mon with absolutism, but
which, when taken concretely and temperamentally, really stands at the
opposite pole. I refer to the philosophy of Gustav Theodor Fechner, a
writer but little known as yet to English readers, but destined, I am
persuaded, to wield more and more influence as time goes on.

It is the intense concreteness of Fechner, his fertility of detail,
which fills me with an admiration which I should like to make this
audience share. Among the philosophic cranks of my acquaintance in the
past was a lady all the tenets of whose system I have forgotten except
one. Had she been born in the Ionian Archipelago some three thousand
years ago, that one doctrine would probably have made her name sure
of a place in every university curriculum and examination paper. The
world, she said, is composed of only two elements, the Thick, namely,
and the Thin. No one can deny the truth of this analysis, as far as it
goes (though in the light of our contemporary knowledge of nature it
has itself a rather 'thin' sound), and it is nowhere truer than in
that part of the world called philosophy. I am sure, for example, that
many of you, listening to what poor account I have been able to
give of transcendental idealism, have received an impression of its
arguments being strangely thin, and of the terms it leaves us with
being shiveringly thin wrappings for so thick and burly a world as
this. Some of you of course will charge the thinness to my exposition;
but thin as that has been, I believe the doctrines reported on to have
been thinner. From Green to Haldane the absolute proposed to us to
straighten out the confusions of the thicket of experience in which
our life is passed remains a pure abstraction which hardly any one
tries to make a whit concreter. If we open Green, we get nothing but
the transcendental ego of apperception (Kant's name for the fact that
to be counted in experience a thing has to be witnessed), blown up
into a sort of timeless soap-bubble large enough to mirror the whole
universe. Nature, Green keeps insisting, consists only in
relations, and these imply the action of a mind that is eternal;
a self-distinguishing consciousness which itself escapes from the
relations by which it determines other things. Present to whatever is
in succession, it is not in succession itself. If we take the Cairds,
they tell us little more of the principle of the universe--it is
always a return into the identity of the self from the