--'
O'Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. 'We control matter
because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by
degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility,
levitation -- anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if
I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must
get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make
the laws of Nature.'
'But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What about
Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet.'
'Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if we did
not, what difference would it make? We can shut them out of existence.
Oceania is the world.'
'But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny
helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the
earth was uninhabited.'
'Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be
older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.'
'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals -- mammoths
and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was
ever heard of.'
'Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-
century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man,
if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outsi