The world,
which I have never known to exist without me, exists by my co-operation
and consent; it can never extinguish what lends it being. The death
prophetically accepted by weaklings, with such small insight and
courage, I mock and altogether defy: it can never touch me."

Such solipsistic boasts may not have been heard in historic times from
the lips of men speaking in their own persons. Language has an
irresistible tendency to make thought communistic and ideally
transferable to others. It forbids a man to say of himself what it would
be ridiculous to hear from another. Now solipsism in another man is a
comic thing: and a mind, prompted perhaps by hell and heaven to speak
solipsistically, is stopped by the laughable echo of its own words, when
it remembers its bold sayings. Language, being social, resists a virgin
egotism and forbids it to express itself publicly, no matter how well
grounded it may be in transcendental logic and in animal instinct.
Social convention is necessarily materialistic, since the beginning of
all moral reasonableness consists in taming the transcendental conceit
native to a living mind, in attaching it to its body, and bringing the
will that thought itself absolute down to the rank of animals and men.
Otherwise no man would acknowledge another's rights or even conceive his
existence.

[Sidenote: Absoluteness and immortality transferred to the gods.]

Primeval solipsism--the philosophy of untamed animal will--has
accordingly taken to the usual by-paths and expressed itself openly only
in myth or by a speculative abstraction in which the transcendental
spirit, for which all the solipsistic privileges were still claimed, was
distinguished from the human individual. The gods, it was said, were
immortal; and although on earth spirit must submit to the yoke and
service of matter, on whose occasions it must wait, yet there existed in
the ether other creatures more normally and gloriously compounded, since
their forms served and expressed their minds, which ruled also over the
elements and feared no assault from time. With the advent of this
mythology experience and presumption divided their realms; experience
was allowed to shape men's notions of vulgar reality, but presumption,
which could not be silenced, was allowed to suggest a second sphere,
thinly and momentarily veiled to mortal sense, in which the premonitions
of will were abundantly realised.

This expedient had the advantage of end