s not obviously
imply mind, if the very idea of matter is unintelligible apart from
mind, it is clear that matter can never have existed without mind.

What then, it may be asked, of the things which no human eye has ever
seen or even thought of? Are we to suppose that a new planet comes
into existence for the first time when first it sails into the
telescope of the astronomer, and that Science is wrong in inferring
that it existed not only before that particular astronomer saw it, but
before there were any astronomers or other human or even animal
intelligences upon this planet to observe it? Did the world of Geology
come into existence for the first time when some eighteenth-century
geologist first suspected that the world was more than six thousand
years old? Are all those ages of past {17} history, when the earth and
the sun were but nebulae, a mere imagination, or did that nebulous mass
come into existence thousands or millions of years afterwards when Kant
or Laplace first conceived that it had existed? The supposition is
clearly self-contradictory and impossible. If Science be not a mass of
illusion, this planet existed millions of years before any human--or,
so far as we know, any animal minds--existed to think its existence.
And yet I have endeavoured to show the absurdity of supposing that
matter can exist except for a mind. It is clear, then, that it cannot
be merely for such minds as ours that the world has always existed.
Our minds come and go. They have a beginning; they go to sleep; they
may, for aught that we can immediately know, come to an end. At no
time does any one of them, at no time do all of them together,
apprehend all that there is to be known. We do not create a Universe;
we discover it piece by piece, and after all very imperfectly. Matter
cannot intelligibly be supposed to exist apart from Mind: and yet it
clearly does not exist merely for _our_ minds. Each of us knows only
one little bit of the Universe: all of us together do not know the
whole. If the whole is to exist at all, there must be some one mind
which knows the whole. The mind which is necessary to the very
existence of the Universe is the mind that we call God.

{18}

In this way we are, as it seems to me, led up by a train of reasoning
which is positively irresistible to the idea that, so far from matter
being the only existence, it has no existence of its own apart from
some mind which knows it--in which and for