are absolute, ubiquitous and all pervasive, and in
regard to which nothing else can possibly exist in its _own_ right; and
second that anything that denies _this_ assertion is _pure_ negativity
with no positive context whatsoever.

Take the latter point first. Is it true that what is negative in one way
is thereby convicted of incapacity to be positive in any other way? The
word "Fact" is like the word "Accident," like the word "Absolute"
itself. They all have their negative connotation. In truth, their whole
connotation is negative and relative. All it says is that, whatever the
thing may be that is denoted by the words, _other_ things do not control
it. Where fact, where accident is, they must be silent, it alone can
speak. But that does not prevent its speaking as loudly as you please,
in its own tongue. It may have an inward life, self-transparent and
active in the maximum degree. An indeterminate future volition on my
part, for example, would be a strict accident as far as my present self
is concerned. But that could not prevent it, _in the moment in which it
occurred_, from being possibly the most intensely living and luminous
experience I ever had. Its quality of being a brute fact _ab extra_ says
nothing whatever as to its inwardness. It simply says to _outsiders_:
'Hands off!'

And this brings us back to the first point of the Absolutist indictment
of Fact. Is that point really anything more than a fantastic dislike to
letting _anything_ say 'Hands off'? What else explains the contempt the
Absolutist authors exhibit for a freedom defined simply on its
"negative" side, as freedom "from," etc.? What else prompts them to
deride such freedom? But, dislike for dislike, who shall decide? Why is
not their dislike at having me "from" them, entirely on a par with mine
at having them "through" me?

I know very well that in talking of dislikes to those who never mention
them, I am doing a very coarse thing, and making a sort of intellectual
Orson of myself. But, for the life of me, I can not help it, because I
feel sure that likes and dislikes _must_ be among the ultimate factors
of their philosophy as well as of mine. Would they but admit it! How
sweetly we then could hold converse together! There is something finite
about us both, as we now stand. We do not know the Absolute Whole _yet_.
_Part_ of it is still negative to us. Among the _whats_ of it still
stalks a mob of opaque _thats_, without which we cannot think.