‘What would be better for us to believe’!  This sounds very like a definition of truth.  It comes very near to saying ’what we ought to believe’:  and in that definition none of you would find any oddity.  Ought we ever not to believe what it is better for us to believe?  And can we then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us, permanently apart?

Pragmatism says no, and I fully agree with her.  Probably you also agree, so far as the abstract statement goes, but with a suspicion that if we practically did believe everything that made for good in our own personal lives, we should be found indulging all kinds of fancies about this world’s affairs, and all kinds of sentimental superstitions about a world hereafter.  Your suspicion here is undoubtedly well founded, and it is evident that something happens when you pass from the abstract to the concrete, that complicates the situation.

I said just now that what is better for us to believe is true unless the belief incidentally clashes with some other vital benefit.  Now in real life what vital benefits is any particular belief of ours most liable to clash with?  What indeed except the vital benefits yielded by other beliefs when these prove incompatible with the first ones?  In other words, the greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.  Truths have once for all this desperate instinct of self-preservation and of desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them.  My belief in the Absolute, based on the good it does me, must run the gauntlet of all my other beliefs.  Grant that it may be true in giving me a moral holiday.  Nevertheless, as I conceive it,—­and let me speak now confidentially, as it were, and merely in my own private person,—­it clashes with other truths of mine whose benefits I hate to give up on its account.  It happens to be associated with a kind of logic of which I am the enemy, I find that it entangles me in metaphysical paradoxes that are inacceptable, etc., etc..  But as I have enough trouble in life already without adding the trouble of carrying these intellectual inconsistencies, I personally just give up the Absolute.  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 cannot easily thus restrict our hypotheses.  They carry supernumerary features, and these it is that clash so.  My disbelief in the Absolute means then disbelief in those other supernumerary features, for I fully believe in the legitimacy of taking moral holidays.