vant and tiresome clowns who
insist upon interrupting with their fantastic pedantry the great
tragic-comedy wherein the soul of man wrestles with its fate.

As I have already indicated, it is necessary in dealing with a matter
as dramatic and fatal as this whole question of ultimate reality, to
risk the annoyance of repetition. It is important to go over our
tracks again so that no crevice should be left in this perilous bridge
hung across the gulf. Reason, then, working in isolation, provides
us with the recognition of an ultimate universal "subject" or, in
metaphysical language, with an "a priori unity of apperception."
Simultaneously with this recognition, self-consciousness, also
working in isolation, provides us with the recognition of an
universal self-conscious "monad" or "cosmic self" which is not
only able but is compelled to think of itself as its own object.

Both these recognitions imply a consciousness which is outside
time and space; but while the first, the outer edge of thought, can
only be regarded as "pure subject," the second can be regarded as
nothing else than the whole universe contemplating itself as its
own object.

In the third place the complex vision, working with all its
attributes together, provides us with the recognition of a personal
or empirical self which is the real "I am I" of our integral soul.
This personal self, or actual living soul, must be thought of as
possessing some "substratum" or "vanishing point of sensation" as
the implication of its permanence and continuous identity. This
"vanishing point of sensation," or in other words this attenuated
form of "matter" or "energy" or "movement," must not be allowed
to disappear from our conception of the soul. If it _were_ allowed
to disappear, one of the basic attributes of the soul's complex
vision, namely its attribute of sensation, would be negated and
suppressed.

Directly we regarded the "I am I" within us as independent of such
a "vanishing point of sensation" and as being entirely free from
any, even from the most attenuated form, of what is usually called
"matter," then, at that very moment, the complex vision's
revelation would be falsified. Then, at that very moment, the
integrity of the soul would dissolve away, and we should be
reduced to a stream of sensations with nothing to give them
coherence and unity, or to that figment of abstract self-consciousness,
"thought-in-itself," apart from both the thing "thinking"
a