The Consequences of Monism 231FINAL QUESTIONS
THE CONSEQUENCES
OF MONISM
The unitary explanation of the world—the monism por-
trayed here—takes the principles needed to explain the
world from human experience. It also looks for the sources
of action in the observable world: that is, in the human na-
ture accessible to our self-cognition, particularly in moral
imagination. Monism refuses to seek the ultimate causes
of the world that appear to our perceiving and thinking by
making abstract inferences about somethingoutside that
world. For monism, the unity brought to the manifold mul-
tiplicity of percepts through the experience of thinking ob-
servation is both what our human urge for cognition
demands, and the means by which this urge for cognition
seeks entry into the physical and spiritual regions of the
universe. Those who seek another unity behind the one
sought in this way merely prove that they do not recognize
the correspondence between what is discovered through
thinking and what is demanded by our drive for knowl-
edge. The single human individual is not, in fact, cut off
from the world. The individual is a part of the world, and