Such a fine expression of personal faith warms the heart of the hearer.  But how much does it clear his philosophic head?  Does the writer consistently favor the monistic, or the pluralistic, interpretation of the world’s poem?  His troubles become atoned for when thus supplemented, he says, supplemented, that is, by all the remedies that the other phenomena may supply.  Obviously here the writer faces forward into the particulars of experience, which he interprets in a pluralistic-melioristic way.

But he believes himself to face backward.  He speaks of what he calls the rational unity of things, when all the while he really means their possible empirical unification.  He supposes at the same time that the pragmatist, because he criticizes rationalism’s abstract One, is cut off from the consolation of believing in the saving possibilities of the concrete many.  He fails in short to distinguish between taking the world’s perfection as a necessary principle, and taking it only as a possible terminus ad quem.

I regard the writer of this letter as a genuine pragmatist, but as a pragmatist sans le savoir.  He appears to me as one of that numerous class of philosophic amateurs whom I spoke of in my first lecture, as wishing to have all the good things going, without being too careful as to how they agree or disagree.  “Rational unity of all things” is so inspiring a formula, that he brandishes it offhand, and abstractly accuses pluralism of conflicting with it (for the bare names do conflict), altho concretely he means by it just the pragmatistically unified and ameliorated world.  Most of us remain in this essential vagueness, and it is well that we should; but in the interest of clear-headedness it is well that some of us should go farther, so I will try now to focus a little more discriminatingly on this particular religious point.

Is then this you of yous, this absolutely real world, this unity that yields the moral inspiration and has the religious value, to be taken monistically or pluralistically?  Is it ante rem or in rebus?  Is it a principle or an end, an absolute or an ultimate, a first or a last?  Does it make you look forward or lie back?  It is certainly worth while not to clump the two things together, for if discriminated, they have decidedly diverse meanings for life.

Please observe that the whole dilemma revolves pragmatically about the notion of the world’s possibilities.  Intellectually, rationalism invokes its absolute principle of unity as a ground of possibility for the many facts.  Emotionally, it sees it as a container and limiter of possibilities, a guarantee that the upshot shall be good.  Taken in this way, the absolute makes all good things certain, and all bad things impossible (in the eternal, namely), and may be said to transmute the entire category of possibility into categories more secure.  One sees at this point that the