Page:Essays on Truth and Reality (1914).djvu/300

IX stand, are throughout self -consistent. If there were an exception the extent of its influence would raise a question at once of the most formidable kind, and the main doctrine obviously would be imperilled. But this is a point on which, through my own incapacity, I have been unable to appreciate Mr. Russell's decision. I must therefore, passing this by, go on to inquire as to the consistency of some leading ideas.

I encounter at the outset a great difficulty. Mr. Russell's main position has remained to myself incomprehensible. On the one side I am led to think that he defends a strict pluralism, for which nothing is admissible beyond simple terms and external relations. On the other side Mr. Russell seems to assert emphatically, and to use throughout, ideas which such a pluralism surely must repudiate. He throughout stands upon unities which are complex and which cannot be analysed into terms and relations. These two positions to my mind are irreconcilable, since the second, as I understand it, contradicts the first flatly. If there are such unities, and, still more, if such unities are funda mental, then pluralism surely is in principle abandoned as false. Mr. Russell, I cannot doubt, is prepared here with an answer, but I have been unable to discover in what this answer consists. To urge that these unities are indefinable would to myself be merely irrelevant. If they had no meaning they could serve no purpose, and the question is with regard to their meaning. If that is not consistent with itself or with Mr. Russell's main doctrine, then that meaning is not admissible as true, unless it is taken subject to an unknown condition. But, if so taken, that meaning, I would urge, is not ultimate truth. For a certain purpose, obviously, one can swallow whole what one is unable to analyse; but I cannot see how, with this, we have rid ourselves of the question as to ultimate truth.

On my own position here I need not dwell. For me immediate experience gives us a unity and unities of one and many, which unities are not completely analysable or intelligible, and which unities are self -contradictory unless you take them as subject to an unknown condition. Such a form of unity seems to me to be in principle the refutation of pluralism, and on the other side it more or less vitiates the absolute claim of all truths (I cannot stop here to make the required qualification) including those of mathematics. Now what is Mr. Russell's attitude towards