Meanwhile the opposite
hypothesis, of a world imperfectly unified still, and perhaps always
to remain so, must be sincerely entertained. This latter hypothesis
is pluralism's doctrine. Since absolute monism forbids its being
even considered seriously, branding it as irrational from the start,
it is clear that pragmatism must turn its back on absolute monism,
and follow pluralism's more empirical path.
This leaves us with the common-sense world, in which we find things
partly joined and partly disjoined. 'Things,' then, and their
'conjunctions'--what do such words mean, pragmatically handled? In
my next lecture, I will apply the pragmatic method to the stage of
philosophizing known as Common Sense.
Lecture V
Pragmatism and Common Sense
In the last lecture we turned ourselves from the usual way of
talking of the universe's oneness as a principle, sublime in all its
blankness, towards a study of the special kinds of union which the
universe enfolds. We found many of these to coexist with kinds of
separation equally real. "How far am I verified?" is the question
which each kind of union and each kind of separation asks us here,
so as good pragmatists we have to turn our face towards experience,
towards 'facts.
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