This
notion of an ALL-ENVELOPING NOETIC UNITY in things is the sublimest
achievement of intellectualist philosophy. Those who believe in the
Absolute, as the all-knower is termed, usually say that they do so
for coercive reasons, which clear thinkers cannot evade. The
Absolute has far-reaching practical consequences, some of which I
drew attention in my second lecture. Many kinds of difference
important to us would surely follow from its being true. I cannot
here enter into all the logical proofs of such a Being's existence,
farther than to say that none of them seem to me sound. I must
therefore treat the notion of an All-Knower simply as an hypothesis,
exactly on a par logically with the pluralist notion that there is
no point of view, no focus of information extant, from which the
entire content of the universe is visible at once. "God's
consciousness," says Professor Royce,[Footnote: The Conception of
God, New York, 1897, p. 292.] "forms in its wholeness one luminously
transparent conscious moment"--this is the type of noetic unity on
which rationalism insists. Empiricism on the other hand is satisfied
with the type of noetic unity that is humanly familiar. Everything
gets known by SOME knower along with something else; but the knowers
may in the end be irreducibly many, and the greatest knower of them
all may yet not know the whole of everything, or even know what he
does know at one single stroke:--he may be liable to forget.
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