Now it would contradict the very spirit of life to say that our minds must be indifferent and neutral in questions like that of the world’s salvation.  Anyone who pretends to be neutral writes himself down here as a fool and a sham.  We all do wish to minimize the insecurity of the universe; we are and ought to be unhappy when we regard it as exposed to every enemy and open to every life-destroying draft.  Nevertheless there are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible.  Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism.

Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world’s salvation inevitable.

Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an attitude in human affairs.  Optimism has always been the regnant doctrine in european philosophy.  Pessimism was only recently introduced by Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet.  Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible.  It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.

It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism.  Some conditions of the world’s salvation are actually extant, and she cannot possibly close her eyes to this fact:  and should the residual conditions come, salvation would become an accomplished reality.  Naturally the terms I use here are exceedingly summary.  You may interpret the word ‘salvation’ in any way you like, and make it as diffuse and distributive, or as climacteric and integral a phenomenon as you please.

Take, for example, any one of us in this room with the ideals which he cherishes, and is willing to live and work for.  Every such ideal realized will be one moment in the world’s salvation.  But these particular ideals are not bare abstract possibilities.  They are grounded, they are live possibilities, for we are their live champions and pledges, and if the complementary conditions come and add themselves, our ideals will become actual things.  What now are the complementary conditions?  They are first such a mixture of things as will in the fulness of time give us a chance, a gap that we can spring into, and, finally, our act.

Does our act then create the world’s salvation so far as it makes room for itself, so far as it leaps into the gap?  Does it create, not the whole world’s salvation of course, but just so much of this as itself covers of the world’s extent?

Here I take the bull by the horns, and in spite of the whole crew of rationalists and monists, of whatever brand they be, I ask why not?  Our acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves and grow, are the parts of the world to which we are closest, the parts of which our knowledge is the most intimate and complete.  Why should we not take them at their face-value?  Why may they not be the actual turning-places and growing-places which they seem to be, of the world—­why not the workshop of being, where we catch fact in the making, so that nowhere may the world grow in any other kind of way than this?