fact that our empirical future feels to us unsafe, and needs some higher guarantee.  If the past and present were purely good, who could wish that the future might possibly not resemble them?  Who could desire free-will?  Who would not say, with Huxley, “let me be wound up every day like a watch, to go right fatally, and I ask no better freedom.”  ‘Freedom’ in a world already perfect could only mean freedom to be worse, and who could be so insane as to wish that?  To be necessarily what it is, to be impossibly aught else, would put the last touch of perfection upon optimism’s universe.  Surely the only possibility that one can rationally claim is the possibility that things may be better.  That possibility, I need hardly say, is one that, as the actual world goes, we have ample grounds for desiderating.

Free-will thus has no meaning unless it be a doctrine of relief.  As such, it takes its place with other religious doctrines.  Between them, they build up the old wastes and repair the former desolations.  Our spirit, shut within this courtyard of sense-experience, is always saying to the intellect upon the tower:  ‘Watchman, tell us of the night, if it aught of promise bear,’ and the intellect gives it then these terms of promise.

Other than this practical significance, the words God, free-will, design, etc., have none.  Yet dark tho they be in themselves, or intellectualistically taken, when we bear them into life’s thicket with us the darkness there grows light about us.  If you stop, in dealing with such words, with their definition, thinking that to be an intellectual finality, where are you?  Stupidly staring at a pretentious sham!  “Deus est Ens, a se, extra et supra omne genus, necessarium, unum, infinite perfectum, simplex, immutabile, immensum, aeternum, intelligens,” etc.,—­wherein is such a definition really instructive?  It means less, than nothing, in its pompous robe of adjectives.  Pragmatism alone can read a positive meaning into it, and for that she turns her back upon the intellectualist point of view altogether.  ’God’s in his heaven; all’s right with the world!’—­That’s the heart of your theology, and for that you need no rationalist definitions.

Why shouldn’t we all of us, rationalists as well as pragmatists, confess this?  Pragmatism, so far from keeping her eyes bent on the immediate practical foreground, as she is accused of doing, dwells just as much upon the world’s remotest perspectives.

See then how all these ultimate questions turn, as it were, up their hinges; and from looking backwards upon principles, upon an erkenntnisstheoretische Ich, a God, a Kausalitaetsprinzip, a Design, a Free-will, taken in themselves, as something august and exalted above facts,—­see, I say, how pragmatism shifts the emphasis and looks forward into facts themselves.  The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be?  What is life eventually to