which the universe knows by heart and acts on every instant cannot be a contradiction incarnate.  If logic says it is one, so much the worse for logic.  Logic being the lesser thing, the static incomplete abstraction, must succumb to reality, not reality to logic.  Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in its chrysalis.  It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.  Fechner, Royce, and Hegel seem on the truer path.  Fechner has never heard of logic’s veto, Royce hears the voice but cannily ignores the utterances, Hegel hears them but to spurn them—­and all go on their way rejoicing.  Shall we alone obey the veto?

Sincerely, and patiently as I could, I struggled with the problem for years, covering hundreds of sheets of paper with notes and memoranda and discussions with myself over the difficulty.  How can many consciousnesses be at the same time one consciousness?  How can one and the same identical fact experience itself so diversely?  The struggle was vain; I found myself in an impasse.  I saw that I must either forswear that ‘psychology without a soul’ to which my whole psychological and kantian education had committed me,—­I must, in short, bring back distinct spiritual agents to know the mental states, now singly and now in combination, in a word bring back scholasticism and common sense—­or else I must squarely confess the solution of the problem impossible, and then either give up my intellectualistic logic, the logic of identity, and adopt some higher (or lower) form of rationality, or, finally, face the fact that life is logically irrational.

Sincerely, this is the actual trilemma that confronts every one of us.  Those of you who are scholastic-minded, or simply common-sense minded, will smile at the elaborate groans of my parturient mountain resulting in nothing but this mouse.  Accept the spiritual agents, for heaven’s sake, you will say, and leave off your ridiculous pedantry.  Let but our ‘souls’ combine our sensations by their intellectual faculties, and let but ‘God’ replace the pantheistic world-soul, and your wheels will go round again—­you will enjoy both life and logic together.

This solution is obvious and I know that many of you will adopt it.  It is comfortable, and all our habits of speech support it.  Yet it is not for idle or fantastical reasons that the notion of the substantial soul, so freely used by common men and the more popular philosophies, has fallen upon such evil days, and has no prestige in the eyes of critical thinkers.  It only shares the fate of other unrepresentable substances and principles.  They are without exception all so barren that to sincere inquirers they appear as little more than names masquerading—­Wo die begriffe fehlen da stellt ein wort zur rechten zeit sich ein.  You see no deeper into the fact that a hundred sensations get compounded or known together by thinking that a ‘soul’ does the compounding than you see into a man’s living