can [we] prove that the primary act of recognition of any reality is real? The answer is that St. Thomas recognized instantly, what so many modern sceptics have begun to suspect rather laboriously; that a man must either answer that question in the affirmative, or else never answer any question, never ask any question, never even exist intellectually, to answer or to ask. I suppose it is true in a sense that a man can be a fundamental sceptic, but he cannot be anything else; certainly not even a defender of fundamental scepticism. If a man feels that all the movements of his won mind are meaningless, then his mind is meaningless, and he is meaningless; and it does not mean anything to attempts to discover his meaning. Most fundamental sceptics appear to survive, bcause they are not consistently sceptical and not at all fundamental. They will first deny everything and then admit something, if for the sake of argument-or often rather of attack without argument. I saw an almost startling example of this essential frivolity in the professor of final scepticism, in a paper the other day. A man wrote to say that he accepted nothing but Solipsism, and added that he had often wondered it was not a more common philosophy. Now Solipsism simply means that a man believes in his own existence, but not in anybody or anything else. And it never struck this simple sophist, that if his philosophy was true, there obviously were no other philosophers to profess it.

To the question "Is there anything?" St. Thomas begins by answering "Yes"; if he began by answering "No," it would not be the beginning, but the end.