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It has become increasingly clear to me that Hartshorne's psychicalism and Post's physicalism are formally very much alike. Each, in its way, is an essay in – -- to use Post's term – -- "nonreductive metaphysics." Although both are substantively pluralistic, both are also attributively monistic, Post's being an attempt at a metaphysics, as I've put it, "within the limits of physics alone," Hartshorne's, an attempt at a metaphysics, as it were, "within the limits of psychics alone" (cf. Hartshorne's "Physics and Psychics: The Place of Mind in Nature"). Accordingly, both of them bear the burden of arguing that their respective positions are not reductive – -- in Post's case, by seeking to show that his physicalism in no way reduces everything to what can be thought and spoken of in the terms of mathematical physics; in Hartshorne's case, by seeking to show that his psychicalism neither holds that "everything is psychic" nor is vulnerable to the objection of being excessively anthropomorphic.

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