pass over and lay hold of him individually and specifically. The cat's
idea, in short, must transcend the cat's own separate mind and somehow
include the king, for were the king utterly outside and independent of
the cat, the cat's pure other, the beast's mind could touch the king
in no wise. This makes the cat much less distinct from the king than
we had at first naively supposed. There must be some prior continuity
between them, which continuity Royce interprets idealistically as
meaning a higher mind that owns them both as objects, and owning them
can also own any relation, such as the supposed witnessing, that may
obtain between them. Taken purely pluralistically, neither of them can
own any part of a _between_, because, so taken, each is supposed shut
up to itself: the fact of a _between_ thus commits us to a higher
knower.

But the higher knower that knows the two beings we start with proves
to be the same knower that knows everything else. For assume any third
being, the queen, say, and as the cat knew the king, so let the king
know his queen, and let this second knowledge, by the same reasoning,
require a higher knower as its presupposition. That knower of the
king's knowing must, it is now contended, be the same higher knower
that was required for the cat's knowing; for if you suppose otherwise,
you have no longer the _same king_. This may not seem immediately
obvious, but if you follow the intellectualistic logic employed in all
these reasonings, I don't see how you can escape the admission. If it
be true that the independent or indifferent cannot be related, for
the abstract words 'independent' or 'indifferent' as such imply no
relation, then it is just as true that the king known by the cat
cannot be the king that knows the queen, for taken merely 'as such,'
the abstract term 'what the cat knows' and the abstract term 'what
knows the queen' are logically distinct. The king thus logically
breaks into two kings, with nothing to connect them, until a higher
knower is introduced to recognize them as the self-same king concerned
in any previous acts of knowledge which he may have brought about.
This he can do because he possesses all the terms as his own objects
and can treat them as he will. Add any fourth or fifth term, and you
get a like result, and so on, until at last an all-owning knower,
otherwise called the absolute, is reached. The co-implicated
'through-and-through' world of monism thus stands proved by