as wide as the Universe itself, and, on this account, they are unable to qualify the soul. And yet, on the other hand, they must do so, if the soul 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
