“Can a plurality of reals be possible?” asks Mr. Bradley, and answers, “No, impossible.” For it would mean a number of beings not dependent on each other, and this independence their plurality would contradict. For to be “many” is to be related, the word having no meaning unless the units are somehow taken together, and it is impossible to take them in a sort of unreal void, so they must belong to a larger reality, and so carry the essence of the units beyond their proper selves, into a whole which possesses unity and is a larger system.14 Either absolute independence or absolute mutual dependence—this, then, is the only alternative allowed by these thinkers. Of course “independence,” if absolute, would be preposterous, so the only conclusion allowable is that, in Ritchie’s words, “every single event is ultimately related to every other, and determined by the whole to which it belongs.” The whole complete block-universe through-and-through, therefore, or no universe at all!
Professor Taylor is so naive in this habit of thinking only in extremes that he charges the pluralists with cutting the ground from under their own feet in not consistently following it themselves. What pluralists say is that a universe really connected loosely, after the pattern of our daily experience, is possible, and that for certain reasons it is the hypothesis to be preferred. What Professor Taylor thinks they naturally must or should say is that any other sort of universe is logically impossible, and that a totality of things interrelated like the world of the monists is not an hypothesis that can be seriously thought out at all.15
Meanwhile no sensible pluralist ever flies or wants to fly to this dogmatic extreme.
If chance is spoken of as an ingredient of the universe, absolutists interpret it to mean that double sevens are as likely to be thrown out of a dice box as double sixes are. If free will is spoken of, that must mean that an English general is as likely to eat his prisoners today as a Maori chief was a hundred years ago. It is as likely—I am using Mr. McTaggart’s examples—that a majority of Londoners will burn themselves alive tomorrow as that they will partake of food, as likely that I shall be hanged for brushing my hair as for committing a murder,16 and so forth, through various suppositions that no indeterminist ever sees real reason to make.
This habit of thinking only in the most violent extremes reminds me of what Mr. Wells says of the current objections to socialism, in his wonderful little book, New Worlds for Old. The commonest vice of the human mind is its disposition to see everything as yes or no, as black or white, its incapacity for discrimination of intermediate shades. So the critics agree to some hard and fast impossible definition of socialism, and extract absurdities from it as a conjurer gets rabbits from a hat. Socialism abolishes property, abolishes the family, and the rest. The method, Mr. Wells continues, is always the same: It is to assume that whatever the socialist postulates as desirable is wanted without limit of qualification—for socialist read pluralist and the parallel holds good—it is to imagine that whatever proposal is made by him is to be carried out by uncontrolled monomaniacs, and so to make a picture of the socialist dream which can be presented to the simple-minded person in doubt—“This is socialism”—or pluralism, as the case may be. “Surely!—Surely! you don’t want this!”
How often have I been replied to, when expressing doubts of the logical necessity of the absolute, of flying to the opposite extreme: “But surely, surely there must be some connection among things!” As if I must necessarily be an uncontrolled monomanic insanely denying any connection whatever. The whole question revolves in very truth about the word “some.” Radical empiricism and pluralism stand out for the legitimacy of the notion of some: each part of the world is in some ways connected, in some other ways not connected with its other parts, and the ways can be discriminated, for many of them are obvious, and their differences are obvious to view. Absolutism, on its side, seems to hold that “some” is a category ruinously infected with self-contradictoriness, and that the only categories inwardly consistent and therefore pertinent to reality are “all” and “none.”
The question runs into the still more general one with which Mr. Bradley and later writers of the monistic school have made us abundantly familiar—the question, namely, whether all the relations with other things, possible to a being, are pre-included in its intrinsic nature and enter into its essence, or whether, in respect to some of these relations, it can be without reference to them, and, if it ever does enter into them, do so adventitiously and as it were by an afterthought. This is the great question as to whether “external” relations can exist. They seem to, undoubtedly. My manuscript, for example, is “on” the desk. The relation of being “on” doesn’t seem to implicate or involve in any way the inner meaning of the manuscript or the
