ecollections which
my past perceptions have left behind them--nay, with the impression,
most positive and full, of the void I have just made about me. How can I
suppress all this? How eliminate myself? I can even, it may be, blot out
and forget my recollections up to my immediate past; but at least I keep
the consciousness of my present reduced to its extremest poverty, that
is to say, of the actual state of my body. I will try, however, to do
away even with this consciousness itself. I will reduce more and more
the sensations my body sends in to me: now they are almost gone; now
they are gone, they have disappeared in the night where all things else
have already died away. But no! At the very instant that my
consciousness is extinguished, another consciousness lights up--or
rather, it was already alight: it had arisen the instant before, in
order to witness the extinction of the first; for the first could
disappear only for another and in the presence of another. I see myself
annihilated only if I have already resuscitated myself by an act which
is positive, however involuntary and unconscious. So, do what I will, I
am always perceiving something, either from without or from within. When
I no longer know anything of external objects, it is because I have
taken refuge in the consciousness that I have of myself. If I abolish
this inner self, its very abolition becomes an object for an imaginary
self which now perceives as an external object the self that is dying
away. Be it external or internal, some object there always is that my
imagination is representing. My imagination, it is true, can go from one
to the other, I can by turns imagine a nought of external perception or
a nought of internal perception, but not both at once, for the absence
of one consists, at bottom, in the exclusive presence of the other. But,
from the fact that two relative noughts are imaginable in turn, we
wrongly conclude that they are imaginable together: a conclusion the
absurdity of which must be obvious, for we cannot imagine a nought
without perceiving, at least confusedly, that we are imagining it,
consequently that we are acting, that we are thinking, and therefore
that something still subsists.

The image, then, properly so called, of a suppression of everything is
never formed by thought. The effort by which we strive to create this
image simply ends in making us swing to and fro between the vision of an
outer and that of an inner reali