The absolute and the world are one fact, I said, when materially considered. Our philosophy, for example, is not numerically distinct from the absolute's own knowledge of itself, not a duplicate and copy of it, it is part of that very knowledge, is numerically identical with as much of it as our thought covers. The absolute just _is_ our philosophy, along with everything else that is known, in an act of knowing which (to use the words of my gifted absolutist colleague Royce) forms in its wholeness one luminously transparent conscious moment. But one as we are in this material sense with the absolute substance, that being only the whole of us, and we only the parts of it, yet in a formal sense something like a pluralism breaks out. When we speak of the absolute we _take_ the one universal known material collectively or integrally; when we speak of its objects, of our finite selves, etc., we _take_ that same identical material distributively and separately. But what is the use of a thing's _being_ only once if it can be _taken_ twice over, and if being taken in different ways makes different things true of it? As the absolute takes me, for example, I appear _with_ everything else in its field of perfect knowledge. As I take myself, I appear _without_ most other things in my field of relative ignorance. And practical differences result from its knowledge and my ignorance. Ignorance breeds mistake, curiosity, misfortune, pain, for me; I suffer those consequences. The absolute knows of those things, of course, for it knows me and my suffering, but it doesn't itself suffer. It can't be ignorant, for simultaneous with its knowledge of each question goes its knowledge of each answer. It can't be patient, for it has to wait for nothing, having everything at once in its possession. It can't be surprised; it can't be guilty. No attribute connected with succession can be applied to it, for it is all at once and wholly what it is, 'with the unity of a single instant,' and succession is not of it but in it, for we are continually told that it is 'timeless.' Things true of the world in its finite aspects, then, are not true of it in its infinite capacity. _Quâ_ finite and plural its accounts of itself to itself are different from what its account to itself _quâ_ infinite and one must be.