posed of
them? This was the course I took in my psychology; and if followed in
theology, we should have to deny the absolute as usually conceived,
and replace it by the 'God' of theism. We should also have to deny
Fechner's 'earth-soul' and all other superhuman collections of
experience of every grade, so far at least as these are held to be
compounded of our simpler souls in the way which Fechner believed
in; and we should have to make all these denials in the name of the
incorruptible logic of self-identity, teaching us that to call a thing
and its other the same is to commit the crime of self-contradiction.

But if we realize the whole philosophic situation thus produced,
we see that it is almost intolerable. Loyal to the logical kind of
rationality, it is disloyal to every other kind. It makes the universe
discontinuous. These fields of experience that replace each other
so punctually, each knowing the same matter, but in ever-widening
contexts, from simplest feeling up to absolute knowledge, _can_
they have no _being_ in common when their cognitive function is so
manifestly common? The regular succession of them is on such terms an
unintelligible miracle. If you reply that their common _object_ is
of itself enough to make the many witnesses continuous, the same
implacable logic follows you--how _can_ one and the same object appear
so variously? Its diverse appearances break it into a plurality; and
our world of objects then falls into discontinuous pieces quite as
much as did our world of subjects. The resultant irrationality is
really intolerable.

I said awhile ago that I was envious of Fechner and the other
pantheists because I myself wanted the same freedom that I saw them
unscrupulously enjoying, of letting mental fields compound themselves
and so make the universe more continuous, but that my conscience held
me prisoner. In my heart of hearts, however, I knew that my situation
was absurd and could be only provisional. That secret of a continuous
life which the universe knows by heart and acts on every instant
cannot be a contradiction incarnate. If logic says it is one, so
much the worse for logic. Logic being the lesser thing, the static
incomplete abstraction, must succumb to reality, not reality to logic.
Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in its
chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the
universe that engendered it. Fechner, Royce, and Hegel seem on the
truer