profundity. For my own part, there seems
something grotesque and _saugrenu_ in the pretension of a style so
disobedient to the first rules of sound communication between minds,
to be the authentic mother-tongue of reason, and to keep step more
accurately than any other style does with the absolute's own ways
of thinking. I do not therefore take Hegel's technical apparatus
seriously at all. I regard him rather as one of those numerous
original seers who can never learn how to articulate. His would-be
coercive logic counts for nothing in my eyes; but that does not in
the least impugn the philosophic importance of his conception of the
absolute, if we take it merely hypothetically as one of the great
types of cosmic vision.

Taken thus hypothetically, I wish to discuss it briefly. But before
doing so I must call your attention to an odd peculiarity in the
hegelian procedure. The peculiarity is one which will come before us
again for a final judgment in my seventh lecture, so at present I only
note it in passing. Hegel, you remember, considers that the immediate
finite data of experience are 'untrue' because they are not their own
others. They are negated by what is external to them. The absolute
is true because it and it only has no external environment, and has
attained to being its own other. (These words sound queer enough, but
those of you who know something of Hegel's text will follow them.)
Granting his premise that to be true a thing must in some sort be its
own other, everything hinges on whether he is right in holding that
the several pieces of finite experience themselves cannot be said
to be in any wise _their_ own others. When conceptually or
intellectualistically treated, they of course cannot be their own
others. Every abstract concept as such excludes what it doesn't
include, and if such concepts are adequate substitutes for
reality's concrete pulses, the latter must square themselves with
intellectualistic logic, and no one of them in any sense can claim to
be its own other. If, however, the conceptual treatment of the flow of
reality should prove for any good reason to be inadequate and to have
a practical rather than a theoretical or speculative value, then an
independent empirical look into the constitution of reality's pulses
might possibly show that some of them _are_ their own others, and
indeed are so in the self-same sense in which the absolute is
maintained to be so by Hegel. When we come to my s