On the other hand, just as the facts of experience show us internal struggle and repulsion within the supposed units, so they also exhibit other relations than that of mutual exclusion between the different units. Human personal interests, for instance, are never merely mutually exclusive. No society consists of individuals whose purposes and interests are simply reciprocally repellent. My aims and purposes may never completely coincide with those of other members of the same community, yet they have no meaning and could get no realisation but for the fact that they are, partially at any rate, comprised in the wider whole of social interests and purposes which makes up the life of the social organisations to which I belong. As the very etymology of such words as “society” and “community” shows—to say nothing of the results of psychological inquiry into the process of learning by imitation—the conception of human selves as independent units which somehow happen to stand in merely accidental or external relations is in flagrant conflict with the most fundamental facts of our social experience. It is only by the systematic suppression of fact that personal and social life can be made to support the hypothesis of Pluralism. (_b_) Again, even if we could accept the pluralist account of the facts, the theory which Pluralism puts forward to account for them is in the end unintelligible. What Pluralism does, consciously or unconsciously, is to separate the unity of the world from its multiplicity. The multiplicity is supposed to be grounded in the ultimate nature of the real things themselves, their unity as a system, if they really are a system, to be imposed upon them from without. We are, in fact, left to choose between two alternatives. Either the world is not a systematic whole at all, but a mere chaos of purely independent atoms, in which case the whole of our thought, with its indispensable presupposition of the systematic unity of the object of knowledge, is an illusion, or else the world really is a system, but a system, so to say, by accident. The things of which the system is composed are real as detached separate units, but by a fortunate chance they happen all to possess some common relation to an external _tertium quid_ (for instance, to God), by which they are combined into a system and thus become knowable as a connected whole.