Remember that one of our troubles with that was its essential foreignness and monstrosity—­there really is no other word for it than that.  Its having the all-inclusive form gave to it an essentially heterogeneous nature from ourselves.  And this great difference between absolutism and pluralism demands no difference in the universe’s material content—­it follows from a difference in the form alone.  The all-form or monistic form makes the foreignness result, the each-form or pluralistic form leaves the intimacy undisturbed.

No matter what the content of the universe may be, if you only allow that it is many everywhere and always, that nothing real escapes from having an environment; so far from defeating its rationality, as the absolutists so unanimously pretend, you leave it in possession of the maximum amount of rationality practically attainable by our minds.  Your relations with it, intellectual, emotional, and active, remain fluent and congruous with your own nature’s chief demands.

It would be a pity if the word ‘rationality’ were allowed to give us trouble here.  It is one of those eulogistic words that both sides claim—­for almost no one is willing to advertise his philosophy as a system of irrationality.  But like most of the words which people used eulogistically, the word ‘rational’ carries too many meanings.  The most objective one is that of the older logic—­the connexion between two things is rational when you can infer one from the other, mortal from Socrates, e.g.; and you can do that only when they have a quality in common.  But this kind of rationality is just that logic of identity which all disciples of Hegel find insufficient.  They supersede it by the higher rationality of negation and contradiction and make the notion vague again.  Then you get the aesthetic or teleologic kinds of rationality, saying that whatever fits in any way, whatever is beautiful or good, whatever is purposive or gratifies desire, is rational in so far forth.  Then again, according to Hegel, whatever is ‘real’ is rational.  I myself said awhile ago that whatever lets loose any action which we are fond of exerting seems rational.  It would be better to give up the word ‘rational’ altogether than to get into a merely verbal fight about who has the best right to keep it.

Perhaps the words ‘foreignness’ and ‘intimacy,’ which I put forward in my first lecture, express the contrast I insist on better than the words ‘rationality’ and ’irrationality’—­let us stick to them, then.  I now say that the notion of the ‘one’ breeds foreignness and that of the ‘many’ intimacy, for reasons which I have urged at only too great length, and with which, whether they convince you or not, I may suppose that you are now well acquainted.  But what at bottom is meant by calling the universe many or by calling it one?