Modern Philosophy. 101 to distinguish between them. The principal difference is that monism (or “absolutism”) “thinks that said substance be comes fully divine only in the form of totality, and is not its real self in any form but the all- form” ; whereas pluralism maintains “that there may ultimately never be an all- form at all, that the substance of reality may never get totally collected * * * and that a distributive form of reality, the each- form, is logically as acceptable, and empirically as probable, as the all- form” (page 34). “For monism the world is no collection, but one great all- inclusive fact, outside of which there is nothing;” “And when the monism is idealistic, this all-enveloping fact is represented as an absolute mind that makes the partial facts by thinking them, just as we make objects in a dream by dreaming them, or personages in a story by imagining them.” “The world and the all-thinker thus compenétrate and soak each other up without residuum.” “The absolute makes us by thinking us.” “The absolute and the world are one fact.” “This is the full pantheistic scheme, the immanence of God in His creation, a conception sublime from its tremendous unity.” On the other hand, pluralism says that “reality may exist in a distributive form in the shape not of an all, but of a set of eaches.” “There is this in favor of the eafches, that they are at any rate real enough to have made themselves at least ap pear to every one, whereas the absolute has as yet appeared immediately to only a few mystics, and indeed to them very ambiguously” (page 129). I have transcribed the foregoing specimens of this solemn nonsense in order that the reader may be informed of the choice which our great universities now set before the thou sands of eager and receptive minds that throng them in quest of knowledge. The rulers of these educational institutions vir.-. tually say to their students, You must accept a pantheistic con ception of the universe, but you may choose between a monistic
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker