APPENDIX D 411 



true and spontaneous causes of their own acts) and an 

 order simply natural, dominated by the determinism issu- 

 ing from an all-encompassing Sole Efficiency. 



Of course, pluralism, simply as such, might mean uni- 

 versal chaos, disorder, and unreason. It has not infre- 

 quently been so interpreted by its advocates. But it has 

 no necessary character of this unruly sort. Idealistic 

 pluralism is distinguished from this pluralism of mere 

 caprice, of pure self-will, by the doctrine that the many 

 Primary Realities, when we discover them in their under- 

 most foundations, are all rational intelligences, and that 

 they therefore spontaneously constitute, not indeed any 

 Unit, in which their freedom would be swamped and 

 crushed, but a rational Union, or Harmony, which is 

 therefore as indestructible as they are. This is the con- 

 ception at the basis of our American ideal of the state as 

 a Federal Nation, and it might well be represented by our 

 national motto, woi plu res ah uno, but e pluribiis uniim. It 

 is just here that I part from Dr. Royce and from the large 

 and justly famous historic company of thinkers from whose 

 lines he sets forth his theoretic array — from Plato, from 

 Aristotle, from Aquinas, from Spinoza, and, above all, 

 from Hegel. Monists of one degree or another all these 

 celebrated minds have been ; monist with them is Dr. 

 Royce. They are a proud and weighty company, in fact 

 of a resistless weight if you grant them their fundamental 

 assumption — that the highest and controlling category 

 of true thought is the category of Cause construed as 

 Efficient Causation. 



But how the reviewer should have lodged me in their 

 camp — even in any quarter of it — is a mystery I must 

 leave him to explain, if he can. I had supposed that my 

 Preface had put my opposition to every sort of monism 

 beyond the chance of mistake, and that I had rendered 

 my position as a rational (or harmonic) pluralist as clear 



