beak
and tail, coming into being simultaneously: so we unhesitatingly lay
down the law that no part of anything can be except so far as the
whole also is. And then, since everything whatever is part of the
whole universe, and since (if we are idealists) nothing, whether part
or whole, exists except for a witness, we proceed to the conclusion
that the unmitigated absolute as witness of the whole is the one sole
ground of being of every partial fact, the fact of our own existence
included. We think of ourselves as being only a few of the feathers,
so to speak, which help to constitute that absolute bird. Extending
the analogy of certain wholes, of which we have familiar experience,
to the whole of wholes, we easily become absolute idealists.

But if, instead of yielding to the seductions of our metaphor, be
it sentence, shower, or bird, we analyze more carefully the notion
suggested by it that we are constituent parts of the absolute's
eternal field of consciousness, we find grave difficulties arising.
First, the difficulty I found with the mind-dust theory. If the
absolute makes us by knowing us, how can we exist otherwise than _as_
it knows us? But it knows each of us indivisibly from everything else.
Yet if to exist means nothing but to be experienced, as idealism
affirms, we surely exist otherwise, for we experience _ourselves_
ignorantly and in division. We indeed differ from the absolute not
only by defect, but by excess. Our ignorances, for example, bring
curiosities and doubts by which it cannot be troubled, for it owns
eternally the solution of every problem. Our impotence entails pains,
our imperfection sins, which its perfection keeps at a distance. What
I said of the alphabet-form and the letters holds good of the absolute
experience and our experiences. Their relation, whatever it may be,
seems not to be that of identity.

It is impossible to reconcile the peculiarities of our experience with
our being only the absolute's mental objects. A God, as distinguished
from the absolute, creates things by projecting them beyond himself as
so many substances, each endowed with _perseity_, as the scholastics
call it. But objects of thought are not things _per se_. They are
there only _for_ their thinker, and only _as_ he thinks them. How,
then, can they become severally alive on their own accounts and think
themselves quite otherwise than as he thinks them? It is as if the
characters in a novel were to get up from th