of witness, each minor witness
being aware of its own 'content' solely, while the greater witness
knows the minor witnesses, knows their whole content pooled together,
knows their relations to one another, and knows of just how much each
one of them is ignorant.

The two types of witnessing are here palpably non-identical. We get a
pluralism, not a monism, out of them. In my psychology-chapter I
had resorted openly to such pluralism, treating each total field of
consciousness as a distinct entity, and maintaining that the higher
fields merely supersede the lower functionally by knowing more about
the same objects.

The monists themselves writhe like worms on the hook to escape
pluralistic or at least dualistic language, but they cannot escape it.
They speak of the eternal and the temporal 'points of view'; of the
universe in its infinite 'aspect' or in its finite 'capacity'; they
say that '_qua_ absolute' it is one thing, '_qua_ relative' another;
they contrast its 'truth' with its appearances; they distinguish the
total from the partial way of 'taking' it, etc.; but they forget that,
on idealistic principles, to make such distinctions is tantamount to
making different beings, or at any rate that varying points of view,
aspects, appearances, ways of taking, and the like, are meaningless
phrases unless we suppose outside of the unchanging content of reality
a diversity of witnesses who experience or take it variously, the
absolute mind being just the witness that takes it most completely.

For consider the matter one moment longer, if you can. Ask what this
notion implies, of appearing differently from different points of
view. If there be no outside witness, a thing can appear only to
itself, the caches or parts to their several selves temporally, the
all or whole to itself eternally. Different 'selves' thus break out
inside of what the absolutist insists to be intrinsically one fact.
But how can what is _actually_ one be _effectively_ so many? Put your
witnesses anywhere, whether outside or inside of what is witnessed,
in the last resort your witnesses must on idealistic principles be
distinct, for what is witnessed is different.

I fear that I am expressing myself with terrible obscurity--some of
you, I know, are groaning over the logic-chopping. Be a pluralist or
be a monist, you say, for heaven's sake, no matter which, so long as
you stop arguing. It reminds one of Chesterton's epigram that the only
thing that