In this present hour I wish to illustrate the pragmatic method by one more application.  I wish to turn its light upon the ancient problem of ‘the one and the many.’  I suspect that in but few of you has this problem occasioned sleepless nights, and I should not be astonished if some of you told me it had never vexed you.  I myself have come, by long brooding over it, to consider it the most central of all philosophic problems, central because so pregnant.  I mean by this that if you know whether a man is a decided monist or a decided pluralist, you perhaps know more about the rest of his opinions than if you give him any other name ending in IST. To believe in the one or in the many, that is the classification with the maximum number of consequences.  So bear with me for an hour while I try to inspire you with my own interest in the problem.

Philosophy has often been defined as the quest or the vision of the world’s unity.  We never hear this definition challenged, and it is true as far as it goes, for philosophy has indeed manifested above all things its interest in unity.  But how about the variety in things?  Is that such an irrelevant matter?  If instead of using the term philosophy, we talk in general of our intellect and its needs we quickly see that unity is only one of these.  Acquaintance with the details of fact is always reckoned, along with their reduction to system, as an indispensable mark of mental greatness.  Your ‘scholarly’ mind, of encyclopedic, philological type, your man essentially of learning, has never lacked for praise along with your philosopher.  What our intellect really aims at is neither variety nor unity taken singly but totality.[Footnote:  Compare A. Bellanger:  Les concepts de Cause, et l’activite intentionelle de l’Esprit.  Paris, Alcan, 1905, p. 79 ff.] In this, acquaintance with reality’s diversities is as important as understanding their connexion.  The human passion of curiosity runs on all fours with the systematizing passion.

In spite of this obvious fact the unity of things has always been considered more illustrious, as it were, than their variety.  When a young man first conceives the notion that the whole world forms one great fact, with all its parts moving abreast, as it were, and interlocked, he feels as if he were enjoying a great insight, and looks superciliously on all who still fall short of this sublime conception.  Taken thus abstractly as it first comes to one, the monistic insight is so vague as hardly to seem worth defending intellectually.  Yet probably everyone in this audience in some way cherishes it.  A certain abstract monism, a certain emotional response to the character of oneness, as if it were a feature of the world not coordinate with its manyness, but vastly more excellent and eminent, is so prevalent in educated circles that we might almost call it a part of philosophic common sense.  Of course the world is one, we say.  How else could it be a world at all?  Empiricists as a rule, are as stout monists of this abstract kind as rationalists are.