e then contrast the one with the other way of representing the status
of the human thinker.

For monism the world is no collection, but one great all-inclusive
fact outside of which is nothing--nothing is its only alternative.
When the monism is idealistic, this all-enveloping fact is represented
as an absolute mind that makes the partial facts by thinking them,
just as we make objects in a dream by dreaming them, or personages in
a story by imagining them. To _be_, on this scheme, is, on the part of
a finite thing, to be an object for the absolute; and on the part of
the absolute it is to be the thinker of that assemblage of objects. If
we use the word 'content' here, we see that the absolute and the world
have an identical content. The absolute is nothing but the knowledge
of those objects; the objects are nothing but what the absolute knows.
The world and the all-thinker thus compenetrate and soak each other
up without residuum. They are but two names for the same identical
material, considered now from the subjective, and now from the
objective point of view--gedanke and gedachtes, as we would say if we
were Germans. We philosophers naturally form part of the material, on
the monistic scheme. The absolute makes us by thinking us, and if we
ourselves are enlightened enough to be believers in the absolute, one
may then say that our philosophizing is one of the ways in which the
absolute is conscious of itself. This is the full pantheistic scheme,
the _identitaetsphilosophie_, the immanence of God in his creation, a
conception sublime from its tremendous unity. And yet that unity is
incomplete, as closer examination will show.

The absolute and the world are one fact, I said, when materially
considered. Our philosophy, for example, is not numerically distinct
from the absolute's own knowledge of itself, not a duplicate and copy
of it, it is part of that very knowledge, is numerically identical
with as much of it as our thought covers. The absolute just _is_ our
philosophy, along with everything else that is known, in an act of
knowing which (to use the words of my gifted absolutist colleague
Royce) forms in its wholeness one luminously transparent conscious
moment.

But one as we are in this material sense with the absolute substance,
that being only the whole of us, and we only the parts of it, yet in a
formal sense something like a pluralism breaks out. When we speak of
the absolute we _take_ the one universal kno