eighty years by thinking of him as an octogenarian, or into our having five fingers by calling us pentadactyls.  Souls have worn out both themselves and their welcome, that is the plain truth.  Philosophy ought to get the manifolds of experience unified on principles less empty.  Like the word ‘cause,’ the word ‘soul’ is but a theoretic stop-gap—­it marks a place and claims it for a future explanation to occupy.

This being our post-humian and post-kantian state of mind, I will ask your permission to leave the soul wholly out of the present discussion and to consider only the residual dilemma.  Some day, indeed, souls may get their innings again in philosophy—­I am quite ready to admit that possibility—­they form a category of thought too natural to the human mind to expire without prolonged resistance.  But if the belief in the soul ever does come to life after the many funeral-discourses which humian and kantian criticism have preached over it, I am sure it will be only when some one has found in the term a pragmatic significance that has hitherto eluded observation.  When that champion speaks, as he well may speak some day, it will be time to consider souls more seriously.

Let us leave out the soul, then, and confront what I just called the residual dilemma.  Can we, on the one hand, give up the logic of identity?—­can we, on the other, believe human experience to be fundamentally irrational?  Neither is easy, yet it would seem that we must do one or the other.

Few philosophers have had the frankness fairly to admit the necessity of choosing between the ‘horns’ offered.  Reality must be rational, they have said, and since the ordinary intellectualist logic is the only usual test of rationality, reality and logic must agree ‘somehow.’  Hegel was the first non-mystical writer to face the dilemma squarely and throw away the ordinary logic, saving a pseudo-rationality for the universe by inventing the higher logic of the ‘dialectic process.’  Bradley holds to the intellectualist logic, and by dint of it convicts the human universe of being irrationality incarnate.  But what must be and can be, is, he says; there must and can be relief from that irrationality; and the absolute must already have got the relief in secret ways of its own, impossible for us to guess at. We of course get no relief, so Bradley’s is a rather ascetic doctrine.  Royce and Taylor accept similar solutions, only they emphasize the irrationality of our finite universe less than Bradley does; and Royce in particular, being unusually ‘thick’ for an idealist, tries to bring the absolute’s secret forms of relief more sympathetically home to our imagination.