Victorian Suggestions Toward Idealism
"Thinkers who first make molecules and then fall down in mute and holy reverence before the awful mystery of how the molecules ever could make them, are far from knowing what it is to cross-question consciousness with any real spirit in their questioning. If I understand you, it is such cross-questioning of consciousness which you want to have done."
--Josiah Royce, in a letter to William James, 1880
"The object is a set of changes in my consciousness, and not anything out of it. Here is as yet no metaphysical doctrine, but only a fixing of the meaning of a word."
--W.K. Clifford, 1886
"How, if 'subject' and 'object' were separated 'by the whole diameter of being,' and had no attributes in common, could it be so hard to tell, in a presented and recognized material object, what part comes in through the sense organs and what part comes 'out of one’s own head'?"
--William James, 1904
"To use a paradoxical expression, nothing matters but consciousness."
--Shadworth Hodgson, 1904