I fear that my previous lectures, confined as they have been to
human and humanistic aspects, may have left the impression on many
of you that pragmatism means methodically to leave the superhuman
out. I have shown small respect indeed for the Absolute, and I have
until this moment spoken of no other superhuman hypothesis but that.
But I trust that you see sufficiently that the Absolute has nothing
but its superhumanness in common with the theistic God. On
pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works
satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true. Now
whatever its residual difficulties may be, experience shows that it
certainly does work, and that the problem is to build it out and
determine it, so that it will combine satisfactorily with all the
other working truths. I cannot start upon a whole theology at the
end of this last lecture; but when I tell you that I have written a
book on men's religious experience, which on the whole has been
regarded as making for the reality of God, you will perhaps exempt
my own pragmatism from the charge of being an atheistic system. I
firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest
form of experience extant in the universe.
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