he word.

Thus, the idealist may conceive of the Absolute as an all-inclusive
Mind, of which finite minds are parts. To Spencer, it is the
Unknowable, a something behind the veil of phenomena. Sometimes it
means to a writer much the same thing that the word God means to other
men; sometimes it has a significance at the farthest remove from this
(section 53). Indeed, the word is so vague and ambiguous, and has
proved itself the mother of so many confusions, that it would seem a
desirable thing to drop it out of philosophy altogether, and to
substitute for it some less ambiguous expression.

It seems clear from the preceding pages, that, before one either
accepts or rejects monism, one should very carefully determine just
what one means by the word, and should scrutinize the considerations
which may be urged in favor of the particular doctrine in question.
There are all sorts of monism, and men embrace them for all sorts of
reasons. Let me beg the reader to bear in mind;--

(1) The monist may be a materialist; he may be an idealist; he may be
neither. In the last case, he may, with Spinoza, call the one
Substance God; that is, he may be a Pantheist. On the other hand, he
may, with Spencer, call it the Unknowable, and be an Agnostic. Other
shades of opinion are open to him, if he cares to choose them.

(2) It does not seem wise to assent hastily to such statements as; "The
universe is the manifestation of one unitary Being"; or: "Mind and
matter are the expression of one and the same principle." We find
revealed in our experience mental phenomena and physical phenomena. In
what sense they are one, or whether they are one in any sense,--this is
something to be determined by an examination of the phenomena and of
the relations in which we find them. It may turn out that the universe
is one only in the sense that all phenomena belong to the one orderly
system. If we find that this is the case, we may still, if we choose,
call our doctrine monism, but we should carefully distinguish such a
monism from those represented by Hoeffding and Spencer and many others.
There seems little reason to use the word, when the doctrine has been
so far modified.

58. DUALISM.--The plain man finds himself in a world of physical things
and of minds, and it seems to him that his experience directly
testifies to the existence of both. This means that the things of
which he has experience appear to belong to two distinct classes.