that one can rationally claim is the possibility that things may be
BETTER. That possibility, I need hardly say, is one that, as the
actual world goes, we have ample grounds for desiderating.
Free-will thus has no meaning unless it be a doctrine of RELIEF. As
such, it takes its place with other religious doctrines. Between
them, they build up the old wastes and repair the former
desolations. Our spirit, shut within this courtyard of sense-
experience, is always saying to the intellect upon the tower:
'Watchman, tell us of the night, if it aught of promise bear,' and
the intellect gives it then these terms of promise.
Other than this practical significance, the words God, free-will,
design, etc., have none. Yet dark tho they be in themselves, or
intellectualistically taken, when we bear them into life's thicket
with us the darkness THERE grows light about us. If you stop, in
dealing with such words, with their definition, thinking that to be
an intellectual finality, where are you? Stupidly staring at a
pretentious sham! "Deus est Ens, a se, extra et supra omne genus,
necessarium, unum, infinite perfectum, simplex, immutabile,
immensum, aeternum, intelligens," etc.,--wherein is such a
definition really instructive? It means less, than nothing, in its
pompous robe of adjectives. Pragmatism alone can read a positive
meaning into it, and for that she turns her back upon the
intellectualist point of view altogether. 'God's in his heaven;
all's right with the world!'--THAT'S the heart of your theology, and
for that you need no rationalist definitions.
Why shouldn't we all of us, rationalists as well as pragmatists,
confess this? Pragmatism, so far from keeping her eyes bent on the
immediate practical foreground, as she is accused of doing, dwells
just as much upon the world's remotest perspectives.
See then how all these ultimate questions turn, as it were, up their
hinges; and from looking backwards upon principles, upon an
erkenntnisstheoretische Ich, a God, a Kausalitaetsprinzip, a Design,
a Free-will, taken in themselves, as something august and exalted
above facts,--see, I say, how pragmatism shifts the emphasis and
looks forward into facts themselves. The really vital question for
us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually
to make of itself? The centre of gravity of philosophy must
therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into
shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights. To
shift the emphasis in this way means that philosophic questions will
fall to be treated by minds of a less abstractionist type than
heretofore, minds more scientific and individualistic in their tone
yet not irreligious either. It will be an alteration in 'the seat of
authority' that reminds one almost of the protestant reformation.
And as, to papal minds, protestantism has often seemed a mere mess
of anarchy and confusion, such, no doubt, will pragmatism often seem
to ultra-rationalist minds in philosophy. It will seem so much sheer
trash, philosophically. But life wags on, all the same, and
compasses its ends, in protestant countries. I venture to think that
philosophic protestantism will compass a not dissimilar prosperity.
Lecture IV