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Observe how radical the character of the monism here is. Separation is not simply overcome by the One, it is denied to exist. There is no many. We are not parts of the One; It has no parts; and since in a sense we undeniably ARE, it must be that each of us is the One, indivisibly and totally.
All he has to do is to be true to his own nature, to live his own life, to understand himself. This takes us back to the Socratic maxim, "Know Thyself." No man ever expressed one phase of Monism so well and beautifully as Emerson has in his "Essay on Compensation."
Modern science, on the contrary, starts from the magnificent synthetic conception of monism, that is to say, of a single substance underlying all phenomena matter and force being recognized as inseparable and indestructible, continuously evolving in a succession of forms forms relative to their respective times and places.
From the time of Śankara onwards nearly all Hindu theologians of the first rank expounded their views by writing a commentary on the Brahma Sûtras, an authoritative but singularly enigmatic digest of the Upanishads. Śankara's doctrine may be summarized as absolute monism which holds that nothing really exists but Brahman and that Brahman is identical with the soul.
Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational. The all-form allows of no taking up and dropping of connexions, for in the all the parts are essentially and eternally co-implicated. In the each-form, on the contrary, a thing may be connected by intermediary things, with a thing with which it has no immediate or essential connexion.
On the rationalist side we have a universe in many editions, one real one, the infinite folio, or edition de luxe, eternally complete; and then the various finite editions, full of false readings, distorted and mutilated each in its own way. So the rival metaphysical hypotheses of pluralism and monism here come back upon us. I will develope their differences during the remainder of our hour.
Turning, then, to the social side first of all, no one, of course, would say that Socialism as such was monistic; on the other hand it is easy to understand the attraction of Socialism for those whose philosophy is Monism.
The strength of materialistic monism does not lie in any proof of there being nothing but mechanism in this wide universe, but in its energetic propaganda against certain traditional theological forms of ecclesiastical religion forms which are rapidly being disowned by the leaders of religious thought. Even monism concedes that "it is better being good than bad, better being sane than mad."
In a certain sense we can regard the conception of "animated atoms" as essentially partaking of the nature of this pure monism a very ancient idea which more than two thousand years ago Empedocles enunciated in his doctrine of "hate and love of the elements."
Only monistic dogmatism can say of any of its hypotheses, 'It is either that or nothing; take it or leave it just as it stands. The type of monism prevalent at Oxford has kept this steep and brittle attitude, partly through the proverbial academic preference for thin and elegant logical solutions, partly from a mistaken notion that the only solidly grounded basis for religion was along those lines.
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