Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/472

Rh true and spontaneous causes of their own acts) and an order simply natural, dominated by the determinism issuing from an all-encompassing Sole Efficiency.

Of course, pluralism, simply as such, might mean universal chaos, disorder, and unreason. It has not infrequently been so interpreted by its advocates. But it has no necessary character of this unruly sort. Idealistic pluralism is distinguished from this pluralism of mere caprice, of pure self-will, by the doctrine that the many Primary Realities, when we discover them in their undermost foundations, are all rational intelligences, and that they therefore spontaneously constitute, not indeed any Unit, in which their freedom would be swamped and crushed, but a rational Union, or Harmony, which is therefore as indestructible as they are. This is the conception at the basis of our American ideal of the state as a Federal Nation, and it might well be represented by our national motto, not plures ab uno, but e pluribus unum. It is just here that I part from Dr. Royce and from the large and justly famous historic company of thinkers from whose lines he sets forth his theoretic array — from Plato, from Aristotle, from Aquinas, from Spinoza, and, above all, from Hegel. Monists of one degree or another all these celebrated minds have been; monist with them is Dr. Royce. They are a proud and weighty company, in fact of a resistless weight if you grant them their fundamental assumption — that the highest and controlling category of true thought is the category of Cause construed as Efficient Causation.

But how the reviewer should have lodged me in their camp — even in any quarter of it — is a mystery I must leave him to explain, if he can. I had supposed that my Preface had put my opposition to every sort of monism beyond the chance of mistake, and that I had rendered my position as a rational (or harmonic) pluralist as clear