Everywhere we find rationalists using the same kind of reasoning.  The primal whole which is their vision must be there not only as a fact but as a logical necessity.  It must be the minimum that can exist—­either that absolute whole is there, or there is absolutely nothing.  The logical proof alleged of the irrationality of supposing otherwise, is that you can deny the whole only in words that implicitly assert it.  If you say ‘parts,’ of what are they parts?  If you call them a ‘many,’ that very word unifies them.  If you suppose them unrelated in any particular respect, that ‘respect’ connects them; and so on.  In short you fall into hopeless contradiction.  You must stay either at one extreme or the other.[8] ’Partly this and partly that,’ partly rational, for instance, and partly irrational, is no admissible description of the world.  If rationality be in it at all, it must be in it throughout; if irrationality be in it anywhere, that also must pervade it throughout.  It must be wholly rational or wholly irrational, pure universe or pure multiverse or nulliverse; and reduced to this violent alternative, no one’s choice ought long to remain doubtful.  The individual absolute, with its parts co-implicated through and through, so that there is nothing in any part by which any other part can remain inwardly unaffected, is the only rational supposition.  Connexions of an external sort, by which the many became merely continuous instead of being consubstantial, would be an irrational supposition.

Mr. Bradley is the pattern champion of this philosophy in extremis, as one might call it, for he shows an intolerance to pluralism so extreme that I fancy few of his readers have been able fully to share it.  His reasoning exemplifies everywhere what I call the vice of intellectualism, for abstract terms are used by him as positively excluding all that their definition fails to include.  Some Greek sophists could deny that we may say that man is good, for man, they said, means only man, and good means only good, and the word is can’t be construed to identify such disparate meanings.  Mr. Bradley revels in the same type of argument.  No adjective can rationally qualify a substantive, he thinks, for if distinct from the substantive, it can’t be united with it; and if not distinct, there is only one thing there, and nothing left to unite.  Our whole pluralistic procedure in using subjects and predicates as we do is fundamentally irrational, an example of the desperation of our finite intellectual estate, infected and undermined as that is by the separatist discursive forms which are our only categories, but which absolute reality must somehow absorb into its unity and overcome.