distinguish the total from the partial way of ‘taking’ it, etc.; but they forget that, on idealistic principles, to make such distinctions is tantamount to making different beings, or at any rate that varying points of view, aspects, appearances, ways of taking, and the like, are meaningless phrases unless we suppose outside of the unchanging content of reality a diversity of witnesses who experience or take it variously, the absolute mind being just the witness that takes it most completely.

For consider the matter one moment longer, if you can.  Ask what this notion implies, of appearing differently from different points of view.  If there be no outside witness, a thing can appear only to itself, the caches or parts to their several selves temporally, the all or whole to itself eternally.  Different ‘selves’ thus break out inside of what the absolutist insists to be intrinsically one fact.  But how can what is actually one be effectively so many?  Put your witnesses anywhere, whether outside or inside of what is witnessed, in the last resort your witnesses must on idealistic principles be distinct, for what is witnessed is different.

I fear that I am expressing myself with terrible obscurity—­some of you, I know, are groaning over the logic-chopping.  Be a pluralist or be a monist, you say, for heaven’s sake, no matter which, so long as you stop arguing.  It reminds one of Chesterton’s epigram that the only thing that ever drives human beings insane is logic.  But whether I be sane or insane, you cannot fail, even tho you be transcendentalists yourselves, to recognize to some degree by my trouble the difficulties that beset monistic idealism.  What boots it to call the parts and the whole the same body of experience, when in the same breath you have to say that the all ‘as such’ means one sort of experience and each part ‘as such’ means another?

Difficulties, then, so far, but no stable solution as yet, for I have been talking only critically.  You will probably be relieved to hear, then, that having rounded this corner, I shall begin to consider what may be the possibilities of getting farther.

To clear the path, I beg you first to note one point.  What has so troubled my logical conscience is not so much the absolute by itself as the whole class of suppositions of which it is the supreme example, collective experiences namely, claiming identity with their constituent parts, yet experiencing things quite differently from these latter.  If any such collective experience can be, then of course, so far as the mere logic of the case goes, the absolute may be.  In a previous lecture I have talked against the absolute from other points of view.  In this lecture I have meant merely to take it as the example most prominent at Oxford of the thing which has given me such logical perplexity.  I don’t logically see how a collective experience of any grade whatever can be treated as logically identical with a lot of