afterwards,--must not such thinness come either from the vision being
defective in the disciples, or from their passion, matched with
Fechner's or with Hegel's own passion, being as moonlight unto
sunlight or as water unto wine?[4]

But I have also a much deeper reason for making Fechner a part of my
text. His _assumption that conscious experiences freely compound and
separate themselves_, the same assumption by which absolutism explains
the relation of our minds to the eternal mind, and the same by
which empiricism explains the composition of the human mind out of
subordinate mental elements, is not one which we ought to let pass
without scrutiny. I shall scrutinize it in the next lecture.

LECTURE V

THE COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

In my last lecture I gave a miserably scanty outline of the way
of thinking of a philosopher remarkable for the almost unexampled
richness of his imagination of details. I owe to Fechner's shade an
apology for presenting him in a manner so unfair to the most essential
quality of his genius; but the time allotted is too short to say more
about the particulars of his work, so I proceed to the programme
I suggested at the end of our last hour. I wish to discuss the
assumption that states of consciousness, so-called, can separate and
combine themselves freely, and keep their own identity unchanged while
forming parts of simultaneous fields of experience of wider scope.

Let me first explain just what I mean by this. While you listen to
my voice, for example, you are perhaps inattentive to some bodily
sensation due to your clothing or your posture. Yet that sensation
would seem probably to be there, for in an instant, by a change of
attention, you can have it in one field of consciousness with the
voice. It seems as if it existed first in a separate form, and then as
if, without itself changing, it combined with your other co-existent
sensations. It is after this analogy that pantheistic idealism thinks
that we exist in the absolute. The absolute, it thinks, makes the
world by knowing the whole of it at once in one undivided eternal
act.[1] To 'be,' _really_ to be, is to be as it knows us to be, along
with everything else, namely, and clothed with the fulness of our
meaning. Meanwhile we _are_ at the same time not only really and as it
knows us, but also apparently, for to our separate single selves we
appear _without_ most other things and unable to declare with
any fulness wha