e pages, and walk away and
transact business of their own outside of the author's story.

A third difficulty is this: The bird-metaphor is physical, but we
see on reflection that in the _physical_ world there is no real
compounding. 'Wholes' are not realities there, parts only are
realities. 'Bird' is only our _name_ for the physical fact of a
certain grouping of organs, just as 'Charles's Wain' is our name for a
certain grouping of stars. The 'whole,' be it bird or constellation,
is nothing but our vision, nothing but an effect on our sensorium when
a lot of things act on it together. It is not realized by any organ
or any star, or experienced apart from the consciousness of an
onlooker.[4] In the physical world taken by itself there _is_ thus no
'all,' there are only the 'eaches'--at least that is the 'scientific'
view.

In the mental world, on the contrary, wholes do in point of fact
realize themselves _per se_. The meaning of the whole sentence is
just as much a real experience as the feeling of each word is; the
absolute's experience _is_ for itself, as much as yours is for
yourself or mine for myself. So the feather-and-bird analogy won't
work unless you make the absolute into a distinct sort of mental agent
with a vision produced in it _by_ our several minds analogous to the
'bird'-vision which the feathers, beak, etc., produce _in_ those same
minds. The 'whole,' which is _its_ experience, would then be its
unifying reaction on our experiences, and not those very experiences
self-combined. Such a view as this would go with theism, for the
theistic God is a separate being; but it would not go with pantheistic
idealism, the very essence of which is to insist that we are literally
_parts_ of God, and he only ourselves in our totality--the word
'ourselves' here standing of course for all the universe's finite
facts.

I am dragging you into depths unsuitable, I fear, for a rapid lecture.
Such difficulties as these have to be teased out with a needle, so to
speak, and lecturers should take only bird's-eye views. The practical
upshot of the matter, however, so far as I am concerned, is this, that
if I had been lecturing on the absolute a very few years ago, I should
unhesitatingly have urged these difficulties, and developed them at
still greater length, to show that the hypothesis of the absolute
was not only non-coercive from the logical point of view, but
self-contradictory as well, its notion that parts and whol