A DEFENCE OF PRAGMATISM 199 



That theism remains, however. It is the lineal descendent, 

 through one stage of concession after another, of the dogmatic scho- 

 lastic theism still taught rigorously in the seminaries of the Catholic 

 Church. For a long time it used to be called among us the philosophy 

 of the Scottish school. It is what I meant by the philosophy that has 

 the air of fighting a slow retreat. Between the encroachments of the 

 Hegelians and other ' philosophers of the absolute/ on the one hand, 

 and those of the scientific evolutionists and agnostics, on the other, the 

 men that give us this kind of a philosophy, James Martineau, Pro- 

 fessor Bowne, Professor Ladd and others, must feel themselves rather 

 tightly squeezed. Fair-minded and candid as you like, this philosophy 

 is not radical in temper. It is eclectic, a thing of compromises, that 

 seeks a modus vivendi above all things. It accepts the facts of Dar- 

 winism, the facts of cerebral physiology, but it does nothing active or 

 enthusiastic with them. It lacks the victorious and agressive note. 

 It lacks prestige in consequence, whereas absolutism has a certain 

 prestige due to the more radical style of it. 



These on the whole are what you have to choose between if you turn 

 to the tender-minded school. And if you are the lovers of facts I 

 have supposed you to be, you find the trail of the serpent of rational- 

 ism, of intellectualism, over everything that lies on that side of the 

 line. You escape indeed the materialism that goes with the reigning 

 empiricism; but you pay for your escape by losing contact with the 

 concrete parts of life. The more absolutistic philosophers dwell on so 

 high a level of abstraction that they never even try to come down. 

 The absolute mind which they offer us, the mind that makes our 

 universe by thinking it, might, for all they ever tell us to the con- 

 trary, have made any one of a million other universes just as well as 

 this. You can deduce no single actual particular from the notion of 

 it. It is compatible with any state of things whatever being true here 

 below. And the theistic God is almost as sterile a principle. You 

 have to go to the world which he has created to get any inkling of his 

 actual character, he is the kind of God that has once for all made that 

 kind of a world. Yet the theistic writers do not replace the old 

 rationalist definitions of him by any new empirical constructions. 

 Their system still lives on purely abstract heights. Absolutism has a 

 certain sweep and dash about it, while the usual theism is more 

 'insipid.' But both are equally remote and vacuous. What you 

 want is a philosophy that will not only exercise your powers of intel- 

 lectual abstraction, but that will also make connection with this actual 

 world of our own finite human experiences. 



You want a system that will combine both things, the scientific 

 loyalty to facts and willingness to take account of them, the spirit of 

 adaptation and accommodation, in short, but also the old confidence 



