As a matter of fact countless human imaginations live in this moralistic and epic kind of a universe, and find its disseminated and strung-along successes sufficient for their rational needs.  There is a finely translated epigram in the greek anthology which admirably expresses this state of mind, this acceptance of loss as unatoned for, even tho the lost element might be one’s self: 

“A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast, Bids you set sail.  Full many a gallant bark, when we were lost, Weathered the gale.”

Those puritans who answered ‘yes’ to the question:  Are you willing to be damned for God’s glory? were in this objective and magnanimous condition of mind.  The way of escape from evil on this system is not by getting it ‘aufgehoben,’ or preserved in the whole as an element essential but ‘overcome.’  It is by dropping it out altogether, throwing it overboard and getting beyond it, helping to make a universe that shall forget its very place and name.

It is then perfectly possible to accept sincerely a drastic kind of a universe from which the element of ‘seriousness’ is not to be expelled.  Whoso does so is, it seems to me, a genuine pragmatist.  He is willing to live on a scheme of uncertified possibilities which he trusts; willing to pay with his own person, if need be, for the realization of the ideals which he frames.

What now actually are the other forces which he trusts to co-operate with him, in a universe of such a type?  They are at least his fellow men, in the stage of being which our actual universe has reached.  But are there not superhuman forces also, such as religious men of the pluralistic type we have been considering have always believed in?  Their words may have sounded monistic when they said “there is no God but God”; but the original polytheism of mankind has only imperfectly and vaguely sublimated itself into monotheism, and monotheism itself, so far as it was religious and not a scheme of class-room instruction for the metaphysicians, has always viewed God as but one helper, primus inter pares, in the midst of all the shapers of the great world’s fate.

I fear that my previous lectures, confined as they have been to human and humanistic aspects, may have left the impression on many of you that pragmatism means methodically to leave the superhuman out.  I have shown small respect indeed for the Absolute, and I have until this moment spoken of no other superhuman hypothesis but that.  But I trust that you see sufficiently that the Absolute has nothing but its superhumanness in common with the theistic God.  On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.  Now whatever its residual difficulties may be, experience shows that it certainly does work, and that the problem is to build it out and determine it, so that it will combine satisfactorily with all the other working truths.  I cannot start upon