It knows the same letters, indeed, but it knows them in this novel way.  It is safer, I said (for I fought shy of admitting a self or soul or other agent of combination), to treat the consciousness of the alphabet as a twenty-seventh fact, the substitute and not the sum of the twenty-six simpler consciousnesses, and to say that while under certain physiological conditions they alone are produced, other more complex physiological conditions result in its production instead.  Do not talk, therefore, I said, of the higher states consisting of the simpler, or being the same with them; talk rather of their knowing the same things.  They are different mental facts, but they apprehend, each in its own peculiar way, the same objective A, B, C, and D.

The theory of combination, I was forced to conclude, is thus untenable, being both logically nonsensical and practically unnecessary.  Say what you will, twelve thoughts, each of a single word, are not the self-same mental thing as one thought of the whole sentence.  The higher thoughts, I insisted, are psychic units, not compounds; but for all that, they may know together as a collective multitude the very same objects which under other conditions are known separately by as many simple thoughts.

For many years I held rigorously to this view,[3] and the reasons for doing so seemed to me during all those years to apply also to the opinion that the absolute mind stands to our minds in the relation of a whole to its parts.  If untenable in finite psychology, that opinion ought to be untenable in metaphysics also.  The great transcendentalist metaphor has always been, as I lately reminded you, a grammatical sentence.  Physically such a sentence is of course composed of clauses, these of words, the words of syllables, and the syllables of letters.  We may take each word in, yet not understand the sentence; but if suddenly the meaning of the whole sentence flashes, the sense of each word is taken up into that whole meaning.  Just so, according to our transcendentalist teachers, the absolute mind thinks the whole sentence, while we, according to our rank as thinkers, think a clause, a word, a syllable, or a letter.  Most of us are, as I said, mere syllables in the mouth of Allah.  And as Allah comes first in the order of being, so comes first the entire sentence, the logos that forms the eternal absolute thought.  Students of language tell us that speech began with men’s efforts to make statements.  The rude synthetic vocal utterances first used for this effect slowly got stereotyped, and then much later got decomposed into grammatical parts.  It is not as if men had first invented letters and made syllables of them, then made words of the syllables and sentences of the words;—­they actually followed the reverse order.  So, the transcendentalists affirm, the complete absolute thought is the pre-condition of our thoughts, and we finite creatures are only in so far as it owns us as its verbal fragments.