A Pluralistic Universe | Page 3

be surprised to hear of a declaration by men of
eminent abilities, that, after years of study, they had not succeeded in gathering one clear
idea from the speculations of Kant. I should have been almost surprised if they had. In or
about 1818, Lord Grenville, when visiting the Lakes of England, observed to Professor
Wilson that, after five years' study of Kant's philosophy, he had not gathered from it one
clear idea. Wilberforce, about the same time, made the same confession to another friend
of my own. "I am endeavoring," exclaims Sir James Mackintosh, in the irritation,
evidently, of baffled efforts, "to understand this accursed german philosophy."[1]
What Oxford thinker would dare to print such _naïf_ and provincial-sounding citations of
authority to-day?
The torch of learning passes from land to land as the spirit bloweth the flame. The
deepening of philosophic consciousness came to us english folk from Germany, as it will
probably pass back ere long. Ferrier, J.H. Stirling, and, most of all, T.H. Green are to be
thanked. If asked to tell in broad strokes what the main doctrinal change has been, I
should call it a change from the crudity of the older english thinking, its ultra-simplicity
of mind, both when it was religious and when it was anti-religious, toward a rationalism
derived in the first instance from Germany, but relieved from german technicality and
shrillness, and content to suggest, and to remain vague, and to be, in, the english fashion,
devout.
By the time T.H. Green began at Oxford, the generation seemed to feel as if it had fed on
the chopped straw of psychology and of associationism long enough, and as if a little

vastness, even though it went with vagueness, as of some moist wind from far away,
reminding us of our pre-natal sublimity, would be welcome.
Green's great point of attack was the disconnectedness of the reigning english
sensationalism. Relating was the great intellectual activity for him, and the key to this
relating was believed by him to lodge itself at last in what most of you know as Kant's
unity of apperception, transformed into a living spirit of the world.
Hence a monism of a devout kind. In some way we must be fallen angels, one with
intelligence as such; and a great disdain for empiricism of the sensationalist sort has
always characterized this school of thought, which, on the whole, has reigned supreme at
Oxford and in the Scottish universities until the present day.
But now there are signs of its giving way to a wave of revised empiricism. I confess that I
should be glad to see this latest wave prevail; so--the sooner I am frank about it the
better--I hope to have my voice counted in its favor as one of the results of this
lecture-course.
What do the terms empiricism and rationalism mean? Reduced to their most pregnant
difference, _empiricism means the habit of explaining wholes by parts, and rationalism
means the habit of explaining parts by wholes_. Rationalism thus preserves affinities with
monism, since wholeness goes with union, while empiricism inclines to pluralistic views.
No philosophy can ever be anything but a summary sketch, a picture of the world in
abridgment, a foreshortened bird's-eye view of the perspective of events. And the first
thing to notice is this, that the only material we have at our disposal for making a picture
of the whole world is supplied by the various portions of that world of which we have
already had experience. We can invent no new forms of conception, applicable to the
whole exclusively, and not suggested originally by the parts. All philosophers,
accordingly, have conceived of the whole world after the analogy of some particular
feature of it which has particularly captivated their attention. Thus, the theists take their
cue from manufacture, the pantheists from growth. For one man, the world is like a
thought or a grammatical sentence in which a thought is expressed. For such a
philosopher, the whole must logically be prior to the parts; for letters would never have
been invented without syllables to spell, or syllables without words to utter.
Another man, struck by the disconnectedness and mutual accidentality of so many of the
world's details, takes the universe as a whole to have been such a disconnectedness
originally, and supposes order to have been superinduced upon it in the second instance,
possibly by attrition and the gradual wearing away by internal friction of portions that
originally interfered.
Another will conceive the order as only a statistical appearance, and the universe will be
for him like a vast grab-bag with black and white balls in it, of which we guess the
quantities only probably, by the frequency with which we experience their egress.
For another, again, there is no really inherent