And it is clear enough that the new monism is open to precisely the same criticism as was that of the mechanists which it looks to supplant. Aiming ostensibly to simplify, it really renders the nature of things incomprehensibly complex. Promising to release us from the known paradox of a world composed of two irreconcilable classes of things, it ends by forcing a perfectly arbitrary paradox upon us in its definition of inanimate objects. To define a stone as an event consisting of a bundle of time, space, value, and relationships, does not seem to me to be moving in the direction of lucid simplicity. “What is the sense,” Mr. Whitehead asks, “of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by mechanics?” And the question is entirely pertinent, if by the word “mechanics” we mean slyly to imply something more than the observed actions and reactions of material bodies in motion. Mr. Whitehead therefore discards the “traditional scientific materialism” for an “alternative doctrine of organism,” that is, for a “theory of _organic mechanism_.” Well and good. But is it unkind to ask the use of talking about an organical explanation when you do not know what you mean by “organism,” or to hint that no very clear idea will be evoked by joining together two unknown quantities, “organism” and “mechanism,” and calling the world an “organic mechanism”? And again, what of the “stubborn and irreducible facts,” in whose name Mr. Whitehead attacks the rationalism of the Huxleyites and their predecessors of the eighteenth century? If we are to cast away their imposing structure of logic as unreasonable for the simple reason that, after all is said, we still know that the human mind (or soul, if you please) is something other than a stone, shall we swallow the contrary theory, which has not even the virtue of logic, and which transfers human qualities to a stone? Aristotle made the proper and sufficient distinction long ago, when he said that a stone obeys laws and a man forms habits: you may throw a stone into the air a thousand times and it will continue to do the same thing, whereas a man learns by experience. But alas for those “stubborn and irreducible facts”! How bravely we all summon them to our aid! How desperately we run from them when they appear!