We may wriggle at this terminus as much as we like, but there is no dodging it. It may be said, for instance, that, while we _know_ and _experience_ nothing but mind and matter (including with matter its phenomenal vistas, space and time), we can _imagine something_ else than either; and, during the past fifty years, this nonsense has found lodgment in some heads. Now I can imagine _anything_, in the meaning that I can arbitrarily produce some foolish _fancy_. I can imagine a white blackbird, with his tail-feathers on his head. But I cannot imagine even this self-evident contradiction as a thing of neither mind nor matter. What is an object of "imagination" in the meaning of fancy? It may be empty of matter, and so unlike the white blackbird. But _no_ object of imagination can be empty of mind. Imagination is itself an act of mind; hence every possible product of imagination must partake of mind. If, therefore, I imagine something apart from mind and matter, it must still spring from mind, contain mind, and so _not_ be apart from mind. The "_reductio ad absurdum_" can be had cheap and sure, just where it is most needed. After Immanuel Kant had once and for good dissected the universe, it seems a pity that he declined to put his findings together, and take the last logical step of his magnificent demonstrations. As a requisite, perhaps, to his microscopic analysis of human subjectivity, he declined to generalize his own discoveries. In short, Kant's synthesis was Hegel. But Hegel we need not follow, as our short cut to him, through the solution of noumena, is worth more, as yet, than the whole German tour of "post-Kantean philosophy." Very early in his work Kant said: "There are two sources of human knowledge (which probably spring from _a common, but to us unknown root_), namely, sense and understanding. By the former, objects are _given_ to us; by the latter, _thought_." Dissecting, with Kant, the nature of "understanding," we have discovered in it the unal form of all our re-presentations--of every perceptible and conceivable objected fact. Dissecting "sense," with the same instructor, we have found it to be certain modes of mental susceptibility, its physical organs being nothing but relations between susceptible awareness and the noumenal unknown, like all the rest of "matter." Led, once more, by our Professor straight up to this noumenal unknown, where _he_ willed to stop and turn his back on it, we have only had to _look_, in order to see it collapse into the self-retention of Spirit--spirit _out_ of _us_, but still _in itself_, and thus going to make up the totality of Spiritual Being. We have thus found the "one common root" of all knowledge and all things. But we have touched, also, the apex of thought, and can now see what is meant--really and fully meant--by "_absolute idealism_."