At most of our American Colleges there are Clubs formed by the studentsdevoted to particular branches of learning; and these clubs have thelaudable custom of inviting once or twice a year some maturer scholarto address them, the occasion often being made a public one. I havefrom time to time accepted such invitations, and afterwards had mydiscourse printed in one or other of the Reviews. It has seemed to methat these addresses might now be worthy of collection in a volume, asthey shed explanatory light upon each other, and taken together expressa tolerably definite philosophic attitude in a very untechnical way.
Were I obliged to give a short name to the attitude in question, Ishould call it that of radical empiricism, in spite of the fact thatsuch brief nicknames are nowhere more misleading than in philosophy. Isay 'empiricism,' because it is contented to regard its most assuredconclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable tomodification in the course of future experience; and I say 'radical,'because it treats the doctrine of monism itself as an hypothesis, and,{viii}unlike so much of the half-way empiricism that is current underthe name of positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it doesnot dogmatically affirm monism as something with which all experiencehas got to square. The difference between monism and pluralism isperhaps the most pregnant of all the differences in philosophy. Primâfacie the world is a pluralism; as we find it, its unity seems to bethat of any collection; and our higher thinking consists chiefly of aneffort to redeem it from that first crude form. Postulating more unitythan the first experiences yield, we also discover more. But absoluteunity, in spite of brilliant dashes in its direction, still remainsundiscovered, still remains a Grenzbegriff. "Ever not quite" must bethe rationalistic philosopher's last confession concerning it. Afterall that reason can do has been done, there still remains the opacityof the finite facts as merely given, with most of their peculiaritiesmutually unmediated