's ears
to the question. When conceptualism summons life to justify itself
in conceptual terms, it is like a challenge addressed in a foreign
language to some one who is absorbed in his own business; it is
irrelevant to him altogether--he may let it lie unnoticed. I went thus
through the 'inner catastrophe' of which I spoke in the last lecture;
I had literally come to the end of my conceptual stock-in-trade, I was
bankrupt intellectualistically, and had to change my base. No words
of mine will probably convert you, for words can be the names only of
concepts. But if any of you try sincerely and pertinaciously on your
own separate accounts to intellectualize reality, you may be similarly
driven to a change of front. I say no more: I must leave life to teach
the lesson.

We have now reached a point of view from which the self-compounding of
mind in its smaller and more accessible portions seems a certain
fact, and in which the speculative assumption of a similar but wider
compounding in remoter regions must be reckoned with as a legitimate
hypothesis. The absolute is not the impossible being I once thought
it. Mental facts do function both singly and together, at once, and we
finite minds may simultaneously be co-conscious with one another in a
superhuman intelligence. It is only the extravagant claims of coercive
necessity on the absolute's part that have to be denied by _a priori_
logic. As an hypothesis trying to make itself probable on analogical
and inductive grounds, the absolute is entitled to a patient hearing.
Which is as much as to say that our serious business from now onward
lies with Fechner and his method, rather than with Hegel, Royce, or
Bradley. Fechner treats the superhuman consciousness he so fervently
believes in as an hypothesis only, which he then recommends by all the
resources of induction and persuasion.

It is true that Fechner himself is an absolutist in his books, not
actively but passively, if I may say so. He talks not only of the
earth-soul and of the star-souls, but of an integrated soul of all
things in the cosmos without exception, and this he calls God just
as others call it the absolute. Nevertheless he _thinks_ only of
the subordinate superhuman souls, and content with having made his
obeisance once for all to the august total soul of the cosmos, he
leaves it in its lonely sublimity with no attempt to define its
nature. Like the absolute, it is 'out of range,' and not an object for