distributive experiences.  They form two different concepts.  The absolute happens to be the only collective experience concerning which Oxford idealists have urged the identity, so I took it as my prerogative instance.  But Fechner’s earth-soul, or any stage of being below or above that, would have served my purpose just as well:  the same logical objection applies to these collective experiences as to the absolute.

So much, then, in order that you may not be confused about my strategical objective.  The real point to defend against the logic that I have used is the identity of the collective and distributive anyhow, not the particular example of such identity known as the absolute.

So now for the directer question.  Shall we say that every complex mental fact is a separate psychic entity succeeding upon a lot of other psychic entities which are erroneously called its parts, and superseding them in function, but not literally being composed of them?  This was the course I took in my psychology; and if followed in theology, we should have to deny the absolute as usually conceived, and replace it by the ‘God’ of theism.  We should also have to deny Fechner’s ‘earth-soul’ and all other superhuman collections of experience of every grade, so far at least as these are held to be compounded of our simpler souls in the way which Fechner believed in; and we should have to make all these denials in the name of the incorruptible logic of self-identity, teaching us that to call a thing and its other the same is to commit the crime of self-contradiction.

But if we realize the whole philosophic situation thus produced, we see that it is almost intolerable.  Loyal to the logical kind of rationality, it is disloyal to every other kind.  It makes the universe discontinuous.  These fields of experience that replace each other so punctually, each knowing the same matter, but in ever-widening contexts, from simplest feeling up to absolute knowledge, can they have no being in common when their cognitive function is so manifestly common?  The regular succession of them is on such terms an unintelligible miracle.  If you reply that their common object is of itself enough to make the many witnesses continuous, the same implacable logic follows you—­how can one and the same object appear so variously?  Its diverse appearances break it into a plurality; and our world of objects then falls into discontinuous pieces quite as much as did our world of subjects.  The resultant irrationality is really intolerable.

I said awhile ago that I was envious of Fechner and the other pantheists because I myself wanted the same freedom that I saw them unscrupulously enjoying, of letting mental fields compound themselves and so make the universe more continuous, but that my conscience held me prisoner.  In my heart of hearts, however, I knew that my situation was absurd and could be only provisional.  That secret of a continuous life