I take the phrase ‘congenital transcendentalism’ from Santayana who defined it as ‘the spontaneous feeling that life is a dream’. ‘The loneliness which is the truth about things’ is a phrase of Virginia Woolf's. The thesis I will advance is that many expressions of doubt or denial of the shareable world are self-misunderstood manifestations of the state indicated by Woolf's expression. But the loneliness of which Woolf speaks must not be construed as the kind of loneliness which can be assuaged by family, friends, lovers or company. Nor is it the loneliness which a convinced solipsist might experience. It is rather the loneliness of ‘that “I” and that “life of mine’” which is ‘untouched whichever way the issue is decided whether the world is or is not’ (Husserl, 1970, 9).

The earliest manifestation of congenital transcendentalism known to me is the familiar story from Chuang-tse (c. 300 BC) of the sage who has increasingly vivid and long drawn out dreams of life as a butterfly until he reaches a point when he can no longer be sure whether he is a man dreaming that he is a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that he is a man. There is an episode with the structure of the Chuang-tse anecdote in Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno (a favourite of Wittgenstein's) where at one point the narrator says, ‘Either I have been dreaming about Sylvie and this is the reality, or else I have been with Sylvie and this is the dream.’