354 MAN AND GOD. 



avoid the difficulty which is so fatal to Monism. It 

 starts with an immense advantage over Monism : it 

 has no need to explain away the appearance of plur- 

 ality. But unless its position is very carefully stated, 

 with more precision and consistency than pluralist 

 philosophers have hitherto bestowed upon It, it has 

 considerable difficulty in explaining the possibility, 

 not of the abstract unity It rejects, but of real union. 



This difficulty may be elucidated by the example 

 of the greatest of pluralist systems, that of Leibnitz, 

 and the criticism upon it. Leibnitz asserted that the 

 world was ultimately composed of spiritual beings, 

 '' windowless monads," each of whom Ideally In- 

 cluded, but really excluded all others. And this 

 statement In its natural sense might have been taken 

 as a forcible expression of the fact that the mutually 

 Impenetrable consciousnesses of spiritual beings yet 

 communicate through the common world of thought. 

 But an unappreclative criticism could easily discover 

 obscurities and flaws in Leibnitz's expressions. It 

 was observed that if the monads were absolutely 

 exclusive, they could not communicate at all, and 

 hence no world could exist, nor plurality in It, and 

 that Pluralism thus supplied its own refutation. If, 

 on the other hand, the Leibnitzlan conception of 

 God as the Central Monad, including all the rest,! 

 was to be taken seriously, there was an end to the] 

 substantiality of the others, and here again Plural- 

 ism was abandoned. 



Such criticism, though it disregards the spirit, 11 

 not the letter, of Pluralism, may serve at least to! 

 bring out the subtle way In which Pluralism includesj 

 and involves the unity of things. 



It Is absurd, in the first place, to suppose thatj 

 Pluralism asserts the existence of the Many In a 



