A Pluralistic UniverseWilliam James

James delivered these Hibbert Lectures at Oxford in 1908, the last major philosophical work of his life. The book argues against monism (the view that reality is a single, all-encompassing unity) and for pluralism (the view that reality is genuinely many, with real connections but no overarching totality).

James's main targets are the Hegelian absolute idealists, especially F.H. Bradley, who argued that all relations are internal and that reality is one seamless experience. James objects that this position makes time, change, and individuality illusory, which contradicts what experience directly reveals. If the Absolute already contains all perspectives, then individual experience is mere appearance, and the problems of evil and suffering become insoluble.

James proposes instead a "concatenated" universe: a world in which things are connected to their neighbors but not to everything at once, where genuine novelty is possible and the future is not already determined. He draws on Bergson's critique of intellectualism to argue that conceptual thought always falsifies the continuity and flow of lived experience, and that philosophy must learn to think with experience rather than about it.

The lectures are a defense of the reality of time, change, and the individual against every system that would absorb them into a higher unity.