and in general, it may be said that all things cohere and adhere to each other somehow, and that the universe exists practically in reticulated or concatenated forms which make of it a continuous or ‘integrated’ affair.  Any kind of influence whatever helps to make the world one, so far as you can follow it from next to next.  You may then say that ’the world is One’—­meaning in these respects, namely, and just so far as they obtain.  But just as definitely is it not one, so far as they do not obtain; and there is no species of connexion which will not fail, if, instead of choosing conductors for it, you choose non-conductors.  You are then arrested at your very first step and have to write the world down as a pure many from that particular point of view.  If our intellect had been as much interested in disjunctive as it is in conjunctive relations, philosophy would have equally successfully celebrated the world’s disunion.

The great point is to notice that the oneness and the manyness are absolutely co-ordinate here.  Neither is primordial or more essential or excellent than the other.  Just as with space, whose separating of things seems exactly on a par with its uniting of them, but sometimes one function and sometimes the other is what come home to us most, so, in our general dealings with the world of influences, we now need conductors and now need non-conductors, and wisdom lies in knowing which is which at the appropriate moment.

4.  All these systems of influence or non-influence may be listed under the general problem of the world’s causal unity.  If the minor causal influences among things should converge towards one common causal origin of them in the past, one great first cause for all that is, one might then speak of the absolute causal unity of the world.  God’s fiat on creation’s day has figured in traditional philosophy as such an absolute cause and origin.  Transcendental Idealism, translating ‘creation’ into ‘thinking’ (or ‘willing to’ think’) calls the divine act ‘eternal’ rather than ‘first’; but the union of the many here is absolute, just the same—­the many would not be, save for the One.  Against this notion of the unity of origin of all there has always stood the pluralistic notion of an eternal self-existing many in the shape of atoms or even of spiritual units of some sort.  The alternative has doubtless a pragmatic meaning, but perhaps, as far as these lectures go, we had better leave the question of unity of origin unsettled.

5.  The most important sort of union that obtains among things, pragmatically speaking, is their generic unity.  Things exist in kinds, there are many specimens in each kind, and what the ‘kind’ implies for one specimen, it implies also for every other specimen of that kind.  We can easily conceive that every fact in the world might be singular, that is, unlike any other fact and sole of its kind.