Page:The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism (1911).djvu/222



There is one difficulty which the exposition I have attempted to give would so readily suggest, that it is perhaps best to mention it at the outset. The goal of final harmony and unification on which the personal idealist counts as — a far-off event, it may be, but still as — a rational possibility may yet never be attained, however rationally possible, because of what we ordinarily call physical hindrances. Let these consist, if you like, of the actions of inferior — sentient it may be — but still irrational monads: the disaster would be none the less appalling on that account, nor is its possibility for that reason very seriously diminished. For we have had meantime to allow that millennial dreams of a liberation of Nature from the thraldom of so-called physical evil are as fanciful as the legends of this subjection as a consequence of moral evil. It is true there are modern pluralists, Renouvier certainly and probably Dr Howison, who still defend such views of the solidarity of the cosmos. But if we smile at Fourier when he imagined that, so soon as we have learnt to dwell in brotherly love together, the whales will seize our ships by their cables and tow them to their destinations over seas no longer briny but pleasant to drink, must we not regard it as still more