“In short, it seems to me that the limitations, or rather the dangers, of the pragmatic tendency, are analogous to those which beset the unwary followers of the ‘natural sciences.’  Chemistry and physics are eminently pragmatic and many of their devotees, smugly content with the data that their weights and measures furnish, feel an infinite pity and disdain for all students of philosophy and meta-physics, whomsoever.  And of course everything can be expressed--after a fashion, and ’theoretically’—­in terms of chemistry and physics, that is, everything except the vital principle of the whole, and that, they say, there is no pragmatic use in trying to express; it has no bearings—­for them.  I for my part refuse to be persuaded that we cannot look beyond the obvious pluralism of the naturalist and the pragmatist to a logical unity in which they take no interest.”

How is such a conception of the pragmatism I am advocating possible, after my first and second lectures?  I have all along been offering it expressly as a mediator between tough-mindedness and tender-mindedness.  If the notion of a world ante rem, whether taken abstractly like the word winter, or concretely as the hypothesis of an Absolute, can be shown to have any consequences whatever for our life, it has a meaning.  If the meaning works, it will have some truth that ought to be held to through all possible reformulations, for pragmatism.

The absolutistic hypothesis, that perfection is eternal, aboriginal, and most real, has a perfectly definite meaning, and it works religiously.  To examine how, will be the subject of my next and final lecture.

Lecture VIII

Pragmatism and Religion

At the close of the last lecture I reminded you of the first one, in which I had opposed tough-mindedness to tender-mindedness and recommended pragmatism as their mediator.  Tough-mindedness positively rejects tender-mindedness’s hypothesis of an eternal perfect edition of the universe coexisting with our finite experience.

On pragmatic principles we cannot reject any hypothesis if consequences useful to life flow from it.  Universal conceptions, as things to take account of, may be as real for pragmatism as particular sensations are.  They have indeed no meaning and no reality if they have no use.  But if they have any use they have that amount of meaning.  And the meaning will be true if the use squares well with life’s other uses.

Well, the use of the Absolute is proved by the whole course of men’s religious history.  The eternal arms are then beneath.  Remember Vivekananda’s use of the Atman:  it is indeed not a scientific use, for we can make no particular deductions from it.  It is emotional and spiritual altogether.

It is always best to discuss things by the help of concrete examples.  Let me read therefore some of those verses entitled “To You” by Walt Whitman—­“You” of course meaning the reader or hearer of the poem whosoever he or she may be.