ption has positive significance at all.

This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. Such a
principle will help us on this occasion to decide, among the various
attributes set down in the scholastic inventory of God's perfections,
whether some be not far less significant than others.

If, namely, we apply the principle of pragmatism to God's metaphysical
attributes, strictly so called, as distinguished from his moral
attributes, I think that, even were we forced by a coercive logic to
believe them, we still should have to confess them to be destitute of
all intelligible significance. Take God's aseity, for example; or his
necessariness; his immateriality; his "simplicity" or superiority to
the kind of inner variety and succession which we find in finite
beings, his indivisibility, and lack of the inner distinctions of being
and activity, substance and accident, potentiality and actuality, and
the rest; his repudiation of inclusion in a genus; his actualized
infinity; his "personality," apart from the moral qualities which it
may comport; his relations to evil being permissive and not positive;
his self-sufficiency, self-love, and absolute felicity in
himself:--candidly speaking, how do such qualities as these make any
definite connection with our life? And if they severally call for no
distinctive adaptations of our conduct, what vital difference can it
possibly make to a man's religion whether they be true or false?

For my own part, although I dislike to say aught that may grate upon
tender associations, I must frankly confess that even though these
attributes were faultlessly deduced, I cannot conceive of its being of
the smallest consequence to us religiously that any one of them should
be true. Pray, what specific act can I perform in order to adapt
myself the better to God's simplicity? Or how does it assist me to
plan my behavior, to know that his happiness is anyhow absolutely
complete? In the middle of the century just past, Mayne Reid was the
great writer of books of out-of-door adventure. He was forever
extolling the hunters and field-observers of living animals' habits,
and keeping up a fire of invective against the "closet-naturalists," as
he called them, the collectors and classifiers, and handlers of
skeletons and skins. When I was a boy, I used to think that a closet-
naturalist must be the vilest type of wretch under the sun. But surely
the systematic theologians are the closet