A DEFENCE OF PRAGMATISM 361 



it kept some touch with concrete realities. Since, however, Darwinism 

 has once for all displaced design from the minds of the ' scientific,' 

 theism has lost that foothold; and some kind of an immanent or 

 pantheistic deity working in things rather than above them is, if any, 

 the kind desired by our contemporary imagination. Aspirants to a 

 philosophic religion turn, as a rule, more hopefully nowadays towards 

 idealistic pantheism than towards the older dualistic theism, in spite 

 of the fact that the latter still counts able defenders. 



But, as I said in my first lecture, the brand of pantheism offered 

 is hard for them to assimilate if they are lovers of facts, or empirically 

 minded. It is the absolutistic brand, spurning the dust and reared 

 upon pure logic. It keeps no connection whatever with concreteness. 

 Affirming the Absolute Mind, which is its substitute for God, to be the 

 rational presupposition of all particulars of fact, whatever they may 

 be, it remains supremely indifferent to what the particular facts in our 

 world actually are. Be they what they may, the Absolute will father 

 them. Like the sick lion in Esop's fable, all footprints lead into his 

 den, but nulla vestigia retrorsum. You can not redescend into the 

 world of particulars by the Absolute's aid, or .deduce any necessary 

 consequences of detail, important for your life, from your idea of his 

 nature. He gives you, indeed, the assurance that all is well with Him, 

 and for his eternal way of thinking; but thereupon he leaves you to 

 be finitely saved by your own temporal devices. 



Far be it from me to deny the majesty of this conception, or its 

 capacity to yield religious comfort to a most respectable class of minds. 

 But from the human point of view, no one can pretend that it doesn't 

 suffer from the faults of remoteness and abstractness. It is eminently 

 a product of what I have ventured to call the rationalistic temper. It 

 disdains empiricism's needs. It substitutes a pallid outline for the real 

 world's richness. It is dapper ; it is ' noble ' in the bad sense, in the 

 sense in which to be noble is to be inapt for humble service. In this 

 real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things 

 is ' noble,' that ought to count as a presumption against its truth, and 

 as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a 

 gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and 

 Heaven is, He can surely be no gentleman. His menial services are 

 needed in the dust of our human trials, even.more than his dignity is 

 needed in the empyrean. 



Now pragmatism, devoted though she be to facts, has no such 

 materialistic bias as ordinary empiricism labors under. Moreover, she 

 has no objection whatever to the realizing of abstractions, so long as 

 you get about with their aid among particulars, and they actually 

 carry you somewhere. Interested in no conclusions but those which 

 our minds and our experiences work out together, she has no a priori 

 prejudices against theology. If theological ideas prove to have a 



