e's proofs that the only
alternative we have is to choose the complete disunion of all things
or their complete union in the absolute One.

Take, for instance, the proverb 'a cat may look at a king' and adopt
the realistic view that the king's being is independent of the cat's
witnessing. This assumption, which amounts to saying that it need make
no essential difference to the royal object whether the feline subject
cognizes him or not, that the cat may look away from him or may even
be annihilated, and the king remain unchanged,--this assumption, I
say, is considered by my ingenious colleague to lead to the absurd
practical consequence that the two beings _can_ never later acquire
any possible linkages or connexions, but must remain eternally as if
in different worlds. For suppose any connexion whatever to ensue, this
connexion would simply be a third being additional to the cat and the
king, which would itself have to be linked to both by additional links
before it could connect them, and so on _ad infinitum_, the argument,
you see, being the same as Lotze's about how _a_'s influence does its
influencing when it influences _b_.

In Royce's own words, if the king can be without the cat knowing him,
then king and cat 'can have no common features, no ties, no true
relations; they are separated, each from the other, by absolutely
impassable chasms. They can never come to get either ties or community
of nature; they are not in the same space, nor in the same time, nor
in the same natural or spiritual order.'[7] They form in short two
unrelated universes,--which is the _reductio ad absurdum_ required.

To escape this preposterous state of things we must accordingly revoke
the original hypothesis. The king and the cat are not indifferent to
each other in the way supposed. But if not in that way, then in no
way, for connexion in that way carries connexion in other ways; so
that, pursuing the reverse line of reasoning, we end with the
absolute itself as the smallest fact that can exist. Cat and king are
co-involved, they are a single fact in two names, they can never have
been absent from each other, and they are both equally co-implicated
with all the other facts of which the universe consists.

Professor Royce's proof that whoso admits the cat's witnessing the
king at all must thereupon admit the integral absolute, may be briefly
put as follows:--

First, to know the king, the cat must intend _that_ king, must somehow