The American tradition has found this view of human history repugnant and false. This tradition sees the world as many, not as one. These empirical instincts, the preference for fact over logic, for deed over dogma, have found their most brilliant expression in the writings of William James and in the approach to philosophical problems which James called "radical empiricism. Against the belief in the all-encompassing power of a single explanation, against the commitment to the absolutism of ideology, against the notion that all answers to political and social problems can be found in the back of some sacred book, against the deterministic interpretation of history, against the closed universe, James stood for what he called the unfinished universe-a universe marked by growth, variety, ambiguity, mystery, and contingency-a universe where free men may find partial truths, but where no mortal man will ever get an absolute grip on Absolute Truth, universe where social progress depends not on capitulation to a single, all-consuming body of doctrine, but on the uncoerced intercourse of unconstrained minds.