There is one more traditional controversy which I wish to consider, namely, that between monists and pluralists. Is the universe one, or is it many? If many, how intimately are they interconnected? The monistic view is very old: it is already complete in Parmenides (fifth century B.C.). It is fully developed in Spinoza, Hegel, and Bradley. The pluralistic view, on the other hand, is found in Heraclitus, the atomists, Leibniz, and the British empiricists. For the sake of definiteness, let us take the monistic view as found in Bradley, who is in the main a follower of Hegel. He maintains that every judgment consists in assigning a predicate to Reality as a whole: the whole is the subject of every predicate. Suppose you start by saying “Tommy has a cold in the head”. This may not _seem_ to be a statement about the universe as a whole, but according to Bradley it is. If I may be allowed to set forth his argument in popular language which his followers might resent, I should put it something like this: First of all, who is Tommy? He is a person with a certain nature, distinguished from other persons by that nature; he may resemble others in many respects, but not in all, so that you cannot really explain who Tommy is unless you set forth all his characteristics. But when you try to do this, you are taken beyond Tommy: he is characterised by relations to his environment. He is affectionate or rebellious or thirsty, noisy or quiet, and so on; all of these qualities involve his relations to others. If you try to define Tommy without mentioning anything outside him, you will find this quite impossible; therefore he is not a self-subsistent being, but an unsubstantial fragment of the world. The same thing applies even more obviously to his nose and his cold. How do you know he has a cold? Because material substances of a certain kind pass from his nose to his handkerchief, which would not be possible if he alone existed. But now, when you take in the environment with a view to defining Tommy and his nose and his cold, you find that you cannot define his immediate environment without taking account of its environment, and so on, until at last you have been forced to include the whole world. Therefore Tommy’s cold is in reality a property of the world, since nothing short of the world is sufficiently substantial to have properties. We may put the argument in a more abstract form. Everything which is part of the world is constituted, in part, by its relations to other things; but relations cannot be real. Bradley’s argument against relations is as follows. First he argues that, if there are relations, there must be qualities between which they hold. This part of the argument need not detain us. He then proceeds: