I believe that every argument ever used to show that reality is spiritual has inferred this (validly or invalidly) from ‘esse is percipere’ as one of its premisses; and that this again has never been pretended to be proved except by use of the premiss that esse is percipi. The type of argument used for the latter purpose is familiar enough. It is said that since whatever is, is experienced, and since some things are which are not experienced by the individual, these must at least form part of some experience. Or again that, since an object necessarily implies a subject, and since the whole world must be an object, we must conceive it to belong to some subject or subjects, in the same sense in which whatever is the object of our experience belongs to us. Or again, that, since thought enters into the essence of all reality, we must conceive behind it, in it, or as its essence, a spirit akin to ours, who think: that ‘spirit greets spirit’ in its object. Into the validity of these inferences I do not propose to enter: they obviously require a great deal of discussion. I only desire to point out that, however correct they may be, yet if esse is not percipi, they leave us as far from a proof that reality is spiritual, as if they were all false too.
But now: Is esse percipi? There are three very ambiguous terms in this proposition, and I must begin by distinguishing the different things that may be meant by some of them.
And first with regard to percipi. This term need not trouble us long at present. It was, perhaps, originally used to mean ‘sensation’ only; but I am not going to be so unfair to modern Idealists—the only Idealists to whom the term should now be applied without qualification—as to hold that, if they say esse is percipi, they mean by percipi sensation only. On the contrary I quite agree with them that, if esse be percipi at all, percipi must be understood to include not sensation only, but that other type of mental fact, which is called ‘thought’: and, whether esse be percipi or not, I consider it to be the main service of the philosophic school, to which modern Idealists belong, that they have insisted on distinguishing ‘sensation’ and ‘thought’ and on emphasising the importance of the latter. Against Sensationalism and Empiricism they have maintained the true view. But the distinction between sensation and thought need not detain us here. For, in whatever respects they differ, they have at least this in common, that they are both forms of consciousness or, to use a term that seems to be more in fashion just now, they are both ways of experiencing. Accordingly, whatever esse is percipi may mean, it does at least assert that whatever is, is experienced. And since what I wish to maintain is, that even this is untrue, the
