Appendix

The problem to which I refer is this: there are thinkers who believe that a special difficulty arises when one tries to understand how another person's soul life can affect one's own. They say: my conscious world is enclosed within me; in the same way, any other conscious world is enclosed within itself. I cannot see into the world of consciousness of another person. How, then, do I know that he and I are both in the same world? The theory which believes it possible to infer from the conscious world an unconscious world which can never enter consciousness, tries to solve this difficulty in the following way. It says: the world I have in my consciousness is the representative in me of a real world to which I have no conscious access. In this real world lie the unknown causes of my conscious world. In it also lies my own real being, of which I have only a representative in my consciousness. In it also, however, lies the being of my fellow man. Now whatever is experienced in the consciousness of my fellow man corresponds to a reality in his being which is independent of his consciousness. This reality acts, in the realm which cannot become conscious, upon my own real being which is said to be unconscious; and in this way something is created in my consciousness representing what is present in a consciousness that is quite independent of my own conscious experience. It is clear that to the world accessible to my consciousness an inaccessible one is here being added hypothetically, since one believes that otherwise one is forced to the conclusion that the whole external world, which I think is there in front of me, is nothing but the world of my consciousness, and to the further—solipsistic—absurdity that other people, too, exist only within my consciousness.