ever drives human beings insane is logic. But whether I be
sane or insane, you cannot fail, even tho you be transcendentalists
yourselves, to recognize to some degree by my trouble the difficulties
that beset monistic idealism. What boots it to call the parts and the
whole the same body of experience, when in the same breath you have to
say that the all 'as such' means one sort of experience and each part
'as such' means another?

Difficulties, then, so far, but no stable solution as yet, for I have
been talking only critically. You will probably be relieved to hear,
then, that having rounded this corner, I shall begin to consider what
may be the possibilities of getting farther.

To clear the path, I beg you first to note one point. What has so
troubled my logical conscience is not so much the absolute by itself
as the whole class of suppositions of which it is the supreme
example, collective experiences namely, claiming identity with their
constituent parts, yet experiencing things quite differently from
these latter. If _any_ such collective experience can be, then of
course, so far as the mere logic of the case goes, the absolute may
be. In a previous lecture I have talked against the absolute from
other points of view. In this lecture I have meant merely to take it
as the example most prominent at Oxford of the thing which has given
me such logical perplexity. I don't logically see how a collective
experience of any grade whatever can be treated as logically identical
with a lot of distributive experiences. They form two different
concepts. The absolute happens to be the only collective experience
concerning which Oxford idealists have urged the identity, so I took
it as my prerogative instance. But Fechner's earth-soul, or any stage
of being below or above that, would have served my purpose just
as well: the same logical objection applies to these collective
experiences as to the absolute.

So much, then, in order that you may not be confused about my
strategical objective. The real point to defend against the logic that
I have used is the identity of the collective and distributive anyhow,
not the particular example of such identity known as the absolute.

So now for the directer question. Shall we say that every complex
mental fact is a separate psychic entity succeeding upon a lot of
other psychic entities which are erroneously called its parts, and
superseding them in function, but not literally being com