nature is somehow fitted to a’s nature in advance. A and b, in short, are not really as distinct as we at first supposed them, not separated by a void.  Were this so they would be mutually impenetrable, or at least mutually irrelevant.  They would form two universes each living by itself, making no difference to each other, taking no account of each other, much as the universe of your day dreams takes no account of mine.  They must therefore belong together beforehand, be co-implicated already, their natures must have an inborn mutual reference each to each.

Lotze’s own solution runs as follows:  The multiple independent things supposed cannot be real in that shape, but all of them, if reciprocal action is to be possible between them, must be regarded as parts of a single real being, M. The pluralism with which our view began has to give place to a monism; and the ‘transeunt’ interaction, being unintelligible as such, is to be understood as an immanent operation.[6]

The words ‘immanent operation’ seem here to mean that the single real being M, of which a and b are members, is the only thing that changes, and that when it changes, it changes inwardly and all over at once.  When part a in it changes, consequently, part b must also change, but without the whole M changing this would not occur.

A pretty argument, but a purely verbal one, as I apprehend it. Call your a and b distinct, they can’t interact; call them one, they can.  For taken abstractly and without qualification the words ‘distinct’ and ‘independent’ suggest only disconnection.  If this be the only property of your a and b (and it is the only property your words imply), then of course, since you can’t deduce their mutual influence from it, you can find no ground of its occurring between them.  Your bare word ‘separate,’ contradicting your bare word ‘joined,’ seems to exclude connexion.

Lotze’s remedy for the impossibility thus verbally found is to change the first word.  If, instead of calling a and b independent, we now call them ‘interdependent,’ ‘united,’ or ‘one,’ he says, these words do not contradict any sort of mutual influence that may be proposed.  If a and b are ‘one,’ and the one changes, a and b of course must co-ordinately change.  What under the old name they couldn’t do, they now have license to do under the new name.

But I ask you whether giving the name of ‘one’ to the former ‘many’ makes us really understand the modus operandi of interaction any better.  We have now given verbal permission to the many to change all together, if they can; we have removed a verbal impossibility and substituted a verbal possibility, but the new name, with the possibility it suggests, tells us nothing of the actual process by which real things that are one can and do change at all.  In point of fact abstract oneness as such doesn’t