A world made by one mind: the limit of the comparison with idealism
For him his own friends are a mythology made up by himself.
The position dramatized here is solipsistic: other people become the individual's own inventions. That is a stronger claim than saying that sensible things exist as ideas. Berkeley supplies a useful counterexample to treating all immaterialism as this nightmare. In his Principles of Human Knowledge (first published 1710; inspected in David R. Wilkins's transcription of the 1734 edition), §29 distinguishes perceptions from voluntary imaginings because the former do not obey our will. Section 145 affirms other spirits, known through effects or signs of their activity; §35 preserves ordinary sensible things while rejecting philosophical material substance. Berkeley, §§29, 35, 145. Chesterton names no philosopher here. Berkeley is therefore a comparison, not an identified target. The passage's horror depends on converting friends and parents into private fabrications, rather than merely denying matter. The further suggestion that fashionable self-assertion stands only an inch away from that conclusion is Chesterton's polemical association, not a demonstrated philosophical entailment.
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