philosophy which I am going
to contrast with it in these lectures, in that both identify human
substance with the divine substance. But whereas absolutism thinks
that the said substance becomes fully divine only in the form of
totality, and is not its real self in any form but the _all_-form, the
pluralistic view which I prefer to adopt is willing to believe that
there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance
of reality may never get totally collected, that some of it may
remain outside of the largest combination of it ever made, and that
a distributive form of reality, the _each_-form, is logically as
acceptable and empirically as probable as the all-form commonly
acquiesced in as so obviously the self-evident thing. The contrast
between these two forms of a reality which we will agree to suppose
substantially spiritual is practically the topic of this course of
lectures. You see now what I mean by pantheism's two subspecies. If
we give to the monistic subspecies the name of philosophy of the
absolute, we may give that of radical empiricism to its pluralistic
rival, and it may be well to distinguish them occasionally later by
these names.

As a convenient way of entering into the study of their differences,
I may refer to a recent article by Professor Jacks of Manchester
College. Professor Jacks, in some brilliant pages in the 'Hibbert
Journal' for last October, studies the relation between the universe
and the philosopher who describes and defines it for us. You may
assume two cases, he says. Either what the philosopher tells us is
extraneous to the universe he is accounting for, an indifferent
parasitic outgrowth, so to speak; or the fact of his philosophizing
is itself one of the things taken account of in the philosophy, and
self-included in the description. In the former case the philosopher
means by the universe everything _except_ what his own presence
brings; in the latter case his philosophy is itself an intimate
part of the universe, and may be a part momentous enough to give a
different turn to what the other parts signify. It may be a
supreme reaction of the universe upon itself by which it rises to
self-comprehension. It may handle itself differently in consequence of
this event.

Now both empiricism and absolutism bring the philosopher inside
and make man intimate, but the one being pluralistic and the other
monistic, they do so in differing ways that need much explanation. Let
m