other beings whose consciousness is separated and different
from our own. That this is so is shown by the experience of
somnambulists. Although the identity of their ego is preserved
throughout, they know nothing, when they awake, of all that a moment
before they themselves said, did or suffered. So entirely is the
individual consciousness a phenomenon that even in the same ego two
consciousnesses can arise of which the one knows nothing of the other.

GOVERNMENT.

It is a characteristic failing of the Germans to look in the clouds
for what lies at their feet. An excellent example of this is furnished
by the treatment which the idea of _Natural Right_ has received at
the hands of professors of philosophy. When they are called upon
to explain those simple relations of human life which make up the
substance of this right, such as Right and Wrong, Property, State,
Punishment and so on, they have recourse to the most extravagant,
abstract, remote and meaningless conceptions, and out of them build a
Tower of Babel reaching to the clouds, and taking this or that form
according to the special whim of the professor for the time being. The
clearest and simplest relations of life, such as affect us directly,
are thus made quite unintelligible, to the great detriment of the
young people who are educated in such a school. These relations
themselves are perfectly simple and easily understood--as the reader
may convince himself if he will turn to the account which I have given
of them in the _Foundation of Morality_, Sec. 17, and in my chief work,
bk. i., Sec. 62. But at the sound of certain words, like Right, Freedom,
the Good, Being--this nugatory infinitive of the cupola--and many
others of the same sort, the German's head begins to swim, and falling
straightwa