g, the right estimate and working of a long series of
experiences and deeds. For a man individually observes now this moment
and now that--never their presupposed integration, never their union
in a single whole of significant life.

If a man says that the workings of his ideas are to be tested by
"scientific experience," then again he appeals not to the verdict of
any human observer, but to the integrated and universalised and
relatively impersonal and superpersonal synthesis of the results of
countless observers.

And so, whatever you regard as a genuine test of the workings of your
ideas is some living whole of experience above the level of any one of
our individual human lives. To this whole you indeed actively appeal.
The appeal is an act of will. And in turn you regard that to which you
appeal as an experience which is just as live and concrete as your
own, and which carries out its own will in that it snubs or welcomes
your efforts with a will as hearty as is your own. For what estimates
your deeds, {151} and gives them their meaning, is a life as genuine
as yours and an activity as real as yours. Pragmatism is perfectly
justified in regarding the whole process as no mere contemplation, no
merely restful or static conformity of passive idea to motionless
insight, but, on the contrary, as a significant interaction of life
with life and of will with will. But the more vital the process, the
more pragmatic the test of our active opinions through the conformity
or non-conformity of their purposes to the life wherein we dwell and
have our being, the more vital becomes the fact that, whether we are
saved or lost, we belong to the world's life, and are part thereof,
while, unless this life is more than merely human in its rational
wealth of concrete meaning, we mortals have no meaning whatever, and
the assertions of common-sense as well as of religion lapse into
absurdity.

VI

In order fairly to estimate aright our relation to this larger life,
we must briefly review the further thesis upon which recent pragmatism
lays so much stress--the thesis that, since the truth of an opinion
consists in the agreement or disagreement of its empirical workings
with their anticipated consequences, all truth is both temporal and
relative and cannot be either eternal or absolute. Let me then say a
word as to the absoluteness of truth.

The thesis of pragmatism as to the active nature {152} and the