How can we know that the Idea itself has any real existence apart from the Energy? Very strangely; by the fact that the Energy itself is conscious of referring all its acts to an existing and complete whole.
Quite simply, every choice of an episode, or a phrase, or a word is made to conform to a pattern of the entire book, which is revealed by that choice as already existing. This truth, which is difficult to convey in explanation, is quite clear and obvious in experience. It manifests itself plainly enough when the writer says or thinks: “That is, or is not, the right phrase”—meaning that it is a phrase which does or does not correspond to the reality of the Idea.
The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.
For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.
What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think.
In fact what solipsism means is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself.
That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of that language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world.
I am my world. (The microcosm.)
The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing.
Hence also there can be no ethical propositions.
Propositions cannot express anything higher.
It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one.)
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.