path. Fechner has never heard of logic's veto, Royce hears the
voice but cannily ignores the utterances, Hegel hears them but to
spurn them--and all go on their way rejoicing. Shall we alone obey the
veto?

Sincerely, and patiently as I could, I struggled with the problem for
years, covering hundreds of sheets of paper with notes and memoranda
and discussions with myself over the difficulty. How can many
consciousnesses be at the same time one consciousness? How can one and
the same identical fact experience itself so diversely? The struggle
was vain; I found myself in an _impasse_. I saw that I must either
forswear that 'psychology without a soul' to which my whole
psychological and kantian education had committed me,--I must, in
short, bring back distinct spiritual agents to know the mental states,
now singly and now in combination, in a word bring back scholasticism
and common sense--or else I must squarely confess the solution of
the problem impossible, and then either give up my intellectualistic
logic, the logic of identity, and adopt some higher (or lower) form
of rationality, or, finally, face the fact that life is logically
irrational.

Sincerely, this is the actual trilemma that confronts every one of us.
Those of you who are scholastic-minded, or simply common-sense minded,
will smile at the elaborate groans of my parturient mountain resulting
in nothing but this mouse. Accept the spiritual agents, for heaven's
sake, you will say, and leave off your ridiculous pedantry. Let but
our 'souls' combine our sensations by their intellectual faculties,
and let but 'God' replace the pantheistic world-soul, and your wheels
will go round again--you will enjoy both life and logic together.

This solution is obvious and I know that many of you will adopt it. It
is comfortable, and all our habits of speech support it. Yet it is not
for idle or fantastical reasons that the notion of the substantial
soul, so freely used by common men and the more popular philosophies,
has fallen upon such evil days, and has no prestige in the eyes of
critical thinkers. It only shares the fate of other unrepresentable
substances and principles. They are without exception all so barren
that to sincere inquirers they appear as little more than names
masquerading--Wo die begriffe fehlen da stellt ein wort zur rechten
zeit sich ein. You see no deeper into the fact that a hundred
sensations get compounded or known together by thinking that a 's