t our own meaning is. Now the classic doctrine of
pantheistic idealism, from the Upanishads down to Josiah Royce, is
that the finite knowers, in spite of their apparent ignorance, are one
with the knower of the all. In the most limited moments of our private
experience, the absolute idea, as Dr. McTaggart told us, is implicitly
contained. The moments, as Royce says, exist only in relation to it.
They are true or erroneous only through its overshadowing presence. Of
the larger self that alone eternally is, they are the organic parts.
They _are_, only inasmuch as they are implicated in its being.

There is thus in reality but this one self, consciously inclusive of
all the lesser selves, _logos_, problem-solver, and all-knower; and
Royce ingeniously compares the ignorance that in our persons breaks
out in the midst of its complete knowledge and isolates me from you
and both of us from it, to the inattention into which our finite minds
are liable to fall with respect to such implicitly present details as
those corporeal sensations to which I made allusion just now. Those
sensations stand to our total private minds in the same relation in
which our private minds stand to the absolute mind. Privacy means
ignorance--I still quote Royce--and ignorance means inattention. We
are finite because our wills, as such, are only fragments of the
absolute will; because will means interest, and an incomplete will
means an incomplete interest; and because incompleteness of interest
means inattention to much that a fuller interest would bring us to
perceive.[2]

In this account Royce makes by far the manliest of the post-hegelian
attempts to read some empirically apprehensible content into the
notion of our relation to the absolute mind.

I have to admit, now that I propose to you to scrutinize this
assumption rather closely, that trepidation seizes me. The subject is
a subtle and abstruse one. It is one thing to delve into subtleties by
one's self with pen in hand, or to study out abstruse points in
books, but quite another thing to make a popular lecture out of them.
Nevertheless I must not flinch from my task here, for I think that
this particular point forms perhaps the vital knot of the present
philosophic situation, and I imagine that the times are ripe, or
almost ripe, for a serious attempt to be made at its untying.

It may perhaps help to lessen the arduousness of the subject if I put
the first part of what I have to say in th