engenders in those who have it is fully in accord with Fechner's
theories. To quote words which I have used elsewhere, 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 whatever quarter it may come, be it
academic or scientific, or be it merely the voice of logical
common sense. They have had their vision and they _know_--that is
enough--that we inhabit 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 Fechner'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 surprise with me that philosophers of the absolute should
have shown so little interest in this department of life, and so
seldom put its phenomena 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 too
much with them. They have preferred the thinner to the thicker method,
dialectical abstraction being so much more dignified and academic than
the confused and unwholesome facts of personal biography.
In spite of rationalism's disdain for the particular, 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 hearing the conversation, but having
no inkling of the meaning of it all. The intellectualist objections
to this fall away when the authority of intellectualist logic is
undermined by criticism, and then the positive empirical evidence
remains. The analogies with ordinary psychology 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_ probability in favor of a general view of the world
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. Fechner, with his distinct
earth-soul functioning as our guardian angel, seems to me clearly
polytheistic; 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 perplexities 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
assume that the superhuman consciousness, however vast it may be, has
itself an external environment, 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
represented by absolutists as having a pluralistic object. But if even
the absolute has to have a pluralistic vision, why should we ourselves
hesitate 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
consciousness, 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 knowledge, 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 make the
notion of him so paradoxical practically 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 usually but needlessly
associated with the philosophy 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 empirical evidence, abate
something of her absolutist 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
Oxford idealists to consider seriously this alternative. Few men are
as qualified by their intellectual gifts to reap the harvests that
seem certain to any one who, like Fechner and Bergson, 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 prevalent at Oxford has kept this steep and brittle
attitude, partly through the proverbial academic 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 panpsychic view of the universe, into which our own
generation has been drawn, and which threatens to short-circuit their
methods entirely and become their religious rival unless they are
willing to make themselves its 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 machinery 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 religion 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 countries, is undoubtedly due in part to religious demands. 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
has to say. I fully believe that such an empiricism 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 approving 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 believe
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 characteristics 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 sight and sound of it
altogether. Everything is smothered in the litter that is fated to
accompany 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.
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. Philosophies are intimate parts of the universe, they
express something of its own thought of itself. A philosophy may
indeed be a most momentous reaction of the universe upon itself. It
may, as I said, possess and handle itself differently 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 mistrust. What mistrusts itself deserves
mistrust.
This is the philosophy of humanism in the widest sense. Our
philosophies swell the current 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 réel dans le réel.' Our
thoughts determine our acts, and our acts redetermine 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 absolute.
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 ourselves. And this great difference
between absolutism 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_ everywhere 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 possession of
the maximum amount of rationality practically attainable by our minds.
Your relations with it, intellectual, emotional, and active, remain
fluent and congruous with your own nature's chief demands.
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
eulogistically, 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 contradiction
and make the notion vague again. Then you get the aesthetic or
teleologic kinds of rationality, saying that whatever fits in any way,
whatever is beautiful or good, whatever is purposive or gratifies
desire, is rational in so far forth. Then again, according to Hegel,
whatever is 'real' 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 'foreignness' and 'intimacy,' which I put forward
in my first lecture, 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
suppose 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
related_. 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 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, functional 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 aspect,
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 one
of these relations is not _by that very fact_ engaged in all the other
relations simultaneously. The relations are not _all_ what the French
call _solidaires_ with one another. Without 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 dropping 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 disconnected, it could never be connected again, according
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 occasion they may
work together, or in some way be connected again. Monism allows for
no such things as 'other occasions' in reality--in _real_ or absolute
reality, 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 distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or
collective-unit form is the only form that is rational. 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 essential 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 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 reality 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 connexion, 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 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 insulating cuts we make there are artificial products of the
conceptualizing faculty, is what distinguishes the empiricism which
I call 'radical,' from the bugaboo empiricism of the traditional
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 conjunctive 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 indubitably characterizes the world we
inhabit, 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 pragmatically different ethical appeals--at least
they _may_ do so, to certain individuals. But if you consider the
pluralistic horn to be intrinsically 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 _reductiones ad absurdum_, I must leave the issue
in 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 hypothesis 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.
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 decide; 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 pluralistic
universe; in just this way do others hold to the timeless universe
eternally complete.
Meanwhile the incompleteness of the pluralistic universe, thus assumed
and held to as the most probable hypothesis, is also represented by
the pluralistic philosophy as being self-reparative through us, as
getting its disconnections 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.'[1] Thus do philosophy and reality, theory and action, work in
the same circle indefinitely.