ABSTRACT
The pluralistic view, of a world of additive constitution, is one that pragmatism is unable to rule out from serious consideration. But this view leads one to the farther hypothesis that the actual world, instead of being complete 'eternally,' as the monists assure us, may be eternally incomplete. The 'possible,' as something less than the actual and more than the wholly unreal, is another of these magisterial notions of common sense. The scope of the practical control of nature newly put into our hand by scientific ways of thinking vastly exceeds the scope of the old control grounded on common sense. Vainly did scholasticism, common sense's college-trained younger sister, seek to stereotype the forms the human family had always talked with, to make them definite and fix them for eternity. Common sense, common science or corpuscular philosophy, ultra-critical science, or energetic, and critical or idealistic philosophy, all seem insufficiently true in some regard and leave some dissatisfaction.
