Page:The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism (1911).djvu/245



We have seen that modern pluralism is, on its own confession, ‘radically empirical.’ It makes no attempt to deduce the universe from a single absolute principle, or indeed to deduce it at all. The world is taken simply as we find it, as a plurality of active individuals unified only in and through their mutual interactions. These interactions again are interpreted throughout on the analogy of social transactions, as a mutuum commercium; that is to say, as based on cognition and conation. To the speculative mind pur sang there is nothing satisfactory about such a view unless perhaps its frankness.

But then, on the other hand, there are objections to all attempts to proceed altogether a priori. It seems obviously puerile to ask, for example, for a sufficient reason why there is something rather than nothing. This notion of being absolutely thoroughgoing, of building up a metaphysic without presuppositions, one that shall start from nothing and explain all, is, I repeat, futile. Such a metaphysic has its own