some body in his mind's eye, altogether other from my own. The
practical point of view brushes such metaphysical cobwebs away. If
what he have in mind be not MY body, why call we it a body at all?
His mind is inferred by me as a term, to whose existence we trace
the things that happen. The inference is quite void if the term,
once inferred, be separated from its connection with the body
that made me infer it, and connected with another that is not mine
at all. No matter for the metaphysical puzzle of how our two minds,
the ruffian's and mine, can mean the same body. Men who see each
other's bodies sharing the same space, treading the same earth,
splashing the same water, making the same air resonant, and pursuing
the same game and eating out of the same dish, will never
practically believe in a pluralism of solipsistic worlds.

Where, however, the actions of one mind seem to take no effect in
the world of the other, the case is different. This is what happens
in poetry and fiction. Every one knows Ivanhoe, for example; but so
long as we stick to the story pure and simple without regard to
the facts of its production, few would hesitate to admit that there
are as many different Ivanhoes as there are different minds
cognizant of the story. [Footnote: That is, there is no REAL
'Ivanhoe,' not even the one in Sir Walter Scott's mind as he was
writing the story. That one is only the FIRST one of the Ivanhoe-
solipsisms. It is quite true we can make it the real Ivanhoe if we
like, and then say that the other Ivanhoes know it or do not know
it, according as they refer to and resemble it or no. This is done
by bringing in Sir Walter Scott himself as the author of the real
Ivanhoe, and so making a complex object of both. This object,
however, is not a story pure and simple. It has dynamic
relations with the world common to the experience of all the