but
nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word
'and' trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes.
'Ever not quite' has to be said of the best attempts made anywhere in
the universe at attaining all-inclusiveness. The pluralistic world is
thus more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom.
However much may be collected, however much may report itself as
present at any effective centre of consciousness or action, something
else is self-governed and absent and unreduced to unity.

Monism, on the other hand, insists that when you come down to reality
as such, to the reality of realities, everything is present
to _everything_ else in one vast instantaneous co-implicated
completeness--nothing can in _any_ sense, functional or substantial,
be really absent from anything else, all things interpenetrate and
telescope together in the great total conflux.

For pluralism, all that we are required to admit as the constitution
of reality is what we ourselves find empirically realized in every
minimum of finite life. Briefly it is this, that nothing real is
absolutely simple, that every smallest bit of experience is a _multum
in parvo_ plurally related, that each relation is one aspect,
character, or function, way of its being taken, or way of its taking
something else; and that a bit of reality when actively engaged in one
of these relations is not _by that very fact_ engaged in all the other
relations simultaneously. The relations are not _all_ what the French
call _solidaires_ with one another. Without losing its identity a
thing can either take up or drop another thing, like the log I spoke
of, which by taking up new carriers and dropping old ones can travel
anywhere with a light escort.

For monism, on the contrary, everything, whether we realize it or not,
drags the whole universe along with itself and drops nothing. The log
starts and arrives with all its carriers supporting it. If a thing
were once disconnected, it could never be connected again, according
to monism. The pragmatic difference between the two systems is thus a
definite one. It is just thus, that if _a_ is once out of sight of _b_
or out of touch with it, or, more briefly, 'out' of it at all, then,
according to monism, it must always remain so, they can never get
together; whereas pluralism admits that on another occasion they may
work together, or in some way be connected again. Monism allows for
no su