lism in any
shape, but to place ourselves straightway upon a more spiritualistic
platform, I pointed out three kinds of spiritual philosophy between
which we are asked to choose. The first way was that of the older
dualistic theism, with ourselves represented as a secondary order of
substances created by God. We found that this allowed of a degree of
intimacy with the creative principle inferior to that implied in the
pantheistic belief that we are substantially one with it, and that the
divine is therefore the most intimate of all our possessions, heart of
our heart, in fact. But we saw that this pantheistic belief could be
held in two forms, a monistic form which I called philosophy of the
absolute, and a pluralistic form which I called radical empiricism,
the former conceiving that the divine exists authentically only when
the world is experienced all at once in its absolute totality, whereas
radical empiricism allows that the absolute sum-total of things may
never be actually experienced or realized in that shape at all, and
that a disseminated, distributed, or incompletely unified appearance
is the only form that reality may yet have achieved.

I may contrast the monistic and pluralistic forms in question as
the 'all-form' and the 'each-form.' At the end of the last hour I
animadverted on the fact that the all-form is so radically different
from the each-form, which is our human form of experiencing the
world, that the philosophy of the absolute, so far as insight and
understanding go, leaves us almost as much outside of the divine being
as dualistic theism does. I believe that radical empiricism, on the
contrary, holding to the each-form, and making of God only one of the
caches, affords the higher degree of intimacy. The general thesis of
these lectures I said would be a defence of the pluralistic against
the monistic view. Think of the universe as existing solely in the
each-form, and you will have on the whole a more reasonable and
satisfactory idea of it than if you insist on the all-form being
necessary. The rest of my lectures will do little more than make this
thesis more concrete, and I hope more persuasive.

It is curious how little countenance radical pluralism has ever had
from philosophers. Whether materialistically or spiritualistically
minded, philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with
which the world apparently is filled. They have substituted economical
and orderly conceptions