“When man has seen himself as one with the infinite Being of the universe, when all separateness has ceased, when all men, all women, all angels, all gods, all animals, all plants, the whole universe has been melted into that oneness, then all fear disappears.  Whom to fear?  Can I hurt myself?  Can I kill myself?  Can I injure myself?  Do you fear yourself?  Then will all sorrow disappear.  What can cause me sorrow?  I am the One Existence of the universe.  Then all jealousies will disappear; of whom to be jealous?  Of myself?  Then all bad feelings disappear.  Against whom will I have this bad feeling?  Against myself?  There is none in the universe but me. ...  Kill out this differentiation; kill out this superstition that there are many.  ’He who, in this world of many, sees that One; he who in this mass of insentiency sees that One Sentient Being; he who in this world of shadow catches that Reality, unto him belongs eternal peace, unto none else, unto none else.’”

We all have some ear for this monistic music:  it elevates and reassures.  We all have at least the germ of mysticism in us.  And when our idealists recite their arguments for the Absolute, saying that the slightest union admitted anywhere carries logically absolute Oneness with it, and that the slightest separation admitted anywhere logically carries disunion remediless and complete, I cannot help suspecting that the palpable weak places in the intellectual reasonings they use are protected from their own criticism by a mystical feeling that, logic or no logic, absolute Oneness must somehow at any cost be true.  Oneness overcomes moral separateness at any rate.  In the passion of love we have the mystic germ of what might mean a total union of all sentient life.  This mystical germ wakes up in us on hearing the monistic utterances, acknowledges their authority, and assigns to intellectual considerations a secondary place.

I will dwell no longer on these religious and moral aspects of the question in this lecture.  When I come to my final lecture there will be something more to say.

Leave then out of consideration for the moment the authority which mystical insights may be conjectured eventually to possess; treat the problem of the One and the Many in a purely intellectual way; and we see clearly enough where pragmatism stands.  With her criterion of the practical differences that theories make, we see that she must equally abjure absolute monism and absolute pluralism.  The world is one just so far as its parts hang together by any definite connexion.  It is many just so far as any definite connexion fails to obtain.  And finally it is growing more and more unified by those systems of connexion at least which human energy keeps framing as time goes on.