ch they have been taken. We are
compelled by the inevitable necessity of thought itself, which
cannot escape from the world of sense-impressions, to think of
personality as possessing for its "substratum" "something" which
gives it concrete reality. This "something" which is utterly
indefinable, is the last gesture, so to speak, made by the
sense-world before it vanishes away.

This "something" which is the substratum of the soul and the thing
which gives unity and concreteness to the soul is the thinnest and
remotest attenuation of the world of sense-impression. It is far
thinner and more remote than the sense-element in our conception
of spirit. Why, it may be asked, can we not get rid of this
"something" which fills that gap or lacuna in the identity of the
soul which can only be thought of in material terms?

We cannot get rid of it because directly we attempt to do so we are
left with that vague idealistic abstraction upon our hands which we
call "thought-in-the-abstract"--or "pure thought" or "pure
self-consciousness." But it may be asked--"Why cannot the physical
body serve this necessary purpose of giving personality a local and
concrete identity?"

First--and this is the psychological reason--it cannot do so because
our feeling of the soul as "something within" our physical body is
an ultimate fact of experience which would then remain as an
experience denied and contradicted.

Secondly--and this is the metaphysical reason--it cannot do so
because our physical body is itself only a part of that objective
universe of sense-impressions which the soul is conscious of as
essentially distinct from its own inmost identity.

Metaphysical idealism seems to hold that the ultimate monad of
self-consciousness is not this personal micro-cosmic monad which
I am conscious of as the empirical self or "soul" but an impersonal
macrocosmic monad or "unity of apperception" which underlies
the whole field of impressions and is unable, by reason of its
inherent nature, to contemplate itself as an "object" at all.

What the complex vision seems to me to disclose, is a revelation
which includes at one and the same moment "the universal
monad" and the "personal monad"; but it indicates clearly enough
that the former is an abstraction from the latter. My thought can
certainly think of the whole universe, including time and space, as
one enormous mass of impressions or ideals presenting itself
inside the circle of my mind.

O