As I read it, its favorite way of meeting pluralism and empiricism is by a _reductio ad absurdum_ framed somewhat as follows: You contend, it says to the pluralist, that things, though in some respects connected, are in other respects independent, so that they are not members of one all-inclusive individual fact. Well, your position is absurd on either point. For admit in fact the slightest modicum of independence, and you find (if you will only think accurately) that you have to admit more and more of it, until at last nothing but an absolute chaos, or the proved impossibility of any connexion whatever between the parts of the universe, remains upon your hands. Admit, on the other hand, the most incipient minimum of relation between any two things, and again you can't stop until you see that the absolute unity of all things is implied. If we take the latter _reductio ad absurdum_ first, we find a good example of it in Lotze's well-known proof of monism from the fact of interaction between finite things. Suppose, Lotze says in effect, and for simplicity's sake I have to paraphrase him, for his own words are too long to quote--many distinct beings _a, b, c_, etc., to exist independently of each other: _can a in that case ever act on b_? What is it to act? Is it not to exert an influence? Does the influence detach itself from _a_ and find _b_? If so, it is a third fact, and the problem is not how _a_ acts, but how its 'influence' acts on _b_. By another influence perhaps? And how in the end does the chain of influences find _b_ rather than _c_ unless _b_ is somehow prefigured in them already? And when they have found _b_, how do they make _b_ respond, if _b_ has nothing in common with them? Why don't they go right through _b_? The change in _b_ is a _response_, due to _b_'s capacity for taking account of _a_'s influence, and that again seems to prove that _b_'s nature is somehow fitted to _a_'s nature in advance. _A_ and _b_, in short, are not really as distinct as we at first supposed them, not separated by a void. Were this so they would be mutually impenetrable, or at least mutually irrelevant. They would form two universes each living by itself, making no difference to each other, taking no account of each other, much as the universe of your day dreams takes no account of mine. They must therefore belong together beforehand, be co-implicated already, their natures must have an inborn mutual reference each to each. Lotze's own solution runs as follows: The multiple independent things supposed cannot be real in that shape, but all of them, if reciprocal action is to be possible between them, must be regarded as parts of a single real being, M. The pluralism with which our view began has to give place to a monism; and the 'transeunt' interaction, being unintelligible as such, is to be understood as an immanent operation.[6]