Some Problems of Philosophy

Only then might we believe that all things really do belong together, instead of being connected by the bare conjunctions ‘with’ or ‘and.’ The notion that this latter pluralistic arrangement may obtain is deemed ‘irrational’; and of course it does make the world partly alogical or non-rational from a purely intellectual point of view. Monism thus holds the oneness to be the more vital and essential element. The entire cosmos must be a consolidated unit, within which each member is determined by the whole to be just that, and from which the slightest incipiency of independence anywhere is ruled out. With Spinoza, monism likes to believe that all things follow from the essence of God as necessarily as from the nature of a triangle it follows that the angles are equal to two right angles. The whole is what yields the parts, not the parts the whole. The universe is tight, monism claims, not loose; and you must take the irreducible whole of it just as it is offered, or have no part or lot in it at all. The only alternative allowed by monistic writers is to confess the world’s non- rationality — and no philosopher can permit himself to do that. The form of monism regnant at the present day in philosophic circles is absolute idealism. For this way of thinking, the world exists no otherwise than as the object of one infinitely knowing mind. The analogy that suggests the hypothesis here is that of our own finite fields of consciousness, which at every moment envisage a much-at-once composed of parts related variously, and in which both the conjunctions and the disjunctions that appear are there only in so far as we are there as their witnesses, so that they are both ‘noetically’ and monistically based.