A Pluralistic Universe | Page 4

order, but it is we who project order into the
world by selecting objects and tracing relations so as to gratify our intellectual interests.
We carve out order by leaving the disorderly parts out; and the world is conceived thus
after the analogy of a forest or a block of marble from which parks or statues may be
produced by eliminating irrelevant trees or chips of stone.
Some thinkers follow suggestions from human life, and treat the universe as if it were
essentially a place in which ideals are realized. Others are more struck by its lower
features, and for them, brute necessities express its character better.

All follow one analogy or another; and all the analogies are with some one or other of the
universe's subdivisions. Every one is nevertheless prone to claim that his conclusions are
the only logical ones, that they are necessities of universal reason, they being all the
while, at bottom, accidents more or less of personal vision which had far better be
avowed as such; for one man's vision may be much more valuable than another's, and our
visions are usually not only our most interesting but our most respectable contributions to
the world in which we play our part. What was reason given to men for, said some
eighteenth century writer, except to enable them to find reasons for what they want to
think and do?--and I think the history of philosophy largely bears him out, 'The aim of
knowledge,' says Hegel,[2] 'is to divest the objective world of its strangeness, and to
make us more at home in it.' Different men find their minds more at home in very
different fragments of the world.
Let me make a few comments, here, on the curious antipathies which these partialities
arouse. They are sovereignly unjust, for all the parties are human beings with the same
essential interests, and no one of them is the wholly perverse demon which another often
imagines him to be. Both are loyal to the world that bears them; neither wishes to spoil it;
neither wishes to regard it as an insane incoherence; both want to keep it as a universe of
some kind; and their differences are all secondary to this deep agreement. They may be
only propensities to emphasize differently. Or one man may care for finality and security
more than the other. Or their tastes in language may be different. One may like a universe
that lends itself to lofty and exalted characterization. To another this may seem
sentimental or rhetorical. One may wish for the right to use a clerical vocabulary, another
a technical or professorial one. A certain old farmer of my acquaintance in America was
called a rascal by one of his neighbors. He immediately smote the man, saying,'I won't
stand none of your diminutive epithets.' Empiricist minds, putting the parts before the
whole, appear to rationalists, who start from the whole, and consequently enjoy
magniloquent privileges, to use epithets offensively diminutive. But all such differences
are minor matters which ought to be subordinated in view of the fact that, whether we be
empiricists or rationalists, we are, ourselves, parts of the universe and share the same one
deep concern in its destinies. We crave alike to feel more truly at home with it, and to
contribute our mite to its amelioration. It would be pitiful if small aesthetic discords were
to keep honest men asunder.
I shall myself have use for the diminutive epithets of empiricism. But if you look behind
the words at the spirit, I am sure you will not find it matricidal. I am as good a son as any
rationalist among you to our common mother. What troubles me more than this
misapprehension is the genuine abstruseness of many of the matters I shall be obliged to
talk about, and the difficulty of making them intelligible at one hearing. But there two
pieces, 'zwei stücke,' as Kant would have said, in every philosophy--the final outlook,
belief, or attitude to which it brings us, and the reasonings by which that attitude is
reached and mediated. A philosophy, as James Ferrier used to tell us, must indeed be true,
but that is the least of its requirements. One may be true without being a philosopher, true
by guesswork or by revelation. What distinguishes a philosopher's truth is that it is
reasoned. Argument, not supposition, must have put it in his possession. Common men
find themselves inheriting their beliefs, they know not how. They jump into them with
both feet, and stand there. Philosophers must do more; they must first get reason's license
for them; and to the professional philosophic mind the operation of procuring the license

is usually a thing of much more pith and moment than any particular beliefs to which the