Idealism has about it the smell of a solipsistic defence against the one's dependence on the body and on others, its refined logic which devastates false identifications also masks a child's peevish and magical wish for absolute dominion. There is an egoistic or positive form of it known in the jargon as 'create your own reality' or as being possessed of a 'reality distortion field', perhaps not dissimilar to what Keats called the 'egotistical sublime', as well as a mystical or negative form, which consoles the self by a negation that carries it off entirely together with the pesky other, but always leaves a moment or two of undivided sovereignty between the two abolishings. It is a tautology that everything we can know must be in mind, since mind is just a name for the knowing - although a misleading one in its suggestion that the functioning must belong to a corresponding organ - but it is also contingently true, at least up to now, that knowing is a dependency of life, and thus is always already situated in relation to birth, development, flourishing, reproduction, decline and death. And all of these depend crucially on others, except possibly death. Life has its own imperatives in which solipsism does not figure, and while it may at times seem permissive, it knows how to enforce them. So, is mind nothing more than the spoiled child of life?