ABSTRACT
The natural or pre-scientific view of the world regards it as a plurality of “things,” each possessing qualities, standing in relation to others, and interacting with them. Lienee arise four problems: those of the Unity of the Thing, of Substance and Quality, of Relation, of Causality. More perplexing than the problem of Substance and its Qualities is the question to which the pre-scientific assumption that the world consists of a number of interrelated things gives rise. The fundamental defect in Professor Royce’s reasoning seems to lie in the tacit transition from the notion of an infinite series to that of an infinite completed sum. Human persons are thought of as being at once units and the possessors of diverse properties, as capable of a variety of relations to one another and to other things, and as interacting with each other and the rest of the environment.
