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- P r a g m a t i s m ,
A N e w N a m e f o r S o m e
O l d W a y s o f T h i n k i n g
L e c t u r e I V
T h e O n e a n d
t h e M a n y
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- We saw in the last lecture that the pragmatic method, in its dealings with
certain concepts, instead of ending with admiring contemplation, plunges forward
into the river of experience with them and prolongs the perspective by their
means. Design, free-will, the absolute mind, spirit instead of matter, have for
their sole meaning a better promise as to this world's outcome. Be they false or
be they true, the meaning of them is this meliorism. I have sometimes thought of
the phenomenon called 'total reflexion' in optics as a good symbol of the
relation between abstract ideas and concrete realities, as pragmatism conceives
it. Hold a tumbler of water a little above your eyes and look up through the
water at its surface - or better still look similarly through the flat wall of an
aquarium. You will then see an extraordinarily brilliant reflected image say of
a candle-flame, or any other clear object, situated on the opposite side of the
vessel. No candle-ray, under these circumstances gets beyond the water's
surface: every ray is totally reflected back into the depths again. Now let the
water represent the world of sensible facts, and let the air above it represent
the world of abstract ideas. Both worlds are real, of course, and interact; but
they interact only at their boundary, and the locus of everything that lives,
and happens to us, so far as full experience goes, is the water. We are like
fishes swimming in the sea of sense, bounded above by the superior element, but
unable to breathe it pure or penetrate it. We get our oxygen from it, however,
we touch it incessantly, now in this part, now in that, and every time we touch
it we are reflected back into the water with our course re-determined and
re-energized. The abstract ideas of which the air consists, indispensable for
life, but irrespirable by themselves, as it were, and only active in their
re-directing function. All similes are halting but this one rather takes my
fancy. It shows how something, not sufficient for life in itself, may
nevertheless be an effective determinant of life elsewhere.
In this present hour I wish to illustrate the pragmatic method by one more
application. I wish to turn its light upon the ancient problem of 'the one and
the many.' I suspect that in but few of you has this problem occasioned
sleepless nights, and I should not be astonished if some of you told me it had
never vexed you. I myself have come, by long brooding over it, to consider it
the most central of all philosophic problems, central because so pregnant. I
mean by this that if you know whether a man is a decided monist or a decided
pluralist, you perhaps know more about the rest of his opinions than if you give
him any other name ending in IST. To believe in the one or in the many, that is
the classification with the maximum number of consequences. So bear with me for
an hour while I try to inspire you with my own interest in the problem.
Philosophy has often been defined as the quest or the vision of the world's
unity. We never hear this definition challenged, and it is true as far as it
goes, for philosophy has indeed manifested above all things its interest in
unity. But how about the VARIETY in things? Is that such an irrelevant matter?
If instead of using the term philosophy, we talk in general of our intellect and
its needs we quickly see that unity is only one of these. Acquaintance with the
details of fact is always reckoned, along with their reduction to system, as an
indispensable mark of mental greatness. Your 'scholarly' mind, of encyclopedic,
philological type, your man essentially of learning, has never lacked for praise
along with your philosopher. What our intellect really aims at is neither
variety nor unity taken singly but totality. 1) In this, acquaintance with reality's diversities is as important as
understanding their connexion. The human passion of curiosity runs on all fours
with the systematizing passion.
In spite of this obvious fact the unity of things has always been considered
more illustrious, as it were, than their variety. When a young man first
conceives the notion that the whole world forms one great fact, with all its
parts moving abreast, as it were, and interlocked, he feels as if he were
enjoying a great insight, and looks superciliously on all who still fall short
of this sublime conception. Taken thus abstractly as it first comes to one, the
monistic insight is so vague as hardly to seem worth defending intellectually.
Yet probably everyone in this audience in some way cherishes it. A certain
abstract monism, a certain emotional response to the character of oneness, as if
it were a feature of the world not coordinate with its manyness, but vastly more
excellent and eminent, is so prevalent in educated circles that we might almost
call it a part of philosophic common sense. Of COURSE the world is one, we say.
How else could it be a world at all? Empiricists as a rule, are as stout monists
of this abstract kind as rationalists are.
The difference is that the empiricists are less dazzled. Unity doesn't blind
them to everything else, doesn't quench their curiosity for special facts,
whereas there is a kind of rationalist who is sure to interpret abstract unity
mystically and to forget everything else, to treat it as a principle; to admire
and worship it; and thereupon to come to a full stop intellectually.
'The world is One!' - the formula may become a sort of number-worship. 'Three'
and 'seven' have, it is true, been reckoned sacred numbers; but, abstractly
taken, why is 'one' more excellent than 'forty-three,' or than 'two million and
ten'? In this first vague conviction of the world's unity, there is so little to
take hold of that we hardly know what we mean by it.
The only way to get forward with our notion is to treat it pragmatically.
Granting the oneness to exist, what facts will be different in consequence? What
will the unity be known-as? The world is one - yes, but HOW one? What is the
practical value of the oneness for US?
Asking such questions, we pass from the vague to the definite, from the
abstract to the concrete. Many distinct ways in which oneness predicated of the
universe might make a difference, come to view. I will note successively the
more obvious of these ways.
1. First, the world is at least ONE SUBJECT OF DISCOURSE. If its manyness
were so irremediable as to permit NO union whatever of it parts, not even our
minds could 'mean' the whole of it at once: the would be like eyes trying to
look in opposite directions. But in point of fact we mean to cover the whole of
it by our abstract term 'world' or 'universe,' which expressly intends that no
part shall be left out. Such unity of discourse carries obviously no farther
monistic specifications. A 'chaos,' once so named, has as much unity of
discourse as a cosmos. It is an odd fact that many monists consider a great
victory scored for their side when pluralists say 'the universe is many.' "'The
universe'!" they chuckle - "his speech bewrayeth him. He stands confessed of
monism out of his own mouth." Well, let things be one in that sense! You can
then fling such a word as universe at the whole collection of them, but what
matters it? It still remains to be ascertained whether they are one in any other
sense that is more valuable.
2. Are they, for example, CONTINUOUS? Can you pass from one to another,
keeping always in your one universe without any danger of falling out? In other
words, do the parts of our universe HANG together, instead of being like
detached grains of sand?
Even grains of sand hang together through the space in which they are
embedded, and if you can in any way move through such space, you can pass
continuously from number one of them to number two. Space and time are thus
vehicles of continuity, by which the world's parts hang together. The practical
difference to us, resultant from these forms of union, is immense. Our whole
motor life is based upon them.
3. There are innumerable other paths of practical continuity among things.
Lines of INFLUENCE can be traced by which they together. Following any such line
you pass from one thing to another till you may have covered a good part of the
universe's extent. Gravity and heat-conduction are such all-uniting influences,
so far as the physical world goes. Electric, luminous and chemical influences
follow similar lines of influence. But opaque and inert bodies interrupt the
continuity here, so that you have to step round them, or change your mode of
progress if you wish to get farther on that day. Practically, you have then lost
your universe's unity, SO FAR AS IT WAS CONSTITUTED BY THOSE FIRST LINES OF
INFLUENCE. There are innumerable kinds of connexion that special things have
with other special things; and the ENSEMBLE of any one of these connexions forms
one sort of system by which things are conjoined. Thus men are conjoined in a
vast network of ACQUAINTANCESHIP. Brown knows Jones, Jones knows Robinson, etc.;
and BY CHOOSING YOUR FARTHER INTERMEDIARIES RIGHTLY you may carry a message from
Jones to the Empress of China, or the Chief of the African Pigmies, or to anyone
else in the inhabited world. But you are stopped short, as by a non-conductor,
when you choose one man wrong in this experiment. What may be called
love-systems are grafted on the acquaintance-system. A loves (or hates) B; B
loves (or hates) C, etc. But these systems are smaller than the great
acquaintance-system that they presuppose.
Human efforts are daily unifying the world more and more in definite
systematic ways. We found colonial, postal, consular, commercial systems, all
the parts of which obey definite influences that propagate themselves within the
system but not to facts outside of it. The result is innumerable little
hangings-together of the world's parts within the larger hangings-together,
little worlds, not only of discourse but of operation, within the wider
universe. Each system exemplifies one type or grade of union, its parts being
strung on that peculiar kind of relation, and the same part may figure in many
different systems, as a man may hold several offices and belong to various
clubs. From this 'systematic' point of view, therefore, the pragmatic value of
the world's unity is that all these definite networks actually and practically
exist. Some are more enveloping and extensive, some less so; they are superposed
upon each other; and between them all they let no individual elementary part of
the universe escape. Enormous as is the amount of disconnexion among things (for
these systematic influences and conjunctions follow rigidly exclusive paths),
everything that exists is influenced in SOME way by something else, if you can
only pick the way out rightly Loosely speaking, and in general, it may be said
that all things cohere and adhere to each other SOMEHOW, and that the universe
exists practically in reticulated or concatenated forms which make of it a
continuous or 'integrated' affair. Any kind of influence whatever helps to make
the world one, so far as you can follow it from next to next. You may then say
that 'the world IS One' - meaning in these respects, namely, and just so far as
they obtain. But just as definitely is it NOT one, so far as they do not obtain;
and there is no species of connexion which will not fail, if, instead of
choosing conductors for it, you choose non-conductors. You are then arrested at
your very first step and have to write the world down as a pure MANY from that
particular point of view. If our intellect had been as much interested in
disjunctive as it is in conjunctive relations, philosophy would have equally
successfully celebrated the world's DISUNION.
The great point is to notice that the oneness and the manyness are absolutely
co-ordinate here. Neither is primordial or more essential or excellent than the
other. Just as with space, whose separating of things seems exactly on a par
with its uniting of them, but sometimes one function and sometimes the other is
what come home to us most, so, in our general dealings with the world of
influences, we now need conductors and now need non-conductors, and wisdom lies
in knowing which is which at the appropriate moment.
4. All these systems of influence or non-influence may be listed under the
general problem of the world's CAUSAL UNITY. If the minor causal influences
among things should converge towards one common causal origin of them in the
past, one great first cause for all that is, one might then speak of the
absolute causal unity of the world. God's fiat on creation's day has figured in
traditional philosophy as such an absolute cause and origin. Transcendental
Idealism, translating 'creation' into 'thinking' (or 'willing to' think') calls
the divine act 'eternal' rather than 'first'; but the union of the many here is
absolute, just the same - the many would not BE, save for the One. Against this
notion of the unity of origin of all there has always stood the pluralistic
notion of an eternal self-existing many in the shape of atoms or even of
spiritual units of some sort. The alternative has doubtless a pragmatic meaning,
but perhaps, as far as these lectures go, we had better leave the question of
unity of origin unsettled.
5. The most important sort of union that obtains among things, pragmatically
speaking, is their GENERIC UNITY. Things exist in kinds, there are many
specimens in each kind, and what the 'kind' implies for one specimen, it implies
also for every other specimen of that kind. We can easily conceive that every
fact in the world might be singular, that is, unlike any other fact and sole of
its kind. In such a world of singulars our logic would be useless, for logic
works by predicating of the single instance what is true of all its kind. With
no two things alike in the world, we should be unable to reason from our past
experiences to our future ones. The existence of so much generic unity in things
is thus perhaps the most momentous pragmatic specification of what it may mean
to say 'the world is One.' ABSOLUTE generic unity would obtain if there were one
summum genus under which all things without exception could be eventually
subsumed. 'Beings,' 'thinkables,' 'experiences,' would be candidates for this
position. Whether the alternatives expressed by such words have any pragmatic
significance or not, is another question which I prefer to leave unsettled just
now.
6. Another specification of what the phrase 'the world is One' may mean is
UNITY OF PURPOSE. An enormous number of things in the world subserve a common
purpose. All the man-made systems, administrative, industrial, military, or what
not, exist each for its controlling purpose. Every living being pursues its own
peculiar purposes. They co-operate, according to the degree of their
development, in collective or tribal purposes, larger ends thus enveloping
lesser ones, until an absolutely single, final and climacteric purpose subserved
by all things without exception might conceivably be reached. It is needless to
say that the appearances conflict with such a view. Any resultant, as I said in
my third lecture, MAY have been purposed in advance, but none of the results we
actually know in is world have in point of fact been purposed in advance in all
their details. Men and nations start with a vague notion of being rich, or
great, or good. Each step they make brings unforeseen chances into sight, and
shuts out older vistas, and the specifications of the general purpose have to be
daily changed. What is reached in the end may be better or worse than what was
proposed, but it is always more complex and different.
Our different purposes also are at war with each other. Where one can't crush
the other out, they compromise; and the result is again different from what
anyone distinctly proposed beforehand. Vaguely and generally, much of what was
purposed may be gained; but everything makes strongly for the view that our
world is incompletely unified teleologically and is still trying to get its
unification better organized.
Whoever claims ABSOLUTE teleological unity, saying that there is one purpose
that every detail of the universe subserves, dogmatizes at his own risk.
Theologians who dogmalize thus find it more and more impossible, as our
acquaintance with the warring interests of the world's parts grows more
concrete, to imagine what the one climacteric purpose may possibly be like. We
see indeed that certain evils minister to ulterior goods, that the bitter makes
the cocktail better, and that a bit of danger or hardship puts us agreeably to
our trumps. We can vaguely generalize this into the doctrine that all the evil
in the universe is but instrumental to its greater perfection. But the scale of
the evil actually in sight defies all human tolerance; and transcendental
idealism, in the pages of a Bradley or a Royce, brings us no farther than the
book of Job did - God's ways are not our ways, so let us put our hands upon our
mouth. A God who can relish such superfluities of horror is no God for human
beings to appeal to. His animal spirits are too high. In other words the
'Absolute' with his one purpose, is not the man-like God of common people.
7. AESTHETIC UNION among things also obtains, and is very analogous to
ideological union. Things tell a story. Their parts hang together so as to work
out a climax. They play into each other's hands expressively. Retrospectively,
we can see that altho no definite purpose presided over a chain of events, yet
the events fell into a dramatic form, with a start, a middle, and a finish. In
point of fact all stories end; and here again the point of view of a many is
that more natural one to take. The world is full of partial stories that run
parallel to one another, beginning and ending at odd times. They mutually
interlace and interfere at points, but we cannot unify them completely in our
minds. In following your life-history, I must temporarily turn my attention from
my own. Even a biographer of twins would have to press them alternately upon his
reader's attention.
It follows that whoever says that the whole world tells one story utters
another of those monistic dogmas that a man believes at his risk. It is easy to
see the world's history pluralistically, as a rope of which each fibre tells a
separate tale; but to conceive of each cross-section of the rope as an
absolutely single fact, and to sum the whole longitudinal series into one being
living an undivided life, is harder. We have indeed the analogy of embryology to
help us. The microscopist makes a hundred flat cross-sections of a given embryo,
and mentally unites them into one solid whole. But the great world's
ingredients, so far as they are beings, seem, like the rope's fibres, to be
discontinuous cross-wise, and to cohere only in the longitudinal direction.
Followed in that direction they are many. Even the embryologist, when he follows
the DEVELOPMENT of his object, has to treat the history of each single organ in
turn. ABSOLUTE aesthetic union is thus another barely abstract ideal. The world
appears as something more epic than dramatic.
So far, then, we see how the world is unified by its many systems, kinds,
purposes, and dramas. That there is more union in all these ways than openly
appears is certainly true. That there MAY be one sovereign purpose, system,
kind, and story, is a legitimate hypothesis. All I say here is that it is rash
to affirm this dogmatically without better evidence than we possess at
present.
8. The GREAT monistic DENKMITTEL for a hundred years past has been the notion
of THE ONE KNOWER. The many exist only as objects for his thought - exist in his
dream, as it were; and AS HE KNOWS them, they have one purpose, form one system,
tell one tale for him. This notion of an ALL-ENVELOPING NOETIC UNITY in things
is the sublimest achievement of intellectualist philosophy. Those who believe in
the Absolute, as the all-knower is termed, usually say that they do so for
coercive reasons, which clear thinkers cannot evade. The Absolute has
far-reaching practical consequences, some of which I drew attention in my second
lecture. Many kinds of difference important to us would surely follow from its
being true. I cannot here enter into all the logical proofs of such a Being's
existence, farther than to say that none of them seem to me sound. I must
therefore treat the notion of an All-Knower simply as an hypothesis, exactly on
a par logically with the pluralist notion that there is no point of view, no
focus of information extant, from which the entire content of the universe is
visible at once. "God's consciousness," says Professor Royce, 2) "forms in its wholeness one
luminously transparent conscious moment" - this is the type of noetic unity on
which rationalism insists. Empiricism on the other hand is satisfied with the
type of noetic unity that is humanly familiar. Everything gets known by SOME
knower along with something else; but the knowers may in the end be irreducibly
many, and the greatest knower of them all may yet not know the whole of
everything, or even know what he does know at one single stroke: - he may be
liable to forget. Whichever type obtained, the world would still be a universe
noetically. Its parts would be conjoined by knowledge, but in the one case the
knowledge would be absolutely unified, in the other it would be strung along and
overlapped.
The notion of one instantaneous or eternal Knower - either adjective here means
the same thing - is, as I said, the great intellectualist achievement of our time.
It has practically driven out that conception of 'Substance' which earlier
philosophers set such store by, and by which so much unifying work used to be
done - universal substance which alone has being in and from itself, and of which
all the particulars of experience are but forms to which it gives support.
Substance has succumbed to the pragmatic criticisms of the English school. It
appears now only as another name for the fact that phenomena as they come are
actually grouped and given in coherent forms, the very forms in which we finite
knowers experience or think them together. These forms of conjunction are as
much parts of the tissue of experience as are the terms which they connect; and
it is a great pragmatic achievement for recent idealism to have made the world
hang together in these directly representable ways instead of drawing its unity
from the 'inherence' of its parts - whatever that may mean - in an unimaginable
principle behind the scenes.
'The world is one,' therefore, just so far as we experience it to be
concatenated, one by as many definite conjunctions as appear. But then also NOT
one by just as many definite DISjunctions as we find. The oneness and the
manyness of it thus obtain in respects which can be separately named. It is
neither a universe pure and simple nor a multiverse pure and simple. And its
various manners of being one suggest, for their accurate ascertainment, so many
distinct programs of scientific work. Thus the pragmatic question 'What is the
oneness known-as? What practical difference will it make?' saves us from all
feverish excitement over it as a principle of sublimity and carries us forward
into the stream of experience with a cool head. The stream may indeed reveal far
more connexion and union than we now suspect, but we are not entitled on
pragmatic principles to claim absolute oneness in any respect in advance.
It is so difficult to see definitely what absolute oneness can mean, that
probably the majority of you are satisfied with the sober attitude which we have
reached. Nevertheless there are possibly some radically monistic souls among you
who are not content to leave the one and the many on a par. Union of various
grades, union of diverse types, union that stops at non-conductors, union that
merely goes from next to next, and means in many cases outer nextness only, and
not a more internal bond, union of concatenation, in short; all that sort of
thing seems to you a halfway stage of thought. The oneness of things, superior
to their manyness, you think must also be more deeply true, must be the more
real aspect of the world. The pragmatic view, you are sure, gives us a universe
imperfectly rational. The real universe must form an unconditional unit of
being, something consolidated, with its parts co-implicated through and through.
Only then could we consider our estate completely rational. There is no doubt
whatever that this ultra-monistic way of thinking means a great deal to many
minds. "One Life, One Truth, one Love, one Principle, One Good, One God" - I quote
from a Christian Science leaflet which the day's mail brings into my
hands - beyond doubt such a confession of faith has pragmatically an emotional
value, and beyond doubt the word 'one' contributes to the value quite as much as
the other words. But if we try to realize INTELLECTUALLY what we can possibly
MEAN by such a glut of oneness we are thrown right back upon our pragmatistic
determinations again. It means either the mere name One, the universe of
discourse; or it means the sum total of all the ascertainable particular
conjunctions and concatenations; or, finally, it means some one vehicle of
conjunction treated as all-inclusive, like one origin, one purpose, or one
knower. In point of fact it always means one KNOWER to those who take it
intellectually to-day. The one knower involves, they think, the other forms of
conjunction. His world must have all its parts co-implicated in the one
logical-aesthetical-teleological unit-picture which is his eternal dream.
The character of the absolute knower's picture is however so impossible for
us to represent clearly, that we may fairly suppose that the authority which
absolute monism undoubtedly possesses, and probably always will possess over
some persons, draws its strength far less from intellectual than from mystical
grounds. To interpret absolute monism worthily, be a mystic. Mystical states of
mind in every degree are shown by history, usually tho not always, to make for
the monistic view. This is no proper occasion to enter upon the general subject
of mysticism, but I will quote one mystical pronouncement to show just what I
mean. The paragon of all monistic systems is the Vedanta philosophy of
Hindostan, and the paragon of Vedantist missionaries was the late Swami
Vivekananda who visited our shores some years ago. The method of Vedantism is
the mystical method. You do not reason, but after going through a certain
discipline YOU SEE, and having seen, you can report the truth. Vivekananda thus
reports the truth in one of his lectures here:
"Where is any more misery for him who sees this Oneness in the
Universe...this Oneness of life, Oneness of everything? ...This separation
between man and man, man and woman, man and child, nation from nation, earth
from moon, moon from sun, this separation between atom and atom is the cause
really of all the misery, and the Vedanta says this separation does not exist,
it is not real. It is merely apparent, on the surface. In the heart of things
there is Unity still. If you go inside you find that Unity between man and man,
women and children, races and races, high and low, rich and poor, the gods and
men: all are One, and animals too, if you go deep enough, and he who has
attained to that has no more delusion. ... Where is any more delusion for him?
What can delude him? He knows the reality of everything, the secret of
everything. Where is there any more misery for him? What does he desire? He has
traced the reality of everything unto the Lord, that centre, that Unity of
everything, and that is Eternal Bliss, Eternal Knowledge, Eternal Existence.
Neither death nor disease, nor sorrow nor misery, nor discontent is there ... in
the centre, the reality, there is no one to be mourned for, no one to be sorry
for. He has penetrated everything, the Pure One, the Formless, the Bodiless, the
Stainless, He the Knower, He the Great Poet, the Self-Existent, He who is giving
to everyone what he deserves."
Observe how radical the character of the monism here is. Separation is not
simply overcome by the One, it is denied to exist. There is no many. We are not
parts of the One; It has no parts; and since in a sense we undeniably ARE, it
must be that each of us is the One, indivisibly and totally. AN ABSOLUTE ONE,
AND I THAT ONE - surely we have here a religion which, emotionally considered, has
a high pragmatic value; it imparts a perfect sumptuosity of security. As our
Swami says in another place:
"When man has seen himself as one with the infinite Being of the universe,
when all separateness has ceased, when all men, all women, all angels, all gods,
all animals, all plants, the whole universe has been melted into that oneness,
then all fear disappears. Whom to fear? Can I hurt myself? Can I kill myself?
Can I injure myself? Do you fear yourself? Then will all sorrow disappear. What
can cause me sorrow? I am the One Existence of the universe. Then all jealousies
will disappear; of whom to be jealous? Of myself? Then all bad feelings
disappear. Against whom will I have this bad feeling? Against myself? There is
none in the universe but me. ... Kill out this differentiation; kill out this
superstition that there are many. 'He who, in this world of many, sees that One;
he who in this mass of insentiency sees that One Sentient Being; he who in this
world of shadow catches that Reality, unto him belongs eternal peace, unto none
else, unto none else.'"
We all have some ear for this monistic music: it elevates and reassures. We
all have at least the germ of mysticism in us. And when our idealists recite
their arguments for the Absolute, saying that the slightest union admitted
anywhere carries logically absolute Oneness with it, and that the slightest
separation admitted anywhere logically carries disunion remediless and complete,
I cannot help suspecting that the palpable weak places in the intellectual
reasonings they use are protected from their own criticism by a mystical feeling
that, logic or no logic, absolute Oneness must somehow at any cost be true.
Oneness overcomes MORAL separateness at any rate. In the passion of love we have
the mystic germ of what might mean a total union of all sentient life. This
mystical germ wakes up in us on hearing the monistic utterances, acknowledges
their authority, and assigns to intellectual considerations a secondary
place.
I will dwell no longer on these religious and moral aspects of the question
in this lecture. When I come to my final lecture there will be something more to
say.
Leave then out of consideration for the moment the authority which mystical
insights may be conjectured eventually to possess; treat the problem of the One
and the Many in a purely intellectual way; and we see clearly enough where
pragmatism stands. With her criterion of the practical differences that theories
make, we see that she must equally abjure absolute monism and absolute
pluralism. The world is one just so far as its parts hang together by any
definite connexion. It is many just so far as any definite connexion fails to
obtain. And finally it is growing more and more unified by those systems of
connexion at least which human energy keeps framing as time goes on.
It is possible to imagine alternative universes to the one we know, in which
the most various grades and types of union should be embodied. Thus the lowest
grade of universe would be a world of mere WITHNESS, of which the parts were
only strung together by the conjunction 'and.' Such a universe is even now the
collection of our several inner lives. The spaces and times of your imagination,
the objects and events of your day-dreams are not only more or less incoherent
inter se, but are wholly out of definite relation with the similar contents of
anyone else's mind. Our various reveries now as we sit here compenetrate each
other idly without influencing or interfering. They coexist, but in no order and
in no receptacle, being the nearest approach to an absolute 'many' that we can
conceive. We cannot even imagine any reason why they SHOULD be known all
together, and we can imagine even less, if they were known together, how they
could be known as one systematic whole.
But add our sensations and bodily actions, and the union mounts to a much
higher grade. Our audita et visa and our acts fall into those receptacles of
time and space in which each event finds its date and place. They form 'things'
and are of 'kinds' too, and can be classed. Yet we can imagine a world of things
and of kinds in which the causal interactions with which we are so familiar
should not exist. Everything there might be inert towards everything else, and
refuse to propagate its influence. Or gross mechanical influences might pass,
but no chemical action. Such worlds would be far less unified than ours. Again
there might be complete physico-chemical interaction, but no minds; or minds,
but altogether private ones, with no social life; or social life limited to
acquaintance, but no love; or love, but no customs or institutions that should
systematize it. No one of these grades of universe would be absolutely
irrational or disintegrated, inferior tho it might appear when looked at from
the higher grades. For instance, if our minds should ever become
'telepathically' connected, so that we knew immediately, or could under certain
conditions know immediately, each what the other was thinking, the world we now
live in would appear to the thinkers in that world to have been of an inferior
grade.
With the whole of past eternity open for our conjectures to range in, it may
be lawful to wonder whether the various kinds of union now realized in the
universe that we inhabit may not possibly have been successively evolved after
the fashion in which we now see human systems evolving in consequence of human
needs. If such an hypothesis were legitimate, total oneness would appear at the
end of things rather than at their origin. In other words the notion of the
'Absolute' would have to be replaced by that of the 'Ultimate.' The two notions
would have the same content - the maximally unified content of fact, namely - but
their time-relations would be positively reversed. 3)
After discussing the unity of the universe in this pragmatic way, you ought
to see why I said in my second lecture, borrowing the word from my friend G.
Papini, that pragmatism tends to UNSTIFFEN all our theories. The world's oneness
has generally been affirmed abstractly only, and as if anyone who questioned it
must be an idiot. The temper of monists has been so vehement, as almost at times
to be convulsive; and this way of holding a doctrine does not easily go with
reasonable discussion and the drawing of distinctions. The theory of the
Absolute, in particular, has had to be an article of faith, affirmed
dogmatically and exclusively. The One and All, first in the order of being and
of knowing, logically necessary itself, and uniting all lesser things in the
bonds of mutual necessity, how could it allow of any mitigation of its inner
rigidity? The slightest suspicion of pluralism, the minutest wiggle of
independence of any one of its parts from the control of the totality, would
ruin it. Absolute unity brooks no degrees - as well might you claim absolute
purity for a glass of water because it contains but a single little
cholera-germ. The independence, however infinitesimal, of a part, however small,
would be to the Absolute as fatal as a cholera-germ.
Pluralism on the other hand has no need of this dogmatic rigoristic temper.
Provided you grant SOME separation among things, some tremor of independence,
some free play of parts on one another, some real novelty or chance, however
minute, she is amply satisfied, and will allow you any amount, however great, of
real union. How much of union there may be is a question that she thinks can
only be decided empirically. The amount may be enormous, colossal; but absolute
monism is shattered if, along with all the union, there has to be granted the
slightest modicum, the most incipient nascency, or the most residual trace, of a
separation that is not 'overcome.'
Pragmatism, pending the final empirical ascertainment of just what the
balance of union and disunion among things may be, must obviously range herself
upon the pluralistic side. Some day, she admits, even total union, with one
knower, one origin, and a universe consolidated in every conceivable way, may
turn out to be the most acceptable of all hypotheses. Meanwhile the opposite
hypothesis, of a world imperfectly unified still, and perhaps always to remain
so, must be sincerely entertained. This latter hypothesis is pluralism's
doctrine. Since absolute monism forbids its being even considered seriously,
branding it as irrational from the start, it is clear that pragmatism must turn
its back on absolute monism, and follow pluralism's more empirical path.
This leaves us with the common-sense world, in which we find things partly
joined and partly disjoined. 'Things,' then, and their 'conjunctions' - what do
such words mean, pragmatically handled? In my next lecture, I will apply the
pragmatic method to the stage of philosophizing known as Common Sense.
____________
1)
Compare A. Bellanger: Les concepts de Cause, et l'activite intentionelle de l'Esprit. Paris, Alcan, 1905, p. 79 ff.
2)
The Conception of God, New York, 1897, p. 292.
3)
Compare on the Ultimate, Mr. Schiller's essay "Activity and Substance," in his book entitled
Humanism, p. 204.
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