the Oxford absolutists in general seem to agree about this logical absurdity of manyness-in-oneness in the only places where it is empirically found.  But see the curious tactics!  Is the absurdity reduced in the absolute being whom they call in to relieve it?  Quite otherwise, for that being shows it on an infinitely greater scale, and flaunts it in its very definition.  The fact of its not being related to any outward environment, the fact that all relations are inside of itself, doesn’t save it, for Mr. Bradley’s great argument against the finite is that in any given bit of it (a bit of sugar, for instance) the presence of a plurality of characters (whiteness and sweetness, for example) is self-contradictory; so that in the final end all that the absolute’s name appears to stand for is the persistent claim of outraged human nature that reality shall not be called absurd. Somewhere there must be an aspect of it guiltless of self-contradiction.  All we can see of the absolute, meanwhile, is guilty in the same way in which the finite is.  Intellectualism sees what it calls the guilt, when comminuted in the finite object; but is too near-sighted to see it in the more enormous object.  Yet the absolute’s constitution, if imagined at all, has to be imagined after the analogy of some bit of finite experience.  Take any real bit, suppress its environment and then magnify it to monstrosity, and you get identically the type of structure of the absolute.  It is obvious that all your difficulties here remain and go with you.  If the relative experience was inwardly absurd, the absolute experience is infinitely more so.  Intellectualism, in short, strains off the gnat, but swallows the whole camel.  But this polemic against the absolute is as odious to me as it is to you, so I will say no more about that being.  It is only one of those wills of the wisp, those lights that do mislead the morn, that have so often impeded the clear progress of philosophy, so I will turn to the more general positive question of whether superhuman unities of consciousness should be considered as more probable or more improbable.

In a former lecture I went over some of the fechnerian reasons for their plausibility, or reasons that at least replied to our more obvious grounds of doubt concerning them.  The numerous facts of divided or split human personality which the genius of certain medical men, as Janet, Freud, Prince, Sidis, and others, have unearthed were unknown in Fechner’s time, and neither the phenomena of automatic writing and speech, nor of mediumship and ‘possession’ generally, had been recognized or studied as we now study them, so Fechner’s stock of analogies is scant compared with our present one.  He did the best with what he had, however.  For my own part I find in some of these abnormal or supernormal facts the strongest suggestions in favor of a superior co-consciousness being possible.  I doubt whether we shall ever understand some of them without using