It is impossible to reconcile the peculiarities of our experience with our being only the absolute’s mental objects. A God, as distinguished from the absolute, creates things by projecting them beyond himself as so many substances, each endowed with perseity, as the scholastics call it. But objects of thought are not things per se. They are there only for their thinker, and only as he thinks them. How, then, can they become severally alive on their own accounts and think themselves quite otherwise than as he thinks them? It is as if the characters in a novel were to get up from the pages, and walk away and transact business of their own outside of the author’s story.
A third difficulty is this: The bird-metaphor is physical, but we see on reflection that in the physical world there is no real compounding. “Wholes” are not realities there, parts only are realities. “Bird” is only our name for the physical fact of a certain grouping of organs, just as “Charles’s Wain” is our name for a certain grouping of stars. The “whole,” be it bird or constellation, is nothing but our vision, nothing but an effect on our sensorium when a lot of things act on it together. It is not realized by any organ or any star, or experienced apart from the consciousness of an onlooker.40 In the physical world taken by itself there is thus no “all,” there are only the “eaches”—at least that is the “scientific” view.
In the mental world, on the contrary, wholes do in point of fact realize themselves per se. The meaning of the whole sentence is just as much a real experience as the feeling of each word is; the absolute’s experience is for itself, as much as yours is for yourself or mine for myself. So the feather-and-bird analogy won’t work unless you make the absolute into a distinct sort of mental agent with a vision produced in it by our several minds analogous to the “bird”-vision which the feathers, beak, etc., produce in those same minds. The “whole,” which is its experience, would then be its unifying reaction on our experiences, and not those very experiences self-combined. Such a view as this would go with theism, for the theistic God is a separate being; but it would not go with pantheistic idealism, the very essence of which is to insist that we are literally parts of God, and he only ourselves in our totality—the word “ourselves” here standing of course for all the universe’s finite facts.
I am dragging you into depths unsuitable, I fear, for a rapid lecture. Such difficulties as these have to be teased out with a needle, so to speak, and lecturers should take only bird’s-eye views. The practical upshot of the matter, however, so far as I am concerned, is this, that if I had been lecturing on the absolute a very few years ago, I should unhesitatingly have urged these difficulties, and developed them at still greater length, to show that the hypothesis of the absolute was not only non-coercive from the logical point of view, but self-contradictory as well, its notion that parts and whole are only two names for the same thing not bearing critical scrutiny. If you stick to purely physical terms like stars, there is no whole. If you call the whole mental, then the so-called whole, instead of being one fact with the parts, appears rather as the integral reaction on those parts of an independent higher witness, such as the theistic God is supposed to be.
So long as this was the state of my own mind, I could accept the notion of self-compounding in the supernal spheres of experience no more easily than in that chapter on mind-dust I had accepted it in the lower spheres. I found myself compelled, therefore, to call the absolute impossible; and the untrammelled freedom with which pantheistic or monistic idealists stepped over the logical barriers which Lotze and others had set down long before I had—I had done little more than quote these previous critics in my chapter—surprised me not a little, and made me, I have to confess, both resentful and envious. Envious because in the bottom of my heart I wanted the same freedom myself, for motives which I shall develop later; and resentful because my absolutist friends seemed to me to be stealing the privilege of blowing both hot and cold. To establish their absolute they used an intellectualist type of logic which they disregarded when employed against it. It seemed to me that they ought at least to have mentioned the objections that had stopped me so completely. I had yielded to them against my “will to believe,” out of pure logical scrupulosity. They, professing to loathe the will to believe and to follow purest rationality, had simply ignored them. The method was easy, but hardly to be called candid. Fechner indeed was candid enough, for he had never thought of the objections, but later writers, like Royce, who should presumably have heard them, had passed them by in silence. I felt as if these philosophers were granting their will to believe in monism too easy a license. My own conscience would permit me no such license.
So much for the personal confession by which you have allowed me to introduce the subject. Let us now consider it more objectively.
The fundamental difficulty I have found is the number of contradictions which idealistic monists seem to disregard. In the first place they attribute to all existence a mental or experiential character, but I find their simultaneous belief that the higher and the lower in the universe are entitatively identical, incompatible with this character. Incompatible in consequence of the generally accepted doctrine that, whether Berkeley were right or not in saying of material existence that its esse is sentiri, it is undoubtedly right to say of mental existence that its
