The Nature of Reality

Is the world made of matter, of mind, or of something that stands behind both? The idealists answer mind: George Berkeley held that for material things, to be is to be perceived. Advaita Vedanta teaches that Brahman alone is real and the world is a superimposition on it, as a rope seen from a distance is taken for a snake. The Neoplatonists traced everything to the One, which gives rise to Intellect, Intellect to Soul, and Soul, at the far end, to matter.

Physics joined the argument late and brought a vocabulary, not a verdict: nothing in quantum theory settles whether mind or matter comes first.

The shelf holds primary texts in translation, histories of idealism, commentaries on Shankara and the Vedanta schools, studies of Plotinus and his successors, and the popular books that set quantum theory beside Eastern mysticism. Plotinus died in 270 CE, and his student Porphyry arranged his fifty-four treatises into six sets of nine: the Enneads.