"But what are our sensations?
The feelings or thoughts of our own minds.

Then what we do is this: from certain ideas in our minds, produced no doubt by, and connected with, our bodily senses, but independent of and separate from them, we draw certain conclusions by reasoning; and these conclusions are in favor of the existence of something other than our sensations and our reasonings, and other than that which experiences the sensations and makes the reasonings, passive in the one case, active in the other.

That something is what we call--Mind.

But plainly, whatever it is, we owe to it the knowledge that matter exists; for that knowledge is gained by means of a sensation or feeling, followed by a process of reasoning; it is gained by the mind having first suffered something, and then done something.
Therefore, to say _there is no such thing as matter_ would be a much less absurd inference than to say _there is no such thing as mind_." ...
"The truth is, that we believe in the existence of 'matter,' because we cannot help it.

The inferences of our reason from our sensations impel us to this conclusion, and the steps are few and short by which we reach it.