The Sources of Religious Insight Part 6

I cannot repeat my student's precise form of expression. I think that I express to you the spirit of what he wrote. In any case, this form of prayer is not peculiar to that man. You see in what way the thought of the divine wisdom became a practical thought for him--a thought at once rational and, as far as it went, saving. When life shattered his little human plans--well, he lifted up his eyes unto the hills. He won a sort of conscious and reasonable union with the all-seeing life. He did not ask its aid as a giver of good fortunes. He waited patiently for the light. Now I do not think that to be an expression of the whole insight of reason; but, so far as it went, that sort of prayer was an essentially religious act. And for that youth it was also a very practical act.

Let me turn to another case. Many years ago I well knew a man, much older than myself, who has long since died. A highly intelligent man, ambitious for the things of the spirit, he was also beset with some defects of health and with many worldly {134} cares. His defects of health made him sensitive to the sort of observation that his physical weaknesses often attracted. In addition, he had enemies, and once had to endure the long-continued trial of a public attack upon his reputation--an attack from which he at length came forth triumphant, but not without long suffering. Once I heard him telling about his own religion, which was the faith of a highly independent mind. "What I most value about my thought of G.o.d," he in effect said, "is that I conceive G.o.d as the one who knows us through and through, and who estimates us not as we seem, but as we are, and who is absolutely fair in his judgment of us." My friend had no concern for future rewards and punishments. The judgment of G.o.d to which he appealed, and in which, without any vanity, he delighted, was simply the fair and true judgment, the divine knowing of us all just as we are.

Now do you not know people whose religion is of this sort? And are not all such forms of religion, as far as they go, practical? Is the recognition of an all-seeing insight, as something real, not in itself calming, sustaining, rationalising? Does it not at the very least awaken in us the ideal which I repeatedly mentioned in our last lecture, the ideal of knowing ourselves even as we are known, and of guiding our lives in the light of such a view of ourselves? Can such an ideal remain wholly a matter of theory? Is it not from its very essence an appeal to the will? {135} Was not my elder friend finding a guiding principle of action in a world where he was often misunderstood? Could one steadily conceive G.o.d in these terms without constantly renewing one's power to face the world with courage?

Surely you all know many people who value the divine as they define the divine, mainly because they conceive G.o.d as what they call the Great Companion. And, for many such, it is the intimately perfect insight of this companion that they seem to themselves most to value.

The ways of this companion are to them mysterious. But he knows them.

They repeat the word: "He knoweth the way that I take." He sees them.

He is close to them. He estimates them. So they view the matter. Is not such a conception a vitally important spring of action for those who possess it?

These ill.u.s.trations suggest that one ill appreciates the insight of reason, even as so imperfectly and one-sidedly sketched by me at the last lecture, who does not see that this insight has an extremely close connection with the will.

IV

Our ill.u.s.trations have now prepared the way for a general review of the relations between our reason and our will. We are ready at length to ask whether any insight of reason, whether any general view of the nature and of the unity of the world or of life, {136} could possibly be a merely theoretical insight. And if we rightly answer this question, we shall be prepared to reply to the objection that, according to the doctrine of the last lecture, the divine insight which overarches our ignorance, and which has all reality for its object, is a lifeless, or an unpractical, or a merely remote type of pure knowledge.

Our attempt to deal with this new question can best be made by taking a direct advantage of what some of you may suppose to be the most formidable of all objections to the whole argument of the last lecture. In my sketch of a philosophy of the reason, I have so far deliberately avoided mentioning what many of you will have had in mind as you have listened to me, namely, that doctrine about our knowledge, and about truth, and about our mode of access to truth, which to-day goes by the name of Pragmatism. Here we have to do, once more, with some of the favourite theses of James's later years. We have also to do with a view with which my present audience is likely to be familiar, at least so far as concerns both the name pragmatism and the best-known fundamental theses of the pragmatist. For I speak in the immediate neighbourhood of one of the most famous strongholds of the recent pragmatic movement. I can give but a comparatively small portion of our limited time to the task of explaining to you how I view those aspects of pragmatism which here concern our enterprise.

Yet this summary discussion will go far, I hope, to show how {137} I view the relations between the reason and the will, and in how far our will also seems to me to be a source of religious insight.

That human knowledge is confined to the range furnished by human experience, and cannot be used to transcend that experience, is an opinion widely represented in all modern discussion, and especially in the most recent times. My own account of the insight which I refer to the reason depends not upon simply ignoring this general doctrine about the limitations of our human knowledge, but upon an effort to get a rational view of what it is that we mean by human experience. My result, as I have stated it, may have seemed paradoxical; and I am far from supposing that my brief sketch could remove this paradoxical seeming, or could answer all objections. My thesis is essentially this, that you cannot rationally conceive what human experience is, and means, except by regarding it as the fragment of an experience that is infinitely richer than ours, and that possesses a world-embracing unity and completeness of const.i.tution. My argument for this thesis has been dependent on an a.s.sertion about the sense in which any opinion whatever can be either true or false, and upon a doctrine regarding that insight to which we appeal whenever we make any significant a.s.sertion.

Now this argument will seem to some of you to have been wholly set aside by that account of the nature of judgments, of a.s.sertions, and of their truth or falsity, which pragmatism has recently {138} maintained. A new definition of truth, you will say--or, an old definition revived and revised; a new clearness also as to the ancient issues of philosophy; an equally novel recent a.s.similation of philosophical methods to those that have long been prominent in natural science--these things have combined, at the present moment, to render the Platonic tradition in philosophy and the laborious deductions of Kant, as well as the speculations of the post-Kantian idealists, no longer interesting. I ought, you may insist, to have taken note of this fact before presenting my now antiquated version of the idealistic doctrine of the reason. I ought to have considered fairly the pragmatist's theory of truth. I should then have seen that our human experience may safely be left and must rationally be left, to fight its own way to salvation without any aid from the idea of an universal or all-embracing or divine insight.

How does pragmatism view the very problem about the truth and error of our human opinions which has led me to such far-reaching consequences?

For the first, it is the boast of pragmatists that they deal, by preference, with what they call "concrete situations," and our "concrete situation" as human beings dealing with reality is, as they maintain, something much more readily comprehensible than is the idealistic theory of a divine insight. Truth and error are characters that belong to our a.s.sertions for reasons which need no overarching heavenly insight to make them clear. In brief, as the {139} pragmatists tell us, the story of the nature of truth and of error is this:

An a.s.sertion, a judgment, is always an active att.i.tude of a man, whereby, at the moment when he makes this a.s.sertion he directs the course of his further activities. To say "My best way out of the woods lies in that direction" is, for a wanderer lost in the forest, simply to point out a rule or plan of action and to expect certain results from following out that plan. This ill.u.s.tration of the man in the woods is due to James. An a.n.a.logous principle, according to pragmatism, holds for any a.s.sertion. To judge is to expect some concrete consequence to follow from some form of activity. An a.s.sertion has meaning only in so far as it refers to some object that can be defined in empirical terms and that can be subjected to further direct or indirect tests, whereby its relations to our own activities can become determinate. Thus, then, a judgment, an opinion, if it means anything concrete, is always an appeal to more or less accessible human experience--and is not, as I have been a.s.serting, an appeal to an overarching higher insight. When you make any significant a.s.sertion, you appeal to whatever concrete human observations, experiments, or other findings of data, actual or possible, can furnish the test that the opinion calls for. If I a.s.sert: "It will rain to-morrow," the a.s.sertion is to be verified or refuted by the experience of men just as they live, from moment to moment.

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It remains to define, a little more precisely, wherein consists this empirical verification or refutation for which a human opinion calls.

An opinion is a definite one, as has just been said, because it guides the will of the person who holds the opinion to some definite course of action. An opinion then, if sincere and significant, has _consequences,_ leads to deeds, modifies conduct, and is thus the source of the experiences which one gets as a result of holding that opinion and of acting upon it. In brief, an opinion has what the pragmatists love to call its _"workings."_ Now when the workings of a given opinion, the empirical results to which, through our actions, it leads, agree with the expectations of the one who holds the opinion, the opinion is to be called true. Or, in the now well-known phrase, "An idea (or opinion) is true if it works." To use the repeated example of Professor Moore, an opinion that a certain toothache is due to a condition present in a given tooth is true, when an operation performed upon that tooth, and performed as a consequence of that opinion, and with the expectation of curing the toothache works as expected. For the operation is itself one of the workings of the opinion in question.

To a.s.sert an opinion, then, is not to appeal to an essentially superior insight, but is to appeal to the workings that follow from this opinion when you act upon it in concrete life. No other sort of truth is knowable.

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A consequence of these views, often insisted upon by pragmatists, is that truth is relative to the various "concrete situations" which arise; so that absolute or final truth is indefinable by us mortals.

Hence an opinion may be true for a given purpose, or in one situation (because in that situation its workings prove to be as expected), although it is relatively false when applied to some other situation, or to some wider range of experience. Absolute truth is as un.o.bservable by us in our experience as is absolute position or absolute motion in the physical world. Every truth is definable with reference to somebody's intentions, actions, and successes or failures. These things change from person to person, from time to time, from plan to plan. What is true from the point of view of my plans need not be so from your point of view. The workings of an opinion vary in their significance with the expectations of those concerned. Truth absolute is at best a mere ideal, which for us throws no light upon the nature of the real world.

Thus, at a stroke, pragmatism, as understood by its chief representatives at the present time, is supposed to make naught of the subtle, and, as the pragmatists say, airy and fantastic considerations upon which my sketch of a philosophical idealism at the last lecture depended. Truth, they insist, is a perfectly human and for us mortals not in the least a supernatural affair. We test it as we can, by following the experienced workings to which our {142} ideas lead. If these workings are what we meant them to be, our opinions are just in so far proven true. If no human and empirical tests of the workings of an opinion are accessible to us, the opinion remains in so far meaningless. If concrete tests lead to workings that disappoint our human expectations, our opinions are in so far false. Moreover (and upon this all the pragmatists lay great stress), truth is for us a temporal affair. It changes, it flows, it grows, it decays. It can be made eternal only by tying ourselves, for a given purpose, to abstract ideas which we arbitrarily require to remain, like mathematical definitions, unchanged. Even such ideas have no sense apart from the uses to which they can be put. Concrete truth grows or diminishes as our successes in controlling our experience, through acting upon our beliefs, wax or wane. Truth is subject to all the processes of the evolution of our concrete lives. The eternal is nothing that can be for us a live presence. What we deal with is, like ourselves, fluent, subject to growth and decay, dynamic, and never static. The pragmatist recoils with a certain mixture of horror and amus.e.m.e.nt from the conception of an all-inclusive divine insight. That, he says, would be something static. Its world of absolute reality would be a "block universe" and itself merely an aspect of a part, or perhaps the whole, of just this block. Its supposed truth would be static like itself, and therefore dead.

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But does pragmatism forbid us to have religious insight? No; James, in ways which you have repeatedly heard me mention, insists that pragmatism leaves open ample room for what he thinks to be the best sort of religion, namely, for a religion suited to what he calls the "dramatic temper" of mind. Truth, so far as we men can attain to it, has indeed to be human enough. But nothing forbids us to entertain the belief that there are superhuman and supernatural realities, forms of being, living and spiritual personalities, or superpersonalities, as various and lofty as you please, provided only that they be such as to make whatever evidence of their being is accessible to us capable of definition in a human and empirical way. The truth, namely, of our belief about such beings, has to be tested by us in terms of our own concrete religious experience. Such beliefs, like others, must "work"

in order to be true. That is, these beliefs, however they arise, must lead to conduct; and the results of this conduct must tend to our religious comfort, to our unity of feeling, to our peace, or power, or saintliness, or other form of spiritual perfection. The fruits of the spirit are the empirical tests of a religious doctrine; and, apart from those uprushes of faith from the subconscious whereof we have spoken in previous lectures, there are for James no other tests of the truth of religious convictions than these. The truth of religion consists in its successful "workings."

Hence, however, religion depends upon an {144} ever-renewed testing of its opinions through a carrying of them out in life. Insight would be barren were it not quickened and applied through our will. To James, as we already know, reason, as such, seems to be of little use in religion. But action, resolute living, testing of your faith through your works and through its own workings, this is religion--an endlessly restless and dramatic process, never an union with any absolute attainment of the goal.

V

Now in what way can I hope, you may ask, to answer these impressive and to many recent writers decisive considerations of the pragmatists?

My answer, like my foregoing statement of my own form of idealism, depends upon extremely simple considerations. Their interest for our discussion lies in the fact that they have to do with the relation between reason and action, and between the real world and the human will. As a fact, the will as well as the reason is a source of religious insight. No truth is a saving truth--yes, no truth is a truth at all unless it guides and directs life. Therein I heartily agree with current pragmatism and with James himself. On the other hand, the will is a collection of restless caprices unless it is unified by a rational ideal. And no truth can have any workings at all, without even thereby showing itself to be, just in so far as it actually works, an eternal {145} truth. And, furthermore, what I have a.s.serted about the insight which the reason gives us is so far from being opposed to the pragmatist's facts, that every rational consideration of the type of truth which they define leads us back to the consideration of absolute truth and to the a.s.sertion of an all-inclusive insight. Only, when we view this all-inclusive insight from the point of view which the pragmatists now emphasise (and which I myself have emphasised from a period long antedating the recent pragmatist movement), such a fair estimate of the insight of reason transforms our first and superficial opinion of its nature and of its meaning. It becomes the insight of a rational will, whose expression is the world, and whose life is that in which we too live and move and have our being.

Let me briefly dwell on each of the considerations which I here have in mind. To me, as a philosophical student, they are not new; for, as I repeat, I insisted upon them years ago, before the modern pragmatistic controversy began.

First, then, there are certain respects in which I fully agree with recent pragmatism. I agree that every opinion expresses an att.i.tude of the will, a preparedness for action, a determination to guide a plan of action in accordance with an idea. Whoever a.s.serts anything about the way out of the woods, or about the cause and possible cure of a toothache, defines a course of action in accordance with some purpose, and amongst other things predicts the {146} possible outcome of that course of action. The outcome that he predicts is defined in terms of experience, and, so far as that is possible, in terms of human experience. And now this is true, not only of a.s.sertions or opinions about toothaches. It is true also of a.s.sertions about all objects in heaven or earth. There is no such thing as a purely intellectual form of a.s.sertion which has no element of action about it. An opinion is a deed. It is a deed intended to guide other deeds. It proposes to have what the pragmatists call "workings." That is, it undertakes to guide the life of the one who a.s.serts the opinion. In that sense, all truth is practical. If you a.s.sert a proposition in mathematics, you propose to guide the computations, or other synthetic processes, of whoever is interested in certain mathematical objects. If you say "There is a G.o.d," and know what you mean by the term "G.o.d," you lay down some sort of rule for such forms of action as involve a fitting acknowledgment of G.o.d's being and significance. So far, then, I wholly side with the pragmatists. There is no pure intellect. There is no genuine insight which does not also exist as a guide to some sort of action.

Furthermore, the proper "workings" of an a.s.sertion, the rational results of the application of this opinion to life, must, if the a.s.sertion is true, agree with the expectations of the one who defines the a.s.sertion. And these "workings" belong, indeed, to the realm of actual and concrete experience, be this {147} experience wholly human, or be it, in some respect, an experience which is higher and richer than any merely human experience. Opinions are active appeals to real life--a life to which we are always seeking to adjust ourselves, and in which we are always looking to find our place. The quest for salvation itself is such an effort to adjust our own life to the world's life. And if the world's life finds our efforts to define our relation to the world's actual and perfectly concrete experience inadequate, then our a.s.sertions are in just so far false; they lead in that case to blundering actions. We fail. And in such cases our opinions, indeed, "do not work."

All this I myself insist upon. But next I ask you to note that the very significance of our human life depends upon the fact that we are always undertaking to adjust ourselves to a life, and to a type of experience, which, concrete and real though it is, is never reducible to the terms of any purely human experience. Were this not the case; were not every significant a.s.sertion concerned with a type and form of life and of experience which no man ever gets; were not all our actions guided by ideas and ideals that can never be adequately expressed in simply human terms; were all this, I say, not the case, then--neither science nor religion, neither worldly prudence nor ideal morality, neither natural common-sense nor the loftiest forms of spirituality would be possible. Here I can only repeat, but now with explicit reference to the active aspect of our opinions {148} and of our experience, the comments that I made in my former lecture. Man as he is experiences from moment to moment. What is here and now, not future "workings," not past expectations, but the present--this is what he more immediately gets and verifies. These momentary experiences of his, these pains and these data of perception, are what he can personally verify for himself. And to this life in each instant he is confined, so far as his own personal and individual experience is concerned. But man _means_, he _intends_, he _estimates_, he _judges_ life, not as it appears to him at any one instant, but as "in the long run," or "for the common-sense of mankind," or as "from a rational point of view" he holds that it ought to be judged. Now I again insist--there is not one of us who ever directly observes in his own person what it is which even the so-called common-sense of mankind is said to verify and find to be true. The experience which "mankind"

is said to possess is not merely the mere collection of your momentary feelings or perceptions, or mine. It is a conceived integral experience which no individual man ever gets before him. When we conceive it, we first treat it as something impersonal. If it is personal, the person who gets it before him is greater than any man.

Yet unless some such integral experience is as concrete and genuine a fact, as real a life, as any life that you and I from moment to moment lead, then all so-called "common-sense" is meaningless. But if such an integral experience {149} is real, then that by which the pragmatic "workings" of our private and personal opinions are to be tested and are tested is a certain integral whole of life in which we all live and move and have our being, but which is no more the mere heap and collection of our moments of fragmentary experience, and of our vicissitudes of shifting moods, than a symphony is a mere collection of notes on paper, or of sc.r.a.ped strings and quivering tubes, or of air waves, or even of the deeds of separate musicians.

The life, then, the experience, the concrete whole, wherein our a.s.sertions have their workings, with which our active ideas are labouring to agree, to which our will endlessly strives to adjust itself, in which we are saved or lost, is a life whose touch with our efforts is as close as its superiority to our merely human narrowness is concretely and actively triumphant whenever our pettiness gets moulded to a higher reasonableness. And unless such a life above our individual level is real, our human efforts have no sense whatever, and chaos drowns out the meaning of the pragmatists and of the idealists alike. _If one asks, however, by what workings our significant a.s.sertions propose to be judged, I answer, by their workings as experienced and estimated from the point of view of such a larger life, as conforming to its will, or falling short thereof, as leading toward or away from our salvation._ For it is just such a larger life by which we all propose and intend to be judged, whenever we make our active appeal to life take the {150} form of any serious a.s.sertion whatever. If a man proposes to let his ideas be tested not by his momentary caprice, and not by any momentary datum of experience, but by "what proves to be their workings in the long run,"

then already he is appealing to an essentially superhuman type of empirical test and estimate. For no man taken as this individual ever personally experiences "the long run," that is, the integral course and meaning, the right estimate and working of a long series of experiences and deeds. For a man individually observes now this moment and now that--never their presupposed integration, never their union in a single whole of significant life.

If a man says that the workings of his ideas are to be tested by "scientific experience," then again he appeals not to the verdict of any human observer, but to the integrated and universalised and relatively impersonal and superpersonal synthesis of the results of countless observers.

And so, whatever you regard as a genuine test of the workings of your ideas is some living whole of experience above the level of any one of our individual human lives. To this whole you indeed actively appeal.

The appeal is an act of will. And in turn you regard that to which you appeal as an experience which is just as live and concrete as your own, and which carries out its own will in that it snubs or welcomes your efforts with a will as hearty as is your own. For what estimates your deeds, {151} and gives them their meaning, is a life as genuine as yours and an activity as real as yours. Pragmatism is perfectly justified in regarding the whole process as no mere contemplation, no merely restful or static conformity of pa.s.sive idea to motionless insight, but, on the contrary, as a significant interaction of life with life and of will with will. But the more vital the process, the more pragmatic the test of our active opinions through the conformity or non-conformity of their purposes to the life wherein we dwell and have our being, the more vital becomes the fact that, whether we are saved or lost, we belong to the world's life, and are part thereof, while, unless this life is more than merely human in its rational wealth of concrete meaning, we mortals have no meaning whatever, and the a.s.sertions of common-sense as well as of religion lapse into absurdity.

VI

In order fairly to estimate aright our relation to this larger life, we must briefly review the further thesis upon which recent pragmatism lays so much stress--the thesis that, since the truth of an opinion consists in the agreement or disagreement of its empirical workings with their antic.i.p.ated consequences, all truth is both temporal and relative and cannot be either eternal or absolute. Let me then say a word as to the absoluteness of truth.

The thesis of pragmatism as to the active nature {152} and the practical meaning of all opinions may be ill.u.s.trated by a simile that, as I think, well brings out the sense in which, as I hold, pragmatism itself is a true doctrine. Any sincere opinion announces a plan of action whereby we are, in some way, to adjust ourselves for some purpose to a real object. That is, an opinion lays down, in some form, a rule for some sort of conduct. This rule is of course valid only for one who has some specific interest in the object in question. For you can guide action only by appealing to the will of the one whom you guide. This is the pragmatist's view of the nature of all a.s.sertions and opinions. And so far, as you already know, I agree with the pragmatist. This account is correct.

This being so, we can, for the sake of a simile, compare any definite opinion to the counsel that a coach may give to a player whom he is directing. The player wants to "play the game." He therefore accepts its rules, and has his interests in what the pragmatists call "the concrete situation." The player, at any point in his training or in his activities as a player, may also accept the coach's guidance, and put himself under the coach's directions. If, hereupon, the player acts in accordance with what the coach ordains, the coach's directions have "workings." Their "workings" are in so far the deeds of the player. These deeds, if the issues of the game are sharply defined, are what we may call hits or misses. That is, each one of them either is {153} what, for the purposes of the game and the player, it ought to be, or else it is not what it ought to be. And each act of the player is a hit or a miss in a perfectly objective sense, as a real deed belonging to a world whose relations are determined by the rules and events of the game and by the purposes of the whole body of players.

Applying the simile to the case of a.s.sertions, we may say: An a.s.sertion is an act whereby our deeds are provided with a sort of coaching. Life itself is our game. Opinions coach the active will as to how to do its deed. If the opinion is definite enough, and if the active will obeys the coach, the opinion has "workings." These workings are our intelligent deeds, which translate our opinions into new life. If our purposes are definite enough, and if the issues of life are for us sharply defined, these deeds are, with reference to our purposes, either hits or misses, either successful or unsuccessful acts, either steps toward winning or steps toward failure. All this is surely concrete enough. And, in real life, this account applies equally to the practical situations of the workshop or of the market-place, and to the ideas and deeds of a religious man seeking salvation.

But now one of the central facts about life is that every deed once done is _ipso facto_ irrevocable. That is, at any moment you perform a given deed or you do not. If you perform it, it is done and cannot be undone. This difference between what {154} is done and what is left undone is, in the real and empirical world, a _perfectly absolute difference._ The opportunity for a given individual deed returns not; for the moment when that individual deed can be done never recurs.

Here is a case where the rational const.i.tution of the whole universe gets into definite relation to our momentary experience. _And if any one wants to be in touch with the "Absolute"--with that reality which the pragmatists fancy to be peculiarly remote and abstract--let him simply do any individual deed whatever and then try to undo that deed.

Let the experiment teach him what one means by calling reality absolute. Let the truths which that experience teaches any rational being show him also what is meant by absolute truth._

For this irrevocable and absolute character of the deed, when once done, rationally determines an equally irrevocable character about the truth or falsity of any act of judgment, of any a.s.sertion or opinion, which has actually called in a concrete situation for a given deed, and which therefore has had this individual deed for any part of its intended "workings." Let us return to the simile of the game. Suppose the coach to counsel a given deed of the player. Suppose the player, acting on the coach's advice, to perform that deed, to make that play.

Suppose the play to be a misplay. The play, once made, cannot be recalled. It stands, if the rules of the game require it so to stand, on the score. If it stands there, then just _that_ item of the score {155} can never be changed under the rules of the game. The score is, for the game, absolute and irrevocable. If the coach counselled that misplay, his counsel was an error. And just as the player's score cannot be changed without simply abandoning the rules of the game, so too the coach's record as a blunderer is, in respect of this one bit of counsel, unalterable. a.n.a.logous results hold for the player's successful hits and for the coaching that required them. All this is no result of abstractions or of bare theory. It is the result of having the will to play the game. It is the absolute truth that results from joining definite practical issues.

Returning to life, we must say: If our a.s.sertions have a determinate meaning, they get their concrete workings through counselling determinate individual deeds. Each deed, as an individual act, is irrevocable and is absolutely what it is. Our deeds, judged in the light of a reasonable survey of life--a survey of life such as that to which, when we form our opinions, and when we act on our opinions, we intend to appeal--are, for a determinate purpose, either hits or misses. If the issues of life in question when we act are definite enough, our deeds, under the rules of the game of life, cannot avoid this character of being the right deeds or the wrong deeds for the purpose in question and in view of their actual place in real life.

Whoever so acts that his deeds are done, as a cant phrase has it, "with a string attached to them"--that is, whoever regards {156} his deeds as having only relative reality, as capable of being recalled if he chooses, is not acting seriously. He is not, as they say, really "playing the game." And, as a fact, he is trifling with absolute reality. He is not only not serious; he views real life as it absolutely is not. For whatever individual deed he actually does is absolutely irrevocable, whether he wants to recall it or not. Once done, it stands eternally on the world's score.

Now I insist, whatever a.s.sertion, or opinion, regarded as itself an expression of one's will, has for its intended working one of these irrevocable deeds, is in so far forth true, as the individual deed which it counsels is for the required purpose quite irrevocably a right deed when estimated with reference to this purpose and to the life into whose score it enters. That is, the opinion is true in so far as the working which it counsels is a deed that is in fact a hit in the chosen game of life under the rules of that game. And whatever opinion counsels a deed that, as the working of this opinion, is a miss in the game of life, is a false opinion. And, so I insist, _this distinction between the truth and falsity of an opinion that counsels an individual deed is as absolute and irrevocable as is the place of the deed when once done on the score of the game of life._

Whoever denies this position simply trifles with the very nature of all individual facts of experience; trifles also with life and with his own decisive will. Every serious man does his daily business with an {157} a.s.surance that, since his deeds are irrevocable, his guiding opinions, that counsel his individual deeds give, in an equally irrevocable way, right or wrong guidance, precisely in so far as they get their workings concretely presented in his deeds. And this view about life is no philosopher's abstraction. It is the only genuinely concrete view. Its contradiction is not merely illogical, but practically inane. I cannot do a deed and then undo it. Therefore I cannot declare it to be for a determinate purpose the right individual deed at this point in life, and then say that I did not really mean that counsel to be taken as simply and therefore absolutely true.

Absolute reality (namely, the sort of reality that belongs to irrevocable deeds), absolute truth (namely, the sort of truth that belongs to those opinions which, for a given purpose, counsel individual deeds, when the deeds in fact meet the purpose for which they were intended)--these two are not remote affairs invented by philosophers for the sake of "barren intellectualism." _Such absolute reality and absolute truth are the most concrete and practical and familiar of matters._ The pragmatist who denies that there is any absolute truth accessible has never rightly considered the very most characteristic feature of the reasonable will, namely, that it is always counselling irrevocable deeds, and therefore is always giving counsel that is for its own determinate purpose irrevocably right or wrong precisely in so far as it is definite counsel.