It can remain religious like the rationalisms,
but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the
richest intimacy with facts. I hope I may be able to leave many of
you with as favorable an opinion of it as I preserve myself. Yet, as
I am near the end of my hour, I will not introduce pragmatism bodily
now. I will begin with it on the stroke of the clock next time. I
prefer at the present moment to return a little on what I have said.
If any of you here are professional philosophers, and some of you I
know to be such, you will doubtless have felt my discourse so far to
have been crude in an unpardonable, nay, in an almost incredible
degree. Tender-minded and tough-minded, what a barbaric disjunction!
And, in general, when philosophy is all compacted of delicate
intellectualities and subtleties and scrupulosities, and when every
possible sort of combination and transition obtains within its
bounds, what a brutal caricature and reduction of highest things to
the lowest possible expression is it to represent its field of
conflict as a sort of rough-and-tumble fight between two hostile
temperaments! What a childishly external view! And again, how stupid
it is to treat the abstractness of rationalist systems as a crime,
and to damn them because they offer themselves as sanctuaries and
places of escape, rather than as prolongations of the world of
facts.
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