You would be accused of
denying nobler conceptions, and of being an ally of tough-mindedness
in the worst sense.
You remember the letter from a member of this audience from which I
read some extracts at our previous meeting. Let me read you an
additional extract now. It shows a vagueness in realizing the
alternatives before us which I think is very widespread.
"I believe," writes my friend and correspondent, "in pluralism; I
believe that in our search for truth we leap from one floating cake
of ice to another, on an infinite sea, and that by each of our acts
we make new truths possible and old ones impossible; I believe that
each man is responsible for making the universe better, and that if
he does not do this it will be in so far left undone.
"Yet at the same time I am willing to endure that my children should
be incurably sick and suffering (as they are not) and I myself
stupid and yet with brains enough to see my stupidity, only on one
condition, namely, that through the construction, in imagination and
by reasoning, of a RATIONAL UNITY OF ALL THINGS, I can conceive my
acts and my thoughts and my troubles as SUPPLEMENTED: BY ALL THE
OTHER PHENOMENA OF THE WORLD, AND AS FORMING--WHEN THUS
SUPPLEMENTED--A SCHEME WHICH I APPROVE AND ADOPT AS MY I OWN; and
for my part I refuse to be persuaded that we cannot look beyond the
obvious pluralism of the naturalist and pragmatist to a logical
unity in which they take no interest or stock.
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