PHILOSOPHY 293 



thus begins by a tentative inquiry how far the metaphysical assumptions of Pluralism 

 will allow us to recognise the experience-world as exhibiting unity. This leads him, 

 inter alia, to a brilliant criticism of the concepts of mechanism and " evolution " as they 

 figure in singularist philosophies. The result of the criticism is much that of Bergson's 

 critique of the " geometrical " bias ascribed by him to the intellect. A mechanistic 

 Monism must reduce " evolution " to a process by which things unfold what has all 

 along been in them in an " incapsulated " form; but the process known to genuine science 

 by the unhappy name of evolution is really more properly " epigenesis," the growth of 

 the qualitatively new, and therefore unpredictable, out of the old. Starting with an 

 original pure Pluralism which resolves the course of things into interactions between 

 agents, each of whom is independent of any other, we can see that a pluralistic universe 

 would develop a tendency to unity in the very process by which its members establish 

 a modus vivendi among themselves, but it is uncertain whether such a tendency would 

 give us the amount of unity we presuppose in the real world when we assume the 

 validity for it of general laws, and it certainly dots not warrant our ascribing to it such 

 a unity as would justify the belief that the universe is such as to permit the realisation 

 of our moral and spiritual ideals. //, however, the Pluralist should modify his hypoth- 

 esis by regarding one member of his universe as a God from whom the rest derive 

 their real but dependent existence, we. could find in the existence of such a. God good 

 ground for faith in the ; persistence of spiritual life after bodily death, and the final 

 victory of good over evil; the alleged difficulties of Theism, in particular the alleged 

 impossibility of reconciling the goodness of God with the presence of evil in His world, 

 have no conclusive force. Thus we are free, as Kant held, to exercise a reasonable faith 

 in God and in immortality; and such a faith, while meeting the demands of morality 

 and religion, involves no breach with the intellect, as it amounts only to a further step 

 along the road which the Pluralist is forced to tread in accounting for the presence of 

 even so much unity of plan and order as he has to admit in the visible world. 



Varisco reaches a very similar position as the result of a polemic against the empiri- 

 cist metaphysic of the ordinary Comtist. He begins with an analysis of the actual 

 moment of sense perception. The objects apprehended in such percep- 

 tion stand at once in two sets of relations. On the one hand, they are con- 

 nected in various ways with one another, and as so connected they form a system which 

 lies open to the perception not only of the special " I " who speak of apprehending them, 

 but to the perception of innumerable other beings, each of whom can equally say " I 

 apprehend " them. Considered from this point of view the system of sense-data and 

 their interconnections may be said to form the common perceived world of mankind at 

 large. But also a given sense-datum which I apprehend is, at the moment of its appre- 

 hension, present along with experiences (feelings, conations), which are intimate and 

 private to me and directly accessible to no other being which calls itself "I." In 

 this sense the perceived objects may be said to be my objects. Thus there is a sense in 

 which the whole world of fact to which the individual has to adjust himself in action is 

 inseparably bound up with the individual's inner life. Varisco develops this idea in a 

 way which may remind us strongly of T. H. Green, but is at least equally reminiscent 

 of Leibnitz, the one great philosopher whom Green persistently misunderstood. It is 

 fatal to the empiricist theories which regard the " external world " as simply given in 

 sensation, that the world reveals itself to science as a complicated network of relations 

 between terms, and neither the universals which pervade it nor some at least of the 

 terms they connect are sense-data. The universals are apprehended by thought, and 

 the self to which they are known, the only thing which we apprehend directly as it is, 

 is also no sense-datum. It is our immediate non-sensuous apprehension of the self 

 which owns its "states" that supplies us with our standard of real Being. Hence 

 Varisco is led to postulate as indispensable factors in the scheme of the universe not 

 only the sense-data and the system of relations between them, but the plurality of 

 persons whose sense-data they are and whose thought apprehends their complicated 

 relations. From these considerations follows the reality of freedom and contingency. 



