two beings can never later acquire any possible linkages or connexions, but must remain eternally as if in different worlds.  For suppose any connexion whatever to ensue, this connexion would simply be a third being additional to the cat and the king, which would itself have to be linked to both by additional links before it could connect them, and so on ad infinitum, the argument, you see, being the same as Lotze’s about how a’s influence does its influencing when it influences b.

In Royce’s own words, if the king can be without the cat knowing him, then king and cat ’can have no common features, no ties, no true relations; they are separated, each from the other, by absolutely impassable chasms.  They can never come to get either ties or community of nature; they are not in the same space, nor in the same time, nor in the same natural or spiritual order.’[7] They form in short two unrelated universes,—­which is the reductio ad absurdum required.

To escape this preposterous state of things we must accordingly revoke the original hypothesis.  The king and the cat are not indifferent to each other in the way supposed.  But if not in that way, then in no way, for connexion in that way carries connexion in other ways; so that, pursuing the reverse line of reasoning, we end with the absolute itself as the smallest fact that can exist.  Cat and king are co-involved, they are a single fact in two names, they can never have been absent from each other, and they are both equally co-implicated with all the other facts of which the universe consists.

Professor Royce’s proof that whoso admits the cat’s witnessing the king at all must thereupon admit the integral absolute, may be briefly put as follows:—­

First, to know the king, the cat must intend that king, must somehow pass over and lay hold of him individually and specifically.  The cat’s idea, in short, must transcend the cat’s own separate mind and somehow include the king, for were the king utterly outside and independent of the cat, the cat’s pure other, the beast’s mind could touch the king in no wise.  This makes the cat much less distinct from the king than we had at first naively supposed.  There must be some prior continuity between them, which continuity Royce interprets idealistically as meaning a higher mind that owns them both as objects, and owning them can also own any relation, such as the supposed witnessing, that may obtain between them.  Taken purely pluralistically, neither of them can own any part of a between, because, so taken, each is supposed shut up to itself:  the fact of a between thus commits us to a higher knower.