8.  The great monistic denkmittel for a hundred years past has been the notion of the one knower.  The many exist only as objects for his thought—­exist in his dream, as it were; and as he knows them, they have one purpose, form one system, tell one tale for him.  This notion of an all-enveloping noetic unity in things is the sublimest achievement of intellectualist philosophy.  Those who believe in the Absolute, as the all-knower is termed, usually say that they do so for coercive reasons, which clear thinkers cannot evade.  The Absolute has far-reaching practical consequences, some of which I drew attention in my second lecture.  Many kinds of difference important to us would surely follow from its being true.  I cannot here enter into all the logical proofs of such a Being’s existence, farther than to say that none of them seem to me sound.  I must therefore treat the notion of an All-Knower simply as an hypothesis, exactly on a par logically with the pluralist notion that there is no point of view, no focus of information extant, from which the entire content of the universe is visible at once.  “God’s consciousness,” says Professor Royce,[Footnote:  The Conception of God, New York, 1897, p. 292.] “forms in its wholeness one luminously transparent conscious moment”—­this is the type of noetic unity on which rationalism insists.  Empiricism on the other hand is satisfied with the type of noetic unity that is humanly familiar.  Everything gets known by some knower along with something else; but the knowers may in the end be irreducibly many, and the greatest knower of them all may yet not know the whole of everything, or even know what he does know at one single stroke:—­he may be liable to forget.  Whichever type obtained, the world would still be a universe noetically.  Its parts would be conjoined by knowledge, but in the one case the knowledge would be absolutely unified, in the other it would be strung along and overlapped.

The notion of one instantaneous or eternal Knower—­either adjective here means the same thing—­is, as I said, the great intellectualist achievement of our time.  It has practically driven out that conception of ‘Substance’ which earlier philosophers set such store by, and by which so much unifying work used to be done—­universal substance which alone has being in and from itself, and of which all the particulars of experience are but forms to which it gives support.  Substance has succumbed to the pragmatic criticisms of the English school.  It appears now only as another name for the fact that phenomena as they come are actually grouped and given in coherent forms, the very forms in which we finite knowers experience or think them together.  These forms of conjunction are as much parts of the tissue of experience as are the terms which they connect; and it is a great pragmatic achievement for recent idealism to have made the world hang together in these directly representable ways instead of drawing its unity from the ‘inherence’ of its parts—­whatever that may mean—­in an unimaginable principle behind the scenes.