, embodied in
language and transmitted to us with our language by our ancestors. That
which we call the world, the objective world, is a social tradition. It
is given to us ready made.
Man does not submit to being, as consciousness, alone in the Universe,
nor to being merely one objective phenomenon the more. He wishes to save
his vital or passional subjectivity by attributing life, personality,
spirit, to the whole Universe. In order to realize his wish he has
discovered God and substance; God and substance continually reappear in
his thought cloaked in different disguises. Because we are conscious, we
feel that we exist, which is quite another thing from knowing that we
exist, and we wish to feel the existence of everything else; we wish
that of all the other individual things each one should also be an "I."
The most consistent, although the most incongruous and vacillating,
idealism, that of Berkeley, who denied the existence of matter, of
something inert and extended and passive, as the cause of our sensations
and the substratum of external phenomena, is in its essence nothing but
an absolute spiritualism or dynamism, the supposition that every
sensation comes to us, causatively, from another spirit--that is, from
another consciousness. And his doctrine has a certain affinity with
those of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. The former's doctrine of the Will
and the latter's doctrine of the Unconscious are already implied in the
Berkeleyan theory that to be is to be perceived.
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