ogarithm, not
a mile away from the door, not worth five hundred pounds sterling, not
a thousand centuries old, the absolute must even now be articulately
aware of all these negations. Along with what everything is it must
also be conscious of everything which it is not. This infinite
atmosphere of explicit negativity--observe that it has to be
explicit--around everything seems to us so useless an encumbrance as
to make the absolute still more foreign to our sympathy. Furthermore,
if it be a fact that certain ideas are silly, the absolute has to have
already thought the silly ideas to establish them in silliness. The
rubbish in its mind would thus appear easily to outweigh in amount the
more desirable material. One would expect it fairly to burst with such
an obesity, plethora, and superfoetation of useless information.[15]

I will spare you further objections. The sum of it all is that the
absolute is not forced on our belief by logic, that it involves
features of irrationality peculiar to itself, and that a thinker
to whom it does not come as an 'immediate certainty' (to use Mr.
Joachim's words), is in no way bound to treat it as anything but an
emotionally rather sublime hypothesis. As such, it might, with all its
defects, be, on account of its peace-conferring power and its formal
grandeur, more rational than anything else in the field. But meanwhile
the strung-along unfinished world in time is its rival: _reality MAY
exist in distributive form, in the shape not of an all but of a set of
caches, just as it seems to_--this is the anti-absolutist hypothesis.
_Prima facie_ there is this in favor of the caches, that they are at
any rate real enough to have made themselves at least _appear_ to
every one, whereas the absolute has as yet appeared immediately to
only a few mystics, and indeed to them very ambiguously. The advocates
of the absolute assure us that any distributive form of being is
infected and undermined by self-contradiction. If we are unable to
assimilate their arguments, and we have been unable, the only course
we can take, it seems to me, is to let the absolute bury the absolute,
and to seek reality in more promising directions, even among the
details of the finite and the immediately given.

If these words of mine sound in bad taste to some of you, or even
sacrilegious, I am sorry. Perhaps the impression may be mitigated by
what I have to say in later lectures.

LECTURE IV

CONCERNING FECHNER