I say 'undecided,' because, apart from the 'so far,' which sounds
terribly half-hearted, there are passages in these very pages in which
Mr. Bradley admits the pluralistic thesis. Read, for example, what he
says, on p. 578, of a billiard ball keeping its 'character' unchanged,
though, in its change of place, its 'existence' gets altered; or what
he says, on p. 579, of the possibility that an abstract quality A, B,
or C, in a thing, 'may throughout remain unchanged' although the thing
be altered; or his admission that in red-hairedness, both as analyzed
out of a man and when given with the rest of him, there may be 'no
change' (p. 580). Why does he immediately add that for the pluralist
to plead the non-mutation of such abstractions would be an _ignoratio
elenchi_? It is impossible to admit it to be such. The entire
_elenchus_ and inquest is just as to whether parts which you can
abstract from existing wholes can also contribute to other wholes
without changing their inner nature. If they can thus mould various
wholes into new _gestaltqualitaeten_, then it follows that the same
elements are logically able to exist in different wholes [whether
physically able would depend on additional hypotheses]; that partial
changes are thinkable, and through-and-through change not a dialectic
necessity; that monism is only an hypothesis; and that an additively
constituted universe is a rationally respectable hypothesis also. All
the theses of radical empiricism, in short, follow.

[59] _Op. cit._, pp. 577-579.

[60] So far as I catch his state of mind, it is somewhat like this:
'Book,' 'table,' 'on'--how does the existence of these three abstract
elements result in _this_ book being livingly on _this_ table. Why isn't
the table on the book? Or why doesn't the 'on' connect itself with
another book, or something that is not a table? Mustn't something _in_
each of the three elements already determine the two others to _it_, so
that they do not settle elsewhere or float vaguely? Mustn't the _whole
fact be pre-figured in each part_, and exist _de jure_ before it can
exist _de facto_? But, if so, in what can the jural existence consist,
if not in a spiritual miniature of the whole fact's constitution
actuating every partial factor as its purpose? But is this anything but
the old metaphysical fallacy of looking behind a fact _in esse_ for the
ground of the fact, and finding it in the shape of the very same fact
_in posse_? Somewhere we mus