new qualities as well as unperceived relations accrue from the collective form.  It is thus superior to the distributive form.  But having reached this result, Royce (tho his treatment of the subject on its moral side seems to me infinitely richer and thicker than that of any other contemporary idealistic philosopher) leaves us very much to our own devices.  Fechner, on the contrary, tries to trace the superiorities due to the more collective form in as much detail as he can.  He marks the various intermediary stages and halting places of collectivity,—­as we are to our separate senses, so is the earth to us, so is the solar system to the earth, etc.,—­and if, in order to escape an infinitely long summation, he posits a complete God as the all-container and leaves him about as indefinite in feature as the idealists leave their absolute, he yet provides us with a very definite gate of approach to him in the shape of the earth-soul, through which in the nature of things we must first make connexion with all the more enveloping superhuman realms, and with which our more immediate religious commerce at any rate has to be carried on.

Ordinary monistic idealism leaves everything intermediary out.  It recognizes only the extremes, as if, after the first rude face of the phenomenal world in all its particularity, nothing but the supreme in all its perfection could be found.  First, you and I, just as we are in this room; and the moment we get below that surface, the unutterable absolute itself!  Doesn’t this show a singularly indigent imagination?  Isn’t this brave universe made on a richer pattern, with room in it for a long hierarchy of beings?  Materialistic science makes it infinitely richer in terms, with its molecules, and ether, and electrons, and what not.  Absolute idealism, thinking of reality only under intellectual forms, knows not what to do with bodies of any grade, and can make no use of any psychophysical analogy or correspondence.  The resultant thinness is startling when compared with the thickness and articulation of such a universe as Fechner paints.  May not satisfaction with the rationalistic absolute as the alpha and omega, and treatment of it in all its abstraction as an adequate religious object, argue a certain native poverty of mental demand?  Things reveal themselves soonest to those who most passionately want them, for our need sharpens our wit.  To a mind content with little, the much in the universe may always remain hid.

To be candid, one of my reasons for saying so much about Fechner has been to make the thinness of our current transcendentalism appear more evident by an effect of contrast.  Scholasticism ran thick; Hegel himself ran thick; but english and american transcendentalisms run thin.  If philosophy is more a matter of passionate vision than of logic,—­and I believe it is, logic only finding reasons for the vision afterwards,—­must not such thinness come either from the vision being defective in the disciples, or from their passion, matched with Fechner’s or with Hegel’s own passion, being as moonlight unto sunlight or as water unto wine?[4]