A DEFENCE OF PRAGMATISM 203 



from illness and was forced to quit after an hour's trial with the shovel. Then 

 the weary task of looking for employment was again resumed. Thoroughly dis- 

 couraged, Corcoran returned to his home last night to find his wife and children 

 without food and the notice of dispossession on the door. On the following 

 morning he drank the poison. 



The records of many more such cases lie before me [Mr. Swift goes on] ; an 

 encyclopedia might easily be filled with their kind. These few I cite as an inter- 

 pretation of the Universe. ' We are aware of the presence of God in his world ' 

 says a writer in a recent English review. [The very presence of ill in the tem- 

 poral order is the condition of the perfection of the eternal order, writes Pro- 

 fessor Royce ('The World and the Individual,' II., 385) .] ' The Absolute is the 

 richer for every discord and for all the diversity which it embraces,' says F. H. 

 Bradley (' Appearance and Reality,' 204). He means that these slain men make 

 the universe richer, and that is philosophy. But while Professors Royce and 

 Bradley and a whole host of guileless thoroughfed thinkers are unveiling Reality 

 and the Absolute and explaining away evil and pain, this is the condition of the 

 only beings known to us anywhere in the universe with a developed conscious- 

 ness of what the universe is. What these people experience is Reality. It gives 

 us an absolute phase of the universe. It is the personal experience of those best 

 qualified in our circle of knowledge to have experience, to tell us what is. Now 

 what does thinking about the experience of these persons come to, compared to 

 directly and personally feeling it as they feel it? The philosophers are dealing 

 in shades, while those who live and feel know truth. And the mind of mankind 

 — not yet the mind of philosophers and of the proprietary class — but of the 

 great mass of the silently thinking men and feeling men, is coming to this view. 

 They are judging the universe as they have hitherto permitted the hierophants 

 of religion and learning to judge them. . . . 



This Cleveland workingman, killing his children and himself, is one of the 

 elemental stupendous facts of this modern world and of this universe. It can 

 not be glozed over or minimized away by all the treatises on God, and Love, 

 and Being, helplessly existing in their monumental vacuity. This is one of the 

 simple irreducible elements of this world's life, after millions of years of oppor- 

 tunity and twenty centuries of Christ. It is in the mental world what atoms or 

 sub-atoms are in the physical, primary, indestructible. And what it blazons to 

 man is the imposture of all philosophy which does not see in such events the 

 consummate factor of all conscious experience. These facts invincibly prove 

 religion a nullity. Man will not give religion two thousand centuries or twenty 

 centuries more to try itself and waste human time. Its time is up; its probation 

 is ended; its own record ends it. Mankind has not reons and eternities to spare 

 for trying out discredited systems. . . . What is man that thou art mindful of 

 him? Why, the answer is that thou art not mindful of him. Thou permittest 

 him to die like a weed, though with all the fiery sorrow that a sentient being 

 can feel. 3 



Such is the reaction of an empiricist mind upon the rationalist 

 bill of fare. It is an absolute ' No, I thank you.' ( Keligion,' says 

 Mr. Swift, ' is like a sleep walker to whom actual things are blank.' 

 And such, though possibly less tensely charged with feeling, is the 

 verdict of every seriously inquiring amateur in philosophy to-day who 

 turns to the philosophy-professors for the wherewithal to satisfy the 

 fullness of his nature's needs. Empiricist writers give him a material- 



3 Morrison I. Swift, ' Human Submission,' Part Second, Philadelphia, Lib- 

 erty Press, 1905, pp. 4-10. 



