Pragmatically, then, the abstract word ‘design’ is a blank cartridge.  It carries no consequences, it does no execution.  What sort of design? and what sort of a designer? are the only serious questions, and the study of facts is the only way of getting even approximate answers.  Meanwhile, pending the slow answer from facts, anyone who insists that there is a designer and who is sure he is a divine one, gets a certain pragmatic benefit from the term—­the same, in fact which we saw that the terms God, Spirit, or the Absolute, yield us ‘Design,’ worthless tho it be as a mere rationalistic principle set above or behind things for our admiration, becomes, if our faith concretes it into something theistic, a term of promise.  Returning with it into experience, we gain a more confiding outlook on the future.  If not a blind force but a seeing force runs things, we may reasonably expect better issues.  This vague confidence in the future is the sole pragmatic meaning at present discernible in the terms design and designer.  But if cosmic confidence is right not wrong, better not worse, that is a most important meaning.  That much at least of possible ‘truth’ the terms will then have in them.

Let me take up another well-worn controversy, the free-will problem.  Most persons who believe in what is called their free-will do so after the rationalistic fashion.  It is a principle, a positive faculty or virtue added to man, by which his dignity is enigmatically augmented.  He ought to believe it for this reason.  Determinists, who deny it, who say that individual men originate nothing, but merely transmit to the future the whole push of the past cosmos of which they are so small an expression, diminish man.  He is less admirable, stripped of this creative principle.  I imagine that more than half of you share our instinctive belief in free-will, and that admiration of it as a principle of dignity has much to do with your fidelity.

But free-will has also been discussed pragmatically, and, strangely enough, the same pragmatic interpretation has been put upon it by both disputants.  You know how large a part questions of accountability have played in ethical controversy.  To hear some persons, one would suppose that all that ethics aims at is a code of merits and demerits.  Thus does the old legal and theological leaven, the interest in crime and sin and punishment abide with us.  ’Who’s to blame? whom can we punish? whom will God punish?’—­these preoccupations hang like a bad dream over man’s religious history.

So both free-will and determinism have been inveighed against and called absurd, because each, in the eyes of its enemies, has seemed to prevent the ‘imputability’ of good or bad deeds to their authors.  Queer antinomy this!  Free-will means novelty, the grafting on to the past of something not involved therein.  If our acts were predetermined, if we merely transmitted the push of the whole past, the free-willists say, how could we be praised or blamed for anything?  We should be ‘agents’ only, not ‘principals,’ and where then would be our precious imputability and responsibility?