ABSTRACT
The human mind has an invincible tendency to reduce the diverse to the identical. That which is given us, immediately, by our senses, is multitudinous and diverse. Our intellect, which hungers and thirsts after explanation, attempts to reduce this diversity to identity. Any proposition stipulating the existence of an identity underlying diverse phenomena, or persisting through time and change, seems to us intrinsically plausible. The effort to reduce diversity to identity can be, and generally is, carried too far. Man is a double being and can take, now the god's-eye view of things, now the brute's eye view. For example, he can affirm that chalk and cheese are both composed of electrons, both perhaps more or less illusory manifestations of the Absolute. Such reduction of the diverse to the identical may satisfy our hunger for explanation; but we have bodies as well as intellects, and these bodies have a hunger for Stilton and a distaste for chalk.
