So long as this was the state of my own mind, I could accept the notion of self-compounding in the supernal spheres of experience no more easily than in that chapter on mind-dust I had accepted it in the lower spheres.  I found myself compelled, therefore, to call the absolute impossible; and the untrammelled freedom with which pantheistic or monistic idealists stepped over the logical barriers which Lotze and others had set down long before I had—­I had done little more than quote these previous critics in my chapter—­surprised me not a little, and made me, I have to confess, both resentful and envious.  Envious because in the bottom of my heart I wanted the same freedom myself, for motives which I shall develop later; and resentful because my absolutist friends seemed to me to be stealing the privilege of blowing both hot and cold.  To establish their absolute they used an intellectualist type of logic which they disregarded when employed against it.  It seemed to me that they ought at least to have mentioned the objections that had stopped me so completely.  I had yielded to them against my ‘will to believe,’ out of pure logical scrupulosity.  They, professing to loathe the will to believe and to follow purest rationality, had simply ignored them.  The method was easy, but hardly to be called candid.  Fechner indeed was candid enough, for he had never thought of the objections, but later writers, like Royce, who should presumably have heard them, had passed them by in silence.  I felt as if these philosophers were granting their will to believe in monism too easy a license.  My own conscience would permit me no such license.

So much for the personal confession by which you have allowed me to introduce the subject.  Let us now consider it more objectively.

The fundamental difficulty I have found is the number of contradictions which idealistic monists seem to disregard.  In the first place they attribute to all existence a mental or experiential character, but I find their simultaneous belief that the higher and the lower in the universe are entitatively identical, incompatible with this character.  Incompatible in consequence of the generally accepted doctrine that, whether Berkeley were right or not in saying of material existence that its esse is sentiri, it is undoubtedly right to say of mental existence that its esse is sentiri or experiri.  If I feel pain, it is just pain that I feel, however I may have come by the feeling.  No one pretends that pain as such only appears like pain, but in itself is different, for to be as a mental experience is only to appear to some one.