Page:Philosophical Review Volume 27.djvu/247

No. 3.] regard the latter as constituted by individual agents of extremely inferior mentality, whose behavior is therefore sufficiently habitual to admit, for the most part, of description in general terms. The reason for the apparent absence of individuality is that we are here probably dealing with individuals in bulk, so that our results are statistical. These results will be even more uniform than the majority of statistics, on account of the nature of the individuals concerned; but there is no reason to suppose that, if we could observe the behavior of one of these individuals in isolation, we should be unable to observe any traces of uniqueness. The above is but a broad outline of the pluralist argument as applied to the inorganic world, and if the question is examined in greater detail, many other reasons can be adduced which show that there is nothing incompatible with experience in this view of apparently lifeless matter.

The first stage in the growth of a pluralistic philosophy is analytic. It consists in the analysis of experience, perceptual and conceptual, and of those particular concepts which we apply to experience under the name of categories. The investigation leads in all cases to results which suggest a pluralistic hypothesis, although they do not lead to it as a strict logical necessity. The second stage in the process consists in the application of the hypothesis to the solution of the particular problems of existence. In the first stage the investigation takes the form, for the most part, of an analysis of the growth of individual experience, and of the transition by intersubjective intercourse to universal conceptual experience. Hence the method employed is genetic. In this way we determine the process by which we have arrived at such knowledge as that of space and time, for example, and at such conceptions as Causality, Quality, and Relation. Thus abundant light cannot fail to be shed on the time-honored problems associated with these names.

Pluralism is an hypothesis, and it therefore stands under the universal limitations inherent in the nature of hypothesis in general. For a just appreciation of values, then, it is necessary that these limitations should be precisely stated and clearly borne in mind.