Full many a gallant bark, when we were lost, Weathered the gale."
Those puritans who answered 'yes' to the question: Are you willing
to be damned for God's glory? were in this objective and magnanimous
condition of mind. The way of escape from evil on this system is NOT
by getting it 'aufgehoben,' or preserved in the whole as an element
essential but 'overcome.' It is by dropping it out altogether,
throwing it overboard and getting beyond it, helping to make a
universe that shall forget its very place and name.
It is then perfectly possible to accept sincerely a drastic kind of
a universe from which the element of 'seriousness' is not to be
expelled. Whoso does so is, it seems to me, a genuine pragmatist. He
is willing to live on a scheme of uncertified possibilities which he
trusts; willing to pay with his own person, if need be, for the
realization of the ideals which he frames.
What now actually ARE the other forces which he trusts to co-operate
with him, in a universe of such a type? They are at least his fellow
men, in the stage of being which our actual universe has reached.
But are there not superhuman forces also, such as religious men of
the pluralistic type we have been considering have always believed
in? Their words may have sounded monistic when they said "there is
no God but God"; but the original polytheism of mankind has only
imperfectly and vaguely sublimated itself into monotheism, and
monotheism itself, so far as it was religious and not a scheme of
class-room instruction for the metaphysicians, has always viewed God
as but one helper, primus inter pares, in the midst of all the
shapers of the great world's fate.
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