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The Fundamentals. universe and a pluralistic universe—between a universe which consists of a single ponderous “All,” or one comprising an in definite number of miscellaneous “Eaches.” CONFLICTING SCHOOLS. Whichever of these “weak and beggarly” conceptions our young student adopts, he must be prepared to hear it assailed by the adherents of the rival school and criticized as highly irrational and absurd; and for this his course in philosophy prepares him. Thus the advocates of monism declare that plu ralism is “infected and undermined by self-contradiction.” On the other hand, Professor James maintains that the “ab solute” of the monist “involves features of irrationality pe culiar to itself.” He points out that, upon the theory of ab solute idealism, the all-knower must know, and be always dis tinctly conscious of, not only every fact, characteristic, and relation of every object in the whole universe, but also all that the object is not—as that a “table is not a chair, not a rhinoce ros, not a logarithm, not a mile away from the door, not worth five hundred pounds sterling, not a thousand centuries old,” etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseam. “Furthermore, if it be a fact that certain ideas are silly, the absolute has to have already thought the silly ideas to establish them in silliness. The rubbish in its mind would thus appear easily to outweigh in amount the more desirable material. One would expect it fairly to burst with such an obesity, plethora, and superfoetation of useless information” (page 128). And how about things that are criminal, vicious, and im pure? These are of necessity just as much the thought-forms of the absolute as their opposites. A p h il o s o p h e r ' s v erd ict . Again, after mentioning certain difficulties of the idealist theory, Professor James speaks disparagingly of “the oddity of inventing as a remedy for the inconveniences resulting from
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