So we see concretely two types of religion in sharp contrast. Using
our old terms of comparison, we may say that the absolutistic scheme
appeals to the tender-minded while the pluralistic scheme appeals to
the tough. Many persons would refuse to call the pluralistic scheme
religious at all. They would call it moralistic, and would apply the
word religious to the monistic scheme alone. Religion in the sense
of self-surrender, and moralism in the sense of self-sufficingness,
have been pitted against each other as incompatibles frequently
enough in the history of human thought.
We stand here before the final question of philosophy. I said in my
fourth lecture that I believed the monistic-pluralistic alternative
to be the deepest and most pregnant question that our minds can
frame. Can it be that the disjunction is a final one? that only one
side can be true? Are a pluralism and monism genuine incompatibles?
So that, if the world were really pluralistically constituted, if it
really existed distributively and were made up of a lot of eaches,
it could only be saved piecemeal and de facto as the result of their
behavior, and its epic history in no wise short-circuited by some
essential oneness in which the severalness were already 'taken up'
beforehand and eternally 'overcome'? If this were so, we should have
to choose one philosophy or the other.
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