It is the intense concreteness of Fechner, his fertility of detail, which fills me with an admiration which I should like to make this audience share.  Among the philosophic cranks of my acquaintance in the past was a lady all the tenets of whose system I have forgotten except one.  Had she been born in the Ionian Archipelago some three thousand years ago, that one doctrine would probably have made her name sure of a place in every university curriculum and examination paper.  The world, she said, is composed of only two elements, the Thick, namely, and the Thin.  No one can deny the truth of this analysis, as far as it goes (though in the light of our contemporary knowledge of nature it has itself a rather ‘thin’ sound), and it is nowhere truer than in that part of the world called philosophy.  I am sure, for example, that many of you, listening to what poor account I have been able to give of transcendental idealism, have received an impression of its arguments being strangely thin, and of the terms it leaves us with being shiveringly thin wrappings for so thick and burly a world as this.  Some of you of course will charge the thinness to my exposition; but thin as that has been, I believe the doctrines reported on to have been thinner.  From Green to Haldane the absolute proposed to us to straighten out the confusions of the thicket of experience in which our life is passed remains a pure abstraction which hardly any one tries to make a whit concreter.  If we open Green, we get nothing but the transcendental ego of apperception (Kant’s name for the fact that to be counted in experience a thing has to be witnessed), blown up into a sort of timeless soap-bubble large enough to mirror the whole universe.  Nature, Green keeps insisting, consists only in relations, and these imply the action of a mind that is eternal; a self-distinguishing consciousness which itself escapes from the relations by which it determines other things.  Present to whatever is in succession, it is not in succession itself.  If we take the Cairds, they tell us little more of the principle of the universe—­it is always a return into the identity of the self from the difference of its objects.  It separates itself from them and so becomes conscious of them in their separation from one another, while at the same time it binds them together as elements in one higher self-consciousness.

This seems the very quintessence of thinness; and the matter hardly grows thicker when we gather, after enormous amounts of reading, that the great enveloping self in question is absolute reason as such, and that as such it is characterized by the habit of using certain jejune ‘categories’ with which to perform its eminent relating work.  The whole active material of natural fact is tried out, and only the barest intellectualistic formalism remains.