FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS AND METHODS 181 



equivalent of chaos, and thus the bete noir of rational metaphysics. 

 Nay, in the opposed camp itself, some of the most ardent adherents 

 of pluralism, the liveliest of wit, the most exuberant in literary re- 

 sources, are the abjectest believers in the hopeless disjunction and 

 capriciousness of the plural, and hold there is a rift in the texture of 

 reality that no intelligence, u even though you dub it ' the Absolute," 

 can mend or reach across. Yet surely there is nothing in the Many, as 

 a sum of units, the least at war with the One as a system of harmony. 

 On the contrary, even in the pure form of the Number Series, the 

 Many is impossible except on the principle of harmony, --the units 

 can be collected and summed (that is, constitute the Many), only 

 if they cohere in a community of intrinsic kindred. Consequently 

 the whole question of the chaotic or the harmonic nature of a plural 

 world turns on the nature of the genus which we find characteristic 

 of the absolutely (i.e., the unreservedly) real, and which is to be taken 

 as the common denomination enabling us to count them and to sum 

 them. When minds are seen to be necessarily the primary realities, 

 but also necessarily federal as well as individual, the illusion about 

 the essential disjunction and non-coherence of the plurally real dis- 

 solves away, and a primordial world of manifold persons is seen 

 to involve no fundamental or hopeless anarchy of individualism, 

 irreducible in caprice, but an indwelling principle of harmony, 

 rather, that from the springs of individual being intends the control 

 and composure of all the disorders that mark the world of experien- 

 tial appearance, and so must tend perpetually to effect this. 



The other main source of our confusions over the Many and the 

 One is the variety of meaning hidden in the concept Cause, and our 

 propensity to take its most obvious but least significant sense for 

 its supreme intent. Closest at hand, in experience, is our productive 

 causation of changes in our sense- world, and hence most obvious 

 is that reading of Cause which takes it as the producer of changes 

 and, with a deeper comprehension of it, of the inalterable linkage 

 between changes, whereby one follows regularly and surely upon 

 another. Thus what w r e have in philosophy agreed to call Efficient 

 Cause comes to be mistaken for the profoundest and the supreme form 

 of cause, and all the other modes of cause, the Material (or Stuff) , 

 the Form (or Conception), and the End (or Purpose), its conse- 

 quent and derivative auxiliaries. Under the influence of this strong 

 impression, we either assume total reality to be One Whole, all- 

 embracing and all-producing of its manifold modes, or else view it 

 as a duality, consisting of One Creator and his manifold creatures. 

 So it has come about that metaphysics has hitherto been chiefly 

 a contention between pantheism and monotheism, or, as the latter 

 should for greater accuracy be called, monarchic theism; and, it 

 must be acknowledged, this struggle has been attended by a con- 



