WorkWilliam James

A Pluralistic Universe

The world is many before it is one — argued at Oxford, on the home ground of the idealism the lectures were built to attack.

by William James272 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1909(aged 67)
Original language: English

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Overview

The title he gave the eight lectures was the present situation in philosophy. The Hibbert Trustees had brought him to Manchester College, Oxford, to deliver them in May 1908, and the situation, as he set it out to an English audience on its own ground, was that English philosophy had taken a wrong turning. Absolute idealism held the field on both sides of the Atlantic, in Bradley and Green in England and in Josiah Royce at home, and it taught that reality is finally one thing, that any relation between two parts of it belongs to the whole rather than to the parts, and that a genuinely open future is therefore a mistake about what we are looking at. Royce was his colleague at Harvard, and James gave the same eight lectures there too before printing them the following year. Underneath the whole construction James found a single bad habit: trusting the concept over the experience the concept was pulled out of, and then ruling that whatever the concept cannot represent is impossible. So he starts from the other end. Things do hang together, but they hang together in places and fail to elsewhere; connections are real, partial, and made as you go; and there is no guarantee that everything is finally gathered up from a single point of view. What that buys him is a world in which something can still be added, and there the argument reaches past metaphysics: a universe already complete leaves nobody anything to do.

Key concepts

What does James mean by intellectualism, and why does he reject it?

For James, intellectualism mistakes an abstract concept for the experience from which it was drawn, then declares whatever the concept cannot contain impossible. In the 1908 Oxford lectures, this targets the habit behind absolute idealism: reason prizes a finished, all-inclusive account over the uneven connections experience actually presents. The concept must answer to life, not replace it.

Are relations real things for James, or merely ways of describing them?

Relations are real when experience gives us actual connections, but they need not bind every part of reality into one system. James therefore allows a connection between two events or things to do genuine work without making it a relation within an all-encompassing whole. His quarrel with Bradley, Green, and Royce turns on this point: partial connection can be real. It need not become total.

What does James mean by the Absolute, beyond simply calling it monism?

The Absolute is the idealist answer to the demand that reality form one complete whole: every relation, event, and viewpoint ultimately belongs to a single system. James treats that completeness as a philosophical construction, not an experience we are entitled to impose on experience. Against Royce in particular, he argues that a finished whole leaves no genuine room for additions. Completion has a cost.

What kind of God could exist in James's pluralistic universe?

A God compatible with James's pluralism would not stand outside a finished universe as the explanation of every relation; the divine would have to belong to a world whose events and connections remain partly open. That possibility separates pluralistic theism from the absolute idealist whole defended by Royce. God may matter to the world's order without cancelling its unfinished character. Divinity does not close the future.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A World Still Being Made

Can reality be one finished system, or must it remain open to new relations and additions? The answer decides whether experience can alter what the world is and whether human action has anything left to do.

James set these eight lectures against the absolute idealism of Bradley, Green, and Josiah Royce, which treated separateness and an open future as defects of limited thought. His radical empiricism began instead with experience: relations can be real without belonging to a completed whole, and connections can hold in one place while failing elsewhere. Delivered at Oxford in May 1908 and published in 1909, the argument makes pluralism a practical metaphysics: a world still unfinished leaves room for activity.

metaphysics
logic
monism
pluralism
empiricism
consciousness
epistemology
experience
rationalism
intellectualism
idealism
relationality
absolutism
absolute
identity
rationality
unity
theism
pragmatism
panpsychism
causality
continuity
reality
ontology
psychology
abstraction
truth
activity
absolute idealism
relations

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 272
distinct concepts: 368
by passages held, corpus-wide: #276

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “monism” and “pluralism”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 27 pairings. 84 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
monism	pluralism	19
empiricism	pluralism	13
pluralism	relations	10
idealism	monism	9
absolute idealism	pluralism	7
absolute idealism	monism	6
consciousness	experience	6
idealism	relations	6
experience	relations	5
monism	relations	5
absolute idealism	consciousness	4
consciousness	idealism	4
consciousness	monism	4
empiricism	experience	3
empiricism	monism	3
experience	pluralism	3
absolute idealism	idealism	2
absolute idealism	relations	2
consciousness	pluralism	2
empiricism	idealism	2
empiricism	relations	2
experience	monism	2
idealism	pluralism	2
absolute idealism	empiricism	1
consciousness	empiricism	1
consciousness	relations	1
experience	idealism	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1890 The Principles of Psychology
The book American psychology grew up on, and the one everything after it came out of: the chapters on habit, will and belief carry his pragmatism and his radical empiricism in embryo.
EN
1892 Psychology: Briefer Course
For most people who studied psychology in America in the 1890s, this was James: The Principles of Psychology cut down for undergraduate courses two years after it appeared.
EN
1897 The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
Ten years separate this collection from the book that made the label famous: platform lectures on chance, faith and the moral life, gathered the year before he first called himself a pragmatist in public.
EN
1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience
Theologians, mystics and anthropologists have been arguing with this casebook ever since — his only sustained book on religion, and the widest-read thing he wrote. The test it applies to a religious state, judge it by what it does, is the one he would soon be calling pragmatism.
EN
1907 Pragmatism
What the Principles had been carrying since 1890 arrives here as a short public statement, spoken to general audiences in Boston and New York before it was printed. The Meaning of Truth exists because of the way this one was received.
EN
1909 A Pluralistic Universe you are here EN
1909 The Meaning of Truth
The companion to Pragmatism, and mostly older than it: back numbers reprinted alongside fresh answers to its critics. It carries the technical version of the theory of truth that the 1907 lectures had handed to the public.
EN
1912 Essays in Radical Empiricism
Radical empiricism is defined here and nowhere in the books he saw through the press: papers written for other philosophers in 1904 and 1905, not talks written for a room.
EN

— or open another of their works