THE UNIVERSE NOT A REAL WHOLE. 



34. 



I 



individual substances who compose and define it, 

 just as the British nation is nothing real by the side 

 of the individual Britons. For though it may be 

 claimed that such a whole is in a sense real, it is 

 not real in the sense in which Pantheism asserts the 

 reality of the Absolute. The reality of a nation 

 depends on the existence of its individual members, 

 and simply expresses the fact that they act together 

 in certain ways. Hence such a whole might be 

 destroyed without the destruction of a single real 

 individual, if, e.^-., all the members of a nation joined 

 other communities. 



It follows, therefore, from the analysis of the rela- 

 tion of a whole to Its parts that our experience of 

 the real world affords us no analogy for the existence 

 of a 7'eal whole, which should be both all-embracing 

 and more real than its parts : the universe is not 

 anything to which this our human conception of a 

 w^hole can be applied. Thus Pantheism, in deifying 

 the All, is proceeding upon a mistaken logical 

 analogy, and we have here traced to its logical 

 source the practical equivalence of Pantheism and 

 Atheism. For If '* the sum of things" cannot be a 

 real being, it can have no real effect upon life. 



§ 19. Thus Pantheism must resign itself to the 

 conclusion that no valid meaning can be given to 

 the assertion that God is the All, unless we frankly 

 depart from the facts of the phenomenal world. 

 For it is possible to conceive the ideal of a third 

 way of relating a whole to its parts. It is possible 

 to conceive parts which should be logically implied 

 in the whole, and incapable of existing except as 

 parts of the whole. In such a case the w^hole w^ould 

 be as real as the parts, by which it was irresistibly 

 and certainly suggested, so that in stating the part 



