6 January 1868 – 12 January 1868

We have had a philosophical meeting at the house of Edouard Claparède. The question on the order of the day was the nature of sensation. Claparède pronounced for the absolute subjectivity of all experience—in other words, for pure idealism—which is amusing, from a naturalist. According to him the ego alone exists, and the universe is but a projection of the ego, a phantasmagoria which we ourselves create without suspecting it, believing all the time that we are lookers-on. It is our noümenon which objectifies itself as phenomenon. The ego, according to him, is a radiating force which, modified without knowing what it is that modifies it, imagines it, by virtue of the principle of causality—that is to say, produces the great illusion of the objective world in order so to explain itself. Our waking life, therefore, is but a more connected dream. The self is an unknown which gives birth to an infinite number of unknowns, by a fatality of its nature. Science is summed up in the consciousness that nothing exists but consciousness. In other words, the intelligent issues from the unintelligible in order to return to it, or rather the ego explains itself by the hypothesis of the non-ego, while in reality it is but a dream, dreaming itself. We might say with Scarron: “Et je vis l’ombre d’un esprit Qui traçait l’ombre d’um système Avec l’ombre de l’ombre même.” This abolition of nature by natural science is logical, and it was, in fact, Schelling’s starting-point. From the standpoint of physiology, nature is but a necessary illusion, a constitutional hallucination. We only escape from this bewitchment by the moral activity of the ego, which feels itself a cause and a free cause, and which by its responsibility breaks the spell and issues from the enchanted circle of Maïa. Maïa! Is she indeed the true goddess? Hindoo wisdom long ago regarded the world as the dream of Brahma. Must we hold with Fichte that it is the individual dream of each individual ego? Every fool would then be a cosmogonic poet producing the firework of the universe under the dome of the infinite. But why then give ourselves such gratuitous trouble to learn? In our dreams, at least, nightmare excepted, we endow ourselves with complete ubiquity, liberty and omniscience. Are we then less ingenious and inventive awake than asleep?