364 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



abstract pragmatist, but merely in my own private person), it clashes 

 with other truths of mine whose benefits I hate to give up on its account. 

 It is associated with a kind of logic of which I am the enemy; it en- 

 tangles me in metaphysical paradoxes that are unacceptable, etc., etc. 

 But I have enough trouble in life already without the added trouble of 

 carrying these intellectual inconsistencies, so I give up the Absolute. 

 Personally, I just take my moral holidays; or else as a professional 

 philosopher, I try to justify them by some other principle. 



If I could restrict my notion of the Absolute to its bare holiday- 

 giving value, it wouldn't clash with my other truths. But we can not 

 easily thus restrict our hypotheses. They carry supernumerary 

 features, and these it is that clash so. My disbelief in the Absolute 

 means disbelief in those other supernumerary features. 



You see by this what I meant when I called pragmatism a mediator 

 and reconciler and said that she ' unstiffens ' our theories. 6 She has 

 in fact no prejudices whatever, no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons 

 of what shall count as proof. She is completely genial. She will 

 entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any evidence. It follows 

 that in the religious field she is at a great advantage both over posi- 

 tivistic empiricism, with its anti-theological bias, and over religious 

 rationalism with its exclusive interest in the remote, the noble and the 

 abstract in the way of conception. 



In short, she widens the field of search for God. Eationalism sticks 

 to logic and the empyrean. Empiricism sticks to the external senses. 

 Pragmatism for her part is willing to take anything, to follow either 

 logic or the senses, and to count the humblest and most personal ex- 

 periences. She will count mystical experiences if they have practical 

 consequences. She will take a God who lives in the very dirt of private 

 fact — if that should seem a likely place to find him. 



Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of 

 leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the 

 collectivity of experience, nothing being omitted. If theological ideas 

 should do this, if the notion of God, in particular, should prove to do 

 it, how could pragmatism possibly deny God's existence? She could 

 see no meaning in treating as ' not true ' a notion that was prag- 

 matically so successful. You see how democratic she is. Her manners 

 are as various and flexible, her resources as rich and endless, and her 

 conclusions as obedient and malleable as those of mother nature. 

 * I get this word from Papini (Leonardo, Aprile, 1905). 



