Are we then to assert that the Absolute consists of souls? That, in my opinion, for two reasons would be incorrect. A centre of experience, first, is not the same thing as either a soul or, again, a self. It need not contain the distinction of not-self from self; and, whether it contains that or not, in neither case is it, properly, a self. It will be either below, or else wider than and above, the distinction. And a soul, as we have seen, is always the creature of an intellectual construction. It cannot be the same thing with a mere centre of immediate experience. Nor again can we affirm that every centre implies and entails in some sense a corresponding soul. For the duration of such centres may perhaps be so momentary that no one, except to save a theory, could call them souls. Hence we cannot maintain that souls contain all the matter of experience which fills the world.
And in any case, secondly, the Absolute would not consist of souls. Such a phrase implies a mode of union which we can not regard as ultimate. It suggests that in the Absolute finite centres are maintained and respected, and that we may consider them, as such, to persist and to be merely ordered and arranged. But not like this (we have seen) is the final destiny and last truth of things. We have a re-arrangement not merely of things but of their internal elements. We have an all-pervasive transfusion with a re-blending of all material. And we can hardly say that the Absolute consists of finite things, when the things, as such, are there transmuted and have lost their individual natures.[1]
- ↑ For this reason Humanity, or an organism, kingdom, or society of selves, is not an ultimate idea. It implies an union too incomplete, and it ascribes reality in too high a sense to finite pieces of appearance. These two defects are, of course, in principle one. An organism or society, including every self past present and future—and we can hardly take it at less than this—is itself an idea to me obscure, if not quite inconsistent. But, in any case, its reality and truth cannot be ultimate. And, for myself, even in Ethics I do not see how such an idea can be insisted on. The perfection of the Whole has to realise itself in and through me; and, without question, this Whole is very largely social. But I do not see my way to the assertion that, even for Ethics, it is nothing else at all (pp. 415, 431).
