A Pluralistic Universe

the reader must beware of slipping from logical into phenomenal considerations. It may well be that we attribute a certain relation falsely, because the circumstances of the case, being complex, have deceived us. At a railway station we may take our own train, and not the one that fills our window, to be moving. We here put motion in the wrong place in the world, but in its original place the motion is a part of reality. What Mr. Bradley means is nothing like this, but rather that such things as motion are nowhere real, and that, even in their aboriginal and empirically incorrigible seats, relations are impossible of comprehension. ↩

Particularly so by Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, in his Man and the Cosmos; by L. T. Hobhouse, in chapter XII (“The Validity of Judgment”) of his Theory of Knowledge; and by F. C. S. Schiller, in his Humanism, Essay XI. Other fatal reviews (in my opinion) are Hodder’s, in the Psychological Review, vol. I, 307; Stout’s, in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1901⁠–⁠02, p. 1; and MacLennan’s, in the Journal of Philosophy, etc., vol. I, 403. ↩

Once more, don’t slip from logical into physical situations. Of course, if the table be wet, it will moisten the book, or if it be slight enough and the book heavy enough, the book will break it down. But such collateral phenomena are not the point at issue. The point is whether the successive relations “on” and “not-on” can rationally (not physically) hold of the same constant terms, abstractly taken. Professor A. E. Taylor drops from logical into material considerations when he instances color-contrast as a proof that A, “as contradistinguished from B, is not the same thing as mere A not in any way affected” (Elements of Metaphysics, 1903, p. 145). Note the substitution, for “related,” of the word “affected,” which begs the whole question. ↩

But “is there any sense,” asks Mr. Bradley, peevishly, on p. 579, “and if so, what sense, in truth that is only outside and ‘about’ things?” Surely such a question may be left unanswered. ↩

Appearance and Reality, 2nd edition, pp. 575⁠–⁠576. ↩

I say “undecided,” because, apart from the “so far,” which sounds terribly halfhearted, there are passages in these very pages in which Mr. Bradley admits the pluralistic thesis. Read, for example, what he says, on p. 578, of a billiard ball keeping its “character” unchanged, though, in its change of place, its “existence” gets altered; or what he says, on p. 579, of the possibility that an abstract quality A, B, or C, in a thing, “may throughout remain unchanged” although the thing be altered; or his admission that in red-hairedness, both as analyzed out of a man and when given with the rest of him, there may be “no change” (p. 580). Why does he immediately add that for the pluralist to plead the non-mutation of such abstractions would be an ignoratio elenchi? It is impossible to admit it to be such. The entire elenchus and inquest is just as to whether parts which you can abstract from existing wholes can also contribute to other wholes without changing their inner nature. If they can thus mould various wholes into new gestalt-qualitäten, then it follows that the same elements are logically able to exist in different wholes [whether physically able would depend on additional hypotheses]; that partial changes are thinkable, and through-and-through change not a dialectic necessity; that monism is only an hypothesis; and that an additively constituted universe is a rationally respectable hypothesis also. All the theses of radical empiricism, in short, follow. ↩

So far as I catch his state of mind, it is somewhat like this: “Book,” “table,” “on”⁠—how does the existence of these three abstract elements result in this book being livingly on this table? Why isn’t the table on the book? Or why doesn’t the “on” connect itself with another book, or something that is not a table? Mustn’t something in each of the three elements already determine the two others to it, so that they do not settle elsewhere or float vaguely? Mustn’t the whole fact be prefigured in each part, and exist de jure before it can exist de facto? But, if so, in what can the jural existence consist, if not in a spiritual miniature of the whole fact’s constitution actuating; every partial factor as its purpose? But is this anything but the old metaphysical fallacy of looking behind a fact in esse for the ground of the fact, and finding it in the shape of the very same fact in posse? Somewhere we must leave off with a constitution behind which there is nothing. ↩

Apply this to the case of “book-on-table”! ↩

How meaningless is the contention that in such wholes (or in “book-on-table,” “watch-in-pocket,” etc.) the relation is an additional entity between the terms, needing itself to be related again to each! Both Bradley (Appearance and Reality, pp. 32⁠–⁠33) and Royce (The World and the Individual, I, 128) lovingly repeat this piece of profundity. ↩

The “why” and the “whence” are entirely other questions, not under discussion, as I understand Mr. Bradley. Not how experience gets itself born, but how it can be what it is after it is born, is the puzzle. ↩

President’s Address before the American Psychological Association, December, 1904. Reprinted from the Psychological Review, vol. XII, 1905, with slight verbal revision. ↩

Appearance and Reality, p. 117. Obviously written at Ward, though Ward’s name is not mentioned. ↩

Mind, N.S., VI, 379. ↩