You see by this what I meant when I called pragmatism a mediator and reconciler and said, borrowing the word from Papini, that he unstiffens our theories.  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 positivistic empiricism, with its anti-theological bias, and over religious rationalism, with its exclusive interest in the remote, the noble, the simple, and the abstract in the way of conception.

In short, she widens the field of search for God.  Rationalism sticks to logic and the empyrean.  Empiricism sticks to the external senses.  Pragmatism is willing to take anything, to follow either logic or the senses, and to count the humblest and most personal experiences.  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’s demands, 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 pragmatically so successful.  What other kind of truth could there be, for her, than all this agreement with concrete reality?

In my last lecture I shall return again to the relations of pragmatism with religion.  But you see already how democratic she is.  Her manners are as various and flexible, her resources as rich and endless, and her conclusions as friendly as those of mother nature.

Lecture III

Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered

I am now to make the pragmatic method more familiar by giving you some illustrations of its application to particular problems.  I will begin with what is driest, and the first thing I shall take will be the problem of Substance.  Everyone uses the old distinction between substance and attribute, enshrined as it is in the very structure of human language, in the difference between grammatical subject and predicate.  Here is a bit of blackboard crayon.  Its modes, attributes, properties, accidents, or affections,—­use which term you will,—­are whiteness, friability, cylindrical shape, insolubility in water, etc., etc.  But the bearer of these attributes is so much chalk, which thereupon is called the substance in which they inhere.  So the attributes of this desk inhere in the substance ‘wood,’ those of my coat in the substance ‘wool,’ and so forth.  Chalk, wood and wool, show again, in spite of their differences, common properties, and in so far forth they are themselves counted as modes of a still more primal substance, matter, the attributes of which are space occupancy and impenetrability.  Similarly our thoughts and feelings are affections or properties of our several souls, which are substances, but again not wholly in their own right, for they are modes of the still deeper substance ‘spirit.’