A Pluralistic Universe · William James
CONCLUSIONS
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. 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 suggestive 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 discussion in these questions to be broadened and thickened up_. It is for that that I have brought in Fechner and Bergson, and descriptive psychology 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 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 empirical 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 elaborately 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 philosophic conclusions of any kind, monistic or pluralistic, from the _particulars of life_, I will say, as I now do say, with the cheerfullest of hearts, 'Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, but ring the fuller minstrel in.' Note 1, page 5.--Bailey: _op. cit._, First Series, p. 52. Note 2, page 11.--_Smaller Logic_, § 194. Note 3, page 16.--_Exploratio philosophica_, Part I, 1865, pp. xxxviii, 130. Note 4, page 20.--Hinneberg: _Die Kultur der Gegenwart: Systematische Philosophie_. Leipzig: Teubner, 1907.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.