This doctrine of the existence of a plurality of divine intelligences has further support by a very eminent professor--no less a personage than Professor James, late of Harvard university. Within the year, his lectures before Oxford university, England, have been published, and this work bears the title _A Pluralistic Universe._ The outcome of Professor James' learned discussion of all the questions involved in this subject is to the effect that instead of the universe being, as he satirically speaks of it, when referring to the monistic view of it--"a solid block," it is a pluralistic universe. One of his passages runs as follows: "I propose to you that we should discuss the question of God, without entangling ourselves in advance in the monistic assumption. Is it probable that there is a superhuman consciousness at all, in the first place? When that is settled, the further question whether its form be monistic or pluralistic is in order." (page 295). This question as to their being a "superhuman consciousness" the professor decides in the affirmative as at least probable; and then he announces that the only way to escape from the inconsistencies of other theories "is to be frankly pluralistic and assume that the superhuman consciousness, however vast it may be, has itself an external envelopment, and consequently is finite" (page 311 ). "The line of least resistance, then, as it seems to me," he adds, "both in theology and philosophy, is to accept, along with the superhuman consciousness, the notion that it is not all-embracing, the notion, in other words, that there is a God, but that he is finite, either in power or in knowledge, or in both at once. These, I need hardly tell you, are the terms in which common men have usually carried on their active commerce with God; and the monistic perfections that make the notion of him so paradoxical practically and morally are the colder addition of remote professorial minds, operating _in distans_ upon conceptual substitutes for him alone" (page 311). Professor James also explains that present day Monism carefully repudiates complicity with Spinozistic Monism, "in that, it explains, the many get dissolved in the one and lost, whereas in the improved, idealistic form they get preserved in all their manyness as the one's eternal object. The absolute itself is thus represented by absolutists as having a pluralistic object. But if even the absolute has to have a pluralistic vision, why should we ourselves hesitate to be pluralists on our own sole account? Why should we envolve our 'many' with the 'one' that brings so much poison in its train?" (Page 311.)