more collective form in as much detail as he can. He marks the various
intermediary stages and halting places of collectivity,--as we are to
our separate senses, so is the earth to us, so is the solar system
to the earth, etc.,--and if, in order to escape an infinitely long
summation, he posits a complete God as the all-container and leaves
him about as indefinite in feature as the idealists leave their
absolute, he yet provides us with a very definite gate of approach to
him in the shape of the earth-soul, through which in the nature of
things we must first make connexion with all the more enveloping
superhuman realms, and with which our more immediate religious
commerce at any rate has to be carried on.

Ordinary monistic idealism leaves everything intermediary out. It
recognizes only the extremes, as if, after the first rude face of the
phenomenal world in all its particularity, nothing but the supreme in
all its perfection could be found. First, you and I, just as we are in
this room; and the moment we get below that surface, the unutterable
absolute itself! Doesn't this show a singularly indigent imagination?
Isn't this brave universe made on a richer pattern, with room in
it for a long hierarchy of beings? Materialistic science makes it
infinitely richer in terms, with its molecules, and ether, and
electrons, and what not. Absolute idealism, thinking of reality only
under intellectual forms, knows not what to do with _bodies_ of
any grade, and can make no use of any psychophysical analogy or
correspondence. The resultant thinness is startling when compared with
the thickness and articulation of such a universe as Fechner paints.
May not satisfaction with the rationalistic absolute as the alpha
and omega, and treatment of it in all its abstraction as an adequate
religious object, argue a certain native poverty of mental demand?
Things reveal themselves soonest to those who most passionately want
them, for our need sharpens our wit. To a mind content with little,
the much in the universe may always remain hid.

To be candid, one of my reasons for saying so much about Fechner has
been to make the thinness of our current transcendentalism appear
more evident by an effect of contrast. Scholasticism ran thick; Hegel
himself ran thick; but english and american transcendentalisms run
thin. If philosophy is more a matter of passionate vision than of
logic,--and I believe it is, logic only finding reasons for the vision