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THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE: A STUDY IN
HUMAN NATURE. Gifford Lectures delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-
1902. 8vo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans,
Green & Co. 1902.

PRAGMATISM : A NEW NAME FOR SOME OLD WAYS OF THINK-
ING: POPULAR LECTURES ON PHILOSOPHY. 8vo. New York,
London, Bombay, and Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co. 1907.

THE MEANING OF TRUTH: A SEQUEL TO " PRAGMATISM." 8vo.
New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co.
igog.

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE: HIBBERT LECTURES ON THE
PRESENT SITUATION IN PHILOSOPHY. Svo. New York, Lon-
don, Bombay, and Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co. xgog.

SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY: A BEGINNING OF AN IN-
TRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY. Svo.
bay, and Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co.

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM. Svo.
bay, and Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co.

New York, London, Bom-
1911.

New York, London, Bom-
1912.

THE WILL TO BELIEVE, AND OTHER ESSAYS IN POPULAR
PHILOSOPHY. i2mo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta:
Longmans, Green & Co. 1S97.

MEMORIES AND STUDIES. Svo. New York. London, Bombay, and
Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. igii.

THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 2 vols., Svo. New York :
Henry Holt & Co. London : Macmillan & Co. 1890.

PSYCHOLOGY; BRIEFER COURSE. i2mo. New York : Henry Holt
& Co. London : Macmillan & Co. 1S92.

TALKS TO TEACHERS ON PSYCHOLOGY: AND TO STUDENTS
ON SOME OF LIFE'S IDEALS. lamo. New York ; Henry Hojt
& Co. London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. 1899.

HUMAN IMMORTALITY: TWO SUPPOSED OBJECTIONS TO THE
DOCTRINE. i6mo. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. London : Archi-
bald Constable & Co. 1S98.

THE LITERARY REMAINS OF HENRY JAMES. Edited, with an
Introduction, by William James. With Portrait. Crown Svo. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co. 1885.

A PLURALISTIC
UNIVERSE

Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College
on the Present Situation in Philosophy

WILLIAM JAMES

138127

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

Fourth Avenue and 30th Street, New York

LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1916

FIRST EDITION 19O9

REPRINTED AUGUST 19O9

MARCH I912, DECEMBER I916

BKHAM YOUNG Wg.VERS«t1
PPOVO, UTAH

CONTENTS

LECTURE I

The Types op Philosophic Thinking

Our age is growing philosophical again, 3. Change of tone since
1860, 4. Empiricism and Rationalism defined, 7. The process of
Philosophizing: Philosophers choose some part of the world to in-
terpret the whole by, 8. They seek to make it seem less strange, 11.
Their temperamental differences, 12. Their systems must be rea-
soned out, 13. Their tendency to over-technicality, 15. Excess of
this in Germany, 17. The type of vision is the important thing in a
philosopher, 20. Primitive thought, 21. Spiritualism and Material-
ism : Spiritualism shows two types, 23. Theism and Pantheism, 24.
Theism makes a duality of Man and God, and leaves Man an
outsider, 25. Pantheism identifies Man with God, 29. The con-
temporary tendency is towards Pantheism, 30. Legitimacy of our
demand to be essential in the Universe, 33. Pluralism versus
Monism: The 'each-form' and the 'all-form' of representing the
world, 34. Professor Jacks quoted, 35. Absolute Idealism charac-
terized, 36. Peculiarities of the finite consciousness which the Ab-
solute cannot share, 38. The finite still remains outside of absolute
reality, 40.

LECTURE II

Monistic Idealism .\ . 41

Recapitulation, 43. Radical Pluralism is to be the thesis of these
lectures, 44. Most philosophers contemn it, 45. Foreignness to us of
Bradley's Absolute, 46. Spinoza and 'quatenus,' 47. DiflBculty of
sympathizing with the Absolute, 48. Idealistic attempt to interpret
it, 50. Professor Jones quoted, 52. Absolutist refutations of Plural-
ism, 54. Criticism of Lotze's proof of Monism by the analysis of
what interaction involves, 55. Vicious intellectualism defined, 60.
Royce's alternative: either the complete disunion or the absolute
union of things, 61. Bradley's dialectic difficulties with relations, 69.
Inefficiency of the Absolute as a rationalizing remedy, 71. Tend-
ency of Rationalists to fly to extremes, 74. The question of ' exter-
nal' relations, 79. Transition to Hegel, 91.

111

COlSfTENTS

LECTURE III

Hegel and his Method ....

Hegel's influence, 85. The type of his vision is impressionistic, 87.
The 'dialectic' element in reality, 88. Pluralism involves possible
conflicts among things, 90, Hegel explains conflicts by the mutual
contradictoriness of concepts, 91. Criticism of his attempt to tran-
scend ordinary logic, 92. Examples of the 'dialectic' constitution of
things, 95. The rationalistic ideal: propositions self-securing by
means of double negation, 101. Sublimity of the conception, 104.
Criticism of Hegel's account : it involves vicious intellectualism, 105.
Hegel is a seer rather than a reasoner, 107. 'The Absolute' and
*God' are two different notions, 110. Utility of the Absolute in con-
ferring mental peace, 114. But this is counterbalanced by the pe-
culiar paradoxes which it introduces into philosophy, 116. Leibnitz
and Lotze on the 'fall' involved in the creation of the finite, 119.
Joachim on the fall of truth into error, 121. The world of the abso-
lutist cannot be perfect, 123. Pluralistic conclusions, 125.

LECTURE IV
Concerning Fechner 131

Superhuman consciousness does not necessarily imply an abso-
lute mind, 134. Thinness of contemporary absolutism, 135. The
tone of Fechner's empiricist pantheism contrasted with that of the
rationalistic sort, 144. Fechner's life, 145. His vision, the 'daylight
view,' 150, His way of reasoning by analogy, 151. The whole uni-
verse animated, 152. His monistic formula is unessential, 153. The
Earth-Soul, 156. Its differences from our souls, 160. The earth as
an angel, 164. The Plant-Soul, 165. The logic used by Fedmer,
168. His theory of immortality, 170. The 'thickness' of his imagi-
nation, 173. Inferiority of the ordinary transcendentalist pantheism,
to his vision, 174.

LECTURE V
The Compounding of Consciousness 179

The assumption that states of mind may compound themselves,
181. This assumption is held in common by naturalistic psycho-

CONTENTS

logy, by transcendental idealism, and by Fechner, 184. Criticism o!
it by the present writer in a former book, 188. Physical combina-
tions, so-called, cannot be invoked as ar alogous, 194. Nevertheless,
combination must be pxDstulated among the parts of the Universe,
197. The logical objections to admitting it, 198. Rationalistic treat-
ment of the question brings us to an impasse, 208. A radical breach
with intellectualism is required, 212. Transition to Bergson's philo-
sophy, 214. Abusive use of concepts, 219.

LECTURE VI
Bergson and his Critique of Intellectualism . 223

Professor Bergson's personality, 225. Achilles and the tortoise,
228. Not a sophism, 229. We make motion unintelligible when we
treat it by static concepts, 233. Conceptual treatment is neverthe-
less of immense practical use, 235. The traditional rationalism gives
an essentially static universe, 237. Intolerableness of the intellect-
ualist view, 240. No rationalist account is possible of action, change,
or immediate life, 244. The function of concepts is practical rather
than theoretical, 247. Bergson remands us to intuition or sensational
experience for the understanding of how life makes itself go, 252.
What Bergson means by this, 255. Manyness in oneness must be
admitted, 256. What really exists is not things made, but things in
the making, 263. Bergson's originality, 264. Impotence of intellect-
ualist logic to define a universe where change is continuous, 267.
Livingly, things are their own others, so that there is a sense in
which Hegel's logic is true, 270.

LECTURE VII
The CoNTiNuiiT of Experience 275

Green's critique of Sensationalism, 278. Relations are as imme-
diately felt as terms are, 280. The union of things is given in the
immediate flux, not in any conceptual reason that overcomes the
flux's aboriginal incoherence, 282. The minima of experience as
vehicles of continuity, 284. Fallacv of the objections to self-com-
pounding, 286. The concrete units of experience are * their own
others,' 287. Reality is confluent from next to next, 290. Intellect-
ualism must be sincerely renounced, 291, The Absolute is only

CONTENTS

an hypothesis, 292. Fechner's Grod b not the Absolute, 298. The
Absolute solves no intellectualist difficulty, 296. Does superhuman
consciousness probably exist? 298.

LECTURE VIII

Conclusions 301

Specifically religious experiences occur, 303. Their nature, 304.
They corroborate the notion of a larger life of which we are a part,
308. This life must be finite if we are to escape the paradoxes of
monism, 310. God as a finite being, 311. Empiricism is a better
ally than rationalism, of religion, 313. Empirical proofs of larger
mind may open the door to superstitions, 315. But this objection
should not be deemed fatal, 316. Our beliefs form parts of reality,
317. In pluralistic empiricism our relation to God remains least
foreign, 318. The word ' rationality ' had better be replaced by the
word * intimacy,* 319. Monism and pluralism distinguished and
defined, 321. Pliualism involves indeterminism, 324. All men use
the 'faith-ladder' in reaching their decision, 328. Conclusion, 330.

NOTES 833

APPENDICES

A. The Thing and its Relations 347

B. The Experience of Activity 370

C. On the Notion of Reality as Changing . . . 395

INDEX > 401

THE TYPES OF PHILOSOPHIC
THINKING

LECTURE I

THE TYPES OF PHILOSOPHIC
THINKING

As these lectures are meant to be public, and
so few, I have assumed all very special prob-
lems to be excluded, and some topic of general
interest required. Fortunately, our age seems
to be growing philosophical again — still in
the ashes live the wonted fires. Oxford, long
the seed-bed, for the english world, of the
idealism inspired by Kant and Hegel, has re-
cently become the nursery of a very different
way of thinking. Even non-philosophers have
begun to take an interest in a controversy over
what is known as pluralism or humanism. It
looks a little as if the ancient english empiri-
cism, so long put out of fashion here by nobler
sounding germanic formulas, might be re-
pluming itself and getting ready for a stronger
flight than ever. It looks as if foundations
were being sounded and examined afresh.

Individuality outruns all classification, yet
we insist on classifying every one we meet

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

under some general head. As these heads usu-
ally suggest prejudicial associations to some
hearer or other, the life of philosophy largely
consists of resentments at the classing, and
complaints of being misunderstood. But there
are signs of clearing up, and, on the whole, less
acrimony in discussion, for which both Oxford
and Harvard are partly to be thanked. As
I look back into the sixties. Mill, Bain, and
Hamilton were the only official philosophers
in Britain. Spencer, Martineau, and Hodgson
were just beginning. In France, the pupils of
Cousin were delving into history only, and
Renouvier alone had an original system. In
Germany, the hegelian impetus had spent it-
self, and, apart from historical scholarship,
nothing but the materialistic controversy re-
mained, with such men as Biichner and Ulrici
as its champions. Lotze and Fechner were the
sole original thinkers, and Fechner was not a
professional philosopher at all.

The general impression made was of crude
issues and oppositions, of small subtlety and

of a widely spread ignorance. Amateurishness

I. THE TYPES OF THINKING

was rampant. Samuel Bailey's * letters on the
philosophy of the human mind,' published in
1855, are one of the ablest expressions of eng-
lish associationism, and a book of real power.
Yet hear how he writes of Kant : *No one, after
reading the extracts, etc., can be surprised to
hear of a declaration by men of eminent abili-
ties, that, after years of study, they had not
succeeded in gathering one clear idea from the
speculations of Kant. I should have been al-
most surprised if they had. In or about 1818,
Lord Grenville, when visiting the Lakes of
England, observed to Professor Wilson that,
after five years' study of Kant's philosophy, he
had not gathered from it one clear idea. Wil-
berforce, about the same time, made the same
confession to another friend of my own. " I am
endeavoring," exclaims Sir James Mackintosh,
in the irritation, evidently, of baffled efforts,
"to understand this accursed german philo-
sophy." ' ^

What Oxford thinker would dare to print
such naif and provincial-sounding citations of
authority to-day ?

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

The torch of learning passes from land to
land as the spirit bloweth the flame. The deep-
ening of philosophic consciousness came to us
english folk from Germany, as it will probably
pass back ere long. Ferrier, J. H. Stirling, and,
most of all, T. H. Green are to be thanked.
If asked to tell in broad strokes what the
main doctrinal change has been, I should call
it a change from the crudity of the older eng-
lish thinking, its ultra-simplicity of mind, both
when it was religious and when it was anti-
religious, toward a rationalism derived in the
first instance from Germany, but relieved from
german technicality and shrillness, and content
to suggest, and to remain vague, and to be, in
the english fashion, devout.

By the time T. H. Green began at Oxford,
the generation seemed to feel as if it had fed on
the chopped straw of psychology and of asso-
^iationism long enough, and as if a little vast-
ness, even though it went with vagueness, as of
some moist wind from far away, reminding us
of our pre-natal sublimity, would be welcome.

Green's great point of attack was the dis-

I. THE TYPES OF THINKING

connectedness of the reigning english sensa-
tionalism. Relating was the great intellectual
activity for him, and the key to this relating
was believed by him to lodge itself at last in
what most of you know as Kant's unity of
apperception, transformed into a living spirit
of the world.

Hence a monism of a devout kind. In some
way we must be fallen angels, one with intel-
ligence as such ; and a great disdain for empiri-
cism of the sensationalist sort has always char-
acterized this school of thought, which, on the
whole, has reigned supreme at Oxford and in
the Scottish universities until the present day.

But now there are signs of its giving way to
a wave of revised empiricism. I confess that I
should be glad to see this latest wave prevail ;
so — the sooner I am frank about it the better
— I hope to have my voice counted in its favor
as one of the results of this lecture-course.

What do the terms empiricism and ration-
alism mean ? Reduced to their most preg-
nant difference, empiricism m^ans the habit of
explaining wholes by parts, and rationalism

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

piean^ the habit of explaining parts by wholes.
Rationalism thus preserves affinities with mo-
nism, since wholeness ^oes with union, while
empiricism inclines to pluralistic views. No
philosophy can ever be anything but a sum-
mary sketch, a picture of the world in abridg-
ment, a foreshortened bird's-eye view of the
perspective of events. Ajid the first thing to
notice is this, that the onlv material we have
at our disposal for making a picture of the
whole world is supplied by the various portions
of that world of which we have already had
experience. We can invent no new forms of
conception, applicable to the whole exclusively,
and not suggested originally by the part^. All
philosophers, accordingly, have conceived of
the whole world after the analosT of some
particular feature of it which has particularly
captivated their attention. Thus, the theists
take their cue from manufacture, the panthe-
ists from growth. For one man. the world is
like a thought or a grammatical sentence in
which a thought is expressed. For such a phi-
losopher, the whole must logically be prior to

I. THE TYPES OF THINKING

the parts; for letters would never have been
invented without syllables to spell, or syllables
without words to utter.

Another man, struck by the disconnected-
ness and mutual accidentality of so many of the
world's details, takes the universe as a whole
to have been such a disconnectedness origi-
nally, and supposes order to have been superin-
duced upon it in the second instance, possibly
by attrition and the gradual wearing away by
internal friction of portions that originally
interfered.

Another will conceive the order as only a
statistical appearance, and the universe will be
for him like a vast grab-bag with black and
white balls in it, of which we guess the quan-
tities only probably, by the frequency with
which we experience their egress.

For another, again, there is no really inher-
ent order, but it is we who project order into the
world by selecting objects and tracing relations
so as to gratify our intellectual interests. We
carve out order by leaving the disorderly parts

out ; and the world is conceived thus after the

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

analogy of a forest or a block of marble from
which parks or statues may be produced by
eliminating irrelevant trees or chips of stone.

Some thinkers follow suggestions from hu-
man life, and treat the universe as if it were
essentially a place in which ideals are realized.
Others are more struck by its lower features,
and for them, brute necessities express its
character better.

All follow one analogy or another; and all
the analogies are with some one or other of the
universe's subdivisions. Every one is neverthe-
less prone to claim that his conclusions are
the only logical ones, that they are necessities
of universal reason, they being all the while,
at bottom, accidents more or less of personal
vision which had far better be avowed as such ;
for one man's vision may be much more valu-
able than another's, and our visions are usually
not only our most interesting but our most re-
spectable contributions to the world in which
we play our part. What was reason given to
men for, said some eighteenth century writer,
except to enable them to find reasons for what

I. THE TYPES OF THINKING

they want to think and do ? — and I think the
history of philosophy largely bears him out.
*The aim of knowledge,' says Hegel,^ 'is to
divest the objective world of its strangeness,
and to make us more at home in it.' Different
men find their minds more at home in very
different fragments of the world.

Let me make a few comments, here, on the
curious antipathies which these partialities
arouse. They are sovereignly unjust, for all the
parties are human beings with the same essen-
tial interests, and no one of them is the wholly
perverse derhon which another often imagines
him to be. Both are loyal to the world that
bears them ; neither wishes to spoil it ; neither
wishes to regard it as an insane incoherence;
both want to keep it as a universe of some kind ;
and their differences are all secondary to this
deep agreement. They may be only propensi-
ties to emphasize differently. Or one man may
care for finality and security more than the
other. Or their tastes in language may be dif-
ferent. One may like a universe that lends itself
to lofty and exalted characterization. To an-

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

other this may seem sentimental or rhetorical.
One may wish for the right to use a clerical
vocabulary, another a technical or professorial
one. A certain old farmer of my acquaintance
in America was called a rascal by one of his
neighbors. He immediately smote the man,
saying, * I won't stand none of your diminutive
enijJTfts/ Empiricist minds, putting the parts
before the whole, appear to rationalists, who
start from the whole, and consequently enjoy
magniloquent privileges, to use epithets offen-
sively diminutive. But all such differences are
minor matters which ought to be subordinated
in view of the fact that, whether we be empiri-
cists or rationalists, we are, ourselves, parts
of the universe and share the same one deep
concern in its destinies. We crave alike to
feel more truly at home with it, and to contrib-
ute our mite to its amelioration. It would be
pitiful if small sesthetic discords were to keep
honest men asunder.

I shall myself have use for the diminutive
epithets of empiricism. But if you look behind
the words at the spirit, I am sure you will not

I. THE TYPES OF THINKING

find it matricidal. I am as good a son as any
rationalist among you to our common mother.
What troubles me more than this misappre-
hension is the genuine abstruseness of many
of the matters I shall be obliged to talk about,
and the difficulty of making them intelligible at
one hearing. But there are two pieces, 'zwei
stucke,' as Kant would have said, in every
philosophy — the final outlook, belief, or atti-
tude to which it brings us, and the reasonings
by which that attitude is reached and mediated.
A philosophy, as James Ferrier used to tell us,
must indeed be true, but that is the least of
its requirements. One may be true without
being a philosopher, true by guesswork or by
revelation. What distinguishes a philosopher's
truth is that it is reasoned. Argument, not sup-
position, must have put it in his possession.
Common men find themselves inheriting their
beliefs, they know not how. They jump into
them with both feet, and stand there. Philoso-
phers must do more ; they must first get reason's
license for them ; and to the professional phi-
losophic mind the operation of procuring the

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

license is usually a thing of much more pith and
moment than any particular beliefs to which
the license may give the rights of access. Sup-
pose, for example, that a philosopher believes
in what is called free-will. That a common
man alongside of him should also share that
belief, possessing it by a sort of inborn intuition,
does not endear the man to the philosopher at
all — he may even be ashamed to be associated
with such a man. What interests the philoso-
pher is the particular premises on which the
free-will he believes in is established, the sense
in which it is taken, the objections it eludes,
the difficulties it takes account of, in short the
whole form and temper and manner and tech-
nical apparatus that goes with the belief in
question. A philosopher across the way who
should use the same technical apparatus, mak-
ing the same distinctions, etc., but drawing op-
posite conclusions and denying free-will entirely,
would fascinate the first philosopher far more
than would the naif co-believer. Their com-
mon technical interests would unite them more
fhan their opposite conclusions separate them.

I THE TYPES OF THINKING

Each would feel an essential consanguinity in
the other, would think of him, write at him,
care for his good opinion. The simple-minded
believer in free-will would be disregarded by
either. Neither as ally nor as opponent would
his vote be counted.

In a measure this is doubtless as it should be,
but like all professionalism it can go to abusive
extremes. The end is after all more than the
way, in most things human, and forms and
methods may easily frustrate their own pur-
pose. The abuse of technicality is seen in the
infrequency with which, in philosophical litera-
ture, metaphysical questions are discussed di-
rectly and on their own merits. Almost always
they are handled as if through a heavy woolen
curtain, the veil of previous philosophers'
opinions. Alternatives are wrapped in proper
names, as if it were indecent for a truth to
go naked. The late Professor John Grote of
Cambridge has some good remarks about this.
* Thought,' he says, * is not a professional mat-
ter, not something for so-called philosophers
only or for professed thinkers. The best phi-

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

losopher is the man who can think most simply,
... I wish that people would consider that
thought — and philosophy is no more than
good and methodical thought — is a matter inti-
mate to them, a portion of their real selves . . .
that they would value what they think, and be
interested in it. . . . In my own opinion,' he
goes on, * there is something depressing in this
weight of learning, with nothing that can come
into one's mind but one is told, Oh, that is the
opinion of such and such a person long ago.
... I can conceive of nothing more noxious
for students than to get into the habit of saying
to themselves about their ordinary philosophic
thought, Oh, somebody must have thought it
all before.' ^ Yet this is the habit most en-
couraged at our seats of learning. You must
tie your opinion to Aristotle's or Spinoza's;
you must define it by its distance from Kant's ;
you must refute your rival's view by identifying
it with Protagoras's. Thus does all spontane-
ity of thought, all freshness of conception, get
destroyed. Everything you touch is shopworn.

The over-technicality and consequent dreari-

I. THE TYPES OF THINKING

ness of the younger disciples at our american
universities is appalling. It comes from too
much following of german models and man-
ners. Let me fervently express the hope that
in this country you will hark back to the more
humane english tradition. American students
have to regain direct relations with our subject
by painful individual effort in later life. Some
of us have done so. Some of the younger ones,
I fear, never will, so strong are the professional
shop-habits already.

In a subject like philosophy it is really fatal
to lose connexion with the open air of human
nature, and to think in terms of shop-tradi-
tion only. In Germany the forms are so pro-
fessionalized that anybody who has gained a
teaching chair and written a book, however
distorted and eccentric, has the legal right to
figure forever in the history of the subject like
a fly in amber. All later comers have the duty
of quoting him and measuring their opinions
with his opinion. Such are the rules of the pro-
fessorial game — they think and write from

each other and for each other and at each other

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

exclusively. With this exclusion of the open
air all true perspective gets lost, extremes and
oddities count as much as sanities, and com-
mand the same attention ; and if by chance any
one writes popularly and about results only,
with his mind directly focussed on the subject,
it is reckoned oberfldchliches zeug and ganz
unwissenschaftlich. Professor Paulsen has
recently written some feeling lines about this
over-professionalism, from the reign of which
in Germany his own writings, which sin by
being ' literary,' have suffered loss of credit.
Philosophy, he says, has long assumed in Ger-
many the character of being an esoteric and
occult science. There is a genuine fear of popu-
larity. Simplicity of statement is deemed syn-
onymous with hollo wness and shallowness. He
recalls an old professor saying to him once :
* Yes, we philosophers, whenever we wish, can
go so far that in a couple of sentences we can
put ourselves where nobody can follow us.'
The professor said this with conscious pride,
but he ought to have been ashamed of it. Great
as technique is, results are greater. To teach

I. THE TYPES OF THINKING

philosophy so that the pupils' interest in tech-
nique exceeds that in results is surely a vicious
aberration. It is bad form, not good form, in
a discipline of such universal human interest.
Moreover, technique for technique, does n't
David Hume's technique set, after all, the kind
of pattern most difficult to follow ? Is n't it the
most admirable ? The english mind, thank
heaven, and the french mind, are still kept, by
their aversion to crude technique and barba-
rism, closer to truth's natural probabilities.
Their literatures show fewer obvious falsities
and monstrosities than that of Germany.
Think of the german literature of aesthetics,
with the preposterousness of such an unsesthetic
personage as Immanuel Kant enthroned in its
centre ! Think of german books on religions-
philosophies with the heart's battles translated
into conceptual jargon and made dialectic.
The most persistent setter of questions, feeler
of objections, insister on satisfactions, is the re-
ligious life. Yet all its troubles can be treated
with absurdly little technicality. The wonder
is that, with their way of working philosophy,

. 19

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

individual Germans should preserve any spon-
taneity of mind at all. That they still mani-
fest freshness and originality in so eminent a
degree, proves the indestructible richness of
the german cerebral endowment.

Let me repeat once more that a man's
vision is the great fact about him. Who cares
for Carlyle's reasons, or Schopenhauer's, or
Spencer's ? A philosophy is the expression of a
man's intimate character, and all definitions of
the universe are but the deliberately adopted
reactions of human characters upon it. In the
recent book from which I quoted the words of
Professor Paulsen, a book of successive chap-
ters by various living german philosophers,^
we pass from one idiosyncratic personal at-
mosphere into another almost as if we were
turning over a photograph album.

If we take the whole history of philosophy,
the systems reduce themselves to a few main
types which, under all the technical verbiage in
which the ingenious intellect of man envelops
them, are just so many visions, modes of feeling
the whole push, and seeing the whole drift of

I. THE TYPES OF THINKING

life, forced on one by one's total character and
experience, and on the whole 'preferred — there
is no other truthful word — as one's best work-
ing attitude. Cynical characters take one gen-
eral attitude, sympathetic characters another.
But no general attitude is possible towards the
world as a whole, until the intellect has de-
veloped considerable generalizing power and
learned to take pleasure in synthetic formulas.
The thought of very primitive men has hardly
any tincture of philosophy. Nature can have
little unity for savages. It is a Walpurgis-nacht
procession, a checkered play of light and
shadow, a medley of impish and elfish friendly
and inimical powers. ' Close to nature' though
they live, they are anything but Wordsworth-
ians. If a bit of cosmic emotion ever thrills
them, it is likely to be at midnight, when the
camp smoke rises straight to the wicked full
moon in the zenith, and the forest is all whis-
pering with witchery and danger. The eeriness
of the world, the mischief and the manyness,
the littleness of the forces, the magical sur-
prises, the unaccountability of every agent,

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

these surely are the characters most impressive
at that stage of culture, these communicate the
thrills of curiosity and the earliest intellectual
stirrings. Tempests and conflagrations, pesti-
lences and earthquakes, reveal supramundane
powers, and instigate religious terror rather
than philosophy. Nature, more demonic than
divine, is above all things multifarious. So
many creatures that feed or threaten, that help
or crush, so many beings to hate or love, to
understand or start at — which is on top and
which subordinate ? Who can tell ? They are
co-ordinate, rather, and to adapt ourselves to
them singly, to 'square' the dangerous powers
and keep the others friendly, regardless of con-
sistency or unity, is the chief problem. The
symbol of nature at this stage, as Paulsen well
says, is the sphinx, under whose nourishing
breasts the tearing claws are visible.

But in due course of time the intellect awoke,
with its passion for generalizing, simplifying,
and subordinating, and then began those diver-
gences of conception which all later experience
seems rather to have deepened than to have

I. THE TYPES OF THINKING

eflFaced, because objective nature has con-
tributed to both sides impartially, and has
let the thinkers emphasize different parts of
her, and pile up opposite imaginary supple-
ments.

Perhaps the most interesting opposition is
that which results from the clash between what
I lately called the sympathetic and the cynical
temper. Materialistic and spiritualistic phi-
losophies are the rival types that result: the
former defining the world so as to leave man's
soul upon it as a sort of outside passenger or
alien, while the latter insists that the intimate
and human must surround and underlie the
brutal. This latter is the spiritual way of
thinking.

Now there are two very distinct types or
stages in spiritualistic philosophy, and my next
purpose in this lecture is to make their contrast
evident. Both types attain the sought-for in-
timacy of view, but the one attains it some-
what less successfully than the other.

The generic term spiritualism, which I began
by using merely as the opposite of materialism,

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

thus subdivides into two species, the more inti-
mate one of which is monistic and the less in-
timate duahstic. The dualistic species is the
theism that reached its elaboration in the scho-
lastic philosophy, while the monistic species is
the pantheism spoken of sometimes simply as
idealism, and sometimes as *post-kantian' or
'absolute' idealism. Dualistic theism is pro-
fessed as firmly as ever at all catholic seats of
learning, whereas it has of late years tended to
disappear at our british and american univer-
sities, and to be replaced by a monistic pan-
theism more or less open or disguised. I have
an impression that ever since T. H. Green's
time absolute idealism has been decidedly in
the ascendent at Oxford. It is in the ascendent
at my own university of Harvard.

Absolute idealism attains, I said, to the more
intimate point of view ; but the statement needs
some explanation. So far as theism represents
the world as God's world, and God as what
Matthew Arnold called a magnified non-nat-
ural man, it would seem as if the inner quality
of the world remained human, and as if our

I. THE TYPES OF THINKING

relations with it might be intimate enough — for
what is best in ourselves appears then also out-
side of ourselves, and we and the universe are
of the same spiritual species. So far, so good,
then; and one might consequently ask, What
more of intimacy do you require ? To which
the answer is that to be like a thing is not as
intimate a relation as to be substantially fused
into it, to form one continuous soul and body
with it ; and that pantheistic idealism, making
us entitatively one with God, attains this higher
reach of intimacy.

The theistic conception, picturing God and
his creation as entities distinct from each
other, still leaves the human subject outside
of the deepest reality in the universe. God is
from eternity complete, it says, and sufficient
unto himself; he throws off the world by a free
act and as an extraneous substance, and he
throws off man as a third substance, extrane-
ous to both the world and himself. Between
them, God says * one,' the world says ' two,'
and man says * three,' — that is the orthodox
theistic view. And orthodox theism has been

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

so jealous of God's glory that it has taken pains
to exaggerate everything in the notion of him
that could make for isolation and separateness.
Page upon page in scholastic books go to prove
that God is in no sense implicated by his crea-
tive act, or involved in his creation. That his
relation to the creatures he has made should
make any difference to him, carry any conse-
quence, or qualify his being, is repudiated as
a pantheistic slur upon his self-sufficingness. I
said a moment ago that theism treats us and
God as of the same species, but from the ortho-
dox point of view that was a slip of language.
God and his creatures are toto genere distinct
in the scholastic theology, they have absolutely
nothing in common; nay, it degrades God to
attribute to him any generic nature whatever;
he can be classed with nothing. There is a
sense, then, in which philosophic theism makes
us outsiders and keeps us foreigners in relation
to God, in which, at any rate, his connexion
with us appears as unilateral and not recip-
rocal. His action can affect us, but he can never
be affected by our reaction. Our relation, in

I. THE TYPES OF THINKING

short, is not a strictly social relation. Of course
in common men's religion the relation is be-
lieved to be social, but that is only one of the
many differences between religion and theology.
This essential dualism of the theistic view
has all sorts of collateral consequences. Man
being an outsider and a mere subject to God,
not his intimate partner, a character of exter-
nality invades the field. God is not heart of
our heart and reason of our reason, but our
magistrate, rather; and mechanically to obey
his commands, however strange they may be,
remains our only moral duty. Conceptions of
criminal law have in fact played a great part in
defining our relations with him. Our relations
with speculative truth show the same exter-
nality. One of our duties is to know truth, and
rationalist thinkers have always assumed it
to be our sovereign duty. But in scholastic
theism we find truth already instituted and
established without our help, complete apart
from our knowing ; and the most we can do is
to acknowledge it passively and adhere to it,

altho such adhesion as ours can make no jot

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

of difference to what is adhered to. The situ-
ation here again is radically duaUstic. It is not
as if the world came to know itself, or God
came to know himself, partly through us, as
pantheistic idealists have maintained, but
truth exists 'per se and absolutely, by God's
grace and decree, no matter who of us knows
it or is ignorant, and it would continue to
exist unaltered, even though we finite knowers
were all annihilated.

It has to be confessed that this dualism and
lack of intimacy has always operated as a drag
and handicap on christian thought. Orthodox
theology has had to wage a steady fight within
the schools against the various forms of pan-
theistic heresy which the mystical experiences
of religious persons, on the one hand, and the
formal or aesthetic superiorities of monism to
dualism, on the other, kept producing. God as
intimate soul and reason of the universe has
always seemed to some people a more worthy
conception than God as external creator. So
conceived, he appeared to unify the world more
perfectly, he made it less finite and mechani-
cs

138127

I. THE TYPES OF THINKING

cal, and in comparison with such a God an
external creator seemed more Hke the product
of a childish fancy. I have been told by Hin-
doos that the great obstacle to the spread of
Christianity in their country is the puerilitj
of our dogma of creation. It has not sweep
and infinity enough to meet the requirements
of even the illiterate natives of India.

Assuredly most members of this audience
are ready to side with Hinduism in this matter.
Those of us who are sexagenarians have wit-
nessed in our own persons one of those gradual
mutations of intellectual climate, due to in-
numerable influences, that make the thought
of a past generation seem as foreign to its suc-
cessor as if it were the expression of a different
race of men. The theological machinery that
spoke so livingly to our ancestors, with its finite
age of the world, its creation out of nothing, its
juridical morality and eschatology, its relish
for rewards and punishments, its treatment of
God as an external contriver, an ' intelligent
and moral governor,' sounds as odd to most of

us as if it were some outlandish savage religion.

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

The vaster vistas which scientific evolutionism
has opened, and the rising tide of social demo-
cratic ideals, have changed the type of our
imagination, and the older monarchical theism
is obsolete or obsolescent. The place of the
divine in the world must be more organic and
intimate. An external creator and his institu-
tions may still be verbally confessed at Church
in formulas that linger by their mere inertia,
but the life is out of them, we avoid dwelling
on them, the sincere heart of us is elsewhere.
I shall leave cynical materialism entirely
out of our discussion as not calling for treat-
ment before this present audience, and I shall
ignore old-fashioned dualistic theism for the
same reason. Our contemporary mind having
once for all grasped the possibility of a more . -
intimate Weltanschauung, the only opinions J

quite worthy of arresting our attention will fall
within the general scope of what may roughly
be called the pantheistic field of vision, the
vision of God as the indwelling divine rather
than the external creator, and of human life as
part and parcel of that deep reality.

iit

I. THE TYPES OF THINKING

As we have found that spirituahsm in gen-
eral breaks into a more intimate and a less
intimate species, so the more intimate species
itself breaks into two subspecies, of which the
one is more monistic, the other more plural-
istic in form. I say in form, for our vocabulary
gets unmanageable if we don't distinguish be-
tween form and substance here. The inner life
of things must be substantially akin anyhow
to the tenderer parts of man's nature in any
spiritualistic philosophy. The word 'intimacy'
probably covers the essential difference. Ma-
terialism holds the foreign in things to be more
primary and lasting, it sends us to a lonely
corner with our intimacy. The brutal aspects
overlap and outwear; refinement has the
feebler and more ephemeral hold on reality.

From a pragmatic point of view the differ-
ence between living against a background of
foreignness and one of intimacy means the dif-
ference between a general habit of wariness
and one of trust. One might call it a social dif-
ference, for after all, the common socius of us
all is the great universe whose children we are.

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

f^ If materialistic, we must be suspicious of this
Ij socius, cautious, tense, on guard. If spiritual-
istic, we may give way, embrace, and keep no
^ ultimate fear.

The contrast is rough enough, and can be
cut across by all sorts of other divisions, drawn
from other points of view than that of foreign-
ness and intimacy. We have so many different
businesses with nature that no one of them
yields us an all-embracing clasp. The phi-
losophic attempt to define nature so that no
one's business is left out, so that no one lies out-
side the door saying 'Where do 1 come in?'
is sure in advance to fail. The most a philoso-
phy can hope for is not to lock out any interest
forever. No matter what doors it closes, it
must leave other doors open for the interests
which it neglects. I have begun by shutting
ourselves up to intimacy and foreignness
because that makes so generally interesting
a contrast, and because it will conveniently
introduce a farther contrast to which I wish
this hour to lead.

The majority of men are sympathetic. Com-

I. THE TYPES OF THINKING

paratively few are cynics because they like
cynicism, and most of our existing materialists
are such because they think the evidence of
facts impels them, or because they find the
idealists they are in contact with too private
and tender-minded ; so, rather than join their
company, they fly to the opposite extreme. I
therefore propose to you to disregard material-
ists altogether for the present, and to consider
the sympathetic party alone.

It is normal, I say, to be sympathetic in the
sense in which I use the term. Not to demand
intimate relations with the universe, and not to
wish them satisfactory, should be accounted
signs of something wrong. Accordingly when
minds of this type reach the philosophic level,
and seek some unification of their vision, they
find themselves compelled to correct that abo-
riginal appearance of things by which savages
are not troubled. That sphinx-like presence,
with its breasts and claws, that first bald multi-
fariousness, is too discrepant an object for phi-
losophic contemplation. The intimacy and the
foreignness cannot be written down as simply

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

coexisting. An order must be made; and in
that order the higher side of things must domi-
nate. The philosophy of the absolute agrees
with the pluralistic philosophy which I am
going to contrast with it in these lectures, in
that both identify human substance with the
divine substance. But whereas absolutism
thinks that the said substance becomes fully
divine only in the form of totality, and is not
its real self in any form but the aZ/-form, the
pluralistic view which I prefer to adopt is will-
fng to believe that there may ultimately never
be an all-form at all, that the substance of
reality may never get totally collected, that
some of it may remain outside of the largest
combination of it ever made, and that a dis-
tributive form of reality, the each-ioruiy is
logically as acceptable and empirically as
probable as the all-form commonly acquiesced
in as so obviously the self-evident thing. The
contrast between these two forms of a reality
which we will agree to suppose substantially
spiritual is practically the topic of this course

of lectures. You see now what I mean by pan-

I. THE TYPES OF THINKING

theism's two subspecies. If we give to the
monistic subspecies the name of philosophy
of the absolute, we may give that of radical
empiricism to its pluralistic rival, and it may
be well to distinguish them occasionally later
by these names.

As a convenient way of entering into the
study of their differences, I may refer to a
recent article by Professor Jacks of Manches-
ter College. Professor Jacks, in some brilliant
pages in the 'Hibbert Journal' for last Octo-
ber, studies the relation between the universe
and the philosopher who describes and defines
it for us. You may assume two cases, he says.
Either what the philosopher tells us is extra-
neous to the universe he is accounting for, an
indifferent parasitic outgrow^th, so to speak ; or
the fact of his philosophizing is itself one of the
things taken account of in the philosophy, and
self-included in the description. In the former
case the philosopher means by the universe
everything except what his own presence brings ;
in the latter case his philosophy is itself an
intimate part of the universe, and may be a

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

part momentous enough to give a different turn
to what the other parts signify. It may be a
supreme reaction of the universe upon itself
by which it rises to self-comprehension. It
may handle itself differently in consequence
of this event.

Now both empiricism and absolutism bring
the philosopher inside and make man intimate,
but the one being pluralistic and the other
monistic, they do so in differing ways that
need much explanation. Let me then contrast
the one with the other way of representing the
status of the human thinker.

For monism the world is no collection, but
one great all-inclusive fact outside of which is
nothing — nothing is its only alternative. When
the monism is idealistic, this all-enveloping fact
is represented as an absolute mind that makes
the partial facts by thinking them, just as we
make objects in a dream by dreaming them, or
personages in a story by imagining them. To
be, on this scheme, is, on the part of a finite
thing, to be an object for the absolute ; and on
the part of the absolute it is to be the thinker of

I. THE TYPES OF THINKING

that assemblage of objects. If we use the word
' content ' here, we see that the absolute and the
world have an identical content. The absolute
is nothing but the knowledge of those objects ;
the objects are nothing but what the absolute
knows. The world and the all-thinker thus
compenetrate and soak each other up without
residuum. They are but two names for the same
identical material, considered now from the
subjective, and now from the objective point of
view — gedanke and gedachtes, as we would
say if we were Germans. We philosophers nat-
urally form part of the material, on the monis-
tic scheme. The absolute makes us by thinking
us, and if we ourselves are enlightened enough
to be believers in the absolute, one may then
say that our philosophizing is one of the ways
in which the absolute is conscious of itself.
This is the full pantheistic scheme, the iden-
titdtsphilosophie, the immanence of God in his
creation, a conception sublime from its tre-
mendous unity. And yet that unity is incom-
plete, as closer examination will show.

The absolute and the world are one fact, I

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

said, when materially considered. Our philoso-
phy, 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 whole-
ness 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 iden-
tical 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 dififerent things true

I. THE TYPES OF THINKING

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, misfor-
tune, pain, for me ; I suffer those consequences.
The absolute knows of those things, of course,
for it knows me and my suffering, but it
does n't itself suffer. It can't be ignorant, for
simultaneous with its knowledge of each ques-
tion 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 at-
tribute connected with succession can be ap-
plied 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.

Qua finite and plural its accounts of itself to

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

itself are different from what its account to
itself qua infinite and one must be.

With this radical discrepancy between the
absolute and the relative points of view, it seems
to me that almost as great a bar to intimacy
between the divine and the human breaks out
in pantheism as that which we found in mo-
narchical theism, and hoped that pantheism
might not show. We humans are incurably
rooted in the temporal point of view. The eter-
nal's ways are utterly unlike our ways. * Let
us imitate the AH,' said the original prospectus
of that admirable Chicago quarterly called the
*Monist.' As if we could, either in thought or
conduct! We are invincibly parts, let us talk
as we will, and must always apprehend the
absolute as if it were a foreign being. If what
I mean by this is not wholly clear to you at this
point, it ought to grow clearer as my lectures
proceed.

MONISTIC IDEALISM

LECTURE II

MONISTIC IDEALISM

liET me recall to you the programme which
I indicated to you at our last meeting. After
agreeing not to consider materialism in any
shape, but to place ourselves straightway upon
a more spiritualistic platform, I pointed out
three kinds of spiritual philosophy between
which we are asked to choose. The first way
was that of the older dualistic theism, with
ourselves represented as a secondary order of
substances created by God. We found that
this allowed of a degree of intimacy with the
creative principle inferior to that implied in
the pantheistic belief that we are substantially
one with it, and that the divine is therefore
the most intimate of all our possessions, heart
of our heart, in fact. But we saw that this
pantheistic belief could be held in two forms,
a monistic form which I called philosophy of
the absolute, and a pluralistic form which I
called radical empiricism, the former conceiv-
ing that the divine exists authentically only

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

when the world is experienced all at once in
its absolute totality, whereas radical empiricism
allows that the absolute sum-total of things
may never be actually experienced or reahzed
in that shape at all, and that a disseminated,
distributed, or incompletely unified appear-
ance is the only form that reality may yet

*have achieved.

I may contrast the monistic and pluralistic
forms in question as the * all-form' and the
* each-form.' At the end of the last hour I ani-
madverted on the fact that the all-form is so
radically different from the each-form, which
is our human form of experiencing the world,
that the philosophy of the absolute, so far as
insight and understanding go, leaves us almost
as much outside of the divine being as dual-
istic theism does. I believe that radical em-
piricism, on the contrary, holding to the each-
form, and making of God only one of the
caches, affords the higher degree of intimacy, y

^ The general thesis of these lectures I said would
be a defence of the pluralistic against the mo-
nistic view. Think of the universe as existing

II. MONISTIC IDEALISM

solely in the each-form, and you will have on
the whole a more reasonable and satisfactory
idea of it than if you insist on the all-form being
necessary. The rest of my lectures will do little
more than make this thesis more concrete, and
I hope more persuasive.

It is curious how little countenance radical
pluralism has ever had from philosophers.
Whether materialistically or spiritualistically
minded, philosophers have always aimed at
cleaning up the litter with which the world
apparently is filled. They have substituted
economical and orderly conceptions for the
first sensible tangle; and whether these were
morally elevated or only intellectually neat,
they were at any rate always aesthetically pure
and definite, and aimed at ascribing to the
world something clean and intellectual in the
way of inner structure. As compared with all
these rationalizing pictures, the pluralistic em-
piricism which I profess offers but a sorry
appearance. It is a turbid, muddled, gothic
sort of an affair, without a sweeping outline

and with little pictorial nobility. Those of you

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

who are accustomed to the classical construc-
tions of reality may be excused if your first re-
action upon it be absolute contempt — a shrug
of the shoulders as if such ideas were unwor-
thy of explicit refutation. But one must have
lived some time with a system to appreciate
its merits. Perhaps a little more familiarity
may mitigate your first surprise at such a pro-
gramme as I offer.

First, one word more than what I said last
time about the relative foreignness of the divine
principle in the philosophy of the absolute.
Those of you who have read the last two chap-
ters of Mr. Bradley's wonderful book, 'Ap-
pearance and reality,' will remember what
an elaborately foreign aspect his absolute is
finally made to assume. It is neither intelli-
gence nor will, neither a self nor a collection of
selves, neither truthful, good, nor beautiful, as
we understand these terms. It is, in short, a
metaphysical monster, all that we are permit-
ted to say of it being that whatever it is, it is at
any rate worth more (worth more to itself, that
is) than if any eulogistic adjectives of ours

II. MONISTIC IDEALISM

applied to it. It is us, and all other appear-
ances, but none of us as such, for in it we are
all 'transmuted,' and its own as-suchness is
of another denomination altogether.

Spinoza was the first great absolutist, and
the impossibility of being intimate with his
God is universally recognized. Quatenus infi-
nitus est he is other than what he is quatenits
humanam mentem constituit. Spinoza's philo-
sophy has been rightly said to be worked by
the word quatenus. Conjunctions, prepositions,
and adverbs play indeed the vital part in all
philosophies; and in contemporary idealism
the words 'as' and *qua' bear the burden of
reconciling metaphysical unity with phenome-
nal diversity. Qua absolute the world is one
and perfect, qua relative it is many and faulty,
yet it is identically the self-same world — in-
stead of talking of it as many facts, we call it
one fact in many aspects.

As absolute, then, or sub specie eternitatis,
or quatenus infinitus est, the world repels our
sympathy because it has no history. As such,
the absolute neither acts nor suffers, nor loves

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

nor hates ; it has no needs, desires, or aspira-
tions, no failures or successes, friends or ene-
mies, victories or defeats. All such things per-
tain to the world qua relative, in which our
finite experiences lie, and whose vicissitudes
alone have power to arouse our interest. What
boots it to tell me that the absolute way is the
true way, and to exhort me, as Emerson says,
to lift mine eye up to its style, and manners of
the sky, if the feat is impossible by definition ?
I am finite once for all, and all the categories of
my sympathy are knit up with the finite world
as such, and with things that have a history.
*Aus dieser erde quellen meine freuden, und
ihre sonne scheinet meinen leiden.' I have
neither eyes nor ears nor heart nor mind for
anything of an opposite description, and the
stagnant felicity of the absolute's own perfec-
tion moves me as little as I move it. If we
were readers only of the cosmic novel, things
would be dififerent : we should then share the
author's point of view and recognize villains
fo be as essential as heroes in the plot. But
we are not the readers but the very personages

II. MONISTIC IDEALISM

of the world-drama. In your own eyes each of
you here is its hero, and the villains are your
respective friends or enemies. The tale which
the absolute reader finds so perfect, we spoil
for one another through our several vital
identifications with the destinies of the par-
ticular personages involved.

The doctrine on which the absolutists lay
most stress is the absolute's 'timeless' char-
acter. For pluralists, on the other hand, time
remains as real as anything, and nothing in the
universe is great or static or eternal enough
not to have some historv. But the world that
each of us feels most intimately at home with
is that of beings with histories that play into
our history, whom we can help in their vicissi-
' tudes even as they help us in ours. This satis-
faction the absolute denies us ; we can neither
help nor hinder it, for it stands outside of
history. It surely is a merit in a philosophy
to make the very life we lead seem real and
earnest. Pluralism, in exorcising the absolute,
exorcises the great de-realizer of the only life
we are at home in, and thus redeems the nature

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

of reality from essential foreignness. Every
end, reason, motive, object of desire or aver-
sion, ground of sorrow or joy that we feel is
in the world of finite multifariousness, for
only in that world does anything really hap-
pen, only there do events come to pass.

In one sense this is a far-fetched and rather
childish objection, for so much of the history
of the finite is as formidably foreign to us as
the static absolute can possibly be — in fact
that entity derives its own foreignness largely
from the bad character of the finite which it
simultaneously is — that this sentimental rea-
son for preferring the pluralistic view seems
small. ^ I shall return to the subject in my final
lecture, and meanwhile, with your permission,
I will say no more about this objection. The
more so as the necessary foreignness of the
absolute is cancelled emotionally by its attri-
bute of totality, which is universally considered
to carry the further attribute of perfection in
its train. 'Philosophy,' says a recent ameri-
can philosopher, ' is humanity's hold on total-
ity,' and there is no doubt that most of us find

II. MONISTIC IDEALISM

that the bare notion of an absolute all-one is
inspiring. *I yielded myself to the perfect
whole,' writes Emerson ; and where can you
find a more mind-dilating object ? A certain
loyalty is called forth by the idea ; even if not
proved actual, it must be believed in somehow.
Only an enemy of philosophy can speak lightly
of it. Rationalism starts from the idea of such
a whole and builds downward. Movement and
change are absorbed into its immutability as
forms of mere appearance. When you accept
this beatific vision of what is, in contrast with
what goes on, you feel as if you had fulfilled
an intellectual duty. 'Reality is not in its
truest nature a process,' Mr. McTaggart tells
us, *but a stable and timeless state.' ^ *The
true knowledge of God begins,' Hegel writes,
'when we know that things as they immedi-
ately are have no truth.' ^ ' The consumma-
tion of the infinite aim,' he says elsewhere,
' consists merely in removing the illusion which
makes it seem yet unaccomplished. Good and
absolute goodness is eternally accomplishing

itself in the world : and the result is that it needs

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

not wait upon us, but is already . . . accom-
plished. It is an illusion under which we live.
... In the course of its process the Idea
makes itself that illusion, by setting an antithe-
sis to confront it, and its action consists in get-
ting rid of the illusion which it has created.' *

But abstract emotional appeals of any kind
sound amateurish in the business that concerns
us. Impressionistic philosophizing, like im-
pressionistic watchmaking or land-surveying,
is intolerable to experts. Serious discussion of
the alternative before us forces me, therefore,
to become more technical. The great claim of
the philosophy of the absolute is that the abso-
lute is no hypothesis, but a presupposition
implicated in all thinking, and needing only
a little effort of analysis to be seen as a logical
necessity. I will therefore take it in this more
rigorous character and see whether its claim is
in effect so coercive.

It has seemed coercive to an enormous num-
ber of contemporaneous thinkers. Professor
Henry Jones thus describes the range and in-
fluence of it upon the social and political life of

II. MONISTIC IDEALISM

the present time : ^ * For many years adherents
of this way of thought have deeply interested
the british public by their writings. Almost
more important than their writings is the fact
that they have occupied philosophical chairs
in almost every university in the kingdom.
Even the professional critics of idealism are
for the most part idealists — after a fashion.
And when they are not, they are as a rule more
occupied with the refutation of idealism than
with the construction of a better theory. It fol-
lows from their position of academic authority,
were it from nothing else, that idealism exer-
cises an influence not easily measured upon the
youth of the nation — upon those, that is, who
from the educational opportunities they enjoy
may naturally be expected to become the lead-
ers of the nation's thought and practice. . . .
Difficult as it is to measure the forces ... it
is hardly to be denied that the power exercised
by Bentham and the utilitarian school has, for
better or for worse, passed into the hands of
the idealists. . . . *' The Rhine has flowed into
the Thames " is the warning note rung out by

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

Mr. Hobhouse. Carlyle introduced it, bringing
it as far as Chelsea. Then Jowett and Thomas
Hill Green, and William Wallace and Lewis
Nettleship, and Arnold Toynbee and David
Ritchie — to mention only those teachers whose
voices now are silent — guided the waters into
those upper reaches known locally as the Isis.
John and Edward Caird brought them up the
Clyde, Hutchison Stirling up the Firth of
Forth. They have passed up the Mersey and
up the Severn and Dee and Don. They pollute
the bay of St. Andrews and swell the waters of
the Cam, and have somehow crept overland into
Birmingham. The stream of german idealism
has been diffused over the academical world of
Great Britain. The disaster is universal.'

Evidently if weight of authority were all, the
truth of absolutism would be thus decided.
But let us first pass in review the general style
of argumentation of that philosophy.

As I read it, its favorite way of meeting plu-
ralism and empiricism is by a reductio ad ah-
surdum framed somewhat as follows : You con-
tend, it says to the pluralist, that things, though

II. MONISTIC IDEALISM

in some respects connected, are in other respects

independent, so that they are not members of

one all-inclusive individual fact. Well, your

position is absurd on either point. For admit

in fact the slightest modicum of independence,

and you find (if you will only think accurately)

that you have to admit more and more of it,

until at last nothing but an absolute chaos,

or the proved impossibility of any connexion

whatever between the parts of the universe,

remains upon your hands. Admit, on the other

hand, the most incipient minimum of relation

between any two things, and again you can't

stop until you see that the absolute unity of

all things is implied. '

If we take the latter reductio ad absurdum

first, we find a good example of it in Lotze's

well-known proof of monism from the fact of

interaction between finite things. Suppose,

Lotze says in effect, and for simplicity's sake

I have to paraphrase him, for his own words

are too long to quote — many distinct beings

a, 6, c, etc., to exist independently of each other :

can a in that case ever act on h ?

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

What is it to act ? Is it not to exert an influ-
ence ? Does the influence detach itself from a
and find h ? If so, it is a third fact, and the prob-
lem is not how a acts, but how its 'influence'
acts on 6. By another influence perhaps ? And
how in the end does the chain of influences find
h rather than c unless h is somehow prefigured
in them already ? And when they have found 6,
how do they make h respond, if h has nothing
in common with them ? Why don't they go
right through h ? The change in 6 is a responsey
due to 6's capacity for taking account of a's
influence, and that again seems to prove that
6's nature is somehow fitted to a's nature in
advance. A and b, in short, are not really as
distinct as we at first supposed them, not sep-
arated by a void. Were this so they would be
mutually impenetrable, or at least mutually
irrelevant. They would form two universes
each living by itself, making no difference to
each other, taking no account of each other,
much as the universe of your day dreams takes
no account of mine. They must therefore
belong together beforehand, be co-implicated

II. MONISTIC IDEALISM

already, their natures must have an inborn
mutual reference each to each.

Lotze's own solution runs as follows : The
multiple independent things supposed cannot
be real in that shape, but all of them, if recip-
rocal action is to be possible between them,
must be regarded as parts of a single real
being, M. The pluralism with which our view
began has to give place to a monism; and
the 'transeunt' interaction, being unintelligi-
ble as such, is to be understood as an imma-
nent operation.^

The words * immanent operation * seem here
to mean that the single real being M, of which
a and h are members, is the only thing that
changes, and that when it changes, it changes
inwardly and all over at once. When part a
in it changes, consequently, part h must also
change, but without the whole M changing
this would not occur.

A pretty argument, but a purely verbal one,
as I apprehend it. Call your a and h distinct,
they can't interact; call them one, they can.
For taken abstractly and without qualification

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the words * distinct ' and * independent' suggest
only disconnection. If this be the only pro-
perty of your a and h (and it is the only property
your words imply), then of course, since you
can't deduce their mutual influence from it,
you can find no ground of its occurring between
them. Your bare word 'separate,' contradict-
ing your bare word ' joined,' seems to exclude
connexion.

Lotze's remedy for the impossibility thus
verbally found is to change the first word. If,
instead of calling a and h independent, we now
call them 'interdependent,' 'united,' or 'one,'
he says, these words do not contradict any sort
of mutual influence that may be proposed. If
a and h are ' one,' and the one changes, a and h
of course must co-ordinately change. What
under the old name they could n't do, they now
have license to do under the new name.

But I ask you whether giving the name of
'one' to the former ' many' makes us really un-
derstand the modus operandi of interaction any
better. We have now given verbal permission
to the many to change all together, if they can ;

II. MONISTIC IDEALISM

we have removed a verbal impossibility and
substituted a verbal possibility, but the new
name, with the possibility it suggests, tells us
nothing of the actual process by which real
things that are one can and do change at all.
In point of fact abstract oneness as such does nt
change, neither has it parts — any more than
abstract independence as such interacts. But
then neither abstract oneness nor abstract in-
dependence exists; only concrete real things
exist, which add to these properties the other
properties which they possess, to make up
what we call their total nature. To construe
any one of their abstract names as making their
total nature impossible is a misuse of the func-
tion of naming. The real way of rescue from
the abstract consequences of one name is not
to fly to an opposite name, equally abstract, but
rather to correct the first name by qualifying
adjectives that restore some concreteness to
the case. Don't take your ' independence ' sim-
pliciter, as Lotze does, take it secundum quid.
Only when we know what the process of in-
teraction literally and concretely consists in can

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

we tell whether beings independent in definite
respects, distinct, for example, in origin, sepa-
rate in place, different in kind, etc., can or
cannot interact.

The treating of a name as excluding from
the fact named what the name's definition fails
positively to include, is what I call 'vicious
intellectualism.^ Later I shall have more to
say about this intellectualism, but that Lotze's
argument is tainted by it I hardly think we can
deny. As well might you contend (to use an
instance from Sigwart) that a person whom
you have once called an 'equestrian' is thereby
forever made unable to walk on his own feet.

I almost feel as if I should apologize for
criticising such subtle arguments in rapid lec-
tures of this kind. The criticisms have to be as
abstract as the arguments, and in exposing
their unreality, take on such an unreal sound
themselves that a hearer not nursed in the
intellectualist atmosphere knows not which of
them to accuse. But le vin est verse, il faut le
boire, and I must cite a couple more instances
before I stop.

II. MONISTIC IDEALISM

If we are empiricists and go from parts to
wholes, we believe that beings may first exist
and feed so to speak on their own existence,
and then secondarily become known to one
another. But philosophers of the absolute tell
us that such independence of being from being
known would, if once admitted, disintegrate
the universe beyond all hope of mending. The
argument is one of Professor Royce's proofs
that the only alternative we have is to choose
the complete disunion of all things or their
complete union in the absolute One.

Take, for instance, the proverb ' a cat may
look at a king' and adopt the realistic view
that the king 's being is independent of the cat's
witnessing. This assumption, which amounts
to saying that it need make no essential differ-
ence to the royal object whether the feline sub-
ject cognizes him or not, that the cat may look
away from him or may even be annihilated, and
the king remain unchanged, — this assumption,
I say, is considered by my ingenious colleague
to lead to the absurd practical consequence
that the two beings can never later acquire any

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

possible linkages or connexions, but must re-
main eternally as if in different worlds. For
suppose any connexion whatever to ensue, this
connexion would simply be a third being addi-
tional to the cat and the king, which would
itself have to be linked to both by additional
links before it could connect them, and so on
ad infinitum, the argument, you see, being the
same as Lotze's about how as influence does
its influencing when it influences b.

In Royce's own words, if the king can be
without the cat knowing him, then king and
cat * can have no common features, no ties, no
true relations ; they are separated, each from
the other, by absolutely impassable chasms.
They can never come to get either ties or com-
munity of nature; they are not in the same
space, nor in the same time, nor in the same
natural or spiritual order.' ^ They form in
short two unrelated universes, — which is the
reductio ad absurdum required.

To escape this preposterous state of things we
must accordingly revoke the original hypothe-
sis. The king and the cat are not indifferent

II. MONISTIC IDEALISM

to each other in the way supposed. But if not
in that way, then in no way, for connexion in
that way carries connexion in other ways; so
that, pursuing the reverse Hne of reasoning, we
end with the absolute itself as the smallest fact
that can exist. Cat and king are co-involved,
they are a single fact in two names, they can
never have been absent from each other, and
they are both equally co-implicated with all
the other facts of which the universe consists.

Professor Royce's proof that whoso admits
the cat's witnessing the king at all must there-
upon admit the integral absolute, may be
briefly put as follows: —

First, to know the king, the cat must intend
that king, must somehow pass over and lay
hold of him individually and specifically. The
cat's idea, in short, must transcend the cat's
own separate mind and somehow include the
king, for were the king utterly outside and in-
dependent of the cat, the cat's pure other, the
beast's mind could touch the king in no wise.
This makes the cat much less distinct from the
king than we had at first naively supposed.

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

There must be some prior continuity between
them, which continuity Royce interprets ideal-
istically as meaning a higher mind that owns
them both as objects, and owning them can also
own any relation, such as the supposed wit-
nessing, that may obtain between them. Taken
purely pluralistically, neither of them can own
any part of a between, because, so taken, each
is supposed shut up to itself: the fact of a
between thus commits us to a higher knower.
But the higher knower that knows the two
beings we start with proves to be the same
knower that knows everything else. For as-
sume any third being, the queen, say, and as
the cat knew the king, so let the king know his
queen, and let this second knowledge, by the
same reasoning, require a higher knower as its
presupposition. That knower of the king's
knowing must, it is now contended, be the
same higher knower that was required for the
cat's knowing; for if you suppose otherwise,
you have no longer the same king. This may
not seem immediately obvious, but if you fol-
low the intellectualistic logic employed in all

11. MONISTIC IDEALISM

these reasonings, I don't see how you can es-
cape the admission. If it be true that the inde-
pendent or indifferent cannot be related, for the
abstract words * independent ' or * indifferent '
as such imply no relation, then it is just as true
that the king known by the cat cannot be the
king that knows the queen, for taken merely 'as
such,' the abstract term *what the cat knows'
and the abstract term * what knows the queen '
are logically distinct. The king thus logically
breaks into two kings, with nothing to connect
them, until a higher knower is introduced to
recognize them as the self-same king concerned
in any previous acts of knowledge which he may
have brought about. This he can do because he
possesses all the terms as his own objects and
can treat them as he will. Add any fourth or
fifth term, and you get a like result, and so on,
until at last an all-owning knower, otherwise
called the absolute, is reached. The co-impli-
cated 'through-and-through' world of monism
thus stands proved by irrefutable logic, and
all pluralism appears as absurd.

The reasoning is pleasing from its ingenuity,

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

and it is almost a pity that so straight a bridge
from abstract los^ic to concrete fact should not
bear our weight. To have the alternative forced
upon us of admitting either finite things each
cut off from all relation with its environment,
or else of accepting the integral absolute with
no environment and all relations packed within
itself, would be too delicious a simplification.
But the purely verbal character of the opera-
tion is undisguised. Because the names of
finite things and their relations are disjoined,
it does n't follow that the realities named need a
deus ex machina from on high to conjoin them.
The same things disjoined in one respect ap-
pear as conjoined in another. Naming the dis-
junction does n't debar us from also naming
the conjunction in a later modifying statement,
for the two are absolutely co-ordinate elements
in the finite tissue of experience. When at
Athens it was found self-contradictory that a
boy could be both tall and short (tall namely
in respect of a child, short in respect of a
man), the absolute had not yet been thought
of, but it might just as well have been invoked

II. MONISTIC IDEALISM

by Socrates as by Lotze or Royce, as a relief
from his peculiar intellectiialistic difficulty.

Everywhere we find rationalists using the
same kind of reasoning. The primal whole
which is their vision must be there not only as a
fact but as a logical necessity. It must be the
minimum that can exist — either that absolute
whole is there, or there is absolutely nothing.
The logical proof alleged of the irrationality of
supposing otherwise, is that you can deny the
whole only in words that implicitly assert it.
If you say ' parts,' of what are they parts ? If
you call them a * many,' that very word unifies
them. If you suppose them unrelated in any
particular respect, that * respect' connects
them ; and so on. In short you fall into hop-
less contradiction. You must stay either at on«
extreme or the other.* ' Partly this and partly
that,' partly rational, for instance, and partly
irrational, is no admissible description of the
world. If rationality be in it at all, it must be
in it throughout; if irrationality be in it any-
where, that also must pervade it throughout.
It must be wholly rational or wholly irrational,

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

pure universe or pure multiverse or nulliverse ;
and reduced to this violent alternative, no one's
choice ought long to remain doubtful. The in-
dividual absolute, with its parts co-implicated
through and through, so that there is nothing
in any part by which any other part can remain
inwardly unaffected, is the only rational sup-
position. Connexions of an external sort, by
which the many became merely continuous
instead of being consubstantial, would be an
irrational supposition.

Mr. Bradley is the pattern champion of this
philosophy in extremis, as one might call it,
for he shows an intolerance to pluralism so
extreme that I fancy few of his readers have
j^^en able fully to share it. His reasoning ex-
emplifies everywhere what I call the vice of
mtellectualism, for abstract terms are used by
him as positively excluding all that their defi-
nition fails to include. Some Greek sophists
could deny that we may say that man is good,
for man, they said, means only man, and good
means only good, and the word is can't be
construed to identify such disparate meanings.

II. MONISTIC IDEALISM

Mr. Bradley revels in the same type of argu-
ment. No adjective can rationally qualify a
substantive, he thinks, for if distinct from the
substantive, it can't be united with it; and if
not distinct, there is only one thing there, and
nothing left to unite. Our whole pluralistic
procedure in using subjects and predicates as
we do is fundamentally irrational, an example
of the desperation of our finite intellectual
estate, infected and undermined as that is by
the separatist discursive forms which are our
only categories, but which absolute reality
must somehow absorb into its unity and over-
come.

Readers of * Appearance and reality ' will
remember how Mr. Bradley suffers from a
diflSculty identical with that to which Lotze and
Royce fall a prey — how shall an influence
influence ? how shall a relation relate .? Any
conjunctive relation between two phenomenal
expefriences a and b must, in the intellectualist
philosophy of these authors, be itself a third
entity ; and as such, instead of bridging the one
original chasm, it can only create two smaller

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

chasms, each to be freshly bridged. Instead of
hooking a to 6, it needs itself to be hooked by
a fresh relation r' to a and by another r" to 6.
These new relations are but two more entities
which themselves require to be hitched in
turn by four still newer relations — so behold
the vertiginous regressus ad infinitum in full
career.

Since a regressus ad infinitum is deemed ab-
surd, the notion that relations come 'between'
their terms must be given up. No mere external
go-between can logically connect. What occurs
must be more intimate. The hooking must be
a penetration, a possession. The relation must
involve the terms, each term must involve it^
and merging thus their being in it, they must
somehow merge their being in each other, tho,
as they seem still phenomenally so separate,
we can never conceive exactly how it is that
they are inwardly one. The absolute, however,
must be supposed able to perform the unifying
feat in his own inscrutable fashion.

In old times, whenever a philosopher was
assailed for some particularly tough absurdity

II. MONISTIC IDEALISM

in his system, he was wont to parry the attack
by the argument from the divine omnipotence.
*Do you mean to Hmit God's power?' he
would reply: 'do you mean to say that God
could not, if he would, do this or that ? ' This
retort was supposed to close the mouths of all
objectors of properly decorous mind. The
functions of the bradleian absolute are in this
particular identical with those of the theistic
God. Suppositions treated as too absurd to
pass muster in the finite world which we in-
habit, the absolute must be able to make good
'somehow' in his ineffable way. First we hear
Mr. Bradley convicting things of absurdity;
next, callijig on the absolute to vouch for them
quand meme. Invoked for no other duty, that
duty it must and shall perform.

The strangest discontinuity of our world of
appearance with the supposed world of abso-
lute reality is asserted both by Bradley and by
Royce ; and both writers, the latter with great
ingenuity, seek to soften the violence of the jolt.
But it remains violent all the same, and is felt

to be so by most readers. Whoever feels the

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

violence strongly sees as on a diagram in just
what the peculiarity of all this philosophy of the
absolute consists. First, there is a healthy faith
that the world must be rational and self-con-
sistent. 'All science, all real knowledge, all ex-
perience presuppose,' as Mr. Ritchie writes, * a
coherent universe.' Next, we find a loyal cling-
ing to the rationalist belief that sense-data and
their associations are incoherent, and that only
in substituting a conceptual order for their or-
der can truth be found. Third, the substituted
conceptions are treated intellectualistically,
that is as mutually exclusive and discontinuous,
so that the first innocent continuity of the flow
of sense-experience is shattered for us with-
out any higher conceptual continuity taking its
place. Finally, since this broken state of things
is intolerable, the absolute deus ex machina is
called on to mend it in his own way, since we
cannot mend it in ours.

Any other picture than this of post-kantian
absolutism I am unable to frame. I see the in-
tellectualistic criticism destroying the imme-
diately given coherence of the phenomenal

II. MONISTIC IDEALISM

world, but unable to make its own conceptual
substitutes cohere, and I see the resort to the
absolute for a coherence of a higher type. The
situation has dramatic liveliness, but it is in-
wardly incoherent throughout, and the ques-
tion inevitably comes up whether a mistake
may not somewhere have crept in in the pro-
cess that has brought it about. May not the
remedy lie rather in revising the intellectualist
criticism than in first adopting it and then try-
ing to undo its consequences by an arbitrary
act of faith in an unintelligible agent. May not
the flux of sensible experience itself contain a
rationality that has been overlooked, so that
the real remedy would consist in harking back
to it more intelligently, and not in advancing
in the opposite direction away from it and even
away beyond the intellectualist criticism that
disintegrates it, to the pseudo-rationality of the
supposed absolute point of view. I myself be-
lieve that this is the real way to keep rationality
in the world, and that the traditional ration-
alism has always been facing in the wrong
direction. I hope in the end to make you

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

share, or at any rate respect, this belief, but
there is much to talk of before we get to that
point.

I employed the word * violent' just now in
describing the dramatic situation in which it
pleases the philosophy of the absolute to make
its camp. I don't see how any one can help be-
ing struck in absolutist writings by that curious
tendency to fly to violent extremes of which I
have already said a word. The universe must
be rational ; well and good ; but how rational ?
in what sense of that eulogistic but ambigu-
ous word ? — this would seem to be the next
point to bring up. There are surely degrees in
rationality that might be discriminated and
described. Things can be consistent or coher-
ent in very diverse ways. But no more in its
conception of rationality than in its conception
of relations can the monistic mind suffer the
notion of more or less. Rationality is one and
indivisible : if not rational thus indivisibly, the
universe must be completely irrational, and no
shadings or mixtures or compromises can ob-
tain. Mr. McTaggart writes, in discussing the

II. MONISTIC IDEALISM

notion of a mixture : * The two principles, of
rationality and irrationality, to which the uni-
verse is then referred, will have to be abso-
lutely separate and independent. For if there
were any common unity to which they should
be referred, it would be that unity and not its
two manifestations which would be the ulti-
mate explanation . . . and the theory, having
thus become monistic,'® would resolve itself
into the same alternative once more: is the
single principle rational through and through
or not ?

*Can a plurality of reals be possible.^' asks
Mr. Bradley, and answers, *No, impossible.'
For it would mean a number of beings not
dependent on each other, and this independ-
ence their plurality would contradict. For to
be * many ' is to be related, the word having no
meaning unless the units are somehow taken
together, and it is impossible to take them in
a sort of unreal void, so they must belong to a
larger reality, and so carry the essence of the
units beyond their proper selves, into a whole

which possesses unity and is a larger system.**^

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

Either absolute independence or absolute mu-
tual dependence — this, then, is the only alter-
native allowed by these thinkers. Of course
independence,' if absolute, would be prepos-
terous, so the only conclusion allowable is that,
in Ritchie's words, * every single event is ulti-
mately related to every other, and determined
by the whole to which it belongs.' The whole
complete block-universe through-and-through,
therefore, or no universe at all !

Professor Taylor is so naif in this habit of
thinking only in extremes that he charges the
pluralists with cutting the ground from under
their own feet in not consistently following
it themselves. What pluralists say is that
a universe really connected loosely, after the
pattern of our daily experience, is possible,
and that for certain reasons it is the hypothe-
sis to be preferred. What Professor Taylor
thinks they naturally must or should say is that
any other sort of universe is logically impos-
sible, and that a totality of things interrelated
like the world of the monists is not an hypothe-
sis that can be seriously thought out at all."

II. MONISTIC IDEALISM

Meanwhile no sensible pluralist ever flies or
wants to fly to this dogmatic extreme.

If chance is spoken of as an ingredient of the
universe, absolutists interpret it to mean that
double sevens are as likely to be thrown out of
a dice box as double sixes are. If free-will is
spoken of, that must mean that an english
general is as likely to eat his prisoners to-day
as a Maori chief was a hundred years ago. It
is as likely — I am using Mr. McTaggart's
examples — that a majority of Londoners will
burn themselves alive to-morrow as that they
will partake of food, as likely that I shall be
hanged for brushing my hair as for committing
a murder, *2 a^d go forth, through various sup-
positions that no indeterminist ever sees real
reason to make.

This habit of thinking only in the most vio-
lent extremes reminds me of what Mr. Wells
says of the current objections to socialism, in
his wonderful little book, *New worlds for
old.' The commonest vice of the human mind
is its disposition to see everything as yes or no,
as black or white, its incapacity for discrim-

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

ination of intermediate shades. So the critics
agree to some hard and fast impossible defini-
tion of socialism, and extract absurdities from
it as a conjurer gets rabbits from a hat. Social-
ism abolishes property, abolishes the family,
and the rest. The method, Mr. Wells contin-
ues, is always the same : It is to assume that
whatever the socialist postulates as desirable
is wanted without limit of qualification, — for
socialist read pluralist and the parallel holds
good, — it is to imagine that whatever pro-
posal is made by him is to be carried out by
uncontrolled monomaniacs, and so to make a
picture of the socialist dream which can be pre-
sented to the simple-minded person in doubt
— *This is socialism' — or pluralism, as the
case may be. * Surely! — surely! you don't
want this ! '

How often have I been replied to, when ex-
pressing doubts of the logical necessity of the
absolute, of flying to the opposite extreme : ' But
surely, surely there must be some connexion
among things!' As if I must necessarily be
an uncontrolled monomanic insanely denying

11. MONISTIC IDEALISM

any connexion whatever. The whole question
revolves in very truth about the word ' some.'
Radical empiricism and pluralism stand out
for the legitimacy of the notion of soine: each
part of the world is in some ways connected, in
some other ways not connected with its other
parts, and the ways can be discriminated, for
manv of them are obvious, and their differences
are obvious to view. Absolutism, on its side,
seems to hold that *some' is a cateo-orv ruin-
ously infected with self-contradictoriness, and
that the only categories inwardly consistent
and therefore pertinent to reality are ' all ' and

* none.'

The question runs into the still more general
one with which Mr. Bradlev and later writers of
the monistic school have made us abundantly
familiar — the question, namely, whether all
the relations with other things, possible to a
being, are pre-included in its intrinsic nature
and enter into its essence, or whether, in re-
spect to some of these relations, it can be with-
out reference to them, and, if it ever does enter
into them, do so adventitiously and as it were

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

by an after-lhought. This is the great question
as to whether 'external' relations can exist.
They seem to, undoubtedly. My manuscript,
for example, is ' on' the desk. The relation of
being ' on ' does n't seem to implicate or involve
in any way the inner meaning of the manu-
script or the inner structure of the desk — these
objects engage in it only by their outsides, it
seems only a temporary accident in their re-
spective histories. Moreover, the* on' fails to
appear to our senses as one of those unintel-
ligible 'betweens' that have to be separately
hooked on the terms they pretend to connect.
All this innocent sense-appearance, however,
we are told, cannot pass muster in the eyes of
reason. It is a tissue of self-contradiction which
only the complete absorption of the desk and
the manuscript into the higher unity of a more
absolute reality can overcome.

The reasoning by which this conclusion is
supported is too subtle and complicated to be
properly dealt with in a public lecture, and you
will thank me for not inviting you to consider
it at all.^^ I feel the more free to pass it by now

II. MONISTIC IDEALISM

as I think that the cursory account of the ab-
solutistic attitude which I have already given is
sufficient for our present purpose, and that my
own verdict on the philosophy of the absolute
as * not proven ' — please observe that I go no
farther now — need not be backed by argu-
ment at every special point. Flanking opera-
tions are less costly and in some ways more
effective than frontal attacks. Possibly you
will yourselves think after hearing my remain-
ing lectures that the alternative of an universe
absolutely rational or absolutely irrational is
forced and strained, and that a via media exists
which some of you may agree with me is to be
preferred. Some rationality certainly does char-
acterize our universe ; and, weighing one kind
with another, we may deem that the incomplete
kinds that appear are on the whole as accept-
able as the through-and-through sort of ration-
ahty on which the monistic systematizers insist.
All the said systematizers who have written
since Hegel have owed their inspiration largely
to him. Even when they have found no use for

his particular triadic dialectic, they have drawn

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confidence and courage from his authoritative
and conquering tone. I have said nothing about
Hegel in this lecture, so I must repair the omis-
sion in the next.

Ill

HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

LECTURE III

HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

Directly or indirectly, that strange and pow-
erful genius Hegel has done more to strengthen
idealistic pantheism in thoughtful circles than
all other influences put together. I must talk
a little about him before drawing my final con-
clusions about the cogency of the arguments
for the absolute. In no philosophy is the fact
that a philosopher's vision and the technique he
uses in proof of it are two different things more
palpably evident than in Hegel. The vision
in his case was that of a world in which rea-
son holds all things in solution and accounts
for all the irrationality that superficially ap-
pears by taking it up as a ' moment ' into itself.
This vision was so intense in Hegel, and the
tone of authority with which he spoke from
out of the midst of it was so weighty, that the
impression he made has never been effaced.
Once dilated to the scale of the master's eye, the
disciples' sight could not contract to any lesser

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

prospect. The technique which Hegel used to
prove his vision was the so-called dialectic
method, but here his fortune has been quite
contrary. Hardly a recent disciple has felt his
particular applications of the method to be
satisfactory. Many have let them drop entirely,
treating them rather as a sort of provisional
stop-gap, symbolic of what might some day
prove possible of execution, but having no lit-
eral cogency or value now. Yet these very
same disciples hold to the vision itself as a
revelation that can never pass away. The
case is curious and worthy of our study.

It is still more curious in that these same
disciples, altho they are usually willing to
abandon any particular instance of the dialec-
tic method to its critics, are unshakably sure
that in some shape the dialectic method is
the key to truth. What, then, is the dialectic
method ? It is itself a part of the hegelian
vision or intuition, and a part that finds the
strongest echo in empiricism and common
sense. Great injustice is done to Hegel by
treating him as primarily a reasoner. He is in

III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

reality a naively observant man, only beset
with a perverse preference for the use of tech-
nical and logical jargon. He plants himself in
the empirical flux of things and gets the im-
pression of what happens. His mind is in very
truth impressionistic; and his thought, when
once you put yourself at the animating centre
of it, is the easiest thing in the world to catch
the pulse of and to follow.

Any author is easy if you can catch the centre
of his vision. From the centre in Hegel come
those towering sentences of his that are com-
parable only to Luther's, as where, speaking of
the ontological proof of God's existence from
the concept of him as the ens perfectissimum
to which no attribute can be lacking, he says :
'It would be strange if the Notion, the very
heart of the mind, or, in a word, the concrete
totality we call God, were not rich enough to
embrace so poor a category as Being, the very
poorest and most abstract of all — for nothing
can be more insignificant than Being.' But
if Hegel's central thought is easy to catch, his

abominable habits of speech make his applica-

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

tion of it to details exceedingly difficult to fol-
low. His passion for the slipshod in the way of
sentences, his unprincipled playing fast and
loose with terms; his dreadful vocabulary,
calling what completes a thing its ' negation,'
for example ; his systematic refusal to let you
know whether he is talking logic or physics or
psychology, his whole deliberately adopted pol-
icy of ambiguity and vagueness, in short: all
these things make his present-day readers wish
to tear their hair — or his — out in despera-
tion. Like Byron's corsair, he has left a name
*to other times, linked with one virtue and a
thousand crimes.'

The virtue was the vision, which was really
in two parts. The first part was that reason is
all-inclusive, the second was that things are
' dialectic' Let me say a word about this sec-
ond part of Hegel's vision.

The impression that any naif person gets
who plants himself innocently in the flux of
things is that things are off their balance.
Whatever equilibriums our finite experiences
attain to are but provisional. Martinique vol-

III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

canoes shatter our wordsworthian equilibrium
with nature. Accidents, either moral, mental,
or physical, break up the slowly built-up equi-
libriums men reach in family life and in their
civic and professional relations. Intellectual
enigmas frustrate our scientific systems, and
the ultimate cruelty of the universe upsets our
religious attitudes and outlooks. Of no special
system of good attained does the universe
recognize the value as sacred. Down it tumbles,
over it goes, to feed the ravenous appetite for
destruction, of the larger system of history in
which it stood for a moment as a landing-
place and stepping-stone. This dogging of
everything by its negative, its fate, its undoing,
this perpetual moving on to something future
which shall supersede the present, this is the
hegelian intuition of the essential provision-
ality, and consequent unreality, of everything
empirical and finite. Take any concrete finite
thing and try to hold it fast. You cannot, for
so held, it proves not to be concrete at all, but
an arbitrary extract or abstract which you
have made from the remainder of empirical

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

reality. The rest of things invades and over-
flows both it and you together, and defeats your
rash attempt. Any partial view whatever of the
world tears the part out of its relations, leaves
out some truth concerning it, is untrue of
it, falsifies it. The full truth about anything
involves more than that thing. In the end
nothing less than the whole of everything can
be the truth of anything at all.

Taken so far, and taken in the rough, Hegel
is not only harmless, but accurate. There is a
dialectic movement in things, if such it please
you to call it, one that the whole constitution
of concrete life establishes; but it is one that
can be described and accounted for in terms
of the pluralistic vision of things far more nat-
urally than in the monistic terms to which
Hegel finally reduced it. Pluralistic empiri-
cism knows that everything is in an environ-
ment, a surrounding world of other things,
and that if you leave it to work there it will
inevitably meet with friction and opposition
from its neighbors. Its rivals and enemies will
destroy it unless it can buy them off by com-

III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

promising some part of its original preten-
sions.

But Hegel saw this undeniable character-
istic of the world we live in in a non-empirical
light. Let the mental idea of the thing work
in your thought all alone, he fancied, and just
the same consequences will follow. It will be
negated by the opposite ideas that dog it, and
can survive only by entering, along with them,
into some kind of treaty. This treaty will be
an instance of the so-called 'higher synthesis'
of everything with its negative; and Hegel's
originality lay in transporting the process from
the sphere of percepts to that of concepts and
treating it as the universal method by which
every kind of life, logical, physical, or psycho-
logical, is mediated. Not to the sensible facts
as such, then, did Hegel point for the secret of
what keeps existence going, but rather to the
conceptual way of treating them. Concepts
were not in his eyes the static self-contained
things that previous logicians had supposed,
but were germinative, and passed beyond them-
selves into each other by what he called their

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

immanent dialectic. In ignoring each other as
they do, they virtually exclude and deny each
other, he thought, and thus in a manner in-
troduce each other. So the dialectic logic, ac-
cording to him, had to supersede the 'logic of
identity' in which, since Aristotle, all Europe
had been brought up.

This view of concepts is Hegel's revolution-
ary performance ; but so studiously vague and
ambiguous are all his expressions of it that one
can hardly tell whether it is the concepts as
such, or the sensible experiences and elements
conceived, that Hegel really means to work
with. The only thing that is certain is that
whatever you may say of his procedure, some
one will accuse you of misunderstanding it.
I make no claim to understanding it, I treat it
merely impressionistically.

So treating it, I regret that he should have
called it by the name of logic. Clinging as he
did to the vision of a really living world, and
refusing to be content with a chopped-up intel-
lectualist picture of it, it is a pity that he
should have adopted the very word that intel-

III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

lectualism had already pre-empted. But he
clung fast to the old rationalist contempt for
the immediately given world of sense and all
its squalid particulars, and never tolerated the
notion that the form of philosophy might be
empirical only. His own system had to be a
product of eternal reason, so the word * logic,'
with its suggestions of coercive necessity, was
the only word he could find natural. He pre-
tended therefore to be using the a jjriori
method, and to be working by a scanty equip-
ment of ancient logical terms — position, nega-
tion, reflection, universal, particular, individ-
ual, and the like. But what he really worked
by was his own empirical perceptions, which
exceeded and overflowed his miserably in-
sufllcient logical categories in every instance
of their use.

What he did with the category of negation
was his most original stroke. The orthodox
opinion is that you can advance logically
through the field of concepts only by going
from the same to the same. Hegel felt deeply
the sterility of this law of conceptual thought ;

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

he saw that in a fashion negation also relates
things ; and he had the brilliant idea of tran-
scending the ordinary logic by treating advance
from the different to the different as if it were
also a necessity of thought. *The so-called
maxim of identity,' he wrote, *is supposed to
be accepted by the consciousness of every one.
But the language which such a law demands,
** a planet is a planet, magnetism is magnetism,
mind is mind," deserves to be called silliness.
No mind either speaks or thinks or forms con-
ceptions in accordance with this law, and no
existence of any kind whatever conforms to it.
We must never view identity as abstract iden-
tity, to the exclusion of all difference. That is
the touchstone for distinguishing all bad phi-
losophy from what alone deserves the name
of philosophy. If thinking were no more than
registering abstract identities, it would be a
most superfluous performance. Things and
concepts are identical with themselves only
in so far as at the same time they involve
distinction.' ^

The distinction that Hegel has in mind here

III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

is naturally in the first instance distinction from
all other things or concepts. But in his hands
this quickly develops into contradiction of
them, and finally, reflected back upon itself,
into self-contradiction ; and the immanent self-
contradictoriness of all finite concepts thence-
forth becomes the propulsive logical force that
moves the world. ^ 'Isolate a thing from all
its relations,' says Dr. Edward Caird,^ ex-
pounding Hegel, *and try to assert it by itself;
you find that it has negated itself as well as its
relations. The thing in itself is nothing.' Or,
to quote Hegel's own words: 'When we sup-
pose an existent A, and another, B, B is at first
defined as the other. But A is just as much the
other of B. Both are others in the same fash-
ion. ..." Other " is the other by itself, there-
fore the other of every other, consequently the
other of itself, the simply unlike itself, the self-
negator, the self-alterer,' etc.^ Hegel writes
elsewhere : ' The finite, as implicitly other than
what it is, is forced to surrender its own imme-
diate or natural being, and to turn suddenly
into its opposite. . . . Dialectic is the universal

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

and irresistible power before which nothing
can stay. . . . Summum jus, summa injuria
— to drive an abstract right to excess is to
commit injustice. . . . Extreme anarchy and
extreme despotism lead to one another. Pride
comes before a fall. Too much wit outwits
itself. Joy brings tears, melancholy a sardonic
smile.' ^ To which one well might add that
most human institutions, by the purely tech-
nical and professional manner in which they
come to be administered, end by becoming
obstacles to the very purposes which their
founders had in view.

Once catch well the knack of this scheme of
thought and you are lucky if you ever get away
from it. It is all you can see. Let any one pro-
nounce anything, and your feeling of a contra-
diction being implied becomes a habit, almost
a motor habit in some persons who symbolize
by a stereotyped gesture the position, sublation,
and final reinstatement involved. If you say
'two' or 'many,' your speech bewrayeth you,
for the very name collects them into one. If you

express doubt, your expression contradicts its

III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

content, for the doubt itself is not doubted but
affirmed. If you say ' disorder,' what is that but
a certain bad kind of order ? if you say * indeter-
mination,' you are determining just that. If you
say ' nothing but the unexpected happens,' the
unexpected becomes what you expect. If you
say * all things are relative,' to what is the all
of them itself relative .? If you say *no more,'
you have said more already, by implying a
region in w^hich no more is found; to know
a limit as such is consequently already to have
got beyond it; and so forth, throughout as
many examples as one cares to cite.

Whatever you posit appears thus as one-
sided, and negates its other, which, being
equally one-sided, negates it; and, since this
situation remains unstable, the two contradic-
tory terms have together, according to Hegel,
to engender a higher truth of which they both
appear as indispensable members, mutually
mediating aspects of that higher concept or
situation in thought.

Every higher total, however provisional and
relative, thus reconciles the contradictions

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

which its parts, abstracted from it, prove im-
pHcitly to contain. Rationah'sm, you remem-
ber, is what I called the way of thinking that
methodically subordinates parts to wholes, so
Hegel here is rationalistic through and through.
The only whole by which all contradictions
are reconciled is for him the absolute whole of
wholes, the all-inclusive reason to which Hegel
himself gave the name of the absolute Idea, but
which I shall continue to call *the absolute'
purely and simply, as I have done hitherto.

Empirical instances of the way in which
higher unities reconcile contradictions are in-
numerable, so here again Hegel's vision, taken
merely impressionistically, agrees with count-
less facts. Somehow life does, out of its total
resources, find ways of satisfying opposites at
once. This is precisely the paradoxical aspect
which much of our civilization presents. Peace
we secure by armaments, liberty by laws and
constitutions; simplicity and naturalness are
the consummate result of artificial breeding
and training ; health, strength, and wealth are
increased only by lavish use, expense, and wear.

III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

Our mistrust of mistrust engenders our com-
mercial system of credit; our tolerance of
anarchistic and revolutionary utterances is the
only way of lessening their danger ; our charity
has to say no to beggars in order not to
defeat its own desires ; the true epicurean has
to observe great sobriety ; the way to certainty
lies through radical doubt ; virtue signifies not
innocence but the knowledge of sin and its
overcoming ; by obeying nature, we command
her, etc. The ethical and the religious life are
full of such contradictions held in solution.
You hate your enemy ? — well, forgive him,
and thereby heap coals of fire on his head ; to
realize yourself, renounce yourself ; to save your
soul, first lose it ; in short, die to live.

From such massive examples one easily gen-
eralizes Hegel's vision. Roughly, his 'dialec-
tic' picture is a fair account of a good deal of
the world. It sounds paradoxical, but when-
ever you once place yourself at the point of view
of any higher synthesis, you see exactly how it
does in a fashion take up opposites into itself.
As an example, consider the conflict between

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our carnivorous appetites and hunting instincts
and the sympathy with animals which our
refinement is bringing in its train. We have
found how to reconcile these opposites most
effectively by establishing game-laws and close
seasons and by keeping domestic herds. The
creatures preserved thus are preserved for the
sake of slaughter, truly, but if not preserved
for that reason, not one of them would be
alive at all. Their will to live and our will to
kill them thus harmoniouslv combine in this
peculiar higher synthesis of domestication.

Merely as a reporter of certain empirical
aspects of the actual, Hegel, then, is great and
true. But he aimed at being something far
greater than an empirical reporter, so I must
say something about that essential aspect of
his thought. Hegel was dominated by the
notion of a truth that should prove incontro-
vertible, binding on every one, and certain,
which should be the truth, one, indivisible,
eternal, objective, and necessary, to which all
our particular thinking must lead as to its con-
summation. This is the dogmatic ideal, the

100

III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

postulate, uncriticised, undoubted, and unchal-
lenged, of all rationalizers in philosophy. ' /
have never doubted J a recent Oxford writer
says, that truth is universal and single and
timeless, a single content or significance, one
and whole and complete/ Advance in think-
ing, in the hegelian universe, has, in short, to
proceed by the apodictic words must he rather
than by those inferior hypothetic words may
he, which are all that empiricists can use.

Now^ Hegel found that his idea of an imma-
nent movement through the field of concepts
by way of ' dialectic ' negation played most beau-
tifully into the hands of this rationalistic de-
mand for something absolute and inconcussum
in the way of truth. It is easy to see how. If
you aflBrm anything, for example that A is, and
simply leave the matter thus, you leave it at the
mercy of any one who may supervene and say
*not A, but B is.' If he does say so, your state-
ment does n't refute him, it simply contradicts
him, just as his contradicts you. The only way
of making your aflSrmation about A self-sectir-
ing is by getting it into a form which will by

101

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implication negate all possible negations in
advance. The mere absence of negation is not
enough ; it must be present, but present with its
fangs drawn. What you posit as A must already
have cancelled the alternative or made it in-
nocuous, by having negated it in advance.
Double negation is the only form of affirmation
that fully plays into the hands of the dogmatic
ideal. Simply and innocently affirmative state-
ments are good enough for empiricists, but
unfit for rationalist use, lying open as they do
to every accidental contradictor, and exposed
to every puff of doubt. The final truth must
be something to which there is no imaginable
alternative, because it contains all its possible
alternatives inside of itself as moments already
taken account of and overcome. Whatever
involves its own alternatives as elements of
itself is, in a phrase often repeated, its 'own
other,' made so by the methode der ahsoluten
negativitdt

Formally, this scheme of an organism of truth
that has already fed as it were on its own liabil-
ity to death, so that, death once dead for it,

102

III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

there 's no more dying then, is the very fulfil-
ment of the rationalistic aspiration. That one
and only whole, with all its parts involved in it,
negating and making one another impossible if
abstracted and taken singly, but necessitating
and holding one another in place if the whole
of them be taken integrally, is the literal ideal
sought after ; it is the very diagram and picture
of that notion of the truth with no outlying
alternative, to which nothing can be added, nor
from it anything withdrawn, and all variations
from which are absurd, which so dominates
the human imagination. Once we have taken
in the features of this diagram that so success-
fully solves the world-old problem, the older
ways of proving the necessity of judgments
cease to give us satisfaction. Hegel's way we
think must be the right way. The true must be
essentially the self-reflecting self-contained re-
current, that which secures itself by including
its own other and negating it ; that makes a
spherical system with no loose ends hanging
out for foreignness to get a hold upon ; that is
forever rounded in and closed, not strung along

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

rectilinearly and open at its ends like that uni-
verse of simply collective or additive form
which Hegel calls the world of the bad infinite,
and which is all that empiricism, starting with
simply posited single parts and elements, is
ever able to attain to.

No one can possibly deny the sublimity of
this hegelian conception. It is surely in the
grand style, if there be such a thing as a grand
style in philosophy. For us, however, it re-
mains, so far, a merely formal and diagram-
matic conception; for with the actual content
of absolute truth, as Hegel materially tries to
set it forth, few disciples have been satisfied,
and I do not propose to refer at all to the con-
creter parts of his philosophy. The main thing
now is to grasp the generalized vision, and feel
the authority of the abstract scheme of a state-
ment self-secured by involving double negation.
Absolutists who make no use of Hegel's own
technique are really working by his method.
You remember the proofs of the absolute
which I instanced in my last lecture, Lotze's
and Royce's proofs by reductio ad absurdum, to

104

III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

the eflfect that any smallest connexion rashly
supposed in things will logically work out into
absolute union, and any minimal disconnexion
into absolute disunion, — these are really argu-
ments framed on the hegelian pattern. The
truth is that which you implicitly affirm in the
very attempt to deny it ; it is that from which
every variation refutes itself by proving self-
contradictory. This is the supreme insight
of rationalism, and to-day the best must-be s
of rationalist argumentation are but so many
attempts to communicate it to the hearer.

Thus, you see, my last lecture and this lecture
make connexion again and we can consider
Hegel and the other absolutists to be support-
ing the same system. The next point I wish
to dwell on is the part played by what I have
called vicious intellectualism in this wonderful
system's structure.

Rationalism in general thinks it gets the ful-
ness of truth by turning away from sensation
to conception, conception obviously giving the
more universal and immutable picture. Intel-
lectualism in the vicious sense I have alreadv

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

defined as the habit of assuming that a
concept ea^cludes from any reality conceived
by its means everything not included in the
concept's definition. I called such intellectu-
alism illegitimate as I found it used in Lotze's,
Royce's, and Bradley's proofs of the absolute
(which absolute I consequently held to be non-
proven by their arguments), and I left off by
asserting my own belief that a pluralistic and
incompletely integrated universe, describable
only by the free use of the word *some,' is a
legitimate hypothesis.

Now Hegel himself, in building up his method
of double negation, offers the vividest possible
example of this vice of intellectualism. Every
idea of a finite thing is of course a concept of
that thing and not a concept of anything else.
But Hegel treats this not being a concept of
anything else as if it were equivalent to the con-
cept of anything else not being, or in other words
as if it were a denial or negation of everything
else. Then, as the other things, thus implicitly
contradicted by the thing first conceived, also by
the same law contradict it, the pulse of dialec-

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III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

tic commences to beat and the famous triads
begin to grind out the cosmos. If any one finds
the process here to be a luminous one, he must
be left to the illumination, he must remain an
undisturbed hegelian. What others feel as the
intolerable ambiguity, verbosity, and unscrupu-
lousnessof the master's way of deducing things,
he will probably ascribe — since divine oracles
are notoriously hard to interpret — to the * dif-
ficulty' that habitually accompanies profun-
dity. For my own part, there seems something
grotesque and saugrenu in the pretension of a
style so disobedient to the first rules of sound
communication between minds, to be the au-
thentic mother-tongue of reason, and to keep
step more accurately than any other style does
with the absolute's own ways of thinking. I
do not therefore take Hegel's technical appa-
ratus seriously at all. I regard him rather as
one of those numerous original seers who can
never learn how to articulate. His would-be
coercive logic counts for nothing in my eyes;
but that does not in the least impugn the phi-
losophic importance of his conception of the

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absolute, if we take it merely hypothetically as
one of the great types of cosmic vision.

Taken thus hypothetically, I wish to discuss
it briefly. But before doing so I must call your
attention to an odd peculiarity in the hegelian
procedure. The peculiarity is one which will
come before us again for a final judgment in
my seventh lecture, so at present I only note
it in passing. Hegel, you remember, considers
that the immediate finite data of experience
are 'untrue' because they are not their own
others. They are negated by what is external
to them. The absolute is true because it and
it only has no external environment, and has
attained to being its own other. (These words
sound queer enough, but those of you who
know something of Hegel's text will follow
them.) Granting his premise that to be true
a thing must in some sort be its own other,
everything hinges on whether he is right in
holding that the several pieces of finite expe-
rience themselves cannot be said to be in any
wise their own others. When conceptually or
intellectualistically treated, they of course can-

108

III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

not be their own others. Every abstract con-
cept as such excludes what it does n't include,
and if such concepts are adequate substitutes
for reality's concrete pulses, the latter must
square themselves with intellectualistic logic,
and no one of them in any sense can claim to
be its own other. If, however, the conceptual
treatment of the flow of reality should prove
for any good reason to be inadequate and to
have a practical rather than a theoretical or
speculative value, then an independent empiri-
cal look into the constitution of reality's pulses
might possibly show that some of them are
their own others, and indeed are so in the self-
same sense in which the absolute is maintained
to be so by Hegel. When we come to my sixth
lecture, on Professor Bergson, I shall in effect
defend this very view, strengthening my thesis
by his authority. I am unwilling to say any-
thing more about the point at this time, and
what I have just said of it is only a sort of sur-
veyor's note of where our present position lies
in the general framework of these lectures.
Let us turn now at last to the great question

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of fact, Does the absolute exist or not? to which
all our previous discussion has been prelim-
inary. I may sum up that discussion by saying
that whether there really be an absolute or not,
no one makes himself absurd or self-contradic-
tory by doubting or denying it. The charges
of self-contradiction, where they do not rest
on purely verbal reasoning, rest on a vicious
intellectualism. I will not recapitulate my
criticisms. I will simply ask you to change
the venue, and to discuss the absolute now as
if it were only an open hypothesis. As such,
is it more probable or more improbable ?

But first of all I must parenthetically ask you
to distinguish the notion of the absolute care-
fully from that of another object with which
it is liable to become heedlessly entangled.
That other object is the 'God' of common
people in their religion, and the creator-God
of orthodox christian theology. Only thor-
oughgoing monists or pantheists believe in the
absolute. The God of our popular Christianity
is but one member of a pluralistic system.
He and we stand outside of each other, just as

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III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

the devil, the saints, and the angels stand out-
side of both of us. I can hardly conceive of
anything more different from the absolute than
the God, say, of David or of Isaiah. That God
is an essentially finite being in the cosmos, not
with the cosmos in him, and indeed he has a
very local habitation there, and very one-sided
local and personal attachments. If it should
prove probable that the absolute does not exist,
it will not follow in the slightest degree that a
God like that of David, Isaiah, or Jesus may
not exist, or may not be the most important ex-
istence in the universe for us to acknowledge.
I pray you, then, not to confound the two ideas
as you listen to the criticisms I shall have to
proffer. I hold to the finite God, for reasons
which I shall touch on in the seventh of these
lectures ; but I hold that his rival and compet-
itor — I feel almost tempted to say his enemy
— the absolute, is not only not forced on us by
logic, but that it is an improbable hypothesis.
The great claim made for the absolute is that
by supposing it we make the world appear
more rational. Any hypothesis that does that

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

will always be accepted as more probably true
than an hypothesis that makes the world appear
irrational. Men are once for all so made that
they prefer a rational world to believe in and
to live in. But rationalitv has at least four
dimensions, intellectual, sesthetical, moral, and
practical ; and to find a world rational to the
maximal degree in all these respects simulta-
neously is no easy matter. Intellectually, the
world of mechanical materialism is the most
rational, for we subject its events to mathe-
matical calculation. But the mechanical world
is ugly, as arithmetic is ugly, and it is non-
moral. Morallv, the theistic world is rational
enough, but full of intellectual frustrations.
The practical world of affairs, in its turn, so
supremely rational to the politician, the military
man, or the man of conquering business-faculty
that he never would vote to change the type of
it, is irrational to moral and artistic tempera-
ments ; so that whatever demand for rationality
we find satisfied by a philosophic hypothesis,
we are liable to find some other demand for
rationality unsatisfied by the same hypothesis.

112

III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

The rationality we gain in one coin we thus pay
for in another; and the problem accordingly
seems at first sight to resolve itself into that of
getting a conception which will yield the largest
balance of rationality rather than one which
will yield perfect rationality of every descrip-
tion. In general, it may be said that if a man's
conception of the world lets loose any action
in him that is easy, or any faculty which he
is fond of exercising, he will deem it rational
in so far forth, be the faculty that of com-
puting, fighting, lecturing, classifying, framing
schematic tabulations, getting the better end
of a bargain, patiently waiting and enduring,
preaching, joke-making, or what you like.
Albeit the absolute is defined as being neces-
sarily an embodiment of objectively perfect
rationality, it is fair to its english advocates to
say that those who have espoused the hypothe-
sis most concretely and seriously have usually
avowed the irrationality to their own minds of
certain elements in it.

Probably the weightiest contribution to our
feeling of the rationality of the universe which

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the notion of the absolute brings is the assur-
ance that however disturbed the surface may
be, at bottom all is well with the cosmos —
central peace abiding at the heart of endless
agitation. This conception is rational in many
ways, beautiful aesthetically, beautiful intellec-
tually (could we only follow it into detail) , and
beautiful morally, if the enjoyment of security
can be accounted moral. Practically it is less
beautiful ; for, as we saw in our last lecture, in
representing the deepest reality of the world
as static and without a history, it loosens the
world's hold upon our sympathies and leaves
the soul of it foreign. Nevertheless it does give
peace, and that kind of rationality is so para-
mountly demanded by men that to the end of
time there will be absolutists, men who choose
belief in a static eternal, rather than admit that
the finite world of change and striving, even
with a God as one of the strivers, is itself eter-
nal. For such minds Professor Royce's words
will always be the truest : ' The very presence
of ill in the temporal order is the condition of
the perfection of the eternal order. . . . We

114

in. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

long for the absolute only in so far as in us the
absolute also longs, and seeks through our very
temporal striving, the peace that is nowhere in
time, but only, and yet absolutely, in eternity.
Were there no longing in time there would be
no peace in eternity. . . . God [i. e. the abso-
lute] who here in me aims at what I now tem-
porally miss, not only possesses in the eternal
world the goal after which I strive, but comes
to possess it even through and because of
my sorrow^ Through this my tribulation the
absolute triumph then is won. ... In the
absolute I am fulfilled. Yet my very fulfilment
demands and therefore can transcend this sor-
row.'^ Royce is particularly felicitous in his
ability to cite parts of finite experience to
which he finds his picture of this absolute expe-
rience analogous. But it is hard to portray the
absolute at all without rising into what might
be called the 'inspired' style of language —
I use the word not ironically, but prosaically
and descriptively, to designate the only liter-
ary form that goes w^ith the kind of emotion
that the absolute arouses. One can follow the

115

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

pathway of reasoning soberly enough/ but the
picture itself has to be effulgent. This admira-
ble faculty of transcending, whilst inwardly
preserving, every contrariety, is the absolute's
characteristic form of rationality. We are but
syllables in the mouth of the Lord ; if the whole
sentence is divine, each syllable is absolutely
what it should be, in spite of all appearances.
In making up the balance for or against abso-
lutism, this emotional value weights heavily
the credit side of the account.

The trouble is that we are able to see so
little into the positive detail of it, and that if
once admitted not to be coercively proven by
the intellectualist arguments, it remains only
a hypothetic possibility.

On the debit side of the account the absolute,
taken seriously, and not as a mere name for our
right occasionally to drop the strenuous mood
and take a moral holiday, introduces all those
tremendous irrationalities into the universe
which a frankly pluralistic theism escapes,
but which have been flung as a reproach at
every form of monistic theism or pantheism.

116

III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

It introduces a speculative 'problem of evil'
namely, and leaves us wondering why the per-
fection of the absolute should require just such
particular hideous forms of life as darken the
day for our human imaginations. If they were
forced on it by something alien, and to * over-
come' them the absolute had still to keep hold
of them, we could understand its feeling of tri-
umph, though we, so far as we were ourselves
among the elements overcome, could acqui-
esce but sullenly in the resultant situation, and
would never just have chosen it as the most
rational one conceivable. But the absolute is
represented as a being without environment,
upon which nothing alien can be forced, and
which has spontaneously chosen from w^ithin
to give itself the spectacle of all that evil rather
than a spectacle with less evil in it.® Its per-
fection is represented as the source of things,
and yet the first effect of that perfection is the
tremendous imperfection of all finite experi-
ence. In whatever sense the word * rationality '
may be taken, it is vain to contend that the
impression made on our finite minds by such

117

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

a way of representing things is altogether
rational. Theologians have felt its irrational-
ity acutely, and the 'fall/ the predestination,
and the election which the situation involves
have given them more trouble than anything
else in their attempt to pantheize Christianity.
The whole business remains a puzzle, both
intellectually and morally.

Grant that the spectacle or world-romance
offered to itself by the absolute is in the abso-
lute's eyes perfect. Why would not the world
be more perfect by having the affair remain in
just those terms, and by not having any finite
spectators to come in and add to what was
perfect already their innumerable imperfect
manners of seeing the same spectacle ? Sup-
pose the entire universe to consist of one superb
copy of a book, fit for the ideal reader. Is
that universe improved or deteriorated by hav-
ing myriads of garbled and misprinted separate
leaves and chapters also created, giving false
impressions of the book to whoever looks at
them ? To say the least, the balance of ration-
ality is not obviously in favor of such added

118

III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

mutilations. So this question becomes urgent :
Why, the absolute's own total vision of things
being so rational, was it necessary to com-
minute it into all these coexisting inferior
fragmentary visions ?

Leibnitz in his theodicy represents God as
limited by an antecedent reason in things
which makes certain combinations logically
incompatible, certain goods impossible. He
surveys in advance all the universes he might
create, and by an act of what Leibnitz calls his
antecedent will he chooses our actual world as
the one in which the evil, unhappily necessary
anyhow, is at its minimum. It is the best of all
the worlds that are possible, therefore, but by
no means the most abstractly desirable world.
Having made this mental choice, God next
proceeds to what Leibnitz calls his act of con-
sequent or decretory will: he says ' Fiaf and
the world selected springs into objective being,
with all the finite creatures in it to suffer from
its imperfections without sharing in its crea-
tor's atoning vision.

Lotze has made some penetrating remarks

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

on this conception of Leibnitz's, and they ex-
actly fall in with what I say of the absolutist
conception. The world projected out of the
creative mind by the jiat, and existing in de-
tachment from its author, is a sphere of being
where the parts realize themselves only singly.
If the divine value of them is evident only
when they are collectively looked at,then,Lotze
rightly says, the world surely becomes poorer
and not richer for God's utterance of the jiat.
He might much better have remained con-
tented with his merely antecedent choice of the
scheme, without following it up by a creative
decree. The scheme as such w as admirable ;
it could only lose by being translated into
reality.^® Why, I similarly ask, should the
absolute ever have lapsed from the perfection
of its own integral experience of things, and
refracted itself into all our finite experiences ?
It is but fair to recent english absolutists
to say that many of them have confessed the
imperfect rationality of the absolute from this
point of view. Mr. McTaggart, for example,
writes : ' Does not our very failure to perceive

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III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

the perfection of the universe destroy it ? . . .
In so far as we do not see the perfection of the
universe, we are not perfect ourselves. And as
we are parts of the universe, that cannot be
perfect.'"

And Mr. Joachim finds just the same diflS-
culty. Calling the hypothesis of the absolute
by the name of the ' coherence theory of truth,'
he calls the problem of understanding how the
complete coherence of all things in the absolute
should involve as a necessary moment in its
self-maintenance the self-assertion of the finite
minds, a self-assertion which in its extreme
form is error, — he calls this problem, I say,
an insoluble puzzle. If truth be the universal
fons et origo, how does error slip in ? * The co-
herence theory of truth,' he concludes, 'may
thus be said to suffer shipwreck at the very
entrance of the harbor.'*^ Yet in spite of this
rather bad form of irrationality, Mr. Joachim
stoutly asserts his ' immediate certainty ' *^ of the
theory shipwrecked, the correctness of which
he savs he has * never doubted.' This can-
did confession of a fixed attitude of faith in

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

the absolute, which even one's own criticisms
and perplexities fail to disturb, seems to me
very significant. Not only empiricists, but
absolutists also, would all, if they were as
candid as this author, confess that the prime
thing in their philosophy is their vision of a
truth possible, which they then employ their
reasoning to convert, as best it can^ into a cer-
tainty or probability.

I can imagine a believer in the absolute re-
torting at this point that he at any rate is not
dealing with mere probabilities, but that the
nature of things logically requires the multi-
tudinous erroneous copies, and that therefore
the universe cannot be the absolute's book
alone. For, he will ask, is not the absolute de-
fined as the total consciousness of everything
that is ? Must not its field of view consist of
parts ? And what can the parts of a total con-
sciousness be unless they be fractional con-
sciousnesses ? Our finite minds Tnust therefore
coexist with the absolute mind. We are its
constituents, and it cannot live without us. —
But if any one of you feels tempted to retort

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III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

in this wise, let me remind you that you are
frankly employing pluralistic weapons, and
thereby giving up the absolutist cause. The
notion that the absolute is made of constituents
on which its being depends is the rankest em-
piricism. The absolute as such has objects, not
constituents, and if the objects develop self-
hoods upon their own several accounts, those
selfhoods must be set down as facts additional
to the absolute consciousness, and not as ele-
ments implicated in its definition. The abso-
lute is a rationalist conception. Rationalism
goes from wholes to parts, and always assumes
wholes to be self -sufficing.^*

My conclusion, so far, then, is this, that
altho the hypothesis of the absolute, in yielding
a certain kind of religious peace, performs a
most important rationalizing function, it never-
theless, from the intellectual point of view,
remains decidedly irrational. The ideally per-
fect whole is certainly that whole of which
the parts also are perfect — if we can depend
on logic for anything, we can depend on it for
that definition. The absolute is defined as the

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

ideally perfect whole, yet most of its parts, if
not all, are admittedly imperfect. Evidently
the conception lacks internal consistency, and
yields us a problem rather than a solution. It
creates a speculative puzzle, the so-called mys-
tery of evil and of error, from which a plural-
istic metaphysic is entirely free.

In any pluralistic metaphysic, the problems
that evil presents are practical, not speculative.
Not why evil should exist at all, but how we
can lessen the actual amount of it, is the sole
question we need there consider.^ 'God,' in the
religious life of ordinary men, is the name not
of the whole of things, heaven forbid, but only
of the ideal tendency in things, believed in as
a superhuman person who calls us to co-op-
erate in his purposes, and who furthers ours
if they are worthy. He works in an external
environment, has limits, and has enemies.
When John Mill said that the notion of God's
omnipotence must be given up, if God is to
be kept as a religious object, he was surely
accurately right; yet so prevalent is the lazy
monism that idly haunts the region of God's

III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

name, that so simple and truthful a saying was
generally treated as a paradox: God, it was
said, could not be finite. I believe that the only
God worthy of the name must be finitey^nd I
shall return to this point in a later lecture. If
the absolute exist in addition — and the hypo-
thesis must, in spite of its irrational features,
still be left open — then the absolute is only the
wider cosmic whole of which our God is but
the most ideal portion, and which in the more
usual human sense is hardly to be termed a
religious hypothesis at all. * Cosmic emotion ' is
the better name for the reaction it may awaken.
Observe that all the irrationalities and puz-
zles which the absolute gives rise to, and from
which the finite God remains free, are due to
the fact that the absolute has nothing, abso-
lutely nothing, outside of itself. The finite
God whom I contrast with it may conceivably
have almost nothing outside of himself;" he
may already have triumphed over and ab-
sorbed all but the minutest fraction of the
universe; but that fraction, however small,
reduces him to the status of a relative being,

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

and in principle the universe is saved from all
the irrationalities incidental to absolutism.
The only irrationality left would be the irra-
tionality of which pluralism as such is accused,
and of this I hope to say a word more later.

I have tired you with so many subtleties in
this lecture that I will add only two other
counts to my indictment.

First, then, let me remind you that the abso-
lute is useless for deductive purposes. It gives
us absolute safety if you will, but it is com-
patible with every relative danger. You cannot
enter the phenomenal world with the notion
of it in your grasp, and name beforehand
any detail which you are likely to meet there.
Whatever the details of experience may prove
to be, after the fact of them the absolute will
adopt them. It is an hypothesis that functions
retrospectively only, not prospectively. That^
whatever it may be, will have been in point
of fact the sort of world which the absolute
was pleased to offer to itself as a spectacle.

Again, the absolute is always represented

126

III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

idealistically, as the all-knower. Thinking this
view consistently out leads one to frame an
almost ridiculous conception of the absolute
mind, owing to the enormous mass of unprofit-
able information which it would then seem
obliged to carry. One of the many redudiones
ad absurdum of pluralism by which idealism
thinks it proves the absolute One is as follows :
Let there be many facts ; but since on idealist
principles facts exist only by being known, the
many facts will therefore mean many knowers.
But that there are so many knowers is itself
a fact, which in turn requires its knower, so
the one absolute knower has eventually to be
brought in. All facts lead to him. If it be a
fact that this table is not a chair, not a rhi-
noceros, not a logarithm, not a mile away from
the door, not worth five hundred pounds ster-
ling, not a thousand centuries old, the abso-
lute must even now be articulately aware of all
these negations. Along with what everything
is it must also be conscious of everything which
it is not. This infinite atmosphere of explicit
negativity — observe that it has to be explicit —

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

around everything seems to us so useless an
encumbrance as to make the absolute still more
foreign to our sympathy. Furthermore, if it be
a fact that certain ideas are silly, the absolute
has to have already thought the silly ideas to
establish them in silliness. The rubbish in its
mind would thus appear easily to outweigh
in amount the more desirable material. One
would expect it fairly to burst with such an
obesity, plethora, and superfoetation of useless
information.^^

I will spare you further objections. The
sum of it all is that the absolute is not forced
on our belief by logic, that it involves features
of irrationality peculiar to itself, and that
a thinker to whom it does not come as an
'immediate certainty' (to use Mr. Joachim's
words), is in no way bound to treat it as any-
thing but an emotionally rather sublime hypo-
thesis. As such, it might, with all its defects,
be, on account of its peace-conferring power
and its formal grandeur, more rational than
anything else in the field. But meanwhile the
strung-along unfinished world in time is its

128

III. HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

rival : reality MAY exist in distributive form, in
the shape not of an all but of a set of eaches,
just as it seems to — this is the anti-absolutist
hypothesis. Prima facie there is this in favor
of the eaches, that they are at any rate real
enough to have made themselves at least ap-
pear to every one, whereas the absolute has as
yet appeared immediately to only a few mys-
tics, and indeed to them very ambiguously.
The advocates of the absolute assure us that
any distributive form of being is infected and
undermined by self-contradiction. If we are
unable to assimilate their arguments, and we
have been unable, the only course we can take,
it seems to me, is to let the absolute bury the
absolute, and to seek reality in more promising
directions, even among the details of the iSnite
and the immediately given.

If these words of mine sound in bad taste
to some of you, or even sacrilegious, I am
sorry. Perhaps the impression may be miti-
gated by what I have to say in later lectures.

IV
CONCERNING FECHNER

LECTURE IV

CONCERNING FECHNER

The prestige of the absolute has rather crum-
bled in our hands. The logical proofs of it miss
fire ; the portraits which its best court-painters
show of it are featureless and foggy in the
extreme; and, apart from the cold comfort
of assuring us that w^ith it all is well, and that
to see that all is well with us also we need only
rise to its eternal point of view, it yields us
no relief whatever. It introduces, on the con-
trary, into philosophy and theology certain
poisonous difficulties of which but for its intru-
sion we never should have heard.

But if we drop the absolute out of the world,
must we then conclude that the world contains
nothing better in the way of consciousness than
our consciousness ? Is our whole instinctive
belief in higher presences, our persistent inner
turning towards divine companionship, to count
for nothing ? Is it but the pathetic illusion of
beings with incorrigibly social and imaginative
minds ?

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

Such a negative conclusion would, I believe,
be desperately hasty, a sort of pouring out of
the child with the bath. Logically it is possible
to believe in superhuman beings without iden-
tifying them with the absolute at all. The treaty
of offensive and defensive alliance which cer-
tain groups of the christian clergy have recently
made with our transcendentalist philosophers
seems to me to be based on a well-meaning but
baleful mistake. Neither the Jehovah of the
old testament nor the heavenly father of the
new has anything in common with the abso-
lute except that they are all three greater than
man ; and if you say that the notion of the ab-
solute is what the gods of Abraham, of David,
and of Jesus, after first developing into each
other, were inevitably destined to develop into
in more reflective and modern minds, I reply
that although in certain specifically philoso-
phical minds this may have been the case, in
minds more properly to be termed religious
the development has followed quite another
path. The whole history of evangelical Chris-
tianity is there to prove it. I propose in these

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IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

lectures to plead for that other line of develop-
ment. To set the doctrine of the absolute in its
proper framework, so that it shall not fill
the whole welkin and exclude all alternative
possibilities of higher thought — as it seems to
do for many students who approach it with a
limited previous acquaintance with philosophy
— I will contrast it with a system which, ab-
stractly considered, seems at first to have much
in common with absolutism, but which, when
taken concretely and temperamentally, really
stands at the opposite pole. I refer to the phi-
losophy of Gustav Theodor Fechner, a writer
but little known as yet to English readers, but
destined, I am persuaded, to wield more and
more influence as time goes on.

It is the intense concreteness of Fechner, his
fertility of detail, which fills me with an admi-
ration which I should like to make this audi-
ence share. Among the philosophic cranks of
my acquaintance in the past was a lady all the
tenets of whose system I have forgotten except
one. Had she been born in the Ionian Archi-
pelago some three thousand years ago, that one

135

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

doctrine would probably have made her name
sure of a place in every university curriculum
and examination paper. The world, she said,
is composed of only two elements, the Thick,
namely, and the Thin. No one can deny the
truth of this analysis, as far as it goes (though
in the light of our contemporary knowledge of
nature it has itself a rather ' thin ' sound) , and
it is nowhere truer than in that part of the world
called philosophy. I am sure, for example, that
many of you, listening to what poor account I
have been able to give of transcendental ideal-
ism, have received an impression of its argu-
ments being strangely thin, and of the terms it
leaves us with being shiveringly thin wrappings
for so thick and burly a world as this. Some
of you of course will charge the thinness to my
exposition ; but thin as that has been, I believe
the doctrines reported on to have been thinner.
From Green to Haldane the absolute proposed
to us to straighten out the confusions of the
thicket of experience in which our life is passed
remains a pure abstraction which hardly any
one tries to make a whit concreter. If we open

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IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

Green, we get nothing but the transcendental
ego of apperception (Kant's name for the fact
that to be counted in experience a thing has to
be witnessed) , blown up into a sort of timeless
soap-bubble large enough to mirror the whole
universe. Nature, Green keeps insisting, con-
sists only in relations, and these imply the ac-
tion of a mind that is eternal ; a self-distinguish-
ing consciousness which itself escapes from the
relations by which it determines other things.
Present to whatever is in succession, it is not
in succession itself. If we take the Cairds, they
tell us little more of the principle of the uni-
verse — it is always a return into the identity
of the self from the difference of its objects.
It separates itself from them and so becomes
conscious of them in their separation from one
another, while at the same time it binds them
together as elements in one higher self-con-
sciousness.

This seems the very quintessence of thin-
ness ; and the matter hardly grows thicker when
we gather, after enormous amounts of reading,
that the great enveloping self in question is

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

absolute reason as such, and that as such it
is characterized by the habit of using certain
jejune * categories' with which to perform its
eminent relating work. The whole active ma-
terial of natural fact is tried out, and only the
barest intellectualistic formalism remains.

Hegel tried, as we saw, to make the system
concreter by making the relations between
things 'dialectic,' but if we turn to those who
use his name most worshipfully, we find them
giving up all the particulars of his attempt, and
simply praising his intention — much as in
our manner we have praised it ourselves. Mr.
Haldane, for example, in his wonderfully clever
Gifford lectures, praises Hegel to the skies, but
what he tells of him amounts to little more than
this, that 'the categories in which the mind
arranges its experiences, and gives meaning to
them, the universals in which the particulars are
grasped in the individual, are a logical chain,
in which the first presupposes the last, and the
last is its presupposition and its truth.' He
hardly tries at all to thicken this thin logical
scheme. He says indeed that absolute mind in

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IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

itself, and absolute mind in its hetereity or other-
ness, under the distinction which it sets up of
itself from itself, have as their real prius abso-
lute mind in synthesis ; and, this being absolute
mind's true nature, its dialectic character must
show itself in such concrete forms as Goethe's
and Wordsworth's poetry, as well as in religious
forms. *The nature of God, the nature of ab-
solute mind, is to exhibit the triple movement
of dialectic, and so the nature of God as pre-
sented in religion must be a triplicity, a trinity.'
But beyond thus naming Goethe and Words-
worth and establishing the trinity, Mr. Hal-
dane's Hegelianism carries us hardly an inch
into the concrete detail of the world we actually
inhabit.

Equally thin is Mr. Taylor, both in his prin-
ciples and in their results. Following Mr. Brad-
ley, he starts by assuring us that reality cannot
be self-contradictory, but to be related to any-
thing really outside of one's self is to be self-
contradictory, so the ultimate reality must be
a single all-inclusive systematic whole. Yet all
he can say of this whole at the end of his excel-

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

lently written book is that the notion of it ' can
make no addition to our information and can
of itself supply no motives for practical en-
deavor.'

Mr. McTaggart treats us to almost as thin
a fare. * The main practical interest of Hegel's
philosophy,' he says, * is to be found in the ab-
stract certainty which the logic gives us that all
reality is rational and righteous, even when we
cannot see in the least how it is so. . . . Not
that it shows us how the facts around us are
good, not that it shows us how we can make
them better, but that it proves that they, like
other reality, are sub specie eternitatis, perfectly
good, and sub specie temporis, destined to be-
come perfectly good.'

Here again, no detail whatever, only the
abstract certainty that whatever the detail may
prove to be, it will be good. Common non-dia-
lectical men have already this certainty as a
result of the generous vital enthusiasm about
the universe with which they are born. The
peculiarity of transcendental philosophy is its
sovereign contempt for merely vital functions

140

IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

like enthusiasm, and its pretension to turn our
simple and immediate trusts and faiths into the
form of logically mediated certainties, to ques-
tion which would be absurd. But the whole
basis on which Mr. McTaggart's own certainty
so solidly rests, settles down into the one nut-
shell of an assertion into which he puts Hegel's
gospel, namely, that in every bit of experi-
ence and thought, however finite, the whole of
reality (the absolute idea, as Hegel calls it) is
'implicitly present.'

This indeed is Hegel's vision, and Hegel
thought that the details of his dialectic proved
its truth. But disciples who treat the details of
the proof as unsatisfactory and yet cling to the
vision, are surely, in spite of their pretension to
a more rational consciousness, no better than
common men with their enthusiasms or delib-
erately adopted faiths. We have ourselves seen
some of the weakness of the monistic proofs.
Mr. McTaggart picks plenty of holes of his own
in Hegel's logic, and finally concludes that ' all
true philosophy must be mystical, not indeed

in its methods but in its final conclusions/

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

which is as much as to say that the rationalistic
methods leave us in the hirch, in spite of all
their superiority, and that in the end vision
and faith must eke them out. But how abstract
and thin is here the vision, to say nothing of the
faith! The whole of reality, explicitly absent
from our finite experiences, must nevertheless
be present in them all implicitly, altho no one
of us can ever see how — the bare word * im-
plicit' here bearing the whole pyramid of the
monistic system on its slender point. Mr. Joa-
chim's monistic system of truth rests on an even
slenderer point. — *7 have never doubted,'' he
says, *that universal and timeless truth is a
single content or significance, one and whole
and complete,' and he candidly confesses the
failure of rationalistic attempts 'to raise this
immediate certainty' to the level of reflective
knowledge. There is, in short, no mediation
for him between the Truth in capital letters
and all the little * lower-case' truths — and
errors — which life presents. The psychologi-
cal fact that he never has 'doubted' is enough.
The whole monistic pyramid, resting on

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IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

points as thin as these, seems to me to be a
machtspruch, a product of will far more than
one of reason. Unity is good, therefore things
shall cohere ; thev shall be one ; there shall be
categories to make them one, no matter what
empirical disjunctions may appear. In Hegel's
own writings, the shall-he temper is ubiquitous
and towering; it overrides verbal and logical
resistances alike. Hegel's error, as Professor
Royce so well says, *lay not in introducing
logic into passion,' as some people charge, ' but
in conceiving the logic of passion as the only
logic. . . . He is [thus] suggestive,' Royce
says, 'but never final. His system as a system
has crumbled, but his vital comprehension of
our life remains forever.' ^

That vital comprehension we have already
seen. It is that there is a sense in which real
things are not merely their own bare selves, but
may vaguely be treated as also their own oth-
ers, and that ordinary logic, since it denies this,
must be overcome. Ordinary logic denies this
because it substitutes concepts for real things,
and concepts are their own bare selves and

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nothing else. What Royce calls Hegel's 'sys-
tem ' was Hegel's attempt to make us believe
that he was working by concepts and grinding
out a higher style of logic, when in reality sen-
sible experiences, hypotheses, and passion fur-
nished him with all his results.

What I myself may mean by things being
their own others, we shall see in a later lecture.
It is now time to take our look at Fechner,
whose thickness is a refreshing contrast to
the thin, abstract, indigent, and threadbare
appearance, the starving, school-room aspect,
which the speculations of most of our absolutist
philosophers present.

There is something really weird and uncanny
in the contrast between the abstract pretensions
of rationalism and what rationalistic methods
concretely can do. If the 'logical prius' of our
mind were really the 'implicit presence' of the
whole * concrete universal,' the whole of rea-
son, or reality, or spirit, or the absolute idea,
or whatever it may be called, in all our finite
thinking, and if this reason worked (for ex-
ample) by the dialectical method, does n't it

144

IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

seem odd that in the greatest instance of ra-
tionalization mankind has known, in * science,'
namely, the dialectical method should never
once have been tried ? Not a solitary instance
of the use of it in science occurs to my mind.
Hypotheses, and deductions from these, con-
trolled by sense-observations and analogies
with what w^e know elsewhere, are to be
thanked for all of science's results.

Fechner used no methods but these latter
ones in arguing for his metaphysical conclu-
sions about reality — but let me first rehearse
a few of the facts about his life.

Born in 1801, the son of a poor country
pastor in Saxony, he lived from 1817 to 1887,
when he died, seventy years therefore, at Leip-
zig, a typical gelehrter of the old-fashioned ger-
man stripe. His means were always scanty,
so his only extravagances could be in the way
of thought, but these were gorgeous ones. He
passed his medical examinations at Leipzig
University at the age of twenty-one, but de-
cided, instead of becoming a doctor, to devote
himself to physical science. It was ten years

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

before he was made professor of physics,
although he soon was authorized to lecture.
Meanwhile, he had to make both ends meet,
and this he did by voluminous literary labors.
He translated, for example, the four volumes
of Biot's treatise on physics, and the six of
Thenard's work on chemistry, and took care
of their enlarged editions later. He edited re-
pertories of chemistry and physics, a pharma-
ceutical journal, and an encyclopaedia in eight
volumes, of which he wrote about one third.
He published physical treatises and experi-
mental investigations of his own, especially in
electricity. Electrical measurements, as you
know, are the basis of electrical science, and
Fechner's measurements in galvanism, per-
formed with the simplest self-made appara-
tus, are classic to this day. During this time
he also published a number of half-philo-
sophical, half-humorous writings, which have
gone through several editions, under the
name of Dr. Mises, besides poems, literary
and artistic essays, and other occasional
articles.

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IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

But overwork, poverty, and an eye-trouble
produced by his observations on after-images
in the retina (also a classic piece of investiga-
tion) produced in Fechner, then about thirty-
eight years old, a terrific attack of nervous
prostration with painful hyperaesthesia of all
the functions, from which he suflFered three
years, cut off entirely from active life. Present-
day medicine would have classed poor Fech-
ner's malady quickly enough, as partly a habit-
neurosis, but its severity was such that in his
day it was treated as a visitation incomprehen-
sible in its malignity; and when he suddenly
began to get well, both Fechner and others
treated the recovery as a sort of divine miracle.
This illness, bringing Fechner face to face with
inner desperation, made a great crisis in his
life. 'Had I not then clung to the faith,' he
writes, *that clinging to faith would somehow
or other work its reward, so h'dtte ich jene zeit
nicht ausgehalten.' His religious and cosmo-
logical faiths saved him — thenceforward one
great aim with him was to work out and com-
municate these faiths to the world. He did so

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

on the largest scale; but he did many other
things too ere he died.

A book on the atomic theory, classic also;
four elaborate mathematical and experimental
volumes on what he called psychophysics —
many persons consider Fechner to have prac-
tically founded scientific psychology in the first
of these books ; a volume on organic evolution,
and two works on experimental sesthetics, in
which again Fechner is considered by some
judges to have laid the foundations of a new
science, must be included among these other
performances. Of the more religious and phi-
losophical works, I shall immediately give a
further account.

All Leipzig mourned him when he died, for
he was the pattern of the ideal german scholar,
as daringly original in his thought as he was
homely in his life, a modest, genial, laborious
slave to truth and learning, and withal the
owner of an admirable literary style of the
vernacular sort. The materialistic generation,
that in the fifties and sixties called his specula-
tions fantastic, had been replaced by one with

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IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

greater liberty of imagination, and a Preyer,
a Wundt, a Paulsen, and a Lasswitz could
now speak of Fechner as their master.

His mind was indeed one of those multitudi-
nously organized cross-roads of truth which
are occupied only at rare intervals by children
of men, and from which nothing is either too
far or too near to be seen in due perspective.
Patientest observation, exactest mathematics,
shrewdest discrimination, humanest feeling,
flourished in him on the largest scale, with
no apparent detriment to one another. He
was in fact a philosopher in the ' great ' sense,
altho he cared so much less than most phi-
losophers care for abstractions of the 'thin'
order. For him the abstract lived in the con-
crete, and the hidden motive of all he did was
to bring what he called the daylight view of
the world into ever greater evidence, that day-
light view being this, that the whole universe
in its different spans and wave-lengths, exclu-
sions and envelopments, is everywhere alive
and conscious. It has taken fifty years for his

chief book, ' Zend-avesta,' to pass into a sec-

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

ond edition (1901). 'One swallow,' he cheer-
fully writes, 'does not make a summer. But
the first swallow would not come unless the
summer were coming ; and for me that summer
means my daylight view some time prevailing.'
The original sin, according to Fechner, of
both our popular and our scientific thinking, is
our inveterate habit of regarding the spiritual
not as the rule but as an exception in the midst
of nature. Instead of believing our life to be
fed at the breasts of the greater life, our indi-
viduality to be sustained by the greater individ-
uality, which must necessarily have more con-
sciousness and more independence than all
that it brings forth, we habitually treat what-
ever lies outside of our life as so much slag
and ashes of life only; or if we believe in a
Divine Spirit, we fancy him on the one side as
bodiless, and nature as soulless on the other.
What comfort, or peace, Fechner asks, can come
from such a doctrine ? The flowers wither at
its breath, the stars turn into stone ; our own
body grows unworthy of our spirit and sinks to

a tenement for carnal senses only. The book

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IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

of nature turns into a volume on mechanics,
in which whatever has Hfe is treated as a
sort of anomaly ; a great chasm of separation
yawns between us and all that is higher than
ourselves ; and God becomes a thin nest of ab-
stractions.

Fechner's great instrument for vivifying the
daylight view is analogy ; not a rationalistic ar-
gument is to be found in all his many pages —
only reasonings like those which men continu-
ally use in practical life. For example: My
house is built by some one, the world too is built
by some one. The world is greater than my
house, it must be a greater some one who built
the world. My body moves by the influence of
my feeling and will ; the sun, moon, sea, and
wind, being themselves more powerful, move
by the influence of some more powerful feeling
and will. I live now, and change from one day
to another ; I shall live hereafter, and change
still more, etc.

Bain defines genius as the power of seeing
analogies. The number that Fechner could
perceive was prodigious ; but he insisted on the

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

differences as weU. Neglect to make allowance
for these, he said, is the common fallacy in ana-
logical reasoning. Most of us, for example, rea-
soning justly that, since all the minds we know
are connected with bodies, therefore God's
mind should be connected with a body, proceed
to suppose that that body must be just an ani-
mal body over again, and paint an altogether
human picture of God. But all that the analogy
comports is a body — the particular features
of our body are adaptations to a habitat so dif-
ferent from God's that if God have a physical
body at all, it must be utterly different from ours
in structure. Throughout his writings Fechner
makes difference and analogy walk abreast,
and by his extraordinary power of noticing
both, he converts what would ordinarily pass
for objections to his conclusions into factors
of their support.

The vaster orders of mind go with the vaster
orders of body. The entire earth on which we
live must have, according to Fechner, its own
collective consciousness. So must each sun,

moon, and planet ; so must the whole solar sys-

152

IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

tern have its own wider consciousness, in which
the consciousness of our earth plays one part.
So has the entire starry system as such its con-
sciousness ; and if that starry system be not the
sum of all that is, materially considered, then
that whole system, along with whatever else
may be, is the body of that absolutely total-
ized consciousness of the universe to which
men give the name of God.

Speculatively Fechner is thus a monist in his
theology ; but there is room in his universe for
every grade of spiritual being between man and
the final all-inclusive God ; and in suggesting
what the positive content of all this super-hu-
manity may be, he hardly lets his imagination
fly beyond simple spirits of the planetary order.
The earth-soul he passionately believes in ; he
treats the earth as our special human guardian
ange! ; we can pray to the earth as men pray
to their saints ; but I think that in his system,
as in so many of the actual historic theologies,
the supreme God marks only a sort of limit of
enclosure of the worlds above man. He is left
thin and abstract in his majesty, men prefer-

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

ring to carry on their personal transactions
with the many less remote and abstract mes-
sengers and mediators whom the divine order
provides.

I shall ask later whether the abstractly mo-
nistic turn which Fechner's speculations took
was necessitated by logic. I believe it not to
have been required. Meanwhile let me lead
you a little more into the detail of his thought.
Inevitably one does him miserable injustice by
summarizing and abridging him. For altho the
type of reasoning he employs is almost childlike
for simplicity, and his bare conclusions can be
written on a single page, the "power of the man
is due altogether to the profuseness of his con-
crete imagination, to the multitude of the points
which he considers successively, to the cumu-
lative effect of his learning, of his thorough-
ness, and of the ingenuity of his detail, to his
admirably homely style, to the sincerity with
which his pages glow, and finally to the impres-
sion he gives of a man who doesn't live at sec-
ond-hand, but who sees, who in fact speaks as
one having authority, and not as if he were

154

IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

one of the common herd of professorial philo-
sophic scribes.

Abstractly set down, his most important
conclusion for my purpose in these lectures is
that the constitution of the world is identical
throughout. In ourselves, visual consciousness
goes with our eyes, tactile consciousness with
our skin. But altho neither skin nor eye knows
aught of the sensations of the other, they come
together and figure in some sort of relation and
combination in the more inclusive conscious-
ness which each of us names his self. Quite
similarly, then, says Fechner, we must suppose
that my consciousness of myself and yours of
yourself, altho in their immediacy they keep
separate and know nothing of each other, are
yet known and used together in a higher con-
sciousness, that of the human race, say, into
which they enter as constituent parts. Simi-
larly, the whole human and animal kingdoms
come together as conditions of a conscious-
ness of still wider scope. This combines in the
soul of the earth with the consciousness of the
vegetable kingdom, which in turn contributes

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

its share of experience to that of the whole solar
system, and so on from synthesis to synthesis
and height to height, till an absolutely univer-
sal consciousness is reached.

A vast analogical series, in which the basis
of the analogy consists of facts directly ob-
servable in ourselves.

The supposition of an earth-consciousness
meets a strong instinctive prejudice which
Fechner ingeniously tries to overcome. Man's
mind is the highest consciousness upon the
earth, we think — the earth itself being in all
ways man's inferior. How should its con-
sciousness, if it have one, be superior to his ?

What are the marks of superiority which
we are tempted to use here ? If we look more
carefully into them, Fechner points out that
the earth possesses each and all of them more
perfectly than we. He considers in detail the
points of difference between us, and shows
them all to make for the earth's higher rank.
I will touch on only a few of these points.

One of them of course is independence of
other external beings. External to the earth

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IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

are only the other heavenly bodies. All the
things on which we externally depend for life
— air, water, plant and animal food, fellow
men, etc. — are included in her as her con-
stituent parts. She is self-sufficing in a million
respects in which we are not so. We depend on
her for almost everything, she on us for but a
small portion of her history. She swings us in
her orbit from winter to summer and revolves
us from day into night and from night into day.

Complexity in unity is another sign of
superiority. The total earth's complexity far
exceeds that of any organism, for she includes
all our organisms in herself, along with an
infinite number of things that our organisms
fail to include. Yet how simple and massive
are the phases of her own proper life ! As the
total bearing of any animal is sedate and
tranquil compared with the agitation of its
blood corpuscles, so is the earth a sedate and
tranquil being compared with the animals
whom she supports.

To develop from within, instead of being
fashioned from without, is also counted as

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

something superior in men's eyes. An egg is
a higher style of being than a piece of clay
which an external modeler makes into the
image of a bird. Well, the earth's history
develops from within. It is like that of a
wonderful egg which the sun's heat, like that
of a mother-hen, has stimulated to its cycles
of evolutionary change.

Individuality of type, and difference from
other beings of its type, is another mark of rank.
The earth differs from every other planet, and
as a class planetary beings are extraordinarily
distinct from other beings.

Long ago the earth was called an animal ;
but a planet is a higher class of being than
either man or animal ; not only quantitatively
greater, like a vaster and more awkward whale
or elephant, but a being whose enormous size
requires an altogether different plan of life.
Our animal organization comes from our in-
feriority. Our need of moving to and fro, of
stretching our limbs and bending our bodies,
shows only our defect. What are our legs but
crutches, by means of which, with restless

158

IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

efforts, we go hunting after the things we have
not inside of ourselves. But the earth is no
such cripple ; why should she who already pos-
sesses within herself the things we so painfully
pursue, have limbs analogous to ours ? Shall
she mimic a small part of herself ? What need
has she of arms, with nothing to reach for ? of
a neck, with no head to carry ? of eyes or nose
when she finds her way through space without
either, and has the millions of eyes of all her
animals to guide their movements on her sur-
face, and all their noses to smell the flowers
that grow ? For, as we are ourselves a part of
the earth, so our organs are her organs. She
is, as it were, eye and ear over her whole extent
— all that we see and hear in separation she
sees and hears at once. She brings forth living
beings of countless kinds upon her surface,
and their multitudinous conscious relations
with each other she takes up into her higher
and more general conscious life.

Most of us, considering the theory that the
whole terrestrial mass is animated as our
bodies are, make the mistake of working the

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

analogy too literally, and allowing for no dif-
ferences. If the earth be a sentient organism,
we say, w here are her brain and nerves ? What
corresponds to her heart and lungs ? In other
words, we expect functions which she already
performs through us, to be performed outside
of us again, and in just the same way. But we
see perfectly well how the earth performs some
of these functions in a way unlike our way. If
you speak of circulation, what need has she of
a heart when the sun keeps all the showers
of rain that fall upon her and all the springs
and brooks and rivers that irrigate her, going ?
What need has she of internal lungs, when her
whole sensitive surface is in living commerce
wath the atmosphere that clings to it ?

The organ that gives us most trouble is the
brain. All the consciousness we directly know
seems tied to brains. — Can there be con-
sciousness, we ask, where there is no brain ?
But our brain, which primarily serves to corre-
late our muscular reactions with the external
objects on which we depend, performs a func-
tion w^hich the earth performs in an entirely

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IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

diflFerent way. She has no proper muscles or
limbs of her own, and the only objects external
to her are the other stars. To these her whole
mass reacts by most exquisite alterations in its
total gait, and by still more exquisite vibratory
responses in its substance. Her ocean reflects
the lights of heaven as in a mighty mirror, her
atmosphere refracts them like a monstrous
lens, the clouds and snow-fields combine them
into white, the woods and flowers disperse them
into colors. Polarization, interference, absorp-
tion, awaken sensibilities in matter of which
our senses are too coarse to take any note.

For these cosmic relations of hers, then,
she no more needs a special brain than she
needs eyes or ears. Our brains do indeed unify
and correlate innumerable functions. Our
eyes know nothing of sound, our ears nothing
of light, but, having brains, we can feel sound
and light together, and compare them. We
account for this by the fibres which in the
brain connect the optical with the acoustic cen-
tre, but just how these fibres bring together not
only the sensations, but the centres, we fail to

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see. But if fibres are indeed all that is needed
to do that trick, has not the earth pathways,
by which you and I are physically continuous,
more than enough to do for our two minds
what the brain-fibres do for the sounds and
sights in a single mind ? Must every higher
means of unification between things be a
literal &ram-fibre, and go by that name ?
Cannot the earth-mind know otherwise the
contents of our minds together ?

Fechner's imagination, insisting on the dif-
ferences as well as on the resemblances, thus
tries to make our picture of the whole earth's
life more concrete. He revels in the thought of
its perfections. To carry her precious freight
through the hours and seasons what form could
be more excellent than hers — being as it is
horse, wheels, and wagon all in one. Think
of her beauty — a shining ball, sky-blue and
sun-lit over one half, the other bathed in starry
night, reflecting the heavens from all her wa-
ters, myriads of lights and shadows in the
folds of her mountains and windings of her val-
leys, she would be a spectacle of rainbow glory,

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IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

could one only see her from afar as we see
parts of her from her own mountain-tops.
Every quality of landscape that has a name
would then be visible in her at once — all that
is delicate or graceful, all that is quiet, or wild,
or romantic, or desolate, or cheerful, or luxu-
riant, or fresh. That landscape is her face —
a peopled landscape, too, for men's eyes would
appear in it like diamonds among the dew-
drops. Green would be the dominant color,
but the blue atmosphere and the clouds would
enfold her as a bride is shrouded in her veil —
a veil the vapory transparent folds of which the
earth, through her ministers the winds, never
tires of laying and folding about herself anew.
Every element has its own living denizens.
Can the celestial ocean of ether, whose waves
are light, in which the earth herself floats,
not have hers, higher by as much as their ele-
ment is higher, swimming without fins, flying
without wings, moving, immense and tranquil,
as by a half-spiritual force through the half-
spiritual sea which they inhabit, rejoicing in
the exchange of luminous influence with one

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another, following the slightest pull of one
another's attraction, and harboring, each of
them, an inexhaustible inward wealth ?

Men have always made fables about angels,
dwelling in the light, needing no earthly food
or drink, messengers between ourselves and
God. Here are actually existent beings, dwell-
ing in the light and moving through the sky,
needing neither food nor drink, intermediaries
between God and us, obeying his commands.
So, if the heavens really are the home of angels,
the heavenly bodies must be those very angels,
for other creatures there are none. Yes! the
earth is our great common guardian angel, who
watches over all our interests combined.

In a striking page Fechner relates one of his
moments of direct vision of this truth.

^On a certain spring morning I went out
to walk. The fields were green, the birds sang,
the dew glistened, the smoke was rising, here
and there a man appeared ; a light as of trans-
figuration lay on all things. It was only a little
bit of the earth ; it was only one moment of her
existence; and yet as my look embraced her

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IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

more and more it seemed to me not only so
beautiful an idea, but so true and clear a fact,
that she is an angel, an angel so rich and
fresh and flower-like, and yet going her round
in the skies so firmly and so at one with her-
self, turning her whole living face to Heaven,
and carrying me along with her into that
Heaven, that I asked myself how the opinions
of men could ever have so spun themselves
away from life so far as to deem the earth only
a dry clod, and to seek for angels above it or
about it in the emptiness of the sky, — only to
find them nowhere. . . . But such an experi-
ence as this passes for fantastic. The earth is
a globular body, and what more she may be,
one can find in mineralogical cabinets.'^

Where there is no vision the people perish.
Few professorial philosophers have any vision.
Fechner had vision, and that is why one can
read him over and over again, and each time
bring away a fresh sense of reality.

His earliest book was a vision of what the
inner life of plants may be like. He called it
*Nanna.' In the development of animals the

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

nervous system is the central fact. Plants de-
velop centrifugally, spread their organs abroad.
For that reason people suppose that they can
have no consciousness, for they lack the unity
which the central nervous system provides. But
the plant's consciousness may be of another
type, being connected with other structures.
Violins and pianos give out sounds because they
have strings. Does it follow that nothing but
strings can give out sound ? How then about
flutes and organ-pipes ? Of course their sounds
are of a different quality, and so may the con-
sciousness of plants be of a quality correlated
exclusively with the kind of organization that
they possess. Nutrition, respiration, propaga-
tion take place in them without nerves. In us
these functions are conscious only in unusual
states, normally their consciousness is eclipsed
by that which goes with the brain. No such
eclipse occurs in plants, and their lower con-
sciousness may therefore be all the more lively.
With nothing to do but to drink the light and
air with their leaves, to let their cells proliferate,
to feel their rootlets draw the sap, is it conceiv-

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IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

able that they should not consciously suffer if
water, light, and air are suddenly withdrawn ?
or that when the flow^ering and fertilization
which are the culmination of their life take
place, they should not feel their own existence
more intensely and enjoy something like what
we call pleasure in ourselves ? Does the water-
lily, rocking in her triple bath of water, air, and
light, relish in no wise her own beauty ? When
the plant in our room turns to the light, closes
her blossoms in the dark, responds to our wa-
tering or pruning by increase of size or change
of shape and bloom, who has the right to say
she does not feel, or that she plays a purely pas-
sive part ? Truly plants can foresee nothing,
neither the scythe of the mower, nor the hand
extended to pluck their flowers. They can
neither run away nor cry out. But this only
proves how different their modes of feeling
life must be from those of animals that live
by eyes and ears and locomotive organs, it does
not prove that they have no mode of feeling
life at all.

How scanty and scattered would sensation

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

be on our globe, if the feeling-life of plants
were blotted from existence. Solitary would
consciousness move through the woods in the
shape of some deer or other quadruped, or fly
about the flowers in that of some insect, but
can we really suppose that the Nature through
which God's breath blows is such a barren
wilderness as this ?

I have probably by this time said enough to
acquaint those of you who have never seen
these metaphysical writings of Fechner with
their more general characteristics, and I hope
that some of you may now feel like reading
them yourselves.^ The special thought of Fech-
ner's with which in these lectures I have most
practical concern, is his belief that the more
inclusive forms of consciousness are in part
constituted by the more limited forms. Not that
they are the mere sum of the more limited
forms. As our mind is not the bare sum of our
sights plus our sounds plus our pains, but in
adding these terms together also finds rela-
tions among them and weaves them into
schemes and forms and objects of which no one

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IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

sense in its separate estate knows anything,
so the earth-soul traces relations between the
contents of my mind and the contents of yours
of which neither of our separate minds is con-
scious. It has schemes, forms, and objects pro-
portionate to its wider field, which our mental
fields are far too narrow to cognize. By our-
selves we are simply out of relation with each
other, for it we are both of us there, and dif-
ferent from each other, which is a positive
relation. What we are without knowing, it
knows that we are. We are closed against its
world, but that world is not closed against us.
It is as if the total universe of inner life had
a sort of grain or direction, a sort of valvular
structure, permitting knowledge to flow in one
way only, so that the wider might always have
the narrower under observation, but never the
narrower the wider.

Fechner's great analogy here is the relation
of the senses to our individual minds. When
our eyes are open their sensations enter into
our general mental life, which grows inces-
santly by the addition of what they see. Close

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the eyes, however, and the visual additions
stop, nothing but thoughts and memories of
the past visual experiences remain — in com-
bination of course with the enormous stock of
other thoughts and memories, and with the
data coming in from the senses not yet closed.
Our eye-sensations of themselves know no-
thing of this enormous life into which they fall.
Fechner thinks, as any common man would
think, that they are taken into it directly when
they occur, and form part of it just as they are.
They don't stay outside and get represented
inside by their copies. It is only the memo-
ries and concepts of them that are copies;
the sensible perceptions themselves are taken
in or walled out in their own proper persons
according as the eyes are open or shut.

Fechner likens our individual persons on
the earth unto so many sense-organs of the
earth's soul. We add to its perceptive life so
long as our own life lasts. It absorbs our per-
ceptions, just as they occur, into its larger
sphere of knowledge, and combines them with
the other data there. When one of us dies, it

170

IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

is as if an eye of the world were closed, for all
perceptive contributions from that particular
quarter cease. But the memories and concept-
ual relations that have spun themselves round
the perceptions of that person remain in the
larger earth-life as distinct as ever, and form
new relations and grow and develop through-
out all the future, in the same way in which
our own distinct objects of thought, once stored
in memory, form new relations and develop
throughout our whole finite life. This is
Fechner's theory of immortality, first published
in the little *Buclilein des lebens nach dem
tode/ in 1836, and re-edited in greatly im-
proved shape in the last volume of his ' Zend-
avesta.'

We rise upon the earth as wavelets rise upon
the ocean. We grow out of her soil as leaves
grow from a tree. The wavelets catch the sun-
beams separately, the leaves stir when the
branches do not move. They realize their own
events apart, just as in our own consciousness,
when anything becomes emphatic, the back-
ground fades from observation. Yet the event

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works back upon the background, as the wave-
let works upon the waves, or as the leaf's
movements work upon the sap inside the
branch. The whole sea and the whole tree
are registers of what has happened, and are
different for the wave's and the leaf's action
having occurred. A grafted twig may modify
its stock to the roots : — so our outlived private
experiences, impressed on the whole earth-
mind as memories, lead the immortal life of
ideas there, and become parts of the great
system, fully distinguished from one another,
just as we ourselves when alive were distinct,
realizing themselves no longer isolatedly, but
along with one another as so many partial
systems, entering thus into new combinations,
being affected by the perceptive experiences
of those living then, and affecting the living
in their turn — altho they are so seldom recog-
nized by living men to do so.

If you imagine that this entrance after the
death of the body into a common life of higher
type means a merging and loss of our distinct
personality, Fechner asks you whether a visual

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IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

sensation of our own exists in any sense less
for itself or less distinctly, when it enters into
our higher relational consciousness and is there
distinguished and defined.

— But here I must stop my reporting and
send you to his volumes. Thus is the universe
alive, according to this philosopher! I think
you will admit that he makes it more thicJdy
alive than do the other philosophers who, fol-
lowing rationalistic methods solely, gain the
same results, but only in the thinnest outlines.
Both Fechner and Professor Royce, for ex-
ample, believe ultimately in one all-inclusive
mind. Both believe that we, just as we stand
here, are constituent parts of that mind. No
other content has it than us, with all the other
creatures like or unlike us, and the relations
which it finds between us. Our caches, col-
lected into one, are substantively identical with
its all, tho the all is perfect while no each is
perfect, so that we have to admit that new
qualities as well as unperceived relations ac-
crue from the collective form. It is thus su-
perior to the distributive form. But having

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

reached this result, Royce (tho his treatment
of the subject on its moral side seems to me
infinitely richer and thicker than that of any
other contemporary idealistic philosopher)
leaves us very much to our own devices.
Fechner, on the contrarv, tries to trace the
superiorities due to the more collective form
in as much detail as he can. He marks the
various intermediary stages and halting places
of collectivity, — as we are to our separate
senses, so is the earth to us, so is the solar
system to the earth, etc., — and if, in order to
escape an infinitely long summation, he posits
a complete God as the all-container and leaves
him about as indefinite in feature as the ideal-
ists leave their absolute, he yet provides us with
a very definite gate of approach to him in the
shape of the earth-soul, through which in the
nature of things we must first make connexion
with all the more enveloping superhuman
realms, and with which our more immediate
religious commerce at any rate has to be car-
ried on.

Ordinary monistic idealism leaves every-

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IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

thing intermediary out. It recognizes only the
extremes, as if, after the first rude face of the
phenomenal world in all its particularity, no-
thing but the supreme in all its perfection could
be found. First, you and I, just as we are in this
room ; and the moment we get below that sur-
face, the unutterable absolute itself ! Does n't
this show a singularly indigent imagination ?
Is n't this brave universe made on a richer
pattern, with room in it for a long hierarchy of
beings ? Materialistic science makes it infi-
nitely richer in terms, with its molecules, and
ether, and electrons, and what not. Absolute
idealism, thinking of reality only under intel-
lectual forms, knows not what to do with
bodies of any grade, and can make no use of
any psychophysical analogy or correspond-
ence. The resultant thinness is startling when
compared with the thickness and articulation
of such a universe as Fechner paints. May not
satisfaction with the rationalistic absolute as
the alpha and omega, and treatment of it in
all its abstraction as an adequate religious ob-
ject, argue a certain native poverty of mental

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demand? Things reveal themselves soonest
to those who most passionately want them,
for our need sharpens our wit. To a mind
content with little, the much in the universe
may always remain hid.

To be candid, one of my reasons for say-
ing so much about Fechner has been to make
the thinness of our current transcendentalism
appear more evident by an effect of contrast.
Scholasticism ran thick; Hegel himself ran
thick ; but english and american transcenden-
talisms run thin. If philosophy is more a mat-
ter of passionate vision than of logic, — and I
believe it is, logic only finding reasons for the
vision afterwards, — must not such thinness
come either from the vision being defective
in the disciples, or from their passion, matched
with Fechner's or with Hegel's own passion,
being as moonlight unto sunlight or as water
unto wine ? *

But I have also a much deeper reason for
making Fechner a part of my text. His assump-
tion that conscious experiences freely compound
and separate themselves, the same assumption

176

IV. CONCERNING FECHNER

by which absolutism explains the relation of
our minds to the eternal mind, and the same
by which empiricism explains the composition
of the human mind out of subordinate men-
tal elements, is not one which we ought to let
pass without scrutiny. I shall scrutinize it in
the next lecture.

THE COMPOUNDING OF
CONSCIOUSNESS

LECTURE V

THE COMPOUNDING OF
CONSCIOUSNESS

In my last lecture I gave a miserably scanty
outline of the way of thinking of a philosopher
remarkable for the almost unexampled rich-
ness of his imagination of details. I owe to
Fechner's shade an apology for presenting him
in a manner so unfair to the most essential
quality of his genius ; but the time allotted is
too short to say more about the particulars
of his work, so I proceed to the programme
I suggested at the end of our last hour. I
wish to discuss the assumption that states
of consciousness, so-called, can separate and
combine themselves freely, and keep their
own identity unchanged while forming parts
of simultaneous fields of experience of wider
scope.

Let me first explain just what I mean by
this. While you listen to my voice, for example,
you are perhaps inattentive to some bodily sen-
sation due to your clothing or your posture,

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

Yet that sensation would seem probably to be
there, for in an instant, by a change of atten-
tion, you can have it in one field of conscious-
ness with the voice. It seems as if it existed
first in a separate form, and then as if, with-
out itself changing, it combined with your
other co-existent sensations. It is after this
analogy that pantheistic idealism thinks that
we exist in the absolute. The absolute, it
thinks, makes the world by knowing the whole
of it at once in one undivided eternal act.* To
*be,' really to be, is to be as it knows us to be,
along with everything else, namely, and clothed
with the fulness of our meaning. Meanwhile
we are at the same time not only really and
as it knows us, but also apparently, for to our
separate single selves we appear without most
other things and unable to declare with any
fulness what our own meaning is. Now the
classic doctrine of pantheistic idealism, from
the Upanishads down to Josiah Royce, is that
the finite knowers, in spite of their apparent
ignorance, are one with the knower of the all.
In the most limited moments of our private ex-

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V. COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

perience, the absolute idea, as Dr. McTaggart
told us, is implicitly contained. The moments,
as Royce says, exist only in relation to it.
They are true or erroneous only through its
overshadowing presence. Of the larger self
that alone eternally is, they are the organic
parts. They are, only inasmuch as they are
implicated in its being.

There is thus in reality but this one self, con-
sciously inclusive of all the lesser selves, logos,
problem-solver, and all-knower ; and Royce in-
geniously compares the ignorance that in our
persons breaks out in the midst of its complete
knowledge and isolates me from you and both
of us from it, to the inattention into which our
finite minds are liable to fall with respect to
such implicitly present details as those corpo-
real sensations to which I made allusion just
now. Those sensations stand to our total pri-
vate minds in the same relation in which our
private minds stand to the absolute mind. Pri-
vacy means ignorance — I still quote Royce —
and ignorance means inattention. We are finite
because our wills, as such, are only fragments

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

of the absolute will ; because will means inter-
est, and an incomplete will means an incom-
plete interest; and because incompleteness of
interest means inattention to much that a fuller
interest would bring us to perceive.^

In this account Royce makes by far the
manliest of the post-hegelian attempts to read
some empirically apprehensible content into
the notion of our relation to the absolute mind.

I have to admit, now that I propose to you
to scrutinize this assumption rather closely,
that trepidation seizes me. The subject is a
subtle and abstruse one. It is one thing to
delve into subtleties by one's self with pen in
hand, or to study out abstruse points in books,
but quite another thing to make a popular lec-
ture out of them. Nevertheless I must not
flinch from my task here, for I think that this
particular point forms perhaps the vital knot
of the present philosophic situation, and I
imagine that the times are ripe, or almost ripe,
for a serious attempt to be made at its untying.

It may perhaps help to lessen the arduous-
ness of the subject if I put the first part of what

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V. COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

I have to say in the form of a direct personal
confession.

In the year 1890 I pubhshed a work on
psychology in which it became my duty to
discuss the value of a certain explanation of
our higher mental states that had come into
favor among the more biologically inclined
psychologists. Suggested partly by the asso-
ciation of ideas, and partly by the analogy of
chemical compounds, this opinion was that
complex mental states are resultants of the
self-compounding of simpler ones. The Mills
had spoken of mental chemistry; Wundt of
a 'psychic synthesis,' which might develop
properties not contained in the elements ; and
such writers as Spencer, Taine, Fiske, Bar-
ratt, and Clifford had propounded a great
evolutionary theory in which, in the absence of
soids, selves, or other principles of unity, pri-
mordial units of mind-stuff or mind-dust were
represented as summing themselves together in
successive stages of compounding and re-com-
pounding, and thus engendering our higher
and more complex states of mind. The ele-

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

mentary feeling of A, let us say, and the ele-
mentary feeling of B,wlien they occur in certain
conditions, combine, according to this doctrine,
into a feeling of A-plus-B, and this in turn com-
bines with a similarly generated feeling of
C-plus-D, until at last the whole alphabet may
appear together in one field of awareness, with-
out any other witnessing principle or princi-
ples beyond the feelings of the several letters
themselves, being supposed to exist. What
each of them witnesses separately, * all ' of them
are supposed to witness in conjunction. But
their distributive knowledge does n't give rise
to their collective knowledge by any act, it is
their collective knowledge. The lower forms of
consciousness ' taken together ' are the higher.
It, 'taken apart,' consists of nothing and is
nothing but them. This, at least, is the most
obvious way of understanding the doctrine,
and is the way I understood it in the chapter
in my psychology.

Superficially looked at, this seems just like
the combination of II2 and O into water, but
looked at more closely, the analogy halts badly.

186

V. COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

When a chemist tells us that two atoms of hy-
drogen and one of oxygen combine themselves
of their own accord into the new compound
substance 'water,' he knows (if he believes in
the mechanical view- of nature) that this is only
an elliptical statement for a more complex fact.
That fact is that when H2 and O, instead of
keeping far apart, get into closer quarters, say
into the position H-O-II, they affect surround-
ing bodies differently : they now^ wet our skin,
dissolve sugar, put out fire, etc., w^hich they
didn't in their former positions. * Water' is
but our name for what acts thus peculiarly.
But if the skin, sugar, and fire were absent,
no witness would speak of water at all. He
would still talk of the H and O distributively,
merely noting that they acted now in the new
position H-O-H.

In the older psychologies the soul or self took
the place of the sugar, fire, or skin. The lower
feelings produced effects on it, and their ap-
parent compounds were only its reactions. As
you tickle a man's face with a feather, and he
laughs, so when you tickle his intellectual prin-

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

ciple with a retinal feeling, say, and a muscu-
lar feeling at once, it laughs responsively by its
category of ' space,' but it would be false to treat
the space as simply made of those simpler feel-
ings. It is rather a new and unique psychic
creation which their combined action on the
mind is able to evoke.

I found myself obliged, in discussing the
mind-dust theory, to urge this last alternative
view. The so-called mental compounds are
simple psychic reactions of a higher type.
The form itself of them, I said, is something
new. We can't say that awareness of the al-
phabet as such is nothing more than twenty-
six awarenesses, each of a separate letter ; for
those are twenty-six distinct awarenesses, of
single letters without others, while their so-
called sum is one awareness, of every letter with
its comrades. There is thus something new in
the collective consciousness. It knows the same
letters, indeed, but it knows them in this
novel way. It is safer, I said (for I fought shy
of admitting a self or soul or other agent of
combination) , to treat the consciousness of the

188

V. COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

alphabet as a twenty-seventh fact, the substi-
tute and not the sum of the twenty-six simpler
consciousnesses, and to say that while under
certain physiological conditions they alone are
produced, other more complex physiological
conditions result in its production instead. Do
not talk, therefore, I said, of the higher states
consisting of the simpler, or being the same
with them; talk rather of their knowing the
same things. They are different mental facts,
but they apprehend, each in its own peculiar
w^ay, the same objective A, B, C, and D.

The theory of combination, I was forced to
conclude, is thus untenable, being both logi-
cally nonsensical and practically unnecessary.
Say what you will, twelve thoughts, each of a
single word, are not the self -same mental thing
as one thought of the whole sentence. The
higher thoughts, I insisted, are psychic units,
not compounds; but for all that, they may
know together as a collective multitude the
very same objects which under other condi-
tions are known separately by as many simple

thoughts.

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

For many years I held rigorously to this
view/ and the reasons for doing so seemed to
me during all those years to apply also to the
opinion that the absolute mind stands to our
minds in the relation of a whole to its parts.
If untenable in finite psychology, that opinion
ought to be untenable in metaphysics also.
The great transcendentalist metaphor has al-
ways been, as I lately reminded you, a gram-
matical sentence. Physically such a sentence is
of course composed of clauses, these of words,
the words of syllables, and the syllables of
letters. We may take each word in, yet not
understand the sentence; but if suddenly the
meaning of the whole sentence flashes, the
sense of each word is taken up into that whole
meaning. Just so, according to our tran-
scendentalist teachers, the absolute mind thinks
the whole sentence, while we, according to our
rank as thinkers, think a clause, a word, a
syllable, or a letter. Most of us are, as I said,
mere syllables in the mouth of Allah. And
as Allah comes first in the order of being, so
comes first the entire sentence, the logos that

190

V. COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

forms the eternal absolute thought. Students
of language tell us that speech began with
men's efforts to make statements. The rude
synthetic vocal utterances first used for this
effect slowly got stereotyped, and then much
later got decomposed into grammatical parts.
It is not as if men had first invented letters
and made syllables of them, then made words
of the syllables and sentences of the words ; —
they actually followed the reverse order. So,
the transcendentalists affirm, the complete
absolute thought is the pre-condition of our
thoughts, and we finite creatures are only in
so far as it owns us as its verbal fragments.

The metaphor is so beautiful, and applies,
moreover, so literally to such a multitude of
the minor wholes of experience, that by merely
hearing it most of us are convinced that it must
apply universally. We see that no smallest
raindrop can come into being without a whole
shower, no single feather without a whole bird,
neck and crop, beak and tail, coming into being
simultaneously : so we unhesitatingly lay down
the law that no part of anything can be except

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

so far as the whole also is. And then, since
everything whatever is part of the whole uni-
verse, and since (if we are idealists) nothing,
whether part or whole, exists except for a wit-
ness, we proceed to the conclusion that the
unmitigated absolute as witness of the whole
is the one sole ground of being of every partial
fact, the fact of our own existence included.
We think of ourselves as being only a few of
the feathers, so to speak, which help to con-
stitute that absolute bird. Extending the
analogy of certain wholes, of which we have
familiar experience, to the whole of wholes,
we easily become absolute idealists.

But if, instead of yielding to the seductions of
our metaphor, be it sentence, shower, or bird,
we analyze more carefully the notion suggested
by it that we are constituent parts of the ab-
solute's eternal field of consciousness, we find
grave diflSculties arising. First, the difficulty I
found with the mind-dust theory. If the abso-
lute makes us by knowing us, how can we exist
otherwise than as it knows us ? But it knows
each of us indivisibly from everything else. Yet

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V. COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

if to exist means nothing but to be experienced,
as idealism affirms, we surely exist otherwise,
for we experience ourselves ignorantly and in
division. We indeed differ from the abso-
lute not only by defect, but by excess. Our
ignorances, for example, bring curiosities and
doubts by which it cannot be troubled, for it
owns eternally the solution of every problem.
Our impotence entails pains, our imperfection
sins, which its perfection keeps at a distance.
What I said of the alphabet-form and the letters
holds good of the absolute experience and our
experiences. Their relation, whatever it may
be, seems not to be that of identity.
vTt is impossible to reconcile the peculiarities
of our experience with our being only the abso-
lute's mental objects. A God, as distinguished
from the absolute, creates things by projecting
them beyond himself as so many substances,
each endowed with perseity^ as the scholastics
call it. But objects of thought are not things
per se. They are there only for their thinker,
and only as he thinks them. How, then, can
they become severally alive on their own ac-

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

counts and think themselves quite otherwise
than as he thinks them ?/lt is as if the char-
acters in a novel were to get up from the pages,
and walk away and transact business of their
own outside of the author's story.

A third diflSculty is this : The bird-metaphor
is physical, but we see on reflection that in the
"physical world there is no real compounding.
* Wholes ' are not realities there, parts only are
realities. * Bird ' is only our name for the physi-
cal fact of a certain grouping of organs, just
as * Charles's Wain ' is our name for a certain
grouping of stars. The 'whole,' be it bird or
constellation, is nothing but our vision, nothing
but an effect on our sensorium when a lot of
things act on it together. It is not realized by
any organ or any star, or experienced apart
from the consciousness of an onlooker.* In
the physical world taken by itself there is thus
no 'all,' there are only the 'caches' — at least
that is the * scientific ' view.

In the mental world, on the contrary, wholes

do in point of fact realize themselves per se. The

meaning of the whole sentence is just as much a

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V. COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

real experience as the feeling of each word is ;
the absolute's experience is for itself, as much
as yours is for yourself or mine for myself. So
the feather-and-bird analogy won't work un-
less you make the absolute into a distinct sort
of mental agent with a vision produced in it by
our several minds analogous to the * bird '-vision
which the feathers, beak, etc., produce in those
same minds. The 'whole,' which is its experi-
ence, would then be its unifying reaction on our
experiences, and not those very experiences self-
combined. Such a view as this would go with
theism, for the theistic God is a separate being;
but it would not go with pantheistic idealism,
the very essence of which is to insist that we are
literally parts of God, and he only ourselves in
our totality — the word * ourselves ' here stand-
ing of course for all the universe's finite facts.
I am dragging you into depths unsuitable, I
fear, for a rapid lecture. Such diflBculties as
these have to be teased out with a needle, so to
speak, and lecturers should take only bird's-
eye views. The practical upshot of the matter,
however, so far as I am concerned, is this, that

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

if I had been lecturing on the absohite a very
few years ago, I should unhesitatingly have
urged these difficulties, and developed them at
still greater length, to show that the hypothesis
of the absolute was not only non-coercive from
the logical point of view, but self-contradictory
as well, its notion that parts and whole are only
two names for the same thing not bearing crit-
ical scrutiny. ^If you stick to purely physical
terms like stars, there is- no whole. If vou call
the whole mental, then the so-called whole, in-
stead of being one fact with the parts, appears
rather as the integral reaction on those parts
of an independent higher witness, such as the
theistic God is supposed to be. ^

So long as this was the state of my own mind,
I could accept the notion of self -compounding
in the supernal spheres of experience no more
easily than in that chapter on mind-dust I
had accepted it in the lower spheres. I found
myself compelled, therefore, to call the abso-
lute impossible ; and the untrammelled freedom
with which pantheistic or monistic idealists
stepped over the logical barriers which Lotze

196

V. COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

and others had set down long before I had — I
had done httle more than quote these previ-
ous critics in my chapter — surprised me not
a little, and made me, I have to confess, both
resentful and envious. Envious because in the
bottom of my heart I wanted the same freedom
myself, for motives which I shall develop later;
and resentful because my absolutist friends
seemed to me to be stealing the privilege of
blowing both hot and cold. To establish their
absolute they used an intellectualist type of
logic which they disregarded when employed
against it. It seemed to me that they ought at
least to have mentioned the objections that
had stopped me so completely. I had yielded
to them against my *will to believe,' out of
pure logical scrupulosity. They, professing to
loathe the will to believe and to follow purest
rationality, had simply ignored them. The
method w^as easy, but hardly to be called can-
did. Fechner indeed was candid enough, for
he had never thought of the objections, but
later writers, like Royce, who should presum-
ably have heard them, had passed them by in

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

silence. I felt as if these philosophers were
granting their will to believe in monism too
easy a license. My own conscience would per-
mit me no such license.

So much for the personal confession by
which vou have allowed me to introduce the
subject. Let us now consider it more objec-
tively.

The fundamental difficulty I have found is
the number of contradictions which idealistic
monists seem to disregard. In the first place
they attribute to all existence a mental or
experiential character, but I find their simul-
taneous belief that the higher and the lower in
the universe are entitatively identical, incom-
patible with this character. Incompatible in
consequence of the generally accepted doctrine
that, whether Berkeley were right or not in
saying of material existence that its esse is
sentiri, it is undoubtedly right to say of mental
existence that its esse is sentiri or experiri. If I
feel pain, it is just pain that I feel, however
I may have come by the feeling. No one pre-
tends that pain as such only appears like pain,

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V. COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

but in itself is different, for to be as a mental
experience is only to appear to some one.

The idealists in question ought then to do
one of two things, but they do neither. They
ought either to refute the notion that as mental
states appear, so they are ; or, still keeping that
notion, they ought to admit a distinct agent of
unification to do the work of the all-knower,
just as our respective souls or selves in popular
philosophy do the work of partial knowers.
Otherwise it is like a joint-stock company all
shareholders and no treasurer or director. If
our finite minds formed a billion facts, then its
mind, knowing our billion, would make a uni-
verse composed of a billion and one facts. But
transcendental idealism is quite as unfriendly
to active principles called souls as physiologi-
cal psychology is, Kant having, as it thinks,
definitivelv demolished them. And altho some
disciples speak of the transcendental ego of
apperception (which they celebrate as Kant's
most precious legacy to posterity) as if it were
a combining agent, the drift of monistic au-
thority is certainly in the direction of treating

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

it as only an all- witness, whose field of vision
we finite witnesses do not cause, but constitute
rather. We are the letters, it is the alphabet;
we are the features, it is the face ; not indeed
as if either alphabet or face were something
additional to the letters or the features, but
rather as if it were only another name for the
very letters or features themselves. The all-
form assuredly differs from the each-form, but
the matter is the same in both, and the each-
form only an unaccountable appearance.

But this, as you see, contradicts the other
idealist principle, of a mental fact being just
what it appears to be. If their forms of appear-
ance are so different, the all and the caches
cannot be identical.

The way out (unless, indeed, we are willing
to discard the logic of identity altogether)
would seem to be frankly to write down the all
and the caches as two distinct orders of wit-
ness, each minor witness being aware of its own
'content' solely, while the greater witness
knows the minor witnesses, knows their whole
content pooled together, knows their relations

200

V. COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

to one another, and knows of just how much
each one of them is ignorant.

The two types of witnessing are here pal-
pably non-identical. We get a pluralism, not a
monism, out of them. In my psychology-chap-
ter I had resorted openly to such pluralism,
treating each total field of consciousness as a
distinct entity, and maintaining that the higher
fields merely supersede the lower functionally
by knowing more about the same objects.

The monists themselves writhe like worms
on the hook to escape pluralistic or at least
dualistic language, but they cannot escape it.
They speak of the eternal and the temporal

* points of view ' ; of the universe in its infinite

* aspect ' or in its finite * capacity ' ; they say that
'qua absolute' it is one thing, 'qua relative'
another; they contrast its 'truth' with its * ap-
pearances' ; they distinguish the total from the
partial way of 'taking' it, etc.; but they for-
get that, on idealistic principles, to make such
distinctions is tantamount to making different
beings, or at any rate that varying points of
view, aspects, appearances, ways of taking,

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

and the like, are meaningless phrases unless
we suppose outside of the unchanging content
of reality a diversity of witnesses who experi-
ence or take it variously, the absolute mind
being just the witness that takes it most com-
pletely.

For consider the matter one moment longer,
if you can. Ask what this notion implies, of
appearing differently from different points of
view. If there be no outside witness, a thing
can appear only to itself, the caches or parts to
their several selves temporally, the all or whole
to itself eternally. Different * selves ' thus break
out inside of what the absolutist insists to be
intrinsically one fact. But how can what is
actually one be effectively so many ? Put your
witnesses anywhere, whether outside or inside
of what is witnessed, in the last resort your
witnesses must on idealistic principles be dis-
tinct, for what is witnessed is different.

I fear that I am expressing myself with ter-
rible obscurity — some of you, I know, are
groaning over the logic-chopping. Be a plural-
ist or be a monist, you say, for heaven's sake,

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V.COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

no matter which, so long as you stop arguing.
It reminds one of Chesterton's epigram that
the only thing that ever drives human beings
insane is logic. But whether! be sane or insane,
you cannot fail, even tho you be transcenden-
talists yourselves, to recognize to some degree
by my trouble the difficulties that beset monis-
tic idealism. What boots it to call the parts and
the whole the same body of experience, when in
the same breath you have to say that the all ' as
such ' means one sort of experience and each
part ' as such ' means another ?

Difficulties, then, so far, but no stable solu-
tion as yet, for I have been talking only criti-
cally. You will probably be relieved to hear,
then, that having rounded this corner, I shall
begin to consider what may be the possibilities
of getting farther.

To clear the path, I beg you first to note one
point. What has so troubled my logical con-
science is not so much the absolute by itself
as the whole class of suppositions of which it
is the supreme example, collective experiences
namely, claiming identity with their constitu-
tes

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

ent parts, yet experiencing things quite differ-
ently from these latter. If any such collective
experience can be, then of course, so far as the
mere logic of the case goes, the absolute may
be. In a previous lecture I have talked against
the absolute from other points of view. In this
lecture I have meant merely to take it as the
example most prominent at Oxford of the thing
which has given me such logical perplexity.
I don't logically see how a collective expe-
rience of any grade whatever can be treated
as logically identical with a lot of distributive
experiences. They form two different concepts.
The absolute happens to be the only collective
experience concerning which Oxford idealists
have urged the identity, so I took it as my pre-
rogative instance. But Fechner's earth-soul,
or any stage of being below or above that,
would have served my purpose just as well:
the same logical objection applies to these col-
lective experiences as to the absolute.

So much, then, in order that you may not be
confused about my strategical objective. The

real point to defend against the logic that I

204

V. COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

have used is the identity of the collective and
distributive anyhow, not the particular exam-
ple of such identity known as the absolute.

So now for the directer question. Shall we
say that every complex mental fact is a sepa-
rate psychic entity succeeding upon a lot of
other psychic entities which are erroneously
called its parts, and superseding them in func-
tion, but not literally being composed of them ?
This was the course I took in my psychology ;
and if followed in theology, we should have to
deny the absolute as usually conceived, and
replace it by the * God ' of theism. We should
also have to deny Fechner's * earth-soul' and
all other superhuman collections of experience
of everv ejrade, so far at least as these are held
to be compounded of our simpler souls in the
way which Fechner believed in ; and we should
have to make all these denials in the name of
the incorruptible logic of self-identity, teach-
ing us that to call a thing and its other the same
is to commit the crime of self-contradiction.

But if we realize the whole philosophic situa-
tion thus produced, we see that it is almost in-

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

tolerable. Loyal to the logical kind of rational-
ity, it is disloyal to every other kind. It makes
the universe discontinuous. These fields of
experience that replace each other so punctually,
each knowing the same matter, but in ever-
widening contexts, from simplest feeling up to
absolute knowledge, can they have no being in
common when their cognitive function is so
manifestly common ? The regular succession
of them is on such terms an unintelligible mir-
acle. If you reply that their common object is
of itself enough to make the many witnesses
continuous, the same implacable logic follows
you — how can one and the same object appear
so variously ? Its diverse appearances break
it into a plurality; and our world of objects
then falls into discontinuous pieces quite as
much as did our world of subjects. The
resultant irrationality is really intolerable.

I said awhile ago that I was envious of Fecli-
ner and the other pantheists because I myself
wanted the same freedom that I saw them un-
scrupulously enjoying, of letting mental fields
compound themselves and so make the uni-

206

V. COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

verse more continuous, but that my conscience
held me prisoner. In my heart of hearts, how-
ever, I knew that my situation was absurd and
could be only provisional. That secret of a con-
tinuous life which the universe knows by heart
and acts on every instant cannot be a contra-
diction incarnate. If logic says it is one, so
much the worse for logic. Logic being the lesser
thing, the static incomplete abstraction, must
succumb to reality, not reality to logic. Our
intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a
pupa in its chrysalis. It must at any cost keep
on speaking terms with the universe that en-
gendered it. Fechner, Royce, and Hegel seem
on the truer path. Fechner has never heard of
logic's veto, Royce hears the voice but cannily
ignores the utterances, Hegel hears them but
to spurn them — and all go on their way
rejoicing. Shall we alone obey the veto ?

Sincerely, and patiently as I could, I strug-
gled with the problem for years, covering
hundreds of sheets of paper with notes and
memoranda and discussions with myself over
the diflSculty. How can many consciousnesses

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

be at the same time one consciousness ? How
can one and the same identical fact experience
itself so diversely ? The struggle was vain ; I
found myself in an impasse. I saw that I must
either forswear that 'psychology without a
soul' to which my whole psychological and
kantian education had committed me, — I
must, in short, bring back distinct spiritual
agents to know the mental states, now singly
and now in combination, in a word bring back
scholasticism and common sense — or else I
must squarely confess the solution of the prob-
lem impossible, and then either give up my
intellectualistic logic, the logic of identity, and
adopt some higher (or lower) form of ration-
ality, or, finally, face the fact that life is logi-
cally irrational.

Sincerely, this is the actual trilemma that
confronts every one of us. Those of you who
are scholastic-minded, or simply common-sense
minded, will smile at the elaborate groans of
my parturient mountain resulting in nothing
but this mouse. Accept the spiritual agents, for
heaven's sake, you will say, and leave off your

208

V. COMPOIJNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

ridiculous pedantry. Let but our * souls ' com-
bine our sensations by their intellectual facul-
ties, and let but * God ' replace the pantheistic
world-soul, and your wheels will go round
again — you will enjoy both life and logic
together.

This solution is obvious and I know that
many of you will adopt it. It is comfortable,
and all our habits of speech support it. Yet it
is not for idle or fantastical reasons that the
notion of the substantial soul, so freely used by
common men and the more popular philoso-
phies, has fallen upon such evil days, and has
no prestige in the eyes of critical thinkers. It
only shares the fate of other unrepresentable
substances and principles. They are without
exception all so barren that to sincere inquirers
they appear as little more than names mas-
querading — Wo die begrifle fehlen da stellt
ein wort zur rechten zeit sich ein. You see no
deeper into the fact that a hundred sensations
get compounded or known together by think-
ing that a *souI' does the compounding than
you see into a man's living eighty years by

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

thinking of him as an octogenarian, or into
our having five fingers by calling us pentadac-
tyls. Souls have worn out both themselves and
their welcome, that is the plain truth. Philo-
sophy ought to get the manifolds of experi-
ence unified on principles less empty. Like
the word 'cause,' the word *soul' is but a the-
oretic stop-gap — it marks a place and claims
it for a future explanation to occupy.

This being our post-humian and post-kant-
ian state of mind, I will ask your permission
to leave the soul wholly out of the present
discussion and to consider onlv the residual
dilemma. Some day, indeed, souls may get
their innings again in philosophy — I am quite
ready to admit that possibility — they form a
category of thought too natural to the human
mind to expire without prolonged resistance.
But if the belief in the soul ever does come to
life after the many funeral-discourses which
humian and kantian criticism have preached
over it, I am sure it will be only when some
one has found in the term a pragmatic sig-
nificance that has hitherto eluded observation.

210

V. COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

When that champion speaks, as he well may
speak some day, it will be time to consider
souls more seriously.

Let us leave out the soul, then, and confront
what I just called the residual dilemma. Can
we, on the one hand, give up the logic of iden-
tity ? — can we, on the other, believe human
experience to be fundamentally irrational ?
Neither is easy, yet it would seem that we
must do one or the other.

Few philosophers have had the frankness
fairly to admit the necessity of choosing be-
tween the 'horns ' offered. Reality must be ra-
tional, they have said, and since the ordinary
intellectual ist logic is the only usual test of ra-
tionality, reality and logic must agree 'some-
how.' Hegel was the first non-mystical writer
to face the dilemma squarely and throw away
the ordinary logic, saving a pseudo-rationality
for the universe by inventing the higher logic
of the 'dialectic process.' Bradley holds to the
intellectualist logic, and by dint of it convicts
the human universe of being irrationality in-
carnate. But what must be and can be, is, he

211

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

says ; there must and can be relief from that
irrationality ; and the absolute must already
have got the relief in secret ways of its own,
impossible for us to guess at. We of course
get no relief, so Bradley's is a rather ascetic
doctrine. Royce and Taylor accept similar
solutions, only they emphasize the irration-
ality of our finite universe less than Bradley
does ; and Royce in particular, being unusually
* thick' for an idealist, tries to bring the abso-
lute's secret forms of relief more sympatheti-
cally home to our imagination.

Well, what must we do in this tragic predica-
ment ? For my own part, I have finally found
myself compelled to give up the logic, fairly,
squarely, and irrevocably. It has an imperish-
able use in human life, but that use is not to
make us theoretically acquainted with the es-
sential nature of reality — just what it is I can
perhaps suggest to you a little later. Reality,
life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use
what word you will, exceeds our logic, over-
flows and surrounds it. If you like to employ

words eulogistically, as most men do, and so

212

V. COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

encourage confusion, you may say that reality
obeys a higher logic, or enjoys a higher ration-
ality. But I think that even eulogistic words
should be used rather to distinguish than to
commingle meanings, so I prefer bluntly to call
reality if not irrational then at least non-ra-
tional in its constitution, — and by reality here
I mean reality where things happen^ all tempo-
ral reality without exception. I myself find no
good warrant for even suspecting the existence
of any reality of a higher denomination than
that distributed and strung-along and flowing
sort of reality which we finite beings swim in.
That is the sort of reality given us, and that is
the sort with which lomc is so incommensur-
able. If there be any higher sort of reality —
the * absolute,' for example — that sort, by the
confession of those who believe in it, is still less
amenable to ordinary logic ; it transcends logic
and is therefore still less rational in the intel-
lectualist sense, so it cannot help us to save
our logic as an adequate definer and confiner
of existence.

These sayings will sound queer and dark,

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

probably they will sound quite wild or child-
ish in the absence of explanatory comment.
Only the persuasion that I soon can explain
them, if not satisfactorily to all of you, at least
intelligibly, emboldens me to state them thus
baldly as a sort of programme. Please take
them as a thesis, therefore, to be defended
by later pleading.

I told you that I had long and sincerely
wrestled with the dilemma. I have now to
confess (and this will probably re-animate
your interest) that I should not now be eman-
cipated, not now subordinate logic with so very
light a heart, or throw it out of the deeper
regions of philosophy to take its rightful and
respectable place in the world of simple human
practice, if I had not been influenced by a
comparatively young and very original french
writer. Professor Henri Bergson. Reading his
works is what has made me bold. If I had not
read Bergson, I should probably still be black-
ening endless pages of paper privately, in the
hope of making ends meet that were never

meant to meet, and trying to discover some

214

V. COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

mode of conceiving the behavior of reality
which should leave no discrepancy between it
and the accepted laws of the logic of identity.
It is certain, at any rate, that without the con-
fidence which being able to lean on Bergson's
authority gives me I should never have ven-
tured to urge these particular views of mine
upon this ultra-critical audience.

I must therefore, in order to make my own
views more intelligible, give some preliminary
account of the bergsonian philosophy. But
here, as in Fechner's case, I must confine mv-
self only to the features that are essential to
the present purpose, and not entangle you in
collateral details, however interesting other-
wise. For our present purpose, then, the essen-
tial contribution of Bergson to philosophy is
his criticism of intellectualism. In my opinion
he has killed intellectualism definitively and
without hope of recovery. I don't see how it
can ever revive again in its ancient platoniz-
ing role of claiming to be the most authentic,
intimate, and exhaustive definer of the nature
of reality. Others, as Kant for example, have

215

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

denied intelJeetualism's pretensions to dejSne
reality an sich or in its absolute capacity ; but
Kant still leaves it laying down laws — and
laws from which there is no appeal — to all
our human experience; while what Bergson
denies is that its methods give any adequate
account of this human experience in its very
finiteness. Just how Bergson accomplishes all
this I must try to tell in my imperfect way in the
next lecture ; but since I have already used the
words * logic,' * logic of identity,' * intellectual-
istic logic,' and * intellectualism' so often, and
sometimes used them as if they required no
particular explanation, it will be wise at this
point to say at greater length than heretofore
in what sense I take these terms when I claim
that Bergson has refuted their pretension to
decide what reality can or cannot be. Just
what I mean by intellectualism is therefore
what I shall try to give a fuller idea of dur-
ing the remainder of this present hour.

In recent controversies some participants
have shown resentment at being classed as in-
tellectualists. I mean to use the word dispar-

216

V. COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

agingly, but shall be sorry if it works offence.
Intellectualism has its source in the faculty
which gives us our chief superiority to the
brutes, our power, namely, of translating the
crude flux of our merely feeling-experience into
a conceptual order. An immediate experience,
as yet unnamed or classed, is a mere that that
we undergo, a thing that asks, 'What sun I ?^
When we name and class it, we say for the first
time what it is, and all these whats are abstract
names or concepts. Each concept means a par-
ticular kind of thing, and as things seem once
for all to have been created in kinds, a far
more efficient handling of a given bit of expe-
rience begins as soon as we have classed the
various parts of it. Once classed, a thing can
be treated by the law of its class, and the ad-
vantages are endless. Both theoretically and
practically this power of framing abstract con-
cepts is one of the sublimest of our human pre-
rogatives. We come back into the concrete
from our journey into these abstractions, with
an increase both of vision and of power. It is
no wonder that earlier thinkers, forgetting that

217

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

concepts are only man-made extracts from the
temporal flux, should have ended by treating
them as a superior type of being, bright,
changeless, true, divine, and utterly opposed
in nature to the turbid, restless lower world.
The latter then appears as but their corruption
and falsification.

Intellectualism in the vicious sense began
when Socrates and Plato taught that what a
thing really is, is told us by its definition. Ever
since Socrates we have been taught that reality
consists of essences, not of appearances, and
that the essences of things are known whenever
we know their definitions. So first we identify
the thing with a concept and then we identify
the concept with a definition, and only then,
inasmuch as the thing is whatever the defini-
tion expresses, are we sure of apprehending the
real essence of it or the full truth about it.

So far no harm is done. The misuse of con-
cepts begins with the habit of employing them
privatively as well as positively, using them not
merely to assign properties to things, but to
deny the very properties with which the things

218

V. COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

sensibly present themselves. Logic can extract
all its possible consequences from any defini-
tion, and the logician who is unerbittlich conse-
quent is often tempted, when he cannot extract
a certain property from a definition, to deny
that the concrete object to which the defini-
tion applies can possibly possess that property.
The definition that fails to yield it must ex-
clude or negate it. This is Hegel's regular
method of establishing his system.

It is but the old story, of a useful practice
first becoming a method, then a habit, and
finally a tyranny that defeats the end it was
used for. Concepts, first employed to make
things intelligible, are clung to even when
they make them unintelligible. Thus it comes
that when once you have conceived things as
'independent,' you must proceed to deny the
possibility of any connexion whatever among
them, because the notion of connexion is not
contained in the definition of independence.
For a like reason you must deny any possible
forms or modes of unity among things which
you have begun by defining as a *many.' We

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

have cast a glance at Hegel's and Bradley's
use of this sort of reasoning, and you will re-
member Sigwart's epigram that according to
it a horseman can never in his life go on foot,
or a photographer ever do anything but photo-
graph.

The classic extreme in this direction is the
denial of the possibility of change, and the con-
sequent branding of the world of change as un-
real, by certain philosophers. The definition of
A is changeless, so is the definition of B. The
one definition cannot change into the other, so
the notion that a concrete thing A should
change into another concrete thing B is made
out to be contrary to reason. In Mr. Bradley's
diflSculty in seeing how sugar can be sweet
intellectualism outstrips itself and becomes
openly a sort of verbalism. Sugar is just sugar
and sweet is just sweet; neither is the other;
nor can the word *is' ever be understood to
join any subject to its predicate rationally.
Nothing * between' things can connect them,
for * between ' is just that third thing, * between,'
and would need itself to be connected to the

220

V. COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

first and second things by two still finer be-
tweens, and so on ad infinitum.

The particular intellectualistic diflSculty that
had held my own thought so long in a vise was,
as we have seen at such tedious length, the im-
possibility of understanding how *your' experi-
ence and ' mine,' which ' as such ' are defined as
not conscious of each other, can nevertheless
at the same time be members of a world-expe-
rience defined expressly as having all its parts
co-conscious, or known together. The defini-
tions are contradictory, so the things defined
can in no way be united. You see how unintel-
ligible intellectualism here seems to make the
world of our most accomplished philosophers.
Neither as they use it nor as we use it does it
do anything but make nature look irrational
and seem impossible.

In my next lecture, using Bergson as my
principal topic, I shall enter into more concrete
details and try, by giving up intellectualism
frankly, to make, if not the world, at least my
ow^n general thesis, less unintelligible.

BERGSON AND HIS CRITIQUE OF
INTELLECTUALISM

LECTURE VI

BERGSON AND HIS CRITIQUE OF
INTELLECTUALISM

X GAVE you a very stiflF lecture last time, and I
fear that this one can be little less so. The best
way of entering into it will be to begin imme-
diately with Bergson's philosophy, since I told
you that that was what had led me personally
to renounce the intellectualistic method and
the current notion that logic is an adequate
measure of what can or cannot be.

Professor Henri Bergson is a young man,
comparatively, as influential philosophers go,
having been born at Paris in 1859. His career
has been the perfectly routine one of a suc-
cessful french professor. Entering the ecole
normale superieure at the age of twenty-two,
he spent the next seventeen years teaching at
lycees, provincial or parisian, until his fortieth
year, when he was made professor at the said
ecole normale. Since 1900 he has been pro-
fessor at the College de France, and member
of the Institute since 1900.

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

So far as the outward facts go, Bergson's
career has then been commonplace to the ut-
most. Neither one of Taine's famous principles
of explanation of great men, the race, the envi-
ronment, or the moment, no, nor all three to-
gether, will explain that peculiar way of looking
at things that constitutes his mental individu-
ality. Originality in men dates from nothing
previous, other things date from it, rather. I
have to confess that Bergson's originality is so
profuse that many of his ideas bajBBe me entirely.
I doubt whether any one understands him all
over, so to speak ; and I am sure that he would
himself be the first to see that this must be, and
to confess that things which he himself has not
yet thought out clearly, had yet to be mentioned
and have a tentative place assigned them in his
philosophy. Many of us are profusely original,
in that no man can understand us — violently
peculiar ways of looking at things are no great
rarity. The rarity is when great peculiarity of
vision is allied with great lucidity and unusual
command of all the classic expository appara-
tus. Bergson's resources in the way of erudi-

226

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

tion are remarkable, and in the way of expres-
sion they are simply phenomenal. This is why
in France, where Vart de bien dire counts for
so much and is so sure of appreciation, he has
immediately taken so eminent a place in public
esteem. Old-fashioned professors, whom his
ideas quite fail to satisfy, nevertheless speak of
his talent almost with bated breath, while the
youngsters flock to him as to a master.

If anything can make hard things easy to fol-
low, it is a style like Bergson's. A ' straightfor-
ward ' style, an american reviewer lately called
it ; failing to see that such straightforwardness
means a flexibility of verbal resource that fol-
lows the thought without a crease or wrinkle,
as elastic silk underclothing follows the move-
ments of one's body. The lucidity of Bergson's
way of putting things is what all readers are
first struck by. It seduces you and bribes
you in advance to become his disciple. It is a
miracle, and he a real magician.

M. Bergson, if I am rightly informed, came
into philosophy through the gateway of math-
ematics. The old antinomies of the infinite

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

were, I imagine, the irritant that first woke his
faculties from their dogmatic slumber. You all
remember Zeno's famous paradox, or sophism,
as many of our logic books still call it, of
Achilles and the tortoise. Give that reptile
ever so small an advance and the swift run-
ner Achilles can never overtake him, much less
get ahead of him ; for if space and time are in-
finitely divisible (as our intellects tell us they
must be) , by the time Achilles reaches the tor-
toise's starting-point, the tortoise has already
got ahead of that starting-point, and so on ad
infinitum, the interval between the pursuer
and the pursued growing endlessly minuter,
but never becoming wholly obliterated. The
common way of showing up the sophism here
is by pointing out the ambiguity of the expres-
sion * never can overtake.' What the word
* never' falsely suggests, it is said, is an infinite
duration of time ; what it really means is the
inexhaustible number of the steps of which
the overtaking must consist. But if these steps
are infinitely short, a finite time will suffice for
them ; and in point of fact they do rapidly con-

228

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

verge, whatever be the original interval or the
contrasted speeds, toward infinitesimal short-
ness. This proportionahty of the shortness of
the times to that of the spaces required frees
us, it is claimed, from the sophism which the
word * never' suggests.

But this criticism misses Zeno's point en-
tirely. Zeno would have been perfectly willing
to grant that if the tortoise can be overtaken
at all, he can be overtaken in (say) twenty
seconds, but he would still have insisted that
he can't be overtaken at all. Leave Achilles
and the tortoise out of the account altogether,
he would have said — they complicate the
case unnecessarily. Take any single process
of change whatever, take the twenty seconds
themselves elapsing. If time be infinitely divis-
ible, and it must be so on intellectualist princi-
ples, they simply cannot elapse, their end can-
not be reached; for no matter how much of
them has already elapsed, before the remain-
der, however minute, can have wholly elapsed,
the earlier half of it must first have elapsed.
And this ever re-arising need of making the

229

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

earlier half elapse -jirst leaves time with always
something to do before the last thing is done,
so that the last thing never gets done. Ex-
pressed in bare numbers, it is like the conver-
gent series \ plus | plus | . . . , of which the
limit is one. But this limit, simply because it
is a limit, stands outside the series, the value
of which approaches it indefinitely but never
touches it. If in the natural world there were
no other way of getting things save by such suc-
cessive addition of their logically involved frac-
tions, no complete units or whole things would
ever come into being, for the fractions' sum
would always leave a remainder. But in point
of fact nature does n't make eggs by making
first half an egg, then a quarter, then an eighth,
etc., and adding them together. She either
makes a whole egg at once or none at all, and so
of all her other units. It is only in the sphere of
change, then, where one phase of a thing must
needs come into being before another phase
can come that Zeno's paradox gives trouble.

And it gives trouble then only if the suc-
cession of steps of change be infinitely divisi-

230

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

ble. If a bottle had to be emptied by an in-
finite number of successive decrements, it is
mathematically impossible that the emptying
should ever positively terminate. In point of
fact, however, bottles and coffee-pots empty
themselves by a finite number of decrements,
each of definite amount. Either a whole drop
emerges or nothing emerges from the spout.
If all change went thus drop-wise, so to speak,
if real time sprouted or grew by units of dura-
tion of determinate amount, just as our percep-
tions of it grow by pulses, there would be no
zenonian paradoxes or kantian antinomies to
trouble us. All our sensible experiences, as we
get them immediately, do thus change by dis-
crete pulses of perception, each of which keeps
us saying *more, more, more,' or *less, less,
less,' as the definite increments or diminutions
make themselves felt. The discreteness is still
more obvious when, instead of old things
changing, they cease, or when altogether new
things come. Fechner's term of the * threshold,'
which has played such a part in the psychology
of perception, is only one way of naming the

231

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

quantitative discreteness in the change of all
our sensible experiences. They come to us in
drops. Time itself comes in drops.

Our ideal decomposition of the drops which
are all that we feel into still finer fractions is but
an incident in that great transformation of the
perceptual order into a conceptual order of
which I spoke in my last lecture. It is made in
the interest of our rationalizing intellect solely.
The times directly felt in the experiences of liv-
ing subjects have originally no common mea-
sure. Let a lump of sugar melt in a glass, to use
one of M. Bergson's instances. We feel the time
to be long while waiting for the process to end,
but who knows how long or how short it feels
to the sugar ? All felt times coexist and over-
lap or compenetrate each other thus vaguely,
but the artifice of plotting them on a common
scale helps us to reduce their aboriginal confu-
sion, and it helps us still more to plot, against
the same scale, the successive possible steps
into which nature's various changes may be
resolved, either sensibly or conceivably. We
thus straighten out the aboriginal privacy and

232

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

vagueness, and can date things publicly, as it
were, and by each other. The notion of one
objective and * evenly flowing' time, cut into
numbered instants, appHes itself as a common
measure to all the steps and phases, no matter
how many, into which we cut the processes of
nature. They are now definitely contemporary,
or later or earlier one than another, and we
can handle them mathematically, as we say,
and far better, practically as well as theoreti-
cally, for having thus correlated them one to
one with each other on the common schematic
or conceptual time-scale.

Motion, to take a good example, is originally
a turbid sensation, of which the native shape is
perhaps best preserved in the phenomenon of
vertigo. In vertigo we feel that movement is,
and is more or less violent or rapid, more or
less in this direction or that, more or less alarm-
ing or sickening. But a man subject to vertigo
may gradually learn to co-ordinate his felt
motion with his real position and that of other
things, and intellectualize it enough to succeed
at last in walking without staggering. The

233

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

mathematical mind similarly organizes motion
in its way, putting it into a logical definition :
motion is now conceived as * the occupancy of
serially successive points of space at serially
successive instants of time.' With such a defi-
nition we escape wholly from the turbid privacy
of sense. But do we not also escape from
sense-reality altogether ? Whatever motion
really may be, it surely is not static ; but the
definition we have gained is of the absolutely
static. It gives a set of one-to-one relations be-
tween space-points and time-points, which re-
lations themselves are as fixed as the points are.
It gives positions assignable ad infinitum, but
how the body gets from one position to another
it omits to mention. The body gets there by
moving, of course ; but the conceived positions,
however numerously multiplied, contain no
element of movement, so Zeno, using nothing
but them in his discussion, has no alternative
but to say that our intellect repudiates motion
as a non-reality. Intellectualism here does
what I said it does — it makes experience less

instead of more intelligible.

234

VI.BERGSONAND INTELLECTUALISM

We of course need a stable scheme of con-
cepts, stably related with one another, to lay
hold of our experiences and to co-ordinate them
withal. When an experience comes with suffi-
cient saliency to stand out, we keep the thought
of it for future use, and store it in our con-
ceptual system. What does not of itself stand
out, we learn to cut out ; so the system grows
completer, and new reality, as it comes, gets
named after and conceptually strung upon this
or that element of it which we have already
established. The immutability of such an ab-
stract system is its great practical merit; the
same identical terms and relations in it can
always be recovered and referred to — change
itself is just such an unalterable concept. But
all these abstract concepts are but as flowers
gathered, they are only moments dipped out
from the stream of time, snap-shots taken, as
by a kinetoscopic camera, at a life that in its
original coming is continuous. Useful as they
are as samples of the garden, or to re-enter the
stream with, or to insert in our revolving lantern,
they have no value but these practical values.

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

You cannot explain by them what makes any
single phenomenon be or go — you merely dot
out the path of appearances which it traverses.
For you cannot make continuous being out of
discontinuities, and your concepts are discon-
tinuous. The stages into which you analyze
a change are states, the change itself goes on
between them. It lies along their intervals,
inhabits what your definition fails to gather
up, and thus eludes conceptual explanation
altogether.

* When the mathematician,' Bergson writes,
' calculates the state of a system at the end of a
time t, nothing need prevent him from suppos-
ing that bet ween whiles the universe vanishes,
in order suddenly to appear again at the due
moment in the new configuration. It is only
the ^th moment that counts — that which flows
throughout the intervals, namely real time,
plays no part in his calculation. ... In short,
the world on which the mathematician oper-
ates is a world which dies and is born anew at
every instant, like the world which Descartes

thought of when he spoke of a continued crea-

236

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

tion.' To know adequately what really hap-
pens we ought, Bergson insists, to see into
the intervals, but the mathematician sees only
their extremities. He fixes only a few results,
he dots a curve and then interpolates, he sub-
stitutes a tracing for a reality.

This being so undeniably the case, the his-
tory of the way in which philosophy has dealt
with it is curious. The ruling tradition in phi-
losophy has always been the platonic and aris-
totelian belief that fixity is a nobler and wor-
thier thing than change. Reality must be one
and unalterable. Concepts, being themselves
fixities, agree best with this fixed nature of
truth, so that for any knowledge of ours to be
quite true it must be knowledge by universal
concepts rather than by particular experiences,
for these notoriously are nmtable and corrupti-
ble. This is the tradition known as rationalism
in philosophy, and what I have called intel-
lectualism is only the extreme application of it.
In spite of sceptics and empiricists, in spite of
Protagoras, Hume, and James Mill, rational-
ism has never been seriously questioned, for

237

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

its sharpest critics have always had a tender
place in their hearts for it, and have obeyed
some of its mandates. They have not been
consistent; they have played fast and loose
with the enemy; and Bergson alone has been
radical.

To show what I mean by this, let me con-
trast his procedure with that of some of the
transcendentalist philosophers whom I have
lately mentioned. Coming after Kant, these
pique themselves on being 'critical,' on build-
ing in fact upon Kant's 'critique' of pure
reason. What that critique professed to estab-
lish was this, that concepts do not apprehend
reality, but only such appearances as our senses
feed out to them. They give immutable intel-
lectual forms to these appearances, it is true,
but the reality an sich from which in ultimate
resort the sense-appearances have to come
remains forever unintelligible to our intellect.
Take motion, for example. Sensibly, motion
comes in drops, waves, or pulses; either some
actual amount of it, or none, being appre-
hended. This amount is the datum or gabe

238

VI. BERGSON ANDINTELLECTUALISM

which reahty feeds out to our intellectual fac-
ulty; but our intellect makes of it a task or
aufgabe — this pun is one of the most memo-
rable of Kant's formulas — and insists that in
every pulse of it an infinite number of succes-
sive minor pulses shall be ascertainable. These
minor pulses we can indeed go on to ascertain
or to compute indefinitely if we have patience ;
but it would contradict the definition of an
infinite number to suppose the endless series
of them to have actually counted themselves
out piecemeal. Zeno made this manifest ; so
the infinity which our intellect requires of the
sense-datum is thus a future and potential
rather than a past and actual infinity of struc-
ture. The datum after it has made itself must
be decomposable ad infinitum by our concep-
tion, but of the steps by which that structure
actually got composed we know nothing. Our
intellect casts, in short, no ray of light on the
processes by which experiences get viade,

Kant's monistic successors have in general
found the data of immediate experience even
more self -contradictory, when intellectually

239

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

treated, than Kant did. Not only the charac-
ter of infinity involved in the relation of vari-
ous empirical data to their * conditions/ but the
very notion that empirical things should be re-
lated to one another at all, has seemed to them,
when the intellectualistic fit was upon them,
full of paradox and contradiction. We saw in
a former lecture numerous instances of this
from Hegel, Bradley, Royce, and others. We
saw^ also where the solution of such an intoler-
able state of things was sought for by these
authors. Whereas Kant had placed it outside
of and before our experience, in the dinge
an sich which are the causes of the latter, his
monistic successors all look for it either after
experience, as its absolute completion, or else
consider it to be even now implicit within
experience as its ideal signification. Kant and
his successors look, in short, in diametrically
opposite directions. Do not be misled by
Kant's admission of theism into his system.
His God is the ordinary dualistic God of
Christianity, to whom his philosophy simply
opens the door; he has nothing whatsoever

240

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

in common with the * absolute spirit ' set up by
his successors. So far as this absolute spirit
is logically derived from Kant, it is not from
his God, but from entirely different elements
of his philosophy. First from his notion that
an unconditioned totality of the conditions of
any experience must be assignable ; and then
from his other notion that the presence of some
witness, or ego of apperception, is the most
universal of all the conditions in question. The
post-kantians make of the witness-condition
what is called a concrete universal, an indi-
vidualized all-witness or world-self, which shall
imply in its rational constitution each and all of
the other conditions put together, and therefore
necessitate each and all of the conditioned
experiences.

Abridgments like this of other men's opin-
ions are very unsatisfactory, they always work
injustice ; but in this case those of you who are
familiar with the literature will see immedi-
ately what I have in mind ; and to the others,
if there be any here, it will suffice to say that
what I am trying so pedantically to point out

241

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

is only the fact that monistic idealists after
Kant have invariably sought relief from the
supposed contradictions of our world of sense
by looking forward toward an ens rationis con-
ceived as its integration or logical completion,
while he looked backward toward non-rational
dinge an sich conceived as its cause. Plural-
istic empiricists, on the other hand, have re-
mained in the world of sense, either naively
and because they overlooked the intellectual-
istic contradictions, or because, not able to
ignore them, they thought they could refute
them by a superior use of the same intellec-
tualistic logic. Thus it is that John Mill pre-
tends to refute the Achilles-tortoise fallacy.

The important point to notice here is the
intellect ualist logic. Both sides treat it as
authoritative, but they do so capriciously : the
absolutists smashing the world of sense by its
means, the empiricists smashing the absolute
— for the absolute, they say, is the quintes-
sence of all logical contradictions. Neither side
attains consistency. The Hegelians have to
invoke a higher logic to supersede the purely

242

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

destructive efforts of their first logic. The
empiricists use their logic against the absolute,
but refuse to use it against finite experience.
Each party uses it or drops it to suit the
vision it has faith in, but neither impugns in
principle its general theoretic authority.

Bergson alone challenges its theoretic au-
thority in principle. He alone denies that mere
conceptual logic can tell us what is impossible
or possible in the world of being or fact ; and he
does so for reasons which at the same time that
they rule logic out from lordship over the whole
of life, establish a vast and definite sphere of
influence where its sovereignty is indisputable.
Bergson's own text, felicitous as it is, is too
intricate for quotation, so I must use my own
inferior words in explaining what I mean by
saying this.

In the first place, logic, giving primarily the
relations between concepts as such, and the
relations between natural facts only second-
arily or so far as the facts have been already
identified with concepts and defined by them,
must of course stand or fall with the conceptual

243

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

method. But the conceptual method is a trans-
formation which the flux of hfe undergoes at
our hands in the interests of practice essen-
tially and only subordinately in the interests
of theory. We live forward, we understand
backward, said a danish writer ; and to under-
stand life by concepts is to arrest its movement,
cutting it up into bits as if with scissors, and
immobilizing these in our logical herbarium
where, comparing them as dried specimens,
we can ascertain which of them statically in-
cludes or excludes which other. This treatment
supposes life to have already accomplished
itself, for the concepts, being so many views
taken after the fact, are retrospective and post
mortem. Nevertheless we can draw conclu-
sions from them and project them Into the
future. We cannot learn from them how life
made itself go, or how it will make itself go;
but, on the supposition that its ways of mak-
ing itself go are unchanging, we can calculate
what positions of imagined arrest it will exhibit
hereafter under given conditions. We can com-
pute, for instance, at what point Achilles will

244

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

be, and where the tortoise will be, at the end
of the twentieth minute. Achilles may then be
at a point far ahead ; but the full detail of how
he will have managed practically to get there
our logic never gives us — we have seen, in-
deed, that it finds that its results contradict
the facts of nature. The computations which
the other sciences make differ in no respect
from those of mathematics. The concepts
used are all of them dots through which,
by interpolation or extrapolation, curves are
drawn, while along the curves other dots are
found as consequences. The latest refinements
of logic dispense with the curves altogether,
and deal solelv with the dots and their cor-
respondences each to each in various series.
The authors of these recent improvements tell
us expressly that their aim is to abolish the
last vestiges of intuition, videlicet of concrete
reality, from the field of reasoning, which
then will operate literally on mental dots or
bare abstract units of discourse, and on the
ways in which they may be strung in naked

series.

245

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

This is all very esoteric, and my own under-
standing of it is most likely misunderstanding.
So I speak here only by way of brief reminder
to those who know. For the rest of us it is
enough to recognize this fact, that altho by
means of concepts cut out from the sensible
flux of the past, we can re-descend upon the
future flux and, making another cut, say what
particular thing is likely to be found there ; and
that altho in this sense concepts give us know-
ledge, and may be said to have some theoretic
value (especially when the particular thing
foretold is one in which we take no present
practical interest) ; yet in the deeper sense of
giving insight they have no theoretic value, for
they quite fail to connect us with the inner life
of the flux, or with the causes that govern its
direction. Instead of being interpreters of
reality, concepts negate the inwardness of re-
ality altogether. They make the whole notion
of a causal influence between finite things in-
comprehensible. No real activities and indeed
no real connexions of any kind can obtain if we

follow the conceptual logic; for to be distin-

^46

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

guishable, according to what I call intellec-
tualism, is to be incapable of connexion. The
work begun by Zeno, and continued by Hume,
Kant, Herbart, Hegel, and Bradley, does not
stop till sensible reality lies entirely disinte-
grated at the feet of * reason.'

Of the 'absolute' reality which reason pro-
poses to substitute for sensible reality I shall
have more to say presently. Meanwhile you
see what Professor Bergson means by insisting
that the function of the intellect is practical
rather than theoretical. Sensible reality is too
concrete to be entirely manageable — look at
the narrow range of it which is all that any
animal, living in it exclusively as he does, is
able to compass. To get from one point in it
to another we have to plough or wade through
the whole intolerable interval. No detail is
spared us ; it is as bad as the barbed-wire com-
plications at Port Arthur, and we grow old
and die in the process. But with our faculty of
abstracting and fixing concepts we are there in
a second, almost as if we controlled a fourth
dimension, skipping the intermediaries as by a

247

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

divine winged power, and getting at the exact
point we require without entanglement with
any context. What we do in fact is to harness
up reahty in our conceptual systems in order
to drive it the better. This process is practical
because all the termini to which we drive are
particular termini , even when they are facts of
the mental order. But the sciences in which
the conceptual method chiefly celebrates its tri-
umphs are those of space and matter, where
the transformations of external things are dealt
with. To deal with moral facts conceptually, we
have first to transform them, substitute brain-
diagrams or physical metaphors, treat ideas as
atoms, interests as mechanical forces, our con-
scious 'selves ' as * streams,' and the like. Para-
doxical effect ! as Bergson well remarks, if our
intellectual life were not practical but destined
to reveal the inner natures. One would then
suppose that it would find itself most at home
in the domain of its own intellectual realities.
But it is precisely there that it finds itself at
the end of its tether. We know the inner
movements of our spirit only perceptually.

248

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

We feel them live in us, but can give no dis-
tinct account of their elements, nor definitely
predict their future ; while things that lie along
the world of space, things of the sort that w^e
literally handle, are what our intellects cope
with most successfully. Does not this con-
firm us in the view that the original and still
surviving function of our intellectual life is
to guide us in the practical adaptation of our
expectancies and activities ?

One can easily get into a verbal mess at this
point, and my own experience with * pragma-
tism' makes me shrink from the dangers that
lie in the word 'practical,' and far rather than
stand out against you for that word, I am quite
willing to part company with Professor Berg-
son, and to ascribe a primarily theoretical func-
tion to our intellect, provided you on your part
then agree to discriminate * theoretic' or scien-
tific knowledge from the deeper * speculative '
knowledge aspired to by most philosophers,
and concede that theoretic knowledge, which
is knowledge about things, as distinguished
from living or sympathetic acquaintance with

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

them, touches only the outer surface of real-
ity.^ The surface which theoretic knowledge
taken in this sense covers may indeed be
enormous in extent; it may dot the whole di-
ameter of space and time with its conceptual
creations ; but it does not penetrate a milli-
meter into the solid dimension. That inner
dimension of reality is occupied by the activi-
ties that keep it going, but the intellect, speak-
ing through Hume, Kant & Co., finds itself
obliged to deny, and persists in denying, that
activities have any intelligible existence. What
exists for thought, we are told, is at most the
results that we illusorily ascribe to such ac-
tivities, strung along the surfaces of space
and time by regeln der verknupfung , laws of
nature which state only coexistences and suc-
cessions.^

Thought deals thus solely with surfaces. It
can name the thickness of reality, but it cannot
fathom it, and its insufficiency here is essential
and permanent, not temporary.

The only way in which to apprehend reality's
thickness is either to experience it directly by

250

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

being a part of reality one's self, or to evoke
it in imagination by sympathetically divining
some one else's inner life. But what we thus
immediately experience or concretely divine is
very limited in duration, whereas abstractly we
are able to conceive eternities. Could we feel a
million years concretely as we now feel a passing
minute, we should have very little employment
for our conceptual faculty. We should know the
whole period fully at every moment of its pas-
sage, whereas we must now construct it labori-
ously by means of concepts which we project.
Direct acquaintance and conceptual knowledge
are thus complementary of each other; each
remedies the other's defects. If what we care
most about be the synoptic treatment of phe-
nomena, the vision of the far and the gathering
of the scattered like, we must follow the con-
ceptual method. But if, as metaphysicians, we
are more curious about the inner nature of
reality or about what really makes it go, we
must turn our backs upon our winged concepts
altogether, and bury ourselves in the thickness
of those passing moments over the surface of

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

which they fly, and on particular points of
which they occasionally rest and perch.

Professor Bergson thus inverts the tradi-
tional platonic doctrine absolutely. Instead of
intellectual knowledge being the profounder,
he calls it the more superficial. Instead of
being the only adequate knowledge, it is grossly
inadequate, and its only superiority is the prac-
tical one of enabling us to make short cuts
through experience and thereby to save time.
The one thing it cannot do is to reveal the
nature of things — which last remark, if not
clear already, will become clearer as I proceed.
Dive back into the flux itself, then, Bergson
tells us, if you wish to know reality, that flux
which Platonism, in its strange belief that only
the immutable is excellent, has always spurned ;
turn your face toward sensation, that flesh-
bound thing which rationalism has always
loaded with abuse. — This, you see, is exactly
the opposite remedy from that of looking for-
ward into the absolute, which our idealistic
contemporaries prescribe. It violates our men-
tal habits, being a kind of passive and recep-

252

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

live listening quite contrary to that efifort to
react noisily and verbally on everything, which
is our usual intellectual pose.

What, then, are the peculiar features in the
perceptual flux which the conceptual transla-
tion so fatally leaves out ?

The essence of life is its continuously chang-
ing character; but our concepts are all dis-
continuous and fixed, and the only mode of
making them coincide with life is by arbitrarily
supposing positions of arrest therein. With
such arrests our concepts may be made con-
gruent. But these concepts are not "parts of
reality, not real positions taken by it, but sup-
positions rather, notes taken by ourselves, and
you can no more dip up the substance of real-
ity with them than you can dip up water with
a net, however finely meshed.

When we conceptualize, we cut out and fix,
and exclude everything but what we have fixed.
A concept means a that-and-no-other. Concep-
tually, time excludes space ; motion and rest ex-
clude each other ; approach excludes contact ;
presence excludes absence; unity excludes

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

plurality; independence excludes relativity;
' mine ' excludes ' yours ' ; this connexion ex-
cludes that connexion — and so on indefinitely ;
whereas in the real concrete sensible flux of
life experiences compenetrate each other so
that it is not easy to know just what is excluded
and what not. Past and future, for example,
conceptually separated by the cut to which we
give the name of present, and defined as being
the opposite sides of that cut, are to some
extent, however brief, co-present with each
other throughout experience. The literally
present moment is a purely verbal supposition,
not a position ; the only present ever realized
concretely being the ' passing moment ' in
which the dying rearward of time and its
dawning future forever mix their lights. Say
* now ' and it was even while you say it.

It is just intellectualism's attempt to sub-
stitute static cuts for units of experienced dura-
tion that makes real motion so unintelligible.
The conception of the first half of the interval
between Achilles and the tortoise excludes that

of the last half, and the mathematical neces-

254

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

sity of traversing it separately before the last
half is traversed stands permanently in the way
of the last half ever being traversed. Mean-
while the living Achilles (who, for the purposes
of this discussion, is only the abstract name of
one phenomenon of impetus, just as the tor-
toise is of another) asks no leave of logic. The
velocity of his acts is an indivisible nature in
them like the expansive tension in a spring
compressed. We define it conceptually as |,
but the s and t are only artificial cuts made
after the fact, and indeed most artificial when
we treat them in both runners as the same
tracts of ' objective ' space and time, for the
experienced spaces and times in which the
tortoise inwardly lives are probably as differ-
ent as his velocity from the same things in
Achilles. The impetus of Achilles is one con-
crete fact, and carries space, time, and conquest
over the inferior creature's motion indivisibly
in it. He perceives nothing, while running, of
the mathematician's homogeneous time and
space, of the infinitely numerous succession
of cuts in both, or of their order. End and

^55

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

beginning come for him in the one onrush,
and all that he actually experiences is that, in
the midst of a certain intense effort of his own,
the rival is in point of fact outstripped.

We are so inveterately wedded to the con-
ceptual decomposition of life that I know that
this will seem to you like putting muddiest con-
fusion in place of clearest thought, and relaps-
ing into a molluscoid state of mind. Yet I ask
you whether the absolute superiority of our
higher thought is so very clear, if all that it
can find is impossibility in tasks which sense-
experience so easily performs.

What makes you call real life confusion is
that it presents, as if they were dissolved in
one another, a lot of differents which concep-
tion breaks life's flow by keeping apart. But are
not differents actually dissolved in one another ?
Has n't every bit of experience its quality, its
duration, its extension, its intensity, its urgency,
its clearness, and many aspects besides, no one
of which can exist in the isolation in which
our verbalized logic keeps it ? They exist only
durcheinander. Reality always is, in M. Berg-

256

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

son's phrase, an endosmosis or conflux of the
same with the different: they compenetrate
and telescope. For conceptual logic, the same
is nothing but the same, and all sames with a
third thing are the same with each other. Not
so in concrete experience. Two spots on our
skin, each of which feels the same as a third
spot when touched along with it, are felt as dif-
ferent from each other. Two tones, neither dis-
tinguishable from a third tone, are perfectly
distinct from each other. The whole process
of life is due to life's violation of our logical
axioms. Take its continuity as an example.
Terms like A and C appear to be connected
by intermediaries, by B for example. Intel-
lectualism calls this absurd, for ' B-connected-
with-A' is, *as such,' a different term from
*B-connected-with-C.' But real life laughs at
logic's veto. Imagine a heavy log which takes
two men to carry it. First A and B take it.
Then C takes hold and A drops off; then D
takes hold and B drops off, so that C and D
now bear it; and so on. The log meanwhile
never drops, and keeps its sameness through-

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

out the journey. Even so it is with all our
experiences. Their changes are not complete
annihilations followed by complete creations of
something absolutely novel. There is partial
decay and partial growth, and all the while a
nucleus of relative constancy from which what
decays drops off, and which takes into itself
whatever is grafted on, until at length some-
thing wholly different has taken its place. In
such a process we are as sure, in spite of in-
tellectualist logic with its *as suches,' that it is
the same nucleus which is able now to make
connexion with what goes and again with what
comes, as we are sure that the same point can
lie on diverse lines that intersect there. With-
out being one throughout, such a universe is
continuous. Its members interdigitate with
their next neighbors in manifold directions,
and there are no clean cuts between them
anywhere.

The great clash of intellectualist logic with
sensible experience is where the experience is
that of influence exerted. Intellectualism de-
nies (as we saw^ in lecture ii) that finite things

258

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

can act on one another, for all things, once
translated into concepts, remain shut up to
themselves. To act on anything means to get
into it somehow; but that would mean to get
out of one's self and be one's other, which is
self-contradictory, etc. Meanwhile each of us
actually is his own other to that extent, livingly
knowing how to perform the trick which logic
tells us can't be done. My thoughts animate
and actuate this very body which you see and
hear, and thereby influence your thoughts. The
dynamic current somehow does get from me
to you, how^ever numerous the intermediary
conductors may have to be. Distinctions may
be insulators in logic as much as they like, but
in life distinct things can and do commune
together every moment.

The conflict of the two ways of knowing is
best summed up in the intellectualist doctrine
that *the same cannot exist in many relations.'
This follows of course from the concepts of the
two relations beine: so distinct that *what-is-
in-the-one' means *as such' something dis-
tinct from what * what-is-in-the-other ' means.

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

It is like Mill's ironical saying, that we should
not think of Newton as both an Englishman
and a mathematician, because an Englishman
as such Is not a mathematician and a mathema-
tician as such is not an Englishman. But the
real Newton was somehow both things at once ;
and throughout the whole finite universe each
real thing proves to be many diflerents without
undergoing the necessity of breaking into dis-
connected editions of itself.

These few indications will perhaps sufiice to
put you at the bergsonian point of view. The
immediate experience of life solves the problems
which so baffle our conceptual intelligence:
How can what is manifold be one ? how can
things get out of themselves ? how be their own
others ? how be both distinct and connected ?
how can they act on one another ? how be for
others and yet for themselves ? how be absent
and present at once ? The intellect asks these
questions much as we might ask how anything
can both separate and unite things, or how
sounds can grow more alike by continuing to
grow more diflFerent. If you already know space

260

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

sensibly, you can answer the former question
by pointing to any interval in it, long or short ;
if you know the musical scale, you can answer
the latter by sounding an octave ; but then you
must first have the sensible knowledge of these
realities. Similarly Bergson answers the intel-
lectualist conundrums by pointing back to our
various finite sensational experiences and say-
ing, ' Lo, even thus ; even so are these other
problems solved livingly.'

When you have broken the reality into con-
cepts you never can reconstruct it in its w^hole-
ness. Out of no amount of discreteness can you
manufacture the concrete. But place yourself
at a bound, or d'emblee, as M. Bergson says, in-
side of the living, moving, active thickness of
the real, and all the abstractions and distinc-
tions are given into your hand: you can now
make the intellectualist substitutions to your
heart's content. Install yourself in phenomenal
movement, for example, and velocity, succes-
sion, dates, positions, and innumerable other
things are given you in the bargain. But with
only an abstract succession of dates and posi-

261

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

tions you can never patch up movement itself.
It slips through their intervals and is lost.

So it is with every concrete thing, however
complicated. Our intellectual handling of it is
a retrospective patchwork, a post-mortem dis-
section, and can follow any order we find most
expedient. We can make the thing seem self-
contradictory whenever we wish to. But place
yourself at the point of view of the thing's
interior doing, and all these back-looking and
conflicting conceptions lie harmoniously in
your hand. Get at the expanding centre of a
human character, the elan vital of a man, as
Bergson calls it, by living sympathy, and at a
stroke you see how it makes those who see it
from without interpret it in such diverse ways.
It is something that breaks into both honesty
and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, stupid-
ity and insight, at the touch of varying circum-
stances, and you feel exactly why and how it
does this, and never seek to identify it stably
with any of these single abstractions. Only
your intellectualist does that, — and you now
also feel why he must do it to the end.

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VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

Place yourself similarly at the centre of a
man's philosophic vision and you understand
at once all the different things it makes him
write or say. But keep outside, use your post-
mortem method, try to build the philosophy
up out of the single phrases, taking first one
and then another and seeking to make them
fit, and of course you fail. You crawl over the
thing like a myopic ant over a building, tum-
bling into every microscopic crack or fissure,
finding nothing but inconsistencies, and never
suspecting that a centre exists. I hope that
some of the philosophers in this audience may
occasionally have had something different from
this intellectualist type of criticism applied to
their own works!

What really exists is not things made but
things in the making. Once made, they are
dead, and an infinite number of alternative con-
ceptual decompositions can be used in defining
them. But put yourself in the making by a
stroke of intuitive sympathy with the thing and,
the whole range of possible decompositions
coming at once into your possession, you are

263

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

no longer troubled with the question which of
them is the more absolutely true. Reality falls
in passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts
in living its own undivided life — it buds and
bourgeons, changes and creates. Once adopt
the movement of this life in any given instance
and you know what Bergson calls the devenir
reel by which the thing evolves and grows.
Philosophy should seek this kind of living
understanding of the movement of reality,
not follow science in vainly patching together
fragments of its dead results.

Thus much of M. Bergson's philosophy is
sufficient for my purpose in these lectures, so
here I will stop, leaving unnoticed all its other
constituent features, original and interesting
tho they be. You may say, and doubtless some
of you now are saying inwardly, that his re-
manding us to sensation in this wise is only a
regress, a return to that ultra-crude empiricism
which your own idealists since Green have
buried ten times over. I confess that it is in-
deed a return to empiricism, but I think that
the return in such accomplished shape only

264

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

proves the latter 's immortal truth. What won't
stay buried must have some genuine life. Avi
anfang war die tat; fact is a first; to which
all our conceptual handling comes as an inade-
quate second, never its full equivalent. When
I read recent transcendentalist literature — I
must partly except my colleague Royce ! — I
get nothing but a sort of marking of time,
champing of jaws, pawing of the ground, and
resettling into the same attitude, like a weary
horse in a stall with an empty manger. It is but
turning over the same few threadbare cate-
gories, bringing the same objections, and urg-
ing the same answers and solutions, with never
a new fact or a new horizon coming into sight.
But open Bergson, and new horizons loom on
every page you read. It is like the breath of
the morning and the song of birds. It tells of
reality itself, instead of merely reiterating what
dusty-minded professors have written about
what other previous professors have thought.
Nothing in Bergson is shop- worn or at second
hand.

That he gives us no closed-in system will of

^65

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

course be fatal to him in intellectualist eyes.
He only evokes and invites ; but he first annuls
the intellectualist veto, so that we now join step
with reality with a philosophical conscience
never quite set free before. As a french disci-
ple of his well expresses it : ' Bergson claims of
us first of all a certain inner catastrophe, and
not every one is capable of such a logical revo-
lution. But those who have once found them-
selves flexible enough for the execution of such
a psychological change of front, discover
somehow that they can never return again to
their ancient attitude of mind. They are now
Bergsonians . . . and possess the principal
thoughts of the master all at once. They have
understood in the fashion in which one loves,
they have caught the whole melody and can
thereafter admire at their leisure the original-
ity, the fecundity, and the imaginative genius
with which its author develops, transposes,
and varies in a thousand ways by the orches-
tration of his style and dialectic, the original
theme.' ^

This, scant as it is, is all I have to say about

266

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

Bergson on this occasion — I hope it may send
some of you to his original text. I must now
turn back to the point where I found it advis-
able to appeal to his ideas. You remember my
own intellectualist difficulties in the last lecture,
about how a lot of separate consciousnesses can
at the same time be one collective thing. How,
I asked, can one and the same identical content
of experience, of which on idealist principles
the esse is to be felt, be felt so diversely if itself
be the only feeler ? The usual way of escape
by *quatenus' or *as such' won't help us here
if we are radical intellectualists, I said, for ap-
pearance-together is as such not appearance-
apart, the world qua many is not the world
qua one, as absolutism claims. If we hold to
Hume's maxim, which later intellectualism
uses so well, that whatever things are distin-
guished are as separate as if there were no
manner of connexion between them, there
seemed no way out of the difficulty save by
stepping outside of experience altogether and
invoking different spiritual agents, selves or
souls, to realize the diversity required. But

267

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

this rescue by * scholastic entities ' I was unwill-
ing to accept any more than pantheistic ideal-
ists accept it.

Yet, to quote Fechner's phrase again, *nichts
wirkliches kann unmoglich sein,' the actual
cannot be impossible, and what is actual at
every moment of our lives is the sort of thing
which I now proceed to remind you of. You
can hear the vibration of an electric contact-
maker, smell the ozone, see the sparks, and feel
the thrill, co-consciously as it were or in one
field of experience. But you can also isolate
any one of these sensations by shutting out the
rest. If you close your eyes, hold your nose,
and remove your hand, you can get the sensa-
tion of sound alone, but it seems still the same
sensation that it was ; and if you restore the
action of the other organs, the sound coalesces
with the feeling, the sight, and the smell sen-
sations again. Now the natural way of talk-
ing of all this^ is to say that certain sensations
are experienced, now singly, and now together
with other sensations, in a common conscious
field. Fluctuations of attention give analogous

268

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

results. We let a sensation in or keep it
out by changing our attention ; and similarly
we let an item of memory in or drop it out.
[Please don't raise the question here of how
these changes come to pass. The immediate
condition is probably cerebral in every in-
stance, but it would be irrelevant now to con-
sider it, for now we are thinking only of results,
and I repeat that the natural way of thinking
of them is that which intellectualist criticism
finds so absurd.]

The absurdity charged is that the self-same
should function so differently, now with and
now without something else. But this it
sensibly seems to do. This very desk which
I strike with my hand strikes in turn your
eyes. It functions at once as a physical object
in the outer world and as a mental object in
our sundry mental worlds. The very body of
mine that my thought actuates is the body
whose gestures are your visual object and to
which you give my name. The very log which
John helped to carry is the log now borne by

James. The very girl you love is simultane-

269

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

ously entangled elsewhere. The very place be-
hind me is in front of you. Look where you
will, you gather only examples of the same amid
the different, and of different relations existing
as it were in solution in the same thing. Qua
this an experience is not the same as it is qua
that, truly enough ; but the quds are conceptual
shots of ours at its post-mortem remains, and
in its sensational immediacy everything is all
at once whatever different things it is at once
at all. It is before C and after A, far from
you and near to me, without this associate and
with that one, active and passive, physical and
mental, a whole of parts and part of a higher
whole, all simultaneously and without inter-
ference or need of doubling-up its being, so
long as we keep to what I call the * immediate '
point of view, the point of view in which we
follow our sensational life's continuity, and to
which all living language conforms. It is only
when you try — to continue using the hegelian
vocabulary — to 'mediate' the immediate, or
to substitute concepts for sensational life, that

intellectualism celebrates its triumph and the

270

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

immanent- self -contradictoriness of all this
smooth-running finite experience gets proved.
Of the oddity of inventing as a remedy for
the inconveniences resulting from this situa-
tion a supernumerary conceptual object called
an absolute, into which you pack the self-same
contradictions unreduced, I will say something
in the next lecture. The absolute is said to per-
form its feats by taking up its other into itself.
But that is exactly what is done when every
individual morsel of the sensational stream
takes up the adjacent morsels by coalescing
with them. This is just what we mean by the
stream's sensible continuity. No element there
outs itself off from any other element, as con-
cepts cut themselves from concepts. No part
there is so small as not to be a place of conflux.
No part there is not really next its neighbors ;
which means that there is literally nothing
between ; which means again that no part goes
exactly so far and no farther ; that no part ab-
solutely excludes another, but that they com-
penetrate and are cohesive ; that if you tear out
one, its roots bring out more with them ; that

271

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

whatever is real is telescoped and diffused into
other reals ; that, in short, every minutest thing
is already its hegelian ' own other,' in the fullest
sense of the term.

Of course this sounds self -contradictory, but
as the immediate facts don't sound at all, but
simply are, until we conceptualize and name
them vocally, the contradiction results only from
the conceptual or discursive form being sub-
stituted for the real form. But if, as Bergson
shows, that form is superimposed for practical
ends only, in order to let us jump about over life
instead of wading through it ; and if it cannot
even pretend to reveal anything of what life's
inner nature is or ought to be; why then we
can turn a deaf ear to its accusations. The
resolve to turn the deaf ear is the inner crisis
or 'catastrophe' of which M. Bergson's disciple
whom I lately quoted spoke. We are so subject
to the philosophic tradition which treats logos
or discursive thought generally as the sole ave-
nue to truth, that to fall back on raw un ver-
balized life as more of a revealer, and to think
of concepts as the merely practical things which

272

VI. BERGSON AND INTELLECTUALISM

Bergson calls them, comes very hard. It is put-
ting off our proud maturity of mind and becom-
ing again as foolish little children in the eyes of
reason. But diflScult as such a revolution is,
there is no other way, I believe, to the posses-
sion of reality, and I permit myself to hope that
some of you may share my opinion after you
have heard my next lecture.

VII

THE CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE

LECTURE VII

THE CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE

I FEAR that few of you will have been able to
obey Bergson's call upon you to look towards
the sensational life for the fuller knowledge of
reality, or to sympathize with his attempt to
limit the divine right of concepts to rule our
mind absolutely. It is too much like looking
downward and not up. Philosophy, you will
say, does n't lie flat on its belly in the middle
of experience, in the very thick of its sand and
gravel, as this Bergsonism does, never getting
a peep at anything from above. Philosophy
is essentially the vision of things from above.
It does n't simply feel the detail of things, it
comprehends their intelligible plan, sees their
forms and principles, their categories and
rules, their order and necessity. It takes the
superior point of view of the architect. Is it
conceivable that it should ever forsake that
point of view and abandon itself to a slovenly
life of immediate feeling ? To say nothing of

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

your traditional Oxford devotion to Aristotle
and Plato, the leaven of T. H. Green prob-
ably works still too strongly here for his anti-
sensationalism to be outgrown quickly. Green
more than any one realized that knowledge
about things was knowledge of their relations ;
but nothing could persuade him that our sen-
sational life could contain any relational ele-
ment. He followed the strict intellectualist
method with sensations. What they v/ere not
expressly defined as including, they must ex-
clude. Sensations are not defined as relations,
so in the end Green thought that they could get
relatedtogetheronly by the action on them from
above of a 'self-distinguishing' absolute and
eternal mind, present to that which is related,
but not related itself. 'A relation,' he said, 'is
not contingent with the contingency of feeling.
It is permanent with the permanence of the
combining and comparing thought which alone
constitutes it.' * In other words, relations are
purely conceptual objects, and the sensational
life as such cannot relate itself together. Sensa-
tion in itself, Green wrote, is fleeting, momen-

278

VII. CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE

tary, unnaraeable (because, while we name it^
it has become another), and for the same rea-
son unknowable, the very negation of know-
abiHty. Were there no permanent objects of
conception for our sensations to be 'referred
to,' there would be no significant names, but
only noises, and a consistent sensationalism
must be speechless. ^ Green's intellectualism
was so earnest that it produced a natural and
an inevitable effect. But the atomistic and
unrelated sensations which he had in mind
were purely fictitious products of his rationalist
fancy. The psychology of our own day dis-
avows them utterly,^ and Green's laborious
belaboring of poor old Locke for not having
first seen that his ideas of sensation were just
that impracticable sort of thing, and then fled
to transcendental idealism as a remedy, — his
belaboring of poor old Locke for this, I say, is
pathetic. Every examiner of the sensible life
in concreto must see that relations of every sort,
of time, space, difference, likeness, change,
rate, cause, or what not, are just as integral
members of the sensational flux as terms are,

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and that conjunctive relations are just as true
members of the flux as disjunctive relations
are/ This is what in some recent writings of
mine I have called the 'radically empiricist'
doctrine (in distinction from the doctrine of
mental atoms which the name empiricism
so often suggests). Intellectualistic critics
of sensation insist that sensations are dis-
joined only. Radical empiricism insists that
conjunctions between them are just as imme-
diately given as disjunctions are, and that
relations, whether disjunctive or conjunctive,
are in their original sensible givenness just as
fleeting and momentary (in Green's words),
and just as 'particular,' as terms are. Later,
both terms and relations get universalized by
being conceptualized and named. ^ But all the
thickness, concreteness, and individuality of
experience exists in the immediate and rela-
tively unnamed stages of it, to the richness of
which, and to the standing inadequacy of our
conceptions to match it, Professor Bergson so
emphatically calls our attention.

And now I am happy to say that we can begin

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to gather together some of the separate threads
of our argument, and see a Httle better the gen-
eral kind of conclusion toward which we are
tending. Pray go back with me to the lecture
before the last, and recall what I said about
the difficulty of seeing how states of conscious-
ness can compound themselves. The difficulty
seemed to be the same, you remember, whether
we took it in psychology as the composition of
finite states of mind out of simpler finite states,
or in metaphysics as the composition of the
absolute mind out of finite minds in general.
It is the general conceptualist diflBculty of any
one thing being the same with many things,
either at once or in succession, for the abstract
concepts of oneness and manyness must needs
exclude each other. In the particular instance
that we have dwelt on so long, the one thing
is the all-form of experience, the many things
are the each-forms of experience in you and
me. To call them the same we must treat them
as if each were simultaneously its own other, a
feat on conceptualist principles impossible of
performance.

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On the principle of going behind the con-
ceptual function altogether, however, and look-
ing to the more primitive flux of the sensa-
tional life for reality's true shape, a way is open
to us, as I tried in my last lecture to show.
Not only the absolute is its own other, but the
simplest bits of immediate experience are their
own others, if that hegelian phrase be once
for all allowed. The concrete pulses of expe-
rience appear pent in by no such definite limits
as our conceptual substitutes for them are con-
fined by. They run into one another continu-
ously and seem to interpenetrate. What in
them is relation and what is matter related is
hard to discern. You feel no one of them as
inwardly simple, and no two as wholly with-
out confluence where they touch. There is no
datum so small as not to show this mystery, if
mystery it be. The tiniest feeling that we can
possibly have comes with an earlier and a later
part and with a sense of their continuous pro-
cession. Mr. Shadworth Hodgson showed long
ago that there is literally no such object as
the present moment except as an unreal postu-

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late of abstract thought/ The * passing' mo-
ment is, as I already have reminded you, the
minimal fact, with the * apparition of differ-
ence ' inside of it as well as outside. If we do
not feel both past and present in one field
of feeling, we feel them not at all. We have
the same many-in-one in the matter that fills
the passing time. The rush of our thought
forward through its fringes is the everlasting
peculiarity of its life. We realize this life as
something always off its balance, something in
transition, something that shoots out of a dark-
ness through a dawn into a brightness that we
feel to be the dawn fulfilled. In the very midst
of the continuity our experience comes as an
alteration. * Yes,' we say at the full brightness,
'this is what I just meant.' 'No,' we feel at
the dawning, * this is not yet the full meaning,
there is more to come.' In every crescendo of
sensation, in every effort to recall, in every
progress towards the satisfaction of desire,
this succession of an emptiness and fulness
that have reference to each other and are one
flesh is the essence of the phenomenon. In

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every hindrance of desire the sense of an ideal
presence which is absent in fact, of an absent,
in a word, which the only function of the pre-
sent is to mean, is even more notoriously there.
And in the movement of pure thought we have
the same phenomenon. When I say Socrates
is mortal, the moment Socrates is incomplete;
it falls forward through the is which is pure
movement, into the mortal which is indeed bare
mortal on the tongue, but for the mind is that
mortal, the mortal Socrates, at last satisfactorily
disposed of and told off.^

Here, then, inside of the minimal pulses of
experience, is realized that very inner com-
plexity which the transcendentalists say only
the absolute can genuinely possess. The gist
of the matter is always the same — something
ever goes indissolubly with something else.
You cannot separate the same from its other,
except by abandoning the real altogether and
taking to the conceptual system. What is im-
mediately given in the single and particular
instance is always something pooled and mu-
tual, something with no dark spot, no point

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of ignorance. No one elementary bit of reality
is eclipsed from the next bit's point of view,
if only we take reality sensibly and in small
enough pulses — and by us it has to be taken
pulse-wise, for our span of consciousness is too
short to grasp the larger collectivity of things
except nominally and abstractly. No more of
reality collected together at once is extant any-
where, perhaps, than in my experience of read-
ing this page, or in yours of listening; yet
within those bits of experience as they come
to pass we get a fulness of content that no
conceptual description can equal. Sensational
experiences are their *own others,' then, both
internally and externally. Inwardly they are
one with their parts, and outwardly they pass
continuously into their next neighbors, so that
events separated by years of time in a man's
life hang together unbrokenly by the inter-
mediary events. Their names, to be sure, cut
them into separate conceptual entities, but no
cuts existed in the continuum in which they
originally came.

If, with all this in our mind, we turn to our

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own particular predicament, we see that our
old objection to the self-compounding of states
of consciousness, our accusation that it was
impossible for purely logical reasons, is un-
founded in principle. Every smallest state of
consciousness, concretely taken, overflows its
own definition. Only concepts are self-identi-
cal ; only * reason ' deals with closed equations ;
nature is but a name for excess ; every point
in her opens out and runs into the more ; and
the only question, with reference to any point
we may be considering, is how far into the
rest of nature we may have to go in order to
get entirely beyond its overflow. In the pulse
of inner life immediately present now in each
of us is a little past, a little future, a little
awareness of our own body, of each other's
persons, of these sublimities we are trying to
talk about, of the earth's geography and the
direction of history, of truth and error, of good
and bad, and of who knows how much more ?
Feeling, however dimly and subconsciously,
all these things, your pulse of inner life is con-
tinuous with them, belongs to them and they

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VII. CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE

to it. You can't identify it with either one of

them rather than with the others, for if you
let it develop into no matter which of those
directions, what it develops into will look back
on it and say, *That was the original germ of

me.'

In prmcipfc, then, the real units of our imme-
diately-felt life are unlike the units that intel-
lectualist logic holds to and makes its calcula-
tions with. They are not separate from their
own others, and you have to take them at
widely separated dates to find any two of them
that seem unblent. Then indeed they do ap-
pear separate even as their concepts are sep-
arate ; a chasm yawns between them ; but the
chasm itself is but an intellectualist fiction,
got by abstracting from the continuous sheet
of experiences with which the intermediary
time was filled. It is like the log carried first
by William and Henry, then by William,
Henry, and John, then by Henry and John,
then by John and Peter, and so on. All real
units of experience overlap. Let a row of equi-
distant dots on a sheet of paper symbolize the

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concepts by which we intellectual ize the world.
I^t a ruler long enough to cover at least three
dots stand for our sensible experience. Then
the conceived changes of the sensible expe-
rience can be symbolized by sliding the ruler
along the line of dots. One concept after an-
other will apply to it, one after another drop
away, but it will always cover at least two of
them, and no dots less than three will ever
adequately cover it. You falsify it if you treat
it conceptually, or by the law of dots.

What is true here of successive states must
also be true of simultaneous characters. They
also overlap each other with their being. My
present field of consciousness is a centre sur-
rounded by a fringe that shades insensibly into
a subconscious more. I use three separate
terms here to describe this fact ; but I might as
well use three hundred, for the fact is all shades
and no boundaries. Which part of it properly
is in my consciousness, w^hich out ? If I name
what is out, it already has come in. The centre
works in one way while the margins work in
another, and presently overpower the centre

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VII. CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE

and are central themselves. What we con-
ceptually identify ourselves with and say we
are thinking of at any time is the centre ; but
our full self is the whole field, with all those
indefinitely radiating subconscious possibilities
of increase that we can only feel without con-
ceiving, and can hardly begin to analyze. The
collective and the distributive ways of being
coexist here, for each part functions distinctly,
makes connexion with its own peculiar region
in the still wider rest of experience and tends
to draw us into that line, and yet the whole is
somehow felt as one pulse of our life, — not
conceived so, but felt so.

In principle, then, as I said, intellectual-
ism's edge is broken ; it can only approximate
to reality, and its logic is inapplicable to our
inner life, which spurns its vetoes and mocks
at its impossibilities. Every bit of us at every
moment is part and parcel of a wider self, it
quivers along various radii like the wind-rose
on a compass, and the actual in it is continu-
ously one with possibles not yet in our present
sight.® And just as we are co-conscious with

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

our own momentary margin, may not we our-
selves form the margin of some more really
central self in things which is co-conscious
with the whole of us ? May not you and I be
confluent in a higher consciousness, and con-
fluently active there, tho we now know it not ?
I am tiring myself and you, I know, by
vainly seeking to describe by concepts and
words what I say at the same time exceeds
either conceptualization or verbalization. As
long as one continues talking, intellectualism
remains in undisturbed possession of the field.
The return to life can't come about by talking.
It is an act; to make you return to life, I must
set an example for your imitation, I must
deafen you to talk, or to the importance of
talk, by showing you, as Bergson does, that the
concepts we talk with are made for purposes of
"practice and not for purposes of insight. Or I
must point, point to the mere that of life, and
you by inner sympathy must fill out the what
for yourselves. The minds of some of you, I
know, will absolutely refuse to do so, refuse to
think in non-conceptualized terms. I myself

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VII. CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE

absolutely refused to do so for years together,
even after I knew that the denial of manyness-
in-oneness by intellectualism must be false,
for the same reality does perform the most va-
rious functions at once. But I hoped ever for
a revised intellectualist way round the difficulty,
and it was only after reading Bergson that I
saw that to continue using the intellectualist
method was itself the fault. I saw that phi-
losophy had been on a false scent ever since
the days of Socrates and Plato, that an intel-
lectual answer to the intellectualist's difficul-
ties will never come, and that the real way out
of them, far from consisting in the discovery
of such an answer, consists in simply closing
one's ears to the question. When conceptual-
ism summons life to justify itself in conceptual
terms, it is like a challenge addressed in a
foreign language to some one who is absorbed
in his own business ; it is irrelevant to him alto-
gether — he may let it lie unnoticed. I went
thus through the 'inner catastrophe' of which
I spoke in the last lecture ; I had literally come
to the end of my conceptual stock-in-trade, I

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

was bankrupt intellectualistically, and had to
change my base. No words of mine will prob-
ably convert you, for words can be the names
only of concepts. But if any of you try sin-
cerely and pertinaciously on your own separate
accounts to intellectualize reality, you may be
similarly driven to a change of front. I say no
more : I must leave life to teach the lesson.

We have now reached a point of view from
which the self-compounding of mind in its
smaller and more accessible portions seems a
certain fact, and in which the speculative as-
sumption of a similar but wider compounding
in remoter regions must be reckoned with as a
legitimate hypothesis. The absolute is not the
impossible being I once thought it. Mental
facts do function both singly and together, at
once, and we finite minds may simultaneously
be co-conscious with one another in a super-
human intelligence. It is only the extravagant
claims of coercive necessity on the absolute's
part that have to be denied by a priori logic.
As an hypothesis trying to make itself probable
on analogical and inductive grounds, the abso-

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VII. CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE

lute is entitled to a patient hearing. Which
is as much as to say that our serious business
from now onward lies with Fechner and his
method, rather than with Hegel, Royce, or
Bradley. Fechner treats the superhuman con-
sciousness he so fervently believes in as an
hypothesis only, which he then recommends by
all the resources of induction and persuasion.
It is true that Fechner himself is an abso-
lutist in his books, not actively but passively, if
I may say so. He talks not only of the earth-
soul and of the star-souls, but of an integrated
soul of all things in the cosmos without excep-
tion, and this he calls God just as others call
it the absolute. Nevertheless he thinks only
of the subordinate superhuman souls, and con-
tent with havino' made his obeisance once for
all to the august total soul of the cosmos, he
leaves it in its lonely sublimity with no attempt
to define its nature. Like the absolute, it is
'out of range,' and not an object for distincter
vision. Psychologically, it seems to me that
Fechner 's God is a lazy postulate of his, rather
than a part of his system positively thought

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

out. As we envelop our sight and hearing, so
the earth-soul envelops us, and the star-soul
the earth-soul, until — what ? Envelopment
can't ffo on forever ; it must have an abschluss,
a total envelope must terminate the series, so
God is the name that Fechner gives to this
last all-en veloper. But if nothing escapes this
all-enveloper, he is responsible for everything,
including evil, and all the paradoxes and diflB-
culties which I found in the absolute at the
end of our third lecture recur undiminished.
Fechner tries sincerely to grapple with the
problem of evil, but he always solves it in
the leibnitzian fashion by making his God
non-absolute, placing him under conditions of
'metaphysical necessity' which even his om-
nipotence cannot violate. His will has to strug-
gle with conditions not imposed on that will
by itself. He tolerates provisionally what he
has not created, and then with endless patience
tries to overcome it and live it down. He has,
in short, a history. Whenever Fechner tries
to represent him clearly, his God becomes the
ordinary God of theism, and ceases to be the

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VII. CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE

absolutely totalized all-enveloper.® In this
shape, he represents the ideal element in
things solely, and is our champion and our
helper and we his helpers, against the bad
parts of the universe.

Feehner was in fact too little of a metaphy-
sician to care for perfect formal consistency
in these abstract regions. He believed in God
in the pluralistic manner, but partly from con-
vention and partly from what I should call in-
tellectual laziness, if laziness of any kind could
be imputed to a Feehner, he let the usual
monistic talk about him pass unchallenged. I
propose to you that we should discuss the
question of God without entangling ourselves
in advance in the monistic assumption. Is it
probable that there is any superhuman con-
sciousness at all, in the first place ? When that
is settled, the further question whether its form
be monistic or pluralistic is in order.

Before advancing to either question, how-
ever, and I shall have to deal with both but
very briefly after what has been said already, let
me finish our retrospective survey by one more

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remark about the curious logical situation of
the absolutists. For what have they invoked
the absolute except as a being the peculiar
inner form of which shall enable it to over-
come the contradictions with which intellectu-
alisra has found the finite manv as such to be
infected ? The many-in-one character that, as
we have seen, every smallest tract of finite
experience offers, is considered by intellectual-
ism to be fatal to the reality of finite experi-
ence. What can be distinguished, it tells us, is
separate ; and what is separate is unrelated, for
a relation, being a * between,' would bring only
a twofold separation. Hegel, Royce, Bradley,
and the Oxford absolutists in general seem to
agree about this logical absurdity of manyness-
in-oneness in the only places where it is empiri-
cally found. But see the curious tactics ! Is the
absurdity reduced in the absolute being whom
they call in to relieve it ? Quite otherwise,
for that being shows it on an infinitely greater
scale, and flaunts it in its very definition. The
fact of its not being related to any outward en-
vironment, the fact that all relations are inside

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VII. CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE

of itself, does n't save it, for Mr. Bradley's
great argument against the finite is that in any
given bit of it (a bit of sugar, for instance) the
presence of a plurality of characters (whiteness
and sweetness, for example) is self-contradic-
tory; so that in the final end all that the ab-
solute's name appears to stand for is the per-
sistent claim of outraged human nature that
reality shall not be called absurd. Somewhere
there must be an aspect of it guiltless of self-
contradiction. All we can see of the absolute,
meanwhile, is guilty in the same way in which
the finite is. Intellectualism sees what it calls
the guilt, when comminuted in the finite object ;
but is too near-sighted to see it in the more
enormous object. Yet the absolute's constitu-
tion, if imagined at all, has to be imagined after
the analogy of some bit of finite experience.
Take any reai bit, suppress its environment and
then magnify it to monstrosity, and you get
identically the type of structure of the abso-
lute. It is obvious that all your difficulties here
remain and go with you. If the relative expe-
rience was inwardly absurd, the absolute ex-

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

perience is infinitely more so. Intellectualism,
in short, strains off the gnat, but swallows the
whole camel. But this polemic against the
absolute is as odious to me as it is to you,
so I will say no more about that being. It is
only one of those wills of the wisp, those lights
that do mislead the morn, that have so often
impeded the clear progress of philosophy,
so I will turn to the more general positive
question of whether superhuman unities of
consciousness should be considered as more
probable or more improbable.

In a former lecture I went over some of the
fechnerian reasons for their plausibility, or
reasons that at least replied to our more obvi-
ous grounds of doubt concerning them. The
numerous facts of divided or split human per-
sonality which the genius of certain medical
men, as Janet, Freud, Prince, Sidis, and others,
have unearthed were unknown in Fechner's
time, and neither the phenomena of automatic
writing and speech, nor of mediumship and
' possession ' generally, had been recognized or
studied as we now study them, so Fechner's

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VII. CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE

stock of analogies is scant compared with our
present one. He did the best with what he
had, however. For my own part I find in some
of these abnormal or supernormal facts the
strongest suggestions in favor of a superior co-
consciousness being possible. I doubt whether
we shall ever understand some of them without
using the very letter of Fechner's conception
of a great reservoir in which the memories of
earth's inhabitants are pooled and preserved,
and from which, when the threshold lowers or
the valve opens, information ordinarily shut
out leaks into the mind of exceptional individ-
uals among us. But those regions of inquiry
are perhaps too spook-haunted to interest an
academic audience, and the only evidence I
feel it now decorous to bring to the support of
Fechner is drawn from ordinary religious ex-
perience. I think it may be asserted that there
are religious experiences of a specific nature,
not deducible by analogy or psychological
reasoning from our other sorts of experi-
ence. I think that they point with reasonable
probability to the continuity of our conscious-

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

ness with a wider spiritual environment from
which the ordinary prudential man (who is the
only man that scientific psychology, so called,
takes cognizance of) is shut off. I shall begin
my fiinal lecture by referring to them again
briefly.

VIII
CONCLUSIONS

LECTURE VIII
CONCLUSIONS

At the close of my last lecture I referred to
the existence of religious experiences of a spe-
cific nature. I must now explain just what I
mean by such a claim. Briefly, the facts I have
in mind may all be described as experiences
of an unexpected life succeeding upon death.
By this I don't mean immortality, or the death
of the body. I mean the deathlike termination
of certain mental processes within the individ-
ual's experience, processes that run to failure,
and in some individuals, at least, eventuate in
despair. Just as romantic love seems a com-
paratively recent literary invention, so these
experiences of a life that supervenes upon de-
spair seem to have played no great part in
official theology till Luther's time; and pos-
sibly the best way to indicate their character
will be to point to a certain contrast between
the inner life of ourselves and of the ancient
Greeks and Romans.

Mr. Chesterton, I think, says somewhere,

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

that the Greeks and Romans, in all that con-
cerned their moral life, were an extraordinarily
solemn set of folks. The Athenians thought
that the very gods must admire the rectitude
of Phocion and Aristides ; and those gentlemen
themselves were apparently of much the same
opinion. Cato's veracity was so impeccable
that the extremest incredulity a Roman could
express of anything was to say, ' I w ould not
believe it even if Cato had told me.' Good was
good, and bad was bad, for these people. Hy-
pocrisy, which church-Christianity brought in,
hardly existed; the naturalistic system held
firm; its values showed no hollowness and
brooked no irony. The individual, if virtuous
enough, could meet all possible requirements.
The pagan pride had never crumbled. Luther
was the first moralist who broke with any ef-
fectiveness through the crust of all this natu-
ralistic self-sufficiency, thinking (and possibly
he was right) that Saint Paul had done it al-
ready. Religious experience of the lutheran
type brings all our naturalistic standards to
bankruptcy. You are strong only by being

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VIII. CONCLUSIONS

weak, it shows. You cannot live on pride or
self-suflBcingness. There is a Hght in which
all the naturally founded and currently ac-
cepted distinctions, excellences, and safeguards
of our characters appear as utter childishness.
Sincerely to give up one's conceit or hope of
being good in one's own right is the only door
to the universe's deeper reaches.

These deeper reaches are familiar to evan-
gelical Christianity and to what is nowadays
becoming known as 'mind-cure' religion or
*new thought.' The phenomenon is that of
new ranges of life succeeding on our most de-
spairing moments. There are resources in us
that naturalism with its literal and legal vir-
tues never recks of, possibilities that take our
breath away, of another kind of happiness and
power, based on giving up our own will and
letting something higher work for us, and these
seem to show a world wider than either physics
or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a
world in which all is well, in spite of certain
forms of death, indeed because of certain forms
of death — death of hope, death of strength,

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

death of responsibility, of fear and worry, com-
petency and desert, death of everything that
paganism, naturalism, and legalism pin their
faith on and tie their trust to.

Reason, operating on our other experiences,
even our psychological experiences, would
never have inferred these specifically religious
experiences in advance of their actual coming.
She could not suspect their existence, for they
are discontinuous with the 'natural' experi-
ences they succeed upon and invert their val-
ues. But as they actually come and are given,
creation widens to the view of their recipients.
They suggest that our natural experience, our
strictly moralistic and prudential experience,
may be only a fragment of real human experi-
ence. They soften nature's outlines and open
out the strangest possibilities and perspectives.

This is why it seems to me that the logical
understanding, working in abstraction from
such specifically religious experiences, will al-
ways omit something, and fail to reach com-
pletely adequate conclusions. Death and fail-
ure, it will always say, are death and failure

306

VIII. CONCLUSIONS

simply, and can nevermore be one with life;
so religious experience, peculiarly so called,
needs, in my opinion, to be carefully consid-
ered and interpreted by every one who aspires
to reason out a more complete philosophy.

The sort of belief that religious experience
of this type naturally engenders in those who
have it is fully in accord with Fechner's theo-
ries. To quote words which I have used else-
where, the believer finds that the tenderer
parts of his personal life are continuous with a
more of the same quality which is operative in
the universe outside of him and which he can
keep in working touch with, and in a fashion
get on board of and save himself, when all his
lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck. In
a word, the believer is continuous, to his own
consciousness, at any rate, with a wider self
from which saving experiences flow in. Those
who have such experiences distinctly enough
and often enough to live in the light of them
remain quite unmoved by criticism, from what-
ever quarter it may come, be it academic or
scientific, or be it merely the voice of logical

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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

common sense. They have had their vision
and they know — that is enough — that we in-
habit an invisible spiritual environment from
which help comes, our soul being mysteriously
one with a larger soul whose instruments we
are.

One may therefore plead, I think, that Fech-
ner's ideas are not without direct empirical
verification. There is at any rate one side of
life which would be easily explicable if those
ideas were true, but of which there appears no
clear explanation so long as we assume either
with naturalism that human consciousness is
the highest consciousness there is, or with
dualistic theism that there is a higher mind in
the cosmos, but that it is discontinuous with
our own. It has always been a matter of sur-
prise with me that philosophers of the absolute
should have shown so little interest in this de-
partment of life, and so seldom put its pheno-
mena in evidence, even when it seemed obvious
that personal experience of some kind must
have made their confidence in their own vision
so strong. The logician's bias has always been

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VIII. CONCLUSIONS

too much with them. They have preferred the
thinner to the thicker method, dialectical ab-
straction being so much more dignified and
academic than the confused and unwholesome
facts of personal biography.

In spite of rationalism's disdain for the par-
ticular, the personal, and the unwholesome, the
drift of all the evidence we have seems to me
to sweep us very strongly towards the belief
in some form of superhuman life with which we
may, unknown to ourselves, be co-conscious.
We may be in the universe as dogs and cats
are in our libraries, seeing the books and hear-
ing the conversation, but having no inkling of
the meaning of it all. The intellectualist ob-
jections to this fall away when the authority
of intellectualist logic is undermined by criti-
cism, and then the positive empirical evidence
remains. The analogies with ordinary psy-
chology and with the facts of pathology, with
those of psychical research, so called, and with
those of religious experience, establish, when
taken together, a decidedly formidable proba-
bility in favor of a general view of the world

309

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

almost identical with Fechner's. The outlines
of the superhuman consciousness thus made
probable must remain, however, very vague,
and the number of functionally distinct * selves '
it comports and carries has to be left entirely
problematic. It may be polytheistically or it
may be monotheistically conceived of. Fech-
ner, with his distinct earth-soul functioning as
our guardian angel, seems to me clearly poly-
theistic ; but the word * polytheism ' usually
gives offence, so perhaps it is better not to use
it. Only one thing is certain, and that is the
result of our criticism of the absolute : the only
way to escape from the paradoxes and perplex-
ities that a consistently thought-out monistic
universe suffers from as from a species of auto-
intoxication— the mystery of the * fall ' namely,
of reality lapsing into appearance, truth into
error, perfection into imperfection ; of evil, in
short; the mystery of universal determinism,
of the block-universe eternal and without a
history, etc.; — the only way of escape, I say,
from all this is to be frankly pluralistic and as-
sume that the superhuman consciousness, how-

310

VIII. CONCLUSIONS

ever vast it may be, has itself an external envi-
ronment, and consequently is finite. Present
day monism carefully repudiates complicity
with spinozistic monism. In that, it explains,
the many get dissolved in the one and lost,
whereas in the improved idealistic form they
get preserved in all their manyness as the one's
eternal object. The absolute itself is thus re-
presented by absolutists as having a pluralistic
object. But if even the absolute has to have a
pluralistic vision, why should we ourselves hes-
itate to be pluralists on our own sole account.'^
Why should we envelop our many with the
* one ' that brings so much poison in its train ?

The line of least resistance, then, as it seems
to me, both in theology and in philosophy, is to
accept, along with the superhuman conscious-
ness, the notion that it is not all-embracing, the
notion, in other words, that there is a God, but
that he is finite, either in power or in know-
ledge, or in both at once. These, I need hardly
tell you, are the terms in which common men
have usually carried on their active commerce
with God; and the monistic perfections that

311

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

make the notion of him so paradoxical practi-
cally and morally are the colder addition of
remote professorial minds operating in distans
upon conceptual substitutes for him alone.

Why cannot * experience ' and ' reason ' meet
on this common ground ? Why cannot they
compromise ? May not the godlessness usu-
ally but needlessly associated with the philoso-
phy of immediate experience give way to a
theism now seen to follow directly from that
experience more widely taken ? and may not
rationalism, satisfied with seeing her a 'priori
proofs of God so effectively replaced by em-
pirical evidence, abate something of. hgr abso-
lutist claims ? Let God but have the least
infinitesimal other of any kind beside him,
and empiricism and rationalism might strike
hands in a lasting treaty of peace. Both might
then leave abstract thinness behind them, and
seek together, as scientific men seek, by using
all the analogies and data within reach, to
build up the most probable approximate idea
of what the divine consciousness concretely
may be like. I venture to beg the younger

31S

VIII. CONCLUSIONS

Oxford idealists to consider seriously this al-
ternative. Few men are as qualified by their
intellectual gifts to reap the harvests that seem
certain to any one who, like Fechner and Berg-
son, will leave the thinner for the thicker path^
Compromise and mediation are inseparable
from the pluralistic philosophy. Only monistic
dogmatism can say of any of its hypotheses,
'It is either that or nothing; take it or leave it
just as it stands.' The type of monism preva-
lent at Oxford has kept this steep and brit-
tle attitude, partly through the proverbial aca-
demic preference for thin and elegant logical
solutions, partly from a mistaken notion that
the only solidly grounded basis for religion
was along those lines. If Oxford men could
be ignorant of anything, it might almost seem
that they had remained ignorant of the great
empirical movement towards a pluralistic
1^ panpsychic view of the universe, into which
our own generation has been drawn, and
whkh threatens to short-circuit their meth-
ods entirely and become their religious rival
unless they are willing to make themselves its

313

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

allies. Yet, wedded as they seem to be to the
logical machinery and technical apparatus of
absolutism, I cannot but believe that their
fidelity to the religious ideal in general is
deeper still. Especially do I find it hard to
believe that the more clerical adherents of the
school would hold so fast to its particular ma-
chinery if only they could be made to think
that religion could be secured in some other
way. Let empiricism once become associated
with religion, as hitherto, through some strange
misunderstanding, it has been associated with
irreligion, and I believe that a new era of reli-
gion as well as of philosophy will be ready to
begin. That great awakening of a new popular
interest in philosophy, which is so striking a
phenomenon at the present day in all coun-
tries, is undoubtedly due in part to religious de-
mands. As the authority of past tradition tends
more and more to crumble, men naturally turn
a wistful ear to the authority of reason or to the
evidence of present fact. They will assuredly
not be disappointed if they open their minds to
what the thicker and more radical empiricism

314

VIII. CONCLUSIONS

has to say. I fully believe that such an empiri-
cism is a more natural ally than dialectics ever
were, or can be, of the religious life. It is true
that superstitions and wild-growing over-beliefs
of all sorts will undoubtedly begin to abound if
the notion of higher consciousnesses enveloping
ours, of fechnerian earth-souls and the like,
grows orthodox and fashionable ; still more will
they superabound if science ever puts her ap-
proving stamp on the phenomena of which
Frederic Myers so earnestly advocated the
scientific recognition, the phenomena of psychic
research so-called — and I myself firmly be-
lieve that most of these phenomena are rooted
in reality. But ought one seriously to allow
such a timid consideration as that to deter one
from following the evident path of greatest
religious promise ? Since when, in this mixed
world, was any good thing given us in purest
outline and isolation ? One of the chief charac-
teristics of life is life's redundancy. The sole
condition of our having anything, no matter
what, is that we should have so much of it, that
we are fortunate if we do not grow sick of the

315

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

sight and sound of it altogether. Everything
is smothered in the litter that is fated to ac-
company it. Without too much you cannot
have enough, of anything. Lots of inferior
books, lots of bad statues, lots of dull speeches,
of tenth-rate men and women, as a condition
of the few precious specimens in either kind
being realized ! The gold-dust comes to birth
with the quartz-sand all around it, and this
is as much a condition of religion as of any
other excellent possession. There must be
extrication ; there must be competition for
survival ; but the clay matrix and the noble gem
must first come into being unsifted. Once
extricated, the gem can be examined separately,
conceptualized, defined, and insulated. But
this process of extrication cannot be short-
circuited — or if it is, you get the thin inferior
abstractions which we have seen, either the
hollow unreal god of scholastic theology, or
the unintelligible pantheistic monster, instead
of the more living divine reality with which
it appears certain that empirical methods tend
to connect men in imagination.

316

VIII. CONCLUSIONS

Arrived at this point, I ask you to go back
to my first lecture and remember, if you can,
what I quoted there from your own Professor
Jacks — what he said about the philosopher
himself being taken up into the universe which
he is accounting for. This is the fechnerian
as well as the hegelian view, and thus our end
rejoins harmoniously our beginning. Philoso-
phies are intimate parts of the universe, they
express something of its own thought of itself.
A philosophy may indeed be a most momen-
tous reaction of the universe upon itself. It
may, as I said, possess and handle itself dif-
ferently in consequence of us philosophers, with
our theories, being here; it may trust itself or
mistrust itself the more, and, by doing the one
or the other, deserve more the trust or the mis-
trust. What mistrusts itself deserves mistrust,
-nrhis is the philosophy of humanism in the
widest sense. Our philosophies swell the cur-
rent of being, add their character to it. They
are part of all that we have met, of all that
makes us be. As a French philosopher says,
*Nous sommes du reel dans le reel.' Our

317

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

thoughts determine our acts, and our acts rede-
termine the previous nature of the world.

Thus does foreignness get banished from
our world, and far more so when we take the
system of it pluralistically than when we take
it monistically. We are indeed internal parts
of God and not external creations, on any
possible reading of the panpsychic system.
Yet because God is not the absolute, but is
himself a part when the system is conceived
pluralistically, his functions can be taken as
not wholly dissimilar to those of the other
smaller parts, — as similar to our functions
consequently.

Having an environment, being in time, and
working out a history just like ourselves, he
escapes from the foreignness from all that is
human, of the static timeless perfect abso-
lute.

Remember that one of our troubles with that
was its essential foreignness and monstrosity —
there really is no other word for it than that.
Its having the all-inclusive form gave to it an
essentially heterogeneous nature from our-

318

VIII. CONCLUSIONS

selves. And this great difiFerence between ab-
solutism and pluralism demands no difference
in the universe's material content — it follows
from a difference in the form alone. The all-
form or monistic form makes the foreignness
result, the each-form or pluralistic form leaves
the intimacy undisturbed.

No matter what the content of the universe
may be, if you only allow that it is many every-
where and always, that nothing real escapes
from having an environment; so far from
defeating its rationality, as the absolutists so
unanimously pretend, you leave it in posses-
sion of the maximum amount of rationality
practically attainable by our minds. Your rela-
tions with it, intellectual, emotional, and active,
remain fluent and congruous with your own
nature's chief demands. y^

It would be a pity if the word ' rationality '
were allowed to give us trouble here. It is one
of those eulogistic words that both sides claim
— for almost no one is willing to advertise his
philosophy as a system of irrationality. But
like most of the words which people used eulo-

319

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

gistically , the word ' rational ' carries too many
meanings. The most objective one is that of
the older logic — the connexion between two
things is rational when you can infer one from
the other, mortal from Socrates, e, g.; and you
can do that only when they have a quality in
common. But this kind of rationality is just
that logic of identity which all disciples of Hegel
find insufficient. They supersede it by the
higher rationality of negation and contradic-
tion and make the notion vague again. Then
you get the aesthetic or teleologic kinds of ra-
tionality, saying that whatever fits in any way,
whatever is beautiful or good, whatever is pur-
posive or gratifies desire, is rational in so far
forth. Then again, according to Hegel, what-
ever is *rear is rational. I myself said awhile
ago that whatever lets loose any action which we
are fond of exerting seems rational. It would be
better to give up the word ' rational ' altogether
than to get into a merely verbal fight about
who has the best right to keep it.
'^Perhaps the words * f oreignness ' and * inti-
macy,' which I put forward in my first lecture,

3£0

VIII. CONCLUSIONS

express the contrast I insist on better than the
words * rationality ' and * irrationality' — let us
stick to them, then. I now say that the notion
of the 'one' breeds foreignness and that of the
'many ' intimacy, for reasons which I have
urged at only too great length, and with which,
whether they convince you or not, I may sup-
pose that you are now well acquainted. But
what at bottom is meant by calling the universe
many or by calling it one ?

Pragmatically interpreted, pluralism or the
doctrine that it is many means only that the
sundry parts of reality may be externally re-
lated. Everything you can think of, however
vast or inclusive, has on the pluralistic view a
genuinely 'external' environment of some sort
or amount. Things are 'with' one another in
many ways, but nothing includes everything,
or dominates over everything. The word ' and '
trails along after every sentence. Something
always escapes. 'Ever not quite' has to be said
of the best attempts made anywhere in the
universe at attaining all-inclusiveness. The
pluralistic world is thus more like a federal

321

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

republic than like an empire or a kingdom.
However much may be collected, however
much may report itself as present at any
effective centre of consciousness or action,
something else is self-governed and absent and
unreduced to unity.

Monism, on the other hand, insists that when
you come down to reality as such, to the reality
of realities, everything is present to everything
else in one vast instantaneous co-implicated
completeness — nothing can in any sense, func-
tional or substantial, be really absent from
anything else, all things interpenetrate and
telescope together in the great total conflux.

For pluralism, all that we are required to
admit as the constitution of reality is what we
ourselves find empirically realized in every
minimum of finite life. Briefly it is this, that
nothing real is absolutely simple, that every
smallest bit of experience is a multum in parvo
plurally related, that each relation is one as-
pect, character, or function, way of its being
taken, or way of its taking something else ; and
that a bit of reality when actively engaged in

322

VIII. CONCLUSIONS

one of these relations is not by that very fact
engaged in all the other relations simulta-
neously. The relations are not all what the
French call solidaires with one another. With-
out losing its identity a thing can either take
up or drop another thing, like the log I spoke
of, which by taking up new carriers and drop-
ping old ones can travel anywhere with a light
escort.

For monism, on the contrary, everything,
whether we realize it or not, drags the whole
universe along with itself and drops nothing.
The log starts and arrives with all its carriers
supporting it. If a thing were once discon-
nected, it could never be connected again, ac-
cording to monism. The pragmatic difference
between the two systems is thus a definite one.
It is just thus, that if a is once out of sight of b
or out of touch with it, or, more briefly, *out'
of it at all, then, according to monism, it must
always remain so, they can never get together ;
whereas pluralism admits that on another oc-
casion they may work together, or in some
way be connected again. Monism allows for no

323

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

such things as * other occasions' in reahty —
in real or absolute reahty, that is.

The difference I try to describe amounts,
you see, to nothing more than the difference
between what I formerly called the each-form
and the all-form of reality. Pluralism lets
things really exist in the each-form or distribu-
tively. Monism thinks that the all-form or col-
lective-unit form is the only form that is ra-
tional. The all-form allows of no taking up
and dropping of connexions, for in the all the
parts are essentially and eternally co-implicated.
In the each-form, on the contrary, a thing may
be connected by intermediary things, with a
thing with which it has no immediate or essen-
tial connexion. It is thus at all times in many
possible connexions which are not necessarily
actualized at the moment. They depend on
which actual path of intermediation it may
functionally strike into : the word * or ' names
a genuine reality. Thus, as I speak here, I may
look ahead or to the right or to the left, and in
either case the intervening space and air and
ether enable me to see the faces of a different

324

VIII. CONCLUSIONS

portion of this audience. My being here is
independent of any one set of these faces.

If the each-form be the eternal form of
reahty no less than it is the form of temporal
appearance, we still have a coherent world,
and not an incarnate incoherence, as is charged
by so many absolutists. Our *multiverse' still
makes a 'universe' ; for every part, tho it may
not be in actual or immediate connexion, is
nevertheless in some possible or mediated con-
nexion, with every other part however remote,
through the fact that each part hangs together
with its very next neighbors in inextricable
interfusion. The type of union, it is true, is
different here from the monistic type of all-
einheit. It is not a universal co-implication,
or integration of all things durcheinander. It
is what I call the strung-along type, the type
of continuity, contiguity, or concatenation. If
you prefer greek words, you may call it the
synechistic type. At all events, you see that it
forms a definitely conceivable alternative to the
through -and- through unity of all things at once,

which is the type opposed to it by monism. You

325

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

see also that it stands or falls with the notion I
have taken such pains to defend, of the through-
and-through union of adjacent minima of
experience, of the confluence of every passing
moment of concretely felt experience with its
immediately next neighbors. The recognition
of this fact of coalescence of next with next
in concrete experience, so that all the insulat-
ing cuts we make there are artificial products
of the conceptualizing faculty, is what distin-
guishes the empiricism which I call 'radical,'
from the bugaboo empiricism of the tradi-
tional rationalist critics, which (rightly or
wrongly) is accused of chopping up experience
into atomistic sensations, incapable of union
with one another until a purely intellectual
principle has swooped down upon them from
on high and folded them in its own conjunc-
tive categories.

Here, then, you have the plain alternative,
and the full mystery of the difference between
pluralism and monism, as clearly as I can set
it forth on this occasion. It packs up into a
nutshell: — Is the manyness in oneness that

326

VIII. CONCLUSIONS

indubitably characterizes the world we in-
habit, a property only of the absolute whole of
things, so that you must postulate that one-
enormous-whole indivisibly as the prius of
there being any many at all — in other words,
start with the rationalistic block-universe,
entire, unmitigated, and complete ? — or can
the finite elements have their own aboriginal
forms of manyness in oneness, and where they
have no immediate oneness still be continued
into one another by intermediary terms — each
one of these terms being one with its next
neighbors, and yet the total 'oneness' never
getting absolutely complete ?

The alternative is definite. It seems to me,
moreover, that the two horns of it make prag-
matically different ethical appeals — at least
they may do so, to certain individuals. But if
you consider the pluralistic horn to be intrinsi-
cally irrational, self-contradictory, and absurd,
I can now say no more in its defence. Having
done what I could in my earlier lectures to
break the edge of the intellectualistic reduc-
tiones ad absurdum, I must leave the issue in

327

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

your hands. Whatever I may say, each of you
will be sure to take pluralism or leave it, just
as your own sense of rationality moves and
inclines. The only thing I emphatically insist
upon is that it is a fully co-ordinate hypothe-
sis with monism. This world may, in the last
resort, be a block-universe; but on the other
hand it may be a universe only strung-along,
not rounded in and closed. Reality may exist
distributively just as it sensibly seems to, after
all. On that possibility I do insist.

One's general vision of the probable usually
decides such alternatives. They illustrate
what I once wrote of as the *will to believe.'
In some of my lectures at Harvard I have
spoken of what I call the 'faith-ladder,' as
something quite different from the sorites of the
logic-books, yet seeming to have an analogous
form. I think you will quickly recognize in
yourselves, as I describe it, the mental process
to which I give this name.

A conception of the world arises in you
somehow, no matter how. Is it true or not.^
you ask.

328

VIII. CONCLUSIONS

It might be true somewhere, you say, for it
is not self -contradictory.

It may be true, you continue, even here and
now.

It is fit to be true, it would be well if it were
true, it ought to be true, you presently feel.

It must be true, something persuasive in you
whispers next; and then — as a final result —

It shall be held for true, you deciae ; it shall be
as if true, for you.

And your acting thus may in certain special
cases be a means of making it securely true in
the end.

Not one step in this process is logical, yet it
is the way in which monists and pluralists alike
espouse and hold fast to their visions. It is life
exceeding logic, it is the practical reason for
which the theoretic reason finds arguments
after the conclusion is once there. In just this
way do some of us hold to the unfinished plu-
ralistic universe ; in just this way do others hold
to the timeless universe eternally complete.

Meanwhile the incompleteness of the plural-
istic universe, thus assumed and held to as the

3^9

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

most probable hypothesis, is also represented
by the pluralistic philosophy as being self-
reparative through us, as getting its discon-
nections remedied in part by our behavior.
' We use what we are and have, to know ; and
what we know, to be and have still more.' ^
Thus do philosophy and reality, theory and
action, work in the same circle indefinitely. .

I have now finished these poor lectures, and
as you look back on them, they doubtless seem
rambling and inconclusive enough. My only
hope is that they may possibly have proved
suggestive; and if indeed they have been sug-
gestive of one point of method, I am almost
willing to let all other suggestions go. That
point is that it is high time for the basis of dis-
cussion in these questions to he broadened and
thickened up. It is for that that I have brought
in Fechner and Bergson, and descriptive psy-
chology and religious experiences, and have
ventured even to hint at psychical research
and other wild beasts of the philosophic desert.

Owing possibly to the fact that Plato and

330

VIII. CONCLUSIONS

Aristotle, with their intellectualism, are the
basis of philosophic study here, the Oxford
brand of transcendentalism seems to me to
have confined itself too exclusively to thin
logical considerations, that would hold good
in all conceivable worlds, worlds of an empiri-
cal constitution entirely different from ours.
It is as if the actual peculiarities of the world
that is were entirely irrelevant to the content
of truth. But they cannot be irrelevant; and
the philosophy of the future must imitate the
sciences in taking them more and more elabo-
rately into account. I urge some of the younger
members of this learned audience to lay this
hint to heart. If you can do so effectively,
making still more concrete advances upon the
path which Fechner and Bergson have so
enticingly opened up, if you can gather phi-
losophic conclusions of any kind, monistic or
pluralistic, from the particulars of life, I will
say, as I now do say, with the cheerfuUest
of hearts, 'Ring out, ring out my mournful
rhymes, but ring the fuller minstrel in.'

NOTES

LECTURE I

Note 1, page 5. — Bailey : op. cit.y First Series, p. 52.

Note 2, page 11. — Smaller Logic, § 194.

Note 3, page 16. — Exploraiio philosophical Part I, 1865,
pp. xxxviii, 130.

Note 4, page 20. — Hinneberg : Die Kultur der Gegenwart :
Systematische Philosophic. Leipzig: Teubner, 1907.

LECTURE II

Note 1, page 50. — The difference is that the bad parts of
this finite are eternal and essential for absolutists, whereas
pluralists may hope that they will eventually get sloughed off
and become as if they had not been.

Note 2, page 51. — Quoted by W. Wallace: Lectures and
Essays, Oxford, 1898, p. 560.

Note 3, page 51. — Logic, tr. Wallace, 1874, p. 181.

Note 4, page 52. — Ihid., p. 304.

Note 5, page 53. — Contemporary Review, December, 1907,
vol. 92, p. 618.

Note 6, page 57. — Metaphysic, sec. 69 ff.

Note 7, page 62. — The World and the Individual, vol. i,
pp. 131-132.

Note 8, page 67. — A good illustration of this is to be found
in a controversy between Mr. Bradley and the present writer,
in Mind for 1893, Mr. Bradley contending (if I understood him
rightly) that * resemblance* is an illegitimate category, because
it admits of degrees, and that the only real relations in compari-
son are absolute identity and absolute non-comparability.

335

NOTES

Note 9, page 75. — Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, p. 184.

Note 10, page 75. — Appearance and Reality, 1893, pp. 141-
142.

Note 11, page 76. — Cf. Elements of Metaphjsics, p. 88.

Note 12, page 77. — Some Dogmas of Religion, p. 184.

Note 13, page 80. — For a more detailed criticism of Mr.
Bradley's intellectualism, see Appendix A.

LECTURE III

Note 1, page 94. — Hegel, Smaller Logic, pp. 184-185.

Note 2, page 95. — Cf. Hegel's fine vindication of this func-
tion of contradiction in his Wissenschaft der Logik, Bk. ii, sec.
1, chap, ii, C, Anmerkung 3.

Note 3, page 95. — Hegel, in Blackwood's Philosophical
Classics, p. 162.

Note 4, page 95. — Wissenschaft der Logik, Bk. i, sec. 1,
chap, ii, B, a.

Note 5, page 96. — Wallace's translation of the Smaller
Logic, p. 128.

Note 6, page 101. — Joachim, The Nature of Truth, Ox-
ford, 1906, pp. 22, 178. The argument in case the belief should
be doubted would be the higher synthetic idea : if two truths
were possible, the duality of that possibility would itself be
the one truth that would unite them.

Note 7, page 115. — The World and the Individual, vol. ii,
pp. 385, 386, 409.

Note 8, page 116. — The best uninspired argument (again
not ironical !) which I know is that in Miss M. W. Calkins's
excellent book. The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, Mac-
millan, 1902.

Note 9, page 117. —Cf. Dr. Fuller's excellent article, * Eth-

336

NOTES

ical monism and the problem of evil,' in the Harvard Journal
of Theology, vol. i, No. 2, April, 1908.

Note 10, page 120. — Metaphysic, sec. 79.

Note 11, page 121. — Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic ,
sees. 150, 153.

Note 12, page 121. — The Nature of Truth, 1906, pp. 170-
171.

Note 13, page 121. —/M., p. 179.

Note 14, page 123. — The psychological analogy that cer-
tain finite tracts of consciousness are composed of isolable parts
added together, cannot be used by absolutists as proof that
such parts are essential elements of all consciousness. Other
finite fields of consciousness seem in point of fact not to be
similarly resolvable into isolable parts.

Note 15, page 128. — Judging by the analogy of the rela-
tion which our central consciousness seems to bear to that
of our spinal cord, lower ganglia, etc., it would seem natural
to suppose that in whatever superhuman mental synthesis
there may be, the neglect and elimination of certain contents
of which we are conscious on the human level might be as
characteristic a feature as is the combination and interweav-
ing of other human contents.

LECTURE IV

Note 1, page 143. — The Spirit of Modern Philosophy,
p. 227.

Note 2, page 165. — Fechner: Uber die Seelenfrage, 1861,
p. 170.

Note 3, page 168. — Fechner's latest summarizing of his
views, Die Tagesansicht gegenuher der Nachiansicht, Leipzig,
1879, is now, I understand, in process of translation. His

337

NOTES

Little Book of Life after Death exists already in two American
versions, one published by Little, Brown & Co., Boston, the
other by the Open Court Co., Chicago.

Note 4, page 176. — Mr. Bradley ought to be to som€
degree exempted from my attack in these last pages. Com-
pare especially what he says of non-human consciousness in
his Appearance and Reality , pp. 269-272.

LECTURE V

Note 1, page 182. — Royce: The Spirit of Modern Philo-
sophy y p. 379.

Note 2, page 184. — The World and the Individual, vol. ii,
pp. 58-62.

Note 3, page 190. — I hold to it still as the best description
of an enormous number of our higher fields of consciousness.
They demonstrably do not contain the lower states that know
the same objects. Of other fields, however this is not so true;
so, *n the Psychological Review for 1895, vol. ii, p. 105 (see
especially pp. 119-120), I frankly withdrew, in principle,
my former objection to talking of fields of consciousness
being made of simpler * parts,' leaving the facts to decide the
question in each special case.

Note 4, page 194. — I abstract from the consciousness
attached to the whole itself, if such consciousness be there.

LECTURE VI

Note 1, page 250. — For a more explicit vindication of the
notion of activity, see Appendix B, where I try to defend its
recognition as a definite form of immediate experience against
its rationalistic critics.

338

NOTES

I subjoin here a few remarks destined to disarm some possi-
ble critics of Professor Bergson, who, to defend himself against
misunderstandings of his meaning, ought to amplify and more
fully explain his statement that concepts have a practical but
not a theoretical use. Understood in one way, the thesis
sounds indefensible, for by concepts we certainly increase our
knowledge about things, and that seems a theoretical achieve-
ment, whatever practical achievements may follow in its train.
Indeed, M. Bergson might seem to be easily refutable out of
his own mouth. His philosophy pretends, if anything, to give
a better insight into truth than rationalistic philosophies give;
yet what is it in itself if not a conceptual system ? Does its
author not reason by concepts exclusively in his very attempt
to show that they can give no insight?

To this particular objection, at any rate, it is easy to reply.
In using concepts of his own to discredit the theoretic claims
of concepts generally, Bergson does not contradict, but on the
contrary emphatically illustrates his own view of their practical
role, for they serve in his hands only to 'orient' us, to show us
to what quarter we must 'practically turn if we wish to gain
that completer insight into reality which he denies that they
can give. He directs our hopes away from them and towards
the despised sensible flux. What he reaches by their means is
thus only a new practical attitude. He but restores, against
the vetoes of intellectualist philosophy, our naturally cordial
relations with sensible experience and common sense. This
service is surely only practical ; but it is a service for which we
may be almost immeasurably grateful. To trust our senses
again with a good philosophic conscience! — who ever con-
ferred on us so valuable a freedom before ?

By making certain distinctions and additions it seems easy
to meet the other counts of the indictment. Concepts are reali-

339

NOTES

ties of a new order, with particular relations between them.
These relations are just as much directly perceived, when we
compare our various concepts, as the distance between two
sense-objects is perceived when we look at it. Conception is
an operation which gives us material for new acts of percep-
tion, then; and when the results of these are written down,
we get those bodies of 'mental truth' (as Locke called it)
known as mathematics, logic, and a priori metaphysics. To
know all this truth is a theoretic achievement, indeed, but it
is a narrow one; for the relations between conceptual objects
as such are only the static ones of bare comparison, as dif-
ference or sameness, congruity or contradiction, inclusion or
exclusion. Nothing happens in the realm of concepts ; rela-
tions there are * eternal' only. The theoretic gain fails so
far, therefore, to touch even the outer hem of the real world,
the world of causal and dynamic relations, of activity and
history. To gain insight into all that moving life, Bergson
is right in turning us away from conception and towards
perception.

By combining concepts with percepts, we can draw maps of
the distribution of other percepts in distant space and time. To
know this distribution is of course a theoretic achievement,
but the achievement is extremely limited, it cannot be effected
without percepts, and even then what it yields is only static
relations. From maps we learn positions only, and the po-
sition of a thing is but the slightest kind of truth about it;
but, being indispensable for forming our plans of action, the
conceptual map-making has the enormous practical impor-
tance on which Bergson so rightly insists.

But concepts, it will be said, do not only give us eternal
truths of comparison and maps of the positions of things, they
bring new values into life. In their mapping function they

340

NOTES

stand to perception in general in the same relation in which
sight and hearing stand to touch — Spencer calls these higher
senses only organs of anticipatory touch. But our eyes and
ears also open to us worlds of independent glory: music
and decorative art result, and an incredible enhancement
of life's value follows. Even so does the conceptual world
bring new ranges of value and of motivation to our life. Its
maps not only serve us practically, but the mere mental
possession of such vast pictures is of itself an inspiring good.
New interests and incitements, and feelings of power, sub-
limity, and admiration are aroused.

Abstractness per se seems to have a touch of ideality.
RoYCE*s * loyalty to loyalty ' is an excellent example. * Causes, *
as anti-slavery, democracy, liberty, etc., dwindle when realized
in their sordid particulars. The veritable ' cash- value' of the
idea seems to cleave to it only in the abstract status. Truth
at large, as Royce contends, in his Philosophy a] Loyalty,
appears another thing altogether from the true particulars
in which it is best to believe. It transcends in value all those
'expediencies,' and is something to live for, whether expedient
or inexpedient. Truth with a big T is a * momentous issue';
truths in detail are *poor scraps,' mere * crumbling successes.'
(Op. ci7.. Lecture VII, especially § v.)

Is, now, such bringing into existence of a new value to be
regarded as a theoretic achievement } The question is a nice
one, for altho a value is in one sense an objective quality per-
ceived, the essence of that quality is its relation to the will, and
consists in its being a dynamogenic spur that makes our action
different. So far as their value-creating function goes, it would
thus appear that concepts connect themselves more with our
active than with our theoretic life, so here again Bergson's
formulation seems unobjectionable. Persons who have certain

341

NOTES

concepts are animated otherwise, pursue their own vital
careers differently. It does n't necessarily follow that they
understand other vital careers more intimately.

Again it may be said that we combine old concepts into new
ones, conceiving thus such realities as the ether, God, souls,
or what not, of which our sensible life alone would leave us
altogether ignorant. This surely is an increase of our know-
ledge, and may well be called a theoretical achievement. Yet
here again Bergson's criticisms hold good. Much as concep-
tion may tell us about such invisible objects, it sheds no ray of
light into their interior. The completer, indeed, our defini-
tions of ether-waves, atoms, Gods, or souls become, the less
instead of the more intelligible do they appear to us. The
learned in such things are consequently beginning more and
more to ascribe a solely instrumental value to our concepts
of them. Ether and molecules may be like co-ordinates and
averages, only so many crutches by the help of which we
g[)ractically perform the operation of getting about among
our sensible experiences.

We see from these considerations how easily the question of
whether the function of concepts is theoretical or practical
may grow into a logomachy. It may be better from this point
of view to refuse to recognize the alternative as a sharp one.
The sole thing that is certain in the midst of it all is that Berg-
son is absolutely right in contending that the whole life of
activity and change is inwardly impenetrable to conceptual
treatment, and that it opens itself only to sympathetic appre-
hension at the hands of immediate feeling. All the whats as
well as the thats of reality, relational as well as terminal, are in
the end contents of immediate concrete perception. Yet the re-
moter unperceived arrangements, temporal, spatial, and logical,
of these contents, are also something that we need to know as

342

NOTES

well for the pleasure of the knowing as for the practical help.
We may call this need of arrangement a theoretic need or a
practical need, according as we choose to lay the emphasis; but
Bergson is accurately right when he limits conceptual know-
ledge to arrangement, and when he insists that arrangement
is the mere skirt and skin of the whole of what we ought to
know.

Note 2, page 266. — Gaston Rageot, Revue Philosophiqtie,
vol. Ixiv, p. 85 (July, 1907).

Note 3, page 268. — I have myself talked in other ways as
plausibly as I could, in my Psychology^ and talked truly (as
I believe) in certain selected cases; but for other cases the
natural way invincibly comes back.

LECTURE VII

Note 1, page 278. — Introduction to Hume, 1874, p. 151.

Note 2, page 279. — Ihid., pp. 16, 21, 36, et passim.

Note 3, page 279. — See, inter alia, the chapter on the
'Stream of Thought' in my own Psychologies; H. Cornelius,
Psychologic, 1897, chaps, i and iii; G. H. Luquet, Idees Gene-
rales de Psychologic, 1906, passim.

Note 4, page 280. — Compare, as to all this, an article by
the present writer, entitled *A world of pure experience,' in
the Journal of Philosophy, New York, vol. i, pp. 533, 561
(1905).

Note 5, page 280. — Green's attempt to discredit sensations
by reminding us of their 'dumbness,' in that they do not come
already named, as concepts may be said to do, only shows
how intellectualism is dominated by verbality. The unnamed
appears in Green as synonymous with the unreal.

Note 6, page 283. — Philosophy of Reflection, i, 248 flF.

343

NOTES

Note 7, page 284. — Most of this paragraph is extracted
from an address of mine before the American Psychological
Association, printed in the Psychological Review^ vol. ii,
p. 105. I take pleasure in the fact that already in 1895 I
was so far advanced towards my present bergsonian position.

Note 8, page 289. — The conscious self of the moment, the
central self, is probably determined to this privileged position
by its functional connexion with the body's imminent or pre-
sent acts. It is the present acting self. Tho the more that sur-
rounds it may be * subconscious' to us, yet if in its * collective
capacity ' it also exerts an active function, it may be conscious
in a wider way, conscious, as it were, over our heads.

On the relations of consciousness to action see Bergson's
Matiere et Memoire, passim, especially chap. i. Compare also
the hints in Munsterberg's Grundziige der Psychologies chap.
XV ; those in my own Principles of Psychology, vol. ii, pp. 581-
592 ; and those in W. McDougall's Physiological Psychology,
chap. vii.

Note 9, page 295. — Compare Zend-Avesta, 2d edition, vol.
i, pp. 165 ff., 181, 206, 244 ff., etc.; Die Tagesansicht, etc.,
chap. V, § 6; and chap. xv.

LECTURE VIII

Note 1, page 330. — Blondel : Annales de Philosophie ChrS"
tienne, June, 1906, p. 241.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS*

Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent.
The active sense of living which we all enjoy, before
reflection shatters our instinctive world for us, is self-
luminous and suggests no paradoxes. Its diflSculties
are disappointments and uncertainties. They are not
intellectual contradictions.

When the reflective intellect gets at work, however, it
discovers incomprehensibilities in the flowing process.
Distinguishing its elements and parts, it gives them
separate names, and what it thus disjoins it cannot
easily put together. Pyrrhonism accepts the irrationality
and revels in its dialectic elaboration. Other philoso-
phies try, some by ignoring, some by resisting, and some
by turning the dialectic procedure against itself, negat-
ing its first negations, to restore the fluent sense of life
again, and let redemption take the place of innocence.
The perfection with which any philosophy may do this
is the measure of its human success and of its importance
in philosophic history. In an article entitled *A world
of pure experience,' ^ I tried my own hand sketchily at

* Reprinted from the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and
Scientific Methods, vol. ii, New York, 1905, with slight verbal revision.

' Journal of Philosophy^ Psychology, and Scientific Methods^ vol. i.
No. 20, p. 566.

347

APPENDIX A

the problem, resisting certain first steps of dialectics by
insisting in a general way that the immediately expe-
rienced conjunctive relations are as real as anything else.
If my sketch is not to appear too naif, I must come
closer to details, and in the present essay I propose to

do so.

*Pure experience' is the name which I gave to the
immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to
our later reflection with its conceptual categories. Only
new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs,
illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experi-
ence pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet
any definite what, tho ready to be all sorts of whats ; full
both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects that
don't appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly
that its phases interpenetrate and no points, either of
distinction or of identity, can be caught. Pure experi-
ence in this state is but another name for feeling or
sensation. But the flux of it no sooner comes than it
tends to fill itself with emphases, and these salient parts
become identified and fixed and abstracted; so that
experience now flows as if shot through with adjec-
tives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions.
Its purity is only a relative term, meaning the pro-
portional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still
embodies.

348

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

Far back as we go, the flux, both as a whole and in its
parts, is that of things conjunct and separated. The
great continua of time, space, and the self envelop
everything, betwixt them, and flow together without
interfering. The things that they envelop come as
separate in some ways and as continuous in others.
Some sensations coalesce with some ideas, and others
are irreconcilable. Qualities compenetrate one space,
or exclude each other from it. They cling together
persistently in groups that move as units, or else they
separate. Their changes are abrupt or discontinuous;
and their kinds resemble or differ; and, as they do so,
they fall into either even or irregular series.

In all this the continuities and the discontinuities
are absolutely co-ordinate matters of immediate feeling.
The conjunctions are as primordial elements of *fact'
as are the distinctions and disjunctions. In the same
act by which I feel that this passing minute is a new
pulse of my life, I feel that the old life continues into
it, and the feeling of continuance in no wise jars upon
the simultaneous feeling of a novelty. They, too, com-
penetrate harmoniously. Prepositions, copulas, and
conjunctions, *is,' Ms n't,' *then,' *before,' *in,' *on,'
* beside,' * between,' 'next,' 'Hke,' 'unlike,' *as,' *but,'
flower out of the stream of pure experience, the stream
of concretes or the sensational stream, as naturally as
nouns and adjectives do, and they melt into it again as

349

APPENDIX A

fluidly when we apply them to a new portion of the

stream.

If now we ask why we must translate experience from
a more concrete or pure into a more intellectualized
form, filling it with ever more abounding conceptual
distinctions, rationalism and naturalism give different
replies.

The rationalistic answer is that the theoretic life is
absolute and its interests imperative; that to understand
is simply the duty of man ; and that who questions this
need not be argued with, for by the fact of arguing he
gives away his case.

The naturalist answer is that the environment kills
as well as sustains us, and that the tendency of raw
experience to extinguish the experient himself is lessened
just in the degree in which the elements in it that have a
practical bearing upon life are analyzed out of the con-
tinuum and verbally fixed and coupled together, so that
we may know what is in the wind for us and get ready
to react in time. Had pure experience, the naturalist
says, been always perfectly healthy, there would never
have arisen the necessity of isolating or verbalizing any
of its terms. We should just have experienced inarticu-
lately and unintellectually enjoyed. This leaning on
* reaction' in the naturalist account implies that, when-
ever we intellectualize a relatively pure experience, we

350

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

ought to do so for the sake of redescending to the purer
or more concrete level again; and that if an intellect stays
aloft among its abstract terms and generalized relations,
and does not reinsert itself with its conclusions into
some particular point of the immediate stream of life, it
fails to finish out its function and leaves its normal race
unrun.

Most rationalists nowadays will agree that natural-
ism gives a true enough account of the way in which our
intellect arose at first, but they will deny these latter
implications. The case, they will say, resembles that of
sexual love. Originating in the animal need of getting
another generation born, this passion has developed
secondarily such imperious spiritual needs that, if you
ask why another generation ought to be born at all, the
answer is: 'Chiefly that love may go on.' Just so with
our intellect : it originated as a practical means of serving
life; but it has developed incidentally the function of
understanding absolute truth; and life itself now seems
to be given chiefly as a means by which that function
may be prosecuted. But truth and the understanding of
it lie among the abstracts and universals, so the intellect
now carries on its higher business wholly in this region,
without any need of redescending into pure experience
again.

If the contrasted tendencies which I thus designate
as naturalistic and rationalistic are not recognized by

351

APPENDIX A

the reader, perhaps an example will make them more
concrete. Mr. Bradley, for instance, is an ultra-ration-
alist. He admits that our intellect is primarily practical,
but says that, for philosophers, the practical need is
simply Truth. ^ Truth, moreover, must be assumed
* consistent.' Immediate experience has to be broken
into subjects and qualities, terms and relations, to be
understood as truth at all. Yet when so broken it is less
consistent than ever. Taken raw, it is all undistinguished.
Intellectualized, it is all distinction without oneness.
*Such an arrangement may work, but the theoretic
problem is not solved' (p. 23). The question is, * Hmc
the diversity can exist in harmony with the oneness '
(p. 118). To go back to pure experience is unavailing.
'Mere feeling gives no answer to our riddle' fp. 104).
Even if your intuition is a fact, it is not an understanding.
*It is a mere experience, and furnishes no consistent
\iew ' fpp. 108-109). The experiences offered as facts or
truths ' I find that my intellect rejects because they con-
tradict themselves. They offer a complex of diversities
conjoined in a way which it feels is not its way and
which it cannot repeat as its own. . . . For to be satis-
fied, my intellect must understand, and it cannot under-
stand by taking a congeries in the lump' Tp. 570). So
Mr. Bradley, in the sole interests of 'understanding'
(as he conceives that function), turns his back on finite

' Appearance and Reality, pp. 152-153.
352

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

experience forever. Truth must He in the opposite direc-
' tion, the direction of the absolute; and this kind of
rationah'sm and naturalism, or (as I will now call it;
pragmatism, walk thenceforward upon opposite paths.
f For the one, those intellectual products are most true
which, turning their face towards the absolute, come
nearest to symbolizing its ways of uniting the many and
the one. For the other, those are most true which most
successfully dip back into the finite stream of feeling
and grow most easily confluent with some particular
/ wave or wavelet. Such confluence not only proves the
V^intellectual operation to have been true (as an addition
may * prove' that a subtraction is already rightly per-
formed), but it constitutes, according to pragmatism, all
that we mean by calling it true. Only in so far as they
lead us, successfully or unsuccessfully, into sensible
experience again, are our abstracts and universals true
or false at all.

In Section the 6th of my article, *A world of pure
experience,' I adopted in a general way the common-
sense belief that one and the same world is cognized by
our different minds; but I left undiscussed the dialectical
arguments which maintain that this is logically absurd.
The usual reason given for its being absurd is that it
assumes one object (to wnt, the world) to stand in

353

APPENDIX A

two relations at once; to my mind, namely, and again
to yours; whereas a term taken in a second relation
cannot logically be the same term which it was at
first.

I have heard this reason urged so often in discuss-
ing with absolutists, and it would destroy my radical
empiricism so utterly, if it were valid, that I am bound
to give it an attentive ear, and seriously to search its
strength.

For instance, let the matter in dispute be a term 3/,
asserted to be on the one hand related to Z, and on the
other to N ; and let the two cases of relation be symbol-
ized by i — M and M — N respectively. When, now,
I assume that the experience may immediately come
and be given in the shape L — M — iV, with no trace of
doubling or internal fission in the M, I am told that this
is all a popular delusion; that L — M — N logically
means two different experiences, L — M and M — iV,
namely; and that although the absolute may, and indeed
must, from its superior point of view, read its own kind
of unity into M 's two editions, yet as elements in finite
experience the two M 's lie irretrievably asunder, and
the world between them is broken and unbridged.

In arguing this dialectic thesis, one must avoid slipping
from the logical into the physical point of view. It would
be easy, in taking a concrete example to fix one's ideas
by, to choose one in which the letter M should stand for

354

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

a collective noun of some sort, which noun, being re-
lated to L by one of its parts and to N by another,
would inwardly be two things when it stood outwardly
in both relations. Thus, one might say: * David Hume,
who weighed so many stone by his body, influences
posterity by his doctrine/ The body and the doctrine
are two things, between which our finite minds can dis-
cover no real sameness, though the same name covers
both of them. And then, one might continue: 'Only
an absolute is capable of uniting such a non-identity.*
We must, I say, avoid this sort of example; for the
dialectic insight, if true at all, must apply to terms and
relations universally. It must be true of abstract units
as well as of nouns collective; and if we prove it by
concrete examples, we must take the simplest, so as to
avoid irrelevant material suggestions.

Taken thus in all its generality, the absolutist conten-
tion seems to use as its major premise Hume's notion
'that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences,
and that the mind never perceives any real connexion
among distinct existences.' Undoubtedly, since we use
two phrases in talking first about *M's relation to i'
and then again about *i/'s relation to iV,' we must be
having, or must have had, two distinct perceptions ; —
and the rest would then seem to follow duly. But the
starting-point of the reasoning here seems to be the
fact of the two 'phrases; and this suggests that the

355

APPENDIX A

argument may be merely verbal. Can it be that the
whole dialectic achievement consists in attributing to
the experience talked-about a constitution similar to
that of the language in which we describe it ? Must
we assert the objective doubleness of the M merely
because we have to name it twice over when we
name its two relations ?

Candidly, I can think of no other reason than this for
the dialectic conclusion! ^ for, if we think, not of our
words, but of any simple concrete matter which they
may be held to signify, the experience itself belies the
paradox asserted. We use indeed two separate concepts
in analyzing our object, but we know them all the while
to be but substitutional, and that the M in L — M and
the M \n M — N mean {i. e., are capable of leading to
and terminating in) one self-same piece, M, of sensible
experience. This persistent identity of certain units, or
emphases, or points, or objects, or members — call
them what you will — of the experience-continuum, is
just one of those conjunctive features of it, on which
I am obliged to insist so emphatically. For samenesses
are parts of experience's indefeasible structure. When
I hear a bell-stroke and, as life flows on, its after-
image dies away, I still hark back to it as 'that same

* Technically, it seems classable as a 'fallacy of composition.' A
duality, predicable of the two wholes, L — M and M — iV, is forth-
with predicated of one of their parts, M,

356

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

bell-stroke.* When I see a thing If, with L to the left
of it and N to the right of it, I see it as one M ; and if
you tell me I have had to ' take ' it twice, I reply that if I
*took* it a thousand times, I should still see it as a unit. ^
Its unity is aboriginal, just as the multiplicity of my
successive takings is aboriginal. It comes unbroken
as tliat My as a singular which I encounter; they come
broken, as those takings, as my plurality of operations.
The unity and the separateness are strictly co-ordinate.
I do not easily fathom why my opponents should find
the separateness so much more easily understandable
that they must needs infect the whole of finite experi-
ence with it, and relegate the unity (now taken as a bare
postulate and no longer as a thing positively perceivable)
to the region of the absolute's mysteries. I do not easily
fathom this, I say, for the said opponents are above
mere verbal quibbling; yet all that I can catch in their
talk is the substitution of what is true of certain words
for what is true of what they signify. They stay with
the words, — not returning to the stream of life whence
all the meaning of them came, and which is always ready
to reabsorb them.

* I may perhaps refer here to my Principles of Psychology, vol. i,
pp. 459 ff . It really seems ' weird ' to have to argue (as I am forced now
to do) for the notion that it is one sheet of paper (with its two surfaces
and all that lies between) which is both under my pen and on the
table while I write — the 'claim' that it is two sheets seems so brazen.
Yet I sometimes susp)ect the absolutists of sincerity !

357

APPENDIX A

For aught this argument proves, then, we may con-
tinue to believe that one thing can be known by many
knowers. But the denial of one thing in many relations
is but one application of a still profounder dialectic
diflficulty. Man can't be good, said the sophists, for man
is man and good is good ; and Hegel and Herbart in their
day, more recently H. Spir, and most recently and
elaborately of all, Mr. Bradley, inform us that a term
can logically only be a punctiform unit, and that not
one of the conjunctive relations between things, which
experience seems to yield, is rationally possible.

Of course, if true, this cuts off radical empiricism
without even a shilling. Radical empiricism takes con-
junctive relations at their face-value, holding them to be
as real as the terms united by them. The world it re-
presents as a collection, some parts of which are con-
junctively and others disjunctively related. Two parts,
themselves disjoined, may nevertheless hang together
by intermediaries with which they are severally con-
nected, and the whole world eventually may hang to-
gether similarly, inasmuch as some path of conjunctive
transition by which to pass from one of its parts to
another may always be discernible. Such determinately
various hanging- together may be called concatenated
union, to distinguish it from the * through-and-through '
type of union, *each in all and all in each' (union of

358

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

total conflux, as one might call it), which monistic sys-
tems hold to obtain when things are taken in their ab-
solute reality. In a concatenated world a partial conflux
often is experienced. Our concepts and our sensations
are confluent; successive states of the same ego, and
feelings of the same body are confluent. Where the ex-
perience is not of conflux, it may be of conterminousness
(things with but one thing between) ; or of contiguous-
ness (nothing between) ; or of likeness ; or of nearness ;
^>^ of simultaneousness ; or of in-ness ; or of on-ness ;
or of for-ness ; or of simple with-ness ; or even of mere
and-ness, which last relation would make of however
disjointed a world otherwise, at any rate for that
occasion a universe 'of discourse.* Now Mr. Brad-
ley tells us that none of these relations, as we actually
experience them, can possibly be real.^ My next duty,
accordingly, must be to rescue radical empiricism
from Mr. Bradley. Fortunately, as it seems to me, his
general contention, that the very notion of relation is

* Here again the reader must beware of slipping from logical into
phenomenal considerations. It may well be that we attribute a certain
relation falsely, because the circumstances of the case, being complex,
have deceived us. At a railway station we may take our own train, and
not the one that fills our window, to be moving. We here put motion
in the wrong place in the world, but in its original place the motion is
a part of reality. What Mr. Bradley means is nothing like this, but
rather that such things as motion are nowhere real, and that, even in
their aboriginal and empirically incorrigible seats, relations are impos-
sible of comprehension.

359

APPENDIX A

unthinkable clearly, has been successfully met by many
critics/

It is a burden to the flesh, and an injustice both to
readers and to the previous writers, to repeat good argu-
ments already printed. So, in noticing Mr. Bradley, I
will confine myself to the interests of radical empiricism
solely.

The first duty of radical empiricism, taking given
conjunctions at their face- value, is to class some of them
as more intimate and some as more external. When two
terms are similar, their very natures enter into the rela-
tion. Being what they are, no matter where or when,
the likeness never can be denied, if asserted. It con-
tinues predicable as long as the terms continue. Other
relations, the where and the when, for example, seem
adventitious. The sheet of paper may be *off ' or *on'
the table, for example; and in either case the relation
involves only the outside of its terms. Having an outside,
both of them, they contribute by it to the relation. It is
external : the term's inner nature is irrelevant to it. Any

* Particularly so by Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, in his Man and
the Cosmos; by L. T. Hobhouse, in chapter xii (the Validity of
Judgment) of his Theory of Knowledge; and by F. C. S. Schiller, in
his Humanism, Essay XI. Other fatal reviews (in my opinion) are
Hodder's, in the Psychological Review, vol. i, 307; Stout's, in the
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1901-02, p. 1 ; and MacLen-
nan's, in the Journal of Philosophy, etc., vol. i, 403.

360

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

book, any table, may fall into the relation, which is
created 'pro hac vice, not by their existence, but by their
casual situation. It is just because so many of the con-
junctions of experience seem so external that a philoso-
phy of pure experience must tend to pluralism in its
ontology. So far as things have space-relations, for ex-
ample, we are free to imagine them with different origins
even. If they could get to be, and get into space at all,
then they may have done so separately. Once there,
however, they are additives to one another, and, with
no prejudice to their natures, all sorts of space-relations
may supervene between them. The question of how
things could come to be, anyhow, is wholly different
from the question what their relations, once the being
accomplished, may consist in.

Mr. Bradley now affirms that such external relations
as the space-relations which we here talk of must hold
of entirely different subjects from those of which the ab-
sence of such relations might a moment previously have
been plausibly asserted. Not only is the situation differ-
ent when the book is on the table, but the book itself is
different as a book, from what it was when it was off
the table.* He admits that *such external relations

' Once more, don't slip from logical into physical situations. Of
course, if the table be wet, it will moisten the book, or if it be slight
enough and the book heavy enough, the book will break it down. But
such collateral phenomena are not the point at issue. The point is
whether the successive relations 'on' and 'not-on' can rationally (not

361

APPENDIX A

seem possible and even existing. . . . That you do not
alter what you compare or rearrange in space seems
to common sense quite obvious, and that on the other
side there are as obvious difficulties does not occur to
common sense at all. And I will begin by pointing
out these difficulties. . . . There is a relation in the
result, and this relation, we hear, is to make no difference
in its terms. But, if so, to what does it make a difference ?
[does n't it make a difference to us onlookers, at least ?]
and what is the meaning and sense of qualifying the
terms by it ? [Surely the meaning is to tell the truth about
their relative position.^] If, in short, it is external to the
terms, how can it possibly be true of them ? [Is it the
intimacy ' suggested by the little word 'of/ here, which
I have underscored, that is the root of Mr. Bradley's
trouble ?] . , , If the terms from their inner nature do
not enter into the relation, then, so far as they are con-
cerned, they seem related for no reason at all. . . .
Things are spatially related, first in one way, and then
become related in another way, and yet in no way them-

I^ysically) hold of the same constant terms, abstractly taken. Profes-
sor A. E. Taylor drops from logical into material considerations when
he instances color-contrast as a proof that A, 'as contra-distinguished
from B, is not the same thing as mere A not in any way affected'
{Elements of Metaphysics, 1903, p. 145). Note the substitution, for
'related,' of the word 'affected,' which begs the whole question.

* But 'is there any sense,' asks Mr. Bradley, peevishly, on p. 579,
*and if so, what sense, in truth that is only outside and "about " things ?*
Surely such a question may be left unanswered.

362

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

selves are altered ; for the relations, it is said, are but
external. But I reply that, if so, I cannot understand
the leaving by the terms of one set of relations and their
adoption of another fresh set. The process and its result
to the terms, if they contribute nothing to it [surely they
contribute to it all there is *of ' it J] seem irrational
throughout. [If 'irrational* here means simply * non-
rational y' or non-deducible from the essence of either term
singly y it is no reproach ; if it means * contradicting ' such
essencCy Mr. Bradley should show wherein and how.^ But,
if they contribute anything, they must surely be affected
internally. [Why sOy if they contribute only their surface ?
In such relations as ^on, ^ a foot away, ^between,* ^nexi^
etc., only surf aces are in question.] ... If the terms con-
tribute anything whatever, then the terms are affected
[inwardly altered ?] by the arrangement. . . . That for
working purposes we treat, and do well to treat, some
relations as external merely, I do not deny, and that of
course is not the question at issue here. That question
is . . . whether in the end and in principle a mere ex-
ternal relation [i. e., a relation which can change without
forcing its terms to change their nature simultaneously]
is possible and forced on us by the facts.* ^

Mr. Bradley next reverts to the antinomies of space,
which, according to him, prove it to be unreal, although
it appears as so prolific a medium of external relations ;

* Appearance and Realityy 2d edition, pp. 575-576.
363

APPENDIX A

and he then concludes that * Irrationality and exter-
nality cannot be the last truth about things. Somewhere
there must be a reason why this and that appear together.
And this reason and reality must reside in the whole
from which terms and relations are abstractions, a whole
in which their internal connexion must lie, and out of
which from the background appear those fresh results
which never could have come from the premises ' (p. 577).
And he adds that 'Where the whole is different, the
terms that qualify and contribute to it must so far be
different. . . . They are altered so far only [how far ?
farther than externally, yet not through and through?],
but still they are altered. ... I must insist that in each
case the terms are qualified by their whole [qualified
how? — do their external relations, situations, dates, etc.,
changed as these are in the new whole, fail to qualify them
*far* enough ?], and that in the second case there is a
whole which differs both logically and psychologically
from the first whole ; and I urge that in contributing to
the change the terms so far are altered' (p. 579).

Not merely the relations, then, but the terms are al-
tered: und zwar *so far.' But just how far is the whole
problem; and *through-and-through' would seem (in
spite of Mr. Bradley's somewhat undecided utterances ^)

* I say 'undecided,' because, apart from the 'so far,' which sounds
terribly half-hearted, there are passagjes in these very pages in which
Mr. Bradley admits the pluralistic thesis. Read, for example, what he
says, on p. 578, of a billiard ball keeping its 'character' unchanged,

364

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

to be the full bradleyan answer. The * whole ' which he
here treats as primary and determinative of each part's
manner of 'contributing,' simply must, when it alters,
alter in its entirety. There must be total conflux of its
parts, each into and through each other. The 'must'
appears here as a Machtspruchy as an ipse dixit of Mr.
Bradley's absolutistically tempered 'understanding,'
for he candidly confesses that how the parts do differ
as they contribute to different wholes, is unknown to him
(p. 578).

Although I have every wish to comprehend the au-
thority by which Mr. Bradley's understanding speaks,
his words leave me wholly unconverted. 'External
relations' stand with their withers all unwrung, and

though, in its change of place, its 'existence' gets altered; or what he
says, on p. 579, of the possibility that an abstract quality A, B, or C, in
a thing, 'may throughout remain unchanged' although the thing be
altered ; or his admission that in red-hairedness, both as analyzed out
of a man and when given with the rest of him, there may be ' no change'
(p. 580). Why does he immediately add that for the pluralist to plead
the non-mutation of such abstractions would be an ignoraiio elenchi f
It is impossible to admit it to be such. The entire denchus and in-
quest is just as to whether parts which you can abstract from existing
wholes can also contribute to other wholes without changing their
inner nature. If they can thus mould various wholes into new gestalt-
qualitdten, then it follows that the same elements are logically able
to ex-ist in different wholes [whether physically able would depend
on additional hypotheses]; that partial changes are thinkable, and
through-and-through change not a dialectic necessity; that monism
is only an hypothesis; and that an additively constituted universe
is a rationally respectable hypothesis also. All the theses of radical
empiricism, in short, follow.

365

APPENDIX A

remain, for aught he proves to the contrary, not only
practically workable, but also perfectly intelligible
factors of reality

Mr. Bradley's understanding shows the most extraor-
dinary power of perceiving separations and the most
extraordinary impotence in comprehending conjunc-
tions. One would naturally say * neither or both,' but not
so Mr. Bradley. When a common man analyzes cer-
tain whats from out the stream of experience, he under-
stands their distinctness as thus isolated. But this does
not prevent him from equally well understanding their
combination with each other as originally experienced
in the concrete , or their confluence with new sensible
experiences in which they recur as *the same.' Return-
ing into the stream of sensible presentation, nouns and
adjectives, and thats and abstract whats, grow confluent
again, and the word *is' names all these experiences of
conjunction. Mr. Bradley understands the isolation of
the abstracts, but to understand the combination is to
him impossible.* *To understand a complex AB, he

* So far as I catch his state of mind, it is somewhat like this : ' Book,'
'table,' 'on' — how does the existence of these three abstract elements
result in this book being livingly on this table ? Why is n't the table
on the book? Or why doesn't the 'on' connect itself with another
book, or something that is not a table ? Must n't something in each of
the three elements already determine the two others to it, so that they
do not settle elsewhere or float vaguely ? Must n't the whole fact be

366

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

says, *I must begin with A or B. And beginning, say
with ^, if I then merely find B, I have either lost A^
or I have got beside A, [the word 'beside' seems here
vital, as meaning a conjunction < external ' and therefore
unintelligible] something else, and in neither case have
I understood.^ For my intellect cannot simply unite a
diversity, nor has it in itself any form or way of together-
ness, and you gain nothing if, beside A and By you offer
me their conjunction in fact. For to my intellect that
is no more than another external element. And '* facts,"
once for all, are for my intellect not true unless they
satisfy it. . . . The intellect has in its nature no
principle of mere togetherness' (pp. 570, 572).

Of course Mr. Bradley has a right to define 'intellect*
as the power by which we perceive separations but not
unions — provided he give due notice to the reader.
But why then claim that such a maimed and amputated
power must reign supreme in philosophy, and accuse on
its behoof the whole empirical world of irrationality ?
It is true that he elsewhere (p. 568) attributes to the
intellect a proprius motus of transition, but says that

prefigured in each part, and exist de jure before it can exist de jacto ?
But, if so, in what can the jural existence consist, if not in a spiritual
mirKiature of the whole fact's constitution actuatinsf every partial factor
as its purpose ? But is this anything but the old metaphysical fallacy
of looking behind a fact in esse for the ground of the fact, and finding
it in the shape of the very same fact in posset Somewhere we must
leave off with a constitution behind which there is nothing.
^ Apply this to the case of ' book-on-table ' ! W.J,

367

APPENDIX A

when he looks for these transitions in the detail of liv-
ing experience, he Ms unable to verify such a solution'
(p. 569).

Yet he never explains what the intellectual transitions
would be like in case we had them. He only defines
them negatively — they are not spatial, temporal,
predicative, or causal; or qualitatively or otherwise
serial ; or in any way relational as we naively trace rela-
tions, for relations separate terms, and need themselves
to be hooked on ad infinitum. The nearest approach
he makes to describing a truly intellectual transition is
where he speaks of A and B as being * united, each from
its own nature, in a whole which is the nature of both
alike' (p. 570). But this (which, pace Mr. Bradley,
seems exquisitely analogous to * taking a congeries in a
lump,' if not to 'swamping') suggests nothing but that
conflux which pure experience so abundantly offers, as
when 'space,' * white,' and 'sweet' are confluent in a
'lump of sugar,' or kinesthetic, dermal, and optical sen-
sations confluent in *my hand.' ^ All that I can verify
in the transitions which Mr. Bradley's intellect desider-
ates as its proprius motus is a reminiscence of these and
other sensible conjunctions (especially space-conjunc-

* How meaningless is the contention that in such wholes (or in ' book-
on-table,' ' watch-in-pocket,' etc.) the relation is an additional entity
between the terms, needinf^ itself to be related again to each ! Both
Bradley {Avpcarance and Reality, pp. 32-33) and Royce (The World
and the Individual, \, 128) lovingly repeat this piece of profundity.

368

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

tions), but a reminiscence so vague that its originals are
not recognized. Bradley, in short, repeats the fable of
the dog, the bone, and its image in the water. With a
world of particulars, given in loveliest union, in con-
junction definitely various, and variously definite, the
*how ' of which you 'understand ' as soon as you see the
fact of them,^ for there is no how except the constitution
of the fact as given ; with all this given him, I say, in pure
experience, he asks for some ineffable union in the ab-
stract instead, which, if he gained it, would only be a
duplicate of what he has already in his full possession.
Surely he abuses the privilege which society grants to
all of us philosophers, of being puzzle-headed.

Polemic writing like this is odious ; but with absolut-
ism in possession in so many quarters, omission to defend
my radical empiricism against its best known cham-
pion would count as either superficiality or inability.
I have to conclude that its dialectic has not invalidated
in the least degree the usual conjunctions by which the
world, as experienced, hangs so variously together. In
particular it leaves an empirical theory of knowledge in-
tact, and lets us continue to believe with common sense
that one object may be known, if we have any ground
for thinking that it is known, to many knowers.

^ The 'why' and the 'whence' are entirely other questions, not
under discussion, as I understand Mr. Bradley. Not how experience
gets itself born, but how it can be what it is after it is born, is the puzzle.

369

APPENDIX B

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY^

. . . Mr. Bradley calls the question of activity a
scandal to philosophy, and if one turns to the current
literature of the subject — his own writings included
— one easily gathers what he means. The opponents
cannot even understand one another. Mr. Bradley says
to Mr. Ward : ' I do not care what your oracle is, and
your preposterous psychology may here be gospel if you
please ; . . . but if the revelation does contain a mean-
ing, I will commit myself to this: either the oracle is
so confused that its signification is not discoverable, or,
upon the other hand, if it can be pinned down to any
definite statement, then that statement will be false.' ^
Mr. Ward in turn says of Mr. Bradley : * I cannot even
imagine the state of mind to which his description
applies. ... It reads like an unintentional travesty
of Herbartian Psychology by one who has tried to im-
prove upon it without being at the pains to master it.'
MUnsterberg excludes a view opposed to his own by
saying that with any one who holds it a verstdndigung
with him is * grundsdtzlich ausgeschlossen ' ; and Royce,

* President's Address before the American Psychological Associa-
tion, December, 1904. Reprinted from the Psychological Review, vol.
xii, 1905, with slight verbal revision.

' Appearance and Reality, p. 117. Obviously written at Ward,
though Ward's name is not mentioned.

370

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

in a review of Stout, ^ hauls him over the coals at great
length for defending * efficacy ' in a way which I, for one,
never gathered from reading him, and which I have
heard Stout himself say was quite foreign to the inten-
tion of his text.

In these discussions distinct questions are habitually
jumbled and different points of view are talked of
durcheinander,

(1) There is a psychological question: Have we
perceptions of activity ? and if so, what are they like,
and when and where do we have them ?

(2) There is a metaphysical question : Is there a
fact of activity ? and if so, what idea must we frame
of it ? What is it like ? and what does it do, if it
does anything ? And finally there is a logical question :

(3) Whence do we know activity ? By our own feel-
ings of it solely ? or by some other source of informa-
tion ? Throughout page after page of the literature
one knows not which of these questions is before one ;
and mere description of the surface-show of experience
is proffered as if it implicitly answered every one of
them. No one of the disputants, moreover, tries to show
what pragmatic consequences his own view would carry,
or what assignable particular differences in any one's
experience it would make if his adversary's were tri-
umphant.

^ Mind, N. 8., VI. 379.
371

APPENDIX B

It seems to me that if radical empiricism be good for
anything, it ought, with its pragmatic method and its
principle of pure experience, to be able to avoid such
tangles, or at least to simplify them somewhat. The
pragmatic method starts from the postulate that there
is no difference of truth that does n't make a difference
of fact somewhere ; and it seeks to determine the meaning
of all differences of opinion by making the discussion
hinge as soon as possible upon some practical or par-
ticular issue. The principle of pure experience is also
a methodical postulate. Nothing shall be admitted as
fact, it says, except what can be experienced at some
definite time by some experient ; and for every feature
of fact ever so experienced, a definite place must be
found somewhere in the final system of reality. In
other words : Everything real must be experienceable
somewhere, and every kind of thing experienced must
somewhere be real.

Armed with these rules of method, let us see what
face the problems of activity present to us.

By the principle of pure experience, either the word
'activity 'must have no meaning at all, or else the original
type and model of what it means must lie in some con-
crete kind of experience that can be definitely pointed
out. Whatever ulterior judgments we may eventually
come to make regarding activity, that sort of thing will
be what the judgments are about. The first step to

372

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

take, then, is to ask where in the stream of experience
we seem to find what we speak of as activity. What
we are to think of the activity thus found will be a later
question.

Now it is obvious that we are tempted to affirm
activity wherever we find anything going on. Taken in
the broadest sense, any apprehension of something doing ^
is an experience of activity. Were our world describ-
able only by the words * nothing happening,' * nothing
changing,' * nothing doing,' we should unquestion-
ably call it an * inactive' world. Bare activity, then, as
we may call it, means the bare fact of event or change.
* Change taking place ' is a unique content of experience,
one of those * conjunctive' objects which radical empir-
icism seeks so earnestly to rehabilitate and preserve.
The sense of activity is thus in the broadest and vaguest
way synonymous with the sense of Mife.' We should
feel our own subjective life at least, even in noticing
and proclaiming an otherwise inactive world. Our own
reaction on its monotony would be the one thing expe-
rienced there in the form of something coming to pass.

This seems to be what certain writers have in mind
when they insist that for an experient to be at all is to be
active. It seems to justify, or at any rate to explain, Mr.
Ward's expression that we are only as we are active,*

* Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. ii, p. 245. One thinks naturally
of the peripatetic actus primus and actus secundus here.

373

APPENDIX B

for we are only as experients ; and it rules out Mr. Brad-
ley's contention that * there is no original experience of
anything like activity.' What we ought to say about
activities thus simply given, whose they are, what they
effect, or whether indeed they effect anything at all —
these are later questions, to be answered only when the
field of experience is enlarged.

Bare activity would thus be predicable, though
there were no definite direction, no actor, and no aim.
Mere restless zigzag movement, or a wild ideenflucht,
or rhapsodie der wahrnehmungen^ as Kant would say,
would constitute an active as distinguished from an
inactive world.

But in this actual world of ours, as it is given, a part
at least of the activity comes with definite direction ; it
comes with desire and sense of goal ; it comes complicated
with resistances which it overcomes or succumbs to, and
with the efforts which the feeling of resistance so often
provokes; and it is in complex experiences like these
that the notions of distinct agents, and of passivity as
opposed to activity arise. Here also the notion of causal
eflScacy comes to birth. Perhaps the most elaborate
work ever done in descriptive psychology has been the
analysis by various recent writers of the more complex
activity-situations. In their descriptions, exquisitely
subtle some of them,* the activity appears as the gestali-

' Their existence forms a curious commentary on Professor

374

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

qualitdt or the fundirte inhalt (or as whatever else you
may please to call the conjunctive form) which the con-
tent falls into when we experience it in the ways which
the describers set forth. Those factors in those relations
are what we mean by activity-situations ; and to the pos-
sible enumeration and accumulation of their circum-
stances and ingredients there would seem to be no nat-
ural bound. Every hour of human life could contribute
to the picture gallery; and this is the only fault that
one can find with such descriptive industry — where is
it going to stop ? Ought we to listen forever to verbal
pictures of what we have already in concrete form in
our own breasts.'^ ^ They never take us off the super-
ficial plane. We knew the facts already — less spread
out and separated, to be sure — but we knew them still.
We always felt our own activity, for example, as *the
expansion of an idea with which our Self is identified,
against an obstacle'; and the following out of such a
definition through a multitude of cases elaborates the
obvious so as to be little more than an exercise in syno-
nymic speech.

All the descriptions have to trace familiar outlines,
and to use familiar terms. The activity is, for example,

Miinsterberg's dogma that will-attitudes are not describable. He him-
self has contributed in a superior way to their description, both in his
Willenshandlung, and in his Grundzuge, Part II, chap, ix, § 7.

* I ought myself to cry peccavi, having been a voluminous sinner
in noy own chapter on the will.

375

APPENDIX B

attributed either to a physical or to a mental agent,
and is either aimless or directed. If directed, it shows
tendency. The tendency may or may not be resisted.
If not, we call the activity immanent, as when a body
moves in empty space by its momentum, or our thoughts
wander at their own sweet will. If resistance is met,
its agent complicates the situation. If now, in spite of
resistance, the original tendency continues, effort makes
its appearance, and along with effort, strain or squeeze.
Will, in the narrower sense of the word, then comes upon
the scene, whenever, along with the tendency, the strain
and squeeze are sustained. But the resistance may be
great enough to check the tendency, or even to reverse
its path. In that case, we (if *we* were the original
agents or subjects of the tendency) are overpowered.
The phenomenon turns into one of tension simply, or
of necessity succumbed-to, according as the opposing
power is only equal, or is superior to ourselves.

Whosoever describes an experience in such terms as
these, describes an experience of activity. If the word
have any meaning, it must denote what there is found.
There is complete activity in its original and first in-
tention. What it is 'known-as' is what there appears.
The experiencer of such a situation possesses all that
the idea contains. He feels the tendency, the obstacle,
the will, the strain, the triumph, or the passive giving

up, just as he feels the time, the space, the swiftness or

376

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

intensity, the movement, the weight and color, the pain
and pleasure, the complexity, or whatever remaining
characters the situation may involve. He goes through
all that ever can be imagined where activity is supposed.
If we suppose activities to go on outside of our expe-
rience, it is in forms like these that we must suppose
them, or else give them some other name ; for the word
* activity' has no imaginable content whatever save
these experiences of process, obstruction, striving, strain,
or release, ultimate qualia as they are of the life given
us to be known.

Were this the end of the matter, one might think that
whenever we had successfully lived through an activity-
situation we should have to be permitted, without pro-
voking contradiction, to say that we had been really
active, that we had met real resistance and had really
prevailed. Lotze somewhere says that to be an entity all
that is necessary is to gelten as an entity, to operate, or
be felt, experienced, recognized, or in any way realized,
as such. In our activity-experiences the activity as-
suredly fulfils Lotze's demand. It makes itself gelten.
It is witnessed at its work. No matter what activities
there may really be in this extraordinary universe of
ours, it is impossible for us to conceive of any one of
them being either lived through or authentically known
otherwise than in this dramatic shape of something sus-
taining a felt purpose against felt obstacles and over-

377

APPENDIX B

coming or being overcome. What 'sustaining' means
here is clear to any one who has lived through the
experience, but to no one else; just as *loud,' 'red,*
* sweet/ mean something only to beings with ears, eyes,
and tongues. The percipi in these originals of experi-
ence is the esse ; the curtain is the picture. If there is
anything hiding in the background, it ought not to be
called activity, but should get itself another name.

This seems so obviously true that one might well
experience astonishment at finding so many of the ablest
writers on the subject flatly denying that the activity
we live through in these situations is real. Merely to
feel active is not to be active, in their sight. The agents
that appear in the experience are not real agents, the
resistances do not really resist, the effects that appear are
not really effects at all.^ It is evident from this that

* Verhorum gratid : 'The feeling of activity is not able, qua feeling,
to tell us anything about activity ' (Loveday: Mind, n. s., X., 463);
*A sensation or feeling or sense of activity ... is not, looked at in
another way, a feeling of activity at all. It is a mere sensation shut up
within which you could by no reflection get the idea of activity. . . .
Whether this experience is or is not later on a character essential to
our perception and our idea of activity, it, as it comes first, is not in
itself an experience of activity at all. It, as it comes first, is only so
for extraneous reasons and only so for an outside observer ' (Bradley,
Appearance and Reality, 2d edition, p. 605); 'In dem tatigkeitsge-
fiihle leigt an sich nicht der geringste beweis fiir das vorhandensein
einer psychischen tatigkeit' (Miinsterberg : Grundziige, etc., p. 67).
I could multiply similar quotations, and would have introduced some
of them into my text to make it more concrete, save that the mingling

378

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

mere descriptive analysis of any one of our activity-
experiences is not the whole story, that there is some-

of different points of view in most of these author's discussions (not in
Miinsterberg's) oaake it impossible to disentangle exactly what they
mean. I am sure in any case to be accused of misrepresenting them
totally, even in this note, by omission of the context, so the less I name
names and the more I stick to abstract characterization of a merely
possible style of opinion, the safer it will be. And apropos of misun-
derstandings, I may add to this note a complaint on my own account.
Professor Stout, in the excellent chapter on 'Mental Activity,' in vol. i
of his Analytic Psychology, takes me to task for identifying spiritual
activity with certain muscular feelings, and gives quotations to bear
him out. They are from certain paragraphs on ' the Self,' in which my
attempt was to show what the central nucleus of the activities that we
call 'ours' is. I found it in certain intracephalic movements which we
habitually oppose, as 'subjective,' to the activities of the transcorporeal
world. I sought to show that there is no direct evidence that we feel
the activity of an inner spiritual agent as such (I should now say the
activity of 'consciousness' as such, see my paper 'Does consciousness
exist .?' in the Journal of Philosophy, vol. i, p. 477). There are, in fact,
three distinguishable ' activities' in the field of discussion: the elemen-
tary activity involved in the mere that of experience, in the fact that
something is going on, and the farther specification of this something
into two whats, an activity felt as 'ours,' and an activity ascribed to
objects. Stout, as I apprehend him, identifies 'our' activity with that
of the total experience- process, and when I circumscribe it as a part
thereof, accuses me of treating it as a sort of external appendage to
itself (pp. 162-163), as if I 'separated the activity from the process
which is active.' But all the processes in question are active, and their
activity is inseparable from their being. My book raised only the
question of which activity deserved the name of ' ours.' So far as we are
'persons,' and contrasted and opposed to an 'environment,' movements
in our body figure as our activities ; and I am unable to find any other
activities that are ours in this strictly personal sense. There is a wider
sense in which the whole 'choir of heaven and furniture of the earth,*

379

APPENDIX B

thino: still to tell about them that has led such able
writers to conceive of a Simon-pure activity, of an ac-
tivity an sich, that does, and does n*t merely appear to

and their activities, are ours, for they are our 'objects.' But 'we' are
here only another name for the total process of experience, another
name for all that is, in fact; and I was dealing with the personal and
individualized self exclusively in the passages with which Professor
Stout finds fault.

The individualized self, which I believe to be the only thing properly
called self, is a part of the content of the world experienced. The
world experienced (otherwise called the 'field of consciousness') comes
at all times with our body as its centre, centre of vision, centre of
action, centre of interest. Where the body is is 'here'; when the body
acts is 'now'; what the body touches is 'this'; all other things are
'there' and 'then' and 'that.' These words of emphasized position
imply a systematization of things with reference to a focus of action
and interest which lies in the body ; and the systematization is now
so instinctive (was it ever not so ?) that no developed or active expe-
rience exists for us at all except in that ordered form. So far as
'thoughts' and 'feelings' can be active, their activity terminates in
the activity of the body, and only through first arousing its activities
can they begin to change those of the rest of the world. The body
is the storm centre, the origin of co-ordinates, the constant place of
stress in all that exjierience-train. Everything circles round it, and
is felt from its point of view. The word 'I,' then, is primarily a
noun of position, just like 'this' and 'here.' Activities attached to
'this' position have prerogative emphasis, and, if activities have
feelings, must be felt in a peculiar way. The word 'my' designates
the kind of emphasis. I see no inconsistency whatever in defending,
on the one hand, ' my ' activities as unique and opposed to those of
outer nature, and, on the other hand, in aflRrming, after introspec-
tion, that they consist in movements in the head. The 'my' of them
is the emphasis, the feeling of perspective-interest in which they are
dyed.

380

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

us to do, and compared with whose real doing all this
phenomenal activity is but a specious sham.

The metaphysical question opens here; and I think
that the state of mind of one possessed by it is often
something like this : 'It is all very well,' we may imagine
him saying, *to talk about certain experience-series
taking on the form of feelings of activity, just as they
might take on musical or geometric forms. Suppose
that they do so ; suppose that what we feel is a will to
stand a strain. Does our feeling do more than record
the fact that the strain is sustained ? The real activity,
meanwhile, is the doing of the fact ; and what is the
doing made of before the record is made ? What in the
will enables it to act thus ? And these trains of experi-
ence themselves, in which activities appear, what makes
them go at all ? Does the activity in one bit of experience
bring the next bit into being? As an empiricist you
cannot say so, for you have just declared activity to be
only a kind of synthetic object, or conjunctive relation
experienced between bits of experience already made.
But what made them at all ? What propels experience
iiberhaupt into being? There is the activity that op-
erates ; the activity felt is only its superficial sign.'

To the metaphysical question, popped upon us in this
way, I must pay serious attention ere I end my remarks,
but, before doing so, let me show that without leaving
the immediate reticulations of experience, or asking

381

APPENDIX B

what makes activity itself act, we still find the distinction
between less real and more real activities forced upon
us, and are driven to much soul-searching on the purely
phenomenal plane.

We must not forget, namely, in talking of the ultimate
character of our activity-experiences, that each of them
is but a portion of a wider world, one link in the vast
chain of processes of experience out of which history is
made. Each partial process, to him who lives through
it, defines itself by its origin and its goal; but to an
observer with a wider mind-span who should live out-
side of it, that goal would appear but as a provisional
halting-place, and the subjectively felt activity would
be seen to continue into objective activities that led
far beyond. We thus acquire a habit, in discussing
activity-experiences, of defining them by their relation
to something more. If an experience be one of narrow
span, it will be mistaken as to what activity it is and
whose. You think that you are acting while you are
only obeying some one's push. You think you are
doing thisy but you are doing something of which you
do not dream. For instance, you think you are but
drinking this glass; but you are really creating the
liver-cirrhosis that will end your days. You think you
are just driving this bargain, but, as Stevenson says
somewhere, you are laying down a link in the policy
of mankind.

382

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

Generally speaking, the onlooker, with his wider field
of vision, regards the ultimate outcome of an activity as
what it is more really doing; and the most previous
agent ascertainable, being the first source of action, he
regards as the most real agent in the field. The others
but transmit that agent's impulse; on him we put re-
sponsibility; we name him when one asks us, * Who's
to blame ? *

But the most previous agents ascertainable, instead
of being of longer span, are often of much shorter span
than the activity in view. Brain-cells are our best ex-
ample. My brain-cells are believed to excite each other
from next to next (by contiguous transmission of kata-
bolic alteration, let us say), and to have been doing so
long before this present stretch of lecturing-activity on
my part began. If any one cell-group stops its activity,
the lecturing will cease or show disorder of form. Ces-
sarde causa, cessat et effectus — does not this look as if
the short-span brain activities were the more real ac-
tivities, and the lecturing activities on my part only their
effects ? Moreover, as Hume so clearly pointed out, in
my mental activity-situation the words physically to be
uttered are represented as the activity's immediate goal.
These words, however, cannot be uttered without inter-
mediate physical processes in the bulb and vagi nerves,
which processes nevertheless fail to figure in the mental
activity-series at all. That series, therefore, since it

383

APPENDIX B

leaves out vitally real steps of action, cannot represent
the real activities. It is something purely subjective;
the facts of activity are elsewhere. They are something
far more interstitial, so to speak, than what my feelings
record.

The real facts of activity that have in point of fact been
systematically pleaded for by philosophers have, so far
as my information goes, been of three principal types.

The first type takes a consciousness of wider time-
span than ours to be the vehicle of the more real activity.
Its will is the agent, and its purpose is the action done.

The second type assumes that * ideas ' struggling with
one another are the agents, and that the prevalence of
one set of them is the action.

The third type believes that nerve-cells are the agents,
and that resultant motor discharges are the acts achieved.

Now if we must de-realize our immediately felt ac-
tivity-situations for the benefit of either of these types
of substitute, we ought to know what the substitution
practically involves. What practical difference ought it
to make if, instead of saying naively that * I ' am active
now in delivering this address, I say that a wider thinker
is active^ or that certain ideas are active, or that certain
nerve-cells are active, in producing the result ?

This would be the pragmatic meaning of the three

hypotheses. Let us take them in succession in seeking

a reply.

384

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

If we assume a wider thinker, it is evident that his
purposes envelop mine. I am really lecturing /or him;
and altho I cannot surely know to what end, yet if I
take him religiously, I can trust it to be a good end,
and willingly connive. I can be happy in thinking
that my activity transmits his impulse, and that his
ends prolong my own. So long as I take him religiously,
in short, he does not de-realize my activities. He tends
rather to corroborate the reality of them, so long as I
believe both them and him to be good.

When now we turn to ideas, the case is different, in-
asmuch as ideas are supposed by the association psy-
chology to influence each other only from next to next.
The 'span' of an idea, or pair of ideas, is assumed to
be much smaller instead of being larger than that of my
total conscious field. The same results may get worked
out in both cases, for this address is being given anyhow.
But the ideas supposed to * really' work it out had no
prevision of the whole of it; and if I was lecturing for
an absolute thinker in the former case, so, by similar
reasoning, are my ideas now lecturing for me, that is,
accomplishing unwittingly a result which I approve
and adopt. But, when this passing lecture is over, there
is nothing in the bare notion that ideas have been its
agents that would seem to guarantee that my present
purposes in lecturing will be prolonged. / may have ul-
terior developments in view; but there is no certainty

385

APPENDIX B

that my ideas as such will wish to, or be able to, work
them out.

The like is true if nerve-cells be the agents. The ac-
tivity of a nerve-cell must be conceived of as a tendency
of exceedingly short reach, an * impulse ' barely spanning
the way to the next cell — for surely that amount of
actual * process* must be * experienced ' by the cells if
what happens between them is to deserve the name of
activity at all. But here again the gross resultant, as
/ perceive it, is indifferent to the agents, and neither
wished or willed or foreseen. Their being agents now
congruous with my will gives me no guarantee that
like results will recur again from their activity. In
point of fact, all sorts of other results do occur. My
mistakes, impotencies, perversions, mental obstructions,
and frustrations generally, are also results of the activity
of cells. Altho these are letting me lecture now, on
other occasions they make me do things that I would
willingly not do.

The question Whose is the real activity ? is thus tan-
tamount to the question What will he the axitual results ?
Its interest is dramatic ; how will things work out ? If
the agents are of one sort, one way ; if of another sort,
they may work out very differently. The pragmatic
meaning of the various alternatives, in short, is great.
It makes more than a merely verbal difference which

opinion we take up.

386

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

You see it is the old dispute come back ! Materialism
and teleology; elementary short-span actions summing
themselves * blindly,* or far foreseen ideals coming with
effort into act.

Naively we believe, and humanly and dramatically
we like to believe, that activities both of wider and of
narrower span are at work in life together, that both are
real, and that the long-span tendencies yoke the others
in their service, encouraging them in the right direction,
and damping them when they tend in other ways. But
how to represent clearly the modus operandi of such
steering of small tendencies by large ones is a problem
which metaphysical thinkers will have to ruminate
upon for many years to come. Even if such control
should eventually grow clearly picturable, the question
how far it is successfully exerted in this actual world
can be answered only by investigating the details of fact.
No philosophic knowledge of the general nature and
constitution of tendencies, or of the relation of larger
to smaller ones, can help us to predict which of all the
various competing tendencies that interest us in this
universe are likeliest to prevail. We know as an em-
pirical fact that far-seeing tendencies often carry out their
purpose, but we know also that they are often defeated
by the failure of some contemptibly small process on
which success depends. A little thrombus in a states-
man's meningeal artery will throw an empire out of gear

387

APPENDIX B

Therefore I cannot even hint at any solution of the
pragmatic issue. I have only wished to show you that
that issue is what gives the real interest to all inquiries
into what kinds of activity may be real. Are the forces
that really act in the world more foreseeing or more
blind ? As between * our ' activities as ' we ' experience
them, and those of our ideas, or of our brain -cells,
the issue is well defined.

I said awhile back (p. 381) that I should return to
the * metaphysical ' question before ending ; so, with a
few words about that, I will now close my remarks.

In whatever form we hear this question propounded,
I think that it always arises from two things, a belief
that causality must be exerted in activity, and a wonder
as to how causality is made. If we take an activity -situ-
ation at its face- value, it seems as if we caught in fla-
grante delicto the very power that makes facts come and
be. I now am eagerly striving, for example, to get this
truth which I seem half to perceive, into words which
shall make it show more clearly. If the words come, it
will seem as if the striving itself had drawn or pulled
them into actuality out from the state of merely possible
being in which they were. How is this feat performed ?
How does the pulling 'pull ? How do I get my hold on
words not yet existent, and when they come, by what
means have I made them come ? Really it is the problem

388

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

of creation ; for in the end the question is : How do I
make them be ? Real activities are those that really
make things be, without which the things are not, and
with which they are there. Activity, so far as we merely
feel it, on the other hand, is only an impression of ours,
it may be maintained ; and an impression is, for all this
way of thinking, only a shadow of another fact.

Arrived at this point, I can do little more than indicate
the principles on which, as it seems to me, a radically
empirical philosophy is obliged to rely in handling such
a dispute.

If there he real creative activities in being, radical
empiricism must say, somewhere they must be immedi-
ately lived. Somewhere the that of efficacious causing
and the what of it must be experienced in one, just as the
what and the that of *cold* are experienced in one
whenever a man has the sensation of cold here and now.
It boots not to say that our sensations are fallible. They
are indeed; but to see the thermometer contradict us
when we say * it is cold ' does not abolish cold as a specific
nature from the universe. Cold is in the arctic circle if
not here. Even so, to feel that our train is moving when
the train beside our window moves, to see the moon
through a telescope come twice as near, or to see two
pictures as one solid when we look through a stereoscope
at them, leaves motion, nearness, and solidity still in
being — if not here, yet each in its proper seat else-

389

APPENDIX B

where. And wherever the seat of real causality is, as
ultimately known * for true ' (in nerve-processes, if you
will, that cause our feelings of activity as well as the
movements which these seem to prompt), a philosophy
of pure experience can consider the real causation as no
other nature of thing than that which even in our most
erroneous experiences appears to be at work. Exactly
what appears there is what we mean by working, tho
we may later come to learn that working was not ex-
actly there. Sustaining, persevering, striving, paying
with effort as we go, hanging on, and finally achieving
our intention — this is action, this is effectuation in
the only shape in which, by a pure experience-philoso-
phy, the whereabouts of it anywhere can be discussed.
Here is creation in its first intention, here is causality
at work.* To treat this offhand as the bare illusory

* Let me not be told that this contradicts a former article of mine,
*Does consciousness exist ?' in the Journal of Philosophij for Septem-
ber 1, 1904 (see especially page 489), in which it was said that while
'thoughts' and 'things' have the same natures, the natures work
'energetically' on each other in the things (fire burns, water wets,
etc.), but not in the thoughts. Mental activity-trains are composed of
thoughts, yet their members do work on each other : they check, sus-
tain, and introduce. They do so when the activity is merely associa-
tional as well as when effort is there. But, and this is my reply, they
do so by other parts of their nature than those that energize physically.
One thought in every developed activity-series is a desire or thought
of purfx)se, and all the other thoughts acquire a feeling tone from their
relation of harmony or oppugnancy to this. The interplay of these
secondary tones (among which 'interest,' 'difficulty,' and 'effort' fig-

390

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

surface of a world whose real causality is an unimagi-
nable ontological principle hidden in the cubic deeps,
is, for the more empirical way of thinking, only ani-
mism in another shape. You explain your given fact by
your * principle,' but the principle itself, when you look
clearly at it, turns out to be nothing but a previous little
spiritual copy of the fact. Away from that one and only
kind of fact your mind, considering causality, can never
get.'

ure) runs the drama in the mental series. In what we term the physical
drama these qualities play absolutely no part. The subject needs
careful working out; but I can see no inconsistency.

* I have found myself more than once accused in print of being the
assertor of a metaphysical principle of activity. Since literary mis-
understandings retard the settlement of problems, I should like to say
that such an interpretation of the pages I have published on effort and
on will is absolutely foreign to what I meant to express. I owe all my
doctrines on this subject to Renouvier; and Renouvier, as I under-
stand him, is (or at any rate then was) an out and out phenomenist,
a denier of 'forces' in the most strenuous sense. Single clauses in my
writing, or sentences read out of their connexion, may possibly have
been compatible with a transphenomenal principle of energy; but I
defy any one to show a single sentence which, taken with its context,
should be naturally held to advocate that view. The misinterpretation
probably arose at first from my having defended (after Renouvier) the
indeterminism of our efforts. ' Free will ' was supposed by my critics to
involve a supernatural agent. As a matter of plain history, the only ' free
will ' I have ever thought of defending is the character of novelty in fresh
activity-situations. If an activity-process is the form of a whole 'field
of consciousness,' and if each field of consciousness is not only in its
totality unique (as is now commonly admitted), but has its elements
unique (since in that situation they are all dyed in the total), then
novelty is perpetually entering the world and what happens there is

391

APPENDIX B

I conclude, then, that real effectual causation as an
ultimate nature, as a * category,' if you like, of reality,
is just what we feel it to be, just that kind of conjunction
which our own activity-series reveal. We have the whole
butt and being of it in our hands ; and the healthy thing
for philosophy is to leave off grubbing underground for
what effects effectuation, or what makes action act, and
to try to solve the concrete questions of where effectu-
ation in this world is located, of which things are the
true causal agents there, and of what the more remote
effects consist.

From this point of view the greater sublimity tradi-
tionally attributed to the metaphysical inquiry, the
grubbing inquiry, entirely disappears. If we could
know what causation really and tran seen dentally is in
itself, the only use of the knowledge would be to help
us to recognize an actual cause when we had one, and
so to track the future course of operations more intel-
ligently out. The mere abstract inquiry into causa-
tion's hidden nature is not more sublime than any other
inquiry equally abstract. Causation inhabits no more
sublime level than anything else. It lives, apparently,

not pure repeiition, as the dogma of the literal uniformity of nature re-
quires. Activity-situations come, in short, each with an original touch.
A 'principle' of free will, if there were one, would doubtless manifest
itself in such phenomena, but I never saw, nor do I now see, what the
principle could do except rehearse the phenomenon beforehand, or
why it ever should be invoked.

392

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

in the dirt of the world as well as in the absolute, or
in man's unconquerable mind. The worth and interest
of the world consists not in its elements, be these ele-
ments things, or be they the conjunctions of things; it
exists rather in the dramatic outcome of the whole pro-
cess, and in the meaning of the succession stages which
the elements work out.

My colleague and master, Josiah Royce, in a page
of his review of Stout's Analytic Psychology^ in Mind
for 1897, has some fine words on this point with which
I cordially agree. I cannot agree with his separating the
notion of efficacy from that of activity altogether (this
I understand to be one contention of his), for activities
are efficacious whenever they are real activities at all.
But the inner nature both of efficacy and of activity are
superficial problems, I understand Royce to say; and
the only point for us in solving them would be their pos-
sible use in helping us to solve the far deeper problem
of the course and meaning of the world of life. Life,
says our colleague, is full of significance, of meaning, of //
success and of defeat, of hoping and of striving, of long-
ing, of desire, and of inner value. It is a total presence
that embodies worth. To live our own lives better in this
presence is the true reason why we wish to know the
elements of things; so even we psychologists must end
on this pragmatic note.

The urgent problems of activity are thus more con-

393

APPENDIX B

Crete. They all are problems of the true relation of
longer-span to shorter-span activities. When, for ex-
ample, a number of * ideas ' (to use the name traditional
in psychology) grow confluent in a larger field of con-
sciousness, do the smaller activities still coexist with
the wider activities then experienced by the conscious
subject ? And, if so, do the wide activities accompany
the narrow ones inertly, or do they exert control ? Or
do they perhaps utterly supplant and replace them and
short-circuit their effects ? Again, when a mental ac-
tivity-process and a brain-cell series of activities both
terminate in the same muscular movement, does the
mental process steer the neural processes or not ? Or,
on the other hand, does it independently short-circuit
their effects ? Such are the questions that we must begin
with. B,ut so far am I from suggesting any definitive an-
swer to such questions, that I hardly yet can put them
clearly. They lead, however, into that region of pan-
psychic and ontologic speculation of which Professors
Bergson and Strong have lately enlarged the literature
in so able and interesting a way. The results of these
authors seem in many respects dissimilar, and I under-
stand them as yet but imperfectly; but I cannot help
suspecting that the direction of their work is very
promising, and that they have the hunter's instinct for
the fruitful trails.

394

APPENDIX C

ON THE NOTION OF REALITY AS CHANGING

In my Principles of Psychology (vol. ii, p. 646) I gave
the name of the *axiom of skipped intermediaries and
transferred relations' to a serial principle of which the
foundation of logic, the dictum de omni et nulla (or, as I
expressed it, the rule that what is of a kind is of that
kind's kind), is the most familiar instance. More than
the more is more than the less, equals of equals are equal,
sames of the same are the same, the cause of a cause is
the cause of its effects, are other examples of this serial
law. Altho it applies infallibly and without restriction
throughout certain abstract series, where the 'sames,*
'causes,' etc., spoken of, are 'pure,' and have no proper-
ties save their sameness, causality, etc., it cannot be ap-
plied offhand to concrete objects with numerous proper-
ties and relations, for it is hard to trace a straight line
of sameness, causation, or whatever it may be, through
a series of such objects without swerving into some
* respect' where the relation, as pursued originally, no
longer holds : the objects have so many 'aspects ' that
we are constantly deflected from our original direction,
and find, we know not why, that we are following some-
thing different from what we started with. Thus a cat
is in a sense the same as a mouse-trap, and a mouse-
trap the same as a bird-cage; but in no valuable or

395

APPENDIX C

easily intelligible sense is a cat the same as a bird-cage.
Commodore Perry was in a sense the cause of the new
regime in Japan, and the new regime was the cause of
the russian Douma; but it would hardly profit us to
insist on holding to Perry as the cause of the Douma :
the terms have grown too remote to have any real or
practical relation to each other. In every series of real
terms, not only do the terms themselves and their asso-
ciates and environments change, but we change, and
their meaning for us changes, so that new kinds of same-
ness and types of causation continually come into view
and appeal to our interest. Our earlier lines, having
grown irrelevant, are then dropped. The old terms can
no longer be substituted nor the relations * transferred,'
because of so many new dimensions into which experi-
ence has opened. Instead of a straight line, it now fol-
lows a zigzag ; and to keep it straight, one must do vio-
lence to its spontaneous development. Not that one
might not possibly, by careful seeking (tho I doubt
it), find some line in nature along which terms literally
the same, or causes causal in the same way, might be
serially strung without limit, if one's interest lay in such
finding. Within such lines our axioms might hold,
causes might cause their effect's effects, etc. ; but such
lines themselves would, if found, only be partial mem-
bers of a vast natural network, within the other lines of
which you could not say, in any sense that a wise man or

396

ON REALITY AS CHANGING

& sane man would ever think of, in any sense that would
not be concretely silly y that the principle of skipt inter-
mediaries still held good. In the ^practical world, the
world whose significances we follow, sames of the same
are certainly not sames of one another; and things
constantly cause other things without being held re-
sponsible for everything of which those other things
are causes.

Professor Bergson, believing as he does in a heracli-
tean Mevenir reel,' ought, if I rightly understand him,
positively to deny that in the actual world the logical
axioms hold good without qualification. Not only, ac-
cording to him, do terms change, so that after a certain
time the very elements of things are no longer what they
were, but relations also change, so as no longer to obtain
in the same identical way between the new things that
have succeeded upon the old ones. If this were really
so, then however indefinitely sames might still be sub-
stituted for sames in the logical world of nothing but
pure sameness, in the world of real operations every line
of sameness actually started and followed up would
eventually give out, and cease to be traceable any far-
ther. Sames of the same, in such a world, will not al-
ways (or rather, in a strict sense will never) be the same
as one another, for in such a world there is no literal or
ideal sameness among numerical differents. Nor in such

a world will it be true that the cause of the cause is

397

APPENDIX C

unreservedly the cause of the effect; for if we follow
lines of real causation, instead of contenting ourselves
with Hume's and Kant*s eviscerated schematism, we
find that remoter effects are seldom aimed at by causal
intentions,* that no one kind of causal activity contin-
ues indefinitely, and that the principle of skipt inter-
mediaries can be talked of only in abstracto.^

Volumes i, ii, and iii of the Monist (1890-1893) con-
tain a number of articles by Mr. Charles S. Peirce, arti-
cles the originality of which has apparently prevented
their making an immediate impression, but which, if I
mistake not, will prove a gold-mine of ideas for thinkers
of the coming generation. Mr. Peirce's views, tho
reached so differently, are altogether congruous with
Bergson's. Both philosophers believe that the appear-
ance of novelty in things is genuine. To an observer
standing outside of its generating causes, novelty can
appear only as so much *chance * ; to one who stands
inside it is the expression of *free creative activity.'
Peirce's * tychism ' is thus practically synonymous with
Bergson's *devenir reel.' The common objection to
admitting novelties is that by jumping abruptly in,
ex nihiloy they shatter the world's rational continuity.
Peirce meets this objection by combining his tychism

* Compare the douma with what Perry aimed at.
' Compare Appendix B, as to what I mean here by • real * casual
activity.

398

ON REALITY AS CHANGING

with an express doctrine of *synechism ' or continuity,
the two doctrines merging into the higher synthesis on
which he bestows the name of *agapasticism {loc. cit., iii,
188), which means exactly the same thing as Bergson's
*evolution creatrice.' Novelty, as empirically found,
does n't arrive by jumps and jolts, it leaks in insensibly,
for adjacents in experience are always interfused, the
smallest real datum being both a coming and a going,
and even numerical distinctness being realized efiFectively
only after a concrete interval has passed. The intervals
also deflect us from the original paths of direction,
and all the old identities at last give out, for the fatally
continuous infiltration of otherness warps things out of
every original rut. Just so, in a curve, the same direc-
tion is never followed, and the conception of it as a
myriad-sided polygon falsifies it by supposing it to do
so for however short a time. Peirce speaks of an * infini-
tesimal' tendency to diversification. The mathematical
notion of an infinitesimal contains, in truth, the whole
paradox of the same and yet the nascent other, of an
identity that won't keej) except so far as it keeps failing,
that won't transfer, any more than the serial relations
in question transfer, when you apply them to reality
instead of applying them to concepts alone.

A friend of mine has an idea, which illustrates on such
a magnified scale the impossibility of tracing the same
line through reality, that I will mention it here. He

399

APPENDIX C

thinks that nothing more is needed to make history
'scientific' than to get the content of any two epochs
(say the end of the thirteenth and the end of the nine-
teenth century) accurately defined, then accurately to
define the direction of the change that led from the one
epoch into the other, and finally to prolong the line of
that direction into the future. So prolonging the line, he
thinks, we ought to be able to define the actual state
of things at any future date we please. We all feel the
essential unreality of such a conception of * history' as
this ; but if such a synechistic pluralism as Peirce, Berg-
son, and I believe in, be what really exists, every phe-
nomenon of development, even the simplest, would
prove equally rebellious to our science should the latter
pretend to give us literally accurate instead of approxi-
mate, or statistically generalized, pictures of the devel-
opment of reality.

I can give no further account of Mr. Peirce's ideas in
this note, but I earnestly advise all students of Bergson
to compare them with those of the f rench philosopher.

INDEX

INDEX TO THE LECTURES

Absolute, the, 49, 108-109, 114 ff,
173, 175, 190 ff., 203, 271,
292 ff., 311; not the same as
God, 111, 134; its rationality,
114 f.; its irrationality, 117-
129; diflSculty of conceiving it,
195.

Absolutism, 34, 38, 40, 54, 72 f,
79, 122, 310. See Monism.

Achilles and tortoise, 228, 255.

All-form, the, 34, 324.

Analogy, 8, 151 f.

Angels, 164.

Antinomies, 231, 239.

Aristides, 304.

Bailey, S., 5.

Bergson, H., Lecture VI, passim.

His characteristics, 226 f, 266.
'Between,' 70.
Block-universe, 310, 328.
Bradley, F. H., 46, 69, 79, 211,

220, 296.
Brain, 160.

Cairo, E., 89, 95, 137.
Cato, 304.

Causation, 258. See Influence.
Change, 231, 253.
Chesterton, 203, 303.
Compounding of mental states,

168, 173, 186 f., 268, 281, 284,

292, 296.
Concepts, 217, 234 f.
Conceptual method, 243 f., 246,

253.
Concrete reality, 283, 286.

Confluence, 326.

Conflux, 257.

Consciousness, superhuman, 156,

310 f. ; its compound nature,

168, 173, 186 f., 289.
Continuity, 256 f ., 325.
Contradiction, in Hegel, 89 f .
Creation, 29, 119.

Death, 303.
Degrees, 74.
Dialectic method, 89.
Difference, 257 f .
Diminutive epithets, 12, 24.
Discreteness of change, 231.

'Each-form,' the, 34, 325.

Earth, the, in Fechner's philo-
sophy, 156 ; is an angel,
164.

Earth-soul, 152 f.

Elan vital, 262.

Empiricism, 264, 277; and reli-
gion, 314; defined, 7.

Endosmosis, 257.

Epithets. See Diminutive.

Evil, 310.

Experience, 312; religious, 307.

Extremes, 67, 74.

' Faith-ladder,' 328.

•Fall,' the, 119, 310.

Fechner, Lecture IV, passim.
His life, 145-150; he reasons by
analogy, 151; his genius, 154;
compared veith Royce, 173,
207 ; not a genuine monist, 293 ;

403

INDEX

his God; and religious experi-
ence, 308.

Ferrier, Jas., 13.

Finite experience, 39, 48, 182,
192-193.

Finiteness, of God, 111, 124,
294.

Foreignness, 31.

German manner of philosophiz-
ing, 17.

God. 24 f.. Ill, 124, 193, 240,
294.

Green, T. H., 6, 24, 137, 278.

Haldane, R. B., 138.

Hegel, Lecture III, passim, 11,
85, 207, 211, 219, 296. His
vision, 88, 98 f., 104; his use
of double negation, 102; his
vicious intellectualism 106;
Haldane on, 138; McTaggart
on, 140; Royce on, 143.

Hodgson, S. H., 282.

Horse, 265.

Hume, 19, 267.

Idealism, 36. See Absolutism.

Identity, 93.

Immortality, Fechner's view of,

171.
' Independent ' beings, 55, 58.
Indeterminism, 77.
Infinity, 229.
Influence, 258, 561.
Intellect, its function is practical,

247 f., 252.
Intellectualism, vicious, 60, 218.
Intellectualist logic, 216, 259,

261.

Intellectualist method, 291.
Interaction, 56.
Intimacy, 31.

Irrationality, 81; of the abso-
lute, 117-129.

Jacks, L, P., 35.
Joachim, H., 121, 141.
Jones, H., 52.

Kant, 19, 199, 238, 240.

Leibnitz, 119.

Life, 523.

Log, 323.

Logic, 92, 211; intellectualist,

217, 242.
LoTZE, 55, 120.
Luther, 304.

McTaggart, 51, 74 f., 120,
140 f., 183.

Manyness in oneness, 322. See
Compounding.

Mental chemistry, 185.

Mill, J. S., 242, 260.

Mind, dust theory, 189.

Mind, the eternal, 137. See Abso-
lute.

Monism, 36, 117, 125, 201, 313,
321 f . ; Fechner's, 153. See Ab-
solutism.

Monomaniacs, 78.

Motion, 233, 238, 254 ; Zeno on,
228.

Myers, F. W. H., 315.

Nature, 21, 286.

Negation, 93 f . ; double, 102.

Newton, 260.

404

INDEX

Other, 95, 312; 'its own other,'

108 f., 282.
Oxford, 3, 313, 331.

Pantheism, 24, 28.

Paui^en, 18, 22.

Personality, divided, 298.

Philosophers, their method, 9;
their common desire, 11 f.;
they must reason, 13.

Philosophies, their types, 23, 31.

Phocion, 304.

Plant-soul, 165 f.

Pluralism, 45, 76, 79, 311, 319,
321 f.

Polytheism, 310.

Practical reason, 329.

Psychic synthesis, 185. See Com-
pounding.

Psychical research, 299.

*Qua,* 39, 47, 267, 270.
•Quatenus,' 47, 267.

Rationalism defined, 7, 98; its

thinness, 144, 237.
Rationality, 81, 112 f., 319 f.
Reality, 262 f., 264, 283 f.
Reason, 286, 312.
Relating, 7.
Relations, 70, 278 ff.; * external,'

80.
Religious experiences, 305 f.
Ritchie, 72.
RoYCE, 61 f., 115, 173, 182 f.,

197, 207, 212. 265, 296.

Same, 269, 281.
Savage philosophy, 21 .
Science, 145.
Sensations, 279.
Socialism, 78.
Socrates, 284.
Soul, 199, 209.
'Some,' 79.
Sphinx, 22.
Spinoza, 47.

Spiritualistic philosophy, 23.
Sugar, 220, 232.

Synthesis, psychic. See Com-
pounding.

Taylor, A. E., 76, 139, 212.

Theism, 24.

Thick, the, 136.

' Thickness ' of Fechner's philoso-
phy, 144.

Thin, the, 136.

Thinness of the current tran-
scendentalism, 144, 174 f.

Time, 232.

Units of reality, 287.

Vision, in philosophy, 20.

Wells, H. G., 78.
Will to believe, 328.
Witnesses, as implied in experi-
ence, 200.
WUNDT, W., 185.

Zeno, 228.

PftlNTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON ft CO.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

U. S. A.

MAR 1 2 1936

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