But the higher knower that knows the two beings we start with proves to be the same knower that knows everything else.  For assume any third being, the queen, say, and as the cat knew the king, so let the king know his queen, and let this second knowledge, by the same reasoning, require a higher knower as its presupposition.  That knower of the king’s knowing must, it is now contended, be the same higher knower that was required for the cat’s knowing; for if you suppose otherwise, you have no longer the same king.  This may not seem immediately obvious, but if you follow the intellectualistic logic employed in all these reasonings, I don’t see how you can escape the admission.  If it be true that the independent or indifferent cannot be related, for the abstract words ‘independent’ or ‘indifferent’ as such imply no relation, then it is just as true that the king known by the cat cannot be the king that knows the queen, for taken merely ‘as such,’ the abstract term ‘what the cat knows’ and the abstract term ’what knows the queen’ are logically distinct.  The king thus logically breaks into two kings, with nothing to connect them, until a higher knower is introduced to recognize them as the self-same king concerned in any previous acts of knowledge which he may have brought about.  This he can do because he possesses all the terms as his own objects and can treat them as he will.  Add any fourth or fifth term, and you get a like result, and so on, until at last an all-owning knower, otherwise called the absolute, is reached.  The co-implicated ‘through-and-through’ world of monism thus stands proved by irrefutable logic, and all pluralism appears as absurd.

The reasoning is pleasing from its ingenuity, and it is almost a pity that so straight a bridge from abstract logic to concrete fact should not bear our weight.  To have the alternative forced upon us of admitting either finite things each cut off from all relation with its environment, or else of accepting the integral absolute with no environment and all relations packed within itself, would be too delicious a simplification.  But the purely verbal character of the operation is undisguised.  Because the names of finite things and their relations are disjoined, it doesn’t follow that the realities named need a deus ex machina from on high to conjoin them.  The same things disjoined in one respect appear as conjoined in another.  Naming the disjunction doesn’t debar us from also naming the conjunction in a later modifying statement, for the two are absolutely co-ordinate elements in the finite tissue of experience.  When at Athens it was found self-contradictory that a boy could be both tall and short (tall namely in respect of a child, short in respect of a man), the absolute had not yet been thought of, but it might just as well have been invoked by Socrates as by Lotze or Royce, as a relief from his peculiar intellectualistic difficulty.