irrefutable logic, and all pluralism appears as absurd.

The reasoning is pleasing from its ingenuity, and it is almost a pity
that so straight a bridge from abstract logic to concrete fact should
not bear our weight. To have the alternative forced upon us of
admitting either finite things each cut off from all relation with
its environment, or else of accepting the integral absolute with no
environment and all relations packed within itself, would be too
delicious a simplification. But the purely verbal character of the
operation is undisguised. Because the _names_ of finite things and
their relations are disjoined, it doesn't follow that the realities
named need a _deus ex machina_ from on high to conjoin them. The same
things disjoined in one respect _appear_ as conjoined in another.
Naming the disjunction doesn't debar us from also naming the
conjunction in a later modifying statement, for the two are absolutely
co-ordinate elements in the finite tissue of experience. When at
Athens it was found self-contradictory that a boy could be both tall
and short (tall namely in respect of a child, short in respect of a
man), the absolute had not yet been thought of, but it might just as
well have been invoked by Socrates as by Lotze or Royce, as a relief
from his peculiar intellectualistic difficulty.

Everywhere we find rationalists using the same kind of reasoning. The
primal whole which is their vision must be there not only as a
fact but as a logical necessity. It must be the minimum that can
exist--either that absolute whole is there, or there is absolutely
nothing. The logical proof alleged of the irrationality of supposing
otherwise, is that you can deny the whole only in words that
implicitly assert it. If you say 'parts,' of _what_ are they parts? If
you call them a 'many,' that very word unifies them. If you suppose
them unrelated in any particular respect, that 'respect' connects
them; and so on. In short you fall into hopeless contradiction. You
must stay either at one extreme or the other.[8] 'Partly this and
partly that,' partly rational, for instance, and partly irrational,
is no admissible description of the world. If rationality be in it at
all, it must be in it throughout; if irrationality be in it anywhere,
that also must pervade it throughout. It must be wholly rational or
wholly irrational, pure universe or pure multiverse or nulliverse; and
reduced to this violent alternative, no one's choice ought l