fact that it assails all monism, of every sort and fashion, and takes for its task the supplanting of it by a system of pluralism. Idealist, indeed, I am; monist, not at all — not in any sense, until one comes to the very subordinate question. Are there two kinds of substantive reality, mind and matter? — is there a dualism of worlds, physical and mental, each existing independently of the other, or is all reality translatable on the contrary into the existence of conscious selves and the derivative existence of their “contained” experiences? In answer to this question, I do indeed say there is but one kind of substantive being, and that mental. But this is one of the characteristic tenets common to all systems of idealism; in the historic nomenclature of philosophy it has never borne the name of monism. The contrast between monism and pluralism is concerned with the theory of ultimate (or primary) reality. A pluralist does not in the least believe (as the reviewer apparently does) that “the ultimate interest of philosophy is to find the One Reality that lies behind the innumerable diverse phenomena of the world.” Pluralism is precisely the stubborn denial that the ultimate reality is any such One and Sole Being, in which every other being is but a component and fragmentary factor, with none but a derivative reality. The pluralist maintains, on the contrary, that this pretender, “The Absolute,” this asserted “One and All,” is an illusion of false speculation, arising from confounding the Real with the empty and meaningless result of persistent higher and higher abstraction. The fundamental issue in philosophy is just this: Is that which is ultimately real One, or is it Many? — or, still less ambiguously. Are there many primary and underived real beings, or is there only one? Here it is that the pluralist divides from the monist; and he divides implacably. The issue is at core the issue between a moral order (which cannot be unless there are many independent agents, the
