flowed into the Thames” is the warning note rung out by Mr. Hobhouse.  Carlyle introduced it, bringing it as far as Chelsea.  Then Jowett and Thomas Hill Green, and William Wallace and Lewis Nettleship, and Arnold Toynbee and David Eitchie—­to mention only those teachers whose voices now are silent—­guided the waters into those upper reaches known locally as the Isis.  John and Edward Caird brought them up the Clyde, Hutchison Stirling up the Firth of Forth.  They have passed up the Mersey and up the Severn and Dee and Don.  They pollute the bay of St. Andrews and swell the waters of the Cam, and have somehow crept overland into Birmingham.  The stream of german idealism has been diffused over the academical world of Great Britain.  The disaster is universal.’

Evidently if weight of authority were all, the truth of absolutism would be thus decided.  But let us first pass in review the general style of argumentation of that philosophy.

As I read it, its favorite way of meeting pluralism and empiricism is by a reductio ad absurdum framed somewhat as follows:  You contend, it says to the pluralist, that things, though in some respects connected, are in other respects independent, so that they are not members of one all-inclusive individual fact.  Well, your position is absurd on either point.  For admit in fact the slightest modicum of independence, and you find (if you will only think accurately) that you have to admit more and more of it, until at last nothing but an absolute chaos, or the proved impossibility of any connexion whatever between the parts of the universe, remains upon your hands.  Admit, on the other hand, the most incipient minimum of relation between any two things, and again you can’t stop until you see that the absolute unity of all things is implied.

If we take the latter reductio ad absurdum first, we find a good example of it in Lotze’s well-known proof of monism from the fact of interaction between finite things.  Suppose, Lotze says in effect, and for simplicity’s sake I have to paraphrase him, for his own words are too long to quote—­many distinct beings a, b, c, etc., to exist independently of each other:  can a in that case ever act on b?

What is it to act?  Is it not to exert an influence?  Does the influence detach itself from a and find b?  If so, it is a third fact, and the problem is not how a acts, but how its ‘influence’ acts on b.  By another influence perhaps?  And how in the end does the chain of influences find b rather than c unless b is somehow prefigured in them already?  And when they have found b, how do they make b respond, if b has nothing in common with them?  Why don’t they go right through b?  The change in b is a response, due to b’s capacity for taking account of a’s influence, and that again seems to prove that b’s