e are only
two names for the same thing not bearing critical scrutiny. If you
stick to purely physical terms like stars, there is no whole. If you
call the whole mental, then the so-called whole, instead of being one
fact with the parts, appears rather as the integral reaction on those
parts of an independent higher witness, such as the theistic God is
supposed to be.

So long as this was the state of my own mind, I could accept the
notion of self-compounding in the supernal spheres of experience no
more easily than in that chapter on mind-dust I had accepted it in
the lower spheres. I found myself compelled, therefore, to call
the absolute impossible; and the untrammelled freedom with which
pantheistic or monistic idealists stepped over the logical barriers
which Lotze and others had set down long before I had--I had done
little more than quote these previous critics in my chapter--surprised
me not a little, and made me, I have to confess, both resentful and
envious. Envious because in the bottom of my heart I wanted the same
freedom myself, for motives which I shall develop later; and resentful
because my absolutist friends seemed to me to be stealing the
privilege of blowing both hot and cold. To establish their absolute
they used an intellectualist type of logic which they disregarded when
employed against it. It seemed to me that they ought at least to have
mentioned the objections that had stopped me so completely. I had
yielded to them against my 'will to believe,' out of pure logical
scrupulosity. They, professing to loathe the will to believe and to
follow purest rationality, had simply ignored them. The method was
easy, but hardly to be called candid. Fechner indeed was candid
enough, for he had never thought of the objections, but later writers,
like Royce, who should presumably have heard them, had passed them by
in silence. I felt as if these philosophers were granting their will
to believe in monism too easy a license. My own conscience would
permit me no such license.

So much for the personal confession by which you have allowed me to
introduce the subject. Let us now consider it more objectively.

The fundamental difficulty I have found is the number of
contradictions which idealistic monists seem to disregard. In the
first place they attribute to all existence a mental or experiential
character, but I find their simultaneous belief that the higher and
the lower in the universe are entitatively iden