04 Part 1 - The One and the Many - Pragmatism - William James

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Lecture 4. The One and the Many

We saw in the last lecture that the pragmatic method in its dealings with certain concepts

instead of ending with admiring contemplation, plunges forward into the river of experience with

them and prolongs the perspective by their means. Design, free will, the absolute mind, spirit,

instead of matter, have for their sole meaning a better promise as to this world's outcome.

Be they false or be they true, the meaning of them is this maliorism.

I have sometimes thought of the phenomenon called total reflection in optics as a good

symbol of the relation between abstract ideas and concrete realities as pragmatism conceives it.

Hold the tumbler of water a little above your eyes and look up through the water at its surface

or better still look similarly through the flat wall of an aquarium.

You will then see an extraordinarily brilliant reflected image say of a candle flame or any other

clear object situated on the opposite side of the vessel. No candle ray under these circumstances

gets beyond the water's surface. Every ray is totally reflected back into the depths again.

Now let the water represent the world of sensible facts and let the air above it represent the

world of abstract ideas. Both worlds are real of course and interact but they interact only at

their boundary and the locus of everything that lives and happens to us so far as full experience

goes is the water. We are like fishes swimming in the sea of scents bounded above by the superior

element but unable to breathe it pure or penetrated. We get our oxygen from it however we touch it

insistently. Now in this part now in that and every time we touch it we are reflected back

into the water with our course re-determined and re-energized. The abstract ideas of which the

air consists indispensable for life but irrespective by themselves as it were an only active in

their redirecting function. All similes are halting but this one rather takes my fancy.

It shows how something not sufficient for life in itself may nevertheless be an effective

determinant of life elsewhere. 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 occasion 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 philosophical 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 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're talking 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 a reduction to system as an indispensable mark

of mental greatness. Your scholarly mind of encyclopedic, philosophical 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 taking singly but totality. Footnote, compare, A. Belanger

concepts the course at Lactivity Intentional Delesbriet. Paris Alcan 1905 page 79FF.

In this, acquaintance with reality's diversities is as important as understanding their connection.

The human passion of curiosity runs on all force with a 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 first 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 meniness, 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? Empiresists as a rule are as stout

monists of this abstract kind as rationalists are. The difference is that empiricists are less

dazzled. Unity doesn't blind them to everything else, doesn't quench their curiosity for special

facts, whereas there is a kind of rationalist who is sure to interpret abstract unity mystically

and to forget everything else, to treat it as a principle, to admire and worship it,

and they are bound to come to a full stop intellectually. The world is one.

The formula may become a sort of number worship, three, and seven have, it is true,

been reckoned sacred numbers, but abstractly taken, why is one more excellent than forty-three,

or than two million and ten? In this first vague conviction of the world's unity,

there is so little to take hold of that we hardly know what we mean by it.

The only way to get forward with our notion is to treat it pragmatically.

Granting the oneness to exist, what facts will be different in consequence,

what will the unity be known as? The world is one, yes, but how one? What is the practical value

of the oneness for us? Asking such questions, we pause from the vague to the definite,

from the abstract to the concrete. Many distinct ways in which oneness predicated of the universe

might make a difference come to view. I will note successively the more obvious of these ways.

One. First, the world is at least one subject of discourse. If its maninus was so irremediable as

to permit no union whatever of its parts, not even our mind could mean the whole of it at once.

There would be like eyes trying to look in opposite directions. But in point of fact,

we mean to cover the whole of it by our abstract term, world, or universe, which expressly intends

that no part shall be left out. Such unity of discourse carries obviously no further

monistic specifications, aka one so named has so much unity of discourse as a cosmos.

It is an odd fact that many monists consider a great victory scored for their side when pure

lists say the universe is many. The universe, the chuckle, his speech bebraeth him,

his stance confessed of a monism out of his own mouth. Well, let things be one in that sense.

You can then fling such a word as universe at the whole collection of them. But what matters

it? It still remains to be a certain whether they are one in any other sense that is more valuable.

Two. Are they, for example, continuous? Can you pause for one to another keeping always in your

one universe without any danger of falling out? In other words, do the parts of our universe

hang together instead of being like detached grains of sand? Even grains of sand hang together

through the space in which they are embedded, and if you can in any way move through such space,

you can pause continuously from number one of them to number two. Space and time are thus vehicles

of continuity by which the world's parts hang together. The practical difference to us

resultant from these forms of union is immense. Our whole motor life is based upon them.

Three. There are innumerable other paths of practical continuity among things. Lines of

influence can be traced by which they together. Following any such line, you pause from one

thing to another till you may have covered a good part of the universe's extent. Gravity and

heat conduction are such all uniting influences so far as the physical world goes. Electric,

luminous, and chemical influences follow similar lines of influence. But Opaq and inert bodies

interrupt the continuity here so that you have to step around them or change your mode of progress

if you wish to get farther on that day. Practically, you have then lost your universe's unity.

So far as it was constituted by those first lines of influence. There are innumerable kinds of

connection that special things have with other special things, and the ensemble of any one of

these connections form one sort of system by which things are conjoined. Thus men are conjoined

in a vast network of acquaintanceship. Brown knows Jones, Jones knows Robinson, etc.

And by choosing your father intermediaries rightly you may carry a message from Jones to the

Empress of China or the chief of African pigmies or to anyone else in the inhabited world.

But you are stopped short as by a non-conductor when you choose one man wrong in this experiment.

What may be called love systems are grafted on the acquaintance system. A loves or hates B,

B loves or hates C, etc. But these systems are smaller than the great acquaintance system that they

presuppose. Human efforts are daily unifying the world more and more in definite systematic ways.

We found colonial, postal, consular, commercial systems, all the parts of which they obey

definite influences that propagate themselves within the system but not to facts outside of it.

The result is innumerable little hangings together of the world's parts within the larger

hangings together, little worlds not only of discourse but of operation within the wider universe.

Each system exemplifies one type or grade of union, its parts being strung on that peculiar kind

of relation and the same part may figure in many different systems as a man may hold several

offices and belong to various clubs. From this systematic point of view, therefore, the pragmatic

value of the world's unity is that all these definite networks actually and practically exist.

Some are more enveloping and extensive, some less so. They are super-posed upon each other and

between them all, they let no individual elementary part of the universe escape.

Enormous as is the amount of disconnection among things for these systematic influences and

conjunctions follow rigidly exclusive paths, everything that exists is influenced in some way

by something else if you can only pick the way out rightly.

Losely speaking, 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 connection 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 maniness are absolutely coordinate 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 their 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. For 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 course for all that is one might then speak of the absolute

causal unity of the world. God's fire on creation's day has figured in traditional philosophy as

such an absolute course and a region. 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 saved for the one. Against this notion of

unity of a region 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 a region unsettled. Five. 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 soul of its kind. In such a world of singular our logic would be useless

for logic works by predicating of the single instance what is true of all its kind.

With no two things alike in the world we should be unable to reason from our past experiences

to our future ones. The existence of so much generic unity in things is thus perhaps the most

momentous pragmatic specification or what it may mean to say the world is one.

Absolute generic unity would obtain if there were one sumo meyinos under which all things without

exception could be eventually subsumed. Beings, thinkables, experiences would be candidates for this

position. Whether their alternatives expressed by such words have any pragmatic significance or

not is another question which I prefer to leave unsettled just now. Six. Another specification

of what the phrase the world is one may mean is unity of purpose. An enormous number of things

in the world subserve a common purpose. All the man-made systems administrative, industrial,

military or whatnot exist each for its controlling purpose. Every living being pursues its own

peculiar purposes. They cooperate according to the degree of their development in collective

or tribal purposes. Larger ends thus enveloping lesser ones until an absolutely single final

and climactic purpose subserved by all things without exception might conceivably be reached.

It is needless to say that their appearances conflict with such a view. Any resultant,

as I said in my third lecture, may have been purposed in advance, but none of the results we

actually know in this world have in point of fact been purposed in advance in all their details.

Men and nations start with a vague notion of being rich or great or good. Each step they make

brings unforeseen chances in to sight and shuts out older vistas and the specifications of the

general purpose have to be daily changed. What is reached in the end may be better or worse

than what was purposed, but it is always more complex and different. Our different purposes

also are at war with each other, where one can't crush the other out, they compromise,

and the result is again different from what anyone distinctly proposed beforehand.

Vagely and generally, much of what was purposed may be gained, but everything makes strongly for

the view that our world is incompletely unified teleologically and is still trying to get its

unification better organized. Whoever claims absolute teleological unity, saying that there is

one purpose that every detail of the universe subserves dogmatizes at his own risk.

Theologians who dogmatize thus find it more and more impossible as our acquaintance with the

warring interests of the world's parts grows more concrete to imagine what the one climatic

purpose may possibly be like. We see indeed that certain evils minister to alter your goods that

the bitter makes the cocktail better, and that a bit of danger or hardship puts us agreeably

to our trumps. We can vaguely generalize this into the doctrine that all the evil in the universe

is but instrumental to its greater perfection. But the scale of the evil actually inside defies

all human tolerance and transcendental idealism in the pages of a Bradley or a Royce brings us

no further than the book of Job did. God's ways are not our ways, so let us put our hands upon

our mouth. A God who can relish such superfluities of horror is no God for human beings to appeal to.

His animal spirits are too high. In other words, the absolute with his own purpose is not the man

like God of common people. 7. Asthetic union among things also obtains and is very analogous to

the ideological union. Things tell a story. Their parts hang together so as to work out a climax.

They play into each other's hands expressively. Retrospectively, we can see that although no definite

purpose presided over a chain of events, yet the events fell into a dramatic form, with a start,

a middle, and a finish. In point of fact, all stories end, and here again the point of view of

a manny is that more natural one to take. The world is full of partial stories that run parallel

to one another, beginning and ending at odd times. They mutually interlace and interfere at points,

but we cannot unify them completely in our minds. In following our life history, I must temporarily

turn my attention from my own. Even a biographer of twins would have to press them alternately

upon his reader's attention. It follows that whoever says that the whole world tells one story

adheres another of those monistic dogmas that a man believes at his risk.

It is easy to see the world's history pluralistically, as a rope of which each fiber tells a

separate tale, but to conceive of each cross-section of the rope as an absolutely single fact,

and to sum the whole longitudinal series into one being living an undivided life is harder.

We have indeed the analogy of embryology to help us. The microscopic makes a hundred flat

cross-sections of a given embryo, and mentally unites them into one solid whole.

But the great world's ingredients, so far as they are beings, seem like the rope's fibers to be

discontinuous crosswise, and to coherent only in the longitudinal direction.

Followed in that direction, they are many. Even the embryologist, when he follows the development

of his object, has to treat the history of each single organ in turn. Absolute aesthetic union

is thus another barely abstract ideal. The world appears as something more epic than dramatic.

So far, then, we see how the world is unified by its many systems, kinds, purposes, and dramas,

that there is more union in all these ways than openly appears is certainly true,

that there may be one sovereign purpose, system, kind, and story is a legitimate hypothesis.

All I say here is that it is rash to affirm this dogmatically without better evidence than

we possess at present. End of Lecture 4 Part 1