The metaphor is so beautiful, and applies, moreover, so literally to such a multitude of the minor wholes of experience, that by merely hearing it most of us are convinced that it must apply universally.  We see that no smallest raindrop can come into being without a whole shower, no single feather without a whole bird, neck and crop, beak and tail, coming into being simultaneously:  so we unhesitatingly lay down the law that no part of anything can be except so far as the whole also is.  And then, since everything whatever is part of the whole universe, and since (if we are idealists) nothing, whether part or whole, exists except for a witness, we proceed to the conclusion that the unmitigated absolute as witness of the whole is the one sole ground of being of every partial fact, the fact of our own existence included.  We think of ourselves as being only a few of the feathers, so to speak, which help to constitute that absolute bird.  Extending the analogy of certain wholes, of which we have familiar experience, to the whole of wholes, we easily become absolute idealists.

But if, instead of yielding to the seductions of our metaphor, be it sentence, shower, or bird, we analyze more carefully the notion suggested by it that we are constituent parts of the absolute’s eternal field of consciousness, we find grave difficulties arising.  First, the difficulty I found with the mind-dust theory.  If the absolute makes us by knowing us, how can we exist otherwise than as it knows us?  But it knows each of us indivisibly from everything else.  Yet if to exist means nothing but to be experienced, as idealism affirms, we surely exist otherwise, for we experience ourselves ignorantly and in division.  We indeed differ from the absolute not only by defect, but by excess.  Our ignorances, for example, bring curiosities and doubts by which it cannot be troubled, for it owns eternally the solution of every problem.  Our impotence entails pains, our imperfection sins, which its perfection keeps at a distance.  What I said of the alphabet-form and the letters holds good of the absolute experience and our experiences.  Their relation, whatever it may be, seems not to be that of identity.

It is impossible to reconcile the peculiarities of our experience with our being only the absolute’s mental objects.  A God, as distinguished from the absolute, creates things by projecting them beyond himself as so many substances, each endowed with perseity, as the scholastics call it.  But objects of thought are not things per se.  They are there only for their thinker, and only as he thinks them.  How, then, can they become severally alive on their own accounts and think themselves quite otherwise than as he thinks them?  It is as if the characters in a novel were to get up from the pages, and walk away and transact business of their own outside of the author’s story.