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 disconnection 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 connection which will not fail, if, instead of choosing conductors for it, you choose nonconductors. 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 coordinate 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 nonconductors, and wisdom lies in knowing which is which at the appropriate moment.
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.
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.
Another specification of what the phrase “the world is One” may mean is
