But I have also a much deeper reason for making Fechner a part of my text.  His assumption that conscious experiences freely compound and separate themselves, the same assumption by which absolutism explains the relation of our minds to the eternal mind, and the same by which empiricism explains the composition of the human mind out of subordinate mental elements, is not one which we ought to let pass without scrutiny.  I shall scrutinize it in the next lecture.

LECTURE V

THE COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

In my last lecture I gave a miserably scanty outline of the way of thinking of a philosopher remarkable for the almost unexampled richness of his imagination of details.  I owe to Fechner’s shade an apology for presenting him in a manner so unfair to the most essential quality of his genius; but the time allotted is too short to say more about the particulars of his work, so I proceed to the programme I suggested at the end of our last hour.  I wish to discuss the assumption that states of consciousness, so-called, can separate and combine themselves freely, and keep their own identity unchanged while forming parts of simultaneous fields of experience of wider scope.

Let me first explain just what I mean by this.  While you listen to my voice, for example, you are perhaps inattentive to some bodily sensation due to your clothing or your posture.  Yet that sensation would seem probably to be there, for in an instant, by a change of attention, you can have it in one field of consciousness with the voice.  It seems as if it existed first in a separate form, and then as if, without itself changing, it combined with your other co-existent sensations.  It is after this analogy that pantheistic idealism thinks that we exist in the absolute.  The absolute, it thinks, makes the world by knowing the whole of it at once in one undivided eternal act.[1] To ‘be,’ really to be, is to be as it knows us to be, along with everything else, namely, and clothed with the fulness of our meaning.  Meanwhile we are at the same time not only really and as it knows us, but also apparently, for to our separate single selves we appear without most other things and unable to declare with any fulness what our own meaning is.  Now the classic doctrine of pantheistic idealism, from the Upanishads down to Josiah Royce, is that the finite knowers, in spite of their apparent ignorance, are one with the knower of the all.  In the most limited moments of our private experience, the absolute idea, as Dr. McTaggart told us, is implicitly contained.  The moments, as Royce says, exist only in relation to it.  They are true or erroneous only through its overshadowing presence.  Of the larger self that alone eternally is, they are the organic parts.  They are, only inasmuch as they are implicated in its being.