abstract pragmatist, but merely in my own private person), it clashes with other truths of mine whose benefits I hate to give up on its account. It is associated with a kind of logic of which I am the enemy; it entangles me in metaphysical paradoxes that are unacceptable, etc., etc. But I have enough trouble in life already without the added trouble of carrying these intellectual inconsistencies, so I give up the Absolute. Personally, I just take my moral holidays; or else as a professional philosopher, I try to justify them by some other principle.
If I could restrict my notion of the Absolute to its bare holiday-giving value, it wouldn't clash with my other truths. But we can not easily thus restrict our hypotheses. They carry supernumerary features, and these it is that clash so. My disbelief in the Absolute means disbelief in those other supernumerary features.
You see by this what I meant when I called pragmatism a mediator and reconciler and said that she 'unstiffens' our theories.[1] She has in fact no prejudices whatever, no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof. She is completely genial. She will entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any evidence. It follows that in the religious field she is at a great advantage both over positivistic empiricism, with its anti-theological bias, and over religious rationalism with its exclusive interest in the remote, the noble and the abstract in the way of conception.
In short, she widens the field of search for God. Rationalism sticks to logic and the empyrean. Empiricism sticks to the external senses. Pragmatism for her part is willing to take anything, to follow either logic or the senses, and to count the humblest and most personal experiences. She will count mystical experiences if they have practical consequences. She will take a God who lives in the very dirt of private fact—if that should seem a likely place to find him.
Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience, nothing being omitted. If theological ideas should do this, if the notion of God, in particular, should prove to do it, how could pragmatism possibly deny God's existence? She could see no meaning in treating as 'not true' a notion that was pragmatically so successful. You see how democratic she is. Her manners are as various and flexible, her resources as rich and endless, and her conclusions as obedient and malleable as those of mother nature.
- ↑ I get this word from Papini (Leonardo, Aprile, 1905).
