“Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.”

He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is.  Change is about the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can get into.

The main point here, however, is that this idea of a fundamental alteration in the standard is one of the things that make thought about the past or future simply impossible.  The theory of a complete change of standards in human history does not merely deprive us of the pleasure of honouring our fathers; it deprives us even of the more modern and aristocratic pleasure of despising them.

This bald summary of the thought-destroying forces of our time would not be complete without some reference to pragmatism; for though I have here used and should everywhere defend the pragmatist method as a preliminary guide to truth, there is an extreme application of it which involves the absence of all truth whatever.  My meaning can be put shortly thus.  I agree with the pragmatists that apparent objective truth is not the whole matter; that there is an authoritative need to believe the things that are necessary to the human mind.  But I say that one of those necessities precisely is a belief in objective truth.  The pragmatist tells a man to think what he must think and never mind the Absolute.  But precisely one of the things that he must think is the Absolute.  This philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox.  Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.  Extreme pragmatism is just as inhuman as the determinism it so powerfully attacks.  The determinist (who, to do him justice, does not pretend to be a human being) makes nonsense of the human sense of actual choice.  The pragmatist, who professes to be specially human, makes nonsense of the human sense of actual fact.

To sum up our contention so far, we may say that the most characteristic current philosophies have not only a touch of mania, but a touch of suicidal mania.  The mere questioner has knocked his head against the limits of human thought; and cracked it.  This is what makes so futile the warnings of the orthodox and the boasts of the advanced about the dangerous boyhood of free thought.  What we are looking at is not the boyhood of free thought; it is the old age and ultimate dissolution of free thought.  It is vain for bishops and pious bigwigs to discuss what dreadful things will happen if wild scepticism runs its course.  It has run its course.  It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin.  We have seen it end.  It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself.  You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves.  You cannot fancy a more sceptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world.  It might certainly