“No truth, therefore, is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, that all that exists for knowledge, and, therefore, this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, idea. This is obviously true of the past and the future, as well as of the present, of what is farthest off, as of {5} what is near; for it is true of time and space themselves, in which alone these distinctions arise. All that in any way belongs or can belong to the world is inevitably thus conditioned through the subject and exists only for the subject. The world is idea.” [1] E. Tr. (Trubner, 1883). [2] Schopenhauer, _op. cit._ beginning. The world, then, for each of us, exists in the medium of our mind. It is a sort of building, of which the materials are our ideas and perceptions. _The “world”_ 4. So much for “idea.” What do we mean by “world”? A succession of images passing before us, or rather making up our consciousness, like a dream, is not a world. The term is very expressive; it is a favourite word in Shakespeare. When the courtier says — “Hereafter, in a better world than this, I shall desire more love and knowledge of you,” he does not mean, as I used to think, “in heaven”; he means in a better condition of social affairs. In “mad world, mad kings, mad composition,” the term means more especially the set of political and family connections within which extraordinary reversals of behaviour have just taken place. Often we use the expression, with a qualifying epithet, to indicate some particular sphere of connected action, “the ecclesiastical world,” “the political world,” and so forth. Always there seems to be implied the notion of a set of things or persons bound together by some common quality which enables them to act upon each other, and to constitute what is technically termed a “whole.” _The_ “world” _par excellence_, then, ought to mean the one connected set of things and persons which we all recognise {6} and refer to as the same, and as including ourselves along with all who use the word in the same sense. Then the “world as idea” means no less than this, that the system of things and persons which surrounds all of us, and which each of us speaks of and refers to as the same for every one, exists for each of us as something built up in his own mind--the mind attached to his own body--and out of the material of his own mind. _The animal’s world_