f this mass of impressions, including time and space, my
thought, thus abstracted from my personal soul, becomes the
circumference. Outside my thought there is nothing at all. Inside
my thought there is all that is. The metaphysical reason insists that
this all-comprehensive thought or all-embracing consciousness
cannot contemplate itself as an object but is compelled to remain
an universal subject whose object can only be the mass of
impressions which it contains.

If it is possible to speak of this "a priori" background of all
possible perception as a "monad" at all, it is a monad which
certainly lacks the essential power of the individual monad which
we know as our real self, for this latter can and does contemplate
itself as an object.

But as I have hinted before, the complex vision's attribute of
self-consciousness projects a second abstraction, which takes its place
between this ultimate monad which is pure "subject" and our real
personal self which is so much more than subject and object
together.

This second abstraction, "thrown off" by our pure self-consciousness
just as the first one is "thrown off" by our pure reason,
becomes therefore an intervening monad which exists midway
between the monad which is pure "subject"--if that can be
called a monad at all--and the actual individual soul which is the
living reality of both these thought-projections.

The whole question resolves itself into a critical statement of the
peculiar play of thought when thought is considered in its own
inherent nature apart from concrete objects of thought. This
original play of thought, apart from what it may think, can result in
nothing better than isolated abstractions; because thought, apart
from concrete objects of thought, is itself nothing more than one
attribute of the complex vision, groping about in a vacuum and
finding nothing. We are, however, bound by the "conscience of
reason," and by what might be called reason's sense of honour to
articulate as clearly as we can all these movements of pure thought
working in the void; but we certainly are forbidden by the original
revelation of the complex vision to accept them as the starting
point of our philosophical enquiry. And we cannot accept them as
a starting point, because the complex vision includes much more
than self-consciousness and reason. It includes indeed so much
more than these, that these, when indulging in their isolated
conjuring-tricks, seem like irrele