Secondly--and this is the metaphysical reason--it cannot do so because our physical body is itself only a part of that objective universe of sense-impressions which the soul is conscious of as essentially distinct from its own inmost identity. Metaphysical idealism seems to hold that the ultimate monad of self-consciousness is not this personal micro-cosmic monad which I am conscious of as the empirical self or "soul" but an impersonal macrocosmic monad or "unity of apperception" which underlies the whole field of impressions and is unable, by reason of its inherent nature, to contemplate itself as an "object" at all. What the complex vision seems to me to disclose, is a revelation which includes at one and the same moment "the universal monad" and the "personal monad"; but it indicates clearly enough that the former is an abstraction from the latter. My thought can certainly think of the whole universe, including time and space, as one enormous mass of impressions or ideals presenting itself inside the circle of my mind. Of this mass of impressions, including time and space, my thought, thus abstracted from my personal soul, becomes the circumference. Outside my thought there is nothing at all. Inside my thought there is all that is. The metaphysical reason insists that this all-comprehensive thought or all-embracing consciousness cannot contemplate itself as an object but is compelled to remain an universal subject whose object can only be the mass of impressions which it contains. If it is possible to speak of this "a priori" background of all possible perception as a "monad" at all, it is a monad which certainly lacks the essential power of the individual monad which we know as our real self, for this latter can and does contemplate itself as an object. But as I have hinted before, the complex vision's attribute of self-consciousness projects a second abstraction, which takes its place between this ultimate monad which is pure "subject" and our real personal self which is so much more than subject and object together. This second abstraction, "thrown off" by our pure self-consciousness just as the first one is "thrown off" by our pure reason, becomes therefore an intervening monad which exists midway between the monad which is pure "subject"--if that can be called a monad at all--and the actual individual soul which is the living reality of both these thought-projections.