hange itself becomes unchangeable.
If the change-worshipper wishes to estimate his own progress, he must
be sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not begin to flirt
gaily with the ideal of monotony. Progress itself cannot progress.
It is worth remark, in passing, that when Tennyson, in a wild and rather
weak manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration in society,
he instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium.
He wrote--

"Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves
of change."

He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is.
Change is about the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can
get into.

The main point here, however, is that this idea of a fundamental
alteration in the standard is one of the things that make thought
about the past or future simply impossible. The theory of a
complete change of standards in human history does not merely
deprive us of the pleasure of honouring our fathers; it deprives
us even of the more modern and aristocratic pleasure of despising them.

This bald summary of the thought-destroying forces of our
time would not be complete without some reference to pragmatism;
for though I have here used and should everywhere defend the
pragmatist method as a preliminary guide to truth, there is an extreme
application of it which involves the absence of all truth whatever.
My meaning can be put shortly thus. I agree with the pragmatists
that apparent objective truth is not the whole matter; that there
is an authoritative need to believe the things that are necessary
to the human mind. But I say that one of those necessities
precisely is a belief in objective truth. The pragmatist tells
a man to think what he must think and never mind the Absolute.
But precisely one of the things that he must think is the Absolute.
This philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox. Pragmatism is
a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs
is to be something more than a pragmatist. Extreme pragmatism
is just as inhuman as the determinism it so powerfully attacks.
The determinist (who, to do him justice, does not pretend to be
a human being) makes nonsense of the human sense of actual choice.
The pragmatist, who professes to be specially human, makes nonsense
of the human sense of actual fact.

To sum up our contention so far, we may say that the most
characteristic current philosophies ha