all is process; that world is timeless.  Possibilities obtain in our world; in the absolute world, where all that is not is from eternity impossible, and all that is is necessary, the category of possibility has no application.  In this world crimes and horrors are regrettable.  In that totalized world regret obtains not, for “the existence of ill in the temporal order is the very condition of the perfection of the eternal order.”

Once more, either hypothesis is legitimate in pragmatist eyes, for either has its uses.  Abstractly, or taken like the word winter, as a memorandum of past experience that orients us towards the future, the notion of the absolute world is indispensable.  Concretely taken, it is also indispensable, at least to certain minds, for it determines them religiously, being often a thing to change their lives by, and by changing their lives, to change whatever in the outer order depends on them.

We cannot therefore methodically join the tough minds in their rejection of the whole notion of a world beyond our finite experience.  One misunderstanding of pragmatism is to identify it with positivistic tough-mindedness, to suppose that it scorns every rationalistic notion as so much jabber and gesticulation, that it loves intellectual anarchy as such and prefers a sort of wolf-world absolutely unpent and wild and without a master or a collar to any philosophic class-room product, whatsoever.  I have said so much in these lectures against the over-tender forms of rationalism, that I am prepared for some misunderstanding here, but I confess that the amount of it that I have found in this very audience surprises me, for I have simultaneously defended rationalistic hypotheses so far as these re-direct you fruitfully into experience.

For instance I receive this morning this question on a post-card:  “Is a pragmatist necessarily a complete materialist and agnostic?” One of my oldest friends, who ought to know me better, writes me a letter that accuses the pragmatism I am recommending, of shutting out all wider metaphysical views and condemning us to the most terre-a-terre naturalism.  Let me read you some extracts from it.

“It seems to me,” my friend writes, “that the pragmatic objection to pragmatism lies in the fact that it might accentuate the narrowness of narrow minds.

“Your call to the rejection of the namby-pamby and the wishy-washy is of course inspiring.  But although it is salutary and stimulating to be told that one should be responsible for the immediate issues and bearings of his words and thoughts, I decline to be deprived of the pleasure and profit of dwelling also on remoter bearings and issues, and it is the tendency of pragmatism to refuse this privilege.