A Pluralistic Universe

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 follows from their position of academic authority, were it from nothing else, that idealism exercises 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 leaders 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 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 Eitchie⁠—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 pluralism and empiricism is by a reductio ad absurdum framed somewhat as follows: You contend, it says to the pluralist, that things, though 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 connection 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, B, C, etc., to exist independently of each other: can A in that case ever act on B?

What is it to act? Is it not to exert an influence? Does the influence detach itself from A and find B? If so, it is a third fact, and the problem is not how A acts, but how its “influence” acts on B. By another influence perhaps? And how in the end does the chain of influences find B rather than C unless B is somehow prefigured in them already? And when they have found B, how do they make B respond, if B has nothing in common with them? Why don’t they go right through B? The change in B is a response, due to B’s capacity for taking account of A’s influence, and that again seems to prove that B’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 separated 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 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 reciprocal 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 unintelligible as such, is to be understood as an immanent operation.10

The words “immanent operation” seem here to mean that the single real being M, of which A and B 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 B 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 B distinct, they can’t interact; call them one, they can. For taken abstractly and without qualification the words “distinct” and “independent” suggest only disconnection. If this be the only property of your A and B (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,” contradicting your bare word “joined,” seems to exclude connection.

Lotze’s remedy for the impossibility thus verbally found is to change the first word. If, instead of calling A and B independent, we now call them