ABSTRACT
The progress of reality is a real progress, the constant achievement of new modes and phases, each having its characteristic aesthetic synthesis, and the whole presenting an ever-widening and enriched contemplation, as the sciences, the systems of practical utility—economic, political, ethical—and the arts of convention and convenience, work out their distinctive contents. The movement of tradition proceeds, the store of intellectual and moral wealth increases, crowned at every stage by the synthesis of art, which renders it, in the full sense, the embodiment of reality. An original or absolute pluralism would contradict even the presupposition of knowledge, upon which the concrete character of each of these realities directly depends. Any pluralistic theory, therefore, that would have a chance of commending itself to reflection, would perforce be a relative pluralism, one of the sort that allows at least the comprehension of the diversity of so-called realities in a larger unity of some sort, such as the unity of experience.
