verbal and empty character of philosophy is surely a reproach with which we are, but too familiar.  If pragmatism be true, it is a perfectly sound reproach unless the theories under fire can be shown to have alternative practical outcomes, however delicate and distant these may be.  The common man and the scientist say they discover no such outcomes, and if the metaphysician can discern none either, the others certainly are in the right of it, as against him.  His science is then but pompous trifling; and the endowment of a professorship for such a being would be silly.

Accordingly, in every genuine metaphysical debate some practical issue, however conjectural and remote, is involved.  To realize this, revert with me to our question, and place yourselves this time in the world we live in, in the world that has a future, that is yet uncompleted whilst we speak.  In this unfinished world the alternative of ‘materialism or theism?’ is intensely practical; and it is worth while for us to spend some minutes of our hour in seeing that it is so.

How, indeed, does the program differ for us, according as we consider that the facts of experience up to date are purposeless configurations of blind atoms moving according to eternal laws, or that on the other hand they are due to the providence of God?  As far as the past facts go, indeed there is no difference.  Those facts are in, are bagged, are captured; and the good that’s in them is gained, be the atoms or be the God their cause.  There are accordingly many materialists about us to-day who, ignoring altogether the future and practical aspects of the question, seek to eliminate the odium attaching to the word materialism, and even to eliminate the word itself, by showing that, if matter could give birth to all these gains, why then matter, functionally considered, is just as divine an entity as God, in fact coalesces with God, is what you mean by God.  Cease, these persons advise us, to use either of these terms, with their outgrown opposition.  Use a term free of the clerical connotations, on the one hand; of the suggestion of gross-ness, coarseness, ignobility, on the other.  Talk of the primal mystery, of the unknowable energy, of the one and only power, instead of saying either God or matter.  This is the course to which Mr. Spencer urges us; and if philosophy were purely retrospective, he would thereby proclaim himself an excellent pragmatist.

But philosophy is prospective also, and, after finding what the world has been and done and yielded, still asks the further question ‘what does the world promise?’ Give us a matter that promises success, that is bound by its laws to lead our world ever nearer to perfection, and any rational man will worship that matter as readily as Mr. Spencer worships his own so-called unknowable power.  It not only has made for righteousness up to date, but it will make for righteousness forever; and that is all we need.  Doing practically all that a God can do, it is equivalent to God, its function is a God’s function, and is exerted in a world in which a God would now be superfluous; from such a world a God could never lawfully be missed.  ‘Cosmic emotion’ would here be the right name for religion.