Is to have the quality which makes it itself. Hence

these contents must be taken from one side of their

being, and the other side, for a particular end, is

struck out. In order for the soul to exist, "experience"

must be mutilated. It must be regarded so far as it

makes a difference to that series of events which is

taken as a soul; it must be considered just to that

extent to which it serves as the adjective of a temporal

series--serves to make the "thisness" of the series of a

certain kind, and to modify its past and its future

"thisness." But, beyond this, experience is taken merely

to be present to the soul and operative within it. And

the soul exists precisely so far as the abstraction is

maintained. Its life endures only so long as a

particular purpose holds. And thus it consists in a

convenient but one-sided representation of facts, and

has no claim to be more than a useful appearance.

In brief, because the existence of the soul is not

experienced and not given, because it is made by, and

consists in, transcendence of the "present," and because

its content is obviously never one with its being, its

"what" always in flagrant discrepancy with its "that"--

therefore its whole position is throughout inconsistent

and untenable. It is an arrangement natural and

necessary, but for all that phenomenal and illusive, a

makeshift, valuable but still not genuine reality. And,

looked at by itself, the soul is an abstraction and

mutilation. It is the arbitrary use of material for a

particular purpose. And it persists only by refusing to

see more in itself than subserves its own existence.

It may be instructive, before we go on, to regard the

same question from the side of the Absolute. Let us, for

the sake of argument, assume that in the Whole

there is no material which is not a state of some soul

(Chapter xxvii). From this we might be tempted to

conclude that these souls are the Reality, or at least

must be real. But that conclusion would be false, for

the souls would fall within the realm of appearance and

error. They would be, but, as such, they would not have

reality. They would require a resolution and a re-

composition, in which their individualities would be

transmuted and absorbed (Chapter xvi.). For we have seen

that the Absolute is the union of content and existence.

It stands at a level above, and comprehending, those

distinctions and relations in which the imperfect unity

of feeling is dissipated. Let us then take the

indefinite plurality of the "this-nows," or immediate

experiences, as the basis and starting-point, and, on

the other side, let us take the Absolute as the end, and

let us view the region between as a process from the

first to the second. It will be a field of struggle in

which content is divorced from, and strives once more

towards, unity with being. Our assumption in part will

be false, since (as we have seen) the immediately given

is already inconsistent. But, in order to instruct ourselves, let us

suppose here that the "fact" of experience is real, and

that, above it once more, the Absolute gains higher

reality--still where is the soul? The soul is not

immediate experience, for that comes given at one

moment; and the soul still less can be the perfected

union of all being and content. This is obvious, and, if

so, the soul must fall in the middle-space of error and

appearance. It is the ideal manufacture of one extreme

with a view to reach the other, a manufacture suspended

at a very low stage, and suspended on no defensible

ground. The plurality of souls in the Absolute is,

therefore, appearance, and their existence is not

genuine. But because the upward struggle of the

content to ideal perfection, having made these souls,

still rises both in them and above them, they, in

themselves, are nearer the level of the lower reality.

The first and transitory union of existence and content