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 is, with souls, less profoundly broken up and destroyed. And hence souls, taken as things with a place in the time-series, are said to be facts and actually to exist. Nay on their existence, in a sense, all reality depends. For the higher process is carried on in a special relation with these lower results; and thus, while moving in its way, it affects the souls in their way; and thus everything happens in souls, and everything is their states. And this arrangement seems necessary; but on the other hand, if we view it from the side of the Absolute, it is plainly self-inconsistent. To gain consistency and truth it must be merged, and recomposed in a result in which its specialty must vanish. Souls, like their bodies, are, as such, nothing more than appearance.
And, that we may realize this more clearly, we find ourselves turning in a circular maze. Just as the body was for Nature, and upon the other hand Nature merely through relation to a body, so in a different fashion it is with the soul. For thought is a state of souls, and therefore is made by them, while, upon its side, the soul is a product of thought. The “thing,” existing in time and possessor of “states,” is made what it is by ideal construction. But this construction itself appears to depend on a psychical centre, and to exist merely as its “state.” And such a circle seems vicious. Again, the body is dependent on the soul, for the whole of its material comes by way of sensation, and its identity is built up by ideal construction. And yet this manufacture takes place as an event in a soul, a soul which, further, exists only in relation to a body.[1]
- ↑ I am not denying here the possibility of soul without body. See below, p. 340.
