A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in PhilosophyJames, William
Philosophy
A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy
James, William
Philosophy, Modern
Everywhere we find rationalists using the same kind of reasoning. The
primal whole which is their vision must be there not only as a
fact but as a logical necessity. It must be the minimum that can
exist--either that absolute whole is there, or there is absolutely
nothing. The logical proof alleged of the irrationality of supposing
otherwise, is that you can deny the whole only in words that
implicitly assert it. If you say 'parts,' of _what_ are they parts? If
you call them a 'many,' that very word unifies them. If you suppose
them unrelated in any particular respect, that 'respect' connects
them; and so on. In short you fall into hopeless contradiction. You
must stay either at one extreme or the other.[8] 'Partly this and
partly that,' partly rational, for instance, and partly irrational,
is no admissible description of the world. If rationality be in it at
all, it must be in it throughout; if irrationality be in it anywhere,
that also must pervade it throughout. It must be wholly rational or
wholly irrational, pure universe or pure multiverse or nulliverse; and
reduced to this violent alternative, no one's choice ought long to
remain doubtful. The individual absolute, with its parts co-implicated
through and through, so that there is nothing in any part by which
any other part can remain inwardly unaffected, is the only rational
supposition. Connexions of an external sort, by which the many became
merely continuous instead of being consubstantial, would be an
irrational supposition.
Mr. Bradley is the pattern champion of this philosophy _in extremis_,
as one might call it, for he shows an intolerance to pluralism so
extreme that I fancy few of his readers have been able fully to share
it. His reasoning exemplifies everywhere what I call the vice of
intellectualism, for abstract terms are used by him as positively
excluding all that their definition fails to include. Some Greek
sophists could deny that we may say that man is good, for man, they
said, means only man, and good means only good, and the word _is_
can't be construed to identify such disparate meanings. Mr. Bradley
revels in the same type of argument. No adjective can rationally
qualify a substantive, he thinks, for if distinct from the
substantive, it can't be united with it; and if not distinct, there is
only one thing there, and nothing left to unite. Our whole pluralistic
procedure in using subjects and predicates as we do is fundamentally
irrational, an example of the desperation of our finite intellectual
estate, infected and undermined as that is by the separatist
discursive forms which are our only categories, but which absolute
reality must somehow absorb into its unity and overcome.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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