It is possible to imagine alternative universes to the one we know, in which the most various grades and types of union should be embodied.  Thus the lowest grade of universe would be a world of mere WITHNESS, of which the parts were only strung together by the conjunction ‘and.’  Such a universe is even now the collection of our several inner lives.  The spaces and times of your imagination, the objects and events of your day-dreams are not only more or less incoherent inter se, but are wholly out of definite relation with the similar contents of anyone else’s mind.  Our various reveries now as we sit here compenetrate each other idly without influencing or interfering.  They coexist, but in no order and in no receptacle, being the nearest approach to an absolute ‘many’ that we can conceive.  We cannot even imagine any reason why they should be known all together, and we can imagine even less, if they were known together, how they could be known as one systematic whole.

But add our sensations and bodily actions, and the union mounts to a much higher grade.  Our audita et visa and our acts fall into those receptacles of time and space in which each event finds its date and place.  They form ‘things’ and are of ‘kinds’ too, and can be classed.  Yet we can imagine a world of things and of kinds in which the causal interactions with which we are so familiar should not exist.  Everything there might be inert towards everything else, and refuse to propagate its influence.  Or gross mechanical influences might pass, but no chemical action.  Such worlds would be far less unified than ours.  Again there might be complete physico-chemical interaction, but no minds; or minds, but altogether private ones, with no social life; or social life limited to acquaintance, but no love; or love, but no customs or institutions that should systematize it.  No one of these grades of universe would be absolutely irrational or disintegrated, inferior tho it might appear when looked at from the higher grades.  For instance, if our minds should ever become ‘telepathically’ connected, so that we knew immediately, or could under certain conditions know immediately, each what the other was thinking, the world we now live in would appear to the thinkers in that world to have been of an inferior grade.

With the whole of past eternity open for our conjectures to range in, it may be lawful to wonder whether the various kinds of union now realized in the universe that we inhabit may not possibly have been successively evolved after the fashion in which we now see human systems evolving in consequence of human needs.  If such an hypothesis were legitimate, total oneness would appear at the end of things rather than at their origin.  In other words the notion of the ‘Absolute’ would have to be replaced by that of the ‘Ultimate.’  The two notions would have the same content—­the maximally unified content of fact, namely—­but their time-relations would be positively reversed. [Footnote:  Compare on the Ultimate, Mr. Schiller’s essay “Activity and Substance,” in his book entitled Humanism, p. 204.]