The belly-band of its universe must be tight. A radical pragmatist
on the other hand is a happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort of creature.
If he had to live in a tub like Diogenes he wouldn't mind at all if
the hoops were loose and the staves let in the sun.
Now the idea of this loose universe affects your typical
rationalists in much the same way as 'freedom of the press' might
affect a veteran official in the russian bureau of censorship; or as
'simplified spelling' might affect an elderly schoolmistress. It
affects him as the swarm of protestant sects affects a papist
onlooker. It appears as backboneless and devoid of principle as
'opportunism' in politics appears to an old-fashioned french
legitimist, or to a fanatical believer in the divine right of the
people.
For pluralistic pragmatism, truth grows up inside of all the finite
experiences. They lean on each other, but the whole of them, if such
a whole there be, leans on nothing. All 'homes' are in finite
experience; finite experience as such is homeless. Nothing outside
of the flux secures the issue of it. It can hope salvation only from
its own intrinsic promises and potencies.
To rationalists this describes a tramp and vagrant world, adrift in
space, with neither elephant nor tortoise to plant the sole of its
foot upon.
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