A Pluralistic Universe | Page 9

of wariness
and one of trust. One might call it a social difference, for after all, the common socius of
us all is the great universe whose children we are. If materialistic, we must be suspicious
of this socius, cautious, tense, on guard. If spiritualistic, we may give way, embrace, and

keep no ultimate fear.
The contrast is rough enough, and can be cut across by all sorts of other divisions, drawn
from other points of view than that of foreignness and intimacy. We have so many
different businesses with nature that no one of them yields us an all-embracing clasp. The
philosophic attempt to define nature so that no one's business is left out, so that no one
lies outside the door saying 'Where do I come in?' is sure in advance to fail. The most a
philosophy can hope for is not to lock out any interest forever. No matter what doors it
closes, it must leave other doors open for the interests which it neglects. I have begun by
shutting ourselves up to intimacy and foreignness because that makes so generally
interesting a contrast, and because it will conveniently introduce a farther contrast to
which I wish this hour to lead.
The majority of men are sympathetic. Comparatively few are cynics because they like
cynicism, and most of our existing materialists are such because they think the evidence
of facts impels them, or because they find the idealists they are in contact with too private
and tender-minded; so, rather than join their company, they fly to the opposite extreme. I
therefore propose to you to disregard materialists altogether for the present, and to
consider the sympathetic party alone.
It is normal, I say, to be sympathetic in the sense in which I use the term. Not to demand
intimate relations with the universe, and not to wish them satisfactory, should be
accounted signs of something wrong. Accordingly when minds of this type reach the
philosophic level, and seek some unification of their vision, they find themselves
compelled to correct that aboriginal appearance of things by which savages are not
troubled. That sphinx-like presence, with its breasts and claws, that first bald
multifariousness, is too discrepant an object for philosophic contemplation. The intimacy
and the foreignness cannot be written down as simply coexisting. An order must be made;
and in that order the higher side of things must dominate. The philosophy of the absolute
agrees with the pluralistic philosophy which I am going to contrast with it in these
lectures, in that both identify human substance with the divine substance. But whereas
absolutism thinks that the said substance becomes fully divine only in the form of totality,
and is not its real self in any form but the _all_-form, the pluralistic view which I prefer
to adopt is willing to believe that there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the
substance of reality may never get totally collected, that some of it may remain outside of
the largest combination of it ever made, and that a distributive form of reality, the
_each_-form, is logically as acceptable and empirically as probable as the all-form
commonly acquiesced in as so obviously the self-evident thing. The contrast between
these two forms of a reality which we will agree to suppose substantially spiritual is
practically the topic of this course of lectures. You see now what I mean by pantheism's
two subspecies. If we give to the monistic subspecies the name of philosophy of the
absolute, we may give that of radical empiricism to its pluralistic rival, and it may be well
to distinguish them occasionally later by these names.
As a convenient way of entering into the study of their differences, I may refer to a recent
article by Professor Jacks of Manchester College. Professor Jacks, in some brilliant pages
in the 'Hibbert Journal' for last October, studies the relation between the universe and the
philosopher who describes and defines it for us. You may assume two cases, he says.
Either what the philosopher tells us is extraneous to the universe he is accounting for, an
indifferent parasitic outgrowth, so to speak; or the fact of his philosophizing is itself one

of the things taken account of in the philosophy, and self-included in the description. In
the former case the philosopher means by the universe everything except what his own
presence brings; in the latter case his philosophy is itself an intimate part of the universe,
and may be a part momentous enough to give a different turn to what the other parts
signify. It may be a supreme reaction of the universe upon itself by which it rises to
self-comprehension. It may handle itself differently in consequence of this event.
Now both empiricism and absolutism bring the philosopher inside