A Pluralistic Universe

or quatenus infinitus est, the world repels our sympathy because it has no history. As such, the absolute neither acts nor suffers, nor loves nor hates; it has no needs, desires, or aspirations, no failures or successes, friends or enemies, victories or defeats. All such things pertain to the world qua relative, in which our finite experiences lie, and whose vicissitudes alone have power to arouse our interest. What boots it to tell me that the absolute way is the true way, and to exhort me, as Emerson says, to lift mine eye up to its style, and manners of the sky, if the feat is impossible by definition? I am finite once for all, and all the categories of my sympathy are knit up with the finite world as such, and with things that have a history. “Aus dieser erde quellen meine freuden, und ihre sonne scheinet meinen leiden.” I have neither eyes nor ears nor heart nor mind for anything of an opposite description, and the stagnant felicity of the absolute’s own perfection moves me as little as I move it. If we were readers only of the cosmic novel, things would be different: we should then share the author’s point of view and recognize villains to be as essential as heroes in the plot. But we are not the readers but the very personages of the world-drama. In your own eyes each of you here is its hero, and the villains are your respective friends or enemies. The tale which the absolute reader finds so perfect, we spoil for one another through our several vital identifications with the destinies of the particular personages involved.

The doctrine on which the absolutists lay most stress is the absolute’s “timeless” character. For pluralists, on the other hand, time remains as real as anything, and nothing in the universe is great or static or eternal enough not to have some history. But the world that each of us feels most intimately at home with is that of beings with histories that play into our history, whom we can help in their vicissitudes even as they help us in ours. This satisfaction the absolute denies us; we can neither help nor hinder it, for it stands outside of history. It surely is a merit in a philosophy to make the very life we lead seem real and earnest. Pluralism, in exorcising the absolute, exorcises the great de-realizer of the only life we are at home in, and thus redeems the nature of reality from essential foreignness. Every end, reason, motive, object of desire or aversion, ground of sorrow or joy that we feel is in the world of finite multifariousness, for only in that world does anything really happen, only there do events come to pass.

In one sense this is a farfetched and rather childish objection, for so much of the history of the finite is as formidably foreign to us as the static absolute can possibly be⁠—in fact that entity derives its own foreignness largely from the bad character of the finite which it simultaneously is⁠—that this sentimental reason for preferring the pluralistic view seems small.5 I shall return to the subject in my final lecture, and meanwhile, with your permission, I will say no more about this objection. The more so as the necessary foreignness of the absolute is cancelled emotionally by its attribute of totality, which is universally considered to carry the further attribute of perfection in its train. “Philosophy,” says a recent American philosopher, “is humanity’s hold on totality,” and there is no doubt that most of us find that the bare notion of an absolute all-one is inspiring. “I yielded myself to the perfect whole,” writes Emerson; and where can you find a more mind-dilating object? A certain loyalty is called forth by the idea; even if not proved actual, it must be believed in somehow. Only an enemy of philosophy can speak lightly of it. Rationalism starts from the idea of such a whole and builds downward. Movement and change are absorbed into its immutability as forms of mere appearance. When you accept this beatific vision of what is, in contrast with what goes on, you feel as if you had fulfilled an intellectual duty. “Reality is not in its truest nature a process,” Mr. McTaggart tells us, “but a stable and timeless state.”6 “The true knowledge of God begins,” Hegel writes, “when we know that things as they immediately are have no truth.”7 “The consummation of the infinite aim,” he says elsewhere, “consists merely in removing the illusion which makes it seem yet unaccomplished. Good and absolute goodness is eternally accomplishing itself in the world: and the result is that it needs not wait upon us, but is already⁠ ⁠… accomplished. It is an illusion under which we live.⁠ ⁠… In the course of its process the Idea makes itself that illusion, by setting an antithesis to confront it, and its action consists in getting rid of the illusion which it has created.”8

But abstract emotional appeals of any kind sound amateurish in the business that concerns us. Impressionistic philosophizing, like impressionistic watchmaking or land-surveying, is intolerable to experts. Serious discussion of the alternative before us forces me, therefore, to become more technical. The great claim of the philosophy of the absolute is that the absolute is no hypothesis, but a presupposition implicated in all thinking, and needing only a little effort of analysis to be seen as a logical necessity. I will therefore take it in this more rigorous character and see whether its claim is in effect so coercive.

It has seemed coercive to an enormous number of contemporaneous thinkers. Professor Henry Jones thus describes the range and influence of it upon the social and political life of the present time:9 “For many years adherents of this way of thought have deeply interested the British public by their writings.