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Presidential Address m uvuorovou the world," says Russell in his latest book, "is composed of events." An "event" he understands, in view of the theory of Relativity, as something occupying a small finite amount of Space-Time. The word "event" has been intended to suggest that there is no such thing as matter in the sense of substance, or that ultimate and indivisible form of it which the old physicists and chemists called an "atom". Matter and motion, the ultimate realities of the bygone age, are "logical construction” using events as their material. The true ultimate reality, therefore, is not material, neither is it mental. Adopting a suggestion of Dr. Sheffer, Russell calls his theory "neutral monism,"
monism in the sense that it regards the world as composed of only one kind of stuff, namely events, though it is pluralism in so far as events are many of which each is a self-subsistent entity This particularism (which may be compared with the Buddhist doctrine of svalakshanas) which distinguishes Russell's philosophy from Alexander's is a serious flaw in the former, for neither science nor philosophy can evade the question-what makes the events one kind of stuff? Oneness of kind points to that further unity of principle which makes them one kind Even assuming that Russell's thesis was modified so far as to make it agree with Alexander's, I wonder how this "neutral monism" can be distinguished essentially and philosophically from the doctrine of the "Unknowable" which was set forth by Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth century, or that of Spinoza in the seven. teenth, except that in one case it does not confess to Agnosticism and has a theory of matter which
