Science, Religion, and the Human Experience

the complementarity of science and religion 149

nature of the emerging relational paradigm in physics and metaphysics. To do
this, we turn to the modern debate among philosophers about the nature of
relations.
It was in the closing years of the nineteenth century that a British philos-
opher, F. H. Bradley, first proposed that all relations are internal. This case was
made in the appendix to the second edition of his magnum opus,Appearance
and Reality, published in 1893, where he argued, among other things, that
“Nothing in the whole or in the end can be external, and everything in the
Universe is an abstraction from the whole.”^24 Bradley’s compatriot, A. C. Ew-
ing, stated that position as follows:^25

The world known to us constitutes a system in which every particu-

lar is linked to the rest of the system by a relation of logical entail-

ment....Itimplies that the nature of any one thing taken by itself

is incomplete and incoherent without the whole system on which it

depends. Things by their very essence belong together.

While many responsible philosophers opposed this doctrine of universal
relatedness, as did Charles Hartshorne, who properly labeled it, it claimed the
allegiance of Brand Blanshard of Yale who argued in connection with the doc-
trine, that scientific method is reductionist because it intentionally dissociates
things that belong together. He continues:^26

Everyone of the experimental canons...does its work by elimina-

tion, that is, by showing that all but certain factors are unconnected

with a given result, either because they are present when it is ab-

sent, or absent when it is present, or independently variable.

It was Blanshard who gives us this definition of internal relatedness:^27

A relation is internal to a term when in its absence the term would

be different; it is external, when its addition or withdrawal would

make no difference to a term.

Bradley had his opponents, mainly Bertrand Russell in his early years,
who argued that all relations are external, while William James and G. E. Moore
made the more cautious case that some relations are internal, some external.
Both men were opponents of Bradley’s neo-Hegelian monism and sought to
dethrone it by defending the thesis that at least some relations are external.
The American philosopher, Charles Hartshorne, devoted his whole career to
articulating and defending the doctrine that some relations are internal to the
terms, and some are external. Yet, it is the case that Hartshorne could not
break completely free of monism, as we see in the following quotation:^28

The interaction between two molecules is slightly peculiar to those

molecules, yet it is one thing even though they are two, or rather, it