To have the alternative forced upon us of admitting either finite things each cut off from all relation with its environment, or else of accepting the integral absolute with no environment and all relations packed within itself, would be too delicious a simplification.

But it is to be mentioned here, that, according to this theory, a nominative coming after than or as, is in general to be accounted a nominative absolute; that is, a nominative which is independent of any verb; or, (as the ingenious author himself expresses it,)

Professor Royce's proof that whoso admits the cat's witnessing the king at all must thereupon admit the integral absolute, may be briefly put as follows: First, to know the king, the cat must intend that king, must somehow pass over and lay hold of him individually and specifically.

Thus Hegel's philosophy of identity is distinguished from Schelling's by two factors: it subordinates nature to spirit, and conceives the absolute of the beginning not as the indifference of the real and ideal, but as ideal, as a realm of eternal thoughts.

'Sitting on a hill apart,' my host and I were discoursing, not 'of fate, free-will, free-knowledge absolute,' but of a question almost as mysteriousthe doings of the Parasol-ants who marched up and down their trackways past us, and whether these doings were guided by an intellect differing from ours, only in degree, but not in kind.

"God" sometimes means the whole absolute, sometimes only the infinite, spiritual moment in the absolute.

It is proper, however, that the different forms of expression which are embraced in this general rule, should be discriminated, one from an other, by the scholar: let him therefore, in parsing any nominative absolute, tell how it is put so; whether with a participle, by direct address, by pleonasm, or by exclamation.

At the same time, his philosophy rejected a substantive absolute, or any other spiritual realities or existences apart from the universe given in feeling and consciousness.

It is incorrect to say that, in his later doctrine, Fichte substituted the inactive absolute in place of the active absolute ego, and the quiet blessedness of contemplation in place of ceaseless action.