ity has its freest play and amplest expression.

III

This has been, and still to a very great extent remains, most
specifically true of philosophy. The environment with which philosophy
concerns itself is nothing less than the whole universe; its content is,
within the history of its dominant tradition, absolutely general and
abstract; it is, of all great human enterprises, even religion, least
constrained by the direction and march of events or the mandate of
circumstance. Like music, it expresses most truly the immediate and
intrinsic interests of the mind, its native bias and its inward goal. It
has been constituted, for this reason, of the so-called "normative"
sciences, envisaging the non-existent as real, forcing upon nature pure
values, forms of the spirit incident to the total life of this world,
unmixed with baser matter. To formulate ultimate standards, to be
completely and utterly lyrical has been the prerogative of philosophy
alone. Since these standards reappear in all other reconstructions of
the environment and most clearly in art and in religion, it is pertinent
to enumerate them, and to indicate briefly their bearing on existence.

The foremost outstanding is perhaps "the unity of the world."
Confronted by the perplexing menace of the variation of experience, the
dichotomies and oppositions of thoughts and things, the fusion and
diversifications of many things into one and one into many, mankind has,
from the moment it became reflective, felt in the relation of the One
and the Many the presence of a riddle that engendered and sustained
uneasiness, a mystery that concealed a threat. The mind's own
preference, given the physiological processes that condition its
existence, constitution, and operation, could hardly come to rest in a
more fundamental normation than Unity. A world which is _one_ is easier
to live in and with; initial adjustment therein is final adjustment; in
its substance there exists nothing sudden and in its character nothing
uncontrollable. It guarantees whatever vital equilibrium the organism
has achieved in it, ill or good. It secures life in attainment and
possession, insuring it repose, simplicity, and spaciousness. A world
which is many complicates existence: it demands watchful consideration
of irreducible discrete individualities: it necessitates the integration
and humanization in a common system of adjustment of entities which in
the last analysis refuse all ordering and re