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“We are thus apprized that distinction involves and carries its own identity; and that ultimate distinction–distinction in the last analysis–is self-distinction, ‘self-knowledge,’ as we realize it consciously every day. Knowledge is self-referred: to know is to know that you know, and to be known as well.

“‘Ah! but both in the same time?‘ inquires the logician. A subject-object knowing itself as a seamless unit, while yet its two items show a real distinction: this passes all understanding.”

But the whole of idealism goes to the proof that the two sides cannot succeed one another in a time-process. “To say you know, and you know that you know, is to add nothing in the last clause; it is as idle as to say that you lie, and you know that you lie,” for if you know it not you lie not.

Philosophy seeks to grasp totality, “but the power of grasping or consenting to totality involves the power of thought to make itself its own object. Totality itself may indeed be taken by the naive intellect as an immediate topic, in the sense of being just an object, but it cannot be just that; for the knower, as other or opposite, would still be within that totality. The ‘universe’ by definition must contain all opposition. If distinction should vanish, what would remain? To what other could it change as a whole? How can the loss of distinction make a difference? Any loss, at its utmost, offers a new status with the old, but obviously it is too late now to efface distinction by a change. There is no possible conjecture, but such as carries with it the subjective that holds it; and when the conjecture is of distinction in general, the subjective fills the void with distinction of itself. The ultimate, ineffaceable distinction is self-distinction, self-consciousness. . . . ‘Thou art the unanswered question, couldst see thy proper eye.’ . . . The thought that must be is the very thought of our experience; the ultimate opposition, the to be and not to be, is personality, spirit–somewhat that is in knowing that it is, and is nothing else but this knowing in its vast relations.[3]

“Here lies the bed-rock; here the brain-sweat of twenty-five centuries crystallizes to a jewel five words long: ‘The Universe has No Opposite.’ For there the wonder of that which is, rests safe in the perception that all things are only through the opposition which is their only fear.”

“The inevitable generally,” in short, is exactly and identically that which in point of fact is actually here.

This is the familiar nineteenth-century development of Kant’s idealistic vision. To me it sounds monistic enough to charm the monist in me unreservedly. I listen to the felicitously-worded concept-music circling round itself, as on some drowsy summer noon one listens under the pines to the murmuring of leaves and insects, and with as little thought of criticism.

But Mr. Blood strikes a still more vibrant note: “No more can be than rationally is; and this was always true. There is no reason for what is not; but for what there is reason, that is and ever was. Especially is there no becoming of reason, and hence no reason for becoming, to a sufficient intelligence. In the sufficient intelligence all things always are, and are rational. To say there is something yet to be which never was, not even in the sufficient intelligence wherein the world is rational and not a blind and orphan waif, is to ignore all reason. Aught that might be assumed as contingently coming to be could only have ‘freedom’ for its origin; and ‘freedom’ has not fertility or invention, and is not a reason for any special thing, but the very vacuity of a ground for anything in preference to its room. Neither is there in bare time any principle or originality where anything should come or go. . . .