facts exist only by being known, the many facts will therefore mean many knowers.  But that there are so many knowers is itself a fact, which in turn requires its knower, so the one absolute knower has eventually to be brought in. All facts lead to him.  If it be a fact that this table is not a chair, not a rhinoceros, not a logarithm, not a mile away from the door, not worth five hundred pounds sterling, not a thousand centuries old, the absolute must even now be articulately aware of all these negations.  Along with what everything is it must also be conscious of everything which it is not.  This infinite atmosphere of explicit negativity—­observe that it has to be explicit—­around everything seems to us so useless an encumbrance as to make the absolute still more foreign to our sympathy.  Furthermore, if it be a fact that certain ideas are silly, the absolute has to have already thought the silly ideas to establish them in silliness.  The rubbish in its mind would thus appear easily to outweigh in amount the more desirable material.  One would expect it fairly to burst with such an obesity, plethora, and superfoetation of useless information.[15]

I will spare you further objections.  The sum of it all is that the absolute is not forced on our belief by logic, that it involves features of irrationality peculiar to itself, and that a thinker to whom it does not come as an ‘immediate certainty’ (to use Mr. Joachim’s words), is in no way bound to treat it as anything but an emotionally rather sublime hypothesis.  As such, it might, with all its defects, be, on account of its peace-conferring power and its formal grandeur, more rational than anything else in the field.  But meanwhile the strung-along unfinished world in time is its rival:  reality MAY exist in distributive form, in the shape not of an all but of a set of caches, just as it seems to—­this is the anti-absolutist hypothesis. Prima facie there is this in favor of the caches, that they are at any rate real enough to have made themselves at least appear to every one, whereas the absolute has as yet appeared immediately to only a few mystics, and indeed to them very ambiguously.  The advocates of the absolute assure us that any distributive form of being is infected and undermined by self-contradiction.  If we are unable to assimilate their arguments, and we have been unable, the only course we can take, it seems to me, is to let the absolute bury the absolute, and to seek reality in more promising directions, even among the details of the finite and the immediately given.

If these words of mine sound in bad taste to some of you, or even sacrilegious, I am sorry.  Perhaps the impression may be mitigated by what I have to say in later lectures.

LECTURE IV

CONCERNING FECHNER