rept
overland into Birmingham. The stream of german idealism has been
diffused over the academical world of Great Britain. The disaster is
universal.'

Evidently if weight of authority were all, the truth of absolutism
would be thus decided. But let us first pass in review the general
style of argumentation of that philosophy.

As I read it, its favorite way of meeting pluralism and empiricism is
by a _reductio ad absurdum_ framed somewhat as follows: You contend,
it says to the pluralist, that things, though in some respects
connected, are in other respects independent, so that they are not
members of one all-inclusive individual fact. Well, your position is
absurd on either point. For admit in fact the slightest modicum of
independence, and you find (if you will only think accurately) that
you have to admit more and more of it, until at last nothing but an
absolute chaos, or the proved impossibility of any connexion whatever
between the parts of the universe, remains upon your hands. Admit, on
the other hand, the most incipient minimum of relation between any two
things, and again you can't stop until you see that the absolute unity
of all things is implied.

If we take the latter _reductio ad absurdum_ first, we find a good
example of it in Lotze's well-known proof of monism from the fact of
interaction between finite things. Suppose, Lotze says in effect, and
for simplicity's sake I have to paraphrase him, for his own words are
too long to quote--many distinct beings _a, b, c_, etc., to exist
independently of each other: _can a in that case ever act on b_?

What is it to act? Is it not to exert an influence? Does the influence
detach itself from _a_ and find _b_? If so, it is a third fact, and
the problem is not how _a_ acts, but how its 'influence' acts on _b_.
By another influence perhaps? And how in the end does the chain of
influences find _b_ rather than _c_ unless _b_ is somehow prefigured
in them already? And when they have found _b_, how do they make _b_
respond, if _b_ has nothing in common with them? Why don't they go
right through _b_? The change in _b_ is a _response_, due to _b_'s
capacity for taking account of _a_'s influence, and that again seems
to prove that _b_'s nature is somehow fitted to _a_'s nature in
advance. _A_ and _b_, in short, are not really as distinct as we at
first supposed them, not separated by a void. Were this so they would
be mutually impenetrable, or at least mutually irrel