We stand here before the final question of philosophy.  I said in my fourth lecture that I believed the monistic-pluralistic alternative to be the deepest and most pregnant question that our minds can frame.  Can it be that the disjunction is a final one? that only one side can be true?  Are a pluralism and monism genuine incompatibles?  So that, if the world were really pluralistically constituted, if it really existed distributively and were made up of a lot of eaches, it could only be saved piecemeal and de facto as the result of their behavior, and its epic history in no wise short-circuited by some essential oneness in which the severalness were already ‘taken up’ beforehand and eternally ‘overcome’?  If this were so, we should have to choose one philosophy or the other.  We could not say ‘yes, yes’ to both alternatives.  There would have to be a ‘no’ in our relations with the possible.  We should confess an ultimate disappointment:  we could not remain healthy-minded and sick-minded in one indivisible act.

Of course as human beings we can be healthy minds on one day and sick souls on the next; and as amateur dabblers in philosophy we may perhaps be allowed to call ourselves monistic pluralists, or free-will determinists, or whatever else may occur to us of a reconciling kind.  But as philosophers aiming at clearness and consistency, and feeling the pragmatistic need of squaring truth with truth, the question is forced upon us of frankly adopting either the tender or the robustious type of thought.  In particular this query has always come home to me:  May not the claims of tender-mindedness go too far?  May not the notion of a world already saved in toto anyhow, be too saccharine to stand?  May not religious optimism be too idyllic?  Must all be saved?  Is no price to be paid in the work of salvation?  Is the last word sweet?  Is all ‘yes, yes’ in the universe?  Doesn’t the fact of ‘no’ stand at the very core of life?  Doesn’t the very ‘seriousness’ that we attribute to life mean that ineluctable noes and losses form a part of it, that there are genuine sacrifices somewhere, and that something permanently drastic and bitter always remains at the bottom of its cup?

I can not speak officially as a pragmatist here; all I can say is that my own pragmatism offers no objection to my taking sides with this more moralistic view, and giving up the claim of total reconciliation.  The possibility of this is involved in the pragmatistic willingness to treat pluralism as a serious hypothesis.  In the end it is our faith and not our logic that decides such questions, and I deny the right of any pretended logic to veto my own faith.  I find myself willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore backing out and crying ‘no play.’  I am willing to think that the prodigal-son attitude, open to us as it is in many vicissitudes, is not the right and final attitude towards the whole of life.  I am willing that there should be real losses and real losers, and no total preservation of all that is.  I can believe in the ideal as an ultimate, not as an origin, and as an extract, not the whole.  When the cup is poured off, the dregs are left behind forever, but the possibility of what is poured off is sweet enough to accept.