Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/14

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PREFACE
xi

Mind that alone has real free-agency. At the same time the aim is not at all to promote a certain other style of pluralism, which one might well enough call individualistic in the bad sense, whose dogmatic ideal is the dissolution of reality into a radically disjunct and wild “multiverse,” — to borrow Professor James’s expressive coinage, — instead of the universe of final harmony which is the ideal of our reason.

The pluralism here set forth is far removed from the anarchic individualism that seems to be advocated by such thinkers as, for instance. Professor Lutoslawski;[1] nor is it to be confounded with that “pluralistic or individualistic philosophy” which Professor James himself, while brilliantly supporting it, defines[2] by saying, “According to that philosophy, the truth is too great for any one actual mind, even though that mind be dubbed ‘the Absolute,’ to know the whole of it. . . . There is no point of view absolutely public and universal.” Rather, to the theory here set forth, the point of view of every actual mind, as that mind in its eternal wholeness is, is absolutely public and universal; and even in the mind’s temporal aspect, the aspect of its struggle toward knowledge over the rugged road of experi-

  1. W. Lutoslawski: Ueber die Grundvoraussetzungen und Consequenzen der individualistischen Weltanschauung. Helsingfors, 1898.
  2. W. James: Talks to Teachers on Psychology, etc., Preface, page v. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1900.