The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical EditionVol. 1: Apprentice Years, 1905-1918

VI. Solipsism

It should be evident why the conclusions already reached demand an examination of Solipsism; but I will briefly recount them. We have seen that there is no other object than that which appears, and its appearance as an object gives it, in an absolute sense, all that objectively it could possibly mean. If you are willing to make the abstraction of a world appearing to one finite centre alone, then we may say that nothing in this world is false or erroneous, but is what it is and as it is. And outside of the objectivity of objects appearing to finite centres, there is no objectivity at all, for we have found that objectivity and thinghood are aspects under which reality appears; true but partial aspects; and that the reality of a “thing” (we are here painfully hampered by language) is in no wise limited to its thinghood. But beyond the objective worlds of a number of finite centres, each having its own objects, there is no objective world. Thus we confront the question: how do we yoke our divers worlds to draw together? how can we issue from the circle described about each point of view? and since I can know no point of view but my own, how can I know that there are other points of view, or admitting their existence, how can I take any account of them? ^1*

Solipsism has been one of the dramatic properties of most philosophical entertainers. Yet we cannot discard it without recognising that it rests upon a truth.

[T]hough my experience is not the whole world, yet that world appears in my experience, and, so far as it exists there, it ismy state of mind. . . . And so, in the end, to know the Universe, we must fall back upon our personal experience and sensation. ( A&R260)

This doctrine I should like to develop in something of detail, with regard to real objects. And in doing this I must summon in the theory of points of view upon which I have relied before. Obviously, by the conclusions at which I have arrived, it is true to say that the real world is real because and in so far as it appears to a finite centre, and yet it has in each appearance to mean to be more–to be real, that is, only so far as it is not an appearance to a finite centre. From a point of view completely detached, reality would contain nothing but finite centres and their several presentations; but from the point of view of each centre, there is an objective world upon which several points of view are trained, and to which they all refer. And it is just the confusion of these two truths which gives the stuffed solipsism of the philosophers. I have tried to show that there can be no truth or error without a presentation and discrimination of two points of view; that the external world is a construction by the selection and combination of various presentations to various viewpoints: and that the selection which makes reality is in turn made possible by the belief in reality: unless we assumed the existence of a world of truth we could not explain the genesis of error, and unless we had presentations of error as well as of truth we could not make that construction which is the real world. But taking the various experience-centres as real, we may inquire, with reference to this manifold, in what consists the reality of the one world which they all suppose.

Every finite centre, we may lay down, intends an “objective” world; and the genesis of this intention is an obscure and difficult matter. We cannot say anything on the subject which will be more than an interpretation; but I offer this as a provisional account, admitting that any account that expresses itself as a temporal sequence can be only very provisional indeed. The first objects, we may say, with which we come into contact are halfobjects, ^2* they are other finite centres, not attended to directly...