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many if not most of which are material rather than mental – is contradictory or at very least misleading. This plurality of things is mere ‘appearance’, which obscures rather than represents the true nature of reality. This implies an important concomitant of the idealist view, as Russell had learned to accept it: that because plurality is a misleading appearance, the truth is that everything is related to everything else in the universe, and therefore the universe is ultimately a single thing – everything is One. This view is called ‘monism’.
    When Moore and Russell rejected idealism in 1898 (the event was marked by publication in that year of Moore’s article ‘The Nature of Judgment’) they opposed both of the chief theses of idealism: that experience and its objects are inextricably mutually dependent, and that everything is one. They thereby committed themselves to ‘realism’, which is the thesis that the objects of experience are independent of experience of them, and to ‘pluralism’, which is the thesis that there are many independent things in the world.
    Russell saw idealism and its concomitant monism as arising from a view about relations which, once refuted, opens the way to pluralist realism. Relations are expressed by such sentences as ‘A is to the left of B’, ‘A is earlier than B’, ‘A loves B’. On the idealist view, Russell claimed, all relations are ‘internal’, that is, they are properties of the terms they relate, and, in a full description, appear as properties of the whole which they form with their relata. This is sometimes plausible; in ‘A loves B’ A’s loving B is a property of A – that is, is a fact about the nature of A – and the complex fact denoted by ‘A loves B’ has the property of being a loving-of-B-by-A . But if all relations are internal it immediately follows that the universe constitutes what the idealist philosopher Harold Joachim calls ‘a significant whole’, for it means that it is part of the nature of anything to be related to everything else, and that therefore a full description of any one thing will tell us everything about the whole universe, and vice versa. Bradley puts the point like this: ‘Reality is one. It must be single because plurality, taken as real, contradicts itself. Plurality implies relations, and, through its relations it unwillingly asserts always a superior unity’ ( Appearance and Reality , 519).
    In opposition to this view Russell argued that the idealists commit a fundamental mistake. This is that they take all propositions to be of subject-predicate form. Consider the sentence ‘The ball is round’. This can be used to express a proposition in which the property of roundness is predicated of a given ball (‘predicated’ means: applied to, said of). In Russell’s view, the idealists wrongly took it that all propositions, even relational ones, are ultimately of subject-predicate form; which means that every proposition must, in the final analysis, constitute a predication on reality as a whole, and that relations as such are unreal. For example: on the idealist view the proposition ‘A is to the left of B’ should properly be understood as saying, ‘Reality has the property of Aappearing-to-be-to-the-left-of-B’ (or something like this). But if one sees that many propositions are irreducibly relational in form, one thereby sees that monism is false. To say that many propositions are irreducibly relational is to say that relations are real or ‘external’ – they are not grounded in the terms they relate; the relation ‘to the left of’ does not belong intrinsically to any spatial object, which is to say that no spatial object must of necessity be to the left of other things. For it to be true that ‘A is to the left of B’, Russell argued, there therefore has to be an A and separately a B for the former to stand to the latter in the relation ‘left of’. And of course to say that there are more