A third difficulty is this:  The bird-metaphor is physical, but we see on reflection that in the physical world there is no real compounding.  ‘Wholes’ are not realities there, parts only are realities.  ‘Bird’ is only our name for the physical fact of a certain grouping of organs, just as ‘Charles’s Wain’ is our name for a certain grouping of stars.  The ‘whole,’ be it bird or constellation, is nothing but our vision, nothing but an effect on our sensorium when a lot of things act on it together.  It is not realized by any organ or any star, or experienced apart from the consciousness of an onlooker.[4] In the physical world taken by itself there is thus no ‘all,’ there are only the ’eaches’—­at least that is the ‘scientific’ view.

In the mental world, on the contrary, wholes do in point of fact realize themselves per se.  The meaning of the whole sentence is just as much a real experience as the feeling of each word is; the absolute’s experience is for itself, as much as yours is for yourself or mine for myself.  So the feather-and-bird analogy won’t work unless you make the absolute into a distinct sort of mental agent with a vision produced in it by our several minds analogous to the ’bird’-vision which the feathers, beak, etc., produce in those same minds.  The ‘whole,’ which is its experience, would then be its unifying reaction on our experiences, and not those very experiences self-combined.  Such a view as this would go with theism, for the theistic God is a separate being; but it would not go with pantheistic idealism, the very essence of which is to insist that we are literally parts of God, and he only ourselves in our totality—­the word ‘ourselves’ here standing of course for all the universe’s finite facts.

I am dragging you into depths unsuitable, I fear, for a rapid lecture.  Such difficulties as these have to be teased out with a needle, so to speak, and lecturers should take only bird’s-eye views.  The practical upshot of the matter, however, so far as I am concerned, is this, that if I had been lecturing on the absolute a very few years ago, I should unhesitatingly have urged these difficulties, and developed them at still greater length, to show that the hypothesis of the absolute was not only non-coercive from the logical point of view, but self-contradictory as well, its notion that parts and whole are only two names for the same thing not bearing critical scrutiny.  If you stick to purely physical terms like stars, there is no whole.  If you call the whole mental, then the so-called whole, instead of being one fact with the parts, appears rather as the integral reaction on those parts of an independent higher witness, such as the theistic God is supposed to be.