The pragmatist is the last
person to deny the reality of such abstractions. They are so much
past experience funded.
But taking the absolute edition of the world concretely means a
different hypothesis. Rationalists take it concretely and OPPOSE it
to the world's finite editions. They give it a particular nature. It
is perfect, finished. Everything known there is known along with
everything else; here, where ignorance reigns, far otherwise. If
there is want there, there also is the satisfaction provided. Here
all is process; that world is timeless. Possibilities obtain in our
world; in the absolute world, where all that is NOT is from eternity
impossible, and all that IS is necessary, the category of
possibility has no application. In this world crimes and horrors are
regrettable. In that totalized world regret obtains not, for "the
existence of ill in the temporal order is the very condition of the
perfection of the eternal order."
Once more, either hypothesis is legitimate in pragmatist eyes, for
either has its uses. Abstractly, or taken like the word winter, as a
memorandum of past experience that orients us towards the future,
the notion of the absolute world is indispensable. Concretely taken,
it is also indispensable, at least to certain minds, for it
determines them religiously, being often a thing to change their
lives by, and by changing their lives, to change whatever in the
outer order depends on them.
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