of action; a grammar that must be changed slowly by time, and may be changed quickly by genius.  To know things as a whole, or as they are eternally, if there is anything eternal in them, is not only beyond our powers, but would prove worthless, and perhaps even fatal to our lives.  Ideas are not mirrors, they are weapons; their function is to prepare us to meet events, as future experience may unroll them.  Those ideas that disappoint us are false ideas; those to which events are true are true themselves.

This may seem a very utilitarian view of the mind; and I confess I think it a partial one, since the logical force of beliefs and ideas, their truth or falsehood as assertions, has been overlooked altogether, or confused with the vital force of the material processes which these ideas express.  It is an external view only, which marks the place and conditions of the mind in nature, but neglects its specific essence; as if a jewel were defined as a round hole in a ring.  Nevertheless, the more materialistic the pragmatist’s theory of the mind is, the more vitalistic his theory of nature will have to become.  If the intellect is a device produced in organic bodies to expedite their processes, these organic bodies must have interests and a chosen direction in their life; otherwise their life could not be expedited, nor could anything be useful to it.  In other words—­and this is a third point at which the philosophy of William James has played havoc with the genteel tradition, while ostensibly defending it—­nature must be conceived anthropomorphically and in psychological terms.  Its purposes are not to be static harmonies, self-unfolding destinies, the logic of spirit, the spirit of logic, or any other formal method and abstract law; its purposes are to be concrete endeavours, finite efforts of souls living in an environment which they transform and by which they, too, are affected.  A spirit, the divine spirit as much as the human, as this new animism conceives it, is a romantic adventurer.  Its future is undetermined.  Its scope, its duration, and the quality of its life are all contingent.  This spirit grows; it buds and sends forth feelers, sounding the depths around for such other centres of force or life as may exist there.  It has a vital momentum, but no predetermined goal.  It uses its past as a stepping-stone, or rather as a diving-board, but has an absolutely fresh will at each moment to plunge this way or that into the unknown.  The universe is an experiment; it is unfinished.  It has no ultimate or total nature, because it has no end.  It embodies no formula or statable law; any formula is at best a poor abstraction, describing what, in some region and for some time, may be the most striking characteristic of existence; the law is a description a posteriori of the habit things have chosen to acquire, and which they may possibly throw off altogether.  What a day may bring forth is uncertain; uncertain even to God.  Omniscience is impossible; time is real; what had