This habit of thinking only in the most violent extremes reminds me of what Mr. Wells says of the current objections to socialism, in his wonderful little book, ‘New worlds for old.’  The commonest vice of the human mind is its disposition to see everything as yes or no, as black or white, its incapacity for discrimination of intermediate shades.  So the critics agree to some hard and fast impossible definition of socialism, and extract absurdities from it as a conjurer gets rabbits from a hat.  Socialism abolishes property, abolishes the family, and the rest.  The method, Mr. Wells continues, is always the same:  It is to assume that whatever the socialist postulates as desirable is wanted without limit of qualification,—­for socialist read pluralist and the parallel holds good,—­it is to imagine that whatever proposal is made by him is to be carried out by uncontrolled monomaniacs, and so to make a picture of the socialist dream which can be presented to the simple-minded person in doubt—­’This is socialism’—­or pluralism, as the case may be.  ‘Surely!—­SURELY! you don’t want this!’

How often have I been replied to, when expressing doubts of the logical necessity of the absolute, of flying to the opposite extreme:  ‘But surely, SURELY there must be some connexion among things!’ As if I must necessarily be an uncontrolled monomanic insanely denying any connexion whatever.  The whole question revolves in very truth about the word ‘some.’  Radical empiricism and pluralism stand out for the legitimacy of the notion of some:  each part of the world is in some ways connected, in some other ways not connected with its other parts, and the ways can be discriminated, for many of them are obvious, and their differences are obvious to view.  Absolutism, on its side, seems to hold that ‘some’ is a category ruinously infected with self-contradictoriness, and that the only categories inwardly consistent and therefore pertinent to reality are ‘all’ and ‘none.’

The question runs into the still more general one with which Mr. Bradley and later writers of the monistic school have made us abundantly familiar—­the question, namely, whether all the relations with other things, possible to a being, are pre-included in its intrinsic nature and enter into its essence, or whether, in respect to some of these relations, it can be without reference to them, and, if it ever does enter into them, do so adventitiously and as it were by an after-thought.  This is the great question as to whether ‘external’ relations can exist.  They seem to, undoubtedly.  My manuscript, for example, is ‘on’ the desk.  The relation of being ‘on’ doesn’t seem to implicate or involve in any way the inner meaning of the manuscript or the inner structure of the desk—­these objects engage in it only by their outsides, it seems only a temporary accident in their respective histories.  Moreover, the ‘on’ fails to appear to our senses as one of those unintelligible ‘betweens’ that have to be separately hooked on the terms they pretend to connect.  All this innocent sense-appearance, however, we are told, cannot pass muster in the eyes of reason.  It is a tissue of self-contradiction which only the complete absorption of the desk and the manuscript into the higher unity of a more absolute reality can overcome.