Let us apply this notion to the salvation of the world. What does it
pragmatically mean to say that this is possible? It means that some
of the conditions of the world's deliverance do actually exist. The
more of them there are existent, the fewer preventing conditions you
can find, the better-grounded is the salvation's possibility, the
more PROBABLE does the fact of the deliverance become.
So much for our preliminary look at possibility.
Now it would contradict the very spirit of life to say that our
minds must be indifferent and neutral in questions like that of the
world's salvation. Anyone who pretends to be neutral writes himself
down here as a fool and a sham. We all do wish to minimize the
insecurity of the universe; we are and ought to be unhappy when we
regard it as exposed to every enemy and open to every life-
destroying draft. Nevertheless there are unhappy men who think the
salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as
pessimism.
Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world's
salvation inevitable.
Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine
of meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as
an attitude in human affairs.
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