from defeating its rationality, as
the absolutists so unanimously pretend, you leave it in possession of
the maximum amount of rationality practically attainable by our minds.
Your relations with it, intellectual, emotional, and active, remain
fluent and congruous with your own nature's chief demands.

It would be a pity if the word 'rationality' were allowed to give us
trouble here. It is one of those eulogistic words that both sides
claim--for almost no one is willing to advertise his philosophy as a
system of irrationality. But like most of the words which people used
eulogistically, the word 'rational' carries too many meanings. The
most objective one is that of the older logic--the connexion between
two things is rational when you can infer one from the other, mortal
from Socrates, _e.g.;_ and you can do that only when they have a
quality in common. But this kind of rationality is just that logic
of identity which all disciples of Hegel find insufficient. They
supersede it by the higher rationality of negation and contradiction
and make the notion vague again. Then you get the aesthetic or
teleologic kinds of rationality, saying that whatever fits in any way,
whatever is beautiful or good, whatever is purposive or gratifies
desire, is rational in so far forth. Then again, according to Hegel,
whatever is 'real' is rational. I myself said awhile ago that whatever
lets loose any action which we are fond of exerting seems rational. It
would be better to give up the word 'rational' altogether than to get
into a merely verbal fight about who has the best right to keep it.

Perhaps the words 'foreignness' and 'intimacy,' which I put forward
in my first lecture, express the contrast I insist on better than the
words 'rationality' and 'irrationality'--let us stick to them, then.
I now say that the notion of the 'one' breeds foreignness and that of
the 'many' intimacy, for reasons which I have urged at only too great
length, and with which, whether they convince you or not, I may
suppose that you are now well acquainted. But what at bottom is meant
by calling the universe many or by calling it one?

Pragmatically interpreted, pluralism or the doctrine that it is
many means only that the sundry parts of reality _may be externally
related_. Everything you can think of, however vast or inclusive, has
on the pluralistic view a genuinely 'external' environment of some
sort or amount. Things are 'with' one another in many ways,