were ideas identified in my mind. In practice, therefore,
idealists feel free to ignore the gratuitous possibility of existences
lying outside the circle of objects knowable to the thinker, which,
according to them, is the circle of his ideas. In this way they turn a
human method of approach into a charter for existence and
non-existence, and their point of view becomes the creative power.
When the idealist studies astronomy, does he learn anything about the
stars that God made? Far from him so naive a thought! His astronomy
consists of two activities of his own (and he is very fond of
activity): star-gazing and calculation. When he has become quite
proficient he knows all about star-gazing and calculation; but he
knows nothing of any stars that God made; for there are no stars
except his visual images of stars, and there is no God but himself. It
is true that to soften this hard saying a little he would correct me
and say his _higher_ self; but as his lower self is only the idea of
himself which he may have framed, it is his higher self that is
himself simply: although whether he or his idea of himself is really
the higher might seem doubtful to an outsider.]

This explanation, in pretending to refute solipsism, of course assumes
and confirms it; for all these _cans_ and _musts_ touch only your idea
of yourself, not your actual being, and there is no thinkable world
that is not within you, as you exist really. Thus idealists are wedded
to solipsism irrevocably; and it is a happy marriage, only the name of
the lady has to be changed.

Nevertheless, lest peace should come (and peace nowadays is neither
possible nor desired), a counter-current at once overtakes the
philosophy of the immediate and carries it violently to the opposite
pole of speculation--from mystic intuition to a commercial cult of
action and a materialisation of the mind such as no materialist had
ever dreamt of. The tenderness which the pragmatists feel for life in
general, and especially for an accelerated modern life, has doubtless
contributed to this revulsion, but the speculative consideration of
the immediate might have led to it independently. For in the immediate
there is marked expectancy, craving, prayer; nothing absorbs
consciousness so much as what is not quite given. Therefore it is a
good reading of the immediate, as well as a congenial thing to say to
the contemporary world, that reality is change, growth, action,
creation. Similarly the