ject all subordination,
consequently keeping the mind on an everlasting jump, compelling it to
pay with eternal vigilance the price of being. The preference for unity,
then, is almost inevitable, and the history of philosophy, from the
Vedas to the Brahma Somaj and from Thales to Bergson, is significantly
unanimous in its attempts to prove that the world is, somehow, through
and through one. That the oneness requires _proof_ is _prima facie_
evidence that it is a value, a desiderate, not an existence. And how
valuable it is may be seen merely in the fact that it derealizes the
inner conflict of interests, the incompatibilities between nature and
man, the uncertainties of knowledge, and the certainties of evil, and
substitutes therefore the ultimate happy unison which "the identity of
the different" compels.

Unity is the common desiderate of philosophic systems of all
metaphysical types--neutral, materialistic, idealistic. But the dominant
tradition has tended to think this unity in terms of _interest_, of
_spirit_, of _mentality_. It has tended, in a word, to assimilate nature
to human nature, to identify things with the _values_ of things, to
envisage the world in the image of man. To it, the world is all spirit,
ego, or idea; and if not such through and through, then entirely
subservient, in its unhumanized parts, to the purposes and interests of
ego, idea, or spirit. Why, is obvious. A world of which the One
substance is such constitutes a totality of interest and purpose which
faces no conflict and has no enemy. It is fulfilment even before it is
need, and need, indeed, is only illusion. Even when its number is many,
the world is a better world if the stuff of these many is the _same_
stuff as the spirit of man. For mind is more at home with mind than with
things; the pathetic fallacy is the most inevitable and most general.
Although the totality of spirit is conceived as good, that is, as
actualizing all our desiderates and ideals, it would still be felt that,
even if the totality were evil, and not God, but the Devil ruled the
roost, the world so constituted must be better than one utterly
non-spiritual. We can understand and be at home with malevolence: it
offers at least the benefits of similarity, of companionship, of
intimateness, of consubstantiality with _will_; its behavior may be
foreseen and its intentions influenced; but no horror can be greater
than that of utter aliency. How much of religion turns wit