‘out of range,’ and not an object for distincter vision.  Psychologically, it seems to me that Fechner’s God is a lazy postulate of his, rather than a part of his system positively thought out.  As we envelop our sight and hearing, so the earth-soul envelops us, and the star-soul the earth-soul, until—­what?  Envelopment can’t go on forever; it must have an abschluss, a total envelope must terminate the series, so God is the name that Fechner gives to this last all-enveloper.  But if nothing escapes this all-enveloper, he is responsible for everything, including evil, and all the paradoxes and difficulties which I found in the absolute at the end of our third lecture recur undiminished.  Fechner tries sincerely to grapple with the problem of evil, but he always solves it in the leibnitzian fashion by making his God non-absolute, placing him under conditions of ‘metaphysical necessity’ which even his omnipotence cannot violate.  His will has to struggle with conditions not imposed on that will by itself.  He tolerates provisionally what he has not created, and then with endless patience tries to overcome it and live it down.  He has, in short, a history.  Whenever Fechner tries to represent him clearly, his God becomes the ordinary God of theism, and ceases to be the absolutely totalized all-enveloper.[9] In this shape, he represents the ideal element in things solely, and is our champion and our helper and we his helpers, against the bad parts of the universe.

Fechner was in fact too little of a metaphysician to care for perfect formal consistency in these abstract regions.  He believed in God in the pluralistic manner, but partly from convention and partly from what I should call intellectual laziness, if laziness of any kind could be imputed to a Fechner, he let the usual monistic talk about him pass unchallenged.  I propose to you that we should discuss the question of God without entangling ourselves in advance in the monistic assumption.  Is it probable that there is any superhuman consciousness at all, in the first place?  When that is settled, the further question whether its form be monistic or pluralistic is in order.

Before advancing to either question, however, and I shall have to deal with both but very briefly after what has been said already, let me finish our retrospective survey by one more remark about the curious logical situation of the absolutists.  For what have they invoked the absolute except as a being the peculiar inner form of which shall enable it to overcome the contradictions with which intellectualism has found the finite many as such to be infected?  The many-in-one character that, as we have seen, every smallest tract of finite experience offers, is considered by intellectualism to be fatal to the reality of finite experience.  What can be distinguished, it tells us, is separate; and what is separate is unrelated, for a relation, being a ‘between,’ would bring only a twofold separation.  Hegel, Royce, Bradley, and