term. Not to demand intimate relations with the universe, and not to
wish them satisfactory, should be accounted signs of something wrong.
Accordingly when minds of this type reach the philosophic level, and
seek some unification of their vision, they find themselves compelled
to correct that aboriginal appearance of things by which savages are
not troubled. That sphinx-like presence, with its breasts and claws,
that first bald multifariousness, is too discrepant an object for
philosophic contemplation. The intimacy and the foreignness cannot be
written down as simply coexisting. An order must be made; and in that
order the higher side of things must dominate. The philosophy of the
absolute agrees with the pluralistic 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.