A Pluralistic Universe Hibbert Lectures Author:William James Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3Mr. Bradley revels in the same type of argument. No adjective can rationally qualify a substantive, he thinks, for if distinct from the substantive, it can't be united with it; and if not ... more »distinct, there is only one thing there, and nothing left to unite. Our whole pluralistic procedure in using subjects and predicates as we do is fundamentally irrational, an example of the desperation of our finite intellectual estate, infected and undermined as that is by the separatist discursive forms which are our only categories, but which absolute reality must somehow absorb into its unity and overcome. Readers of ' Appearance and reality ' will remember how Mr. Bradley suffers from a difficulty identical with that to which Lotze and Royce fall a prey — how shall an influence influence ? how shall a relation relate ? Any conjunctive relation between two phenomenal experiences a and 6 must, in the intellectualist philosophy of these authors, be itself a third entity; and as such, instead of bridging the one original chasm, it can only create two smallerchasms, each to be freshly bridged. Instead of hooking textit{a to 6, it needs itself to be hooked by a fresh relation / to textit{a and by another textit{r" to 6. These new relations are but two more entities which themselves require to be hitched in turn by four still newer relations—so behold the vertiginous textit{regressus ad infinitum in full career. Since a textit{regressus ad infinitum is deemed absurd, the notion that relations come 'between' their terms must be given up. No mere external go-between can logically connect. What occurs must be more intimate. The hooking must be a penetration, a possession. The relation must textit{involve the terms, each term must involve textit{it, and merging thus their being in it, they must somehow merge their being in ...« less