I confess that I shrink from using metaphors, since

they never can suit wholly. The writer tenders them

unsuspiciously as a possible help in a common

difficulty. And so he subjects himself, perhaps, to the

captious ill-will or sheer negligence of his reader.

Still to those who will take it for what it is, I will

offer a fiction. Suppose a collection of beings whose

souls in the night walk about without their bodies, and

so make new relations. On their return in the morning we

may imagine that the possessors feel the benefit of this

divorce; and we may therefore call it truth. But, if the

wrong soul with its experience came back to the wrong

body, that might typify error. On the other hand,

perhaps the ruler of this collection of beings may

perceive very well the nature of the collision. And it

may even be that he provokes it. For how instructive and

how amusing to observe in each case the conflict of

sensation with imported and foreign experience. Perhaps

no truth after all could be half so rich and half so

true as the result of this wild discord--to one who sees

from the centre. And, if so, error will come merely from

isolation and defect, from the limitation of each being

to the "this" and the "mine."

But our account, it will fairly be objected, is

untenable because incomplete. For error is not merely

negative. The content, isolated and so discordant, is

after all held together in a positive discord. And so

the elements may exist, and their relations to their

subjects may all be there in the Absolute, together with

the complements which make them all true, and yet the

problem is not solved. For the point of error, when all

is said, lies in this very insistence on the

partial and discrepant, and this discordant emphasis

will fall outside of every possible rearrangement. I

admit this objection, and I endorse it. The problem of

error cannot be solved by an enlarged scheme of

relations. Each misarrangement cannot be taken up wholly

as an element in the compensations of a harmonious

mechanism. For there is a positive sense and a specific

character which marks each appearance, and this will

still fall outside. Hence, while all that appears

somehow is, all has not been accounted for by any

rearrangement.

But on the other side the Absolute is not, and can

not be thought as, any scheme of relations. If we keep

to these, there is no harmonious unity in the whole. The

Absolute is beyond a mere arrangement, however well

compensated, though an arrangement is assuredly one

aspect of its being. Reality, consists, as we saw, in a

higher experience, superior to the distinctions which it