So far, then, in estimating the possible value of this central and essential defect of experience, we have found that it implies action and that it makes for, or testifies to, real unity. Now, thirdly, perhaps only to enlarge upon what has just been said, contradiction is an absolutely effective correction of narrowness or partiality or relativity or one-sidedness in life or consciousness, and so it makes experience not abstract, but realistic. This is in truth only another view of the worth of contradiction to integrity and vitality, to unity and reality, but it would emphasize, what is very interesting at least to the metaphysician, and cannot fail to be of some interest to the moralist and the theologian, that where there is real unity there [p.144] is also true reality. Only the One is. The One and Being are the same. There can be but one substance, as also but one God. So men have said in effect throughout the ages, and where they have conceded reality or substantial character to manifoldness, the concession has simply concealed a reassertion, but with fuller and deeper meaning, of the intimacy of unity with reality. What makes for real unity or wholeness, then, must impart realistic character, giving actual contact and intimacy with just that of which, so to speak, the world is made. Now individual things or ideas always show life suffering in some measure under tangential digressions from the circle of its real wholeness, and only opposition can save them or can preserve the reality to which they both belong and contribute. Has not Emerson, among many others, declared with a cogency and a depth of meaning which quite defy the superficiality and levity attractive to a few, that mere consistency is narrow and confining? Any particular view-point or idea or ideal, any particular thing or activity, simply needs an opposite to balance the abstraction or digression which being particular must always involve. Particularity, specific individuality, is certainly a necessary condition of real worth in life, but with an equal necessity there could be no life, no conservation and wholeness of life if the particular, individual things stood unchallenged in the world, and no realistic experience, if experience were not thus paradoxical and divided against itself. Life, therefore, gets not only movement and unity from the contradictions that lie at the very heart of experience, but in getting unity it gets also contact [p.145] with reality, and the three together may be summed up in the one word poise. Montaigne marvelled at the hopeless folly of mankind as compared with the wisdom of God, but man's folly is divided against itself and so imbued with God's wisdom; and with countless others he saw the ideas of man to be only subjective and unsubstantial and irresponsible, but man's ideas, though fanciful and illusory, though subjective and imaginative, work against each other for what is real and substantial. Man's ideas co-operate for their own