ghbors. The recognition of this fact of
coalescence of next with next in concrete experience, so that all
the insulating cuts we make there are artificial products of the
conceptualizing faculty, is what distinguishes the empiricism which
I call 'radical,' from the bugaboo empiricism of the traditional
rationalist critics, which (rightly or wrongly) is accused of chopping
up experience into atomistic sensations, incapable of union with one
another until a purely intellectual principle has swooped down upon
them from on high and folded them in its own conjunctive categories.

Here, then, you have the plain alternative, and the full mystery of
the difference between pluralism and monism, as clearly as I can
set it forth on this occasion. It packs up into a nutshell:--Is the
manyness in oneness that indubitably characterizes the world we
inhabit, a property only of the absolute whole of things, so that you
must postulate that one-enormous-whole indivisibly as the _prius_
of there being any many at all--in other words, start with the
rationalistic block-universe, entire, unmitigated, and complete?--or
can the finite elements have their own aboriginal forms of manyness in
oneness, and where they have no immediate oneness still be continued
into one another by intermediary terms--each one of these terms being
one with its next neighbors, and yet the total 'oneness' never getting
absolutely complete?

The alternative is definite. It seems to me, moreover, that the two
horns of it make pragmatically different ethical appeals--at least
they _may_ do so, to certain individuals. But if you consider the
pluralistic horn to be intrinsically irrational, self-contradictory,
and absurd, I can now say no more in its defence. Having done what
I could in my earlier lectures to break the edge of the
intellectualistic _reductiones ad absurdum_, I must leave the issue
in your hands. Whatever I may say, each of you will be sure to take
pluralism or leave it, just as your own sense of rationality moves and
inclines. The only thing I emphatically insist upon is that it is a
fully co-ordinate hypothesis with monism. This world _may_, in the
last resort, be a block-universe; but on the other hand it _may_ be a
universe only strung-along, not rounded in and closed. Reality _may_
exist distributively just as it sensibly seems to, after all. On that
possibility I do insist.

One's general vision of the probable usually decides such
alternatives.