or mine. It is a conceived integral
experience which no individual man ever gets before him. When we
conceive it, we first treat it as something impersonal. If it is
personal, the person who gets it before him is greater than any man.
Yet unless some such integral experience is as concrete and genuine a
fact, as real a life, as any life that you and I from moment to moment
lead, then all so-called "common-sense" is meaningless. But if such an
integral experience {149} is real, then that by which the pragmatic
"workings" of our private and personal opinions are to be tested and
are tested is a certain integral whole of life in which we all live
and move and have our being, but which is no more the mere heap and
collection of our moments of fragmentary experience, and of our
vicissitudes of shifting moods, than a symphony is a mere collection
of notes on paper, or of scraped strings and quivering tubes, or of
air waves, or even of the deeds of separate musicians.

The life, then, the experience, the concrete whole, wherein our
assertions have their workings, with which our active ideas are
labouring to agree, to which our will endlessly strives to adjust
itself, in which we are saved or lost, is a life whose touch with our
efforts is as close as its superiority to our merely human narrowness
is concretely and actively triumphant whenever our pettiness gets
moulded to a higher reasonableness. And unless such a life above our
individual level is real, our human efforts have no sense whatever,
and chaos drowns out the meaning of the pragmatists and of the
idealists alike. _If one asks, however, by what workings our
significant assertions propose to be judged, I answer, by their
workings as experienced and estimated from the point of view of such a
larger life, as conforming to its will, or falling short thereof, as
leading toward or away from our salvation._ For it is just such a
larger life by which we all propose and intend to be judged, whenever
we make our active appeal to life take the {150} form of any serious
assertion whatever. If a man proposes to let his ideas be tested not
by his momentary caprice, and not by any momentary datum of
experience, but by "what proves to be their workings in the long run,"
then already he is appealing to an essentially superhuman type of
empirical test and estimate. For no man taken as this individual ever
personally experiences "the long run," that is, the integral course
and meanin